Emotional pain is an inevitable part of life, but REBT can effectively treat self-defeating emotional disturbance. Strive to adopt the profound philosophical idea of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT): no matter how much you desire something or how important it is to you, you never absolutely have to get your wishes fulfilled. When you understand and consistently apply this insight, you will no longer experience emotional disturbance. Healthy feelings of concern, sadness, sorrow, disappointment, regret, remorse, healthy anger, healthy jealousy, and healthy envy will replace your unhealthy negative feelings. These feelings will help you go and change what is changeable and tolerate what is unchangeable. While you may not feel satisfied or content, you will be free from unhealthy negative emotions if you hold flexible and non-extreme attitudes toward adversity and misfortune.
Once you succeed at applying REBT to adversity and do not experience unhealthy negative feelings in the face of adversity, you will be in a better position to take calculated risks that can lead to greater contentment and satisfaction in life. Experiencing improved life satisfaction is a longer-term project involving finding interests that absorb you and yield a sense of meaning to life and finding a few people to develop deeper emotional connections and reciprocate your feelings. Sadly, discovering such vitally absorbing interests and deep connections may not be easily achieved. Keep at it.
Achieving relative freedom from emotional disturbance may be more attainable than achieving high levels of life satisfaction or significantly increased contentment. Avoid holding a rigid and extreme attitude toward life satisfaction. Thinking that you must have greater life satisfaction will only introduce emotional disturbance, making it more elusive. Avoiding demandingness, as we call it in REBT, is challenging because it can work back into your life so easily and in many different ways. Remain alert, and when you notice unhealthy negative emotions, inertia, substance abuse, procrastination, and other indicators of emotional disturbance, take a step back and analyze what is going on with you emotionally by using the ABC framework of REBT.
(A) Adversity: An undesirable state of affairs
(B) Basic attitudes: Rigid and extreme attitudes often referred to as “musts,” “absolute shoulds,” and “have to’s “ are also known as “demandingness” and can be applied to yourself, others, and life conditions.
Also, look for extreme attitudes like:
It is awful that I am deprived of this important thing I strongly want.
I cannot bear to live without it.
Life is completely bad without it, showing I am a complete failure.
(C) Consequences: these are the emotional and behavioral consequences that are self-defeating, like unhealthy anger, despair, anxiety, worry, inertia, substance abuse, and other forms of procrastination and avoidance.
Once you have analyzed your self-defeating emotional and behavioral reactions to adversity, go on and examine and challenge your rigid and extreme attitudes. We call this disputing in REBT. The most straightforward lines of attack on self-defeating thinking is to ask the following questions:
Teach a Child Dispute: Would I teach a child to hold my rigid and extreme attitudes? Why not?
Functional Impact Dispute: How do my rigid and extreme attitudes impact my ability to function? Is the impact positive or negative?
Seeking Evidence Dispute: What evidence supports my rigid and extreme attitudes? Is there evidence that supports my rigid attitude, or is there only evidence that supports the idea that I have unfulfilled desires?
The final steps include creating a new alternative attitude that is flexible and non-extreme and one that you take action upon. Ask yourself:
What flexible and non-extreme attitude would I want my child to hold if they faced the adversity I face?
What flexible and non-extreme attitude would positively impact me and help me function optimally in the face of this adversity?
One that I most often use on myself is this:
No matter how badly I want something, I do not have it. Things never have to be as I want them to be. I can tolerate life and people as they are and not disturb myself. I can have some satisfaction despite not having everything I desire. I can keep trying to obtain greater satisfaction. Too bad. Life does not have to be easy. What are you going to do? That is life.