Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 94

If you asked for the world’s foremost therapist for desperate, suicidal people, that might be Aaron Beck, psychiatrist emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Beck has spent much of his professional life studying and treating despondent people. Beck found defective thinking patterns that all the suicidal people had in common. Faulty thinking, what another cognitive therapist Albert Ellis called “stinking thinking,” took them down and kept them there.

A common flaw he found in their thinking was a sense that they were basically inadequate persons, defective goods, life’s failures who just could not get it right. As in Murphy’s Law, they had convinced themselves that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong for me.” Their low opinion of themselves contaminated most everything they touched.

They also saw the prevailing state of things as permanent—fixed, static, frozen. They could see no exit. Believing that they are losers, and unable to imagine things ever getting better, they concluded that the future was hopeless.75 That surely was what Mark Twain had in mind when he said, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.”

We all know on our better days when we are not depressed that life hardly works that way. We know that things are constantly changing and we know how ignorant we are of the way things are going to be one week off, much less a year away.

I sometimes think of life like the four quarters of a football game, or four trips around the track in the mile run. By those measures, I am most likely in the last quarter of the game or on my last lap around the track.

But this time of year I find myself thinking of life in terms of four seasons: spring is childhood, summer is adolescence, fall is maturity, and winter is death. I hope you will think of this spring as a gift—another chance for one more birth. Fuchsia and chartreuse, pink and green, are overwhelming brown and gray. It is spring again, and once more all things seem possible.