My clinical experience has demonstrated that more than psychological insight is needed for you to make real change. Even REBT insight, which is more focused and efficiently achieved than the insights of other psychotherapies, must be augmented for fundamental emotional and behavioral change. You must actively engage with your self-defeating rigid and extreme attitudes to achieve real therapeutic change. You need to think through why your attitudes are illogical, contemplate the lack of evidence supporting them, and how these attitudes lead to self-defeating feelings and behavior. At first, most people find this challenging to do.
REBT’s Definition of Deeply Engaging with Your Self-Defeating Attitudes
Let me describe what I mean by deeply engaging with your self-defeating attitudes. You should explicitly identify, challenge, debate, and differentiate them from possible flexible and non-extreme healthy alternative attitudes you could hold about the adversity you are facing. This rational reflection takes a certain amount of time to do and some effort. You have to transform, tenderize, and de-escalate your rigid attitude, your “must,” back into a flexible, preferential attitude. This process is a core skill of REBT. People resist doing it.
Furthermore, it is also essential to look for the derivatives that emanate from your core musts. This reflection also takes time and effort, which you may be disinclined to carry out. REBT theory says that once we take a wish or a desire and escalate it into a rigid must, we are inclined to create derivative inferences like it is awful to face this particular adversity, the adversity is unbearable, and to make global devaluations of yourself, others, or life. For genuine emotional relief, REBT teaches you to actively detect, debate, dispute, and discriminate these extreme attitudes from non-extreme attitudes that logically follow a preferential, flexible philosophy. For example, if you think you must not face rejection and fail to have your wishes fulfilled, you need to delineate why, once rejected, you “should” be rejected. You need to produce the evidence that supports what is happening rather than fixate on all the subjective reasons you typically and silently cite as evidence that reality should not be as it is. Furthermore, you must also expose why it is illogical to think you must not fail and how thinking this way leads you to defeat yourself.
Deeply Engage with Your Attitudes by Asking Scientific Questions
In REBT, we encourage you to engage actively with your self-defeating attitudes by asking scientific questions. Examples include the following questions:
Where is it written that I must do well?
Prove that it’s awful to be unloved and not have my greatest wishes fulfilled.
Why am I not worthless because I have misbehaved despite my efforts not to do so?
How does it follow that because I failed many times, I will always fail in the future?
What evidence do I have that proves it is hard to bear rejection but is not unbearable?
Why must this deprivation not exist for a doll like me? Am I special or unique and will suffer rejection and failure just like everyone else does at one time or another?
Could worse things happen beyond not having the love of this particular person? If yes, what does it say about my conclusion that it is awful not to have this person’s love and approval?
You can scientifically dispute your self-defeating attitudes as you would in a science experiment. You can examine the evidence, attempting to disconfirm your hypothesis. Show yourself that unless you do more than parrot healthy attitudes but actively think about how to disconfirm them and actively generate healthy alternative attitudes that you also question, you will not experience real emotional change. Get yourself to see that, unlike the rigid and extreme attitudes, your flexible and non-extreme attitudes are unassailable. You need to do this hard cognitive work to set the stage to experience profound emotional change.
Although active reflection on the logic, evidence, and functional utility of your new flexible and non-extreme attitudes is better than passively parroting them, don’t stop there. You need to go a step further for profound emotional change to occur.
Action is Also Required
You need to act against your old attitudes forcefully. You must identify ways to live harmoniously with your new attitudes to deepen your conviction in healthier thinking. This alternative behavior usually involves acting oppositely to how you are accustomed to operating. REBT is hard because new attitudes require doing awkward new behaviors, taking calculated risks, asserting yourself instead of passively going along with others’ wishes, risking disapproval, and finding alternative paths to happiness instead of moping about your desires being unfulfilled. Acting on our new flexible and extreme attitudes is even more challenging than the active cognitive engagement emphasized thus far. REBT is hard work.
Parrotting Does Not Work
Reader, you need to see that debating or disputing your rigid and extreme attitudes is a requirement for real change and that just changing the words around in your head does little to ease your suffering. The easy, lazy path is to skip straight from “musts” to another immediate correct answer without doing the disputing in between. Unless you actively contemplate why your rigid and extreme attitudes are illogical, see that no evidence exists to support them and identify how they are dysfunctional, you will not get the relief from your emotional suffering and self-defeating behavior that you are seeking. Doing REBT is not merely converting a rigid and extreme attitude into a flexible and non-extreme attitude. Taking the path of the parrot will not lead to deep emotional relief from REBT.
Genuine Emotional Transformation Requires Deep Engagement Over Days or Weeks
You must repeatedly do this deep engagement over days or weeks to do what it takes to experience genuine emotional change. Remember that you have long thought in rigid and extreme ways, and unfortunately, one round of targeted disputing will not do the trick. It is merely a place to start. Recall that the theory of REBT says it is your nature to convert your wishes into rigid musts and that you are well-practiced in this way of thinking. Accept that you must get equally well-practiced at the vigorous critical thinking I write about today. Practice takes time and effort, and one round of explicit disputing is unlikely to get you to relinquish your grip on your self-defeating attitudes at the core of your emotional suffering.
When I challenge my patients in session to dispute their rigid and extreme attitudes, I have found that they respond with a puzzled look, do not answer my questions to engage them in vigorous thought, or do not demonstrate the skill of being able to ask themselves effective questions to challenge their dysfunctional attitudes. People want to learn the alternative philosophy, dismiss the deep questioning, and say, I know I do not have to perform perfectly. They want to acknowledge that others do not have to be nice to them and that they appreciate that the world is unfair and difficult and move on. They have great difficulty showing me why these attitudes make sense, lead to good functioning, and would be the healthy, logical attitudes they would teach a child. REBT takes effort, and people are often disinclined to give it the cognitive and behavioral effort it takes to make the profound change possible with REBT. Yet, I push them to go against the grain, ask the hard questions, and press them until they answer them accurately. This process can be draining on both of us, but it is required for emotional change to occur.
I want my patients to do what is better and actively ask themselves why it is truthful to think that people do not have to be nice to them. The goal is for my patients to be capable of pointing to instances of one person treating another poorly and stating that it constitutes evidence that people do not have to treat each other nicely. This way of precisely thinking about their unhealthy musts is what I mean by thinking it through and not just parroting the healthy, rational attitude.
Actively Monitor Your Reactions to Start the Process
You must accurately understand what I mean by deeply thinking things through. Deeply thinking things through means that you actively monitor your reactions. When you notice either the presence of an uncomfortable emotion or your behavioral response to a negative set of circumstances, you take the time to evaluate what feeling best describes your inner experience and if your outward behavior is constructive or self-defeating. You live with an awareness of what is going on inside of you and how that impacts your behavioral responses. You also evaluate the short-run and long-run consequences of what you are inclined to do or have just done. Rather than just reacting, you monitor, reflect, actively work on a healthy emotional and behavioral choice, and then force yourself to respond in this healthy way. You do not just keep going forward, reacting mindlessly like a pigeon in a Skinner box, but you pause between encountering adversity and responding to it overtly. Think of the metaphor of driving your car and suddenly noting you have a flat tire. You notice the unwelcome sound of the flat tire, and you pull the car over to the side of the road. You take the necessary time to take off the flat and replace it with a spare; you then drive off. Similarly, you live with awareness and note when you need to pause and do self-therapy to proceed healthily.
This kind of reflective functioning is challenging when you start learning to do REBT self-therapy. Whether you work with me or not, using REBT means actively doing self-therapy as needed. You will want to charge ahead to the rational attitudes you have come to memorize. Slow down and think. Force yourself to not just jump to “I want to succeed but do not have to.” Instead, stop and think about what evidence would show you do not have to succeed. Doing so is what I mean by deep engagement, REBT style active reflection. Giving yourself an immediate rational idea to parrot is not nearly as helpful for producing profound emotional change as calling to mind evidence that would disconfirm this attitude and going a step further to ponder why that evidence is disconfirming your rigid attitude.
I will admit that many of my patients are either unwilling or have difficulty doing this kind of active engagement with their thinking, which leads to lasting emotional and behavioral change. When they report that their emotions and behaviors are not improving, I get them to show me how they are disputing their self-defeating attitudes. More often than not, they have one of three problems. Either they are simply not taking time to reflect on their thinking actively, or they are merely parroting the rational attitudes of REBT and not engaging with them when they think about and dispute their rigid and extreme, self-defeating attitudes, or they are not forcing themselves to live in behavioral ways that go along with their new ways of thinking. For example, they say they can bear the discomfort of worthwhile activities but continue to avoid doing beneficial activities and make excuses for their avoidance.
REBT is Not Vent, Vent, Vent Therapy – See You Next Week
REBT is not vent, vent, vent therapy, whether you are working with me or doing self-therapy. When people keep a journal, they often chronicle adversity, vent, and analyze but fail to challenge their thinking in the precise ways that REBT prescribes. The best way to journal would be to do ABCDE analyses in your journal and carefully consider why your rigid and extreme attitudes are illogical, not supported by available evidence, and lead to poor results in your life. Then, in my type of journal, you would engage with your self-defeating philosophy and actively see why it is irrational. You could use journaling to identify evidence that disconfirms your rigid musts and generate flexible alternative attitudes. You then could engage with those adaptive attitudes and think of all the evidence that would support them, why they are logical, and how they would lead to better emotional and behavioral functioning. You could also cite why these are the kinds of attitudes you would hope your son or daughter would come to adopt and live by as they make their way through life. That would be rational journaling!
Below is a list of questions to use when you attempt to engage with your self-defeating attitudes. Be sure to contemplate accurate answers to these questions instead of merely jumping to the rote response subscribing to REBT theory. If they are hard to answer, this suggests you are doing the cognitive work that will ultimately lead to emotional change! However, remember to act on that healthy answer, not just parrot it!
- What evidence shows that I do not have to perform as well as I would like to?
- Is it logical to go from thinking I want to do well because it is important to me to conclude that I must do well?
- What beneficial negative emotion would I feel if I had a strong desire to do well but refrained from crossing the psychological line and concluding I must do well?
- Must I get what I want? Do other people always get what they strongly wish to?
- If other people do not have to have their wishes granted, where is the evidence that I must get what I want?
- How would it be better to hope that I get my wishes fulfilled but always to accept reality as it is when my desires do not come about?
- What evidence disconfirms the idea that the universe compels people to treat each other kindly?
- Is it logical to believe people must treat me kindly because I treat them nicely?
- How would I function if I accepted that people can and will do what they want and not what is right, fair, kind, or loving?
- What is the philosophical implication for me that other people have it hard in life?
- What evidence reflects that we do not live in a utopia where life is always as easy as we would like it to be? Asked another way, how would things be if we lived in a paradise of ease?
- What emotional cost comes to you for thinking your life must not have this burden?
- Where is the evidence that you cannot bear the burden life has assigned to you?
- What evidence shows you can bear the burden life has assigned you?
- Why is it worth bearing your burden and acknowledging that you can withstand it?
- How is it logical to go from acknowledging your heavy burden to concluding it is unbearable?
- Is your loss tragic or the end of the world?
- Is this obstacle inconvenient or awful?
- How do you logically go from this is tragic to nothing worse could happen to you?
- Although it is hard to do, how would you handle this tragic loss if you recognized that you could suffer a greater tragedy?
- Have other people suffered greater tragedies than I have?
- Prove that you are not a loser and will always lose because you lost in this way.
- Is it a fact or an opinion that you are a failure? What is the difference between a fact and an opinion?
- Who delineates the line between doing a bad thing or multiple bad things and being a bad person? Are things as cut and dry as you seem to be making them out to be?
- What effect does it have on your relationship with this person that you consider them an idiot?
- Have there been great moments in life? Have there not also been moments in life when times were quite hard? What does that say about life?
- What leads you to conclude that you can not think deeply about your rigid and extreme attitudes?
- What price do you pay for not thinking deeply about your rigid and extreme attitudes?
- What does it mean to think scientifically?
- Is it hard to discipline your mind to engage deeply with your rigid and extreme attitudes, or is it impossible?
