Extracting the Good from The Bad and Carrying it Forward

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy aims to enhance a person’s ability to adapt to and learn from adversity. I have found that cultivating the capacity to take the good from the bad exemplifies adaptation and is essential to making the most of life. In life, bad things will happen. We will perform poorly, suffer losses and misfortune, face betrayal, and many other undesirable circumstances. As we refer to them in REBT, these adversities will happen to you, me, and everyone else. What separates some people from others is their ability to extract something good when something bad happens. When a person does this, they carry a piece of wisdom forward and are better equipped to face the next adversity in life. How can REBT help you extract the good from the bad and adapt and learn?

Avoid Demanding that Bad Things Not Happen

In REBT, adversity will occur but cannot produce emotional disturbance, unhealthy negative emotions, or self-defeating emotions. People come to misfortune with preferences, wishes, and hopes and then think rigidly about the conditions of life that undermine these preferences. A person might think, “I want to do well in this important endeavor, and therefore I must.” REBT’s theory of emotional disturbance argues that rigid thinking makes the individual prone to anxiety as they approach their important performance event and then feel anger, shame, or depression after they have not met their standard of excellence. Their rigid stance towards performing well will likely lead to an extreme rating of their disappointing performance and a devaluation of themselves as people for having fallen short in their performance. These attitudes would be: “Because I did not perform as I must, it is awful, terrible and the end of the world.” Awfulinzing, as we call it in REBT, is an extreme rating of badness. The other likely derivative attitude from one’s core demand would be, “Because I did performed poorly as I must not, I am lesser as a person because I define my worth as a person on the basis of how well I perform.” This attitude reflects an empirical assessment of performing poorly and a definitional component appended to that empirical rating that is subjective and self-harming.

Discipline Your Mind and Avoid Awfuling

REBT emphasizes logical thinking; logically speaking, only bad events exist, but awful, terrible, and the end of the world circumstances do not exist if we define our terms properly. A proper definition of awful and its synonymous terms is an appraisal of an adverse event where there is an acknowledgment that it cannot be exceeded in badness, wickedness, or misfortune by any other event and is not completely bad. If one thinks logically, which is sometimes hard for humans to do because they are fallible, they will realize that no matter how bad an event is, in all probability, a worse event could occur. Furthermore, when a bad event occurs, unless the event kills the individual, it can be borne, regardless of how difficult it may be to withstand or how much damage it does to the individual. Furthermore, when a bad event occurs, something good can always come from it for the individual if only they assume it to be there. An example of disciplined anti-awfulizing thinking that will lead to healthy negative emotions and positioning you to extract the good from the bad would be: “It is bad that I did not perform well in this important endeavor, but it is not awful. I will use it as a learning experience and move on.”

Discipline Your Mind and Reason Logically When It Is Hardest to Do

The key to avoiding awfulizing is to reason logically and use a percentage scale from greater than 0% bad to less than 100% bad. This badness scale is logical, awful, and terrible, and the end of the world lies beyond 100% bad, which cannot occur by definition of what a 100% percent means. When a person disciplines their mind to remain logical and rates things on a badness scale ranging from above 0% bad to somewhat less than 100% bad, they empower themselves to adapt and function well in the face of bad events. Rating an exceptionally bad event in a disciplined and logical way is very difficult for humans when they face adversity about something that matters greatly to them. The fact that fallible humans may find it difficult to think logically and assign a bad event a rating less than awful, terrible, or the end of the world does not make this type of reasoning impossible or not worth learning to do. By seeing events with a healthy degree of badness, we are better able to withstand them, and we are more likely to adapt and extract the good from the bad of having faced adversity. We learn better when we have the healthy negative feelings of disappointment, concern, and annoyance resulting from such non-extreme thinking. An example of an anti-awfulizing attitude towards a bad event that acknowledges something worse could happen would be: “It is bad that I was in an auto accident and badly wreckd my car, but not awful. No one involved in this bad accident was seriously injured and this is fortunate because it is possible someone could have been badly injured if it were not for the hand of fate. A badly wrecked car and serious physical injuries would be far worse. The good that come come from the bad is I had better slow down because speeding reduces the margin of error when driving and a split second can make a big difference in whether an accident occurs. Next time I may not be so lucky!”

Avoid Devaluing Yourself 

REBT also teaches that if you wish to extract the good from the bad, it is best to avoid devaluing yourself (as a person). Regarding devaluing ourselves, REBT means that humans note their errors, rejections, and misfortunes, go beyond this empirical rating and then define their total selves as bad humans, worthless individuals, or lesser persons. When a person overgeneralizes this way, they will feel unhealthy negative emotions. We in REBT point out that each of us is unique, fallible, and complex, with many changing positive and negative characteristics leading to a nearly infinite number of ratable acts over one’s lifetime. Because of humans’ uniqueness, complexity, and dynamic quality, it is, therefore, impossible to objectively assess the whole value of a person. People learn from evaluating what they do and the thinking behind their actions but do not learn from devaluing themselves through a subset of negative ratings, leading to arbitrary definitions of human value. Humans do not have value but do have aliveness. The best way to enjoy one’s aliveness and make the most of life is to rate what one does, not go beyond this rating, and define and devalue one’s total self for doing poorly.

People often counter with examples of bad people who rape, kill, pillage, and do other heinous acts. REBT counters that these people’s evil actions result from their flawed thinking, debatable value system, and other negative qualities, but they remain fallible humans nonetheless. An example of such thinking would be: “Yes, that person who committed the heinous crime did a bad thing and is responsible for their antisocial act. Their heinous act reflects some bad aspects, such as their ability to empathize with others, their values, their ability to reason, impulse control deficits, and consequential thinking skills. Nevertheless, they remain a fallible human, not a bad person. Condemning them for their heinous act will only make me angry and not undo their harmful actions. Am I better off with such unhealthy, condemning anger?”

Crooked Thinking Undermines Extracting the Good from the Bad

Avoiding global devaluations of a total person because they do immoral acts is reasoning properly, just like rating a lousy event on a badness scale from greater than 0% to less than 100% but never awful is also reasoning correctly. We humans are prone to jumping from one idea to another in an illogical way. It is an example of our incurable fallibility. Here are examples of such illogical jumps that REBT targets for change:

1. I badly want your love; therefore, I must have it.
2. When I perform poorly, it is awful.
3. Failure is uncomfortable and painful; therefore, it is unbearable.
4. Because I did a bad thing, this proves I am a lesser person or a bad person.
5. Because you mistreated me, that makes you a bad person.
6. Because I have been striving for success in my chosen career for 25 years, by now, I (absolutely) should have achieved it, and life is completely bad for it.

All of the above examples are non-sequiturs. Ellis observed that the human mind quickly thinks with non-sequiturs and is especially likely to do so when we face adversity about something important to us. When we display such “crooked thinking,” as he called it, the result is unhealthy negative emotions and self-defeating, immature, short-sighted behavioral reactions. Learning to extract the good from the bad involves avoiding thinking crookedly, as shown below:

1. I badly want your love, but you do not have to love me back, and I do not have to have such love.
2. When I perform poorly, it is unfortunate, and the consequences could be costly but not awful.
3. Failure is uncomfortable and painful, but failure is not unbearable.
4. Because I did a bad thing, this proves I am a fallible human, not a lesser person or a bad person. Nevertheless, I am responsible for my actions.
5. Because you mistreated me, that does not prove you are a bad person. It proves you are a fallible human who did a bad thing to me, and this reveals flawed thinking, a questionable value system, or other bad parts and qualities mixed in with your finer qualities.
6. Even though I have been striving for success in my chosen career for 25 years, it would be great if I had achieved it by now. However, favorable events occur when all the conditions enable them to come into existence, and they have not happened yet. Even though this success has not occurred, it does not mean it will never happen. I will continue to attempt to make those conditions arise. Furthermore, although this is frustrating and bad, it does not mean life is completely bad for it.

Summary

Life will inevitably involve adversity. None of us are exempt from the challenges of being human. REBT is a powerful and liberating system of ideas that allows us to react effectively to adversity, change what we can, and live well with the unchangeable. REBT helps people have healthy negative emotions that enable them to extract the good from the bad and carry that wisdom forward to the next adversity. Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, pointed out that humans overvalue the role of the environment and are biologically predisposed to disturb themselves upon encountering adversity. He went on to specify the mechanism of this self-disturbing tendency: the tendency to think crookedly about reality as we infer it to be. These non-sequiturs were value-based self-statements that were quickly transformed into rigid attitudes. These rigid attitudes led to a second non-sequitur, extreme attitudes derived from the core non-sequitur. Monitor your thinking and reactions to adversity. Remain vigilant, spot your crooked thinking, reflect on it, and adopt flexible and non-extreme attitudes that will enable you to extract the good from the bad and carry it forward.