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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Hey man, I'm sorry you have had to go through all that. It sounds really difficult. I think you are doing really well to be where you are in life, given the unhealthy environment you were raised in. So, give yourself some praise if you can, you have had to endure a lot which you didn't deserve and came out reasonably ok. That says good things about you as a person.
For your specific topic with relationships, I would strongly encourage you to not pin your happiness on the idea of a relationship to bring warmth into your life. It is great to have a woman who loves you and who wants to be around you, but it isn't fundamentally going to fix things for you. That is, if you're struggling with depression and messy feelings about sexuality now, if you get a girlfriend you'll still struggle with those things just as much. You don't necessarily have to wait until you feel like those things are fixed before dating someone, because after all we are never finished projects. But don't make the mistake of thinking that dating someone is going to be a fix for them, because it won't be. They are separate issues.
I also would encourage you to not just go after whomever will have you. It seems like you feel like you can't be picky, but you must be picky to some extent when choosing a mate. Not picky about superfluous stuff (like how pretty she is or how big her breasts are), but picky about character for sure. Going in with an approach of "I have to take what I can get" is likely to mean you will settle for someone who is a bad fit for you, and you'll be miserable with that. So try to have some idea going in about what flaws you can and cannot realistically live with. It's easy to go "eh I can live with it" when you are in the heady early days of a relationship, but over the course of years that stuff will wear you down.
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