Three Insights of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

REBT helps people develop three important insights into the nature of emotional and behavioral disturbance. Let’s look at each one:

1. We don't merely get upset but mainly upset ourselves by holding inflexible beliefs.

REBT argues that people had better acknowledge the active role they play in making themselves upset. Life and other people give you an opportunity to get upset but you largely create your disturbance by demanding that life, other people, and even yourself be as you think they absolutely ought, and must be. Since you can modify your rigid demands REBT puts forth the idea that you are the more important driver of your emotional disturbance.

2. No matter when and how we start upsetting ourselves, we continue to feel upset because we cling to our irrational beliefs.

REBT acknowledges that traumatic events in the past may be related in time to the onset of your emotional disturbance but you perpetuate your emotional disturbance in the present by holding onto or clinging to rigid demands and derivative self-defeating beliefs in the present.

3. The only way to get better is to work hard at changing our beliefs. It takes practice, practice, practice.

REBT encourages you to see that humans have the capacity to change how they think, feel and behave.  However, humans also so easily slip into rigid thinking and because this rigid way of thinking is so well practiced real therapeutic change involves a great deal of work and practice. Furthermore, REBT argues that to prevent backsliding once therapeutic change has occurred lifelong work and practice is required.