Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (6 page)

After a while, the euphoric state may escalate into uncontrollable delirium requiring involuntary hospitalization, or it may just as suddenly switch into an incapacitating depression with pronounced immobility and apathy. I want you to be familiar with the symptoms of mania because a significant percentage of individuals who experience a true major depressive episode will at some later time develop these symptoms. When this occurs, the personality of the afflicted individual undergoes a profound transformation over a period of days or weeks. While psychotherapy and a self-help program can be extremely helpful, concomitant treatment with lithium under medical supervision is a must for an optimal response. With such treatment the prognosis for manic illness is excellent.

Let’s assume that you do
not
have a strong suicidal urge, hallucinations, or symptoms of mania. Instead of moping and feeling miserable, you can now proceed to get better, using me methods outlined in this book. You can start enjoying life and work, and use the energy spent in being depressed for vital and creative living.

As you read the previous chapter, you became aware of how extensive the effects of depression are—your mood slumps, your self-image crumbles, your body doesn’t function properly, your willpower becomes paralyzed, and your actions defeat you. That’s why you feel so
totally
down in the dumps. What’s the key to it all?

Because depression has been viewed as an emotional disorder throughout the history of psychiatry, therapists from most schools of thought place a strong emphasis on “getting in touch” with your feelings. Our research reveals the unexpected: Depression is not an emotional disorder at all! The sudden change in the way you
feel
is of no more causal relevance than a runny nose is when you have a cold. Every bad feeling you have is the result of your distorted negative thinking. Illogical pessimistic attitudes play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms.

Intense negative thinking
always
accompanies a depressive episode, or any painful emotion for that matter. Your moody thoughts are likely to be entirely different from those you have when you are not upset. A young woman, about to receive her Ph.D., expressed it this way:

You will learn, as she did, that the negative thoughts that flood your mind are the actual
cause
of your self-defeating emotions. These thoughts are what keep you lethargic and make you feel inadequate. Your negative thoughts, or cognitions, are the most frequently overlooked symptoms of your depression. These cognitions contain the key to relief and are therefore your most important symptoms.

Every time you feel depressed about something, try to identify a corresponding negative thought you had just prior to and during the depression. Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood, by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood.

You are probably skeptical of all this because your negative thinking has become such a part of your life that it has become automatic. For this reason I call negative thoughts “automatic thoughts.” They run through your mind automatically without the slightest effort on your part to put them there. They are as obvious and natural to you as the way you hold a fork.

The relationship between the way you
think
and the way you
feel
is diagramed in Figure 3–1. This illustrates the first major key to understanding your moods: Your emotions result entirely from the way you
look
at things. It is an obvious neurological fact that before you can experience any event, you must process it with your mind and give it meaning. You must
understand
what is happening to you before you can
feel
it.

Figure 3–1
. The relationship between the world and the way you feel. It is not the actual events but your perceptions that result in changes in mood. When you are
sad
, your thoughts will represent a realistic interpretation of negative events. When you are depressed or anxious, your thoughts will always be illogical, distorted, unrealistic, or just plain wrong.

If your understanding of what is happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal. Depression falls into this category. It is always the result of mental “static”—distortions. Your blue moods
can be compared to the scratchy music coming from a radio that is not properly tuned to the station. The problem is
not
that the tubes or transistors are blown out or defective, or that the signal from the radio station is distorted as a result of bad weather. You just simply have to adjust the dials. When you learn to bring about this mental tuning, the music will come through clearly again and your depression will lift.

Some readers—maybe you—will experience a pang of despair when they read that paragraph. Yet there is
nothing upsetting
about it. If anything, the paragraph should bring hope. Then what caused your mood to plunge as you were reading? It was your thought, “For other people a little tuning may suffice. But I’m the radio that is broken beyond repair. My tubes are blown out. I don’t care if ten thousand other depressed patients all get well—I’m convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that my problems are hopeless.” I hear this statement fifty times a week! Nearly every depressed person seems convinced beyond all rhyme or reason that he or she is the special one who
really is
beyond hope. This delusion reflects the kind of mental processing that is at the very core of your illness!

I have always been fascinated by the ability certain people have to create illusions. As a child, I used to spend hours at the local library, reading books on magic. Saturdays I would hang out in magic stores for hours, watching the man behind the counter produce remarkable effects with cards and silks and chromium spheres that floated through the air, defying all the laws of common sense. One of my happiest childhood memories is when I was eight years old and saw “Blackstone—World’s Greatest Magician” perform in Denver, Colorado. I was invited with several other children from the audience to come up on stage. Blackstone instructed us to place our hands on a two-feet by two-feet birdcage filled with live white doves until the top, bottom, and all four sides were enclosed entirely by our hands. He stood nearby and said, “Stare at the cage!” I did. My eyes were bulging and I refused to blink. He exclaimed, “Now
I’ll clap my hands.” He did. In that instant the cage of birds vanished. My hands were suspended in empty air. It was impossible! Yet it happened! I was stunned.

Now I know that his ability as an illusionist was no greater than that of the average depressed patient. This includes you. When you are depressed, you possess the remarkable ability to
believe
, and to get the people around you to believe, things which have no basis in reality. As a therapist, it is my job to
penetrate
your illusion, to teach you how to
look behind
the mirrors so you can see how you have been fooling yourself. You might even say that I’m planning to dis illusion you! But I don’t think you’re going to mind at all.

Read over the following list of ten cognitive distortions that form the basis of all your depressions. Get a feel for them. I have prepared this list with great care; it represents the distilled essence of many years of research and clinical experience. Refer to it over and over when you read the how-to-do-it section of the book. When you’ are feeling upset, the list will be invaluable in making you aware of how you are fooling yourself.

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking
.
This refers to your tendency to evaluate your personal qualities in extreme, black-or-white categories. For example, a prominent politician told me, “Because I lost the race for governor, I’m a zero.” A straight-A student who received a B on an exam concluded, “Now I’m a total failure.” All-or-nothing thinking forms the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear any mistake or imperfection because you will then see yourself as a complete loser, and you will feel inadequate and worthless.

This way of evaluating things is unrealistic because life is rarely completely either one way or the other. For example, no one is absolutely brilliant or totally stupid. Similarly,
no one is either completely attractive or totally ugly. Look at the floor of the room you are sitting in now. Is it perfectly clean? Is every inch piled high with dust and dirt? Or is it partially clean? Absolutes do not exist in this universe. If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories, you will be constantly depressed because your perceptions will not conform to reality. You will set yourself up for discrediting yourself endlessly because whatever you do will
never
measure up to your exaggerated expectations. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is “dichotomous thinking.” You see everything as black or white—shades of gray do not exist.

2. Overgeneralization
.
When I was eleven years old, I bought a deck of trick cards at the Arizona State Fair called the Svengali Deck. You may have seen this simple but impressive illusion yourself: I show the deck to you—every card is different. You choose a card at random. Let’s assume you pick the Jack of Spades. Without telling me what card it is, you replace it in the deck. Now I exclaim, “Svengali!” As I turn the deck over, every card has turned into the Jack of Spades.

When you overgeneralize, this is performing the mental equivalent of Svengali. You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again, will multiply like the Jack of Spades. Since what happened is invariably unpleasant, you feel upset.

A depressed salesman noticed bird dung on his car window and thought, “That’s just my luck. The birds are always crapping on
my
window!” This is a perfect example of overgeneralization. When I asked him about this experience, he admitted that in twenty years of traveling, he could not remember another time when he found bird dung on his car window.

The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization. In its absence, a personal affront is temporarily disappointing but
cannot
be seriously disturbing. A shy young man mustered up his courage to ask a girl for
a date. When she politely declined because of a previous engagement, he said to himself, “I’m never going to get a date. No girl would ever want a date with me. I’ll be lonely and miserable all my life.” In his distorted cognitions, he concluded that because she turned him down once, she would
always
do so, and that since all women have 100 percent identical tastes, he would be endlessly and repeatedly rejected by any eligible woman on the face of the earth. Svengali!

3. Mental Filter
.
You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative. For example, a depressed college student heard some other students making fun of her best friend. She became furious because she was thinking, “That’s what the human race is basically like—cruel and insensitive!” She was overlooking the fact that in the previous months few people, if any, had been cruel or insensitive to her! On another occasion when she completed her first midterm exam, she felt certain she had missed approximately seventeen questions out of a hundred. She thought exclusively about those seventeen questions and concluded she would flunk out of college. When she got the paper back there was a note attached that read, “You got 83 out of 100 correct. This was by far the highest grade of any student this year. A +”

When you are depressed, you wear a pair of eyeglasses with special lenses that filter out anything positive. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind is negative. Because you are not aware of this “filtering process,” you conclude that
everything
is negative. The technical name for this process is “selective abstraction.” It is a bad habit that can cause you to suffer much needless anguish.