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96 Years since Albert Ellis's birth by Jim Byrne, 27th December 2009
For more than six years, I have been exploring the model of psychotherapy that was outlined by Albert Ellis in his 1957 paper to the American Psychological Association, and his first major book - Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy - which appeared in 1962. I have now produced a brief paper on the models that underlie Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, and it can be found here. Please take a look and see what you think. Best wishes, Jim Dr Jim Byrne ABC Coaching and Counselling Services PS: See also The Institute for CENT Studies; and What is REBT? ~~~ THE 24TH JULY 2009 WILL MARK THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF DR ALBERT ELLIS, THE CREATOR OF RATIONAL EMOTIVE BEHAVIOUR THERAPY (REBT) This is a celebration of Al's value and contribution, not a crying party.
~~~ A Personal Tribute from Renata
Taylor-Byrne Hi, Most of you will be familiar with some elements of REBT, and some of you will be highly familiar with all of it. For those who have not previously taken these ideas very seriously, I want to try a little encouragement. I want to remind you, or inform you, of two of the gems that Albert Ellis created – invaluable ideas and techniques which can be used every day to enrich the quality of your life. These are the ones that I use the most for myself, and that I teach to my students. Apart from those two gems, I want to remind you of Al's great courage, which inspired others to be brave in relation to their own life's challenges. The first statement by Al that I ever noticed was his reference to the fact that: "I was scared s***less of public speaking, and so I forced myself to speak and speak and speak until I became so comfortable with it that now you can't keep me away from public speaking platforms". The first of his gems was USA - or Unconditional Self Acceptance. This involves permission to make mistakes and behave like the imperfect human being that I am. And what a relief! My theory is that there is a silent, invidious pressure on all of us to be perfectly competent, and to excel in any skill we undertake or to show ideal qualities in any relationships that we are engaged in. And what a cruel, distorting and wasteful fantasy that is. The pressure to be perfect is difficult to spot in ourselves, until we start to learn a new skill, or try to understand any feelings of inferiority we may experience when we are interacting with people from different social classes or backgrounds. (Of course, we cannot excuse our immoral intentions with the idea of unconditional self acceptance. We must behave morally!) Albert Ellis encouraged people to separate their behaviour from their essence, and showed that rating people as good or bad, based on what they did, in terms of their competence, was inaccurate and over simplistic. Students can really benefit from USA when they are trying to develop any skill. In my experience, many of them judge themselves really harshly if they fail an assignment, or get too far behind in their work. This blocks them from taking corrective action and then starting again, and so this is one of the first models I teach on every course I run. How can we develop our skills if we are giving ourselves a hard time because the skills aren’t (immediately and automatically) as polished as we’d like them to be? So using this model means that we can accept ourselves with our imperfections (and work to improve on them if we choose to) in many areas of our lives. It takes away all the heat and the squandering of our precious life energy, if we say to someone who had just pointed out to us that we’ve messed up in some way: “Yes – I messed up – I’m imperfect – just like everyone else”. The second, and in many ways the most brilliant model that he created, was the ABC model. What a superb tool for un-upsetting yourself and having much more fun in life. I use it all the time. So what is it and how does it work? If you are feeling angry or upset, then ask yourself what happening or event caused this reaction. (Call that ‘A’, or Activating event). Then, check out what you are telling yourself about that event. Why? Because it is your belief about the event or happening that colours or impacts on you and results in your feelings of anger, or annoyance etc. This is called the B – the belief. Here is the model: A: the activating event. What happened to you that started you feeling angry or enraged? B: Your belief about the event: For examples, demanding that it should not have happened. Or merely preferring that it not have happened. C: The feelings you experienced, or reactions and behaviours. (The ‘C’ is the emotional consequence of your beliefs ('B's) about the event happening for you, and the behaviours that resulted from those emotions). This is a very simplistic summary of the model – but once you’ve got your head around it, you can use it all the time to change from resisting and protesting about the inevitable frustrations and hassles of everyday life to accepting and allowing life and people to be the crazy and imperfect way that they indubitably are. (For a fuller description, see the What is REBT? page). The improvement in the quality of your life, if you study the model, and take it on board, will be phenomenal. It will reduce your stress level so much, and give you the mental space to savour and absorb the beauty and magnificence that we have around us every single day. Bear in mind, though, that Albert Ellis said that: “It works because we work it ”. In other words, we need to use it, and practise using the model, over and over and over again, until it is second nature. So the key question - “Now, what am I telling myself about that, I wonder?” - can be one of the most useful and life-enhancing questions that you can ask yourself. I want to recommend that you read Al's books, for the great wisdom in them and especially for these two techniques, and give yourself the permissions that he encouraged us all to accept. Remember – charity begins at home. Best of luck! PS: In an effort to debunk him, someone once described Albert Ellis as: “Just a kid from the Bronx”. But what a kid! I loved that man and always will! A whiz kid from the Bronx is what he was! Renata Taylor-Byrne ~~~ If you like this web page, then please bookmark it in your Favourites, or in your social networking location, by using the following button:
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The Background By Dr Jim Byrne On 24th July 2007, Dr Albert Ellis died, aged 92, after several years of serious illness. It was a merciful release from suffering. Throughout his final years he kept his spirits up, despite many difficulties, pain and frustration, and demonstrated that he was the master of high frustration tolerance. In the final two or three years of his life he was in conflict with the charitable Institute that he had formed many years earlier to promote his therapy services, training services and book sales. In July and September 2005 the board of that Institute had split 4:3 over a move to exclude Dr Ellis from his professional responsibilities and to eject him from his seat on the board. He sued his adversaries and won the first court case. Before the second case could be heard, Al died. On 23rd March 2009, an announcement appeared on the internet, apparently made jointly by the Albert Ellis Institute and the Estate of Dr Ellis. This statement claimed that all but one of the disputes between the two parties had now been resolved. This may be the case. (It was not signed by anybody, nor validated in any way). What does this mean? I do not know, as there was no detail attached, and I am out of touch with the parties to this dispute. One logical inference might be that an out of court financial settlement has taken place between Al's widow and the Albert Ellis Institute. But this is just a guess. This, or any other kind of out of court settlement, would not, however, resolve all the outstanding issues for the supporters of Albert Ellis. I think it was in November 2005 that Al finally went public about his removal from office and from the board. He sent an email to his network of contacts around the world, announcing that there would be a campaign to have him reinstated to the board and to his professional work, and asking for support for that campaign. In the event, at least two public campaigning bodies emerged, if not three; and there were a couple of other backroom support groups. Money was raised for the campaign, and almost two thousand signatures were collected on a petition, calling for the reinstatement of Dr Ellis. However, all of these campaigning activities were unsuccessful. At a certain point in these campaigns against the adversaries of Ellis, I realized that we were actually in a similar situation to the factional perceptions of Home Rule in Belfast in 1886. When William Moneypenny, acting for the British Civil Service, went to Belfast in 1886 to find out how the local population felt about the draft Home Rule bill, he reported that "there are no facts in Ireland". That is to say, Protestants and Catholics had totally different sets of "facts" to relate, about the "same" situation, and there seemed no possibility of agreeing to a common narrative about the future of Ireland. And by analogy, at the Albert Ellis Institute in 2006-7, there were no agreed facts about any aspect of the dispute between the group of 3 and the group of 4. When I realized we were in a Belfast 1886 situation at the Albert Ellis Institute, I suggested that what was needed was some kind of "public inquiry" to determine some kind of agreement about the broad brush strokes of what had happened to split the board of the Albert Ellis Institute, and also what was needed to repair the damage. I did not make this suggestion just once, or in passing. I made it my main point and rallying cry many, many times, in bulletins that were widely read by both sides in that dispute. My idea fell on deaf ears on both sides: and one prominent member of the group opposing Albert Ellis declared that "There is nothing to negotiate or mediate!" (Al had been calling for mediation for months). Now the possibility of resolving this matter has been lost for all time. A court case in open court might have satisfied the concept of a "public inquiry" - but now (it seems) that is no longer possible. Each of us is going to have to journey on with our own story of what happened at the Albert Ellis Institute in July and September 2005. We are going to have to learn to live on opposite sides of the "peace lines" for the longterm. For my part, the credibility of REBT, as a philosophy of life, has been stretched thin [1]. So much so that I am taking the best of Al's ideas and moving on. I cannot stay here. I will not buy this. I cannot be duped. I want an obviously clean start, in unambiguously fresh air, with an indisputably moral philosophy at the core of my therapeutic beliefs. [1] I will show later, on another page, on another day, how the gossamer fabric of REBT was stretched across the cruel rocks of adversarial conflict, until it ripped in two places. Briefly, those places were, (A): That it became clear that REBT cannot sustain a moral discourse, because it eschews the use of all of the prescriptive words: should, must, have to, ought to, got to, need to. Without these prescriptive words, our systems of morality are unsustainable (e.g. utilitarianism, deontology and principle ethics all depend on 'ought' and 'must'). Morality is not a set of preferences, but rather a set of prescriptions, as declared by R.M. Hare, in his 1981 book: ('Moral Thinking: Its levels, method and point'; Oxford: Clarendon Press). And, (B): Any philosophy which logically leads to any variant of the following statement - "Although you are vigorously and viciously kicking me in the scrotal region, I Unconditionally Accept You as a fallible error prone human" - cannot long survive in the real world of "good and bad wolves" [2]. This kind of philosophy would amount to (implicit) permission to harm me, and permission to harm me is against all our urges towards self-preservation, which drives all of us to seek to survive and thrive. My philosophy of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT) will therefore take forward what survives of Al's philosophy, and jettison anything that proved unsustainable during this sad and incomplete civil war. [2] The concept of the Good Wolf and Bad Wolf comes from the Native American Cherokee people. All humans are assumed to have a good and bad side to their character (innately and permanently), and the side that develops is the one that is fed by the individual, and unrestrained or encouraged by his/her society. We cannot (logically, morally and durably) have a therapeutic philosophy which ignores the moral and immoral tendencies of clients and their therapists, or the morality/immorality of our social environments. My first paper on CENT will appear in the next few weeks. (For a foretaste of this development, please take a look at 'What is CENT?') ~~~
~~~ Let us now remember Al! By Jim Byrne and Renata Taylor-Byrne At the time of his funeral service in 2007, a host of prominent individuals made gracious statements of tribute to Al, testifying to his many fine qualities. Those tributes came from 34 individuals, and amount to 38 pages of text. (See the 'REBT Reflections' page at the REBT-Network). It is difficult to process so much information, and sometimes more words count less, in terms of painting a word picture of the subject of those words. I want to extract a few, brief quotes from those statements to illustrate the value of Albert Ellis, the qualities of the man, and the contribution that he made to individuals and to the world. Aaron Tim Beck, the creator of Cognitive Therapy (CT) made a lengthy and detailed tribute to Albert Ellis, in which he described the way they had met, and how helpful Al had been to him professionally, and how impressed he (Beck) had been of Ellis's ability to tease out a client's problems and difficulties. He then went on to make a more personal point, as follows: "There is much more I could tell about Al but I would like to close with a personal appreciation of what Al meant not only to me but to the world. When I was a young boy, I read about the Cedars of Lebanon, grand trees that lived for over 100 years and were objects of awe and reverence. It was believed that if these trees were cut down, it would be the end of civilization because they were irreplaceable. "Al was one of the cedars and he will not be replaced in this generation. However, he leaves a grand legacy behind him with his wonderful wife, Debbie, all his students, and the scores of grateful patients who are living better lives because of him". Amongst other things, Dr David Burns MD, author of The Feeling Good Handbook, etc., said this: Dr Richard Schnieman declared: "I have personally benefited from my experiences with Albert and REBT. These experiences have been profound and positive for me and I am sure for many others. It is my desire to sustain and grow Dr. Ellis's work in a direction he would want. My hope is that other "kindred spirits", dedicated REBTers, will join in this effort. The legacy and contribution Dr. Ellis has made to humankind is remarkable and precious. I believe they are worthy of our efforts to sustain and further develop his marvelous work. I believe Dr. Ellis will live through our efforts." Dr Arnold Lazarus described his great debt to Al like this: "I considered Al a friend, an esteemed colleague, and one of my heroes. He visited me in Princeton on several occasions and we both enjoyed having debates, serving on professional panels, conducting workshops together and so forth. Perhaps one of the most helpful pieces of advice I ever received came from Al. In 1968 I was a professor at Temple University Medical School and was unhappy with my work environment and many of my colleagues. I took a train to New York and asked Al if he would give me a job at his Institute. He said to me that I am not the sort of person who should be working for someone else. It was okay to serve on a university faculty, but if I wanted to work at an institute, I would best be advised to set up my own one. Coming from a man I liked and admired who was about 18 years my senior, this gave me a big boost of confidence, and in retrospect, as with many things, Al was 100% on target. His loss is inestimable." And Irwin Altrows, among other things, mentioned the role of humour in REBT: "Although Freud wrote eloquently and profoundly about humour, he never seemed to do much with it. Al knew that humour is not merely a tool for therapy, but part of its fabric. He showed how humour can convey acceptance of oneself, of one’s client, and of adversity, and how humour can motivate people to make useful though difficult changes. He showed that well-crafted humour is the antithesis of irrational “shoulds” and “musts”." Steve Lake also referred to the importance of humour in his tribute to Al. First Steve said that "...he (Al) helped countless thousands of individuals. I’m one of them. Reading and re-reading Ellis helped me to dig my way out of a mudslide of self-created crises. His inventiveness in illuminating REBT from so many angles in books of such different character was more than inspiring. So was the resilience of his mind, trapped in a failing body. ... I had some direct experience of Ellis’s creativity in this regard in telephone sessions with him in 2002. “Oh no,” he said, on hearing my English voice. “This is bad. You have an accent and I’m very deaf. You will have to shout at me in American!” Which I proceeded, with not a little embarrassment, to do. Yet it is amazing how fast problems can disappear when you roar them aloud in an accent not your own! Try it: suffering quickly acquires a comic dimension. Ellis, of course, knew all about the therapeutic value of humour. With Rabelais, another outrageous philosopher, he could have said, “For all your ills, I give you laughter.” Further down this page I will use this reference to humour to link to a proposal that we all join in a singalong of three of Al's Rational Humorous Songs, to celebrate his genius, his contribution, his value as a great healer and encourager of personal development in others. But before moving on from these selected nuggets from the vast array of tributes he received at the end of his life, I want to present a little video tribute by Dr Jeff Zeig, President of the Milton Erickson Institute. The interviewer is Dr Jeffrey Guterman. ~~~ PROPOSED CELEBRATORY ACTIVITY FOR 24TH JULY By Jim Byrne Here is my little proposal. Why don't we all who support Al have a global singalong to three of his Rational Humorous Songs, which I have recorded on the following video clip? I think 3.00pm GMT would work best for everybody between New Delhi and San Francisco. It's a bit late for Australia, but what else can I do? How about it? Let's do it for Al. Just be on this page at 3.00pm GMT on Friday 24th July, and click the arrow on the following video screen once to play the video of the three songs. Then sing along with gusto! My fantasy is that if there were enough of us, we could shake to earth on its axis! If you are willing to have a go, please email me at jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com so I can get some indication of the numbers involved. I have also added a discussion forum below, so you can comment on the experience: Go to the discussion forum/noticeboard, here. * REBT Coaching/Counselling and Psychotherapy ~~~
ABOUT ALBERT ELLIS Albert Ellis PhD was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1913, and grew up in 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. 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. 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 that he was in NYC, 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, within 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. As far as I know, at the time of writing this piece (21st May 2009), the second case is still pending in the court system. (This may or may not be correct, as I no longer follow the story). 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. (Remember, Piaget’s cognitive developmental ideas did not arrive in New York until 1968!) 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). 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. As we approach the second anniversary of Al’s death – on 24th July 2009 – I dare to hope that if he were here now, he would say: “Your CENT therapy, Jim, sounds okay to me; but can’t you keep the god-damned 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, with a weaker conscience than he would have had if his parents had been committed to their roles, he may have sometimes fallen short of what some people might have expected of him, in some limited ways. He may also (inadvertently) have given permissions to others to sidestep their previous 'moral shoulds' and to engage in patently bad, anti-social behaviours. 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 being “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 in the world, and who operate from unusually high levels of nonpossessive love for their fellow humans. In other words, they develop the "good wolf" side of their character, and tend to mainly shrink the "bad wolf" side (though they can hardly hope to eliminate it completely, as it is an innate part of every human!) 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, TA 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. Or: Albert Ellis Friends. And remember 24th July, the second anniversary of his death, and celebrate this great man's work. Perhaps you could sing a couple of his rational humorous songs, which are available on the www somewhere (e.g. on YouTube), including being sung by me in a video on the 'What is REBT?' page.. Jim Jim Byrne ~~~ Historical Links * Final Farewell to Albert Ellis * Personal Statement about the Albert Ellis Campaign ~~~
"If that's the way it is, then that's the way it is!" Albert Ellis.
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It is now more than 96 years since the birth of Dr Albert Ellis. From about the age of 45 years onwards, he had an increasing
inpact on the nature of counselling and psychotherapy, all over the world. However, very little attention is paid to
his contribution; its nature; and how to take it forward. Why is this? Partly because we have forgotten just how
much of a revolution he wrought, in dumping the longwinded and highly expensive system of Freudian psychoanalysis. And
partly because his philosophy was largely misunderstood by many observers, including many of his followers. 
Further down this page, at the end of this post, you will find a unique opportunity to engage in a collective celebration
of the life and value of Dr Ellis. If enough individuals take up this challenge, then we might just be able to wobble
the earth on its axis!
Janet L. Wolfe, Ph.D. received her doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University, where she is currently Adjunct
Professor of Applied Psychology. She has a private consulting and therapy practice in New York City. She served for over 20
years as Executive Director of the Albert Ellis Institute, supervising interns and fellows and conducting individual and group
therapy. Dr. Wolfe is the co-editor of the REBT Resource Book for Practitioners, author of What to Do When He Has a Headache,
and co-author (with Albert Ellis) of How to Raise an Emotionally Healthy, Happy Child. She has
published over 100 chapters and articles and conducted hundreds of workshops in REBT/CBT and its applications to addictions
treatment, anger management, and gender and relationship issues throughout Europe, Latin America, Japan, Taiwan, and India.
She has helped spawn numerous programs in clinics, schools, and agencies based on REBT/CBT principles.