by Albert Ellis
d. “Since the conditions under which I live are not as comfortable as they should be, and since my life has several major hassles, as it must not have, I can’t stand it! My existence is a horror!” (can’t-stand-it-itis)
e. “Because I have failed as I ought not and have been rejected as I absolutely should not have been, I’ll always fail and never get accepted as I must be! My life will be hopeless and joyless forever!” (overgeneralizing; hopelessness)
4. Work at seeing that these irrational Beliefs often and generally upset you. See that you bring them to many different kinds of undesirable situations.
Realize that in just about all cases where you feel anxious and depressed and where you act foolishly, you are consciously or unconsciously sneaking in one or more of these iBs. Consequently, if you reject them in one and are still disturbed about something else, you can use the same REBT principles to discover your irrational Beliefs in the new area and to eliminate them there.
5. Keep showing yourself that it is almost impossible to disturb yourself in any way if you abandon your rigid, dogmatic shoulds, oughts, and musts and if you replace them with flexible (though still strong) desires and preferences.
6. Continue to acknowledge that you can change your irrational Beliefs (iBs) by powerfully using the scientific method. With scientific thinking, including reflection on your emotions and behaviors, you can show yourself that your irrational Beliefs are only assumptions—not facts. You can logically and realistically Dispute them in many ways, such as these:
a. You can show yourself that your iBs are self-defeating—that they interfere with your goals and your happiness. For if you rigidly convince yourself, “I must succeed at important tasks and have to be approved by all the important people I meet,” you will at times fail and be disapproved—and thereby make yourself feel anxious and depressed instead of sorry and frustrated.
b. Your irrational Beliefs do not conform to reality—and especially do not conform to the fact that humans are imperfect and fallible.
If you always had to succeed, if the universe commanded that you must do so, you obviously would always succeed. And of course you often don’t!
If you invariably had to be approved by others, you could never be disappointed. But clearly you frequently are!
The universe plainly does not always give you everything you demand. So although your desires are often realistic, your godlike commands definitely are not!
c. Your irrational Beliefs do not follow from your rational premises or assumptions and are therefore illogical and absurd. “I strongly want to succeed” doesn’t lead to “Therefore I must!” No matter how desirable justice is, it never, therefore, has to exist.
Although the scientific method is not infallible or sacred, it helps you discover which of your beliefs are irrational and self-defeating and how to use facts and logical thinking to give them up. If you think scientifically, you will avoid dogma and keep your hypotheses about yourself, about other people, and about the world always open to change.
7. Try to establish some main goals and purposes in life—goals that you would like very much to reach but that you never absolutely must attain. Keep checking to see how you are coming along with these goals. At times revise them. See how you feel when you achieve them. You don’t have to have long-range goals. But they help!
8. If you get bogged down and begin to lead a life that seems miserable or dull, review the points made here and work at using them. There’s rarely any gain without pain!
Many of my clients, alas, refuse to extend their use of REBT, even though it helped them to quickly—sometimes “miraculously”—overcome the problems that drove them to therapy. Because, often, they have low frustration tolerance (LFT) and refuse to march on to extended and elegant REBT solutions.
Not so Malvina. When she first came to REBT, she was a highly attractive nineteen-year-old student, majoring in history. Although bright and talented (especially in music), she was a social basket case. She was too shy to date. She had no close female friends. She considered herself plain and not too intelligent. She was severely depressed and often thought about suicide. She had no real career goals. She hated her parents—both of whom were severely depressed, too—and blamed them for her troubles.
Three years of psychoanalysis had done little for Malvina but only helped her become more hostile toward her family and dependent on her analyst. Although her friends did their best to get her away from the analyst, nothing worked until he had a heart attack, retired, and moved to Florida. She tried to keep in touch with him by phone, but he finally refused her calls. The only reason she agreed to see me was that at that time I was his exact age, fifty-one, and looked somewhat like him.
For many months I got nowhere with Malvina, as I tried to show her that her own crooked, self-damning thoughts—and not the “horrible teachings” of her parents—mainly created her feelings of depression. At first, she wouldn’t accept these REBT hypotheses.
I continued showing her that she had several strong irrational Beliefs—especially, “I must always be exceptionally beautiful, bright, and lovable and I’m worthless when I fall short of this!” She finally admitted, “I guess you’re right. I am idiotically depressing myself.” But instead of working to give this up, she immediately started berating herself “for being so stupidly irrational,” and she became, if possible, more depressed.
On several occasions, Malvina talked so much about suicide that I encouraged her to go for antidepressants and to consider entering a hospital. She refused to consider medication, but the threat of being hospitalized encouraged her to work at accepting and using REBT.
First, Malvina stopped blaming herself for being so disturbed. She worked hard to stop upsetting herself about being upset, and she began to accept herself with her depression.
Although when Malvina stopped damning herself for being disturbed she became one of the most relaxed depressives I have ever seen, she still often blamed herself for her “plainness” (she had “too large” a nose), for her “stupidity” (she only received Bs instead of As at math), and for her lack of career goals. But—because she now really saw the ABCs of REBT and saw how Disputing helped her give up the irrational Belief that she must not be depressed—she decided to work at overcoming all her self-damning.
She did. Malvina first accepted herself with her “plainness”—and then saw that she was fairly attractive. She stopped blaming herself for her “stupidity”—and then realized she was intelligent. She convinced herself that it was too bad but not awful that she had no career vocational goals—and then started planning to get some.
Although she now realized she was attractive and bright, Malvina used rational emotive imagery to vividly imagine herself becoming really ugly and stupid. She then made herself feel only sorry and regretful, instead of depressed, because she told herself that even under these grim conditions, she still could—and would—accept herself and strive to lead a fairly happy existence.
After several months of refusing to belittle herself, Malvina for the first time in her life felt undepressed. Better yet, she realized that she could soon reduce her other feelings of anxiety and shame by strongly counterattacking all her self-put-downs.
To make her gains more solid, Malvina also tackled her awfulizing and concluded, “It’s not awful—only annoying—that I am not very good in math!” She worked against her can’t-stand-it-itis until she convinced herself, “I can bear my large nose though I’ll never like it.” Furthermore, she fought stoutly against her ideas of hopelessness and replaced them with, “Although I haven’t come up with a suitable career yet, there’s no reason why I never will. It’s hard to find something I really will like. But it’s hardly hopeless!”
In addition to using scientific thinking and firmly attacking her dogmatic musts, Malvina began helping her friends see and Dispute their own irrational Beliefs. She did so well in this respect that she finally found her career. She went for graduate work in clinical psy
chology and for the past fifteen years has been an excellent rational emotive behavior therapist. She enjoys her work immensely. She has several close friends. After a few years of comfortable dating, she successfully married and is the happy (and rational!) mother of a nine-year-old daughter.
Is Malvina now happy because she is a successful psychologist, wife, mother, and friend? Yes. But she insists, when I see her at professional meetings, that she would be undepressed and unanxious even if she had failed in these respects. I believe her because she has worked exceptionally hard at extending the ABCs and DEs of REBT to any feelings of anxiety and depression she may experience. So she has achieved the elegant rational emotive behavior therapy solution.
You, once you use REBT to overcome any of your main problems, may not have to work as hard as Malvina to generalize and extend it to your other emotional difficulties. But if you do, you do! If you follow REBT’s Insight No. 13, you can use the rational ideas that helped you overcome one problem to show yourself how you can conquer other neurotic difficulties. Once again—if you work at doing so!
REBT Exercise No. 18
Imagine that you have overcome one of your greatest anxieties—such as your fear of writing, public speaking, sexual rejections, or doing poorly at work. You are feeling fine about this, but now you see that you have developed a new fear—say, talking to people at parties or other social gatherings.
First, see if you feel really upset—downed or depressed—about this new anxiety. If you do, use rational emotive imagery to make yourself feel only disappointed with your behavior, but not horrified about you, the person who has fallen back. To change your unhealthy feeling, tell yourself rational self-statements, such as: “I don’t like my foolishly falling back and creating a new irrational fear, but that doesn’t make me a total fool!” Or: “Too bad I created another silly anxiety, but I’m still fallible in that respect and I can work at becoming somewhat less fallible but never perfect.”
Once you really begin to accept you in spite of your new irrational behavior, look for the things in common between the irrational Beliefs (iBs) creating your new anxiety and those that you worked on to give up your old anxiety. For example, suppose you previously feared doing poorly at work and you now fear socializing at parties.
Your previous iB may have been: “I must impress my fellow workers.” Your new iB may be: “I must impress the people I meet at social gatherings.”
Again, your old iB may have been: “My fellow workers must not put me down. If they do and I don’t tell them off, I’m a real schnook!” Your new iB may be: “People at social gatherings must not scorn me and laugh at me. If they do and I don’t very wittily get back at them, I’m a schnook and an idiot!”
When you discover the common irrational Beliefs that led to the original anxiety you overcame and you see how they are repeated to create your new set of anxieties, use the same kind of Disputing and the same kind of other REBT techniques that you successfully used to overcome your previous irrational fears and persist at them until you also can use them to overcome your new fears.
Since there are only a few basic iBs that lead to anxiety, depression, guilt, hostility, and self-downing, when you see that you have a new disturbed feeling, or a variation of one of the old ones, assume that you once again can find the iBs that you are using to create your new symptoms. And when you do find these iBs—which you will, if you persist—use techniques of Disputing and other REBT procedures that you found worked well on the old emotional problems. Don’t give up! Keep working at it! And almost invariably you will find that similar neurotic symptoms stem from similar iBs. Try generalizing in this respect—and see how well it often works!
The same thing goes for your self-defeating behaviors. You may have been compulsively addicted, say, to overeating and you overcame your addiction by discovering your iBs—such as, “I need this delicious food, I can’t stand being deprived of it! ”—and by changing them. Now you may be compulsively addicted to smoking or to caffeine, and you can often find similar needs and I-can’t-stand-its that are making you addicted. If you formerly proved to yourself that you don’t need delicious food and can stand being deprived of it, you can similarly now prove to yourself that you do not need smoking or caffeine and definitely can stand their loss. Just as you once forced yourself to uncomfortably push away the extra food, you can now force yourself to push away the unnecessary cigarettes and coffee. You were uncomfortable but did not die the first time. Nor will you die of discomfort now!
You can also generalize from your successful use of emotive REBT techniques. Thus, you may have overcome your guilt about not visiting your in-laws every week by very vigorously telling yourself, “I’m not upsetting them by refusing to see them as often as they demand. They are responsible for their own upsetness. Too bad! If they hate me, they hate me! I can live with that. At worst, I’m rotten to my in-laws, but that doesn’t make me a rotten person!” To get over guilt or shame about other things—such as disclosing one of your weaknesses to people or not being the greatest parent who ever lived—you can generalize from your past REBT success and use a similar emotive method to overcome the new aspect of your self-downing.
Whenever, then, you have used REBT to reduce one aspect of your disturbance, ask yourself how you can use it to overcome other aspects. And practice using this REBT technique again and again in somewhat similar circumstances until it becomes second nature for you to employ it in various areas of your disturbance.
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REBT Insight No. 14: Yes, You Can Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Severely Anxious or Depressed About Anything
Suppose the very worst—yes, the worst—happens, can you still stubbornly refuse to make yourself severely anxious or depressed about anything?
Yes. Definitely, yes.
Don’t forget that you are a creative human being. If you even partly use your creativity, you can be unmiserable—and at times even happy—under some of the most unfortunate conditions.
Let me illustrate with an extreme case, which was told to me years ago by a famous American musician. He knew an elderly retired couple who had lost their only child, a bright and very attractive boy, when he died of pneumonia at the age of six. They took this loss very well, and continued to do so even after they tried unsuccessfully to have another child.
For many years after their son’s death, people would say to them, “Isn’t it sad that you lost such a charming child? Imagine how nice it would be if he were still alive. He would be such a comfort to you. He’d probably be married by now and you’d have grandchildren to lighten your life as you grow older. Of course, you are very sad about such a great loss!”
“Oh no,” this couple would immediately respond. “We don’t feel sad at all when we think about Marvie and his death.”
“You don’t?” would come the astonished query.
“No, of course not. He was such a fine boy and led such a good life while he was here. And now that he’s gone, we are sure that God is taking the best care of him in heaven, and that he is, and will always be, very happy there. So we are not at all sad about what happened to him.”
Both these parents would then genuinely beam and convince everyone, especially themselves, how happy they were in the face of this grim loss.
Cover-up? Defensive denial? I would say, yes. Did this couple repress their underlying feelings of sadness, perhaps even depression? Again, probably yes. So I by no means recommend their refusing to acknowledge their severe loss. In fact, I am highly suspicious of it.
The main point I am making, however, is this: People can change their feelings. No matter what happens to them, they can creatively decide to feel one way or another about it. And they have quite a range of possible feelings to choose from!
Do you really want to test out this freedom of choice in your own life? All right, let’s experiment. Let us imagine some of the worst things that might happen to you—things that you would clearly dislike and about which you might easil
y make yourself anxious, depressed, or enraged. I am going to present some of these grim events to you and ask you, if you strongly use the REBT insights we have been discussing in this book, how you would rationally cope with them and make yourself feel appropriately sad, displeased, and annoyed but not unhealthily panicked and destroyed.
Ready?
Question: Suppose you find, after a long search, a job that is ideal for you and suppose you foolishly come late for work, are lazy, act nastily to your boss, and get fired. What can you rationally and emotionally tell yourself?
REBT answer: You can tell yourself: “Too bad! I certainly behaved poorly this time. But that hardly makes me a stupid or incompetent person. Just someone who needlessly did myself in. Now what can I do to find another job like this one, work hard at it, and please my boss? But even if I never get as good a job again, I am determined to do the best I can and to be as effective and as happy as I can be with a worse position.”
Question: Suppose you have a serious accident and lose an arm or a leg—or even your vision—how can you manage to live with those kinds of handicaps?
REBT answer: Not so well! You certainly would feel greatly deprived and frustrated. But not necessarily depressed! If you tell yourself, “Although my abilities and pleasures are seriously limited, I can still do many interesting and enjoyable things and can find ways to compensate for my disabilities. Instead of focusing dismally on what I can not do, I can concentrate on the many interests and pleasures I can still have and thereby almost guarantee myself a reasonably happy existence.”
Question: Suppose you bought a stock at a low price, felt anxious about how high it might go, and sold it only at a small profit, instead of the large amount you could have made if you had held on to it a while longer. Can you still refuse to make yourself miserable about that?