ABSTRACT
One of the dif®culties novice therapists have in practising REBT is in making sense of their clients' distorted inferences. They know that they are supposed to encourage their clients to assume temporarily that their inferences are true, but sometimes when they do this and these inferences are highly distorted, they run into great dif®culty clinically. For example, let's suppose that a client reports that she (in this case) was panicking the night before. Not unreasonably, the novice REBT therapist asks the client what she was panicking about to which the client responds that she was most scared of dying from a heart attack. This, of course, is an inference, so the novice REBT knows not to challenge it, but to encourage the client to assume temporarily that she will die from a heart attack as a way of identifying and disputing her irrational beliefs about what the therapist thinks is an ``A''. And, indeed, from one perspective it is an ``A'', but it is also a thinking consequence of a prior irrational belief about a less distorted ``A'' and it is this standpoint that is more likely to yield the best results clinically in this given situation. This example shows that highly distorted inferences are often best conceptualised in REBT as cognitive consequences (i.e. ``C'') of rigid and extreme irrational beliefs about less distorted inferences at ``A''. While schema-focused therapy (e.g. Young & Klosko, 1993) also makes this point, only REBT does this in the context of the ABC framework for which it is known.
