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Wellness Wednesday for November 22, 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 haven't really considered it, as my understanding is it was created for borderline personality disorder. When I investigated it, I was troubled by the focus, certainly part of what's necessary to treat BPD, that it puts on trying to get people to realize they're not well ("recognize the illness"). I guess it just sounds condescending. I don't have the instability of self-image or interpersonal relationships that characterizes BPD, my perceptions there are some of the most stable views I have. So insofar as DBT is oriented towards that, I'm not sure it's applicable to me.

But nevertheless, looking at it with fresh eyes, there's definitely a lot about DBT that does apply to the problems I face, especially how the focus is on skills to deal with dysregulated emotions, taking them almost as a given, because for me they kind of are. Being able to gain a certain amount of cognitive distance between my emotions and my thoughts is actually a big part of how I cope with my problems as it stands. If I let them carry me with them, I think my emotions would quickly become overwhelming. Insofar as I appear to casual observers like @TheDag to be well-adjusted (and this is something that I hear in person as well, acquaintances and even friends are often surprised how much I struggle with my emotions), it's because I have a mode of thinking that challenges impulsivity and counters dumb decisions with a calculation of utility. That is probably the nerdiest way to put it, but still, it's true.

Often I think that, if I weren't so introverted and behaviorally conventional, I would be much, much more emotionally challenged and poorly adjusted than I am. My negative emotions, philosophical (and thus often detached) orientation, and conventional behavior operate kind of in a homeostasis that helps me cope. If one piece were missing, I think I would spiral out of control.

There's probably something to the DBT assertion (that I saw on the wiki page you linked) that emotional dysfunction can persist because it's rewarded or not challenged by the environment. As it is, I think I don't expose my dysfunction to the world to the point where its consequences would alter my perception. I was reading about schema therapy the other day (it might even have been a lesswrong post?), and I think in part my problems persist because my negative perceptions are never challenged by reality, because I don't act on them. There's probably also something to that.