“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.”
– Epictetus.
What if you’re fighting the wrong battle?
It’s easy to assume it’s the situation that’s making us feel this way.
More often than not, it’s the beliefs we’ve built around it that keep us stuck.
Two people can go through exactly the same experience and come away feeling completely different. One brushes it off. The other spends weeks replaying it, criticising themselves, worrying about what it means, or feeling as though they’ve somehow failed.
The difference usually isn’t the event itself. It’s the beliefs sitting underneath it. That’s the idea at the heart of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, or REBT.
“I tried CBT once. It didn’t really help.”
I hear this quite a lot.
For some people, CBT is life-changing. For others, it feels rushed, overly structured, or as though it’s focused on managing symptoms without getting to the beliefs driving them.
If that’s been your experience, it’s worth knowing that REBT is a different approach.
Although REBT and CBT are often grouped together, they come from different traditions. Albert Ellis, who developed REBT, built his work around an observation made nearly two thousand years ago by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus:
“People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.”
That simple idea still sits at the heart of REBT today.
What REBT is particularly good at:
REBT works best when there’s a specific difficulty you want to change. Things like:
Anxiety
OCD
Low self-esteem
Perfectionism
Procrastination
Anger
Social anxiety
Excessive guilt
If you can describe the problem, even if you can’t yet explain why it keeps happening, REBT is often a good fit.
It’s not about getting rid of difficult feelings.
One of the biggest misconceptions about REBT is that it’s about “thinking positively.” It isn’t.
In fact, REBT has very little interest in positive thinking. Instead, it asks a different question:
Is this belief helping you, or hurting you?
Together we’ll look at a specific situation. We’ll work backwards from what happened. What were you feeling? What did you do? What were you telling yourself at the time? Usually that’s where we find the belief that’s keeping the cycle going.
The four thinking traps
Over time, Albert Ellis noticed that most unhelpful beliefs fell into a surprisingly small number of patterns, each with a healthier alternative sitting right next to it.
Rigid demands. “I must get this right.” The healthier version isn’t giving up on wanting things to go well, it’s the difference between “I must” and “I’d really like to, but it doesn’t have to happen.”
Awfulising. “If this happens it’ll be unbearable.” Against that sits a more honest scale: bad, even very bad, doesn’t have to mean the end of the world.
Low frustration tolerance. “I couldn’t cope if that happened.” Usually untrue. The healthier version is admitting something would be genuinely hard, while still trusting you could stand it.
And global self-rating. “I failed, therefore I’m a failure.” One event, however painful, doesn’t get to define the whole of who you are. The alternative is accepting yourself as fallible rather than writing yourself off.
None of this is about pretending difficult things aren’t difficult. It’s about noticing where understandable thinking has become unhelpful thinking.
The beliefs we hold shape the emotions we experience. Change the belief and the behaviour that comes from that belief, and the emotional response often changes with it.
That’s why REBT spends so much time working with beliefs rather than simply trying to manage feelings.
What you can expect in sessions
The first session is about understanding the problem properly. We’ll agree exactly what we’re working on and what improvement would actually look like.
From there, sessions become practical. We’ll take real situations from your life and examine them together, testing beliefs against reality rather than simply accepting them because they feel true.
Yes, there’s homework. I did say this was practical. There’ll often be things to try between sessions too. Not because I’m testing you. Because real change happens in real life.
If something works, we’ll build on it. If it doesn’t, that’s just as useful, we’ll learn from it together. And if it doesn’t happen at all, that’s worth talking about too, since there’s usually a reason, and the reason is often as useful to know as the task itself would have been.
My goal is to do myself out of a job.
One of the things I like most about REBT is that it’s designed to teach you a skill, not create a dependency.
I’m not trying to get you to keep coming back indefinitely. I want you to become increasingly able to notice your own thinking, challenge it when it’s unhelpful, and respond differently without needing me in the room.
Eventually, the process becomes second nature. Rather like learning to drive, you stop consciously thinking about every movement because it becomes part of how you operate.
A couple of important things to know:
REBT isn’t the main approach I use for grief work (although I may weave elements of REBT principles in, if needed). The reason for that is that grief isn’t a problem to solve, and I work with it very differently. If grief is what’s brought you here, you’ll find more about that on my grief page.
I’m also currently completing the final stage of my REBT training. That means I can’t describe myself as an accredited REBT therapist yet, and I think it’s important to be open about that.
It also means I can only work with a small number of REBT clients at any one time, and only where the difficulties they’re bringing are a good fit for the training pathway I’m following. If we think it’s the right approach, I’ll explain exactly how that works before we agree anything, including fees, timescales and what you can expect.
Let’s start with a conversation
Curious whether this therapy is a fit for you? Reach out and let’s have a chat. We’ll talk about what’s been happening, whether REBT genuinely feels like the right approach for you, and what working together would look like.
If it is, we’ll take it from there. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you honestly.