I’m fine now (I’m 14), but I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a crazy father who physically abused me until a couple of years ago—that’s when my mother finally figured out what was happening and had me come live with her. The trouble is, I guess you could say my father doesn’t see reality the way other people do and he never remembers hitting me. In his mind, when he’d hit me, it was because I was trying to destroy him, so what he tells the judge is that he loves me and that my mother is a raging alcoholic who has brainwashed me to hate him (my mother stopped drinking after the divorce, years ago) and he really believes what he says. My goal is to get him to stay away from me and convince others that his version of reality isn’t real.

Kids aren’t the only ones who have trouble accepting the fact that we often can’t protect ourselves from scary crazy boogeymen, particularly when the craziness isn’t obvious, and the boogeymen are family.

We’ve said it here before: certain crazy people are not obviously crazy and are particularly good at persuading other people to see them as injured victims because they truly, truly believe they are, no matter what really happened. It’s a kind of sickness for which no one has the cure, and nobody feels sicker than the victims in the wake of these sickos, who don’t necessarily feel sick at all.

So cops, judges and social workers often can’t figure out who is telling the truth for a long time. Meanwhile, they often make mistakes and put restrictions on kids and families that hurt everyone and cost more money than the family can afford. It’s a sad fact of life, but they’re trying to do the right thing.

The system usually works to try and protect the weakest party, and when you’re aggressive, even if you’re just aggressively trying to get people to see the truth, you make sickos look that much more weak and innocent. It’s unfair, but pushing hard to express the truth will often push it underground.

So Dr. Lastname’s advice for kids is the same as for adults: don’t think that expressing your emotions sincerely and eloquently will solve the problem. If your father is sincere and has a good lawyer, he’ll persuade the judge that you have, possibly, been brainwashed by your mom, and they’ll treat you like a poor, emotional kid who deserves pity but doesn’t really know his own mind. Then everyone will spend lots of time visiting shrinks. Thanks for the business, but no thanks for the bullshit.

First things first, give up on the goal of convincing others, and try instead to make positive sense of this experience and prepare a statement that you could, if necessary, read to your father.

The less anger and fear you put in your statement, the more it will help others get at the truth. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have negative feelings—of course, they are what they are—but the goal of your statement is to keep out the negative feelings without in any way holding back on the facts of what really happened.

You might not make his sickness go away or get people to see the truth, but being clear, honest, and emotionless is the best protection against the boogeyman.

STATEMENT:
Here’s an example. “I think it’s a bad idea for us to spend time together. I know you care about me and want to see me, but I think you forget about the bad things that happen when you get upset and lose your temper. You forget about (put in details, including bruises and dates). I don’t want to hurt you and I want you to be happy but I don’t think we should spend time together until I’m old enough to protect myself from your temper. Sincerely.

I’d like to get help for my wife’s younger sister because she drives the family crazy. Simply put, she’s a lying drug-addict, and my wife’s parents are always trying to help her in a way that ruins things for the rest of us—they give her money, pressure my wife and me to accept her at family events, and then make us feel guilty if we don’t want to see her. She’s totally poisonous as she is, but I know she can’t help herself, and I’d like to get her real help, not just hand-outs and pretending everything’s OK, so we don’t have to continue like this.

Your goal is just as bad as your wife’s parents’ goal, because you’re both assuming that your sister-in-law can be helped when all the evidence points the other way. They’re throwing their money away at her directly, you’d be throwing your money away at “real help” she isn’t ready for. It’s a lose/lose.

Really, everyone wishes your sister-in-law could be helped, but proceeding on that assumption when it’s not true is a good way to make things worse, and that’s exactly what you’re complaining about.

The sad fact is, treatment is often hopeless. You know that’s true for lots of medical problems, from cancer to Crohn’s disease, so why not accept the fact that it’s equally true for everything else.

Instead, stick with the realistic hope that she’ll change someday, and that you (and others) will have an opportunity to help. It might happen, but it’s not something that you can make happen or are responsible for.

In the meantime, don’t blame her, because there’s a good chance she has as little control over the problem as you do, even though it’s her body and her problem. Blame life, it sucks more reliably than anyone or anything else.

Now that you’ve listened to me and given up on your goal of getting help for your sister-in-law, realistic thinking suggests some positive things for you to do. Since you’re not responsible for saving your sister-in-law or protecting your parents-in-law, you can bow out of family events you don’t really want to go to.

Ignore feelings of guilt or responsibility. You’d help if you could, but you can’t, and there are other important priorities, like going on with your life and enjoying time with those you love.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a statement that responds to the most guilt-provoking accusations you can imagine. “I’m concerned about my sister-in-law and take full responsibility for helping her whenever possible. One thing I’ve learned, though, from watching her parents do a wonderful job of trying to help her is that, for the time being, it’s just not possible. When it’s not possible, we do more good by distancing ourselves from her problems so as to limit their harm and provide her with more incentive to change. Distancing ourselves from her problems does not mean distancing ourselves from her. The better we protect ourselves, the more welcoming we will be if and when she begins recovery.”

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.

As someone who’s counseled a lot of bad people and their innocent bystanders (like you), I can tell you that people who do bad things don’t have the same control that you or I do.

Maybe their control was weakened by childhood trauma, or addiction, or maybe they were born that way, but it doesn’t matter. Life isn’t fair and some people are fucking weak in ways that cause all kinds of trouble (and some of that trouble gets caught by the crook cam).

So think about which is better: to think of mother as a self-made asshole who chose to neglect her kids because she didn’t care and the people who loved her couldn’t get through to her; or, to think of her as having a fucked-up nervous system that made her unreliable and vulnerable to drug addiction and criminal behavior in spite of all her good impulses and the good love of people who cared for her.

Don’t tell me that saying that your wife was fucked-up lets her off the hook or tells the kids that crime is OK; they know that crime isn’t OK because her life and relationships are fucked and there’s pain everywhere. Nobody’s off the hook here, except maybe for you.

Tell your kids the truth—Mom can’t help it, but she loves you—and Christmas will not be lost. If Santa had a heart, he’d give her presents in prison because, with the gifts she’s lacking for good judgment and impulse control, she doesn’t stand a chance.

STATEMENT:
Write out a statement you could share with the kids. “There’s something wrong with your mother and you have to be careful with her, no matter how much you love her. Most of the time, she can’t meet your needs or anyone else’s needs or even her own needs, other than the need to feel good right away. Recently she stole something and got caught and she’ll probably get put in prison for a while, so I don’t think you’ll see her this Christmas. She probably didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but she certainly hurt the people who love her and need her and she hurt herself. But that’s the way your mother is. You’ll never know, when you hear from her, whether she will keep her promises or get you in trouble. But I’ll teach you how to be careful so you can keep in touch with her as much as possible. And maybe someday she’ll get more control of herself and you’ll be able to trust her as much as you love her.”

My alcoholic father and whiny, always-in-trouble younger brother were asshole buddies who always felt neglected by selfish, got-it-together me and they took great delight in cutting me and my kids out of my father’s will. I was angry for a long time after my father died, but when my brother reached out to me recently (he explained that he’s on medication now, although he didn’t offer to give me any of the inheritance), I was happy to meet and socialize. But now he wants my grown-up kids to be part of his one-happy-family-at-Christmas reunion, and the kids, who are now grown, aren’t interested. Their memories of him are negative but they’re not mad, they just don’t care. My brother genuinely does not understand why they’re cold to him and don’t respond to his calls or emails and he asks me to intervene. My goal is to get my brother to back off without reopening the rift.

Don’t let yourself get sentimental about a Christmas reunion. You might yearn for a re-unionable brother, but you don’t have one and never will (especially now that you’re father’s gone).

Your brother will always be a high risk earthquake zone, so don’t make yourself responsible for avoiding a rift or you’ll find yourself triggering one. His dangerous expectations could easily cause a natural disaster, no matter what you do.

Medication may have made him more even-tempered, but you have no reason to believe his attitude has changed. He’s probably following the 12-step shuffle and doing gracious forgiveness now, but then, when the kids don’t respond, he’ll think he has the right to feel wounded by your neglect all over again. Of course, he’s more likely to feel that way if you say something negative about his past behavior.

So your goal isn’t to prevent a rift, but to make sure you and the kids aren’t responsible for it; not in his eyes, of course, but in your own. Make the best of the tentative, fragile, potentially explosive relationship that you have, and that means putting caution ahead of sentimentality.

Stay calm, don’t bring up the past, and remind your brother that Christmas with just the two of you isn’t so bad. Just don’t get carried away by your fucking Christmas spirit, and hopefully he won’t get carried away, either.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a statement in response to his Christmas expectations (and yours). “It’s nice to get together, forget about past conflict, and share Christmas as brothers. Life is complicated now that the kids are grown and have lives of their own and we can seldom get everyone together at once, and they probably expected me to tell you that they wouldn’t be able to join us because they consider me responsible for brother-to-brother communication. I don’t pressure them because I respect their other priorities. I look forward to seeing you.”

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.

Repentance leads your daughter to hating herself more for the shit she does when she loses control, and self-hate makes it that much easier to lose control again. Your goal isn’t to get her to repent. It’s to get her to accept that she’s fucked and should nevertheless try for better self-control.

Fuck forgiveness, too, while you’re at it. You wouldn’t forgive a snake for doing its thing with your foot and its fangs, because it does what it does, and your daughter’s lack of self-control is probably the same kind of thing. If you weren’t around, she’d still be having the same problems. She’s just steal someone else’s TV.

No one knows why some kids have so little self-control over anger and neediness, or sometimes we know but knowing does no good. Acceptance means you aren’t entitled to judge or forgive; just to make the best of things.

Making the best of things means trying all the standard tricks for keeping a kid of any age away from over-stimulation and temptation. Keep her busy, move her away from the bad kids if you can, and find good activities you can schedule regularly. Above all, stay calm and positive, and don’t show how scared and upset you are about her fuck-ups.

Don’t expect treatment to change her. Sometimes a 24 hour control-your-every-activity residential school will break bad habits and build new ones, but it’s expensive and often doesn’t work.

As for the oft-derided “Good Will Hunting” one-on-one psychotherapy, it’s less expensive and similarly unlikely to lead to a basic transformation. More realistically, therapy can do the same thing as you’re doing: positive coaching towards better behavior. As for achieving that better behavior by getting her to take responsibility, own her actions, and feel bad…you’d have better luck with a snake charmer.

STATEMENT:
Compose a statement of purpose that will keep you positive. “I think you want to be a good kid and that you regret at least some of the things that happen when you mess up. But it’s hard for you not to mess up because your brain pushes you so hard to act before you think, that’s just the way you are. So we’ll keep on trying to keep you away from risky situations and slow you down, so you have more time to think about what you really want to do. There are some troubles we can’t protect you from. You may get HIV or go to jail. But nothing will change our determination to help you get the control that you need, sooner or later.”

My sister and I have had issues over the years, but we’ve always managed to stay cordial despite our differences, at least until she got married. Just after she got married five or so years ago, she did something to my parents that really pissed me off—she was basically stealing from them, as far as I can tell—and while, in the past, she and I would have eventually gotten over it, her husband got into the crossfire (I chewed both of them out, not just her), and now he won’t let me anywhere near my sister to even try to move past this. I still think what she did was awful, and I still think her husband is an asshole, but she’s my sister, and she’s family, and I need her in my life. My goal is to figure out how and whether I should make amends to my brother-in-law, even though I’m not really sorry, so I can put my family back together.

You’re right to start thinking about what’s best for your family relationships and forget about who’s a conniving criminal, because you’re never going to stamp out family crime or protect its willing victims. You’re not God, or even Judge Judy.

On the other hand, you may benefit in the long run by avoiding unnecessary conflict, retaining your family membership card, and participating in events that allow you to make the best of the family you have, crooks, liars et al.

If forgiveness is important to you, you’re fucked, because whatever you forgive your sister for, she’s likely to do again, which will destroy your faith and make you nasty. Fuck forgiveness. Again.

If she’s a criminal, she is, so your goal is to accept her the way she is and decide what you want to do with her and the family relationships that you will always unavoidably share.

Figure out if the fight with her is worth it, and if it’s not, and you decide that peace will give you a better chance of enjoying family events, then mend fences, declare the war over, and let all hostilities from this point on be for her and her husband to sustain, or not.

You can’t stop her and her husband from continuing to hate you or freeze you out, but by refusing to hate them back, you just may lull them into giving it up, shutting up, and making nice.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a statement that stays positive, doesn’t lie, and lays out the advantages of peace. It may sound like an apology, but it’s not. An apology would be dishonest. “I know we’ve had our differences, but there were tensions in the past that no longer seem important, at least not to me. I believe you and your husband are an important part of my family and I think we’ll all be happier if we can share some friendly time together. I think it’s better to put the past behind us and remember that we share lots of good childhood memories, a love for our parents, and responsibility for their welfare as they grow older. I think we’ll all gain from resuming a positive relationship.”

I can’t seem to make a decision about the life/death issue. I want to want to live, or have the balls to call it quits. Shit or get off the pot. It takes too much damn energy vacillating.

“To be or not to be”—that’s still the question, right? Well, it’s also a question I never like to answer or hear.

Shakespeare or no, it’s a bad question to ask, because most people who ask it don’t really want an answer; they want an antidote to their hurt or someone to blame for not providing it.

It’s similar to the way Boston taxi drivers ask the passenger whether to take the Pike or Storrow to Logan airport — to have someone else to blame when, either way, they inevitably run into heavy traffic.

I know, the question expresses your deepest feelings. It also wears out friends, drives them away/proves that no one can help, and confirms your right to be very, very unhappy. The whole cycle sucks and it’s unhealthy. Keep asking it, and somebody will go ahead and hurt you more.

Hamlet, after all, was once a nice guy, A-student, and highly respected politician-in-training. Then some anguish over loss and hard decisions pushed him to ask his famous question and become increasingly self-centered, murderous, whiny, paralyzed, and dangerous to his friends until a couple of them tried to assassinate him, which shocked him back to his good old self just in time for his death scene, which would otherwise have been a relief. Goodnight, sweet recovered asshole.

And that, for whatever reason, is what I usually encounter when people ask me this question, often telling me they’re traumatized by something they don’t want to talk about, have a suicide plan they’re ready to implement, and are speaking into a phone at a location they refuse to disclose. They’re not just deliberating life vs. death, they’re challenging me to reduce their despair; otherwise, it’s my bad.

They can’t help feeling angry and despairing—their feelings are authentic, and I never buy the idea that the question represents nothing more than a plea for help or attention—but by channeling their feelings into an unanswerable question and posing it to others, they invariably make a bad thing worse.

So I won’t tell you to live or not live. But, until you decide to end it, try to forget about your pain, make a living, and be a good person. Pursuing your usual goals will distract you from pain and navel-gazing and protect your from becoming a full-time victim to whom more trauma and bad things will happen to happen.

And yes, if you stop measuring your pain and challenging others to respond to it, you’ll have more energy to consider how to make it better. Like trying various therapies and medications, and giving yourself enough time to recover from loss and depression.

Ask people, including me, how to make things better, and we’ll offer suggestions and heart-felt support. Ask us whether you should live or die, and we’ll stop a conversation you shouldn’t be having, even with yourself.

STATEMENT:
Here’s a statement you can use on yourself to stop poisonous rumination. “I feel despair and death is starting to feel attractive, but thinking about suicide will make the pain worse and ruin what I value about my life and what I respect myself for. Sure, I’m fucked, but as long as I’m living, the best thing I can do is live according to the values I’ve always had, and not let pain stop me, unless or until it does.”

My son drinks too much, and when he’s drunk, he gets into serious trouble, like fights, arrests, or both. My husband and I have done all we can to keep him out of jail with a clean record—this town is small, and the cops know our family—and also get him into rehab, residential and otherwise, or just on probation, anything to try and keep him clean without jail-time. He just got arrested though (again) for violating his probation (he was high and violent), and I don’t know what else I can do. I keep waiting for him to hit bottom and turn his life around, but instead he keeps falling further and further down, and unless I try something new, he’ll definitely end up in jail and probably wind up dead. I don’t want to give up on him, because that’s the same as killing him, but I feel like I’m out of options. My goal is to figure out an alternative to letting my son die.

The sad news is that you don’t have much power over your son’s life or death, and trying to exert a power you don’t really have will make him worse. That’s why, unless your son is presently choking on a sandwich and you know the Heimlich, saving your son’s life is a bad goal.

Since you can’t save it, your efforts will do nothing more than make him think you’re in control, and allow him to forget the sad fact that no one is in control until he finds the strength to control himself, if he can.

Also, you might have noticed by now that would-be saviors usually wind up madder than shit and ready to murder the person they want to save; it’s one of life’s little paradoxes that happens almost inevitably.

You can’t save him so you try a little harder, get a little more tired and frustrated, encounter a source of resistance that you’re sure you can overcome by becoming more forceful and, voila, you’re ready to murder the kid yourself.

Then you feel terribly guilty and more responsible and resume the saintly approach, so being part of a cycle that generates a big source of my business.

[There are a couple books that illustrate how to do the difficult but supremely worthwhile task of continuing to show love to someone you know is dancing on the edge of a precipice while accepting that loving them is the only thing you can do; George McGovern’s Terry, My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism and Norman McLean’s A River Runs Through It.]

If it’s not in your power to let him live or die (unless you have secret powers/a deadly sandwich), then your goal isn’t—can’t be—to back away and let him die . It’s to keep your fear and anger to yourself while encouraging him to do better next time, to keep on loving him, knowing that you’ve done your best and that, despite all of that, he may not live much longer.

STATEMENT:
Write a statement to protect yourself from false guilt and dangerous over-responsibility. “I love you and I see your wonderful strengths, but I haven’t found a way to protect you from a life-threatening weakness that isn’t getting better, and I know you haven’t found a way, either. I’ll never give up on you. I’ll always love you and offer help if you find the strength to use it. Many people have found a way to control themselves when it seemed hopeless. Meanwhile, I want us to share good times when we can and not think about the bad times any more than we have to.”

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.

So your goal isn’t to stop your daughter’s evil behavior, but to help her manage it by providing advice, incentives and acceptance for the person who isn’t always able to control her nastiness. Yes, being mean is wrong, but assume there’s a part of her that doesn’t like her behavior, either, and that tries to control it. (Even if you’re wrong, it’s a good assumption to begin with).

You haven’t mentioned trouble at school, so I’ll assume she’s doing a good job of controlling herself there, and you should give her credit. It’s probably better for her to control these impulses in school than at home, because bad behavior at school will cause much more trouble.

Telling her she needs to take more responsibility for controlling herself is the modern way of telling her she’s sinning against Christ, so don’t use that stupid r-word. Of course she’s responsible, but telling someone they’re responsible when their feelings have swept them away isn’t likely to strengthen their self-control. If anything, it’s more apt to make them feel helpless and self-hating and undermine their control.

Instead, assume she’s responsible but doesn’t yet have the strength to control herself, and it’s your job to help her get stronger. Give her disincentives, like time-outs or lost points. Give her structure, like scheduled activities.

Don’t present your procedures as punishments or babying, but as respectful attempts to help her keep her negative impulses at bay. After all, you’ve probably got a temper (as do the best of us, especially David Letterman), and it’s not always under control.

So don’t look at your child as the devil you don’t know, but the devil you know all too well—a chip off the ol’ evil block—and let her know even if she’s being bad, she’s not alone, and you’re there to help, not call a priest.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a statement that offers tough controls in a positive package. “You’re a great kid and you’re doing well in many, many ways. But you get too negative with your sister, and by that I include saying sarcastic and critical things, so we’re going to help you. If you start doing it, we’ll ask you to stop. Then, if that doesn’t work, we’ll insist that you go to your room and do something pleasant until you think your control is stronger. And, if that doesn’t work, you may lose something you like, like TV time, until you get yourself back together and do some work to make up for your behavior. I know you’ve got negative feelings for your sister and it doesn’t surprise me that, in spite of talking about them, they’re still there and they still hurt. That’s why life is hard. Those feelings will eventually get better but, in the meantime, you’ve got to learn to live with them without letting them out. And that’s what we’re trying to help you do. It won’t make you happy, but that’s not our fault. Life is hard. It isn’t any easier for us. So you’ve got to learn to do what we do: shut up and try to act decent.

I am what my father would call a terminal fuck-up. Basically, I know that drinking is a bad idea, because when I get fucked up, I tend to do dumb shit, like steal, get into fights, and hook up with random guys. I’m on meds for bi-polar disorder, which my doctor tells me should help me be less impulsive, but he also tells me that I can’t drink and take meds, and I can’t not drink, so meds don’t really help. I don’t mean to be so stupid, and sometimes, when everything’s mellow and I can focus, I can really keep my shit together and be normal and think. Most of the time though, I just can’t help myself, and I’ve started to get a long arrest record, which makes my dad want me to go to rehab again, but I think AA is culty bullshit that never works, anyway. So if pills don’t help, and rehab doesn’t help, is there any straight-up advice you can give me to be less of an idiot? I wanna fuck-up less.

Ouch, you’re in a tough spot. Simply put, life is hard and it’s starting to knock the crap out of you. It’s not fair, you don’t deserve it, but unless you find the strength to get yourself together, you’ll find the shit-pile getting deeper and deeper and your capacity for fuck up-ery never ending.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, and I do think you’ve learned your lesson. But you know that the part of you that wants to party and drink is stronger than the part of you that knows you can’t afford to, and that’s the way it is.

Obviously, no one can give you the strength you need to control yourself. If all you needed was a lesson, you would have benefited from one of the many you’ve already received. In your case, lessons don’t work, nor does punishment. You want to fuck up less, but when given the option of rehab, your inner fuck-up says “no, no, no.”

Here’s the only practical advice I know of to help you get stronger, over the long run—try to keep after what you really value, even if you can’t have it at the present time. Try to be decent and independent. Try to take care of your illness. Try to get sober. And when you slip, don’t give yourself a hard time. It doesn’t help.

Try to figure out how much harm you’ve done yourself and, if the harm was bad, think about what you might do differently next time. Be shameless, so you can talk about your efforts with others, maybe even in rehab or AA one day if the planets finally align.

And even if you never go to rehab, think of this as your first appearance at Fuck ups Anonymous; you’re a fuck-up, you’re fucked, and you need to take it one day at a time. That’s the way it is. Be proud of your efforts to control it, and thanks for sharing.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a statement to keep yourself on track. “I’ve got a couple genetic traits that push me into chaos and self-destruction and, so far, I haven’t found the strength to control myself. I hate what I do to myself and others but I can’t stop it. But I won’t stop trying to stop and I respect myself for that. I’ll welcome helpful ideas and I’ll look for ex-fuck-ups who’ve found the strength to control themselves. And maybe, someday, I’ll get there.”