Diagnosis: Muddled

Posted by fxckfeelings on February 6, 2012

Mental pain is like the check-engine light on your car; it tells you something’s wrong, but doesn’t specify what, so it could be anything from an impending engine fire to a stupid broken check-engine light. So, when communication is painful, don’t assume you need a new communicator, and when you don’t like the image in your mirror, you may not need a make-over. You’ll always do better at figuring out what your problems are really about, and what to do for them, if you ignore the painful messenger and refuse to let it make your diagnosis for you.
–Dr. Lastname

I wish my boyfriend wasn’t so critical about the money I spend on clothes. Couples therapy helped me understand that growing up poor left him with deep insecurity about money (he still doesn’t make much compared to me, though he’s a hard worker). What therapy hasn’t done, however, is stop him from giving me a hard time about every sweater I buy, even though I’ve got good savings, no debt, and a total willingness to carry more than my share of expenses. If we get married, I’m sure his criticism will get worse and I don’t think I can stand it. My goal is to get him to back off, so we can have a life together.

The potentially bad side of couples’ therapy, as readers of this blog know, is that it can encourage a person’s tendency to take unlimited responsibility for getting through to their spouse. Like food, booze, or anything you enjoy, communication should be enjoyed in moderation.

After all, you’re supposed get a break from that responsibility once you’re sure you’ve done the right thing, but couples’ therapy can make you into a share-aholic who can never rest until togetherness has been restored.

Discussions that could be settled in hours are instead plumbed for weeks, accomplishing nothing positive (unless you’re the therapist, who’s putting every hour of your bullshit towards his/her mortgage).

In other words, if you give proper attention and respect to your partner’s objections, continue to believe you’ve done the right thing, and offer a respectful response, you shouldn’t have to talk about the issue any more, even if he remains unhappy and angry about it. It’s unfortunate that his childhood was poor. You can still buy shoes.

If you feel obliged to keep on explaining and defending yourself because of his feelings, you’re making yourself responsible for something over which you have no control. Of course, you wish he could feel better about your spending decisions, but if you make yourself responsible for changing his mind or doing whatever else is necessary to ease his unhappiness, you’ve downgraded the importance of your own moral compass, and that’s dangerous. It’s not good for either one of you, and it could ruin your relationship.

You’ve already decided that your fashion budget isn’t a sin. You’ve given the higher priorities their due, including saving for the future, doing your share with your partner, and, I assume, giving to charity. If you’ve passed your own ethics test, you shouldn’t have to feel guilty about enjoying your money; as you’ve suspected, facing regular budgetary non-acceptance from a spouse isn’t good for a marriage.

So forget about his feelings about your money and your feelings about his feelings. Let him know you believe your budget is morally justified, and you don’t want to hear about it. You aren’t expecting his feelings to change; you don’t want to be punished by them or hear about them anymore.

For both of your sakes, you hope he can shut up, regardless of how he feels. You’ve given up on the hope that he can feel great about your money; but, if he can keep his feelings to himself, you may have a good working partnership. You’ll know what the future holds by observing how he acts, and then you can reward yourself for doing the right thing with some new boots.

STATEMENT:
“My guilty pleasures feel a lot guiltier when I see them reflected in my boyfriend’s low-budget eyes, but our relationship won’t work if I have to apologize for good, responsible spending habits. I don’t want our partnership controlled by his feelings (particularly since I don’t think he has control over them himself). I’ll stand by what I believe, and let him know that his feelings are his responsibility to manage.”

People see me as successful because I’m a well-regarded doctor who makes a good income for doing interesting work, but I’ve really lost interest in it myself and feel like I’m going through the motions. To my mind, I’ve become like Richard Corey in the poem, who kills himself because of the gap between how he feels and the way people respect his appearance. I’m not doing a bad job, but I feel like a failure because, in spite of all the hard work and good income, I just don’t care, and every day I go to work and have to pretend that I do. My goal is to figure out where I went wrong.

Your letter is a good example of how dangerous depression can be when negative thinking burrows into your system of beliefs. Indeed, your words are the very weapons your depression is using against you. They’ve already beaten you into thinking you’re a failure, so stop them before they do any more harm.

If you judged yourself objectively, you would see a man doing good work and helping people. You wouldn’t hold him responsible for feeling happy; after all, life routinely destroys the happiness of good people who are well insured. Depression is just one of the many, many totally uncontrollable ways that life can do that. You would never be so cruel as to suggest that a suffering, unlucky friend was therefore leading a meaningless life.

Take inventory if you like, but as long as you’re making a living, taking care of yourself, providing good service, and helping people, you’ve got lots to be proud of. Nothing has changed except your feelings, and they can be ignored.

Once you pay more attention to your values than your feelings, you’re ready to protect yourself from insidious allegations of failure. The only thing that has failed is the happiness carburetor in your brain.

While we can’t (and wouldn’t) assure you that medication or any other kind of therapy will restore your happiness—it might, but it might not, because treatment is uncertain and no one controls happiness—my message is that your happiness is unimportant, at least in comparison to your pride. You have a right to respect yourself. Defend your self-respect, and your unhappiness is just another source of pain. It’s bad, but it isn’t you.

Once you see your unhappiness as nothing other than a form of pain, rather than personal failure, you’ll deal with it more effectively. You won’t give up on the good activities and people you formerly liked because they now leave you cold. You’ll let others know that you continue to care about them even if you don’t feel particularly caring at the moment, and that you appreciate their interest and concern. You’ll spend less time alone reading poetry, and eventually, you won’t notice the pain as much.

STATEMENT:
“It drives me crazy the way everyone sees me as the picture of success when I feel like a total loser, but I know I’m not a loser and feeling this way is just part of the pain of depression. I won’t buy the idea that I feel this way because I’ve made mistakes or bad decisions. I’ll respect myself for doing a good job and putting on a professional smile when I really feel like shit.”