Advances in REBT: Theory, Practice, Research, Measurement, Prevention and Promotion

391 Pages·2019·4.753 MB·English

by  Michael E. Bernard, Windy Dryden

Michael E. Bernard · Windy Dryden
Editors
Advances
in REBT
Theory, Practice, Research,
Measurement, Prevention and
Promotion
Advances in REBT
Michael E. Bernard • Windy Dryden
Editors
Advances in REBT
Theory, Practice, Research, Measurement,
Prevention and Promotion
Editors
Michael E. Bernard Windy Dryden
Melbourne Graduate School of Education Goldsmiths University of London
University of Melbourne London, UK
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-93117-3 ISBN 978-3-319-93118-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93118-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933301
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Preface
At the 2nd International Congress on Cognitive Behavioral Coaching held in Athens
in June, 2016, Windy and I agreed that it was timely for current REBT theory, prac-
tice, research, measurement, and applications to be written about by leading REBT
scholar-practitioners throughout the world. Sharon Panulla, Executive Editor at
Springer whom we have worked with over two decades, agreed to support the proj-
ect. In discussing the range of global REBT professional activity, we arrived at 36
topics for chapters, and the project with Sharon’s support became two books.
Windy and I first met in 1980 while attending the REBT Supervisor’s Practicum
at the Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy in New York that was conducted by
Richard Wessler. 1980 was an important year for REBT as four books were pub-
lished on the theory and practice of REBT by authors other than Ellis (Wessler/
Wessler, Bard/Fisher, Grieger/Boyd, Hauck). It was an exciting time for both of us
as we had the opportunity to work directly with Albert Ellis, sat in on his group
therapy sessions, and became close to an amazing array of REBTers including but
not limited to Ray DiGiuseppe, Janet Wolfe, Dom Dimattia, and Ann Vernon.
Subsequently, we became serial editors of the Journal of Rational-Emotive &
Cognitive-Behavior Therapy.
Albert Ellis was a genius (we know he scored in the top 99% of the Army Alpha
IQ test). As a result of his superior aptitude, his extensive reading of philosophy and
psychology, and his 150,000+ hours of clinical practice, he discovered something
about the human psyche that is quite unique. This discovery and its derivative clini-
cal, counselling, educational, and coaching practices continue to stand the test of
time and form a major part of his legacy. Ellis discovered rationality as a mental
strength that helps people overcome adversity and self-manage negative emotions
and self-defeating behaviors and as a self-actualizing force that assists people to live
fulfilled, goal-achieving lives. Of course, Ellis also shed light on an oppositional
force within the human psyche, irrationality, that, as he so eloquently discussed and
wrote about, is more important as a contributor to people’s mental health problems
than their surrounding environment or their early childhood experiences.
v
vi Preface
Ellis expressed his view that the goal of REBT, when practiced in its most e legant
and powerful form, is to educate people to become more rational in order to achieve
their goals (and dreams) largely through changes in their philosophy of life. Ellis
considered that all people construct personal beliefs that together form a belief sys-
tem that ideally helps them to achieve their goals of living a long, self-actualized,
and happy life and which leads to achievement, love, and an absence of stress.
Unfortunately, because of people’s largely biological propensity, rational beliefs (“I
very much want to be successful, loved and stress free”) are made into rigid, irratio-
nal shoulds, oughts, musts, and needs (“I need to be successful, loved and comfort-
able”). This is how people’s belief system can prevent them from achieving their
goals, leading to emotional misery. Much of REBT is devoted to helping strengthen
people’s rational beliefs. At the same time, and deriving from his self-confessed
gene for efficiency, Ellis and REBT methods help people through the use of his
renowned ABC model to become great problem-solvers in the emotional domain –
further developing their mental faculty of rationality.
We think the chapters in this book on REBT measurement and REBT empirical
status by Professor Daniel David, Department of Clinical Psychology and
Psychotherapy/International Institute for Psychotherapy, “Babeș-Bolyai” University
of Cluj-Napoca, and his colleagues deserve special mention. In the early days,
REBT was unfavorably compared with Beck’s cognitive therapy because the scien-
tific rigor and evaluation studies were not up to the best standards. Through Professor
David’s research, meta-analyses of REBT research, and thoughtful discussion of
how current REBT assessment surveys exemplify best measurement practice,
REBT can now be viewed better through the lens of science and research.
Thirty-eight years later, Windy and I are as excited about REBT’s contribution to
our own work and the mental health and well-being of everyone as we were in the
1980s. And this view is shared by the contributors to these two books and the many,
many mental health practitioners using REBT today. The contributors know and
practice REBT very well. They share Ellis’ views on the empowering aspects of
rationality and how REBT methods achieve this end. We have no doubt that you will
share in the excitement we have about how REBT continues to make a difference to
the lives of many.
Melbourne, VIC, Australia Michael E. Bernard
London, UK Windy Dryden
Contents
1 Early Theories and Practices of Rational Emotive Behavior
Therapy and How They Have Been Augmented and Revised
During the Last Three Decades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Albert Ellis
2 The Distinctive Features of Rational Emotive
Behavior Therapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Windy Dryden
3 A Comparison of REBT with Other Cognitive
Behavior Therapies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Walter Matweychuk, Raymond DiGiuseppe, and Olga Gulyayeva
4 The Measurement of Irrationality and Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Daniel O. David, Raymond DiGiuseppe, Anca Dobrean, Costina
Ruxandra Păsărelu, and Robert Balazsi
5 E mpirical Research in REBT Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Daniel O. David, Mădălina Sucală, Carmen Coteţ,
Radu Şoflău, and Sergiu Vălenaş
6 Future Research Directions for REBT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Daniel O. David, Silviu A. Matu, Ioana R. Podina,
and Răzvan M. Predatu
7 Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and the
Working Alliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Windy Dryden
8 Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: Assessment,
Conceptualisation and Intervention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Windy Dryden
vii
viii Contents
9 Brief Interventions in Rational Emotive
Behavior Therapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Windy Dryden
10 REBT in Group Therapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Kimberly A. Alexander and Kristene A. Doyle
11 REBT and Positive Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Aurora Szentagotai-Tătar, Diana-Mirela Cândea,
and Daniel O. David
12 REBT in Coaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Oana David
13 Rational Emotive Behavior Education in Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Ann Vernon and Michael E. Bernard
14 REBT in Sport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Martin J. Turner
15 REBT and Parenting Interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Oana Alexandra David, Horea-Radu Oltean,
and Roxana Andreea-Ioana Cardoş
16 REBT in the Workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
Michael E. Bernard
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
Chapter 1
Early Theories and Practices of Rational
Emotive Behavior Therapy and How They
Have Been Augmented and Revised During
the Last Three Decades
Albert Ellis
Theories and Practices of REBT to Which I Still Subscribe
A large number of Rational-Emotive Therapy theories and practices that I wrote
about in the mid-1950s and early-1960s and that I largely summarized in my book,
Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (Ellis, 1962), are still central tenets of
REBT. These include the following:
1. Active-Directive Therapy is significantly more helpful to more people than is
passive, less active therapy. Effective therapists not only listen carefully to
their clients and not only unconditionally accept them with their problems
and with their ineffective, and sometimes antisocial, behavior but also teach
them what they did and still are doing to disturb themselves and how they can
think, feel, and act differently to ameliorate their emotional and practical dif-
ficulties. Whenever obnoxious or unpleasant activating events occur in peo-
ple’s lives, they have a choice of making themselves feel healthily and
self-helpingly sorry, disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed, or making them-
selves feel unhealthily and self-defeatingly horrified, terrified, panicked,
depressed, self-hating, and self-pitying. They usually, though not always, cre-
ate and construct healthy feelings by believing rational or functional beliefs,
and they usually, though not always, create self-defeating feelings and behav-
iors by constructing and creating irrational or self-defeating beliefs. When
people take their strong preferences or desires for success, love, or comfort
and define them as absolutist musts, needs, and commands, they tend to make
themselves grandiosely anxious, depressed, hostile, and self-pitying. People
A. Ellis (*)
Albert Ellis Institute, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1
M. E. Bernard, W. Dryden (eds.), Advances in REBT,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93118-0_1
2 A. Ellis
who feel inadequate and worthless learn and create definitional premises or
philosophies by which they tend to make themselves disturbed.
2. When people accept the fact that they largely control their own emotional and
behavioral destiny, and that they can make themselves undisturbed or less dis-
turbed mainly by acquiring realistic and sensible attitudes about the undesirable
things that occur or that they make occur in their lives, they then usually have
the ability and power of changing their belief system, making it more func-
tional, and helping themselves to feel and to behave in a significantly less dis-
turbed fashion.
3. When people understand or have insight into how they needlessly disturb them-
selves and create unhealthy and dysfunctional feelings and behaviors, that
insight often will help them change and make themselves less disturbed. But
understanding and insight are not enough. In order to significantly change
themselves, they almost always have to pinpoint their irrational philosophies
and work at changing them to more functional and self-helping attitudes. They
can do this in a number of cognitive, emotive-evocative, and behavioral ways.
4. Humans, unlike just about all the other animals on earth, create fairly sophisti-
cated languages that not only enable them to think about their feeling, and their
actions, and the results they get from doing and not doing certain things, but
they also are able to think about their thinking and even think about thinking
about their thinking. Because of their self-consciousness and their ability to
think about their thinking, they can very easily disturb themselves about their
disturbances and can also disturb themselves about their ineffective attempts to
overcome their emotional disturbances.
5. Practically all humans are born very gullible or teachable, especially in the
course of their childhood, and consequently they accept many kinds of ideas,
feelings, and actions that their parents and other caretakers tell them are benefi-
cial and often reward them for believing, feeling, and behaving. They can also
accept from their parents and other caretakers dysfunctional and self-defeating
ideas that help them disturb themselves.
6. Even when they accept such dysfunctional beliefs from others, they tend to
reconstruct them and actively carry them on; and they are not merely affected
years later by the fact that they accepted these beliefs but by their continuing to
promulgate them and to act on them.
7. When people acknowledge that they are now needlessly upsetting themselves
with their own absolutist musts, and their own necessitizing about themselves,
about others, and about the world, they can almost always dispute and chal-
lenge their dysfunctional philosophies, act against them, and return to their
non-disturbing preferences and desires.
8. When people keep challenging and questioning their self-disturbing core phi-
losophies, after a while they tend to automatically, and even in advance, bring
new, rational, self-helping attitudes to their life problems and thereby make
themselves significantly less upsettable, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
9. REBT assumes that human thinking, emotion, and action are not really sepa-
rate or disparate processes but that they all significantly overlap and are rarely