Conquering Depression Enjoying Life - Self-Help Method for Recovering from Depression

Written by Julian L. Simon

The discovered value may lead you to accept yourself for what you and your limitations are, and to go on to other aspects of your life. A person with an emotionally-scarred childhood, or a polio patient confined to a wheelchair, may finally accept such a fact as fact, cease railing at and struggling against fate, and decide not to let these handicaps dominate but rather to pay attention to what one can contribute to others with a joyful spirit, or how one can be a good parent by being happy.

Value Therapy need not always proceed systematically. But a systematic procedure may be helpful to some. At the least it makes clear what operations are important in Value Therapy. Such a systematic procedure may be described as follows:

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

Step 2): Now order these desires according to their importance to you. One simple way to do this is to put numbers on each want, running from, say, "l" (all-important) to "5" (not very important).

Step 3): Now ask yourself whether any really important things 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 a reputation as a person who is helpful to others.

Step 4): Next, examine the list to see where there are conflicts, and/or if there are conflicts that 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 be working so hard for professional success that you are doing serious harm to your health, with depression as a result. Or--as was the case with me--the 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 but not at the top, is success in my work as measured by its impact upon the society. Yet in the past I had invested most of myself in my work. Furthermore, the results were not (at that time) a howling success in terms of their impact upon others, by my criteria. Therefore, thoughts about my work depressed me. This led to the discovery that if I am to live in accordance with my stated values and priorities, I must treat my work in some fashion that I do not let it depress me, for the sake of my children even if for no other reason.

In discussing other people's depressions with them, we usually discover some conflict between top-level values that demand that the person not be depressed, and lower- level values involved in causing the depression. The top-level value that life is a gift to be cherished and enjoyed is a frequent top-level value of this sort. More about that later.

Step 5): Take steps to resolve the conflicts between higher-order and lower-order values in such manner that higher-order values which require you not to be depressed are put in control. For example, if you recognize that too-hard work is injuring your health and depressing you, and that health is more important than the fruits of the extra work, you'll be more likely to face up to a decision to work less, and to avoid being depressed; a wise 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 can help once you take on this task. With respect to work, it is often useful 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. Still another device is to refuse to allow negative self- comparisons concerned with work to remain in your mind, either by pushing them out with brute force of will, or by training yourself to switch them off with behavior- modification, or with meditation techniques.

The result of the value-discovery process may be that a person becomes "twice born," by William James's term. This is radical therapy, like surgery that implants a second heart in a person to aid the leaky and failing original heart.

Values Therapy usually is not an easy and comfortable curve for depression. At the beginning, Values Therapy requires hard mental work and discipline, even with the aid of a counselor, in constructing an honest and inclusive graded list of what you want in life. After you have identified your most fundamental values, you remind yourself of those values whenever you start to make negative self-comparisons and get depressed. But it takes effort and dedication to keep reminding yourself of those values--just as it takes effort to remind another person of important matters when they are being forgotten. (The word "re-mind" is very precise.)

So staying undepressed with Values Therapy is not a piece of cake. But did you really expect otherwise? You'll have to judge for yourself whether the necessary effort is too high a price to pay for being free of depression.

More generally, all the techniques described here exact a price for overcoming depression. Many popular books promise that if you will just come to accept yourself, or just give yourself to God, or just love your neighbor with all your heart, you will immediately and miraculously and effortlessly go from sadness to bliss. Not likely. Such illusory promises can be destructive when they disappoint you. But if you are prepared to pay your dues, then you usually can overcome your depression.

Can You Fiddle Your Own Formula?

So, get your numerator straight, or change your denominator to one that produces positive comparisons, or choose other dimensions on which to compare yourself, or make no self-comparisons at all, or put your highest values in charge. Any or all of these devices may fit your situation and prove to be your own personal salvation.

But--can you climb out of depression by yourself, or must you have the help of a "doctor" to do it for you? I have been focusing on your capacity to help yourself. This is in contrast to the older psychoanalytical position that you are a patient who must have a therapist to "operate" on you. But all the newer scientifically-proven psychotherapeutic approaches and the psychological evidence agree in emphasizing the enormous possibilities for people to help themselves, to drag themselves up by their own bootstraps from depression, and thereby find new happiness.