I've had similar experiences with the taking your shoes off thing. And to give an example that's probably closer related, when i started posting on the old sub, and regularly saw people calling out ableist language there, i'd start avoiding that kind of language in my posts, and quickly noticed how much it helps to bring my point across better, how it automatically made me focus more on criticizing people for what they do and lay out why i object to it when i couldn't take the shortcut of just writing out a word salad about how "stupid" or "insane" their views seem to me. Even when i decided to just resort to name calling, my insults became more powerful, because i had to make them more personal and unusual instead of simply telling others how dumb they were.

This is coming from somebody who, at that time, had both a history of mental illness and some understanding of social darwinism, a passing familiarity with anti-psychiatry and a good grasp of how pathologizing behaviors works as a social control mechanism. So i had both enough lived experience and theoretical knowledge to reject ableist language, but it took comrades setting an actual example to make me change my posting behavior, and that change of behavior to see the secondary benefits it offers.