In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), we encourage unconditional other-acceptance. It is a form of acceptance you apply to friends, family, colleagues, and everyone else you encounter. When you unconditionally accept others, you distinguish between the other individual and the parts of that individual you like, dislike, and evaluate as neutral. You restrict your judgment and evaluation to the other person’s characteristics, components, behaviors, and qualities. You use your values and preferences to make these judgments and evaluations. It is essential that you refrain from yielding to the natural human tendency to take the value you have assigned to one or more of the other person’s parts or their observed behavior and summate the value of those parts, and then assign value to the whole person. When you do this, you make the part-whole error, confusing the part with the whole. You are likely to experience unhealthy emotions like anger. You may then devalue the person as a person based on a negative part of them or demonstrated behaviors you dislike. Confusing a part or parts of a person with the individual will set the stage for conditional other-acceptance and condemnation of the other person, which fuels anger and other self-defeating emotions.
REBT teaches that people are inclined to make thinking errors or, as Ellis put it, to be sloppy or crooked thinkers. Making errors in reasoning is evidence of our fallible nature. Even the best educated among us will reason in a twisted way occasionally. These errors in reasoning then result in disturbed emotions like anger, guilt, shame, and depression. REBT teaches you to spot such thinking errors and correct them. When you reason scientifically as REBT advocates, you will continue to feel negative emotions, but these emotions will be healthy and enable you to live better with yourself and others. With proper reasoning, healthy negative emotions like annoyance, displeasure, disappointment, remorse, sadness, and sorrow result and reflect the unfavorable conditions you are facing. In some situations, you may feel healthy negative emotions strongly. Strength of emotion is not the characteristic distinguishing healthy from unhealthy negative emotions. The flexibility or the inflexibility of the attitudes underpinning the healthy and unhealthy negative emotions and the functional quality of the behavioral response distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy negative emotions. Healthy negative emotions are based on flexible, non-extreme attitudes, leading to self-helping behavioral reactions. Unhealthy negative emotions are based on rigid and extreme attitudes and result in self-defeating behavioral responses.
Unconditional other-acceptance is achievable when you hold flexible and non-extreme attitudes about the parts of others you dislike. For example, let’s say you have the attitude, “I want my friend to treat me nicely.” With this flexible attitude, you will feel disappointed when your friend does not treat you how you deem nice. You will then be inclined not to like how they are or may be treating you, but you will likely accept them despite their disappointing behavior towards you. Let us assume you hold the rigid attitude, “Because I treat my friend nicely, they (absolutely) should in turn, treat me nicely.” According to REBT theory, you will have a more difficult time unconditionally accepting the other person because your mind will be inclined to jump to “they are a bad person for treating me badly.” This conclusion exemplifies the part-whole error. Bad behavior is the part you have used to represent the whole of the other person. Your rigid attitude sets the stage for conditionally accepting the other person and for condemnation of the other person when they fail to meet your conditions.
REBT strives to help you maximize your enjoyment of life and minimize and even eliminate the emotional suffering you experience. People are an essential part of our lives. We are social animals, and even when we live alone, we still have to interact with others a good deal of the time. Learning to live well with people rests on applying flexible and non-extreme attitudes to people, their characteristics, and what they do. By unconditionally accepting people, you still hold them responsible for their behavior. However, you will have better control over the healthy negative emotions flowing from your attitudes as you interact with them, enabling you to assert yourself and fairly negotiate with them for what you want. You will be better able to communicate during your interaction with the healthy negative emotions that flow from flexible and non-extreme attitudes. When you elect to punish behavior, your evaluation of suitable punishment will correspond more closely to the infraction. You will be focusing on the bad behavior a person emitted, not judging the whole of them for doing the bad behavior.
People are biological beings in a constant state of change. Allowing our language to uphold our scientific understanding of people and our world is essential to healthy emotional reactions. When you hold a rigid attitude towards how people absolutely must be, your attitude leads to conditional other-acceptance and creates black-and-white, good and bad categories of people. A scientific mindset helps you achieve unconditional other-acceptance and see people as a biological process of great complexity that does many things, good, bad, and neutral. It is good to evaluate the good, the bad, and the neutral parts and behaviors of others. Still, with a scientific attitude, you will avoid global abstractions of others that are inconsistent with unconditional other-acceptance. With unconditional other-acceptance, you will likely achieve healthier relationships with the fallible humans of your life.