Rational-emotive Role Plays

Emotional Reasoning seems to respond well to rational-emotive roleplays. In the first round, the therapist takes the role of the client's thoughts, and the client takes the role of his own emotions.

Client: I'm a failure.
Therapist: You've got a great family, a nice house, and a job you're good at. You don't sound like a failure to me.

And so on.

In the next round, the therapist and client switch roles, which gives the client an opportunity to practice providing adaptive responses to his cognitive distortions. Though I've never read it commented upon, another benefit of this technique is that sometimes in the heat of "battle" the client will reveal evidence that wasn't exposed through Socratic questioning or evidence gathering:

Client: I'm a failure.
Therapist: You've got a great family, a nice house, and a job you're good at. You don't sound like a failure to me.
Client: Yeah right. I've really got it together. That's why I'm sitting in therapy!

In this example, the client revealed another possible CD (a belief that only failures need therapy, or something of that nature) that he may have been too polite to reveal otherwise. (This would almost certainly indicate a problem with the therapuetic alliance, of course.)

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