To despair at how helpless some people are

[ThankYouVeryMuch]

You see it on here all the time, poster says they’re in a difficult situation and lots of people respond with sensible advice and details of organisations they can call for help and there’s always a reason why they can’t ask for help.

I saw a job at a local hair salon advertised on Facebook, 1 person posted “interested” underneath so the salon owner responds with their contact details (that were in the ad) and asks for a cv and the person responds “I don’t have a cv, nevermind” or someone else put on my local Facebook group saying she was new to the area and asking if there were any new mums in the local area, so I responded that there was a lovely, free mum and baby group in her village the next day and I knew the organiser so if she wanted to go along I’d make sure she got a warm welcome, and the response was “I can’t go to a baby group, what if none of the other mums speak to me”

Some people just seem as if the world owes them something and they should get what they want without putting in any effort.

It isn't the case of stiff upper lip and getting on with things it runs much deeper and it is almost like a mental block.
A therapist would have a field day with me.
On the surface I am confident loud and out going and can talk to anyone. But underneath my neurosis, weird likes and dislikes and what I can and cant do make me look pathetic.

.

I think we have moved from ‘pull yourself together’ which may not have been totally helpful, to do what you want and if that means nothing, then so be it.
There needs to be an adjustment.

What nasty judgemental thread.

I think a lot people these days use anxiety as an excuse not to do things. When actually it's just having to do something that is a upside of your comfort zone. Most people get anxious about certain things if it's something unfamiliar but it shouldn't be an excuse to never bother.

I've always encouraged my kids to do stuff for themselves and put themselves out of their comfort zone once in a while. They are now much more confident people and always feel a sense of achievement after they've done that. I think children who are not encouraged and just told it's ok you don't have to, end up feeling not so great about themselves as they won't achieve much and then it's a vicious circle

100% agree with PP who’ve also recognised that there’s been a real sea change in our culture away from taking pride in pulling up your bootstraps and conquering difficult things, and towards absolutely never exposing yourself to anything that might be slightly uncomfortable, anxiety provoking or upsetting.

You can see it on here, when someone makes a comment that they had anxiety for example and explain how they managed to overcome it, others will try and reply with every reason under the sun as to why they’re incapable of doing the same. Instead of actually proactively attempting to do something about it in their own way.

It is a GOOD THING when someone with social anxiety for example learns ways to cope with it, or someone who is terrified of public speaking (like the teacher who just posted) pushes themselves to get on with it and gets better at it. Avoidance is recognised as one of the worst things you can do for anxiety, it’s short term gain for long term maintenance of the issue. We have a saying ‘if you fall off a horse/bike get back on it!’, it’s a light hearted way of explaining it but so many people seem to be totally unaware of that ethos currently, believing instead that if you fall off a horse or bike you should avoid it for the rest of your life or better still, have never tried in the first place.

Resilience is a positive and healthy thing to aim for. Our culture is quickly forgetting that and going the complete other direction where anyone who displays it gets torn down and people are encouraged to avoid anything that might make them feel even slightly anxious. We’re losing sight so quickly of the fact that anxiety, discomfort, fear, sadness, are all normal human emotions just like joy and happiness, and avoiding them at all costs does nobody any good.

A therapist would have a field day with me.
On the surface I am confident loud and out going and can talk to anyone. But underneath my neurosis, weird likes and dislikes and what I can and cant do make me look pathetic.

You’re not unusual, trust me. It’s very normal to be this way. Almost everyone has neuroses, unusual likes and dislikes and things they struggle with, and the majority find a way to hide that so they can rub along with others and aren’t putting their issues onto everyone else (who are dealing with their own!).

Feeling this way is normal, it’s what you do to live with it that matters. Whether you allow it to rule your life and imprison you, or whether you accept that everyone is dealing with their own stuff and find ways to manage it so you’re not avoiding stuff all the time.

Best lesson I ever had was horse riding. Pony dumped me, unceremoniously in muddy cross country ditch. I was about 10.

I was wet, muddy and aching. And in tears.

Instructor took one look at me and said "get back on that pony and get over that bl**dy fence".

Despite my initial protestation, she told me pony would do it again unless I got the confidence to go for it. He picked up on my nerves. So get on and get over that fence.

Next time he put in a cheeky stop too but I stayed on. By this point instructor was shouting at me....and third time I did it.

Every time I am bricking myself about a new job, a new situation or something that scares me, I can hear her shouting "get over that bl**dy fence!" and it reminds me I CAN do stuff, even if my first attempt ends in mud, tears and bruises.

In my experience it is the loudest, most extravert people who often have the most self doubt. I'm quiet but I know my own worth.

^Unfortunately the current culture is that you “don’t make anyone do anything they are uncomfortable with”, and this is the inevitable outcome.
amen^

This 100% ^

It is normal to be anxious about being in new situations, going for job interviews, the 'phone ringing and waking you up in the middle of the night. What isn't helpful is to avoid doing things altogether, you just become more avoidant and then more and more things make you feel anxious because you're not building any tolerance to feeling that way.

I know someone whose employers bent over backwards to make (un!) reasonable adjustments to work to manage their anxiety. They're now likely to make themselves unemployable because the more adjustments were made, the more avoidant they became of any situation which may cause them anxiety.

They're now likely to face a disciplinary because they refused to engage with being on the informal stage of the sickness policy because it was making them anxious and if 'you carry on trying to push it, I'll be so anxious I'll go off sick long term'.

Everyone they work with is resentful and sick of it and wants them to go. Which is sad as they're not bad at their job.

I threw up before my first 'proper' job interview after uni. I've lived with OCD tendencies for years as a control mechanism for my sensibilities.

Fight/flight is part of normal emotional responses. It's what we do with them that counts.

I know when I'm stressed and anxious now, and actively use my CBT etc to try and reset my responses.

And think about being a muddy, bruised 10 year old in a ditch.....with her riding instructor giving her a valuable life lesson.

Yep I threw up before two of my uni interviews (you had interviews in those days). I'd forgotten that.

I agree with this... especially with some SAHMs looking for work. No matter how good and flexible the job, it is never good and suitable enough.

It is a job you know, not another stupid craft activity to kill the time, you know?

My son had an interview for Uni 3 years ago. i think its still a thing to have them. He was worried, but it went off okay and he was accepted on to the course.

I'm a bit like this
Tbh I think sometimes it's laziness and other times it's a case of over thinking things and getting myself in such a tiz about everything that could possibly go wrong so I don't bother.
I'm trying to change and when I realise that I'm being ridiculous I tell myself to get a grip and get on with it.

CheeseyToast

Metoodear I agree with you that homelessness is often the visible side of mental illness but there are also people who perfectly well who are homeless simply because of the crippling cost or the scarcity of housing in some areas.
i haven’t met any at the charity I worked for their were the following
Largely men
Largely white
Who drank or were
Drug users or were
Former soilders who had PTSD or
Polish guys who drank or
Men who had MH issues
Or people who had SN air very low Iq

The majority had council homes in the past but lost the tenacey due to behaviour while under the influence of drink or criminal behaviour surrounding drugs eg going to jail and the Loosing flat

The majory of the drinkers has hostel places but couldnt stay their because they were dry hostels (a dry hostel is one were you cannot drink)

And the vast majority of the ones that had SN air low iq lost their flats due to mistrusting people or being taken advantage of becoming cookcoed (this is when a vunrable persons flat is taken over)

so with all due respect their just aren’t many people who had degrees or professionals who just couldn’t afford rent the vast majority were from the above category’s we had one guy who was a plumber who was homeless but the root cause was his MH

The jobs for their kids make me laugh.

I must be a horrible parent! I told ds18, when he reached 16 it was time to look for a part time job around his A-Levels if he wanted money.

He went into town, to shops, restaurants etc himself, dropped off the cv he wrote himself, oh and attended the interviews himself!! (I've had 6 parents being their dc's over aged 18 to interviews!!).

To be honest he would have been mortified if I had got involved. He sorts out his annual leave, problems with pay and phones in sick himself if he's unwell. To me this is life skills!!!

Having read this thread it reminded me of a woman who was offered a role as a manager under me , bear in mind the set up was that there were several identical roles across an area and as such she had entirely comparable peers

She then requested we paid for parking for her , I said No , she had a base and no manager was paid parking for ( Senior Managers like myself were because we often had to pay for public parking several times a day in the middle of london)

I was a bit surprised as I don't think I have ever had my daily parking paid by a job, I thought she had misunderstood and explained there was a single parking space at the back of her branch

" yes but my assistant manager may park there"

" well yes possibly but you'll have to have that conversation with her"

" can you tell her never to park there?"

" ermm no , it's a free branch parking space not my problem to police it for you"

" what if someone else parks there?"

" well you'll have to park elsewhere then"

" well I'd like full printed directions as to where, train routes set up for me and my alternative parking paid for then"

I lost my control then and started laughing...it was a resounding no

Seriously ...?? It very much came from a place of incapability rather than CF but the mind boggled

She didn't last long

I know someone whose employers bent over backwards to make (un!) reasonable adjustments to work to manage their anxiety.

I have a very strong feeling against such adjustments. It is not lack of fucking empathy, it is that those adjustments have impacted in my own anxiety and mental health at difficult times, like having to put up with a horrible bitch who suffered with paranoia and emailed everyone in the organisation saying I was trying to steal her job because I was asked to do her job and mine for months on end when she was trying to de stress, having her shouting at me CONSTANTLY, when she was back at work and being asked by my spineless manager to put up with such behaviour because she had mental health problems.

The other one was being asked, like the rest of the team, to draw a face to indicate our mood on the day, on a whiteboard with all the team’s names so the person with a mental health problem didn’t think that if we were quiet or hurried on the day, it was because we didn’t like her... I was getting through a very contentious divorce at the time and having to report my mood every day was humiliating. I didn’t feel like drawing a sad, angry or desperate face on the board, I felt like drawing a hand with two fingers up and the words Fuck you Beth!

Nowadays I don’t put up with this shit. It is not lack of empathy, it is not putting up with behaviours that affect me. I don’t owe them anything and need to protect my own mental health.

It's a difference in how you see what a job is for, too, isn't it?

I grew up with a workaholic parent who regularly brought work home from the office, stayed late, drove long distances for work. There was a fairly blurred boundary between what he was paid for and what he did to advance his career, because he wasn't paid by the hour, he was paid to get the job done. Of course he could claim overtime, but realistically, I am sure he did more hours than the terms of his contract.

I'm not sure that's particularly desirable. But it's very different from my DP's family. If they work, they work shift jobs, so there's no core 9-5 pattern, but after your shift ends, you go home, and that's it. There's no question you'd work at home (how? why?). There's no sense you'd do extra to finish the job. And if you want a day off, you can usually just take it, sometimes at quite short notice, or you can call in sick. If you lost a job, you'd pick up another one.

I do not think you need to have PTSD or mental health conditions or anything at all, to find that it's a huge mental leap to understand either of those attitudes if you were brought up with the other one. People talk as if it's all obvious. I don't think it is. If you're suddenly confronted with the idea that someone might be working a 40 or 50 or 60 hour week, and you've never imagined doing that, your first response is going to be that it's a ridiculous expectation. And you will probably think you're being taken advantage of.

I think some people don't appreciate that it's normal to feel stressed, anxious, nervous in some situations.

God yes, I can think of so many times when I've had to something I'm not comfortable with from the first time I had to stand up in front of a room to give a presentation to the first time I flew on my own and had to navigate an airport in a foreign country.

There's a book called "Feel the fear and Do It Anyway" - the central message is that we ALL have moments where we feel nervous, or scared, or out of our comfort zone, but that you have to push through, fake confidence and "do it anyway".

Notsure - that's not entirely dissimilar to the situation I'm talking about.

Someone once said to me that reasonable adjustments should be helping someone to find the correctly fitting shoes so they can walk around the same as everyone else. Not covering the rest of the world with leather..

They just used to be less visible to anyone outside their immediate family before the advent of social media!

I agree with @catinasplashofsunshine - I don't think this is new at all.

Do the majority of posters actually think that the problem is with overly involved parents? Really?

Overly involved parents are definitely an issue in the middle/upper middle classes, but I don't think that these jobs (the baristas, hair washers, etc) are targeting those people. I think that the problem with these young adults is the lack of involved parents who would have taught these children to have some ambition or goals in life. They have not equipped these young people with the skills necessary to be employable - get up on time, be dressed accordingly, do as they are told at work, be prompt and get their jobs done efficiently. This is not the fault of helicopter parents.

Don't get me wrong, there is an issue with helicopter parents, but it is not at this level!

I do think that former generations were more stoical - they probably had to be when there was less tolerance of perceived 'weakness' and people were often just told to 'pull yourself together'.

Especially perhaps for the WW2 generation and before, when there were few if any benefits to rely on.

My mother (she'd have been 100 this month) suffered from bad social anxiety all her life, so that any social occasion where she had nobody to 'hide behind' so to speak, was impossible for her, and she was an appalling worrier about everything - if she didn't have anything concrete to worry about, she'd find something.

But she still managed to hold down quite a good job and move away from home before having children - her folks lived in what was then the middle of nowhere - it was a case of having to, or being 'buried alive' in a rural backwater with no jobs to speak of.

During the Blitz she was on her own in London with a baby, never knowing whether my father would ever come home - at the time he was on the terribly dangerous North Atlantic convoys.

I've often wondered how, with all her anxiety,, nervousness and endless worrying she ever managed to cope, but at the time presumably there was just no alternative, and plenty of people were coping with a lot worse.

My job is working with words. The number of times the same five people on our professional email list write to ask how to spell something rather than JFGI does my nut. Sending an email to two hundred fucking people rather than just taking ten seconds to look it up yourself boils my piss.