Helping Clients Deal with Adversity by Changing their Attitudes

A Concise Therapist Guide

Windy Dryden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000113570
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Helping Clients Deal with Adversity by Changing Their Attitudes: A Concise Therapist Guide provides an outline for therapists wishing to help clients deal with life's adversities by encouraging them to change their attitudes.

Divided in two parts, this book first provides a thorough, but concise, introduction to attitude-based approach to therapy, then applies these ideas to therapy. By redefining established concepts of 'rational' and 'irrational' beliefs in terms of the 'rigidity' and 'extremity' of client attitudes, Professor Dryden puts forward a language and an approach that is more acceptable to both clients and therapists.

Helping Clients Deal with Adversity by Changing Their Attitudes will be a great asset to clinical and counselling psychologists, counsellors, and psychotherapists as well as trainees in these areas. It will be particularly of interest to CBT practitioners and students who do not cover REBT in their training, but are looking for a concise guide to how its attitudinal focus can be understood and applied in clinical practice.

Part 1

The role of attitudes in psychological disturbance and health in the face of adversity

In this part of the book, I discuss the role of attitudes in psychological disturbance and health in the face of adversity. In particular, I distinguish between rigid and flexible attitudes and discuss the extreme and non-extreme attitudes that are derived from each respectively.

Using a case study, I detail the emotive, behavioural and cognitive consequences of rigid/extreme attitudes and flexible/non-extreme attitudes and show how the former are the hallmark of disturbed responses to adversities and the latter are the hallmark of healthy responses to the same adversities.

Introduction

An inherent feature of human beings is our tendency to like certain things and dislike others. Most of us like similar things in life (e.g. being approved and doing well at things that are important to us) and dislike similar things (e.g. being criticised unfairly and failing at those same important tasks). In other areas of life, however, we differ markedly in what we want to happen and want not to happen. Thus, I may want Albion Rovers to be promoted next season from the Scottish Second Division, while you may be completely indifferent about this. You, on the other hand, may want to see a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle which I might pay not to see! When we get our desires met, we will have positive feelings, at least initially, and when our desires are not met, we will generally experience negative feelings. This book is based on the idea, which I will develop later, that psychological health occurs in response to our unmet preferences when we experience negative feelings that are healthy, while psychological disturbance occurs in response to this same situation when we experience negative feelings that are unhealthy.

In this concise guide, I refer to situations where a client’s preferences are not met as ‘adversities’ (Dryden, 2016). People can experience a variety of adversities in life and, in part, the type of adversity we face determines what feelings we experience. Please note the phrase ‘in part’ as it is critical, as I will make clear later.

Adversity

As I have just said, in this guide, I will call a situation where a client’s preference has not, is not, may not or will not be met an adversity. This includes both situations where a client does not get what they want and situations where they get what they don’t want. While anything can be an adversity for a client, the emotions that they experience point to the existence of a particular type of adversity. This is not to say that an adversity causes an emotion – far from it as you will soon see – but there is an association between different emotions and different adversities. So, if you are unsure about what kind of adversity a client is facing or thinks they are facing, one way to find out is to determine what emotion the client is experiencing. Table 1.1 lists a number of troublesome emotions and some of the adversities with which they are associated. I refer to such troublesome emotions as ‘unhealthy negative emotions’ (UNEs) in this guide (Dryden, 2012).¹

Table 1.1 Eight unhealthy negative emotions and some of their associated adversities

Unhealthy negative emotion	Adversity
Anxiety	• You are facing a threat to which you hold dear.
Depression	• You have experienced a significant loss. • You have significantly failed at something. • You and/or others have experienced an unfair plight.
Guilt	• You have broken one of your moral codes. • You have failed to live up to one of your moral codes. • You have hurt or harmed someone.
Shame	• You have fallen very short of your ideal. • Others have shown that they devalue you. • You have let down a social group with whom you closely identify. • A member of the social group with whom you closely identify has let down that group.
Hurt	• Others have neglected or betrayed you and you think you don’t deserve this. • You are more invested in a relationship with someone than that person is with you.
Unhealthy anger	• Someone frustrates you, threatens you or disrespects you. • You have encountered an obstacle to an immediate goal or longer term objective. • Someone breaks one of your rules. • You break one of your own rules.
Jealousy	• Someone is threatening the relationship you have with a significant other. • You face uncertainty with respect to the above threat.
Unhealthy envy	• Someone has what you desire but do not have.

What is important to bear in mind is that an adversity can represent what actually happened to a client or what they think has happened to them. The latter is known as an inference, and it is important to recognise that while the inferences that clients make may be accurate or inaccurate, they have an impact on them when they think they have experienced them. Table 1.1 outlines the UNEs that a client experiences when that impact is unconstructive and Table 1.2 outlines the healthy negative emotions (HNEs) that they experience when that impact is constructive (Dryden, 2012).

Table 1.2 Eight healthy negative emotions and some of their associated adversities

Healthy negative emotion	Adversity
Non-anxious concern	• You are facing a threat to what you hold dear.
Non-depressed sadness	• You have experienced a significant loss. • You have significantly failed at something. • You and/or others have experienced an unfair plight.
Guilt-free remorse	• You have broken one of your moral codes. • You have failed to live up to one of your moral codes. • You have hurt or harmed someone.
Shame-free disappointment	• You have fallen very short of your ideal. • Others have shown that they devalue you. • You have let down a social group with whom you closely identify. • A member of the social group with whom you closely identify has let down that group.
Hurt-free sorrow	• Others have neglected or betrayed you and you think you don’t deserve this. • You are more invested in a relationship with someone than that person is with you.
Healthy anger	• Someone frustrates you, threatens you or disrespects you. • You have encountered an obstacle to an immediate goal or longer term objective. • Someone breaks one of your rules. • You break one of your own rules.
Non-jealous concern for your relationship	• Someone is threatening the relationship you have with a significant other. • You face uncertainty with respect to the above threat.
Healthy envy	• Someone has what you desire but do not have.

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

This guide is based on the therapy approach called ‘Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy’ (REBT) which is a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 The role of attitudes in psychological disturbance and health in the face of adversity
• Part 2 Helping clients change their attitudes towards adversity
• Appendix 1: A guide to the eight emotional problems and their healthy alternatives with adversities, basic attitudes and associated behaviour and thinking
• Appendix 2: A list of inferential (cognitive) distortions, their realistic and balanced alternatives, descriptions and examples
• Appendix 3: A Arguments to help clients examine their rigid/extreme and flexible/non-extreme attitudes
• Suggested further reading
• References
• Index