Brooke Guttenberg, M.S.
How are you feeling today? Happy, sad, angry, guilty, neutral? This last option is an interesting choice. Many times, individuals enter therapy presenting with an emotional disturbance, seeking therapy to address concerns about their current emotional state. REBT aims to help these individuals replace “unhealthy negative emotions,” that are self-defeating and block an individual from achieving their goals (i.e. anxiety, depression, anger), replacing them with adaptive “healthy negative emotions” (i.e. concern, sadness, remorse). However, what happens when an individual does not want to feel a “healthy negative emotion,” but would like to feel “neutral” instead?
What does it mean to feel neutral? By definition neutral means impartial or unbiased. How would somebody know if they were feeling neutral? Is there is a physical sensation that accompanies this feeling of neutrality, such as the “butterflies” when one feels anxious, or muscle tension when one is angry? What types of behaviors accompany feelings of neutrality? We know that when an individual is anxious he or she may engage in avoidance or if a person is happy he or she may smile. What does it look like to feel neutral? Moreover, is it adaptive to feel neutral?
An individual suffering from anxiety may experience anxiety throughout the day when confronted with different activating events. These may range from a conversation with a boss, a ride on the subway, or a mistake made at work. The individual then holds a belief about these events, which lead to feelings of anxiety. We can help this individual become more flexible in their thinking, learn that they can tolerate the subway, and accept they are a fallible person. By changing their belief, they may learn to reduce their anxiety, but what will they feel instead? For an individual that does not like confronting their boss, will they ever have an absence of emotion when facing that activating event? By this I mean, is it possible to ask someone to feel neutral about an event they perceive as negative?
This seems to be a fairly unrealistic goal. Emotions such as anxiety exist for a reason. If we are confronted with a bear in the woods, feeling neutral is not going to signal our body that it is time to run. Going back to the previous example, helping an individual feel neutral when speaking to a difficult boss may not equip them to effectively assert themselves. While intense anxiety may lead to avoidance or difficulty communicating, healthy concern will keep the individual from becoming relaxed to the point of not caring, and will likely allow that person to be alert and communicate with care.
Giving-up all negative emotions may seem a viable choice in theory, but would be more detrimental in practice. If you ever catch yourself wishing to replace anxiety or anger with neutrality, think about how that emotion would benefit you the next time you run into a bear, or a boss who is just as grizzly.
