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 February 21, 2019
Intervention may be long off the air, but its approach to pushing addicts and alcoholics into recovery is still part of the national consciousness; it’s now taken as common wisdom that the way to get someone you care about into rehab is through raw, emotional confrontation. In reality, when there aren’t cameras, specialists, and access to highly specialized recovery programs around, it’s much better to keep emotion, confrontation, and personal responsibility out of it. So, for those of us in the real world dealing with an addicted loved one in real time, here are five steps you can take to compose a statement or otherwise address a loved one’s alcoholic or addictive behavior.
1) Put Things Positively
Regardless of how entitled you are to feel angry, hurt, or screwed, expressing those feelings will only make achieving your purpose more difficult; your goal isn’t to start an argument, vent your unhappiness, or listen to excuses, but to discourage alcoholic behavior and protect yourself from its effects. That’s why your statement should express what you believe is the best approach to a problem that isn’t necessarily solvable or controllable. So begin by talking about the alcoholic’s positive qualities and achievements, i.e., the reasons that you care about and love him in the first place. Then refer to alcoholism as an illness and set of behaviors, not a fault in his character, that’s a problem that has aroused your concern and for which you have a plan.
2) Fixate on Facts
When addressing the problematic aspects of his alcoholism, focus on behavior that you believe is doing the most harm to his life or that goes most against his values, not what irritates you the most. That means behavior that damages his health, puts his and the safety of his loved ones at risk, and generally is at odds with the kind of good, caring person you’ve known him to be. Of course, you know that conveying the magnitude of a problem is not likely to make an alcoholic change. What you’re after is a bald statement of fact that gives him reason to fear and oppose what his addiction is doing to him for his sake, not yours.
3) Beware The Blame Game
The amount addicts and alcoholics hate taking responsibility for their actions is matched only by their love for their substance of choice, so don’t let the conversation become about who’s really to blame or should take responsibility. You can never be sure how much you, the alcoholic, a therapist, a program, or anyone else can make a difference when it comes to alcoholism. Regardless of how an addiction starts, it develops a power of its own. Plus, if you put too much emphasis on how his addiction impacts your life, he’ll make you the reason for getting sober instead of doing it for himself (and then blame you if sobriety doesn’t stick). So be clear that you’re determined to help in any way you think might work if he sees that sobriety is best for him, and that you respect him if and when he does the best with the addiction he’s got.
4) Put Forth Your Plan
Now that you’ve cited concrete issues with his behavior, spell out the protective changes you’re going to take in order to address his issues and help him recover. These may include limiting the time you spend together, leaving events early if he gets drunk, or even notifying his doctor that he’s an alcoholic. If he feels unsupported or criticized, don’t feel guilty. You’re not trying to punish him, just to do what’s necessary and/or constructive for the both of you. If he promises to get help, be supportive of that choice, but don’t change your plan based on empty guarantees. By avoiding unrealistic optimism, you make clear that he has a tough road ahead and that external factors such as your love, the family’s support, and the presence or quality of treatment cannot guarantee success.
5) Conclude the Conversation
Once you’ve stated the facts and your plans going forward, it’s time to end discussion. Resist if he tries to engage you further with excuses, or further thoughts about sobriety or how both of you feel. Don’t try to plow through the conversation and “win” with the force of your personality, because that would be a temporary victory and make you responsible for generating his motivation. Instead, wrap things up once you’ve created a set of conditions and actions that rest on facts, hoping that your continued belief in those facts and you’re following through on those actions will, in the long run, build his motivation. If they don’t, they will at least improve your self-protection and give you peace of mind knowing that you did all you could in a fairly impossible situation.
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 7, 2019
When you discover that a loved one is in a life-threatening situation, it’s natural and often helpful to focus all your strength on removing obstacles to a cure. That works well if you can fix the situation by donating bone marrow or even lifting a car off your injured child, but addiction is a much harder obstacle to remove than a Chevy or even cancer. That’s because addiction not only has no clear cause, but also no cure, and the effort to find either can exhaust your resources and harm the ones you love the most. Instead of striving for the super-power to save someone at all costs, learn how to give it your best shot, respect your own efforts without becoming responsible for a fix, and then find ways to live with the obstacle, not remove it, for as long as necessary.
-Dr. Lastname
Several months ago, my dad got diagnosed as pre-diabetic and was told to stop drinking. We gave him time—he’s been a drinker for most of 50 years—but here we are now, many months later, the only thing that’s changed is that I can barely be around him because his drinking makes me so furious. It wasn’t until he got diagnosed that my mother and I realized how dangerous his drinking is to his health. We knew it was dangerous in other ways, because when he’s drunk he turns into a zombie/jerk: he gets aggressive, he doesn’t understand anything that is said to him, he can’t speak or walk, and my mom is stuck having to apologize for him and take the brunt of his behavior. Other members of our family have been noticing and talking to my mom about an intervention, but she’s worried about his feelings, which I understand—he has had a very hard time at his job—but to me that is no fucking excuse for killing yourself little by little every fucking day. I don’t want to lose respect for my mom too, because she’s my best friend, but I’m also getting frustrated with her for how much she enables and protects him. For months I have been keeping my anger to myself and talking with my mom, but she says we can’t talk to him with anger. But why fucking not? I’m so pissed at this point I feel like I can’t be around them anymore. If nothing changes soon my relationship with my parents is going to crumble. My goal is to get somebody or something to change before I lose my family entirely.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 6, 2017
Good sleep, along with YouTube videos of porcupines eating and fresh mozzarella cheese, is one of life’s simplest pleasures. Unlike those other things, however, it’s not just a joy but also something of a necessity. A life without hungry porcupines or good cheese of any kind of unfortunate, but one without sleep can feel excruciating, so it’s not surprising that those who just can’t shut themselves down at a reasonable hour are so eager to figure out what’s wrong with them and so quick to blame themselves for their sleeplessness. While we now have clinical sleep specialists and a bunch of helpful theories, suggestions, and treatments, we don’t, of course, have any solid answers or cures. The answer then isn’t seeking complete control over your insomnia, but learning to manage it and find pleasure in life despite it.
-Dr. Lastname
In short, I cannot sleep. I mean, theoretically I can (because, well, biology), but practically I can’t, and I know it’s all in my head— the fact that I feel that “I have insomnia” makes it so much harder, because, obviously I don’t have any clinical disease that it’s a symptom of, just some mental block that makes sleep impossible. I really, really want to sleep and get back control over this one thing without depending on anything (drugs, diets, etc.) or anyone to fix the problem for me. My goal is to get to the bottom of whatever’s causing this insomnia and get rid of it.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on March 31, 2016
There are no surefire ways to cure, let alone control, mental illness, so, if like our reader from earlier this week, you find yourself yearning for a way to get your sick brain well, then you should stop torturing yourself and start redirecting your energies elsewhere. Here are five better goals for controlling your illness.
1) Assess Your Own Symptoms
Make your own list about the things that bother you most about your illness, paying more attention to your own experiences than the descriptions from doctors or textbooks, or whether you fit one specific diagnosis or another. Give priority to the symptoms or problems that endanger your safety, cause you pain, make it hard to work, or interfere with being a good friend. Only you know what symptoms are worth keeping an eye on and making an effort to manage.
2) Keep Track of Trouble
Until doctors develop a blood test or breathalyzer for measuring mental illness, you’re the one who knows best how you’re doing from day to day. So keep a log or diary of your symptoms and status, reviewing the list of problems that bother you and putting a number from 1 to 5 next to each one representing how bad it is on that given day. That’s the only way you can tell whether whatever you’re doing to get better is having a good effect or not.
3) Adjust Your Expectations
While you should of course work to get better, you should never expect to achieve total recovery. Some people do get better and never have symptoms again, but it isn’t necessarily because they’re good patients and know how to do the right thing (though that helps). It happens, mainly, because they’re luckier and their illness is not as bad. So instead of expecting to get better, get real about the work you have ahead of you and what the realistic rewards are.
4) Punishment Hinders Progress
If you try too hard to make yourself better and become too obsessed with your illness you’ll spend all your time looking for treatment and be too busy to spend time with friends, enjoy a fine meal, or generally go about your usual business. As hard as you should try to explore treatments that might work and pursue methods that you think are helping, you shouldn’t keep going with a treatment that isn’t working, nor so focus on treatment that you forget to live your life.
5) Remember the Real Goal
The fact is, you don’t beat an incurable disease by making it go away but by going about your business in spite of all the trouble that the mental pain, fatigue, doctor visits, medication side effects, and general chaos of your illness throws in your way. When you can tolerate all that shit, stick to your values, and try to live a life that matters, you’re accomplishing something incredible.
Posted by fxckfeelings on January 12, 2016
Many parents know what it’s like to hate their kids at some point in the long, close process of living together as a family, be it during the early years when they eat, break or crap on something you really care about, or during the teen years, when they metaphorically do the same. Unfortunately, some parents don’t know it does no good to hate yourself for the way you feel, so instead of trying to feeling loving all the time or running away when you’re angry, remember what you want to accomplish as a parent, whether you like your kid at that moment or not. Then learn how to keep hate to yourself while pushing the relationship in the direction you think it should go, namely towards mutual respect and away from destruction.
-Dr. Lastname
I’m a single mom in my 40s, and I am in complete awe of kids today and their sense of entitlement. My teenaged daughter down-talks to me constantly and is always arguing about every little thing. Tonight I told her to do the dishes, and when she gave an attitude about it, the fight escalated until we started hitting each other. She talked down to me and called me crazy, and I ended up putting her in a headlock and saying, “You think this is crazy, you haven’t seen crazy!” Eventually, I even said the words I will go to hell for saying–“I hate you”—and I hate myself right now. All I have ever wanted was the best for my daughter. Her father was in and out of her life and that devastated me because I know how important a father is since I didn’t have one myself. I have done everything to show her love and build her up so she would have the self-esteem to make better choices for herself, yet here I am acting like my mother, which makes me want to go play in traffic. She has been stubborn and strong willed since day one and everything I thought about having a little girl has been shattered. A factor to consider is I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 10 years ago. I can’t work (but I take care of the household), am in pain a good percentage of the time, and my cognitive skills are most effected, so I can’t multi-task at all (and I have explained to her that if I am doing something and she comes in and starts talking, my brain can’t shift that fast, but she still gets annoyed when I ask her to repeat herself). I feel like my life is fucked and over and I’m depressed about a shitload of things, but mainly our relationship. What the hell do I do to change our relationship before I have a stroke? My goal is to get my daughter to see that I love her so much instead of just seeing my resentment.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 15, 2015
Earlier this week, we heard from a reader who’s having trouble coping with a disabling illness. While such situations may feel hopeless, there are ways to make the best of life and have a lot to be proud of in the process. When you have an overwhelming health issue, here are five things you can do to cope.
1. Stop Asking Why…
Resist the temptation to figure out what you, your family, your boss, your cat, etc., did to ruin your health. Don’t think for a minute that exercise and healthy eating offered you significant protection, or that your failure to recover constitutes a medical mystery or probable malpractice. A guaranteed healthy existence is something advertisers promise in order to sell things; in the real world, no one is immune to bad luck.
2. …And Ask Smarter Questions
Instead of blindly accepting whatever treatment is offered, ask yourself, your doctor, and whatever relevant literature exists what the chances are that it will help you and how you can measure its benefit. That way you can stop that treatment and move on if it’s not doing you any measurable good. It’s also helpful to contact other people with a similar condition, not just to compare treatments, but to prove to yourself that life can be this unfair to anyone, not just you.
3. Be Patient and Persistent
Don’t quit treatment because the first efforts have failed. If, as suggested above, you’ve educated yourself about all treatments, then list those you think are worth trying and pick your doctors’ brains about the ones they would try on themselves. Don’t rely on your doctors to make all the decisions; work together as a team to figure out what actions are worth trying.
4. The Mental Health Factor
Read up on the way anxiety and depression can make you feel like a failure, riding a roller coaster into a seemingly-bottomless pit that’s actually a well of shit. Find out about all the treatments that can protect you from these dangerous distortions and try those you think can help; but whatever you do, don’t assume the helpless voices in your head are reliable and worth listening to.
5. Take Stock/Credit
Make a list of your usual priorities—like keeping busy, spending time with the people who matter, and continuing to be a good person by your own standards—and build those priorities into your schedule, making allowances whenever possible for the fact that you are sometimes incapacitated. Then review the immense amount of work you do to manage symptoms and tolerate disability, and respect your efforts while continuing to live your life, despite poor health and bad luck.
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 13, 2015
If you’ve been struck with a severe medical illness, then PTSD is like the mental aftershock. Instead of recovering from your initial illness, you can end up struck with panic attacks that turn recovery into a sequel to your suffering. Just because you can’t recover feelings of calm equanimity, however, doesn’t mean that you’re not on the mend or that you can’t lead a meaningful life in spite of anxiety and not working. Learn how to fight negative thinking, even when life sucks, the anxiety won’t go away, and the ground never stops shaking, and you can still find meaningful things to do with each day.
-Dr. Lastname
My life is currently in complete disarray and I’m on medical leave from work to resolve my health issues, which almost took my life several times over the last few years. I go to a therapist who also teaches yoga, and started seeing a CBT as well, but my daily life is still miserable and I need help. I’m currently sitting at my computer sweating, crying, shaking and no amount of medicine or breathing technique or exercise is helping. My goal is to figure out how to get my health issues under control.
Expecting to get most health issues under control, including depression and panic attacks, is often a way to make yourself even more unhappy and sick.
That’s because we can never totally control our health or our illnesses, and cures are few and far between. In your case, you’re obviously doing all the right things—getting medical help, seeing therapists, exploring various kinds of treatment—so give yourself credit for what you’re doing, and cut yourself some slack for not being able to control what your brain and body have decided to do on their own.
It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed when you’ve recently experienced extreme medical problems, and it’s impossible not to get freaked out when experiencing the extreme symptoms of a panic attack, but you know, deep down, that the anxiety will pass.
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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 »
