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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.

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
Happen
Applied
Happens
Clients
Epictetus
Many
Notion
Reread
Years
View
Disillusioned
People
Events
Psychoanalysis
Views
Proposed
Started
Reminded
Philosophy
Disturbed

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The easy way out is often just that-the 'easy' way out of the most rewarding lifestyle.
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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.
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Lack of forgiveness of others breeds lack of self-forgiveness.
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For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
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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. So it would have had more disadvantages than advantages for them.
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The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, or law-abiding citizen. He will become a compulsive wrong-doer.
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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.
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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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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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The goal of all life is to have a ball.
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Failure doesn't have anything to do with your intrinsic value as a person.
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Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.
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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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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.
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Stop shoulding on yourself
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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.
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The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better. But you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.
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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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People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.
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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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