Reading Time: 6 mins
I worried a lot about my appearance and weird personality, but this taught me to be free from worries. The Courage to Be Disliked is a self-help book formatted as a philosopher talking to a youth about his life struggles. The concepts discussed in the books are built on top of Adlerian psychology.
Adlerian Psychology in a Nutshell
Your Social Context Matter More
Cause and Effect is the Wrong Way to Think about Trauma
You Choose the Meaning of Your Life Stories
Happy People Creation Boundaries
How to Stop Caring What Others Think
Living in the Present and Self Acceptance
Impression on Book
I found the book difficult to comprehend because it rejects most of the Freudian psychology theories that are more popularly accepted. This summary aims to help build your background knowledge in helping you understand how the ideas in the book can be applied to your life.
I was pretty anxious when I read this book because of all the controversial beliefs it has to mine. However, I have changed many core beliefs through self-CBT worksheets and made my future self healthier.
Adlerian Psychology in a Nutshell
Adlerian psychological theories were deprived of Alfred Adlerian. He was once a colleague of Sigmund Freud but later rejected Freud’s theory; then, he named his school of psychology — individual psychology. There can be many interpretations of what individual psychology means, leading to confusion when clinical psychology applies the theories.
Your Social Context Matter More
Individual psychology does not mean focusing on the person with the problems. Instead, the individual’s social context and environment will influence their behavior.
The concept of “individual” means that a person is considered an inseparable whole. The social context influences an individual’s thoughts, behavior, and emotions. Adlerian psychology is to Human behaviors that are also goal-oriented, so an unhappy person’s goal is to be unhappy. Adlerian psychology intervenes in a client to encourage an individual to be cooperative and function in society by changing their core mindset about human behaviors and emotions and meeting other people’s expectations.
How do unhappy people think?
When humans are unhappy, the first instinct is usually to blame external factors. Humans rarely look at the mistakes and mindsets that can lead to our unhappiness. Our ego is making us blind to ourselves.
Unhappy people choose to be unhappy because it achieves their goal. For example, if someone thinks the world is dangerous and cannot be trusted.
People Fabricate Emotions
Adlerian psychology states that a person will choose to fabricate the emotion of depression and social anxiety, leading him not to want to leave the house and remain socially isolated. The book’s similar example was about how a customer fabricated anger towards the waiter because his goal was to make the water submissive to him.
Unhappy people also choose a goal to of meeting other people’s expectations. If eon’s goal is to meet external expectations, one will never be happy because other people’s exceptions are changing and is out of your control. There will be nothing that you can switch to increase the likelihood of a new person liking you. People living to achieve others’ validation will play the power struggle game and look down on others because they view life as a competition.
Ultimately, unhappy people find methods to adopt core beliefs that serve their goals. Adlerian psychology claims sound ridiculous, but you truly have the freedom to choose your core beliefs.
People Hate to Change
Humans like to behave consistently with their past selves to keep their identities consistent. Most people dislike changing their identity because the “cost” of change is anxiety and disappointment.
You can choose your identity
In Adlerian psychology, personality is described by lifestyle. It seems like an odd word to describe your characteristics. Lifestyle is the thoughts and actions that determine who you are.
When we are young, our lifestyle is mainly influenced by external factors, such as nationality, different parenting methods, culture, religion, home environment, and other people’s behaviors.
Since we cannot change the circumstances we are born into, as grown-ups, we can choose “what kind of self” we want to be and unlearn the emotional baggage and unhealthy core beliefs.
Why Trauma Does Not Exist?
The first core belief that should be changed is you have the power to choose the meaning of an unfortunate event that has happened to you. The book made a bold claim: Trauma does not exist. Adlerian psychology is based on the definition of etiology and teleology.
Cause and Effect is the Wrong Way to Think about Trauma
Etiology is the study of the causes and factors of a phenomenon. Freudian view trauma as a person’s psyche wounds causing them to be unhappy.
If we view past traumatic events as something that causes us to be who we are today. It will be tough to rewrite our life narratives. If I always say to myself I am insecure about rejection, my behaviors will slowly align with the mindset of being fearful of rejection.
You Choose the Meaning of Your Life Stories
Teleology is the study of assigning meaning to a story rather than focusing on the cause. Using a teleological perspective, humans can free themselves from trauma and give sense to whatever event happens.
We do not have to suffer our experience; we can assign a purpose to the occasion and let it suit our life purpose. For example, I was socially rejected for authentically being who I am; I can view this as a trauma or an opportunity to develop my social skills.
Happy People Creation Boundaries
The second core principle is the separation of tasks and being honest with yourself. The book assumes that all problems faced are interpersonal problems. A person is unhappy because an individual intrudes on another’s tasks.
Imagine that a parent is forcing their child to do their homework and says, “You have to go do your homework” The parent and child are operating in a vertical relationship and create superiority over the child. The parent is intruding on the child’s task of doing the homework. If the parent invades the job and does the reading for the child, the child never develops the skills to do their homework.
After separating one’s tasks, we can encourage another person in a horizontal relationship to take responsibility for their life and be honest with themselves.
How to Stop Caring What Others Think
If you are working on being judged for your work and how you look, the same principles apply to the courage of being disliked. Your task is to behave in a socially acceptable manner to the best of your abilities. What people think of you is another person’s task. You are not in control of the other person’s thoughts.
If you have done your best, let it be. You are drawing clear boundaries like this sets set us free from worrying about thinking about other people’s judgments. Of course, separating tasks should not be taken to the extreme of doing something entirely out of the blue and out of social context.
Free to be Who You Are
Life is Not a Competition
In the end, If we view life as a competition, we worry and live under the pressure of other people winning over our achievements. This belief is tiring because it s a finite zero-sum game.
Instead, encouraging other people to change with the separation of tasks in mind is the way to help people. We gain confidence and feel meaning in the process of helping.
Redefining Meaning
If unfortunate events happen to us, we can practice radical acceptance deliberately and then consciously decide to see this event as a learning opportunity and set ourselves free from the effects of the events. We have the power to choose to be now.
Living in the Present and Self Acceptance
Lastly, happy people live in the present. The future should not be a pressure on your present happiness. Interestingly, the neuroscientist coined the turn default network as t e brain state of living in the future and past. It patrols our social situations and makes predictions about the environment based on past experiences. Although evolution has made humans live in the future, we can still do many things to live in the present.
How to change yourself?
- Practice mindfulness meditation to increase your skills of controlling your attention. Being functionally healthy means that we can behave appropriately in the proper context. To do this gracefully requires a lot of dynamic attention control.
- Process your trauma by rewriting your narrative.
Here’s Huberman’s podcast on how you can do exposure therapy yourself. - Change your identity and mindset. Run a thought experiment and imagine what might happen if you accepted a challenge instead of running away from one.
Priscilla Xu 
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