MEBO RESEARCH
PRESENTATION
Cognitive Behavior
Therapy (CBT)
Commonalities between all
Cognitive Behavior Approaches
 Collaborative relationship between therapist
& client
 Premise psychological distress is largely a
function of disturbance in cognitive processes
 Focus on changing cognitions behaviors to
produce desired changes
Rational Emotive Behavioral
Therapy (REBT)
 Stresses thinking, judging, deciding,
analyzing, and doing
 Teaches that our emotions stem mainly from
our beliefs, evaluations, interpretations, and
reactions to life situations
Albert Ellis
Assumptions of REBT
 People contribute to their own psychological
problems & symptoms by way they interpret
events & situations
 Reorganization of one’s self-statements will
result in reorganization of one’s behaviors
 Operant conditioning, modeling & behavioral
rehearsal applied to thinking & internal
dialogue
View of Human Nature
 We are born with a
potential for both rational
and irrational thinking
 We have the biological and
we mistake simple
preferences (love,
approval, success) for dire
needs
cultural tendency for self-  We learn and invent
preservation and selfdisturbing beliefs and keep
destruction
ourselves disturbed
through our self-talk
 Humans are self-talking,
self-evaluating & self We have the capacity to
sustaining
change our cognitive,
 We develop emotional &
behavioral problems when
emotive, and
behavioral processes
Emotional Disturbance
 We actively reinforce self-
defeating beliefs by the
processes of autosuggestion
and self-repetition.
 To recover from neurosis
(personality disorder) we need
to stop blaming ourselves and
others
 Blame is the core of emotional  We escalate desires &
disturbance-so to recover stop
blaming self & others
preferences into dogmatic &
absolutist “shoulds, musts,
oughts, demands, commandswhich are irrational beliefs
which need to be changed
Irrational Beliefs
 Irrational ideas lead to self-defeating behavior
 Some examples:
 “I must have love or approval from all the significant
people in my life.”
 “I must perform important tasks competently and
perfectly.”
 “If I don’t get what I want, it’s terrible, and I can’t stand
it.”
Disputing Intervention


Challenges irrational beliefs
Use principles of logic to destroy unrealistic,
unverifiable hypotheses
1. Detect - detect the “shoulds”, “I musts”
“awfulizing” “self-downing”
2. Debate - learn to logically & empirically
question beliefs-to argue self out of them
3. Discriminate - irrational-self-defeating from
rational-self-helping beliefs