Please Note: Our next post will be a week from today. Happy holidays, everyone! As always, we look forward to hearing from you if/when they aren’t.

I’m having a hard time since the death of my father. I was expecting the grief to be rough, but I thought I’d reached the acceptance stage and was starting to feel better. Then I noticed that my two sisters were able to talk and share memories much more easily with one another than they could with me, and suddenly I felt more alone than ever before. My wife is supportive, but I don’t want her to feel I don’t love her by telling her I feel alone. My goal is to get over this grief.

You probably were starting to recover from losing your father, but that’s when you experienced another loss—a broken connection with the people who should be the most understanding.

When you grieve the loss of parents with your siblings, a major source of comfort is knowing that, whatever your differences, you’re the only ones who remember the world of your family home and share the experience of growing up there. With that missing, you’ve got a double source of grief.

Pain always causes vicious circles, so the biggest danger here is that your feeling of isolation will cause you to withdraw, which will confirm your isolation. Your job with grief then is to fight to keep your perspective, rather than letting pain shape it for you.

Currently, your perspective is that there were good, meaningful times growing up with your father and sisters, and there were memories worth sharing and preserving. Instead of letting hurt stop you, figure out what you want to say, interrupt your sisters, and see if they can respond. After all, you’re the only guy who remembers that time and they need you as much as you need them.

If they can’t listen, talk to your wife, and if your wife’s not available, a pet’s always a good captive audience. You have eulogies to compose for yourself about your father’s contributions and values and what you wish to carry on, and delivering them to anyone or thing willing to listen will do you a lot of good. Of course, you’re the most important listener but there are others who would benefit from hearing your words.

You can’t shorten the grief or change your sibling relationships. What you can do, however, is respect the strength it takes to live with pain and not let it push you to the sidelines or shade your memories of your dad. With all the loss in your life, you should never lose your right to grieve.

STATEMENT:
“I wish I could share memories with my sisters, but that’s not the measure of how well I’m dealing with grief or of how much I took away from my relationship with my father. I’ll continue to treasure my memories and look for ways to share them, and not expect the grief to go away until it does.”

After my mother died, there were an amazing number of people who came to her funeral and told wonderful stories about their friendships and how much they loved her. It made me feel bad, however, because she and I never really got along. We loved one another, but we really didn’t understand one another, and now we never will. The more I saw the closeness other people had with her, the more I wondered what was wrong with me. I miss her, but what I feel most sad about is never being able to have a good relationship and not being able to mourn her as well or as much as her friends do.

Don’t assume that you could have or should have improved your relationship with your mother without first looking at the evidence. After all, you know that many close relationships can’t be improved because whatever is bad about them comes from character rather than things you can change. They are what they are, or they were what they were.

If your relationship with your mother was sub-par because you didn’t try hard enough, then yes, you’ve learned a sad lesson about not waiting until it’s too late. For most people, however, the problem isn’t a lack of trying or an overdose of waiting; it’s blaming themselves for a lack of good results after lots of trying and still assuming they could have done better if they’d tried harder.

Don’t assume that, because other people didn’t have your problem with your mother, you shouldn’t have had it either. You’ll probably find evidence that you tried hard and that many, if not all, of the reasons for your distance were not under her control or yours.

Like the person above, you have a double grief. You miss the mother you had and you also grieve the mother you could never have. It’s a grief you can’t share, because others, especially those who really connected with your mother, don’t understand.

Don’t feel bad then about not feeling bad the way they do. Your grief for her, like your relationship, is what it is. Instead of examining what was wrong, try to remember what worked. Hopefully, in spite of her disappointment with you, she did you some good and tried to be a good mother, and, hopefully, in spite of your frustration with her, you kept your life on track and spared her your anger. These are major accomplishments that need to be celebrated, particularly since they lead more often to tooth-grinding than to pleasure.

Celebrate the strength it takes to make the best of a bad relationship. Hopefully, some of that strength was hers, as well as yours.

STATEMENT:
“I often felt like a failure because I didn’t feel as positively about my mother as other people did, but I’ve come to accept that those feelings are not under my control and to respect what I’ve done with them. My job, now that she’s dead, is to do more of the same.”

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.”

My wife suffers from non-medication responsive depression (we’ve done ECT’s, every med in the book, and she has a psychiatrist). She’s bitter and short to family; she goes off on the kids and then can turn around and be nice. I do all the work around the house, get the kids to activities, etc., and I’m wearing out. She comes home from work and just logs on her lap top and sits in front of the TV while I get dinner and clean up. She shows no affection towards me and I feel like a servant. When I complain or push her, she talks about killing herself and putting herself out of our misery (she’s been hospitalized several times) or just hurting herself (sometimes she cuts on her arms and legs). I’m getting to the point where I don’t like her anymore. She just seems to have given up. Nothing interests her, nothing tastes good…she gets no enjoyment from anything. What can I do? She’s in her forties, now, but she struggled with depression in her twenties and this current bout has been going on for 5 years. Her doctor and therapist are really committed to her, but it seems like she doesn’t care, like she enjoys being miserable. Sometimes I feel like I’m spiraling down with her, but I’m not going to give up. If I just stand by, she seems to just sink lower, but I can’t leave, because she’s said that the kids and I are the only reason she’s still alive.

If you’re like most married people, you become dependent on your spouse for a positive response, no matter how independent you are as an individual. You married her because you respect her opinion and take pleasure in her approval. You make her happy, everyone feels good. You see the problem here.

So it’s normal to feel bitterly disappointed and deflated when depression turns her into a grouchy, nasty, unappreciative, unaffectionate black hole who threatens suicide if you criticize her and never does her share.

It’s not just the lack of approval from her that’s bothering you, it’s the overabundance of disapproval, of you and everything else.

Unfortunately, the bitterness you feel in response to your unmet needs adds to her self-hate, creating a vicious circle of negative emotion that demoralizes everyone. Controlling that bitterness is the one thing you can do to improve what is an otherwise impossible situation.

First, pretend that she’s had a stroke that zapped the part of her personality that was warm, active, and responsive; your loss isn’t personal or preventable, and your needs are no longer plausible. Acknowledging these difficult truths now prepares you to assess, without hurt or a sense of failure, whether your family is better off with the two of you together or apart.

There are positive aspects to your marriage, like the fact that she contributes financially, and that, by staying alive, she helps the kids, and hopefully she does some parenting from time to time. She’s showing courage, whether she knows it or not. Maybe the advantages of staying together outweigh the many disadvantages you’ve listed above.

Whatever you decide is best, present it to her positively; tell her you know she’s trying and there’s probably love and affection in there somewhere, if the depression would only lighten up. Remember the person she was and talk to that person as if she’s still there but, like Sleeping Beauty, can’t wake up.

If you feel separation is for the best, let her know that you value and support her role with the kids and that what you are separating from is not her, but her illness. And if she threatens suicide, tell her that her threats are a factor in the separation.

When depression takes over your personality, it makes you do bad things, like putting your life in other people’s hands. If she could control that side of herself, she might improve her parenting and your partnership, even if her depression does not improve. Recommend DBT, a kind of therapy I often recommend, that helps people who feel terrible protect themselves from acting terribly.

Decide what’s for the best, don’t be a victim, and ignore blackmail. You may be a victim of her illness, but you’re also the man in charge who’s doing a wonderful job of soldiering on. If you do what’s best for you and your kids, then it doesn’t matter what she says now; the healthy part of her approves, even if it can’t be heard.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like I’m taking it from all sides and that all the love and nurturing I give my sick wife comes back as shit. I know, however, that her response is not her, but her illness. I have assumed a huge load as a single parent who must now go on alone without the love and support of a partner. I will make hard choices that she may see very negatively, as she sees everything. I will hold fast to my own vision of what’s best for the family.”

I’m writing because my husband wants me to. He thinks there’s something wrong with me, but I like being a little manic, so I haven’t taken my mood-stabilizer medication in 10 years. It’s true, I talk fast, I can’t hold a job, I’m irritable, and he’s had to put me in the hospital a couple times. On the other hand, I don’t hurt anyone and I like the way I feel, most of the time, except for one thing: he wants me to be the way I used to be and he’s always unhappy with me. I hate sleeping in the same bed, but he’ll give me a hard time if I move to another room. My goal is to get him off my back, so I agreed to write.

As noted above, when you’re married, you can’t help depending on your spouse’s approval, in some deep, hard-wired way, which means that, if you never seem to get it, you become a permanent rebel who cares too much to leave but feels better every time you do the opposite of what he wants. In the process, you lose track of your own priorities.

On the other hand, you know your priorities about your hypomanic mood. Keeping it natural and un-medicated is more important to you than holding a job, staying out of hospitals, and keeping your husband happy. That’s where you stand.

The problem is, you wish your husband would get used to the new (10-year-old) you, but that’s not going to happen. There’s no point in talking about whether he should accept you, just like there’s no point in talking about whether you should damp down your hypomania. He can’t help where he stands and neither can you.

So instead of writing to someone who’s supposed to persuade you to take your medication, face the sad fall-out from your decision. Don’t blame yourself; just ask whether the marriage is worth it, because clearly, your old marriage and the mania can’t co-exist.

On the one side, you’ve shared a lot of years together and your standard of living is probably better with him than without him, given that you’re on disability. On the other hand, there’s the mutual non-acceptance, which is hard for both of you to live with.

Whatever you decide, stop whining. You’re not to blame for a bad decision, and you aren’t a victim of bipolar disease, so don’t make yourself a victim of your husband’s non-acceptance.

If you want to continue to live with him, have the balls to stand by your decision. Tell him you’re sticking with the temperament you’ve got, you still want to live with him, you won’t talk to shrinks, and you’ll sleep where you sleep. If he wants to throw you out when he realizes, after 10 years, that you aren’t going to change, so be it. You don’t blame yourself for choosing to live with your hypomanic mood, and you don’t blame him if he wants to leave his life with you behind.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like I’ve ruined my marriage by deciding to do what’s right for me, but the decision has been costly in so many ways that I know I didn’t do it lightly or to spite my husband, so I respect my decision. Now I need to ignore feelings of guilt or wishes that he could accept me the way I am and instead accept him the way he is. Whatever I decide to do about our marriage, I’ll do what I think is best for us and never be a victim.”

I have been wrestling with depression for years now and my maternal side of the family has a history of depression and suicide. I don’t feel that I can do this on my own anymore and need help. I don’t want to just take a medical cocktail of antidepressants. My question to you is how do I go about finding a therapist and/or doctor that will be most helpful to me.

The first step for getting treatment for your depression seems simple– don’t get depressed about treatment for depression. After all, depression’s just another form of pain unless it twists your thoughts into thinking that not getting rid of it is a kind of failure that marks a meaningless life.

As long as you realize depression is a persistent ailment, just like persistent back pain or diabetes, you’ll have an easy time making treatment decisions because you won’t regard using treatment as evidence of weakness.

The fact that your family has had depression and suicides doesn’t indicate weakness or failure on the part of anything but your genes. Suicide is terrible, but it often happens to good people who’ve lived meaningful lives and been good friends in spite of lots of depression, which doesn’t make them failures—it makes them heroes.

If depression causes you a lot of pain or makes a noticeable difference at home or work, the very least you should do is get help in fighting the negative thinking. While using therapy to find the cause of your depression and get rid of it is usually useless when the depression is long-lasting and familial, using many therapies to protect yourself from feelings of weakness and failure is often a necessity.

A therapist is like a thesis adviser for an academic; you have a topic you want to explore, and you’re looking for someone who both understands that topic and supports your approach. If you start treatment with someone and it doesn’t gel, chalk it up to bad chemistry, not your own failures, and continue your search.

Whether a therapy helps you to keep a positive perspective is easy for you to evaluate; you can tell whether a particular therapist is a good coach or has good ideas, or when you’ve got little more to learn from someone and need a fresh point of view.

Yes, a sustaining therapeutic relationship helps, but not if you come to feel it’s necessary for fighting negative beliefs. Sometime that special therapist won’t be there, or your insurance will change and you won’t be able to afford to see him/her, and then you won’t have the tools to manage your depression on your own. Your goal in talking to a nice, warm therapist is to pick up positive ideas, practice using them, and report back on how you’ve done. Don’t cling to the warmth or the need for their approval.

Make sure you try behavioral treatments, including exercise, which at the very least can distract you from depressed thinking (but don’t punish yourself if your depression makes you too tired or listless to exercise regularly). If, as often happens, the non-medical treatments can only help so much, it’s time to consider medical options. Usually, medical options have a higher risk, but they should be considered if and only if you think the alternative is worse.

If you use a sound risk management methodology to make your decision, respect yourself. Never call antidepressant treatment a “medical cocktail” unless you would say the same about chemotherapy for cancer or pills for high blood pressure.

In addition to having a greater (although not terribly high) risk, antidepressants are a pain because they take weeks to work and often (30% of the time) don’t. So after becoming a risk-manager in order to make the decision to use or not use them, embrace your inner scientist and prepare to conduct an experiment—on yourself. It’s hard, risky work, but if you feel it’s necessary, it’s worth taking on.

In the end, do everything you think is reasonable and required. Use the low risk treatments first, the higher risk treatments when needed, and be prepared for mixed results at a slow pace (that in no way reflect on you or your effort). Needing help or medication doesn’t make you weak; it makes you sick, but strong enough to do something about it.

STATEMENT:
“If I found a medication that relieved my depressive pain, it would be hard not to feel that I’ve taken an illegitimate shortcut. I know from experience, however, that there’s nothing illegitimate about treatment that reduces depressive pain as long as it doesn’t create risks that are worse than the pain itself and that the only illegitimate way to treat depression is to regard it as a weakness.”

I’d like your advice in helping my sister, who is starting to act crazy again, but she won’t accept anyone’s help. She was in the hospital several years ago for hearing voices telling her she was a friend of the Virgin Mary. Now she’s starting to talk fast again and calling the company that I think she was fired from, saying she believes they’ve sent her on a special project and she needs to report back. She sometimes sounds ludicrous, and I can’t help laughing, but I’m afraid where this will end. How can I get her help?

It’s tough to respect an illness that makes people act silly and ridiculous, and tougher still to believe you can’t get through to someone who seems, in many ways, to be in control of herself and able to care about you in the way she usually does. If only mental illness came with a rash or flu that made it easier to recognize and accept.

You’re right, however. Your sister’s illness is serious, it could get her into big trouble, and, in spite of her apparent lucidity, it can be very, very hard to help her. Especially if she’s too sick to know she needs help in the first place.

As hard as it is to be depressed (see above) and to respect yourself when you have depressive symptoms, depressed people usually know they’re sick and are ready to accept help, even if it feels humiliating. With mania, however, people often can’t see themselves as being ill. If respect were measured in nothing but feelings, you could say they respect themselves too much.

If you push your sister too hard, you may provoke a fight, which does no one any good. Manic people are often irritable and ready to fight or flee (often on motorcycles, cars and airplanes, and in the middle of night, and often while underdressed). Don’t let your concern for her become an impassioned plea that triggers her great (naked) escape.

Persuade her, if you can, with calm reason, emphasizing the positive. You think she’ll feel better and calmer if she sees a doctor, and you’ll be happy to drive her to an emergency room and wait with her while she gets an evaluation. Don’t argue about what’s wrong with her, just express confidence in your belief that there’s good help available and that you can lead her there, if she’ll let you.

If persuasion fails, be aware that your ability to intervene depends entirely on her demonstrating dangerous behavior. The moment she says or does something that shows, in an obvious way, that she could hurt herself, put herself into danger, or hurt someone else, you have acquired the critical information that allows police to take her to an emergency room and emergency room clinicians to commit her. At that point, the hope is she becomes lucid enough to want treatment herself.

Until that day comes, it takes great patience and restraint to live with a manic person. Respect yourself for your kindness and tolerance, be patient, and remember, no matter how unreasonable or naked she becomes, you’re doing the right thing.

STATEMENT:
“It’s agonizing to watch my sister act crazy and feel like I’m doing nothing, but I’m really doing a great deal by waiting, caring for her, trying to steer her towards help, preparing to intervene if she gets worse, and tolerating the helplessness.”

I can’t seem to recover from my wife’s infidelity. Six months ago, when I found out, it nearly destroyed me. I stopped sleeping, and started eating compulsively, and felt depressed and anxious all day. I have a demanding job and we have a 2-year-old son and I simply had to keep going. Now, after months of couples therapy and my wife’s promising to stop drinking and then starting up again, I’ve gotten strangely detached. I don’t think our marriage is going to make it and, on some level, I don’t care. I can’t lose the 20 pounds I gained, I don’t exercise the way I used to, and I can’t seem to get my confidence or happiness back. What more should I be doing?

I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you, not for losing a horrible spouse (that seems both insensitive and obvious), but for becoming a fat, lazy mope. Most people consider “letting themselves go” to be a bad thing, but in this instance, it’s a positive side-effect of recovery at work.

After all, the best measurement of how well you’ve recovered from trauma is not how good you feel. This Sunday marks a rather grim anniversary for many Americans, and after 10 years, some of those people still hurt, and some of those in pain are also in shape. Trauma doesn’t factor into it.

Depending on the trauma and what it means to you, there may be no way to feel good for aa long, long time, no matter what you say or do. What counts is how well you cope with it, and coping well doesn’t necessarily make you feel good or hit the treadmill.

For instance, you’re telling me that you’ve continued to co-manage a growing business and parent a 2-year-old boy despite a severe emotional shock. At any size, that’s amazing. You’ve also accepted the fact that your wife has resumed drinking and is unlikely to get control of other behavior. It’s sad, but you’re not obsessing about what you did wrong or what you should do to change her.

This is the kind of pain you need to have. Not that you deserve it, but life sucks, and it’s far better than the pain that would come with denial, holding on to what you can’t have, or assuming responsibility for things you don’t control.

Indeed, the fact that your weight and appearance come last is also a strength. You’re absolutely right in acting like what comes first is parenting your son, making a living, and accepting what happened. Dieting should never be your top priority.

Exercising would help if you have time for it, but there are times when you don’t, and shouldn’t, have time for it. When the chaos subsides a bit, you can renew your gym membership. For now, be proud that you’ve got your priorities straight, even if you feel rotten and sluggish and look large.

You’ve done the right thing under difficult circumstances for both yourself and your son, so stop mourning how far you’ve let yourself go and instead admire how far you’ve come.

STATEMENT:
“My heart remains broken and I don’t have the energy I used to have, but I’m doing what really needs to be done and I’m realistic about my options, so I know I’m doing the right thing, even if I feel far from confident about myself and life in general.”

I’ve think I’ve gotten over my last boyfriend, but my friends tell me I still need help. They know that my ex had a fidelity problem and a way of borrowing money from me and not paying it back, but I didn’t tell them about how worried I was that the loan sharks would hurt him (and I knew he wanted to pay me back), so it was more complicated than my friends realized. In any case, I eventually realized he was getting money from someone else and, when I confronted him, he said he couldn’t stand my nagging and that he needed someone who would give him more respect. I was shattered, but I’m OK now, and I don’t know why my friends don’t believe in my recovery.

Once again, the point of getting over a bad relationship isn’t to feel better; as nice as it would be, your top priority in “getting over” something isn’t to land in the sweet valley of bliss (and weight loss). Instead, you get through it in order to learn what went wrong so you can do better next time or, at least, figure out whether there was any way you could have seen the bad stuff coming.

If you feel better without learning something, you won’t feel better for long; there’s always more trouble coming, and no valley in sight.

Don’t try to forget him before first trying to remember what went wrong and searching for warning signs. No matter how shocking a boyfriend’s bad behavior can seem, most guys who have fidelity problems don’t develop them the moment they meet you. They’ve had them for a long time and the behavior problem isn’t invisible if you know where to look (and aren’t blinded entirely by the good feelings that come with a budding romance).

Usually, it’s just a matter of asking straightforward questions about past relationships and getting corroboration from friends and family—the same methods a dumb cop would use. Ask yourself whether your love of romance caused you to turn off not just your inner detective, but your brain entirely.

Trying to protect loved ones from behavior they show no signs of stopping is another red flag, announcing that you have a weakness for your own nurturing instincts. It’s a good thing to protect babies and children, and a terrible idea to protect grown babies from behavior that can take you both down. I suppose he doesn’t see himself as having a problem, and that’s his cross to bear. That you also don’t see it is a big problem for you, and that’s what worries your friends.

Of course, there are smooth-talking-but-bad boyfriends whom no one can see coming—those polished psychopaths who fool everyone because they believe in their own lies and are good at hiding their pasts. If your inquest doesn’t uncover that kind of nutjob, then you have less to worry about, because you didn’t make any mistake other than to have bad luck.

So before you insist he’s in the rearview and you’re feeling great, figure out exactly what you’re putting behind you; do your homework, figure out what went wrong, and then it’s OK to forget about him. As the old saying goes, you don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. If you push through the pain and figure out what your last relationship was really about, you’ll be able to go forward without getting over quite so much.

STATEMENT:
“I’d prefer to put the past behind me, particularly because I’m much more attractive and fun to be with when I’m feeling happy, but I’ve learned more from my mistakes than from the relationships that went well, and I take pride in being a good learner.”

I constantly feel inadequate, though I am socially quite confident and easy-going. I have always been a worrier, and someone that seeks approval from others—mainly because of the relationship I have with my parents, where praise is hard to come by. Ever since graduating (a year ago),my confidence seems to have hit rock bottom. I became very disheartened by the whole application process, and felt like I became reduced to a series of bullet points. As a result, the many rejection emails I received were crushing. I have since found a job I generally enjoy, but cannot shake a feeling of anxiety. I constantly worry that I’m being a bad employee, friend, daughter. I worry about money, about the fact I don’t meet guys that I can make a relationship work with…When a guy I was dating recently treated me undeniably badly, I still found myself questioning my own behavior, worrying it was my fault. I want to make plans for the future, but keep finding reasons why my ambitions will be impossible to achieve. How can I stop giving myself such a hard time, and take my future by the horns?

Yes, there are people who are optimistic, happy, and full of confidence, and their optimism often generates its own good results and gets everyone, including advice-givers, worshiping the “groove” they’re in and telling you how to get it.

What they don’t tell you is that the groove is overvalued; sooner or later, life sucks, and when it does, it won’t shake you nearly as much as someone who has never experienced self-doubt and thinks they’ve got the world by the tail. So one thing you can be optimistic about is that you’re prepared for disaster.

What’s even more impressive about your feelings of overwhelming insecurity is that they don’t seem to be coupled with inertia; they call it “paralyzing self-doubt” for a reason, but you’re still on the move using your worry as a motivator, and it’s commendable.

Instead of letting your insecurity hold you back, you’re still filling out your applications, getting a job you like, dating, and, presumably, dumping someone who treated you badly, even if he got you doubting yourself. I’m not minimizing the power of your feelings at all; just suggesting that, as strong as they are, you’ve proven yourself stronger, and that’s what counts.

Therapy might or might not help reduce your feelings of insecurity, but if you can’t afford therapy or have already had some, don’t get discouraged. What helps most, very often, is not therapy itself, but the techniques you learn from therapy and the effect they have on you after much practice.

In any case, don’t expect your self-doubt to go away very soon, because that expectation will just feed your negative thinking. If, instead, you expect to keep your worry and need for approval from affecting your decisions, you’re already well on the way to your destination.

It’s too bad you’re haunted by insecurity, but keep on doing the right thing and hanging out with people who respect you, and you’ll find the haunting matters less and less and your faith in your own strength and accomplishments will grow.

You’ve accomplished so much, despite your nagging concerns—don’t worry about getting your “groove” back.

STATEMENT:
“I hate feeling insecure all the time and not being able to stop it, but I haven’t let it stop me, and I will never let those feelings make me forget what I value about myself, my friendships, and my accomplishments.”

My daughter is a screw-up but she’s always sure she’s on the right track. She forgets to pay bills, loses track of appointments, avoids any daily routine, and often doesn’t return phone calls. She’s very smart and can hold an IT job for a while, but it’s only a matter of time until she drops the ball. The trouble is, she always believes she’s got the answer, or that she doesn’t need anyone else’s advice when, in reality, she’s a mess. I hate to knock her poise—and I know some people would say she’s just masking uncertainty—but, whatever it is, being gentle with her doesn’t work. How do I get through to her that she needs to manage herself more carefully?

So the good news is that your daughter doesn’t suffer from being overly sensitive, or sensitive at all, to criticism. The bad news is that, because she can’t learn from criticism, you worry about her ability to survive. As we always say, excessive self-esteem is not a problem that can be ignored.

Don’t hold yourself responsible for getting through to her; others may think that no one can be a total screw-up unless they’re spoiled rotten, but you and I know better. I’m sure her teachers and others have tried to hold her responsible for her mistakes and gotten nowhere. Some people are born that way (probably complimenting themselves for such a great birth).

If that’s true, there’s no point in holding her responsible for her mistakes, because your moral disapproval will sour your relationship, stiffen her resistance, and do no good. The scary fact is that God creates some people who lack the capacity to see their mistakes. They’re not assholes, because they do have values and sensitivities; they just have an enormous, self-shaped blind spot.

You also know that her handicap lets no one off the hook, even if it makes blame pointless, so you’re still responsible for trying to teach her better survival tools, even if she’s blind to her problems.

Hold yourself responsible for nothing but trying. Instead of chiding her or winning her agreement, let her know that you think she’s got a broader disability than she thinks she has, even though she’s very bright, and that the worst part of her disability is that she can’t tell when she’s in trouble.

Think up tools she can use to audit herself, like to-do lists, schedules with deadlines, and budgets. Prompt her to do daily audits on all her major problem areas. Whenever she fucks up, urge her to ask herself whether she slipped up on the audit and how to do better next time.

If only she could join ESE (Excessive Self-Esteem) Anonymous, your burden would be easier. Meanwhile, use 12-step methods to keep her focused on her problem without expressing negative feelings or forcing her to agree. You think she’s blind to responsibilities, she doesn’t, and time will give her evidence she may or may not interpret correctly.

In the meantime, you’ve done a good job, even if you’re not yet getting results, so maybe it’s time to take some of her extra esteem for yourself.

STATEMENT:
“It sometimes amazes me that someone can be as bright as my daughter and not see what she’s doing to herself, but I know her problem is real, she can’t help it, and my wife and I have done a good job. We’ll keep on doing a good job, whether or not she gets better at managing her problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m feeling a little lost. For most of my life, I’ve been an excellent student. I made As and Bs with minimal effort. Seriously, I’d just show up to class, take a few notes, and get an A. I didn’t really have to try. It just happened. The past two years, however, it seems like I’ve been sinking further and further into a hole that’s gotten so deep, I can’t even see where I fell in. I have difficulty motivating myself to get out of bed 90% of the time. When I used to be able to pen an excellent paper in a few hours’ time, I find myself now staring at a blank Word document with nothing but a header for weeks. My GPA has plummeted from fantastic (not stellar, but it would’ve done well enough) to abysmal. The only thing keeping me from dropping out of college entirely is the fact that I know I’d have nothing else at all to live for. My family already thinks I’m a failure, because I haven’t graduated yet. The past two years has put me painfully behind schedule. I’m thoroughly unhappy, and I honestly don’t know how the hell to stop it. I need help figuring out what the hell I need to do to get out of this hole.

Pretend you’ve just been told you have a fatal disease. Suddenly, your GPA and the opinions it inspires in your family and friends probably matter a lot less, no?

When you’re in workplaces, families and/or schools, they seem to be the whole universe and your place in them seems to define who you are. The best thing about being cast out, or even just moving on, is that you gain an opportunity to define your worth more independently, in terms of your values and efforts, instead of what people thought of your performance.

Right now, your grades and your family are telling you you’re a failure, but they don’t deserve to have the last word. You have obstacles you can’t control, and you have good qualities not currently recognized in your limited universe.

It’s time to reassess not just what’s wrong, but how it’s wrong, for whom, and how much is really in your power.

Start by exploring your learning stoppage. For most people who want to learn something but can’t, the two most common reasons are depression and learning problems (or some combination of the two). Find out whether you have these problems and, if you do, get help.

Remember, you don’t control whether you have those problems, and there’s no perfect cure. What you are responsible for, however, is doing your best to get moving and learn what you want to learn, regardless of equipment/perceived failures.

Fear tells you that you’re caught between the helplessness of not being able to function and the hopelessness of having nothing to live for. Those are terrible thoughts that you would never, ever impose on anyone else, and you certainly don’t deserve to hear them yourself. Your school and your family probably don’t feel this way either, although depression can convince you otherwise.

If you were counseling a friend, you’d tell them that good people are sometimes unable to function and that achievement is never a good thing to live for, because sometimes you can’t achieve. You’d urge a friend to live for the values he or she has always lived for and accept the fact that sometimes you’re fucked.

With or without a fatal disease, we’re all at risk for sudden death, but there are measures we can take to try and make life last. It’s time to put your health above academics and other people’s opinions. If you’ve got the right priorities and perspective, then failure is not an option.

STATEMENT:
“I’m getting nowhere and have lost my ability to perform, but there’s no reason to think my problem is permanent and there are lots of good things I can do, other than school, until I recover. I may be flunking out of school, but I’m also enrolled in Impairment 101, which forces me to think constructively about my impaired performance or get swept away by fears of failure and humiliation. I intend to do well.”

I used to love my job, which I began while I was still in high school. My first boss was a wonderful mentor who groomed me to take over when she got promoted, and for about 10 years I followed her into her old jobs as she moved up in the company. I worked hard and people respected me. Then we got bought by another company, she left for another city, and I reported to a new boss who was much more comfortable with his male buddies from the other company than with any woman, including me. I knocked myself out to show him what I could do, and he still found fault and gave all the good assignments to the guys. Finally, after a negative performance review, I let him know I was thinking of suing for sex discrimination, and suddenly no one is talking to me. They’re not threatening to fire me, but people avoid eye contact and I’m totally out of the loop. So now I’m depressed and it’s hard to get to work and I’m worried they’ll really have grounds to fire me, because I’ve lost all my get up and go. I don’t see any way forward. My goal is to get back on track.

The real Horatio Alger American Dream isn’t just about getting ahead because of hard work; it’s also about good, hard-working people always getting what they deserve. It’s a promise made by every teacher and every CEO; work hard, and you’ll get ahead.

Too bad no one can actually deliver on that promise. It’s called the American Dream, not the American Reality, for a reason. Yes, great teachers and great bosses are wonderful, and they sometimes happen. So does good weather. And so does hail.

It’s tempting to believe you can create a better world in your particular social or work group or family, and it’s certainly worth trying. Sooner or later, however, things can go sour and it’s your job to have individual priorities and principals for yourself that can take over in an emergency, when the lights and liking and fairness go out and you have to find your own way to the exit.

If you can prove sex discrimination and make a bundle, more power to you. What it sounds like, however, is that you’re expressing your anger and helplessness at the injustice and exhaustion of your position, and that’s destructive. Your boss, of course, doesn’t see it that way and neither does his boss. So the moment you take them on, you’re out in the cold. Bad weather made worse.

Give up on them, but not on yourself. Absolutely nothing has happened that should shake your belief and faith in yourself and your own accomplishments. Despite your history, you need to dismantle your emotional ties to this company and these people; they’re not your family, they’re not good for you, and they have nothing else to offer at this point.

Think harder about the assets you offer and the sort of workplace you need to find that would be a good fit, even if you need to work with a headhunter or a job coach. Remember who you are and the professional you’ve become.

If, like the idealist above, you feel depressed, a doctor might be able to help. For now, remember that getting what you deserve is a fantasy; get out of this job, and get what you need.

STATEMENT:
“The abilities I’ve discovered in myself, the skills I’ve acquired, the things I’ve accomplished, and my dedication and motivation haven’t changed one bit. The only thing that changed is that I’ve learned that good jobs can go bad, no matter how good you are, and that’s a painful but valuable truth. I’m going to suck up the pain and make use of the truth.”

You’ve probably had a disgusting amount of questions like the ones I’m about to put towards you, and that’s another thing that annoys me—I’m a cliché. 17 months ago my boyfriend broke up with me, explaining that he was too young to be in a serious relationship. I know this is perfectly logical but I have never been able to get over it, even though I do understand his point of view. I am still very much in love with him. I know perfectly well that realistically no one really marries their first love, that realistically it wasn’t even a proper adult relationship but I feel as raw today as I did the day it happened. I’ve been diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. I have regular nightmares about him. Last Easter I attempted suicide yet it failed. I’ve been sent to counseling, but I didn’t like it. I dropped out of university as I was too distracted and there is nothing I can throw myself into to make me forget it. The idea of him with someone else would kill me. I keep thinking to myself, I’m only 21 and I shouldn’t take this so personally and seriously but I do and I have no idea why. I know I need to wise up but I can’t.

Some say love’s like a drug, but we think it’s more like a (sometimes) innocuous mental illness; it doesn’t make you “crazy”—at least not necessarily—but it does give you weird thoughts, sometimes long after the relationship is over.

While those thoughts are hard to stop and easy to believe in, at least they’re not true. Like anxiety and depression, love has a weird way of keeping itself alive by changing the way you think and act, until it changes your beliefs. That’s when you’re in trouble.

You think there’s no value to life once love goes from bliss to bad, so you try to remember and revisit and talk about everything that hurts the most, even though that keeps it hurting longer. Each time you think the thought, visit the memory, and talk about your feelings, you grind the loss in deeper, and the pain makes you do it again. You can set a Guinness record for miserable pining (i.e., a lifetime) if love-thinking goes unchecked.

Love has got you treating yourself like shit, and there’s nothing noble or beautiful about that. You feel worthless, treat yourself as worthless by trying to kill yourself, and then feel more worthless for failing and still feeling miserable.

Remember, there’s nothing wrong with being needy. OK, you’ve got a sensitivity to love, and in the right situation, that makes you open to certain kinds of joy and poetic feelings that others miss. Like some traits associated with mental illness, it has its good side (if there was no such thing as depression, most of the good art in the world would not exist).

Besides, the most likely reason you have this trait of sensitivity is that you were born with it, so don’t waste time wondering why you’re suffering, what you did wrong, or what you need to do to change. You are who you are, and you happen to be vulnerable to lost love. You need to manage that part of yourself better instead of focusing on it and feeding its destructiveness.

Big Pharma has yet to release an anti-love potion, so take treatment into your own hands by challenging the thoughts and memories that keep the disease going; keep busy while accepting the sad fact that you’re miserable, you can’t control it, and you can’t stop it. Almost everything you want to do about it will make it worse, so force yourself to do the opposite.

Find a recovery coach, or a recovery support group, that can remind you that you have a self that’s independent of your sadness and loss and that you deserve to respect yourself for carrying on with your life, in spite of your pain, one day at a time.

If you ruminate, visit old haunts, or try to share your sad story, they can tell you to shut up and do whatever you’re supposed to do when you “slip.” Prepare to fight negative thoughts and feelings every day for as long as it takes.

You will recover, learn from your experience, and do better next time, but only if you accept the unfair burden of your disease. There’s no cure for love, but if you work hard enough, you can manage your mind again, and then maybe one day find a truly healthy relationship.

STATEMENT:
“Right now I don’t care about living, but I’ve never believed that the meaning of my life is much related to how I feel. I respect myself for doing what I think is right and being a good woman and that hasn’t changed. I’ll stand by that view for as long as it takes.”

My husband and I have been married two years. Before we were married, we had been living separately and co-parenting our then 4-year-old son (we had split up when he was 18-months-old because I suspected he was cheating on me). He became involved with the woman I suspected, moved in with her and got engaged all within a year of us breaking up. Then, she cheated on him and they broke up. We began hanging out with each other and “dating.” I broke it off with him when he admitted he did not consider our relationship “exclusive.” I moved on again with my life. Then eight months later he proposed marriage stating that he knew he had made mistakes but was now certain he wanted nothing more than to be with me exclusively for life. I have trouble getting our past out of my head and trusting that he will not abandon me for someone else again. We have trouble getting along sometimes and his passive-aggressive behavior bothers me. My goals are to get over my feelings of mistrust and to be able to communicate better with my husband.

Being abandoned feels terrible—the word suggests the helplessness of a newborn left alone on a wet rock—so don’t apply the word to yourself if you’re an adult unless you intend to abandon yourself, which I’m sure you won’t do unless you’re thinking too much about your husband.

Besides, you did fine without him before and you’ll do fine without him again, if necessary. Meanwhile, ask yourself whether life is better with him around, assuming that you can’t get rid of your suspicions. Put aside, for the time being, whether your suspicions are true or not; assume you’ll find out someday and, if you do, you’ll deal with it then.

One thing you don’t want to do is to get rid of your suspicions by asking him for reassurance or watching him closely. That’s a good way to kill your relationship, drive you both crazy, and improve my business.

It’s unfair you should have to live with painful suspicion, but as long as you decide he’s a worthwhile partner, it’s part of your job description. That’s what you get when you re-cycle a flip-flop guy, which is why deciding his worthiness is so important—otherwise, it’s a lot of suffering in vain.

Don’t blame yourself for your suspicions, and don’t blame him; you can’t help having your feelings and he can’t help stirring them up. All you can do is not make things worse (see above) by keeping your feelings to yourself and not being overt about checking his email.

Remind yourself that you’re independent and not a fool. If he strays, you’ll find out sooner or later. At that point, you’ll know it’s not because he’s “too young for commitment,” but because he’s too self-absorbed to be faithful. Luckily, you seem self-reliant enough to “abandon” his sorry self and move on.

STATEMENT:
“It’s hard to live with suspicion, but I can do it if I think it’s necessary for a good partnership, and not because I’m too needy to say good-bye to a jerk. I can live alone again if I have to. Whether my husband proves true or not, I respect myself for taking risks in a good cause.”