Human beings rarely have pure thoughts and feelings. There are often unarticulated wants, goals, desires and beliefs.
The three musts:
I must do well and have to be approved by others
Other people must treat me fairly
I must have a comfortable and hassle free life.
Common neurotic problems- ego disturbance (self damning), low frustration tolerance, discomfort disturbance.
You create both appropriate and inappropriate feelings when your goals and desires are blocked.
You largely (not completely) create your own disturbed thoughts and feelings; and, therefore you have the power to control them.
You mainly make yourself needlessly and neurotically miserable by strongly holding absolutist irrational beliefs, especially by rigidly believing unconditional shoulds, oughts and musts.
Your early childhood experiences and your past conditioning did not originally make you disturbed, you did.
Fully acknowledge that you upset yourself with irrational musts. Acknowledging that you have musts will not in itself make them disappear. Fight them.
You can refuse to upset yourself about upsetting- yourself.
As you attempt to solve your practical life problems, look carefully to discover whether you have any emotional problems, such as feelings of anxiety or depression- about practical issues If so, seek out and actively dispute your dogmatic, musturbatory thinking that leads to your emotional difficulties and use effective self-management and problem solving methods to tackle them.
You can change irrational beliefs by acting against them, by performing behaviors that contradict them.
Expansion of 3 - No matter how clearly you see that you upset yourself and make yourself needlessly miserable, you rarely will improve except through work and practice, yes considerable work and practice - to actively change your disturbance creating beliefs and to vigorously (and often uncomfortably) act against them.
If you mildly dispute your irrational beliefs you may not change them and keep them changed. Therefore, you had better powerfully and persistently argue against them and persuade yourself that they are false.
You may for a while find it easy to change your feelings, but you'd better keep working to maintain your gains.
When you improve your emotional disturbance, it will be a miracle if you never backslide, When you backslide, go back to the RET drawing board.
Once you understand the basic irrational beliefs you create to upset yourself, you can use this understanding to explore, attack and surrender your present and future emotional problems.