OK, this book needs a blow-by-blow commentary.

Someone suggested that I read "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions", and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.

From the title, I thought it would have potential.  I do grow tired of people who mistake imperfect families for dysfunctional.  Being made of human beings, no family is perfect, and somewhere in the 80s we got the idea that if you weren't the Huxtables, your family was dysfunctional.  If you can make the joke "my family put the fun in dysfunctional", odds are your family isn't.  There's nothing at all fun about a dysfunctional family.

The author of IDYD is railing against "the recovery movement".  What is "the recovery movement"?  Damned if I know.  It's this vague half-fictional entity that's destroying society.  As near as I can tell, anything that isn't yanking yourself up by your bootstraps is this evil society-destroying entity.  Of course, virtually no one needs any bootstrap yanking because the only form of abuse is violent incest.  If you were not raped by your parents, you were not abused.  Point blank.

This is actually a good place to jump into the blow-by-blow, I think.  I am currently half-way through chapter 3 of 7 + a conclusion.  The first ones may get mooshed together, and I don't know how much detail I'll go into the later ones.  Hell, I very well may bail at any moment.  But this book deserves a good ripping as long as I can handle it.

So, intro and chapter 1.  I'm putting them together because I didn't realize the book had started with chapter 1.  It seemed a continuation of the introductory explanation/whining. However, this is a good place for me to put a caveat.  Just as, at least according to her early insistence if not her later writing, the author insists that she is criticizing the "movement" and not the people within it, I am criticizing how she says things, not necessarily what she says.  Some of what she says, but not all of it.  She does have some good points in here, but she's cast her net too widely, painted them with too broad a brush, buried them too deeply and committed other horrible cliches to them.

So, problem with how this author makes her point.  First, she is very much a Suffering Olympics person.  If anyone anywhere has ever had bigger problems or more suffering than you, you have no right to say anything about it ever.  She is also astoundingly black and white.  Hence the attitude that abuse is being raped by your parents, full stop.  If you think any other behavior was abusive, you're a whiny mindless sheep.  (The reason I repeat the phrase "raped by your parents" is because she repeats it, several times, as her standard for abuse.)

She's also misusing sources -- taking them out of context, not giving them when it's critical, that sort of thing.  I think my favorite so far, though, is when in her complaints about the overuse of the concept of codependency,she writes "Almost everyone -- 96 percent of all Americans -- suffers from codependency, experts assert" -- and gives no citation.  This statement right here is the crux of the entire book.  Anything that 96% of the population experiences is normalcy; she's here to complain at least somewhat about normalcy being pathologized.  But with no citations, what experts are we talking?  Are we talking recognized and respected experts, or are we talking "Dr. Phil" type 'experts'?

I will say, there are some positively hilarious tidbits in this, though.  One of my favorites in Chapter 1:
"Whether alcoholism is an inheritable disease or a learned behavior is a controversy about which I have no opinion.  (I do doubt, however, that absolutely everyone who drinks habitually or in excess is a victim of her genes.)"
*snert* Nope, no opinion here.

She also has problems with etymology.  I'm sorry, but the word "disease" actually does come from the roots "dis" and "ease" via the French, des+aise.  It's not simple coincidence like god and dog.  Yes, it gets annoying to hear it over and over in cheerful voices, but that doesn't make it not true.

Whoo.  I write it out and it's worse than I thought.

Tomorrow: how the horrible society destroying monster will attack you through your television.