In my dreaming last night, I saw more literal signals than symbolic, i.e, conversations in their entirety without adulteration by my unconscious mind (which would have to be taken with a grain of suspicion anyhow!)
A friend of mine called me out of the blue - he wanted something from me and I figured as much since I had never received a social call from him before. We got to talking and he hit upon his recent feelings about being depressed. I had noticed after much self-reflection that his depression was not innate or a priori, but learned and reinforced throughout his life.
If we maintain that the Structural Differential holds true-to-fact, then language shapes thought and thus behavior. So at which point can we define the fundamental causes of undesirable or depressive feelings being generated? In my opinion, identification at the evaluation level and its confusion with the event level effects on our feelings with greatest impact.
My friend would say (i.e., utter and most likely subvocalize) that his pursuits both for his work and pleasure were nothing to be commended; that they were "adequate" at best. He would mostly downplay his achievements and enforce irrational restrictions on his well-being.
The maps he had internalized in the past now bear claim to appearing as "reality", using broad and vulgar terms. Despite his activities being "neutral", he identifies them as good or bad by holding them up to unattainable comparisons (i.e., his writings are not read by millions, therefore it is a failure or inherently bad) or believing them as so instead of evaluating them as they are in their environment, or liking/loving them unconditionally as an extension of himself. He continually struggles to feel happy by placing demands on the universe when realizing it is neither benign or malignant but indifferent to his needs.
If you wish to feel inadequate or worthless, I recommend you start or continue to do the following:
- Need rather than want, or have second-order needs: i.e, "I need my need for love."
- Misidentifying others' problems for your own.
- Reversing the order of abstraction by mistaking your evaluations of reality for reality itself.
- By thinking either too negatively or positively in absolute terms.
- By tying your well-being to external events and external evaluations (i.e., verbal praise)
- By using outdated maps (i.e., past situations) to navigate present territories.
- By merely hypothesizing and never testing situations to gain the facts.
- By thinking the universe owes you something for services rendered or intentions pure.
I do not claim to be a psychologist; I do however claim to be a student of General Semantics. By using the GS approach, much of his needless self-imposed suffering could be avoided and effectively remedied.