Hey guys and welcome to episode 64 of the OCD stories

com podcast.

Now in this episode I interviewed Donald Robertson.

Donald is a psychotherapist working within CBT and helping people with anxiety. Now he has treated people with

O. C. D. Before, primarily it's around anxiety. But I wanted to get him on because his kind of specialism is in Stoicism, which is a type of philosophy.

It's a practical philosophy and a philosophy some 2,000 years ago. People like Marcus Aurelius, if you've seen the film Gladiator, you'll

be familiar with him or Seneca and arguably Albert Ellis, Albert Ellis, who created originally REBT,

which became, evolved into CBT,

was heavily influenced by Stoicism.

And there's a quote by Epictetus,

which goes something along the lines of

people aren't disturbed by things themselves,

they're disturbed by how they see those things.

And that's really the core of CBT is kind of changing the cognition and how you look at things.

It's not necessarily the things themselves, it's how we are perceiving the things. And I also like Stoicism

because I think it heavily links into exposure response prevention therapy and

Donald highlights this in the interview.

For example, Seneca, I believe it's Seneca,

but he said Donald does actually correct me in this,

but I recorded the episode a few weeks ago so I forgot if it was

Seneca of Socrates let's go with Seneca and what Seneca used to do was

every let's say few months so to get past the fear of caring what other people

...