If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you know that most of what I write links ancient Stoic philosophy to self-improvement and the challenges of modern living. What I haven’t done before is focus on five practical techniques and teach them to you directly, one at a time. That’s what we’ll be doing in this miniseries.

The Stoic Mind is based on a two-hour workshop that I developed, called Ancient Wisdom for Modern Anxiety. I’ve been studying the Stoics for three decades and teaching these techniques to therapy clients, workshop participants, and readers for most of that time. I’ve been impressed, again and again, by how well they work. They’re not important just because they’re ancient, but because they often anticipate modern evidence-based psychological techniques.

Before we get started, let me explain what this miniseries is all about. It’s not a series of history lessons or philosophy lectures. It’s a practical guide for putting Stoic philosophy to work in daily life.

Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.49

Consider the image below, which depicts a Stoic statue looking down at a storm. I like to think it’s not because he’s escaped it, but because he’s able to use his vantage point to calmly take it in.

That’s what these five techniques are designed to give you: the ability to stand steadily and see clearly through the chaos. And together they form a basic system. Each one builds on the last, and in the final lesson of the miniseries I’ll show you how all five fit together.

The Five Techniques

In each of the first five lessons, you’ll learn one of the five techniques. They include how to:

1. Detach from Anxious Thoughts (Stoic Mindfulness). This core technique from modern Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which was originally inspired by the Stoics, teaches you how to observe your anxious thoughts without getting entangled in them. You’ll gain the ability to create a space between you and your worries, giving you more control over your reactions.

2. Mentally Rehearse Coping (Premeditation of Adversity). Inoculate yourself against stress and build emotional resilience by calmly contemplating future challenges. This isn’t about worrying; it’s about progressively reducing your fear of the unknown and developing the confidence to handle whatever life throws at you.

3. Make Wise Decisions (Contemplation of the Sage). Discover a practical method for navigating difficult situations. This technique involves constructing an “inner mentor” based on the wisdom of figures like Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, and consulting them when you feel anxious or overwhelmed. It provides a clear framework for more rational and rewarding behaviour.

4. Find Strength in Your Own Values (Stoic Virtue Ethics). Come to understand how the Stoics found an unshakable source of confidence and tranquility not in external events, but in their own character and values. You’ll learn how to focus on what you can control, making you less vulnerable to the things you can’t.

5. Put Your Problems into Perspective. (The View From Above.) Discover a powerful Stoic meditation technique that helps you gain a “cosmic” vantage point. You’ll learn how to put your everyday worries into a much larger context, reducing their emotional impact and allowing you to see the bigger picture.

In the final lesson, we’ll bring all five techniques together as a system for managing anxiety. This lesson will be for paid subscribers only. (See more on that below.)

About This Miniseries

If you’re already a subscriber, you know what this newsletter’s about. The Stoic Mind sits inside it. It’s a six-lesson miniseries running within Stoicism: Philosophy as a Way of Life, publishing every second Tuesday.

Lessons 1 through 5 are for everyone. Each will teach you a complete technique, for free, with enough context and practical detail to actually use it and benefit from it. I don’t believe in withholding the substance from my readers.

What I’m offering paid subscribers within each lesson is something different, however: a deeper, guided experience of the same material. The paid portion of each lesson will contain an audio of me walking you through the technique, the way I do in my workshops. Many will also include a downloadable resource or practice tool, such as a worksheet or reference card. Think of the paid tier as the workshop version of The Stoic Mind.

Here’s a preview of what’s to come.

Download the Infographic

The infographic is an example of the kind of resource paid subscribers will receive throughout the series. While it’ll mean more after you’ve worked through the series, it’ll help you right now to see how the five techniques fit together.

The Stoic Mind Infographic

128KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download this PDF of the infographic, which outlines the five practical techniques taught in The Stoic Mind.

Download

Listen to the Audio

The audio’s my personal welcome to you. Consider it the opening of the workshop.

The paid portion of each lesson includes a guided audio recording, and many also include a practical template or worksheet. Lesson 6, the final lesson, is available to paid subscribers only and is a complete synthesis of all five techniques. In it, you’ll receive a longer coaching-style audio in which I guide you through using all five techniques together as a complete system.

Claim your Special Offer

To mark the launch of The Stoic Mind, new paid subscribers get 25% off for a limited time. Get full access by November 3, 2026, and you’ll unlock the full guided course, including audio practices, worksheets, reference cards, and the synthesis lesson.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, this miniseries is the perfect opportunity to do it, because the audio and practice tools make a genuine difference to how well the techniques actually stick.

I’m looking forward to this. These are techniques I’ve used myself, taught to clients, and written about for years. Putting them together in this format, in the right order, with time to breathe between each one, feels like the right way to share them.

See you in two weeks.

Donald Robertson

The event takes place on Sunday, October 11, and only 20 places are available. Reserve your ticket through TicketScene.

Reserve your Place

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

In conversation with Donald Robertson

Sunday, October 11, 2026
Indigo Pointe-Claire (map)
Doors open: 2:30 p.m.
Talk and Q&A: 3:00–4:00 p.m.

Tickets: $5, or $30 including a signed paperback copy of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

Only 20 places available

What can the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius teach us about coping with adversity, managing difficult emotions, and living with greater purpose?

In this talk, I’ll explore some of the central ideas in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and explain how ancient Stoic philosophy anticipated several techniques used in modern cognitive-behavioural therapy. We’ll look at practical ways to apply these ideas in everyday life, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

The event is suitable both for readers who are new to Stoicism and for those already familiar with the philosophy. Reserve your place through TicketScene.

Reserve your Place

On the trip from Laguna Beach, my Uber driver was a great guy, who was really into yoga and philosophy. I’d already been talking nonstop for nearly two hours when I arrived at Andre’s place, so you can probably hear by the end my voice is starting to get a little tired! But I wouldn’t change anything about it. It was a great day and we had a fantastic conversation. Enjoy!

The modern word “stoicism” (lowercase) means someone who has a stiff upper-lip, or more specifically someone who suppresses or conceals unpleasant or embarrassing emotions. The word “Stoicism” (capitalized) denotes the ancient Greek school of philosophy, which has a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of human emotion. People often confuse these two concepts, though, and the Internet is awash with blog posts and podcasts in which stoicism, the unemotional coping style, is confused with Stoicism, the philosophy. In this article, I’ll explain the difference, and show how the Stoics, borrowing language from Socrates, consistently rejected the idea that their philosophy was about eliminating our feelings.

Socrates, Antisthenes, and the Cynics

In Plato’s Apology, during the trial that led to his execution, Socrates says to the jury that some of them may judge him harshly because he does not throw himself at their feet, begging for mercy and weeping profusely, as others have in the past. To these men, he would say:

My friend, I too have relatives, nor I am, as Homer has it, “born of an oak or a rock,” but of human parents. (Apology, 34d)

In other words, although Socrates was famous for his equanimity, even in the face of danger, he was nevertheless a human being, of flesh and blood, and had natural feelings, such as concern for the welfare of his wife and children.

We’re told that Antisthenes, one of Socrates’ friends and students, learned apatheia, or freedom from unhealthy passions, from him, and that his work later inspired the Cynic tradition.

From [Socrates], having acquired his endurance and having emulated his freedom from passion [apatheia], he was the first to inaugurate Cynicism.

Diogenes Laertius goes on to say that the Cynics and Stoics derived some of their teachings from Antisthenes, presumably including their conception of apatheia, which does not mean “apathy” or being unemotional, like a tree or a rock, but having feelings appropriate to a human being, and being free from unhealthy passions.

Apatheia in Stoicism

Diogenes Laertius therefore emphasized that the founders of Stoicism did not mean what some people think by their use of the word apatheia, which literally means “free from passions”.

They say the wise man is also “free from passions”, because he is not overcome by them. But the bad man is called “free from passions” in a different sense, which means the same as “hard-hearted” and “insensitive”. (Diogenes Laertius, 7.117)

Today we might perhaps say that someone wise is “unemotional” in a good way, meaning they have overcome unhealthy fears and desires, but we may also call certain unwise people “unemotional” in a bad way, meaning that they are merely unfeeling and callous. Despite the fact that the Stoics explicitly sought to correct this misconception. It’s still extremely common today. We see several ancient authors openly rejecting the idea that the goal of Stoicism was to be unemotional, in the sense of being apathetic and insensitive, and in doing so they often use similar language to Socrates.

For instance, Epictetus repeatedly says that Stoics ought not to pursue freedom from passions (apatheia) in the sense of trying to be unfeeling “like a statue”. He links natural feelings with “appropriate action” and maintaining one’s natural and acquired relationships, as a family member and a citizen (Discourses, 3.2). To be completely devoid of feelings may, therefore, be natural to a statue but not to a human being.

Neither then is it possible for a man completely to lose the movements [i.e., feelings] of a man; and even those [eunuchs] who are deprived of their genital members are not able to deprive themselves of man’s desires. (Discourses, 2.20)

Cicero likewise portrays the Roman Stoic Laelius as saying that it would be the greatest possible mistake to try to eliminate feelings of friendship, because even animals experience natural affection for their offspring, which Stoics viewed as the foundation of human love and friendship (Laelius, 13). We would not only be dehumanising ourselves by eliminating natural affection between friends, he says, but reducing ourselves below animal nature to something more like a mere tree-trunk or a stone and we should turn a deaf ear to anyone who foolishly suggests that the good life entails having “the hardness of iron” in terms of our emotions. This even more clearly echoes the Homeric quote (”born of an oak or a rock”) used by Socrates in the Apology, to explain the nature of his feelings.

Seneca makes the same point, employing similar language, saying that the Sage is still a man and should not be imagined having the emotional “hardness” of a rock:

There are misfortunes which strike the sage – without incapacitating him, of course – such as physical pain, infirmity, the loss of friends or children, or the catastrophes of his country when it is devastated by war. I grant that he is sensitive to these things, for we do not impute to him the hardness of a rock or of iron. There is no virtue in putting up with that which one does not feel. (On the Constancy of the Sage, 10.4)

This final point is, I think, decisive for the Stoics. The man who feels no trace of fear or desire can hardly be said to exhibit the virtues required to overcome them. How can someone be called courageous who is simply incapable of experiencing fear? How can someone be considered temperate, or self-controlled, who has no more feelings of desire than a rock does? Ironically, the Sage must have at least incipient feelings in order to exercise the cardinal virtues of fortitude and temperance. The Stoics refer to these incipient, automatic, feelings as “proto-passions” or as the “first movements” of the psyche in response to an impression.

Against the Epicureans

For this reason, Seneca elsewhere explains that whereas the goal of Epicureanism is “a mind immune to feeling”, this “unfeelingness” is actually the opposite of what the Stoics desire.

This is the difference between us Stoics and the Epicureans; our wise man overcomes every discomfort but feels it, theirs does not even feel it. (Letters, 9)

The virtue of the Sage consists in his ability to endure painful feelings and rise above them, with magnanimity, while continuing to maintain his relationships and interaction with the world. Seneca returns to this point several times:

I do not withdraw the wise man from the category of man, nor do I deny to him the sense of pain as though he were a rock that has no feelings at all. I remember that he is made up of two parts: the one part is irrational, — it is this that may be bitten, burned, or hurt; the other part is rational, — it is this which holds resolutely to opinions, is courageous, and unconquerable. […] You must not think that our human virtue transcends nature; the wise man will tremble, will feel pain, will turn pale, for all these are sensations of the body. (Letters 71)

The Epicurean ideal, usually described as ataraxia, or freedom from all disturbance (such as pain or anxiety), is normally contrasted with the Stoic ideal of apatheia, freedom from being overcome by passions not complete insensibility. As we’re told Zeno put it, what the Stoics meant by a “passion” is “an irrational and unnatural movement [feeling] in the psyche” and “an excessive impulse” or desire. Stoic apatheia therefore specifically means freedom from unhealthy, irrational, and excessive desires and emotions.

This may be one reason why Stoicism has become popular with modern psychotherapists, whereas Epicureanism has not. The Stoic position corresponds much better with the goal of mental health as defined by modern psychology. Epicureanism sounds closer to what researchers today call “experiential avoidance”, meaning an urge to get rid of unpleasant or painful feelings. The excessive effort to avoid emotional disturbance has been found to correspond, not with emotional resilience, but with greater vulnerability and poorer mental health outcomes in the long-run. The Stoics, in other words, were closer to the truth than the Epicureans.

Conclusion

The English philosopher, James Harris, attempted to refute this misconception of Stoicism at some length, citing numerous ancient passages as evidence.

The word παθος [pathos], which we usually render a passion, means, in the Stoic sense, a perturbation, and is always so translated by Cicero; and the epithet απαθης [apathes], when applied to the wise man, does not mean an exemption from passion, but an exemption from that perturbation which is founded on erroneous opinions. The testimony of Epictetus is express to this purpose. I am not, says he, to be apathetic like a statue, but I am withal to observe relations both the natural and adventitious; as the man of religion, as the son, as the brother, as the father, as the citizen. – Harris, Dialogue Concerning Happiness, 1744

Prof. Margaret Graver’s book Stoicism and Emotion, analyzes the ancient sources in great detail and concludes that feelings always played a role in the psychology of the wise, the Stoic goal or ideal.

The founders of the Stoic school did not set out to suppress or deny our natural feelings; rather, it was their endeavor, in psychology as in ethics, to determine what the natural feelings of humans really are. With the emotions we most often experience they were certainly dissatisfied; their aim, however, was not to eliminate feelings as such from human life, but to understand what sorts of affective responses a person would have who was free of false belief.

Recently, Prof. Brad Inwood, one of the leading academic experts on Stoic philosophy today, has made this point very clearly in his book, Stoicism: A Very Brief Introduction, where he states:

There is a stereotype of Stoicism familiar to everyone, the claim that Stoicism involves being relentlessly rational, but without a trace of emotion—Mr Spock from Star Trek, only more so. That this isn’t the right view of Stoicism is now generally understood, and specialists will even point out that the passions (pathē) from which the Stoic wise person is said to be free are not what we mean by emotions but a more narrowly defined group of states of mind that are by definition pathological. The wise person may well be perfectly rational, but that doesn’t deprive him or her of all affective or emotional experience.

Another excellent introduction to Stoicism by a leading academic scholar in this field, Lessons in Stoicism by Dr. John Sellars, arrives at the same conclusion.

In modern English the word ‘stoic’ has come to mean unfeeling and without emotion, and this is usually seen as a negative trait. […] When the ancient Stoics recommended that people ought to avoid emotions, it was these negative emotions [such as anger] that they primarily had in mind.

He adds,

Contrary to the popular image, the Stoics do not suggest that people can or should become unfeeling blocks of stone. All humans will experience what Seneca calls ‘first movements’. These are when we are moved by some experience, and we might feel nervous, shocked, excited or scared, or we might even cry. All these are quite natural reactions; they are physiological responses of the body, but not emotions in the Stoic sense of the word. Someone who is upset and momentarily contemplates vengeance, but does not act on it, is not angry according to Seneca, because he remains in control.

And he concludes,

The Stoics certainly do not envisage turning people into unfeeling blocks of stone. So, we’ll still have the usual reactions to events – we’ll jump, flinch, get momentarily frightened or embarrassed, cry – and we’ll still have strong caring relationships with those close to us. What we won’t do, however, is develop the negative emotions of anger, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, obsession, perpetual fear or excessive attachment. These are the things that can ruin a life and that the Stoics think are best avoided.

I hope these quotes from modern scholars, as well as those from the primary sources above, are enough to clarify the Stoic concept of apatheia, a word which implies something close to the outcome of psychotherapy — overcoming desires and emotions that are unhealthy, excessive and irrational.

The real Marcus was more interesting than that. He experienced grief, wept, and worried. He struggled with anger, fear, illness, bereavement, war, plague, political intrigue, and the moral burden of ruling the whole Roman Empire.

I wrote Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor, for the Yale University Press Ancient Lives series, to tell the real story of the man behind the Meditations.

Here is a short passage from the opening of the book:

Marcus Aurelius did not have a heart of stone. When the news was brought to him that one of his most beloved tutors had died, the young Caesar was distraught, and tears poured down his cheeks. Palace servants, afraid his reputation would be harmed by such a public display of raw emotion, rushed to his side, trying to restrain him. His adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius, a thoughtful and gentle man, gestured for them to step aside. He whispered, “Let him be only a man for once; for neither philosophy nor empire takes away natural feeling.”

That episode captures one of the most important things to realize about Stoicism. Stoicism was not about becoming cold or inhuman. It was about learning how to experience natural feelings without allowing grief, fear, anger, or desire to overthrow reason.

For example, we’re told that the early Stoics, who founded the school were careful to distinguish between being “free from passions” in the therapeutic sense and merely being unemotional and hard-hearted.

They say, moreover, that the Sage is free from unhealthy passions [has apatheia], because he is not prone to be overcome by them. But they add that in another sense the term apatheia is applied to the vicious man, when, that is, it means that he is hard and insensitive.

Marcus, therefore, did not aspire to be “stoic” (lowercase), or cold and unemotional, but to be wise and unperturbed by strong emotions.

My biography of Marcus Aurelius, explores his life in context: his childhood, his mother Lucilla, his Stoic teachers, the shadow of Hadrian, the example of Antoninus Pius, the wars, the plague, and the experiences that shaped the philosophy of the Meditations.

If you have read the Meditations and want to understand the man who wrote it, the book is available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

Read or listen on Amazon

I’d be curious to read your answer to the poll, and hear about your reasons in the comments section.

Highlights

• Do you think readers will perceive any parallels between ancient Athenian politics and recent history?

• What are our sources like for this period? How biased are they? What’s missing?

• How Athenian were the Spartans and how Spartan were the Athenians?

• How did Athens and Sparta become rival powers? What set the stage for the Peloponnesian War?

• What can we learn about the strengths and weaknesses of democracy from the Athenians?

• What was the status of slaves and women in Athens and Sparta?

• What can we learn about how alliances work, or don’t work?

• What role did ancient “technological” advantage play in the outcome of the war?

• What would have happened if the Athenians had stuck to the military policies of Pericles?

• Was Sparta a bit of a myth? How distorted is the popular image of the Spartans today?

• If the Athenians had conquered Sicily and defeated Sparta, would they have invaded Persia? (What caused the Sicilian disaster?)

Links

• Adrian Goldsworthy’s Amazon author profile

• Athens and Sparta on Amazon

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A World War II veteran returned home from the South Pacific afraid of the dark.

This was no childish fear. His nervous system had come to associate darkness with the frequent threat of enemy fire, at dead of night, in the South Pacific jungles. He’d watched his friends die right before his eyes. Now, back in civilian life, his brain remained constantly on alert for sudden movements. Even in the safety of Denver, Colorado, his body still reacted as if darkness meant danger, and for a while he was afraid just to step outside in the evenings.

The method that helped him was surprisingly simple. He forced himself to go out for long walks at night, down side streets, while continually reminding himself that the darkness he now encountered was not identical with the darkness he had experienced while serving the Pacific War.

In other words:

This darkness is not that darkness.

Darkness (here and now, 1946, in Denver) ≠ darkness (back there and then, 1942-1945, in the South Pacific jungles)

That phrase captures one of the most useful ideas in a forgotten precursor of modern cognitive therapy known as General Semantics. Alfred Korzybski, its founder, is now mostly remembered, if at all, for the saying: “The map is not the territory.” Our words and mental images are like maps. They may be useful. Some maps are more accurate than others. But a map is just a map. It is never completely identical with the reality it represents.

Our nervous system often deals in generalizations. Not “this darkness right now is dangerous” but merely “darkness means danger.” Emotional problems often arise, or are made worse, when we fail to make clear distinctions.

This person is not that person.

This place is not that place.

This darkness is not that darkness.

Have you ever noticed that maps refer to themselves? Right there printed on the page there are instructions on how it should be interpreted. There’s usually a key, or “legend”, that tells you what the symbols mean, and a scale used to convert the distances. In fact, one of the most important pieces of information you’ll find printed on any map is the date on which it was published. If you’re using a map dated 1976 in the year 2026, you may get quite lost, and feel confused and disorientated, if the landscape and paths have changed significantly. Once you notice the date written on the page, though, you will realize that it could still contain useful information but may no longer correspond with the real terrain.

Language and thought have the same ability to refer to themselves. We can talk about our speech, and think about our thinking. We do it all the time. Get into the habit of making a mental note to remind yourself that your mental map has certain limitations. That’s the psychological equivalent of adding a key to a printed map.

Rather than saying “I hate the dark”, slow down and spell it out more accurately: “I did hate the dark back there and then, in 1946, in the jungle, but this darkness, tonight in Denver, is not identical with that darkness.” It might seem a little pedantic at first but with practice, you can train your nervous system to understand that these are two different situations. A thought or memory that’s undated can be as misleading as a map that’s undated. At first glance, you may feel like this is stating the obvious, and you already know that this darkness is not that darkness, etc. However, knowing it intellectually and responding to it emotionally are two different things. It takes practice to make this stick at an emotional level.

WWII Rational Therapy

The psychiatrist who pioneered this wartime application of General Semantics was Dr. Douglas M. Kelley. He is better known today as the chief psychiatrist responsible for assessing the Nazi high command before the Nuremberg trials, portrayed by Rami Malek in the 2025 film Nuremberg. However, before Nuremberg, Kelley served as Chief Consultant in Clinical Psychology for the European Theatre of Operations during the Second World War.

In that role, he oversaw the training of “hundreds of battalion-aid surgeons”. Together, they provided psychotherapy, both remedial and preventative, to over seven thousand US soldiers. Many of whom were suffering from what was then called “war neurosis,” “battle fatigue,” or “combat stress.” In retrospect, many of these cases resemble what we would call posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although the modern diagnostic term did not exist at that time. These men were often suffering from severe anxiety, hypervigilance, intrusive memories, and extreme nervous reactions to reminders of traumatic combat experiences.

This was more than a decade before Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), the earliest form of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Psychoanalysis still dominated psychiatry at that time but during the Second World War it proved of little or no use in the theatre of operations. Soldiers needed brief therapy, taking less than a dozen sessions, and consisting of direct advice, rather than hundreds of hours of dream analysis and other such indirect methods. Even better would be preventative psychological training, delivered in groups, which could build emotional resilience. They needed something practical: a way of understanding what was happening to them and regaining their capacity to function under the extreme stress of combat.

Kelley and others therefore adopted shorter-term, more psychoeducational methods. Kelley was particularly interested in the principles of General Semantics, which he believed had practical value both for prevention and treatment. Korzybski himself, incidentally, had served during the First World War, in the Russian army, and still walked with a cane, due to the injuries he sustained in combat. When he first arrived in America, after the war, it took him months to get used to sleeping at night without the sound of constant artillery fire in the background. He understood, from personal experience, that the nervous system can continue responding to old dangers long after they have passed.

One of his most important observations was that the original fear reaction is often less damaging than what he called second-order reactions: fear of fear, nervousness about nervousness, worry about worry. This remains a central point in modern anxiety treatment. Panic about anxiety can intensify anxiety. The belief that normal traumatic reactions mean we are “broken” can make them much worse.

General Semantics was not psychotherapy in the narrow sense. It was intended as a general training in sanity, scientific thinking, and orientation to reality. Yet it had obvious therapeutic implications. It taught people to become more conscious of the way they abstract, label, generalize, and identify one thing with another. In everyday language, it trained people to ask: Am I reacting to the facts before me, or to my map of those facts? Am I reacting to reality or my way of thinking about reality?

The Map Is Not the Territory

Korzybski distinguished between what he called “intensional” and “extensional” thinking. The terminology may be unfamiliar, but the basic idea is simple. Intensional thinking is dominated by words and their verbal definitions. Extensional thinking is oriented toward concrete observable facts. The intensional meaning of the word “dog” is “a carnivorous mammal closely related to the gray wolf that has long been domesticated as a pet”, etc. The extensional meaning, by contrast, consists in all the dogs to which it refers, and can be indicated by actually pointing at some examples.

Suppose I say, “Dogs are dangerous.” That may be based on some real experience, but as a statement it is too crude. Which dogs? Under what conditions? Dangerous in what way? The dog in front of me now is not identical with the dog that bit me several years ago. If I forget that distinction, I may react to the label “dog”, to an abstract idea of “dogs are dangerous”, rather than to the real individual dog before me now.

General Semantics called this the principle of non-identity. No two things are completely identical. Even the “same” thing changes over time. A person today is not identical with that person yesterday. A situation now is not identical with a situation then. Anxiety and anger often blur those distinctions.

The Stoics would have recognized this problem immediately. Epictetus told his students that we are disturbed not by events themselves but by our opinions about them. He also taught them to pause when troubled by an impression and say something like: “You are just an impression, and not the thing you claim to represent.” The Stoics called this withholding assent. Modern therapists call similar processes cognitive distancing or cognitive defusion.

General Semantics offers another route to the same basic discipline. Do not immediately fuse with the first appearance of things. Do not assume the label captures the whole reality. Do not confuse the map with the territory.

How Veterans Used General Semantics

The veteran whose report I’m discussing had served in four South Pacific campaigns. He returned home tense, anxious, and constantly alert. He did not learn General Semantics from Kelley directly, but from classes taught by Professor Elwood Murray at the University of Denver. Korzybski later published the veteran’s report, with comments, because it provided such a vivid illustration of the method.

His fear of darkness was one example. He overcame it, at least in part, by walking at night while reminding himself that the darkness around him in Denver was not identical with the darkness of combat.

He also feared crowds. Eventually, he realized that slight movements among people downtown were being confused, by his nervous system, with movements in trees and bushes that might have signalled enemy danger in the jungle. So he deliberately exposed himself to crowds while practising this distinction. These movements, in Denver, were not those movements, in South pacific island jungles.

He reacted to war newsreels in cinemas as if the battle were happening again. So he forced himself to remain in his seat and remind himself that he was looking at black-and-white pictures on a screen, not actual combat. The image was not the event. The map was not the territory.

He heard fire-engine sirens and felt an urge to drop to the ground. So he visited a fire station and examined the sirens. He looked at them as they were now: part of civilian emergency vehicles, not air-raid warnings in a combat zone. These sirens were not those sirens.

He developed a strong aversion to rice because of a horrific memory involving a dead enemy soldier whose bag of rice had been torn open. So he ate rice again, while reminding himself that the rice on his plate was not identical with the rice he saw on that man’s corpse.

He disliked dogs because of what he had seen stray dogs devouring human corpses during the war. So he forced himself to pet dogs in America while remembering that these animals were not identical with the dogs he had seen on the islands.

The recurring method was simple enough but not easy. He repeatedly entered situations that triggered anxiety or aversion, and while doing so he trained himself to discriminate more accurately between present reality and traumatic memory. Modern therapists might describe this as a combination of exposure, reappraisal, and inhibitory learning. General Semantics described it as developing a more extensional orientation toward facts.

Hit the Semantic Pause Button

One of the most interesting parts of the report concerns anger. The veteran became irritated when civilians made what he regarded as silly remarks about the war. At first, he responded with cutting comments. Later, he became sullen and withdrawn. Eventually, though, he learned to use silence as a way of delaying his reaction and evaluating the situation more objectively.

This is a small but important point. A pause can become a form of training. Instead of immediately assenting to the first angry impression, he used the gap to consider the situation more carefully. Perhaps these civilians were not malicious. Perhaps they simply lacked the experience required to understand what war had been like. Perhaps his label “silly” captured something, but not the whole story.

This relates to another General Semantics concept: non-allness. No statement says everything. No label captures the whole person. No description exhausts the facts. When we are anxious or angry, however, we often behave as if our first description were complete.

He is selfish.

They are ignorant.

This is unbearable.

Nobody understands.

Everything is ruined.

These judgments may contain some truth, but they are usually incomplete. They leave things out selectively. And what they leave out may be precisely what we need to notice if we want to respond wisely.

That is especially relevant to anger. Anger often identifies a person with a single action, or a present disagreement with a whole history of injury. This person becomes that person. This remark becomes every insult. This inconvenience becomes intolerable disrespect. General Semantics, like Stoicism, asks us to slow down and inspect the impression before we endorse it.

Do This Simple Exercise

The practical lesson can be stated quite simply. When you notice anxiety or anger arising, especially when the reaction seems stronger than usual, slow down, pause, pay attention to what’s happening, and ask yourself:

• How am I labelling or evaluating this situation right now?

• How is this situation different from similar ones in the past?

• How might I be falling into the trap of selective thinking — is it the whole story?

• Would everyone else evaluate this situation in exactly the same way?

Focus on differences rather than similarities. You can then formulate the distinction in plain language:

• The thought is not the fact.

• The present is not the past.

• I am not the person I was in the past.

• This darkness is not that darkness.

This is not an effort to suppress emotion. The veteran in our story did not recover by telling himself he wasn’t allowed to feel afraid. He recovered by repeatedly confronting the things he feared and patiently training himself to perceive them as accurately as possible. His feelings were not denied but rather vague and imprecise habits of thinking were corrected and his emotions followed.

His example remains interesting historically. It shows that, before CBT even existed, military psychiatrists were already experimenting, on a large scale, with methods that look strikingly cognitive and behavioural. They were teaching individuals to face feared situations, distinguish appearance from reality, and challenge the overgeneralizations that keep their anxiety and anger alive.

Not the Same Person

According to the report, after several months the veteran’s family and associates noticed a marked improvement. He felt more confident, his physical tension had diminished, and he seemed more at ease. This is just a personal anecdote, of course, not a clinical trial. But it does illustrate a principle that appears again and again in ancient philosophy and modern psychotherapy.

• We suffer when our impressions become identified with reality.

• We suffer when our old maps are mistaken for the current terrain.

• We suffer when our words lead to sweeping generalizations.

The Stoics trained themselves to pause before assenting to their impressions. Korzybski taught people to introduce a “semantic pause” and remind themselves that the map is not the terrain. Modern therapy often teaches us to notice that thoughts are not facts. These are not identical doctrines, but they point in a very similar direction.

Many problems arise from when fear and anger blur the difference between past and present. The reaction is real, but not the whole story. The resemblance is real, but it is not identity.

And sometimes the most therapeutic thing we can say to ourselves is also the simplest:

This darkness is not that darkness.

Read the original in-depth article below…

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In How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci reveals the way to a meaningful, happy life through the power of curiosity and doubt with the ancient Roman public advocate, orator, statesman, and thinker Marcus Tullius Cicero as his guide. Cicero lived in turbulent times at the end of the Roman Republic. Though he mostly lived as a Stoic, Cicero also followed Plato’s Skeptical Academy, believing a spirit of inquiry and an open-minded attitude were the secrets to living well.

The basic idea of exposure therapy is very familiar, and can even be found in the ancient folk wisdom of Aesop’s Fables. For example, in one fable, the fox is frightened when he stumbles across a lion in the woods but by returning to the same spot each day, because the lion turns out to be harmless, his initial anxiety eventually wears off. In another fable, a boar is mocked by a fox for putting so much effort into sharpening his tusks when there is no danger around, but the boar replies that by preparing himself to cope in advance, he will be ready when one day he hears the huntsmen’s horns. You can read that fable, for comparison, at the end of this article.

There are many ways of doing this. In the past, it was common for a therapist to guide a client through prolonged exposure, perhaps ten or twenty minutes, or more, until their anxiety had reduced to a minimal level — around 1 or 2 points, say, on a 10 point scale. That’s called the “emotional habituation” approach. You can compare it to getting into a very hot or very cold bath and waiting for your body to get used to the temperature naturally. Most anxiety will naturally wear off over time, if you maintain the exposure long enough. It’s perhaps easiest to think of it in terms of your heart rate going up, and then slowly returning to, more or less, its original resting level, even though you remain in the feared situation. That can require patience, though, and it’s usually easier with the guidance of a therapist, or at least by listening to a recording. Moreover, in recent decades, emphasis has shifted toward the goal of learning that your feelings can be tolerated safely, as we’ll see below.

In the approach I’ll describe, I’m also drawing on a closely-related form of evidence-based therapy called Stress Inoculation Training (SIT), developed in the 1970s by Prof. Donald Meichenbaum. Over the years, SIT has been tested pretty rigorously in many settings, with many different types of clients coping with different problems. Its name comes from the analogy with medical inoculation: voluntary exposure to a moderate dose of stress now can prepare us to cope better with greater challenges in the future. As Meichenbaum explains: “a person’s resistance [to stress] is enhanced by exposure to a stimulus strong enough to arouse defenses and coping processes without being so powerful that it overwhelms the individual.” In other words, with practice, especially practice under stress, we can become more skilled and confident at coping with our emotions.

In this article, I’m going to describe a variation of classical imaginal exposure and SIT that I teach to clients. I like to call it virtues-based exposure. It combines some elements from different approaches found in cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). It also adapts a simple meditation technique, made famous by Herbert Benson, a professor of cardiology at Harvard Medical School, in his bestselling book The Relaxation Response (1974). Benson carried out research on a variety of different meditation and relaxation techniques and concluded that simply repeating a word or short phrase while adopting a passive mental attitude was one of the simplest methods capable of inducing a reduction in sympathetic nervous system arousal, which he dubbed the “relaxation response”. However, I don’t recommend viewing this as a relaxation technique. Rather, I think of it more as a simple cognitive exercise, used to centre the mind on the idea of accepting uncomfortable feelings, and building up tolerance of them, by cultivating an attitude of patience.

Stage One: The Benson Method

The basic method is easy to describe.

1. Sit in a comfortable, neutral position, in a room free from distractions, and close your eyes. Most people sit on a chair, with their hands separated and feet flat on the floor. Some choose to lie down, although you should avoid doing this if it causes you to fall asleep.

2. Focus your attention on your breathing. On each exhalation of breath, repeat the word “patience” to yourself, in your mind. You may find that it helps to say the word a little more slowly than normal, and in a slightly more calming tone.

3. Continue for 12-15 minutes per session. If your mind wanders, that’s natural, so just adopt an attitude of indifference to distractions, as if shrugging it off, and patiently return your attention to your breathing and the word you’re repeating.

I would usually recommend that people do this once or twice per day, for around 2-3 days before proceeding to the next stage.

During this exercise, you may notice:

• That your attention is more grounded in the present moment than normal

• That you are more aware of the distinction between voluntary thought or what you are doing (repeating the word) and automatic processes (everything else) happening in your body and mind.

• That you become more aware of your stream of consciousness and bodily sensations as a process unfolding over time, rather than as something static.

• That the exercise requires maintaining acceptance and detached indifference toward automatic thoughts and feelings, which Benson described as an attitude of “Oh well.”

• That the exercise requires temperance, or doing less for a while, and temporarily letting go of certain urges and desires.

Benson originally emphasized that the word could be neutral, or even meaningless, and the relaxation response would still follow. However, he later revised his views, having found that his method worked better when people combined it with what he called the “Faith Factor”, by which he meant that they connected the meditation with their personal beliefs and values.

A number of years ago, I thought that this approach was all that was required to elicit benefits from the Relaxation Response. And it’s true that the basic procedure is as valid as it ever was for helping individuals reduce stress, lower blood pressure, and otherwise enhance their physical and mental well-being. But now I’ve come to understand that the effects of this simple technique, combined with a person’s deepest personal beliefs, can create other internal environments that can help the individual reach enhanced states of health and well-being. — Herbert Benson, Beyond the Relaxation Response, 1984

Building on Benson’s observations, you can select a word or short phrase that encapsulates your core values. For example, if you’re interested in Stoicism, the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, fortitude, or temperance. For most clients, however, if they’re undecided, I think it’s a good idea just to begin by repeating the word “patience”, as that’s central to the practice anyway, and can often be connected with other values, such as wisdom and resilience.

Stage Two: Virtue-Based Exposure

What’s missing from many meditation practices, and self-help techniques, is some element of exposure to feared situations. The Benson Method, in my experience, combines well with imaginal exposure, precisely because it’s very simple. Imagining yourself in a stressful situation takes some attention and that can be difficult if you’re also trying to practice a more complex meditation technique at the same time. So picking the simplest possible method is ideal for our purposes here. If you’ve already spent a few days practising the Benson Method, it will have become more familiar, which also makes it easier to add in a new component to the exercise.

Therapists normally construct what’s called an exposure hierarchy, by drawing up a list of situations that provoke anxiety when imagined, and rating them 0-10 on a subjective units of distress (SUDS) scale. Don’t begin with your worst memory or most overwhelming fear — it should be manageable. For this exercise, unless you suffer from a severe anxiety disorder such as panic disorder or posttraumatic stress disorder, I’d normally recommend beginning work on a scene that’s moderately high on the scale, though, say around six or seven out of ten SUDS, if possible.

That could be a memory of a recent event where you felt anxious. It could also be an anticipated or hypothetical situation, where you fear becoming anxious. Often, I recommend starting with memories as they’re usually easier to imagine, then moving on to anticipated situations, where appropriate. NB: If the scene involves trauma, dissociation, self-harm urges, panic attacks, or overwhelming distress, don’t use this as a self-help exercise without professional guidance.

Don’t worry about visualizing things perfectly. Most people report picturing incomplete, fragmentary, or somewhat vague images at first when asked to use their imagination. In fact, I prefer to talk more about imagining the scene or even pretending you’re there rather than visualizing images. It’s probably more cognitive than visual, in the sense that believing you’re in the real situation for a moment, or pretending that you are, may be more important than trying to conjure up photorealistic mental images. So you’re just going to imagine you’re really there, reliving the memory, or experiencing the anticipated scene.

Don’t try to suppress your anxiety, or any other uncomfortable feelings. In fact, I’d recommend you imagine you are relaxing into acceptance of the anxiety rather than trying to relax it away. Why do I say that? Surely your goal is to eliminate or control your anxiety? Research suggests that when people try too hard to suppress their anxiety, it can backfire and make them more anxious. It can make you tense up physically and mentally, which is the opposite of what you want. It can also encourage your nervous system to view anxiety as a sign of danger, triggering what we call second-order anxiety, anxiety about anxiety, which is also not what you want.

Recent research on exposure therapy has supported the view that it works mainly through what psychologists call “inhibitory learning”, which means that you are repeatedly proving to your nervous system that you can cope with the unpleasant feelings, and that they are not really threatening. Over time, the brain learns to treat the trigger as less dangerous, and the alarm response becomes less easily activated. For that to happen, though, it’s important that you allow yourself to experience your anxiety, without avoidance or too much distraction. In fact, instructing people to actively tolerate their feelings of anxiety during the process has been found to enhance the benefits of exposure therapy. It also means that if your anxiety returns for any reason, which it might, you’ll be able to cope with more skill and confidence.

So here are the steps:

1. Assume a neutral position: Sit in a quiet room, close your eyes, and settle in by doing the basic Benson method for two minutes.

2. Evoke the scene: Imagine you are reliving the stressful memory or anticipating the future anxiety-provoking situation. Allow yourself to actually feel the tension creeping into your body, your heart beating a bit faster, or other unpleasant sensations.

3. Exhale and accept: With each repetition of “patience” on the out-breath, imagine yourself relaxing into the scene and leaning into acceptance of the discomfort.

4. Continue for 12–20 minutes: Let the feelings run their course naturally without trying to fight, suppress, or control them.

5. Evaluate: At the end, rate yourself on a scale of 0–10 for how well you practiced patience (or whichever virtue you’re practising). Optionally, also note your anxiety SUDS level.

Don’t try to get rid of the feelings of stress or anxiety, or even to control them. Just let them run their course naturally. Your role is to completely abandon the struggle against them, and just accept them more fully, allowing your brain to process them naturally, in its own time.

That said, they will often tend to reduce over time. It’s helpful to know that the anxiety response tends to come and go in waves and the initial surge of nervous arousal may only last a few minutes in some cases, although it can take longer for the body to recover and return to its normal state. In other words, you’ll often find that with patience your body naturally settles down over time.

As mentioned above, by linking this exercise to your core values, you potentially add another dimension, which can make it more rewarding, and more beneficial. For example, think of “patience” as precisely the character trait of someone who copes well with stress or anxiety, and something that you admire in other people. Perhaps it is a quality you would like to model for your children, or others close to you. Imagine you’re becoming the sort of person you want to be in life — it’s about your self-image and sense of identity. That attitude may be at the back of your mind throughout the exercise, but it can change things significantly. Placing more importance on your own character than on the feelings can shift your attention slightly, and create an increased sense of confidence in your ability to cope. Whereas, in a sense, anxiety is mindless, coping is mindful. Bringing your values into things can create subtle changes, though, that are best experienced through practice.

Conclusion

The technique is very simple. That makes it easy to learn, and possible to adapt to different needs and circumstances. It allows room for multiple processes to take place, which can benefit you psychologically. You can view it, from the perspective of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), for instance, as an exercise in developing High Frustration Tolerance. As you confront unpleasant feelings triggered by the imagined scene, imagine that you’re proving to yourself “This may be uncomfortable, but I can handle it”, “It’s unpleasant but not unbearable”, and so on.

Troubleshooting and things to avoid:

1. Try to identify the real fear, and focus on the real triggers.

2. Don’t keep jumping around from one image to another, but stick with one scene until you’re pretty confident that you’re ready to move onto the next one.

3. Don’t keep changing your phrase. Pick something and stick with it for a while, because it’s not all-important anyway. Change it later, if necessary.

4. Don’t try to avoid, control, or suppress your anxiety or other unpleasant feelings but rather prove to yourself that you can tolerate and accept them, and let them run their course naturally.

5. Don’t fidget so much that it becomes a distraction.

Repeat the stage two exercise about once a day for about 2-3 weeks, and you should begin to notice that it’s becoming much more familiar and habitual, and that the stressful situations are less upsetting than before, as though you’ve started to get used to them.

If you undertake a role which is beyond your powers, you both disgrace yourself in that one, and at the same time neglect the role which you might have filled with success.

Commentary

We all adopt different roles in life, which depend on our ability to influence external events, in various ways. Epictetus seems to mean that if we’re going to undertake roles where we’re expected to manage people or events appropriately then we should first be certain that this is within our power. Otherwise, it’s as though we’re making a promise that we don’t know if we can keep.

I don’t think he’s talking about external success so much as fulfilling a role in accord with wisdom and virtue. He presumably means that we disgrace ourselves when we undertake tasks beyond our power because fear or temptation lead us astray. For example, some people would have the wisdom and temperance to endure political office without being corrupted, whereas others would find it stressful and would be tempted to abandon their principles. How do we know that it is within our power to fulfil a role without being corrupted? We can only learn this through self-observation and experience.

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Everyone is welcome. You’ll be able to join the live stream on Substack using this link, and a recording will be sent out afterwards.

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In How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci reveals the way to a meaningful, happy life through the power of curiosity and doubt with the ancient Roman public advocate, orator, statesman, and thinker Marcus Tullius Cicero as his guide. Cicero lived in turbulent times at the end of the Roman Republic. Though he mostly lived as a Stoic, Cicero also followed Plato’s Skeptical Academy, believing a spirit of inquiry and an open-minded attitude were the secrets to living well.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time and never have time so today I’ve set myself the challenge of writing this stream-of-consciousness style, in one go, off the top of my head! Well, first of all, this is a common — virtually universal — problem in therapy. So we have well-worn methods for dealing with it, meaning that I’m about to describe how other people have overcome the same obstacle. In broad terms, there are three complementary solutions: develop appropriate coping skills, rehearse the situation in advance, and change the attitudes that make you prone to the old response.

1. Coping Skills

The first answer is that you learn appropriate coping skills, and how to use them. Most people will say “I’ve done that already!” But usually they’ve learned the wrong coping skills, haven’t practiced them, haven’t adapted them to the needs of the situation, or aren’t noticing the right cues to use them. I call this “reactive coping” because we’re talking about responding in the heat of the moment. The other two strategies I describe below will make this much easier, but we have to start by building reactive coping skills. I’ll link to an article at the end, called Coping with your Emotions, which goes into more detail about the generic coping skills that I teach most clients.

In brief, my view is that the best response to anxiety, or anger, for instance, is to begin by instructing yourself to slow down. Rushing into things is clearly going to mean losing control. So you usually need to buy time, even if it’s just a few seconds. You could think of this as a prerequisite for other coping skills. Stephen Covey talks about the gap between stimulus and response — that’s what you want to expand first. There are several ways of doing this but the simplest is just to use what we call “self-instruction” and literally say to yourself, in your head, “Whoa, slow down, hold your horses, buddy, take a moment before you do anything else here!”, or words to that effect. At first this tends to be more conscious and deliberate but your goal is to “fade” out the verbal instructions over time, so that you just do the behavior without always having to talk yourself through doing it. Think of it this way: you’re behaving like a performance coach, inside your own head, by talking yourself through coping with the emotion. Rushing, or responding hastily, without hesitation, is usually going to make things worse. Your first step, in most instances, will be to tell yourself to pause, slow down, or take a moment, so that you have time to decide what to do next.

Secondly, alongside this, you’re going to want to tell yourself to “pay attention” to what the heck is going on. Shifting attention onto the crucial aspects of the experience is essential. Strong emotions often distract our attention from what matters. How can you change your response unless you’re paying attention to it properly? So focus. You can call this “mindfulness” or “self-awareness”. You probably want to pay attention, in particular, to your own actions, and how your thoughts, or evaluations, are shaping your emotions, in the present moment, as it happens.

The third component, which I think is virtually essential to most emotional coping strategies, is that you’re going to want to stop identifying your initial impressions with reality. No enraged person ever thinks “Right now I have the impression this guy is a jerk and it seems to me that he may deserve a punch on the nose”. Enraged people think: “This guy is a jerk and he does deserve a punch on the nose!” It’s not experienced as a subjective opinion; it’s experienced as if it were an objective fact. Opinions or impressions have become identified, or fused, with reality. There are several names for this but I usually call it “cognitive defusion”. So long as you go along with that and fuse your thoughts with reality, your goose is basically cooked, my friend. You’ve already been captured by your own angry opinions — you’re trapped inside them, and that has become your angry world. So you better stop that from happening, if you want to regain your freedom, okay?

Epictetus taught his students to say to troubling impressions: “You are just an impression, and not at all the thing you claim to represent!” Epictetus was a very smart guy, and way ahead of his time in this regard. You can abbreviate this by just telling yourself: “I’m evaluating this as awful right now” rather than “This is awful.” As Korzybski said — be conscious of the “is” of identity. Treat it as an activity you’re engaged in, rather than an objective fact about events. When people evaluate events as catastrophic we call that “catastrophizing” — you’re the one doing it. You have to regain that sense of ownership and self-awareness, if you want to free yourself from the emotional trance you’re in.

A lot of clients today have some of these coping skills already, although they usually need to be adapted. Often people have learned self-help techniques that are actually unhelpful, especially if they subtly function as forms of avoidance. Often they have learned techniques that might work, but take too long. Under stress, in the heat of the moment, while there’s a lot going on, people can normally only manage to perform what I would call “low bandwidth” reactive coping techniques, which are very rapid and don’t require too much thought. So I’d recommend beginning with the very basic and generic skills I described above, and learn to do them in a few seconds. Practice, practice, practice, until they become second nature. If you never practice a skill, it’s no surprise that you’re going to be unable to use it properly when you actually need it. So get to work on it, until it’s almost automatic.

The main point of failure, in most cases, though is that people don’t notice the cues to use these skills early enough. You can help yourself “nip it in the bud” and “catch the problem early”, in a number of ways. The first is to be crystal clear about the high-risk situations and high-risk states, in which you’re more likely to experience the problem. This may seem like common sense, but people often forget to do it. It’s basic preparation. If you tend to lose your temper when you’re in a “pre-anger” state such as being tired, being hungry, having a headache, and so on, and in situations or environments where there’s a lot of noise, or time pressure, or people are talking about politics, you would be well-advised to ready yourself in advance for dealing with stressful situations under those conditions. Go into the situation prepared, on the lookout for the typical triggers and early-warning signs of your old response, so that you can catch it early, and deploy your coping skills more efficiently.

Finally, you should notice the early-warning signs. Study your reactions carefully. I’ve worked with thousands of individuals over the years who told me they practised “mindfulness” every day, and who, somehow, were totally oblivious to the obvious signs that they were becoming anxious or enraged — signs that any observer would have noticed in their facial expression, for example, or the sound of their voice. People tend to massively overestimate their own level of self-awareness, and to underestimate the big gaps or holes that powerful emotions create in our awareness. Train yourself to notice things that previously went unnoticed. Imagine holding up a mirror to your irrational emotions. Let’s get specific. What exactly do you see?

Here’s my favourite example: Charles Darwin goes on at length in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) about the muscles in your forehead. Darwin noted that humans, like many animals, constrict the corrugator supercilii muscles, frowning by drawing the eyebrows down and together, and wrinkling the brow, when they are angry, frustrated, or worried. Modern electromyography (EMG) studies, measuring the facial muscles during emotion, have consistently shown that Darwin was spot on in this regard. People do usually tense those muscles when frustrated, even if it’s barely visible. You might practice mindfulness for decades without ever noticing that you’re doing that, though. So think more carefully about what’s going on in your body and mind, and look hard for the early-warning signs of strong emotions. Say “That’s my signal to slow down, pay attention to what’s going on in my mind, and notice how I’m evaluating this situation right now!” — or words to that effect.

2. Rehearsal

Okay, from now on things become a bit simpler. You’re far more likely to be able to use your coping skills in real situations if you practice, practice, practice. You can do that by using them in a wide range of other situations. For example, look out for any minor hassles in daily life that cause stress and think to yourself “Hey, this is a great opportunity to practice those same coping skills that I want to be able to use for really stressful situations in the future!” Don’t be lazy, learning any skill requires practice. Luckily for you, in this case, it’s not like you’re learning to play the cello or something. It’s more like a simple motor skill, such as tying your shoelaces. You’ll probably begin making progress immediately and certainly within a couple of weeks, with more or less daily practice, you should be finding it you can use the coping skills you’re learning much more quickly, easily, flexibly, and automatically.

Even better, rehearse the skills under stress by using your imagination to simulate exposure to the high-risk situations, and the triggers, and experience the early-warning signs or initial phase of the emotion. You can do that by role-playing conversations — that’s common in assertiveness training or in some therapy sessions. You could do it by watching a video, say, of spiders, if you have arachnophobia. The most common way to simulate exposure, though, is just by shutting your eyes and imagining the trigger situation is happening now — we can call that “imaginal exposure” or “mental rehearsal”. So you could be doing that every day, to prepare yourself for situations that normally trigger your problem. Evidence consistently shows that imaginal exposure works well for a variety of problems, especially anxiety.

There are two options here. You could relive a recent memory of an event where you experienced anger or anxiety, and “redo” it by using your coping skills. Or you could imagine a hypothetical situation in the future. My advice is usually to start with memories, because they tend to be more evocative of the emotion and easier to imagine in most cases. The very act of imagining things repeatedly, and for long enough, tends to lead to what psychologists call “emotional habituation”, where feelings, especially anxiety, peak and then wear off gradually. So the most common mistake people make here is not being patient enough. In traditional exposure work, people were often encouraged to continue until the emotion naturally declined to a negligible level, such as 1-2 out of 10 on a subjective scale. That works but you can also benefit by proving that you can tolerate the feeling without escaping, suppressing it, or reverting to the old habit. In any case, you should be careful your attitude is one of accepting the uncomfortable feelings, and letting them run their course, rather than trying to suppress or avoid them, which can prevent real improvement or even backfire in some cases.

Perhaps the easiest way to do this consistently is by listening to an appropriate audio recording, which guides you through the process. Mental rehearsal and exposure are basically forms of conditioning, common in behavior therapy. You’re creating new habits, and learning, through repetition. That ideally means that when you find yourself, even by surprise, in a situation that normally triggers your problem, your nervous system will have been conditioned to respond differently, making it much easier and more natural for you to employ the coping skills we described above.

3. Cognitive Therapy

Finally, having spoken about skills and conditioning, basically behavior therapy, we’re now going to talk more about cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy may consist in changing the things you actually say to yourself in your head, by repeating coping statements or self-instructions, as noted above. However, usually today we’re talking more about changing cognitive structures, known as “schemas”, or underlying irrational beliefs. These are trait-like enduring attitudes, which predispose you to respond in certain ways to the trigger situations. For instance, if deep down I believe that making mistakes in public is AWFUL and that I MUST avoid it at all costs, otherwise it means I’m a worthless FAILURE then, of course, I’ll be prone to social anxiety. Learning coping skills can help me deal with that anxiety, at a superficial level at first, although with practice we now know, changing behavior often leads to deeper cognitive change. In particular, you can prove to yourself in practice that you’re able to cope with your feelings. So using coping skills can be understood as a type of “behavioral experiment”, which potentially leads to schema change, by disproving certain old unhealthy attitudes.

In other words, research has shown that behavior therapy can lead to cognitive change. However, we can also work more directly on underlying beliefs by using Socratic questioning and other classic cognitive therapy techniques. I can only touch on the methods for doing that briefly here but the key point is that if you change your underlying attitudes, especially ones that are evaluative (“This is awful!”, “I am worthless!”, “He is an idiot!”) or prescriptive (“I MUST succeed!”, “You MUST respect me!”, “Life SHOULD be fair!”), you will tend to change your proneness to certain problematic emotions and behaviors.

First you need to identify what those beliefs are. You can frame them in different ways but I agree with Albert Ellis, the original pioneer of CBT, that typically the best option is to root out any rigid demands (“MUST”, “NEED”, etc.) you are imposing on yourself, other people, or events, and dispute those vigorously. Your rigid demands are a recipe for neurosis as they’re bound to be violated, which inevitably leads to frustration and emotional distress — therapists used to like to call this “The Tyranny of the Shoulds”. “People SHOULD respect me!”, well they’re bound not to sometimes. So then what? You get frustrated and angry. Neurotic disturbance follows rigid demands like night follows day. It’s kind of staring you in the face, to be honest. “This MUST not happen”, and it does, so you get upset.

Ellis believed, and I agree, that rather than simply abandoning those sorts of irrational demands, you would do better to correct them and replace them with rational preferences. You can usually do that by disputing the old beliefs. Ask yourself where the evidence is that you MUST always succeed. (Spoiler alert: there is none.) Where the heck is it written in stone that you MUST? (Nowhere.) Does everyone else, especially people you admire, share the same rigid demand about similar situations? How is it logical to demand that something MUST not happen if it’s bound to happen sooner or later? How is it rational to demand that something MUST happen if it’s not up to you and not under your direct control? Where does it get you in the long run to impose this rigid demand on yourself? (Clue: it keeps making you upset, causes you stress, and then where does that lead you?) You get the idea. Really push yourself, though. Often, I find that people who swear they’ve already disputed their irrational beliefs have done a half-hearted job. Irrational beliefs are sneaky. It can take effort, perseverance, and diligence, to really break them.

Finally, all this disputation will lead inexorably to the conclusion that there’s probably a more rational, realistic, and constructive way to think about your problems. That can often be summed up as a rational statement of belief like “I would highly prefer it if people respected me but I don’t NEED them to do so”, “When I make mistakes it’s highly undesirable but it’s not AWFUL”, “I really don’t like going to the dentist, but it’s not UNBEARABLE, I can cope”, or “If someone doesn’t like me, that’s too bad, but it doesn’t make me UNLOVABLE”, and so on. You get the idea. Disputation is the workhorse that makes these rational beliefs more meaningful. But practice, practice, practice, telling them to yourself, if you want to make them habitual, and second nature. Practice them under stress, with conviction and emotion. Think, act, and feel, as if you really believe what you’re saying, and are willing yourself to adopt a more philosophical attitude to adversity. Doing this between times will make it easier for you to consciously recall your philosophical attitude in the heat of the moment, perhaps alongside the coping skills described earlier.

Conclusion

Of course, there are other ways you could approach things, and other coping skills, or self-help strategies you could practice. For instance, some people want to learn relaxation techniques, and apply them rapidly in stressful situations. Research shows that people who cope well with stress exhibit coping flexibility. They have options, and adapt to different circumstances. The ideal solution is to learn some basic skills thoroughly, and apply them consistently, but also to have more than one string to your bow, and to be able to combine methods and tweak them to suit your needs.

Ideally, you would combine all three approaches above, and attack your problem from different angles. Many people do benefit from focusing primarily on just one of these angles. CBT tends to favour the combined approach. Don’t overload yourself, though. Take one step at a time, whether you choose to begin with reactive coping skills, mental rehearsal, or cognitive disputation.

Far more research has been conducted on anxiety than upon anger. More self-help literature targets anxiety, and more clients seek therapy for anxiety than for anger. But does that reflect the perceived harm? What do you think?

After responding, you’ll be able to view the results so far. Share your thoughts in the comments.

1. Our ability to observe our own thoughts without being swept along by them is central to Stoicism.

2. Delaying, even just by counting to ten, can potentially be an effective technique. Some old-fashioned and simple techniques actually work better than fancy modern self-improvement teachings.

3. The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — something everyone should read. It’s a short text, and seems to have been important to the Stoics.

4. Half-truths can be more dangerous than flat out lies, especially the ones we tell ourselves.

5. Slow down, pause, and notice that thoughts are not facts.

The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself. — Seneca, Letters, 113

When I came up with the title of my book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor it was intended to have a double meaning.

First of all, of course, I had in mind a specific Roman emperor. Not one of the bad ones like Caligula, Nero, or Commodus, but rather one of the good ones: Marcus Aurelius. That’s made explicit in the book’s subtitle: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, we might say that we have an excellent guide to thinking like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his private notes, known today as The Meditations. However, I was also referring to one of the famous paradoxes of Stoicism, the notion that being a king, or a ruler such as an emperor, is actually a state of mind.

We can all be kings or emperors, in this sense, as long as we free ourselves from certain unhealthy desires and emotions, which the Stoics call the “passions”. We might view this as a striking metaphor, although the Stoics intended it to be taken more literally. The true meaning of kingship, for them, is self-determination and freedom from slavery to our passions. Most of the individuals, though, who are popularly called “kings” (or “emperors”) aren’t actually worthy of the name.

How better or how otherwise could a man be a good ruler or live a good life than by studying philosophy? For my part, I believe that the good king is straightway and of necessity a philosopher, and the philosopher a kingly person. — Musonius Rufus, Lecture 8

Over a hundred years before the Stoic school was founded, Socrates had considered equating moral wisdom with the art of kingship, according to Plato’s Euthydemus. As is often the case, notions hinted at in the Socratic dialogues appear later to have been embraced more fully by the Cynics and their philosophical heirs the Stoics. Indeed, according to Diogenes Laertius, Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, wrote a lost book On Kingship. We’re told that he said, presumably in this book, that as only the wise are truly free only they can truly be called kings.

This obviously seemed ridiculous to many people. The third head of the Stoic school, Chrysippus, had to defend his paradoxical use of the word “king” by arguing that a true king must know the difference between good and evil, and that only the genuinely wise can be said to possess this knowledge. Once again, therefore, only the wise man can be called a king.

When Epictetus later says that “An ill-fortuned king does not exist more than an ill-fortuned god”, he means that a true king makes his own good fortune out of whatever circumstances befall him in life (Discourses, 3.22). According to the Stoic definition, the mythic tyrant Eurystheus wasn’t a true king, although he appeared outwardly to be one. How could he be if he did not have sovereignty over himself? By contrast, his cousin Hercules, despite being constrained to complete the Twelve Labours, and having no kingdom of his own, was a true sovereign because he exercised wisdom and self-mastery of the kind revered by the Stoics.

[Zeus] does not supply me with many things, nor with abundance, he does not will me to live luxuriously; for neither did he supply Hercules who was his own son; but another (Eurystheus) was king of Argos and Mycenae, and Hercules obeyed orders, and laboured, and was exercised. And Eurystheus was what he was, neither king of Argos nor of Mycenae, for he was not even king of himself; but Hercules was ruler and leader of the whole earth and sea, who purged away lawlessness, and introduced justice and holiness; and he did these things both naked and alone. — Discourses, 3.26

The training in self-mastery endured by Cynic and Stoic philosophers is in the service of attaining the sort of inner “kingship” possessed, at least according to the their interpretation of the myths, by the hero Hercules: “Great is the combat, divine is the work; it is for kingship, for freedom, for happiness, for freedom from perturbation” (Discourses, 2.18).

According to Stobaeus, the early Stoics held that the wise man is the most fulfilled (eudaimon) type of person and therefore also the most blessed, prosperous, pious, and indeed the most like a king and a general. Hence, the vicious, foolish and base are the opposite, being essentially bankrupt and servile by their very nature. Therefore, “only the wise man is a king and regal, but none of the base is”, because true monarchy is absolute and superior to everything else, we’re told. Likewise, “only the virtuous man rules, and even if he does not in all circumstances do so in actuality, still in all circumstances he does so by disposition.” In other words, even if he lacks any worldly power, the wise and virtuous man is still kingly in his very character.

By this standard, men like Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic were kingly and free. Socrates lived in relative poverty, was ridiculed by many Athenians, condemned, and eventually cast into prison and executed. Diogenes was an exile who lived like a beggar, was mocked even by children, and ended up being kidnapped and enslaved by pirates. However, they were considered wise and therefore absolutely free. Powerful rulers like Xerxes I, the Great King of Persia, and Alexander the Great, by contrast, were more like slaves than kings, according to this paradox, insofar as they lacked moral wisdom and were ruled by their passions.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was one of the most powerful men in European history. However, ironically, we can see from his private notes in The Meditations that he dedicated his life to learning how to think like the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, a crippled former-slave who had lived, a generation before him, in poverty.

What are Alexander [the Great], [Julius] Caesar, and Pompey when compared to Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates? For these latter [were wise and free]. As to the others, consider how many cares they had and to how many things they were enslaved! — Meditations, 8.3

If this sounds like he’s being a bit harsh on these great rulers, he does comes back to this point later to justify his remark.

Go on, then, and talk to me of Alexander [the Great] and Philip [of Macedonia] and Demetrius of Phalerum. If they saw what universal nature wishes and trained themselves accordingly, I will follow them; but if they merely strutted around like stage heroes, no one has condemned me to imitate them. The work of philosophy is simple and modest; do not seduce me into vain ostentation. — Meditations, 9.29

Here famous rulers are compared to actors playing a role on stage. They pretend to be regal, heroic, and powerful but if they haven’t mastered themselves, and aren’t living in agreement with Nature as the Stoics described the goal of life, then it’s just an appearance rather than reality. The external trappings of wealth and power are of negligible importance from the perspective of philosophy because, in the grand scheme of things, they’re temporary: “Alexander the Great and his stable boy were brought to the same level in death” (Meditations, 6.24).

In one well-known passage, Marcus does say that he’s seeking to avoid having his character turned into that of a Caesar:

Take care that you are not turned into a Caesar, that you are not stained with the purple; for such things do come about. Keep yourself simple, then, and good, sincere, dignified, free from affectation, a friend to justice, reverent towards the gods, affectionate, and firm in the performance of your duties. Struggle to remain such a person as philosophy wished to make you. — Meditations, 6.30

However, he clearly means that he must avoid being made ostentatious and insincere by his position as emperor, again, like an actor playing the role. On the contrary, the true ruler speaks plainly, without affectation. He is also someone unafraid of death and totally committed to virtue.

When you act, let it be neither unwillingly, nor selfishly, nor unthinkingly, nor half-heartedly; do not attempt to embellish your thoughts by dressing them up in fine language; avoid excessive talk and superfluous action. Furthermore, let the god within you be the overseer of one who is manly and mature, a statesman, a Roman, and a ruler, who has taken his post as one who is awaiting the signal for his recall from life and is ready to obey without need of an oath or another man as his witness. And show a cheerful face to the world, and have no need of help from outside or the peace that others confer. In brief, you must stand upright, not be held upright. — Meditations, 3.5

Marcus uses one of his favourite phrases here to express the self-reliance of the wise and good man, who rules over his own mind: he stands upright of his own accord, without having to depend on others to hold him up.

In his tragedy Thyestes, Seneca expresses the same notion albeit dressing it up in fine language himself:

Ye know not, for high place greedy, wherein true kingship lies. A king neither riches makes, nor robes of Tyrian hue, nor crown upon the royal brow, nor doors with gold bright-gleaming; a king is he who has laid fear aside and the base longings of an evil heart; whom ambition unrestrained and the fickle favour of the reckless mob move not, neither all the mined treasures of the West nor the golden sands which Tagus sweeps along in his shining bed, nor all the grain trod out on burning Libya’s threshing-floors; whom no hurtling path of the slanting thunderbolt will shake, nor Eurus, harrying the sea, nor wind-swept Adriatic’s swell, raging with cruel wave; whom no warrior’s lance nor bare steel ever mastered; who, in safety ‘stablished, sees all things beneath his feet, goes gladly to meet his fate nor grieves to die. — Seneca, Thyestes

In particular, one of secrets of true kingship is the ability to endure criticism and even insults from others with relative indifference. In Hercules Furens, Seneca wrote “’Tis the first art of kings, the power to suffer hate.” This notion perhaps goes back to Antisthenes whose saying Marcus Aurelius later quoted with approval: “It is a king’s part to do good and be spoken of ill” (Meditations, 7.36). If we’re easily upset by negative remarks then we make ourselves into slaves of our own passions, and we grant other people lordship over us. Someone who has the wisdom and strength of character to genuinely rise above these things, though, is a king.

I think, ultimately, though, the Stoic king, or emperor, is someone unafraid of death. Their inner sovereignty and freedom is grounded in the philosophical acceptance of their own mortality. Seneca said that to learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave. This reminds me of the final verses from William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
 Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
 Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
 How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
 I am the captain of my soul.

22 Cells in Nuremberg (1947), Kelley’s book, was controversial, and faced a hostile reception. He wrote bluntly: “I am convinced that there is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state”, adding:

As far as the leaders go, the Hitlers and the Goerings, the Goebbels and all the rest of them were not special types. Their personality patterns indicate that, while they are not socially desirable individuals, their like could very easily be found in America. Neurotic individuals like Adolf Hitler, suffering from hysterical disorders and obsessive complaints, can be found in any psychiatric clinic. And there are countless hundreds of similar ones, thwarted, discouraged, determined to do great deeds, roaming the streets of any American city at this very moment.

The film covers Kelley’s time at Nuremberg, one of the most dramatic moments in his life. However, in this article, I’m going to discuss something it barely mentions: his pioneering work as a psychotherapist.

In the mid 1950s, Albert Ellis invented what would later become known as Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), the earliest form of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Over a decade before Ellis, though, in the heyday of psychoanalysis, a number of psychiatrists had already adopted “rational” approaches to psychotherapy. They found that psychoanalysis, which typically took hundreds of sessions, was of little or no value in treating soldiers suffering from so-called “war neuroses”, who needed faster results. Kelley and others began to experiment with short-term and more directive or psycho-educational approaches, which focused upon rational thinking and a basic scientific understanding of the nervous system.

Prior to being sent to work at Nuremberg, Dr. Kelley, then a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Medical Corps, served as Chief Consultant in Clinical Psychology and Assistant Consultant in Psychiatry for the European Theatre of Operations, between 1943 and 1945. In that role, he treated thousands of military personnel, using group and individual methods. Kelley’s approach derived mainly from General Semantics, a school of thought founded in the 1930s by Alfred Korzybski, a Polish engineer who had emigrated to America. Ellis would later assimilate certain aspects of General Semantics into REBT, although its influence is now largely forgotten in the field of psychotherapy. In 1948, however, Kelley published a detailed report on his use of General Semantics in the psychotherapy of war neuroses titled ‘The Use of General Semantics and Korzybskian Principles as an Extensional Method of Group Psychotherapy in Traumatic Neuroses’.

The same year, in the third edition of Science and Sanity (1933/1948), Korzybski had included a Preface penned in October 1947, which states: “Perhaps the most telling applications [of the methods of General Semantics] were those on the battlefields of World War II, as reported by members of the armed forces, including psychiatrists on all fronts, and especially by Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, formerly Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Corps,” adding the following report by Kelley:

General semantics, as a modern scientific method, offers techniques which are of extreme value both in the prevention and cure of such [pathological] reactive patterns. In my experience with over seven thousand cases in the European Theater of Operations, these basic principles were daily employed as methods of group psychotherapy and as methods of psychiatric prevention. It is obvious that the earlier the case is treated the better the prognosis, and consequently hundreds of battalion-aid surgeons were trained in principles of general semantics. These principles were applied (as individual therapies and as group therapies) at every treatment level from the forward area to the rear-most echelon, in front-line aid stations, in exhaustion centers and in general hospitals. That they were employed with success is demonstrated by the fact that psychiatric evacuations from the European Theater were held to a minimum.

That quote originally appeared in the article that I’m going to discuss here, which was published a year earlier, in 1946. It contains a report from a veteran of the Pacific War, with a foreword by Kelley and notes by Korzybski. (At the end of this article, there’s a link from which you can download the PDF of the original report.)

The US Veteran’s Experience

I’ve chosen this report because it provides a very vivid and compelling example of how the General Semantic approach to rational psychotherapy could actually help individuals suffering from war neuroses. The report came from an anonymous veteran of four South Pacific campaigns, who was discharged from the army due to “nervous disability”. He describes feeling physically tense, in a constant state of anxiety and alertness, ready “to move quickly should it be necessary”, which we would call hypervigilance for threat. In retrospect, we can recognise these as well-known symptoms of what is now labelled posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although we can’t be certain that he would meet that diagnosis, it does seem likely. In the 1940s, no such formal diagnosis existed, although similar clusters of symptoms were recognized, and commonly referred to as “battle fatigue”, “combat stress”, or “war neurosis”.

Kelley thought that the traumatic effects of war could best be understood on the basis of Pavlovian conditioning and, as we’ll see, the veteran understood his symptoms in more or less the same way. Kelley states of his report:

No human being can conceive of a more adequate mechanism for twisting human emotion and for developing organismal responses to specific stimuli than is achieved in an active battle zone.

Although Kelley wrote the preface to the report, the veteran in question did not actually attend his psychotherapy workshops but classes in General Semantics given by Professor Elwood Murray at the University of Denver. From what Korzybski says, the veteran seems to have attended one hour-long lecture each week, for ten weeks, i.e., ten hours of training. He describes the use of “extensionalizing” methods from General Semantics as a therapy for his symptoms of war neurosis, and Kelley seems to think this resembles what he was also training his patients to do in the field.

Korzybski’s Comments

Korzybski himself had served on the eastern front, during World War I, as a language and psychology expert attached to the General Staff Intelligence Department of the Second Russian Army. He received a bullet wound to his knee, and at another time his horse was shot and fell on him crushing his hip, injuries which meant he later required a cane to walk. His experience of constant artillery fire made it difficult for him to sleep for several months after arriving in New York, where, paradoxically, he found the relative quiet of the city unnerving. He was therefore very familiar with the psychological impact of warfare, and sympathetic to the US veteran’s experience.

Let me repeat that this veteran is probably not psychiatrically ill; he simply reacts as most living human beings would react to his experiences, which certainly were not happy, to say the least. On the battlefronts one cannot help but see the dead and dying, hear the screams, curses and prayers, smell the blood and stench of decaying flesh, etc., and so feel personally the indescribable terrors of war. These horrors become impressed on our nervous systems and so naturally we respond to them for some time to come.

Korzybski reflects on his own military career in his preface to the veteran’s report because he wants to emphasize that the real problem is not usually our emotional reactions to war, which are natural, but how we react to those reactions.

I have recounted some of my own experiences and reactions to reassure veterans as well as the public that many little disturbances as a result of war experiences are not always serious and often disappear after some rest and return to civilian life . What should be avoided are second order reactions, such as fear of fear, nervous- . ness about nervousness, worry about worry, etc., which may seriously aggravate the originally normal reactions under abnormal conditions.

Regarding the method of training, he writes:

The main point in connection with general semantics, or, if you wish, a nonaristotelian orientation, is in the fact that non-medical men giving group classroom training in scientific method can convey through extensionalization (i.e., evaluating in terms of facts), constructive techniques which do work.

General Semantics was not a psychotherapy, in other words, but it nevertheless had therapeutic benefits. It makes a basic distinction between “extensional” thinking, which consists in orientation to facts, grounded in concrete experience, and “intensional” thinking, which depends more on abstract verbal definitions. Korzybski claims that concrete thinking is natural and that all effective psychotherapy consists, in some sense, in restoring our basic orientation toward reality.

Let us recall that in general children are born extensional, and we eventually do endless harm by training them in intension, for which they usually pay the price later in life. Non-aristotelian extensional methods are not a medical discipline, but any psychotherapist in retraining the patients in adjustment to ‘facts’ or ‘reality’ must knowingly or unknowingly depend on some sort of extensionalization.

Korzybski notes the way in which General Semantics can seem at first glance to be “common sense”, and yet it is quite “uncommon” and alien to our normal habits.

Superficially it may seem ‘all so simple’ —`common sense,’ some may say — but experience shows that this is not ‘common’ at all today. […] In our work we are trying to make this modern ‘uncommon sense’ ‘common’ and workable.

He rightly points out that positive “falsehoods” are usually more easily detected than errors of omission.

‘False’ theories are less dangerous than inadequate ones. The former involve commission of errors, comparatively obvious, and simply discovered. The inadequate theories are much more harmful, as they often pass superficial inspection and require creative work to reconstruct them. They do not involve erroneous commissions, but pernicious omissions by default with their inevitably paralyzing effects.

This is a profoundly important point in modern cognitive approaches to therapy, where clients fall into the trap of believing something that appears true, from a certain perspective, but misses out crucial information — for instance, they focus on real mistakes or character flaws, selectively, while ignoring the bigger picture.

The veteran employed several methods of training himself in “extensional” thinking, described below. These were designed to improve “consciousness of abstracting” or awareness of how our words, and evaluations, are abstract and incomplete (non-allness) and how experiences differ from one another (non-identity). His honest first-hand account provides a good example of how General Semantics could help with emotional disturbances, and even quite severe traumatic anxiety.

The Veteran’s Report

The veteran said it was difficult for him to face putting some of his experiences into words, in order to write the report. However, he hoped that doing so might help him with his anxiety, and he found it beneficial as a way of continuing his training exercises in General Semantics.

In summary, the veteran’s General Semantics training involved several recurring moves: noticing the trigger; pausing before reacting; distinguishing present stimulus from past combat stimulus; indexing similar-but-different cases by numbering them; and deliberately re-entering ordinary civilian situations while maintaining his consciousness of abstraction, or the awareness that the “map is not the territory”.

Fear of Darkness

The first problem he describes is that as a civilian in the US, he experienced “fear of darkness”, which evoked memories of hearing enemy fire after sunset and feeling unsafe. At first he was reluctant to leave his home in the evenings because of this anxiety. Over time, though, he forced himself to go for long walks down side streets at night. He used this early form of what we now call “exposure therapy” to rehearse a simple cognitive strategy derived from General Semantics, called the principle of non-identity. No two things, or experiences, are truly identical. Even what we tend to refer to as the “same” things, actually change, and therefore differ over time. In other words, even though two experiences may appear to be the same they are never completely identical in reality.

The veteran therefore described using this technique by “keeping in mind that the darkness he then encountered was entirely different from that in combat.” I think Korzybski might say that it would potentially suffice for him to remind himself each time that “The darkness now (1946), walking down this side street in Denver, Colorado, is not identical to the darkness I experienced back then (1942-1945) in the South Pacific jungles.”

Repeatedly confronting feared situations has long been a strategy used by psychotherapists but what’s unique here is the incorporation of General Semantics, such as the emphasis on non-identity. This might be described today as a form of exposure combined with “inhibitory learning”, correcting faulty appraisals of how dangerous the situation really is. The veteran, for instance, trained himself to realize that “this darkness is not that darkness” and there is therefore no reason to feel afraid in the current situation. This very simple strategy can, as the veteran repeatedly attests throughout his report, be very effective. He says that after a week or so of facing his fears in this way, he became less tense, and was able once more to take part in activities outdoors in the evenings.

Anger Toward Others

The veteran reports also having a great fear of crowds, the origin of which he does not fully understand, although he thinks it could be related to certain periods of isolation that he experienced while on campaign in the South Pacific. He trained himself to overcome this in a similar manner to his fear of darkness, by taking walks downtown where he forced himself to mingle with other people. At the time of writing, he said he had made partial progress but still had some work to do.

He added that his anxiety about mingling with crowds of people may be triggered by the idea that they have expressed “silly conceptions” of war.

At first, he lost his temper quickly and made many cutting remarks to people. Later he developed a sullen silence refusing to comment on or discuss the situation except with those he felt were interested and were making an attempt to ease the situation.

He had learned, however, to cope by adopting an objective point of view, influenced by General Semantics, and remaining conscious of the fact that although the “silly” remarks of others about war may irritate him, there is no way he could reasonably expect strangers to understand what it was like during the Pacific War without having experienced the same conditions themselves.

Using this method of silence mentioned has helped a great deal with delay of reactions as an aid to evaluation. Though at first he reacted within himself, and carried all the marks of ill-will, at present he uses this period entirely for evaluation.

This part of the report is a little ambiguous but he appears to be referring to the General Semantic technique known as “silence on the objective level”. I take him to mean that he learned to pause and remain silent outwardly for a moment, in order to gradually practice a form of inner silence as well, or at least to reduce angry internal chatter.

He is using this semantic pause to pay more attention to how he evaluates the situation and presumably to develop what Korzybski called “consciousness of abstracting”, i.e., in this case perhaps to keep reminding himself that his initial evaluation of people in the crowd as having “silly conceptions about war” is abstract and incomplete (non-allness). “The map is not the terrain”, as Korzybski said. The label “silly conceptions about war”, which the veteran initially added to his experience, is not identical with the underlying reality of the conversation.

He probably also reminded himself that the person before him was not identical to individuals in the past with whom he became angry, and turned his attention from his angry preconceptions toward the concrete observable facts of their real behaviour. Indeed, he says that he eventually noticed that his constant alertness and feeling on edge was due to conflating movements among the crowds in Denver, no matter how slight, with his memories of “movements in trees and bushes that might be those of the enemy in combat”. He felt more at ease when he realized that he was falsely identifying these two distant experiences.

Watching the News

While watching movies, the veteran used to always leave during the newsreel. He found himself reacting to battle scenes as though he were actually present in the conflict once again, which left him with great anxiety and what he calls “fresh combat fatigue”, i.e., a sudden return of his initial symptoms. At the time of the report, he was still working on challenging his identification of the movie reel with the real events.

In doing so, he remains in his seat and tries to keep in mind that it is just a screen with black and white pictures, rather than actual battle. There has been a noted improvement in regard to after-effect; however, while witnessing the scenes, he sweats profusely.

Again, this is a form of exposure therapy avant la lettre. This example is striking because it deals with an image rather than a real event. Korzybski’s “map-terrain” distinction fits this very clearly. The newsreel is merely a depiction of the war, an abstraction or representation, and not the real thing. As Magritte’s famous painting, The Treachery of Images, reminds us, a picture of a pipe is not a pipe, but we easily lapse into talking about it as if it were. Moreover, our nervous system, as the veteran’s example shows, will readily confuse appearance with reality, unless we train ourselves to remain conscious of this distinction.

Sirens and Planes

When the veteran heard sirens from fire engines, etc., he would break into a sweat and experience a powerful urge to drop to the ground.

The veteran, to make this a proper evaluation, visited a fire station and examined the sirens on the engines. Seeing them as they were and for the purpose they are now used has contributed to more self-control.

In other words, he developed his awareness of the non-identity of the fire-engine sirens with the air-raid sirens he heard during the Pacific War.

The veteran lived through a bombing early in the war. Out of a group of sixteen men, he had been the sole survivor that day. This may have been one of the main factors contributing to his later PTSD-like symptoms. Low-flying planes therefore triggered acute anxiety and flashbacks to this traumatic event. He also tried to address this using a form of early exposure therapy, combined with extensionalizing.

He stood close to the runway when planes came in. This has not helped too much, but he believes in time he can train himself to picture peaceful maneuvers of friendly planes landing on an airstrip rather than death-dealing Jap [sic.] bombers.

He also mentions suffering from nightmares which cause insomnia, another common symptom of PTSD. He had made no progress dealing with these through General Semantics, though.

Aversion to Rice

The veteran gives an example of another problem he describes as “pure identification”. He became disgusted by rice, for the following reason.

His first view of the enemy dead was that of a Jap soldier which was in the process of deterioration. The bag of rice the soldier had been carrying was torn open and grains of rice were scattered over the body mixed in with maggots. When the veteran, to this day, sees rice, the above described scene is vivid and he imagines grains of rice moving in his dish.

Again, he described employing a similar exposure therapy method, combined with reminders of non-identity, focusing on the differences in the real experience.

To overcome this, he has eaten rice several times trying to remember the rice before him is not the same as that on the body. Though the food is not relished, he has succeeded in overcoming the vomiting reflex at the sight of rice.

A similar method was employed by him to overcome his aversion to dogs.

When first returned, the veteran had a great dislike for dogs resulting from experiences with native dogs. These native dogs were seen to devour bodies of both American and Jap soldiers, which, of course, was most distasteful to the observer.

He forced himself to pet mongrels in the US while reminding himself that “these dogs were quite different from those on the islands.” He notes that this was effective and he has become “fairly well adjusted” to the dogs in America.

He describes a number of other triggers for his anger toward other people or aversion and anxiety in response to certain triggers, all of which he appears to have treated himself, with reasonable overall success, using the same exposure therapy and extensionalizing methods described above.

Dislike for Elderly Women

The veteran uses his aversion toward all elderly women as an example of the General Semantics method called “indexing”. On one occasion, two weeks after returning home from the South Pacific, he and his wife were visited by an elderly woman who had been a friend of the family. As he was leaving the room, he overheard her ask his wife pointedly “Why isn’t your husband in the army?” He was offended, marched back into the room, and “not too politely” informed the visitor that he had been discharged for medical reasons. “This”, he says, “led to a grave dislike for all elderly women.”

“Since,” he adds, “he has tried to bear in mind that all elderly women are not the same as the one described.” Moreover, recognizing that he had a habit of viewing elderly women in a limited way, and only seeing one side of the situation, helped him to change his reaction. He would constantly remind himself instead that “no two people act or think alike” and that “this woman is not that woman”, etc. Korzybski’s method of “indexing”, when used more formally, would involve numbering different instances of a class, such as “elderly women”, in subscript, borrowing a convention from mathematics. So elderly woman₁ is not identical with elderly woman₂ or elderly woman₃, and so on.

I find it surprisingly helpful to have clients imagine it were possible to enumerate each instance in this way and then simply ask, e.g., “So when you say you find ‘elderly women’ unbearable, if we’re being precise, to which instances are you referring?” These sorts of “extensional” devices are what the veteran appears to have in mind when he writes:

Seeing only similarities is a result of neglecting differences, resulting in identification mechanisms. Devices giving a sense of difference in evaluations are most beneficial.

The veteran also mentions the concept of “non-allness”, a term used in General Semantics to refer to the fact that there is always more to say about objects or events than our words capture. The map, that is, does not represent all there is to know about the terrain. In explaining this method the veteran quotes from a popular book on General Semantics by I.J. Lee called Language Habits in Human Affairs (1941).

“The assumption of allness leads to tension and conflict, the preservation of ignorance and blockage of further learning.”

The veteran states that he actually applied this principle of non-allness to each of the problems described in his report.

Semantic Relaxation

The veteran has started learning a technique called “semantic relaxation” but had not yet had an opportunity to report much progress.

It has been a very short time since he started, however, since he began he finds tension relieved during the application and is earnestly working with [it] in hopes of complete success soon.

Korzybski refers to this technique as “Neuro-semantic relaxation”, and he developed it as a means of heightening awareness of tension and its role in our evaluative reactions. Korzybski believed it was capable of normalizing blood pressure, which he considered very important for healthy neurological functioning.

The best-known description of the technique, to which Korzybski refers, is in Wendell Johnson’s People in Quandaries.

The technique of semantic relaxation is strikingly different from this sort of massage. In fact, it does not involve massage at all. With one hand you simply feel the palm and fingers of the other, holding the hand gently without pinching or squeezing it, slowly and with light pressure bending the fingers under and back again, noting how the hand feels. Is it soft, warm, and dry, or stiff, cold, and moist? Do the fingers bend readily? You hold the hand with firm but light pressure for a few seconds, then release even this light pressure, then apply it again. Now you bend the fingers gently again two or three times. You reverse hands and repeat the process. That is essentially all there is to it.

Later he adds that this can be applied to the face or forearm as well and that the main purpose of the technique is to heighten awareness of physical tension.

What it amounts to is simply feeling with one hand the state of tension of the other, and ‘loosening up’ the one with the other, not so much by physical pressure and active massage as by direct manual expression of calmness, ease, warmth, reassurance. It is the semantic rather than the mechanical aspect that is important.

Through the hand, however, one can directly feel the state of tension in the face, or the forearm, for example, and so become more acutely aware of it. This heightened awareness of tension through feeling it with the hand and fingers is probably responsible, in large measure, for the relaxation that follows. Everyone is doubtless familiar with the fact that when we become aware that we are tense we tend to relax.

And he comments:

The method tends to produce not the deep relaxation that is conducive to sleep or profound restfulness, but simply an optimal degree of tension […] its chief advantage lies in the fact that it gives one relaxation for work, so to speak. It counteracts our common tendency to make hard work of whatever we do, to frown and grimace unduly, to overreact, to carry on our daily activities with a greater degree of tension than is necessary.

I believe you can achieve a similar effect just by slowing down, noticing your facial expression and breathing, and perhaps letting go of about 10-20% of the tension from them, while you continue to think about or respond to situations. In other words, it’s mainly a means of increasing self-awareness of muscular tension, and noticing how that is coming into play in our emotional reactions.

Conclusion

In addition to applying the principle of non-identity to various triggers, such as low-flying planes, rice, and elderly women, the veteran benefited from applying it to his thinking about himself.

The veteran’s status is changed. He is now a civilian, not in a combat zone but in the United States. The fact that he has changed, as well as his surroundings, should be foremost in his mind. That there is constant change in all matter and situations should be kept in mind.

He is no longer exactly the same man he was yesterday, or the same man he was back in the jungles of the South Pacific. Tomorrow, he will be a slightly different version of himself again. Applying the principle of non-identity to yourself in this way, can be surprisingly helpful. This is how the veteran sums up the benefits he experienced as a result of applying General Semantics to his traumatic neurosis.

It has been observed by the family of the veteran, and his outside associates, that in the past three months there has been a marked improvement in his attitudes and reactions. There is a more general easiness, expressed in both his actions and his physical appearance. The veteran himself admits more confidence in all he undertakes and relief of the absolute tension he previously experienced. He also feels, that though he was unwilling in the beginning to try to write about his identifications, this procedure has been most beneficial.

Hopefully, this has provided a vivid example of one veteran’s experience of applying General Semantics in a therapeutic manner. Finally, to return to where we started with Dr. Kelley, I hope to write another article, in the near future, discussing the more detailed and systematic account of psychotherapy, based on General Semantics, that he provided in his own writings.

A Veteran's Re Adjustment And Extensional Methods

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Reference

Alfred Korzybski, “A Veteran’s Re-Adjustment and Extensional Methods,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 3, No. 4, Summer 1946. Reprint available via Internet Archive; listed there as released for public distribution by the Alfred Korzybski Literary Estate.

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We’ll be talking about how Stoic philosophy can be applied in practice — not just as a set of ideas, but as a way of working with emotions, values, habits, and everyday problems.

Friday, May 15
12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT / 5:00 PM UK

This should be especially useful for anyone interested in Stoicism, psychotherapy, coaching, emotional resilience, or philosophy as a way of life. Everyone is welcome to join us live, or watch the recording afterwards.

Join us live here or click the button below:

Join Live Stream

Bring your questions. We’ll try to take some from the audience during the session.