F*ck Feelings Page 13

  Using love or any strong emotion to push an addict toward rehab usually causes nothing but false promises and/or a nasty argument (e.g., quoth Amy Winehouse, “No! No! No!”), so when it comes to trying to help an addict, it’s best to manage your emotions carefully.

  Trying to nurture a tortured, misunderstood, drunk Shrek who loves you into a confident prince is appealing as a fairy tale but dangerous as an actual game plan. Of the many things that cannot cure addiction, love is one of them, even if it’s unconditional and mutual. Believing otherwise and banking on Beauty’s curative love actually prevents Beasts from realizing they need to learn to manage themselves.

  Sheltering a needy drunk when no other place will is another sweet gesture that backfires. Addicts don’t deserve the horrible dangers they encounter, but if you don’t make shelter conditional on sobriety or ensure your safety in some other way, they won’t get better and you (and your marriage, health, and credit score) will suffer even more than they will.

  Rescue makes addiction worse until you gain control of your own addiction to being a rescuer, and spell out what’s acceptable and safe. Borrow a page from the Intervention playbook by figuring out what will oblige you to leave, evict, or divorce an addict if they don’t give recovery a try. Spell out addiction-related behaviors that must stop, whether it’s stealing, nodding off, neglecting your kids, and all the other shades of the fuckuppery rainbow. Decide what you need to do with your feet, wallet, and brand-new alarm codes, then let the addict know where you stand, with regret, and be prepared to follow through.

  Don’t skimp on your love, but know what needs to be done to protect it from addiction, including yours to helping. Let your caring motivate sobriety, not stimulate emotional reactivity.

  If addiction is just a possibility, and not a well-established disaster, don’t overdiagnose or overreact. Instead of asking a beloved suspect to get sober because you care and you’re worried, ask him to figure out his own standards for defining problematic drug use and apply it to himself. Avoid debate over how often he has to experience cravings, hangovers, or withdrawal to be in trouble. Instead, ask him whether drug use has interfered at work or caused him to do things he regrets. If he’s unsure, ask him to try a few months of sobriety, just to compare.

  Educate yourself about treatment and AA. If you think it might help, invest in a big intervention, but keep in mind that, like bar mitzvahs and magic shows, interventions are only for the young, impressionable, and green, at least in terms of usefulness. Even then, treatment’s power is limited and depends a great deal on an individual’s motivation, so don’t assume that more is better.

  If treatment fails, urge him to keep thinking about his own reasons for getting sober—not to make you happy, but because he wants to keep living with you—and to use whatever he’s found helpful. Even so, don’t regard relapse as failure; every day of trying to stay sober, as long as one is trying one’s hardest, is a success.

  If you can’t get an addict help, respect the strength it takes to continue to love someone who is always in trouble, always requires careful management, and may or may not get sober, recover, and grow. If you can control your urge to save an addict while not giving up, however, you may help people recover from addiction and possibly get a yes, yes, yes.

  Quick Diagnosis

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

  • An ability to get through to someone about addiction, with or without professional assistance

  • Faith in treatment

  • Progress through spontaneous sharing of feelings

  • Freedom from fear of relapse

  • Freedom from addiction worst-case scenarios

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

  • Accept addictive behavior as possibly unavoidable and uncontrollable

  • Limit responsibility and blame

  • Manage anger and false hope

  • Do your best to help addiction without taking responsibility for rescue

  • Know when you have to go and know that you’ve done your best

  Here’s how you can do it:

  • Discuss tools for thinking rationally about addiction

  • Define what has to change for both you and the addict to live under the same roof or under current conditions

  • Offer input about ongoing addiction-related behaviors and stand by what you think about their dangerousness or other potential for harm without expressing negative emotion

  • Urge an addicted person to check out potential sources of therapy, guaranteeing that a patient search will be rewarded but that he or she may first find many duds

  • Rescue yourself if you can, knowing that you can’t rescue anyone else

  Your Script

  Here’s what to tell someone/yourself when you’re tempted to rescue him from addiction.

  Dear [Self/Beloved Drunk or Junkie/Person I Once Trusted Who Pawned My TV to Buy Pills],

  I would have given my [life/TV/fortune] to save you, but that approach seems likely to cost me my [life/TV/fortune] and make me [pissed/broken/broke/very obsessed with the one relationship in my life that makes me most unhappy and which I can do nothing about]. So instead I will [check your health insurance/put aside money/change the locks] and let you know that living with me requires [sobriety/doing your share/no unreasonable shit]. Of course, various treatments may help you get there, but that’s up to you. Good luck.

  What They Say on Intervention vs. What’s More Likely to Be Helpful

  The long-running A&E series Intervention made a few things very clear: (1) even the gnarliest addict has cute baby pictures, (2) huffing keyboard cleaner is a thing, and (3) most important, speaking to an addict from the heart is the best way to break addiction’s spell. While two outta three ain’t bad, that last Intervention lesson is actually false, since heartfelt pleas often make someone else’s addiction your problem when you want to make it his or hers. Instead, bypass hiring a former drunk named Jeff and reserving a hotel conference room, talk to the addict one-on-one, strip away the drama from the content of your concern, and ask him whether or not he’s ready to make it his. In the meantime, find old episodes of Hoarders, because the therapists on that show may be worse than the interventionists, but at least you’ll get motivated to clean your house.

  Intervention

  Helpful

  Your addiction has affected me in the following ways . . .

  Your addiction has affected you in the following ways. The question is, which of those matter to you?

  I can’t keep watching you kill yourself!

  You’ve lost the ability to protect yourself. (Or even wash your hair.)

  I love you so much and your addiction is destroying me.

  Your addiction will drive away the people who love and depend on you and leave you with a new group of friendly fellow addicts who might rape you when you’re unconscious.

  Listen to your mother! You owe her that much!

  Try listening to your own values and experience. And stop calling your mother when you’re broke.

  Will you accept this gift [of rehab, or else] we are offering you today?

  If you haven’t tried rehab before, there’s a lot you can get out of it, but it depends on you. If it didn’t work for you last time, then ask yourself whether you’re ready to try harder. Either way, if you can’t examine your addiction seriously, then I have to withdraw from this relationship.

  Protecting Victims of Injustice

  Everybody loves an underdog, mostly because, at one time or another, everyone’s been one. If you’re lucky enough to have never felt powerless or mistreated, you probably feel an extra obligation to help the underdog, because helping the wronged is a way for the undeserving lucky to feel less guilty and even the score.

  That’s why coming to the rescue of the unfairly disadvantaged is one of those equally selfless and self-serving acts; helping a badly treated good guy feels like you’re both avenging a personal injusti
ce and making the world a better place. You’re helping him, helping yourself, and helping the universe.

  Unfortunately, it’s often hard to tell a sob story from the real thing, and not all mistreated underdogs are necessarily good people.

  Even when you’re sure he’s a good guy and his mistreatment is real, defending him may do nothing but draw further fire and endanger other good people, including you and yours. In other words, even if you’re not taken for a sucker, rescuing good people from injustice may suck you into an impossible situation that can create more injustice and victims, namely you.

  Fortunately, you can protect yourself from your instincts for helping victims of injustice, while actually helping victims when it’s possible. It requires strength and patience and is often emotionally frustrating. If what you’re committed to, however, is protecting victims of injustice when it’s actually possible to do so, rather than satisfying your desire to feel like a victim protector, then you can do good while staying out of the (under)doghouse.

  Here are some magical powers you’d like to have to protect victims of injustice, but lack:

  • A truth amulet that distinguishes noble victims from conniving liars

  • An enchanted canary that tells you how many new victims will be created, if any, by your protective efforts

  • A sword of justice that defends true victims without causing unintended cuts, sprains, or amputations to its wielder and innocent bystanders

  • A Pegasus that flies you away to your next assignment, putting an end to your responsibilities to the victims you’ve just helped by making you impossible to trace

  Among the wishes injustice menders express are:

  • To find a method for protecting victims that will be effective and not provoke any counterattack

  • To get others to understand that a victim deserves support and respect

  • To spread the truth about who hurt whom and why their reasons were bad and the results were devastating and unfair

  • To feel like they did the right thing

  Here are three examples:

  Our new boss is trying to fire one of the best members of our team. He was loyal and helpful to me when I was starting out and deserves better. The boss seems to like me for some reason, but she doesn’t like it when I defend this guy, and seems to think that, by defending this coworker, I’m trying to undermine her authority, and I don’t want to get myself into trouble. My goal is to find a way to protect a hardworking colleague from getting unfairly targeted with criticism and maybe losing his job.

  My family hates my girlfriend, not because she has three kids from previous relationships, but because all the kids have different dads, and she never married any of them. I tried to explain to them that each of those men was abusive, and that, like me, my family should instead see her as someone who has been treated badly and is now flowering because she’s finally with someone who loves her and treats her right. She no longer feels like cutting herself and says she’s stopped taking pain pills altogether, and I’m so proud of her. My goal is to stop my family from being mean and undermining her confidence.

  It’s my job as a high school counselor to help troubled kids, whether or not they’ve had run-ins with the law, and I think the positive relationship I’ve formed with this one particular kid has been good for him, since he needs the extra attention. My colleagues tell me to watch out because foster kids are always trouble, plus he’s had a specific history of getting violent with a series of foster parents, and he broke into his last counselor’s house while she was away on vacation. I’ve gotten to know this kid and I think he just gets blamed for everything because he’s had such a tough upbringing that everyone expects the worst. My goal is to give him the trust and confidence he deserves.

  The risks of protecting victims of injustice are numerous, including possible violence that can turn you from protector to one of the persecuted. That’s why it’s your job to assess your risks before getting on your white horse (and possibly galloping off a cliff).

  First, find out what happened to the white knights who preceded you into battle. Often, they ran into bad guys who had the big boss and HR behind them, or a damsel in distress who went back to her wicked thug boyfriend, or a counselee who filed complaints. You can try to talk to your predecessors, but it might be hard, as they’re likely in hiding, prison, or the grave.

  Do your best to check out facts, because, as much as it can give you a headache (and absolutely no catharsis) to hear three contradictory-but-sincere versions of the same story, information is the key to knowing how much help is deserved and what it’s likely to trigger. If you know that your coworker has a clean record with HR and that your efforts have a remote chance of saving his job and, most important, won’t cost you yours, then rescue away. The odds of those things being true, however, let alone knowable, are as good as a successful quest for the Holy Grail.

  Second, do background checks on all innocent victims, no matter how clear their innocence may seem. Without blaming them for their bad luck, explore the possibility that they encounter more of it than most because of weaknesses they can’t help, including mental illness and addiction. If that’s true, your intervention won’t do much to protect them in the long run unless they change their bad habits. Be suspicious of stories that are too bad to be true, especially when they concern serial victims and their tales of woe. Your innocent single mother may be the kind of unstable person who falls in love as quickly and arbitrarily as she falls into hate.

  Finally, remember your other priorities. You have obligations to others, as well as yourself, for your independence, safety, and stability, even if those commitments lack the emotional pull of the good fight. Don’t enlist until you’re sure your protective mission doesn’t endanger your other missions at home, because, like the distressed damsel above, your misunderstood teen may turn out to be a jerk who steals your laptop. Since, by definition, Assholes (chapter 9) always see themselves as victims, some victims of injustice will turn out to be Assholes, and it’s your job to protect yourself.

  Real opportunities to help victims of injustice are limited, but you’ll be most effective when you’re selective and careful. Respect yourself for doing careful screening, which requires hard work, is often painful, and seldom gives you the thrill of righting a wrong. Even when you can’t protect someone from unfairness and harm, however, show respect for how hard it is to endure injustice and still remain a good, determined person.

  Given the facts of life’s injustice, you do good by honoring victims of injustice who refuse to alter positive moral values and priorities, despite knowing that a rescue party isn’t on the way.

  Quick Diagnosis

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

  • Knowledge of who really deserves protection and will really benefit from it

  • Power to protect those who really deserve it

  • Resources to protect yourself from retaliation

  • The ability to protect people from weaknesses that expose them to repeat victimization

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

  • Care appropriately about helping people who have been mistreated

  • Develop the skills to assess a complex, righteousness-drenched situation

  • Tolerate the fact that you may be able to help no one

  • Retain your personal priorities, regardless of protective urges and pressures

  • Respect people who endure injustice, regardless of what happens

  Here’s how you can do it:

  • Develop effective methods for fact gathering

  • Do careful risk assessments, including risks caused by a victim’s bad habits

  • Perform careful political evaluations that include the risk of escalation and retaliation

  • Offer respect to those who endure injustice, whether or not you can correct it

  Your Script

  Here’s what to say when you’re tempted to rescue
a victim of injustice.

  Dear [Self/Unfairness Refugee/Victim of Nastiness],

  Helping you, after you’ve been unfairly damaged by [your boss/your ex/the town gossip/the IRS/Fox News] would give me great pleasure, but I can’t forget that [I’ve got to make a living/I’m vulnerable to the same kind of crap attack/you have a history of making enemies]. I will find out more about what happened and whether it’s likely to happen again while trying to figure out whether I can help and [lying low/changing my name/winning a Nobel Prize for unassailable virtue/making it look like it’s coming from someone else]. Even if I can’t help, I respect your ability to stay focused on the goals and values of your life without being distracted by [bad luck/bad choices/being born under a bad sign].

  Brokering Peace at Home

  Of all the “-making” professions, from cheese to dress, peacemakers are the only ones to be blessed, and with good reason; a good cheese can be heavenly, but peacemaking has more potential benefit, given that conflict often hurts and tends to escalate in ways that bring out the worst in everyone.

  If the warring enemies are sufficiently powerful (e.g., India and Pakistan, Godzilla and Mothra, Red Sox and Yankees), successful peacemaking can be exciting, but can also be dangerous and sometimes prolong conflict. So don’t assume every peacemaker is, or should be, blessed, and therefore able to work without a bulletproof vest.

  Taking too much responsibility for other people’s wars means you wind up feeling responsible for everything they say and do, so before long, you’ve got their headaches and they’ve got someone to complain to who feels obligated to listen. Yes, you may have every good reason in the world to wish for peace, but your peacemaking may actually make it easier for hostilities to continue, especially now that their conflict has one convenient, human representative who can neatly receive all grievances and blame.