ABSTRACT
While Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) therapists prefer to encourage their clients to take large steps forward and to take big risks to help them overcome their problems, such tasks which we as therapists might consider 'challenging' may be experienced by clients as 'overwhelming'. The fact that their experience may well be based on irrational thinking is not the point here. If clients evaluate therapeutic tasks as overwhelming they will not undertake them. Rather than trying to push your clients to do homework tasks it is better to encourage them to choose tasks which are challenging. REBT practice is to introduce clients to the 'challenging, but not overwhelming' principle and encourage them to choose a task that is challenging for them, given their present psychological state, avoiding, on the one hand, 'overwhelming' tasks and, on the other, tasks that are 'too easy' for them. Therapeutic change occurs when clients undertake healthy challenges to their irrational thinking.
