Albert Ellis (1913-2007) was born in Pittsburgh to a Jewish immigrant family, and raised in New York City. A sick and unhappy child, the young Albert suffered from near constant illness, spending extensive time recovering in hospitals and sick rooms. His parents, who were both emotionally and physically absent, offered their son little in the way of comfort, reassurance, or affection, and Ellis was left to raise himself and his younger brother and sister more or less alone.
As a young adult, Ellis did not want to become a psychologist. After graduating college with a business degree, he decided he wanted to write novels, but after spending most of his twenties failing to make a good living, Ellis entered the PhD program at Columbia University in 1942. Ellis's writing--direct and bracing to the point of causticity--would remain a great asset to him, and one of the keys to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy's success: Ellis would go on to publish dozens of books and over a thousand articles over the course of his long and productive career. Ellis wrote for all audiences, and he was especially adept at "self-help" books, writing extensively on topics such as sex, marriage, addiction, work, and stress for a popular audience.
When Ellis was pursuing his PhD, psychoanalysis as conceived of by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung was the established creed, but Ellis quickly grew impatient with what he took to be its cold detachment from what he took to be the real pressing issues of his clients' lives. According to Ellis, his clients were not suffering due to some ineffable trauma hidden in the back recesses of their subconscious, but because of their false and irrational interpretations of the situation in which they find themselves. These beliefs may not ever be openly articulated--indeed, their very existence often depends on remaining private and internalized, for if they were ever spoken out loud, they could be challenged and revealed to be the absurdities they often are. But they are intelligible and accessible to discussion, and, if properly challenged, might be overthrown and replaced with new, truer, more useful ideas and interpretations. This, briefly stated, is the job of the therapist: to replace their client's irrational beliefs about themselves with rational ones.
Ellis's approach to therapy was lively, direct, ruthlessly pragmatic, and even occasionally combative, though usually in a good natured way. Ellis was not interested in mining his clients' dreams, or in ferreting out their hidden urges like some kind of shaman. He did not lose himself in the labyrinth of the client's past experiences, or attempt to trace the threads of cause and effect between them. The approach which became known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) focused on the only thing the client can control: present attitudes towards and beliefs about current experiences. It is only in the present that the therapist (and the client) can do useful work.
This shift away from Freudian psychoanalysis to the conscious thought processes of the client would later become known as the Cognitive Revolution, and Ellis was the first real figure in the movement. Ellis' work served as one of the primary influences on the development of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) by Aaron Beck in the 1960s, and Ellis has sometimes been known as the grandfather of CBT. CBT has become so universally practiced that if Ellis had done nothing else but influence its development, he would still remain an important figure in the history of counseling and psychology. But Ellis ensured that his career would be more than a historical footnote: for nearly six decades, he published books and research articles, mentored psychotherapists, and continued meeting with clients. Even today, REBT remains a commonly employed modality in its own right, and many Ellis' ideas continue to influence current practice.
No single person, with the possible exception of Carl Rogers, did more to change the trajectory of the theory and practice psychotherapy in the second-half of the 20th century than Albert Ellis. This LibGuide provides an introduction to Ellis' ideas in particular and to the practice of REBT in general.
Perhaps the simplest way to conceptualize the therapeutic taken by Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is the ABCDE model as outlined by Dryden (2008). This simple heuristic outlines Ellis entire approach to guiding the client from Adversity or the Activating Event to the New Effective Rational Belief.
A. Adversity, or Activating Event.
The "A" in the ABCDE model is not so much a stage in the therapeutic process, but the event or situation which causes distress in the client and prompts him or her to seek therapy. In general, the therapist in REBT does not attempt to question, recontextualize, or downplay the severity of the Activating Event, but seeks instead to address,
B. The Irrational Belief
In response to the Adversity or Activating Event, the client develops irrational beliefs about himself, about others, and about his situation. These beliefs, Ellis notes, often involves fusion: that is, an identification of the self with circumstances. A husband leaves his wife for another woman, for example, and in response, the wife tells herself that she is unlovable, undesirable, and a bad wife and mother. A man loses his job, and he in response he tells himself that he is worthless, a failure no good to anyone. These responses, Ellis emphasizes, are entirely irrational--that is, they are not based on a clear-headed assessment of the Activating Event, but are cognitive distortions based on fear, insecurity, anxiety, and self-protection. The client may struggle to articulate their beliefs openly, but they repeat them all the time, "catechizing" themselves with these false and maladaptive patterns of thought until they begin to permeate all aspects of the client's thinking.
C. Emotional and Behavioral Consequences
As a result of irrational beliefs, the client begins to experience significant suffering and dysfunction in their own lives. Crucially, REBT considers that it is these irrational beliefs, and not the activating events themselves, which are the source of the client's suffering. Sarracino et al. (2017) states succinctly that "“external events (A) do not cause emotions (C), but beliefs (B) and, in particular, irrational beliefs (IB) do” (p. 278). It is here that the influence of stoicism upon Ellis' thought is most apparent: Epictetus (1948) writes, "Men are not disturbed by things, but by the views which they take of things. [. . .] When, therefore, we are hindered or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves--that is, to our own views." As the client persists in their unhelpful and irrational beliefs, the consequences to themselves and to their relationships become more severe. The client may continue to spiral, or they may decide at this stage to seek help, at which point the REBT therapist is able to enter at stage
D. Disputation
The first and most important task facing the therapist is to identify and Dispute the irrational beliefs of the client. The therapist must guide his client into articulating their false or irrational beliefs, and then must convince the client that these beliefs are irrational, and so must be abandoned. Crucially, the therapist must teach the client to dispute these beliefs on his own, whenever he finds them returning to his mind. The therapist might do this by assigning the client homework--take home exercises the client uses to practice new patterns of thought.
E. New Effective Rational Beliefs
But it is not enough to simply dispute false beliefs--the therapist must also seek to instill new, more effective "rational" beliefs in the client. In the final stage of REBT, the therapist seeks to replace the (now discredited) irrational beliefs of the client with new, more useful and more true beliefs. Instilling these new "rational" beliefs in the client are the entire focus of REBT, which, when compared to more person-centered approaches, in uniquely directive, requiring the therapist to serve as a kind of teacher or instructor for the client.
Works Cited:
Epictetus. (1948). The Enchiridion (T. W. Higginson, Trans.). Project Gutenberg, March 10, 2014, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45109/45109-h/45109-h.htm
Sarracino, D., Dimaggio, G., Ibrahim, R., Popolo, R., Sassaroli, S., Ruggiero, G.M. (2017). When REBT Goes Difficult: Applying ABC-DEF to Personality Disorders. Journal of Rational-Emotive and Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 35(3), 278-295.
Wood, A., Barker, J. B., & Turner, M. J. (2017). Developing performance using rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT): A case study with an elite archer."
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