Episode Summary

Most of the men who walk into my office are already following a dead Roman. They may not know it because it's come second and third hand. Control what you can. Master yourself and let the rest go. That's a great starting point and it's the map most of them been handed. What they weren't handed was the compass needed to navigate it. Today I'm going to talk about why Western men resonate so much with stoic thinking. What happens to the ones that only pick up three of the four virtues and what's needed to reclaim the full tool set. Let's get into it. So Stoic thinking is the map that Western guys get handed. A few years ago, people started asking men how often they think about Rome and were shocked at the answers. Guys who couldn't name their great-grandfather could tell you all about the Punic Wars. There's a reason for that. The Roman Empire had covered most of Europe, and that meant it touched all the different cultures that come out of that world. Stoic thinking influenced the founding fathers of the US, many different governments, and many ways that thought is taught in Western education. The way that we develop out of life is we show up with what we're born with, our genetics and biology. We have our individual experiences, what we've been through, and the culture that it's all framed through. Stoic thinking is a deep part of that culture. So, you've already been handed a map, but let's talk about how it fails when you only use part of it. Stoic thinking is the map that you've been handed, and it's the map I've been handed in my profession. From Zeno to Epitis to Ellis to Beck, the influence of Stoicism on modern psychology is direct. Epatitis quoted, "Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about things, event then verdict, then feeling." Beck and Ellis both credit the Stoic thinkers directly for starting that idea. And they've expounded on it to create the most tested psychology in the world today. One of the things that comes up with this though is when we talk about cognitive models of therapy, people think we mean that we're not addressing emotion. And when people look at stoic thinking, they think that emotion shouldn't be there. And that has never been true. The Stoics had a word for healthy emotion. It's calledupathies. I'm probably mispronouncing that. What it means is you have the emotion, but it's metered to be effective. So, you have joy in place of pleasure. You have caution in place of fear. And you have a considered wish in place of desire. It's not that you're not feeling the pull of your emotions. It's not that you're not navigating the world with them. It's that you're paying attention to them, pausing for a moment, and then choosing actions that actually line up with the life that you want. Without the emotions, you can't go towards people. Just like bad therapy. If all you're doing is talking about your own thoughts, you're just naval gazing. You're not bringing it into the world. Without that emotional compass, we can't connect with others. And we can't have self-compassion. Cherry-picking self-control, dismissing what you can't govern. And then taking the extra leap that convinces you that you only need yourself. That curdles a life. Ryan Holidayiday is the reason why so many Western guys know what stoic thinking even is. His work on the daily stoic has been huge for people. And he is constantly trying to remind us that little as stoic going cold and emotionally separating from things is not stoic thinking. The capacities that it earns, the power that it gets you, the influence it gets you when you can focus starts to erode your ability to have a compass. There's a researcher out of Berkeley that spent decades looking at this. And what they found is that as you gain power and more influence, the things that got you there, the passions that drove you become harder to maintain. Your mirror neurons start to degrade. And the mirror neurons are part of how we share experience with other people. It doesn't mean that those in power don't have it and don't have empathy. It means that it takes extra work to maintain it when you're at that level. I see it all the time in my seauite guys. These are guys that gave up everything to have the career pinnacle that they're looking for. And when they come in, they can't tell me the last time that they've had an intimate conversation with somebody or the last time that they've touched somebody. They gave up everything to get to where they are and have completely forgotten what got them the passion to start in the first place. Going into your logic with no emotion just paints a picture. It's a map on a wall. It does you no good. If you don't have the empathy both for yourself and others, you have no idea what direction to go to, no idea what people to look for, and no idea where you're really at. You can't reach the full map without that compass. Guys love imagining themselves being emperor. But what they forget is it was a slave's words and philosophy that an emperor was using to find himself. A petitis brought forward Greek virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. And those four make a complete map. But what I see most often is missing is justice. A modern example of this is what we found on inside the manosphere. The interviewer looked at all these men, these powerful influencers that were giving these young men the tools that they developed to survive in a hard world. And what they found was there was no justice in there. And when he dug deeper, a lot of the guys he interviewed didn't have a positive male figure in their life when they were growing up. They were never modeled justice. And so this is what stoic thinking looks like when it's built on fear. Because without empathy, there's no justice. And without empathy, temperance is incredibly hard to maintain because you can't name where you're at. Justice is the part of the map that have other people on it. Empathy is the compass that you use to find them. The good news is is that this is already starting with most of a really useful frame. By having the empathy, we can fill in that last quadrant, help guys find where they are on that map, and help them have the juice to connect and go forward to where they want to be. Self-compassion and being kind to oneself is really difficult if you have no empathy and kindness for others. They reinforce each other by developing out empathetic language, by developing out an understanding of what other people go through. It's a lot easier to name what's happening to yourself and learn how to meter it effectively instead of just suppress it. When all we do is suppress emotions or use anger to blanket them, we're waiting on a time bomb. Emotions are going to come forward. The drives that aren't being addressed are going to be there. The hurts that aren't being tended to are going to be there and eventually they pop off into some pretty negative ways. So to get that empathy, a lot of people recommend therapy. I recommend therapy. I'm a therapist, but a lot of guys struggle in it. They interviewed a pile of guys in Australia that tried therapy and right around 45% of them left therapy early and the most cited reason was for lack of connection with the provider. Now, gender doesn't matter as much as we like to think it does. There's a pretty even split on who guys want, man, woman or other. What is needed though is that feeling of being understood and that willingness to engage. So, in my experience, when I see these ruptures happen and I hear about them from my patients about what happened with their previous therapist, it's either that the therapist didn't do a good job of reflecting back the person's experience in a way that they feel respected and understood, or the patient was either unable or unwilling to pick up the compass to fill out the rest of the map. There's a really easy way to give you a better shot at that going well. Before you ever start therapy, screen your therapist. Call around to a few of them. And you're looking for two things. One, when you tell them what's going on with you, they can say it back to you in a way that makes you feel heard, understood, and respected. And two, when they explain how they're going to help you, you understand what they're talking about, and you're willing to engage in the kinds of tools they're bringing to the table. If you do those two things, you're setting yourself up for a lot of success. Now, to learn empathy doesn't require therapy. Sometimes we can go through a YouTube tutorial. I developed a worksheet that takes you through the ways that I teach graduate students on how to improve their therapy before they become counselors. It takes about a month and at the end of that month, you'll have more emotional language, a better understanding of what's happening with yourself, and a better understanding of how to connect with others. Now, just like anything else, if you try the tutorial and it doesn't work, don't freak out. Just go to a professional. If I've got a busted toilet, I go on YouTube and I try to figure it out on my own first. Usually break it more and need to pay him more to fix it, but then I go to a plumber. And if the first plumber doesn't work, I don't just leave my bathroom busted. I go find another one. So, start with your tutorial. Start trying to improve the empathy to fill out the rest of your map and have that compass. But if it doesn't work, don't beat yourself up. Go get help and try to screen it so it's the right help. Marcus Aurelius wasn't writing for an audience. He was writing to remind himself of the man he wanted to be. I would add to that, a man who only focuses on selfmastery builds a fortress. A man who focuses on selfmastery and the empathy to connect with other builds a home. We want a full life. We've got this beautiful philosophy that's been handed down for over 2,000 years on how to have a complete life. And by not having empathy, so many of us are missing an entire quadrant of it and are having a really hard time actually finding the temperance required for a good life. So whether it's through a tutorial, the worksheet that I listed, or therapy, I hope you find the empathy you need in your life to finish filling out your map. This has been Tim Wiki with American Masculinity, episode 62. Thanks for listening.