My ex-wife cares about our kids, but she’s always been overbearing and intense, which is why I ‘m very happy not to be married to her now. Her latest rage, in both senses, came from her new therapist, who persuaded her that she’s depressed and has bad dreams because she was neglected and maybe abused by her alcoholic parents, so now she wants our kids to have no contact with them, their grandparents, at any time, whether the kids are staying with me or with her (we have joint custody). Now, I’m not crazy about her parents and they sometimes drink too much, but they never did anything unsafe and the kids love them, so I was shocked to hear from the kids that they miss their grandparents (my wife never informed me about her new policy). I don’t want to trigger a court fight with my wife—I can’t afford it, and neither can she, but she spares no expense when she feels her kids are threatened by the forces of evil—and I’ve got no great wish to put myself on the line for her parents, but I don’t like having her tell me what the kids can do when they’re with me and I don’t think losing their grandparents is good for them. My goal is to send her a message that she can’t control what our kids do when they’re with me and protect the kids from losing their grandparents.

The short answer is, you can’t win a pissing contest with a fire hydrant.

Yes, your ex-wife has no right to tell you what you can and can’t do with the kids when they’re with you, and yes, it hurts them to be cut off from their grandparents, and yes, in the short run it’s entirely within your power to facilitate grandparental visits.

No, none of this matters in the big picture.

If your wife is the kind of self-righteous, crusading, angry asshole you describe her as being, then you have very little power to make things better and many, many opportunities to make things worse.

In the trade, we call people like your ex “bad borderlines”, meaning they’re madder’n hell and get even madder when anyone, therapists especially, try to change them. “Asshole” is also a totally applicable term. Or, as you used to call her, “dear.”

The sad fact of life that you and your kids must live with is that your ex has her rages and there’s no stopping her. She’s itching for a target to drop her bomb on, regardless of how much damage she does to herself, her finances, or the feelings of all around her. Don’t oppose her unless it’s absolutely necessary and then, if at all possible, don’t be in the room when the bomb goes off.

If you think about it, your goal isn’t to protect your kids from her rage (not unless she leaves slap-marks or the equivalent, you can’t). If you try, predict what happens next; she gives the kids an emotional overdose (tears, sorrow, worry, anger) about the re-awakening of her trauma by their undoing her unselfish attempt to protect them, and after an hour or so, they’ll do anything for her to stop.

After all, they have to live with her for another eternity and, unless they’re pretty hardened cases, her disapproval hurts like hell. They then cop a plea against you, saying the crime was your idea, and she threatens to take you to court with the kids as her witness and a crazed, victim-rights lawyer as her champion. The asshole’s undefeated streak continues.

Instead of unleashing her ever-ready, hydrant-esque deluge of abuse, choose your battles. If the grandparents want to take her on, you can give them secret support, but save your energy for the big ones.

Yes, it might feel humiliating, but that’s the price of doing right by your kids when you chose an ex-wife like this one. So no, don’t take this one on…and don’t get tied down to a partner like this ever again.

STATEMENT:
Refresh your parenting mission statement. “I can’t protect my kids (or me, the dog, the grandparents or the postman) from my wife’s nastiness, but I can show my kids how to avoid unnecessary conflict, eat shit when required, and be proud of my ability to smile and say ‘that tasted goooood.’”

My boyfriend and I have a 2 year old son together and, for the first year, he was very loving and we lived together, though he was never great at keeping jobs or getting anywhere on time, but in the past year he started drugging more and staying away for days after I criticized him and never coming by when he promised to and then, when I’d tell him he couldn’t just drop by unannounced, he said he wouldn’t give me money if he couldn’t see his kid when he wants to and he’s been pretty bad about providing money anyway. Our son loves his father, but he now looks unhappy when his name comes up or when he drops by, and I don’t know how to protect him. The boy gets very upset when he hears us fighting, so I try to avoid conflict, but I can’t let my boyfriend come by and take his son whenever he wants. I don’t want him back because I don’t think he’ll ever settle down and be reliable, but I’d like him to see that his behavior is hurting his son and he needs to stop.

The first thing you need to do is separate your righteous emotions from what you want to accomplish. If your goal is to express yourself so beautifully, articulately, passionately and forcefully that you persuade your (I don’t think you’ll disagree that he’s an ex-) boyfriend to act like less of a jerk, you’re nuts.

He doesn’t get it, and he’ll tell you it’s all your fault for being mean and controlling and poisoning his son against him, and you don’t want to have that conversation again and again. Your friends will pat you on the back for standing up to him, and you’ll feel good…briefly, until you fight about the same shit again. It’s not worth it.

Decide for yourself whether you’re right about your son’s needs, regardless of how you feel about his father. Ask yourself if it’s in his interest to see his father at random times, given the disruption to his routine, yours, and the uncontrolled nature of his father’s mood, mouth, and sobriety, or to have his financial support dependent on his father’s feelings for you.

Even if it’s in his interest, ask yourself the most important question; if you can live your life that way. If you decide that your ex’s position is harmful and unworkable, and that your anger has nothing to do with your opinion, then you may be able to improve the situation, but only if you keep your feelings in check.

Accept the sad fact that you can’t change his mind, get him to understand, or communicate better. Then you’ll be much more effective at finding a legal way, if one exists, to get protection from his financial blackmail and bad visitation behavior.

Ask a lawyer what the law can do for you, how much it will cost, and what you need to do to document your ex’s bad behavior. Then you can decide whether the fight is worthwhile and how to strengthen your position while refusing to be drawn into a shit-slinging contest that will make you both smell as bad as you already feel.

STATEMENT:
Begin a business-like, positive, written correspondence. “My dear partner, I’m sorry we’re no longer together but I want you to have a positive relationship with our son and will do everything I can to make it happen. Given what I’ve seen of his negative reactions to your unscheduled visits and my own efforts to make ends meet when we run out of money, I think the following is necessary to make things work. You need to schedule regular time with him, come on time, provide regular child support (remember, it’s child support, not ex-partner support), and refrain from expressing unhappiness with me in his presence. If you can’t or won’t do those things, my legal advisor tells me the court will force these conditions on you because they’re what’s best for our son. I’d rather we agreed to these conditions ourselves. Sincerely.

I just started at college, and I like my roommate, but she’s bulimic and hard to be around. Not just because she’s sick (and everybody on the floor knows about her problem, it’s hard not to), but because when she binges, it’s on my food because that’s what’s closest, and she always feels really bad about it and cries that she wishes she could stop, but then she doesn’t offer to pay for it and it’s costing me a lot of money. Part of me just feels bad for her, because she’s clearly really messed up, but another part of me is pissed because I’ve lost a lot of money this year on food that she’s eaten and thrown up, and that just makes me feel guilty like I’m a bad person for putting my lost money above her health. I want to move after the break, but I don’t want her to feel abandoned. My goal is to help her and myself.

Welcome to that other part of college, Hard Knocks University, where the class Helplessness 101—what to do when you can’t help both someone and yourself, and sometimes you can’t help at all—is a frosh requirement.

The tough part is not the decision, but accepting the shitty nature of your options. Bulimia, like any chronic condition (depression, addiction, etc.) is not completely curable, not by you or certainly the patient herself.

If you buy into the psychobabble about body image and low self-esteem, you might think you could help her by praising her strengths, noticing her attractive qualities, or getting her to think about the superficiality and limitations of attractiveness. Ha!

Whether it’s coming from you or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of Therapists, your therapeutic support is not going to change those mysterious urges to binge and puke. Buying into that notion will waste you even more time and money than all the cash you’ve already flushed away at the supermarket.

Bulimia, like all addictions, can turn people into assholes. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t choose to be assholes, but when you’re more interested in binging and purging than in anything else, including other people’s feelings and squaring your debts, you’re an asshole. Or really, you’re a normal, possibly good person suffering from a bad case of asshole-itis.

It’s a humiliating thing to say about ourselves, but what helps most in controlling dangerous behavior, when all else fails, is to be treated like a soldier or dog-in-training in a program where our every movement is controlled. That’s the kind of treatment that saves lives when bulimia gets dangerous.

Obviously, it doesn’t cure it, but it stops us from going over the cliff until we can get enough control back to keep it down to a barf or two a day.

So the most you can do is let her and others know if you think her life’s in danger. Otherwise, you’ve got little influence over her for good or ill, and you’re living with an asshole you can’t cure who’s costing you a bundle.

You may wish you could help her, ease her pain, and not make yourself feel guilty by locking the refrigerator if you don’t get a check. Well, I hate to say this, but fuck you. That’s a goal of feeling good, which is much like her goal.

If, however, your goal is to make the best of this situation, it’s not to feel good but to do what’s right by helping her if you can and otherwise preserving your resources for worthwhile causes.

That means bearing the pain of watching her in pain, feeling helpless, and ignoring the guilt of receiving a look that accuses you of adding to her misery. It also means letting her know you’re there if she wants to get real help, establishing your refrigerator perimeter, and getting to eat your own damned ice cream.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a mission statement that protects yourself from false guilt. “I can’t help my roommate feel better or control her eating behavior, but I can watch out for her if her life is in danger and I can encourage her to be a stronger obsession manager by requiring her to pay for what she eats. In doing so, I may temporarily make us both feel unhappy; but that’s an unavoidable part of her recovery and my self-protection. It’s the work we both must do to pass this course in making the best of a bad situation.”

Since there’s no easy way to say it, I’ll just put it out there that I have a problem with my anal sphincter (a botched surgery when I was a kid that left me with very little control). Like everyone since then, my co-workers notice that I sometimes smell bad and like to joke about it, usually but not always behind my back. I do my best to control it, and I’ve seen specialists about it, but what it comes down to is that everyone is happier when I keep my distance and I just wish I could find a job I could do from home. I even avoid attending family events and leave early when I go because I don’t want to embarrass my parents (and I obviously avoid women and people in general). I just transfered to another branch, and now I’m terrified about the reaction of my new co-workers. I know this sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. My goal is to find a treatment that can control this problem or a lifestyle that is less full of humiliation.

By now you should know that you can’t have what you want, either a sweet-smelling body or a solitary, well-stocked bat cave to retreat to. Forgive the pun, but tough shit.

You’re fucked, and if you keep trying to eliminate the problem you’ll never live your life and your parents will die and you’ll regret the things you didn’t do with them or the other things you want to do with yourself like make more money.

Now that that’s cleared up, ask yourself what your goal is when the goals you’ve been chasing are unattainable and there’s no way to avoid a shit-load of pain (last sly double-entendre, I swear).

The obvious answer is to try to reduce your sensitivity to humiliation so that you can live life as fully as possible. It would be nice if you were a natural-born comedian who could deflect nasty jokes, or an insensitive clod who never understood them in the first place; but you’re not. Now that you’re an adult, however, and no longer a school-kid, there are lots of other things you can do.

First, confront the Madison Avenue notion that your self-esteem depends on attractiveness. Your goal isn’t to be attractive, but to make people feel as comfortable as possible with your ugly side while you pursue your other goals.

So pretend you’ve got a colostomy and that’s the way it is and learn how to be shameless. Wear a diaper if it will help, just learn how to not take shit personally and put together a list of what you want to do with yourself and do it. That’s your goal.

Make people more comfortable by telling them, frankly, that you have a GI problem that sometimes causes bad smells and you can’t stop it but that you’re pretty good at managing it. That’s why you, for instance, use incense and deodorizers, and sometimes have to leave meetings unexpectedly. If your smell is a problem and you don’t notice it, you don’t mind having it pointed out to you.

Keep a candle burning on your desk. Be the first to let them know when you’re having a bad day. Read a book of bathroom jokes beginning with “What died in here?”

Your goal isn’t to control your colleagues; that’s impossible with heaps of cash or hypnosis, so accept that they’ll be nice or nasty, as they are. Instead, create a wall between you and your problem and invite them to see your problem as something apart from you. Lots won’t, but a few will.

After all, you’re not a bad smell, just a guy who’s trying to do a good job despite a tough, humiliating handicap. That’s something to be proud of, a much bigger accomplishment than being sweet-smelling and attractive. Fuck advertising.

Give your parents similar directions, letting them know that you’re happy to attend family events, but you’ll let them know if you’re having a bad day and you won’t take it personally if they’re planning a big event in a poorly ventilated space and don’t want you to come.

You can’t control your problem or how people react to it, but you can’t let those factors take over your life completely. After all, even for those of us with cooperative anuses, life often stinks. You just arm yourself with Fabreze and carry onward.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a manifesto that keeps you focused on your own priorities rather than the reactions of idiots. “My job is to lead my life and try to make a living and find friends, and I’m not responsible for my bad smell. I manage it well by protecting others and making it easy for them to protect themselves. My bad smell may humiliate me; but it can never outweigh my pride in not letting it stop me.”

OK, I’m having an issue with a guy at work, and it’s pretty gross, but it’s also driving me crazy and nobody will take me seriously. I can’t say exactly where I work, but it’s the kind of bureaucratic place where nobody ever gets fired. Like you’d have to murder someone in the office, and even then, vacation without pay. This guy recently got kicked down to my office, which is pretty small and windowless (it’s a filing sort of thing), and I’m not sure what landed him here—he’s nice enough, although he’s a little creepy around girls—but all I do know is that he farts. All the time. And I know, it’s funny, ha ha, but it’s not funny when you have to spend all day with him and he occasionally bends over to file something and lets one rip in your fucking face. Normally, I’d just bust his balls about it, but he has zero sense of humor, and I think he’d just stare at his feet and say nothing and avoid me in the future. Which would be great, except our desks are right next to one another. My boss thinks it’s a joke and told me to deal with it. But it’s not a joke, it’s fucking gross, and working with him makes my sick, literally. So my goal is to get someone to take me seriously and help me deal with this guy.

Congratulations! You’ve come to the right doctor because, while I rarely care about your feelings, I always take farts seriously. After all, is it possible to feel happy without happy bowels? Of course not.

I’ve often theorized, (if not in scientific meetings, at least at family get-togethers), that farts were the first form of pheromonic communication, before people learned to lie by making sounds with their vocal cords. After all, while assholes often lie, farts do not.

Then the brain routes their message directly to the amygdala, (I’m sure that’s what brain imagists will discover, when they do the necessary experiments), which is, on the higher level, very similar to what happens when you touch a hot skillet and jump back before you realize what’s happened.

Here, of course, the danger isn’t that you’ll leap from your desk, but that you’ll haul off and slug him or, just as likely, point directly at him and break out laughing. So we have here an ultimate challenge that requires you to rein in the deepest reflexive responses of your brain and body, while your rational mind tries to solve this problem constructively. This should be an Olympic event.

With your feelings tightly “sphinctered,” your goal is to find a non-threatening way to invite him to discuss better management of his gaseous emissions. Tell him you’ve noticed that he has problems with gas and wonder whether it’s causing him distress. If he responds, you can offer suggestions (“activated charcoal worked for my dog”) while suggesting that he step out of the room before relieving himself; otherwise the smell might get (other) people angry.

Offer him this free bit of wisdom: “Bad smells cause bad feelings.” Pinch yourself hard, so that you retain your seriously earnest demeanor and assure him that he never need fear your laughter. And at least get to the bathroom before you release some feelings of your own.

STATEMENT:
Perhaps a statement might help you retain your sense of purpose and a straight face. “Intestinal gas is a basic form of human communication that probably predates words and, like everyone, I’ve got automatic ways of responding. But if I want to influence this guy’s gas management, I have to distance myself from any possible threat of humiliating him and be prepared to offer practical suggestions, no matter how much I sound like the weird commercials on TV.”

I graduated from college last year and just moved into a house with 5 friends from school. At first, everything was cool—kitchen was clean enough, trash made it’s way out the door, people left each other’s ramen alone, whatever—but now things are kind of falling apart, and, I swear, it’s because one roommate, and nobody will admit it’s them, refuses to flush the toilet. Just won’t do it. And hey, if it’s yellow, let it mellow, I’ve heard that before, but yellow this isn’t, and it’s not just disgusting, it’s rude. I left a note about the toilet that basically said “please flush,” but that didn’t help (actually just seemed to piss everyone off), and now the dishes are getting done less and food is disappearing because everyone’s annoyed and just passively sniping at each other. I don’t want to move (or can’t, really, with the lease) and I don’t want to lose my friends, but I do want the shitter sitter (his nickname) to jiggle the fucking handle already. No, this isn’t a joke.

Believe me, nobody is laughing at your dilemma; overcoming fecalphobia is a crucial part of anyone’s medical school education, right up there with basic anatomy and prolonged insomnia. I like to think of myself as a pioneer in the field of psychoscatology, as the use of shit as a method of communication covers the entire field of human psychology. Trust me, it’s science.

You see, according to the psychoscatological theory, words are unnecessary. Shit is the ur-form for semiotics, the sign of all signs that communicates almost everything you want to say. Flowers ain’t got nothing on it, a diamond ring is meaningless. Say it with shit, for shit is forever.

Of course, you can’t change your roommate’s behavior, and you’ve already learned what happens when you try: more shit. He probably doesn’t even know why he does it or really realize what he’s doing, because planting your shit prominently is an old reflex for asserting control over your territory. At least this is true for pets, but if you’re feeding your roommate and cleaning his mess…well, let’s just hope he doesn’t shed.

If you fight the floater with all your might (and passive-aggressive note-writing skills), you’re the chief cop, and become the target of everyone’s resentment, so being the arbiter of house law and order is a shitty, if not dangerous, goal. After all, the biggest problem, and this applies to most roommate issues, is that whoever is most bothered by the shit gets most covered by it.

Now that you’re ready to accept that your roommate situation has turned to shit, it’s time to invite your roommates to a sit down (on the couch) and ask them whether they feel cooperation on chores has become a problem. If they aren’t bothered by the current state of chaos, then you’ve just gotta flush your anger down and let it go. You’re in the shit, and this is not a battle you can win alone.

If they are bothered, ask them what they think are the most important chores to share and then draw up a schedule. Whatever your real feelings, stifle, because if you show any zeal beyond being just the facilitator, you’re the narc/parent and they’ll all hate you. Then you’re in the shit once more.

Finally, assume that, despite your best efforts, your shitter sitter will not likely be a quitter. Do put pen to paper for more note writing. Put your money in the bank so you can afford to live alone.

STATEMENT:
Compose a statement to help you keep your real shit out of the negotiations. “I have a right to be disappointed in the carelessness of my roommates, particularly the shit-meister, but there’s little I can do about it except choose better next time and wonder if there’s a warning sign that I missed because I liked these guys too much and didn’t take a close look at their hygiene habits. I’ll try to make things a little better if I can. For now, it’s the old choice of eating less shit now or more shit later.”