Walter Matweychuk will be one of the speakers at the Stoicon 2017 Stoicism Conference in Toronto, on October 14th.
Q: How would you introduce yourself and your work to our readers?
I am a clinical psychologist who has the good fortune of having work I love. I conduct around thirty-five adult outpatient individual and couples psychotherapy sessions a week at the University of Pennsylvania and in my private practice in Center City Philadelphia. The problems of everyday living I help people with range from coping with emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, anger, and phobias to behavioral disorders like addictions, to resuming one’s life in the aftermath of rape, serious accidents, medical illness, and failing to obtain tenure.
I also train and supervise doctoral level externs in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), the pioneering form of Cognitive Behavior Therapy, as well as teach a graduate course in Cognitive Behavior Therapy Theory and Applications at New York University in New York City. I maintain the website, REBTDoctor.com, which contains a great deal of freely accessible audio and video on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and do professional writing as well. I just completed, along with Dr. Windy Dryden, a book for professionals entitled Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: A Newcomer’s Guide. In short I am a practicing psychologist who also trains and teaches psychologists, writes on and disseminates Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.
Q: How do you currently make use of Stoicism in your work?
I use Stoic ideas and Stoic quotations to teach people how to effectively manage their emotional and behavioral responses to both relatively small to immensely challenging adversities. I use Stoic ideas to potentiate my interventions as an REBT psychotherapist. Stoicism works hand in hand with Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy because Dr. Albert Ellis, the originator of this distinct form of cognitive behavior therapy, heavily borrowed from Stoicism to create Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Although I primarily recommend to my patients REBT self-help books for homework, I have also recommended Bill Irvine’s book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy as a homework assignment to my patients.
Q: When and how did you first become interested in Stoicism?
I am continually striving to enhance my skills as a REBT psychotherapist and self-actualize as an individual. I want to have the happiest and most meaningful life possible with the only life I assume I will ever have to live. I also especially want to share Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy with the widest possible audience. Knowing Ellis borrowed heavily from Stoicism I assumed that by retracing the steps he took through reading the Stoics I might make further headway in accomplishing my previously stated personal goals. I am continually searching for ways to deepen my understanding of REBT and studying Stoicism seemed like a way of doing this.
Q: What’s the most important aspect of Stoicism to you?
The emphasis on identifying and focusing my effort on what is well within my domain of control and more or less being indifferent to those aspects of life and any given set of circumstances I cannot control. This single concept offers me incredible emotional leverage as I face personal adversity and as I teach and help my patients how to more effectively respond to their adversities. Secondly, when doing psychotherapy it is important to find language that resonates with patients in order to facilitate deep level emotional change. Although REBT has very powerful language associated with it, I judiciously sprinkle in Stoic quotes and ideas in order to keep the therapeutic dialogue fresh and interesting. Language and words in psychotherapy are like keys on a keychain. It is sometimes hard to know in advance which key will open a particular lock. By knowing and studying Stoicism I have some philosophical keys to try in my effort to open the emotional locks I am trying to pick, if you will.
Q: In what ways do you think Stoicism still matters today?
Despite our great scientific and technological advances since the time of Epictetus people continue to struggle to manage their emotions, find meaning and happiness, and have difficulty coping with losses, deaths, medical illnesses, defeats, failures, and injustices. In my view Stoicism and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy are efficient, powerful, and self-liberating tools I want to share with my fellow citizens of the world. Life is hard enough without needlessly making it harder by trying to control that which is outside our domain of control, while overlooking what is well within our sphere of control.
Q: How has Stoicism affected the way you live your life?
Stoicism and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy have immensely affected the way I live and the quality of life I enjoy. I no longer experience depression, anxiety, anger, envy and shame as I once did going way back to high school and even before that. When I do have a flash of one of these very self-defeating and unhealthy negative emotions I quickly swap them out for healthy negative emotions. I do this by examining my philosophy and any rigid and extreme attitudes operating at the moment so that I am better able to do what I can do, if anything, to favorably influence the situation I am facing. Let me explain.
In high school I began to see that my perceptions of reality impacted my painful emotions. As a college student at the University of Pennsylvania I worked closely with Dr. Aaron Beck who originated (about five years after Ellis had created Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) the second and a somewhat different form of cognitive behavior therapy. Beck’s Cognitive Therapy emphasizes and focuses on the inferences we make about reality and showed me how to check these inferences for erroneous assumptions and distortions in order to make certain these inferences are accurate and consistent with the available empirical data. This helps one’s emotions quite nicely when in fact our inferences about a given situation are distorted.
For example, if I have a medical symptom and think, “I have cancer and will die in the near future”, slowing down and checking to see if this is an accurate inference by consulting a physician will help alleviate my panic. However, what if in fact my inference is unfortunately correct and I do in fact learn the empirical data suggests I have an aggressive form of cancer and will likely die in a year or at most two. This is where Beck’s Cognitive Therapy begins to have some difficulty and where Stoicism and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy shine.
These two closely related philosophies will enable me to face this existential adversity and cope with it. By having deep conviction in the liberating overlapping philosophes of Stoicism and REBT I do not have to panic or despair. I can choose my emotional destiny and still can have some degree of happiness right up to the end of my life. Although helpful in less dire situations, Stoicism and REBT are the philosophies to turn to when your worst nightmare is your reality. Since learning REBT and Stoicism I no longer fear the worst case scenario in my life when I think of things that might go wrong. I also am better able to have some happiness when things go wrong despite their presence in my life. In essence now that I know REBT and Stoicism I change what I can change and move on when I cannot change anything and still find a way to have some pleasure in my life despite the presence of adversity.
Q: What’s one of your favorite Stoic quotations and why?
There are so many great Stoic quotations, so this is a very challenging question for me to answer. It used to be Seneca’s “Bring the mind to bear upon your problems” but it no longer is my favorite. I will select another by Seneca which is “Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.” I have selected this one simply because so much self-inflicted and other-inflicted damage and pain results from this unhealthy negative emotion whether one is angry at another person, himself, or in response to the situation in which he finds himself. This emotion is so seductive and yet so destructive that mastering the ability to not yield to anger at the tempting moment is an essential life skill if a person wants to be his best. Whether you hold anger in or let it out, anger significantly diminishes your creativity and problem-solving ability and can, paradoxically, undermine the persistence you bring to bear to solve the problem you face. I have also seen how anger corrodes or can suddenly end relationships, and the resulting pain that ensues from a moment of anger can be enormous and lifelong. I often silently say to myself as a way of preventing getting angry “Anger defeats me. Do not yield to it.”
Q: What advice would you give someone who wanted to learn more about Stoicism?
My guess is that if you are interested in Stoicism you are also interested in applying this liberating philosophy to your life. With that in mind I have two recommendations. I would read books on both Stoicism and REBT because there can be a synergy created by doing this. I would start with Bill Irvine’s book titled A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy as it is so very accessible. Then I would go onto Epictetus’s Discourses. To me he is the hub of Stoicism. I would attend Stoicon on a regular basis to see and hear how Stoicism can be applied in different ways and meet fellow Stoics. I would regularly read Massimo Pigliucci’s website How to Be a Stoic as he seems to be quite the Stoic scholar.
I would also study the many self-help books written by Albert Ellis and Windy Dryden on Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy. I sometimes think of REBT as the Cliff Notes of Stoicism or as a distilled, highly concentrated form of Stoicism. You will see how REBT efficiently teaches you how to implement the wisdom of Stoicism. You might even go and study the freely available audio and video found on my website REBTDoctor.com to facilitate your understanding of REBT. Finally, I would read a Stoic Quote every morning and write it on an index card. Carry it with you and try to find opportunity to apply that insight to any adversities you encounter during the day. Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living would be a good source of useful Stoic quotations along with daily commentary Holiday makes on the meaning and implementation of each quotation. Most importantly attempt to use Stoicism (and REBT) to learn Stoicism! As Epictetus said “Learning that does not lead to action is useless.”
Q: Do you have anything else that you wanted to mention while we have the chance?
Life is hard for all of us. Stoicism and REBT can help you more effectively respond to life’s adversities and to self-actualize. These philosophies can help you either quickly terminate or entirely side-step needless suffering. Learn these powerful philosophies and then be a good model of them to others. When they display curiosity about how you maintain such equanimity in the face of adversity then introduce them to both Stoicism and REBT. Let them know your secret!
