The Dark Side Of Stoicism: Are You Bypassing Your Emotions?

In this video I'm going to say some things that most people in my position would never say.

Maybe they'd fear losing credibility or subscribers,

But it's my view that if I didn't say this stuff,

The ancient Stoics themselves would probably be disappointed in me.

This seems great.

More people discovering ancient wisdom,

More people learning about the dichotomy of control,

About negative visualization and how to handle adversity.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

Well,

Quite a lot actually.

And I'm not talking about the obvious stuff like the Sigma male edits,

The Bee emotionless Instagram accounts,

The Andrew Tate followers slapping Marcus Aurelius quotes and whatnot over their workout footage.

That stuff is obviously bad and most practitioners and most people interested in Stoicism can see right through it.

What I'm talking about here is something harder to spot,

Something that's a lot more subtle,

And I've done it myself.

Jules Evans is one of the founders of the modern Stoic movement.

I've been lucky enough to speak to Jules a couple of times on a podcast.

He wrote the book Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations.

He ran the Center for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University at London,

And he is as credible as it gets.

And a few years ago,

Jules coined a term that pretty much stopped me in my tracks when I first read it.

The term is stoic bypassing.

Here's how he describes it.

It's when your conscious intellectual mind is committed to the idea of Stoicism.

Get it,

Right?

It's like,

I engage with this,

I understand it,

I like it.

You can talk about the frameworks,

You can quote certain Stoics.

And you just appreciate the system that is Stoicism.

You can speak the language.

But underneath all of this,

Your emotional life is just as messy as it ever was,

Even pre-Stoicism.

But then what's even worse is as you go through life and you encounter obstacles or difficulties,

You use philosophy to shut them down.

You label difficult experiences as not rational.

You retreat into your intellect,

Into thought,

And then say that you're making progress.

And he was also coined a second term which I also really like called Stoic Bullshitting.

This is when someone cloaks their own selfish desires and needs.

In Stoic language.

Of course,

This applies to Stoicism,

But not only to Stoicism.

You can use this type of bullshitting in any kind of spiritual practice.

I'm going to do these selfish things and then reframe them as if it's philosophically sound and reasonable.

So instead of admitting when they're angry or they're hurt or they need something,

They dress it up in philosophical language.

Like I'm practicing non-attachment or it's a preferred indifferent and I'm just focusing on what I can control.

And I've done this too as well.

Let's just say that I've been having a difficult day.

Maybe I'm underslept.

Things are not going well.

There's a general feeling of stress.

I sort of tell myself,

You should be focusing on what you can control you are not thinking clearly you're not being rational.

Therefore all of this stuff doesn't really count it's not real the only thing is virtue and instead of developing and practicing.

Using stoicism as a sort of training ground over time.

I tell myself I should be something that I'm not,

I should be already this person who embodies these ideals,

And that's a way of actually just avoiding the reality of the situation.

And as I said,

This is not just to do with Stoicism.

It exists in all forms of spirituality.

The psychologist John Wellwood called this spiritual bypassing back in the 1980s.

Robert Augustus Mastis described it as dissociation disguised as holy drag.

Therapists do it.

Best-selling authors do it.

Self-help junkies do it.

Meditators do it.

Journalists do it.

A lot of us do it.

We all do it.

If you're clever enough,

You can use any kind of spiritual or philosophical framework to hide.

But Stoicism is uniquely good at this.

And let me explain the reason why.

Think about what Stoicism actually teaches.

The external world is indifferent.

The only thing that matters are our judgments.

The wise person is imperturbed.

Freedom is internal.

When these things are thought about and practiced honestly,

They are incredibly powerful.

This is why I love stoicism,

For that reason.

But if you're not careful,

They can also be used to just not feel things.

Every time a difficult emotion comes up,

Sadness,

Grief,

You get rejected,

You feel lonely,

You feel envy,

You can just use one of the Stoicism cliches to just shut down your emotions.

Oh,

It's just an indifferent.

Oh,

It's not within my control.

The only thing that counts here is my internal space.

All I need to do is retreat into the inner citadel.

The philosopher Julian Begany,

I'm a big fan of his work by the way,

He put this bluntly.

He said that modern Stoics are like plundering troops that take the bits that they like and then cleverly reinterpret the bits that they don't.

And he's not wrong.

And here's why this really does matter and why I'm making this video.

So there's a guy called James Gross at Stanford,

And he's one of the most cited psychologists alive today.

And he draws a really sharp distinction between two ways of handling emotions.

The two terms are reappraisal and suppression.

Reappraisal is when you sort of reinterpret the emotion before it fully takes hold.

And suppression is when you try to shut down the emotion after it's taken hold.

A genuine stoic practitioner is focused on reappraisal before the passion takes over.

You question your initial impressions,

Your knee-jerk reactions,

Your hidden assumptions.

It's healthy and it works well.

But most people,

When they say they're practicing stoicism,

They are already in the grip of a passion,

An emotion,

And they try to push it down and shut it down and then they say that they're using discipline.

And when you suppress your and hide them,

What happens is you get more physiologically stressed,

Your memory will get worse,

And your relationships will suffer.

And a 2024 study published in Mindfulness found that stoic ideology negatively correlated with mindfulness and positively correlated with alexithymia,

Which is the clinical term for not being able to identify your own emotions.

So you know when someone is experiencing distress and you say to them,

You know,

How you How are you feeling?

What's going on?

And they can't quite.

Tell you?

What's happening,

That's what that means.

And so we need to be careful because What starts as this innocent choice,

Like I just want to express my feelings,

Eventually can lead to this way of being where you can't even identify them in the first place.

And that can be pretty dangerous,

I think.

So we need to be careful here.

Now this video primarily focuses on Stoicism,

But it does go way beyond just Stoicism.

In fact,

We could call this wisdom bypassing.

This is when we use the language of wisdom as a way to bypass the actual hard work of real growth.

Meditators may do this.

I'm a meditator.

I find meditation incredibly useful.

But it's quite easy to say that I'm just watching and observing the thought,

But that can become a problem if you're then never going to act on it.

The culture of therapy can sometimes do this too.

You can spend years processing thoughts and emotions and things in the past and the patterns,

And you get this great self-awareness.

You can really talk the talk.

You get a new therapist and they're astounded,

Wow.

And I've actually seen this.

One of the things I see in my clients a lot is incredible self-awareness,

Not taking action based on that awareness.

They know the answers but they just don't do what they should do.

It's almost as if they think that awareness is the destination,

Whereas I like to say awareness is sort of like the first checkpoint.

It's right at the beginning.

Yes,

Awareness is good.

You need to be able to know your patterns,

But we're only just getting started here.

The self-improvement world also is guilty of this.

Reading your 10th productivity book instead of actually just spending 20 minutes looking at your to-do list.

Or reading a book on discipline instead of just doing that thing you've been putting off for four years.

You could do it with Stoicism,

Right?

Instead of actually having that difficult conversation,

You just instead read more Epictetus.

And you don't really hear many people in the Stoicism space talk about this because it's probably bad for business.

You can't really go on camera and say,

Well,

Stoicism might actually be part of the problem too,

Like everything else.

But I think that people like Epictetus and people like Socrates and Zeno,

The originals,

Would have really hated that way of being.

The Socratic tradition is based on examining your own assumptions.

And the Stoics took that,

Ran with it,

And based a lot of their philosophy on that premise.

And if,

As practitioning Stoics,

We're not able to flip the camera back on ourselves and examine it,

Which I know that they themselves would have done a lot,

Then we're not really practicing Stoicism.

We're just practicing being fans.

So the question then is,

How do you honestly practice stoicism in a way that doesn't make you hide behind it and suppress your feelings?

Well,

I think there are three questions you can ask yourself and I would really encourage you to think about these,

To sit with them,

To journal about them,

To talk about them instead of just consuming it and moving on with your day.

Question one,

Am I using this philosophy to approach my difficult feelings or to just avoid them?

There's a big difference between reading Epictetus's line that it's not events that disturb us but our judgments about them.

Them as a way to really think through your own mind and psychology and question your assumptions as opposed to using that line as a shield whenever you experience even the glimmer of pain.

The test is pretty easy.

When you use a stoic technique,

Do you feel a sense of opening?

Towards life,

Towards the situation.

Or do you feel a sense of closing,

Shutting something down?

Pay attention to this next time you practice.

Remember,

Reappraisal versus suppression.

Stoicism is about reappraisal.

Question number two.

Would you be humble enough to say,

I don't know,

Instead of instantly reaching for a framework or a philosophy tool?

The Stoics valued this term called prazoke,

Which is like a Stoic form of mindfulness or attentiveness.

Your own thoughts.

Part of being mindful of your own thoughts is sometimes realizing that you just don't have the answer,

That there's no immediate stoic fix for whatever you're dealing with,

That you're angry,

You're very angry and you don't know why,

That you're grieving and you don't have a nice letter from Seneca to make you feel better right now.

If you read Meditations by Mark Sorelius,

You'll see someone who's not a stoic sage.

He's writing in his private journal and he's often frustrated at himself.

Thank you.

He's not living up to his own ideals.

He's grappling with different situations.

He's reminding himself over and over again what to think about,

How to think about it.

He's someone that is embracing the messiness of life,

You know,

And he's using his journal to think through things.

Question three,

Am I using stoicism in my relationships or am I just keeping it in my head?

Stoicism can feel very comfortable when it's just this internal monologue.

Where it gets hard is when you need to practice more patience with your partner.

You need to be more accepting and tolerant of your own children.

You need to give people permission.

When they have a bad day.

You need to see yourself in the offender.

When someone triggers you.

Martha Nussbaum,

Probably one of the most influential philosophers to engage with Stoicism,

Thought that the Stoics got something fundamentally wrong.

She thought that the Stoics wanted to care for other people without being vulnerable in front of them.

She says you can't really have one without the other.

You can't care for people while also not being vulnerable to them.

And I think she's right,

At least partially.

The person who is permanently imperturbed by anything is not wise.

They're probably just isolated.

I get to practice stoicism pretty much every day because I have young kids,

And when they are dysregulated or tired,

Or they are argumentative,

I get to always remind myself of those fundamental stoic questions like,

What is mine in this situation?

Or what would the best version of me do here?

Or do I really need to change?

Is this really an emergency?

As much as my body is telling me.

So I'm always questioning my impressions and assumptions.

So I'm grateful for that.

I really do think.

Having children or having people to care about or even just having relationships that are engaging will teach you more about actual stoicism than simply reading about it ever will.

I still teach Stoicism,

I still study Stoicism,

I still love Stoicism and philosophy and self-improvement in general.

I still think it's one of the best.

Philosophical frameworks ever invented.

I'm a huge fan of it.

But we owe it a lot more than just cheerleading.

I don't think that is philosophical.

You can't be told to question your impressions and assumptions and live an examined life while also just never questioning the framework that you're following in the first place.

It doesn't make sense.

Of his own bullshit.

If Stoicism can't look at its own shadows and survive,

It's not really a good philosophy in the first place.

I think that it can survive this,

But we need to stop treating Stoicism as just a brand and instead start treating it like a practice.

A practice that we can engage in and we can fail.

It can be messy.

We can get it wrong.

We can admit our shortcomings.

And we can also acknowledge that sometimes we don't have the stoic cancer and there is no steroid cancer available.

That's a philosophy that I can get behind and that's a philosophy that I would like to practice.