Thanks.

First, it must always be said, people who feel so bad they're suicidal or debilitated should always get as much help as they can, pronto. No permanent solutions for temporary conditions, please.

Our current preoccupation is brain chemistry and those color photos of firing neurons. We too quickly jump to our prejudice that if a problem looks mechanical, the solution is of course mechanical. So, we think, only pills activate (what we call) those poor sick brain mechanisms. Moderate exercise also activates those mechanisms, as does therapy and meditation and recovery groups and good friends and doing art and any other non-compulsive active engagement with the world around and in us. If you're depressed because you live in a dysfunctional situation and you only get meds, they're at best only over-riding the chemistry in you brought on by your participating in a dysfunctional situation. So does not therapy and/or something like ACOA make sense? neuroelectrochemical sense? You and your organicity in its synergistic interaction with your environment can change your brain chemistry.

The guy romanticizing feeling bad reminds me that Hitler got over his shame of behaving shamelessly by intentionally behaving shamelessly. I've got the quote here somewhere. Ah - "In making Germany great, we are also entitled to think of ourselves. We have no need to cling to bourgeois notions of honor and reputation. Let these ‘well-bred' gentry be warned that we do with a clear conscience the things they do surreptitiously with a guilty one." (Adolf Hitler, 1933, from Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, by Hans Peter Bleuel.) This does bring up an interesting point, symptom encouragement. A symptom you can't help doing feels better when you do it intentionally. It is important, however, that you simultaneously place in your heart a sincere desire to get better, which, if done correctly, baffles the permitted symptom into crying uncle.

Much happiness. Best -

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

Yes, a lawyer. To minimize the life-damaging consequences. Good. Do that.

More than that, I think the issue boils down to what in the psych world is called symptomatic behavior - things we don't want to do that we keep doing, or things we want to do that we keep not doing. Though we don't want to cut off our nose to spite our face, there we are cutting off our nose to spite our face, saying as we do it, "I can't help it!"

You said you come from a dysfunctional family. One hallmark of such an upbringing is symptomatic behavior. The key is this: In order to protect oneself from parents' dysfunctional injunctions in a way that one does not intentionally disobey them, one removes control of certain of one's behaviors FROM ONESELF. That is, "I think I want to do what parents say, but the only way for me not to fall under their dysfunctional control is for me to not be able to control myself. I really want to do what you say, but I can't help but do the opposite." This may take therapy to be fully understood and straightened out. Compliance with parents is still confused with compliance with your own best self. You can learn to do what is, fortunately, in your heart of hearts. Not that it's easy. But your heart's in the right place. Keep after it. Good luck.

Meanwhile, talk to that lawyer about how much you may or may not need to be punished for what you've done wrong. You can somewhat fix this. See, we confuse feeling bad with doing bad things and therefore with being bad.

Best -

Iyanla VanZant said, "I was ugly till I was thirty and then I changed my mind."

I take this to mean that before thirty she was other-directed, and by the time she was thirty she had done enough inner work to become inner-directed.

Looks are a funny thing: they matter and they don't matter. Serously: they in fact do really matter and in fact they don't really matter. The deciding factor lies in how inner- or other-directed you are; on how much or little you, personally, determine the reality of your being and, consequently, your view of reality based on what other people think.

Society certainly plays into this; little girls playing with Barbies. But, I think, far more important, perhaps even a bulwark against a screwy society, is parents with their heads screwed on straight. Inner-directed parents. (Inner-direction, it should be said, is the opposite of narcissism.) Which is another way of saying that if parents teach neurosis, kids learn neurosis. Teach kissing up and the kids learn kissing up.

Best,

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

The creating person's dilemma is always worth looking at. I'm glad to have run into this letter by the poet and artist William Blake: "It is now Exactly Twenty years since I was upon the ocean of business, & Tho' I laugh at Fortune, I am perswaded that She Alone is the Governor of Worldly Riches, & when it is Fit She will call on me; till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is busied among my Friends." - to George Cumberland, August 26, 1799.

Best -

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Funny, though Republicans love telling us how great the 1950s were, you don't hear them harkening back to Dwight Eisenhower. And even then he wasn't a liberal Republican.

No, the locus of the political spectrum has been driven so far rightwards since 1980 that even pro-torture Republicans have till recently been mainstream. We best never forget that straight-talking John McCain, just because he does liberal things like obey the Constitution, is still a very conservative conservative. He touts the name of Ronald Reagan who, after all, would have been sent packing to Halifax as one of them Loyalist Royalists during our Revolution. And Reagan wasn't so constitutional, either.

Best -

(More, for free: search "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")