by Albert Ellis
Is this belief logical? No, for just because I find certain people important, it does not follow that they must approve of me. And even if I find it highly inconvenient when important people do not approve of me, it doesn’t follow that my life will be catastrophic or awful. Indeed, if someone I like does not quickly like me, I may actually gain: for this person might first like me and later frustrate or leave me.
Is this belief flexible and unrigid? Definitely not, because it holds that under all conditions and at all times people whom I find important absolutely have to approve of me. Quite inflexible!
Can this belief be falsified? Yes, because important people can disapprove of me and I can still find life desirable. But it also implies omniscience on my part, since I am commanding that people whom I find important must under all conditions approve of me; even when they don’t approve, I can view them as approving or contend that they really do approve, even when the facts show that they most probably don’t. I can always claim that I am omniscient and that I know people’s secret thoughts and feelings; and this kind of belief is falsifiable.
Does this belief prove deservingness? No, I cannot prove that even if I act nicely to important people that there is a rule of the universe that they ought to and have to approve of me. Deservingness is another falsifiable belief.
Does this belief show that I will act well and get good, happy results by holding it? On the contrary. No matter how hard I try to get people to approve of me, I can easily fail—and if I then think that they have to like me, I will most probably feel depressed. By holding the idea that at all times under all conditions people whom I find important must approve of me, I will almost certainly fail to work effectively at getting their approval and also hate them, hate myself, and hate the world when they do not do what they supposedly must.
IRRATIONAL BELIEF
“People have to treat me considerately and fairly, and when they don’t they are rotten individuals who deserve to be severely damned and punished.”
SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS
Is this belief realistic and factual? No, it isn’t. It commands that under all conditions and at all times other people have to treat me considerately and fairly. Obviously, they don’t and the facts of life often prove that they won’t. It is also not factual that they are rotten individuals—for such people would be rotten to the core, would never do good or neutral acts, and would be eternally doomed to act rottenly. No such totally rotten people seem to exist. This belief also implies that people who treat me inconsiderately and unfairly always deserve to be severely punished and that somehow their damnation and punishment will be arranged. This is not what happens in reality.
Is this belief logical? No, because it implies that because people sometimes do treat me inconsiderately and unfairly, they are totally rotten individuals and always deserve to be punished. Even if I can indubitably prove that by usual human standards some people treat me badly, I cannot prove that therefore they are totally rotten and therefore always deserve to be punished. Such conclusions do not follow from my empirical observations that people treat me badly.
Is this belief flexible and unrigid? No, because it states and implies that in every single case all people who treat me inconsiderately and unfairly are totally rotten and invariably deserve to be severely damned and punished. No exceptions!
Can this belief be falsified? Part of it can be because it holds that people who treat me badly and unjustly are totally rotten individuals, and it can be shown they often do some good and neutral acts. My belief in deservingness and damnation, however, cannot be falsified, because even if no one else upheld me and believed it to be true, I could always claim that all the other people in the world were sadly mistaken, that my view of punishment and damnation is unquestionably the right one, and that punishment for those who treat me unfairly should exist, even when it doesn’t. When people who wrong me are, in fact, not severely punished, I can always contend that there are special reasons why they have not been penalized so far and that they undoubtedly will be in the future or in some afterlife.
Does this belief system prove deservingness? No, even if people treat me inconsiderately and unfairly, and even when they sometimes are punished after they do so, I cannot prove that (a) they were punished because they treated me badly, (b) that some universal fate or being dooms them to this punishment, or (c) that hereafter they (and other people like them) will always be damned and doomed for treating me (and others) unjustly. I will even have trouble proving that their acts against me indubitably are bad—because in some respects they may be “good” and because some others may not view them as “bad.” The concept of deservingness for one’s “sins” implies that certain acts are unquestionably under all conditions “sinful.” And this is impossible to prove.
Does having this belief mean that I will act well and get good, happy results by holding it? Not at all! If I strongly believe that people have to treat me considerately and fairly, that they are rotten individuals when they don’t, and that they then deserve to be severely damned and punished, I will very likely bring on several unfortunate results:
1. I will feel very angry and vindictive, and will consequently stir up my nervous system and my body in a way that will often prove harmful to me.
2. I will be obsessed with the people whom I think have done me in and will spend enormous amounts of time and energy thinking about them.
3. When I try to do something about people’s unfair acts, I will tend to be so enraged that I will fight with them in a frantic manner and will often fail to convince them or stop them. Indeed, they are likely to see me as an overly enraged, and therefore unfair, person and deliberately resist acknowledging their wrongdoing.
4. I will probably be unable to understand why people treat me “wrongly,” may unjustly or paranoically accuse them of wrongs that they have not committed, and will often interfere with my amicably and objectively discussing with them and perhaps arranging for suitable compromises.
If you resort to scientifically questioning and challenging your own irrational Beliefs, as shown in the above examples, you will tend to see that they are unrealistic, distinctly illogical, often inflexible and rigid, cannot be falsified, and are based on false concepts of universal deservingness. If you continue to hold these unrealistic and illogical notions, you will frequently sabotage your own interests.
This kind of analysis and disputing of your irrational Beliefs (iBs) is one of the main methods of REBT. If you continue to use it, you will take advantage of the most powerful antidote to human misery that has so far been invented: scientific thinking. Science will not absolutely guarantee that you can stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable about anything. But it will greatly help!
REBT Exercise No. 3
Whenever you feel seriously upset (anxious, depressed, enraged, self-hating, or self-pitying), or are probably behaving against your own basic interest (avoiding what you had better do or addicted to acts that you’d better not do), assume that you are thinking unscientifically. Look for these common ways in which you (and practically all your friends and relatives) deny the rules of science:
UNREALISTIC THINKING THAT DENIES THE FACTS OF LIFE
Examples
“If I am nice to people, they will surely love me and treat me well.”
“If I don’t pass this test, I’ll never get through school and will end up as a bum or a bag lady.”
ILLOGICAL AND CONTRADICTORY BELIEFS
Examples
“Because I strongly want you to love me, you have to do so.”
“When I fail at a job interview, that proves that I’m hopeless and will never get a good job.”
“People must treat me fairly even when I am unkind and unjust to them.”
UNPROVABLE AND UNFALSIFIABLE BELIEFS
Examples
“Because I have harmed others, I am doomed to roast in hell and suffer for eternity.”
“I am a special person who will always come out on
top no matter what I do.”
“I have a magical ability to make people do what I want them to do.”
“Because I strongly feel that you hate me, it is certain that you do.”
BELIEFS IN DESERVINGNESS OR UNDESERVINGNESS
Examples
“Because I am a good person, I deserve to succeed in life, and fate will make sure that nice things will happen to me.”
“Because I have not done as well as I could, I deserve to suffer and get nowhere in life.”
ASSUMPTIONS THAT YOUR STRONG BELIEFS (AND THE FEELINGS THAT GO WITH THEM) WILL BRING GOOD RESULTS AND LEAD TO COMFORT AND HAPPINESS
Examples
“Because you treated me unfairly, as you should not have done, my making myself angry at you will make you treat me better and make me happier.”
“If I thoroughly condemn myself for acting stupidly, that will make me act better in the future.”
When you have discovered some of your unscientific beliefs with which you are creating emotional problems and making yourself act against your own interests, use the scientific method to challenge and dispute them. Ask yourself:
Is this belief realistic? Is it opposed to the facts of life?
Is this belief logical? Is it contradictory to itself or to my other beliefs?
Can I prove this belief? Can I falsify it?
Does this belief prove that the universe has a law of deservingness or undeservingness? If I act well, do I completely deserve a good life, and if I act badly, do I totally deserve a bad existence?
If I continue to strongly hold the belief (and to have the feelings and do the acts it often creates), will I perform well, get the results I want to get, and lead a happier life? Or will holding it tend to make me less happy?
Persist at using the scientific method of questioning and challenging your irrational Beliefs until you begin to give them up, increase your effectiveness, and enjoy yourself more.
5
Why the Usual Kinds of Insight Won’t Help You Overcome Your Emotional Problems
Will insight into your emotional problems help you overcome them? It may help—providing it is not conventional or psychoanalytic insight.
Conventional insight will help you very little. For it says that your knowledge of exactly how you got disturbed will make you less neurotic. Drivel! It will often help make you become nuttier!
Suppose, for example, your parents insisted that you make a million dollars, else you are a slob. Suppose you have actually made little money and you now “therefore” feel worthless. Your wonderful “insight” about the “origin” of your self-hatred may only push you to loathe your parents. Or to hate yourself more for listening to them! Or to think that they were right—that you should have made a million dollars and are a turd for not following their great teachings.
Insight, even when it is correct, doesn’t automatically make you better, though—if you use it correctly—it may help. And it can easily—very easily!—be false. For even if you did take your self-hating idea from your parents, we still had better ask: Why did you accept these ideas? What are you now doing to carry them on? How do we know that if your parents taught you to always accept yourself, you still wouldn’t have concluded that you must make a million dollars to be worthwhile?
In other words, conventional “insight” is usually dubious and hardly tells you what factors really caused your disturbance. Nor what you can do to overcome it.
Psychoanalytic insight is worse. Because it is based on many different and contradictory guesses—and they cannot possibly all be true. Thus, if you now believe that you absolutely must make a million dollars to accept yourself, different analysts will try to convince you that you believe this because:
1. Your mother gave you pleasurable enemas and you are therefore “anally fixated” and are obsessed with money.
2. You unconsciously think that a bag of money represents your genitals and therefore your obsession with money really means that you want promiscuous sex.
3. Your father was cruel to you, so now you have to win his love and think you can do so only by making a million dollars.
4. You hate your father and want to shame him by making more money than he made.
5. You have a small penis or bosom and have to make lots of money to compensate for it.
6. Your unconscious views money as power and you really are obsessed with gaining power, not money.
7. Your great-grandfather was a pauper and you now have to remove the family shame about this by becoming a millionaire.
Et cetera, et cetera.
All these psychoanalytic interpretations—and a thousand similar ones—are possible, but none of them is very plausible. And even if one of these “insights” were true, how would knowing it help you change your obsession about making money?
If, for example, you truly think you have to win your father’s love and that you can only do so by making a million dollars, how does that knowledge make you surrender your dire need for his approval? To change, you still would have to dispute that idea and to act against it. And psychoanalysis helps you do nothing like this—and encourages you (and your analyst) to keep looking for more brilliant “true” interpretations.
Conventional and psychoanalytic “insights,” then, are not enough—or are too much. They frequently block scientific thinking and prevent active change. Does REBT therefore ignore insight? Not at all! It uses—and teaches—several kinds of unconventional insight that help you understand your emotional problems and what you can specifically do to uproot them.
In REBT terms, insight first means understanding who you are. Actually, you are a human being who has various likes and dislikes and who does many acts to get more of what you like and less of what you dislike. So REBT helps you explore your likes and dislikes and what you can do to achieve the former and avoid the latter.
REBT, then, helps you not only to understand what you “are” but to change what you harmfully think, feel, and do. It accepts your desires, wishes, preferences, goals, and values, then tries to help you achieve them. But REBT shows you how to separate your preferences from your insistences—and thus keep from sabotaging your own goals. It gives you insight into what you are now doing rather than into what you (and your damned parents!) have done.
Annabel, one of my clients who cherished her perfectionism because she felt that it made her a fine writer and an excellent mother, was having a hard time with some of David Burns’s teachings against perfectionism in his book, Feeling Good. Dr. Burns, she thought, told her to give up all ideal goals and stick only to realistic and average ones. Then she couldn’t be disappointed or depressed.
“But if I don’t strive for ideal goals, I will never achieve half the good things I do achieve,” she said. “How about that?”
“True,” I replied. “You and many outstanding inventors and writers have striven for the ideal and have thereby helped yourself do remarkably well. REBT, therefore, does not oppose competition or striving for outstanding achievement. It advocates task-perfection, not self-perfection.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you can try to be as good, or even as perfect, as you can—at any project or task. You can try to make it ideal. But you are not a good person if it is perfect. You are still a person who completed a perfect project, but never a good person for doing so.”
“How, then, do I become an incompetent or bad person?”
“You don’t! When you do incompetent or evil acts, you become a person who acted badly—never a bad person.”
“But why, then, should I strive for perfection—or even for good achievements?”
“Because you presumably find them—the achievements—desirable. And if your achievements are outstanding or ideal, you will find them more desirable—more enjoyable. But your achievements, no matter how good, never make you a totally good person.”
“But isn’t Burns right about my being disappointed if I try for the ideal and don’
t reach it?”
“Yes—disappointed, but not self-hating if you use REBT.”
“And how do I do that?”
“By not giving up your preference for perfect motherhood or perfect writing, but eliminating your demands, or musts. As long as you tell yourself, ‘I really would like to write a perfect novel—but I don’t have to,’ you’ll retain your task-perfectionism but not your self-perfectionism.”
“So the crucial difference is the must. I can strive for perfectionism in my writing as long as I don’t think I must achieve it and do not view myself as a sleazy writer and a rotten person if I don’t.”
“Exactly!”
Annabel continued to work hard at perfecting her mothering and her writing. But she overcame the anxiety that drove her to therapy by changing her perfectionist musts back to preferences.
REBT at times deals with your past—for if you are disturbed, you most likely had crooked thinking then as well as now. But it mainly shows what you did and what you thought in your early years—and spends little time on what your dear parents and others did to you. It especially shows you how you are now thinking, feeling, and acting—and how to change your weaknesses.
Insight, then, can help you see exactly how you are sabotaging yourself and what you can do to change. REBT—which uses philosophy more than most other forms of therapy—stresses many different kinds of self-understanding. The following chapters will describe many insights that REBT teaches and how you can use them in your efforts to stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable about practically anything.
