The simple, deep and very counterintuitive insight that Ellis, Beck and other founders of CBT/REBT arrived at is alluded to in these two paragraphs of the review that you cite in your very first post on this thread:
There is nothing more appealing to the mind of the average intelligent person than the idea that to solve a psychological problem you have to dig deep (into the past, childhood, or the deep subconscious) and get to the roots of the problem. Only then you can understand it and maybe solve it.
This was the whole thrust of Freud's thinking, and the reason it conquered the world is that it has such immediate appeal, especially to intelligent and thoughtful people who are naturally drawn to this kind of self-reflection and rumination.
The genius of Ellis was that he (and a few others around the same time) made the extremely surprising realization that this doesn't work and is in fact exactly the wrong idea. The way to solve problems is not by digging deep into the past or the subconscious; that accomplishes nothing. The most important sources of our problems are plain to see; they are hidden in plain sight, as part of our most basic day-to-day habits of thought and action. The way to solve the problem is to change these habits, almost mechanically.
Here is another way to say this: you don't solve a psychological problem by understanding it or figuring out its deep or hidden causes. You just let it go. What this also means is that you can do it at any time. There is no time like the present.
Take the time to think about just how counterintuitive this very simple idea is. It's not that it's hard to understand -- it's easy to understand. But it's hard to keep it in one's mind because it is so natural for us to be drawn to the useless morass of digging for deep and mysterious causes. It feels like "going deep" is the right thing; the insights of REBT often feel too workaday, too superficial; they are easy to miss because they seem almost too simple. That's what took real courage for Ellis back in the day -- to go in a direction which made him seem almost like a simpleton.
Now, this is not all there is to REBT/CBT, of course. To actually use it you need to learn the techniques of how to go about this process of letting go of false and useless habits of thought. But it's all made possible by the single insight that day-to-day habits of thought and action are what matters above all else, and that the search for hidden causes is a waste of time.
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REBT says that emotions do not arise as a result of repressed desires and needs, as Freud insisted, but directly from our thoughts, ideas, attitudes and beliefs. It is not the mysterious unconscious that matters most to our psychological health, but the most humdrum statements that we say to ourselves on a daily basis. Added up together, these represent our philosophy of life, one which can quite easily be altered if we are willing to change what we habitually say to ourselves.
Albert Ellis began his career working in the Freudian psychoanalytical tradition, but came to the conclusion that going deeper into a person's history and troubles did not actually have much positive benefit. His focus only on 'what worked' led him to the counterintuitive view that thoughts generate emotions, not the other way around. Reasoning your way out of emotional tangles seems doubtful, but Ellis's pioneering ideas, and four decades of cognitive psychology, have shown that it does indeed work.
There is nothing more appealing to the mind of the average intelligent person than the idea that to solve a psychological problem you have to dig deep (into the past, childhood, or the deep subconscious) and get to the roots of the problem. Only then you can understand it and maybe solve it.
This was the whole thrust of Freud's thinking, and the reason it conquered the world is that it has such immediate appeal, especially to intelligent and thoughtful people who are naturally drawn to this kind of self-reflection and rumination.
The genius of Ellis was that he (and a few others around the same time) made the extremely surprising realization that this doesn't work and is in fact exactly the wrong idea. The way to solve problems is not by digging deep into the past or the subconscious; that accomplishes nothing. The most important sources of our problems are plain to see; they are hidden in plain sight, as part of our most basic day-to-day habits of thought and action. The way to solve the problem is to change these habits, almost mechanically.
Here is another way to say this: you don't solve a psychological problem by understanding it or figuring out its deep or hidden causes. You just let it go. What this also means is that you can do it at any time. There is no time like the present.
Take the time to think about just how counterintuitive this very simple idea is. It's not that it's hard to understand -- it's easy to understand. But it's hard to keep it in one's mind because it is so natural for us to be drawn to the useless morass of digging for deep and mysterious causes. It feels like "going deep" is the right thing; the insights of REBT often feel too workaday, too superficial; they are easy to miss because they seem almost too simple. That's what took real courage for Ellis back in the day -- to go in a direction which made him seem almost like a simpleton.
Now, this is not all there is to REBT/CBT, of course. To actually use it you need to learn the techniques of how to go about this process of letting go of false and useless habits of thought. But it's all made possible by the single insight that day-to-day habits of thought and action are what matters above all else, and that the search for hidden causes is a waste of time.
same old shit, sixes and sevens Shaft...