Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy teaches you to identify the rigid and extreme attitudes that underpin your unhealthy emotional disturbance in the face of adversity. For example, let us assume you disturb yourself because you hold the attitude: “Because this is an important matter in my life, therefore I have to do perfectly well.” Some people wrongly think that after one conversation with a psychotherapist or one attempt at self-therapy, they will relinquish this unhealthy attitude. If only the human mind were that pliable. Sadly, it is not.
Regular Examination and Action Transforms Unhealthy Attitudes
It is essential to understand that relinquishing a firmly held attitude will generally take multiple examinations. You must revisit the attitude daily and depropagandize yourself of this dubious attitude. One must train, rest, and train on another day, such as an athlete who strives for improved physical fitness. The athlete will train their body using multiple exercises or fitness machines, often on an every-other-day basis. She will use one resistance training fitness machine to train her upper body biceps and another to train her lower body quadriceps. Each fitness machine targets a specific muscle group of her body. She will also tax her heart muscle while stressing one muscle group with a particular machine. The athlete may spend an hour in the gym targeting multiple muscle groups and then go home, rest, and return to the gym in two days. Likewise, you must challenge your unhealthy attitudes for a few minutes, practice forcefully verbalizing the healthy alternatives, and then rest. Later in the day, you may spot the opportunity to act opposite to how you would typically act under the influence of the old unhealthy attitudes and seize the opportunity and act differently. Engaging in behavior consistent with the new attitudes strengthens conviction in the new attitudes you are training yourself to adopt. Action is required for profound change to occur, as the following Chinese proverb explains, “I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.”
Examine Your Unhealthy Attitude with Multiple Lines of Attack
Like the athlete who uses multiple resistance training machines to cultivate and improve overall physical strength, in REBT, we have various avenues of attack to examine and challenge an unhealthy attitude. To disabuse yourself of a harmful attitude, particularly one held firmly about a matter close to your heart, you must have appropriate expectations for attitude change. You will need to use different avenues of attack, referred to as disputes in REBT, over days or weeks to acquire a healthy alternative attitude towards the emotional issue you are grappling with. Below are various avenues of attack you can use to examine your self-defeating attitude:
Teach a Child Dispute: Would you teach a child to hold your rigid and extreme attitudes? Why not?
Functional Impact Dispute: How do your rigid and extreme attitudes impact your ability to function? Is the impact positive or negative?
Seeking Evidence Dispute: What evidence supports your rigid and extreme attitudes? Are you sure there is evidence that supports your rigid attitude and not evidence that merely supports your desires?
Logical Dispute: Given your premise, do your rigid and extreme attitudes logically follow?
Metaphorical Dispute: Do wise fables and stories exist that teach that your attitude is self-defeating or self-helping?
Stoic Philosopher’s Dispute: What would Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Seneca say about your rigid and extreme attitudes?
Think Deeply and Write Down Your Answers
You should preferably write or type your answers to the above questions. Why write or type your answers? By doing so, you will think deeply about your answers and articulate the answer to each question precisely. You will not experience genuine emotional change if you merely read one of the above questions and think, “Oh yes, I know my attitude is one I would not teach a child,” without going beyond this lazy answer and explicitly going over why you would not want a child to hold your attitude. Emotional change will only result from thinking through the answers to the above questions, explicitly answering, doing this more than once over time, and striving to implement through action the healthier attitude.
Use Mental Imagery to Envision Yourself Acting on Your Healthy Attitude
Other ways of disciplining your mind to maintain a flexible and non-extreme attitude include using mental imagery. Mental imagery can prepare you to implement a healthier attitude through action. For example, you may imagine yourself more effectively dealing with a particular adversity while actively holding that image in mind and rehearsing the healthy alternative that you intellectually know but have been reluctant to put into action or have had difficulty putting into action.
Teach but Appropriately Model REBT to Others
Lastly, you can teach REBT to others. Medical doctors train resident physicians with the expression, “Watch one, do one, teach one.” Explaining REBT and thinking about how a friend might apply it to one of their problems will enhance your understanding of REBT.
Keep Training to Maintain Your Healthy Attitude
Once you have disabused yourself of a rigid and extreme attitude you have held and has caused you to suffer emotional disturbance, you must maintain that healthy attitude. Try applying the new attitude to problems similar to the initial application area. In other words, generalize your healthy attitude to different parts of your life. Accept that your psychological fitness is like physical fitness, which an athlete will lose if she stops going to the gym and taxing her heart and muscles regularly; you, too, need to make an active effort to hold onto your new healthy attitude. Continue to examine the old rigid attitude with the various lines of attack outlined above. Most importantly, continue to act in harmony with the new attitude. If you backslide and lose your fitness, go back to what worked before – regular REBT training as outlined above.
Hold Realistic Attitudes Regarding the Change Process
Do not expect you or others to have a profound philosophical change after one conversation or a single self-therapy attempt. You will need to revisit the unhealthy attitude, challenge it, and revisit it again. Accept this aspect of human nature. It would be lovely if you could have one and only one conversation with someone or yourself, then relinquish your unhealthy attitude and live rationally ever after. Sadly, profound emotional, behavioral, and philosophical change does not occur that way. Too bad!