REBT tasks
“Instead of interpreting to the client the historical causation of his deviations, the rational approach therapist shows him that he has power, that he has allowed the initial inadequate reactions to failure and frustration to take over him. Therefore, he continues to react in the same manner that he chose a few years ago. The therapist fully acknowledges that the client’s biological heritage and social environment make it very easy for the client to fall into some dysfunctional habit patterns and revert to self-destructive behavior. But he shows the client that difficult does not mean impossible; that he can change through active work on himself; and that he had better force himself to do so if he wants to live with a minimum of anxiety and hostility.
In other words, the rational approach therapist explains to the client the essential two-sidedness that underlies his past, present, and future behavior. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the client is biologically and socially predisposed to neurotic deviations. On the other hand, the therapist shows that a person has unique abilities, which are developed by effort and practice, and with the help of which he can overcome his excessive suggestibility, strong hedonism and rigid thinking. He explains to the client how he got to be the way he is and what kinds of irrational beliefs he uses to stay the way he is. At the same time, he explains how the client can logically parse, deliberately challenge, and ruthlessly eradicate these beliefs. Therefore, his explanations are much deeper and have a stronger impact on clients with emotional or behavioral disorders than the interpretations of therapists of many other schools.
The rational-emotional therapist teaches his clients the basic principles of the scientific method. He shows them that wrong conclusions about objective reality or themselves arise from wrong premises and subsequent reasonable conclusions from those premises, or from correct premises and subsequent illogical conclusions. He demonstrates to his clients what their wrong premises and illogical conclusions from correct premises are. It trains them to accept hypotheses as hypotheses, not facts, and to demand observed data as real, independent of the evidence for those hypotheses. He also shows you how to experiment (as far as possible) with your own desires and activities to discover what they would truly like to have in life. The therapist is in many ways a scientific interpreter who teaches his clients, in many cases resembling students of other sciences, how to follow the hypothetical-deductive method and apply it more accurately to their value systems and emotional problems (Ellis A. Humanistic psychotherapy: Rational-emotional Approach / Translated from English — St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Owl, Moscow: Izd-vo EKSMO-Press, 2002. — P. 45).
Application of REBT
… Rational-emotional psychotherapy has a wider range of applications than other types of psychotherapy. Robert Harper, Cecile H. Patterson, and others have shown that many techniques, such as classical psychoanalysis, can have a measurable effect only on a relatively small number of clients and are rejected by other people (such as schizophrenics). However, rational-emotional therapy can be used to work with almost any type of person who comes to a psychotherapist, including those who are conventionally considered psychotic, people in «borderline» states, psychopaths, and the mentally retarded. This does not mean that equally good results are obtained when RET is used with difficult clients and mild neurotics. But the basic principles and methods of RET are so simple and effective that even people with very serious problems for whom years of intensive therapy with other methods have been unsuccessful can achieve significant improvement after using RET (Ellis A. Humanistic psychotherapy: A rational-emotional approach. / Per . from English — St. Petersburg: Publishing House Owl, Moscow: Publishing House EKSMO-Press, 2002. — P. 45).
REBT Efficiency
… Is RET actually more effective than other forms of psychotherapy? The question is not to prove it. Clinical results would seem to indicate that it benefits more people than most other methods; that through RET, positive results are achieved in a surprisingly short time; that the improvements that appeared after a course of RET are more stable and profound than the results obtained by other methods. But this clinical evidence has been collected ad hoc, and controlled trials of therapeutic outcome are underway. My hypothesis is that RET is a more effective procedure for clients and therapists because it is active-directive, comprehensive, extraordinarily clear and precise, sober and practical.
It is also very important that rational-emotional therapy is philosophically unambiguous, logical and empirically oriented.
… A psychotherapy which contains a great deal of rational analysis and reconstruction … will prove to be more effective in dealing with more varied types of clients than any non-rational or semi-rational therapies currently in common use; and that a significant part, or at least a proportionate part, of rational therapy will become in fact the only type of treatment that can eliminate the underlying neuroses (which are different from the superficial neurotic symptoms) of many clients, and especially those for whom other therapies have already proved ineffective.
… Is RET only a short-term form of treatment? No, not necessarily. Typically, therapy takes one to twenty sessions for individual therapy, or twenty to eighty sessions for group therapy. Consequently, many clients are observed for relatively short periods of time. Ideally, however, clients should be followed for two years, during which they will receive approximately twenty individual and seventy-five group sessions, which take significantly less therapeutic time than in psychoanalytic therapy. . / Translated from English — St. Petersburg: Owl Publishing House; M .: EKSMO-Press Publishing House, 2002. — P. 45).
“Does RET help the client understand the causes of his disorders and the essence of the healing methods? Yes, and I believe at a deeper level than conventional dynamic psychotherapeutic approaches. These [psychodynamic] techniques help the client to identify the divinatory causes of his behavior and often cause him (wrongly!) to pay attention to the origins of these causes (if they can actually be truly known). RET helps him understand specific causes and realize three important points about his behavior.
First, it is explained to the client in the RET process that not only does his dysfunctional behavior have a priori causes in the past, but that these causes still exist and are affecting him at the moment. Secondly, the client realizes that his disorders continue to exist because he is now actively working to perpetuate them. Third, the client understands that there is no other way for the client to improve other than constantly observing himself, challenging his own belief system, and working hard to change his own irrational beliefs through verbal and motor activity that overcomes established conditioned reflexes (Internet Document: http ://www.fenichel.com/Beck-Ellis.shtml».
Ellis on the depth of work in RERT
“If suggestion therapy is the only way to keep the client from harming himself, then the REBT therapist can use this method himself or, more likely, refer such a client to a healer.” If the client’s cognitive mechanisms are only receptive to shamanism, then the shamans will honestly earn their bread, but the priority of rationalism will not suffer in the least. As J. Swift noted: “I am convinced that the existing definition of “man is a rational animal” is false and somewhat premature. It would be more correct to formulate: “man is an animal receptive to reason.”
“The main goal of preference REBT is ambitious enough to induce the client to significantly change the worldview in two main areas regarding ego anxiety and discomfort. What is meant here is to help the client, as far as possible, to get rid of his irrational thought process, like must-nanism, and to replace it with rational non-absolutist thinking. …With most clients, from the first session, REBT therapists prefer to use strategies designed to make a fundamental change in worldview. The therapist begins REBT of preference with the assumption that a particular client is able to effect such a change, and terminates it after enough data has been collected to disprove the initial hypothesis.
…Even though REBT therapists prefer to help their clients achieve fundamental changes in philosophy through the «B», they do not insist that their clients do just that. If it becomes apparent that the client cannot or will not, at any given time, change his irrational beliefs, then the REBT therapist tries to help him either directly change «A» (by avoiding embarrassing situations or changing behavior) or change his distorted conclusions about situations.
… REBT is a flexible type of therapy that does not involve the formulation of absolute, dogmatic therapeutic rules ”(Ellis A., Dryden W. The Practice of Rational-Emotional Behavioral Therapy. — P. 65-66).