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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 12

cont.

If you can get yourself into this active mode and make improvements in the work, it will have the additional beneficial effect upon your mood that your activity will oppose your helplessness. And reducing the sense of helplessness reduces the sting of sadness, and the consequent pain, from self-comparisons. All this fits together with the discussion at the end of the last chapter about carrying out your plan of action.

4. Build the habit of assessing your numerator correctly. Here we may take full advantage of recent advances in cognitive therapy, which teaches you how to avoid misinterpretations and misconstructions of your situation that cause negative self- comparisons. A person may incorrectly gather or process the data about one's life, as for example, when I say "My writings are lousy" in response to one of my writings being ignored, without trying to remember those of my writings that have been successful. Or a woman may say "I'm a klutz" when she spills a bottle of beer, without remembering that she is actually a skilled professional ballet dancer. Or, after your suggestion for improving a machine is rejected by your boss, you may fail to analyze why the suggestion was rejected, and then take stock of further possibilities. That is, you may act like an unskilled and/or incompetent researcher into the facts of your situation, reaching unsound conclusions because of poor research habits or insufficient knowledge.

Simple habit-training, such as learning to say "I'm really the greatest" every time the world pans your work, is not likely to succeed in case like this one. But coming to see the flaws in your method of gathering and processing information about how good your work is, and how well it is received, can sometimes reduce unfavorable self-comparisons.

An important common problem is generalizing from a particular trait to your whole life situation. The person who is not good at school work generalizes to "I'm no good at anything." This misunderstanding is seen in the famous cartoon about Adlerian inferiority-complex psychotherapy. The psychiatrist is shown saying to the patient, "I'm very sorry, Mr. Smith, but you really are inferior." But there is no logical connection between a low relative standing in school work, or piety, or any other single dimension, and a person's relative worth as a whole person. Becoming aware of this logical error can remove the source of pain for many.

Thinking Clearly About Your "Numerator"

Interpretation of depressives' numerators are similar to the fallacies that logicians have taught about for centuries, which are also similar to the biases that cause difficulties in scientific research. The problem is a universal one: how to think clearly.

Peter L. is a social scientist who does research which is usually ahead of the times. Sometimes a piece of his work is at first neglected, but later it usually catches on and is successful. But he always gets depressed when the research is first published and receives a cool reception. He would be depressed less if he would take into account the possible long- run effects of his work, even if those effects are now uncertain, rather than ignore them entirely and focus on the short-run neglect.

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Cognitive therapy aims to teach Peter how to think more realistically in this regard. But if your past history continues to lay a heavy hand upon you in such manner that you feel that you must find negative self-comparisons for yourself, or you must choose dimensions of comparison which show you in a bad light, then cognitive therapy will not succeed.

Now let's exercise the theory. We begin with the same analysis of uninvited thoughts that was introduced in Chapter 10. Refer again to Table 10-1, and notice the first line of the analysis which refers to changing the numerator of the woman who says "I never do anything right".

Consider Nancy who says "I am a bad mother".2 First she writes that uninvited thought in column 1 Table 12-1 below. Next she writes in column 2 the causal event just preceding that invited thought, a note from the teacher saying that one of her sons was having difficulty in school. Next she writes in column 3 the underlying self-comparison, which is that she is "less effective than other mothers".

Table 12-1

Now Nancy is ready for the analysis in column 4, asking "Is it true that I spend less time with my children, and less time working with them, than do most mothers? " Phrasing the question in this concrete fashion leads her to review her behavior. She also asks, "Are all or most mothers more skilled and more attentive to their children than I am?". This and the first question lead her to do a mental survey of the mothers whom she knows, and check out the statements. And as in so many cases, the facts that are known to her do not support the generalization that she had made in the absence of an examination of the data. If anything she spends too much time with her children, and she works with them on their schoolwork very actively -- certainly as much as the average mother.

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