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Page 6 of 7
The Role For A Counselor
A counselor can certainly help many people in their struggles to get their values in order and hence overcome depression. The counselor's role here is that of good teacher, clarifying your thoughts for you, helping you concentrate on the task, pushing you to stay at it rather than running away from the hard work. For some people who lack the discipline and mental clarity to do their own Values Therapy, a counselor may be indispensable. For others, however, a counselor may be unnecessary or even a distraction, especially if you cannot find a counselor who will help you do what needs to be done for you. Too many therapists insist on doing what they are accustomed to doing, or cannot work within your value structure but insists on inserting their own values into the process.
Other drawbacks of working with a therapist are discussed in Chapter 00. Before you try a therapist, you might first consider working with the computer program OVERCOMING DEPRESSION that comes free with this book.
Making It Happen
Is Values Therapy an easy and comfortable cure for depression? Usually it is not, just as all other anti-depression tactics require effort and stamina. At the beginning, Values Therapy requires considerable mental hard work and discipline, even with the help of a counselor, in constructing an honest and inclusive graded list of your desires in life. After you have decided which are your most fundamental values, you must remind yourself of those values when you start to make negative self- comparisons and get depressed. But it takes effort and dedication to keep reminding yourself of those values--just as it takes effort to remind another person of important matters when they are being forgotten.
So staying unrepressed with Values Therapy is not perfectly easy. But did you really expect otherwise? As the lady said, I never promised you a rose garden. You'll have to judge for yourself whether this is too high a price to pay for being free of depression.
The list of steps given above for Values Therapy may seem pedestrian (a modest play on words, for which I trust you will forgive me) because it is stated in simple, operational terms. You may also assume that this procedure is standard and well- known. In fact, Values Therapy as embodied in these operational steps is quite new. And I hope that you will consider the procedure seriously if other procedures have not managed to overcome your depression. I also hope that theoreticians and empirical workers in psychology will recognize the newness of this approach and will consider it with some gravity, even though it is not simply an extension of the approaches they are accustomed to.
Postscript: Values Treatment As Upside-Down Spectacles
Depressives see the world differently than do non- depressives. Where others see a glass as half-full, depressives see the glass as half-empty. Hence depressives need devices to turn many of their perceptions upside down. Values Therapy often can provide the impetus for the reversal of viewpoint.
A person's capacity to alter his or her perspective of the world by effort and practice is astonishing. An interesting example comes from a long-ago experiment in which subjects were given "upside down" eyeglasses that inverted everything seen; what normally is seen below appeared above, and vice versa. Within a period of weeks the subjects had grown so accustomed to the glasses that they responded quite normally to visual cues. Depressives need to put on psychological spectacles which turn their comparisons upside down and make them perceive the glass as half full rather than half empty, and invert a "failure" into a "challenge."
Values Therapy radically alters one's life perspective. Humor, too, changes one's perspective, and a little humor about one's depression can help you. Not the black humor of "I wasn't cut out to be a human being," but rather amusement at how one twists reality to give oneself a ridiculously bad shake. For example, at 9:30 a.m. today, I've now been at my desk for 1-1/4 hours, working on notes for this book, a bit of stuff for class, some filing, etc. But then I notice I haven't written anything yet. I haven't done something both creative and solid, haven't created any pages yet. So I tell myself that I can't let myself have breakfast yet, because I don't deserve it, as if all the other things I have done have not been useful work. When I catch myself in this kind of willful rotten interpretation of reality, I'm amused, and it relaxes me.
Another example: As I was looking for the elevator on the sixth floor of an apartment house while I was depressed, I saw a sign on the wall that said, "Incinerator -- Trash and Garbage". I immediately said to myself, "Ah, that's the way I should go down." This amused me and reminded me how silly is my lack of self-esteem that led me to have such thoughts.
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