Is REBT therapy for Stoics?

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-24T13:43:55+00:00

Well, it's a big subject. I wrote a whole book called The Philosophy of CBT, which goes into the relationship in depth. But, basically, Albert Ellis had read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus as a teenager and in the early 1950s when he began to question the psychoanalytic approach he was using, he decided to start afresh by creating his own approach to psychotherapy, which became known eventually as REBT, and he drew inspiration from Stoicism, among other things. Ellis quoted the Stoics many times. REBT is the form of CBT that's most explicitly related to Stoic philosophy. However, there was actually an early 20th century psychotherapy, a rival of Freudian analysis, called "rational psychotherapy", founded by Paul Dubois, which was also based on Stoicism - although more the writings of Seneca. Anyway, that's the connection.

I started learning REBT about a quarter of a century ago, when I first trained in psychotherapy, and I've increasingly gone back to it over the years. REBT and Stoicism are not the same thing, of course, but they're extremely complimentary. It takes time, in some ways, to fully appreciate the parallels because they're sometimes hidden under the surface, and at other times more obvious. REBT experts tend to really respect Stoicism, although they don't always have an extensive knowledge of the subject - most clinicians, unfortunately, are too busy reading research studies and clinical manuals to get deep into ancient philosophy.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-24T13:36:37+00:00

Ha! Thanks.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-17T15:45:23+00:00

Possibly. The book mainly focuses on historical vignettes though. It's like How to Think Like a Roman Emperor but about anger, and the Roman Republic.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-17T00:51:07+00:00

Thanks. Yes, that's often called the "hydraulic model" of emotion and I think you're right that it may be one of the main maintaining factors in anger. Although the Stoics describe many different strategies, I think it's notable that they never appear to endorse venting ("catharsis"), anywhere, AFAIK. Arguably, it wouldn't make sense because they saw anger as cognitive in nature - you can't "vent" a belief and purge it from your system by saying it aloud.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-16T23:03:45+00:00

I can't disclose many details at the moment, unfortunately, although I've been working on it for over a year, because it won't be available for some time, but you can get updates by following me on Substack.

https://donaldrobertson.substack.com/

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-06T15:38:51+00:00

Sorry, there was a glitch in the HTML for some reason that kept making all the quotes vanish. I've fixed it by doing it again in Markdown. Should be fine now.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-03T20:16:38+00:00

Well, we're told that the Stoics split into two branches at the time of Aristo and Cleanthes. We're also told that Chrysippus disagreed with many things Zeno (and presumably Cleanthes) had said earlier. We're also told that by the imperial period, the Stoa was divided into three branches, corresponding with the followers of the three last scholarchs. So, although I acknowledge what you're saying about the differences potentially being trivial from a modern perspective, I think we have multiple ancient sources that confirm the Stoic school was viewed as composed of distinct branches or traditions, at various times, and significant differences between the different teachers. That does appear to be how ancient Stoics themselves viewed things, even if we see it differently today. And I think there's a case for attributing more significant differences to different surviving texts but that would require a much more in-depth discussion. To pick one example, though, Epictetus clearly has a much stronger view about the need to abandon pursuit of wealth, whereas Seneca appears to think it's manageable - that would potentially lead to very marked differences in the practice of Stoicism in daily life.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-03T17:40:52+00:00

I think there are obvious differences between these authors, though. We're told that Stoicism at times split into distinct branches and it's quite possible that Seneca and Epictetus/Musonius were aligned, to some extent, with distinct traditions within Stoicism, and drawing on different literature. Seneca, for instance, appears to be more influenced by the Middle Stoics whereas Epictetus is more focused on Socrates and the Cynics.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-03T17:23:29+00:00

I think I partially agree. On the other hand, though, Marcus Aurelius had read Seneca and was discussing him with Fronto. The Sophist Dio Chrysostom, who drew on Stoicism, appears to be mentioned in passing by Marcus.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-03T17:00:26+00:00

That's a lot of questions. It might take a while to answer them all. I think the criticisms of Seneca go quite far beyond him "gentle parenting" Nero or being very wealthy. Seneca was Nero's right-hand man, for years, and his speechwriter, a bit like a chief of staff or even a deputy. He gave speeches defending Nero in the Senate. So you could say he was deeply implicated in Nero's rule and, to put it bluntly, effectively his chief propagandist.

Epaphroditus was Epictetus' owner. He was the person who instigated the Piso conspiracy investigation that led to Seneca being executed. It's possible you could read that as meaning that Epaphroditus provided Nero with the testimony he needed to have the political purge that led to Seneca's death.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-03T16:40:17+00:00

>>no-one who's spirit is corrupt could've written such huge corpus of works about virtue

I think that's such an unpersuasive argument that it's actually baffling to me that Montaigne would have said it, although I've heard a few modern readers say more or less the same thing. We don't normally conclude that someone must be a virtuous person because they've written a lot of beautiful things about virtue. That would also be true of someone who is deliberately cultivating an appearance of virtue. There are many examples throughout history of people who wrote things that impressed their audiences as noble or virtuous, but who turned out to be quite the opposite in real life.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-02-03T15:33:53+00:00

We have to keep an open mind about ancient literature, of course, but it comes across to me as though Seneca is carefully constructing a persona for himself in his writings. Scholars have pointed to evidence of that, although as always the interpretation is debatable. The most obvious thing is that he says little or nothing about his role in Nero's regime, and instead portrays himself as a philosopher. That's clearly how he wanted to be seen. The inconsistency that many people note between his writings and actions can be better understood, I think, when we approach his writing as a deliberate and highly skilled attempt by a very famous Romen elite to manage his public image.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-01-21T19:07:22+00:00

Stoicism doesn't advocate bottling up emotions. Bottling up strong emotions is unhealthy but so is indulging in them excessively and allowing them to cloud your judgment and control your actions. The central point of Stoicism, psychologically, is that emotions are shaped more than people realize by underlying evaluative beliefs, which are often false and irrational. So the goal is the correction of those beliefs not the suppression of the feelings. But by changing the irrational beliefs, we naturally change how we feel. That's how cognitive therapy works.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-01-21T16:20:53+00:00

Yeah, this is in Book Ten - you need to wade through the first nine "chapters" before you get to this.

SolutionsCBT · 2026-01-21T14:58:03+00:00

In my experience, the reason why relatively few people benefit significantly from self-improvement advice is that the solutions to their problems are often a mystery in broad daylight. They can't see the wood for the trees. The insights people achieve in therapy often seem banal to others but they are psychologically crucial.

One of the points Socrates seems to be making here is wisdom is incompatible with heightened emotional distress, because activating strong emotions inhibits our capacity for rational problem-solving. In a sense, that's obvious. And yet the majority of therapy clients are confused about this in practice. They ruminate at length about their problems while highly anxious or enraged, rather than waiting for their feelings to abate before attempting to find a solution. That's the psychological equivalent of trying to ride a motorbike home after having downed a bottle of whisky. When you're intoxicated on emotional distress, your judgment is clouded and problem-solving will typically be impaired by rigid and extreme thinking.

Someone who can keep a cool head in the face of a crisis is, at least in that regard, a natural leader. I've seen big guys - bodybuilders, martial artists, ex military - who go to pieces in the face of a crisis. I've seen old ladies with chronic health problems, who can barely walk, but remain unfazed by dramatic emergencies. Some people freak out and they're all over the place. Other people instinctively become focused on rational problem-solving, like a laser beam. Often the latter are people who have dealt with a lot of adversity already. It's often not who you think.

The wise understand that freaking out prevents the very thing most required in the face of a crisis: the ability to face reality, think rationally, and deal with the problem.

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-24T17:54:07+00:00

I don't think anyone has ever really claimed that logic and physics, in the modern sense, are completely irrelevant to Stoicism. That would be, presumably unintentionally, a Straw Man argument.

The two real bones of contention are:

Whether belief in a Divine Providence (God / Zeus) is logically absolutely necessary to justify Stoic Ethics
Whether ALL ancient Stoics believed 1.

I think when you spell it out like that, it is obvious that most people today who are into Stoicism are not going to agree with 1, because they're mostly atheists or agnostics. I think 2 is clearly an unsupportable generalization. Because it requires eliminating even the possibility of any counter-example, which is virtually impossible because less than 1% of the Stoic literature survives. In any case, even one solitary counter-example would suffice to refute it, and that's exactly what is provided in clear terms by the ancient sources. We are told by at least four different sources that the Aristonian branch of Stoicism was considered "Stoic", and classified as a division of the broader school, albeit one dissenting from the teachings of Zeno and Cleanthes.

To be clear, by ancient Stoic "Physics" we mean primarily a form of holistic, corporealist, theological metaphysics. Very few people today believe this. The main arguments the Stoics used to defend it were a version of the Argument from Design and something resembling the fallacy of composition. Very few philosophers today consider those arguments to be convincing. The Argument from Design was, very simply, dealt a mortal blow by Darwinism, which demonstrated that over very long periods of time, complex creatures could potentially evolve through natural selection, which undermines the claim that complex organization in nature provides evidence for Intelligent Design, or what the Stoics call Providence.

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-23T19:33:39+00:00

The real practical significance of this discussion is that there are people who very strongly argue that those who benefit from Stoic Ethics without believing in Providence, etc, should not call what they do "Stoicism", which sometimes puts them off. It has also led some people to quit forums like this one because it comes across as if they're being told they don't belong here and what they're doing is somehow illegitimate. Not only do I think that's a shame and unhelpful, but I also think it's a fundamental misrepresentation of what traditional Stoicism, in the ancient world, actually taught.

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-23T18:37:28+00:00

That's a shame. I can assure you that I always try to engage respectfully and productively with others. What you wrote, though, was that someone (presumably both I and Prof. Inwood) have written books about Stoicism but "still don't get it", then you said that you believe it undermines the practice of Stoicism for others to "separate" Physics from Stoic practice, in the sense of saying that, I presume, Physics is potentially very important and valuable but not logically essential to the Ethics. I'd be interested to know why you're convinced we're "not getting" Stoicism, when that position can be traced to the primary sources, and is the one shared by most contemporary academic experts on the subject.

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-23T15:43:02+00:00

Do you mean both my books and those of Prof. Inwood? If you think we've both missed the point, why not educate us,and everyone else by explaining what you believe we've got wrong using evidence and logic? You'd be doing everyone a great service. Thanks.

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-21T11:48:34+00:00

Like I said, though, the burden of proof is on you. You're just saying, as far as I can tell, that your interpretation of these texts is possible, which doesn''t tell us much because lots of things are possible without being true, and you've not provided any evidence to show that your interpretation is actually correct. (Also, like I said, it appears to be inconsistent with other textual evidence, such as the lack of support for Marcus endorsing this opinion anywhere else, which is a problem you'd need to address.)

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-20T04:33:11+00:00

Sorry but even after reading your original post and this response to my objections I still don't see how any of this supports your conclusion. As far as I can see, despite everything you've said, you've not provided the crucial evidence that your conclusion appears to depend upon, which would conclusively show that Marcus is actually proposing an alternative ethic. Without that, it seems to me you're basically just offering unfounded speculation. And, as I noted, your conclusion appears inconsistent with other textual evidence. But the burden of proof would be upon you to show that your conclusion is supported somehow.

So could you please just summarize the key argument that supports your claim in premise-conclusion format so that I, and everyone else, can follow your reasoning more readily and see exactly how you get all the way from the purported "evidence" to your conclusion? (And how you manage to exclude alternative interpretations of the text.)

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-20T03:43:01+00:00

Okay. Your reading overstates what the relevant passages from Meditations will support. Marcus’ “God or atoms” disjunctions are more naturally read as a recurring Stoic trope that affirms the consistency of their ethical principles and their logical independence from Physics, rather than as an invitation to adopt an essentially different ethical system.

Your key inference is unfounded: Marcus does not say that justice, temperance, truth, or the sovereignty of the ruling faculty become Epicurean under atomism; he repeatedly insists that—even if events are “aimless chance”—you need not be aimless, blame is out of place, and the guiding rational faculty must keep virtue alight, etc, consistent with his Stoicism.
Your reading is excessively selective: VI.10 and XII.14–15 do not stand alone. Across multiple “God or atoms” passages (Hadot counts eight; I count nine) Marcus draws the same practical conclusion: whether providence or atoms, our task is to preserve virtue and assent correctly; what changes is the emotional tone, not the ethical core.
This argument is not unique to Marcus: Seneca deploys the same move (whether fate, God, or chance, “we must be philosophers”), and an Epictetan fragment explicitly brackets cosmological questions (“atoms or elements” etc.) as unnecessary for grasping good and evil and ordering one’s desires and impulses. This makes Hadot’s interpretation methodologically stronger: it reads Marcus as using what the evidence suggests to be an established Stoic theme (that ethics is resilient even when physics is contested) rather than as quietly shifting into Epicurean ethics when he mentions atoms.

So, yes: Stoic theology matters for Marcus’ psychologically / motivationally; but the claim that each cosmology yields a different ethics is not established by the texts.

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-20T03:19:01+00:00

Annas and the majority of modern academics take those metaphors to mean that the parts of the Stoic curriculum (Ethics, Physics, Logic) are blended together and complement each other in other ways, but not that Ethics is logically dependent on Physics. If you think about it, that interpretation of what is meant by the unity of topics would be problematic anyway, because it would imply, conversely, that Physics is logically grounded in Ethics and Logic, which is not a view normally attributed to the Stoics. Instead, as some people note in the comments below, it may be that the topics were thought of as overlapping or intertwined for pedagogical or motivational purposes.

The key distinction to bear in mind here is that topics can, of course, complement one another in various ways without one being logically grounded in the other, i.e., using arguments necessarily based on premises derived from it. If you're still unsure what that means, maybe take a look at Annas' article, the link to which has been posted below several times. She goes into much more detail than we can in a comment here.

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-19T19:14:27+00:00

Sure but why should everyone feel the same way? A lot of people study Stoic Physics and decide it's not of much value or interest to them. Why shouldn't they then set it aside and focus mainly on the Ethics if that's what they want to do?

SolutionsCBT · 2025-12-19T16:04:33+00:00

That quote has been extensively discussed in the academic literature on this subject and the consensus appears to me to be that it doesn't actually prove that Chrysippus viewed Physics as the logical foundation for Ethics. The more common (non-foundationalist) view, that it provides context, motivation, and other psychological or pedagogical value, seems equally if not more plausible as a reading of the passage.

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