Cognitive Behavior Therapy with Religious Beliefs and Practices

Description of the Strategy

In 1956, psychologist Albert Ellis gave up practicing psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy and began what he first called “rational therapy” and what is now called “rational-emotive behavior therapy.” However, Ellis continued at least one Freudian tradition. He took a dim view on religion. Nevertheless, within 15 years, papers appeared showing the compatibility between what was by then known as rational-emotive therapy and Christian beliefs and practices.

Even as an adolescent, Ellis had been attracted to philosophy. When he established his new treatment, he incorporated philosophic points of view from around the world. The treatment approach was philosophic because it began by asking, “What is the good life, and what is the means of obtaining it?” His answer was a life based on long-term hedonism, with a particular tip of his cap to the Stoic philosophers, especially Epictetus and his dictum, “Men are not disturbed by events but by the view they take of them,” a view that is hardly unique to the Greco-Roman philosophers.

This insight is the basic kernel of all cognitive behavior treatments. Namely, it is the way one construes, cognizes, or “thinks about” a situation that is the crucial factor in determining one's emotional and behavioral response to that event. This remains true whether the event takes place inside or outside an individual's skin and whether the event is also a thought, feeling, or action.

Cognitive therapy, developed by the psychiatrist Aaron Beck, follows this same basic A-B-C method of analysis: There is some activating event about which an individual has beliefs that lead to emotional and behavioral consequences with regard to the original activating event. Beck also had chaffed at the indirectness of psychoanalytic methods. He saw direct examination of what individuals thought and said as the key to understanding and remediating dysfunctional emotions and behavior. He first concentrated his efforts on depression. Unlike Ellis, his approach did not outline any broad philosophic context into which his therapy was to be placed. Rather, it was tacitly understood that no one wanted to be depressed and that which could alleviate depression, especially without the side effects and other problems associated with medications, was a good thing.

By the late 1970s, the “cognitive revolution” was in full swing. Many practitioners who had previously viewed themselves as more strictly behavioral began to take more seriously the idea that “private speech” was just one more type of behavior, as had been maintained by some behaviorists since the time of John [Page 196]Watson. The old requirements of methodological behaviorism, which held that events about which only one person could make reports, such as thoughts and images, were not eligible for psychological analysis, were largely abandoned. Under that doctrine, what someone said about their thoughts, images, or bodily sensations was admissible to scientific investigation but not the thoughts, images, and sensations themselves. Whatever “cognition” was, it was no longer regarded as existing in the spaceless, weightless, timeless mind-stuff suggested by Rene Descartes. It was more and more regarded as just more empirical or theoretical material of the same ontological type as overt behavior.

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