ALBERT ELLIS THEORY: RATIONAL EMOTIVE THERAPY
Rational Emotive Therapy works with three aspects of human performance which are cognitive, emotive and behavioral. RET recognizes that humans are thinking symbolizing beings capable of taking responsibility for their actions.
RET places man at the center of the universe. Man according to this theory can decide to make or not himself emotionally disturb. The word disturb means to RET practitioners when a person goes beyond its limits and demands that, what he or she wants or desires has to happen in reality (disturbance could also be equivalent to irrationality). Human disturbances in most cases are considered self created.
Examples of basic disturbances are:
1. Self downing, anxiety, depression and worthlessness.
2. Needless hostility towards others.
3. Self pity and low frustration tolerance.
Ellis believe that humans very frequently sabotage their own happiness. In this conceptual framework basic human goals are, to remain alive and reasonably happy.
What is expected as a result of treatment is that patients that undergo therapy learn to think and emote appropriately.
RET recognizes that a degree of anxiety and hostility is natural. To RET is not the things of life that bother us but rather our point of view of those things. Because of this central concept RET depends obviously in man’s phenomenological point of view; therefore thoughts, concepts and cognition are key to this theory.
To Ellis man has an inborn tendency to rate himself and his performance. The problem with this tendency is that the rating mechanism yield a total self rating of one’s self. An example of what happens as a result is when a person says: “I am a worthless” or “I am good for nothing”. Patients under RET learn to evaluates their traits and not their total behavior and performance; they also learn to evaluate their skills and not their total self.
Finally RET teaches patients how to identify their irrational believes, emotions and behavior, with the goal in mind that the person will be able to think, emote and behave in a rational way.
As part of the therapeutic process patients in order to get better have to learn to give up their irrational ideas and substitute them for rational thoughts which in turn will bring about appropriate emotions and behavior.
*Emote for RET means to generate and emotion.
AARON T. BECK’S THEORY
Beck believes mood and behavior are determine by the way we view the world. Patients problems are caused by the way they think about the world.
Although patients problems might be caused by hereditary biochemical factors or by environment stress, in the majority of cases they are due to psychological problems which are induced by their world’s perception. On the other hand their distorted perception is largely caused by the way they think.
Often negative thinking is the most important factor that causes patients depression as well as other psychological problems. Patients often draw very general conclusions about their past and future and then exclude almost any positive aspect of their thinking, focusing only on the negative ones.
Usually there is a precipitating event that brings about a process that ends up with a defective perception. Sometimes there might be several small ones and not only one event what might start a sequence of illogical ideas.
Patients believe that the way they see things is the way things are. Because of their illogical thinking they function poorly and often get depressed. The therapist role is to put together the patterns of defective thoughts that are causing the patients to have an skew perception of the world.
Loosing confidence in ones performance might be key to commence the negative thinking pattern. The negative evaluation the person makes of himself or the perception that he is powerless and unable to confront the situation that be faces could bring about also a negative thought process.
Patients should learn to think about situations that confront them as problems they need to solve. They should develop solving problems skills and learn to untangle life problems. A positive attitude about life should be finding a solution to their problems and moving forward.
Learning to change thought patterns is crucial for patients to get better. Wrong thinking patterns could be changed by identifying and correcting certain basic assumption the patients believe in.
An example of some basic assumptions could be for instance “I cannot live without love” or “if I am not the best then I am nothing”.
THEORETICAL DIFFERENCES IN BETWEEN ALBERT ELLIS AND AARON BECK.
To Beck patients problems arise in most cases because their thought’s are not logical and often based on faulty assumptions while to Albert Ellis defective thinking patterns most of the time can derive from man’s biological irrationality.