How a Shy Teenager Started a Paradigm Shift in Psychotherapy

As many fans of REBT know, Dr. Albert Ellis first flirted with behavioral techniques at age 19.
It was a way to get over his shyness, fear of public speaking and a fear of approaching women.

He had read in philosophy that if you did what you're afraid of doing, then you could get over
your phobia about it. He learned that we upset ourselves if we construct an idea that failing is
horrible and being rejected is horrible. It isn't the act of failing or being rejected that upsets us,
but our ideas about it.

FEAR OF APPROACHING WOMEN

Important to the young Albert Ellis was his shyness around women. He flirted with them in
Bronx Botanical Garden near his home, but he never approached them. Instead he made up all
kinds of excuses to avoid doing so because he was scared of rejection.

At the age of 19, he gave himself a homework assignment when he was off from college. He
went to Bronx Botanical Garden every day that month, and whenever he saw a woman sitting
alone on a park bench, he would sit next to her, which he wouldn't dare do before. He gave
himself one minute to talk to her, calming his fears by saying silently to himself, "If I die, I die.
Screw it, so I die."

He didn't die.

He found 130 women sitting alone that month on park benches. He sat next to all of them,
whereupon 30 got up and walked away. He spoke to the remaining 100 — for the first time in his
life — about the birds and the bees, the flowers, books, whatever came to mind.

Al later said, "If Fred Skinner, who was then teaching at Indiana University, had known about
my exploits, he would have thought I would have got extinguished, because of the 100 women I
made one date — and she didn't show up!

"But I prepared myself philosophically, even then, by seeing that nobody took out a stiletto and
cut my balls off, nobody vomited and ran away, nobody called the cops. I had 100 pleasant
conversations and with the second 100 I got good and made a few dates.

It wasn’t awful or terrible, it's just a pain in the ass. That's all it is. "There's no horror in being
rejected. I forced myself uncomfortably to do what I was afraid of, the opposite of what phobics
do, because whenever they're afraid of innocent things, they beat it the hell out of there and then
never get over their fears.