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
DBT = making decisions and changes about oneself and the environment to further one’s goals dialectically
CBT = umm have you considered not being sad about climate change? Lol
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.
“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.
The dialectical treatment approach is to talk to the person to try to understand the feedback loop, then look for points in the loop where intervention is possible, not only in their thinking and behavior but also in their external situation, to yield a gradual improvement over time.