"Normal" people alter their denominators rather flexibly in accordance with the implicit rule that the denominator should be chosen in such a manner as will make you feel good about yourself. That is, the psychologically-normal tennis player chooses opponents who provide an even match--tough enough to provide invigorating competition, but sufficiently easy so one can win enough to feel successful. The depressive personality, on the other hand, may pick a strong opponent who almost always wins. (A person with another sort of problem picks an opponent who is so weak that he or she provides no exciting competition.)

In the more important of our life situations, however, it is not as easy as in tennis to choose an "appropriate" denominator for the standard of comparison. A boy who is physically weak and un-athletic relative to his grammar-school classmates is stuck with that as a fact. So is the child who is slow at learning arithmetic. So is the big-boned thick-bodied girl. A death of a spouse or child or parent is another fact which one cannot deal with as simply as one can change tennis partners.

Though the denominator that stares at you in the mirror may be fact, this does not mean that misery is your inexorable fate. People change schools, start new families, or retrain themselves for occupations that fit them better than the old ones. They find ways to accept difficult facts as facts, and to alter their thinking so that the unpleasing facts cease causing distress. But some people do not manage to free themselves from denominators that hag-ride them into depression, and sometimes all the way to death by suicide or other depression-caused disease.

We must know, therefore, how and why some people appropriately adjust their denominators while others do not. Some people do not change their denominators because they are unaware--for lack of experience or imagination or flexibility--of relevant possibilities. For example, until he got some advice, three-time occupational loser Joe T. had never even considered an occupation for which his talent later enabled him to succeed. Others are stuck with pain-causing denominators because parents insisted that unless the child would reach certain particular goals--say, a Nobel prize, or becoming a millionaire--the child could consider her/himself a failure in the parent's eyes. Still others believe that attaining certain goals--curing others of illness, or making a life- saving discovery, or bringing up several happy children--is a basic value in itself, and should not be altered simply because it causes pain to the person who holds that goal. Still others feel that they ought to have a denominator so difficult to attain that it stretches them to the utmost, and/or keeps them miserable.

The worst possible denominator is the belief that you should be perfect in everything that you do. Associated with this denominator often is the belief that you have an obligation to remind yourself of every lapse by constant self-criticism, and that you ought to punish yourself for each such departure from perfection as a device to flay you into better performance.

If a denominator is killing or depressing you, I recommend that you proceed in these steps, which run from easier to harder:

(l) Ask yourself honestly whether you would like to change your denominator to one that will give you less pain, sadness, and depression.

(2) If your answer was "no" in Step l, go to Step 6. If you answer "yes", then consider whether you can change the objective conditions that give rise to the denominator that yields negative self-comparison.

(3) If changing jobs, colleagues, or what-have-you is not the answer for you, ask yourself whether your denominator--the benchmark standard to which you compare yourself-- is one that you feel you "must" retain. If you feel no such powerful "must", change the benchmark.

(4) If you feel that you are unable to change the benchmark standard of comparison by deciding to do so, and if the benchmark is general (such as a level of occupational achievement) rather than specific (such as producing as many insurance sales as the average man or the top man in your firm) then you might consider delving into your past to learn when and how you developed that denominator. Sometimes this historical adventure in psychotherapy leads to changing the denominator.

(5) If you do not wish to, or cannot, dig into your personal history to discover the roots of the troublesome denominator, or if after finding out the origins of the denominator through a search of your personal history you still prefer to hold onto the benchmark standard of comparison, then you may get tougher with yourself: You may demand and require of yourself that, by act of will and habit, you give up the old standards and instead compare yourself to standards that will make your comparisons positive rather than negative.

Shutting off the pain of depression would seem to be irresistibly attractive. But for many people this is not compelling, as we shall see later. Hence you must look for another reason for changing the denominator by brute force. The reason can be that there is something else which is very very important to you--say, the well-being of a beloved spouse or children--which is being injured by your negative self-comparisons. That is, the importance to you for that reason of making yourself happy for the sake of spouse and children can be sufficiently great so that you are willing to make the decision, and to do the work of implementing the decision, to change the denominator by force. (I myself might have taken this course of action, but I took a related but somewhat different course as I'll describe below.)

Can this actually be done? Of course it can be done, and it is done all the time. Think of the paraplegics confined to wheelchairs after accidents who take up wheelchair basketball, enjoy it vastly, and stoutly refuse to compare themselves to players who can run and jump when they play (or to themselves before the accident). Think of the Danish novelist who, if she wrote in a world language such as English, would be read by millions instead of by only a few thousands of her compatriots; she keeps herself cheerful thinking of the importance of bringing fine stories to a small number of people in their native language. Think about the postal clerk who, when lamenting his inadequate salary, forces himself to compare that salary to his father's laborer's wage, and to the wages of postal clerks in Asia and Africa.

(6) If your response in step (l) was "no"--as it is for a surprising number of persons--ask yourself whether you don't work to change denominators because (a) you want to feel pain, or (b) because you think that the denominator you now have is so important in itself that you feel you should not allow yourself to change it just for your own well- being. If you want to feel pain, perhaps it is because you think you ought to feel pain because you are so "bad". This may turn out to be a problem in improving your numerator, finding out that you are not "really" as "bad" as you think you are when you objectively assess your supposed sins and the sins of other people.

If you don't want to change denominators because you believe that the denominator reflects your most basic values, then continue to step 7.

(7) If none of the foregoing devices for giving you a more livable denominator seems promising for you, then perhaps you will most successfully battle your depression by changing dimensions of comparison, or by reducing the number of comparisons, or with the help of Values Therapy. These tactics will be discussed in succeeding sections.