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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Due to the sensitive nature of this I will keep this as discreet as possible and not divulge too much, but at the ripe age of 18, I recently discovered that someone very near and dear to me was not merely exhibiting tough love but in fact had every symptom of NPD in the book. On one hand it's liberating to receive an answer for why everything is the way it is and beat myself up over what I needed to do differently this entire time. On the other hand, I'm left with an empty void in my heart having to deconstruct what I've learned from them, and come to terms with the fact that they operate on a different wavelength and nothing I say will make them have a change of heart. Very gut-wrenching feeling, at this juncture my church is the only thing that gives me the strength to keep going which I'm immensely grateful for.
Is there anybody here who is in a similar position or otherwise qualified to offer any valuable input?
I come from a bad home life, and the part about deconstructing what you have learned really resonates. I didn't really know what normal people were like until I was in my late 20s.
There have been three things that have been valuable for me:
I don't know if it helps, but I hope it does.
#1 is a big one in relationships that people greatly undervalue. If you can’t be a safe space for your spouse or partner, then you’d better start working on it very seriously. Trust is foundational for relationships of all types, and without it, what do you really have?
To point #3 as well, having a solid group of friends or family members helps with this a lot. There’s a very small group of people in my life for which we’d practically been each other’s therapist for 30 years. We grew up in the same environment, similar conditions and all had something to offer for how we made it through things, owing in no small part of the amount of support we showed for one another.
A lot of people get robbed of developing the psychological resources in their youth to be able to deal with tough living conditions and circumstances. It’s a major reason why so many people turn to drug use. It’s not really about the cool experience of “changing your consciousness,” the way people like Joe Rogan would tell you. No. The reason they take drugs is because it’s a form of escapism. It’s how rappers would relate to the pain of people in the hood. Developing the mental tools to navigate crushing hardship isn’t easy at all, and it takes a lot of time; but it can be done. I tend to think professional therapy is something of a racket, but in my case it wasn’t the ‘kind’ of thing I needed to make things better off.
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