Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth.
Albert EllisRead
Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.
Interpretation
Neurosis refers to emotional distress that is often trivialized as mere complaining or whining.
In this quote, Albert Ellis uses humor to highlight the tendency of people to exaggerate their emotional struggles, labeling them as neurosis when they may simply be common complaints. By framing neurosis in this light, he encourages individuals to recognize the often mundane nature of their emotional turmoil and perhaps approach it with a lighter perspective.
In practice
During a mental health seminar, this quote could be used to lighten the mood while discussing emotional issues.
Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth.
Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.
I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public.
If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it almost impossible to upset yourself emotionally - about anything. Yes, anything.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
Attempts to help humans eliminate all self-ratings and views self-esteem as a self-defeating concept that encourages them to make conditional evaluations of self. Instead, it teaches people unconditional self-acceptance.
... The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.
I always just forced myself to do crazy things in public. In college I would push an overhead projector across campus with my pants just low enough to show my butt. Then my friend would incite the crowd to be like, 'Look at that idiot!' That's how I got over being shy.
It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
Why don't you laugh? If I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.
Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.
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