THAT BRANCH UP YOUR ASS ISN'T ATTRACTIVE

That Branch Up Your Ass - It Isn't Attractive

by Korin Mumford

I recently had the misfortune of being exposed to another one of those puke-inducing sentimentality emails - you know, the kind that go on and on about how a Twue Fwiend (tm) will do X, Y, and Z for you, and aren't you glad you said you loved your mother today? This one, however, was a pathetic attempt to salve the egos of a certain type of girl and at the same time reinforce the idea that she's incomplete on her own and must just wait for the man to come along, while continuing to create the ideal of women as prizes for men to compete over.

"Tree of Life"

Girls are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. The boys don't want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just get the rotten apples from the ground that aren't as good, but easy. So the apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they're amazing. They just have to wait for the right boy to come along, the one who's brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.

Vomit-inducing crap. So I turned around and sent it back to the sender, along with a list of questions.

So, are you assuming you're one of the apples at the top of the tree or at the bottom?

If you're assuming you're one of the ones at the top...why? What makes you that special?

What criteria does it take for a woman to be considered one of the "rotten apples from the ground"?

Why don't you think you fit that description?

What, exactly, is this email supposed to do?

Okay, so it's a sad try at soothing the bruised egos of girls who can't get a boyfriend, right?

Have you ever wondered WHY those girls can't get a boyfriend?

Have you ever wondered why they're all so desperate to get one, anyway?

What's wrong with being happy with yourself as a whole, individual, independent person?

Why must you base your sense of self-worth on whether or not you have boys after you? You see, if you had your own inherent sense of self-worth and self-esteem, you wouldn't start to wonder "what's wrong with me?" when you're single.

Furthermore, if you're so desperate to be part of an "us" instead of just being an "I", why the hell are you sitting at the top of your tree with a branch up your ass, waiting?

Oddly enough, I haven't heard from her since. I wonder why that is..

http://www.heartless-bitches.com/rants/treeoflife.shtml

THE SELFISHNESS OF THE SELF-HELP INDUSTRY

if this doesn't describe the toxic babble on Our Place, the Next Right Choice and all those flying monkeys... I don't know what does... shove that 'positive thinking' cyberbabble... you're re-victimizing abuse survivors!!!

The Cult of Positive Thinking Blames All The People Who Falter or Fail in Life For Their Own Misfortune

by Johann Hari

I am thinking of writing a book called The Power of Negative Thinking. Subtitle: Let's Hear It For Hate. Yes, let's hear it for pure, undiluted loathing, for negativity, for black-eyed bile.

I say this because I have just pored through the "book" that has thwacked Harry Potter into second place and sent The Da Vinci Code spinning back into its Vatican vault. The Secret - written by Australian reality TV producer Rhonda Byrne - has sold six million DVDs and books since it first sprouted a few months ago, even earning the recommendation of St Oprah of the Screaming Studios.

In its slim 198 pages, it crystallises a sit-up-and-smile-right culture that is, in fact, making us all more miserable.

The Secret boasts that it can change your life. On every page. At least three times. Byrne brags that she has uncovered the One True Law that guarantees success. "I began tracing the Secret back through history," she writes. "I couldn't believe all the people who knew this. They were the greatest people in history: Plato, Shakespeare, Newton..." and on and on.

So what is this not-very secret Secret? It is the most extreme strain of positive thinking yet preached. In a desperate attempt to give it a scientific sheen, Byrne calls it "The Law of Attraction".

You are, she says, like a giant transponder, sending signals out into the universe.

"Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency." If you send out negative thoughts, you will attract negative things into your life. If you send out positive thoughts, positive things will come. "It is exactly like placing an order in a catalogue," she says. Exactly.

If you want a mansion, you need to really, really picture a mansion, believe in it - and it will be yours. Ask, believe, receive. "The Universe will start to rearrange itself to make it happen for you... If you see it in your mind, you're going to hold it in your hand."

If you plough enough positive thinking into something, it will "always" happen. As one "case study" in the book puts it, "I would visualise a parking space exactly where I wanted it, and 95 per cent of the time it would be there for me and I would just pull right in." Another "case study" is of a woman diagnosed with breast cancer who shunned medical treatment, pictured herself without breast cancer really, really hard - and the cancer vanished.

By taking the cult of positive thinking, which stretches back to Norman Vincent Peale's famous book in the 1950s, to this barking extreme, The Secret reveals what was wrong with the idea all along: it instinctively blames all the people who falter or fail in life for their own misfortune.

Look at the pressure always put on people diagnosed with cancer, who are entitled to be wailingly, howlingly depressed, to "stay positive".

The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote recently:

"I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly when I was being treated for breast cancer", and, she believes, it only places "an additional burden on the sick and aggrieved".

The Secret takes this further, saying: "Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an unbalanced perspective, or we're not being loving and grateful." Ah, Aids - a sign of ingratitude. Cancer - a sign you don't love.

The Secret takes this to its sick logical conclusion. Did the 9/11 victims "attract" Mohammed Atta? Did the Jews "attract" Auschwitz? Yes: "If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, those thoughts can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Bob Proctor, one of the "gurus" who features heavily in the book, was asked on the TV show Nightline whether the children of Darfur - currently being hunted down and murdered for being black - had been thinking negative thoughts that "manifested" in the Janjaweed. He replied, "I think the country probably has."

The Secret isn't only a piece of charlatanry; it's a social barometer that reveals something sad about our psyches after 30 years of spiralling inequality and the collapse of political hope.

The rise of self-help exactly coincides with the decline of faith in collective political solutions. You won't find an answer out there, through getting involved with the society you live in, it says. "I made a decision I would not watch the news or read newspapers any more, because it did not make me feel good," Byrne declares. She urges her readers to shun their friends if they become sick, because "you are inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness".

You shouldn't even look at fat people because that lets "fat thoughts" into your mind. (If you already looked at my byline picture - too late, fatso.)

If it seems like a leap from The Secret to the ballot box, you just have to turn to the book's explicitly political pronouncements. "Why do you think that 1 per cent of the population earns around 96 per cent of the money that's being earned?" it asks.

Massive tax cuts, markets rigged in the favour of the rich, the rise of a right-wing ideology? No, "the rich think thoughts of abundance and wealth, and they do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take root in their minds." And as for the poor, "the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them in their thoughts."

The American self-help industry, inevitably drifting across the Atlantic, has always been a reactionary response to economic stresses beyond the control of citizens sitting at home alone. Since the 1950s, whenever there has been a sense of economic anxiety - and for most poor and middle-class Americans, the Bush years have been a time of declining relative incomes even as the super-rich soar off into the stratosphere - this industry has been there with a simple message: the problem is within you.

One of the reasons Bush has got away with so much is that so many Americans have internalised the cruel myths of the self-help industry. I can't think of a sadder symbol of the Bush years than the news that the One God, One Thought Church is screening The Secret DVD to their housing counselling programme "to show people who feel hopeless that they can own a home". Don't create political pressure for cheap houses for Katrina refugees; just tell them to visualise it very, very hard.

This is the real secret - that the book is a pure expression of Bushism: a slop of rancid aspiration-speak masking selfishness, social collapse and religiose myth-making.

In place of this siren vision of self-help, let's help each other. In place of obsessively changing yourself, let's change the world. And in place of blithe, blind optimism, yes - let's hate.


RELATED: Joel Osteen: False POSITIVE THINKING Prophet

________________________________________

AND SPEAKING OF 'LET'S HATE'... LET'S HATE THIS SON OF A BITCH....
AS OF 4/13/10 DYING IN THE HOSPITAL FROM LIVER & RENAL FAILURE!

MIKE MCGRANNAHAN, KANSAS CITY MISSOURI, DOG MURDERER, WIFE BEATER, CON MAN, THIEF, ALCOHOLIC , DRUG ADDICT

PSYCHOPATH

Do the Admins Even Read Their Own B.S.?

What do I do if I think I'm being abused?

Educate yourself. Knowledge is power. Learn everything you can about abuse. We have an excellent resource section with links and book recommendations as well as very active forums so you can talk to others who are or have been in similar situations. Do not confront your abuser as this generally escalates the abuse. Learn coping techniques while you decide your course of action. And remember…the abuse is not your fault. No one deserves to be mistreated.

http://www.our-place-online.net/abuseinfo.html


Wait a sec... let's look at this one... line by line

Educate yourself. But toss off the forums people who merely post information... heaven forbid anyone think for themselves... embrace rigorous truth or figure something out that we don't spoon feed them...

Knowledge is power. Learn everything you can about abuse. See above.

We have an excellent resource section with links and book recommendations as well as very active forums so you can talk to others who are or have been in similar situations. And we pilfered those resources from other sources, and don't you dare have better resources or stuff than us admins!!!

Do not confront your abuser as this generally escalates the abuse. Don't confront us admins or Dr. Irene as only we get to decide how you should feel and how you should heal... or heel...

Learn coping techniques while you decide your course of action. And we get to judge if your coping techniques are appropriate... don't stand up to the abuser... lie down... be codependent... blame yourself... feel sorry for your abuser... and most of all... BABY STEPS...

And remember…the abuse is not your fault. No one deserves to be mistreated.
Unless it's us doing the mistreating, misinterpreting or avoiding the truth... then we blame you for having being honest, bad mouth you... call you an angry stalker or tell you you're wallowing, berate you and throw you off our precious forum... Our abuse IS your fault.

smell the hypocrisy anyone?

BABY STEPS???!!....ARE YOU KIDDING ME????!!!

OMG!!.. when i first ventured into the world or forums for abused women... every other post was about baby steps!!!... 'take baby steps'... 'remember... baby steps... take baby steps'

i was stunned... but i quickly surmised that the rank and file on the catbox, and our place and the next right choice were whining, hand-wringing babies... so i guess the baby steps thing was to be expected...

but then... when i ventured into online therapy... dished up by a licensed therapist, for pete's sake... i heard the same thing... 'just take baby steps'...

uh... let's get real here... first off... we're not babies... and secondly... have you ever actually watched a baby taking 'baby steps'???... it's not pretty... one step forward... four steps back... they fall down a lot too... and sometimes they can't get up!!! baby steps don't get you anywhere!!! ask any real baby!!! a baby can take ten thousand steps, without ever escaping the imprisonment of her playpen!!.

let's can the 'baby steps' bullshit, ok?... it's insulting... and it's asinine...