Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (6 page)

Most poems are about emotions. Perhaps yours. William Wordsworth said that poetry was ‘powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity’. Open one of the books and run your eyes down the verses. Find one that holds you. Then look at the title, and the name of the poet. That’s it. You can go home now. But remember the Book Church and come back here again!

NOTE

1
. Etty Hillesum,
Etty, a Diary 1941–43.
Jonathan Cape, 1983.

4

The ‘born loser’

MINDSETS OF DOOM

Anyone knows what ‘feeling a bit down’ is like.
Such sadness is generally short-lived: low spirits, a bad mood. Life is full of ups and downs and these are the downs. But when the downs become so long-lasting and so severe that we are permanently trapped in a dark cloud, we are experiencing despair. Despairers may adopt the following mental strategies:

•
Apathy –
I can’t be bothered.
 

•
Resignation –
I give up, I give in, I submit to anything.
 

•
Hopelessness –
I don’t expect anything will come of this – it’s all futile.
 

•
Stoicism –
I never get excited about anything: it all rolls over me.
 

•
Effort thrift –
If I never try, I reckon I can’t fail.
 

•
Cynicism –
I can knock anything down with my joyless quips.

These are all controlling mindsets. They are also destructive mindsets. They place controls on mental energy and emotion in order to avoid pain and effort. They limit the amount of belief and faith we are prepared to give to anything, or anyone. They are mean and miserly with our feelings, yet the whole effect is to render us emotionally bankrupt.

These mindsets are often the recourse of people who believe they are somehow
unfortunate, doomed
or
unlucky.
Born losers may act tough, or they may wallow in self-pity, but deep down they feel the cards are stacked against them, that life is utterly unfair. And the trouble is they are generally proven right. Such mindsets
work like self-fulfilling prophesies, because if you think like a loser, you tend to behave like a loser and you look like a loser in the mirror and to other people. Reality reflects back what we think and believe, like this:

DEAF TO ALL ENTREATIES

When I worked as a ‘scary Mary’ Restart trainer, long-term unemployed people used to come on my courses with a negative mindset. A lot of them seemed
permanently fed up
. For these demoralised souls, nothing had ever gone right, and nothing would ever go right. If you asked them what’s the matter, the conversation generally went something like this:

Talking to the ‘born loser’ (male)

‘What’s up?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘I am asking.’

‘Oh, our house was burgled and I lost my computer.’

‘Don’t worry – claim it on the insurance.’

‘I haven’t got any insurance.’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t afford it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m out of work.’

‘Why can’t you find work?’

‘I’m too old’ or ‘I’m not qualified’ or ‘I’m not good at interviews’ or ‘I can’t get up in the mornings’ or ‘I’m not confident with other people.’

‘Why not?’

At this point you may as well give up, because you won’t get anywhere – at least not like this. The person you are talking to has inwardly resigned himself to misfortune on a permanent basis. He doesn’t have any hope, or resources, or prospects. He feels like a loser, and therefore behaves like a loser, with fairly predictable results. He believes he is doomed to bad luck and unhappiness and that all his efforts will prove futile.

Another example is the girl who behaves as though she doesn’t like boys. It turns out that she doesn’t like her appearance either. You try talking to her.

Talking to the ‘born loser’ (female)

‘Why don’t you like boys?’

‘They don’t like me.’

‘What makes you think that?’

(Shrug.) ‘Dunno.’

‘What makes you think they don’t like you?’

‘They don’t talk to me.’

‘Do you talk to them?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘They don’t like me.’

This girl has made up her mind that she is destined for a life alone. Even if you introduce her to a nice young man and he asks her out, she will very likely bite his head off.

It is very difficult to reason with a ‘born loser’. Even if they go into therapy, the notion that they are somehow destined to be at the bottom of the heap is very hard to shift. As they see it, life is a vicious circle, and very vicious towards them, no matter what they do. Even if somebody tries to help them, it must be because of pity or some ulterior motive. Born losers will put up barrier after barrier to helpful suggestions from friends, family, colleagues, counsellors. The born loser
has the power to bring other people down, like a drowning man grabbing at his rescuer. Eventually others lose patience and begin to avoid such ‘saddoes’ altogether – yet another self-fulfilling prophesy confirmed. And when all else fails, the born loser has one final mental strategy up his sleeve. It is this:

•
Helplessness –
Someone must take pity on me. I can’t manage.

Unfortunately that doesn’t usually work either. It simply annoys people.

Fig. 1
The born loser’s vicious circle.

Clearly, we need to get to the bottom of this psychological mystery of what
makes
born losers. Those who adopt destructive mindsets become trapped in their circular thinking like hamsters in a wheel. When they have the chance to interact with the world, they grit their teeth and dig their heels in. They say ‘no’ a lot. They behave like victims rather than survivors. It ruins their lives and wrecks their chances, yet they can’t stop doing it, and on the surface it
doesn’t make sense.
Strangely, there is a centuries-old philosophy that underpins this self-defeating behaviour.

THE ‘GLOOM AND DOOM’ MERCHANTS

For generations in Western culture, there has been a link between
gloom
and
doom
– between simply feeling downcast over current circumstances and feeling that one is
destined to be a loser.
In the past, for example in Calvinist and Puritan thinking, hopelessness and depression were not seen as mood disorders or diseases of the mind in the way they are today. A tendency to melancholia was thought to be based on one’s personal balance of ‘humours’ in the body (air, fire, water and earth). But despair itself – that disabling black hopelessness that destroys all effort and will – was looked upon as a spiritual state. It was considered ‘sinful’ and a sign that God must have turned His face away from the sufferer, who was therefore lacking in ‘grace’ – that magic cloud of love, luck and positive energy that you get when someone upstairs likes you.

For the Puritans, there was a widely accepted analogy between personal despair and economic ruin, and not just because debtors’ prisons like Sponge Row were full of people in abject despair. The Puritans believed in hard work. They didn’t spend their money in conspicuous consumption like the Catholics of the period. They were thrifty, and a lot of them were shopkeepers and middle-class business folk. They saved their money and kept careful accounts and diaries. To these people, evidence of failure to build up a respectable store of wealth and success by hard work in this life – in other words, bankruptcy, destitution or reliance on illegitimate trade like thieving or harlotry – were taken as a sign that the ruined person was predestined for one thing:
to go to Hell.
One’s fortune
prefigured
one’s eventual Fortune. ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’ – it was all providential.

THE PURITANS AND THE ‘CASTAWAY’

Unlike the
non
-despairing, hardworking and frugal middle-class Puritans who were evidently going to be saved, the poor man in despair was known as a ‘castaway’. Bankrupts could be sent to Newgate, and then literally ‘cast’ or hanged. Dr Johnson in his famous dictionary defines the castaway as ‘one cast away from the ship of the Elect’ (meaning the saved). The terrible predicament of this blighted soul meant that he kept up his anxious shadow-boxing all his life, miserably struggling on, as much from fear of extinction as anything else.

John Bunyan
was almost overwhelmed with anxiety at the thought of being a castaway. In Pilgrim’s Progress, Despair is a terrifying monster, and Christian has to get away from it and out of the Slough of Despond by his courage and effort. He succeeds in the end.

John Milton,
another Puritan writer, explored the predicament of the very first ‘Castaway’, Satan, in his epic Paradise Lost. Throughout the poem Milton’s Devil is trying to ‘build a heaven in hell’s despair’. Although Milton was a devoutly religious man and loved God, his depiction of the Devil somehow emerges as a glorious character, a fallen angel doomed to perpetual torment but refusing to give up. Milton was a political activist. He reached out almost to grasp his utopia, only to be thrown in prison by his opponents, bereaved of two successive wives and a son, struck blind and robbed of all his hopes. What he wrote came from his heart, and it was about the grandeur of fighting despair. If you read the poem, he gives his Devil all the best lines.