An example: Wanda L. did not get much affection or respect from people in her work or personal life, other than from her husband and children. There were no obvious objective facts to explain this; she is a productive and talented worker, a very decent person, and not personally unpleasant. But a wide variety of aspects of her personality and behavior apparently combine to lead others to distrust her or not seek her out or to choose her for positions of responsibility.

Wanda can accept the situation as it is, not dwell on it in her thinking, and hence reduce the amounts of negative self- comparisons and sadness. But if she does that, she will not be able to study and analyze herself to change her behavior so as to improve her relationships.

Which should Wanda choose to do? The decision is like that of a business investor who must guess at the chances that the investment will pay off. So there is a price for Wanda to "accept" herself as she is. The price is foregoing the chance of changing her life. Which is the better choice in this trade-off? That is a tough decision--and a choice that is ignored in the usual self-help books. And this makes those simplistic books, and their promises of quick and free miracles, unrealistic and ultimately disappointing.

Whereas this book focuses mostly on changes in how you think, this example focuses on changing the actual state of affairs so as to produce a more Rosy Ratio. But the underlying principle is exactly the same: reduce the negative self- comparisons.

Table 10-1

Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 Uninvited thought Causal Event Self-Comparison "I never do anything Late for a I do fewer things right right." meeting than do most people. Column 4 Column 5 Analysis Response Numerator: Are you usually late for meetings? Almost never. Denominator: Do most other people do most things more "right" than you do? Not really. Dimension: Is your timeliness at meetings an important aspect of your life? Of course not. Column 6 Behavior you wish to change Inappropriately generalizing from a single instance to your entire life. Biased assessment of what other people are like, making you look bad. Focusing on a dimension which a) you need not attribute importance to, and b) does not reflect well upon you.

Summary

This chapter begins the section of the book that discusses ways to overcome depression and the sadness-creating mechanisms that the earlier chapters discussed. The understanding of depression provided by cognitive therapy and Self-Comparisons Analysis is an exciting advance over the older ways of dealing with depression. But this new theory also shows that there is more to understanding depression than a single magical button. Instead, you must do some hard thinking about yourself. Whether you have the help of a psychotherapeutic counselor, or fight your depression by yourself, the battle takes effort and discipline.

Self-Comparisons Analysis teaches that your negative self- comparisons, together with a sense of helplessness, cause your sadness. Obviously, then, you will have to eliminate or reduce those negative self-comparisons in order to banish depression and achieve a joyful life. But with the possible exception of drug therapy or electroshock, every successful anti-depression tactic requires that you know which depressing thoughts you are thinking. Cognitive therapy also requires that you monitor your thinking in order to prevent those self-comparisons from entering and remaining in your mind. Writing down and analyzing your depressed thoughts is a very important part of the cure.

The first step in every tactic is to observe your thoughts closely when you are depressed, analyze which negative self- comparisons you are making, and write them down if you can make yourself do so. Later, when you have learned how to keep depression at bay, an important part of your continuing exercise will be to identify each negative self-comparison before it gets a firm foothold, and pitch it out of your mind.

You may have to straighten out some misapprehensions or confusions that customarily depress you. You may need to re- think your priorities. It may even help to search your memory for some childhood experiences. Perhaps hardest of all, you may have to study how you misuse language, and how you fall into linguistic traps.

One may seek the help of a counselor or choose to tackle depression by yourself. Self-cure certainly is feasible. The simple fact is that all of us, all the time, make and carry out decisions about how our minds will act in the future. We decide to study a book, and we do so. We focus our attention on doing this or that, and we do it. We are not beyond our own control.

The help of a counselor clearly can be valuable. But finding a counselor who meets your needs is not easy. Depression is a profoundly philosophical disease. A person's most basic values enter into depressive thinking. On the one hand, values can cause depression when they set up over-demanding and inappropriate goals, and therefore a troublesome denominator in a Rotten Mood Ratio. On the other hand, values can help overcome depression. Helping you deal with such issues requires a depth of wisdom which is not learned in school, and which is too seldom in any of us. But without such wisdom, a therapist is useless or worse

Depression is also a philosophical matter when it arises from disorder of logical thinking and misuse of linguistic

Self-comparisons Analysis makes clear that many sorts of influences, perhaps in combination with each other, can produce persistent sadness. From this it follows that many sorts of interventions may be of help to a depression sufferer. That is, different causes--and there are many different causes, as most psychiatrists have finally concluded, call for different therapeutic interventions. Furthermore, there may be several sorts of intervention that can help any particular depression. Yet all these interventions may be traced to the "common pathway" of negative self-comparisons.

Self-comparisons Analysis points a depression sufferer toward whichever is the most promising tactic to banish the depression. It focuses on understanding why you make negative self-comparisons, and then develops ways of preventing the neg- comps, rather than focusing on merely understanding and reliving the past, or on simply changing contemporary habits. With this understanding you can choose how best to fight your own depression and achieve happiness.

next: Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 11