REBTOZ

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...

Even the most competent and composed amongst us will say how we have battled or continue to battle our inner demons of self-doubt and low self-worth. Some would measure their self-worth against goals achieved and how popular they are with others. This kind of ‘confidence glow’ can be temporary if one is inclined to put all of their psychological well-being eggs in the same ‘self-esteem’ basket. Albert Ellis, creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, famously stated: ‘Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to personkind because it’s conditional.’ We condition ourselves when we rehearse and re rehearse certain ingrained thought constructions that are unhelpful or helpful to us. Ellis claims, and I agree, that if a person’s self-worth is contingent on how others regard them or how well they do at tasks it can be very harmful. They will feel OK or not OK depending on which way the self-esteem winds blow! This is what Ellis called conditional self - worth, how one esteems...

The student continues to explore the idea that events don’t cause our extreme ill feelings but rather it is our interpretation or thinking about them that does. The belief we are worthwhile only when others do is an errant philosophical view and our student is beginning to realise that his unrealistic demand that others MUST like him to be likeable is doing him a disservice. In the counselling office in a school in South Australia Counsellor:    You say that you feel anxious when you think you have ‘offended’ someone. Is that fair to say? Student:   Yes I want people to be happy. I hate it when they feel bad because of me. Counsellor:   It would appear that you believe you are responsible for how others feel. You say you ‘made him upset.’ Would that also mean that you believe others ‘make you upset?’ Student:   Yes. People can make me upset and I can upset others. Counsellor:    I want to talk about a ‘must’ rule that people m...

There's confusion around behaviour management as compared with (Rational Emotive) behaviour education. So ... All teaching and learning is based on constructivist theory. People learn in interaction with the world and others building on existing knowledge and understandings to create new learning. In other words knowledge is not acquired from some kind of  repository from which everyone draws upon for learning. Learning takes place when new ideas and content are connected with old conceptual understandings and the learner is extended from where she is not from where somewhere presumes she is. Rational Emotive Behaviour Education is finding where the child is in terms of her philosophical views about herself, others and life in general. When we know this we can help the child challenge what may be unhelpful personal philosophies and build (construct) better ones. We can work from where she's at. We also teach reinforce and acknowledge the helpful (rational ways of think...

On the 24 th July eight years ago Albert Ellis died but his work lives on. He would have been encouraged to know that schools have taken up the challenge he set many years ago; teach children how to make themselves less ‘disturbable’. Rational Emotive Behaviour Education is doing this is many South Australian schools with positive outcomes. Teachers have been trained in the understanding and application of Ellis’ ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance and they are helping their students to understand that their habits of thinking are linked to how they act and how they feel. Gone but not forgotten This insight empowers the child to monitor and assess how she is feeling and how she is estimating (thinking about/interpreting) the situation at hand. How am I feeling? Is this situation as bad as I think it is? I can reassess this situation so that I remain in control and make OK choices. Rational Emotive Behaviour Educators (REBE’rs) remind students daily that their ...

The English lingo is replete with idioms that would pose a problem or two to a student with Aspergers Syndrome. Certain turns of phrase would be as clear as muddy water! She would remain none the wiser if you were to ask her to ‘pull your socks up’ or ‘pull your finger out'or 'take a chair!’ Are you with me? She’d be flat out trying to cop on to the message.    How difficult would it be to get a handle on the meaning of a message if it can only be taken literally. Consider the expressions ‘to get a handle on something’ and ‘turns of phrase’ mentioned above. Somehow we internalise these expressions, which make particular meanings and we draw them out of our linguistic hat and use them in the right place at the right time in the right context (We hope!). But what of the student who has Aspergers Syndrome?    What assumptions can we make about her capacity to understand these culturally specific idioms? I was once asked to observe a student in the classroom...