A review of·
Albert Ellisâs
Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better
ÊAtlas
April 2, 2002
University of
Hawaii at Manoa
Instructor:Ê Dr. Leon James
Instructions for this report
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ Dr. Albert Ellis is an internationally renowned psychologist
and author in the field of self-help, relationship, and psychotherapy.Ê His book ãFeeling Better, Getting Better,
Staying Betterä serves as a guide for individuals who seek to change their
self-disturbing behavior.Ê The topic
revolves around therapy which individuals can perform on themselves as a
therapeutic aid for their emotions.
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Main Divisions and Parts
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Ê
Other major topics presented in
the book are Dr. Ellisâs own concepts.
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U.S.A.
(Unconditional Self-Acceptance) You fully accept yourself
despite your short-comings, bad performance, or rejection by significant
others.Ê It relies on this deduction:
Existence is good.Ê You exist.Ê Therefore you are good.Ê It is the basis of Rational Emotive
Behavior Therapy (REBT), that you refuse to give yourself any global rating. |
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C.S.A. (Conditional
Self-Acceptance) Humans are conditional when
accepting themselves by default.Ê We accept
ourselves on condition that we perform well and earn other peopleâs
approval.Ê Though we choose to be
C.S.A. beings, we can also choose to be U.S.A., though the choice is not
easy, simply because we are programmed by our parents and other institutions
of society to have the conditional philosophy.Ê It is a long and hard effort to change our
thinking, feeling, and acting processes once a particular philosophy has been
lived and practiced, but it can be done if you PYA (push your ass)! |
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Irrational Beliefs/ Rational Beliefs (IBâs and RBâs) IBâs: Self-defeating that cause you to react negatively to adversities or ãawfulizeä events that are otherwise bad, but not harmful or disastrous.Ê They are usually accompanied by ãshouldsä and ãmustsä (ãmusturbatoryä) demands. RBâs: Self-helping behavior that regulates your negative emotions so that they are healthy, rather than destructive.Ê Demands become preferences. |
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U.O.A. (Unconditional Other
Acceptance) As a member of the human race, you
will inevitably interact with other humans (assuming youâre not a hermit),
and are dependant on others for food, education, shelter, clothing, etc·Ê It is within your best interest to live in
a social group and get along with them.Ê
You want others to treat you fairly and decency, and therefore you
should treat them the same.Ê Though
you donât have to personally agree with their conduct, you should tolerate
it. You unconditionally accept
others because they are like you.Ê They
exist, they make mistakes, and they should not be evaluated by their total
selves, but just their acts and traits.Ê
There are no ãgoodä and ãbadä people, just ãgoodä and ãbadä traits. |
High
Frustration/Low Frustration Tolerance
High Frustration Tolerance (HFT):Ê Though you may view bad things as bad and undesirable, you do not demand that they be abolished nor do you ãawfulizeä them as even worse than they actually are. Low Frustration Tolerance (LFT):
ãAwfulizeä about problems and demanding that ãthey must not exist,ä and if
they do they make you panicked, depressed, and anguished. |
Death of the West
Media
and Society
Unconditional Self-Acceptance
is no radical idea, it has been embraced by Eastern society since the times of
Gautama Buddha and Lao-Tzu.Ê However, it
has been philosophically rejected by Western society.Ê Dr. Ellis brings this much needed, but resented, idealistic way
of living in to the form of psychotherapy to the West, but for what
reason?Ê Whoâs John Galt?
Objectivists and ãRandites,ä such as Nathaniel Brandenâs ãself-esteemä camp would try to argue that ãUnconditional Self-Acceptanceä is morally agnostic, and therefore irrational.Ê In addition, one might try to compare China and India (where Unconditional Self-Acceptance first emerged) against the United States (largely Conditional Self-Acceptance) and compare them in terms of economic prosperity, military strength, literacy, standard of living, and other quantitative measures.Ê According to these materialistic evaluations, Conditional Self-Acceptance wins out.
Yet, Dr. Ellisâs aim is not
to degrade materialistic achievement, but simply points out an irrefutable
truth: Westerns, especially Americanâs in the United States, are more depressed
than anyone else.Ê With all these
accomplishments Westerners have made in the scientific method in prolonging
life and making it more comfortable, things that unite humanity and give that
life meaning have been sacrificed and forgotten through the process.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ
Unconditional Self-Acceptance is
a much needed message in Western society today, especially among Americans in
the United States.Ê Too often have I found
my own self (an American in the USA), who wrong believed to be immune to
societies image of success and attractiveness, have allowed opportunities
flutter past me like a plastic bag blowing in the wind.Ê The root of this emotional masochism,
because of which Iâve avoided people I thought were interesting, looked away
when a cute girl gave me the goo-goo eyes, didnât contribute my ideas to a
professor, and silently suffered for dozens of years is because of Conditional
Self-Acceptance.Ê Each time that I was
at war with myself was triggered by thoughts such as: ãIâm not as profound as
that person,ä ãThat girl wouldnât want to date a loser like me,ä and ãMy
professor has overrated my intelligence.ä
The importance of
Unconditional Self-Acceptance rests mainly on the axiom that oneâs self-worth
can not be determined by how much one achieves.ÊÊÊ This is a serious blow to Capitalism and rational
self-interest, which is why it is such an alien subject to our society that
itâs put in the category for psychotherapy.Ê
But perhaps that is also why it is important that we know of such ideas,
so that we do not limit our way of seeing the world and treat those that are
different as mortal enemies.Ê If you
were in a cave all your life, chained to the wall, and the only thing you saw
were shadows, how would you react when someone freed you and took you out in to
the sunlight?Ê It is important because
it is important to know as much ideas as possible, to view the world in as much
perspectives as possible, so that we may destroy our self-made prisons.
Anyone who has denied their potential as a human being, thrown away
opportunities because of self-doubt, or feel they do not deserve to be happy
should read this book. In fact, maybe we all should read this book. The Western
world has paved itâs road to self-destruction with a combination of Conditional
Self-Acceptance, debauchery, and hedonism. One of the greatest spawns of this
sweet-smelling but poisonous flowering is the media, which plays one of the
major roles in this gradual decline in society. Iâm not saying lets overthrow
Capitalism and set up a Communist structure to enforce "harmony,"
because I think Capitalism and the Free-Market are good things and one of the
best offspringâs of humanity. However, the idea has become perverted. We no
longer have hard-working, honest families running "mom-and-pop"
stores, itâs now run by people who are trying to make a fast buck.
When a boat sinks, itâs usually women and children to be rescued
first. But when Enron collapsed, the executives saved themselves instead of the
families of their workers; and the women and children were indeed first, to go
overboard and die. The example only palely illustrates the new problem, and
unfortunately standard of our society: the rich have become the bourgeoisie,
ruling "elite." In effect, the rest of society is crumbling down like
a row of dominoes after itâs foundations are shaken. Our children are in
despair when they can not buy the new piece of plastic toy, made by a poorer
child their age in a sweatshop in China. Teen-agers and most college students
entire lives revolve around what-some-professor-thinks-about-my-essay, and
what-some-girl-thinks-about-my-shoes. There is no common thread that binds us
together. We do not speak words, we speak shit.
We have become actors. We all play roles that are not from our
heart. We choose are leaders, not for their honesty or bravery or integrity,
but how good they are at playing these roles. We do not trust our leaders but
we follow and vote for them anyway. We treat each other with fear and
suspicion, each of us in our own subjective universe going about our own,
insignificant "business." For the most of us, we go through our daily
routines: Wake up, shower, eat, go school, go work, do homework, watch TV, talk
on the phone, eat again, use the bathroom, complain about our day, complain
about our boss, complain about someone who cut us off in traffic, get ready for
bed, sleep. Their mind contains a blank.
For some of the rest of us, they think about what the point of
all "this" is. They wonder where all this ordered chaos came from, or
whoâs doing it. Is everything they do, see, read, speak, hear, or think about,
all pointing in one direction toward That Indescribable Thing? Their mind
contains a question mark. And that is all we have become, blanks and question
marks. And long series of 1âs and 0â s.
The media is the most powerful piece of propaganda in this whole
universe. We eat what the media says to eat, wear what it says to wear, and
vote who it says to vote for. It can make or break ideas, wars, presidents, and
countries. When the media touts the false message that being thin is in,
millions of women starve themselves so they can be what TV wants them to be. TV
is the new pagan God which most of us are willing to kow-tow, and meddling with
itâs power is almost like heretics attacking the Church during the Dark Ages.
It socializes us in to humanoids, not humans.
We flip through the channels, looking aimlessly for something to
amuse us. Murder, war, rape, crime, and poverty are dismissed like empty
bottles of beer when "Friends" or "Sex in the City" comes
on. Our lives are in despair when we canât solve all our problems in a
convenient, 30-minute time frame, sponsored by Diet Coke or AT&T. And when
we do see something on the news that scares us, we huddle in front of the tube
growing more suspicious and fearful of the world around us. Our brains, which
have become a hazy, gray cloud of uncertainty screams out "At least let me
be safe in my own living room!" Each day the world begins to shrink around
us like saran wrap, on the inevitable path toward the suffocation of our
morals, humanity, decency, and genuine concern for the human race. TV has
become real and our lives have become fake.
Perhaps by reading Dr. Ellisâs book we can help solve this
philosophical disaster.
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Sometimes the media can be an outlet for stress relief during
national crisis and may serve as a common beacon for people who are lost or
confused in their emotions. http://www.ncptsd.org/facts/disasters/fs_self_care_brief.html Most of the stress relief tecnhinques given on this website are
pretty general, but they're simple, easy-to-do ordinary things that we all
probably do daily. |
Das Buch
Dealing
with your Problems/Exercises
First and foremost, you have to want to change. A therapist does
not hold the power of God in his words, or the knowledge of Lao Tzu in her
advice to make you feel, get, or stay better. Itâs all said in Dr. Ellisâs
axiom that: You disturb yourself. "To improve, you have to take suitable,
self-changing risks yourself" (Ellis, p. 69)
Feeling Better!
He suggests some popular behavioral self-help methods that would
make you feel and maybe even get better, though not actually stay better. The
reason being that even though they may not be permanent in your
self-enhancement, it is at least a small step in the right direction. Also, you
can not stay better if donât feel better to begin with. To feel and get better,
he proposes the following:
1. Using Breathing Exercises:
Primary reason is to prevent
hyperventilation, which leads to emotional dysfunction. "Belly
breathing" is healthier than "chest breathing" because it is not
rapid and shallow. It will help you decrease the your level of anxiety and help
you get better quicker.
2. Exercising
When you exercise, it stirs up
endomorphins (anti-depressants) and disrupt your anxious and obsessive
thinking. He warns, however, that a devotion to exercise can actually
side-track you from getting better, because you are not confronting your
problems but evading them.
3. Sports
They have regular schedules which
will keep you consistently pre-occupied and socially involved with others. On
the other hand, it consumes a lot of time, energy, and money and easy to become
over-evolved with.
4. Yoga
Relaxing movements and steady
concentration, but the philosophy behind Yoga (Hindu, Buddhism, and Taoist) is
what he calls, "mystical nonsense." Therefore, it does not have the
philosophic ammunition to overcome your self-disturbing behavior.
5. Business and other Practical Matters
As long as you can keep yourself busy
with work or other practical matters without insisting that they absolutely
should and must be solved, then this can be a great distracting method. But
thatâs all it really boils down too, a distracting method to keep you from
worrying but also prevents you from recognizing your Irrational Beliefs.
Now that youâre on your way in feeling better, how about
actually getting better? The crux of getting better is to change your
philosophic outlook on life. No, he doesnât mean to buy "Philosophy for
Dummies" and soak in as much as you can (although I personally think that
people underestimate the power of philosophy and it would be wise to learn as
much of it as you can as a defense). Dr. Ellis does not also mean that you just
think, but also act on your philosophizing.
Dr. Ellis offers a very wide range of REBTâs (Ration Emotive
Behavioral Therapies) to choose for philosophizing methods. Here is a brief
outline of each one:
Getting-Better!
Disputing Core Irrational Believing: Absolutistic Shoulds,
Oughts, and Musts
Depressed and raging people drive
themselves in to insanity by turning wishes, desires, and goals in to demands.
The "trick" is, whenever you find yourself saying something like,
"I must get an A for my book review or else Iâm a failure," challenge
that statement! Dispute it with a Rational Belief by saying, "I donât have
to get an A on this paper, where is it written that Iâm a failure if I donât? I
would like to get an A for this book review so I should start on it
right now and work hard on it. But it still does not mean that Iâm a complete
jerk if I donât."
"What-if?"-ing
Go from "What if?" to
"So what if?" Some disadvantages may have some advantages in long
run, like being fired from a job can lead to prospects of a better job. Think
of the worst that could possibly happen, and prepare for it! "My life has
been filled with terrible misfortunes-most of which never happened!"-Mark
Twain.
Cost-Benefit Analysis:
Time and energy is limited, so
make sure you donât forget about the hidden costs of many pleasures, like
smoking, procrastinating, and poor eating habits. Figure out a quicker, easier
way to do things.
Overcome Perfectionism:
At the essence of your
self-disturbance is your need for a guarantee. Demanding yourself that you be
perfect is almost a certain failure, though Dr. Ellis says thereâs nothing
wrong with preferring to be perfect, but do not make it a must.
Modeling-Method:
Find someone who has conquered
their handicap (physical or mental) and derive inspiration from that person.
Find people who are currently dealing with their adversities (such as blindness
or poverty) and who refuse to be depressed about it, and derive inspiration
from them.
Minimize Over-generalizing and Absolutistic Thinking:
This is kind of self-explanatory.
Check the premises of your demands. Are they rational? Must I get that
cute girl to go out with me? Do I have to get an A for this paper?
Stop Disturbing Yourself about Your Self-Disturbing!
The most common thing people do
when they disturb themselves is to disturb themselves about their self
disturbing (say that 10 times fast)! Theyâre whipping themselves for whipping
themselves! Counteract this ridiculous cycle by recognize that you are human
and make mistakes.
Imagining Techniques:
Take an event that you remember with
anxiety and imagine that it happened 10 years before that. Why? The distance
may give you a different perspective on the actual importance of the trivial
event in the overall perspective of your life.
Writing:
Writing about your feelings may
help release them and forces you to recall and confront those strong emotions.
Cognitive Flooding:
If something is bothering you, then
let yourself be bothered! Donât escape from it, just feel it to itâs fullest,
possible, anxiety-provoking potential. Eventually, youâll become bored with it
and desire to conqueror it once and for all! Desensitize yourself to your own
horrors.
Three-Way Disputing:
- Realistic Questioning: Are your IRâs
factual?
- Logical Questioning: Do your conclusions
about not meeting your demands really need to be scrutinized? Are the
consequences of not getting an "A" really that horrible?
- Practical/Healthy Disputing:
Question your demands and ask yourself if not fulfilling them will cause
you to harm yourself or others.
Rational Emotive Imagery:
Similar to Cognitive Flooding, but instead of
allowing yourself to feel the fullest extent of your anger, you try to feel a
different, but healthier, negative feeling (like sorrow or disappointment).
Shame-Attacking Exercises:
The essence of human disturbance is shame, and
a lot of it is self-inflicted and unnecessary. In Shame-Attacking, you
purposely do something that would normally be embarrassing and realize that
thereâs nothing to really be embarrassed about. Such as calling out the time in
a crowded apartment store to no particular person, or looking at a pornographic
magazine in a public bus. You do something foolish, but that doesnât mean that you
are a foolish person, just a person doing a foolish act.
Rational-Role Playing:
You talk to a significant person in your life,
represented by an empty chair. Then you take the empty chair yourself and
become that person. Itâs also good for skill training purposes, like practicing
for a job interview. It helps reveal profound feelings that a normally
repressed.
Multiple-Chair Role-Playing:
You have 4 chairs. Chair 1 is your Rational
Beliefs. Chair 2 is Irrational Beliefs. Chair 3 is Disputing your Irrational
Beliefs. Chair 4 is your dysfunctional Consequences (anxietizing, self
depressing).
Humor:
Seeing things in a humorous light can prevent
self-depressing, see alternatives, blocks black-and-white viewing, sense of play
in your life, punctures your grandiosity, gain control over your feelings,
interrupts your dysfunctional patterns, relate to people better, and shows that
human foibles are universal. However, humor can become compulsively funny and
not give enough attention to your philosophic problems.
Risk-Taking, In Vivo
Desensitization:
Put yourself in the situation that you are
fearing. If you are afraid of public speaking, then make a public speech. If
you are shy at approaching cute girls, then approach them! If youâre afraid of
heights, go up to the highest floor of the tallest building in your area!
Staying Better!
Itâs not the adversity that happens to you, but
your view of it. Staying better involves changing your philosophic assessment
of adversities and to stop awfulizing them, and thereby stopping your
self-depressing. You have to change your three absolutistic, dogmatic musts
(adversities must not happen, you should be able to prevent them,
other people have to treat you the way you want to be treated). Use the
3-Way Disputing (see above), thus logical Disputing of your irrational beliefs
will help you come to a realistic conclusion. The main factor here, however, is
practice, work, and practice at it more!
Take
responsibility for your life, act, act, act!
Most
of the problems that this book deals with are interpersonal conflict,
inadequacy, self-disturbing, and not coping positively to adversities. The
solutions offered are listed above, starting with feeling better. After trying
the "feeling better" exercises, move on to the "getting
better" and try one of the numerous exercises described. The entire book
is related to health and stress, in a sort of new-age, humanistic approach. In
the broad field of psychology, it would best fit in with Clinical psychology,
particularly self-help.
Achilles Heel
Strengths and Weaknesses
First the weakness. Most of these are just technicalities and not
fundamental faults in Dr. Ellisâs ideas. Dr. Ellis warns against the 3 Dogmatic
Musts, but also says that if you want to change, you must want to change,
because only you can change yourself. That you must want to change away from
musturbation is mustabatory itself.
Then Dr. Ellis makes a lot of contradictory statements like
"the essence of your self-disturbance is your need for guarantee,"
and then few pages later remarks that, "the core of human self-disturbance
is shame." Then adds, a couple of pages later that "the need to be
perfect is the root of our self-disturbance." Which one is it? Or perhaps
itâs all of them, but with different masks on the same Damned Thing.
Dr. Ellis refers to religion as unrealistic and that Buddhism,
Hindu, and Taoism is "mystical nonsense." Iâm not a religious person
myself, well, at least not in the sense of mainstream religion because I think
all people worship their own form of religion. However, are people who do put
their faith in God, or Buddha, or Allah, or the Tao, philosophically disturbed?
Are they nuttier than a squirrels dinner? Also, Dr. Ellisâs own ideas have a
lot of parallels with Taoism, including the concept of Unconditional
Self-Acceptance, and Unconditional Other Acceptance. What would his reaction be
if someone called Dr. Ellisâs ideas as "a self-help cult of moral grayness."
Speaking of moral grayness, I think this there might be one,
fatal flaw in Dr. Ellisâs ideas. That fatal flaw is called moral agnosticism.
This plagues Taoism, which again Dr. Ellis accuses of being "mystical
nonsense" but endorses it himself! Placing no conditions on yourself is a
convenient way to get away with things that are evil, and placing no conditions
on other people is giving them a license to do whatever they want to do to you.
Dr. Ellis even says that "expecting your partner to treat you fairly"
is irrational. Or really?! Let me ask you this: So the woman who gets beat by
her husband everyday irrational for expecting her husband not to beat
her? In this case, Dr. Ellis would tell the woman that she should not expect
her husband to be a kind and fair person, and that she should see his daily
beatings in a different, positive view! She is "musturbating" when
she thinks, "My husband must not beat me," and therefore causing
herself disturbance.
Ok, here are the strengths. Dr. Ellis gives a nice, long, helpful
list of exercises that you can do to feel and get better. A lot of them are
simple to do and donât require the need of a therapist to do them. It allows
you to practice them on your own time, accord, and pace. Though they all wonât
work for everyone, numerous alternatives keep you from giving up, and I even
tried a few and found them to be quite helpful!
Anthem
Personal Relevance
My favorite passage and exercise of the book would be "In
Vivo Desensitization." Dr. Ellis, at the age of 19, approached 130 women
in a single month to overcome his fear of approaching desirable women. I have
the same fear myself, and I was really impressed by Dr. Ellis's
persistency to approach, and be rejected, by so many girls and not allow
himself to feel depressed by it! Iâm
21 and have been rejected by 4 girls in the past 7 years, compare that to Dr.
Ellis at the tender age of 19, rejected by 130 girls in 30 days! While Iâve pretty much given up all hope of finding a
girl that I like who would like me too, Dr. Ellis tried and tried again,
without depressing himself.
This is my favorite quote by Dr. Ellis: "If you keep risking,
the one thing you will almost always gain is freedom-the freedom to be
yourself, the freedom to try, the freedom to get over your years-maybe many
years-of frightened inhibiting. What have you got to lose but your
chains!" (Ellis, p. 183).
After I had found out that I
had already accumulated 14 penalty points (and probably another 7 for getting
this book review up so late), I thought that I was so stupid for not checking
the due date of this assignment.Ê I told
myself that I was a loser because I hadnât done this in time, and the fact that
I already lost almost 20% of my grade for this class because of a prior
assignment didnât make matters any better.Ê
But after reading Dr. Ellis, I thought, ãI donât have to get an A in
this class.Ê Where does it say so?Ê I am not a loser if I donât score in the top
10% of my class.ä
The fundamental lesson I learned
from Dr. Ellis is that reality doesnât always work the way Iâd want it too, and
that I have to come to terms with that fact and learn how to work with it.Ê
Unconditional Self-Acceptance
is thousands of years old for half of the world, but recently introduced in to
the Western half.Ê That this ideal can
only introduced to Westerners in the form of mental help is either a
mockery of Unconditional Self-Acceptance and Eastern philosophy, or simply a
reflection of the massive, moral degradation of Western society that assumes
that anything non-western canât possibly be for the mentally healthy people.
Links to other book
reviews of ãFeeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better.ä
Impact
Publisherâs Inc.
http://www.impactpublishers.com/reviews/fbgbsb.html
The Menstuff
Library
http://www.menstuff.org/books/byissue/feelings-general.html#ellis1
Amazon.Com
(write your own review)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1886230358/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/104-7541730-7632740
Robert V. Heckle
PhD
http://www.midnet.sc.edu/scpa/Fbwntr01.htm#book