Hasta La Gadget!

When I was unhappily married, I kept my feelings secret for many years, hoping that I would snap out of it.

On the inside, I was suffering with my torment, but to everyone else, I appeared happily married. And of course, my parents they had absolutely no clue that I was unhappy. So, the day I told them I wanted a divorce, I think they would have handled the news better if I told them I was gay.

When they tried talking me out of it on multiple phone calls, each time I felt like I was a lawyer presenting my case for judgment, hoping I would be granted amnesty.

But it was a complete waste of my time.

They were just as much a victim in my marriage as I was — they drank the “narcissistic Kool-Aid,” and fell for all of it. But while I had broken free from my husband’s spell, they were still in a trance by his false charm and grandeur.

I made a critical decision — I couldn’t wait around for their approval — it was my life, and I had to do what was right for me. Soon enough, I had hoped, they would understand the truth (which they did, although it took them three years).

However, every time I would tell them my divorce plans or even mention the D-word, their plea efforts pressed on: “Oh Lindsey, are you sure you want to do this? Can’t you do counseling? What about the kids? You know, marriage isn’t always a bed of roses; it takes work and commitment…” Blah, blah, blah.

Their “support” was becoming my greatest road block. Every week I built the courage and strength to move ahead, but even their slightest negative comment would set me back a few weeks. I had to build a boundary, perhaps my biggest boundary yet.

There’s a funny thing about our parents — no matter our age, we still feel like a child when we are around them. We can’t always articulate our feelings, perhaps because we are afraid of what they will think.

But when it comes to taking a massive risk in life, you need not their approval, but their willingness to adhere to what you require of them. And if they are unwilling, you walk away, hopefully only temporarily.

You do not have to listen to advice from those who have never witnessed rage, insults or lack of empathy. You cannot make decisions based on their opinion of a person who is charming only in public.

Only seek guidance and validation from those who truly understand your situation. Anything less than that, you set a boundary. Here’s how:

1. Write down your trigger issues — what do people say that get you upset, uncomfortable, sad, fearful, etc.? Let’s say it’s the question, “Are you sure you want to do this?” Then ask yourself, how does this make you feel? If it makes you retreat into insecurity, then this is your boundary, and it’s not up for questioning by anyone.

2. Then you write this down, practice it, and then verbally state your boundary:

“Mom, I can see why this is confusing you, but I can’t have you ask that question anymore. It makes me feel scared and insecure, and all I need is support right now. Are you able to refrain from asking me that?”

And the last question is key — get them to answer, so that they truly acknowledge your boundary. If they can’t, then tell them the consequence:

“Okay, then I’m going to need space from you right now. When you are ready to be supportive, then I am here to accept it.”

See how easy and refreshing that is? Now you no longer have to deal with their grief and confusion, on top of yours!

When a woman gives birth to a child — you don’t hear the nurse saying, “Wow, are you sure you want to rip your vagina to 13 centimeters? It’s gonna be pretty rough down there!”

Or what about the climbers on Mt. Everest — you don’t see Sherpas saying, “It’s pretty cold and horrible up there — you might even die — are you sure you wanna do this?”

I’m pretty sure that a birthing mother or a mountain climber would tell anyone to shut the hell up should it interfere with their mission.

You must do the same.

Except don’t tell your parents to shut the hell up. Use the examples above, please… I don’t want them to yell at me.

Lindsey Ellison is founder of Start Over. Find Happiness., a coaching practice that helps women navigate their divorce or breakups. She specializes in helping women with narcissistic abuse, and coaches them on how to break free from their narcissistic partners. For a free video series on breaking free, click here.

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While Realpolitik arguments, and in particular the need to co-opt Iran into a stable balance of power system in the Middle East, have been central to President Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening to Tehran, he has also integrated an element of idealism into his approach, proposing that American “engagement” with Iran would bring about political and economic changes in that country.

“I think the election of [President Hassan] Rouhani indicated that there was an appetite among the Iranian people for a rejoining with the international community, an emphasis on the economics and the desire to link up with a global economy,” suggested Obama in an interview with the New York Times’ Tom Friedman. “And so what we’ve seen over the last several years, I think, is the opportunity for those forces within Iran that want to break out of the rigid framework that they have been in for a long time to move in a different direction,” stated the president, predicting that a nuclear deal with Iran would strengthen “those forces inside of Iran that say, ‘We don’t need to view ourselves entirely through the lens of our war machine. Let’s excel in science and technology and job creation and developing our people.'”

According to Friedman, the notion that American engagement with Iran would help accelerate political and economic reforms in that country was part of a new Obama Doctrine. But in fact, some version of this “doctrine” has been the focus of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and has been promoted by leading American pundits, including Friedman.

Hence, the decisions to normalize trade relationship with China and allow it to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) reflected the expectation that not only would the United States benefit economically from greater access to Chinese markets but also that China would become a more open society.

“In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem,” said then President Bill Clinton in a speech he delivered in 2000. “We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China,” he stressed, as he marketed his policy of engagement with China. “In the knowledge economy, economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand,” he predicted.

Like Obama who admits that the political future of Iran remained uncertain, Clinton conceded in 2000 that bringing China into the WTO “doesn’t guarantee that it will choose political reform.” But “accelerating the progress, the process of economic change, will force China to confront that choice sooner, and it will make the imperative for the right choice stronger,” Clinton insisted.

Anyone who goes through the speeches delivered by U.S. officials and the op-eds authored by American columnists since 2000, would discover that Clinton’s prognosis about China would become a foreign policy axiom in Washington. It assumed that whether it was in China, or Russia or the Middle East, economic and diplomatic engagement with the United States and the West would help drive political reform and lead to the embrace of a more accommodative foreign policy.

Very few people would deny that the introduction of capitalism into China and its integration into the global economy helped to pull out millions of people out of poverty and to make the country more prosperous. There is a continuing debate over the long-term impact of China’s rise as an economic power on American economic interests. But no one would seriously argue today that China is on the verge of being transformed into a democratic system and by extension, into an ally of the United States. In fact, Maoist China in the 1970’s probably shared more common interests with the United States than it does today.

In a way, in trying to forecast political changes in China, Russia, and elsewhere, American officials and analysts proved to be more often wrong than right. That is not surprising if you consider that most of them probably wouldn’t be able to predict who would be elected as the next sheriff in their town, not to mention as the next president of their country.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, while it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, it’s quite dangerous to make critical policies for the future based on those predictions that can prove to be nothing more than wishful thinking.

But that is certainly what Republican and Democratic administrations have been doing when it came to making decisions about war and peace in the Middle East in recent years. Hence, President George W. Bush ousted Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as part of a campaign to democratize Mesopotamia and advance the Freedom Agenda in the Greater Middle East, while President Obama assumed that helping eject Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak from power would allow the United States to ride on the rising wave of history powered by the Arab Spring.

It is amusing that Republican lawmakers and neoconservative pundits who were the leading advocates of the Bush Administration’s plans to remake the Middle East along democratic and liberal lines, have been bashing Obama’s response to the Arab Spring and his proposed nuclear deal with Iran by depicting it as the foreign policy naiveté of a spacey peacenik.

In a way, not unlike Obama, these critics are also fantasizing about the day when Iran would become a thriving democracy and a prosperous free market economy. But while Obama expects that to take place as a result of American engagement with Iran, Republicans and neoconservatives believe that America could help that happen through a U.S.-led regime change in the country. In fact, they criticized the current White House for not providing support for the anti-government demonstrations led by the Green Movement in Iran in 2009.

But while it’s clear that they majority of Iranians would like to see the lifting of the economic sanctions on the country as well as expansion of trade and investment ties with the West, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of popular pressure for political reforms in Iran today that would lead it to a more democratic and liberal direction.

It is quite conceivable that the integration of Iran into the global economy and the ensuing economic growth that the country would experience could strengthen the hands of the leaders of the Islamic Republic, and that like in the case of China or Russia, a more economically powerful Iran would embrace a nationalist agenda that could even win the support of many secular Iranians.

The prospect that a nuclear accord and American engagement with Iran would not necessarily turn Iran into a democratic ally of the United States doesn’t necessarily mean that Washington shouldn’t reach a diplomatic deal with Tehran that would make sense based on U.S. national interests. But it then should let the Iranians write their own political history that would reflect their own hopes and not American wishful thinking.

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