Totally.
It's impossible to describe the feeling of true depression. It is more than discouragement and defeat. It feels as though your soul has been torn from you. Amazingly, I functioned at work, but inside I was empty. I felt like a zombie, shuffling aimlessly from activity to activity. There was no joy, nothing to look forward to. Every single day, I lived with the idea of killing myself. But even that seemed pointless. For what seemed an eternity, I went through the ritual of getting up, going to work, and helping other people. But there was no one home, no one inside. Later, a friend told me that I looked frightening during that time: scuffed shoes, hair ragged and uncombed, eyes lifeless.
Just like Jack. When I saw him, it was as if I were facing myself years ago. It was a self I had swept under my mind's carpet but recognized too, too well. Nietzsche was right: When you stare long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Slowly, wearily, I told Jack my story. I'm not sure what that big, boisterous guy expected when he came to a therapist, but I'm confident he didn't expect to hear his counselor's tale of suicidal depression.
I told Jack how the market was to be my way of making it big and proving myself I needed to prove myself to my parents, who were successful themselves, to the people who hadn't believed in me, to myself. Making a killing was going to redeem me from the humdrum of daily life. I was going to make it. As I made money over the first years of trading, the profits were nice, but modest. They brought no redemption. So I increased my bet size, using margin to place more money on the line than I actually had in my account. The plunge of 1982 was going to set me free, cementing my career as a trader. Instead, it plunged me into depression.
I explained to Jack that my depression was followed by a wild period of drinking and dating, a frantic effort to escape the black hole. Bottom came in a bar in Homer, New York, after several rounds of Scotch and a particularly potent (and probably adulterated) smoke. There was a band playing that evening, but I couldn't make out the words or the tunes. The sounds seemed to emanate from within, feeling almost like liquid swirling inside my head. I was immobilized, recognizing that I was very, very impaired. I dared not leave my seat; I knew I would never stay vertical. After an indeterminate time (and the same tune swirling through my skull), I pulled myself together and made it to my car. By that time, I was sober enough to drive with extreme caution and the roads were empty enough to reduce the risks of accident. After a night of throwing up, I awoke to the guilty sense that I could have killed someone on those roads. My thoughts were clear, though my head was throbbing, and my words echoed Jack's: I can't keep living this way.
There was something powerful in that realization. Only a couple of weeks later, I got drunk for the last time in my life—at a New Year's party where I met Margie, the woman who would become my wife and the one great love of my life. Seven months after that, we were engaged; the following year I took a major pay cut to do the work I really wanted to do: student counseling. From the pits of head-throbbing despair, my life had turned 180 degrees.
Jack listened with rapt attention. Once slumped over, he now held my gaze. He chimed in with his tales of partying and infidelity. He talked of his own depression, born of the unavoidable sense that he was responsible for his own downfall, that he would never amount to anything. For a few minutes, the boundaries blurred, the conversation as liquid as the music years ago. There was no counselor, no client. Just two people who had undergone similar agonies, reveling in battle stories and war wounds.
I broke the spell.
"Hell, Jack," I said. "You don't care about the money or the trading. That's not why you're depressed. If that's what it was, you could take your gun, hold up some people, and grab as much as you need. But that wouldn't prove anything. You wanted to prove your parents wrong, you wanted to make something of yourself. That's what you lost, not just the trading stake."
Jack seemed deep in thought. My voice lowered just a bit as I suggested, "I bet you can hear people's voices in your head, telling you you're never going to amount to anything." Jack nodded. "And that depresses you," I said gently, "the thought that they might have been right."
Jack's eyes widened with surprise as he wondered, "How do you know that?"
I offered my best, thin smile. "It depressed me, too."
CREATING CHANGE BY CREATING NEW ROLES
Telling clients of your own travails is not exactly textbook therapy. Nor is it something I would think of doing in most professional situations. Taking a one-down position, however, introduces a most unexpected element into the process. People often rise beautifully to the challenge.
For several years, I participated as a group therapy leader on an adult inpatient psychiatric unit. Such hospital units serve one purpose primarily: to keep people safe. In this era of cost-consciousness, people are hospitalized when they are a danger to themselves or others or when they are so out of touch with reality that they cannot properly care for themselves.
The clients on the unit were beaten down. Many had experienced long-term physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Others had long-standing problems of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. Occasionally, it was difficult to separate out what was "mental illness" and what were the long-term effects of myriad tranquilizing medications. Vacant eyes, a shuffling gait, and low tones of despair were the typical signs of lifelong emotional difficulties and chemical treatments.
In the group sessions, sustaining a conversation was a major undertaking. Fearful of ridicule, certain that their problems could be of no interest to others, the participants sat with eyes cast downward, barely responding to direct inquiries. Just an hour later, however, sitting in the dayroom, these same patients would engage each other in animated conversation, often sharing difficult and significant personal stories. It was especially eye-opening to see how they dealt with crises. When one person hit a low point, contemplating suicide, even the most noncommunicative individuals would rally to their support, offering friendship and guidance. At such points, it was often difficult to discern that these were chronic psychiatric patients.
It struck me, after one tooth-pulling session of group therapy, that the problem was that I was the therapist. If I am the helper, what role is left for the others? They can only be helpees. When the clients were in the dayroom, however, there were no patients and therapists. Everyone helped everyone. And everyone was needed. The patient role meant not being needed, not being of use to anyone—except, of course, when dealing with other patients.
The next session, I tried an experiment. Speaking in a low, somber voice, I explained to the group that I would not be able to talk very much for that meeting. I indicated that there was a significant health problem in my family and that I was afraid for our daughter's well-being.
The therapy room was perfectly quiet. Nothing like this had happened before.
"What's wrong with your daughter?" one member asked tenderly. She was a young woman who had been abused as a child, one of the members who rarely spoke.
"She was diagnosed with a tumor near her brain," I explained. "It's going to take major surgery. I'm just a little freaked out, that's all. They say that the success rate for the surgery is high."
"I never knew you ever freaked out," a young man with long hair remarked with astonishment. I could tell that "you" referred to the plural, to all therapists.
"It would be nice if that were true," I smiled. "I wish I never had anxious feelings or suicidal feelings or depressed feelings."
A slight gasp was audible. "You've been suicidal?" one member asked in amazement. It was if she had said, "You've been to Mars?"
"Of course," I replied, a slight hint of annoyance in my tone. "What do you think I am, a robot?"
"It's just that none of you ever talks about it," the first woman explained. "You get to know us and we don't know anything about you . . . "
"Yeah," an angry young man chimed in, "It's like you just sit back there watching and judging us."
"Okay, fair enough," I offered. "What do you want to know about me?"
"Have you ever lost anyone you were close to?" the young man challenged.
I paused for a second. "Twice," I said. "My grandfather died, and I was the first to discover his body in the apartment. I knew he was sick, and I went to visit him in the afternoon, but he had died. For a long time I felt guilty, wishing I had stopped by to see him in the morning. At least he wouldn't have died alone."
I paused again and plunged in with both feet. "My wife and I also lost a child during a pregnancy. It was very difficult. I'm very afraid of losing another child."
An older woman, who had been depressed and silent throughout our sessions, suddenly stirred. "I'm sorry," she said. She started to speak further, then hesitated, started, and paused again. "My husband died just before I came here to the hospital," she explained. "He killed himself." She broke into tears. "We had been fighting. We were always fighting. But I never thought he'd kill himself. I feel like I killed him."
The abused young lady left her seat and hugged the sobbing woman. The angry man was visibly touched. "My dad left us when I was five," he ventured.
The silence was gone from the room, never to return for the remainder of my tenure as group leader. If an observer had entered the room at that moment, it would have been difficult if not impossible to discern who was the doctor and who were patients. In the space of a few minutes, we had created new identities.
LEAPS AND TEMPOS
So what is happening in the therapy with Jack and the group in the hospital? The answer can be found in music.
In his The Listening Book, W. A. Mathieu refers to leaps, in which the musician makes a sudden movement from one scale tone to another. He explains that leaps tend to be filled in by the subsequent melody, as in the development following the first two notes in Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Technical analysts rely on the very same phenomenon when price action creates a gap—a sudden, discontinuous move from one price level to another. People's equilibrium-seeking tendencies lead them to find a middle ground between the extremes of a leap or a gap.
The leap in therapy is from one structuring of the relationship to another. When the sessions begin, I am cast in the role of therapist. Jack and the people on the hospital unit are the patients. I initiate the questions, they respond. They tell me how bad they feel, I try to find a solution. The very structure of the situation keeps the participants locked in narrow roles.
It doesn't take much of a change in the structure of a musical piece to alter its emotional tone. Philip Glass's music derives much of its power from exploring the nuances of change: the ability of the listener to adapt to repetition and to become highly attuned to small shifts in structure. When a Glass piece on the CD is over and moves to the next track, the absorbed listener experiences a leap—a sudden, discontinuous transition. The effect is jarring.
It is precisely such a leap that occurs in therapy when a counselor steps out of role. By withholding the expected response, the therapist makes it impossible for clients to respond with their normal patterns. This creates fluidity, opening the door to filling in the gap with new action patterns. The "music" of therapy is radically altered if I disclose my own problems or appear to be more vulnerable than the people I am helping. Not infrequently, ones-who-need-help fill in the leap and respond with a trance-formation, exiting the loop of their own problems and reaching out as ones-who-can-help.
The participants in therapy, like those in any significant relationship, create a musical score with their interactions. That score has themes and tempo, a distinctive timbre and texture that reflect the states of the "players." When one party alters a parameter of the score, by restructuring the relationship or simply by shifting his or her tone of voice or volume level, the musical creation is changed, opening the door to new variations, new themes, and new tempos.
This has profound implications for altering the behavior patterns of traders. If traders want to accelerate their changes, they need to act not just differently, but radically differently from their norms in order to create a leap. While incremental change might be necessary for the person who has been traumatized, and hence needs a sense of safety, taking baby steps may not be the best solution for most people.
Consider a practical trading example. I recently reached the point where my research and trading had been going sufficiently well that it was time to increase my size. Nevertheless, I found myself balking at the move. No doubt I was being extracautious, lest my hard-won confidence turn out to be overconfidence.
No one ever overcame a fear by avoiding it, however. Instead of increasing my size incrementally, which would have been a concession to my fear, I decided to immediately double my positions for my normal trades. Making this leap was my way of using my actions to reinforce confidence, much as I had done as Jack's therapist. I may not have felt totally confident, but I was going to act on the premise of confidence, and thereby reinforce confidence.
Moreover, I realized that I was creating a new role for myself. I had always thought of myself as a "small trader." I knew that I would never change this identity by nudging my size higher and becoming a "less small trader." If my goal was to trade size, I needed to gain familiarity with myself as a "large trader."
I won't pretend that this was an easy period in my trading. Doubling size doubles dollar drawdowns and more than doubles one's susceptibility to emotional whipsaws. Sitting in front of the screen, continually reassuring myself that these were the same trades that I had been making successfully, and allowing the markets to buffet me with random movement were not unlike Ali's ordeal in Kinshasa. All I could do was absorb the blows, keep myself psyched, and wait for the moment when I could say, "Now it's my turn!"
My turn came when I decided to create one of my nearest-neighbor models of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) TICK indicator. The model identified all days in the past three years that were similar to the most recent day with respect to the behavior of the TICK. This allowed me to see how the market performed subsequent to each of these past occasions.
The TICK had been extremely strong for a while, so I queried the database to give me all historical periods in which TICK was strong but price had not gone to a new high. The results hit me in the face. Whenever the TICK had been strong and price had not followed, the market weakness did not end until the TICK—and price—came tumbling down.
Armed with what seemed to be solid research, I doubled my normal size and shorted the market, despite the fact that it had already been down for a while. I made the leap—and kept nervously glued to the screen—but stayed grounded in the research. I would not close the position unless the market hit a new high or unless the TICK sold off.
As the trade turned profitable, I found my normal calm confidence returning. I could appreciate that this really was no different from my other trades, size notwithstanding. I took my profits, but I didn't feel elated. To the contrary, it seemed routine. I was adjusting to the leap and it was feeling more normal. It was becoming part of me.
If traders have the courage to stick with their leaps, they have the potential to internalize a new set of experiences and to draw a radically different map of the self. One trader I knew, Dwayne, indicated to me that he had a problem with impulsive trading. He became caught up in market action, especially around times of volatility, and ended up in trades that were not well thought through.
I encouraged Dwayne to make a major leap. For a while, he was not to trade more than once a day and he was not to trade unless both of his trading systems solidly pointed in the same direction. At first, he balked. "I might not trade for the whole day!" he complained.
"That's the point," I explained. "If you want to be in control, you can't do it by being less impulsive. Let's take a few trades where you are totally in control, and see what that feels like."
Dwayne carried out the exercise faithfully and placed a good number of winning trades over the ensuing weeks. Unable to gain excitement by overt
rading, he poured his energy into research and planning, discovering new directions for his trading. By the time he finished our little experiment, he seemed less interested in returning to frequent trading. But he realized that he could now fill in the gap and trade more often while remaining in control. Having experienced control for a while, he felt like it was becoming part of him and would not leave—even if he increased the frequency of his trading.
If you want to achieve an ideal, shift your actions radically in the direction of your ideal, and spend enough time in that mode to internalize the results. If you have defined your desired end reasonably and stick with the initial awkwardness, you will have created a new role for yourself, much like those patients on the hospital unit.
I strongly suspect that the duration and the extent of the leap is directly correlated with its results. This may account for much of the success of experiential and brief dynamic therapies, which immerse clients in experiences that they have been warding off, creating massive shifts from accustomed modes. The therapy of Habib Davanloo is quite unusual, in that it features a vigorous confrontation of each and every client resistance. Over the course of an extended session, clients become increasingly agitated and frustrated by Davanloo's maneuvers. Eventually this spills out as a direct expression of anger and resentment—the very feelings that they often have been withholding. The leap to a new, angry state, but now with none of the feared consequences, is a powerful corrective emotional experience. Like Walt, Davanloo's clients discover that they can be angry without being destructive.
The majority of trading problems appear to involve a faulty regulation of personal control. Some traders are overly inhibited in the markets, unable to pull the trigger and act on their plans. Others are impulsive, unable to follow routines and discipline, and continually trading outside their plan. The most helpful emotional leaps for the inhibited trader are those that involve shifts to highly energized, action-oriented states: the pounding on the mattress advocated by Alexander Lowen, the immersion in experiencing described by Alvin Mahrer. The most productive leaps for the impulsive trader accomplish the reverse: dampening reactivity through increased focus, relaxation, and physical stillness. With sufficient practice, these leaps open new frequencies on the radio dial, reinforcing traders' abilities to program themselves.
The Psychology of Trading Page 35