​Unravel the Secrets of Your Family

Nearly all families have some dysfunction. And SECRETS. Secrets are bonding. A family will unconsciously assign “roles” to different members to compensate for some of the imperfections in the group, or deep-seated wishes.  (E.g., “peace keeper,” “servant,” “provider,” “the sick/incompetent one”) If you want to break free and assign yourself roles that feel more AUTHENTIC, you need to look at the pacts that were created, first by your imperfect parents, and then joined by everyone, and then automatically reinforced in a thousand tiny interactions and words. How would someone outside the family, looking at the HEALTH of every person, see the games that you collectively allowed? Then practice HEALTH. On The Family, John Bradshaw.

You Are Allowed to Outgrow Your Parents’ Wishes For You

The “gifted child” is every child who is born and who uses his/her wiles to survive. It will accept nearly all treatments because it instinctively knows that the alternative is to be abandoned, punished, or die. That’s why abused children stay. Children’s brains grasp how they need to behave in order to survive. The trick is, when you CAN survive on your own, pull away from rotten “deals” with a parent. Say “no” to being put in the service of a parent’s dysfunctions--pleasing parents who really want to continue to own you, and maybe use you. You can love them, but when you grow up, try to rescue the SELF-WITHIN that compromised extremely, that “went along” with THEIR PERSONALITY more than it wanted to, deep-down. The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller.

Your Life Matters, Own It, Don’t Waste It

Pelzer is a coach for people who need to grow up. He himself transcended a horrific, cruel childhood. He models what it means to BECOME HEALTHY. Stop blaming other people, hating based on stupid reasons, own your actions. The book is aimed at teens, but trust me, it’s a bath of wisdom. Help Yourself for Teens, Real-Life Advice for Real-Life Challenges, Dave Pelzer.

Stay on Top of Boundaries, Confusing Foibles

We all get into stupid pickles on a daily basis. “My mother-in-law smokes around my kids.” “My boyfriend won’t let me see my friends.” “My friend won’t speak to me since the wedding.” If you want excellent, routine coaching, covering the big and little foibles of life, subscribe to her feed or read her books. Carolyn Hax, https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/carolyn-hax/ or Tell Me About It.

​We all have voices in our head. Pithy messages from people who tell us good ways to think. Parents, therapists, friends. Self-help books.

Here are a few that reached into my confused, tormented, scrambled mind and heart at various points, and stuck, forever:

Recover Happiness

I was in deep despair about a romance, alone in a new city. I had experienced an obsessive, unrequited love for several continuous years in my early youth (e.g., “Maybe he’ll appear around the next corner? Please, please.”) This book told me how to BREAK THE HABIT OF SADNESS. Actions you can take every day, as if easing from an addiction. The Book of Hope, Helen A. DeRosis and Victoria Y. Pellegrino.

Choose a Good Love Partner

Almost forever, I mulled and mulled: What is a good love? How do you know you have a good love going? I knew that great chemistry is NOT the best clue.

Peck told me: With a good partner, you will GROW, spiritually, intellectually. They will provide a foundation and partnership for CHANGE, for GROWING UP. A bad partner will fear your change, your new ideas, your ventures even into new, petty daily habits. With a good partner, you can “be yourself” without a lot of censorship. You tolerate and adapt to each other. Want to learn guitar? Okay, go ahead. Want a new career? Okay, I’ll support you. Want to go vegan? Let’s plan a path that works for both of us. Neither person is PUT INTO SERVICE of the other so much that their soul feels crushed. The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck.

Be Creative, Explore

It is okay to be HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE and UNCONVENTIONAL. Society won’t break. (Anyway, you ARE society.) You don’t need to be destructive or angry about conventions you don’t like (e.g., girdles for women, neckties for men). Drop it, and see what happens. Create YOU and YOUR STYLE. Don’t live in fear of “what others think.” (They might be over-compromised, conforming in ways they don’t like.) Compromise when you need a trade-off, if you can tolerate it (dress for a job, clean up for a romance, show up for a community you want to join).  The Fan Man, William Kotzwinkle (a novel).

Treat Kids Like People

I grew up with authoritarian parents. Control and order were more important than fun, and warmth, and teaching to think. My automatic behavior with kids was to talk down to them, and guide them by being BOSSY PANTS. Here is a HANDBOOK for retraining yourself to be a kind and effective adult. There are exercises. Simulated conversations using cartoons. Examples of dialogs, responses. You will recognize your childhood in the examples of WHAT PEOPLE USUALLY SAY, and it’ll tell you to TRY THIS INSTEAD. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, Adele Faber and Elain Mazlish.

Feminism was STIGMATIZED over the last decades. It’s having a revival, however. People like Beyonce and Taylor Swift are able to use the word again. Some of their critics are boiling them in oil for using the word, or for being “the wrong kind of feminist.”

They were joined by about six million people during the Women’s Marches the day after Trump’s inauguration (January 2017), who defied the STIGMA of “feminism” to protest the sexism of the Trump campaign.

What’s a stigma? It’s a strong feeling of disapproval, a mark of disgrace or reproach, a set of negative and often unfair beliefs.

I think the stereotype of a feminist is someone who is angry, unhinged, and obsessively hates men. Someone “who doesn’t know how to be a woman and who doesn’t like being a woman.” (Note: And “a woman is… ?”)

This stereotype led to fierce rejection of the label by generations after 1975 or so: “I am NO feminist!” “Feminists are against Moms.” “We don’t want any feminists in our workplace.” “Feminists [like female graduate students] are ugly, angry spoilers. Undateable.”

Meanwhile, since the 1950’s and 1960’s when feminism rose up—Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer—many were proud to finally decipher and talk about what was wrong with the treatment of women in our time. There are explicitly “feminist” movements and organizations that never faded from the scene, in spite of decades of stigma: NOW, MS Magazine.

The rise of women’s studies (facilitated by The Feminist Press) means we are busy documenting the “missing stories” about women in history. (The first college course was in 1969.) Stories about women whose research was denied and stolen by Nobel Prize winners, whose mathematical skills were critical in national achievements (“Hidden Figures”), women who trained as astronauts and were denied their chance by men like John Glenn (who thought he deserved one more mission at 70-years, over any woman).

Even though we are half the population of the world, we need to list the leading lights just to remember they exist. See the “ten most famous” and even databases of names. As if, THERE ARE NOT MANY, my dear, who “make it.”

Organizations who don’t use “the word” are busy challenging laws, practices, concepts: National Women’s Law Center, AAUW, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and Women’s National History Museum campaign, for example.

Here’s my point: it is really about respect and dignity for women, and opportunity. We can call it a wish for “equal rights.” It’s a protest against stereotypes, behavior, laws, and social conventions that limit women and push them into lesser-paid, subordinate roles. That insult them and exclude them from power and achievement. Steer them only to the roles of the nurturing servant and the sex-mate.

Our wish for respect is NOT inconsistent with the wish for nurturing, motherhood, femininity, or LOVING MEN. It means: just like men, women want to live free of harassment, free of being reduced to being a sex servant, free from being pressured to be a near SLAVE in a highly restricted role in society. We want choice in procreation, in managing the marvelous role of motherhood. And we have brains just like men who want power and complexity at work.

What the anti-feminists want, is to make this wish AWFUL. They say, Girls: Stop protesting, stop complaining about the insults, the lower pay, the lack of advancement at work, the stupid pressure to be a man’s wet dream. It’s unpleasant. It interferes with the power and PLEASURE men have in feeling that they own women. It tarnishes the treasured image of the selfless, loving mother who wants nothing more, the giving lover who needs nothing for herself. JUST SHUT UP. Stay in the little box we’ve made for you.
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I think we need to reframe the “dialog.” Just like the politicians we know do. Talk about a “new normal” when a girl can grow up as free as a boy, and a woman can live like a man. (Without some of the garbage that goes with that…). Talk about respect, dignity, freedom of choice in life, and fair pay. Don’t use “the word” because there’s an automatic stupid response to it.