F*ck Feelings: Less Obsessing, More Living - Sarah Bennett

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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

       Your Script

      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.

       Did You Know . . . What Is the Real Secret of The Secret?

      The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, is a self-help tome in which the essential thesis is: if you put your desires “out into the universe” (which is to say, if you think about what you want), then the universe will give you what you want.

      The Secret says, if you’re fat and poor, it’s not because you have a crappy job in a terrible economy, or because, after another day working a job you hate, you treat yourself to a deluxe cheeseburger with an extra side of Crisco. It’s because when you stand on the scale in your efficiency apartment, you’re thinking, This sucks, I am fat and poor, not, Hey, universe, I am thin, rich, and wonderful. Oprah’s a huge fan of The Secret, as are those out there who credit it for doing everything from getting them better jobs to ridding them of cancer.

      In reality, notions like the one put forth in The Secret have come up over and over through the ages, often claiming to be extensions of spiritual ideas that are exactly the opposite. The real secret, of course, is one that you don’t want to hear and would never shell out your money to learn because it doesn’t feel good, which is exactly why you’re better off hearing it: whatever good or focused thoughts, wishes, or prayers you put out there, shit happens and it won’t be fair, no matter how many collages you make.

      The more you project your wishes, the more futile life seems while you continue to wait. The worst thing that can happen is that your wish actually comes true, because that’s when you think you’ve discovered The Secret, but haven’t. Then, since it’s your nature to have more wishes, it’s only a matter of time until you run into a brick wall of disappointment, which is now your fault, because you’ve failed to do The Secret properly. No matter how much you deserve it, you can’t always get what you want, and that’s life (unless you’re Oprah).

      Go ahead and wish, pray, and focus—they help you to know what you want, particularly if it guides you toward keeping your priorities straight and working hard—just don’t take it personally when you don’t get your reward. And watch your Crisco intake.

      It’s not clear when people started equating solving emotional issues with retracing your steps in order to find your car keys, but if you retrace your steps to uncover the ultimate source of your problems, you won’t usually find it. On the plus side, you might find your sunglasses.

      What people hate to consider, even after root seeking has been getting them nowhere for some time, is that, sometimes, it just doesn’t work. There are lots of problems we’ll never know the answer to. There’s nothing wrong with looking for answers that might actually exist, but, when the search isn’t bearing fruit, there’s a strong possibility that answers aren’t to be had, and obsessing about finding them is a distraction to figuring out where the real keys are—and what you’re going to do next.

      People prefer to believe that, with enough fact gathering, insight, and the heart-to-heart sharing of honest, heretofore suppressed, and probably embarrassing emotion, any problem can be sourced and solved. In fact, knowing why you’ve got a bad habit usually gives you no ability to stop it, and the search for deeper knowledge sometimes serves as an excuse for waiting until it’s easier to stop, which it never is. So getting to the root of your problem is often antitherapeutic, and, at worst, a giant waste of time.

      Or, if therapy hasn’t solved a problem, you wonder whether it’s been intense and long-lasting enough, or if you’ve been sincere enough, or if your therapist is skilled enough. If the problem involves a relationship, you wonder if you’ve worked hard enough to express painful and negative feelings—which again, surprise, often makes things worse.

      Here are telltale signs that your quest for a deep solution—or Holy Grail—must end:

      • The amount of searching you put in is inverse to the amount you have been able to change your problem

      • Your friends, kids, and pets have made it clear that the subject of your past/problems/bullshit is closed

      • Your therapist has been less blunt than your friends, kids, and pets, but is clearly falling asleep

      • You’ve revised the past so many times, your déjà vu has déjà vu

      Among the wishes people express when they feel there must be an answer to an unsolvable problem are:

      • To figure out what happened that caused them to lose the control they once had

      • To find out why they can’t do something when they’ve always been good at doing something similar

      • To understand why they can’t stop being drawn to doing something bad

      Here are three examples:

      I don’t understand why I started drinking again after ten years of sobriety. I had no desire to drink—going to bars didn’t bother me, nor did having liquor in the house or being around friends who were drinking. Then suddenly I was tense over a problem at work, and I figured I should be able to control myself after all these years, so I had a drink. It was fine, I had only one, and kept to a one-per-day limit until a week later, and now, three months later, I have no control over my drinking and I’m back to square one. My goal is to figure out what happened to me and why.

      I

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