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
Under no circumstance does individualistic self-help concepts being incorrect mean that you are helpless. Working towards bettering one’s life so you’re happier is something that does not require blaming oneself, and it requires an understanding of the material circumstances that are affecting you in the first place.
A holistic understand of improving oneself doesn’t imply complete helplessness, but a more pragmatic perspective, where you change your environment to then change yourself indirectly.
It doesn’t mean that it is impossible to change yourself, it means that it requires actual analysis and not just Willpower
Right, this is the issue, but I don't think self-blame is baked into the name self_improvement.
There's a feedback loop between your thinking and behavior and your environment, it's chicken and egg, it's a dialectic. Where to intervene in that loop is a case-by-case question. Sometimes you do have to start with the thinking and behavior. More often it'll be a mix of both environmental and internal work — you start with whatever changes you can make immediately in either category, and then work up to other changes that might have prerequisite conditions. Whatever your situation, often the first step is to decide to make a change, which is an internal decision that comes from deep inside you and is an expression of agency.
Your body is a system, not an anime power you can make start up by thinking hard enough. Sure, “willpower” is sometimes required, but laziness is not real. That’s the root of this.
Of course it’s a chicken and egg situation. You have the ability to change your circumstances in small ways BECAUSE it’s a chicken and egg situation.
It isn’t, and I’ve already (implicitly, sorry I’ve been bad at clarifying this) ceded that we shouldn’t change the name, but our general cultural conception of self improvement is pretty individualistic and that’s what people think when they hear those words.
you're reducing it to a question of willpower, but people can have maladaptive beliefs, attitudes, and patterns of thinking that can get in the way of them taking steps to change their situations. I don't think that's such a silly idea that you can compare it to an anime powerup.
Yes, true, but people don’t really seem to be talking about that when they talk about motivation or most individual perspectives. I do not disagree that those are factors at all.