03 What are the Benefits?
Some of the benefits of working with Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, the original cognitive-behaviour approach.
WELCOME and IF you've decided to use REBT to help yourself, CONGRATULATIONS!
You have made a decision that can benefit you for the rest of your life. In seeking mental health help, you are looking for solutions to an emotional problem, perhaps help for a troublesome behaviour problem, or maybe answers for a relationship or career question. By doing so, you have taken a significant step in a personal commitment to yourself.
We are practitioners and teachers of Rational-Emotive Therapy (REBT ). In REBT there is a tremendous amount of information that explains how people develop emotional problems, whether these be depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, guilt, or low self-esteem. We also know what is behind most self-defeating behavioural habits, such as procrastination, drug or alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and aggression. And we have tremendous insights into how and why people ruin good, meaningful relationships. Capitalising on this knowledge, REBT guides people through a step-by-step process to help them eliminate these problems and thereby enhance their happiness and well-being.
In working with literally hundreds of thousands of people like you, we REBT therapists have found that the more you understand what causes your problems, the easier it will be to overcome them. We have also found that the more you understand REBT itself the better you can participate in therapy and the quicker and more complete will be your change. So, as an REBT client, this page and the accompanying page, How to use REBT Effectively, will help you to understand what your therapist is doing and why, and what your responsibilities are as a client. The Rational-Emotive Therapy Companion will help you understand how your personal problems arose and teach you exactly what to do to eliminate them.
THE GOOD NEWS
Before beginning, we would like to offer some words of encouragement. Here goes!
REBT is a good thing for you to do for yourself
You matter. Your happiness is important. Through REBT, you are likely to emerge with skills that will very much reduce your problems and increase the quality, happiness, and satisfaction in your life.
This is a good thing to do for the people you care about When you reduce your distress, you will most likely be more pleasant and effective in your interactions with others. So, family, friends, and associates will benefit from your increased happiness and, when they do, you will also gain from the pleasure they gain from you. In other words, everyone you care about, including yourself, stands to gain.
You are not a helpless victim of your present bad circumstances
We will do our utmost to convince you that the circumstances in your life -- the bounced check, the difficult boss, even the lost love -- do not entirely cause your emotional pain. Rather, the fact really is, as the philosopher Epictetus said in the 1st century A.D., "People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them."
Although you may not have realised it, your distress has been primarily self-produced. Once you learn what you yourself do to create your emotional problems, and what you yourself can do not to get so upset anymore, you will appreciate that you are not a helpless victim of these circumstances. You will no longer need to change others or things in your world in order to prevent or reduce your emotional pain (although you may find it desirable to make such changes). You can take charge of your emotional life regardless of the circumstances.
You are not a helpless victim of your past "Because of what has happened to me in my life, I am what I am, and there is very little I can do about it." This is a position we will strive hard to disprove. In truth, we are all in part products of our past experiences, for we learn to think, feel and act as we do today because of our past. But also, in truth, if we choose to do so, we can change things about us that we learned in the past. Thus, we can regenerate ourselves and make the hurts and horrors of our pasts almost obsolete. Once you learn what to do to change your learned, self-defeating patterns, the less the past will matter and the more you can take charge of how you want to be in the future.
Changing may be hard, but it's not impossible It would be nice if there was a pill you could take that would effect a quick, effortless change in you. Unfortunately, because over the years you have unwittingly ingrained and habituated patterns that embody your problems, you will have to work hard to get rid of them. However, if you will commit yourself to doing what we and your therapist show you, and persist for awhile, without question you can bring about significant change. As you go along, you will quite likely find that it becomes easier and easier. You can use your own experience to convince your-self that this is true. Many of the things that you have learned to do in your life were hard and strenuous at first, but they are now "second nature." So too with this.
There are no risks, side effects or dangers involved in REBT
When first seeking therapy, some people worry that they will be forced to endlessly review and relive painful memories. Others fear that they will become bland or emotionless. Still others wonder if they'll become aggressive, insensitive, or uncaring. Don't worry! REBT is a teaching and learning process that will show you a constructive way to put your life together. While it can be hard work, and while you may experience some slight discomfort, using the REBT steps will help you be more peaceful, alive, and caring.
Blaming someone, including yourself, is not part of the process
It is neither required, encouraged, desirable, nor helpful to put the blame on someone, including yourself, for the misery you have been exper-iencing. In REBT, in fact, we categorically discourage blaming of any kind. You can merely accept the fact that you have been distressed and you can work at reducing your distress without blaming anyone, including even you.
Finally, for most people all the benefits of REBT can be accomplished WITHOUT THE USE OF MEDICATION. While we are not anti-medication, and understand that prescription drugs may indeed be temporarily important for some clients, REBT is a learning process involving:
the identification of faulty components in your thinking.
the critical disputation of these faulty components.
the replacing of each with non-faulty components.
Through the process, you will learn to control and reduce your emotional and behavioural problems, which enables most people to eliminate the need for medications.
