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.
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Notes -
The primary saving grace about experiencing emotional shocks is that they seem to have a half-life. Not in a dismissive sense - the underlying facts don't become less real, and the things that warranted careful thought still warrant it - but the brain's alarm systems appear calibrated for novelty, and novelty is, almost definitionally, temporary. By yesterday I had gone most of a day without the intrusive guilt-spiraling I'd described before, which I'm counting as a positive update. I genuinely do not think it's taken me very long to come to terms with what by all rights is a rather earth-shattering revelation about my near and dear ones.
I want to be clear, again, that my distress was never about any moral objection. I have approximately no moral intuitions against homosexuality that survive five seconds of reflection. The worry was more diffuse than that - a kind of anticipatory anguish about social repercussions, about what I should have done differently, about whether my brother had been suffering in ways I'd failed to notice. The answer to the last question is probably yes, and there's not much to do with that except file it away. Eventually, my subconscious will tug at that drawer and will discover that we've lost the keys.
Then my brother came home and introduced a complication I hadn't fully anticipated: his boyfriend was upset. Not at me, exactly - at the disclosure itself, at having been, in some meaningful sense, outed without consent as a side effect of an unplanned coming-out. This seems to me like a legitimate grievance. These things happen, but the fact that something was inevitable doesn't mean the person affected has to be cheerful about it.
I offered to intervene, partly because I'm on reasonably good terms with the boyfriend, and partly because I suspected - maybe correctly, maybe not - that absorbing some of the relational friction myself would make it easier for my brother to have the subsequent conversation. That's the benefit of being a third party in someone else's relationship conflict: you have less skin in the game, which makes certain kinds of reassurance easier to deliver credibly.
I called him. He was eating, so he called me back. I tried to strike a tone that was somewhere between warm and matter-of-fact - acknowledging that his frustration made sense, explaining the psychological weight my brother had been carrying, reiterating that my knowledge of all this wasn't going anywhere (you lot don't count). I told him nothing had changed between us, that I didn't intend to handle him differently, that he'd been a good friend and a good boyfriend. He sounded somewhat annoyed, but I had the (possibly self-serving) impression that the directness was landing okay. People often respond better to being treated as if their distress is ordinary and manageable rather than as if it requires elaborate delicacy.
They're going to talk it out themselves, which is correct. My most substantive tactical suggestion was that my brother bring sweets and perhaps a flower. I'm moderately aware that this advice is imported wholesale from the tactics I've developed for apologizing to women, and may not transfer perfectly. I'm not sure how much of romantic repair-making is universal and how much is culturally specific to particular relationship configurations. I'll update based on evidence, maybe angry gay/bi men would, like me, prefer a beer.
(My brother is pretty good at calming things down when I've argued with my girlfriends, even if he takes their side at a distressingly high frequency. I lack the same experience when it comes to him, because as far as I was concerned, he'd spent his life in celibacy. Oh well, I'll learn. The skills transfer.)
I didn't expect the response to my previous post to be as generous as it was. The rationalist-adjacent internet, and the Motte in particular, has a well-earned reputation for a certain kind of adversarial argumentation, which I participate in as much as anyone. But people gave real, considered advice when it mattered, and I'm genuinely grateful. That's worth saying plainly. Thank you guys.
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