Posted by fxckfeelings on October 4, 2018
Like our reader from earlier, you may never be able to stop the nagging voice in your head that craves closure from an ex after a bad breakup. What you can do, however, is follow these five steps to give yourself a kind of closure, or at least an education. It might not be the exact thing that the voice is begging for, but it is something the rest of you can benefit from.
1) Catch Up On What Closure Means
Despite what the pesky voice in your brain might insist, closure isn’t about getting reassurance from someone you care about that you’re OK and not at fault. It certainly isn’t what most people secretly want it to be, which is a chance to stay in contact with someone you may still have strong feelings for or even an opportunity to argue your case for getting back together. Closure, in so far as it exists, is a self-assessment you can do yourself to figure out what went wrong so you can avoid making the same mistakes, or falling for the same mistake-prone person. Involving the other person in your closure process isn’t just unnecessary, it’s unhealthy, because it makes his judgment more important than yours when it’s your own authority you should be heeding. Overall, closure is not the reassuring feeling your brain craves, just the act of doing what’s right to help you move on.
2) Solidify Your Standards
Begin your self-assessment, not by focusing on the forensics of your recent breakup, but by thinking objectively about what you think makes a good relationship and what qualities you think a good partner should possess. For example: someone who can keep his promises while not promising more than he’s ready to deliver, does his share, tries hard to be a good person and friend, i.e., someone who cares enough to put up with a reasonable amount of shit without too much complaining. Try to prioritize those qualities over more trivial ones, like looks, swagger, hairline, etc.
3) Make Sure You Measure Up
Once you’ve figured out your relationship standards, use them to judge whether he or you fucked up, or whether you both made a good try but it just didn’t work. For example, if he dumped you without warning, or even after acting very, very positively, you have a right to wonder whether he cares about the right things and is straight about his commitments (and whether your screening procedures need improvement). On the other hand, if you check with your friends and they think you treated him badly, then that’s something to work on. At no point in this process do you need to get his views or get him to agree with your views, just to come to a judgment of your own and stick with it.
4) Make Plans For Improvement
If he was a jerk and you should have seen it, don’t waste time blaming yourself for your own stupidity. Beating yourself up is a useless exercise while building up your aforementioned screening proceedures is a useful one that can protect you from future heartbreak. For example, if you want to avoid being taken by another self-centered user, force yourself to ask future prospective partners more questions about prior relationships or pay more attention to how he handles money and responsibilities. On the other hand, if you were a jerk to him and didn’t realize it, work with a therapist or a 12 step group on managing your shortcomings. In any case, after deciding what went wrong and what needs improvement, prepare to close the case.
5) Refuse Your Urges And Reassure Yourself
Whatever his faults or yours, or the absence of any fault, your evaluation is now finished, as is your excuse for wanting to reach out to your ex. Pushing yourself for approval from or agreement with him isn’t just an unnecessary thing to do, but a cruel thing to do to yourself, so of course you should stop it. Of course, the voice in your head will likely continue to pester you for the (nonexistent) type of closure that only he can provide, but at least now you can talk back to that voice using the results of your own closure search. You can also distract yourself from that voice, and from other urges to reconnect with your ex, by spending more time with friends, diving into work and hobbies, and/or using your new knowledge to rededicate yourself to finding a new relationship that’s much less likely to make you this crazy again.
Posted by fxckfeelings on September 20, 2018
People often talk about closure as a necessary tool for recovering from trauma, as if closure were the psychological stitches required to heal the deep wounds caused by loss or suffering and move on. Unfortunately, as much as we deserve to be at peace with ourselves, psychic wounds don’t have the same healing protocol as physical ones; there are no quick procedures to sew yourself up and become whole again, and efforts to get that kind of closure can easily make things worse. As satisfying a feeling as closure may be, then, it’s never a a constructive goal. The best way to heal after a loss is to figure out for yourself what went wrong and what you can do better next time while doing your best to keep going, despite the pain. You may never feel a sense of resolution, but you will find a way to move on.
-Dr. Lastname
“Closure” is a pain in my ass, mainly because I’m the kind of person who OBSESSES over closure until it’s been obtained. Until I get it, I constantly wonder if my ex thinks poorly of me, what did I do to make him cut off all communication, if he thinks I’m a wingnut, if everything that’s happened is my fault, etc. My goal is to be able to “let go” of my ex and to “embrace” the here and now, even though it’s rather MEH, without the closure my brain relentlessly craves.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on September 5, 2018
As our reader from earlier can attest to, the “Seven Year Itch” in marriage doesn’t really keep to a schedule, nor can it be easy to ignore, no matter how solid, smooth, and not-irritating your union has been up to that point. As with any itch, however, there are dangers to actually scratching it, especially in excess, like drawing blood and causing permanent damage that will do nothing to prevent a similar itch in the future. So instead, scratch satisfaction off your list and use these five ways to manage an emotional itch instead.
1) Identify Your Most Important Personal Goals, Independent of Itching
If you value independence and being a good parent and partner, you know how much you need to work at a job, not just for personal satisfaction but, more often, in spite of personal dissatisfaction, because you need the money for survival, security, and helping your children. Your partnership, which is also work, has a similar purpose; you stick with it because of how it contributes to your life and the life of your family, in addition to, or despite, how much it does or doesn’t satisfy your needs for fun and intimacy. That’s why you have to remember all your needs and values when the urge to cheat strikes, not just the ones that promise you happiness and satisfaction when you’re lonely or bored.
2) Dedicate Yourself To/Distract Yourself With These Goals
Build a busy schedule around relevant activities that contribute directly to achieving your big picture goals. That includes time for work and doing your best to provide for your family, but also a large amount of time for your kids, not just in terms of having fun with them but also caring for them and getting them to and from their activities. And of course, you also need to schedule time to nurture your marriage as well as your individual wellbeing, by maintaining friendships and getting exercise. With all that going on, you should be too tired at end of the day to get hung up on being lonely, bored or easily distracted by old flames.
3) Find a Friend or Coach Who Can Make Urge Management Easier
Dwelling on your lost love, wandering eye or or trying to understand the reasoning or motivations behind either will just make your urges worse and keep your old flame/new interests alive. Instead, look for coaching from a friend or professional, like a therapist or life coach, who can help you distract yourself from feelings that won’t go away any time soon by reinforcing your reasons and values for not satisfying them.
4) Teach Yourself To Identify Triggers
It may not be worth trying to understand why you feel a certain way, but it is helpful to note exactly when and how you do. By keeping a diary of when and how intensely you’re haunted by feelings of loss and identify, you’ll learn what events, places, and general circumstances trigger these feelings and are thus best avoided, if possible. Even if you notice that the feelings hit you when you’re tired or bored or irritated with your spouse, you’ll get better at seeing them as a side effect of exhaustion and not something to be taken seriously. Either way, note the patterns, if any, and remind yourself, with the help of a therapist or coach, that your feelings go away and don’t require you to act on them.
5) Regularly Remind Yourself Of Your Success
At the end of the day, don’t measure how you’re doing at dealing with and managing urges by how happy you are or how well you’ve eliminated feelings of loss or yearning. Instead, take time to view your day in the context of what you’re trying to accomplish and how hard you’re working towards it, whether or not it makes you happy, and give yourself credit when it’s deserved. Indeed, when you’re tired, bored, and somewhat lovesick but still manage to reach your goals and act like a good parent and friend, you’ve been more successful than you can imagine, whether or not you can appreciate it.
Posted by fxckfeelings on August 25, 2018
Many people, like the cancer-riddled protagonists of young adult novels, stars of reality shows who spend most of their time on screen bleeped or blurred, or anybody who’s gotten a neck tattoo on a dare, believe the point of life is to live intensely and in the moment and therefore any experience or relationship that makes them feel more alive has value. The major problem with that notion, aside from how it actually decreases one’s life expectancy, is that it devalues the work it takes to make a living, keep promises, build and support a family, and generally build a life you can truly be proud of. Sometimes these efforts are boring and do not yield joy for long periods of time, but it’s for you to decide whether you’d rather have a short life dedicated to thrilling romance and great adventure, or a long, boring one dedicated to being a good person.
-Dr. Lastname
I’ve been married over 10 years but I just had a short affair with an also-married friend and it ended when he confessed the whole thing to his husband after the guilt of keeping secrets got to him. His husband made us cut all contact with each other so they can repair their marriage and I haven’t heard from him since. I also confessed to my husband and he has forgiven me and gotten over it, but I haven’t. I don’t think I was ever happier than during the time when I was having the affair. I do realize the affair was a fantasy situation—we both have young kids and care about our spouses—but the attraction to our significant others had diminished while the chemistry between us was powerful and ideal. My goal is to stop thinking about my affair partner, move on with my life, and be the spouse and parent that everyone needs me to be without constantly mourning this lost love.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on August 9, 2018
If you live with a recurring, debilitating mental illness, you may, like our reader from earlier, be hoping to find a routine, a management plant, or just an ancient spell that will keep unpleasant, disruptive relapses at bay. Unfortunately, mental illness doesn’t reliably respect our routines—it is, for lack of a better word, crazy that way—so instead of looking for ways to prevent relapses, here are five ways to deal with a relapse if and when one does occur.
1) Don’t Confuse A Few Symptoms With Something Bigger
Beware the urge to overreact every time you find yourself dragging, getting overly anxious, feeling miserable, or generally exhibiting some of the symptoms that come with your illness, especially when they could have an easy-to-identify cause, like PMS or stress at work. Instead, force yourself to look at the bigger picture; review your list of prior symptoms and ask yourself whether these ones are occurring in the same bad combination that interferes with your work and relationships and refuses to disappear after you’ve tried to chase it away with some healthy, happy activities. Then get input from your therapist or just people who know you as you decide whether to declare an illness in progress and implement your relapse plan.
2) Put Your Relapse Plan Into Action
As described in our earlier response to our reader, you should already have prepared a list of the interventions and medications that did or did not seem to work in the past and used this experience, together with advice from clinicians and others who observed your responses, to devise a plan for stopping future relapses. Of course, you may not know for sure what worked because clinical symptoms are often slow to respond and circumstances make it hard to tell what treatment, among the many you may be trying at one time, is actually doing the trick. As such, your plan must take these uncertainties into account while offering you clear options.
3) Know What New Treatments Are Out There
After reviewing your current relapse plan with your current doctor, ask her about any new treatments that may have been developed since your last episode. While remaining open to new treatments and ideas, remember to trust your own ideas, because your doctor is less likely to remember what worked for you in the past than you do. Also, there is currently no way for doctors to make good predictions about what will or won’t work for you based on an analysis of anything but the most basic symptoms and, of course, your previous response.
4) Push Back Against Fear and Pessimism
Drawing on your previous experience with depression and anxiety, as well as any ideas you have picked up from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doctors, and friends, ask yourself whether your current thinking is distorted by symptoms, e.g., whether your depression or anxiety is making you believe that nothing seems to be working, you can’t tolerate your symptoms, your health routine has failed, etc. Then use your knowledge about the facts of depression and your own experience with it to respond to those false, negative perceptions of reality that your illness is flooding your brain with.
5) Begin Treatment While Staying Both Positive And Pragmatic
Knowing, as you do, that the results of current treatments for mental illness are always hard to predict, even when a certain treatment has worked well in the past, focus on how well you do with the process rather than the quality of its results. If improvement is delayed or a particular treatment fails, remind yourself that other treatments may well succeed and that keeping your life on track and persevering with your work and relationships when you’re impaired and distracted by psychiatric symptoms is always an achievement to be proud of and feel good about, even when you feel terrible overall.
Posted by fxckfeelings on July 12, 2018
After experiencing something painful and difficult, it’s natural to work hard to regain control and find ways to avoid going through the same thing again. In some cases, that means avoiding a certain kind of person, or type of dark street, or a specific hairstylist, and hoping that these better choices, combined with better luck, will keep you safe. However, when the experience involves a severe episode of what could likely become a chronic mental illness, your smart choices and allotment of good luck are fairly limited; as much as you may want to prevent a recurrence of your disease and future symptoms, no search for the best treatment or routine is guaranteed to help. And pushing yourself too hard to keep yourself safe won’t just dangerously raise your expectations but distract you from the real work of making a plan for how to deal with a relapse. So real hope should never create expectations of control, be it over your safety, heart, or bangs, but on living one’s life as fully as possible when control isn’t possible.
-Dr. Lastname
I am a person who has a mental illness! I have treatment-resistant depression and ADD and a soupçon of PTSD. I am in treatment with a psychiatrist I like very much and it’s actually pretty chill that therapy really works. I’m a much healthier person than I was five years ago! So between that and the fact that I have been in therapy long enough to throw my inner child a quinceañera, I am not asking for treatment-related advice. It’s just that sometimes, daily life is really challenging, and as a moderately successful person with a moderately growing career, I spend a lot of time worrying that my relative instability is going to just tank everything. Like I have spent the past three days in a panicky fear that I had re-entered the depression abyss when it turned out to really just be hideous PMS, which I can’t predict (really). Either way, my Depressed Self was back in action and I spent a couple days sleeping, crying, and unable to work. My goal is to build a routine, consistent life with steady work and self-care, despite the occasional, disruptive curveballs that depression throws my way.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 17, 2018
Just as mental illnesses are harder for people to accept because they lack the visible symptoms of physical illnesses, cognitive disabilities are much more misunderstood than physical ones. After all, you wouldn’t tell someone paralyzed to just try getting out of their wheelchair, but people often assume that they can help someone who, like our reader from a previous post, has a legitimate cognitive impairment like ADHD by encouraging him to just work harder or focus. And of course, as well intentioned as that kind of advice may be, it’s also ignorant, which means it hurts more than it helps. Here are five common, incorrect ways to avoid when trying to help people with ADHD and what you should do instead.
1) Loading Up Their ADHD Library
Some books on ADD are quite good and filled with helpful information, but expecting someone with ADHD to read them, no matter how beneficial the books are, is bound to backfire. If someone struggles with accomplishing tasks, giving them another task to fulfill, no matter how much it may benefit them, is only going to further frustrate them and disappoint you. Besides, trying to change someone, rather than helping them manage who they are, is always going to be met with resistance and resentment. So give them your own synopsis of whatever you liked about the book and offer positive reinforcement if and when they seem to put those ideas into action.
2) Nagging with Negative Reinforcement
You may think that someone with ADHD would appreciate frequent reminders about tasks; after all, if they have trouble focusing, any effort to help them stay focused should be a good thing. Unfortunately, people with ADHD are also still people, and there is no human being on earth who responds well to constant nagging, especially when it culminates in an angry scolding for not listening to the nagging and getting the task done. Don’t then assume that someone who lacks the ability to remind themselves to do things is eager to outsource the constant reminders to you or anyone else. Instead, urge them once to think about a way to set up reminders for themselves, like on their phone, or to feel free to ask for your help in providing such reminders if that would be better.
3) Echoing Others/Past Achievements
Encouraging someone with ADHD to believe in himself by comparing current failures to past achievements, or the achievements of others, is intended to give that person confidence by showing him that he can perform better now because he once did, or because someone who isn’t smarter/just as flakey once did. But there may be good reasons why he can’t repeat an earlier success or equal the performance of someone who may be similar but isn’t his equal in other ways. So, without meaning to, you’re making him responsible for a failure he may not be able to help, and that won’t have a good effect on his mood, self-esteem, or performance (and certainly not on his relationship with you). Better to focus on his efforts, regardless of whether he gets good results, and, if the results suck, to find methods that manage his attention better.
4) Giving Them Goals
As with providing constant reminders (a.k.a. nagging), giving someone with ADHD very specific and quantitative performance goals also seems like a good way to help since you think you’re stepping up where their brain can’t. In reality, giving someone a goal, let alone reminding them about it and rewarding them for meeting it, isn’t really the same as giving them the techniques to wrangle their mind enough to meet it. Since inventing and pushing someone towards a finish line will probably just make them more flustered and frustrated, ask them to create and share goals for themselves. Then congratulate them on their efforts, regardless of results, while supporting successful approaches and encouraging the search for better ones if a goal isn’t met.
5) Figuring Out Why They Fuck Up
Whether the problem is a cognitive issue like ADHD or an everyday issue like drinking or infidelity, most people assume the best way to solve is to get to its source or cause. So you may think you’re helping someone with ADHD by getting her to explore her emotional reasons for failing, e.g., that she’s performing badly because she’s secretly really angry at you and trying to defeat you out of spite, or because she’s afraid that succeeding will set her up for future shame, humiliation, or rejection when she eventually fails again. In reality, finding the source of a behavioral problem gives you an explanation, not a cure; being abused might be the reason you started drinking, but admitting that causation won’t be the reason you stop. With ADHD, the cause isn’t anything someone has done or feels, but the bad luck and/or genes they were cursed with. So trying to help someone find out why they have ADHD is in fact only pushing them to needlessly blame themselves for a problem they didn’t create. Instead, stop trying to fix or change them, period; you don’t get rid of or overcome ADHD, you manage it, so as soon as you accept them for who they are, it’ll be easier for them to do the same and work towards making the best of the brain they’ve got.
Posted by fxckfeelings on May 3, 2018
ADHD, like any cognitive disability, can be misdiagnosed as a personality flaw; seeing your problems as due to your character, not a disorder, can make you self-critical and vulnerable to the criticism of others at a time when you should be self-motivated and eager to find outside encouragement. Blaming yourself for everything you can’t achieve will just make you depressed, which just makes it harder to do well, which of course makes you feel even worse and more responsible, further impairing your ability to perform. So before you let your depression and/or critical audience bring you down entirely, push yourself to recognize that you aren’t a bad or worthless person, just a good person with the bad luck to have a quirky brain. Then develop standards that are realistic and respectful of good efforts rather than competitive results so you’ll be able to give yourself, and demand from others, the respect you deserve.
-Dr. Lastname
So my husband and I have had a very bad run over the last few years of our marriage, after we had our first child and made the mistake of getting into business together. We do things VERY differently; he’s always on time, organized and knows his mind, and I’m the opposite on all fronts. The cash flow and our available time kept dwindling while our family grew. And I caused a lot of damage—in our relationship and in our business—so that we had to shut the business down. He kept telling me what I needed to do to change my ways, buying me books and sending me links to articles, all along believing that I would and wanted to change, until at some point he realized that I was uninterested in the work. He also concluded that I am the most selfish person he’s known, and that I have been lying, thieving, and not investing in our relationship a fraction of what he has. He stopped helping around the house and with the child. I now had baby, house AND work to do up to his standards in order to redeem myself. So from here it goes like this; I’m constantly in a frame of mind that I don’t have enough time so I don’t do anything significant to address things, then wait ’till the last minute and then throw up my hands saying that, well, I did not have enough time to do it (when in truth, I had a lot). He then turns into a nag, waiting to catch my every slip-up and make a mountain out of it. Now the house and the child also start getting short shrift, up until the point where EVERYTHING lies around incomplete or half done and I have no motivation to do even the things I loved doing. I don’t groom myself anymore. He’s so nasty with me that he’s recently become short with our child and physically abusive to me. My goal is to understand why I don’t do things I know I should be doing so I can overcome both my inertia to change and this hellish situation.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on April 19, 2018
If, like our reader from a previous post, you’re feeling lost after losing a long-term relationship, don’t let the urge to sulk and self-flagellate prevent you from doing a smart, objective romantic post-mortem. After all, every bad break up is an opportunity to learn good lessons about what went wrong, so as a cheat sheet for your relationship evaluation, here are five unhealthy things that people are all-too-often attracted to; learning how to recognize your weaknesses is the only way to get stronger, smarter, and less likely to ever be this miserable again.
1) Attracted to Unavailability
Groucho Marx famously said he didn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member, but when it comes to relationships, most people feel the inverse; they only want to be with people who don’t seem to want them around. This may be due to deep-seated, unhealthy levels of insecurity and self-loathing, i.e., the feeling that, if someone loves you and is eager to spend time with you, there must be something wrong with them. So check to see if you tend to pursue those who keep their distance while avoiding those who show interest and seek your company. If you do, it’s worth taking time to get to like yourself a little more before finding someone else to love.
2) Cool with Constant Criticism
If you’re a perfectionist who is often self-critical or just been raised by a family of critics, you may find yourself attracted to people who also love picking you apart. As long as they aren’t also mean and unloving, that’s fine, but that’s rarely the case. Ask yourself if past partners have been cold and good at put-downs; if they have, beware seeking the company of critical people and get to work on finding ways to be kinder to yourself. Raise your standards for how you treat yourself and you’ll automatically raise the standards for how you expect to be treated by others.
3) You Find Slackers Sexy
You may be the kind of hard worker who’s drawn to partners who generally give making an effort a hard pass. Perhaps you’re drawn to the appreciative-yet-aimless because they make you feel useful and strong by comparison, but their inability to share your work ethic, along with a willingness to let things go to pot when you’re unavailable, will eventually make you nuts. So if you find that you have an unwise tendency to love the lazy, make an extra effort to try finding a partner with a job, a goal, or just an aversion to spending too much time on the couch.
4) The Need To Nightingale
Too many people are attracted to the damaged and wounded, likely because they get an extra good feeling from having someone they can’t just love but also rescue and take care of. This attraction may come from taking care of someone while growing up who was wounded, or from feeling wounded themselves. For whatever reason, helping the helpless is a hopeless situation; if they get better, you’ll resent feeling useless, and if they don’t, you may still eventually become disappointed by your partner’s persisting disabilities. If it becomes clear that a larger-than-expected number of your exes were the walking wounded, find a smart way to channel your nurturing instincts, like through volunteering, or adopting a one-legged cat, so you can find a partner who doesn’t require them.
5) Drawn to Drama
While it would be nice if everybody were happy to get their drama fix through tabloids, pro wrestling, or the Bravo network, too many of us enjoy and invite drama into our everyday lives. Lots of us are attracted to the kind of people who can turn real life into an episode of Real Housewives; the crazy, angry, and altogether dramatic who initially provide a lot of fun, excitement and passion (that eventually becomes exhausting and even scary). So if you tend to bypass boring people and seek out “big personalities,” it’s time to stop seeing drama as a draw and start recognizing it as a red flag.
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 5, 2018
Given the choice, most people prefer to hold the stars, a deity, or their own shortcomings responsible for the pain in their lives rather than accept the existence and power of pure bad luck. And while no one can definitively argue that horoscopes and gods aren’t worth believing, it’s objectively true that assuming responsibility for and blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong in your life, especially where relationships are involved, is a total waste of time. Sure, you can learn how to avoid bad partners, but you can’t control whether you’ll ever find or keep a good one, and some people just aren’t lucky that way. So if you turn out to be unlucky in love and heartbroken, don’t waste time cursing your sign, your lord, and especially not yourself; refocus your energy on what you do control, the kind of life you want to live, and the ways you can achieve that life on your own, regardless of whose company you’re blessed with or what crap the universe throws at you next.
-Dr. Lastname
I’ve been in and out of a relationship with the same married man for 17 years. I’m ashamed of the stupidity of it all, including moving hundreds of miles to be closer to him. I broke it off again a few months ago and he seems fine, but I’m not. We are not in communication and it continues to hurt, but I’m determined not to ever allow him back in my life. I honestly don’t trust myself though if the opportunity presents itself. I’ve been divorced for 24 years and living and working on my own, but I feel addicted to this man and have no idea how not to be. My goal is to finally end things for good and find a way to move on.
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