Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (17 page)

Figure 5–9.

Disarming Technique
. Your sense of paralysis will be intensified if your family and friends are in the habit of
pushing and cajoling you. Their nagging should statements reinforce the insulting thoughts already echoing through your head. Why is their pushy approach doomed to failure? It’s a basic law of physics that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Any time you feel shoved, whether by someone’s hand actually on your chest or by someone trying to boss you around, you will naturally tighten up and resist so as to maintain your equilibrium and balance. You will attempt to exert your self-control and preserve your dignity by refusing to do the thing that you are being pushed to do. The paradox is that you often end up hurting yourself.

It can be very confusing when someone obnoxiously insists you do something that actually would be to your advantage. This puts you in a “can’t win” situation because if you refuse to do what the person tells you, you end up defeating yourself just in order to spite him or her. In contrast, if you do what the person tells you to do, you feel had. Because you gave in to those pushy demands, you get the feeling the individual controlled you, and this robs you of self-respect. No one likes to be coerced.

For example, Mary is a woman in her late teens who was referred to us by her parents after many years of depression. Mary was a real “hibernator,” and had the capacity to sit alone in her room watching TV soap operas for months at a time. This was due in part to her irrational belief that she looked “peculiar,” and that people would stare at her if she went out in public, and also by her feeling of being coerced by her domineering mother. Mary admitted that doing things might help her feel better, but this would mean giving in to her mother, who kept telling her to get off her duff and do something. The harder Mom pushed, the more stubbornly Mary resisted.

It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that it can be extremely difficult to do something when you sense you are being forced into it. Fortunately, it’s very easy to learn how to handle people who nag and harangue you and try to run
your life. Suppose you are Mary, and after thinking things over, you decide you would be better off if you got involved in doing a number of things. You’ve just made this decision when your mother comes into your bedroom and announces, “Don’t you lie around any longer! Your life is going down the drain. Get moving! Get involved in things the way the other girls your age do!” At that moment, in spite of the fact that you already have decided to do just that, you develop a tremendous aversion to it!

The disarming technique is an assertive method that will solve this problem for you (other applications of this verbal maneuver will be described in the next chapter). The essence of the disarming technique is to agree with your mother, but to do so in a way that you remind her you are agreeing with her based on your own decision, and not because she was telling you what to do. So, you might answer this way: “Yes, Mom, I just thought the situation over myself and decided it
would
be to my advantage to get moving on things. Because of
my own
decision, I’m going to do it.” Now you can start doing things and not feel had. Or if you wish to put more of a barb in your comments, you can always say, “Yes, Mom, I
have
in fact decided to get out of bed in spite of the fact that you’ve been telling me to!”

Visualize Success
. A powerful self-motivation method involves making a list of the advantages of a productive action you’ve been avoiding because it requires more self-discipline than you have been able to muster. Such a list will train you to look at the positive consequences of doing it. It’s only human to go after what you want. Furthermore, clubbing yourself into effective action doesn’t usually work nearly as well as a fat, fresh carrot.

Suppose, for example, you want to quit smoking. You may be reminding yourself about cancer and all the other dangers of smoking. These fear tactics make you so nervous that you immediately reach for another cigarette; they don’t work. Here’s a three-step method that
does work
.

The first step is to make a list of all the positive consequences that will result when you become a nonsmoker. List as many as you can think of, including:

Once you have prepared the list, you’re ready for the second step. Every night before you go to sleep, fantasize you are in your favorite spot—walking through the woods in the mountains, on a crisp autumn day, or maybe lying on a quiet beach near a crystal-blue ocean, with the sun warming your skin. Whatever fantasy you choose, visualize every enjoyable detail as vividly as possible, and let your body relax and let go. Allow every muscle to unwind. Let the tension flow out of your arms and legs and leave your body. Notice how your muscles begin to feel limp and loose. Notice how peaceful you feel. Now you are ready for the third step.

Fantasize that you are still in that scene, and you have
become a nonsmoker. Go through your list of benefits and repeat each one to yourself in the following way: “Now I have improved health and I like it. I can run along the beach, and I want this. The air around me is clean and fresh, and I feel good about myself. I respect myself. Now I have greater self-discipline, and I can take on other challenges if I want to. I have extra spending money,” etc.

This method of habit management through the power of positive suggestion works amazingly well. It enabled me and many of my patients to quit smoking after a single treatment session. You can do it easily, and you’ll find it’s well worth your efforts. It can be used for self-improvement in losing weight, lawn mowing, getting up on time in the morning, adhering to a jogging routine, or for any other habit you’d like to modify.

Count What Counts
. A three-year-old boy named Stevie stood by the edge of the children’s pool, afraid to jump in. His mother sat in the water in front of him, urging him to take the leap. He held back; she cajoled. The power struggle went on for thirty minutes. Finally, he jumped. The water felt fine. It wasn’t so difficult, and there was actually nothing to fear. But his mother’s efforts backfired. The unfortunate message imprinted on Stevie’s mind was “I have to be
pushed
before I can do anything risky. I don’t have the gumption to jump in on my own like the other kids.” His mother and father got the same idea; they began to think, “Left to his own devices, Stevie would never dare go into the water at all. If he isn’t constantly pushed, he’ll do nothing by himself. Raising him is going to be a long, hard struggle.”

Sure enough, as Stevie grew up, the drama was repeated over and over. He had to be
persuaded
and
pushed
to go to school, to join the baseball team, to go to parties, and so on. He rarely initiated any action on his own. By the time he was referred to me at age twenty-one, he was chronically depressed, living with his parents, and not doing much
with his life. He was still waiting around for people to tell him what to do and how to do it. But by now his parents were fed up trying to motivate him.

After each therapy session, he would leave the office charged with my enthusiasm to follow through on whatever self-help assignment we had discussed. For example, one week he decided to smile or say hello to three people he didn’t know as a small first step in breaking his isolation. But the next week he would come into my office with a drooping head and a sheepish look that let me know he had “forgotten” to say hello to anyone. Another week, his assignment was to read a three-page article I had written for a singles magazine on how an unmarried man learned to overcome his loneliness. Steve came back the next week and said he had lost the manuscript before having a chance to read it. Each week as he left, he would feel a great surge of eagerness to help himself, but by the time he was in the elevator, he would “know” in his heart of hearts that the week’s assignment, however simple, would just be too
hard
to do!

What was Stevie’s problem? The explanation goes back to that day at the swimming pool. He still carries in his mind the powerfully imprinted idea that “I really can’t do anything on my own. I’m the kind of guy who’s got to be pushed.” Because it never occurred to him to challenge this belief, it continued to function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he had over fifteen years of procrastination to back up his belief that he “really was” like that.

What was the solution? First Stevie had to become aware of the two mental errors that were the key to his problem: mental filter and labeling. His mind was dominated by thoughts about the various things he put off doing, and he
ignored
the hundreds of things he did each week that did
not
involve his being pushed by someone else.

“All of that is well and good,” Stevie said after we discussed this. “You seem to have explained my problem, and I think that’s correct. But how can I
change
the situation?”

The solution turned out to be simpler than he anticipated. I suggested he obtain a wrist counter (as discussed in the last chapter), so that each day he could count the things he did on his own without prodding or encouragement from anyone. At the end of the day he was to write down the total number of clicks he scored and keep a daily log.

Over a several-week period, he began to notice that his daily score increased. Every time he clicked the counter, he reminded himself that
he
was in control of his life, and in this way he trained himself
to notice what he did do
. Stevie began to feel increased self-confidence, and to view himself as a more capable human being.

Does it sound simple? It is! Will it work for you? You probably don’t think so. But why not put it to the test? If you have a negative reaction and are convinced the wrist counter won’t work for you, why not evaluate your pessimistic prediction with an experiment? Learn to count what counts; you may be surprised at the results!

Test Your “Can’ts
.” An important key to successful self-activation involves learning to adopt a scientific attitude toward the self-defeating predictions you make about your performance and abilities. If you put these pessimistic thoughts to the test, you can discover what the truth is.

One common self-defeating thought pattern when you are depressed or procrastinating is to “can’t” yourself every time you think of something productive to do. Perhaps this stems from your fear of being blamed for your do-nothingism. You try to save face by creating the illusion that you are just too inadequate and incompetent to do a single thing. The problem with defending your lethargy in this manner is that you may really start believing what you are telling yourself! If you say, “I can’t,” over and over often enough it becomes like a hypnotic suggestion, and after a while you become genuinely convinced you really are a paralytic invalid who can’t do anything. Typical “can’t” thoughts include: “I can’t cook,” “I can’t function,” “I can’t work,” “I can’t concentrate,” “I can’t
read,” “I can’t get out of bed,” and “I can’t clean my apartment.”

Not only do such thoughts defeat you, they will sour your relationships with those you love because they will see all your “I can’t” statements as annoying whining. They won’t perceive that it
really looks and seems
impossible for you to do anything. They will nag you, and set up frustrating power struggles with you.

An extremely successful cognitive technique involves testing your negative predictions with actual experiments. Suppose, for example, you’ve been telling yourself: “I’m so upset I can’t concentrate well enough to read anything at all.” As a way of testing this hypothesis, sit down with today’s newspaper and read one sentence, and then see if you can summarize the sentence out loud. You might then predict—“But I could never read and understand a whole paragraph.” Again—put this to the test. Read a paragraph and summarize. Many severe, chronic depressions have been cracked open with this powerful method.