Emotional Responsibility – Dr. Walter J. Matweychuk
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own emotional destiny.”
– Albert Ellis, Ph.D.
In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, we teach the Principle of Emotional Responsibility. Simply stated this principle is that you are largely responsible for your emotional upset. We acknowledge that other people will treat you poorly, and life will be difficult, but it is your self-created unrealistic demands that lead to your emotional upset. It might be accurate to say that life frustrates you, that others will disappoint you or displease you, but you anger yourself. You depress yourself. You will fall short of your standards, but you shame yourself when you fall short. Emotions like anger, depression, and shame are defined in REBT as unhealthy negative emotions or what could also be called emotional upset. These unhealthy negative emotions are self-defeating and are the result of two fundamental ideas:
1. Other people and life must be as I want them to be and it is unbearable when this is not the case. (Discomfort disturbance)
2. I must perform well or very well, I must have the traits and characteristics I want to have, and when this is the not the case, I am lesser as a person or worthless as a person. (Ego disturbance)
In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy I teach you that you are largely responsible for constructing your emotional experience. It does not just happen to you, you largely create it. The way in which you create your disturbance is by holding unrealistic, absolutistic attitudes towards others, the world, and yourself. If you take responsibility for changing these two basic ideas stated above, you can create emotional health when things are not as you want them to be. Therefore you could choose to hold yourself responsible for your healthy feelings by adopting these two fundamentally healthy attitudes:
1. I want other people and life to be as I want them to be but this does not have to be so. When conditions are not ideal, it will produce discomfort, but that discomfort is not unbearable. I will not disturb myself over the inconveniences and adversities of life whether these things are caused by other people or by the hand of fate. I will change what I can change and accept what I cannot which will allow me to feel healthy, self-helping negative emotions. (Unconditional Other Acceptance, Unconditional Life Acceptance)
2. I want to perform well or very well, I want to have desirable traits, but I do not absolutely have to perform well or very well, and I do not absolutely have to possess the desirable qualities and characteristics I wish I possessed. When I do not perform as well as I like and acknowledge I do not possess certain traits and features I will not arbitrarily define myself as a lesser person or a worthless person. I cannot prove I am lesser as a person or worthless but I can prove that my performance was lesser than I wish it to be or my characteristics or parts of me are not as I want them to be. My inferior performance and undesirable characteristics prove I am human, not inferior as a human. I will accept myself warts and all. (Unconditional Self-Acceptance)
Bottom line: Acknowledge that you upset yourself by unrealistically demanding that life and other people be as you think they “absolutely should be,” which is discomfort disturbance. Acknowledge that you upset yourself when you think you have not performed as you “absolutely should have” performed or lack characteristics you “absolutely should or must possess,” also known as ego disturbance. You upset yourself, the Principle of Emotional Responsibility, and you can choose not to do so.