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Your best bet for changing your self-defeating behavior is first to admit you are responsible for your behavior and for changing it. Second, accept yourself as a person who currently is defeating yourself. Third, refuse to label yourself as a loser or a victim. If you call yourself a victim, you fo…

If you drink alcohol so that it interferes directly or indirectly with achieving your goals, you have a problem with it. You can make drinking a problem when you give it excessive power to enable you to cope better, to feel good, or to help you reduce emotional distress. It’s a problem when you bel…

According to the ABC theory of Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) that I (AE) originated in 1955, and according to the other cognitive-behavioral therapies that followed RET, this is what usually occurs when you make yourself neurotic. That is, when you make yourself anxious, depressed, enraged, self-h…

Of course Family Lexicon cannot possibly recover from this blunt, devastatingly terse report. Not even the Levi family can summon the voluble bluster and blab to lift their lives back onto the plateau of anxious comedy where they had once resided. Postwar Italy is in ruins. Everyone is older. There…

Ginzburg is not an ostentatious writer. Her prose is famously terse and forceful, an instrument in which the smallest things are made to seem fresh and telling. In Family Lexicon she doesn’t disclose much about her own thoughts or feelings growing up in the Levi home, but when we learn about everyo…