Rational Emotive Therapy Quotes

Too many people are unaware that it is not outer events or circumstances that will create happiness; rather, it is our perception of events and of ourselves that will create, or uncreate, positive emotions.

Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears don’t hijack us. (For example, your fear at being flagged down by the police can turn instantly to gratitude when the cop warns you that there’s an accident ahead.) But the moment we feel trapped, enraged, or rejected, we are vulnerable to activating old maps and to follow their directions. Change begins when we learn to "own" our emotional brains. That means learning to observe and tolerate the heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations that register misery and humiliation. Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable.

For many years now I have had the quaint idea that all humans-yes, the whole six billion of them on this planet-are out of their fucking minds.

When a person is in emotional pain, it’s hard to be rational and to think of a good solution. Nevertheless, many of the coping strategies used by people with overwhelming emotions only serve to make their problems worse.

Men are not disturbed by things, but by the views which they take of them

Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals.[72] One reason for that is many of the fears and inhibitions of Autistic people are often entirely reasonable, and rooted in a lifetime of painful experiences. We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have been browbeaten into ignoring our feelings too much.

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus. The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities." Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy." But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.

To help people achieve the three basic REBT philosophies of unconditional self-acceptance, unconditional other-acceptance, and unconditional life-acceptance, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral methods, which are described in this monograph, are used.

Materialism is a conviction based not upon evidence or logic but upon what Carl Sagan (speaking of another kind of faith) called a “deep-seated need to believe.” Considered purely as a rational philosophy, it has little to recommend it; but as an emotional sedative, what Czeslaw Milosz liked to call the opiate of unbelief, it offers a refuge from so many elaborate perplexities, so many arduous spiritual exertions, so many trying intellectual and moral problems, so many exhausting expressions of hope or fear, charity or remorse. In this sense, it should be classified as one of those religions of consolation whose purpose is not to engage the mind or will with the mysteries of being but merely to provide a palliative for existential grievances and private disappointments. Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy.

Acceptance is not the same as resignation

One note of caution: Do not use words describing your emotional reactions in the Automatic Thought column. Just write the thoughts that created the emotion. For example, suppose you notice your car has a flat tire. Don’t write “I feel crappy” because you can’t disprove that with a rational response. The fact is, you do feel crappy. Instead, write down the thoughts that automatically flashed through your mind the moment you saw the tire; for example, “I’m so stupid—I should have gotten a new tire this last month,” or “Oh, hell! This is just my rotten luck!” Then you can substitute rational responses such as “It might have been better to get a new tire, but I’m not stupid and no one can predict the future with certainty.” This process won’t put air in the tire, but at least you won’t have to change it with a deflated

Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals. One reason for that is many of the fears and inhibitions of Autistic people are often entirely reasonable, and rooted in a lifetime of painful experiences. We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have been browbeaten into ignoring our feelings too much.

However one may interpret this culturally, the upshot is the same: people carry within them a great number of wishes to which they react passively and which they hide. Stoicism, in our day, is not strength to overcome wishes, but to hide them. To a patient who, let us say, is interminably rationalizing and justifying this and that, balancing one thing against another as though life were a tremendous market place where all the business is done on paper and tickertape and there are never any goods, I sometimes have the inclination in psychotherapy to shout out, “Don't you ever want anything?” But I don't cry out, for it is not difficult to see that on some level the patient does want a good deal; the trouble is he has formulated and reformulated it, until it is the “rattling of dry bones,” as Eliot puts it. Tendencies have become endemic in our culture for our denial of wishes to be rationalized and accepted with the belief that this denial of the wish will result in its being fulfilled. And whether the reader would disagree with me on this or that detail, our psychological problem is the same: it is necessary for us to help the patient achieve some emotional viability and honesty by bringing out his wishes and his capacity to wish. This is not the end of therapy but it is an essential starting point.

Albert Ellis, who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, a precursor to cognitive behavior therapy, taught me the extent to which we teach ourselves negative feelings about ourselves—and the negative and self-defeating behaviors that follow from these feelings. He showed that underlying our least effective and most harmful behaviors is a philosophical or ideological core that is irrational but is so central to our views of our self and the world that often we aren’t aware that it is only a belief, nor are we aware of how persistently we repeat this belief to ourselves in our daily lives. The belief determines our feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, etc.), and our feelings in turn influence our behavior (acting out, shutting down, self-medicating to ease the discomfort). To change our behavior, Ellis taught, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.

Getting better is even more important. It consists of clients’ (1) feeling better; (2) continuing to feel better; (3) experiencing fewer disturbing symptoms (e.g., depressing and needlessly inhibiting themselves); (4) making their distressing seldom recur; (5) knowing how to reduce it when they partly cause it; (6) using this knowledge effectively; (7) being less likely to disturb themselves when new adversities occur in their lives; (8) accepting the challenge of making themselves minimally undisturbing, even when unusually aversive events occur.

Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), arguably the foremost modality in counselling today. As a college freshman in an informal study group devoted to reading and commenting on major philosophers, Ellis was struck by Epictetus’ insistence that ‘It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them’ (Enchiridion 5). Ellis openly credits Epictetus for supplying his guiding principle that our emotional responses to upsetting actions – not the actions themselves – are what create anxiety and depression; and that (a point basic to Stoic psychology in general) our emotional responses are products of our judgements – are in fact (irrational) judgements tout court: ‘Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind – a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind – of thought. What we call feelings almost always have a pronounced evaluating or appraisal element.’6 Ellis points out that irrational beliefs often appear in the way people talk to themselves. Compare Epictetus at IV 4, 26–27:

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture that person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things: → DIRECT the Rider FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it. [Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, solutions-focused therapy] SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors. [1% milk, four rules at the Brazilian railroad] POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. [“You’ll be third graders soon,” “No dry holes” at BP] → MOTIVATE the Elephant FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. [Piling gloves on the table, the chemotherapy video game, Robyn Waters’s demos at Target] SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. [The 5-Minute Room Rescue, procurement reform] GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset. [Brasilata’s “inventors,” junior-high math kids’ turnaround] → SHAPE the Path TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. [Throwing out the phone system at Rackspace, 1-Click ordering, simplifying the online time sheet] BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. [Setting “action triggers,” eating two bowls of soup while dieting, using checklists] RALLY THE HERD.

Things, people, and circumstances don't upset you; you upset yourself. You feel the way you think.

The ABCD Model Rational emotive therapy is all about the ABCDs. This simple acronym describes an effective, easy-to-remember framework for recognizing and changing irrational ideas. Here are the basics: A is for activating. These are the red-flag events that trigger your anger. They could be almost anything, such as someone spills a drink or your spouse forgets to pay a bill. B is for belief. Here, belief is a catchall term for how you think about or appraise the activating event. C is for consequence. This refers to emotional consequences in particular. These are the feelings you experience as a result of how you interpreted the event. D is for dispute. This is when you examine your beliefs and expectations (B) regarding the activating event (A). Are they unrealistic or irrational? Is there a more constructive and emotionally agreeable way of looking at things?

While you cannot always control your automatic thoughts, you can control your rational ones and as such can control your emotional responses by learning which thoughts trigger happier emotions.

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture that person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things: → DIRECT the Rider FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it. [Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, solutions-focused therapy] SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors. [1% milk, four rules at the Brazilian railroad] POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. [“You’ll be third graders soon,” “No dry holes” at BP]               → MOTIVATE the Elephant FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. [Piling gloves on the table, the chemotherapy video game, Robyn Waters’s demos at Target] SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. [The 5-Minute Room Rescue, procurement reform] GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset. [Brasilata’s “inventors,” junior-high math kids’ turnaround]                             → SHAPE the Path TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. [Throwing out the phone system at Rackspace, 1-Click ordering, simplifying the online time sheet] BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. [Setting “action triggers,” eating two bowls of soup while dieting, using checklists] RALLY THE HERD. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread. [“Fataki” in Tanzania, “free spaces” in hospitals, seeding the tip jar] ————— OVERCOMING OBSTACLES ————— Here we list twelve common problems that people encounter as they fight for change, along with some advice about overcoming them. (Note

You will invariably face jobs that are associated with uncomfortable feelings, ranging from relatively minor annoyance (e.g., taking out the garbage in the rain) to more persistent and recurring feelings of stress and discomfort (e.g., dissertation, organizing income taxes) that activate your procrastination script. Even a minimal degree of stress or inconvenience (what we have come to describe as the feeling of “Ugh”) can be potent enough to make you delay action. Think about some of the mundane examples of procrastination, such as watching a boring television show because the remote control is out of reach (e.g., “It’s ALL THE WAY over there.”) or exercise (e.g., “I’m TOO TIRED to change into my workout clothes.”). The use of capital letters is meant to illustrate the tone of voice of your selftalk, which serves to exaggerate and convince you of the difficulty of what you want to do. You are capable to perform the action, but your thoughts and feelings (including feeling tired or “low energy”) makes you conclude that you are not at your best and therefore cannot and will not follow through (for seemingly justifiable reasons). You might think, “I have to be in the mood to do some things.” But, how often are any of us in the mood to do many of the tasks on which we end up procrastinating? The very fact that we have to plan them indicates that these tasks require some targeted planning and effort. When facing emotional discomfort, ADHD adults are particularly at risk for bolting to pleasant, easy, and yet often unsatisfying activities, such as eating junk food, watching television, social networking, surfing the Internet, etc. In fact, sometimes you may escape from stressful tasks by performing other, lower priority errands or chores. Thus, you rationalize violating your high-priority project plan in order to run out to fill your car with gas. This strategy can be seen as a form of “plea bargaining”—“I will do something productive in order to justify not doing the higher priority but less appealing task.” Moreover, these errands are often more discrete and time limited than the task you are putting off (i.e., “If I start mowing the lawn now, I will be done in 1 hour. I don’t know how long taxes will take me.”), which is often their appeal—even though they are low priority, you are more confident you will get them done. You need not be “in the mood” for a task in order to perform it. A useful reframe is the reminder that you have “enough” energy to get started and recall that once you get started on the first step, you usually feel better and more engaged. Breaking the task down into its discrete steps and setting an end time help you to reframe the plan (e.g., “I’m tired, but I have enough energy to do this task for 15 minutes.”). Rather than setting up the unrealistic expectation that you must be stress-free and 100% energized before you can do tasks, the notion of acceptance of discomfort is a useful mindset to adopt and practice.

I wonder who "they" are for him. Most of us have a "they" in the audience, even though nobody is really watching, at least not how we think they are. The people who are watching us - the people who really see us- don’t care about the false self, about the show we are putting on. I wonder who those people are for John?" "I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because its more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place." "Every hour counts for all of us and I want to be fully present in the fully hour we spend with each one." "You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friends - and they will hurt you- because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal." "The more you welcome your vulnerability the less afraid you'll feel" "We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what’s fascinating about them is that we aren't aware of them in the moment. A familiar examples is denial- some, rationalization." "Generally when the therapy is coming to an end, the work moves toward its final stage, which is saying goodbye. in those sessions, the patient and I consolidate the changes made by talking about the "progress and process". What was helpful in getting to where the person is today? What wasn't? What has she learned about herself -her strengths, her challenges, her internal scripts and narratives- and what coping strategies and healthier ways of being can she can take with her when she leaves? Underlying all this, of course, is how do we say goodbye?" "Just like your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack." "But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can't mute one emotion without muting others. You want to mute the pain? You will also mute joy.

Zettle notes, we misuse many nouns in psychology instead of verbs and thereby create semifictional entities that Kevin Everett FitzMaurice (1997) calls “thought things.” Thus we say, “My feelings upset me when panic overwhelms me when I am in closed spaces” instead of, “I upset myself by panicking when I am in closed spaces.

her takes a good deal of clinical experience. More importantly, the therapist needs to have worked deeply with her own early life experiences, and has to actively work with it throughout the life span. A successful therapeutic relation precipitates emotional growth not only in the patient but also in the therapist. Sieff refered to the fact that short-term cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is currently very popular and widely used. Can it help with healing relational trauma? Schore answered that CBT is grounded in cognitive psychology, and its research base is grounded cognitive processes such as explicit memory, rational thought, language, and effortful conscious control. Cognitively based therapy’s basic theoretical assumption is grounded in the assumption that we can change how we feel by consciously changing how we think and what we believe. This means that cognitive therapy focuses on language and thought, both of which are located in the left brain. People who have trouble regulating their emotions typically have a left brain that is already more developed than their right brain, and they may well have learned to use rational thinking and words to obscure the deeper emotional experiences and to keep them dissociated. Cognitive therapy may strengthen the very strategies that keep the affect dampening defense of dissociation in place. Even if the left brain becomes more able to control the emotions of the right brain, it can only control emotional arousal that is of low or moderate intensity. As a rule, when emotional arousal reaches a certain level of intensity the left brain goes off-line and the right brain becomes dominant. Changes made in the cognitive strategies of the left brain are unavailable when this happens. At these times, emotionally-focused therapy may enhance the neural connections between the right amygdala and the right orbifrontal cortex which allows the patient to more effectively tolerate and regulate intense emotions. Cognitive therapy which exclusively focuses on the ability of the left brain to control the right cannot directly alter changes within the right-lateralized limbic system. The

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). REBT teaches clients how to identify their unhelpful beliefs, challenge them, and replace them with more constructive ways of seeing the world.[ix]

Research has also shown that the primary cause of depression is the constant repetition of negative thoughts, as concluded by the American psychologist Albert Ellis (1913-2007), considered the second most influential psychologist of all times by the American Psychological Association (APA), who in 1955 founded the Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. Ellis determined that “we largely feel according to the way we think” and that what makes us depressive are not our specific personal circumstances, but our “catastrophic” repetitive thoughts and beliefs regarding these circumstances.

These feelings don't just go away. They linger. Hover. They are with me always. Even at my most functioning...they are there, watching me. These emotions are my roommates now, bunking up beside me at night. They do not pay any rent...they are determinded to ruin me, and yet I can never fully evict them from my brain. I have tried -- really tried -- to chip away at my grief...But lately, I've just given up. I'm finally giving it permission to breathe and exist... Most days now, they lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad. So mad. I can starve it, avoid it, rationalize it, manage it, talk about it in therapy, and eat it up in neat little points value. No matter how much weight I lose, I will never lose this one simple truth: I want my mom. I am so f***ing mad that she's gone. And that feeling will never, ever die.

These feelings don't just go away. They linger. Hover. They are with me always. Even at my most functioning...they are there, watching me. These emotions are my roommates now, bunking up beside me at night. They do not pay any rent...they are determined to ruin me, and yet I can never fully evict them from my brain. I have tried -- really tried -- to chip away at my grief...But lately, I've just given up. I'm finally giving it permission to breathe and exist... Most days now, they lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad. So mad. I can starve it, avoid it, rationalize it, manage it, talk about it in therapy, and eat it up in neat little points value. No matter how much weight I lose, I will never lose this one simple truth: I want my mom. I am so f***ing mad that she's gone. And that feeling will never, ever die.

Albert Ellis system of Rational Emotive Therapy ... the ABC system. In every human reaction there is an Activating event, a Belief system through which the event is interpreted and evaluated, and a Consequent set of emotional reactions.

The multiple consequences of early child maltreatment call for early identification and intervention with strategies that are effective to children with poorly developed cognitive and verbal abilities. Symptoms mediated through the regulatory neural networks originating in lower brain regions are far less responsive to treatment interventions using verbal, logical, rational, or even emotionally expressive treatment modalities. This is also true of play therapy strategies utilizing these methodologies. van der Kolk (2004) pointed out that traumatized individuals show little activity in the left hemisphere, particularly in language areas, resulting in decreased capacity for planning and analyzing while displaying excessive activity in the right limbic hemisphere, suggesting excessive emotional experience, but no ability to communicate it or understand it. Not surprisingly, such individuals respond poorly to cognitive, verbal, and multimodal treatment designs due to their self-regulatory deficits and language-based limitations.

We had better rate our important parts-our thoughts, feelings, and actions-to see how they helped or hindered us. But-damn it!-we didn't have to rate our self, our being, our essence. Our self or personhood was too complex to be given a global rating. We could say, for practical reasons, it was "good"-meaning it helped us to live and enjoy. Or we could say that it just didn't have to be rated at all. Use our self but not rate it!

In cognitive behavioral therapy we call this defusion. Becoming aware of this difference de-fuses—creates a distance between—the part of you that is hyperreactive to threat and the rational part of you that can notice your thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, and learn to override them when necessary.

It took me a year of therapy to finally admit that I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. There was a part of me that would always think, “But he’s never hit me, so it’s not abuse. Right?” I didn’t see the manipulation, jealousy, domination and constant blame as abuse. I didn’t see the bursts of anger, screaming, put-downs and shaming as abuse. I’d make excuses for his unacceptable behavior, rationalizing it in my head.

Stoicism inspired a family of schools of effective psychotherapy called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), starting with Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behavior therapy in the 1950s.

Consider some of the other examples of sleep-related thoughts that you listed above. Work through these thoughts in a similar way, identifying the emotional reaction, associated thoughts, and actions that have occurred in the setting of insomnia. After reviewing these patterns, it becomes possible to identify false beliefs and begin to restructure this thinking to aid sleep. Substituting more evidence-based thoughts when these negative thoughts recur can shut down their recurrence. False Beliefs Interfere with Normal Sleep The mind is not rational in a state of sleep deprivation. Logic suffers in the emotional swings of fitful sleep. Flights

as people get older, emotion often takes the place of rational thinking. People feel free to cry more, are more adept at pulling differentiated emotions into consciousness. The awareness of death tends to make life’s trivialities seem…trivial. “Cancer cures psychoneuroses,” one of Irvin Yalom’s therapy patients told him. “What a pity I had to wait till now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.

One note of caution: Do not use words describing your emotional reactions in the Automatic Thought column. Just write the thoughts that created the emotion. For example, suppose you notice your car has a flat tire. Don’t write “I feel crappy” because you can’t disprove that with a rational response. The fact is, you do feel crappy. Instead, write down the thoughts that automatically flashed through your mind the moment you saw

Drawing and other forms of visual art can be an amazingly powerful tool for inner child healing. Drawing, painting, and playing with clay are things that children do spontaneously, happily, and naturally. We only lose our artistic inclinations as adults, when we are made to feel ashamed of something that we've created. Drawing is so ingrained in our natural human development that it comes well before writing. Art therapy is often used with children who refuse to speak or who feel they cannot verbalize their feelings. Inviting your inner child to color and draw can give you the freedom to finally say thins you were never able to put into words. If you are artistically inclined as an adults, you know that the process of creating visual art breaks you out of rational, analytical mental states. If you suffered with very restrictive parents or an education that prioritized verbal logic, drawing can help you reconnect with your natural, childlike creative impulses. Everyone is capable of making art. It's a natural, necessary part of our development. The stifling of creativity through shame or criticism leaves very real wounds on the inner child. Drawing through our self-doubts, self-criticisms allows us to speak with the child in its own language.