Posted by fxckfeelings on June 10, 2021
Since loneliness and a string of bad relationships can make you feel like a loser, it’s not surprising that most people assume finding someone new is the path to victory. And if you could order a perfect new partner through an app with free delivery, that would be fine. Instead, the search for someone new mostly requires luck—also not available to order—so making a good relationship your goal just makes you unfairly responsible for achieving the uncontrollable while pushing you to make bad compromises to avoid loserdom/loneliness. Instead, remind yourself that you’re never a loser if you do your best to be a good person and live independently with whatever loneliness is unavoidable. If you can do that, celebrate by ordering yourself something nice.
-Dr. Lastname
After a nightmare divorce and a shitty abusive relationship following that, I’ve been alone for three years now. I want a companion but I don’t know how to find one, or at least know how to find one that sucks less than the last two (I also don’t know how to change my attitude). By the way, I have three kids, which makes finding someone that much harder since single moms are, well, an acquired taste. My goal is to figure out how to overcome my past and, in some ways, my present in order to find a good partner.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on December 4, 2014
Loserdom, like Asshole™-itis, bigotry, or lupus, is rarely a problem for those who’ve convinced themselves they have it, and often a problem for those who’d never consider themselves susceptible. When you’re lonely, it’s easy to see yourself as a loser, and if you’re living with an Asshole™, it’s easy to get won over by his belief that everybody’s a loser but him. So, if you feel like a loser, check to see if you’re being unfair to yourself or too fair to somebody else. Then rate yourself carefully, give yourself the respect you deserve, and lose your bullshit diagnosis for good.
–Dr. Lastname
I escape into work, but really don’t have much of a life. I’ve worked in city government for 10 years and, since I’m really shy and not very attractive to girls, I haven’t had much success cultivating a social life, but I’m enthusiastic about my job. I enjoy mentoring younger co-workers, volunteering at city shelters, and coaching youth sports. My boss says she doesn’t know what she’d do without me, but it worries me that everyone else seems to have a personal life and I don’t. My goal is to live a more normal, balanced life and have a family.
Many of the expectations of a “normal” life are, generally speaking, sensible—going to college, getting married, and having a career are all smart things to pursue—but they’re also not possible or just desirable for everyone. Given that “normal” people also spend tens of thousands of dollars on weddings and line up overnight to buy new telephones, however, being “normal” is often overrated.
Very good people can have very real impediments to normalcy, like lacking some skill, or living in the wrong place with people who are on a different wavelength, so they don’t get the same social opportunities as others who may be much less talented or hardworking. They aren’t weird or inferior, just unlucky or unique. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on May 5, 2014
While they don’t have to deal with diapers, tantrums, or the mysterious stains of adolescence, childless adults have major child-related problems of their own, namely the longing for children or the longing for people to stop bugging them about not having kids. In either case, whether you’re fending off potential disappointment or unavoidable disapproval of any nature, make sure you believe in the value of your goal. Then prepare yourself to accept your lack of control of everything else and to respect yourself for going ahead anyway, with or without a baby on board.
–Dr. Lastname
All I’ve ever really wanted is to get married and have a family since my parents had a messy divorce and my dad left. Despite that, I feel like I’m constantly single and constantly being rejected. I’m getting older and feel like the only thing I really want in life I can’t have. I don’t feel like I have a purpose. How do I stop feeling sad about this and enjoy my life for what it is?
Your wish to raise a stable family of your own is the best way imaginable of trying to make the world a better place, particularly when you know the pains and burdens of growing up with nasty conflict, insecurity, and uncertainty about the future. You’re doing everything you can do, despite repeated rejection, to make your wish come true.
The problem of course, is that it’s just that—a wish. Which means you just don’t control whether or not it will actually happen. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 10, 2014
If you think of your life as a rollercoaster—and there are plenty of inspirational posters that would like it if you did—than the downhill plunges will feel uncomfortable, scary, and inducing of barf. Whether you’re looking back on your best days or your worst decision, it’s hard not to fear the transitions and wonder what you did wrong to fall so profoundly, even when you’re not at fault. If, however, you accept your current low as a painful fact of life that hasn’t changed your values or basic priorities, then you need never feel like a failure and instead can take pride in enduring whatever life throws at you and still working hard. Then life will be less like a scary rollercoaster, and more like a steady old road.
–Dr. Lastname
I wish I could stop thinking about how I’ve ruined my life. I used to be comfortably well off and never worried about the food bill, basic repairs, or even taking a vacation. Then I had to make a major financial decision about my capital and decided to put it all into an investment that was a total bust. There’s no point in explaining everything that went wrong, but, by the time I got out of it, I was broke, and now, every time I thing about it, the bills I haven’t paid, or the phone calls from creditors I have to constantly ignore, I want to throw myself out a window. It was the biggest, stupidest mistake of my life, and I shouldn’t have believed any of the advisers who said it was a good risk. My goal is to stop being haunted by the feeling that my life is, or should be, over.
If you judge your actions by how they happen to turn out, then every bad luck turd that comes your way is a personal failure, including: getting the flu (you were too stupid to get a shot!); getting laid off (too foolish to prepare for the recession); and getting hit by a meteor (too busy watching “Real Housewives” to buy a telescope).
In a fair world, where everything is safe and predictable, you’d be right, but in this world, you’re just being mean to yourself over something that probably couldn’t have been helped. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on December 19, 2013
People often feel that the success of their relationships depends on feelings of self-confidence—love yourself and find love, whatever that means—when really it’s the other way around. In fact, if you have very little self-confidence but choose your friends and partners wisely, your self-confidence will grow as your relationships endure. If you have lots of self-confidence and choose friends foolishly, you’ll wonder what they’re doing wrong and why life is getting harder. Regardless of how confident you feel, you can learn to think about life and your needs realistically, make good relationship choices, and build friendships and partnerships that last, all without sounding like a hippie.
–Dr. Lastname
I think I know why relationships don’t work out for me, but it doesn’t seem to stop me from messing them up in the same way every time. I think guys drop me because I don’t really value myself as much as I should, and they pick up on my lack of self-esteem. There are probably other reasons, too, because I knew my last boyfriend really wanted different things than I do—he was much more materialistic than I am, and I kind of knew it from the beginning—but he was very interested at first, and I feel it’s stupid not to give someone the benefit of the doubt and spend some time if they’re really interested in me and are attractive. Anyway, he turned out to be just the kind of guy I thought he was, so it was no surprise that our relationship got nowhere, but still, it hurt to break up with him and I wonder how I’ve ever going to get enough self-esteem to make things work.
The trouble with blaming bad choices on a lack of self-esteem is that it requires you to first gain confidence in order to make better choices—a tall order when you’re down on yourself for making bad choices, the latest of which is this “blaming your low self-esteem” thing.
Don’t pay attention then to your lack of confidence, and instead consider whether there’s a simpler way to improve your dating methodology. One obvious procedure you’ve omitted from your dating method is proper screening, which should exclude anyone who doesn’t seem like a good match, even if they’re interested and interesting to/in you.
Sure, to once-again paraphrase RuPaul, it is hard to love somebody else when you can’t love yourself, but it’s harder to love someone else when the only reason you’re with them is because they appear willing to be around you. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 17, 2013
Life is always unfair—kids get sick, dogs don’t live forever, the Real Housewives supply is infinite—but how you react to unfairness is what matters. Some people who are undeniable victims of hard luck never see themselves as helpless, whereas other people feel like victims because life does not always reward good moral choices with good luck. If your luck turns bad, you have a right to hurt, but never expect good luck to reward you for being a good guy. You’ll never feel like a victim if you accept bad luck as part of a shitty, unfair world, and take pride in doing what you think is right, regardless of all the illness, injustice, and Bravo starlets who are out there.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve been derailed for the last three years after thinking my life was moving along perfectly well. I’d worked for 15 years at a large company, starting out as a clerk, and somehow my warm personal style and hard work—it sure wasn’t my education, because I never did well in school and did just two years of college—kept getting me promoted until I was about to be regional director. I had three sons and a husband I thought I could count on. Then, suddenly, due to what almost everyone agreed was a minor, unintentional accounting error, I was fired because I technically broke company policy and a higher-up had decided to be a hard-ass. And my husband decided, just about the same time, that I was boring and he moved out. The kids are still great, but I feel stopped in my tracks and turned upside down, not just as if I’ve lost everything, but as if life has stopped playing by the rules. I’m doing a job search, but it’s hard to get into it or really take anything that seriously, other than the kids. My goal is to get back my faith in life, because I thought I was doing everything right, but then everything went totally wrong.
If Job, the guy in the Bible story who God screwed royally, basically to make the devil look stupid, was actually a bad guy, he might have had the satisfaction of knowing that his bad luck was for a good reason (besides winning a bet with Satan).
Unfortunately for everyone, he was a good person, just as I assume you are, so all the bad things that happened to him were for no reason and left him feeling he was living in a world where rules don’t count. That’s why his decision to keep on being a good guy was so remarkable and Bible-worthy.
Until several years ago, your life worked by the rules and reaped justifiable rewards, but then life did one of its horrible little twists and you were fucked for absolutely no reason, and from several directions at once. We want a world where the bad guy always gets what he deserves in the end, which reassures us that we’ll get good results if we work hard, act nice, and play by the rules. You’re living proof that life is unfair, which is a hard burden to shoulder. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on May 20, 2013
It’s appropriate that singer Mary J. Blige had a hit singing, “I just wanna be happy” since her best songs were about being miserable. Everybody thinks they want happiness, but like wealth, fame, and everything else on Blige’s own episode of Behind the Music, happiness is too erratic and temporary to set your hopes on, and concerning oneself too much with it is a good way to get a headache and feel like a loser. Instead, think hard about the values that give you direction, whether you’re happy or not. If they’re good values, they’ll always take you in the right direction and will give you strength, regardless of whether you have another hit.
–Dr. Lastname
I fell in love with the wonderful work I was doing in South Africa, but in the two years since I returned to the States, I still struggle with connecting and finding friendships or a relationship with meaning. In South Africa, I worked with an organization that rehabilitated inner-city gang kids to get them back in the public school system. The experience was life changing. I fell in love with the children I worked with, the mentality of the locals, the culture, and the relationships I built with like-minded volunteers. Unfortunately, since I’ve been back, my connections with my friends were no longer the same because they could not relate to the life and experiences I lived abroad. I’m in my mid-20s, and my life is good in many ways, but most of my friends are getting married, having children, or going to graduate school now, and I am at a stand still…stuck in time with memories I wish I was still living. I want to be able to relate and understand the people in my life. I want to feel fulfilled and in love with my surrounding and the life I’m living again.
The trouble with wonderful, life-transforming jobs is that they don’t actually transform your life, just your expectations. The stars align for a brief period of self-discovery and fulfillment, but then the earth keeps rotating, and the stars shift away again.
Even though good times like that inherently can’t last, they still leave you feeling that, if you were able to find it once, you should be able to find it again. Unfortunately, good luck, like bad luck and the earth on its axis, moves on, whether you like it or not, sometimes leaving you not just with a sense of loss, but also of having missed the boat. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 15, 2013
Like a pain threshold, need to buy a Hank Williams record, and Jesus, a true appreciation of what’s important only seems to become clear when our lives seem most meaningless or most precious. When everything seems to be going wrong for yourself, or a loved one is going through his or her last days, you can feel like a helpless, frustrated loser, at least at first. Once you realize, however, that you’re just a human being who doesn’t have much control over the really bad things in life, you can stop feeling like a loser and start gaining perspective about what’s really important, like doing good and being good, with or without country music.
–Dr. Lastname
I am 40 years old and have gone from a size 4 to a size 14 in very little time. Basically, I love food and drink, but I also take spin classes three times a week. I feel like no one will ever love me for who I am “on the inside” now that I’ve gotten this big, especially because I didn’t have a boyfriend until I got skinny in college. I had been seeing a therapist for four years, but my limited funds have gotten in the way. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think that to be loved meant to be thin. I want to convince myself that, like so many before me, being big doesn’t mean being unlovable, and to be ok with my weight, because I am beautiful with it (right?). How do I put my self-confidence out there again? I have a bunch of Percocets from a recent surgery, and while body image is not the only thing I struggle with, I think about those pills all the time. To date, they have been my medal of honor. They are here, and I am strong enough to leave them there, so far. Help.
It’s hard not to be lonely, dateless, and getting nowhere with diet and exercise, without feeling bad about your life. You feel ugly inside and out, in an ugly, unfair world, often from the vantage point of on an ugly, un-fun fake bike.
You want to empower yourself and you’re willing to work hard, but when nothing’s going your way, the confidence often just doesn’t come and the weight won’t go away. That doesn’t mean, however, that you’re a failure, or even that the world is quite as ugly as it seems.
It means you’re not lucky, at least not yet, even though you’re doing lots of good things to make your life better. You’re doing right by yourself, but as much as we all like to get inspired by stories of self-empowerment, the truth is, it has its limits. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 4, 2013
There are plenty of things that money can’t buy, but when you don’t have any money, you’d gladly sell any number of those things for some food, rent, or pride. Whether economic desperation destroys a once-solid relationship or forces you to kiss up to someone you once told to kiss off, it’s hard not to feel like a loser when you have no money left to lose. Working hard when you feel like a loser, however, is a much tougher feat than working hard when life is fair and the rewards flow in. If you refuse to hold yourself responsible for hard times and give yourself proper credit for what you do with them, you can survive periods of apparent dependence and humiliation without losing faith in yourself or the truly priceless values you stand for.
-Dr. Lastname
I know my husband wants a divorce because I’ve worn him out with my up-and-down moods, emotional crises and being unemployed and dependent on him for the past three years. It’s lots more than he bargained for, particularly since we never wanted kids and married five years ago for companionship, when we were both making good money and never thought one of us would have to support the other until we were both retired and had good pension plans. Now I can’t afford to let this marriage end, not just because I still love him, but because I’m broke and have nowhere else to go. I haven’t given up on trying to find work—I’ve kept up a steady search, and I’m not too picky—but it’s been very discouraging and my chance of getting anything like the salary I got before I got sick is very slim. So I’m scared shitless he’ll get a lawyer, force me out, and lock the door behind me. My goal is to figure out how to postpone that day until I’m back on my feet.
When uncontrollable events make a nice, companionable partnership increasingly burdensome and loveless for one or both partners, said partners can very quickly turn into archenemies. When two people can no longer turn to each other, turning on each other becomes their next option.
During what amounts to a marital Armageddon, finger-pointing abounds, and you could easily see your husband as a fair-weather promise-breaker, he could see you as a needy leach who promised a lot more than you delivered, and mutual accusations could bring out nasty behavior and more destruction.
Your first goal is to keep a lid on the potential ugliness, but even shutting up can be dangerous. Acting as if you don’t give a damn, or feel like the injured party, or both, can stir up trouble without a word’s being spoken. You need to define and own a positive goal in order to manage an extremely negative situation and keep everything from falling apart. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on January 28, 2013
Everyone will tell you that there are valuable lessons to learn from bad experiences, but unfortunately, there are some valueless lessons as well if you misinterpret your misfortune. For example, some people read too much into their painful experiences and become afraid to take new risks, while others learn almost nothing and have to retake the lesson/get screwed again and again. The answer is not to sample your crises like Goldilocks—trying to find a response that is not too much, not too little, but just right—but instead, to ground yourself in values that help you determine what risks are worth taking, what feelings are worth keeping to yourself, and what’s truly worth learning for the future.
–Dr. Lastname
The end of last year I was able to stop taking my anti-depressants after about 4 years. I feel good, my drinking is in control (though I do sometimes feel the old instinct that, when I’m stressed, a drink will help, though after one sip I know it won’t). I’m free of my fear of going outside my apartment or with groups of people. I did see a therapist, which helped me so much, though we never found out what triggered my depression, so I have a deep worry that it might come back. I know there is no point worrying about something that might never happen (I fully believe that its just a waste of time), but I doubt my relationship will survive another ride on the depression roller-coaster as it was nearly destroyed the first time. Also, my partner is concerned as I hope to have kids at some point and my partner has read that postpartum depression is worse if you have suffered depression before. The thought of being ill again terrifies me and I want to avoid that black hole anyway I can. Should I try to work out why I got depressed before? Is postpartum depression something I should be concerned about what the time comes? If I can somehow prepare myself then I’m hoping that if/when depression comes knocking again I might be able to put up a better fight.
After experiencing and surviving the pain and repercussions of a bad bout of depression, it’s normal to fear recurrence, but that fear is often worse than the thing itself; that’s certainly true with depression, as well as heights, spiders, and gays.
In fact, a PTSD-like syndrome of anxiety is common among people who’ve survived such painful and intense symptoms, so it’s important that you pay as much attention to managing the fear of depression as to treating the depression itself.
It’s understandable that you want to figure out a way to prevent recurrence, but reassuring yourself that everything is going to be alright is as misguided as parents’ insisting their kids they can grow up to be whatever they want; whether you’re hoping to rid yourself of depression or reach the major leagues despite being a one-armed girl, the odds aren’t good, so don’t make the mistake of reassuring/promising yourself that it won’t happen again.
In reality, as with all problems, real consolation comes not from putting the trauma out of mind completely, but from knowing that, whatever happens, you survived the first time and acquired a lot of weapons you’ll use to fight depression if and when it comes again.
Of course, fear will tell you that you and your relationship barely made it, but the fact is, you did make it, which is a great accomplishment. Now you’ve found treatments that work and, most importantly, you know that depression is just a bunch of symptoms, it’s not who you are; it wasn’t personal and you weren’t lazy, just unlucky and sick. Don’t get so freaked, then, by the harm a postpartum depression might do to your kids and/or marriage that you forget that child-rearing and maintaining relationships is always risky, and that you have developed good tools for managing that risk.
Yes, you have a chance of having a post-partum depression, but instead of terrifying yourself with thoughts of that possibility, investigate what you can do to decrease the risk. For one thing, you’ll find you can take antidepressants, even while pregnant; their risk of harming a fetus is low and outweighed by their ability to protect you (and the fetus) from its crushing symptoms.
And don’t fall prey to the notion that because medication has risks, it’s automatically unsafe to take, or that you’re weak or dependent to do so. It means you have an obligation, as with any danger, to weigh benefit against risk by sizing up the chance that your symptoms will come back and deciding whether treatment is worth it. So ask your doctors (and do your own research) to inform yourself about the odds of relapse. If they’re high, find out what the risks and benefits are of taking antidepressants as a preventive vitamin.
Instead of letting depression persuade you that you’ll ruin your family by making your partner and children miserable, treat it like any other disabling illness that tests most families, sooner or later, and teaches them how to survive hard times. Get your arsenal ready for fighting the negative thinking that depression both causes and is caused by.
Don’t let your experience make you a depression-phobic; remember how well you handled that depression, take a cue from the gays, and counter that fear with pride. We’d gladly see that parade.
STATEMENT:
“I can’t think about depression without feeling overwhelmed by fear. I know, however, that fear distorts my thoughts and that my experience with depression has made me much more knowledgeable and better equipped to manage it. I will prepare myself and take any reasonable risk that will allow me to stay as healthy and functional as possible, regardless of whether it recurs.”
I don’t see how I can go back to working in my family’s car business because my brother is such a dickhead. I’m broke and I need the work, and my father doesn’t mind if I work there, but my brother and I have never gotten along, and the last time we worked together he was so insulting, day after day, that I finally picked up a tire iron and we would have killed one another if they didn’t pull us apart. I promised to bury the hatchet and keep my mouth shut—as I said, I need the money—but I was back at the shop for barely four hours when he started up again and I had no choice but to punch him in the face. My goal is to teach my brother to leave me alone, so I can work at the family business when there’s no other work around.
Most of us have an instinct to push back when we’re pushed, particularly if the pusher is aggressive and insulting (and a blood relation). No words are necessary and we don’t have to be in a bad mood—all it takes to get triggered is getting cut off in traffic or a dirty look from a spouse. Maybe this instinct helps us protect ourselves from predators by showing them we’re too much trouble to dominate, but more often than not it just makes assholes, inmates, and/or corpses out of everyone.
Unlike the woman above, whose depression has taught her fear and pessimism, you don’t seem to have learned anything from your many fights. Like her, however, your response is based on feeling, not reason, so it’s both about learning from experience, as well as restraining your emotions.
Your brain is obviously wired to fight back, so if someone pushes, you feel obliged to return the favor, even if you aren’t necessarily looking for a fight in the first place. Trouble is, once that instinct gets hold of you, it gives you no choice but to fight, and the results in the real world usually suck for everyone who isn’t a Hollywood hero. Tough guys get arrested, sued, betrayed, beat up by other tough guys, and, like the rest of us, old and too weak to throw much of a punch.
So instead of just following your instinct towards fury, ask yourself whether you want to satisfy that instinct or control it. Sure, satisfying it feels better in the short run but, you guessed it, always ends badly. Controlling it is hard, takes lots of practice, and it’s what the authorities want you to do, which may make it harder for you to decide whether it’s what you want to do for yourself. Until you control that fighting instinct, however, there’s nothing anyone can say that will protect you from endless fights with your brother and others.
Wanting to control it is no guarantee that you can, and neither is therapy. If you decide to control it, you will probably need to work at building your control day by day, one day at a time, like AA, getting religion, or a gym membership. You can call it anger management, but you’d be better off calling it humiliation tolerance and/or finding goals that are more important than insult and injury (like making a living or being a good guy) and reminding yourself about them, hour by hour. The only thing you have to fight is the urge to fight, and the tire iron won’t do you any good.
STATEMENT:
“I can’t stand to feel pushed around and I take pride in being the guy who never starts fights but who knows how to finish them. I know, however, that fighting always ends badly in an unfair world and I have goals that are more important than what anyone says or does to me, particularly if they’re assholes. I am proud of myself for pursuing those goals regardless of how assholes make me feel.”
