The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com.

Dear Dr. Kenner, my 27-year-old girlfriend, Megan, is incredibly independent, strong-willed, motivated, and intelligent. If your boyfriend said that about you, that would feel good, but she still has damaging self-talk from childhood and low self-esteem. In childhood, her parents were bent on controlling her and trying to make her dependent on them. Intellectually, Megan knows that their criticism was wrong, but emotionally, she falls back into the same patterns, and she can't get the criticism out of her mind, even though her life is wonderful now. We treat each other well. She's working hard in a career she loves. She still can't get past her own habitual negative self-talk and simply enjoy her life, except in occasional fits and spurts. Could you recommend some reading material or workbooks with exercises that can help her put these demons behind her? I've told her some of the things that I did to get myself past being raised religiously and living with an almost constant state of honor and guilt. I felt guilty for thinking for myself and for pursuing my own goals, even though intellectually I understood it took almost five years of living my life with the rational principles of objectivism before I no longer felt the honor and guilt. Thanks, Tom.

For your girlfriend, Tom, I'm assuming you're going to share this with her. For Megan, she's 27 years old; she's bright and intelligent. That doesn't mean she's fully self-aware of how good she is. You're actually helping her by reflecting that back to her. Next, we want to tackle self-talk—the negative talk that most of us still have buried in some corners of our mind. Sometimes it's not so buried for many people.

How do you get rid of habitual negative self-talk? You need to examine it. There are exercises she can do. One of the books is Mind Over Mood by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky, which you can find on my website, DrKenner.com. She can identify her negative self-talk by capturing every single phrase she has. If she has thoughts along the lines of "I'm not good enough unless I please Mom and Dad," "I can't let my parents down," or "I have to do what my father wants me to do," she needs to get those thoughts out of the closet of her mind and into the open. Once she examines those thoughts, she'll see themes in them. She has drawn the conclusion that thinking and valuing for herself is somehow bad, even though she knows it isn't, because she's obviously pursuing her dreams, which is good. But she's conflicted, so she needs to change her emotions.

A friend of mine calls it recalibrating her emotions. She needs to see, in reality, that the opposite conclusion is true—that thinking for herself and pursuing her dreams is moral and good. She can make a list of examples of the good things in her life and the good things about people pursuing rational dreams to see that it's moral and that it's good. Within her own life, she needs to realize that she is living with contradictory guidance. It is an impossible situation to put yourself in. She cannot obey her parents and think for herself; you can't do both, and the result is self-doubt. She shouldn't have to go through life with chronic, unresolved conflict and guilt.

What I'm going to recommend is that I wrote a book with Dr. Edwin Locke called The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason. We start with chapters about what love is, but also, how do you make yourself lovable? How do you build self-esteem? What are the rational virtues? How can you have a rational moral code that's not conflicting or contradictory, that can guide your life toward happiness without ever stepping on anyone else or allowing them to take advantage of you? You can get my book at selfishromance.com or Amazon. It's again, The Selfish Path to Romance, co-authored with Dr. Edwin Locke.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com.

Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke, who's world-famous for his theories in goal setting.

Another emotion that is important to understand and detect, both in yourself and any potential romantic partner, is envy. Envy involves resentment of and/or the desire for objects or qualities possessed by another. Jealousy is similar in meaning. In the best sense of these terms, they refer simply to wishing that one had what another has. In the worst sense, they refer to wanting the destruction of another person's values, including virtues of character—virtues and values which one lacks. If I can't have X, then nobody should have it.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at Amazon.