Whatfeeling Better Can Look Like After Using A Coping Technique:

what “feeling better” can look like after using a coping technique:

beng able to get up and walk around safely

thinking/talking more clearly and lessening of brain fog

a willingness to re-engage with a situation/emotion (even with some reluctance)

ability to do a task you did not want to/could not do before

being able to plan and problem solve (even if you still don’t know what to do)

improved concentration/focus

more understanding of a situation

calmer and slower thoughts (rather than scattered thoughts/rumination)

slower heartbeat and breathing

faster heartbeat, if doing exercise, and momentum that gives you a chance to do a task before you sit down again

being able to sleep easier

an ability to look at the big picture and not get lost in the details

feeling that you can “manage”

ability to control outbursts/destructive behaviour or pause before acting

managing to stop crying

I think people tend to assume their mood is what will improve after trying coping techniques, however, your mood is not the full extent of your mental health, and it doesn’t totally define whether or not a technique has helped you. When disorders cause symptoms like chronic emptiness and low mood, it’s worthwhile to pay attention to your body and your abilities to look for signs of improvement, which can then have an affect on your mood in the long term.

how to forgive others that hurt you? I can’t help to be so filled with spite after experiencing it

That's the neat part: You don't.

If someone hurts you and refuses to aknowledge that they've hurt you, or you know they're going to do that again, you can just stop thinking of them as a person who's capable of choosing to be better. From now on they're like the weather, or chimpanzees - something that's just going to hurt you because of what they are. You won't be disappointed by them if you don't expect any better of them. If a chimp bites you, you can just shrug and think "well, it's a wild animal, what did I expect would happen?"

And the next thing you do is get out of the chimp enclosure and don't go back there again. If you got frostbite the last time you went outdoors in the snow without shoes, because you trusted that the snow wouldn't do that to you, that's unfortunate. But it's worse for you if you keep doing it again and again in hopes that this time the snow won't freeze what's left of your feet.

You don't forgive people who hurt you. You just stop thinking of them as people who are capable of doing better, and protect yourself accordingly.

René Descartes believed that animals do not have souls - that they are machines that have no will of their own, no thoughts, no feelings, no capability to feel true pain, joy or sorrow. They are only clockwork mechanisms made of meat, incapable of doing anything except what they were programmed to do. I don't think that about animals, but that's how I think of my father.

I don't hate him because I didn't think of him as a conscious, thinking and feeling human being who could have done better, and chose not to. He was only a mindless machine made of meat.

my heart fell out

the original post by @matrose can be found here. the comic was posted on Patreon @/magpiecrown a month ago, so to see these comics when they come out feel free to have a snoop 💗

Consider: Aliens land on Earth, they are vaguely humanoid in shape and size, but there is no real way to communicate with them. They're social, curious and friendly, though, and try to get to know humans and interact with us the same way as cats do. By mirroring.

They follow humans around - not necessarily any specific ones, but just wandering wherever people go - and do human things with them. Or at least do their best to try. In gravely serious, intensely focused, but deeply confused silence, they join human activities with this air of "I don't understand what we're doing, or what this achieves, but we're doing it together now."

When there are people waiting at bus stops, one or two of the creatures will join the group, standing in wait. When the bus comes, they'll join the queue lining up inside, and once inside, turn their open palm into a light source and show it to the bus driver in the exact same way as the people showing their bus passes from their phones (the aliens' ability to shapeshift this way has raised theories that they may not be naturally as humanoid as they seem, they've just adopted the human shape to better interact with us), and then go find seats wherever, just like humans do.

They're not going anywhere in particular, nor are they capable of actually paying for their ride, but since there doesn't seem to be any force to stop them from this, people just have to accept their presence. If the bus is crowded, they'll stand just like people do - and sometimes when seated aliens see a human offer their seat to someone who is pregnant, disabled or elderly, they will unpromptedly get up and offer their own to the nearest standing human.

They go to churches, temples, grocery stores, libraries, wherever people go, and clearly try their best to do whatever people are doing. In temples and holy places, they will sometimes join hymns in their eerie, wordless howls, which follow no melody but stop when humans stop singing. They sit and stand where the people do, and copy the positions in which humans pray, and many places of worship don't just tolerate, but downright welcome them - no matter what these creatures are, do they not have the right to pray?

In the libraries they are silent, eerily wandering the hallways, picking up books at random and staring at the pages, turning the page this way or that every few minutes. They don't bother anyone much, once the librarians figured out how to make them put the books they pick up into the returns cart, instead of some random place in the shelves. Some of them seem to enjoy simply grabbing random books, and carrying the whole piles to the returns cart.

They don't understand why we do what we do. We don't understand why they do what they do. But we're now doing it together.

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