What Is Rational Emotive Therapy, And How Can It Help Me?
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No matter who you are, no matter what kind of help you're seeking, some type of therapy can likely benefit you. One therapy that can help you change stubborn core beliefs and deal with the problems at hand is rational-emotive therapy, also known as rational emotive behavior therapy or REBT.
What is rational emotive behavior therapy?
REBT aims to address painful emotions and maladaptive behaviors by learning techniques to solve problems practically. Another goal is to grow as a person and develop a reasonable, rational personal philosophy that allows you to work effectively toward the life you want.
REBT therapy vs. cognitive behavioral therapy
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is similar to rational emotive behavior therapy in that they both address distorted thoughts. However, there are some important differences between the two.
- REBT looks at the philosophic bases of emotional problems, while CBT works to change the behavior.
- REBT emphasizes secondary disturbances such as anxiety about being anxious, while CBT does not.
- CBT promotes self-rating, while REBT promotes unconditional self-acceptance.
- REBT, unlike CBT, recognizes that certain negative emotions, such as grief, are helpful and seeks to change only unhelpful negative emotions.
- In REBT, all anger is considered inappropriate, but in CBT, some anger is considered healthy.
Elements of rational-emotive therapy
Certain key elements of rational emotive behavior therapy set it apart from other behavioral therapies.
Philosophical and empirical
REBT has a philosophical component. The goal is not just to change one behavior but to change the philosophy behind choosing behaviors. This involves disputing core beliefs and developing a more helpful philosophy.
REBT also has an empirical component in that its techniques are scientifically proven in research studies and in that you use evidence from your life to determine what has been both true and helpful in your life.
Fundamental musts
Rational-emotive therapy identifies three types of unrealistic expectations. We expect ourselves, other people, and the world, in general, to meet our demands and become emotionally upset when they don't. REBT seeks to dispute the following "musts" to give us a more realistic attitude.
- I must be competent, loveable, and a winner at all times. If I'm not, I'm worthless.
- Other people must treat me well. If they don't, they're a bad person.
- I must get what I want. If I don't, it would be terrible.
Relationship of thoughts, emotions, and behavior
Rational emotive behavior therapy uses the ABC Model to show how misinterpretations of events lead to unhappiness.
- A is the activating event that happens in your life.
- Bis your belief about the event.
- C is the consequences of your belief (not of the event itself).
By disputing and changing your belief about the event, you can change how you feel about it, even if you can't change the event itself.
Action-oriented
REBT is action-oriented in two ways. First, the therapist is actively engaged in your process of disputing your beliefs about events. They're more than a listening ear. Second, you don't just talk about what's happened to you. Instead, you identify problems with your thinking and work during your sessions and in homework assignments to solve them.
Present-focused
The focus of rational-emotive therapy is at the present moment. You examine and challenge the beliefs you hold right now. These beliefs may have come from traumas in your distant or recent past. Or, they may come from the environment you were raised in or the relationship you're currently in.
The source of your thoughts is only important if it can help you in the here and now. For instance, if your parents abused you, you might benefit from recognizing that your current beliefs are based on bad parenting. However, the focus in REBT is not on the past but your current maladaptive beliefs about it.
REBT therapy techniques
REBT therapy uses several techniques that are the same as other therapies use. In rational emotive behavior therapy, though, the techniques are aimed at changing current beliefs. Also, some special techniques are usually used only in REBT therapy.
Disputing irrational beliefs
Disputing irrational beliefs is a cornerstone of rational emotive behavior therapy. When you bring up a situation that's causing you emotional turmoil, the first step is to identify the beliefs behind that emotional response. Then, you question whether that underlying belief is helpful for you.
You may notice that a belief can be true without being helpful. In this case, you can either change what you do to cause it or have no control over it; you can change the core beliefs behind your reaction to it.
Evidence-seeking
When you think a belief might be irrational, you look for evidence supporting that belief or proving it wrong.
Identifying and changing self-talk
Everyone has self-talk of some kind. You might tell yourself you're a total failure, or you might tell yourself it's okay to make a mistake. A part of REBT is changing the self-talk so that it is helpful rather than self-defeating.
Thought-stopping technique
Thought-stopping means learning to break the flow of negative thoughts as soon as they come to you. Dwelling on irrational thoughts can cause you misery, anxiety, depression, or rage, but disrupting that train of thought can help you gain composure.
Finding a new perspective
When you identify a thought that's inaccurate or distorted, you may be left wondering what the real truth is. So, the therapist helps you find a new way to look at the more accurate and helpful event by reframing it in a new light.
Finding humor
Humor can be a useful way of dealing with negative feelings or difficult events. In REBT, it's common to look at a situation in a humorous way. This can bring acceptance of yourself, others, and events that happen to you.
Role-playing exercises
You might use role-playing in your quest to find evidence supporting or refuting your belief. As you act in someone else's role, you may discover a new perspective on the situation. You may realize that the belief is distorted or inaccurate.
Shame-attacking
Your therapist might guide you through exercises meant to get past the shame, accept yourself, and make better choices.
Learning to be assertive
Rational emotive behavior therapy is well-suited to learning assertiveness skills. When you have realistic expectations, manageable emotions, and positive core beliefs, you can truly understand what it means to treat both yourself and others with respect using assertiveness techniques.
Homework
An REBT therapist usually gives you homework to do between sessions. This is a part of learning to take care of your own needs when you're on your own.
Relaxation techniques
Many different types of therapy use relaxation techniques. In REBT, you might use deep breathing, systematic muscle relaxation, or meditation to calm yourself down. Then, you can think rationally and make a decision that helps you achieve your goals.
Systematic desensitization
If something is causing you extreme anxiety or distress, your therapist might guide you in exposing yourself to that stressor a little at a time until you feel more comfortable with it.
Journaling
When writing in your journal for rational-emotive therapy, you write down your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In REBT, you also use journaling to practice the techniques you learn in therapy, such as identifying and disputing beliefs.
Mental health education
Improving your mental health is an important part of the process. In REBT, you find out about your mental conditions or personal challenges through educational materials and research assignments given to you by your therapist. This helps put you in an active role in the therapy process.
How can REBT therapy help me?
It's interesting to learn about rational-emotive therapy. Knowing about it can only get you so far. If you want it to help you, you'll need to practice its techniques, usually with the help of a therapist. That involves a certain level of commitment, so it's important to understand the benefits you can receive from the therapy. Below are just a few of them.
Overcome mental conditions
REBT therapists can help you deal with a variety of mental conditions as well as unhelpful behaviors. It can also help you deal with the challenges you face. These conditions, behaviors, and challenges may include:
- Depression and suicidal thoughts.
- Low self-esteem.
- Trauma from abuse, grief, or losses of any kind.
- Anxiety, panic attacks, or phobias.
- PTSD
- OCD
- Eating disorders
- Autism disorders
- Behavioral problems in children
- Addictions such as substance abuse, alcoholism, porn addiction, or gambling addiction.
- Impulsivity
- Personality disorders
- Relationship issues, marital issues, and family conflicts.
- Anger and aggression
- Sleep problems, pain management, or other physical problems
- Dealing with health problems
- Procrastination
- Extreme guilt
- Self-sabotage
- Extreme stress
- Life transitions
Accomplish goals
When you clear away the confusion and maladaptive behaviors generated by unhelpful core beliefs, you can focus more on achieving your goals.
Accept responsibility for your feelings and behaviors
You can't change what you don't own. REBT therapy helps you take responsibility - not for what happened necessarily, but for the way you responded to it. This amounts to giving you the freedom and the power to make the changes that will help you survive and thrive.
Discover new core beliefs that work better for you
You may have always thought that there was only one acceptable belief. Through rational emotive behavior therapy, you can find out why the beliefs you hold aren't working for you. You can discover new core beliefs that help you achieve your goals while still making sense to you.
Lessen the emotional impact of negative situations
Life is hard at times for most people. You might change some situations, but there will be other events that you have no control over. What you can change, though, is your reactions to events. When you find more adaptive ways of responding to negative situations and events, your feelings become more bearable.
Develop resiliency
Through this therapy, you can develop the ability to face new situations in healthier ways. When you do, you become more resilient to emotional problems and more tolerant of frustration.
Become more realistic
Therapists often walk a fine line trying to make you feel better without encouraging you to hold false opinions. Rational-emotive therapy is different from most therapies in that it encourages you to accept negative information. After all, you might be right. Maybe someone doesn't like or accept you. Fortunately, REBT therapy also helps you find more helpful ways to respond to negative facts and feel better about them.
Exploring online therapy options
REBT therapy is one of many therapies that you may find beneficial. If you’re considering accessing the services of a mental health professional, you may want to consider online therapy in your search for a therapist. Online therapy has become increasing popular in recent years, and many are drawn to the scheduling flexibility and access to a greater number of practitioners than what is available locally. Many people have also found that online therapy provides a more affordable option than in-person options.
The surge in online therapy’s popularity spurred a wave of empirical research to determine if therapy delivered remotely works as well as therapy delivered in an office setting. Online therapists use the same evidence-based techniques as traditional therapists, and evidence suggests that those techniques, in most cases, are just as effective when administered online as in-person.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What is rational emotive therapy in psychology?
In 1955, Albert Ellis developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, also known as (REBT). Initially known as rational therapy, this type of therapy would later inspire the development of the more popularly known and practiced cognitive behavioral therapy.
The central idea of rational emotive behavior therapy is that our emotions mainly influence our thoughts. Rational emotive behavior therapy seeks to correct this error. This is because our emotions are often not grounded in reality, so we might find ourselves behaving irrationally if our emotions determine our thoughts. This type of therapy seeks to correct this flaw by introducing rational thinking and a healthy, rational connection between our thoughts and emotions.
The idea is that if we can correct our emotional response to things, we will let go of irrational beliefs and live fuller lives.
The irrational beliefs often stem from traumatic events we experienced in the past, particularly during childhood. The coping mechanisms we use to deal with trauma in the past often stay with us. We begin to assume that our emotional responses are rational, and we carry these negative emotions into adulthood, and without knowing, we let them influence our thought patterns. Emotive behavior therapy REBT aims to eliminate these unhelpful beliefs and coping mechanisms and introduce rationality. By doing this, rational emotive behavior therapy hopes to help individuals live more fruitful and wholesome lives.
A good example is someone who grew up experiencing neglect from their parents. Such a person might hold onto the false thought that they “aren’t worth being paid attention to.” By devaluing their self-worth, they can accept their reality and reduce the intensity of their distress. This is a bad short-term and long-term solution, but irrational beliefs are often a temporary haven that provides a measure of comfort in cases of trauma. Such an individual will grow up seeing themselves as a person of low value. This will make social interaction very difficult, and even though the irrational beliefs no longer provide any comfort, the individual will still cling to them. This will inevitably lead to depression, an accumulation of irrational beliefs, low self-esteem, antisocial behavior, social anxiety, etc.
What are the 3 main beliefs of REBT?
To help individuals become more aware of the irrational beliefs that guide their daily lives, Ellis developed the 3 main beliefs or principles of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. These are popularly referred to as the ABCs of emotive behavior therapy REBT. ABC refers to the:
- Activating event (A)
- Beliefs (B)
- Consequences (C)
The activating event is the event or situation that triggers irrational beliefs and negative emotional responses.
As for beliefs, this refers to the core ideas we connect with certain emotional or behavioral responses. We use beliefs to interpret our environment in a way that makes sense. When you throw trauma into this, beliefs become a way to sustain the irrationality of trauma-induced coping mechanisms against the real and rational reality. So, if an individual has devalued their self-worth to cope with the trauma from childhood neglect, their beliefs will translate subsequent events and interactions in a way that sustains the illusion of being worth nothing. Beliefs are ‘B’ because they stem from the activating event ‘A.’
Consequences are ‘C’; they refer to the result of the combined activating event and core beliefs. The consequences often manifest as social anxiety, depression, extreme cases, agoraphobia (the fear of the outdoors), etc.
These principles are also applied, although differently, in cognitive behavioral therapy.
What are the key concepts of REBT?
While developing rational emotive behavior therapy, Albert Ellis believed that people are disturbed by their view of things and not by themselves. The way we perceive our experiences has more of an impact on us than the experiences themselves. The key concept of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is the transformation of thought patterns and core beliefs from irrational to rational beliefs.
Rather than focusing on the traumatic events themselves, rational emotive behavior therapy focuses on the connection between the trauma and the core beliefs. Like therapy cbt, REBT draws a link between cognitive patterns and behavioral patterns and examines them as potential root causes of emotional distress. Negative cognitive patterns and behavioral patterns can be undone by solving where the core beliefs originated and why they were adopted.
This might seem very similar to cognitive behavioral therapy, but there is a major difference between them. Cognitive behavior therapy does not consider the philosophies that lie beneath the emotional distress, while rational emotive behavioral therapy focuses on the hidden philosophies.
What are the four major musts?
Rational emotive behavior therapy proposes that individuals hold four core ‘musts,’ also known as irrational beliefs. These are:
- Demands: We tend to demand things that cannot be guaranteed and won’t necessarily be provided. Things like success, respect, fair treatment, etc.
- Low Frustration Tolerance: we claim not to be able to stand things we don’t like. Things such as unfair treatment, disrespect, etc. This belief directs our behavior whenever we are confronted with undesirable interactions and situations. We react based on negative emotions because we believe that we cannot react any other way.
- Awfulizing: Individuals tend to look at unfavorable situations and events as bad or awful. Because we do not realize that our character rather than the events should determine our response to external events, we respond negatively. Those emotions guide our thoughts and actions.
- Depreciation: This is the reduction of a single event or action into a conclusion that concerns the whole. In other words, if a person or even you act poorly, a person who depreciates will use that single action to judge the entirety of the person who did the action.
Although these are also heavily considered in cognitive behavioral therapy, they originate from REBT.
Does rational emotive therapy work?
Rational emotive behavioral therapy is a very effective form of behavioral therapy. It addresses our philosophical core and looks at the roots of our behavior by studying our thoughts and emotions and looking at the inciting event or events that caused those thoughts and emotions to spring up.
What are emotive techniques?
Emotive techniques are strategies developed to inspire genuine emotional and cognitive expression in clients during therapy sessions. These are used to make the reality of these emotions and thoughts more explicit and easy to discuss. These are used most commonly in rational emotive behavior therapy. They are especially useful for eliminating irrational beliefs and replacing them with more intellectually and emotionally honest ones.
What is the ABC Model of Rational Emotive Therapy?
The ABC model is the guiding belief of emotive behavior therapy REBT. It is divided into A, B, and C.
A: The activating event is the event or situation that triggers irrational beliefs and negative emotional responses.
B: this stands for beliefs. These are the core ideas we connect with certain emotional or behavioral responses. We use beliefs to interpret our environment in a way that makes sense. When you throw trauma into this, beliefs become a way to sustain the irrationality of trauma-induced coping mechanisms against the real and rational reality.
C: These refer to consequences. They are the result of the combination of the activating event and core beliefs. The consequences often manifest as social anxiety, depression, etc.
Like cognitive behavioral therapy, rational behavior therapy takes a multi-dimensional approach to therapy. This puts a lot of context to the claim that therapy cbt has its roots in REBT.
What is the main therapeutic goal of REBT?
What are the limitations of REBT?
What is difference between CBT and REBT?
How does REBT therapy work?
How does REBT treat anxiety?
How is REBT used to treat depression?
Why is REBT better than CBT?
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