Illeism #1965

In our last few +1s, we’ve been hanging out with Donald Robertson and his buddy Socrates.

We’re going to continue our exploration of wisdom from his new book.

Let’s get straight to work.

Donald tells us: “A closely related method involves referring to our own thoughts and actions as if we were talking about those of someone else. Third-person self-talk is known as ‘illeism’ (pronounced ILL-ee-ism), from ille, the Latin pronoun for ‘he.’ We don’t even need to use our imagination for this, just our words. For example, rather than thinking ‘I’m really upset and don’t know what to do!’ (in the first person), I might say to myself ‘Donald is really upset and he doesn’t know what to do!’ (in the third person).”