Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Skip this chapter about the effect of your history upon your depressive tendencies if you are impatient to get on to practical methods for overcoming your sadness. But come back later if you do skip now; this material should help you understand yourself better, and therefore help you deal with yourself better.

Childhood experiences are the colors with which the adult draws pictures of life. A typical case: M.'s father gave M. the impression that he never expected much of M. So M. spent the years until age 50 so hungry for achievement that he kept learning new occupations, and giving chunks of himself to the needy, while at the same time deriding all his achievements as those of an "overachiever".

The child builds patterns of behavior on her experiences as she lives them, even if the childhood experiences are not relevant to adult life. In the lingo of scientific research, the adult sees her latest experience as one observation in her lifetime sample of experiences.

A single traumatic childhood experience can leave a lasting imprint and predispose a person to adult depression. Or, none of the experiences may be traumatic yet their effect may be cumulative.

The early experiences may influence the adult's perceptions and interpretations of the adult's actual situation. Or they may work directly upon the self-comparison mechanism. They may also affect the adult's sense of being competent or helpless to improve her life situation.

Non-traumatic experiences which gain their force by accumulation can be repeated punishments, or parental directions about which self-comparisons the child should make, or which companions to associate with, or--perhaps most deeply rooted in the adult--goals and values implanted in the young child by the parent or other persons, or by his own reactions to people and environment. These matters will now be discussed one by one.

Death or Loss of a Parent

The classical Freudian explanation of depression is the death or disappearance of a parent, or the lack of parental love. Though it is probably incorrect that such an event has occurred to all depressives, it is likely that children who have suffered the loss of a parent are especially predisposed to depression.1

There are several ways that loss of a parent can cause depression. Children whose parents die often believe that they themselves caused the parents to die by some bad behavior or failure. Therefore, bad behavior or failure as an adult brings back the depressing feelings associated with great loss.

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