Posted by fxckfeelings on December 27, 2010
Maybe, on an animal level, disrespect is a challenge to our status in the herd that must be met with immediate, overwhelming attack, or we lose out. What an emotional reaction to disrespect usually results in, however, is more conflict and more power to the disrespecter. Take disrespect as a chance to see whether you measure up to your own standards and, if you do, your defense will become simple and require no huffing, puffing, or drama around the watering hole.
–Dr. Lastname
PLEASE NOTE: The next new post will be 1/3/11. Have a happy New Year’s Eve, but for our sake, an unhappy new year overall. (Not really.)
I get no respect and nothing but criticism at home, and only an idiot would stick around. My teen-age daughter complains loudly, to anyone who will listen, including holiday dinner guests, that I was never there for her, and my wife treats her as if she’s a sensitive soul who needs understanding and shouldn’t be contradicted. I think my daughter is verbally abusive, disrespectful, and embarrassing, and that my wife encourages her. As a practicing physician, I have no trouble finding respect at work; at home, I’m chopped liver. Tell me why I shouldn’t leave.
I’ll take your word that you’re a doctor, because your need for respect makes you sound more like a drug dealing thug from “The Wire.”
Disrespect might make you feel like you’re being perceived as weak, but that’s nothing compared to telling yourself, or anyone else, that criticism or disrespect is driving you out of your house.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 23, 2010
When you do something truly stupid, the punishment is twofold; first, you have the knowledge of your stupidity, and then, you have living with the results of said stupidity, or making someone you love live with your stupidity, which makes you feel guilty and makes them feel stupid for loving you in the first place. Unfortunately, stupid is an incurable part of being human—some of us have a more dominant stupid gene than others—and remorse makes it worse. If you want to get smart, begin by accepting your inner stupid and getting to know its habits. Then, maybe next time stupidity calls, you’ll have a better answer and skip the punishing results.
–Dr. Lastname
PLEASE NOTE: We will have a new post on Monday, 12/27, but we’re taking a week off after that for family’ing. If you have angst, holiday related or no, that you need to share, speak now or wait until 2011.
Every now and then my husband, who is a sweet soul and mostly very smart, does something so mind-bogglingly stupid that it puts the whole family in danger. The latest incident happened when he was hanging out at a bar after work and, deeply (into drinking and) moved by the hard luck story of the guy on the stool next to him, he offered, without asking me, to guarantee the guy’s car loan. The next thing we knew, the bank was after our savings because his ex-best-bar-buddy had stopped paying the loan and the car was nowhere to be found. I admit it, I did a lot of screaming and feel like I was a saint for not killing him, but the real goal here is, how do I prevent him from doing it again.
You’re asking a mental health clinician to help you understand and/or change your husband’s behavior. Instead, you should be talking to a lawyer.
You want to stop him from doing it again, but what you really need is to protect yourself from the sure-to-happen next time his impulsive, besotted generosity imperils the family treasury.
You probably expect me, as a mental health clinician, to support the humanistic, liberal, uplifting belief that therapy can help people can change. Sadly, you don’t need a professional of any kind to tell you what you already know: that therapy doesn’t have that kind of power WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on December 20, 2010
Whenever people are hurting at work, management will try to boost productivity by easing pain, which makes them feel both competent and compassionate. Trouble is, most such efforts piss everyone off by trivializing pain and suggesting things can be better when they can’t. Instead of trying to coddle your workforce or push up your company morale, both the employee and the employed would probably do better if they respected the fact that work is often painful, kept the personal bullshit to a minimum, and just got back to work.
–Dr. Lastname
[Adapted from a reader’s comment.]
Our boss tried to improve sagging morale by having us meet regularly in small groups led by a psychologist. I wish I could figure out what she’s trying to do and not be so annoyed by the way she’s doing it. She asks us to think of a wish-list of how to improve the way the organization functions, and then asks if that’s alright, and then, when someone describes something they’d like to see, like making people feel special by recognizing their birthdays, she praises them for having a great idea and makes them think of ways they could implement it, and then asks us if that’s alright, and then tells us we’re doing great and asks for more and is that alright. She sounds like Hal in 2001 and acts like a computer reinforcing people for contributions that will lift the group. Frankly, she creeps me out and the reason morale is bad is because we’re working too hard and not getting paid enough. My goal is to figure out what to do about someone who is being false and unhelpful.
Your work colleagues are not your family, regardless of what the boss and the boss’s psychologist tell you. When they start holding “sharing” sessions like this, the office becomes “The Office.”
Positive recognition and communication are not the answer to your work troubles, if only because work often sucks, which is why you get paid to do it. If you’re unhappy about doing too much for too little, it sucks even more.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 16, 2010
It’s easy to feel like a success when you’re given a gold medal; and when you’re just another schmuck getting lapped at the local track, it’s hard to take much joy from your efforts. If success is subjective, so is failure. If, however, we look at our accomplishments objectively, our lives are actually Special Olympics, and many of us who feel like losers are really champions.
–Dr. Lastname
My son makes a living and he’s a nice guy, but I don’t think he’s ever really pushed himself or lived up to his smarts. He works in a pet shop and lives with a nice girlfriend, but he’s 30 already. All his friends are professionals who own their own homes, and he cleans animal cages and rents an apartment. I wish I knew how to motivate him to do more with his life. Maybe if he went into therapy he’d discover that he’s afraid of success.
To paraphrase Fran Lebowitz, if you’re an American white Christian male and you’re not President of the United States, to some degree, you blew it.
It seems logical to say, about any bright, well-educated kid, that he could do anything if he really wanted to, particularly in this country, and that it’s a shame if he didn’t seize his opportunities.
If you truly agree with this statement or Fran’s, however, your thinking is wishful and potentially dangerous.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 13, 2010
Emotional blackmail, just like the unemotional kind, can’t be fought back against easily. Normally, blackmail leaves you broke, but when it’s emotional, you’re less broke and more broken, since you end up spending all your energy caring too much about the other person’s feelings. At that point, it doesn’t matter who has the last word; you’ll wind up exhausted and distanced both from the blackmailer and who you really are. To shield yourself from blackmail, know where you stand and why you stand there. After all, if you can hold your head up, they’ve got nothing to hold against you.
–Dr. Lastname
My husband always complains that I’m neglecting him and making him worry when I do what I really like, which is hiking and swimming, because he’s an indoor sort who worries a lot and doesn’t like to be alone. Now that we’re retired and the kids are well on their way in life, we’ve got plenty of time, and I wish he’d come along, but that’s not his nature. I’m not a daredevil, but after I took a serious tumble two years ago while hiking, he forced me to promise I’d never do it alone. Actually, I like company, but the pressure of worrying about when he’s going to go off on me about my selfishness and what I put him through and my lack of respect for his feelings makes me wonder if we’d be better off apart. My goal is to reach a decision about our marriage.
Going into this marriage, you must have known that it would be hard for your “indoor worrier” spouse to find middle ground with a weekend warrior like yourself. Now you’re wondering if you should call off the search.
It’s hard to stay unemotional about choices like this, but the best way to prepare for a decision about ending a marriage is to build up your independence and re-examine any concessions that are wearing you down.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 9, 2010
There are lots of frightening things in life, and unless you want to live out your days in a panic room, freedom from fear is never an option. Besides, if we all gave up after our first major scare or humiliation, everyone would still be hiding in a high school bathroom stall. So, instead of running for cover in your nearest small space, get used to freaking out and/or fucking up and ignoring whatever dismal news or critical judgment that fear tells you is the truth. Rely on your usual, pre-fear abilities to size up dangers, emerge from your hidey-hole, and respect yourself for doing whatever you think is necessary when fear is trying to bring you down.
–Dr. Lastname
I haven’t been able to recover my confidence since my new boss screamed at me and humiliated me in front of my team. He’s an ex-Ranger who’s been known to become abusive, like the drill sergeant he used to be. The company has reprimanded him, and my job isn’t in jeopardy, but even thinking about going back to work leaves me shaking, and I’ve had nightmares, so I need to get myself back together before going back to work.
This may sound unkind; but taking time to feel traumatized won’t put food on your table.
If there were a cure for your condition, I wouldn’t say that. I’d tell you to get cured, feel better, and then get back to work. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as canned “trauma-be-gone,” but government cheese is very real.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 6, 2010
Everyone from Mariah Carey to Charlie Brown has told us that what Christmas means is a happy, if not the happiest, time, and that you’re supposed to spread that happy to your neighbors, parents, and children. Most of us learn at an early age that Christmas is a mixed bag, and that the unhappy spreads faster than the happy, mostly among family members. Instead of focusing on good cheer, decide how best to use the holiday to express the Christmas spirit which, for those of you with some dysfunction in your families, means finding the best compromise between sharing a holiday together, protecting yourself from bad behavior, and avoiding the songmanship of Mariah Carey.
–Dr. Lastname
My 16-year-old daughter is a good kid, but she’s always been hell on wheels about breaking the rules. I always worry about her, because her father was sick and school is hard for her (she’s very ADD) and it would take very little to get her to drop out. The more I do to make sure she gets up on time, however, like driving her to school when she’s late, the more she misses the boat by always getting one absence more than whatever the school allows, so now I’ve got regular meetings with the principal (she refuses to show up) and neverending special ed plans. She’s really a nice kid and behaves well when she’s staying with her friends, but with me she’s often mean and nasty and swears all the time, and I just laugh it off. Now Christmas is coming, and I’d like her to be able to visit Mexico with a friend’s family, if she can just keep out of additional trouble. My goal is to avoid provoking her into doing more dumb things, dropping out of school, and getting into major trouble.
It’s clear that you love and accept your bad-ass kid, and that’s probably the most important part of any relationship, because non-acceptance is deadly.
You accept her, she accepts that you love her. She just can’t accept being told what to do.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 2, 2010
People often feel broken by trauma if they can’t stop attacks of anxiety and achieve the sense of control that they’re sure normal people have. Sadly, normal people are as common as guiltless donuts and pegasi; if being broken means that you can’t be fixed, then everyone is broken, because we all eventually have problems about ourselves that can’t be fixed. If you’re out there, braving the risks of relationships and work and child-rearing in spite of trauma symptoms, then you’re not broken—you’re a hero.
–Dr. Lastname
I made the executive decision today to not participate in our airport’s body scan or pat down procedure, and now my whole family is f*cked. I had my “no more than 3oz bottles” in their “official” airline approved baggies, so obviously I arrived at the airport planning to suck it up and be a team player. When we got to the security checkpoint however, I discovered there was not enough scope (or vodka) in my 3oz bottles to get me through the required security procedure. I started having flashbacks dating back to a sexual assault 20+yrs ago, and called off the idea of being a team player. I’m pissed at myself for ruining our plans, and equally pissed that my husband (who knows about my past experience) thinks it’s “silly” that I couldn’t just suck it up and go through it like everyone else. My kid’s are totally confused now as to why we are at home and not at Grandmas. I know from news stories I’m not the only one having a problem with our new security procedures. I know I don’t “owe” anyone an explanation, but it seems avoiding their questions is only making matters worse. How do I explain, without really explaining, why I’m refusing to put myself back in the position that clearly was not in my best interest at the time?
If you’re reactive to your feelings in public, for any reason, life becomes more dramatic, unpredictable and sometimes humiliating. You want your junk, physical and emotional, untouched.
Unfortunately, most times you do end up saying something emotionally, it doesn’t come out cool, leaving you and everyone else feeling a bit violated.
There are, however, some advantages to being emotionally reactive, particularly in the anxious way you describe, even if those advantages don’t involve airports.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on November 29, 2010
If you’re the kind of person who lets your job take over your life, then work can become like a bad relationship; you get totally consumed with pleasing your beloved, and while that devotion gives you great satisfaction of the kind you want, it seldom supplies the kind that you need. Don’t assume that work satisfaction is good for you until you’ve decided what else is important in your life, including money, real human romantic relationships, and, of course, not working.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m a competitive, hard-working woman who’s always been a star among my peers at work. My social life has been pretty good, too, though I haven’t been lucky in finding a partner. My problem is that I’m bored and discouraged by my current job—it doesn’t allow me to get the outstanding results I’m used to achieving—and it’s starting to put a dent in my confidence, my dating, and even my ability to look for a new job. I want to get my mood back to normal, I don’t care whether it’s through medication or psychotherapy, so I can again lead the work-pack and have more energy for my social life.
It’s nice to be a work superstar, especially when that confidence extends outside the office to every other facet of life. Too much hubris, however, and you’re starring in your own corporate episode of “Behind The Music.”
When you depend too much on being outstanding, as good as it feels, you’ll get into the special trouble that always happens to gifted people who need that special feeling of achievement (you, Leif Garrett, same difference).
For one thing, if you’re ambitious and good at what you do, you’ll always be recruited, and sooner or later, you’ll be recruited into a position that can’t work out. Your skills are still perfect, but your luck isn’t.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on November 25, 2010
As promised, we are taking today off to deal with our own woes and appetites. If you can’t wait until Monday, there’s always holiday advice leftovers from last year, plus Facebook and Twitter.
Happy Thanksgiving! We are, as always, thankful for your misery.
–Dr. Lastname
