Look, it's your choice how you want to feel: It really is. Here is why

After teaching health education for 33 years, and living 24 years before that and nearly 13 since I retired, I believe I can safely say that human beings have a tendency to generate more emotion in their lives than is helpful or necessary, more than they want to have, and more than they know what to do with. I certainly did my share of that for the first half of my life. It did not take long for me to realize that generating what I call a dysfunctional amount of emotion was the real underlying problem for many of my students. Many of the problems and issues they struggled with were literally defined by generating too much emotion, i.e. anger problems, anxiety disorders, depression, loneliness and toxic shame and guilt. It was what often caused and drove needless conflicts between them, and them and their teachers and parents. More emotion than was necessary or helpful, than they wanted or knew what to do with was what gave purpose to the many unhealthy behaviors I was trying to prevent and that they engaged in, or might at some point in the future. Those behaviors gave them relief. As long as they continued to generate a dysfunctional amount of emotion, such behaviors would either continue to serve a purpose in their lives or start serving one at some point in the future. As long as such behaviors served a purpose, all the information and advice I gave them would probably fall on deaf ears, or worse, add to the shame and guilt they already felt and sought relief from. Meanwhile, I was struggling myself with quite a bit of anxiety myself. It is why I was always looking for a way to help my students better manage their emotions, and to better manage my own. Then one day I was having one of those days that teachers can have, where some chronically troublesome students got the best of me. I went to complain to their counselor who was also a good friend. He was patient and listened for a while but finally said, “Look Ray, it’s your choice how you want to feel”. I did not take that well at first, but he went on to tell me about Dr. Albert Ellis’ ABC Theory of Emotions, and that there were classes offered for teachers in the Chicagoland area in Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) and Education (REBE). They were taught by an REBT therapist named Terry London. I knew the first night of my first class with Terry that I had found what I was looking for, for my students and myself. In Dr. Ellis’ ABC Theory of Emotions, A stands for an Activating Event, B stands for our Beliefs about the event, others, ourselves and life, and C stands for Consequences, or what we feel and do as a consequence of what we believe about the event, others, ourselves and life. It is like that algebraic formula we all learn, a + b = c, where a is a constant and b is a variable. If a stays the same and you change b, c changes. Likewise, if we change our beliefs about an event, others, ourselves or life, our feelings change, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse, depending on what our new beliefs are. I use the formula EVENT + THOUGHTS = FEELINGS > BEHAVIOR. I say that THOUGHTS cause feelings, not EVENTS. Here is why “It’s your choice how you want to feel” is true. There is always more than one way to think about or look at anything. Some of those ways will make us feel better, others worse. Some will make it easier to deal with what we do not like, others harder. Most of us have what Dr. Ellis called automatic irrational beliefs. They are irrational because they make us feel worse than is necessary or helpful. They are automatic from prior practice and rehearsal. However, with practice, we can learn to choose to look at things differently and feel better. Learning about this and incorporating it into my everyday life changed my life for the better forever.