Let us be honest life is challenging and, at times, downright hard. Frustration, disappointment, loss, burdens, betrayal, incompetency, and complexity abound. In response, you experience emotions, feelings, and behavioral reactions. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) is a philosophy for managing your responses to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want. What is it that humans are naturally inclined to want? In general, we want to survive and experience happiness. For many, survival is easier to achieve than experiencing joy.
Ellis argued that humans have implicit wishes and desires, some innate and others learned from culture and family. As we live, we encounter moments where the realization of our wishes and desires is made difficult by the circumstances of our lives, other people’s actions, and sometimes even by our misguided decisions and behaviors. Ellis observed that all humans sometimes insist on fulfilling their most highly valued wishes and desires. He argued that the more critical a wish or desire is to an individual, the more likely a person will hold the attitude, “I must have my wish and desire fulfilled. I cannot bear that it is not. How awful is my state of deprivation.” He pointed out that the probability of transforming a wish or desire into a dogmatically held attitude increases when the wish or desire is relatively more important than our other wishes or desires. In other words, it is easier to accept and experience a healthy negative emotion to unfulfilled wishes and desires that are less important to us.
Ellis hypothesized that once adversity blocks a human in the realization of their innate or learned wishes and desires, and they cross the psychological Rubicon, so to speak, into a state of emotional disturbance he dubbed demandingness, the intensity of their human reaction will increase with the greater relative importance of the wish or desire. In other words, we tend to have less intense negative emotions (healthy or unhealthy) about unfulfilled wishes and desires that are less important to us.
Likelihood and Intensity of Disturbance Expressed as Equations
Likelihood of demandingness occurring (unhealthy emotion) = relative importance of one’s wish X the condition of the unfulfillment of a wish
Intensity of the emotional reaction (healthy or unhealthy) when a wish goes unfulfilled = relative importance of one’s wish X the condition of the desire going unrealized
Feeling Emotionless in the Face of Adversity is Unmotivating
Ellis showed that when the circumstances of life block the fulfillment of our wishes and desires, we cannot feel emotionless. He pointed out that feeling emotionless would be unhealthy because we would lack the motivation to change what we might be capable of. Why settle for unfulfilled wishes when we could try to get them fulfilled? The question is whether our attitudes will lead us to feel an unhealthy negative emotion (i.e., emotional disturbance) that undermines both changing what we can and accepting what we cannot or lead us to feel a healthy negative emotion that motivates us to attempt to change what we can and allows us to accept and adapt to what we cannot.
It is Good to Feel Healthy Negative Emotions
REBT practitioners aim to help people distinguish between healthy and unhealthy states of negative emotion. Healthy states of negative emotions like concern, disappointment, sadness, displeasure, and annoyance acknowledge that what we want, desire, and wish for either will be threatened in the future (concern) or have already gone unfulfilled (disappointment, sadness, displeasure, annoyance). The natural reaction of most humans most of the time is to feel the urge to act upon these healthy emotional states and take steps to change something in their circumstances to fulfill their wishes or desire. Healthy negative emotions are motivational in an adaptive way.
Set your sights on choosing a healthy negative emotion accompanied by self-helping behavior to change what you can. Beneficial emotional experiences start with monitoring your emotions and behavioral reactions throughout the day. Some of your responses may be strong and self-defeating. You will likely find that life blocks you as you pursue your wishes and desires through the inevitable frustrations, disappointments, losses, burdens, betrayals, incompetency, and complexities you encounter. Look for when you transform those wishes into rigid attitudes, coinciding with unhealthy negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. Call to mind the understanding of emotions that REBT offers.
Start by pushing yourself to choose to experience healthy negative feelings. If you are anxious, worried, fearful, or panicked about being threatened in the future by the occurrence of a negative state of affairs, stop and take a breath and remember that you could choose to feel concerned about the threatening situation you face and will function better when influenced by this healthy emotional state. When you feel angry, depressed, or shameful, take a step back and call to mind that annoyance, sadness, disappointment, and displeasure are available for your choosing. This feeling is an emotional option you have.
Why choose these emotions? Because you will avoid ruminating, aggressing, withdrawing, and other self-defeating responses to the circumstances you face. These healthy emotions, accompanied by the behavioral responses they set the stage for, will better enable you to change what you can change and have some happiness even when you cannot change the circumstances you face.
Go beyond mindful monitoring of your reactions and strive to identify your rigid and extreme attitudes towards your unfulfilled desires and wishes. Zero in on one or more possible rigid attitudes you may hold about your wants and desires. You can express these self-defeating attitudes in different ways, but REBT theory hypothesizes that you will focus your demandingness towards yourself, others, or life conditions:
- I (absolutely) have to do well. I have to possess the desirable characteristics I favor. I am lesser or totally bad because I do not perform as I must or do not possess the desirable traits I wish to have.
- You (absolutely) have to treat me as I want you to treat me. You are lesser or a totally bad person because you fail to treat me as I demand you to treat me.
- The conditions of my life and those of my loved ones must be as I want. When life deviates from these ideal conditions, it is awful. I cannot tolerate these conditions if they are not as I want them to be.
Identification of your rigid and extreme attitudes is the easy part. The hard part is stepping back and reflecting upon the functional impact of these attitudes, the lack of evidence to support them, and the inherent illogic between the premises they rest upon and the conclusions they are. In general, the premise they rest upon is your desire for something to be a certain way. REBT theory argues you then “jump” to an illogical conclusion that your wishes must come to fruition. Sometimes the premise that you want what you want will not be stated, and you will be more aware of the rigid attitude you jump to and use to upset yourself. However, Ellis argued we think in non-sequiturs, and those unstated wishes are often the premises from which we escalate our thinking into a rigid demand.
Aside from the inherent illogic of your thinking, your rigid and extreme thoughts will not bring out the most effective behavioral responses you are capable of. You set yourself up for not changing what you can and doing better in your situation. When you think in these rigid and extreme ways, you also overlook that the available evidence does not support your attitudes. In effect, you live in a fantasy world and fail to see that what you want does not ever have to be how things unfold. Yes, life is challenging. This insight can be hard to digest when your most valued wishes and desires go unfulfilled.
Start with Reflection But Go to A New Attitude and Action
REBT encourages you not to stop with mere philosophical reflection. We encourage you to actively construct a new philosophy of flexibility towards your unfulfilled desires and wishes. Explicitly think of the best way of representing what you want in flexible and non-extreme ways that will enable you to feel healthy negative emotions and make an effort to change what you can. Those above-stated attitudes would be transformed into flexible and non-extreme attitudes as follows.
- I strongly want to do well. I have a strong preference for the desirable characteristics I favor. I am not lesser or totally bad because I do not perform as I wish to perform or do not possess the desirable traits I wish to have. Too bad for me. I will keep trying to do better.
- I want you to treat me as I want you to treat me. You are not lesser or a totally bad person because you fail to treat me as I strongly prefer that you treat me.
- I strongly desire the conditions of my life and those of my loved ones to be as I want. The current unfavorable conditions are bad, but they are not awful. I acknowledge conditions could still be worse, and it is good for me to recognize this to be the case. I am uncomfortable with conditions as they are, but I acknowledge they are not intolerable. I will tolerate them either because they exist and I can do little about them for the time being or because tolerating them is worth the long-term gain derived from not avoiding them.
REBT is A Realistic Philosophy of Life
REBT is a realistic philosophy of life. It acknowledges that life has tough moments and very difficult to bear challenges. It acknowledges that we are imperfect humans living, working with, and loving other flawed humans. REBT is a tough-minded philosophy that helps you survive and be happy despite inevitable adversities. Reflect on how it will help you face your existential challenges and leave room for some happiness! Learn it, practice it, and use it. Keep at it!