This Saturday, August 7th, marks the first anniversary of the Saturday Rational Emotive Behavioral Conversation Hour on Zoom. The purpose of this hour is to share with the world the lessons, ideas, strategies, and philosophy of Dr. Albert Ellis and his REBT theory. Ellis trained me, and over the thirty-one years of my career as a psychologist, I have remained an REBT therapist not out of loyalty to my mentor. I have remained a practitioner of REBT because I have not found a better approach to understanding humans and helping them manage their reactions to adversity. I have carefully examined other theories and therapies but have not found one as versatile, efficient, and effective. I hope to continue this weekly Saturday conversation hour over the next year and introduce many more people to this liberating philosophy and psychotherapy.
In today’s Intermittent Reinforcement email and video, I would like to list a few of the fundamental ideas of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. REBT is deceptively simple but far from simplistic. It is highly psychoeducational, and one cannot use it effectively without having a firm understanding of its fundamental ideas and assumptions about human nature. It is therapeutic to go back and review some of the core ideas of REBT, which will enable you to better apply this philosophy to the adversities you face daily.
Fundamental Ideas and Assumptions of REBT
- Humans tend to rate themselves in a global way to their detriment. This global self-rating or person rating is invalid because all humans are too complex, constantly evolving, unique, and prone to error by their very nature. In short, a human being defies a simple rating of good or bad. Alternatively, it is valid to have a goal and then to evaluate your behavior vis-à-vis that goal. You also can rate your traits and the decisions, thoughts, and emotions that come from those traits. These ratings help you learn from your experiences. When you go beyond this focused rating and rate your totality, essence, self, or personhood, you are likely to experience unhealthy feelings of anxiety, depression, shame, guilt, unhealthy envy, unhealthy anger, unhealthy jealousy, or hurt. These feelings are unhealthy because they tend to defeat your overarching goals of survival and personal happiness. If you discipline your mind and learn not to rate yourself, you set the stage for unconditional self-acceptance. Unconditional self-acceptance is emotionally liberating and allows you to take calculated risks, which helps you to enjoy life maximally. Unconditional self-acceptance also will enable you to fail and try again instead of withdrawing from future attempts in a state of depression or shame.
- Humans disturb themselves. Although all humans face adversity and misfortune, such unfortunate events are insufficient on their own to produce emotional disturbance. Humans create emotional disturbance because they naturally hold rigid extreme attitudes about important matters. When humans meet with adversity and apply their rigid and extreme attitudes, they essentially create the emotional disturbance they experience.
- REBT theory defines sadness, disappointment, concern, and some other emotions as healthy and self-helping negative emotions. Healthy negative emotions result from not getting what you want or possibly facing a threat to your interests in the future. Healthy negative feelings are part of the human condition and are important and motivating. They preferably should be acknowledged and used to guide decision-making and spark adaptive behavior in the face of adversity. It is only your unhealthy negative emotions that preferably should be transformed into healthy negative emotions simply because these unhealthy emotions lead to self-defeating behavior in the face of adversity.
- Humans often hold attitudes that they cannot bear certain things. Usually, the evidence suggests they can endure these things. Humans do not perish when facing these adversities. A human cannot endure extremes of temperature or the deprivation of food, water, and oxygen for very long. Humans often confuse what they do not like, find inconvenient, or wish not to exist with things they cannot endure. When humans reason in a crooked and invalid way about misfortune, they render themselves unsane and create an emotional disturbance that makes it harder to live with misfortune. REBT teaches people how to reason correctly about those things the evidence shows are bearable, even if these things are highly dispreferred or obnoxious.
- Humans can gain leverage over a problem by focusing on changing what they can change and philosophically accepting what they cannot. Humans are disinclined to accept what they cannot change when it comes to highly valued matters in life. However, during these most trying times of loss, failure, deprivation, and injustice, accepting what cannot be eliminated yields the maximum emotional leverage.
- Humans are happiest when they have a life mission, pursue a series of highly valued goals, or what Ellis called vitally absorbing interests. Humans experiment to discover these critical activities. Humans sometimes need to adopt new missions in life as they age and the circumstances of life change. Humans who remain engaged in life through vitally absorbing interests tend to experience maximum pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, and meaning.
- Utopias, perfection, certainty, and infallible humans do not exist. In all probability, there are no absolutes. REBT encourages realistic thinking that helps us to live well with uncertainty, imperfection, and human error. REBT encourages unconditional life acceptance, which includes acknowledging that shortly after facing one challenge in life, another will come our way.
- REBT philosophy and strategies are easy to understand on an intellectual level. You will come to understand this philosophy on an emotional level through consistent work and behavioral practice. Progress can be slow at first. Backsliding often occurs. Still, humans can use this powerful philosophy to liberate themselves and experience less emotional disturbance and greater satisfaction, happiness, and personal meaning in life. Although humans cannot perfect themselves, with regular use over a lifetime, humans can experience significant personal growth.
Over the past year and a half, humans have faced common adversity. This adversity has been the threat of illness from Covid-19. Although a great deal of suffering has occurred around the world, some good has come from bad. The REBT Conversation Hour probably would never have come about if it had not been for Covid-19 and the challenges it caused. Good can come from bad, and REBT can help us face the bad, endure it well, and find the good in the bad. REBT assumes we can experience some degree of happiness even when times are bad. I hope you will join me and share this practical philosophy with others throughout the world.
Below is a partial list of the countries where people have lived who have attended and participated in the Rational Emotive Behavioral Conversation Hour as a volunteer willing to discuss a real problem. This partial list includes:
Albania, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States