Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
What These Words Mean
You know that moment when your chest tightens before you even speak, as if the argument has already started inside you. A message comes in, a look is misread, a tone lands wrong, and suddenly your whole day feels hijacked. These words walk right into that private storm and point to where the match actually caught.
Start with “People and things do not upset us.” On the surface, it is a blunt claim: the coworker, the traffic, the comment, the delay, the spilled coffee are not the direct cause of your upset. The deeper push is even more unsettling: what happens outside you is only raw material until your mind turns it into a verdict. The world throws events at you, but it does not get to decide what they mean unless you hand it that power.
Then comes “rather we upset ourselves.” This shifts the finger from the outside to the inside, but not in a shaming way. It is describing an action you do, often automatically: you stir up your own alarm, your own anger, your own humiliation. It is almost tender in its honesty, because it implies you are not helpless. If you can upset yourself, you can also pause yourself, soften yourself, steady yourself.
The real engine is “by believing.” That’s ordinary language for something that happens fast: you tell yourself a story and treat it as fact. It might be “They disrespected me,” “This shouldn’t be happening,” or “I can’t stand this.” In the surface sense, belief sounds like an opinion. In the emotional sense, belief is the hand that squeezes the feeling tighter. It’s the moment your mind stops exploring and starts sentencing.
Finally, “that they can upset us” names the specific belief: that other people and external things have the ability to reach into you and flip your switches. You experience it as being acted upon, like your mood is a room with no lock. These words are asking you to notice how often you assume upset is something done to you, instead of something you participate in through what you accept as true.
The pivot is built right into the connectors: it moves from “do not” to “rather,” and then explains the mechanism with “by.”
Here is how it can look in a normal afternoon: you are in a meeting, you share an idea, and someone talks over you. Your face warms, and you go quiet. The surface event is interruption. The upsetting part often arrives a half-second later: the belief that it proves you are invisible, or that you must fight to be valued, or that you just got publicly reduced. If you catch the belief, you can feel the tiny space open up. The room sounds the same, the air conditioning still makes the air a little cool on your skin, but your inner grip can loosen.
One important edge to hold: this phrase does not ask you to pretend people are never rude or situations never unfair. It is narrowing in on a particular moment, the moment you treat an external trigger as a guaranteed emotional outcome. You can still name what happened and choose your response without letting the belief run the whole show.
I think the quiet courage in this quote is that it gives you responsibility without stripping you of dignity.
And still, it does not fully hold in every heartbeat. Sometimes you are upset before you have words for what you believe, and the feeling arrives like weather. In those moments, the most honest first step might be to soothe the body, and only later untangle the belief.
Behind These Words
Albert Ellis is widely associated with a practical, mind-centered approach to emotional suffering, one that focuses on how your thoughts shape your feelings and actions. In the broader climate that brings a quote like this to life, there is a strong desire for tools that work in the middle of ordinary stress: conflict, frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, and the daily friction of being around other humans.
This saying carries the imprint of that toolkit mindset. Instead of treating emotion as something that simply happens to you, it treats emotion as something influenced by interpretation. That idea shows up in many traditions, but it became especially influential in modern self-help and therapeutic cultures that emphasize personal agency and skill-building. The point is not to become unfeeling. The point is to become less easily yanked around by the moment.
It also makes sense as a response to a common habit: blaming people and circumstances for your inner life. These words argue that the outside world is an occasion, not a controller. The phrasing is often repeated in motivational contexts, and while attribution is commonly given to Ellis, it is shared in spirit with many thought-based approaches to resilience.
About Albert Ellis
Albert Ellis is a psychologist and influential voice in modern approaches to emotional well-being, especially those that pay close attention to the beliefs you carry into daily life. He is strongly associated with the idea that your feelings are not only responses to events, but also outcomes of how you interpret those events, the rules you live by, and the demands you quietly place on yourself and others.
He is remembered for pushing psychology toward practical, usable methods, the kind you can apply in the middle of an argument, a spiral of worry, or a surge of shame. His work emphasizes noticing the thoughts that show up fast, questioning the ones that act like absolute laws, and choosing more flexible ways to see a situation without denying reality.
That worldview fits this quote closely. It places the turning point inside you: not in what happens, but in what you believe about what happens, and in the assumption that something outside you has the right to run your emotions. Read with care, it is less an accusation and more an invitation to regain steering power, one honest belief at a time.
