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Wellness Wednesday for April 8, 2026

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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my parents were miserably married and I got to see that up front and personal because my mom saw me as her confidante.

That's tough. I'm sorry to hear that. I've had the same thing with my parents a bit, and have had to gently remind them that I (as a very not neutral party) can't really be there for them as a shoulder to cry on when they have issues with each other.

I was around five years old when my mom first told me, "I love your father, I just don't like him very much." I wasn't really great at setting firm boundaries at the time.

Yeah, that's fair. Fortunately, when my parents tried to talk to me about their marriage woes I was in my twenties so I had more ability to push back. I sympathize that you had to deal with that from a young age; I know it couldn't have been easy.