PTypes - Three Insights Gained from Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Albert Ellis (pp. 40-41) claims that RET, now called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), helps the psychotherapy client gain three important kinds of insight.

"Is RET an insight-producing form of therapy? Yes, it is; and on a level that goes deeper, I believe, than that of the usual dynamic psychotherapies. Where these techniques help the client to gain insight into the presumed antecedent causes of his behavior, and often induce him—wrongly!—to focus on the origins of these causes (if, indeed, these can ever truly be known), RET helps him gain three important kinds of insight:

"Insight No. 1 consists of the client's seeing that his present dysfunctional behavior not only has antecedent causes in the past but that these causes still exist and are presently observable.

"Insight No. 2 consists of the client's acknowledging that the main reason why his early tendencies to disturb himself continue to exist is because he is now actively instrumental in perpetuating them.

"Insight No. 3 consists of the client's acknowledging that there probably is no other way for him to get better but by his continually observing, questioning, and challenging his own belief system, and by his working and practicing to change his own irrational beliefs by verbal and by motor counter-conditioning activity.

"The three main insights derived through RET, then, involve the client's seeing that he had better act against as well as understand the philosophic causes of his disordered behavior. Whereas most psychotherapies, including psychoanalysis and other "depth centered" methods, give the client what has been wrongly called "intellectual insight" into his problems (or what might more accurately be called his knowledge that he is acting badly and his wish to correct his behavior), RET, when it is successful, gives him so-called "emotional insight": meaning, his determination to work hard at using his "intellectual insight," so that he finally and forcibly changes—that is, reconditions himself in regard to— that behavior."

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