Sonic’s Reviews > Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy > Status Update

Daaang! Dr. Burns pulls the Hitler AND the Charles Manson cards.

In order to unearth the origins of your mood swings, most psychiatrists, as well as the general public, assume that a long and painfully slow (several years) therapeutic process is necessary, after which most patients would find it difficult to explain the cause of their depression. One of the greatest contributions of cognitive therapy has been to circumvent this.

After all, half of all the carpenters (and psychiatrists, secretaries, writers, and dentists, etc.) throughout human history have been below average. Do you believe that? It’s true by definition because “average” is defined as the halfway point! It’s ludicrous to fume and complain that this particular carpenter’s average talent is “unfair,” or that he “should” be other than he is.

When the all-too-human performance of other people falls short of your expectations, as will inevitably happen from time to time, you’ll feel bitter and self-righteous. You’ll either have to change your expectations to approximate reality or always feel let down by human behavior.

When you are depressed, you wear a pair of eyeglasses with special lenses that filter out anything positive. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind is negative. Because you are not aware of this “filtering process,” you conclude that everything is negative. The technical name for this process is “selective abstraction.” It is a bad habit that can cause you to suffer much needless anguish.