Our latest blog by William Taboas, M.A. I’m a firm believer that one of the major thorns to healthy psychological living is experiential avoidance; avoidance of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that come with the highs and lows in life, but more so the latter. As a variant to experiential avoidance, avoidance of mistakes contributes to prolonged misery and demoralization. And it all can be curbed by accepting that both pain and failing are parts of life. In the coming year (and the rest thereafter), you will make mistakes. There’s no doubt about that. In REBT, Dr. Albert Ellis has taught us that you can choose to disturb yourself by demanding that you don’t make mistakes, by overestimating and catastrophizing the consequences of a mistake, by telling yourself that you cannot stand the fact that you make mistakes, or by self-downing your own value as a whole for a single mistake (this applies to other-downing, as well). And guess what? By avoiding the pain altogether by not taking action or approaching a potential mistake-laden scenario, you will often lose out on a learning a potential experience. There’s usually a silver lining in a mistake. A learned experience from a mistake may be end up being a correction that will prevent or diminish the probability of future mistakes. Al would consider this an inelegant answer, though. The elegant learned experience would be that mistakes need not be something else except a mistake, and accept that we are allowed to make as many as our fallible human nature allows. And, you know what? That’s OK! Being a perfectionist or mistake-free and having Unconditional Self-Acceptance are two incompatible concepts. A preference for excelling is fine, but demanding to excel in every way without accepting your own limitations is a recipe for emotional disturbance. In the end, it won’t be catastrophic, horrific, awful, etc. You know what to do. You can endure it, and, as Dr. Ellis would say, it would be worth doing so. Now, in the spirit of Dr. Ellis’ famous shame attacks, a homework task: go make a deliberate mistak [sic]!
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:44:50 +0000
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