Inner Citadel essay

Hollings Therapy has published a new essay, “Inner Citadel: Stuff Cannot Touch the Soul,” extending a 2025 blog series that adapts Stoic ideas into therapy-style reflection. (hollingstherapy.com) The post appeared on Hollings Therapy’s blog about 29 minutes before it was indexed on April 22, 2026, under a category tied to *The Daily Stoic*. It defines a citadel as a fortress and uses that image to describe an inner place of security. (hollingstherapy.com) Hollings Therapy says the series is informed by Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, or REBT, and by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s 2016 book *The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living*. The site says the April 3, 2025 entry “The Daily Stoic” was the first post in that series. (hollingstherapy.com) That link matters because REBT, the therapy model Hollings says it practices, treats distress as shaped partly by beliefs and interpretations rather than events alone. Hollings Therapy says its staff received advanced REBT training from the Albert Ellis Institute and describes REBT as a method for addressing how beliefs affect emotions, physical sensations, and behavior. (hollingstherapy.com) Holiday and Hanselman’s book is built as a yearlong Stoic guide with 366 meditations, quotations, commentary, and exercises from writers including Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus. Hollings Therapy’s blog category says it uses that book as a guide but processes the material “as time permits” rather than on a daily schedule. (dailystoic.com) (hollingstherapy.com) The “inner citadel” phrase itself is a familiar Stoic shorthand for protecting judgment from outside events. Daily Stoic, Holiday’s site, describes it as an inner fortress drawn from Marcus Aurelius and the scholar Pierre Hadot, where choices, desires, and aversions remain under a person’s control. (dailystoic.com) Hollings Therapy has been publishing these short Stoic adaptations steadily since 2025. Posts including “A Stoic Journaling Routine,” “Speaking of Silence,” and “The Only Way Out Is Through, Not Back” carry the same disclaimer linking REBT practice to *The Daily Stoic* series. (hollingstherapy.com 1) (hollingstherapy.com 2) (hollingstherapy.com 3) The new essay keeps that format: a classical Stoic image, a practical mental-health frame, and a short exercise in separating what happens from what a person does with it. In Hollings Therapy’s version, the wall around the citadel is not the world outside; it is the line between outside events and inner judgment. (hollingstherapy.com)