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On my good days, praise is exciting, gratifying to hear. On my bad days, until recently, praise launched the automated program called Undoing Success. It started with a weight of doom sinking into the center of my chest. There followed in quick succession an attack of intense anxiety and a mental emptying of every idea and word I’d ever known about the subject at hand.

If a teacher in school praised me, I’d stare in emptiness at the very next question I was asked. If my fellow students joked that I’d probably get the best score on a test, I would sit down in the midst of such anxiety that I couldn’t think straight and had to guess at answers. Much later in life, if I heard a lot of praise for a report, I’d make a hopeless muddle of the next.

The problem was at its worst when I blocked out all awareness of depression and lost my defenses against it. At those times, I never thought – oh, I’m depressed so I need to turn down the volume of that negative voice. Not at all. I simply listened and agreed completely with the F-streaked report card that voice was describing. There was no difference between depression’s verdict and my own thinking: I know what I’m worth, even if I can fool a lot of people. When someone did or said something to contradict that negative self-concept – like praising me or rewarding success – my depressed mind was ready to prove how wrong they were.

Remarkably, I was not conscious of the many subtle and ingenious strategies I used to prove that I couldn’t do a job I had mastered long ago. I had only the anxiety I mentioned and a whisper in my mind: They shouldn’t have said those words of praise. My reaction was different from the dulled and scattered thinking that also accompanies depression. That went on too during the bad times and was an especially useful ally in the war against praise.

Fortunately, there were also long periods when sheer determination to reach a goal pushed depression far into the background. I cycled the drive to climb with the drive to fall over long arcs in some periods, short ones in others. I remained so many data points on this curve for a long time, convinced I had no power to change. Then, as I’ve written before, something shifted, and depression has become a minor irritant rather than the dominant force it was for so long. But this particular problem has a life of its own, and it’s not always easy to catch it in time. I decided I needed a new strategy to stop the process.

A daydream scenario came to me that seemed to work. Let’s push this fight against praise to the next level. I’ll sue myself to end all praise. And so was born the strange case of John1 v. John2.

Here are some of the grounds of complaint filed by John1 against his better half, John2.

1. He has been cheated out of his inheritance of anti-praise and condemnation which had been legally bestowed upon him by the last will and testament of his parents.

2. Subverting his role of trustee for this will during John1′s youth and continuing his efforts for years afterward, John2 repeatedly suborned teachers, employers and friends to praise John1 for one fraudulent success after another. By these deliberate ruses, John1 suffered incalculable pain and suffering over a period of several decades.

3. Even more insidiously, the defendant infiltrated and undermined John1′s mental, even spiritual states. By slow poisoning of the imagination, he implanted obviously false bursts of energy, creativity, ambition and talent which had no basis in actual fact. On repeated occasions, this subtle poison deluded the plaintiff and compelled him to endure the excruciating pain of elation and unsuitable enthusiasm.

4. The fact that John1 had been able to deflect some of the worst tortures and deceptions perpetrated by John2 does not lessen, excuse or alter in any way the tortious conduct of the defendant. Only by considerable sacrifice of time and opportunity, and often at the expense of years of rightly deserved depression and hopelessness, was John1 able to undo the conspiracies of praise.

5. John1 further alleged that John2 employed accomplices, John3 and John4, who assumed the noms de guerre of Messrs. Humor and Hope for this purpose. Their plot consisted of befriending John1 under these false names in order to induce fantasies about his innate capacities of humor and hope for success in life. It was demonstrated that, apart from the illusory states so induced, John1 possessed neither of these qualities. This elaborate conspiracy continued for several years and for a time effectively lured John1 into acceptance of such false beliefs.

6. John1 requested complete restitution of the specific and lengthy list of missed opportunities for anti-praise and condemnation to which he was entitled by law and by fact. He further requested that the massive burden of debt that was rightfully his, due to what would have been a highly effective program of undoing success, be restored to him, compounded at the current average prime lending rate for failed-future options. For the severe emotional trauma of enduring falsely earned praise, the plaintiff sought treble damages.

This daydreamed defense has been extremely effective in removing the fear that used to be the companion of praise. I can’t say I’d recommend this form of therapy to anyone else, but giving the friends of depression a working over in the imagination often gets the job done for me.

How well do you handle praise?

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I’ve just gone through a six weeks experiment to see if a moderate dose of lithium would strengthen an antidepressant that’s been fading in effectiveness. No such luck. Instead, I went through a tortured sequence of headaches, dizziness, muscular wobbliness, loss of balance, tremors and thick mental fog that always hits in depression but this time was intensified by the strange poison in my blood. I felt mentally impaired for several weeks, with difficulty retaining enough organizing facility to give a short presentation. Try doing your job when you’re under that influence. The crisp one-two-three main points at a meeting become uh, one is something like this or maybe that and somewhere in here is two and was there another point, uh, let’s see, uh, well, never mind. Eyes glaze over, exasperation is high, things are said, I am called on the carpet afterward. That’s humiliating, though plainly justified, and it’s just not the way I’ve been regarded by my peers before the onset of this last period of illness that now adds up to several years.

The lithium experience may have intensified the sluggishness of thinking that always comes with depression, but that symptom even without the impact of lithium has done more to undermine my effectiveness at work than any other. I’ve written other posts about this problem, but things have only gotten worse in terms of performance. Since I can’t function at anything like the top of my game anymore, I’ve decided to pull back from active practice and instead focus on using the knowledge I’ve gained through 25 years in a profession to write and mentor younger people trying to learn the ropes. Those are things I can still do quite well.

And how do I feel about that? As you might imagine, it’s storm and anxiety time in soul-land. Part of me feels a gnawing sensation of failure and frustration, but another part feels total relief. I just can’t predict when my mind will be working properly or when it will either drift in a cloud or put glue in my thinking and speaking. So it’s a relief to stop trying to do something well when I can’t count on my own talents to be there when I need them. And I get it that depression is doing this and that it’s not just me, but I still have to work at believing that – hence the bouts of feeling like a flop.

The depression I live with is full of an obsessive way of thinking so I dwell on what others think of me and constantly project a stream of negative judgments about me into their minds and slightest glances. I’m obsessed with every mistake I make and take it as further proof of what a worthless jerk I am. Part of the relief I feel is escaping from the trap of thinking that every business meeting is always all about me when the reality is that people are pushing hard to get what they need. And if I’m looking sanely at my role, I know it’s to help them get there, not to give a great performance. I’ve been so unable to separate depressed thinking from doing my real job that I’m no longer providing the service that’s needed. It’s genuinely a relief to face that reality and focus on what I know I can do well.

But the most important thing is that I feel a lot of excitement about writing and mentoring.

Talking about these ventures, planning them, writing the new material, all generate a wonderful sense of possibility and fill me with energy – great weapons against depression. True, that high is countered by spells of anxiety and fear about the prospects of financial success with these new activities. Coming through those ups and downs, though, is a determination to make this work and a powerful hopefulness and – if I can use a word I usually shun – joy – at doing something deeply in line with what I want.

All this has me thinking more about why we choose the work we do in the first place. The reasons in my case clearly flow from my formative years as a kid in a troubled household. Perhaps stepping back from that career, determined by a half-understood past, is a positive step in achieving my own independence. I no longer need to play that particular role, and depression is simply the mechanism that has made this clear to me.

Work is such a testing place of dreams, ambitions, obsessions and ideas of self-worth. It’s hard to know what the key driver is in my own work history, but it is clear that I’m feeling now a kind of excitement about the prospect of new work that I haven’t felt in years.

Has a mental condition like this pushed you into new activities or work that feel like positive changes, or has it felt like you’re losing ground?

Photo Credit: Derek Benjamin Lilly – MorgueFile

Depression is a strange thing. No one seems able to explain exactly what it is, yet there is no doubting the reality of its pain. I've had it with me since boyhood, though at that time, I was years away from even hearing the term, let alone getting treatment.  I grew up with it, not only experiencing my own moods, headaches and gradual isolation but also watching my mother succumb for years without ever seeking help. In those days, either you had a "nervous breakdown" (something I could only imagine as a kid as writhing and thrashing about on the floor) or you were fine. I was clearly fine – the top-of-my-class kind of fine. It was bizarre hearing people praise me often when I knew damn well that it was all phoney. Those grown-ups might be fooled, but I knew deep down how worthless I was. I lived in fear that this fact would be discovered.

Even as an adult, long after I had been through numerous talking therapies and medications and accepted the fact that I had this condition, I still couldn't quite believe that it wasn't just something incorrigible and rotten about me that was really the problem. I could see clearly enough that my moods, anger and isolation were damaging my family and the core relationship with my wife, and that recognition prompted many efforts to get help.  None of them had a lasting effect, though they all helped me grasp in powerful ways the influences of my past that played a role in distorting the balanced psyche I was born with. In fact, I made one breakthrough after another in recognizing destructive patterns of behavior and learning ways to prevent them from controlling my actions. My wife joined me in therapy at times, and those experiences helped keep us together. But depression kept coming back, and I kept returning to the feeling that I must be at fault. When problems started emerging at work, I made only a tenuous connection with depression and couldn't shake the inner conviction that it was just my inadequacy or stupidity at the heart of the problem.

Eventually, I did come to accept the idea that depression was an illness. I even tried to be open in discussing it with friends, but there were many who didn't know what to make of this. Some understood depression vaguely as a kind of cosmic anomie that must be caused by an intellectual conclusion I had reached about the futility and meaninglessness of life. Others would ask me about what had been going on lately, suggesting some external cause or event that was getting me down. No, I would try to explain, it doesn't have a cause, that is, it's not a response to anything I think or experience. It just takes over – it's always there in the background, like any chronic disease that never gets cured. Or some would get restless and look as if they wanted to tell me to buck up and get a hold on myself. Emotional issues were embarrassing to discuss. They wanted to run far from that kind of talk. I even had to listen to a therapist of an alternative bent tell me, after my decades of dealing with the condition, that depression was a popular ailment these days because of the influence of advertising and the eagerness of drug companies to promote their products. He knew what real depression was like from his clinical experience, and he thought that strenuous exercise and deep massage would set me right.

Socially and culturally, the messages still made it seem so wrong to be depressed, as if it were a moral failing, and that only reinforced my worst fears. One person, who called to tell me about the shocking suicide of a young friend, long troubled by depression, concluded by calling him a failure, someone who'd had all the advantages but still managed to lose himself. I couldn't think what to say to him, the gulf between our understandings was so great. I knew full well that our friend was no failure, but I couldn't avoid feeling that I was failing. I was afraid I might be next on this grim list.

I wound up having to choose very carefully who I talked to about this condition. But it was still hard not to believe that on some level I was using depression as a rationalization for my own weaknesses, a cover for the knowledge that I was just no good.

What I came to realize, after too many years, was that in accepting the reality of those beliefs, I was still lost in depression itself. I had to get to a place where I could finally look around the edges of that thinking, to grasp that self-contempt was a symptom and that as the depression lifted, what I believed about myself and the possibilities of life could also change. And the trick was to understand this not just on an intellectual level (that was the easy part) but on the deepest level of belief. How do you change belief? I'm still not sure how it happened, but I know it did. As a line in a film said about everything coming together on stage for a play, It's a mystery.

Mystery or not, that was the turning point for me, the missing piece that suddenly made all the treatments I was getting begin to work in a more lasting way. That belief gave me the one tool I could always use, even in the worst despair. And it gave me hope.

I'll post more about how that change took place. In the meantime, it would be so helpful to hear what you have been through in understanding this condition and learning how to fight back.