Posted by fxckfeelings on February 18, 2010
If about half of all marriages end in divorce, then, say, a tenth of marriages end in nothing short of open warfare. In a marital battle, some people fight by keeping the verbal (and legal) bombs flying, others hide face down in a fox hole, but both of those tactics only serve to make the war intensify. A better battle plan is to give up on any control of your opponent’s forces (or feelings) and, without too many words or too little action/open fire or fatalities, figure out what you think is right and calmly begin peace talks on those terms.
-Dr. Lastname
My husband always saw himself as the righteous protector of our daughter and, after our divorce, he got into the habit of dragging me into court to force me to pay for some super-costly treatment or schooling that was always no more than a little bit better than what was available for free, but he’d look like a hero to our daughter and the court and the social worker, and I’d look like a miserly shit, and I’d complain bitterly, which just got everyone more on his side, and I was screwed. My daughter bought the bullshit, which meant she and her father shared a tight bond based on hating me, the Scrooge. But I thought the court assaults would stop when she turned 18, until yesterday, when I learned he’s suing me, once again, this time to pay for our daughter’s college tuition, even though she never asked me, she’s over 18, and, with her history of alcohol abuse (and no attempt to get sober), paying for her to go to college without going to rehab first is a waste of money. I think they’re both just scraping the barrel for reasons to drag me into court and I’m getting flashbacks about being raped by the judge. I don’t have any illusion about all of us getting along, but I think it’s fair to want this craziness to stop.
Like it or not, it’s your ex’s legal right to haul you into court at his whim, force you to hire a lawyer, and make you look like a creep. As a reward, you get to give him a good chunk of your savings to pay for something you don’t believe in, to someone who’s out to ruin your life.
Say what you will about justice, but most of the time, it isn’t very fair.
There’s no way you can avoid feeling helpless and outraged, and there’s no shower long or hot enough to make the violated feeling walk away. If, however, your goal is to stop this from happening again by repeatedly venting your outrage, you’ll actually make it worse. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 15, 2010
As Valentine’s weekend comes to a close and the Holiday Death Triangle of Christmas-New Year’s-Valentine’s once again completes its cycle of horror, it’s time to reassess what makes relationships last. Sometimes Mr. Right doesn’t have a connection with you that makes you see fireworks, while a connection with Mrs. Wrong does make you see fireworks, but only after her left hook connects with your face (and your family disconnects from your life). Valentine’s Day might be about love, but there’s a reason why good relationships last for years and Valentine’s haunts our lives but once a year.
-Dr. Lastname
I’m in my mid-30s, about to have my first child with my husband of about a year. My husband is a solid guy—he’s steady, and very caring—but deep down, I know a big reason I married him is because I wasn’t getting any younger and wanted to start a family. I dated a guy in law school that I was really in love with, but he was a lot older, made it clear he never wanted kids, and was your basic passionate, unavailable nightmare. I admit, I’m hormonal, which means my husband’s been getting on my nerves a lot lately, which just makes me obsess more and more about how I’ve settled for a life without love. My goal is to figure out how to get through the next stage of my life and live with my decision.
Don’t get superficial and compare the Valentine’s Day smiles at the next bistro table to your current mood and nostalgic memories of past lovers. In my experience, finding the love of your life isn’t too difficult, but finding a good partner is a real pain in the ass.
By “good partner,” I don’t mean someone you’re crazy about, under any and all circumstances, forever and ever, amen. I mean someone who is strong, easy to live and work with, accepts you during your weaker and less likeable moments, communicates on your wavelength, and picks up the load when you can’t. As well as someone whom you can put up with most of the time.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 4, 2010
If someone’s related to you, there’s no guarantee they’re going to be honest with you, or even honest about you to anyone else. You can try to get them to own up to their problems with anger, eloquence, and/or the help of the court system, but the smarter choice is to stop pushing them towards the truth and hold onto the facts yourself. As long as you’re calm and factual, people can draw whatever conclusions they want and your relatives can stick to their version, but your part in the family affair is settled.
-Dr. Lastname
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.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 21, 2009
Even if none of us has spent Christmas with our entire families, most of us feel like we should help make it happen and feel terribly guilty if we can’t (I just feel guilty for taking their money, but only a little). We have some illusion that the holidays are the time for our criminal or alcoholic or crazy relatives to put their behavior aside, slap on a Christmas sweater, and join their loved ones around the tree and we feel bad if we can’t make the reunion happen, or even let it happen. But fear not, there’s a way to make excuses tactful and blameless without bringing down everyone’s holiday cheer. Gaw bless us, every drunk and lawless one.
-Dr. Lastname
Please note: There will be no new post on Thursday, 12/24, due to the holiday. Please continue to write in, however, because there will be a new post on 12/28. Thanks, and happy holidays!
My ex-wife was always a wild outlaw in high school, (I got the kids), she’d show up from time to time, but rarely when she said she would, and you never knew when she’d be high, so the court imposed supervised visitation. I want my kids to have a mom though, but when she no-shows, the kids are crushed. Of course, the kids want to see her, particularly for Christmas, but what they don’t know is that she and her current boyfriend were caught on video robbing a liquor store, so if she’s going anywhere, it’s probably straight to jail. . My goal is to figure out a way to break this to my kids so that they don’t hate their mother (even though I sort of think they should).
You can’t protect your kids from the hurt of loving an outlaw mother, any more than you could protect yourself for falling for her years ago. Telling your kids that she’s a bad person inflicts a worse kind of hurt, because it devalues the love you and the kids have given her (which, as you know, you can’t get back).
Even if you can’t protect them from hurt, you still can and should protect the value of their love for her and whatever is meaningful about hers for them.
To begin with, don’t buy the idea that outlaws are regular people who make bad choices. That’s one of those stupid, false-hope ideas that assumes that everyone has the choice to be good or bad and can redeem themselves by making better choices. It’s sort of a hybrid of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Santa’s “Naughty/Nice” list…and it’s bullshit.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on December 14, 2009
As Christmas gets even closer, we have to help our readers with even more holiday-inspired, toxic self-reflection. The holidays have the unfortunate tendency to push people to examine and confront their hurt feelings, when really, the best gift they could give themselves is to ignore their feelings and just enjoy their friends, family, and seasonal baked goods.
-Dr. Lastname
I consider myself to be a pretty thoughtful gift-giver—I pay attention to what other people need, things they don’t even know they need, their birthdays, their anniversaries, and I usually get it right. My husband, on the other hand, isn’t sentimental at all about birthdays or anniversaries and doesn’t remember them, so he’s a lousy gift-giver and, I can’t help it, it really gets to me. After I knock myself out to get him a good birthday present, he either forgets mine, or gets flowers at the last moment, or thinks of getting me something and then doesn’t follow through. We have a wonderful marriage but every year around Christmas, his lazy, lousy gifting really gets on my nerves (particularly since I can’t help doing a good job with his gifts). It’s humiliating. My goal is to find a good way to address this problem so I won’t resent him this Christmas.
There’s not one, but two good reasons why it’s a bad idea to address the problem of unequal gift giving with your husband, and the first, it’s a safe bet, is that you’ve done it before and it turned out badly. I’m right, am I not? (It’s important for me to be right, given my Harvard background).
You reproach your husband for neglecting your Christmas needs, he gets defensive, tells you how he knocks himself out for you, maybe goes further and remembers the time you didn’t do your share, and then you have to tell him how he got the facts wrong.
Meanwhile, both of you are drifting further away from any spirit of Christmas giving, other than that old staple of gift-giving everywhere, the Christmas Earful.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on November 23, 2009
The one gift everybody can expect to get around the holiday season is a surplus of emotions (which, as I’ve said before, turns into a surplus of business for me—ho ho ho!). The ghost of Christmas (and Thanksgiving and New Years) past visits most of us, but for those with rough pasts, said ghost can be a real bitch. If you keep your emotional swamp in check and focus on the positive in the present, you can keep your festivities from being too haunted (and keep yourself out of my office).
-Dr. Lastname
You said before that everybody hates the holidays, and I think most people hate seeing their families. Well, I hate the holidays, but it’s because I don’t have a family; my parents still drink too much, one brother is in jail and the other I don’t trust around my kids, and so every time the holidays roll around I get depressed that I don’t have anyone because the people I should be happy to see are the ones who made me the crazy mess I am today (honestly—I’m bipolar, but on medication). I’m sick of basically being guaranteed to hate myself and life all winter just because of what my family did. My goal is to find a way to feel better no matter what time of year it is.
There’s a simple answer to why it’s a bad idea to expect to get over the sorrow of a bad, abusive family; because usually, it simply can’t be done.
Focusing on your pain and waiting for it to go away will spoil your holidays even more than they’re already spoiled. Talk about a turd in the cranberry sauce.
Maybe you think it’s a holiday right and tradition to vent/celebrate your sad feelings with a shrink. Well, this shrink says forget it. I’m not interested, and neither should you be.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on October 1, 2009
Guilt is an unvoidable part of life—as well as a central motivator of at least a couple of religions—and often the sources of guilt (see: family) never go away. What most people don’t realize is that there’s false guilt and real guilt, the former far more easy to ignore, the latter worth confronting in a meaningful way. Still, while you can’t get rid of guilt overall, there are ways of managing it so that, at the very least, it doesn’t become a holy pain in the ass.
-Dr. Lastname
My mother is a drama queen– she thrives on family conflict and gossip and needs to control every step of my life. She has her nose in everyone’s business, talks badly about most people, and also has a violent temper (at 79 years old, she still throws things and flips people [like me] the bird out of anger). Several events happened that finally made me so angry with her that I literally told her off and have cut ties with her for over a year, but during this year I have suffered from terrible guilt and shame for turning my back on my elderly mother. Believe me, I feel better and more relaxed without her constant turmoil, but there are nights that I wake up from a dream where I am shunned at her funeral as “the daughter who abandoned her mother”. I have tried, in the past, to talk sense into her and explain my feelings but she creeps back to her same troubling ways. My goal is to get over the guilt that I feel about cutting my mother out of my life.
Anger is never a good reason for doing anything, and particularly not for cutting off ties with your mother; after all, anger’s a feeling, and you know that’s a dirty word. It’s not that you don’t have good reasons for being angry, just not for letting anger make your decisions.
As you’ve now realized, once you let anger take over, it’s very hard to protect yourself against guilt, which is where your major problem lies now. The only good, healthy defense against guilt, other than drowning your neurotransmitters in alcohol, is to know you’ve done the right thing, regardless of how unhappy you’ve made someone feel or how badly they’re suffering while you’re the one standing watch.
In this instance, unfortunately, you haven’t done the right thing, so guilt has become your master.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on September 17, 2009
Trauma becomes a part of who you are—the more you fight it, the more you punish yourself—so don’t struggle against the scars, physical or mental, that’s life’s given you. Many people have the notion that therapy can cure psychological trauma, but, in reality, trying to “cure” trauma is like trying to win a war on terror: you can’t defeat an emotional response, you can just keep living in spite of it.
-Dr. Lastname
Up until 2003, I lived in Brooklyn and worked in Tribeca, so, as you can imagine, 9/11 was a big, scary deal for me. I went to therapy for a while—both for the PTSD and the grief over a couple of friends at Cantor/Fitzgerald who died—and while I think I’m doing much better than I was, I still get shaky when I see footage or pictures from that day. Problem is, 8 years have passed, I now live in Chicago, so there’s not a lot of sympathy for my sensitivity. In fact, last week, when the topic came up at work and I expressed my discomfort, one of my co-workers accused me of being totally over dramatic, and I then became the subject of some light ribbing. And I know they have a point sort of, but I also know that it was really fucking scary. So my goal is to figure out what I should do, be it get more therapy or more resistance to my co-workers’ bullshit, in order to move past my trauma.
Trying to block or control your trauma-reactive sensitivity is a bad idea; after awhile, you simply can’t control it, and trying to do so makes it worse. The number of treatments that aim to reduce your symptoms after traumatic events should warn you that success is partial, and control impossible.
And, of course, there are all those natural treatments for blocking pain—alcohol, weed, sugary baked goods, and other high-side-effect mental painkillers that work beautifully, however briefly—while also destroying your life.
In the short run, some treatments are helpful…but they’re not cures. Now you’ve had treatment, it’s 8 years later, you’ve moved away and tried to move on, so whatever sensitivity you’ve got at this point, you’re not going to get rid of.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
