Happy New Year 2025-PRACTICE doesn’t make PERFECT!

Quotes and page numbers from the Book Club session on PRACTICE

THE PASSION FOR SELF-DISTRUST, from Manage Your Fears, Manage Your Anger, lecture 2, page 8
"Environment is not constantly threatening. Environment changes. And if you feel constantly insecure, that cannot refer to any reality and any real danger in the environment. That can only be a sense of insecurity that has developed into a senseless habit apart from any danger in environment."

PANICS, TRIVIALITIES AND FEAR, from Manage Your Fears, Manage Your Anger, lecture 43, page 266
”Fear is a belief … that there is danger.”

EXPECT THE SETBACK AND SPOT EXTREMES (PART 2), from Manage Your Fears, Manage Your Anger, lecture 66, page 430
”And you will understand now why here in Recovery we stress the concept of averageness. You will now understand that, from this viewpoint, that averageness is wedged in between two contrast pairs of opposites. And try your best never to reach the opposite, either above or below the average middle.”

INTELLECTUAL VALIDITY AND ROMANTIC VITALITY, from Manage Your Fears, Manage Your Anger, lecture 12, page 68-69
“Many things in a nervous patient are depressed and crowded out of the stream of life. They are in life but don't "stream." And in order to make the stream flow again, the stream of feeling, the stream of interest, the stream of mental reaction and emotional reaction, what is required is for the patient not to discourage himself.

And in order not to discourage himself, the patient must be trained, trained to develop courage, trained to develop the capacity for braving discomfort - even if you call it torture, but it's still discomfort. And once you learn that, after due training, there is no difficulty to have both validity and vitality restored to its former function, which is then as lively as it ever was.” 

“Annette the practice champion, in OBJECTIVITY AS MEANS FOR TERMINATING PANICS, from Mental Health Through Will Training, chapter 10, page 130 in the 1997 edition
Success came to her after many unsuccessful trials. Credit is due to her not so much for the final triumph but rather for her refusal to be discouraged by so many previous failures. What she did was to practice faithfully and untiringly the method of trial and failure till finally she acquired an amazing skill of handling the method of trial and success. Many of our patients have made an effort to apply the self-help method of objectivity but met with initial failure and gave up. Annette persisted after many failures and finally scored a signal success.