"Control Theory" by William Glasser

• All behavior is made up of three components: what we do, what we think, and what we feel. Doing and thinking are always expressed as verbs, like running or meditating, but feelings are usually expressed as adjectives, like depressed, or nouns, like depression.
• To say the man is depressed would be to infer that the depression happened to him. What I will explain in this book is that it is a behavior he is choosing.
• To describe accurately what this man is feeling as a behavior and also be grammatically correct, I would have to say that he is depressing or choosing to depress.
• Therefore, throughout this book, verbs rather than nouns and adjectives will be used when they refer to feelings.
• Language is not insignificant. It is the main vehicle by which we communicate. The more we use it correctly, the farther it will take us in the direction we want to go.
• Nothing we do is caused by what happens outside of us. If we believe that what we do is caused by forces outside of us, we are acting like dead machines, not living people.
• In fact, what I will explain in this book is that everything we do--good or bad, effective or ineffective, painful or pleasurable, crazy or sane, sick or well, drunk or sober--is to satisfy powerful forces within ourselves.
• If I believe that the motivation for all I do, good or bad, comes from within me, not from the outside world, then, when I am miserable, I cannot claim that my misery is caused by uncaring parents, a boorish spouse, an ungrateful child, or a miserable job. If I were a machine, this claim might be valid. But I am not a machine, and although I strongly desire good treatment from everyone in my life, if I don’t get what I want, it is my choice whether or not to be miserable.
• How you feel is not controlled by others or events.
• While what we do always seems sensible to us when we do it, even a moment later it may seem like the stupidest thing we could have done. Therefore, good or bad, everything we do is our best choice at that moment.
• The next time you laugh, think a moment and I am sure you will find that you have unexpectedly encountered a short burst of truth and wisdom.
• To gain effective control of our lives, we have to satisfy what we believe is basic to us and learn to respect and not frustrate others in fulfilling what is basic to them.
• All you will ever know is what drives you.
• Everywhere we turn, the problem of gaining or losing control over ourselves or others surfaces. This is because all living organisms, as well as many dead machines, like thermostats, function as control systems.
• As much as we like to believe we can control other people, we cannot unless what we do persuades them that it satisfies some picture in their heads.
• Regardless of how we feel, we always have some control over what we do.
• The four easily recognizable components that together make up our total behavior are as follows: doing, thinking, feeling, and physiology.
• Difficult as it may be to accept, our feelings are just as much a part of our total behavior as what we do and what we think.
• At this stage of our evolution, we have almost total control over the doing components, some over the thinking component, almost non over the feeling component, and even less over the physiological component of our total behavior.
• We have almost no ability to change what we feel or think, but we have almost total control over what we do, whether it satisfies us or not.
• We are all more than willing to pay the price of sever pain and misery as a part of the total behaviors we choose as we attempt to regain control.
• By the end of the first year of life, a baby has learned a whole repertoire of angering behaviors to control his mother or anyone else who helps take care of him.
• The second reason we choose to depress when we are frustrated is to attract help.
• Committing suicide is very powerful self-control, but worthless to gain control of others, so it is the threat of suicide that most people use to gain control.
• It would be logical to ask, “If we want help, why don’t we just ask for it? Why depress? One reason is that we are afraid of being refused, especially if we have asked before and been refused. Since we still want what we want, we have to find another, more powerful way to ask, and depressing is what we try.
• An even more important reason we don’t like to ask is that asking is an admission of weakness. It is frustrating to our need for power, and to many of us it is tantamount to begging.
• Many of us have become so skilled at the “art” of depressing that we are able to depress just enough to get help without asking--to choose to depress more would be to suffer needlessly.
• It is common to use pain and misery as an excuse for either effectiveness or fear or a combination of the two.
• If you have a friend or family member whose life continues to be seriously out of control, who has been depressing for months and then stops for no apparent reason, you should be cautioned that he now may be considering suicide. In this instance, when he stops depressing, it is because things are getting worse, not better.
• What blocks most of us from taking effective control of our lives is our resistance to changing a lifetime of feeling as if our misery happens to us.
• Some short-lived but intense feelings are not chosen--they happen to us.
• We choose what to do, think, and feel, but we do not choose the pure feelings that precede any of these behaviors: those are built into our control systems to tell us immediately whether we are or are not in control.
• How many people did you pin a value to yesterday with no awareness on your part that you were doing it?
• It is my observation that most of us tend to have a low opinion of our creativity. We think of it as a special gift that a few lucky people possess but we’ll never have. This is unfortunate because we are all much more creative than most of us realize.
• Anytime a behavior we create helps us to achieve increased control, that behavior is stored in the behavioral system as an organized behavior ready to use in any situation where it may work.
• It is impossible to keep doing anything the same way; we always reorganize and improve in a myriad of small, creative ways--and while we do, we probably reject as worthless an equal number of “improvements.”
• Creativity is the creation of something new that has never before existed in the life of its creator.
• People do not easily or quickly give up their old, well organized behaviors for new ones.
• The foundation of all good medical treatment, whatever the disease, should be to do as much as possible to help those who are sick maintain and even regain as much control over their lives as their disability allows.
• Research has repeatedly shown that normal sleep entails a necessary amount of dreaming. Medications for sleeping cause us to be unconscious, but disrupt the normal and necessary nightly access to reorganization that is dreaming.
• Most serious conflicts evolve from our attempts to control others who will not accept our control, because what we want does not satisfy them.
• In every false conflict there is an obvious hard-word choice that the “conflicted” person does not want to face.
• If you are willing to do the hard work that making a change will require, there is almost always a way.
• Almost all of us pay a bitter price in lost relationships because we constantly let those around us know that what is good for them is to perform the way we picture them in our albums
• As any relationship matures, the parties involved tend to move toward a feeling of equality, and criticism is resented more and more.
• Perhaps the most insidious form of criticism is self-criticism.
• As adults, we are so competitive, so busy maintaining our power, that we rarely listen to what is often sound advice. The basic flaw of criticism, therefore, is not that it isn’t well intended, but that its intentions are almost never realized.
• Ultimately any system that depends exclusively on external motivation will break down.
• Choosing long-term pain or criticism is not going to get us what we want now or ever.
• The greatest value of discussing the past is not for its misery but for the strengths it may provide that can be used now.
• As soon as we try to push our children to become the specific people that they may be in our heads, we become less effective as parents.
• Nothing that we do will alienate a child more than to be pushed to be something he or she does not want to be.
• Because all of us, young and old, have such a strong need for power, negotiation and compromise are the only ways that both the parent and child can fulfill this need and still get along with each other.
• Try as hard as possible to reach, show, and help your children to gain effective control of their lives.
• I believe very strongly that many of us tend to do too much for them if what we want is for our children to be in control of their lives when they are grown.
• We do not do enough purely with them without concurrently doing for them or to them.
• At all ages we don’t leave children alone enough.
• To satisfy the strong need to belong, children should be encouraged to find friends (on their own) to play with. Finding friends at five (assuming other children are available) is good practice for the more complex teenage social scene later.
• How to deal with friends is very difficult, if not impossible, to teach, but it is usually very easily learned if adults do not interfere.
• When we work with them, we must be patient and not rush to do for them because they are slow. Instruct them, and show them, but let them do their part of the task and they will gain strength and confidence.
• Discipline is effective, punishment is not--and the difference is clear.
• Discipline involves the sanctions of the loss of either freedom or privileges until the child is willing to negotiate.
• Punishment is inflicting pain, physical or mental, in the hope that the rule breaker will remember the pain and next time follow the rule.
• To deal with a very young child, under two and a half, who is too young to understand that she broke a rule, it is sensible to restrain her firmly, but not painfully, and tell her in a stern voice, “NO.”
• When we deal with a child of three, old enough to know that she broke a rule, we should always discipline, never punish.
• What the plan is with a young child is not important--what is important is that she have a plan that she can put into action.
• Never let anyone control you with the pain and misery he or she chooses.
• You should deal with long-term sufferers as if they were not miserable at all.
• Keep as much control as possible. Your ability to control your life even when seriously ill is your best chance for health.