Blog: Self-Help Posts on REBT

Live Life to Enjoy Yourself Not to Prove Yourself

All people have goals, purposes and values. The pursuit of these things produces a sense of accomplishment, achievement, and personal meaning. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is pretty much unique in its emphasis on rating the progress one makes towards these personal goals, purposes, and values while encouraging the elimination of the rating of the self or the … Read more

Valentine’s Day with Fallible Humans

This may seem paradoxical but each partner in a marriage or love relationship would be better off if they expected incompatibility, emotional disturbance, moodiness, counterproductive behavior, and general irrationality. After all each partner is a highly fallible human. If you expect irrationality and misbehavior you will be in a much better frame of mind than if you … Read more

Healthy Negative Emotions Are Good For You

In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) we point out that it is healthy and actually helpful to feel certain negative emotions. Here is the REBT list of healthy negative emotions: Concern Sadness Remorse Disappointment  and displeasure Sorrow  Healthy anger and annoyance Healthy jealousy Healthy envy Depending upon the situation you will feel one of these … Read more

REBT Philosophy in a Nutshell

Change what you can change about yourself, others and the world while accepting what you cannot change. Have high frustration tolerance for yourself, others and the world. Things generally take more time and effort than we wish. This is too bad. Remain responsible for your emotional responses at all times. Keep your ego out of … Read more

The REBT Path

Acceptance, tolerance, resilience, flexibility, rolling with the punches, making the best of a bad situation, accommodation all are different ways of saying what is at the heart of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. We all face thwarted desires. We then try and get around the obstacle and get what we desire. This is all well and … Read more

Sadly, These Things Happen

I recently heard a news report where several train commuters were inconvenienced due a computer glitch on the railroad. Trains lost their ability to be centrally coordinated and so each train had to proceed to the nearest station and wait for a couple of hours until the problem was solved. After the spokesperson more or … Read more

Inconvenient but Not Awful

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) encourages people to experience and then maintain healthy negative emotions when they encounter problems. Healthy negative emotions help us experience the motivation to change what can be changed. Healthy negative emotions enable us to have the poise to do what is in our long-term best interest rather than to do … Read more