Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Ellis

Ellis lands a therapist’s grenade in a single line: your feelings aren’t just weather systems that roll in; you’re helping make the storm. The phrasing is deliberately a little clunky - “upsetness” sounds like a child’s word - because he’s trying to strip away the romance of suffering. If you can name it plainly, you can work on it plainly. The target is the reflexive story we tell ourselves in conflict: you made me angry, they ruined my day, the world did this to me. Ellis refuses that grammar.

The intent is not to blame people for having emotions, but to relocate power. In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, the stressor (A) matters less than the belief you attach to it (B), which is what generates the emotional consequence (C). “Contribute” is the moral and practical hinge: it doesn’t deny that life hits hard; it insists that interpretation, expectation, and self-talk are active ingredients. You may not choose the trigger, but you often choose the demand underneath it: “This must not be happening,” “They have to treat me fairly,” “I can’t stand this.” Those absolutist rules are where “upsetness” is manufactured.

Culturally, the line reads like a pre-internet antidote to modern outrage economics. It punctures the rewarding posture of pure victimhood without sliding into stoic coldness. Ellis is selling an uncomfortable liberation: if you helped build the upset, you can help dismantle it. That’s the subtext therapists love and defenses hate.