About REBT

About Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Albert Ellis the father of cognitive-behavioral therapy and founder of Rational-emotive-behavior therapy (REBT) discovered that peoples' beliefs strongly affected their emotional functioning. In particular certain irrational beliefs made people feel depressed, anxious or angry and led to self-defeating behaviors. Cognitive behavioral therapy is now the accepted intervention for people suffering from chronic pain conditions as well as other emotional problems.

The word belief means a “ conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something” (Microsoft Bookshelf 2000). So a belief is a thought with an emotional component (conviction) and a factual component (truth, actuality or validity). Our beliefs can be either positive or negative. Having a negative belief is not necessarily a bad thing, however, when we believe in something that it is not actually true or valid, a negative belief tends to become an inappropriate, negative belief or Irrational Belief. Irrational beliefs are not friendly to happiness and contentment and are definitely unhelpful for getting your basic desires for love and approval, comfort and achievement or success met.

Core Irrational Beliefs

Demandingness or Absolutism – inflexible, dogmatic, extreme beliefs signaled by such words as should, must, have to, and need to. For example, ”I should not be in pain” or “I should be able to do what I used to do!’ This is not the kind of should as in "I should go to the store and get some milk." But rather a should with a capital “S”, a demand.

Demand for Love and Approval from nearly everyone we find important, the

Demand for Success or Achievement in things we find important

Demand for Comfort or nearly no frustration or discomfort.

When someone hold one of these irrational beliefs, they also tend to hold one or a combination of the following irrational beliefs.

Awfulization - refers to 100% disasterizing beliefs signaled by such words as disaster, horrible or awful, and catastrophe.

Low Frustration Tolerance - beliefs signaled by such words as intolerable, can’t stand it, and too hard.

Global-Rating - beliefs in which you condemn or blame your entire selfhood or someone else’s basic value in some important way. Global rating is signaled by such words as loser, worthless, useless, idiot, stupid.

ABCDE Model of Emotional Disturbance

Albert Ellis thought we develop irrational beliefs in response to our preferential goals being blocked. He set this up in a ABCDE model (Ellis and Dryden, 1987). "A" stands for Activating Event or Adversity. This is an event inside or outside of you. It is just a fact. "B" refers to one's Irrational Belief about the event at “A”. That belief then leads to "C" the emotional and behavioral Consequences. "D" stands for disputes or arguments against our irrational beliefs. E stands for New Effect or the new more effective emotions and behaviors that result from more reasonable thinking about the original event (Ellis and Dryden, 1987.)

Disputing Irrational Beliefs

Up to this point, we explored the connection between your beliefs, emotions, activities and pain. Now that you are more aware of how your beliefs, especially extreme and rigid beliefs, affect your mood, activities and pain, let’s look at ways to replace those negative beliefs with more realistic, coping ones or what we call Rational Beliefs. A rational belief is just the opposite of an irrational belief.

Rational Belief – is one that is flexible, not rigid, not extreme and more helpful to your natural goals for happiness, comfort, success, love and approval.

Rational beliefs are based on your preferences not extremist demands for comfort, success and approval. A belief also develops an emotional component after you practice it 50 billion times a day. As the saying goes practice makes perfect. Unfortunately we humans can rehearse idea that are not true and develop irrational beliefs. Typically our common sense tells us that an irrational belief is false but we do not have much emotion connected to our common sense thought. In other words, we can see the idea is wrong but it feels true. We tend to confuse this feeling, because it is so strong, with the truth and then tend to engage in activities that support our irrational belief. Disputing your irrational beliefs involves asking yourself a few simple questions. isputing irrational beliefs or iBs involves three basic strategies: 1.) The Empirical or Scientific Dispute, 2.) The Functional Dispute and 3.) The Logical Dispute (Ellis and Dryden, 1987).

The Empirical or Scientific Dispute: Ask yourself Where is the proof that this belief is true? With this question, you are looking for the scientific evidence of your irrational belief’s validity. Let’s take a non-pain related example. John’s irrational belief is that his love interest, Jane, should not reject him. But John is feeling very sad and rejected because Jane turned him down for a dinner date and he thinks that he cannot stand this rejection and that it is just awful! Where is the proof that his belief that Janet should not reject him is true? There isn’t any is there? In fact, she did reject him, therefore, the irrational belief that she should not reject him is clearly false. Also, do you think that did not hold his irrational belief about Jane in the first place, he would not feel overly sad or rejected? Definitely not! Let’s hope that john gives up his irrational belief and does not turn into a stalker!

The Functional Dispute: Ask yourself Is my irrational belief helping me or does it make things worse for me? With this question, you are asking yourself whether your belief works to help you achieve your goals or not. Is this belief helping you to be happier or more upset? It was clear that John’s Irrational belief made him feel worse when his belief was confronted with the facts.

The Logical Dispute: Ask yourself Is this belief logical does it ring true to my common sense? With this question, you are looking for ways in which your belief does not stem from your preferences for love and approval, comfort and success or achievement. You may be blowing things way out of proportion or over-generalizing. Does it make common sense that Jane should not reject John because he believes that she should not? Human's three basic goals of love and approval, comfort and success or achievement are desires. They are preferences or wants. When we engage in demanding thinking or absolutist thinking we turn those preferences into absolute demands (Ellis and Dryden, 1987).

Our preferences are not laws of the nature. While it is true that humans have these basic desires or preferences for their lives that does not mean that those preferences are necessarily achieved. Remember in the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson states that we have the rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We do not have the inherent right to happiness but only a right to pursue it. The reason why he does not say we have the right to happiness is that happiness is not a law of nature. That we like happiness appears to be law and that we pursue happiness appears to be law of our nature. That we like love and approval comfort and success is a fact. But because we like something or want something or prefer something does not make it a law that we must have it. We definitely suffer if we don't have happiness or get our goals met that is true. It is not a law that we must have it. If it was a law of nature we would simply be happy our desires for love comfort and success would just exist for everybody as a fact. And there would be no reason for Jefferson to state that we have the right is to pursue happiness. You would have just said we have the right to happiness. Any irrational belief stems from a core 'should', 'must', 'have to', 'need to' statement. The illogical inferences of low frustration tolerance, awfulizing, and self or other downing (global rating) all flow from the demands for comfort, love and approval, and success or achievement. When you make a logical dispute the first question to ask yourself is do my conclusions stem from my preferences or do they stem from some demand that I have made. Let's take a look at how making a demand can lead to false conclusions.
The statement all dogs must have white hair followed by a the presence of what appears to be a dog with black hair leads us to incorrectly conclude that this dog-like creature with black hair is not a dog. When we say I must have love and approval and we don't get it from someone we find important, we then tend to conclude that it is awful that it is intolerable and that maybe you are unworthy. If we take each of these conclusions we can also argue against them independently as being illogical. If it was a fact that not getting the love we want was truly awful or intolerable we would just drop dead. We would not be able to survive. And if we conclude that we are unworthy or unlovable because we do not get someone's love we also make a false statement. It is impossible for your basic worth to be based on getting the love or approval of one particular person. As I have discussed above self-worth is the result of judgment we pass on ourselves. It is our judgment of ourselves that makes us feel bad or good. When we judge our basic value based on some external events like not getting someone's love or approval were saying that our value as a person is dependent on getting someone's love or approval and it clearly is not. In fact, when we call ourselves worthless or we use the words awful or say I can't stand it we are really using words they have very vague definitions. We know they are vague because every person's definition of them is different.

You will find that when you begin to regularly and vigorously dispute your irrational beliefs, the irrational beliefs feel less true than they once did and the rational beliefs begin to feel truer. You will also notice that your ability to problem-solve improves and that you tend to become emotionally upset less frequently.
Copyright Ann C. Jorn 2007