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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Potentials and Limits of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
A Personal Perspective on iconic psychologist Albert Ellis's assertions.
Posted January 2, 2022 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is today's dominant psychotherapy modality, and Albert Ellis is one of its founders and most respected exponents. Here are some of his assertions, my yes-ands, and yes-buts.
Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things,
That’s true. If a happiness meter were attached to one’s brain, true, it will spike when the project is done, but far more total happiness accrues while the project is getting done. Don't so eagerly focus on getting it done that you don't appreciate the process of doing it..
Convince yourself that worrying about many situations will make them worse.
Here’s where I have a hard time with cognitive-behavioral therapy. It’s easy to say “stop worrying,” much harder to do. Worrying may even be a biological imperative, an evolutionary attribute for survival. True, you may be helped by cogntive-behavioral techniques such as fellow Psychology Today blogger Michael Edelstein’s Three Minute Exercise: Write and paraphrase aloud your erroneous thinking three times a day. But my clients have found that too much of the worry usually remains.
Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.
Again, easier said than done although worth aspiring to. When someone does something evil, your reflexive response may be to get sad or mad, but it’s what you next that matters. Try to distract yourself to something constructive or fun.
Even injustice has its good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.
Viewing injustice as merely a challenge to be happy may be unrealistic or even undesirable— Outrage can fuel efforts to right a wrong.
Decide your problems are your own. Do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president.
Your problems are often not just your own. They're at least exacerbated by externalities, for example, poverty, poor health, or being born into a tough environment, It’s unfair to put all the blame on your shoulders. Yes, your self- or therapist-assisted efforts might identify lessons learned from past trauma, but usually it's wise to quickly move forward. For example, I've known dozens of Holocaust survivors and, on average, the ones that kept revisiting the horrors were less happy than those who focused on taking steps forward.
The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better, but you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.
That is a strength of cognitive-behavioral therapy compared with, for example, psychoanalysis. Moving quickly to behavior change can not only improve your practical life but reduce the emotional pain—Behavior change can precede emotional change.
There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well, you must treat me well, and the world must be easy.
We may not think that our goal is a must but we act as though it is. Alas, we can't insist our way into everything happening as we’d like. Better to decide what we think are improvable and strive, but try to graciously accept that the chips only sometimes fall our way.
By honestly acknowledging your past errors but never damning yourself for them, you can learn to use your past for your own future benefit.
Right.
The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in (clients') long-term recovery.
I don’t agree. Not fully accepting oneself drives a person to improve.
Most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.
Often that's not true, for example, regarding the common fear of death or dying.
The art of love... is largely the art of persistence.
There’s truth to that. You need to persist in recognizing what is and isn’t resolvable. Spend moderate effort trying to fix the possibly fixable, but more important over the long-term, focus on doing the things together that work naturally What are the goods in your relationship that you should focus on? What problems should you try to fix, and which should you shrug at?
By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas that are very often unpopular.
True, you don’t want to be a slave to others’ opinions. That said, it’s self-absorbed to care little about what others think. No one has a monopoly on wisdom, so it's worth considering, although not always accepting, what others might think.
Like all approaches, cognitive-behavioral therapy has strengths and limitations. The wise practitioner and client know that fixing often requires more than one tool.
I extemporize on Ellis’s assertions on YouTube.
