ABSTRACT
All approaches to psychological treatment are based on how psychological disturbance is conceptualised. A major distinctive theoretical feature of REBT is that people are disturbed not by things but by the rigid views that they take of them. This updated version of Epictetus's famous dictum (``Men are disturbed not by things but by the views that they take of them'') speci®es the type of cognitions that REBT considers to lie at the core of disturbance, namely rigid beliefs. Rigidity (also referred to as religiosity, dogmatism, absolutism and demandingness in the REBT literature) takes the form of musts, demands, absolute shoulds, needs, have to's, got to's, among others. These musts have three foci: self, others and life, as in:
· ``I must . . . .'' · ``You (others) must . . . .'' · ``Life must . . . .''
