While most mental health clinicians would feel guilty admitting this, I’ve been in the biz for long enough that I don’t give a shit and I need to vent. Most of the crisis calls I get from my psychotherapy practice are senseless and irritating; they’re from patients who feel bad because they forgot to take their medications, or drank too much or when they shouldn’t, or allowed their demons to wreak vengeance on their enemies, the nearer the better, self best of all. A few call me because they’re feeling suicidal (but won’t go to the hospital) and just want me to make them feel better, which is hard when it’s late and I’m tired, and often impossible just because I don’t have that kind of power. I try to be civil, but their calls leave me feeling helpless and wondering whether I’m doing any good. Discussing their responsibility for their behavior is useless, because it usually makes them mad or apologetic. My goal is to figure out what to do with crisis calls that are really a useless pain in the ass.

Many crisis calls you receive as a shrink do a good job of showing off a patient’s worst behavior. It’s like having partial custody of a colicky child.

It’s not that their distress isn’t real and severe—it is, almost always—it’s that it causes self-defeating behavior, like drinking or mouthing off or retreating from the world, which creates a jam that is extra hard to get out of.

Bad feelings cause bad behavior, bad listening skills and bad regrets about going into the therapy business instead of owning a Toyota dealership.

You’re right to wonder whether your response to crisis calls is helpful. Whether you realize it or not—and you seem to realize it—your words sound moralistic and angry, though for good reason. The more you care about your patients’ welfare, the more upset you get about what they’re doing to themselves and how it undoes all those good talks (and/or medications) that seemed to help. As you say, their negative feelings become contagious as you wrestle with your own fatigue, doubts, and fears about more calls to come.

Unfortunately, a moralistic tone usually makes people who’ve messed up feel more messed up. You judge them as having made bad choices, whereas they experience a rush of emotions and habits that sweep all choice away. Your intentions are good, but labeling your bad-behaving patients as irresponsible bad-choosers will usually make them feel like losers talking to their dads.

The good side is that you’ve given them a focus for their anger and disappointment that isn’t themselves. The bad side is that you may get an honorable mention in a suicide note.

If you truly believe in your observations, however, assure yourself that you’re not responsible for making the crisis caller less destructive. The threat to you isn’t the intrusion on your time, it’s feeling responsible for the mess they’re in, which you’re not. Their mess is out of your control, and theirs. Your only responsibility is to give them good advice and do what you can if they’re not safe.

Tell them what you think they eventually need to be able to tell themselves; it will pass, there are good things to do meanwhile, and they’ll sort out the cleanup when they’re better rested. If they’re not safe, they should take themselves to an emergency room.

Assure them you’ll work with them on increasing their self-control over anything they think they’re doing wrong, but it can’t happen now. Good night and good luck to them, and I hope it felt good for you to vent.

STATEMENT:
“It’s hard to stay calm when I see my patients fucking up their lives and then wanting me to make them feel better during my spare time, but my feelings are just a reflection of their feelings, and don’t have to get in my way. When I can’t help them, it’s too bad, but it doesn’t help to blame them, and we can make good use of the experience later, when we talk during work hours.”

As a therapist, I assume that my strongest weapons are kindness and empathy, but sometimes the process is exhausting and my family does not appreciate the amount of time I spend fielding patient phone calls off-hours. When I get desperate calls at dinnertime or late at night, they interfere with my family life, but I don’t believe in hanging up until my patients feel better. Many have been traumatized and go through terrible periods of emptiness and they need to know that someone cares. My family jokes, somewhat bitterly, that my patients have more access to me than they do. I feel unappreciated, tired, and torn in many directions. At least my patients feel that I care. My goal is to help my family see that I also care about them.

If empathy and kindness were as powerful as some therapists and Christians believe, the world would be a lot better than it is. As your family correctly observes, however, the calls keep coming, there are no cures, and What About Bob is coming down the road.

Ask yourself whether your patients are actually getting better, or just feel better because they’ve found someone nice to take their calls. If they are feeling better, figure out if it’s because they’re better at managing their own crises, or because you’ve confirmed their right to have a nice response whenever they need it. If it’s the latter, heaven help them when you’re not there (and help your family when you are).

It’s good that you’re kind and empathic; that’s why your family and patients like to spend time with you. What’s wrong, however, is that, in over-valuing the therapeutic impact of those qualities, you’re putting too much responsibility on yourself for your patients’ problems (see above). Realistic experience should tell you that kindness doesn’t cure. Neither (see above) does moralistic confrontation.

That is sad, and limits your powers considerably, but it also means you should keep calls short and treat them as evidence of your patients’ need for better self-management. If a patient is willing to try improving his/her self-management, that’s a great focus for treatment and the calls are grist for the mill.

If, on the other hand, a patient can’t see any possibilities for better self-regulation and wants nothing other than better treatment from others, your therapy won’t do any good other than providing him/her with a short-term fix and your family with an empty seat at the table. In that case, Forget Bob and return to the family fold.

STATEMENT:
“It feels right to soothe those who are in despair, and to help them carry their load, but I know that I can’t really carry anyone else’s load and that responding to repeated off-hours calls doesn’t help patients appreciate and make best use of their own resources. Without sacrificing my kindness, I will offer them ideas about how to manage their moments of disorganization and despair, and I will do that most effectively during treatment hours and not at other times.”

Like a lot of artists, I don’t think I’m good at anything else. I’ve been “the arty one” since I can remember, I went to art school on a scholarship, and I’ve gotten illustration work pretty steadily since then. Ever since my last job, however, I’ve started to wonder if I’ve lost it somehow. I got a steady gig in a graphic design department, and at first, I totally got along with my co-workers and we seemed to share a sensibility. Then, for some reason—maybe it’s my age (I was the youngest one), the new department head, an off-the-mark project I completed, I don’t know—the group consensus turned on me and I was treated like an untalented hack for the first time in my life. I’ve never dealt with this before, and I still don’t get it, because the higher-ups were still pleased with my work even if my peers decided it sucked, and I was always nice to everyone. The only thing that did happen was that I started to doubt my ideas more, because every time I’d come up with something I’d immediately think of all the reasons my co-workers would hate it. After a few months of this, I couldn’t take it anymore, so when a college friend told me there was an opening at his work, I jumped on it. The problem is that I still can’t get that negativity and doubt out of my head—maybe I am a hack, after all—and I’m terrified of starting this new job and either not coming up with anything good or not coming up with anything period until eventually I can’t get a job at all. I’m not good at anything else, but what if I’m not good at design anymore, either? My goal is to get my mojo back (or at least get these assholes out of my brain).

One of the curses of being talented, in arts or sports, is that talent becomes the heart of your self-esteem. Talent and ego have a flawed-yet-symbiotic relationship.

It’s particularly true if, like many talented people, you’re actually not so hot at doing other things. It’s as if your talent takes up extra brain-space, crowding out room for the basics and leaving you both gifted and klutzy, brilliant and ADD, hyper-capable and totally incompetent.

Other people might tell you that you’re good at other things, but those other people are wrong; they don’t have or understand an artistic mind. They had to decide on a career, whereas you probably felt like you didn’t have a choice. They also probably have health insurance.

What you’re “good at” is what you and others respect until you come to believe that nothing but hard work stands between you, success, and being a somebody. That’s when ego starts to assume you’ve got control over your artistic career when, in truth, no one controls art.

Even with all the hard work in the world, art is outside of your control. Sooner or later, you’ll perform poorly, perform well but meet an unresponsive audience, and/or get ill, injured, or misunderstood. And that’s when, if you rate yourself by performance, you’ll start to fear failure, and then fear the fear of failure, which is the fear of losing your mojo.

The feelings are awful and there’s no avoiding them. You can sense the rejection and feel your creative juices drying up, like you’ve lost your gift and can’t get it back. Meanwhile, you feel like there’s nothing good you’re good at. Without talent, ego feels like a total failure.

So here’s the hard part for people who want to do well at what they’re good at (and everyone else): develop a deeper set of values. You’ve already got the hard-work ethic for managing the controllable part of your gift—no need for improvement there. Now, learn to respect yourself for dealing with shit, which is just a technical term for that part of life that you don’t control.

Counter those fucked-up feelings with your beliefs; that you’ve done your best, and if you can’t do what you’re good at, you’ll do your best with other things. You’ll try to make a living and be a good friend. You’ll do what matters with what you’ve got.

Remember, what you admire most in others is not their ability to do great things, but to eat shit and still be a good person (unless, of course, you’re one of those shallow people who admire nothing but good performance, and then you don’t really have any friends and you’re probably an entertainment executive). Suck up the pain and remember who you are.

That’s the antidote to losing your mojo: redefining what you value. When you decide that mojo doesn’t matter, it comes back. When you care more about trying and less about results, results improve.

No one can stop the agony of unfulfilled talents, but the real challenge is to bear that pain, remember what you’re here for, and do what you can with what you’ve got until your ego’s healthy enough for talent to return.

That’s not easy to do—it’s a lot harder than being lucky and performing well—but it’s an art in itself, and a much higher achievement.

STATEMENT:
“I’m stuck with excruciating feelings of failure and self-doubt, but I have no doubts about my hard work or my ability to do whatever is necessary when I think it’s worth doing. I have no doubts about my ability to be a good friend. I will not let my feelings touch my self-respect.”

I can’t deny that I’ve had success as a musician—I’m well known in the area—but fashions have changed over the last few years and now gigs are far from plentiful. Financially, though I have a day job, I’m just getting by. I do my best to schmooze and talk up producers, but I’m basically a shy person who’s happiest to be alone, practicing. I know the economy is bad and every performing artist is having a hard time, but I can name at least 3 other musicians of my generation who are doing much better than I am because they’re more energetic and sociable and maybe more talented. I feel like a failure who’s wasted his life and watched his professional reputation ebb away and now I’m facing a sad end in a lonely rooming house. My goal is to turn this situation around.

As noted above, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve proven yourself as an artist; sooner or later, the pursuit of an artistic career exposes you to an unusual amount of shit you don’t control and, when that happens, it feels personal.

Fortunately, you’re too old and well-established to worry about the negative impact of your feelings on your music, and thus on your career, and thus on your music, etc. It’s good not to worry about the losing-your-mojo whirlpool.

It’s not much better, however, to fear that no one cares about your mojo, you’re facing a sad and lonely decline, and you’re sure it’s your own fault, as proven by the fact that your peers are doing better.

That kind of proof, however, is one of the nastier tricks the human mind plays on itself in the name of so-called reason. You know you’ve managed a good career for many years, in spite of a shy temperament, and you’ve never neglected the business side of music-making. You also know that other people’s gifts, both musical and non-, are different than yours. So real logic tells you that the only thing that deserves criticism is your luck.

If you believe in making music, you also know it’s a meaningful thing to do with your life, whether or not it pays. Remind yourself that no artist in his or her right mind expects to get rich and that living with poverty is part of your job description (though one you hope to escape).

Be proud of your choices and the good music that resulted. Keep with your successful formula, playing when you can and paying your bills when you’re able. Don’t doubt that you chose a tough life…and did well with it.

STATEMENT:
“When I’m poor, old, and gig-less, it’s hard not to feel miserable; but music is important, I worked hard at it, and I will not regret past or future sacrifices. Life is hard, but good music is forever.”

I am in the fourth year of a partnership with a great guy—smart, athletic, caring, fair, trustworthy, all of it—but I am bored out of my mind. Although he loves outdoor activities like biking and skiing by day, his only hobby in the evenings is watching TV. I am a musician, artist, craftsperson, not an outdoor whiz, and I feel like I am completely uninspired in this situation. I have talked with him about at least not watching TV every night, and we try for a while, but it always ends up back where we started, with him watching TV, and me in another room reading or doing something somewhat productive, or just giving in and watching with him (I hate TV, wish we didn’t have one). I want to do things together but he is not interested in any of the things that I am interested in. Maybe this is just the most a person can hope for in life and I’m spoiled for wanting more than loyalty and love from someone, but I feel guilty all the time for hiding these thoughts from him. Maybe he would be better off without me, too, you know? Maybe I should let him go so he can find a girl who is really IN LOVE with him.

How much you love someone depends, in part, on the effect of partnership on the necessities of your life, as well as your interests. In your case, however, you don’t seem to see partnership as necessary for the necessities, so the difference between what you two want may be be more than television.

If you’ve been struggling to make ends meet and/or raise kids and someone enters your life who’s decent and willing to share the load, you’re probably going to wind up loving him, even if you don’t love everything you do together.

On the other hand, if you’re a fairly self-sufficient person who doesn’t need a partner in order to have a decent standard of living and raise kids, then there’s no reason to live with anyone who doesn’t ring your bells or leave the couch.

You didn’t mention kids or finances, so I assume you’re kid-less, and, despite being an artist and musician, miraculously not broke. If that’s true, then what do you need this guy for? If you haven’t grown to depend on him after four years of living together, and you’re not eager to have a family, then it’s hard to see him as a better off with you since you don’t really sound better off with him.

Be careful not to get paralyzed by guilt. You can’t control your feelings about him, and what you’re going to do next isn’t about failing or lacking, it’s about evaluating how well the two of you match up and deciding whether that match suits your goals. So add up what life would be without him (the effect on your time, bank account, plans, etc.). You sound as if you’ve done this, but sometimes, feeling guilty can prevent you from doing routine accounting.

If, as you suggest, you can do better without him, don’t feel defensive about letting him go. You both made a good effort to make it work, and you have many good things to say about his character and can be sure he’ll do well with someone else. You’ve just seen many big differences in your interests and activities and have gained a healthy respect for their importance in making a relationship work. Neither of you were stupid to try this relationship, but, despite being a good idea, it was a near miss you can both learn from. You’re doing the right thing for both of you by moving on.

If the pain of breaking up is more his than yours, that’s not as important as the other stuff you evaluated. As a matter of fact, you suspect he may well have an easier time finding his next match than you will.

If this experience has taught you about your needs and you respect what you’ve learned, you’ll become better at screening out your dates and ensuring that you don’t compromise your independence again unless you encounter a more compatible candidate.

If you aren’t happy with someone who’s “perfect” for you, then they probably aren’t. And if you don’t need a someone, period, give them the chance to find someone new (or spend more quality time with the TV).

STATEMENT:
“I wish I could like my boyfriend better and I don’t want to hurt him, but I think I’m better off without him and vice versa. I won’t let fears about negative feelings stop me from doing what’s necessary and remembering that break-ups are part of the learning process.”

Now that I’m 35 and looking around for a wife, I can’t help feeling that I destroyed my future by not marrying my college sweetheart. She’s a terrific person and we had a great relationship, but I wasn’t ready to settle down back then. So I dumped her, she found someone else, and now she’s happily married with kids and I’m a successfully executive who can’t find anyone to compare with her. The women I meet always have something wrong with them and I think my mistake has doomed me to die single and alone.

The biggest danger you face is not dying single, but dying defeated. Well, the biggest danger you face after death itself.

Some good people are single because they aren’t lucky about finding a mate—their lives are too complicated or, for various good reasons, they don’t meet someone who’s both available and on their wavelength—but that doesn’t mean they’re sad, lonely failures. They’re simply dealing with a mixed bag of luck, like everyone else.

As Christ might have said, if he hadn’t been so busy telling parables, what’s important is not whether you find riches or happiness, it’s how you deal with it when you can’t find riches and happiness. And, despite dying penniless, single and alone, he seems to have done alright for himself.

In addition, your negative attitude may be damaging your mate-search technique. While your college relationship taught you that you have a good capacity for friendship and partnership, it’s the timing that was wrong; your personal equipment—the size of your heart, and size is everything—has proven itself. So instead of feeling sad and defeated when you think of your old flame, be proud of your relationship and determined not to give up your independence unless you find someone just as good.

Assess the efficiency of your mate-search. Like any kind of search, it needs to be done efficiently or you’ll wear yourself out and then, see above, feel tired and defeated. That’s often a sign that you’re spending too much time on unsuitable candidates and losing your focus. Ask yourself whether guilt, horniness, or sentimentality are causing you to prolong pseudo-friendships that drain energy, reduce availability, and leave you yearning for solitude. If so, get a coach and learn how to do a good, tight search and a rapid, polite exit.

You can’t make yourself lucky, but you can be sure that there’s nothing wrong with your ability to be a good partner. If you’ve also given yourself the benefit of a good mate-search, you also know you’ve done your best. You may be sad about being single, but it’s not personal and it’s not failure. It’s just life, which, as always, is preferable to the alternative, no matter what your relationship status is when you enter it.

STATEMENT:
“I can’t avoid feeling that I fell off the deck of the love-boat after having been given a choice cabin for two, but I’ve made reasonable choices, I’m a good candidate, and I know what I’m looking for, so I will pursue my search with patience, I will not doubt myself, and I will never give up. “

I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anorexia nervosa purging type a few years ago. Both of these issues had pretty much consumed my life during the years leading up to that diagnosis and have continued to be impairing ever since. I started cutting myself two years ago (it has become more frequent this past year), and I’ve had several panic attacks in the past several months. Fortunately, my overwhelming desire to commit suicide has subsided, although I still think of suicide and my death in general fairly often. In addition to my own issues, I have watched my mom slip into a state of psychosis during the past two years, triggered by the death of her father. She has become so depressed, delusional, and violent that my parents separated and sometimes I don’t even feel safe staying in the house with her—a few weeks ago my dad and I had to stop her from going through with a suicide attempt. The police were called, and I had to hold her arms down while she was clearly in a psychotic rage. At one point, she tried to stab my hand to make me let go. She was taken to a mental health facility where she stayed for a week, and now she’s furious at us for making her go there and hasn’t been much better since then. I feel like I never get anywhere with therapists because they just prescribe medicines that make me feel numb to any emotions or focus on my eating disorder so much that I never get to work through these other issues. I feel like my life is unraveling and it’s gotten so bad that, honestly, I don’t feel like I even want to fix it. My goal in telling you this is to figure out a way to help my mom and how to get through school while I’m dealing with this.

It may seem strange to hear this, for someone who suffers as much as you do from depression, anorexia, and the burdens of taking care of a very sick mother, but I think you’re doing an amazing job.

Yes, you’re chin-deep in shit, but you haven’t drowned, and that’s a remarkable accomplishment.

Your depression hasn’t made you hate people or blame them, and your anorexia hasn’t caused you to pretend you’re not sick, so you must have a solid hold on reality. There you are, with all your pain, finding the love to help your mother and the energy to go on with your studies. You’ve got good values and a big soul.

So you feel hopeless because treatment hasn’t done you much good, or, I should say, hasn’t done your symptoms much good. It sucks, but that’s the way it usually is when symptoms are as severe as yours. That doesn’t mean they won’t get better by themselves, or that a better treatment won’t come along. It does mean that, at least for the time being, you’re stuck with heavy-duty pain.

That’s not important, however, or at least not nearly as important as what you’re doing with that pain, which is, as I said, amazing, and there’s treatment that can help you distinguish between you and your symptoms. Any good cognitive treatment will help, whether it comes from a cognitive therapist, a good coach, or a friend with a positive attitude. One treatment that is aimed specifically at helping people with this much pain keep a positive attitude is Dialectic Behavioral Therapy, or DBT.

The inventor of this treatment, Marsha Linehan [link: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html], suffered similar symptoms and, like you, managed to stay focused on the value of helping people and improving her own skills. She wound up inventing a kind of treatment that helps others do what she did for herself, and, like you, she found that helping others was a great way to keep her own demons in check.

It’s normal for you to feel that your life is unraveling, but trust me, it isn’t; your pain is a mess, but you’re doing a good job of bearing it and doing good things with it.

You are not your pain; you’re dealing with a lot of shit, but you are anything but. You’re the person who’s managing it while leading a good and meaningful life, and that’s not someone you should give up on.

STATEMENT:
“I may feel like a hopeless, deteriorating mess, but I love my mother and care about my education and I’m doing good things about both. I may not be able to stop my symptoms or save my mother, but life sucks and that’s not a personal failure. I haven’t let my symptoms stop me, however, and that’s why I’m doing well, even if my pain and my mother are doing badly.”

I have a great life and there’s nothing I care about more than my family, so I became really worried when, out of nowhere, I started to have horrible thoughts about murdering my children. I’m too ashamed to tell my husband. I’m not an angry person, and I love my kids and get along well with them, and I’ve never needed a shrink, but the thoughts keep me up at night. If there’s the slightest chance I could hurt my kids, I’ve got to do something about it, but I don’t know what to do. Please help.

Before you get crazy about having crazy, murderous thoughts, check out the risk factors for crazy murders. It’s not hard to do. What you’ll find out is that crazy murderers don’t just have intrusive murderous thoughts; they’re crazy as well.

By that, I mean they’re very detached, or they have strange ideas about their kids that they actually believe in, or they’re hearing voices, or going through extreme mood swings.

Ask yourself whether you fit the picture of people who really run amok. While I don’t know you, of course, my guess is that you don’t fit the picture at all, which means you run the same finite-but-small risk as your average Joe.

Trouble is, everyone who has intrusive, horrible thoughts without other symptoms of craziness is nevertheless terrified of losing control, so reassuring yourself is hard to do. What you want, of course, is total reassurance that the horrible thoughts will go away and that you’ll never, ever lose control; as you say, if there’s the slightest chance that you might hurt your family, you feel obliged to take definitive action. Unfortunately, you can’t. No one controls such thoughts, and trying to control them will just add to your helplessness.

Your goal then isn’t total reassurance or freedom from fear, but reasonable self-control and an ability to go ahead with your life in spite of fear. Assess the real risk you pose to your family and take steps to protect them if you think it’s necessary. Having done that (and realizing that your family is better off with you just the way you are, crazy thoughts and all), learn to bear your fear and go about your business, which isn’t easy to do.

If you want to tell your family about your symptoms, that’s the story you’d tell. You’ve got these crazy thoughts, but you’ve checked on the internet, and probably seen a shrink, and discovered you’re at no particular risk of doing harm, you’re just at risk of suffering from creepy thoughts. Reassure them that you have no intention of letting the crazy thoughts interfere with your normal activities and that, if you thought you were dangerous, you’d do whatever’s necessary to protect them.

As with the woman above, you are not your symptoms; a good mom can have crazy thoughts, and a great mom can carry on despite them.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like I’ve got crazy thoughts and might lose my mind but the truth is that I’ve checked out my symptoms and the part of my mind I’m losing is pretty small and insubstantial (although the process is scary and painful). Whether or not I can make my symptoms go away, I’m competent to manage them, keep everyone safe, and go on with my life, and that’s all I need to do.”

Please Note: Monday is also a fxckfeelings.com holiday. Happy New Year (and again, if/when it’s unhappy, you know the drill).

I’m a current student and I’ve sort of self-diagnosed myself as having an unusual kind of OCD. It started out four years ago when I was studying for an upcoming major exam. I had always been one of the few top students, but at one point in time in the midst of hours of straight studying, I couldn’t absorb any more info, and in a fit of frustration, a ball of emotions welled up and I actually said harshly in my mind to myself, “you shall FAIL!”, even though I’ve always tried to avoid such negative thinking. What came next was an unshakable, unexplainable, and annoying-yet-scary series of feelings, thoughts and emotions for the next few days and weeks. After that episode, I developed an irrational apprehension about me having “ruined” myself and my academic ability. To get myself back to my normal, anxiety-free mind when studying or doing anything related to studies, I imagined “transferring” the whole chunk of this mental mess on other stuff, whether it is the faces of people who did badly in academics in my field, to those I don’t like, etc. Still, my mind would automatically be inclined to have these random obsessions appear in my mind while studying, and it’s really prevented me from fully unleashing my full academic ability in subsequent grades. I really felt restrained and trapped by this, and my goal is to eliminate this strong-rooted (it’s been 4 years) mental condition that happens whenever I study and then makes it almost impossible.

Some OCD thoughts are crippling but come out of nowhere, like fear of contamination or making a mistake. While they often lead to compulsive rituals, like repeated hand-washing and fact-checking, you manage to keep studying. So, while you’re suffering, you’re still lucky.

The fact that your obsessive fears are tied to school may make them easier to deal with, because, unlike germs, school (usually) doesn’t go on forever.

School is built on mental constructs that attract obsessions like lint to a dryer vent; it’s got grades, grade-points, and exams that hinge on a word or the instructor’s interpretation of same. It invites obsession and obsessive argument, which can be torture, but at least it has an end date.

After school is over, you can find branches of almost every major profession that thrive on obsessional thinking, but you can also avoid them if you want; you’ll have choices beyond what courses you can take and how much to put on your meal card.

Also, the mental activity that sticks words in your mind as if they’re big, significant boulders is probably good for certain kinds of learning, and it’s not uncommon. Respected psychiatrist John Nemiah liked to point out that Martin Luther had a similar problem, and went on to start Protestantism (although his Catholic colleagues might not see this as a success).

The bad news, I guess, is that you’ll probably never “eliminate” your fear of certain intrusive thoughts. What you can do, however, apart from putting school behind you, is develop techniques for breaking into the vicious circle that enhances the power of whatever you’re afraid of.

In other words, if you’re afraid to think about something, you’ll think about it, and your fear will probably have a small negative effect on your performance, which will prove you’re right to fear the intrusive thoughts, which scares you even more. What a good cognitive therapist can offer you is a bunch of mental and physical exercises that either distract you from the vicious circle or remind you of your ability to deal with fearful events as they occur.

Get used to the idea that, like many people for whom ideas and words have a life of their own, you can be troubled by obsessive thoughts. You can’t get rid of them, or always prevent them from distracting you, but you can always stop them from changing your goals or failing to try your best and reach the finish line of graduation.

STATEMENT:
“I’m afraid that intrusive thoughts will prevent me from ever living up to my potential, but, if I have to live with them, I can do it. I will regard them as just one more weakness that I can learn to deal with as I go about pursuing my interests and trying to graduate and make a living.”

I do pretty well as project director at work, but I’ve always been troubled by thoughts that get in my head and just won’t quit. During the last year, I’d get haunted over and over again by the thought that I’d said the wrong thing to one of my colleagues and offended them. What I’d want to do was ask them if I had in fact offended them, but if they said no, I’d probably worry that my asking them had offended them, and I’d want reassurance about that, thus making it worse. Instead, I ask my wife, who listens carefully and reassures me…but then I think of something I left out of the story and ask her again, and make it worse at home instead of at the job. She’s a kind woman and understands I can’t help it, but, after a while, her patience wears thin, and then I worry about my marriage. My goal is to figure a way out of this trap.

A couple good things about your obsessive thoughts are that you’re used to them and they haven’t stopped you from succeeding at a tough, challenging job. The bad thing is that your technique for diminishing painful self-doubts has gained a hold on you and, if unchecked, could trap you in a dangerous vicious circle. Instead of washing your hands, you’re using the Purell of reassurance to wash your mind of guilt.

If you read up on obsessive compulsive disorder, you’ll learn that the behaviors for reducing painful thoughts (like your reassurance technique) are called “rituals” and they can get out of hand. The treatments for controlling them are a lot like the one invented by Mel Brooks’ comic alter ego, Dr. Haldanish, who cured a young boy of a paper-tearing habit by yelling at him not to tear paper. Which is to say, an absurd-seeming disorder has a similar therapeutic approach.

The goal of these treatments is, simply, to help you stop the ritual, even if this causes more short-term pain and doubt. The therapist may give you reassuring thoughts to repeat or exercises you can use to distract or calm yourself. In extreme cases, the therapist may actually accompany you and directly encourage you to refrain from the ritual (alas, Mr. Brooks doesn’t do house calls).

If you think there’s an element of truth in your concerns and that your speech with colleagues is too negative when you’re stressed or find yourself worried, angry, or unhappy, coaching would also be helpful. You may discover new ways to keep your statements positive, while being direct about tasks and responsibilities.

If you were really offensive, however, you’d be getting more criticism at work and at home, and you aren’t. On a professional level, that’s really your standard and it’s one you want to think about and reinforce as much as possible.

Your goal isn’t to make your doubts go away, though that would be nice; it’s to have respectful conversations at work, even when you’re stressed, and feel confident about your ability to have those conversations. And to keep all paper intact.

STATEMENT:
“It’s hard not to ask for reassurance when I’m haunted by doubts, but I have my own good standards for professional behavior and, so far, I know I’m meeting them. My job is to make them stronger while I tolerate the doubt that seems to be part of my brain chemistry.”

Helping my daughter pay the rent on a bigger apartment seems to have lifted her out of her depression and she’s much more active at her job, but she’s still not making enough money and I’m running out of cash. If I tell her that she has to take a roommate, I’m afraid she’ll just crawl under the covers again and we’ll be back where we started. It shouldn’t be that hard for her to make enough money, but it is. I’m mad and I’m stuck. My goal is to get her to make more money and/or understand that I can’t keep supporting her like this.

While you may think you’re giving your daughter money out of love, you’re actually doing it out of fear. That’s trouble, because when you give money out of fear, you’re usually being mugged.

Fear makes you forget long-term risks, like what you’ll do after you run out of money and the consequences for you, her, and other people who depend on you. Your love is infinite, but your finances aren’t.

You’ll also forget that your daughter may be able to do more for herself now than she could before. She may be able to tolerate more stress and access other resources if yours are less available.

Finally, your fear amplifies her fear and vice versa, until you both doubt that she’ll be able to survive without your current level of support, without there being any evidence of that, other than fear itself.

If you want to manage her disability, rather than be managed by it, you must continually test out what she’s capable of. If she’s stressed by looking for a roommate, coach her on how to do it or how to find a coach. If the roommate is hard to live with, advise her on ways to protect herself. If you protect her more than absolutely necessary, you’re just stifling her growth in the long run.

After all, you’re not responsible for relieving her stress, but for teaching her how to live with it. You’re trying to ensure her basic safety and security, and while you wish she could be happy, that’s not something you or she control.

If she’s afraid of slipping back into depression, point out the constructive things she’s doing to prevent it. Stress may make her feel overwhelmed, but that doesn’t necessarily cause depression or mean that she’s slipping back. It just that means life is hard.

Don’t let her panic incite yours. Instead, think up an emergency, affordable bail-out plan in case she has a bad relapse. Don’t share it with her, just remind yourself that you know what to do for her safety and that the pain she may experience as you cut her funding is an unavoidable part of her recovery and your solvency.

By giving no more than you think is necessary, you become a strong fear-manager and learn self-defense against an emotional hostage situation. Ultimately, that’s the skill you want to give her.

STATEMENT:
“I’m terrified of the stress my daughter will experience if I cut back on the money I’m giving her, but I’ve thought carefully about what she needs and I’m sure she’ll be stronger if she can cope with the stress and do more with less.”

My 22-year-old daughter is mildly retarded, but she’s pretty well taken care of. She’s not unhappy—she worries about things much less than I do—but I’m unhappy, because I’ve never felt comfortable with her. Most people think she’s sweet and docile, but my daughter very much has a will of her own; she doesn’t like to shower, she doesn’t care about other people’s feelings, and she has no idea of how people are reacting to her, or anyone else. I’ve tried hard to find a point of positive connection, and failed. Other people think I’m a great father, but I can’t get over the feeling that I never met this challenge and that there’s unfinished business between my daughter and me.

Regardless of whether your daughter is retarded, super-powered or “normal,” you can never be sure that you’ll like her. It’s so much easier to be her father if you do, but that’s never a guarantee.

It may be that no one would like her if they really knew her, but that doesn’t matter. It sounds like you’ve tried hard to like her, but you don’t, and it’s not in your control.

Given the lack of good chemistry, however, you should appreciate your achievement all the more. You haven’t punished your daughter or told her she’s a failure; on the contrary, you’ve taken good care of her. You’ve done your job under much tougher conditions than most parents have to deal with, and I don’t mean because she’s retarded, but because of your negative feelings for her.

The test of a good teacher isn’t how well she teaches the kids she likes, but how well she does with the kids she doesn’t like and how well she hides that fact.

If this were the movies, your business wouldn’t be finished until the two of you have a good hug. Since this is real life, it’s never finished, so every day, do your best to treat her with respect and friendliness. If you slip and get nasty, apologize. It’s one day at a time.

It’s certainly sad that you couldn’t like her more, but it’s not a failure. It’s a success that, in spite of that, you treat her right, and one that only a great father could achieve.

STATEMENT:
“I will never feel comfortable with my daughter and I will always suspect that, if I were a better person, I would; but I am who I am and she is who she is and I’ve done the best job possible given that simple fact of life.”

I have been struggling with performance anxiety for years. It was particularly difficult during university, where I saw three psychologists, including a campus counselor, who, while supportive, weren’t helpful. It got much better though when I was able to take control of a treatment group I was facilitating, where I could design the program and run it the way I wanted to. I enjoyed being the therapist who helps others, and the experience gave me confidence. Still, the anxiety has not been extinguished in all situations—when teaching and presenting at conferences, the anxiety in these two areas is just as high as it was previously. I have been managing this for a long time and I do not feel motivated to continue to place myself in situations where my anxiety is raised again so high that I experience nausea, stomach pains, dry mouth, etc., not to mention the exhaustion I feel after the anxious-provoking event has finished. I do have some mild/moderate social anxiety—I don’t like socializing in big groups unless I know the people, and this prevents me from making new social contacts and networking for my profession. I am well versed in exposure therapies and ACT and have used these to get me to the point I am at now, and I continue to use them. However, I don’t think my anxiety will ever improve beyond where it is now and I am too exhausted to continue to try. I guess I’m stuck and don’t know if I should try to find a specialist to help me to continue to force myself to network, push myself to present at conferences, and become an academic psychologist or move into working as a clinical psychologist in a private practice, where I would work more on my own and I would be happier and more relaxed but also know that I am avoiding the events that are anxiety-provoking.

Maybe being in the mental health business makes you feel more responsible for controlling symptoms of anxiety and becoming a role model for good mental health. It’s ironic, given that most people in our field are the worst role models for mental health. If we were totally sane, we’d just go into dermatology and rake it in.

If you are driven to perfection, it’s causing you to forget that certain symptoms, like anxiety, tend to be incurable, and that, if you’ve reached the point where you can’t make them better, it’s because you’ve done an amazing job of managing them and pushing yourself to the limit of what you can bear.

That you’ve pushed yourself so hard during a long educational process may have caused you to become academically institutionalized, i.e., to rate your progress by where you stand in the institution (not the other, less fun kind).

You’ve become the very model of an up and coming academic psychologist, but now that the institutional phase of your life is no longer a requirement, you have a wider array of options and no easy reference points. You don’t have to present papers or schmooze colleagues if you don’t want to; that’s not avoidance, unless presenting papers and schmoozing colleagues are part of the life you want to lead going forward.

You know what they call the PhD who came in last in his class? Doctor. Sure, it’s a nasty MD joke, but the fact remains that your degree sets you free, offering you many different career options and you’re now familiar with most of them. Ask yourself how much money you need and then rate your options according to how well they pay, and how much you might enjoy them. Then, when you consider the amount of anxiety each will require you to bear, you’ll know whether it’s worth it.

Remember, like its first cousin, depression, anxiety causes your brain to focus on helplessness and failure rather than achievement and courage. It will tell you that treatment has failed and that you’re a failure if you don’t act normal, but wisdom tells you that you’ve already accomplished your biggest academic goals, in spite of great obstacles, and reached the point where you can finally put your own spin on life.

Be proud of what you’ve done, and don’t mistake anxiety and fatigue for discouragement; they’re challenging you to recognize what you don’t enjoy doing, and there’s no shame in choosing the career path of least (torturous) resistance.

It’s up to you, however, to decide what’s meaningful enough to be worth the pain. If you can maintain a practice despite your own struggles, you’ll be a role model, with or without symptoms (or an MD).

STATEMENT:
“I feel like I’ve failed to conquer my anxiety, but in reality I’ve done everything I set out to do, other than get rid of my symptoms. Now I’m in good position to decide what I want to do next and confident that I can bear whatever unavoidable anxiety goes with that choice.”

Whenever I screw up at work, it causes a chain reaction of even more fuck-ups until fate mercifully intervenes. The most recent incident started when I miscalculated the logistics of a project and ended up forcing another department to work overtime to make up for it. The department head was understanding, but I was so pissed off at myself that I actually couldn’t sleep at night, and that made me late enough for work to miss at least one really important meeting, so now I’m of course thinking that this time I won’t get lucky and will actually lose my job. There’s got to be a way to fix this myself.

It’s certainly unpleasant to make mistakes (that make mistakes that make mistakes), but don’t lynch yourself before you conduct a proper trial. It’s possible that your pain is torturing you to confess to crimes you didn’t commit, just because confession makes you feel better and provides a cheap sort of redemption.

You don’t need a judge and jury to conduct a proper trial on your own conduct, just rules that you believe in (i.e., that you’d apply to a friend) and an ability to review your behavior.

You’d expect a friend to take reasonable precautions to avoid making the same mistake twice; your standards, after all, are for his conduct to be good enough, not perfect. So you wouldn’t assume his miscalculation, the overtime, or his missed meeting were easily avoidable unless he hadn’t followed procedures that he should have known about. At least, those are the rules I think you’d use, but you be the judge. It’s your trial.

Then ask yourself what you should do if the verdict from your trial is “not so bad” but your heart still proclaims you a loser who should embroider a scarlet L in your shirts. That’s when you have to give yourself some good coaching and dismiss your heart’s request for an appeal.

Remind yourself that challenging projects always expose you to the unforeseen and congratulate yourself for taking responsibility and working hard, and give credit to your boss and co-workers. Apologize, but only once.

Be aware that frustration and humiliation, like anxiety (see above), make you think of the should-haves and could-haves without regard to actual, reasonable responsibility. They trigger a lynch mob in your head, but you’re not just the law, but order, and justice will overcome.

STATEMENT:
“I feel frantic when things go wrong and I’m sure I could have or should have prevented it, but I’m also capable of deciding what my real responsibilities should be and standing by that decision.”

So I’m a 20-something girl who has been faced with a couple big problems in a short period of time, the first being that I am in my last semester of nursing school and I failed. This has been a very long hard stressful experience, and being faced with failure is devastating. I have to wait till September to try to get back into the program and that’s my last chance, so I’m having a hard time accepting that my very laid-out plan for my life is now in jeopardy. Also I am being faced with health issues, with myself and with my family, and finally, I have been in a mind-fuck of a relationship for three years with a person that shows me five different faces. I know all the ways he’s done me wrong but I cannot walk away because I have yet to conquer him, even tough I’m trying to accept the fact I cannot change him and need to stop being a doormat. In summary, I have obvious control issues, over-analyze everything, have anger that is uncontrollable if I don’t get what I want, and really need help to fix it.

Priorities are like dominos, and if you put the wrong one first, you lose your goals one by one. So, while this may look like a chaotic clusterfuck of issues, you probably already know that it’s actually a chain reaction caused by putting school behind this five-faced jerk.

After all, the main source of your strength is your desire to get stronger, pick up skills, and make a living, while the main source of weakness is, as usual for most people, your need for something/someone you can’t have.

Fortunately, you’re smart enough to recognize your effort to change your boyfriend is a compulsion that you just can’t stop, and you have the willpower and determination in your character to take on and pursue difficult goals.

Unfortunately, you’ve focused this strength on changing your boyfriend, thus throwing said smarts and willpower down the shitter.

In addition, you expect to control your school performance and your relationship without bowing to the fact that you don’t have the time or energy for everything, but your school performance won’t improve unless you have more time for it, and your boyfriend, well, we covered that.

Besides, you can’t “conquer” someone; even actual conquerors like Napoleon don’t die happy (or even with their genitals intact).

When you give yourself a reasonable assignment, your control demon helps you do a great job. If you don’t put a limit on your self-assignment, your demon will eat you alive. It’s a tough reality to accept, but if you can—not just admit that you can’t change your boyfriend, but find the strength to stop trying—you can give yourself an assignment you can do, and do well.

You’ll probably do better in school if you stop blaming and scaring yourself, because that can’t do wonders for your ability to focus. Instead, don’t be ashamed to look for help, either from a nice, positive tutor or a study group, and prepare a new study plan that helps you with your weaknesses.

No problem, you’ll have the time, because there’s no reason to continue wasting it with your boyfriend. This is probably not the answer that you want, but it’s the only acceptable one since succeeding in school means more to you (and is more tenable) than putting up with quintface.

Inside, it may feel like a defeat to let him go, but once you do, all the other, better goals in your life will have room to grow. You just need to stay vigilant about your priorities, because it’s amazing how easily a compulsive person can make them all fall down again.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like a total, helpless loser, but my priority is to put my energy into getting ahead, and not into relationships that don’t work. I can’t conquer my boyfriend, but my compulsion can’t conquer me. I’ve learned a valuable, painful lesson that can help me move forward if I stop criticizing myself and start doing what I need to do.”

I had a terrific boyfriend, whom my parents loved, but I just couldn’t see us staying together all our lives, and my feelings for him weren’t as positive as what I see my parents’ having for one another (they have a wonderful marriage). So I left him and broke his heart, and now I’m dating someone I feel closer to, because I think he understands me better. We’re going very slowly, however, because I’m afraid of making the same mistake, and I want to see if I still feel the same way about him in another year. He’s getting impatient, and I wonder if you think I’m right to go slow.

I suppose the traditional reason for going slow in a relationship is to see how you really feel about someone as time goes by. Still, that won’t do you much good if you happen to really love him a lot, and he’s a useless jerk.

Yes, it would be nice if you could find someone you love as much as your mom and dad love one another; but many good partnerships are not totally lovey-dovey, and good partners are hard to find. Begin then with the important stuff and consider perfect harmony as the icing on the cake, rather than the filling.

So, instead of hooking yourself up to a love-meter and graphing your progress as time goes by, tthink about the basic qualities you’re looking for. Again, priorities are key, but if a relationship is your main goal, then looking for the right things in a relationship is what you need to be mindful of.

The important stuff that makes a prospective partner eligible for consideration, as you know, begins with a solid character, reliability, common values, and mutual acceptance. He’s got to be able to do his share and share your mission, without your having to change or persuade him. Otherwise, it’s a no-go.

Yes, positive chemistry is necessary, but it can also be dangerous; the guy who connects with you most is not necessarily a solid character, and often the exact opposite. So take your eyes off the love meter long enough to do your due diligence.

If your guy checks out as a good prospect, but the emotional fit is not quite as perfect as your parents’, think carefully about how many good guys you’ve run across and how much mileage you have left on your dating tires before deciding whether he’s worth the compromise.

Don’t wait for the love-meter to make your decision for you while you pick mental daisy petals to see whether you love him or love him not. Add up the reasons you trust him to be good company in hard times, and prepare for a possible compromise.

Yes, you may cry a tear for the loss of romantic dreams; but you’ll have far fewer tears in the future, when the stakes are much higher. As we always say, if you want unconditional love, get a pet. If you want a partner, get your priorities straight.

STATEMENT:
“I don’t want to break another guy’s heart because I don’t love him enough, but t won’t let my worries stop me from checking out his basic strengths and deciding whether we have the makings of a good partnership. When it’s time to decide, I’ll use my wisdom and experience rather than measuring my love against my parents’ romance.”

Please Note: The next new post will be 11/28, after American Thanksgiving.

My husband and I get along better since I left with our daughter to start a new job in a nearby town, and he is usually polite when he comes for his weekend visits (he sleeps on the couch). He’s a devoted father, but sometimes, when he’s in a bad mood, he gets as nasty as ever and calls me a loser and a wimp who can’t keep things clean or make much money, and I’m back with the old feeling of not being able to do anything right. I suppose I should shut the fuck up, because anything I say just sets him off and gets our daughter upset. My goal is to keep my feelings to myself and keep the peace.

It’s hard to tell nasty criticism from the valid kind if you already tend to get down on yourself for not getting much done. Then again, it’s hard to get much done when you have a kid and an ex-husband who’s always criticizing you.

What you seem to be taking issue with is how unfair your ex’s judgments are, as if you’re agreeing with him that you’re a loser, but you wish he’d be less harsh. The real problem, however, is that, without carefully applying your own standards, you’re allowing yourself to take his judgments seriously in the first place.

If you’re afraid of his reaction to your disagreement, you could say that staying quiet is a way of keeping the peace, and that peacemakers are blessed. It doesn’t seem blessed, however, to absorb nastiness indefinitely unless you can explain to yourself and your daughter why it’s necessary.

Otherwise, it actually make you a wimp, and it encourages him to be a bully, and while you can’t get double divorced, you can shut his criticism down without absorbing it.

After all, you’re no longer stuck with him and with doing nothing. You’re working during the weekdays and being a single parent, so you may be tired and have little to show for it at the end of the week. Still, you’re independent and accomplishing difficult and important goals, and you’d be foolish not to respect yourself, regardless of what your inner voice, or your husband, has to say about it.

Without getting mad, you can tell your ex-husband that you’re satisfied with how you run your life and don’t want his comments; if he insists on sharing, you insist on his leaving. It’s not hard to do if you believe you have a right (and he doesn’t), and it’s easier to feel you have a right if you’ve thought it through and don’t get into a fight.

You may never feel great about what you’re doing, given that you’re poor, tired, and have a critical ex who gives you a regular earful. Look objectively at the good things you’re doing, however, and you can stand up to those self-critical feelings and challenge anyone who echoes them. It’s time to recognize who the real loser is in this scenario.

STATEMENT:
“I may never feel like a winner, but I’m doing two tough and worthwhile jobs in working and raising a child, and I now have the right and opportunity to veto negative topics my husband would like to share. I will let him know that, if he escalates, he goes.”

I get enough done when I have a full-time job to go to—I’m motivated, show up on time, and keep up with my work—but since I’ve been unemployed I can’t seem to keep moving. I get up late, scan the internet, play some games, and go back to bed. It’s depressing, and the more depressed I get, the less I do. I’m turning into a total loser. How do I kick myself into action?

Lots of people need structure to keep moving; at school, you’ve got bells, attendance, and homework. At work you got a time-clock and a boss who will notice if you no-show or don’t get your work done. As such, structure’s basically a fancy word for having other people force good habits upon you so you don’t have to worry about them yourself.

When people don’t have structure, they have trouble getting things done. Some people, of course, are very good at staying energetic and knocking off their priorities in a disciplined way. And then there’s the rest of us.

Of course, when people don’t get much done they see themselves as lazy; with all that time on one’s hands, there doesn’t seem to be an excuse for accomplishing nothing. It’s the same tone we use to chide ourselves for making a careless mistake or eating too much pie. The negative criticism usually makes escape more attractive/leads to yet more pie.

If you’re ashamed of your low productivity, you may hide it by diverting energy into appearing busy and inventing a cover-up to explain what you haven’t done. The less you do, the more it becomes a secret. When the secret comes out, you’re more likely to be chided for laziness, the more you’ll want to hide again.

Don’t sink into that rut. Instead, treat your problem as important and respectable, and become your own boss or principal. Wage a campaign to be structured, whether you like it or not, to the degree to which you can get your employee/self to go along with you.

Start with a job description that keeps you busy and attends to priorities, i.e., what work you need to accomplish everyday until real work comes along. It should have enough time for hygiene, exercise, work, and friends. Not perfect, but good enough.

Look for help wherever you can get it. You may need help in putting together a schedule, or appreciate a call or a visit from a friend to watch you do something you said you’d do but wouldn’t do if there wasn’t somebody watching.

If you ask friends to help out, they’ll appreciate the chance to be helpful and will respect your struggle to bring your inner sludge under control. You’ll find lots of them have the same problem, so you can create a structure for each other until you’re back in a cubicle without so much cursed free time.

STATEMENT:
“I feel lazy and incompetent when I realize I can’t get much done when no one is watching but I realize that good people are often unable to control bad habits, so I’m determined to bear the shame and take advantage of every trick I can to get where I need to go.”

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.”