REBT: An Active-Directive Therapist

REBT is an active-directive therapy. This states that both the therapist and client must make an active affort to help the client. Clients will normally strongly hold on to their beliefs; these beliefs are not facts, meaning it is the therapist's job to challenge them. An effective therapist will also counteract negative influences on the clients, such as their parents and their culture. The therapist will help the client decrease their innate self-defeating tendencies and help increase their natural ability to self-actualize. Clients must be encouraged to change despite any fears, discouragements, or resistance. This resistance comes from the client’s low frustration tolerance. Their LFT and shame for their problems should be overcome with
REBT finds that Freudian psychoanalysis, including methods such as free association and dream analysis, produces information that is not relevant to helping the client and it time consuming. There is no emphasis put on transference neurosis between the therapist and client, as in Freudian practices. Freudians also put great emphasis on past events. REBT looks to dispute beliefs, such as those in an Oedipus complex, while a classical analyst looks mainly to uncover the beliefs. Jungian therapy also uses Freudian methods of symbolism and interpretation, but, like REBT, holds that the goal of therapy is holistic, trying to help the individual break free from mental disturbances. REBT and Adlerian therapy are closely related in that they both center around the theory that disturbances are caused by an individual's values and philosophies. Rogerian person-centered therapy has the same end goals as REBT and an unconditionally accepting therapist, but takes the passive therapist stance that REBT rejects. REBT practitioners feel that the methods of existentialist therapy, such as free encounters, unrestrictiveness, and unstructeredness, may help with the relatively healthy client, but do little for the seriously neurotic or personality disorders. Conditioning-learning therapy concentrates on deconditioning learned disturbances through symptome removal, unlike REBT’s practice of
CBT does not make an effort to help clients make a philosophical change to their cognition. CBT may be humanistically oriented, but does not require this as REBT does. REBT’s goal is to create a new outlook for the client which will help maintain emotional health in all future situation; CBT’s focus is on symptom removal at the present situation. CBT teaches its client to develop self-esteem or a positive rating for themselves as a person, which REBT calls illegitimate. REBT strongly uses humor to combat the irrational beliefs that clients take too seriously, but CBT sparingly makes use of this method. REBT goes deeper into disputing irrational thoughts than CBT by focusing on musts that cause the irrational beliefs. While REBT and CBT use many of the same cognitive methods, REBT also disputes irrational beliefs by having the therapist vigorously debate that client on their irrationality and teaching the client to do this to themselves as well. CBT focuses on practical problem solving while REBT first looks at the underlying emotional problem. REBT takes a greater focus on clients’ low frustration tolerance than does CBT. REBT, unlike CBT, also takes into account secondary symptoms of disturbances, i.e. feeling depressed for having anxiety, and how to eliminate them. REBT takes into consideration semantics and sentence restructuring that CBT does not.