The world's most influential living psychotherapist looked me in the eye. "As the Buddha said 2,500 years ago," he began, jabbing a finger, "we're all out of our fucking minds. That's just the way we are."
To be honest, I'd have felt short-changed if Albert Ellis hadn't used the f-word early in our conversation, such is his notoriety for swearing. Still, I figured he had to have more going for him than bad language: a few years ago, America's psychologists voted him the second most important psychotherapist of the 20th century - beaten by Carl Rogers, but ahead of Freud. This was generous, really, given Ellis's opinion of much traditional psychology, which is that it is "horseshit".
A few days earlier, I'd watched Ellis, still vigorous at 93, deliver one of his famous Friday night workshops in New York, in which he hauls volunteers up on stage and berates them before an audience. The first volunteer was beset by anxiety: she couldn't decide whether to give up her job and move across the country to be with her fiance - what if he wasn't the one for her? "So maybe he turns out to be a jerk and you get divorced," Ellis said, or rather shouted, partly because he's deaf but also, I think, because he enjoys shouting. "That would be highly disagreeable. You might feel sad. But it doesn't have to be awful."
That last statement isn't as glib as it sounds. It encapsulates a key principle of cognitive therapy, which he helped create: that it's our thoughts - our irrational beliefs about the events that happen to us - that make us upset, not the events themselves. We take the things we merely want (success at work, a fulfilling relationship) and elevate them into things we believe we absolutely must have or else catastrophe will strike. "Pretty much every time a human being gets disturbed, they're sneaking in, consciously or unconsciously, a 'must'," Ellis said. "That's what I call 'awfulising'." By regularly arguing with ourselves, we can identify our hidden "musts", realise they're irrational, and gradually become happier. This, as you might guess from the title, is the message of Ellis's bestselling book How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything (Yes, Anything!).
When he was 19, Ellis realised his shyness around women came from believing he needed their approval, so, for a month, he sat on a bench in the Bronx and said hello to 130 female passersby, until he trained himself to realise it didn't kill him when they snubbed him. In the same vein, he advises clients to practise "shame-attacking exercises", publicly embarrassing themselves to make them less neurotic about what others think. As an example, he told me to ride the subway, loudly proclaiming the name of each station on the way. People would think I was weird, but that was the point. I tried it. I managed one station before I had to switch carriages, red-faced, even though nobody had visibly reacted. I get the feeling that this discovering-the-secret-of-happiness thing is going to take a while.
