A core idea of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is to avoid esteeming yourself. Self-esteem means valuing the self. You then value yourself based on material possessions, relationships, achievements, and many other things. Thinking in this way puts you on an emotional roller coaster of good feelings linked to the self and bad feelings linked to the self. You end up identifying yourself as a success or as a failure.
Success or failure exists outside of you and in your actions, not within yourself. Most people think of themselves as a success or as failure. This is a categorization of one’s personhood. That is, they identify with success or failure. This way of reasoning is erroneous and false to the facts of life as I see it. It is better to live life to enjoy yourself by picking the path with the most desirable cost-benefit ratio. That is, select the course with the best tradeoffs. All routes have tradeoffs. Avoid living life to prove your intrinsic value, establish it, or raise it. Living life to confirm, show, or increase your intrinsic worth sets you up for shame and depression. You do not possess inherent value. You have aliveness and then do things that work in the real world, achieve what you want, and are therefore valued actions or “doings.” You also do things that defeat your ends. These “doings” lack value. Learn not to do those things that defeat your ends. One thing you would be well-advised to stop doing is thinking you have intrinsic worth as a person. As I see it, you and I don’t have inherent value as people. We possess aliveness and then lose our aliveness. Get off the emotional roller coaster of self-esteem in order to enjoy your aliveness before it runs out.
See you on Saturday for the Rational Emotive Behavioral Conversation Hour.