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It snowed. It stuck. There wasn’t enough to bother with the snow blower, but I had people coming by to pick up things, so I shoveled. And that was my exercise for today. OK, that’s a lie. There will be more up and down a lot of stairs as well.
Boat (inflatable, NIB) and safety vest got picked up. Next up are potato heads in a bin and a wooden ramps toy.
Ellis is something else again:
“Suppose you want to change your obsessions, compulsions, phobias, and addictions. What then? Well, no one method will work for you all of the time. Sometimes using one philosophy to rid yourself of your anxiety will work—and sometimes it won’t. Often, fully expressing your feelings will considerably help you—and often deliberately avoiding your feelings, and instead distracting yourself with some intellectual pursuit, will serve you better. At times, you will best ward off disturbances by trying every therapeutic method you can think of—the long and the short and the tall!”
That last sentence more or less describes how DBT came into existence. I’m reading a 2012 edition of this book, so I don’t believe this is prescient, altho you never know what editions it might have appeared in in the past and Ellis was writing along these lines for long enough that this type of statement/approach could have sparked Linehan and others.
He goes on in that vein for a bit and then says:
“As I pointed out in 1962 in Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, and as Joseph Wolpe, Hans Eysenck, Isaac Marks, Albert Bandura, Stanley Rachman, and other behavior therapists later asserted, sometimes the best—or indeed the only—way to change a fixed idea is to force yourself to act against it: to engage in live homework assignments. This kind of forced—yes, forced—activity may show you that you can surrender an obsessive, compulsive, or frightful belief. Similarly, if you work directly on your feelings, and vividly experience and express them, you may more thoroughly change your crooked thoughts than by directly disputing these irrational Beliefs.” That’s pretty clearly a lot of CBT and exposure therapy approaches.
He then describes how he went from being overly afraid of public speaking to really enjoying public speaking by forcing himself to do it when young.
“However—surprise, surprise!—I unexpectedly began to enjoy speaking in public and have had fun doing it for the next sixty-five years. To my astonishment, I made a 180-degree turnabout of my extreme fear.”
NLP would 100% expect that, as would tons of other people, whether in an organized or informal way. High energy to high energy is pretty common.
Things take a dark turn however!
“Seeing that forcing myself to do uncomfortable things worked, I decided to do the same with my enormous fear of meeting new women. Because of my terrible fear of rejection, I never—and I mean never—approached strange women, although I went to walk and read in the Bronx Botanical Gardens about 250 days a year and saw a number of desirable women with whom I was eager to talk and date, and who also seemed to be flirting with me.”
He decides to make himself talk to woman and obviously this doesn’t kill him. Only one agrees to a date and she doesn’t show up so 100% this guy is proud — in 2000, well over 80 years old and thus old enough to know better — of having once made a daily habit of harassing women alone in the park minding their own business. Whenever you are sitting around wondering why men are so awful, consider the possibility that this guy was their therapist — or their dad’s therapist, or their grandfather’s therapist and told them to be awful. It’s not just Joe Rogan.
My daughter did a deep dive into Albert Ellis online, looking for trouble, and boy howdy did she find it!
From the wikipedia entry where she found it:
“ Ellis committed numerous sexual assaults[9] against women during his teens and early twenties, writing that he became addicted to nonconsensual frotteurism at the age of fifteen, and claimed to have had “had hundreds of frotteur-incited sex adventures” until his twenties. He reported that he "sought out crowded trains, standing rooms in the back of movie theaters, crowded elevators, and other places where I could rub my midsection against women's backsides and hips and soon get delicious orgasm,” stating that the encounters were “sometimes nonconsenting.”[9] Ellis also wrote, “I am now, when I think about it, guilty about my acts. I have remorse for what I did,” adding that, “I deplore the sin and accept the sinner” but then went on to say “I knew that frotteurism was wrong – that it is sometimes nonconsenting” but “Subway sex was the cheapest and easiest sex I ever had, and I continued it into my twenties . . . . But in some ways it was great: no fuss, no obligations, no time wasted, no having to put up with the inane conversation of most women, no pregnancy, no disease, no boredom.”[9]”
He was a big believer in telling people the stuff you are ashamed of as a way of reducing its power over you, so you could certainly see revealing this about himself (in a 2004 book about REBT) as practicing what he advocated. OTOH, you could equally see it as someone who behaved very badly and is really enjoying having the power to now brag about getting away with behaving badly. It can be quite difficult to tell the difference, but the memory of Feynman is always front-of-mind when I run across stories like this.
Like virtually every therapist of his vintage, he devoted himself to trying to cure people of homosexuality, and then turned around when the community did (to his credit, he wasn’t one of the last to pivot, but he wasn’t leading either).
A lot of appealing therapists — now and in the past — built careers on folding people from the edges of society back into the middle of current expectations, and viewing lapses as failures. The notable good part of Ellis, is that he viewed _the lapses_ as failures, not _the people_. The bad side, of course, is the sheer relentlessness of cheerful enforcement of social norms.
Boat (inflatable, NIB) and safety vest got picked up. Next up are potato heads in a bin and a wooden ramps toy.
Ellis is something else again:
“Suppose you want to change your obsessions, compulsions, phobias, and addictions. What then? Well, no one method will work for you all of the time. Sometimes using one philosophy to rid yourself of your anxiety will work—and sometimes it won’t. Often, fully expressing your feelings will considerably help you—and often deliberately avoiding your feelings, and instead distracting yourself with some intellectual pursuit, will serve you better. At times, you will best ward off disturbances by trying every therapeutic method you can think of—the long and the short and the tall!”
That last sentence more or less describes how DBT came into existence. I’m reading a 2012 edition of this book, so I don’t believe this is prescient, altho you never know what editions it might have appeared in in the past and Ellis was writing along these lines for long enough that this type of statement/approach could have sparked Linehan and others.
He goes on in that vein for a bit and then says:
“As I pointed out in 1962 in Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, and as Joseph Wolpe, Hans Eysenck, Isaac Marks, Albert Bandura, Stanley Rachman, and other behavior therapists later asserted, sometimes the best—or indeed the only—way to change a fixed idea is to force yourself to act against it: to engage in live homework assignments. This kind of forced—yes, forced—activity may show you that you can surrender an obsessive, compulsive, or frightful belief. Similarly, if you work directly on your feelings, and vividly experience and express them, you may more thoroughly change your crooked thoughts than by directly disputing these irrational Beliefs.” That’s pretty clearly a lot of CBT and exposure therapy approaches.
He then describes how he went from being overly afraid of public speaking to really enjoying public speaking by forcing himself to do it when young.
“However—surprise, surprise!—I unexpectedly began to enjoy speaking in public and have had fun doing it for the next sixty-five years. To my astonishment, I made a 180-degree turnabout of my extreme fear.”
NLP would 100% expect that, as would tons of other people, whether in an organized or informal way. High energy to high energy is pretty common.
Things take a dark turn however!
“Seeing that forcing myself to do uncomfortable things worked, I decided to do the same with my enormous fear of meeting new women. Because of my terrible fear of rejection, I never—and I mean never—approached strange women, although I went to walk and read in the Bronx Botanical Gardens about 250 days a year and saw a number of desirable women with whom I was eager to talk and date, and who also seemed to be flirting with me.”
He decides to make himself talk to woman and obviously this doesn’t kill him. Only one agrees to a date and she doesn’t show up so 100% this guy is proud — in 2000, well over 80 years old and thus old enough to know better — of having once made a daily habit of harassing women alone in the park minding their own business. Whenever you are sitting around wondering why men are so awful, consider the possibility that this guy was their therapist — or their dad’s therapist, or their grandfather’s therapist and told them to be awful. It’s not just Joe Rogan.
My daughter did a deep dive into Albert Ellis online, looking for trouble, and boy howdy did she find it!
From the wikipedia entry where she found it:
“ Ellis committed numerous sexual assaults[9] against women during his teens and early twenties, writing that he became addicted to nonconsensual frotteurism at the age of fifteen, and claimed to have had “had hundreds of frotteur-incited sex adventures” until his twenties. He reported that he "sought out crowded trains, standing rooms in the back of movie theaters, crowded elevators, and other places where I could rub my midsection against women's backsides and hips and soon get delicious orgasm,” stating that the encounters were “sometimes nonconsenting.”[9] Ellis also wrote, “I am now, when I think about it, guilty about my acts. I have remorse for what I did,” adding that, “I deplore the sin and accept the sinner” but then went on to say “I knew that frotteurism was wrong – that it is sometimes nonconsenting” but “Subway sex was the cheapest and easiest sex I ever had, and I continued it into my twenties . . . . But in some ways it was great: no fuss, no obligations, no time wasted, no having to put up with the inane conversation of most women, no pregnancy, no disease, no boredom.”[9]”
He was a big believer in telling people the stuff you are ashamed of as a way of reducing its power over you, so you could certainly see revealing this about himself (in a 2004 book about REBT) as practicing what he advocated. OTOH, you could equally see it as someone who behaved very badly and is really enjoying having the power to now brag about getting away with behaving badly. It can be quite difficult to tell the difference, but the memory of Feynman is always front-of-mind when I run across stories like this.
Like virtually every therapist of his vintage, he devoted himself to trying to cure people of homosexuality, and then turned around when the community did (to his credit, he wasn’t one of the last to pivot, but he wasn’t leading either).
A lot of appealing therapists — now and in the past — built careers on folding people from the edges of society back into the middle of current expectations, and viewing lapses as failures. The notable good part of Ellis, is that he viewed _the lapses_ as failures, not _the people_. The bad side, of course, is the sheer relentlessness of cheerful enforcement of social norms.