Six bullsh*t ideas about psychology that everybody believes
Interesting how these two tie into the deadly sins

• Anger: ‘If you let your anger out you’ll feel better!’ This is why you don’t see a lot of Buddhist monks throwing bricks through storefront windows on their path to enlightenment. The rush of anger is addictive as hell.
• Pride: ‘Just believe in yourself and you’ll succeed!’ They tried to teach people to feel good about themselves for no other reason than pure entitlement, figuring the actual reasons for feeling good about themselves would follow at some later date. It would, you know, seem like the solution would be to teach the stuff that leads to success (like social and communication skills, better strategies at dealing with stress, etc.) and just let that lead naturally to success and thus self-esteem, rather than just bypassing all that and going right for the self-esteem part. Or the difference between the truth that everybody is inherently valuable as a human being made by God and 1) fuelling the sin of pride, 2) setting people up for nasty falls by lying about their abilities and limits (the wise common-sense conservative Mike Judge made a wonderful ‘King of the Hill’ episode on that) and 3) giving kids trophies just for showing up, which I think most are smart enough to twig early on is condescending as well as dishonest.

From Cracked.