Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy
{ May 19, 2008 @ 1:38 pm }
There is this last minute inclusion of Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy for the Psych Exam. I thought that it would be a nice addition to client-centered, cognitive and behavioral therapy. I wonder how it sinks in for the students. I tried it myself as I tried many and varied ways of working with the and beyond the mind. I wanted to give them something that can be used as a tool in life as they go through the increasingly challenging period of adolescence.
Looking back, I thought that had I been given enough tools to navigate through my experiences, life wouldn’t have been that tough. I could have been spared from innumerable moments of uncertainties, anxieties and irrational fears. I could have “sucked the marrow out of life” more had I not been so ill-equipped with tools to deal with the realities of life. I could have been spared from unnecessarily expecting unrealistic demands from people and myself that simply lead to suffering.
Perhaps, it’s one of the reasons I chose to “teach” Psychology and simply not practice it in a clinical setting. It seems to be a sly case of projection, but metaphysically, I am bound to rationalize the oneness of life.
The rational emotive therapy seems to be nothing but putting out fire with fire. It’s too fast to process. It’s simply, I feel not enough to get a hold of rational thoughts to put off irrational ones, since, I feel that we are simply not in our thoughts all the time.
Once we are worn-out with thinking, something else takes over. In cases of extreme fatigue and exhaustion, the monkey mind drops to the ground sleeping while a tsunami of emotions flood away. The boat floats away while the oar is tucked inside the boat. What happens now, when the mind no longer can spar the negative and irrational thoughts born of conditioning and maybe human wiring ? ( who knows, with the human genome project, almost everything ends up imprinted in the genes now).
In denial of determinism and in the perspective of life’s complexity, I feel , what resonates to me, resonates to me.
“When I live within, I do not live without”. A simple law of duality perhaps.
“There is no place where love is not”. It all boils down to–
” we are all okay”.
