That description makes the process seem much easier than it really is, of course. Focusing your mind upon your chosen values requires effort, often very great effort. Sometimes the required effort is so great that you cannot will yourself to make it, and instead you let yourself remain in the slough of despond. But the method of Values Treatment teaches you what has to be done, and gives you a reason for making the effort to do what must be done.

The depression-fighting value may be (as it was for me) the direct command that life should be joyful rather than sad. Or it may be a value that leads indirectly to a reduction in sadness, such as my value that my children should have a life-loving parent to imitate.

The discovered value may lead you to accept yourself for what you are, so that you can 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 the situation as fact, cease railing at fate, and decide not to let the handicap dominate. The person may decide to pay attention instead to what he can contribute to others with a joyful spirit, or how he can be a good parent by being happy.

Values Treatment need not always proceed systematically. But a systematic procedure may be helpful to some people, and it makes clear which operations are important in Values Treatment. In Chapter 18 I'll describe such a systematic procedure for Values Treatment.

Is This Magic?

Please let's get this straight: This book, and cognitive therapy in general, do not offer you an instantly-working formula that will transport you from misery to bliss without the slightest effort or attention on your part. In order to transform yourself from being sad to being joyful you'll have to give the problem your attention and some hard work--whether you do the work alone or with the help of a professional counselor. The work includes writing down and analyzing your thoughts, a tedious but invaluable exercise. If you picked up this book looking for a while-you-wait no-sweat miracle, put it right back down again.

Nevertheless I do offer you "magic." I offer you a new analytic way of understanding your depression, upon which you can build a rational, successful procedure for extricating yourself from your unhappy jam. And the cure need not wait for long years of psychotherapy, dredging up the details of your past life and reliving it all. If you do choose to get outside help, ten or twenty sessions with a therapist are par for the course, and insurance often pays most of the cost.

This is not a guarantee that you will succeed with this method. But it is a promise that a speedy cure -- faster than nature's usual regenerative processes -- is possible for a large proportion of depression sufferers. Understanding aspects of your past life may be helpful in figuring out how to reconstruct your present mental life. But cognitive therapy focuses on the present structure of your thinking, and on changing that structure so that you can live with it joyfully, rather than simply proceeding to examine your history in the faith that such an examination will eventually produce a cure.

Though I believe that this book offers the most powerful methods for overcoming your depression, I recommend as strongly as I can that you read other books as well. The more you learn, the greater the chances that you will stumble across sentences or thoughts or anecdotes which will be just the right triggers for you to understand and cure your own depression. The best books for laymen, in my opinion, are David Burns's Feeling Good and Albert Ellis's and Robert Harper's A New Guide to Rational Living. Both contain lots of practical suggestions, as well as dialogues between therapists and depression sufferers which demonstrate the processes involved in dealing with depressed thinking. Your reading of those books will be even better if you bring to them the Self-comparisons Analysis discussed in this book. It will render the ideas in the other books more specific, and easier to understand and put to work. And after you have worked your way through one or both of those books, you might like to study some of the other books, including some intended for professionals, named in the reference at the end of their book.

You may also find crucial nuggets of wisdom in the aphorisms and anecdotes which fill popular self-help books. The common- sense ideas in those books would not live on from generation to generation they it did not help a substantial number of people from time to time.

Making yourself happy when you have been depressed is a great achievement. That achievement can make you proud of yourself in addition to the relief from pain and the new joy it brings. I wish you the same success and joy that I have had in using this method.

Summary

The term "depression" means a continued state of mind with these central characteristics: (1) You are sad or "blue." (2) You have a low regard for yourself. In addition, (3) a sense of being helpless and hopeless is an integral part of the depression process.