A Competent Advice Columnist

Posted on December 14, 2007 in Journalists & Pundits

I’ve spent the week trying to formulate this article, but the results all seem lame. So here is what I have, sans passion. Perhaps I should mark these days as low on my mood chart?

Many of us have an advice column that we love to follow. They range from Dear Abby to Savage Love. I’ve told myself that I’m better than these, but recently I’ve become addicted to the columns at Counselingresource.com. These are filled with stories that the regular columnists would either slough off as being too weird and impossible or merely signs of mental illness or examples of behavior that must be defended because people are all different and variety is to be defended in all its manifestations.

Of course, you can expect the explanations to be clinical, small lectures in interpersonal or abnormal psychology. There’s the ex-wife who had co-opted her son in a war against a father and his new wife, for example. Of the man who is nervous around his wife of three years because of her “horrible temper”:

A few months ago, during a fight, my wife told me that she had slept with an old boyfriend during our dating years, once when we were broken up. Normally, this type of thing wouldn’t bother me and quite frankly in the past when in other relationships I really didn’t care one bit. But for some reason this time it did bother me. Over the months I never told her that it bothered me until one night when having sex I got so heady that I lost my desire to have sex with her. The next day I told her what was on my mind and she told me that she never had slept with her old boyfriend, that it was just something to say to hurt me, which I believe. Now the problem is that for some reason I am nervous around her. I can’t figure it out. I have a great deal of anxiety with her, and I get nervous when I’m with her sexually. I get heady and worry that I’m going to lose my desire to have sex with her while in the act. This is not normal for me who only a few months ago had the desire to have sex with her every night and would normally get shot down by my wife who was more often than not not in the “mood”.

Then there’s the Mynah-bird-man:

What do you call a person that does everything someone else does? Like for instance, say I take a shower in the middle of the day my husband will do the same, if I take one in the morning he will do it too. One morning I made some bacon and toast, he did the same; I got an ice cream bar, a few minutes later he did the same. If I call a friend and talk on the phone, he will do the same and be loud so I can hear him. He always makes sure I am doing or have something he doesn’t — it’s an unhealthy competition. For example, I bought my youngest son some polo shirts; my husband went the next week and bought some, but had previously said he didn’t like them. It’s kind of spooky! My oldest son was wearing those puffy vests and my husband said he would be cold in something like that, then he went and bought 2!

Or this classic of denial:

I think I have anhedonia, meaning I can’t feel pleasure. Most pleasurable activities don’t feel any different from standing there and doing nothing. Yet, I am sure I do not have depression. I’m a high achiever, but I never feel good when I do something. It just happens and I don’t feel like I care. I don’t feel like I have any motivation, only habits that make me do things. I smile a lot and I joke a lot, goof around etc., and I can laugh. But things like going on a roller coaster, achieving things, sexual things, love, eating good food, etc. don’t make me feel any bit good. Strangely, I still feel like continuing doing those things despite that. I don’t understand this at all.

The answers are only nominally interesting for me, though I do read them. It was easy to see, for example, that the secret agent woman was mentally ill, that the man with the angry wife needed marriage counseling, and that the copycat husband was insecure but not necessarilly the victim of an organic brain dysfunction. I could only shake my head at the last letter and loved the response:

If you ever attend a Bean Soup contest, you’ll see about 45 Bean Soups…but each will taste different. Why? All are Bean Soup, but each recipe is different. There are many types of depression — each with a different neurotransmitter recipe. When depression surfaces quickly — we have intense thoughts of death/dying/suicide. Other forms of depression are slow-cooking — gradually losing our humor, energy, motivation, pleasure, interests, and enjoyment. You are describing a chronic moderate depression. You’ve also made adjustments as the depression has continued, now living a depressed and anhedonic lifestyle. Sadly, this is not uncommon in high achievers who gradually burn themselves out due to their high personal expectations.

I admit that I have become an addict, I who scoffs at the conventional columnists. We won’t see much of Dr. Joseph Carver in newspapers across the land. He inserts facts and understanding where the others inject their own variety of political correctness and venom.