I first began counseling over 20 years ago (I mean, as a counselor). The first lesson I learned in psychology was that any behavior which is reinforced (rewarded) is more likely to be repeated. What they taught in counseling (which is different from psychology) is to listen in such a way that the person who is talking knows he or she is being heard and that what they say matters. What no one told me was that being listened to the way a counselor (or hopefully, a friend) listens is rewarding! The main thing I was trained to do as a counselor often tended to make matters worse from the psychological viewpoint.

Case in point: I had a friend, a neighbor, who was diappointed in love. He would come to my home (where I had a room with a desk in it, and books, very much like my counseling office). He would tell me about how upset he was that the girl he loved didn’t reciprocate his feelings. I would listen empathically, accurately, nonjudgmentally, and with unconditional positive regard for my friend and his feelings. He got worse and worse, more and more depressed. Finally, he was psychiatrically hospitalized, suicidal. It occurred to me that in trying to be his friend, using the same tools I had been trained to use as a counselor, I had participated in his very nearly departing this plane. Those times I had been warm and accepting as he told me how depressed he was rewarded him for being depressed. So after he got out of the hospital and came over to my house to talk, I began behaving differently: whenever he would talk about anything but his depression, I would look at him and nod, paying attention and being interested. However, if ever he talked about his unrequited love, I looked out the window and stopped responding. (The next thing I had learned in psychology was that if a behavior is not rewarded, it tends to go away.) His depression lasted only a few days after that.

So it’s 20 years later: I’ve just been through my third divorce. I’m bankrupt. I’ve been living in my van in the national forest during the summer. I’m depressed. So what do I DO about it? Talk to my friends, of course. (A rather advanced thing I learned in psychology was about a mechanism called "compulsive retelling." Have you ever known anyone who was in a serious traffic accident? Did you hear her or him tell about that accident about a million times? It’s ok! It’s normal! It’s one of the ways, built-in, that humans react to stress. Somehow, telling about things tends to reduce the anxiety or strong emotions associated with events or circumstances.)

Have I painted myself into a corner at this point? I’ve made the point that talking about depressing things can make one more depressed AND I’ve made the point that talking about stressful things can reduce the stress. But there is a difference. The helpful aspect of compulsive retelling involves resolving feelings about a past incident. We keep ourselves depressed incessantly talking about our PRESENT or FUTURE circumstances (which we perceive as unfortunate).

Now as I was talking to a friend about how depressed I was, he pointed out to me that "What you think about expands." Or, another statement of his principle (called by many the Law of Mind Action): "Thoughts held in mind tend to reproduce after their own kind." Or as another school of thought teaches, those thoughts I held in mind, thoughts such as "I’m really miserable," become a command for the unconscious mind (or the Overmind) to produce in visible form that which has been mentally created. Or, in keeping with the case history given above, talking about my depression was earning me sympathy, caring, attention from my friends: I find sympathing, caring, and attention rewarding. And to keep getting those things from my friends, I had to keep on being depressed. The ultimate extreme of this pattern doesn’t require friends to keep it going: in fact, it works even better when your friends are sick of hearing about your problems and are finding ways to avoid you. The ultimate is SELF PITY. Your misery earns its own rewards without ever having to leave your own head!

OK, so this has been pretty negative so far. You’ve always wanted to know how to keep yourself depressed, right? NO! You are a normal person: you want to learn how NOT to be depressed. The key was right there in what my friend reminded me: "What we think about expands." As soon as I caught myself telling someone about my depression, or talking to MYSELF about my depression, I STOPPED those thoughts (counseling has a fancy name for this technique: it’s called "thought stopping!") and began to think instead of how lucky I am to have such good friends or how grateful I am that I can receive help from a Power greater than myself: anything except how depressed I was. I practiced the Golden Key taught by Emmet Fox (in a booklet called The Golden Key): "Stop thinking about the difficulty, whatever it is, and think about God instead."

And do you know what? I’m not depressed any more! Thank whatever Power(s) may be, I’m not depressed! And you needn’t be, either.