I’m not OK, you’re really not ok./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Lorelyn Medina.
Salutary and Salubrious Salutations, traditionalist health-seekers!
Hello. My name is Deepika Choprawalla, and I’m this week’s guest Wellness columnist at everyone’s favorite did-someone-really-waste-his-or-her-time-on-it Alt-right lifestyle blog, Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW). More so than any column on this ill-advised Web destination, it’s the Wellness department SYRW whose misguided, quixotic, and overreaching counsel that can help our right-wing ilk live the debased, empty lives they seek to. Of course, most of the departments at this fantabulous website would say that. We’re big fans of good-natured ribbing and rivalry.
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Today, I want to talk to you about codependence, and how it plays into the current conservative political scene. I hope that you’ll see that we right-wingers have a deeply unhealthy, unproductive, and frankly, sick relationship with a one President Donald Trump. People can spend lifetimes trying to heal codependent relationships, and their codependent nature doesn’t mean they can’t be healthy and fulfilling in other ways. However, it seems like this twisted push-and-pull thing we’ve got goin’ on with His Orangeness is damaging not just two, but 350 million or so people, American democracy, and ——-. So, get out now while you can. Er…something less flip-the-fudge-out-ish.
Building on the Basics
First, readers, I ask you to take a collective look-see at what Shawn M. Burn, PhD an expert–yes, dear RWNJs (Right Wing Nut Jobs), that’s still a thing, whom everyone but the embarrassing creatures on the right acknowledges and derives benefit from–defines, in an article on Psychology Today, as the seven generally, universally agreed-upon features of codependence among fellow experts, no matter what the particular circumstances of individual codependent relationships are. I’m going to look at three from Burn’s list, below.
Paging Secretary Sanders
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a pretty messed up relationship with Trump, most thoughtful White House watchers would say. The first item on Burn’s list defining the aspects of a codependent relationship reads thusly: “Codependents] have an excessive and unhealthy tendency to rescue and take responsibility for other people.”
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Sanders full-time job, that no doubt bleeds over into her personal time, is to bailout Trump from his daily gaffes, pratfalls, and hiccups, to put it comically, in the area of federal governance. She has to, essentially, take responsibility for all his misbehavior, in the form of offering justifications, explanations, and historical-rewritings of every one, standing behind the podium in the briefing room with admirable poise and aplomb.
This job used to fall to Senior White House Adviser Kellyanne Conway, who in the course of her defending her boss’ day-in-day-out cretinous, substandard, and damaging behavior now has the dubious honor of having invented a national tragedy (“The Bowling Green Massacre”), coined a phrase (“alternative facts”), and used elementary school tactics to belabor a point (the Mueller probe is a “delusion,” because Trump’s “collusion” with Russia is a “delusion.”
Non-Scientific Engineering
Codependents, Burn writes, “Regularly try to engineer the change of troubled, addicted, or under-functioning people whose problems are far bigger than your abilities to fix them.” That’s number four on Burn’s list, and I think we can all see it applies to one Trump Administration official in particular, and then actually pretty much all of them. The “one” is White House Chief of Staff General John F. Kelly, tasked with the nobody-else-wants-it job of reining in and disciplining the president. His problems are, truly, the definition of bigger than just what Kelly set out to help fix. They’re numerous, longstanding, and rooted deep in Trump’s psyche.
You Didn’t See This One Coming
I propose to you that seen through another facet of the codependence prism, the relationship Trump has with his base of supporters is rather codependent, too.
In the fifth item on Burn’s list, she writes: “[Codependents] seem to attract low-functioning people looking for someone to take care of them so they can avoid adult responsibility or consequences, or attract people in perpetual crisis unwilling to change their lives,” writes Burn.
If we replace “low-functioning” with “low-earning,” we’ve got the bond between Trump and his “Deplorable” base. We wanted someone, and clearly, anyone, to help us so we could avoid facing the fact that what adults do is accept help from social safety net programs, take advantage of government programs designed to assist those who need help, and even help each other. No one has it easy, so everyone should make it easier.
Democrats, liberals, and the rest of our myriad opponents would scarcely fault us for wanting getting into this mess of a codependent relationship with the leader we selected with zeal and fanfare. But the longer we stay in it, the harder it becomes for them to understand or excuse, no doubt. This may strike our dear Alt-readers as NMP, Not My Problem, right now, but one day, when Trump’s reign is a sad, regrettable footnote in history, we’ll take upon ourselves the shame of having inflicted Don Jon on the nation and the world.–unless, of course, we’re willing to simply admit we were wrong.
It’s Liberation O’Clock
It may be time, dear readers, to cut the cord. Especially as Trump is not our baby gestating in our wombs. He and we are all grown-ups, at least chronologically, so it’s time to consider ending this toxic, pernicious codependent relationship on a grand scale. There’s a whole lot more than just damaged psyches at stake, although those are important, too, of course. But this codependent relationship might just be the codependent relationship to end all others, in that it literally end in nuclear war. The best thing to do is to decide and then say out loud, “I’ve had enough.” And then the healing can begin. As long as we continue to see that we need Trump and he needs us, we’ll stagnate, if not regress.
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Now, next week Dane Scarnegie, SYRW’s regular Wellness columnist will be back to explore holistic health with you. I have really enjoyed my time with at SYRW, and I hope to be back for more guest contributions.
Until then, go forth and be well…well, as well as you can be given how sick in the head you are.
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