Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
Distress follows not from adversity but from absolutistic demands — musts, shoulds, oughts — that people impose on themselves, others and the world, and it lifts when those demands are actively disputed and replaced with strong preferences.
You are not disturbed by things, but by the rigid demands you place on them.
Who built it
Albert Ellis
1913–2007Clinical psychologist, New York
Founded the first cognitive therapy in 1955, eight years before Beck. Combative, funny, deliberately profane, and philosophically explicit — REBT is Stoicism operationalised, and Ellis said so.
REBTWindy Dryden
Psychotherapist and writer, London
The principal contemporary systematiser and the source of most of the careful distinctions in current REBT teaching.
REBT
Theory of personality
Ellis held that humans are simultaneously and biologically disposed toward rational and irrational thinking, and that the tendency to escalate preferences into demands is innate rather than learned. This is a harder line than Beck’s: for Ellis, people do not merely acquire distorted beliefs, they manufacture them, and they will do so again unless the underlying philosophy changes.
The ABC model
| Element | What it is |
|---|---|
| A — Activating event | What happened, or what the person inferred happened |
| B — Beliefs | The evaluative beliefs about A. Rational (preferences) or irrational (demands) |
| C — Consequences | Emotional and behavioural. Caused by B, not by A |
| D — Disputing | Empirical, logical and pragmatic challenge to the irrational belief |
| E — Effective new philosophy | The replacement belief, and the new emotional and behavioural consequence |
The four irrational beliefs
- Demandingness
- The core: "I must", "you must", "the world must". Ellis regarded all other irrational beliefs as derivatives of this one.
- Awfulising
- Rating an event as more than 100% bad — worse than it could possibly be.
- Low frustration tolerance
- "I can’t stand it." Almost always empirically false, and the belief that most reliably produces avoidance.
- Global rating of self or others
- Rating a whole person on the basis of a behaviour: "I am a failure", "he is worthless".
Theory of psychopathology
Disturbance comes in two forms. Ego disturbance concerns self-rating: "I must perform well and be approved of, or I am worthless." Discomfort disturbance concerns conditions: "life must be comfortable and I must not be frustrated." Ellis considered the second at least as important as the first, and considerably under-treated.
REBT also distinguishes primary from secondary disturbance — the person who is anxious, and then anxious about being anxious, or depressed about being depressed. The secondary layer is frequently the more disabling and is targeted first.
Theory of change
- 1Identify the C, then the A, then the B — in that order, which is counter-intuitive and deliberate.
- 2Distinguish the irrational demand from the rational preference beneath it.
- 3Dispute it on three grounds: empirical (where is the evidence?), logical (does it follow?), and pragmatic (where does holding it get you?).
- 4Construct an effective new belief and rehearse it forcefully.
- 5Act against the belief — REBT is behaviourally aggressive, with shame-attacking and risk-taking exercises.
- 6Aim at philosophical change: unconditional self-acceptance, other-acceptance and life-acceptance.
Key concepts
The vocabulary you need to read the literature and to be understood in supervision.
Where it sits in the transtheoretical grid
Which change processes the system leans on, and at what level of content it aims.
- Consciousness raising
Increasing information about oneself and the problem - feedback, interpretation, education, observation.
- Self-reevaluation
Appraising how one thinks and feels about oneself with respect to the problem; values clarification.
- Counterconditioning
Substituting an incompatible response for the problem response - relaxation, assertion, exposure, defusion, opposite action.
- Self-liberation (choosing)
Choosing and committing to act, plus the belief that one can change - the deliberate exercise of agency.
- Maladaptive cognitions
- Symptom & situational problems