Rational emotive behavioural therapy

I never thought CBT would work for me, as i had been trying it for over 15 years. My psychologist even said to me that she didn’t know why it wasn’t working for me, which was great to hear lol.
Anyway after just giving up with it i stumbled across an article about REBT by a psychologist called Ellis. I was surprised to hear it was a form of CBT because i wasn’t told certainly not by my psychologist that
there were different forms of CBT. WIth the standard CBT i was repeating doing the things i found most difficult in the hope that the more i was exposed to them the less frightening they would become. This never worked for me.
Maybe because my fear of people mostly was just too much, or i think it was because i didn’t believe in it. Well the REBT did appeal to me it’s mostly about the way you choose to look at things. It’s the realness and sensible
ness of it i like. e.g I’m terrified of going up,to a checkout with someone standing there looking at me, so basically the REBT approach to this is you are just paying for your petrol no more no less it will take two seconds then you’re out.
That actually works better for me than the standard CBT which is giving false hope i.e that the more you do something the better it gets, which is a bit of a high claim, but worse still if things don’t get better then YOU have failed the task.
REBT doesn’t make such wild claims, it’s not saying going up to the checkout will ever be easy, but it’s just being more honest. You need petrol for you’re car so going up to the till is a means to an end…

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I have been in a form of BCT for almost three years. The stated belief is that we attach DANGER to our symptoms and that we need to take the danger out of our thinking to dispose of the symptoms. This works sometimes, but I have SZ and my symptoms override the Recovery training a lot. Still I have learned a great deal in our group meetings. People in the group point out to me that I am steadily improving. For us, going up to a checkout means we have to see that we are average not exceptional. We shouldn’t see ourselves as exceptional people who need to be checked out right away ahead of others because we’re mentally ill or free to get impatient with others in the line. We aren’t able to control our feelings but we are able to influence our thinking. Here we see the primacy of thinking over feeling. We are asked to take the danger out of checking out. Checking out is not dangerous. We fear the discomfort associated with our symptoms not the actual symptoms themselves.

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I got a little bit of this rational by accident in vocational training it sounds like. You have to eat, you can’t steal the food, so just stand back, let the lady scan the stuff and give her the money she needs.

I like the idea of this… thank you for sharing this… I will be looking into it.

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REBT is one form of CBT as I understand it - here is more info on both forms:

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Sounds kinda like common sense.