Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

On the Wikipedia page for Stoicism, I learned that there's a kind of therapy called "Cognitive-behavioral therapy" that incorporates elements of Stoicism. This is quite interesting to me, so I looked around, and found a page describing it.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors, not external things, like people, situations, and events. The benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we think to feel / act better even if the situation does not change.

CBT is based on aspects of stoic philosophy [...] Cognitive-behavioral therapy does not tell people how they should feel. However, most people seeking therapy do not want to feel they way they have been feeling. The approaches that emphasize stoicism teach the benefits of feeling, at worst, calm when confronted with undesirable situations. They also emphasize the fact that we have our undesirable situations whether we are upset about them or not. If we are upset about our problems, we have two problems -- the problem, and our upset about it. Most people want to have the fewest number of problems possible. So when we learn how to more calmly accept a personal problem, not only do we feel better, but we usually put ourselves in a better position to make use of our intelligence, knowledge, energy, and resources to resolve the problem.

I really like this logical way to think about issues, of calmly accepting problems. And I'm conversely not a believer in the need to vent anger. First of all, I think that acting angry only makes you more inclined to be angrier later. You are practicing anger. Second of all, from what little I've read on it, the evidence is that "blowing off steam" does not help. It's better to just calmly accept and deal with the problem.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy actually seems like the last vestige of Stoicism in modern times. But it's purely practical, and not concerned with morality at all. That's fine, though. This is not a philosophy, it's a therapy. Most of us won't be going to therapy sessions any time soon, but we can still benefit from this advice.

I'm going to try to read more into this therapy later. There is almost certainly quite a bit more to it.