Sometimes you have to use shock to make a point. Sensing I’d get away with it, I said to my chronically self-blaming client Claire:<\/p>\n
“You know, there’s a kind of greed<\/em> in snatching all the blame. You and I have our fair<\/em> share of responsibilities<\/a>, but we shouldn’t be grabbing too many pieces of the blame pie. Not when some of those pieces rightly belong to other people. Why should you grab all the blame? It’s just greedy!”<\/p>\n (Understand I said this with what I hoped was a jocular glint in my eye!)<\/p>\n I noticed Claire’s lower lip tremble. Then, for the first time, she laughed with me. Not a polite laugh like the ones that had punctuated our initial meeting. This was different. A genuine laugh and a real connection. Which was great because I had (sort of) been joking.<\/p>\n When her chortling died down, she replied with her lovely Irish brogue, “Well, no therapist has ever called me greedy before. You’re not too PC, are you Mark?” But I could tell my un-PC words had appealed to her. She was plain speaking, so I was too.<\/p>\n Then, in mock seriousness, she said, “Gosh, Mark, are therapists even allowed to say what you just said to their clients? Isn’t that victim blaming?”<\/p>\n “Oh, and you haven’t<\/em> been victim blaming?” She laughed a little at that too. But she also looked pensive. My reframe of excessive self-blaming as a form of greed had obviously cast it in a new light for her.<\/p>\n “And now I have to blame myself for being greedy, I suppose!”<\/p>\n “Or you could just stop being greedy!”<\/p>\n She laughed again. “I’ll remember what you said… next time I’m being ‘greedy’!”<\/p>\n Earlier in the session Claire had described how she always blamed herself for everything. She took the blame for her sister’s marriage break-up, her son’s laziness at university, her husband’s dissatisfaction with his job.<\/p>\n “I immediately feel responsible,” she admitted. “For everyone. When my neighbour got depressed, I immediately wondered, was I not good enough to her? Was I not helping her enough? I don’t even watch the news anymore, because I feel like I should be doing more \u2013 but I don’t know what.”<\/p>\n I wasn’t surprised when Claire told me she was prone to depression<\/a>. In fact, even as she spoke, she exhibited three common depressive thinking biases.<\/p>\n Martin Seligman, who was also the first to describe ‘learned helplessness<\/a>‘, found that children who showed certain thinking styles in the way they explained events to themselves were much more prone to developing depression.1<\/sup><\/p>\n He also found that when he taught kids who were vulnerable to depression (because of the way they responded to life) to change<\/em> their ‘explanatory styles’, they were much less likely to depress.<\/p>\nHow to think like a depressed person<\/h3>\n
Prefer to watch instead?<\/h3>\n