Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy or REBT is a type of professional therapy for people with conditions related to emotive behavior such as depression. This type of treatment has its advantages and comes with an undoubtedly reasonable price.
“Therapy doesn’t need to be an arduous never-ending process; however, the length of therapy depends on many factors.” Nathaniel Cilley, LMHC said. However, is it worth the money? What exactly does it do and what separates it from talk therapy provided by family and friends?
“Our society tells us that if you talk about your issues, express your feelings, or even verbalize you have a mental health disorder, you must be “weak.”,” says Ryan Parks, M.Ed, LPCC. That explains why seeking help from your friends and family will render two responses. First off, your friends might tell you and guide you on how to change the things you do not like, or they can lend you an ear so that you feel understood and appreciated. Unfortunately, these things, however competent as they may sound, do not work all the time. Some situations are far more complicated, and sometimes you do not have the right set of friends with the right set of experiences to cater to your needs. Although your friends may offer you insightful things, some situations will require more intellect.
On the other hand, a friend offering their ear for you to talk to is not the best answer at times. Although it is a good thing to feel understood, this practice is just temporary bliss and only acts like a plaster solution to your problems. Situations may still recur after each venting session, and anything recurring can be merely tiring for both parties.
This is where REBT enters. REBT or Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is a goal-oriented approach that tackles your emotional and behavioral problems differently. What the REBT does is provide you with different solutions on how you can adopt different beliefs about yourself, others, and the whole world in general. By doing so, you are given a chance to overlook these problems positively somehow so that you will no longer be disturbed by them. REBT recognizes that like can be rough and unfair sometimes and it can take a toll on you. With this, REBT psychologists will identify and replace certain beliefs and think to make you more adapting and open to situations.
After adopting their adaptive beliefs, you will have a renewed outlook on life, and you will now be able to tackle situations differently. Through the thinking that REBT will ask you to do, you will be able to work efficiently towards turning a specific situation in your favor and create more creative solutions to your problems. “With attention, curiosity, and permission to be expressed, those emotions start to become unstuck and move through” Molly Bowman, MS, LPC said.
REBT addresses your problems in a way that your friends and family, more often than not, would not be able to do. REBT changes your fundamental philosophy for a chance to create a more self-enhancing thinking pattern for better handling of emotional and behavioral patterns. With REBT you can both feel better, and at the same time, actually, be better.
As compared to other forms of cognitive behavior therapy, REBT generally vaccinates you from the situations you dread the most so you can think more clearly and effectively. Other cognitive treatment would assume that you perceive the world mistakenly, so they gather evidence to help you change your mind regarding things. This method of cognitive therapy is a classical one and can work in some situations. However, in cases where the people’s beliefs are not entirely distorted, the method may be rendered a little bit outdated. For example, for cases where the clients are rejected, their perception is not entirely wrong as they are rejected so you can’t change your opinion about it anymore.
REBT addresses this type of situation by telling you to embrace the situation. REBT will teach you how to live with the situation by changing your perception towards it and not the whole notion of rejection. Basically, REBT teaches you how to respond to worst-case scenarios.