Dr. Albert Ellis and how to be a sane writer...or anything

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.

Tags:

sanity

artistic personality

dr. albert ellis

rational emotive behavioral therapy

manhattan

freelancing

Prim-Raf Theatre Murder Mystery Evening......

Maybe I should confess. When I was a small child, I discovered the arts in the following order:

• Ballet at age 3 (I must have seen it on TV, as that is the year we got our first one and I teased until they broke down and sent me for lessons!)
• Literature/Reading (shortly thereafter)
• Drawing as a serious pursuit at age 5 when my Kindergarten teacher tried to convince my parents that I should go to art school  (they declined, as I was already in ballet, and it was LONG before the over-scheduled child era)
• Theatre at age 9, when my grandmother took me to see West Side Story, the original original, on Broadway (yes, now you can calculate my age)
• Music at age 16, when my mother insisted I take piano lessons, which I loathed, as I had long since given up ballet, and she thought it would be useful to me as I was an avid theatre-goer by then, and acted in school plays.

So naturally, I became a journalist when I grew up, writing both arts and business, and spending a miserable year as editor of a large American agriculture magazine--odd enough since I was raised in New York City and on Long Island, where the only agriculture was to be seen in parks and consisted mainly of grass and ornamental trees.

From where to eternity???

I went to art school as an adult, and now do as much painting as writing. But old loves never really leave one, so I've gotten back into theatre, in a way. I accepted the task of doing promotion for Prim-Raf Theatre, Callington, Cornwall, UK. It's a job I did for a couple of years in the 1990s for a world-famous theatre in the US, Barter Theatre, which produced Gregory Peck, Larry Linville (Maj. Frank Burns on MASH), Frances Farmer (Titanic), Ernest Borgnine, Patricia Neal and more. At Barter, it was both a labour of love and of money in the bank; at  Prim-Raf, since it's a community theatre, is a labour of love.

Worthy love object

Prim-Raf is worth loving. Among the stars who have graced its stage are Edward Woodward and Michele Dotrice. It owns its building, highly unusual for a community theatre in any country. It has a store of costumes most professional theatres would drool over (and it hires them out to groups for productions and to individuals in need of fancy dress). And it gets high marks from the critics for its annual pantomime. The most recent one was an adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes--as it happens, a favourite fairy tale of mine when I was little, along with The Twelve Dancing Princesses with whom I naturally identified. Prim-Raf's version of Clothes saw a King who wanted to become a top model in the modern world, so all the songs were current. But that didn't mean the production lacked exploding cakes and all that sort of thing, and the ultimate baddies and the charming goodies, and of course a perfect ending.

Currently in rehearsal for presentation May 2 and 3, 2014 is Blood Money, an interactivie murder mystery evening written by Prim-Raf member Paula Beswetherick. It's Cornish all the way to the ground, with the action taking place in a pasty factory, and the audience being treated to pasties and a pint as they unravel who dunnit. At the end of the evening, one audience member, drawn from those who correctly provide the killer's identity, will be rewarded for his or her efforts with a prize.

No mystery about it

If you live in Cornwall or West Devon, pass it on. It will be a fun evening, as the interactive mystery evenings always are. It isn't Shakespeare (too high-falutin') nor Eugene O'Neill (too problematical)....but it is Paula Beswetherick, who has a deft feel for comedy and is a dab hand at food, having been a professional chef for no less that Madame Tussaud's some years ago. (So, of course, food WOULD have to be a part of her art.....)

Take a peek at the poster above. Click it and enlarge it and pick up your tickets in Callington, or on the door (if available). Frankly, for ten quid per person, it's a heck of a deal if I do say so myself.

***

Below, bonus video from a couple of years back.....

Monuments Men

Part of the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck (Wiki Commons)

I saw The Monuments Men this morning. Clooney was Clooney, Matt Damon was Matt Damon, and John Goodman was John Goodman, and Bill Murray was sort of Bill Murray, all acting like soldier not-wannabes to rescue stolen artwork from the Nazis.  There was one French actor, Jean Dujardin, one of only five French actors ever to win an Academy Award for his role in The Artist (I guess I'll have to see it!), but one who could give Clooney himself a run for his money as aging heart-throb. 

Despite the box-office gold casting, it was a good film. Not a great one. Good. But it did highlight the perfidy of Nazi officers and the overweening hubris of their miserable excuse for a Fuhrer, Der Fuhrer. Little Dolph, failed artist, failed everything.

WWII Redux

I've been reading a lot of WWII books lately, some fiction, some factual. There was one otherwise forgettable book a while back about young British women working at Cadbury's during WWII. I noticed later that the book was sponsored by Cadbury; I guess they needed some good PR to overcome the rather diminished character of their chocolate after the takeover by American food conglomerate Kraft, Inc. (It could be worse; they could have sold out to Nestle, reputedly the world's largest food company by revenue, headquartered in Switzerland...which, in my current mind frame...seems too damn close to Deutschland. Plus one wonders how many Nazi-thieved artworks live today in Swiss vaults. But I digress....)

I also read a book about Bletchley Park. What amazing feats those young and untried cipher-breakers did. Probably their work did shorten WWII by two years, simply by breaking the Nazi codes and never letting Dolph's Boys know their codes had been broken. This did, unfortunately, mean some Nazi targets were sacrificed so the commanders would not know their plans were known; shortly, the British command figured out they could keep the Nazis off-kilter by simply beefing up reconnaissance in the area the code breakers had revealed to be the next targets; then the Nazis thought the obvious recon and not code-breaking was responsible for their defeat.

I suspect that, despite the finding of five million--yes, FIVE MILLION--artworks stolen by the Nazis, there are an equal number left to find, or to prove definitively were destroyed by the Nazi horde. Spite, it would seem, was part and parcel of the Nazi mindset, not surrendering like gentlemen but pillaging like brutes.

WWII goes on and on and on....

Some of the remainder were found not too long ago in Austria, although the man whose house they were in claims they were not stolen, either from museums or Jewish collectors. Believe what you wish, but his father was an art dealer to Little Dolphie...and there is no honour among thieves.

There are many great collections on the continent with questionable provenance. The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, supposedly amassed by a family with Dutch and Hungarian ancestry, some connections in England and apparently great connections with the Nazi-tainted American Bush family (yes, THAT Bush family) is, I think, open to discussion. It is claimed much of the collection was purchased from embarrassed American millionaires after the 1929 stock market crash. Sure. Maybe. Who knows? Who will ever know? But taking at face value the provenance of any artwork in any private collection--in the aftermath of WWII's Nazi depredations on the artworks of the world--is simply being gullible. Provenance is not exact. Expert opinion is even less exact.

Film recreates life

What the real Monuments Men--about 350 of them, both men and women, and from half a dozen concerned nations--did to restore art stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners is astounding. If they had done no more than recover the Ghent Altarpiece, 17 Renaissance panels of incredible beauty and value, they'd have done a good day's work.

The Monuments Men deals with the theft and recovery of that altarpiece in a very dramatic way (I won't spoil it). But it is true that Little Dolphie ordered it seized; eventually, it was stored in the Altaussee salt mines to protect it from Allied bombing (Dolphie still expected to win, apparently, even as his 1000-year reich was being stillborn in a hail of bombings and routing of his soldiers). When the altarpiece was restored and returned to Belgium in a ceremony with the Belgian royal family, the French were not invited; the Vichy government had allowed the Nazis to take the painting in the first place.

It's a good movie, worth watching if only to assure one's self that there were, in the Allied nations, men and women of good will and deep convictions regarding the need to same humanity's artworks from brutalization, theft and destruction by the Nazis, and were willing to put their lives on the line to do it.

I salute Clooney, writer, producer and actor in The Monuments Men, for bringing it to public attention.



 

The Yoga Cure: Alive and well in Artland

I couldn't do this one yesterday....but soon!  (Wiki Commons)

Yesterday, I did something I haven't done in about six years, and it made an enormous difference.

I took a yoga class.

I've never been a yoga nut; I really haven't been a nut for anything, not even my beloved horse. But I did enjoy yoga when I got the chance all my life. When I was young (that is to say, under 60), I didn't need to practice it often because I was strong, healthy and flexible and I never had a problem with a pose.

That was then, this is now.

I actually could not perform the one-legged poses; I had suspected my balance was off, but that tested it.

I actually fell over in one close-to-the-floor tripod pose.

The instructor fell out of a pose shortly thereafter. No, she didn't. Yes, she did. This is England, where people are polite, doubtless the source of the hostess drinking from the finger bowl when an ignorant guest does so that the guest won't feel embarrassed. Just so, the instructor fell out of a pose. I actually wanted to tell her, "Hey, you didn't have to do that. I'm a former Yank, I can deal." But I didn't. Why should I rain on her civility parade?

Enlightenment through very gentle movement

But I learned something. By the end of the class, I realized that my faintly perceived balance issues were actually more like total lack of muscle tone. And of course, after having ridden horses, hard, for 20 years before just hanging it up eight years ago and doing zilch for exercise, the descent in strength was long and hard.

Fortunately, I am healthy. Despite my evening cocktail, which I regard as natural anyway, I eat no crap. I breathe as little crap as I can, which is probably very little indeed in semi-rural Cornwall. I work (sometimes) at staying mentally and emotionally healthy...although I admit that the go-round with the IRS 2.5 years ago about pushed me off the rails. Still, even that had a good effect; I renounced my US citizenship to rid myself of those wankers once and for all, and I'd wanted not to be an American for a long, long time.

So back to yoga and art.

Yoga Nazis

Before I left Upper East Tennessee/Southwest Virginia for the last time, I had started going to a  yoga class at the Johnson City, TN, community center. It was very inexpensive, like about 3 bucks, but the instructor was magical. I loathed the Salute to the Sun, still do, but  the rest was wonderful and her closing meditation alone was worth the price of admission. I have missed it since 1997.

I tried a yoga class  in Westminster, MD, about 6 years ago, realizing lack of riding was wrecking my muscles. But I was doing a lot of gardening, and frankly, it was better than the class. Then I tried one in Frederick, MD, that almost killed me. It was, I learned yesterday, probably Bikram yoga, which is like eastern calisthenics in a very, very warm room. I did that only once. And gave thanks that I lived through it.

And then the years rolled by. When I lived in the flat in Tavistock, I walked everywhere. Now, from my house on a windy road with lots of traffic in suburban Cornwall? Not so much, proving I do value my life. Good excuse, though, to become a slug.

Good yoga transcends place and time

Yesterday, at Sadhana Yoga Studio in Tavistock, owner/instructor Kathryn Blackie got me back to reality and yoga. She is kind. She is competent. She is knowledgeable. She does a good closing meditation. I actually signed up for two months of classes, something I have never done, ever.

Some parts of me, despite not being able to stretch ANY pose to the max, were sore, but a good sore.
The pain that had crept back into my knees after I tinkered (wildly) with the paleo diet that had cured them last summer disappeared. Last night, I didn't get the excruciating pain in my hips that had been with me most nights for a couple of months now.

In short, a single, gentle yoga class, in which I failed to do any pose to the max, cured a lot of what ailed me.

It also cured my attitude. I'd been snapping at Simon for weeks, for nothing. I thought it was the various promotional problems with my artwork and my writing making me crabby. Apparently not. Apparently it was disorder in my system. I had no need to snap at the poor man yesterday. So I didn't, and he was so happy, back to the charming, funny Simon I met and married.

I had been fretting for weeks about things that are very probably seven years away. I stopped fretting.

Onward and upward

I wrote a diatribe just for fun. (I love exercising those rhetoric muscles.) I finished a small painting. I cooked a really swell Chinese dinner-twice-cooked pork, spicy eggplant and cold peanut noodles. I ate fruit for dessert, not chocolate. (Simon was less thrilled with that, as he seemed to feel compelled to eat canned peaches with me. Yes, canned peaches. A childhood fave that I happened to have on hand. Plus I believe what a friend from Goa once told me; it is not good to eat raw fruit after dinner.)

So what's this got to do with art? Everything. One cannot properly produce artistic works if one is hurting and listless and lethargic and thinks there might be something wrong...which doctors probably could not pin down, but would have a good time trying to do and probably wreck the rest of one's life in the process.  I admit, I was actually thinking of visiting a doctor. Me. Visiting a doctor. Without having been tossed off a horse and carted off against my will. That's how bad it had gotten.

I'm going to do a few poses later today. I'm going to do a few tomorrow. I'm going to do a few every day, and lots of them on Tuesday mornings from 10 am to 11.30 am.  Why not? The benefits are enormous. They include:

• Less pain, heading toward none.
• Regaining strength and balance.
• Meeting some nice people.
• Being less crabby.
• Being more peaceful.
• Getting more writing and art done.

OK. Yes, increased work appears on my list. But you knew that. I might be one of a small group of Type A introverts in the universe. But there it is. And I make no apologies for it.

Whitewash

 

Drawing from book 12 Years a Slave (Wikipedia)

I've been looking forward to seeing the film 12 Years a Slave. Directed by Steve McQueen, it it scheduled to open in the UK on January 28, 2014. I expect I'll have tickets booked at my local Vue as soon as  I possibly can. I read the book a couple of months ago, and loved it, if one can use such terminology regarding a subject so fraught with horrors, particularly for an ex-New Yorker who grew up in horror at the things that went on in the American South up to the Civil War, and after for that matter. The first time I drove south, below the Mason-Dixon line separating former slave from former free states, I was horrified that some motels had huge signs saying "Colored." At first, I thought they were talking about TVs, and then it dawned on me.

I worked, in 1968, in a restaurant in the Florida Keys. There, no blacks were served, but no one ever told me not to serve blacks. As far as I know, no black person ever arrived and asked to be served, the colour lines were so firmly drawn. But the racism was all around; when I went to get the courtesy card from the local Winn-Dixie supermarket, they asked for my race. I refused to write it in. They asked me why, since I am white. I told them THAT's why...because I am white, and I am insulted to be asked to prove I am not black, since it made no difference to me whether I were white or black, so why should it make any difference to them? They let me have the card. Whoop-de-do! I could now cash my paycheck at the supermarket. And I figured I had made a small point for humanity.

White and Black were different in America

Of course, it would have made a great deal of difference to my life had I been black in America. Some bad, some good. For instance, I couldn't get an internship at Time, Inc. magazines because I was not a member of a minority, and Affirmative Action had been instituted right before I got my bachelor's degree in 1970. Had I been black or Hispanic, I would have been a shoo in.  It was not the end of the world, though, and life went on.

Later, when I was in grad school in 1973, in Georgia (the deep south), I was told by a prospective employer that I would have to refuse to wait on black customers if he told me to. I refused that offer of employment. Within the year, a black woman was the maid of honour at my wedding. Was I saying anything to that racist restaurant owner by choosing her? Not as far as I know. Alberta Knox, former sometimes singer with the Hot Nuts, was simply my best friend.

All this is not to proclaim my status as an enlightened white former New Yorker; it is to let readers in the UK know how totally pervasive dealing with the race issue was, and still is, in the United States.

How to screw up advancement

That having been said, I am now of the opinion that two black men have done great harm to journalism and the arts in America, one because his grasp was longer than his reach and the other because he is, to put it mildly, an unreconstructed intellectual bumpkin whose ignorant posturings would be an embarrassment regardless of his race.

The first man is Jayson Blair, the man who submitted plausibly bogus stories to the editors at the New York Times; those editors did not recognize shoddy journalistic practice until it smacked them in the face. Blair set feature writing back a good few decades with his shenanigans. It would have been the same had he been white. But there is some reason to believe that the editors were doing their own version of Affirmative Action, and in their appalling ignorance, selected for bling and nor for brains, doing no one any favours.

The second man is Armond White, whose name I had never come across until today. It seems, though, that he pitched a hissy fit--which is to say was unbearably rude and condescending--when Steve McQueen won a New York Film Critic's Circle award for directing 12 Years a Slave. According to the Toronto Sun:

Armond White, the editor of New York arts publication CityArts, whose opinions are often at odds with those of other film critics, called out, 'You're an embarrassing doorman and garbage man. F**k you. Kiss my a**'.'

Another Canadian publication, Maclean's, noted that White thinks of himself as a "pedigreed film scholar." Odd, scholars rarely use such terminology as that above. They usually have larger and more creative vocabularies with which to express disdain or delight, and they usually refrain from the sort of ad hominem attack that would seem to be White's speciality.

I would consider White a boor at best, a mental midget at worst, as long as we are traversing the Ad Hominem Trail, opened by none other than White himself. And I'm fairly certain my mongrel dog's pedigree is better than White's scholarly pedigree, regardless of where he got his sheepskin. I should think he'd be an embarrassment to most universities.

Which issue is he protesting?

It would appear that White, who claims enlightenment beyond that of all others, finds it somehow unacceptable that a British man could direct a film about an American black issue. But it is not, of course, a black issue. Enslavement of one group of people by another is a human issue. Period. We were all affected by it, one way or another, and no one person has a mandate to claim the high ground. Not one. We all have traces of racism within us; we all have been affected by racism in some way. We all have the right to speak our minds about it, to make films about it, whether because we are intrigued by the art itself, or because we wish to expiate our own or our society's guilt.

By the way, the Steve McQueen in question is not the white action-film hero; he is the black British director.

So what is White saying, then? That McQueen was somehow being a waterboy to vicious white men? That he has no right to make an American film, being a British man? That the book was trash? What, exactly, is this black man--who preens himself like a bygone Bojangles and who retains the name White while many black men changed to African-derived names--what is this grandstanding peacock of loud plumage and absent substance doing, exactly?

Darned if I know. I think he's laughable, frankly. Which many of the readers of the Maclean's article noted as well. One wrote:

It's obvious what White is doing. It's equally obvious what a wank it is. Pure self-indulgence. If you like something you should be honest about it and give an unfiltered review, regardless of what the 'masses' OR the 'cognoscenti' think. Clearly he waits to see what the consensus is, and if something gets too many raves, he feels it's his duty to take it down a peg. Hey, what ever gets him off, it's his own business, but it has nothing to do with reality.

Indeed. White's substance- and literacy-challenged rantings do about as much for me as American artist Julian Schnabel's sticking pottery through canvasses and calling himself a genius did. Less, really. At least Schnabel was, for a time, entertaining. White? Not so much. Just a bully using his racial pulpit to get away with stuff that marks him not as a fighter for human equality and artistic standards but, to descend into his chosen gutter, an elitist wanker reverse cultural snob of, however, the very highest order.