Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT)

Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy is a form of psychotherapy that helps you identify self-defeating thoughts and feelings, challenge the nature of irrational and unproductive feelings, and replace them with healthier, more productive beliefs.

REBT focuses primarily on the present to help you understand how unhealthy thoughts and beliefs create emotional distress, which in turn leads to unhealthy actions and behaviours that interfere with your life and goals. Once identified and understood, negative thoughts and actions can be changed and replaced with more positive and productive behaviours, allowing you to develop more successful personal and professional relationships.

One of the major influences on this thinking was the work of the Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers (especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius). They emphasised the primacy of the philosophical cause of psychological disturbances. In essence, the Stoic viewpoint is that people are disturbed not by things but by their view of things, and this perspective remains at the core of REBT. The fundamental goal of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy is to enable clients to live effective lives by helping them to change their irrational evaluations of themselves, other people, and the world.