Step 4): Address your sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

It is an accompanying sense of helplessness that converts negative self-comparisons into sadness and eventually depression. Therefore, if you can acquire the attitude that you are capable of altering your life situation, rather than simply accepting it, you can reduce sadness. Tactics for dealting with helplessness are discussed in Chapter 17.

Step 5): Intervene in the depressed person's thinking with the aim of reducing negative self-comparisons and the sense of helplessness.

Let us assume that drug therapy will not be used for now. Yet something stronger than rest and distraction is necessary. The type of intervention must then be determined by the causes of the depression diagnosed in the previous steps. The chapters to come discuss specific ways of intervening for specific sorts of problems.

As a review and preview, here are the various ways of battling your depression: (a) Improve the numerator in your happiness ratio by altering your perception of the facts of your life. (b) Sweeten your ratio by changing the benchmarks you use for self-comparisons. (c) Change the dimensions on which you evaluate yourself. (d) Reduce the number of self-comparisons you make. (e) Diminish the sense of helplessness and increase your sense of competence to change your actual circumstances and hypothetical benchmark states. (f) Change aspects of your life that lead to negative outcomes. (g) Use Values Treatment.

Several sorts of interventions may be useful for any particular sort of cause. For example, one might intervene entirely in the present by creating habits to shut off the past, or one could also delve into the past to help relieve the problem. But one mode of intervention may be more efficient and successful than others.

Your past history, and especially your childhood, is almost inevitably involved in your depression. But the influence of the past can be relatively great or relatively little, and it may be relatively difficult or relatively easy to pry you loose from the relevant aspects of the past. The other side of this coin is that changing your present conditions may have greater or less influence, depending on the strength of the influence of the past on your mood.

An analogy may help. Consider a building's plumbing. A faucet that was installed some years ago is leaking badly. If the faucet was weak at the time of installation, then past events influence the present leak. If one can replace the faucet and thereby resolve the problem, the present situation can be effectively separated from its past, just as some habits people have can be changed in the present without further influence by the past that created the habit. But it may be that a new faucet will also go bad quickly because the rest of the plumbing that was installed years ago is defective and will ruin the new faucet. If so, the present leaky faucet problem cannot be separated from the past in a simple way, but rather the entire system created in the past requires inspection and repair. Just so with some kinds of contemporary behavior: a person may take herself out of one depressing situation and invariably find her way into another depressing situation because of some general tendencies created in the past.

This suggests that therapeutic strategy depends upon the continuing role of the person's past. That is why it is often (though not always) useful for you to know the cause of the present negative self-comparisons before deciding whether to concentrate on your present or your past. To paraphrase Robert Frost, "Find out why a fence was put up before you tear it down."

Step 6): Get into Action.

Two kinds of action are important: carrying out our self- curative plan, and participating in the worlds of work and of pleasurable life activity. Let's talk about them in that order.

Excellent self-knowledge and terrific plans by themselves will do you no good. Your plan of action will help you only if you carry it out. More specifically, this means that you must WRITE DOWN your thoughts and the analysis of them, as in Table 10=1. In many cases, it also means carrying out actions that will liberate you from hang-ups with respect to other people or with respect to phobias such as fear of elevators.

Yes, writing your thoughts requires effort. But this one thing only can I guarantee you: If you don't make at least some effort, you will either remain mired in your depression for a long time, or at the least you will remain in it for longer than you need to.

Two wise therapists put it this way:

We can't say this often enough: the major function of therapy is educational. To have therapy sessions or to read self-help books without practicing and without doing homework assignments is like attending lectures at school without reading or studying. It is like taking piano lessons without practicing. You may get something out of it but only a fraction of what you might otherwise have derived. Keeping a notebook, recording observations about your own thinking and behavior, and practicing new thinking and behavior are the best ways of changing.1

Again, writing your thoughts, and carrying out other curative actions, requires effort. This means laboriously hauling yourself uphill rather than sliding effortlessly downhill. Exerting effort requires expenditure of energy and will. It is a drag, a cost.

Now let's talk about the second type of action you must crank up, participating in the worlds of work and of pleasurable life activity. Even normal people do not readily expend the energy and will that they believe would be sensible for them in the long run--in exercising for fitness, for example. And depressives typically have an even greater propensity than do normal people for not swinging into action and doing the things that they believe they ought to do for their own well-being.

A few depressives, like me, are lucky enough to go in the opposite direction of working too much rather than too little. This has the benefit that when they finally come out of their depression, their lives are not blighted by the accumulation of problems caused by lack of work while they were depressed. I was lucky enough to enjoy my main work, writing and research, and to find it easy to do, and therefore it required little energy to stay at it. Indeed, the hours while I was writing were the only oasis in my life when I could concentrate on what I was doing and not be obsessed by my depressed thoughts. My too-strict work discipline, which is a problem for me in other ways, was also a benefit at this time.

next: Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 12