Confessions of a novice rational-emotive therapist

Excerpt

Many therapists who subscribe to RET are converts from other approaches. Few master’s or doctoral training programs exclusively teach RET and many do not place any emphasis on it at all. Thus, many otherwise experienced therapists are novices when it comes to integrating RET techniques into their professional repertoire of interventions. And as novices, they experience many of the doubts and obstacles in trying something new. I am such a novice. My formal training in RET consists solely of a Five Day Intensive Practicum (Weinrach, 1977) conducted by Ellis and his staff in 1976 since neither my master’s nor doctoral programs paid much attention to this approach. It has taken me 4 years to feel secure enough to call myself a Rational Therapist. My reluctance was not a philosophical one. Philosophically, I’ve been there for a long time. But I have found it difficult to integrate various RET interventions into my counseling style and feel comfortable at the same time. The discomfort I experienced is similar to what my counselor-trainees experience during their first few years after training with me and my colleagues. It takes a while for a therapist to develop an internally consistent style apart from the role models experienced while in training. …