E: Yes, that ’s part of it. That is the erroneous belief: that if you never make mistakes ev-
erybody will love you and that it is necessary that they do. …But is it true? Suppose
you never did make mistakes —would people love you? They ’d sometimes hate your
guts, wouldn ’t they?
Rational emotive therapists challenge clients to identify their irrational beliefs
and see how these beliefs lead them to their faulty conclusions. Of course, thisis not easy. Most of us can readily identify what ’s wrong with our friends ’
thinking, but it ’s quite another matter when we ’re the ones with an emotional
problem. Nonetheless, the success of rational emotive therapy with a largenumber of clients has contributed to the increased popularity of cognitive
approaches to psychotherapy in recent years.
ASSESSMENT: THE REPERTORY GRID TECHNIQUE
George Kelly made personal constructs the key concept in his theory of
personality as well as the focus of his approach to psychotherapy. But this
emphasis created a bit of a problem. Specifically, how does one go about
measuring a person’ s personal constructs? Of course, a therapist might obtain
some idea of a client ’s construct system during the course of therapy sessions.
But Kelly and his colleagues needed a more efficient way to examine con-struct systems that could then be communicated fairly easily to the client.Kelly’s answer was the Repertory Grid Technique. Kelly and his followers de-
veloped several variations of this technique (Fransella, Bell, & Bannister,2003), but the essential procedure consists of two steps (Bell, 1990). First,the test taker creates a list of elements. The items on this list can be anything
the individual encounters in life, but most often the list consists of specificpeople the test taker knows. Second, the test taker’ s personal constructs are
elicited by comparing and contrasting various elements on the list.
The most common version of the grid technique is the Role Construct
Repertory Test, or more commonly, the Rep Test. A shortened version of
the basic Rep Test procedure is presented on pages 433 –434. Therapists
begin by asking clients to provide a list of 24 people from various personal
experiences —for example, a teacher they liked, the most interesting person
they know, and so on. The therapist then presents clients with three of the
names from this list and asks, “In what important way are two of these peo-
ple alike but different from the third?” A client might say that two of them
arewarm people and that the third person is cold. In Kelly ’s terms, this client
has used a warm– cold construct to categorize the three people. The process is
repeated with three different names from the list. Perhaps this time the client
will divide the people along an outgoing –shyor a generous –miserly construct.
Kelly suggested that about 20 trials, or “sorts,”provide the therapist with a
useful sample of the client ’s principal constructs.
In one variation of the Rep Test, the therapist takes away one of the three
names and replaces it with a new one. This procedure can be useful in identi-fying clients ’difficulties in applying new constructs to new situations. To ex-
amine self-concepts, therapists sometimes present the client ’s name along with428 CHAPTER 15 The Cognitive Approach