Posted by fxckfeelings on November 23, 2009
The one gift everybody can expect to get around the holiday season is a surplus of emotions (which, as I’ve said before, turns into a surplus of business for me—ho ho ho!). The ghost of Christmas (and Thanksgiving and New Years) past visits most of us, but for those with rough pasts, said ghost can be a real bitch. If you keep your emotional swamp in check and focus on the positive in the present, you can keep your festivities from being too haunted (and keep yourself out of my office).
-Dr. Lastname
You said before that everybody hates the holidays, and I think most people hate seeing their families. Well, I hate the holidays, but it’s because I don’t have a family; my parents still drink too much, one brother is in jail and the other I don’t trust around my kids, and so every time the holidays roll around I get depressed that I don’t have anyone because the people I should be happy to see are the ones who made me the crazy mess I am today (honestly—I’m bipolar, but on medication). I’m sick of basically being guaranteed to hate myself and life all winter just because of what my family did. My goal is to find a way to feel better no matter what time of year it is.
There’s a simple answer to why it’s a bad idea to expect to get over the sorrow of a bad, abusive family; because usually, it simply can’t be done.
Focusing on your pain and waiting for it to go away will spoil your holidays even more than they’re already spoiled. Talk about a turd in the cranberry sauce.
Maybe you think it’s a holiday right and tradition to vent/celebrate your sad feelings with a shrink. Well, this shrink says forget it. I’m not interested, and neither should you be.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 1, 2009
Guilt is an unvoidable part of life—as well as a central motivator of at least a couple of religions—and often the sources of guilt (see: family) never go away. What most people don’t realize is that there’s false guilt and real guilt, the former far more easy to ignore, the latter worth confronting in a meaningful way. Still, while you can’t get rid of guilt overall, there are ways of managing it so that, at the very least, it doesn’t become a holy pain in the ass.
–Dr. Lastname
My mother is a drama queen– she thrives on family conflict and gossip and needs to control every step of my life. She has her nose in everyone’s business, talks badly about most people, and also has a violent temper (at 79 years old, she still throws things and flips people [like me] the bird out of anger). Several events happened that finally made me so angry with her that I literally told her off and have cut ties with her for over a year, but during this year I have suffered from terrible guilt and shame for turning my back on my elderly mother. Believe me, I feel better and more relaxed without her constant turmoil, but there are nights that I wake up from a dream where I am shunned at her funeral as “the daughter who abandoned her mother”. I have tried, in the past, to talk sense into her and explain my feelings but she creeps back to her same troubling ways. My goal is to get over the guilt that I feel about cutting my mother out of my life.
Anger is never a good reason for doing anything, and particularly not for cutting off ties with your mother; after all, anger’s a feeling, and you know that’s a dirty word. It’s not that you don’t have good reasons for being angry, just not for letting anger make your decisions.
As you’ve now realized, once you let anger take over, it’s very hard to protect yourself against guilt, which is where your major problem lies now. The only good, healthy defense against guilt, other than drowning your neurotransmitters in alcohol, is to know you’ve done the right thing, regardless of how unhappy you’ve made someone feel or how badly they’re suffering while you’re the one standing watch.
In this instance, unfortunately, you haven’t done the right thing, so guilt has become your master.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on September 17, 2009
Trauma becomes a part of who you are—the more you fight it, the more you punish yourself—so don’t struggle against the scars, physical or mental, that’s life’s given you. Many people have the notion that therapy can cure psychological trauma, but, in reality, trying to “cure” trauma is like trying to win a war on terror: you can’t defeat an emotional response, you can just keep living in spite of it.
–Dr. Lastname
Up until 2003, I lived in Brooklyn and worked in Tribeca, so, as you can imagine, 9/11 was a big, scary deal for me. I went to therapy for a while—both for the PTSD and the grief over a couple of friends at Cantor/Fitzgerald who died—and while I think I’m doing much better than I was, I still get shaky when I see footage or pictures from that day. Problem is, 8 years have passed, I now live in Chicago, so there’s not a lot of sympathy for my sensitivity. In fact, last week, when the topic came up at work and I expressed my discomfort, one of my co-workers accused me of being totally over dramatic, and I then became the subject of some light ribbing. And I know they have a point sort of, but I also know that it was really fucking scary. So my goal is to figure out what I should do, be it get more therapy or more resistance to my co-workers’ bullshit, in order to move past my trauma.
Trying to block or control your trauma-reactive sensitivity is a bad idea; after awhile, you simply can’t control it, and trying to do so makes it worse. The number of treatments that aim to reduce your symptoms after traumatic events should warn you that success is partial, and control impossible.
And, of course, there are all those natural treatments for blocking pain—alcohol, weed, sugary baked goods, and other high-side-effect mental painkillers that work beautifully, however briefly—while also destroying your life.
In the short run, some treatments are helpful…but they’re not cures. Now you’ve had treatment, it’s 8 years later, you’ve moved away and tried to move on, so whatever sensitivity you’ve got at this point, you’re not going to get rid of.
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