How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything-yes, Anything!

by Albert Ellis

If, when you force yourself to plan and decide on some important tasks quickly, you refuse to do so or you achieve this goal and upset yourself because your plans and decisions are not good enough, fill out an REBT Self-Help Form about your emotional problem. (See Figures 1 and 2.)

  Figure 1. BLANK REBT Self-Help Form

  Figure 2. REBT Self-Help Form

  13

  REBT Insight No. 8: Changing Thoughts and Feelings by Acting Against Them

  As I noted in the previous chapter, you are influenced by your social groups, your environment, and your own body. But to understand yourself and your emotional problems, you had better also see that your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors all affect each other.

  In my first major paper on REBT, which I presented in 1956 and published in the Journal of General Psychology, I stated that humans rarely, if ever, have pure thoughts, emotions, or behaviors. Feelings include thoughts and actions, and they are also followed by thoughts about your emotions.

  Particularly when you have steady feelings—as when you hate someone for years—you prolong and keep reviving these feelings by thinking, imagining, and rating what you and others do.

  Roberto was beaten by his father when he was fifteen and insisted that the pain of the beating and the fact that it was done in front of one of his friends clearly caused him to feel enraged at his father and humiliated before his friend. But Roberto was wrong—because some boys, under the same conditions, would have felt anxious instead of enraged and defiant rather than ashamed. So Roberto very likely created his rage and shame by thinking, within a few seconds of being beaten by his father:

  1. “That bastard shouldn’t beat me like this, especially when I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  2. “My friend must think I am a weakling for letting my father beat me. I shouldn’t be so weak! How shameful it is for me to let my father get away with this unfair beating!”

  Roberto didn’t remember, when I saw him fourteen years later, thinking anything like this—and sometimes insisted that he automatically, without any thinking on his part, became angry and ashamed because of his father’s unfair beating in front of his friend. I showed him that we rarely feel without thinking, and he partially accepted this.

  He was much more convinced when I showed him that he had kept alive his feelings with hate-creating thoughts like: “How could my father have been so cruel and unjust to me when I was in no position to fight him back? He shouldn’t have done an awful thing like that! That bastard!” And every time he contacted his father, he continued to upset himself with thoughts like, “Even though I was much smaller and weaker than he at that time, I should have done my best to bite him, kick him in the balls, or do something to stop him! How shameful that I didn’t!”

  Moral: pure feelings rarely, if ever, exist. And even if they do—if you see an object flying at you and you immediately, without a thought, feel panicked—your feelings last for a few seconds and do not develop into real disturbances. Unless you then have irrational Beliefs about them. Such as: “Hell! That object almost killed me—as it must not do!” Or: “I shouldn’t be panicked! How foolish of me to panic like this!”

  So, whenever you feel emotionally upset, look for your musturbatory thinking that is at the bottom of your upsetness—track down your silly demands and strive to change them.

  But, says REBT, just as your thoughts create feelings and behaviors, the latter also affect your thinking. When Roberto raged at his father, he could hardly think straight and he “unthinkingly” did foolish things—such as stubbornly refusing to lend his father rent money and thereby harming his mother, whom he loved.

  So thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact with and circularly affect each other. Crazy ideas create frantic feelings and strange acts. Hysterical feelings bring on foolish notions and behaviors. Rash actions produce nutty convictions and insane deeds. Thoughts, moreover, lead to other thoughts, feelings to new feelings, actions to different actions. The influence of thoughts, emotions, and activities on each other never seems to stop!

  Suppose you want to change your obsessions, compulsions, phobias, and addictions. What then? Well, no one method will work for you all of the time. Sometimes using one philosophy to rid yourself of your anxiety will work—and sometimes it won’t. Often, fully expressing your feelings will considerably help you—and often deliberately avoiding your feelings, and instead distracting yourself with some intellectual pursuit, will serve you better. At times, you will best ward off disturbances by trying every therapeutic method you can think of—the long and the short and the tall!

  Give up any prejudices about which technique should or must work. Freely experiment! Try almost any treatment plan that seems sound for a reasonable length of time. But don’t necessarily stick with it forever. You are not any seeker after help, or an average troubled person. You are you—and what goes for, or against, you is not the same as what is good or bad for anyone else. Remember that as you go about your self-therapy experiments.

  There practically never is one and only one helpful way. According to REBT, you can often find one main, most elegant path to undo your neurotic difficulties. (that is, make a profound change in your thinking that will curtail your upsetness, keep it from coming back, and prevent you from manufacturing new emotional problems in the future).

  Fine: let us for the moment grant this. Even then, there is no one way for you to produce this new dramatic outlook. Many roads lead to Rome!

  As I pointed out in 1962 in Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, and as Joseph Wolpe, Hans Eysenck, Isaac Marks, Albert Bandura, Stanley Rachman, and other behavior therapists later asserted, sometimes the best—or indeed the only—way to change a fixed idea is to force yourself to act against it: to engage in live homework assignments. This kind of forced—yes, forced—activity may show you that you can surrender an obsessive, compulsive, or frightful belief. Similarly, if you work directly on your feelings, and vividly experience and express them, you may more thoroughly change your crooked thoughts than by directly disputing these irrational Beliefs.

  Let us, then, state Insight No. 8: You can change irrational Beliefs (iBs) and disruptive feelings by acting against them: by performing behaviors that contradict them.

  In fact, it is doubtful if you ever truly change an irrational Belief until you literally act (and act many times) against it. Similarly, you practically never permanently stop your compulsive behaviors until you think about changing them and decide to do so—again and again!

  Some psychologists have spread the tale that REBT was at first purely intellectual and that it only later added behavioral methods. Fiction! I was a cognitive-behavior sex therapist in 1943 when I first started to do psychotherapy, and I wrote pioneering papers on active-directive sex therapy in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition, I summarized some of this material in my 1954 book, The American Sexual Tragedy—which was denounced by many passive Freudian and Rogerian therapists. Although I largely abandoned behavioral methods when I practiced psychoanalysis between 1949 and 1953, I found psychoanalysis incredibly inefficient and therefore went back to cognitive-behavioral methods in 1953 as I was beginning to create REBT.

  My strong bias in favor of behavior therapy stemmed from my successful experiments with myself when I was nineteen years old and had no idea of becoming a therapist. I often tell the story of how, being unusually shy of speaking in public, I forced myself, for three months, to give many political talks.

  I told myself, following several philosophers, that nothing terrible would happen to me if I spoke badly. I followed the teachings of the pioneer behavior therapist, John B. Watson, who showed that active reconditioning, or forcing yourself to keep doing what you are afraid of doing, really rids you of irrational fears. So I expected—intellectually! —to overcome my fear of public speaking. And I did.

  However—surprise, surprise!—I unexpectedly began to enjoy speaking in public and have had fun doing it for the next sixty-five years. To my astonishment, I made a 18
0-degree turnabout of my extreme fear.

  Seeing that forcing myself to do uncomfortable things worked, I decided to do the same with my enormous fear of meeting new women. Because of my terrible fear of rejection, I never—and I mean never—approached strange women, although I went to walk and read in the Bronx Botanical Gardens about 250 days a year and saw a number of desirable women with whom I was eager to talk and date, and who also seemed to be flirting with me.

  So I gave myself the activity homework assignment of talking to every young woman I found sitting alone on one of the park benches. No exceptions! No cop-outs!

  Although very fearful and uncomfortable, I forced myself to carry out this assignment—made myself open a conversation with over one hundred women in a single month. Yes, one hundred “stranger” encounters—the kind I had always wanted to make but had fearfully avoided up to that time.

  I received no direct reward from these pick-ups—since only one of these one hundred females made a date with me and she never showed up!—but I completely overcame my fear of encountering strange women and have been able to talk to them easily ever since. For by getting rejected so many times, I saw that nothing dreadful happened—no name calling, no vomiting and running away and screaming, no calling a cop! And I concluded that I could talk to strange women, fail to date them, and still lead a highly enjoyable existence.

  I also saw that behavioral methods—particularly acting against one’s fears—often work better to change irrational Beliefs than do purely intellectual methods. And when I later found that psychoanalysis helped my clients very little and that talking them out of their irrational Beliefs (iBs) helped much more, I also realized that there are many ways of changing human attitudes—and that actively doing-what-you-are-scared-witless-of-doing is one of the best.

  So, from its start, REBT has always included a variety of thinking, affective, and action methods. Over the years, it has added many therapy techniques, but it was decidedly multimodal (to use Arnold Lazarus’s term) from the start.

  Ironically, although the outstanding behavior therapist, Joseph Wolpe, has consistently opposed “cognitive” therapy, his famous systematic desensitization technique uses imagination, teaching, and other forms of thinking. REBT, however, prefers more risk-taking activity homework assignments and is therefore more behavioral than many popular behavior therapies.

  In the case of Roberto, noted at the beginning of this chapter, he agreed to often do the homework of Disputing his irrational Beliefs that his father absolutely should not have beaten him when he was a child and that he positively ought not have been a “weakling” who let his father get away with these beatings. I also helped him devise and carry out two activity homework assignments: (a) keep talking to his father regularly instead of (as he had been doing) completely avoiding him and (b) stand up to him in a firm but unhostile manner instead of backing down or screaming at him (as he had usually done before).

  As a result of this combined thinking and behavioral REBT approach, Roberto gave up his rage toward his father and himself within a period of seven weeks. He continues to work on being tolerant and self-accepting several years after his therapy sessions ended.

  REBT Exercise No. 13

  Think of something you are irrationally afraid of doing, such as:

  Speaking poorly in public

  Writing an inadequate essay or report

  Drawing badly

  Being rejected by someone you care for

  Riding in a fast elevator

  Breaking into an ongoing conversation

  Dancing in public

  Talking to strangers

  Taking a difficult course

  Being laughed at by others

  Playing a game or sport badly

  Force yourself to do one of the things that you most fear and try to do it many times in rapid succession. Once you decide to do it, don’t hesitate, or cop out. Do it and do it and do it!

  While you are doing this “fearful” thing, show yourself that it is not really dangerous or fearful. Show yourself that:

  • You will hardly die of doing it.

  • You will be in no real physical danger.

  • You may come to enjoy it.

  • You can learn by doing it.

  • You will add to your life by conquering your irrational fear.

  • You will have the great challenge of overcoming it.

  • You will eliminate the endless restrictions and frustrations of indulging in your fear.

  • You will be working at disciplining yourself and overcoming your low frustration tolerance.

  • You will behave more efficiently as you overcome this fear.

  • You will gain more approval from others.

  • You will help ward off physical and psychosomatic ailments, such as ulcers and high blood pressure.

  • You will greatly reduce your negative feelings of anxiety, depression, self-downing, and self-pity.

  • You will find life on the whole much more enjoyable.

  REBT Exercise No. 13A

  You may not see that you irrationally fear or are anxious about certain acts, but see yourself, instead, as being ashamed, embarrassed, or humiliated to perform them. Thus, you may not see yourself as being “afraid” to wear an unstylish dress or jacket or of telling someone about one of your weaknesses, but you may never do these things because you feel they are “shameful,” “embarrassing,” or “humiliating.”

  REBT considers feelings of shame or humiliation illegitimate because they almost always include a rational element (“I did something people consider wrong or stupid, and I would not like people to disapprove of me for doing it”) and they also include an irrational or self-downing statement (“Therefore, I am a rotten or stupid person”).

  To combat this second, irrational element of shame, I created, in the late 1960s, my famous shame-attacking exercise—which is designed to help people stop feeling irrationally ashamed of anything, even when they perform and are disapproved of for some silly, stupid, inconvenient, weak, or foolish act.

  To help you act against your irrational Beliefs and disturbed feelings, you can benefit from doing some shame-attacking exercises. To do so, you select something that you personally feel is shameful or embarrassing to do in public. Examples include:

  • Dress inappropriately.

  • Say something foolish to a group of people.

  • Confess some weakness that people usually despise, such as, “I can’t spell well.”

  • Act strangely, such as singing in the street or holding up a black umbrella on a sunny day.

  • Yell out the stops on a train or bus.

  • Tell someone that something is radically wrong with you, such as, “I just got out of the mental hospital. What month is this?”

  • Say something that is unusually sexy, such as saying to a male or female companion in a loud voice so that others can hear, “Wasn’t it great that we had sex five times last night?”

  • Refuse to tip a waiter or cabdriver who has given you poor service.

  • Return food to the kitchen of a restaurant when it is badly done.

  • Walk a banana on a leash, as if it were a pet dog.

  • Try to get a watch fixed in a shoe-repair shop.

  • Ask people for a left-handed monkey wrench.

  When you do this act that you consider silly or shameful, make sure that, first, you do not get into any real trouble. For example, don’t expose yourself publicly and risk getting arrested; don’t tell your boss that he or she is a worm and therefore risk getting fired.

  Second, don’t do anything that would harm someone else, such as slapping someone in the face or continue to bother someone.

  The main thing to keep in mind as you do this shame-attacking exercise is to work on yourself while doing it so that you do not feel ashamed or humiliated even when others clearly disapprove of you. You can stubbornly refuse to feel ashamed by using self-statements.

  Examples:
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  “So people think I am stupid or foolish. Too bad! Let them think so!”

  “Actually, by doing this ‘shameful’ act I am helping myself overcome my self-downing. And that is great!”

  “What I am doing may well be foolish but that doesn’t make me a fool!”

  “I am sorry that people think I am wrong for doing this thing, but that is only a disadvantage and is hardly the end of the world!”

  “I know exactly why I am doing this act that I consider shameful, and therefore I can view it differently and see that it may be peculiar, but that doesn’t mean that I am a peculiar or incompetent person. I am just a person who is choosing to act strangely in this instance.”

  Do this shame-attacking exercise and preferably do it many times until you feel thoroughly unashamed of doing it and even feel comfortable with it. Observe how your feelings and attitudes about “shameful” acts distinctly change as you keep doing these exercises.

  14

  REBT Insight No. 9: Using Work and Practice

  In my book, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, I pointed out that REBT includes three main insights, which are quite different from psychoanalytic insights. The first two REBT insights are:

  1. You largely upset yourself at point C (Consequences) and do not only get upset by others or by events at point A (Activating Events or Adversities), and you do so by accepting or inventing irrational Beliefs (iBs).

  2. No matter when, how, and why you originally made yourself anxious or depressed, you remain so today because you still consciously or unconsciously hold iBs.

  We have been talking about and expanding these REBT insights so far and have added the insight that although as a child you were limited in your ability to see and change your irrational Beliefs, you now have considerable ability to do so—if you see and use the eight expanded insights discussed in the previous pages.

  We now proceed to REBT’s original Insight No. 3, which in our expanded version we shall call Insight No. 9: No matter how clearly you see that you upset yourself and make yourself needlessly miserable, you rarely will improve except through work and practice—yes, considerable work and practice—to actively change your disturbance-creating Beliefs and feelings and to vigorously (and often uncomfortably) act against them.