REBT teaches three types of acceptance:
(1) unconditional self-acceptance;
(2) unconditional other-acceptance;
(3) unconditional life-acceptance.
According to Albert Ellis, each of these types of acceptance is based on three core beliefs:
Unconditional self-acceptance:
- I am a fallible human being; I have my good points and my bad points.
- There is no reason why I must not have flaws.
- Despite my good points and my bad points, I am no more worthy and no less worthy than any other human being.
Unconditional other-acceptance:
- Other people will treat me unfairly from time to time.
- There is no reason why they must treat me fairly.
- The people who treat me unfairly are no more worthy and no less worthy than any other human being.
Unconditional life-acceptance:
- Life doesn’t always work out the way that I’d like it to.
- There is no reason why life must go the way I want it to.
- Life is not necessarily pleasant but it is never awful and it is nearly always bearable.
Why is this useful for OCD?
As OCD sufferers we are terrified of our fears. But because we can’t absolutely prove that these fears could never come true, there’ll always be a seed of doubt in each and every case of OCD suffering no matter how many exposures you do. Or how often we are told “thoughts are just thoughts” and “go with uncertainty”.
If you feel there’s a chance that the fear could come true (something we often greatly fear) then the cycle continues. The same goes with food contamination OCD. If you are terrified you might poison your whole family through serving undercooked chicken, we can apply the principles of unconditional self and life acceptance. So we change our thinking to “I really wouldn’t want to make my family unwell so of course I will be hygienic and careful when preparing meals however it hardly makes sense to dread the event of my family becoming unwell. Even if it did, worse has happened in the grand scheme of the whole world and it’s not something to build my entire life around avoiding and it hardly makes me a terrible person if I made an error that led to my family becoming unwell”. These examples can be applied across all areas of OCD fears and, while tricky to get our head around at first, once we start to realise that in reality there is nothing to fear as much as we imagine we need to, the OCD cycle starts to unlock. This same theory can be applied across all areas of OCD and whilst extremely challenging at first and difficult to grasp (particularly in the case of harm related OCD) the application of unconditional self and life acceptance and the idea that no one act can entirely write a human’s worth or value off, we start to train our brain to the realisation that there really is nothing to fear. OCD sufferers are often terrified of making a mistake, or of situations in life happening that are beyond our control. Once we accept that humans are fallible, the life does take turns and that we don’t need to fear this, freedom is ours.
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