How many times has a bad thought led us to unwanted situations?Thought can have great power over us. Make the decision to want to think. The final decision is in us.
Albert Ellis was one of the founding psychologists of cognitivism. Did you start developing your therapy in 1962, which you called?Emotional rational therapy? (TRE). Ellis believes that most psychological problems are due to irrational thought patterns.
- Ellis focuses his theory on the fact that “people do not change by events.
- But by what they think of such events”.
- As the stoic philosopher Grefo Epictetus said.
- So we can say that the “TRE” is part of the following hypothesis:.
? It is not events (A) that generate emotional states (C), but how to interpret them (B), so if we are able to change our mental patterns, that is, our thought patterns, we will be able to generate less painful, more positive and reality-based emotional states.
So Ellis listed a series of irrational beliefs and grouped them into 11 basic irrational ideas that we can summarize as follows:
These fundamental irrational ideas contain three basic notions in which individuals make absolute demands on themselves, others, and the world.
On the other side of the coin, however, we can find rational beliefs for each of the beliefs presented above, rational beliefs tend to be more flexible, without putting obstacles in our path and without causing stress as intense as that of irrational beliefs.
This time, to end in a more practical and dynamic way, I suggest that you, the reader, find a rational belief presented by Ellis; or even I invite you, when you have free time, to reflect on your own life and make a list of irrational thoughts that cause discomfort and, in another column of this list, alternative ways of thinking. In this way the knots can begin to loosen, opening new avenues of serenity.
“Our reward lies in effort, not result. Is a total effort a complete victory? Gandhi