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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Notes -
What are you counting as silent treatment? It could mean making a point of pretending someone doesn't exist, or it could be expecting someone to proactively reach out more than they're interested in doing so, or it could be badgering somebody who then retreats without satisfying your appetite for their input.
I could have been accused of all three at points. In the first case it would have been simple carelessness and taking someone for granted rather than a conscious tactic to upset them. In the second it's just disparate needs for reassurance. The times that I most remember consciously choosing to be silent were when I didn't fully understand myself and so couldn't say what I felt, or I did understand myself and knew that my position was either unacceptable or indefensible, or a combination where I knew my position was unacceptable but couldn't understand and express why I held it even if I wanted to. In that aspect I'd say it more closely matched "their words don't matter" rather than "act like a brat", but it assumes that sufficient words are available to be said.
What was I hoping to achieve? Distancing myself from what I felt was unpleasant and uncomfortable or insurmountable. Simple defence. I was never trying to make anyone else feel bad ("pushing back", even if passively), and I still can't fully wrap my head around the idea of both wanting to make someone feel bad and imagining that not talking to them is the way to do it. Passive aggression relies on baiting someone into questioning what they did wrong. Either they come to agree that they did something wrong and address that, or they're forced to accept the frame in order to deny it whereupon they can be attacked directly (actually obliquely). But it depends on them taking the bait, which depends on them caring, which depends on them noticing.
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