Addiction can pose a serious threat to your health and well-being, as well as the well-being of those around you or who depend on you. Of course, it can be difficult to manage and move on from addiction. At the end of the day, it is a chronic dysfunction of the brain system that revolves around factors including reward, motivation, and memory. When you are addicted to something, your body will crave it, regardless of the consequences. To overcome addiction and eliminate the behaviors surrounding it, you are likely to need some professional support and assistance along the way. 

Here at Evolve Indy, we are specialists in addiction recovery and offer a range of treatment plans to support you on your journey to moving past your addiction. Let’s take a moment to look further into Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (or “REBT”), which could prove to be a useful option for you.

The History of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy has been around since the 1950s when Albert Ellis began to trial its methods on patients facing addiction. Since then, it has been widely used and has also influenced other extremely successful forms of therapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy (or “CBT”). We often recommend REBT to individuals tackling addiction recovery, as it provides a lot of opportunities that can help you along the road to recovery and can enhance other forms of substance abuse treatment, therapies, and modalities.

What Does Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Entail?

REBT revolves around beliefs (both rational and irrational beliefs) and focuses on how these beliefs can influence your thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions. This may sound similar to CBT, but the two are different forms of therapy with different focuses and approaches. CBT focuses on challenging cognitive distortions to tackle your addiction, including secondary beliefs, such as anti-awfulizing, high frustration tolerance, and self or radical acceptance.

Put simply, REBT is based on the idea that your individual beliefs can significantly influence your emotions or feelings, which can have an impact on how you behave and react to different life situations.

The ABC Model

The “ABC Model” lies at the heart of REBT:

A- Activating event

REBT believes addiction can start with adversity – an event that has an impact on your life and results in your holding certain beliefs. These beliefs then go on to work with your inner dialogue to make you feel a way that results in you acting or reacting in a certain manner. For some, this will be healthy, for others, it will be unhealthy (potentially addiction).

B- Beliefs

REBT helps you to find your activating event and the beliefs that it has created. The therapy then aims to help you to reframe these beliefs. This can help you to understand the cause of your addiction and can then help you to tackle it.

C- Consequence

The “consequence” in ABC denotes your reaction to the activating event. If you’re reading this article, chances are, the consequence of the beliefs you’ve grown to hold is addiction. Common consequences include emotional responses and negative behaviors resulting from these emotions.

Common Uses of REBT

REBT is commonly used in addiction recovery plans. It’s important to be aware it is also used to assist a variety of other conditions. Often, those who are concerned with irrational beliefs. Some examples include obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, social phobias, anger, guilt, shame, social phobias, general phobias, and so much more.

Receiving REBT

REBT often works best when paired with other forms of therapy or treatment, rather than alone. This is why we work it into our plans alongside other forms of treatment, such as CBT. If you’re interested in learning more about REBT or receiving REBT, our team of experts can help you along the way. We can incorporate REBT into our inpatient, outpatient, and partial hospitalization plan to help you better understand the root causes of your addiction and to help you overcome and reframe your beliefs and behavior. Our team has a thorough knowledge and understanding of REBT. We can help you with your addiction recovery.

As you can see, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy can play an important and effective role in your recovery plan. This is a technique that has great results with a huge number of patients. To learn more, or to start REBT, please get in touch. A member of our team will be able to assist you further.

 

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