Posted by fxckfeelings on March 3, 2011
Pride comes before the fall, and the fall is sometimes into a prolonged depression, which, to mix metaphors, can lead to a lengthy winter of discontent. No matter how much you deserve to be confident in a job well done at work, there are uncontrollable things that can put the brakes on your momentum or just stop you from doing excelling work. One of the major sources of stalling is the aforementioned depression. That’s when you either find a more solid source of pride or start seeing yourself as a failure, and you know what we advocate. Real excellence is accepting your best work when it’s not excellent, and real pride comes with healthy expectations and is fall-free.
–Dr. Lastname
After 5 years of facing up to issues with PTSD after a sexual assault, depression, anxiety and feeling generally emotionally disconnected, I felt that I made progress. As a creative person, I was stuck in a job surrounded by other artists but not creating anything myself. I left my job last autumn and set myself up as a freelance artist and have been working hard at being pro-active. I have been ignoring the signs of depression since last November, maybe earlier. I am doing the bare minimum just to support myself but over the past month or so I have been sinking down further and further. I feel like a failure to be back at this place again. In the past I have taken anti-depressants but they cut all creative flow off and I just can’t do that again, it’s the only thing holding me together at the moment. I cried last night for the first time in 9 years at the sheer frustration of not moving forwards and not being the artist I want to be. I’ve kind of given up on the idea of having the things normal people do like family (have no contact with my own), so I do tend to define myself by my art. My goal is to be brave enough and good enough to create the work that I feel is inside me without sabotaging or running away.
One of the dangers of being an artist is that you may gain too much confidence in your control over creativity. Sometimes, you feel the muse. Most of the time, you feel the misery.
When you feel inspired, you define yourself by your art, despite the lack of control you have over it. Creative types are in the unique position where talent and productivity don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. When the former outweighs the latter, problems ensue.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 14, 2011
All kids mess up—they take after parents, after all. Even more than their parents, they’re vulnerable to acting impulsively due to a cranial cocktail of stupidity, hormones and youth. They’re half-baked brains often interfere with any and all important activities, from behaving decently to getting homework done. There’s no good reason to hold them responsible for most of what goes wrong, then, but every reason to hold them and ourselves responsible for trying any reasonable remedial tactic and treatment. You can’t stop the apple from falling where it will, but you may be able to pick it up before the worms get it.
–Dr. Lastname
My 15-year-old daughter was stealing, using drugs, and staying out all night until I had her arrested and brought to court in shackles, where the judge put her under the supervision of a probation officer. At that point, which was a week ago, she started to behave herself and act like the nice kid she can sometimes be, until today, when I noticed money missing from my wallet and found a bong in her room. I hate putting her through another “scared straight” court confrontation, but she has choices, and she has to learn that there are consequences. My goal is to make sure she makes the right ones.
I’ve heard that nutty “kids have choice” concept applied to fatties, druggies, and sex perverts, as well as kids. I’ve also seen it proven false. Every time.
Everyone wants choices, but when impulses take over, they can get you to do things before the concept of choice has even entered your head. That’s why, at this point, the choice is yours, not hers; whether or not to slow her down with some tough training.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 7, 2011
When in the midst of one of life’s many shit storms, it’s easy to forget that feeling helpless and feeling that things are out of your control aren’t the same thing. It’s probably true that you don’t have much control over what troubles you, but that doesn’t mean you’re totally powerless and doomed to total annihilation. Helplessness, after all, is just a feeling, and a dangerous one if it makes you give up, lose faith, or act like a jerk. So if you can take a step back and look at what you actually can do, even if it’s very little, those shitty storm clouds will begin to clear.
–Dr. Lastname
I can’t stand myself since I lost my job—I know I hated my boss and I was looking forward to retiring in a year, but I liked the clients and was good at what I did—but getting fired was humiliating and unfair and now I don’t feel like doing anything or going out. I can’t make myself feel better and my medications aren’t working and my friends can’t cheer me up. My goal is to feel like my old self and do the kind of work I can now afford to do, since I don’t really need the money.
The job you lost is one you hated, you have enough money to live on, and you now have the freedom to do whatever you want…this is probably what you’ve already heard from your friends a million times.
What they don’t know is that thinking that way just makes you feel worse.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 3, 2011
Just as it’s sometimes better to be feared than loved, it’s sometimes better to be afraid than completely at ease. Yes, anxiety may push up your blood pressure, pound your pulse and punish your insides to the point where it feels like pure punishment. On the other hand, anxiety will also help you run faster, be more aware, and work harder. All these survival skills go back to the cavemen, who couldn’t kick back and feel too good, lest they end up getting snatched up and tasting good to a predator. Even now that we’ve moved from caves to condos, everybody needs a healthy dose of stress to stay alive.
–Dr. Lastname
I never used to be particularly anxious, but that’s because I could count on my wife to run the family, manage the finances, and take care of the kids while I focused on work. Then a month ago, after she announced she was having an affair and wasn’t sure that she wanted to stay together, I started to have anxiety attacks and a feeling of dread. It changed my entire outlook on my life, past, present, and future. My anxiety got worse when I started to look at our finances and discovered we’ve got loads of debt she never told me about. Now she tells me that the affair is over and she wants to make the marriage work, but the anxiety isn’t going away—this whole incident has opened up a Pandora’s box of worry that goes way beyond her cheating. My goal is to get back to the way I felt before and not wake up to this terrible feeling every morning.
If you believe every pharmaceutical ad you see on TV, you might think that anxiety is as deadly as cancer and machine guns combined.
There’s a great disconnect, however, between random anxiety attacks and the very real possibility that you might lose everything and go totally, tits-up broke.
When you let someone else do life’s worrying for you and then discover they’re not really competent, you’ve probably got a lot of past worrying to catch up on.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 13, 2011
When faced with scary health issues, from strange lumps to bad thoughts, people often avoid treatments that hurt, particularly after long-standing symptoms have sapped their hope, fed self-hate, or fostered bad habits. They deny anything’s wrong, or they insist that resistance is futile, but either way, if you criticize them for not helping themselves, they will readily agree, hate themselves more, and burrow deeper into their holes and further away from treatment. Before they can find the way out, they need to reconnect with their real strength. Only by recognizing their actual achievements and their past and potential courage, can they face what ails them. The pain may continue, but not its power to intimidate and paralyze.
–Dr. Lastname
Please Note: In responding to suicidal goals, as in the case below, we do not presume to offer emotional support. If you’re at risk of hurting yourself, you should, of course, go to an emergency room, discuss your state of mind with a professional, and decide how much support you need in order to remain safe. In most of the cases we encounter, however, our correspondents are not simply suicidal; they are familiar with treatment and have come to believe that it won’t help. Often, we must agree that their feelings are unlikely to change in the near future. What we try to demonstrate, however, is that negative feelings create falsely negative and hopeless beliefs and that there are ways to recover your strength and perspective, even when the pain won’t let up.
I’m considering suicide. My life is a joke. I am in my late 30s and female and I have never had a relationship with a man. Several men have used me for sex and at least 2 of them begged me not to tell any of their friends they’d had sex with me. I’ve never been loved, been held, been listened to, been cherished. I’ve just been used like a toilet. On the outside I’m pretty. I can hold a conversation and I have a reasonable number of friends. But I hate myself and I don’t feel good enough. I was abandoned by both parents and I was raped for the first time when I was about 2-years-old. It’s like men I meet can smell the self-hate on me and they treat me accordingly. I do not have even one person in my life who cares about me or who I could trust. My friends are there to go for drinks or dinner with me if they can find nothing better to do but they are not there to be supportive ever, in any way. What is the point of me continuing to live?
It’s horrible to feel that you don’t belong to the human race, except for your ability to satisfy the needs and cravings of jerks.
Remember, however, that those feelings almost always beget more falsely negative beliefs, particularly about relationships. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you feel infinitely rejectable, comfortable in the company of jerks, and anxious around people you respect, since you know they will reject you for your anxiety and fundamental worthlessness.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 6, 2011
Names are often misleading; there are no arts or entertainment on the A&E channel, Greenland is mostly ice, and, most importantly, Therapy isn’t necessary therapeutic. Fact is, few therapies work completely or all the time, whatever kind of medical problem you have, and there are no guaranteed cures for psychiatric problems. That means there are no no-brainer decisions; all decisions require your brain, so you’re the one who must make all the tough calls. As such, you’re the one who must decide whether a therapy is therapeutic and whether, given its risks, it’s worth trying. The more responsibility you take, however, the more control you’ll experience over your choices, and the more respect you’ll command from others and yourself. If you want to see the mushy kind of therapy, you can watch it on A&E.
–Dr. Lastname
Things have been much better since my husband began therapy—he’s much less explosive and sensitive lately—which is good, because I didn’t really think we could start a family the way he was acting before. He was traumatized as a kid, and it’s made him very suspicious and touchy. I think therapy is helping him to get to the root of his problems, and that, if things continue to go well, we could actually have kids, but I’m not sure when he’ll be well enough for the time to be right. My goal is to set a goal for us.
Your husband may be happy because his relationship with his therapist has filled a deep need, or because he’s excited about a breakthrough, or because the McRib is back.
Sooner or later, however, therapy or no, life won’t be so easy, particularly if you have kids and you run into the usual kinds of medical, economic and personal kinds of bad luck that happen to most of us.
That said, don’t use your husband’s apparent happiness or serenity to decide whether he and your partnership are ready for child-rearing; what you need to know is how well his serenity stands up to stress.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 20, 2010
Whenever people are hurting at work, management will try to boost productivity by easing pain, which makes them feel both competent and compassionate. Trouble is, most such efforts piss everyone off by trivializing pain and suggesting things can be better when they can’t. Instead of trying to coddle your workforce or push up your company morale, both the employee and the employed would probably do better if they respected the fact that work is often painful, kept the personal bullshit to a minimum, and just got back to work.
–Dr. Lastname
[Adapted from a reader’s comment.]
Our boss tried to improve sagging morale by having us meet regularly in small groups led by a psychologist. I wish I could figure out what she’s trying to do and not be so annoyed by the way she’s doing it. She asks us to think of a wish-list of how to improve the way the organization functions, and then asks if that’s alright, and then, when someone describes something they’d like to see, like making people feel special by recognizing their birthdays, she praises them for having a great idea and makes them think of ways they could implement it, and then asks us if that’s alright, and then tells us we’re doing great and asks for more and is that alright. She sounds like Hal in 2001 and acts like a computer reinforcing people for contributions that will lift the group. Frankly, she creeps me out and the reason morale is bad is because we’re working too hard and not getting paid enough. My goal is to figure out what to do about someone who is being false and unhelpful.
Your work colleagues are not your family, regardless of what the boss and the boss’s psychologist tell you. When they start holding “sharing” sessions like this, the office becomes “The Office.”
Positive recognition and communication are not the answer to your work troubles, if only because work often sucks, which is why you get paid to do it. If you’re unhappy about doing too much for too little, it sucks even more.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 6, 2010
Everyone from Mariah Carey to Charlie Brown has told us that what Christmas means is a happy, if not the happiest, time, and that you’re supposed to spread that happy to your neighbors, parents, and children. Most of us learn at an early age that Christmas is a mixed bag, and that the unhappy spreads faster than the happy, mostly among family members. Instead of focusing on good cheer, decide how best to use the holiday to express the Christmas spirit which, for those of you with some dysfunction in your families, means finding the best compromise between sharing a holiday together, protecting yourself from bad behavior, and avoiding the songmanship of Mariah Carey.
–Dr. Lastname
My 16-year-old daughter is a good kid, but she’s always been hell on wheels about breaking the rules. I always worry about her, because her father was sick and school is hard for her (she’s very ADD) and it would take very little to get her to drop out. The more I do to make sure she gets up on time, however, like driving her to school when she’s late, the more she misses the boat by always getting one absence more than whatever the school allows, so now I’ve got regular meetings with the principal (she refuses to show up) and neverending special ed plans. She’s really a nice kid and behaves well when she’s staying with her friends, but with me she’s often mean and nasty and swears all the time, and I just laugh it off. Now Christmas is coming, and I’d like her to be able to visit Mexico with a friend’s family, if she can just keep out of additional trouble. My goal is to avoid provoking her into doing more dumb things, dropping out of school, and getting into major trouble.
It’s clear that you love and accept your bad-ass kid, and that’s probably the most important part of any relationship, because non-acceptance is deadly.
You accept her, she accepts that you love her. She just can’t accept being told what to do.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 2, 2010
People often feel broken by trauma if they can’t stop attacks of anxiety and achieve the sense of control that they’re sure normal people have. Sadly, normal people are as common as guiltless donuts and pegasi; if being broken means that you can’t be fixed, then everyone is broken, because we all eventually have problems about ourselves that can’t be fixed. If you’re out there, braving the risks of relationships and work and child-rearing in spite of trauma symptoms, then you’re not broken—you’re a hero.
–Dr. Lastname
I made the executive decision today to not participate in our airport’s body scan or pat down procedure, and now my whole family is f*cked. I had my “no more than 3oz bottles” in their “official” airline approved baggies, so obviously I arrived at the airport planning to suck it up and be a team player. When we got to the security checkpoint however, I discovered there was not enough scope (or vodka) in my 3oz bottles to get me through the required security procedure. I started having flashbacks dating back to a sexual assault 20+yrs ago, and called off the idea of being a team player. I’m pissed at myself for ruining our plans, and equally pissed that my husband (who knows about my past experience) thinks it’s “silly” that I couldn’t just suck it up and go through it like everyone else. My kid’s are totally confused now as to why we are at home and not at Grandmas. I know from news stories I’m not the only one having a problem with our new security procedures. I know I don’t “owe” anyone an explanation, but it seems avoiding their questions is only making matters worse. How do I explain, without really explaining, why I’m refusing to put myself back in the position that clearly was not in my best interest at the time?
If you’re reactive to your feelings in public, for any reason, life becomes more dramatic, unpredictable and sometimes humiliating. You want your junk, physical and emotional, untouched.
Unfortunately, most times you do end up saying something emotionally, it doesn’t come out cool, leaving you and everyone else feeling a bit violated.
There are, however, some advantages to being emotionally reactive, particularly in the anxious way you describe, even if those advantages don’t involve airports.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on November 29, 2010
If you’re the kind of person who lets your job take over your life, then work can become like a bad relationship; you get totally consumed with pleasing your beloved, and while that devotion gives you great satisfaction of the kind you want, it seldom supplies the kind that you need. Don’t assume that work satisfaction is good for you until you’ve decided what else is important in your life, including money, real human romantic relationships, and, of course, not working.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m a competitive, hard-working woman who’s always been a star among my peers at work. My social life has been pretty good, too, though I haven’t been lucky in finding a partner. My problem is that I’m bored and discouraged by my current job—it doesn’t allow me to get the outstanding results I’m used to achieving—and it’s starting to put a dent in my confidence, my dating, and even my ability to look for a new job. I want to get my mood back to normal, I don’t care whether it’s through medication or psychotherapy, so I can again lead the work-pack and have more energy for my social life.
It’s nice to be a work superstar, especially when that confidence extends outside the office to every other facet of life. Too much hubris, however, and you’re starring in your own corporate episode of “Behind The Music.”
When you depend too much on being outstanding, as good as it feels, you’ll get into the special trouble that always happens to gifted people who need that special feeling of achievement (you, Leif Garrett, same difference).
For one thing, if you’re ambitious and good at what you do, you’ll always be recruited, and sooner or later, you’ll be recruited into a position that can’t work out. Your skills are still perfect, but your luck isn’t.
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