ABSTRACT
When I first formulated the ABCs of rational-emotive therapy (RET) and of cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT), I fully realized how complex cognitions, emotions, and behaviors are and how they inevitably include and interact with one another. Thus in my first paper on RET, presented at the American Psychological Convention in Chicago in August 1956, I said:
Thinking … is, and to some extent has to be, sensory, motor, and emotional behavior…. Emotion, like thinking and the sensory-motor processes, we may define as an exceptionally complex state of human reaction which is integrally related to all the other perception and response processes. It is not one thing, but a combination and holistic integration of several seemingly diverse, yet actually closely related, phenomena.
(Ellis, 1958, p. 35)