Therapeutic Frame of Reference
EFT retains emphasis on the importance of Rogerian empathic attunement and communicated understanding. It focuses upon the value of engaging clients in emotional experiencing moment-to-moment in session. Thus, the experiential roots of the approach remain strong. It holds the view that individuals engage with others on the basis of their emotions, and construct a sense of self from the drama of repeated emotionally laden interactions.

View of Pathology
EFT views healthy individuals as self-actualizing beings with an innate tendency to growth. With such growth as a mark of maturity, theorists consider psychological health “...as the ability to creatively adjust to situations and to be able to produce novel responses, experiences, and narratives”. Conversely, EFT views pathology as a stagnation of growth characterized by an avoidance of primary emotional experience, the employment of maladaptive emotions in obscuring primary emotions, as well as a rigidity in cognitive processes that stem from unresolved intra- or inter-personal conflict. Therefore, “the goal of treatment is to transform maladaptive emotion responses and gain access to adaptive emotional responses to guide the process of becoming”.

Emotion-focused therapy categorizes emotion responses into four types to help therapists decide how to respond to a client at a particular time: primary adaptive, primary maladaptive, secondary reactive, and instrumental. Emotion-focused therapy also has six principles of emotion processing: (1) awareness of emotion or naming what one feels, (2) emotional expression, (3) regulation of emotion, (4) reflection on experience, (5) transformation of emotion by emotion, and (6) corrective experience of emotion through new lived experiences in therapy and in the world. While primary adaptive emotion is seen as a reliable guide for behavior, primary maladaptive emotion is seen as an unreliable guide.

Johnson's approach to emotionally focused therapy rarely distinguishes between adaptive and maladaptive primary emotions, and rarely distinguishes emotion responses as dysfunctional or functional. Instead, all primary emotional responses are usually construed as normal survival reactions in the face of what John Bowlby called "separation distress". Emotionally focused therapy, like other systemic therapies that emphasize interpersonal relationships, presumes that the patterns of interpersonal interaction are the problematic or dysfunctional element. The patterns of interaction are amenable to change after accessing the underlying primary emotions that are subconsciously driving the ineffective, negative reinforcing cycles of interaction. Validating reactive emotions and reprocessing newly accessed primary emotions is part of the change process.

Therapeutic Objectives
The goal is to assist clients in achieving a greater degree of independence and integration so they can better cope with problems as they identify them. Within emotion-focused individual therapy, there is a 14-step case formulation process that regards emotion-related dysfunction as stemming from at least four different possible causes: lack of awareness or avoidance of emotion, dysregulation of emotion, maladaptive emotion response, or a problem with making meaning of experiences. The theory features four types of emotion response, categorizes needs under "attachment" and "identity", specifies four types of emotional processing difficulties, delineates different types of empathy, has at least a dozen different task markers, relies on two interactive tracks of emotion and narrative processes as sources of information about a client, and presumes a dialectical-constructivist model and an emotion schematic system.

The role of person-centered therapists is rooted in their ways of being and attitudes, not in techniques designed to get the client to "do something". Research on person-centered therapy indicates that the attitude of therapists, rather than their knowledge, theories, or techniques, facilitate personality change in clients. Basically, therapists use themselves as an instrument of change by encountering clients on a person-to-person level. 
Emotion-focused therapy posits that each type of emotion response calls for a different intervention process by the therapist. Primary adaptive emotions need be more fully allowed and accessed for their adaptive information. Primary maladaptive emotions need to be accessed and explored to help the client identify core unmet needs (e.g., for validation, safety, or connection), and then regulated and transformed with new experiences and new adaptive emotions. Secondary reactive emotions need empathic exploration in order to discover the sequence of emotions that preceded them. Instrumental emotions need to be explored interpersonally in the therapeutic relationship to increase awareness of them and address how they are functioning in the client's situation.

A therapeutic task is an immediate problem that a client needs to resolve in a psychotherapy session. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers such as Laura North Rice applied task analysis to transcripts of psychotherapy sessions in an attempt to describe in more detail the process of clients' cognitive and emotional change, so that therapists might more reliably provide optimal conditions for change. This kind of psychotherapy process research eventually led to a standardized (and evolving) set of therapeutic tasks in emotion-focused therapy for individuals.

The following table summarizes the standard set of these therapeutic tasks as of 2012. The tasks are classified into five broad groups: empathy-based, relational, experiencing, reprocessing, and action. The task marker is an observable sign that a client may be ready to work on the associated task. The intervention process is a sequence of actions carried out by therapist and client in working on the task. The end state is the desired resolution of the immediate problem.

In addition to the task markers listed below, other markers and intervention processes for working with emotion and narrative have been specified: same old stories, empty stories, unstoried emotions, and broken stories.

Central Tenets
The A-B-C framework is central to REBT theory and practice. This model provides a useful tool for understanding the client's feelings, thoughts, events, and behavior. A is the existence of an activating event or adversity, or an inference about an event by an individual. C is the emotional and behavioral consequence or reaction of the individual; the reaction can be either healthy or unhealthy. A does not cause C. Instead, B, which is the person's belief about A, largely creates C, the emotional reaction. Believing that human beings are largely responsible for creating their own emotional reactions and disturbances, and showing people how they can change their irrational beliefs that directly "cause" their disturbed emotional consequences, is at the heart of REBT. 
After A, B, and C, comes D (disputing). Essentially, D encompasses methods that help clients challenge their irrational beliefs. There are three components of this disputing process: detecting, debating, and discriminating. Clients learn to discriminate irrational beliefs from rational beliefs. Once they can detect irrational beliefs, particularly absolutistic "shoulds" and "musts", "awfulizing" and "self-downing", clients debate dysfunctional beliefs by logically, empirically, and pragmatically questioning them. Clients are asked to vigorously argue themselves out of believing and acting on irrational beliefs. Although REBT uses many other cognitive, emotive, and behavioral methods to help clients minimize their irrational beliefs, it emphasizes the process of vigorously disputing such beliefs both during therapy sessions and in everyday life. Following that, clients are encouraged to develop E, a new effective philosophy, which has a practical side. A new and effective belief system consists of replacing unhealthy irrational thoughts with healthy rational ones.

Therapeutic Frame of Reference
REBT is a present-centered and future-oriented approach to psychotherapy.

View of Pathology
One of the main pillars of REBT is that irrational and dysfunctional ways and patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving are contributing to much, though hardly all, human disturbance and emotional and behavioral self-defeatism and social defeatism. REBT generally teaches that when people turn flexible preferences, desires and wishes into grandiose, absolutistic and fatalistic dictates, this tends to contribute to disturbance and upset.

Albert Ellis has suggested three core beliefs or philosophies that humans tend to disturb themselves through:

"I absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, perform well (or outstandingly well) and win the approval (or complete love) of significant others. If I fail in these important—and sacred—respects, that is awful and I am a bad, incompetent, unworthy person, who will probably always fail and deserves to suffer." (Holding this belief when faced with adversity tends to contribute to feelings of anxiety, panic, depression, despair, and worthlessness.)
"Other people with whom I relate or associate, absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, treat me nicely, considerately and fairly. Otherwise, it is terrible and they are rotten, bad, unworthy people who will always treat me badly and do not deserve a good life and should be severely punished for acting so abominably to me."  (Holding this belief when faced with adversity tends to contribute to feelings of anger, rage, fury, and vindictiveness.)
"The conditions under which I live absolutely MUST, at practically all times, be favorable, safe, hassle-free, and quickly and easily enjoyable, and if they are not that way it's awful and horrible and I can't bear it. I can't ever enjoy myself at all. My life is impossible and hardly worth living." (Holding this belief when faced with adversity tends to contribute to frustration and discomfort, intolerance, self-pity, anger, depression, and to behaviors such as procrastination, avoidance, and inaction.)

Function of Symptoms
REBT commonly posits that at the core of irrational beliefs there often are explicit or implicit rigid demands and commands, and that extreme derivatives like awfulizing, frustration intolerance, people deprecation and over-generalizations are accompanied by these. According to REBT the core dysfunctional philosophies in a person's evaluative emotional and behavioral belief system, are also very likely to contribute to unrealistic, arbitrary and crooked inferences and distortions in thinking. REBT therefore first teaches that when people in an insensible and devout way overuse absolutistic, dogmatic and rigid "shoulds", "musts", and "oughts", they tend to disturb and upset themselves.

Further REBT generally posits that disturbed evaluations to a large degree occur through over-generalization, wherein people exaggerate and globalize events or traits, usually unwanted events or traits or behavior, out of context, while almost always ignoring the positive events or traits or behaviors. For example, awfulizing is partly mental magnification of the importance of an unwanted situation to a catastrophe or horror, elevating the rating of something from bad to worse than it should be, to beyond totally bad, worse than bad to the intolerable and to a "holocaust". The same exaggeration and overgeneralizing occurs with human rating, wherein humans come to be arbitrarily and axiomaticallydefined by their perceived flaws or misdeeds. Frustration intolerance then occurs when a person perceives something to be too difficult, painful or tedious, and by doing so exaggerates these qualities beyond one's ability to cope with them.

Essential to REBT theory is also the concept of secondary disturbances which people sometimes construct on top of their primary disturbance. As Ellis emphasizes:

Therapeutic Objectives
The many roads taken in REBT lead toward the destination of clients minimizing their emotional disturbances and self-defeating behaviors by acquiring a more realistic, workable, and compassionate philosophy of life. The therapeutic process of REBT involves a collaborative effort between therapist and client to choose realistic and life-enhancing therapeutic goals. The therapist's task is to help clients differentiate between realistic and unrealistic goals and also between self-defeating and life-enhancing goals. A basic aim is to teach clients how to change their dysfunctional emotions and behaviors into healthy ones. Another goal of REBT is to assist clients in the process of achieving unconditional self-acceptance, unconditional other-acceptance, and unconditional life-acceptance. As clients become more able to accept themselves, they are more likely to unconditionally accept others and to accept life as it is.

Role of the Therapist
The therapist has specific tasks, and the first step is to show clients how they have incorporated many irrational absolute "shoulds", "oughts", and "musts" into their thinking. The therapist disputes clients' irrational beliefs and encourages clients to engage in activities that will counter their self-defeating beliefs by replacing their rigid "musts" with preferences.
A second step in the therapeutic process is to demonstrate how clients are keeping their emotional disturbances active by continuing to think illogically and unrealistically. In other words, when clients keep reindoctrinating themselves, they create their own psychological problems. Ellis reminds us that we are responsible for our own emotional destiny.
To get beyond mere recognition of irrational thoughts, the therapist takes a third step - helping clients change their thinking and minimize their irrational ideas. Although it may be unlikely that we can entirely eliminate the tendency to think irrationally, we can make ongoing efforts to reduce the frequency of such thinking. The therapist encourage clients to identify the irrational beliefs they have unquestioningly accepted, demonstrates how they are continuing to indoctrinate themselves with these beliefs, and reminds them that change is possible with persistent effort.
The fourth step in the therapeutic process is to strongly encourage clients to develop a rational philosophy of life so that in the future they can avoid hurting themselves again by believing other irrational beliefs. Tackling only specific problems or symptoms can give no assurance that new disabling fears will not emerge. It is desirable, then, for the therapist to dispute the core irrational thinking and to teach clients how to substitute rational beliefs and healthy behaviors for irrational beliefs and self-defeating behaviors.

Therapeutic Process & Techniques
REBT therapists are multimodal and integrative. They use a number of different modalities to dispel self-defeating cognitions and to teach people how to acquire a rational approach to living.
REBT practitioners usually incorporate a persuasive cognitive methodology in the therapeutic process. They demonstrate to clients, often in a quick and direct manner, what is that they are continuing to tell themselves. Then they teach clients how to challenge these self-statements so that they no longer believe them, encouraging them to acquire a philosophy based on facts. REBT relies heavily on thinking, disputing, debating, challenging, interpreting, explaining, and teaching. The most efficient way to bring about lasting emotional and behavioral change is for clients to change their way of thinking.
Some cognitive techniques available to the therapist include: (1) Disputing irrational beliefs: clients dispute a particular "must", absolute "should", or "ought" until they no longer hold that irrational belief, or at least until it is diminished in strength. (2) Doing cognitive homework: REBT clients are expected to make lists of their problems, look for their absolutist beliefs, and dispute these beliefs. Clients are encouraged to record and think about how their beliefs contribute to their personal problems and are asked to work hard at uprooting these self-defeating cognitions. (3) Bibliotherapy: REBT can utilize bibliotheraphy as an adjunctive form of treatment. There are advantages of bibliotheraphy, such as cost-effectiveness, widespread availability, and the potential of reaching a broad spectrum of populations. (4) Changing one's language: REBT rests on the premise that imprecise language is one of the causes of distorted thinking processes. Clients learn that "musts", "oughts" and absolute "shoulds" can be replaced by preferences. (5) Psychoeducational methods: REBT programs introduce clients to various educational materials such as books, DVDs, and articles. Therapists educate clients about the nature of their problems and how treatment is likely to proceed.
REBT practitioners use a variety of emotive procedures, including unconditional acceptnce, rational emotive role playing, modeling, rational emotive imagery, and shame-attacking exercises. These strategies are used both during th etherapy sessions and as homework assignments in daily life. Their purpose is not simply to provide a cathartic experience but to help clients change some of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Some of these emotive therapeutic techniques includes: (1) Rational emotive imagery: this is a form of intense mental practice designed to establish new emotional patterns in place of disruptive ones by thinking in healthy ways. In rational emotive imagery, clients are asked to vividly imagine one of the worst things that might happen to them and to describe their disturbing feelings. Clients are shown how to train themselves to develop healthy emotions, and as their feelings about adversities change, they stand a better chance of changing their behavior in the situation. (2) Humor: Ellis contends emotional disturbances often result from taking oneself too seriously. One appealing aspect of REBT is that it fosters the development of a better sense of humor and helps put life into healthy perspective. (3) Role playing: role playing has emotive, cognitive, and behavioral components. The therapist may interrupt to show clients what they are telling themselves to create their disturbances and what they can do to change unhealthy feelings to healthy ones. Clients can rehearse certain roles to bring out what they feel in a situation. (4) Shame-attacking exercises: Ellis developed exercises to help people reduce shame and anxiety over behaving in certain ways. He asserts that we can stubbornly refuse to feel ashamed by telling ourselves that it is not catastrophic if someone thinks we are foolish.
REBT practitioners use most of the standard behavior therapy procedures, especially operant conditioning, self-management principles, systematic desensitization, relaxation techniques, and modeling. Behavioral homework assignments carried out in real-life situations are particularly important. These assignments are done systematically and are recorded and analyzed. Homework gives clients opportunities to practice new skills outside of the therapy session, which may be even more valuable for clients than work done during the therapy hour. Doing homework may involve in-vivo desensitization and live exposure in daily life situations. Clients actually do new and difficult things, and in this way they put their insights to use in the form of concrete action. Acting differently helps them incorporate functional beliefs.

What is missing from this theory 

In 1998 when asked what the main criticism on REBT was, Albert Ellis replied that it was the claim that it was too rational and not dealing sufficiently enough with emotions. He repudiated the claim by saying that REBT on the contrary emphasizes that thinking, feeling, and behaving are interrelated and integrated, and that it includes a vast amount of both emotional and behavioral methods in addition to cognitive ones. Some people have also criticized REBT for being harsh, formulaic and failing to address deep underlying problems.