Now that I’ve caught you with the clickbait title,

Basically every post has included some form of toxic self-hate, minus one or two mentioning exercise. While I do like being able to confront these in the first place, the purported goals and name of this community gives people who are giving the exact wrong advice far too much credibility, and the last thing these people need is a comment with the most upbears regurgitating individualistic self-help concepts at them.

If we’re going to keep this sort of community around, I suggest doing some serious research and basing it off of DBT, and integrating serious critiques of CBT style mental healthcare and improvement.

I am just some random nerd who is terrible at self-improvement at general, so I understand taking this with some serious doubt. But I just had to get this off my chest.

Thank you, WithoutFurtherBelay

    • WithoutFurtherBelay [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      Crab bucket mentality is when I want my comrades to apply materialism to their concepts of self improvement and the more they use materialism to improve themselves the more crab bucket-y it is

          • RonPaulyShore [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            fwiw all of my encounters with cognitive behavioral therapy have suggested that it concerns engaging in practices (journaling, breathing exercises, meditation practice, etcetera etcetera etcetera) aimed to develop more healthful and less debilitating patterns of thought, so i’m not really following what you’re saying (if i’m affirmatively open to CBT, and i affirmatively engage in such practices, am i not implicitly “making decisions and changes about [myself] . . . to further [my] goals”? i’m not even being shitty or rhetorical: what would it mean to do, whatever we want to call this process or aim --of internal change, directed for our individual/communal/political betterment-- what would it mean, substantively, to do this process “dialectically”, or to do this process by “applying materialism”?

            would a dialectically-hip comm just entail providing a coda or preface on every request for or provision of advice, clarifying that we are asking for and providing such advice with the acknowledgement that we understand ourselves partly as individuals who enact change on an individual level, but we are seeking to do more and to be able to do more in light of our obligations to our environment/communities, and aren’t just trying to sigma-grind and slay pussy? would it be a comm that is just really encouraging and tries to maintain a positive outlook in the answers it provides and receives? cause i’d agree with this, but assumed it was already what was going on.

            • iie [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              10 months ago

              “Dialectical” just means there’s a feedback loop. In fact I’m pretty sure the word “dialectical” is just “dialog” as an adjective.

              If you take a dialectical approach to self-improvement, it means you view the problem as a self-reinforcing feedback loop between a person’s thinking and behavior and their external situation, rather than blaming everything on their thinking and behavior alone while ignoring where it comes from.

              For example, maybe a narcissist uses delusion to cope with self loathing and an ill-formed sense of self, and externally to hide that fucked up inner person from the world and maintain their social life. But the delusion feeds back into the same problems it addresses. It fuels the self-loathing because their inner self does not match the delusion, it perpetuates the ill-formed sense of self because they are living a lie instead of learning who they are, and it causes them to build their external social life on top of that lie until they don’t know how to stop. The dialectical approach to helping this person is to acknowledge that their delusions are currently serving a purpose (one that began in childhood), map out the feedback loop, then look for places in the loop where you can intervene and begin to redirect it. Maybe internally you start to work on their sense of self, helping them confront who they really are in a safe environment, and then externally you help them slowly reorganize their social life so it stops pressuring them into maintaining this fake self.