Paranoid Guy -- Update

Yesterday I copied the trigger reframing worksheet in the book Recovery from Cults, which I bought at the ICSA conference a couple months ago, and filled it out in relation to the problem with Paranoid Guy. In the process, the questions it posed -- familiar to me from Cognitive Behavior Therapy-based forms in my social anxiety workbook -- led me to reconsider my previous decision to avoid him. I now think it's better to simply ignore him and learn by experience that his statements can't hurt me. (I called my friend Tricia yesterday and she agreed with this judgment.) In other news, I just bought a gift subscription to $pread magazine for Noam Chomsky. I had a quite frustrating email exchange with him some months ago in which he exhibited a closed mind about both sex work and kink. I'm hoping that regular exposure to the firsthand viewpoints of sex workers may make a difference. One reason the exchange was so aggravating is that it also triggered me in much the same way as Paranoid Guy does, because Chomsky kept attributing positions to me that I wasn't taking, even after I'd carefully restated my actual position. Because of my particular sensitivity to this sort of thing, I would go for weeks before opening his latest email to me, out of fear of the trauma of being misrepresented again. I had a similar experience a few years ago when first posting on Nina Hartley's forum board: I kept finding words put in my mouth, and putting off reading people's responses because this was so painful.