Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help you recognize and understand your irrational beliefs and change them. With this therapy, you learn to challenge the legitimacy of your negative thoughts, then replace them with thoughts that are more productive.
At Discovery Point, we understand that irrational thoughts can cause emotional distress, which in turn can lead to detrimental behavior such as alcohol and drug abuse. For example, perfectionism is a typical irrational standard many hold people hold themselves to. But we know that perfection is not attainable. During therapy, we help you see why perfectionism doesn’t exist and understand how such thought patterns contribute to your cycle of addiction.
We show you how to identify and understand this unhealthy pattern and teach you how to replace those negative thoughts with positive ones. As a result, your damaging actions are replaced by healthier, more beneficial behavior.
Rational emotive behavior therapy deals with three basic elements that contribute to your addiction – activating events (situations that trigger an emotional reaction), your beliefs (how you feel about those events), and the consequences (your response based on those beliefs).
At the beginning of your rational emotive behavioral therapy, we will help learn how to recognize those negative, irrational thoughts. Examples include:
Clearly, thoughts such as these are not helpful when you’re struggling to overcome addiction to drugs or alcohol. Instead, they can derail your recovery by causing you to feel disappointed with yourself and your efforts to attain long-term sobriety.
Once you understand how to recognize these thoughts, your REBT therapist encourages you to challenge them. This portion of your treatment may become somewhat contentious as your therapist pushes you with blunt and honest questions. This is an intentional part of the design of REBT, as we force you to tackle these problems head-on and see how they negatively affect your life.
In the final stage of rational emotive behavioral therapy, you learn how to replace those negative, irrational beliefs with positive ones. Even though you know such thoughts are harmful, it can be difficult to accept that they are truly irrational. But you must make this necessary step to successfully complete the therapy and reap the benefits to your recovery.
