Building Mental Resilience - Donald Roberston

In this podcast episode, Vaso Karmenikas interviews Donald Robertson, a cognitive behavior psychotherapist and author. They discuss the relevance of ancient techniques, particularly Stoic philosophy, in building a resilient mind in the age of anxiety. Robertson explains that Stoicism is closely intertwined with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy. He also discusses the importance of psychological skills in prevention and resilience training. Robertson is involved in various activities related to Stoicism, including organizing courses and conferences, writing books, and working on a secret project. He further explains that the inspiration for CBT came from Stoicism, particularly the cognitive theory of emotion, which states that emotions are shaped by underlying beliefs and cognitions. Albert Ellis, a famous psychotherapist, drew on Stoic philosophy to develop rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), a precursor to CBT. Ellis used Hello everyone, I am Vaso Karmenikas, and you are listening to our YouTube podcast. I think that this episode might be helpful to everyone because we are all vulnerable to anxiety and stress, and this episode's guest is Donald Robertson, who is a cognitive behavior psychotherapist and author of a great book called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. I was quite excited when Mr. Robertson accepted my invitation to come to this podcast to talk about his experience of applying those ancient techniques with his patients and some other techniques that can help us to build a resilient mind in the age that is often called age of anxiety. I hope you'll enjoy this episode, and let's begin. Thank you so much, Mr. Robertson, for coming to my podcast. I wanted to say that your work is so relevant at the times that we are, particularly right now with COVID around, with our lives changing, but I believe that it's not only for this time that it is relevant, but at any time. Even before COVID, I think there were challenges that we face in our daily lives. I believe that your work is very relevant. For our listeners who are not familiar with your work, could you give a glimpse to your background? Well, I'm a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist by profession, and I have written, I think, six books now about philosophy and psychotherapy, mainly cognitive behavioral therapy and mainly Stoic philosophy. It's an ancient Greek school of philosophy that happens to be the philosophical inspiration for cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy. And I'm also very interested in using psychological skills preventatively. So when we use cognitive therapy, people already have a diagnosis normally, so they already have a problem. But the holy grail of mental health would be prevention is better than cure. And prevention in mental health and psychology is what we tend to call resilience training. So if we make people more psychologically or emotionally resilient, they're less likely to develop clinical depression or clinical anxiety in the future. Stoicism is particularly relevant to psychological resilience training, so that's one of my areas of specialism as well. And I do lots of other things. I'm a founding member of the Modern Stoicism nonprofit organization. We organize annual courses online that are free that anyone can attend, and we do conferences. I'm currently organizing a conference coming up on the 15th of May for the military, all branches of the armed forces in different countries called Stoic on X Military. And also, the two books I'm working on at the moment are unusually, I guess uniquely in fact, a graphic novel about Stoic philosophy, about the life of Marcus Aurelius. And I'm also writing a biography for Yale University Press about Marcus Aurelius as well, a new biography of him. So that's all the stuff that I do. And also, I have a secret project that I don't tell anybody about, except you and your listeners. I call it my secret project, but I cannot tell everyone about this, really. So we are, I live in Athens, and we are proposing to build a center or open a center at the original location of Plato's Academy, the Academy Park in Athens. That sounds incredibly interesting. I'm already intrigued. You mentioned that the inspiration for modern cognitive behavioral therapy was coming from Stoicism. Could you please elaborate on that? How did it happen? Well, let's talk about it obliquely. I was going to say that it all begins with something that Plato said, which is wrong. So Plato thought, Plato had this thing called the tripartite model of the soul. And he thought you've got a faculty of reason, and then you've got your passions or emotions, and they're kind of like two separate parts of your mind, and they kind of battle against one another. And actually, that's how most people today tend to talk about or think about reason and the passions or reason and the emotions, like as if it's two different bits of you. And the Stoics said, we think that's wrong. And actually, Socrates seems to have disagreed with that. Socrates and the Stoics adopted what's sometimes called an intellectual theory of the emotions. So they believed that reason and the emotions are really very closely intertwined. Your emotions are cognitive, like they consist of thoughts, beliefs, and opinions. They're not two separate things. And that's really important. So skip forward in time. We're now in 1950 in New York, and there's a famous psychotherapist called Albert Ellis. And Ellis reaches a point of frustration, because he's a psychoanalytic therapist. And he, like a lot of people in the 50s, he's kind of reaching the decision that psychoanalytic therapy isn't for him. It's not really working out that well for him. And he thinks, he does something that I always admire in people. He kind of rips all his books up metaphorically. And he says, I'm going to start again from scratch, and I'm going to develop a whole new approach to psychotherapy, which became known as rational emotive behavior therapy. And it's the first version, or the main precursor, of what we tend to call cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, today. And so Ellis had read Marcus Aurelius and read Epictetus, the Stoics, as a teenager, in fact. And so he drew on Stoicism and other influences to develop rational emotive behavior therapy, or REBT. And so clients do this thing in therapy, where they'll say to the therapist, I've got this problem. And the therapist will say, oh, that sounds interesting, tell me about that. And the client will say, well, I get really anxious, or I get angry, or depressed, or maybe all three. And it's no good. And the therapist will say, what do you mean? And they'll say, well, it's caused me all sorts of problems. And the therapist will say, tell me about that. And the client will say, well, it's ruining my sex life, it's destroying my relationships, it's consuming all of my time, it's spoiling my hobbies and my leisure time, it's affecting my sleep, it's giving me stomach ulcers, it's affecting my performance at work. It's just overall ruining my whole quality of life, this emotional problem that I've got. And the therapist will say, jeez, that sounds terrible. And then the client will say, it is, but I just can't help it. It's just how I feel. And they're expressing stuckness. Having said how terrible this is, and all these reasons that they would have for doing something to change it, they've basically just given a strong argument for changing this problem. So then they have to explain why they haven't changed it already. And they'll go, I can't help it. I'm stuck. It's just how I feel. And Ellis would lean forward and say, but it's not just how you feel. It's also how you think. Because thoughts and feelings aren't actually two separate things. There are no emotions that are not also cognitions. If someone is anxious, it's because they believe that something threatening or dangerous is about to happen and that they won't be able to cope with it, or something along those lines. If someone's angry, it's because they believe that someone else has violated a rule or done something unjust, something that they shouldn't have done, and they probably also believe that the other person deserves to be punished for it. So emotions tend to be accompanied by beliefs, attitudes, thoughts. And the Stoics knew that 2,300 years earlier. Why? And so Socrates knew that because they had this intellectual or what we would call cognitive theory of emotion. So the cognitive theory of emotion is that our emotions are shaped to a large extent by underlying beliefs, cognitions, as we say in technical jargon. And so Ellis thought, see, every modern psychotherapist is also a kind of translator of sorts, because a good therapist has to study psychological research. And it's hard to read, I'll be honest. You have to be really a pretty serious nerd to get excited about reading randomized control trials and stuff like that, right? There's a lot of statistics. It's pretty hardcore, modern psychology. But if you're a therapist, you've got to read all that stuff. You've got to study research methods. Then you have to sit down in a little consulting room with a nice, comfortable armchair and some flowers and a vase in the corner. You've got to talk to a complete stranger. And you've got to explain it to them. And the person you're talking to might be a 12-year-old kid. It might be an old lady. It might be a guy that works on the buses. It could be any random number of people. And probably 90% of them are not particularly interested in psychological research studies or advanced inferential statistics or whatever. So you have to take that knowledge and translate it into layman's terms. Therapists have to do this translation job if they're going to do evidence-based psychotherapy. Because the evidence is complicated. It's simplified so people can actually put it into practice. And so Ellis thought, well, there's a lot of modern psychological research on the cognitive theory of emotion. There are many experiments and things that substantiate this theory. How can I explain it to clients? And he thought, oh, I know how. There's a quote from Epictetus in his Enchiridion, or Handbook of Stoicism, in passage 5. He says, it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them. And actually, the word he uses for opinions, you could just translate as cognition if you wanted to, really. It's not things that upset us, but our cognitions about them, our opinions, our judgments about them. And so Ellis taught that quote from Epictetus to, as far as I understand it, all of his students, all of his clients. He quotes it in most of his books, many books that he wrote on REBT. And for a generation or so, every cognitive therapist knew that quote, and it became kind of a cliche. And so that's how I was introduced to stoicism. I started studying CBT, and everywhere I heard this quote from Epictetus, from stoicism, because it was a simple way of explaining what lots of complicated research tells us about how our emotions actually work. Or another way of putting it was, the Stoics were basically right 2,300 years ago. And that's even more shocking, because loads of other people were not right. Lots of people were wrong, like Freud, for example, and Jung, and all these famous psychologists didn't understand the cognitive nature of emotion. And it took until the 1950s before a psychotherapist actually gained that insight. But it was an insight that had already been around for thousands of years, and had kind of got forgotten about. The motivation perhaps plays a role, whether one wants to change their way of thinking and adapt, like to admit that maybe their reaction to the external world is wrong. And it's causing depression or anxiety. In your experience with your clients, how easy it was, let's say, maybe it sounds silly, but to convince them that their view to the world is wrong, because it's quite difficult to tell someone, look, your worldview is wrong. And from now on, you have to change. What's the process of helping clients? We have a name for that. We call that the socialization phase of therapy, or the orientation phase of therapy, you could call it. So at the beginning of therapy, the client has to understand what their role is, what the therapist's role is, the general orientation to the whole process that they're going to be getting into. And part of that is the client has to kind of buy into the cognitive behavioral model to some extent. Otherwise, if they don't agree with it, they're not going to benefit from the therapy. So therapists, kind of like this translation job that I mentioned earlier, have to help clients to prove to themselves. There's also no point in the therapist just kind of saying, well, that's how it is, right? Your cognitions cause your feelings and expecting the client to agree with that if they don't. What we do is what we call socialization experiments. So that means giving the client little exercises to do so they can kind of test it out and figure out for themselves what the role of cognition is. And because it happens to be correct, almost invariably, clients say, oh, I see what you mean now. Yeah, you're right. So we'll get clients to do little experiments to determine these things. And we might say, for example, or we'll give them examples that they can reflect on. So for instance, you might say, suppose you had a really important meeting to attend, like a job interview or something, and you are trying to get there on time, but your bus was delayed or your train was delayed. And so you're getting really anxious, stressed out, maybe frustrated and angry, because you're like five minutes, ten minutes late now to go to this thing. So you'd be angry and upset and frustrated and experiencing all these emotions. And then to take a really simple example, suppose you then realize that actually your watch is wrong. And in fact, you're an hour early. So it's going to take a while. There's going to be a delay before you calm down and adapt. But having now straight up completely changed the anxiety provoking belief, like you now know that's not true. Like you're actually early, you're probably going to feel less anxious. Now, there might be some cases where the anxiety lingers or people worry about other things. But basically, once you realize that you were mistaken, then generally the anxiety will dissipate, like the anger and frustration will go away. In the same way, the example that Aaron Beck, the founder of Cognitive Therapy, gives is imagine you're lying in bed at night and you hear a footstep and you wake up with a start and you're anxious. You think there's someone in the house. Maybe it's a burglar. Did they strangle me in my sleep or something like that? So you kind of tentatively get out of your bed and you're very anxious and frightened and you look around the corner and you see it's like your cat or something. And now again, because you've corrected the misconception, it might take you a little while to calm down. But basically, you're not going to be anxious anymore because you realize that the threat isn't real. In other situations, you might look at a threat and you might be overestimating the probability or overestimating the severity of the threat. This is more commonly how it works in an anxiety disorder. So when our beliefs and our opinions change, our emotions will typically change as well. And we kind of take that for granted in a sense. Cognitive therapy, once somebody realizes, once somebody accepts the cognitive model of emotion and they realize that their cognition to a large extent, if not in 100 percent, but to a large extent, shape their emotions, then it opens up a toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques that we can now use because you could, first of all, help someone to clarify what the beliefs are that cause their anxiety, anger or sadness. You could then help people to evaluate the evidence for those beliefs to see whether they're true or false. And you can get people to test the beliefs out in practice to check the facts. You can ask people to reflect on what others might believe about similar situations that might be more helpful. You can get them to reflect on whether their beliefs are helpful or unhelpful. And each of those strategies, each of those things you can do in lots and lots of different ways. But you basically now opened up this whole toolbox of cognitive techniques. The Stoics had a bunch of similar techniques. And the Stoics were children of the Socratic method. They inherited from Socrates the Socratic method of questioning, which is all about doing something kind of similar. In fact, in cognitive therapy, we call it, in a loose sense, we call it Socratic questioning when we ask clients what evidence is there for this belief that nobody likes you, everybody hates you or whatever the upsetting belief is that's causing them to feel bad. And, you know, that's the kind of basic form of cognitive therapy. Nowadays, we now know that there's a more subtle change that can benefit people. It's a little bit harder to describe. We use a technical term called cognitive distancing to describe it. And it may be that you don't even have to disprove a belief. It may be simply that realizing that your beliefs are causing your emotions and viewing them from a more detached perspective might be sufficient to reduce the emotional impact of them. So that's a little bit more subtle. We don't really have good language in normal, ordinary English to describe cognitive distancing, but we can get clients to test it out in practice and we can show them how it works. And the Stoics were also aware of this. And in fact, the Stoics probably put more emphasis on this than they do on Socratic questioning. So Marcus Aurelius, throughout the meditations, repeatedly tells himself to separate his beliefs, his value judgments, from the external things to which they refer, to realize that there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so that when you see something's terrible or awful, it's because you're projecting a value judgment onto it. And so he says you have to take ownership of these value judgments and realize that the awfulness comes from you, like the awfulness is a value judgment, an opinion that you hold rather than a quality of the event itself. It's not an objective fact, as it were. Other people might view the same situation non-catastrophically as not being awful. Or you yourself, 10 years from now, say your girlfriend dumps you or you get sacked from your job or something, you might think, this is awful, it's a catastrophe. But 10 years from now, you might look back on it and think, actually, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Or you might think it was an opportunity to move on and to grow. Or it was bad, but it wasn't actually catastrophically bad. And someone who gains cognitive dissonance will realize that one day they might view it differently or that other people might see it differently. So they will realize that the awfulness is kind of arbitrary in a way. It's just how you choose to evaluate at the present moment in time. And realizing that, we now know, is perhaps an even more important cognitive therapy technique. The Stoics did this as well. In fact, that saying from Epictetus, it's not things that upset us, but our opinions about them. Beck thought, the founder of cognitive therapy, thought that this was kind of a precursor of therapy. You have to realize that, and then you can start questioning the evidence for the belief. But we now realize that maybe that statement itself, if you really, really grasp it very deeply, might be all that you need to do. Like, you know, just really grasping that it's not things that upset us, but our opinions might be enough for many people to actually reduce the amount of distress that they're having. When I shared your book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, a couple of months ago in my book newsletter that I send every month, and one of the readers emailed me and we started to chat. And he particularly liked cognitive distancing technique. I hope he doesn't mind that I'll say that he's a bit of an anxious person. Anticipation makes him very anxious. And he started applying the technique that he read you describing in your book. And he said, you know, after a week or two, it's quite a good technique. It's he really, he really found it useful. And your book, you mentioned that you're writing for Yale University, a biography of Marcus Aurelius. But your book, How to Think Like Marcus Aurelius, it's like kind of biography of Marcus Aurelius' kind of path to the ideas that he came for and to his meditations. In the beginning, at the start of his life, he wasn't this wise person who could control his emotions. Could you please tell about his first part of his life when he wasn't perfect? Weirdly, I'm kind of, I'm going to have written, in a sense, three biographies of Marcus, actually four biographies of Marcus Aurelius. I wrote an introduction to the copy of the meditations, which contains a biography. So I wrote this biography, really, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor contains bits of biography. And then the graphic novel is biographical. And then I'm writing a more conventional biography as well. But they're all actually completely different from one another somehow. So I'll tell a story about Marcus. So when you're doing ancient biography in particular, there's a lot of uncertainty in the material that we have, the evidence, there's contradictions, there's ambiguities, there's inconsistencies, and there's gaps, there's stuff that we just don't know. However, rather than boring people by saying it could be this, it could be that, you can say, look, you could, there's a possible story here that you can tell. We don't know 100% for sure that this is the historically correct story, but certainly this is what it looks like the sources are telling us. So one plausible story about Marcus Aurelius is that, first of all, we know his father died when Marcus was, we believe, round about three or four years old. And so he was raised by several other people, relatives, but mainly by his mother. And Marcus in the Meditations implies that he was quite anxious about the changes in his life, moving from one household to another. He kind of felt like his life was out of his control. And he was in a very, I would say, actually dangerous position, surprisingly, because he was a Roman noble who was kind of in line to the throne, and that was a very dangerous position to be in, in ancient Rome. Lots of people want to get rid of you. Oh, yeah. And the first thing that a Roman emperor often did when he became Roman emperor would be to get rid of all the potential rivals to the throne. And so Marcus is in quite a precarious position in that respect. And Hadrian was the emperor when Marcus was a child growing up. Hadrian went bonkers towards the end of his life. And he was very physically ill. He became quite dictatorial, totalitarian. He had secret police and spies everywhere. And I would say it's pretty likely that Marcus was spied on by Hadrian and knew that he was... One of the things we're told several times is that everybody, it was an open secret, everyone knew that Hadrian had spies everywhere, different types of spies. Some of them were professional spies called frumentarii, like soldiers who wore plain clothes and went around trying to entrap people or spy on them. And also just people that were paid off, like slaves or servants in households that would get a lot of money if they told the emperor what people were saying behind his back. Not only do we know that Hadrian used these spies to keep an eye on potential successors, he also executed or persecuted or exiled a number of people that he wasn't happy with. And so Marcus grew up in this incredibly toxic environment. And at one point, Hadrian even said, I want you, Marcus, to come and live in my villa. And Marcus had to move and come and live in his... Now, I would say, like, he's gone from living in households where he could assume there's probably a bunch of spies around him to then living in a household where he might as well assume that everybody around him is potentially an informant or a spy, because they're all Hadrian's staff, like that he, when he was... How old would he have been? He would have been an adolescent at that point. And so Marcus says that he had problems with anger as a young man, controlling his temper. And I don't know if it's related to this unusual toxic environment or to the loss of his father when he was quite young, but he was under a lot of pressure and in a difficult, unnatural kind of environment. And he latched on to stoicism. I think you can see the meditations. Definitely, it strikes me very simply is that it clearly looks, the book itself, like a father substitute. So the meditations is Marcus giving this kind of advice to himself about how to be a good man, how to find a sense of direction in life. And this is all the stuff that you might get growing up from your dad in an ideal world. But he's kind of having to do it for himself. He's kind of having to parent himself in the absence of his father and surrounded also by some quite toxic authority figures, the emperor. And so we see, also incidentally in that book, Marcus says things that derive from Stoic and Cynic philosophy, but nevertheless they take on a strange double meaning when we know more about his life. For instance, at one point he said, never do anything that requires walls or curtains, which is a striking thing for someone to say who grew up in the household of Hadrian, who was known for employing lots of informants and spies. So there are things even in that book that take on a more sinister meaning or a double meaning when we understand the odd life that Marcus had as a boy growing up. And so he says that he was very angry, but he says the person he got angriest with was his Stoic mentor, Junius Rusticus. But he also says that Junius Rusticus taught him how to overcome his temper and how to restore friendship. What was the reason of him getting angry with Stoic teacher? Well, we don't know, but actually we have a lot of clues, right? So in the writings of Epictetus, he describes, and also in Masonius Rufus, these other famous Stoic teachers from the previous generation, they describe how a Stoic teacher would morally scrutinise and examine his students and pinpoint their character flaws. And like, in a way, Socrates had done earlier by questioning people's character and their values very deeply. And some people found that incredibly insightful and liberating, and other people got really offended and really annoyed and made him drink hemlock. So the Stoics say, they say the philosopher's school is like a doctor's clinic. They say you don't go there to have fun. They say you go there to have surgery. You go there to get your teeth pulled out or whatever. You go through an experience that might be quite painful, but you come out of it hopefully being a better person, being healed. And so I think that's a clue as to why Marcus got angry with his Stoic teacher. Because his job, the Stoics believed in this principle, like the cynics before them, of paresia, which means speaking plainly, frankly, or freely, and being completely honest. And Marcus would have given Junius Rusticus permission to speak honestly to him. That's a very heated kind of strange thing in imperial Rome, because if you spoke freely to an emperor or someone that was in line for the throne, obviously there's a pretty good chance that you could be punished or even executed for having... Really, it's quite a stressful thing. Are you sure it's okay if I'm honest with you? You're not going to change your mind about that? So if you were honest with Nero, I don't think Seneca, for example, who was advisor to Nero, really had much chance to do this with Nero. And I think he would have struggled to speak truth to power in Nero's case, because Nero probably just executed him, which is what he ended up doing with him eventually anyway. But Marcus was more tolerant, and I think he found it painful to have his character flaws highlighted. And then actually in the Meditations, after mentioning this, Marcus goes on to list a bunch of things that he learned from Junius Rusticus, and some of them are kind of implicitly criticisms of Marcus's character. And actually, several of them have to do with vanity, interestingly. And so Marcus, whom we don't really think of as a vain emperor, and in fact, one of the things I'd say about the Meditations biographically is that if you look very closely at the things that Marcus criticizes himself for implicitly, or sometimes quite explicitly, like vanity, sexual lust, you know, anger, these are all things which the biographies of Marcus paint a completely contrasting picture of. And I would say one way of interpreting that, unless we think all the biographies are just very overly generous to Marcus, I think what we see here, and this is what makes him so interesting, is a guy who really on the inside was struggling with some of these very human feelings, and on the outside had kind of succeeded in mastering them. In the Meditations, we see them, it's like a workshop, like he's working on himself. But in the history, they're like, he never lost his temper. He was a paragon of self-discipline and wisdom and equanimity. And maybe what we're looking at is a guy that had enough hormone struggles, but actually succeeded in conquering it. It's like behind the scenes, you know, histories is what happens on the scene, and Meditations behind the scene, how does they come. And one of the techniques that you mention in your book is finding mentors and asking yourself what would they think about this or that action, or what advice they would give. Could you please tell about how did you apply with your patients this technique, and how did Marcus Aurelius came to realize that this technique helps? Well, the ancient Stoics often had these mentors, and Genius Rusticus is clearly an example of that. He's Marcus Aurelius, he's like Merlin in King Arthur or something, he's like his wise advisor. And he had other advisors and mentors as well. And often when I speak to people today, what they'll say is, but I don't have anyone like that. I mean, I guess we have coaches and mentors and therapists to some extent, but not really in the way that they had in the ancient world. There aren't many individuals like that that we can turn to, or we do it in a professional context now, more in a consulting room. But the first thing I think that the Stoics must have noticed about their mentors, and I think it's clear implicitly that they didn't realize this. There's a problem with wise mentors, and that is, like all material things, what is born must die. And they've got a tendency to die. Like, so Zeno, Socrates, obviously, to the dismay of his followers, was executed. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was this ultimate role model to the Stoics. But he died eventually. And then there were other famous Stoics. They all died as well. Now they're all dead, right? And so you'll see in the meditations, Marcus talks a lot about reflecting on the transience of human life, and the mortality of preceding emperors, in particular, and other people that he's known. And so the Stoics, when Zeno died, the founder of the school, I guess pretty quickly, the early Stoics thought, what are we going to do now? They thought, do we have to find another Zeno? So they found another head of the school, but they said he'll die as well. So they thought, we need some way of continuing to work on ourselves in the absence of our dead mentor or teacher. And so the Stoics have a bunch of techniques that they use. They thought, first of all, we have to construct a hypothetical image of an ideal sage. So we should be able to dig deep within ourselves and imagine what the perfect teacher would be like. And we should practice doing that by asking ourselves, what qualities would the ideal teacher have? How would they behave in different situations? We could base it on studying historical figures or even fictional characters, but we have the ability to find this resource within ourselves. Even if we're on a desert island or even if the ancient Stoics are all long dead, we can use our imagination, our creative thinking to come up with exemplars. And so you see the Stoics doing this. They call it the Sophos or the ideal sage, trying to construct a mental image and then imagine what would the sage do in the situation that you're facing today? And what would they advise you to do? Like, or what would the sage say if they could see how you're behaving and how you're thinking in the situation? What advice might they give you? And we use similar techniques. We call them modeling techniques and modern cognitive behavioral therapy as well. So that's one way in which we can kind of create a substitute for actually having a living mentor. And there are several solutions to this problem, actually. The other one is to kind of compartmentalize people's qualities. So Marcus does this. In the book, One of the Meditations, he goes through the names of 17 different people, ish, family members and tutors. And some of them are people that he has mixed feelings about, but he focuses on what the virtues are. So he says, listen, I can learn from emulating this person as a role model, even if I don't agree with everything that they do. Like, we have to learn how to work with imperfect role models as well as, you know, looking for exceptionally good ones. You know, there might be slim pickings in terms of wise and virtuous individuals that we can study around us. Or we have to think more deeply about where we can find examples like that. So Marcus talks even about his brother, Lucius Verus, who by all accounts was not anything approaching a stoic stage. But Marcus says, I can learn affection from him and loyalty. And he talks about other people that he clearly had mixed feelings about and nevertheless thinks that he can learn some good quality. They all have some traces of virtue within them. That's another respect. And then another way, in the absence of a role model, is Marcus will think, within myself, do I have virtues? Is there a better, a stronger part of me in this situation? What virtues has nature given me that would help me to cope better? And so looking deeper within yourself to find a better wisdom within yourself that you can embrace more fully and model in daily life. Again, it's something you could do in the absence of a role model. That's like asking yourself, don't I know better? Is there a wiser part of me that I could tap into and access in order to cope with this in the absence of a living mentor? So there are many ways that the Stoics would find substitutes for this. Although, you know, if you're lucky today, you might find somebody who can act as a mentor to you. But I know from experience, a lot of people tell me these days that they find that a little bit tricky to do in practice. You have to use these alternative strategies a lot. Before we continue, I wanted to say that this episode is kindly sponsored by Audible. And actually, Donald Robertson's book is available in audio format on Audible as well. And you can grab it for free if you are not an Audible subscriber yet by following the link that I attached in the description below. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode, and let's continue. It's quite easy when there is an example such as Zeno walking around and embodying the philosophy. I think one of the things that makes Stoicism appealing today is that since they practiced what they preached, it makes it more practical. Another technique is, if you go on YouTube right now, everybody talks about journaling. How important is journaling? It makes you calm and gives you an idea about past, present, and future. The Stoics practiced this, not in a kind of modern sense, but like meditations of Martha Rilles, is journaling in some sense. Could you tell about this technique of how journaling can help us with the past and future? Well, this might surprise people, but I'm going to say that journaling is something that has pros and cons. Actually, probably in therapy, more often than not, I ask clients to stop journaling because it's actually quite problematic in some cases, and I'll explain why. We know now that one of the key maintaining factors in clinical depression, and also in certain types of anxiety, particularly psycho-generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, is a particular style of thinking that we call ruminative or perseverative thinking, where people kind of overthink or overanalyze things. Every therapist will just know from experience that there'll be clients who have those personality traits, quite a lot of clients, and you'll say, traditionally, we would say, could you keep a record of your negative thoughts? Someone will maybe keep a couple of sheets of paper with some brief notes on it, but then you'll get these clients who come in to the session next week with a big stack of papers, and they'll say, I've written all these hundreds of notes and all of my negative thinking stuff, and that's overthinking, overanalyzing, ruminative thinking style. And so actually, over the past 15, 20 years or so, based on research, many different approaches to therapy, evidence-based approaches, have sought ways to get people to abandon these styles of thinking. And so the concern with things like journaling is that in some cases, they might actually exacerbate ruminative thinking. So people who overthink things might be prone to do that. We might ask clients to stop writing everything down in some cases and to learn to do cognitive distancing, basically, which is a very different way of responding to negative thoughts. That said, for many people, particularly people who do not have a diagnosable mental health problem, and for some people who do have a diagnosable mental health problem, journaling could be a very useful therapeutic tool. Now, it kind of depends. I'm not a big fan of kind of cathartic or venting or abreactive approaches to journaling where people just kind of spill their guts and talk about how bad they feel and things like that. I feel that typically that's not helpful, and often it can exacerbate certain problems, make them worse rather than better. However, there are other ways of journaling. So you'll find that the Stoics used writing in a number of ways, but one of them was to reframe situations and to see catastrophic situations as opportunities, for example. So there was a Stoic statesman, a senator in Rome called Piconius Agrippinus, and Epictetus, the famous Stoic teacher, really admired him. He was one of his heroes. He was a role model, a hero to him, and he was informed by the emperor that he was going to be sent into exile, and Epictetus says that Piconius Agrippinus used to write letters to himself, kind of like journaling. He describes eulogies, like letters of praise about poverty, exile, sickness. So he'd write a letter to himself saying, oh, I'm going to be sent into an exile. What an amazing opportunity this is. There are loads of really cool things that can come out of this if I approach it in the right way. So he'd make an effort to frame it as a positive opportunity, and he'd actually put that in writing to himself. And I think in the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, you can see what he's doing is a lot more complex than that, but you can see little traces of it. In fact, there are passages in the meditations where he pretty much straight up does that. At one point he says, do not say that this is misfortune, but the opportunity to bear it well is good fortune, which is pretty much the same thing, but he's expressing it in more abstract, more strategic terms. The other thing that Marcus is doing, and we know he's doing this because a lot of people don't realise how much we know about Marcus Aurelius. We know quite a lot about him. So there are several surviving histories of his reign. But also, among all the other evidence, in the middle of the 19th century, an Italian scholar called Angelo May discovered a bunch of letters between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto, his rhetoric tutor. And in those letters, Fronto kind of has this ongoing polite argument with Marcus about the conflict, this notorious ancient conflict between rhetoric and philosophy. There was a rivalry that went on throughout antiquity. In Socrates, it's very obvious there was this big tension between the rhetoricians or sophists and the philosophers. There was a conflict or tense competition between them. And you still find this 600 years later in the time of Marcus Aurelius. And so Fronto says to Marcus, look, philosophy is really good for helping you to achieve profound insights, but it's not so good at helping you to articulate those insights. And you need both skills. So rhetoric and philosophy can complement one another. So philosophers figure out these subtle ideas, but they express them in language that's quite technical. And I would recommend that what you do is take wise sayings or profound concepts or insights, paradoxes, they would say, like complicated, abstract ideas, and practice putting them into plain English or Latin or Greek repeatedly, several times. So Marcus was fluent in both Latin and Greek. He wrote the Meditations in Greek, incidentally, although Fronto taught him Latin rhetoric. So he said over and over again, and he goes, you have to try really hard to find exactly the right word, or we might say the right metaphor, to capture an idea, to make it memorable and evocative. And so the Meditations, that's what Marcus Aurelius is doing. So he's got some insight from philosophy, and then over and over again, he'll repeat it in different words. And he often uses very kind of memorable phrases and analogies. And you can see him really kind of reaching. He's using the skill of rhetoric. He's building on his experience of the things that are happening around him. He turns everything into a metaphor for philosophy, in a sense. And so that's, I guess, like journaling. But not just journaling in the sense of writing down venting or something like that, or maybe kind of trying to impose rigid goals on yourself, but in using writing in a much more strategic way to transform your personality. So I think journaling is often done badly and in a way that's counterproductive. But it can also be done well in a way that's potentially very therapeutic. I personally journaled for nine years. I just accidentally one day started journaling. And I use it particularly like when I read a book. I think I understand the idea that is written in a book, but I write down the quote and kind of ruminate on what exactly that means and realize that maybe I haven't fully understood. And I really liked that in your book that you mentioned also another technique how we can control our emotions is we often don't realize how we catastrophizing situations or exaggerating certain things that happen. I noticed in myself, I see a film which is good and I say, this is amazing. This is a great film. But it is due to my poor vocabulary rather than a clear description of the film. So I try in my journal to find kind of the precise description. And this technique is particularly useful when something bad happens to you and you say, oh, this is horrible. This is terrible. This is a tragedy. But once you write down what it really is, you realize that you chose those words affect your way of thinking. Can you tell about this technique of the catastrophizing? The Spirits call it fantasia cathartica. That's the kind of technical term that they use is related to this. Fantasia cathartica means it's hard to translate into English, but it kind of means representing things to yourself in a way that has a firm grip on reality. And some scholars just translate it as objective representation of things. So learning to literally phrase things in a more matter of fact, down to earth, balanced, rational and objective way. You think, don't we all do that? No, like most people do the opposite most of the time. So go on the internet, buddy, and look at all the stuff that people write. How many sweeping generalizations, unfounded assumptions, how much emotive language, vulgar language is used just to stir the pot of anger and anxiety on the internet. Language is the closest thing that we have to magic. You know, like casting a, we weave a magic spell with our words and we hypnotize other people with the language that we use, but we also hypnotize ourselves by the way that we articulate things, the way we choose to describe things. So people like, rhetoric evolved as a technique for manipulating audiences. So, you know, speakers, orators would appear in front of a crowd and they want to whip them up into a frenzy so that they, in the political assembly, they would vote in favor of declaring war on some other nation. You know, they try to kind of whip up a reaction to get support for doing something. And, you know, they use rhetoric to do that. They use emotive language, you know, they use other rhetorical tropes, like they use vivid metaphors in order to kind of like stoke emotion. And language has very much evolved to do that. But then the weird thing is, this is how, this is so weird. We, if I thought I'm going to, I want to make you really angry about something, you know, so that you go out and protest. I can understand, like if that was my goal, why I might use language that was designed to do that. Why would I do it to myself? Like, we also use evocative language. We use rhetoric in our own internal dialogue and we manipulate ourselves through our use of language, which seems crazy. Like, who in their right mind would use language to distort, to turn a drama into a crisis, you know, like to kind of like, to turn events into tragedies, like literally the Stoics thought, like we, like the ancient tragedians, we turn setbacks in our life into Greek tragedies by the language that we use. So somebody says to me, oh, I was in a meeting yesterday and, you know, they just shot me down in flames and tore a strip off me and it was awful and I wished that the ground would open and swallow me up. And I might say, could you just tell me exactly what happened, but get rid of all the metaphors and emotive language and strong value judgments and just like stick to the facts. And they might say, well, I gave a presentation and somebody in the audience said that they disagreed with something that was in my presentation. And I might think that sounds very different from what you, the way you just described it, right? So like, you know, sticking to objective facts is a Stoic technique. It's kind of anti-rhetoric or counter-rhetoric, and this is why there's always been a bit of a culture clash between philosophy in the Socratic tradition, so Socrates and the Stoics and the Synopses, and the Sophists, orators or rhetoricians who, by the very nature of their profession, want to distort and manipulate our perception of events. I used to think the Sophists was a profession that existed in the ancient world, and we don't really have equivalents today. We maybe have certain motivational speakers or self-help gurus or whatever, but I thought, you know, not quite the same. And then one day I realized that we do have Sophists today, but they've evolved into being digital. So Facebook is a Sophist, Twitter is a Sophist, CNN is a Sophist, you know, Breitbart and Fox News are Sophists, like the news media and social media are basically Sophists. And the way that they work is they feed off our attention and engagement. So the news will tell you things that make you angry or frightened, because then you pay more attention to it for longer, and they can make more money from advertising because it improves their viewing figures. And social media will pump your head full of whatever gets the most likes and most engagements and most views. It has an algorithm that does that. So the social media, Facebook doesn't think, let me figure out what the truth is and then present that to you. It figures out, what are you most likely to spend the most time reading on Facebook? What are you most likely to interact with on Facebook? It might be the stuff that's most ridiculous and most obviously false and distorted, or the most inflammatory about a situation. Socrates faced exactly the same problem 2,300 years ago, 2,400 years ago, and he said, this is very dangerous for society. Like, the sophists will give a speech, and the speech that gets the biggest reaction from the crowd might literally win a prize in a festival. Or the sophists who get the biggest reaction from the audience are the ones that potentially earn the most money. And so they're doing it for the applause. They're doing it for the likes. They're doing it for Instagram or Facebook or whatever. And that leads to lies, like distortions and deceptions, because you're telling people what they want to hear, or even telling people what they hate to hear, as long as you get a reaction out of them. And Socrates said, truth goes out the window, like when this happens. We need to get back to doing things for the sake of truth and wisdom, and not for the sake of getting a reaction. So it is kind of an eternal battle between your external world that surrounds you and internal world. And Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius said that you have to build your inner citadel, where you can retreat and kind of protect yourself from the external events. And in modern day, I assume this is also very important for everyone, you know, with social media, as you said, trying to grab our attention, emotion, and kind of takes us out of our inner citadels. I would go further and say that we actually, this is pretty much the point of being here, is to rise above these things and learn to deal with them and conquer them. So we think, oh, isn't it terrible that in the modern world, we're surrounded by all this propaganda and social media and stuff? No, it's what life is all about. It was the same in the ancient world as well. It's an opportunity. It's like a sparring partner that you have. It's there so you can learn how to conquer it and rise above it. That's how you become stronger as an individual. But the people that complain about it the most are the ones that are succumbing to it and giving into it. So Stoics exposed themselves to the danger, the threat of propaganda so that they could learn how to see through it, rise above it, and grow stronger as a result. They didn't retreat from society. They went out into the agora where all the sophists were. Funny, you know, Socrates thinks the sophists are dangerous. He follows them around everywhere. Wherever you find a sophist, you won't find Socrates far away, right? Because he thought, this is how I learn. It can go one of two ways. Either you're brainwashed by these guys, or you learn how to see through them. And we should be practicing learning how to see through Facebook and CNN and Fox and Breitbart and all that kind of stuff, because that's what makes us stronger as individuals. That's really why we're here. It's the goal of life is to become wise and develop strength of character, according to the Stoics. We need challenges. We need brainwashing. We need propaganda. We need setbacks and adversity in life in order to have an opportunity to develop these structures within ourselves. How much do you think that the Stoicism, the ancient Stoicism needs adaptation? Some of the modern thinkers such as Massimo Biliucci, maybe I'm pronouncing his name incorrectly, in his field guide to a happy life, the Stoic guide to a happy life, he proposes Stoicism 2.0. Do you think Stoicism needs an adaptation to the modern challenges? Or do you think it should stay the way it is? I don't think it needs to be adapted, which might shock people. And I'll tell you why I don't think it needs to be adapted. Because Stoicism isn't a bunch of empirical claims. It's a moral philosophy. So the Stoics had claims about the nature of the universe. They believed that the universe was designed by a provident being, the size of the whole cosmos, called Zeus, whom they worshipped. And they believed in divination techniques and stuff like that. Modern Stoics don't believe that stuff. Does that mean that Stoicism has been updated? Well, those things weren't essential to Stoicism. In the first place. In fact, all ancient philosophers believed in the gods and stuff like that. Those are peripheral aspects of Stoicism. The Stoics thought they were very important. Some Stoics thought they were very important. But they're not the essence of Stoic philosophy. The Stoics are crystal clear that the essence of their philosophy is the doctrine that virtue is the only true good. Now, does that no longer apply since the development of the internet? I don't think that changes in the slightest. I think it's a perennial philosophy. Like, it's as true now as it was back then. The core of the philosophy is a timeless piece of moral wisdom. It's pure ethics, as we sometimes say, that's devoid of any empirical reference to physics or technology or culture. So the Stoics would say, look, this is really what Stoicism is all about. This is the core of it. This doesn't change. The way you apply it might change over time as we learn more about the world, about physics or as society changes, for sure. Like, loads of things that the Stoics taught are out of date. There are theories of logic, psychology, physics are all out of date. That stuff needs to be updated. But that's not really the heart or essence of what Stoicism is. Stoicism, in the very core of its being, is a pure ethical doctrine that's timeless and perennial, in my view, and is as true today in the age of the internet as it was in imperial Rome or classical Athens. Towards the end of the interview, I always ask about the future projects of my guests, but you mentioned it right at the beginning. Do you have a precise date for your graphic novel that is coming out about Stoicism? No, I'll tell you roughly. I think it will be out next year, 2022, maybe in the autumn or for Christmas. So that takes a long time. I guess the book for Yale might be out next summer. It might actually come out a little bit earlier than the graphic novel. Graphic novels take a long time because it's 250 pages, roughly, of full-colour illustrations. So that takes a long time for the artist to do the work. And then the conference on the 15th of May. So coming up, we have the military conference, which anyone can attend. And so it's going to be people from all branches of the armed forces, including some quite senior figures, talking about Stoicism. So that's going to be unique. That's the first time we've really done something like that open to the public anyway. I'll send you the details for that. And then the other thing, Plato's Academy, is going to take a few years. But we're going to put a website up for that quite soon. The web domain, actually, is just platosacademy.org, all one word. So if someone wants to go there right now, there's no point in it. But actually, in a few days' time, we're going to have the website up pretty soon. And so people can see we'll be releasing information in little steps and stages as the project develops. But as soon as we mentioned doing this, we had a lot of interest from people offering to fund it, and from people involved in existing organizations that would be stakeholders in it and stuff. So it moved forward very, very quickly. And so if people want to check that out, we're always happy for people to learn about it. It's partly about public engagement. We want people to come to Athens. But we also want people online to benefit from the stuff that we're planning to do here. To reintroduce the Socratic method and the original location of Plato's Academy, and also to help revitalize and renew the area in Greece, because it could benefit economically from tourism and from some funding. And so we want to teach people. I don't want people to learn about Plato's Theory of Forms and these abstract theories and stuff. I want them to learn how to do philosophy. I want them to learn to use the Socratic method. I want to approach it as rather than didactically, like lecturing, is actually my area of expertise in psychotherapy is skills training. So I want to approach Socratic philosophy from the perspective of skills training, like not telling people philosophical theories, but teaching them how to actually use questioning methods in a way that's modelled on the questioning method, the Alenchus, we call it, that Socrates used to use. So I want to see people doing that in the streets, like learning how to think. And again, we're hoping that people realise that this is kind of an antidote to the media and rhetoric and propaganda, learning critical thinking and how to really put that into practice in daily life. I also ask the guests to recommend some books, very usually, that our listeners should read from modern Stoic philosophy, one from ancient, other than meditations, and perhaps the third one could be that is not related to Stoicism, perhaps. So a modern book on Stoicism, I like to be a bit quirky, and I'll recommend a book that probably most people, some people have read it, but it's not explicitly a book about Stoicism. So it's by a British TV celebrity and a mentalist and illusionist called Derren Brown. And Derren Brown has a book called Happy, which is a kind of self-improvement book. And there's like a chapter or so about Stoicism in that. I wrote a review of it recently. And actually, I disagree with some of the things he says about Stoicism, but I still think it's an exceptionally well-written book. He's a very, very talented writer. And I think it's very reflective and thoughtful and insightful. And I would place it head and shoulders above most of the self-help books that, and I've read a lot of self-help books recently. Most of them I'm not super keen on, but I thought that was a really interesting book and really worth reading. So it's got a bunch of Stoicism in it, although it's not the main focus of the book. So I'd recommend Derren Brown's book, Happy. And then an ancient Stoic book. There's a bunch of things that I could recommend. I mean, first of all, by the way, everyone should read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but that kind of goes without saying. I think that's the main way that people get into Stoicism. So the other book that I recommend that people... Is there a translation of Meditations that you prefer? Well, the main problem that people have with translations is that they read cheap or free of charge public domain translations, which are usually ones that were written in the Victorian era or the beginning of the 20th century. So the language is more difficult for some people. It's anachronistic, it's dated. And so basically any modern translation will, and I think they're all, I'm interested in the translation. Like I read a little bit of Greek, I'm a bit rusty. Like my Greek's not great, but they are. So I'm not fussed about the translation because I'll look at the original Greek and compare different translations. I don't think there's one translation that's way better than another in that regard. But Robin Waterfield has a new translation of Meditations that's coming out in a few months. I read a review copy of it recently. I thought that was good. Robin Hard's translation is good. It's got a preface by Christopher Gill, who works in the Modern Stoicism team. He founded Modern Stoicism. And also the most popular modern translation is Gregory Hayes, although it's not perhaps the most literal translation. It's the most readable. So that's the one that's most popular, I think, with modern readers. So anyone that kind of struggles with it, probably Gregory Hayes is the easiest to get into. But any modern translation generally will be good. So having said the Meditations, because most people read it, the book that I really think people should read is Plato's Apology, because it's a masterpiece. And it's one of the finest pieces of philosophical writing in the entire Western canon. And here's a clue. Like, the Stoics had all read it. Everyone in the ancient world, even critics of Socrates or of Plato, knew the Apology by heart because it was like Hamlet. It's a masterpiece of literature. And in it are contained the seeds of the Stoic philosophy. And the Stoics were influenced by the story of Socrates and his behaviour during his trial, his noble death, as it's called. So I would say everybody should read Plato's Apology. And also, it's not very long. You can read it in like two hours or something. So during lockdown or whatever, I mean, I really think everyone should just go and read that book because it doesn't take long. And it's one of the single most... Anyone that has any interest in philosophy whatsoever should definitely... It would be absurd for them not to have read that book because it's the single most important text in the entire history of Western philosophy. And a book on non-philosophy, on a non-Stoic philosophy. A non-Stoic philosophy book. That's trickier. I can tell you, one of my favourite therapy books is very out of date now. But I still like it because it's written in a very peculiar style. This is a very strange and very obscure book. It's got a terrible title. It's called Conditioned Reflex Therapy, which is a rubbish title for a book. So it's called Conditioned Reflex Therapy. And it's by a guy called Andrew Salter, who was really one of the very first behaviour therapists. This book was written... Gosh, when was Conditioned Reflex Therapy? It was written in the 1950s, if I remember rightly. Early 1950s maybe. And it's remarkably ahead of its time. It's got a very, very vivid style. I'm just going to tell you how that book opens because I've read many books on therapy and they're all written in the same voice. And I picked up that book and I couldn't believe the opening sentences of it. I almost dropped it. I was like, when was this written? I can't believe it. One of the odd things you'll notice in life is there are many books by people who are experts on marketing or public speaking or whatever, and you read them and think, this is really boring. This person claims to be an expert on this subject, but there's no evidence of it in their writing style, perhaps. Well, Andrew Salter was one of the guys who founded Assertiveness Training. And the entire book is like an example of assertiveness. It's incredibly bold and outspoken. In the heyday of psychoanalysis, you couldn't say stuff like this back in the day. Psychotherapy was dominated by people that were completely obsessed with Freudianism and they wouldn't tolerate any criticism of it. Andrew Salter, way back in the early 50s, I think it was, opened this book by saying, the time has long since passed by which psychoanalysis, like the elephants of fable, should drag itself off into some distant jungle graveyard, lay down and die. Quite bold. That's the opening sentence. This guy invented Assertiveness Training. He seems to know what he's talking about in terms of speaking his mind, at least. You can say stuff like that now. You couldn't say that in the 1950s. Every psychiatrist would have went, that's outrageous. This is the dominant school of thought. But Andrew Salter was right. Like, he was one of the pioneers of behavior therapy back in the day when people laughed at it and then it turned out CBT completely superseded psychoanalysis. So he backed the right horse or the right elephant or whatever. And the rest of the book has got some pretty shocking things in it as well. So I think of all the psychotherapy books, that's probably one of the most memorable, although there are many things in it that are very dated. It's a very old book, but it's a very exciting book. He's used some incredibly dramatic language in it. This is good rhetoric, because he's trying to put across ideas in a way that's vivid and memorable, rather than just using it as a way of a tool for evoking fear or anger or manipulating our emotions in a way that might bias our thinking. So I think it's an exciting book and it's one that I know people enjoy reading. Thank you so much, Mr. Robertson. And looking forward to your graphic novel. And we'll put the link to the conference in the description so our listeners can follow up and sign up. Thank you once again. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. It was such a pleasure to talk with Mr. Robertson. He's such a good speaker. And before we go, I wanted to mention that I will add all the book recommendations to the blog post of Mr. Robertson on our website, including his own books and the references to his website, to the Stoic military convention that he mentioned, so you can sign up online and join. So you'll find everything on our DOAT website. All the links will be included in the description. And one last thing is that I send book recommendations newsletter every month with books such as Mr. Robertson's. So if you are interested, please consider subscribing. All the links will be included in the description. And I'll see you in the next one.