Values Therapy: A New Systematic Approach For Tough Cases

Values Therapy suits some tough cases of depression, where the cause of the depression is not obvious and easily altered. It may be especially suitable for a person who has suffered a severe shortage of parental love as a child, or experienced over- long grief following loss of a loved one as an adult.

Values Therapy is a more radical departure from conventional modes of fighting depression than are the tactics discussed earlier. Other writers have mentioned and used some of its elements in an ad hoc fashion, and have emphasized that depression is often a philosophical problem (e.g. Erich Fromm, Carl Jung, and Viktor Frankl). Values Therapy is quite new, however, in offering a systematic method of drawing upon a person's fundamental values so as to conquer depression.

Values Therapy is especially appropriate when a person complains that life has lost its meaning--the most philosophical of depressions. You may wish to re-read Tolstoy's vivid description of this state, in Chapter 6, as well as pages 000 to 000.

The Nature of Values Therapy

The central element of Values Therapy is searching within yourself for a latent value or belief which conflicts with being depressed. Bringing such a value to the fore then causes you to modify or constrain or oppose the belief (or value) that leads to the negative self-comparisons. Russell describes his passage from a sad childhood to happy maturity in this fashion:

Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire--such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other--as essentially unattainable.(1)

This is quite different from trying to argue away the sadness- causing way of thinking, which is the main approach of cognitive therapy.

The discovered value may be (as it was for me) the value that says directly that life should be happy rather than sad. Or it may be a value that leads indirectly to a reduction in sadness, such as the value that one's children should have a life-loving parent to imitate.

The discovered value may be that you are unwilling to subject people you love to the grief of having you respond to your depression by killing yourself, as was the case with this young woman:

My mother died seven years ago by her own hand...

I can't imagine what [my father] must have felt when he found her. I can imagine how my mother must have felt as she descended the stairs to the garage for the last time...

I know. I've been there. I tried suicide several times in my life when I was in my early 20s and was quite serious at least twice....Besides actually attempting suicide, I've wanted, wished and even prayed to die more times than I can count.

Well, I'm 32 now and I'm still alive. I'm even married and have moved from a secretarial position into entry-level management...I'm alive because of my mother's death. She taught me that in spite of my illness I had to live. Suicide just isn't worth it.

I saw the torment my mother's death caused others: my father, my brother, her neighbors and friends. When I saw their overwhelming grief, I knew I could never do the same thing she had done -- force other people to take on the burden of pain I'd leave behind if I died by my own hand. (2)

The discovered value may lead you to accept yourself for what you and your limitations are, and to 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 look facts in the face, cease railing at and struggling against their fates, and decide not to let those handicaps dominate their lives but rather to pay attention to what they can contribute to others with a joyful spirit. Of they may devote themselves to being better parents by being happy instead of sad.

A Five-Step Process of Value Transformation

Values Therapy need not always proceed systematically. But a systematic procedure may be helpful to some, at least to make clear what operations are important in Values Therapy. This is the outline of such a systematic procedure:

Step 1:

Ask yourself what you want in life -- both your most important desires as well as your routine desires. Write down the answers. The list may be long, and it is likely to include very disparate items ranging from peace in the world, to professional success, to a new car every other year, to your oldest daughter being more polite to her grandmother.

Step 2:

Rank these desires corresponding to their importance to you. One method is to put numbers on each want, running from "1" (all-important) to "5" (not very important).