QuoteProject
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
Albert Ellis
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Our emotional responses are often influenced by our own thoughts and behaviors.

In this quote, Albert Ellis emphasizes that individuals play a significant role in their emotional disturbances. Rather than viewing upsetness as a purely external reaction, he suggests that our internal processes, beliefs, and interpretations contribute heavily to how we feel. This perspective encourages self-awareness and personal responsibility in managing emotions.

Themes

EmotionsUpsetResponsibilitySelf-AwarenessThoughts

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used during a mental health workshop to illustrate personal accountability in emotional well-being.

More from Albert Ellis

Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth.
Albert EllisRead
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.
Albert EllisRead
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.
Albert EllisRead
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.
Albert EllisRead
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.
Albert EllisRead
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.
Albert EllisRead

Similar quotes

Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
Bren BrownRead
The only possible recourse a baby has when his screams are ignored is to repress his distress, which is tantamount to mutilating his soul, for the result is an interference with his ability to feel, to be aware, and to remember.
Alice MillerRead
It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.
Matthew WalkerRead
A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.
Albert BanduraRead
I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.
Robert SapolskyRead
There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.
Harry Stack SullivanRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.