Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) acknowledges that it is challenging for humans to think flexibly and in a non-extreme way. In REBT, we encourage you to keep your preferences and desires but to avoid transforming your desires into absolute demands. It is easier to follow this recommendation when the object of your desire is a relatively low-order one. Weak desires are easier to keep at the level of wishes and preferences. As we go from lower-order desires to higher-order desires, it is all too easy to transform a want into a demand. We experience unhealthy negative emotions like depression, anger, and anxiety when we demand what we want.
The First Step in Addressing Adversity
When facing a negative situation in life, Adversity in REBT terminology, the first step in helping yourself is to evaluate if your emotional response is healthy or unhealthy. A healthy emotional response acknowledges the negative situation you face while enabling you to function optimally. If you conclude you are reacting in a self-defeating way according to REBT theory, you are under the influence of an unhealthy negative emotion. When this is the case, acknowledge the unhealthy feeling and unconditionally accept yourself with your unhealthy negative emotion. If you do not accept yourself and think you “absolutely should not be reacting so poorly,” you will deny the presence of the unhealthy feeling, which will only compound your problems. From the REBT standpoint, responding optimally to adversity means your emotional reaction helps you to strategically change what you can change or to accept that you cannot change. The healthy negative emotions allow you to see that the adversity is bad, not awful, that you can bear the adversity when you cannot change it and you can transcend it. The healthy negative emotion allows you to have some happiness despite your acknowledgment that you are facing adversity in your life that you wish did not exist.
Once you have acknowledged you are under the influence of an unhealthy negative emotion, think about what your options are. Do you want to do self-therapy, or do you want to continue to emote in an unhealthy way? You are not obligated to do self-therapy, but if you elect to avoid this work, you are likely to continue to be influenced by your unhealthy negative emotion and run the risk of compounding your difficulties. By avoiding the work of transforming your unhealthy negative emotion into a healthy negative emotion you will both suffer emotionally and are likely to continue to engage in self-defeating behavior.
Identify Your Unhealthy Negative Emotion
If you wish to do self-therapy, start by identifying your unhealthy negative emotion. Each unhealthy negative emotion has a different theme at A in the ABC model of REBT. Dr. Windy Dryden has nicely articulated the themes of the eight basic negative emotions. Click on the file at the end below to get my handout on the themes of these emotions. The unhealthy negative emotion is your C (Consequence) in the ABC model. You can use the handout to help you identify the unhealthy emotion you are feeling and its healthy alternative.
Identify the Critical Aspect of the Adversity
Next, seek the A of the ABC model. What is it that you are responding to emotionally? Is it that you think or infer that you have been rejected, betrayed, or have failed? Again, go back to my handout to help you identify the critical aspect of your Adversity. It is essential to get a good idea and specify what you find aversive in the situation you face. Search for the aspect of the situation you are reacting to with unhealthy emotion. Once you identify this, you have located your Critical A (Adversity).
Identify What Makes Your C Unhealthy and What Would be a Healthy C
Next, give some thought to what makes your C unhealthy. Is it that you use poor judgment when under the influence of this unhealthy emotion? If so, your healthy C would be to avoid impulsivity and think through a more strategic response to your problem. Alternatively, your unhealthy C might be that you avoid changing what can be changed and resign yourself to conditions as they are. If so a healthier response at C would be to try to change aspects of your situation even if there is no guarantee that your attempt to improve the situation will succeed.
Identify Your Rigid Attitude at B
After identifying your Adversity and both your unhealthy and healthy negative emotions, it will be far easier for you to determine the rigid and extreme attitudes you hold at B. Put into words a personalized version of one of the below three general rigid ideas:
1. I must perform perfectly well.
2. You must treat me as I want you to treat me.
3. Life must be easy.
Determine if You Hold an Extreme Derivative Attitude
After specifying your rigid attitude, determine if you hold an extreme attitude that derives from your rigid attitude. REBT theory states that there are three possible derivative attitudes:
1. It is unbearable when things are not as I want them to be. (Alternatively – It is intolerable to experience the emotional distress I feel about the circumstances I face.)
2. It is awful, terrible, or the end of the world when things are not as I want them to be.
3. I am lesser as a person or worthless when I am not as I am supposed to be. (Alternatively, you may devalue others or life – You are lesser of a person because … or life is totally bad because …)
Challenge and Recreate Your Attitudes
The next step in the REBT self-therapy process would be to challenge and modify the attitude you have identified associated with your unhealthy reaction. You could use different questions for this purpose, but the easiest to start with is how you would respond to a child you loved who was thinking as you are and disturbing themselves with the attitude you are holding. You could ask:
Would I teach my child to hold the rigid or extreme attitude that I am using to upset myself?
If I would not encourage a child to hold my rigid and extreme attitude towards this Adversity, why would I not?
What flexible and non-extreme attitude would I teach a child to help them move on and have some happiness despite the presence of this particular Adversity?
These three questions are easy to understand and practical. They help people see the self-defeating nature of their thinking and help them see an alternative way of thinking that allows them to acknowledge the Adversity, do something to change it, or move on when they cannot do anything to change it.
Conclusion
The self-therapeutic process of REBT is not easy to learn or to do. I want to close by restating the REBT premise that it is easy for fallible humans to convert their strongest desires into absolute needs. When we badly want something or someone, it is easy to think we absolutely need what we want, must have it, cannot bear to live without it. It is our nature to think in this crooked, illogical, self-defeating way as humans. Fortunately, we can go against our nature and get some control over our self-harming emotional reactions. Going against the impulse to demand what we desire is also part of our human nature. We have an inner voice that reminds us that no law of the universe entitles us to have what we want, and we can survive. The process of listening to this voice and strengthening it is not easy. It is a very weak voice in those circumstances when we have a very strong desire for something or someone. Due to our thwarted strong desires and our tendency to demand that we get what we want, life is not easy. It has disappointments, losses, and challenges for all of us to face, and REBT is not to blame for this. REBT’s philosophy is difficult to adopt because life is hard, and our nature is to think rigidly and in extreme ways. However, clinical experience and empirical research have clearly shown that if you work at the process outlined above, you can make significant progress in changing your fundamental attitudes towards some of the most difficult challenges you will face as a human. You can cultivate that inner weak voice of flexible and non-extreme attitudes. That voice will help you to change what you can change and accept what you cannot. Learning, practicing, and implementing REBT in these life circumstances where your strongest desires are thwarted is then up to you.