The theory of Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) starts with the position that people have two biological tendencies. The “rational” or “self-helping” tendency expresses itself with flexible and non-extreme attitudes, allowing us to solve problems using logic and scientific reasoning. REBT therapy builds, strengthens, and looks to expand this side of us. Unfortunately, we also have a biologically driven side that competes against our healthy side. Our “irrational” or “self-defeating” side expresses itself with anti-scientific, rigid, and extreme attitudes. Although therapy tries to reduce the impact of this side through numerous therapeutic activities, it is never annihilated. The continued life of this self-defeating side of a human explains why people backslide and regain lost weight, relapse into drug and alcohol use after a period of abstinence, return to procrastinating on projects, and lapse into states of unhealthy emotions like anger, depression, shame, and anxiety. Perhaps worst of all, people who develop some degree of unconditional self-acceptance return to a state of conditional self-acceptance and self-devaluation following their backsliding, which then hastens their descent back to their previous state of self-defeating, emoting, and behaving.
Restoring Your Therapeutic Gains
The initial step to restoring lost therapeutic gains is to spot your backsliding early on and take action immediately. To acknowledge your backsliding, you must anticipate it to some degree. Doing so will put you in the mindset to spot it quickly rather than deny it. Remind yourself that you remain a fallible human who cannot annihilate your biologically based self-defeating side. This explanation for backsliding is not an excuse for whatever may follow from your backsliding, as you remain responsible for your actions. However, this position will help you accept yourself unconditionally with the backsliding and whatever damage it may cause. However tempted you may be to denigrate yourself, resist this tendency. The guilt, shame, and self-directed anger that come from it will make it harder for you to reverse the momentum and will keep you headed further down the road of relapse.
Go Back and Do What Produced Therapeutic Gains Before Relapsing
Next, you must reinstate whatever REBT-informed self-help activities initially facilitated your emotional and behavioral change. REBT is an approach that encourages self-therapy. Chances are you stopped identifying and challenging your rigid and extreme attitudes, which led to self-defeating emotions and behaviors. Start using my ABC worksheets to examine how you are upsetting yourself. Remind yourself of the Principle of Emotional Responsibility, which teaches that you essentially disturb yourself and have a choice to feel healthy and self-helping negative emotions or lapse into unhealthy, self-defeating negative emotions when facing adversity. Review any old REBT notes you may have, remind yourself of the healthy attitudes you had worked hard to adopt, and force yourself to act upon these healthy attitudes even when they are hard for you to do. Regularly question the rigid and extreme attitudes you tend to hold, and then firmly tell yourself healthy alternative attitudes throughout the day. Examples include:
I want to do perfectly well, but never have to do so. I will do my best to overcome my backsliding, self-defeating behavior, but always unconditionally accept myself as a fallible human capable of doing better but never perfecting myself.
I want the love and approval of significant others, but I never need this love and approval. I can be sad or concerned about being deprived of their love and acceptance, but I can remind myself that I can stand on my own two feet and have some happiness even when significant others reject me. I will always unconditionally accept myself, with or without the love and approval of significant others.
I want other people to treat me nicely, but sadly, sometimes, whether I deserve such treatment or not, they will not. The universe does not compel humans to treat each other nicely. People are fallible and will creatively express their fallibility and block, reject, insult, and down you. You never have to put them down as people for their antisocial behavior while taking steps to influence them to treat you as you wish.
Life will, at times, be hard and unfair, and that is too bad. Life does not have to be easy, and getting what you desire may take more time and effort than you wish. When a goal is worthwhile, bear the discomfort of obtaining it and never conclude that it is too hard to make the required effort to achieve it.
Utopias, certainty, and perfection do not exist. I will accept the tradeoffs of life, the probabilities of life, and the imperfections of all people and things.
I will strive to find a sensible balance between living for today and the longer term. Either living too much for today or too much for the future tends to be self-defeating.
Expose Yourself to Psychoeducational Resources
Strengthen your inborn healthy, scientific, flexible, and non-extreme side and attempt to neutralize the impact of your inborn rigid and self-defeating side by regularly exposing yourself to REBT educational resources. Here is a list of things you can do:
- Watch my REBT Conversational Hour at 9 AM every Saturday. Watching others have their problems addressed with REBT will help you reactivate your latent learning, strengthen it, and extend it to new areas of your life. Also, ask questions during the question-and-answer period.
- Listen to the free audio and video found on REBTDoctor.com while you are doing other things. Remember, repetition is the mother of learning.
- Attend masterclasses and didactic presentations I give so that you deepen your understanding of the comprehensive, powerful system of ideas.
- Read REBT self-help books by Albert Ellis, Windy Dryden, and other REBT authors. A simple search on Amazon.com for these authors’ names will show you many well-written REBT books on various topics. Dryden’s books are shorter than Ellis’s. Remind yourself that the easy part is buying the REBT book with the catchy title. Keep after yourself to read your purchased book and put it into action!
- If necessary, return to therapy for booster sessions with your REBT therapist. A few sessions may help you get back on the self-helping, rational path in life you once were more or less on before you started to backslide.
ACT on Your REBT Knowledge and Insights
REBT is a problem-focused, solution-oriented, action-taking self-help therapy. You cannot just learn the REBT core ideas and expect magic to occur. You must FORCE yourself to take action. To this end, do the following:
- Do things you find shameful, anxiety-provoking, or uncomfortable. Never do anything illegal or dangerous to yourself or others, but you must get out of your comfort zone and keep getting out of it. Low discomfort tolerance, low frustration tolerance, and attitudes of unbearability are at the core of backsliding. Battle your human, inborn tendency to take the easy way out when it undermines some worthwhile goal.
- Teach others REBT ideas. The best way to do this is to model unconditional self-acceptance, other acceptance, and life acceptance. Then, with their permission, offer them the REBT point of view on a problem they are sharing with you. Try to show them the choices they have in their attitudes towards their particular adversity and their choice to experience healthy or unhealthy negative emotions. Remain flexible in your presentation, and do not cross the fine line between enthusiasm for disseminating REBT and insisting that others agree with and accept REBT.
Summary
As a fallible human, you will go to your grave with your inborn self-defeating, anti-scientific, rigid side. Thankfully, you will always retain the opposing, self-helping, scientific, and flexible side. Healthy living and maintaining your treatment gains are akin to physical fitness. Ongoing training is required to keep both your physical and psychological gains. As with physical deconditioning, whose antidote lies with returning to the gym and working out, so does your psychological deconditioning, which requires returning and doing the therapeutic activities that reliably produce results. Avoid self-downing, as you are a fallible human who must always work hard to avoid backsliding. Accept yourself unconditionally with your backsliding and then fight the inertia to immediately start doing what we know in REBT works and works well.