I think one of the biggest differences between Stoicism and cognitive therapy is that Beck believed “cognitive distancing” was an essential precursor to Socratic questioning, whereas the Stoics view it the other way around, they think philosophical arguments should be used mainly to achieve something resembling cognitive distancing, or separation of our false impressions from external events.

For example, arguing that external events cannot be intrinsically good or bad, but their value depends on the use we make of them, leads to suspension of value judgments of that kind. We still have the impression “This is awful”, that’s how it feels sometimes, but we view that impression as distorting reality by projecting value onto things that are inherently neutral.