Albert Ellis
Albert Ellis
Albert Elliswas an American psychologist who in 1955 developed rational emotive behavior therapy. He held M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University and American Board of Professional Psychology. He also founded and was the President of the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute for decades. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapies. Based on a 1982 professional survey of USA...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 September 1913
CountryUnited States of America
You mainly feel the way you think.
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.
Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.
The goal...is not to change your desires and wishes but to persuade you to stop demanding that you absolutely must have what you wish-from yourself, from others, and from the world. You can by all means keep your wishes, preferences, and desires, but unless you prefer to remain needlessly anxious, not your grandiose demands.
If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
By honestly acknowledging your past errors, but never damning yourself for them, you can learn to use your past for your own future benefit.
Most people would have given up when faced with all the criticism I've received over the years.
If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it almost impossible to upset yourself emotionally - about anything. Yes, anything.
Failure doesn't have anything to do with your intrinsic value as a person.
Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.
Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.
Stop shoulding on yourself
Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.