Donald never has the opportunity to find out what his real capabilities are, because his mother always takes over before he has a chance to work through his problems. When Donald is 14, his school tests his IQ and records that he’s in the top range. However, his teachers describe him as an underachiever, and Donald believes that he’s pretty incompetent, despite the contradiction between his basic belief of inadequacy and his IQ score. Although Donald is in fact very bright, he somehow doesn’t see this. Donald’s history shows one of the ways in which beliefs of inadequacy and dependency can arise. But not having enough help can also lead to problems: Dependency and/or inadequacy beliefs can also stem from a childhood in which the child gets excessive, harsh criticism, or if parents force their children to be independent at too early a stage. The latter can paradoxically cause the child to feel highly dependent. For example, if parents never provide assistance that’s realistically required, their children may give up too easily. A similar result may occur if parents neglect their children, frequently leaving them alone to fend for themselves at too early an age.
If you think that you may have a dependency or inadequacy belief, reflect on your own childhood. Is it possible that:
One or more important people harshly criticised you over the years?
One or both of your parents stepped in to help you too quickly when you felt frustrated?
You rarely got help that you truly needed when you asked for it?
Your parents pushed you way too hard?
Your parents neglected you and left you alone too often at an early age?
If you answer ‘yes’ to any of the questions in the previous list, you may now understand the basis of your dependency or inadequacy belief. Do remember that the reasons you reached those conclusions don’t mean that you’re actually dependent or inadequate! We provide you with some strategies for dealing with these and other dysfunctional beliefs in the ‘Analysing your findings’ section, later in this chapter (and in Chapter 7 as well).
Uncovering an undeserving outlook
The belief that you’re undeserving can also sabotage your attempts to overcome depression. Many people who believe that they’re undeserving think that there’s something inherently wrong with them. They beat themselves up for the slightest flaw or mistake. They really believe that they don’t deserve to feel good or have good things happen to them.
When people feel that they’re undeserving, they may put minimal effort into overcoming their depression. They may feel as though depression is what they deserve and can expect out of life during their miserable existence on this planet.
If you frequently have any of the following thoughts, you may believe that you’re undeserving:
I feel like other people deserve more out of life than I do.
I don’t expect much out of life.
I think that having needs shows weakness.
I feel guilty when people do things for me.
Bad things only really happen to bad people, so if I’m depressed, I must deserve to be.
I don’t deserve to get what I want.
Believing that you deserve less than other people is going to make your depression more difficult to tackle: you may well fear that any happiness will inevitably result in punishment, because happiness is undeserved. You need to root out this belief before making serious attempts at ridding yourself of depression.
You can start working on getting rid of this undeserving outlook by uncovering its roots. People don’t feel undeserving without reason. Childhood events often provide the foundation for the undeserving belief. Ask yourself the following questions about your childhood:
Were my parents emotionally unavailable to me?
Did I frequently feel slighted (compared to my brothers or sisters)?
Did one of my parents try to make me feel guilty as a form of punishment?
Was I abused or severely punished?
Were my parents exceptionally unpredictable in the things they punished me for?
If these situations feel familiar, your undeserving belief is probably anchored in childhood. You formed this conclusion about yourself because, as a child, you tried to make sense out of the things that were happening to you. It’s natural to decide that you’re undeserving if your parents tried to make you feel ashamed and/or failed to express love consistently. Donna’s story illustrates one way this undeserving belief can arise.
Donna’s mother, Katherine, is what psychologists call a narcissist. Katherine thinks far more about her own needs than her child’s. When 3-year-old Donna is irritable, Katherine sends her to her bedroom for the rest of the day. Katherine’s motivation is to get rid of anything annoying her, rather than to help Donna learn self-control. Katherine deals similarly with Donna’s desires. If Donna wants something that will inconvenience her mother, Katherine calls her selfish, greedy, and ungrateful. Donna reaches the conclusion at a young age that she doesn’t deserve good things.
In reality, Donna deserves as much out of life as any other child. But she didn’t think that she deserved happiness – and she still doesn’t today, as an adult, given her upbringing.
Fighting the unfair fight – Just do it!
When people get stuck and avoid working on their depression, they sometimes say, ‘It’s just not fair! I shouldn’t have to work at this! Why did this happen to me?’ The belief that depression is unfair and that you ideally shouldn’t have to work on the problem is understandable.
While we agree that experiencing depression isn’t fair, and do wish that you didn’t have to put in so much work to do something about it, we are also convinced that:
No one truly wants to be depressed.
No one deserves to have depression.
No one is to blame for having depression.
Depression has many causes (refer to Chapter 1 for more on this topic) including genetics, diseases, childhood experiences, tragedy, abuse, and trauma. You’re not to blame for your own depression.
However, as unfortunate and unfair as it may be to have depression, you’ve got to put effort into overcoming it. No fairy godmother will come along and wave your depression away with a magic wand. Even if you choose medication to help you, you still have to work closely with a trusted GP or psychiatrist, who’ll prescribe the medication, monitor possible side effects, and work in partnership with you, rather than ‘doing it for you’.
Like other change-blocking beliefs, a preoccupation with unfairness may date back to childhood. Quite commonly, people who focus on unfairness were themselves treated unfairly by their parents when they were children. Exploring the early causes helps you identify some contributors to change-blocking beliefs, laying foundations to develop new, more helpful beliefs.
Rejecting the long-term victim role
Unfortunately, bad things can happen to good people for no reason at all. Negative events potentially may substantially disrupt a person’s whole world, including how they view themselves. This disruption usually occurs when:
Something really awful happens, such as severe illness or trauma.
The negative event was seen as undeserved or unfair.
The person feels upset and/or angry about the negative event.
When such undeserved events happen to people, their views about who and what they are change. They can begin believing that they’re ill, or are a victim. And beliefs about sickness and victimhood involve an entire set of related self-views and altered behaviours, which we now describe.
People typically shift in both their feelings and behaviours – from independent to dependent, from well to sick, from capable to incapable, from being in control to being helpless, from placid to angry. Such change in beliefs, behaviours, and expectations (that come from perceiving yourself as being in one state, versus its opposite) is normal and natural when traumatic events occur.
In a sense, these new beliefs and behaviours about sickness and victimhood mean that you take on a new role, like an actor in a play. The individual takes on
the role of patient or victim, and society, friends, family, and mental health professionals, including doctors, carry out supporting roles as helpers. These helpers have certain expectations for the patient or victim role as well as for their own roles. For example:
Helpers feel motivated to help.
Helpers don’t see the patient as someone who deserves to be blamed.
Helpers see themselves as mainly responsible for creating improvement and the patient as a passive recipient of their assistance.
Certain helpers may be responsible for authorising financial compensation for the victim.
Helpers believe that it’s natural for the patient to feel upset or angry.
Helpers usually provide sympathy, concern, and support.
The patient and victim roles are legitimate, reasonable, and feel deserved. In a sense, society creates these roles so that people can receive the necessary help when bad things undeservedly happen to them. We suspect that nearly everyone has occupied one or both of these roles at one time or another. So what’s the problem? Well, nothing at all if you only take on one of these roles for a short period of time.
Unfortunately, over time, patient and victim roles can easily become permanent, rather than temporary states. As belief in t sickness or victimhood gets established, people focus more and more on the unfairness and awfulness of what’s happened to them. They may start feeling furiously angry. The worst part is that, at the same time, they frequently feel helpless to do anything to improve matters.
The best way to decide if a belief in the patient or victim role has taken over your life is to ask yourself the following questions:
Do I frequently think about how unfair life has been to me?
Do I feel angry when I think of what has happened to me?
Do I frequently complain to others about my circumstances?
Do I feel helpless to do anything about my plight?
Do I feel that doing something about my problems undermines the importance of what’s happening to me?
If any of the thoughts from the previous list apply to you, it’s likely you’re entrenched in the victim or patient role. The roles provide no guidance for how to move on. So the problem is...you’re stuck.
Here are alternative roles that you may want to consider – the role of the person who’s coping and the role of the one who’s getting better. People who are coping or improving may have experienced bad (possibly horrible), undeserved, unfair events. But taking on these particular roles means finding a way to dig deep, let go of anger and rage, and focus on what they can do to improve their circumstances. Recovery sometimes takes months or years of hard work, but most people find t the results well worth the effort.
If you find yourself bogged down in these roles, you probably need professional help. See Chapter 4 for guidance on this.
However, even in cases of severe trauma, shifting into a coping mode and working hard towards a better life is your ultimate, though highly challenging achievement. To make this shift, you need to both understand and accept that you deserve peace. But most importantly, you need to appreciate that rediscovering happiness in no way discounts or diminishes the awfulness of what happened to you.
Sometimes people wrestle with the idea that seeking happiness fails to take into account what some one’s been through. They may think that a renewed pleasure and zest for life somehow negates previous horrific events. If this type of thinking sounds familiar, you may want to get back on the road to happiness by taking charge, rather than allowing the trauma to subsequently control your life. Try the following techniques:
Putting it in a vault: Dr Robert Leahy recommends that you picture in your mind a large bank vault with thick steel doors. Put your mind’s videotape of the trauma into the vault and lock it away. The tape stays in the vault, and you can unlock the vault and play the video of the trauma to appreciate the meaning it has for your life anytime you feel a need to do so. However, when you finish viewing the tape, imagine that you lock the trauma away. In this way you can live your life safe in the knowledge that the trauma doesn’t need to harm you any further, and it can just stay safely locked in the vault.
Rewriting the script: The clinical psychologist Derek Jehu suggests that rather than letting your mind keep replaying the trauma over and over again, you rewrite the script in your brain. First, you acknowledge to yourself that the real events happened, but that replaying the painful events repeatedly in your mind isn’t helpful. Then, when the scene starts to play in your mind’s eye, you come up with a different, better ending, and switch to visualising that. You tell yourself that neither visual picture is currently happening, - they both exist only in your mind. You discover one scene’s so much better to watch than the other, and that you’re able to do this without denying the reality of what actually happened.
Analysing your findings
Ridding yourself of change-blocking beliefs isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do because, as we say throughout this section, they frequently originated long ago in childhood and adolescence. Reviewing your personal history to understand more about how you acquired these beliefs is a good place to start. This new knowledge can help you to stop blaming yourself for having the beliefs in the first place.
After working out which change-blocking beliefs you have, you can see how these beliefs help and hinder you. A ‘Help and Hindrance Analysis’ provides you with important ammunition for challenging these beliefs when they get in your way. To do a Help and Hindrance Analysis:
1. Get a notebook out and make a chart.
Draw a line down the middle of your paper. Write down the change-blocking belief that you want to tackle at the top of the page. Then label one column ‘Help’ and the other ‘Hindrance’. See Table 3-1 for a sample analysis.
2. Write down all the reasons why your change-blocking belief is helpful to you.
Perhaps your belief allows you to avoid risks and losses. Maybe others will like you more if you hold on to this belief.
3. Write down all the reasons why your change-blocking belief gets in your way.
Perhaps the belief keeps you from exploring new opportunities ,or prolongs your state of unhappiness.
4. Review your two lists carefully.
Ask yourself whether the advantages or disadvantages seem more compelling. You’re likely to find that the disadvantages greatly outweigh the advantages. If so, commit yourself to challenging your change-blocking belief by reading over the Hindrance column often. And see Chapter 7 for more ideas on how to challenge problematic beliefs.
Harry’s story shows how he uses the Help and Hindrance technique to his benefit. Harry does nothing about his depression for nine months. He hopes his low mood will just go away all by itself, but his depression only deepens. His therapist suggests reading a particular self-help book. After three more months of putting it off, Harry reads a chapter. He discovers he believes he’is undeserving. This prevents him from tackling his depression - he feels that he doesn’t deserve happiness. And he’s particularly undeserving of pleasure because his depression’s meant he’s been unproductive as a freelance writer. Although a bit sceptical, Harry does a Help and Hindrance Analysis of his undeserving belief. Table 3-1 shows the results of Harry’s analysis.
Table 3-1 Harry’s Help and Hindrance Analysis
Belief: Undeserving Outlook
Help
Hindrance
Avoiding pleasure stops me from feeling guilty.
This belief stops me from trying to improve my life.
People won’t think I’m self-centred.
I actually feel guilty all the time, whether I have a good time or not.
I’ll be satisfied with less.
I always feel unhappy.
Overcoming Depression For Dummies Page 9