Surviving Solitary Confinement
"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, air-less—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." - C.S. Lewis
A Few Little Ideas: If a petty criticism about you is obviously false, you tend not to care. If anything it just makes the person criticizing you look dumb. If the criticism could be true, you might become outraged because you know it’s a genuine attack on your identity. I thought about this when I heard an FBI interrogator say the #1 way to spot someone covering up a lie is how angry and righteous they become when defending themselves.
https://collabfund.com/blog/a-few-little-ideas/
Mental Health Scorecard: I found this mental health scorecard developed by the McCance Centre for Brain Health in Massachusetts that people can use for diagnosis of their own brain health, and possibly even use it to track if they are on the path of improvement. Will not be a substitute for a mental health professional if you need one, but only a tracking tool.
https://www.massgeneral.org/assets/mgh/pdf/neurology/mccance-center/brain-care-score.pdf
How to Survive Solitary Confinement: Angela Duckworth was teaching seventh-grade math in a New York City public school when she noticed that intelligence was not always the best predictor of which of her students succeeded. There was another key ingredient: the ability to demonstrate effort and passion over time, a quality she called “grit.” Grit isn’t just about achievement. In fact, achievement can obscure grit. Writes Duckworth, “Whereas individuals high in need for achievement pursue goals that are neither too easy nor too hard, individuals high in grit deliberately set for themselves extremely long-term objectives and do not swerve from them—even in the absence of positive feedback.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-survive-solitary-confinement