How To Handle Insults: A Stoic Step-By-Step

An insult only lands if you agree with it. That is the Stoic claim, and in this lesson I turn it into something you can actually use. I walk through a step-by-step way of meeting an insult so it loses its sting, drawing on how the Stoics thought about other people’s opinions of us.

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Welcome to the Stoic Handbook Podcast. This is your host, John Brooks. Today's episode is a deep dive on the Stoic view of insults. In this episode I talk about why insults hurt so much, why the Stoics focused so much on them. I talk about the five Stoic metaprames, how the Stoics viewed insults in general. And then I provide six tactics that the Stoics used to navigate insults, and my favorite personal method for navigating all types of insults. It's quite an extensive look at insults. But the end portion will only be available to Stoic Handbook Premium subscribers. The Stoic Handbook Premium is a private podcast feed. It's easy to access on your favorite podcast app. And on this feed I upload my premium lessons, courses, and meditations. So we have my seven-day anxiety melting stoic meditation course, my seven day radical gratitude stoic meditation course, the Social Anxiety to Core Confidence 10 part course, as well as exclusive QAs and deep dive workshops. If you'd like to try out Stoic Handbook Premium for free, you can do so by visiting stoichandbook.supercast.com. You'll find the link in the show notes to this episode as well. But without further delay, let's now get into today's episode. I'm very excited to share it with you. So today we're going to be talking about insults. And so let's begin this with an open question. When was the last time you experienced an insult? Okay, and maybe we might want to define what an insult is. So there are different types of insults. So an insult can be very obvious and direct, like you are insert insult. An insult could be a slight, so, you know, like a ruffling of the nose or not complimenting you and you've made an effort for something. An insult could be ignoring you, blanking you. You know, that's a sign of disrespect. You could call that a form of an insult. In fact, bullying is often the most hurtful when we get the silent treatment. You know, that can be miserable social isolation. Um, that's essentially people saying, like, you have so little value you don't even enter into our perception. You, you know, we can't even detect you because you have that little amount of value. There are lots of different ways that you can be insulted, could be snubbed for a job promotion as well. You know, there are lots of different ways. When was the last time you were insulted? You might be wondering why did the ancient Stoics put so much of an emphasis on how we can learn to overcome insults, right? Because they were very wise individuals. And you'd think that they would care more about, you know, how do we navigate death and fame and you know, what should we do in life to make the most out of it? But the Stoics talked a lot about insults, like how do we deal with difficult social situations? And you have to ask, well, why would they care so much? And the answer is because getting insulted hurts so much and threatens our social status so much that people have literally become clinically depressed over certain types of social insults. Uh, people have even taken their own lives, you know. Uh the getting insulted or getting bullied really matters because our life, our survival depends on it. Not so much anymore, but we've evolved from hunter-gatherers, right? So 100,000 years ago, we were hunter-gatherers, we lived in tribes of about 150 to 200 people. And if you were exiled from the tribe, then you would face certain death, right? Because you'd have to survive in the wilderness on your own. But let's say that you weren't exiled. Let's just say that you were ridiculed and your status was kind of mocked, and you were put at the bottom of the social hierarchy in that tribe. What kind of food would you have had? What kind of relationships would uh you your actual survival and likelihood of reproduction would have heavily depended on how well you could have gained social status in the tribe. And so we evolved to be very good at getting social status, right? Receiving compliments, receiving validation from people, and feeling a strong distaste towards people attacking us and getting insulted. It sounds kind of crazy now, you know, when you see people who have road rage and they get into fights over small things that happen on the road. If you were to go back a thousand years ago, in certain cultures, a slight to one's social reputation could have resulted in a duel to the death. You know, that's how important your pride might have been in certain cultures, you know, and there were historical examples of people having duels over insults, small insults, uh, because they got into this headspace where if you attack my social status and I don't do anything about it, and people see that, that shows weakness, and that takes away all of the perks of having high social status in this tribe, in this environment. If you look at you know our evolutionary past, the more you would have cared about social status, the more likelihood you you would have had to survive and to reproduce. If you didn't care about it, then you might have been at the bottom of the hierarchy of your tribe, and then you might not have eaten, you might not have got access to mates. So we've been hardwired through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to deeply care about our place in the tribe that we're in. And that's why insults can really hurt, even though they appear to be just words. A lot of times we get insulted when we're younger. Um, school is a is a place where I think pretty much everyone has had their fair share of pain and and social attack. I certainly did. And and if you think back to your school years or your teenage years, obviously you were establishing your identity at that point, going through a lot of changes. You potentially were a bit more vulnerable and also kind of competitive as well with other people. Did you receive any bad insults when you were younger? And when you recall them now, do they still carry a sting, or do you feel like you've overcome it? You can look back at those times and you know have complete acceptance for it. Because a lot of a lot of us actually carry around this trauma, you know, in our in our system that when we think back to those school days, it can can reactivate it and it can be painful. So insults, not only are they intense, they can also last a long time. You know, so there's uh there's a lot to it. I have some strategies for dealing with insults in real time, right? So what do you do when someone actually attacks you in some way? But before I get into that, I'd like us to look at the stoic view of insults from a meta perspective. I call this a meta frame. So rather than the strategies we use to deal with insults in the moment, how can we think about insults more generally? And I hope that there'll be some ideas in this uh that will be useful to you over the next few weeks and months. I'd like to start with a quote by Epictetus. Epictetus was the writer of the handbook, uh, the Stoic Handbook. He was also the creator of the Discourses of Epictetus, a big influence on Marcus Aurelius, and the name Epictetus means acquired. Uh, he was originally a slave, uh, had his leg broken by his master, eventually became freed, and went on to become a legendary philosophy teacher. And he says, and this is counterintuitive, a lot of us might get kind of confronted by this idea and we can discuss it. Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation, which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions, take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control. So that's an interesting statement that he makes there. What do you think about that? Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. Do you agree with that or disagree with that? It doesn't mean that it's easy to not feel harmed, but the in the thought experiment I like to give is imagine I introduced you to someone and I explained that they had a particular kind of health issue where when they would give insults, that actually meant that they really liked you, right? And they couldn't help it, it was just the way that their mind worked. And you meet them for the first time and they insult you, that's not going to land the same way, right? So the context is different, and because the context is different, you are not playing as much of a role in the provocation, which is uh which is huge, right? Um, and that's the starting point of this. So let's go through some of the the frames of of of how the Stoics saw insults. So the first one is they always looked when it came to other people to see if they shared the same values as them. So there are people in your life, right? Like friends, colleagues, coworkers. You don't like the same music, you don't like the same films, you don't like the same books, you don't like the same food, you don't have the same values about what constitutes a good life, you don't have the same values about what constitutes good parenting, good relationships. Your values are completely different, and yet they can come along and tell you something about you and it hurts. Why would it hurt when you have completely different values? It doesn't really make sense. If anything, it could actually be a good thing that they are insulting you because they love all these things that you don't like and they hate all these things that you love. So it could actually be the case that them not liking you is actually a good thing. So the Stoics would not see every comment from every person equally. They used their values and the values of other people as a compass to see what to pay attention to. With social media, this has kind of become lost, right? Now we post something and we pay attention to the number of likes. You know, do I get 50 likes, 100 likes, 20 likes? That's the thing that counts rather than who is liking what I'm posting. What values does each individual share? And it could be the case that if you saw things this way, that one person could equal 100 likes, you know, and 50 people could equal one like because you just don't share the same values as them. And so you almost don't, you didn't create the post for them. You didn't put the picture up for them. Uh, and this can really trip us up. And so, as a starting point, now as you go through about life, if someone slights you or insults you, ask that question what does this person value? Okay. And if this person has the same values as you, maybe you can actually learn from their insult, maybe see it as feedback, maybe see them as a mentor. But if this person has different values from you, um, then it could actually be a good thing that they disagree with something that you're doing. So the next one is praise neutrality. So, as I said, we've evolved to become very good at getting validation, and we've evolved to become very good at building our social status in whatever tribe we find ourselves in. You know, from a young age, you see children. I have a four-year-old, you know, doing drawings and saying cute things and riding his bike well, and it's like he's getting very good at getting attention and getting praise, which is amazing, right? That's part of healthy development. But at what point in life do we learn the skill of not needing it? Which is a skill, right? Like we can learn the skill of getting praise from people, but how much time and effort have you spent learning the skill of not needing praise from people? It's a different skill. You know, the skill of being your own witness, getting praise from yourself. When you do something epic, being able to compliment yourself and value that above something external or someone external from you. And the ancient Stoics would say that that's an important life skill to learn to not need praise from other people. So if someone comes and they give you a lovely compliment, it's okay to let that in and to see where they're coming from and to share in that good feeling. You know, there's a strong connection there. But you almost don't want to become dependent on it, where I need this person's compliment for me to feel complete, for me to feel whole. You know, if they didn't compliment me, I'd feel crushed and broken. And so Marx Aurelius talked about this idea of, you know, if you have a diamond and you call the diamond a name, it doesn't stop the diamond from being a diamond. Whether you praise it or insult it, it stays the same. And so the ancient Stoics kind of tried to become like that, where whether they get insulted or whether they get praised, they always went back to this simple fact of like, I am who I am, I know who I am. And while I'll take feedback and I'll take praise, I don't need that. Diane says, This point I haven't needed praise for 10 years. I generally feel if most people compliment me, then I'm going the wrong way because I don't want to be heading where the rest of the general population are going. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, so sort of uh I think Oscar Wilde said everything popular is wrong, something like that, right? Sort of um, yeah, and what you're doing there is you're looking, you're using the value compass that I've just talked about. You're looking at like what are the general values of people? Do I share those values? Should I care about those values? And ultimately, you know, the best thing that we can do is we get clear about what we value and live according to those values. The third frame is contempt for contempt. So the Stoics would look at the intention behind someone who's giving the insult or the slight, and they would just ask the simple question: Is this malicious? Is this person actually trying to hurt us? Sometimes people can be not very mindful. Sometimes we show someone something that we've created and they don't give us much attention or they don't give us the praise that we're looking for. That's not malicious. You know, that's just them being busy or caught up in their own thing or being self-absorbed. Being malicious is like, I'm out to get you. I'm, I you know, I want to I want to punish you in some way, I want to hurt you, I want to see you in pain. And the Stoics had a lot of contempt for people who express contempt. Um, not contempt uh towards them as humans, but just contempt for that kind of energy, that kind of pattern. Um, and so they would they would almost always disregard that kind of energy. Like if someone's coming at you with this malicious energy, if you spot that, you almost want to just close off immediately, you know, and just sort of be like, oh, I don't I don't see anything uh productive in kind of letting that energy in. The next one is the idea of endless approval. So the Stoics have this cool way of thinking about appetite or desire. So they categorize desires into two main types: natural and unnatural. So a natural desire would be something that can come to an end, right? So if you're hungry and you eat food, you feel full, right? It's at the end. If you're freezing cold and you get warm, you sit by a fire, you get warm again, right? And the cold feeling ends. It's a natural desire. There are certain appetites or desires that are unnatural in the sense that there's no actual end to them. One of those is approval. So let's just say you build your social status up, you get lots of friends, you feel really popular, you feel really important. At what point do you hit the limit? Same as wealth. You can always become richer and richer and richer and buy more things and have a more lavish lifestyle. And the Stokes would be very skeptical about pursuing those types of desires. So instead of chasing this endless approval from other people, they would say, like, why don't you just get a few friends or a few relationships that are very important to you and you know help those relationships to really flourish and to feel full, like turn those unnatural desires into natural ones. The next frame the Stoics had was frankness of shortcomings. This was actually a big one for me in developing my own confidence and overcoming my own social anxiety. When I was more insecure and more anxious, I would almost like try to avoid looking and thinking about the parts of me that I didn't like. And you know, that the old classic self-help phrase, whatever you resist persists. When you don't look at the dragon, the dragon grows scarier. This is like the exposure model in treating anxiety. When we avoid things, the things that we avoid become scarier. And one of the best ways to develop confidence is to just be okay with who you are. Now you might think, well, how do I become okay with who I am? You have to look at who you are. You know, you have to face your shortcomings and look at them, you know, with a pinch of salt, with a bit of laughter. This is why sometimes having friends that can call you out and point out funny things about you, that's a really good way to practice this acceptance of your shortcomings. And uh something I've noticed in life, which has been interesting, is some of the most confident people I've ever met are the ones that have friends that tease them the most. You know, it's almost like this the sense of like you can you can say anything to me, and I've become desensitized to it. You know, I'm I'm okay with it. This is not um insults, you know, this is like the the the love of of a of a of a friendship, you know, just like friendly teasing, like a back and forth kind of banter. Um, and that can really help you build up. So you could you could write everyone has things they don't want to look at, whether that's your physicality, um, things to do with your body, your face, things to do with your personality, certain things that you kind of you don't want to lean into. And let's just say, how do you feel looking at yourself on camera or listening to yourself in voice notes? Does that make you kind of cringe a little bit, or are you comfortable with that? Because I used to not like listening to myself, not like watching myself on video. Um, I would want to look away and it would be very uncomfortable. Um because I just wasn't okay with myself, right? And it's that kind of, oh, I don't wanna don't wanna don't wanna I don't want to accept that that's how things are. So yeah, becoming more okay with your shortcomings and you know, almost like a comedian who welcomes heckles. That's like a really healthy perspective. And as we progress in our ability to deal with insults, you might actually find that you become almost like an insult connoisseur where someone says something to you that's a bit cutting, you almost like want to savor it, remember it, you know, make a note of it, and show how well you can deal with it. This completely takes the power away from the insult. The Stoics refused to see themselves as victims under any circumstance. They're just that was fundamental to their philosophy. They were never victims in the deepest sense. Not that they everyone could theoretically be a victim of a situation, but as an identity, they they never wanted to identify as being a victim who was unable to problem solve or deal with a particular situation. Um, and so one of the most empowering aspects of of uh stoicism is this idea of the psychological immune system. We get vaccinated to build up our immune system so that when some other kind of virus or infection comes, we've strengthened up to it. You can also do the same things psychologically, and they had a technique called premeditation of adversity, and they would almost like vaccinate their mind and practice dealing with setbacks in their own mind, so when they happened in the real world, they'd be ready for it. Uh, here's something that Epictetus said about getting insulted that shows his level of frankness with shortcomings. If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer he was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone. So he's saying that if anyone speaks ill of you, if anyone says anything bad of you, instead of fighting or resisting it, say, Well, you could have said a hundred other things. Um, you clearly don't know me that well. I have a lot more faults than that. You know, he's kind of uh humorously approaching the insult with wit and accepting that he's not a perfect human and he doesn't need to be. And Epictetus is not doing this to try and make other people laugh and get other people's approval. He's doing it because he's he's taking the power back into his own hands, right? Someone's come along and they've attempted to mess with his well being. He's saying to them, Not only are you not going to mess with my well being, I'm actually going to use that attempt to make myself feel better than I was feeling previously. So I'm going to take that insult and I'm going to use it to actually feel even happier now. And I'm going to do that by making myself Laugh. The Stoics were not a sort of in the dictionary means like stiff up a lip, like you do not have any emotion. People think of Dr. Spock. The Stoics, that's the name of uh a philosophy, right? Just like there was a school of philosophy called the Cynics, it's just the name of the school. There were also a school of philosophy called the Skeptics, different from the dictionary definition. Uh, the whole reason why the Stoics were called the Stoics is because they met on the Stoa Poicale. That's the place, and it was just a painted porch. Uh the Stoics understood that a lot of our suffering comes from a poor grasp on reality. And this is something that cognitive behavioral therapists are also understand. In other words, the way that we think about the world, if it's distorted, that can lead to more anxiety and more depression and more suffering. Classic example would be you're in a social situation and you start thinking other people don't like you. A CBT, a cognitive behavioral therapist, would say, well, you might be mind-reading. You don't actually know what other people are thinking, you're jumping to conclusions, you're catastrophizing, you're blowing things out of proportion, you're minimizing the positive. That person invited you here, you're minimizing that and saying that they don't like you all of a sudden with very little evidence. And when you kind of dial in your thoughts and get a better grasp of reality, what you'll find is that suddenly your anxiety starts to go and suddenly your depression starts to go. And so they weren't just people that lived in their heads, they just recognized that the types of thoughts that we have play a major role in the emotions we feel. Um, there's actually a like a psychological difference between feelings and emotions. So, and the Stoics knew this too. This is also something that it comes from modern uh psychology. A feeling is that knee-jerk reaction, right? So, like something loud happens or something scary happens, you feel a pang of fear. But that emotion that comes like 10 seconds later, that's a combination of the feeling plus a perception, right? And the perception comes from the way that you're thinking about it. You know, are you saying that it's the end of the world? Do you are you telling yourself that you're gonna die? Are you telling yourself that there's a solution? Like, how are you thinking about that? That mixes in with the feeling and creates the emotion. Um the Stoics also had a lot of um intuitive exercises as well. So they had things like the view from above exercise where they would take a step outside of their small selves and like imagine reality from up above. And that is like you essentially take a trip up into the cosmos. So it's not you're not really in your head. You you feel all those feelings of getting distanced from your from your uh insecurities and anxieties down in inside of yourself, and you see things from a different perspective. Uh also Marcus Aurelius, if you he wrote a book called Meditations, which was never meant to be published. If you read that book, he has constant passages about compassion and kindness and tolerance. You know, he's a person that could have anyone exiled, killed, imprisoned, um, but he didn't, right? And he was always trying to rein himself in. You might have seen popular TV shows about kings and thrones and queens, right? And you know, you can see the power power does to people. Well, Marcus Aurelius lived with that power, you know, for many, many years. And what he was doing was using Stoicism to help himself become more grounded, make the right decision. So, yeah, it's uh it's it sadly gets mischaracterized as this philosophy that is very hyper-rational and had no heart and had no compassion. But the key doctrine for Stoicism was how can we use a reason for the betterment of society? In other words, how can we use this thing that human beings have, the ability to think through problems to make everyone flourish and live a better life, you know, not just ourselves. So those are some frames on Stoicism from up above, but let's talk about what we can do in the moment. Okay, so going back to that quote by Epictetus that I started with. Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. A thought experiment that really drives this home if you're struggling to grasp that. If you've ever done any kind of weightlifting before or any kind of exercise, and you know that you feel that kind of lactic acid buildup or that the pain in the muscle. When we're exercising, we associate that pain with health, right? Like we're actually becoming healthier and stronger and fitter. And that pain becomes a source of pleasure in a way, it becomes something that we enjoy. If you were to wake up in the middle of the night with the identical pain you feel in a weightlifting session, you would probably have a panic attack, right? You'd like go, you'd absolutely freak out, it would be catastrophic, unbearable, because the context is completely different, right? So, like same physical sensation in terms of just the pure feeling, but because we're thinking about it differently, we have a different frame around it, it feels completely different. And the same is true with an insult, right? Like, so someone insults you, you tell yourself, like, that is absolutely harmful fact. It's like, don't be so sure about that. The fact that you are telling yourself it is harmful, the storyline in your own mind, you're playing a role in being harmed. Um, and when we realize this, we can actually start to take more control um and start to cultivate more emotional mastery. So let's go through some actual strategies and techniques. So the first one is I just call it truth. Okay, so someone comes along and they insult you. The first thing you can ask is, is this true? Is what they're saying true? And you actually look for the truth. So I'm gonna give you an insult now so you can play around with this. Um, so I I can't see you, obviously, but I'm just gonna give you a generic insult. Um you don't work hard enough, right? Something like that. Ask yourself, is it true? And just really try to find the truth in it. Is it actually true or false? And if it's true, then it's it's not an insult, right? It's self-evident. Yeah, okay, I don't work hard enough. You're you're right. I could work harder. Self-evident. And if it's not true, then it's not true. So why would you get insulted by it? Right? So like you can look for the truth in it. If you'd like to keep listening to the rest of this talk where I share specific tactics for dealing with insults in the moment, as well as my personal favorite method, you can do so for free after visiting and enrolling at stoichandbook.supercast.com. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.