Posted by fxckfeelings on March 19, 2020
There’s a good reason that every “quest” story, from Luke Skywalker’s to Harry Potter’s, ends with said quest being satisfying fulfilled; namely, a hero who fails doesn’t seem like much of a hero at all. That’s why it can feel so painful if you dedicate years to your education—making a long series of educational sacrifices for the sake of a career, acquiring mountains of debt, forgoing all the pleasures that your paycheck-receiving contemporaries are enjoying—only to discover that your would-be career sucks and your epic quest has been in vain. Since it happens to good people who are making reasonable decisions, however, there should be no shame, self-recrimination, or rumination on mistakes if you must find ways to use your hard-won knowledge and discipline to figure out what to do next. Then you haven’t actually failed; you’re just on a longer hero’s journey than bargained for.
-Dr. Lastname
I have a Bachelors in Psychology and a Masters in Counseling and Psychology, and I am a Ph.D. candidate but I need to leave my program to move back home and take care of my mom. I spent some time kinda feeling bad about leaving this “elevation” of the Ph.D. behind, but I also knew, in a way, that this whole field was bullshit. My question then is, if my field of study is stupid—even after all the years I’ve dedicated to it—what should I do now? I want to play a part in the future understanding of mental health, which will no doubt be informed by science, but I’m not sure that what I’ve been studying will provide that (i.e., the stuff I’ve studied is nothing like the approach in your books). My goal is to be a part of the mental health field with an approach that makes sense to me (and the academic one does not).
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Posted by fxckfeelings on August 9, 2018
If you live with a recurring, debilitating mental illness, you may, like our reader from earlier, be hoping to find a routine, a management plant, or just an ancient spell that will keep unpleasant, disruptive relapses at bay. Unfortunately, mental illness doesn’t reliably respect our routines—it is, for lack of a better word, crazy that way—so instead of looking for ways to prevent relapses, here are five ways to deal with a relapse if and when one does occur.
1) Don’t Confuse A Few Symptoms With Something Bigger
Beware the urge to overreact every time you find yourself dragging, getting overly anxious, feeling miserable, or generally exhibiting some of the symptoms that come with your illness, especially when they could have an easy-to-identify cause, like PMS or stress at work. Instead, force yourself to look at the bigger picture; review your list of prior symptoms and ask yourself whether these ones are occurring in the same bad combination that interferes with your work and relationships and refuses to disappear after you’ve tried to chase it away with some healthy, happy activities. Then get input from your therapist or just people who know you as you decide whether to declare an illness in progress and implement your relapse plan.
2) Put Your Relapse Plan Into Action
As described in our earlier response to our reader, you should already have prepared a list of the interventions and medications that did or did not seem to work in the past and used this experience, together with advice from clinicians and others who observed your responses, to devise a plan for stopping future relapses. Of course, you may not know for sure what worked because clinical symptoms are often slow to respond and circumstances make it hard to tell what treatment, among the many you may be trying at one time, is actually doing the trick. As such, your plan must take these uncertainties into account while offering you clear options.
3) Know What New Treatments Are Out There
After reviewing your current relapse plan with your current doctor, ask her about any new treatments that may have been developed since your last episode. While remaining open to new treatments and ideas, remember to trust your own ideas, because your doctor is less likely to remember what worked for you in the past than you do. Also, there is currently no way for doctors to make good predictions about what will or won’t work for you based on an analysis of anything but the most basic symptoms and, of course, your previous response.
4) Push Back Against Fear and Pessimism
Drawing on your previous experience with depression and anxiety, as well as any ideas you have picked up from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doctors, and friends, ask yourself whether your current thinking is distorted by symptoms, e.g., whether your depression or anxiety is making you believe that nothing seems to be working, you can’t tolerate your symptoms, your health routine has failed, etc. Then use your knowledge about the facts of depression and your own experience with it to respond to those false, negative perceptions of reality that your illness is flooding your brain with.
5) Begin Treatment While Staying Both Positive And Pragmatic
Knowing, as you do, that the results of current treatments for mental illness are always hard to predict, even when a certain treatment has worked well in the past, focus on how well you do with the process rather than the quality of its results. If improvement is delayed or a particular treatment fails, remind yourself that other treatments may well succeed and that keeping your life on track and persevering with your work and relationships when you’re impaired and distracted by psychiatric symptoms is always an achievement to be proud of and feel good about, even when you feel terrible overall.
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 24, 2016
As our reader from earlier this week made clear, it’s sometimes easier to blame yourself for bad luck than accept how little power we have over our luck in the first place. So before needlessly beating yourself up for false mistakes or claiming innocence and blaming fate entirely, take these five steps to evaluate whether you’re causing your bad luck or whether you’re caught being fate’s bitch.
1) Find the Facts
Do the detective work to gather any objective details that connect your actions and responsibilities with what went wrong; facts aren’t based on opinion, so if you hold yourself responsible because you were stupid or lazy, then you aren’t being a smart detective on the case, just a big jerk to yourself. Be specific about what your responsibilities were, what actually happened, when it happened, and how much damage occurred. If the facts show that your actions were, in fact, destructive, then it’s worth looking for larger patterns and help in managing your behavior.
2) Mind Your Motives
It’s easy to tell yourself something bad wouldn’t have happened if you had simply done something differently, e.g., if you’d only left the house ten minutes later or not stayed for that second cup of coffee, you could have prevented all this trouble. Before you go down the black hole of hypotheticals, however, ask yourself whether your choices were intentionally harmful or made you feel good but were thoughtless and potentially dangerous. If the answer is no, then your regrets are pointless, but if you did make knowingly bad choices, you have to work to manage negative impulses.
3) Think In the Third Person
If your friend were in the same situation and asked you whether she had done anything wrong, odds are you wouldn’t judge her as harshly as you judge yourself and blame her for being negligent, stupid or mean; even a stranger would be more willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, with only an enemy rushing to condemn you so unforgivingly. Remember, friends don’t decide whether you’re super-smart or perfect, just whether you made reasonable decisions as an imperfect-but-trying-hard human being. So be a friend to yourself and judge accordingly.
4) Spell Out Your Standards
If you can’t get over a guilty feeling simply because things turned out very badly, ask yourself what specific rule you broke. Pretend you’re writing out five rules for people who have to manage the situation that caused you problems, for posting on the wall in the office kitchen of your mind, right near the sign about labeling your food in the fridge and not putting fish in the microwave. If you can’t spell out a rule that you broke, chances are the only rule you broke was, “don’t have bad luck.”
5) Seek Out Smart Opinions
Don’t let shame stop you from telling your story to a friend or professional, like a therapist or even a lawyer, whom you can trust to be impartial. Don’t choose someone who just wants to make you feel good or someone mean, but someone who likes you but is willing to tell it like it is. Present all the facts, asking whether you should have done things differently and, if so, is there a lesson to learn other than that sometimes life sucks. If, after all your opinion seeking, you find that the blame isn’t yours, it’s your responsibility to find a way to move on. If it becomes clear that there are things you could have done differently, your path forward involves finding ways to manage that behavior so it doesn’t mess with your luck in the future.
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 22, 2016
It’s hard not to feel guilty when things go wrong, and guilty feelings may be particularly bad for just those who deserve them the least, i.e., those who are generally self-critical and insecure. If you’re someone who’s gone through a bad stretch and can’t help but feel bad and responsible for letting it happen, learn how to rely on specific information and common sense to figure out what you should really take responsibility for, if anything, and how to use your conclusions to fight a compulsive sense of having done something wrong. Instead of endless punishment, you deserve a fair assessment of the facts.
-Dr. Lastname
I often find myself on a streak of “wellbeing,” then out of nowhere I manage to fuck up whatever I had going for me, royally. Almost like I have a problem committing to something for too long. Just looking for some realistic advice as to why this may be. My goal is to figure out some realistic systems I could improvise to better cope with this dilemma.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 11, 2016
Unlike with love, ‘tis better to have always been broke than to have known big bucks and lost them all. If, like our reader from earlier this week, you find yourself in the latter situation, you don’t need to find yourself poor in both cash and self-respect. Here are five ways to build pride when you’re poorer than you used to be.
1) Forget Myths About Former Success
You probably think your prior success was due to hard work, strong ability and perhaps some unique talent/chosen one status. If you re-examine the role of luck and remember the people you know who worked just as hard and got nowhere, it’ll become clear that you weren’t quite so chosen as you recall. When you realize you don’t control success, failure becomes less personal, and future success, should you be lucky enough to find it again, becomes that much sweeter.
2) Judge Job Quality Objectively
Since we’re often far too hard on ourselves, evaluate your employment situation as if you were considering a friend in the same position, using objective criteria to define good performance (and being a friend to yourself, as well). Never use criteria like how much you’re making, whether it’s more or less than before, or whether it’s more or less than your friends or, worse yet, enemies.
3) Don’t Avoid Downsizing Decisions
Cutting back has undoubtedly required painful and sometimes humiliating sacrifices, not just for yourself, but for your family, and often within judging distance of the neighbors. As much as you’d like to forget them, list them instead to remind yourself you had the courage to do what was necessary, even though it hurt.
4) Value Evaluation
Using the friend POV again, ask yourself how much you respect someone who is hardworking, happy, and rich versus one who lost his dough and is now hardworking but unhappy and poor, perhaps to the point of suffering. Remember your answer whenever you feel like a loser, and don’t hold back from reprimanding yourself for being a judgmental jerk.
5) Rate Effort, Not Outcome.
Without comparison to your former self or dreams of obscene wealth, evaluate your efforts to do a good job using the mental equipment and other resources that you actually have, not what you wish you had. If you’ve prevented discouragement from diminishing your effort, give yourself a high score. Just because you lost your good luck doesn’t mean you’ve lost your ability to work hard, try hard, and value what you do; you may have lost your wealth, but that doesn’t mean you’ve lost your worth.
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 9, 2016
If you find yourself going from a higher income bracket to a lower one, you don’t just lose income; you also find yourself changing where you live, whom you socialize with, and how you feel about yourself as person. So don’t allow the lingering humiliation of downward mobility make you feel like a failure. Work hard, not just to climb back up, but to remember what success really is.
-Dr. Lastname
Although I know that the best thing to do is to live in the present, I have been reliving and brooding over my past mistakes (mainly professional ones) quite a bit recently. I had a much better financial situation in the past than I do now, what makes it almost impossible not to beat myself up since I keep comparing the “today me” with more successful “past me.” My goal is to be able to start again, fresh, having learned the lessons of such mistakes.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 21, 2016
At the start of a new year, you don’t have to be like our reader from earlier this week—someone in an usual career going through an usually hard time—to feel motivated to get your shit together. Here are five easy steps anyone can follow to get back on track no matter how rocky the terrain of your life happens to be.
1) Get A List of Goals
Obviously, if you’re trying to figure out how to get organized and motivated, you need to know what’s important enough to you to work for. Define these goals in terms of values, not results, e.g., include making a living, not making a mint. Think about what’s necessary, healthy, and fun in the long run, not what your wildest dreams are made of.
2) Put Together Your Priorities
The hardest part of prioritizing is learning to both accept the fact that two or three things deserve highest priority and the skill of juggling them all at once. It gets easier over time, and in the process of learning, you also get better at figuring out whether some of your priorities are actually worth dropping or putting aside.
3) Choose a Coach/System
Without a domineering spouse, day job, or ticking bomb in the basement, most people have to develop a system for self-management, particularly when they have to juggle their own obligations on top of their spouse’s, kid’s, dog’s, etc. Since most schools don’t teach you executive functioning skills, take a course and/or hire a coach. It’s amazing how much better you can do with a good to-do list, a set of urgency categories, and an omnipresent schedule.
4) Suss Out a Schedule
Assuming you have lots of responsibilities, limited time, and a strong desire to have fun, you need to create a schedule. A schedule helps you develop habits and shortcuts, so that you can reduce procrastination, deal with top priorities first, and make time for the things you really want to do. Again, don’t hesitate to take a course or use a coach.
5) Learn Your Limits
Many people experience endless feelings of responsibility once they engage in a serious task and those feelings can become consuming, particularly if an outside source (boss, spouse, parent, etc.) believes your share of responsibilities is never big enough. Train yourself to judge your responsibilities objectively by comparing them to your job description, taking into account your resources, and determining what a good person should do. Then you can remain focused on what’s really important, not overextend yourself, and not only get your shit together, but get shit done with a real sense of pride.
Posted by fxckfeelings on August 3, 2015
Dear Readers,
As you might have noticed, the site’s been going through some changes in the past week or so as we prepare for the release of our book, F*ck Feelings (see pre-order links to the right, it makes an excellent Labor Day gift).
This week, we debut our biggest change—instead of doing two cases per post, we’re going to do two per week. New posts will still go up on Mondays and Thursdays, but those posts will contain just one case, and it’ll be the Monday case and the Thursday case that have a unique and insightful connection, as opposed to two cases within each entry.
We hope you approve of these changes, and we appreciate your patience as we revamp the site and drag it from the WordPress dark ages.
In conclusion, please enjoy FF 2.0, and also, please buy our book. These A/C-bolstered electric bills aren’t going to pay for themselves.
-Dr. Lastname
When people are under stress, they sometimes become different people. While nobody aside from Bruce Banner experiences a physical transformation, stress does make some people repeatedly do things they know they shouldn’t. If stress sucks you into a bad habit, learn to accept your loss of control, put shame aside and have faith that the real you is still there and will come back from your mental-Hulk state. Next time, we’ll discuss the strange flipside of stress-induced compulsion.
-Dr. Lastname
I pride myself on being a pretty independent woman, so when I realized I had to give up on a relationship that was going nowhere with a guy I liked, I barely let it phase me. Six months later, however, I fell hard for someone else and, when he dumped me, it seriously messed me up and made me miserable. That’s when I was horrified to find myself calling my previous, going-nowhere boyfriend again. Since then, I can’t seem to stop calling him, even though I feel the same old vague emptiness after we spend time together. I’ve never seen myself as weak, but I feel like an addict every time I get sad and find myself picking up the phone. My goal is to figure out what went wrong with me to make me become someone who can’t stop calling someone whom I know will leave me feeling worse.
Experiencing the urge to do something destructive, be it calling a crappy ex, eating your weight in Oreos, or returning to the vodka trough, isn’t always a sign of overall weakness, weirdness, or creepiness. More often, it’s a sign that a part of your brain is possessed, and Oreo-loving demons don’t get up and leave on their own.
That’s because these compulsions often have a life of their own, and sometimes independent people who are proud of their self-control find themselves struggling with the urge to do something they really don’t want to do, whether it’s drinking, eating, or over-connecting. Nobody’s immune to bad habits, not even good people. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on July 27, 2015
Obviously, accidents are, well, accidental, but if we purposefully avoid identifying relative responsibility, then we risk putting ourselves and others through them again. After all, if we don’t take responsibility for accidents that are not largely accidental, we miss an opportunity to prevent them. And if we do take responsibility for accidents that are entirely accidental, we compound the misery unnecessarily, which may make more accidents happen. So, instead of getting swept up in shame or guilt, add up the facts and seek second opinions. Accidents happen, but if you don’t learn from them you’re deliberately setting yourself up for more mistakes.
–Dr. Lastname
My sister drinks because she says it’s the only way to make her anxiety go away—her anti-depressants don’t do it—but she’s been hospitalized three times now because of blackouts caused by drinking and taking extra medication. She gets mad when they try to keep her at the hospital for observation because she always says that she didn’t want to kill herself, she was just trying to get some relief for depression and screwed up by drinking, and being at the hospital makes her more depressed and then she signs out as quickly as possible. She’s mad at me and the rest of the family for insisting that she has a problem with alcohol and needs help, because she thinks we’re just freaking out over a few stupid mistakes and we’re doing this because we like to make her feel worse. My goal is to find her the help she needs.
As you already know, the only problem your sister will admit to having is the one she has with you and your insane overreacting, and maybe also one with your family, who should love her the most but are making her difficult life even more excruciating. You almost can’t blame her for turning to the bottle.
What’s hard for you to accept, of course, is that you can’t get through because, from what you’ve described, her mind is focused entirely on the way she feels in the moment, and in most moments, it’s lousy.
She might have even felt suicidal at the time she almost died, but since she doesn’t afterwards, what was a suicide attempt is now, in her estimation, a silly mistake. As such, she’s not lying, she’s just incapable of seeing the big picture. Shrinks call people whose depressed and angry feelings distort things this way “borderline personality disorders” and, when their distortion is as severe are your sister’s, there’s nothing much that can help them, at least not for the time being.
So don’t try to argue or tell her how much she needs help. Instead, simply trust yourself and act according to what you see and believe. You can’t promise her that she’ll feel better if she stops drinking, particularly not at first. You can promise her, however, that treatment and sobriety can help her think more positively, act more carefully, and reduce the risk of accidental overdose and death if she truly wishes to build a better life.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on July 23, 2015
While the whole concept of “shoot first, ask questions later” sounds cool to many of us, it obviously has some detractors (namely, those who were shot before they could have been vindicated through question-asking). In reality, as always, you need to strike a balance, because, while asking questions can sometimes interfere with action, taking action can be a way to avoid asking difficult questions. So, instead of assuming that either is good without the other, learn how to limit your questions to those that are necessary and how to take action, hopefully unarmed, even when you’re not sure how things will turn out.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve been taking a medication for several years that has been very good for my depression, but now I’m having obsessive thoughts and my doctor thinks I should take a larger dose and see if it reduces the OCD. She says there’s always an advantage in taking one medication instead of two, and that a month of taking a larger dose every day will tell me whether this medication can help all my symptoms or whether I need to try something else. It’s hard for me to take the same dose every day, because the medication makes me jumpy, so I always take less when I need sleep and then I take more when I need to be awake. In addition, I read on the internet that larger doses might make me fat, or, in some cases, suicidal, so I have a lot of doubts about this increased dose, and a lot of questions that nobody seems able to answer. My goal is to find somebody who has the answers (you?) and figure out the best way to deal with my obsessive thoughts.
If you’re having obsessive thoughts, and both you and your doctor acknowledge this to be a problem, then maybe you shouldn’t take your endless doubts about medication at face value. You can’t alleviate obsessive thoughts by entertaining them, which is what you’re doing here.
It’s valuable, of course, to make careful decisions about medication, and your questions would be useful if your medication were really designed to work quickly and help you stay awake. Instead, it’s designed to help you stop obsessing about factors like these, and to do so at its own pace. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
