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‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them.’ This sentence inspired Ellis’s ‘ABC’ model of the emotions, which is at the heart of CBT: we experience an event (A), then interpret it (B), and then feel an emotional response in line with our interpretation (C).
Aaron Beck calls this technique of examining your unconscious beliefs ‘the Socratic method’,
4 Most people, he suggested, sleepwalk through life, never asking themselves what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. They absorb the values and beliefs of their parents, or their culture, and accept them unquestioningly. But if they happen to absorb wrong beliefs, it will make them sick. Socrates
I placed too much value on the approval of other people (which Plato suggests is the classic sickness of liberal democracy) and this philosophy made me socially anxious.
psychotherapy, which comes from the Greek for ‘taking care of the soul’. It’s up to us to examine our souls and choose which beliefs and values are reasonable and which are toxic.
learn to be Socrates to yourself, so that when a negative emotion knocks you off your feet, you ask, am I responding wisely to this? Is this reaction reasonable? Could I react more wisely? And you take this Socratic ability with you through the rest of your life.
CBT has shown, in many randomised controlled trials, that people can challenge and overcome even deeply entrenched emotional disorders.
We can lead people to the well of philosophy, but we can’t force them to think.
three Socratic steps: 1) Humans can know themselves. We can use our reason to examine our unconscious beliefs and values. 2) Humans can change themselves. We can use our reason to change our beliefs. This will change our emotions, because our emotions follow our beliefs. 3) Humans can consciously create new habits of thinking, feeling and acting. These three steps are, in essence, what CBT teaches.
‘I approached every problem I encountered, whether it was failing an exam or a disease or getting shot down and shot up the same way: I would fix what I could fix and I wouldn’t complain about what I couldn’t.’5 Cornum
person with social anxiety, for example, becomes obsessed with what other people think of them. They become nervous, paranoid, angry and hopeless, all because they are completely fixated on other people’s opinions – which are out of their control. Their intense focus on Zone 2 is a recipe for paranoia, helplessness and alienation. To begin to feel more in control, they need to learn to focus more on Zone 1, on their own beliefs and attitudes.
Resilience, and mental health, come from focusing on what is in our control in a situation, without driving ourselves crazy over what is not.
This attitude was summed up by the Serenity Prayer, which is read at the end of each meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It says: ‘Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference.’
Epicurus tells us that we’re only on this planet for a few years before we disappear, and while we’re here there’s nothing we have to do. There’s no one we have to please. There are no commandments we have to follow. We can choose simply to enjoy ourselves, rather than finding reasons to be miserable. We can make the radical choice of happiness.
The Epicurean poet Horace put it well: ‘Let the soul which is happy with the present learn to hate to worry about what lies ahead.’ If something bad happens to us in the future, philosophy gives us the means to cope with it, and if we die, we won’t exist any more so it’s not really a problem.
‘You think that you will never forget not to worry about the small stuff and to enjoy each moment like it’s your last. The sad thing is, you do forget. You get caught back up in the small stuff.’
