I thought I’d always be able to trust my wife, even though I’ve never been able to trust anyone else before. I’m just like that, always nervous and suspicious, even when people are reasonably nice. My wife is an unusually nice and nurturing person, but when I found out she was doing some compulsive shopping and she lied about it, I flipped out and I can’t recover. The more she tries to reassure me, the more I don’t trust her. She’s just about had it with me and I want to recover our old intimacy before our marriage breaks up.

It’s really remarkable that you assume that your wife isn’t necessarily bad, just because she’s triggered your suspicions. It’s also remarkable that she’s the first person you’ve trusted, but why focus on the negative.

Most people who suffer from severe suspicion are pretty sure that it’s the other person’s bad actions that have caused a loss of trust, but you aren’t falling for that trap.

You’re open to the idea that your wife isn’t that bad, even though her actions have shattered your peace of mind. But you’re also a little too accepting that one white lie and the sadness that lie has caused you can lead to your divorce.

It’s a bummer, but this sounds less like therapy-inducing “trust issues” and more like a severe case of “the honeymoon is over.” In other words, if you expect to get back that old trusting feeling, given the demon of suspicion that has always haunted you, you’re probably wrong.

Plus, trying to get it back will just make both of you feel more angry and responsible for the pain you’re in. False hope is more dangerous for your marriage than your wife’s covert shopping habits.

Rely instead on your good common sense and do a fact-based investigation of your wife’s trustworthiness as a partner; don’t listen to your feelings before you collect, and review, the facts. Begin by defining the crimes that you consider deal-breakers, like compulsive shopping that empties your accounts or major drug use or lying about other close relationships. Imagine advising a friend about the kinds of bad spousal behavior that can turn marriage into a dangerous, depression-inducing burden without hope of redemption.

Then weigh your wife’s behavior against these standards. If her shopping doesn’t represent a major drain and her lying doesn’t apply to most difficult topics, then it may not represent a major threat. From what you say, that’s a possibility, but it’s for you to decide.

If it’s true that she’s not so bad, however, then you’ve got a tough job ahead of you that will actually increase your pain, not make it better, but thems the breaks. If you decide your marriage is worth hanging on to, then you’ve got to stop breaking it up while seeking a relief you’re never going to feel.

Once you stifle your paranoia and decide this is your problem to manage, you open new doors for yourself. You can talk to a therapist about ways of thinking positively despite your mistrust, and you may also find that your mistrust gets better if you don’t stimulate it by expressing it. If nothing else works, you may find that medication can help.

It may initially make you feel helpless and hopeless to allow suspicion to reenter a relationship you thought would be a safe haven. In the long run, however, tolerating a certain amount of suspicion may save your marriage and allow a deeper sense of trust to develop. Sure, you’ll always worry about her shopping sprees, but you may also take comfort in the fact that she tolerates your faults and that your partnership is good for both of you. Trust your own standards, rather than your feelings, and divorce may not be so inevitable after all.

STATEMENT:
“I’m profoundly disappointed to discover that my marriage is no longer a refuge from the suspicions that have always tortured me, but I won’t let them control what I do with it. If I decide that my marriage is solid enough, I will find ways to keep my suspicion from making my decisions for me, even if I can’t get rid of them. If I let them control me in the past, I’d have never gotten married. Now I need to take the fight to the next level.”

I’ve broken up with my boyfriend many times over the 5 years we’ve dated, but after I made it clear to him, for the umpteenth time, that he had to start including me in his inner family circle, he turned around and told me not to drop by on Thanksgiving because he needed to spend time with his kids, which made me explosive. It’s not just that he excludes me from his inner family circle; he’s always backing out of plans, which is why we still live separately and I never know whether we’ll spend time together next weekend. Now that I’ve cooled off, I find it hard to really end things with him when we’ve been together so long and know one another so well. I feel like we should be able to work things out, but maybe we keep breaking up for a reason.

You’re obviously attached to your boyfriend and haven’t been able to give him up, even when you knew the relationship wasn’t working for you. Maybe you love him too much or you’re too needy, which are also two reasons that you should flee from this unhealthy relationship in the first place.

In any case, you’ve told him what you want, again and again, and there’s been no progress. The problem isn’t that you’ve failed to get through to him; it’s that reality has failed to get through to you.

The sad fact is that there’s usually no way to change the distance between you and the person you love. It’s like the distance between molecules; you can push it back and forth, but there’s something basic about it, on average, that you can’t change, even with a megaton of talk, therapy, or whatever.

If you can bring yourself to accept the idea that he, and the relationship, are not going to change, and decide that this relationship will never give you enough of what you want, then you have to find the strength to move on.

Remember that you’re right to look for someone who includes you in his intimate family gatherings and with whom you can make reliable weekend plans. Until you find that person and check out his credentials, however, you must become strong enough to keep your heart to yourself. Hang out with friends and family, develop social hobbies, and build up your independence muscles so you aren’t forced to lean on people who aren’t sturdy. Build your strength while remaining wary of your instincts.

Don’t assume there’s someone out there for you, because there often isn’t, and the false assumption that there is will confirm your belief that you’re doing something wrong every time you don’t connect, and that will lead you back to connecting too much. There may be someone out there for you, or not, but your job is to conduct a good search, not compromise your heart or try to force the wrong guy to do the right thing.

STATEMENT:
“I can’t help feeling very connected to my boyfriend, but I know he can’t meet my needs and I can’t change him. If I want a chance at a better partnership, I must move on and become independent enough to resist going back or falling into some new and equally painful compromise. I know what’s good for me and I can’t afford to accept less.”

I was sexually abused quite a bit by my dad (and am de-repressing memories right now, fun-fun). I am realizing that I am very fearful of the people I love, and avoid them. Honestly, if I didn’t need to bond to keep from going insane, I would never have a close relationship, because anyone I care about enough can destroy me. But I’m in a lot of pain from loneliness as it is.

Many people believe there are tons of benefits to confronting your past, namely that it will teach you something that will bring catharsis to your present. The common notion being that if you can figure out what went wrong then you can avoid being victimized again.

The problem here is that reviving memories of sexual abuse by your dad will also bring back the old feelings of helplessness and having no choice, which, of course, is the opposite of your situation as an adult, so the lessons are the opposite of useful to your life now.

You’re not examining the past to drown yourself in feelings of helplessness, but to assure yourself that you can protect yourself from abuse.

Also, as an adult, your love for your dad may leave you with a dangerous sense of comfort and familiarity with low-boundary, exploitative sleazebags. In other words, your dad may have given you a tendency to be drawn to people who aren’t trustworthy, and who are worth being fearful of. I’m sure there are people in your life who aren’t scumbags, but your history makes you especially vulnerable to them.

It’s hardly surprising then that your world, as you see it as an adult, will seem full of both loneliness and dangerous people who can’t be trusted. Don’t criticize yourself then for being fearful of relationships or lonely; fear is a good protector, until you get strong enough to protect yourself.

So, as you examine your past, a therapist’s support for your pain and trauma may not be enough to counterbalance an ingrained conviction of helplessness. You may need an additional shield against that conviction before awakening the sleeping dragon of your memories.

One way to get stronger is to approach your past with less feeling and more thought. Develop specific standards for screening potential friends and lovers and use them to override any instincts to get together with, or over-involved with, the wrong people. In other words, if you want to remember your father’s worst traits, look for those traits in people before you decide whether or not they’re worthy of your friendship. Once you convince yourself that you’re a reasonably good self-protector, you can approach your memories with less fear of being swept away.

Find a therapist who’s a good relationship coach, or a therapy group whose members have some wisdom with difficult or exploitative relationships. Don’t force yourself to re-experience memories of abuse until you know how you’d manage it as an adult.

Don’t assume, because you’re fearful of the ones you love, that you’re bad at relationships or that they’ll turn out badly. You’re right, relationships are potentially dangerous, but your awareness of that fact and willingness to get some coaching and training can protect you and eventually help you find friends and lovers who deserve your trust.

Learning from/dealing with the past can be helpful, but beware of the risks, particularly if you (and a therapist) focus exclusively on painful emotions for which you still haven’t developed defenses.

If you want to look back, don’t lose sight of your present ability to spot and avoid guys like dear old dad; then you can learn from and use your memories, instead of being haunted by them.

STATEMENT:
“Because of the past, I may never feel secure about relationships. Once I learn how to detect abuse and avoid abusers, however, I can find friends I can trust, even if my fears remain.”

My friends can’t stand my girlfriend because they say she steals from me to feed her habit, but we’ve been together for 3 years and I can’t help feeling she’s the best friend I have. It’s true, she has a drug habit that she can’t control, and money sometimes disappears from my wallet, but it’s an illness and it’s no good to blame her for it. It doesn’t change the fact that we love one another. Aside from her habit, I know I can trust her. I truly believe our love is a positive factor in helping keep her habit from getting worse. My goal is to help her, of course, while getting my friends to see that she’s a real person, not a drug addict.

Relationships can always be dangerous if you focus too much on the other person’s feelings, or your own, without stopping to think about your other priorities in life. She might make you feel like a hero, feel like you’re a healing saint, feel guilty if you can’t do what she asks, etc. If you focus on that instead of whether or not this relationship is ruining your life, you’re doing it wrong. The more sweet, sensitive and generous your temperament, the worse your peril.

The opposite of caring too much for someone isn’t, of course, to be selfish; it’s to be responsible for your other goals, the ones that arise from your values, interests, and other obligations, including your job to take good care of yourself. You need money for your own education or rainy day fund or, simply, survival during hard times. You deserve to be loved for more than your ability to give.

Go back to basics and think about your own standards for a good relationship, as if you were advising a friend. Yes, you’d say, you need love and good chemistry, but you also need someone who can cover your back, take care of things when you’re disabled, help you on your way, and work well with you in a crisis. You’d have to agree that, without those standards, you’ll team up with someone who can suck you dry and undermine your stability in a very unstable world.

Love is a drug and it can addict and ruin your life and other relationships in a way that puts meth to shame. That’s why, rather than getting into a discussion of how wonderful it feels, you’d urge your friend to think about what he wants a relationship for and how it will help him do what matters.

Forget about what your friends think and put aside your desire to help your girlfriend; instead, focus on what you want to make of your own life and trying to be a good person in a crazy world. Remember who you are and then see where this relationship fits. You’re not a saint, you’re a boyfriend, and if you want to do what’s best for both of you, you won’t even be that much longer.

STATEMENT:
“I love my girlfriend and want to save her from drug addiction and I don’t mind her faults, but what comes first are my own standards for being a strong and self-reliant person that are not dependent on any one person’s love or approval.”

I always suspected that I was attracted to women more than to men, but I liked my husband, and we’ve been good companions for the past 20 years. It hurt him deeply, however, that I wasn’t interested in him sexually and finally, when he pressured me to tell him what was wrong, I told him I thought I might be gay. Now he feels I lied to him, that our marriage has been meaningless, and he wants a divorce. Our life together is over and I feel totally to blame, like I’ve let down my husband and betrayed our marriage. What can I say to make amends?

There’s one important step people sometimes forget to take before making amends– asking yourself what you’ve done wrong.

Obviously, your husband is hurt and he thinks you’re to blame, but, as we’ve said many times, that’s the whole point of marriage—having someone to blame. Real sin requires knowing that you have something to hide, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.

With only 3 shopping days left until Yom Kippur, you might wish to remind yourself that the Day of Atonement, when Jews make a special effort to examine our sins, begins with a thrice-repeated statement claiming that no one should ever be responsible for vows they can’t keep.

In other words, life is often impossible and it’s not rationalizing to say you can’t be responsible for what you don’t control– it’s Old Testament.

So look what you’ve done with your (newly coined) homosexual feelings. You haven’t been unfaithful, or blamed your lack of attraction to your husband on his being fat. If you kept a secret from him, it was because you also kept it from yourself, and in spite of your uneasiness, you forged a 20 year relationship. That’s a major accomplishment for both of you.

So don’t let your sexual identity shock shake your confidence; you’ve taken a step forward that allows you to be more self-accepting and spontaneous. While it damages your husband’s matrimonial ideal, it shouldn’t diminish your pride in what both of you have done with the marriage so far, or your hope in what it might become in the future, if your husband calms down.

After all, this doesn’t need to be the end of your relationship; you maybe not have been a great sexual partner, but you’ve always been a great partner, and there’s no reason not to continue to be great friends.

STATEMENT:
“I wish our sexual chemistry and my sexual identity were less complicated, but I feel my husband and I have been good partners, not because of my lying, but in spite of it. I wish it didn’t hurt to face these sexual realities but I’m glad we did and think we can be better friends now that I no longer have to hide who I am.”

I would like to stay off pain pills and I attend AA meetings regularly, but I get the pills from an old friend of mine who also goes to the meetings. She’s been sick with HIV and needs all the support she can get, so we wind up hanging out and then getting high. I wish my husband gave me a little more credit for trying to stay clean, even if I haven’t been successful. It’s hard to say “no” to spending time with a dying friend.

Forget for a moment why other people think it’s bad for you to take pain pills; instead, do your own assessment, not just for whether the pills are bad, but for whether or not amends are in order.

Obviously, the good side is that they make you feel better and you enjoy passing time with a sick friend. Then again, pain pills have a magical ability to kill pain while also causing a ton of it.

Start with a checklist of possible negatives, so you won’t miss the big picture. Include the weekly cost and whether the pills interfere with your ability to work, either directly or by risking a positive drug screen. Ask friends and family whether they see a negative effect on your behavior, and ask yourself whether your focus on feeling better has pushed aside other priorities, like being a good friend or parent.

Finally, assess your friendship with this friend in the same way. Ask yourself whether this is a friend who, in addition to being fun to hang out with, is someone you can count on. Look carefully at whether the feel-good focus of the friendship excludes the more important priorities above.

You need to find your own reasons for being sober, and the strongest reasons will come, not from your need to please your husband or meeting-mates, but from your sense of what it takes to be a good person. As the AA saying goes, you are the reason for your own sobriety. If you’ve used drugs a long time, however, you tend to be super-aware of how other people feel about you and relatively insensitive to your own standards. Those standards give you the reasons to stay clean.

Remember, however, that standards aren’t the same as sentiments. You may feel like a good woman for supporting a sick friend—a nice sentiment—while failing to meet important commitments to manage your health, work, family and other friendships.

Be careful not to bullshit yourself, or your good deeds will, surprise, get you little appreciation or, more importantly, little self-respect. If keeping your friend company keeps you from doing the right thing, then, like the pills themselves, you’re causing more pain than you’re preventing.

STATEMENT:
I feel good when I can help out an appreciative pal and share some good times, but if I want to keep my relationships with people who really care about me, I need to put commitments ahead of good feelings.

I met (and fell for) my girlfriend when I first started doing comedy improv—she’s been doing it for years, so she taught me the basics—and I’ve been looking forward to performing together ever since. We’ve been getting along well as a couple, particularly since I understand and accept that she’s not very good at understanding and interacting with people, and that she can get brusque when she’s just preoccupied with her own ideas. I don’t take that stuff personally, but when she told me recently that she didn’t want to perform with me because my timing is off and it interferes with hers, I was hurt. After all, that’s not what our director or the audience seems to think—they think we’re funny together—but she obviously disrespected my abilities, after having been encouraging me for so long, and it really bothered me. I don’t know if there’s any point in wanting to be with her if she doesn’t respect my work.

Everyone talks about how crucial honesty is in relationships, but when you’re dating someone with a social palsy, you often get honesty in excess…which can often lead to a lack of wanting to talk to each other anymore.

Even though you know your girlfriend’s bad at censoring herself or her moods, you can’t help feeling hurt when the girl you love and respect, personally and professionally, tells you she doesn’t like your style. It’s especially baffling when she helped create your style in the first place.

Once you act hurt and retaliate, however, you’re provoking or criticizing someone who already has an ax to grind, and more disrespect is sure to follow. That’s how road rage ignites and Middle Eastern wars begin. Honesty is not the best policy.

Take comfort from the fact that you’re no longer a comedy neophyte and rejection by your partner is not so important now that you have the experience to make and respect your own judgment.

After all, you know that the basic reason people create partnerships is not really love, sex, or creative collaboration—although these reasons may be important at the beginning—but because they need someone to blame when they’re not feeling good. That and separate sinks are the foundation of any good marriage.

Too much blame and grumpy honesty, particularly if it’s one way, may indeed make a creative relationship unbearable and not worth sustaining. Give yourself a chance though to weigh the whole thing before letting your hurt feelings take over. Ask yourself what you value about the relationship; if it’s being close to someone who consistently puts down your work and, even worse, gives you bad notes, then sure, suck it up and say good-bye.

Here, however, you’ve had a lot of good give and take. You’ve learned from one another, and that implies true respect. You’re both comedy professionals, which allows you to support one another and share a unique perspective that’s alien to most civilians, even if you can’t be creative together. You know she’s got a bad mouth and that it’s not personal, and if nothing else, she knows you’ve got potential.

If you decide the relationship has value, then don’t let hurt control your actions. If you decide the package is worth it, then put negativity off the agenda. Tell her your timing is fine, and so is hers, and that you believe you would work well together.

If she disagrees, then you’ll enjoy a brief turn as a tragedy duo and go your separate ways.

STATEMENT:
“It hurts to hear my girlfriend say she doesn’t like working with me, but I’m now experienced enough to believe in my own work and I know her well enough to think her reasons come from her problems, not mine. I believe she respects me. My goal is to make the best of our relationship and not let my judgment be swept away by hurt feelings.”

I’ve started dating a guy I really like, and I realize that, after 5 dates, I haven’t told him a couple things I’m afraid would scare him away, like the fact I was once married for a year, and that I’m 30 and living with my parents. I work hard, like my job, and save up my money, and the marriage wasn’t crazy, it just didn’t work out. I’m worried, though, that if I tell him now he’ll feel I wasn’t being honest and I’ll just sound defensive. This is my first post-divorce/at-home relationship, so I’m not sure what the rules are. What should I say to him?

Before worrying about what someone else will think of the less attractive aspects of your life, decide what you think. These are not things you can hide from a prospective partner for too long, nor are they exactly secrets. After all, living with your parents isn’t exactly the same as being born a different gender (but at least most transsexuals don’t have to deal with mom folding their underwear).

The more importance you put on your image, the more your self-acceptance depends on the opinion of others, which gives you more reason to hide information and fear their judgment. And that makes it really hard to feel comfortable expecting acceptance and love from anyone else.

Ask yourself what you think about living at home at age 30, forgetting what it looks like. Use criteria you think are more important, like whether you’re doing your best to make a living, be a good roommate, and manage your money responsibly.

There’s no shame in having bad employment luck or in using a stay at home to build capital. If you think that you’re avoiding responsibilities by living at home, however, then you need to change—not to look better to boyfriends, but to live up to your values and get your life together. Otherwise, be proud of what you’re doing and show your pride when you talk about it.

Divorce may look bad, too, but trust your own standards for making the best of a failed relationship. Decide for yourself whether you broke up because of your bad behavior, or problems with commitment—or whether you gave marriage a good try, behaved yourself, and simply ran into some basic incompatibilities.

You probably learned much from your hard times, and, from what you haven’t said, I suspect that your own behavior has been fine. Don’t apologize for the hopes and values you brought to your marriage or for the efforts you made to make it work and/or manage the divorce with minimal conflict.

So, when you talk to your boyfriend, don’t confess or try to win his approval, because that gives too much power to appearance and the opinions of others. Instead, stand by your decisions and see if he respects you enough for who you are, no matter where you live, what your marital status has been, or what junk you were born with. If you accept those things and he doesn’t, then he’s the one who should be ashamed.

STATEMENT:
“I guess I’m reticent to talk about things that may make me seem like an unattractive loser, but I have my standards and I’m living up to them in ways I can be proud of. If I can talk about how I’ve managed my problems instead of confessing that I have them, I’ll give my boyfriend a chance to get to know my strengths and give myself a chance to see if he values me for the right reasons.”

I discovered this site after reading Emma Forrest’s book, “Your Voice In My Head” [fxckfeelings.com was cited in the acknowledgments –Dr. Lastname]. I am very young (in high school) and have suffered from anorexia/bulimia for 3 years. I never had a calm childhood, and after being obese I lost half of my body weight through anorexia within half a year, but I gained all of it back by bingeing in not even a few months. I feel like I was not even strong enough to ”stay anorexic’,’ so I became bulimic. Everyday I wake up thinking about how I should die or how long I can keep living with myself, because I despise who I am, and it is becoming unbearable. I truly believe I will never see the light at the end of the tunnel, I will never get out of this and will spend the rest of my life with an eating disorder which has ruined my life. I have no more strength to keep fighting, I have had enough, enough of life. Please help, I am ready to hear anything.

As mental illnesses go, eating disorders are the most parasitic; they literally consume their host in order to thrive, but instead of demanding more food, they feed upon your body and self-worth.

Instead of having a moderate, healthy awareness of your own attractiveness, you’re dealing with a leech that is rarely satisfied with how you look and more often intensely disgusted with the ways you fall short. It would rather wipe you out than live with you ugly (and it always thinks you’re ugly).

If you’re lucky, you’ve got parents who understand your obsessions but have gained an ability to value themselves for who they are, not how they look, that allows them to live with the pain of body-hate or out-of-control eating and/or starving. They then work patiently with you (and likely outside help) to help you regain that perspective.

If you’re unlucky, depressive thoughts and/or out-of control behaviors, driven by genes or childhood experiences that are similar to yours, have pushed your parents into big trouble or divorce, or they’ve pushed you to the point that you can’t accept help from anyone. I hope that’s not your problem, but you’re sure not lucky.

Since you found out about fxckfeelings.com from Ms. Forrest’s book, you know then that the hero of the book is the psychiatrist she found who, in addition to helping her feel better, also gave her perspective about her mood swings and out-of-control behavior. He made it clear that, while there was no cure, it wasn’t her fault, and there were lots of good people who learn to live with these problems and lead good lives. He gave her realistic hope that she’s carried with her, even after his death.

While there’s no guarantee that psychotherapy or medication could help you feel better, at least not immediately, there’s a chance it might. What you can expect, however, if you spend time with someone who has perspective on your problems, is help in fighting your negative thinking and developing a sense of self-worth that doesn’t depend on size, weight, beauty, or being totally in control of your eating behavior.

Don’t get discouraged if counseling hasn’t helped you so far. Look for a good, positive coach with a vision of your value and your future. Don’t settle for less.

If you check out of life because you can’t stand yourself, you’re surrendering to that parasite who both hates you for and thrives on your perceived ugliness. Stand up to it and protect the nice kid who deserves respect, if only for her good literary choices.

STATEMENT:
“I can’t stop the endless self-hate, but I believe that everyone, including me, has a value that doesn’t depend on looks, size, or mouth-control and that, if I select the right friends, supporters, and therapists, I will get stronger.”

I don’t see the point in therapy. I was depressed and suicidal throughout my teenage years, and was often sent to therapists. I was hospitalized several times, once after an overdose and a couple times because I threatened to kill myself if I had to return home. Treatment did absolutely no good. Now I get by, but I don’t trust people and I wouldn’t be surprised if I wind up killing myself, and I don’t really care. What’s your advice?

People who don’t care whether they live or die are often disappointed (it comes with the full depression package). Usually, that disappointment comes from things they can’t help or control, but care a lot about. It can be that they hate their looks or personality (see above), or just want something they can’t have, but either way, that loss and anger become more important than their promises, ideals, or commitments.

Under the right circumstances, disappointed rage can give people courage and scare away opposition; when you have nothing to lose, you’re truly dangerous, to yourself and everyone else. People will often back off and give you what you want, unless they get just as mad or put you in jail. Either way, it’s a lose/lose (either you lose what you want or you lose your dignity/composure/mind).

Right now, your main issue isn’t your depression, but that nobody’s been able to help you do anything about it; I won’t tell you to get help because there’s no help for your disappointment, and you know it. You know that therapy can’t make you feel better, and any promise to the contrary gives you a target for your disappointment (and it’s dangerous to become a target for the kind of rage you’re packing).

The worst thing about your rage is that it makes you right; you attack people who disappoint you and they act more like jerks, which confirms your disappointment, so you feel justified in giving them more, and they give you back more to hate and despite. It’s a vicious cycle that feeds your self-righteousness while destroying your chances for improvement.

Ask yourself, though, if there’s anything more important to you than your disappointment and the confidence that it brings. Ask if there is anything worth doing or anyone worth caring for, or if you value helping people, being independent or making the world better. If so, ask if pursuing your values is worth keeping your disappointment, and rage, to yourself.

If there is something more important to you than disappointment, then you may want to learn how to keep it from turning you into a monster who loves to stomp on small cities, friends, and yourself. Restraint hurts, but it can be learned, if you want to learn it. First, though, you must decide whether it’s worth it.

I doubt that anyone can help you feel better if you continue to draw strength from your rage at their perceived incompetence. If you decide that life is worth living anyway, there are lots of people, including some therapists, who can help you be decent to yourself and others.

For now, start at square one and accept that life is unfair, dealing with mental illness is hard work, and you’re not big on luck. Don’t get mad, get over it, and then get on with the slow process of feeling a little better.

STATEMENT:
“I feel stronger when I’m attacking my enemies, and I’ve got good reason to attack them, but I won’t allow my enemies to become more important to me than my beliefs in what I should do to be a good person. However much I fear or hate them, I’ll try to focus on ignoring them and giving my own life meaning.”

Well, I’ve been with my boyfriend for 5 years, and during our third year I got into his Facebook account and saw that he’d cheated on me by talking online with girls saying he loved them. I walked away for about 4 months. He tried everything to get me back and after he showed me he changed I thought I should give it one last chance since he is my first everything. I’m trying to move past this but I feel there is something inside me that wants to explode every time I am with him. What advice can you give me to forget this incident or should I not forget?

You’ve given this guy one more chance because he’s your “first everything,” which is understandable. At this point, however, he’s also your first lesson in how character, unlike love, is forever.

He didn’t do this to hurt or disrespect you, because that would imply he thought his actions through before taking them. Instead, he acted on his very flawed set of instincts, which is what brings his character into question.

Sincerity, tons of respect, and heaps of flowers shouldn’t get you to lower your guard. Most guys who sincerely regret their bad behavior regret it because they got caught, or they don’t feel like that any more, or they wish you weren’t mad at them.

Sure, guys like this may really, really love you and have nothing but sincere regrets, but they can’t admit that their basic instincts haven’t changed, won’t change, and will always come back. They sincerely wish that weren’t true and that the guy who did those bad things was another guy, but all the earnest wishes in the world don’t guarantee that his actions will improve.

Most guys with bad instincts improve, not by becoming better people, but learning to control themselves after getting to truly know themselves, for better or worse. At some time or other, they accept the fact that their bad instincts will never go away, and that they will always have to struggle to keep them in check. They know that the moment they think they’ve won permanent control, they’re in real trouble.

Unless he worships the ground you walk on, your boyfriend’s love will probably not keep him on the straight and narrow. If he controls himself because he loves you and doesn’t want to hurt you, that’s fine for as long as it lasts. Usually, however, real couples get mad at one another over stupid things and have petty urges to hurt one another. That’s when his control will break down, unless it’s rooted in deeper, personal values, not just loving feelings that can fade after a shouting match.

Your goal then isn’t to forget this incident, but to first figure out whether it’s indicative of what your future together holds. Don’t pay lots of attention to the sincerity of his love or whether he shows you tons of respect, but do give him points for admitting that he has an honesty problem, and give him more points if he wants to change because he wants to be a better guy, and not just to get your love. Give him lots of points if his actions reflect his words over a long period of time.

You know what you think about his cheating, but the real question is, what does he think about it, and what does he plan to do. If his plan just involves groveling and empty promises, get ready to be the first one in the relationship to say it’s over.

STATEMENT:
“Cheating feels like my boyfriend disrespects me and that it won’t happen if his respect is real. That’s not true. Cheating is a bad habit that’s hard to change and it has very little to do with how much he loves or respects me. The only way I can safely trust him with my future is if I see that he owns his problem, wants to be a better guy, and keeps his hands, eyes, and email connections to himself.”

After 10 years of working my butt off for this company, my boss rewarded me by giving me all the shitty parts of her job and taking away all the things I liked to do and giving them to herself. She’s not mad at me and doesn’t want to force me out. I don’t think she expects me to be mad and if I told her, she’d think I was being touchy. My goal is to feel better about these changes so I don’t blow up, but doing this job has never been easy and now it feels like an endless humiliation.

If you’ve worked your butt off for a company and gotten treated like shit, there’s a wonderful lesson to be learned. You should never, ever treat work as if it’s family or the whole of your life. You also shouldn’t be surprised if losing your ass makes a shitty feeling increase.

I know most jobs come to feel like family; you see more of the people you work with than anyone else, and the bosses talk about caring, loyalty, and fairness. It’s hard not to feel humiliated and/or like the mistreated middle child if no one listens and you’re given tasks that everyone else hates doing.

Remember, however, that your goal in working is to make a living, not to get the job done or win your boss’s respect. You work for yourself and your own values, and, while your boss is your most important client, that’s all he is. Until the day arrives when respect becomes currency, focus on your paycheck and timecard instead.

If you care too much about your work and then feel unappreciated, your feelings become dangerous. It’s not just that disgruntlement gets noticed, but that criticized bosses always find something wrong with you. At that point, it gets personal and moral, and you’re the one who will wind up in the shrink’s office, not them.

Step back, assess your strengths and opportunities, then market yourself and see what’s out there. If the job market is dead—and that’s been the rule for the last few years—respect yourself for working with disrespect. It’s hard enough to make a living when your boss likes you.

Take comfort in this secret: the guy who does the shit-work no one else wants usually has a more secure job because processing shit is the most essential part of any job. Work hard, but get your butt back; after all, you already work for an asshole.

STATEMENT:
“I may feel as if my devotion has been rewarded with humiliation and disrespect, but that means I’ve been giving too much to my job and not thinking enough about my own priorities. It’s time to become my own boss and develop a job description that limits overwork and attends to other parts of my life. I don’t really want to be a well-appreciated worker who knocks himself out for the sake of the company. I want to be a guy who values his own work and loves quittin’ time.”

I have a friend who has a history of being diagnosed with depression, self-mutilation and, recently, suicidal thoughts. She was forced to seek treatment with a counselor in HS (now 24-years-old) whom she said was no help, and now she says she won’t ever seek treatment again because it won’t help her. She acknowledges she has issues that need addressing, but she doesn’t believe in mental illness diagnoses, states she just needs to “deal” with it. However, all we talk about is how much she hates her life, hates feeling this way but isn’t willing to do anything about it. I’ve told her she’s an adult, and makes her own decisions and no one can force her to do anything, but I’ve been very honest with my concerns about her, and that she needs help. I don’t want to treat her with kid gloves or enable her but I also don’t know how much I can push her, since I know its her mental illness that’s clouding her view of the world/reality. How can I continue to be a good friend without beating my head into a wall and enabling her?

For many people, “help” and “cure” have become interchangeable words, as if good motivation and proper treatment will always make things better (tell that to the common cold).

Sadly, the help your friend needs, just like a cure for what ails her, may or may not exist, depending on her luck, the severity of her issues and whether she sees them as hers or just a reaction to other people.

Regardless of treatment, the normal course for severe problems like depression, eating disorder, and urges to hurt yourself are the same; off and on, for many years. There is certainly no cure, and very rarely can anyone provide the help to stop recurrence completely.

Don’t then assume that treatment would make your friend feel better if she were “willing to do something about it,” because, unfortunately, this might not be true. After all, she was willing to try something, and it simply failed to take.

Instead, find out what she knows about the various kinds of treatment available to her and what she thinks about their possible benefits and risks. If she lumps them all together as useless because the one didn’t work, you have good reason to warn her against the power of negative thinking when people are in pain and/or depressed.

If you can persuade her that depression-pumped negative thinking has clouded her judgment into fearing and avoiding options that are worth exploring, you’ve also provided her with some excellent cognitive therapy and shown her that she needs it—a beneficial trifecta. If not, you’ve shown yourself that she’s too negative to be logical, you’ve been as helpful as you can be, and you just can’t get penetrate her depressive pseudo-logic.

Never buy the idea, however, that you have to get better to get better. If she has, in actuality, exhausted all likely treatments and nevertheless keeps trying to work and be a good friend, respect what she’s doing, because that’s what beating an illness is all about.

It’s easy when treatment works, but the true heroes are the ones who keep on going when it doesn’t. If you’re there for her during that struggle, that’s the best kind of help there is.

STATEMENT:
“I hate to see my friend suffer and I’m worried that she could do herself serious harm, but I know that mental illness and negative thinking can brainwash good people and that help, from me or a professional, is not necessarily the answer. I will always insist that there is a hopeful way forward, but accept the fact that she may not agree and that argument is not helpful.”

I can’t stand the way I’ve become a disorganized idiot when I used to be incredibly good at juggling multiple responsibilities. I’m only 35-years-old and, while becoming a father has been stressful, it shouldn’t have destroyed my basic organizational abilities. Admittedly, I ‘ve been through a major depression or two, but I’m in a good mood now, I love my work, I’ve got a great wife, and my life isn’t a lot more complicated than it used to be. Nevertheless, I ruminate over tasks that go nowhere, get distracted before I get important things finished, forget my priorities and miss important meetings. I’m a mess, I’m an incompetent ditz, and I hate it. Medications haven’t helped so far, and neurological tests show nothing. There must be something that will give me back my competence.

If there was some way to restore your mojo, you probably would have found it by now, because you’ve had yourself evaluated and tested, and you’ve tried treatments and nothing has worked. In other words, here lies your mojo, may it rest in peace.

It’s sad, but I’ve seen this kind of acquired ditziness happen to people who’ve had a bad depression or two, as well as to people who’ve been concussed. Things may get better in the long run.

Meanwhile, a part of your brain has shut down, even though you feel normal in every other way and nothing shows up on an MRI. Only a voodoo doctor will notice the missing mojo, and your insurance won’t cover all the chicken blood that likely requires.

On the plus side, there’s lots you can do to help yourself if you stop trying to turn the clock back and substitute your old brain for the one you’ve now got. Yes, it’s humiliating, but so is a colonoscopy. Accept it, and you can keep yourself in the clear.

You can ask your wife and friends for help, take a course on organizational techniques, buy a to-do calendar book to write down priorities and create a schedule. You can also put alarms into your smartphone, and set up habits for checking your book, your messages, and your checkbook. Accept the need to learn simple, dumb-looking methods for doing things you used to accomplish intuitively, and you may be able to compensate 100% for your dysfunction.

Ambitious perfectionists fight this notion, because they want to control their lives in their heads. They get mad at themselves for losing control, then depressed, then more dysfunctional, and then more depressed. They also keep me from becoming unemployed.

Fighting your ambitious nature will not be easy, but remember, your goal isn’t to be who you were; it’s to be organized enough to make a living, run a family, and keep your life together, that’s all. The next step is to accept that what used to feel like “that’s all?” is now “that’s a lot.”

STATEMENT:
“I feel like a brain-damaged ex-whiz kid, but my real goals haven’t changed. If I can force myself to endure rehabilitation, and become competent enough to keep my major commitments, it will be the biggest achievement of my life so far.”

A year and a half ago, my ex-fiancé died suddenly from a heart attack. He was 38. We had broken up a year earlier, and it was a very messy break-up. He called my boss at work and told her I was trying to have her fired so I could steal her job, I walked away from most of my personal belongings when I moved out, and I walked away from my savings because we had a joint bank account. I went to the funeral and found out that while we were planning our wedding he was pursuing on-line long-distance relationships as well as inappropriate relationships with women in our city. A letter from one of the long-distance women was read out at the funeral. I can’t move past this. I have been dating a man for about 3 months now and he’s wonderful. I have a really hard time thinking positively, and every time we have an argument I think ‘worst case scenario’—that he will leave me. How can I think more positively?

First, begin with the idea that love is dangerous and some people are more vulnerable than others. We’ve called love a virus before, and sadly, your emotional immune system is impaired.

People love to say it’s important to “follow your heart,” but for people like you, that can be deadly; after all, those same people might say that “love is blind,” and when you’re helpless to love, following your blinded heart can lead you right off a cliff.

Maybe a vulnerability to love is a genetic trait that helps people stick together, like the way geese imprint on one another, and it’s a good survival trait under certain circumstances and in moderate doses. Without guidance from your common sense, however, love can overwhelm your ability to think positively, negatively, or at all.

To recover from a love that binds you so powerfully to someone who is nasty, unreliable, and destructive takes lots of time and it hurts. You’re already doing something helpful by dating someone who seems nice, so take it one step further by defining what you mean by nice and checking out whether he fits.

From now on, your definition should never depend on how strongly you love or feel close to someone, because you get love-sick so easily and so quickly that your instincts are shot.

So stop looking to your useless heart for directions and follow the facts. What you want to see is a good track record for reliability in relationships, work, and money management. Then you want to see good evidence that he accepts you when you’re down, prickly, and not terribly responsive. Finally, maybe, you can let yourself start to connect.

Keep working at it until you get it right, and don’t be afraid to ask your friends whether they agree with your findings. The more you practice, the better you’ll get, and the less reactive you’ll be to whether he makes you feel good or your fears make you feel bad.

Along the way, your pain may make you feel needy. Fortunately, however, it sounds like you’ve acquired a healthy sense of self-doubt and wariness and that’s the kind of negative thinking that, in moderation, can be healthy.

Being susceptible to love doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you; just that the world contains bad people, that some are too easy to love, and you’re learning how to protect yourself.

If your heart’s judgment is going to fail you, then train your mind to pick up the slack. It’s not about becoming more positive; it’s about getting real.

STATEMENT:
“It’s hard to get over feelings of being broken, uncertain, and doomed after loving a psychopathic man, but I learned a lot, and my pain is there to warn me of danger. I will use my fear to think more logically about danger signs and how to spot them. I will remind myself that there are far worse things than being alone. I will become better at identifying people I can really trust.”

My sister keeps going out with the same kind of guy—attractive and sleazy—and, as you might expect, she gets her heart broken regularly. She’s a good kid and I try to tell her she needs to look for love in better places, but she insists that she sees good in these guys and knows what she’s doing. If I push too hard, she tells me I’m jealous of her happiness and unwilling to take the necessary risks to find a love of my own. I’ve learned to shut up, but my goal is to see her happy.

Sometimes love is 100% blinding, just like anger, sex, fear, etc., and getting in its way is useless. In your sister’s case, it isn’t love for a particular person, as in the case above; it’s love in general.

She wants to follow her heart and believes it’s a good thing, regardless of her bad experiences, which she probably rationalizes as something she did wrong. It’s hard to watch, but impossible to stop.

So don’t suffer and watch. Instead, wait until she recognizes that one of these guys is a jerk or that she’s lost something she values by spending time with them.

At that point, you can tell her you told her so, but not in terms of what she did wrong. As satisfying as that might be, sharing your frustration will make her feel bad and push her where you don’t want her to go: self-recrimination and the fantasy that things would go well if she did things right.

Instead, tell her that, as far as you can see, she’s been a great friend and partner to her boyfriends, but that you warned her that that particular jerky boyfriend was unworthy of her love. It’s not her you’re critical of, or her search for love, but the great number of attractive guys out there who can’t be good friends and partners.

Help her separate the idea of her performance from the pain of her loss. She’s not hurting because she fucked up, but because life is hard, her luck sucks (and so does her taste in men, but keep that to yourself).

Then, maybe, if she’s less defensive, she’ll buy into your procedures for screening out sleaze-buckets. Or maybe not, and you’ll just have to accept the fact that some people are fatally blind when it comes to love and the jerks that pretend to offer it.

STATEMENT:
“It’s no fun watching my sister fall for bad guys time and again, but good people sometimes have blind spots about love and blind spots about their blind spots, and I don’t know she’ll ever do better. If there’s a chance, I’ll help her. If not, I’ll try to have dinner with her when her guy isn’t around.”

My wife is a good woman, and she loves our son, but she has a trauma history and when she gets anxious, she gets very negative and loses hope in us, herself, and our future. Antidepressants helped some, but less than we hoped. Two years ago, before our son was born, her psychiatrist showed her that negative thinking was half the problem and urged her to get DBT, a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy that would help her develop positive thinking habits. She didn’t follow through but seemed to be doing well until the other day, when I discovered she’s been drinking secretly since she delivered. She says alcohol is the only drug that helps relieve her anxiety, which has been overwhelming. My goal is to find something else that will help her.

Everyone is entitled to anxiety-relief, a fair life, and a healthy body. Along with that entitlement comes the guarantee that everybody (except for a few lucky jerks) has to pay the price.

At this point, her motto is, to paraphrase the New Hampshire license plate, “live free (from anxiety) or drink.” If it were up to you, she wouldn’t feel this way, but it’s not, and you’ve got to tell her that neither freedom nor booze is an option.

Theoretically, there should be a good medication for anxiety, but in actuality all current medications are a compromise. The reliable, effective drugs—benzodiazepines—are also addictive, and the safe, non-addictive drugs—antidepressants and others—are less reliable and slower to take effect.

So, while most people get some anxiety relief from medication, there will always be a few people who don’t. Unfortunately, they’re the ones who are most vulnerable to alcohol addiction and have the most reason to wonder how they can be expected to tolerate anxiety without its benefit.

The sad fact is that she’s fucked, and as long as she’s unwilling to accept that fact—and her question implies that she is—she’ll make herself worse. Helping her means helping her face facts, then seeing what she can do.

There’s no immediate relief, and sobriety, which is what she needs, will begin by making her feel worse. That said, if she can stay sober, she can learn new ways to get stronger. The psychiatrist was right—DBT will help, and so will AA.

Let her know you’ll stick with her if she tries, and protect yourself and your child if she doesn’t. You’re not warning her because you’re angry or want to control her, just because you’re stating the sad facts of life.

Hopefully, once she realizes what’s at stake, and accepts the lack of feel-good alternatives, she’ll be ready to make sacrifices to preserve what’s truly valuable in her life.

STATEMENT:
“My wife’s pain is real and it’s hard to see it without feeling she deserves better, which she does. If she can’t find the strength and motivation to get sober, however, she’ll become a dangerous parent and weak partner. I love her and believe in her potential strength, but I must do what’s necessary to survive if she can’t get herself under control.”

My wife has been horribly depressed for the past 6 months and none of the medications that used to help her are doing much good now. ECT, the treatment they use when medications don’t work, caused her too much memory loss and she can’t do it again. Her psychiatrist says the only medications that might work are ones that sometimes cause weight gain, so she refuses to try them. (Another psychiatrist, whom she saw for a second opinion, agreed.) Now she’s suicidal and insists that there should be a medication that won’t cause weight gain and that she needs to find a psychiatrist who can help her. My goal is to help her, but she’s making it impossible.

Weight gain is bad for her health, as well as her looks, self-esteem, and pants budget, so it’s understandably the side effect your wife hates the most.

The one positive sign in all of this is that your wife is eager to find treatment, even if she’s got the wrong priorities (which is better than reacting like the wife above and looking in the wrong places). The key is getting her to look harder, expect less, and be willing to put her mind above panic about her body.

After all, she should remember that side effects are usually mentioned in the same phrase as the word “risk,” which usually means less than 100%, and that weight gain never appears overnight, so she will always have time to recognize it and respond before acquiring 10 new pounds and a need for bigger pants.

Of course, depressed people often don’t think rationally–weight gain, panic, misery—but that’s where you have to come in and remind her that, unfortunately, a risk of weight gain is a possible side effect of almost all psychiatric medications that are used after the first round or two of treatments fail.

So, if you can’t persuade your wife to take it one step at a time before she rules out meds that might cause weight gain, tell her that she has no other choice. She’s done a good job trying medication, hasn’t been lucky, so now comes the same tough choice that cancer patients face about chemo: brace for possibly serious side effects, or make the most of living with your illness.

If she clings to false hope, expect trouble. You’ll be living with a hypochondriac who puts the search for treatment ahead of other family priorities and blames you and others for not being helpful. The longer she looks for a non-existent solution, the longer she postpones hard choices and distances herself from what’s good in her life.

Show respect for the courage it takes to make tough risk management decisions when there’s no good option. Remind her that there are often good ways to manage bad side effects. Assure her you’re there for her no matter what size pants she wears.

STATEMENT:
“I don’t understand why my wife isn’t able to recover from depression the way she did before, but I know it’s not her fault or the medications’ and that her options are now limited. I’ll encourage her to make tough decisions and respect her, no matter what decision she makes. I’ll make adjustments to help her manage her condition. If she avoids reality, however, I will not accept responsibility for relieving her pain or re-ordering my priorities to help her find a non-existent cure.”

As a middle manager, I’ve always been interested in ideas about good management, so when the new senior managers at my company asked for suggestions, I gave them an honest response and suggested they cultivate a culture that encourages less overwork and more creativity. It was no secret that I thought they were pushing people too hard and burning them out, which was not the way things used to be at the company. Well, things have been frosty since, so I want to know how to tell the truth without getting into trouble.

I assume you’re not working at a truth-factory. Hence, it’s not your job to tell the truth.

Instead, your job, like anyone’s job, is to do a good day’s work and make a living. Unfortunately, telling the truth is not compatible with that goal.

Business magazine writers are a lot like romance writers; they pretend that the truth eventually wins out and makes people happier. In real life, managers who tend to overwork their subordinates usually believe they are sacrificing their personal popularity for the sake of the company’s survival and take any criticism as a threat to morale, so they don’t change or react well to it.

While your assessment is probably fair, sharing it is unwise. The truth will set you free, if you mean “free of employment.”

Remember, the opposite of telling the truth isn’t lying; it’s keeping your opinion to yourself. If your job is a marriage, then you manager/wife essentially asked you whether she’s fat, and you earnestly told her she needs to lose 20 lbs. It’s the wise spouse who just tells his wife she looks nice and changes the subject.

So, instead of saying too much, use a polite script for taking the fifth amendment, honestly and tell your boss that you think everyone is working hard and getting a lot done, that everyone deserves a lot of credit for hard work, and the transition has required a steep learning curve, and people have risen to the task. Now you’re ready to write fortune cookies.

It’s ironic that your boss probably sees you as a troublemaker when the real problem is that you’re too much of a team player who actually wants to heal your company. The danger of speaking up is not just one of antagonizing the boss, but of making yourself responsible for changes that can’t occur, and then becoming angry and demoralized as a result. It’s dangerous to be a team player when you’re no longer really on the team.

Accept the fact that your company’s management isn’t what it was, cry if need be, then keep the truth to yourself and figure out a new goal. You can’t restore the old culture or improve the new, but you can make a living, build your resume, and look for your next job. As always, the truth hurts.

STATEMENT:
“It’s hard to feel successful when the boss takes it for granted that we should work all the time. I feel worn out, unappreciated, and uncreative. In reality, I’m meeting my own goals, which are to make a living in spite of tough working conditions, and for that I deserve great respect.”

I’m ready to blow up at my sister-in-law, who asked me a bunch of personal, prying questions about my old girlfriends while we were hanging out at a party. She put me on the spot, and I found myself giving answers that didn’t make me look like an idiot or a loser, whether they were honest or not. I don’t like to lie, but I didn’t want to look bad. My goal is to figure out why she does things like that and get her to stop.

There’s no need for you to be angry at your sister-in-law for giving you the third degree because she isn’t the real power behind your humiliation. Sadly, that honor belongs to you.

You’re the one who, for reasons unknown (considering that you’re an adult and not under a court order) felt obliged to sing like a canary, even if it was a false tune. You put the pressure on yourself.

Maybe it’s your fear of looking bad or appearing rude that obliges you to talk, but whatever it is, it’s just a feeling. Ask yourself how much a good guy should share if a close relative asks personal questions, and where those boundary lines would lie (no pun intended).

Don’t excuse your need to talk and tell tales with a fear of being rude, because there are lots of ways to decline a question that are perfectly polite. You could tell your sister-in-law that you don’t like to discuss the past, that it’s old history, that you’d rather discuss the Celtics’ possible elimination. You can give yourself the right to decline questions if you’re doing what you think is the right thing and forget about what others think.

If your sister-in-law accuses you of holding back or being distant or defensive, don’t feel obliged to come up with a clever answer or convince her that she’s wrong. Just share your conviction that you’re not wrong by assuring her you mean no disrespect, but there are some things you’d rather keep to yourself.

Here’s the paradox: if you feel responsible for answering questions in order to appear agreeable, you’ll wind up angry, and possibly lying, and then say something negative that will make you appear disagreeable, even to your own eyes. If you allow yourself to control your answers, however, you may be accused of being disagreeable, but you won’t get angry and it’s less likely that you, or anyone else, will see you as being disagreeable.

You won’t have to dredge up the past, let alone fabricate it. In this case, telling the truth is best, and the truth is, you’d rather discuss something else.

STATEMENT:
“I hate it when family members tell me I’m not sharing, as if I’m stuck up and don’t care and don’t deserve to be accepted by the family. I’m old enough, however, to believe that I have much to offer without having to share secrets and that those who insist on knowing my secrets are not the ones I should share them with. I will say no when I need to, without asking for understanding or showing any sign of the fear or self-doubt I sometimes feel.”