When I Say No, I Feel Guilty Read Online Free Page A

wife comes home frustrated and grouchy and vents her feelings by kicking me instead of the dog, we go six rounds occasionally and really get into the spirit of it! If things like these happen, our inherited psychophysiology allows us no choice; we are going to feel afraid or angry. But when you can assertively interact with other people and, by doing so, have a chance of getting at least part of what you want, automatic anger or fear is less likely. If, on the other hand, we are frustrated by something we cannot change, or we fail to use our innate verbal ability to cope with something we can change, we are likely to feel emotionally depressed.
    Although depression would appear to have little or no survival value today, its worth to our ancestors becomes clear if we look at how you or I typically behave when we become depressed. In fact, we hardly behave at all! We do little or nothing except maintain our essential body functions. We usually don’t make love orenjoyably explore things like going to the movies, learn anything new, solve many problems, or get much done at home or at work. If we look at how we get depressed, we can observe that when we are mildly depressed or sad, we miss something we are used to or we have been mildly frustrated. When we are deeply depressed, we have suffered an emotional loss or we have been very much frustrated. When you feel depressed, you sense the result of messages sent by the primitive parts of your brain to slow down much of the normal functioning of your body physiology needed for most common, everyday activities.
    For our early ancestors, depression was a beneficial state when they had to put up with a period of harsh conditions in their environment. When things got rough, they really had to withdraw to retrench. Our early ancestors who got depressed and just sat around during very frustrating times were more likely to conserve their resources and energy. In doing so, they increased their chances for survival until better times came along. We probably see an indication of this primitive emotional residue in ourselves on a cold, overcast wintery Saturday when, for no reason we can put our finger on, we find it difficult to do anything besides snacking, napping, and moping around the house. The common depression you and I often experience may last from several hours to several days. We feel miserable, but with time and some positive experience our depression lifts.
    In the relatively affluent society we live in today, depression and withdrawal have no apparent survival benefits. For most of us, conditions are not so physically harsh and demanding as they were for our early ancestors. So this psychological “hibernation” mechanism of depression, evolved by our ancestors for successfully waiting out harsh periods in the environment does nothing for us. Our frustrations today do not come from the environment but from the action of other people. Patients that I, and other therapists, have seen for long-term depression have a history of being frequently frustrated.
    Clinical experience in treating persons for temporary or even long-term depression suggests that it is more beneficial to help the depressed person to get his or her feet moving again and reconnected with positive life experiences than to sit out the course of the depression. The treatment of Don, a thirty-three-year-old divorced bookkeeper with recurrent phases of long-term depression, illustrates this concept, Don was reared by a mother and father who constantly frustrated what he wanted to do. When he was a young child, the typical interaction between Don and his parents was for him to receive little or no thanks for performing his tasks around the house, but to be severely punished and made to feel guilty whenever he did anything poorly. When he wanted his first bicycle, for example, Don was given all sorts of reasons why bike riding at his age was dangerous—bikes were expensive, and he was reminded that a careless child