Go Suck a Lemon: Strategies for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence (Unabridged)

Many of your emotional responses, regardless of how much strength you've given them, can be brought down, deconstructed, and reshaped. You will just have to learn how to give your knee-jerk response to emotional stimuli less strength - less of a jerk. To do that you will have to commit to reinventing the way you think and behave. With Go Suck a Lemon, you will approach that task by accepting and then adapting to a no-nonsense style of emotional problem solving. You will learn and use a process of level-headed decision-making. You will try to become more efficient, flexible, and open-minded when addressing your emotional problems.

You will learn that there is always another emotional option. You will learn to make fact-based observations, something most of us are unfamiliar with doing. You will also incorporate in vivo (in life) exposure, i.e., homework, to encourage you to independently act against your learned thoughts and behaviors. In the end, you will become more informed, increasingly more capable, and far more emotionally self-reliant. Instead of being your own worst enemy, you will become your own best friend - your own therapist.

We may be strengthened when we learn to be emotionally self-reliant, to free ourselves from emotional helplessness and our dependence on others for our emotional solutions.