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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As someone with a mother who most likely suffers from BPD (Mercifully, she's been pensioned off on VA disability and has embraced the "disabled veteran" identity in middle age, so she's mostly not my problem now.), I think you more or less nailed it. It's hard to describe, but if mom loved you, you were invincible. If she hated you, you were an enemy combatant to be destroyed. If someone else you loved was the object of her ire your only recourse was to stay out of the way.
It's an amusing instead of awful story (There were plenty of those.), but to give an example when I was seven years old right after my parents had divorced my father took me mud riding in his SUV. As a little boy into all things motorized of course I had fun mud riding with dad, but when I came home and expressed that I'd had fun mother took it to mean that I loved dad more than her, and so she kicked me out of her house, threw every belonging of mine out of onto the front yard, called my dad, and told him that he could have me. Of course, it couldn't be that easy. After dad showed up and dutifully packed all my stuff into his car mom changed her mind and there was a fight. Mom won, I stayed with her, and I'll never watching my clothes sway in his his back window as he fishtailed making the turn away from her house. My parents' post divorce "co-parenting" wound up being a 15 year War of the Roses.
I'm not sure it's entirely possible to come out of that experience without a mis calibrated emotional Richter scale. I find myself drawn to emotional intensity and struggle with finding women who don't have that to be...boring (The trick is to find someone who has an intense affect, but is otherwise relatively sane.). I have a sufficiently developed fear response that the actually violent borderline types (Mom was one, but they're a minority relative to the unfixable dysfunctional black holes.) will make me run quickly, but those who are skilled at eliciting care/pity have been a sore spot in my life. I'd be lying if I said with certainty that I wouldn't ruin my life for the right combination of hot/smart/crazy. Being on the right side of it is that good.
Yeah...that's accurate, and yes it's tragic. My last encounter was very brief (about six weeks), a roommate gone wrong. Her life's story was something akin to Jenny from Forrest Gump, sexually abused by father turned sex worker in her teens/twenties turned to drugs/alcohol to being hopelessly burned out by her mid-30s, interested only in drinking herself to death. There's "self-diagnosed on Tumblr", "diagnosed by a mental health professional but working on it", and "would never dare face a mental health professional but gives me all the heebie-jeebies", and she was firmly in the third category. I had the sense to nuke things quickly and got out of it unscathed, but I still think about her sometimes and hope that she found someone whose variety of codependency can deal with her, because she deserves better than what she's gotten/given herself from life. I just couldn't do it without being dragged down into her Hell, and as intoxicating as her affection was it wasn't worth it (could've been hot enough if she took better care of herself, wasn't smart enough to be interesting).
This is called splitting and is one of the main coping mechanisms associated with the illness.
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It's me.
And yeah, they also have to be smart and, to some degree, self aware.
Unfortunately them merely being aware that they're being unreasonable isn't enough to convince them to STOP being unreasonable.
The smart ones tend to be able to create unique coping mechanisms that work until they have a particularly bad episode and then all collapse at once.
At which point they usually shut down all connections in life, job, friends, living situation, move somewhere new and start over to try again "fresh."
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