Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Geraldine [was] a highly intelligent and efficient thirty-three-year-old female client who came to see me (R.A.H.) about six months after she obtained a divorce. Although she had felt decidedly unhappy in her marriage to an irresponsible and dependent husband, she had gotten no happier since her divorce. Her husband had drunk to excess, run around with other women, and lost many jobs. But when she came to see me, she wondered if she had made a mistake in divorcing him. I said: "Why do you think you made a mistake by divorcing your husband?" "Because I consider divorce wrong," she replied. "I think when people get married, they should stay married." "Yet you do not belong to a religious group that takes that position. You do not believe that heaven somehow makes and seals marriages, do you?" "No, I don't even believe in a heaven. I just feel wrong about getting divorced and I blame myself for having gotten one. I have felt even more miserable since I got it than I felt when living with my husband." "But look," I asked, "where do you think your feelings about the wrongness of divorce originated? Do you think you had them at birth? Do you think that humans have built-in feelings, like built-in taste buds, that tell them how to distinguish right from wrong? Your buds tell you what tastes salty, sweet, sour, or bitter. Do your feelings tell you what proves right or wrong?" The young divorcee laughed. "You make it sound pretty silly. No, I don't suppose I have inborn feelings about right or wrong. I had to learn to feel as I do." Seeing a good opening, I rushed in where less directive and less rational therapists often fear to tread. "Exactly," I said. "You had to learn to feel as you do. Like all humans, you started life with tendencies to learn, including tendencies to learn strong prejudices--such as those about divorce. And what you learned you can unlearn or modify. 

So even though you don't hold fundamentalist faith in the immorality of divorce, you could have easily picked up this idea--probably from your parents, school- teachers, stories, or movies. And the idea that you picked up, simply stated, says: "Only bad people get divorces. I got a divorce. So I must qualify as a bad person. Yes, I must acknowledge my real rottenness! Oh, what a no-good, awful, terrible person!" "Sounds dreadfully familiar," she said with a rather bitter laugh. "It certainly does," I resumed. "Some such sentences as these probably started going through your mind--other- wise you would not feel as disturbed as you do. Over and over again, you have kept repeating this stuff. And then you have probably gone on to say to yourself: "'Because I did this horrible thing of getting a divorce, I deserve damnation and punishment for my dreadful act. I deserve to feel even more miserable and unhappy than when I lived with that lousy husband of mine. She ruefully smiled, "Right again!" "So of course," I continued, "you have felt unhappy. Anyone who spends a good portion of her waking hours thinking of herself as a terrible person and how much she deserves misery because of her rottenness (notice, if you will, the circular thinking involved in all this)--any such person will almost certainly feel miserable. If I, for example, started telling myself right this minute that I had no value because I never learned to play the violin, to ice-skate, or to win at tiddly-winks--if I kept telling myself this kind of bosh, I could quickly make myself feel depressed.

"Then I could also tell myself, in this kind of sequence, how much I deserved to feel unhappy because, after all, I had my chance to learn to play the violin or championship tiddly-winks, and I had messed up these chances. And what a real worthless skunk this made me! Oh, my God, what a real skunk!" My client, by this time, seemed highly amused, as I satirically kept emphasizing my doom. "I make it sound silly," I said. "But with a purpose--to show you that you act just as foolishly when you start giving yourself the business about your divorce." "I begin to understand what you mean," she said. "I do say this kind of thing to myself. But how can I stop? Don't you see quite a difference between divorce, on the one hand, and violin-playing or tiddly-winks, on the other hand?" "Granted. But has your getting a divorce really made you any more horrible, terrible, or worthless than my not learning to play the fiddle?" "Well, you'll have to admit that I made a serious mistake when I married such an irresponsible person as my husband. And maybe if I had behaved more maturely and wisely myself, I could have helped him to grow up."

"O.K., agreed. You did make a mistake to marry him in the first place. And, quite probably, you did so because you behaved immaturely at the time of your marriage. All right, so you made a mistake, a neurotic mistake. But does this mean that you deserve punishment the rest of your life by having to live forever with your mistake?"

"No, I guess not. But how about a wife's responsibility to her husband? Don't you think that I should have stayed with him and tried to help him get over his severe problems?"

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