Posted by fxckfeelings on November 18, 2013
There are about as many ways to describe “love” as there are ways to order coffee at Starbucks; you can love someone but not be in love with them, care about someone but not love them exactly, love someone but want someone else low-fat, etc. Family relationships are even more complicated, because sometimes a standard, easy parent-child relationship can get spoiled by a critical event that makes it hard for you to accept one another, and sometimes a clash in parent-child personality styles prevents acceptance. In any case, don’t berate yourself for what can’t be helped and don’t expect the relationship will ever be easy. If it’s important to maintain, however, there’s nothing to stop you from avoiding conflict by gritting your teeth, making nice, and keeping your irritation and disappointment to yourself. It may not be pleasant, but when you love someone but hate being around them, it’s the best option on the menu.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve always taken it for granted that I get along fine with my parents because we never had any significant conflicts—they were supportive when I was little, and we always found pleasant things to do together. That’s why it’s really surprising that we’re running into problems now, when I’m in my twenties. What’s happened is that they’ve both suddenly gotten religion and become Evangelicals—maybe because my sister and I left town and their lives felt a little empty—and now, whenever we talk, they make frequent reference to Jesus and have something serious and earnest to say about almost everything. They obviously feel it’s their duty to save me, which makes it very hard to have a pleasant conversation without exercising a lot of polite tact and changing the subject. I find myself getting very irritated and, really, I’m sad that the easy relationship we used to have is gone and I can’t get it back. My goal is to find some way out of this nightmare.
Having a friend get religion is like having them marry someone you don’t like—they’re still the same person, but now hanging out is less fun and more of an exercise in torture.
After all these years, you had a right to think you knew your parents inside and out and that you were lucky enough to have a solid, easy relationship based on love and mutual acceptance. While the love is still there, the ease is no more; fundamentalist religion makes it harder for them to accept you (you’re not saved) and you to accept them (you don’t want to hear about it).
Given the fundamental nature of, well, fundamentalism, and the fact that it seems to leave you fundamentally cold, you now have to negotiate a new relationship that will take a lot more work than the one you had. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on November 14, 2013
Whenever someone’s bad behavior forces you to set limits, it’s like slapping a hysterical person in the face; you can’t know in advance whether they’ll thank you or hate you forever. In either case, if you do it only when necessary, nicely, and with respect, you’ll know you’ve done a good service, whether it’s appreciated or not. In the short run, you’ve offered them a target for their resentments about the world and it’ll sting them as much as it stings you, but in the long run, you’ve given them a chance to learn and grow.
–Dr. Lastname
My eighteen-year-old son is very bright and imaginative and, when he’s sweet, I feel we have a special relationship. Periodically, however, he gets frustrated with things and gets very, very nasty with me. He bullies me into doing things for him and I try to be flexible, but then if I don’t do exactly what he wants he throws a big scene and threatens to break the furniture or crash the car. After the last incident, I threw him out of the house and he went to live with his father for a few days. Now I’ve got him back, but I know it’s going to happen again sooner or later and I don’t know how to explain to him that I can’t give him everything he wants without provoking an irrational freak-out.
When you have a kid who throws dangerous freak-outs, don’t make it your top priority to avoid provoking him; a child’s tantrums are a pain to deal with at any age, but trying to permanently tiptoe around a moody teenager is just as futile and damaging as always coddling a cranky toddler. They keep having tantrums while you get progressively more insane.
Of course, you don’t want to give him a hard time, but the behavior/temper problem is his, not yours, and not only will you drive yourself crazy, you’ll fail to give him the kind of help he needs most, which is a clear set of rules that can help him manage the poorly hinged part of his personality. Tantrums may be eternal, but so are time-outs, even if they take a different form. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on November 4, 2013
Family isn’t just the gift that keeps giving, but the constant presence that keeps taking, which is why saying “no” and setting boundaries on what they expect you to do is often hard. Sometimes, even when you believe strongly in your need and right to refuse them, guilt makes you agonize and get defensive. Other times, guilt is so strong that you’re sure you’d be wrong to say “no” and can’t even consider the consequences of what will happen if you don’t. In any case, when it comes to saying “no,” don’t wait until you’re angry, stop feeling guilty, or otherwise feel the urge. Instead, look at what happens when you don’t say it and how it affects your major obligations. Then, if you decide it’s necessary, learn how to do it short and sweet, without offering defense or explanation, and give yourself some boundaries, the best gift of them all.
–Dr. Lastname
My unhappy marriage of more than 20 years is soon to end in a divorce driven by me after a long and painful separation. When my husband left I was devastated as I felt abandoned and unable to cope on my own. This resulted in me allowing my husband to set the terms, come and go as he pleased, lie and mess around with my emotions. After two years of this he decided to stay with his girlfriend and asked for a divorce. I agreed but he took no real action. After a lot of therapy and much heartache I have rebuilt my life, found work I like, learned how to cope and have just taken an exciting holiday with my new partner while remaining on amicable terms with my ex. I live in what was the family home with one of my two adult sons and my daughter and her baby are about to move in. I have asked my ex to inform me if he wants to come round but he continues to make arrangements with our adult children at short notice or no notice at all. His girlfriend has taken a job which involves being away for the working week, which frees him up to hang around here when he wishes to spend family time. After years of turmoil I do not want to risk my hard earned independence and growing emotional detachment by getting sucked in once again. I also resent the way he expects to be welcome here when it suits and be unavailable when his demanding girlfriend is around. My goal is to set healthy boundaries for going forward. I wish to protect myself from further chaos without dividing loyalties or giving him underdog status in the eyes of our children.
If you ever thought that your flexibility about your ex-husband’s comings and goings would make him interested in returning to your marriage or, later on, negotiating a marital settlement, you now know better. All it makes it easier for him to do is raid your fridge and unsettle your mind.
He’s continued to do what he’s felt like doing, and you’ve learned how to take care of yourself and go on with your life, which you’ve done very well. Now it’s time to tell him that your life can no longer allow him unlimited access. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 31, 2013
At a certain age, it becomes clear that high school ends, but the feeling is one you never outgrow; there will always be days when you want to dress like an idiot, be forced to eat food on a tray, or feel bullied, either by a group of alpha-males or by your own inner-Heather. No matter what the source of your browbeating, however, getting a bully to stop is often impossible, and fighting a bully may give him/her more power over your feelings and thoughts. So remember, standing up to a bully doesn’t require you to fight, win, or gain control over someone else. Instead, it requires you to know your own values and respect your own behavior, regardless of whatever mean, provocative statements get thrown your way, or how many Mean Girls/Women/Men you have to encounter throughout your life.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve been sober 15 years and get a huge amount out of my AA meetings, but I still hate myself. It isn’t that I act like a jerk anymore—I’ve got a great husband and I do my job and make a living—but that doesn’t change how I feel. I don’t do anything bad, but I waste time, I don’t have the smarts to go back to school and do well, and I haven’t done anything particularly good or accomplished much. I envy people who are successful, which makes me feel that much smaller. I wonder what steps I need to work on to ever get to like myself.
For some people, hating yourself is an unavoidable bad habit, like mentally biting your nails, and if you’ve ever been a nail-biter, you know that it’s almost impossible to stop entirely, even if you’re destroying your fingertips and/or self-esteem.
As painful as self-hatred is to live with, it’s probably an unavoidable condition for many perfectionists and idealists especially, as well as those who were subject to severe criticism and abuse as kids. Expecting to be healed from it, then ,just adds to your sense of having an unacceptable defect and thus to your self-hatred, as you start hating yourself for hating yourself for hating yourself, etc.
For many years now, you’ve done nothing you should hate yourself for and you’ve got people in your life who don’t hate you. If you still hate yourself, in spite of these good things, then it’s probably a feeling you can’t change. Given that you’re a self-hater, however, you’ve done a remarkable job of changing or preventing self-hating behaviors, and remembering that is your best weapon against your brain’s urge to knock you down. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 21, 2013
It’s easy for your individual sense of right and wrong to be at odds with the customs and attitudes of your community, workplace, and/or message board chums, and you may well experience guilt when there’s a difference between the two, regardless of whether you did anything wrong. As a result, it may be hard to find your own way when you first go solo, or to re-discover your own way when pressured by an absorbing new community. In any case, ignore guilty feelings and get back to basics. Judge your actions in the light of your own experience and values and stand by them, regardless of what others think, say, and put into FAIL-related .gif form.
–Dr. Lastname
I grew up in a very Christian family where we all went to religious school and attended church several times a week, and kids weren’t allowed to date or talk to members of the opposite sex on the phone (or even consider sex before marriage). Now that I’m in my second year of college and away from home, however, I’m not sure I want to live my life this way. The school is Christian, but there are other, secular universities nearby, and I like hanging out in the college bars in town and dating. Of course, doing so makes me feel like I’m sliding into sin and would catch all kinds of criticism if my parents and home community knew what I was doing. I feel like I can’t feel like a good person in either world; I haven’t really been a bad person, but my faith in my parents’ rules has lessened. My goal is to stop swinging up and down like a yo-yo.
When you’re young, your main way of knowing whether you’re doing right or wrong is by perceiving whether others, particularly grown-ups, are angry at you; sometimes it’s through a subtle reward, and other times it’s via a very blunt spanking.
This sensation usually persists, even when you know, as an adult, that you’ve done nothing wrong or everything right. If you belong to a religious community with many conventions and rules, those feelings are also tied to doing what everyone else defines as good behavior, like going to church, praying, and not dating, all of which are tied to what they believe God wants. And God hasn’t handed out personal wrath in at least a millennium or so. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 17, 2013
Life is always unfair—kids get sick, dogs don’t live forever, the Real Housewives supply is infinite—but how you react to unfairness is what matters. Some people who are undeniable victims of hard luck never see themselves as helpless, whereas other people feel like victims because life does not always reward good moral choices with good luck. If your luck turns bad, you have a right to hurt, but never expect good luck to reward you for being a good guy. You’ll never feel like a victim if you accept bad luck as part of a shitty, unfair world, and take pride in doing what you think is right, regardless of all the illness, injustice, and Bravo starlets who are out there.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve been derailed for the last three years after thinking my life was moving along perfectly well. I’d worked for 15 years at a large company, starting out as a clerk, and somehow my warm personal style and hard work—it sure wasn’t my education, because I never did well in school and did just two years of college—kept getting me promoted until I was about to be regional director. I had three sons and a husband I thought I could count on. Then, suddenly, due to what almost everyone agreed was a minor, unintentional accounting error, I was fired because I technically broke company policy and a higher-up had decided to be a hard-ass. And my husband decided, just about the same time, that I was boring and he moved out. The kids are still great, but I feel stopped in my tracks and turned upside down, not just as if I’ve lost everything, but as if life has stopped playing by the rules. I’m doing a job search, but it’s hard to get into it or really take anything that seriously, other than the kids. My goal is to get back my faith in life, because I thought I was doing everything right, but then everything went totally wrong.
If Job, the guy in the Bible story who God screwed royally, basically to make the devil look stupid, was actually a bad guy, he might have had the satisfaction of knowing that his bad luck was for a good reason (besides winning a bet with Satan).
Unfortunately for everyone, he was a good person, just as I assume you are, so all the bad things that happened to him were for no reason and left him feeling he was living in a world where rules don’t count. That’s why his decision to keep on being a good guy was so remarkable and Bible-worthy.
Until several years ago, your life worked by the rules and reaped justifiable rewards, but then life did one of its horrible little twists and you were fucked for absolutely no reason, and from several directions at once. We want a world where the bad guy always gets what he deserves in the end, which reassures us that we’ll get good results if we work hard, act nice, and play by the rules. You’re living proof that life is unfair, which is a hard burden to shoulder. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 10, 2013
There’s no perfect way to deal with someone close to you when, due to depression, discouragement, and/or plain laziness, they become too dependent on you for support; whether your strategy is to give loving comfort or a tough kick in the pants, their attitude tends to defeat them and their would-be helpers. If you wish to help someone who is under-engaged in life, whether your motivation is love or self-survival, don’t wait for the underactive to feel rejuvenated. Instead, create a regimen and reward progress with gifts, food, and/or good ol’ verbal encouragement. Then, if they still don’t do their share, decide on the support you think is right to provide, knowing that change is not an option, but cutting them off is.
–Dr. Lastname
My younger son is 23 and living at home. He dropped out of university and has drifted since, working abroad for a while, now doing an office job on a temp contract for the past year. When not at work he sleeps in and is lackadaisical in direction. I am going through a divorce from his father and working very hard in a low-paying job. I am also having to support my daughter through the collapse of her marriage. My son wants to quit his job which he dislikes and sees as a dead end and use the time to pursue a career. His earnings are paying for some of his bills and he hasn’t saved much although I charge very little rent. I fear his half-hearted approach will soon return and resent coming home from a tough shift at work to find him still in bed. My goal is to be supportive without feeling used and resentful. I am worried about him but nagging wears me out and I have problems of my own.
Whatever career your son hopes to pursue, let’s hope it’s not one that requires basic skills of observation; you’re obviously stretched out, so if he thinks he can rely on you when he doesn’t have income, he’s not just oblivious to your situation, but his own.
Even if he doesn’t realize it, you know that his business plan is heavy on dreams and light on discipline. Instead of expressing anger, skepticism, or disappointment, however, ask him whether he sees himself as having a problem with avoidance. Shame may have made him lie about his difficulties and pretend that he’s done more than he has. If he can acknowledge the problem, you can offer him coaching, advice, and incentives for building good habits. You may not be able to help support him financially, but you’ve got emotional support in spades. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 7, 2013
There’s a certain art to negotiation, especially when the discussion involves money; go too hardline, with a patronizing tone or, say, a shutdown government, or too soft, hesitating to stand up for your own financial needs, and you’re not going to make any headway. Worse, you could get incredibly angry, and money rage can be just as dangerous and useless as road rage, except with road rage, you still usually get somewhere. Better to avoid arguments about non-payments, regardless of how unfair or harmful they are, and if good advice and sweet reason don’t work, do what’s necessary to protect yourself while bringing conversation to a firm stop. If you can’t stop yourself from losing it over money, the only thing to shutdown is the conversation, then learn and move forward.
–Dr. Lastname
My daughter is supposed to be a grown-up—she graduated from college but now she’s living back home—and the other day I realized she hasn’t opened a credit card bill in three months. I said something to her, and she still did nothing, and then I was really worried about the mounting interest payments and her credit rating, so I told her I didn’t understand what she was doing and why she was being so irresponsible. She started crying and accused me of being mean and picking a fight, and then my husband asked me why I was attacking her. My goal is to stop this fighting and get my daughter to live up to her responsibilities.
You can’t help being worried, as a parent, when your daughter’s avoidant behaviors no longer just possibly result in suspensions or a visit from the principal, but in fines, a ruined credit rating, and worst of all, frequent collection agency calls. Adult problems, however, deserve adult talks, and a verbal spanking does not qualify; berating her for failed responsibilities usually doesn’t work.
The reason why is that, while she knows you’re right, she doesn’t know why she did it, and her helplessness will make her even more avoidant—of you, your advice, and the next batch of credit statements. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 3, 2013
Whenever the topic of healthy relationships comes up, you’ll inevitably hear about compromise, balance, putting your socks in the hamper and not somewhere on the ground near the hamper, etc. Unfortunately, emphasis is rarely put on the importance of maintaining your own autonomy and remembering not to put your partner’s feelings and judgments ahead of your own. Any strong bond can suck you in—love, sex, and/or fear can do it—and if you’re too far gone, you don’t see your own options, just the way your overly significant other would feel. If you feel trapped then, don’t believe it. You will always find you have more choices than you think if you can create a little breathing room, remember who you are, and think for (and thoughtfully clean up after) yourself.
–Dr. Lastname
My friend has been in a potentially harmful relationship for a long time. I won’t go into details, but the people around her and especially herself could get hurt because there is illegality involved. Somehow, my friend is completely oblivious to the dangers and sheer shady and depraved aspects of it. The two met and started a relationship over text, and that’s how they mainly communicate because he lives in another state. They meet every few months and shack up in a hotel for a weekend in secret. I’ve been conflicted between being her friend and trying to protect her. I feel like I can’t protect her, because she’ll do what she wants, but I tell her I worry about her and when I do, I feel like an asshole. She thinks that when I tell her I worry about her, I’m judging her, and when she thinks that, she lies to me. It’s confusing because I don’t know how to be the “everything’s fine, fuck the law” type because I know it’s wrong and not just because it’s against the law. I just don’t know what to think or do or feel about it at all.
Sometimes you can’t help worrying about someone else’s danger, but expressing your worry can often trigger more risk-taking, probably because you’re making someone else responsible for your feelings, just as you’re taking responsibility for theirs. In other words, when you feel worry, she gets it in her head she doesn’t have to.
So accept the fact that you’re worried for good reason, but shut up about it. Instead, express your concern in a way that’s positive, unemotional, and focused on your friend’s self-management. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on September 26, 2013
Sometimes it’s as hard to save a marriage from the false suspicion of infidelity as it is to save it from infidelity itself. That’s because people respond to marital hurt by trying to prove their love, which, after all, is what started the whole thing going, makes the world go round and supports the diamond and edible underpants industries. Unfortunately, you often can’t manufacture romance in an old marriage, even with jewels, Viagra, and clothes that double as meals, so rating your relationships by their emotional flame is a good way to generate additional marital doubt, conflict, and defeat. So, when expressions of love are not enough, try rating your marriage as a functioning partnership and source of acceptance. Then, when your romantically-deprived or -injured side goes looking for drama, you’ll know the real value of what you’ve got, and have nothing to fear.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve never had an affair before, but after 20 years of marriage and an only child in college, I started to feel like my life was over, and I needed an adventure. The problem is that I love my husband, who is a good guy and a terrific father, and when he found my email messages to the guy I had a (fairly regrettable) one night stand with, it broke his heart. Now he’s depressed and goes back and forth between wanting to be with me and asking me what it was like to be sleeping with someone else. I’ve told him I love him, and I really do, but he can’t seem to get over it and, even though I’m the guilty party, I lose patience and feel even worse. My goal is to get him to see I love him, because I really don’t want to lose my marriage.
As the old saying goes, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die, and that’s especially true for most people who consider infidelity; everybody wants excitement, but nobody wants to kill their marriage.
Now that you’ve discovered that love alone won’t undo the hurt and stop him from agonizing for some time to come, it’s a good time to consider why he, and you, should stay married, apart from the sincerity of your feelings, given the fact that, at least for a moment, you’re capable of fucking up.
In other words, now that you’ve attempted to murder your marriage, is it worth saving or just pulling the plug. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
