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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In terms of situation, you sound pretty similar to myself, though your condition might be more severe. My own perspective is that skills based therapy is probably going to do nothing for you. When it comes down to it, my ability to rationalize my negative thoughts is too strong for me to overcome. On anger, I sympathise. Holding a lot of anger is really unpleasant especially when you don't have any good way of expressing yourself.
To that end, I think insight-based therapy could be a better choice. The way I see it insights are basically ways of fitting your symptoms into a narrative that you can resolve.
Since it usually comes up, I personally found that exercise doesn't really help at all with this stuff, except acutely and sometimes not even that.
This is definitely something I've struggled with. I think one of the big challenges for smart, philosophical people who struggle with emotional regulation is how powerful the rationalizing impulse is in them.
That's one of the big reasons I want to lean more towards skill or solution based therapy, actually -- I'm not particularly interested in altering my worldview or doing extensive cognitive restructuring, and to be entirely honest I would find it impossible to lean on the judgment of a psychotherapist when doing so. I think someone would have to be close to enlightened -- as @TheDag said -- to actually offer insight into my cognitions or personality that would both ring true and motivate change. Otherwise, and this is what I've run into with the current therapist, I would quite easily be able to argue against their supposed insights to my satisfaction, if not theirs. My hope would be that, with a more skills-based approach, we could talk more about behaviors than cognitions. And my behavior is really what I want to be different.
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