What Would Aristotle Do?

Analytic words, talk without emotion (feelings) leads to knowledge without change. Anything a psychologist can do to encourage feelings is on target. The key is to create an intensity of feeling through a story, bit of psychodrama, and feeling the feelings, the person is more likely to remember what needs to get remembered. Cognitive and EMOTIVE together leads to lasting change!

Using a story is just one example, and not the only way of course, to create an intensity of feeling or to produce lasting change. For instance, picturing yourself dying of lung cancer at age 50 and all the pain and loss, is better than knowing rationally you should not smoke. Yes, I also like the R in the REBT as well as the E, although the E is often given short shrift in the books, lectures, etc. Ellis was fantastic in numerous ways, and, yes, his one big idea - derived from Epicurus - that you tell yourself all sorts of negative things and you have the power to change that and tell yourself positive things is powerful stuff, but doesn't cover the territory (and Gestalt, TA, Psychodynamic, and other approaches and techniques are useful for insight and to conceptualize what is going on in their head for the person).