Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 1994

B E L I E F S A N D INTENTIONS IN RET Frank A. Gerbode Robert H. Moore

ABSTRACT: Since a "belief' can be purely "indicative" (A-descriptive), the belief bridge (B) between activating events (A) and emotional consequences (C) is understood to consist of a different kind of '%elief': a mental construct that might be called "imperative" or, in plain language, an "intention". Intention is closely related to emotion, in that negative and positive emotions result (respectively) from the frustration and fulfillment of intentions. Chronic negative emotions result from fixed and strong intentions that are continually frustrated. The task of the counselor is to find means to help the client unfix or reduce the intensity of these intentions. Intentions are arranged in a hierarchy, and it is helpful to use a technique such as inference chaining to find higher-level intentions, in order to help the client become less fixated on lower-level ones. Intentions formed during a traumatic incident can become fixed when the trauma is suppressed. An anamnestic technique called Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) can help the client to discover and re-evaluate the circumstances under which an intention was formed and thus to have an opportunity to rationally revise or discontinue it. T h e R a t i o n a l - E m o t i v e T h e r a p e u t i c (RET) m o d e l m a i n t a i n s t h a t e v e n t s a n d c i r c u m s t a n c e s (A) do n o t directly cause t h e feelings (C) we h a v e a b o u t t h e m , b u t t h a t c e r t a i n beliefs (B) a b o u t such e v e n t s determ i n e h o w we r e a c t to t h e m emotionally.

T H E M E A N I N G OF " B E L I E F " T h e word "belief' i t s e l f is p r o b l e m a t i c because it h a s such a wide v a r i e t y of m e a n i n g s b e y o n d RET's well-focused p a r s i n g of beliefs (B) into r a t i o n a l (rB) a n d i r r a t i o n a l (iB). Indeed, p o p u l a r u s a g e defines a Address correspondence to Frank A. Gerbode, M.D., Institute for Research in Metapsychology, 431 Burgess Dr., Menlo Park, CA 94025. 27

9 1994 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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belief as virtually any construction that you can prefix with the phrase, "I b e l i e v e . . . ," which is to say, nearly anything that crosses one's mind. It would be idiomatically correct, for instance, to say, "I believe": he's a liar and a cheat. (identity statement) a human being is a featherless biped. (definition) she's manipulative. (predication) he's been a good husband and father. (moral judgment) she is going to do it. (prediction) he must have done it. (postdiction) in zero population growth. (statement of value) I'll have a drink. (statement of intention) in God. (statement of faith) in Ronald Reagan. (statement of support) It's no wonder clients don't zero in directly and exclusively on their shoulds, oughts, musts, awfuls, terribles, etc. when we ask them what they believe, think, or tell themselves about something. They have too much to choose from! Suppose you ask a client what she believes or has told herself about the activating event, "My husband came home two hours late, looking disheveled." A typical response might be, "He lied when he told me he had to work late," or "I knew at that point that he had been with someone else!" Such responses express neither rB's nor iB's. They simply express two of the many inferences or assumptions with which the client further defines her activating event. In other words, they are actually part of A, not part of B. It is entirely unremarkable, however, that a client should respond in this way when asked about her "beliefs" before she has been thoroughly indoctrinated into the special meaning RET attaches to the word. INELEGANCE Since we do want to get as complete a picture as possible of our client's real or imagined activating events, a client's empirical statements about A, such as her inferences and assumptions about the significance of his late arrival and disheveled look, can be quite important to the intervention process even though they are not the B's responsible for her upset. A client typically will have both iB's and rB's associated with her inferentially defined A's, and unless we actually address those iB's, our intervention remains "inelegant". It be-

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comes downright inept when we misconstrue such A-defining responses as the iB's responsible for the client's upsets and immediately set about to dispute them (e.g., "Where's the evidence he actually lied to you?", "How could you really know he had been with someone else?"). Even those who use the inelegant approach to R E T - - t h a t of helping the client to objectify her description of an activating e v e n t - are careful not to misidentify a cognitively constructed A as a B. Inelegance is rarely the appropriate initial intervention, in any case. We should not work on helping a client redefine a low-probability or otherwise overly-fanciful A until after we have elicited and dealt thoroughly with the iB's associated with the A as originally stated. Otherwise we lose the opportunity to explore the iB's most directly responsible for perpetuating the client's upset. The point isn't whether the client's husband was actually cheating on her. The point is that she feels miserable because she thinks something like: "No one must ever cheat on me." If you convince her that her husband is not really cheating on her by disputing her assumptive A, you have no opportunity to explore this particular lB.

WHICH "BELIEFS" ARE B's? Of all the cognitive constructions commonly regarded as "beliefs" (a sampler of which appears above), only three have traditionally held high rank as B's in RET: 1. Imperatives--statements like "No one must ever cheat on me." 2. Predications--"It would be perfectly awful if I didn't get a high score on this test." 3. Identity statements--"I'm nothing but a loser." Within each of these three constructions, moreover, only statements that: 1. Are of doubtful validity, and 2. Contain significant intensity or motivational force are considered legitimate targets for disputation. In fact, as we shall see, the motivational factor is much more important than the particular syntactic form the client uses to express her thought.

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CATEGORIES OF THOUGHTS Thoughts can actually be divided up into categories, according to whether: 1. They contain motivational force. 2. They contain belief. 1 This fact is reflected in the way we use language: the indicative and imperative moods. "Indicative thoughts" are expressed in indicative sentences. They contain belief but not force. Hence, when we speak here of beliefs, we mean indicative thoughts. Such thoughts constitute part of A, as a rule. "My husband is cheating on me," is a belief (in the above sense), but it carries no particular force in itself. "Imperative thoughts" can be expressed in the imperative mood, though they need not be. They contain force but not belief proper. "Don't ever cheat on me!" contains force, but in itself, it is not an indicative, asserts no reality, has no truth value, and hence does not qualify as a belief and cannot, in itself, be disputed. As we shall see below, however, intentions are characteristically intertwined with beliefs that can be disputed. Even though imperatives don't contain belief, they do have a conceptual component. A concept is simply a thought (as opposed to a mental picture, feeling, etc.) that does not contain belief or force, such as the concept of being cheated on. It can be expressed as a progressive gerundive phrase, like "My husband's cheating on me." As Hare stated in The Language of Morals (Hare, 1952), a sentence consists of a concept plus a second element that expresses the appropriate mood. The indicative sentence, "You are letting the cat out," can also be rendered by the somewhat artificial but meaningful construct: "You letting the cat out--YES." The clause "you letting the cat out" expresses the concept, and "YES" expresses belief in the truth or reality of that concept. To express the thought as an imperative, we could use the same initial phrase, expressing the same concept, and simply add a different second element to it. Thus "Put the cat out!" is equivalent to: ~Here, we are using the term "belief' in the technically precise sense to mean an assertion of past, present, or future reality--to denote A, rather than B.

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"You putting the cat out--PLEASE!" Hare also observed that "must" and "ought" statements, while syntactically rendered in the indicative mood, are semantically imperative. An alternative way of expressing the above imperative is: "You must put the cat out!" A "musturbatory" thought, then, is simply an imperative one, expressed in a grammatically indicative construction. Imperatives need not be expressed in the second person. There's a "third person" form of the imperative that does a good job of expressing such thoughts. "No one must ever cheat on me!" could also be rendered as: "Let no one ever cheat on me!" ("No one's ever cheating on me--PLEASE!") Of course, "You must never cheat on me!" can also be expressed as: "Don't you ever cheat on me!" Whenever you see a "must," you can replace it with a strong and absolute imperative without loss of meaning. Hare generalizes this idea to include all statements of goodness or badness. "It would be a good thing for you to put the cat out," is equivalent to a mild form of "Put the cat out!" "It would be very bad [or perfectly awful] if someone cheated on me," is equivalent to: "Let no one ever cheat on me!!!!" An imperative or "musturbatory" statement, then, is basically an expression of intention. "No one must ever cheat on me," is really a way of expressing a strong intention against anyone's cheating on me. In general, "I must have X!!!" is simply an expression of a strong intention to get X, and "I must not have X!!!" is an equally strong expression of an intention in opposition to having X. So a fruitful way of looking at the distinction between what forms part of A and what lies at B is to say that A's are perceptions and beliefs about the world and B's are really intentions that relate to the A's. The conceptual component of a belief and an intention may be the same, as we showed above. The difference between them lies in the second element added to the concept: the "YES" (in the case of a belief) or the "PLEASE!" (in the case of an intention). According to Ellis (1991), B's of all constructions and intensities support our underlying pre-existing personal goals, values, and desires (we use the term "intentions" to cover this same cognitive ground). According to Ellis, iB's that cause emotional disturbance derive directly from the felt need to defend the continuity of our intentions (G's) against the real or imagined opposition of intrusive activating events (A's). If we had not already formulated intentions related to accomplishing or acquiring something in life, in fact, we would not

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regard even the most unexpected events and circumstances as particularly disturbing. Lacking intentions to defend, we would also lack iB's. We can simplify the picture considerably, however, by pointing out that B's do not merely arise from the need to defend our intentions. They actually are those very intentions! The act of intending is the basis of all human endeavor, and each human accomplishment consists of the fulfillment of an intention (actualization of a B). An unfulfilled intention sponsors activity in the direction of its fulfillment, assuming that there aren't even stronger counter-intentions opposing that intention. When something or someone (an A) comes along to help fulfill an intention (B), the result (C) is a feeling of positive emotion, of pleasure. When the A thwarts or opposes an unfulfilled intention, it can trigger a degree of pain and negative emotion that stands in direct relation to the intensity of the intention.

EMOTION AND INTENTION To clarify these matters, we would like to present what we t h i n k is a useful model for relating intention and emotion. Ellis (1991) observes that there is an obvious strong connection between the two, whether we are dealing with basic intentions (such as the intention to avoid pain) or more subsidiary ones (such as the intention to go to a dentist to get one's painfully impacted tooth pulled). The emotion we feel at any given time reflects the degree of success we conceive ourselves as having in fulfilling a particular intention. Emotion is how we feel about how well we think we are doing. As Ellis (1991, pp. 5-6) points out, negative emotions are normally associated with the perception t h a t an activating event is conducive to failure and positive emotions with the perception that an activating event is conducive to succ e s s - a t fulfilling whatever goals we happen to have at the moment. The intensity of the emotion depends entirely upon the intensity of the goal or intention that is being either frustrated or fulfilled. Any emotion is relative to the intention and activity it is "about". Hence, we may feel several different emotions at the same time about different intentions. We may at the same time feel quite contented with our professional work while being thoroughly depressed about one of our domestic roles. In other words, we may give ourselves good grades as clinicians and bad grades as parents. Although it is true that one's intentions and the evaluation of their degree of fulfillment or frustration engender emotions, it is also true t h a t one's emotions, in turn, engender certain characteristic inten-

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tions and evaluations. As Seymour Epstein points out (1984), emotions seem to have personalities of their own. Each one closely associates with a particular viewpoint, attitude, and modus operandi. An angry person is likely to have the attitude: "It's all his fault!" and a violent modus operandi; an apathetic person will believe: "There is nothing I can do about it," and will do just that: nothing; an enthusiastic person will usually think: "It's going to work out beautifully!" and will apply constructive strategies to make that happen. Epstein (1984) has also pointed out that there are two kinds of emotion: primary and secondary. The latter (such as jealousy and humiliation) are complex, socially conditioned, and infinite in number. The former are limited in number, simple, innate, and trans-cultural. Epstein limited the primary emotions to fear, anger, sadness, joy, and possibly love or affection, but in our view there are many more, and they can be arranged in a scale, depending on the degree of (perceived) success or failure with which they are associated (see Table 1). This scale is arranged in order of increasing perception of success, starting with apathy and proceeding upward to exhilaration. 2 Coming up the scale, at a given level of intensity, each emotion is felt as less unpleasant or more pleasant than the one below it and associated with an increasing sense t h a t one is being successful. Thus, an anxious person actually feels better when he "moves up" in the direction of anger. An angry person can at least blame others for whatever has gone wrong. Anger, on the other hand, does not feel as pleasant as complacency which, in turn, does not feel as good as enthusiasm. The position on the emotional scale is, as it were, the "pitch" of the emotion; its "amplitude" is determined by the strength of the intention the emotion is about. One can feel mildly sad, strongly ambivalent, extremely enthusiastic, and so forth, depending on the strength of the corresponding intention and on the degree of fulfillment or frustration of that intention. When a person is extremely distressed, she must clearly have at least one very strong intention ("high amplitude") that she perceives as being severely frustrated (resulting in a "low pitch" emotion). Helping someone in emotional distress, then, must consist of doing something to alleviate this painful combination of frustration and strong intention. In theory, one way of helping would be to show the client that the degree of frustration is not as great as she thought it was. This kind of 2At this point, the Emotional Scale is based largely on common sense and clinical observation and mainly has heuristic value, but it is certainly regarded as empirically verifiable by those who, like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (1970), have contributed most significantly to its definition.

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Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy Table 1 T h e E m o t i o n a l Scale

Success Level

Attitude

Emotion

Final Success

I knew it would work!

Exhilaration

Success imminent

It's going to work out beautifully!

Enthusiasm

Things going well

Everything's just fine.

Cheerfulness

Everything normal An acceptable routine Uncertain success

We are making out all right. It's good enough.

Conservatism

Ambivalence

Something in the way

Maybe it'll work; maybe it won't I wish they wouldn't bug me!

A definite block

I hate it!

Anger

A degree of overwhelm More overwhelm

It isn't fair!

Resentment

They mustn't find out what I'm doing.

Subversion

Things out of control Danger of failure

It's getting to be too much for me. I've got to get out of this! Have mercy on me!

Anxiety

It's completely hopeless.

Apathy

Failure imminent Final Failure

Complacency

Antagonism

Fear Grief

Modus Operandi Enjoying the success and moving on to the next game. Applies constructive, innovative strategies. Works energetically to achieve the goal. Defends the status quo. Relaxes into a routine. Acts in a listless, wishy-washy way. Pushes back against real or imagined opposition. Seeks to stop or destroy opposing forces. Seeks to control others by guilt. Seeks covertly to undermine or destroy "dangerous" others. Desperately tries to cope. Tries to run away. Manifests pain to elicit sympathy or help. Withdraws from the activity.

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work has to do with eliminating misconceptions or wrong interpretations of A (the "inelegant" practice mentioned above). A wife is upset because, seeing her husband coming home late in a disheveled state, she assumes he has been unfaithful, hence frustrating her intention to have him as a monogamous partner. She will feel better if the therapist can convince her that he probably hasn't been unfaithful on this occasion. But this solution is inelegant because it is probably quite temporary in its effect. When she notices he smells of perfume, it will be necessary to go through the whole exercise again. And what if he has stepped out on her? The therapeutic work will n o t have prepared her to confront this eventuality. The more elegant approach is to attack the other factor that causes frustration: the intention itself. We can help the client to gain control over her intentions, to exercise freedom of choice in taking on, modifying, or dropping any given intention. Then, when an intention looks as though it's not going to be fulfilled, she can simply modify that intention or unmake it and make another one. To see how best to help the client achieve this degree of flexibility in her intentions, we must look a little deeper into the nature of intention.

THE NATURE OF INTENTION Intention and desire are not precisely the same thing. We can desire something without formulating an intention about it if we think it is impossible to fulfill the desire. When attending a movie, an adolescent boy may feel a strong desire to possess Michelle Pfeiffer without actually formulating the intention to do so--and without feeling upset or frustrated about the situation. In order to form an intention, one must feel t h a t there is at least some possibility of fulfilling the desire. Thus an intention is composed of a desire p l u s a felt ability to fulfill it. In the absence of desire or of felt ability, intention cannot exist; on the other hand, when the two exist together, intention m u s t exist. 3 Thus to change or eliminate an intention, we need only address one of its two components: the felt ability or the desire. Some intentions are doomed to frustration because they cannot be fulfilled. The appropriate intervention, then, is to point out this impossibility. A s long as a person intends to do everything perfectly, for instance, he is doomed 3As mentioned above, a n intention need not lead to action if it is overruled by counter-intentions. Also, the circumstances m i g h t not be appropriate for fulfilling the intention. One m i g h t w a n t to win a certain automobile race, b u t if one is off on a vacation in Hawaii, one m a y not be able to do a n y t h i n g about it j u s t then.

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to a life of negative emotion because no one can accomplish such a feat. For a person to i n t e n d t h a t no one shall ever betray or insult h i m is to construct a perfect formula for unhappiness, because no one has such a h i g h degree of control over others' actions As soon as one arrives at a p e r m a n e n t recognition and acceptance of the impossibility of fulfilling such an intention, the i n t e n t i o n disappears, and so does the distress. The other possible i n t e r v e n t i o n is to address the desire element, which' specifies w h a t is intended. Ideally, we have the power to control our intentions to a g r e a t degree and to assign t h e m appropriate importances. If we can teach the client to be flexible in h e r intentions and to exercise freedom of choice to t a k e on or drop any given intention, t h e n she will have the tools needed for the reduction or e l i m i n a t i o n of the intention. In order to do so, we m u s t t a k e a look at the motivational system in w h i c h the desire is embedded.

THE H I E R A R C H Y OF MOTIVATIONS Desires and intentions form a hierarchy, w i t h "higher-level" ones being the reason w h y we form "lower-level" ones. We i n t e n d to drive to the store so t h a t we can get food. We intend to get food so t h a t we can eat. We eat so t h a t we can r e m a i n alive and healthy. Higher-level intentions, by definition, are more central and i m p o r t a n t t h a n lowerlevel ones. Thus, if we w a n t to achieve m a x i m u m effectiveness in counseling, we should address the higher-level intentions. To appreciate how intentions relate to emotional disturbance, consider the following case example: A: 1. 2. 3. 4.

He came home two hours late, looking disheveled. (perception) He lied when he told me he had to work late. (postdictive inference) I knew he had been with someone else. (postdictive inference) My marriage is in jeopardy. (predictive inference)

iB: 1. I must never be / can't stand being lied to or cheated onV 2. Lying and cheating are despicable! He has behaved despicably! 4"I can't stand it!" and its derivatives express the client's felt inability to "stand" or confront a given circumstance (A) without reacting to it with a given upset (C). So understood, "I can't

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3. Liars and cheaters are bastards! He is a bastard! 4. I am a failure as a wife. I am a failure. C: 1. Anger/rage 2. Sadness Most rational-emotive therapists would spot the irrationality of this client's thinking and its relevance to her emotional disturbance in a heartbeat and would waste little time getting into dispute mode with her. Bypassing any temptation to dispute A-2, A-3, and A-4 (they could turn out to be true, after all), the elegantly-oriented therapist would in all likelihood directly address the client's strongly-stated intolerance of her husband's apparent credibility gap (her demandingness) and challenge her flawed definition of personal and wifely adequacy (her conditional self-esteem). Suppose, however, that the client were a garrulous sort and gratuitously revealed a bit more of her thinking. How would it affect our understanding of or intervention in her case to discover that she had the following pre-existing, higher-level intentions (in Ellis's terms, "G's" for "goals"): G: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

To maintain an open and trusting relationship with my husband. To convince my mother that he would never be unfaithful to me. To prove to myself that I can satisfy a man completely. Never to bring the dishonor of divorce into our family. To remain a housewife and mother and never again have to work. To provide my children with a happy and stable family life. To put all my children through college. To retire early on my husband's inheritance and travel the world together while we're still young enough to enjoy it.

Rational-emotive therapists who devote their attention mainly to disputing iB's associated with specific presenting A's (e.g., the husband's late arrival and possible philandering and the belief that the husband stand it!" is actually a valid client self-report which can occur only after one or more episodes of emotional disturbance. Therefore, it cannot properly be regarded as an iB responsible for causing such a disturbance. Therapists who dispute the "I can't stand it!" construction (e.g., by saying, "Oh yes you can! You're alive, aren't you?") are missing the client's point and have lost the opportunity to identify whatever A, B, or C-defining detail they could glean from looking at the combination of activating event and disturbance that the client "can't stand".

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must always be truthful) might be inclined to dismiss G's of this sort as largely irrelevant to their immediate clinical purpose. They would point out t h a t their way of helping the client straighten herself out emotionally is to challenge her iB's, not to derive or justify them. However, as it turns out, it is highly relevant to help the client find the higher-level intentions from which she has derived these iB's; dismissing these intentions as off-task usually turns out to be short-sighted. The fact is that the retentions that we call iB's do not arise spontaneously in isolation from the client's motivational system. They are part of that system. And in order to eliminate the client's distress, we must help her to revise her motivational system. And specifically, when a client's emotional disturbances persist beyond the disputation or repudiation of the specific iB's that apply to the relevant A, she probably has one or more powerful but frustrated higher-level intentions still operating 9 It is then necessary to bring the relevant underlying intentions (G's) into focus for revision. Some clients report activating events that directly jeopardize their highest level intentions (e.g., life-threatening illness). Others report A's that strike lower in their hierarchies (e.g., getting fired from a job). We note that an emotional upset over the frustration of a lowlevel intention (e.g., to remain employed) can be every bit as intense as an upset over the frustration of a high-level intention (e.g., to remain alive). In fact, a high degree of upset over the frustration of a lower-level intention indicates that that lower-level intention is actually connected in the client's hierarchy with a much higher-level one. It is always gratifying to find the client herself aware of such a connection, to find, for instance, that she is aware that that her fear of giving a report to the executive committee is actually a fear of doing it badly, getting fired, and winding up without a job, which, in turn, is driven by her fear of becoming destitute and dying in the gutter like a bag lady. Not that we shouldn't at some point directly address her discomfort at having to give a report at the upcoming executive committee meeting. But being aware of the connection between the client's fear of failing to fulfill the lower-level intention to impress the executive committee and her fear of failing to fulfill her highest-level intention to survive does greatly expand our remedial access to her case. In RET, it is relatively easy to miss carrying an intervention to its most basic and rewarding (highest intentional) level. Suppose a client presents with anger at her husband's having forgotten to pick up a quart of cottage cheese on his way home from work, as promised. 9

9

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Consider how easily the persistence of her rage (C) at his "gross thoughtlessness" might draw us into focusing exclusively on her irrational demandingness and intolerance of his forgetfulness (iB's). Consider also how, in doing so, we forfeit the opportunity to discover and address the true significance of her experience, as defined by the hierarchy of her underlying intentions, to wit: 1. To deliver to her sorority sisters as promised the most delicious cheesecake they will ever have tasted, 2. Thereby to earn their admiration and trust, 3. In turn, to secure their votes in the upcoming chapter presidential election, 4. Thus to get her name engraved for all time alongside that of the revered Mme. Simone de Chanson on the Presidential Plaque of Honor. In a nutshell, if we really want to "reach paydirt" in counseling, we had best address the highest-level intentions of which our clients are aware. One way of doing this is to draw out the "inference chain" (Moore, 1983) of real or imagined outcomes associated with each reported activating event (this was the technique that elicited the hierarchy given above). This expanded RET technique is best understood as a way of finding underlying, higher-level intentions associated with each activating event. It is a way of digging deeper into the core of the client's motivational system. You can trace an inference chain by using the following sorts of questions: "What is the significance of [the A event]?" "What are the consequences of [the A event]?" "What was so critical (awful, maddening, etc.) about [the A event]?" If, as is almost always the case, the real or imagined A event frustrated a higher-level intention as well as a lower-level one, the higherlevel one will immediately come into view. The woman will say, "How the hell was I to make a cheesecake without cottage cheese?", or "The girls were miffed beyond beliefl" If the counselor patiently repeats the same question, he will ultimately elicit the full significance of the client's experience: "There went my shot at the presidency!" The inquiry ends only when the client has run through her entire chain of increasingly dreadful A scenarios, at which point she will reveal the highestlevel intention that was frustrated at the time of her original upset.

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As a way of confirming that the lost presidency is (as the higherlevel issue) more basic to her case than the lost cheese, you could ask her how she would have reacted to her husband's forgetfulness if the sorority weren't involved. You could ask, "If you had only wanted to make the cheesecake for the two of you, how would you have felt about his coming home empty-handed?" You'd probably get the reply, "No big deal. The absent-minded lug would just have gotten jello again, that's all." The value of finding higher-level motivations and working with them instead of lower-level ones is that, from the viewpoint of a high level on the hierarchy of intentions, the client can have more flexibility about lower-level intentions. Although one cannot dispute an intention per se, one can dispute the connection the client conceives to exist between a higher- and a lower-level intention in m a n y different ways. One can, for instance, show that that the lower-level intended action does not, in fact, lead to the higher objective, or that there are better ways of fulfilling the higher-level intention. From the higher viewpoint, the client can also see more ways in which higher-level intentions can be fulfilled and can thus feel less desperate about having to fulfill them by following a particular lower-level intention. She may continue to have the same lower-level intention, but failure in that intention would not have the same global impact that it had before she could look at other options. Given the ambition to share immortality with her sorority's founding President, the client may observe t h a t cheesecake is not the only way to win the hearts and minds of her sisters. She may even realize, at some point, that having her name inscribed on the sorority's Presidential Plaque of Honor is not the only way to fulfill her next-higher intention, (the intent to survive in the memories of others, perhaps). If followed to its conclusion, the inference chain may lead to one or another of the highest-level or fundamental goals (FG's) outlined by Ellis (1991) and Epstein (1991), such as t h e goals to experience pleasure and avoid pain, to understand, and to relate to other people. Fortunately, these are usually broad enough to allow for fulfillment in a number of different ways.

FINITE VS. INFINITE INTENTIONS A further source of frustration (hence negative emotion) can come from a confusion between two different kinds of intention: finite and infinite. A finite intention is one that has a specific, discrete satisfying

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condition or "objective", a "target", e.g., "To earn a degree", "to divorce Bill". Once one has fulfilled a finite intention--once the degree is earned or Bill is divorced--that intention ceases to exist. Thus the intention can no longer be frustrated, and there can be no further emotional disturbance connected with it. 5 But other intentions have infinite objectives or "values". "To create beautiful works of art" or "to avoid getting into arguments" are values that can be continually pursued, and even when they are achieved, they do not end the intentions that spawn them. So these intentions continue to exist, unless and until the person changes his mind about what he values. Infinite intentions, therefore, can remain indefinitely as a source of frustration and negative emotion. While everybody has both infinite and finite intentions, they get into trouble when they confuse the two. Suppose a student intending to write a master's thesis treats that finite intention as though it were infinite. By working continually to improve the thesis instead of working toward its completion in a finite amount of time, he opens himself up to experiencing continual uncomfortable feelings. Perfectionism and various obsessive-compulsive tendencies are tied to this kind of confusion. On the other hand, a person may have an infinite intention and feel frustrated because she is treating it as a finite one. Imagine an attorney treating her infinite career goal, "to defend the civil liberties of the downtrodden" as a finite one. Instead of seeing how her ongoing service as a Public Defender continually fulfills this intention, she imagines herself to have failed at it entirely each time she loses a case, and thus suffers repeated major upsets. In such a case, rationalemotive intervention would not be complete if it addressed only the iB's associated with her upset over the cases she'd lost. It would also have to include a review of the infinite, high-level intention behind her feeling a need to win those cases, and the client would have to come to the realization that this intention is infinite and never fully attainable, but, overall, is nevertheless being attained.

5Other, related intentions may remain unsatisfied and thus lead to negative emotions. If a person intended to write a master's thesis and does so, she might still be upset because she thinks she could have written a better thesis, but in that case there is another intention that remains unsatisfied: the intention '%0 do it better". Accordingly, we would expect her to remain upset until she does, in fact, do it better or until she decides to abandon the intention "to do it better". If she continues to cling to the intention "to do it better" such that she is never satisfied with her efforts, the intention she has is actually the infinite intention "to do it better and better", commonly associated with perfectionism (see below).

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Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy S U P P R E S S E D RATIONALE

A person will commonly h a v e a fixed intention w h e n she has forgotten or suppressed w h y she formulated t h a t i n t e n t i o n in the first place. Like a religious t r a d i t i o n the origin of which has been lost, the fixed i n t e n t i o n compels compliance w i t h o u t reason. If a person has a strong sense t h a t it's i m p o r t a n t to do s o m e t h i n g but doesn't k n o w why, it is h a r d for h e r to c h a n g e h e r intention. Such an i n t e n t i o n often seems to an outsider to be clearly self-defeating. But to the person who has the intention, absent a n a w a r e n e s s of the reasons w h y it was formulated, it tends to feel inborn and n a t u r a l . It m a s q u e r a d e s as a law of the u n i v e r s e and defies conventional r a t i o n a l revision. The "reasons why" an i n t e n t i o n is formulated always include higher-level intentions. Conventional disputation misses t h e m a r k until the client can find and e x a m i n e t h e r e l e v a n t higher-level intentions. Only t h e n can she come to a n e w decision about the original fixed intention. At a certain point in the process of u n r a v e l i n g h e r motivational hierarchy, t h e client will e n c o u n t e r an i n t e n t i o n for which she can find no higher-level goal. At this point, t h e r e are two possibilities: . She has identified the highest-level or most fundamental goal (FG) on that inference chain (e.g., to survive, to relate to others). A FG cannot and should not be disputed, of course, but identifying it gives the client a chance to rationally revise her overall motivational game plan by allowing herself more flexibility in choosing the day-today lower-level intentions by which she is going to fulfill the FG. As mentioned above, it is always easier to revise an iB (fixed intention) when the relevant higher-level goal or goals are known. . The circumstances surrounding the formulation of the goal were so traumatic and unconfrontable (e.g., being raped or tortured), that she has suppressed them, Intentions formulated as coping strategies in response to highly stressful or traumatic circumstances (e.g., "to avoid intimacy at all cost") are usually quite inappropriate to ordinary life. The fact that the client has suppressed the traumatic context in which she formulated an intention does not inactivate that intention. Instead, because the intention is unexplainable in the absence of the context in which it made sense, it takes on the post-traumatic status of a categorical imperative and thus becomes quite fixed. In order to unfix a n i n t e n t i o n formulated u n d e r t r a u m a t i c circumstances, a client m u s t k n o w more t h a n simply w h e n it was acquired. She must regain full awareness of the surrounding circumstances and of

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the higher goal or goals that intention served at the time. Then and only then can she see for herself (which is different from being told) that the higher goal or goals are either (a) already fulfilled or (b) no longer relevant. We have elsewhere described Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) (Gerbode, 1989; Moore, 1993), a means for achieving the anamnesis and resolution of suppressed intentions, and we recommend it as a useful adjunct to conventional rational-emotive technique. The TIR technique can be used to address either known past traumatic incidents or specific irrational feelings, attitudes, or emotions that the client is interested in exploring. To work on a known trauma using TIR, the therapist begins by asking the client to specify its date and duration, then has the client silently "run" the trauma like a movie, proceeding chronologically from beginning to end. When the client has finished perusing the incident on her own, the therapist asks her to give an account of what happened. Then the therapist directs her back to the beginning of the incident for a second run-through. The client in this manner goes through the incident as m a n y times as it takes to achieve a full anamnesis, at which point she reaches an "end point", in which she experiences good feelings, spontaneously voices a cognitive shift, and also locates and unmakes buried, inappropriate, and unfulfilled intentions contained therein. It usually takes only a single session to address and resolve a traumatic incident in this way. When starting with a feeling, emotion, or attitude ("theme"), the first step of TIR is simply to locate a n y incident containing that theme (perhaps one that is quite recent). After going through t h a t incident two or three times, one asks for an earlier incident containing that same theme. The procedure continues tracing the theme backwards in time until the client reaches the earliest incident of type, whereupon, after a few repetitions, the client achieves the same kind of "end point" as was described above. This form of TIR is particularly useful where the client suspects there may be an early trauma connected to her difficulty, but can't locate it right away.

CONCLUSIONS The concepts presented above point to several interesting therapeutic possibilities: 1. Directly addressing goals and intentions as such would eliminate a certain degree of confusion, and would thus make it possible for both

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Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy therapist and client to have a better idea of what they are doing. Techniques for having clients examine in detail their own goals and how they relate to each other should also be useful in resolving emotional difficulties, especially where goals are in conflict with each other, so that the client is going to feel frustrated regardless of what happens. . The Emotional Scale can prove very useful as a tool for assessing the progress a client is making in general or with respect to a particular issue. At a good point of resolution, the client should be feeling good, i.e., she should be manifesting some of the emotions high on the scale. We can also look at what emotion she is currently manifesting and determine how much further she has to go to achieve a full resolution. A client who is experiencing a lower-scale emotion has not reached a full resolution of the matter at hand. . The classic RET model would have the therapist work with the client to change a current iB into a current rB, which would then lead to an improvement in the client's emotional status. It seems, however, that in certain cases (such as cases involving past traumas), it makes more sense to start with emotion and to trace it back to the past trauma from which it originated, because in such cases, that is where the most relevant iBs are to be found. In the context of confronting the original trauma, the client can identify and correct the iB's contained in it. Here we are working from emotion to cognition rather than the other way around. Traumatic Incident Reduction provides one systematic way of accomplishing this result. Such techniques could be included in the armamentarium of RET practitioners and could greatly increase their effectiveness in certain kinds of cases. The t h e o r y p r e s e n t e d above can also be subjected to empirical tests: 1. The model given above predicts that using inference chaining should give better results than not doing so. That should be testable. 2. Studies could be designed to validate the contents and scalar ordering of the Emotional Scale and to test the correlation between a person's emotional status and his sense of being successful. In such a study, the model given above would predict a scalar ordering in sense of success that follows the ordering of the Emotional Scale, as given above. The correlation between the attitudes and emotions given on the Emotional Scale could also be tested. 3. TIR is a good technique to study because it is simple and highly standardized and thus does not much depend for its outcome on the personality of the therapist. Controlled empirical studies are already underway in England and the United States to test the effectiveness of

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TIR. In cases where specific past incidents have had a significant impact, such as PTSD cases and cases of bereavement, we could compare the outcome of "standard" RET against TIR.

REFERENCES Ellis, A. (1991). The revised ABC's of rational-emotive therapy (RET). Expanded version of a paper presented at The Evolution of Psychotherapy: A Conference, Anaheim, CA 1990). Epstein, S. (1984). Controversial issues in emotion theory. In P. Shaver, (Ed.), Review of personality and social psychology: emotions, relationships, and health, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Epstein, S. (1991). The self-concept, the traumatic neurosis, and the structure of personality. In D. Ozer, J.H. Healy, and A.J. Stewart (Eds.), Perspectives in personality, V. 3, Part A. London: Jessica Kingsley. Gerbode, F.A. (1990). Beyond psychology: an introduction to metapsychology. Menlo Park, CA: IRM. Hare (1952). The language of morals. Oxford: Clarendon. Kubler-Ross, E. (1970) On death and dying. New York: Macmillan. Moore, R.H. (1983). Inference as 'A' in RET. British journal of cognitive psychotherapy, 1, No. 2. Moore, R.H. (1993). Traumatic incident reduction: a cognitive-emotive treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, in W. Dryden and L. Hill (Eds.), Innovations in rational-emotive therapy. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.