Posted by fxckfeelings on December 28, 2009
Most people don’t wait until New Years to make resolutions about the bad behavior they’re going to stop putting up with next year; usually, things get bad enough by Christmas Eve that we’ve already started our mental lists of “never again.” The problem is that the worst kind of bad behavior can seldom be stamped out; it tends to exist all the time, for all of time, amen. Aiming to start 2010 by confronting that bad behavior is a bad idea; finishing 2009 working around that behavior is a better start.
–Dr. Lastname
I don’t know where I failed as a parent, but my daughter announced over Christmas that she’s leaving her perfectly nice husband after cheating on him, and it’s the last straw in terms of me wanting to just ask her why her behavior is and always has been so self-destructive. These aren’t the values I taught her—for one thing, I’m still married to her father after 30 years—and I’ve always pushed her to follow through in life and work, but she seems incapable of doing anything but sabotaging herself. My goal is to get my daughter to tell me why she feels she has to mess up her own life.
If your greatest joy as a parent is to see your kid happily married off, then it makes sense that one of your greatest sorrows is to see her unhappily divorced, particularly if she’s messed up and there’s nothing you can do to stop her.
If it hasn’t already occurred to you many times about parenting your daughter, this is certainly a good time to realize that you have no control, and that parents with good values and solid self-control can, and often do, have fucked-up kids and lose sons-in-law they’ve learned to love.
The gene for fuck-up-edness can skip a generation, or lay dormant until fed with alcohol, or it can wave a bright red flag in the form of the names “Randi” or “Amber.” Or it can just come out of nowhere and make parenting really hard, which is what it’s done to you for years.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 21, 2009
Even if none of us has spent Christmas with our entire families, most of us feel like we should help make it happen and feel terribly guilty if we can’t (I just feel guilty for taking their money, but only a little). We have some illusion that the holidays are the time for our criminal or alcoholic or crazy relatives to put their behavior aside, slap on a Christmas sweater, and join their loved ones around the tree and we feel bad if we can’t make the reunion happen, or even let it happen. But fear not, there’s a way to make excuses tactful and blameless without bringing down everyone’s holiday cheer. Gaw bless us, every drunk and lawless one.
–Dr. Lastname
Please note: There will be no new post on Thursday, 12/24, due to the holiday. Please continue to write in, however, because there will be a new post on 12/28. Thanks, and happy holidays!
My ex-wife was always a wild outlaw in high school, (I got the kids), she’d show up from time to time, but rarely when she said she would, and you never knew when she’d be high, so the court imposed supervised visitation. I want my kids to have a mom though, but when she no-shows, the kids are crushed. Of course, the kids want to see her, particularly for Christmas, but what they don’t know is that she and her current boyfriend were caught on video robbing a liquor store, so if she’s going anywhere, it’s probably straight to jail. . My goal is to figure out a way to break this to my kids so that they don’t hate their mother (even though I sort of think they should).
You can’t protect your kids from the hurt of loving an outlaw mother, any more than you could protect yourself for falling for her years ago. Telling your kids that she’s a bad person inflicts a worse kind of hurt, because it devalues the love you and the kids have given her (which, as you know, you can’t get back).
Even if you can’t protect them from hurt, you still can and should protect the value of their love for her and whatever is meaningful about hers for them.
To begin with, don’t buy the idea that outlaws are regular people who make bad choices. That’s one of those stupid, false-hope ideas that assumes that everyone has the choice to be good or bad and can redeem themselves by making better choices. It’s sort of a hybrid of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Santa’s “Naughty/Nice” list…and it’s bullshit.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 17, 2009
We keep saying that Christmas is hard on everyone, but that’s because religion is hard on everyone, no matter who or what you believe in, and religion is around all year long. Just because religion is hard, however, doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s good, actually, because it expresses essential differences and gets people upset, confused, and heading towards my office.
–Dr. Lastname
I recently had to relocate my family for work, so we were forced to move from a fairly large east coast city to a small town nowhere near water (unless you count the great lakes). My wife and I are Jewish, and we’re raising our kids in the religion, but that was much easier where we used to live than where we are now, where our 12-year-old son, who was always a bit of an outsider, is now facing a lot of teasing at school for all the ways he’s different, which includes his religion. It’s been especially bad for him lately, given that the town is very Christian, with prayers before high school football games and lots of school-centered Christmas activities, and he’s even further on the outside of what the other kids are doing. As you may or may not know, Channukah isn’t Christmas—it’s a minor holiday—and we don’t try to pretend otherwise by giving smaller gifts and not playing it up so much. My son is younger than his age, though, and he likes to tell everyone he’s not interested in Christmas and then they pick on him and he accuses them of anti-Semitism and it’s a mess. My goal is that he should be proud of being a Jew while getting along better with people at school.
It’s painful to watch your kid get picked on and called a dork, particularly when he is a dork and does dorky things that you know are going to make his troubles worse.
If you tell him to shut up and keep his opinions to himself, you may be destroying the paltry remains of his self-esteem. If you try to get his tormentors to stop, you may stir up additional trouble.
You could argue that it’s your job, and society’s, to give him a positive school experience that supports differences in religion and personal style. I would argue that’s bullshit. It’s not in your power and idealistic expectations will often make things worse.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 14, 2009
As Christmas gets even closer, we have to help our readers with even more holiday-inspired, toxic self-reflection. The holidays have the unfortunate tendency to push people to examine and confront their hurt feelings, when really, the best gift they could give themselves is to ignore their feelings and just enjoy their friends, family, and seasonal baked goods.
–Dr. Lastname
I consider myself to be a pretty thoughtful gift-giver—I pay attention to what other people need, things they don’t even know they need, their birthdays, their anniversaries, and I usually get it right. My husband, on the other hand, isn’t sentimental at all about birthdays or anniversaries and doesn’t remember them, so he’s a lousy gift-giver and, I can’t help it, it really gets to me. After I knock myself out to get him a good birthday present, he either forgets mine, or gets flowers at the last moment, or thinks of getting me something and then doesn’t follow through. We have a wonderful marriage but every year around Christmas, his lazy, lousy gifting really gets on my nerves (particularly since I can’t help doing a good job with his gifts). It’s humiliating. My goal is to find a good way to address this problem so I won’t resent him this Christmas.
There’s not one, but two good reasons why it’s a bad idea to address the problem of unequal gift giving with your husband, and the first, it’s a safe bet, is that you’ve done it before and it turned out badly. I’m right, am I not? (It’s important for me to be right, given my Harvard background).
You reproach your husband for neglecting your Christmas needs, he gets defensive, tells you how he knocks himself out for you, maybe goes further and remembers the time you didn’t do your share, and then you have to tell him how he got the facts wrong.
Meanwhile, both of you are drifting further away from any spirit of Christmas giving, other than that old staple of gift-giving everywhere, the Christmas Earful.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 10, 2009
Most of us make a big deal out of apologies, but the sad truth is that “sorry” doesn’t serve as a guarantee of lessons learned or absolution, just a band-aid on our hurt feelings until one party messes up again. For all our emphasis on forgiveness, it’s hardly a virtue, Christian or otherwise, if it requires you to assume that people have more choices than they really do.
–Dr. Lastname
My daughter is turning into a petty criminal. She’s getting kicked out of school again, she won’t stop messing around with drinking and drugs, she has unprotected sex, and her boyfriend is probably the guy who broke into our house and stole our TV, though she refuses to believe it. My husband and I have tried so many times to get her to see what she’s doing wrong and steer her in a better direction—we’re our own private “scared straight” program at this point—but every time we confront her about where she’s headed, she says she feels terrible, that she’s sorry, that she never wants it to happen again…and then she gets wasted and everything repeats itself. If only we could get her to understand the harm she’s doing, maybe we could get through to her and turn her around. Meanwhile, it’s killing us. We try to forgive her, but it’s hard. My goal is to forgive her and get her to see what she’s doing to herself and everyone who loves her.
There’s no point in getting your daughter to see what she’s doing wrong if she can’t really stop herself from doing it, and she really, really can’t. You can’t scare straightness into a boomerang.
Regret and remorse will make her feel bad, and you might think that will stop her from fucking up next time. Well, au contraire, my dear unHarvard-educated sap. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. You should know that since you’re the one missing a TV.
According to Christmas movies and sentimental parts of the Bible, repentance leads to redemption, but I say, goddammit, that’s just wishful bullshit.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 7, 2009
At fxckfeelings.com, we’re never afraid to tackle the ickier topics; we deal with not just the feelings that come out of us, but the solids, as well (although often they’re equivalent). So if someone can’t hold it down or you can’t hold it in, sure, it’s an awkward situation, but it’s not the end of the world. You’re not responsible for what goes in or what comes out, just for what you do about it, whether it’s your problem or your neighbor’s.
–Dr. Lastname
I just started at college, and I like my roommate, but she’s bulimic and hard to be around. Not just because she’s sick (and everybody on the floor knows about her problem, it’s hard not to), but because when she binges, it’s on my food because that’s what’s closest, and she always feels really bad about it and cries that she wishes she could stop, but then she doesn’t offer to pay for it and it’s costing me a lot of money. Part of me just feels bad for her, because she’s clearly really messed up, but another part of me is pissed because I’ve lost a lot of money this year on food that she’s eaten and thrown up, and that just makes me feel guilty like I’m a bad person for putting my lost money above her health. I want to move after the break, but I don’t want her to feel abandoned. My goal is to help her and myself.
Welcome to that other part of college, Hard Knocks University, where the class Helplessness 101—what to do when you can’t help both someone and yourself, and sometimes you can’t help at all—is a frosh requirement.
The tough part is not the decision, but accepting the shitty nature of your options. Bulimia, like any chronic condition (depression, addiction, etc.) is not completely curable, not by you or certainly the patient herself.
If you buy into the psychobabble about body image and low self-esteem, you might think you could help her by praising her strengths, noticing her attractive qualities, or getting her to think about the superficiality and limitations of attractiveness. Ha!
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 3, 2009
No matter how much someone loves us, there’s usually one thing about us they can’t stand. As we’ve said many times here, short of a new hair color or weight gain, changing who you are is virtually impossible. So accepting what you don’t like about someone is a necessity if you want to avoid relationship hell, and accepting that someone else’s non-acceptance is something you can’t accept.
–Dr. Lastname
My big sister, whom I live with, is always on my case about my spending habits—I’m no good at budgets, and she knows I’ve always been that way—but the more she nags me , the more I want to spend. I’ve been feeling really down for the past year or so, which also doesn’t really help me get motivated to do much of anything, including taking care of my kids, which just makes her even angrier, because she says that I basically spend money and she does all the work, including cleaning and childcare. So when I told her I needed money to visit a sick friend, she said she’d give it to me, but then there’d be no money for Christmas presents. So now it’s a few days from Christmas and she’s blaming me for spending the Christmas money and I’m tired of listening to her lecturing. My goal is to get her to find the money, which I’m sure she can, and get her off my case.
You’re pushing for money you don’t control from a sister who may not have it, and you want her to change feelings that aren’t going to change in a living situation that you can’t afford to escape. While you’re at it, you should attempt to eat a mouthful of pure cinnamon and cure cancer.
As you might have gathered, you can’t have what you want, any of it, and going after it will make your happy home into a hellhole that will make your kids yearn for the day they can escape for their lives and sanity.
You’ve got a right to your wishes—they’re human and understandable—but watch what trouble you create by making it your goal to express them. You’re not just farting into a phone booth, but laying down a shit as well.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on November 30, 2009
Seeing someone through a long illness makes saying goodbye a little easier, but that’s like saying that lifting weights makes it easier to lift a truck; losing someone you love is an impossible, painful task, no matter what the circumstances. You don’t protect them from death by protecting them from death, but by bearing the sorrow of their memories.
–Dr. Lastname
My father, a Holocaust survivor, is dying of cancer. I’m his only child, and while my mother is doing the best she can, I feel overwhelmed with responsibility and grief. I don’t know how to stop feeling so helpless, not just because I love him and can’t save him, but because he overcame so much to make life possible for me, and now all I can do is watch him die. My goal is to figure out what I can do for him since he’s done so much for me.
Don’t fall for the common misconception that you fulfill your duty to your parents by taking care of them and keeping them safe when they’re old. As a genuine geezer, Dr. Lastname can tell you with authority: you can’t, and it’s not your duty anyway.
No, I’m not telling you to push your dad out on an ice flow or forget about him, not for a moment. I am telling you to think about two things: what your goal will be for your kids when you get old and need their help, and how little you can do for anyone when they’re suffering from old age.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on November 23, 2009
The one gift everybody can expect to get around the holiday season is a surplus of emotions (which, as I’ve said before, turns into a surplus of business for me—ho ho ho!). The ghost of Christmas (and Thanksgiving and New Years) past visits most of us, but for those with rough pasts, said ghost can be a real bitch. If you keep your emotional swamp in check and focus on the positive in the present, you can keep your festivities from being too haunted (and keep yourself out of my office).
-Dr. Lastname
You said before that everybody hates the holidays, and I think most people hate seeing their families. Well, I hate the holidays, but it’s because I don’t have a family; my parents still drink too much, one brother is in jail and the other I don’t trust around my kids, and so every time the holidays roll around I get depressed that I don’t have anyone because the people I should be happy to see are the ones who made me the crazy mess I am today (honestly—I’m bipolar, but on medication). I’m sick of basically being guaranteed to hate myself and life all winter just because of what my family did. My goal is to find a way to feel better no matter what time of year it is.
There’s a simple answer to why it’s a bad idea to expect to get over the sorrow of a bad, abusive family; because usually, it simply can’t be done.
Focusing on your pain and waiting for it to go away will spoil your holidays even more than they’re already spoiled. Talk about a turd in the cranberry sauce.
Maybe you think it’s a holiday right and tradition to vent/celebrate your sad feelings with a shrink. Well, this shrink says forget it. I’m not interested, and neither should you be.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on November 19, 2009
Unless you’re holding a weapon, getting someone to do something they don’t want to with a simple request is virtually impossible. Even harder, however, is getting someone to do something they don’t want to do by passively nudging them; now both the request and the delivery of the request are so repellent that you’ve guaranteed a bad outcome. Taking a stand isn’t easy, and jebus knows it’s often a bad idea, but when it has to be done, you need to cowboy up and be direct, weapon or no.
–Dr. Lastname
Lately, I’ve been trying to get my life together, and part of that is quitting drinking; my fiancé and I are actually getting sober together. The problem in all this is my mother; she lives nearby and comes over often (believing she is providing “moral support” for turning my life around), and, for whatever reason, no matter what the occasion, she brings a bottle of wine as a gift and makes a really big deal about the vintage and how refined it is and all this nonsense. I guess she doesn’t really understand that drinking is a big source of my problems, and both my fiancé and I have dropped hints to that effect, but it’s not getting through, and so, surprise, it’s messing with our sobriety. My goal is to get through to my mother that, while I appreciate her kindness, she’s actually being kind of cruel.
When you decide it’s necessary to get a grip on any powerful hard-to-control behavior, your goal is not to get people to take the hint that they should avoid tempting you. (Hint, hint—you’re being a wuss).
If you’re hinting, it’s because you’re afraid to tell people, straight out, that you’re trying to get sober, and that means that you’re more worried about what they think than about your reasons for not drinking. Your sobriety doesn’t stand a chance; you’re not strong enough.
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