by Jennifer Shindman, M.S.
One of the aspects of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) that distinguishes it from other forms of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is the elegant solution. In following the ABC model, Cognitive Therapy usually first intervenes by tackling the distortions of the perceptions or inferences of the activating event (A). For example, “where is the evidence that you messed up your presentation and that your colleagues hated it? How many presentations have you given in your life, and how many have you messed up?” This line of questioning is known as the inelegant solution. Albert Ellis considered it inelegant because this strategy does not provide the client with a coping technique to deal with his or her distress should reality ever match or approach the client’s distorted version of it. Instead, Dr. Ellis suggests that therapists use the more philosophical, elegant solution, which encourages clients to assume their worst-case scenario is true (e.g. assume you actually mess up your presentation), and instead, feel a healthy negative emotion rather than an unhealthy negative emotion. For example, a therapist may ask, “What can you think about giving a poor presentation that would lead to concern rather than anxiety?” It is likely that the client is telling himself something about messing up that is leading to his anxiety (it will be awful or terrible, he cannot tolerate it, and it must not happen). Consequently, the individual is feeling an unhealthy negative emotion, and the therapist will challenge this underlying irrational belief in order to help the client achieve a healthy negative emotion. This way, the client will learn to cope with his worst-case scenario and not be debilitated by unhealthy negative emotions.
But now what? Should the client go on thinking that he will always mess up, that people think he sucks, and feel concerned all the time? Although the client may have adopted a rational way of thinking about his worst-case scenario, he may still be constantly living in this scenario because he has assumed it was true. In such cases, aspects of clients’ lives remain unpleasant and this is worthy of psychological intervention as well. Clients could make poor life decisions based on such cognitive distortions and non-disturbed negative emotions. Take our earlier example; this client, believing he is always messing up, may leave his job thinking he is not successful at it. In such situations, the therapist could examine the accuracy of the client’s “A”- (inference). It would be disappointing if this client left his job based on erroneously drawn inferences.
One method of challenging the A (inference) can be taken from Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy (CT). CT postulates that there are two primary ways in which clients distort data: selective abstraction and magnification or minimization. In selective abstraction, clients focus on one category of data and ignore others. In magnification/minimization, clients ignore information within a category. In both errors, clients ignore features of the world around them and gather biased data. For example, the client who believes he has given a terrible presentation to his colleagues may overly focus on only those individuals who tell him it could have been better, rather than focusing on those who tell him he did a great job. He may also minimize the positive reactions, thinking that these people are “just trying to be nice.” To help the client, the therapist and client may come up with a list of what data is relevant to the hypothesis, thereby avoiding selective abstraction. Client and therapist could operationally define “messing up,” consisting of several parts, to help the client avoid referring to his global performance this way. Additionally, the client, during the next presentation that he makes, could count how many people praised his work versus criticized it. He could also ask his colleagues what they thought of it, rather than assuming the worst. This way, he would have a more balanced and objective record of his overall performance. In summary, the goal of this would be to train the client to objectively collect and accurately label data and to question his automatic conclusions from the data.
As mentioned earlier, using the inelegant solution by directly challenging the truth of the clients’ A’s (inferences) is not the initial strategy in REBT. However, once clients learn how to better cope with their worst-case scenario, it may be helpful to re-examine the accuracy or inaccuracy of the A’s, especially if holding these beliefs is leading to needless negative emotions and/or ineffective decision-making.
