Friday 5^th March 2010

The Happiness Blog:

Mindfulness and Self-Responsibility

Yesterday afternoon, I asked myself: ‘What shall I write about in the Happiness blog tomorrow?'  The image that came up - from the basement of my mind (my adaptive unconscious) - was a famous TV cigar advert:

"Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet"

This process of asking myself a question and then striving to answer it is what I call ‘thinking'.  Thinking is a process of asking and answering questions, or posing and solving a problem.

But what is the significance of this cigar advertisement?

Well, the advert went like this:  An image would appear on the TV screen of a man reclining in a comfortable chair, and in the background would begin an intensely relaxing piece of classical piano music.  The man would put a long, lighted cigar to his lips, inhale the toxic smoke, and smile as he threw back his head and exhaled the smoke skywards.  The voiceover, at that point, would say:

"Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet"

I know lots of people who were influenced by that advert to go out and buy a packet of five Hamlet cigars, to try to capture that ‘happiness moment'.  I was one of them!

But cigars and cigarettes cannot create happiness.  The first one, or even a few, cigarettes or cigars produce a brain chemistry response which shows up experientially as a ‘nice buzz' - but thereafter we former smokers did not smoke to experience that happiness moment.  No.  We had to smoke to take away the craving induced by the addictive nature of tobacco.  We were hooked by false advertising.

Here's a comment from Richard Nelson Bolles which is relevant to where I am going with this blog:

"You have got to know what it is you want!  Or someone is going to sell you a bill of goods somewhere along the line that will do irreparable damage to your self-esteem, your sense of worth, and your stewardship of talents that God gave you".

If you do not know what you want, your mind will be taken over by those who do know what they want.  This can be done via the TV, radio, newspapers, political parties, cults, other individuals, and on and on.

You have got to develop a respect for your mind, and to protect it from being controlled by others.  I recently read this little parable:

"Imagine you are sitting in a coffee shop, and somebody comes past your table and, using a small bottle of liquid and a dropper, squirts a few drops of a clear liquid into your coffee cup, would you drink that coffee?  No?  Then why would you listen uncritically to the propaganda of people who are trying to poison your mind?"

Perhaps you think I am exaggerating here?  I am not talking about big political issues, like Iraq and Afghanistan, although many people have serious doubts about the stories they have been told by the media and the US and UK governments about those wars.  No, I am talking about much smaller, but nonetheless significant, issues.

Did you see that TV commercial where a little mobile (or cell) phone waddles onto the screen and declares that it is ugly, because newer models have come out with sexier screens?  The sad, crestfallen little phone takes to wearing a brown paper bag over itself, while it scuttles off to the nearest ‘carphone warehouse to trade itself in for a new, sexier model.  That advert, which was designed to make almost all mobile phone owners feel ashamed of their 'outdated' models, ran for months on UK commercial TV channels.  Shame would force them to buy the newer, more exotic models.  But what if they could not afford one?  Around the same time, the incidence of muggings, in which some of the newer, sexier phones were grabbed from richer kids by poorer kids in the street, seemed to skyrocket in number.  Mobile phone muggings in London became such a big issue it took up lots of time on national TV news and current affairs coverage.  Nobody seemed to make the connection with the sad little phone in the brown paper bag.  But this is somehow related to status anxiety:

"'Tis very certain that each man (and woman) carries in his/her eye the exact indication of his/her rank in the immense scale of men/women, and we are always learning to read it'.  Indeed, psychological experiments suggest that we make judgements of each other's social status within the first few seconds of meeting.  No wonder first impressions count, and no wonder we feel social evaluation anxiety".  Wilkinson and Pickett (2010)[1].

How does this relate to thinking your way to happiness?

Firstly, it is the job of advertisers to spread discontent and unhappiness, and to suggest that this discontent and unhappiness can be solved by owning a bigger car, having a sexier holiday, wearing more expensive clothes, having a beautiful, expensive home, and on and on.  None of those claims is true, but the more of that stuff you imbibe, the more negative judgements you will make of ‘yourself' relative to people who have ‘lots of stuff' and who go 'lots of places'.

Secondly, it is your responsibility to stop others putting poison drops in your coffee, and poison ideas in your mind.

Thirdly, you can protect your mind from a lot of pollution by taking a ‘news fast': Stop reading daily newspapers and watching TV news for at least a month.  (And repeat this every few months!)  You will feel a whole lot happier without all that socially divisive, inequality-emphasizing bullshit washing around in the basement of your mind.  You will also free up a lot of time in which you can pursue your own meaningful goals - such as connecting with significant others; engaging in health promoting exercise or games; making a contribution to the lives of others. 

You can defeat social evaluation anxiety by developing anti-materialistic values, like honesty, diligence, integrity, commitment, compassion, contribution, community development, family life, spiritual values, and so on.

If you run into any London School of Economics professors who try to tell you that the solution to unhappiness in the UK is to give a few thousand people 6 to 10 sessions of cognitive behaviour therapy, refer them to the Equality Trust, which has amassed a great deal of data that shows that mental health and drug use problems are a function of greater inequality in the UK and the USA, and in other grossly unequal societies; and that more equal societies have less mental health distress, such as anxiety and depression.

Check out the Equality Trust, at http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/.

Or read the book - The Spirit Level: Why equality is better for everyone - by Wilkinson and Pickett (2010), below.

Quick tip:  If you want to be happier in this unequal world of ours, then start to ask yourself this:  "What can I control?" and try to control that.  Then: "What is beyond my control?"  Give up trying to control the uncontrollable.

I recently read about a man who was 108 years old, who attributed his long and happy life to one thing:  "When it rains", he said, "I just let it rain!"

Try to fit in a couple of brisk walks this weekend.  List three things you can be grateful for, and go over them every night before bedtime.  Develop your compassion for others, and offer love to those people who are important in your life.  And try a news fast!

Learn to meditate.

(PS: And if you see some new equivalent of a little mobile phone in a brown paper bag passing before your eyes, look for the immoral villain behind it who is dropping clear drops of poison into your coffee!)

[1] Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everybody.  London: Penguin Books.

~~~

THE HAPPINESS BLOG

Friday 26^th February 2010

You can't hold on to happiness - You can only create it!

Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2010
 

"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.  And the selfsame well from which your laughter arises was oftentimes filled with tears"
Kahlil Gibran

Towards the end of each week, I find myself wondering what I will write about in this blog.  The blog is about - mainly - thinking your way to happiness - in the context of the development of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy.  It sometimes seems to me that I must pretty soon run out of things to say on this subject.  Just how much is there to be said on the subject of how to work your way towards a happier life?  (Answer: I don't know yet!)

This morning I opened a little book of quotations on happiness: titled, ‘Happiness: Inspirational quotations'; no author.  My attention was grabbed by this quote:

"Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued,

is always beyond our grasp, but which,

if you will sit down quietly may alight upon you".

Nathan Hawthorne

This is a very interesting idea.

Firstly, it reminded me of how happy I feel when I have done my daily meditation, which involves being will to ‘sit down quietly', and observe your own breathing, in and out, and focus your attention on a small area of space directly in front of you.  My life has definitely been enriched by daily meditation, and I would recommend it to anybody, as an experiment for them to explore.

Secondly, this little quotation reminded me of a statement by Werner Erhard, the creator of Erhard Seminar Training (est).  In his Relationships Course, Werner used to teach that "You cannot hold on to satisfaction; you can only create it.  And the only way you can create anything is if you have the space in which to create it.  And the only way to create the space in which to experience satisfaction is if you complete your experience of the dissatisfaction in your life".

Now that is a kind of specialist form of words, so what does it mean?

Firstly, we all have great moments in our lives, and we then make the mistake of trying to hold on to them.  But trying to hold on to such moments is like trying to stop the sun going down at the end of a happy day, or resisting moving into Saturday because Friday was so nice.  It cannot be done.  So right there you have the two edged sword of satisfaction.  Because you like it, you want to cling to it, but because you cannot cling to it, you experience dissatisfaction.  So even if nothing objectively bad ever happened to you, you would still be unhappy much of the time, because you would be stuck in the dissatisfaction of having to let go of every good moment that passes through your life.

Secondly, most people also have objectively bad experiences, of being criticized, or punished, or deprived of something or somebody, of feeling pain, of being bullied, abused, and so on.  And when we encounter those bad experiences, it is not uncommon for humans to try to push them away, which means to push them out of awareness; to repress them into non-consciousness.  This is a big mistake.  Why?

Because, whatever you resist persists.  To the degree that you resist any negative experience, you are refusing to process it; refusing to digest it.  And so it gets stuck in the basement of your mind in an undigested form, and rattles around there for years, or perhaps even for a lifetime, throwing up neurotic symptoms, including a great deal of personal unhappiness.  All of the incomplete, undigested experiences in your life, in the basement of your mind, mounts up to feeling like a great invisible weight which you must carry through each day. 

The solution is to complete your experience of those bad things that have happened to you; to digest them; to chew them up; or burn them up; so that they can disappear, or go into the background of your life with their emotional charge neutralized or discharged.

If you have a major unhappiness in your life, especially one that stems from early childhood, then you need to dig that up, process it, digest it, and allow it to burn out, and become a neutral element that disappears into the background of your life.

How can you do that?  One way would be to see a good psychodynamic counsellor; or read appropriate books on healing childhood memories.  Or you could take a look at how I came to terms with a most unsatisfactory relationship with my mother, which I have written up in CENT Paper No.10.

Helen Keller said: "Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness.  It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose".  What is your worthy purpose?  What is your life about?

My worthy purpose over the years has been to try to understand the human mind and especially human emotions; to help myself to become more whole; and to help others to benefit from my learning.  That is what drives my work at the Institute for CENT Studies.

Quick tip:  You can make yourself somewhat happier right now, simply by doing two things:

1. List three things you can be grateful for, and read them over three or four times. Then:

2. Change your face into a smile.

"Let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes and in the warmth of your greeting.  For children, for the poor, for all who suffer and are alone, always have a happy smile.  Give them not only your care but your heart". 
Mother Teresa.

What do you think of these ideas?  Do you want to explore the idea of ‘completing your experience' of some past pain.  You can always email me, or phone me, if you need any help with this.

Back to the Windows

What perspective are you taking on your life?

By Dr Jim Byrne

Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2010

In previous posts, I have described the Five Window model of CENT, which says that we are always looking at the world through a ‘window frame' - or cognitive-emotive ‘frame of mind' - and that all we ever see are our own interpretations of what seems to be going on out in the world.  Today I received a nice little quote from an associate of mine which speaks to this issue:

"Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."

Alan Alda
Actor, Writer and Director

This idea, that we need to ‘clean the windows' of our mind, was also nicely illustrated by a little story I saw this week, in ‘Healthy Pages', an online newsletter, here: http://www.healthypages.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=70011

Here is the story in full:

A young couple moves into a new neighbourhood.
The next morning while they are eating breakfast,
the young woman sees her neighbour hanging the wash outside.
"That laundry is not very clean", she said.
"She doesn't know how to wash correctly.
Perhaps she needs better laundry soap."

Her husband looked on, but remained silent.
Every time her neighbour would hang her wash to dry,
the young woman would make the same comments.

About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a
nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband:

"Look, she has learned how to wash correctly.
I wonder who taught her this."

The husband said, "I got up early this morning and
cleaned our windows."

What do you think of this little story?

From my perspective, that story is a great little illustration of the ways in which our past experiences distort our current ‘reality'.

Human beings are delusional beings, and we are unaware of how deluded we are.  Our ‘common sense' tells us that we are looking out through our eyes at the world, and that we see whatever is ‘there'.  (This perspective is called ‘naïve realism').  But this is clearly false.  If I was looking out through my eyes at the world, then that would mean that I am standing (or sitting?) behind my eyes, looking out.  And what would I be ‘looking out' with?  My eyes, of course!  But then I would have to imagine I am behind those eyes also, looking out, with yet more eyes, behind which I am looking out, back into an infinite regress.  I would never get to the ‘ultimate one' who is ‘looking out'.

There is nobody behind your eyes to look out.

Light comes in through your eyes, and that light stimulates nerve endings at the back of your eyes, and that stimulation sends signals to various parts of the brain, including the conscious and non-conscious areas of the visual cortex.  The various elements or modules of the brain then constructs an interpretative image of the ‘outside world' - based on your past experience - and you naively believe that you are looking out at this image, which is actually inside your brain!  This perspective is called ‘the constructivist view'.

More accurate is the ‘social constructionist perspective', which says that I get my words, ideas and concepts from my culture, and that I can only see what is ‘facilitated' by my social language.

Therefore, the world in which you live is actually given to you, very largely, by your past experiences; and especially your social experiences.  There are, of course, ‘external objects' in your current environment.  But you can never see them directly.  You can only ever see them through the lenses, or frames, you constructed in the past.  Therefore, you need to be very critical about your interpretations.  How reliable are they?  Who agrees with your views and who disagrees?  How seriously have you studied ‘critical thinking skills' to ensure that you are being as logical as possible?  How much have you worked on your past experiences - especially the disturbed ones - to make sure you are functioning as well as you can as a human being?

One of the best ways to clean up distorted lenses that are built from past experiences is to engage in a series of cognitive emotive counselling sessions. Do you need to ‘clean your windows'?

PS: If you want to improve your happiness today, change your perspective by focusing on what you can be grateful for.  Every night before you go to bed, write down three things you can be grateful for today.  (It can be the same things as yesterday!)  Then determine to dream about one of them.

CALM, SERENE HAPPINESS IS THE PRIZE TO AIM FOR

By Dr Jim Byrne

Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2010

In the past, I have distinguished between calm, serene happiness, and excited, aroused happiness.

Excited, aroused happiness occurs in response to something that you strongly desired and got;

or something that surprised you which was positive. 

It comes from outside of you.

Calm, serene happiness occurs when you are at peace with the world, and you have a positive mental attitude that is not dictated by the external world.  This is what Seneca meant when he said:

"True joy is serene".

Aristotle believed that our deepest happiness comes from living a good life.  What he meant was that moral functioning translates into happy functioning.  That's why I always say: to live the good life, you have to be willing to live a good life.

An element of this idea is caught in the following quote from Maeterlinck:

"Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is in itself an act of happiness.  It is the flower of a long inner life of joy and contentment; it tells of peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul".  Count Maurice Maeterlinck

To spend "peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul" you can always choose to read uplifting literature; read the best authors on the moral life; read Buddhist literature; or Sufi literature; or any elaborated spiritual tradition's literature.  Try Alan Watts' book: The Way of Zen; or Eckhart Tolle's book: The Power of Now.  Look for books of uplifting quotations from sages and wise people.

You could try walking in nature; Gardening; Listening to classical music, especially Baroque music, or Mozart.  (Not loud rock music or heavy metal.  Those kinds of music promote the dark side of the mind).

Try dancing and singing along to uplifting pop songs.

Meditation is a great source of serenity and inner peace, and you can learn how to do it from a book, a DVD, or a local class in a Buddhist centre, or even in some adult education centres.

Accept that change is the law of life, and your life will keep changing no matter how comfortable you are feeling.

Go on a ‘news fast'.  Avoid the newspapers and the TV and radio news for a month.  Believe me, you won't miss it, and your life will become much less distressed and agitated than it currently happens to be.

Eliminate violent and aggressive films and angry soap operas.

Try listing three things you can be grateful for, each night, before you retire, and then try to dream about one of them.

Write a letter of gratitude to somebody who has helped you.  Write a letter of gratitude to your mother, and/or father, for giving you life, and bringing you up.  (You don't have to post it - but if you were willing to post it, think what a rare gift that would be for them!)

Choose to love, and refuse to hate.

Avoid angering, depressing or frightening yourself with exaggerated ideas and excessive demands about how life should be.

Choose to be optimistic and always expect the best to happen.

Avoid gloomy thoughts.

Do not spread or listen to rumours about others.

Maintain a positive mental attitude, for the more often you have a good, positive mental attitude, the more often you will live through happy days.

Do whatever counselling and therapy you need to do in order to clean up the past. (Some of that can be done by writing therapy, on your own; or by reading the best self-help books).  Get coaching advice on dealing with knotty problems.

Explore the Personal Development section of good book shops. 

But how do you maintain a good, positive mental attitude when your environment is bad, negative, and objectionable?  That is the trick that was mastered in Buddhism, in Stoicism, and brought to counselling and therapy by Dr Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy(REBT).  It is carried on in various ways in my Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT).

Next week I will demonstrate how to be happy in a negative, unpleasant environment, using the CENT structure called the E-F-R model.

I wish you a happy day, and a happy week, and a happy life.

But you will have to figure out how to achieve that, in practice.  If you are unhappy, and you do not change anything about you: how you think; how you act; how you cope; then nothing else will change in your life.

REGARD AND ACCEPTANCE: DEFINING TERMS

This blog post is designed to clarify some words and concepts that I used last week.  By the end of this post, you should have a much clearer idea of what it being described and proposed here.

Last Friday I wrote about ‘Unconditional Positive Regard', which is an attitude of mind promoted by Carl Rogers.  I did that as a prelude to thinking and writing about ‘Unconditional Self Acceptance', the alternative attitude of mind promoted and recommended by Albert Ellis.

To clarify this a little: Carl Rogers, who created person-centred, or non-directive, counselling, recommended that we should all treat ourselves and each other with Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR).  On the other hand, Albert Ellis - who was originally influenced by Rogers' ideas, and who then moved on to study psychoanalysis, and finally to develop his own system of therapy (called Rational Therapy) - recommended that we should all offer ourselves and each other Unconditional (Self or Other) Acceptance.

On Saturday morning I had to see a client in Halifax.  On the way to the office I stopped at Café Nero for a green tea and a sandwich, and while I sat there I wrote some notes in my pocket notebook.  Essentially I was thinking about you (dear reader) and wondering what sense you can make of this presentation of ideas, and whether it might be a good idea to clarify some of these terms.  I therefore wrote down what I thought might be your questions, with the intention of answering those questions in this week's blog post.  And so here they are:

1. What does ‘positive regard' mean?

There are four definitions of different uses of the concept ‘regard' in my dictionary; but the second definition seems to be the only one that fits our present case: "2. high opinion, respect".

Thus we can say that Carl Rogers added the word "positive" to "regard" to clarify the fact that he was referring to definition 2, and not to one of the other three definitions.  We can also say that he was advocating that we each have "an unconditionally high opinion of, or respect for, ourselves and all others".  Well that is one thing we could do, but we will have to think about that, and contrast it with Ellis's suggestion; and with my reasoning; and perhaps some other ideas.

2. What does ‘acceptance' mean?

Unfortunately for Albert Ellis, there are two aspects of the definition of the word "accept" which could apply here.  The first is: "2. regard favourably". And the second is: "5. put up with". 

I am going to rule out the second of these definitions, on the grounds that Albert Ellis was not simply asking us to ‘put up with' ourselves and others.  If we go for the first of these definitions, then it would seem that "self acceptance" and "self regard" mean the same thing; so that Ellis was not moving as far from Rogers as he thought.

3a. How does ‘regard' relate to ‘acceptance' and ‘non-acceptance'?   

Essentially, Rogers and Ellis were involved in the same mission: to find a way to help despondent, depressed and discouraged counselling clients to believe in themselves; to accept that they are okay; to accept that they have some worth - and to reject their own idea that they are worthless.  For it was widely agreed, and still is, that for the client to continue to believe that they are worthless, because they have screwed up badly in their lives, is to continue to be neurotic and self-defeating in their beliefs, and thus to continue to feel lethargic and directionless: Stuck. 

Ellis seems to have essentially been saying: "If you regard yourself highly when you succeed, then you will, logically, and necessarily, regard yourself lowly when you fail.  Thus regard, as a form of ‘self esteem', is part of the problem, and not part of the solution.

This is not as self-evidently obvious as Albert Ellis thought.  Why?  Because, in theory, I could decide to regard myself highly when I succeed; and then when I fail, to refuse to regard myself lowly, but rather to say "I will continue to regard myself highly, even if I don't succeed, just so long as I keep setting goals, and keep functioning intelligently towards their achievement". 

3b. What are USA and UOA?

Ellis was interested in how to avoid his identified problem, of rating yourself highly when you succeed, or when you get love and respect from others, and then rating yourself lowly when you fail in work, or fail to get love and respect from others.  (This is a common problem, but as I showed above, it is not the only way to go with this idea).  His solution was this: "Never rate your ‘self' as a whole human being at all.  Only rate your acts and deeds.  And accept yourself unconditionally, whether or not you do well, and whether or not anybody loves you".

This seems like an elegant solution, and indeed Renata and I have been pursuing this solution - called Unconditional Self Acceptance (USA) - for many years now, with great success.  (The other elements of the system are Unconditional Other Acceptance [UOA] and Unconditional Life Acceptance [ULA] - which call for us to accept other people unconditionally, no matter how they behave or fail to behave; and to accept the world exactly the way it is, no matter how that happens to be).

4a. Am I saying that I am opposed to ‘positive regard' for myself?

Yes and no. In principle, I try to never rate the whole of myself highly when I do well in the world, and never to rate the whole of myself lowly when I perform badly in the world.  And perhaps I achieve that about 80% or so of the time.  However, the other 20% of the time, I do rate myself highly when I do well in the world. I sometimes, for example, exclaim that ‘I am an exceptionally good therapist', as Albert Ellis has also been heard to say in public!  And I do occasional get on my own case if I cannot move my business forward in line with my goals.  However...

4b. Do I ‘accept' myself?

...in the main, up to 2005, I did try to stick to Unconditional Self Acceptance (USA), Unconditional Other Acceptance (UOA) and Unconditional Life Acceptance (ULA), as Ellis's argument is very powerful, and the results of these systems are that I almost never disturb myself about my performance in life, or how other people respond to me.

5a. Am I saying I am opposed to ‘positive regard' for others?

Yes and no. 

No, I am not opposed to positively regarding other people in this sense: I relate to all others on the basis of Carl Rogers' core conditions: I treat all other people with respect, genuineness and empathy.  And that is a form of regard. I also tend (without willing it) to regard highly those people whose work I admire - e.g. fellow researchers and writers on personal development topics. (And I allow that to continue because it seems a harmless form of admiration).

Yes, I am opposed to ‘positive regard' in this sense: I try not to regard most people positively when they perform well at their work, and then regard them negatively when they perform badly in their work.  That would be to confuse them and their performances.  They are not their performances.  They do the performance; and they are responsible for it.  But they are not it.

But I do regard bad work as bad work, and I believe that that behaviour had better be corrected.  And I do regard good work as good work, and believe that good work should be acknowledged, and the worker praised for that good work.

That still leaves the question of whether or not I would offer unconditional positive regard to another human being, and I will deal with that further down this page...

5b. Do I ‘accept' others?

Yes, I do aim to accept all other humans exactly the way they are, and I try not to *demand* that they should be different from the way they happen to be.

However, again, would I accept another human being unconditionally?  We will see in a little while that I would not, and why not...

6. What are the advantages of USA/UOA?

In the past I have found this effect: If and when I accepted myself unconditionally, I no longer got upset with myself when I failed to achieve a goal, or when I screwed up in a practical task, forgot to do something, or made an embarrassing mistake in public.  "What would you expect from a fallible, error-prone human?" I would ask myself and the world. But I still accept myself as being okay, just because I'm alive, and just because I choose to do so.

The advantage of unconditionally accepting others (UOA) is that when they let you down, screw up, or fail to give you what you want, you won't go up the wall and have a screaming fit, because after all, you accept them as being okay, even though they are fallible and error-prone.  You accept them just because they are alive, and because you have chosen to be accepting towards them, even though they will always be somewhat imperfect.

7. What are the potential disadvantages of USA/UOA?

It was not until July and September 2005, when the board of the Albert Ellis Institute split 4:3 on votes to remove Albert Ellis from his professional role; and later to remove him from the board; that I began to see that offering unconditional acceptance to others is unrealistic.  When Albert Ellis was asked how he felt towards one of the key figures who had been instrumental in having him removed from key roles in his own institute, he did not say: "I accept him unconditionally; and I can clearly see the distinction between his bad actions and his totally acceptable essence!"  No: he said something more like this: "I want him Denounced, Dismissed, Discarded".  He made no distinction between the individual and his actions.  And why was this?  Because we were now dealing with (his perceptions of):

1. A moral issue; and:

2. A personally painful issue.

8. How does CENT deal with regard/acceptance?

It took months for me to be able to make sense of this situation, but I eventually came to recognize, as a general rule, applied to any part of the world, at any time, present or future, that it is not okay to attribute "unconditional acceptance" to anybody, if that means exempting them from the normal moral and legal standards of his/her society.

Albert Ellis did not offer Unconditional Life Acceptance (ULA) to his life as it stood in September-December 2005.  No: he went to the court system to demand redress for what he saw as a major act of unfairness.  (Of course, his adversaries presented a counter case).  In the process he found out why life must be fair, even when it is proving to be unfair.  It must be fair, because anything less than fairness will not work for any reasonable person. (Of course if achieving that fairness proves to be impossible over the longer term, it then becomes necessary to ‘accept the uncontrollable fact that, this time, I cannot win'). And once a society, or community, drops below a certain critical level of fairness, that society or community is doomed to fracture and fall asunder.  Fairness is the glue that holds families, communities and societies together.

I was involved in the Justice for Albert Ellis Campaign between 2005 and 2007, when it was wrapped up.  My opponents, trained in Unconditional Other Acceptance for decades, did not accept me unconditionally.

And in time I came to see that I must preserve to myself the right to conditionally accept others - and that one condition that I must always preserve to myself is this: I accept all other humans, exactly as they are, provided they act from a reasonable moral sense or code; and commit to operate within the law!  This is what I call One-Conditional Other Acceptance (or O-COA).

I also apply One-Conditional Self Acceptance (O-CSA) to myself: I will accept myself as being okay just so long as I am clearly committed to living my life as a moral person, within the law of the land.

~~~

POSTSCRIPT

Have I anticipated all your questions on this subject?  Do you want me to address any outstanding issues?  If so, please leave a comment below, or contact me by email or telephone.