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Wellness Wednesday for October 5, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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E-Prime is English without the verb "to be." I read a quote somewhere by someone that it is an effective way of teaching the scientific way of thinking, removing the ability to make god-like declarations about the nature of reality. Albert Ellis suggested that it is useful for therapy.

You know, it actually helps for self-reflection. Many times in thinking we are confused about where the emphasis ought to be. Is the fault with me? Ought I not to blame myself? How should I feel? E-Prime has a way of obviating the problem by acting as a compass where you only need to follow the needle and see where you end up.

For example, instead of thinking "I am sorry," in E-Prime I ended up thinking "I want the problem to stop." This is a revealing conclusion, because wanting the problem to stop does not mean that I am doing anything to stop it.

Today I was reflecting on another mistake, and E-Prime led me to "I acknowledge that I failed to meet expectations in an egregious manner, and now that I put it that way, I realize that I have a lot of work to do before I intuitively understand the gravity of my error." This is considerably more useful than the "sorry" that came naturally, and importantly, it helps me clearly understand my state of mind- I didn't say "I feel terrible about it," instead I said "maybe I should feel terrible about it, but I need to put in some effort before that can happen."

This complexity is easily masked in "I am sorry," which can include anything from "I regret the choice" to "I recognize that I must offer an apology for social harmony" to "I feel horrible about this." It seems more about belonging to a category than anything specific.

Is this self taught or did you take a course?

Just stumbled on it on Wikipedia and tried it myself after reading some Ellis (though I didn't read his opinions on E-Prime). It's a feeling that isn't too hard to grasp with experimenting with it, because banning "I am" turns into "I feel...no, that word isn't right..."

If you want to try it, the list of banned words are: be, is, am, are, was ,were, been, being (as a verb), and contractions 'm (eg. I'm), 's (eg. it's), 're (eg. you're), and I guess things like "isn't," not sure if this is comprehensive. Can be a pain but it helps when I'm stumped.

(Bourland suggested banning some other words after "to be," but I think it ruins the simplicity of the method. I can't remember them, they're in papers he wrote.)