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How Behavior and Emotions
are Affected by Our Ideas, Part I
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Today we're going to be examining philosophy in psychotherapy. We'll be looking at how our behavior, our emotions, are affected by our ideas. With me is Dr. Albert Ellis, one of the most influential psychologists in the history of psychology. Dr. Ellis is the author of over sixty books and six hundred academic papers. He originally began his career as a sexologist, and as the author of such books as The Art and Science of Love and Sex Without Guilt, and is considered one of the fathers of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In addition he is considered the grandfather of cognitive behavior therapy, perhaps the most influential psychotherapeutic movement today, and the founder of Rational-Emotive Therapy. Welcome, Dr. Ellis. ALBERT ELLIS, Ph.D.: It's good to be here, Jeff. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. You are probably most widely noted for introducing into the field of psychotherapy an idea that seems almost self evident, which is that our behavior, our being, our selves, are affected by our philosophies, by what we think. ELLIS: Right. And also conversely I introduced many years ago, when I first formed RET, Rational-Emotive Therapy, the idea that our thinking is also affected by our behavior and our feelings. MISHLOVE: So in effect it's all one system. ELLIS: That's right, interactional. MISHLOVE: And that system can therefore obviously be affected by dealing with any part of it, I would assume -- behavior, emotions, or cognition or thoughts. ELLIS: Right, but if you profoundly change your philosophy, your thinking, then you're more likely in all probability to profoundly change your feeling and your behavior, and especially your disturbed feeling and your disturbed behavior. MISHLOVE: You drew on the ancient philosophers, coming to the notion that philosophy itself could be a form of psychotherapy. At that point you broke away from psychoanalysis and developed a form of cognitive therapy. ELLIS: Yes, I practiced and was a psychoanalyst for a while, but then I discovered that it didn't work, and I have a gene for efficiency, while poor Sigmund Freud had a gene for inefficiency. So I went back to my hobby since the age of sixteen, philosophy, the philosophy of the ancients largely -- of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and in the East, of Confucius and Lao Tzu and Buddha -- and amalgamated it with behavior therapy, which I'd used on myself at the age of nineteen to get myself over my phobia of public speaking and of approaching young females. MISHLOVE: If I could get to the kernel of your thought, it is basically that whatever happens to us in life, it's not totally responsible for our emotions. ELLIS: Right. It's partly, it contributes to it. A, activating events, contribute to C, consequences in our gut. But it's B, our belief system, our philosophy, which mainly, largely, or certainly in great part, makes us feel and think the way we do -- I should say behave the way we do, especially in a disturbed manner. We disturb ourselves. MISHLOVE: Typically, I suppose, when a person is very angry or very depressed, they almost always think that it's something outside that's causing that. ELLIS: Right. And we normally, and I think biologically, tend to think that because C, consequences -- my anger -- immediately follows your treating me unfairly, that you made me angry, instead of you made me feel sorry and regretful to some degree, but my anger I added by commanding and demanding that you not do what you indubitably did. MISHLOVE: And in a sense, if I'm right, you broke with Freud in suggesting that the parents aren't responsible, early upbringing isn't responsible -- that we teach ourselves these kinds of neurotic behaviors. ELLIS: Right. We're
born gullible to our parents, influenceable, teachable, in the first place.
Therefore we stupidly listen to our parents, but then we invent many musts,
shoulds, oughts, demands, commands, in addition to the standards, the values,
that we adopt from our parents. But the standards don't upset us. We mainly
upset ourselves with those Jehovan commands.
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