> In your book, you also write about the importance of following your own values — and that Stoicism is a personal choice.

> therapists today are increasingly encouraging clients to identify their true inner values and do things that serve those more fully. The big problem here is that most people don’t know what those values are.

It's important to remember that the Stoics did not encourage us to follow our own individual, personal values, or to look for them as some sort of "inner truth." Rather, they thought that value was objective, and that we should give up our existing values in favor of the correct ones (the ones in accordance with nature).

> It’s something they identify with at a deeper kind of more spiritual level, almost like a substitute for religion.

Well, it effectively was a religion, based on a fairly developed system of theology.