Psychologist Steven Hayes suggests that trying to suppress your bad feelings can in the long run bring on depression. For example, if you’re angry and you don’t let it out, you direct your frustration inwards at yourself. He suggests that you make a spare room available for bad feelings; inviting the bad feelings to stay for a while.
Dr Hayes tells the story of a little boy who had troubling, recurrent nightmares about monsters. More than anything the little boy wanted to drive his nightmares away. Dr. Hayes said that instead of trying to rid himself of the monsters, why not place a small box under his bed where the monsters could stay for a while. He told the boy that the monsters had nowhere else to go and needed a little space of their own. Soon the monsters were no longer disturbing the boy’s sleep.
Yesterday and tomorrow: Living any time but now
Only humans, as far as we know, have the ability of looking back to the past and visualising the future. Sometimes looking back and looking forward can be a pleasurable activity. But too often the mind puts your life ‘on hold’ keeping you bogged down in the mire of the past, and filling you with dread about the future. The result is that feelings of guilt, resentment, revenge, self-hate, and sadness can well up causing you fear and anxiety.
In this section, we show you how depression can try to fool your mind and manipulate your past to sabotage the present. When you see how living in the past and future distorts your perspective, you’re going to fully appreciate the value of living in the present.
Waiting to be happy
How often have you thought ‘I’ll be happy when I . . .’? Perhaps you’re going to be happy when:
You finish writing the book you’ve been working on.
You can buy that dream home.
You retire.
You finish your degree.
You finally meet that special someone.
You afford that new car.
Looking for happiness can involve you in a never ending struggle to fulfil your desires. Perhaps the price you’re paying for being in a highly-paid job means working excessively long hours. Then you give yourself a new goal of finding happiness by looking for a job with a lower salary but more freedom. Being repeatedly seduced by the promise of future happiness persistently prevents experiencing the pleasure of the here and now.
Predicting a miserable future
Your depressed mind enjoys playing yet another trick on you: predicting that your future looks grim and you’re never going to be able to cope.
Janet, a teacher, has battled mild with depression for over a year. She’s studying part-time for her master’s degree, and is nearly at the end. To complete her degree, Janet only needs to write her dissertation. Only? Writing a dissertation is a formidable task. Janet’s mind focuses on pictures of herself being drowned in a flood of of work. These images cause a motivational meltdown. Janet has no idea how she’s going to move forward.
Eventually, Janet buckles down and starts working on her dissertation. When she finally completes her task, Janet looks back and is stunned to find that writing up her dissertation was a totally absorbing and satisfying experience: she isn’t able to recall one single moment of working on her dissertation that caused her stress or sorrow. No, not one!
Playing the victim role
Knowing the origins of your negative thinking can be of value to you. For example, you realise that your response to an event has more to do with your past experiences than with what’s happening to you right now. Seeing the difference between the two can help you make sense of what is going on right now (flick to Chapters 3 and 7 for more information playing the role of the victim and overcoming distorted thinking).
Watch out that you don’t allow your mind to become fixed on past difficulties and disasters and picturing the injustices you’ve experienced throughout your life. You can so easily start seeing yourself as a victim, resenting and blaming others for all that has happened to you. Chapter 3 discusses the seductiveness of victim thinking as well as exploring ways to get out of that mindset.
Imperfect Past Makes Future Tense!
Your mind has a clever way of leading you into passing judgements on yourself based on your past. Falling into this trap makes it likely you’re going to come up with some pretty harsh verdicts. You may even feel overwhelmed by guilt and self-loathing. But to be honest, can you think of anyone who wouldn’t jump at the chance of changing some things about their past?
Of course, looking back to the past, and knowing what you know today, you’re likely to do many things differently. But let’s face it, you didn’t know then what you know now. And anyway, you can’t change the past. The past is useful for acting as guide for turning negative experiences into positive actions, now and in the future. It’s crucial that you seize the opportunity for making those changes now.
Take a leaf from a dog’s book. Dogs don’t live in the past, even though they can learn from what they’ve been doing (well eventually, anyway). Have you ever come home and found that your dog has been misbehaving? You scold him, and no dog could look guiltier or more apologetic. But how long does it take your mutt to bounce back from being sorry? Three minutes? Your dog may have been feeling genuinely sorry for behaving badly – or at least he simply hated you being cross with him. But what you can be sure of is that he’s not going to spend the next few days beating himself up about his misdemeanor. No, more likely five minutes later he’s going to to be running around happily, just as if nothing had happened.
The next time you make a mess of something, try feeling as guilty . . . as a dog. Allow yourself to feel bad for only a short time, then drop it. Beating yourself up is going to do absolutely nothing to improve your life. Avoid wreaking havoc on the here and now.
Living Mindfully
We hope after reading the previous sections of this chapter, you’ve got to grips with mindfulness and can now think about applying mindfulness to your daily life. Mindful living covers two main areas: acceptance and connecting with experience.
When life deals you a hand of cards, acceptance keeps you in the game. And once you discover acceptance, you don’t judge yourself as being a good or bad player, you just play. You view the dealer (fate) as neutral, not good or bad.
Connecting with experience means staying in the game. You don’t spend time grieving over previous hands or worrying about future ones. If your hand is good, you enjoy playing it. However, if you’re dealt a poor hand, you do the best you can. You don’t throw your cards down in disgust and walk away. Perhaps you’ll have better cards next time; perhaps not. Either way, connecting with the experience makes you willingly accept whatever deal you get.
Acquiring acceptance
Acceptance is a willingness to cope with whatever comes your way. Acceptance is the opposite of rejection and resistance. To become accepting, you must give up passing judgements on yourself, others, and events. Criticising yourself and others can lead to rejection and unhappiness.
Perhaps you find acceptance a novel idea? Your mind probably has been long trained to fight and resist anything and everything that feels unpleasant. To do the opposite seems downright illogical, self-defeating, and dangerous. Practically unthinkable.
How can we possibly write an entire book about overcoming depression, and suggest you think seriously about accepting depression? Do we want you to be depressed? Are we suggesting you resign yourself to depression? Actually, quite the opposite.
Your mind may be telling you right now, ‘That’s a ridiculous idea! You can’t possibly accept feeling depressed! Don’t listen to this rubbish!’ But just hang on for a second, and all is about to become clear . . .
Psychologists are discovering something that Buddhist monks have known for many centuries. Acceptance provides a key to peace and harmony. Accepting what is happening to you now, although it may seem quite the wrong thing to do, has great value:
Acceptance allows you to walk away from the struggle. Imagine you’re playing tug of war with your depression. You
fight your depression with all your might and throw everything you have at it. But inexplicably, your depression only deepens. Yet, this tug of war is no game. Depression is like a 20 foot, two-ton monster. And between the two of you gapes a huge chasm, so deep you can’t even see the bottom. Every time you pull harder on your end of the rope, your depression in the shape of the monster pulls harder still. You feel you’re being pulled over the edge. Desperation sets in. Then you have a bright idea. Just let go, and drop your end of the rope! The monster topples over backwards. You calmly walk away.
Acceptance involves walking away from the struggle. That’s because, as we say in the earlier section ‘Knowing that resistance is futile’, the more tenacious you are about avoiding feeling anxiety or depressed, the more likely it is that you’re going to end up experiencing full-blown depression.
Acceptance of where you are now often helps you discover a better route. Imagine that you’re out driving at night on a dark country road, and you hit a blizzard. You’ve only got ten miles to go when your car slides into a snow drift. You press the accelerator and the wheels start spinning. You accelerate more; they just spin faster. You’re completely and totally stuck. You’re afraid you may die if you’re not rescued soon. And you’re in a place where there’s no mobile phone signal. Petrified, you accelerate even more.
So you tell yourself to ‘Stop it!’. You think things through – ‘Here I am, stuck in a drift and panicking – how helpful is this?’ Just sitting reflecting on your situation, you remember that the way out most certainly isn’t by flooring the accelerator. So you gently accelerate and when the wheels begin to spin, you reduce the pressure a bit. The car rocks back a little, and then you apply a bit more pressure on the accelerator. You get into a rhythm. Slowly but surely the car makes bigger swings to and fro. Eventually, you move on.
You got out of your predicament by accepting the idea of dealing with where you are for a little while (stuck), allowing yourself to rock backwards (not where you want to go), and only then gently moving forward a little at a time. Working on your depression is much like digging yourself out of a snow drift.
Now that you understand what acceptance is all about, here are a couple of strategies for introducing acceptance into your life.
Accept where you are. Developing the skills of acceptance takes time and hard work. Any gains you make can improve your quality of life. Acceptance isn’t about assessing how accepting you’re becoming. Don’t be discouraged if you feel you’re taking one step forward and two backwards. Acceptance doesn’t see the difference between forwards and backwards.
Accepting without judging
Think about the value of accepting yourself as you are. If you must, try judging the consequences of your actions, rather than your ‘self’. By the way, this is the same advice psychologists give to parents about bringing up their children: identify a child’s behaviour as bad or undesirable, but don’t label the child as ‘bad’. If you’re unhappy with something that you have done, tell yourself that you can always find new and better ways of behaving.
You’re probably far harder on yourself than you are on others. You like your friends and acquaintances for who they are, warts and all. Try behaving towards yourself as if you were one of your best friends.
Living as if no one will know
Imagine no one ever knowing anything about you – what you’ve been doing with your life,your successes and your failures. No one is in a position to pass judgement on you. Now ask yourself what changes would you make in your life if no one knew anything about your successes and failures? Would you change the way you live your life, if it wasn’t subject to the scrutiny of others? If so, you’re making changes in response to the judgement of others. Try living for yourself. You do need to consider what others want, but without being dominated by them.
Addressing self-absorption
A number of psychologists have identified the role of self-absorption (preoccupation with yourself) in a range of emotional disorders, including depression. The more you focus on yourself, the stronger your negative feelings become. Focusing on your thoughts and feelings is understandable, as you try to gain some kind of ‘insight’. This can cause more harm than good. Also, much of this self-focus involves judging and evaluating the self, often negatively. According to Professor Williams and colleagues, when we become preoccupied, we lose touch with the world, with those around us including those we most love, and who most love us. We deny ourselves the rich input of the whole experience of living. By practising mindfulness, and the cognitive therapy discussed in Part II, means you’re less likely to be self-absorbed. Even though the exercises in this book do ask you to try looking at yourself from another angle, you’re probably going to end up being far less preoccupied with self.
Connecting with experience: Life’s no spectator sport
Do you know the saying ‘the past is history, the future is a mystery, but the here and now is a gift, which is why we call it the present!’ This saying nicely sums up what cognitive therapy and mindfulness are about.
Here’s the story of two Buddhist monks on a journey. Reaching a stream, they see a small, frail woman. She asks to be carried across – the water’s too wide and the current too strong for her. Despite the prohibition of touching a woman, the first monk picks her up, carries her across, and the two monks continue on their way. After two hour’s silence, the second monk bursts out ‘I can’t get over it! You carried that woman! Across the river!’ The second smilingly says ‘Yes. But I put her down hours ago. You’re still carrying her.’
As you bring acceptance into your life (see the earlier ‘Acquiring acceptance’ section) you’re preparing to experience life grounded in the present. The idea of being connected with present-moment experience is rather strange for many people. Staying connected with ‘now’ takes practice. However, even small steps towards acceptance can lead to some respite and peace in your life.
Few people truly know how to mindfully accept what is. You are constantly being bombarded with countless pressures and distractions. With such competing stimuli, you need to give yourself time to acquire the skill of mindful acceptance. Be non-judgemental about your attempts. Your mind is going to go on throwing up disrupting thoughts as inevitably as the sun rises and sets each day. You can acquire the skill of acceptance slowly and surely, acknowledging your achievements even while still being attacked by negative thoughts. It’s a dog’s life!
Fortunately, few people experience really horrific events in their lives; for most people it’s the small stuff that’s upsetting. Thoughts can all too easily get in the way of what you‘re actually experiencing, encouraging you to invent and focus all sorts of horrors or unwanted feelings.
Imagine you have the opportunity like Charles, one of the authors of this book, to break up your writing day with a bit of exercise. You take the dogs out for a long walk three or four times each week. Given the unpredictability of the British weather, you’re bound to get rained on sometimes.
While out with his dogs Charles curses his fate when it starts to drizzle, and returns home as quickly as possible. But quite often Charles gets a thorough soaking. Then Charles notices that the dogs never seem to mind the rain. They just shake off the excess water and go on enjoying the outing as much as ever. Charles wonders how his dogs can connect with their experience apparently undaunted and unfazed. Then it hit him. Dogs don’t have any preconceived idea about how awful it is to get soaked; they merely connect with the joy of the experience.
Can you do the same? Try taking another view of the rain, reminding yourself that it really doesn’t feel that different to your usual morning shower . . . but a bit cooler! Like Charles, ask yourself does getting soaked matter? The experience of being outdoors, regardless of the rain, can feel wonderful, if you let the thoughts go and simply ‘be’.
Of course, you may say, ‘But what about lightning? Isn’t that dangerous and don’t I need to shelter?’ Well, you’re right, taking positive act
ion in response to a negative thought does have it’s uses.
On the occasions when thoughts warn you of real danger, you do need to listen to them. However, all too often, negative thoughts send out false alarms that are best ignored.
Take the same approach as Charles and try connecting with your experiences. When your thoughts magnify the awfulness of what you’re going through, try disengaging from them. Merely connect with the actual experience, not with what you’re making the experience out to be in your mind.
When you find yourself dwelling on past regrets or future worries, try the Connecting with the Present exercise. This exercise shows you how to observe your thoughts mindfully. We suggest you practise 10 or 15 minutes each day, for a few weeks. Try not to let yourself get upset if troubling or distracting thoughts interfere while you’re doing the exercise. Remember, that’s just what the mind does. If such thoughts come into your mind, merely notice them, rather than judging whether you’re doing the exercise correctly.
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