The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download Chapter One for free at DrKenner.com and at Amazon.com

Let me read some—Oh no, no, no, no. I never, I never let anybody read my stories.
Why not?
Well, what if they didn’t like them? What if they told me I was no good?
I don’t know if I could take that kind of a rejection.

And that’s from Back to the Future Part One, and we’ve all had those moments of vulnerability—and sometimes they’re not moments, sometimes it is just the undercurrent of our lives. We’re real anxious, we’re real nervous, or we’re real—we just feel depressed, we feel like it’s hopeless for us, that we’re unlovable.

With me to discuss core beliefs, our deepest beliefs, is Dr. Jeff Riggenbach. He’s a cognitive therapist in the state of Oklahoma, practicing at Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital, and he has completed training with the gold standard of training in my book—with the Beck Institute of Cognitive Therapy—and is certified with the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. He gives seminars routinely, and has been a professor, and I’m delighted to have you on the show, Dr. Riggenbach.

Hi, Ellen, thanks for having me.

Oh, it’s wonderful that you’re here. And when a person goes through life saying, “Oh, I’m afraid to show anybody my writing. I’m afraid that I’ll be rejected.” What’s going on there?

Well, as you talked about at the beginning, a lot of times—well, actually always—our specific thoughts that we have are products of what you mentioned, which are called core beliefs. Our core beliefs are really these deeply ingrained or deeply held beliefs or assumptions or rules that we’ve developed over time, and they really serve as kind of filters for how we see ourselves, how we see other people, and how we see the world. So they kind of serve as templates through which we process the information that we encounter as we live our lives.

And what would be a core belief about myself that might mess me up in life?

Oh, boy. There are several of those. Just listening to your clips there, I’m reminded of the core belief that a lot of people have: that they see themselves as a failure. So if you are one of those people who catch yourself—well, let me back up, because a lot of times core beliefs are unconscious, and so we don’t even catch ourselves. We don’t actually realize what we’re telling ourselves. I actually had a guy not too long ago—I’m reminded of—that said, “I guess I’ve been telling myself all this time that I’m a loser and I’ll never amount to anything.” Fascinating. “I realized my dad always told me that when I was growing up, but I didn’t realize that I continued to tell myself that.” And so that belief of being a failure is a really big one that a lot of people struggle with.

So that’s one core belief about yourself. What about a core belief about others that a person might have?

Well, some people see others as kind of incompetent or never able to do the right thing—

Stupid. You can’t trust anybody.
Yeah, untrustworthy, those kinds of things. And depending upon exactly what the belief is, you might act in different ways or feel different ways. But people who see others as incompetent or never able to do the right thing oftentimes kind of walk around life feeling angry—

Yeah.
—a lot of just kind of irritable with people, and never seem to be happy with life. And if we see people as not trustworthy, we’re probably going to be more prone to not wanting to be vulnerable or keeping secrets or not opening up or not sharing what’s going on or those kinds of things.

So some commitment problems with marriage, or, you know, you’re dating, dating, dating, but they can’t commit. It could be that they just—they’re just afraid to take that chance, just because they have a core belief that good things can’t happen to them—that could be one belief about the self—or that other people will always let you down.

Yeah, absolutely. Those are two really big ones that a lot of people struggle with, and those come from experiences that people have had in the past, where people have let them down or people have hurt them. And so they’ve come to perceive themselves as vulnerable or not able to succeed or those kinds of things. And so they do act in ways that serve to keep them safe—whether it’s getting angry with people or defensive—or some people don’t believe it that strongly, maybe, and so they’re able to get along socially pretty well with people and have some good social skills and have some surface-level friends. But they just put those walls up, and they don’t let anybody get too close. And you know, those walls work for people who are trying not to be hurt, because they work to keep people out from hurting them again. But the problem is, they keep people out that might hurt them, but they also keep people out—the good people—to help them, right?

Or friends, potential friends. And they never find out—without taking a risk—they never find out that what? That not everybody is untrustworthy. Not everybody’s going to hurt them. Not every—you know, in order to break through that barrier, to let your wall down, what do you need to do? What would a cognitive therapist do to help a person break down that wall?

Well, you’re right. It is a matter of starting to be willing to take a small risk and maybe identifying one person that is currently in your life that you think might be worth taking a small risk for. And a lot of people aren’t willing to take that risk, and so they live their entire lives with their walls up and keeping themselves safe but never really experiencing any intimacy or happiness or joy or support—

Or those sorts of things, and sometimes blaming it on the world.
Right. “It’s everybody else’s fault.”
Everybody else’s fault. “If only…” That’s always the easy answer, isn’t it?
Right, right.

So what are some other common destructive beliefs about oneself that we carry around?

Hey, I gotta interrupt this because we’ve got to pay some bills. Thirty seconds—that’s it. A very quick ad, and then Ellen will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where’s that ad I saw? Here it is—the Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download Chapter One for free at SelfishRomance.com and buy it at Amazon.com. Hmm. The Selfish Path to Romance—that is interesting.

So what are some other common destructive beliefs about oneself that we carry around?

Well, I mentioned the vulnerability belief—a lot of people see themselves as being vulnerable to harm or unsafe. I’m thinking of a lady that I’ve been working with who’s in her 30s, and she was abused by her father and went through kind of several other horrible things growing up that caused her to see herself as vulnerable and the world as unsafe. And as recently as last week, her husband kind of reached up to the refrigerator to get out a jug of milk, and in the corner of her eye, she saw a hand go up. Well, because those two beliefs were filtering it in such a way that, “Gee, when somebody raises my hand, I’m in danger.”
Yeah.
She still flinches to this day. And so because she filters kind of everyday events in that way, she perceives there to be danger in many situations in life when there really isn’t any actual danger.

So what she would need to do is to really work and see her husband raise his hand a hundred times, or something—or other people raise their hands—and realize that there are two categories: one where the hand will come down and hit you—but that was from her childhood—and another category where people are just getting a jug of milk or just doing something that is not harmful, or even going to shake your hand.

That’s right.
Throw confetti.
That’s right.

And you can do those sorts of exposure techniques, they call them—doing those things over and over and over—and having them look at how they’re thinking about it in each situation. But yeah, I mean, the goal is to help them realize that just because certain things happened in the past with certain triggers doesn’t mean that they’ll happen in the present.

So if a person feels unlovable, or feels that they’re a loser, or feels somehow inferior or defective, or feels like a failure—they don’t have to go through life having that unchallenged, as if that’s just the given. They could go see a cognitive therapist such as yourself—this is Dr. Jeff Riggenbach—and they could work on these problems, so that they would have a whole skills basket that would help them put their lives back together in a much better way.

Oh, absolutely. That’s one of the things that I love about cognitive therapy, is that it gives people hope—people that thought that maybe their life was hopeless or that they didn’t have any help, and they kind of struggled with the same sorts of feelings—depression, anxiety, irritability—whatever hurtful emotions they’ve experienced over and over and over, and so they assumed they would always have to feel that way. And a lot of people who work with this sort of therapy come to see that they don’t have to continue to feel those feelings, and they don’t have to live life in the way that they’ve been living it previously.

Right? And what I love so much—this is Dr. Jeff Riggenbach, a cognitive therapist—what I love so much about cognitive therapy is your comment that the job of a cognitive therapist is to work our way out of a job, meaning we teach the clients thinking skills, the method to challenge negative ideas or problems in their life so they can embrace their life and love it more. Thank you so much for being with me today, Dr. Jeff Riggenbach.

Thank you for having me.

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Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance: A Serious Romance Guidebook by Drs. Kenner and Locke:

Assertiveness is very different from aggression. One way to be healthfully assertive is to use the pronoun “I.” You have every right to say what you observe, think, feel, and expect. Whatever you’re trying to express in “you” language—“You make me angry”—can be effectively translated into “I” language. For example, change “You make me angry” to “I feel angry.” You can change “You never listen” to “I feel ignored.” You can change “You drive me crazy” to “I am so frustrated.” In each case, the sentences with “you” language make you and your partner feel attacked. The sentences with “I” language make you both more likely to listen and talk with one another.

You can download Chapter One for free by going to DrKenner.com and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.