Posted by fxckfeelings on May 26, 2011
People like to call one another on bad behavior, and, thanks to the likes of Oprah, think that such acts of “openness” are a good idea. What they’re forgetting is that most badly behaved adults want to behave that way, have their own reasons for thinking it’s OK, and are ready to behave even worse if confronted, threatened, or attacked. If you want to continue and/or improve your relationship with a badly behaved person, don’t give him/her an earful s/he doesn’t want to hear. Offer a proposal for a better way of behaving, your plan for making it worthwhile, and your intentions in case it’s declined. You can’t whip anyone into shape, but you may persuade someone to develop better manners, for their own reasons, on their own terms, in a now Oprah-free universe.
–Dr. Lastname
My crazy ex-wife’s bitterness and sabotage blocked me from seeing our son, but when he got to college and out of her grasp, I hoped that 20 years of patience was paying off and I could finally begin to revive a long interrupted relationship. I’ve tried to show how much I love him and want to help him, and I’ve looked for opportunities to give him gifts and take him on vacations. The trouble is, I’m beginning to feel that all he wants me for is money and that, otherwise, he either doesn’t care or is angry and suspicious. He asks for things, says thanks, and then disappears until he needs something else. If I ask him why he hasn’t been answering my calls, he gets huffy. My goal is to let him know that I won’t put up with that crap and try to make the relationship work the way it should.
The main barrier to a good relationship between you and your son isn’t your ex and all the lost years, but the fact that, according to your son, it’s your problem to fix, not his.
After all, whether you like/deserve it or not, you have a needy and untrustworthy rep, and at this point, you don’t know if it’s because he’s brainwashed, oblivious, or a jerk.
Time will tell, and the best way to make the best of what’s there, be it a good kid with bad ideas or a bad kid with bad ideas, is to keep your expectations low, your feelings to yourself, and your needs in check.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 23, 2011
Ambition is a blessing and a curse; a curse for most of those people who possess it, but a huge blessing for my business, which flourishes off the self-hate of said overly-ambitious people who believe they could have been contenders (if it wasn’t for themselves). Actually, the usual reason you can’t have your dream is that your equipment isn’t what it should be, and the best way to restore your faith in yourself is to accept the fact that your brain, while not a blessing, isn’t exactly a curse, either, and requires a set of expectations all its own.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m going back to school in the fall (for my master’s), and am really worried about the problem that plagued me in undergrad—academic OCD (which combines with general OCD, natch). Specifically, I over-cite EVERYTHING in my papers, because I have this terror of plagiarizing—to the point where my papers are hard to read, and the citing is ridiculous. I haven’t been out of undergrad very long, and I know I need to go back to school to achieve my career goals, but I’m DREADING the papers—any thoughts on how to prepare myself to deal with this very specific anxiety?
If you want an easy way to manage your over-citation compulsion (OCC), here it is; stop making too many citations! Stop it! Bad! Hope it works, and we don’t accept personal checks.
As always, the problem with looking for easy answers to your problem is that you’ll assume that all you need to do to get better is give yourself a kick in the pants or share your feelings with a therapist. It’s not true, and thinking like that will make you feel like a failure (and, if you’re lucky/buy answers like the one above, an idiot).
Long story short, your problem is here to stay (citation: this site, on a weekly basis) and, as long as you’ve got to write papers, managing it is going to be painful.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 12, 2011
Speaking without thinking first is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates– stupid (plus, you never know what you’re going to get). When emotion wins out over thought, people either feel compelled to tell the truth and other times they feel compelled to lie, and it doesn’t usually help to figure out why since the speaking didn’t give it much consideration in the first place. In order to avoid saying something true or untrue that you’ll regret, it’s important is to give yourself the time to figure out what you believe is best to say, according to your own ideas of right and wrong, and what will probably happen next. You’re only obligated to tell the truth if you’re under oath; otherwise, your obligation is to yourself, your values, and your need to change the subject.
–Dr. Lastname
As a middle manager, I’ve always been interested in ideas about good management, so when the new senior managers at my company asked for suggestions, I gave them an honest response and suggested they cultivate a culture that encourages less overwork and more creativity. It was no secret that I thought they were pushing people too hard and burning them out, which was not the way things used to be at the company. Well, things have been frosty since, so I want to know how to tell the truth without getting into trouble.
I assume you’re not working at a truth-factory. Hence, it’s not your job to tell the truth.
Instead, your job, like anyone’s job, is to do a good day’s work and make a living. Unfortunately, telling the truth is not compatible with that goal.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 9, 2011
Parents get a lot of blame when something goes wrong in their kids’ lives, and a fair share of it is heaped on by those in my industry. The lion’s share, however, comes from parents themselves, and that feeling of responsibility, no matter who assigns it, is great at making things worse. The truth is that parents have little control over their kids’ weaknesses or the fact that life is sometimes hard and painful beyond their powers of protection. Accept this sad truth, and you’ll become a much more effective parent and much less blaming of your spouse and your kid, whether Freud’s disciples admit it or not.
–Dr. Lastname
I still can’t understand why my 15-year-old daughter would purposely overdose. I understand she’s always been an emotional kid and that she hasn’t been happy lately, but my husband and I love her. We’ve always told her we want to hear about any problem she wants to share with us, and she knows it would kill us to lose her. Still, she seems to have no remorse for what her suicide might have done to herself or the rest of the family. My goal is to understand how she could do it and teach her a sense of responsibility so it won’t happen again.
In many ways, a suicide attempt is like a natural disaster; you shouldn’t bother asking why it happened, or what if you had done things differently. Whether you blame global warming or God’s wrath, it won’t change the fact that it happened or that there is at least some chance that it will happen again.
The moment you think you understand the reason, you’ll think you know what she did wrong, or, at least, what she should have done better, and that will just make her feel more like a loser, and more like doing it again. Or you’ll think you know what you or your husband did wrong, which will make you feel like losers and blame one another, and make her feel like doing it again.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 2, 2011
As feelings go, love isn’t so problematic—you feel good, you act nicer to others, and if all goes well, it is truly “all you need.” Unfortunately, if you’re not careful, love can easily triggers negative thoughts and actions that lead to a whole heap of trouble and turn love from something fuzzy into “a battlefield.” If you can remember who you are and what you believe in, however, you can take risks on love without losing your sanity, and find something more compatible with reality than pop songs.
–Dr. Lastname
You’ve probably had a disgusting amount of questions like the ones I’m about to put towards you, and that’s another thing that annoys me—I’m a cliché. 17 months ago my boyfriend broke up with me, explaining that he was too young to be in a serious relationship. I know this is perfectly logical but I have never been able to get over it, even though I do understand his point of view. I am still very much in love with him. I know perfectly well that realistically no one really marries their first love, that realistically it wasn’t even a proper adult relationship but I feel as raw today as I did the day it happened. I’ve been diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. I have regular nightmares about him. Last Easter I attempted suicide yet it failed. I’ve been sent to counseling, but I didn’t like it. I dropped out of university as I was too distracted and there is nothing I can throw myself into to make me forget it. The idea of him with someone else would kill me. I keep thinking to myself, I’m only 21 and I shouldn’t take this so personally and seriously but I do and I have no idea why. I know I need to wise up but I can’t.
Some say love’s like a drug, but we think it’s more like a (sometimes) innocuous mental illness; it doesn’t make you “crazy”—at least not necessarily—but it does give you weird thoughts, sometimes long after the relationship is over.
While those thoughts are hard to stop and easy to believe in, at least they’re not true. Like anxiety and depression, love has a weird way of keeping itself alive by changing the way you think and act, until it changes your beliefs. That’s when you’re in trouble.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on April 25, 2011
There’s plenty of evidence out there, from newspaper headlines to vicious drivers, that life is unfair. The clearest proof, at least as we see it at fxckfeelings.com, is that we never cease to get cases about unfairness and the need for justice it inspires. Accepting that life is unfair doesn’t mean giving up, just giving up on the futile goal of stamping out evil altogether. Learn to tolerate unfairness and manage the anger and pain it inspires. After all, given all the ways life can suck, we’re sure you have tons of other personal problems you can write in about.
–Dr. Lastname
I was a wild girl as a teenager and took drugs and cheated on my boyfriends, but one of them stuck by me and now I’ve got a good marriage and 2 nice kids. Life has been pretty good to me, but lately, I don’t know whether it’s getting older or having some acquaintances die, but I feel preoccupied with death and a feeling of not being a very good person. I mean, focusing on those things makes me feel ungrateful, because I’ve been so lucky, but then I feel guilty that I’ve had so much while people I came up with didn’t get the same things I did. I wish I wasn’t so worried about death and thinking about what a jerk I was and how I didn’t get what I deserved.
What we all deserve is a good childhood and a decent set of genes. What most of us actually get doesn’t come close.
Instead, most people end up with a random mishmash that easily includes an extra dose of wildness and parents who are too wild themselves to help us manage our own impulses (the apple, and the genes, don’t fall far from the tree). In a world that’s this unfair, nobody can claim to deserve anything.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on March 31, 2011
On a good day, the average person makes about 10 mistakes. Slight screw-ups are annoying, but not exactly indicative of one’s character. Major screw-ups, on the other hand, deserve some consideration; they’re the kind where you don’t mess up by doing something incorrectly, but by correctly doing something that’s wrong. When it comes to evaluating todays mistakes, it’s important to distinguish between not double checking your work and not double checking your values.
–Dr. Lastname
An email I intended to send to one person, I mistakenly sent to another. As a result, I have managed to obliterate, in one push of a button, what feels like my entire world. Yea, I know this sounds overly dramatic, but honestly, even after attempting to make things right with the people involved, things will never be right. I can’t figure out how to get over, under or through the degree of self hatred I now have for being such a complete f*ckup. I’m human, mistakes happen blah blah blah, but that’s no comfort to me since the people involved aren’t interested in any sort of apology. How do I ever forgive myself??
There’s a big difference between self-forgiveness as a feeling, and self-forgiveness as a moral judgment. After all, there’s a big difference between doing wrong and doing dumb.
Having committed a stupid but not malicious act that’s fractured relationships forever, you don’t have any reason to ask forgiveness of yourself, because you’ve committed no crime. Shazzam, you’re absolved. Dr. Lastname absolves thee! Tada!
If you don’t feel better, I’m not surprised, because your self-accusation isn’t moral, it’s chagrin over bad luck and rejection by someone you care about. Sadly, that’s proclamation proof.
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