CONTENTS:
Forewords
Preface

THE ANATOMY OF FRUSTRATION
one THE FRUSTRATION TRAP
two LOW FRUSTRATION TOLERANCE
three TEST YOUR FRUSTRATION TOLERANCE

BASIC PROBLEM-SOLVING APPROACHES
four THE PROCESS OF CHANGE
five SOLVE YOUR FRUSTRATION PROBLEMS
six FRUSTRATIONS AND VALUES

LIFE FRUSTRATIONS
seven MANAGING FRUSTRATING PEOPLE
eight MANAGING YOUR CAREER FRUSTRATIONS
nine MANAGING YOUR TIME FRUSTRATIONS

Bibliography

FOREWORDS

You're about to read an extraordinary book—one that should be on the required reading list of every literate person in the country— written by a talented and insightful psychologist, Dr. William J. Knaus.

The topic, frustration, is one with which each of us has had personal, and perhaps agonizing, experience. Anyone who has ever been beset by needless anxiety and has been prevented by perceived psychological barriers from fulfilling the promise of his or her personal dignity and integrity should read this book.

This is not just another self-help book, promising quick-fix solutions to enduring problems. Nor is it a book of golden aphorisms which, if diligently memorized, produce magical lead-into-gold transformations.

Instead, it's a book you're going to have to work with. You can't just sit back in your easy chair and become a mindless, passive recipient of a few witch-doctor incantations.

You must be an active participant in these strategies.

For, as Dr. Knaus will tell you again and again, the ultimate key to change is action. People involved in physical conditioning programs know the meaning of the phrase "no pain, no gain," and in this book Dr. Knaus outlines a psychological conditioning program that also demands that, on occasion, you're going to feel a little soreness in your psychic muscles.

But even that transitory soreness comes to feel good after awhile, because it signals some good feelings—the exhilaration of personal freedom—freedom from a lot of psychological bogeymen that have prevented you from growing.

In this way, the frustration tolerance training program provides you with an inoculation of low-level frustration, which then prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by intruders on your psychological life space.

That is, some minor frustrations are good and help in the building of frustration tolerance that, in turn, add to your feeling of well-being and security.

For example, if you're a procrastinator it may not be easy to make out your first "code red" list, but once you've done it, the up-beat feeling of tension reduction becomes self-reinforcing, and within a week or so you'll find yourself looking forward to listing your new priorities.

The best way to read this book is a chapter at a time. Don't try to finish it in one sitting, for the messages take time to sink in, and, more importantly, you need time to practice the actions that are involved. Take time to think about it during those off-moments— when you're folding clothes or mowing the lawn.

Think of how you've been trapping and imprisoning yourself, and how, with little effort, you can unlock the chains. This book, although based on sound psychological principles, is not just the product of college lecture halls or laboratory experiments. It isn't so super-academic as to be detached from humanity.

The roots of this book come firmly from the soil of Dr. Knaus's clinical practice, and its compelling message, substantiated by many illustrative case studies, is "if he or she can do it, so can I."

With Dr. Knaus's program you're not going to scale every psychological mountain on your first hike. He takes you on a guided tour, one step at a time, and he details how to take those steps. You're not going to be subjected to "glittering generalities" with built-in cop-outs, but instead you'll be trained, in almost recipelike fashion, to develop your growth potential.

Dr. Knaus, to be sure, won't just take you on the easy route around those mountains, but he will, eventually, get you to the peak—and the view from the top will be well worth the climb.

        Richard C. Sprinthall, Ph.D. Director, Graduate Studies in Psychology
        American International College Springfield, Massachusetts

How to Conquer Your Frustrations is not for you if you are looking for a magical solution to eliminate your frustrations. Such magical solutions do not exist.

But if you want a resource that provides a highly effective blueprint for managing frustration, you are reading the right book. In this extraordinary book, Dr. William J. Knaus gives us a penetrating analysis of how we frustrate ourselves along with insightful strategies for how we can master our frustrations.

Through his awareness-and-action approach, he shows how to master frustration, reduce stress, and feel confident. In How to Conquer Your Frustrations, Dr. Knaus tackles difficult problems most psychological self-help authors fail either to recognize or to face.

His materials on low frustration tolerance, for example, direct our attention to a rarely considered but highly important area of psychological concern—one that is the scaffolding for most human misery.

Dr. Knaus knowledgeably and carefully guides us through the catacombs of our frustrations to realistically experience them and helps us to develop our potential to cope with frustration.

Frustration, as Dr. Knaus clearly points out, is inevitable. We can't avoid it. Instead, we can learn how to eliminate false reasons for frustrating ourselves and how to respond effectively to legitimate frustrations. This takes time and work.

But it is worth the effort when you consider the alternative—tension, stress, disorganization. Stress researchers tell us that we make ourselves vulnerable to disease, heart trouble, and possibly cancer if we subject ourselves to ongoing distress. We may even shorten our lives.

True, it takes work to improve our chances of living a longer, more satisfying life. But the work is simpler and the hours better than leading a status-quo existence where you react to change only to reduce frustration. When you take charge of your life, you initiate changes that map a challenging course that can cause you to tap your resources.

And as you learn more about your resources, as you develop confidence in your ability to face and master frustration, you find yourself.

     L. Rene Gaiennie, Ph.D. Professor, School of Business Administration
     University of South Florida
     President, Strategic Planning Associates Bellaire, Florida
     Senior Vice-President The Singer Company (Ret.)

PREFACE

Although almost all psychological self-help books present ways to get rid of problems and improve personal qualities and skills, few provide tested methods for dealing with the inevitable tensions and frustrations in the growth process. How to Conquer Your Frustrations helps fill this void.

Those who choose the pathway to self-improvement need to know how to manage their frustrations and tensions. The development of this ability constitutes a great benefit for those who want to self-improve, because frustration mastery promotes growth.

In comparison, people who avoid frustrations will restrict their growth experiences, elevate their frustrations, and lead a stressful existence.

Many opportunities exist for mastering the inevitable frustrations involved in self-improvement actions, such as advancing career interests, expanding perspective, building a healthy self-concept, and contributing to the advancement of humankind. Growth also involves destroying barriers that impede progress.

For example, you may want to reduce the negatives in life by losing weight, giving up smoking, overcoming shyness, persisting with plans, controlling a hot temper, getting better organized, purging a phobia, minimizing erroneous thinking, successfully challenging boredom, overriding a rut, overcoming procrastination, and so forth.

In effect, by building your positive resources and destroying the barriers that block development, you can gain greater mastery over your environment and have a chance to feel fulfilled and in command.

Those who want to develop positive qualities and reduce negative habits will find that change and growth do not happen by magic.

To find out what it takes to change requires getting involved in the process. To participate productively requires both willingness and the proper psychological tools.

In How to Conquer Your Frustrations I present important frustration-management concepts that you can use imaginatively to master your frustrations.

This book has value for many other readers as well. It can serve as a resource that graduate students in counselor-training will find helpful to use in working with clients who appear resistive to change, especially those who feel insecure and doubt their ability to face the tensions and frustrations involved in growth.

In addition, learning and applying frustration-management skills can directly benefit the person who wants to work out problems in counseling. Frustration-tolerance training, as described herein, plays a pivotal role as a resource for the person who wants to make changes through counseling because frustration mastery promotes growth.

Because How to Conquer Your Frustrations provides both prevention and problem-intervention strategies, professors may wish to use the work as an assigned reading when they teach Psychology of Adjustment or Mental Health courses.

It provides many frustration-problem-solving strategies that students can readily learn to employ to reduce stress, improve studies, and take better advantage of social and recreational opportunities.

CAN THIS BOOK SUBSTITUTE FOR A THERAPIST?

This book will provide helpful material that you can use in your self-study. If you test and practice the written principles, you'll progress toward your goals. Indeed, some people who have read one or more of my books have written to tell me that they gained more from the books than from formal therapy.

But in general I have to answer no to the question "Will the book substitute for therapy?" The book cannot interact with you in the manner of a warm, friendly, and competent therapist. You may not recognize the validity of your bibliotherapy and thus not apply some pivotal concepts.

You may procrastinate if a trained specialist does not help monitor your progress. You may find it difficult to self-observe objectively. Some of your frustrations may come from concepts, ideas, images, and behaviors that seem so natural that you don't recognize or question them even when the book describes them.

THE AVAILABILITY OF THERAPY ASSISTANCE

With the exception of Rational Emotive Therapy, Behavior Therapy, and Cognitive Behavior approaches, few systems provide direct help with frustrating problems. Most therapy systems fail to emphasize frustration tolerance and mastery as part of the therapy.

Indeed, practitioners of some systems, such as classical psychoanalysis, eschew problem-solving methods, and thus prove virtually worthless for people who want to develop coping skills. Modern psychotherapy systems, especially those oriented to Rational Emotive and Cognitive Behavior systems, have moved forward using tested multiple-treatment strategies to help people deal with frustrating problems and stresses.

But even with the use of modern multiple-strategy systems, helping people master frustration takes time and work for both therapist and client.

Erich Fromm, a noted thinker in the psychology of love, has written that love requires care, concern, and discipline. In effect, Fromm says that love requires work. So does the development of healthy self-love. It requires caring and disciplined work to change dysfunctional frustration-creating thinking and behaving to objective thinking and functional actions.

HOW I WROTE THE BOOK

I wrote How to Conquer Your Frustrations to help the reader recognize, channel, and manage frustration. You can't avoid frustrations, but you do have control over how you manage them.

This book suggests fresh concepts, strategies, and tactics you can use to embark upon a frustration management self-help program. In this book I describe multiple strategies, including both awareness (cognitive) and action (behavioral) methods, for mastering frustrating circumstances.

I show more than one route to get there. However, as Alfred Korzybski, the great general semanticist, noted: "the map is not the same as the territory." The map, for example, can't give you the sensory experiences of walking along one of the pathways that appear upon it.

To know the territory you have to actively explore and experience it through your senses. To get to the territory a map can help. To make a clear map of the "frustration territory," I wrote How to Conquer Your Frustrations in a language style called E prime (E').

E' eliminates all forms of the verb "to be" (am, is, was, were, has been, have been, will have been).

For example, instead of saying "I am a psychologist," in E' I would say, "I work as a psychologist." In non- E' I might say that "Sandra is a thief." In E' I would say that "Sandra stole my watch and sold it to Sam." I describe Sandra's actions (which she can learn to correct) rather than typing her as a thief.

By using E' I can define situations, such as my functioning as a psychologist and Sandra's theft of a watch, with greater precision. The E' system developed from the work of the general semanticist D. David Bourland, a follower of Alfred Korzybski.

Bourland advises us to eliminate the verb "to be" because it often leads to vagueness, overgeneralizations, sloppy thinking, inaccuracies, and misleadingly abbreviated statements.

Of course, E prime can do little more than reduce problems caused by the inappropriate use of the verb. However, E' does enforce a discipline that requires the writer to express ideas in a more factual, active, and descriptive style, but it has some drawbacks.

For example, in using verbatim transcripts of conversations, eliminating "to be" would change the quote.

So in How to Conquer Your Frustrations, transcribed conversations remain as spoken. I also keep the verb when I quote other works. I used E' to improve the flow of the material and to help make the message clear.

Indeed, you probably will not miss the verb. The use of the system served as a challenge to me to bring my points into sharper focus, so that you don't have to wonder what I meant and spend time interpreting my work. You can use your time working instead to manage your frustrations and developing your positive qualities.

In Part 1 we will look into how we contribute to the development of our own frustrations and what we can do to manage them. In this section we look closely at low frustration tolerance, because unless we can deal with our frustrations with reasonable tolerance, we will befuddle our own best interests, cause ourselves to feel emotionally distressed, and dramatically water down the quality of our daily activities.

In Chapter 1 we will consider how our frustrations tie us down and how we can start to build emotional muscle using our frustrations for a psychological workout.

Chapter 2 spotlights low frustration tolerance and describes how this condition can have a disrupting effect on our emotional well-being.

Chapter 3 gives us an opportunity to test our frustration tolerance and to consider ways to begin boosting it.

Imagine the year 1789, the American Revolution, and the British General Charles Cornwallis at the battle of Yorktown surrounded by the Continental Army, fighting a siege war that he abhorred.

A superior French fleet guarded the Chesapeake Bay, preventing the British fleet from entering with reinforcements and supplies.

The rest we know. Cornwallis surrendered, thus ending the American Revolution. We can easily guess how frustrated Cornwallis must have felt.

His expectations that the British fleet would protect him so that he could fight the type of open warfare he preferred simply did not materialize. So at the day of surrender, the British band played "As the world turns over," reflecting their general feelings about the defeat.

As for Cornwallis, he felt so frustrated by his defeat that he refused to turn his sword over to George Washington, the leader of the rag-tag Colonial Army, claiming instead that the French had defeated him. The history books brim with tales of frustration for one and victory for another.

Cornwallis's misadventure portrays but one of thousands of frustrating endings. We all experience frustration every day of our lives. Some, like Cornwallis's great frustration, we have little control over. Most others, however, we can control.

In Part I we will look into how we contribute to the development of our own frustrations and what we can do to manage them. In this section we look closely at low frustration tolerance, because unless we can deal with our frustrations with reasonable tolerance, we will befuddle our own best interests, cause ourselves to feel emotionally distressed, and dramatically water down the quality of our daily activities.

In Chapter 1 we will consider how our frustrations tie us down and how we can start to build emotional muscle using our frustrations for a psychological workout. Chapter 2 spotlights low frustration tolerance and describes how this condition can have a disrupting effect on our emotional well-being. Chapter 3 gives us an opportunity to test our frustration tolerance and to consider ways to begin boosting it.

CHAPTER ONE THE FRUSTRATION TRAP

In Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver woke up one morning and found himself tied to the ground by thousands of small threads attached the night before by tiny people called Lilliputians.

The story of Gulliver's encounter with the Lilliputians suggests a universal human experience. Many of us at times feel like Gulliver— bound by restraints and frustrations.

While no one "thread" can tie us down, collectively they can. And while major life frustrations, such as the loss of a valued relationship, can prove especially frustrating, research has shown that the little frustrations of life, such as running out of clean shirts or missing the train, can accumulate and affect our physical as well as our emotional well-being.

Most people will discover as they read this book that they do a better job than they thought they did in managing their frustrations. Indeed, we should give ourselves credit for meeting the frustrating challenges in our lives.

By improving our ability to tolerate and to manage the inevitable frustrations that enter our lives, we increase our chances for having more time and energy to do the things we most want to do: to build a sense of relaxed self-confidence and to feel a sense of command over the course of our lives.

But if frustrations inhibit the enjoyment of sex, for example, or the ability to think clear-headedly to resolve problems alternative ways of coping need priority treatment.

In How to Conquer Your Frustrations, we will look into some of the mental and environmental traps that provoke our frustrations, understand how they arise, figure out how we can remove them, and eliminate both the major and the minor "Lilliputian threads" that tie down our potential.

We will learn three major ways to manage frustrations:

1. Build the body to withstand the stress of multiple frustrations. We will review this concept in this chapter under the topic on stress.

2. Liberate the mind so that we can remain alert to opportunities and use our resources to take advantage of them.

3. Change the pattern(s) that promote needless frustrations.

Don't stay stuck in a rut or repeat counterproductive actions. While we can't always control the environment and other people, we can apply the three principles to ourselves. However, many of our frustrations have value in that they act as motivators, impelling us to face challenges and take corrective actions.

We don't want to vanquish the sensations of frustration forever (an impossible task), but rather to respond effectively to them. So first, we'll look at some examples of frustration, then define frustration, look into how frustration differs from related emotions, and discuss frustration tolerance training.

POTENTIAL FRUSTRATIONS

Frustrations come in many forms. For example, do you find yourself bogged down in your career or marriage? Do you think your future looks uneventful and uninteresting? Have you ever looked forward to a vacation trip only to have rain spoil it? Do you lose weight, then gain it back?

Have you a habit, such as smoking, that you can't seem to break?

Do you find it difficult to get organized, let matters slip, and helplessly watch your work pile up?

Do you think some people get the breaks in life that you deserve but don't seem to get? Have you ever tried to put a simple child's toy together and found the instructions unclear and confusing? Have you ever had someone push ahead of you in line?

Do people you feel close to argue with you and resist you?

Do you have more than your share of unpleasant routines, such as household chores?

Do you feel dissatisfied with your financial status? Has your automobile ever failed to start when you had to get to a meeting? If your life goes like that of most of us, you'll answer yes to some of these questions.

Frustrations abound—you experience them daily. Most do not present overweening problems. Some seem like glue—you feel stuck to them. Clearly, each has the capacity to elicit frustration. How you interpret the experience determines if you will feel frustration.

As the sixth century B.C. philosopher Heraclitis noted, our eyes and ears prove poor witnesses; the mind must interpret their evidence.

However, the mind can also promote frustrations based upon the meanings we give to our sensory information. The items mentioned only scratch the surface of potential frustrations.

The following frustration inventory asks you to identify some frustrating circumstances in your life.

Frustration Inventory

I designed the following twenty-item true/ false test as a frustration-awareness task. Read the following statements. If you think the statement seems true or mostly true, circle the T next to the statement. If you think the statement seems false or mostly false, circle the F.

1. I feel satisfied with my career. T F

2. I have at least one poor habit. T F

3. I get to meetings on time. T F

4. I keep my life so well-organized that I have very little stress. T F

5. I don't manage my finances well. T F

6. I often want to get away from it all. T F

7. I feel frustrated when I can't find something. T F

8. I remain calm if I can't find a parking place. T F

9. I feel frustrated when I can't find something interesting to do. T F

10. Lateness doesn't bother me. T F

11. I rarely get into conflict with my neighbors. T F

12. When I'm stuck in traffic, I make constructive use of my time. T F

13. I usually get my work completed on schedule. T F

14. I get bugged by delayed deliveries, confusing instructions, and other matters that slow me down. T F

15. I get frustrated when I have to wait in line. T F

16. I feel tolerant of people who borrow items and don't return them. T F

17. I feel frustrated if I don't know the answer to a question. T F

18. I feel unhappy with my usual daily routine. T F

19. I have a quick temper. T F

20. I don't get bogged down by detail. T F

 If you circled T for numbers 1, 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, and 20, and F for numbers 2,5, 6,7,9,10,14,15,17,18, and 19, you probably bought this book to help a friend, as you have few, if any, frustrations. Or perhaps you have not answered the questions honestly.

The inventory results may provide some clues as to whether you experience ongoing frustrations in important sectors of your life.

If you answered true to any of situations 2, 5, 6, 10, 18, or 19, and false to any of situations 1, 3, 4, 11, 13, or 20, you may have identified an ongoing frustration problem worth exploring. The remaining items reflect your tolerance for normally frustrating circumstances.

If you answered true to items 7, 9, 14, and 17, and false to items 8, 12, and 16, you feel frustrated by events that most people find frustrating.

If you dwell upon such frustrations and regularly feel intolerant about them, you may cause yourself double troubles. The double-trouble principle states that you can double your frustrations when you feel frustrated about feeling frustrated!

At different times you may react to frustrations in various ways: You may see the frustration situation as a challenge, you may try to dodge the frustration, you might fight against the situation, or you may give up.

At least part of your response depends upon how you perceive and define conditions so as to promote your own frustrations.

To liberate the mind, learn to take responsibility for creating frustrations. After all, we do not respond as robots do to electrical signals except reflexively, as when we touch a hot burner.

In most cases, as the experimental psychologist Robert S. Woodword pointed out, we process what we experience, as the accompanying diagram shows.

Thus, we do not mindlessly respond to most stimuli. If, for example, we get stuck in traffic, the traffic (stimulus) does not cause our response (frustration).

Instead, we create our frustrations based upon what we think about the traffic. We will look into self-generated frustrations later on in this chapter when we consider how our attitudes and expectations provoke feelings of frustration.

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Continued in ebook [224 pages]: How to Conquer Your Frustrations