In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, we encourage you to live your life to enjoy yourself. Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, encouraged people to assume this was the only life they would likely have and to live it to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. He pointed out that humans are naturally inclined to have goals and desires. When humans are thwarted in pursuing their goals and desires, especially when the goal is strongly valued, it is natural for humans to escalate their wish to a demand. Ellis argued we could modify our rigid attitude into a flexible, adaptive attitude which would lead to healthy displeasure, sadness, or disappointment. This healthy negative emotional state would enable us to change what we can change, accept reality when we cannot get what we want, and move on and have some happiness despite having failed to obtain our goal.
In REBT, we teach people to question the rigid attitudes that lie at the core of their emotional disturbance and the derivative extreme attitudes that follow from their rigid attitudes. We call the process disputing, which is the primary way we help you accept reality as it is when you suffer losses, failures, make mistakes, etc. Dryden points out that acceptance in REBT means:
a) An acknowledgment that adversity exists;
b) A realization that, unfortunately, all the conditions are in place for the adversity to exist;
c) An evaluation that the adversity is bad but not awful and that you can bear and transcend it; and
d) A determination to change the adversity when this is possible and to deal with it constructively when changing the adversity is not possible.[1]
I have been thinking about ways to facilitate coming to accept what cannot be changed. Traditionally, rigorous disputing of one’s rigid and extreme attitude is the primary way a person creates the emotional state where they come to accept what they cannot change. However, getting to acceptance is very difficult with some adversities. Recently, I have been contemplating what I can teach a person to do beyond disputing rigid and extreme attitudes daily and engaging in alternative rewarding activities to usher in a state of acceptance.
An alternative path to acceptance may involve learning to reflect upon reaching a state of acceptance in previous periods of your life. It appears that when we are in a state of emotional disturbance (i.e., suffering) because we are not accepting a negative state of affairs, it is as if we have come to have tunnel vision and have lost awareness of the fact that there is still room in life to have some happiness despite the existence of the adversity or loss we are facing. We have lost perspective. Once a person expands their awareness and can sincerely believe that their life will still have some happiness despite the hardship they are facing, acceptance occurs, or they are at least a bit closer to it than before this emotional “click” has been experienced. Once a person starts to have thoughts like “Yes, I now believe there is life and pleasure after this loss,” and “I don’t need things to be different to have some happiness,” they are well on their way to the state of acceptance that will free them from their emotional suffering.
In addition to disputing your rigid and extreme attitudes about a loss or adversity which you wish to accept, think back throughout your life when you suffered similar losses or misfortunes that initially were very hard for you to accept. Remember how badly you felt when reality set in, and you originally began your emotional struggle. Get in touch with the period when you had difficulty accepting the facts you then faced. After a few seconds of reflection go beyond recalling the period when you were suffering and call to mind when you started to pull out of that state of nonacceptance and got back on your feet. Reflect on what you did or who may have assisted you with coming to terms with your misfortune. Acknowledge that a genuine state of acceptance eventually occurred no matter how significant the loss initially was and how much suffering you were then experiencing. It will help to construct a list of these types of profound periods of suffering you previously experienced in your life and refer to it from time to time to remind you that you will pull through this current period of nonacceptance and suffering just as you did so many times before. Some possible categories for your list might be:
- Relationship losses and defeats (family relationships, romantic relationships, friendships)
- The death of family and friends
- School, job, and professional failures and defeats
- Defeats in athletic competitions
- Defeats in artistic endeavors
- Loss of possessions (lost money, items stolen, things broken)
- Loss of status in organizations or society
- Loss of health and ability to function due to being injured
- Profound mistakes and errors
Go back and forth from disputing your rigid and extreme attitudes about the current loss and reflecting on how you came to move on and accept similar types of failures in the past. By repeatedly calling to mind that you came to terms with similar painful adversities in the past, you may loosen your grip on the currently held rigid and extreme attitudes at the base of your emotional suffering. Target attitudes like:
- This misfortune must not be the case. I need this thing, position, relationship, etc.
- I cannot bear my life with this deprivation.
- Because this was one of the greatest pleasures I experienced, I must have it and will not accept living without it.
- Nothing can be worse than living with this loss, this defeat, misfortune.
- Now that this misfortune has occurred, my life is not worth living.
- Because I have suffered this loss, I am lesser of a person.
- Because I can’t get what I want so badly, it shows I am a loser, a failure.
My clinical experience has shown that accepting what you cannot change is essential to emotional well-being. I advise you to hone this skill because we all will face multiple losses, failures, and other misfortunes throughout our lives. Managing our emotional reactions so that we experience healthy negative emotions can be challenging to do. We can get better at it by using REBT’s traditional strategy of disputing our rigid and extreme attitudes about the current adversity we face. We can also help ourselves achieve a state of acceptance when we cannot have what we want by reflecting on previous times in our lives when we suffered similar losses and defeats. You can ask yourself, “If I could move on from that loss or failure, from that misfortune, why cannot I do so with this one as well? What is leading me to think this loss is different from all those other misfortunes I have faced?” The present loss or defeat could be more difficult to accept because your desire to achieve success with this goal is very, very strong. Although this may be true when you see that you can bear far more than you think and still have some happiness, an emotional click, a pivotal moment, occurs. When this moment occurs, when you experience that click, acceptance follows. Good luck getting there!
[1] Dryden, W., & Matweychuk, W. J. (2022). The REBT Client Companion (2nd ed.). Rationality Publications.