THE ASSUMPTIONS OF REBT

Psychiatrist Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in the 1950s. Psychology Today explains:

·       Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)…helps you identify self-defeating thoughts and feelings, challenge the rationality of those feelings, and replace them with healthier, more productive beliefs…Once identified and understood, negative thoughts and actions can be changed and replaced with more positive and productive behavior… https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/rational-emotive-behavior-therapy

What irrational beliefs had Ellis identified? Wikipedia summarizes them:

·       REBT therefore first teaches that when people in an insensible and devout way overuse absolutistic, dogmatic and rigid "shoulds", "musts", and "oughts", they tend to disturb and upset themselves.

Interestingly, it seems that just about all the beliefs that REBT regards as irrational pertain to moral expectations. I had responded to the PT article:

·       Even if the "must" is uncomfortable, perhaps society needs it? Perhaps we need it? Perhaps discomfort is not the criterion for truth and for mental health? Perhaps the "must" is hot-wired into us in the same way that we are pre-programmed to experience hunger and thirst. Perhaps we need to listen to these “musts?”

“Perhaps discomfort should not be the determining factor for truth and even for mental health?” Perhaps discomforting feelings like guilt and shame are necessary to inform us when we violate a moral principle against lying, cheating, or adultery.

The road to peace is to live in harmony with our moral nature, our many “musts” and “must nots.” And perhaps we can profitably embrace our troubling “musts” when we are assured of God’s forgiveness. Instead, when we deny them, it is like deny the signal that our car needs more oil. To deny this message may not immediately incapacitate our car, but evidentially, we will pay the price for our denial.

Instead, REBT seems to assume that our uncomfortable feelings of guilt and shame are not needful and that we ought to confront our “negative” thinking with positive self-talk to relieve these feelings. However, isn’t this kind of self-talk a matter of waging war against our legitimate moral instincts and ourselves as social beings? Isn’t it also a matter of narrowing who we really are – a refusal to accept the fact that we are moral beings?

Perhaps there is a vital role for our “musts” and “shoulds?” REBT’s denial of them is problematic. This is precisely the critique offered by ABC Counseling:

·       Firstly, the REBT position on fairness is a formal rejection of the basis of most systems of morality.  It is a rejection of the Golden Rule, which states that we should treat others as we wish them to treat us; and we should never treat them worse than we would want them to treat us, if our roles were reversed!

·       Secondly, you will tend to believe that you cannot use the word should at all – even though I use it validly to point to a moral prescription, rather than an absolute demand.

·       Thirdly, you will tend to echo Ellis’s anthem which says this: “Why must life be fair when it’s obviously unfair!” https://abc-counselling.org/whats-wrong-with-rebt/

However, this assessment does not mean that our “musts” might also be associated with irrational elements, which might incline us to obsess to the point of dysfunctionality. However, it is difficult to determine if someone’s “must” is irrational. What if the deceased wife mourns for her husband for two years rather than one? Is this irrational or is it just a legitimate personal difference?

Instead, our human nature and human thriving depend upon listening closely to our feelings and intuitions to hear what they are telling us and to live accordingly. When we live in a way contrary to our nature, we are like a fish trying to swim out of water. Our water is our moral nature. As the fish must live in the water, we too must live according to the reality of our moral nature.

Let’s expand this principle a little further – “How should we regard our failures, rejections and infirmities?” Accurately! To manage anything, we have to think accurately about them. If your house is about to be repossessed, you have to do a careful cost/benefit analysis of your various options. It might be painful to consider the options, but this shouldn’t be your main criterion to decide whether to think about these options or not.

However, alleviating pain and discomfort is often the main deciding factor in secular psychotherapies. It is in REBT:

·       …awfulizing is partly mental magnification of the importance of an unwanted situation to a catastrophe or horror, elevating the rating of something from bad to worse than it should be, to beyond totally bad, worse than bad to the intolerable and to a "holocaust". (Wikipedia)

According to REBT, regarding a situation as awful is not only disturbing but also irrational, but by what standard? Regarding the Holocaust as awful is a sane reaction, and to deny it was not only a moral violation but even a violation of our own conscience, and it forces us to rationalize our moral lapse and to continue to fight against our guilt. It also leads us to obsessively try to prove that we are good and worthy people, when our conscience tells us that we are not – an unending struggle. Meanwhile, this paper has not even addressed the long-range effectiveness of REBT.

Instead, we need a belief system that will enable us to embrace our “shoulds” without crumbling under their weight. All of the self-talk and positive affirmations were unable to lift the weight of my guilt, shame, and denials. Nor are they able to impart the hope and confidence that we so desperately need. It was only through the assurance of Christ the Saviors forgiveness and love that the weight of my many failures lifted. It is because of Him that I can get up again after many otherwise crushing defeats.

To know God’s love is also to satisfy us so that we no longer need to crave the approval of others:

·       and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:19)

To know God’s love is to fill us and to give us the security to begin to truly love others, rather than to do things out of guilt.