Chapter 16:
Albert Ellis and the Rational Emotive Behavioral Theory of Personality: Is Psychoanalysis Harmful: Web Resources: Emotional Disturbance and Its Treatment in a Nutshell When I presented my first paper on rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) at the American Psychological Association convention in 1956, I fully realized how complex cognitions, emotions, and behaviors are and how they inevitably include and interact with each other. REBT has always had a complex, interactional, and holistic view of the ABC's of human personality and disturbance. Simply stated, the ABC theory of REBT follows the views of several ancient philosophers - especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius -and of Robert Woodworth's stimulus-organismresponse theory. It holds that activating events (A's) in people lives contribute to their emotional and behavioral disturbances or consequences (C's) largely because they are intermingled with or acted upon by people's beliefs (B's) about these activating events (A's). BASIC HUMAN GOALS AND VALUES People generally have a set of goals, values, or desires. Humans, biologically and by social learning, are goal-seeking animals and their fundamental goals normally are to survive, to be relatively free from pain, and to be reasonably satisfied or content. As subgoals of these primary goals, they want to be happy (1) when by themselves; When, in response to an activating event, people think, at point B, "This is good! I like this activating event," they tend to experience the emotional consequence of pleasure or happiness and the behavioral consequence of approaching (or trying to repeat) this activating event. When these same people experience activating events that they perceive as blocking or sabotaging their goals, they normally react in an unpleasurable, avoiding manner. Thus, they preferentially think, at point B, "This is bad! I dislike this activating event," and they experience the emotional consequences of frustration or unhappiness and the behavioral consequence of avoiding or trying to eliminate this activating event. THE ABC'S OF EMOTIONAL DISTURBANCE The ABC model of REBT becomes more complex and controversial when applied to neurotic disturbance. For it hypothesizes that when people's goals are blocked by activating events they have a conscious or unconscious choice of responding with disturbed or undisturbed negative consequences. If their belief system is rational or self-helping, it will include attitudes or philoso- phies that help them to achieve their goals. These rational beliefs will mainly create healthy emotional consequences, such as appropriate feelings of disappointment, sorrow, regret and frustration. Rational beliefs will also tend to encourage healthy behavior such as trying to change, improve, or avoid activating events that sabotage their goals. This ABC model of emotional/ behavioral disturbance is fairly straightforward and, as noted above, is followed by most REBT and cognitive behavior therapy practitioners and theorists. It hypothesizes that the irrational beliefs or dysfunctional attitudes that constitute people's self-disturbing philosophies have two main qualities: This ABC model of human disturbance is followed, in REBT, by D-the disputing of people's irrational beliefs (iB's)-when they feel and act in a self-defeating way, until they arrive at E, a new set of more rational beliefs. For example, "I'd prefer to succeed and be lovable, but I don't have to do so!" "I'd very much like others to treat me fairly and considerately, but there is no reason why they must do so." "I greatly desire my life conditions to be comfortable and pleasant, but I don't need them to be that way." Disputing of irrational beliefs is first done cognitively, by using scientific questioning and challenging to uproot people's musts and demands. For example, "Why must I perform well, even though it's desirable that I do?" "Where is the evidence that you have to treat me considerately, however much I'd like you to do so?" Disputing is also done emotively. For example, using rational emotive imagery, people imagine one of the worst failures to achieve their goals, letting themselves feel very depressed. They are then to fully work to change their inappropriate feeling of depression to the healthy ones of keen disappointment or regret. Disputing is also done behaviorally. For example, people who avoid socializing can force themselves to socialize while simultaneously convincing themselves that it is not awful, but only inconvenient, to get rejected. The more specific clinical application of the ABCs of REBT has been successful in thousands of reported cases and in scores of therapy outcome studies. Most of these studies have used REBT cognitive disputing, but have failed to add its emotive and behavioral disputing methods. So I predict that when REBT is properly tested it will do even better against control groups than has up to now been shown. Bernard, M.E., and DiGiuseppe, R. Inside Rational-Emotive Therapy. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1989. Additional copies of this pamphlet are available at:
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