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 you say is true, about the dangers and failure modes of it. But there's another aspect to it. Most modern people - and that comes equally for both men and women - don't have much experience being in physical confrontation and even less experience of being anything other than a helpless victim in that situation. I'm not talking about criminals steeped in violent street life or something like that, or professional fighters, most people on the street aren't like that. So the most common reaction for people in such a situation is absolute panic and rational brain shutdown. This is hard to avoid even for somebody who is well-trained, we all have mostly the same hardware after all, but for somebody without any physical conflict experience - which, in our modern world, is a lot of people - it will be a very major factor. Some self-defense training can reduce this reaction. Will it make a tiny woman be able to subdue a violent criminal twice her size? No, never. But maybe it can give her a chance to slip out, run away, hold out till the help comes, make enough noise, make herself more trouble than it's worth, etc. It's never equal chances, but it's some better chance. Of course, if the person is stupid and thinks having better chances means one has to take on more risks now - that's really self-defeating.
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