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Wellness Wednesday for September 6, 2023

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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I respect you for having the guts to go through some of these experiences, I know it's not easy. The most tragic part of our current society is that we don't have a good avenue for healing this sort of trauma. Therapy is an attempt, albeit hobbled by it's regulated and bureaucratic forms to the point of almost uselessness.

If you can, I'd recommend finding a religious tradition and community to immerse yourself in before opening that box. Religion is uncool nowadays, but it really is the best container for this sort of work. Religious traditions have been selected over centuries to be useful to people going through deep transformational experiences that can often feel paradoxical and too large to grasp with our rational mind.

At the very least, as you allude to by your discussion of 'demons' in this post, religious frameworks give you a shared language to discuss your experiences with others, without the fear of them calling you crazy.