Last year, I was invited by my customer to a team-building event at a marine resort (always pick a rich customer!), and one day was dedicated to the Insights team building exercise. It was the standard corporate Jungian nonsense, although surprisingly practical for navigating everyday business. The tutor was a very energetic 60-year-old Indian grandma, and at the start of the training, she promised a "
psychologically safe environment". Obviously, it wasn't. The entire upper management was present, so everyone knew they should keep quiet and not say anything that could be used against them.
But that was my takeaway message, and I was contemplating where to find such an environment and how to nurture it to benefit the people around me. Clearly, it wasn't in the team-building activities, not within my family, not among my friends, and not even with my therapist and psychiatrist - in the end, I found myself pretending that my problems were getting better because they would keep repeating the same things, and I would keep saying it's just not working. By the end, I couldn't even tell them that we had only managed to create a fake and shallow environment between us that wasted everyone's time.
I looked into social networks, the usual suspects, and they are as far from safe environments as they can be. They come from a place of bad faith, yapping instead of listening, meming as an empty response to serious answers, and virtue signaling for internet fame.
However, from /r/suicidewatch, where you can't afford to be suicidal for some reason, I was redirected here and was blown away by the emotional maturity of many people here. I think when pain turns inward, there is little energy left to turn it against others. At least, this is my interpretation of why this is such a positive place. This is precisely the place I was looking for, and I'm not sure it exists anywhere else, at least for me. A safe place for me means that you can share anything without people starting to see you in a different light, without trying to fix you, use you for their own ends, make you feel guilty for your thoughts, actions, or existence.
Now, it's not all positive. A mod reached out to me a few days ago after I disabled and reinstated my account - I've done it twice, and I will probably do it many more times because I can't decide if this site is actually good for me. Not for the topics relating to CTB, which doesn't influence me either way, but for all the stuff around it.
I made the mistake of going to the sister Incel forum (knowing how SaSu began, I thought I'd have a look). I don't want to generalize this group of people, I know better, and on some level, I can sympathize with their pain. However, I opened a topic that was indirectly about me and couldn't believe the amount of hate and vitriol thrown at me for just existing. It was some 14th-century backward thinking, completely disconnected from reality. I still don't understand how they could come to such conclusions. Not that I mind too much if they would succeed in gassing me in a concentration camp, it would save me the time to acquire the means to CTB, but I'm concerned that many people here come from that crowd, and they seem to be proud and loud about it. Now, there is obviously no real danger to me, and I don't want to be a drama queen. I have enough of my real problems, but it seems so weird when I'm sharing my experience and thinking about SN as a means of getting some peace, there are people who might be thinking about Zyklon B to "help" me out. I can only hope that SaSu has nicer incels
Summing this all up, I think this is still a very magical place full of compassion, and I would like to contribute to making it the psychologically safe environment I was looking for. I might not be great at it, coming from decades of social anxiety, but I come from a place of genuine care and love. I don't intend to sway anyone in their path, but making our time here a bit more bearable, be it for a few months, days, or last minutes for some, is something I would very much like to do