Aging & Wisdom Quote by Albert Ellis

A little brag slips in under the lab coat here, and it’s doing strategic work. Ellis isn’t confessing a quirky youth detail for color; he’s staging an origin story for his whole project: therapy as a tool you can pick up, apply, and use on yourself with measurable results. The phrase “used ... on myself” is the tell. It’s a rebuke to the mystique of the couch, the notion that insight must be coaxed out by an oracle. Ellis is arguing, implicitly, that psychological change is an engineering problem: identify the fear, run the protocol, repeat until it weakens.

“Eclectic therapy and behavior therapy” reads like a résumé line, but it’s also a hedge and a flex. Eclectic signals pragmatism over allegiance; behavior therapy signals an impatience with endless narrative. If you know Ellis’s later role in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, the subtext sharpens: he’s positioning himself as the clinician who tested the product in the harshest possible setting, his own embarrassment.

Then he chooses two fears that are socially legible and almost comically specific: public speaking and approaching young women. That second one, in particular, locates him in a pre-dating-app world where rejection is face-to-face and masculinity is quietly on trial. It’s not just anxiety; it’s status. By naming it, Ellis normalizes the humiliation that therapy often circles around but rarely states plainly, and he frames exposure to it as the price of freedom.

The intent is credibility through vulnerability, but the vulnerability is curated: not “I was broken,” but “I fixed it.” In one sentence, he sells a worldview where self-help isn’t a genre; it’s a method.