F*ck Feelings
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contents
Epigraph
Introduction: What’s Your Goal?
chapter one fuck self-improvement
Taking Back the Reins of Your Life (After a Stampede)
Getting to the Root of Your Problem . . . and Tearing It Out
Becoming a More Positive Person
Stop Fucking Up
Curing Yourself of Addiction
chapter two fuck self-esteem
Fighting the Loser’s Curse
Unleashing the Power of Persuasion
Standing Up to Bullies
Overcoming the Stigma of Disability
Saving Your Kid’s Self-Esteem
chapter three fuck fairness
Defending Your Right to Live in Safety
Getting Closure After Childhood Abuse
Getting a Square Deal
Clearing Your Name
Getting Justice and/or Closure
chapter four fuck helpfulness
Easing Others’ Sorrow
Rescuing the Addicted
Protecting Victims of Injustice
Brokering Peace at Home
Raising the Downtrodden
chapter five fuck serenity
Stop Hating the Ones You Love
Accepting the Inescapably Annoying
Facing Fear
Healing Heartache
Accepting Enmity
chapter six fuck love
Finding Someone
Getting to Commitment
Changing for Love
Enjoying Healthy Sex
Salvaging Lost Love
chapter seven fuck communication
Nurturing Closeness
Airing Trauma
Venting Anger
Life-Changing Conversation
chapter eight fuck parenthood
Not Ruining Your Baby
Stopping Constant Parent/Child Conflict
Raising a Jerk
Living with a Learning Disability
Rebuilding Divorce-Damaged Parenting
chapter nine fuck assholes
Fucked by Your Nearest and Dearest Asshole
My Parent, the Asshole
Rising Up from an Asshole Takedown
Saving Assholes from Their Shit
Living and Working with Inescapable Assholes
bonus chapter ten fuck treatment
Getting Treatment
Getting Your Fill of Treatment
Getting Treatment for the Unwilling
Afterword: Well, Fuck Me
Acknowledgments
About Michael I. Bennett and Sarah Bennett
Suggested Bibliography
Index
For the previous generation, Claire and Dr. Jacob Bleiberg, and Beatrice and Jacob Bennett. Tough lives couldn’t stop them from sticking to their values and working hard so that our lives could be so much easier.
And for friend, mentor, and legendary mensch Dr. Ted Nadelson, who taught us that the best way to help people accept what’s tough about life is to make them laugh.
There’s no “should” or “should not” when it comes to having feelings. They’re part of who we are and their origins are beyond our control. When we can believe that, we may find it easier to make constructive choices about what to do with those feelings.
—Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember
introduction
what’s your goal?
Most people read self-help books, or come to see shrinks, because they can’t solve their problems after trying very, very hard to do it themselves. This is true whether they feel depressed, anxious, ill-treated, burdened with self-destructive behaviors, hurt by an unhappy relationship, too fat, too thin; you name it. They come expecting advice or treatment that will reduce symptoms, ease painful feelings, strengthen self-control, or mend broken relationships. Basically, they want a cure. These expectations are stoked by the public faces of therapy, particularly those telegenic, first-name-basis self-help gurus like Drs. Phil, Drew, Laura, Nick, etc.
F*ck Feelings offers a more realistic approach from a medically trained, practicing psychiatrist who, over a forty-year clinical career, has treated hundreds of patients with intractable mental illness, bad habits, and troubled relationships—Dr. Lastname. That was the alias used by your authors—Dr. Michael Bennett, the aforementioned Harvard-educated psychiatrist, and his daughter Sarah Bennett, a writer who spent years writing sketch comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York—as we developed our collaborative technique at our website, fxckfeelings.com.
Observing the difference between what people expect from therapy and what they are actually likely to achieve, I, Dr. Bennett, came to believe that people use the very act of coming for help—and their overbelief in a cure for their problems—to deny the fact that there is much about life, others, and their own personalities that is beyond anyone’s power to change. They would rather see themselves as failures or as partially developed seekers who cannot properly begin their lives until they have found an answer that has so far eluded them. Clinging to the belief that they can be cured, they want to know what they or any prior therapists did to block them from achieving their treatment goals. Unfortunately, many therapists, eager to help patients realize these wishes, support their false hopes. I am not one of them.
F*ck Feelings explains that, in most cases, you have not failed and do not need to try harder or wait longer for improvement to begin; instead, you need to accept that life is hard and your frustrated efforts are a valuable guide to identifying what you can’t change. After urging you to accept whatever it is you can’t change—about your personality, behavior, spouse, kid, feelings, boss, country, pet, etc.—the F*ck Feelings approach shows you how to become much more effective at managing life’s impossible problems, instead of vainly and persistently trying to change them. If you’re willing to accept what you can’t change, we have many positive suggestions for improving the way you manage the shit on your plate—beginning with not wasting time repeating what hasn’t been working.
Your issue may be the love or hate you wish you could stop, the urge to drink or drug that you wish would go away, the blues you wish you could cure, or the spouse, kid, or parent you wish you could change. By the time you seek help, however, it’s usually obvious that something about your wish isn’t feasible, but that hasn’t stopped you from confusing that wish with a permanent, dedicated, high-priority goal. You can’t go forward, or be helped by treatment, until you accept its impossibility, suck it up, and turn your bullshit wish into a goal that can actually be achieved.
Accept whatever is obviously impossible about your goals. Accept that depression is often chronic and incurable, so you can stop blaming yourself for not controlling it. Stop treatments that don’t seem to be helping. Embrace whatever positive steps help you to live with and manage your illness or issue. Accept that there are some losses that never stop hurting, so you can stop delving into them, get used to living with a heavy heart, and try to build a better life. Accept that you have some urges for stimulating but unhealthy substances, sex partners, or self-expression that no amount of self-understanding will change. Stop asking why you’ve got weaknesses and start preventing them from turning you into a jerk.
After challenging advice seekers, patients, and our readers to accept what you can’t change, we show how you’re much less responsible f
or your misery than you thought. We teach good, often well-established methods for making the best of things—methods that you weren’t using because you were too busy with wishful thinking instead of problem solving.
Obviously, we don’t guarantee happiness—quite the contrary—but instead we offer you methods for building strength and pride in your ability to deal with the inevitable misery of a tough life. It’s not that we’re against happiness, just against holding yourself responsible for making it happen when it can’t. In our world, feelings don’t rule, many things can’t be changed, and acceptance of limits, not limitless self-improvement, is the key to moving forward and dealing effectively with any and all crap that life can throw your way.
So, no, we can’t tell you how to repair a long-broken relationship with a difficult parent, reform a bad boyfriend, or get respect from your boss, but that’s only because nobody can. The only book that can actually teach you how to change how others think is a lobotomy manual. Instead, we can show you how to look past the disappointment, resentment, and/or neediness that result from those issues so they can be managed realistically.
With the right limits, you can have a peaceful relationship with a difficult parent, and with the right standards, you can avoid bad boyfriends altogether. And with realistic expectations, you can get your work done in spite of a bad boss, or better yet, find a better one. Instead of false promises or happy endings, we provide concrete steps for getting past unavoidable bad feelings so you can do your best with what you actually control.
This book is also filled with fun sidebars and tables, like this one, so that I, Sarah, can amuse myself:
Bad Wish
Good Goal
Be my best me!
Learn to accept that “me” isn’t the best, and that that’ll do.
Learn to love myself!
Love the effort I put into putting up with myself.
Never drink again, ever!
Never stop working hard to resist delicious alcohol.
Given life’s cruelty and unfairness, F*ck Feelings believes profanity is a source of comfort, clarity, and strength. It helps to express anger without blame, to be tough in the face of pain, and to share determination without sentimentality. On the other hand, we don’t tolerate the reverent use of truly obscene f-words, like “fair” or “feelings.”
Each chapter addresses the usual wishes people have when they hope to solve a common problem—like loneliness, bad self-image, or conflict—and explains what part of these wishes are impossible to achieve. Using several composite case examples, we show you how to define the limits of what’s possible, create realistic goals, and devise businesslike procedures for achieving those goals. We remind you, repeatedly, because you need to hear it, to respect yourself for how you deal with bad luck, not for the overall quality of your luck. We also include information on how to find off-the-page therapy that might work for you.
So while other self-help books guarantee the path to happiness, F*ck Feelings guarantees that said path is nonexistent; furthermore, convincing yourself that there is such a path will actually lead you to feel like a true failure, instead of an unlucky hero. What F*ck Feelings can promise you is that there is no situation in life that can’t be endured if you can keep your sense of humor, bend your wishes to fit reality, restrain your feelings, manage bad behavior, and do what you think is right.
To those who want one of the many famous, overoptimistic Dr. Firstnames to tell them the secret to being happy, we say, fuck happy. Fuck self-improvement, self-esteem, fairness, helpfulness, and everything in between. If you can get over that, you can get real and get to a realistic solution, and yes, you can get it from this book, and from a real doctor, last name and all.
chapter one
fuck self-improvement
Buying a self-help book is usually the second-to-last step to surrendering to a crisis of self, the last step being therapy and the first step being a gym membership, or at least a Zumba DVD or a pamphlet for the Learning Annex.
Dedication to improving yourself is admirable—and if you’re Oprah, unbelievably lucrative—but what separates this book from your average work of Deepak Chopra is that we can tell you, up front, that being prepared to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to improve yourself doesn’t mean you can do it. You can’t somehow get taller once you’ve stopped growing; there are limits to your physical strength and intellectual ability, no matter how rigorously you train; and, odds are, you have done too many drugs to ever be president.
Eventually, striving to improve yourself brings diminishing returns and prevents you from accepting yourself and living with what you’ve got. That’s one reason self-improvement efforts have to take into account your limits and competing priorities. Otherwise, it’s less self-improvement, more self-sabotage.
The same principle applies to controlling bad habits and other weaknesses. The reason twelve-step programs urge people to accept the uncontrollable nature of addictions is not because they’re never controllable but because, given human weakness, they’re never fully controllable. There’s always something that can, at least temporarily, overwhelm human control and cause us to do things we’ll regret, and believing otherwise only makes us more foolishly vulnerable to that possibility and more self-critical when it occurs. Life sucks, our control sucks, but it’s not personal. There are limits to what you can do to change yourself, and recognizing these limits is essential to managing bad behaviors, bad pieces of your personality, even bad taste in shoes.
Indeed, the more you study dysfunctional behaviors, the more convinced you become that most of us have weird brains, and those who appear not to just haven’t exposed their own brains to the kinds of stress, relatives, or Japanese animation that will reveal their mental dysfunction. The prevalence of unique, genetically associated dysfunctions is certainly consistent with Darwin’s theory that individual differences, even dysfunctional ones, improve genetic diversity for the species and enhance its chances of surviving unforeseeable future threats. If genetic diversity is a good thing for the species, however, it’s often a disaster for the individual, who gets to carry all kinds of odd instincts and impulses in his DNA that cause trouble and are hard to bear.
Neuroscience seems to show that many emotional and behavioral problems we thought were caused by bad parents or trauma are also caused by wiring that isn’t reversible. This explains why self-improvement is hard and sometimes impossible, even when we’re strong-willed and well guided. In other words, we’re often fucked.
On the other hand, while there’s much pain in incurable dysfunction, the joys of self-improvement are overrated. Strength and confidence may give you a wonderful feeling and a license to walk around in a cape and tights, but big fuckin’ deal. Real confidence comes from knowing you’ve used what limited strength you have to do what’s important. If your strength isn’t great, and as a result you have to strain harder, you deserve even more credit, assuming you’ve got the values to do something worthwhile.
If you accept that self-improvement has its limits, then you can begin to discover the nature of these limits, which you need to know if you’re going to manage them well. So the goal of pushing your potential isn’t just to improve your performance but to improve it as much as you reasonably can, given your resources, while discovering what your limits are. That way, you’ll know how much help you need and how much to compromise when you can’t do everything yourself.
Addiction isn’t the only self-destructive behavior that seems like it should be controllable but isn’t. Eating disorders, hair picking, hoarding, and procrastination are similar in that they seem like bad habits that should improve with steady effort and strong willpower, but are actually very hard to change. It’s no one’s fault, not even your mother’s. The only conclusion to draw is that many people have less control over their basic behavior than they deserve, and that it’s often hard to know how much responsibility they should bear for their actions.
Of course, just bec
ause you can’t always make yourself stronger or even correct your weaknesses, you still have to try. If your goal is to be a good, decent person who carries out his responsibilities, you’re never off the hook. The fact that you’re flawed and have limits to how much you can improve or even control yourself means that you just have to work harder to get as close as you can to where you want to go. You should never hold yourself accountable for results you don’t control, but always for the strength of trying.
Many requests for help spring from an expectation for self-improvement and a denial of the fact that it hasn’t yet happened in spite of many failed previous efforts to get help. This chapter—and really, life—is about how to realistically assess your ability to get better, cope with the pain of accepting what you already know, and turn your knowledge of your limits into a useful plan of action. No matter what shape your life is in, what step of the ladder you’re on, or what drives you to buy this book.
Taking Back the Reins of Your Life (After a Stampede)
Since humans control very little besides their DVR queues and their opinions about Miley Cyrus, it’s not surprising that we often feel like our lives are slipping into chaos. Sometimes it’s because you’re actually losing control, sometimes because someone close to you is spinning out, and sometimes because whatever you don’t control feels far more important and overwhelming than what you do. In any case, the goals you wish for when you’re feeling out of control, as listed and described in the following three examples, are rarely realistic and will often make your helplessness worse.
The trouble is, of course, “out of control” usually means just that, and no amount of sweating, seeking, and therapizing is going to change the fact that life reserves the right to throw more shit at you than you can possibly handle. Accepting the way life sometimes becomes—or at least feels—uncontrollable, however, need never stop you from managing damage or speeding up recovery.