Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 9

cont.

Benefits of Self-Pity

Self-pity is a pleasant substitute for pity from others. In turn another person feeling pity for you is pleasant because it is associated with the other person caring about you, and that caring is associated with loving you. Any lack of love of others may be the proximate cause of sadness, because of the close association between lack of parental love and neg-comps. (Notice how a parent expressing love for a child can banish a child's sadness. And a depressed adult is often conscious of the desire that a friend or spouse give comfort in the form of expressing sorrow.)

There is sound inner logic, then, in remaining depressed so that you can give yourself a reasonable substitute for the love of others that you crave. And this may act as a powerful attraction toward depression and a formidable obstacle to forsaking depression for happiness.

In this respect depression is similar to hypochondria, which elicits sympathy from others and provides an excuse not to exert oneself. Just as with hypochondria, the benefits of depression may seem greater than the costs.

The concept of self-comparisons is especially fruitful in analyzing self-pity. Consider these examples of external events upon which people fix their thoughts when they are in a self- pitying frame of mind:

Homely Sally pities herself because she does not have the advantages that come with being better looking; men therefore don't appreciate her other virtues, she tells herself. Unsuccessful poet Paul pities himself because magazines never publish his poetry, though they publish others' poems that are nowhere near as good as those he writes. Five-foot-seven-inch Calvin pities himself because, though he was a hot-shot basketball player in high school, no college would give him a scholarship due to his height, and he therefore never went on with his studies. Mother Tamara pities herself because two of her five children died.

Earlier I said that people enjoy self-pity. They get so much benefit from it that they are unwilling to stop feeling sorry for themselves even if the price of the self-pity is continued depression. But why should this be? What is there so pleasant in the nature of the examples given above that would make the thought desirable? Why would anyone want to go on pitying herself for losing two children to death, or because his poetry doesn't get published? We need an explanation in terms of neg-comps.

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The answer to this riddle is that in their self-pity people also make a positive self-comparison which gives them gratification. Poet Paul tells himself, while he is feeling sorry for himself, that he really is a better poet than many of those who do get their poetry published; that self-praise makes him feel good. At the same time, the thought that he is not getting what he deserves -- a negative self-comparison, please notice -- is making him feel sad. He flips back and forth from one thought and feeling to the other, getting pleasure from the self-praise and the positive self-comparison, and then getting sadness from the negative self-comparison.

Tamara tells herself that when her two children died, she got a worse deal from life and God than she deserves, a negative self-comparison which makes her sad. At the same time she reminds herself that she is a virtuous woman who did not deserve the blow, and she gets gratification from thinking of her virtue by comparison to other people.

Calvin gets pleasure from reminding himself what a hot-shot basketball player he was, while pitying himself for the opportunities he did not know. And Sally gets pleasure from thinking about her good mind and her fine character when pitying herself that because of her face men don't like her despite these virtues.

We can now understand how a person gets hooked on the self- pitying mechanism, just the way a person gets hooked on heroin, and why it is so hard to kick this habit. Self-pity exerts a fatal fascination. It is like the situations in experimental psychology called "plus-minus stimuli," stimuli that are neither only positive nor only negative, but rather are both negative and positive. The fatal fascination arises because you cannot obtain the benefits without suffering the costs. Paul cannot think how he is a good poet without also coming to think how his poems do not get published. And he cannot stop thinking about his publishing failure without giving up the pleasure of self-praise of his poetry.

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