Rational emotive behavior therapy

Section:

PRACTICE AND APPLICATION

Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) is one of the main humanistic psychotherapies. It shows how people, in an all-too-human manner, create a large part of their emotional disturbances and also have the ability to uncreate them. It is a theory of personality and of therapy that emphasizes emotional health and self-actualization for individuals and for the social group in which they choose to live. It avoids devotion to any kind of magic and supernaturalism. It especially emphasizes unconditional selfacceptance (USA), antiabsolutism, uncertainty, and human fallibility, and tries to combine scientific flexibility and rigor with an existentialist-humanist approach. This article is adapted from Ellis (1994b), and Ellis (1972a).

In his article “Humanistic Psychology,” in Raymond Corsini’s Encyclopedia of Psychology, M. Brewster Smith (1994) pointed ‘out that secular humanism is “a neglected version of humanistic psychology,” and showed that where Pascal and Kierkegaard defined the religious version of existentialism, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Sartre, and other thinkers “proposed a mundane, Godless humanism, also existentialist in its concern with the responsibility entitled by human selfconsciousness” (p. 158). Smith also contrasted the somewhat irreconcilable perspective of causal and interpretive understanding in psychological science and argued that “for the distinctly human world, interpretation and causal explanation must somehow be joined… Indeed, the only satisfactory science of human experience and action must be one on which the hermeneutic interpretation plays a central part conjoined with causal explanation” (p. 158).

Quite a problem! Secular humanism, which is in many ways opposite to the religious, mystical, and spiritual humanism that seems to have largely prevailed during the last decade in the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP), as well as in the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association, and, to a certain extent in the Association of Humanistic Education and Development (AHEAD), tries to be quite existential, social, phenomenological, and even postmodernistic. But it also does its best to be rigorously (not rigidly) empirical, naturalistic, relativistic, and scientific (Clark, 1992; Kurtz, 1973, 1985; Stein, 1985). On the other hand, transpersonal psychology, the dominant theme in recent AHP publications, often claims to be scientific because it uses some of the methods of science, but actually is often dogmatic and absolutist (Ellis, 1972b, 1985; Ellis & Yeager, 1989; Kurtz, 1986). I could go on at great length showing what I think are the evils of transpersonal and mystical humanism–including that they are actually antihumanistic. But I have already done this elsewhere (Ellis & Schoenfeld, 1990; Ellis & Yeager, 1989), so let me focus on what secular humanism is and how it specifically applies to rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT).

Secular humanists see men and women as unique individuals who almost always choose to live in a social group. They are individuals in their own personal right but also are–and had better be–social creatures who try to live together peacefully, fairly, and democratically. Even their discrete “personality,” as Sampson (1989) noted, is also a social product. Secular humanists fully acknowledge people to be human–that is, very limited and fallible–and in no way are they either superhuman (more than human) or subhuman (less than human). They all seem to have good and bad behaviors and traits; but, as Korzybski (1933) pointed out, they are not what they do.

The personalities of men and women are an ongoing, ever-changing, constructing and reconstructing process. Once they set up goals and purposes, which as humans they invariably seem to do, their acts and deeds are measurable or ratable but they, themselves, their essence, their being are too complex and changeable to be given any global rating or report card. We consequently have no accurate or meaningful way of deifying or damning them. They are not good or bad, they merely exist. If they choose to continue to exist and to enjoy their existence, then again some of their acts are good because they aid their goals and some of their behaviors are bad because they sabotage these goals. People’s goals and purposes cannot be assessed scientifically or objectively because, as individuals, they can choose from a wide variety of goals, none of which (except by arbitrary definition) can be assessed as unconditionally good or bad. But once they pick a certain goal (e.g., succeeding at work, love, or psychotherapy) it can often be scientifically or empirically determined whether (a) they actually achieve it, and (b) they achieve the results they wanted by achieving it.

Secular humanists, in other words, favor certain values such as human life and well-being, but do not claim that these values are absolutely good or bad. If their goals are viewed as good, it can be scientifically shown that they can or cannot be achieved and whether their achievement actually brings about the results the valuers desired. The meanings or purposes people subscribe to are largely chosen (or adopted from others). But whether their actions to reach these goals (which are largely chosen) will actually lead to their achievement can be scientifically determined by looking for a cause-effect relationship.

Secular humanists acknowledge that humans have the human ability to imagine, fantasize, and strongly believe in all kinds of superhuman entities and powers such as gods, angels, spirits, and fairies, and that, in fact, they often create meaning and explanations for anything they do not fully understand. Therefore, they impatiently and cavalierly invent such supernatural entities and forces. But, along with Popper (1985), humanists contend that unless these spirits and forces are in some way empirically falsifiable, any imaginative person can invent an infinite number of them. Moreover, many of these fantasized creations are contradictory to other supernatural fantasies. The existence of any and all of them is never impossible but is highly improbable. Belief in such spirits may of course help some people to overcome some of their emotional problems (such as anxiety) or behavioral problems (such as addiction to alcohol). But devout belief in improbable gods and spirits often creates its own difficulties, such as dependency, dogma, bigotry, pollyannaism, and wars with nonbelievers.

Secular humanists are, almost by definition, relativists, skeptics, and nondogmatists (Clark, 1992). Though many of them, such as Ayer (1936), used to be logical positivists, they now mostly realize that logical positivism in some respects is itself not falsifiable, so they have revised it (Bartley, 1984; Popper, 1985). Although they do not tend to be radical or devout deconstructionists, they do tend to favor the more moderate kind of postmodernism espoused by Levin (1991). As Levin noted, this kind of postmodernism has given up modemism’s near-sacred “assumptions about certainty in knowledge, faith in absolute systems, totalities and unities.” And, he stated, “postmodernism recognizes ambiguities, indeterminacies, undertones and overtones, complexities, uncertainties, tensions, interactions, exchanges, equivocations” (pp. 251-252). This kind of thinking is favored by today’s secular humanism.

What is called “humanistic psychotherapy” and counseling tends to consist of (a) existential encounters between therapists and their clients (Frankl, 1959; May, 1969; Rogers, 1961; Yalom, 1990), (b) experiential and body-oriented exercises (Perls, 1969), and (c) transpersonal therapy (Grof, 1984; Tart, 1975; Walsh & Vaughan, 1980). The first two of these methods have often proven useful and even the third one has shown, at times, that it helps some people, though I still think that on the whole it does more harm than good (Ellis, 1994a, 1996; Ellis & Abrams, 1994; Ellis & Yeager, 1989).

The one form of therapy that has been most neglected by many humanist therapists is cognitive-behavioral therapy, perhaps because its main proponents have largely been secular humanists. Thus, Alfred Adler (1926, 1927) was a pioneering cognitive therapist as was George Kelly (1955), both of whom were secular humanists. I started to do rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), the first of the popular cognitive-behavior therapies, in 1955 (when I had read Adler but not Kelly) and I followed a secular humanist model, which I largely derived from several philosophers, including Epictetus, Epicurus, John Dewey, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred Korzybski (Ellis, 1957, 1962, 1985, 1988; Yankura & Dryden, 1994).

Today’s cognitive-behavior therapy was originally derived from REBT but also went its own way and followed, to some extent, the computer-oriented aspects of the cognitive revolution in psychology. Consequently, it sometimes became sensationalist, mechanistic, and rationalist, instead of, as REBT has always tried to be, existentialist and philosophic. Thus, some of the cognitive-behavioral therapies, such as those of Beck (1976), Maultsby (1984) and Meichenbaum (1977), used empirical disputing of irrational beliefs and added to them positive affirmations, as originally proposed by Coue (1923). But they included little of the philosophical flavor of REBT.

REBT, as noted above, is quite humanistic, but abjures spiritual, religious, and mystical overtones and implications. Its secular humanistic origins lead to some of the following theories and practices.
CONSTRUCTIVlSM

Like Kelly’s theory of personal constructs, and in some ways more so, REBT is highly constructivist. It holds that although humans largely learn their goals, standards, and values from their family and their culture, they construct, yes, create, most of their emotional disturbances. For, unlike rats and guinea pigs, they take their strong desires and preferences, and they raise and propel them into Jehovian, absolutist musts, shoulds, and demands. Thus, when people want and prefer to succeed at school, work, or love, they frequently insist and command, “At all times and under all conditions I must, I have to succeed!” Because their self-constructed musts are often unrealistic and often impossible to achieve, they do not merely (as psychoanalysis and behavior therapy claim) get disturbed or acquire disturbances. More important, says REBT, they make themselves upset-consciously and unconsciously construct their musts and the emotional and behavioral disturbances that stem from these imperatives (Dryden, 1994a, 1994b, 1995; Ellis, 1973, 1988, 1991a, 1991b, 1994a; Ellis & Dryden, 1990;Yankura & Dryden, 1994).
PHENOMENALISM

REBT, with Epictetus and several other ancient philosophers, holds that it is not things and events that upset us but our view of these Activating Events (A’s). Unfortunately A’s influence us, but our B’s (Beliefs) about these A’s largely bring about disturbed C’s (Consequences), such as anxiety and depression. Therefore, to undisturb ourselves, we can proceed to D-to actively and forcefully Dispute our self-defeating, musturbatory B’s. The ABCD Theory of emotional disturbance and how to change it is unusually phenomenalistic.

The ABC’s of REBT also stress the meanings and interpretations people give to events and to results rather than the events and results in themselves. Thus, being thwarted at point A may mean a horrible hassle to one person and mean an adventurous challenge to another. Also, feeling anxious at point C may be viewed as awful and terrible by one individual, who thereby creates her or his own great anxiety about anxiety and makes himself or herself doubly or triply disturbed. But another person may view this same kind of anxiety as “damned inconvenient” and may make real efforts to understand and to cope with it. REBT tries to help people look at the meanings and interpretations they give to events and results and, especially, to their own possibilities of creating new meanings and interpretations. It focuses not merely on people’s gruesome past and present but also on their possibilities for the future (Ellis, 1991 a, 1991 b).
EXISTENTIAL CHOICE

Unlike most other therapies, REBT holds that people, even though they may not be fully aware of this, largely choose their dysfunctional core philosophies and lifestyles. Consciously and unconsciously, they mainly train themselves to feel panicked, depressed, self-hating, and enraged, rather than get conditioned to feel these ways. They are biologically and socially predisposed to needlessly upset themselves, usually from childhood onward, to create dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; and they hardly have complete free will. But they still have a significant degree of choice, and they therefore can almost always choose to think, feel, and behave in less disturbed and more fulfilling ways.
SELF-FULFILLMENT AND LONG-RANGE HEDONISM

REBT theorizes that people will not greatly enjoy or fulfill themselves when they make themselves distinctly disturbed, so it first helps them to significantly reduce their disturbances. It favors hedonism and fulfillment and tries to help people become less disturbed and happier. However, because immediate gratification-like excessive drinking–may easily lead to harmful results, REBT favors long-range rather than short-range hedonism.
UNCONDITIONAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE

Like person-centered therapy (Rogers, 1961), REBT accepts people unconditionally, whether or not they perform well or are likeable. But it also actively teaches them how to unconditionally accept themselves (and others). It shows them they can choose to fully accept themselves, no matter what they do, just because they choose to do so. It also shows them a more elegant philosophical solution in which they refuse to rate themselves and their totality at all, and only rate what they do and do not do (Berne, 1972; Ellis, 1973, 1985, 1988, 1994a; Ellis & Dryden, 1990, 1991; Hauck, 1991; Mills, 1993).
FLEXIBILITY AND ALTERNATIVE SEEKING

While helping people to give up their dogmatic, rigid shoulds and musts, REBT also shows them how to look for other alternative solutions and pleasures. As they work to change their absolutist demands, they see the wide world for what it is-a place with many possible knowledges and adventures. They learn and teach themselves that either/or rules are often unnecessary and that all kinds of possibilities (“both/and” or “and/also”) can be made to occur (Crawford, 1988; Ellis, 1962, 1985, 1994a, 1996; FitzMaurice, 1994; Korzybski, 1933).
PROFOUND PHILOSOPHICAL CHANGE

Like the other cognitive-behavior therapies, REBT helps people to give up their unrealistic, anti-empirical attributions and inferences, such as, “Because he frowned, I am sure he thinks I acted badly, he hates me, and he knows I am a real loser!” It shows them how to dispute and challenge these misperceptions and false Beliefs. But it also looks beyond them to people’s absolutist demands by which they often create their mispcrception. Such as, “He absolutely must, and at all times, approve of me. And because he frowned this time–as he must not!–that proves that I acted badly, that he hates me, and that he knows I am a real loser!” Instead of just getting to people’s disparate dysfunctional cognitions, REBT tries to help them get to their basic, core philosophies from which these spring, and to show them how to actively dispute them until they make a profound philosophic change. As they make this change, they may change their basic patterns of dysfunctional thinking and automatically and tacitly tend to think more rationally in the future.
INDIVIDUALITY AND SOCIALITY

Although REBT has been part of the human potential movement since the 1960s, REBT practitioners have tried to avoid its excesses by helping people see that they choose to live in a social group and that they are interdependent with this group. An essential part of people’s lives is group living and their economic, ecological, political, and other happiness depends on the well-functioning of their community. While they had better not be too self-sacrificing and other-directed, they had also better not be too self-indulgent and self-centered. The principle of both/and, rather than either/or, is important. Active democratic participation in community affairs rather than self-centered isolation will usually help oneself and one’s social group. REBT tries to help each individual in a family, community, or other system understand and healthfully change himself or herself. But it also stresses the importance of improving and changing the system in which all humans interdependently live (Ellis, 1985, 1991a, 1994a; Ellis & Dryden, 1991, 1997).
THERAPEUTIC ENCOUNTER

REBT consists of a therapeutic encounter between the client and the therapist in the course of which the therapist may not personally like or want to befriend all clients but cares very much about helping them overcome their emotional behavioral problems and lead happier lives. Like their clients, therapists and counselors are humans in their own right and are not blank screens, nor are they purely objective. They may therefore reveal a good deal of themselves to clients and have human relationships with them, but still take care to be responsible professionals and not get personally involved with their clients. REBT practitioners clearly show clients their shortcomings and disturbances, but always try to accept them as people, to give them unconditional acceptance no matter how badly they perform, and never to condemn them for their poor behaviors. But in addition to giving and modeling what Rogers (1961) calls unconditional positive regard to their clients, REBT professionals actively-directively teach them how to give it to themselves. For REBT holds that most clients easily and naturally damn themselves as well as their dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and actions, and that unless they are specifically taught the humanistic philosophy of self-acceptance, they are not likely to devise it and work for it entirely on their own. REBT, therefore, is collaborative and instructive, supportive and active-directive. It uses the therapeutic relationship as a vehicle to show clients how to relate to one human, the therapist, and therefore to be able to relate better to others. But it also teaches a large number of cognitive, emotive, and behavioral methods that clients can use to help themselves function in their intrapersonal, interpersonal, and community relationships (Ellis, 1973, 1985, 1994a, 1996; Ellis & Harper, 1997; Franklin, 1993; Hauck, 1991; Mills, 1993).
EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIORAL METHODS OF REBT

Although I once over-optimistically thought that people could logically and rationally be convinced to change their dysfunctional feelings and behaviors, I soon realized that they very often hold on to their musts, misperceptions, and misleading inferences and attributions very strongly, and they persistently habituate themselves to self-defeating emotions and actions. So, from the start, I incorporated into REBT many forceful, emotive-evocative methods (such as my famous shameattacking exercises). I also, right from the start, favored in vivo desensitization, implosive deconditioning, and the use of reinforcements and penalties with many of my clients. In addition, REBT uses active Disputing by clients of their irrational Beliefs, but also uses a number of other cognitive methods, such as self-help reports, coping self-statements, and bibliotherapy, in its wide-ranging therapeutic armamentarium. So REBT is far from being an intellectual or rationalist therapy, but is truly rational-emotive, strongly behavioral, and in many ways one of the most integrarive of modem therapies (Ellis, 1985, 1988, 1994a, 1996).

Humanistic psychotherapy, in my view and that of REBT, is the study of the whole individual for the purpose of helping people live a happier, more self-actualizing, and more creative existence. It completely accepts them with their human limitations; it particularly focuses on and uses their experiences and their values; it emphasizes their ability to create and direct their own destinies; and it views them as holistic, goal-directed individuals who are important in their own right, just because they are alive, and who (together with their fellow humans) have the right to continue to exist and to enjoy and fulfill themselves. This concept of humanistic psychotherapy and counseling includes both an ethical and a scientific orientation.

Humanistic psychotherapy and counseling is an important offshoot of humanistic psychology; but it has often gone off into its own idiosyncratic realms and has been particularly preoccupied, in recent years, with experiential, nonverbal, and physical approaches to personality change. It has assumed that modem man has become too intellectualized, technologized, and unemotional, hence alienated and dehumanized. It has, therefore, proposed itself as a corrective experiential force to make up for the lapses of classic behaviorism and orthodox psychoanalysis. In this respect, it has made notable contributions to psychotherapy and to the actualizing of human potential.

However, humans do not live by emotional (and by highly emotionalized) bread alone. They are remarkably complex, cognitive-emotive-behaving creatures. Of their main traits, their high-level ability to think about their thinking is probably their most unique and most “human” quality. If, therefore, people are effectively working against their strong individual and societal tendencies to dehumanize themselves, they would do better to learn to vigorously use some of the highest level thinking and metathinking of which they are innately capable but which they easily neglect and avoid (Piatelli-Palmarini, 1994).

The cognitive-behavioral therapies are in the vanguard of those methods that can be effectively used to preventively and psychotherapeutically help humanization. Because I am the founder and leader of one of the best known cognitive schools, namely, rational emotive behavior therapy or REBT, let me briefly describe this system and try to show why it, like similar cognitive schools, is one of the most revolutionary humanistic psychotherapies ever practiced.

Unlike the orthodox psychoanalytic and the classical behavioristic psychologies, REBT squarely places humans in the center of the universe and of their own emotional fate, and gives them almost full responsibility for choosing to make or not to make themselves seriously disturbed. Although it weighs biological and early environmental factors as quite important in the chain of events that lead to human disorganization and disorder, it holds that, nonetheless, individuals themselves can, and usually do, significantly intervene between their environmental input and their emotionalized output, and therefore have an enormous amount of potential control over what they feel and what they do. Moreover, when they unwittingly and foolishly make themselves disturbed by devoutly believing in irrational and dysfunctional assumptions about themselves and others, they can almost always make themselves undisturbed again, and can often do so within a relatively short time by using rational-emotive procedures.

Although I first discovered that individuals with neurotic feelings and behaviors usually have a dozen major irrational Beliefs (iB’s) that strongly encourage their self-defeating conduct, I later realized that these iB’s, and dozens of others that people commonly hold, can be placed under three main headings:

1. “I absolutely must perform important tasks well and be approved by significant others, or else I am an inadequate, pretty worthless person!” Result: Severe feelings of anxiety, depression, and demoralization, often leading to severe inhibition.

2. “Other people, especially my friends and relatives, truly must treat me kindly and fairly, or else they are rotten, damnable people!” Result: Severe feelings of anger, rage, fury, often leading to fights, child abuse, assault, rape, murder, and genocide.

3. “The conditions under which I live absolutely must be comfortable, unhassled, and enjoyable, or else it’s awful, I can’t stand it, and my life is hardly worth living!” Result: Severe feelings of low frustration tolerance, often leading to compulsion, addiction, avoidance, inhibition, and phobic reactions (Ellis, 1988, 1994a).

All three of these major self-sabotaging philosophies include absolutistic, grandiose shoulds, oughts, and musts. This kind of masturbation is decidedly all-too-human (because all of us often put ourselves in its throes) but it is also pronouncedly inhumane. REBT and most of the other cognitive behavior therapies humanistically fight against this inhumanity. They teach people how to dispute and challenge their grandiose musts and how to replace them with strong realistic, but still very human, preferences.

REBT uses an A-B-C method of viewing human personality and personality disturbance. When I am trying to help people, I usually begin with C, the upsetting emotional Consequence that they have recently experienced. Typically, they have been rejected by someone (which I call A, the Activating experience), and then feel anxious and worthless, and feel that A, their being rejected, has caused or depressed them at C. They wrongly believe that C, their feelings of anxiety, worthlessness, or depression, stem directly from A, and they may even overtly voice this belief by saying something like, “He rejected me and that made me depressed.”

I quickly try to show these clients that A does not directly cause C; that an Activating Event or Adversity in the outside world does not, by itself, create any feeling or emotional Consequence in their head and gut. For if this were true, then virtually everyone who gets rejected would have to feel just as depressed as the client does, and this is obviously not the case. C, then, must at least partly be caused by some intervening variable, or by B: the individual’s Belief system. Normally, when people are rejected at A they have two distinct Beliefs: one that is sensible or rational and another that is irrational. Their rational Belief (rB) generally is as follows: “Isn’t it unfortunate that they rejected me! I will suffer real losses or disadvantages by their rejection, and that is too bad. Now, how can I get them to accept me in the future; or, if I cannot, how can I get accepted by some other quality people who will probably bring me the kind of joy I would receive if they had not rejected me.” This latter Belief is rational because it (a) is designed to increase people’s happiness and minimize their pain and (b) is consonant with observable reality. For it can easily be seen, by the people themselves and by others, that it is unfortunate to be rejected by someone they care for; that they will suffer real losses or disadvantages by their rejection; and that they probably can find another person who will accept them and bring them the kind of joy they would have received had they not been rejected by the first person.

If these individuals held rigorously to their rational Beliefs about being rejected and did not go an iota ‘beyond them, they would usually experience pronounced feelings at point C (emotional Consequences), but not those of anxiety, worthlessness, or depression. Instead, they would have feelings of disappointment, sorrow, regret, frustration, and annoyance. Their feelings would then be quite appropriate to the Activating experience or event, because these would motivate them to try to change their lives so that they would in the future be accepted as desirable companions and hence enjoy themselves more.

Humans, however, are biologically and sociologically prone to think magically at point B, and to have self-defeating or irrational Beliefs (iBs) in addition to their rational ones. Consequently, my clients will usually conclude: “Isn’t it awful that they rejected me! I am less worthwhile because they have done so! No desirable person will probably ever accept me! I should have done a better job of getting them to accept me, and I deserve to bepunished for being so inept!” These Beliefs are highly irrational because (a) they are almost certain to decrease clients’ happiness, maximize their pain, and prevent them from fulfilling their desires in the future; and (b) they are related to magical, empirically unvalidatable and unfalsifiable hypotheses for which there is not, nor probably ever can be, any substantial evidence.

When a man hypothesizes that it is awful (or terrible or horrible) that he has been rejected by a woman he desires, he is really contending (a) that it is exceptionally inconvenient for him to be rejected and (b) that it must not be as inconvenient as it actually is. Although the first of these statements is verifiable, the second one really is not. It implies that he should not, ought not, must not be inconvenienced when he doesn’t want to be; that there is a law of the universe that posits that his wishes have to be satisfied, and that he can’t stand living in a world where he is seriously deprived. But these are all absolutist and grandiose propositions that have little basis in reality and that he has foolishly created in his head. Awfulness is really a devil that he invents and with which he then plagues himself. Inconveniences and disadvantages clearly exist, but awfulness and terribleness are made-up monsters and demons.

When a woman hypothesizes that she is worthless because a preferred person has rejected her, she again resorts to an unvalidatable and unfalsifiable hypothesis. For the conclusion that she is worthless means (a) that her life has somewhat less worth or value now that she has lost the person she wants and (b) that it has and will forever after have no value. Although, again, the first of these propositions may well be true, the second proposition cannot really be proven or disproven, but it is merely definitional. For how, except by definition, can it be shown that she, a very complex and evolving human being, is and will always be of no value whatever because one preferred person has rejected her? Even if she never wins a desirable partner, she could normally do many other enjoyable things during her lifetime and therefore bring considerable value to her life.

When a man hypothesizes that no desirable person will ever accept him because the one he now prefers has rejected him, he again is stating an unprovable assumption. For if he keeps trying, he has a high probability of eventually winning a valued partner, as long as he does not so seriously affect and deflect himself by his foolish self-fulfilling prophecy that he cannot possibly win one.

When a man concludes, “I should have done a better job of getting this woman to accept me; and I deserve to be punished for being so inept!” he is holding several magical and unverifiable propositions:

1. He claims not only that it would have been better if he had convinced the woman to accept him, but also that he should and ought to have done what would have been better. But how can he ever substantiate his absolutist should and ought?

2. He strongly implies that he is a louse, a no-good person for not inducing the preferred woman to accept him. But how could he ever become a totally bad person just because he has done some mistaken or inefficient acts?

3. He insists that because he has been inept in gaining the acceptance of this woman (a) he will be penalized or deprived by her loss, and (b) he deserves, by some inalterable law of the universe, to be condemned, damned, and punished forever. Although point (a) can be verified, point (b) is a dog-matic, faith-backed hypothesis that can probably never be substantiated or falsified.

In many ways, then, people’s irrational Beliefs (iB’s) are magical, and they are much more likely to lead to more harm than good. The more they devoutly and uncritically hold them, the more they will almost inevitably feel anxious, worthless, and depressed. These feelings, moreover, will usually sabotage rather than help them solve their original problem–namely, how to win the acceptance of the person they prefer or of someone somewhat equivalent to this person.

As a rational emotive behavior therapist, I talk with these disturbed individuals and quickly show them that A (their Activating experiences or events) do not directly cause C (their dysfunctional emotional Consequences), but that they themselves partly create these poor Consequences by absolutistically and unscientifically convincing themselves at point B, of several highly irrational Beliefs. I then lead them on to point D, which consists of vigorously Disputing their irrational Beliefs. I show them how to question and challenge these Beliefs by asking themselves (a) “Why is it awful that the person I greatly prefer rejected me?” (b) “How am I pretty worthless because he or she has refused me?” (c) “Where is the evidence that no desirable person will probably ever want me?” (d) “Why must I have done a better job of getting him or her to accept me?” (e) “By what law do I deserve to be punished or damned for being so inept?”

If people feel anxious, worthless, and depressed about being rejected but succeed in Disputing (at point D) their irrational Beliefs (iBs) about themselves and the world, they then proceed to E, a new Effective Philosophy. First, they have a new cognitive Effect (cE, which amounts to a restatement, in a more generalized form, of their original rational Beliefs or rBs). Thus, they will tend to conclude the following:

1. “It is not awful, but merely very inconvenient and disadvantageous for this preferred person to reject me.”

2. “Although, for the present, my life may be less enjoyable, or worth less than it would have been had he or she accepted me, I am never a worthless individual, unless I foolishly define myself as one.”

3. “There is of course no evidence that no desirable person will ever accept me; in fact, it is likely that in the future one will.”

4. “There are many reasons why it would have been better had I done a good job of getting this person to accept me, but there is no reason why I absolutely should or ought to have done such a good job.”

5. “There is no law that says that I deserve to be punished or damned for being so inept at winning the allegiance of the person I care for.”

If I encourage clients to adopt these new philosophies of living, they will then get a new, and often very pronounced, behavioral Effect (bE); namely, they will lose their feelings of anxiety, worthlessness, and depression. Moreover, when similar Activating Experiences (loss of approval by a desired person) occur, they will become increasingly able to nip their disturbance in the bud.

This, in simple outline, is one of the main cognitive essences of rational emotive behavior therapy. In addition, it uses a large variety of evocative-emotive and behavioral-motorial methods of helping troubled individuals change their basic irrational values and philosophies and acquire more sensible, joy-producing and pain-minimizing ideas. Because it is exceptionally persuasive, educational, and active-directive, and because it straightforwardly challenges many of the sacred myths, superstitions, and devout religiosities that are so prevalent among humans, REBT is often viewed as being antihumanistic. Thus, especially when it contends that people do not absolutely need love or success and that they have considerable ability to think about and to change their self-defeating emotions, it has been criticized as being overintellectualized, mechanistic, and manipulative.

These accusations are not only mistaken, but they miss an important pointefficient therapies that stress the potentialities of cognitive control over dysfunctional emotional processes are in many respects the most humanistic methods of personality change yet developed. They are unusually person-centered, creatively oriented, and relevant to the maximal actualization of human potential. Although experientially oriented psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow (1954), Fritz Perls (1969), and Carl Rogers (1961 ) were outstanding humanists, so too, were and are cognitive oriented therapists such as Aaron T. Beck (1976), Eric Berne (1972), George Kelly (1955), Arnold A. Lazarus (1989), and Richard Lazarus (1994).

The cognitive therapies in general, and rational emotive behavior therapy in particular, are among the most humanistic of psychological treatment procedures for a number of reasons:

1. Cognitive-behavior therapies largely deal with beliefs, attitudes, and values–rather than mainly with stimuli and responses, as many other therapies do. Psychoanalysis, for example, heavily emphasizes the activating events of people’s lives, especially the stimuli that impinged upon them during their early childhood. Classical behavior therapy is mainly preoccupied with their responses or symptoms. Experiential and encounter therapies are also focused on their responses or experiences. But REBT quickly zeros in on and primarily stays with people’s most uniquely human behaviors, namely, their cognitions and beliefs. It recognizes, as MagdaArnold, RudolphArnheim, George Kelly, and Richard Lazarus have shown, that their perceptions, on the one hand, and their emotions, on the other hand, are both significantly influenced and even caused by their concepts and constructs; and that although lower animals may be importantly conditioned and deconditioned by externally applied reinforcement and extinction, human beings seem to be the only creatures who can literally recondition or retrain themselves by changing their basic ideas. REBT specifically deals with humans as humans and not merely as representatives of the animal kingdom (Ellis, 1994a).

2. Cognitive-behavior therapies squarely put people in the center of the universe and give them a somewhat wider range of choice or existential freedom than many other therapies do. REBT holds that people’s behavior, although to some degree determined and limited by their biological nature and history, is considerably less determined than the orthodox Freudians or behaviorists seem to think that it is. It shows people how they can extend their choices of action and significantly change their personalities by (a)understanding precisely how they needlessly constrict themselves, (b) uprooting and modifying their rigid philosophies of life, and (c) actively working against their self-defeating habits until they break through their gratuitous restrictive shell.

3. Cognitive-behavior therapies do not merely accept humans the way they are, nor use their biosocial tendencies to be highly suggestible, prejudiced, and conforming to their social reality. They also enhance the possibility of people’s transcending some of their biological and social limitations and making themselves into radically changed and different (though not superhuman) individuals. REBT, in particular, teaches people to be less conditionable and suggestible, to think largely for themselves no matter what the majority of their fellow humans think and feel, and to minimize their dire needs for approval and success, which often force them into constrictive conformity. Instead of relying only on ordinary kinds of reinforcement to effect personality change, it also emphasizes the reinforcements of independent and creative thinking as an integral part of the human “hedonic calculus.”

4. Cognitive-behavior therapies are deeply philosophic and reeducative, emphasizing the more elegant types of personality-restructuring solutions, as opposed to symptom-removal types of solutions to human problems. Psychoanalysis, experiential, and behavior therapy may all help troubled individuals to forego a specific phobia, such as their fear of failing at love or at work. But they will rarely arrive at the point where they are not overly concerned with any form of failure unless their therapist or counselor engages in a depth-centered philosophic discourse about the general issues of failure, anxiety, and human worth. REBT is one of the few psychotherapies in which clients can be elegantly shown (a) that self-acceptance is a purely tautological and definitional concept and may always be had for the asking by people whose definitions are in good order; (b) that humans do not have to rate themselves at all, although they are generally better off if they accurately rate their traits and deeds; and (c) that virtually all human disturbance is the result of magical thinking (of believing in absolutistic shoulds, oughts, and musts) and can therefore be minimized by helping individuals to think and feel preferentially rather than musturbatorily. Not only, therefore, can people who are troubled gain insight into their fundamental difficulties in the course of relatively few sessions, but they can also be taught a method of dealing with their problems that can serve them for the remainder of their life.

5. The perceptual-cognitive-philosophic approach to therapy helps provide individuals with a neater, saner balance between their individualistic, selfseeking tendencies and their being a helpful and cooperative member of their social group than do other kinds of treatment. Some methods of therapy, such as experiential or psychoanalytic methods, may encourage people to indulge themselves and somewhat antisocially hate others. Other methods, such as relationship therapy, may encourage them to be overly concerned with others’ approval and to sacrifice themselves for their social group. REBT attempts to provide wellrounded discussion of questions, such as individualism versus conformity, enabling people to arrive at a sensible mean between two unreasonable extremes. Most major problems of living involve people’s taking a two-sided, tolerant, and somewhat compromising attitude toward themselves, others, and the world. This kind of attitude is much more likely to be arrived at through intelligent, realitycentered psychophilosophical discussion with a well-trained and wise therapist than it is through immersion in more one-sided types of therapy.

6. The cognitive-behavioral therapies make maximum use of a humanisticscientific methodology that is based on relevance and pleasure-seeking, but that also is closely tied to scientific thinking. REBT starts frankly with a human value system–namely, the assumption that pleasure, joy, creativity, and freedom are efficient for human living and that pain, joylessness, uncreativeness, and bondage are inefficient. It also assumes that what we call emotional disturbance is largely self-created and can therefore be self-dispelled. Because, however, it relies on induction from empirical evidence, on logic, and on flexible, alternative seeking, it ties its human-centered, hedonistic goals to the best available methods of achieving those goals. Therefore, instead of being anti-intellectual and antitechnological, as so many systems of psychotherapy and of philosophy are today, it tries to use modern science and technology for clear-cut humanistic purposes. REBT shows the clients, for example, that they are not alienated by technology and science but that they alienate themselves by irrationally “sacrealizing” these human tools; and that they can unalienate or get in touch with themselves and use such instruments to their own human advantage.

7. The cognitive-emotive therapies help the individual strike a balance between short-range and long-range hedonism. Virtually all psychotherapies are essentially hedonistic in that they encourage the individual to minimize needless pain (for example, anxiety and depression) and to maximize pleasure (for example, love and creative work). Many therapies, however, especially those that are religious centered, strongly stress self-discipline and long-range goals; whereas other therapies, especially experiential and encounter-type methods, stress the shortrange goals of here-and-now enjoyments. REBT, being philosophic and nonextremist, emphasizes both the releasing pleasures of the here and now and the longer-range goals of future gain through present day discipline. It holds that humans have the capacity to be contemporary and future-oriented hedonists, to actively work for personal and social changes and to be relatively patient, to enjoy a wide range of healthy negative feelings (including, at times, deep sadness or regret), and to control and change their unhealthy emotions (such as depression and rage).

8. The cognitive-behavior therapies use a wide variety of educational and reeducational methods. REBT teaches individuals how to understand themselves and others, how to react differently, and how to change their disturbed patterns through the therapist’s giving the client full empathic acceptance, a nonjudgmental environment, and practice in individual and group relating. It encourages them to do risk-taking and adventurous activities, both inside and outside the therapy sessions. It shows them how to express themselves in more authentic, less defensive ways. It uses behavioral desensitizing and operant conditioning procedures. But it also, along with these highly emotive and behavioral methods, didactically and directly teaches clients the facts of life and the intricate pathways of their own self-defeatingness and childish demandingness through explanations, stories, persuasive arguments, scientific data, bibliotherapy procedures, audiovisual aids, philosophic discussions, and a host of other educational procedures. For many individuals, this wide range of interventions proves more efficient than the one-sidedly dramatic or one-sidedly behavioral approaches used in many other therapies. Humans, obviously, do not live by intellect alone; but they rarely live very well without it. REBT integrates the rational-cognitive elements with many of the other time-tested, less didactic methods of psychotherapy.

9. The cognitive behavioral therapies are unusually effective for pain reduction and are therefore exceptionally humanistic. All psychotherapies are designed to help reduce unnecessary emotional and physical suffering. But many of the most popular methods, especially classical psychoanalysis, take a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of 5 or more years before the client is appreciably helped and becomes less anguished. Rational emotive behavior therapy, because it stresses an active-directive, concentrated, multifaceted attack on people’s basic irrational thinking and behaving, is frequently able to help them significantly in a matter of weeks or months (Ellis, 1996). Moreover, as has been shown in clinical research studies of REBT and other forms of cognitive therapy, these methods are often able to achieve better results with problem-afflicted individuals than are less cognitive-oriented forms of therapy (Hollon & Beck, 1994; Lyons & Woods, 1991; McGovern & Silverman, 1984; Silverman, McCarthy, & McGovern, 1992).

10. The cognitive-emotive therapies tend to be unusually accepting of human fallibility and to encourage maximum understanding of and tolerance for human frailty. Many psychotherapies wittingly or unwittingly encourage individuals to judge and condemn themselves or others. Thus, psychoanalysis teaches them that their parents are to blame for their emotional problems and implies that they are therefore reprehensible. Experiential, cathartic, and encounter therapies often show them that they are right in hating others and that they had better openly “vent their spleen” on them. They also encourage people, in many instances, to feel deeply hurt by others’ rejections and thereby to be self-damning. Religiously oriented and confession-type therapies tend to induce people to acknowledge their sins, to feel terribly guilty about them, to expiate them in various ways, and to retain or augment a self-flagellating philosophy of sin and atonement.

REBT is one of the few types of therapy and counseling that specifically and vigorously opposes all types of blaming, including people’s negatively judging themselves, others, and the universe. It persistently shows the ashamed, hostile, and self-pitying people that no one is to be blamed or damned for anything; that they can always unconditionally accept themselves and others, no matter what their or others’ deficiencies are; and that no matter how rough or unfair the world is, it is a waste of time and energy for people to whine about and rant against it. In other words, it shows people with problems how they can humanistically refuse to loathe themselves, other fallible people, or the world at large; and how they can realistically accept humans as humans (instead of as superhumans or subhumans) and desist from deifying and “devilifying” themselves and any other people. In this particular sense, in its complete acceptance of people as being incredibly human and never anything but fallible and ungodlike, rational emotive behavior therapy is surely the epitome of humanistic psychology and counseling and psychotherapy.
CONCLUSION

Is REBT a truly revolutionary approach to psychological treatment and to the prevention of emotional disturbance? In some ways, of course, it is not, because it basically stems from the teachings of stoicism, the scientific method, existentialism, and humanism, all of which have been around for a good many years and are therefore no longer too revolutionary. But in some of its specific applications of these values and ideas to the field of psychotherapy, rational emotive behavior psychology is truly innovative and radical. For example:

1. It has an exceptionally clear-cut theory of personality disturbance, or human demandingness, that hypothesizes that people do not get upset but instead largely upset themselves by insisting that (a) they must be outstandingly loved and accomplished, (b) other people must be incredibly fair and giving, and (c) world conditions must be exceptionally easy and munificent. The rational emotive behavior therapist and counselor can, therefore, usually quickly zero in on people’s fundamental disturbances, show them exactly what they are doing to create them, and demonstrate how they can begin to minimize them if they wish to work at doing so.

2. It is one of the few methods (perhaps the only method) of personality change that provides people with severe emotional problems with the most elegant, deepest, and non-palliative solutions to these problems; namely, their learning how to steadfastly refuse to berate themselves at all times and instead to rate and measure only their traits and performances. REBT is the one regular mode of psychotherapy and counseling that truly solves the ego problem: by showing individuals how to stop esteeming or “disesteeming” themselves for anything, and thereby eliminating pride or self-rating.

3. REBT is one of the few systems of counseling and psychotherapy that truly does not involve any kind of magic, god or devil, or other kinds of sacredness. Where many other systems deify feeling, experience, self-interest, social interest, self-disclosure, relationship, trust, reason, anti-intellectualism, and what have you, REBT deifies nothing, holds to no absolutes, and is quite comfortable with the world of probability, uncertainty, fallibility, and even disorder. It teaches people to desire and prefer many goals, but not to demand, to need, or to dictate anything. In this sense, and quite revolutionarily, it helps free humans of their own anxiety-creating, depression-invoking, and hostility-manufacturing grandiosity and demandingness. Not merely, mind you, of the unfortunate symptomatic results of this demandingness, but of the essence of the demandingness itself.

Humans are human–they will (in all likelihood) never be more than human. When and if they fully accept that reality, together with the reality that the universe doesn’t give a damn about them nor likely ever will, they will then become truly humanistic. Rational emotive behavioral psychology is one of the main modem methods of helping them work toward that goal.

To understand the human condition from an REBT perspective is to understand how one can very likely change it. Human means “malleable” and “changeable.” To be a humanist, for oneself and for others, is to plan and work for change.

As I stated earlier, humans have many contradictory and conflicting tendencies. They compete and cooperate; they have a profound self-love and self-hatred; they strive for security and novelty; they are ecologically constructive and destructive; they are scientific and dogmatic. As Korzybski (1933) pointed out over 60 years ago, an either/or view of people and the world is misleading and “unsane.” To understand ourselves and help us solve our problems, let us see ourselves in an and/also light.

REBT applies this kind of humanism not only in individual and group psychotherapy but in a variety of public venues as well. For example, REBT has inspired the creation of, and actively cooperates with, SMART (Self-Management and Recovery Training), a self-help group that helps people overcome substance abuse and other addictions without calling upon any “higher power.” SMART is a group project for concerned individuals. Each of its participants helps him or herself through social participation and without any respect to or dependence on a belief in superhuman or supernatural entities. This, I think, is a decidedly humanistic way to go.

In view of human complexity, I can see no perfect solution to individual and world problems. Solving these problems now often seems to create the need for newer, often quite different, solutions later. So, is our task therefore hopeless? Not quite, for as the outstanding modern humanist George Kelly (1955) said, people easily are irrational and self-destructive but they are also marvelously constructive, creative, experimental, and scientific. I view the process of helping them to be more constructive and less hostile to themselves and others as one of the most important humanistic goals. An attitude that is nonabsolutist, open-minded, scientific, nondogmatic, and flexible seems to provide one possible answer. Let us experimentally, and humanistically, try it.

Blot out vain pomp; check impulse; quench appetite; keep reason under its own control. ..RJ.Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Meditations, IX, 7
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