;tldr
Find something you enjoy and try and capture it in a way that you can look at it and appreciate what you do, I mean you might not appreciate it but it can be something that gets all that built thoughts out into the open so it is easy to see with one’s own eyes.
I know and understand it will not work for everyone but I still hope it can be a positive contribution from my own experiences and I can only hope it can be useful for someone
End tldr;
So I have posted a lot and it felt a bit selfish always using the service but not really contributing.
I don’t know how long I can keep it up, but over the past 2 weeks I have been trying to blog a video game article every day on my personal blog. I mean I should space things out so that I don’t burn out of course, but so far just doing the writing has helped me not be overwhelmed with thought.
Perhaps it is a distraction, but I do feel less social anxiety as I am branching out more on Lemmy and try to engage with people more and I think for that is good thing.
I don’t know if it is good advice or not, but for me it feels being able to express something one really enjoys in what ever way that one is most comfortable with and then being able to reflect on it - in my case writing and then going over it and then being able to say I completed something when I publish it - has created to me a, I can only assume, a postive feedback loop.
I write this as I am someone that enjoys being social but is incredibly socially insular, and in writing the video games blogs it is making me feel more comfortable trying to branch out as I “empty my head” so to speak.
I made contact with the friends I felt ashamed of being a detriment to the group and explained my situation, stating I would communicate every now then via posting but be unable to communicate via voice
I even made a Mastodon account, and although I spent most of the day trying to figure out how to write and learn about correct # usage while stil building up the courage to use because I have never been big on social media before, I finally got around to post to share my blog online and I built that courage by myself, which I however small is an achievement to me considering I have always felt I cannot do things without someone else’s help.
The help I did get from going to a blogging group is to just not care what other people say and write for myself, create something I want and over time I can make it better and refine. Just so long as I am doing something that is a good thing. If nothing else writing can be for its own benefit and that has a reassuring comfort for someone like me that is incredibly harsh on myself as well.
There is probably a name for this, but I guess in absence of other choices, this is almost like therapy for me in a sense. I still do strongly recommend that those that can should seek professional help though
This is a Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT) skill called “build positive experiences” and it helps combat the warping of memories by the strong emotions characteristic of certain mental illnesses. All memory is emotion dependent, it’s easier to remember happy things when you’re happy and sad things when you’re sad, but in a person with a heightened emotional response such as someone with borderline personality, bipolar, or certain kinds of PTSD, the mood swings are strong enough to block out chunks of memory.
Borderline is particularly famous for this, and the phenomenon is typically referred to as “splitting,” or more clinically as idealizaton-devaluation. When someone upsets this person, they will be unable to recall a time when the person has been kind and supportive to them, and will devalue them. This can also cause them to unhealthily idealize another person, which is often not recognized by even professionals because it rarely causes issues in the short term, but it is still indicative of the same maladaptive thinking patterns. If someone is capable of idealizing another person, it means their emotional spectrum is wide enough to suddenly devalue them when that person fails to live up to their unrealistic image.
Building positive experiences (and recording them in an easy to access space) helps the person stabilize and take back control of their emotional memory; when they are upset with a friend or loved one, they are easily able to look back at all the good memories that seem blurry at the moment. This also makes it a valuable skill for people who are depressed and/or anxious who have a tendency to catastrophize (my life has always been horrible/this will never get better) because it provides concrete reinforcement of times that actually were better.
That was very interesting to read and to think about. Thank you
Seems to be something like what I am doing because that fits me to a tee in some respects with idolizing someone and now I have fallen out of that when I did not get a response when I sent a message. So while I do still appreciate the effort they provided, I have in essence emotionally written them off because I do not feel like they are not fully respecting me.
I guess the writing part also is in that regard because I am in a state of trying to think and apply positive memories, reinforcing that reading it with it having an additional potential positive reinforcement if someone looks at it, making me feel like what I have done has value.
I guess because I am rummaging around in this “positive” headspace it leads to more “positive” experiences because I am doubling down on thinking of something good and then reading something I thought of as good.
I appreciate reading that and trying to approximate it into my situation
:)