Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy  (REBT) was discovered by  Dr Albert Ellis  he died in 2007 and was ninety three years old, an American psychologist and psychotherapist.

REBT is a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that was brought to light by  Dr Aaron Beck the god father of CBT.

REBT is an evidence based psychotherapy, a practical action oriented approach that helps you to cope with your problems and enhance your personal growth. It is recognised as a form of ‘talk therapy’ that addresses the clients irrational thinking and behaviours, it specifically targets irrational beliefs, while CBT focuses on cognitive distortions. Also REBT is more direct in the teaching that emotions are primarily the result of irrational beliefs and that changing these beliefs can directly change emotional responses. Its focus is about dealing with things in the present day, and not letting the past experiences inhibit your life, but to concentrate on achieving a fuller life experience.   REBT can provide a variety of methods to help the person re-adjust and make sense of their dysfunctional beliefs into more of a sensible, realistic and helpful one by using the powerful REBT technique called “disputing.”   This effective way of working can enable the person to feel happier in themselves, their own health and personal wellbeing.

These irrational beliefs are challenged through a means of disputing them, Ellis developed a model of doing this called ABC and the ABCDE.  

A – to identify the adversity or activating events

B – identity the irrational beliefs

C – identify the consequence, our feelings and behaviours in response to the event caused by our beliefs 

D –learn to dispute the beliefs causing disturbance

E – install effective new philosophies based on rational beliefs

REBT is an active and direct approach that involves teaching, persuasion and debate with some levels of fun and humour thrown in.  This therapeutic humour tool was a way that Ellis liked to work.  He helps to diffuse the client’s own seriousness and to separate themselves from their inner irrational world.  Clients will be given some homework tasks to do; it is good to see if they are happy with this, like doing self-monitoring or recording of negative thoughts and self-sabotaging beliefs.  Use of imagery is another useful tool/ technique and this involves the client being asked to imagine themselves responding in a positive way to situations that have been a big problem for them in the past.  Another useful way of working might be to do some role playing back and forth between client and therapists, for example if a client was going for a job interview and gets worked up or overthinks scenarios they can talk it through with you to diffuse any unnecessary negative cognitions.

During your first session, your therapist will discuss your goals and the activating event (or events) that prompted you to seek treatment. They may want to delve into REBT techniques straight away as this form of therapy is very active and focused. So your therapist is not likely to spend a lot of time on casual conversation. Also throughout your treatment, you will probably receive homework assignments to complete and look at these new behaviours and experiment with them. So your willingness to want to change and try out new beliefs and to install these different behaviours are paramount if you want to change your behaviour.

I will give an example of so ABCDE model,  so two girls have to make individual presentations in front of the same group. This will be the first presentation that either of them has ever made, and both of them have prepared well.

Yet the first girl at the time of presentation gets nervous, goes blank, she muddles through delivering her presentation.  Whereas the second girl is confident and makes the presentation effectively. Both these girls were in exactly the same situations, but their emotional and behavioural responses were different.  The activating event was facing the audience,  for the first girl the activating event triggered a belief that “I am not capable and not good enough”, which led to the feeling of nervousness and poor presentation. For the second girl the activating event triggered a belief that “I am capable and good”, which led to the feeling of confidence and effective presentation.

So, as per the ABCDE model, if we were to dispute the original belief that ‘I am not capable and not good’  in a way that we could break it along with creating an effective new belief, that ‘I am capable and good’ , the girl would now begin to feel confident which given the fact that she is well prepared will help her deliver more effectively.