F*ck Feelings

One Shrink's Practical Advice for Managing All Life's Impossible Problems

By: Michael Bennett MD, Sarah Bennett

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

Other self-help books claim to reveal the path to happiness, but F*ck Feelings warns that convincing yourself that there is such a path will actually lead you to feel like a true failure. What the Bennetts can promise you is that you can manage any situation life throws at you if you can keep your sense of humor, bend your wishes to fit reality, restrain your feelings, manage bad behavior, and do what you think is right.

Life is hard. It's not fair. Our feelings cloud our rationality, and we become tangled in our efforts to achieve the impossible or change the unchangeable. In this groundbreaking, entirely sensible, and funny book, the Bennetts open the shrinks' secret solution manual and show you how to find a new kind of freedom by working toward realistic goals and doing the best with what you can control. They address the most common problems Dr. Bennett's patients bring to his private practice and give you a script for going forward.

With no-bullshit advice from a Harvard-educated shrink freed of all jargon and patronization by his smart-ass, comedy-writer daughter, F*ck Feelings is the cut-to-the-chase therapy session you've been looking for. Contains mature themes.

©2015 F*CK Feelings LLC (P)2015 Tantor

Critic reviews

"The Bennetts administer a highly informative and entertaining smack down to get your head on straight." ( Kirkus Reviews)

Good for a wake up call. But no useful info

I hate this book. Although, it does have some redeeming messages that resonated with me, I couldn't get past the over-the-top irreverence (which was originally what drew me to this book) just for the sake of being irreverent. If there is any useful "how to" suggestions, I must have missed it in the sea of sarcasm (which is a language I speak fluently). Friends and I started a book club with this book and at the first meeting decided we all hated it and looked for another. the book would have been more useful if written as 12 bullet points (as is probably true about this review). Total waste of time and money.

Insightful, But Not Meant For Audio

What did you like best about F*ck Feelings? What did you like least?

F*ck Feelings is great at getting straight to the point: how to wear your heart on your sleeve, what you can realistically aim for and actually achieve. The problem is that it reads more as a handbook than a novel. Not every chapter will be applicable to you or your loved ones, and because of this, it's not necessary to read/listen to it cover-to-cover.

What about Patrick Lawlor’s performance did you like?

Lawlor's gives a high-energy and entertaining read and makes the best out of an oddly formatted text.

A string of blog posts don't make for a good book

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I would write it as a book. It typifies the problems with established bloggers writing books. They tend to be very weak at overall structure and flow, having an attention span that's limited to 2000 words. When I'm listening to an audiobook, I don't want to hear mostly unrelated, though often overlapping chapters with the same detailed sections and structures repeated dozens of times over. I have no high-level overview of the material and at any given point I have no idea where the book is going.

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

Get better recording equipment and an voice actor that doesn't sound like he's reading a script

This book is terrible.

I really disliked this book. I agree with many of the points Dr. Bennett makes but the way this book is put together is terrible. It could maybe be a useful pamphlet but I wish I hadn't wasted money on this book. It was unnecessarily drawn out and just very hard to listen to.

Straight, helpful talk; ultimately life affirming

What’s an idea from the book that you will remember?

Most of the many insights offered here can be summarized as: Realize how little control you have over the things in life you wish were better, and hold your head high anyway.

This is a thinking person's (one might even say, an experienced person's) self-help book. It spends about half its time debunking the popular advice in the thousands of best-sellers that sell "you can have it all if you just tweak a few things." If you are a big fan of "The Secret" or even Tony Robbins, you are probably not going to like this.

The lesson throughout is there are many things, people, family issues and real suffering that you cannot do anything about, no matter what you see on Oprah or read in your favorite blogs. And because the book necessarily deals with pretty negative, even sometimes tragic, life events (unexpected break-ups, addiction, borderline personality disorder, sexual incompatibility to name only four of more than three dozen) it can seem pretty bleak to be told that most of this s*** doesn't have a solution or cure. The authors believe profanity is appropriate for emphasis, so the f-word and other cusswords pepper the prose, which some like me will find amusing and others might find offensive.

But the ultimate message is that you can live a good life, be a good person, and yes, even enjoy yourself from time to time by looking life squarely in the eye and giving a good shrug to the stuff you can't fix. You can feel good about yourself no matter what s---storm is swirling around you.

Two thousand years ago, the Stoics (esp. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca) taught a similar message. The ideas presented here, if not first to appear on Earth, are refreshingly updated for the problems we face today. If you can't figure out why your teen-ager has suddenly stopped talking to you, the hot woman you've been dating seems to want to pick out all your clothes for you, your temporary unemployment has landed you and your husband in the living room with your mother-in-law whom you can't stand, or the guy / girl you love can't keep his / her promise to stay sober even for a day, you might want to give this a listen.

Well done, Bennetts. And thanks for the great reading, Patrick.

Not for the delicate flower

I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It is well organized, deals it straight, offers practical solutions, and is laugh-out-loud funny. I even enjoyed the parts that had no applicability to my life. The narrator's timing and inflections are spot on. No, it definitely isn't something you should play in front of your children, but you probably shouldn't be listening to self-help books in front of your kids anyway. If you're one who enjoys wallowing in your problems, doesn't actually want to solve anything, or needs to be coddled along, this book is not for you.

Say goodbye to personal responsibility

If you're looking for a book that will help you justify being a lack-luster, mundane, mediocre person with no drive or ambition....then this book is for you. If your goal is to avoid any reason to push yourself to succeed, then this book is for you. If, however, you goals in life are to pick yourself up out of a rut and become a better person than you are now, look for a different book.

Cheeky, useless

I am tired of people thinking that using profanity in their writing immediately makes the writing better, because often it just works as a smokescreen. The writing in Fuck Feelings is okay, but extremely redundant and forgettable, and it often generalizes itself into extremely weird corners. Basically what I learned from this book is that I don't need this book.

I ended up listening to this at 1.5 speed, just to get it over with quicker.

Boring and Hard to Comprehend !

A bunch of meaningless jabber. A complete waste of time. Probably the worst book I have ever read. I am surprised it got published.

M. Bennett, MD finally a fun psychiatrist.

A totally honest, no nonsense book on how to cope with life. The nuts and bolts "how you can do that" sections at the end of chapters made behavior change nearly idiot proof. I loved the snarky irreverent narrator. His performance of the material added the perfect touch to an excellent book.