The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

Albert Ellis, the psychologist who developed a type of therapy calledRational-Emotive Therapy, listed many beliefs that cause people misery in a bookcalled A Guide to Rational Living. He included beliefs such as:• To be happy one needs to be loved and approved of by virtually everyone• To consider oneself worthwhile, one should be thoroughly competent andachieving• It is awful and catastrophic when things are not the way one wants them to be• One’s past history determines one’s present behavior; if something stronglyaffected your life, it will always affect it• There is invariably a right, precise, and perfect solution to human problems andit is catastrophic if this solution is not found.Ellis maintained that most of our negative feelings stem from a belief that istriggered by something that happens to us. For example, if someone criticizessomething we have done, this might trigger the belief that to be happy we need tobe approved of by everyone. It is not the criticism itself that triggers negativefeelings in us, but rather the belief that everyone should approve of everything wedo, and therefore, that disapproval should make us upset. He suggests that a wayto counteract this process is to identify this belief and dispute it. For example, onemight remember that some of the most admired people in history had people whodisagreed with them. Galileo was disciplined by his own church, Socrates waseven sentenced to drink hemlock, Gandhi was shot. The disapproval does not takeaway from these people’s importance in world history. If such personages couldbe criticized, why should we be immune from disapproval?HMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 79