Albert Ellis
Metropolitan State University
Biography Albert Ellis was born into his Jewish family on September 17, 1913 in Pittsburgh where is father was a businessman. Growing up Ellis classified his parents as emotionally distant and barely showed mediocre affection to their children. His mother he describes as self-absorbed with a bi-polar affect, his father was mostly away on business. As a child Ellis suffered numerous health problems and hospitalized several time between the ages of seven and eight. During this time his parents provided little to no support, rarely visiting. Ellis was the eldest of three and took on the responsibility of caring for two younger siblings by purchasing his own alarm clock …show more content…
Six years later Ellis revised the name of this new psychotherapy in order to accurately reflect the theory it is based on. Now with a new name, Rational Emotive Therapy continued to look at inaccurate cognitive perceptions, emotions, and maladaptive behavior. It took Ellis another thirty four years to add the word ‘behavioral’ to the name, now entitle Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy. Even with a number of changes to the name Ellis stated in an article that he would have changed the name to Cognitive Emotive Therapy, which would be a more concise name for the theories underlying premise (Why RET to REBT 1999). This change was never made due to the close relationship to Cognitive Therapy (Beck, 1976) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Meichenbaum, 1977). Ellis felt that autonomy must remain between these similar psychotherapies. These three styles of cognitive psychotherapy were founded on the premise that irrational thinking creates dysfunctional feelings. These feelings result in the eventual maladaptive behaviors and the individual begins to suffer from self-inflicted negative consequences. This paper will refer to Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) as the same as Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) and Rational Therapy …show more content…
This program was invented in the 1980s as a reaction to only having one 12 step program as a means to recover from addiction. SMART recovery incorporated a combination of REBT and ideas to cope with cravings. Ellis is credited as the foundation in which SMART recovery was developed as it is based on the cognitive-behavioral treatment of addiction as severe addictive behavior is an excellent example of irrationality. Ellis supported the program by reviewing the books and allowed the SMART recovery training to be held at his NYC facility. (Horvath T, Marlatt A,