Albert Ellis is credited with developing the ABC model of emotional stress. Ellis was an American psychologist who, in the 1950′s, developed a new method of psychotherapy that involved helping a patient understand that their own beliefs contributed to their own emotional pain. He termed this new method “rational emotive behavior therapy”, or REBT. REBT is an action-based method of helping individuals examine their own thoughts, beliefs, and actions that tend to be negative and self-defeating and help them replace those thoughts and beliefs with alternatives that produce more desirable actions and outcomes.
This methodology can help all of us in understanding how we deal with stress. Within this methodology, Ellis created a very simple model that looked at emotional distress. He called this model the ABC model. Here is how it works:
An Example of the ABC Model
Waiting in line can be a stressful event in many people’s lives. If you’re checking out at a supermarket, you’re faced with deciding which line will move the fastest. Once you’ve made a decision to join a particular line, you now gauge your progress based on the other lines you could have chosen. If you notice that every line other than the one you’re in is moving faster, you’re now faced with an activating event (which could also be called adversity). Something you have noticed in your environment has the potential to cause a reaction from you.
This situation by itself doesn’t have any effect on you, positive or negative, until you couple the situation with your thoughts about the situation. You may feel thankful that you have some time to yourself, perhaps to review whether you have picked up everything you needed at the store. Or you may feel angry at the people ahead of you in your line because it’s taking too long to move in comparison with the other lines. These thoughts represent the consequence, or what happens to you as a result of how you view the activating event.
As you read previously, there can be positive or negative consequences. Why is it possible to react differently to the same event? Different reactions portray different beliefs, or ideas about how a situation impacts you personally. Beliefs refer to your values, your sense of right and wrong, or your perceptions about how the world should work.
So the activating event is standing in the slowest-moving line. If you have a belief that you have plenty of time and need to review your list of items in your cart, then the consequence is that you have a pleasurable experience knowing that you purchased everything on your list. If you have a belief that you should be in the fastest moving line, then the consequence is that you are angry at the people in front of you for causing you to not checkout as quickly as everyone else.
How the ABC Model Works
From the example it can be seen that it’s really your beliefs that create your consequences. If you can change your beliefs, then you can change your consequences, which means you can reduce or eliminate your stress.
The activating events stay the same, even though once you realize what are activating events, you can take steps to avoid them, particularly those that cause you problems because of your beliefs about them.
Summary
A is for activating events. These are the situations in your environment that have the potential to cause you stress. B is for beliefs. These are the thoughts and feelings we have toward those activating events. And C is the emotional consequence of holding certain beliefs regarding a particular activating event.
In a nutshell, to reduce the stress in your life, use the ABC Model to change your beliefs about the events that cause you stress.