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Whenever you avoid alarming situations, you almost always increase your anxiety about them.

Albert Ellis

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Albert Ellis
Age: 93 †
Born: 1913
Born: September 27
Died: 2007
Died: July 24
Behaviour Therapist
Cognitive Scientist
Non-Fiction Writer
Psychologist
Sex Educator
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Avoid
Anxiety
Whenever
Increase
Situation
Almost
Always
Alarming
Situations

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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.
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People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.
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If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.
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Attempts to help humans eliminate all self-ratings and views self-esteem as a self-defeating concept that encourages them to make conditional evaluations of self. Instead, it teaches people unconditional self-acceptance.
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I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it.
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To err is human to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.
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Whatever may be, I am still largely the creator and ruler of my emotional destiny.
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Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love and thereby seriously disturb yourself.
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Being assertive does not mean attacking or ignoring others feelings. It means that you are willing to hold up for yourself fairly-without attacking others.
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Needing leads to bleeding - to almost all inevitable suffering.
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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.
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There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
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Whining about your own, others', or the world's failings is a main element in what we usually call neurosis.
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When I started to get disillusioned with psychoanalysis 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 could see how that applied to many of my clients.
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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.
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I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.
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People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has.
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If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.
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Is self-esteem a sickness? That's according to the way you define it. In the usual way it is defined by people and by psychologists, I'd say that it is probably the greatest emotional disturbance known to man and woman.
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For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
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