And the Finger of the Day

The hand of the past pushes a depressive toward depression. But it is usually the jab of a present event that triggers the pain - say, loss of your job, or being jilted by your lover. It is that contemporary happening that darkly dominates your thoughts when you are depressed. To get undepressed you must reconstitute your current mode of thinking so you can get rid of the black thoughts. Again - yes, the past causes you to be what you are now. But the main avenue out of your present predicament is by reconstructing the present rather than dealing with the past.

A crucial issue is whether you interpret contemporary events accurately, or instead distort them in such manner as to make them seem more negative than they "really" are. We are here talking only of negatively-perceived current events. Positively- perceived current events which are persistently misperceived as even more positive than they "really" are constitute part of the manic phase of a manic depressive cycle. (By the way, most depressives do not have extended manic periods after their depression becomes chronic.)

Usually there is little question about whether a current event has a negative or positive valence for a person. Almost all of us, almost all the time, agree about whether such events as loss of a job, death of a loved one, damage to health, financial distress, success in sports or education, are positive or negative. Sometimes, of course, a person's reaction is unexpected: You may conclude that loss of wealth or a job or a competition really is beneficial, by relieving you of a hidden burden or opening up new perspectives or changing your view of life. But such unusual cases are not our topic.

In many cases the knowledge of your fate reaches you along with knowledge of how others have done. And in fact, such outcomes as an examination score or a competitive sports outcome only have meaning relative to the performance of other people.

What Should Be Your Standards For Self-Comparisons?

The choice of whom to compare yourself with is one of the important ways that you structure your view of your life. Some choices lead to frequent negative comparisons and consequent unhappiness. A psychologically "normal" seven-year-old boy will compare his performance in shooting a basketball to other seven- year-olds, or to his own performance yesterday. If he is psychologically normal but physically not talented, he will compare his performance today only to his performance of yesterday, or to other boys who are not good at basketball. But some seven-year-olds like Billy H., insist on comparing their performances to their eleven-year-old brothers; inevitably they compare poorly. Such children will bring unnecessary sadness and despondency upon themselves unless they change their standards of comparison.

Whose performance should you compare yourself to? People of the same age? Those with similar training? People with similar physical attributes? With similar skills? There is no general answer, obviously. We can say, however, that the "normal" person chooses a standard for comparison in such manner that the standard does not cause very much sadness. A sensible fifty- year-old jogger learns to compare his time for the mile to others' times in his age and skill class, not to the world record or even to the best fifty-year-old runner in the club. (If the standard is so low that it provides no challenge, the normal person will move to a higher standard that offers some uncertainty and excitement and pleasure in achievement.) The normal person lowers too-high standards in the same manner that a baby learns to hold on when starting to walk; the pain of doing otherwise is an effective teacher. But some people do not adjust their standards in a sensible flexible fashion, and hence they open themselves to depression. To understand why this is so for a particular person, we must refer to his psychological history.

I am an example of a person with an unwise set of standards. I treat myself the way an engineer treats a factory: the goal is perfect deployment and allocation of resources, and the criterion is whether the maximum output is achieved. For example, when I wake at 8:30 a.m. on weekdays, I feel like a time thief until I have hit my desk and started work. On a weekend day I may wake at nine--and then I think "Am I cheating the children by sleeping too much?" Maximum productivity may be a reasonable goal for a factory. But one's life cannot be satisfactorily reduced to a striving to meet a single criterion. A person is more complex than is a factory, and a person is also an end in himself or herself, whereas a factory is only a means to an end.

How We Distort Reality and Cause Negative Self-Comparisons

One may manipulate current reality in still other ways that produce frequent negative self-comparisons. For example, one may convince oneself that other people perform better than they really do, or are better off than they are. A young girl may believe that other girls really are prettier than she is, or that others have many more dates than she has, when this is not true. An employee may be wrongly convinced that other employees are being paid more than she is. A child may refuse to believe that other children share her difficulty in making friends. A person may think that all others have argument-free marriages, and never fail to cope with the demands of their children.

Another way that you may generate more negative self- comparisons than a "normal" person is by inaccurately interpreting a single event as something other than what it really is. If you receive a reprimand from the boss, you may immediately leap to the conclusion that you will be fired, and if you are warned that you may be fired you may conclude that the boss surely intends to fire you, even when these conclusions are not warranted. A person who suffers a temporary physical disability may conclude that he is disabled for life when that is medically most improbable.