What is Operation Helmet?

Founded in 2003 by Dr. Robert H. Meaders whose grandson is an active duty Marine in Iraq, Operation Helmet is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to providing safer helmet pad upgrade kits to the troops in Iraq & Afghanistan. To date, more than 6,000 kits have been shipped to the troops in the field.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kathleen

What Can I Do To Stop Feeling So Miserable?

QUESTION:

I was never miserable as a child. I came from a Brady Bunch family. I don't know what my problem is.  For the last couple of years I've been depressed. After my first love left me, I tried to commit suicide. 

I felt so lost & saw no hope. I always feel insecure & need constant reassurance in relationships.  I read about personality disorders & connected most w/dependent personality disorder.  My biggest fear is rejection.  If someone leaves me I go out of control. 

I fly into a rage & feel this intense heat come over my body.  I always feel like it's my fault & end up in total depression. Some days I have road rage so bad & feel like "so what" if someone hurts me, it'll be better than feeling this pain.

Also I've noticed that all I do is complain about my problems & the solution to me seems out of reach.  I read your list for mentally happy people & realized that I put my happiness second to the person whom I'm in a relationship w/for fear of rejection. 

I know that isn't normal & it scares me.  I carry anger around w/me everywhere, mainly for lacking self confidence in every aspect of my life. I can remember as early as the 2nd grade not finishing a project because I thought that mine could never look as good as my friends.

I know this is long, but I've never spoken so openly about myself.  Now that I look back at what I've wrote I can't help but feel like I'm defective in someway.  I envy happy people. I don't want to live my life miserable & afraid anymore.

Please help.

living your life in misery is something like the description above...  this was a real letter written to an online psychologist for help...

 

Understanding about your emotions can help you begin to process some of the emotions & feelings that you have to start to resolve your feelings of misery...

Miserable People

9-18-1999

 

What I write few will read & even fewer will understand. If somehow it helps even one person, then the effort put forth will be justified.

I just can't believe how miserable people can be w/everything. They're unkind & 'Mad" all the time. They blame their plight on others. They want others to be perky, bright & jolly. They want pity & others to feel sorry for them. They can't accept or understand the needs of others.

They claim they're compassionate but this trait is never seen w/out a corresponding vocal statement about how tired they are & how many sacrifices they've had to make to be helpful. In other words, they're only compassionate & kind when it results in pity & others feeling sorry for them.

I, obviously, don't know why nature made these people this way. It may be a learned trait. In any event, these people love to make others feel bad. They love to be martyrs. They love to complain about everything others do. In fact, it seems their happiest moments are when they're berating someone else with or w/out cause.

The storm trooper attitude of these people is unbelievable. They walk over anyone & everyone in their field of vision. They take everything they can get in the process. They take & take whether needed or not. They never give anything back. They never get enough. They can never see their own short-comings.

This is the environment & society I have inherited. This is the society which believes they've earned & deserve to be a beneficiary in spite of their belligerent & hateful attitude. Attitudes which they never recognize.

They're uneducated, miserable, unhappy & broke . They'll not spend a minute trying to correct these characteristics. They prefer to make all those around them miserable & then blame everything on those they have just made miserable.

The following sorta sums up my frustration. This is from an Ann Landers column in the Wichita Eagle on September 16, 1999.

Live Long & Prosper!
J F Hawkins

Maintaining bad marriages can hurt kids

By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY

Couples who keep an angry, belittling marriage together "for the sake of the kids" tend to raise children whose marriages are as miserable as the ones they grew up in, suggests a new 17-year study of two generations.

The findings provide strong evidence that marital unhappiness can be passed on to younger generations, marriage experts agree.

But that doesn't mean discontented partners are always better off divorcing, says Penn State University sociologist Paul Amato, senior author of the study. He and coauthor Alan Booth followed 297 married couples & one child from each family for 17 years. The researchers took into account key influences on marital happiness, such as income, education, age at first marriage & divorce history. Still, they found:

• The more discord parents reported in their marriages, the more unhappily married their grown kids were.

• If a parent's marriage improved over time, their child's marriage was better than that of kids whose parents were unhappy to start & never became happier. Worsening of the parental marriage led to poorer marriages for grown kids.

• The key qualities in parents' marriages linked to later bad matches for their youngsters were: jealous or domineering behavior by spouses; quickness to anger; being critical or moody & refusing to talk to one's spouse.

"If people in these marriages are staying together for the sake of the kids, they're not doing their kids any favor," Amato says.

But most marriages go thru bad patches, he adds. The findings don't suggest youngsters are better off if their parents split up rather than working thru periodic hard times.

Children raised by parents who quarrel bitterly or give each other "the silent treatment" may imitate these patterns in their own marriages, Amato speculates. Also, these kids don't learn how to resolve disputes w/loved ones.

Spouses are constantly battling in about 20% of U.S. marriages, says psychologist Mavis Hetherington, University of Virginia professor emeritus & author of For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (W.W. Norton & Co. Inc.), due out next month.

"In these very contentious marriages, particularly if parents are arguing about the children a lot, kids are much worse off than they'd be if parents just divorced," Hetherington says.

But many marriages that end in divorce aren't hostile, Amato says. 3 out of 5 divorcing couples are just bored by their partners, his research shows.

And splitting up apparently hurts adult kids, too. Compared w/ couples from intact homes, having one partner from a divorced family doubles the chance of an adult child's divorce, Hetherington says. If both spouses are from divorced families, the risk is nearly 3 times greater.

None of this is written in stone, though. If a spouse has divorced parents but marries someone from an intact home who is well-adjusted & supportive, their divorce risk is no greater than that of couples whose parents weren't divorced, Hetherington says.

"Just about everyone can improve their marriage," says University of Denver psychologist Howard Markman, author of Fighting for Your Marriage (Jossey-Bass). "They can learn skills to help them handle negative emotions in marriage. It's the discord that hurts kids," Markman says.

Why There are so Many Marriage Failures Today

This is caused by 3 things, mobility, affluency & isolation.

In times past people lived & died in one geographic area as did their family. This meant that there were many relatives of yours who had observed your potential spouse grow up & could give you wise advice about them. Since both you & your spouse came from the same area, it was more likely that you had shared values & aspirations.

In times past it was both spouses against nature. Keeping alive was the primary goal. They didn't have discretionary resources to spend. Each spouse could have different dreams of the future, but since they wouldn't be implemented, they didn't conflict. Now that life is easy, there are expectations that these dreams can be implemented. If there aren't enough resources for both, conflicts emerge.

People live in isolation these days. They don't get to observe others & see how actions have long term consequences. Instead, they live in an unrealistic dream world created by fiction entertainment, journalism & advertising. As a result, they have world views that are more conducive to causing disasters in the physical world that their bodies live in.