Posted by fxckfeelings on July 6, 2020
If, like our reader from earlier, your Asshole family is wearing you down, there are ways to keep your anger at bay that don’t involve drugs, lobotomy or mass murder. So here are five ways to deal with your Asshole family. You can’t get rid of their DNA, but you can stop their dumb bullshit from taking over your life.
1)Forget Fair
If you haven’t come to terms with this fact already, it’s time to accept that your family will never play by the same rules the rest of us not-awful people do. They will bully you according to their needs, ignore usual rules of behavior, and try to turn other family members against you when they decide it’s your turn to be a pariah. As you’ve likely experienced an infinite number of times, protesting will target you for punishment and make you feel even more outraged about their unfairness, even though they have no understanding of fairness in the first place. Yes, you should still try to treat others fairly, but expecting fair enforcement of rules with these people will just exhaust you and make their behavior even worse.
2) Build Boundaries
It’s natural to want or enjoy love and affection from your family—that’s what families are supposedly for—but if you need love or anything else from an Asshole there are always strings attached, regardless of family ties. Maybe, in exchange for their kindness or basic humanity, a family member will expect you to listen to their complaints, side with them against someone else, or generally get involved with the family drama you’ve tried so hard to avoid. So learn to keep your needs to yourself or know exactly what kind of quid pro quo they have in mind before you engage.
3) It’s Pushy, Not Personal
Assholes can’t help blaming others for the hurt in their lives, regardless of actual facts, so it’s hard not to feel a little bit guilty when that blame comes your way. If you notice what they say about other people, however, you’ll see they do the same thing to everyone. So, while the criticism may feel personal, especially after hearing it for so many years, remember that their shit-list is long and all-inclusive. It has nothing to do with you and what you’ve done and everything to do with who they are.
4) Get Selective With Guilt
Remember, it’s easy to feel guilty, even when someone isn’t trying to make you feel that way. And Assholes are especially good at making you feel responsible for their feelings because they truly believe you’re the reason they’re unhappy, even if you aren’t. So no matter how insistent they are or how persistent your guilty thoughts, push yourself to think hard about whether you’ve done actually anything wrong. In the end, you’ll build up the ability to fight unnecessary guilty feelings, whether Assholes have induced them or not, and trust your own judgment before guilt gets you in its clutches.
5) Family is Figurative
If the people you’re bound to by blood are boundlessly awful, then you can make a better family of your own. This doesn’t just mean marriage and kids, but finding good, caring people who are fun to be with, trustworthy, sane and reliable. Beware of people who immediately try to get too close and have an immediate effect on you, because they’ll turn out to be exactly like the family members you’re trying to get away from. Find people to get close to who don’t partake of the usual family pastimes, like complaining, blaming, using and scapegoating. If the family you were given rejects you, make one that accepts you instead.
Posted by fxckfeelings on June 5, 2020
Over the course of our lives, we gradually age out of many things—diapers, fast fashion, the ability to use hashtags—but one thing no amount of time and maturity can confer on us is the ability to prevent Assholes in our families from getting under our skin. Age and wisdom confer no superpower defensive shield against the pain and guilt Assholes cause, especially since they won’t stop causing it no matter how calmly and maturely you approach them. So if you’re descended from Assholes, expand your acceptance to include your own feelings, namely the negative and human ones that your family will always inspire. Don’t try to achieve a state of imperturbable forgiveness; that’s an inhuman standard for controlling your feelings that only an Asshole would impose.
– Dr. Lastname
I come from a family that is violent and alcoholic on one side and borderline/bipolar/crazy on the other; several relatives are all of the above. I’m over 70 now, so I have a lifetime of experience turning the other cheek, hoping for the best, and standing up for my values with integrity. All the same, I am tired of my family and their problems (none of which I exhibit to even a small degree, luckily). Even my patience has limits. My goal is to not feel hate for the whole fam damily and to fill in the chip they’ve nicked off my shoulder.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 28, 2020
The children may be our future, but in their present state some children, like the one a reader described earlier, cannot be taught well or allowed to lead the way (unless you want to be lead into jail). That’s because some kid are just Assholes, i.e., they’re impossible to reason with and a danger to everyone around them. Unlike adult Assholes, kids have the potential to grow out of it and change, but making limitless efforts to be that agent of change can make you into an Asshole yourself. So here are five ways to tell if your kid isn’t just troubled but an Asshole, a.k.a., trouble itself.
1) Pep Talks Have No Purpose
When someone won’t stop fucking up, it’s natural to believe that, if they only understood why what they’re doing is wrong and how it’s really hurting people then they’d finally get why it’s bad and put an end to it. But after discussing bad behaviors with this kid, the bad feelings they cause in others and their own bad feelings that might motivate them, nothing’s getting through. Your explanations fall flat, your limits are blown through, your explanations for your limits might as well be in Klingon…eventually, you have no confidence that anything you say or do will work to keep him safe or out of trouble. Then you find yourself expecting the worst and not being surprised.
2) You’re Not Alone
When none of your ideas seems to be working, try to compare notes with his other caregivers—teachers, case workers, therapists—to see what their experiences with him are like and what techniques, if any, they find successful. Review what they’ve tried and determine whether they seem unreasonable or kind and accepting. If they strike you as trustworthy and skilled and make it clear that, despite appreciating this kid’s strengths, formulating good rules and following through on simple, reasonable punishments, they also got nowhere, then you know you know it’s not you, it’s him (and the fact he’s as Asshole).
3) Absence of Empathy
One reason explanations and pep talks are useless—why telling him how much he’s hurting himself and others doesn’t seem to make an impact—is because he’s unable to register or be aware of how his actions make others feel, whether they’re peers or adults. Awareness may be blotted out by the intensity of his own emotions or compulsions, or, if he’s a true sociopath, may simply not exist, even at the best of times. He doesn’t seem to be avoiding empathy in order to avoid guilt, because he can be unaware with no good reason; he’s just wired wrong, so either his brain is currently bypassing his empathy chip or he never got one in the first place.
4) Compulsive Self-Harm
Unfortunately, this kid’s path of destruction doesn’t just take down external targets; when he’s in the wrong mood—overloaded with anger, frustration, misery, etc.—he can’t stop destroying his own things and/or hurting his own body. In recollecting the harm he caused, he shows no regret for what he’s done or wish to protect himself in the future. He may wish he didn’t feel that way again, but cannot imagine a good reason for not doing what he did given his feelings, or not doing the exact same thing should that feeling return. In other words, he doesn’t just lack empathy for how his actions impact others, but how they impact him and anything he cares about.
5) Assholes, Assemble
You’d think that being empathy-less, impulsive, and rage-filled would make human connection tricky, but Assholes, even young ones with violent streaks, often have no problem making friends, even if it’s just with people as awful as they are. As such, this kid has a talent for finding friends who do more bad things together than either one could ever accomplish alone. Sometimes, such friends aren’t assholes but just passive followers and sidekicks who are drawn in by the Asshole’s passionate, rebellious nature. In either case, these friends raise the risk of causing serious harm and undermining the (already weak) influence of your rules and management tools. Because, while you may at first find some hope in the fact that this kid made friends, friendships, like reasoning and empathy, won’t make an Asshole a better person. If you’re lucky, time, medication, and/or life experience may help. But in the meantime, don’t take their actions personally while planning what to do if your Asshole kid goes from impossible to dangerous.
Posted by fxckfeelings on May 6, 2020
People who help troubled kids are bona fide living saints, but kids with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are sometimes beyond miracles; kids with the most extreme form of this disorder can suck all the love and patience out of even the kindest, most dedicated caregivers, leaving them to feel burnt out and powerless. Since most of us aren’t saints, it’s important not to make yourself responsible for changing a troubled kid if you find one in your charge. Unless you include additional priorities and values in your approach and are prepared to encounter problems you can’t necessarily change, it’ll take a massive miracle to keep you from getting into major trouble.
-Dr. Lastname
My stepdaughter came to live with us two years ago. I knew there would be obstacles to overcome; we gained custody of her after a bitter, multi-state fight with her drug-addicted mother and nasty grandmother. And not surprisingly, she does indeed have a lot of issues. So I find myself yelling a lot and spending heaping amounts of time trying to help her gain some control of what her therapist calls an oppositional defiant disorder, which she certainly has. I start out trying to be kind and gentle and always end up yelling because her repeated “forgetting” of the rules of our home (100% Honest, 100% respectful) is awesomely frustrating. In the meantime, I know I’m not spending the quality time I’d like to with my husband and my other children, and I feel like shit when I finish one of these yelling sessions—they always seem to uncover lie after lie—and sad because I just don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. My goal is to get through to my stepdaughter and help her be a part of the family, AND gain more quality, happy time with my other kids and husband.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on April 30, 2020
As with addiction, admitting you’re depressed is merely the first step to management and recovery. After that comes the work of fighting your depressive thoughts so they no longer make you doubt yourself, your work, and your right to live. So if, as with our reader from earlier, your grief and/or depression are making your life impossible, here are five ways to prevent those depressive thoughts from becoming assumed beliefs.
1) Ignore Your Emotions
Depression is like having your own personal garbage internet messageboard in your head; it will tell you you’re bad at your job, have lost the respect of those you work with and for, and should just crawl in a hole and die. In truth, you’re probably doing a good job, given the way that you feel, so the first step is the most obvious one; learning to push back when your brain floods you with negative feedback. Just because you feel bad doesn’t mean you’re doing everything badly, so don’t let your sadness taint your impression of your performance, self, worth, etc.
2) Be Your Own Best Friend
One quick way to refute your internal negativity is to ask yourself whether you’d say something similar to someone you care about. Ask yourself what standards you would expect this friend to meet given their situation/illness, and what language and tone would be appropriate, both in terms of being kind and motivating. You’d probably conclude rather quickly that you would never been that harsh to a friend because it’d be far more hurtful than helpful, and if you wouldn’t say it to a friend you shouldn’t say it to yourself.
3) Find the Facts
The best way to combat the misinformation coming from your brain is through research into your illness, because knowing exactly how depression works, and how little you are to blame for being afflicted by it, will make the thoughts easier to ignore. You will find that illness happens and people often have very little ability to prevent it. And even when they know they didn’t cause it they find ways to blame themselves for not eating healthy or sleeping enough, even though the major causes of depression are usually bad genes or bad luck. You will also find that depression is common, can be triggered by grief, and that you can lose focus and motivation regardless of how well you take care of yourself or how motivated you are to do your work. Once you know that your illness isn’t your fault, it’s easier to take its insults less personally and be less ashamed for being afflicted.
4) Stand Up To Stigma
Even after admitting to yourself that you’re depressed, it can be hard to admit it to others, especially outside of your inner circle. On the one hand, you’re entitled to keep your personal information private. But if your depression is imparing your ability to do your job—if it makes you look angry or withdrawn, or less eager to volunteer to do your part, or harder to focus and do your job well—then calmly stating to your colleagues what you’re going through won’t just explain your poor job performance but will also probably make them more understanding, patient, and eager to help going forward. Don’t ask for help apologetically, as if you’ve messed up and need forgiveness. Instead, let people know you’re having a tough time with symptoms, but you’re still trying very hard to do a good job and take care of your problem.
5) Out of Hiding, Seek Help
Your depression may tell you that it’s not worth getting help, or that looking is too hard, or that you’ll just end up pumped full of drugs and even more miserable. But this, of course, is yet more bullshit. Fighting the negativity of depression is hard, but a cognitive therapist can help you identify and challenge those negative thoughts and prevent them from becoming accepted. Medication may also help, although it takes at least several weeks to work and often requires multiple trials before an effective one can be found. Mostly, finding outside help will give you the support to face your illness. It will give you an outside opinion to remind you that you’re not a bad person, that bad symptoms happen to sane people, and that you’re not alone. Respect your work ethic while you prepare to fight a serious illness and give yourself the support and treatment you need.
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 16, 2020
People worship self-esteem and confidence as if they signify success and are as much of a job requirement as being able to learn fast and use Excel. In reality, although skill and experience will certainly make you feel more confident, and while confidence is a useful trait, there are lots of random, uncontrollable conditions that can deflate your feelings of self-worth, like illness, depression, and loss, and they have a way of combining and reinforcing one another and making work, and life, impossible. So if you’ve built up real skill and experience and know you’re good at what you do, it shouldn’t matter if you feel terrible. Indeed, if you can feel lousy and still do a good enough job, you’re qualified to do almost anything.
-Dr. Lastname
It has been almost a year since I’ve lost my father. Aside from trying relentlessly to deal with the grief, I’ve also turned into a less confident, socially awkward person at the worst possible moment. I’m in my residency where confidence and interaction with people is highly scrutinized, along with the intelligence and capacity to handle extremely sick people. Stress is at an all time high, and I struggle everyday to remember how proud my dad was of me for achieving my goals. But now that I’m so close to completing my goals…I feel myself letting them slip through my fingers because I don’t have the will or energy to do the work. My goal is to learn how to get a grip and to not lose track of my life goals.
F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship
If dealing with loss and stress weren’t depressing enough, you now have actual depression to make you feel even worse. A stupid/simply as it may sound, it’s really depressing to be depressed, particularly when it interferes with your energy, performance, and ability to achieve your bigger life goals.
Unfortunately, severe depression often affects those parts of your brain that control drive, concentration and social interaction, and grief is often indistinguishable from depression, so your father’s death has, in effect, triggered a disabling illness. Then your feelings of failure about your disability are causing more depression, which makes his absence feel even more painful, and it keeps feeding itself until your career, ability to get out of bed, and will to live are completely gone.
But don’t believe for a moment that your current disability is any more significant than one caused by a stroke or concussion. Your poor performance is not a measure of laziness or incompetence, simply of temporary brain dysfunction and bad luck. Depression will tell you otherwise because it is notorious for creating intensely negative self-judgments and ruminations, but depression is also a notorious liar. So it’s important for you to confront the vicious cycle of depressive symptoms, fake news of failure, and more depression.
With the help of a friend, coach, or therapist, get help in restoring your perspective. Then let others know about your illness and its symptoms. Your colleagues and supervisors will be relieved to know why you’re not performing as well as usual and they will expect that, with time, help, and recovery, you’ll eventually get back to yourself. Meanwhile, they should be willing to give you the same support as if you were recovering from any illness.
Friends will also be relieved to know why you’ve been antisocial lately. Just as depression makes you feel like a failure, they’ve been thinking that you no longer value them as friends; your taking depression personally leads them to take your depression personally. When you let them know what’s really happening, you also block that infectious distortion, let them know you care and allow them to be helpful.
As a doctor you know that illness just happens and that it can be disabling, so use your professional experience to accept your depression as just an illness like any other. Learn to fight the feelings of failure and set up procedures and a group of helpers that will speed your recovery.
Depression hurts and disables, but it can’t do nearly as much damage as the false thoughts it creates if you start to believe them. So remember who you are and use your experience to reject false thoughts. Eventually, they’ve been so trivial and inconsequential that you’ll be able to move on in your career and from the pain of your father’s death without depression getting in your way.
STATEMENT:
“I may be performing poorly, but I know I’m impaired by depression and grief. As a matter of fact, for someone who’s as impaired as I am, I’m doing an impressive job just showing up and trying hard to get a tough job done. I can feel nothing but self-criticism, but I have good reason to be proud. I need to take good care of myself and let others know what’s happening, so they can help me get through this tough time.”
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 2, 2020
Figuring out what you want to do with your life—or at least choosing a career path at a relatively early age—can feel like a blessing. But, if like our reader from earlier, you get pretty far along that path before realizing you might have made a wrong turn at the start, you can quickly go from blessed to completely messed up. If you find yourself souring on the career you’ve spent years training for, here are five things you can do to figure out whether your career path is worth sticking with.
1) Don’t Ignore The Possibility That You’re Depressed
Depression, anxiety, and/or just being very, very tired can make you feel like whatever work you’re doing is useless and so are you. Even if your brain is usually reliable, the thoughts of a depressive mind are not, and taking those impulses seriously can lead you to make poor decisions that will just make you feel even worse. So give yourself time and talk things over with a friend, spouse, colleague or even therapist to see if your alienation from your field is substantial or just the result of an unfortunate mental distortion from a longlasting bad mood.
2) Partake In Your Own Personal Performance Review
Before getting fed up with everything about your field, talk over your performance with a trusted mentor or colleague. In particular, don’t take for granted abilities that you enjoy and do well just because they’re enjoyable or come easily to you; list them and think about what you can use them for, because whether you stay in this field or not, they will help guide you to wherever you belong. On the other hand, if you perform badly in some areas, ask yourself whether you’re likely to improve and whether your field requires you to do better. Then think hard about whether that improvement is something you’re capable of or are willing to put the work into.
3) Seek A Second Opinion
Beyond the cliché of the high school career test—the highly scientific survey that seems to tell most kids that they’ll end of in food service or jail—there are many, more accurate psychological tests that can profile your way of thinking style and suggest jobs that you might like or dislike. Very frequently your college or graduate school will offer you these tests for free (because your univeristy looks good if you find a good job) as well as counselling on the kind of jobs that you might prefer. At best, the test will confirm that you’re on the right track, and at worst it might say you should pursue a career in the sandwich arts but still help you to think hard about your priorities and skills.
4) Sample Shadowing
Short of actually doing a job, spending time with practicing professionals in the field is the best way to experience what your future may be like. An internship or certain other low-paying jobs can put you in their midst without requiring you to know much, and while you probably won’t get to do anything that puts your training to use (or that a monkey couldn’t do), you will get to observe what the job is like and whether you would actually enjoy doing what they’re doing. If you’re lucky, one of your superiors may treat you as a mentee and share their thoughts about the rewards and annoyances of what they actually do. Meanwhile, you can ask yourself whether they’re your kind of people, period.
5) Look for Loopholes
It’s not uncommon for someone to get a degree or go far in their field just to use their degree or experience to start a different, atypical career. For instance, some people with medical educations are more interested in doing government administration or medical marketing than in seeing patients while several comedy writers only entered the field after getting a law degree. Look through alumnae statements to find people whose careers have gone in odd directions and ask yourself whether you could use your current education in the same way. Above all, don’t feel like a failure because your efforts haven’t yet pointed you to a career that suits you; respect your determination to keep plugging away and working hard until you find something that you like.
Posted by fxckfeelings on March 19, 2020
There’s a good reason that every “quest” story, from Luke Skywalker’s to Harry Potter’s, ends with said quest being satisfying fulfilled; namely, a hero who fails doesn’t seem like much of a hero at all. That’s why it can feel so painful if you dedicate years to your education—making a long series of educational sacrifices for the sake of a career, acquiring mountains of debt, forgoing all the pleasures that your paycheck-receiving contemporaries are enjoying—only to discover that your would-be career sucks and your epic quest has been in vain. Since it happens to good people who are making reasonable decisions, however, there should be no shame, self-recrimination, or rumination on mistakes if you must find ways to use your hard-won knowledge and discipline to figure out what to do next. Then you haven’t actually failed; you’re just on a longer hero’s journey than bargained for.
-Dr. Lastname
I have a Bachelors in Psychology and a Masters in Counseling and Psychology, and I am a Ph.D. candidate but I need to leave my program to move back home and take care of my mom. I spent some time kinda feeling bad about leaving this “elevation” of the Ph.D. behind, but I also knew, in a way, that this whole field was bullshit. My question then is, if my field of study is stupid—even after all the years I’ve dedicated to it—what should I do now? I want to play a part in the future understanding of mental health, which will no doubt be informed by science, but I’m not sure that what I’ve been studying will provide that (i.e., the stuff I’ve studied is nothing like the approach in your books). My goal is to be a part of the mental health field with an approach that makes sense to me (and the academic one does not).
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 23, 2020
Rushing into a close relationship, even if it’s just platonic, is always dangerous. Whether you’re racing to the altar or to a full calendar of hang outs and confessional conversation, taking the time to really get to know someone, beyond the immediate rush of chemistry, will save you from getting too close, too quickly with someone you’ll soon want to get away from. Here are five ways to save yourself from friending up too fast.
1) Avoid Early Oversharing
Just because you have an intense, immediate intimacy with someone that involves deep personal discussions instead of diving into bed, that doesn’t make your relationship potentially more solid or substantial. Getting too close to someone before you really know them will blind you to qualities you may eventually dislike and create an attachment that hurts one or both of you when you discover that, on a basic, less exciting level, your friendship just doesn’t work. Yes, knowing that you connect with someone makes it worthwhile to get to know them better, but under the right (or wrong) circumstances, quick connections can happen easily. So before you and this exciting new someone share life stories, take a step back.
2) Avoid Exchanging Emotions
The best way to get to know someone isn’t just by going slowly, but by finding out about who they are, not how they feel. Fact-based bonding doesn’t just allow you to share interests and life stories without getting emotionally involved; when you’re not flooded with feelings, it’s easy to see possible red flags of poor friendship potential. For example, if you find out that this person can’t keep a job, apartment, or even a cat for very long, odds are their friendship track record is equally stellar. Finding out the basic facts about someone can tell you tons about their strength and character without invading their privacy or creating premature intimacy.
3) Select Friends While Sober
From consuming record amounts of Flaming Hot Cheetos to singing the entire Little Mermaid soundtrack in public, being drunk or high makes a lot of things easier, including meeting people. But however much being intoxicated can reduce shyness or awkwardness, or make it pleasurable to socialize, it can also reduce your ability to be selective and careful while enhancing your impulsivity. Besides, people you can count on for a party can rarely be counted on for much else. Drugs and booze can make it easy to talk to people but much harder to get to know who they are or whether they’re worth getting to know in the first place.
4) Overcome Attractiveness
Aside from having too much to drink or too few boundaries, getting over-focused on attractiveness, either yours or the other person’s, is a good way to blind yourself to red flags and danger signs. Whatever makes someone attractive also makes it harder for people to see or judge them for who they truly are. So whether it’s due to charm, wit, wealth, charisma, or sex appeal—your own or others’—don’t allow attractiveness to control your choice of friends. On the contrary, how you get along when you or they are at your least appealing will tell you more about the power of your real friendship chemistry.
5) Bond Through Bad Times
Just as partying may make it too easy to connect with someone, having a fun-based friendship can fool you into thinking your bond is solid. Real friendships don’t just require work, they survive it, so test your friendship by working together, on a project or planning a trip, particularly during a time of personal hardship. Doing so will require you to define priorities, manage stress, demonstrate strengths and weaknesses, and match values and motivation. If you work well together, even when you’re tired and irritable, then your chemistry, and your friendship overall, are more likely to be stable. So seek opportunities to travel, cook, or assemble Ikea; if you can get through it intact, then you know you’ve found the real deal.
Posted by fxckfeelings on January 9, 2020
Lasting relationships based on instant connections are like positive news stories and quick-yet-healthy weight loss techniques; they’re so nice to hear about but so hard to believe they aren’t bullshit. Getting close to someone quickly feels wonderful, but like most good feelings, it isn’t necessarily good for you. And if the need for friendship drives you to become close before you really know someone, you are more likely to discover their bad or obnoxious side when it’s too late to back away without causing pain. Instead, develop your own ways for getting to know someone safely and slowly. That’s the only way to make a BFF without all the unnecessary pain and BS.
-Dr. Lastname
I have a very close friend who is driving me crazy! I’m not sure why but I feel as though everything she says is mindless and completely irritating. For example, she offered to lend me an upholstered chair for a work project. I know that was a nice thing for her to do, but it was the wrong color. And when I told her that it was the wrong color, she said I should “paint it,” which I’m pretty sure is nonsensical advice because it’s a chair, not a table, and if I try there’s a huge risk it will look like crap and be useless to both of us. The problem is that I know that she hasn’t changed at all during our friendship—she’s always been a little flakey—but my feelings towards her have, and I have no idea why. This has happened to me before with other people that I’ve been close to and I’m sick of it. My goal is to figure out why my feelings have changed and what can I do to stop being so irritable, because I’m tired of losing patience with her and losing friendships in general.
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