I smiled, probably a little uncertain myself, but thrilled to be taken into her confidence.
"I don't even know if I love him."
"You love him," I said. "He's the coolest guy here."
Everyone was in love with Ray.
So explains Betsy Lerner on page 57 of Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories. And we're in the self-help aisle for a reason,: The Cult of St. Barack is seriously out of hand. It's time for an intervention.
Are you now or have you ever been overjoyed to read the details of one of Barack and Michelle Obama's Friday night 'dates'? Then you, friend, have a serious problem. Either your own life is so pathetic that you need to live vicariously through others or you have a strong need for an authoritarian system.
If it's the latter, toss us an e-mail and we'll try to help you find a good Dom (master or mistress) in your area who can help you actually find release from those issues thereby preventing further embarrassments and support for other illegal wars due to your perpetual state of heightened frenzy.
If it's the former, we suggest that you immediately shut off the computer (scary thought!) and go outside into the real world (even scarier!). If it weren't for the crowds working through their own sexual issues and the shut-ins, we doubt that either George W. Bush or Barack H. Obama would have ever been the object of a Cult of Personality.
With Bush, the nation had to go through a national intervention that was slow and messy and, in the process, not one but two illegal wars were started , the Constitution was shredded and oh so much more took place. People, citizens, we don't have the time, your country doesn't have the time, to go through all of that again.
In 2000, Michael Hardiman shared in Overcoming Addiction: A Common Sense Approach, "The notion that people can become psychologically addicted to another human being is recent." See, if you'd paid attention in 2000, well before that year's election, you could have done your part to assist the nation with avoiding George W. Bush. You could have been a sponsor, possibly set up some support groups. Hardiman continues, "This is a complex and epidemic problem." As they say, 'You ain't just whistling Dixie.' Back to Hardiman, "In general, an addictive relationship is one in which a person consistently tries to change another person in order to get their own needs met."
We hear a collective gasp as the scales fall away from the eyes of many members of the Cult of St. Barack. Not Norman Solomon but he's too focused on the results of his pregnancy test. (Norman, call us, we'll help connect you with your local Planned Parenthood. An unwanted pregnancy is an unwanted pregnancy, regardless of whether the mother is a female or male.) Yes, Cult members, you have been repeatedly encouraged to believe that you can change Barack.
It goes hand-in-hand with the trust-and-obey principle so many pushed. Laura Flanders is probably among the chief exponents of the 'change' philosophy. But look at her own pathetic personal life. Oh, wait. You can't. The woman who never needed a closet while working in the Bay Area, went diving for one when she got a national talk show. Trust us, the self-loathing, re-closeted lesbian Laura Flanders has a pathetic personal life filled with lousy sex and non-stop screaming matches. So she's the last one you should ever take advice from.
Don't beat yourself up for turning to a closet-case for advice. You came to the table with your own issues. Hardiman explains, "People who are addictively involved with another person tend to have low self-esteem, a high tolerance for suffering, a need to define their worth in terms of other people's opinions, an overestimation of the suffering of others, an underestimation of others' ability to help themselves, and a sense of failure when they cannot make their partner happy." We believe several of you are nodding at that check-list.
You may also grasp that Team Obama has repeatedly use those flaws to manipulate you and others. You've cheerleaded a man who has accomplished nothing of value and, when that nagging thought comes to the forefront, Team Obama and it's shrill shill Team (Nancy Pelosi's become among the worst of that collective) show up to start playing on your issues in an attempt to manipulate you back into blind devotion.
They play on your low self-esteem. It's why Barack has so damn little good to say about the country and usually runs with any attack on the US (a worthy critique or a flawed critique) while immediately insisting it's on people other than him because he wasn't even born, or he was a child, or he was only 8 years old, or . . . He plays on your low self-esteem and you find yourself returning to your pool of shame, a pool you've already bathed in for far too many years.
It's past time for you to break the cycle.
That can seem scary. To the sick, healthy can seem scary. You can grow so familiar with you own sickness that it becomes a comfort blanket. Tossing it aside is never easy; however, there is help if you want it.
In The New Codepency: Help and Guidance for Today's Generation, Melody Beattie outlines how you can enter THE CIRCLE OF LOVE with giving and receiving that is healthy. She explains, "It's said people can't outgive God, but codependents come close." Good, you're laughing. Laughter is healthy. We've been a sick nation for far too long and part of the drive to keep us sick has been the Water Cooler Set's determination to pass off the likes of My Name Is Earl as "funny." Beattie offers seven steps for you to live healthy within THE CIRCLE OF LOVE and you can pick up the book to explore all seven; however, we'd suggest that right now you zoom in on three important steps.
"Know your boundaries." Beattie advises, "Boundaries aren't static. They're based on how we feel and what feels right or wrong to us in each situation. Be aware of what feels right or wrong to us in each situation. Be aware of what feels right to us concerning giving and receiving. If we're unsure, wait until we're clear." You really need to remember that one. As MoveOn and countless others repeatedly spam you daily, insisting you must take action to support Barack, you need to always remember that you do not need to do anything immediately that MoveOn or anyone other than the Weather Channel advises. (If the Weather Channel tells you to head for higher ground, get packing immediately!)
Your boundaries are what protect you. Consider them your invisible force field that allows in only those things which will not harm you. That's when your boundaries are working correctly. But messy, co-dependent relationships -- especially ones encouraged by sick-f**ks like Laura Flanders and Norman Solomon -- tend to screw with our natural concept of boundaries. Equally true is that a great deal of time was spent in 2007 by Team Obama grasping how to tailor the message to those who already had issues, baggage and damaged senses of self, how to work the principle of emotional reactivity on victims of past trauma. So it really is imperative that you work on repairing your boundaries.
As part of the repair, you’re going to need to learn the Power of No and practice it. Grasping that you need to work on yourself and do not have the time to devote yourself to the alarming cry of The Daily Obama which insists you must take on this, that and everything else in the name of Obama and in the name of His Cause will be tremendously freeing. Right now, you are being manipulated. The Daily Obama exists to prey on the instincts of the abused.
"Victims acclimatize to the terror," Patrick J. Carnes explained in 1997’s The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships. That principle is part of what The Daily Obama attempts to work as they attempt to create non-stop drama that stirs a sense of dislocation in a victim's previous trauma.
As you work on your boundary issues, you will slowly grasp that what you're doing is saying no to a one-way relationship that requires you give of your time to him and you give of your strength to protect him while he does nothing for you. You will grasp that all the interference MoveOn and others order you to run to push through Barack's right-wing and/or neo-liberal policies are not helping you or anyone not in the Fortune 500.
Beattie also advises that you "Give cleanly and clearly." She explains that as, "Give without ulterior motives or conditions. If we have conditions with our giving, then be clear about what those are, otherwise it‘s manipulation." Ask yourself when have sick-f**ks Laura Flanders, Norman Solomon or any of the other beggars ever encouraged you to be clear? You were told to blindly support Barack in the Democratic Party primaries and not make demands on him. You were told the time for that would come later. You were told to blindly support Barack in the general election. You were told that his feet would be held to the fire later.
Later never came, now did it. He's now pushing ObamaBigBusinessCare which is a confusing series of nebulous plans that promises little to American citizens but is set to force every American to buy (bad) insurance policies which will further enrich the insurance industry -- the same industry which has driven the sky rocketing costs of health care today. His 'answer' is to force everyone to fork over more money to the tyrant.
Laura Flanders, Norman Solomon and all the rest are sick-f**ks. They truly are. And Norman's late-life pregnancy doesn't excuse his illness. Ralph Nader, loudly and repeatedly in 2008, warned against offering blind support and repeatedly insisted people needed to make demands upon their candidates.
The last step by Beattie that we're going to emphasize here: "Saying no is loving." She explains, "God needs people to be vessels to give to and care for people. If we don't want to give, it means we probably aren't meant to (unless we're stuck in our fear about compulsively giving). Knowing when to give, how much, and to whom, are as important as knowing when not to give."
It's The Power of No. A principle we've long pushed here. One best explained in the axiom: “Hollywood always wants what it cannot have.” Many a successful career have been built around The Power of No. And you can apply that to your own life and be well on your way down the Path of Awareness as you Write Your Story or you can get caught in the canyons of Denial and Repression, trapping yourself within them for many more years to come.
If you can avoid those canyons, we'd advise you to prepare for owning your anger. That's a step further on down the line. One where you break the silence and begin calling out the abusers, the ones who forced you into silence, who manipulated and abused you. When enough people get to that point, the Laura Flanders of this world will either have to get fully honest or leave public life. Either would be a victory for the people of the world. For now, Flanders, Norman Solomon and others escape scrutiny as a result of the concept of carried shame, where the victim who has been lied to and had their trust abused ends up carrying the shame instead of the aggressor who did the shameful things. Perpetrators and predators like Laura Flanders always know they can count on the victim to feel shame.
But you can Write The Story and you can take control of your life. You can reject the non-stop attempts by Team Obama and all of his surrogates to create drama and play on your past traumas in order to manipulate you. It's about being healthy. And you can do that at any point and at any age. In Chicken Soup for the Recovering Soul, Theresa Peluso shares the moment when she walked away from the life of abuse:
My stepfather spent a few days in jail and went through the motions in rehab after which they reunited and we moved. I suppose we were all so desperate to feel something pain was acceptable. Consequently nothing changed.
One late summer evening, another argument ensued. I listened from my room for the signs that would tell me where on the Richter scale this one would fall. The sound of crashing glass and a blood-curdling scream brought me into the living room where my stepfather began coming toward me. Something had snapped and when our eyes made contact I knew I was next. I turned, opened the front door and ran. A police car was heading toward the apartment; lights flashing and sirens wailing. I went the other way.
I would be fourteen in a couple of months, we had just moved to another state and I had no idea where I was. I wasn't enrolled in school yet, had no friends, no money, only the clothes I was wearing. But I knew one thing with every fiber of my body: that I wasn't going to live like that any longer. If my mother had chosen that for her life, it was her life and she could live it.
