Sweetening Your Denominator

Remember that when told that life is hard, Voltaire asked, "Compared to what?" One's actual state, almost no matter how bad it is in objective terms, can only cause sadness when you compare it to some benchmark hypothetical state of affairs, the denominator in your self-comparisons Mood Ratio.

Whether a self-comparison is positive or negative depends on the benchmark standard of comparison as well as the perceived facts of your life. (The latter was discussed at length in Chapter 12.) Many cases of depression can best be attacked by changing the benchmark state. This chapter discusses how that may be done.

People we consider "normal" tend to adjust their denominators flexibly in such fashion that they will feel good about themselves. They seem to do this almost automatically, but in fact they may give considerable thought to the process, and the change may require a fair amount of time and pain to accomplish. Nevertheless, non-depressives people do alter their denominators when necessary for their well-being. In contrast, depressives--people with a propensity for depression--usually have a tendency to hang onto their denominators even when afflicted by them.

People are not wholly free to alter their denominators for the sake of emotional comfort. A woman who has trained to be a professional tennis player cannot reasonably take much pleasure from entering local club tournaments and doing well. An even stranger case: a man who was paralyzed in an accident should not expect to have no unusual difficulty in maintaining a merry mood. A dog may be unaware of having lost a leg and hopping peculiarly on three legs, but humans almost surely have a consciousness of their situations that dogs do not have. One can try to use the facts as they are; the paraplegic may focus on his courage in meeting his terrible fate with fortitude. He may even get satisfaction from participating in wheelchair athletics. But this is not the equivalent of not being paralyzed.

This is true in one's occupation as well. If one is striving to make a great scientific discovery but so far without success, it is almost impossible to maintain total serenity as the results continue to be negative, and as others are making better progress.

Depressives can use the following systematic procedure to alter their denominators: (1) First, grasp the importance of the denominator in the Mood Ratio as the standard of comparison. (2) Then, accept that your denominator can be changed, and that you can change it, though of course you may decide not to do so. (3) Next, consider whether you are willing to change your denominator, that is, whether you are willing to exert the effort as well as give up any rewards (including the benefits of depression) that you obtain for yourself from the old denominator.

This procedure for helping you change your denominator to one that will produce fewer negative self-comparisons is described in this chapter. Chapter 18 discusses Values Treatment, which is a more radical procedure for changing your denominators and other aspects of your self-Comparisons Mood Ratio.

Altering Your Goals and Aspirations

The standard of comparison in a denominator may be (a) your former state; or (b) the state in which you think you ought to be; or (c) the condition in which you wish to be; or (d) what a peer is; or e) it may be a goal that you aspire to achieve. Because achievement goals and workaday failures are so commonly implicated in depression in our modern society, let us take them as our examples for discussion here.

William James vividly described how it feels to be depressed about such perceived failures:

Failure, the failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.(1)

Aspirations and achievement goals have a particularly important place in the depressions commonly found in a modern society because success in one's occupation is so important in the evaluation of a person by others and by himself. Hence the comparison between, on the one hand one's actual achievements, and on the other hand the attainments to which one aspires, frequently results in negative self-ratings and consequent sadness. Even if an individual has no special reason to compare herself negatively in this way, but has some generalized need to compare herself negatively on some dimension, success is the dimension she will probably pick in a modern, mobile, profession- oriented society.

Therapists and medical doctors faced with depressed (and also anxious) patients have often advised the person to lower or change her goals, even though it has not been part of their theory. For example, psychoanalyst Rubin reports:

My depressed patient eventually learned that her depression was always linked to personal dissatisfaction with herself, to seeming "failures." ... She eventually also learned that her self-hate was connected to impossible standards, which required considerable reduction to realistic human levels and possibilities...She became aware that to block depression successfully she must realize first that she was depressing and putting down angry feelings and thoughts about herself and others.(2)

The tactic of changing one's standards derives directly from the view of depression embodied in the self-comparisons Mood Ratio: Sadness and depression result from an unfavorable comparison between a person's actual and hypothetical states. The theory and the practice fit perfectly with each other.