Pretending as a Healing Tool: Acting Your Way to Health

Pretending has a bad name, as it implies dishonesty. However, in a way that parallels the negative side-effects of a useful medication, pretending/acting can actually help a person suffering with the blues or even with full-blown clinical depression feel a bit better.

This article is not written to encourage unhappy or clinically depressed people to pretend to be happy all of the time and deny their true feelings while they shield others from being able to see them. Like other self-help techniques that can often complement professional interventions, there is a role for trying to sometimes behave as you feel you would IF you felt better. This is not a word game but a reflection of an established behavioral technique which, when deliberately and moderately applied, can actually result in a person feeling a bit better.

We know that all unhappiness is not major clinical depression and attempts to self-medicate it away with the use of alcohol and other substances do not work over time but actually contribute to the depression growing stronger.

In-and-of itself, acting or pretending is not a magically curative technique. In tandem with 1) The availability of a professional (either individually or in a group) to talk honestly with about your feelings and 2) An openness to considering medication prescribed by a physician, appropriately trained and Board-certified in psychiatry, certain self-help coping behaviors can be a part of the solution.

When people are depressed, one of the more common symptoms is the inability to imagine ever feeling better. Depression has what mental health professionals sometimes refer to as a "voice" that lies and says things like, "You are no good," "You can't do anything right," "You are worthless as a person" and "You will never feel any better than you do right now." Learning that this voice is a function of the problem and tries to keep a person depressed by repeating all of their darkest and most self-defeating thoughts about themselves is a key element in the treatment of depression.

Like the treatment of any emotional problem, the healing and change does not happen in the 50 minutes a person spends in the office of the therapist. If it happens, it is manifest in their real lives outside the professional setting. Deliberately confronting and, if you will, doing battle with that "voice" is, both attitudinally and behaviorally, critical in the successful treatment of depression.

When the voice of depression says "You don't want to go out or talk with anyone. You will stay home, turn the lights out and feel alone, unloved and get even unhappier than you already are," one way to counter is to actually act as though you felt better and go out! This has the impact of slapping that aspect of the depression in the face and, in an incremental way, breaking its hold over you. You don't really feel like going out and being with people, but you force yourself to do it anyway and in doing so weaken the grip that the depression seems to have assumed over your life.

This strategy is not to be confused with pretending you are OK when you are not as a form of denial. Rather, it is a part of a deliberate battle plan to weaken and hopefully defeat an internal enemy which has assumed more control over you and your life that is healthy for you. To get the control back, a person must take some action on their own behalf. Please note that the first syllable of "action" is ACT. That is not a coincidence. Depression wants you to be a reactive. I am encouraging you to be pro-active!

Further along the line of not-so-coincidentally, ACT is also the abbreviation for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a variety of Behavior Activation Therapy referenced in the following paragraph. It too is relevant to this issue.

Although there is much published to suggest that pretending to be happy is a bad thing, this is simply not categorically accurate. In moderation, many things have positive aspects, and this would include acting and pretending. The growing literature in the area of what is called Behavior Activation Therapy (BAT) strongly supports this concept and approach.

If you can recall a day when you felt better and try to behave as you did on that day rather than the way the depression is driving you, you have scored an important point in the battle to regain and sustain your wellness.

So, pretending or acting is not always a reflection of superficiality, denial or deception. It can be a useful tool in surviving the painful throes of depression. You won't (probably) be nominated for a Tony or Oscar for it, but it just might help you feel a little bit better.

Afterword:

For those interested in finding out more about what may sound like a peculiar idea, further information regarding Behavior Activation Therapy can be found in many journals and in published papers from major medical centers.