The Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
What is the relationship of Reality to Rationality?
A goal of RET is to help people accept reality, including the reality of one’s own thoughts and feelings, and to reject the baseless additional evaluations they attach to reality. It is not always pleasant to accept reality, particularly grim reality. However, we seem able to work best at changing reality when we first accept the present reality and refrain from demanding that it magically change because we do not like it. The old idea that we can work to change what can be changed and accept what cannot be changed seems appropriate here. It is not a goal of RET to eliminate all feelings, not even all negative feelings. Rather, the goal is to emote and behave in ways that are not dysfunctional in the long run and in ways that ultimately promote one’s happiness and survival. By fully accepting reality and eliminating extreme, absolutist evaluations of reality, we take major steps toward that goal.
From The Principles and Practice of Rational-Emotive Therapy
By Ruth A. Wessler and Richard L. Wessler Page 35
What is reality to a limited personality embodied in a bounded being?
As local, temporal and discrete beings our present is a tiny snapshot of reality in the full sense of that word. Do we ever make enough sense of it to call that reality?
But people are convinced that reality can be known, so let’s leave off these larger questions.
I like Rational Emotive Therapy and where Albert Ellis further took it, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. What this type of thinking does is point out thinking that is truly dysfunctional, and that’s good. We can misconstrue what is happening, what has happened, and what might happen, so misconception can be a problem.
But it is the hardened absolutist appraisals and predictions that become the basis for our most neurotic behaviors. Softer, more open to revision appraisals and a wait and see attitude don’t turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Appraisals: Convinced that someone we know very little about is bad can bring out the worst in us and them. The social consequences of a sour attitude might be that someone we ought to be cooperating with behaves badly, just as we expected. People do that when we talk to them or about them in ways that bring out the worst in them.
I can think of numerous regrets I have which are mitigated by, “well how did they expect me to react to being treated like that.” Usually, this was in a situation that ought to have been a positive social experience, because that was where the relationship began.
Predictions: We don’t know the future, but being certain that something is going to be only one way prevents us from adapting to new circumstances.
Absolutist demands. The must and shoulds of people who persist in expecting the world to behave as they think it ought to rather than how it is are the active ingredients in neurosis.