“Hey, that’s not fair!”
Do you remember the first time you heard or said these words? Maybe it was while playing hopscotch, tag, or “Monopoly” with your friends or siblings. Or, like me, you may recall that expression from the school playground, when someone broke the rules of the touch football game. The fact is, most of us grew up in a culture that places great value on “fairness” and “playing by the rules.”
There’s just one problem with this noble ideal: the world simply doesn’t work that way. As the biblical book of Ecclesiastes observed, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise… but time and chance happens to them all.”
Indeed, the physicists tell us that the universe tends toward maximum disorder, or “entropy” — not fairness! And yet, most of us react to injustice, mistreatment, and even natural disasters with a sense that we have been treated unfairly — as the B.J. Thomas song put it, we feel that “Somebody done somebody wrong!”
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After a very enlightening exchange with Dr. Debbie Joffe Ellis, I would like to clarify some issues relating to the type of therapy developed by the late Dr. Albert Ellis.
Although terms such as “cognitive therapy” and “cognitive behavioral therapy” are often used quite loosely in the literature, it is important to note that the earliest cognitively-oriented psychotherapy in this country was developed by Dr. Albert Ellis, in the 1950s. His form of treatment–originally called “rational therapy”, and later “rational emotive behavior therapy” (REBT)–actually preceded the “cognitive therapy” later developed by Aaron Beck, MD.
There are also important differences in emphasis between Beck’s form of treatment and REBT. The latter emphasizes the importance of unconditional self-acceptance (as well as acceptance of the foibles of others); the importance of developing a “high frustration tolerance”; and tends to be more “active” or vigorous in its approach to the irrational, self-defeating beliefs of the patient or client, compared with Dr. Beck’s mode of treatment.
I thank Dr. Joffe Ellis for helping clarify these issues. For further reading, I strongly recommend
the classic text by Ellis & Harper, A New Guide to Rational Living, Wilshire Books, 1975.
Ronald Pies MD