Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

A child who loses a parent to death or divorce may re- experience the pain and sadness whenever, as an adult, the person suffers a loss in the widest sense--loss of job, loss of a lover, and so on.

Still another way in which loss of a parent may predispose a person toward depression is by simply making the person sad for a prolonged time after the event. That is, the child continually makes a negative comparison between (a) his present parentless situation, and (b) his former situation when the parent was alive (or to the situation of other children who still have parents.) In this way the child develops a pattern of making neg-comps, and being depressed from time to time, which may simply continue into adulthood.

Another theory of why early separation can cause depression is that attachment to the mother is biologically programmed just as are mating behavior and parenting behavior in animals. If the bond is absent, pain is caused, says this theory.2

What at important for us is that if the attachment is broken by separation, temporary depression may occur immediately, and the chance of adult depression goes up.

Punishment for Failure as a Child

Some parents punish their children severely for actions inside or outside the home which the parents do not approve. The punishment may be straightforward, such as spanking or loss of rights; or the punishment may be more subtle, such as withdrawal of the parent's love. Many children who are severely punished by their parents learn to punish themselves for lack of achievement, and they continue to do so in adulthood. This self-punishment increases the pain suffered from a negative self-comparison, and hence it intensifies a depression. This was my case until I realized what was happening and decided to change: When I was a child my mother would say to me, no matter how well I did in school or other test situations: "That's fine, but you can do better." I then felt (rightly or wrongly) that I was being reprimanded for not doing well enough. And as an adult, I cursed myself for each minor fault, feeling painful sadness at my perennial failure to reach perfection.

It was this pattern which -- after a precipitating event -- kept me in constant depression for thirteen years. One day I realized that there was no good reason why I should punish myself on my mother's behalf, no reason why I should speak her reprimands to myself. This was a major breakthrough in lifting my thirteen-year depression.

Though my sense of well-being came in a sudden rush, there had been hard work going on for weeks and months, along the lines of the program described in this book. And there is nothing miraculous about my continuing to stay free of depression, however; that is a matter of diligent effort which is sometimes so demanding that it seems too much to be worthwhile. I have trained myself to say, whenever the impulse to do so arises, "Don't criticize." And whenever I catch myself saying to myself "You idiot!", I have trained myself to smile at the nuttiness of the abuse that I heap on myself for the silliest reasons. So even though I am a depressive with a propensity to sadness which I must constantly fight in this and other ways to be described below, I live a life that is free of prolonged sadness and which includes joy and contentment, as described at length in the Epilogue.

My story also points up the importance of building new habits to counter the habits of self-criticism and low self- esteem that have been worn their ways into one's thinking over the years since childhood, the way wheels wear ruts into soft roads.

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