How Behavior and Emotions are Affected by Our Ideas, Part II
with Albert Ellis

Excerpted from the Thinking Allowed Television Series 
Host, Jeffrey Mishlove
Reprinted with permission
This is Part II of a 5 Part Series
 

MISHLOVE: You've used the term -- I think you must have coined it -- "musterbation." 

ELLIS: Right. "Masturbation is good and delicious, but musterbation is evil and pernicious," is one of my sayings. 

MISHLOVE: Musterbation is when we tell ourselves, "I must do this," or, "Things must be this way," even though they're not. 

ELLIS: Right. The three main musts are "I must do well or I'm no good," "You, you louse, must treat me well or you're worthless and deserve to roast in hell," and "The world must give me exactly what I want, precisely what I want, or it's a horrible, awful place." 

MISHLOVE: It would be awful. 

ELLIS: It would be terrible, right. Because of the must. If you didn't musterbate, then you wouldn't awfulize, terribilize, catastrophize, say "I can't stand it," and put yourself down. If you only stuck with, "I'd like very much to do well, but I never have to," you wouldn't then disturb yourself. 

MISHLOVE: So the technique that you get engaged in with your clients is one of disputing their musts, their ideas, and showing them that logically, scientifically, philosophically, things are not that way -- that nothing must be, if it isn't. 

ELLIS: The technique is a scientific method, and we say -- and we're the only cognitive behavioral therapy which does say -- that when you think antiscientifically, devoutly, really piously, dogmatically, which is inflexible, antiscientific, then you disturb yourself. Therefore we use the flexible scientific method to get you philosophically and otherwise to undisturb yourself. 

MISHLOVE: Now, many people, I think particularly the Freudian school of therapy, would suggest that simply being told by your therapist that you're thinking things wrong isn't going to make a bit of difference -- that you'll continue with the same old behaviors anyway. 

ELLIS: We would agree -- that being told it, or told where you got it, which is you didn't get it from your sacred mother and father -- won't help you. But the insight that I made myself disturbed, I foolishly listened to my mother and father and took them too seriously, and I'm still doing it, and that now I require work and practice, work and practice, to give up my biological and sociological tendency to disturb myself, that will help you -- not the belief that I disturbed myself and that I don't have to. That will help, but not that much. 

MISHLOVE: Doesn't the idea that if you can simply change your philosophy your whole behavior will change, somehow go against the behaviorist concept, or the materialist notion, that the mind doesn't really influence matter? In effect you're saying that the mind will influence. 

ELLIS: Very significantly. But we also say that since you practiced, worked at this foolish philosophy, engrained it in yourself, conditioned yourself, that therefore it requires work and practice to give it up, and it requires feeling against it. So we always use cognitive thinking and emotive, dramatic, evocative, and behavioral techniques to get people comprehensively to change and to stay changed. 

MISHLOVE: In effect what you say is that every emotional state has its concomitant belief system. 

ELLIS: Right -- that even sorrow and regret, which would be appropriate emotions when you're not getting what you
want, have the belief system, "It's too bad. Isn't it bad? Isn't it unfortunate?" while horror and depression are, "It's awful; it must not be this way; I can't bear it." So each of the negative, self-defeating states such as depression or anxiety or despair or rage has some individual difference in what you tell yourself, what you believe philosophically. 

MISHLOVE: So in a sense the heart of your philosophical approach, then, is to distinguish between what we might call appropriate philosophies, appropriate emotions, and inappropriate ones. 

ELLIS: And oddly enough, I discovered after years of doing Rational-Emotive Therapy, RET, that there only are a few differences. And one main difference, and it's crucial, is taking a preference, a desire, a goal, a value, practically all of which are legitimate, and escalating it again, transmuting it into a demand, a should, an ought, a must, an absolute. 

MISHLOVE: In other words, the most terrible thing could happen to me -- perhaps I have leprosy, or some kind of fatal disease. Or as I think you pointed out, maybe somebody is slowly torturing me to death. That doesn't necessarily justify me going into a state of depression. 

ELLIS: Or of horror. 

MISHLOVE: Or of horror. 

ELLIS: But it does justify your saying, "I don't like this. I wish it weren't so. What am I going to do about it?" Which you won't do if you're horrified. You'll freeze and make yourself worse. So you control largely, not completely, your emotional destiny and your behavioral destiny, and if you change your basic philosophy of life, then you can change it. You have the power to do so, but you only sit on your rump and don't use that power. 
ELLIS: Well, Emerson had some of it, and Thoreau, and some of the American philosophers, and I got it mainly from the original philosophers, and also from their derivatives -- from John Dewey, who had a good deal of it; Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher; Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, and other modern philosophers. 
 
 
 
 

Previous "Dolphin Relationship Lagoon" pages:
 

#1	How to Develop Self Esteem
#2	Love Them, Anyway
#3	Perf Measurements at Call Centers
#4	Staff Empowerment
#5	Team Training for Your Teams
#6	Handling Confrontations
#7	Social Support
#8	The Power of Influencing...
#9	Expectations
#10	Impression
#11	Learning Through the Ages
#12	Instructions for Life
#13	More Instructions for Life
#14	Inner Feelings with Virginia Satir
#15	More conversations with Virginia Satir
#16	What I've Learned in Life
#17	What Do You See?
#18	If the World Were a Village...
#19	Lessons from Noah's Ark
#20	Discussion with Albert Ellis, Part I

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