Not Every Negative Emotion Needs to Be Cured

Albert Ellis, REBT, and a distinction psychotherapy should never forget

There is an idea that strikes me as both simple and revolutionary: feeling bad does not necessarily mean that we are psychologically unwell.

We can be sad and still be psychologically healthy.

We can feel afraid and still be responding appropriately to reality.

We can experience frustration, disappointment, worry, remorse, or envy without necessarily suffering from a psychological disorder.

Contemporary psychotherapy sometimes runs a curious risk: turning every form of suffering into an abnormality that needs to be eliminated. As though mental health were a permanent state of serenity, satisfaction, and optimism.

It is not.

Human life inevitably includes loss, frustration, rejection, failure, fear, separation, and death.

Perhaps the truly interesting clinical question is not:

“Is this emotion negative?”

but rather:

“Does this emotion help the person respond to reality, or is it beginning to prevent them from living?”

This is precisely where one of the central distinctions of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), developed by Albert Ellis, becomes particularly interesting.

There Are Healthy Negative Emotions

One of the fundamental ideas in REBT is the distinction between healthy negative emotions and unhealthy or dysfunctional negative emotions.

This seems paradoxical only because we have become accustomed to dividing emotions into positive and negative categories.

• Joy: positive.
• Sadness: negative.
• Enthusiasm: positive.
• Fear: negative.

But psychological life does not work in such a simple way.

Imagine that someone I love dies.

I become profoundly sad.

That sadness hurts. I may cry. I may find it difficult to concentrate. I may wake up in the morning and, for a few seconds, forget what has happened, until reality suddenly and brutally returns to consciousness.

None of this is pleasant.

But it would be strange to conclude automatically that I am psychologically ill.

Sadness can be an appropriate response to loss.

In the language of REBT, an emotion can be negative in terms of subjective experience while simultaneously being healthy in terms of its function.

It is unpleasant, but it makes sense.

It is painful, but it is not necessarily pathological.

The Problem Is Not That We Feel

This radically changes the therapeutic question.

Perhaps the goal is not to teach someone to stop feeling sadness, worry, frustration, or disappointment.

Perhaps it is to help them understand what they are doing with what they feel and what they are telling themselves about what has happened.

One person loses their job and thinks:

“I’m very sad. I liked that job. This is going to be difficult. I wish it hadn’t happened. But it has happened, and I’m going to try to work out what I can do now.”

Another person, faced with the same event, thinks:

“This could not have happened. It’s unbearable. My life is over. If I was fired, it means I’m a failure. I’ll never achieve anything again.”

The event is similar.

The pain exists in both cases.

But the relationship with that pain is profoundly different.

And this brings us to the heart of Ellis’s thinking.

It Is Not Only What Happens. It Is What We Believe About What Happens

One of the best-known contributions of REBT is the ABC model.

Put simply:

• A — Activating Event: something happens.
• B — Beliefs: we construct beliefs, interpretations, and evaluations about what happened.
• C — Consequences: emotional and behavioural consequences follow.

It is tempting to think:

Something happened to me, therefore I feel this way.

Ellis introduces a crucial variable between those two things:

Something happened to me. What am I telling myself about what happened?

This does not mean that we can simply think suffering out of existence.

A death remains a death.

A separation remains a separation.

An illness remains an illness.

Poverty does not disappear through positive thinking.

A victim of violence did not suffer because they “misinterpreted” the aggression.

Reality exists.

And some realities are terrible.

The question is different: in addition to the inevitable pain produced by an event, we may create a second layer of suffering through absolutist, catastrophic, or self-deprecating beliefs.

“It’s Terrible” Is Not Quite the Same as “It’s Very Bad”

This distinction may seem almost linguistic, but psychologically it can be enormous.

Compare:

“It is very sad that this happened.”

with:

“This could not have happened.”

Or:

“I would really like this person to love me.”

with:

“I absolutely need this person to love me.”

Or:

“I failed.”

with:

“I am a failure.”

In the first case, I acknowledge a painful reality.

In the second, I often transform an event into a global condemnation of reality, of other people, or of myself.

One of Ellis’s powerful insights was recognising how easily human beings transform preferences into demands.

• “I would like” becomes “I must.”
• “I would rather this didn’t happen” becomes “this cannot happen.”
• “It is difficult” becomes “it is unbearable.”
• “I made a mistake” becomes “I am worthless.”

And it is often in this transition that suffering increases exponentially.

Worry Is Not Necessarily Crippling Anxiety

Imagine someone waiting for the results of a medical examination.

Being worried is understandable.

Indeed, one could argue that some degree of worry is adaptive. It may encourage the person to seek information, attend appointments, prepare questions, and mobilise resources.

But worry can become something else.

The person begins to think:

• “I’m sure it’s going to be terrible.”
• “I won’t be able to cope.”
• “If I’m ill, everything is over.”

They spend nights unable to sleep.

They compulsively research symptoms.

They stop working.

They cannot talk about anything else.

The imagined future begins to destroy the actual present.

The emotion is no longer merely unpleasant. It has become disorganising.

This distinction is clinically far more interesting than simply asking whether an emotion is “positive” or “negative.”

Sadness Is Not Depression

Sadness belongs to the human condition.

We lose people.

We lose relationships.

We lose jobs.

We lose abilities.

We lose youth.

We lose possibilities.

And sometimes we even lose versions of ourselves that we thought would exist forever.

It would be profoundly inhuman to imagine that the healthy response to all these losses would be to remain emotionally untouched.

Sadness says:

“This mattered to me.”

In that sense, sadness exists precisely because there was investment, attachment, desire, or love.

The clinical question is not automatically to eliminate that sadness.

It is to observe what it becomes: its intensity, duration, context, consequences, and the way it affects the person’s ability to remain engaged with life.

Grief May Be the Clearest Example

Grief shows us, with extraordinary clarity, the limits of a psychology obsessed with eliminating suffering.

When someone we love dies, there is pain that needs to be allowed to exist.

Not because suffering is morally superior.

Not because a person has to complete certain “stages.”

And certainly not because there is some universal timetable for when suffering should end.

But because there was a relationship.

Absence exists because presence existed before it.

So when we sit with someone who is grieving, perhaps the first question should not be:

“How do we make this sadness disappear?”

Perhaps it should be:

“What place can this sadness occupy without destroying the possibility of continuing to live?”

There is an enormous difference.

We Should Not Treat Everything That Hurts

This idea has important consequences for psychotherapy.

A therapist should not behave like an emotional mechanic who immediately starts looking for the broken part.

A person arrives feeling sad.

Perhaps we do not need to “work on the sadness” in order to eliminate it.

First, we need to understand it.

• Where does it come from?
• What is it responding to?
• What does it mean to this particular person?
• What have they lost?
• What beliefs accompany that loss?
• Does the sadness allow them to remain connected to life, or has it begun to remove every possibility of movement?

Some emotions need transformation.

But others may need something else above all:

permission.

Permission to exist.

Permission to be felt.

Permission not to be immediately converted into a diagnosis.

But We Should Not Romanticise Suffering Either

The opposite movement would be equally dangerous.

To say that sadness can be healthy does not mean that every form of sadness should simply be left alone.

To say that worry can be adaptive does not mean minimising crippling anxiety.

To say that suffering belongs to life does not mean that someone should endure it indefinitely without help.

The decisive question is functional and contextual:

• What is this emotion doing in this person’s life?
• Is it helping them adapt?
• Does it allow them to acknowledge reality?
• Does it encourage them to seek solutions?
• Does it preserve their ability to love, work, think, and relate to others?
• Or has it become so intense and persistent that it has begun to imprison them?

That difference interests me far more than the simplistic division between “good” and “bad” emotions.

Perhaps Psychoanalysis Can Have a Conversation with Ellis Here

I come from a tradition that places enormous importance on individual history, the unconscious, repetition, conflict, relationships, and what a person has not yet been able to think about their own experience.

REBT begins from different assumptions and uses different methods.

But we do not need to turn schools of psychotherapy into football clubs.

I can ask, with Ellis:

“What do you believe when this happens?”

And then add a psychoanalytic question:

“Why did this belief become necessary in your history?”

I can ask:

“Is this interpretation rational?”

And then:

“Why is it emotionally so difficult to let go of it, even when intellectually you know it is not true?”

Because rationally understanding a belief and ceasing to be emotionally organised by it are two very different things.

A person can say:

“I know I don’t need everyone’s approval.”

And spend their entire life desperately seeking it.

They can say:

“I know that making a mistake does not make me a failure.”

And collapse at the first criticism.

It is precisely in this gap between what we know and what we are able to live that psychotherapy becomes fascinating.

Emotion Is Not the Enemy

Perhaps this is the idea I most want to keep.

We do not need to declare war on unpleasant emotions.

Fear can protect us.

Sadness can acknowledge a loss.

Remorse can lead to repair.

Worry can prepare us to act.

Disappointment can force us to revise our expectations.

Frustration can teach us that the world does not exist to satisfy all our desires.

Even certain forms of envy can reveal something we desire but have not yet been able to recognise within ourselves.

The problem begins when emotion stops informing us and starts governing us.

When it stops accompanying life and begins replacing it.

When we no longer simply have sadness, because sadness has begun to have us.

Perhaps Mental Health Does Not Mean Feeling Good

Perhaps we have been sold an impoverished idea of mental health.

A psychologically healthy person is not someone who wakes up happy every day.

It is not someone who is never afraid.

It is not someone who never becomes angry.

It is not someone who never suffers.

A healthy person can be devastated because someone has died.

They can be frightened before an operation.

They can be profoundly disappointed after a failure.

They can cry after a separation.

They can feel lost for a while.

Mental health may be something else.

It may be the ability to feel without being entirely destroyed by what we feel; to think about what we feel; to tolerate reality when it does not correspond to our desires; to ask for help when necessary; and, little by little, to begin investing in life again.

It is not about defeating every negative emotion.

It is about building a different relationship with them.

Because some forms of pain need treatment.

And some forms of pain simply need someone who is capable of staying with us while they hurt.

Not every negative emotion is an illness. Sometimes, it is simply evidence that something matters to us.