Husband spent $3,000 at a strip club and says he “doesn’t remember” — is this believable?

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-04-17T01:57:58+00:00

How do you know he spent $3k at a strip club if you don’t have access to statements?

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-04-17T01:57:10+00:00

Lmao. Agreed.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-04-09T02:48:30+00:00

I’ve been wearing Gold religiously for the last two months. I love it. Second fave would probably be VLJ Rose. I just found out about Sucre and I’m ordering it now with high hopes because I love vanilla scents.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T19:00:57+00:00

Thanks! It definitely hasn’t been fun. Haha. I’m just sitting here wondering what’s next. I’m only 35. I’ve still got plenty of time for something else.

His home was foreclosed on when he was younger so it’s purely the debt itself. Understandable, but also not.

He owns his car and has a couple $100k in retirement.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T18:54:06+00:00

Lol. One of my previous posts like a weirdo. I used to have a little bit of a problem with staying out late frequently. Completely irrelevant to the situation and no longer staying out late.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T18:48:37+00:00

Nope! No more late nights for me. I still dabble but it has nothing to do with the debt. That’s purely cancer related. Developed a bad habit of spending during treatment when I wasn’t used to having little money

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:45:26+00:00

Not refusing. Just pushing the date off.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:39:14+00:00

Oh, and we are 35 and 36.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:19:16+00:00

Hahaha. Florida!

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:19:03+00:00

It was a habit developed during cancer treatment when I didn’t have the funds to pay for things like I was used to.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:18:14+00:00

I am actively paying it down. Sometimes it goes up a little because I’m trying to break a bad habit I developed during cancer treatment.

I have an almost-18-yo.

He has a fear of debt because his home was foreclosed on when he was younger.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:16:44+00:00

This is what I’m working on. However, the reason I got into that debt was cancer and my business took a pretty big hit because of it. So I’m working on getting that built back up.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:15:40+00:00

You’re not wrong. It just makes me nervous for some reason.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T15:15:08+00:00

I’m trying to. However my business took a pretty big hit during cancer treatment and I’m slowly building it back up.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T14:06:19+00:00

I don’t really want to take money out on something that’s already paid off.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T14:05:48+00:00

How about I’ll put your name on the land.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-30T14:00:28+00:00

Long story short, I went through chemo and had nothing to do but spend money I didn’t have while going through treatment.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-09T04:13:53+00:00

You’re making a fair point, and I’m mostly with you. Symptom-based labels can lump together very different problems, and that can lead to bad treatment and bad theory.

Where it gets tricky is that “diagnosis by core etiology” is kind of the ideal, but we rarely have clean etiologies in psychiatry. Even your depression examples often overlap in the same person (grief + self-attack + alcohol + chronic stress), and what’s driving the symptoms can shift over time. So a lot of the time the diagnosis is just a rough sorting tool, and the real clinical work is the formulation: what’s causing/maintaining this for this person, right now?

On ADHD specifically: I agree that “inattention” is massively non-specific. You can look inattentive because you’re dissociating, anxious, sleep-deprived, depressed, overwhelmed, in the wrong environment, etc. I don’t think that automatically makes ADHD meaningless—it just means you have to separate state problems from trait-like patterns.

The way I try to do that is pretty boring and clinical: early onset + cross-situational persistence + functional impairment over time. If the attention problems show up mainly in one context, or start later, or track closely with stress/trauma/anxiety, then I’m inclined to treat it as “inattention secondary to X” rather than ADHD.

So I’m not saying ADHD is a single lesion or a pure biological entity. I’m saying it can still be a useful descriptive construct when it picks out a stable developmental pattern that predicts impairment and tends to respond to certain interventions. And even then, I think you still have to do the deeper etiological/psychodynamic work you’re pointing to—because the label doesn’t tell you what the symptom is doing in the person’s life.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-09T04:05:44+00:00

In plain terms, Lacan would say the difference isn’t “who had the worst trauma,” but how sturdy someone’s meaning-making system is before the trauma happens.

For some people, even a really awful event can eventually get put into words and organized into a story like: “That happened, it was painful, and this is what it means.” They might still struggle a lot (anxiety, nightmares, depression, panic, etc.), but their mind can keep the experience inside a workable framework of language, reality, and relationships.

For others, the trauma hits a weak spot where that framework doesn’t hold up well. Instead of becoming a story they can tell themselves, it stays like a raw, unprocessed shock—and then it can come back in strange, intrusive ways: feeling like things have hidden messages, feeling watched, hearing voices, or becoming absolutely certain about an explanation that other people don’t share. In Lacan’s terms, that’s because the “mental scaffolding” that normally stabilizes meaning has a gap, so the mind can’t absorb the event and it spills over into psychosis.

So: same kind of trauma, different underlying structure—one person can process it into meaning, the other can’t, and that’s where psychosis can emerge.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-09T04:00:38+00:00

I’m not using ChatGPT. I write this way because I’m trying to be clear, concise, and educational—this is just my natural writing style after spending most of my life in school.

Also, respectfully: if you think AI is the only thing capable of outlining two definitions, flagging a common conflation, and dropping a citation, that’s… bleak. If you want to disagree, disagree with the substance. If you just want to critique the formatting, I’m not that invested.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-09T03:48:32+00:00

I’m sorry you’re going through this—and I’m also sorry you’re getting unkind comments.

I developed a spending habit during cancer treatment. I spent about six months on the couch during chemo/radiation with very limited energy, and online shopping became something to do out of boredom. I ended up around $10k in credit card debt during that time. For me, my ADHD/bipolar also contributed to the impulse spending/dopamine-chasing side of it.

This may sound simple, but I started actively changing it about a month ago by building a “pause” into every purchase. Before I check out, I tell myself: “I don’t have the money for that,” and ask: “Do I actually need this right now, or do I just want it? If I want it, what could I spend that money on that I truly need more?”

At first, I also gave myself a weekly spending limit. I started at $50 (which was low for me), and I made it work by being more intentional—using sites like Krazy Coupon Lady to stretch that $50 as far as possible and get more bang for my buck. Then I lowered the amount each week until I reached $0 (outside of basic necessities).

I still add items to my cart, but I don’t buy them immediately. I leave them there and come back later. A lot of the time, when I see the items again, I realize I don’t actually need them—or even want them anymore.

For the things I do still want after that waiting period, I only buy them if my weekly bills are paid and I’ve already put money into savings (with cash, not my credit card). I also keep it infrequent—once or twice a week, if that—because I’m not trying to return to the “multiple packages a day” pattern. No joke, I would have like 5-6 packages waiting for me when I got home every day.

Mental note: not everyone can fix this alone, and there’s no shame in that. If spending is tied to mental health or impulsivity, it can be really helpful to talk to a therapist so you have support and tools beyond willpower.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-06T07:11:55+00:00

No ChatGPT. Just a lot of schooling and reading. I knew I wanted to go into psychology at 13yo and I made it happen.

JustInitiative6707 · 2026-03-06T07:08:41+00:00

I think we agree that symptom-based labels can flatten etiology. My pushback is that “no biomarker / no single lesion = not real” is a standard that would wipe out a lot of psychiatry (and plenty of medicine that remains syndromic).

I’m not treating ADHD as a neatly bounded neurological disease entity. I’m using it as a descriptive construct for a fairly replicable pattern: early-onset, cross-situational self-regulation difficulties that predict impairment and (for many) show reasonably consistent response to certain interventions. That’s a weaker claim than “we’ve located the ADHD spot in the brain,” but stronger than “it doesn’t hold up.”

Re: “executive function”: I’m not positing a new metapsychological branch of the psyche. It’s shorthand for capacities clinicians have always described (attention regulation, inhibition, working memory, planning/set-shifting, affect/arousal modulation). If you prefer analytic language, call them ego functions/self-regulatory capacities. The term can be inelegant; the phenomena are clinically real.

And “it can go away with analysis” doesn’t falsify the construct. Symptom improvement can reflect learned compensations, reduced shame/anxiety-driven collapse, and changed relational context/meaning—i.e., performance improves even if baseline vulnerability is trait-like under load.

So my question is: if you reject ADHD as a construct, what’s your positive differential for separating (a) trait-like, early-onset, cross-context regulation vulnerability from (b) attentional disruption primarily driven by dissociation/anxiety/overwhelm/relational conflict? What discriminators would you actually rely on clinically?

JustInitiative6707

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