"If people don't approve of you, you ought to question your self-worth." By telling ourselves things like these, we create our own unhappiness, frustration, and anger; that is the point of view of cognitive therapy. During the 1950s, Albert Ellis (1913-2007) developed a theory of personality that claims that people are largely responsible for their emotional reactions. They tell themselves that things _ought_ to be different, that people _should_ do certain things, and that what they desire they _must_ have. Life, for people whose thoughts are filled with _shoulds_, _oughts_, and _musts_, is full of disappointment, annoyance, and hurt. Ellis observed that, as time goes by, we tend to reinforce an emotional pattern that amplifies our sensitivities more and more. The emotional reactions we create in ourselves become more exaggerated, distorted, and self-destructive. {141} But, like any habits, these mental (or cognitive) habits can be broken. Cognitive therapy attempts to do this. Ellis called his own approach _rational-emotive therapy_. By this, he acknowledged that people have both rational and emotional dimensions. Their emotions and thoughts (cognitions) are so thoroughly intertwined that they cannot be clearly separated. Yet mental evaluations and ideas are given so much power that cognitive habits are responsible for emotional responses. It is thinking that makes it so. Rational-emotive therapy is the most widespread approach to cognitive therapy, so we will examine Ellis's approach in some detail. The main technique of rational-emotive therapy, and of cognitive therapy in general, is to focus clients' attention on their belief systems, their views about what "should" and "ought" to be, their cognitive "filters" through which they interpret, in a semiautomatic way, the world around them. If the "activating event" is a failure or a rejection, for example, a client's _rational_ belief system will lead to feelings of regret, sorrow, disappointment, or annoyance; if an individual's beliefs are _irrational_, on the other hand, he or she may instead feel depression, worthlessness, futility, and severe anxiety. For rational-emotive therapy, emotional good health depends on the rationality of the way a person receives and interprets events. WHAT RATIONAL-EMOTIVE THERAPY IS LIKE Therapy usually begins with individual sessions. Once clients have learned how to identify mental habits that create disturbing emotions, therapy is sometimes continued in groups, where new attitudes and forms of behavior can be practiced in a kind of microcosm of the larger world. Rational-emotive therapy that is done in a group context is not, however, "group therapy," since the therapist's focus is on individual styles of thinking, not on relationships among members of the group.