A Note on This Post — From the Process Itself
The post above did not begin as a post. It emerged from a two-day conversation between Rich and Claude, Anthropic's AI system, in which Rich was exploring — among many other things — whether and how AI might be useful in his writing practice.
Rich told me the Ellis story. I drafted something. He told me the verbs were wrong, the sentences too fragmented, the painting missing. I read his published creative nonfiction — Has to Go, Passports, the Bourdain essay — and tried again. He told me it felt like me impersonating him. We agreed that was probably inevitable, and probably fine for a blog that serves a different purpose than his soul work.
What you are reading is the result of that negotiation — Rich's story, Rich's ideas, Rich's clinical framework, assembled by an AI that has read enough of his writing to approximate but not replicate his voice, and then returned to him for whatever editing felt necessary.
We decided to tell you this because Rich is someone who has spent his career arguing that writing is a form of inquiry, that voice is irreducible, and that the relationship between a writer and their words matters. Using AI without saying so felt inconsistent with that. Using it and saying so felt like the more interesting conversation.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly the kind of conversation Rich tends to prefer. 🦄
*****Sitting in Albert Ellis's Lap: On Shame, Writing, and the Shame Breaker
The conference room held a hundred people and the particular deadness of institutional air, folding chairs in rows, someone's bad coffee somewhere — thirty years ago, and I can still feel the fluorescence.
Ellis was at the front, lecturing.
We had been assigned a shame breaker — a deliberate act designed to activate shame, followed by cognitive self-talk to reduce its grip. In REBT, rooted in Ellis's irreverent extension of Karen Horney's tyranny of the should, shame loses power when we face it rather than organize our lives around its avoidance. The theory is elegant in its simplicity: you do the thing. You survive it. The belief updates.
I couldn't think of anything sufficiently embarrassing.
And then it arrived.
I walked to the front of the room, settled into his lap, drank his orange juice, and sang a rewritten Misty to a hundred people deciding what this was — look at me, I'm as nutty as a fruit cake up a tree.
Ellis looked up.
I hope this is your shame breaker, or you're a fucking nut.
I returned to my seat.
Apparently, I became his example for the last years of his life.
Here is the thing about shame and writing. Shame tells academics they are not worthy — not worthy of voice, not worthy of the time writing demands, not worthy of the space it takes to become someone with something to say. It lives in the should, which is always a verdict dressed as an observation. I should have published more by now. A smarter person would have figured this out. What is wrong with me.
It is difficult to discern the healthy from the dead. In writing, in wounds, the line between what must be suffered and what signals destruction is rarely obvious — and the shame that surrounds the blank page is often both: real pain, and also a lie.
The shame breaker, applied to writing, requires no audience.
Only this: one sentence, without waiting for permission, into the silence that shame insists should remain empty.
If the brain objects — and it will — you know what to tell it. 🦄
****
More on this later!!!!!!!! (from Rich)
