As the daughter of two Harvard-educated psychiatrists, the comedy writer Sarah Bennett could have been encouraged to explore her feelings ad nauseam and get to the root of any problems that life threw her way. Instead her parents’ approach was: “F*** feelings.”
This is also the title of the profanity-laced book she and her father, Dr Michael Bennett, have written as an antidote to the self-help books that claim people can ease painful feelings, strengthen self-control or mend broken relationships if they only try hard enough.
Writing with humour and a touch of shock-value, the father-daughter duo suggest that wallowing in our feelings and trying to fix the unfixable isn’t going to get us anywhere. The very act of seeking help, they claim, whether through a self-help book, chewing it over with friends or going to therapy, is a denial that there is a lot about life, our personalities and others that is beyond anyone’s power to change.
And it keeps us repeating what hasn’t been working. We can become more effective at managing life’s challenges if we accept there are some things that are beyond our control and become more realistic about what can actually be achieved.
“Life is a s*** sandwich,” says 37-year-old Sarah, cheerfully, as we meet in a deserted restaurant in downtown Manhattan. We are the sole customers because the water supply has gone off, the kitchen is temporarily closed and the waiter can only serve coffee instead of the delicious lunch we had been anticipating. “You see? There are some things in life that are beyond our control.”
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Most self-help books are about our feelings and fulfilling our wildest dreams and this sets us up to fail, she explains. “People make ridiculous goals for themselves that are really only wishes. On the one hand, it’s lovely to think that if you want something badly enough you can have it but on the other hand it’s poison because if it doesn’t happen it’s all your fault. It puts the onus on you to be happy and we all know that you can’t control your happiness, no matter what a book says.”
Sarah and her father believe that too many people are overly fixated on feelings and that sometimes there is no “magic fix”. As they say in the book,“In most cases, you don’t need to try harder or feel you’ve failed because life is hard and your frustrated efforts are a guide to identifying what it is that you can’t change. Whether it is your personality, behaviour, spouse, kids, feelings, boss, country, pet, etc, the F*** Feelings approach shows you how to be more effective in managing life’s impossible problems instead of vainly and persistently trying to change them.”
If we ditch false hopes and wishful thinking, the authors say, we can build strength and take pride in our ability to deal with bumps in the road. “It’s so you don’t wake up every day and feel like a loser,” says Sarah, who has written for television and the theatre.
This rational approach to life is rooted in her parents’ work. “I was raised by two very cynical, professional advice-givers. My parents worked in a public mental hospital in Boston with really crazy people and they had to maintain a sense of humour just to get through the day. They would talk about work over the table so my sister and I heard about the crazy woman who fake-punched people in the face, the crazy man who decided toilets were out to get him so he clogged them all up and the nutty person who tried to ride a bird and fell off the roof.”
These were people who were not going to get better, she adds. “If they were lucky, they might be able to function in a halfway house, so there wasn’t any of that nonsense about being the ‘best you that you can be’. It was about finding ways to live with what you can’t change.”
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When Sarah was an adolescent and metaphorically kicked herself because she did badly in an exam or hated the way she looked, her father would use the same practical approach and tell her that being consumed with feelings of failure would do no good. “That’s what happens when your dad’s a shrink,” she laughs. “There was not a lot of sugar coating. It was practical, straightforward advice.”
In a career stretching over three decades, Michael Bennett, a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association , says he has seen many chronic illnesses and problems arising from a person’s genes or early experience that are not curable. “The chronic depression or schizophrenia I’ve treated with medication are not that different from hypertension and diabetes,” he tells me over the telephone from a conference abroad. “They’re not that different from non-medical or quasi-medical problems such as having a weakness for alcohol or a terrible temper or a tendency to love destructive people.
“When you want something badly or you’re in a lot of pain, you tend to think that between modern medicine, therapy and all the advice that is going around there has to be a solution. Very often there isn’t an answer and accepting that is part of getting creative with what you can do with life as it is.”
Isn’t there a danger in not exploring our feelings? When talk therapies began more than 100 years ago, people kept their feelings much more to themselves but nowadays we can talk ourselves into the ground, he believes. “It’s whether continuing to focus on your feelings is going to take you ahead or whether it’s become a dead end. We’re asking people to at least consider the possibility that they’ve done a reasonably good job of trying to share their feelings and now it’s time to suck it up and do the best with the pain that they may have to bear for a long time.”
How does this work in practice, such as with a marriage problem? “If you’ve tried to work out misunderstandings and negotiate a better marriage and it’s not getting you anywhere, you need to look at whether the things you can’t stand in the other person have been there all along. When you married the person, maybe you thought they were going to change or you didn’t do your due diligence well enough and you didn’t ask why all their old relationships went up in smoke. It might be because the other person is just an a**hole,” he laughs.
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“The bad news is that you’re not going to change the other person but the good news is you don’t need to drain yourself by trying to accomplish the impossible — making yourself responsible for solving the problem or changing the relationship. I’d ask the person what does he or she want to do? You might be better staying off where you are for the time being because you’ve got a lot invested in the marriage. You can keep busy, build up your own life and your own independence, expecting that at some point you’ll go your separate ways.”
He and his daughter have a similar sense of humour and they make no apology for the colourful language that is in the book. “I think f*** is a useful word,” he says. “It’s part of male work language that can help fight false hope, sentimentality and the overvaluation of feelings over actions.” On the other hand, he says, the words “feel” and “fair” seem dangerous four-letter words to them, together with the other dangerous words “should” and “why”.
The psychiatrist came up with the phrase “f*** feelings” in conversations with patients in his private practice. “The idea was to challenge — hopefully with humour — their idea that therapy was just about them telling me more about their feelings. Hearing a psychiatrist say, ‘F*** your feelings, what are you going to do about this?’ gets them talking about problem-solving.”
The book is filled with no-nonsense advice and includes the Bennetts’ unique approach to problems such as addiction, self-esteem issues and the challenges of parenthood. Part of it is based on the serenity philosophy adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous to accept the things we cannot change, to have the courage to change the things we can and to have the wisdom to know the difference.
“It’s getting people to see the absurdity in their s***ty situations so that you’re willing to think constructively about what you can do to make things better,” says Sarah. “It’s about being your best even if you’re not getting what you want — someone who puts in a good day at work, who spends time with your friends and cares about your family.
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“Some days just getting out of your pyjamas is a pat-on-the-back achievement or going to work and not crying in your cubicle all day is a gold-star accomplishment. We were never going to call the book The Rainbow Pegasus Road to Happy Ever After.”
As Dr Bennett says: “When you’re properly realistic, when you kill off all hope and stick a knife in it, often that’s when people have the courage to move on.”
F*** Feelings: Less Obsessing, More Living by Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett is published by Harper Thorsons at £12.99