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Wellness Wednesday for November 1, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 find the best thing is to show reverence for the deceased, even if you don't really care. Besides being socially appropriate, it can help others through their grief.

This is generally what I do, I've just been doing it for so long, and people around me do it too, that I'm not really sure how anyone really feels. Which is why I asked here.

There's been a few situations after a death, where I've been having a quiet drink with someone I trust who doesn't seem to be grieving. I'd say something like 'you know, this hasn't really hit me much. How about you?'. I've had replies like 'Yeah, I'm not sad really at all'. Or 'Yeah it sucks, but they had a good life so I'm not really upset about it to be honest.'

You just need to be careful about how you probe people about this kind of thing, but you can get some really honest replies from people that ground the whole experience. For people who haven't experienced deaths of people in their lives it can seem like this really big thing that you need to walk on eggshells around, but after a few deaths you realise that its just another life event like a wedding, or a birth. At least if it wasn't something really tragic like suicide, murder, or the death of a child.

I don't really expect death to hit me hard any more unless its my wife or child.

I don't really expect death to hit me hard any more unless its my wife or child.

I feel a bit the same. My parents and siblings would probably hit me hard, as well as a few close friends and neighbors.

Surprisingly SSCReader went through that and seems like they came out ... not great, but not ruined either.

I guess people get through stuff.

I've dealt with clinical depression most of my life, and the weirdest thing to explain to other people is that it seems worse when I should be happy. Its when something terrible happens that it almost fits better.

I've dealt with clinical depression most of my life, and the weirdest thing to explain to other people is that it seems worse when I should be happy. Its when something terrible happens that it almost fits better.

Yeah, I've been through periods of acute depression in my life. I can see how you would have people around in the depths of grief, but for you it was Tuesday.