Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

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Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) is a comprehensive, active-directive, philosophically and empirically based psychotherapy which focuses on resolving emotional and behavioral problems and disturbances and enabling people to lead happier and more fulfilling lives. REBT was created and developed by the american psychotherapist and psychologist Albert Ellis who was inspired by many of the teachings of Asian, Greek, Roman and modern philosophers. REBT is one of the first and foremost forms of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and was first expounded by Ellis in the mid-1950s.

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[edit] Overview

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) is both a psychotherapeutic technique and school of thought established by Albert Ellis. Originally called Rational Therapy, its appellation was revised to Rational Emotive Therapy in the 1970s, then to its current appellation in the early 1990s. REBT was the first of the cognitive or cognitive behavior therapies as it is predicated in articles Ellis first published in the 1950s [1], nearly a decade before Aaron Beck first set forth his Cognitive Therapy [2].

One of the fundamental premises of REBT is that people, in most cases, do not merely get upset by unfortunate adversities, but also through how they construct their view of reality through their evaluative beliefs, meanings and philosophies about these adversities. In REBT therapy clients usually learn and begin to apply this premise by learning the A-B-C-model of psychological disturbance and change. The A-B-C model first states that it normally is not merely A, adversities (or activating events) that lead to a disturbed and dysfunctional emotional and behavioral consequences - at C, but adversity times what people B, believe (the explicit and implisit meanings and philosophies) in relation to these events and their personal desires and preferences. This belief system is highly evaluative and consists of interrelated cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects. Generally, if the evaluative "B" about the activating event "A" is rooted in an illogical, unrealistic and self-defeating belief the emotional and behavioral consequence is likely to be un-healthy and destructive. Or, alternatively, if it is rooted in a empico-logical, constructive and self-helping belief the emotional and behavioral consequence is likely to be healthy and constructive. It is also important to understand that an “A” can be an internal or an external situation and it can refer to an event in the past, present, or future.[3]

By understanding the role of their mediating, evaluative and philosophically based illogical, unrealistic and self-defeating meanings and interpretations in upset, clients often can learn to identify them, begin to D, dispute, falsify, challenge and question them and come up with more rational and functional ones for them to subsequently begin to experience relief from their self-defeating emotions and behaviors.[4]


An illustration of the thinking-context connection:

Imagine that you are standing at one edge of a cleared field. From a distance of about sixty feet away, someone throws a small, fist-sized object toward the general vicinity of your head and shoulders. What do you do? Some possible answers: (1) run away, (2) duck, (3) run toward that person to act aggressively toward them, (4) call the police, (5) try to catch it and throw it back at them, (6) other____________________.

OK. Have you chosen what you would do? Is it one of the above, other than “other”? If it is “other”, does “other” still fall into the same general sort of response? If yes, why would you do that when you are standing at home plate with a bat in your hands? Most people answer the question in the first paragraph of this section with one of the first three suggested answers. The reason is that, with no further information given (such as the above paragraph gives) most people interpret (or believe) that action of throwing the “small fist-sized object” (also known as a baseball or softball) to be aggressive and/or threatening. When you add the additional detail of the ball game scenario, your belief about the action changes and so does your response. The situation did not change, your belief changed. With the change of belief came a change of feeling. Instead of fear, you might have felt anxiety (over probably striking out), confidence that you would put it over the wall, or glad for the opportunity to show off your skills. Of course, other responses are also possible, but the point is made.


The REBT framework assumes that humans have both innate rational (meaning self- and social-helping and constructive) and irrational (meaning self- and social-defeating and un-helpful) tendencies. REBT claims that people to a large degree create and construct emotional difficulties such as self-blame, self-pity, clinical anger, hurt, guilt, shame, depression and anxiety, and behaviors and behavior tendencies like procrastination, over-compulsiveness, avoidance, addiction and withdrawal by the means of their irrational and self-defeating thinking, emoting and behaving. REBT is then an educational process in which the therapist often active-directively teaches the client how to identify irrational and self-defeating beliefs which in nature are rigid, extreme, unrealistic, illogical and absolutist, and then to forcefully and actively falsify and dispute them and replace them with more rational and self-helping ones. By using different cognitive, emotive and behavioral methods and activities, the client, together with help from the therapist and in homework exercises, can gain a more rational, self-helping and constructive rational way of thinking, emoting and behaving. One of the main objectives in REBT is to show the client that whenever unpleasant activating events occur in people's lives, they have a choice of making themselves feel healthily and self-helpingly sorry, disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed, or making themselves feel unhealthily and self-defeatingly horrified, terrified, panicked, depressed, self-hating, and self-pitying [5]. By attaining a more rational and self-constructive philosophy of themselves, others and the world, people often are more likely to behave and |emote in a more life-serving and adaptive ways.

Albert Ellis[6] posits three major insights of REBT:

Insight 1 - People seeing and accepting the reality that their emotional disturbances at point C do not stem from the activating events or adversities at point A that precede C. Although A contributes to C, and although strong negative A’s (such as being assaulted or raped) are much more likely to be followed by disturbed C’s (such as feelings of panic and depression) than they are to be followed by weak A's (such as being disliked by a stranger), the main or more direct cores of emotional disturbances (C's) are people’s irrational beliefs—the absolutistic musts and their accompanying inferences and attributions that people strongly believe about their undesirable activating events.

Insight 2 - No matter how, when, and why people acquire self-defeating, irrational beliefs that mainly lead to their dysfunctional, emotional-behavioral consequences, if they are disturbed today, they tend to keep holding these irrational beliefs and upsetting themselves by them -- not because they held them in the past but because they are still actively, though often unconsciously, reaffirming them and acting as if they are still valid. They still follow, in their minds and in their hearts, the core "musturbatory " philosophies that they may have taken over or invented years ago, or that they have more recently accepted or constructed for themselves.

Insight 3 - No matter how well they have achieved insight 1 and insight 2, insight alone will rarely enable people to undo their emotional disturbances. They may feel better when they know, or think they know, how they became disturbed and are still making themselves upset largely because they believe these insights to be useful and curative. It is unlikely, however, that they will really get better and stay better unless they accept insights 1 and 2 and also go on to 3: There is usually no way but work and practice to keep looking for and finding one’s core irrational beliefs; to actively, energetically, and scientifically dispute them; to replace one’s absolutist musts with flexible preferences; to change one's unhealthy feelings to healthy, self-helping emotions; and to firmly act against one’s dysfunctional fears and compulsions. Only by a combined cognitive, emotive, and behavioral, as well as a quite persistent and forceful, attack on one's serious emotional problems is one likely to significantly ameliorate or remove them—and keep them removed.

Originator Albert Ellis sums up the cognitive-affective processes like this[7]: "REBT assumes that human thinking, emotion, and action are not really separate or disparate processes but that they all significantly overlap and are rarely experienced in a pure state. Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind—a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind—of thought. But emotions and behaviors significantly influence and affect thinking, just as thinking. Evaluating is a fundamental characteristic of human organisms and seems to work in a kind of closed circuit with a feedback mechanism: Because perception biases response and then response tends to subsequent perception. Also, prior perceptions appear to bias subsequent perceptions, and prior responses appear to bias subsequent responses. What we call feelings almost always have a pronounced evaluating or appraisal element."

Albert Ellis further points out, "People are born and reared with the ability to look at the data of their lives, particularly the negative things that happen to them against their goals and interests, and to make inaccurate inferences and attributions about these data."

From whence do people's self-sabotaging irrational and self-defeating tendencies originate? REBT proposes that many of these self-defeating cognitive, emotive and behavioral tendencies are both innately biological and indoctrinated early in and during life, and further grow stronger as a person continually revisits and self-propagandizes them.

REBT differs from psychoanalysis in that it places little emphasis on exploring the past, but instead focuses on changing the current evaluations and philosophical thinking about people's lives, others and themselves.

[edit] Psychological Dysfunction and Mental Wellness

One of the main pillars of REBT is that irrational patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving are the cause of much, though hardly all, human disturbance. REBT teaches that when people turn flexible preferences, desires and wishes into grandiose absolutistic jehovian demands and commands, they disturb and upset themselves. Albert Ellis has suggested three core beliefs that humans disturb themselves through[8]:

  • "I absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, perform well (or outstandingly well) and win the approval (or complete love) of significant others. If I fail in these important—and sacred—respects, that is awful and I am a bad, incompetent, unworthy person, who will probably always fail and deserves to suffer." This belief usually contributes to feelings of anxiety, panic, depression, despair, and worthlessness.
  • "Other people with whom I relate or associate, absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, treat me nicely, considerately and fairly. Otherwise, it is terrible and they are rotten, bad, unworthy people who will always treat me badly and do not deserve a good life and should be severely punished for acting so abominably to me." This belief usually contributes to feelings of anger, rage, fury, and vindictiveness and lead to actions like fights, feuds, wars, genocide, and perhaps ultimately an atomic holocaust.
  • "The conditions under which I live absolutely MUST, at practically all times, be favorable, safe, hassle-free, and quickly and easily enjoyable, and if they are not that way it's awful and horrible and I can't bear it. I can't ever enjoy myself at all. My life is impossible and hardly worth living." This belief usually contributes to frustration and discomfort, intolerance, self-pity, anger, depression, and to behaviors such as procrastination, avoidance, and inaction.

REBT commonly posits that at the core of irrational beliefs there often is an explicit or implicit rigid demand and command, and that extreme derivatives like awfulizing, low frustration tolerance, people deprecation and over-generalizations are accompanied by these. A key tenet in the REBT framework is that the evaluative belief system, based on core philosophies, is very likely to create unrealistic, arbitrary, and crooked inferences and distortions in thinking. REBT therefore first teaches that when people in an insensible and devoutly way overuse absolutistic, dogmatic and rigid "shoulds", "musts", and "oughts", they disturb and upset themselves. REBT holds that that devoutly held absolutistic philosophies and beliefs often contribute to disturbances, and that these inflexible and self-defeating philosophies are better replaced with more flexible, self-constructive and self-helping attitudes.

Disturbed evaluations generally occur through over-generalization, wherein people exaggerate and globalize events or traits, usually unwanted events or traits or behavior, out of context, while almost always ignoring the positive events or traits or behaviors. For example, awfulizing is mental magnification of the importance of an unwanted situation to a catastrophe, elevating the rating of something from bad to worse than it should be, to beyond totally bad, worse than bad to the intolerable and to a holocaust. The same exaggeration and overgeneralizing occurs with human rating, wherein humans come to be defined by their flaws or misdeeds: the person is bad based on bad behavior or bad traits. Frustration intolerance occurs when one perceives something to be too difficult, painful or tedious, and by doing so exaggerates these qualities beyond one's ability to cope with them.

As would be expected, REBT argues that mental wellness results from a surfeit of rational and self-helping ways of thinking, emoting and behaving. When an undesired and stressful activating event occurs, and the individual is interpreting, reacting to and evaluating the situation rationally and self-helpingly, then the resulting consequence is likely to be more healthy, constructive and functional. This does not mean a relatively undisturbed person never experiences negative feelings, but REBT does hope to keep debilitating unhealthy affect and behavior to a minimum. To do this REBT promotes a flexible, un-dogmatic, self-helping and efficient belief system and constructive philosophy about adversities.

REBT acknowledges and emphasizes that people in addition to disturbing themselves, also are innately constructivists. Because they largely upset themselves with their beliefs, they can be helped to examine, to question, to think about these beliefs and thereby to develop a more workable, more self-helping set of constructs.

REBT teaches:

  • That the concepts of unconditional self-acceptance, other-acceptance, life-acceptance are of prime importance in achieving mental wellness and mental health.
  • That human beings are inherently fallible and unperfect and that they had better accept their and other human being’s totality and humanity, while at the same time not like some of their behaviors or characteristics. That they had better consider themselves valuable simply because they are alive and kicking, and are better off not measuring their entire self or their "being," or giving themselves any global rating, because all people are continually evolving and are therefore far too complex to rate, and all humans do both good and bad deeds and have both good and bad attributes and traits. REBT holds that ideas and feelings about self-worth are largely definitional and are not empirically confirmable or falsifiable.
  • That people had better accept life with its hassles and difficulties not in accordance with their wants, while trying to change what they can change and live and as elegantly as possible with what they can not change.

[edit] REBT Therapy

As Albert Ellis[9] explains: "Humans, unlike just about all the other animals on earth, create fairly sophisticated languages which not only enable them to think about their feeling, and their actions, and the results they get from doing and not doing certain things, but they also are able to think about their thinking and even think about thinking about their thinking." This is quite essential to the REBT thought. Ellis, also points out that "because of their self-consciousness and their ability to think about their thinking, they can very easily disturb themselves about their disturbances and can also disturb themselves about their ineffective attempts to overcome their emotional disturbances". In REBT terminology, this is referred to as secondary disturbances.

One of the most popular methods in REBT is as explained forceful and active disputing. Central in REBT is helping the client challenge, falsify and question the irrational and self-defeating evaluations and interpretations they construct in relation to their adversities and preferences. These disputing processes incorporate cognitive-philosophic, emotive-evocative-dramatic, and behavioral methods necessary to successfully challenge the irrational beliefs. In therapy the therapist may point out irrational and self-defeating beliefs, but he or she also teaches the client how to dispute them and come up with constructive alternatives in day-to-day life outside of therapy and also gives the client homework exercises.

By using emotive, cognitive and behavioral methods the client learns effective ways to dispute, question and replace the irrational and self-defeating beliefs with more rational and self-constructive ones, which then are likely to cause and create healthier and more constructive emotions and behavior. The therapist is most interested in finding core beliefs and deep rooted philosophical evaluations. These contribute to automatic negative inferences and higher level cognitions.

REBT acknowledges that understanding and insight are not enough. In order for clients to significantly change, they had better pinpoint their irrational philosophies and work forcefully and actively at changing them to more functional and self-helping attitudes. Although REBT teaches that the therapist had better demonstrate unconditional other-acceptance, the therapist is not necessarily always encouraged to build a warm and caring relationship with the client. The therapist's most important task is to aid the client in identifying and confronting irrational thinking, emotive, and behavioral processes and, through a manner of ways and methologies, to replace them with more rational ones.

REBT posits that the client has to work hard to get better, and this work may include homework assigned by the therapist. The assignments may for example include desensitization tasks, i.e., by having the client confront the very thing he or she is afraid of. By doing so, the client is actively acting against the belief which often is contributing greatly to his disturbance.

Often REBT focuses on specific problems and is used as a brief therapy, but in deeper and more complex problems longer therapy is promoted. Another factor contributing to the brevity of REBT is that the therapist helps the client learn how to get better through hard work, and to help himself get through future adversities. It holds that hard work, and hard work only, is the way to get better and to stay that way. REBT only rarely promotes any temporary solutions. An ideal successful collaboration between the REBT therapist and a client results in changes to the client's philosophical way of evaluating him- or herself, others, and his or her life, and which is likely to yield effective results: The client moves toward unconditional self-acceptance, other-acceptance and life-acceptance.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ellis, A. (1957). Rational psychotherapy and individual psychology. Journal of Individual Psychology, 13, 38-44.
  2. ^ Beck, A. (1970). Cognitive therapy: Nature and relation to behavior therapy. Behavior Therapy, 1(2), 184-200.
  3. ^ StressGroup USA. (2004) The ABC's of REBT: Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy explains how our thoughts affect our feelings, Retrieved November 19, 2007 from, http://www.stressgroup.com/abcscrashcourse.html
  4. ^ Ellis, Albert. (1994). Reason and Emotion In Psychotherapy, Revised and Updated. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group
  5. ^ Ellis, Albert (2003). Early theories and practices of rational emotive behavior theory and how they have been augmented and revised during the last three decades. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 21(3/4)
  6. ^ Ellis, Albert (2003). Early theories and practices of rational emotive behavior theory and how they have been augmented and revised during the last three decades. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 21(3/4)
  7. ^ Ellis, Albert (2003). Early theories and practices of rational emotive behavior theory and how they have been augmented and revised during the last three decades. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 21(3/4)
  8. ^ Albert Ellis (2001). Overcoming Destructive Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors: New Directions for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Prometheus Books
  9. ^ Ellis, Albert (2003). Early theories and practices of rational emotive behavior theory and how they have been augmented and revised during the last three decades. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 21(3/4)

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