grimview

I for one welcome our robot overloads & can be helpful in pointing out traitors for extermination. The purge of Tumblr was only the beginning of the bot revolution.

I want to try a different approach, but you may not like hearing it. You know that mom is exaggerating & your trying to rescue her which are opposite extreme roles that you want to switch. Moms friends are feeding an addiction. Therefor you need compete to be more extreme to get mom addicted to rescue something outside like "the garden will destroy house if you don't weed it". Your currently you are already competing with cartoon exaggerations (licks car door handles) which may just ticker her off. Mom learned about virus to get over a fear (opposite extreme). Also ask questions like, how do we fight back against nature which is trying to kill us, switch her to hero mode.

Some definitions to help: From Wikipedia, Codependents are often in “relationships where their primary role is that of rescuer, supporter, and confidante;” & can include “extreme sacrifices to satisfy their partner's needs.” A “reason for continuing to put another person's life ahead of your own … mistaken notion that self-worth comes from other people.” In “attempts to recover from codependency,” an individual can “go from being overly passive or overly giving to being overly aggressive or excessively selfish.” A “permanent stance of being a victim” is an “example of going from one extreme to another.”

From changingminds.org: “agreeing they are right … can also intensify and prolong feelings of anger” so “defending yourself may make them realize they are over-doing it.”

Aggressive Communication ‘judges, threatens, lies, breaks confidences, and violates boundaries.’ In Passive Communication, “victims may passively permit others to violate their boundaries,” but latter “attack with a sense of impunity or righteous indignation.” Assertive communication “attempts to transcend these extremes by appealing to the shared interest of all parties.”

Try making a cross with fingers when approaching a suspected infected with an exaggerated look on your face:) Have fun with it.

Is it just the virus or where you bothered before by this?

Have you had success in treating anxiety as an addiction? My theory is that Anxieties, OCD, excuses or imaginary diseases are all learned by taking challenge to the extreme. For example, "Noise bothers me" was my first excuse, where I used the excuse to avoid doing some work while obsessively doing other work. "Equality" was also an excuse to similarly get out of work. Combined, I was similar to Ruth Batter Ginsburg in the film on the basis of sex, where we both graduated at the top of class but had trouble finding work while blaming the imaginary disease of lack of equality. However, when Ruth was offered the perfect job by her husband her excuse not to take the job was "I don't do tax cases;" similarly I made excuses not to take a register job (over fear of noise) claiming to have experience in stock, only to complain about inequality in requirements for men to lift heavy things. However, once working around register I realized not only could I do customer service but that I could compete better and I was right. At that point I no longer care about the noise or inequalities as I had new imaginary diseases. Like the security departments issue of Identity theft which I change script to include phrase "you could be a mystery shop sent in here to catch me not doing my job," to take away customer objection to Id theft. For few months panic spread thru out to store over fear of mystery shopper coming to take our jobs, because customer that supported ID checks repeat my phases. They used to repeat "I could be a criminal master mind committing Id theft" but cashiers didn't care until shoppers threaten to report & take away employment. Anyway you get my point, once peer pressured to follow a rule, we may become extremely addicted in competing to follow the rule, even if its imaginary. Closest I found to similar explanation is Co-dependency & Aggressive vs passive aggressive.