In 1965, Albert Ellis began to hold weekly public demonstrations of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy which he called Friday Night Workshops. For a nominal fee, he would open the doors of his Upper East Side townhousetraining centerclinic and welcome the public to witness him doing a new, active form of rational therapy. He would take a volunteer and ask them to disclose to him a personal problem (no role-playing was allowed), and he would show them how the ideas and strategies of his new therapy could help them effectively address their problem. The conversation was audio-recorded, and he gave the volunteer the audio recording so they could listen to the discussion at home after the demonstration. After the thirty-minute demonstration session, he took questions from the audience. Each Friday night, he did two demonstration sessions. As part of my training in the Institute’s Fellowship program, I also conducted REBT demonstration sessions with Ellis by my side in case I stumbled.
Watch One
The staff therapists that saw clients at the Institute would often suggest as homework given to their patients that they occasionally attend the Friday Night Workshop to watch Albert teach REBT and perhaps learn something from observing him. It was not uncommon to see some people in the audience who became regular attendees. These people often sat up front in the first-floor auditorium and were known to Ellis.
At the outset of the pandemic, I had the idea to take the Friday Night Workshop, put it on the Zoom platform on the Internet, and make it available to anyone around the world who might be interested in these powerful ideas and strategies. I thought this would assist with the stress and social isolation the pandemic was causing. I elected to call my psychoeducational demonstration the Saturday Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Conversation Hour. I do not charge for attendance nor plan to do so. I always wanted to find meaningful volunteer work to add to my life, and the Saturday demonstration is my form of volunteerism. Each Saturday, I select one volunteer participant, speak with them for about forty-five minutes, and then take questions, comments, and criticisms. All volunteers can use a pseudonym, and although I prefer they keep their cameras on, even this is not required. The only rule is that no one engages in role playing and that the volunteer speaks about an actual problem they are struggling with and does not use the time to talk about someone else’s problem. Like Al, I want volunteers to have some skin in the game.
I have done this for 94 weeks and regularly have over 90 attendees. The volunteers have been from all over the world (North and South America, Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, Asia, and Australia). Throughout these 94 demonstrations, I have noted something Ellis clearly knew but probably could not witness in the same way I have.
I encourage my patients with whom I regularly do psychotherapy to attend the Zoom demonstrations on Saturdays and watch my work with different volunteers. I quickly noticed that a significant number of those patients who followed my recommendation and observed the demonstration each week began to have a sudden exponential increase in their therapeutic progress. Although this group had been making progress before the Zoom demonstrations, once they witnessed my work with others, their progress in understanding and, more importantly, implementing REBT began to accelerate significantly. The Zoom demonstrations are at 9 AM Eastern (2 PM in the UK, 4 PM in Moscow, 6:30 in New Delhi, and 10 PM in Japan). The patients I regularly see in my time zone can wake up, pour a cup of coffee, lie in bed (with their camera off!), and conveniently watch weekly. Ellis’ patients had to fight Friday night traffic to the Institute. So he probably did not have the opportunity to see as many people as I do attend the weekly demonstrations on an ongoing basis. I have little doubt Albert would be surprised by the anecdotal reporting I am making here of the exponential treatment gains people in individual therapy with me begin to make when they attend my weekly demonstrations.
Albert used to say that millions of people benefitted merely from reading his books because they would write letters to him reporting that REBT helped them simply by reading the books he wrote. Along these lines, I believe many people can help themselves with REBT by reading a book on it, using the free audio and video recordings on my website REBTDoctor.com, and attending the Zoom sessions weekly. The different resources will synergistically impact one’s acquisition of REBT. I hope I am correct, as I think the world could use more REBT-informed people, and I certainly do not have the time to see them all! I would venture to guess that individual sessions with me are unnecessary for some people.
Do One – Disputing with a Worksheet
Ellis encouraged people to dispute their rigid and extreme attitudes regularly. Disputing is where one identifies their rigid or extreme attitude, which they use to disturb themselves and ask questions to expose its lack of utility, supporting evidence, and internal logic. The disputing process concludes with reworking the rigid and extreme attitudes and transforming them into flexible and non-extreme ones that lead to healthy functioning in the face of adversity. To do this, I encourage people to use my REBTDoctor.com worksheet #17 downloaded here to help them through this process. People generally do not like to do this process on paper. Most elect to try to work with their thinking in their heads. Perhaps due to thinking the worksheet is too hard to do or that they have to do it perfectly well, they do a half-assed version of disputing in their heads. It is best not to yield to this temptation. Pen and paper thinking, the kind you do when you use my worksheet, provides a measure of cognitive distance from your self-defeating thinking and enables you to more easily see the lack of utility, evidence, and logic of your attitudes. To see real treatment gains, use the worksheet. If you keep at it, you will do better.
Do One – Rehearsing an Attitude with Cognitive Distance
If you are not going to do a worksheet or dispute an unhealthy thought, alternatively, you can focus on rehearsing a healthy idea. Take a flexible and non-extreme attitude that you have previously identified as self-defeating and which you have used in the past to disturb yourself. You might repeatedly say, “I am having the thought, ‘I will fail when I try this.’ I am holding the attitude ‘I must not fail.’ The truth is I do not have to succeed. The universe does not compel me to do perfectly well when I leave my comfort zone and try new things. I can accept this. I can choose to have the thought, ‘I will accept myself shamelessly if I fail.’” Keep saying this repeatedly when you are tangled up and ruminating about failure. We get entangled with our “musts.” Precede your flexible and non-extreme attitude with “I am holding the attitude…” or “I having have the thought…” and put some cognitive distance between you and your attitude. Then state the flexible and non-extreme attitude. This language structure will help you get some cognitive distance from your rigid thought, and this distance will make it easier for you to adopt the healthy attitude that, in truth, you do not have to succeed. You will see you do not have to succeed at anything. You will see that “absolutely having to succeed at anything” is only a thought in your head, not a fact of life.
Teach One
My final point is this. Teach REBT to others. The best way to do this is to model it—model a healthy response for your friends and family when you do not get what you want. Show people how to take calculated risks and accept themselves unconditionally when they fail by DOING this in your life. Benjamin Franklin said that the best sermon is a good model. Ellis said that the best REBT therapists were the ones that practiced REBT in their own lives. So model REBT for your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues.
Another way to teach REBT is to introduce it to another person struggling with an unhealthy emotional reaction to adversity. You could discuss the ABC model and show them how they are disturbing themselves by holding one of the three rigid andor derivative extreme attitudes REBT posits are primarily responsible for their emotional upset. A word of caution here. Please do not demand that others want to hear the powerful ideas you are offering them. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; if they are not open to REBT, you could strain your relationship with them. In this case, model unconditional other acceptance and empathy. In addition, you might try stealth mode REBT. Stealth mode REBT is when you gently respond to a person with the ideas of REBT but intentionally do not mention the acronym REBT, the name Ellis, or sound therapeutic. When doing stealth mode REBT, respond from the perspective of someone who lives by the philosophy of REBT as you show empathy to them.
Watch REBT, Do REBT, Teach REBT
An often-quoted saying in the training of surgeons is, “Watch one, do one, teach one.” This saying applies to you and REBT. Watch my Zoom demonstrations, do worksheets regularly, rehearse with cognitive distance flexible and non-extreme attitudes, and model and teach REBT to your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues. If you follow this easy-to-remember prescription, I am very confident you will see noteworthy gains in your personal life when you encounter adversity.
Note: If you appreciate my efforts to disseminate REBT philosophy, please encourage your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues to attend the Saturday REBT Zoom Conversation Hour. Every week, I need a new volunteer to show how REBT can apply to innumerable scenarios across different cultures. I sincerely appreciate your efforts to help me in my mission to share the powerful philosophy Ellis weaved and taught me. My goal is to keep REBT alive and further his goal to help people learn to help themselves and lead a more enjoyable and rewarding life.