Cognitive Truisms
These are cognitive restructuring truths used in manualized cognitive lifeskills workbooks to help change distorted thinking and self-destructive behaviors.
If you continue doing what you've been doing; you'll continue getting what you've gotten in the past.
Life is short and fragile. The average healthy person lives only around 800 to 900 months. It is not birth or death that's important, but what happens in between.
Much of the people we are today was scripted while we were children. Scripting, positive or negative, continues to be passed down from one generation to another. Our relations who are now dead still have powerful influence over our personal lives and values.
People can choose be blockers and reduce the wrong done to them, they can choose to stay neutral and pass on what offenders did to them or they can choose to be magnifiers and make things worse. They have the ability to rewrite their future. They can choose to influence their posterity in a negative or positive way. It is their choice.
If a person is seen acting in a negative or self destructive way, lift his/her lid and look underneath to see a person who is hurting. And, under that will be found usually a worthwhile person.
One can determine good from bad by what it produces. Doing wrong has never brought true happiness and never will. One can choose to do that which is wrong, but one can�t decide the consequences.
Six basic emotional needs are required for people to have happy lives. Men and women who don�t have these needs met become emotionally damaged or handicapped. However, they can choose to triumph over their emotional handicaps through forgiving others and moving on with their life. Life moves forward once the past is released.
Life is usually unfair. Often bad things happen to good people.
In marriage, the thing that matters most are the people. When a couple wants to improve their marriage, then they have to improve themselves.
Good communication requires to seek to understand and then to be understood.
When you decide to do what is wrong, you allow other people and the circumstances around you to have power over your life.
Doing wrong will ensure that life will not get better. Offenders will have to suffer the consequences of their bad choices.
Numerous people with bad beginnings will have bad endings. Their past will equal their future unless they consciously choose to do something in between to alter it.
Who we are is what we do. What we do is who we are. There is no way to hide who we are because ultimately we'll give ourselves away by our bad choices and actions. Our long-term behavior is a direct indication of our values and who we are.
You can tell right from wrong by what it produces. Good people mostly produce good actions, bad people mostly bad actions. A person can�t be good and bad at the same time. They are one or the other.
Those who are emotionally damaged are better people than they believe they are. They believe lies others have told them about themselves and they believe untruth about themselves. If they don�t understand this and have a desire to begin changing they'll continue getting what they have been getting.
There are certain basic laws or needs that are so essential that we must have them all to be a whole person. Cecil B. Demille once said, "We cannot break the laws; we can only break ourselves against them." A few of these laws include love, validation, affirmation, sympathy, gratitude and security. If these are absent in our lives, we become damaged people.
Life isn�t always fair. Bad things happened to good people. It isn�t life that causes our problems, but our reactions to it. Mistakes can be forgiven, emotional scars can be healed. Life isn�t over until it is over. Each new day brings an opportunity for change.
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About the Author: Larry Lloyd is the founder of American Community Corrections Institute (ACCI), which sponsors a news blog on the subject of anger management and related issues.
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