From the author: An essay on the topic of irrational beliefs that prevent us from living, published on my website and in the space of the blogosphere. The last article was devoted to the study of such a fundamental irrational belief among those that prevent us from living as " The world around me should be honest and just." I don’t know how much I managed to convince you of how strongly this and other beliefs influence the feeling of our own unhappiness that sometimes visits many of us. But this time, I would like to continue exactly where I left off last time. Naturally, at the same time, I discovered something in myself, something that in the same way prevented me from living and enjoying life, developing, and achieving success in my time. Very often, having broken many copies, having spent incredible efforts fighting for the honesty and justice of the world (efforts that were essentially unsuccessful, doomed to failure in advance, it must be admitted), a person simply gets tired. And some people not only get tired, but, as they say, “give up.” So often and in such a large number of people you can catch fragments of phrases thrown every now and then: “Well, why bother in vain now?..”, “This will not help in any way..”, “There is no benefit from this..” , “If I don’t think about it, then it doesn’t bother me..”, “I really want to finally do it, but I just can’t muster the strength..”, “I don’t like my life today, but.. ", "I'll do anything to avoid it..", "Drinking helps me forget..", "Come on, it's not such a serious problem..", "Nothing will help me.." These statements are possible verbal signs of the presence of another belief that interferes with life: “It is better to avoid life’s difficulties than to fight them.” This is, in a way, the other extreme, the other pole. If earlier a person struggled with all his might against the imaginary injustice of the world, now he declared the whole world to be completely unfair for himself and decided to simply withdraw from the flow of everyday difficulties, relieving himself of all responsibility for them. The search for the easy way, the belief in the easy way, the focus on it is typical for very, very many people. There is a wonderful and favorite quote from E.T.A. Hoffman: “In life you need to do only what comes easy, but do it with all your might.” In my opinion, its main meaning comes down to finding your true purpose; it does not negate the need to make efforts, quite the contrary. You can immediately recall the biblical quotes: “Enter at the narrow gate...”. But, be that as it may, many people are constantly looking for an easy way. In which problems seem to simply resolve themselves. All the same problems, worries, troubles, everyday difficulties and tasks that arise on our way again and again, waiting for some good solution on our part. The research of the American psychologist Richard Lazarus is interesting in this regard. They show that relatively minor troubles and problems can have a much greater impact on a person than large and large-scale ones. Well, what are minor troubles? Traffic jams, who cut someone off on the road, who stepped on someone’s foot in public transport, the same broken heel or a snag on tights, and much more - an endless list. Many people tend to have a stress reaction to all these events. So Lazarus proved the effect of stress accumulation for minor troubles. Major troubles happen relatively rarely; between them there is a long period of time during which a person has time to “move away,” rethink everything, and somehow accept these events for himself. Minor troubles happen almost constantly, forming whole sequential chains: overslept on the way to work - got stuck in a traffic jam - had an argument with some driver or passenger - bad mood - was late for work - missed an important meeting - didn’t hear important information - failed negotiations with the client -had a fight with the boss - fired - financial difficulties appeared in the family - quarreled with my wife - divorce... I, of course, exaggerate for the sake of clarity, but often everything happens in a similar way with minor troubles and worries. If a person reacts to them with stress, then such stress very quickly becomes chronic. Well, and then - all this is already a familiar list of stress disorders, which include various diseases. The body, after all, lives in tension mode under stress: pressure rises, impulses increase in certain parts of the nervous system. In such a situation, the rule may work in the body: “Where it’s thin, that’s where it breaks.” When some organ, its work is disrupted. A person gets sick, but the disease itself is a kind of adaptation to existence in conditions of constant stress. Some people simply try to escape from these various minor troubles. The extreme form of such escape is binge drinking. When a person literally leaves, he plunges into a state in which his mind is simply not able to distinguish and record all these troubles and worries. But practice shows that just because the chain of worries was suddenly interrupted for a while by binge drinking, it did not stop. All these problems and worries still need to be resolved. Each person has their own strategies for dealing with stress, their own ways of solving everyday worries and problems. In the course of research, theoretical psychologists have identified three fundamentally different groups of such strategies for coping with stress: - Resolution strategy. When a person tries to understand the causes of difficulties and find alternative ways to solve them. In essence, this is a behavior strategy for an adult. - Strategy for seeking social support. When a person is looking in the outside world for someone who can provide him with the resources necessary to solve a problem: material or emotional. Here is the search for all kinds of patronage, connections, attempts to find the “right people,” the search for psychological support from friends and girlfriends, advice. - Avoidance strategy. Here the name itself speaks for itself. Actually, this strategy is the main one for those people who decide to live, guided by the conviction: “It is better to avoid life’s difficulties than to fight them.” A kind of avoidance of the unfair world and its manifestations. This is a search for all possible ways to reduce the internal manifestations of stress without interacting with the source of the stress reaction in the outside world. In fact, whether a person realizes it or not, stress itself suits him - the person does not want to change anything radically. It often happens in the analysis of such cases that it is convenient to be a loser, simply because the person himself does not know what to do with success. It’s convenient to feel like such a tragic hero who is incredibly talented, but his strong life principles do not allow him to be successful. A tragic hero who cannot adapt to life in this unjust world. In the professional environment, one not particularly developed, but very interesting direction is known, called provocative psychotherapy. Actually, its main and main representative is the living and creative American psychotherapist Frank Farrelly. The essence of his method comes down to maintaining a warm and loving attitude towards his client in his soul, verbally encouraging the client as much as possible to get angry at the state of affairs, the state into which he has entered in his problems. And on the wave of these aggressive emotions, this indignation, we begin to emerge from the crisis. I sometimes tell my patients the story of how Frank spent 90 (!!!) sessions in a row trying to convince his depressed patient of his ideas about his own uselessness, worthlessness and impossibility of recovery. And at the 91st session I simply said to him: “You know, but you’re right. You’re really worthless, hopeless, and you have no future!” To which the patient was reasonably indignant:.