this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
10 points (100.0% liked)

Mental Health

4214 readers
19 users here now

Welcome!

This is a safe place to discuss, vent, support, and share information about mental health, illness, and wellness.

Thank you for being here. We appreciate who you are today. Please show respect and empathy when making or replying to posts.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules

1-Posts promoting paid products and services of any kind are not allowed here.

2-All posts and comments must be helpful and supportive. Do not put vulnerable people at risk.

3-Do not DM or ask to speak privately to any of our members unless they specifically request it.

If a person from this community disturbs you in a comment, please report the comment. If you receive a DM you did not request, send a screenshot of the DM in a message to a moderator. This is a bannable offense.

4-Suicide, Self-Harm, Death-- Extended discussions are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED here. First, mods and community members are caring people, but not experts in crisis situations. Second, we want to avoid Lemmy becoming like many commercial social media platforms, where comments can snowball into counterproductive talk.

If you or someone you know needs more help than can be found here, please refer to the pinned resources.

If BRIEF mention of these topics is an important part of your post, please flag your post as NSFW and include a (trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, death, etc.)in the title so that other readers who may feel triggered can avoid it. Please also include a trigger warning on all comments mentioning these topics in a post that was not already tagged as such.

Partner Communities

- Therapy

Neurodegenerative Disease Support

ADHD

Autism

Fibromyalgia

TMJ

Chronic Pain

Bipolar Disorder

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Friends and Family of People with Addiction

To partner with our community and be included here, you are free to message the current moderators or comment on our pinned post.

Community Moderation

Some moderators are mental health professionals and some are not. All are carefully selected by the moderation team and will be actively monitoring posts and comments. If you are interested in joining the team, you can send a message to ZenGrammy for more information.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I've never thought about it until now, the only times when I ever felt fulfilled is when I'm doing something for others and helping them achieve their goals. I myself have goals and dreams of my own but I've never feel motivated to work towards them for myself, it just feels like a boring chore.

And thanks to that, my life is an absolute mess now, I know what I should have done for my own good but I just couldn't find the will to do it without someone forces me, and sometimes even that doesn't work.

I'm not saying I'm a good person, I'm anything but a saint, I might enjoy helping others but for some I just don't give a damn.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Rule #2 from Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life:

Treat yourself as someone you are responsible for helping

The basic idea is that if you’re high in agreeableness, ie you strongly exhibit the “mothering” instinct of taking care of others, then one of the most effective ways to take care of yourself is to pretend that you, yourself, are one of those other people.

Also, my own recommendation is to do a lot of therapy and spiritual work. Uncover and resolve any childhood trauma you absorbed around “being selfish”.

Kids are naturally selfish. When parents don’t know how to make good boundaries, they tend to silently stew then explode at the kid, giving the kid a basic equation forged into their subconscious that goes like:

“If I focus on my needs it hurts Mommy and she stops loving me”

There’s a great book on this topic called Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

Doing the exercises in that book helped me transform — over the course of about 5 minutes of ugly crying — into someone who has a much easier time serving myself in balance with serving others.