by Brooke Guttenberg, M.S.
‘Cause the good ole days weren’t
Always good
And tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems’
-Billy Joel, ‘83
The other day I was listening to the one and only Billy Joel, and a song lyric of his struck a chord. The above lyrics reflect two important types of beliefs in REBT, awfulizing and wonderfulizing.
Awfulizing refers to one’s evaluation of an event as being the most horrible and terrible situation, whereas wonderfulizing is evaluating a situation as being the most amazing and incredible event. This way of thinking leads to an emotional disturbance when one continues to rigidly hold onto these beliefs, despite the thoughts being illogical, devoid of evidence, and inconsistent with reality.
For example, think about a person who broke-up with a significant other and all of a sudden she can no longer remember her reasons for doing so. All of the problems in the relationship have dissolved and she is left thinking about how amazing and incredible the relationship had been at all times. If this line of thinking continues, the individual will be left feeling anxious and depressed about the break-up. This could result in clouded judgment about what the appropriate next steps may be. For instance, the individual may want to get back together for the wrong reasons. Similarly, we may wonderfulize periods of our life that may have been filled with exciting and memorable times, but were not short of mishaps and missteps; however, it’s the former we choose to wipe from our recollections.
On the other extreme, at times, we may think about the future and all of the potential problems or pitfalls we may run into. As a result, we begin to awfulize and catastrophize about the outcomes. Even if we suppose that these hypotheses are true, they may be bad, but not as horrible and terrible as they seem. However, we may disturb ourselves to the point where we avoid the situation all together.
What is Billy’s solution? In his song lyrics, Billy points out very succinctly that the good and bad times may exist together and perhaps they were not as bad or as good as they currently seem. This manner of thinking is much more flexible. Billy reminds us that rather than shifting between the extremes of amazing and horrible, it’s important to put things in perspective. Glorifying or awfulizing our experiences keeps us from accurately evaluating situations and can result in self-defeating emotions and behaviors. We may strive to recreate situations that were not as perfect as we are currently remembering and shy away from experiences that we do not have evidence will be as terrible as we are projecting.
