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| Dr. Albert Ellis |
A friend asked me over the weekend to help her with an emotional reaction she was having to an event in her life because, she thought, I had some wisdom along those lines.
I don't actually, except what I learned from the late
Dr. Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. For my
money, practicing REBT is the quickest, most permanent path from
blooming neurosis (which most writers and other artists seem to harbor
in their personalities, I think) to virtually 100% workable sanity.
Virtually, not totally, 100%. We must keep a bit of the neurotic, I also
think, to find ways of expressing, creating...all those non-nailed-down
sorts of things.
But I can say without any doubt at all that my
discovery of Dr. Albert Ellis was a magical turning point in my life,
without which I wonder how I would have avoided various sorts of mental,
emotional and physical doom.
The beginning of sanity was crazy
In the late 1970s, my husband had an assignment to
cover the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Association's annual conference in
Poughkeepsie, NY. I went along for the ride; at the time, I was
freelancing and doing pretty well. Dr. Ellis was the featured speaker.
He intended using a volunteer guinea pig to demonstrate his A-B-C method
of disputing one's nutty thoughts and acting sanely—regardless of
conditions or your past history or how crazy your parents were (another
favorite subject of Dr. Ellis)--and thereby creating a happy and
productive life.
Just to show you how NUTS most shrinks of the Freudian
stripe can be, not one of the entire audience of several hundred New
York shrinks volunteered.
Oh, dear. My husband needed his story. He worked for a
Dow-Jones paper as a bureau chief, and he couldn't fail to produce the
necessary full report for publication. So naturally, I volunteered.
Oh boy.....This involved my going up on stage, telling
Dr. Ellis and the world at large one of my own nuttinesses. I said I
hated waiting for people, and I was ALWAYS having to wait for my
husband, daily news being what it is.
So Dr. Ellis asked me pertinent questions, many along
the lines of, “Will the world end if he is 15 minutes late? Will you
have a heart attack? Will long purple hairs grow out of your nose?”
Sensible things. That is, things to show me how stupid it was for me to
get my knickers in a twist over a bit of a wait. AND...Ellis being Ellis
(which I would subsequently learn), in addition to teaching me how to
dispute nutty beliefs, he told me other sensible stuff, such as, “Just
take a book along and then you won't waste the time you're waiting.”
Duh.
A-B-C simplified
The dispute mechanism is simple. A is having to wait
for someone for an unspecified length of time, + B is awfulizing it,
telling myself it is terrible, unfair, etc., and it equals C, getting
upset and acting crazy. Obviously, the place to change the equation is
at B. At B, one changes the nutty, annoyed chatter to, “Oh, well, I can
just sit and relax then, or maybe call the person expecting me to say
I'll be late, or meditate.” And then C never materializes. No upsetness
ensues, no argument with a spouse, no downward spiral of life and the
events therein.
It was magic.
I used it quite a lot. Good thing, because moving back
to Manhattan from up the Hudson and BOTH of us freelancing was
definitely a prescription for nuttiness.
Tune-ups are quick and relatively cheap
For the first two years back in Manhattan, we were so
damn busy keeping the wolf from our 17th floor door, I didn't have TIME
to be nutty. But then we began making money, being able to relax a bit,
even take a vacation. And suddenly, I had time for nuttiness once again.
Fortunately, Dr. Ellis's Institute for RET, as it was then called, was also in Manhattan.
So I called him and made an appointment. It took about
three appointments, and I was back on track, nuttiness banished for
several years. I admit it helped a lot when he told me not to worry
about becoming a bag lady (which possibility terrified me) if the
freelance income ever got thin. Dr. Ellis pointed out that the bag
ladies were usually drug addicts or schizophrenics. “Haven't you noticed
they don't wear coats in winter and bundle up in summer?” he asked.
Well, yes. AHA! As long as I didn't blow coke or do something to send my
brain chemicals off the rails, he assured me, I would not become a bag
lady. I'd simply get a job.
About five years later, both my husband and I were
feeling a bit out of mental sorts, so we both saw Dr. Ellis. Again, a
brief stint, maybe five visits, and we were back to un-nutty again.
The opposite of shrinkage
Dr. Ellis didn't “shrink” his patients; he expanded
them into greater understanding of how to break their own nuttiness
juggernauts—and almost everyone has some from time to time. He didn't
care where the nuttiness came from (who cares how I got so obsessed with
being on time and nutty about waiting? Really?) He only cared to teach
people how to stop the nuttiness, shift attention to logical conclusions
and behavior, and get on with it.
He was one of my very few heroes. I felt a horrific
shift in the universe the day I learned that he had died. I had thought,
nuttily, that he was immortal.
Eternal ideas
His ideas are. Maybe Freud did something to change
people's attitude toward mental illness and those who suffered from it.
But seventeen years on the couch? No. Just no. Not economically
feasible, really, and not really good to keep dragging up old crap, I
think. The fact is, and this is my finding only, if you persist at
disputing your irrational beliefs via the A+B+C model, making the
rational changes needed at B, you'll eventually discover where your
irrational beliefs arose. If you care at that point.
I don't. I'm just happy I know how to make a happy
life, despite my continual dipping into the slime of political
commentary and such other examples of nuttiness. And I know how to do
that primarily because I had the good fortune to be a guinea pig for the
founder of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, and later to see him
for tuneups. (It must be noted that Dr. Ellis was an early sex
therapist, also. Naturally, I bought him a T-shirt in Key West once that
said, “Sex Therapist. First Session Free.” He said he would wear it to
some erudite convention, and I've no doubt that he did.)
Thanks, Albert Ellis. I was so privileged to know you.
To find out more about Dr. Ellis' work, and how you can benefit, click here.
For a quick intro to his A-B-C method, click here.
