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.

Mapping Out Your Wants

Your wants, goals, values, beliefs, preferences, or desires by any other name are a most complex subject for anyone. Counselors often ask people, "What do you really want?" This question tends to confuse and mislead the person of whom it is asked. The question suggests that (a) there is one most- important want that (b) the person can discover if she will only be sufficiently honest and sincere, the word "really" suggesting such honesty and truth. In fact there usually are several important wants, and no amount of "sincere" searching can determine which one is "really" most important.

The key point here is that we must aim at learning the structure of our many wants, rather than fruitlessly chasing after just one most-important want.

We must also recognize that our wants cannot easily be sorted out. Consider this curiosity: No matter how depressed a person is, he usually would not say that he would prefer to change places with other individuals who are not depressed, even super-happy or super-successful people. Why? Is there some deep confusion here about the meaning of "I" in the sentence "I would like to change places with X"? What can one make of this? Does it show some greater self-affection than we attribute to depression sufferers? Or is it simply the impossibility or meaninglessness of "changing places"? Would memories remain with the person after the change? Is there just a problem of misfitting, as a beggar would not prefer the clothes of a rich man if the clothes are a grossly bad fit to the beggar? I do not urge you to break your head on this curious question, but only to recognize that the structure of wants is more complex than a shopping list.

Behavior-modification therapy can offer help in Values Therapy by building the habit of interposing the discovered value in front of the depression-causing value whenever you feel sad.

The result of the values-discovery process may be that a person becomes "twice born," as in the cases described by William James. Clearly this is radical therapy, like surgery that implants a second heart in a person to aid the leaky and failing original heart.

What About Innate Wants?

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There is a school of thought--two prominent representatives of which are Maslow4 and Selye5--who believe that the most important and basic values are biologically inherent in the human animal. This implies that there are inherent goals which are the same for all people. For this school of thought the explanation of depression and other ills is that "life must be allowed to run its natural course toward the fulfillment of its innate potential."(6) Or in Frankl's words, "I think the meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected."(7) For Selye, one's innate potential is a capacity to do productive work with a feeling of success. For Maslow8 the potential is for "self-actualization," which is basically the state of freedom to experience one's life fully and enjoyably.

I think the better view is that though one's values and aims are inevitably influenced by the physical make-up of homo sapiens and the social conditions of human society, there is a wide range of possible basic values. And I think one will do better in discovering what one's own values are, and what they ought to be, by looking into oneself, rather than by looking at human experience in general and then deducing what one's basic values "really" are or ought to be.

The very fact that different observers such as Maslow and Selye point to different basic "innate" values should warn us of the difficulty or impossibility of making such deductions soundly. And if a person exhibits basic values that do not jibe with Maslow's self-actualization--for example, if a person sacrifices family for religion or country, and is never sorry afterward--Maslow simply assumes that this is not healthy and that the person will inevitably have to pay a price later on. But that kind of reasoning only proves what one wishes to prove. I prefer to accept the simple evidence of my eyes that people differ greatly in their values. I believe that neither I nor anyone else can determine which values are "inherent" and hence "healthy," and which are not.

I recommend, therefore, that you look into yourself--but with diligence and with the urge to find some truth--to determine what are your basic values and priorities. This is quite consistent with believing that a more fundamental source of one's values is outside oneself, of religious or natural or cultural origin.

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