Time & Perspective Quote by Albert Ellis

Ellis’s genius is the blunt reversal at the center: you’re not “made” angry, anxious, or ashamed by events; you recruit yourself into those feelings by the story you tell about what happened. “We teach people that they upset themselves” is almost aggressively unsentimental, a refusal of the modern comfort-food narrative that healing is mostly about excavating a villain in your past. The line lands because it offers both provocation and relief: provocation, because it strips away the moral leverage of “you did this to me”; relief, because it returns agency to the person who’s suffering.

The subtext is a quiet war against fatalism. Ellis, as the architect of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, was pushing back on mid-century psychoanalytic dominance, where insight into childhood could become a kind of luxurious stalemate. He doesn’t deny history; he denies history’s veto power. “We can’t change the past” isn’t a shrug, it’s a boundary. Therapy, in this frame, is not an archaeological dig but a live editing session.

Notice the present-tense precision: “today.” Ellis is selling a technology of immediacy. Change doesn’t require a perfectly sourced origin story; it requires catching the belief that turns pain into catastrophe, disappointment into identity, regret into a life sentence. The rhetoric is brisk because the method is brisk: dispute the thought, shift the feeling, change the behavior. It’s less confession, more recalibration - a secular, psychological version of “repentance” without the guilt, aimed at making suffering negotiable rather than sacred.