In our last few +1s (here, here and here), we’ve been hanging out with Donald Robertson and his buddy Socrates.
We’re going to continue our exploration of wisdom from his new book.
Let’s get straight to work.
Donald tells us: “A closely related method involves referring to our own thoughts and actions as if we were talking about those of someone else. Third-person self-talk is known as ‘illeism’ (pronounced ILL-ee-ism), from ille, the Latin pronoun for ‘he.’ We don’t even need to use our imagination for this, just our words. For example, rather than thinking ‘I’m really upset and don’t know what to do!’ (in the first person), I might say to myself ‘Donald is really upset and he doesn’t know what to do!’ (in the third person).”
He continues by saying: “A recent pair of studies on illeism asked a total of 555 participants to record their thoughts in a journal for four weeks. To test whether wise reasoning could be cultivated in daily life, participants were to write about various social experiences that happened each day, one group using first-person and the other third-person language (illeism). Those employing illeism were found to have improved on ratings of ‘wisdom,’ measured in the same way as above. The study also found that in some cases illeism reduced negative emotions, such as anger or frustration, in participants’ relationships.”
Now…
One of the things that makes Donald so special as a modern-day (Stoic!) philosopher is the fact that his background is as a cognitive behavioral therapist. He knows how to APPLY this wisdom and what works and what doesn’t in a VERY practical way.
Right before that passage, he says: “In one study, [researchers] described a hypothetical relationship problem to participants in two groups. One group was asked to imagine it was a friend’s problem, the other group’s participants, to view it as if it were their own. The group examining the problem as if it happened to a friend scored 22 percent higher on ratings of intellectual humility, 31 percent on open-mindedness, and 15 percent on compromise.”
Right after that passage, he tells us: “Similar verbal techniques have long been used in cognitive psychotherapy. Aaron T. Beck and his colleagues advised clients suffering from anxiety disorders to practice detached self-awareness: ‘Look at your thoughts, feelings, and actions as if you’re a friendly, but not overly concerned, bystander.’ They describe this as learning to ‘watch myself watching myself,’ in language highly reminiscent of Socrates’s analogy of the eye that looks at itself. Moreover, using third-person language can, they claim, help a client to ‘increase self-awareness by voluntarily choosing to distance himself from his anxiety.’”
That’s Today’s +1.
Illeism.
It does a Hero good.
Try it.
Today.
P.S. The basic idea here is similar to what other CBT practitioners describe as “defusing” from our thoughts. Check out our Notes on Stephen Hayes’ Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life and Russ Harris’ The Confidence Gap for more.
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