SoleInvictus

It took me a minute. Turn the image 90° anticlockwise. Then it's easier to see it's an image of portions of two vertically stacked monitors with the Ubuntu Studio logo on the bottom one and part of the install dialog on the top.

Hi! CPTSD here thanks to untreated BPD dad. My partner also has CPTSD from an even shittier childhood. Between the two of us, we've done everything you've mentioned here and worked most of it out. I can write a novel - and I will, right here! Here's what came to mind reading your post. Feel free to ask anything, I'm an open book.

It takes years to make the first big changes when you have a personality and/or trauma-related disorder, because you're using your wonky brain to fix your wonky brain. It fucking sucks. And it's never going away, just getting better managed. I'm over two decades in on treatment and I still sometimes do the same shit I did when I started. The difference is it's very infrequent now, I can typically stop it immediately, and it's comparably mild if I don't.

You'll make the slowest progress at the beginning, so it's hard to see. I remember beating myself up because nothing seemed to get better, which was making it even harder to improve. I eventually moved my goalposts way back and learned to become my own cheerleader. I have victory conditions, really small achievements where I take a moment to recognize that I did something right and check in to see how I'm feeling. If I was upset, I'd find a mirror, make eye contact with myself, and talk myself down, comforting myself like I might want an ideal friend to do. Sometimes I'd just hug myself and say I was sorry I was upset and cry a bit (or a lot) until I felt better. The point was being my own best friend, even if I didn't feel like it. Especially when I didn't feel like it.

It's all about recognizing incremental progress and heaping on the praise. I call the praise part "training my own dog". Calm me is rational and can think through shit. Emotionally flooded me isn't very bright and needs to be trained, so I give that "me" positive reinforcement when they do a good job. Just like a dog. I sometimes give myself treats when I do a very good job.

There's much more, like learning to be better at emotional regulation so I don't have to rely on dysregulated me being a good dog, but this is what got me over the hump of "everything sucks, I suck, and I'm never getting better".

Edit: oh oh! Look up amygdala hijacking in reference to getting really upset and going on rants where you later look back and are like "...WTF?" My partner does this HARD if they've been pushing themselves too hard for too long. I at first thought they were delusional and, well... they were. Temporarily. Because their brain had mostly shut down.

The more you can learn about psychology and neuroscience, especially affective neuroscience, the more you'll be able to recognize what drives certain aspects of your behavior, which will help you figure out what to do about it. Knowledge is power and all that.

Tell me about it, and there's always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.

I didn't know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.

We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I've acquired over my life. They've paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It's one of those "having money saves money" situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.

Don't get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

OR

DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don't die from an aneurysm first. It'll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

Nope.

Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can't see that don't go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

They don't know, they'll never know, and they don't need to know.

Same with Wi-Fi being used to refer to Internet access in general. I basically lived on the phone with our ISP's tech support for two days and one tech person even told me they needed to "reset our modem so they could get the WiFi flowing to our house again". I died a little inside.

I worked for a call center as a stop gap when I was younger. The economy had shit itself and while this company was doing great, it was looking to save money because they knew they could squeeze desperate people. Annual raises were coming up. They were based on a system heavily influenced by disciplinary action, so many of my coworkers started getting verbal and written warnings for ridiculous things.

I finally got written up for not pulling up a reference before telling a customer about a past event. I didn't pull the reference up because I already had it and other common topics open for easy access, which my supervisor told us to do.

I disputed the write-up but the department manager denied it as "the information could have changed between calls, so you should have looked it up through our knowledge base". I asked how the past could have changed and was told it doesn't matter: it's policy. I asked to see the policy. The goalposts immediately changed: "disciplinary action is at management's discretion and this was a serious error in judgment". I told them that I was shocked anyone could say that and still expect to be taken seriously, even by themselves, and refused to sign my write-up. I was pulled into the HR manager's office and given a "Final Warning" write-up for my attitude and not signing my initial write-up. I signed that one and got on a PIP, so they were happy.

Annual reviews were that week. I had extraordinary performance stats but got a $0.04 per hour annual raise - $83.20 per year! I walked out once I got a new job.

I just checked: my old manager is now a "boss babe" who sells essential oils and scented candles for MLMs. Sometimes a life well lived really is the best revenge.

I'm even the kind in your picture, though he's not seeing anything in that microscope.

I agree, you just should tell people first! Unsolicited story time:

We had been dating for a few weeks. She was smart, nice, and very fun. I really liked her and had decided to consider getting serious. I thought she had ghosted me for our dinner date, though, so I had left and was feeling sad. She called over an hour later to apologize profusely and beg me to come back, saying she'd explain and buy everything that night as apology.

What she didn't mention was that she was going to alternate between incoherent rambling and staring, silent and unresponsive, into one corner of the cafe's ceiling. I had no idea what was going on. I got ahold of her roommate, who said she had eaten a bunch of shrooms and walked to her friend's house. I left after he arrived and I learned he was her roommate... and her boyfriend. Fun.

I went full no contact. Years later, we worked together briefly in graduate school, where she pretended not to know me despite having already told our lab mates we used to be friends. Super awkward, maybe mental problems.

I am one, and it's the closest you can get to being a wizard. You use the in-depth knowledge and tools of your domain to do things the general population often doesn't fully understand and can't do well themselves, if at all.

Sounds like wizards to me.

I had a formula: "Hi!", my real first name, a brief mention and open-ended question about something I found interesting on their profile,, then closing with something like "Online dating can be a lot. I'd love to hear from you, but only when you're ready. No pressure. I hope you have a great day."

So about four sentences. It took me like two minutes. I got about 1 response in 10 instead of over 1:30 that way, at least from women. Success!

I then proceeded to have all of the worst dates I've ever been on. One person showed up on shrooms, a woman interrogated me about marriage and children within ten minutes of meeting, another seemed to be fabricating their entire life story on the spot... and more! There were good dates too, but soooo much bad.

Same, he's such a great guy too..

YES. I'm piggy backing on your post to drive home why you keep your receipts.

I was fired for performance issues after a little over a year of employment. They claimed I was working at a level lower than an entry level new hire. This was a big surprise to me as my most recent review was glowing, my expertise was carrying the department, and no one ever mentioned any concerns. The company was having issues, though, and I was the highest paid person in my department.

Unbeknownst to them, I keep a work journal. I spend five minutes at the beginning of each day reviewing what I did the day prior and what needs to be done that day, then recording it all in a little notebook made exactly for the purpose (I can link anyone if they're interested). So I spent about 20-25 hours over my time there doing this and had meticulous records of the entire time.

What's fun about my termination is I was out for 2 months recovering for surgery from a work injury. They fired me the day I returned for unsubstantiated performance issues that I can refute by the day.

Guess who is getting a $150k settlement.

That little notebook, on top of keeping me on track and making work easier, earned me about $6000/hour.