I sent the text at 9:14 on a Saturday morning. Still on for dinner Friday? I’d drafted it three times to get the tone right, breezy but not needy, and then I put the phone face down and made coffee.
By noon there was no reply. By three I’d worked out why — the joke I made at her birthday about her new boyfriend’s haircut. She’d laughed, but now I could see it was the polite kind.
By nine that night I’d written two messages in my head. One was an apology for the joke. The other was a cool little note saying no worries, I’m busy Friday anyway. I’m glad I sent neither.
She answered Sunday morning. Her phone had spent the night in her sister’s car. Yes!! 7?
Nothing had happened to me that Saturday except a phone that didn’t buzz. Everything else I’d built myself. A Stoic philosopher named Epictetus described that whole day about nineteen hundred years ago, in one sentence.
“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.”
He’d been enslaved, and he never wrote a word of it down
Epictetus was born into slavery around 50 AD, in what’s now Turkey, and was owned by a wealthy official in Rome. He walked with a bad leg his whole life. Once freed, he taught philosophy until the emperor threw the philosophers out of the city, and then he started over with a school in Greece.
He wrote nothing. A student named Arrian took notes in class and later boiled them down into a handbook small enough to carry. The line about opinions is the fifth entry.
His example was death, not a text. Death can’t be terrible in itself, he argued, or it would have seemed so to Socrates, who met his own calmly. The terror is in the opinion.
The rude comment and the unanswered text are my examples. He started with the hardest case there is and trusted the small stuff to follow.
It’s easy to wave this off when it comes from someone comfortable. It’s harder when it comes from a man who had been someone’s property and decided the one thing nobody could own was what he made of it.
Nineteen centuries later, a therapist handed it to his clients
In the 1950s, a New York psychologist named Albert Ellis was losing faith in psychoanalysis. He’d trained in it and practiced it, and he’d stopped believing it worked. As a young man he’d sorted out his own problems by reading the Stoics, so he began teaching his clients what had helped him.
He turned the sentence into three letters. A is the activating event. B is the belief about it. C is the consequence, the feeling you end up with.
Most of us live as if A causes C: she didn’t reply, so I’m upset. Ellis built his whole method on the letter we skip.
In the 1960s a psychiatrist named Aaron Beck built cognitive therapy on the same foundation, and the two approaches grew into what’s now called cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT.
Psychiatrist Neel Burton, writing about what Stoicism teaches, notes that CBT has become the most common form of talking treatment. Beck himself traced its philosophical origins back to the Stoics, and Ellis kept returning to that one line from Epictetus.
Run my Saturday through the letters. A: no reply by noon. C: a knot in my stomach and two drafted messages. B: she’s angry about the haircut joke.
I never noticed B as a belief at all. It showed up pretending to be information.
More Bolde Stories
The meaning arrives so fast it passes for fact
Therapists spend most of their time right here. The story shows up so quickly, and so fully formed, that it doesn’t register as a story. Beck called these automatic thoughts.
A coworker watches me pack up at four and says, Must be nice. On a day when I’ve slept and the morning went well, I laugh and say it is. On a day when I’m behind, the same three words follow me to the car, and I’m drafting a defense of my hours by the first red light.
Same remark, same coworker, same tone. If the comment were doing the upsetting, it would do it every time.
The treatment is mostly slowing that moment down. Write the thought out. Ask what the evidence is. Ask what else could explain it: a dead battery, a bad day of her own, a joke that was only a joke.
It sounds too simple to be a treatment. But it’s the same move Seneca, another Stoic, was making when he said we suffer more in imagination than in reality. The suffering is real, even when its cause is a first draft.
Where the old line goes too far
The bumper-sticker version says it’s never the event. Never is a big word. Some comments are rude. Some silences are an answer.
And reframing can work too well.
In one study, people who’d recently been through serious stress were tested on how good they were at seeing a sad situation in a better light. For those facing trouble they couldn’t change, like a spouse’s illness, being good at it went with less depression.
For those whose trouble was fixable, like problems at work, the skilled reframers were more depressed.
Psychologist Allison Troy at Franklin & Marshall College, studying when reframing backfires, explained the risk: make a bad situation seem less bad and you’re less inclined to change it.
Epictetus saw some of this coming. His handbook opens by sorting everything into what’s in our power and what’s outside it. The opinions exercise was meant for the second pile.
And the passage with the famous line keeps going. Blaming other people for your distress, he says, is what an untaught person does. Blaming yourself is what a beginner does. Someone fully taught blames nobody.
I needed that last part. For a while I used the idea as a new way to be wrong: upset, and then annoyed at myself for being upset over a story. I was the beginner with a better vocabulary.
So I ask two questions now. What am I deciding this means? And if I’m right, is there anything I can do about it?
If my friend had been hurt by the joke, the fix was a phone call, and no amount of reframing would’ve made it for me.
What I do with an unanswered text now
I still write the story. I don’t think that stops. Twenty minutes of silence and some part of me has a full plot, with motive.
What I’ve added is a label. I say it to myself: the story I’m telling is that she’s upset with me. Putting those five words in front does more than I expected. A fact has to be dealt with. A story can wait for more information.
Last month a different friend went silent after I sent a long message about a hard week. A day passed. I wrote the story, labeled it, and found one thing in my power, so I texted: No rush, wanted to make sure that last one didn’t read weird.
She replied two days later with a single thumbs-up.
I looked at it for a while. Then I decided it meant she loved me and was busy, and went to make dinner.
