Self-Evaluation and Your "Life Report"

Put the above discussion another way: At any given moment you have in your mind something like a school report card -- call it your `Life Report' -- with grades on it for a variety of "subjects." You write the grades for yourself, though taking into account how other people judge you, of course, to a greater or lesser degree. The "subjects" include both life conditions, such as the condition of your love life or marriage, and activities, such as your professional achievements and your behavior toward your granduncle.

Another category of `subjects' on the Life Report are future occurrences that matter to you and which are related to your `success' or `failure'-- on the job, in your relationships with others, even religious experiences. These are marked "High hope" or "Low hope".

The "subjects" are marked "important" (e.g. professional achievement) or "unimportant" (e.g. behavior toward granduncle). Again, other people's judgments influence you, but probably less so than in their judgments about how you are doing in specific activities.

The over-all state of your Life Report - the larger proportion of those "important" matters that are of your own doing are marked positive or negative--constitutes your self- esteem or "self image." If there are many important matters marked "bad," the composite constitutes low self-esteem and a poor self-image of yourself.

Then along comes some unpleasant event, minor or major, that leads to a negative self-comparison between, on the one hand, what you think about yourself in light of the event, and on the other hand, the standard which you take as your benchmark for comparison. The consequent sadness will be only temporary when the event is not seen as all-important or is surrounded by a lot of other negative indications: the effects of the death of a loved one upon a person with generally high self-esteem is such an example. But if your Life Report is predominantly negative in the categories marked "important," then any negative event will be reinforced by the overall sense of worthlessness, and will in turn contribute to your feeling worthless. This gives extra strength to each particular negative self-comparison. And when (or if) the thought of that particular negative self-comparison leaves you, the generalized negative self-comparison of being worthless keeps you feeling sad. When that state continues for a time, we call it depression.

When talking of his own depressed thoughts, Tolstoy put the matter this way: "[Like drops of ink always falling on one place they ran together into one big blot." (4)

How does one happen to have a negative Life Report? These are possible contributing factors, a) one's childhood training and upbringing, b) one's present life situation, including the recent past and the expected future, and c) an innate predisposition to react fearfully or otherwise negatively toward events. The last of these possibilities is pure speculation; no evidence has yet been shown for its existence.

The role of the present is straightforward: It provides evidence that you interpret about how well you are doing with various matters, and how well you can hope to do in the future.

The past has a multiple role: It provided--and still provides--evidence about how well you usually do on some matters.(5) But it also taught you methods --sound or unsound--to interpret and evaluate the evidence that the world provides to you about your activities and life condition. And, perhaps most important, your childhood training influences which categories you mark as "important" and "unimportant." For example, one person may consider relationship with one's family or work success as very important, whereas another person may consider neither important because of (or in reaction to) childhood experience.

Those are some of the ways in which a depressive may differ from a normal person, differences that may cause the depressive to suffer prolonged sadness in the face of a set of external conditions whereas they cause only fleeting sadness to the normal person.

Many of the above tendencies can be summarized as a propensity for seeing a half-empty glass instead of a half-full glass. This propensity is neatly demonstrated by an experiment that showed people two images at the same time -- a positive and a negative, one in each eye--with a special viewing device. Depressed persons "saw" the unhappy image and did not "see" the happy image more frequently than persons who were not depressed (6). And other research shows that even after a siege of depression is over, the former sufferers have more negative thoughts and biases than do normal persons.

There are many possible reasons why depressives differ from other persons. For example, depressives may have experienced especially strong pressure from parents to set and achieve high goals, and in response have come to rigidly believe that those goals must be sought . They may have suffered traumatic loss of parents or others as children. They may have genetically-caused biological makeup's, such as a low energy level, that may easily make them feel helpless. And there are many other possible causes. But we need not further consider the matter because it is the current thinking and behavior patterns that must be changed.

Biology and Depression

Earlier, it was mentioned that biological factors--genetic origins, physical constitution, state of your health --may influence your propensity for depression. A word about them seems appropriate here.

Biological factors can apparently operate directly upon the emotions of sadness-happiness, and/or upon the comparison mechanism to make a comparison seem more negative or positive than it otherwise would be perceived. This is consistent with such observed facts as that:

1) Being sad often comes with being tired. Being tired also makes depressives judge that endeavors will fail, that they are helpless as well as worthless, and so on. This makes sense because when one is tired it is objectively true that one is less competent to control the circumstances of one's life than when one is fresh. And the tiredness also typically makes depressives project into the future that they will not be successful. Hence the bodily state of being tired affects the person's self- comparisons and hence her sadness-happiness state.