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
Albert Ellis quotes about
In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.
Whatever may be, I am still largely the creator and ruler of my emotional destiny.
Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.
In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.
Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.
To err is human; to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.
Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.
The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in their long-term recovery.
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.
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.