• 0 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 21st, 2023
  • jbrains@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How do you work on internalized fears/expectations?
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    1 month ago

    I recommend the book The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate for some possible insights.

    I recommend loving kindness meditation, also known as “metta”. There is an old saying that 1 hour of metta for a troublesome person is worth 100 hours of other kinds of meditation. I have used it to help me work through and (mostly) get past my feelings for the troublesome people in my life, even including an alcoholic and abusive parent.

    Metta for myself also helps me make peace with how I feel, the constant “on guard” mode, which I know helped me survive, but isn’t needed to that degree any longer. It makes sense that I am this way. It’s not always fun, but I’m also not broken.

    There is so much more, but I offer you this as a place to start. I hope that others give you helpful ideas.

    Peace.

  • jbrains@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How do I convince an illiterate family member to let me teach them how to read?
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    3 months ago

    I absolutely didn’t mean it like that, which I tried to say up front, because I understood how it might sound. I have to ask, did you even notice that? (It’s easy not to notice once you think you’ve been slighted or threatened. That’s how brains tend to work.)

    I can’t tell whether you’re suspicious or merely curious. If you’re suspicious, then maybe that’s how your relative feels when confronted with someone trying to teach them to read. Or there are many many possibilities. I won’t know what to suggest until I know more.

    If you’re curious, I get it, but please understand that the point of asking is to offer advice better suited to your situation than generic advice that might be fine and might blow up in your face. Asking me for the whole playbook up-front is not reasonable. It fills a bookshelf and comes from 25 years of experience helping people. If I know more about your situation, then I believe I can help more effectively.

    That’s it. Nothing up my sleeve. No hammer behind my back. Empty hands.

    I’m asking because I can help you better if I know. It’s that simple.

  • jbrains@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How do I convince an illiterate family member to let me teach them how to read?
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    3 months ago

    I will note here that I have tried earnestly to ask OP questions that would help me offer better advice than the generic slop I could offer without knowing more about the situation.

    Knowing that OP might not trust me enough yet and might assume that my questions were expressing indirect doubts about their motivation, I emphasized that I’m not criticizing them, but asking genuine questions in order to gather information with which to help more effectively.

    Subsequently, more than one person has doubted my motivations for asking these questions and already some seem unwilling to take my answers at face value.

    See? Maybe it’s not as simple as “But I want to help!” I want to help and some of you seem really suspicious both of my intentions and my methods before even giving OP the opportunity to answer my first question.

    Now maybe OP’s relative would feel similarly about being approached to learn to read.

    🤷