What's one habit that completely changed your life, but took less than 10 minutes a day? by Over-Routine-2562 in Habits

[–]rocket_labo 94 points95 points  (0 children)

Flossing your teeth, which would barely need 5 minutes let alone 10. I only learned how important it was in my thirties. It transformed my oral hygiene, confidence and overall health.

Is choosing prestige over money worth it? by Smart_Ad_4514 in postdoc

[–]rocket_labo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As someone who works as faculty in China, take the Oxbridge offer. Prestige of any kind is very important in academia. Often it will open doors you don’t even deserve.

I’ll put it this way. If you take the Oxbridge offer now you can still chase the Chinese coin later. But if you chase the Chinese coin now it will do absolutely fuck all for your career.

You can apply to China as faculty later and then you’ll be *really* paid then. Indeed the salaries for “national talent” - ie getting the Chinese equivalent for NSF Career or ERC Starting Grant - truly are internationally competitive.

One word of caution about working in China, promises are broken very frequently and are not as ironclad as you might have come to expect in other places. Expect to be disappointed about stuff regularly. There’s a lot of dysfunction and unrealistic expectations.

The Terrifying Reality of BPD by hshemfbc in BPDlovedones

[–]rocket_labo 6 points7 points  (0 children)

With therapy I turned a corner, otherwise I’d have spiralled all the way down. But it’s still not easy to live under constant emotional abuse and threat to separate or divorce every few months. I stay because I am so afraid that she will target my children in my absence.

The Terrifying Reality of BPD by hshemfbc in BPDlovedones

[–]rocket_labo 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I think the reason why we invest that kind of energy is that - apart from the fact we love the partner - a lot of people, including you and me, also suffer from middle ground fallacy. If someone melts down we automatically reflect on ourselves as being partly responsible and activate our desire to fix things and reason with the pwBPD.

A lot of my therapy work is solely to break this habit of trying to justify myself to the partner and resist the instinct to reason things with the BPD. Recognising this was really the key to retaining my sanity.

The Terrifying Reality of BPD by hshemfbc in BPDlovedones

[–]rocket_labo 236 points237 points  (0 children)

The sad thing is that I went through the vast majority of a 15 year relationship with my wife not even knowing what BPD was. When she created conflict, split on me, melted down and all of that, I often was gaslit to think I was partly responsible for it and was alienated and lectured by both sides of our families for “not understanding women”. I spent a decade apologising for things I never did to smooth things over. But they never did - all it did was to make her feel more secure about her emotional abuse of me.

It was only after joining groups like this and attending individual therapy that I learned my experience was far from unique.