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

by Albert Ellis

  And you can answer: “I never have to be accepted, though I would very much prefer to be. If I am rejected, that makes me, alas, a person who is rejected this time. But it hardly makes me an unlovable, worthless person who will always be rejected by anyone for whom I really care.”

  5. Keep looking for and vigorously Disputing your irrational Beliefs. Keep doing this, over and over, until you build emotional muscle (just as you would build physical muscle by learning how to exercise and then continuing to exercise).

  6. Don’t fool yourself into believing that if you merely change your language you will always change your thinking. You may neurotically tell yourself, “I must succeed and be approved,” and then you may sanely change this to, “I prefer to succeed and be approved.” Underneath, however, you may still believe, “But I really have to do well and truly must be loved.”

  Before you stop your Disputing and before you are satisfied with your rational answers, keep on working until you are really convinced of these rational answers and until your anxiety, depression, and rage truly decline. Then do the same thing many, many times—until your new Effective Philosophy (E) becomes firm. It almost always will, if you keep reworking and repeating it.

  If you convince yourself lightly (or “intellectually”) of your new Effective Philosophy, it will tend to get through to you lightly—and briefly. Think it through strongly and vigorously, and do so many times.

  Thus, you can powerfully convince yourself, until you really feel it: “I do not need what I want! I never have to succeed, no matter how greatly I wish to do so!” “I can stand being rejected by someone I care for. It won’t kill me—and I still can lead a happy life!” “No person is damnable and worthless—including and especially me!”

  Windy Dryden, one of the most creative practitioners of REBT, has invented a technique of dealing with your light rational Beliefs and turning them into strong, solid, truly emotional ones. Thus, if you lightly tell yourself, “I do not need what I want! I never have to succeed, no matter how strongly I wish to do so!” and you are not convinced that you feel the way you supposedly think, you can Dispute your rational Belief—yes, your rational Belief—to come up with answers that make it more convincing. For example:

  Light rational belief: “I do not need what I want.”

  Disputing: “Why don’t I need what I want?”

  Answer: (a) “I can obviously live without getting what I want.” (b) “Fate and the universe never owe me what I want.” (c) “I can still be happy about many things if I don’t get what I want.” (d) “If I absolutely needed and achieved everything I wanted, I wouldn’t have time to enjoy all my wants.”

  Light rational belief: “I never have to succeed, no matter how strongly I want to do so.”

  Disputing: “Why do I never have to succeed, no matter how strongly I want to do so?”

  Answer: (a) “Obviously, I always can fail, no matter how hard I try to succeed.” (b) “There is no law of the universe that says I have to succeed.” (c) “I am a fallible human who will naturally and easily fail.” (d) “All kinds of unfortunate conditions, like sickness and disability, can make me fail.” (e) “Only if I were superhuman, which I am not, could I always succeed at everything.”

  If you strongly and persistently dispute your light rational Beliefs-feelings-actions, you will see that they are light and can turn them into stronger and more convincing Beliefs that you may actualize.

  Tony, a member of my therapy group that included Georgiana (whose case I presented in the previous chapter), saw that Georgiana worked so well on overcoming her violent feelings of jealousy that he gave himself a similar homework assignment to help overcome his own backsliding. Tony was a forty-six-year-old owner of a retail store, severely anxious and depressed about his business. He desperately needed, especially at Christmas time, to do better than last year’s sales. When he didn’t, he was depressed for the next several months.

  Tony was in one of my therapy groups for a year, and every few months we helped him to accept uncertainty and to stop worrying about his sales. Then he would fall back to renewed feelings of panic. Seeing Georgiana finally maintain her progress, he assigned himself to using the same techniques she used. He concentrated on these points:

  1. He at first put himself down greatly for making himself panicked again about his store. But he worked at seeing that his backsliding only showed that he was a normal—though not a healthy—fallible human. He shamelessly talked about his renewed anxiety in group and acknowledged it to his family and friends.

  2. He was able to see it, his backsliding, as bad but not view himself as a weak person for letting himself backslide. This self-acceptance enabled him to go back to working at getting over it.

  3. Tony saw, once again, that, when his panic returned, he mainly held the irrational Belief (iB), “I must have good sales this year! It would be horrible if they fell off. I couldn’t bear the hardships that would ensue!”

  4. He forcefully and persistently asked himself, “Where is it written that I must have better sales this year?” Answer: “Only in my nutty head! I don’t have to, though that would be lovely.”

  And: “In what way would it be horrible if sales fell off?” Answer: “In no way! It would only be damned frustrating. But not the end of my life!”

  And: “Could I really not bear the hardships of a poor sales year?” Answer: “Obviously I could! I won’t go out of business. My family won’t starve. And I can work to make things better next year.”

  5. Tony kept actively and vigorously Disputing his irrational Beliefs until he found it easy to do so and until he regularly arrived at E, his Effective New Philosophies.

  6. When he answered himself, at E, “Too bad. If I do poorly at sales, so I do poorly!” he stopped to inquire: “Do I really accept that ‘too bad’ or do I still really think ‘It’s awful’?” He answered: “Yes, dammit, whether I accept it or not, it is too bad. Not awful! Not unbearable! Just too damned bad!”

  7. He strongly told himself, many times, “I never need good sales. I can live and be happy if I don’t do better than last year. Loss of income is never a holy horror!”

  By often working at these assignments, Tony reached a point where he only occasionally fell back to a state of panic. Fortunately—if we may call it that—he did have one of the worst Christmas seasons he ever had at his store. And although he was disappointed and sorry, he was rarely anxious and never depressed about it. As he reported to his therapy group:

  “I lost a hell of a lot of sales and money this Christmas. But I gained a hell of a lot of me—of control over my anxiety. That’s worth much more than money.” The group agreed.

  Tony went on to work on other problems—especially his decreased sex drive. His poor retail business, for the first time in years, was easy to accept.

  Following the above REBT plan, you can stop your own backsliding and can regain any progress that you have made and temporarily lost—if you keep working to do so!

  REBT Exercise No. 17

  Use rational emotive imagery (REI) to get over any emotional upsetness that you may have about falling back to a previous level of disturbance; or use it for almost any other problem of anxiety, depression, or rage that you may have.

  In using rational emotive imagery, you first imagine one of the worst things that might happen to you: for example, you worked very hard to overcome your fear of public speaking or to overcome your addiction to cigarettes, and now you have fallen back again, and in fact have a worse fear than you ever had or are smoking even more cigarettes a day than you ever did before in your life.

  You let yourself feel anxious, depressed, or self-hating about how you have just fallen back after previously working hard and effectively using REBT to overcome your fear or your addiction. Let us suppose that as you vividly imagine this worst possible thing happening, you feel exceptionally ashamed, guilty, and self-downing about your allowing yourself to fall back. Get fully in touch, now, with your disturbed fe
eling and let yourself fully—yes, fully!—experience it for a brief time. Don’t avoid your feeling of guilt or self-downing. On the contrary, face it and make yourself truly feel it.

  When you have actually felt, really felt, this disturbed emotion for a while, push yourself—yes, push yourself—to change this feeling in your gut, so that instead you only experience a healthy (but still strong) feeling. Thus, make yourself feel keenly disappointed, regretful, annoyed, or irritated with your behavior (for you have done a wrong self-defeating thing by letting yourself fall back to your original fear or addiction), but get rid of, actually change, your unhealthy feeling of shame, guilt, depression, or self-downing.

  As I point out in a pamphlet on rational emotive imagery (REI) that is published by the Albert Ellis Institute (and that is included in the final chapter of A Guide to Rational Living), don’t think that you can’t do this, can’t change your feeling—for you invariably can. Don’t forget that you—not the Man in the Moon!—created your upsetness in the first place; so you—yes, you—can always change it in the second place. You can, at almost any time you work at doing so, get in touch with your gut-level feelings and push yourself to change them so that you experience different feelings. You definitely have the ability to do this. So try, concentrate—and do it!

  When you have let yourself push yourself only to feel sorry, regretful, disappointed, or irritated (instead of ashamed, guilty, depressed, and self-downing), look at what you have done in your head to make yourself have these new, healthy (though still negative) feelings. You will see, if you observe yourself clearly, that you have in some manner changed your Belief System (or irrational Beliefs or Bullshit) at B, and have thereby changed your emotional Consequences at C, so that you now feel healthy instead of unhealthy emotions. Become fully aware of the rational Beliefs (rBs) that you have used to create your new healthy emotional Consequences (Cs) regarding the unpleasant Activating Experiences (A) that you have imagined or fantasized.

  Thus, in this particular case, A was the observation that you have fallen back to your old phobia or addiction. At iB, you told yourself something like, “I should not have fallen back! How awful and shameful to fall back! I’m a pretty incompetent person to let myself do a foolish thing like that!” Then you felt depressed, guilty, self-hating. Now, if you do the rational emotive imagery correctly, you have changed to a new set of rBs (rational Beliefs), such as: “It was most unfortunate and unpleasant that I fell back but that is the nature of humans, including myself, to take two steps forward and one step backward. And sometimes two or three steps backward! I’m hardly an incompetent person to let myself do a foolish thing like that, but a fairly competent person who sometimes acts incompetently. And that is my nature, too!—to at times act foolishly. What a pain in the butt! But I can do better than that, I am sure, in the future, and get right back to the progress that I formerly made. Okay: back to the drawing board!”

  Observe and understand that these new, rational Beliefs are the ones that made you change your feelings. So, practice changing your disturbed feelings again and again, by repeating the rational Beliefs. If your upsetting feelings do not change as you attempt to feel more healthily, keep fantasizing the same unpleasant experiences or events and keep working on your gut and your head until you do change your feelings to healthy ones. Never forget: You create and control your feelings. Therefore, you can invariably change them.

  Once you succeed in feeling sorry, regretful, disappointed, irritated, and frustrated rather than anxious, depressed, guilty, and self-downing about your falling back (or about any of your other disruptive emotions and behaviors), and once you see exactly what Beliefs you have changed in your head to make yourself feel badly but not emotionally upset, keep repeating this process. Make yourself feel really disturbed. Then, make yourself feel displeased but not disturbed. Now, see exactly what you did in your head to change your feelings and practice doing this same kind of thing, over and over again. Keep practicing, until you can easily, after you imagine highly unfortunate experiences (such as falling back in your self-therapy after you have previously made some progress) at point A, feel upset at point C, change your feelings at point C to those of disappointment and sorrow but not upsetness, and see what you keep doing at point B to change your Belief system that creates and maintains your feelings. If you keep practicing this kind of rational emotive imagery (REI) at least once (and preferably two or three times) every day for the next few weeks, you will tend to reach the point where whenever you think of this same kind of unpleasant event, or it actually occurs in your life, you will unconsciously and automatically feel displeased and sorry rather than unhealthily depressed and self-downing.

  REI, then, can be done imaginatively before an unfortunate event (like falling back in your progress) occurs. It can also be done at the same time that the event actually occurs. And if you miss doing it when it occurs, it can be done an hour later, or a day or two later. In all cases, you let yourself feel guilty, ashamed, depressed, or anxious, and then you push yourself to feel disappointed and frustrated but not truly upset.

  Suppose you promise yourself to do REI at least once a day about your falling back from your REBT progress (or about anything else that you upset yourself about) and suppose that you keep postponing it and failing to do it. You can then use reinforcement by rewarding yourself with something you really like to do (such as reading, eating, television viewing, or social contacts with your friends) after you have done the rational imagery as often as you have promised yourself to do it. Moreover, you can penalize yourself with something you really dislike (such as eating something obnoxious, contributing to a cause you hate, burning a twenty-dollar bill, or getting up a half hour earlier in the morning) when you have not done REI as you have promised yourself to do it. You may do REI without this kind of reinforcement or penalizing, but if you have trouble doing it this way, then you may help yourself by resorting to reinforcement methods. Similarly, if you procrastinate on any other important task, you can reward yourself after you do it and penalize yourself when you don’t. This system won’t absolutely make you do what you want to do. But it will often help!

  18

  REBT Insight No. 13: You Can Extend Your Refusal to Make Yourself Miserable

  REBT gives you two kinds of solutions to your emotional problems: (a) Immediate, limited, and short-lived answers and (b) Long-lived, extended, and elegant answers. Even its less elegant and short-range answers are pretty good, for they show you how to quickly rid yourself of feelings of anxiety, depression, self-hatred, hostility, and self-pity. And how to reduce your lethargy, incompetence, procrastination, phobias, compulsions, and addictions.

  But REBT’s extended and long-lasting solutions are better. For they show you:

  How to maintain your improvement

  How to rarely upset yourself again in the same way

  How to quickly recover when you fall back

  How to generalize from your original disturbance to other upsets that you may experience

  How to overcome—and maintain your victory over—any kind of neurotic problem for the rest of your life

  How to stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable over anything—yes, anything

  For REBT says that your neurotic problems stem from three basic kinds of godlike, musturbatory thinking and that if you surrender your unrealistic and unscientific dogmas, you can see that all your emotional problems stem from similar irrational Beliefs. You can then extend your REBT answers to your other destructive behaviors. REBT thereby gives you specific and general solutions to emotional pain.

  This brings us to Insight No. 13: Once you understand the basic irrational Beliefs (iBs) you create to upset yourself, you can use this understanding to explore, attack, and surrender your other present and future emotional problems.

  How do you broaden your use of REBT from solving one set of emotional problems to reducing your other miseries? Here are some ways to extend your results to other possible trou
bles:

  1. Show yourself that your present upsetness and the ways in which you create it are not unique. Admit that virtually all your emotional problems are partly created by your own irrational Beliefs (iBs). Therefore—fortunately!—you can uncreate these iBs by firmly and steadily disputing and acting against them.

  2. Once again, recognize that you mainly use these irrational Beliefs (iBs) to disturb yourself:

  a. “I must do well and have to be approved by people whom I find important.” This iB makes you feel anxious, depressed, and self-hating, and it leads you to avoid doing things at which you may fail and to run away from relationships that may not turn out well.

  b. “Other people must treat me fairly and nicely!” This iB makes you feel angry, furious, violent, and over-rebellious.

  c. “The conditions under which I live must be comfortable and free from major hassles!” This iB creates feelings of low frustration tolerance and self-pity and sometimes those of anger and depression. It also leads to procrastination, compulsions, and addictions.

  3. Recognize that when you employ these three dogmatic musts you easily derive several other irrational conclusions from them. Such as:

  a. “Because I am not doing as well as I must, I am an incompetent, worthless person!” (self-downing)

  b. “Since I am not being approved by important people, as I have to be, it’s awful and terrible! It’s the end of the world!” (awfulizing; terribleizing; catastrophizing)

  c. “Because others are not treating me as fairly and as nicely as they absolutely should treat me, they are utterly rotten people and deserve to be damned!” (damnation)