Posted by fxckfeelings on February 11, 2010
Parents instinctually want to protect their children from distress, but that doesn’t mean that help will do any good; some kids run to their parents in a panic at every loud noise, some kids are too thick to even know they’re in trouble. Either way, it’s the parents who have to be more practical than sentimental before they jump in. If only more people did that before they decided to have kids in the first place, I’d have a lot less business.
–Dr. Lastname
My daughter drove me and my husband crazy the other day. She’s a great kid who does very well in school, but at the beginning of every term she calls us up in great distress to tell us she can’t figure out what courses to take because the ones she really wants to take aren’t available and it’s impossible to make a decision about the others. So she did it again, and, as always, when we asked about the courses and made recommendations, she told us we were doing nothing but making her more confused and then broke off the conversation. I talked to my wife and she agrees we were careful to listen and we weren’t overbearing. P.S., the next day my daughter made up her mind and found a perfectly good group of courses to take, as usual. How can we help her get less distraught and see that we’re just trying to help?
Nobody wants their child to be in pain or agony, but it’s important to ask yourself whether it’s important if your daughter is…distraught.
Yes, her panic hurts her and it hurts you, but life is pain, pain is often unavoidable, and it’s not getting in her way, so why make it more important than it has to be?
It’s hard not to come running when a kid is crying, but this is a situation that’s familiar, always turns out well, and can’t be helped with a band-aid and a kiss on the boo-boo.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 25, 2010
If you hate someone or something for reasons beyond your control, then those feelings are, in essence, beyond your control, so resistence is essentially futile. Hating something is one thing, but then feeling guilty for hating, then angry for feeling guilty, depressed for feeling angry…so it goes down the feelings spiral, down the emotional toilet.
–Dr. Lastname
When I broke up with my girlfriend, I felt like I didn’t have a choice; she was smothering me, she made me feel guilty and like a bad person all the time, and I just couldn’t take care of her anymore. We’d been together for a relatively long time and I had reached the end of my rope (she’d even started hitting me and breaking things in our apartment). The problem is now that I feel even worse because, in the months since I ended it and she moved out, she’s started getting high a lot and has threatened to kill herself more than once. If she goes through with it, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself. My goal is to feel less awful about breaking up with her (which I did to feel less awful).
As a not-sociopath, you can’t feel less than awful about your ex-girlfriend’s drugging, depression, and self-destruction.
It’s the feeling responsible, as well as awful, that will not only do nothing to help her recovery, but will also turn your sorrow into well-entrenched, call-the-doctor depression. So…Dr. Lastname here, how can I help you?
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 14, 2010
Changing your habits is a lot like changing your physique; it takes a lot of hard work and effort, and after a while, most of us revert to our old selves, which means our habits/fat pants reenter our lives. Still, wanting to change or help someone change is not an entirely dismissable goal, it just requires a lot of will power, patience, and the right degree of responsibility for what you can and cannot control. In either situation, try to eat less fast food.
–Dr. Lastname
I love my girlfriend, but I noticed that she drank like a fish at parties and carried lots of credit card debt, so when we began to think seriously about getting married, I told her I needed her to cut way back on her drinking, stick to a budget, and pay down her debt. She was hurt, but since then she’s been doing what I asked, and we’ve been getting along well. What I’ve noticed since then, though, is that she’s lost some of her spark and generally seems less happy. I wanted to help her, not hurt her, but at the same time, I don’t know how we can finally get married if she still wants to act like an irresponsible kid. My goal is to help my girlfriend (or really both of us) without making her miserable.
It’s natural to feel responsible when your words do, indeed, wipe the smile off her face—instead of a diamond, you gave her an earful—but it’s a dangerous way to think because your words are also her best warning against greater pain to come.
So you’re right, there’s no way your marriage will work if she can’t control her drinking and spending, so your real goal isn’t to avoid hurting her feelings. Instead, it’s to protect both of you from creating a family just to watch it fall apart.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 11, 2010
We’ve often made the point that shrinks are doctors, not magicians, but we got a couple of cases this week take that point even further; not only aren’t shrinks magicians, they’re also people (and it turns out that surgeons are doctors and people, but really don’t want to be confused with shrinks). Not surprisingly, even doctors need a doctor once in a while, even if it’s an e-MD…with no magical powers.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m a therapist who takes great pride in being available and supportive to my patients, but I’ve got one who’s driving me crazy. At first, he thought I was great at helping him get more confident and functional, but lately he’s been slipping and drinking too much and fighting with his wife, and, instead of seeing me as a supporter who wants to help him control behavior that’s hurting him, he blames me for giving bad advice and being critical. I asked if he’d like to see a different therapist but he said he wants me to apologize and listen to him more carefully so I can make up for the pain I’ve caused. I’ve listened, and all he does is give me an endless earful about how badly I and other people have treated him and how I’ve made him feel worse, not better. I want to refer him elsewhere, but I can’t, because I wouldn’t wish this guy on my worst enemy but I can’t abandon him, and I don’t want to get sued or burn any bridges in what’s a pretty small professional community in this area. My goal is to get rid of this guy without feeling like I’ve abandoned him or triggering a malpractice suit.
If your goal as a therapist is to make people feel better, then it’s no wonder you’re fucked; as such, you’ll have no defense against the kind of asshole who feels you (or really, anyone but them) is responsible for their happiness and pain (mostly pain) and therefore deserves punishment when things go bad.
Under your rational exterior, you seem to agree that you’re responsible, Dr. Feelgood, so he’s got you, and he knows you speak his language. Asshole 1, Therapist 0.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 4, 2010
In fxckfeelings.com terms, most resolutions are just grand, annual wishes, not goals. Goals, as we define them, are realistic, while wishes are failure-prone yearnings that are usually best ignored. The holidays are over, and so are the excuses n’bullshit, so for our own New Year’s babies/cases, happy New Year, and it’s time to ditch these resolutions, stat.
–Dr. Lastname
My girlfriend got mad at me on New Year’s Eve and now she tells me it’s blown over, but I can’t believe her. I’ve always had these massive how-stupid-could-you-be thoughts that I can’t get out of my mind after I say something that might be stupid, even if it isn’t really stupid, but I keep on thinking about what I said and have to tell a friend about it and then, when they re-assure me, I can’t believe them and have to ask them again until it drives them crazy, and I start to worry about how stupid I sound to them, and so on. So my big New Year’s resolution was to stop myself from being so insecure, but now it’s happening again and, even though my girlfriend is a pretty uncritical person, I can’t stop wanting to ask her for re-assurance. My goal is to be able to tell myself that I didn’t say anything stupid and have more confidence in myself and finally become the person I want to be.
Many people don’t grow out of their “I-hate-myself-for-being-so-stupid” reaction, no matter how much they accomplish, or get reassured, or seek professional help. They never find out why they’re so stupid, but they never stop asking.
The reason for their so-called immaturity is a kind of painful mental tic that hurts like hell when it happens, and can’t really be prevented or eliminated (other than by lobotomy, which is a skill I’m trying to acquire, as soon as I can find a willing test patient/Jon Gosselin returns my calls).
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 28, 2009
Most people don’t wait until New Years to make resolutions about the bad behavior they’re going to stop putting up with next year; usually, things get bad enough by Christmas Eve that we’ve already started our mental lists of “never again.” The problem is that the worst kind of bad behavior can seldom be stamped out; it tends to exist all the time, for all of time, amen. Aiming to start 2010 by confronting that bad behavior is a bad idea; finishing 2009 working around that behavior is a better start.
–Dr. Lastname
I don’t know where I failed as a parent, but my daughter announced over Christmas that she’s leaving her perfectly nice husband after cheating on him, and it’s the last straw in terms of me wanting to just ask her why her behavior is and always has been so self-destructive. These aren’t the values I taught her—for one thing, I’m still married to her father after 30 years—and I’ve always pushed her to follow through in life and work, but she seems incapable of doing anything but sabotaging herself. My goal is to get my daughter to tell me why she feels she has to mess up her own life.
If your greatest joy as a parent is to see your kid happily married off, then it makes sense that one of your greatest sorrows is to see her unhappily divorced, particularly if she’s messed up and there’s nothing you can do to stop her.
If it hasn’t already occurred to you many times about parenting your daughter, this is certainly a good time to realize that you have no control, and that parents with good values and solid self-control can, and often do, have fucked-up kids and lose sons-in-law they’ve learned to love.
The gene for fuck-up-edness can skip a generation, or lay dormant until fed with alcohol, or it can wave a bright red flag in the form of the names “Randi” or “Amber.” Or it can just come out of nowhere and make parenting really hard, which is what it’s done to you for years.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 21, 2009
Even if none of us has spent Christmas with our entire families, most of us feel like we should help make it happen and feel terribly guilty if we can’t (I just feel guilty for taking their money, but only a little). We have some illusion that the holidays are the time for our criminal or alcoholic or crazy relatives to put their behavior aside, slap on a Christmas sweater, and join their loved ones around the tree and we feel bad if we can’t make the reunion happen, or even let it happen. But fear not, there’s a way to make excuses tactful and blameless without bringing down everyone’s holiday cheer. Gaw bless us, every drunk and lawless one.
–Dr. Lastname
Please note: There will be no new post on Thursday, 12/24, due to the holiday. Please continue to write in, however, because there will be a new post on 12/28. Thanks, and happy holidays!
My ex-wife was always a wild outlaw in high school, (I got the kids), she’d show up from time to time, but rarely when she said she would, and you never knew when she’d be high, so the court imposed supervised visitation. I want my kids to have a mom though, but when she no-shows, the kids are crushed. Of course, the kids want to see her, particularly for Christmas, but what they don’t know is that she and her current boyfriend were caught on video robbing a liquor store, so if she’s going anywhere, it’s probably straight to jail. . My goal is to figure out a way to break this to my kids so that they don’t hate their mother (even though I sort of think they should).
You can’t protect your kids from the hurt of loving an outlaw mother, any more than you could protect yourself for falling for her years ago. Telling your kids that she’s a bad person inflicts a worse kind of hurt, because it devalues the love you and the kids have given her (which, as you know, you can’t get back).
Even if you can’t protect them from hurt, you still can and should protect the value of their love for her and whatever is meaningful about hers for them.
To begin with, don’t buy the idea that outlaws are regular people who make bad choices. That’s one of those stupid, false-hope ideas that assumes that everyone has the choice to be good or bad and can redeem themselves by making better choices. It’s sort of a hybrid of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Santa’s “Naughty/Nice” list…and it’s bullshit.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 17, 2009
We keep saying that Christmas is hard on everyone, but that’s because religion is hard on everyone, no matter who or what you believe in, and religion is around all year long. Just because religion is hard, however, doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s good, actually, because it expresses essential differences and gets people upset, confused, and heading towards my office.
–Dr. Lastname
I recently had to relocate my family for work, so we were forced to move from a fairly large east coast city to a small town nowhere near water (unless you count the great lakes). My wife and I are Jewish, and we’re raising our kids in the religion, but that was much easier where we used to live than where we are now, where our 12-year-old son, who was always a bit of an outsider, is now facing a lot of teasing at school for all the ways he’s different, which includes his religion. It’s been especially bad for him lately, given that the town is very Christian, with prayers before high school football games and lots of school-centered Christmas activities, and he’s even further on the outside of what the other kids are doing. As you may or may not know, Channukah isn’t Christmas—it’s a minor holiday—and we don’t try to pretend otherwise by giving smaller gifts and not playing it up so much. My son is younger than his age, though, and he likes to tell everyone he’s not interested in Christmas and then they pick on him and he accuses them of anti-Semitism and it’s a mess. My goal is that he should be proud of being a Jew while getting along better with people at school.
It’s painful to watch your kid get picked on and called a dork, particularly when he is a dork and does dorky things that you know are going to make his troubles worse.
If you tell him to shut up and keep his opinions to himself, you may be destroying the paltry remains of his self-esteem. If you try to get his tormentors to stop, you may stir up additional trouble.
You could argue that it’s your job, and society’s, to give him a positive school experience that supports differences in religion and personal style. I would argue that’s bullshit. It’s not in your power and idealistic expectations will often make things worse.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 14, 2009
As Christmas gets even closer, we have to help our readers with even more holiday-inspired, toxic self-reflection. The holidays have the unfortunate tendency to push people to examine and confront their hurt feelings, when really, the best gift they could give themselves is to ignore their feelings and just enjoy their friends, family, and seasonal baked goods.
–Dr. Lastname
I consider myself to be a pretty thoughtful gift-giver—I pay attention to what other people need, things they don’t even know they need, their birthdays, their anniversaries, and I usually get it right. My husband, on the other hand, isn’t sentimental at all about birthdays or anniversaries and doesn’t remember them, so he’s a lousy gift-giver and, I can’t help it, it really gets to me. After I knock myself out to get him a good birthday present, he either forgets mine, or gets flowers at the last moment, or thinks of getting me something and then doesn’t follow through. We have a wonderful marriage but every year around Christmas, his lazy, lousy gifting really gets on my nerves (particularly since I can’t help doing a good job with his gifts). It’s humiliating. My goal is to find a good way to address this problem so I won’t resent him this Christmas.
There’s not one, but two good reasons why it’s a bad idea to address the problem of unequal gift giving with your husband, and the first, it’s a safe bet, is that you’ve done it before and it turned out badly. I’m right, am I not? (It’s important for me to be right, given my Harvard background).
You reproach your husband for neglecting your Christmas needs, he gets defensive, tells you how he knocks himself out for you, maybe goes further and remembers the time you didn’t do your share, and then you have to tell him how he got the facts wrong.
Meanwhile, both of you are drifting further away from any spirit of Christmas giving, other than that old staple of gift-giving everywhere, the Christmas Earful.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 10, 2009
Most of us make a big deal out of apologies, but the sad truth is that “sorry” doesn’t serve as a guarantee of lessons learned or absolution, just a band-aid on our hurt feelings until one party messes up again. For all our emphasis on forgiveness, it’s hardly a virtue, Christian or otherwise, if it requires you to assume that people have more choices than they really do.
–Dr. Lastname
My daughter is turning into a petty criminal. She’s getting kicked out of school again, she won’t stop messing around with drinking and drugs, she has unprotected sex, and her boyfriend is probably the guy who broke into our house and stole our TV, though she refuses to believe it. My husband and I have tried so many times to get her to see what she’s doing wrong and steer her in a better direction—we’re our own private “scared straight” program at this point—but every time we confront her about where she’s headed, she says she feels terrible, that she’s sorry, that she never wants it to happen again…and then she gets wasted and everything repeats itself. If only we could get her to understand the harm she’s doing, maybe we could get through to her and turn her around. Meanwhile, it’s killing us. We try to forgive her, but it’s hard. My goal is to forgive her and get her to see what she’s doing to herself and everyone who loves her.
There’s no point in getting your daughter to see what she’s doing wrong if she can’t really stop herself from doing it, and she really, really can’t. You can’t scare straightness into a boomerang.
Regret and remorse will make her feel bad, and you might think that will stop her from fucking up next time. Well, au contraire, my dear unHarvard-educated sap. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. You should know that since you’re the one missing a TV.
According to Christmas movies and sentimental parts of the Bible, repentance leads to redemption, but I say, goddammit, that’s just wishful bullshit.
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