Psychology for Dummies (82 page)

Albert Ellis is the founder of a combined form of therapy that borrows from both behavior therapy and cognitive therapy.
Rational emotive behavior therapy,
or REBT, is built on the premise that psychological problems are the result of irrational thinking and behavior that supports that irrational thinking; therefore, they can be addressed by increasing a patient’s ability to think more rationally and behave in ways that support more rational thought.

Ellis is a charismatic psychologist whose style and personality accentuate the main ideas of REBT. Rational emotive behavior therapists believe that most of our problems are self-generated, and that we upset ourselves by clinging to irrational ideas that don’t hold up under scrutiny. The trouble lies in the fact that most of us don’t scrutinize our thoughts very often. We make irrational statements to ourselves on a regular basis:

These are examples of irrational thinking. Rational emotive behavior therapists define these statements as irrational because they argue that people can actually handle or “stand” negative events. These events are rarely, if ever, as bad as people think they are. Also, we often hold ourselves to rules of “should” that increase our guilt for being overwhelmed, sad, anxious, and so on. “I shouldn’t get angry.” “I shouldn’t care what she thinks.” “I shouldn’t worry about it.” Ellis used to call this “shoulding all over yourself.” REBT therapists vigorously challenge statements like these.

The challenging posture of REBT should not be taken as harsh or uncaring. REBT emphasizes the same levels of empathy and unconditional acceptance as many other therapies. REBT therapists are not necessarily trying to talk patients out of feeling the way that they feel. They’re trying to help patients experience their emotions in a more attenuated and manageable fashion. There are healthy levels of emotion, and then there are irrational levels of an emotion. The goal of therapy is to help the patient learn how to experience her emotions and other situations in this more rational manner.

The behavior-therapy aspects of REBT involve the patient engaging in experiments designed to test the rationality or irrationality of his beliefs. A therapists may ask a patient who is deathly afraid of talking to strangers to approach ten strangers a week and strike up a conversation. If the patient originally thought that he was going to die from embarrassment, the therapist might begin their next session with, “Nice to see you. I guess talking to strangers didn’t kill you after all, did it?”

REBT takes the position that two approaches can bring about changes in thinking — talking with a therapist and rationally disputing irrational ideas and engaging in behaviors that “prove” irrational ideas wrong. Ellis states that people rarely change their irrational thinking without acting against it. Their thinking won’t change unless their behavior changes.

Accepting the person

Getting what I need

Facing death

Therapist:
Hello Mrs. Garcia, nice to meet you. Dr. Huang had mentioned that you’ve been having some trouble going to work and that you recently attended your mother’s funeral. Please, sit down.

Patient:
Thanks. First of all, I want to say that I’m a little uncomfortable with this. I’ve been through psychoanalysis before, and I didn’t like it. My doctor was too impersonal and cold.

T:
I’m sorry that you had a bad experience. Just so you know, I’m not a psychoanalyst. Would you like to talk about that experience?

P:
Not really, not now anyway. I’ve been feeling pretty bad lately, really ever since my mother became ill. I’d go and help my sister take care of her and leave feeling this sense of doom and gloom.

T:
Doom and gloom? Like sadness? Was it related to your mother’s condition?

P:
Yes to both. But I didn’t really feel sad about the fact that she was dying; she had suffered for a long time, and I accepted that her death would probably be a relief. It was her life, not her death, that seemed to be bothering me.

T:
Her life was bothering you. You had accepted her death. Tell me more.

P:
Here was this 68-year-old woman who had worked as a maid since the age of 16. She was a loving mother and a devoted wife, and I felt almost ashamed of her. It’s horrible to say, but that’s how I felt.

T:
You did not approve of her lifestyle?

P:
Kind of. It was like she was living for everyone else, the boss, my father, us children, the grandchildren. I felt really bad about judging her, especially when I began to realize that I was living the exact same life.

T:
You’ve been living the same way as your mother?

P:
Not exactly, but close. Doctor Cash, I spend four hours a day on the freeway going to and coming from a job where I feel unappreciated. I need the money. When I get home, I have to cook dinner and take care of my son. My husband gets home and expects dinner to be ready. I know it sounds selfish thinking about my own life when mother was dying, but her sickness and death led me to reflect on my own life, and I didn’t like what I was seeing.

Take a minute to do a little exercise. Get a piece of paper and a pen and make a list of all the people you admire and hold in a positive light. Who’s on the list — teachers, spouses, celebrities, parents? What about yourself? Are you on your list of people you positively regard? Would you be a member of your own fan club?

In this big, chaotic world of over 6 billion people, sometimes it seems like I don’t matter, like my individual identity is so small, so insignificant. Yet all of us walk around with the sense of being an individual. Sometimes we feel so independent that we actually feel lonely and isolated, like no one cares about us. “What about me? Don’t I matter?”

Carl Rogers cared. His influence on psychotherapy has been profound. He put the person back into the process, attempting to understand and value each of his patients as unique individuals with real problems and not just as abstract theories and models. You can say one thing for sure about Carl Rogers’s
client-centered therapy
— it placed great value in the “humanness” of each and every patient. Rogers believed that all humans inherently strive toward the fullest development of their capacity to maintain an optimal level of survival. It’s kind of like the U.S. Army slogan, “Be all you can be.”

All of us begin life with the humble need to have our basic needs of food, shelter, and protection met. From this foundation, we seek to enhance our lives and expand our abilities to their fullest extent.
Growth
is a big buzzword for client-centered therapists. A patient’s personal growth is foremost in the therapist’s mind and central to the therapy process. Every time I read something from a client-centered perspective or something that Carl Rogers wrote, I start reflecting and asking myself, “Am I growing?” If you count my waistline, the answer is definitely yes. As far as that personal growth and expanding abilities stuff. . . .

What does Carl Rogers’s belief in the inherent worth of each of his patients have to do with helping them get better? Are client-centered therapy patients paying for someone to like them, to value them? Kind of, but that would be a gross oversimplification. It’s a little more than a “I’ll love you until you can love yourself” therapy or “I’ll accept you until you can accept yourself.”

The healing or helping mechanism in client-centered therapy is found in the process of the therapist working to understand the patient’s unique experiences, thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. As the therapist strives to understand where the patient is coming from, the patient learns to experience herself in a new, and more productive, life-enhancing way.