Getting Relationships Together by Getting Yourself Together

Newborn infants often panic when a newspaper or a paper bag is rustled near their ears. To them, with their near-zero experience with the non-uterine world, any sudden change in the messages impinging on their senses may represent a great threat. As experiences increase, so may real or imagined dangers. Some dangers lessen or disappear, but others increase. As the eight-year-old shows when he or she hides in the closet at a thunderclap, experience does not necessarily teach one how to deal with fear.

How can you learn to live a relatively unpanicked life? How can you tolerate the frustrations of coupling? Not easily! Most of us learn to face crackling paper and even thunder without fear, but we tend to pick up other disturbances that interrupt our individual happiness and render us undelightful to another person who wants to keep closely relating.

Before you contemplate and get involved in couplehood, you had better keep two things in the back of your mind. First, you must make substantial headway in accepting and coping with your own life. Second, be sure to look for long-term satisfactions — not just immediate gratifications.

We emphasize coupling when we deal with happiness-seeking not because we believe that true and lasting enjoyment cannot be achieved by solitary individuals — both history and current observation prove that it can be — but because humans try, and often try repeatedly, to be in happily intimate relationships. Also, our long experience as scientists, educators, and clinicians indicates that most of us can use all the help we can get in learning how to couple happily.

We developed the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) theory of human behavior in the mid-1950s. This theory holds that people are born with strong tendencies to act both well (self-helpfully) and badly (self-defeatingly), but that they have considerable choice in the way they react. You, as a human, are born with two conflicting tendencies: a tendency to needlessly (and, hence, neurotically) disturb yourself, and a tendency to seek enjoyable, non-disturbed thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. REBT tries to help you to enhance the positive second tendency and to reduce the strength and persistence of the first, which is often reinforced by yourself and by others.

Before we get to the major principles of REBT and how to apply them to your life, let us present some basic facts about humans and human behavior.

First off, all human behavior (thinking, perceiving, feeling, and acting) derives from individuals. No proof has ever been uncovered of a collective unconscious, let alone a collective conscious. Also, there is no such thing as a mystical couple merged into one being. Therefore, you have to make efforts at changing a relationship first within yourself. Then you have to agree with your partner that you will do or not do certain things to improve your relationship, and vice versa. But whatever middle ground you come to as a couple, your actions or inactions (and the attitudes behind them) still belong to you (Individual A) and to your partner (Individual B) separately.

Keeping that in mind, know that you can only directly change yourself. Even if you are a therapist, all you can do is try to make change seem attractive and interesting and possible for someone else — it's up to the individual whether or not s/he makes the change. If you think you can change Individual B or that s/he automatically should change (because, after all, look how wonderfully changed you are), trouble will likely ensue!

Individuals function more effectively and enjoyably when they learn to reduce their tendency — either instilled early on or possibly innate — to rate themselves. Contrary to many other psychotherapists and educators, we have long contended that self-esteem is something to shun rather than to embrace and enhance. By all means take satisfaction in your behavior — your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions — and rate or have your behavior rated by others as "good" or "bad." But rating your personhood, your totality, your self is bound to be incomplete and inaccurate. Is a "good person" always "good" and therefore a "good" hockey player, orator, or electronic troubleshooter all at once? Self-ratings can have distracting and disturbing effects. If you are focused on "How am I as a person?" or "Am I what others rate me to be?" you are probably reducing the effectiveness of what you are doing to that degree. Self-rating leads to self-cremating.

The next principle is a tough one to understand and difficult to act on in your daily life, as most of us have been immersed in the process of rating the total person (ourselves and others) since infancy. "She's a good baby." "I'm a bad person." Many of the efforts of REBT are directed toward helping people overcome their tendencies to rate themselves and others as persons, and instead only to evaluate actions. By rating people's actions, separate from their personhood, we can learn to live more happily.

Let's step back for a moment to examine the ABCs of REBT. A stands for the activating events or adversities in your life — the phone is ringing, your jury duty notice has arrived, or your life raft has developed a leak. B is your beliefs or belief system, or how you filter the A's. C is for consequences (emotional and behavioral) and is a result of how you used B to deal with A. Like most people, you probably thought that A (adversities) produces C (consequences) directly and naturally. But that isn't necessarily the case. REBT teaches you to understand that your Bs largely effect your Cs. Let us illustrate.

Charlene, an intelligent and energetic fifteen-year-old, sought therapy because, in her words: "I have just squarely faced the fact that I am a lesbian, and naturally it blows my mind. What a shit I am for letting myself be attracted to women. I've known about my lesbianism for a long time, but I kept telling myself that it would blow over — it was a phase I was going through. Now I'm looking at it — I'm a total goddamned dyke. And it's terrible, and I hate it! I am miserable. I don't want to live, but my mother, who doesn't know what's eating me but knows something is, made...