PSYCHOTHERAPY BEYOND THE FRINGE, continued
‘Values’ (1) are the most basic ‘guides’ which select for us what is most important to us and influence our approaches to things, (2) are the most abstract and ‘general’ things about us, which therefore determine what we think of ourselves — our self-definitions, (3) provide the up-front ‘motivation’ which decides what we will do, how we will spend our time and how strongly we will be driven to do things, and (4) provide the after-the-fact means by which we ‘evaluate’ how well we have done in doing anything — that is, they also determine how pleased we are with ourselves or how guilty we will feel. Not only that, but we all have values, and those values do govern our lives. If we think that someone or some group does not have values, we are wrong – it’s just that their values don’t correspond with our own.
So, what has all this got to do with treatment? That’s easy. If we want to help a person most generally to improve the quality of his or her life, the quickest way to do it might be to work at the level of values – the most abstract guides for the person’s life which most widely affect everything about the person. However, the person may not make the distress in his or her life into abstract ideas. The distress may also be experienced in a quite concrete but generalized way, as a picture or image of that which hurts most or is most idealized.
A Sympathetic Antipathy
Martha was about as depressed a person as one might wish to meet. A single mother in her early thirties, she spent most of her evenings staring down the barrel of her loaded hand-gun, trying to pull the trigger and end her misery. The only thing she clung to as a reason for living was her daughter. She feared what might happen to her daughter if she was not around to care for her. Martha’s mother would gain custody, and Martha knew how horrible that fate would be from long personal experience.
But her own life felt unbearable to her. She constantly judged herself, and found herself to be guilty and unworthy. Her unworthiness seemed verified by a sudden and unexplained separation from the man with whom she had been making long-term plans. And, although she was in a position of great responsibility in her work, she felt her boss disapproved of her, and she felt certain she would make a major mistake at any moment. So each evening she sat in a big, beautiful house, surrounded by expensive and tasteful things, well-fed and watching her lovely daughter play, and she held her gun in her hand trying to find a way to kill herself.
Martha knew that the way she felt was ‘crazy’. But that knowledge changed nothing. All she had to do was to get up and look in the mirror and she winced with disgust at what she saw. Now anybody else looking at Martha would respond with warm appreciation to this very attractive and pleasant person — certainly, that was how Felicity reacted when she consulted him about her ‘crazy’, but firmly held beliefs about herself.
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