How Epictetus Influenced CBT

Hi guys, welcome back to my blog. Today's post is quite different to my recent posts, they've been quite spiritual but today's post is going to be a bit more scientific and a nice change if you aren't one to believe in spiritual practices. I have been extremely stressed at school lately and frankly I've been meaning to write a post about dealing with stress but I haven't exactly managed to figure out what I would write seeing as the way I deal with my problems is simply just bottling it all up and then showing emotion about my life once every six months or so. I know, I know, it's super hypocritical seeing as I write this blog to let out some of my thoughts and emotions but I don't know why, I kind of feel myself closing off a bit recently, it has also got to the point where I've been doubting my intuition which, if you know me, is a very rare occurrence. Anyways, that's enough of that, let's get onto the post!!

What is CBT?    

CBT stands for cognitive behavioural therapy. It is a therapy in which the psychologist will try to identify types of negative beliefs or thoughts and help you restructure them into something more rational and positive. It can be used for the treatment of depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, schizophrenia and much more. It was developed by the psychologists Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck.

I watched a really good Ted Talk, it was called 'How philosophy can save your life' and it's kind of what inspired my post today. The speaker, Jules Evans talks about how he suffered with panic attacks in his late teens which appeared out of nowhere and how he went through intensive CBT in order to heal. He then went on to to immerse himself in psychology and got the chance to interview Albert Ellis in order to find out more about how he developed CBT. Ellis went on to tell him that what inspired him to develop his theory for explaining depression (the ABC model) was ancient Greek philosophy, in particular, Epictetus. He then looked into ways we can use early Greek philosophy to improve our lives right now.

Epictetus' Philosophy and Ellis' ABC Model 

Epictetus was a stoic philosopher. Stoicism in ancient Greek times was a philosophical school of thought which taught people to develop self control as a means to overcome destructive emotions. He essentially believed that people were burdened and dragged down in life because they cared about too many things. The way he thought we could change this was not to stop caring completely, but rather, to care about the right things and to stop caring about things that don't matter. After making this observation, he came up with 'The Dichotomy of Control'. This is a pretty simple concept to understand, basically it means that we are in control of some things and we are not in control of some things. If we manage to concern ourselves with the things we are in control of, we are in a strong position in life. If we concern ourselves with the things that we cannot control, that brings us down in life. His philosophy to a happy life is to simply just stop caring about things that are out of our control, the things in our control are determined by our environment and our position in society.

Ellis’ ABC model for explaining depression states that there is an activating event (A) which leads to a belief (B) and depending on what belief you have it can lead to a certain consequence (C). The activating event can be something like a bereavement or breaking up with a partner. This leads to a rational, healthy negative response or an irrational negative response. The irrational negative response is what causes depression. He basically believes that it can’t be an event which causes depression but rather your response to the event. CBT using Ellis’ explanation starts off with the therapist finding evidence of these irrational beliefs and then helping the patient to restructure their thoughts and change those irrational beliefs to rational ones.

The similarity here is that Epictetus, who was thousands of years before Ellis, also believed that the way we control our emotions is what leads us to living a happy life. I frankly know that mental health wasn’t really studied very well in those days compared to nowadays but it’s just really interesting to see how philosophy has its roots in every single subject, including very well respected and modern subjects like psychology.

Honestly, I don’t know why I wrote this post. I guess it was kind of to prove the value of philosophy. I have ranted about this a lot on here but I constantly get questioned why I chose philosophy and if it’s actually credible to society. If it weren’t for Epictetus and his views, we would not be studying Ellis’ ABC model in schools or his part in CBT would probably not exist. Ellis openly states that he was influenced by Epictetus but in reality, all of CBT is based off of his views as CBT is essentially restructuring negative beliefs in order to improve the quality of living. I think that sometimes people in scientific areas of study or work get offended when I tell them or when others tell them that everything in this world is based off of philosophy as people believe there is no scientific aspect to it. The reality is, philosophy has discovered many things before science has and science has only been able to prove it more recently due to the development of technology. For all the science people reading this, even Isaac Newton is called the ‘great philosopher’ because his discoveries have made him attain the title of being a philosopher. A philosopher is simply one who loves knowledge and therefore, no matter what you study or pursue, if you enjoy it and make discoveries credible to society, you are indeed a philosopher. I hope you all have a lovely day and week ahead, love you guys <33