We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.
To achieve and maintain the relationships we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw. We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem. These.
Since the obvious purpose of pain, misery, and suffering is to tell you something is wrong, fix it, change it, reform, improve, get help; if you don’t have the strength to do it, you are stuck with the pain. This is not to say that people with strength don’t suffer – they do. They have no immunity to life, but when they feel pain, they get moving or at least they try to do something, and the more strength they have the more successful their efforts are.
It takes a lot of strength to risk getting rejected by someone new, so we hang onto the one we know and say, “The hell with it,” because we are used to that pain. If we had more strength we would say not, “The hell with it,” but “The hell with all this pain, I’ll find someone else.” Weak people carry a torch for life, they “enjoy” wallowing in their misery. They do so partly in the hope that someone will feel sorry for them and solve their problems.
While it is possible that we do know what’s right for others, unless they agree with us, trying to force this knowledge on them is usually a disaster.
If you look around at your family and friends, you will see that the happiest people are the ones who don’t pretend to know what’s right for others and don’t try to control anyone but themselves.
Kids aren’t stupid; we figure things out. We don’t want to wreck our lives any more than you do. As long as we’re loved, most of us come out okay.
While it is easy to blame a teen for not succeeding, there are serious flaws in the school system that make it impossible for many students to feel successful in school.
Choice Theory explains that, for all practical purposes, we choose everything we do.
It takes strength, however, to be warm, firm, humorous, and caring and still do what we know we ought to do. Our lives would be much better if we never said, “The hell with it!
Weak people carry a torch for life, they “enjoy” wallowing in their misery. They do so partly in the hope that someone will feel sorry for them and solve their problems.
Perhaps the beginning of gaining strength is becoming aware of the bad choices you make. Just knowing that you choose much of your misery yourself will help you get the idea that it may be worth trying to make a better choice. If you believe your misery just happens to you and you have no control over it, then you will never get much more than what you are getting now from life.
No one is so inadequate that he can’t help himself to some degree. Not only can he, but he must; nothing else will work.
Beware of getting involved with people who seem to be able to feel good but have no close friends. They may be witty and fun to be around, but their humor is all put-downs and hostility. If you marry such a person, you will soon be the recipient of that hostile humor and may regret it for the rest of your marriage. Look for someone who has good friends whom he or she treats well and whom you enjoy being with, too. Someone who does not have good friends does not know how to love.
A choice theory world is a tough, responsible world; you cannot use grammar to escape responsibility for what you are doing.
Choice theory explains that, for all practical purposes, we choose everything we do, including the misery we feel. Other people can neither make us miserable nor make us happy. All we can get from them or give to them is information. But by itself, information cannot make us do or feel anything. It goes into our brains, where we process it and then decide what to do.
To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It has happened to all of us; we are it’s victim and we have no control over it.
The best thing parents can do for their children is love each other.
This entire book is an attempt to answer the all-important question that almost all of us continually ask ourselves when we are unhappy: How can I figure out how to be free to live my life the way I want to live it and still get along well with the people I need?
Fun is the genetic reward for learning.
All of us know happily married couples, solid families, and people who are well satisfied with their jobs. But when asked to explain their happiness, many hesitate. They aren’t sure. Some say, We work hard to get along with each other, but others shrug and say, Maybe luck has a lot to do with it. What they never say is, We have given up trying to control each other. They don’t realize that they may be following a different theory, that inadvertently they have discovered choice theory.