by Kristen Tobias, M.A.

In my experience of both working with clients and applying REBT to my own life, I have found the concurrent use of anti-awfulizing and frustration tolerance beliefs to be very effective.  The two types of beliefs seem to have a relationship that is symbiotic such that one can help fuel the strengthening of the other rational response and mitigate the irrational response (and thereby the unhealthy negative emotion).

At first, it might be very hard to tell yourself that something isn’t awful, especially if you have a history of rehearsing this type of thinking.  For example, you might have developed a schema that includes “It is awful for me to fail at anything.”  In REBT practice, we would dispute this irrational thought.  At first, you may only partially buy into the alternative rational belief that it is just unfortunate and not awful to fail at something.  Or, you may be able to regurgitate the rational response, but not really believe it.  It is hard to give up thinking that has been practiced over and over.

If we believe that it is awful to fail at any endeavor, we might also have the cognition,  “And I can’t stand to fail at anything!”  Let’s attack this belief.  Have you failed before?  If you are currently recalling a past failure, you have lived to stand it!   If you lived to stand a failure, you can live to stand another failure!  A failure might be hard to deal with, but human beings can tolerate failure.

Now that we believe that we can stand to live through a failure, we might be more inclined to think that it is not so awful after all.  Alternatively, if we think it is not that horrible to fail, we may be more likely to believe that we can stand failure.  The two beliefs can serve to buttress one another and individuals may differ in their proclivity to believe one versus the other.  An image of a sculptor chipping away at a piece of marble from different directions to achieve the desired outcome comes to   mind when I think about the application of this rational belief merger.  Let’s grab our chisel and hammer and get to work.

Kristen Tobias, M.A.