Posted by fxckfeelings on February 18, 2010
If about half of all marriages end in divorce, then, say, a tenth of marriages end in nothing short of open warfare. In a marital battle, some people fight by keeping the verbal (and legal) bombs flying, others hide face down in a fox hole, but both of those tactics only serve to make the war intensify. A better battle plan is to give up on any control of your opponent’s forces (or feelings) and, without too many words or too little action/open fire or fatalities, figure out what you think is right and calmly begin peace talks on those terms.
–Dr. Lastname
My husband always saw himself as the righteous protector of our daughter and, after our divorce, he got into the habit of dragging me into court to force me to pay for some super-costly treatment or schooling that was always no more than a little bit better than what was available for free, but he’d look like a hero to our daughter and the court and the social worker, and I’d look like a miserly shit, and I’d complain bitterly, which just got everyone more on his side, and I was screwed. My daughter bought the bullshit, which meant she and her father shared a tight bond based on hating me, the Scrooge. But I thought the court assaults would stop when she turned 18, until yesterday, when I learned he’s suing me, once again, this time to pay for our daughter’s college tuition, even though she never asked me, she’s over 18, and, with her history of alcohol abuse (and no attempt to get sober), paying for her to go to college without going to rehab first is a waste of money. I think they’re both just scraping the barrel for reasons to drag me into court and I’m getting flashbacks about being raped by the judge. I don’t have any illusion about all of us getting along, but I think it’s fair to want this craziness to stop.
Like it or not, it’s your ex’s legal right to haul you into court at his whim, force you to hire a lawyer, and make you look like a creep. As a reward, you get to give him a good chunk of your savings to pay for something you don’t believe in, to someone who’s out to ruin your life.
Say what you will about justice, but most of the time, it isn’t very fair.
There’s no way you can avoid feeling helpless and outraged, and there’s no shower long or hot enough to make the violated feeling walk away. If, however, your goal is to stop this from happening again by repeatedly venting your outrage, you’ll actually make it worse. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 11, 2010
Parents instinctually want to protect their children from distress, but that doesn’t mean that help will do any good; some kids run to their parents in a panic at every loud noise, some kids are too thick to even know they’re in trouble. Either way, it’s the parents who have to be more practical than sentimental before they jump in. If only more people did that before they decided to have kids in the first place, I’d have a lot less business.
–Dr. Lastname
My daughter drove me and my husband crazy the other day. She’s a great kid who does very well in school, but at the beginning of every term she calls us up in great distress to tell us she can’t figure out what courses to take because the ones she really wants to take aren’t available and it’s impossible to make a decision about the others. So she did it again, and, as always, when we asked about the courses and made recommendations, she told us we were doing nothing but making her more confused and then broke off the conversation. I talked to my wife and she agrees we were careful to listen and we weren’t overbearing. P.S., the next day my daughter made up her mind and found a perfectly good group of courses to take, as usual. How can we help her get less distraught and see that we’re just trying to help?
Nobody wants their child to be in pain or agony, but it’s important to ask yourself whether it’s important if your daughter is…distraught.
Yes, her panic hurts her and it hurts you, but life is pain, pain is often unavoidable, and it’s not getting in her way, so why make it more important than it has to be?
It’s hard not to come running when a kid is crying, but this is a situation that’s familiar, always turns out well, and can’t be helped with a band-aid and a kiss on the boo-boo.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 4, 2010
If someone’s related to you, there’s no guarantee they’re going to be honest with you, or even honest about you to anyone else. You can try to get them to own up to their problems with anger, eloquence, and/or the help of the court system, but the smarter choice is to stop pushing them towards the truth and hold onto the facts yourself. As long as you’re calm and factual, people can draw whatever conclusions they want and your relatives can stick to their version, but your part in the family affair is settled.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m fine now (I’m 14), but I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a crazy father who physically abused me until a couple of years ago—that’s when my mother finally figured out what was happening and had me come live with her. The trouble is, I guess you could say my father doesn’t see reality the way other people do and he never remembers hitting me. In his mind, when he’d hit me, it was because I was trying to destroy him, so what he tells the judge is that he loves me and that my mother is a raging alcoholic who has brainwashed me to hate him (my mother stopped drinking after the divorce, years ago) and he really believes what he says. My goal is to get him to stay away from me and convince others that his version of reality isn’t real.
Kids aren’t the only ones who have trouble accepting the fact that we often can’t protect ourselves from scary crazy boogeymen, particularly when the craziness isn’t obvious, and the boogeymen are family.
We’ve said it here before: certain crazy people are not obviously crazy and are particularly good at persuading other people to see them as injured victims because they truly, truly believe they are, no matter what really happened. It’s a kind of sickness for which no one has the cure, and nobody feels sicker than the victims in the wake of these sickos, who don’t necessarily feel sick at all.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on December 21, 2009
Even if none of us has spent Christmas with our entire families, most of us feel like we should help make it happen and feel terribly guilty if we can’t (I just feel guilty for taking their money, but only a little). We have some illusion that the holidays are the time for our criminal or alcoholic or crazy relatives to put their behavior aside, slap on a Christmas sweater, and join their loved ones around the tree and we feel bad if we can’t make the reunion happen, or even let it happen. But fear not, there’s a way to make excuses tactful and blameless without bringing down everyone’s holiday cheer. Gaw bless us, every drunk and lawless one.
–Dr. Lastname
Please note: There will be no new post on Thursday, 12/24, due to the holiday. Please continue to write in, however, because there will be a new post on 12/28. Thanks, and happy holidays!
My ex-wife was always a wild outlaw in high school, (I got the kids), she’d show up from time to time, but rarely when she said she would, and you never knew when she’d be high, so the court imposed supervised visitation. I want my kids to have a mom though, but when she no-shows, the kids are crushed. Of course, the kids want to see her, particularly for Christmas, but what they don’t know is that she and her current boyfriend were caught on video robbing a liquor store, so if she’s going anywhere, it’s probably straight to jail. . My goal is to figure out a way to break this to my kids so that they don’t hate their mother (even though I sort of think they should).
You can’t protect your kids from the hurt of loving an outlaw mother, any more than you could protect yourself for falling for her years ago. Telling your kids that she’s a bad person inflicts a worse kind of hurt, because it devalues the love you and the kids have given her (which, as you know, you can’t get back).
Even if you can’t protect them from hurt, you still can and should protect the value of their love for her and whatever is meaningful about hers for them.
To begin with, don’t buy the idea that outlaws are regular people who make bad choices. That’s one of those stupid, false-hope ideas that assumes that everyone has the choice to be good or bad and can redeem themselves by making better choices. It’s sort of a hybrid of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Santa’s “Naughty/Nice” list…and it’s bullshit.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 29, 2009
When people feel most powerless, they instinctively attempt to exert as much control as they can; even—especially—when they have less control than ever. In those situations, they go to the one thing over which they feel they’ll always have control, which is their own life, or the lives of those closest to them, but the more they discuss whether or not to continue life, the more they make that life difficult. Ultimately, it’s best not to ask “should I live,” but to admit—you guessed it—”I am fucked.”
–Dr. Lastname
I can’t seem to make a decision about the life/death issue. I want to want to live, or have the balls to call it quits. Shit or get off the pot. It takes too much damn energy vacillating.
“To be or not to be”—that’s still the question, right? Well, it’s also a question I never like to answer or hear.
Shakespeare or no, it’s a bad question to ask, because most people who ask it don’t really want an answer; they want an antidote to their hurt or someone to blame for not providing it.
It’s similar to the way Boston taxi drivers ask the passenger whether to take the Pike or Storrow to Logan airport — to have someone else to blame when, either way, they inevitably run into heavy traffic.
I know, the question expresses your deepest feelings. It also wears out friends, drives them away/proves that no one can help, and confirms your right to be very, very unhappy. The whole cycle sucks and it’s unhealthy. Keep asking it, and somebody will go ahead and hurt you more.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 8, 2009
It’s easy, when someone can’t control their behavior, to assume that they are evil, stubborn, or somehow defective and that you’ve got to get through to them, one way or another (not so nice) way. Just because someone can’t behave, however, doesn’t mean s/he’s evil and/or totally resistant to your values; and just because you’re getting nowhere with them doesn’t mean they won’t get it together eventually. It’s easy to write someone off, and it’s easy to be written off, but if you’re hoping to work through a problem instead of just blame someone for it, the only thing incurably defective in these scenarios is the moralizing.
–Dr. Lastname
My older daughter just turned 10, and I’m fairly certain that she is pure evil. My wife and I are not bad people—no family history of mental illness, either—but our older daughter, who looks like a normal little girl, says such nasty things to her little sister that it would make your head spin. Our younger daughter, who’s 7, thinks her sister is a miserable terror, and I have to say, I agree with her; the stuff that comes out of our 10-year-old’s mouth is so cruel, I’m almost in awe of it. My wife and I have sat her down and asked her if she acknowledges how awful her words are, how much it hurts her little sister, and how serious we are about how much she needs to change her attitude. Since then, our older has been less mouthy with us, but just as terrible to her little sister, and we have no idea how to make it stop. My goal is to stop my older daughter from being so mean—that is, if she’s not just satanic and hopeless. I’d really like to get her to understand what she’s doing and why she needs to stop (if I can get that through her evil mind).
As those Spanish Inquisition cardinals learned while swishing around in their gorgeous red gowns, any effort to stamp out the devil gives him a giant energy boost and brings him (or her) to dramatic life.
This is because most of us—even the best of us, like David Letterman—have some devilish impulses that bust out when we’re tired, or rubbed the wrong way, and generally when our control is far from perfect.
So when someone tries to eradicate our wickedness, we may initially agree with their goals. Sooner or later, however, when our impulses don’t cooperate by disappearing, self-hate and shame get stronger and, yes, you guessed it, feed the nasty impulses, whatever they are. The cardinals get to meet the very devil they were trying to exorcise, and the devil’s poor host snarls back and throws up pea soup. A classic vicious circle.
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