Recent: A brief introduction to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy has newly been published on youtube.com by REBTer Will Ross.

Quotes by Albert Ellis

"The cardinal rule of treatment in REBT is: 'Cherchez le should, cherchez le must!'"

"We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today"

"REBT assumes that human thinking, emotion, and action are not really separate or disparate processes but that they all significantly overlap and are rarely experienced in a pure state."

"To help people gain unconditional self-acceptance and to believe that they are okay or are good just because they exist had better be taught to all children in the course of their schooling, from early childhood onward."

"REBT often encourages people to importantize many things and events in their lives as long as they do not sacredize these things and insist that success at them is completely imperative."

"No, we cannot accurately say that some people are essentially evil. Even those who commit many immoral acts would have to do so all the time to be evil people. As Alfred Korzybski wrote in 1933, calling anyone an evil person is to falsely overgeneralize and to completely damn her or him for some evil acts. Invariably, the Hitlers and the Ted Bundys of the world, who steadily commit some of the worst crimes, also do a number of good and kind deeds. And some "bad people," like St. Augustine when young, later achieve sainthood. Humans are fallible—and changeable."

"Whenever obnoxious or unpleasant activating events occur in people’s lives, they have a choice of making themselves feel healthily and self-helpingly sorry, disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed, or making themselves feel unhealthily and self-defeatingly horrified, terrified, panicked, depressed, self-hating, and self-pitying."

"REBT consequently specializes in showing people what their own basic theories about themselves and the world are and how these hypotheses often lead to destructive feelings and actions, how they can be forcefully falsified and replaced with more workable philosophies."

"Practically all humans are born very gullible or teachable, especially in the course of their childhood, and consequently they accept many kinds of ideas, feelings, and actions that their parents and other caretakers tell them are beneficial and often reward them for believing, feeling, and behaving"

"This is the essence of intellectual fascism: it is a belief about humans which convinces not only the believers, but usually their victims as well, that people acquire intrinsic worth not from merely being, but from being intelligent, talented, competent, or achieving. It is politico-social fascism with the trait names changed—the same hearse with different license plates."

"REBT assumes that clients often resist psychological treatment and that they frequently do so because they have a biological tendency to keep habituated to their dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors."

"REBT is a pioneer relationship therapy because when people relate to each other they also upset themselves about each other. Not all of the time, but most of the time, and that’s why we see them for psychotherapy."

"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 often become a compulsive wrongdoer. This is because he does not nearly blame his behavior—but also blames his total self, his entire being."

"We say that nothing is awful, nothing. Rape, incest, terrorism, Hitler-it isn't awful. Not that they aren't bad, but a rational person would recognize that the world is inherently unfair."

"REBT is much more than didactic, rational, and philosophic. In addition to verbal discussion between clients and therapists, it strongly emphasizes that logical parsing and rational persuasion on the part of both therapists and clients be employed to help the clients act and work against their neurotic attitudes and their self-defeating habit patterns."

"Although emotions may sometimes exist without thought, it appears to be almost impossible to sustain an emotional outburst without bolstering it by repeated ideas."

"No, our wills are not completely free, nor are we completely governed by our heredity and environment. We seem to be born and reared with some degree of choice, agency, or self-control but have to work at accepting its limitations and push ourselves to use it adequately."

"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."

"Clients are shown that they had better fight, in practice as well as in theory, against their acquired and invented irrational ideas and the dysfunctional behavior patterns that accompany these ideas."

"Although emotions may sometimes exist without thought, it appears to be almost impossible to sustain an emotional outburst without bolstering it by repeated ideas."

"Just because people do not like adversity, they decide that it should not exist, They say, 'You disturbed me,' or, 'It disturbed me,' or 'My mother disturbed me' - They won't accept responsibility for their own disturbance. They refuse to accept the way it is. And then they get depressed about their depression. They rage about their rage. They're screwballs."

"It is the current philosophic and behavioral re-traumatizing that keeps the early disturbance alive in the present."

"The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed—such a probabilistic, uncertain world."

"The emotionally sound person should be able to take risks, to ask himself what he really would like to do in life, and then to try to do this, even though he has to risk defeat or failure. He should be adventurous (though not necessarily foolhardy); be willing to try almost anything once, just to see how he likes it; and look forward to some breaks in his usual life routines."

"People’s intrinsic value or worth cannot really be measured accurately because their being includes their becoming. They are a process with an everchanging present and future."

"REBT consequently specializes in showing people what their own basic theories about themselves and the world are and how these hypotheses often lead to destructive feelings and actions, how they can be forcefully falsified and replaced with more workable philosophies."

"REBT uses reason, empiricism, logic, and flexible, alternative-seeking ways of thinking. But it also stresses the use of metaphor, hermeneutics, philosophy, narrative, drama, humor, and other presumably non-rational and non-logical means of understanding and alleviating human disturbance."

"REBT partly subscribes to some elements of postmodern philosophy, which shows that nothing, including science, is sacred."

"The absolutist musts and overgeneralizations that people add to their desires to perform well and to be approved by others, are (a) unrealistic (b) exaggerated conclusions, and (c) definitional."

"REBT is also a double-systems therapy in that it helps people unupset themselves while they are still in a bad system, such as a bad family, or a bad work system, and then it helps them go back to point A, the activating events or the adversity in their lives and work out practical and problem-solving solutions to these realistic problems."

"Irrational and dysfunctional beliefs, then, are almost always involved in seriously disturbed feelings and actions. But these beliefs may be set off by biological processes, and then may also exacerbate these processes. Biological processes may also encourage disturbed feelings and behaviors that, once again, influence and help to create musturbatory and other dysfunctional beliefs."

"Evaluating is a fundamental characteristic of human organisms and seems to work in a kind of closed circuit with a feedback mechanism: Because perception biases response and then response tends to subsequent perception. Also, prior perceptions appear to bias subsequent perceptions, and prior responses to bias subsequent responses. What we call feelings almost always have a pronounced evaluating or appraisal element."

"It (REBT) accepts the religious beliefs and values of its clients and shows them how to live undisturbedly with religious, mystical, or superstitious ideas. But it questions devoutness and sacredizing - wheater theological, political, economic or social-and shows people how to combat rigid dogma and absolutism."

"Once people accept these irrational beliefs from their parents or culture and once they create some of them largely on their own, they almost always derive self-defeating and society-defeating inferences from them such as awfulizing, I-can’t-stand-it-itis, self-deprecation, damnation of others, personalizing, overgeneralizing, phonyism, etc."

"Even silly rules that people learn and that they foolishly follow do not by any means necessarily disturb them. They largely disturb themselves by creating absolutist musts about these rules."

"REBT accepts the usual moral rules of any society or culture and shows clients how they are wrong and immoral if they act against these rules. But it particularly tries to help them to only criticize and regret their dysfunctional behavior and not to put themselves down, as total humans, for engaging in immoral behavior."

Selp-help suggestions from Albert Ellis (quotes)

Albert Ellis - Remember there are no heroes or heroines, any great people. These are fiction, myths which we fallible humans seem determined to believe in order to ignore the fact that we presently are, and probably will always be, highly inefficient, mistake-making animals.
- Science and reason are good and useful. But so are art and emotion. Reason often implements desire and emotion; and feelings can also implement reasoning. Both/and rather and eighter/or!
- You have choice and will to change yourself, but your will power includes strong determination and, especially, action.
- It is impossible for you to be harmed by purely verbal or gestural attacks unless you specifically let yourself—or actually make yourself—be harmed.
- Getting enduringly or extremely upset over a given set of circumstances will rarely help us to change them for the better.
- Take an optimistic rather than pessimistic view on yourself and your future - as long as you do not take to unrealistic extremes
- People do do bad things but they are never, never bad people. Nor are they good people when they behave well
- You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny
- 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!
- You accept all humans because they're human. You don't like what they do and you stay away from some of them and you put some of them in jail if they act immorally, but still fully accept them as persons.
- 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.
- Some dreaded events—such as your ultimately becoming seriously ill or dying—are inevitable and nothing, including your worrying about them, can possibly prevent them from occurring.
- Conventional insight will help you very little. For it says that your knowledge of exactly how you got disturbed will make you less neurotic. Drivel! It will often help make you become nuttier!
- Changing your life involves your willingness to separate yourself from the childish concept that your parents still can make you act and think today. It also involves your attending to your present and future situations, not to your infantile ones.
- A life of ease and avoidance of responsibility may often be temporarily satisfying—especially on periods of vacation from a more active kind of life—but it is rarely continually rewarding.
- Once one tells oneself for a long enough period of time that one need not upset oneself about annoyances or dangers, one will then find it difficult to get over-excited about them and will find it easy to remain calm when they occur.
- The greatest sickness known to man or woman is called self-esteem. If you have self-esteem, then you're sick, sick, sick, because you say: I'm okay because I do well and because people love me, so when I do poorly, which I'm a fallible human and will, and people hate me because they may jealously hate me or they just don't like me, then back to shithood I go.
- You're never a good person. Because if you do a good deed -- save a child, for example, from drowning at the risk of your own life -- that's a good deed. But ten minutes later you might kill somebody, or steal, or lie. So you're a person who does good, valuable, self- helping, and bad, unfortunate, self-defeating things.
- When we choose to create profound meanings and long-range goals for ourselves and our community we tend to lead more satisfying and less disturbed lives.