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Key points
- Stoicism, like CBT, is concerned with separating facts from feelings and value judgments about those facts.
- The Stoics emphasized living mindfully in the moment to prevent anxiety and catastrophizing.
- The Stoics emphasized acceptance of what is and avoiding "what ifs."
- Moral self-examination is important to both Stoicism and CBT.
How could I not read a book, highly recommended by a friend whose literary taste I trust, with a title like How to Think Like a Roman Emperor? Especially when it promised to explore the striking parallels between the ancient Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and modern cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)?
I was struck regularly, as I read, by those parallels. It was as though after years of CBT as a consumer of psychotherapy myself, and even more years of reading and learning about it, I had discovered the primordial roots of the very philosophy behind the theory driving the type of therapy my providers practiced.
For the Stoics, the goal of life was to live in agreement with Nature. It required mindfulness, being present in the moment rather than allowing fear—for example—to generate the kind of “what if” catastrophizing that can quickly pull the rug out from under even the most competent individual when they can’t imagine their way through whatever-it-is and the triumph that may well await on the other side of it.
The Stoics understood that, as they would have said in Greek, “skata happens” in life. We suffer disease and injury. We lose loved ones. We are heartbroken in love. They didn’t for one minute deny the normal emotional responses to such events. But they went an important step further by cultivating the ability to separate facts from feelings.
As the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus famously put it, “It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things.” The ability of “things” to upset us depends on the meaning we attach to whatever the thing may be.
If, for example, I believed that living with HIV, as I do, is something shameful and “proof” that I am worthy only of moral condemnation and, eventually, an eternity in hellfire—well, then, why in the world would I be motivated to take my medication and keep my doctor appointments? There are in fact HIV-positive people who believe they “deserve” God’s judgment and do not take their lifesaving medication because they don’t consider themselves fit to live. I am not one of those people.
Instead, I choose to frame the situation—the story—very differently. I stick to the facts of the situation and spare myself the value judgments some would attach to those facts. The facts are these: I am a human being living in a dangerous physical world. I have wanted to feel loved and desired, as we humans do. My own trauma at times undermined my better judgment and led me to engage in behavior that put me in the way of the human immunodeficiency virus.
As my doctor said at the time, the important thing was not to focus on how I’d gotten infected—but on how I was going to live with this new fact of my life. Epictetus himself, afflicted with a lame leg, taught his students about coping with illness. He tells them that disease impedes our body—but it does not impede our freedom of will unless we make it so.
Donald Robertson, the cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, says Epictetus, “was no more perturbed by his crippled leg than he was by his inability to grow wings and fly—he simply accepted it as one of the many things in life that were beyond his control.”
My diagnosis marked the beginning of what I think of as my heroic journey. I searched my memories and journals to understand not only the losses and traumas that had brought me to this terrifying medical moment in my personal history. I also sought to understand where along the way I had developed the resilience I felt confident would help me move into this new dimension of thinking about myself, about life, and about death.
This kind of self-examination is central to Stoicism—and, really, to CBT. It’s all about trying to understand why we do what we do, think and feel as we do, and how to fix the parts of ourselves that are out of harmony with the better parts of ourselves. It’s about framing our stories with facts, not value judgments about those facts.
Robertson writes, “By deeply reflecting on our values each day and attempting to describe them concisely, we can develop a clearer sense of direction in life.” He suggests posing questions like these of yourself:
- What’s ultimately the most important thing in life to me?
- What do I really want my life to stand for or represent?
- What do I want to be remembered for after I am dead?
- What sort of person do I most want to be in life?
- What sort of character do I want to have?
- What would I want to be written on my tombstone?
Once you clarify your own core values, Robertson advises comparing them to the Stoics’ cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.
An important example of how those virtues are lived is demonstrated in how we handle difficult experiences, such as losing our loved ones to death. Robertson says that Marcus Aurelius learned from his multiple experiences of loss and bereavement that death is a natural and inevitable part of life. That changed perspective altered his experience of grief. “He still sheds tears and mourns losses, but as a wise man does,” writes Robertson. “He no longer adds to his natural grief by complaining and shaking his fist at the universe.”
Wisdom, the Stoics’ foremost value, lies in understanding that we are not uniquely singled out for cosmic persecution, but we are instead part of a marvelously interconnected web of ever-renewing life. Such understanding is liberating because it means living out the principles of the Serenity Prayer: Possessing the courage to change what we can, being able to accept what we can’t change, and having enough wisdom to know the difference.
