Reddit mentions of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions

My first suggestion is to recognize that you are holding onto a belief that a relationship is to some degree necessary for your happiness or contentment. The next step is to question this belief. Try this thought experiment: Imagine that you can be perfectly content in your life without a relationship. You go through your days fulfilled, wanting for nothing. You enjoy whatever activities you choose to engage in fully. You have all you need. Now a relationship becomes available. Do you take it? Maybe yes, maybe no. If the benefits outweigh the costs, perhaps it's a "yes." If not, you walk away, because after all why pay the cost if it's not worth it? You certainly don't need it.

I would like to suggest that this is completely possible. The first step here is to stop holding onto the belief that you can't be happy without that. As long as you believe that, you make it true. Any such fixation becomes self-fulfilling. You obsess over the thing you don't have and make yourself miserable.

You say you have a history of mental health problems. Well let me tell you, a relationship won't fix them. It's common for people to believe that the solution to their problems is something external to themselves, but in situations like yours it is never true. Until you address your problems internally a team of supermodels taking turns riding your dick wouldn't help you. It'd be fun, sure, but once the initial thrill wore off you'd find yourself back in the same emotional space with the same problems.

How to get there? I'm not aware of any single one-size-fits-all solution, but it would be worth considering therapy if that appeals to you. To me meditation is a must. If you're not doing that I'd say make it a priority to develop a practice with the intention of making it lifelong. The best book of which I am aware and the one I'd recommend for this is The Mind Illuminated.

Beyond that try to work on your emotional health. A book I highly recommend for this is The Presence Process. Another good one is The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion.

Read these books, apply them, and live them diligently and consistently, and I predict that in a year or two your outlook on life will be completely transformed. Once you get to that point, maybe a relationship will happen, or maybe it won't. You'll be fine either way, and that's more valuable than any pickup technique.

>1,100 calories daily, and burning off 600 or so of that every other day

Do less. I don't mean eat less, I mean do less. 1,100 calories is not really enough for anyone, let alone for someone 5'9". Some calculations for a female, 5'9" weighing 230lbs (don't know your age so I put in 25, and no bf% guess entered either) estimates a BMR of 1856 (this would be how much you burn just lying in bed being alive) and even sedentary activity level is a TDEE of 2227 (that's with general day to day activity like walking around and sitting upright), so at a 500kcal deficit we're talking 1700kcal and at a 1000kcal deficit we're still talking 1227kcal. On a day that you were burning an extra 600 that means you were burning a total of ~2800kcal and only eating 1100kcal to replenish - no wonder you had hunger pangs and all that jazz. So don't push quite so hard, make it more sustainable. The whole "eating at a deficit that I'm always hungry" is why so many people fail diets - they try too hard, they're hungry and miserable, they give up.


Self control gets you started, but it's unreasonable to expect yourself to ALWAYS practice self control/willpower, so you need to just make it so dead simple, and a habit, that it's just easier to do it than it is to fall off the wagon.


You say you lost your self control and motivation, but those should be intrinsic, they need to come from inside yourself. You were depressed, you lost a friend, and you started eating in excess - did that in any way make you happier? Did you really feel any better while or after eating that large pizza? I'm suspecting the answer is NO, and that's the thing. From all those years you've convinced yourself that when you are unhappy or sad that eating will make you happy, but it doesn't, it just makes things worse. You have to reprogram your brain and this will take time.

From here I can only suggest what I know helped me - two non-diet/health/fitness books: The Willpower Instinct and Self Compassion (or maybe I liked The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion better, I can't remember which was which now)

I wish you the best. Acknowledging that there is a problem and having an awareness of it are the first and most important steps.

>I agree with you here. So does this mean you disagree with TRP's stance on this topic?

I've never been one for towing the party line.

> Interesting. I still don't really get it honestly. women are emotionally trained to place responsibility for their feelings onto their partners? What does this mean, and what leads you to believe that?

There are 2 parts to this. One is well explained by Women's Infidelity by Michelle Langley, and is also it's a common criticism feminism makes of popular culture. Society conditions women that marriage or a relationship with a man will make them happy. That they need to find the right guy who will complete them (the implication that without a man they are incomplete). This is bullshit of course, no one can make anyone else happy. You have to learn to be happy yourself.

The second part is that while society conditions men to be stoic (avoid and suppress their feelings) girls are taught to over identify with them. Women who aren't emotionally whole often surrender to their feelings, rather than simply accept them, while understanding the distinction between their being and what they feeling in any given moment.

TRP accurately observes that women end marriages (and probably relationships) more than men, but concludes falsely that this is because women cannot love the way men can. In reality, it's the combination of what I described above. Women enter into relationships thinking that will magically make them happy and they will feel whole and complete and loved. When this doesn't happen because it was never realistic to begin with, they begin to feel sad, anxious, and often angry. While a man would probably bury these emotions until he explodes (or becomes depressed) women both act on them and blame their partners due to how they have been emotionally conditioned.

>There is an huge amount of psychological evidence to support this assertion, and anyone who has spent any time working on emotional healing and therapy will quickly see that I am correct.

Here are some links, but these are books not easily digestible articles. The important thing to understand is that core emotional problems are the same amongst all people. It's the external expression of that pain that is often gendered. Reading about the difference between NPD and BPD will shed some let on this.

Women's Infidelity

Facing Co-Dependence

The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion

Healing the Shame that Binds You

Healing Your Aloneness

Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization

>I don't really see what this has to do with gender. Both partners need to feel that expression of love. Dread Game actually seems to be based around purposely withdrawing love and affection, which seems irreconcilable with the idea of unconditional love.

What tends to be gendered is the preferred expression of love (love language). Different people need and express love differently, and sometimes couples don't have compatible styles of showing affection. In cases where one partner will not work on the issue, that partner is withdrawing their love. I agree that dread game is not compatible with unconditional love, and I don' think I ever said it was compatible.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mindful-Path-Self-Compassion-Destructive/dp/1593859759

In brief, stop telling yourself it will all work out in the end, That is pressure you don't need. Stop doing things to "work things out in the end", do things because they have some value to you now.

This book emphasizes pretty heavily the idea that your thoughts should be truthful. The context is Metta meditation but it's essentially positive self talk. http://www.amazon.com/The-Mindful-Path-Self-Compassion-Destructive/dp/1593859759


However I just discovered this article where they claim good or bad intention in self talk, not belief, was the only thing that mattered in improving athletic performance. http://www.athleticinsight.com/Vol8Iss4/SelfTalkandPerformance.htm

Totally endorse all of this. The Mindfulness Based Self-Compassion stuff that Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer pioneered has also been life-changing for me. I think the biggest take-away is that instead of constantly fighting to suppress anxiety, stress, guilt, and anger, it gives you tools to embrace these things in a compassionate way. So instead of a battle in your mind constantly, you can acknowledge when you're anxious and that acknowledgement takes the sting out of it, and makes it more manageable.

This is the Christopher Germer book that I really like: https://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Path-Self-Compassion-Yourself-Destructive/dp/1593859759

self compassion!

from self-compassion wikipedia

"Although psychologists extolled the benefits of self-esteem for many years, recent research has exposed costs associated with the pursuit of high self-esteem,[11] including narcissism,[12] distorted self-perceptions,[13] contingent and/or unstable self-worth,[14] as well as anger and violence toward those who threaten the ego.[15]
It appears that self-compassion offers the same mental health benefits as self-esteem, but with fewer of its drawbacks such as narcissism, ego-defensive anger, inaccurate self-perceptions, self-worth contingency, or social comparison"

it has changed my relationship with myself greatly and made me much happier and more at peace.

My friend, you’re really far behind in the mental health world.

>For most illnesses this is not okay

I’m reading countless things on mindfulness as the path to healing with mental illness. Better to accept yourself than to live with shame.

https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/transgender-people-suicide/
> A survey of trans people in the UK found that a completed medical transition was shown to greatly reduce rates of suicidal ideation and attempts, in contrast to those at other stages of transition (imminently transitioning or beginning transition). 67% of transitioning people thought about suicide pre-transition and only 3% post-transition (Bailey et al., 2014).


http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885
> For the purpose of evaluating the safety of sex reassignment in terms of morbidity and mortality, however, it is reasonable to compare sex reassigned persons with matched population controls. The caveat with this design is that transsexual persons before sex reassignment might differ from healthy controls (although this bias can be statistically corrected for by adjusting for baseline differences). It is therefore important to note that the current study is only informative with respect to transsexuals persons health after sex reassignment; no inferences can be drawn as to the effectiveness of sex reassignment as a treatment for transsexualism. In other words, the results should not be interpreted such as sex reassignment per se increases morbidity and mortality. Things might have been even worse without sex reassignment. As an analogy, similar studies have found increased somatic morbidity, suicide rate, and overall mortality for patients treated for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.[39], [40] This is important information, but it does not follow that mood stabilizing treatment or antipsychotic treatment is the culprit.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383812/
> A number of studies have shown that interventions focused on increasing clients’ mindfulness of psychological events can reduce experiential avoidance (Hayes et al., 2006), suggesting that mindfulness may be a promising alternative to suicidal behavior as a means of coping with seemingly intractable pain. In this article we review the theory and data that support the idea that mindfulness may be a means to target the common core process of experiential avoidance.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333999132_Health_of_Non-binary_and_Genderqueer_People_A_Systematic_Review
> From a clinical perspective, as well as for transgender individuals [e.g., American Psychological Association (APA), 2015; Edwards- Leeper et al., 2016], an affirmative practice with NBGQ people is highly recommended, especially in light of the evidence that some NBGQ individuals have access clinical services for gender-affirming treatments ( Koehler et al., 2018;Taylor et al., 2018). Such a practice refers to a non-pathologizing clinical approach that accepts and validates all genders, rejecting the gender binary as a marginalizing social system, privileging some while oppressing others ( Austin and Craig, 2015;Bochicchio et al., 2019;Scandurra et al., 2019b).

I’m reading this book as well, which discusses many clinical case studies of people practicing self acceptance as a path to overcoming mental illness—for anxiety, you recognize the anxiety you have rather than try to ignore it. Then you try to adapt to it. Having trans folks “embracing the illness and adapting [their] lifestyle around it.” is what they’re supposed to do.

I tried to find reference to your claim about medication that “repress”es (I think you mean suppresses?) dysphoria. From the APA:

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/expert-q-and-a
> Many transgender people who take feminizing or masculinizing hormones report improvement of emotions as their gender dysphoria lessens or resolves.

So...yes, affirming is the correct, clinical action.