ABSTRACT
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) therapists know that striving for philosophical change with clients means helping them to surrender their irrational beliefs and adhere to a set of rational beliefs. REBT theory advocates that the therapist is best placed to help clients make environmental changes after you have helped them achieve a fair measure of philosophical change. Therapists need to be flexible and prepared to compromise on their preferred goal of effecting philosophical change. They also need to realize that certain clients may be able to effect philosophical change after they have effected inferential, behavioural or environmental changes because having made one of these latter changes they become more open to philosophical change. The therapist should avoid working inflexibly towards philosophical change when the client is stubbornly resisting on this point, otherwise he will be doing authoritarian therapy, not REBT.
