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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From an old Reddit post: When you use the words “I should”, you’re silently finishing the sentence with “…in order to be worthy of love and respect.”
Spot on! Also, “I should [verb]” is a comparison of my choices with a standard I got from someone else if I can’t truthfully say “I want to…” or “I need to…” in its place. If that replacement doesn’t help, I can try replacing it with “I could…” or “I can…” to replace obligation with opportunity and maybe even place it in my Next Actions queue, pre-choosing it in a way.
There’s also “I should be able to…” which is a similar dynamic relating ability to worth.
Do people really process language in this way? It doesn't feel like that internally to me. All these phrasings are basically equivalent and I certainly am not consciously making a distinction between them.
I, also, always got mad when my friend's mom wouldn't give me a cookie if I asked, "Can I have a cookie." No I'm not still mad, why should you ask, or is it would you ask?
Sort of yes, but not in the way I think you’re asking about. This post is about a few of the wellness-related emotion-based implications used by an unhealthy subconscious which uses “should” to smuggle a personal negative judgment in with a prioritization statement. As a person with autism, I have found that stating the exact implications of my innocuous statements can cleanly uncover my subconscious/unconscious expressing someone else’s emotions as if I’d originally generated them.
My “should” analysis hit me hard since I’ve been working on the unconscious portion of my weight problem lately with some success. I’d returned to “should” emotion-statements without noticing: “I shouldn’t eat, I’m full” instead of the decisive “I won’t eat” or the confessional “I want to eat”, “I should be able to turn down food” instead of the opportunistic framing “I can”, and so on. My own big realization struck whilst reading about someone with ADHD recounting making the statement “I should be able to focus” who was then told by their therapist ‘When you use the words “I should”, you’re silently finishing the sentence with “…in order to be worthy of love and respect.”’
Neither the human seeking of self-esteem, nor the akrasiatic self-negation of unworthiness emotions, care about the logic of inability/disability. They are of a different nature than logic.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YWmIlGQmuvU
Yeah, yeah, but it does take a while to work out which estimations of one’s worth and abilities are just delusions and which ones model reality.
The mind can be as hallucinatory as an LLM on the small details, especially since, as an autistic person, my learned understanding of emotions is basically prosthetic for my missing emotional instincts.
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