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ABOUT ALBERT ELLIS On this page you will find, first, two tributes to Albert Ellis, dated 24th July 2011, on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of his death. Those tributes are followed by a biographical outline of the life of the man. ~~~ TWO TRIBUTES TO DR ALBERT ELLIS ON THE OCCASION OF THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH 1. A Tribute to Albert Ellis, 24th July 2011 By Renata Taylor-Byrne
One of the main things he said to people was this: "Accept yourself as you are, with your imperfections. You're an imperfect, fallible human". This is a powerful permission, and I had never heard anyone say anything like that before, in my life. What an immensely compassionate and kind thing to say to people! Why do I say that? Because there is an unspoken, invisible pressure on people to never make mistakes; to be perfectly competent in all their doings. This sets them up to fail, in a way that allows their peers and others to jump on them and berate them when they get things wrong. Because of Al's influence, when I now spot people who are giving themselves a hard time because of mistakes and incompetent acts they have made, I remind them that we are imperfect, and that they should "cut themselves some slack!" And, of course, when I screw up or act incompetently, which is inevitable, I hear Al giving me permission to be a fallible, error prone human. I will always be grateful to him for that sense of liberation from what he called ‘s**t-hood' which comes from accepting that ‘even if I act incompetently, I do not become a bad person, or a s**t'. He also taught us - for which I am deeply grateful - to accept reality, just the way it is, whether we like it or not. It is ‘tough s**t' instead of ‘awful', when life is not the way we want it to be, according to his very therapeutic philosophy. I must add one rider here, though: We need to use this strategy for ourselves, and on ourselves, and not impose it on other people. It can be very unhelpful to tell another person, who is distressed by some loss or other, that it is merely ‘tough s**t'. This can show up as clever smart-alecky word play, or verbal bullying, when dealing with others. And decidedly lacking in empathy! When used appropriately, this approach - of accepting that what happened to me (1) happened; and (2) that it cannot be changed (if it cannot be changed) - binds us to sanity. It shows us that we are demanding life to be different, and are in what Freud called our ‘King (or Queen) Baby' state. The last thing our Big Baby state wants to hear is that ‘reality should be the way reality is'. Or, as Scott Peck said: The most important principle in good mental health is ‘dedication to reality at all costs'. Finally, Albert Ellis encouraged us to be scientific; to think critically; and to challenge our nutty ideas. He created ‘disputing questions', like these: "Where is the evidence (that X is the case)?" "How does it follow logically (from P that Q is the case)?" "Where is it written, on a tablet of god-given stone (that you must get Z)?" "How does it help or support you (to ‘awfulize' about P)?" "Prove that (Y is true)". Some of these questions can free us from the cruel nonsense of our culture; e.g.: That men are somehow superior to women; or: That people with money and power are more valuable and important than those without money; as well as liberating us from our own innate and culturally shaped irrationalities; such as: ‘ I must get what I want, when I want it, right now, immediately; and that it's awful when I don't get it; and ‘I cannot stand not getting it; and that the world's a rotten place for depriving me, and that self destruction or other destruction is the only way out!' Using these questions, and other aspects of Al's philosophy, can free us from mental oppression and set us on the road to straight thinking and happier, more creative lives. Please read his books - you'll get so much from them and they will strengthen you for the rest of your life, if you use his ideas! Best wishes, Renata Taylor-Byrne Hebden Bridge 24th July 2011 ~~~ 2. A Tribute and a Clarification: On the ways in which I have moved on, and the ways I have not moved on By Jim Byrne Preface To some people it will appear odd that I am writing an open letter to a man who died four years ago. The explanation is quite simple. I am writing to that part of Albert Ellis which is still stuck in me - incomplete - and not to the physical Albert Ellis who departed in 2007. Introduction Dear Al, It is now four years since your sad death (on 24th July 2007), which was also a release from suffering. Looking at the information traffic on the internet in recent months, one could be forgiven for thinking that the world has forgotten you and moved on. My main goals today are: (1) to honour your value as a human being, and as a great psychotherapist, who helped me, and perhaps tens of thousands of others, to get over their emotional disturbances - through your therapy sessions, books, videos, audio programs, public lectures, and (in my case) personal letters and emails; and: (2) to clarify some of the ways in which I have moved on from REBT into the somewhat overlapping territory of CENT. I ‘found you' in 1992, when my business career was collapsing around my ears, and I had huge financial problems. I was struggling with anxiety and depression about those events and developments. Renata, my lovely wife, found a copy of your book on Executive Leadership, from which I extracted: (a) your critiques of ‘awfulizing', or ‘catastrophizing' about less than catastrophic developments; (b) your concept of ‘demandingness', or insisting that I absolutely must get what I want, when I want it, right now, immediately; (c) ‘low frustration tolerance', or a lack of resolve and resilience in facing up to the inevitable difficulties of life'; and: (d) the common practice of ‘condemning and damning' of myself, other people and the world. I tenaciously set about teaching this philosophy of life to myself, and found that it brought moments of relief from my exaggerated negative emotions about my life crisis. Slowly, over a period of weeks and months, I got more and more mastery of my emotions. I then began to teach this philosophy of life to others, and, by the end of 1998, I was training as an REBT therapist with Dr Al Raitt (in Bristol), who you had trained in New York. I then found that my counselling and therapy clients quickly got over their upsets, to the extent that they were willing to work at and practice the philosophy of REBT. I have not forgotten you, Al, but I have to some considerable extent moved on into new territory, beyond REBT. And it is to clarify the ways in which I have moved on, and the ways in which I have not moved on, that motivates my writing of the remainder of this piece. ~~~ Who was Dr Albert Ellis?
As a child he was both physically and psychologically unwell. He experienced acute shyness and social anxiety, which he treated himself with his famous experiments in desensitization, by exposing himself to the threats and dangers of repeated public appearances on peace campaign platforms, and by approaching young women in the Bronx Zoological Gardens and asking for cold dates. His first degree was in business studies, and he was mainly determined to become a great novelist. However, after many rejections, he decided to retrain as a psychologist, and gained both a masters and a doctoral degree in psychology from Columbia University. Although he originally was influenced by the Rogerian person-centred approach, he then retrained as a psychoanalyst in the Karen Horney school, which was based on the Object Relations approach. From an early stage he had a private practice, helping his friends and acquaintances with their sex, love and relationship problems. In this practice, he increasingly rebelled against the psychoanalytic approach, and made active directive interventions with his clients, based on his own experience of using philosophy and desensitization to cure his own problems of anxiety and shyness.
In the period 1953-55 he began to develop his own form of Rational Therapy, as he called it, and presented his first paper on this topic to the 1956 American Psychological Association convention in Chicago. By 1962 he had written enough papers to be collated into his first major book, entitled ‘Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy’. In that book he claimed that humans are goal directed organisms who seek to feel relatively happy and to be free of pain. When these goals are thwarted we experience emotional disturbance, not because of the thwarting of the goal, but because of our thoughts about that frustration. He argued that thoughts, feelings and behaviours were closely related, and were, in some respects, virtually the same thing. So when we think, we create feeling and behaviours; when we emote, we create thoughts and behaviours; and when we act, we create thoughts and emotions. This book – Ellis 1962 - heralded a revolution in psychotherapy, and Ellis influenced a number of individuals who went on to develop their own forms of rational or cognitive (thinking) therapy, including: Maxie Maultsby; Donald Meichenbaum; Aaron Tim Beck, and many others. The core of Ellis’ therapy was reasoning, and self persuasion. In particular, looking for the ways in which we are exaggerating how bad our lot is, and reducing our upset by ‘disputing’ our exaggerations. He himself said the core of his orientation in the world was: reason, humour and scepticism. Despite that scepticism, he sometimes seemed to swallow the claims of positivistic science wholesale, though he mainly stuck to the perspective of Popper, who saw scientific hypotheses as inferences that preceded experimentation, and did not arise out of experimentation. The only role for experimentation in Popper’s view was to try to invalidate existing hypotheses. Nevertheless, Ellis continued to hunt for the holy grail of ‘final confirmation’ of REBT as a ‘scientific discipline’. In practice, ‘human science’ is never this ‘hard’ or ‘certain’. He also emphasized giving up ‘shoulds’ about things that are unchangeable (at this point in time). And refusing to condemn and damn ourselves, others and the world when they show up as bad for us. ~~~ If you like the content of this site, please share it with your favourite social networking
group (e.g. at Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc). ~~~ There are a few other elements to this therapy, but that is really the essence of REBT. Some others that are worth mentioning are as follows: - The use of the ABC model of disturbance to conceptualize cases. A is the activating event (something happens); B is the belief (or attitudinal response) that is triggered in us by the A (activating event); and C is the emotional and behavioural consequence that is triggered by the interaction of the A (activating event) and the belief (or attitudinal response). Then there is the D, or debating and disputing the belief (or attitude) and E, which is an effective new belief or attitude. - The distinction between ego disturbances and discomfort disturbances, which can be helpful. - The distinction that he made between ‘reasonably upset emotions’, like concern, sadness, irritation; and ‘overly upset emotions’, like anxiety, depression, anger, etc. - His argument against self-esteem and in favour of self-acceptance. - Like Werner Erhard, a generation after him, Ellis considered that ‘insight’ (so loved by Freud and his psychoanalytic followers) was the booby prize, and did not change anything much for the client/patient. - Instead, Ellis advocated the use of cognitive, emotive and behavioural techniques to help the client to talk themselves out of their problematic emotional and behavioural situations. The cognitive techniques involve asking questions about the logic, reasonableness and usefulness of particular beliefs/attitudes. The behavioural approaches involve desensitization by forcing yourself to behave differently than you feel. And the emotive approaches include ‘shame attacking exercises’ and ‘rational humorous songs’.
Al Ellis worked very hard for fifty years to build up his own form of therapy, including his institute in New York City. He wrote more than 75 books and hundreds of articles and academic papers; saw about eighty clients per week; maintained a correspondence with supporters all over the world; and ran the Friday Night Workshop every Friday night he was in NYC on a Friday for more than thirty years. He was incredibly generous in his support of ‘new kids on the block’, and responded to a number of letters that I wrote to him, on such topics as: REBT and research; REBT and personality theory; the use of questioning techniques in REBT; and so on. Despite being extremely busy, he normally responded, politely and helpfully, with ten days in most cases. Al was supported in his energetic mission by his girlfriend of thirty years, Dr Janet Wolfe, who seems to have spent sixty hours per week, for those thirty years, promoting Ellis’ institute, ideas and books. (In the run up to his ninetieth birthday, Al and Janet split; and Al fell in love with, and married, Debbie Joffe-Ellis). Al was also supported by half a dozen others, who helped with the development of his ideas. Some of those others fell out with Al in the last couple of years of his life, and removed him from his professional role, and also from the board of the institute. Al took legal action over those disputes, and won his first case in the New York Supreme Court. Albert Ellis will be remembered for his contribution to the development of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Aaron Tim Beck, who pioneered Cognitive Therapy, recently acknowledged that all who followed Ellis owed a great debt of gratitude to him for opening the floodgates. Albert Ellis created the field of Cognitive/Rational Therapy, based on his own experience of using philosophies, like Stoicism, to heal his own psychological problems; and also his reading of various emerging strands of cognitivism, in Berne (1957), Rosen (1953), Wolpe (1958) and others. But perhaps the most important influence was the philosophical writings of McGill (1954), who wrote: “Emotions…include a cognitive component, and an expectation of readiness to act; their rationality and adaptive value depends on the adequacy of these two components in a given situation … Foreseeing that an object promises good or ill and knowing, or not, how to deal with it, determines the attitude towards it, and also the feeling”: (cited in Ellis, 1962, page 41). ~~~ If you like the content of this site, please share it with your favourite social networking group (e.g. at
Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc). ~~~ When I first read Ellis (1962), I was impressed by the thoroughness of presentation of his literature review, in Chapter 2. Ellis was a formidable intellectual, mixed with a freewheeling use of street language, and a Lennie Bruce veneer designed to cover over his lifelong social anxiety and shyness (as well as expressing his rebellious child side). He lacked the constraints of one who has a controlling father-figure internalized in his superego. (His father let him down in that respect, by being largely absent). He could also be brusque and irritable in his final years, and perhaps prone to homing in on simple answers, which deviated from the great complexity of his original analysis, created in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. Some considered him to be a ‘sloppy philosopher’, failing to clarify his meanings, but why would he care when he could see that he was making a huge impact on the field of psychotherapy. Despite his weaknesses and failings, in leadership for example, he managed to steer Rational Therapy through three ‘waves’ of cognitive revolution. (Or was it just two and a half?) In the third wave he offered the view that REBT may not survive for much longer, and may be incorporated into a more general CBT. This is happening to some extent already. But even as it is happening, CBT is confronting the psychodynamic school, within the National Health Service in the UK. And there is pressure for some kind of rapprochement between the two schools. (See: House, R. and Loewenthal, D. [2008] Against and For CBT: Towards a constructive dialogue?) Just a few years ago I was for maintaining the purity of REBT, and keeping Al on a pedestal. But time and tide wear away all our fantasies. And now I am in the vanguard of the development of a ‘fourth wave’ of therapy – the integration of REBT, TA., Object Relations theory, Zen philosophy, Narrative therapy, and other elements, into a new form of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT) – which straddles the CBT and psychodynamic empires. I dare to hope that if Albert Ellis were here now, he would say: “Your CENT therapy, Jim, sounds like a good therapy; but can’t you keep the goddamned Buddha out of it?” But actually, Al admired the Buddha’s philosophy, and owed something to it. Al also acknowledged his debt to Eric Berne; and I informed him of my use of TA ego states to supplement REBT, back in 2001, because, as I put it: “REBT does not have a theory of personality”. Al’s response to that was to get together with Mike and Lydia Abrams to plan a new book on personality theory.
In the end we have to make our own minds up. And mine says Al was a great force for good in the world. However, because he was a fallible, error-prone human, he may have sometimes fallen short of what some people might have expected of him, in some limited ways. Even if this proved to be true - in some limited ways – nevertheless, when taken in context, it is a small blemish on a glorious life of dedication and contribution to those who suffer emotional and behavioural limitations of their life’s possibilities. Towards the end of his life, Al joked about his work as “the gospel according to Saint Albert”. This is closer to the truth than he may have realized at the time – so long as we remember that saints are just fallible, error prone humans who strive for high standards of moral functioning or social service in the world. And it is because of Al’s saintliness that I am sure he would not object to the fact that CENT is founded primarily on moral philosophy, with REBT and the rest added in afterwards. If you would like to read a range of tributes to Al, then please go here: The REBT Network. Jim Jim Byrne ~~~ ABC Coaching and Counselling Services ~~~ ~~~ If you like the content of this site, please
share it with your favourite social networking group (e.g. at Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc). ~~~
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Sadly, today is the fourth anniversary of the death of Dr Albert Ellis, the creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy
(REBT), and I want to remind you of just a few of the gems of therapeutic wisdom he gave to the world through
his writings and his public demonstrations of REBT.
Albert Ellis PhD was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1913, and grew up on New York City. His father was absent for
most of his childhood, and his mother was neglectful. This may have thrust him into a nurturing parent role with his younger
brother and sister, and a rebellious child attitude towards authority. 