Self-Help Junkie

For most of my adult life I have been a Self-Help Junkie. I have hundreds and hundreds of books on the subject, most incredibly say the same or similar things and because of reading so many self-help books I tend to come off sometimes sounding in my writing like a self-helper. I cannot stop myself from wanting to help people to improve themselves and I cannot stop myself from wanting to improve me. My friends simply accept this as part of my personality and for a long while I have accepted that is who I am, doling out advice as if I have all the answers and God love me maybe I do, but who wants to listen to that shit all the time? People do come to me for advice and I love it, but what I have found is that people mostly just want to be heard. Because I have noticed big-time that most people don’t do as they are advised. I know I sure don’t! And let’s face it if I did follow the advice of every self-help book, manual or tape/cd set I own I would be the most enlightened puppy on the planet. You can read stuff, pay a therapist, go to an anonymous meeting or get a psychic reading and still never follow the instructions you receive, it’s called free-will. So if you know this stuff are you required to practice it or just take it all in and see what comes out at the end. I like the saying, “ignorance is bliss” because if I don’t know I don’t have to shit!

Lately though I have stopped main-lining self-help stuff and have in fact sold many of my self help books on Amazon. It’s a truly freeing experience and I have earned some extra cash in the process. But I’ll tell you what at first it wasn’t easy, parting with all those books, some I hadn’t read. Ugh. I hope someone else will put them to good use. So I have been going through this change in realization that I can steer my own ship, make my own way and find my own path without all of this extra-curricular activity and then today I open one of my email messages and this is what I find:

“The Disease of Self-Improvement“

“The very act of trying to improve ourselves causes us to believe that there is something wrong with us in the first place.“

It’s a free report by Dr. Robert Anthony and if you go to his website you can download it. And on his website he also takes comments so I read through them and found this, my favorite one:

“I really like the clarity of your thought and writing, Dr Anthony. This reminds me of an article I read called “From Self Help Addiction To Self Reliance” by Wily Walnut. It is kind of funny though where you start out this report saying so clearly that we have all the answers within and then end it by trying to upsell us to your Real Mind LIfe Strategy system! Hilarious too all the fuzzy-wuzzy SECRET stuff at the back end laced with all the hypnotic commands to ‘STOP RESISTING, START ALLOWING’ and to ‘put yourself into a non-resistant state of mind ! All while reaching for my wallet presumably!! I love it! You are such a rascal! You are really the best at this stuff, so subtle and skilled at it that I really like you even if you are hypnotizing the shirt off me! So, for me, A+ for the front and A- for the back! Thank you for the free report and for all your other ideas so beautifully expressed.”

I did NOT download that free-report since I quit my addiction, but I think that this comment proves that someone will use reverse psychology to sell another self-help book labeled as a non-self-help book as another way to part you with your money and the free report thing is simply a sales letter to hook you in. Great marketing strategy, but I still feel it feeds off of those of us who believe that if they can find the answer in a book life will be golden, but it just isn’t true. I did of course click over to read what Wily Walnut had to say and I liked it a lot and he wasn’t trying to sell me anything a big plus in my book nowadays!

I think the way I am feeling right now can be summed up in a quote, well I have so many:

“People say that what we’re all seeking is the
meaning of life…I think that what we’re
really seeking is the experience of being alive.”
~ Joseph Campbell

So let’s have at it!

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What if He’s Not Attracted to You Anymore?

I don’t know, maybe it’s the phase of the moon, but I have been thinking a lot about the attraction factor this week and how difficult it can be to compete in a world preoccupied with looks. Today I want to talk about what happens when your partner is no longer attracted to, and more specifically I want to talk about when they are no longer attracted to you because you have gained weight. I hear about this a lot, especially from women who start out in a relationship at an average weight and then over time begin to gain once the relationship becomes comfortable. It reminds me of the “freshman 15″, except rather than just 15 pounds it can become 20 or even 30 pounds and sometimes more. Some couples spend a lot of time eating out or preparing meals together or their lives get so hectic that they eat convenience food and have no time to exercise and all of a sudden both are gaining weight. Sometimes I think weight gain happens because a couple gets into a routine of watching TV and eating late a night and then going to sleep, or perhaps it’s just the boredom factor, but whatever the cause eventually overtime in relationships weight gain happens. I think it’s a well known fact that women gain weight much easier than men and if a man gains 10 pounds a woman might gain 15 or 20. This leads to my next observation. Men are primarily visual creatures, living in a visual world of “eye candy”. I mean it’s inescapable. Sooner or later we all begin to believe that every one “should” look a certain way, never taking into account the fact that celebrities and models looks are often modified in the media so they look good all the time. So now you are with your loved one and everything seems great. You are living a comfy-cozy existence, feeling safe and secure in your relationship when all of a sudden the sex begins to wan and you notice your jeans are getting a little tight and your cheeks are getting a little puffy and you say something to your partner like, “Geez, I think I am gaining some weight.” And your partner concurs and admits they are gaining too. So you decide to diet together and that lasts about a week and it’s right back to the old routine and more weight gain and less sex. The cycle continues and one day your partner points out a particularly over-weight person and says, “if you ever look like that I will leave you.” You are stunned because you can’t imagine why anyone would compare you with someone “that” over weight, and you can’t believe they could think you could balloon up to that size ever. Then you start to get self-conscious and a downward spiral of self-hatred begins. With self hatred comes the need to self-medicate and if food is your drug of choice more over-eating ensues. Until that dreaded day when your partner proclaims they aren’t attracted to you anymore, and even thought they may have gained some weight too it’s more acceptable on a guy. You know they wear it better. And the next thing you know he has hooked-up with someone younger and thinner and he is out the door. I don’t like guys like this. I know a lot people will say, “Hey, if your weight is ruining your relationship, lose it. Being overweight is bad for your health anyway”, but what if you are healthy and you just don’t fit the “prescribed” thinness that’s expected in society? I think a guy who leaves you because you are over-weight is a superficial Jack-ass. I think if you are dating or married to someone who obsesses about your weight that it’s time to re-think the relationship, because no one stays beautiful forever and a person who does that won’t stick around for the long-haul and the first chance they get they will be out the door!

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Love and Self-Worth

Anyone who reads this blog might consider it at times to be about, “man-bashing”, but honest to God it isn’t! I really love men, in fact I love them so much that at one point it actually became a detriment to me, a detriment and a wonderful learning experience. My last X-husband taught me so much about how dysfunctional I was that after 2 years of reading and therapy and self hatred and denial I realized I would never, ever put myself in that situation again, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. I did several short stints with some guys I met on the Internet and I soon realized that nothing had changed inside me. I was just dashing off trying to establish a relationship of the same ilk as the one I had just gotten out of. I was trying to establish relationships that eased my loneliness but did absolutely nothing for my life by way of quality. I was the same old me dating the same old loser and I had everything to offer and nothing to gain. So I started to really wonder why I was doingthat. I felt like I was scrambling around in the dark clutching at anyone who would ease my pain if only for a moment. I was clutching at anyone who would get my mind off my X, who had conveniently planted himself into a new relationship before he extricated himself from ours. I felt like a throw-away girl, like a disposable blade he used to clean himself up before he moved onto new and better things, and that really, really hurt. I perpetuated my own pain by focusing on it. I focused on it to the point of obsession, but worst of all I hated myself. I hated myself for not being able to keep my man, for not being a good enough wife or lover, for not being thin enough, nice enough or mean enough. And so, I started a quest to find out everything I could about what I had done wrong in the hopes of preventing another failure in the future, and sadly enough, in the hopes of re-capturing his heart. You see it didn’t really matter how many men I dated, it was my X who I really wanted back and I thought if I could just fix myself, he would somehow, magically, return and everything would be better. But, I was living in a delusion. If you want to read my story, (which I am updating slowly, scroll down to the second entry, until I figure out how to make a separate page to it).You see the thing I refused, profoundly refused to do was accept the situation for what it was. Rather than seeing him as the self-serving prick he was I decided to blame myself for the short-comings in the relationship and the more empty he was the more I tried to fill the void by being loving and accommodating, but the problem inherent in trying to adapt myself to someone elses needs was the exhaustion I created within myself. I was constantly scrambling to anticipate his needs, constantly wondering why he had all those female “friends” programmed into his phone, constantly wondering why it took him so long to get home at the end of the day, constantly wondering why we never had sex and constantly figuring out what would please him, while he constantly worked on pleasing himself. In all fairness to him, he did try to work on the realtionship for about a minute, which he viewed as an eternity. While I went to therapy he stayed home and played computer games and spent money on electronic gadgets for which I freely indulged him.If nothing else, I thought he was my friend, a kind gentleman who was probably the only person in the world who could live with me and put up with my, “craziness”, my “illness. You see when I was a child my father molested me while my mother was dying of cancer, so I never really so I never really had parents. I went through life on automatic pilot, falling into bed and into love with whatever man would have me and there weren’t too many, and I considered myself lucky that anyone would love me at all. These all were actions and experiences prompted by the want of a love I had never experienced as a child and nothing more. Of course I didn’t know anything about how to love either, except for experiences with my father which are too deluded to mention here, but I am sure you can use your imagination.My inexperience with love left me with no expectations, but some fantasy of what true love was, probably gleaned from television or fairytales, so I mainly attracted men who were just like me, wounded souls with nothing to give, on a constant path yearning for the love they thought they could absorb through someone else. It’s sad really, like vampires, and I was guilty as hell, but if you don’t know what you are doing is wrong, is it?I had many question like that and for me everything seems to be this quest for knowledge, the quest for truth and on that quest I actually learned something, and it’s not about hating men, it’s about loving yourself first, Honoring yourself first and treating yourself the way you would want others to treat you. This is a tall order for someone who has no idea what these concepts entail, but I assure you the solution is not to go right out and start dating all over again. It should be about introspection, self observation and self change. It may be more difficult to cultivate self love than it is to keep doing what you have always done and in the end it will be worth it.

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