ABSTRACT
Another distinctive feature of REBT is its stance on the speed with which clients should ideally face adverse situations and practise thinking rationally in these situations. Many years ago, Joseph Wolpe (1958) developed a therapeutic technique, called systematic desensitisation, based on the principle of reciprocal inhibition. Focusing on anxiety, Wolpe argued that the best way of dealing with anxiety was to inhibit the anxiety response to a threat by replacing that response with one that was incompatible with anxiety; namely, a relaxation response. In order to do this, Wolpe argued that the therapist had to work very gradually up a sophisticated hierarchy of graded anxietyprovoking situations. In doing so, the client was to imagine each situation from a state of relaxation. At the ®rst sign of anxiety, the client was to stop imagining the anxiety-provoking situation and return to the relaxation state before returning to imagining the anxious scene. When the client could do this, they would then take one step up the hierarchy and repeat the procedure. Therapist and client would work very gradually up the hierarchy until the client could imagine the most anxietyprovoking scene in a state of relaxation.
