Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression
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I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What
I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing
left.
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat,
drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things;
but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I de-
sired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied
my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy
come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have
known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt
something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by
former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I
could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of
what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.
I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till
I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was
nothing... ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible
to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close
my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but
suffering and real death--complete annihilation.1
Some writers use the term "existential despair" to describe
the same phenomenon.
A collapse in values often results from philosophical and
linguistic misunderstanding of such key concepts as "meaning" and
"life". These concepts seem obvious at first thought. But they
are in fact often obscure and misleading, both the concepts and
the words which stand for them. Making clear the confusion often
reveals the implicit values.
The sense of loss of meaning is usually followed by
depression, though it sometimes is followed by uncontrolled
elation or by a violent oscillation between the two poles. The
basic idea of this book, negative self-comparisons, explains this
phenomenon: Before the event, actuality and the person's values
were in balance or positive most of the time. But with the
removal of one's customary values there is no longer a basis of
hypothetical comparison for one's activities. Hence the result
of the comparison is indeterminate but very large in one
direction or the other, because there is no boundary to the
comparison. The comparison is more likely to be negative than
positive because the former values are likely to have been a
support for, rather than a constraint of, the person's activities
and life style.
VALUES CAN CURE THE SICKNESSES VALUES CAUSE
The most interesting curative possibility for collapse of
values is the discovery of new values, or the re-discovery of
neglected old ones. This is what happened to Tolstoy, when he
later came to believe that life itself is its own value, a belief
which he also thought characterized peasant life.
Values Treatment for collapse of values will be discussed in
detail in Chapter 18. We should here note, however, that though
values are interwoven from childhood into the very foundations of
a person's character and personality, they are nevertheless
subject to change as an adult. That is, values can be accepted
and rejected as a matter of personal choice, though one cannot do
so lightly and casually.
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