Self-Help and Abductions

There isn’t a self-help group for self-help groups. I think, in this quest for Variety, I have discovered the only niche self-help has yet to try and fill. Tired? Depressed? Too happy? There’s a self-help group for all your worries, fears, closets of anxiety and everything else out there. The sheer proliferation should explain half the problem, since if they actually worked, there would just be one of them. The Self-Help Book.
      It would probably start by saying there was nothing wrong with being normal. And that you can actually like yourself, and maybe other people in the bargain. Then it would just be “shit happens” followed by “get over it and yourself”.
      And it would probably get banned faster than anything else ever written, but I’ve spent too many nights drinking bad coffee and listening to sob stories over stale food from people whose lives, on the whole, would improve immensely by bathing more often. And gaining hope. That’s really all it takes to be a romantic, and being a romantic (in all senses of the word) is probably the end goal of most self-help advice.
      But I didn’t get paid to spit out vague wisdom I’ll forget after this paycheque and a few stiff drinks. I got paid to find strange self-help groups and report about them, to you, because I can. And because, if I had to suffer through it, so do you.

Self-help for alien abductees

No, you didn’t read that one wrong. They offer help if you’d been abducted, or someone you love has been abducted. they offer counselling for abductees who people try and convince were not really abducted by aliens at all. There is, apparently, a large subset of the psychiatric profession dealing with this, and the instructors compared it to ex-gay ‘therapy’ and the like and said abductees weren’t hiding their true natures and so forth.
      They even offered a 12-step plan for coming to terms with having been abducted, ways to stand up to an abductor and that the aliens were as confused and lonely as we are. How that translated into cattle prods up the anus apparently involved not standing up to bullies or aliens having confused notions about human greetings based on porn movies. (It depended on the group, and their instructor.)
      The latter, naturally, had people re-enact their abductions. Graphically. I imagine videos are floating around youtube by now, along with the “I Was Abducted By Aliens” T-shirts some of them claim the aliens gave them as proof. While this sounds very far-fetched, an alien UFO with a gift shop is probably preferable to cattle prods. And far healthier.
      More to come later, after a few drinks.