A, B, C

Albert Ellis was a New York psychologist who in 1955, a few years before Beck, built the first of the cognitive therapies, and he built it from the Stoics. Epictetus, whom you met on day sixty-eight, said people are disturbed not by things but by their views of things. Ellis turned that into a method: Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. REBT.

The model is three letters. A is the activating event: what happened. C is the consequence: how you feel and what you do. Most people think A causes C. Ellis said no: B does, the belief about A. Same event, different belief, different consequence. The job is to find B, and B is almost always a demand dressed as a fact: I must succeed. People must treat me fairly. Life must be easy. He called it musturbation, with a grin, and he said those three musts produce most human misery.

The method is dispute. D: challenge the belief. Where's the evidence that you must? What happens if you don't? Is it true that it would be unbearable, or merely hard? And E: the new effect, the feeling that follows a preference instead of a demand. "I'd strongly prefer to succeed, and I'll be disappointed if I don't" produces disappointment. "I must succeed" produces panic.

Ellis was blunt, funny and tireless, and he saw patients until the week he died at ninety-three. His key for the Healing chamber is the difference between a preference and a demand. Most of what torments us is a wish we've promoted to a law.

Vault Human points to REBT and CBT therapists; the ABC is a tool for everyone, and it fits on an index card.