Parenting & Family Quote by Albert Ellis

Ellis is smuggling a radical ambition into the plain language of public service: make therapy so basic it belongs next to reading and multiplication. The giveaway is his phrase "disturb himself or herself". In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, distress isn’t just something that happens to you; it’s something you help manufacture through rigid demands, catastrophic interpretations, and moralistic self-talk. That framing quietly shifts power back to the student. It also risks sounding like blame, which is why Ellis pairs it with "overcome disturbance when it occurs" - a failsafe against the charge that he’s denying trauma, poverty, or abuse. He’s insisting on a skill set, not a moral verdict.

The intent is preventative, almost public-health minded. Ellis came of age in a mid-century clinical world that treated psychotherapy as specialized repair work, reserved for the already broken. His proposal flips the pipeline: normalize cognitive and emotional literacy early, before habits of anxiety, shame, and anger calcify into identity. "Rarely seriously" is doing a lot of work too. He’s not selling a fantasy of constant calm; he’s arguing for reduced frequency and intensity - a pragmatic metric that fits classrooms better than the lofty promise of happiness.

Subtext: the school system is the only institution with universal reach, and Ellis wants psychological tools democratized, not rationed to those with money, time, or cultural permission to seek help. It’s a quietly political claim: mental resilience shouldn’t be a private luxury.