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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2863 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Scruton. Also picking up Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.

I just finished Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder

I'm just starting Stop Walking on Eggshells now.

I'm reading both for 'reasons'.

Did you find them helpful? Asking for a friend, as the Redditors say.

Not OP and my situation is different (dealing with a parent, i.e. mother who almost certainly suffers from BPD), but Understanding the Borderline Mother was useful to me for two reasons: One, for whatever it's worth, it was validating in describing an at times weird and other times so over-the-top experiences that it's hard to describe or expect outsiders to believe.

Secondly, I did use it as a screening question when picking a therapist in my early 20s, i.e. "Have you read this?", and I think that doing so was helpful for finding one that had a frame of reference for dealing with my situation.

Otherwise, I'm not sure what a book is supposed to do. If you're at the point of picking and reading one about a relatively niche topic like this you probably have a decent to good idea of what you're dealing with. Maybe a book written by someone with letters after their name gives you the permission to feel however about whatever but in the end what happened happened and there's no undoing that. There's only where you are now and how you choose to deal with it or not, and the hardest part about being a survivor of child abuse (Ugh, that term is a touch cringe inducing.) is realizing that as an adult you are the author of your life's story now. Nobody is going to give you free karma points to cash in on living happily ever after and what you do when you're in charge is on you. As an adult dealing with a shitty spouse or friend the same applies.

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