Albert Ellis, the originator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, argued that believing in the unchangeable influence of the past is invalid and self-defeating. Human behavior is highly unpredictable. Just because a person reacts in some circumstances one way does not necessarily predict they will respond in that same way under all conditions forever more. Yes, there are patterns to human behavior associated with the past, but let us notice the exceptions and times people act unexpectedly or differently despite their history. That suggests people can change how they react in the future if they have a sound strategy and work at it. People can break a pattern of behavior if they assume it is possible and stick to the process of change over the long run.
The spirit of REBT is to look for solutions rather than allowing how we acted in the past to determine how we will continue to do things in the present and future. In REBT, we assume we can approach our problems from multiple perspectives if we do not box ourselves in with fatalistic thinking. REBT shamelessly cultivates out-of-the-box thinking. Holding flexible and non-extreme attitudes and a scientific perspective toward a particular problem makes you more likely to keep trying different solutions until you discover or create one that works. When the methods of solving a problem worked well in the past and continue to yield good results, then by all means, stay with them. If you objectively see that they are ineffectual today, give them up and search for a better way to respond to life’s challenges. Experiment with new approaches to life’s problems.
Sometimes the emotional-behavioral responses that were effective at one time in our lives can be improved upon to help us respond more effectively to our present challenges. Sticking to the same way of addressing life’s challenges and being unwilling to experiment with new solutions limits you and will cause history to repeat itself. From the REBT scientific view, it is better to experiment, learn and grow through new experiences. Better to try and fail than never to have tried to change and grow.
Life is Flux
REBT encourages you to note that we live in a constantly changing world. We face unique moments and new problems because life is in flux. The present difficulties you face differ from those you encountered earlier in your life, and therefore it is often a good idea to keep your mind open to new types of solutions, new ways of doing things, new people who can help you, and new ideas. I remember Ellis once saying in group supervision that “the only constant is change,” his words have stuck with me.
Although many psychotherapists will encourage you to revisit your past and maybe even dwell on it in search of the emotional solutions you seek today, REBT does not make that mistake. We acknowledge that your family history sometimes influences you to repeat old behavior patterns. We often adopt our values from those offered by our families. We learn ideas and model our parents at times. However, Ellis argued that the past does not have to dominate how we act today and in the future. You can change your ingrained, well-practiced habits using the ideas and strategies of REBT. I have overcome emotional and behavioral problems such as shyness as a child, cannabis addiction and alcohol abuse as a young adult, procrastination, and perfectionism, using the same attitudes and strategies I teach my patients. If these REBT ideas and strategies worked for me, there is reason to believe they will work well for you if you commit great effort to use them and practice them to address your problems.
Assume You Can Change Without In-Depth Analysis of the Past
Your past experiences have not engraved self-defeating habits that necessitate an extensive analysis over years of therapy to modify them. I often have said that Freud’s ideas, especially analyzing the past, will never die because they help people remain comfortable and give them a facesaving excuse to avoid the hard work fundamental emotional-behavioral change requires. Give up the assumption you have to understand the past to change the present and the future, as it will keep you stuck in the past. If we blame our parents, the institutions of contemporary society, our friends, and other environmental factors, it allows people to avoid the responsibility and hard work that personal change requires. Life is too short for that. Self-actualization is possible. Ellis famously said, “The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” Adopt his self-helping philosophy rather than childishly rebel against it.
Humans Maintain Their Disturbances
One of the fundamental premises of REBT is that people keep reinforcing their old ways of thinking and reacting to keep from making healthy changes in their functioning. We unwittingly tell ourselves and continue to believe that we must do very well or better than others; if we fall short, we keep jumping to the same conclusion that we are lesser in human value and must hide our imperfections. We repeat the error of rigidly demanding that others treat us nicely and consistently jump to the conclusion they are jerks and often try to hurt them rather than merely ignore and tolerate them. We keep attempting to engineer greater comfort in our lives and reinforce the idea we cannot bear discomfort and must avoid it even when our long-term goals require effort and hard work. We blame others for making us angry rather than taking responsibility for our immature reaction to the misbehavior of others. People unwittingly maintain their emotional disturbances and unknowingly retraumatize themselves by failing to carefully evaluate the implicit attitudes shaping their self-defeating emotional and behavioral reactions. They unknowingly keep the past alive in the present by practicing the same self-defeating attitudes they held earlier in their life. Many mental health practitioners increasingly favor critiquing one’s thinking in favor of the mindfulness approach. REBT is a toughminded therapy that goes against the zeitgeist. It encourages you to examine long-held attitudes critically and to practice a new way of thinking and acting to change the present and set the stage for a better future. Hard to do but far from impossible.
The good news is that if we maintain our emotional and behavioral disturbance by holding certain attitudes, we can do better in the future by doing the hard work of adopting and then implementing more realistic, flexible, scientific attitudes. Assume that your current behavior largely stems from your thinking. So by deliberately practicing new ways of thinking, you can regulate and control your emotional-behavioral functioning and set the stage for increasingly more effective functioning. This practice may be challenging, but if you assume it is possible, you will take the first step toward profound personal change.
Avoid Demanding Immediate Gratification – This is the Wrong Path to Follow
My personal and clinical experience has shown that people naturally expect and then demand immediate gratification. It is human to look for the easy way out, some of the time. REBT is old school in that it encourages you to train yourself not to do so and favor long-range goals.
When you commit to change, you can remind yourself day in and day out that it does not matter how long you have had a bad habit, nor how many people have reinforced you by giving you excuses that shield you from responsibility for your indulgences, that you are tired of defeating yourself and will now start to do what it takes to change. You can consciously choose to stop making excuses and work against your self-defeating habit because you know it is worth overcoming rather than hoping it will magically go away on its own, yield to a new pill, or effortlessly go into remission.
Make a philosophical and behavioral commitment to change a longstanding self-defeating habit. You need to force yourself to act in a way consistent with the attitudes of REBT. Ellis called it willpower and emphasized that it must back up the new attitudes he was teaching you. Accept the no-nonsense philosophy of REBT and push yourself to go against your fears, shameful moments, and inertia. You can make profound and long-lasting cognitive-emotional-behavioral changes if you push yourself to.
Backsliding Is Not Evidence Change is Impossible
Understand that as a fallible human whose nature is to think in immature, shortsighted, unscientific ways, we all will backslide. It will be a minor slip if you do not use your slipping back to ‘prove’ to yourself that you definitely can’t change, that the past does dictate how you must act today, and therefore you are a worthless failure. Stick to the assumption you can change, that your attitudes are yours to choose and create, and keep working for a better future. You will recover from your backsliding and can immediately resume the practice of your new cognitive-emotional-behavioral changes. When you slip, you can say, “Okay, I did it again. I went back to my immature and unrealistic thinking to make myself slip. Let me reflect on what attitude led to this relapse to get back on the rational path that will enable me to break free and respond to life how I want to. I do not want to be a prisoner of my past ways of responding. I can do it. I will do it. I won’t put myself down for backsliding. Practice makes better.”
If you actively look at your backsliding reactions and the attitudes that primarily cause them, you will condition yourself in a self-helping way and change your problematic responses.
REBT is a realistic philosophy and psychotherapy. Our past will influence us. However, it does not have to determine how we develop if we actively choose to work against the negative influence of the past. Ellis taught people to accept that “your present is your past of tomorrow’s behavior.” What do you want tomorrow to look like?” Will you work to make tomorrow better, or take the easy path and blame your upbringing or environment for your disturbed, self-defeating emotions or behavior? You have a choice.
You can see your past as a handicap but a surmountable one, not an impenetrable wall to your desired personal changes. Honestly, reflect on your past errors without devaluing yourself for making them. With this stance, you can allow your past mistakes to be instructive of what works and what does not work to help you achieve your future goals.
Identify the factors under your control that contributed to the missteps you took in the past. Reflect on them and how you could do things differently next time. Don’t go through life repeating the same mistakes and not learning from them. Be creative and always try to make new mistakes.
Learn to resist the influences of the past forcefully. Push yourself to think, feel and do things more healthily, even if that is very uncomfortable and difficult for you to do. Remind yourself of the benefits of change for your future tomorrow.
Strengthen New Patterns of Thinking
Keep telling yourself healthy, self-liberating attitudes:
The past is the past. I made the mistakes I made. That was then, and this is now. I do not have to keep defeating myself by thinking that I must do perfectly well and have the love and approval of everyone. Having their love and approval is nice but never necessary.
When people reject me, I will not reject or devalue myself as I have most of my life. It is time I unconditionally accept myself. I will accept people do not have to be nice to me. I will not anger myself when they treat me unjustly. I can show them unconditional other acceptance and tolerate them.
Life never has to be easy and comfortable. Life is hard, too bad, and I will not be like other fallible humans who defeat themselves by not taking responsibility for meeting life’s challenges head-on with a tough-minded philosophy. I will train myself to have a mature attitude toward the existential challenges of life.
Although REBT emphasizes changes in your attitudes, you must act differently to change longstanding destructive habits. Deliberately work against any negative influences, past or present, that makes you a victim:
- Force yourself, for example, to act towards others with greater poise and tolerate those awkward moments when they may convey disapproval. Strive to be assertive, not aggressive.
- If you see someone who interests you, talk to them.
- Remind yourself others are no better as a human than you are, and they will not bite you. Suppose they do not reciprocate your interest. Never, ever reject yourself for being rejected by them.
- Remind yourself you can accept yourself with or without their acceptance.
If you want to do something and have no one to do it with, follow the REBT’s path of self-direction:
- Go by yourself to a party, a restaurant, a movie, or a concert and commit yourself to having a good time, not putting yourself down for being alone and remain open and friendly to talk to anyone you meet who interests you.
- Do fearful, shameful acts that you think are very uncomfortable and free yourself from your typical way, your past way, of acting in social situations.
- Keep trying to do these uncomfortable acts until they become comfortable and even fun. Mastering your fears can be very rewarding.
- Hold yourself accountable. Take a firm stance with yourself. Commit to bringing the best out of yourself.
- Don’t just think in an unconditional self-accepting way. Act in an unconditional self-accepting manner.
- Don’t make excuses for your anxious, shameful behavior. You can overcome years of past self-defeating behavior by steady forced practice at doing what is challenging and worthwhile.
- You will decondition yourself in far less time than you think if you face the uncomfortable feelings of shame and anxiety head-on. No nonsense is the REBT way of changing your behavior.
Use Self-Administered Rewards, Penalties, and Contingencies
You can help yourself to change in profound ways by using self-management schedules. For every therapeutic self-prescribed homework assignment you set for yourself, reward yourself by permitting yourself some pleasure, such as reading or watching TV only after you do that day’s assignment. Every time you avoid a self-prescribed therapeutic challenge to take advantage of an opportunity to grow, deprive yourself of reading or watching TV for the rest of the day and the following. Penalties work when they are swift and uncomfortable. You can change your usual way of doing things and train yourself to do what is new and uncomfortable but worth learning.
Regularly Practice Rational Emotive Imagery to Prepare
Use rational emotive imagery. Every morning take a few minutes to anticipate a fearful or shameful therapeutic opportunity to get out of your comfort zone. Let yourself feel the anxiety and shame. Then change that feeling into a healthy negative emotion such as concern or disappointment by changing your attitudes and working to have a preference for demonstrating more effective, self-determined social behavior. Practice an attitude of unconditional self-acceptance even if you perform inadequately. Refuse to reject yourself for falling short.
Be Careful Which Mental Health Professionals You Believe
Put aside what some mental health professionals and some in society will tell you. The past has passed, but the future is yours for the making. Take responsibility for your self-defeating feelings and behaviors. Learn to discipline your mind rather than merely observing your self-defeating, unrealistic thinking and not reflecting on it. Acknowledge that much of what we call emotional disturbance is immature, rigid, utopian thinking that so many people practice at one time or another it sometimes passes for sensible thinking. Adopt the uncommon sense of REBT. Work to think in a way that brings out your most effective responses to life’s challenges. Remember that action matters and push yourself to act in harmony with the tough-minded, more self-helping way of thinking prescribed by REBT. Commit to change despite your perceived limitations, environmental obstacles, and past traumas. Remember that you are not a victim, don’t allow yourself to become one, and hold responsible for your self-defeating behavior and emotional destiny.