Thread by @DonJRobertson

I've been writing about #Stoicism and #psychotherapy for nearly a quarter of a century now. I started by giving talks on Stoicism at conferences for psychotherapists and discussing it with student counsellors, therapists, coaches, etc., on the training programs I ran in the UK.

My first book on Stoicism was meant to be an overview of the history of its influence on modern psychotherapists, for academics and clinicians. Instead, it became more widely read among nonacademics and "laypersons". Stoicism then became more popular, partly due to Stoic Week.

Authors like Bill Irvine, Ryan Holiday, and Massimo Pigliucci were reaching a wider audience of nonacademics. Communities for Stoicism formed on the Internet. Stoicism became a "thing" again. But something did NOT happen. To my surprise, psychotherapists largely ignored it.

I think there's a lot to learn from the relationship between Stoicism and modern psychotherapy. Nobody ever talks about Paul Dubois, for instance, a once-famous psychotherapist who was writing about Stoicism as a therapy at the start of the 20th century.

I'm just reviewing edits on an article I wrote about Stoicism and psychotherapy for a forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and thinking "Why don't people seem to know any of this stuff?"

A couple of years ago, I co-authored a review of how Stoicism compares to CBT for the journal "The Behavior Therapist", reaching out to modern clinicians. I got permission to republish it free of charge online so laypersons could read it as well. medium.com/stoicism-philo…

I kind of feel like this is all I've been talking and writng about for 25 years but I'm still surprised that when people talk about Stoicism today they often know nothing about how it relates to CBT or how specific psychological practices actually formed part of ancient Stoicism.

This is what ancient Stoics "did" with the philosophy.
It's how they put it into practice on a regular daily basis. I think in the information-centric age, though, everyone craves practical advice but few actually put it into practice.

Why do so many people read the Stoics but so few actually put it into practice in their daily lives? What could we do to help/encourage more people to actually experiment with Stoic psychological practices?