by Mark Schiffman, M.S.
John’s wife just left him, his kids hate him, and he just lost his job. Understandably, he is very distressed and reports feeling both angry and depressed. “So, John, what specifically can I help you with?” his therapist asks. “What would you like to feel instead of angry and depressed?” “I really want to just not care anymore” John responds. “I wish I just had thicker skin so that these things would stop bothering me already so I can finally be happy!”
According to the Practitioner’s Guide to REBT, one of the starting points to good therapy is identifying and agreeing upon treatment goals (p.79). Often times, one of the pitfalls of achieving agreement on goals is when a client has unrealistic goals. The book gives an example of Paolo, who wanted to be happy, and not care at all about the fact that his wife left him. Trying to incorporate such a belief of “I don’t care” is irrational and unrealistic. Is it really true that you don’t care that your wife left you? Having an emotional reaction and caring about such an event would be completely expected and normal.
Sometimes we delude ourselves into thinking that we really don’t care when something unfortunate happens and that might even work for a short window of time. However, in Paola’s case for example, the next time he visits his favorite diner that he used to go every Sunday morning with his now ex-wife, all of the memories and emotion will come flooding back and he will have a powerful reminder that he actually does care.
When we are confronted in life with unfortunate events, instead of setting an unrealistic goal of just “not caring,” we would probably be better off acknowledging the unfortunate reality and allow ourselves to feel appropriate negative emotions (e.g., sadness, disappointment, frustration) without getting wound up in unhealthy negative emotions (e.g., depression, unhealthy anger).
