ABSTRACT
Let me (WD) provide an example to underscore this point. One of my clients was very anxious about being rejected by her boyfriend. She was convinced that if she was rejected by him she would fall apart and never recover. I asked her to imagine that she was in fact rejected by her boyfriend and was extremely distraught about this. I then suggested that she imagine herself entering a time machine which could quickly take her into the future. First I asked her to imagine how she would feel a week after the rejection. She replied that she would still be distraught, depressed and suicidal. I then asked her to advance time one month into the future. She thought that she would be depressed and that life would still not be worth living. However, when she saw herself six months into the future she began to see that she could put the event into a broader perspective; that life was not so bad after all and that she could begin to see a future for herself and even consider the possibility of dating another man. Having established that she could think rationally about this rejection, the issue was now: how long was it productive for her to think irrationally about it? What could she do to think more rationally about it sooner? She thought about this and concluded that perhaps she could be more rational about it three weeks after the rejection. I thought, in the circumstances, that this was reasonable and did not target this time-limited irrationality for change (see Point 51).
