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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I appreciate the context. It seems to me that your hands are rather tied, unless you want to go pretty drastic by doing things like calling the cops on her if she's driving drunk. I wouldn't do that myself, the consequences would be severe for the family, even if you manage to do it anonymously.
As for therapy, eh, for a would-be psychiatrist I'm ambivalent on it. I like me my drugs, no wishy washy bullshit. But that aside, therapy covers a lot of different techniques, from those with good empirical evidence bases to bullshitting everything like Freudians and Lacanians. I hope they're doing the more validated (and ideally less woo) stuff, but it's not a miracle maker, especially when a person seems to plausibly lack insight or regret for their decisions.
I'd advise you to wait and watch, at least for now. Or perhaps have a good bud of your brother, some he listens to, try and give him a hint. Or maybe have the family corner your SIL and make pointed comments when she's acting up.
But what do I know dawg, other than that it's a shitty situation to find yourself in. I do hope it works out!
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