It Is Not Only What Happens to Us. It Is What We Tell Ourselves About What Happens to Us.

Albert Ellis, the ABC model, and the possibility of questioning the beliefs that turn events into suffering

There is an apparently simple idea at the heart of Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) which, when taken seriously, can profoundly change the way we understand psychological suffering:

Between what happens to us and what we feel, there is an interpretation.

It sounds obvious. Yet we rarely live as though it were.

When someone criticises us, we feel that the criticism hurt us. When we are rejected, we assume that the rejection produced our sadness. When we lose a job, we attribute our anxiety, fear, or sense of failure directly to the loss itself.

The sequence appears to be:

Event → Emotion

Albert Ellis inserted something apparently small into the middle of this equation.

And that small addition changed an important part of the history of psychotherapy.

The sequence became:

A → B → C

And it is especially in B that things become interesting.

A does not directly cause C

In the classical REBT formulation, the ABC model can be understood like this:

• A — Activating Event
  The event, situation, or circumstance that occurs.
• B — Beliefs
  The beliefs, evaluations, assumptions, and interpretations through which we understand that event.
• C — Consequences
  The emotional and behavioural consequences.

Imagine a very ordinary situation.

My boss criticises a piece of work I have done.

That is A.

Now imagine that I immediately think:

“I’m incompetent.”

“I’ve failed again.”

“I have to do everything perfectly.”

“If someone criticises my work, it means I am worthless.”

“Everyone is going to realise that I’m a fraud.”

We have entered B.

Then come anxiety, shame, anger, sadness, rumination, sleeplessness, or the desire to run away.

That is C.

The important clinical insight is not to deny that the criticism happened.

It happened.

The insight is to recognise that the same criticism would not necessarily produce the same psychological consequences in another person.

Someone else might think:

“I didn’t enjoy hearing that, but perhaps there is something I can learn from it.”

Another person:

“My work was criticised. I was not destroyed.”

And another:

“I can have done a poor piece of work without being a poor human being.”

The event may be essentially the same.

The interpretation has changed.

And when interpretation changes, emotional experience can change with it.

The little tyrant living inside us

Ellis was particularly interested in rigid forms of thinking.

They often sound like this:

• I must.
• I should.
• I have to.
• I can’t stand this.
• This must not have happened.
• I absolutely need to be loved.
• I must be competent.
• Other people must treat me fairly.

There is nothing pathological about wanting certain things.

It is perfectly human to desire love, recognition, competence, safety, and justice.

The difficulty begins when a preference becomes an absolute demand made upon reality.

There is an enormous psychological difference between saying:

“I would really like people to like me”

and:

“I need people to like me in order to have value.”

Between:

“I would rather not fail”

and:

“I must not fail.”

Between:

“This is extremely difficult”

and:

“This is unbearable.”

Reality may be exactly the same.

But the second formulation adds suffering to suffering.

“What is the evidence?”

There is an extraordinarily simple question running through this therapeutic tradition:

What is the evidence for what I believe?

If someone thinks:

“I am a failure.”

we might ask:

• A failure at what?
• Always?
• In every area of life?
• What evidence supports that conclusion?
• What evidence contradicts it?
• Are we dealing with a fact or an interpretation?
• Does one particular failure logically allow us to transform an entire human being into “a failure”?

This is where therapy becomes something more than reassurance.

The therapist does not simply say:

“Don’t think like that.”

Nor does the therapist automatically replace:

“I’m a failure”

with:

“I’m wonderful.”

That would merely replace one absolute statement with another.

The work is more demanding.

It is an investigation.

We are terrible lawyers when defending our own beliefs

There is something fascinating about human psychology.

Once we develop a deep belief about ourselves, we often begin collecting evidence that confirms it.

If I believe nobody likes me, I notice rejection.

If I believe I am incompetent, my mistakes become enormous while my successes become accidents.

If I believe I will be abandoned, a delayed message can become evidence of impending abandonment.

The belief begins to organise perception.

We are no longer simply looking at the world.

We are looking at the world through a theory about ourselves.

And then we use what we see as evidence that the theory was correct all along.

A circle emerges:

Belief → Interpretation → Emotion → Behaviour → Consequence → Confirmation of the belief

This is why questioning a belief is not merely a matter of finding “positive thoughts”.

It means discovering the mechanism through which we construct our experience.

The event may be happening today. The emotion may come from much further back.

This is where I find it particularly interesting to bring the ABC model into conversation with psychodynamic and psychoanalytic thinking.

Not every belief was born yesterday.

A person may react with apparently disproportionate intensity to a criticism in the present because that criticism touches a much older emotional organisation.

The boss says:

“This report needs improvement.”

But something inside the person hears:

“You are never good enough.”

And that sentence may be twenty, thirty, or forty years old.

This is precisely where different psychotherapeutic traditions can speak to one another without having to cancel each other out.

REBT might ask:

What belief stands between the event and its consequence?

Psychoanalysis might add:

• Where did that belief come from?
• Within which relationships was it formed?
• Why did it acquire such power?
• Why does it return in precisely this form?
• What unconscious fear, fantasy, conflict, or need continues to organise it?

One approach may seek to dispute the belief.

The other may seek to understand the history that once made that belief necessary.

These questions do not have to be enemies.

It is not enough to tell someone that they are wrong

Here we encounter an essential difficulty.

Core beliefs are not computer files that can simply be deleted and replaced.

A person may understand intellectually:

“I know I am not a failure.”

and remain emotionally convinced that they are.

Someone may know perfectly well:

“Not everyone has to like me.”

and still suffer enormously whenever someone dislikes them.

A person may repeat:

“I have value.”

and feel exactly the opposite.

Because knowing is not yet transformation.

Deep beliefs are often built over years. They are connected to experiences, relationships, memories, emotions, defences, and ways of relating both to ourselves and to others.

That is why psychotherapy is a process.

Transformation rarely occurs because somebody said one extraordinary sentence during a therapy session.

It happens through repetition.

Thinking.

Feeling.

Observing.

Questioning.

Experimenting.

Failing.

Thinking again.

And sometimes through experiencing, within the therapeutic relationship itself, something different from what we expected to encounter.

The danger of turning Ellis into a salesman for positive thinking

It would be a serious simplification to reduce Albert Ellis to the idea of “thinking positively”.

REBT does not say:

“Everything will be fine.”

It says something far more interesting:

“Even if things do not turn out as you hoped, that does not necessarily mean what you are telling yourself it means.”

• I can lose my job without becoming a failure.
• I can be rejected without becoming unworthy of love.
• I can make a mistake without becoming a mistake.
• I can suffer without concluding that the suffering is unbearable.
• I can deeply desire something without declaring that the universe is obliged to give it to me.

The distinction is enormous.

Rational thinking does not eliminate reality.

It can eliminate some of the catastrophe we add to reality.

Acceptance is not resignation

The famous Serenity Prayer, commonly associated with the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, expresses a distinction that speaks surprisingly well to this perspective: the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish between the two.

There is an important subtlety here.

Acceptance does not mean liking something.

Accepting that I was rejected does not mean wanting rejection.

Accepting that I have lost something does not mean avoiding grief.

Accepting a limitation does not mean abandoning growth.

Acceptance means, among other things, ceasing to demand that a past reality become different from what it was.

Some psychological battles cannot be won because the opponent is an event that has already happened.

Perhaps we need to add two more letters to ABC

The ABC model is wonderfully clear and pedagogical. REBT subsequently extended this reasoning.

After identifying:

• A — Activating Event
• B — Belief
• C — Consequence

we can move towards:

• D — Disputation
  Actively questioning the irrational belief.

And then:

• E — Effective new belief or philosophy

Not:

“I must be loved by everyone.”

But:

“I want to be loved, but I can live without everyone’s approval.”

Not:

“I must never fail.”

But:

“I prefer to succeed, but failure is part of being human.”

Not:

“This was terrible, therefore my life is over.”

But:

“This was profoundly painful, and my life continues.”

Notice something important.

The new belief does not have to sound beautiful.

It has to be more realistic, more flexible, and more liveable.

Between the event and our response, there is room to think

Perhaps one of the most valuable contributions of this model is that it restores some degree of psychological freedom.

We cannot control everything that happens to us.

We cannot control the past.

We cannot control every other person.

We cannot fully control loss, rejection, ageing, illness, or death.

But we can gradually learn to observe what our minds do with these realities.

We can ask:

• What actually happened?
• What am I telling myself about what happened?
• What belief is hidden here?
• What emotion appeared?
• How did I behave because of it?
• What evidence supports this belief?
• What evidence contradicts it?
• Am I expressing a preference or making an absolute demand?
• Is there another equally realistic way of interpreting this?

These questions appear small.

But they can open a crack in a mental system that we had mistaken for reality itself.

And perhaps this is where Ellis and psychoanalysis meet

At first sight, they may appear to belong to very different worlds.

Ellis asks about beliefs.

Freud might ask about conflict.

Jung might ask about the shadow and symbolic meaning.

Contemporary psychoanalysis might ask about attachment, repetition, the internal world, and the relationship being created between patient and therapist at that very moment.

But beneath these different traditions lies a question that connects them:

Why does this particular person experience what happened in this particular way?

It is a beautiful question.

Because two people can go through apparently similar events and construct radically different inner worlds.

Psychotherapy begins precisely when we stop asking only:

“What happened to you?”

and begin asking:

“What happened inside you with what happened to you?”

Perhaps that is the real territory of transformation.

Not erasing history.

Not manufacturing a new personality.

Not replacing suffering with optimistic slogans.

But becoming able to look at an old belief and, perhaps for the first time, recognise:

This is a belief. It is not necessarily reality.

And in that small space between what happened and what we came to believe about what happened, something extraordinary can emerge:

the possibility of responding differently.

Something to take with you

The next time something deeply disturbs you, try not to ask only:

“Why did this happen to me?”

Add another question:

“What am I telling myself about what happened to me?”

And then a third:

“What if what I believe is not the whole truth?”

Sometimes transformation begins precisely there.

We cannot rewrite what happened. But we can understand, question, and transform the way we continue making it happen inside us.

Pedro Fernandes

#Psychology #Psychotherapy #AlbertEllis #REBT #ABCModel #CognitiveTherapy #Psychoanalysis #MentalHealth #Beliefs #SelfKnowledge #PersonalDevelopment