Re:Self-esteem

I too find Ellis' ideas about self-esteem to be intriguing. However, it is my view that every informed cognitive therapist, whether they be Beckian, Ellisian, or of any other stripe, is interested in targetting the vague, global rating of self, and assisting people to learn to challenge these tendencies in as detailed and rigorous a way as possible. In many ways, the goal in any CBT approach would be to "rate the behaviour not the person" and, in Seligman's terms, move from an internal, stable, and global explanatory style to an external, unstable, and specific one. While our clients may come through the door wanting "greater self-esteem," feeling better about themselves and decreasing their vunerability to depression is attained not by reinforcing this concept, but by the concentrated work of identifying and challenging the automatic thoughts, conditional and core beliefs that maintain the vunerability to emotional dysfunction. As success is attained, the person becomes more discriminating, and can no longer believe such sweeping notions of self as "awful." I think we are all on the same page.

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