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Sparkle (2)
I have a long history of negative self-talk, and, although I have been less harsh with myself in recent years, I still manage to be my own worst bully. So, when I came across The 40-Day Inner Mean Girl Cleanse one afternoon in late August, a six-week course hosted by co-creators Amy Ahlers and Christine Arylo, I thought it was probably a good idea to join up. My very recent commitment to sobriety, thoughts about positive personal revolution, and a strong desire to be kinder to myself made this seem like the right step to take.
Plus, The Inner Mean Girl Cleanse was free. I like free, and how could the over 7000 women who had already signed up to be a part of The Inner Mean Girl Revolution be wrong? I signed up for the six-week course and waited to see what my e-mail inbox would bring.
In Week One, the goal was to give up gossip for good talk, and the daily practice was to repeat the following affirmation every morning: "Today I speak only from my heart. I leave gossip and toxic words behind. I truly speak only from my heart." I put the daily personal affirmations part aside, because daily affirmations seem to have the opposite effect on me and make me feel terrible, but I did take the message to heart and tried to remain mindful of gossip, both from others around me and myself.
Before I was even able to really get into practicing mindfulness about gossip, though, I hit my first stumbling block when The Inner Mean Girl Cleanse managed to annoy me by August 26th, less than 24 hours into the program. There was a live launch call that was advertised as being accompanied by “FREE gifts!,” which were a free e-course and a teleclass by SARK. The Inner Mean Girl Cleanse had barely begun, and its hopefully worthwhile offering of positive influence against unnecessary internal negativity was already being muffled by its secondary agenda as a vehicle to advertise other programs by its contributors. At least, that’s how it felt with the ALL-CAPS-ed and exclamation-pointed excitement in the e-mail.
I didn’t know it yet, but I had just received the first of what would be many ad fliers.
This apparent bait-and-switch did not help me to cultivate good talk from the outset. I grumbled to myself, but, in the spirit of the first week, I chose to think positively and persevere. The real bully in my life is usually myself, and I wanted to give this course a shot instead of dropping out due to my own knee-jerk response to a sales flier in my inbox. I decided to hope for the best and carry on.
With that in mind, I gave the live launch call with SARK, Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy, a listen. As much as I tried to take it in with an open mind though, the repeated use of hyperbolic language struck me as precocious, hammy and pedantic in the way that one would speak to a small child. Words like “amazing” and “inspired” and “empowered” were sing-songed repeatedly, which only inspired me to think Really?, and want to hand them a thesaurus. I wanted to learn how to deal with my Inner Mean Girl, not join some 1990s-style cult of female empowerment reliant on dissociating through fictive, archetypal entities with names like “The Critic” and “The Comparison Queen” and “Perfectionist Patty”.
This is where the Inner Mean Girl Cleanse met my Outer Critical Bitch.
I do realize that this whole thing was called The Inner Mean Girl Cleanse. The title pretty much points out straight away that these archetypes were going to be part of the process and I should have expected it, but, still it irked me. Any therapeutic exercise that calls upon people to separate out parts of themselves as entities with particular characteristics strikes me as not only obfuscatory and reductive when it comes to understanding ourselves as complicated wholes, but, at its worst, it is also dissociative. It is a clever tactic to distance ourselves from the fullness of what it is to be human in all its messy negative and positive glory in order to create a tidier, cleaner package for ourselves to look at. You might think you feel better, but this creates more delusion, not less.
Despite my initial impression, though, I did take care to be mindful of gossip over the course of that week, and I found the vast amount of it, both from others and myself,
