Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 18

cont.

A Five-Step Process of Value Transformation

Values Therapy need not always proceed systematically. But a systematic procedure may be helpful to some, at least to make clear what operations are important in Values Therapy. This is the outline of such a systematic procedure:

Step 1:

Ask yourself what you want in life -- both your most important desires as well as your routine desires. Write down the answers. The list may be long, and it is likely to include very disparate items ranging from peace in the world, to professional success, to a new car every other year, to your oldest daughter being more polite to her grandmother.

Step 2:

Rank these desires corresponding to their importance to you. One method is to put numbers on each want, running from "1" (all-important) to "5" (not very important).

Step 3:

Ask yourself whether any really important wants have been left off your list. Good health for yourself and your family? The present and future happiness of your children or spouse? The feeling that you are living an honest life? Remember to include matters that might seem important when looking back on your life at age seventy that might not come to mind now, such as spending plenty of time with your children, or having the reputation as a person who is helpful to others.(3)

Step 4:

Look for the conflicts in your list of wants. Check if conflicts are resolved in a manner that contradicts the indications of importance that you accord to the various elements. For example, you may put health for yourself in the top rank, and professional success in the second rank, but you may nevertheless be working so hard for professional success that you are doing serious harm to your health, with depression as a result.

In my case, future and present happiness of my children is at the top of the list, and I believe that the chance that children will be happy in the future is much better if their parents are not depressed as the children are growing up. Close to the top for me, but not at the top, is success in my work as measured by its impact upon the society. Yet I had invested so much of myself in my work, and with such results, that my thoughts about my work depressed me. It therefore became clear to me that if I am to live in accordance with my stated values and priorities, I must treat my work in some fashion that it does not depress me, for the sake of my children even if for no other reason.

In my discussions with others about their depressions, we usually discover a conflict between a tomp-level value which demands that the person not be depressed, and one or more lower- level values that are involved in depression. The goal that life is a gift to be cherished and enjoyed is a frequent top-level value of this sort (though, unlike such writers as Abraham Maslow, Fromm, Ellis, and others, I do not consider this to be an instinct or a self-evident truth). More about this later.)

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Step 5:

Take steps to resolve the conflicts between higher-order and lower-order values in such manner that higher- order values requiring you not to be depressed are put in control. If you recognize that you are working so hard that you are injuring your health and additionally depressing yourself, and that health is more important than the fruits of the extra work, you will be more likely to face up to a decision to work less, and to avoid being depressed; a wise general physician may put the matter to you in exactly this fashion. In my case I had to recognize that I owe it to my children to somehow keep my work-life from depressing me.

Many sorts of devices may be employed once you address yourself to a task such as this one. One such device is to make and enforce a less-demanding work schedule. Another device is to prepare and follow an agenda for future projects that promises a fair measure of success in completion and in reception. Another device is to refuse to allow negative self-comparisons concerned with work to remain in the mind, either by pushing them out with brute force of will, or by training yourself to switch them off with behavior-modification techniques, or by meditation techniques, or whatever.

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