|
| |
|
About Rational Living Therapy
|
Rational Living Therapy is a very systematic approach to
cognitive-behavioral therapy, which means that the Rational Living
Therapist knows where he or she is at any given point in the process of
therapy.
Rational Living Therapy emphasizes both therapist skills and client
rational self-counseling skills. Rational Living Therapy
emphasizes Aldo Pucci's belief that any approach to counseling or
psychotherapy that emphasizes instruction becomes a "sales job."
The clinician has something to sell the client (the philosophy and
techniques of rational self-counseling) and is hoping that the client
will "buy" it. For that reason, Rational Living Therapy utilizes
powerful persuasive techniques techniques to help decrease conscious
resistance to the therapist's suggestion of success in therapy.
Rational Living Therapy is highly motivational. If you dislike
giving up on clients, and wish that there were some way to
encourage any client to make changes, Rational Living Therapy is ideal
for you. It is designed to tap into the client's desires by
utilizing Rational Motivational Interviewing techniques.
Rational Living Therapy is very instructive. The instructive
nature of RLT helps produce long-term results for the client.Rational
Living Therapy also focuses on underlying assumptions. By doing
so, therapy is much "deeper" thus making the results more long-term.
Rational Living Therapists are very concerned with irrational
labeling. For this reason, we disagree with the labeling that
results from mental health professionals' use of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders. Many of these
"diagnoses" actually are only labels for a set of behaviors.
However, these labels often create a perception that the client "has" or
"suffers from" a "disorder." This perception can become very
problematic for the client, leading to a great deal of hopelessness.
Rational Living Therapists help clients avoid irrational labeling and
hopelessness.
Rational Living Therapy takes the best of Rational Emotive Behavioral
Therapy, Rational Behavior Therapy, and Cognitive Therapy and integrates knowledge and research findings in
the areas of cognitive development, learning theory,
general semantics, brain functioning, social psychology and perception,
and linguistics. Rational Living Therapy takes advantage of
special brain states to facilitate learning and progress.
Rational Living Therapy also rejects the common concepts of self-esteem
and self-confidence, and also departs from the traditional CBT emphasis
of "self-acceptance." RTL's replacement to these concepts
(the "Four A's") is
much more practical and useful.
An Additional Component of Rational Living Therapy
Some Rational Living Therapists utilize an
optional component called Rational Hypnotherapy because:
-- with hypnotherapy, the client does not need to
believe the therapist's suggestions, such as, "Seeing people causes
you to relax" for the client to integrate those suggestions into his/her
manner of thinking;
-- some thoughts / reactions are acquired through
hypnosis (especially in those cases of "PTSD"). When
thoughts /
reactions are acquired through hypnosis we have found that the client
is relieved of those thoughts / reactions much
more quickly through
hypnotherapy than conventional "conscious" CBT;
-- hypnotherapy is just another technique to help
a person change the way he / she thinks. However, the
deeper the
state of hypnosis, the fewer repetitions are needed for the client to
integrate and act on those suggestions.
-- the deeper the state of hypnosis, the fewer
repetitions of the message are needed for the client to integrate it
into
his / her manner of
thinking and to act on it.
Additional training is available to professionals who wish to include
this component in their therapy.
We do realize that there are many reasons why practitioners might
elect not to be trained in hypnotherapy. As a result, Rational
Living Therapy is designed to produce results for the client both with
and without it. Therefore, there is no requirement that Rational
Living Therapists receive training in Rational Hypnotherapy.
 since
November 25, 2005
|
|
