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How Behavior and Emotions
are Affected by Our Ideas, Part III
MISHLOVE: How would you distinguish your approach, say, from Norman Vincent Peale, the Power of Positive Thinking? ELLIS: Well, that
is a good one in a limited way, because instead of, "I can't do well,"
it says, "I can hit the tennis ball better," and it helps you perform better.
But underlying this philosophy is, "and I have to, and if I don't hit that
damn tennis ball well, there's something rotten about me as a tennis player
and a person." So we undermine the negative thinking and don't just cover
it up, which will help to some degree, with positive and often Pollyannaish
thinking: "Day by day in every way, I'm getting better and better and better"
-- that's Coue. But he went out of business because people
MISHLOVE: In effect I guess what you're saying is things or not get better; they even get worse. But they don't have to get awful. ELLIS: Right. One of the techniques in RET is to show you that you can do better, which is positive thinking, but if you don't, you don't, and even at the very worst -- and we sometimes implode what you do or what happen to you at the worst, show you that you don't have to be miserable. My book which is just coming out now, my new book for the public, is called How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything -- Yes, Anything. MISHLOVE: That's quite a title. You just used a technical term, implode. Why don't we elaborate on that? ELLIS: Implode means really get into your feeling or your behavior, and do it many times forcefully, vigorously -- feel the worst, feel very upset -- and then change it to appropriate negative feelings. We're not against feelings, just against inappropriate, self-defeating feelings such as sorrow and regret and frustration and annoyance, which will drive you back to A, activating events, bad events in life, to change them. So we want you to feel, we don't want you to have no feeling, indifference, nirvana, desirelessness, or anything like that, but real feeling. MISHLOVE: In a sense it would seem that when people awfulize, when they make things awful, they're using that almost as a screen to keep from getting in touch with their genuine feelings of disappointment. ELLIS: That's right. Their very genuine feeling, their good negative feeling, would be disappointment: "I don't like this. What can I do to change it? How bad, how unfortunate." And they miss that with, "How awful, how horrible, how terrible." And then again they get bad results and sit on their rumps again and do nothing, instead of forcing themselves to go back to the grind and change what you change what you can change and to accept what you cannot. MISHLOVE: It almost sounds like good old-fashioned American philosophy in some way. 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. MISHLOVE: In effect you're saying if you just live your life more rationally, if you think things through, you'll be saner. ELLIS: Much saner. But then again you'd better force yourself to do what you're afraid of, and to feel differently. So again RET is always primarily cognitive-philosophic, but very much also emotive, dramatic, evocative and behavioral-active. To be continued...
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