How to Stop Getting Yelled At by Your Pro-Vax Friends

(And How to Make a Difference That Matters)

I don’t know if you’ve sat for a minute with how traumatized you probably are.

If you didn’t get vaccinated in the last two years, you’re in the minority. 

You had nonstop arm-twisting propaganda coming at you from all angles, in maybe the greatest discrimination campaign of your lifetime. 

You were gaslit for not doing what the media told you to do, even if you weren’t sure why you didn't want to “do as you were told” in the early days — besides a gut feeling.

Your president sentenced you to a “dark winter” of misery. Pundits including Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, and Piers Morgan (who has since eaten crow) hexed you. 

Celebrities and other influencers proclaimed that you should literally be sentenced to house arrest and denied all access to public life, for your discerning choice. Some wished you physical harm, or even death! 

This played out not only on the public stage, but in your personal life as well. You put up with intense bullying from many directions — from your own family, your friends, maybe your bosses … and even random strangers in the store. Some of your friends likely stopped talking to you.

And you’re still standing tall. But, you’re probably also suffering with some social anxiety or battle fatigue.

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You’re Weary … I Get It … (Me Too)

First, congratulations on being one of the few to refuse to be bullied into poisoning yourself repeatedly. I see you, and I would love to help.

I can completely understand why you may be very quickly “dukes up” in any conversation about the vaccine. These days, we never know, when meeting someone new, what “camp” they align with. Even those of us who didn’t already suffer from social anxiety are now finding casual interactions to be fraught with landmines. 

Even if you got the vaccine, you might be a holistic-leaning person, feeling frustrated by the limited options and manipulative tactics you’ve experienced in the allopathic medical industry.

This may not actually be the first time doctors have browbeat you if you didn’t buy their products.

It’s not my first time, either.

So maybe you could use some help “standing up for yourself.” That’s what this post is about.

Peer Pressure and “Fear Pressure”

A friend of GreenSmoothieGirl wrote us this email. And that prompted this post.

My staff asked me to take on the request at the end of the above post. It’s not a fun topic, because I theorize that every single one of us who didn’t get vaccinated has some level of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I’m No Stranger to This Dynamic

I’ve definitely felt this way for decades. I remember one very sweet neighbor telling the others that my children were the “pure vessels” because I went out of my way to make sure they weren’t eating a pillowcase full of poison on Halloween.

(I took other treats around to the neighbors, like natural fruit leather, before the festivities began, and asked them to give them to the kids in the wizard, ghost, Harry Potter, and pumpkin costumes).

But others weren’t so kind. The teachers gossiped: “Are her kids really allergic to junk food?”

My mother and mother-in-law didn’t support the no-junk-food lifestyle I adopted to get my kids well. My MIL sneered at our diet choices and said “You know, Robyn, kids grow out of asthma without making dietary changes. A little dairy and sugar isn’t going to hurt them.”

I could go on, but I’ll stop with these examples — they’re just my way of saying, “I’ve been there.”

Scientism: A Cult of Blind Obedience

Science has been co-opted. It used to be an open, objective exploration of what is true. Now it’s the virtual opposite — it’s a cult: the Cult of Scientism.

California has now made it a crime for a doctor to tell her patient anything that diverges from the government diktats (declared from on high by the CDC, the same bureaucracy that deceived the public into believing that the vaccine would stop transmission — which Pfizer has now clearly admitted it didn’t even test for, in its pre-market trial). 

In case you missed it, click this image:

You may think I’m being dramatic, but having escaped from the cult in which I was raised in my early forties has made me acutely aware of cult dynamics. For example:

• You must submit to it.

• You must not question it. 

• And government bureaucracies — or despots — decide what “it” is (e.g., the guy who, in a moment of astonishing hubris, dubbed himself  “The Science”)

Here are a few more common characteristics of cults:

• Cult leaders are experts in manipulation and mind control. 

• Cult leaders do your thinking for you, providing black-and-white answers to hard questions — which sits just fine with people who like to have the “lanes painted” for them.

• Cults also appeal to those who long for a source of comfort, however misguided. 

• Cults foment an “us vs. them” mindset. 

• Many cult members have rejected organized religion.

• Cult membership can be unsafe and do long-lasting harm..

• Cults ostracize and punish those who walk away from (or even threaten to leave) the cult.

• Cult members generally are entirely unaware that they are in a cult. 

And while I recognize that some on the other side view unvaxxed people to be similarly indoctrinated, the two factions are not mirror images of each other. Because opting out of what the majority is doing is based on independent thinking and research.

Plus, when you say no to the thing you have every social reason to say yes to, you're left with no “in group” to join. (For example, getting vaccinated was sold to the public as a chance to be seen in the admirable light of someone who “puts others’ needs first.”)

How to Call Off the Dogs

I don't know about you, but personally, I am SO not going through life being bullied by self-righteous cult members. Here are some ways I’ve averted the malice, and even managed to create some positive outcomes in these difficult situations:

1. Arm Yourself With Key Facts

A primary reason I don’t get “yelled at,” and that even my smartest friends avoid debating with me whatsoever, is that I’ve made it nearly a full-time job doing my best to become a walking encyclopedia of facts about the Covid-19 bioweapon. 

Injuring my oldest child as a baby, and putting myself in bed for four years (both as a result of allegedly “safe and effective” “vaccines”) motivated me to do that. One of my motives is, I’m doing penance.

Now, that said, you’re likely not going to make it a near-obsession to read and retain hundreds or thousands of factoids to help you out in a conversation with an angry pro-vaxxer.

But if you want to hold your own in a conversation with someone who has drunk the Kool-Aid and joined the cult, you’ll want to commit at least a few key facts and stats to memory. 

(Write them down, in a notebook or on your phone, next time you read something important, then read them a few times, to really learn them.)

2. Extend the Olive Branch 

While honing a few choice factual chops is absolutely key to standing strong in these contentious discussions, I also suggest checking yourself to make sure you’re speaking in love and compassion, with the Golden Rule, rather than in a spirit of debate or anger. 

I’m as dismayed by the comments of some in the medical freedom movement as I am by those in the ferociously pro-vax movement. 

While it’s true that civility, kindness, and the whole “inclusion” thing that the Left holds out like a badge of honor flew right out the window the minute a handful of serial-felon drug companies foisted their mystery products upon us. (It’s been two years now, and still none of us knows what’s in them.)

Are we doing any better at living our own values if we gloat about deaths and injuries, or we say that “they made their beds and now they have to sleep in them,” and the like?

(Also, being open minded, yourself, is an important aspect of credibility, and of modeling the values you claim to hold.)

3. Listen First

Listening to others — before (or even instead of) educating them— is also vital for building human connection, if you want any hope of eventually being heard. 

Last year, I had a beautiful two-hour conversation with neighbors who were vaccinated, and I’m quite certain the only reason I was able to share my anti-vax thoughts and be heard and received so well is that I first spent quite a bit of time listening to the woman’s traumatic experience being hospitalized for nearly a month with Covid, never seeing her family the entire time.

I would imagine that she and her friend listened to me–is that I listened first.

4. Stay the Course … Steadfastly and Gently 

What moved me, years ago, from being mocked by almost everyone around me, to full acceptance and even some heart-opening requests for advice with their own health issues, was just being consistent — staying the course.

Those who started out making fun of me for drinking green smoothies while they were eating Cheetos– well, the joke got old when they saw me doing it at every baseball game for years and years. 

Then when their health tanked, some were astute enough to give new consideration to the things I had done so steadfastly, for so long, and they wondered if my habits might make a difference for them. 

Many of them have reached out to me over the years, for ideas and recipes and help. But they would never have approached me had I not treated them with good humor and love in the first place. 

We have to keep that door open, by never mistreating anyone, even though they may have mistreated us. 

5. “Be the Change”

I get it, people have said awful things to you, if you refused to get vaccinated. 

And I know it’s crushingly painful to feel so powerless, watching everyone you care about get caught up in a stampede running off a cliff.

My adopted son is having heart surgery, later this month. After I paid him $200 to spend a couple hours reviewing content, before deciding to get the vaccines or not. And he got them anyway.

The folks who made this choice see their choice as life-saving medicine, while you and I see them as victims of a deranged propaganda campaign; we see their choice as irreversibly poisoning themselves. 

But neither snark,  nor counterpunch, nor righteous indignation paves the road to the world we want to live in. 

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

I actually pray that we’re wrong. And that our friends are okay.

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