The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

On the selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com

Our man’s in position on the center camera.
It’s like a terrorist supermarket, Chinese Long March, Scud, Panther AS 565, attack helicopter, a pair of Russian mortars. And the crates look like American rifles, Chilean mines, German explosives.
We’ll take the naval option, yes, one strike.
We take out half the world’s terrorists.
Get me the Chester, Black King to white bishop.
Authorization to fire weapons. Authorized. Prepare to fire on my count, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. As I will, wait you.

Could we handle that? That’s Pierce Brosnan as Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies. But 9/11, September 11, 2001, was unbelievably shocking. I can remember I came home on an ordinary day, came home from work for lunch, and my husband told me something on the order of, "You know, a small plane accidentally flew into the Trade Towers." So, I imagined just a window broken, and maybe the people in the plane died, which is tragic, but little did I suspect, and little did the rest of the world suspect, what we would discover in the hours to follow and in the days that followed.

Something happened to my whole view of the world. My whole view of a stable world was shaken, totally shattered. I can remember thinking, maybe we’ll lose the America we’ve known. Maybe we’ll be invaded by some dictator like Hitler. Maybe it will be one terror strike after another. And then the anthrax scare came along, and our own mailboxes were a source of threat. My comfort zone had totally been penetrated. This was unthinkable on September 10, 2001.

Now, what did I do for myself? I had to deliberately use the skills that I taught each day as a clinical psychologist. I had to use those skills personally to recapture and to hold on to my optimistic view of the world, that naivety that I had that, you know, not in the 20th century or not in the 21st century America. You know, we were impervious to attack, especially by a bunch of barbarians. That was, that was just lunacy. You know, we’ve got these cavemen after us.

So I held on to my positive outlook by hearing what the influential voices, and you can think of your own firsthand experience, the influential voices on TV, on radio, in my own group of friends who spoke of finding the terrorists and the terrorist sponsoring nations and killing them just the way James Bond did, killing them wherever they are hiding, and that bystander nations had to take a stand. They couldn’t be neutral on this. They couldn’t play where Switzerland pretended to play neutral. They were either with us or against us.

Now there was passion, there was conviction, and there was moral certainty behind those words, as opposed to what? As opposed to wimpiness, moral appeasement, moral confusion. We’ve seen what’s happened since now. I, as Dr. Ellen Kenner, host of The Rational Basis of Happiness, teach my clients who have abusive spouses, moving away from nations now, that there is no reasoning with irrationality. If a person is irrational, any reasons you give them as to why they should be more reasonable, they’re going to twist your words, contort them, use them against you.

So, the principle here is that self-defense is a moral imperative. Anything less is self-destructive. So, the solution for ending marital abuse and for ending radical Islamic fundamentalism is similar in principle. You don’t appease perpetrators. In the case of the marriage, you leave the marriage. With the terrorist, you destroy those who destroy life. If they’re hell-bent on destroying life, you must destroy them. So, psychological and moral appeasement only emboldens the perpetrators.

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Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and Dr. Edwin Locke.

One pitfall to nurturing your sensual attraction to your partner is the view that sex is merely a primal urge or an innate instinct that is unrelated to your mind, your values, or your character. Sex, in this view, is just physical. Thus, it hardly matters who you have sex with, as long as you get some positive physical sensations. There is no spiritual aspect, no connection to the mind. But if sexual pleasure were disconnected from your mind, then mood and setting would not matter. However, to experience full enjoyment, both partners must be in the mood for sex and in a setting conducive to sexual pleasure.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at Amazon.com