can't trust bi-sexuals

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Question: I'm gay, and in the past both times I have tried dating someone who was bi she cheated on me with a guy. Now I can't feel comfortable dating someone who is bi because I know there is something they might be looking for that I can't give them. Recently my girlfriend got drunk and made out with a male friend. She said there was no romantic attraction to him, she is gay it was just an intimacy thing that seemed like a good idea when she was drunk. Now I can't stop thinking that she is secretly bi and that I need to break up with her before she dumps me for some meat stick. The problem is I love her. What should I do?

Answer: Love yourself enough to demand total fidelity from no matter who you are with and if you believe you can get it from this girl you keep her, and if you don't trust her you let her go.

Some might say you are prejudiced against bi-sexual women. Ok. That is your right. You don't have to like bi girls or blonds, or girls who don't like nascar. But if, however, you think you are going to be safe from being cheated on by keeping to just gay women you are kidding yourself.

I wonder about the fact that your girlfriend made out with someone other than you and you are more concerned that it was guy than about the fact that it happened at all.

Dating is hard for anyone. 99% of all romantic relationships end before death do us part. Just getting to the marriage part is a struggle and we know 50% of those end in divorce. If we try to be smart about relationships and make rules that will prevent us from getting hurt we are playing a fools game.

Every relationship (even the ones that last 60 years) hurt. Sometimes the pain comes because a relationship ends badly, sometimes it comes in the middle and we stagger on. If you are going to date you will know pain.

The only rule you need to keep is to demand that who ever you are with respect you and treats you with dignity. If you do this it will not keep you safe but if you don't you are quite clearly heading for disaster.

Let go of the bi-sexuality question with your girlfriend. Decide if you can trust her, and if you can roll the dice.

What if I don't feel guilty?

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Question: You said in one of your posts that "guilt has a function, it keeps us from screwing people over." Well, what if I don't feel guilty? I was dating this guy and he fell in love with me and I broke his heart and I thought I would feel really bad because I knew things were heading that way, but I don't. What does that say about me?

Answer: If you do a bad thing and you don't feel guilty you have either 1.) learned to rationalize and justify your behavior in your own mind, 2.) possibly the thing you did was the best choice you could have made in the situation, 3.) you are a sociopath, 4.) some combo of the previous three.

Guilt, like any emotion, is not a good thing or a bad thing it is a response to the stimuli of your environment. In this way emotions are the same as our senses of touch, taste, smell, etc... If you were to say to me "my baby had a dirty diaper but I couldn't smell it, what does that say about me?" As an isolated event, nothing, if it happens all the time you either have an amazing baby or a poor sense of smell.

The fact that you are even questioning if you should feel more guilty suggests that you are not a sociopath or any other personality disorder (borderline, narcissist, etc..) because you are questioning your own behavior and your impact on others. Your acknowledgement that you don't feel as much guilt as you think you should suggests you have felt guilt in the past and this is less intense.

Guilt falls on a spectrum, it is not like you either have it or you don't. The anger spectrum can go from mild irritation all the way to rage. Similarly the guilt spectrum ranges from mild regret to a paralysis of shame and self loathing.

Guilt is about what you have done, shame is about who you are. It sounds like you do have some guilt, or at least mild regret, that this guy got hurt. You kinda wish you could have avoided that but but it isn't eating you up inside. Ok, works for me.

If this becomes a pattern of behavior for you, where you put your needs ahead of the needs of others and you feel just dandy about it, that would suggest your guilt has stopped functioning the way it should and you will end up having crappy-selfish-one sided relationships if you don't do some work on it.

Some people seek to justify selfish behavior by saying "I'm just an asshole" or "I'm just a bitch" as if they are frozen that way and others just need to accept it. 99% of us are selfish at times but if we can consider the needs of others some of the time then we do not have to act like jerks. We can rationalize guilt away all we want but ultimately there is a direct relationship between selfish behavior and unhappiness.

None of us like feeling guilty but without guilt in the appropriate amount for the situation we will end up very lonely. Personally I would rather have the guilt.

Using a guy for the holidays

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Question: My heart is still sore from my last relationship but I HATE being single during the holidays. I've gone on a couple dates with this guy and I think I might try to spend a lot of time with him just to survive until after 2/14. He is not Mr. Right, but neither of us is looking for anything serious. Does this plan make sense or am I just rationalizing so I don't have to be alone?

Answer: You are most certainly kidding yourself. In the best case scenario you will have used a guy to self medicate and protect you from your feelings during a rough patch of the year. In the worst case scenario you will end up feeling really used and you might have missed meeting the real Mr. Right.

It is irresponsible of me to jump to conclusions from just a couple of lines from your question but I'm going to assume you are one of those people who is always in a relationship. Often after getting out of one you tell yourself you just want to be single for awhile but somehow before two weeks have passed you just happen to have met someone interesting.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be connected to another person and have relationships, but dating a person just to protect you from the feeling of loneliness almost never leads to lasting love and fulfillment.

Relationships can be addictive and can be used just like drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, self injury, etc... to distract and insulate us from our emotions. If I'm in a relationship and I'm angry it can be because my boyfriend is acting like a jerk, but if I'm single and angry then what? I guess it has to be my fault.

Truly healthy people can be alone without being lonely. They can be angry, sad, surprised, anxious, and a hundred other feelings without needing a substance, a person, or any action to rescue them from their feelings.

You don't need a guy to make the holidays bearable. You need to change your expectations about what the holidays are supposed to be. If Christmas was about kissing under the mistletoe maybe you need to make it about visiting the elderly at a nursing home.

If you spend time with this guy that is not the end of the world, but just go into with your eyes open. Chances are if you spend a lot of time with a person and you are romantically linked whether or not you ever call it a relationship your heart is not going to get the memo.

If he isn't there to kiss you on New Years or he has plans with his "mom" on Valentines, the fact that you weren't looking for "anything serious" isn't going help with the loneliness. If you already know this guy isn't Mr. Right, then move on because Mr. Right isn't going to find you if you are hanging out with Mr. Placeholder.

Sexpectations hurting relationship

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Question: I know my husband loves me but we don't make love, we have sex and often afterward I feel like I was used, like I'm just an object that he used to get off. I tried to explain it to him but he won't listen or maybe I can't find the right words. Am I just being too sensitive?

Answer: If you feel it, then it is real and it needs to be dealt with. If you try to ignore this you will grow less and less enthusiastic for sex and the energy will go out of this part of your relationship. That would be a terrible loss when some communication might be all it takes to correct this.

I once had a male client whose girlfriend taught him this lesson. They were in a long distance relationship and as soon as they got together the first thing he wanted to do was have sex. Although she loved him and missed him both emotionally and sexually this pressure on the sexual aspect turned her off and made her feel disconnected emotionally.

When she tried to explain this to him he wanted to dismiss it. He would plead and pressure saying things like, "You know I love you, can't you just do it for me, even if you aren't really into it right now?"

Finally one day she decided if she was going to be treated like an object that is how she would act and she just lay back completely still and expressionless, once they began having sex. He told me that when he realized how she was feeling through her actions he became repulsed and was physically nauseous.

While I don't recommend that you necessarily take these steps you may choose to tell this story so your husband might start to understand how important it is for you to feel like making love is done with you rather than to you if it is to improve in your relationship.

For most men this is a matter of ignorance not stupidity. If you can help your husband to understand that a little work on his part will lead to much more enthusiasm and enjoyment for you and much better sex for both of you he will very likely be on board.

The step which most women struggle with at this point of the conversation is to explain to their men exactly what it is that they should do differently. Women often feel that just explaining the concept should be enough to get men to change their behavior. This is the reasoning that comes from having an intuitive mind WHICH MEN DON'T HAVE!

As I have said before men are the reason why there are directions on the back of the shampoo bottle. That is how simply and directly you must break everything down if you want men to understand what you want and don't want.

It is not enough to say "I hate it when you..." although that is a necessary first step. What you might try instead is say "Honey what will really put me in the mood for intense connected sex sometime soon is if you could show some interest in ... for awhile instead of ..." If men see the pay off they will usually oblige and they will even defer instant gratification if they believe there will be greater pay off later.

Never second guess your feelings, they are there to tell you something even if you cannot explain the logic of them. Feelings don't have to obey logic, but that does not make them insubstantial any more than the wind is unreal because we cannot see it.

Men really want to please their romantic partners, this is one of the ways men like to define themselves. If you can help your husband to connect with you everybody wins, even if he never understands why there was a problem.

enabling the love addict

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Question: My friend broke up with her boyfriend for, I kid you not, the 14th time since January! Every time she is a mess and I skip dates, or things I want to do to go and console her, and then no more than a week later they are back together. I want to be a good friend but I'm starting to resent her. What should I do?

Answer: Your friend is an addict and you are participating in and enabling her addiction by putting your life on hold for her melt downs. True friendship does not feed into an addiction it insists that your friend get into some counseling and work on her issues.

The real question is what are you getting out of this? You stand as the outsider of her relationship with her on again off again boyfriend, and clearly you can see it isn't healthy and she needs a change. Let me guess, she tells you, "but when things are good they are soooo good." I'm sure you just shake your head.

Let me ask you this, would an outsider looking at your relationship with her say the same things? Is your friendship great when things are good, when she isn't putting her boyfriend and her relationship needs ahead of you?

At the end of the day you put up with her BS the same reason she puts up with his, because an unhealthy relationship is better than being alone. When looking at her you can see she deserves to be treated better. The same is true for you.

We train people on how to treat us. What you show her by dropping everything when ever her life is a mess is that you feel that her life is more important than yours. Your friendship makes her feel good about herself. What reason does she have to stop abusing this relationship. A true friendship has balance. Give your friend a chance to be a real friend by treating yourself as well as you treat her, she may surprise you by understanding.

We all get the relationships we believe we deserve and that includes friendships. Next time she and Mr. NotSoRight break up you do not have to ignore her, but you do have to go on with your life. You have to tell her how much it hurts you to see her continual suffering and that she owes it to your friendship to seek counseling. You have the right to stop putting yourself through the turmoil and working harder than she is to keep her from suffering.

I know that what I'm saying is simple, but not easy. These things rarely are, but every relationship worth having requires work and sacrifice and friendship is certainly no exception.

just drinking a lot or drinking problem?

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Question: recently my husband has been drinking more and seems to try to hide it. He still seems to be functioning fine. I know he's not an alcoholic, but how do I know when to be concerned that this has become a drinking problem.

Answer: A person has a drinking problem when drinking leads to problems in their life. That answer is so simple that it may seem like I'm being facetious, I'm not.

Often people get lost in the details of semantics and word choice. What is the cut off between alcoholic and heavy drinker or eating disorder and disordered eating? To me at the end of the day when a person engages in any behavior that impairs their functioning, places stress on their relationships, is detrimental to their health, significantly impacts their finances, or any combination of these things, and yet they continue doing it, they have a problem.

I had a friend in college who had a B+ average. He went to class, had good relationships with people, stayed in shape, but two out of every three times he drank alcohol he would get in a fist fight or destroy property. Was he an alcoholic? Absolutely not. Did he have a drinking problem, YES. Fortunately after we talked to him he agreed and stopped drinking.

If your husband seems to be hiding his behavior you should absolutely be concerned about it because that means that he is. A rule of thumb for therapists is if you are afraid to tell your supervisor what you did you know you did something wrong. I think that maxim holds true for everyone.

There are two kinds of substance use, recreational and medicinal. When we use a substance in a social setting to enhance our experience and reduce our inhibitions this is recreational use. It may never be wise but at least this is usually the intended purpose of the substance. When we use any substance to change the way we are feeling, we are using it as a medicine. Any time we use "medicine", even those prescribed by a doctor, to get an effect that they were not designed for we are heading down a dangerous road.

For example if I have a headache from the stress of work and I decide to fix myself a cocktail to get rid of it I am using alcohol as a medicine. This can easily lead to a pattern where I increase my consumption as my stress increases and before long I have done damage to my body, my mind, and/or my relationships.

If you are concerned about your husband express it. Anytime we are afraid to bring a topic up with someone that is an indicator that we need to. Expect him to be defensive and counter that by pointing out your fears and ask that he merely look at it from your point of view. Hopefully he will decrease his consumption and replace alcohol with some far more healthy stress reliever.

married to a cheater

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Question: My wife and I are separated and I have been trying my hardest to save our marriage. Recently I found out there is another guy. Is there any chance for us? How do marriages survive when someone cheats?

Answer: There is always a chance that any relationship can survive, but there is almost no chance this marriage will ever return to a healthy relationship filled with trust. The question is are you sure you still want it?

Infidelity is extremely common especially among men whose peers support it or who at least feel they will not ostracized in their community if they are caught. Many of these men have compartmentalized sex and love. They love their wife BUT: they have not been having sex in awhile, they don't want to ask their wife to do kinky things, they saw an opportunity they just could not pass up, they didn't think anyone would get hurt.... At the end of the day they rationalize it to say “it was just sex” and often “it will never happen again”

Men cheating is usually a response to external stimuli, paired with an internal ability to rationalize, women cheating is more often a response to an internal feeling and may often be in reaction to the relationship itself.

A woman is in a marriage and is feeling: bored, lonely, isolated, ignored, trapped, powerless, angry, unattractive, scorned... She remembers that when she used to feel this way she was able to change how she was feeling by... cutting her hair short. She tries that, it doesn't work, so she tries finding a new guy to fill her with life and energy. If she is mad at her husband it may have the added benefit pissing him off. It may also be her way of escaping from the relationship by blowing it up.

This does not imply it is the husband's fault for neglecting his wife's needs. She had the option of saying something and if that didn't work she had the option of leaving, she made the choice to deal with her feelings in this way.

The response depends upon your view of marriage. If you see your spouse as a partner for raising children, a travel buddy, and you don't really care who they share their genitals with, infidelity does not represent much of a threat, as long as they do not become too open and socially embarrass you.

We will call this the French position, where men having mistresses is more acceptable than not knowing a proper wine pairing. Your spouse is a partner like a business relationship, you can even be good pals, but sex and intimacy do not need to be a part of your partnership.

If however, your view of marriage is about closeness and intimacy, if you believe your partner is supposed to be your best friend, then your relationship is shattered and it is almost impossible to get that back. The problem is no matter how “legit” the excuse was for one partner cheating, you will never be able to trust that they won't do it again.

The cheater will also be suspicious of you because they will think you want revenge, and maybe you will. Now instead of an environment of love, support and trust the marriage has the feeling of a spy novel.

The hard part is when you still love the person. They f@#$%@ up and you get hurt and lose your marriage and your friendship. That sucks! What makes it even harder is wonderful people do really crappy things. So if you want to fix it and work at it you are not crazy and you are not stupid, but know it is going to be a long hard road and you need to seek marriage counseling to even have a chance.

Also know there is someone out there for you who would never be selfish enough to risk losing your love.

why do I say mean things?

Question: Why do I say nasty-horrible-painful-mean things to people I love when I am angry?

Answer: Usually I encounter four main possible reasons: 1.) you want to make the other person feel like you are feeling, 2.) you have learned that when you fight you must destroy your opponent., 3.) to push the other person away so you can be safe from rejection 4.) because you can, you have to get rid of the energy you are feeling and you know that this person loves you enough to take it no matter what.

First we must understand the function of anger. Anger is the body's emotional alarm system. Its physical twin is called pain. Both anger and pain are designed to keep us alive by telling us that something is going wrong and we need to change something. When the body feels anger/pain the fight/flight/freeze response gets triggered and we are filled with energy.

So there you are, pissed and full of energy? What are you going to do with it? You look around to find the cause so you can fight it or run away from it.

In situation number 1.) you want to make them feel like you are feeling. People try to make their outside match their inside. If you are feeling torn apart inside and Bob is standing next to you, he better look out because there is about to be some tearing going on. It doesn't matter if it is fair or not, the you just don't want to be alone with this awful feeling so you drag others down too.

Reason number 2.) Destroying the opponent. We learn how to argue and handle conflict as we watch our role models growing up. If in our experience in a fight the other person will hurt you as bad as they can you learn to do whatever it takes to win. You learn that it is not enough to win the argument, you must destroy your opponent or they will keep coming at you like a horror movie villain. So you say the meanest things you can hoping you will hit them so hard they won't swing back.

Reason number 3.) pushing the other person away, aka blowing up bridges. Many people have been burned in the past when they let others get too close so they often have to test their loved ones level of commitment by pushing them away as hard as they can. One of two things will happen, the abused loved one will take the beating and come back “proving” how much they love you or they will walk away “proving” they never really loved you anyway and you were better off without them.

This can be coupled with a fear of rejecting someone else. If you believe that only bad people break hearts, then you can never reject someone, BUT if you can get them to break up with you and leave then that is okay. Consequently you have to be mean as hell so that they will go away and never come back. As odd as it sounds this doesn't make me a bad person because I'm doing it for their own good. Like when the little kid in the movies tries to release the wild pet into the woods (always a tear jerker).

Reason 4.) Because you can. We say mean things for the same reason we swear when we hit our thumb with a hammer. Does it really help? Well it lets the whole world know how angry we are. We fear that if we just say “oh crumbs” then no one will pay attention to the reality of our pain. You know there are certain people that will let you get away with saying those mean things, and since you can't tell off your boss, or the police man, or God, you rage at your Mom or you boyfriend. And sometimes, even though you feel guilty, you also feel a little better. We keep engaging in most negative coping skills because, in some way, they work.

Notice that no where on this list is the reason “you can't help it.” No matter how angry a person is they can almost always direct their energy to a non-violent (mean words are violence) path. It doesn't matter if a person is drunk or high, there are certain things they would never do.

If you ever think you “couldn't help it” ask yourself, "Would you have said that if someone had a gun pointed to your head?" If the answer is no then that means you could help it.

Your anger is a tool, you need it to survive and you are responsible for how you use that tool. There are a lot of reasons why people say mean things when they are angry. If you want to stop find out what you are getting from it and find a healthier way to get that need met.

why give love another chance?

Question:
If you touch something hot and you get burned you don't touch it anymore. If you do you are crazy or stupid. So why do people keep telling me to give relationships another shot? I'm just going to get burned again. When is it time to accept that you are better off alone?

Answer:
"We who are about to die salute you!" That line from the movie Gladiator sums up my whole philosophy of facing the pain that will come our way in life. The Gladiators know they are going to die in a very painful fashion. They have no reason to try, except they know that in the struggle and pain there may be a moment of glory and they will certainly feel more alive than they have ever felt before.

We are all going to die. We are all going to feel pain. There is no avoiding these facts of human existence. Our only choice is how we will face the moments in between. We can curl up in a ball and wait for pain and death to find us, or we can charge forward and pry as much life as possible out of the moments that we have.

What you feel when you get "burned" by love is loss, isolation, rejection and self doubt. Do you think that the person who avoids relationships is free of these feelings?

My personal bias is that there is no better feeling in this world than to be connected to another person. Friendship, romantic love, even two strangers sharing the same sight at a concert and knowing the other saw it too. For me life without these connections would be empty.

This does not mean you need to be stupid and give your heart away at every opportunity. Trust is something that must be earned and if you have recently had a heart break then you should take your time before you open up again.

At the end of the day, however, there is no life without risk. Those who try to avoid pain at all costs are merely waiting to die.

why girls are crazy

Dear Maigler, okay so I saw you post saying guys are dumb. So is it just me or is every girl nuts? I mean every girl I have ever dated was crazy in one way or another, are they all that way or do I just find the super emotional ones?

Crazy Magnet


Dear Crazy,

[a note: throughout this post (and many others) I will be making generalizations about men and women. This clearly does not apply to all but in the interests of time and space I am not qualifying every sentence]

What does it mean to be crazy?

Women are not crazy, they are just responding to a crazy society. If you were to play chess but you were given nothing but pawns the chances of winning would zero. So if you refused to play by the “rules” and you swept all the pieces to the floor your opponent might think you were crazy or irrational.

Our society was set up by men with the rules designed for them. If a man goes aggressively after the things he wants and gets them (sex, money, power, a nice house, prestige) he is called a success. If a woman goes after those same things in the same way some might call her a success but far more would call her a bitch. Women are constantly caught in a trap where every action will be thought wrong in some one's mind. Consequently women are often split wanting two opposite things at the same time.

For example should a woman go back to work after she has a child or should she stay home to raise him/her? There is no right answer to this. A man would say "well just choose one and accept it", but for a woman there will be many times when she wants both things and does not want to let either go, she knows she can't have both but doesn't stop wanting them. Does that make her crazy?

How about this one, when dating how good should a woman be at sex? Not being good could lead to being dumped but being too good could lead to the notion that she is a slut? That catch-22 would drive me crazy.

The most important thing though to understand is that most women value relationship and emotional connection over reason. For men feelings are compartmentalized, that which is rational is good, that which is irrational or impossible is not just bad but must be ignored and dismissed. Men are concrete and women tend to be fluid.

I imagine a man as a desk with a file cabinet and each issue is separate in it's own place. Family life should not touch work, romantic life does not taint sports, a place for everything and everything in it's place. Now I imagine a woman needing to use that desk but pouring herself, a gallon of life, in the top drawer of the desk. It pours down into all the files, everything is soaked, everything is impacted.

Does that sound crazy? To pour liquid in a file cabinet? It only sounds crazy because we are using the male construct for our basis of what is right and wrong. If we started with an aquarium and the man tried to stick his files in it he would be the one who seemed crazy.

For women whether or not something is reasonable is less important than if it is right. Once I realized that and stopped dismissing the ideas of the women in my life just because they were impossible we got along much better and the world seemed to balance in a new way.

So if you define crazy as irrational, then yes, every woman I have ever met at times values something over reason. Every woman I have ever met has at times been ruled by her emotions and has felt trapped by our society and felt like there was no way she could win.


So if every woman is “crazy” and every man is “dumb” what can we do? You have to find the right balance where one's crazy and they other's stupid complement each other. The key to happiness is finding the right fit and we all have to deal with the failings of the other, or be alone. I'll take a partner and a headache every time.

why men are dumb

Dear Maigler, my boyfriend is a very smart person, so why is it so hard for him to pick up on anything that I want or that I'm feeling. What bugs me is sometimes he can and other times he is totally clueless. Is he really "emotionally stupid" or is it just an excuse for him to ignore my feelings when he wants to?

Seriously Suspicious,

Dear Seriously,

Next time you are in the shower I want you to look at the back of your shampoo bottle to read the directions. Who needs those? Why are they even on there, are there seriously people who need things broken down THAT simply? Yes. Those people are called men.

The stupidity that most women complain about in their men comes from two main sources. The first is ignorance. As a man I have something called male privilege. It means our society was built by people like me for people like me and so getting through the world doesn't require a lot of thought. Consequently it just does not occur to me that someone else is not happy with the way things are unless they tell me. Privilege means not having to think about a problem. As a man if my needs are being met, I am content and do nothing, if my needs are not being met I go get what I want.

So if you want something from someone who is perfectly happy with the way things are then you have to let him know in very simple direct terms.

This brings us to the second part of male stupidity. Intelligence is the ability to gather information from the environment and use that information to solve problems.

Women are constantly putting information out into the environment in the form of signals. This works when women communicate with one another because women are more intuitive. In our society women are conditioned to operate this way because those who are aggressive or even assertive are considered "bitches" or manly. Unfortunately research has shown that men's brains are just not designed for picking up subtle hints, and that even the act of listening is harder for men than for women.

So what is a girl to do? Stop waiting for him to get it right and if you want something tell him exactly what it is you want, and how, and when you want it done. This is not romantic, it isn't very fun, but it works. Most men want the women in their lives to be happy and they tend to respond very well when they have a defined task that they think they can accomplish successfully.

we do not negotiate with emotional terrorists

Dear Maigler: My boyfriend, well I guess now my ex-boyfriend, and I finally got together after 4 years of being friends but always having terrible timing. The first three months were great but I am going away to college in the fall and lately he has been very clingy. He can't stop saying I love you, even when I ask him to stop and it has been getting on my nerves. While I really feel like we will be together eventually I do not think it is realistic to think we will stay together all through college without dating anyone else. While we were on a trip to Wisconsin with friends we talked honestly about it and he flipped. He broke up with me and threatened to kill himself. We went home and now his friends, his parents (who I was really close with) and even my Mother are all blaming me. I tried to talk to him and he was an emotional wreck. His parents threatened to call the police if they saw me near his house again. What was I supposed to do lie to him? Am I responsible if he does something to himself? Is he just doing this for attention? None of this makes sense to me. I feel like I'm the one going crazy and everyone is making me out to be the bad guy. Help!

Thorougly Confused

Dear Confused:

You did nothing wrong. When something goes wrong people feel the need to blame someone. Your ex-boyfriend is in horrible emotional pain and the people who care about him feel the need to find a cause for it. The think if they can eliminate the cause (You) they can eliminate the pain and then he will be safe, problem solved. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

It sounds like your boyfriend was pretty emotionally unhealthy. When anyone threatens to kill themselves ever we must always take it seriously. One of my biggest pet peves is when people minimize suicidal statements by saying "He is just saying that for attention." News flash for ya, if a person needs attention that badly and making comments about suicide is the only way they can figure out to get it, then there is something very wrong with them and we better give them some attention before they die.

Do people sometimes say things like "If you break up with me I'll kill myself" or "Sometimes you make me so mad I just have to drink" or "If you hang up the phone I'll cut myself and it will be all your fault." Sure they do. So how should we handle it? Just like the US government. We do not negotiate with terrorists! So what do we do? We say "Okay, I'm giving you one chance to ammend that statement and tell me what you really mean. If you are seriously in danger I'm going to call the police so they can take you to the hospital. Now, are you in danger of harming yourself." If they say yes call their bluff and call the cops. If they were "just doing it for attention" they will not pull that crap again on you. If they are serious then they need to be in a hospital.

I should ammend that. A person who self injurs or a person who threatens to drink does not necessarily need to be in a hospital but they have no right to try and imply that you are responsible for their actions. No one is responsible for any other person's actions. Ever!

Don't believe me? Try this experiment. Look at any object in the room with you right now. Try something small like a pencil. Now using nothing but your mind move it six inches to the right. Go ahead really try. Seriously. Did it work? No? Try again, really focus this time.... Still no luck huh? If you are from planet earth you cannot control anything outside of your self and anybody who tries to claim otherwise is trying to manipulate you.

We all want to be able to control things. Why? For the same reason we need to blame people when something goes wrong. We feel like if we can assign responsiblity for bad things we can avoid them in the future. If we can't that means bad things might be lurking around every corner. Unfortunately that is the truth. When that scary reality becomes too much to handle we make false little rules to order our universe and keep us safe. That process is natural and it only becomes a problem when it starts interfering with our relationships and our functioning. And see all this time you thought you didn't understand why people with OCD washed their hans 10,000 times a day. It all makes sense when you know the function of the behavior.

Back to you Confused, What should you do? Everyone has told you to stay away from the boyfriend and I don't hear you fighting that. What that tells me is you need at least a little time away from him anyway. People seek people at their same emotional level and it sounds like you are healthier than he is right now. Until one of you changes (and I hope it is him) it is not going to work. I hope he gets into some treatment soon. You can give him my card.

Should you have lied to him? I think you knew the answer to that question before you asked it. If you cannot be open in a relationship then you don't have trust. Love without trust is like a glove without a hand inside of it. There is no strength and no substance to a relationship without trust.

Your next step is to figure out what you want to happen. How you want things to go from here. I suggest you write it in a letter to him. Read it to a friend you trust to see how it might be misinterpreted and then edit it. Send the letter to him and tell him to contact you when he wants to and hopefully you guys will be together someday if that is the healthiest thing for you.

While you are waiting, mourn the loss of your relationship and try to do as much as you can to distract yourself. You are fortunate that summer time between senior year of high school and the start of college tends to be a busy time. That is certainly not to minimize your feelings. You do need to grieve like you would for any loss, but I'm sure that will be the topic of another blog. Hang in there confused, but please remember, this is not your fault!

Maigler