The Stoic View From Above: The Key To Happiness

What if a 2,000-year-old Stoic practice could transform modern therapy? In this exclusive clip from my interview with Stoic author Donald Robertson, we dive into the "View from Above"—a simple yet powerful visualization technique that’s catching the eye of psychologists and CBT experts. Why? It’s easy to do, shifts your perspective instantly, and might just be the next breakthrough in mental health.

Transcript

The following is a clip from a conversation I recorded with Donald Robertson, A cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and renowned expert on stoicism. Donald specializes in bridging ancient philosophical wisdom with the modern psychology to enhance resilience, Emotional clarity, And well-being. Enjoy. I mean, It's a really weird thing. When I first started talking to therapists about stoicism, The thing they were most interested in was a view from above. And I guess it's kind of hard to explain exactly why. But the only way I can put it very simply like this, That the view from above it is really easy to do. And it clearly has a psychological effect. So psychologists love that because they think that there's got to be it looks like the sort of thing that should have some kind of therapeutic effect. It looks like a no-brainer to put it very crudely, That you should be able to do some kind of outcome study on this. Out of everything in stoicism, You think, All we have to do is make a recording of this, Get a bunch of people to listen to it, Impair its control. This should be a piece of cake to do an outcome. So I think whenever you're talking to CBT practitioners or psychologists, They immediately get interested in it and their eyes light up. And also they're kind of thinking, How come we haven't already done research on this? So I don't think it'll be that long before we see there already are studies being done on it. That is funny because a lot of therapists and philosophers will say, Like Freudians for ages used to say, Oh, You can't research this stuff. They'd be talking about Freudian analysis or Jungian analysis and they'd be like, It's too subtle. It can never be measured. It can never be quantified. It's like, Good on you, But sometimes you kind of need to know whether something works or not. And some things are cool and philosophical and also stupidly easy to test. The view from above is like a godsend to psychologists. Because they're like, Clearly, If you visualize things from an elevated perspective and stuff like that, That's a learnable skill and it clearly changes your perspective dramatically. So it's got to do something. I mean, Either it's going to kill you or it's going to cure you, Right? It's got to do something. So psychologists are like, It's one or the other. Let's start testing it and find out which it is. So it really appeals to them. I mean, Luckily, Anecdotally and from what little evidence we have, It looks like it's beneficial, Like the Stoics thought it was. But I guess almost more importantly, It's easily testable. And weirdly, It's not part of CBT really. There are some indirect things, But one of the things that surprised me when I was talking to therapists, They'd say, No, You're right. Many of the things we do in Stoicism are identical to or very similar to things that we would do in broadly CBT-based therapy. But there's not a common technique that we use in therapy that closely resembles a view from above. It's like a gap in the market. There's an obvious gap there in terms of the repertoire of modern therapy. And all the therapists I know are like, How come we're not doing this? It's definitely got to be worth a try. So I guess it's an exciting concept for psychologists and psychotherapists.