How to have good feelings, become happy and devellop self-esteem ? - David D. Burns PHD

so hello everyone we are in a new city today and I am with a new awesome guest he is David Burns he is the best-selling author of the best-selling book feeling good so today we will learn how to have good feeling how how to become happy and also how to develop the self esteem he is with me so hello David hi I love your name yes yeah good name David David so maybe I let you to introduce yourself to people who are following us yeah well I'm a psychiatrist and I kind of started out and research on brain chemistry and feeding depression and anxiety with pills I was at University of Pennsylvania Medical School and then I switched over my career to working on some of the new forms of psychotherapy which were in the mid-1970s just coming into existence one called cognitive behavior therapy and I became very excited about it and saw that some of the new psycho therapies had far more power to change the way people think feel and behave then simply prescribing pills and medications and so I gave up my academic career in brain research to develop a private practice helping to create fast-acting powerful psychotherapy technology and how do you define a cognitive therapy therapy well that's a big word but it has a simple meaning a cognition is just a thought it's what what's going through your mind at every moment your interpretation of what's happening and it goes back to the Greek philosopher Epictetus 2,000 years ago he said people are not disturbed by things or events but rather you know the views we take of them if it's your thoughts rather than what's happening to you that creates your emotions yeah and the ideas been around for 2,000 years or even more probably the Buddha was into this 2500 years ago but now psychiatrists and psychologists have turned this into a powerful form of psychotherapy and and another interesting thing about it I mean but the idea is so simple people don't even even grasp what it means like even at this moment our thoughts are creating how we feel like if I'm thinking oh my gosh I'm going to screw up I won't smile well enough I won't I have to come up with something interesting to say but I don't have anything interesting to say then I'll feel a great deal of anxiety but it's not the cameras that would be grading those emotions but rather the messages that I'm giving myself and so that's one of the powerful theories underneath cognitive therapy it's just a simple idea but the second idea behind it is even more kind of mind-blowing and that's when we're upset meaning when you're depressed yeah when you feel anxious when you feel insecure or when you when you're kind of beating up on by self yeah you're in a bad mood to press mood the thoughts it's again it's not what's happening to you but but your thoughts and those thoughts will almost never be valid thoughts that you're fooling yourself depression and anxiety are the world's oldest cons it's a year there's a kind of fraud involved that's that's the really amazing thing about it and then feeling good I talked about 10 cognitive distortions or forms of twisted thinking yeah like like I would love to know the town yeah like for example one of them is called all-or-nothing thinking black or white thinking you you if you're not a complete success you think you're a total failure like yeah in my dream very envision perceptions yeah yeah yeah for example I mentioned now I'm out at Stanford and I have this weekly training group where I help local therapists and students learn new psychotherapy but also develop their own self-esteem break out of their own depression and a lot of what we do is live work we help the people who attend this weekly seminar deal with their own mood slumps their own times they fall into a black hole and so this Tuesday I have a dear colleague a wonderful woman and she's a it she's in her 60s she's a local therapist and a woman of tremendous skill and compassion but a single a single woman and she's very kind of generous she spent her life treating people who don't have any money and and working with people who are poor and then things like that and she went to her retirement advisor to see you know what will happen when I retire and she discovered that she hasn't been planning very well for her retirement and that her income from Social Security and from her investments is going to be very modest and the shocked her frightened her hmm but then she had the thought I'm a failure I'm a loser yeah and and she believed that thought those thoughts a hundred percent and it plunged her into a very severe depression she was angry at herself I gave her depression test she was moderately depressed so you are seeing that if we change your thoughts we will change Aurum when you change the way you think you can change the way you feel that's the whole whole basis of it but you've got to take your thoughts and write them down I had to write these negative thoughts down on a piece of paper then I have this little checklist of ten distortions for example I have a bad mood and I take a paper and I write down everything I have in my mind on the paper right yeah all the negative thoughts oh that I'm a loser I will fail I'm not good enough I don't just in a study I'm you know I'm I'm too slow yeah yeah that's right exactly and we all do this to ourselves and and you think those thoughts are real and you think those thoughts are valid so with her I just went through the list of ten distortions one at a time did I said that are there any distortions in that thought and you know she said well all-or-nothing thinking and also another one called discounting the positive and I said well I guess I could point out to myself that I have or master's degrees in a PhD and and also my colleagues have told me that my skills in treating the most difficult patients of all are superb yeah and then she went on looking at all these things about herself that she'd been overlooking when she was saying I'm a loser I'm a failure and but that's what we what we do to ourselves we get into these black holes where we're thinking about things in an incredibly distorted way it happens to me and I'm sure it has happened to you today but I remember when I when I was a psychiatric resident were just learning psychotherapy I had this very famous mentor who he was actually one of the creators of cognitive therapy Aaron Aaron Beck mmm he's in he's in Philadelphia and I was presenting a case to him and it's a patient it hadn't been paying his bill at the clinic he was coming but he wasn't paying for his sessions he was way behind in his billing and I made a comment to him about the billing and the patient got upset so then I presented this to dr. back and he said oh well you didn't handle this this correctly with this patient and I began to panic and feel worthless and extraordinarily ashamed and so I went home and I said well I jog it I'll have to jog and get my brain chemistry straightened around so I went for a 6 mile jog and the farther I ran the more those thoughts seemed true and I said wow I'm the worst therapist in the world they're going to kick me out of the state of Pennsylvania they'll take my license away I have no skill you know I'm a horrible human being and I thought my gosh those thoughts aren't distorted that's real and why did it take me so many years to see what a horrible human being I am and I can tell you I believed at 100% and that's that's the kind of thing that happens and then when I got home I said why don't you write your thoughts down on a piece of paper like you tell your patients to do and see if they're any Distortion send them and and I said oh no no that wouldn't do any good my thoughts are real there's no distortions and I said yeah but that's what your patients say they whine like that too but for why don't you try it now just try it out so I wrote down I'm one of the worst therapists in the world I you know I have no talent I have no skill they're going to kick me out of the state of Pennsylvania I wrote them down one two three I said are there any distortions here then I thought well wait a minute all or nothing thinking over generalization discounting the positive emotional reasoning hidden should statements I'm saying I should be perfect I should never make mistakes self blame I found about six or eight of the distortions and it was a surprise to me and then he said now can you write a positive thought down can you challenge these thoughts it says it's against DEP yeah right on second steps you've identified the distortions yeah and then the third step you come up with a positive thought it's kind of a simple approach it's pretty sophisticated in reality but the basic ideas are simple and then I said well I could tell myself I'm human and and as a student or even an advanced therapist I have the right to make mistakes and that right that yeah and I write it down and and that doesn't mean I'm a terrible therapist because I've had a lot of patience I've been able to help but maybe instead of being all ashamed I can go back and tell this patient that I made a mistake and talk it over with them and use that as an opportunity to develop a deeper better relationship Wow and I said how much do you believe that I put a hundred percent how much do you believe I'm a failure I'm a loser I'm horrible human being zero percent it was like magic and I just felt elated my egg ative mood just you know flew away and you came back your power to improve yourself and learn from you yeah failure yeah and then the next day I saw the patient I said boy you know I screwed up so bad last session and and I was so ashamed of it and I'll bet you were so angry and hurt I didn't handle that about the billing well at all let's talk it over and he just opened up and we had the best session ever it was just it was like an amazing amazing thing but inside me you see I had these rules that I have to be perfect I'm not allowed to make mistakes you know I have to get everyone's approval all the time and it was those core beliefs my attitude my way of thinking about it that was the source of my misery yes it wasn't what what actually happened but the way I was thinking about it and how do you had someone who who have these deep believes that you have to do has that she has to do perfect this is my cat in case you can't see it this is my and he's called happy this is we adopt stray cats and we just we love our cats and I've learned a lot from my cats too I've learned a lot about psychotherapy it's amazing because I've learned the power of patience and and kindness and love we take stray cats some of our cats that we've adopted like Obie you haven't seen him yet but he was a wild violent cat when he came to our house he'd never had in contact with humans and he only came to our house because his paw was all infected was as big as his head and he knew he was on the verge of death so we captured him and brought him to the vet and he and he had surgery to save his life and then and then we adopted him and initially when we brought him in the house he he would try to break through the windows and when my wife tried to get close to him he bit her real hard real badly on the cheek and he would pee and poo all over the the carpets and now he's turned into the most loving sweet little just like happy here just my best friend and has really taught me the tremendous power because we were told that a feral cat a wild cat can't learn to trust people and now he gets on my chest at night and he needs me with his paws he drools he purrs when we have guests over like for my Sunday hikes of my students come and we hike I mentioned for our some do personal work and practice techniques and he's very trusting and he's just very warm and loving and you know so I'm just really a believer in the tremendous power of human beings I've treated I've had over thirty five or forty thousand therapy sessions with patients with severe depression and severe anxiety and it's such a joy to see someone before your very eyes the depression disappear and go to joy and that's why I wrote my first book feeling good because I wanted to share these techniques with people to let the world know that that magic is impossible and now at Stanford we're developing a new version of cognitive therapy where we're trying to complete a course of therapy in just one or two sessions to take people who are suffering terribly and see their mood change from sobbing to joy and laughter and usually in just a single therapy session yes and may question about that is how to become happy in this life yeah well you know you're a motivational speaker I've seen what you do on YouTube and it's really really cool and you're kind of into taking people with kind of normal mood and Happiness and elevate them to greatness my thing is a little different from that the people who come to me are struggling with suicidal thoughts and feeling that they're worthless and extreme forms of anxiety and some I my thing is is to get a person up to where all those negative feelings disappear but what but that itself is one of the greatest feelings in the world because patients when their depression disappears they say it's like being born again it's the greatest feeling a human being can experience and so I'm not so much trying to say how can you increase your potential or increase your joy but say give me a moment that you were upset with with a colleague with your spouse with your boyfriend your girlfriend or when you're feeling anxiety you're worrying or having a panic attack or feeling depressed and then I help the person change the way they were thinking and feeling at that moment using many power full techniques and then to watch them go from that state of despair to to a state of joy for example if they come to you in saying I hate my life I'm 80% angry and bad mood every time I don't know why I'm in this this Earth's what do you do with me in a visualization well they do the new way we would work with you is is we call a team therapy te al and team stands for testing so the first thing by happy well first like I do I give you what I call a brief mood serve a little test of your moods that you can complete in 30 seconds on on a paper yeah and it would show me exactly how depressed you are right now how suicidal you are how anxious you are how angry you are those are all negative feelings plus a test of positive feelings so I'd see how happy you are but in this case you wouldn't be happy at all that's the first thing the snakes only 30 see you yeah ha ha filming I can show you the test label to use 1 & 2 yes 2 to measure yeah the tests are very anchored they took decades to develop but they're roughly 95% accurate like the depression test you can take in 15 seconds and score it interpret up and it has an 85% accuracy it's very very sensitive and it's how are you feeling right now because I want to know how the patient is feeling at the start of the session because then we're going to measure it again at the end of the session and see if we've gotten this massive shift that we're trying to get to get you out of that horrible mood and into joy and self-esteem and and optimism so that's the first the first thing and a lot of therapists don't do that they just with people behind closed doors and and they're not measuring anything so what we're trying to do is is have a data-driven form of psychotherapy and empirical psychotherapy where we're measuring things and proving that we're getting results rapidly or not getting results in which case we have to changed the strategy the second thing I would do is to empathize and I use what's called five secrets of effective communication I wouldn't try to help you with your bad mood I would just listen repeat your words find truth in what you're saying try to see the world through your eyes so that I would be your ally yeah not somebody who's trying to fix you in some way that's that's the e of empathy to use a synchronization of your buddy or your voice no no I think that's but a lot of people talk about that kind of stuff I'm opinionated and half of what it comes out of my mouth is good and half is not so good so take what I say with a grain of salt but no I think the the secrets it is more finding the truth than what the person is saying and acknowledging their emotions what kind of question you asking these day of woman's well you mentioned that you're very angry you know there's a lot to be angry about in the world and also you're feeling down you mentioned to me tell me about that and what are the things that have been going on and that are causing you to feel a lot of angry and a lot of discouragement okay and then whatever the person says I would find truth in what they're saying I would agree with them and they asked them about their emotions and show them that I'm their ally not not somebody trying to fix them or we're trying to give them advice or anything like that and this takes a lot of training of therapists to teach them how to do this also when people have troubled relationships we teach them how to do this in in the relationship with the person they're having trouble with should show them how to relate more skillfully but that's that's a little different topic then the third thing I would do as the therapist is called paradoxical agenda-setting now that's another big word but but what it means is I would bring out all the reasons for you not to change mmm I would try to make you proud of your anger proud of your depression to show what their shows about you that's really very elegant and very awesome and and I would like kind of question you do to help the people to see to be put off by dr feeling well remember i gave you an example earlier in the interview of the colleague yeah who said i'm a failure yeah because she hadn't planned well for her retirement and before i helped her change her thinking i I said to her what what do these thoughts show about you that's really kind of beautiful and awesome well and she said well I can't think of anything I said well I can think of five or ten things but for example for one thing it shows that you're a woman of great integrity because you're looking at your faults and your flaws with ruthless honesty yeah she said well that's true and so she wrote down a integrity great what else is it show about you see said bullet shows that I'm very humble and spiritual I said that's absolutely true you're one of the most you had them to consider what they're fully in you know their perceptions yes yeah in other words therapists are always trying to change patients right to help them and that forces people to remain the same because any time you try to push something on someone they naturally resist yeah yeah so instead I show get the patient to see that you're suffering this is this is something awesome about you and we came up a list of 10 tremendous things that showed about her it showed to that she had devoted her life to helping people the poor rather than making a lot of money so it showed that her to be a very loving person and also showed when she beats up on herself it shows she has high standards right yeah and on and on and on and so Wow by the time we got the end of this list we say well you know so and so I won't say her name to protect her identity but but maybe maybe this isn't something we we would need to change maybe all this suffering that you're having is a good thing yeah and and then she says yeah but I you know I'm feeling so horrible and and you know but I really do want to change and say well then maybe we could dial it down a little bit rather they she was a hundred percent depressed a hundred percent angry a hundred percent ashamed hundred percent anxious what would be a healthy amount of negative feelings she said oh well twenty percent depression would be enough and ten percent anxiety and five percent shame I don't need all that and now we're on board you say well now let's just lower it we won't make these feelings go away completely what would you just lower them and so what I've really done now is I've made a deal with her subconscious mind do you see I I've now she won't resist treatment and then I you you had helped her to low allow some of the negative feelings yes rather than trying to go from horribly depressed to euphoric we but we don't need to be 100 percent depressed when you find you have to make new retirement plans you don't need all these these these negative feelings doesn't you don't need to be beat up on yourself that much and then I then I use em of method CT II am testing empathy agenda setting and methods and I've developed 50 or 100 methods to change negative thinking patterns and I just used one called externalization of voices and she hit the ball out of the park and she was able to crush all of her negative thoughts in about one or two minutes and all of her negative feelings disappeared it was like magic yeah and it was like a miracle and she the feelings went much lower they went down to zero most of them you see once she decided she'll keep some of them then she didn't need them anymore and they all disappeared and it innit once once she was motivated to attack those negative thoughts and feelings it the I would say the treeview it took maybe less than five minutes to complete the treatment at that point and we see this over and over again now I didn't use to see this in the early days of my of my practice it's we feel it's an amazing new breakthrough in psychotherapy and in my my team at Stanford has develop that we call it team therapy and now I've been doing workshops on it around the United States and Canada and they've opened a little feeling good Institute here right and you know so it worked we're kind of excited about it great I love that you know just before the interview we are talking about the fact we were shy yeah and and I love that the fact that the people can listen to that ish you asides impossible yeah and do you have some keys but to develop self to increase self-esteem well like you one thing that I want to mention you've talked about self esteem and self confidence and I think those are very different yeah and I don't know what your definition is but I call self confidence is the idea you're going to be successful because you've been successful at that type of thing in the past so when I give a workshop I have self confidence because they've given so many workshops I pretty much know they'll be pretty successful they might be a home run or they might be somewhat successful that depends on how warm and kind I am to the audience and how enthusiastic I am but I know they'll be okay they'll be pretty darn good now self-esteem I think is the ability to love yourself and accept yourself but you fail as much as when you succeed and I think that's the difference between them but you asked a question I don't even remember what it was yeah I repeat it again do you have some tips to do to develop the self-esteem for the people who are following us what they can do to develop to increase their self-esteem well I could answer that and two different within two different ways what people can do to increase their self-esteem the first place of someone who's watching this has low self-esteem the probability is overwhelming that they're experiencing some depression because a loss of self-esteem is the key to depression that's the the most important symptom and the other most important symptom is hopelessness the idea that things will never change they'll be like this forever now one thing and this might be overly promotional but there's been a lot of research on my book feeling good and I know there are there is a French translation there you can obtain it in France in French you can take oh that book right if you lose it April in French no I I can't find it on my bookshelf the French versions but I know there's a French version in France and then there Quebec also has a French version yeah and they're slightly different from from each other but there's been a lot of research on the book feeling good and this wasn't my research but a colleague in University of Alabama for a scogan and what they have discovered they were looking for the cheapest way to treat depression and so they said what would happen if we just give people with severe depressions a copy of dr. Byrnes his book feeling good and see what happens to them over a four-week period of time with no treatment these were people coming to the Medical Center asking for drugs or psychotherapy for moderate to severe depression and what they discovered was that two thirds of them roughly 65% of them at the end of the four weeks they had recovered from the depression and they didn't need medications they didn't need psychotherapy then they've also done long-term follow-up studies on those patients to see do they then relapse and the long-term they've done up to three years long-term follow-up studies and they're even feeling better at the end of the three years that at the end of the initial four weeks so that's called bibliotherapy or self-help self-help therapy with no psychiatrist no psychologist and no drugs now it doesn't mean everyone would be cured because a third of the people the book wasn't enough but for many people if they could get a copy of feeling good in French or whatever that would be one one one thing that you could do you know to help yourself now for myself personally you know the the I've developed 50 hundred techniques but the technique that has helped me the most is called the acceptance paradox and it's the opposite of perfection yeah and the acceptance paradox means to to accept the fact that you are flawed that you're not as good as you should be and you never will be and rather than trying to better yourself to accept yourself as a human being now you can talk about acceptance but it's hard for people to grasp but I've developed exercises to help people your early acceptance very without to exert a these we the people can do now for example well one is called externalization of voices yeah and it's kind of like that written exercise where we're talking about writing down negative thoughts and combating them with positive thoughts but instead of writing it down you do it in a roleplay like do I mean I could help you with with this if you have any negative thoughts of your own do you get negative thoughts sometimes yeah and what do you tell yourself I am NOT in and if good yeah maybe it was that I'm not good enough yeah I'm not good enough okay that's I love that thought that that's when everyone watching this video can identify with we can have put your hands up if you feel you're not good enough of many hams just just went up that's a good one and any others I have it as I run I will not be capable to do it is all I have sometimes and what is it that I won't be capable to do I I won't be successful enough yeah I wouldn't be successful enough in my company for example okay let's just work on those two thoughts yeah I know what one of us will be the negative David and one will be the positive David we're both going to be your your mind yeah and I'll let you stir up is the positive one and I'll be the negative one and this will allow us to illustrate the acceptance paradox and another strategy called the self defense yeah paradigm there's two opposite ways of defeating your own negative thoughts now people watching this video the first thing they need to know is to write down our negative thoughts when they're upset that that's the key to it if you try to do this in your head yeah it won't work but we know two of your negative thoughts now could I talk to you for a minute David yeah you know who I am yours any gays in the gates you've won yeah I'm negative you and I didn't want to upset you but I I wanted to mention a couple things to you yeah and the first thing I want to mention to use your you're actually not good enough okay okay think how are you going to defeat that thought how you will defeat you you have to defeat me oh you're the positive David I'm the negative Dave okay okay so quite a weight loss why do you think that use the first person I I okay I have to explain yeah you okay I think I think I see you're not good enough you can't even respond to my criticism Tony Robbins would have been able to answer that right okay yes yes I can because I I did so many things I am proud of mm-hmm yeah okay now who won that exchange did you defeat me or did I defeat you ah yeah you defeat me okay try a role reversal yeah I thought you did pretty well where as the positive David but now you be the negative David and I'll be the positive David and say the exactly the same thing to me you're you're not good enough I think I am the anything he would shock that you would do I'll explain it again if you if you like because even in English this is sophisticated yeah but it's fun so it's worth explaining so you and the people watching this can understand ask a question if you don't understand what we're doing and also fill it out and so you are not good enough okay well you know I've accomplished a lot of things and and that I'm you know proud of those things but there's probably nothing about me that couldn't be improved and there's probably a lot of people who are way better than I am and virtually everything that I do and and I I accept that in fact I have many friends in low places yeah I bet it's amazing who won that exchange you yeah and how did I win because you accept that you're not perfect yeah exactly exactly and for me personally that has changed my life that then that concept now I'm going to be the negative David again yeah so again let's just do what you did let's do a role reversal I'm the negative David the negative voice in your mind you're the positive voice yeah I'm going to try to make you feel upset and you see if you can defeat me okay okay once again David I just I just wanted to remind you that you're not as good as you should be okay I think I achieved a lot of things and I'm proud of that and the other thing I am improving myself every day so it's okay for me to try not good enough now because I'm I know that I'm improving every day so I okay now that's called the self defense paradigm you're defending against the negative thought and you did well that's that's very impressive but I'll show you a different way to defeat that thought using what I call the acceptance paradox hit me get that same negative thought I just to and I had except that again I had a contrite and accept the fact that I am maybe not good enough oh you so you accept the fact that you're not good enough is that right yeah what do you think that's rather shameful what is shameful bad no it's good it's fades it's okay for me well why is it okay to be not as good as you should be how can that be okay because I because I am have you lay that right and that's that that's the acceptance paradox and it's hard for people to grasp yeah once you've grasped it it's it's it's liberating it's really what the Buddha was trying to to to get people it's called enlightenment it's the same thing now I'll show you the my version of the acceptance paradox David Burns Albee David Burns and you be the negative just just what just listen can I say it's okay for me to not be good sometimes but I think I am good enough can I say that well I'll show you a different way to to respond to it you'll be the negative yeah but I'll be the positive David so David then I have to die I have to say you something and go go for it yeah yeah you are not good enough oh absolutely there's nothing about me that couldn't be improved a great deal yeah straight you see that yeah that's pure acceptance that paradox without any self defense and that's what is the most helpful for me personally so you don't need to to defend yourself because it's a K that's right exactly but it's it is it's a spiritual insight and it can't be taught intellectually you have to suddenly see it it's like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time it takes your breath away mm-hmm and and but but you were what you were saying is you know I'm getting better and better all the time and the problem with that it puts you on a treadmill now I have a student and you're never good enough do you see you're working working working to try to try to get to something I have a student had a student named Matthew May the psychiatrist Matthew May MD and he's become phenomenally effective I think he might be the most effective psychiatrist in the world and we teach together now at Stanford and he has his private practice but when he was a student I used to supervise him for three hours once a week and we get a pizza talk about his difficult cases and then we'd go driving around to the hills and talk about his personal issues little bit you know his data and his insecurities and once we were driving around to the hills and and we came to a stop sign and he looked at me and he says so dr. burns I want you to know that every day I'm working so hard to become a better person and I looked at him and I said Matt I hope you get over that pretty soon he just burst into laughter because he saw down his he got his enlightenment at that moment you see this try to become a better person can be a kind of be kind be a kind of trap a kind of yeah narcissistic trap but let's come back to the externalization of laces I'll be the negative David and you be the positive David yeah well there was another thing I want to tell you David is is you may not become as successful as you should be you may not become as successful as you want with this project and you know that you're working on in fact it might not be successful at all and okay anyway thethethe I say so who won that exchange I don't know I don't know this is time I don't know mm-hmm do a role reversal you be the negative and I'll be the positive okay so David you yeah you will not you would not succeed in your project well you know succeed and fail as all-or-nothing thinking I will have already had some success in my project because I'm having fun with that I'm meeting people all over the world I'm learning about video I'm learning about you know web development it's an exciting journey and so I'll have some success and that success might be tremendous or it might be only very modest I accept it either way if it's a modest success I'll move on to to the next to the next project and if it's a great success all you know thank thank God and thank my lucky stars that it's helpful to to so many people can I say can I say I will have I have success in faders when CK yeah yeah that's the whole the whole point yeah yeah I've had a lot of successes in my life I've had a lot of failures in my life and I'll have a lot of failures in the future I don't need to be afraid of failure failure I can learn from failures just as much as I can learn from it I'd say it's a K - it's okay for me to fail because I will succeed in learning from that it is a difference right but it's also okay to fail even if I don't learn from it yeah mmm I love what you're saying because it is maybe the this step higher yeah just yeah that's right yeah it's achieving true freedom no see when I started out my career I thought I had to be the greatest psychiatrist there was and that was my perfectionism and it drove me very hard so when I was stuck with a patient a patient said you're not helping me I would create more techniques and more techniques and I couldn't stand it if I was failing with a patient I added that too yeah so there was some some value in it but it was also a bad thing because my patients had power over me because all they had to say you're not helping me and then then they could kind of control me because it made me so anxious and uncomfortable I would do anything to try to get them to change and after I'd been in practice for seven years I had a sudden change and the patient said to me you know dr. burns you're not helping me enough and these these were by the way very difficult suicidal angry you know very difficult individuals very challenging and this patient said that said that to me and I said you know you're right about that and and I feel sad about it and and I can imagine that you're angry with me and and I feel that I haven't helped you nearly as much as one fact I haven't helped you at all you're just as depressed and angry today is the first date when you came in let's talk about it tell me about all the ways I failed you and all the negative feelings you have this is incredibly important and then suddenly the patient opened up and we had the best session ever and I suddenly realized the willingness to fail gave me a new source of power that I hadn't had the first seven years of my practice so the desire to succeed can be a good thing but it can also be a curse yeah I think so it's amazing because with this project here I spent a lot of money to help to do that and it's huge for me it's incredible for me to meet such of young people but at the same time I feel more more fear more bad emotions than yeah maybe - yeah I'm the year yeah yeah it's amazing because yeah and it's that need to succeed that fear of failure yeah now before you came over I was went for my morning jog and I was feeling anxious because I've always had a phobia of cameras I've had when I wrote my book on anxiety I realized I've had you know thirteen or fourteen different anxiety disorders myself I've had China's and I've had fear of cameras and fear of bees and fear forces I've had all kinds of fears and you know speaking anxiety and just on and on and on so whenever anyone is anxious has come to me with anxiety I say boy I love and love treating you because I know how you feel I've had that too and I can show you how to defeat that thing I can show you the cure that's why I love treating anxiety because I've had just about every kind of anxiety there is but when I was jogging before you came over I was getting anxious as I go I won't be good enough I won't be able to think of anything worthwhile to say and he's going to feel like he's wasting his time he's going to go and talk to Tony Robbins next and Tony Robbins has more talent and his fingernail than I have in my whole body and I'm kind of a loser I'm no good I'm not good enough and then I said to myself well that's okay you know if you're not if you if you don't give what he wants if you if you don't do well you know you you can accept that you know you'll still have a nice lunch you'll meet a wonderful person his girlfriend life goes on and then when I accept that it kind of takes takes the pressure away because I do my best work when I'm not trying to be successful when I'm just connecting what the patient are going with the flow or hanging out with the cats or being relaxed that's when the good stuff comes out and what you are when you just are doing now I use you can't imagine that how I I love what you are saying what you are doing now it's you you are inspiring me oh is it yeah I don't know if you see that yeah that's great I'm so I'm so happy about that because it's a message that's changed my life and it's changed a life of so many people that I've worked with I am seeing a lot of power in you and your ability to for me it's easy to talk about it the fact I was shy because it's it's it's finished yeah it's not so easy for me to do what I just do before in speaking about what what I'm what are my fear of now because when I do is that in camera I show my my imperfection yeah yeah yeah and just you are doing right so what I love you know what you're doing yeah I think right and can you see that your imperfections it's actually the best part about you yeah you see that yeah I see that in you and and I wash to connect yeah right so it's not cool yeah it is it is new for me yeah I started one week ago to do that and I started to do something maybe I will love that and when I do videos I do videos about tips keys and or my past story stories it was easy for me yeah I am confident and I about to do videos I did a lot but from one week ago I started to do videos in live what I mean for example the two two days ago I was angry and I decided to record that yeah put the camcorder I don't in live explain what I do to 12 to 2 to have good feelings yeah yeah and it was hard for me to accept to show me with bad emotions yeah but I I do that because I think it will be more powerful for people to see that I can feel my emotions yeah I call that emotive obeah which means the fear of negative emotions the idea I'm not supposed to have negative emotions yeah and it's a it's another belief and that happens to me too now for example at Stanford when I have this weekly group we have about 25 people who come or 30 people students and therapists in the community and we work for two and a half hours and I teach them and my colleague Jill Levitt a psychologist who teaches with me she's the co-leader of the group we teach new techniques and they practice them and we treat them and things like that and then at the end of the evening they rate the teachers they rate me on a very personal scale yeah so every little error that I made comes out on this scale and they write what did you like the least and what did you like the most they have they write it at the bottom and this last Tuesday I was a little critical of one of the students I was too critical of her of her empathy skills and she gave me orrible ratings and it was a shock to me I think it's the lowest ratings I've ever had in a seminar at Stanford and I thought I was doing great and then I get to feeling ashamed and I think oh I better not let her see this because I'm supposed to be a guru I'm supposed to be a professor you know I'm supposed to have it all together but what I've discovered is that then the next week I go back and say you know I did such a poor job with with you in the teaching and I felt really embarrassed and ashamed afterwards because your criticisms were valid and it was really really kind of hard for me to acknowledge this but I really appreciated your feedback because what you what you said was absolutely correct suddenly then the person feels close to me and the teaching becomes magical but like you there's a part of me that thinks we shouldn't have certain kinds of negative emotion so we try to cover them up or or hide them yeah I love that isn't that neat yeah it's so David I have I have a serious question to ask you do you have advice is to become unhappy in this life yeah it's fairly trivial but it has some value and it's also something I saw on television so I can't necessarily take credit for it and it goes back I think to Epictetus or one of the early Greek philosophers and said that the way to become unhappy is to tell yourself you're going to have a wonderful day when you wake up mmm and to expect that good things are going to happen because then when you get in a traffic jam or you meet some irritating person you'll say oh this this shouldn't be happening and you'll work yourself up into a state of frustration and irritation and well and a good example of that is computers because you're a computer person I I just I haven't done a workshop for six weeks so my laptop has been turned off yeah so this morning I turned it on to see if I could update my my Norton security and the Windows updates yeah and which should be easy right yeah but I told myself this is probably going to be a pain in the ass I'll probably have to call the help lines and the computer is probably not going to work properly and sure enough that's exactly what happened the laptop it couldn't even connect to the Internet the Norton said your security has expired and I just paid two years to renew it for two years and it had the wrong BIOS in it and I had to call Norton security for about two hours and I had to call the hewlett-packard laptop help that some guy in the Philippines for about an hour and now it's finally up to speed but I dicted that it would be a pain in the house and it was a pain in the ass oh it wasn't that much of a surprise so I didn't get that upset about it they just said well this is this is what I expected so that that's kind of a you know a humble idea but but but if I like on a workshop if I say boy I'm going to hit the ball out of the park I get I get kind of arrogant and then people get annoyed with me yeah and it's not it's not as good and if I tell myself that I'll probably have some bumps in the road then when they come they're not a surprise and and you know and I can handle that yeah that's it's kind of a trivial thought yeah it is amazing key so if I would like to become unhappy in this life I have to take it pay attention to my bad thoughts and yeah and the other thing you can do to continue to be unhappy when you have bad thoughts like I'm not good enough and I should be better yeah people should treat me better and I shouldn't have made that mistake in all of these things don't write them down on a piece of paper are gay those right just let them go around and around in your head and then you'll be able to put yourself into a very severe state of thank you never try that

Channel: PARADOX Unfiltered

Views: 73,639

Keywords: become happy and devellop self-esteem ?, Brain, cognitive, david d burns interview, emotions, How to become happy?, how to develop self-esteem, How to have good feelings, negative, positive, psychoterapy, thoughts, to help

Id: p6u3tT2NLEc

Length: 52min 54sec (3174 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2016