Conquering Ego and Non-Ego Disturbance
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is a philosophy and a self-help approach that empowers you to correct your self-defeating emotional and behavioral reactions. To experience healthy responses to life’s challenges, you need to understand how to evaluate and monitor your disturbed reactions and the conditions surrounding them. There are two broad categories of emotional disturbance. These categories are ego disturbance and non-ego disturbance.
Ego disturbance is emotional upset about one’s self and the evaluation of one’s worth as a human. Albert Ellis argued that humans were biologically inclined to sloppy reasoning and that we easily confuse aspects of the self with our human worth. This confusion often leads to conditional human value, where the individual links their worth as a person with some subjective criteria they have adopted. For example, one might conclude they have value or more value as a human if they perform well and get the love and approval of significant others. With this mindset, the individual thinks they possess less or no human worth if they fail to perform well or obtain the love and approval of others. Ego disturbance is the result of failing to meet the subjective criteria one sets up for self-worth and self-acceptance. Ego disturbance also exists when one fears falling short of their standards of personal worth in the future. Most people who accept themselves on the condition of performing well in important domains of their lives will be anxious before they act as they might fail their test of human worth. After the performance test, if they have performed poorly, their ego disturbance may manifest itself in the feelings of depression and shame for having executed poorly and not meeting the subjective standard they have adopted for accepting themselves. These people are living their lives to prove themselves instead of living their lives to enjoy themselves. They suffer from ego disturbance due to their lack of unconditional self-acceptance.
Non-ego disturbance is an entirely different type of disturbance. Under this broad heading lie many kinds of intolerances. When people upset themselves by holding rigid and extreme attitudes towards how the conditions of life must be or how others must treat them, they will experience self-defeating negative emotions like anger, self-pity, depression, and unhealthy envy, which constitute their non-ego disturbance. Aside from the mistakes we make, another reason REBT sees all humans as fallible is that we quickly and wrongly believe that we must get what we want and cannot bear facing undesirable conditions constituting states of unfulfilled desire. Imperfect humans tend to think that it is awful and the end of the world if the conditions of life are not precisely as they wish conditions to be. The emotional tension that is associated with their intolerance for uncertainty, injustice, complexity, deprivation, boredom, and pretty much any negative external or aversive internal set of conditions is a manifestation of their non-ego disturbance. Typical attitudes reflecting non-ego disturbance include:
1. I must have certainty that I will get what I want or avoid what I wish to avoid. It is awful or unbearable if I cannot be sure I will get what I want.
2. I have to have justice. It is awful and unbearable when injustice occurs.
3. I like it when life is not exceptionally complicated, and it must not be so. It is awful or unbearable when I face complex problems and situations.
4. I do not like states of deprivation. They must not exist. When they do, it is awful and unbearable to suffer these states of deprivation.
5. I like pleasurable stimulation and dislike boredom. Boredom must not exist. When it does, it is awful or unbearable.
6. Negative internal states like physical pain, fatigue, anger, depression, and anxiety must not exist. It is awful to experience these inner states and unbearable. I must escape these negative internal states quickly and easily. If I cannot avoid them, then I must be capable of reducing or improving them quickly and easily.
One reason REBT self-therapy is difficult is that ego disturbance can interact and be simultaneously present with non-ego disturbance. For example, let’s assume you avoid exercise and healthy food choices because you find doing these things uncomfortable. You hold the attitude that a healthy lifestyle is too difficult to implement. This avoidance would be an example of your non-ego disturbance. You believe you cannot bear the sacrifices of a healthy lifestyle. As time goes on weight gain results, and you start to put yourself down for not exercising and making healthier food choices. You depreciate your essence as a person for your indulgences. Measuring yourself as lesser of a person for not keeping yourself fit and healthy and the associated shame would be your ego disturbance. REBT would recommend you address both disturbances, ego disturbance and non-ego disturbance, to increase the chances of making comprehensive emotional and behavioral changes.
In this instance, it probably would be best to start with your ego disturbance. You could attack the idea that you are lesser of a person for not exercising and making healthy food choices, both of which contribute to unhealthy and unappealing weight gain. Emotional health would be closer at hand if you only negatively rated your behavior as bad but elected to unconditionally accept yourself with your weight problem, avoidance of exercise, and poor food choices. You could choose to accept yourself unconditionally, and in so doing, feel healthy disappointment and concern, which will serve to motivate you to make future behavioral changes.
As you work on accepting yourself unconditionally (i.e., work on your ego disturbance), you could also work on your non-ego disturbance. In this case, your non-ego disturbance is the intolerance you have for the effort involved in exercising and making healthier food choices. You could attack the ideas which underpin your non-ego disturbance:
1. I like unhealthy foods and must eat them.
2. Healthy food choices are too hard and involve too much deprivation.
3. I dislike exercise and must avoid it. I cannot bear the effort exercise requires.
4. These changes are too hard, even if they will slowly produce favorable conditions for my weight and health in the long run.
Careful examination of the available evidence would reveal that even though you like unhealthy foods, you do not absolutely have to eat them. Unhealthy food does not escape from the refrigerator and jump onto your plate and compel you to consume it. Instead, you could acknowledge, without downing yourself, that you choose to consume this food because it tastes so good. You give yourself permission and all sorts of excuses why you deserve this pleasure and “must” eat this food while denying your free will and the choices you are making along the way. You could examine the evidence that you cannot bear the effort of moderate exercise because you dislike it. You could open your eyes to the reality that these lifestyle changes are hard, as there is ample evidence of this, but not too hard, as there is no evidence of this.
REBT is realistic psychotherapy. It acknowledges that humans are fallible as we easily defeat our ends. We readily adopt a stance of intolerance for all sorts of things we do not like (non-ego disturbance) and then rate our human worth and depreciate our total self for this intolerance and the consequences it brings (ego-disturbance). REBT is optimistic that with work and practice, and the rational insight of the sort REBT theory reveals to you along with a good deal of effort, you can stop defeating your ends and overcome both disturbances, ego and non-ego alike. Conquering these disturbances is not necessarily easy but possible and well worth doing in the long run. This effort is worth making as it will increase the chances of less pain and more comfort in the long term. So learn REBT and let’s get cracking!