Hear what happened when this listener, a popular Wisconsin farm girl moved to the big city and crippling anxiety set in. Now throw in her discovering she’s a lesbian and her mother’s dislike of gays. Sounds like the recipe for a schizophrenic break.
This episode was taken down at Bobby’s request. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Incestuous or inappropriate behavior by parents isn’t always easy to define. Paul’s friend “Barbara” and her boyfriend “Steve” (both using pseudomnyms) talk about their parents, their childhoods, and the issues they struggle with especially learning to use sex for power and manipulation instead of intimacy.
The Holocaust survivor, mother, teacher and activist reflects on her coping mechanisms, her ability to find joy, feelings unique to motherhood, her childhood in Nazi-occupied Warsaw as a Jewish 7 year-old, and the special bond she forged with her mother, Eugenia Lubowski Krol, as they fled for their lives.
The comic actor (The Sarah Silverman Program) and writer (Jimmy Kimmel) talks to Paul about his conservative upbringing, the teenage rebellion that landed him in military school, his agorophobia and the odd manifestation of his panic attacks.
The standup comedian (Last Comic Standing, The Tonight Show) and podcaster (You Had to Be There) opens up about hitting bottom with anorexia as a teen, only to discover ten years later, her food issues haven’t disappeared. She and Paul talk about self-medicating, caring too much about what other people think, avoiding painful truths, and the difficult road to self-acceptance.
The former East L.A. gang member has been dodging bullets for years – sometimes literally sometimes figuratively. Though he walked away from his criminal ways years ago, he opens up about the mindset that made that life seem like a good choice, the high that comes from being shot at, dealing with tragedy, finding God and what it felt like to be a Chicano in 1970’s Los Angeles.
Paul’s friend Ru stops by to talk about the deep-rooted fear she has of men abandoning her. From her absentee Air Force dad to her broken poet boyfriend living in a storage shelter, she reveals the painful choices she has made to try to get men to stay – sleeping with Gene Simmons and chasing Tommy Lee – and the humiliation by peers that almost killed her. We talk about the damage of labeling girls as “sluts”. Plus some great listener suveys, especially one about not knowing what constitues sex abuse. How can you not listen to an episode involving Gene Simmons and Albert Einstein?
The actor/ singer/ comedian is best known for performing musical comedy with Stephen Lynch, most notably selling out Carnegie Hall in 2009. What most people don’t know is that Mark was diagnosed at age eleven with scleroderma, a crippling, often fatal disease. He has beaten the odds but denying the pain and fear associated with it left him with a coping mechanism just as insidious – an addiction to lying. Mark can be seen on the show A.N.T. Farm on the Disney Channel.