Interview with author and CBT therapist, Donald Robertson
Sometimes we all feel a bit stuck. Perhaps you’re making no headway with an important project or task. Perhaps you’re just feeling stuck in general, when you think about your life as a whole. Some people get stuck and remain stuck for a long time. That can be the cause of a lot of suffering for them. It can also lead to other problems, such as through the wider and longer-term impact on their confidence, mental or physical health, work, studies, or their relationships with other people.
Some of us really struggle to get unstuck. However, there are others who cope well, and manage to get through periods of stuckness, and break free from them, relatively quickly or easily. So what are the crucial differences between those of us who cope badly with stuckness and those lucky souls who cope better? Donald got straight into a discussion of practical hints and tips, based on his clinical experience, and knowledge of practical philosophy.
I asked author and cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist, Donald Robertson, for his advice. Donald has been helping therapy clients and coaching all sorts of high-functioning professionals, helping them to get unstuck, for over two decades now. He’s the author of six books on philosophy and psychotherapy, including the recent best seller on Stoicism and cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, published by St Martin’s Press. Donald got straight into a discussion of practical hints and tips, based on his clinical experience, and knowledge of practical philosophy. He focused on some of the techniques that have proven most helpful to his clients in the past. Here’s what he said…
Q: What are your favourite ways of helping people get unstuck?
Just a quick reminder that the Marcus Aurelius anniversary event organized by Modern Stoicism will take place on Sunday. See the EventBrite listing for details or to book your ticket, free of charge. There’s still time to register if you’re interested in joining us, and over 1,200 other participants. Can’t make it on time? Book now and, for a small donation, you’ll be granted access to videos of the presentations afterwards.
Please help spread the word by sharing the link below with anyone you think may be interested in learning more about Stoic philosophy. Thanks!
NB: Approximate times, schedule may vary slightly.
12pm EST. Welcome, Donald Robertson (5 min)
12.5pm, Introduction, Christopher Gill, emeritus professor of Ancient Thought, Exeter University, editor of Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, Books 1–6 (OUP) (45 min)
12.50pm, Core Ideas of Marcus’ Stoicism, John Sellars, author of Marcus Aurelius (Routledge) (30 min)
1.20pm Break (10 min.)
1.30pm, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Robin Waterfield, editor of Meditations: The Annotated Edition (Basic Books) (30 min)
2pm, Marcus Aurelius, the Man, Donald Robertson, author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius (St Martins) (30 min)
2.30pm, Perspective: The Modern Relevance of Marcus Aurelius and the Meditations for Professional Women, Sukhraj Gill and Lori Huica discussion with Justin Stead, founder of the Aurelius Foundation (30 min)
Moral self-examination can lead to self-improvement
Journaling for self-improvement is nothing new. Daily reflection as moral self-examination goes all the back to ancient Greece and Rome. It was first described in a poem called The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, based on the doctrines of the famous sixth century BCE philosopher. The famous Stoic thinker Seneca wrote:
I make use of this privilege, and daily plead my cause before myself. When the lamp is taken out of my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, has ceased to talk, I pass the whole day in review before myself, and repeat all that I have said and done. I conceal nothing from myself, and omit nothing. — From On Anger
And then there’s the most famous Stoic text of all, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, in which we have the philosopher-emperor’s own personal notebook — the product of similar reflections on his own character and actions. This is the great-grandaddy of most subsequent self-help and psychotherapy literature.
Galen, the famous court physician of Marcus Aurelius, also describes this technique in a little-known book about philosophical therapeutics called On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passions. Galen recommends that each morning, we should prepare for the day ahead by imagining the contrast between acting in accord with wisdom and self-discipline on the one hand and being led by our irrational passions and desires on the other. What difference would it make if we followed the wiser path rather than simply going down the easier one? Planning our day ahead in this way can help us review how we’ve done later, before retiring to sleep.
The most famous Stoic teacher of all, Epictetus, wrote nothing. His words were transcribed and edited by a Roman citizen called Arrian of Nicomedia, who attended Epictetus’ lectures in Greece around 120 CE. Arrian was later appointed governor of Cappadocia (in modern-day Turkey) and assumed command of a provincial army. Arrian was, in other words, a highly accomplished Roman statesman and general, an expert on cavalry training and tactics. Perhaps his success in life was helped by the use of Stoic philosophical exercises.
Arrian was also a prolific, erudite, and talented writer who was clearly very interested in Epictetus’ philosophy. Having transcribed eight volumes of the master’s discourses — only half of which survive — he acquired a very thorough understanding of Stoic teachings. In the Discourses, Arrian portrays Epictetus teaching a specific daily routine that clearly lends itself to journaling (Discourses, 4.6). It’s a Stoic version of the method described in The Golden Verses of Pythagoras.
Each morning Epictetus’ students, including Arrian, were to prepare for the day ahead by asking themselves what they need to do in order to further master their own fears and unruly desires and free themselves from any traces of unwarranted distress. They were asked to consider what steps they must take to fulfill their potential for living wisely and in accord with virtues such as justice, courage, and temperance.
Each evening they were supposed to review their progress by asking themselves three questions, which I paraphrase as follows:
What have I done well today, with regard to self-improvement and fulfilling my potential in life?
Where did I go wrong, in this regard?
What did I omit that I could do next time?
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous contains a remarkably similar daily strategy. Step 11 of the 12-Step Program describes the following retrospective meditation technique:
When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others, of what we could pack into the stream of life? But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others.
The authors add that after making this review they ask God for forgiveness before contemplating “what corrective measures should be taken.”
The next morning, they continue with the following prospective meditation:
On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives.
This method obviously resembles that of Galen and the Stoics, though couched in somewhat more religious language.
I described how this technique could be combined with modern cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in my recent book on the life and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius,How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, providing a simple framework for Stoic practice. In this way, you can enter into a daily cycle of learning with a beginning, middle, and end.
In the morning you prepare for the day ahead; throughout the day you try to live consistently in accord with your values; and in the evening you review your progress and prepare to repeat the cycle again the next day. … Having a daily routine like this makes it much easier to be consistent in your practice.
When we journal in the morning and again at night, we are walking in the footsteps of Arrian, who doubtless discussed similar ideas with his officers on the battlefields of Asia Minor during his campaign against the Alani. We know Emperor Marcus Aurelius was keeping notes of a similar kind while stationed with the Roman army on the Danube frontier during the Marcomannic Wars.
The personal challenges you face today may seem quite different from these, but deep down, there are probably a lot of similarities: We all have to make decisions every day and think both about our own lives and priorities and the larger picture. The same capacity for careful reflection and moral or psychological self-examination will, fate willing, serve you just as well as it did Arrian and Marcus Aurelius.
Journaling for self-improvement is popular today but it builds on a tradition of moral self-examination that goes all the back to ancient Greece and Rome. This article describes a simple method of daily reflection, which was well-known in antiquity. It was first described in a poem called The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, based upon the doctrines of the famous 6th century BC philosopher. However, it was later assimilated into Stoicism, as we’ll see.
Arrian and Stoicism
The most famous Stoic teacher of all, Epictetus, wrote nothing. His words were transcribed and edited by a Roman citizen, called Arrian of Nicomedia, the capital city of Bithynia (in the northwest of modern-day Turkey). Arrian attended Epictetus’ lectures at Nicopolis in Greece, around 120 AD. He was later appointed senator, and reached the rank of consul, under the Emperor Hadrian, with whom he was most likely good friends.
Perhaps his success in life was helped by the use of Stoic philosophical exercises.
Later, around 131 AD, Hadrian appointed Arrian the governor of Cappadocia (in the northeast of modern-day Turkey). As such, he assumed command of a provincial army, consisting of two legions, Legio XII Fulminata and Legio XV Apollinaris, numbering approximately 20,000 men in total, including auxiliaries. Arrian was, indeed, a highly-accomplished Roman statesman and general, an expert on cavalry training and tactics. Perhaps his success in life was helped by the use of Stoic philosophical exercises.
Arrian became known as the second “Xenophon”, after a famous Athenian general and author who lived five centuries earlier. Xenophon was part of Socrates’ circle of friends and students, and left a collection of Socrates’ dialogues known as the Memorabilia Socratis. Arrian was also a prolific, erudite, and talented writer, who was clearly very interested in Epictetus’ philosophy. The relationship between him and Epictetus was like that between Xenophon and Socrates. Having transcribed eight volumes of the master’s discourses — only half of which survive — he acquired a very thorough understanding of Stoic teachings. Arrian also reputedly wrote twelve volumes of conversations with Epictetus and possibly even a biography of the philosopher, which are lost today.
In the Discourses, Arrian portrays Epictetus teaching a specific daily routine, which clearly lends itself to journaling (Discourses, 4.6). It’s a Stoic version of the method described in The Golden Verses of Pythagoras.
Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been. — Marcus Aurelius
When I was younger — in my mid-20s — I had a very strong, ego driven, sense of entitlement about my feelings. However, if you asked me to tell you about myself, I would have said that, of course, I was the most humble person you’d ever meet. I was deluding myself, though.
I remember being in a squabble back then with a family member, about some work I was doing for them. I told them: You know, it really hurts you would say that!
This wasn’t the first time I’d said this in response to a statement, a critique of my performance, based merely on opinion. I thought I was putting on my “big girl pants” by being honest about my feelings. I basked in the triumphant feeling of being vulnerable and transparent! Surely these were the behaviors of someone wise beyond their years! Such bravery!
Time projection can be an easy way to use cognitive therapy at home
Time projection can be an easy way to use cognitive therapy at home
I began practicing as a psychotherapist in the mid-1990s. I studied many different approaches. I used to train other therapists and became known as a psychological “techniques guy” because I was fascinated by the variety of psychological strategies and tactics we can learn.
You’ll find psychological techniques in books on psychotherapy, as well as in self-help books and even spiritual and philosophical classics. Each individual technique can be classified in different ways. For instance, is it broadly visual, meditative, cognitive, verbal, written, or behavioral in nature? Some are quite complex. Others are surprisingly easy to learn, and work pretty reliably — they often provide “easy wins” for therapists.
I’ll let you in on a trade secret. Most experienced psychotherapists know that one such easy win is what we call “time projection”. That’s the terminology used by early cognitive-behavioral therapists, although you’ll find similar techniques in lots of other types of books. Time projection is a vague term that refers to using your imagination to shift your perspective as if you’re in the future or the past. There many different ways of doing this. Some work better than others. Let me give you my favorite example…
When a client comes into my consulting room I normally begin by asking “How are things?” One young woman, in Scotland, looked at me strangely for a moment and then said “I’m still in shock, to be honest!” (I’m disguising certain details, to anonymize the client.) She told me that the day before she’d gone to her boyfriend’s apartment. He wasn’t expecting her but, some time ago, had given her a key so she let herself in. She found him in bed with another woman. That would have been bad enough, but a heated argument ensued and the other woman attacked her physically, scratching and badly bruising her face. Her boyfriend stood by and did nothing to defend her. Eventually, she fled the scene in tears.
Doing Time Projection
We talked about it for a while. She felt very humiliated. Often clients are depressed about things that aren’t all that bad or worried about things that never happen. This situation wasn’t like that, though. It would obviously be very emotionally painful for anyone to have that experience. So I began by normalizing her distress and letting her know that I understood how she felt. We were probably a good 20 or 30 minutes into the conversation before I felt it was appropriate to shift perspective.
“How do you think you’ll feel about this tomorrow, looking back on it?” I asked. She told me she might be a bit calmer but still shocked and confused. So we talked a bit more. “How about a week from now — will you feel any different looking back on it then?” She said she’d feel bad but would probably be starting to think more about moving on. “So what about a month from now or two months from now?” She’d have gotten over the shock and be focusing on the future. “What about a year from now?”, “Ten years from now?”, and so on… You get the idea.
Arnold Lazarus, one of the pioneers of modern behavior therapy used the same strategy on himself:
“Whenever I upset myself over various issues […] I always picture myself looking back at the incident from about six months in the future. I instantly realise that a few months from now (or sometimes even a few days from now) it will make very little difference. This produces instant relief. I say “Tough luck!” and go about my business.”— In the Mind’s Eye, 1977
You can use this method of time projection with anything, any perceived catastrophe or misfortune. It works about 90% of the time. Very occasionally someone might say that even twenty years from now they’d still be really upset so you’d either talk that through or switch to another technique — it’s the exception that proves the rule. Because this way of doing time projection is so quick and simple and works so well, you don’t need a therapist to do it for you. You can easily use it yourself at home, as a form of self-help.
Getting More Benefit
There are ways to “squeeze more therapy” out of the technique, though, as I like to say. I often ask clients: “So if you’d feel that way about it if it had happened a year ago, why shouldn’t you feel the same way about what just happened a day ago?” (Assuming the “catastrophe” was the day before.) That’s a puzzling question for most people. It’s worth chewing over, though. What’s done is done, to paraphrase Lady Macbeth, and what’s beyond remedy should be beyond regret.
You might say that’s interesting but the experience is still fresh so you don’t yet feel as removed from it as you would in the distant future. Every time you project yourself into the future, though, you get a glimpse of what it would feel like, looking back. Practice makes perfect so if you keep doing that, maybe once per day or more, you’ll get into the habit of feeling more as if you’ve already moved on.
In a sense, you’re just speeding up the natural process of adapting to setbacks and recovering from them. It puts things in perspective. As an added bonus, time projection also tends to encourage people to think creatively about coping strategies.
If you start by imagining yourself in the future having moved on, you can more easily imagine how you got there. What must you do in order to recover from the problem and reach that new perspective? Maybe you spoke to your friends about how you were feeling, for instance, and started making changes in your daily life. It’s long been understood that focusing on ways of coping, both practically and emotionally, tends to relieve emotional distress.
Make It a Habit
Sometimes cognitive therapy techniques can be complicated. Sometimes, though, we make them more complicated than they need to be. This particular way of doing time projection is so simple that anyone can use it. Arnold Lazarus was one of the pioneers of this approach in the cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) field.
However, it isn’t just a modern concept. The ancient Stoic philosophers — such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — were doing similar things, as I describe in my book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor:
“Another simple and powerful technique is to ask yourself how you would feel about the situation that worries you in ten or twenty years’ time, looking back on it from the future. It’s an example of a more general strategy known as “time projection.” In other words, you can help yourself develop a philosophical attitude toward adversity by asking “If this will seem trivial to me twenty years from now, then why shouldn’t I view it as trivial today instead of worrying about it as if it’s a catastrophe?” You’ll often find that shifting your perspective in terms of time can change how you feel about a setback by making it seem less catastrophic”.
For example, Marcus Aurelius likes to remind himself of things that people took great pride in, or worried about, in the distant past. Decades or even centuries later, to others looking back on events from the past, their concerns may seem less important. Marcus tells himself that whenever he sees the statue of one of his predecessors in the office of emperors, such as Augustus or Hadrian, he should imagine himself in their shoes, and realize that one day many of his own concerns will seem like nothing.
“Then let this thought be in your mind, “Where then are those men now?” Nowhere, or nobody knows where. For thereby you will continuously look at human things as smoke and nothing at all, especially if you reflect at the same time that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time.” — Meditations, 10.31
I’ve known many people who figured out similar strategies for themselves — it just came to them intuitively. It’s worth practicing these sorts of techniques when you don’t need them so that they come more easily to you when you do. In other words, asking yourself “How will I feel about this looking back on it years from now?” is a good habit to get into.
Time projection can be an easy way to use cognitive therapy at home
I began practicing as a psychotherapist in the mid-1990s. I studied many different approaches. I used to train other therapists and became known as a psychological “techniques guy” because I was fascinated by the variety of psychological strategies and tactics we can learn.
You’ll find psychological techniques in books on psychotherapy, as well as in self-help books and even spiritual and philosophical classics. Each individual technique can be classified in different ways. For instance, is it broadly visual, meditative, cognitive, verbal, written, or behavioral in nature? Some are quite complex. Others are surprisingly easy to learn, and work pretty reliably — they often provide “easy wins” for therapists.
I’ll let you in on a trade secret. Most experienced psychotherapists know that one such easy win is what we call “time projection”. That’s the terminology used by early cognitive-behavioral therapists, although you’ll find similar techniques in lots of other types of books. Time projection is a vague term that refers to using your imagination to shift your perspective as if you’re in the future or the past. There many different ways of doing this. Some work better than others. Let me give you my favorite example…
