The May 2^nd service of the NTCOF featured the subject of FRIENDSHIP by NTCOF Presenters Don Lewellyn, Erin Taylor and Licensed Professional Counselor Luciana Whipple.  Mr. Lewellyn considered some stories of friendship and the lessons – and questions! – such stories offer us in thinking about what it means to have friends and how friends help us bring meaning to our lives.  Ms. Whipple reminded us of what friends do for us and what we do for our friends, and also what friendships can’t do.  She discussed levels of friendship in terms of the degrees of trust and intimacy we establish with others, that friends offer benefits that show up in not just our emotional but our physical health.  Scientific evidence strongly suggests that loneliness and friendlessness can adversely affect life and health.  Drug and alcohol addictions can be the cause and/or effect of a failure to establish and maintain healthy friendships.  Most importantly, “friendship brings us joy!”  Whipple discussed how true friendships can survive conflict and difficulties, can overcome the bounds of time and space and even “dissolve the distance between life and death” when we remember and continue to benefit from our past connections with friends who have died.  Ms. Whipple identified 15 elements of successful friendships:

1. TRUST (We need to be able to trust and to be loyal to our friends.)
2. HONESTY (Tactful honesty is a foundation of friendship!)
3. RESPECT (We honor our disagreements as well as our agreements and respect healthy boundaries.)
4. ACCEPTANCE (We want to “be ourselves” with our friends and accept our friends for who they are as well.)
5. SHARED INTERESTS (It makes it easier to have friends when we can do things together.)
6. SHARED VALUES (The most solid friendships depend on similar core values.)
7. COOPERATION (Friendships depend on a certain level of working together to foster and support the friendship and its needs.)
8. RELIABILITY (Friends rely on each other so friends need to be dependable.)
9. SUPPORT (As Mark Twain put it, we want friends that can defend us when we’re in the wrong since nearly everyone will defend us when we’re in the right!)
10. UNDERSTANDING (Most people would rather be understood even more than agreed with.)
11. SENSITIVITY (Friends who know us can often know how we are feeling.)
12. RECIPROCITY (What we expect or do with or for our friends is what is expected of us.)
13. ABILITY TO COMPROMISE (Friends are willing to “give in” at times and let the other person have something their way.)
14. SENSE OF EQUALITY (It is hard to have a real friendship with someone that we are either responsible to or for.  This is why it doesn’t work out well for a parent to try to be “best friends” with their child(ren).)
15. FORGIVENESS (Too much to say about this!  And even with friends forgiving is not the same as forgetting or even setting ourselves up for another cause for forgiveness.)

Finally, Ms. Whipple reminded us that we often need different friends for different situations and at different levels of intimacy, that one friend cannot fulfill all of our needs.  Our challenge, she concluded, is also to explore what it means to restore the public nature of friendship to the world.  There are connections between friendships and choice, justice and the public good that need to receive greater attention and care.

BROTHER SAM SINGLETON appeared and performed at the April 4th service of the NTCOF!  You can find out about the ministry of Brother Sam, the Atheist Evangelist, at http://www.samsingleton.com/Foyer.html which includes videos of his preaching. It will be noticed that Brother Sam, like the "Holy Bible" itself, frequently includes profanity and sexual references in his material.  But his remarks at the NTCOF service, as with all of our service materials, was 100% "family friendly."  (No, we don't read things like 1 Samuel 18:25-27at our church!)

from samsingleton.com:

"Sam Singleton Atheist Evangelist likes to point out that 'unlike you' he has a creator. That’s why he claims to identify with God. 'We’re both totally made up,' he explains. Brother Sam, as his friends refer to him, considers himself inevitable. 'Sooner or later somebody like me was bound to happen if families kept (messing) with their children’s heads. I’m surprised it took this long. You know what Hosea 8:7 says about reaping the whirlwind. Well, here we are.'"

Roger Scott Jackson is the Creator of Brother Sam, who says:

"Brother Sam is not my alter-ego, although the parallels between the two are obvious: childhood terrors involving bizarre religious practices, the expectation to follow previous generations into the ministry, a period of intense spiritual seeking, recognition that God is fictional, estrangement from family, and finally a rich full life free from fear of the supernatural. But, so far as is known, Brother Sam never worked at dozens of jobs, from fish gutter to debate teacher, nor did he toil for years as a reporter and editor, or worse, stoop to writing ostensibly funny copy for radio and other media."

ALBERT ELLIS: Founder of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy

Albert Ellis was born in Pittsburgh in 1913.  Ellis recalled both his parents as being emotionally (and often physically) unavailable and wrote that he had assumed much of the care of his two younger siblings.  As a very young child he also had numerous health problems and much of his years between the age of 5 and 7 in the hospital.

After graduating from college with a business degree in 1934, Ellis tried and did not succeed in business or as a fiction writer.  He subsequently became interested in human sexuality, wrote on the subject, and became sought-after for his expertise and advice.  This motivated him to begin a program of study at Columbia University in clinical psychology as well as a clinical practice as a psychologist since there were in New York no laws requiring licensure at the time.  Also prior to receiving his PhD in 1947, Ellis began to write about the lack of scientific validity of various personality tests then in use.

In 1950, Ellis wrote about the problem of the scientific and evidential basis for psychoanalysis, in which he himself had been trained:

“Some analysts, notably Jung, have at times been frankly unscientific, even antiscientific, and have contended that there are more things to analysis than are dreamed of in scientific ideologies.  Other analysts … have offered doughty lip-service to scientific ideals, but have in practice advocated semi-mystical theories of analysis that are antithetical to scientific viewpoints. …  Most contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists agree, however, that thorough going scientific knowledge is the only valid basis for analytic (and other) therapy, and that rigorous criticism of non-scientific psychological methods is quite justified.”

Ellis continued to study and write about human sexuality and also collaborated in legal cases defending publishers of sexual materials, gays, and others accused of “obscenity” and consensual sexual “crimes.”  These latter activities did not come without cost as Ellis was refused teaching positions and had presentations canceled or banned.

But by 1953 Ellis is said to have broken with the psychoanalytic methods in which he had been trained and began calling himself a rational therapist.  In 1955 he began calling his approach “Rational-Emotive Therapy,” basing it on the examination and correction of self-defeating beliefs and the behaviors that followed from them.  By this time he had also begun teaching he technique to other therapists.  In 1959, Ellis founded a non-profit organization, The Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy, to facilitate this work.

Now known as Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy, or REBT, Ellis stated that he derived his approach from his own professional experiences, his reading of classical philosophy and especially the writings of ancient Stoics, and the ideas of Polish-American philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski, who developed the theory of General Semantics.  There is an anecdote concerning Korzybski’s demonstration of how context and beliefs play into human experience and especially emotional responses:

 “One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. ‘Nice biscuit, don't you think,’ said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words ‘Dog Cookies.’ The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. ‘You see, ladies and gentlemen,’ Korzybski remarked, ‘I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.’ Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.” [R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58, quoted in Wikipedia] 

According to Ellis, REBT:

“ … is a comprehensive approach to psychological treatment that deals not only with the emotional and behavioral aspects of human disturbance, but places a great deal of stress on its thinking component.  Human beings are exceptionally complex, and there neither seems to be any simple way in which they become ‘emotionally disturbed,’ nor is there a single way in which they can be helped to be less-defeating. Their psychological problems arise from their misperceptions and mistaken cognitions about what they perceive; from their emotional underreactions or overreactions to normal and unusual stimuli; and from their habitually dysfunctional behavior patterns, which enable them to keep repeating nonadjustive responses even when they ‘know’ that they are behaving poorly.”

Ellis was a known atheist and humanist and thought that unbelief was the most emotionally healthy stance.  He was recognized by the American Humanist Association as “Humanist of the Year” in 1971.  At the same time, Ellis acknowledged that he could not be absolutely certain that no god(s) exist and was also careful to state that REBT did not depend on one’s beliefs about religion.  In fact, Ellis coauthored a book with a Mormon and a Christian evangelical religious psychologist that integrated REBT with belief systems based on the supernatural.

Although many of Ellis’ ideas were criticized from the beginning, REBT proved to be the forerunner of a therapeutic strategy now known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT.  CBT’s are in wide use internationally and have gained significant theoretical and scientific support.  In 1982, a survey of American and Canadian psychologists ranked Ellis ahead of Freud in terms of impact on their profession.  In the same year, a survey of US psychology journals found that he was the most cited author after 1957.

Ellis’ work eventually extended into areas such as business, education and politics.  He publicly debated others involved in these subjects including Objectivist Nathanial Branden and anti-psychiatric activist Thomas Szasz.  And Ellis held many workshops and seminars worldwide for many years and well into his 90’s.

Ellis was diagnosed with diabetes in 1953 but this did not prevent his living a long life.  Towards the end he was in poor health but remained remarkably active nonetheless.  His last book, published after his death on July 24, 2007, combined his theory of personality with biological and evolutionary concepts.

A number of quotes help to shed light on Albert Ellis’ key ideas:

“Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human.”

“As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.”

“By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular.  And I succeed.”

“I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.”

“I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn't love them back.  They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression.”

“I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.”

“I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system.  We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.”

“If something is irrational, that means it won't work.  It's usually unrealistic.”

Ellis even had something to say about the changes in the medical care system:

 “In the old days we used to get more referrals, because people had insurance that paid for therapy.”