Posted by fxckfeelings on July 22, 2021
When close family members are fighting, it’s natural to want to step in and make it stop. After all, you care about these people and don’t want to see them hurt or have them angry at you. But, as we always say, unless you’re a drill sergeant, judge or magician, making people do things isn’t an option. So before you try to get between to warring parties, even if you love/are related to them, here are five things to remind yourself of before getting sucked into family drama.
1)Examine The Previous Effect of Expressing Your Feelings
While speaking your piece has probably given you relief in the past and, if you were speaking to someone who cared about you but was uninvolved with the drama, it might’ve helped to clear the air and organize you thoughts. But if you’re speaking to someone who is involved, then you’re less “clearing the air” than “giving the fire oxygen,” all without providing any insight or argument that will actually clear the conflict up. Experience should tell you that self-expression is out.
2) Ponder Past Attempts To Be A Protector
When close family members are fighting, it’s natural to want to step in and make it stop. After all, you care about these people and don’t want to see them hurt or have them angry at you. But, as we always say, unless you’re a drill sergeant, judge, or magician, making people do things isn’t an option. So before you try to get between warring parties, even if you love/are related to them, here are five things to remind yourself of before getting sucked into family drama.
3) Assess Who the Real Assholes Are
Most families have at least one and, very much like the actual kind, s/he can be counted on to produce shit regularly, no matter how nice, thoughtful, and constructive you may be. Remembering how they are and their history of assholery, be careful not to share too much time or intimate information with them, as it only gives them material to “digest.” And be ready with polite scripts that will allow you to disagree and disengage whenever necessary (see below).
4) Stick to the Script
Rehearse some scripted lines, crafted from your experience of past conflicts, that will help you assert yourself when necessary, i.e., when you have to calmly refute an accusation, provocation, or invitation to feel guilty, without provoking conflict. Tell them that you’ve given [their statement/horseshit] a lot of thought because it’s an important point and you respect their opinion, etc., but that you disagree and prefer not to get into why at this time. If they won’t let it go, then it’s time to express dismay to let them know you have somewhere you need to be that you also can’t get into and will be in touch soon.
5) Craft Constructive, Controllable Goals
Now that you’ve accepted that the smart choice is staying out of it and made that clear to the warring parties involved, that doesn’t mean that you can or should have to cut these people out of your life entirely. You can still figure out safe, positive, neutral things you can do to stay involved, like benignly checking on their welfare, expressing good wishes, and acting decently when insulted or mistreated (then getting the fuck out as soon as your mission is complete). Now that you know what you can’t do to help, be proud of the good things you offer, whether they’re appreciated or not.
Posted by fxckfeelings on July 8, 2021
Just as it is with Oreos and interneting, selflessness is best enjoyed in moderation. Too little, and you’re mean, selfish and approaching asshole territory; too much and you’re mean, guilty, and in need of a shrink. That’s because trying to help people, especially the ones you love is often impossible. It can drain you, open you to exploitation, and make you angry, which then makes you feel guilty and like you need to be even nicer, and on it goes down the toilet. It’s worth examining ways of helping those you love, but only if you can find a middle ground; your goal isn’t to solve their problems but to see if, with your encouragement, they can do better at making things better themselves.
-Dr. Lastname
My tween, much-younger sister is acting out, causing my (widowed) mother a great deal of stress and impacting her ability to make a living. I’m in my late 20s, living with my partner, and at a loss as to how to help manage my sister’s behavior going forward. When I have her stay with me she is polite, understanding, rational, and accepting of consequences. My love of routine seems to have a lot to do with this. As soon as she returns home, however, she falls back into negative patterns of behavior. I often have to leave work in order to negotiate their disagreements or to give my mother a “break,” which isn’t easy to do. Throw into the mix my current emotional state—questioning my life/career choices while trying to plan for the future—and I am feeling incredibly overwhelmed and completely out of my depth! My goal is to feel less overwhelmed and ultimately give my sister the best possible care and guidance.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on June 24, 2021
If, like your reader from earlier, you’re trying to stay positive about finding someone worthwhile after finding yourself with a string of assholes, moving forward can be tricky. Instead of trying to let go of the past, use it; mine it for lessons that can keep you from repeating your mistakes and becoming even more discouraged. So if you don’t want to let your bad experiences keep you from having the will to find something good, here are five ways of overcoming bitterness in relationships.
1) Forget Feelings of Betrayal
Having good times together, making promises of fidelity, and getting matching tattoos may make you feel as if you have a right to a good, long-lasting relationship, but you don’t. What controls a relationship, besides luck, is character, including how solid someone is and how well you work together when the times are pretty bad, the promises don’t come as easy and the tattoos get infected. Some people are deceivers—both of others and themselves—but it’s your job to look out for them, and now you know what to look for and when to run.
2) Work Past Feeling Weak
You can’t help feeling helpless when a relationship goes bad, and you’re certainly helpless when it comes to putting it back together or making yourself feel happy. In truth, however, you have a good way forward and you do know what to do, even if it doesn’t involve making your relationship, or your feelings better; you need to learn from the relationship, focus on doing everything else that makes your life meaningful, and ignore the pain until it goes away.
3) Ditch Further Discussions
Don’t expect talking about your post-breakup feelings to lead to any breakthroughs, mend any fences, or generally sort out what’s wrong. If a relationship has gone bad, you’ve already tried to express your feelings and it hasn’t worked. At a certain point, your feelings just keep getting more negative and the discussions more destructive. Shut up, restore your privacy, and communicate only what you feel is necessary and positive if you have ongoing matters together (e.g., work, kids, shared cat) that must continue.
4) Cut the Complaining
Yes, a little support from/venting to friends is helpful, but at a certain point, your friends will be sick of hearing about it and upset at how powerless they are to do anything. Plus the more you talk about it, the harder it gets for the wound to heal; your friends want to help you, but they’re not helping you if they let you keep going on about your ex and letting them live rent-free in your skull. Acknowledge your sorrow, but then invest in spending good time with your friends, not rehashing your misery fishing for good advice that doesn’t exist.
5) Get Back Out There, Whether Or Not You’ve Gotten Over It
At this point, you can’t trust your feelings, so it’s impossible to tell whether you’re still grieving or you’ve got the same dumb urges you always did. Instead, figure out what you should be looking for and go looking for it while exercising a much higher degree of caution and restraint. Use your pain as a reminder to slow down, be careful, and avoid emotional involvement until you’ve gotten to know someone and think they really check out. The best way to avoid becoming bitter about love is to keep moving; don’t dwell on past disappointment or let it define you, but do let it define the kind of person whom you think will be good for you so your next relationship will be less bitter, more sweet.
Posted by fxckfeelings on June 10, 2021
Since loneliness and a string of bad relationships can make you feel like a loser, it’s not surprising that most people assume finding someone new is the path to victory. And if you could order a perfect new partner through an app with free delivery, that would be fine. Instead, the search for someone new mostly requires luck—also not available to order—so making a good relationship your goal just makes you unfairly responsible for achieving the uncontrollable while pushing you to make bad compromises to avoid loserdom/loneliness. Instead, remind yourself that you’re never a loser if you do your best to be a good person and live independently with whatever loneliness is unavoidable. If you can do that, celebrate by ordering yourself something nice.
-Dr. Lastname
After a nightmare divorce and a shitty abusive relationship following that, I’ve been alone for three years now. I want a companion but I don’t know how to find one, or at least know how to find one that sucks less than the last two (I also don’t know how to change my attitude). By the way, I have three kids, which makes finding someone that much harder since single moms are, well, an acquired taste. My goal is to figure out how to overcome my past and, in some ways, my present in order to find a good partner.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 5, 2020
A conflict-free relationship that hasn’t gone through hard times is like a rare, expensive sports car; just having it and occasionally driving it around the block makes you feel good and special, but if you suddenly need it for regular use it becomes a tiresome burden. So if you’re in a feel-good, low-stress relationship that suddenly becomes somewhat feel-bad, it’s up to you to decide whether what you have is worth working on and keeping, flaws and all, or whether it’s time to let it go and find something more along the lines of a human minivan.
– Dr. Lastname
My partner of some years has mild Aspergers and an anxiety disorder, and we’ve been in a long-distance relationship for most of those years (seeing each other every other weekend or so). We share the same values and enjoy doing most of the same things. Although he’s a good learner and he’s gotten better in these years, he has a lot of quirks that make me have to do more work (like saying “ok” instead of helping me to continue a conversation or accidentally teasing me in a way that hurts my feelings). Still, when I bring them up, which generally happens when I visit him, it often ends up with him not talking and shutting down, rolled in a ball, saying he’s a monster, and then I get upset because he’s not talking to me and I hate that I caused conflict. Still, when I don’t bring them up I feel resentful. It’s gotten to a point that we feel somewhat anxious around each other (though at the same time we enjoy being together). My goal is to find a way to bring up issues with him that’s constructive without being upsetting.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 9, 2020
Lasting relationships based on instant connections are like positive news stories and quick-yet-healthy weight loss techniques; they’re so nice to hear about but so hard to believe they aren’t bullshit. Getting close to someone quickly feels wonderful, but like most good feelings, it isn’t necessarily good for you. And if the need for friendship drives you to become close before you really know someone, you are more likely to discover their bad or obnoxious side when it’s too late to back away without causing pain. Instead, develop your own ways for getting to know someone safely and slowly. That’s the only way to make a BFF without all the unnecessary pain and BS.
-Dr. Lastname
I have a very close friend who is driving me crazy! I’m not sure why but I feel as though everything she says is mindless and completely irritating. For example, she offered to lend me an upholstered chair for a work project. I know that was a nice thing for her to do, but it was the wrong color. And when I told her that it was the wrong color, she said I should “paint it,” which I’m pretty sure is nonsensical advice because it’s a chair, not a table, and if I try there’s a huge risk it will look like crap and be useless to both of us. The problem is that I know that she hasn’t changed at all during our friendship—she’s always been a little flakey—but my feelings towards her have, and I have no idea why. This has happened to me before with other people that I’ve been close to and I’m sick of it. My goal is to figure out why my feelings have changed and what can I do to stop being so irritable, because I’m tired of losing patience with her and losing friendships in general.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 16, 2019
When your life is particularly unstructured and chaotic, it can be hard to restore order, especially if you’ve usually relied on outside sources—like your family, school or job—to provide structure and discipline for you in the past. So when you can’t find a tiger mom or drill sergeant to whip you into shape, here are five ways to be your own disciplinarian.
1) Prepare a List of Your Priorities
Even if your whole life is up in the air, there are certain fundamental needs that keep us all grounded, like money, food, shelter, and health care. There are probably things in life you think you need, from a romantic relationship to a drink, but it’s worth sitting down and differentiating between your needs and wants, then making a plan to fulfill those needs in a way that doesn’t violate one of your other major priorities; being a decent person, despite the shitshow that you’re currently living through.
2) Don’t Give in to Distraction
If you’re someone who tends to put the needs of others first—either because you’re just programmed that way, or because experience, like military training, has done the programming for you—then you have to learn to supress that instinct. The common analogy in times of personal crisis is to think of airline safety instructions; you need to put your oxygen mask on first before you can help anybody else. For veterans in particular, the instinct to find good people to protect and bad people to attack will be strong, but your job right now is to protect yourself. Otherwise, you’re useless to help the people you care about.
3) Reflect on Your Resources
No matter how resourceless you may feel, and no matter how many obstacles may be in your way, from health to legal issues, you always have time and abilities you’ve accrued over the course of your life. If you’ve had military training or just waited tables, or have a rich uncle or just know someone who knows someone who’s hiring, you have abilities or connections that can help you get through.
4) Set up a Schedule
After you settle on a list of priorities, make a daily schedule with blocks of time dedicated to each item on your list. If can get some idea of how much time you’ll need to accomplish each goal, that will make you schedule even more useful in terms of dividing your time more wisely and prioritizing tasks even further. Then set alerts on your phone, set up a rewards system for yourself, whatever it takes to keep your new structure intact.
5) Build a Team
Since phone alerts are rarely enough support, don’t be too proud or shy to get your friends and family, or even a professional, like a therapist, to help you stay focused. Assemble a team that’s willing to help you monitor your progress by discussing your planning, reviewing your schedule and priorities, and talking with you regularly about your execution of your plan. Remember, you’re supposed to lean on their shoulders, not cry on them; if you unload on them with your feelings of helplessness or disappointment, it will make them feel helpless and likely to abandon the mission. Keep focused on what you’re trying to do, and they’ll help keep you focused on your goals in return. Then they’ll be more motivated to give you what you need, you’ll be more motivated to do what you need, and you’ll have a structure that will support you and your plans going forward.
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 18, 2019
When, like our recent reader, you know you’re trapped in a pattern of becoming the most attached to people who are the least interested or even worthy of your attention, it’s useful to strategize and make a plan for when the next would-be (but shouldn’t-be) object of obsession crosses your path. Here are five task-oriented techniques for overcoming obsession before it starts.
1) Accept Your Obsessiveness without Obsessing About It
You might think that you could avoid future fixations if you could just figure out why they happen, but plumbing the depths of your psyche to figure out which childhood trauma or lost toy caused you to be this way is, in fact, just another empty obsession that will lead you nowhere. As you’re already learned the hard way, there’s no better way to feed an obsession than to obsess about it, even if what you’re obsessing about is why you have it and how you can make it go away. In reality, no one knows why some people are prone to obsessive attachments and no one has a formula for ungluing you once you’re stuck, other than time and a constant effort to manage your unfortunate habit.
2) Delve Into Distraction
When you start to feel obsessive thoughts creeping in, try to keep your brain busy with more important activities instead. A new object of fixation can be hard to resist—especially at first, when they seem so exciting and promising—but your attachments to other people, work, family, and your long term interests will always be much stronger and more meaningful, in the end, than any obsession. So immerse yourself in whatever usually matters to you, fighting as hard as you can until your shiny source of fixation fades away.
3) Don’t Think You Can Turn A Fixation Into A Friendship
As much as you’d be willing to settle for any relationship with an object of obsession, even a platonic one, it’s too much to think you can immediately force yourself into a benign friendship with someone you were once fanatical about. These attempts at casual connection usually just make the obsession worse, since you’ll now be analyzing and obsessing over every conversation hoping to find evidence of something more. Then you won’t be able to control your sensitivity to being treated as a casual friend and you will hate yourself if your vulnerability shows, which will then cause you to obsess over your pain and foolishness until you’re in full fixation meltdown. Accept the fact that your obsession limits your options and there’s to be no contact until you’ve recovered.
4) Process Patterns
Obsessive tendencies are a lot like weather; you can’t control them, but with enough experience you can learn to predict when they’re coming and prepare for the storm accordingly. Look back at the kind of person you get obsessed with and identify what drew you to them. Unfortunately, the things you like about obsessive objects probably double as red flags, which means those are the qualities you should look out for and avoid in the future. Then list the character qualities that might guarantee you a more positive and reliable response so you can seek them out instead. Recall how quickly you latched onto people in the past and examine whether you could have improved your safety by slowing things down, determining new mandatory procedures for pumping the breaks in the future. You may not be able to make your brain stop obsessing, but you can teach yourself ways to stop those obsessions from taking over.
5) Consider Treatment
If the symptoms of your obsessive tendencies are extraordinarily painful or interfere with work or important friendships and you can’t find a way to break out of the cycle on your own, don’t be afraid to find a therapist who can help you manage the issue. Consider first non-medical treatments, which include everything from exercise to cognitive behavioral therapy (techniques to manage unwanted thoughts) to hypnosis. If those prove ineffective, you should consider medical treatments, namely medication that is low risk yet frequently effective, like a high dose of an SSRI. Either way, don’t assume that you’re doomed to an endless cycle of empty obsession and heartbreak. With some work and even a little help, you can learn ways to manage obsessive tendencies so your obsessions no longer manage you.
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 7, 2019
Kids hate to see their parents fight, and while you’d think that the feeling would lessen as they grow into adults, the opposite is often true; the older they get, the more they feel like having an adult’s power should give them the ability to set things right and ease their family’s pain. Of course, no human, no matter what their age, emotional investment, or relationship to others, has much power to change or ameliorate the chemistry of a longstanding partnership, so making the best of a bad parental relationship doesn’t require a determination to do good or make sacrifices. All you really need is the ability to judge the actual benefit of bearing witness to a brawl versus exercising the adult’s most wonderful superpower— the ability to leave the room and focus on your own, independent, more peaceful life.
-Dr. Lastname
My parents kept fighting nonstop throughout my childhood and teenage years and it was a painful, helpless experience for me. Even now that I’m in my late 20s and out of the house, they still fight constantly when I’m around and it still makes me cry uncontrollably and feel depressed. All through these years I’ve tried my best to solve and fix things, or just ask them not to fight so regularly in front of me, but nothing’s ever worked. My mother’s negativity, tendency to throw blame around and create chaos… I hate it all. My goal is to find ways to deal with this problem, because it’s been sucking away at my happiness and sanity for far too long.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 26, 2017
Very rational, even tempered guys can be attractive in their own way, particularly after you’ve been put through the ringer by emotional, indecisive man-boys who make impulsive, irrational decisions (like picking fights/cheating or breaking up with you). A rational style, however, does not necessarily guarantee that they’re better at managing their emotions or acting more decently than their less moody brethren. That’s why you need to learn to evaluate a rational guy’s ability to be a good guy before you decide whether he’s truly good for you.
-Dr. Lastname
My kid’s dad used to say that he wanted to be Data from Star Trek as a kid because Data didn’t have feelings, so he changed his personality to one that wasn’t “ruled by emotions.” Instead of becoming wise and patient, however, he’s morphed into a complete narcissist. He might not show emotion, but he seems fueled by anger and selfish impulses; he doesn’t get angry, just calmly denies he’s done anything wrong, which is less like Star Trek and more like Gaslight. He’s become a totally unempathetic, perpetual victim. My goal is to figure out if there’s a way to un-Data him or if he’s just beyond hope.
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