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 October 22, 2020
Too often, when it comes to choosing whether to be, stay, or break-up with someone, we let our hearts be our guides. But when it comes to a committed partnership, feelings are a false guide; there’s no way to share a house, family, life, savings account, and/or bathroom with someone for eternity and not feel some sort of bad a lot of the time. So, if like our reader from earlier, you can’t decide whether you can put up with your partner anymore, here are five ways to tell whether a flawed relationship is worth keeping.
1)Ask Yourself If You Were Better Off Before
Remember what your life was like back when you were single and how you hoped a relationship would make things better. Then assess whether this relationship does or doesn’t fulfill those needs, consulting friends if necessary to recall how you were living then and what your goals were. Don’t get distracted by how you wanted to feel, but on what you wanted to achieve; ask if your relationship helped you meet major life goals, like starting a family, getting an education, taking a job or living somewhere you couldn’t otherwise afford, etc. Make sure you include your need (if any) for a relationship that would offer you support and security in case of illness or possible unemployment. If your relationship hasn’t helped you achieve any those things or has even made reaching those goals harder, that’s important to know.
2) Ask If Acceptance Is Mutual
Determine how well you can accept your partner as he is and how well he accepts you. If, in spite of your best efforts to take him as he is, you find yourself cringing and criticizing, you should move on before you both become mean and awful. And, likewise, if you feel he can never really let go of wanting you to change and you often feel like you have to defend or explain yourself, you’re better off with your own company until you can find someone better. Remember, sometimes there are things about those close to us that make us nuts even if they don’t bother others, but figuring out why they’re annoying won’t make them more bearable or easier for your partner to change. If, despite your best efforts, the acceptance can’t come, then it’s time for you to go.
3) Do a Budget For Being Alone
Review your income, expenses, savings and debt and ask how breaking up would affect your finances. It’s possible that ending things, at least doing so immediately, would force you to make big sacrifices that would make it hard to connect with family and friends, live in your chosen neighborhood, create a nest-egg or just plain survive. If the immediate financial hit is too hard, you’re not trapped forever; you’ll just have to wait while you save up and create a financial plan that makes the separation financially feasible.
4) Review Possible Red Flags
Consider whether there are any “red flag” behaviors that make your or any relationship burdensome, unequal, or even dangerous. These behaviors include addictions, lying, overspending, impulsivity, and/or violent behavior. If there are no such flags, you should nevertheless ask yourself whether the relationship is too one-sided and you don’t get as much as you give. Then, if you do recognize red flags or inequality, ask a friend or therapist to help you find the strength to make a plan to move on. If you realize that you might be in danger, move quickly to get yourself and your children to safety.
5) When You Do Figure it Out, Keep Feelings Out of It
If you’re going to do a smart, factual assessment of the pros and cons of a relationship, you can do it when you’re still feeling angry, hurt, or generally upset. And in order to have a clear head, you have to figure things out when you’re calm, not moments after a fight or reconciliation. If you leave, you should believe that you’d be better off without him for objective reasons, regardless of heartbreak and the loss of whatever he added to your life. If you stay, it should be with the conviction that he makes your life better and doesn’t make it harder for you to be safe or be you. Whatever you decide, if you’ve done a good review of (over)due diligence, you’ll know you’re doing the right thing, even if it feels a little wrong.
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 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 November 1, 2019
In the give and take of marriage, it’s common for one partner to suck up having to cook and pick up the dirty socks because their spouse grits his or her teeth through doing the dishes and take out the garbage. But if one partner ends up with the cooking, the socks, the dishes, and the garbage, the give and take, and the marriage, can give way entirely. So here are five ways to hold your subpar parter accountable for doing his or her share.
1) Fairly Consider His Contributions
If you’re frustrated by the fact you do everything in your marriage while your spouse does nothing/God knows what, take a pause to consider whether you’re being fair or just fed up and frustrated. After all, as we always say, the point of getting married is always having someone to blame; if you’re dealing with stress, depression, or separate marital issues, it’s easy to see your spouse’s actions, words, and/or stupid face as the source of your problems. So begin by making a thoughtful, thorough list of all the things you do and all the things he does. And if your list is still lopsided, despite being objective, you know that you’re right to address the issue.
2) Tackle Your Terms
Draw up a revised, fair marital job description for your partner that takes into account what you want as well as the ways he is wanting, i.e., his obliviousness and lack of motivation. You don’t necessarily want to divvy everything up 50/50, not just because you can’t change his weaknesses, but also because you want to take advantage of his strengths as well as your own. A good job description then includes tasks he’s good at, puts more emphasis on effort and commitment than results, and leaves you with confidence that you’re better off with his contributions as a whole rather than with not having to take care of him.
3) Navigate Negotiations
Bring up your new terms in a positive context that implies no blame, regardless of how you really feel. Present your reasons for re-evaluating his family-related activities as a way of improving his level of function, maximizing his positive impact on the family, and relieving you of any additional responsibilities you’ve picked up when he was unable to do them or unaware they existed in the first place. Of course, you may describe problems, such as your overwork or the kids’ dysfunction, as reasons for this negotiation, but not as evidence of his personal or moral failure (even though that’s what you may feel). Condemnation, however deserved, is rarely constructive.
4) Pin Point Problem Behaviors
Again, without implying that he’s lazy or purposefully negligent, specify any behaviors that you’ve observed that tend to undermine his productivity. For instance, if he spends too much time hanging out with his buddies, drinking, or playing video games, show respect for his right to relax before discussing the impact of his behaviors on the time he spends doing his share around the house, hanging out with the kids or having private time with you. Or if he doesn’t stick to a budget, describe the negative impact on everyone’s choices, including his.
5) Conclude Confidently
Aside from remaining positive, the key to getting your point across is conveying confidence; if you know that what you’re asking for is well thought out and reasonable, there’s no reason to be defensive or timid. With conviction, state your belief that he and the rest of the family will be better off if events prove you right, and that argument is unnecessary; if he disagrees, the only way he can convince you you’re wrong is if he can’t meet your terms despite his best efforts. In the meantime, you will continue to wish for his success with your plan, especially since continuing to endure your partnership in its present form will force you to reassess your future plans entirely.
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 3, 2019
Nobody wants to hear that their health problems are chronic, i.e., that the symptoms you’re dealing with are never really going to go away. If you’ve got anxiety, however, it’s not just unpleasant to hear that you’ve got a chronic illness–it can be downright impossible. Your brain is wired to obsess, so it’s natural to keep searching for a solvable problem instead of accepting the one you’ve got. Instead of fruitlessly fixating on ways to fix yourself, here are five ways to force yourself to accept you’ve got a chronic illness.
1) Resist Revisiting the Diagnosis
Don’t believe your feelings when they tell you that if you could just find a better doctor/hospital/health care system then you’d be able to find someone who knows how to help. Bad news often makes people feel that way, but searching for better news is a good way to make the inevitable disappointment even more painful. Your job isn’t to find a cure or just the right doctor to deliver it, but to look for treatments that might help and figure out how much risk they pose to your health and finances.
2) Get A Civilian Second Opinion
Find a friend, relative, or therapist who can help you figure out your options, focus your questions and keep them realistic. Don’t look for blanket reassurance and emotional support, which won’t protect you from listening to every charismatic quack you find or embracing a never-ending series of unlikely and dangerous treatments. Ask your trusted guide to help you interpret what your doctor says and ask yourself and your doctor whether you’ve gotten all the necessary tests, what any possible risks or side effects are to a suggested treatment, and whether you’ve tapped into all the expertise available.
3) Confusion Isn’t Failure
When the first round of tests don’t offer a cure or explanation, don’t let helplessness or fear convince you that you’ve failed to find the right help. Remind yourself that it’s important to know the conditions you don’t have; otherwise, you wouldn’t know what treatments won’t help you and aren’t worth pursuing. Then get a second medical opinion to help you figure out whether there are other tests worth doing or treatments worth trying. Either way, trial and error is what chronic illnesses are all about, so don’t get discouraged quickly if you get negative results or don’t see immediate improvement.
4) Dictate Your Own Direction
Don’t blindly ask your doctors to tell you what to do. Instead, gather as much information as you can and ask them why they think a particular diagnosis isn’t worth pursuing or treatment isn’t worth doing. Without letting your anxiety push you into an endless quest for the answer you desire, use it to gain expertise in your actual, undesirable situation so you gain confidence in your decision making. Having learned all you can, you will develop your own opinions about how you wish to manage your symptoms; knowledge may not lead you to a cure, but it will make you feel less helpless and doomed.
5) Get New Goals
Once your research into your illness has persuaded you to accept that a cure is unrealistic, assign yourself a new set of management goals. They should include seeking advice and gathering knowledge from other people with your illness who have been successful at living with their symptoms and deciding whether there are management techniques or medical treatments worth trying. You must also select clinicians who have the expertise to provide treatment, advice, and coaching over the long term. Most importantly, don’t let your diagnosis consume you; don’t focus so much on your illness that you forget the other important things in your life, like your relationships, work and values. Just because you’re not a healthy person doesn’t mean you can’t still be a good one.
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 April 4, 2019
Having crushes turn into obsessional attachments may seem like a bizarre weakness or psychiatric symptom that only happens to people who lack pride, insight, or self-respect (or like the premise to an excellent musical sitcom). In reality, such obsessive behavior can happen to anyone, but once it gets going, no amount of pride, insight, and treatment can make it go away. Nevertheless, if you are unlucky enough to have the kind of crushes that can crush your spirit and self-esteem, there’s no reason to let them ruin your life or to make you despair about your ability to ever find a healthy attachment. It just means you have to learn how to manage your attraction and obsessive impulses, no matter how powerful your emotions or ability to carry a tune.
-Dr. Lastname
So I’ve tried over the last few years to be close friends with someone that I was once involved with briefly. Our friendship’s had its up and downs, but I was managing, although “managing” isn’t quite what I was after. At a certain point he developed cancer; it now looks like he’s in the clear, but I was there for him every step of the way, and during the whole ordeal we expressed our love for each other constantly, hugged, kissed, and spent time together. Problem is, we were supposed to be platonic, but I never quite got past wanting him, and I’ve had a therapist talk to me about having attachment issues in general. So this guy and I are still friends, but hell has opened up least week because I asked for a firm commitment to get together over the weekend, after which I became obsessed, acted out, was anxious… something of a tidy mess. I know what I need to do and it hurts bad, but I also think I’ve made more progress with him faster now than ever before, so I dimly hope he and I salvage something. I’ve been searching for books, advice of relationships to figure out how I might heal faster, let go completely if need be, and learn how not to repeat the same mistakes again. My goal is to find some task-oriented technique for overcoming my obsession, or for dealing with my attachment issues overall, because as much as I want to keep my connection to him, I worry that I’m being an idiot by refusing to give up on what I want him and I to have.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on March 26, 2019
If, like our reader from earlier, the only thing more reliable than your parents fighting is how much pain it causes you, you can feel like it’s up to you alone to relieve everyone’s suffering. As many problems as their conflict may cause you, however, solving the problems that cause that conflict isn’t actually within your control. So instead of continuing to feel hurt and frustrated by endless parental arguments, here are five ways to figure out when your attempts at family peacekeeping are making the war worse, and what you can do instead.
1) Carefully Assess Their Compatibility
Pay attention to whether or not your parents function as a couple, ignoring their complaints. This doesn’t mean you should look for times and ways they get along, but to really investigate how and if they work together; if possible, determine whether they do or don’t share or interfere with one another’s spending on essentials like housing, food, travel, and taxes. Note also whether they travel or socialize together, act independently, or interfere with one another’s ability to do so. Conflict is always a part of relationships, but so is cooperation; without that, you’ve got real trouble.
2) Gather Whether Advice Gets Through
You may have spent years trying to get through to your parents, but odds are you’ve never really paid attention to whether any of your pleas or guidance has actually gotten through. So take stock of whether either of your parents really seems to listen to your advice or ever really seems to take it. Either way, ask yourself how they manage to cope when you’re not available and whether either is really helpless or at risk of harm when you’re not around. Of course, if you believe either is in danger of being harmed, you should get professional advice and consider reporting abuse. In all likelihood, however, each has found good ways to manage conflict when they’re without you but, when they have your ear/a captive audience, they take the opportunity to stress their unhappiness.
3) Recognize Responsibility
Notice how much accountability each parent takes for dealing with what he or she doesn’t like vs. just complaining about it. Notice whether their complaints just put responsibility on you as the listener and/or on their partner for abusing them, rather than either accepting some responsibility for what bothers them or for the fact that no one’s really to blame. After all, it’s quite likely that whatever’s causing the conflict between your parents—like a bad habit or irksome personality trait—isn’t going to change. So if neither parent can either own their faults or resign themselves to them, then they’re never going to stop bickering, either.
4) Generate A Realistic Goal
Don’t assume that your objective is to help them get along better or ease their pain, because, as the previous steps should reveal, that’s completely outside of your control. It’s natural, of course, to want to find a way to make your parents listen to you, heed your advice, or accept each other’s faults, but since doing so would require magic or mind control, it’s time to reassess your endgame. Instead, try to protect yourself from their conflict while encouraging each of them to develop his and her own way of managing their feelings that doesn’t require raised voices, especially with you as the audience.
5) Assemble an Exit Strategy
Once you’ve realized your goal isn’t to keep the peace but encourage them to keep quiet, prepare a statement asserting this truth and rejecting personal responsibility, saying, in effect, that you wish you could help them, but their unhappiness together is beyond everyone’s control, so you think it’s better not to talk about it and instead think about ways to make life better. Then prepare to be tested and to follow through on your exit plan, without any appearance of hesitation or guilt, if they misbehave. Just because they’re constantly in conflict doesn’t mean you should be about the smart decisions you’ve made.
Posted by fxckfeelings on January 24, 2019
As we’ve hopefully made painfully clear by now, the most powerful emotions tend to fuel our
poorest decisions; deep despair can lead to anything from substance abuse to misspelled tattoos
while blinding love can bind you to someone whom you, in saner times, wouldn’t so much as
follow on Twitter. There’s no point then in being ashamed of the company love can drive you to
keep. The only shame comes from not using the heartbreak to learn how to better protect
yourself, retain your values, and exercise your judgment next time. Then your bad experience
can become an anchor that will keep you from getting swept away by any waves of intense
emotion that may hit you in the future.
-Dr. Lastname
Simply put, I’ve been dating and subsequently fell for an older man (in his 50s) who, without telling me, had plans the whole time to marry a 22-year-old Central American stripper. He finally admitted this to me by explaining that he’s in love with her but still wants to be my very good friend. Of course, I am still in love with him and he is very aware of that. My dumb ass is waiting for his feelings to change, which I realize is, well, dumb, but I don’t know what else to do. How do I get over this? My goal is to figure out whether I can be his friend, or whether that’s a reasonable/doable option to begin with.
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