Answered questions(18)
Reliving Details
I am not a racist. I was attacked and beaten by 2 men after I honked at them in my car. It was a road rage type situation. Foolishly I never got their license plate number so they got away with it and I got a broken jaw and 4 nights in a hospital. This happened in the December. The men were of a certain minority group. It doesn’t matter which one and I do not really want to say because I am embarrassed. I am embarrassed because now whenever I see men from that group that are of a similar age I feel rage and hatred toward them, even though they have done me nothing wrong. I do not like feeling like this and I cannot bring myself to admit this to anyone except anonymously such as on this forum. I do not want to go through the rest of my life as a person that hates people of a certain prevalent group. But I cannot control my visceral reactions. What to do?
Read answer →Faith and Stress
I am a father of 3, a small business owner and a caregiver to my elderly mom who has dementia. I am just feeling so stressed and so totally overwhelmed. I have tried to cut out non essential responsibilities and commitments so what I am left with is just the core of it and I can’t cut down any further without becoming a neglectful father, a neglectful businessman and employer or a neglectful caretaker. I am Jewish and I believe in God and I pray every night. This feels weird to be writing this but I need to get more from my faith. Is this a wrong thing to want? It feels selfish but I feel like my faith could be a comfort against the stress that is killing me…but I am not sure how to make this happen. This is hard to explain. Do you have any recommendations for how my faith can help me to deal with stress?
Read answer →Narcissism
I think I am a self centered narcissist. I am always thinking about myself. Whenever I see family pictures I pretend to be looking at everyone but really I am only interested in my one images. I am a father and I am supposed to be more interested in my children than myself right? Nope. I fake it but at the core of the matter I am number one in my own eyes. On dark sleepless nights I feel terrible and I worry that I am missing my children’s childhoods because I am always so self centered. Is there a self help program or book I could read to get over this. If it was a book I am not even sure I could read it because I would feel to embarrassed to read it in front of my family, which would be admitting I am self centered, which is something I would not feel comfortable with.
Read answer →Pastoral Counseling and Bipolar Disorder
Can pastoral counseling help me with my bipolar disorder?
Read answer →Interrupted Sleep at Night
I keep waking up in the night with this feeling like something bad is going to happen and then it will take me hours to fall back asleep and I will just worry about everything so much. From my perspective at 4 in the morning my life is really a messed up place but by the time I am fully awake and on the go things don’t seem so bad anymore. This has been happening on and off for a couple of months and I do not know how to deal with it. I do not think I can take sleeping pills because it is usually not until 3 or 4 in the morning that I wake up and I have to get up by 7 to get ready for work. I am so tired all the time now and those hours before dawn are really miserable for me. What should I try?
Read answer →The Effect of Therapy
I am not like other people. I don’t like anybody. I can fake it when it is my best interest to do so and nobody ever knows how much I despise them as I pretend like we’re best buds. It’s pretty comical actually. But most of the time I find it humorous to just tell people what I think of them especially people I am never going to see again. These morons never have a frigging clue how to respond when I just basically point out the truth of their pathetic existence. My family wants me to get ‘help’. What a joke. I want to know is therapy going to make me start to love and want to cuddle everybody all of a sudden or is it just going to make me better at faking it?
Read answer →Understanding Our Vocation
I don’t know what I want to do. I have a philosophy degree (and no job…surprisingly!) but I also have the good fortune to have the time and means to attempt another degree. The problem is I do not have a clue what I want to do with my life and since I do not have the immediate need to support myself financially I have absolute freedom to choose a career. While this may sound like a blessing I am finding it to be a curse. With so much choice I am having a problem making any choices. I am not lazy (I work in a bookstore now, just because I don’t know what to do) but I am getting depressed about my inability to find direction or passion. I need get this jumpstarted. How do I find my passion in life?
Read answer →Concerning Changes in an Elderly Parent
My dad is retired and he drinks too much. He lives alone and over the past year I have noticed that he is getting more and more paranoid about everything around him. He used to have a lot of friends and be friendly with his neighbors but now he thinks they all hate him. His neighbor on one side mentioned that he’d like to buy the house if my dad ever wanted to sell and now my dad is convinced they are trying to force him out and that other people the neighborhood are ‘in on it’ and he has a lot of crazy explanations and reasons for his thinking. Other than this paranoia he is in good health and gets along OK. How worried do I need to be about his new conspiracy mindset and what could this mean that it is happening all of a sudden? The problem is, my dad doesn’t see anything wrong with the way he is thinking.
Read answer →Frustrated Teenager
idk what to do when my mom makes me feel so small and literally always puts me down, she says she hates me and she wants me out of her life, and everything is just getting worse. I've tried talking to my dad but he doesn't listen nor care because he thinks its just always complaining. I want to leave more than anything but I am only 14 and a half. please give advice?
Read answer →Getting Help Without Creating More Problems
What if I have a friend who is an undocumented illegal alien and she has a brother who is hallucinating and going crazy and they are just keeping him at home because they wont go to a hospital. What can they do to get some help without risking getting deported?
Read answer →Religious Recovery Site or a Cult
What’s the main difference between a respectable religious recovery organization and a cult? Lets say an organization wants a person to separate from and cut off contact from family and friends does that sound like a cult? Also, what if that person is encouraged to live on the organization’s compound and pay quite a lot each month to stay there for an indefinite length of time? Shouldn’t a recovery program have an ending where you go back to the real world? When family members question what’s going on they are said to be against recovery.
Read answer →Therapy for a Child?
I am an extroverted optimist. My daughter is 9. She is clearly introverted (which drives me crazy sometimes) and I have to remember that she does not need or want the same things that I do to be happy. I am also a very optimistic person. Her outlook ranges from healthy caution to general worry to worrisome pessimism. I believe that looking on the bright side to life is something that makes a person happier and more successful for all of life. I understand that I cannot change my daughter’s introverted nature, but is there some way I can change her pessimistic outlook? It seems absurd to me to have a 9 year old on the therapists couch but I am worried if I wait too long her nature will solidify and become unchangeable.
Read answer →Can you act to be happy?
When I act like myself people don’t like me and I have a hard time keeping relationships alive. When I act like a phony person who is much nicer and more interested in other people’s kids and families etc. then people like me a lot and I have lots of friends – but I don’t like myself and I know they don’t really like the real me, just the fake me. It seems like no matter what I do I can’t be happy. So how should I act around other people?
Read answer →Reaffirming Comments
Do mantras and positive affirmations help? Sometimes I get blue and my mind gets really negative and I look at everything in a really bad light. My friend recommended picking mantras like My life is great or I am happy and smart and saying them over and over to myself a thousand times a day. I feel a little stupid doing this and I don’t see how I am going to fool myself. Is there anything to this idea?
Read answer →Ethics of Risking Passing On Mental Illness to Children
This is an ethical question. I am getting ahead of myself since I am not at the stage in a relationship with this girl where we are talking about kids but I am already THINKING about kids with her so this is the first serious relationship I have had in about 5 years. I am not sure if I should end this relationship now because it can’t end well. Here is the thing. We both want kids and we both have bipolar. And not only that, we both have one parent who was also bipolar (actually she is just guessing about her dad but he killed himself when she was a baby…). So in this situation there is a ridiculously high chance that our baby would get bipolar and there is also a pretty good chance that possibly both parents will be affected with mania or depression for significant periods of his or life. Is it OK to bring a child into the world into this situation? I have not talked about the specifics with her yet because I feel like once I do the bubble will burst and I am not sure I want it to.
Read answer →Moving On In New Ways
My mom died last year and my dad took it really hard. He decided to go and see Angkor Wat a few months ago as this is something he had always wanted to do but my mom had been sick for a long time and unable to travel so he was not able to. My sister and I were really encouraging him to go since he had been so depressed since mom died. He extended his visit there and we were all happy that he was having a good time. Now he says he has met a Cambodian woman and he is going to get remarried. She is 26 and he is 67. I am worried that he is not thinking clearly. He has only known her for a couple of months so this is a concern, as is the huge age difference. I don’t mean to sound insensitive either, but I can’t help but wonder why a woman in her 20s would want to marry such an older man if not for his money? This is very unlike the man I know to do something so rash. I am worried he is mentally ill or suffering from some sort of extreme grief reaction. I am traveling over next week to talk to him and to meet his fiancé. I would like to know what signs I should be looking for that might indicate that he is not making decisions of a sound mind – I wonder if he might need to talk to someone or take some medication or something?
Read answer →Dealing with the Past
Can cognitive behavioral therapy teach me some tricks so that I can turn off my bad memories that plague me when I lay awake at night. I have a hard time with insomnia and then also I have a hard time with thinking about a lot of my regrets and humiliations and bad memories when I am trying to fall asleep and this doesn’t help me get to sleep any easier. I know that just thinking about all this bad stuff is not good for me and makes me feel depressed but I cannot seem to help it once I get started every night when I have nothing else to think about.
Read answer →Depression in the Midst of a Divorce
I separated from my wife 2 months ago and she is insisting on a divorce. I do not want it but I was unfaithful and she has grounds so there you go. My whole world is tossed upside down like a mixed salad right now and I feel really depressed. I just don’t want to do anything. I can barely even face people at work. I have been feeling like this for about a month. I don’t know why the first month was OK but it seems to be getting worse. Should I go see a doctor about depression and antidepressants or is this normal to be feeling like this when going through a divorce that you don’t want?
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