ABSTRACT
This chapter shows clients how they can largely determine their emotional destiny through self-directed efforts to adopt and then maintain healthy, flexible, non-extreme attitudes. Albert Ellis was an exceptionally self-directed individual and the theory of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) places a strong emphasis on personal responsibility, self-acceptance and self-direction. REBT therapists prepare clients for lapses and relapses before therapy has ended. REBT therapists want their clients to evolve into their own therapists, in effect to think like an REBT therapist and to continually use the ABC framework to analyse their disturbed emotional and behavioural reactions. REBT strives to teach clients to become personally responsible for their emotional and behavioural reactions in response to the adversities of life. Some of the self-directed therapeutic activities can be the continued use of REBT self-report forms, Rational-Emotive Imagery and self-assigned behavioural homework assignments.
