Hitting Children I've pretty much always believed that hitting kids is abuse and can't possibly be good for them in any way. It doesn't teach them right from wrong or whatever, it only teaches them to fear their parents. I used to think that my parents were pretty good because they didn't hit me. Except for that one time my dad hit me when I didn't do some or other thing he asked me to do immediately. I don't remember what I did, or what he wanted me to do. I only remember the look on his face, and how angry I ...
All posts by Wolf
A Basic Guide To Feeling Words
When I first started journaling, I was just writing short snippets about what happened that day, so that I could read it later in order to trigger my memories of that day. This was great for remembering stuff, but what really made a big difference was when I started making a point of journaling about how I felt every day. Like I'd still write what happened, but I'd also write things like "I felt (feeling word) when that happened". Practicing putting my feelings into words regularly helped a lot to make get better at it, and to feel better in general. ...
Arguing on the internet is not worth the cost to your mental health
I checked the post history of a Reddit user who said they were feeling very triggered lately... and their post history was full of them arguing with various people in political subreddits. I thought: "well, that's certainly not helping!" Getting involved in internet arguments is really really bad for your mental health! Arguing is a trap - don't fall in it. 99% of the time people won't change their minds anyway. I mean, have you ever seen it happen? I haven't, and I was the admin of a forum for 16 years. In over 500k posts and thousands of dramatic arguments, ...
The healthiest food that can be prepared using the least possible brainpower
You can skip to The Actual Recipes section down below if you don't care about the back story here. I've spent years trying to find the balance point between how to feed myself the healthiest possible food, while also using the least possible amount of effort and brainpower. This is what I've discovered so far. Most of this stuff is relatively cheap too. A lot of recipes out there on the internet have a focus on perfection - they're all about following it precisely to get a very specific result. That's not what this post is about. This is about getting a ...
There Is No Such Thing As “Small Trauma”, and Abuse is Really Common
I've noticed that some people downplay their trauma quite a lot if they didn't experience "big" trauma like physical abuse or sexual abuse. They might say that their traumas are "small" in comparison to "big" traumas like physical or sexual abuse. It's understandable why they would do this, but trauma is not a competition! Trauma is trauma. I was listening to a podcast the other day about trauma. They were talking about how even "minor" things that don't qualify as abuse can cause trauma. As an example the one person recalled a situation where a mother and daughter were walking in ...
Free Isochronic Tones For Grounding (7.83Hz)
I've been playing around with creating isochronic tones for myself, and decided to share some. They should be playable in the playlist player, and you should also be able to do the "save link as" thingy to save the .ogg files on your computer/device so you can play them in whatever player you prefer. They are each 10 minutes long. I personally find that's more than long enough because my ears tend to get tired of them after a while. A decent audio player should be able to loop each individual file infinitely if you tell it to. On linux, Qmmp and ...
How I learned to say NO
Googling "how to say no" brings up a lot of advice articles, with tips for how to say it politely, and a few really basic things about why it's hard to say no... but I found those somewhat lacking. For me it was never a matter of finding the right words, it was about really genuinely understanding why the fuck it's been so hard, and actually finding solutions for the underlying causes. Why is it so hard to say no? Saying no feels like rebellion Rebelling as a kid meant I'd be in trouble, and being in trouble was scary, therefore saying no ...
Journaling
How journaling has helped me Journaling has helped me get to know myself better. To figure out how I feel about things, to access my feelings in general. I used to have a lot of brain fog, like I was trying to think of something but I couldn't find the words for it because it was just a thick fog in my mind. I had racing thoughts when trying to sleep. When I would lie down in bed and try to sleep, I'd lie awake for hours just thinking about stuff. Often the thoughts would race so fast they didn't even make ...