Blog Post #121: How Stoicism Can Help Type Cs
On our podcast, we recently hosted Donald Robertson, expert on the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and the author of nine books including the popular How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. Highlights of the episode are below.
Society teaches us that wealth and reputation are worth striving for, but the ancient Stoics would say that wisdom, character, and virtue are in fact more important and are the key to flourishing in life. This shift in values makes you more emotionally resilient and better able to cope with adversity.
The adjective “stoic” with a lowercase “s” means having a stiff upper lip, being unemotional - but the Stoics with an uppercase “S” thought differently. They believed in recognizing, understanding, and learning to regulate emotions.
The Stoics said emotions are characterized by certain underlying beliefs. Fear, for example, is the belief that something bad is going to happen imminently. Anger is a desire for payback against someone who has harmed us. They believed parts of emotions are voluntary and parts are involuntary, and they developed a sophisticated understanding of how we could deal with them.
Initial emotional impressions and thoughts inevitably arise after an event or interaction. They are a natural reflex. We have to accept those and see them as morally indifferent - neither good nor bad. We shouldn’t try to un-think thoughts or un-feel feelings. What’s important is how we choose to respond. This, we have control over. We can pause, take a step back, and consider how we want to respond. In psychotherapy, this is called cognitive distancing.
We constantly confuse what is within our control and what is not. People spend a lot of time trying to control the bits that aren’t under their control and they neglect to take responsibility for the bits that are under their control. Instead, we can cultivate a flexible and adaptive attitude toward things that aren’t under our control.
We also have to understand that we only have control over the present moment. This is where our actions take place. We’re busy rubbernecking, sticking our head out the window, and taking our hands off the steering wheel instead of grounding our attention in the present.
The Stoics said one should be ashamed to hand your body and mind over to someone else by investing too much value in their opinion of you, in trying to please them to gain their approval. They saw this as enslaving yourself, voluntarily.
Courage comes from tearing down illusions and seeing through them. For example, letting other people down might be something that feels catastrophic to us, but in reality isn’t catastrophic. It takes time to get there. We have to gain cognitive distance. We have to notice our frightened thoughts and develop the ability to step back from them. We have to tolerate feelings of discomfort and courageously step back from them.
One practice advised by the Stoics is premeditatio malorum, where we picture difficult situations. We imagine our worst fears. In our minds, we practice responding to them with wisdom and courage so we’re not taken by surprise. We can train ourselves to be more prepared for them and to not respond with shock or surprise towards inevitable setbacks and misfortunes in life.
For Type C, developing the virtue of temperance is equally important as courage. Type C people overly fixated on gaining the approval or love or affection of other people are lacking temperance. They're placing far too much value on something that's not directly under their control. It’s ok to care about the approval of others as long as we’re not doing it too rigidly.
Consider book reviews on Amazon. Books receive scores from 1 star to 5 stars. Authors too fixated on the one-star reviews are missing lots of valuable feedback. The rational approach is to look at everything. We can apply this logic to ourselves. We can’t give too much weight to the opinions of people we’ve put on a pedestal.
The sane approach is, “I”m okay with a certain amount of disapproval.” The Stoics would even make the argument that if everyone is agreeing with you, you’re not really saying anything interesting or original or mind-expanding.
Check out more from Donald in his Substack newsletter found here.