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've talked about it here several times in the past, but yeah, I've been there. My own particular realization didn't hit until my mid-forties and took some seriously and pervasively bad behavior on the part of my mother to illuminate the reality of the situation (BPD Queen), so if you're catching it at the age of 18, you're way ahead of the game on that front. For me, the revelation as as dramatic as my first pair of glasses in terms of finally being able to see fuzzy things clearly. The one thing that I want to add to all of the good advice below is that the deconstructing what you've learned from them is going to take a long time, but will also probably be the best possible thing you can do for yourself in the long run. It's taken me years to start bringing my life and my personal relationships into some sort of better balance, and a lot of the time my honest answer to what I want or what I think is best for me is still an, "I don't know," but one of the things that I do know is that if I pay enough attention to what I'm experiencing, as opposed to just stuffing it into the closet and hyperfocusing on $Thing_In_Front_Of_Me, I can have enough of a sense to understand what's generally good for me versus what's generally draining and exhausting. And if it's the latter, then I have to ask myself why I'm in a situation that's draining and exhausting, and whether or not I'm setting myself on fire so that I can keep a loved one warm for a time, which is to say that at least I no longer give until it hurts and then some purely out of habit based on previous expectations.
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