F*ck Feelings (15 page)

• To accept the loss of what you thought was yours

• To accept your lack of control over staying happy and keeping the good times rolling

• To develop tools for confronting false assumptions about a good person's right to a good life

• To live with regret without considering it important

Here's how you can do it:

• Confront negative should-have and could-have thoughts

• Think about how you demonstrated your ability to do good things and enjoy good times

• Learn to tolerate regret and need without giving it value or allowing it to control what you do

• Confront yourself with the inevitability of unfair loss

• Reassure yourself of your lack of responsibility for losing what's gone

Here's what to say to yourself and others when you yearn for closure.

Dear [Me/Fellow Closure-Seeker],

I know I can't get it out of my mind that I once had a [respectable job/spouse/nice car/unshakable sense of safety] and now I need some way to restore my faith in life and myself. I also know that life [insert extremely negative verb here] and I've done nothing to deserve this. If I can't [move to a better universe/get plastic surgery/find a mystic guru], I will try to accept that I can't protect myself from major shit and learn to live with whatever bad feeling that leaves in my [head/gut/bones]. If I need closure, I'll get a zip tie.

Some people extol the human yearning for a just and fair society; it's certainly something everyone wishes for and many people adopt as a goal, without stopping to accept the many, many situations in which fairness, justice, etc., are impossible. Ironically, defying that reality is the surest way to increase pain, frustration, and injustice. Accept unfairness and injustice, without ever giving up on trying to be a fair and just human being, even if that acceptance may require you to face your vulnerability, and that of your family, to the chaotic nature of our world. On the other hand, it will also give you more power to deal with that chaos and impose your own (very) small measure of order and justice.

Helpfulness is supposed to be a higher form of goodness, but you should know by now that if it feels good (and helpfulness can feel wonderful), it can be dangerous (like that other source of wonderful feelings, heroin).

In fact, altruistic-feeling efforts almost always carry a high risk of making things worse, yet most religious leaders, therapists, politicians, and professional do-gooders talk as if you can never do enough to help your fellow man. Meanwhile, history has too many examples of people with the best intentions—from missionaries to armies to the developers of OxyContin—who end up helping people to death.

The truth is that helpful feelings are what drive us to try to change others, whether it's possible or not, and regardless of unintended consequences. The most strongly motivated and dedicated would-be helpers have been known to kill people in order to protect them from spiritual harm, and if you're taking a life to save a soul, you're probably doing it wrong.

Yes, other people need and deserve our help, and we have a special responsibility to help our families. The fact is, however, that many of us have an off/on switch in our brains when it comes to helpfulness. If it's on, we feel responsible for whatever happens to our helpees and guilty if we neglect to do something that might help; if it's off, too bad, they're on their own, and there's no guilt to worry about.

We avoid in-between commitments because they make us feel more uncertain about what we're supposed to do and whether we've done enough. Unfortunately, most of life isn't in the convenient on/off or black/white decision areas; it's the in-between/gray area where you have to do less and think more. Also known as the place most humans hate the most.

Helping indiscriminately—reacting reflexively instead of thoughtfully—does harm when it's misdirected, misappropriates resources, and raises risks. Yes, it's noble to make sacrifices for the sake of others, but not when the chances of benefit are low and the cost and risk are high. Many helpers, by nature, are not interested in doing cost-benefit analyses; they live to help and despise risk-benefit managers as coldhearted, selfish, and timid. They would readily sacrifice their entire family resources for an incurably sick child, regardless of the impact on the health and welfare of the other kids, whose chances of growing up healthy and safe are diminished with each noble act.

Resist the call to helpfulness and the rush that comes with it unless you're willing to acknowledge its potential to do harm and evil. There are methods for managing this powerful emotion and the dangers it creates, so if you want to be helped to be a better helper, read on.

If one end of the giving scale is donating a kidney, the other is that ol' standby, “making someone smile.” After all, if you can't help people in a material way, at least you can try to ease their pain and sorrow. The trouble starts, however, when it's just not possible, and instead of making someone feel better, you make a bigger mess.

Many of us feel compelled to accept responsibility for the happiness of our loved ones, without question or limit, either because we're the responsible type or we instinctively feel guilty if we fail. Which means that when they aren't smiling, we're in tears.

Or we may need to help people feel happy to make ourselves happy, meet a professional goal, give in to a guilt trip, or simply to satisfy altruistic urges. The sad fact of life, however, is that we're often unable to help others feel better, regardless of our motivation, intimacy, and commitment.

There are, for example, people who can't help but always be in pain, whether from grief, physical or mental illness, or even self-destructive actions they can't perceive or stop. If they, other loved ones, and professional helpers can't improve their suffering, there's little chance you will.

The fact that you have accepted responsibility, even when it's for a very good reason, does not mean you have more power to be helpful. It just means you might be making things tougher for everyone, since failing to help will hurt you as much or more than anyone else.

We take on that blame because it's human nature to find someone to blame for our unhappiness, beginning with loved ones—an uncaring mother and painful childhood, or a vengeful ex—and ending with the president or a local sports team. A major reason for marriage, of course, is having someone to blame. But that doesn't actually mean there's a person, be it a parent, political figure, or pitcher, who's responsible for our unhappiness. More often, the real source may be our personalities, our genes, or a lot of shit luck.

Knowing when you can't make people happy, even when you want to with your whole heart, is essential to changing your goal to one that's constructive and achievable instead of dangerous and exhausting. Accept that and you'll end up doing less harm and feeling better, even if nobody else does.

Among the wishes people express are:

• To find the right words, action, or therapy to make someone feel better after everything has failed

• To get an unhappy person to understand that they've done their best to help her and can't do more, but that she needs to help herself

• To get an unhappy person to change behavior that is causing her unhappiness

• To feel less guilty and powerless about their inability to help

Here are three examples:

I hate how much my seventeen-year-old son is suffering from depression, and how there's nothing I can do to help him. Helping him to feel better is the top priority for me and my wife, but nothing we've done has worked. His doctor says he's depressed, but can't seem to find a medication that will help him, and the therapist he sees says they can't seem to get at the cause. My son weakly jokes that I look so miserable that he's very, very sorry for making me depressed with his depression, but the fact is, I'm just endlessly worried. My goal is to do something, anything, to help my son.

I had a wonderful relationship with my mother for many years, but she's developing dementia, and now being around her makes me feel totally helpless. She's convinced that people are breaking into her apartment and stealing from her and she complains that I'm unwilling to do anything to help her. Meanwhile, she's had a couple bad falls but refuses to use a cane. She feels scared and abandoned and there's nothing I can do. Her lawyer tells me I can't force her to accept treatment or move into assisted living until she's more obviously impaired. My goal is to ease my mother's suffering and protect her from danger.

I'm scared to death that my ex-boyfriend will kill himself and it will be my fault. I know he had periods of depression before we dated, but after I decided to end our relationship, he told me he was suicidal and couldn't stop drinking every evening. I urged him to get help, but he says the only thing that makes him feel better is talking to me. I hate to see him suffer, but I don't want to resume our relationship. I hoped I could use our phone calls to persuade him to stop drinking and get help, but he says they're the only thing keeping him alive. My goal is not to be responsible for his suicide.

If you can't stop feeling responsible for making someone feel better, it can make
him
feel guilty for not getting better, make
you
feel guilty for not making it happen, and drain everyone's resources until you and the sufferer are each other's pain slaves in a misery death-spiral. At this point, assuming you aren't in therapy, the only person you've helped is probably your local bartender.

You'll also wind up angry at the one you want to help, at yourself for being angry, and at everyone else for not being helpful enough. If you don't know when to give up on your happiness-bringing goal, you can get locked into a vicious cycle of anger, guilt, and therapy, either the real or liquid kind. Whereupon you'll find yourself the subject of an intervention as all of your friends try to help
you
, and then the world will implode.

Before allowing yourself to take responsibility for other people's painful feelings, ask yourself whether there's something you can do
that will actually help, that you can afford to do (given your other commitments), and that isn't better done by someone else (including the person you're trying to help).

Using these standards, you'll decide whether the person you want to help is doing a good job bearing chronic, incurable pain for which there may be no cure. Instead of feeling like a failure because you can't help, or wondering why he can't do better for himself, respect your joint efforts and the success of living a full life together in spite of chronic pain. Then you can focus more on enjoying your small victories than your greater defeat.

Give yourself even more respect if the person you're trying to help is needy, demanding, and impossible to satisfy. Even when you know that person can't avoid it, you can't help but want therapy yourself after being around them for any period of time. Once you decide on and meet your own standards for providing necessary care, you can protect yourself and your own needs, go about your other business, and then give yourself a medal.

The biggest medal you can win is for trying to help a desperately unhappy person who tells you that you're the only reason they're still alive. Whether you're his ex-lover, child, or therapist, accepting responsibility for saving someone from despair can enslave you if you let it. Unfortunately, the only person who can save the life of a desperately needy person is that person, and releasing his death grip on the ones he loves is the first step toward recovery.

As long as you don't take or give responsibility for life's incurable misery, you're free to evaluate and respect what's more important: whether everyone is doing what they can actually do about it, assuming unhappiness really is unavoidable. Don't be surprised that unhappiness continually promotes negative thinking and self-blame in all involved.

If, however, you remember how much you respect what this person does despite his unhappiness, you can show him how to fight negative thinking and urge him to seek coaches who can build pride by focusing on what he does with his pain, rather than on whether or not he has it.

You may not be able to make him happy, but you can show him powerful tools for preserving his pride, and save yourself and them from the dark, powerful forces that can turn helplessness into pure (sometimes boozy) hell.

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

• A happy smile on the face of the one you love, like, or are otherwise related to

• Confidence in your ability to make someone feel better

• Belief in the power of the right treatment to solve any problem

• Faith in everyone's ability to feel good as long as they take care of themselves and practice meditation, yoga, a gluten-free life, etc.

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

• Know that you've done what you can to make someone happy

• Tolerate unhappiness without flinching or blaming

• Respect how well people pursue their values in spite of unhappiness