I received the following letter regarding telling people things they don’t want to hear:
Dear People’s Therapist
I have been a fan of your blog for a long time, and thank you for running the blog! I have the following question:
My mother-in-law is obese. My father-in-law just passed away a year ago from diabetes. My husband wants to talk to his mother to get her to lose weight because he doesn’t want to lose her (she is almost 60 years old). We tried hinting but it got no where. We tried inviting her over to our house for healthy dinners but because I’m Chinese and my husband is Caucasian American, our Chinese diet of vegetables and tofu is not exactly her cup of tea. We tried analyzing the situation and decided that she doesn’t eat much during meals but she snacks a lot on junk foods. My husband wants to know how can he talk to his mother about her losing weight and not hurt her feelings or sound like we don’t like fat people (my husband and I are the only skinny people in the family)??Thank you very much!!
Y
And here’s my response:
To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com
If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
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If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”
My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”
(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.)
For information on my private practice, click here.
The phrase “addicted to oil” gets bandied about a lot with reference to the USA’s massive reliance upon – and consumption of – fossil fuels.
The second factor spurring addiction is aggression. As the addict awakens to the cost of his behavior, it begins to take on a different tinge – it becomes about anger. As one of my clients, a recovered alcoholic, told me – when you’re doing something so obviously self-destructive, there’s always a “to hell with it” attitude running things, an attitude of aggression. You can wrap yourself up in excuses, but deep down every addict knows what he’s doing is not only self-destructive, but destructive, period. Feeding the addiction becomes an outlet for aggression.
It will take more than a single morning-after and one bad hang-over to wake this country up to its addiction. At very least, it will require hitting a true bottom – like the environmental holocaust happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico. After this calamity, there can be no more denying how far things have gone. The USA is a sad case. A wreck. Let’s be realistic – we’re hard-core users. If that oil weren’t swirling in deadly currents in the Gulf and the Atlantic right now, it would be burning in power plants and a million internal combustion engines, its deadly currents rising into our atmosphere to wreak a different kind of havoc. We’re unleashing astonishing destruction each and every day. We know that.
We are Americans and we are fossil fuel addicts. We know it is bad for us. We know it is bad for our neighbors and our family – the Earth and every species on it. The question is whether this is it – we’ve hit bottom – or whether we’ll go right back to bingeing. How bad does it have to get? Can we get clean, or will we continue as we have been – following in the footsteps of so many addicts before us – killing ourselves and wrecking the lives of others.
We’re there. Take a look at the pictures of wildlife destroyed by this spill.
The news has been full of reports of Heidi Montag-Pratt and her claim to have undergone 10 separate plastic surgery procedures in one day. That includes rhinoplasty (a nose job), breast augmentation, lip collagen injections, chin reduction, and god only knows what else.
The People's Therapist 