Bill L. Little - Self-Destruction Made Easy

BILL L. LITTLE

Foreword by Albert Ellis

PELICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY

Gretna 2006

Copyright 1977, 2005

By Bill L. Little

All rights reserved

First published as This Will Drive You Sane by CompCare
Publications, 1977
Published by arrangement with the author by
Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 2006

The word "Pelican" and the depiction of a pelican are trademarks of Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., and are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.

1000 Burmaster Street, Gretna, Louisiana 70053

Acknowledgments

There are always many people who make possible the production of a book. I could never have had the time to put together even this brief work without the patience and acceptance of the people of Christ Memorial Baptist Church of St. Louis, where I have served as pastor since 1959. They are the kind of congregation that is conducive to healththeirs and mine. I hope their characteristically practical religion can be spread to many others.

Self-Destruction Made Easy is a result of a lot of ideas planted by various teachers and many friends. I owe particular thanks to my good friend Dr. Thomas W. Allen, professor in the Department of Counselor Education at Washington University.

I am grateful also to another good friend, my secretary, Sandra McWhorter, who has patiently typed and retyped the manuscript, as well as contributed helpful suggestions and personal encouragement.

I am indebted to Don Sparks, director of the Employee Assistance Program at McDonnell-Douglas Corporation, and to the people at the CareUnit at DePaul Community Health Center, Bridgeton, Missouri, for acquainting me with CompCare Publications. Diane DuCharme, CompCare s manager of publications, has been a teacher, co-worker and encourager extraordinaire.

I acknowledge all of the above and many of my counselees, students and members of a local CareUnit alumni group for their support and help.

It won't go without saying, so I'll say, "I thank God, who is the source of every good thing in my life."

Bill Little

Foreword

Bill Little's Self- Destruction Made Easy constitutes a rather rare work in the field of psychotherapy: one with a profound sense of humor, and one that employs jocularity to make many serious, sensible points. As he rightly notes, some well-known psychotherapists, such as Viktor Frankl, have espoused the use of humor in therapy and have demonstrated its good effects. Little might also have mentioned, in this respect, Frank Farrelly, whose technique of provocative therapy sometimes goes Frankl one better and takes clients' problems to hilarious extremes. Harold Greenwald, too, has espoused the use of jocosity and play in psychotherapy for a good many years and has given some fascinating talks and workshops on this subject.

I think I can, without any undue modesty, mention some of my own contributions in this respect. My first published book, The Folklore of Sex, partly consisted of a study of humor and sex, and also had its own highly jocular stylewhich, in those days of relative prudery, the prosexual critics heartily enjoyed and the antisexual ones hauled me over the coals for, seeing my witticisms as forced and inappropriate. I could say, of course, that the latter had no sense of humor! Anyway, nothing daunted, I continued to inject drollery into many of my other writings on sex and psychotherapy.

Even more than this, my therapeutic style, and that in which I conduct my public talks and professional workshops, has always overflowed with banter and jestat least to my biased way of thinking; and not a few of my listeners, equally prejudiced no doubt, tend to agree with me. As for my regular group therapy sessions (which I still conduct on the scale of seven per week, since originating rational-emotive group therapy over twenty years ago), I would not exactly say that hilarity reigns supreme during these sessions, but it certainly tends to run a close second to the main theme of the groups: the teaching and experiencing of rational thinking.

Motivated by one of the basic tenets of RET (rational- emotive therapy), that of deliberate risk-taking in order to do one's own thing instead of remaining too beholden to the critical views of others, I finally made a uniquely humorous sally at one of the un-uniquely sober national conventions of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. Before an unsuspecting audience of a thousand, I not only presented an enormously irreverent paper on "Fun as Psychotherapy," but I also illustrated my paper by singing, in my faded baritone, two of the humorous rational songs that I had recently composed.