REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) is a type of short-term psychotherapy that aims to help you identify self-defeating attitudes and feelings, question their rationale, and replace them with better, more productive beliefs.
Rational emotive behaviour therapy focuses on the present moment to help you learn how problematic beliefs and thoughts cause emotional pain, which leads to unhealthy attitudes and behaviors that obstruct your immediate life goals.
Negative actions and ideas can be modified and substituted with more positive and constructive behavior once they’ve been identified and understood, allowing you to establish more effective personal and professional connections.
Negative emotions like anxiety, guilt, depression, and excessive or inappropriate anger can all be helped with REBT. This method can also help you modify stressful and self-defeating behaviors like anger, poor eating habits, and procrastination that interfere with your quality of life and your ability to achieve your goals. Sometimes psychotherapy alone isn’t enough to fix all the problems, so in certain cases other treatments like ketamine iv infusion therapy can be introduced by a psychiatrist to help with the overall recovery.
What to expect
The counselor will work with you to understand the attitudes and restrictive thought processes that keep you hostage to help you regulate and overcome issues or achieve life objectives. The therapist will assist you in seeing how absurd these beliefs are and how they are causing you damage.
Next, you will learn how to lessen your negative ideas and responses and substitute them with better, more productive, and self-accepting one’s through a range of mental exercises.
Positive imagery, resetting your thoughts, including the use of self-help materials and audio-visual aids, as well as assignments for reinforcement between sessions, are some of the approaches and instruments used in REBT.
How does it work?
Rational emotive behavior therapy arose from the mid-1950s research of psychiatrist Albert Ellis as the first form of cognitive-behavioral treatment. Most people, according to Ellis, are unaware that many of their self-perceptions are irrational and harm how they behave in critical relationships and situations.
These thoughts, according to Ellis, are what cause people to experience bad emotions and indulge in self-destructive actions. At the same time, if people are prepared to put in the effort, they may challenge and change their erroneous views.
While specific life circumstances may have a role in mental health disorders, REBT therapists think that the individual’s faulty belief system is the root of the problem. One can improve one’s ability to accept oneself and others by releasing negative thoughts and substituting them with good beliefs. As a result, one can live a happier life.
REBT’s three major insights
The three main insights of REBT are:
- When people recognize and accept that their views about an event, rather than the event itself, are the primary cause of emotional reactions, individuals do not just become upset as a result of an event. Irrational ideas drive people to be upset with themselves.
- If people do not deal with their irrational beliefs, they “hold” on to them, which causes them to feel upset in the present. That is, these people still believe in the “three musts” entirely.
- Understanding these ideas, according to Ellis, does not automatically make people “better.” To put it another way, knowing about these beliefs and how they affect our emotional responses isn’t enough to “heal” people.
In truth, the greatest method to improve and maintain one’s REBT results is to concentrate on detecting and contesting illogical ideas, changing irrational “musts,” and shifting negativity into more healthy emotions. The only way of improving is to put in the effort to change one’s beliefs. It takes time and effort to get good at it.
Look for a certified mental health professional who has completed rational-emotive and cognitive-behavioral therapy training. It’s crucial to choose a rational emotive behavior counselor with whom you feel at ease, in addition to confirming credentials.
