2. Rational Emotive Therapy (REBT)
- proposed by Albert Ellis (1913-2007), an American
Psychologist who was known to be an abrasive,
humorous and flamboyant speaker
- Ellis has rightly been referred to as the grandfather of
cognitive behaviour therapy
3. Tenets/Key Points
- psychological problems are often due to people’s rigid and extreme
beliefs they hold about events and situations
- emotions stems mainly from our beliefs which influence the evaluations
and interpretations people make of the reactions we have to life
situations
- human beings are born with both potential for both rational and
irrational thinking
- people learn irrational beliefs from significant others during childhood
and then re-create these irrational beliefs throughout lifetime and then
behave in ways that are consistent with this beliefs
4. - blame is at the core of most emotional disturbances. To
be psychologically healthy, people need to stop blaming
themselves and others and learn to fully and
unconditionally accept themselves despite its
imperfections
- “people are disturbed not by events, but by the views
which they take of them”
5. - people have strong tendencies to transform desires and
preferences into dogmatic “shoulds”, “musts”, “oughts”,
demands and commands. When people are disturbed, it is good
to look to their hidden dogmas. Such demands underpin
disruptive feelings and dysfunctional behaviors.
6. A-B-C Framework
-A framework that provides useful tool for understanding the client’s feelings,
thoughts, events, and behaviour
A (activating event) B (belief) C (emo & behavioural
consequence)
D (disputing intervention) E (effect) F (new feeling)
7. Therapeutic Goals
- learn skills that give them tools to identify and dispute
irrational beliefs
- replace ineffective ways of thinking with effective and rational
cognitions, and as a result they change their emotional
reactions to situations
- focus is on working with thinking and acting rather than
primarily with expressing feelings. Therapy is seen as an
educational process
8. - acquiring a more realistic and workable philosophy of life
- to assist clients in the process of achieving unconditional self-acceptance
(USA) and unconditional other acceptance (UOA),
and see how these are interrelated. As clients become more
able to accept themselves, they are more likely to
unconditionally accept others
9. Therapist’s Function and Role
-Therapist teaches clients how to feel sad, but not depressed
- encourage clients to be less emotionally reactive, for example, but feeling sadness
and disappointment about life’s adversities rather than by feeling anxiety, depression
and shame
- therapist disputes clients’ irrational beliefs and to replace their rigid “musts” with
preferences
- demonstrate how clients are keeping their emotional disturbances active by
continuing to think illogically and unrealistically
- helping clients modify their thinking and minimize their irrational ideas by
encouraging clients to identify the irrational beliefs they originally unquestioningly
accepted and demonstrates how they are continuing themselves with these beliefs
10. - challenge clients to develop a rational philosophy of life so
that in the future they can avoid becoming a victim of other
irrational beliefs
- teach the clients about the cognitive hypothesis of disturbance
and showing how rigid and extreme irrational beliefs lead to
disturbed negative consequences
14. Cognitive Therapy
- proposed by Aaron T. Beck as a result of his research of
depression
- cognitive distortions are contributed by the negative bias in
the interpretation of certain life events
- perceives psychological problems as stemming from faulty
thinking, making incorrect inferences on the basis of inadequate
or incorrect information, and failing to distinguish between
fantasy and reality
- the way people feel and behave is influenced by how they
perceive and structure their experience
15. ** Systematic errors or logical errors in reasoning that
lead to faulty assumptions and misconceptions
1. arbitrary inferences – refer to making conclusions
without supporting and relevant evidence. This includes
catastrophizing or thinking of the absolute worst scenario
or situation
2. selective abstraction – forming conclusions based on
an isolated detail of an event. In this process other
information is ignored, and the significance of the total
context is missed
16. 3. Overgeneralization – process of holding extreme beliefs on a
basis of a single incident and applying them inappropriately to
disseminate events or settings
4. Magnification and minimization – perceiving case or situation
in a greater or lesser light that it deserves
5. Personalization – tendency for individuals to relate external
events to themselves, even when there is no basis for making
this connection
17. 6. Labelling and mislabelling – portraying one’s identity on the
basis of imperfections and mistakes made in the past and
allowing them to define one’s true identity
7. Dichotomous thinking – categorizing experiences in either-or
extremes. Events are labelled in black and white terms
18. - cognitive techniques focus on identifying and examining
client’s beliefs, exploring the origins of these beliefs, and
modifying them if the client cannot support these beliefs.
19. Therapeutic Goals
- emphasize recognizing and changing unrealistic
negative thoughts and maladaptive beliefs
- To assist clients in examining and restructuring their
core beliefs
20. - an important way to produce lasting change in
dysfunctional emotions and behaviours is to modify
inaccurate and dysfunctional thinking
- clients learn to employ specific problem-solving and
coping skills
21. - clients are expected to identify the distortions in their
thinking, summarize important points in the session, and
collaboratively devise homework assignments that they
agree to carry out
- the aim is to identify specific, measurable goals and to
move directly into the areas that are causing the most
difficulty for clients
22. Therapist’s Function and Role
- encourage clients to gather and weigh the evidence in
support of their beliefs, therapists help clients bring about
enduring changes in their mood and their behaviour
- teaches clients how to identify these distorted and
dysfunctional cognitions through a process of evaluation
- clients learn to engage in more realistic thinking, especially
if they consistently notice times when they tend to get
caught up in catastrophic thinking
23. - clients are taught to test these automatic thoughts
against reality by examining and weighing the evidence
for and against them
- therapist considers it essential to understand how and
when certain core dysfunctional beliefs originated and
how these ideas have a current impact on the client’s
specific schema
24. - therapists must also have a cognitive conceptualization of
cases, be creative and active, be able to engage clients through
a Socratic questioning and be knowledgeable and skilled in the
use of cognitive and behavioural strategies aimed at guiding
clients in self-discoveries that will lead to change
- help clients frame their conclusions in the form of testable
hypotheses
- therapists aim to teach clients how to be their own therapist.
Typically they will educate clients about the nature and course
of their problem, about the process of cognitive therapy and
how thoughts influence their emotions and behaviours
25. Applications of Cognitive Therapy
- behavioural techniques typically used by cognitive therapists include activity
scheduling, behavioural experiments, skills training, role playing, behavioural
rehearsal, and exposure therapy
- therapist would ask you to look at your inferences which may be faulty, and may
investigate whether these inferences can be traced back to earlier experiences in your
life
- learn about the process of magnification and minimization of thinking. The therapist
would assist the client how he/she disregard important aspect of the situation ,
engage in overly simplified and rigid thinking, and generalize from a single incident of
future
