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Page 3 of 4
The "normal" person revises his expectations so that they fit his possible accomplishment reasonably well. The middle-aged violinist may reassess his abilities and arrive at a more realistic assessment of the future. The aging athlete chooses to play in an over-forty tennis league. But some adults do not respond to a gap between expectations and performance by revising their expectations. This may result from heavy parental emphasis on certain expectations such as "Of course you'll win a Nobel prize if you work hard." Such a person carries expectations beyond actual possibilities, and depression ensues.
An interesting but troublesome set of expectations that many of us form as children concerns "happiness." As young people we get the idea that we can hope for (and even expect) a life of care-free ecstatic bliss, a perennial walking on air, as seen in movies and magazine articles about celebrities. Then, when in our youth or young adulthood we do not attain golden bliss--and at the same time we think that other people have attained it--we feel let-down and suffer depression. We must learn that continued bliss is not an attainable goal for anyone, and instead aim at the best that one can realistically expect from life as a human being.
Persistent Criticism by Parents
If your parents continually tell you that your acts are clumsy, foolish, or naughty, you are likely to draw the general conclusion that you are clumsy, foolish, or naughty. Hence as an adult you may have the habit of making negative self- comparisons. For example, a social act that may or may not be clumsy immediately evokes the inner response, "I'm an idiot," or "I'm a klutz." This habit acts like a prejudiced judge who always finds the person guilty, and hence produces frequent negative self-comparisons and consequent prevailing sadness.
Childhood punishment for failure may also make you fear failure so much that the threat of failure panics you to the point that you do not think clearly. This may cause you to reach wrong conclusions because you misinterpret relevant information, which can lead to neg-comps and sadness. As one salesman put it, "Every time I was a minute late for an appointment I'd be scared that the customer would think I am irresponsible and lazy, which would make me so nervous that I couldn't sell effectively. And I also immediately reminded myself that I never manage to do anything right."(3) This was a fellow whose mother set very high standards of reliability for him even as a four-year-old child, and chided him when he failed to meet those standards.
Childhood-Formed Expectations About Adult Accomplishment
Experiences in childhood and adolescence influence your expectations about professional and personal accomplishments.
Each violinist in any [symphony orchestra's] second chair started out as a prodigy in velvet knickers who expected one day to solo exquisitely amid flowers flung by dazzled devotees. The 45-year-old violinist with spectacles on his nose and a bald spot in the middle of his hair is the most disappointed man on earth.(4)
Sometimes changes in one's capacities trigger the depression. A thirty-nine-year-old amateur athlete's present expectations were formed both by his relative excellence as a youth and by his absolute excellence as an adult. And when age curbed his performance and he compared his performance with those expectations, he began to feel sad and depressed.
The "normal" person revises his expectations so that they fit his possible accomplishment reasonably well. The middle-aged violinist may reassess his abilities and arrive at a more realistic assessment of the future. The aging athlete chooses to play in an over-forty tennis league. But some adults do not respond to a gap between expectations and performance by revising their expectations. This may result from heavy parental emphasis on certain expectations such as "Of course you'll win a Nobel prize if you work hard." Such a person carries expectations beyond actual possibilities, and depression ensues.
An interesting but troublesome set of expectations that many of us form as children concerns "happiness." As young people we get the idea that we can hope for (and even expect) a life of care-free ecstatic bliss, a perennial walking on air, as seen in movies and magazine articles about celebrities. Then, when in our youth or young adulthood we do not attain golden bliss--and at the same time we think that other people have attained it--we feel let-down and suffer depression. We must learn that continued bliss is not an attainable goal for anyone, and instead aim at the best that one can realistically expect from life as a human being.
Persistent Criticism by Parents
If your parents continually tell you that your acts are clumsy, foolish, or naughty, you are likely to draw the general conclusion that you are clumsy, foolish, or naughty. Hence as an adult you may have the habit of making negative self- comparisons. For example, a social act that may or may not be clumsy immediately evokes the inner response, "I'm an idiot," or "I'm a klutz." This habit acts like a prejudiced judge who always finds the person guilty, and hence produces frequent negative self-comparisons and consequent prevailing sadness.
The habit of comparing oneself negatively and thinking "I'm a klutz" arises from some combination of experiences in early childhood and throughout the rest of one's life. Each event in one's adult past is probably less important the longer ago it occurred, so that it is not only the sum of such experiences but also their recent timing which matters; if one has recently been down-and-out and unsuccessful, this probably matters more than being down-and-out for a similar length of time ten years earlier. In contrast, childhood experiences may have relatively heavy weight because the events involved interpretation by the parent. That is, if every time a child does poorly in school the parent says, "See, you'll never be smart like your big brother," the effect is likely to be greater than a school failure after the child has left the house.
Furthermore, the habit of comparing oneself negatively is strengthened by each additional negative self-comparison the person makes.
In addition to directly biasing the person's self- comparisons, this habit of self-criticism may act cumulatively to produce the sort of "bio-chemical scar" mentioned in Chapter 4. Or, such a biochemical scar may result from the feedback effect of negative self-comparisons and the sadness itself upon the nervous system.
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