The theory of REBT places a strong emphasis on personal responsibility, self-acceptance, and self-direction. I encourage you to hold yourself personally responsible for your self-defeating emotional and behavioral reactions in response to the adversities of life. I encourage you to unconditionally accept yourself even when others reject you or disapprove of you. I encourage you to be self-directed in finding and then pursuing your idiosyncratic vitally absorbing life interests that will give you meaning and maximize your personal happiness over the course of your lifetime.
I want you to evolve into your own therapist, in effect to think like a REBT therapist and to continually use the ABC framework to analyze your disturbed emotional and behavioral reactions. I want you to identify your rigid beliefs (i.e. Musts, Absolute Shoulds) and extreme beliefs (I can’t stand it, It is awful, the end of the world…, or I am a failure as a person because I failed) and to question these beliefs on your own and then to come up with new and empowering flexible and non-extreme beliefs just as I would do so with you during a face to face therapy session. I want you to maintain the philosophical change that occured in my office and to strengthen it through self-directed therapeutic activities. Some of these activities can be the continued use of REBT self-report forms, Rational-Emotive Imagery, and self-assigned behavioral homework assignments. Another especially good way of strengthening and extending treatment gains is to strive to be a good model of REBT philosophy to friends and family. This translates into concrete behaviors like refraining from rating people when others misbehave. This means modeling tolerance for yourself (when you screw up or misbehave), others (when they misbehave), and life (when it is rough and unfair). When you become a model of the philosophy on which REBT therapy is built you are not merely talking the rational talk but walking the rational walk for yourself and for others. This might mean showing others how to accept themselves warts and all and then to work on changing those things about themselves that can be changed. Formally teaching or displaying the philosophy of REBT is a good way to keep it fresh in your mind and to see how it can be applied to new problems not necessarily covered during your sessions me. So use and share REBT. You will help others as you move towards a higher level of emotional functioning and self-actualization.