Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Look first at the numerator. Is the assessment of her actual situation correct? Is she "always" late, or even usually late? She asks this question, and writes it in column 4. Now X realizes that she is very seldom late. She had told herself, "I'm always late", and then "I never do anything right", because she has a typical cognitive-distortion habit of depressives, generalizing to "always" or "everything" bad from just a single bad instance. She specifies this self-fooling device in the last column of the table.

Ms. X now can see how she has created a painful neg-comp unnecessarily. If she has any sense of humor she can laugh at how her mind plays silly tricks on her -- but tricks that make her depressed -- because of habits built up through the years, for reasons that are long in her past.

Notice how the pain of depression is removed by examining present thoughts. It might be interesting and useful to know how and why X developed the habit of over-generalizing from a single bad instance, but it is usually not necessary to have that knowledge. (Freudian doctrine erred fundamentally in this matter.)

It is worth mentioning that if you are usually late for meetings, you should re-arrange your life so that you get there on time. Depressives often fail to do this because, even when they acknowledge that they could change the situation so as to remove the causal event, they say they are helpless to change. Often the effort to get things right seems worse than the pain and sadness that getting it wrong produces; as long as a person feels this way, the person will continue to be depressed.

The analysis of X's actual-state numerator may be sufficient to demolish this painful neg-comp. But perhaps Ms. X is not easily convinced that she is playing the self-depressing mind game with her numerator that is shown in the table. People's capacity to fool themselves by using additional plausible- sounding distorted arguments is almost limitless. Therefore, let us go on to a second possible way to deal with this neg-comp, the denominator.

Ms. X agrees that her statement "I never do anything right" implies that others do better than she. Now she can ask herself, Do others really usually do things more right than I do? And is my benchmark comparison really appropriate? Hopefully she will see that this is not a correct assessment, and she is not on average a poor performer. Once more, she may come to see how her biased assessment of others is biased against herself, and hence will let go of the depressing neg-comp. And perhaps she will see the humor in this, too, which will help even more.

Table 10-1 shows still a third line of analysis. Is the dimension of Ms. X being late for meetings important and appropriate for her to rate herself upon? When she asks herself that question, she answers "No". Even if she is late for meetings, this does not mean that she is an incompetent person. And having realized this to be true, she can focus on other aspects of her life which are more important and on which she looks good to herself.

The analysis above provides three different tactics to deal with the neg-comp. Any one of these strategies may be appropriate and effective for a given circumstance for a given person. Sometimes, however, using more than one tactic increases your effectiveness in combating the neg-comp.

There are still other ways to address the problem Ms. X causes herself by telling herself "I never do anything right", and we will discuss them later. The important point emphasized now is writing down the analysis, as a way of forcing your thoughts out into the open so that you -- perhaps together with a therapist -- can analyze their logic and their factual support. The rest of this Part II of the book expands on this advice.

The moment just after awakening in the morning commonly is the bleakest, blackest of the day, depressives commonly say. Therefore, this moment is one of the most interesting to observe, just as it is one of the most challenging to deal with. It takes a bit of time, usually, to get one's morning thoughts directed onto a non-depressing path. This makes sense when you realize that when you first awake your thoughts have just been in the less-consciously-directed sleep state, which tends to be negatively-directed for depressives.

Can you really conquer depression by your own efforts, or do you need the help of a professional counselor? Many of us can do it alone, and if you are able to, you will gain great satisfaction and renewed strength from doing so. And nowadays you can have the assistance of Kenneth Colby's computer program OVERCOMING DEPRESSION, which comes with this book and is based on the principles of Self-Comparisons Analysis set forth in this book; experimental research shows that computer-based cognitive therapy does as well as therapy with a counselor (Selmi et. al., 1990), and avoids several possible dangers touched on below.

In the example above, Ms. X can conduct the analysis in Table 10-1 by herself. And if she does so, she will gain considerable satisfaction from it. But a trained therapist can be helpful in helping X unravel her patterns of thought, and may help her discipline herself to proceed through the analysis.

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