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How Behavior and Emotions
are Affected by Our Ideas, Part V
MISHLOVE: One of the techniques that I see in your work that strikes me as quite interesting, and a little unfamiliar to me personally, is the use of sarcasm. ELLIS: Right, we use humor. We're sarcastic about your ideas if you're upset, because when you're unhumorous you take things too seriously, and we reduce your ideas to absurdity. But we never laugh at you, only the way you think and act and feel, and we show you how to laugh at yourself and not to take yourself too seriously, which is what emotional disturbance, again, is. MISHLOVE: You've even written a whole series of little songs that you teach people to sing, to sort of sarcastically laugh at their own ideas. ELLIS: Right, rational, humorous songs, to show them that they can look at themselves and what they do and laugh at it, and not upset themselves about it, even when they fail. MISHLOVE: I suppose the interesting thing about your work, as a whole body of work, is that in today's day and age psychotherapy in general is controversial. Scientists question whether any form of therapy works, but there's quite a bit of research that suggests that these approaches that you've developed are effective with specific problems. ELLIS: We have about 250 studies of our therapy, mainly RET, but also what is called cognitive therapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy, that shows when you get people to basically change their irrational thinking, they become significantly improved. Almost all those 250, about 80 percent or 90 percent, do. Then we have another 250 studies or so which show that what I call irrational ideas -- "You must do well, and it's terrible when you don't" -- when you endorse more of those, you're more disturbed, and the people who are psychologically and psychiatrically disturbed do endorse more of them, so they look like they're valid. These are experiments. They're not clinical studies, which are always prejudiced by the therapist, but these are objective studies. MISHLOVE: Some of the reports go rather far, in terms of being able, for example, to help a person get rid of a physiological addiction, like cocaine or alcohol, by working through the cognitive processes that they have. ELLIS: Yes, cognitivlly
and behaviorally. Especially in the San Francisco area, we have Dr. Emmett
Belton, who's very good at this, and many of us are. We have a new book
on the Rational-Emotive treatment of alcoholism and substance abuse, by
myself and some of my collaborators, and we show people that they don't
have to get themselves anxious, and when they're anxious they don't have
to run for the bottle or the coke or the methadone or whatever they use
when they're anxious, and they don't have to put themselves down for being
alcoholic or drug addicts. We show them all
MISHLOVE: In other words, you get at the belief system that they must have, that it would be awful if they don't continue with their addiction. ELLIS: That's right, because that's low frustration tolerance. The two main things that upset people are, one, "I have to do well and be approved, and I'm no good," but, two, "Things must be easy, and my anxiety or my despair or my depression must not exist, must not exist. I can't stand it, so I'll cop out by taking the alcohol or the drugs." We show them they can stay with the anxiety, define it as a pain in the neck and not as awful, as horrible, and then work using RET to give it up. MISHLOVE: But when a person's belief system is that they have to -- "I have to have this drug," and they say, "Well, physiologically it's a disease; I know I'm addicted," how do you logically dispute that? ELLIS: Well, the answer is that some people -- alcoholics, for example, do have a gene for alcoholism, so they find it most difficult to drink one drink and not finish the bottle. But they don't have to drink even one drink, and when they're anxious or depressed or anything, they can say, "Too bad, tough; that's the way I am. I don't have to cover it up or drink to feel better. I'm going to get better by facing my pain and then working through it" -- which again RET specializes in telling them how to do. MISHLOVE: In a sense it's very much influenced, I think, by the Stoic philosophers, in showing people how to lump life. ELLIS: Right, and St. Francis' philosophy, and Reinhold Neibuhr, and Alcoholics Anonymous: "Give me the courage to change what I can change, the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two." That's one of the precepts of RET, which we got mainly from the ancient philosophers. MISHLOVE: Well, Dr. Albert Ellis, this has been an exciting discussion. We've got just a couple of minutes left, and I wonder if there's any final thought you might like to leave our viewers with. ELLIS: The main thing is to accept responsibility for what you do -- you do it, it doesn't do itself -- but never to damn yourself for other human beings, no matter how abominable or stupid or incompetent your behavior. MISHLOVE: No matter how low you've gone, no matter what you've done in your life, you can respect and accept yourself as a human being. ELLIS: Right, and in a sense you can like yourself and dislike what you do, and acknowledge what you do, and again work to change it. But even if you never change, you are you. You are neither good nor bad. You are a person who does good and bad, self-helping and self-defeating things. Now, how do you stop it and change? MISHLOVE: In a sense there's a paradox in all of this. It's as if you're telling people they have to face the worst, and in facing the worst there's always a ray of hope, there's always a sense of optimism. ELLIS: Right. Because you face it, because you don't put yourself down for it, because you see that with hard work and practice -- thinking, emoting, and behaving -- you can change. Because almost invariably you can. MISHLOVE: Well, Dr. Albert Ellis, it's been a pleasure sharing this half hour with truly one of the giants in the field of psychology. Thank you very much for being with me. ELLIS: It's good to have been here, Jeff. END
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