Albert Ellis Famous Quotes
Self-evaluation enhances self-consciousness and therefore tends to shut you up within yourself, to narrow your range of interests and enjoyments. People can be viewed as good in themselves—because they are people, because they exist. They may be good for some specific purpose because they have this or that trait. But that purpose is not them. The religious person must, by virtual definition, be so concerned with whether or not his hypothesized god loves him, and whether he is doing the right thing to continue to keep in this god’s good graces, that he must, at very best, put himself second and must sacrifice some of his most cherished interests to appease this god. Although being reasonably successful and achieving has distinct advantages (particularly in our society), compulsive drives for accomplishment usually result in undue stress, hypertension, and forcing oneself beyond one's own physical limitations. This is the essence of intellectual fascism: it is a belief about humans which convinces not only the believers, but usually their victims as well, that people acquire intrinsic worth not from merely being, but from being intelligent, talented, competent, or achieving. It is politico-social fascism with the trait names changed—the same hearse with different license plates. It would often be nice if things were different from the way they are, or if we got what we wanted out of life instead of what we actually get. But the fact that it would be nice if this were so, hardly makes it so, nor gives us sensible reason to cry when it is not so. Practically all individuals have strong innate and learned tendencies to act like babies all their lives: to define their wants as absolute needs (necessities); to devoutly believe that they must perform well, that others ought to treat them fairly, and that their conditions of living have to be comfortable and pleasant. I used to think the most awful thing would be to be tortured to death slowly, but then I realized I could always be tortured to death MORE slowly. If children were not brought up with the philosophy of blaming themselves and others for possible or actual mistakes and wrongdoings, they would have great difficulty becoming anxious, guilty, or depressed (which feelings result from self-blame) or hostile, bigoted, or grandiose (which result from blaming others). Since the quest for certainty can only raise false expectations and consequent anxiety in connection with these expectations, the only sane thing to do is to accept (grim or pleasant) reality and never idiotically to tell oneself that one must know it fully, or has to control it completely, or ought to have perfect solutions to all its problems. Just as your deeds and characteristics constantly change (today you play tennis or chess or the stock market very well and tomorrow quite badly), so does your self change. Even if you could, at any one second, somehow give your totality a legitimate rating, this rating would keep changing constantly as you did new things and had more experiences. Only after your death could you give your self a final and stable rating. If you allow yourself to be unduly influenced by your past history, you are committing the logical error of over-generalization: that is, you are assuming that because a thing is true in some circumstances it is equally true in all circumstances. Disliking nasty people or conditions is perfectly reasonable; but becoming seriously disturbed because reality is reality is patently absurd. One has no control, in many instances, over one's own achievements and characteristics—cannot, for example, be beautiful when one is homely or a fine concert pianist when one is tone deaf—and it is therefore pointless for one to be over-concerned about these uncontrollable traits. By worrying about inevitable events—such as your ultimately becoming seriously ill or dying—you do not in any manner, shape, or form, decrease the chances of their occurring; and you not only thereby manage to obtain the disadvantages of the dreaded events themselves, but create for yourself the additional, and often much more crippling, disadvantages of being upset about these events long before they actually occur. The emotionally healthy individual should fully give other human beings the right to be wrong; and while disliking or abhorring some of their behavior, still not blame them, as persons, for performing this dislikable behavior. He should accept the fact that all humans are remarkably fallible, never unrealistically expect them to be perfect, and refrain from despising or punishing them when they make inevitable mistakes and errors. Dependency, by definition, is inversely related to individualism and independence; and you cannot very well be you and be sorely dependent on others at one and the same time. You can train yourself to behave for your own interest, and for the interests of the social group in which you choose to live. When you behave neurotically, you create problems within yourself (intrapersonal problems) and problems with and for others (interpersonal and social difficulties). You mainly choose to upset yourself by creating absolutistic musts and demands by taking your healthy preferences for success, approval, and pleasure, and turning them into unhealthy insistences and commands. Nothing yes, nothing is awful, horrible. Or terrible, no matter how bad, inconvenient, and unfair it may actually be. Stop damning yourself and others by fully accepting the view that wrong, unethical, and foolish acts never can make you or them into bad or rotten people. Your basic goals are to remain alive and be reasonably happy. Whatever discomfort, pain, or unhappiness you experience whether it be physical or mental you observe, think about it, and push yourself to reduce it. No miracles as many "New Age" treatises cavalierly promise you. But, with hard work and practice, you can make yourself less upsettable. Yes, you can. Here are three main musts to look for when you bring on disturbed feelings: 1. Feelings of serious depression, anxiety, panic, self-downing: "I absolutely must perform well on important projects and be approved by significant people or else I am an inadequate and unlovable person!" 2. Feelings of strong and persistent anger, rage, fury, impatience, bitterness: "Other people, particularly those I have cared for and treated well, absolutely must treat me kindly and fairly, or else they are rotten individuals who deserve to suffer! 3. Feelings of low frustration tolerance, depression, self-pity: "The conditions under which I live absolutely ought to be easy, unfrustrating and enjoyable or else the world is an awful place, and I'll never be able to be happy!" Let me do my best to change the unfortunate condition or accept it and live with it if I truly find that I can't change it. Whining about how awful it is will only make it seem worse than bad and make me feel more miserable! No matter what conditions exist in my life yes, even poverty or fatal illness I can still find some enjoyable pursuits if I think I can and if I try to find them! So I can stand, can tolerate, almost anything that I really don't like. Disputing your self-defeating, irrational beliefs is one of the main and most helpful methods of REBT. "Neurotics" choose to over-react to unfortunate adversities by foolishly insisting that they must not occur. Accept, though not like, hassles and difficulties. Your main goals are to remain alive for many more years and to live happily. When your important Goals are blocked by Adversities, you can largely choose to have either healthy or unhealthy feelings and you can also choose to act either helpfully or defeatingly. I want what I want, but I don't absolutely need it. You'd better strongly think, believe, and yes! feel that you can control your own emotional destiny. Not others' thoughts and actions. No. Not the fate of the world. No. But your thoughts, feelings and actions. Because you upset yourself, therefore you, luckily, can practically always unupset the one person in the world whose thoughts and feelings you control you! Your parents, friends, and culture often encouraged you to damn yourself, others, and the world. In spite of your biology, your family, and your culture you don't need to stupidly disturb yourself. Because your disturbances include thoughts, feelings, and actions, you can make a three-way attack on them: change your thinking, your emoting, and your behaving. Use your head, your heart, and your hands and feet! There is no magic, no free lunch. Self-change, while almost always possible, requires persistent work and practice. I will stop whining about the Adversities and stop demanding that they absolutely should not and must not exist. Your totality is too complex and too changing to measure. Repeatedly acknowledge that. I wish that the Adversity had not occurred and I don't like it but I can live with it. Wanting and not needing changed me forever. Unconditional self-acceptance is the basic antidote to much of your depressed self-downing feelings. Once you damn an individual, including yourself, for having or lacking any trait whatever, you become authoritarian or fascistic; for fascism is the very essence of people-evaluation. Evaluation of an individual tends to bolster the Establishment and to block social change. Conformism, which is one of the worst products of self-rating, generally means conformity to the time-honored and justice-dishonoring rules of the Establishment. If you do not measure your selfness, you tend to spend your days asking yourself, "Now what would I really like to do, in my relatively brief span of existence, to gain maximum satisfaction and minimum pain?" If you do measure your selfhood, you tend to keep asking, "What do I have to do to prove that I am a worthwhile person?" "Goodness" itself can never accurately be determined, since the entire edifice of "goodness" is based on concepts, which are largely definitional. Accept rather than rate the so-called self and strive for enjoyment rather than the justification of the existence. I can rate my traits, deeds, acts, and performances for the purpose of surviving and enjoying my life more, and not for the purpose of "proving myself" or being "egoistic" or showing that I have a "better" or "greater" value than others. To believe or not to believe that is the question! Life, as the Buddhists said twenty-four hundred years ago, isn't but includes suffering. See it as it is, accept the good with the bad, and thereby enjoy much of it. Your neediness leads you to rate your desire as necessary and potentially self-downing. There can be no absolute ethics except for angels and God. Surrender your demand to be perfect. Have acceptance that your present path is not likely to work, acceptance that hassles will still exist, acceptance that you had better try a different path, and acceptance that the new path (or any new paths) may still not work. Don't upset yourself and give yourself the best chance of dealing with the adversity You desire what you want, but don't need it. In the course of REBT, the focus is largely on what is happening to clients during the present, and particularly on what they tell themselves about what is happening. Why should I live up to any other individual's standards? It is not a matter of teaching children how to control their emotions. It is rather a matter of teaching people philosophies of living different from the negative philosophies which now produce disordered emotions, and, through teaching these different philosophies, to help them change rather than to control their feelings. Remember that it never was, in the first place, an original traumatic experience that made people disturbed but their attitude toward this experience at what I call point "B". So-called sex problems are almost invariably the result rather than the cause of basic problems of thinking. Vital absorption may mean being distinctly concerned about (a) people, or (b) things, or (c) ideas, or (d) any combination of (a), (b), or (c). Loving often stems from personal strength meaning, that loving people do not really care that much whether others love them and are therefore strong enough to be truly interested in others. I favor talking about human thinking, feeling, and behaving mainly in terms of verbs, to avoid creating thought-things that exist by themselves, out of our control. The goals of psychotherapy are twofold: to help clients disturb themselves less emotionally and to enable them to lead happier and more fulfilling lives. Unless they achieve the first of these goals, attaining the second one is, while not impossible, damned difficult! When people disturb themselves, they view "bad" things as "awful" or "terrible" and think that they absolutely must not occur. People learn overgeneralized self-deprecating from their family, peers and teachers. "You are a bad boy because you do bad things!" If one thinks that failing makes one a complete failure, this is an illogical jump, because a complete failure would have to fail at everything and one surely does not do that. A complete failure would also be doomed to fail in the future which cannot be proven. Do, don't stew! Will power includes the intention, the decision, and the determination to change--and, particularly, the action required to do so. Will has no power without action. The action required for will power involves strong, persistent commitment to act and to keep acting until changing becomes solid. I suggest that people take the challenge and adventure of creating and maintaining a profound attitude of unconditionally accepting themselves, other people, and world frustrations, no matter what occurs in life. They better make it an integral, unforgettable part of their living. Having an optimistic rather than a pessimistic view of themselves and their future is highly preferable, as long as people do not take this view to overoptimistic extremes. Seek happiness today--and also tomorrow! Do cost-benefit calculations to determine if your gains, now and in the future, are too costly. Try to create a vital meaning and absorbing interest in your life that you adapt from others or mainly construct yourself. Dedicate yourself, but not rigidly, to developing and following your meaning. We do not have any absolute certainty about what reality is or what it will be. Things and processes exist on a both/and and an and/also basis. Thus almost every human act or condition has its advantages and disadvantages. If you depend on yourself to make decisions and to carry out actions, you can at least work with and rely on your own thinking and behavior. But if you depend on others, you never know when they will cease being dependable, move to another part of the world or die. Blame, hostility, and anger are almost certainly the most essential and serious causes of most human disturbances. By depending on others, you put yourself to a considerable degree at their mercy, and hence at the mercy of outside forces which you often cannot possibly control. Musts imply absolute necessity—which rarely, if ever, exists. They usually lead to your feeling anxious about an important project before it occurs, and to depression after it occurs if your grandiose demands are not fulfilled. Keep forcefully and persistently disputing your irrational beliefs whenever you see that you are letting them creep back again. And even when you don't actively hold them, realize that they may arise once more, bring them to your consciousness, and preventively - and vigorously! - dispute them. The best or most effective criterion of our human worth is no self rating—yes, no measure of our self or our ego. For then we would only rate our behaviors and traits, and thereby strive for continued aliveness and enjoyment—and not for deification or devil-ification. My approach to psychotherapy is to zero in, as quickly as possible, on the clients' basic philosophy of life, to get them to see exactly what this is and how it is inevitably self-defeating; and to persuade them to work their asses off, cognitively, emotively, and behaviorally, to profoundly change it. Does the universe, fate, or the powers that be really care if I have or do not have a steady relationship? Even if the universe has the purpose of my (and other people) achieving a steady relationship, is it likely to damn and punish me if I (and others) fail in this important respect? The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. Keep forcefully and persistently disputing your irrational beliefs whenever you see that you are letting them creep back again. And even when you don't actively hold them, realize that they may arise once more, bring them to your consciousness, and preventively - and vigorously! - dispute them. Practically all individuals have strong innate and learned tendencies to act like babies all their lives: to define their wants as absolute needs (necessities); to devoutly believe that they must perform well, that others ought to treat them fairly, and that their conditions of living have to be comfortable and pleasant. Self-confidence arises only through doing something, and virtually never through avoidance. Once one has told oneself for a long period of time that one really should get upset about certain annoyances or dangers, one will then form the habit of becoming so upset about these things that it will be most difficult, if not impossible, for one to remain calm. A 'bad' act does not make a 'bad' person. The more you rely on others to guide you and help you do various things, the less you will tend to do these things for yourself, and in consequence to learn by doing them. This means that the more dependent you are, the still more dependent you tend to become. In our present society, people rarely physically or economically assault you; and almost all their 'onslaughts' consist of psychological attacks which have little or no power to harm you unless you erroneously believe that they are harmful. It would often be nice if things were different from the way they are, or if we got what we wanted out of life instead of what we actually get. But the fact that it would be nice if this were so hardly makes it so nor gives us sensible reason to cry when it is not so. Just because I find certain people important it does not follow that they must approve of me. And even if I find it highly inconvenient when important people do not approve of me, it doesn't follow that my life will be catastrophic or awful. Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they’re alive and human. After we show people that they are partly responsible for their upsetness, then we say: Now that your not very disturbed about it, what were the details? Did it really accur? As a result of my philosophy, I wasn’t even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn’t hate him. I hated what he was doing. By not caring to much about what people think, I’m able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed. Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. I eventually gave up being an analyst. You had to be too passive and not speak up. I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them. I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn’t love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression. I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young woman in public. I hope to die in the saddle seat. I just had a client this week who came to me after 10 years of Freudian therapy. He’s in love with his analyst, and she is sort of in love with him. I reread philosophy and was reminded of the constructivist notion that Epictetus had proposed 2,000 years ago: People are disturbed not by events that happen to them, but by their view of them. I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs. I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it. I was trained in Rogerian therapy at Columbia University, but I didn’t buy it, so I never practice it. I would have liked having children to some degree, but frankly I haven’t got the time to take the kids to the goddamn ballgame. I would like to remember as one of the individuals who founded, ideologically and practically, cognitive behavior therapy and who pioneered multimodal or integrated therapy. I’m one of the best – loved psychologist doing REBT or cognitive behavior therapy. Whether I’m the best in the world – that would certainly be questionable. There are three musts that hold us back: I MUST do well. You MUST treat me well. And the world MUST be easy. _______________________________ Let me help! Let me help you realize how you can implement the philosophy of REBT in to your daily living. This will help you to live a much happier and control life. It is a therapy and philosophy which empower you to be your own best therapist. The goal of REBT is USA (Unconditional al Self Acceptance) - UOA (unconditional Other Acceptance) - ULA (Unconditional Life Acceptance). Contact me for an appointment in person or online - It is that easy! Previous pageAbout%20Hennie.htmlAbout%20Hennie.htmlOnline%20Therapy.htmlAlbert%20Ellis%20%26%20REBT.htmlshapeimage_3_link_1shapeimage_3_link_2shapeimage_3_link_3