Post

sometimes someone in my discord is is so self-hating, stating as fact such nasty shit, that they become hostile to any kindness at all. "i'm shit and if you say I'm not you're lying to me" type shit. you have to change your outlook before your helplessness becomes real in a way you don't expect

This post is unavailable.

329 reposts870 likes

Experienced these loads of times and I've just started up front asking them what they want from the interaction Folks who actually want help will actually pause to try and articulate it but if they just keep going with the same you know they just want an audience for their spiral

It's disrespectful, people show up to try to help u and you just swat em off every time. brother... it gets annoying. Then when people finally give up since there's no solution ever, what happens, whining about how nobody cares! Augh!

I tend to respond to that kind of behavior with "what are you hoping to achieve with this?" or some variant of the same, which isn't going to help anyone who's in a bad spiral, but is really good for the ones who are seeking praise

Needed this rn as in a slightly similar place (well, not self hatred to that extreme, just anxiety), trying to get out of that mindset with therapy and honestly so far it's helping, hope others who are in this spot can get the help they need to as its really not a good place to be in

Back when I still used the shitbird app I stumbled across this individual who frequently tweeted about how shitty their existence was. At one point I had actually slipped them a suicide hotline number and they were like "well that's not going to help at all and I'm insulted by your gesture".

Like, on one hand. I get it. But holy shit. I genuinely wanted to help and they went and turned that sentiment into something else entirely. No clue what happened to that individual. But reading this reminded me of them. All that hopelessness and how nobody wants to be around that. It's tragic.

Untreated depression will do that, yeah. Substituting your own (bad) feelings for real life facts is a terrible cycle that only leads to darker places. It is very difficult to trust in others when in such a state.

even with smart, thoughtful, kind, patient, experienced people putting in work to try to help, i find that once someone is lashing out against basic kindness they're often unreachable from the outside. gotta go get into some harmful situation and wait it out, or maybe never recover

that extreme self-hate-as-fact thing, where you no longer think you're *feeling* this way but that it *is* this way, has a warped sort of self-aggrandizement at the middle of it. main character syndrome. you're the special exception to every rule of life you believe in, uniquely intractably dogshit

to think you're uniquely, immensely horrible in a way nobody else can be or understand or conceive of, is actually to think very highly of yourself, just in a tense, gross way. you find people get very defensive of the idea that they're shit. questioning it becomes an insult

in an extreme case, someone left the 'cord, and months later i realised, and went, oh shit, are they ok? later i found they'd received a screenshot of this, and posted like: "look at this piece of shit who hates me pretending to care if i'm alive". bottomless, delusional self-regard-via-self-hate

anyway if you haven't seen it here is an idea i heard about from robert anton wilson. that every interpersonal interaction can be slotted into a 2x2 grid with variations of "i'm okay / i'm not okay" and "you're okay / you're not okay" "i'm noy okay and you're not okay" is the death spiral position

I used to be this way and lost a lot of people for it. And even long after I started being that way publicly, I still did it sometimes... My view completely changed when someone else did it to me, and I realized, "you really think I'm an evil jackass who wants you to die? That hurts my feelings".

And like, it does! I stopped completely after that, and it took a lot of freakin effort! And that was with years of already working on myself prior. I'm way happier now for it, and I don't really tolerate that behaviour from others nowadays because it's exhausting and painful to deal with.

back when i used to moderate bigger discords, i found it helpful to bring up how it's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy - if you insist "no one can help me" enough times, it becomes true that no one can help you, because you've made that the reality through not allowing them to

I developed that habit myself after like the third or fourth person trying to solve me by inventing psychiatric problems I don’t have and telling me to ignore my doctor’s advice. I’m stuck isolated due to chronic pain and fatigue and it gets to me. Especially the people saying it gets better.

Honestly the entire conversation about this feels eerily familiar - I’ve reached out for help dozens of times and got the same spiel about accepting help when nobody ever did anything to help. I mean yeah nobody can help, the damage’s too severe and it permanently severed irl social connections.

i remove these people now. they can't be helped but they'll ruin everything around them for as long as it takes for everyone to get sick of them and then point to that as evidence they were right since it's going to happen anyway, you can at least speed it up

daamn 😭 wish i had someone explain stuff like this to me a long time ago, i've been used as a human good will dispenser by people like this way too many times, and my daft ass was just stubbornly giving it out until the point it worsened my anxiety disorder