ABSTRACT
Suppose, for example, that one of your clients believes that she must gain the approval of her boss at work. In therapy, she has learned to identify, challenge and change this belief with the result that she experiences less dysphoric emotions and has become more assertive with her boss. Your next step is to encourage her to identify other people in her life whose approval she thinks she needs. Help her to specify and seek out situations that involve the possibility of incurring the disapproval of these significant others and help her to challenge her approval-related irrational belief in these situations using cognitive disputing methods and imagery methods. As you do this, reduce your level of activity and direction as the client demonstrates her increasing ability to generalize her learning (see Point 4). Then, help the client to identify other core irrational beliefs and encourage her to identify, challenge and change these – first in specific situations and then in a broader range. As your client demonstrates an increasing ability to generalize her self-helping skills from one set of situations to others, you can then teach her general rules about the REBT approach to self-help. Thus, you can teach your client first to learn to identify self-defeating emotions and behaviours, then to search for the clinically relevant aspects of the activating event, thereby to identify the irrational beliefs that underpin her problems (these may be specific versions of more general core irrational beliefs). Your client can utilize her disputing skills and begin to strengthen her conviction in her new specific and core rational beliefs by using a variety of cognitive, emotive and behavioural techniques.
