REBT philosophy encourages passion without dogma. When you pursue a goal (e.g. love, career success, fitness, health, wealth, harmony with family) you are likely to encounter obstacles. You then have a choice as to how you think about the obstacles. You may think in a passionate but flexible way such as “I badly want to achieve my goal and this obstacle is blocking me but sadly these things happen. I can stand the existence of this obstacle as I work to eliminate it. The block to my goal is bad but is not awful. If I succeed at overcoming this adversity it does not make me a great person as my nature will still be fallible but I will have done a great thing in finding a way to achieve my goal.” Alternatively you may think in a dogmatic and rigid way such as “I badly want to achieve my goal and this obstacle is blocking me and these things absolutely should not happen. I cannot stand the existence of this adversity as I try to achieve my goal. This obstacle in the path of my goal is awful! When I succeed at overcoming this adversity it will show that I am a great person because overcoming it will be a great achievement.”
These two philosophies are very different. They produce very different emotional responses to the adversity. The first philosophy produces rational passion as the person maintains the value to get what they want but philosophically acknowledges that adversity is part of the human condition. By contrast the dogmatic philosophy rigidly demands the nonexistence of what exists and the individual adds to natural sadness and disappointment by wrongly believing that they cannot stand the adversity they are encountering. Anger, despair, and other self-defeating emotional and behavioral reactions then follow from this rigid philosophy.
REBT therapy aims to help people learn to think about their dogmatic thinking and to question it. We call this process of questioning beliefs disputing. I teach my patients how to dispute their self-defeating, dogmatic beliefs. The goal of the therapy is to show you how to keep your passion for overcoming adversity while giving up emotional upset and self-defeating beliefs. REBT theory argues that all humans are predisposed to rigid, dogmatic thinking but that we are also able to relinquish such rigid, self-defeating thinking. When we do so we are experiencing our finest hour. The process of learning to do this is a difficult one. It takes effort and practice. Some people resist learning to think in a more flexible manner. Fallible humans find flexible thinking uncomfortable and some wrongly believe it is too uncomfortable. As a REBT psychologist I strive to practice what I preach. I always strive to maintain the belief that it would be better if people adopted the REBT point of view of flexible, nondogmatic thinking but sadly some will not. That is too bad but far from awful. Furthermore, I believe I can stand this even though I do not like it and I remain passionate about showing people in all sorts of creative ways how they too can learn to think more flexibly and give up the dogmatic beliefs that lead to self-defeating emotional upset and behavioral reactions. So with this philosophy I avoid fatigue as I work with my fallible and sometimes very resistant patients and show them that with effort they too can keep their passions without giving into the temptation to think dogmatically about achieving what they deeply value.