Making someone feel better by making them feel worse?

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Ana54
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06 Jun 2009, 2:18 pm

My mother sometimes thinks she can make me feel better by making me feel guilty for feeling bad, which is a contradiction and impossible besides. Furthermore, my being depressed and anxious is beyond my control. She says my boyfriend is doing the same thing she's doing because he's tired of me not just being happy, and he isn't doing that, so what she's saying about him isn't the truth.



DonkeyBuster
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06 Jun 2009, 3:55 pm

Quote:
My mother sometimes thinks she can make me feel better by making me feel guilty for feeling bad, which is a contradiction and impossible besides.


Seems like your mother may be a tad confused... she's trying to get you to ACT better by guilt-tripping you.

I've certainly ACTED happier just to get people off my back... I personally hate the "oh, poor dear, tell me all about it" types. :tongue:

And sometimes faking it til you make it does work, if the depression isn't too bad. :)



Fudo
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06 Jun 2009, 4:01 pm

ah the "tough love" thing.. i think it can work but can also easily be abused.. i got this from my stepfather, many years ago. he was more depressed than me though, and in the end he seemed to insult me simply to make himself feel better..
The only person i ever truly hated. he also "struck" my mother, the dirty f*cking coward. :( I was far away at the time
She left him eventually.



Psygirl6
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08 Jun 2009, 10:31 am

My family(not just my mother),my group home agency and everyone around me does the same thing. they think because I have high intelligence that that is going to work. If anything it makes matter worse. This "tough love" thing does not work with me because of my Asperger's. It is impossible for me because I am emotionally detached where because I lack sympathy, empathy, and/or understanding for others, they can not make me feel guilty because I am not being the way they want me to be. Pretty much they are trying to get me to feel sorry for them because they have to put up with me and if they do the whole feel sorry for them thing it does not work. I have the same problem when it comes to my housemates and the other clients. they bully me, but because they are more disabled, the employees think they can get me to feel sorry for them enough where I would just let it go and allow the bullying. I can not, especially when bullying bother me from anyone, including other disabled people. Second of all, when i lack all those emotional reciprocity, it is impossible to get me to "change my ways".
This causes me to avoid and withdraw from my family and everyone around me. Everyone wants to me understand them, but the do not have Asperger's,especially the family and agency employees and since I do, they should be understanding me enough to know that they can not get their way.The employees need to do their jobs and stop the other clients from bullying me, just like when these clients bully other clients, the employees tell them to stop bullying them. But when it comes to me, i am the one who is forced to understand and allow it.
The difficult issue is that with Asperger's because we are for the most part not mentally ret*d and/or considered severely disabled, people think that we can do what they want and that we are just "badly" and/or "rude" people who want to be rude. they get confused because they think "how is an intelligent person not able to get along "emotionally" with others and not have empathy,sympathy and/or understanding". The treat it as a behavior rather than a symptom of an incurable,untreatable disorder, which Asperger's is not curable nor treatable. The unfortunate thing is that if I was a classic autistic person with mental retardation, than it would be more understandable and people would not "force" me and/or "get" me to these "emotional" things. they would not consider it a behavior, but an actual disability that I can not help and they would just let it go.
My family and the agency are hard a** people anyway and do not care.



Ana54
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08 Jun 2009, 11:01 am

They're a**holes. They're not trying to change you to help you, but to help themselves. You were in the group home to be helped, not to help them and make their lives easier. It reminds me of this boy in a behavioral hospital my boyfriend worked at who said just mean rude things to his grandmother when he talked to her on the phone. Instead of telling him he didn't have to talk to her (or did they? I'm not sure), the people at the behavioral hospital agreed to the grandmother's request to have a staff member (my boyfriend) there when he was talking on the phone to his grandmother, making sure he only said nice things. They were supposed to be there to help the boy, not to help the grandmother. This probably made the boy's mental health worse, not better (and the grandmother's mental health better, but she was not the patient). I wonder sometimes what immoral things my boyfriend did as a psych tech.