Why do some things affect us more than others? A friend of mine once told me that the things that affect us emotionally the most, are the parts of ourselves that we need to work the most on ourselves as there is something unresolved within us in that specific area.

Unconsciously we want and maintain behaviors in real life that consciously we deny or hate. It can be anything, maybe you hate your job, and you know what you have to do to get a better one or to start one yourself, but you don’t. Unconsciously you are looking for something there, maybe protection. Many of the situations in our lives are because of this, fears that we don’t even know are there. I had one of these experiences today as I woke up and I can tell you friend that the unconscious is real, very, very real.

I have used stoicism to make my life better, and it has become better in many ways.

Stoicism makes you a person of grit, but today I had a realization that took my understanding of stoicism a bit deeper.

Stoicism can help you deal with all of your problems. It helps you transcend them and transendance of oneself and obstacles most be stoicism’s aim.

Because, it can be used incorrectly.

How? Let’s suppose that you are in a situation in your life that you personally don’t like or that you like but that you don’t really know the why of it.

It can be your work, you fill pissed about it, but you don’t do anything to change it. We can make excuses and rationalize that we are too tired to do something else in the day, but, unconsciously, maybe that’s just what we want (feeling protected and not being responsibles for ourselves, just blaming everything but oursleves).

Maybe we just want protection from the world and we take the job and the boss as a father, just changing some figures for others, as long as it fills the role hey.

Maybe it’s something that we like, like, commonly , a romantic relationship, and you love it. Because, consciously we justify it with feelings of “love” but maybe unconsciously we want another figure, some oedipus complex (our mother role), I know it sounds weird but you are looking for the role to be filled, nothing else. Love most come from yourself, if we demand it, we are not really in love, we just want something.

So, you and me need to figure out what is happening, and make the unconscious, conscious. Face our fears, our inner fears and our core fears so we can transcende them.

Stoicism however can be understood in many forms, think about it, it can be counter beneficial for you, if we use it to justify our actions based on fear, thinking that we are acting courageously (like enduring the job or painful relationship).

When it comes to make the decision to live courageously it means that we are acting from love, form amor fati. Fear and Amor fati are two very different things. If we, however act from fear deep inside, like not pushing for a better job or not being as great as we can be, we are acting from fear.

If we stoically support our fears and live despicable lives because we do not consciously know what we are doing, we are using stoicism wrong, in fact, it is not stoicism, it is just a justification to keep on the petty behavior.

Stoicism acts from love and courage and most of the time we think that there are challenges outside ourselves, but no. They are never outside, remember what is it that we have control over, ourselves. We must face our inner fears and understand ourselves truly if we want to be truly stoic. We cannot have fear inside and courage outside, that’s just simply not stoicism.

We must have courage to live truly inside and outside. Pay very close attention to yourself, what you are doing in life and ask questions, whether stoicism is a deep core philosophy in yourself or just a facade to hide your inner child.

I wish you all the courage and greatness of a proud warrior friend.

Good morning

Subscribe for weekly advice

Visit our Patreon page for more stoic, patreon only content. Thanks.