Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Reference entry · last updated September 20, 2026

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) is an active-directive psychotherapy developed in 1955 by Albert Ellis that identifies irrational, absolutist beliefs and verbalizations as the primary cause of emotional and behavioral disturbance.[1][2][4]

1. First principles and the ABC framework

The foundational claim of REBT is that people are rarely disturbed by events themselves. They are disturbed by the beliefs they hold about those events. Ellis traced the idea to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who wrote that people are disturbed not by things but by the views they take of them, and he treated that premise as the system's first principle.[1][4]

From that premise Ellis built the A-B-C-D-E-F model of disturbance and change. An activating event or adversity (A) is met with beliefs (B), and the emotional and behavioral consequences (C) arise from the event as it is appraised through those beliefs. Ellis held that activating events contribute to consequences largely because they are intermingled with or acted upon by beliefs, so adversity does not disturb a person on its own. Rational beliefs produce healthy negative emotions such as disappointment, sorrow, and regret, while irrational beliefs produce disturbed ones. Disputation (D) challenges the beliefs, an effective new philosophy (E) replaces them, and new feelings (F) follow.[1][5] REBT holds that thinking, emotion, and action overlap rather than standing apart, so a change in evaluative belief is expected to change feeling and behavior together.[3]

Ellis reported that he arrived at REBT by the end of 1954 and began practicing it in January 1955, and that he formulated the ABC model of emotional disturbance in 1955. The theory is constructivist in emphasis: people are treated as active authors of their emotional responses, not as passive products of circumstance.[4]

2. Internal language and absolutist demands

At the center of REBT theory is demandingness. Irrational beliefs are said to carry explicit or implicit rigid demands and commands, expressed as absolutist musts, shoulds, oughts, and have-tos, such as the belief that one absolutely must win approval or that others must treat one fairly.[1][5]

The other recurring irrational patterns are derivatives of that core demand rather than separate sources: awfulizing, judging an event as completely bad or as bad as it could possibly be; low frustration tolerance, the belief that one cannot bear or survive the adversity; and depreciation or global self-rating, treating a single act as a verdict on the whole person.[1][5] Ellis called the habit of converting a preference into a demand musturbation, and he described the resulting unconditional statements as musturbatory because they are inflexible and admit no qualification.[6][4]

A companion error is overgeneralization, in which an unwanted event or trait is exaggerated and globalized out of context. In Ellis's account the overgeneralizing step is what turns a rating of what a person did into a rating of what a person is.[1][4]

3. Lineage and the debt to Alfred Korzybski

Ellis credited Alfred Korzybski, Korzybski's Science and Sanity, and the discipline of general semantics with starting him on the philosophical path that led to rational therapy. He treated general semantics as a significant modern influence and alluded to its similarities with REBT when explaining how irrational beliefs produce self-defeating behavior.[2][1]

The specific borrowing Ellis named is Korzybski's critique of the is of identity, the error of treating a description as the thing described and, in the personal case, of identifying a person with a single act. Ellis adopted the critique directly: a person may rate a deed as good or bad but is not thereby a good or bad person, and the phrase I am what I do is the is of identity in speech. He also followed Korzybski in calling overgeneralized thinking unsane.[4]

4. Clinical techniques and disputation

REBT is active-directive and educational. The therapist teaches the client to identify irrational, self-defeating beliefs, to question and dispute them, and to replace them with more rational and self-helping ones, using homework between sessions.[1]

The disputing step (D) is carried out cognitively, through scientific questioning of the evidence for a belief; emotively, through exercises such as rational emotive imagery; and behaviorally, through deliberately attempted actions that test the belief. The goal at E is an effective new philosophy: the demand is replaced by a flexible preference, so that a wished-for outcome is pursued without being treated as a necessity.[5]

5. Legacy and the relationship to CBT

REBT is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, and it is generally regarded as the first form of CBT. Ellis presented his ideas at a conference of the American Psychological Association in 1956 and published the seminal article in 1957, roughly a decade before Aaron Beck set out cognitive therapy; Ellis contacted Beck in the mid-1960s.[1][2]

The approach changed names over time. It began as rational therapy, was renamed rational emotive therapy in 1959, and took the current name rational emotive behavior therapy in 1992, the change intended to mark the integration of cognitive, emotive, and behavioral elements. Ellis continued to develop the system until his death in 2007.[1]

References

↑ “Rational emotive behavior therapy,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_emotive_behavior_therapy
↑ “Albert Ellis,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis
↑ Albert Ellis, “Rational Psychotherapy,” The Journal of General Psychology 59(1), 35–49 (1958). DOI: 10.1080/00221309.1958.9710170. Free full text: albertellis.org (PDF)
↑ Albert Ellis, Overcoming Resistance: A Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Integrated Approach, 2nd ed. New York: Springer Publishing, 2002.
↑ Albert Ellis, “Emotional Disturbance and Its Treatment in a Nutshell (ABCs),” Albert Ellis Institute. https://albertellis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Emotional-Disturbance-and-Its-Treatment-in-a-Nutshell-ABCs-.pdf
↑ Albert Ellis, “Must musturbation and demandingness lead to emotional disorders?” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 34(1), 95–98 (1997). DOI: 10.1037/h0087779