Rachel’s Musings

In order to do more dragon taming, I am reading Windy Dryden’s book How to Accept Yourself, which is based on Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT). He argues against self-esteem and suggests instead to work toward Unconditional Self-Acceptance (USA).

Dryden presents eleven principles of USA and suggests to copy those. So, I thought I’d share them. He gives more details on each principle in the book.

1. As a human being you cannot legitimately be given a single rating, but parts of you can be rated, as can what happens to you.
2. As a human being your essence is that you are fallible and unique.
3. You are equal to other humans in terms of shared humanity, but unequal in many specific respects.
4. When you accept yourself unconditionally, you think logically and avoid overgeneralization errors.
5. Unconditional self-acceptance is closely linked with a flexible, preferential philosophy.
6. When you accept yourself unconditionally, your emotions are healthy and your behavior is constructive.
7. If you still want to rate yourself, judge yourself against conditions that do not change in your lifetime. Thus, think of yourself as worthwhile because you are human, alive, unique, and constantly changing.
8. Unconditional self-acceptance promotes constructive action, not resignation.
9. You can learn to accept yourself unconditionally (but never perfectly, nor for all time).
10. Internalizing unconditional self-acceptance is difficult and involves hard work.
11. Internalizing unconditional self-acceptance requires force and energy.

To learn more about REBT, please check out my section in healing tools.

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting my pet dragons. It was a mixed pleasure, of course. Realizing what thoughts perpetuate my internalized singlism was somewhat frustrating (I thought I was over these!) but it was also good to see them clearly. After all, unidentified dragons are difficult to tame. “Dragons” are self-defeating thoughts that come up over and over again as repeating themes, sometimes with variations but usually easily identifiable on close inspection. Calling these thoughts dragons helps create enough distance to analyze them more carefully (although as Timothy Wilson points out that might be an uphill battle).

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In the United States, we almost seem obsessed with finding happiness, which is rather ironic because “it is not something to be sought or pursued, but a result of how we live” (Richard Eckersley. Well & Good. 104). From early on, we are taught that we will find happiness once we’ve found our soul mate. We’ll “live happily ever after.” What gets lost in this matrimania myth is teaching on how we can create a life that invites happiness without demanding that someone else be responsible for it.

Eckersley gives us some hints based on his review of what the “wise and famous” said (104):

• Focus on others, not ourselves.
• Balance wants and means.
• Be content with what we have.

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Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) and its cousin, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) have been researched quite a bit. A REBT counselor and researcher in Britain, Jim Byrne, offers this research summary. Of particular interest are his “Summary Notes On REBT Research” in Section 6 (there are no links to the sections…). The most recent meta-analysis that Byrne cites, published in 2005, concludes:

A balanced approach, analyzing both the strengths and weakness, suggest that REBT has hundreds of research articles and that high-quality studies tend to support REBT’s basic theory and efficacy.

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