The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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That example works for me because I understand the underlying principle then - only you live inside your brain - but it absolutely works, I wouldn't be able to hang out on the motte if it didn't, because despite having no trouble on chans and lolcow farms, opinions on the motte hurt more because they matter to me. And on the motte the labels and attacks that hurt me aren't even meant as attacks it seems, or at any rate are never insulting enough to regular people to merit any mod action.
If an ad hominem feels accurate, step back a little and reassess - @urquan says we see many ad hom attacks based on success with the opposite sex allowing malicious actors to exploit a vaccum, and he's absolutely right, but it's not just pure maliciousness motivating them, it is also deep insecurity. (insult threads blur the line though, not everyone engaged is serious). You don't need to aggressively attack others when you are happy with yourself.
It all circles back to only you live in your head though. You can't be sure your attacker did it out of insecurity, but inside your head that makes as much sense as anything else. If it doesn't, find something else. What good are rationalisations if you can't use them to get out of a funk?
One thing that really upsets me (and I really hope me telling you this doesn't backfire on me, although that is what I expect) is when people use schizo or schizophrenic to mean violently insane or stupid. It used to make me so angry when people did it that I would burn with rage, because it affects me personally. But nothing ever happened if I reported it and me slinging a bunch of insults at the person who said it didn't do much except make people dislike me. But then I remembered I already had the answer, I'd had it for decades, since the days when I would get the shit kicked out of me on a daily basis - the only person who lives inside your head is you. Now when someone uses schizophrenic insultingly, or when one of our wealthier members casually insinuates something despicable about the working class I can respond in good humour.
The fact that you doubt your beliefs is a cool aspect of your personality you should be proud of, and it's probably looking like the biggest stumbling block for this method to work, but as a recovered schizophrenic I doubt my beliefs more than anyone. But beliefs inside your own head, beliefs with no outward facing elements about fleeting interactions with strangers, those you don't need to doubt, because they fundamentally don't matter. That's probably the one good thing about schizophrenia, the way it helps you delineate the difference between internal thoughts and thoughts that interact with reality, and see how your core thoughts remain distinctly internal at all times. But as I said, I have been using this technique for decades, schizophrenia is not a prerequisite.
You can prove it to yourself actually, by engaging in a bit of light trolling. Next time someone throws an ad hominem at you (I can't see the picture you linked or I would try to give you a better example) take what they said and instead of dismissing it amplify it. They say "you look like an incel" you say "and I fuck like one too". They call you a manlet you say "yeah my mum smoked when she was pregnant because she's fucking cool as shit." Or more universally, they say something about your appearance and you reply "yea that's true but my grandma says my dick makes up for it."
The only people you will be insulting will be yourself and your own family, and yet it almost always defuses the situation entirely, because you immediately demonstrate supremacy over your own mind.
I know I'm not very good at explaining myself, so if you have any questions I am happy to answer them. Or if you want to give it a go and someone insults you and you don't know how to handle it shoot me a pm and I can give you a new perspective on it.
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