Rational therapy or rational emotive therapy, also called RT for short, is based on several fundamental propositions or hypotheses. And the first of these is that the past is not crucial in a person's life . The past affects him a good deal but he affects himself much more than the past affects him.
Because no matter what he has learned during his historical development, the only reason why these things that have happened to him and have been told to him affect him today is because he is still re-indoctrinating himself with the same philosophies of life, the same values that he usually imbibed and taught himself too early in his childhood. So we stick largely in the present in rational emotive psychotherapy rather than in the past. And we believe that today the individual experiences negative emotions,self-defeating behavior, inefficiencies because he now is indoctrinating himself with what we call simple exclamatory sentences which involve ideas.
Human beings can tell themselves ideas in all kinds of languages, in pictures, in sign languages, in non-verbal expression, in math, for example, but they normally speak to themselves in simple English if English is their native tongue. And when they talk to themselves in an irrational or an illogical way then they create, they literally create their negative feelings or emotions in the behavior that follows there from. Now just to give an example, the individual usually tells himself when he's upset, first a sane sentence and then an insane sentence.
The sane sentence is something along the order of I don't like the thing that I've done, I dislike my own behavior. And that would be fine but unfortunately he follows it with an insane sentence which says to himself and because I don't like my behavior I am a louse, I am worthless, I am a no-goodnik. And this thoroughly insane sentence, which is a sentence of faith unfounded on fact which has no empirical reference, which is a kind of superstitious or dogmatically religious system, creates what we call his anxiety and through his anxiety his depression, his guilt, his other forms of self- defeatism.
Or again, the individual tells himself the same sentence I don't like your behavior when, let us say, somebody has acted badly with him. And instead of following that up with that because I don't like your behavior I can still stand it and I'm going to change to get you to change your behavior, he says I can't stand your behavior or in an absolutistic God-like, grandiose manner, you shouldn't be the way you are because I think that I don't like the way you are. Now it's these second, B, sentences which upset the individual.
Or another way of putting it, as Epictetus, a Roman philosopher, said many years ago, it's not what happens to us at point A that upsets us, it's B, our view of what happens to us. And in rational emotive psychotherapy we go after this individual, the patient's view and show him that whatever he thinks has upset him, usually some external situation, what somebody else has done, it's really what he's telling himself about this thing, this event which upsets him. And although he may never be able to do anything about the external event at A, he can change the internal event, his sentence, his belief to himself at B.
Now in rational emotive psychotherapy we try to show the patient three kinds of insight in contradistinctions with some other therapies which usually emphasize one major kind. The first kind we try to show him is that all his behavior, especially his negative, self-defeating behavior which we're interested and which is upsetting him, has clear-cut ideological antecedents. He may have learned these, as I said before, in the past but right now today he must still believe these same ideologies else he would not get the negative behavior that flows there from.
And insight number two, which is most important and which is unfortunately neglected in many other systems of psychotherapy, is that he being as Ernst Cassirer once said a symbolizing animal is continually re-indoctrinating himself with these ideologies and that's the issue, that's why he's now disturbed. Now insight number three is that even when he sees clearly what he's telling himself and that he's telling himself nonsense, only by work and practice, by continually reassessing and revaluing his own philosophic assumptions will he ever get better. Now we also stress the fact that action is necessary to change an individual.
Just talking about things, thinking about things is nice but not necessary. Or I should say it's not a necessary condition for a psychotherapeutic change. What the individual has to do in addition usually is act.
And we therefore give him concrete homework assignments and get him to act these out and check up and follow to see whether he does these homework assignments. And our final goal is to get the individual to learn and learn for the rest of his life to challenge and question his own basic value system, his own thinking so that he really thinks for himself. He must do this particularly when he feels miserable, he feels anxiety or depression or guilt or too much frustration or anything else that is negative or when he behaves very inefficiently.
And finally he was able through this kind of new thinking, rethinking his own assumptions to apply what we call the scientific method to the facets of human living and to be truly scientific in his behavior to question and challenge his own assumptions and we do in science and thereby to minimize, though never entirely to eliminate, the terrible anxiety and the atrocious hostility which unfortunately affects most of us in this existence. Hello, Gloria, I'm Dr Ellis. Hello, how do you do, Dr Ellis.
Do you want to be seated, please? Well, would you like to tell me what's bothering you most? Hmm, yeah.
I think the things that I'd like to talk to you the most about are adjusting to my single life, mostly men, I guess. As a matter of fact, I don't know if I'm doing the wrong thing but I'm going to refer to your book anyway because this is what I'm impressed with, the book about The Intelligent Women's Guide to Man-Hunting. Yeah.
I tried to follow it and I believe in it. This is why it's so fun reading your book because I'm not much of a reader but I sort of believe the same way you do. But then I've got a problem in this area.
The men I'm attracted to or the type of man I'd like to become closely involved with I can't seem to meet or I get too shy with or something but it just doesn't click. The men I seem to be dating nowadays are the ones that I don't respect much, the ones I don't enjoy much, that seem flip and uninteresting. And I don't know if it's something about me or what because I really do want to meet his kind of man.
Well, let's talk a little about your shyness. Let's suppose you meet somebody who you consider eligible, that you might like. Now let's see if we can get at the source of your shyness, just what you're telling yourself to create this.
You meet this man and you feel shy, embarrassed. Yes, but I don't usually show that. I usually act flip right back.
Yeah. I act like the other men act to me, as a matter of fact. I act flip.
I don't seem near as intelligent. I act like a typical dumb blonde. I'm just not myself with them.
I'm more un-at-ease. Yes, well, as you probably know from Guide to Man-Hunting, I believe that people only get emotions such as negative emotions of shyness, embarrassment, shame because they tell themselves something in simple exclamatory sentences. Now let's try to find out what you're telling yourself.
You're meeting this individual. Now what do you think you are saying to yourself before you get flip. I know what it is, that I'm not, I don't stand up to his expectations.
I'm not quite enough for him. He's superior to me. Although I want this type of man, I'm afraid I won't have enough to attract him.
Well, that's the first part of the sentence and that might be a true one because maybe he could be superior to you in some ways. Maybe he wouldn't be attracted to you. But that would never upset you if you were only saying that I think he may be superior to me.
Now you're adding a second sentence to that which is if this is so that would be awful. Well, I'm not quite so extreme as that cause I've thought about that too. It's usually I've missed my chance again because if I want to show the very best of myself, because I think I have self-confidence, and I have enough to offer.
Yeah. But when I get afraid like that then I show all the bad qualities. I'm flip.
Then I'm so much on the defensive that I can't show my good qualities and it's like I missed my change again. There was a good opportunity to be close to this man and I loused it up again. All right, but even let's suppose you're saying that, and I think you really are, but you must be saying something else too because if you were just saying, hell, I missed my chance again you'd say, all right, next time I'll take advantage of what I learned this time and do it a little better.
Now you still must be saying if you feel shame, embarrassment, shyness that there's something pretty bad about your error in missing your chance again. I don't know if this follows in contact to what you're saying but the thing I do feel is that I get suspicious then, am I the type of woman that will only appeal to the ones that are not my type of guy anyway? Is there something wrong with me?
Am I never going to find the kind of man I enjoy? I always seem to get the other ones. All right, now you're getting closer to what I'm talking about cause you're really saying if I am this type of woman that none of these good, eligible men that I could appeal to then that would be awful.
I'd never get what I want and that would really be something frightful. Plus, I don't like thinking of myself that way. I want to put myself on a higher standard.
I don't like to think that I'm maybe just an average Jane Doe. Well, let's just suppose for the sake of argument at the moment that that were so. All right.
That you were an average Jane Doe. Now would that be so terrible? It would be inconvenient.
It would be unpleasant. You wouldn't want it. But would you get an emotion like shyness, embarrassment, shame out of just believing that maybe I'm gonna end up like Jane Doe?
I don't know. I don't think you could because you still would have to be saying on some level as I think you just said and it would be very bad, it would be terrible. I would be a no-goodnik if I were just Jane Doe.
Well, plus I'd never get what I want. If I were just a Jane Doe and if I would have to accept that I'd never get what I want and I don't want to live the rest of my life with just icky men. Well, it's not necessarily so that you'd never.
You really mean your chances would be reduced because we know some icky girls who get some splendid men, don't we? You see, so you're generalizing there. You're saying it probably would be that I'd have a more difficult time but then you're jumping to therefore I'd never get at all.
You see the catastrophizing there that you jumped to. Yes, but it feels that way to me at the time. It seems like forever.
That's right. But isn't that a vote of non-confidence in you? An essential vote of non-confidence?
And the non-confidence is because you're saying, one, I don't want to miss out on things. I would like to get the kind of a man I want and be a, in your words, superior kind of girl who gets a superior kind of man. Yes.
But if I don't then I'm practically on the other side of the chain completely, a no-goodnik, somebody who will never get anything that I want, which is quite an extreme away, isn't it? Yes. And that's what I call catastrophizing.
Taking a true statement, and there is a good deal of truth in what you're saying, if you didn't get the kind of a man you wanted that it would be inconvenient, annoying, frustrating, which it really would be and then saying I'd never possibly get what I want. And even beyond that you're really saying and then I couldn't be a happy human being. Aren't you really saying that on some level?
But let's just look at that. Let's just assume the worst, as Bertrand Russell once said years ago. Assume that worst, that you never got at all, for whatever the reasons may be, the kind of a man you want.
Look at all the other things you could do in life to be happy. Well, I don't like the whole process. I don't even like it as I'm going through it.
All right, even if it wasn't a catastrophe. Yeah. Even if I didn't look at it as a catastrophe, I don't like the way I'm living right now.
For example, when I meet somebody that I'm interested in that could have some potential, right away I find I'm not near as relaxed with him. I worry more should I be friendly, should I kiss him good night, should I do this? If it's just a Joe Doe and I don't give a darn I can be anything I want to be.
I turn out to be more of a person when I'm not as concerned. I don't like the way I'm. But you're not really concerned, you're over-concerned, you're anxious.
Because if you were just concerned you'd do your best and you'd be saying to yourself if I succeed, great, if I don't succeed, tough, right now I won't get what I want. But you're over-concerned or anxious. You're really saying, again, just what we said a moment ago, if I don't get what I want right now I'll never get it and that would be so awful that I've got to get it right now.
That causes the anxiety, doesn't it? Yes, or else work toward it. Yes, but if you.
If I don't get it right now that's all right but I want to feel like I'm working toward it. Yes, but you want a guarantee I hear. My trained ears hear you saying I would like a guarantee of working towards it and there are no certainties and guarantees.
Well, no, Dr Ellis, I don't know why I'm coming out that way. What I really mean is I want a step toward working toward it. Well, what's stopping you?
I don't know. I thought, well, what I was hoping is whatever this is in me why I don't seem to be attracting these kind of men. Why I seem more on the defensive?
Why I seem more afraid? You could help me what it is I'm afraid of so I won't do it so much. Well, my hypothesis is so far that what you're afraid of is not just failing with this individual man, which is really the only thing at issue when you got out with a new, and we're talking about eligible males now, we'll rule out the ineligible ones.
You're not just afraid that you'll miss this one, you're afraid that you'll miss this one and therefore you'll miss every other and therefore you've proved that you are really not up to getting what you want and wouldn't that be awful. You're bringing in these catastrophes. Well, you sound more strong at it but that's similar.
I feel like this is silly if I keep this up. There's something I'm doing. There's something I'm doing not to be as real a person with these men that I'm interested in.
That's right, you're defeating your own ends. I've done it again. If I weren't so doggone anxious about trying to hook this guy I could be more real.
He's going to enjoy me more if I'm real anyway. So I'm only giving him the stinky part of me. Right.
How can anybody I respect respect a chooch and that's what I am when I don't really come through. But look how you just devalued yourself. Let's just suppose for the sake of argument you kept giving the stinky part of you.
All right. A human being, another person who is trying to get interested in you might not like these attributes, these characteristics of you but I don't think he's going to despise you as a person, which you are really doing. I am harder on myself than I think he is.
That's exactly the point. But he just doesn't like me, there's not enough to me. Right, and as I said before, if people just didn't like you and you went through enough of them, and it would be hard to go through enough but it would be possible, you'd eventually find one who did like you and whom you liked.
But as long as you devalue yourself personally in your own eyes, you complicate the problem enormously and you're not focusing on how can I be myself. Change the traits. If you, for example, had a, let us just say, a mangled arm and you wouldn't accept your whole person, your being because of this mangled arm then you would focus so much on that mangled arm that you wouldn't be able to do things that you would otherwise be able to do.
That's almost what I do, yes. Yes, you see, that's exactly. So you're taking a part of you, an arm, and focusing almost completely on that.
And just to bring it down to our own conversation, you're taking a part of you, your shyness, your not being yourself with males and focusing so much on that part that you're almost making it the whole of you and you get an awful picture of your total self because of this defective part. And we're assuming, you and I, that it is defective. We're not glossing over and saying, oh, you're doing all right.
You're not doing that well. Right. Now if you could accept yourself for the time being with this defective part, with these attributes and not beat yourself over the head, as I feel you definitely are doing, then it becomes a relatively simple problem to work and practice, to work and practice against this negative attribute.
In other words, let's get back to that now, how to be yourself. Let's just suppose for the moment that you really were fully accepting yourself with your failings. All right.
You know you're going to go out and you know you're going to screw up with the next man and the man after that in all probability but you're saying, all right, I have to go through a learning process, that's too bad. I won't be very good during this while but I'll do it just as I would as ice skating where I'd have to fall on my neck for a few times before I learn to ice skate. OK, now let's suppose that.
Then if that were so, if you were really accepting you, you'd go out, take the risks of being you because after all if you do win one of these men, you have to be yourself. You're not winning them for a day. You're not winning them for an affair.
I assume you want to marry one of these individuals eventually and be with them a long time. But mostly a long relationship. I don't think so much as marriage as a long relationship.
All right, a long relationship, in the course of which you couldn't act. So we don't want to give you some technique of acting well that he will later find out was a role-playing sort of thing. So you have to eventually be yourself.
Now if you really weren't so disturbed about these present, current failings of yours you could go out and be this self of yours, ask yourself what do I really want to do with this man to help enjoy him and have him help enjoy me? Because that's the basic function of life, enjoyment, which we tend to lose. And you force yourself to take the risk of being that because if you succeeded, great, if you failed, too bad.
Either you are not for him or he may even not be for you. Because don't forget, you said before when these men reject you, you assume right away it must be my doing and my fault. You know they may not be your cup of tea and you may not be their cup of tea and it's nobody fault.
It's just true incompatibility. I know it could be, yes. You see.
Yeah. So if you would really accept yourself as you are and then force yourself, and if you were one of my regular patients I would give you this homework assignment and then check up on you to see whether you could force yourself to open your big mouth and be you for a while. Even though it hurt with these males, you would find that, A, you would start being yourself and gradually lopping off these inefficiencies, which incidentally are the result of not being you but watching yourself from the outside while you're trying to be you, which is almost impossible.
Because you can't spy on yourself and still be yourself very well at the same time. No, but it would become like a habit. After a while if you took the risks and forced yourself to, as I said, open your big mouth and even though you thought maybe it will come out badly, maybe he won't like me, maybe I'll lose him completely, and so on and so forth, then you'd start swinging in the groove and being what you want to be.
And I would almost guarantee that you'd become more practiced and less inefficient, especially in terms of the shyness, because you wouldn't be focusing on, oh my God, isn't this awful how bad I am. You would be focusing on what a nice individual this is and how can I enjoy him, which is the focus, the purpose of the relationship. Well, you say my focus is the opposite way.
Right. How can I be more attractive to him and how can he be pleased by me? Because underneath if I am not then I cannot enjoy myself.
I refuse to accept myself unless I attract and win this good individual. Isn't that what you're basically saying? Yes, I even go further, DrEllis.
When there is one of these men I come in contact with and I find that I want to cultivate more of a relationship, well, if he accepts me and we're going along pretty great, I find myself constantly on the defensive. Constantly watching the way I sit, not drinking too much, the whole time instead of just relaxing and saying he'll either like me or he doesn't. An emotion in psychotherapy.
You're giving a very good illustration of why other-directedness doesn't pay. Because if you really are defining yourself in terms of others' estimation of you then even when you're ahead of the game and you're winning them you have to be saying to yourself will I win them today, will I win them tomorrow, will I keep winning them? And you're always focused on am I doing the things to please him and you never are yourself, you never have a self.
While if you're saying what do I want to do in life, there must be some human beings who would like me the way I am, let's see if this is one of those human beings then that's the only way is that you can be. You see? Yeah.
Now we haven't got too much time now so let's try to get it off on a constructive note of more concretely what you can do. You asked before where you can go, how you can meet new people. I'd say that, I don't know this particular area but it's almost anyplace, if you could do what we are talking about, really take risks and focus on what you want out of life, and on the fact that it's going to take time, which unfortunately it does, and it is not awful and you are not awful while it's taking that time, then you can leave yourself open unshyly to all kinds of new encounters.
And these encounters can take place on busses, while waiting for a street car, if they have street cars in this area, at cocktail parties, anywhere. You can talk to people who look eligible, you can ask your friends to get you eligible males, and so on. But the main thing is that you have to, A, like yourself while you're not doing badly and, B, not be intolerant against conditions which are bad.
And I'm agreeing with you that they are. Now as I said, I would give you if you were a patient of mine the homework assignment of deliberately, very deliberately going out and getting yourself into trouble. In other words, taking the most eligible males you can find at the moment and forcing yourself, risking yourself to be you.
Are you saying even if it were like if I went into a doctor's office to start a conversation with him because he was attractive to me or he appealed to me? Right. Even go so far as to starting out a conversation with him, a personal one?
Why not? If he's an eligible individual, any kind of an eligible individual. Well, I know you accept that but that seems awfully brazen or something.
Well, let's suppose it is brazen. What have you got to lose? The worst he can do is reject you.
And you don't have to reject you if you were thinking along the lines that we've been talking five minutes or so. Oh, yeah. Now can you try to do that?
I think, I think so. It sort of gives me a spurt to go out and see. You're right, that's all I can do is be rejected.
Right, and that leaves you intact. It just leaves you, unfortunately, not for the moment getting what you want. So you try.
The one you've already read and I'll be very interested in finding out what happens. Oh, I'm excited about it. Well, it was certainly very nice meeting you, Gloria.
Thank you, Dr I enjoyed talking with this interesting and I think highly courageous patient and thought that the session gave a pretty good illustration of a fairly typical session of rational emotive psychotherapy. How was it typical? In several ways.
In the first place, I was able rather rapidly and quickly to get to some of what I think are the philosophic cores of the patient's disturbances. To show her that the reason she is feeling shy and ashamed and afraid in this instance is because, even though partially unwittingly, she is defining herself in a very negative way or devaluing herself by blaming herself too much for imperfect behavior. Because perfectionism is the root of most human evils and she was showing some fairly typical perfectionistic notions.
So very quickly, as is usually done in rational emotive psychotherapy, we skipped some of the asides, we skipped going back into the history as some of these psychoanalysts do and we skipped some of the transference relations between us and the patient and we skipped some of the non-verbal expression. Not that we think these things are quite unimportant but we think there are of relatively little relevance to the basic core of the patient's disturbance which is her philosophy of life. And typically again, this patient showed both anxiety and low frustration tolerance which most patients showed.
And these were intertwined and,again, very usually she was then beating herself over the head, blaming herself, condemning herself for feeling these kinds of feelings. Now she did not see very clearly, at least I thought so at the beginning of the session, exactly what declarative sentences and exclamatory sentences she was telling herself to create these feelings and I endeavored to show her some of these sentences and what could be done about it. And among other things, I also, though briefly because this is just one brief session, tried to give her a homework assignment that she could go and get her teeth into and actively try to do to de-propagandize herself by going out and taking risks which normally up to now she hasn't been taking that much of.
It's interesting to note that, again quite typically, in this session although I was attacking fairly vigorously the patient's attitudes or philosophies, she did not feel an attack on her. She felt that I was supporting her, if anything, and she ended up, I thought, rather optimistically feeling that I had given her several ideas of what she could do in the future. Again rather typically, in this session I kept persuading the patient and attacking her ideas and showing her that her philosophy of life not only was such and such but that if she stuck to this kind of philosophy she had to get negative and self-defeating results from it.
And then I kept persistently going on even though at times she became defensive and wasn't quite accepting by any means what I was saying, I didn't let this bother me but kept going on against her basic core system, her value system. Because this is, again, what bothers patients, that they give up very easily on attacking their own negative evaluations of themselves and therefore they persist forever. Now there were limitations, of course, especially in terms of time, to the session and these limitations did have some effect.
For example, there was not enough time for repetition. In several sessions, I would have gone over much of the same material until I was sure that it had sunk in. Then I would have had time to get feedback from the patient to see whether she really understand, in action in particular, what I was talking about and whether she was following it up or leading herself up some other diverting pathway, which people can do.
There was no time to emphasize that she would have to continually reassess her evaluations of herself and her general philosophies and do rethinking for the rest of her life. There was no time to show the patient very much that even during this session, in relation to me and what she was saying about herself, that she was displaying her bad attitudes toward herself. And finally, there was no occasion, of course since this was an individual session, to see how she related specifically to other non-therapists as she would in group therapy, and in the midst of this group situation to show her exactly what was going on and what she could do about it.
But I do feel hopeful about the session and think that perhaps I was able at least to give the patient a few ideas which she could then go out and work on on her own. Because unless patients do work themselves with the material that we therapists give them in psychotherapy nothing eventually happens. It isn't any magic that we have for them but we can give them certain catalytic ideas and influences which then if they work and practice at, work and practice at will do them good for the rest of their lives.
