Stoic half stories... Yeh, but how?

Person: it hurts when I lift my arm.
Stoic: then don't lift your arm.

https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/stoic-advice-i-want-a-child-but-i-cant-conceive/
http://modernstoicism.com/resistance-is-futile-stoic-counsel-about-externals-by-william-ferraiolo/

The stoics and Buddhist always say to let go of your desires, attachments, delusions for all sorts of problem, but they never go on to tell anyone how to do that. That is the real problem, we never learned to let go of anything out of our minds, our will. We fail at a lot of things because we have never learned to let go of desires. There in is the "real" problem.

So how did we get those desires anyway? Well we were told that those were good desires to have, or we, as youths, decided those were good desires. These are a collection of common cultural beliefs that we assimilated, and some are just wrong. These we foisted onto us by the well meaning but wrong culture; perhaps it was not what the elders tried to teach but it was what we learned. We assent to that belief and never realized the belief was wrong, just wrong. We assented to eating more because we wanted to grow large so that the little bastards would not harass us for being small; we ate to grow larger, to be able to withstand the bully.  We ate out of defense, we ate because the numbing effect of sugar high took the edge off the pain. Overeating became epigenetically fixed. No one ever took the time to teach us to unload learned behavior, wrong behavior in favor right behavior. It is not until the bully gets the shit beat out of them that many parents even realize there is a problem. Often the wrong problem gets fixed. Do not antagonist the bully, and let the bully have his way. This is the root cause of terrorism; everyone is afraid to offend the Muslims, when the right thing is for Muslims to learn to mind there own business. But nobody ever bothers to teach unloading of wrong beliefs and reloading of the correct beliefs.

We assented to the original preposition without understanding the consequence or testing to see if it is correct. Now we know, and we can call bullshit on the wrong proposition. So until the Stoics and Buddhist start teaching unloading, they are just beating their gums.

Now I have made a few hints at the process of unloading wrong beliefs. First we need to recognize desires, aversions, delusions, as beliefs that at some time in our past we assented to, and as such tuck these into our automatic decision making matrix. Next we need to recognize these as wrong, and this may also confirm the source. We need to become willing to let go of this belief, even if it was religion or parental based. Often identifying it as wrong is helpful. We may need to load a new correct belief in it's place. Eat only the correct amount, just enough to where you can stop eating. Or that desire was our parents, not ours. We are in control of our desires because we assent to them in the first place, and that makes us responsible.

Religions likes to load the gun for there own growth. Rational thought and behavior should trump all religions and belief systems, except when the belief system is rational and complete.  If we apply the legal standard laws of evidence, there is no god.

Some things are up to us and some are not. The main part of what is up to us is our assent to propositions. We are responsible for what propositions we accept, even wrong ones. When we realize they are wrong, we should unload these promptly, and load the correct ones.