We are apparently pessimistic about our future. A poll has officially declared that we hold a dismal outlook for our immediate future.

Daily we are assailed with climate change stories of woe. Just tonight I have heard that the ice caps will be gone shortly, that we are probably too late to save the Great Barrier Reef and the Kakadu Rainforest, and possibly our Murray-Darling River system may be beyond resuscitation.

I have also been told to expect that the oil will be $150 a barrel sooner rather than later, and that new green energies are going to add huge amounts to my cost of living. We aren't go to have enough food for everyone and what there is is going to cost more money as well.

As an aging baby boomer who only came to superannuation late I am not going to have enough money to live on in my retirement. My children are never going to be able to afford their own homes so they may have to live with us for ever...even if they marry. Hopefully I wont need old age care, because there wont be enough places in care for me, and if I need serious medical treatment I will either have to pay huge amounts of money out of my own pocket to ensure speedy treatment, or go onto a public waiting list where a lot of people only get the call for assistance after they have passed on (my Dad got an appointment with a dentist four months after he died).

The number of people on medication for depression and stress is growing every week. Small wonder. The media is, every day in every way, calling us to hysteria, mass moral outrage, and fear. Their motto, as always, is "if it bleeds, it leads".

I feel like my life blood is being sucked out of me and is gurgling down the public sewer. The only way for me survive is to rely on my own ability to build creativity, serentity and peace into my own exisitence and that of the people around me. I refuse to let "them" the self declared all knowing all seeing harbingers of doom to bring me down. I will surivive. I will thrive and I will overcome...

they are not going to push me over the edge... I will jump when I am good and ready

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One of those days, one of those lives...

Not a great day in the Flamingo Dancer household. I am back in the dork neck collar due to a flare up with the back injury. I am so tired of it - the most positive I can be today is to feel blessed that I am still breathing...

Mr FD is experiencing another one of his intermittent crazy man episodes where he wants to tell the bosses to stick it and walk out the door and I have to talk him off the roof. It is like his brain chemistry goes awry and he becomes his own worst ememy and jumps at shadows. He has very low self-esteem but at the same time thinks he often has all the answers and has to save the company and then wonders why no one says thank you and raises him shoulder high for a victory lap. His whole identity is caught up in his job - like so many Australian men of his generation. I have to remind him that he is 58 and only wants to work another 5 years and took this job to enable us to live our dreams after that time... He is very impulsive, prone to angry outburts that he instantly regrets and becomes a high maintenance employee which tires and alienates people...but he is so loyal, so hard working, so honest, so earnest...a contradiction in  terms.

Today he is exhausting me and I feel like inserting a curtain rod through one of his ears and out the other ear and just hanging him somewhere until he either calms down or I feel able to cope with him.

Beware of the high maintenance husband.

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I actually went to University for the first time at the age of 36. After a number of years at home raising our children we were finding it more difficult to make ends meet, and so I tried to re-enter the work force.  Doors shut in my face. It was made too obvious that they considered that my brain could only have solidified and my skills all but vanished.  So I applied to University and was accepted.

The first literature assignment I handed in came back with a mark of 12 out of 20. I stood in my lecturer’s office and cried because I thought I was never going to make it. Obviously I was stupid and was never going make it to ever graduate. Right in that moment it was all or nothing to me. This one setback, a low mark,  was enough to jump start my defeatist mind set and have me on the verge of running all the way back to my home sweet home.

However, I was able to muster the right or more positive responses to allow me to continue and even to flourish at University. I managed a credit for that unit in the first semester, and a High Distinction for following.

A friend had a similar experience when she embarked on journalism studies. One of the lecturers was an abrasive man who worked the students hard. Each week he made them do a general knowledge test and would be dismissive of anyone who would fail. His real method was to make the students aware that journalism was in fact a nasty business and you had to be tough to make it. If not there was the door. She ran for that door as fast as she could and for the past 15 years has blamed the lecturer for her “career loss”. She did go back to university but chose a course that had little hope of actually leading to a real career in Australia. She has worked in food service or retail every since.

So why did she default to helplessness so readily? She appeared not to be able to see that everything was not all or nothing. There is more than one way open to us. I assessed my options and decided that I had to work  smarter, she looked around and decided there were no options for her except to run away. Passivity, fear and depression have ruled her life ever since.

My friend decided that she wouldn’t just give up on this specific battle but with the tape on repeat in her head continually, she embraced the decision to capitulate on every issue. This feeling of helplessness that she took as her mantel  has allowed her to shun real responsibility for choices and the frustrations she experiences continuously.  My friend blames fate, circumstances and particularly other people for what befalls her. Somehow she never mobilized her own energy to overcome roadblocks to her goals.

How has she done this? She makes long lists of the negatives or disadvantages. Catastrophe  thinking.  I never hear her speak of positives. No little train that thinks it can. All defeats are so serious that she rehashes them continuously. Years after the fact, she is still generalizing it to her entire existence.

Why can I see these tendencies in her and she can’t see them herself? She willingly gives into them but never stops to think why is it so? Her frustrations bring her down and she sees all defeats as permanent and long term. She lives an immobilized life always waiting for the next hit which of course does come because she sets herself up in the crosshairs every time.  She surrenders before the first shot, when she perhaps should be singing I think I can, I think I can as she goes over the top of the trenches.

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 Stress Generation, Avoidance Coping, and Depressive Symptoms: A 10-Year Model 

Author   Holahan, Charles J; Moos, Rudolf H; Holahan, Carole K; Brennan, Penny L; Schutte, Kathleen K  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Vol 73(4), Aug 2005, pp. 658-666

This study examined (a) the role of avoidance coping in prospectively generating both chronic and acute life stressors and (b) the stress-generating role of avoidance coping as a prospective link to future depressive symptoms. Participants were 1,211 late-middle-aged individuals (500 women and 711 men) assessed 3 times over a 10-year period. As predicted, baseline avoidance coping was prospectively associated with both more chronic and more acute life stressors 4 years later. Furthermore, as predicted, these intervening life stressors linked baseline avoidance coping and depressive symptoms 10 years later, controlling for the influence of initial depressive symptoms.

Folks – if I keep avoiding cleaning up the mess which passes for my kitchen, it would seem that I am guaranteed both chronic and acute stress and future depression. In other words, are they are telling me that if I don’t clean my kitchen, next time I try to cook a meal I will be severely stressed and then depressed?  I see only one solution. My husband should take me out for all meals, thus alleviating my need to avoid cleaning the kitchen, and halting a major depressive episode into the bargain. I could cope with that.

I wonder if there is a solution for my avoiding doing the ironing?

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