Posted by fxckfeelings on June 10, 2013
While many have argued that romantic feelings can alter a person’s ability to reason, they also seem alter one’s vision, either giving one the ability to see faults in their partner and relationship that aren’t visible to the ordinary naked eye, or blinding them to real details in a rose-colored cloud. The best way to correct this impaired vision isn’t with glasses, but by keeping your eyes shut for a bit and looking inward; all good partnerships require behavior that meets your idea of what the job requires. So instead of analyzing unhappy feelings or taking comfort in love, figure out what you want him or her to do, dig for facts, and make it clear what’s acceptable and what isn’t, according to your experiences. Then, regardless of whether you break your heart or just his, you’ll have what you need, and you’ll never have to wonder what you “saw in him,” or what to look for going forward.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve been in a relationship for about five years now but I’ve gradually realized that my significant other derives his self-worth from a futile “Superman complex,” and he has admitted as much. That is, he feels his parents are stuck in an unhappy marriage, they express panic at the thought of him leaving home once a steady job comes along, and he has to make them happy. He takes the approach that he’s the mortar holding unhappy people together, whether they be relatives, friends, or coworkers. I’ve let him know my opinion, that he’s not helping them one whit, and that he may be keeping them from advancing in one direction or the other. Up goes the great “you’re wrong” wall of China. He hides low self-esteem behind a front of cockiness and runs like hell from any negative emotion (i.e., bottles it up and believes the pressure will never blow). I don’t understand how someone who doesn’t love himself can truly love anyone else, let alone me. I know I can’t force a change in him, but I still feel driven to reason with him since he professes to be a creature of logic. His intentions are ultimately good. Am I being completely dumb and trying to salvage a relationship that was built on unsteady ground to begin with?
Before you get too convinced that your boyfriend’s Superman issues are going to drive you apart, remember that Superman himself is rarely actually single. So, instead of assuming his parents are your relationship’s Kryptonite, ask yourself what you want from him and to what degree his unhappiness and over-involvement with his parents get in the way, if they do.
Lots of people can’t stop being unhappy because it’s not under their control, and expecting them to be happy leads to nothing but disappointment and a sense of failure. No matter how much you love someone, remember, you can’t make it work unless you also accept him, so if you need a happier guy, maybe you should look elsewhere. Superman or no, he’s powerless to his emotions. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on May 2, 2013
From Mama Rose to your average scary hockey dad, pushy parents who steamroll their kids into living out their own dreams are seen as monsters who seldom inspire real motivation. Pushing a relatively unmotivated kid into therapy instead of the spotlight might not make you feel like Dina Lohan, but the fact is, an enthusiasm gap between parent and child never bodes well. It doesn’t necessarily mean that your kid is an unmotivated, treatment-rejecting slacker, but it does mean that the intensely emotional intervention of a caring parent, whether offering treatment, discipline, or both, can make a child too reactive to others’ motivations to discover his or her own center and strength. When you want to help a difficult child, you must also learn to sell your child on the values of patience and self-restraint through example, waiting for your child to meet you halfway. Pushing a child to be mentally healthy is more valid than pushing her to be a superstar or pro-athlete, but if she don’t want it as much as you do, all you’re doing is pushing her away.
–Dr. Lastname
My daughter’s therapist is extremely expensive (hundreds of dollars, and he doesn’t take our insurance), but my daughter said the sessions helped her with her depression when it seemed like no one and nothing else could, so my husband and I took out a loan and paid for weekly treatments, which started when she was in high school and continue over the phone now that she’s in college. At the end of last semester, however, she’d flunked out of a course and now says she needs more money for personal expenses, and my husband and I have reason to think she’s drinking and partying way too much. We’re furious and my husband doesn’t want to keep “throwing money away,” especially since it’s money we have to borrow, but I’m afraid that if we confront her or reduce support for her treatment she’ll get even worse, drop out of school, and never get her degree or her mental health in order. My goal is to figure my way out of an impossible dilemma.
Ironically, endlessly searching for ways to keep your daughter safe is, in itself, a fairly dangerous proposition; if you make yourself too responsible for her treatment, she won’t develop her own values and reasons for using it and accepting its limitations. You can lead the kid to therapy, but you can’t make her think.
Until she builds her own foundation for managing her illness and its treatment, your recovery plan remains shaky. It gets shakier the more it depends on your efforts and the availability of therapists who may or may not be there when you need them, no matter what their cost. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 18, 2013
Whether it’s mental illness, high blood pressure, or Bieber Fever, finding out that you or a loved one has a chronic, incurable condition stirs up feelings that you must learn to manage if they aren’t to manage you. Instead of attempting to change what you can’t or fleeing into comforting activities with bad hangovers, gather your courage and learn about actual risks and the limits of treatment. If you do that and avoid panic, self-medication, and/or dubious musical choices, you’ll become effective at helping yourself while staying focused on your life rather than your disease.
–Dr. Lastname
I met the greatest girl six months ago—she’s smart, hard-working, and we share the same values, so it’s not just an infatuation based on her looks or laugh or whatever. As I was getting to know her, I was thinking she’s the sort of person I would want to have a family with. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got the feeling that she was getting a little…weird? She wasn’t sleeping, and was working obsessively on random stuff like color-coding the bookshelves, couldn’t stay focused, even while driving, which was pretty scary. Then last week, she started to talk fast/non-stop and text our friends about how great our sex was. The next thing I knew she was in the hospital, where I now understand she’s been once before, and her parents tell me she’s bipolar. I’m really not discouraged about her having a mental illness freak-out, I just want to find a way to help and also not let this get in the way of our relationship.
We tag every post on this side with “acceptance,” and that’s because it’s central, not just to dealing with life’s problems and getting to use the iTunes store, but in terms of long-term relationships. Acceptance isn’t easy for most, but it’s clear you have full faith in your girlfriend, in sickness and in health.
The downside to such natural, positive acceptance, however, is the lack of screening process for the life you wish to share with her; if you’re looking for a partner, you also have to ask whether her illness will allow her to do the job. Your relationship is rooted in something real, but so is her illness. 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 8, 2013
Sometimes goals that appear meaningful, like speaking your mind, getting closure, or getting an art degree, are excuses for pursuing feel-good results we damn well know will turn out badly. If you put aside your yearning for a better world while examining the probable results of your actions, however, you’re much more likely to do actual good, even when it doesn’t feel so hot, rather than let good intentions draw you into making the same old mistakes. No matter how right it feels to try, getting the last word, closure, and/or a BFA just aren’t worth it.
–Dr. Lastname
It really isn’t my ex-girlfriend’s fault that I got paranoid and couldn’t work for two months—she didn’t make me start using meth with her (she’s was a heavy user when we met). I used because I wanted to, not just because I loved her and the chemistry between us was amazing. Eventually, though, the meth made me unbelievably paranoid (I’d never been into drugs before) and I thought she was putting the smell of cat piss in my apartment. I also couldn’t sleep, think straight, or pay attention to anything for more than two seconds, so it wasn’t long before my boss told me to get help or else. Months of treatment have almost put my brain back where it was before and I’m almost ready to return to work, but I want my ex-girlfriend to know I don’t blame her and I want us to part on good terms, so I think we should meet once more, just to get closure. My goal is to erase the negativity caused by my bad reaction to meth and close the book on the situation for good.
After month of treatment, you should be well-versed in how to approach your addiction one day at a time; while there might be a rehab out there that preaches having one last meth binge hurrah “for closure,” it probably won’t be open for long.
The search for closure is the broken person’s version of the Holy Grail; long, dangerous, and ultimately futile. You might think you’re trying to put things right, but you’re really just picking a scab, so if you think it’ll help you heal, the opposite is true. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 1, 2013
Since we now live in a mostly-online world where everything is a loss/”fail” or victory/”for the win,” it’s normal to regard death as the ultimate fail since we’d give almost anything to prevent it from happening to ourselves and those we love (although if it happens to our worst enemies, it’s a win situation, even if most of us wouldn’t even admit that in Youtube comments). In reality, we disrespect our humanity by considering ourselves defeatable by something we don’t control, and what we do with ourselves and our family and friends when someone is dying or otherwise afflicted is what makes us great/gives us p0wnage of mortality, at least for a little while.
–Dr. Lastname
After 15 years of homelessness, prison, jails, rehabs, psych meds, medication management, horrific poly substance abuse, and occasional hopeful stints of sobriety, our son overdosed two months ago. He was 30 years old.
All the years of fear, guilt and depravity notwithstanding, his father and I miss him terribly. I won’t go into the efforts (financial, emotional, time) to get/keep him sober that consumed our entire family for the last decade. Lets just say our son’s use of his drug of choice, heroin, has been the 24/7 of our lives. I could write a book about police cars in the driveway, family sessions I’ve sat through with green rehab “counselors” who appeared to be clinging tenuously to not using themselves, and the finer points of being frisked by zealous prison guards.
Some days, like today, all I can remember is what a horrible slog it’s been. Other days I remember my son’s big, kind heart when he was himself, his ability to read a room, and the way he only talked when he had something to say.
I’ve examined our family life over and over, and I had pretty much come to grips with the past, and the present. The future was plainly jails, institutions, or death. I knew all this, and had many sleepless nights to steel myself for the inevitable.
Of course when the inevitable arrives, it is a total sledgehammer to the heart and mind. The worst part is this: his father and I had kicked him out of our home (again) where he was living (again) because he was shooting Xanax. He actually got the Rx for Xanax from the same doctor that prescribed his Suboxone (why heroin addicts should not be prescribed Benzodiazopines is another post). Later that night he died of an overdose from a lethal mix of Xanax and heroin.
So, he is dead, after we pushed him out in an argument. No goodbyes, no “I love you,” just unkind and hurtful words.
In a way I feel this was our son’s final selfish act, leaving me a lifetime of guilt and replaying that night he left over and over in my mind. I feel I’ll go crazy if it doesn’t stop. I don’t want to live this way for the rest of my natural life.
[Please note: We usually edit submissions for length and clarity, but we felt this was so well-written that it should be left almost entirely intact. If the author ever follows through on her threat to write a book, we would read it.]
The usual way we judge ourselves as parents is by the way we help our kids survive and grow, even if we can’t make them happy. That standard is usually fair, unless your child suffers from a disease that nobody and nothing control, from doctors and medication, to the child or the parents who feel responsibility for his/her survival.
The toughest thing in the world then is to judge yourself properly when you still can’t stop your son from dying, unhappily, in the midst of drug abuse and conflict. It’s a mix of every kind of hell, because you feel you’ve failed, that he failed, and that the universe has failed everyone involved.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where nice kids get addicted to horrible drugs, nice parents can’t save them, and part of the illness of addiction is that the kids fuck up again and again, and you can’t keep them at home when they do. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 28, 2013
Addiction is easier to understand if you picture it as a mental squatter, the way advertising for nasal decongestants depicts mucus as a working class family that happens to be gooey, green, and getting by in your sinuses. Even when people are strongly motivated to stop compulsive or addictive behavior, their addiction is often one step ahead of them, distorting their thinking to undermine their efforts and stay put. In some cases, they are so obsessed with the self-perceived ugliness of their bad habit that they can’t consider more important reasons for stopping, while in other cases, they are so obsessed with finding their addiction’s ultimate cause that they wind up blaming people who care the most and could offer the most help in their recovery/to send the addiction packing. If you’re ready to quit, avoid stoking up feelings of self-disgust or blame; instead, prepare to tolerate pain without blame while looking for positive reasons to manage lingering inner demons and keep them from setting up house.
–Dr. Lastname
I think I meet the clinical definition of having an eating disorder (at least, according to the all-knowing and all-powerful Wikipedia). For the past four years I have been binge eating and semi-purging through excessive laxative use. Before that, for about two years, I was probably somewhat anorexic, although I say this in retrospect as I don’t think I either realized or would have admitted it at the time. (5’2” and less than 90 lbs. is pretty thin, though). My goal is to stop binge eating, and I don’t know how. My eating and obsession with food have basically taken over my life, and though I fight it and things have gotten better than they were a year or two ago, I’m constantly afraid of when I will binge next. I don’t trust myself at all. It affects my professional life, and I need to stop letting that happen. I miss the self-control and feelings of power and self-worth that my thinness used to give me. I realize that going back to that is not exactly a healthy goal, though. I’d frankly be pretty pleased if I could just stop binging and get on with my life.
It’s hard to underestimate how all-consuming an eating disorder can be; as you obsess about the ways to keep food out of your body, it becomes the main occupant of your mind. Every moment spent avoiding the act of eating requires twice as many moments of mental torment on the subject.
Then there are endless concerns about your appearance, feelings of worthlessness, compulsive behaviors, and the intense ties between them. Eating disorders foster a kind of self-obsession, a dependence on your own thoughts and secret behaviors that devalues other goals and relationships.
It’s not surprising then that managing an eating disorder requires, not more self-control, but an acceptance that you’ve lost control and a willingness to admit other people, like family and therapists, into your private, obsessive relationship with food. It’s not unlike the so-called First Step of managing an addiction—admitting your helplessness and recognizing the importance of values other than your needs and shame. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 14, 2013
Most of us feel driven to help someone who’s in pain, whether they want it or not, but as sitcoms, Jodie Foucault books, and alcoholics have tried to teach us over and over again, stepping in to relieve or prevent suffering isn’t always a good idea. The sad reality is that lots of pain can’t be helped, and the sufferer is the only one who can make the tough decisions required to manage that pain effectively. Helping, then, is often less a matter of providing relief and more of encouraging people to ignore pain that they can’t change and take credit for the good things they do about it. The outcome isn’t as dramatic as it is when you attempt to rescue someone, but it’s often a lot more meaningful for everyone involved.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m a resident advisor in a college dorm (it’s free room and board, and I’m a psych grad student, so it’s training of sorts), but I’m stuck because I don’t know how to help one of the kids on my floor. He’s severely depressed and it’s complicated by the fact that his parents, who are Middle Eastern, don’t believe in mental illness and think he’s supposed to just get over it, so they won’t pay for treatment and would probably accuse him of shaming the family if they knew he got it. For a couple years, he was cutting his arms while keeping it a secret and not letting it affect his grades. Lately he says he’s stopped cutting but often thinks of suicide and sometimes gets into a strange, spacey state of mind where he’s caught himself standing on balconies and thinking about jumping. He’s a good kid and he denies being traumatized (I think he might be in the closet, and with his parents, I understand why he’s afraid to come out), but he obviously needs help. My goal is to find him the help he needs.
Before trying to help someone who’s suicidal and restricted by his own beliefs from getting help, you’ve got to remind yourself that your powers are sharply limited, and that, even under the best circumstances—if you had a practice and he was a willing patient—his case would be a challenge. This is the stuff they don’t teach you in school, or you’d switch your degree to finance.
You can coach him on his options, but the alternatives are all painful and there’s no guarantee of relief, so don’t expect to make him feel better; what you can do, however, is help him see his choices as meaningful and positive. In other words, if the desire to heal others is what’s driving your degree, it’s time to begin your coursework for Life is Unfair 101. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 4, 2013
I don’t know who wrote the book of love, but it appears to lack a solid ending; it may lead you through the rules of finding and loving someone, but it’s useless when it comes to telling you how to break up a bad relationship, or even friendship, with someone you simply can’t stop thinking about. While it has been written that you can’t control love, there should at least be an appendix directing you to respect how much toughness love takes, and how much pain you’ll have to bear, in order to move on. Then you would know how to take what you’ve learned from the failed relationship to find someone and make something better, and return to chapter one.
–Dr. Lastname
I have recently let go of a friendship with a narcissist. She meets the standard criteria for being a narcissist and has a Bi-Polar 2 disorder confirmed by a therapist, but it seems I was the last to realize as I was so incredibly caught up in her cycle of “needing” me only to be treated appallingly in between. I am finally in a happy place in my life after a lot of work and therapy and haven’t been able to “help” her as much as I used to as I now have a fulfilling job and support network. She has lashed out at me and I had let go of the friendship, but now I am having types of flashbacks where I can finally see how badly I was treated over the years and I am so disappointed in myself that I put up with it. She has been trying to contact me but I have ignored her, as I read No Contact is best with a narcissist but part of me wants to tell her to get serious help but I know I won’t be heard. I am confused, hurt and feel like I have been living a friendship lie for over twenty years. Please help me to move on.
Though they say that madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, people who compulsively give of themselves to help others, no matter how hopeless the cause or ungrateful the recipient, tend to dodge that age-old observation and be seen less as insane and more as saints.
While you now recognize your former friend’s talent for taking without giving, you need to acknowledge your own help-aholic tendencies and how they got you into this mess in the first place. Otherwise, you might end up in a similar friendship, or worse, driven to try to get this person “serious help” one last time, and either way, it’s nuts. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 18, 2013
When people who are both highly motivated and deeply depressed get unhappy with their own poor job performance, regardless of how little control they have over it, they often do something that makes it worse—walking out, acting out, and forcing themselves to play out the same scenario over and over again with jobs that either ask too little or too much. Obviously, you deserve better from yourself when you’re trying hard and can’t get good results, particularly when you must keep on performing, regardless of how badly you do or how tired you feel. There’s nothing wrong with pushing yourself when you’re sick, as long as you apply the right expectations.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve suffered from insomnia for years, and it’s only getting worse. I’m now on anti-depressants to try and combat the extreme lows of being constantly exhausted. I feel like my life is being dictated by the insomnia. I have had to quit a job, my social life suffers, I don’t enjoy anything I used to, everyday is a challenge to get through. If I had the choice I would choose not to go on it is just so debilitating. Currently, I manage to hold down two part-time positions that are very much “beneath” my education and experience, and only because one of them is casual and I can get away with not going in once a week or so when I feel like I can’t move. I know I’m a good worker but when the exhaustion gets the better of me. I feel like I perform poorly. Recently I’ve been offered a really good job, based on my past experience and friendly, pleasant, easy-going manner. My rested self would take the job in a second and count myself lucky to get in to such a great company. My exhausted self thinks I can’t do it and what happens when they find out I’m tired all the time and not as motivated as my resume would indicate. I probably could do the job but I just can’t make any decisions when I’m like this. Or should I just stay put and count myself lucky to be able to hold down these two jobs? I used to be ambitious and motivated with goals in life; now I’m just letting those go out the window while trying to get through each day. My goal is to figure out how to live with this in the best way possible, and how to make realistic decisions that are right for me based on my health without letting the insomnia make decisions for me.
While depression primarily messes with your head, the disease has clever ways of messing with your body, as well; it becomes a chicken-or-egg situation, with one wondering whether it was the misery that begat the exhaustion/inability to eat/constant hunger/etc., or vice versa.
Sleep disturbance is one of the worst symptoms of depression, which may include sleeping too much, too little, and at the wrong times, along with helpless fatigue and an irregular sleep-wake cycle that puts you out of step with the rest of the world. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
