Tyson (00:00.289)
that mistake before. did a podcast once. I actually host a running podcast as well called Relax Running and I had an athlete on and he was a guy who had moved from New Zealand to Kenya at the age of 17 and I had always admired his story and he was one of those guys that at the time I was probably a little bit lucky to get and at the end of the conversation I went to end the recording and I saw that it started the recording.
Donald J. Robertson (00:05.687)
Uh-huh.
Tyson (00:26.655)
And I was like, I don't know why I'm responsible. need like a, I need a tech. so.
Donald J. Robertson (00:30.414)
Oh, you didn't hit record. Yeah, geez, I've never done that. I did a couple of podcasts the first time I moved into this room and I had my external mic and I didn't realize the echo was as bad. So I did two recordings with professors at universities that are quite senior guys and both of them had such bad echo on my side all the way through that they were, I thought they were unusable, but I was on Brian Johnson's
Modern Wisdom podcast. And I just kind of mentioned him in passing. I was like, oh, this kind of sucks. This thing happened. And he said, oh, there's this AI app that we use that cleans up echo. And I was like, I think that's almost impossible because I spoke to my buddy who's a sound engineer. He's like, it's really hard. And I tried it and a few things didn't work. But then I tried that thing that he told me about and it cleaned up perfectly, almost perfectly. It got rid of most of the echo from it. So it kind of saved my bacon a little bit.
Tyson (01:24.927)
us.
Donald J. Robertson (01:28.77)
But yeah, I'd sat through a couple of hours with these two guys asking them really detailed stuff. And I was like, man, I might not be able to use these recordings.
Tyson (01:37.345)
It's the worst feeling on both sides. Yeah, I feel I've been guest on a few podcasts as well and I I know the feeling is it feels so much worse when it's your own because obviously When you can just handball it to someone and say hey good luck with that It's always a relief. But yeah, man, I feel just say modern wisdom. Was that Chris Williamson's podcast? Yeah, Yeah, he's a he puts on a good show so I can appreciate the the back end to that would have been a
Donald J. Robertson (01:56.748)
Yeah, yeah, modern wisdom. Yeah.
Tyson (02:04.531)
a bit of a handful. You're just telling me before we hit record about how wild the schedule is. And it's probably a pretty good lead into a question that I was hoping to ask you around the popularity of stoicism in general. Like it kind of blows my mind that in 2025, it seems as though it's as strong as ever, if not stronger. Like why do think it is so many of us are so interested in the subject?
Donald J. Robertson (02:10.254)
Mm-hmm.
Donald J. Robertson (02:25.73)
Well, are you sitting comfortably? So I've been asked that question a few times and actually, you know, it can give you a pretty good answer because I've been involved in stoicism for a long time and I've spoken to hundreds, thousands and thousands of people over the years. So I can just tell you what people say to me, right? There's a couple of different ways of answering. So this is what people tell me. They say,
Tyson (02:28.57)
I'm standing.
Donald J. Robertson (02:54.562)
They're drawn to Stoicism because they see it as a Western alternative to Buddhism. So people run to Buddhism and stuff like that and they go, want something that feels more familiar though. And that's partly, I used to study Buddhism. I was interested in that, I used to go to Buddhist retreats. I was drawn to it for a similar reason. I was like, I like this, but I want something that seems a little bit more consistent with my cultural norms and values, a little bit more familiar to me. So a Western alternative to Buddhism, they see it as a secular alternative to Christianity.
So the ancient Stoics mostly worshiped Zeus, but the majority are modern Stoics, are atheists, are agnostics, interestingly. There's reasons for that, but they see it as having some of the things that you get from Christianity, the sense of the brotherhood of man, the ethical cosmopolitanism and stuff like that, but without having to have faith in a religion. They see it as a more down-to-earth alternative to academic philosophy.
I'm the same, my first degree is in philosophy. I was studying Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre at the end, but I felt it was too abstract and too technical. And I was looking for something that was more grounded and down to earth, which you potentially find in ancient philosophy. So more down to earth. They see it as more philosophical than cognitive behavioral therapy. And I'm the same, like I love cognitive behavioral therapy, I love modern self-help, but sometimes I kind of think, does it fit into a bigger picture? Is there something?
deeper, wider, these techniques kind of serve and fit into. So people that are into CBT and self-help, they're drawn to Stoicism because it provides a kind of broader philosophical framework for some of the stuff that they're doing. So those are the four things that they tell me. Western alternative to Buddhism, secular alternative to Christianity, modern era version of academic philosophy, and more philosophical version of cognitive behavioral therapy or modern self-help. The other things I'd say are, you can see from
Data on Google, the stoicism has been growing in popularity since around about the 1960s, 1970s. It kind of spiked a bit after the year 2000, which is when the movie Gladiator came out. And that's because a lot of people saw Richard Harris playing Marcus Aurelius in the first act. And they thought, that's interesting. Who is this guy? And they read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and became a big deal.
Donald J. Robertson (05:18.324)
It's been growing since the 50s because cognitive behavioral therapy has been growing since then. There was a time. When people kind of. This seems odd now. Right? So there was a time, do you do you remember when everything was made of wood? Before they can go back that long, like before the Internet, right and stuff.
Tyson (05:39.873)
I'm 36. I've got enough energy.
Donald J. Robertson (05:47.918)
Do you remember that time before life coaching? Right. There was a time in history, there was like an era, pre life, like before life coaching really took off and was a thing. But I'm being kind of half serious, right? There was a watershed moment in Oprah Winfrey's career. I'm not kidding. Because Oprah Winfrey used to get people who were more psychodynamic therapists, and then she got Dr. Phil.
Tyson (05:51.239)
Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (06:18.06)
Right. And there are reason historical reasons for that. There was a culture shift away from therapies that are about the unconscious mind, subconcepts are influenced by Freud and Jung, what we call psychodynamic psychology. And there was a shift in America, probably in the 80s, 90s for various reasons, towards more solution focused, more here and now focused forms of coaching and therapy. And so in the past,
People frowned on Stoicism because it's solution focused and here are now focused. The Freudians would say, Freud believed that all forms of anxiety were caused by repressed castration anxiety. Freud thought everything pretty much was caused by the Oedipus complex. So for almost 100 years, probably about 70 years or whatever, loads of people believed that if you try to change your thinking,
or change your behavior like a life coach or a CBT therapist would, that you'll get something called symptom substitution. So if you try and deal with your thumb sucking habit, like through changing your habits and working on your your think patterns of thinking and behavior, you might stop sucking your thumb, but you'll end up compulsively masturbating instead or something like that. Right. That's Freudians believe they thought if you push it down here, it pops up somewhere. Right.
Tyson (07:35.556)
Sorry.
Donald J. Robertson (07:41.194)
So they thought anything that works on the level of behavior and cognition and stuff like that potentially backfiles. And they were wrong about that. They were catastrophically wrong in that assumption. so cognitive behavioral therapy gradually proved that. Like CBT worked on beliefs and behavior and that didn't happen and people just got better, right?
It's a bit of a roundabout story, but the point was that stoicism seemed kind of implausible for the first half of the 20th century as a psychological, psychotherapists sort of frowned on that and they thought, that seems like a bad idea. But then when cognitive behavioral therapy became popular, and now it's the leading form of evidence-based psychotherapy, it validated stoicism, lent indirect support to it. And even if people...
aren't aware of research on CBT and stuff, it filtered down through the culture, even down to Oprah Winfrey and the prevalence of life coaching, which is kind of influenced by the cognitive behavioral therapy revolution and stuff like that. If it hadn't been for CBT, life coaching wouldn't really have evolved in the way that it did. And so, you know, the whole culture of mental health and self-health changed, like, as a result of
CBT being developed basically and now most ordinary people are like Oedipus, Schmidipus. you know, they're like, I don't believe that if I stop sucking my thumb, I'm going to start compulsively masturbating or something like that. That's not how the mind works, right? And nobody anymore really believes in the Oedipus complex or the stuff that Freud said, you know, where we're naturally, everyone now is naturally much more here and now focused thinking in terms of
cognitions or thinking patterns and behavioral work habit training and stuff like that. So people are far more open to stoicism and ready for it now than they were like 50 years ago. Those are some of the reasons why it's resurgent in popularity. And the other one is that our culture has changed so that we are now people are sick of it.
Donald J. Robertson (10:02.956)
Like people are sick of modern life is rubbish, right? As the blur famously said. And there's something rotten in the state of Denmark. there's something, this quote from Hamlet, there's something rotten at the core of modern society and everybody knows it, right? We all know there's too much consumerism. There's too much celebrity nonsense, celebrity culture. There's too much political propaganda.
There's social media has become a cesspit of political extremism. Everyone knows. It's not even controversial anymore. Everyone knows something's wrong with our values, the prevailing values of our society, what's going on around us. And a big part of it, right at the heart of this mess, is what the ancient philosophers used to call rhetoric, or people trying to tell you what to think, right? Mainly,
There's a type of person whose job it is to tell you what to think. We call them politicians, right? And that's all they do. And like, they're really at the heart of it, right? You in social media is fueled by so-called political debate. Not even that, you know, it's not even really about politics and it's not even really debate. Like, it's just a bunch of people trying to tell you what to think about immigration, healthcare, whatever.
Tyson (11:08.033)
Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (11:30.592)
like to try and influence you and to vote in a certain direction and stuff like that. And everyone is sick of it. Like it's fueled by anger and hatred and greed and they are constantly appealing to our lowest character traits. And that happened in the ancient world, but not on anything like the scale that happens today. So this is the parallel, right? In the time of Socrates,
It really started the ball rolling that led to stoicism. Democracy was in its infancy when Socrates was alive and it kind of worked pretty well to begin with. You have a bunch of people and they'd meet on this hill called the Ponyx in Athens and they someone with a statesman were that they all respected would come along and he'd say, this is why I think we should do declare war on this.
nation or this is why I think we should make peace with this nation. This is why I think we should spend more money on defenses or whatever. And other people would say, well, I'm not so sure about that. You what about this and what about that? And they'd have a reason of rational debate in front of assembly and then people would vote on it. Right. And the leading at the height of Athens power was a statesman called Pericles, who was highly regarded. And then he died. He dropped. What problem was he dropped dead one day from the plague? Right. They had a plague in Athens.
And in that vacuum stepped in a bunch of what the Greeks called demagogues. So there were people who thought, we don't have to debate the pros and cons of policies. We could just say that the guy that's proposing a policy we don't like is corrupt. And he's a big old jerk. He's an idiot. So they started slagging each other off, like using insults.
Tyson (13:15.551)
Heh.
Donald J. Robertson (13:23.362)
bogus accusations of corruption went back and forth. They weaponized the legal system and the democratic system, which always had these weaknesses in it, these fault lines began to strain as they exploited the weaknesses in it as much as they possibly could. And then, the next thing that happened was you had professional experts on political oratory or rhetoric that stepped in, they called the sophists.
And they trained people how to exploit the voters, the assembly, as much as they possibly could using the art of persuasion. They taught them how to win arguments on any subject without knowing. But supposedly, this office would say, if you become an expert on the art of rhetoric, you can defeat an expert on any subject in debate, even if you know nothing about the subject. How cool is that? You don't need to study engineering.
You don't need to study military strategy. You don't need to study medicine. Like you just need to study rhetoric and you'll win an argument on any subject. And Socrates was like, well, you'll mean that you would be able to defeat someone who's knowledgeable about a subject, even if you're ignorant of it. And they're like, yeah, isn't that awesome? And Socrates thought, this is a disaster. The difference is now we have social media. But really it started with the printing press.
You know, and then the invention of the radio and the television and the internet and social media. And with all of those progresses and all those developments in communication, what happened was that politicians began to encroach more and more and more on every aspect of our lives. In ancient Greece, you had to leave your house if you wanted to walk up the hill to the panics and sit and listen to propaganda. You had to go out the front door.
Your wife would be like, where are you going? And he'd be like, I'm just off to listen to some political propaganda in the hell for a bit. And then you'd like, it's getting a bit chilly here. I'm going to leave after a while. Right? I'm not kidding. If Socrates came forward in time, people say, what would Socrates say if he could see the modern world? He'd be like, you guys carry around political rhetoric with you everywhere you go.
Donald J. Robertson (15:42.422)
It's on your TV, it's on your radio. You've invited the sophists into your house. You carry around multiple devices that beam it into your earphones, into your eyes, straight into your brain. You lie in bed watching videos by these guys. We used to have to go out the house to be brainwashed. You guys have invited it into your... So you think, wow, it's become much more pervasive and philosophy evolved.
is an attempt to try and defend people against the threat of political rhetoric and propaganda. So you ask me why has it become more popular? Because the problems become exponentially worse that it was designed to cure. Everyone can think, you know, everyone knows something's wrong. Like we're drinking from a veritable fire hose of BS every day, all day long. Like, and as soon as we log on to the
Tyson (16:24.533)
Yeah
Donald J. Robertson (16:40.654)
pig swill of social media that gets worse and worse and worse. It's all bots, you know, and then it's AI generated stuff. And then it's like, you know, constantly where they're pulling our strings, manipulating us. And everybody, I think reaches a point where they think there's got to be a way to see through this, to protect ourselves from it. Like we have to learn. So it's like Socrates was saying to people, I hate to break it to you kids.
but you're gonna have to learn to think for yourselves. So that's what the Socratic method is, teaching people how to stand on their own two feet, how to grow up, and how to think for themselves. Because otherwise we're just like puppets allowing marketing experts, advertising guys, mainly primarily politicians to pull our strings on social media.
whatever now, I think everybody's reacting against this kind of toxic flood of rhetoric. The tension in the ancient world has been philosophy and rhetoric. There's good rhetoric and bad rhetoric, but mainly it kind of serves this purpose of stoking anger, fear, and greed, because angry people are gullible.
Why frightened people are gullible, greedy people are gullible, and easily, the gullible are easily manipulated. So there's no coincidence. Like you turn on the news, like you go on social media and they're constantly trying to freak you out and make you angry about this or that. They're always blaming people for things, right? Because that's how they captivate your attention and sell you stuff that you don't even need in the first place, right?
Tyson (18:09.365)
you
Tyson (18:36.225)
Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (18:37.58)
You know, that's everyone's sick of it. That's why I don't mind saying it, you know, everyone agrees with it. But we look back, Socrates saw this happening at the very beginning when democracy was just emerging. He was like, whoa, we need to do something about it. Something's wrong here. So he diagnosed the problem and he offered the solution for it. And so today people are kind of rediscovering stoicism, Socratic philosophy. You know, these are the weapons.
like they evolved in the ancient world in order for people to defend themselves against basically the same problem.
Tyson (19:12.243)
Yeah, man, I absolutely love I love so much of what you said, but I think my favorite part was the idea that you'd have to leave the house to go and swallow some propaganda. You had to leave when it got a bit chilly. It's such a good point and such a funny point. The other thing I wanted to say was I think, like I reckon here in Australia, probably like so many parts of the world, the last couple of years, I reckon I saw the power of just the ability to name call and not necessarily being as knowledgeable and being able to win an argument like all.
Donald J. Robertson (19:35.948)
Yeah.
Tyson (19:38.921)
With COVID fresh in my mind here in Australia, all you had to do to discredit someone else's point of view was say they were anti-vax and a conspiracy theorist and all of a sudden it meant you could disregard everything they had to say despite any of the titles that they may have or like the record of success in their career up to that point.
Donald J. Robertson (19:56.462)
There's too much of that. You know, it's what we call in philosophy, the ad hominem fallacy, right? And it takes sometimes subtle forms, sometimes less subtle forms, but it absolutely dominates in political rhetoric. I mean, in ancient world, it was just like, you know, you're corrupt. No, you're corrupt. You're even more corrupt than I am. Well, you're all corrupt, right? But
Can we just sit down and figure out the pros and cons of the thing that you're actually proposing we all do? Like, you know this thing you want to spend money on? Can we just sit and talk about whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, and not who's more corrupt than the other guy? It's a distraction, it's a smoke screen. I mean, during the presidential elections in the US, which we all have to, I don't know, probably in Australia, I don't know, have you ever heard of this guy, Donald Trump? You've heard the name. I don't even live in America.
Tyson (20:47.593)
I have heard of him. Yeah, I can't remember the of the name.
Donald J. Robertson (20:51.982)
Like, you know, I don't like, but everywhere you are in the world, we have to listen to the American presidential campaign. You know, I don't like, I mean, I'm sure there's places you can go to get more information, but I would say like 95 % of what I heard people saying was just about who's the bigger idiot. Like, and hardly any of it was actually about the policies.
that they were properly, no one cared. We don't care what they're gonna do. We're just more content. All we wanna know is who's the most, who's the stupid or more horrible person? It just becomes mudslinging. And everybody feels, I think everybody feels slightly degraded by even looking, don't feel slightly tainted sometimes just going on social media. I have to use social media for work.
You know, and I seldom do I like actually look at the stuff in the feed because I feel kind of tainted by it. Like I'm like really, is this what people are really saying, you know, thinking and talking about? So much of it is just insults and kind of like pettiness and stuff like that. we need to society needs to kind of turn itself around in some ways. And I mean, we have to be able to spot the way that
we're being exploited. Let me put it, I'll make a connection. Like there are many parallels that I could make between what's going on in politics and self-improvement, psychology and so on. Rhetoric evolved as a way of manipulating other people, right? In the ancient world it was like a science. There are many books written on the art of rhetoric. We think of our society as being more advanced than the ancient world, but the ancients were actually better at rhetoric than we are.
Like it was a formal and systematic discipline. Like Marcus Aurelius would wipe the floor, like with most people today in terms of his grasp of ancient rhetoric, for example. It's highly sophisticated, but it's about how can you get people to agree with you? Like how can you refute somebody, like even though they might be right? know, how can you make...
Donald J. Robertson (23:13.262)
The weaker argument seemed like the stronger argument, this is how people would describe ancient rhetoric. Now, the funny thing is, it's like any weapon throughout history. It seems like a great idea when you're using it against your enemies. But what about when they start using it against you? So people developed rhetoric to try and manipulate others.
Then other people started using counter rhetoric, trying to get back at them, manipulate them. But then something really weird started to happen.
people would be sitting at home on their own, not a soul around, sitting there, lying in bed at night, and just thinking about life. And they'd be using selective thinking, jumping to conclusions, they had homonym fallacy, like, using emotive language, like, using colorful metaphors. Somebody maybe, I'd talked to a client in therapy, and they,
I'd say, you know, they say, really, at work I got really anxious today, almost had a panic attack. And I would say, what happened? And they say, well, I was given a presentation and I made a total complete idiot of myself. You know, someone shot me down in flames, like they kind of tore a strip off me and I just wished that the earth would open and swallow me up. And I'd be like, wow, yeah, like that sounds catastrophic.
Tyson (24:40.225)
you
Thank
Donald J. Robertson (24:49.902)
right, from the way that you've described it. I'd be like, well, what, could you tell me again what actually happened, but without using any of these kind of value judgments or like metaphors? And they'll say, well, I said something and somebody disagreed with me. I'd be like, that sounds different from the way you described it a moment ago, because you were using rhetoric, like to evoke anxiety. It's a powerful tool in that regard.
Tyson (25:05.537)
you
Donald J. Robertson (25:20.056)
But why would you use it on yourself? So it's like an infection, like spreads into your brain. You start to talk like the people that are trying to manipulate you. You start to use depressive language. You start to use hostile language. You start to use anxious language. You engage in distorted thinking that evolved as a means of manipulating other people, but it's become so familiar, so habitual to us.
that we start accidentally brainwashing ourselves, we freak ourselves out. When someone is worrying, I think of worry as a form of self-hypnosis, right? I mean that very seriously. In fact, psychologically, there are many measurable aspects of worrying that resemble research on hypnosis or self-hypnosis. People, when they're hypnotized, one of the most consistent findings about hypnosis is that people tend to lose track of time.
They underestimate how much time has passed. That's exactly what happens when people are engrossed in morbid rumination or worrying as well. They lose touch with the present moment and become lost in their thoughts, right? And people are worrying, like they engage in a type of thinking that psychologists call catastrophizing. They exaggerate the probability of something happening that they fear and they exaggerate its severity and they tend to trivialize or underestimate their coping ability.
the resources that are available to, we call that catastrophizing, kind of blowing things out of proportion. It's a form like distorted thinking. It's like you're passing all this information through a filter over and over and over again, repeatedly distorting it, and then distorting it again, then distorting it again. It'd be like passing an audio recording through a sound filter multiple, multiple, multiple times until it's just kind of like noise at the end of it, so badly distorted. So that's what we do when we're worrying. We go over and over and over something.
We're passing it through a filter each time distorting it more and more and more escalating, spiraling like in our minds. But it's also like political oratory. We're doing the same thing. We tell ourselves a story that's like a horror. Another way I would describe it is when people worry, it's like they're telling themselves a horror story about their own life and about their future. So, you I use rhetoric like...
Tyson (27:36.438)
Hey.
Donald J. Robertson (27:44.046)
when we're writing a novel, like a horror story, we want to evoke fear, right? We use the same kind of language and the same kind of techniques when we worry. We use language designed to freak ourselves out. Why would we do that? It's crazy, right? But we all do it. So cognitive therapy, stoicism, the Socratic method are all attempts to try and snap us. Wake up! Out of this trance of the crazy BS.
that we're constantly telling ourselves in life. We've absorbed it from all these people that just trying to manipulate us. And now we're manipulating ourselves, but we don't even know why anymore. It's senseless, right? I just like freaking, know, like I'll you an example. I talked about anxiety. Different emotions are different. People do the same thing when they're depressed, but in a slightly different way. So when people are depressed, they have a cognitive bias that's called
selective thinking, they're negative, right? If someone has clinical depression and they make a movie or a play or they write a book, they might get like a hundred reviews of it. Like, and some of are five stars and some of them are four stars and some of them are three stars, some are two star and some of them are one star reviews, right? Now, a normal person would go, wow, got like a, I'd look at the average, right? Clinically depressed person would just look at the one star reviews.
And they kind of forget about all the others. Because they have a negative filter. Everything else gets kind of filtered out, and their attention gets drawn by the information. It's a form of confirmation bias. They have a negative self-image. They think I'm worthless, I'm stupid. And so they look at, they put anything that seems to validate that under a magnifying glass. And then they think about it for hours, passing it through that negative filter over and over and over again, getting more more selectively focused on it.
Tyson (29:12.756)
Thank you.
Donald J. Robertson (29:42.594)
That would be like if you were trying to make someone else feel really bad, you might do that, you know? But why would you do it to yourself? We've learned the, it's like, you know, we've learned how to poison other people. It's like you're a professional poisoner, but then you've accidentally poisoned your own food. It's crazy, it doesn't make sense. So we've got to figure out a way to snap out the trance, wake ourselves up, see through what we're doing.
like take control of it. You know, that's what stoicism is all about really, you know.
Tyson (30:16.863)
Yeah, I didn't realize how much of an impact CBT or modern therapy had on the acceptance of soicism or at least like the distribution of it maybe for lack of a better term, because that was my experience. Yeah, I got with my wife in 2008 and I'd liked her for ages. And then when we started dating, I was like, she's going to break up with me for sure. Like the dream is going to be over soon. And it sounds funny looking back now, but it became such a trance in my mind that over a period of a couple of months,
I actually got super depressed and I went to a psychologist here in Melbourne and I said, mate, like I'm depressed. And he's like, what's going through your mind? And I said, I think my girlfriend's gonna break up with me. And he goes, why is she gonna do that? And I'm not kidding, in 15 minutes, he asked me a couple of questions like, do think you might be catastrophizing? Like what you did with the person who made that presentation. And I left that office and I was like, I'm gonna be fine.
I didn't realise that there was an alternative to just sitting there and letting my brain run the ship. I didn't know I had the capacity to actually go, hey, is there potentially another way to see this situation?
Donald J. Robertson (31:27.778)
There was a guy called Albert Ellis who back in the 50s had been a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. And Ellis, like many people around that time, started to feel that that approach wasn't working out for him. So he did something that I always admire people for. He kind of threw away all his books. And he kind of ripped everything up and he said, you know what, I'm going to start again from scratch.
and I completely start again from scratch. That's something I'm trying, I feel like I'm trying to kind of like paint over the cracks in this traditional approach to psychotherapy. It's not working for me. Let's start again, go back to drawing board. And he thought, you know, when I was a kid, I read these books by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And that seems like a more rational, more common sense.
approach, you maybe that would actually work. And so Ellis was inspired by the Stoics. They developed a thing called rational emotive behavior therapy or REBT. That was the first form of cognitive behavioral therapy. It took a while before it went mainstream. It was controversial to begin with. Ellis got a lot of stick from people who opposed him, but he was on the right track because now it's the leading evidence-based form of psychotherapy has evolved out of his approach.
And Ellis used to try and think, like Ellis's big insight was people come into therapy and they'll usually say, the therapist will say, what's the problem buddy? And the person will say, well, I'm depressed or I'm anxious, I'm super anxious. Or they'll say, I get really angry sometimes, it's caused me problems, right? And the therapist will say, well,
How's it affecting your life? And then the client will say, well, you know, it's giving me a stomach ulcer. Like, you know, it's ruining my performance at work. My wife's thinking about leaving me because it's causing all these arguments and stuff between us. I can't sleep properly at night. And it's just affecting how I got on with my kids and destroying my quality of life. So they give a bunch of reasons for desperately wanting to change.
Donald J. Robertson (33:52.406)
the consequences of the emotional problem that they're experiencing. And then almost all clients will do something pretty similar. They tend to express stuckness, right? Because they've now kind of described how desperately they want to get rid of this problem. And then they'll go, I can't help it. It's just the way I feel. It's stuck. And Ellis used to lean forward at that point. He'd say, yeah, but it's not. Just the way you feel, is it? Also.
how you think. Because the big insight that happened in the 50s is called the cognitive revolution in psychotherapy. Cognition just means thoughts and beliefs, thinking. And people realize that emotions aren't just like a blob of energy or something. Our emotions are influenced to a far greater extent than most people normally assume by our pattern of thinking and our underlying beliefs. Emotions...
are cognitive and that's revolutionary because most people say I can't help it, you know, it's just how I feel, I just feel anxious. But if anxiety involves anxious thinking, like catastrophizing, it might be true or false, might be mistaken, might be rational or irrational. You can question it, it may be contradictory, know, there might be selective thinking involved.
You you might be making sweeping generalizations or jumping prematurely to certain conclusions. Maybe errors in your thinking that could be exposed so you start to question it and see beyond it. Same with your anger. You know, you might think someone else has done something they shouldn't have done and they deserve to be punished for it. You may be wrong about that or blowing it out of proportion or something like that perhaps. That's obvious when you look at other people. You know, like that angry guy over there, you might think he's going to blow things out of proportion. Why?
You look at somebody who's freaking out unnecessarily, you might say, that guy's worrying about nothing. He's exaggerating things. Someone that's depressed, you would look at them and think they're being overly negative. But that's because it's easy to see other people's biases. It's very difficult to spot your own because your biases are the lens through which you look at the world. It's the same way you can't see your own eyes. You can't see the look in your own face unless you look in a mirror. I can look at other people and I can think, you know, I can see the look in that guy's face.
Donald J. Robertson (36:13.934)
I can see the look in his eyes, but I can't see my own. It's too close to home. And so I said, it's also the way you think. Right. It's obvious when you look at other people, but you tend to be we overlook it in ourselves, our thinking. And once we identify what those thoughts are, we can start to change them. We can start to question and challenge them. And so I always thought, how can I? This was what all the research was converging on at the time, the 60s and 70s increasingly.
Tyson (36:18.401)
Hmm.
Tyson (36:31.945)
Yeah. Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (36:42.838)
And then Ellis said, how can I teach this to the pro? There's a problem that psychotherapists have. All psychotherapists do something that kind of resembles public health communication because they have to take complicated state of the art research that you have to study, like to interpret the statistics and understand the terminology. And then you're going to sit down with a 15 year old kid or an elderly Jewish matriarch, like
or a bus driver with a lot of tattoos, or any random person. And you've got to explain to them what the latest research in the field of psychology says about how their emotions work. And so Ellis thought, how can I explain the cognitive model, for want of a better word, this cognitive model of emotion to my clients? And he thought, there was this quote.
the Epictetus, the stoic philosopher said, he used to say, people aren't upset by things, but rather by their opinions about them. It's not things that upset us, but our opinions about them, right? And he said that to a couple of people, and they went, I get it, like that kind of makes sense, I see what you mean there, right? It's our thinking, right? So Ellis taught that quote to all of his clients, to all of his students that he trained, he mentioned it in probably every one of his books.
And it became a cliche in the field of cognitive. At one point in every book on cognitive behavioral therapy had this quote from the stoic philosopher Epictetus on it. So that's one of the reasons that in its stoicism and cognitive therapy are based on the same premise that our beliefs or cognitions shape our emotions to a greater extent than we normally assume. And if that's your starting point, you'll tend to reach a bunch of similar-ish conclusions about what do you do about it? What should you do next?
Well, probably you're going to have to identify what those thoughts are. And then you're probably going to have to question them, like using Socratic questioning, whether it's rational or irrational, what the implications of it are, what the pros and cons are looking at things that way. And then you have to maybe explore a model, how other people, like, how would somebody else look at the situation? Like, how would someone I admire deal with the problem? How would they think about it differently? How would somebody who's wise or rational?
Donald J. Robertson (39:07.116)
view the situation differently, you know, and then work on changing those underlying beliefs. And so at first you might think, well, that's all good and well, but when you change those underlying beliefs, does anything happen? What happens? Well, that's where this magic thing comes into play that we call a randomized controlled trial, like our outcome research, clinical outcome research. So there are hundreds of clinical trials on coronal behavioral therapy.
that conclusively show, and lots of other pieces of research that show that when you get people to change their underlying beliefs and their thinking, the beliefs and thoughts that are connected to their emotions, then the emotions change. It's not just how you feel, it's also how you think. When you change how you think, it changes how you feel. The way that psychologists used to explain that would be like if, at one level it's obvious.
If you woke up in the night, you sat bolt upright in your bed, you thought you heard footsteps down the hall, but you knew you were the only person in the house, right? Your heart would start beating, you'd think, someone's not right here, man, I can hear footsteps creaking on the floorboards outside, right? And you might think, you might grab a baseball bat or something and tiptoe down the corridor like in case...
thinking that there's a burglar or something like that. And you open your door and you walk out into the corridor and it's the effing cat, right? And you're like, it's a cat. Why? Why do think it was a burglar? So what happens to your anxiety now? I mean, maybe your heart's gonna continue beating fast for another couple of minutes, but it's gradually gonna slow down now. You might think, why don't you take a few breaths and calm down? Like, it was all in my head, it was just a cat, right? Because you believed there was a burglar.
Tyson (40:43.809)
You
Donald J. Robertson (41:03.372)
And now you no longer believe there's a burglar. That belief has gone like the wind, because you saw the cat now. So for sure, your anxiety was caused by belief. And when that belief was eliminated, maybe after a short delay, the anxiety went away as well. So clearly, beliefs can cause emotions. And when beliefs change, emotions can change. That's kind of obvious in a sense.
But that was a big innovation in the field of psychotherapy. Before that, Sigmund Freud told everyone that if you're anxious, it's because you had repressed castration anxiety. And the way to fix that was to lie on a couch, a schezlong, five times a week, right? And tell an old Austrian guy about your dreams, right? I mean...
Tyson (41:59.617)
Sounds like a good boost to sorrow.
Donald J. Robertson (42:02.506)
Yeah, it was a good business model. He only needed a few clients. But I mean, it sounds crazy in retrospect, but that was what psychotherapists at one point thought. If you went, man, I'm really anxious. I get super anxiety about my girlfriend breaking up with me or losing my job. Fousey, lie on that couch. Tell me about your dreams. And now we'd be like, well.
Tyson (42:04.48)
this.
Donald J. Robertson (42:29.666)
What exactly are the thoughts that are causing this anxiety? What's the worst that could happen in the situation? Are there any errors in your thinking? What's the evidence for and against? your girlfriend leaving you? Even if it did happen, would it be the end of the world? Would you potentially be able to cope? What do you think someone else might say to themselves in the same situation? And we get people just to start questioning their thinking, looking at it from different...
perspectives. It doesn't involve asking. Do you know, in asking them about their dreams very seldom comes up. Castration anxiety has never come up in conversations that I have with clients about depression or anxiety. Generally speaking, that doesn't feature in the conversation, And yet people, you know, so people would say sometimes that calling it behavioral therapy in some way seems a bit more like a sort of common sense.
Tyson (43:13.198)
Have you caught yourself masturbating on a bus?
Donald J. Robertson (43:28.204)
my approach to therapy, like coaching and stuff is. But it's hard to emphasize, it's hard to kind of stress just like how much of an innovation this sort of return to common sense actually was. I mean, and how far ahead of the time the Stoics were. I don't use that lightly, it makes me cringe a bit. You know, it's like saying, I was into this band before they were cool or something like that. You know, the Stoics were way ahead of their time. You're like, yeah, sure, buddy.
But honestly, they really, really were man like they were way ahead of their time. They had insights about human psychology that would make Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and these guys look ridiculous by compound primitive by comparison. You know, it took them 2000 years. Why, you know, to prove the stoics were right to the logic, it's just it's not the same as cognitive therapy by any means.
But there's a lot in common. Some of most fundamental premises that each approach is built upon are basically the same. So, you know, that's why people keep returning to it today. You know, they see there's a simplicity to it. It's not things that upset you. It's your opinions about them. It's your way of thinking, right? And that's been validated.
by scientific research in field of psychology. Well, yeah, no, that actually works. Like, you know, there's no research that shows that lying on a couch telling an old Austrian man about your dreams is going to, you know, improve things really, you know, there's other forms of psychoanalytic theory. I don't want to caricature it too much. I'll just caricature it enough. Like, I'll just caricature it a tiny bit. But like, that's, that's fair. That is pretty much what Freud was originally doing. You know, that was a hundred years ago. was over a hundred years ago though.
Right? Things have moved on since then. But ironically, when they moved on, we reinvented the wheel. We discovered something. People think, some people think Freud was the first psychotherapist. Well, that was this baloney, right? Sigmund Freud trained in psychotherapy under Charcot at the Solpétrie Hospital in Paris, and also under a guy called Hippolyte Bernheim, a town called Nancy in France.
Donald J. Robertson (45:54.99)
There were already psychotherapists in modern medicine for at least half a century before Freud even came along on the scene. He's just the most famous modern psychotherapist. But like I was saying earlier, you know, we tend to think we've invented everything and that people in the ancient world were just walking about in sandals, you know, scratching their backsides or something. But they invented stuff too, like...
They had psychotherapy in the ancient world. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they had psychotherapy. They didn't have the word psychotherapy. They called it therapy of the psyche, which is close enough for me. And they wrote entire books on it. The ancient Stoics, Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school, wrote a book called On Therapeutics. Galen, Marcus Aurelius' doctor, wrote a book called On the Diagnosis and Cure.
of the soul's passions, right? Which is about psychopathology and psychotherapy. It still exists today. Seneca wrote an entire book called On Anger that's about stoic psychotherapy for anger that still exists today. They called it Therapeia, like the therapy of the mind. And many of the things that they describe are still absolutely valid today. Some of the things they describe we haven't tested today, right?
Like, you know, I mean, it's crazy. It's like, you know, discovering a gold mine or something like that. It's just like discovering oil. Like, whoa, we didn't realize it was a huge like, like oil here. Like there's all these resources that are untapped. Like there's a tiny sense of stoicism that modern cognitive behavioral therapists haven't tapped into or started to test. But when we look at them, they have intuitive plausibility.
That's not, sitting on your, lying on couch and telling me about your dreams doesn't actually have much intuitive plausibility. Most people will be like, how's that going to cure my panic attacks? Frightened people will be like, trust me, it does. Right? Well, I don't know, mean, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But a lot of the things that the ancient Stoics did seem more plausible. You think, that might be worth testing, right? I can see how that could potentially help people. One of them is, the most obvious one is a thing called the view from above.
Tyson (48:02.282)
Thank
Donald J. Robertson (48:17.942)
So the Stoics would imagine, Marcus Aurelius in particular describes this many times. He tells himself a little narrative where he says, like, imagine looking down in the world from high above. That was easy in the ancient world because ancient towns often evolved around hills in many cases. So you'd be tending your farm and then the barbarians would come.
bandits would come and you'd where am gonna hide? So if you're beside a hill, you can go, we built a fence around the hill, we're gonna run up there and get behind it. Good luck to the bandits charging up the hill while we throw spears and rocks down them. So they would build hill forts and fortify them. Athens developed the most prestigious, beautiful beacon of culture in the ancient world.
grew up around an ancient hill fort that evolved into what we today call the Acropolis. Acropolis just means the high up part of the city. It evolved into a temple, the temple of Parthenon, the temple of the Virgin goddess Athena. And the ancient Acropolis has a sacred precinct that looks down in the Agora, the marketplace or city center of Athens, where there's the law courts, there's merchants, there's the prison, Socrates.
Tyson (49:20.201)
me
Donald J. Robertson (49:43.49)
was put on trial and executed, we believe, in the Agora, which you would look down on from high up in the Acropolis. So this idea of the view from above is very familiar to people in the ancient world. Like, yeah, that's like what you see when you look down on the Agora from the Acropolis. Like even the most dramatic events you can see from high above. So ancient philosophers would imagine broadening their chronological and spatial perspective. Now you might think, well, that sounds kind of mystical, and it sounds kind of cool.
Why, you know, maybe that's something people, you could make a little audio recording that guides you in a contemplation or meditation where you do something like that. It has intuitive plausibility, right, to psychologists to go, well, I guess that would change the way that you feel, you broaden your perspective. Yeah, like maybe it does make you feel more kind of detached, more serene. Now, it also has plausibility to psychologists because one of the problems,
that we experience psychologically is when we have upsetting thoughts or memories, we usually do, we vacillate between doing one of two extreme things. We either become very entangled with our thoughts and ruminate about them and focus on them, or we try to suppress or avoid them or distract ourselves from them. So we go back and forth between dwelling too much on things and trying to stop ourselves from thinking about them. And neither of those two things is particularly healthy, like they both kind of mess us up.
So the view from above is an alternative. Like it's not going over and over something, but it's looking at it from a different perspective. It's not trying to suppress or avoid it. So I might still be looking down at Socrates being executed, all the drama that, and I might say, oh, that was a terrible tragic thing that happened. But I'm looking at it from a different perspective than normal, right? So it has plausibility because it's neither ruminative nor avoidant, but something else. And it has plausibility for another reason.
And that is that we know that when people become very anxious and angry and depressed, they engage in a form of bias called selective thinking, and their attention becomes selective as well. So usually our attention becomes narrowed down in scope, almost like when we're upset about something, we put it under a magnifying glass, right? So it stands to reason that if when you're...
Tyson (51:52.885)
Mm.
Donald J. Robertson (52:07.02)
the more anxious you are, the more you put something under a magnifying glass and you get tunnel vision for it, if you did the opposite and expanded your perspective, it might have the opposite effect on your emotions, right? So it seems to rectify something or reverse something that we already know happens when people are anxious or depressed. And there's another aspect to it. The Stoics did this chronologically as well. They'd say, imagine the current event, but in
context of your life as a whole, or the whole history of the human race. You can still think about it, but it seems like less catastrophic, less significant from that perspective. When people worry, they do something really weird when they ruminate and go over things in their mind. It's like we're constantly replaying a section of a video, right? You know, when you're watching YouTube, there's a bit that says the most replayed section, right? When people worry, so...
It's odd how people in therapy at the beginning, one of the peculiar things that everybody exhibits is they naturally assume that what they're doing is the only way that they could respond, right? And so the first big step for people is just to realize that actually, you know, there's another way of thinking, like other perspectives are available.
Right? And so for instance, when somebody, when you're like worrying about breaking up with your girlfriend, like the most replayed part of the video is probably her walking out the door or something like that. It'll be usually the peak part. I mean, it's arbitrary, right? Cause there's a whole sequence of events. So you could choose where you begin and end the bit that you're replaying in your imagination. Like which part are you worrying about? Like, you know, what's the timeframe that you focus on when you're worried about?
Well, the primitive part of our brain is naturally drawn towards threat. So it's like we're watching a horror movie and we keep replaying the scariest part of it, like the jump scare moment, or whatever, over and over again, when we worry, right? But with any catastrophe that happens, there's usually before, during, and after. And afterwards, we have to recover from it and move on. And that's less anxiety provoking.
Donald J. Robertson (54:35.158)
And thinking about that forces us to engage in problem solving and to plan our coping behavior. So with worrying, usually you just think, why don't you just expand your perspective? And instead of just focusing on your girlfriend walking out the door, think about what you would do the following week and then the week after that. And then as you kind of think about that more, you probably start to realize, well, I guess I'd have to gradually, I'd be really upset maybe for a while, but then eventually.
Like, you know, how a year later would you feel looking back on it? 10 years later, how are you gonna feel looking back on it? Like, you know, I guess as time goes on, you'd naturally have to rebuild and move on, although it might take a while. But thinking about that, like kind of gradual ascent back to normality is less overwhelming and anxiety provoking, and also encourages you to prepare to take action to help yourself, right? But when people are anxious, it's almost like they think, they don't realize.
that they're arbitrarily replaying the jump scare moment over and over again on a loop, right? And if all they did was just expand the chronological perspective a little bit, the stoics tell us to do that. So we know that when people worry, they narrow the chronology down onto the worst moment. And then it would be like you're watching a movie and it stops like in the second act. Like it doesn't, know, like it cuts off, like.
before they saw, you know, like there's some kind of crisis, like there's a problem to be solved and then movie just ends. Well, we know what happens. How did they solve the problem or whatever? It'd be like you're watching, you know, Spider-Man or whatever and you know, he gets, I don't know, beaten up or Batman or whatever gets beaten up by Bayon or something like that. And then the movie just stops. Anyway, but doesn't it come back from that way? What, like, I don't know what happens next.
But that's what it's like when you worry and you do lot of negative things. If you moved on to the next act, in your imagination, it would alleviate a lot of the anxiety, depression, or whatever that you feel. The Stoics realized that. That aspect is not even something that we utilize that much in modern therapy, but it's just one of many things that most cognitive behavioral therapists or psychological researchers can look at and go,
Donald J. Robertson (56:55.278)
That seems plausible. There's a bunch of reasons why those guys weren't idiots. It's not a stupid thing to do. And also by comparison, to a lot of the things that modern psychotherapists did in the recent past, it's got far more surface plausibility than a lot of the other things that we've tried.
Tyson (57:19.691)
So interesting. Do you ever find that the identifying of the original issue is hard? Because sometimes when I notice myself in a rut, sometimes it just feels like the whole life is a rut and you kind of have to be very deliberate about what am I thinking? What is triggering my opinion or my emotion? Like, and obviously once you pinpoint that, I feel the next steps are a lot easier, but that first step is what seems to be the most tricky, at least for me.
Donald J. Robertson (57:43.438)
It varies. Some people find it easy. I mean, there's research that shows this. Some people are what we call more psychologically minded than others. mean, we can measure. Some people find it easier to articulate their emotions than other people do and kind of nuanced distinctions between different emotions. You know, that varies. It's a trait-like quality that varies from one person to another. And some situations...
Sometimes you might be angry and you might think, don't even know why I'm angry. Like, other times you think, it's pretty obvious why I'm angry. Like, you know, it varies a lot. I don't know why I'm anxious. Maybe I just drank too much coffee. Or you think, it's just because I think we're about to die. Like, it's obvious, right? Like, I'll tell you why I'm anxious. Like, you know, I've just seen our credit card bill. Like, that's what's freaking me out. Like, I mean, so that varies, right? So with some clients, it's really hard work.
Tyson (58:32.543)
Hey.
Donald J. Robertson (58:40.514)
to get them to identify what the trigger is. But there's a tendency, there's definitely a tendency, if you say to somebody, tell me about the last time you got angry or anxious or whatever, most people naturally, almost always, will in a sense create a smoke screen of sorts unintentionally by...
kind of ruminating and going into unnecessary details. So usually the first task in therapy is to kind of train the client to focus on essentials. So I had this argument with my girlfriend. All right, so how did you actually feel? What did you actually do? What were you actually saying to her? What did you actually say to yourself? What thoughts were flashing through your mind in that situation? Well, it's not the first time we had an argument.
And in some ways, I think it's because she reminds me of my mother. And then people start going off into the story about the backstory, like the wider context, you know, the kind of pontificating, speculating about it. But in CBT in particular, what brings about change is bracketing all that stuff off and just going, no, what did you actually do? What did you actually say? What was it she said that you responded to?
And sometimes you've got a phrase that almost it seems like in baby steps, spoon feeding language. Like, when you first began to get angry, what was it that she said the second before that? I guess when I think about it like that, that was when she told me I was ugly. Maybe that was why I was angry. Yeah, that would make sense. So the anger appeared the second after she told me, maybe that was why I was angry. So honestly, sometimes you've got to walk people very slowly through an event.
in order to kind of try and reconstruct. But actually, the first few times you do that, the main thing I think that happens is it makes them self-conscious in a good way. So that next time they get in an argument, they're more likely to go, all right, I noticed now at what point I got angry and what my girlfriend said immediately that triggered it. You could say it's really hard the first time and sometimes it's inconclusive, but that primes.
Donald J. Robertson (01:01:04.77)
the client to be more observant in the future so that from then on it often becomes much, much easier for them to go, right, okay, it was not a situation. I know what it was that I was thinking this time. I noticed, like, I said, how dare you? Like, you know, and that was what I was going through in my mind. was focused on it, you know, and then I was kind of like, I couldn't even hear the rest of what she was saying. I was just like focused on that one remark. Like, so my attention became narrowed down on it. Like.
Tyson (01:01:16.523)
Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (01:01:33.998)
and I started raising my voice and then she became upset. That's the kind of analysis that you really want. And it's hard at first for people to kind of make that paradigm shift. Although it seems again like common sense. But people can't see the wood for the trees. They kind of get lost in everything except what you actually need to know about the situation. But the key things are what you did, what you said.
what thoughts flash through your mind. I'll tell you a thing about, I mentioned anger. Anger is unlike other emotions in the sense that sometimes psychologists say anger can take the form of a secondary emotion. It's like an emotion that we have in response to other emotions. Anger in some ways actually resembles a coping strategy, right? So normally we just think, eh, there's anger, there's fear, there's sadness.
Anger's a little bit different. Anger's almost more like a way of coping. Anger and worry, like worrying about things, the activity of worrying have some things in common. There's different forms of anger. But Aaron T. Beck, like the founder of cognitive therapy, as we call it, the other major pioneer of cognitive behavioral therapy, the wider approach. Aaron T. Beck wrote a
a great book about anger and he said that of all the clients that he worked with, he gathered data from them. gathered data really scrupulously on what actual thoughts were flashing through people's minds and he trained people to become very observant. He said in almost every case when people became angry, there was a preceding emotion. And often they weren't aware of it at first. So it might be frustration. It might be that you get hurt in the feels.
Like, so somebody says, hey, you're ugly. you may think, how my feelings? And go, how dare you? Like, now I'm angry. But sometimes that switch from the feeling of hurt or anxiety or the pain or the frustration, sometimes the switch to anger is so fast that people don't even notice that their feelings were hurt. But they might notice it in the future when it happens. And sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes there's more of a delay.
Donald J. Robertson (01:04:00.143)
but it can be so fast that it kind of blocks out your awareness of what the initial emotion was. And that's partly why we get angry. So you say, hey, you're ugly, you're bit of an idiot, you're a big fat idiot, Donald. And I'll be like, oh man, I have my feelings. And then I go, hang on a minute, you're not so great yourself, buddy. Right, now I've thrown all of my attention outwards onto you, because now I'm blaming and attacking you, but that distracts me.
Tyson (01:04:16.907)
Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (01:04:26.894)
from the pain that I was feeling a moment about. Now I'm all focusing on you and not focusing inwardly on the pain I was feeling. So anger allows me to blot out other uncomfortable feelings. It acts as a sort of distraction technique. Like, that alleviate, temporarily that makes me feel better, right? Because I'm not noticing my pain anymore. I'm distracting myself by focusing what a jerk you are. Like, you know, that makes me feel great. Like, I don't have to think about.
Tyson (01:04:53.473)
I'm so glad we didn't start the podcast. I was taking notes on the first question. I'm glad I didn't take that direction. It would have been a real awkward platform to build this conversation on.
Donald J. Robertson (01:05:01.902)
Well, I think it's useful for people. know I'd add a piece of advice to that, which is the...
In my experience, many, many cases, sometimes solutions are really simple. In many cases, if people can, most people will tell you, in my experience, most people will tell you, if I could only slow things down, I think I could probably have stopped myself from getting so angry. feel like, you know, I need to introduce more of a gap between stimulus and response. I wish there was a little bit more time to slow it down. But you can slow it down. There are a bunch of different ways that you can slow it down. But the easiest way to slow it down,
Tyson (01:05:24.886)
Hmm.
Donald J. Robertson (01:05:41.838)
is to notice more of what's going on. That'll make it seem like time's moving more slowly, becoming more observant slows things down. So notice the preceding emotion and then choose to voluntarily sit with it for a while. And clients will say to me, well, how long? And often I'll say, at least five or 10 seconds. Like, it doesn't even have to be all that long, right? Almost always if people go, my feelings were hurt, I felt anxious.
You still allow yourself to kind of actually experience that fully and set with it for a little while. What almost always happens is feelings change when you sit with them. So they kind of evolve, like they mutate. And so the feeling of heart will kind of start to like grow and then it start to fade, you know, like it will start to kind of change its quality a little bit. And but then it's to the moments past, like it doesn't seem worth getting angry about anymore.
Tyson (01:06:13.601)
you
Donald J. Robertson (01:06:39.522)
potentially you just introduce a delay. And this is more of the origin of the problem anyway. You wouldn't have got angry if you hadn't been hurt in the first place. So you have to learn to stay with the initial feeling a little bit longer. Just accepting it, not being afraid of it, allowing yourself to tolerate it, experience it. I mean, it's a minimalist response.
responses in modern therapy, however many of them end up being fairly minimalist. You don't have to do all that much. Just allow yourself to experience that feeling for a lot longer than normal. That's gonna disrupt the sequence of events that normally unfolds. The anger's gonna seem kind of pointless or arbitrary after that. It's gonna feel like it's not worth the effort, like getting angry. Marcus Aurelius used to say something, the Stoics in general would often say to people,
Sometimes they'd say things that are a bit more extreme than we would be saying in modern therapy. But it makes you think many of the things that Socrates says no one would agree with.
But they make you think, right? Socrates said when someone commits an act of injustice, the perpetrator harms himself more than they harm the victim. And people used to say that's ridiculous. Are you honestly saying that if a tyrant comes along, a dictator, and seizes all of your property and kills your wife and kids and tortures you, he's harmed himself more than he's harmed you? And Socrates would go, yeah, that's what I believe.
Like, and he'd have a debate with them about it. And people would walk away thinking, Socrates, I kind of admire you in a way for having the temerity to say these kind of things. And you're an original thinker, but no one believes that. And I can't help but think, you know, you can't be serious. And, you know, you're a bit of a jerk. But then they'd walk away and they'd think, man, like, what if he did, what if he really did mean that? Like, I don't know. Like, it's kind of interesting that anyone
Donald J. Robertson (01:08:47.15)
believe that. So Socrates would say no man does evil willingly. People would be like don't be ridiculous Socrates. Like and he said honestly like that's what I believe you know. I think people do bad things out of ignorance. People would be like that, nah that can't be right. But they'd go away and they'd think 10 years 20 years later they'd still be kind of they'd still be thinking about it right. One of the things the Stoics say Marcus Aurelius says
Anger does you more harm than the things you're angry about.
People are I don't know about that. I don't know if I can believe that. There's a lot of things. I get pretty angry about Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whoever it is. I feel like I'm justified in getting angry about that. Marcus Willis would like, no, your anger's doing you more harm than Joe Biden or Donald Trump or any of the rest of them have ever done you. I don't know about that. People find it hard to swallow. But that doesn't matter. At least it's got them thinking about it.
Tyson (01:09:40.064)
Hmm.
Donald J. Robertson (01:09:51.212)
Like, you know, they'll chew it over. Like 10 years later, they might still be kind of thinking, I don't know, not thinking what Marcus Aurelius said, you know, maybe, maybe it was half true. Maybe there's something, maybe he was kind of on to something, you know. Anger, Marcus Aurelius would say other people can only rob your possessions, destroy your reputation, break your legs and things like that. But anger destroys your character. Like, it gets to the very core. All these other things are kind of extraneous. Like, they're external. Like,
Tyson (01:09:51.624)
Sure. Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (01:10:20.908)
But anger is a form of temporary madness. You lose your mind, you lose your soul to anger. It penetrates to the very, core of your being. And you might never come back from it. That's why anger does you more harm. Also plus the consequences, even at a practical level of anger. It's almost a cliche to say this, but when people get angry, angry people specialize in achieving the opposite of what they want.
I tend to think about it. If you want somebody, if you want to find somebody who's can achieve the opposite of what they intended to find an angry person, like, so somebody in a relationship, I'll be like, man, you know, I really wanted respect from my wife. you know, when she didn't get me a birthday card, I just got really angry and I thought I'll teach her a lesson.
I slapped her about a bit and now she's left me. I thought, well, buddy, you really showed her. How did that work out for you? So what you wanted as a wife that respects you, what you ended up with is nothing. You're going to die alone and disrespected by everybody that you know. You didn't achieve the complete opposite of what it was that you thought you were. I'm going to get people to respect me.
Like by losing my temper and freaking out and yelling at them and stuff like that. Hey, no one's gonna respect you. get, it's the only way I can get people to do what I want. Eventually nobody's gonna do what you want. Like shout, use violence and aggression. Like it works temporarily, but in the long run it tends to backfire. So angry people very often cause more harm. Like many, many cases. But that wasn't even what Marcus Aurelius was talking about. He was like, you cause a...
not only do you cause more harm to yourself externally, but you cause a different type of harm, a qualitatively different type of harm, right? What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? Angry people lose their soul. So what to do? You get people to do what you want temporarily, probably in the long run, the opposite's gonna happen. But even so, regardless, you do it at the cost of sacrificing your.
Donald J. Robertson (01:12:44.166)
insanity, by your character, you become the sort of person that you hate. So you can't even look yourself in the mirror anymore. Why? You know, so Marcus really said, you know, anger does a more hard anger does us more harm than the things that were were angry about. And my people might think that's hard to swallow. But I think it's worth meditating on because there's at least an element of truth to it. And thinking about that, things that way, I believe.
Tyson (01:12:48.929)
Yeah.
Donald J. Robertson (01:13:13.07)
you know, has the potential to actually change liberators from anger. I said earlier that anger works to cast your attention outside. Anger is the opposite of mindfulness. It's difficult to be mindful and angry. Angry people are mindless, because they've externalized blame. So they're more concerned, if they're angry with other people, they're more concerned about what other people are doing. They're not really paying attention to themselves. They're not really looking in the mirror with the throes of anger.
But as soon as you say, is my anger doing me more harm than the thing that she said to me or did, like the thing that I'm angry about? My anger maybe do matter. That forces you to allocate at least some of your attention to yourself. You're asking a question that would require mindfulness. How much harm is my anger doing me right now? I know, I have to think about that. I have to look in a mirror. I have to pay attention to myself, right? That is inherently antagonistic to the psychology of anger, right?
Anger wants you to stop paying attention to what you're doing and saying, to lack self-awareness. That question forces you to regain self-awareness. So, my belief is simply asking that question, in many cases, can help people to snap themselves out of the trance of anger. But there's many, many other things that we can take from the stoics that could be beneficial.
Tyson (01:14:38.515)
Man, I can see why some days there's six podcasts in a day. There's just so many different ways you can delve into this subject from so many different angles. I mean, I got one eye on the clock, Donald. So I'm gonna love you and leave you in just a moment. But I appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom. It was one that I was really excited for, even if it was just the last 24 hours when I got to see the email to say that we are in fact doing it. It was a nice email to check. I don't know how I missed your first one, but.
Mate, thanks so much for joining the show. It's been so good to sit here and chat with you. It's been fun.
Donald J. Robertson (01:15:07.278)
That's a pleasure. All right. You're welcome. Yeah. It's been a, it's been a pleasure.
Tyson (01:15:13.075)
Awesome man, I'll cut off the recording there but I really appreciate it. I hope you didn't mind. I was looking at the clock because I set an hour to you and I was at about an hour I was like, I hope.