What is Rational Self Counseling?

Rational Self Counseling (RSC) is a self-help method you can use to improve the quality of your life by reducing your excessive upsets and increasing your effectiveness. It consists of 1) becoming aware of your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes and how they affect your feelings and actions, 2) evaluating your thinking using five criteria for rational or healthy thinking, and 3) replacing harmful thoughts and beliefs with ones that lead you to feel better and act more in your best interest.

You are probably aware of the connection between thoughts and feelings. If you are feeling angry, you probably notice anger producing thoughts, such as: "He shouldn’t have done that! It’s unfair! How awful!" You have also probably used thinking to change feelings, for instance by talking yourself down from a highly agitated state. But most people are not in the habit of carefully thinking about their thinking and belief systems and how those affect both their emotional and behavioral responses to life.

RSC helps you take that extra step of carefully analyzing how your thoughts, attitudes and beliefs influence your emotions and actions. It provides a method to change those that cause you unnecessary trouble. On a deeper level, RSC can help you become aware of your fundamental belief system. With your new awareness, you can then work on changing the self-destructive part of that system.

A Brief Description of how RSC Works

Fundamental to RSC is the anatomy of an emotion:

  1. You perceive, remember or imagine an event.
  2. You think certain thoughts about the event or tap into well learned attitudes or beliefs relating to the event.
  3. You have an emotional and behavioral response to your thoughts and attitudes about the event. Not to the event itself!

The last statement is key: your feelings are the result of your thoughts, attitudes and beliefs and not the event itself. This insight is fundamental to RSC and other cognitive therapies. Most of us have learned our patterns of thinking so well that we are often unaware of our thoughts and so may be unaware of the B that comes between our perceptions (A) and our feelings (C). This is called thought shorthand.

Everybody to one degree of another thinks "irrationally" at times. Our culture promotes various irrational beliefs and it is the rare individual that escapes with no significant irrationalities in his or her thought repertoire. But what do we mean by rational and irrational?

RBT defines rational thinking as thinking that:

  1. Is based on objective reality.
  2. Helps protect my life and health.
  3. Helps me best achieve my short and long-term goals.
  4. Helps me avoid unwanted conflict with others.
  5. Helps me habitually feel and act the way I want to.

Irrational (or harmful) thinking violates one or more of these criteria. Criterion #1 is the most important one because thinking that is inconsistent with reality is likely to get one into trouble. An important working assumption of RBT, then, is that a reality exists that is independent of the mind.

In principle the practice of RSC is simple: 1) pick a situation that you'd like to work on, 2) write down the facts of the situation, 3) write down how you felt in the situation, 4) write down the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs you had that you think caused your feelings, 5) test your thoughts against the criteria for rational, 6) find rational alternatives to the thoughts you identified as irrational, and 7) practice your new rational thinking in similar situations. Note that we have reversed B and C in that we write the feelings down first and then the thoughts. This is not required but it is often easier to identify how we feel and then identify our thinking than the other way round.

In actuality using RSC is a developed skill that takes understanding and practice. Understanding can be acquired from materials such as this web site, books, or a teacher or group. The practice is up to you and how motivated you are to change. A teacher or group can be very helpful in accelerating your progress by giving you feedback and tips. But you can accomplish a lot on your own if you carefully and consistently apply what you learn from the written material available on RBT. The course presented on this site will give you the information you need, and you can use the forums to get your questions answered.