Chapter 21 – Additional Emotive and Behavioral Approaches to a Good Life
While many negative emotions are unhealthy, you can have negative feelings that are healthy. It is important to understand the distinction between the two. Ellis says that extreme sorrow and unhappiness (healthy negative emotions) do not equal depression, despair, shame, and self-downing (unhealthy negative emotions). Even 99% unhappiness does not equal 1% of depression. These two feelings are on different emotional planes.
REBT does not teach you to be happy when things go wrong. That would be crazy, and would end up hurting you (even killing you). If you were equally happy whether your goals where blocked or not, what incentive would you have to take care of yourself and improve yourself? What REBT does teach is to not let your negative emotions become overwrought when things go wrong. It encourages you to feel healthy negative emotions when you your goals are blocked (like frustration and disappointment) but to avoid feeling depressed and enraged and self-downing when your goals are blocked.
Feeling merely unhappy when an important goal is blocked (as opposed to depressed) is healthy because it results in you taking action to correct things. Depression, despair, self-downing however are never healthy, and it’s better to minimize those emotions in your life.
Healthy negative emotions like frustration arise when you strongly prefer, desire, or want something and your preferences are blocked. “I desire for this girl to want to sleep with me.” If you think this way, and she does not want to sleep with you, thus blocking your desire, you will feel healthy frustration. This healthy frustration will probably motivate you to figure out what you could have done differently, and what you will do differently in the future to better achieve your goals.
If instead of preferring or desiring that this girl would want to sleep with you, you instead thought about it in a demanding way such as “This girl absolutely must want to sleep with me!” you set yourself up for emotional trouble. Because if you think this way, and she doesn’t want to sleep with you, you will conclude “It is awful that she won’t sleep with me as she must! I can’t stand that she is not attracted to me! I will fail with all girls! I am in inadequate person because she doesn’t desire me!” With these highly irrational, absolutistic beliefs, you make yourself depressed, despairing, ashamed, and self-downing. These emotions sap your energy, and you usually perform very poorly when experiencing them.
REBT theory says that almost everyone has overarching goals of being alive, healthy, and happy. REBT defines irrationality as any thought, idea, attitude, belief, or philosophy that sabotages your goals. Rational ideas aid you in pursuing your goals that enhance your health and happiness.
Ellis says here that shame is the essence of much human disturbance. Shame is a judgment of your bad act (which is healthy) and a judgment of you (not healthy). It signifies that you, your whole personhood, is bad and worthless because your deed is bad. REBT is consistent with the Christian belief of hating the sin but loving the sinner.
Ellis created the “shame-attacking” exercise to confront shame and to learn to accept yourself unconditionally. With the shame-attacking exercise, you do something foolish in public to deliberately try to embarrass and shame yourself, but then you use your thinking skills to unshame yourself. So for example, you might wear some outlandish outfit in public. Or you might yell out the time in the supermarket. (In Neil Strauss’ “The Game”, a PUA walked around with a dildo attached to his head as a sort of shame-attacking exercise). The idea is to do something foolish publically, but work on your thoughts and emotions so that you don’t feel ashamed or overly embarrassed.
Here's an example of someone doing a shame-attacking exercise. She appears to be walking a
on a leash through the mall:
Ellis moves on here to talk about Rational Emotive Imagery (REI). I talked about REI before and have done it myself a few times. With REI, you use your imagination to conjure up a situation that would normally cause emotional distress, then learn to change your emotions into something healthier. For example, you can imagine the worst rejection ever, the worst blow-out, and imagine it so vividly that you actually start feeling emotions like anxiety. Hold this feeling for a minute or two. Then you change your outlook about this imaginary scary thing, and change your emotions into something more manageable and less debilitating (in this case you might just feel mildly perturbed at the blow-out, rather than anxiety, rage, and dread).
As someone pointed out, Roosh suggested something similar in Day Bang.
Roosh asks you to imaging being in a coffee shop and trying to strike up a conversation with a cute girl there. She laughs condescendingly at you. Other people in the coffee shop see it and laugh hysterically too, and start contacting their friends so they can share in the laugher of you. Someone has a camera and sends a live feed to a Jumbotron.
Then Roosh points out that even in the most ridiculously bad rejection your imagination can muster, nothing truly bad happens to you. You don’t die. There’s no physical injury. Just a little red face for a few seconds. You then learn to put it behind you and move on with your life.
I would go even further than Roosh, and pull out a piece of paper and start disputing my “feeling like shit” that I initially feel. Where is the evidence I need to feel like shit? Aren’t the people in the coffee shop overacting? So this girl doesn’t like me; she is not the first and won’t be the last. I can handle that; I even expect it to happen a lot. These people don’t have any power over me unless I grant it to them. I get stronger each time I get rejected and learn to not let it bother me. She kind of did me a favor, because she provided good rejection practice for me to prove how mentally tough I can be. And so on..
Ellis says “REI, if repetitively done, thus becomes a useful REBT tool to train yourself more thoroughly to feel healthy instead of unhealthy negative emotions when bad Activating Events enter your life. By consistently using it, you can change both your thinking and feeling habits and make yourself not only less disturbed, but eventually less disturbable.”
Next up are forceful rational self-statements or coping statements. Sometimes after we identify our irrational beliefs that cause our overwrought emotions and replacement them with sensible and rational new ideas, we can still feel these overwrought emotions. This is because we still only believe our new rational ideas lightly, while we feel our old irrational ideas strongly. So use repetition to help reinforce your new rational ideas. I did this a lot when I was experiencing a lot of stress on my job a few years ago. I kept reminders on an index card in my pocket that I would look at during the day to remind me not to exaggerate or take things too seriously. Just little statements like “Relax man, nothings ruined you yet!” “This is all just a game you have to play to get your paycheck, don’t take it too serious!” Nowadays, you can put rational statements on the notepad of your smart phone. People will just think you are reading email or something. I recommend this in my book actually. Have on your phone a few reminders of things that help calm you before an approach, and look at while you’re out and about.
Next is forceful or vigorous disputes. Here you can swear and yell at your irrational thoughts. I put my own twist on this. I have you imagine your internal critic is an actual person separate from you, whose always trying to undermine you and wants you to fail, and he’s an asshole and you essentially tell him to get the fuck out of my life I don’t want you in here no more. (Don’t go full retard and go walking down the street yelling at the voice in your head though
- unless you do it as a shame-attcking exercise
)
Ellis recommends taping yourself articulating your irrational thoughts, and then confronting them in a convincing and forceful manner. Then listen back, do you sound convincing enough yet? He also suggest role playing with a friend. Have your friend speak your irrational thoughts, then like an attorney cross examine him and point out the bullshit. Switch roles.
Ellis says people rarely change themselves unless they not only rethink their self-defeating philosophies but also act against their irrational beliefs. This is the
B in RE
BT,
behavior. Thus Ellis recommends giving yourself activity based homework assignment. Of course, approaching is an excellent activity based homework assignment to change your irrational beliefs. Ellis says, while practicing your new rational thoughts, deliberately stay in anxiety-invoking situations at times, while showing yourself you can handle such situations. Rebel against your irrational thoughts. Show them whose boss. Your irrational thoughts will weaken and eventually mostly disappear when you repeatedly rebel against them with your behavior.
Ellis also recommends in vivo desensitization. This where you learn to overcome your phobia of something by gradually exposing yourself to it. If a small child was scared of rabbits, you wouldn’t lock him in a room and throw a rabbit on his head. No, what you would do is first walk in the room with a rabbit securely in your arms and stay a safe distance, and leave with it after a few seconds. Then the next day you stand a little closer and stay a little longer. Then you do that more and more. Then you get close enough and you ask the kid to touch the rabbit for a second with his index finer. And so on until he’s petting it, and eventually holding it in his lap with no fear.
I used in vivo desensitization to get over my phobia of approaching pretty women during the day (I’d say most men have this “phobia”). I started out just smiling at pretty girls on the street. Sometimes they’d smile back, sometimes they wouldn’t. Then after awhile I started saying "hello" to them. At first it was hard to do then it got ridiculously easy. (While doing all this by the way, when I got home I would fill out a REBT dispute form for each approach or near approach or abandon approach identifying my irrational thoughts that made me anxious, and replacing them with rational ones). Then after awhile I would add some elderly chat (“that’s a nice knapsack, is it a good one?”). As I was getting more and more comfortable, I’d try to challenge myself more by elongating the conversation. Very rapidly I got to the point where I could effortlessly approach striking beauties* during the day, at least a decade or more younger than me, have a pleasant conversation with them (many I had to cut off myself after 30 minutes) and ask for numbers and arranging dates. I created a philosophical transformation in myself. Some of the girls I approached have commented to me how confident and at ease I am, and how easy it is to talk to me. So I’m writing a book teaching exactly what I did for myself to conquer a lifetime of approach anxiety – with the main tools being: in vivo desensitization, many many dispute forms to restructure my core philosophies, and a little bit of REI.
Okay, that was chapter 21, we only have chapter 22-23 left (and the one I skipped 14).
* Note: Not all are striking beauties. But I approach 6s-9s routinely (mostly 6s-7s because they are more plentiful, with a few 5s by mistake).