REBTOZ

Mr Popoffalot of What's Up? News has popped by for another chat about the Have a Go Spaghettio! Success Helper approach to student personal development. Mr P. has interviewed Ms Smithers before, and he is eager to follow up and learn some more. Mr. Popoffalot ‘How are things going Ms. S.?’ asks Mr. P. Ms. S. replies: Well, we’re well into the term and classroom discourse is very Have a Go Spaghettio! rich. All the students have set their personal Success Helper goals for the term, the Have a Go capability they want to work at. E.g., Ahmed has a Red Success Helper goal, Bridget, a Yellow SH goal, etc. They each have identified a habit of thinking which may be Brain Bully stopping them from doing stuff because they might be too scared, worried etc. Mr. P. A great idea. So, they decide what they want to get better at. This gives them agency. Yes indeed. Agency or locus of control, where personal goals are set and work planned to realise them. Locus of control and frustration...

  Headwork Ahead is a sign that Ms. Smithers has standing in her classroom. It’s a visual reminder that monitoring how we feel, behave and how we think about what’s happening around us is an ongoing matter of mindful mind maintenance that can become an automatic, intuitive practice. Nevertheless, we need to be vigilant because Brain Busting Brain Bully is an opportunist and lurks around every corner! Have a Go Spaghettio! is a constructivist-based teaching and counselling pedagogy. It’s based on Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and General Semantics theories. Each posit that how we see ourselves, others and the world is a construction, a mind made virtual reality that can either be far removed from how the world is or is pretty well aligned with it. General Semantics introduces the notion that the ‘map is not the territory’ meaning that our constructed ideas about how things work are just that, a simulated internally fabricated model, the map that we believe represents the ...

Have a Go Spaghettio is a teaching program designed for early childhood education. Its primary purpose is to help teachers instruct students about the connection between thinking, feeling, and doing using Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) principles. The program focuses on building resilience in young students and is based on the ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance, which explains how emotions and behaviors are influenced by the way we think about events. By teaching students to recognize and challenge their thoughts, Have a Go Spaghettio aims to promote emotional well-being, confidence, and positive behavior. Some key aspects of the program include: - *Resilience Building*: Encouraging students to take on challenges and develop coping skills - *REBT Principles*: Teaching students to identify and dispute irrational thoughts and behaviors - *Think-Feel-Do Connection*: Helping students understand the relationship between their thoughts, emotions, and actions - *Visual...

The goal of REBT, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, is to help the person identify the beliefs they have constructed and how they are connected to the way they feel and behave in response to adverse happenings. The emphasis is on the views one holds, personal philosophies that underpin and drive how we feel and behave, as it is they, not solely the adverse event, that ‘makes’ them as upset as they become. In essence we upset ourselves, and Albert Ellis calls this self-disturbance, we are causing what he calls our own ‘upsetness.’ This presentation is titled ‘our – upsetness’ as Ellis’ invites us all to learn to be less ‘self-disturbable.’ In the school context we call this endeavour Rational Emotive Behaviour Education. Dr. Albert Ellis The Have a Go Spaghettio! Success Helper approach to social, emotional, and behavioural wellbeing provides a pedagogy for teachers to use in the early childhood context. It is underpinned by Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and General Semantics t...

The Quality of Our Thoughts “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius This message comes across loud and clear in Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) theory. Ellis talked about the quality of our thoughts in terms of how helpful or unhelpful they are in getting what we want in our lives, our wants, goals, and aspirations. We can learn to think in ways that help us, rational thinking or we can construct beliefs that are more irrational and unhelpful. REBT provides the ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance paradigm that counsellors and psychotherapists use in therapy to help their clients understand how it is that they experience what Albert Ellis calls emotional and behavioural ‘upsetness.’   The ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance (see video) embraces the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and others of the Stoic tradition and considers the relationship between belief constructions, and emotional and behavioural res...

Rational Emotive Behaviour Education (REBE) is a powerful teaching tool to use in the classroom at any level. It is based on REBT (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy). It’s been around a long time, and  started out as RET (Rational Emotive Therapy) in the 1960’s. Dr. Albert Ellis created the theory and his counselling paradigm, the ABC Theory of Emotional (and behavioural) Disturbance, provides us with a framework for our teaching and counselling practice. As with all effective teaching it helps to know what we are doing and why. So, step one in our learning journey would be to understand what the ABC Theory is. ABC easy as 1,2,3… It might appear easy, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. And therein lies the genius of Albert Ellis as he took all his reading, thinking and psychotherapy practice and put it into a little package, a formula for us to use in the classroom. Indeed, Albert Ellis said a long time ago that: ‘The future of psychotherapy is in the school system.’ ...

And the world continued to turn. His world turned within that world. In his world everything was neat, tidy, symmetrical, clean, and predictable. This was his template for ‘normal,’ the way things 'should' be. Ordered. His world was the way it 'must' be and the big world beyond was anything but. The tension between what he demanded of the world and how things were in reality was always close to breaking. Taut. Tense. 'The Angry Man.' We might talk of one world but there are many individually constructed worldviews. Mental health according to  Albert Ellis  is when we best align our own expectations and demands of self, others and life in general based on what we are most likely to get. If we don't want to feel uncomfortable and if we believe the world should give us what we want and it doesn't there is a disparity between what we want and what we receive! As Ellis reminds us: 'The world isn't for us or against us. It doesn't give a shit...

I had the pleasure of working with a group of educators at a high school in the northern suburbs of Adelaide recently. The school has set up a well being hub where students can go for support if needed particularly of a social/emotional/behavioural kind. The 'Hub'staff is sourcing ideas to support their students and one staff member who attended several of my workshops last year considered that REBT would value add to the 'Hub'mission to help students better manage themselves in day to day life especially when things go awry. Craigmore High School It is always a challenge when presenting to 'hit the spot' as it were so that people become engaged and interested in the message. Is this stuff useful to my practice as a teacher/counsellor? Will it benefit my students? What will be my strategy, the hook used to get everyone 'in?' To start we looked at the philosophical underpinnings of the ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance. One significant ...

My name’s Brain Bully and you most probably don’t know me and that’s a problem for you. Why? Because I am a major player in how you might feel about yourself, others and the world in general. The extreme negative emotions you may experience are always accompanied by an action or actions, which contrive against you. Yes I’m Brain Bully and I really can ‘do your head in!’ You might ask yourself at times ‘why did I do that? Or ‘why do I feel so angry when things don’t go my way?’ These questions largely go unanswered because you don’t know about me and you won’t know unless you find out. Some find out by reading and talking to others about how they might feel about things and an attentive ear may pick up on little snippets of tell-tale signs that I am somewhere lurking deep within you. This insight can be the beginning of a self-help journey that may in time purge your mind of me, an alien menace that resides in your deep and dark subconscious self. But it isn’t exactly accurate to sugge...