Backsliding is not limited to people who use REBT with addictions. People who overeat can lose weight, but it will take effort and experimentation over time to learn how to maintain their new weight and not slowly creep back into eating large portions when under stress. During stressful periods, people often find it hard to consistently eat healthy portion sizes and make healthy food choices in our obesogenic environment. Those who exercise know that it is sometimes easy to fall out of a regular exercise routine when life gets busy. Another example of backsliding is when students who have progressed in addressing their academic procrastination relapse and begin to procrastinate once again. People with anger problems, social anxiety, and phobias who have made therapeutic gains need to remain vigilant as well. REBT theory emphasizes that all humans who have made changes need to continue to do what helped them change in the first place, or else they are likely to backslide into well-established patterns of anger or anxiety-based avoidance and passivity. I hope you now are convinced that backsliding, lapsing, and relapsing, whatever you may call the problem of losing your therapeutic gains, is, unfortunately, part of the human condition.
Patients often experience a period of emotional upset in response to backsliding. They will commonly depress themselves, shame themselves, guilt themselves, and feel hopeless after making changes and noticing that those changes are not enduring. Some patients will wrongly conclude that the presence of backsliding indicates that they cannot change and will never achieve long-lasting behavioral and emotional change. I teach these patients that this conclusion is not necessarily valid. I build into my REBT psychotherapy from nearly the outset that it is the human condition to make both emotional and behavioral changes only sometimes to find those changes dissipate and old well-established patterns of behaving and emoting re-emerge. Backsliding and relapse may occur when we are under stress or when multiple events occur to distract us or otherwise prevent us from taking time to do what has been working in the first place to produce those hard-earned emotive and behavioral gains. I have observed that people, fallible humans, fatigue and discontinue doing what has been helping them. They stop rehearsing healthy thinking; they stop taking time to do an ABC analysis of emotional upset. They stop listening to REBT audio found on REBTDoctor.com, stop refreshing their REBT skills, and forget how to think, feel, and behave healthily. People stop working at REBT. They stop helping themselves and our biological tendency to defeat ourselves gets the upper hand once again.
Backsliding and Attitudes of Unbearability
I have found that a patient’s reaction to backsliding is often evidence that they hold attitudes of unbearability, also known as low discomfort tolerance. It is as if the patient falsely believes that one makes a therapeutic change, and it absolutely should be maintained without significant effort and vigilance on an ongoing basis. The truth is that humans can and do make emotional, behavioral, and cognitive changes, but because we are fallible humans, we will backslide. To assist these patients, I address their attitudes of unbearability about maintaining behavioral gains. I teach the REBT philosophy of unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional life-acceptance. Unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional life-acceptance are choices we make. You can choose to accept yourself unconditionally even when you backslide. You surely will never like the tendency we all have to backslide, but you can always choose to accept yourself despite this unwanted tendency. You acknowledge that life often involves taking eight steps forward and two backward. Such relapsing and backsliding are unfortunate, but it is never the worst possible thing in the world, nor is it unbearable unless you are addicted to heroin and backslide and overdose. Death by overdose is sad, dramatic evidence that the backsliding was truly intolerable. Here the addict relapses and uses an amount of heroin they once were able to tolerate physically. After a period of abstinence, they no longer can take that same amount, and they overdose and stop breathing. However, thankfully backsliding does not usually produce truly unbearable conditions. In most instances of backsliding, we regain weight, stop exercising, start procrastinating, stop asserting ourselves and upset ourselves. However, we do not die from any of these steps backward because they are not genuinely unbearable, no matter how disappointing they may be.
I teach that disturbing one’s self over backsliding will NEVER assist one in curtailing their backsliding. Take careful note of this critical point. Many people wrongly believe that upsetting themselves over backsliding is necessary and helpful in response to backsliding. I show them that disappointment, concern, and displeasure with backsliding are healthy and beneficial negative feelings to experience. These feelings are self-helping because they both acknowledge the relapsing but motivate and help us resume the work necessary to restart therapeutic change. These feelings result from healthy and self-helping attitudes such as:
1. I wish I did not backslide, but sadly I have, and the universe permits this as I do not have to maintain my therapeutic gains no matter how desirable doing so would be.
2. Backsliding is very disappointing but not the end of the world in nearly all cases. Only when backsliding results in immediate death can we say it is truly unbearable.
3. Resuming REBT methods and ideas may be a struggle but far from unbearable and well worth doing and tolerating. REBT works when I choose to work at implementing it! I commit to resuming the processes that helped me change in the first place.
4. The fact that I have taken a few steps backward is proof that I am a fallible human, NOT lesser as a person. I will unconditionally accept myself but not my backsliding because backsliding can harm my long-term well-being.
Take note that feelings of shame, depression, anxiety, anger, and guilt are unhealthy and self-defeating and are what we in REBT consider avoidable emotional disturbance. See that disturbing oneself at the initial sign of backsliding, often called lapsing, will only maintain the backsliding instead of initiating a determined effort to curtail it.
Backsliding and Self-Rating Based on Conditional Self-Acceptance
In addition to low discomfort tolerance attitudes, people may rate themselves due to their backsliding leading to shame, guilt, anxiety, or depression. Rating oneself for backsliding leads to self-downing and will lead to hopelessness, despair, and inactivity. Here the person is predicating accepting themselves on the condition they maintain their therapeutic changes. Backsliding is bad. However, you, the person doing the backsliding, is never bad. You are an organism in evolution. No matter how crucial to your personal goals, no behavior is a measure or a proxy for your human worth. Avoiding defining your total self on the basis of the changes you have made.
To effectively address your backsliding, you need to think differently about it. It would be best to examine your attitudes ABOUT your backsliding and your attitudes leading to and maintaining your backsliding. To this end, I encourage you to question those crucial self-defeating attitudes you hold. The process of reflection in REBT is known as disputing your rigid and extreme attitudes. For example, to begin challenging those self-disturbing attitudes underpinning your backsliding, consider these questions:
Is my human value validly defined by the self-defeating behavior I may exhibit or a negative characteristic that I may possess? Is this not a myopic view of a complex organism in a state of flux?
Answer: No one behavior or characteristic defines the whole person. To define the whole in terms of a bad part is an error in logic known as the part-whole error.
Where is it written that change must occur linearly with no starts and stops, lapses, and relapses?
Answer: The sensible answer to this question is that no law of the universe dictates that change absolutely must be enduring and easily or effortlessly maintained. Accept this. Change is NOT a one-and-done affair. Rather change is a process that never really ends.
Does it help me to hold the attitude that change must not require continued effort?
Answer: The self-helping answer is that it NEVER helps to demand that change NOT require persistent effort.
What attitudes towards backsliding are valid and helpful?
Answer: Therapeutic gains are difficult to maintain but not impossible when one accepts ongoing effort is necessary. Unfortunately, all humans are at risk of backsliding. The sensible approach to backsliding is to unconditionally accept oneself so that one fully and non-defensively acknowledges backsliding and then rejects it NOT oneself. By doing so, one can immediately make an effort to address one’s backsliding.
I also point out to my patients that humans learn through experience. Doing and re-doing is the way we learn. We are natural scientists and natural experimenters. The thing to do is to see that when humans keep after their goals and do not upset themselves when they backslide, they continue to try and try again. By repeatedly working at a goal, we very often learn how to achieve the goal. What often makes the difference between goal achievement and ultimate goal failure is if we continue to try and figure out how to succeed at the goal. When we stop trying to change we ensure failure to change. As long as we keep trying, successful change is always possible. Grit is the capacity to work passionately at your goals over long periods, is facilitated by healthy, flexible, and non-extreme attitudes towards the struggle. REBT builds true GRIT, helps you keep after yourself, and helps you to keep making the effort that success at self-change requires. Use Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy to address your emotional reaction to backsliding and observe what happens!