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Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better, Profound Self-Help Therapy for Your Emotions
By Albert Ellis, Impact Publishers, Inc.,: Atascadero, California, 2001, 272 pages, $15.95.
I come not to bury Albert, but to praise him. He is nothing if not experimental, and this, his latest, book Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better, Profound Self-Help Therapy For Your Emotions proves it! He introduces his subject saying, “This is going to be an experiment in writing as far as my use of language is concerned.”
His well-known thesis that “negative feelings do not occur or exist in their own right, but that we have the choice of creating or not creating them for ourselves has remained constant. We are the actors who actively act”. “Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!” –The White Queen to Alice.
But, he has decided in this book to talk about human thinking, feeling, and behaving as verbs rather than to construct “misleading nouns” [sic] for them. Thus, instead of over-generalizing and saying, “I am depressed,” you say, “I depress myself right now.” This device reportedly discourages one from using language to defeat oneself. Well…
Dr. Ellis, in fact, would have liked to carry his experiment in writing even further, but fortunately for the reader his editor is a traditionalist. The result was a compromise. But still, “Anxietize?” “Awfulize?” “Perfectionize?” Neologize, anyone? …“If you tell me what language ‘fiddle-de-dee’ is, I’ll tell you the French for it!” –Alice to the Red Queen.
In my opinion, if he can’t sentence his words without verbing his nouns, he shouldn’t be Englishing at all!
To give the devil his due, however, the book manages to provide a clear exposition of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). In the book he incorporates the best research findings, citing the work of Bandura, Seligman, and Lazarus, to name some of the oldest few. Additionally, he does so without seeming to imply that he’s created the whole discipline of psychology.
Motivated patients of mine have used Ellis’s work outside of therapy to jumpstart themselves in their work on separation and individuation. Discounting some of his cuter techniques, e.g., attacking shame by yelling out the time in a department store, Ellis’s work has helped people see themselves as agents—“doers” rather than the “done-to.”
But here one would do well to consider the Dodo Bird Verdict. Luborsky, Singer and Luborsky, reviewing outcome studies, announced in 1975 that all the different therapies seemed to be equal in effectiveness. This was dubbed the “Dodo Bird Verdict borrowed from Alice in Wonderland. “Everyone has won and all must have prizes.” The most recent meta-analysis, done to answer objections to earlier studies (citation provided upon request) has once again reconfirmed the Dodo Bird verdict. Further, when meta-analyses account for allegiance of the investigator, differences favoring one approach over another largely vanish (citation also provided upon request).
The explanation for the Dodo Bird Verdict is provided by studies establishing that the patient is the primary agent of change in treatment. Although accounts of therapy typically glorify the therapist’s contributions, recent investigators find about 70% of the outcome variance depends upon the patient. According to Tallman and Bohart (November 2001) each approach to psychotherapy allows the patient to work through and resolve his problems. “Thus, for example, a client can use cognitive or interpersonal techniques (Elkin, 1994) or emotional exploration procedures, or empathetically based client-centered therapy (Greenberg & Watson, 1998) to move themselves out of depression. The major engine driving effective therapy is the patient’s active self-healing.”
With that in mind, the utility of Ellis’ book lies in its role as an adjunct to whatever else is going on in the office. For that reason, it is primarily a book for the patient, not the practitioner. One of my patients reported surprise and agreement with the idea that we don’t have to be incapacitated by our own emotions. Ironically, this man then became freer to experience his own feelings. This is only one example of several different ways that some of my patients have let this book influence them. Others just said it didn’t interest them.