Effects (cognitive and emotional) of revising your beliefs (now known as ‘cognitive restructuring’).Įllis believed that the therapist was primarily a teacher, and so did not put any focus on the therapeutic relationship.Disputing irrational beliefs (the counsellor disputes that you are a bad driver, and points out that most people have at least one accident in their driving career).Consequences (emotional and behavioural: you stop driving because you fear you will have another accident).Belief system (this leads you to believe that you are a bad driver).Activating event (for example, you crash your car).It is an active-directive therapy based on challenging faulty beliefs (replacing irrational thinking with rational thinking) to resolve emotional and behavioural problems.īelieving that we can think our way out of distress, Ellis developed the ABCDE model, named after the five stages that it involves: REBT belongs to the behavioural school of therapy and is closely related to CBT. Although he didn’t get a date from this, he became more confident about talking to women and managed to alter what he saw as his irrational fear.Įllis viewed helping people to think more rationally as the best route to improving their emotional and behavioural functioning. Wanting to find a partner, he decided to try to tackle his shyness by going to Central Park in New York and making himself talk to 100 women. He was apparently a sickly child who lacked self-confidence, and he struggled as a young man to talk to women of his own age. This philosophy gave Ellis the idea that humans have a tendency to think irrationally, based on self-defeating beliefs that lead to problematic cycles of behaviour.Įllis held both an MA and a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia University. Online and Telephone Counselling Courseĭrawing upon Stoicism, US psychologist Albert Ellis (1913–2007) developed rational emotive behavioural therapy (REBT) – the earliest form of cognitive-based psychotherapy – in the 1950s.

Counselling Theory in Practice – Textbook.Importance of Modality and Medium in Choosing a Supervisor.

Abcd model