I recently went on safari to Africa and observed a great deal of animal behavior. I wanted to learn something from the trip that would make me wiser. Here is what I took away that reinforced what I more or less already knew. Facing ongoing adversity is the natural condition of all living organisms from birth to death. All living organisms, from birth to death, must remain vigilant and protect themselves from being eaten or killed in some other way. This observation applies to plants, trees, and bugs as well. Plants and trees have some ability to resist aversive conditions. They can sway in the wind and go for a limited time without water. However, plants and trees face adversity in the form of destruction from severe wind storms, lightning, and drought.
REBT argues that humans aim to survive and experience happiness in that order. Ellis always mentioned survival first and then happiness, and for good reason. We have to be alive to experience some degree of happiness, and staying alive can sometimes not be easily achieved.
REBT Prepares You for the Challenges of Life
The rationale for adopting the REBT philosophy is to be optimally prepared to face what life throws your way. The emotional and behavioral reactions that the REBT philosophy will engender will help you survive in a challenging world and allow you to experience some degree of happiness despite all the challenges you will face from birth to death.
Humans have attempted to make our world safe and comfortable. Despite our engineering feats, we still live in a world where danger lurks around the bend. Disease, war, and economic hardship all show that life is fragile, and even when we are lucky enough to survive into old age, there are many difficult moments that, although they may not be life-threatening, are very painful and challenging. REBT philosophy helps us take all this in stride, adapt, and even flourish. We function better, have greater happiness, and can find personal meaning when we use REBT to refuse to be miserable, work hard to change aversive circumstances and environmental conditions, and face our hardships head-on rather than run from them.
Adversity is constantly a part of life, but we also learn to anticipate it. When we think about the future, we have different options for how to make ourselves feel better. We can appraise the likelihood of a bad event happening. We can appraise the resources we have to cope with adversity. We can do both. REBT encourages you to hope for the best and prepare for the worst emotionally.
Assume the Worst-Case Scenario and Go From There
REBT argues that it is best to temporarily assume adversity will strike rather than try to comfort ourselves by hoping to conclude the odds are good and that the worst-case scenario will not come to pass. This strategy allows us to access deeper-level, unrealistic philosophical attitudes that REBT theory argues are at the base of emotional disturbance. When you adopt the REBT approach and target these deeper-level philosophical attitudes, you learn to feel better about the possible threat. You are also better prepared to handle future threats emotionally because you have made a profound philosophical change about the world, yourself, and others.
Reassurance Has Its Limitations – Tragedy Strikes
Your friends and other psychotherapists who practice the commonplace CBT (not REBT’s brand of CBT) will generally try to help you in one of two ways dispreferred by REBT theory. They will try to help you identify the so-called cognitive distortions that lead to your anxiety. They will help you avoid jumping to the conclusion your worst-case scenario will happen. However, worst-case scenarios come to pass, and tragedy strikes. CBT therapists often say that they do not dispute facts. They dispute distorted thinking, leading to dysfunctional emotions. They add that when faced with a grim reality with evidence showing no distorted thinking exists, they advocate “problem-solving” strategies. They look to reassure you with this double-barreled approach.
There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it has its distinct limitations. Some problems do not have favorable solutions, and a person must endure them. A child gets ill and dies; a romantic partner leaves you. An industry changes, and you lose a coveted job. Your income degrades. There are solutions to these problems, but they are inadequate when people worry about their occurrence in advance. Once these losses have occurred, many people see the available solutions as insufficient. You may be able to have another child. You may take solace in the fact that there are “other fish in the sea” and can expect that there will be other romantic partners. If AI takes your job, you can take your education and train to work in another industry and strive to make enough money to pay your bills. These are solutions, but many people see them as undesirable. REBT takes a different approach.
Acceptance Offers Leverage and Confidence
REBT is a distinct form of CBT therapy. It is the philosophical CBT to fall back on when your worst nightmare occurs. I often tell myself and my clients, “You can run, but you cannot hide. Sooner or later, adversity will occur, and you had better be philosophically prepared when it does.” REBT advocates that we learn to accept what we cannot change and get good at doing this about ourselves, others, and life. Cultivating the skill of philosophical acceptance applied to what we cannot change builds confidence in our ability to face life’s challenges.
For example, people have health scares and often, after being worked up for life-threatening illnesses, learn that there is no illness to treat. It is what the medical doctors call a false positive diagnosis. You leave the experience with a clean bill of health. Not so fast!
Sooner or later, that fatal illness or old age and the illness that goes with it will not be a false positive. Now, you will have to face the worst-case scenario and deal with the existential anxiety associated with dying.
REBT does not seek to reassure people. No one knows what is just around the bend in life. Sooner or later, we will all face something that preys on us, much like animals face their death when another animal eats them in the wild. Even the lion, known as the king of the jungle, has to protect its offspring from predators, hunt for its food, and ultimately face illness and death. No one has a utopian existence, a free lunch. Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, faces daily back and neck pain due to a slipped disc. Chronic pain is a challenging burden. I now take you back to where we started this essay: Facing ongoing adversity is the natural condition of all living organisms from birth to death.
Cultivate the Strength to Endure Difficulty
Resist the urge to reassure yourself that life will not test you. Doing so will ultimately backfire. Life will test you. Learn to cultivate philosophical acceptance. Remember the wise words of Bruce Lee. He said, “Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” This piece of wisdom is consistent with the REBT philosophy. Adopt the REBT philosophy that life is not easy and does not have to be so. Accept that life will not spare you; you will face burdens and hardships sooner or later. Come to terms with life as it is, not as you would like it to be. Adopting this realistic and toughminded approach allows you to savor the moments between adversities because you know you can handle what life will ultimately dish out to you. You experience confidence in your ability to handle adversity, which frees you to enjoy the moments when you are not actively facing new adversity.
Critics may say this approach is pessimistic. Always assuming the worst-case scenario and emotionally preparing to deal with it creates a dark outlook. They also say it is a challenging philosophy to sell to people. People do not want to face the facts. Why teach them acceptance when we are good at engineering solutions and can hope for the best, which often serves us well? For starters, it does not always serve us well in a challenging world. Tragedy and loss are part of the human condition. They will occur. Just read the Wall Street Journal’s world news section every night as I do, and you will see that very bad things happen. Also, when you work to learn to accept what you cannot change and get confidence in your ability to do without, you can better assess probability. Knowing you can handle life lets you be concerned but not anxious about misfortune. With concern, you are less prejudiced to predicting doom and gloom. If something “absolutely must not occur, which is unacceptable,” your resulting anxiety will bias you in your assessment that the dreaded outcome may occur.
When adversity strikes, we advocate adopting flexible, non-extreme attitudes to cope with it. The philosophical attitudes REBT teaches are empirically valid and, therefore, realistic. They work in the real world or the jungle, where bad things happen. Philosophically prepare for the worst and learn to accept sooner or later, it will occur to you and your loved ones. Hope for the best and then savor the moments between the adversities that will eventually happen to you from birth to death.