I’ve done therapy off-and-on for a few years now, with a few different therapists, using a few different techniques. What I’ve found is that, like almost everything in life, therapy requires experimentation. You try different people, different philosophies, different approaches until you find one that is genuinely helpful for you.

During one session my current therapist recommended we look into Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT). In our hour we went through the “ABCs of REBT” (more on that later) and I felt it illuminated some thing in a new light, so after the session I bought a book on REBT (and then like … six more) and started to dig into it.

And what I found was that the REBT approach is very helpful for me! So below I’ll talk through what it is a bit, why I think it is at least a little helpful for everyone, and why it could potentially be very helpful as I review Albert Ellis’s book “How to subbornly refuse to make yourself miserable about anything, yes anything!”

What is REBT?

REBT is a step-by-step process, but before we get into the process, let’s get some terminology and assumptions down.

Emotions can be healthy or unhealthy — even negative ones

First, emotions, even negative emotions, can be healthy and useful unless they become too extreme. Caution about driving makes us careful on the road and it can help us avoid other dangerous drivers, keeping us safe. But anxiety about driving, where the mere thought of getting on the highway makes us seize up with fear, is unhealthy.

Caution and anxiety are on the same continuum — they’re related. So REBT seeks to turn unhealthy emotions into healthy emotions.

This can happen because our emotional response isn’t hard-wired. It is a result of our beliefs. In fact, if you bring different beliefs to the same experience, people will feel completely different about it.

Our beliefs influence our emotional response to experiences

Let’s go back to driving, specifically getting on the highway. The activity — getting on an on-ramp, getting up to speed, merging into traffic — all of the mechanics of it are the same no matter who you are.

But people feel differently based on their own beliefs and attitudes. How do you think these people would respond to driving on the highway:

• An F1 race car driver
• A father of four who commutes an hour to work
• A teenager who just got their license

Now, we can look at these people and say “Oh yeah, they’d all behave differently, obviously.” But the question is WHY. Why do they behave differently to the exact same experience?

The answer lies in their beliefs about themselves. A race car driver probably believes something like “I’m excellent at driving cars. They are an extension of my body, my reflexes are finely tuned, and I can handle anything anyone throws at me.”

A dad who commutes probably believes “I’m a decent driver. I drive this highway every day, I have lots of experience, and I’ve avoided accidents in the past and feel pretty confident I’ll continue to avoid them.”

The teenager probably believes something like “I can barely handle driving down the street in front of my house. Yesterday I blew through a stop sign! I’m not a good driver, and everyone else on the road is going to judge me and get mad at me.”

The point in these examples is to show that, no matter the stimulus, it is our beliefs which ultimately creates the emotional response. And when we have beliefs that don’t match reality, it’s a recipe for a poor response.

The difference between rational and irrational beliefs

The key to knowing if a belief matches reality is using the scientific method. As Ellis explains:

Science … is flexible and nondogmatic. It sticks to facts and to reality (which always can change) and to logical thinking (which does not contradict itself and hold two opposite views at the same time). But it also avoids rigid all-or-none and either/or thinking and sees that reality is often two sided and includes contradictory events and characteristics.

Many of us hold beliefs that don’t match reality. For example, I might think “I’m a good person, so I must be kind at all times.” Ellis points out that the words “must” and “should” are tip-offs that you’re holding an irrational belief. Must I be kind at all times? If it were true, that I MUST be good at all times, then it would be impossible for me to behave badly. The universe would make it so that I can only be good.

But that’s not what reality is. I know that I can fail to be kind sometimes. Maybe often! If I hold to this irrational belief “I’m a good person, so I must be kind at all times” and I see myself not being kind, what is going to happen?

Well, a few things could. I could deny it, or blame someone else. I could say “I AM kind, but that person cut me off in traffic and I was reacting to them! It’s their fault I wasn’t kind!” Or I could follow the logic through and become depressed: “If my being a good person requires that I’m always kind, and I’m not always kind, that must mean I’m a bad person!” That’s also a bad outcome.

So you need to do away with irrational beliefs, and replace them with rational beliefs. A rational belief takes a belief with a must or should and replaces it with a preference or desire. So “I must be kind” becomes “I prefer to be kind, but I know that I’m not always kind and that’s OK because I’m not a perfect person.”

If you have a rational belief, instead of feeling extreme emotions, you’re more likely to experience helpful emotions (Ellis calls them “Heavy vs light” emotions). So the purpose of REBT is to identify these irrational beliefs, and then help you turn them into rational beliefs, and thus help you turn heavy negative emotions into light negative emotions. So let’s look at the process.

The ABCs of REBT

The book actually has an REBT self-help form, which I really like (pg 96) so we’ll pull most of the process from that. So the basic sequence of events is:

A — Activating Event (what happened that made you feel something)
B — Belief (what beliefs influenced your response)
C — Consequences (How did you feel and/or respond?)
D — Disputation (How can you dispute your irrational belief?)
E — Effective (what is your new, rational belief?)
F — Functional (and what functional emotions does your new rational belief make you feel?)

This process is how you find an irrational belief, and dispute it until you can find a more functional, rational belief. I think the best way to understand it is through an example of an irrational belief, I’ll use a real one, from my life.

An example of one of my irrational beliefs

One thing Ellis points out is that you can kind of work backwards to find your beliefs, by starting with the Consequences. When you notice you’re feeling those heavy negative emotions, you can bet there’s an irrational belief somewhere causing them.

So when I started looking for irrational beliefs I made a list. What are the circumstances that make me feel heavy negative emotions? Things like anxiety, depression, or anger?

One that jumped to mind was when my kids don’t listen to me. Nothing makes me upset faster than when they ignore me. I wasn’t sure why, but it really got under my skin.

Once you’ve identified the consequence (me feeling angry at my kids) you’ve likely already identified the Activating Events (my kids ignoring me), which means it’s time to find the Belief. As Ellis says, you need to look for the MUST or the SHOULD. What must or should belief is making me so angry?

I spent a lot of time on this, so I won’t bore you with the false starts or dead ends. Instead I’ll just say what I believe my irrational belief is:

“Kids should respect their parents, and the obvious way to display respect is by listening to them, so good kids must listen to their parents. If they don’t it means either the kids are rotten, or the parents are terrible.”

(I threw in some stuff called awfulizing and/or terribilizing that he mentions in the book that I’m not going to explain here, but hopefully you get the idea. The idea is to make the belief as extreme and forceful as you reasonably can)

Once you identify the irrational belief (which has both musts and shoulds in mine!) it’s time to start Disputing those beliefs. He has a list of questions you can use to dispute your belief, which include things like:

• Can I rationally support this belief?
• What evidence exists of the falseness of this belief?
• Does any evidence exist of the truth of this belief?
• What are the worst things that could actually happen to me if I don’t get what I think I must?
• What good things could I make happen if I don’t get what I think I must?

Let’s ask ourselves those questions about my irrational belief that good kids must listen to their parents. For example:

• What evidence exists of the falseness of this belief?
  • If good kids HAD to listen to their parents, there would be no way for them not to! The universe would make it so, but that’s not reality.
  • I’ve known lots of people I consider good who didn’t always listen to their parents. I didn’t always listen to my parents, and I considered myself a good kid — I think my parents would say I was one too. So good kids clearly don’t always listen to their parents.
• Does any evidence exist of the truth of this belief?
  • None. While it’s true that I would prefer that my kids listen to me, it’s very obvious that they don’t have to. I don’t like it when they don’t, and it’s can be irritating, but me getting angry about it isn’t going to help them listen in the future, it’s just making me angry and miserable.

You get the idea. After you dispute the irrational belief, you can make a rational one:

“I prefer it when my kids listen to me, but if they don’t it’s not the end of the world. Kids are kids, and they don’t always listen, but that doesn’t mean they’re rotten kids or I’m a terrible person. It just means they’re distracted. At the worst it could mean they don’t think I have anything important to say, but I can’t control that, and forcing them to listen won’t change their evaluation of what I say.”

(Rational beliefs end up being a lot longer. I don’t know if that’s always the case, but it seems like it for me)

Ideally, over time, I can dispute my irrational belief enough, and remind myself of the rational belief, that it becomes second nature to me. Instead of anger, I’ll feel mild annoyance, and I won’t be nearly as miserable. But it does take a lot of time and effort — this is not an overnight fix. Changing your beliefs about yourself and the world takes a lot of time.

Is REBT for you?

The great thing about REBT is that the process is fairly simple. You have probably thought about times that you feel those heavy negative emotions just while reading this — you may have even identified some Activating Events already.

So it doesn’t take much to know if REBT could be helpful for you. If it seems like it might, buy the book! It’s less than ten bucks and it could be anywhere from mildly helpful to extremely helpful, which is probably worth that investment.

I think it’s been really helpful already for me. It’s helped me deal with some anxiety around board presentations, as well as some frustrations at home, so it’s worth it for me to keep using it. I would love to get to a place where I no longer make myself miserable.