Taking Out Your Mental Trash: A Consumer's Guide to Cognitive Restructuring Therapy

How can you take control of your life?

Why do negative thoughts sometimes predominate, despite your knowledge that they’re unfounded? Why do your best efforts to stave off these negative thoughts so often fail? What can you do to identify your core beliefs?

For the first time, there is a book that offers the consumer and the public what has previously been available only to professional audiences. This book is a layperson’s version of Dr. McMullin’s successful professional book―The New Handbook of Cognitive Restructuring Therapy (2000)―and his other professional works. Written by one of the founders of Cognitive Restructuring Therapy (CRT), Taking Out Your Mental Trash offers the key principles, techniques, and exercises necessary for a solid foundation in CRT. It incorporates Dr. McMullin’s three decades of full time clinical practice with many thousands of clients, from many different cultures, with many different problems. The book is written in an informal, personal style and presents reading guides, copious real life examples, step-by-step instructions, picture-forming stories, illustrations, and 53 exercises and 23 worksheets to help the reader. To date, it is one of the most accessible, reader friendly, and up-to-date books for the public on CRT. Packed with problem-tackling strategies on how to use McMullin’s own Cognitive Restructuring Therapy to overcome phobias, social anxiety, stress, relationship difficulties, and more, this invaluable workbook promises to help you dump even the most stubborn negative thoughts. McMullin then helps you adopt fresh beliefs and, in doing so, reclaim meaning and control over your life.

Rian E. McMullin, Ph.D., is director of the Counseling Research Institute, a licensed clinical psychologist at the Hawaii State Hospital, and on the clinical-associate faculties at the University of Hawaii and the American School of Professional Psychology. He is the author of eight books, including (with T. Giles) Cognitive-Behavior Therapy: A Restructuring Approach and (with B. Casey) Talk Sense to Yourself: A Guide to Cognitive Restructuring Therapy.