“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” - Albert Ellis

This week Dr. Albert Ellis died. You may never have heard of him or met him, but Dr. Ellis most certainly changed your life. In the 1950’s Dr. Ellis broke away from traditional pschology practices and created what became known as Cognitive (CBT) or Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). In other words, Dr. Ellis championed the practice of using your thoughts to “heal” your mental habits, your internal rules, that create depression, and other “mental illness”.

Simplistically, Dr. Ellis believed that we are taught certain ways of thinking that don’t serve us very well as adults, that we develop an internal set of rules. We create unrealistic expectations for ourselves - an internal catalog of “shoulds” and “musts” that ultimately hurts our self-esteem. He used to tell people to “stop shoulding on yourself” and to stop “musterbating“. He once said that “neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.”
Some common ways that we can tell if we’re driving ourselves crazy, include:

1. Awfulising: using words like ‘awful’, ‘terrible’, ‘horrible’, ‘catastrophic’ to describe something - e.g. ‘It would be terrible if …’, ‘It’s the worst thing that could happen’, ‘That would be the end of the world’.
2. Cant-stand-it-itis: viewing an event or experience as unbearable - e.g. ‘I can’t stand it’, ‘It’s absolutely unbearable’, I’ll die if I get rejected’.
3. Demanding: using ’shoulds’ (moralising) or ‘musts’ (musturbating) - e.g. ‘I should not have done that, ‘I must not fail’, ‘I need to be loved’, ‘I have to have a drink’.

4. People-rating: labelling or rating your total self (or someone else’s) - e.g. ‘I’m stupid/hopeless /useless /worthless.’

The path out of this irrational negativity was to change your thoughts, to see things as they really are, accepting or tolerating frustration and discomfort, accepting “badness” for what it is. Ellis helped people be more realistic, more “real world”, more fact-based, avoiding exaggeration. He helped people focus on the near-term, what was happening now, and to choose the thoughts that helped them find a way to a better now.

Every time you come to a “personal growth workshop“, every time your therapist suggests choosing a new thought, every time you watch Dr. Phil or listen to Dr. Terri Orbuch (the Love Doctor), et. al., you are seeing the legacy of Dr. Albert Ellis. Every time you do an exercise at the end of one of my podcasts, somewhere Dr. Ellis is smiling.