Quote

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

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Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.
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You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.
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If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them.
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Religious fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide, feuds, wars, and genocide.
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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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Strong feelings are fine it's the overreactions that mess us up.
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Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth.
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We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
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Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.
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I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.
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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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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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In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.
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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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And just as two wrongs don't make a right, rage against offenders is probably the worst way to try to correct them.
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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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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 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.
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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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Most people would have given up when faced with all the criticism I've received over the years.
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