You can start training yourself in this Stoic practice of objective representation right now by writing down a description of an upsetting or problematic event in plain language. Phrase things as accurately as possible and view them from a more philosophical perspective, with studied indifference. Once you’ve mastered this art, take it a step further by following the example of Paconius Agrippinus and look for positive opportunities. Write how you could exercise strength of character and cope wisely with the situation. Ask yourself how someone you admire might cope with the same situation or what that person might advise you to do. Treat the event like a sparring partner in the gym, giving you an opportunity to strengthen your emotional resilience and coping skills. You might want to read your script aloud and review it several times or compose several versions until you’re satisfied it’s helped you change how you feel about events.
Marcus tends to refer to this way of viewing events as entailing the separation of our value judgments from external events. Cognitive therapists have likewise, for many decades, taught their clients the famous quotation from Epictetus: “It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things,” which became an integral part of the initial orientation (“socialization”) of the client to the treatment approach. This sort of technique is referred to as “cognitive distancing” in CBT, because it requires sensing the separation or distance between our thoughts and external reality. Beck defined it as a “metacognitive” process, meaning a shift to a level of awareness involving “thinking about thinking.”
“Distancing” refers to the ability to view one’s own thoughts (or beliefs) as constructions of “reality” rather than as reality itself.35
He recommended explaining this to clients using the analogy of colored glasses. We could look at the world through positive rose-tinted glasses or sad blue ones and just assume that what we see is how things are. However, we can also look at the glasses themselves and realize that they color our vision. Noticing how our thoughts and beliefs tinge our perception of the world is a prerequisite for changing them in cognitive therapy. Later generations of clinicians and researchers discovered that rigorous training in cognitive distancing, by itself, was sufficient in many cases to bring about therapeutic improvement. Greater emphasis on this cognitive skill is an integral part of what became known as the mindfulness and acceptance approach to CBT.
Sometimes merely remembering the saying of Epictetus, that “it’s not things that upset us,” can help us gain cognitive distance from our thoughts, allowing us to view them as hypotheses rather than facts about the world. However, there are also many other cognitive distancing techniques used in modern CBT, such as these:
• Writing down your thoughts concisely when they occur and viewing them on paper
• Writing them on a whiteboard and looking at them “over there”—literally from a distance
• Prefixing them with a phrase like “Right now, I notice that I am thinking…”
• Referring to them in the third person, for example, “Donald is thinking…,” as if you’re studying the thoughts and beliefs of someone else
• Evaluating in a detached manner the pros and cons of holding a certain opinion
• Using a counter or a tally to monitor with detached curiosity the frequency of certain thoughts
• Shifting perspective and imagining a range of alternative ways of looking at the same situation so that your initial viewpoint becomes less fixed and rigid. For example, “How might I feel about crashing my car if I were like Marcus Aurelius?” “If this happened to my daughter, how would I advise her to cope?” “How will I think about this, looking back on events, ten or twenty years from now?”
There are several distancing methods found in the ancient Stoic literature. For instance, you can help yourself gain cognitive distance just by speaking to (“apostrophizing”) your thoughts and feelings, saying something like, “You are just a feeling and not really the thing you claim to represent,” as Epictetus in the Handbook advised his students to do.
The Handbook actually opens with a technique to remind ourselves that some things are “up to us,” or directly under our control, and other things are not. Modern Stoics sometimes call this the “Dichotomy of Control” or the “Stoic Fork.” Just recalling this distinction can help you recover a sense of indifference toward external things. Think of it this way. When you strongly judge something to be good or bad, you also commit yourself to saying that you want to obtain or avoid it. But if something is outside your control, then it’s simply irrational to demand that you should obtain or avoid it. It’s a contradiction to believe both that you must do something and also that it’s not within your power to do so. The Stoics viewed this confusion as the root cause of most emotional suffering. They pointed out that only our own acts of volition, our own intentions and judgments if you like, are directly under our control. Sure, I can open the door, but that’s always a consequence of my actions. Only my own voluntary actions themselves are truly under my control. When we judge external things to be good or bad, it’s as though we forget what’s under our control and try to overextend our sphere of responsibility. The Stoics view only their own actions as good or bad, virtuous or vicious, and therefore classify all external things as indifferent, because they’re not entirely “up to us” in this sense.
As we’ve seen, of course, the Stoics still believe it’s reasonable to prefer health to disease, wealth to poverty, and so on. They argue, however, that we deceive ourselves when we invest too much value in external things. They also trained themselves to gain cognitive distance by understanding that events don’t seem the same to everyone: our own perspective is just one of many. For instance, the majority of people are terrified of dying, but, as Epictetus points out, Socrates wasn’t afraid of death. Although he may have preferred to live, he was relatively indifferent to dying as long as he met his death with wisdom and virtue. This used to be known as the ideal of a “good death,” from which our word “euthanasia” derives. However, for Socrates and the Stoics, a good death didn’t so much mean a pleasant or peaceful death as one faced with wisdom and virtue. Knowing that not everyone sees a certain situation as catastrophic should make us more aware that the “awfulness” of it derives from our own thinking, our value judgments, and our way of responding rather than the thing itself. Awfulness (badness) is not a physical property. As Aristotle said, fire burns just the same in Greece as in Persia, but men’s judgments about what’s good or bad vary from one place to another. Marcus therefore compares our opinions to beams of sunlight shining on external objects, not unlike Beck’s analogy of looking at the world through tinted glasses. By realizing that our value judgments are projections, Marcus says, we separate them from external events. He refers to this cognitive process as the “purification” (katharsis) of the mind.