Reading Temple Grandin Offers a New Perspective on REBT!

I have long agreed with Albert Ellis that his Rational Emotive Therapy (modernized to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy), is a simple, elegant method for helping clients to learn how to improve their mood and live more comfortably. It is also a derivative of the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. I have worked with individuals and groups for many years, and most people to whom I have introduced REBT easily learn and use this technique for calming their unruly emotions and feeling better. It is not instant. It is not magic. But it really works. As with anything, using REBT well requires practice. 

One of my long-standing puzzles as a therapist has been how CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) has gained more popularity than REBT as the go-to therapy. There are indeed many books by many authors on each technique. Does CBT work better? Does it have better press? Are there more practitioners? is it easier to teach to therapists in training? Is it easier to teach to clients? 

My take on the above questions is  quite the opposite. I find REBT to be easier to learn, easier to teach, and more effective than CBT. I am trained in both, and, while I learned CBT in school and learned it first, when I studied REBT (Albert Ellis was one of my instructors), I was immediately stuck by how easy it was to learn, to teach, and to put into effect in my own life not to mention those of my clients. So is it the press? Perhaps.




I was reading _Animals in Translation_  by Temple Grandin with Catherine Johnson, and an interesting point about how humans think and process versus how animals or autistic people think and process was made. Humans want a narrative. They prefer complexity and big picture thinking. They see the forest more than the trees.  When Dr. Grandin was looking at the treatment of animals in slaughter facilities (regardless of your moral stance on this, she improved animal handling by light-years), she created SIMPLE, ELEGANT checklists for plants to use to determine if the animals were handled appropriately. Grandin notes that the more items on the old lists, the easier it was for a plant to pass if one critical item was missed. The more items on the list, the more difficult it was to get things right, but the easier it was to pass. The less clear and objective the criteria, the more questions arose and the less clear passing versus failing became, which caused less safety rather than more at the plants. "Most language-based thinkers find it difficult to believe that such a simple audit really works." (Grandin & Johnson, p 268). Substitute "form of therapy" for "audit" and there you have it! Sometimes simple is best.

Rational Emotive Therapy is so easy to learn that Michael Edelstein has an REBT-based website (and a book) called "Three-Minute Therapy". Now, he is not saying someone will be cured of his depression nor anxiety in three minutes, but rather, that there is a three-minute exercise you can learn that, with practice, CAN teach you to overcome your unpleasant and less-than-useful emotions. I love this. What CBT has done is to add complexity--to add more narrative, more layers, more paperwork, more words, to REBT. It works, but it has lost some of the elegant simplicity of REBT. 

My clients know me as a very paperwork-adverse therapist. I keep my practice simple. I keep my intake forms simple. I love simplicity. If it is simple, I can  keep track of it, and they can understand it. I learned to do CBT from many trainings and many books. It advises a lot of papers to be filled out and has a lot of diagrams for demonstration to clients.  I copied all of them and prepared to use them according to my instructors.  When I learned REBT, the lightbulb went off. THIS, said I to myself, is more for me. It is simple. It is elegant. It contains ONE simple homework sheet to be filled out.  Clients can keep the responses as simple or complex as THEY desire.  They can make REBT their own, and they can all learn it.

Maybe I lean a little in that direction of animal intelligence, where I like simplicity and clear statements and short, operationalizable lists, and I hate piles of paper. For me, REBT helps me to teach my clients what they come to learn, and this helps people to feel better faster, and be independent of therapy sooner. 



Edelstein, M. & Steele, D.R. (1997) _Three Minute Therapy_. Glenbridge.

Ellis, A. (2016). _How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything
      --Yes, Anything!_ Citadel.


Grandin, T. & Johnson, C. (2005).  _Animals in Translation_   Scribner.