26 Stoic Labelling with L M Montgomery | Philosophy and Literature - Female Empowerment - Bluestocking Society -Women's intellectual history
Welcome to the Female Stoic podcast.
My name is Stephanie Poppins and I am an advocate for literary empowerment.
That means I believe the example set by the literary masters can broaden life perspective, create increased self-awareness, and empower us to overcome the obstacles we encounter here in the 21st century.
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By listening and referring what we hear to Stoic philosophy, we can foster a strong sense of self and navigate the world more effectively.
This podcast takes the form of both discussions and meditations, and if you like what you hear, you might consider looking me up on my socials where I post empowering videos every day.
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Or you may like my classic audiobooks and original stories available on my website, newworldbooks.uk.
Happy listening.
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So welcome to today's episode of the Female Stoic Podcast.
Today's episode is entitled Stoic Labelling of Emotion and we will be looking at how we can use the labelling of our emotions to create a pause between them and our actions, which enables us to gain greater clarity and regulation over our lives.
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As we know, emotional regulation is essential for the protection of our Stoic inner peace, which is what this podcast is all about.
And hopefully I'm creating for you and you feel that this is a soothing, safe space to discuss female literature and Stoic philosophy.
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So today, the literary master we will be referring to is Lucy Maude Montgomery.
As you may or may not know, Lucy Maude Montgomery journaled extensively in the early 1900s up to the age of about 43.
And it's those journals we'll be looking at today, as they were one of the tools she used to document her emotions and understand them.
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These journals follow her departure from Prince Edward Island in 1911, when she travelled to England and Scotland on her honeymoon, began her new role of minister's wife in Ontario, gave birth three times and watched Canada go to war, all the while battling with her own mental health.
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So we shall be focusing on Montgomery, tapping into the theme of Stoic labeling.
And of course, we will have a journal task of our own as we do each week.
So if you have your journals, that's great.
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If not, listen again wherever you hear podcasts and you can do the journal task then.
And if you're interested in Montgomery's work, remember to look out for my newly remastered full audio books available on the link on my page, my profile page, or the original recordings available as a playlist on Insight Timer.
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And as a New Year treat, I have just begun Montgomery's Blue Castle.
What a story.
If you don't know the story, it was set in the 1900s in the fictional town of Deerwood in Ontario.
And it's considered one of her best works, but also one of her only works of adult fiction, the only book that she wrote that is entirely set outside of Prince Edward Island.
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So all her other books she refers to PEI in one way or another, and it features a female protagonist, Valenci Sterling.
At 29, she's considered a spinster.
Her family, the Sterling clan, has lived in the same region for over 50 years.
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As an only child, her entire life is spent with her nagging mother, her perpetually downtrodden aunt and a gossipy extended family who, in the spirit of the Victorian middle class, treat valency like a child.
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So Valency Sterling is told what to do everyday.
She is constantly being compared with her beautiful cousin, her only respite, hence the title.
Her only respite comes from daydreaming of her blue castle and the handsome men who would reside in it with her, along with, of course, immersing herself in nature as all Montgomery's female protagonists do as she did, which we will see as we go along this episode.
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Unfortunately for Valency, and this is the call to action if you like, in the story, unfortunately she's diagnosed with a fatal heart ailment.
When she goes for a check up and believing she has very little time left to live, she decides to break free from the oppressive constraints and expectations of her family and make a life of her own.
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Take a listen.
It's a great story, not least of all because it champions the challenge, societal expectation on women and the commitment to courage and authenticity that she has.
So it's a heartfelt story of somebody who decides to take life into her own hands at a time when women just did not do that.
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And because of this, it was, incidentally, it was banned in some places because of its critique of societal expectation.
This challenge of traditional gender roles were seen as racy and inappropriate by some parents, teachers and librarians.
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So all the more reason to listen along.
And of course, if you're into short Canadian romance, I hope you will like my latest short story, Return to Comedy Lake.
It's a two-part short audio drama set in a small Canadian town in the Edwardian era.
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So take a listen to that too.
And so we will begin.
The topic of the day, as I said, is stoic labelling of our emotions to protect our inner peace.
As we know, Stoicism is not about suppressing feelings, but we are seeking to understand them.
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Why?
So we can realise any underlying judgements that we create about external forces, things we come into contact with.
So we're looking at emotional reactivity and how we can empower ourselves to avoid this where at all possible.
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This is a practice of cognitive restructuring.
We are trying to reprogram and avoid negative patterns that we have created for ourselves.
And in so doing, we are seeking to identify the external event through labelling, identify that thing that has triggered us and analyse our internal judgement of the event to determine if our emotional reaction is proportionate to the event itself.
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And that's the key here is our reaction proportionate to what happened.
So as Stoics, we believe our emotions are not just raw feelings, but the result of our judgements we have made and are making about the world.
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We don't want to get into the habit of judging in different things external forces as something that are inherently good or bad.
It is better for our inner peace if we are quite pragmatic and understand, as the Stoic masters would say, these external forces are indifference.
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And by naming the reaction, by labelling the emotion we experience when we come across external forces that trigger us, we can create this psychological distance from it.
And that moves us from a state of being reactive to being able to observe the situation objectively, which is what we're trying to do.
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And that protects our inner peace.
This was something Ellen Montgomery was very good at.
So as a writer, she used journals as a way to compartmentalise, at times overwhelming emotional reactivity.
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And she experienced this often.
She suffered with poor mental health.
She struggled and so did her husband.
So she had a lot of challenges and she used her journals as empowering tools to be able to cope with those.
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And of course, Nature, or as she labeled them, the Nature Rambles.
They were the key to the de escalation of her depressive episodes.
And they featured so significantly in the works we read and love that I it would be remiss of me not to mention that.
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So let's just remember Montgomery's journaling.
Montgomery's efforts to empower herself were a huge shift from the Victorian era.
The idea that she would spend more time in nature, go outside and take control of her well-being was practically unheard of.
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Women were confined by society to the home.
They were encouraged to stay inside, whereas men were encouraged to develop beyond the restriction of the familial setting.
And this was a great time for women, the early 20th century, because it marked the change.
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Suddenly there was an emergence of the new woman and cycling, tennis, swimming, rowing, golf and so on were becoming more socially acceptable.
So she was on the cusp of this.
And of course, that pushed against fashion constraints.
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So then eventually women were more able to adopt practical, less restrictive attire.
So all of the movements culminating in this big societal change.
So let's have a look at her journal from her Cavendish years, where she makes an account of the stroll she took a day after what she labels as her white knight.
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This label she used to give a knight of intense insomnia, anxiety and deep existential anguish a name to compartmentalise it and understand it.
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She is quoted as saying, This evening I went for a walk in Lover's Lane to exorcise my evil spirit.
It was efficacious as usual.
Somewhere in me, the soul of me rose up and said, no matter for these troubles and problems that look so big and black in the night, they are mortal and they will pass.
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I am immortal and I will remain so.
We can see here this transformative influence she believes that nature has on her psyche.
And we can see an attempt to label this emotion as a reaction to something.
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That quote looks so big and black in the night.
She's asserting this is just an emotion.
It's in the past and she will call it such.
She will name it an evil spirit that is separate from her that she must exorcise.
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She is not owning the emotion.
She is placing it at a distance and saying I'm labelling this, this is a white knight.
This is a difficult period, but it's not me.
So in this way she's detaching herself from the ownership of the emotion and creating distance between it.
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This is a very affecting coping mechanism.
She used it a lot.
So we can assume here that she understands the label.
White knight is a way of compartmentalising this external force, this force being something that happens to her but that is not her rational self.
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She's displaying A measured understanding of what's happening, even though when she is consumed and in the white knight she finds it hard to see a way out.
So by using her journal, by rationalising it after the fact, she can cope and further understand and come to accept when these triggers happen, how she can deal with that.
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And I suggest here that she, by using this powerful imagery of immortality, she said they are mortal and will pass the troubles and problems.
I am immortal and will remain.
By using this imagery, she's enabling herself to rise above and beyond the emotional reaction, albeit after the fact.
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So when she's consumed by this, when this is her depressive episode, she understands.
I can't see a way out, but I know there will be an end to it.
I will be able to.
I am labelling it, and I will be able to understand when my head's clear.
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This is separate from me, and of course as we know if any of us have had depressive episodes or periods of great disbelief or fear or trauma, these episodes take patterns and we can come to recognise those patterns through stoic labelling.
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So she's enabling herself to rise beyond the emotional reaction, albeit after the fact.
Through her journal in June of 19-O2, she recounts, I had a white knight last night.
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I don't often have them now.
I generally have a firm enough grip on myself to choke back all promontory symptoms and go to sleep like a philosopher.
But last night, somehow the floods overwhelmed me again.
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By labelling these episodes white Knights, she's creating the space to look at the reaction and measure it against her calm, rational self that she can exhibit when she's immersed in nature.
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And this is my point here.
To label the emotion.
To label the reaction is to create a juxtaposition between moments, to create distance in order to compare and gain understanding of our emotional reactions.
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For further clarity, Montgomery frequently used her journals to meticulously label, analyse and document her emotions which acted as a therapeutic, self distancing and at times self silencing mechanism to manage intense experiences of depression and anxiety.
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This practice of writing it down allowed her to objectify her internal state, create a detachment between her true self and the overwhelming emotion, and we can use this as a great starting point for our own journey.
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If we learn to name our feelings, we can observe them rather than just feel them.
If we can label what we are expressing, we can create a distance between ourselves and the emotion itself.
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Montgomery's journals were not just Diaries, but they were detailed records of her mental health struggles.
She documented her highs and lows.
She labeled them as such.
And this helped her make sense of her internal landscape.
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And it's very, very helpful for us every day, whether we struggle with mental health issues or not.
An empowering tool that we can use to indeed document how we feel at any given time, she is quoted as saying.
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For a woman to be independent, she has to cloak her real self under an assumed orthodoxy.
So of course, during this time, there are so many expectations put up on women.
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And what she's saying here in her journal is, I understand that in order to be my true self, I have to accept this expectation, but I can empower myself quietly, individually, separately.
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So she's using her writing to separate her public dutiful persona from her inner intense self.
And this is what I always say, do not deny the emotion.
You can use it to fuel your artistic endeavours.
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You can use it to manage everyday expectations and as I said last week, purposes whilst maintaining this rational exterior.
Now you may say that's inauthentic, but as mentioned last week, we have roles and purposes we undertake and they require a certain level of rationality in order to effectively carry them out.
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So using our journals, using the tools given our Stoic tools, we can create a distance and so then maintain external reaction and protect our inner peace.
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And what is Stoic philosophy take on this?
Well, it emphasises observing emotions as temporary external impressions rather than identifying with them, which is what Montgomery did.
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Name the feelings to reduce their power.
And this is a technique similar to modern cognitive behavioural therapy.
So how do we do this everyday ourselves?
We can acknowledge what Stoics called first movements, blushing, shaking, sudden pang of fear.
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We can acknowledge them as involuntary natural reactions.
The goal is here to label them before they become uncontrollable.
Learn to read the signs.
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Learn to recognise our behaviours.
Empower ourselves to understand more about what triggers us.
So note the physical sensation and say it to yourself.
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Make a conscious decision to say it.
I'm feeling a tightening in my chest.
I'm feeling afraid and then rationalise that.
But this is just an impression.
I'm feeling it but I don't have to agree with it.
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And then we question that judgement that might come up.
And this is how I started this week's episode by saying we're making judgements and we have to understand they are just judgements and they are not necessarily the truth.
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So what am I assuming from this physical sensation, this reaction?
Am I assuming that there's something evil going on, something's terrible's going to happen?
Is it truly bad?
Or is it just inconvenient to me?
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Again, maintaining a sense of proportion.
So a proportional reaction to the external force.
An example, instead of saying I'm so angry that that person just cut me up in the queue, we can label that as saying I'm feeling anger, I'm judging, they've wronged me, but I'm not going to give in to this emotional reaction.
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I need to rise above it.
Instead of saying I'm devastated I've just lost my job, we can say I understand I'm going to be distressed.
Of course I am.
I'm going to believe all is lost.
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But I have to remind myself my job is an external force and indifferent and my inner worth remains intact.
That is something separate from me.
It is not me.
It's something that I do now.
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I have to seek using my journal, be proactive in seeking a way forward, distance our self from anything that's coming up that might be irrational rage, terror, fear, intense jealousy.
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This stoic labelling is about having a calm, rational and virtuous mind that's not disrupted by external events.
And it's daily practice and that's why we use our journals.
So let's go on to the journal task for today.
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In our journals today, we're going to write down 4 notes.
Now, as I say, if you don't have your journal with you, you can come back to the exercise by tapping into the Female Stoic podcast wherever you hear podcasts over the week.
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Ahead, these four notes that we are about to write, we'll be related to any times we feel we are about to react disproportionately.
We're going to note down these four notes and read them, relate to them when we have experienced something and felt a disproportionate sense of rage via jealousy, etcetera.
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So what are the four notes?
Note #1 This is just an impression, it's not real, it's just my interpretation.
Note 2 was the external force within my control was what happened within my control.
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Note #3 What false belief is driving my reaction or was driving my reaction?
And note #4 How should I let the emotion pass?
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What significance should I give to it and how can I let it go?
Epictetus said.
You are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be.
What he's saying here is if you believe yourself hurt, you will be, but it is within your power of control as to whether you label yourself hurt or not.
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Practice then, said Epictetus, from the start to say to every harsh impression this is an impression.
You are an impression and not at all the thing you appear to be.
Then examine it and test it by the rules you have.
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Again, we are labelling the emotional reaction.
We are identifying it before it becomes too big, too large, too overpowering for us to deal with.
So to conclude today, say your emotions, speak them out loud.
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Identify them as Montgomery identified her white Knights, give them names, and then bid them farewell.
Don't forget to check in with my Montgomery tracks and I shall see you again next time.
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Bye.
Hey Stephanie here, thank you for listening to the Female Stoic podcast.
It is an honour and I just want to say I really appreciate you being here.
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It's amazing the power of women in literature and the stoic messages they have to share.
Please, if you can, return the favour by spreading their words and sharing this podcast far and wide so more of us can benefit from their wisdom.
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And don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard.
See you next time.
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