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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
Anxiety
Whenever
Increase
Situation
Almost
Always
Alarming
Situations
Avoid

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Thinking rationally is often different from positive thinking, in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible.
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I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
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I started to call myself a rational therapist in January 1955 later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist. But from the start, I always included philosophic techniques as well as experiential, emotional and behavioral techniques.
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Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.
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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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When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.
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You have considerable power to construct self-helping thoughts, feelings and actions as well as to construct self-defeating behaviors. You have the ability, if you use it, to choose healthy instead of unhealthy thinking, feeling and acting.
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If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.
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Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.
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Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.
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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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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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There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
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Worry itself is one of the most painful conditions.
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People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
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I don't recommend that people speak their minds to their bosses or to somebody who's directly over them. You need to know when to speak your mind and what the penalty will be for doing so. Sometimes it's worth it, and often it's not!
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By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed with them because, again, I don't care too much what other people think.
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The goal of all life is to have a ball.
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We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
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