ABSTRACT
Assuming that you and your clients are targeting their irrational beliefs for change, help your clients get most out of the disputing process by disputing one irrational belief at a time. Thus, if your clients understand that they do hold a ‘must’ about an activating event and can see the relationship between this ‘must’ and their disturbed emotion, help them to dispute this irrational belief until they can understand that the belief is irrational and that there is a rational alternative to it. This process requires the full attention of your clients and therefore you need to minimize anything that interferes with their full attention. If you switch from disputing your clients’ ‘must’ to disputing one of the other irrational belief variants before you have helped them to dispute the ‘must’ fully, you will very likely confuse your clients. The consequence of this confusion is that the clients will neither adequately challenge their ‘must’ nor its derivative.
