Step 2: When someone talks about their pain, struggles, things going poorly for them — especially any mental health issues — especially crippling / disabling mental health issues– immediately respond with an outpouring gush of love and support.
The problem is not the love and support per se. It’s the implied threat that it will all disappear the very moment your situation improves.
Maybe sometimes it is possible for you to improve your situation, and sometimes it is not. But in this setup, you have an incentive against improving even in the case the improvement happens to be possible.
Also, I suppose you get more love & support for legible problems. So the best thing you can do is create a narrative that blames your problems on something that is widely recognized as horrible (e.g. sexism, racism). This moves your attention away from specific details that may be relevant to solving your problem, and discourages both you and the others from proposing solutions (it would be presumptuous to assume that you can overcome sexism or racism using the “one weird trick” <doing the thing that would solve your problem>).
The problem is not the love and support per se. It’s the implied threat that it will all disappear the very moment your situation improves.
Maybe sometimes it is possible for you to improve your situation, and sometimes it is not. But in this setup, you have an incentive against improving even in the case the improvement happens to be possible.
Also, I suppose you get more love & support for legible problems. So the best thing you can do is create a narrative that blames your problems on something that is widely recognized as horrible (e.g. sexism, racism). This moves your attention away from specific details that may be relevant to solving your problem, and discourages both you and the others from proposing solutions (it would be presumptuous to assume that you can overcome sexism or racism using the “one weird trick” <doing the thing that would solve your problem>).