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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
I guess I don't have a very good handle on what you mean here by 'pity'. Do you just mean self-loathing?
I see self-loathing as less central than self-pity right now. I think the basic definition of "feeling sorrow for someone's misfortunes" is what I mean by pity. So to fit my example, some bad memory trigger makes me anxious, I pity myself to cope with the pain (feel sorrow about the past, about what it means about me as a person, etc.), a critical feeling enters judging me of not being worth pity, and I turn that around and say, oh, what a misfortunate situation it is that I should feel shame from pitying myself , and from there you have that recursive cycle. And that is potentially one of many strategies to sustain the pity, self-loathing can enter as another strategy, etc.
It seems like what has worked for me lately is a very strong belief that I will not benefit from striving to pity myself, which would short-circuit this process if I am right that this is what's happening. It may be that others can pity themselves healthily, or I might regain the ability to do so. But I believe it's possible that because I used it so reliably as a coping mechanism, I developed a unhealthy dependency on it that it is best to quit.
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