Our ability to feel social judgment and shame reuses the same neural circuits as physical disgust or nausea. This effectively makes it so you can take anti-nausea medication to temporarily make you less judgy of other people's life choices.

Not good at it, but I've been toying with the idea of writing recently too. Maybe it's less a perfectionism thing, and more of a scope/focus issue? Like, a lot of stories get away with sillier elements by making it clear that's not the main point, and gloss over the details.

What's the minimum scope and level of detail that sets the right tone, and context? In porn specifically I would think the main point is how the characters feel, so it just needs to be believably implied there are good reasons for them feeling that way, and your mind can fill in the blanks on its own. Sort of like how it's easier to make the monster scary without showing it in a horror story.

"You're very self-aware" is basically a meme in the corners of the internet that discuss trauma. It's a genuine compliment on the part of the therapist, but also an implied admission that they won't be able to help you.

You're already aware of the observations they would make and the tools they would propose, so you might as well skip to the end and look for another therapist.

Since Jitsi is open-source, there are other public instances hosted by known orgs that don't require accounts. That's what I've been doing since they started requiring it.

https://calyxinstitute.org/...

https://brave.com/talk/

Not per se, but it depends. I find that usually when people name "too much self awareness" as a problem, it has to do with a focus on exhaustive cataloging of all their issues and shortcomings, with no tools to move past that. It's a sort of mental health target fixation.

I think it becomes a problem only to the extent that it distracts from the actual goal of becoming able to live a life you actually want, that is aligned with your values and desires. The main focus should be on what you can do 'different' to move in a desirable direction, not on the problem. Awareness is good to the extent you can actually utilize the information you're aware of, and not get stuck in it.

As for avoiding "non positive" emotions, I think it's important to keep in mind that emotions are a signal. They convey information. It's a part of your mind saying "Hey I think this is important, please pay attention". I personally like how this is illustrated in IFS therapy, where you sort of personify the part of you that is having that emotion, and listen as if it were a distinct person. Often simply being listened to, and offered acceptance, understanding, love, is enough for the feeling to subside. It needs to know that you got the message, and will act with the information in mind. And the more you do it, the more those parts trust you, and the process.

If you have a history of trauma especially, touching intense emotions (like sadness) can be really overwhelming, and bring up a lot of stuff. One thing that I've found very helpful in practicing, is working with holding intense 'positive' emotions instead. A capacity to hold intense feeling is transferable to different feelings, and immersing yourself in something pleasurable is much more appealing. Try to do something that feels good, and be fully present with the feeling, without needing to do anything about it, just try to sustain it comfortably. It also helps with the target fixation issue above. Orient on what you want, not what you want to fix, the rest will follow.

Hope this helped at all

Saw a yt video recently that claimed the calorie efficiency of eating cows is about 3% (which sounds reasonable if you think about it). So then for every 100 calories we feed a cow, a human eats 3.

So even if you do use fertilizer to grow all of it... Growing 30 times less of it to fill the same need is a massive difference.

And then there's the reduction of green house gasses that goes along with that too.

In terms of being into weird random stuff probably from the very beginning. I remember reading about a study where they taught mice to associate the smell of lemons with sex, and they developed a strong preference for lemony partners. The takeaway was there 'is' no universal set of sexually relevant stimuli, it's learned. So if mice do it I'd bet homo erectus was getting up to some freaky stuff on occasion.

The other definition would be non-normative sex acts, which makes you wonder when did we start having norms for how we have sex. Like I don't imagine people were doing missionary with their clothes on in the back of the cave.

I had the same issue, and eventually realized we have resources specifically for learning this: I started reading parenting books.

I would recommend "Unconditional Parenting" by Alfie Kohn as a starting point.

Aw, that's so nice to hear, I'm glad it resonated. Of course, feel free to message me any questions you have, I know it's a pretty vague/hard to explain subject. I'll try to think of some resources I can link as well, and get back to you. It's a bit of a mishmash of different ideas and things I've tried.