On this week’s GOSSIP GIRL, Dan finally makes a move on former-nemesis-now-unrequited-love-interest Blair, which, despite her skinny-pregnancy, extremely complicated (and weirdly easily attainable) pre-nup, and looming problems with bruised and vengeful former boyfriend Chuck, Blair responds to. But then multi-hyphenate Serena (the multihyphenataion being Blair’s-best-friend-and-Dan’s-high-school-girlfriend-but-they-broke-up-and-got-back-together-a-bunch-of-times-and-now-Serena’s-into-him-again-but-Dan-isn’t-into-her) sees it all and uh oh!

What Serena Says

My BFF stole my not-BF – how could she?!?!

Back Up And Tell It Right

Whoa girl. Serena has a common view shared by many of us when strong feelings are involved, which is that we tend to view people as possessions and other people’s intrusions on those feelings as theft. But this sense of having had something stolen is a trap and here’s why. From Serena’s point of view, Blair has stolen from her since Blair knows about Serena’s feelings for Dan and, as a friend, should allow Serena’s feelings to take precedence. Serena’s trap – and one, I might add, that she falls into ALL THE TIME – is that of assuming her expectations of Blair’s behavior are valid. For example, Blair could make the equally logical argument that Serena knows she’s trapped in a loveless marriage (to a prince for a year, there was a video involved and some weird thing with a dowry – I can’t go into it right now) and that Dan’s been there for her so it’s Serena who needs to respect her need to reach for happiness and not the other way around.

In the same way that crime requires “mens rea” (a guilty mind), so does betrayal need an intent to betray. In the absence of that, there’s just your needs conflicting with someone else’s needs. A friend simply wanting the same thing you want is not a betrayal regardless of what your friend knows about your feelings. Instead of focusing on what you think the other person did to you and potentially destroying a strong friendship, focus on whether your exepctations of that person’s behavior was either fair or realistic, and, if not, work on your own feelings of sadness or disappointment. It may not feel good to have a friend chasing a guy you’re into, but it’s also not a stab in the back.

Which isn’t to say a lot of backstabbing isn’t exactly what I’m hoping for for Seblada in the upcoming months…

I made the terrible mistake of Netflixing NO STRINGS ATTACHED (the Natalie Portman/Ashton Kutcher eff buddies movie (wasn’t there another one too?)) the other day, and, in addition to having my soul crushed for two hours, I also got to witness an almost pathological amount of self-degradation, the kind that oftens crops up in real (equally soul crushing) relationships.

What Emma Says

Natalie’s character, Emma (who rooms with a band of three inexplicably wacky surgical interns), keeps randomly running into Ashton’s character, Adam, and decides they should have sex while, for reasons unstated, avoiding any emotional attachment.

Back Up And Tell It Right

I’m not sure what’s weirder: the conceit that you can somehow avoid emotional attachment to other people or the notion that you’d want to. First off, if you’re doing anything regularly with another person, you’re in a relationship, no matter what lie you’re telling yourself. Second, if the goal of your relationship is to not have one, then you’re likely best off alone until you work through your issues. And FYI, Emma, sex isn’t something you can separate from feelings because that connection isn’t under your conscious control; in other words, you’re either having sex with someone and not feeling anything for them or you’re having sex with someone and developing feelings but in either case it’s not something you can decide upfront. Having a predetermined goal of numbing out or repressing your emotions in case they accidentally crop up is not a great way to enter into any kind of connection. Instead, check in with yourself to see if you’re emotionally ready for a relationship, then go connect in whatever form you like and be open to seeing what happens. Because otherwise the primary emotional attachment you’re avoiding is the one with yourself.

Though I’ve got to admit, despite it obviously being for nudity rider reasons, watching someone roll around having sweaty, intense, breathless, unattached sex while ALWAYS wearing either a T-shirt or tank top becomes, after two hours, kind of intriguingly kinky…

After Kourtney’s babydaddy Scott punches his fist through a mirror right after a fight with Kourtney, Kourtney decides it’s time to put up some boundaries and move on… ish.

What Kourtney Says

I’ll let Kourtney speak for herself.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Here’s the game. There are two video clips, each of which contains moments of pure, unadulterated codependency. Can you spot them? Click the down arrow () below each video to see the ones I spotted.

• Clip Setup: A day or so later, Scott tells Kourtney that he’s going to need surgery for his mirror-punching hand and that he’s all alone in Miami and would really like her to be there when he wakes up from surgery – not that he’s trying to guilt her into it or anything (heh heh) because, he says, he knows he’s totally blown it with her, that their relationship is over, and that he has no right to expect anything.  After lots of assertive conversations about how she won’t be seeing Scott until he’s gotten help for himself (meaning rehab) because she has to put her baby, Mason, first, Kourtney flip-flops the morning of Scott’s surgery and heads out the door to visit him, telling sis Kim that she doesn’t want to hear any arguments about it, that this what she’s doing.  Kim says fine but insists on coming along:

• Clip Setup: Though perhaps Kourtney’s codependency issues are more forgiveable in light of seeing their monstrous one-codpendency-to-rule-them-all source, momager Kris Kardashian. Kim flies home to LA and tells Kris bits and pieces of what went down with Kourtney and Scott, at which point Kris wings out to Miami, tells Kourtney how upset she is and all the things Kourtney needs to do (without actually bothering to ask Kourtney how she feels or what decisions she’s made), and then, behind Kourtney’s back, does the following in stripes and with men’s jacket button epaulets on her shoulders:

If you find yourself taking care of (read: controlling) the emotional issues of an adult in your life, if you can’t feel okay unless you’ve taken action to “make them feel” okay, you are likely in a codependent relationship with that person.  The process from codependent to independent is ceasing taking action on behalf of that person’s bad feelings (Kourtney) and feeling good about yourself regardless of how that other person feels (Kris).

And to think, people have accused the Kardashians of being vapid time-wasters who offered nothing to the universe…

On KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS (of whatever season or spinoff I’m currently watching), Khloe sure hates Scott.

What Khloe Says

He’s bad for my sister QED I hate him.

Back Up And Tell It Right

This is actually very typical. Someone you love winds up in a relationship with someone you hate primarily because you hate how miserable they seem to make the person you love, and, by extension, you. You hate them so much you don’t want to see them or talk to them. You can’t be in the same room with them. You can barely be polite to them. Here’s the deal: that outside hateful person – Scott in this case – isn’t the problem; rather, that person is merely a reflection of two other problems.

First problem: Pretend Khloe’s right for a moment (and, remember, you can never judge a relationship from the outside, even one you’re watching 24/7 on E!) and that Scott is a hateful, volatile, unreliable, destructive cow who’s pulling Kourtney away from her family. Even so, making Scott go away won’t solve the problem since the problem (if there is one) lies with Kourtney and not Scott. After all, she’s the one making the choice.

Second problem: When we get as upset about someone as Khloe gets about Scott, that’s generally because that person is reflecting something within ourselves that we dislike. Perhaps Khloe recognizes hateful pieces of herself within Scott and lashes out at him for having those characteristics she dislikes. Or perhaps she views Kourtney’s response to Scott as a horrible weakness because that’s how she would feel if she found herself staying in a relationship with someone who was volatile or self-centered. Or perhaps her father’s death felt like an abandonment and she’s mushing that in with Scott’s seeming unreliability toward her sister. Or whatever.

In other words, Khloe’s big angry feelings are hers, and their resolution doesn’t lie with Kourtney or Scott but rather with figuring out what that relationship is triggering within her and resolving that core issue instead.

Hey, Khloe, here’s hoping you work it by the time I get to Season Six…

I guess I’m on a corporate rant! There’s a bill before Congress (called SOPA in the House and Protect IP in the Senate) that is designed to protect copyright at the expense of speech.

What Hollywood Says

We need these bills because we’re losing jobs and money to piracy.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Once again, we’re in that strange world where Congress is putting human principles behind corporate desires.

For the most part, no one cares about copyright and for good reason because, unless you’re in the arts or software design, copyright isn’t something that really affects you.  However, we now all have one major reason to be concerned about copyright: the pipeline for free speech and the pipeline for copyright are now one and the same – the internet.  Hollywood, because it makes all its money off of copyright, has designed a bill that is a “guilty ‘til proven innocent” approach where a mere accusation that a website contains infringing content will result in that website being taken down by the government, essentially transformng the US government into repressive regimes like Egypt, China, and Iran, all for the sake of… a few corporations.

For me, it’s always humans first, and it’s interesting – and kinda frightening! – to see how difficult it is for Congress to view itself as anything other than the legal arm of corporations.

The Benevolent Dolphin

Hollywood’s contention is that piracy is costing billions of dollars in jobs and lost revenues.  This contention, however, is what’s known in cognitive theory as a benevolent dolphin.  Here’s what that means: Dolphins have a reputation for benevolence because we hear many stories about dolphins nudging a flailing swimmer to shore or beating off a shark when someone was stuck at sea or swimming next to boats etc.  As a result, word has spread about dolphin kindness toward humans.  Of course, we have no idea if dolphins are really benevolent because we have no idea how many people dolphins have pushed out to sea and drowned as those people obviously never returned to tell the tale.

Hollywood’s insistence – and Congress’ blind belief – that piracy is costing money and that therefore speech should be squelched in the name of protecting copyright is based on a similar fundamental logic flaw – which is the assumption that piracy has a cost at all.  Here’s why.

First, piracy only applies to people who would’ve bought a particular piece of content but downloaded it for free instead.  If all the Jennifer Aniston movies in the world were somehow locked away and only available for purchase and you never, in a billion years, would purchase one (I admit, I may be talking about myself here), then Hollywood loses no money if you managed to download one since you never would’ve spent that money to begin with.  If, however, you’re that one Jennifer Aniston fan and you download a movie for free, then, yes, you’ve stolen money from Hollywood.  In other words, the cost of piracy only applies to the subset of people who would have paid but didn’t; let’s call this number A.  A, of course, is impossible to calculate, which is why Hollywood uses inflated numbers that include everyone.

Second – and this is where the benevolent dolphin comes in – Hollywood has utterly failed to calculate the benefit of piracy, i.e. the people who bought a product solely as a result of access to an illegal copy.  Let’s call this number B.  If you’ve ever downloaded an MP3 illegally then later purchased the band’s album as a result of enjoying that stolen MP3, you’ve experienced how piracy benefits the industry.  Author David Pogue did a little experiment in this regard whereby he released both a print and PDF edition of his book; the PDF was copied everywhere around the internet for free… yet his print sales rose.  Along those same lines, the megahit children’s book Shut The F*** Up was the consequence of pirated PDFs, and Justin Bieber has made tons of money for the recording industry as a result of singing pirated songs on YouTube.

Thus piracy is only a cost if B – A = (a negative number).  I find it bizarre that Congress is doing something as extreme as suppressing speech based on a non-existent number.  And, btw, this isn’t the first time Hollywood has cried foul about copyright only to turn out to be totally wrong.  In the ’80s, Hollywood tried to destroy the VCR (they lost in the Supreme Court) only to have tapes and DVDs become Hollywood’s largest source of revenue.

Once again, Hollywood is being shortsighted in its view of the future.  This would be totally irrelevant except this time Hollywood’s shortsightedness is going to directly affect YOUR ability to communicate.  Only corporations and Congresspeople could think that the solution to internet piracy would be shutting off speech and creating opportunity for individual Americans to be silenced by the threat of an endless stream of corporate lawsuits – because those RIAA file-sharing lawsuits were so amazingly successful I guess!

The Bottom Line

Congress’ job is not to protect a dying business model. No law requires Hollywood to put its product on the internet. In fact, up until around five years ago with the rise of YouTube, Hollywood’s product came to people via totally separate pipes (cable and satellite) from speech.  Hollywood wants to be on the internet because it’s cheaper for them, and their contention is that, now that Hollywood’s arrived on the ‘net, all other issues better take a back seat to their corporate profit mongering because nothing else matters but them.  I don’t blame Hollywood for trying to pass this law – it’s their business after all and they should be fighting for their interests – but I do blame Congress for its utter lack of thought about the issues.

If Hollywood doesn’t want its product stolen, Hollywood should protect it better, and Congress certainly shouldn’t be taking away our speech in any event. Clearly, Netflix is doing just fine with uncopyable streaming content (as, by the way, is Hulu and every single TV network website that streams its TV shows). If you don’t give people a product they can copy… it won’t be copied.  Put another way, if you don’t want your diamond bracelet to be stolen, maybe you shouldn’t leave it in the middle of Times Square.

The good news, if the these bills pass, is that you will be able to take down the website of your own Congressperson simply by accusing them of infringing your copyright, and by the time your false accusation gets sorted out in the courts, someone else will have been elected. In fact, I highly recommend that you issue takedown notices to all the members of the committees in both the House and Senate as well as the websites of all of the major Hollywood studios so their freedom of speech can be removed just like they’re lobbying for to be.  Just sayin’…

Occupy Wall Street has pushed a lot of – perhaps undefined – disassatifaction to the fore which, from my relationship-centric POV, really boils down to one problem: corporate America, you have boundary issues!

What Corporations Say

What’s good for us is good for everyone.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Um, no.

To be clear about something upfront, I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with corporations; rather, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the legally defined relationship between corporations and humans.  The Supreme Court, since the early 20th century, has been treating corporations more and more like humans.  To me, the Supreme Court has utterly failed to consider one essential question in granting these rights: what are the characteristics by which we define “human”?

The problem with the Supreme Court’s assessment and with American laws in general is that they’re very focused on what corporations should receive but not at all focused on what should they give up in exchange.  This get/give exchange is inherent in human law because human law is predicated on the notion of other people – you can park at a meter but not all day because other people might want to park there too; you can have a BBQ but not in your apartment living room because other people might get hurt or their property damaged if there’s a fire; etc.

This sense of other people puts the brakes on some of our more selfish inclinations and can be summarized in two basic behavior-mitigating characteristics that corporations lack and which the law and the Supreme Court currently fail to take into account: size and sociality.

Size, aka Goliath Meet David, David Meet… Oh, I Guess He Already Ate You

Unlike corporations, humans don’t enter the world with a battalion of attorneys.  For that reason, it’s rare that the law gets involved when humans settle differences with each other – we do this thing called “working it out” or, when working-it-out tanks, “dealing with it.”  By contrast, human-on-corporation dispute resolution always involves either (a) the human losing the dispute or (b) the human paying for an attorney.

The problem is the David-and-Goliath financial inequality – human earns $40k, corporation earns $4 billion – which allows corporations to use the cost of engaging the legal system as a means of bludgeoning humans into submitting to corporate will (I’m looking at you, Monsanto!).

Barring a few exceptions, real humans are, basically, equal in size, meaning while sure there’s variation in income, physical strength, intelligence, etc., we’re all really just a bunch of Davids.  The law needs to address this size inequity between humans and corporations by squeezing Goliath’s power down to David’s level, like by requiring corporations to pay our attorney fees upfront during disputes which can then only be reimbursed to the corporation if the human loses, a situation which might cause corporations to think twice – just like humans do – before stonewalling on settlements or taking things to court.

Sociality, aka But I Want It Now, Daddy!

Laws aren’t there to tell humans how to behave.  Rather, laws are a function of how most humans behave most of the time anyway; laws are a consequence of the millions of years of evolution that resulted in us being the only species on Earth to cooperate extensively with groups of unrelated individuals.  By contrast, laws ARE there to tell corporations how to behave because, in the absence of laws, corporations would behave in their own self-interest regardless of the consequences to those around them.

What we call “morals” or “ethics” are really just the constraints we evolved to put on our own behavior in order to reap the huge benefits we get from being in a group.  It’s why we teach 2-year-olds to share; we rein in their natural instinct to keep everything for themselves so they will be better able to integrate with and connect to other people.

Sociality is why humans don’t need laws telling us not to steal; humans (barring some people obviously) don’t steal BECAUSE we’re human.  By contrast, if there were no laws against stealing, corporations would be stealing from us and from each other nonstop.  Along the same lines, a corporation would never give an anonymous donation because what would be the point (Exhibit A: Idol Gives Back) – how could the corporation get something out of it if it didn’t tell all the humans the amazing thing it had done?  Humans, by contrast, give anonymously all the time because we have evolved with an inherent sense of relating to each other, feeling each other’s pain, and extending ourselves and our resources to each other with no thought of ever getting anything in return because sociality is a core component of our humanity.

This lack of inherent sociality is why corporations often get labeled as “greedy” or “evil” – because if a human behaved as self-centeredly and uncaringly as corporations do, that’s how the human would be labeled.  Corporations aren’t human; thus, they can’t be “greedy” or “evil” either.  However, because they’re not human, they have no idea how to behave among humans.  The law, then, needs to remedy this by constraining corporate behavior so it more approximates the natural give-and-take of actual human beings.  I believe part of Occupy Wall Street’s frustration is that Congress seems to be operating from the deeply bizarre perspective that we humans need to adapt to corporations’ non-human needs as opposed to forcing the non-humans to behave like the rest of us.

To put it another way, Mitt Romney and all you others who think corporations are people, let me just say, if you wind up with the terrible circumstance of having a heart attack, I hope, for your sake, that you are surrounded by, oh, a subway car filled with total strangers rather than a bunch of your corporate donors.

How About This For A Start

So Occupy Wall Street and 99%-ers, here are three demands (though believe me, I’ve got pleeeeeeeeeeeeeenty more, but this blog post is already getting too long), the ones related to size and sociality that upset this particular human; feel free to pass this on and/or add to it the ones that matter to you:

1. Pass laws preventing corporations from using my humanity against me.  Yes I’m a human – I’ll make mistakes, I’ll get sick, I’ll make controversial lifestyle choices, I might be bad with paying off my credit cards, with dieting, with doing illegal drugs in my free time, with being kind to my friends.  What does any of this have to do with me getting or keeping my job?
2. No mass consumer contract can ever take away or limit my rights.  When, exactly, did we waive our right to trial by jury in favor of arbitration?  How’d that shizz go down?  Or how about this seemingly innocuous one: Amazon, via the Kindle, has decided to eliminate the “first-sale doctrine” (the law that allows people to give away or resell their books).  Um, really?  Hey, Amazon, if you want to prevent me from donating my Kindle books to hospitals or giving them to my mom, from selling them on Ebay or lending them to friends for whatever duration I choose, take it up with Congress, but who the Hades are you to eliminate a federal right just because you stuck some clause in a licensing agreement?  The point of the first-sale doctrine, like many human laws, is sharing and giving up some self-interest in favor of a larger whole (see Sociality above).  How come some self-serving corporate licensing agreement can override the balance of individual versus societal needs that forms the basis of our Constitution?
3. Get rid of limits on civil suit damages.  Since you can’t put corporations in prison, the only meaningful punishment to a corporation is money, and, if the money amount isn’t commensurate with a particular company’s finances, the company won’t feel it.  Civil amounts that would be ridiculous in David-on-David disputes – $5 million! – would barely be a rounding error for most Goliaths.  Because humans (like juries and appellate judges) have such a hard time grappling with one human receiving so much cash, how about this: instead of juries awarding damages in dollar amounts, they award them as a percentage of a corporation’s 5-year average gross.  That way a jury, without having any idea whether a company grosses on average $10,000 per year or $10 billion per year, could give a damage payment of, say, 12% or 20% or 3% or whatever the jury felt was fair irrespective of how much real money that percentage translated into.  Congress’ weird notion is that somehow corporations will be treated unfairly by vengeful juries.  In other words, Congress’ belief is that a system we entrust with being able to put aside bias in order to take away human life and liberty is somehow incapable of putting aside that bias when it comes to judging corporations.  Really?  Let me get this straight – corporations are the ones that require Congressional protections from humans?  Huh.  Who decided we humans were incapable of judging corporations fairly and that therefore corporations shouldn’t be held to human standards?

Bottom line: in Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi universe, even robots have three laws controlling robot-on-human interactions.  So shouldn’t the non-humans in our present-tense real-world universe have a few as well?

The Setup

Elise is a reality-show staple, the contestant who has gotten into fights with more or less everyone on her team but sees everyone else as the problem. Her main techinques are the classics, talking over rather than to other people, escalating arguments instead of resolving them, etc. Having been put up for elimination twice because her team finds her to be disruptive in the kitchen, she vows that, from here on out, she’s going to prove she’s a team player.

What Elise Says

But then, in previews for next week’s episode, Elise, during a confessional, says that she’s not here to make friends, she’s here to win!

Back Up And Tell It Right

Elise’s line which, in my completely unscientific survey, has been said on every single confessional-based competition reality-show ever produced, begs a very simple question: why do people have such a hard time both making friends AND winning? Why, for them, is it either one or the other but not both? Well, it’s not just reality-show contestants who find themselves unable to distinguish being nice from losing. Many people feel that conciliatory or kind gestures undercut their positions during conflict. If you’ve ever been in a fight with someone and told yourself that they need to call you first because you’re certainly not calling them, then you’ve experienced exactly this feeling, the notion that reaching out equates to giving something up. It doesn’t. Expressing a desire to resolve the conflict isn’t the same as sacrificing your core principles; admitting someone is important to you doesn’t mean you’ve just handed them all the power in the relationship. Real winning, on HELL’S KITCHEN or otherwise, means being able to integrate the various ways you interact with the world around you – being friendly AND winning – rather than feeling a need to compartmentalize them – being friendly OR winning.

Friends are good, Elise, though you might want to work on that rubbery lobster…

The Setup

During a Parliamentary session about the NEWS OF THE WORLD scandal, Louise, in making a general point about the pervasiveness of phone-hacking by British tabloids, apparently misquoted something from Piers’ autobiography. She went on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show to discuss her statement, and Wolf brought Piers to tell her how he felt (Piers arrives around 1:45):

What Piers Says

In case you didn’t watch the above video, basically Piers tells Louise she got the quote wrong and then nitpicks over the details rather than addressing her bigger-picture intent; he follows up with some name-calling then talks both loudly and over her before wrapping up by minimizing the value of her responses.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Piers essentially has one thing to say – “I’m angry and you’re wrong!” – and he repeats it for roughly seven minutes. He’s certainly right to be angry about having been misquoted, and I can imagine that it was frustrating that Louise, for legal reasons, couldn’t get into details with him over the air (of course, if he’d genuinely wanted to get into a discussion with Louise, he could have simply absolved her of all legal claims right then and there and had a real discussion). However, Piers was playing an emotional shell game that many people play when involved in conflict: communicating with tone rather than content. If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with someone whose idea of conflict resolution comes down to “he who shouts loudest must be right” and seems to be in it to win rather than resolve then you’ve experienced this very issue. A shouted lecture is never going to lead to resolution. When you throw tone at people, all they hear is the tone; if you want them to hear your words… then you need to lose the tone (and if you’re having problems losing the tone, then take a break from the conflict until you can get your emotions under control). Remember, the point of conflict is to resolve conflict; if only one party “wins” then both parties have lost. So take a breath, cool the tone, and talk rationally.

Piers, here’s hoping you add tone-lowering to your resume…

The Setup

Elise, played by Emily Blunt, is a contempo wackerina whose idea of a fun midweek night out involves some casual wedding crashing, a quick stop to a nearby men’s room, and a bit of light boundary-crossing before fleeing the building while being chased by security. David, played by Matt Damon, feels an instant connection with her, runs into her randomly (or, rather, mistakenly since it turns out that a fate-controlling angel(?) fell asleep on the job), and, based on that feeling, spends the rest of the movie fighting fate itself to be with her.

What David Says

David battles the forces of destiny because he just KNOWS he’s meant to be with Elise. The fact that he doesn’t actually know her as a human being is irrelevant – the feeling is what matters.

Back Up And Tell It Right

While I am, of course, aware that this movie is a romantic fantasy, it’s a nice example of a real-world romantic fantasy that can get in the way of actual romance: the romantic fantasy of just knowing, with absolute certainty, that the person you’re with is “the one” – and, because you already “know” this, you don’t really have to do any work to get the whole thing started since it’s destined to happen and just be awesome.

The problem is that people end up equating the lack of KNOWING with the lack of romantic potential. Remember, the entire issue in the early stages of dating is that you DON’T know – you don’t know if they’re into you or if you’re even that into them or what they’re really like or if you can trust them or if they’re going to hurt you or if your time investment is going to pay off or a host of other uncertainties. So here’s the deal: the absence of romantic fantasy – your heart not going pit-a-pat, you being unsure and only partly into it, getting bored sometimes, etc. – isn’t a reason to stop. Invest in the reality of two strangers working to get to know each other rather than searching for signs that a higher power jotted something down in a book.

I’m not saying it won’t work out for David and Elise, but, really, hang onto that hat…

The Setup

Despite her family’s money, Fergie had it pretty rough growing up. Her mom abandoned her at 12 to run off with an Argentinian polo player, and, like many children who went through similar things (albeit with fewer ponies), she blamed herself for her mother’s abandonment, thinking it must have been something she did. She still carries that self-loathing with her and is going on an Oprah-fueled reality TV journey – meaning visiting people like Dr. Phil, Suze Orman, etc. – on a quest for her self-worth.

What Fergie Says

Fergie talks about herself in negative terms all day long, right, left, and center. Throughout the episode, she refers to herself variously as “flawed,” “worthless,” “unloveable,” and self-sabotaging. In fact, unless I missed it, there wasn’t a single moment in the episodes where she presented herself as being anything other than hopeless and lost.

Back Up And Tell It Right

Words matter. Negative words, over time, become an unexamined shorthand that only serve to keep us stuck in our self-loathing stories. The simple-to-say/hard-to-do act of changing those words, of stopping ourselves in real time and re-editing our self-descriptions, can literally change the way we think about ourselves. In Fergie’s case, I would suggest that, for every negative word, she force herself to stop and recharacterize her self-description as a positive, e.g. go from “flawed” to “whole but working on believing in myself,” “worthless” and “unloveable” to “was a better mother to my children than my mother was to me so broke a potential abandonment cycle – thus I’m strong and loving” etc.

If you really want self-worth, Fergie, start by changing those words…