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 -
Apologies this response is going to be briefer than I would like secondary to me being on vacation.
Also apologies I don't like diagnosing people second hand, but..... based off of what you said in the past and here this person almost certainly has cluster-b personality traits and very likely has borderline personality disorder.
This means a few things.
-People with this sort of personality structure have mangled coping mechanisms. They don't handle stress in a healthy way and that often includes lashing out in seemingly irrational and inappropriate ways, for instance "splitting" (people are "all good" or "all bad"). Now that the board is the adversary they are super evil and awful and therefore certain kinds of behavior is both justified and necessary. "Projection" is also very common.
-Self-harm, "fake" suicide attempts, and "real" suicide attempts are all common responses to distress in this population. It is questionable whether these behaviors are ever an appropriate response, but it's very commonly super duper out of proportion with the cause of stress here. They don't generally have very serious attempts though "if you break up with me I'm going to overdose...on melatonin" but do still have higher rates of completion than population average.
-If things aren't going well with people like this, they are super fucking frustrating. Don't feel about your response not being up to your standards. These people are hard to deal with and even professionals in a professional setting need to constantly stop themselves from going "Jesus fucking christ shut your fucking mouth."
-These people are very good at hijacking social justice, the legal system, and other avenues to get revenge, make changes to something, whatever. This is often distressing for everyone else.
In sum you didn't do anything wrong and while this person deserves some pity and human decency for being both a human being and mentally ill, they are still a threat to you and doing things that absolutely should drive you bonkers (and you shouldn't feel bad about it). Borderline is essentially the female equivalent of anti-social personality disorder (gross oversimplification but still) and while both deserve kindness you should take steps to protect yourself and not feel bad about it.
Outside of social justice communities most people have experiences with a person like this and kinda get the vibe.
Why are social justice communities so immune to noticing BPD?
Questioning lived experience and emotions is typically a no-go in those communities so it's really hard to challenge borderlines. Likewise it's common to not be able to challenge them when they use social justice language/concepts. This leads to a feedback loop of poor coping skills and reality testing that can lead to poor outcomes in these patients and difficulty in treatment.
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This is good advice, thank you
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