3 CBT Exercises from the Stoics
The philosophy of yesterday became the basis of therapy today
The philosophy of yesterday became the basis for therapy today
Stoicism was the ancient philosophy which actually inspired what is now known as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which is a therapy focused on our thoughts and how to overcome them.
This week, we’re going to look at three exercises in CBT which the Stoics themselves spoke of continuously.
Reframing Our Thought Patterns
Much of what we emotionally experience in life comes back to our thoughts and how we are interpreting the world around us. The events we experience are processed through the lens of our past experiences and we then apply some type of opinion to the events. In some cases, these events, and the opinions we’ve formed around them, can stick with us for a very long time.
But many of us don’t spend the time to properly analyze our thoughts or our thought patterns.
Why is it so important to look at our thought patterns? Because if we do not, we do not properly process the negative thought patterns we find ourselves entering.
For example, many of us have a tendency to experience an event and then over-generalize other events based upon what we learned from that first event. We think that because we had a bad experience at a sushi restaurant, all sushi restaurants must be bad.
Or another common example is catastrophizing events that occur. Rather than looking at the event and accepting the event for what it is, we build the event to be much worse than what actually occurred.
Reframing our thought patterns are critical to how we interpret events that we experience. One who reads Marcus Aurelius’ Mediations can quickly see that the book is not a diary or journal in a normal sense, rather, it is a mental gym to help Marcus reframe his thoughts.
For example, he states:
“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.”
He’s reminding himself that he is in control of his thoughts and the opinions he places on those thoughts. We must realize that we too hold power over our thoughts and our thought process.
Here’s another example of Marcus reminding himself of properly thinking about his thoughts:
“You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones — the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you’d be ashamed to be caught thinking.”
Reframe your thoughts and you will be better positioned to properly frame your life.
Exposure to What We Fear
Another tendency we a have is to avoid the things we fear. But how often are the fears we have built upon the mental frames we built from our past experiences? As discussed above, we sometimes experience an event and allow that experience to form an opinion that sticks with us for life.
But what if the fear that we have built is irrational or unnecessary?
Epictetus taught his students the need to analyze their thoughts on a continuous basis and realize that it is the opinions we have of events that are the basis for our fears.
“It is not things themselves that trouble people,” he would say, “but their opinions about things.”
Exposing ourselves to the things we have put a certain opinion around can help us to overcome those opinions and build new ones.
“Right now, then, make it your habit to tell every jarring thought or impression: “You are just an appearance and in no way the real thing.” Next, examine it and test it by these rules that you have. First and foremost: does it involve the things up to us, or the things not up to us? And if it involves one of the things not up to us, have the following response to hand: “Not my business.””
Understanding what we should fear and what we shouldn’t fear comes back to the opinions we place upon events.
Learn to Journal
So, we understand the need to reframe our thoughts and to rid ourselves from some of the fears we have built from previous experiences, but how do we actually go about investigating ourselves to get to this level of consciousness?
Journaling.
Journaling can take many forms. You can journal about your day, the emotions and events you’ve experienced. You can journal about where you are mentally today and where you would like to be mentally tomorrow. You can use the journal as a way to reframe events or thoughts the way Marcus Aurelius did.
The magic of journaling is that it provides you the opportunity in an ever-growing world of go-go-go to give you freedom to stop and spend some time with yourself.
Seneca advises his process stating:
“When the daylight has faded from view, and my wife, who knows well this custom of mine, keeps quiet, I become an inspector and reexamine the course of my day, my deeds and words; I hide nothing from myself. I omit nothing. There’s no reason my mistakes should give me cause to fear, as long as I can say: “See that you don’t do that any more, but this time I forgive you… next time consider not the truth of what you say but whether the one you say it to can endure hearing the truth; good folk are glad to be chastised, but the worst sort find their preceptor very grating.”
Journaling helps us to better understand ourselves and the thought patterns we’ve formed. Lying to ourselves does no good. If we want to make a change, we should, as Seneca stated, hide nothing from ourselves.
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