REBT: Study for CA MFT Licensing Exam

Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy

Albert Ellis

- A comprehensive, active-directive, philosophically and empirically based psychotherapy
- A form of CBT
- Focuses on resolving emotional and behavioral problems and disturbances and enabling people to lead happier and more fulfilling lives

A - Activating event or Adversity
B - Belief about A (rational or irrational)
C - Behavioral and/or emotional Consequence of B
D - Disputation
E - Effects (consequences) of D

- Method of direct, simple questioning that challenges irrational beliefs, by requesting empirical evidence

A person is rarely affected emotionally by outside things but rather by his perceptions, attitudes, or internalized sentences about outside things and events

Stoicism

- The therapist often active-directively teaches the client how to identify irrational and self-defeating beliefs and philosophies which in nature are rigid, extreme, unrealistic, illogical and absolutist, and then to forcefully and actively question and dispute them and replace them with more rational and self-helping ones
- The therapist often gives the client homework

• 1) Identify any existing irrational beliefs.
• 2) Clarify those beliefs that are rational.
• 3) Challenge clients to debate those irrational beliefs in light of logic and reality.

Help clients achieve Unconditional Self Acceptance (USA) using cognitive, emotive, and behavioral techniques

- Musturbating/Should-ing
- Illogical overgeneralization
- Awfulizing
- All-or-nothing thinking
- Labeling
- Blaming
- Mind-reading
- Prophesying
- Emotionalizing
- Personalizing
- Filtering
- Can't-ing

- “Healthy and often strong, desires, goals, and values that (client's) raise to absolute musts, shoulds, demands, and necessities”
- Putting pressure on oneself (and others) to conform to "divine" rules about the world and life, then expressing such in statements that involve "should" and "must"
- i.e. “I must get straight A’s in school in order to be considered a good student.”

- The use of “global ratings to their selves, personalities, and their essences”
- Jumping to conclusions on little evidence or without facts - i.e. “I didn’t well on my quiz so I’m a bad student.”

- Seeing something or a certain event as all bad or even worse
- Imagining the worst possible scenario and then amplifying it with a non-referencing word, like "awful"
- i.e. “My supervisor found mistakes with my casework. This is terrible! This is the worse possibly thing that could have happened!”

- Polarizing at extremes
- Black and white thinking