What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [57]
The Right Treatment
UNIPOLAR DEPRESSION SUMMARY TABLE
Everyday Depression
Your score on the depression test was probably below the moderate-to-severe range; most people score between 5 and 15. If that is true for you, you are probably not in need of therapy for depression. It may be true that you are sad quite a bit, that most of your life is not filled with gusto, that you get fatigued pretty easily, that setbacks hit you pretty hard, that you suck up energy from social gatherings rather than adding life, and that you are not optimistic about your future. But you probably do not have a depressive disorder.
If the last paragraph describes your state, you should try to do something to change this state of affairs, for even mild depression poisons everyday life. The same four groups of symptoms—sadness, pessimism, passivity, and muted physical appetites—occur when depression is mild, only with less force. When mild depression has become a life-style, it is pointless, and it should be changed.
Mild depression is usually caused by pessimistic habits of thinking. The pessimist sees the causes of failure and rejection as permanent (“It’s going to last forever”), pervasive (“It’s going to ruin everything”), and personal (“It’s my fault”). These habitual beliefs are just that, mere beliefs. They are often false, and they are often inaccurate catastrophizings. The main lesson of cognitive therapy is that this way of thinking can be permanently changed—even in severe depressions. Mild depressives can usually change it without therapy.
The main skill of optimistic thinking is disputing. This is a skill everyone has, but we normally use it only when others accuse us wrongly. If a jealous friend tells you what a lousy executive or bad mother you are, you can marshal evidence against the accusation and spit it back in his or her face. Mild depressives make the same sorts of accusations to themselves, about themselves, many times a day. You walk into a party and you say to yourself, “I have nothing to say. No one is going to like me. I look terrible.” When these accusations issue from inside, you treat them as if they were unimpeachable. But the automatic pessimistic thoughts you have are just as motivated and irrational as the ravings of a jealous rival. They originate not in hard fact but in the criticisms your parents made of you in anger, your big sister’s jealous mocking, and your priest’s unbending rules, all absorbed passively when you were much younger.
You can, with some discipline, learn to become a superb disputer of pessimistic thoughts. I wrote a book about this, Learned Optimism (1991). It has exercises in it that should prove useful to you. This is not the place to repeat its contents, but I commend it to you. Once you acquire the skills of optimism, they stay. This regimen is not like dieting, which, as we shall see in chapter 12, almost always undoes itself after a time. Staying on a diet, continuing to refuse the food you love, is no fun. Disputing your own negative thoughts, in contrast, is fun. Once you are good at it, it makes you feel better instantly. Once you start doing it well, you want to keep doing it. If you have a low mood almost every day, you can choose to change the way you think. When you do so, you will find that your life is more worth living.
9
The Angry Person
For some of the large indignities of life, the best remedy is direct action. For the small indignities, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie. The hard part is knowing the difference.
Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion
THE DISHWASHER FIGHT
Akron, Ohio, 8:15 p.m.
KATE: Scrape the gunk off the plates before you hand them to me, puhllease.
JONAH: Look, I’m rinsing them off first.
KATE: Rinsing isn’t enough. I’ve told you a hundred times: Dishwashers don’t scour plates.
JONAH: