by Mark Schiffman, M.S.
How many times can you eat I can’t Believe it’s not Butter! before you actually believe it is not butter? How many times can you watch Stephen Curry hit a ridiculous three point shot and say “I can’t believe he just hit that shot!” We often throw around the expression “I can’t believe it” without stopping to reflect if we actually could believe it. With the two relatively frivolous examples above, the fact that we “can’t believe it” will hopefully not result in too much emotional distress (unless you are one of the few people who don’t like Stephen Curry).
The “I can’t believe it” phenomenon can become problematic when we apply it to negative things that other people do. “I can’t believe that he always leaves his socks on the floor!” “I can’t believe that my child doesn’t listen to me!” “I can’t believe that she is late again!” When we tell ourselves that we can’t believe something it can engender emotional distress because our expectations have not been fulfilled. In technical terms, this is referred to as the expectancy-reality-discrepancy. When there is a discrepancy between what we expect and the reality of what actually happened we can either adjust our expectancy or be upset that our expectations have not been met.
There is a good example of this in the Practitioner’s Guide to REBT, where a husband was upset at his wife for the fact that she always left the milk out when she got up early in the morning and by the time he used the milk for his coffee, it was already warm. Every morning he was in disbelief as to how she could be so inconsiderate to leave the milk out. The therapist inquired and discovered that she has done this approximately five days a week for forty-eight weeks a year, for eleven years, which is a total of 2,640 times. The therapist reflected that even “after 2,640 times you are still shocked and surprised about what she has done.”
How many times does he have to leave his socks on the floor/not listen to you/be late, before we stop saying “I can’t believe it!” Instead of being consistently disappointed when our expectations are not met, we may be better off looking at the evidence and changing our expectations – “Maybe I could believe it!”
