Emotions

Ignore Your Feelings

We certainly share a lot with DBT, a kind of CBT for people who have intensely destructive feelings—dialectic behavioral therapy. Particularly because it started out with the idea that it was directly for people who were suffering terribly.

Ignore Your Feelings
A profanity-filled new self-help book argues that life is kind of terrible, so you should value your actions over your emotions.

OLGA KHAZAN SEP 9, 2015
Put down the talking stick. Stop fruitlessly seeking “closure” with your peevish co-worker. And please, don’t bother telling your spouse how annoying you find their tongue-clicking habit—sometimes honesty is less like a breath of fresh air and more like a fart. That’s the argument of Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett, the father-daughter duo behind the new self-help book F*ck Feelings.

The elder Bennett is a psychiatrist and American Psychiatric Association distinguished fellow. His daughter is a comedy writer. Together, they provide a tough-love, irreverent take on “life’s impossible problems.” The crux of their approach is that life is hard and negative emotions are part of it. The key is to see your “bullshit wishes” for just what they are (bullshit), and instead to pursue real, achievable goals.

Stop trying to forgive your bad parents, they advise. Jerks are capable of having as many kids as anyone else—at least until men’s rights conventions come equipped with free vasectomy booths. If you happen to be the child of a jerk, that’s just another obstacle to overcome.

In fact, stop trying to free yourself of all anger and hate. In all likelihood you’re doing a really awesome job, the Bennetts argue, despite all the shitty things that happen to you.

Oh, and a word on shit: “Profanity is a source of comfort, clarity, and strength,” they write. “It helps to express anger without blame, to be tough in the face of pain.”

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