CHAPTER 5-4
        STEP-BY-STEP FIGHT AGAINST SADNESS AND DEPRESSION

     The previous chapter described the general processes of 
fighting against sadness and depression.  This chapter gets down 
to the nitty-gritty work of doing so.

                    IMPROVING YOUR NUMERATOR

     Are you actually in as bad shape as you think you are?  If 
you have an incorrect unpleasant judgment of some aspects of 
yourself that you consider important, then your self-comparison 
ratio will be erroneously "rotten".  That is, if you 
systematically bias your estimate of yourself in a manner that 
makes you seem to yourself objectively worse than you really are, 
then you invite needless negative self-comparisons and 
depression. 
     Keep in mind that we are talking about assessments of 
yourself that can be checked objectively.  An example:  Samuel G. 
complained that he was a consistent "loser" at everything he did.  
His counselor knew that he played ping pong, and asked him 
whether he usually won or lost at ping pong.  Sam said that he 
usually lost.  The counselor asked him to keep a record of the 
games he played in the following week.  The record showed that 
Sam won a bit more often than he lost.  This information 
surprised Sam.  With that evidence in hand, he was receptive to 
the idea that he also was giving himself a short count in other 
areas of his life, and hence producing fallacious negative self-
comparisons.  If you can improve your numerator -- that is, if 
you can find yourself really to be a better person than you now 
think you are--you will make your self-comparisons more positive.  
By so doing you will reduce sadness, and increase your good 
feelings. 

                   SWEETENING YOUR DENOMINATOR

     It is so important that I repeat:  When told that life is 
hard, Voltaire is said to have asked,"Compared to what?"  The 
denominator is the standard of comparison against which you 
habitually measure yourself.  Whether your self-comparison 
appears favorable or unfavorable depends as much upon the 
denominator you use as upon the supposed facts of your own life.  
Standards of comparison include what you hope to be, what you 
formerly were, what you think you ought to be, or what you think 
others to whom you compare yourself, are like. 
     "Normal" people--that is, people who do not get depressed 
frequently or for a long time--alter their denominators flexibly. 
Their procedure is:  choose the denominator that will make you 
feel good about yourself.  The psychologically-normal tennis 
player chooses opponents who provide an even match--strong enough 
to provide invigorating competition, but weak enough so you can 
often feel successful.  The depressive personality, on the other 
hand, may pick an opponent so strong that he almost always beats 
you.  (A person with another sort of problem picks an opponent 
who is so weak that he or she provides no exciting competition.) 
     In the more important of our life situations, however, it is 
not as easy as in tennis to choose a well-fitting denominator the 
standard of comparison.  A boy who is physically weak and 
unathletic relative to his grammar-school classmates is stuck 
with that fact.  So is the child who is slow at learning 
arithmetic, and the homely girl.  A death of a spouse or child or 
parent is another fact with which one cannot deal as flexibly as 
one can change tennis partners. 
     Though the denominator that stares you in the face may be a 
simple fact, you are not chained to it with unbreakable shackles.  
Misery is not your inexorable fate.  People can change schools, 
start new families, or retrain themselves for occupations that 
fit them better than the old ones.  Others find ways to accept 
difficult facts as facts, and to alter their thinking so that the 
unpleasing facts cease causing distress.  But some people--people 
we call "depressives"--do not manage to free themselves from 
denominators that hag-ride them into depression, or even unto 
death by suicide or other depression-caused diseases. 
     Why do some people appropriately adjust their denominators 
while others do not?  Some do not change their denominators 
because they lack experience or imagination or flexibility to 
consider other relevant possibilities.  For example, until he got 
some professional career advice, Joe T. had never even considered 
an occupation in which his talent later enabled him to succeed, 
after failing in his previous occupation.  
     Other people are stuck with pain-causing denominators 
because they have somehow acquired the idea that they must meet 
the standards of those pain-causing denominators.  Often this is 
the legacy of parents who insisted that unless the child would 
reach certain particular goals--a Nobel prize, say, or becoming a 
millionaire--the child should consider himself or herself a 
failure in the parent's eyes.  The person may never realize that 
it is not necessary that she or he accept as valid those goals 
set by the parents.  Instead, the person musturbates (note the 
first "n"), in Ellis's memorable term.  Ellis emphasizes the 
importance of getting rid of such unnecessary and damaging 
"oughts" as part of his Rational-Emotive variation of cognitive 
therapy. 
     Others believe that attaining certain goals--curing others 
of illness, or making a lifesaving discovery, or raising several 
happy children--is a basic value in itself.  They believe that 
one is not free to abandon the goal simply because it causes pain 
to the person who holds that goal.  In such a case, it is harder 
to decide how to handle the pain of failure. 
     Still others think that they ought to have a denominator so 
challenging that it stretches them to the utmost, and/or keeps 
them miserable.  Just why they think that way is not usually 
clear to those persons.  And if they do come to understand why 
they think so, they usually stop doing so, because it does not 
seem very sensible to do so.  

                NEW DIMENSIONS AND BETTER RATIOS
     If you can't make the old Mood Ratio rosy or even livable, 
then consider getting a new one.  Folk wisdom is indeed wise in 
advising us to forcefully direct our attention to the good things 
in our lives instead of the bad things.  Counting one's blessings 
is the common label for focusing on dimensions that will make us 
happy:  remembering your good health when you lose your money; 
remembering your wonderful loving children when the job is a 
failure; remembering your good friends when a false friend 
betrays you or a true friend dies; and so on.  
     A related device is refusing to consider aspects of your 
situation which are beyond your control at the moment in order to 
avoid letting them distress you.  This is commonly called "taking 
it one day at a time."  If you are an alcoholic, you refuse to 
let yourself be depressed about the pain and difficulty of 
stopping drinking for the rest of your life, which you feel 
almost helpless to do.  Instead, you focus on not drinking today, 
which seems a lot easier.  If you have had a financial disaster, 
instead of regretting the past you think about today's work as a 
way to begin repairing your fortunes.       Taking it one day at 
a time does not mean that you do not plan for tomorrow.  It does 
mean that after you have done whatever planning is possible, you 
then forget about the potential dangers of the future, and focus 
on what you can do today.  This is the core of such books of folk 
wisdom as Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.1, 
old 9 
     Finding personal comparisons which make your Mood Ratio positive is the way that most people construct an image of themselves 
which makes them look good to others.  The life strategy of the healthy-minded person is first, to find a dimension on which he or 
she performs relatively well, and second, to argue to oneself and to others that this is the most important dimension on which to 
judge a person. 
     A 1954 popular song by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen went like this: "You've got to accentuate the positive...Eliminate the 
negative...Latch on to the affirmative...Don't mess with Mister In-between."  That sums up how most normal people arrange their 
views of the world and themselves so that they maintain self-respect.  This procedure can be unpleasant to other people, because 
the person who accentuates his or her own strengths may thereby accentuate what in other people is less positive.  And the person 
often proclaims intolerantly that that dimension is the most important one of all.  But this may be the price of self-respect and 
non-depression for some people.  And often you can accentuate your own strengths without distressing others. 
     A more attractive illustration:  appreciating your own courage is often an excellent way to shift dimensions.  If you have 
been struggling without much success for years to convince the world that your fish-meal protein is an effective and cheap way of 
preventing protein-deficiency diseases in poor children (an actual case), you may be greatly saddened if you dwell on the 
comparison between what you have achieved and what you aspire to achieve.  But if you focus instead upon your courage in making 
this brave fight, even in the face of the lack of success, then you will give yourself an honest and respectable positive 
comparison, and a Mood Ratio which will make you feel happy rather than sad.  This process will lead you to esteem yourself well 
rather than poorly. 
     Because of childhood experiences or because of their values, depressives tend not to be flexible in choosing dimensions that 
will make them look good.  Yet depressives can successfully shift dimensions if they work at it.  In addition to the ways 
mentioned above, there is still another -- and very radical -- way to shift dimensions:  Make a determined effort -- even demand 
of yourself -- in the name of some other value, that you shift from a dimension that is causing you grief.  This is the core of 
Values Treatment which was crucial in curing my own 13-year depression; more about this shortly. 

                THE SOUND OF A NUMERATOR CLAPPING

     No self-comparisons, no sadness.  No sadness, no depression.  So why don't we just get rid of self-comparisons completely?
     A practicing Zen Buddhist with an independent income and a grown family can get along without making many self-comparisons.  
But for those of us who must struggle to achieve our ends in the workaday world, we must make some comparisons between what we and 
others do in order to keep us directed toward achieving these ends.  Yet if we try, we can successfully reduce the number of these 
comparisons by focusing our minds on other activities instead.  We can also help ourselves by judging only our performances 
relative to the performances of others, rather than judging our very selves -- that is, our acts rather than our whole persons.  
     Work that absorbs your attention is perhaps the most effective device for avoiding self-comparisons.  When Einstein was asked 
how he dealt with the tragedies he suffered, he said something like:  "Work, of course.  What else is there?"  
     One of the best qualities of work is that it is almost always available -- even cleaning the basement will do.  And 
concentrating upon work requires no special discipline.  While one is thinking about the task at hand, one's attention is 
effectively diverted away from comparing oneself to some benchmark standard. 
     Another way to shut off self-comparisons is to care about other people's welfare, and to spend time helping them.  This old-
fashioned remedy against depression--altruism--has been the salvation of many. 
     Meditation is the traditional Oriental method of banishing negative self-comparisons.  The essence of meditation is to shift 
to a special mode of concentrated thinking in which one does not evaluate or compare, but instead simply experiences the outer and 
inner sensory events as interesting but devoid of emotion.  (In a less serious context this approach is called "inner tennis.") 
     Some Oriental religious practitioners seek continued deep meditation in order to banish physical suffering as well as for 
religious purposes.  But the same mechanism can be used while participating in everyday life as an effective weapon against 
negative self-comparisons and depression.  Deep breathing is the first step in such meditation.  All by itself, deep breathing (in 
your belly rather than in your chest) can relax you and change your mood in the midst of a stream of negative self-comparisons.  
It also helps to smile at the same time, I find.  (Details about meditation are in Chapter 8-0). 
                        GETTING HOPE BACK

     Negative self-comparisons by themselves do not make you sad.  Instead, you may get angry, or you may mobilize yourself to 
change your life situation.  But a helpless, hopeless attitude along with negative self-comparisons leads to sadness and 
depression.  This has even been shown in rat experiments.  Rats that have experienced unavoidable electric shocks later behave 
with less fight and more depression, with respect to electric shocks that they can avoid, than do rats that did not earlier 
experience unavoidable shocks.  The rats that experienced unavoidable shocks also show chemical changes like those associated with 
depression in humans.2, old 10   
     It behooves us, then, to consider how to avoid feeling 
helpless.  One obvious answer in some situations is to realize 
that you are not helpless and you can change your actual state of 
affairs so that the comparison will be less negative. Sometimes 
this requires gradual re-learning through a graded series of 
tasks that show you that you can be successful, eventually 
leading to success in tasks that at the beginning seemed 
overwhelmingly difficult to you.  This is the rationale of many 
behavioral-therapy programs that teach people to overcome their 
fears of elevators, heights, going out in public, and various 
social situations. 
     Indeed, the rats mentioned in the paragraph above, which 
learned to be helpless when given inescapable shocks, were later 
taught by experimenters to learn that they could escape the later 
shocks.  They showed diminished chemical changes associated with 
depression after they had "unlearned" their original experiences. 

                   A NEW HOPE:  VALUES TREATMENT

     Let's say that you feel you're at the end of your rope.  You 
believe that your numerator is accurate, and you see no 
acceptable way to change your denominator or your dimensions of 
comparison.  Avoiding all comparisons, or drastically reducing 
the quantity of them, does not appeal to you or does not seem 
feasible to you.  You'd prefer not to be treated with anti-
depression drugs or shock treatment unless there is absolutely no 
alternative.  Is there any other possibility open to you? 
     Values Treatment may be able to rescue people who feel at 
the end of their ropes.  And for people who are less desperate, 
Values Treatment may be preferable to other approaches to their 
depressions.  
     The central element of Values Treatment is discovering 
within yourself a value or belief that conflicts with being 
depressed, or conflicts with some other belief (or value) that 
leads to the negative self-comparisons.  That is how Bertrand 
Russell passed from a sad childhood to happy maturity in this 
fashion: 
               Now [after a miserably sad childhood] 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.3, old 11

     Values Treatment does exactly the opposite of trying to 
argue away the sadness-causing value.  Instead it seeks a more 
powerful countervailing value to dominate the depression-causing 
forces.  Here is how Values Treatment worked in my case:  I 
discovered that my highest value is for my children to have a 
decent upbringing.  A depressed father makes a terrible model for 
children.  I therefore recognized that for my children's sake it 
was necessary to shift my self-comparisons from the occupational 
dimension that led to so many negative comparisons and sadness, 
and focus instead on our family's health, and on the enjoyment of 
the day's small delights.  And it worked.  I also discovered that 
I have an almost religious value for not wasting a human life in 
misery when it can possibly be lived in happiness.  That value 
helped, too, working hand-in-hand with my value that my children 
not grow up having a depressed father. 
     The depression-fighting value may be (as it was for me) the 
direct command that life should be joyful rather than sad.  Or it 
may be a value that leads indirectly to a reduction in sadness, 
such as my value that my children should have a life-loving 
parent to imitate. 
     The discovered value may lead you to accept yourself for 
what you are, so that you can 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 accept the 
situation as fact, cease railing at fate, and decide not to let 
the handicap dominate.  The person may decide to pay attention 
instead to what she can contribute to others with a joyful 
spirit, or how she can be a good parent by being happy. 
     Values Treatment need not always proceed systematically.  
But a systematic procedure may be helpful to some people, and it 
makes clear which operations are important in Values Treatment.             
For more information on any of these ways of addressing sadness 
and depression, see my book Good Mood. 
Pae # thinking thrp253@ 3-3-4d