There Are a Lot of Different Situations Where We Feel We Just Can’t Handle It
There are times when something’s really difficult, or when we see a belief that seems so wrong, or when someone does something so bad that we could lose our patience. Receptive skeptics may feel like they can’t help but scorn things that look too terrible and harmful to not. There are also times when your thoughts about yourself leave you feeling you just can’t handle it. You may scorn yourself, diminish your value, or sell your abilities short. In this post, I’m going to lay out four steps you can use to handle so much more than you imagine right now. They aren’t hard, so even if you have your doubts, give it a try.

Practicing Receptive Skepticism Is All About Being Methodological About Everything We Decide Is True
We make truth claims about ourselves and our own lives, our relationships and the people we encounter These claims set how we feel. Our epistemology process is better managed when we apply rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). You may ask, “Isn’t therapy only supposed to happen under a licensed clinician?”. No, REBT has always been promoted by licensed clinicians for self-guided use. (Still, don’t use it in place of a licensed clinician for serious problems).

How We Get Our Feelings
Albert Ellis, the father of cognitive behaviorism, and the founder of REBT, regularly shared with people that the main cause of our distress is from boxing ourselves into traps from our “musts”. Leave the old notion of the heart and the mind in conflict, replacing that with the understanding that it is actually your beliefs about one thing, being in conflict with your beliefs about something else that gives a false impression that our mind and feelings are at odds. The model showing the process is pictured below:In any circumstance we experience, both the situation, and our perception of the particulars of the situation, plus the beliefs we draw about the particulars of what it means (or at least means for us), makes emotion formation is a bit more like a recipe, where different ingredients can change the emotion quite a bit. Our biological drives and other unconscious influences, integrate at B. REBT gets to improves cognition by adding a D, and an E, to the ABC model, and applying some guiding principles that help us to better to manage our feelings.

Making ABCDE Simple and Practical
Some shortcuts to telling if we are developing a recipe of feeling based on an irrational belief are, we:

Catastrophize the situation, “This will be horrible”
Low Frustration Tolerance “I can’t stand/handle this”
Global Evaluation “I am a failure”

This is a sign of what Ellis called “Demandingness”, where we accidentally take things as absolutes. Reality is just not simply absolute with most things to the level we tend to take “musts”. And absolute things are important, so your cognitive process will lay on the aversive stimuli, (aka make you miserable).

Granted, some things are absolute for us, like:

“I must get away from this lion that’s chasing me.”. Seeing “must” as absolute makes for the right ABC recipe of feeling. The distress is just right, very high, and very unpleasant because you must get away. But for things that aren’t the language we use, easily has an unwanted and distorting effect on the beliefs we form.

Now let’s look at some of these examples:

“I must be treated with respect.”
“This shouldn’t happen”
“They should know about this”
“They can’t be doing this”

Let’s look at some even stronger examples:

“I can’t lose my job”
“We can’t lose our house”

Thinking Along These Lines, Usually Results in Us Applying the General to the Specific, Making for Very Mismatched Feelings
Think back to “I must get away from this lion that’s chasing me” There’s no room for other options with that. So if I say “I must be treated with respect”, the feelings I am going to get if I don’t maintain awareness of the nuances, are going to be pretty bad. This is a problem if mistaken as an absolute. You might not think so right away, but it’s a faulty sense of entitlement. Nobody is always treated with respect. And even the best of us can have bad days where we aren’t always respectful. But if you believe yourself entitled to respect, you have an irrational demand of others. But also, if you believe others must treat you with respect, then you also likely will demand a level of respect for others out of yourself that you can never live up to. When either happens, how awful you feel is likely to be very bad, and your tolerance for the situation is likely to be poor.

Applying D & E To “I Can’t Lose My Job”
Now let’s look at one of the more serious examples, “I can’t lose my job”. Losing a job would be very difficult to experience, but there are possibilities of a new job, worker retraining, ect. People have lost more and lived happy lives. You can lose your job and still find fulfillment in life. There’s no room for that nuance in “I can’t lose my job”. Still, it’s a bad thing to happen. We should try to avoid it, and use a lot of energy to make sure it doesn’t happen. Now I am not saying that if you use these terms, that you are thinking irrationally. If you include the nuance for the situation, then great, there’s a good chance your thoughts are rational.

No Matter Your Confidence, When You Feel You Can’t Handle Something, Test Your Reasoning With These Easy Steps

1. It doesn’t matter what writing method you use, as long as you write it down. I can’t emphasize this enough. Write it down, so implications are clear, and you don’t miss anything. Don’t try to modify it. Get the purest version of the way you can’t help but see it in that moment.

2. Lay it out in if-then style.

Example:
3. Change to ranges. Take what you wrote, and change the absolutes to their counterparts in terms of ranges/degrees.

4. Add the qualifier of “If” to any absolutes we can.


If you were in this situation, your situation would be very bad still, but the difference is how manageable it is. If you do this, and your result is no change to your feeling, then you can be more confident your reasoning process was sound. However, if you experience a different feeling about it now, then you can know your reasoning process had some errors, and your situation, while tough still, is something that you can handle better.

Here’s conversions for the examples from earlier:

“I must be treated with respect.”
It would be best to be treated with respect, and best to make sure that I do everything reasonable to get treated that way. If someone is not being respectful, it would be best to see if the situation is right for me to intervene and bring about a behavior modification.

“This shouldn’t happen”
It would be better if this didn’t happen. It is very bad this happened. It is likely to make things a lot more difficult if X, or Y is the case. It’s best to take any measures to prevent this from happening if those measures are reasonable, and if I have the resources to make a difference, and if my intervention stands a reasonable chance of success.

Conclusion
This is not all there is to REBT, there are other principles, especially unconditional self, other and life-acceptance. But as you move from reacting to problem-solving, practicing receptive skepticism in tough environments becomes a lot easier, because you aren’t getting distracted by the red herrings in your own mind as you work toward a goal of outreach.

-John Kelly

Receptive Skepticism (2017)
Featured image by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash