Dr. Matweychuk – REBT Asks a Great Deal of You and Me
As a philosophy and psychotherapy, REBT asks a great deal of the patient and the psychotherapist. It is not a natural philosophy for the patient to adopt and practice. The message of REBT is to resist your human nature and do what is uncomfortable and hard for humans to do. REBT wants you to go against the grain of your biology and your nature. It encourages you to think flexibly, scientifically, and in non-extreme ways in order to do what is uncomfortable in order to achieve your long term goals. It advocates that you do not blame others for your emotional upset but to hold yourself responsible for your reactions to others and to live in a self-directed way. This message is difficult for patients and professionals to accept and implement. A self-help oriented psychotherapy which emphasize self-responsibility for your emotional disturbance is far harder to practice than psychotherapies that attribute your emotional upset to your parents, your environmental conditions, or to society. I think this is one reason some people do not like REBT. In many ways the core ideas of REBT go against the current zeitgeist. The basic philosophy behind REBT can be hard to get professionals and patients to adopt. As a psychotherapist, it would be far easier for me to merely empathize with my patients, help them to understand the past, teach them palliative methods of coping and encourage them to hope for the best. Instead, in a straightforward way REBT takes us down the harder road of actively teaching humans to give up their demands that life proceed in an ideal way and instead to accept life as it is, have a healthy negative feeling towards adversity and then work to change what can be changed. It is challenging to resist the rigid demandingness that lurks within all of us. All humans, to a greater or lesser extent, will occasionally and quite naturally demand that people and events be as we want them to be. Fallible humans do this quite naturally about things that are important to us. Imperfect humans find it very easy to blame others and living conditions for our emotional upset and self-defeating reactions rather than accepting responsibility for your own emotional disturbance. We do this almost instinctively and sometimes mental health professionals can unintentionally or on theoretical grounds strengthen this self-defeating idea.
In addition to avoiding personal responsibility for one’s own emotional upset, humans also love to rate themselves and their personhood. Humans quite naturally and easily rate their essence and subsequently down themselves as people. Humans love to measure themselves against arbitrary standards and praise themselves for conditional achievements. Again, other than REBT all present day psychotherapies appear to encourage building up of a patient’s conditional self-esteem. Unfortunately, what goes up often will come crashing down, especially one’s conditional self-esteem. Humans easily choose to rate themselves and esteem themselves when they do well, with or without the encouragement of mental health professionals, and they will just as quickly and easily rate themselves when they do poorly and thereby create self-defeating feelings of inadequacy, shame, depression, and misery. Practicing REBT is hard work as it teaches humans to go against their natural inclination to rate themselves as people and instead focus on only rating what they do and the characteristics they possess. This sort of limited rating of the parts of a person can help them to develop new skills and to achieve. However, teaching people to understand deeply the concept of unconditional self-acceptance and how it is far better than conditional self-esteem is difficult psychotherapeutic work. Helping patients to go beyond understanding the idea of unconditional self-acceptance and to actually take steps to develop it is even harder work.
All day long I push back against irrationality and emotional irresponsibility. I do not blame my patients for their upset, but I do point out their responsibility for the contribution to they make to largely create their emotional upset. All day long one person after another tries to convince me, directly or indirectly, that personal adversity leaves little choice but emotional upset and misery. I hold my ground with each patient and show each patient the liberating and powerful insight Ellis taught me. This insight is that other people and life give us an opportunity to get upset, but fallible humans largely disturb themselves. Allow me to say once again that the REBT position is that humans largely disturb themselves. No one pushes your buttons other than you. REBT encourages accountability and personal responsibility. Life and other people will often present challenges, but we upset, anger, shame, guilt and depress ourselves by demanding that all people and things be as we think they ideally “should” be. I hold my ground with each patient and logically show one person after another that they can accept what they dislike and the practical value of philosophical acceptance.
I also teach each patient how to endure discomfort and that the price of achievement is a great deal of work, effort, and sacrifice. Many people do not want to hear this message. Our modern technological society has engineered discomfort out of much of our lives. Furthermore, we continue to eliminate more discomfort each day. We now even have phone apps that allow us to skip the line at our favorite coffee shop so that we no longer have to wait to get our daily coffee. On the face of this, there is nothing wrong with saving time and eliminating effort and discomfort. But our culture and modern society is also reinforcing the expectation and cultivating a “need” of instant success. People by nature want to succeed at their goals quickly and easily and to have this success guaranteed in advance of expending effort. Unfortunately, there are some things in life that still, and probably always will require, effort over an extended period to achieve with no guarantee of success. REBT to the rescue!
With regards to human worth, I consistently show my patients that people are always fallible people, not good people, or wicked people when they do good or bad things. REBT teaching in this regard goes against our human nature which often appears to be inclined to judge people as people and to condemn them. People quite naturally want to believe they are a good person. I push back and fan the flames of unconditional self and other acceptance. I show them the emotional perils of thinking of themselves as a good person, a successful person, an inadequate person, or a bad person. Teaching people to rate what is done, what people do but never to rate the person as a person is not an easy lesson to get across. I persist!
I do acknowledge that REBT asks a great deal of effort from you and me. Before you are introduced to REBT, you have rehearsed irrational attitudes thousands of times. You have measured and then downed yourself and others, blamed your parents or other people for the way you are and your self-defeating emotional reactions many, many times. You are well practiced in these self-defeating ways! Before you are introduced to REBT you probably have avoided discomfort while deceiving yourself you still can achieve your goals. Then one day you learn about REBT philosophy, see its value and you attempt to implement it. You then have a rude awakening when you begin to see that changing your self-defeating rigid and extreme attitudes that you have rehearsed over a period of many years is not an easy task. Some people hold onto the attitude “Change should be easy, there absolutely must be an easier path to take and REBT is too hard” and quit on their therapeutic goals.
I encourage you to accept the REBT therapeutic challenge. You can change your longstanding self-defeating attitudes, but it will take effort and personal responsibility and accountability. You can change, grow as a person, and self-actualize but it takes a good deal of effort. REBT is a great tool to use to bring about all sorts of personal change and self-actualization. The return on investment is quite handsome if you stay the course. You can learn to have healthy negative feelings instead of disturbed negative feelings which serve to motivate you to change what you can change. You can learn to unconditionally accept yourself and others. You can learn to have some degree of happiness even when things are not as you think they ideally “should” be. The consequential healthy negative emotions which result from the flexible, scientific, and non-extreme philosophical attitudes REBT teaches will then motivate you to change what you can change and to persist with this type of change. Far from a philosophy of compliance, REBT is a philosophy of strength and endurance for making big change in ourselves and in our lives and society. Keep at REBT, keep after yourself, and hold your ground! You too can choose rationality with study and practice. Do the work, take up the challenge!
Rehearse these ideas:
1. I will keep my wishes and wants, I will keep trying to get what I want, but I will not demand, command, or hold an unrealistic attitude that things HAVE to be my way. This attitude is self-harming even if it is natural and easy to think about the important matters of my life.
2. I want comfort, security and ease but I acknowledge discomfort, uncertainty, and effort are required in different domains of life. Discomfort, uncertainty, and having to expend effort are undesirable aspects of life but they are NOT unbearable.
3. I am a fallible human and I am responsible for my emotions and actions. When I do poorly it never makes me lesser as a person. I will review how I react to challenge and what I do, but I will not rate myself as a person. Failing or performing poorly proves I am human, not less human or a worthless human.
4. I will work hard to change what I can change and what is important to me, accept what cannot be changed, and choose to have some degree of happiness as I try to enact change or live with unchangeable adversity.
REBT – Not a quick fix but an enduring result!