Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else —happiness, respect, self-esteem, etc… And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.

But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.

We’ve spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that’s precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.

In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.