F*ck Feelings (2 page)

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.

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 because 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.

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.

Feeling helpless doesn't mean that everything is going to turn out badly or that you're doing a poor job with your life. If you can ignore the terrible meltdown feeling and take credit for how you're handling the problem, rather than getting carried away or feeling too responsible, you'll have much to be proud of and many more options to consider.

Among the wishes people express are:

• To regain control they thought they once had

• To figure out how to get close family members to control themselves

• To stop feeling helpless all the time

Here are three examples:

I've always been hardworking and good at doing sales, and I married someone whose love I thought I could count on, so I really don't understand why my life seems to be coming apart. After getting laid off from my old job when the company was sold, I had to take a lower-paying job with a new boss who hates me. Meanwhile, my wife decided her feelings for me were gone and that she couldn't stay married to someone she doesn't love, even though I thought we had built a really nice life together. Now every day feels like a death march and I can't stop crying. I'm the biggest loser I know, and the pain won't go away. My goal is to regain control of my life.

My son has always been a nice kid, but he's always been too good at finding trouble, and even now that he's twenty-five, he just can't seem to get his life together. We tried hard to get him extra help when he was in school, but he never did homework and quit college after a year. We think he drinks too much, but he won't admit it, and the girl he hangs out with has no job, too many rings in her face, and an ex-boyfriend in jail. My husband and I dread the day when she announces she's pregnant with our grandchild. My goal is to finally find out what's the matter with our son so we can empower him to get control of his life.

I'm the world's biggest phony. People at work think I've got it together but they don't know that I'm a nervous wreck who has trouble holding down lunch, can't sleep for three days before every presentation, and is always obsessing about the stupid things I just said and wish I could take back. I'm a mental case who just pretends to have it together, which makes me feel even more out of control. My goal is to have a life that doesn't feel like a train wreck.

It's hard to believe there are ways to classify chaos, but when it comes to losing control of your life, there are different kinds of feeling fucked. Some people get sucked into a bad-luck, no-fault meltdown that, if taken personally, can destroy a good person's belief in his values and motivation. Other people become helpless by proxy, usually by watching a loved one who's unable to get themselves straight, while others feel like they're living on the verge of a meltdown without realizing just how effective they are at staying away from the edge.

In any case, just because you feel out of control doesn't mean you should have been able to prevent it. Instead of searching for mistakes or weaknesses, judge yourself realistically, in terms of what a good person can actually do in a bad situation. Even if your situation is due to a foolish mistake, learn from it and stop blaming yourself for bad results you don't control, whether they involve your job, kids, or mental condition.

If you do blame yourself for the mess you're in, simply because it happened on your watch, you'll weaken and distract yourself at a time you need to be stronger. If you dwell on second-guessing yourself and believing you deserve punishment, you'll have more trouble figuring out the smart thing to do, giving strength to others, and tolerating painful feelings without panicking.

Once you've separated your overwhelmed feelings from a realistic assessment of your own performance, however, you can build self-respect and get to work on managing life. You'll have more strength for rebuilding your work and relationships, setting limits on out-of-control kids, and tolerating anxious feelings without doubting your capacity to ignore them when necessary. In the end, you'll have more respect for the times you kept trucking through a meltdown than the times you were confidently cruising along because everything was going your way.

Here's what you wish for and can't have:

• The praise, salary, or family you deserve

• Peace, love, and happiness (aka, financial security)

• The knowledge that your present is right on track

• Confidence in your ability to keep it there

Here's what you can aim for and actually achieve:

• Create reasonable standards for what you can actually do, given your Muggle status

• Respect yourself for meeting your standards

• Survive pain, fear, and distress and give yourself credit for doing so

• Not let pain change your values, basic course, or determination

Here's how you can do it:

• Look for pre-meltdown red flags that might have warned you in the past and could warn you next time

• Ask yourself whether you could reasonably be expected to do anything different

• Rate yourself for work effort, honesty, and the value of your priorities

• Assuming you deserve better, find a friend or therapist who can remind you that you've lived up to your values and that the helplessness and humiliations have nothing to do with you, regardless of how you feel

• Check with a psychiatrist or therapist to see whether there are behavioral techniques and/or medications that might reduce anxiety or depression, if they're extreme

Here's what to tell someone or yourself while you're feeling hopelessly fucked-up.

Dear [Me/Family Member/Fuckup I Can't Help But Care About],

I know you feel like [the royal “we”/you/our fuckup son] is on the verge of [insert mistake or potential tragic experience], and life feels like an unholy disaster. The truth is, however, that life often sucks and sometimes I can't expect to feel other than [insert classier, more dire synonym for “shitty”], especially given issues in the past regarding [bad luck/anxiety/your many addictions and world-record unemployment]. So don't take it personally and do take credit for whatever good things you were doing, even if they were totally ineffective at fending off this mess. Take pride in doing a good job, regardless of bad [luck/genes/associates/mental pain] and don't stop.