A Review of Albert Ellis's "Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better: Profound Self-Help Therapy for Your Emotions" by SteggyBlue, University of Hawaii, Dr. Leon James, Instructor

A Review of Albert Ellis's book "Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better: Profound Self-Help Therapy for Your Emotions", Impact Publishers, 2001

As one can clearly see from the title, the three main divisions of Dr. Ellis's book is feeling better, getting better and staying better in regards to mental health and general outlook on life. As for the feeling better part, I think Dr. Ellis was saying that feeling better about yourself and others is a good start towards the overall goal of staying better, but in and of itself, it can be more detrimental than helpful. You can feel better if you participate in cognitive distractions such as meditation, exercise or engaging in hobbies but if you never bother to get to the root of what is actually disturbing you, then you are not solving your problem but merely sweeping it under a carpet of relaxing activities. The getting better part encompasses ways in which you can make yourself less susceptible to being disturbed about life's frustrations. The foremost way to do this is to go through the ABCs of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy or REBT in your mind when faced with adversarial conditions. The last section deals with ways in which you can make REBT a permanent factor in your life. This will help prepare you for your journey through life. By making profound healthy changes in your cognitions and doing preferring instead of demanding, you are well on your way to achieving a happier, healthier life. Dr. Ellis wrote this book in layman's terms so that anyone could read this book and get something from it. So I strongly recommend that reading this book.

The topics that are covered in the book are relevant to public concern by the fact that feeling better, getting better and staying better are ways to improve ourselves and the general welfare of society. I heard on a newscast that presently 1 in every 5 Americans are depressed and unhappy with their lives. This statistic may in part be due to the recent terrorist attacks, but I think that people generally feel that life's frustrations are too much to handle. We were never taught to deal with our emotions in a formal way and had to conduct trial and error studies of our own to cope with our emotions.

I think that we would all like to receive help in this area but psychotherapy can be expensive. There is a large demand for self help but the mass media does not seem to know this fact. According to one website, there are presently 720 television self-help stations operational. However, self-help stations make a very small contribution to total coverage. For example, the 281 SABC 2 self-help stations contribute to less than 1% of the channel’s coverage. (http://iba.org.za/selfhelp.html)

We may have seen scenarios on television and used them as models. But are they realistic ways of dealing with situations and real human emotions? Most of the popular shows on television are sitcoms in which the characters poke fun at each other and everyone laughs. When a character takes offense to the wisecrack, then that becomes funny as well. However, in reality this is far from the truth. When people say negative things to each other they usually become upset and reciprocate the negativity. This book with its message of having a positive outlook and working towards sincere, healthy and profound lifestyle changes, teaches us to undo the negativity that society and evolution has created. I found a website that more or less agrees that real life situations are not so easily solved. This website gave some good advice on how to handle major life decisions. (http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/major.htm)

Dr. Ellis's message of high frustration tolerance and non-musturbating is needed in today's society now more than ever because we all seem to have an impatient and intolerant attitude towards one another and ourselves. The mentality seems to be "make me wait and you'll be sorry!" We are always rushing and want things done quickly. The book tells us to have compassion for other people and it teaches us to have more patience. Life is full of difficult situations but they need not be distressing. The book states that we have control over how we go about living and that we can lead happy lives even when things don't go our way. We play the largest roles in our own lives and should not brush off this responsibility onto others. We may not have to ability to escape adversity and disappointment, but we do have a choice of how we handle it. I know it is easier said than done, but with practice and a sincere effort, anyone can become a master of REBT and use it to help them overcome virtually anything.

Dr. Ellis states the we disturb ourselves and if you think about it, it is indeed true. We may not be consciously aware of it, but we are in fact choosing to be disturbed. When someone does something we don't approve of we get all hot and bothered about and decide that the person is an idiot. But in actuality that person just had a difference of opinion...sometimes a very vocal difference of opinion, but a difference of opinion nonetheless.

The biggest culprit of propagating negativity is irrational believing. This tendency to make a mountain out of a mole hill stagnates our growth as people. We make things seem worse than they really are and then go off on tangents about it. We ruminate and ruminate about how we were wronged and how it's not fair and how dare so and so say such a thing/do that to me. But as the old saying goes, whoever said life was fair? It isn't and probably won't ever be. We have to get used to this cold, hard fact, move on and steer clear of using musts, shoulds and oughts. We have to dispute our irrational beliefs as they come and learn to change our cognitive scripts to something that includes realistic scenarios and dialogue.

Another problem that we have is that we consistently rate ourselves and others and let this dictate our emotions. According to the book, we should try to have unconditional self acceptance and unconditional other acceptance. This is accepting yourself and others regardless of how you and others perform.

We are also guilty of low frustration tolerance, meaning that we think things are horrible instead of just unfortunate. This exemplifies the exaggeration and we make things worse than they really are. High frustration tolerance is seeing situations as bad but manageable. In this instance, we are able to think of ways to handle the adversity and move on.

Another problem the book addressed is the tendency for some to want to be absolutely perfect. This can never happen because we are not capable of being perfect. Life is a learning experience and part of the learning is making mistakes. Making mistakes is not necessarily bad if you have learned a lesson from it.

Dr. Ellis’s book had many useful and simple exercises to try. These exercises are intended to help us with our use of REBT in our lives. They teach us ways of disputing irrational beliefs and coming up with ways to minimize the distress caused by bad experiences.

The book discussed imaging techniques as a way to gradually overcome trauma and as a way to allow ourselves to experience life’s pleasures. We can either imagine the good or bad experience or actually go through it.

Another exercise was flooding. This is when we imagine a terrifying experience to the fullest extent. According to Ellis we will eventually become bored with the scenario and be able to think of ways to get out of the terrifying scenario, which we can then use as cognitive scripts for when similar real life situations occur.

Dr. Ellis also suggests that we encourage ourselves realistically and thus have realistic optimism. It is good and well for us to believe in ourselves and think that we are capable of doing practically anything, but if we go too far it can be detrimental to our health. We are not superheroes and should not live our lives thinking we are.

He also gave a personal account of using in vivo desensitization to overcome his phobias of public speaking and talking to women he did not know. In vivo desensitization is when a person immerses themselves in the dreaded situation and eventually gets used to it.

Well, for the first and second exercise I imagined myself drowning. I can actually swim and tread water quite well, but for some reason I like to steer clear of the ocean. I imagined myself all alone in the dark in the big, vast ocean treading water. I imagined sharks in the depths waiting to rip my limbs off. It was scary, but then I started thinking realistically that sharks don’t like humans. The only time they actually bite people is when they mistake us for something else, like a turtle. I realized that I am not really afraid of sharks or the water but of the unknown.

For the third experiment I just wrote down my goals and ways that I thought I could achieve them. I then looked over the list and marked off the unrealistic goals and ways to achieve them. I then though about realistic ones and substituted them into the list.

I didn’t do the in vivo desensitization because I don’t have any phobias. I have things I am afraid of but I don’t feel that they required me to actually through myself into those situations.

Throughout the book, Dr. Ellis gives mini reviews of books and exercises written and used by other psychologists. He said that Mihali Csikszentmihalyi found that short-term involvement in something can lead to pleasure in his book "Flow". Ellis agrees with this to a certain extent. He believes that a vital involvement in something is good but if a person is consumed by the interest, then it is unhealthy. He states that Jacobson's Progressive Relaxation Technique can actually be a cognitive distraction and make a person dependent on the exercise before they can go ahead and do something like public speaking. Thus the person never really gets to the root of their problem and uses the technique as a crutch.

Well if you think about it, the entire book deals with the topics of health and stress. This book was written with the intention to help reduce our stress via REBT and the aforementioned exercises, which, in turn would help us to lead healthier lives. Stressing ourselves unnecessarily takes it toll on us mentally and physically. When we constantly worry and feel that we were wronged and that life is unfair, we depress ourselves and this adversely affects our ability to function normally. Specifically, avoiding self-disturbing beliefs is the key to success. Once we are able to dispute our irrational beliefs and replace them with practical and rational ones we are less paranoid and catastrophic in our thinking. This greatly reduces our stress factor and we are more healthy mentally, leading to better physical health and thus become more functional people.

I have taken about 9 psychology courses and thus far, I think this book fits in with the Humanistic Approach to psychotherapy, which has themes of the self, self-actualization, living healthy and having individuality. The main figures in this branch of psychology were Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May.

These humanistic themes follows the same themes that Dr. Ellis put forth in his book. REBT is a method to be more aware of the self in situations. It teaches us to change our negative thinking to rational thinking. We are then able to feel less upset about difficult or unexpected situations and act out in a practical manner. The ability to think rationally in times of adversity allows us to potentially become self-actualized individuals.

This book made it a point to really differentiate between feeling better and actually getting better. It explained that although a person feels better about their situation it is just a cognitive distraction and a temporary fix. If we don't get to the root of our problems they persist long after we feel better. The ABCs of REBT is a good start to changing our irrational belief systems. It helps us to understand that we actually have a choice of how we feel. I enjoyed hearing about how other neurotic individuals were able to overcome their irrational beliefs and live happier, healthier lives. It was inspiring to hear that some holocaust survivors were able to deal with their adversity and became clowns to brighten the days of children.

I liked the client examples that Dr. Ellis incorporated into the book. It was inspiring to hear other people overcome their misfortunes and live happy lives. If other people can do it so can I. I generally feel more positive about my life. I sometimes falter and go back to my old irrational beliefs but for the most part I am able to think rationally. I also liked the readability of the book. He used some interesting terminology but he explained them very well and now I use the terms in my daily conversations with people. I also liked his straightforward advice. He said that we can go ahead and use cognitive distractions like cleaning and exercising because it makes us feel a little better, but not to forget to uncover the root of the disturbance. If we forget to do this most important part, then we may never actually get to the next levels which is to get better and stay better.

This book was helpful overall but I did not agree with some parts. It seemed to me that Dr. Ellis had some unrealistic expectations of his patients. For example, he wanted Joyce to not feel bad that her husband left her and her son after he got his 19-year old secretary pregnant. He wanted her to say that it was merely unfortunate. Joyce is human and has emotions. I think she could eventually get to this point but not right after is happened. He also suggested the flooding technique. It was very terrifying to flood my mind with images of a horrific incident. I think I was able to overcome the situation because I did have a phobia of the situation. But for others that are just scared to death of something, I don't think it would work, but might even make them more fearful.

I would just like to say that this was a really interesting and helpful book. I was skeptical that my attitude would change just by changing my negative thoughts to positive ones, but it does indeed work. It took me a while to get to this point because I was a very cynical and pessimistic person. It was a little awkward at first to use REBT, but with practice it is very do-able. If So if I can do it, anyone can.