Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (27 page)

    1.   The events of this world don’t make you angry. Your “hot thoughts” create your anger. Even when a genuinely negative event occurs, it is the meaning you attach to it that determines your emotional response.

              The idea that you are responsible for your anger is
ultimately to your advantage because it gives you the opportunity to achieve control and make a free choice about how you want to feel. If it weren’t for this, you would be helpless to control your emotions; they would be irreversibly bound up with every external event of this world, most of which are ultimately out of your control.

    2.   Most of the time your anger will not help you. It will immobilize you, and you will become frozen in your hostility to no productive purpose. You will feel better if you place your emphasis on the active search for creative solutions. What can you do to correct the difficulty or at least reduce the chance that you’ll get burned in the same way in the future? This attitude will eliminate to a certain extent the helplessness and frustration that eat you up when you feel you can’t deal with a situation effectively.

              If no solution is possible because the provocation is totally beyond your control, you will only make yourself miserable with your resentment, so why not get rid of it? It’s difficult if not impossible to feel anger and joy simultaneously. If you think your angry feelings are especially precious and important, then think about one of the happiest moments of your life. Now ask yourself. How many minutes of that period of peace or jubilation would I be willing to trade in for feeling frustration and irritation instead?

    3.   The thoughts that generate anger more often than not will contain distortions. Correcting these distortions will reduce your anger.

    4.   Ultimately your anger is caused by your belief that someone is acting unfairly or some event is unjust. The intensity of the anger will increase in proportion to the severity of the maliciousness perceived and if the act is seen as intentional.

    5.   If you learn to see the world through other people’s eyes, you will often be surprised to realize their actions
are
not
unfair from their point of view. The unfairness in these cases turns out to be an illusion that exists
only in your mind
! If you are willing to let go of the unrealistic notion that your concepts of truth, justice, and fairness are shared by everyone, much of your resentment and frustration will vanish.

    6.   Other people usually do not feel they deserve your punishment. Therefore, your retaliation is unlikely to help you achieve any positive goals in your interactions with them. Your rage will often just cause further deterioration and polarization, and will function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if you temporarily get what you want, any short-term gains from such hostile manipulation will often be more than counterbalanced by a long-term resentment and retaliation from the people you are coercing. No one likes to be controlled or forced. This is why a positive reward system works better.

    7.   A great deal of your anger involves your defense against loss of self-esteem when people criticize you, disagree with you, or fail to behave as you want them to. Such anger is
always
inappropriate because only your own negative distorted thoughts can cause you to lose self-esteem. When you blame the other guy for your feelings of worthlessness, you are always fooling yourself.

    8.   Frustration results from unmet expectations. Since the event that disappointed you was a part of “reality,” it was “realistic.” Thus, your frustration always results from your
unrealistic
expectation. You have the right to try to influence reality to bring it more in line with your expectations, but this is not always practical, especially when these expectations represent ideals that don’t correspond to everyone else’s concept of human nature. The simplest solution would be to
change
your expectations. For example, some unrealistic expectations that lead to frustration include:

    9.   It is just childish pouting to insist you have the
right
to be angry. Of course you do! Anger is legally permitted in the United States. The crucial issue is—is it to your advantage to feel angry? Will you or the world really benefit from your rage?

  10.   You rarely need your anger in order to be human. It is not true that you will be an unfeeling robot without it. In fact, when you rid yourself of that sour irritability, you will feel greater zest, joy, peace, and productivity. You will experience liberation and enlightenment.

No book on depression would be complete without a chapter on guilt. What is the function of guilt? Writers, spiritual leaders, psychologists, and philosophers have grappled forever with this question. What is the basis of guilt? Does it evolve from the concept of “original sin”? Or from Oedipal incestuous fantasies and the other taboos that Freud postulated? Is it a realistic and helpful component of human experience? Or is it a “useless emotion” that mankind would be better off without, as suggested by some recent pop psychology writers?

When the mathematics of calculus was developed, scientists found they could readily solve complex problems of motion and acceleration that were extremely difficult to handle using older methods. The cognitive theory has similarly provided us with a kind of “emotional calculus” that makes certain thorny philosophical and psychological questions much easier to resolve.

Let’s see what we can learn from a cognitive approach. Guilt is the emotion you will experience when you have the following thoughts:

This concept of the “badness” of self is central to guilt. In its absence, your hurtful action might lead to a healthy feeling of remorse but not guilt. Remorse stems from the undistorted awareness that you have willfully and unnecessarily acted in a hurtful manner toward yourself or another person that violates your personal ethical standards. Remorse differs from guilt because there is no implication your transgression indicates you are inherently bad, evil, or immoral. To put it in a nutshell, remorse or regret are aimed at behavior, whereas guilt is targeted toward the “self.”

If in addition to your guilt you feel depression, shame, or anxiety, you are probably making one of the following assumptions:

The simplest way to assess whether the feelings created by such thoughts are useful or destructive is to determine if they contain any of the ten cognitive distortions described in Chapter 3. To the extent that these thinking errors are present, your guilt, anxiety, depression, or shame certainly cannot be valid or realistic. I suspect you will find that a great many of your negative feelings are in fact based on such thinking errors.

The first potential distortion when you are feeling guilty
is your assumption you have done something wrong. This may or may not actually be the case. Is the behavior you condemn in yourself in reality so terrible, immoral, or wrong? Or are you
magnifying
things out of proportion? A charming medical technologist recently brought me a sealed envelope containing a piece of paper on which she had written something about herself which was so terrible she couldn’t bear to say it out loud. As she trembling handed the envelope to me, she made me promise not to read it out loud or laugh at her. The message inside was—“I pick my nose and eat it!” The apprehension and horror on her face in contrast to the triviality of what she had written struck me as so funny I lost all professional composure and burst into laughter. Fortunately, she too broke into a belly laugh and expressed a sense of relief.

Am I claiming that you
never
behave badly? No. That position would be extreme and unrealistic. I am simply insisting that to the extent your perception of goofing up is unrealistically magnified, your anguish and self-persecution are inappropriate and unnecessary.

A second key distortion that leads to guilt is when you
label
yourself a “bad person” because of what you did. This is actually the kind of superstitious destructive thinking that led to the medieval witch hunts! You may have engaged in a bad, angry, hurtful action, but it is counterproductive to label yourself a “bad” or “rotten” person because your energy gets channeled into rumination and self-persecution instead of creative problem-solving strategies.

Another common guilt-provoking distortion is
personalization
. You inappropriately assume responsibility for an event you did not cause. Suppose you offer a constructive criticism to your boyfriend, who reacts in a defensive and hurt manner. You may blame yourself-for his emotional upset and arbitrarily conclude that your comment was inappropriate. In fact, his negative
thoughts
upset him, not your comment. Furthermore, these thoughts are probably distorted. He might be thinking that your criticism means he’s no good and conclude that you don’t respect him.
Now—did
you
put that illogical thought into his head? Obviously not.
He
did it, so you can’t assume responsibility for his reaction.

Because cognitive therapy asserts that only your thoughts create your feelings, you might come to the nihilistic belief that you cannot hurt anybody no matter what you do, and hence you have license to do
anything
. After all, why not run out on your family, cheat on your wife, and screw your partner financially? If they’re upset, it’s their problem because it’s their thoughts, right?

Wrong! Here we come again to the importance of the concept of cognitive distortion. To the extent that a person’s emotional upset is caused by his distorted thoughts, then you can say he is responsible for his suffering. If you blame yourself for that individual’s pain, it is a personalization error. In contrast, if a person’s suffering is caused by valid, undistorted thoughts, then the suffering is real and may in fact have an external cause. For example, you might kick me in the stomach, and I could have the thoughts, “I’ve been kicked! It hurts!———!” In this case the responsibility for my pain rests with
you
, and your perception that you have hurt me is not distorted in any way. Your remorse and my discomfort are real and valid.

Inappropriate “should” statements
represent the “final common pathway” to your guilt. Irrational should statements imply you are expected to be perfect, all-knowing, or all-powerful. Perfectionistic shoulds include rules for living that defeat you by creating impossible expectations and rigidity. One example of this would be, “I
should
be happy at all times.” The consequence of this rule is that you will feel like a failure every time you are upset. Since it is obviously unrealistic for any human being to achieve the goal of perpetual happiness, the rule is self-defeating and irresponsible.

A should statement that is based on the premise you are all-knowing assumes you have all the knowledge in the universe and that you can predict the future with absolute certainty. For example, you might think, “I shouldn’t have
gone to the beach this weekend because I was coming down with the flu. What a jerk I am! Now I’m so sick I’ll be in bed for a week.” Berating yourself this way is unrealistic because you didn’t know for certain that going to the beach would make you so ill. If you
had
known this, you would have acted differently. Being human, you made a decision, and your hunch turned out to be wrong.

Should statements based on the premise you are all-powerful assume that, like God, you are omnipotent and have the ability to control yourself and other people so as to achieve each and every goal. You miss your tennis serve and wince, exclaiming, “I
shouldn’t
have missed that serve!” Why shouldn’t you? Is your tennis so superb that you can’t possibly miss a serve?

It is clear that these three categories of should statements create an inappropriate sense of guilt because they do not represent sensible moral standards.

In addition to distortion, several other criteria can be helpful in distinguishing abnormal guilt from a healthy sense of remorse or regret. These include the
intensity, duration
, and
consequences
of your negative emotion. Let’s use these criteria to evaluate the incapacitating guilt of a married fifty-two-year-old grammar-school teacher named Janice. Janice had been severely depressed for many years. Her problem was that she continually obsessed about two episodes of shoplifting that had occurred when she was fifteen. Although she had led a scrupulously honest life since that time, she could not shake the memory of those two incidents. Guilt-provoking thoughts constantly plagued her: “I’m a thief. I’m a liar. I’m no good. I’m a fake.” The agony of her guilt was so enormous that every night she prayed that God would let her die in her sleep. Every morning when she woke up still alive, she was bitterly disappointed and told herself, “I’m such a bad person even God doesn’t want me.” In frustration she finally loaded her husband’s pistol, aimed it at her heart, and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired and did not go off. She had not cocked it properly. She felt
the ultimate defeat: She couldn’t even kill herself! She put the gun down and wept in despair.