Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

Many people do that. A man once said to me, "I thought I was really happy for a week. But then I looked back and thought about it, and realized that I wasn't really happy; it was all a mistake." When he looked backwards, he recoded all his experience and believed he had a rotten week. I wondered, "If he can revise his history that easily, why doesn't he do it the other way? Why not make all the unpleasant experiences nice?"

People often revise the past when they get divorced, or if they find out their spouse has had an affair. Suddenly all the good times they enjoyed together over the years look different. "It was all a sham." "I was just deluding myself."

People who go on diets often do the same thing. "Well, I thought that diet was really working. I lost five pounds a week for three months. But then I gained a pound, so I knew it wasn't working." Some people have successfully lost weight many times, but it never dawned on them that they were succeeding. One little indication that they're gaining weight and they decide, "The whole thing was wrong." One man came to therapy because he was "afraid of marrying the wrong woman." He'd been with this woman and he thought he loved her, and really wanted to marry her, to the point where he'd pay to work on it in therapy. The reason he knew that he couldn't trust his ability to make this kind of decision is that he had married the "wrong woman" once before. When I heard him say that, I thought, "I guess when he got home from the wedding, he must have discovered that this was a strange woman. I guess he went to the wrong church or something." What on earth does it mean that he married the "wrong woman"?

When I asked him what it meant, I found that he had gotten a divorce after five years of marriage. In his case, the first four and a half years were really good. But then it got bad, so the whole five years were a total mistake. "I wasted five years of my life, and I don't want to do that again. So I'm going to waste the next five years trying to figure out if this is the right woman or not." He was really concerned about that. It wasn't a joke to him. It was important. But it never dawned on him that the entire question was inappropriate.

This man already knew that he and this woman made each other happy in many ways. He didn't think about asking himself how he was going to make sure he got even happier as he stayed with her, or how he was going to keep her happy. He had already decided that it was necessary to find out if this was the "right woman" or not. He never questioned his ability to make that decision, but he didn't trust his ability to decide whether to marry her or not!

Once I asked a man how he depressed himself and he said, Well, like if I go out to my car and find there's a flat tire."

"Well, that is an annoyance, but it doesn't seem like enough to get depressed. How do you make that really depressing?"

"I say to myself, 'It's always like this,' and then I see a lot Pictures of all the other times that my car broke down."

I know that for every time his car didn't work, there were probably three hundred times that it worked perfectly. But he doesn't think of them at that moment. If I can get him to think of all those other times that his car worked fine, he won't be depressed.

Once a woman came to see me and told me that she was depressed. I asked her, "How do you know that you are depressed?" She looked at me and told me that her psychiatrist had told her. I said, "Well, maybe he's wrong; maybe you're not depressed; maybe this is happiness!" She looked back at me, raised one eyebrow, and said, "I don't think so." But she still hadn't answered my question: "How do you know that you're depressed?" "If you were happy, how would you know that you were happy?" "Have you ever been happy?"

I've discovered that most depressed people have actually had as many happy experiences as most other people, it's just that when they look back they don't think that it was really that happy. Instead of having rose–colored glasses, they have gray lenses. There was a marvelous lady up in Vancouver who actually had a blue hue over experiences that were unpleasant for her, but experiences that were pleasant had a pink hue. They were well sorted out. If she took one memory and changed the hue, it changed the memory totally. I can't tell you why that works, but that is how she does it subjectively.

The first time one of my clients said, "I'm depressed," I replied, "Hi, I'm Richard." He stopped and said, "No."

"I'm not?"

"Wait a minute. You're confused."

"I'm not confused. It's all perfectly clear to me."

"I've been depressed for sixteen years."

"That's amazing! You haven't slept in that long?"