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The Rationality of AA—Alcoholics Anonymous and
the Spirituality of REBT—Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy^©1

Emmett Velten
 

Abstract

AA differs dramatically from Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and its recovery self-help derivatives, SMART Recovery^® and the original version of Rational Recovery, but AA’s objective is rational as REBT defines it and it uses many secular, cognitive-behavioral methods. People who attend REBT-based recovery meetings show both the sudden and the slower “educational variety” of change AA co-founder Bill Wilson described. AA attributes these changes to spiritual experiences, whereas REBT attributes them to normal human efforts and talents for transcending social and biological limitations. Both AA and REBT emphasize a philosophical shift as a principal ingredient for change. Many conceptions of spirituality overlap with “self-actualization,” which REBT promotes through advocacy of self-reliance, its attitude toward the past, and its constructivist view of personality and self-esteem. REBT is unique in psychotherapy in integrating a secular humanistic philosophy of life with cognitive-behavior therapy.

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The Rationality of AA—Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Spirituality of REBT—Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

In this paper, I will make a case for the rationality of AA—Alcoholics Anonymous—and the spirituality of REBT—Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Why this seemingly odd pairing? Not odd at all, when you consider that Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) has parented or grandparented not one or two of the non-spiritual alternatives to AA and the other 12-step programs, but four of them—if you count separately the two distinct versions of Rational Recovery.

First, Jack Trimpey founded Rational Recovery (RR) in 1986 and explicitly extrapolated it from REBT, or what then was RET (Ellis, 1988; Ellis, McInerney, DiGiuseppe, & Yeager, 1988; Trimpey, 1992; Trimpey, Velten, & Dain, 1992; Velten, 1989). An RR advocate in Indiana, Audrey Kishline, recognized that large numbers of problem drinkers do not define themselves as alcoholics or as addicted, but nevertheless have problems with alcohol. She saw that RR’s absolute insistence on abstinence, as much as AA’s, turned off many such individuals. She believed it could be useful to have a moderated drinking alternative to RR and founded MM, Moderation Management, which is almost entirely a practical application of cognitive-behavioral techniques (Kishline, 1994). Then, in 1994, Trimpey changed RR in ways that led to a split in its ranks. Several of his new positions were diametrically opposed to positions that had originally attracted many of RR’s main proponents (Trimpey, 1994). He solidified his theory that a specific physical structure in the brain is responsible for overindulgence in alcohol, advocated the abolition of all substance abuse treatment, debunked REBT except for treatment of mental disorders, ridiculed substance abuse research and academic professionals, scoffed at the idea that depression and other psychological problems contributed to substance abuse, declared that only people who had had drinking problems could understand those with such problems, and stated that one’s life philosophy had nothing to do either with addiction or recovery from it. These radical changes in RR left many RR advocates, and most of its board members, with nowhere to go. They founded Self Management And Recovery Training, known as SMART Recovery®, which has retained a close alliance with Ellis and REBT (Tate, 1995).

Albert Ellis’s paper on humanistic psychology and REBT in this special issue of the Journal of Humanistic Education and Development illustrates his approach as a secular humanistic psychology and describes some of REBT’s goals, purposes, and methods. REBT is a prime example of a self-help methodology, having been used in many self-help books, including several that have sold in the millions. SMART Recovery® is an application of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and other cognitive-behavioral therapies for laypeople wanting secular tools they can learn and use in their efforts to overcome addictions.

There are several fundamental differences between REBT and AA. For example, REBT strongly emphasizes individual human power and capacity for self-growth and self-development, and AA equally strongly emphasizes permanent disease status, personal powerlessness, and reliance on a Higher Power and God As You Understand Him. A number of papers and books have described these differences from the REBT viewpoint (Ellis & Velten, 1992; Velten, 1992; Velten, 1993a, 1993b; Tate, 1993) as well as from the perspective of a social psychological critique of the 12-step ideology (Fingarette, 1988; Peele, 1989; Peele & Brodsky, 1991).

While AA and REBT have radical differences, Ellis’s view is that the central aim of AA’s spiritual healing approach is rational (Ellis & Velten, 1992). AA’s purpose—namely to help people stay alive (by abstaining from alcohol) and suffer less—is the core definition of “rational” in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). As well, Ellis and Velten (1992) point out and use a number of practical ideas, sayings, and procedures from the 12-step traditions that easily could have sprung from the cognitive-behavioral therapies. The present paper will look at some of these ways in which AA is rational (as in REBT). A more surprising question that this paper will address is whether there are some ways in which REBT and its addiction self-help extrapolation, SMART Recovery®, are spiritual and, therefore, “humanistic” even from the present-day non-secular perspective. Instead of their differences, then, this paper will discuss the similarities between the AA approach and the REBT approach. In particular, it will discuss their similarities on the dimension (or the characteristics at least) on which they would seem to differ most, namely spirituality-rationality.

Definition of Rational(ity)

To determine in what ways AA is rational, we begin by defining rational. According to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd Edition, Unabridged, “rational” has eight meanings. Two of them are strictly mathematical and of no interest in this connection, leaving six:

1. agreeable to reason, reasonable; sensible
2. having or exercising reason, sound judgment, or good sense
3. being in or characterized by full possession of one’s reason; sane; lucid
4. endowed with the faculty of reason
5. of, pertaining to, or constituting reasoning powers
6. proceeding or derived from reason or based on reasoning.

That is “rational” according to the dictionary. The particular definition of rational used in Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and by its derivative, SMART Recovery^®, as well as the original version of Rational Recovery, is closest to the dictionary meanings of rational that include the words “sound judgment” and “good sense.”

The "rational" and the “irrational” of REBT and SMART Recovery^® are defined in the context of the individual’s goals and objectives. Rational Beliefs² are those that:

• promote healthy emotions—whether negative or positive—and self-helping action tendencies, which are those that tend to help one reach long-term and short-term goals, including happiness, good health, and continued life;
   

• avoid unnecessary conflict with others; and
   

• motivate one to solve life problems more effectively and to constructively cope with what cannot be changed.

Irrational Beliefs, on the other hand, are those that:

• promote unhealthy emotions—whether negative or positive—and self-defeating action tendencies, which are those that tend to interfere with one’s reaching long-term and short-term goals, including happiness, good health, and staying alive;
   

• contribute to unnecessary conflict with others; and
   

• compound life problems or otherwise help defeat the individual’s purposes.

Thus, rational and irrational in REBT are relative to the individual’s particular goals, purposes, motivations, priorities, and options. What shows sound judgment or good sense for an individual at one time, may be foolish—or irrational—at another time. Rational Beliefs, that is, those that are helpful to the individual in a particular context, are not always logical or factually supported, but many, probably most, are. For example, belief that crystals combat cancer may not be logical or empirically supported; yet, if belief in crystals produces optimism, the cancer victim might feel better. Feeling more hopeful might possibly also help combat the cancer, but if so, a belief, not the crystals, would have produced the effect. On the other hand, belief in the efficacy of crystals could work against the person's goal of staying alive and, therefore, be irrational. The person might ignore effective treatments or waste so much money on quackery that she or he could not afford legitimate treatment.

How AA Is Rational and a Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Having defined rational as used in REBT, what components of AA’s spiritual healing program are rational? As pointed out above, AA’s major goal of course is rational, namely to help people suffer less from alcohol problems and stay alive. In that, AA and REBT (and SMART Recovery^®) are alike.

Despite some radical differences of AA from REBT and SMART Recovery^® in assumptions about alcohol dependence and what is required to recover from it, AA also shares many of the same REBT and other cognitive-behavioral components used in SMART Recovery^®. Some of these main rational (as in REBT) components of AA include:

• The Serenity Prayer. A major part of REBT is the focus on teaching oneself to gracefully deal with crummy reality once you determine that you cannot change it favorably. This is the Serenity Prayer: accept what cannot be changed; work to change what can be changed; and develop the wisdom to know the difference. While in AA this is literally a prayer to God, the idea in the Serenity Prayer is a simple secular rule, sans God and Higher Powers.
   

• Just as REBT does, AA emphasizes Belief Systems. “Stinking thinking,” the 12 steps, the 12 traditions, and many other portions of the 12-step approach reflect AA’s emphasis on cognitive Belief Systems, both self-helpful and self-hurtful.
   

• AA and REBT encourage people to learn and practice new ways of thinking and acting. This includes using such cognitive-behavioral techniques as slogans, affirmations, and bibliotherapy to combat stinking thinking and reduce the likelihood of drinking.
   

• Many of AA’s famous sayings are cognitive-behavioral coping statements. A sample of them include:
  First Things First; Let Go and Let God; There but for the Grace of God; Easy Does It, But Do It; Take Time but Take Steps; Live and Let Live; Think, Think, Think; Get Off the Pity Pot; Do It For Yourself; Go To A Meeting; 90 Meetings in 90 Days; Get a Sponsor; Avoid Slippery Places; Get Your Feet to a Meeting and Your Mind Will Follow; Fake It Till You Make It.
   

• AA is like REBT in advising people to put into practice, by helping others, their new, self-helping philosophy. People help themselves maintain their new ways of thinking and acting by helping others. In AA, this is called Twelfth-stepping, while Albert Ellis calls it common sense, given the irrational tendencies and marked fallibility of human nature.

Having demonstrated that many of AA’s ideas and methods considerably overlap with those of REBT, let me now turn from rationality, a relatively easy term to define, to spirituality, a much more difficult term to define. I will provide three definitions: one from the dictionary, one from Bill Wilson’s Alcoholics anonymous—universally known as the Big Book—and one from Charlotte Davis Kasl (1992), a psychologist and leading feminist recovery and spirituality writer.

Definitions of Spiritual(ity)

Dictionary meaning. According to Random House, “spiritual” has 12 meanings. Three of them are nouns and not pertinent in this context, which leaves nine:

1. of, pertaining to, or consisting of spirit; incorporeal

2. of or pertaining to the spirit or soul, as distinguished from the physical nature: a spiritual approach to life

3. closely akin in interests, attitude, outlook, etc.

4. of or pertaining to spiritual or to spiritualists: supernatural or spiritualistic

5. characterized by or suggesting predominance of the spirit; ethereal or delicately refined: She is more of a spiritual type than her rowdy brother.

6. of or pertaining to the spirit as the seat of the moral or religious nature

7. of or pertaining to sacred things or matters; religious; devotional; sacred

8. of or belonging to the church; ecclesiastical: lords spiritual and temporal

9. of or relating to the mind or intellect.

So far, except for the “mind or intellect” dictionary definition, REBT would not rate as being too highly spiritual given Ellis’s emphatic non-use of religious, spiritual, or Higher Power concepts. But what about spirituality as the AA Big Book (Wilson, 1985) itself defines it?

Big Book meaning. According to Stewart C.’s A reference guide to the big book of alcoholics anonymous (1986), a concordance which is exhaustive of the first 164 pages of the Big Book (plus the 13 pages of its appendixes), but illustrative regarding the story section of the Big Book, the word spiritual appears some thirty-four times. It appears most often in the phrases spiritual experience, spiritual principles, and spiritual awakening. Surprisingly, the word spirituality does not appear even once in the Big Book. (Less surprising, rational and rationality do not appear there either.)

Stewart C. reports that God, capitalized personal pronouns referring to God, and other titles of God (such as Creator) appear 260 times in the 177 comprehensively indexed pages of Alcoholics anonymous—the AA Big Book. This is at a rate of almost 1.5 times per page. It seems sensible to conclude that the spiritual of the Big Book has to do with God. This conclusion, however, often raises the hackles of many 12 steppers, who strenuously deny that AA and the 12 steps have anything at all to do with theology. As I noted elsewhere (Velten, 1993b):

The 12 steps are exceptionally explicit in their views of God and of the proper way of relating to Him. . . . the God of the 12 steps is vitally interested in human doings; likes to be supplicated in quite specific, prayerful ways; can restore people to sanity; likes to have people turn their will and their lives over to Him; listens to people's searching and fearless moral inventories and likes them to admit to Him the exact nature of their wrongs; removes all defects of character from some people if they are entirely ready; prefers to be approached humbly by people asking Him to remove their shortcomings; likes to have people seek through prayer and meditation to improve their conscious contact with Him; and likes to have them pray for knowledge of His will and the power to carry it out. (p. 207)

It may clarify AA’s concept of spirituality to look at Bill Wilson’s own original spiritual experience, which he vividly describes in Alcoholics anonymous comes of age: A brief history of A. A. (1957). Undergoing withdrawal while drying out at Charles B. Towns Hospital in Manhattan and being treated with “the belladonna cure,” which included morphine and chloral hydrate, Wilson reported:

All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”

Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.” (p. 63)

That was Bill Wilson’s specific, dramatic spiritual experience. Indeed, Stewart C.’s concordance references these words as attributes of spiritual experience: dramatic, extraordinary, overwhelming, powerful, profound, revolutionary, spectacular, stirring, and spectacular.

In Appendix II, “Spiritual Experience,” to Alcoholics anonymous, Wilson states:

. . . many alcoholics [who read the Big Book] have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming “God-consciousness” followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.

. . . such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time. (p. 569)

Thus, personality change, which Bill Wilson equates in the AA Big Book with “religious experiences” (p. 569), depends on adoption of a new Belief System, namely faith in a Power Greater than oneself. In AA, this can be either a sudden dramatic personality change or a slow one of the “educational” variety. That being the case, how spiritual (as in AA) are REBT and its derivative, SMART Recovery^®?

How REBT and SMART Recovery^® are Spiritual,
According to Bill Wilson’s Definition

In SMART Recovery^® and the original version of Rational Recovery before it, as well as in group and individual REBT, participants have seen changes similar to those Bill Wilson saw. The first president of SMART Recovery^®, Joe Gerstein, has given several papers that describe “the conversion experience” in the original version of Rational Recovery (Gerstein, 1993). SMART Recovery^® participants see the same kind of sudden transformation in some people who attend SMART Recovery^® meetings, but without the white light of the God of the Preachers.

In SMART Recovery^® as in AA, change of the “educational variety” is more typical. Whether slow or a quantum leap, such change can involve a philosophical shift. The philosophical shift is the adoption of a new, more helpful philosophy of life—a Belief System, according to REBT, and a spiritual awakening, according to AA.

REBT and AA both strongly emphasize the importance of adopting a new, different, and more self-helpful philosophy of life. The AA distinction between dry and sober catches the distinction in REBT between merely doing or feeling better (also called “inelegant” by Ellis) and truly getting better (elegant). The title of one of the main books about AA’s history is Getting better (Robertson, 1988). Similarly, a recent article title in Box 1980 (better known as the AA Grapevine) was “Don’t drink, and change the rest of your life” (Anonymous, 1995), thus naming what it takes to recover. Because they reflect the philosophical shift, AA and REBT prize sober and getting better more than dry and doing-feeling better, which do not reflect the shift. A core goal in REBT is to encourage people to create meanings in their lives, to develop purposes, commitments, and a philosophy of life. REBT actively teaches a new way to think about one’s thinking, feelings, and actions. REBT openly and explicitly espouses a value system that promotes its criteria of mental health. These include self-interest, self-direction, self-creation, commitment, involvement, flexibility, acceptance of uncertainty, scientific thinking, nonutopianism, self-responsibility for one's own emotional disturbances, long-range hedonism, and skepticism.

REBT is unique among the cognitive-behavioral therapies in its open promotion of humanistic values and its detailed methodology for constructing a satisfying philosophy of life. For that reason, SMART Recovery^® could spring only from Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). Ideas in the central writings of SMART Recovery^®, Ellis and Velten’s When AA doesn’t work for you (1992), and Tate’s Alcohol: How to give it up and be glad you did (1993), may fill a void in the lives of many substance abusers as successfully as the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous does in its own way.

REBTers have pointedly noted that Ellis’s positions in REBT, some from as early as the mid-1950s, are unself-consciously “discovered” by practitioners of other forms of cognitive-behavior therapy, with no credit given Ellis and often no mention of his work even in their subsequent writings after his earlier work is brought to their attention (Beal, Bishop, DiGiuseppe, Faith, Gotterbarn, Kern, Knaus, Newins, Richman, Robb, Rosenbaum, Velten, & Warren, 1994). These discoveries include cognitive therapy’s realization of the primacy of “core beliefs” (Beck, 1991); constructivism in therapy and personality theory (Mahoney, 1991); “acceptance and commitment” in therapy (Hayes, McCurry, Afan, & Wilson, 1991); “dialectical behavior therapy” with its focus on low frustration tolerance as one of the two key psychological contributors to disturbance, its use of Disputing, and its emphasis on behavioral exposure and other in vivo methods as ways to help clients toughen up (Linehan, 1993); “case formulation” as a method to identify clients’ core irrational ideas and show how their more conscious automatic thoughts and action tendencies relate to those beliefs (Persons, 1989); and secondary emotional disturbances or problems about problems (Barlow, 1991). One thus wonders whether, when practitioners and theorists of other kinds of cognitive-behavior therapy hit upon the idea that a sound philosophy of life is a giant step to regaining mental health and retaining it, they will have anything to say about Ellis’s voluminous, detailed writings on this subject over the last four decades. Do not bet on it! The same may well be true of his identification of evaluation as the core of disturbance, his exposition of the healthy and the unhealthy negative emotions, and his use of humor in psychotherapy.

The two differing philosophies of AA and REBT—if adopted—can help the individual sidestep drinking and related acts likely to cause unhappiness and help them—to use Ellis’s word in his paper in this journal—transcend some of their biological and social limitations. AA’s philosophy is religious and spiritual, whereas REBT’s is scientific and psychological. Their explanations of the roots of recovery are quite different. REBT uses more mundane explanations. The 12-step literature often attributes natural phenomena to spiritual forces. For instance, if heavy drinkers stop drinking, in time their thinking clears up. Twelve Steppers call this a spiritual awakening. REBT calls it a natural result of improved physical and mental health. In SMART Recovery^®, natural growth processes and the results of human effort and ingenuity are not attributed to "spiritual awakenings" or “a miracle of recovery.” Instead, SMART Recovery® self-help groups embody REBT’s ideas about the normal human inclination to encounter problems, work out ways to cope with them, and move on.

REBT and Spirituality as Self-Actualization

Now, having shown the “spiritual” dimension of REBT from AA’s viewpoint, let me take a short look at a different kind of spirituality. Charlotte Davis Kasl, a feminist recovery and spirituality writer, developed 16 steps in her book, Many roads, one journey: Moving beyond the 12 steps (1992). While Kasl does believe in spirituality in the sense of “a life-force energy within us and around us,” her definition of spirituality emphasizes developing one’s full potential—including the full range of human emotion, passions, power, creativity, and mental capacity. This seems quite close to Maslow’s (1964) views about self-actualization, as well as Ellis’s. Kasl has even said that the original version of RR and Secular Organizations for Sobriety are more spiritual than AA.

If spiritual growth, according to some definitions, is similar to or the same as self-actualization, how does REBT promote self-actualization? It does so in at least four ways:

1. According to REBT, absolute demands for approval and support from others produce pathological dependency. REBT tries to help people learn how to think, act, and depend on themselves more effectively. REBT sees itself as no more than one of many possible tools useful for one phase of a person's life.

2. The second way REBT may promote self-actualization is through its viewpoint about the past. "The past is gone forever," as Women For Sobriety notes in one of its key sayings. REBT agrees with that point. REBT, as well as SMART Recovery^®, is largely ahistorical and believes in self-determination and self-construction. REBT looks at one’s genes and one’s past as influential, but hardly the only factors in how one acts now. In fact, the more people believe the past is all important, the more they may limit their growth and ability to change and self-actualize. As Ellis stated in his paper in this journal: [REBT] also enhances the possibility of people’s transcending some of their biological and social limitations and making themselves into radically changed and different (though not superhuman) individuals. REBT, in particular, teaches people to be less conditionable and suggestible, to think largely for themselves no matter what the majority of their fellows thinks and feels, and to minimize their dire needs for approval and success which often force them into constrictive conformity. Instead of relying only on ordinary kinds of reinforcement to effect personality change, it also emphasizes the reinforcements of independent and creative thinking as an integral part of the human hedonic calculus.

3. REBT promotes self-acceptance, not self-esteem. REBT considers that when people esteem themselves, they do so on some basis, usually achievement or approval. Doing so can contribute to fear of risk-taking, to defensiveness, to blaming others and the past for one’s own poor behavior, and to anxiety and depression. How so? Because if you have worth on one basis, you will have lack of worth on that basis (once you slip or encounter those who do better than you do) or some other basis. Therefore, REBT aims to help people rid themselves of self-rating, replace it with unconditional self-acceptance, and switch to rating one’s actions according to how they help or hinder reaching one’s goals.

4. REBT advocates that people adopt a flexible identity, not an immutable one. An example of the latter is "I am an alcoholic," and an example of the former is “I am someone who now has an alcohol problem.” While the aim of identifying oneself as having a permanent disease appears rational, that is, to warn people away from self-defeating behavior, its permanence locks people into a rut. Further, the 12-step approach advocates that one organizes one’s whole remaining life around the disease identity and rituals to ward off succumbing to it. REBT, on the other hand, more humorously acknowledges that, of course, none of us ever recovers from human nature; that is, we always have the capacity—if we want to exercise it—to defeat ourselves in either old, boring ways or new, creative ways! REBT sees people as multi-faceted works, always in progress. That is why in REBT and SMART Recovery^®, the person who once “was” a severe substance abuser (that is, who once severely abused substances), can graduate from that problem and from that self-identity, can graduate from recovery groups and from the "in recovery" identity, and can get on with life (Velten, 1994a; 1994b).

Summary

My goal in this paper has been to show the following:

1. In its major objective, AA is rational as REBT defines it and also happens to use many REBT-like, distinctly secular and humanistic, cognitive-behavioral methods. While AA and its derivatives differ from REBT dramatically in many ways, such as seeing people as powerless over alcohol, having a specific disease forever, needing to surrender to a Higher Power, always being just a tiny slip from catastrophe, and having a negative and immutable identity, AA is a good example of a cognitive-behavioral therapy.

2. People who attend SMART Recovery^® meetings (as well as the original form of RR) derived from Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), show both the sudden-spectacular type and the slower “educational variety” of change, as described by Bill Wilson in Alcoholics anonymous. In AA, these changes stem from spiritual experiences, whereas similar changes stem from non-spiritual, secular, normal human efforts in Albert Ellis’s REBT and SMART Recovery^®. Throughout world history prior to the invention of AA in 1935 and REBT in 1955, millions of self-reliant people stopped drinking, smoking, and doing other addictive behaviors. Even now, most people who stop such behaviors and stay stopped do so by depending on themselves. A number of the self-help alternatives now available, including SMART Recovery^®, Rational Recovery, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, Women For Sobriety, Weight Watchers, and others, openly encourage people to stand on their own two feet.

3. In both REBT and AA, a principal ingredient for change is a philosophical shift. In the case of AA, the philosophical shift is thought to be caused by turning one’s life over to one’s Higher Power and admitting powerlessness. In the case of REBT and its derivative SMART Recovery^®, on the other hand, fallible human beings make the philosophical shift by changing their human fallible thinking, emoting, and acting. This is almost the heart of secular humanism, as Ellis sees it.

4. Many conceptions of spirituality overlap with, and may be the same thing as “self-actualization” or self-construction. This seems true, for instance, of Kasl’s work. In a great many usages, spiritual change means exactly the same thing as psychological change.

5. REBT promotes self-actualization through its advocacy of self-reliance, its attitude toward the past, and its views about self-esteem, self-acceptance, and labeling. Its secular and humanistic viewpoint on these subjects allows and encourages people to continue to change and to leave the past and past identities behind. AA, by contrast, considers it of dire importance that people who had active alcohol problems always consider themselves alcoholics, ever poised at the brink of drinking, and, therefore, just a step away from needing divine intervention once again.

6. REBT is unique in psychotherapy in integrating a secular humanistic philosophy of life with cognitive-behavior therapy. The former is the foundation and the inspiration of the latter. Secular humanism puts humans, and the individual, first. Instead of bemoaning our fallibility and marked tendencies toward self-defeat, and then looking heavenward (or toward new-age California) for rescue, Ellis’s REBT advocates that we use our hearts, heads, and hands to develop our skills, to construct ourselves in images of our own choosing, and to transcend some of our biological and social limitations. It’s an adventure throughout one’s lifetime, a story that’s never finished. What we create, and how much we enjoy the process, depends—or so says Albert Ellis—not on wishes and prayers, but on decidedly humanistic work and practice.