33 Bad Attitudes and What to Do With Them
By Jude Bijou
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About this ebook
This ebook is your go-to guide for quick information when you’re strung out, pushed to the limits, or about to blow your lid and need help now! I’ve outlined 33 destructive attitudes and given you easy-to-read bullet points that will send you in the right direction to make the changes you desire. Discover how to handle such challenges as mourning a loss or forgiving someone you’ve been angry with for a long time. Learn how to shift a lingering dark mood and let go of guilt, worry, anxiety, defensiveness, or low self-esteem.
You can put any destructive attitude to the test. Chapter 1 focuses and dissects attitudes about yourself that are rooted in the emotion of sadness. They will help you come into your personal power, take charge of your life, and feel more joy. Chapter 2 addresses attitudes based in anger and how they’re affecting how you relate to other people and situations. You’ll get straightforward advice on achieving true acceptance and acting from a place of love. Chapter 3 is all about fear and attitudes that come from that agitation. You’ll explore how to peacefully live in the moment and responsibly enjoy whatever comes your way.
Every time you contradict your old ways of operating, an internal shift, a divine shift, will confirm you’re on the right track. You can select a recommendation for a current situation that keeps you beating your head up against the wall. Or randomly pick one suggestion each day, to contemplate or practice. With over 30 to choose from, you can devote an entire month to honoring yourself, accepting other people and situations, and staying present and specific. The result? More joy, love, and peace!
Jude Bijou
Jude Bijou is a licensed marriage and family therapist (MFT), an educator in Santa Barbara, CA, and the author of multi-awarding winning, Attitude Reconstruction: A Blueprint for Building a Better Life (Riviera Press, November 2011).As the daughter of a renowned pioneer in the field of behavioral child psychology and applied behavior analysis, Jude’s upbringing sounds like it would be pretty cool. There was just one problem: she was miserable.Earning a BA in psychology from Reed College and a master’s in psychology from Carleton University, she became a marriage and family therapist. Success was attained, yet something was still missing. Looking eastward, she immersed herself in the world of meditation and Vedic philosophy. The result: an integrated, truly holistic approach to viewing ourselves and our relationships with others. Her multi award-winning system, Attitude Reconstruction was birthed into the world.In 1982, Jude launched a private psychotherapy practice and started working with individuals, couples, and groups. She also began teaching communication courses through Santa Barbara City College Adult Education. Word spread about the success of Attitude Reconstruction, and it wasn’t long before Jude became a sought-after workshop and seminar leader, teaching her approach to organizations and groups.The culmination of Jude’s groundbreaking work can now be found in Attitude Reconstruction: A Blueprint for Building a Better Life. These simple principles have impacted countless clients, seminar participants, and students. And Jude promises this: if we can learn to harness the tools we’re intrinsically born with, creating a life full of joy, love, and peace is truly possible, right here, right now.
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33 Bad Attitudes and What to Do With Them - Jude Bijou
No one wants to be told they have a ‘bad attitude’. Often, it conjures up images of a rebellious teen that comes home after curfew or has a mouthy comeback for everything she’s asked to do. But whether we’d like to admit it or not, we all have bad attitudes that creep into every aspect of our interactions and can make our lives miserable.
Struggles in marriage. Feeling lost in the world. Consistently packing on the pounds despite trying dozens of diets. All of these less than desirable results stem back to a bad attitude of some sort, and often, we are completely unaware of it.
How do I define a bad attitude? It’s an all-pervasive belief that determines how we behave and how we react to events in our lives. For instance, when something doesn’t go our way, it’s easy to play the sulk,
the victim, or the blame game.
We have taken on bad attitudes about ourselves, spouse, kids, job, and the world. They proliferate the space around us and color every experience we have. They make us feel exhausted and rob us of feeling good.
So where do these attitudes come from? When events happened in our past without us expressing nary an emotion – or at least not to the extent we felt them — we created a way to escape what we were experiencing in our bodies. Maybe we ate some comfort food, acted out, or kicked the dog. Today we still call on those coping mechanisms whenever we feel sadness, anger, and fear.
Emotions get a bad wrap. We spend so much time avoiding them, but they’re just completely normal responses to what’s going on in our world. They’re nothing to be afraid of! That overwhelming sadness, anger, and fear we feel is just pure physical sensation in the body. Emotions are just energy in motion, e-+motion
.
Not releasing that energy has a steep price. Years of hurts and losses accumulate and lead to overwhelming sadness. All of the injustices and violations we experience and cannot reconcile, ultimately end up creating a wad of unexpressed anger. And threats to our survival, whether literal or perceived, create a storehouse of unresolved fear. The unexpressed sadness, anger, and fear we carry eats away at the quality of our lives.
Believe it or not, there was a time when we weren’t burdened down by held-in emotions. Think of a child. When he doesn’t get the sugar cereal he wants in the grocery store, he may throw himself into a tantrum on the floor, kicking and screaming, and wailing as loud as he can to show his displeasure. Then minutes later, with a tear-streaked face, he’s back to his happy self and playing with the toy truck.
Expressing how we feel is natural. It’s the inherent way we were wired — before our parents, religion, and society in general showed us what was ‘correct’ behavior. Most of us were taught it was wrong or socially unacceptable to express our emotions, both good and bad. So by the time we’re adults, suppressing and diverting emotions is the norm.
THE OLD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
But alas, the moment our sadness, anger, and fear are triggered, instead of staying present and dealing with emotions that arise, we bolt. We’ll do anything to escape the surges of emotions that put us on overdrive.
To distract ourselves from dealing with the emotional energy, we compensate in predictable ways: we revert to bad
habits. These habits don’t honor ourselves, don’t show acceptance of other people and situations, and don’t allow us to enjoy the present moment. Simultaneously, we invest in practices that don’t produce joy, love, and peace, the qualities we truly long for. Instead, we behave in ways that continue to generate more sadness, anger, and fear.
Our old bad habits fall into two categories. They’re either destructive attitudes or addictions to substances or activities. Both are anesthetics we use to avoid feeling emotions.
All attitudes and addictions are driven by unexpressed sadness, anger, and fear, and at their core, fear. When we experience but don’t express fear, our minds leap out of the present (where our emotions reside). We’ll knee-jerk, check-out, engage in old habits — anything to escape the frenzied agitated feeling.
We’ll also find ourselves projecting into the future and over-generalizing, that is, making the ‘event’ or a ‘feeling’ seem like a catastrophe or somehow distorting its significance. We don’t believe we are and will be all right no matter what transpires. At that moment, we forget our good intentions to break our habit and become fixated on the lure of our escape.
Expressing our emotions physically feels scary and vulnerable. Our old coping mechanisms provide immediate comfort and familiarity. We feel safe and less vulnerable or at the least, less emotional discomfort. But are we really in control if we’re high tailing as fast as we can away from our own emotions? Not so much. So we seek a fleeting shot of instant gratification to avoid confronting them and feel in control and pacified.
In addition to emotions being elicited by events in our lives, each of us is born with a ‘constitution’ or tendency to experience one emotion more than the others. If you lean towards sadness, you