by Albert Ellis
REBT Exercise No. 4
Try to remember some of the worst incidents that took place during your childhood. How about the time your mother bawled you out in front of several of your friends? Or the time you were called upon to recite in class and were so panicked that you couldn’t say anything and the whole class laughed at you. Or the time when your skirt or pants were hung too low and half of your behind was sticking out for everyone to see. Or the occasion when you told another child how much you really liked him or her and got only a cold or negative response.
Do you remember that very “traumatic” event or events? Do you still think that it greatly influenced the rest of your life?
Well, it really didn’t! Not if you think about it carefully.
First of all, try to remember—or to figure out—what you told yourself to make this past event so “traumatic” and “hurtful.” When your mother bawled you out in front of your friends, weren’t you telling yourself that she shouldn’t have done that and that you couldn’t stand your friends’ knowing something negative about you? When you were panicked about reciting in class, weren’t you thinking, “I must answer my teacher well. Isn’t it awful when I do poorly—and when the other kids laugh at me!” When you neglected to hitch up your skirt or pants and your behind was showing, weren’t you telling yourself, “How shameful to be so careless about my clothing! I must not behave so foolishly!”
Track down—as you definitely can—the irrational Beliefs that made you feel hurt and upset when you were young. Then also look for the self-defeating ideas that you have kept repeating to yourself since that time and that have made you keep this “traumatic” incident alive.
Such as: “My own mother knew I was no good and that’s why she kept criticizing me. She was right!” “I still can’t recite well in front of people. How terrible!” “Because I dressed so sloppily as a child, everyone could see what a slob I was. And I still haven’t improved, as I should. I am a fool who deserves to have others laugh at me!”
Use your knowledge of REBT, and of how you upset yourself with your musts and commands, to understand exactly how you upset yourself during your childhood and how you are still preserving your upset feelings today.
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REBT Insight No. 1: Making Yourself Fully Aware of Your Healthy and Unhealthy Feelings
Insight is another name for awareness. Awareness is the first step toward ridding yourself of misery. The more you are keenly aware of your misery-creating thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the greater your chances are of ridding yourself of them.
Let us—as we usually do in REBT—begin with your miserable feelings. How can you be aware of what you feel—and how healthy your feelings are?
The first part of this question is fairly easy to answer: You know how you feel by merely asking yourself, “How do I feel?”
You sometimes may, of course, be defensive. You may deny that you feel anxious or angry because you are ashamed to admit such “wrong” feelings.
Usually, however, you won’t. If you are severely anxious or depressed, you will tend to feel so uncomfortable that you will freely admit—at least to yourself!—that you have these miserable feelings. Such misery is easy to feel—and to acknowledge.
But how healthy are your uncomfortable emotions? Oh, that’s a much harder question to answer. But REBT gives you a pretty good key. For it is the one system of psychotherapy that clearly distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy feelings.
How? By stressing Insight No. 1 : You create both healthy and unhealthy feelings when your goals and desires are blocked.
You can—and had better—learn how to clearly distinguish between these self-induced emotional reactions. Most other therapies—such as the behavior therapy of Joseph Wolpe and the cognitive therapies of Richard Lazarus, Aaron Beck, and Donald Meichenbaum—emphasize strong feelings, like severe sadness and irritation, and put them into the same category as feelings of depression and anger.
Not so REBT! REBT considers your strong feelings of sadness, irritation, and concern to be healthy, because they help you to express your displeasure at undesirable happenings and to work at modifying them. But REBT defines your feelings of depression, anger, and anxiety as (almost always) harmful, because they stem from your unrealistic commands that unpleasant events absolutely must not exist, and because they usually interfere with your changing these events when they do exist.
Unlike most other therapies, therefore, REBT shows you not only how to get in touch with your negative (and your positive) feelings, but also how to be aware of—to have insight into—whether they are healthy or unhealthy. It encourages you to feel your feelings—and also to weigh how desirable they are. Do you really want to feel them? And what good or bad results do they get you?
Thus, if you feel concerned about losing your job, you will try to be on time, to work hard, and to cooperate with your boss and your associates. If, however, you are overconcerned—or severely worried—about losing it, you will tend to be obsessed with it, take away time and energy from doing it, and lose confidence that you can perform it adequately.
Result? No damned job! Or a job and an ulcer. Or great misery while working.
Again: If you are disappointed and regretful about being rejected by a love partner, you will try to discover why you were abandoned, to win back that person’s love, or to attempt to mate with a more suitable partner. But if you are angry at your rejector, you will probably antagonize him or her and remain an enemy instead of a friend. And if you are depressed about being rejected, you will tend to withdraw completely and see yourself as quite unlovable.
Your feelings of disappointment and regret, then, are usually healthy feelings that help you withstand undesirable events and strive for a happier future. Panic, depression, and rage, on the other hand, are unhealthy feelings that interfere with your coping and block your improving of your life.
How about mild or moderate anxiety or anger? Don’t those feelings spur you to act against life’s hassles? Aren’t they therefore beneficial?
Not exactly. Almost any negative feeling occasionally can be useful. Extreme panic may energize you to outrun a forest fire. Intense rage may help you fight against an unfair bureaucracy.
May! But they probably won’t!
Extreme panic will usually disorganize and freeze you so that you won’t efficiently escape from the fire. Intense rage will normally make you stew instead of do when you encounter unfairness, and if you act while enraged you will often fight foolishly and badly.
You have, moreover, better choices. You can choose to be strongly concerned rather than grippingly panicked about escaping from a fire and you can decide to be greatly displeased and determined to act against unfairness.
With, most probably, better results! And with, almost certainly, less dreadful wear on your system!
REBT holds that you can choose between great concern about your safety or panic or horror about it. And REBT contends that you can decide to be strongly displeased about and determined to change injustice or rashly infuriated about it.
And you’d better be concerned about unpleasant happenings. For your feelings of concern, caution, care, and vigilance help keep you safe and satisfied; whereas your feelings of overconcern, anxiety, panic, and horror help keep you insecure and dissatisfied. Similarly, when you are treated unfairly or badly, you can choose to feel healthily displeased, sorry, frustrated, and determined to change the unfair situation. Or you can choose to feel unhealthily angry, enraged, furious, and homicidal—and consequently whining and inactive.
Can you clearly distinguish between unhealthy and healthy feelings? Not always, since your emotions are rarely pure and often include healthy and unhealthy elements. At one and the same time, you can be rationally concerned about escaping from a fire and irrationally overconcerned or panicked about escaping. Where does the first feeling end and the second one begin?
REBT has an answer. It holds that when you are healthily concerned about
any danger, you are sensibly desiring, wishing, or preferring to avoid it. But when you are overconcerned, panicked, or horrified about the same danger, you are still desiring but also insisting that you absolutely must—yes, have to—avoid it. You legitimately and wisely desire to avoid danger. Because why should you not want what you want and why should you not prefer to avoid what you don’t want?
No reason! But your dogmatic command that you always must get what you desire is illegitimate and self-defeating—because the universe clearly does not owe you your heart’s desire. And you will interfere with getting your preferences by fanatically demanding that they have to be fulfilled.
I have said that REBT is more philosophic than other systems of psychotherapy. Now perhaps you can see how it is. When you are disturbed, REBT’s Insight No. 1 holds that you have both healthy and unhealthy emotions. Usually (not always!) you can distinguish between the two by looking for the cognitions—the thoughts and feelings—that accompany them.
Your healthy feelings arise from thoughts that express your preferences—such as, “I strongly want to avoid this fire but I don’t have to escape and live happily ever after.” And: “I abhor injustice and am determined to fight against it.”
Unhealthy feelings stem from commanding, dictatorial thoughts—such as, “I absolutely must avoid this fire because the universe ordains that I have to live and be happy!” And: “I hate everyone who acts unjustly! They absolutely must not behave that way! At all costs, I have to stop them and make them see that they must always treat me fairly!”
Insight No. 1 of REBT, once again, states: “You create both healthy and unhealthy feelings when your goals and desires are blocked; and you can, and had better, learn how to clearly distinguish between these two self-created emotional reactions.” By using the ABCs of REBT—which are outlined in the next chapter—you can learn how to do this.
REBT Exercise No. 5
Go back to the end of chapter 2 and once again do the REBT exercise that gives you practice in distinguishing between your healthy and unhealthy negative feelings. Also try to see the difference between some of your healthy and unhealthy positive feelings.
Imagine that you are performing something remarkably well—for example, playing tennis, acting, writing, painting, or running a business in an outstanding manner. Let yourself feel happy about this accomplishment.
Now observe your happy feeling. Is it only a feeling of being happy and pleased about it, your performance? Or do you also—be honest now!—feel great about you, about yourself, about your whole being? Do you feel like a great person—a noble, godlike, almost superhuman individual?
If you do feel like a noble, superhuman, holier-than-thou person, you are then, according to REBT, experiencing an unhealthy positive feeling. For you are then in a grandiose, egotistical state and have raised yourself above other human beings. You have jumped from the idea that “My behavior is outstanding” to “I am therefore an outstanding, great person!”
This is dangerous. Because when you don’t perform remarkably well the next time, back to slobhood you will go! And even when you do perform well, you will be anxious about not doing so next time. So you had better like your fine performance—but not deify yourself for doing it.
When you do feel godlike or noble, look for your shoulds and musts. Such as: “I have just done as well as I have to do. Good. My success makes me a fine, worthy individual.” And: “Now that I have done this thing so well, people will see me as a marvelous person. I need them to see me in that light in order to accept myself and be happy with my life.”
When you feel unhealthily bad or great, make a list of the disadvantages of having these feelings. You will find it easy to list the disadvantages of negative feelings, like those of depression, guilt, or self-hatred. But your positive unhealthy feelings also have distinct disadvantages. Thus, when you feel like a great and superior person, here is a list of disadvantages these feelings may bring you.
• Unrealistically assuming that you will always continue to perform well
• Acting in an egotistical, arrogant, and obnoxious manner to others
• Thinking that you are so great that you do not have to bother to work at performing well in the future
• Being anxious about later falling on your face and greatly disappointing others who admire you
• Maintaining and increasing your belief that you have to do well and that it is terrible if you don’t
• Making too much of the tasks at which you do well and neglecting other aspects of your life
• Becoming so absorbed in your own ego that you lose your feelings for and misunderstanding of others and ruin your human relationships
• Striving so hard to continue to perform well that you put yourself under great stress and possibly interfere with your mental and physical health
Ask yourself whether you are bringing on any of these—or other—disadvantages by making yourself feel unhealthy positive (or negative) feelings. If so, look again for the demands and commands with which you are creating these self-defeating feelings and work at disputing them and giving them up.
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REBT Insight No. 2: You Control Your Emotional Destiny
Many modern therapies—particularly psychoanalysis—let people cop out on their responsibility for their own neuroses. Not REBT. Over twenty years ago, Psychology Today titled it, “The No-Cop-Out Therapy”—which indeed it is.
Not that REBT (like some extreme cults) says that you are totally responsible for your upsets. You aren’t. As noted before, you are influenced by your biology and your learning, which also help you to become disturbed. Nonetheless!—you will, to some degree, control your emotional destiny. To some extent you choose how often and how intensely you upset your own emotional applecart. For you listen to your parents and teachers. You carry on their nonsense. You choose to indulge in your panic and despair—even when you sometimes know how to stop these feelings.
Yes—you.
Which is quite fortunate. For if emotional problems simply overwhelmed you, if outside conditions really made you as neurotic as you are, what could you do to help yourself be undisturbed? Damned little!
But if you, no one but you, mainly create your nervous destiny, you most likely can change this destiny. Whatever you choose to do, you can also refuse to do. Whatever you choose to think and feel, you can also refuse to think and feel. This is REBT’s Insight No. 2: You largely (not completely) create your own disturbed thoughts and feelings, and therefore you have the power to control and change them. Providing that you accept this insight and work hard at using it!
Let me outline the famous ABCs of REBT. A stands for Activating Event—which is usually some happening that blocks or frustrates your important goals, desires, or preferences. For example: you want a job and you fail the interview and get rejected. A (Activating Event) is your failure and your rejection.
Please note! In REBT, we start the ABCs of emotional disturbance with your goals, purposes, desires, and values. You enter these ABCs with (conscious and unconscious) Goals (G).
What, usually, are your main goals, about which you sometimes make yourself miserable?
They are, first, that you stay alive and, second, that you be satisfied or happy. Once you are born, you have strong biological tendencies to want to remain alive and to strive for contentment. If you didn’t have the wish to survive, you rarely would. And if you didn’t have the desire—the Goal—of being happy, you would probably not want to keep living. So your Goals of surviving and being happy while you are alive are inborn tendencies and help perpetuate you and your species.
How do you want to be happy or satisfied?
• When you are by yourself, alone?
• When you are with other people?
• When you are intimately involved with a few special people?
• When you are doing well in business or a career and are earning a living?
• When you are involved in art, science,
sports, or other recreations and creative acts?
Once you desire to survive and be happy, you bring these Goals to the ABCs of human living. You go to A (Activating Events) wishing, preferring to get your Goals fulfilled; and when you feel miserable and act foolishly (at point C, Consequences of A and B), your Goals are usually being blocked at A.
So now we have:
• G—your Goal of getting what you want (especially, success and approval).
• A—the Activating Events that block your Goal (especially, failure and rejection).
• C—the Consequences of G and A (especially, feelings of anxiety and depression and self-defeating behaviors, like withdrawal and addiction).
Whenever your Goals (Gs) are thwarted by unfortunate Activating Events (As) and whenever you feel disturbed at Consequences (Cs), you tend to falsely blame C on A. Thus, you say, “Because I failed and got rejected at A and because I then felt depressed at C, A causes C. Failure and rejection make me depressed!”
Wrong! False! Mistaken!
A (failure or rejection that blocks your Goals) contributes to but never really causes C.
Why? Because, obviously, if a hundred people with the same Goal (say, desire to obtain a job) all were blocked at A (got rejected), would they all feel equally depressed at C? Obviously not.
Some would feel very depressed and suicidal. Some would feel disappointed and sorry but not really depressed. Some would feel relaxed or indifferent. A few would even feel happy. Why? Because these few would conclude that the job they wanted was really unpleasant. Or that they would rather be unemployed than be working.
So, you see, Activating Events (As) do not directly cause disturbed Consequences (Cs) in your gut—though they may contribute to these feelings.
