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1. When deeply depressed, it’s not the fear of failure I carry but the fear that success is getting too close.

2. When I’m living in the timeless Now, what happens to hope, to a future, to recovery? I think I’ll want them back if I land again in the tightly timed now.

3. @soulful sepulcher said to me: Try this, you’re already recovered. Real recovery began as I considered that idea.

4. Mind: Recovery takes a long time, many steps, hard work: Belief & Feeling: Take us too or you’ll never know when you’ve arrived.

5. Thought, feeling, decision are instantaneous & preverbal. So what’s with all the mental words that slow down the doing?

6. Who am I talking to when I talk to myself? Who’s in that nameless, invisible audience I need to convince?

7. I’ve got a backseat driver jabbering his stop-action words of fear and undoing. He used to be the buzz but now he’s too boring to keep around.

8. No room in this town for Depression and me so I’m chasing him out right now. Or is that him chasing me?

9. Pema Chodron says the struggle to “meditate” gets nowhere. In the moment of hearing the gentle gong, your mind is still. That’s the moment of non-meditation.

10. Steven Hayes re ACT: “To be willing & accepting means noticing you are the sky, not the clouds; the ocean, not the waves.”

11. Steven Hayes again on ACT: “..willingness & acceptance are states of being that minds can never learn how to achieve.”

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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?

Photo Credit: JesterArts – Stockxpert

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed reading the many moving responses to my post dealing with depression at work, Support or Defeat?, that have appeared on Beyond Blue and Furious Seasons. The comments describe many tortured work histories, some with good outcomes, others with no end in sight to an anguished battle. Through these wrenching stories, I’ve been trying to look more deeply at my own experience because it is all I have to offer by way of advice to others. In doing that over the past week or so, I’ve been tending to fall into memory holes of dark moments and getting a little lost there. So to regain perspective, I’ve been trying a new tack, stepping back and struggling to see if there’s something a little less heavy that I could bring to mind, if only as an experiment in cognitive therapy. Then I kept coming back to two ideas, two words, that strike me just now as – and please, I mean no disrespect – a little funny.

I have to offer a dose of background, though, before I can explain why I’m trying to find a streak of humor in what’s often a nightmare. I am struck by how many people recoil from the idea of seeing themselves as having a disability (the first word on my mind). Although the disability accommodation process was important in having my employer make adjustments, I backed away from having this label attached to me by going through all the formalities. That’s not just because it’s a legal concept that stays with you, probably forever. I don’t want to think of myself as disabled. After all, I’m working everyday at fighting the effects of depression. Changing the way I think in order to filter out the words of the D-Man is part of what I do. So why do I need another d-word, sanctified by law no less, inviting my needle-mind to get stuck in this cracked groove? (Disabled, disabled, disabled …)

And, like anyone else, I want to be successful at work. That’s the other word I keep coming back to. Sure, everyone wants to be successful at what they do – and recognized for their contributions, to enjoy their work, get decent reward for it and feel they’re making a difference in the world. But remember I’m looking at life through a lens of depression, feeling and reacting to my work in the midst of a struggle with this illness. So what’s amusing about disability or success? Deadly serious, I’d say. Well, it’s not those concepts so much as thinking about me, headed to work on a typical day, not disabled and bent on success. Now part of my recovery is being realistic about what I can do, and the thing about heading off to work is that I’m never really alone. The D-Man goes to work with me everyday. And he has a cousin, Mr. Obsession – the O-Man. He’s there too.

Think of it this way. On a good day, D-Man isn’t wearing his dark cloud suit. No, he can be more like that lazily bemused character, the Dude, in The Big Lebowski. This shaggy ex-hippy radical doesn’t like to push himself by walking a lot so he gets up on my back, and we go around like that, the Dude keeping up his Oh, man, what’s the point, man, I mean, what the f- monologues. But I also have a little chain around my neck that O-Man likes to pull on by means of a 3-foot straight rod. He’s not so amusing – more like that mechanical killer with the glasses in Sin City. He walks in straight lines so I often have to reach forward to grab his shoulder (don’t forget the Dude is on my back so this is a difficult maneuver – I often miss) to keep him from colliding with a wall or something more dangerous.

With these guys, it’s hard even getting out of the car – we’re usually trying to go in three different directions. But I manage slowly and with great determination to yank them all with me and stand on the parking lot pavement. Then there’s the issue of walking through the office with all the nice hello’s to my truly friendly co-workers. They look at us a little strangely, but I smile as if everything’s perfectly normal, barely avoiding a desk here, a wall there as I grab at O-Man’s shoulder, and ignoring the odd comments from above and behind my ear. What the f-! What are you doing, man? I mean what’s this place? I mean…it’s … I don’t know, man…what the f-? Hey, she’s cute! Need any help there?

Then I get into my office room and shut the door. I’m already tired from walking around with these two burdens. The Dude finally slides off my back and starts shuffling through my papers, especially the ones with the most urgent tasks in triple underlining. Oh, man, what is this? Weird! It looks all blurry! I’m reminded of a Woody Allen movie where he’s playing a director trying to shoot a scene with his leading man. He says, “Oh, no, it’s not working – you’re blurry!” And he steps out from behind the camera to talk to his actor, who is, in fact, a walking blur. I followed the Dude’s glance and, sure enough, everything I was trying to work on was totally out of focus – nothing was clear! Everything else in the room stood out in sharp relief, but all my papers were blurred and impossible to decipher. What was the point of trying to get anything done with this mess? It had no meaning whatsoever – why bother? It’s all useless. I was about to toss that pile of blurry paper into the trash when the phone rang.

O-Man answered, listened carefully, then stared fixedly at me through those impenetrable lenses of his. I took the phone, listened to a client ask for some information that he needed. I assured him it was coming and hung up. Then that paper came sharply into focus, and that file folder and that triple-red-underlined reminder. I had forgotten to do this! And this was the client I had been losing sleep over, convinced he despised my work, worried sick that he would complain to the program director and give her one more reason to stick me forever in her niche of the incompetent. My mind was sizzling. I thought I had put that behind me, but this knife-like reminder was burning a hole in the center of my mind all over again. Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. …

So there I am, depressed for success, ready for a dynamo day at work. And that’s what I mean about being realistic. I do better if I can forget words like “disabled” or “success,” or quite a few others (“normal” and “happy” come to mind) and just think about all the time it takes to divert D-Man and O-Man. I have to put a lot of energy and precious work time into trying to stop listening to them, trying to get a clear and relatively objective picture of what it is I’m trying to accomplish. (Of course, my first big step is to think of them as them – trespassers I need to fence out of my mind.)

It doesn’t help to beat myself up about falling short of my dreams of success or waiting for someone to praise me or give me a raise to feel good about what I’m doing and who I am. It’s a daily struggle. I still do good work, but it takes a bit longer. And there are days when I can’t get into the car, much less out of it. So adjusting to this reality is another step in recovery. After all, healing has to come before everything – that’s my most important work, my real job, and for now, all the success I need.