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How Behavior and Emotions
are Affected by Our Ideas, Part IV
MISHLOVE: In your work as a therapist you don't just sit back and calmly philosophize. You try and use philosophical approaches that really get inside of a person, to their own inner thoughts, and work with them to change those inner thoughts, what they tell themselves. ELLIS: Right. And we teach them to do it. We have homework, cognitive and behavioral homework, so that they as homework can do most of it themselves. That's why our therapy, Rational-Emotive Therapy, is an intrinsically briefer therapy than almost all the others. That's the way it usually, not always, is. MISHLOVE: When you're dealing with logic, you would admit, I know, that most people are irrational much of the time. ELLIS: Much of the time. MISHLOVE: Not only do we feel that we have to be a certain way, and that we must do this, and we can't do that, but we also feel bad if we don't. That is, if I'm a little bit upset, then I feel I must not be, so I make it even worse. ELLIS: Yes, the secondary disturbance is worse than the primary. The primary is, "I must do well and I'm no good if I don't," or, "You must love me and you're no good if you don't." But the secondary one is, "My God, I feel anxious, I feel depressed, I feel angry, as I must not, as I should not, as I ought not be." And you get anxious about your anxiety, depressed about your depression, guilty about your anger, and then you really -- MISHLOVE: Then you go into a panic state. ELLIS: That's right, and then you're not able to really correct the primary. And so in RET we first get you over your self-downing about your disturbance, then we go back to the original disturbance, showing how you mainly, largely created it, and how you have the power within you to think differently, act differently, and feel differently, and undo it. MISHLOVE: A good deal of the philosophical aspects of this, I suppose, has to do with the labels that a person applies to themself: "I am a horrible person." ELLIS: Right, and we quote general semantics -- Alfred Korzybski, a genius, not a therapist, who said, "When we overgeneralize we render ourselves unsane." So we are against overgeneralized thinking, which again is one of the cores of human disturbance. MISHLOVE: So you would spend a lot of time, if a person thinks that they're a horrible person, saying, "Well, maybe you did a horrible thing, but that doesn't mean you're always a horrible person." ELLIS: Right, and 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. You are not ratable. We teach people and show them how to not rate themselves. They're being only what they do -- their performances, their deeds, their acts. MISHLOVE: Consequently, I suppose, when they're angry at someone else, not to damn another person, no matter what they do. ELLIS: Right. One of the main derivatives of the musts is, "You must do well as I think you must, and if you haven't done what you must, you are a totally rotten individual, and you deserve, again, to never get any joy on earth and maybe roast in hell for eternity." So we are against damnation of you, of other people, and the universe. MISHLOVE: This must involve, in a sense, an unconditional acceptance of whoever might walk into your office, no matter what they have done in their lives. ELLIS: Right. We and the late Carl Rogers had unconditional positive regard or acceptance for people. But we also teach them, which I'm afraid Carl did not, how to regard themselves -- how to teach themselves to always, under all conditions at all times, no matter how badly they act, or who doesn't adore them, to accept themselves, just because they're human, just because they're alive. Period. MISHLOVE: I guess that aspect of your work is what has caused many people to label you profoundly humanistic. ELLIS: Oh yes, and I am. One of my best and most popular books, published by McGraw-Hill, is called Humanistic Psychotherapy: The Rational-Emotive Approach, which is a little different from some other so-called humanistic approaches. MISHLOVE: Well, when
a person is really all worked up, in a state of panic, as it were, do you
find that disputing with them is effective when they're in that heightened
aroused state, or are there other techniques that are more appropriate
ELLIS: We have many
emotive, evocative techniques. One of them is accepting them ourselves,
which is emotive. And we have Rational-Emotive imagery, where we get people
to imagine the worst and then feel terrible, and then work on their feeling.
We have my famous shame attacking exercise, because shame is the essence
of much disturbance, where we get you and other people and our clients
to go out and do something asinine, ridiculous, foolish, and not feel ashamed.
Now don't get in trouble; don't walk naked in the streets or anything like
that. But yell out the stops, if you're
MISHLOVE: In other words, it's almost the opposite of positive thinking. You have people really confront their greatest fear. ELLIS: Right. MISHLOVE: And then in the middle of the thing that they thought would be the most awful thing that could ever happen to them, they learn that at least it's not totally awful -- that there must be something redeeming about it. ELLIS: Right. I got this partly because at the age of nineteen I was scared witless of public speaking and approaching young females, and I made myself in vivo, alive, uncomfortably speak in public, so I got over my fear, and now you can't keep me away from the public speaking platform. And approaching those females -- I approached a hundred of them, and I only got one date, and she didn't show up; but I saw cognitively that nothing terrible happened, and I got over my fear of approaching women. So we get people to act against their nutty philosophies. MISHLOVE: It's as if in a sense when a person thinks that things are hopeless, if you can use your approach to show them one tiny little ray of light, that that's an improvement for them. ELLIS: That's right.
When you say, "I can't stand it," you mean, "I'll die of it," which you
won't, or, "I can't be happy at all if you reject me, or I fail an examination."
We show you can be happy at all; you can often be very happy, despite the
failure, de
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