Posted by fxckfeelings on October 26, 2009
Like the injured gazelle at the watering hole, human beings also have an instinct to conceal their weakened status; often, our worst fear isn’t being set upon by unknown predators, but by those close to us, who will be disappointed when our wounds impair our usual performance. Even a gazelle, however, would realize that, when wounded, putting pride and other people’s needs first is ridiculous.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m an early middle-aged woman, lucky enough to have the problems that come with getting saner and older. I grew up in one of those sad alcoholic homes from which I never gave up working to extricate myself. I screwed life up at first but have been recovered from alcoholism over twenty years, similarly recovered from eating disorders (bulimia, anorexia, binge eating), returned to the school I had ditched to finally graduate with honors, kept jobs (now retired) and, a real miracle, I have been married to a terrific guy in my sobriety and am (for real) happily married. I have solid loving friends. I’ve seen therapists for the depression, which intermittently interferes but even found a half-assed but useful medication. A good life…except for the real problems that come with age. That wonderful husband has a couple of chronic diseases, my best friend died of the cancer I survived, and everyone is dead in my small original family. I am experiencing that trapped childhood feeling of being in a world in which I am helpless and those I love are hopeless and going away. I realize I must just feel the hurt and keep on anyway, but I am tired, and my stamina is more fragile now. I disappoint those I love and make mistakes more. Goal in writing you: To get a better grip on myself and accept more deeply that I cannot change the pain of life. I would like to not keep blaming myself, a old bad habit that lingers. Sorry I’ve gone on so long but I guess I wanted to show that I have really tried to help others and myself even if I’m whining now.
You see your goal as rising above the pain of aging, but you can’t fool me (remember, I went to Harvard): your deeper goal is to help people, to the point that their aging has worn you down and caused you to forget that you have other goals. For example, not getting worn down unless it’s really necessary.
So it’s not aging that’s your problem, but what aging has done to your ability to help others while keeping your priorities straight. That’s what I think is causing you the most grief. After all, if you were old but weren’t as responsive to the needs of others, all you’d have to worry about is your bad back and Tivo’ing NCIS.
On top of ascertaining your real goal, I can also guess you’re not from Samaria, so you don’t have a Samaritan license (funny, you don’t look Samaritan). That’s the first thing that’s wrong with your initial goal—wanting too much to help others.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 22, 2009
When different members of one family worship more than one god, life can become an unholy mess. If all parties can appreciate each other, however, and share the same values—even if they attribute their higher motivations to be good to different sources—then religion doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with the love that a family shares.
–Dr. Lastname
My wife is Jewish, and I’m not (I’m a severely lapsed Catholic). Our oldest kid is about to enter school, and my wife has put it on the table that she wants him to go to a Jewish private school, which is surprising to me, not just because I’m not Jewish, but because my wife isn’t that religious at all—we go to celebrate a couple of holidays a year at her parents’ house but we never go to temple or anything. Now she wants our son to learn Hebrew, and I don’t get it, not just because she’s never cared before, but because if she’s worried about getting him a good education, Catholic schools are cheaper and he doesn’t need to learn a new alphabet. I don’t know how to get into this discussion without opening a huge holy can of worms, which is so strange considering how small a role religion has played in our married life up to now. My goal is to figure this out without stepping on any landmines or having my son end up studying and entering a religion I myself don’t practice (nor does my wife!).
If you stick with your own kind, be they your same religion, race, or member of the same area Trekker group, you can take lots of things for granted. It’s easier, there’s less pain, and you share common holidays, religious education, and strange-smelling foods.
Then again, maybe you knew what you were doing when you married outside the clan; it’s going to be a lot more interesting. Of course, if you dislike negotiation and conflict, you should have stayed away from Jews [disclaimer: Dr. Lastname is a proud member of the tribe].
If you can accept the fact that there are some painful, unavoidable differences between you and your wife, however, then you can start working on defining your areas of commonality and difference and find respectful ways to compromise without incurring any wrath, be it God’s or your wife’s.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 19, 2009
The old saying is, “opinions are like assholes– everybody’s got one.” The sentiment here at fxckfeelings.com is more along the lines of, “assholes make up a lot of the population,” so you need to deal with other people’s unsolicited input without letting it grind you down. Many opinions are ignorable and interchangable, like many of the assholes in the universe. Other opinions, however, are worth considering, because not everyone is an asshole, and you might have something you need to learn.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve always gotten some attitude at work because I’m a woman (some people seem to act like that’s the only reason I’ve gotten as far as I have), but recently, due to the economy, I’ve been dealing with a lot more disrespect. Frankly, the opposite should be true, and I should be getting loads of appreciation for doing twice the work I used to after so many lay-offs. Instead, people think that it’s not fair that I get to keep my job, and while the sexist stuff was annoying, this recent turn of events has made things almost unbearable. I’m sick of not being appreciated for my talent and hard work and instead having to deal with everyone’s bullshit and bitterness instead. My goal is to get treated appropriately for a job well done, simple as that.
While appreciation certainly makes the job easier—it makes most things in life easier—it doesn’t cut it as a goal, if only because need for appreciation makes you easy prey to anyone who gives you lots of appreciation, twice as much work, and no more pay. I can’t abide your goal to be a sucker.
Appreciation also makes you reactive to other people’s feelings, instead of to your own reasons for being there, so don’t quit a job because everyone at work is critical, and don’t stay because they tell you you’re marvelous.
Remember what you’re working for: money, not love. Unless you’re a bad prostitute.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 15, 2009
Accepting that we are all fucked by life is a basic tenet of the f*ckfeelings.com philosophy; there’s a certain zen to it, as we encourage not just being one with the universe and its glory but also with its amber waves of pain. For people who suffer from depression, pain makes an obvious attempt to define your life goal as “I’ve got to stop this.” But killing pain, as desirable as it is, will always compound your troubles if you make it your goal. Your goal is your goal and pain is pain and never the twain should meet.
–Dr. Lastname
I have been struggling with depression for most of my adult life, and I do mean struggling. No matter how many times I find myself going through months at a time of feeling hopeless, angry, and miserable, I know it’s a treatable illness—a chemical imbalance— nd that there must be a way to control it. Over the past twenty years, I’ve been through a handful of shrinks and at least a dozen medications, because no matter how bad it gets, I’ve refused to give up looking for the treatment that will allow me to fulfill the promise of my otherwise lucky life. The problem is that, twenty years into this battle, and I’m still not winning. Treatment works for a while, and just when it seems like things are finally working out for me and I’m in the clear, everything falls apart again. My goal is to figure out how—with what treatment, medication, game plan—to get control of this disease and live a normal life, because I’m stronger than this, and I refuse to let depression get the last laugh.
Hold up—did I miss the morning’s headlines that declared depression a curable illness? Up until yesterday, it wasn’t, and when you think about it, the list of truly curable diseases is an adorably short one. Really, unless you’ve got athlete’s foot, you’re probably shit out of luck.
That said, it doesn’t mean you should shoot yourself unless you’re similarly upset by the incurability of hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis, high cholesterol, and all the other illnesses that most of us get, sooner or later. Even athlete’s foot isn’t worth it.
The issue here is that if you think that beating an illness means getting rid of it, you’ve lost before you’ve begun to fight. And if that illness is depression, then losing means getting more depressed, which means becoming a bigger loser, ad infinitum.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 13, 2009
Sometimes, knowing is indeed half the battle, at least if you’re talking about where you left your car keys or the answers to a math test. When it comes to tracing the origins of your behavior, however, pinning your temper on dad or your bad taste in men on bad boys isn’t going to lead you to a nicer, smarter you. Knowing why you’re a prick won’t make you better; not being a prick will, regardless of where the fault for your prickish genes lies.
–Dr. Lastname
It’s been a tough year (surprise), and so I’ve been a little more quick to anger than I usually am, and I tend to have a few more beers after work than I would normally have. Things with my wife were kind of rough because of all of this, so she told me to see a therapist, and for the sake of my marriage, I agreed, because losing my wife would be the worst thing that could happen. Six months or so ago, my therapist started asking me about my childhood, and it finally clicked that my dad also had a really bad temper, and was also a pretty lousy drunk, but I’d never really thought of him that way, and I’d never really made the connection to my own behavior. My therapist was really pleased at my breakthrough, but here I am, six months later, and I don’t feel any better, and my wife is ready to leave if I don’t stop yelling at her. My goal is to use what I’ve learned in therapy to solve my problems, but what is it I haven’t figured out, why do I keep acting this way, and why am I spending money on therapy if I’m getting nowhere?
Once psychotherapy helps you figure out where your mean streak comes from, you can write an interesting book about it and, usually, blame it on a brutal ancestor and tell Oprah all about it.
What all that hard-earned knowledge probably won’t help you much with is keeping you in check the next time you get irritable and/or drunk. Bad daddy or no, what will help you a lot more is to get sober and learn how to shut the fuck up.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 12, 2009
Due to the holiday weekend/a day of mourning for the end of the baseball season (Sox take it all the way in 2010!), Dr. Lastname is taking today off and will have a new post on Tuesday instead. See you then.
–Dr. Lastname
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 8, 2009
It’s easy, when someone can’t control their behavior, to assume that they are evil, stubborn, or somehow defective and that you’ve got to get through to them, one way or another (not so nice) way. Just because someone can’t behave, however, doesn’t mean s/he’s evil and/or totally resistant to your values; and just because you’re getting nowhere with them doesn’t mean they won’t get it together eventually. It’s easy to write someone off, and it’s easy to be written off, but if you’re hoping to work through a problem instead of just blame someone for it, the only thing incurably defective in these scenarios is the moralizing.
–Dr. Lastname
My older daughter just turned 10, and I’m fairly certain that she is pure evil. My wife and I are not bad people—no family history of mental illness, either—but our older daughter, who looks like a normal little girl, says such nasty things to her little sister that it would make your head spin. Our younger daughter, who’s 7, thinks her sister is a miserable terror, and I have to say, I agree with her; the stuff that comes out of our 10-year-old’s mouth is so cruel, I’m almost in awe of it. My wife and I have sat her down and asked her if she acknowledges how awful her words are, how much it hurts her little sister, and how serious we are about how much she needs to change her attitude. Since then, our older has been less mouthy with us, but just as terrible to her little sister, and we have no idea how to make it stop. My goal is to stop my older daughter from being so mean—that is, if she’s not just satanic and hopeless. I’d really like to get her to understand what she’s doing and why she needs to stop (if I can get that through her evil mind).
As those Spanish Inquisition cardinals learned while swishing around in their gorgeous red gowns, any effort to stamp out the devil gives him a giant energy boost and brings him (or her) to dramatic life.
This is because most of us—even the best of us, like David Letterman—have some devilish impulses that bust out when we’re tired, or rubbed the wrong way, and generally when our control is far from perfect.
So when someone tries to eradicate our wickedness, we may initially agree with their goals. Sooner or later, however, when our impulses don’t cooperate by disappearing, self-hate and shame get stronger and, yes, you guessed it, feed the nasty impulses, whatever they are. The cardinals get to meet the very devil they were trying to exorcise, and the devil’s poor host snarls back and throws up pea soup. A classic vicious circle.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on October 5, 2009
While being selfless seems like an admirable quality in the abstract, most of us learn early that people with a thing for giving aren’t actually so easy to be around; it’s hard to have an even give-and-take with somebody who doesn’t fulfill the “take” part of the bargain. Selflessness maybe feel good in the short term, but the more you extend yourself while shutting out (or being shut out by) the other party, the more likely you are to end up with only yourself as company.
–Dr. Lastname
I love my girlfriend, and we’ve gone through a lot together; not just living in different cities (which I’ll get to), but also serious health problems. I was there for her for every second of her treatment for cancer, an ordeal that lasted for one scary year, before she went into remission. While we were living together at that point, it wasn’t long after she was in the clear that my father asked me if I could move back to my home city to help him at work—he wanted some help expanding the family business—so I told my girlfriend it would be six months, max, and then I’d move back in with her. But six months have passed, and my dad says the business won’t work without me (although, admittedly, it has in the past), and I don’t think it would be fair to keep stringing my girlfriend along. I love her, but I’m needed here, and I also don’t want to hurt her and be responsible for a relapse. My goal is to break up with my girlfriend and get her to understand it’s the best thing to do.
Some people are born givers; they enjoy giving and, if they don’t think about it, their giving impulses push them closer to whomever needs them most. You might think such selfless givers were saints, regular Ghandi-jis or Mary Poppinses.
In reality—and while most people are loath to admit it—most selfless givers are assholes to everyone but the one who makes them feel most obligated. (Just ask Ghandi’s wife.)
So, my giving friend, I’m going to tell you the same thing I’d advise your ex-girlfriend to say to you: that your goal shouldn’t be to feel better about excusing yourself from your obligation to your girlfriend, but to figure out your own priorities, regardless of your obligations to her, your father, or anyone else.
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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 28, 2009
From having your sister falsely accuse you of stealing her doll to being landed with a deadbeat dad, most people learn early that family is rarely fair. Still, be you the familial accuser or accusee, there’s usually a great risk to speaking your mind; family bonds, unlike bridges, can never be completely burned, so unless you want to be forever tied to someone you’ve tried to set on fire, it’s better to shut up about injustice and accept the relatives you’ve got.
–Dr. Lastname
My mother has always been quick to take offense—hear things the wrong way, feel easily hurt, want an apology—and I’ve always been the one to smooth things out and reassure her and, if necessary, tell her I’m sorry. Recently, she got really angry when she heard me talking to a family friend at a party and thought that I was being critical and complaining about her. I told her that was absurd, I didn’t mean things that way and that the family friend didn’t hear it that way. Besides, it’s not the sort of thing I’d say about anyone. But my mom acted like I didn’t realize how mean I’d been. So I spoke to the family friend, who agreed with me, and I asked her to talk to my mom and let her know she hadn’t heard any criticism either, but my mom says she’s just trying to smooth things over. I know this is just how my mom is, but that doesn’t mean that it ever stops making me crazy, and everything about this latest stunt is totally unreasonable. My goal is to get her to see she’s being a nut and get over it.
Freud famously put a lot of emphasis on mothers, and most people assume that “tell me about your mother?” is the first question a psychiatrist asks a patient. My response to that, however, is that I don’t really care about your mother. And even if your mother was my patient, I wouldn’t be able to make her “better.”
You think, if only you could get your mom to stop being a nut, your problems would be over. And hey, if only I could find a way of turning dog turds into solid gold, I’d never have to work again. Alas, turds are turds, and your dreams haven’t come true for many years. Assume they won’t come true now.
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