MEBO RESEARCHPRESENTATION

Cognitive BehaviorTherapy (CBT)

Commonalities between all Cognitive Behavior Approaches

Collaborative relationship between therapist & client

Premise psychological distress is largely a function of disturbance in cognitive processes

Focus on changing cognitions behaviors to produce desired changes

Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT)

Stresses thinking, judging, deciding, analyzing, and doing

Teaches that our emotions stem mainly from our beliefs, evaluations, interpretations, and reactions to life situations

Albert Ellis

Assumptions of REBT

People contribute to their own psychological problems & symptoms by way they interpret events & situations

Reorganization of one’s self-statements will result in reorganization of one’s behaviors

Operant conditioning, modeling & behavioral rehearsal applied to thinking & internal dialogue

View of Human Nature We are born with a

potential for both rational and irrational thinking

We have the biological and cultural tendency for self-preservation and self-destruction

Humans are self-talking, self-evaluating & self-sustaining

We develop emotional & behavioral problems when

we mistake simple preferences (love, approval, success) for dire needs

We learn and invent disturbing beliefs and keep ourselves disturbed through our self-talk

We have the capacity to change our cognitive, emotive, and behavioral processes

Emotional Disturbance

We actively reinforce self-defeating beliefs by the processes of autosuggestion and self-repetition.

Blame is the core of emotional disturbance-so to recover stop blaming self & others

To recover from neurosis (personality disorder) we need to stop blaming ourselves and others

We escalate desires & preferences into dogmatic & absolutist “shoulds, musts, oughts, demands, commands-which are irrational beliefs which need to be changed

Irrational Beliefs

Irrational ideas lead to self-defeating behavior

Some examples: “I must have love or approval from all the

significant people in my life.”

“I must perform important tasks competently and perfectly.”

“If I don’t get what I want, it’s terrible, and I can’t stand it.”

Disputing Intervention

Challenges irrational beliefs Use principles of logic to destroy

unrealistic, unverifiable hypotheses

1. Detect - detect the “shoulds”, “I musts” “awfulizing” “self-downing”

2. Debate - learn to logically & empirically question beliefs-to argue self out of them

3. Discriminate - irrational-self-defeating from rational-self-helping beliefs