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Consider two approaches: one is to spend hours ruminating on your experiences every day to form insights and approaches to tackle new problems and make new progress. The other is to panic at the slightest sign of anything, compartmentalize everything and get stuck in fruitless thought loops constantly, making very little progress to integrate information or have insights. Say both of those take the same immense amounts of energy, but maybe the former would have a better shot at fighting active abuse, you know? In my experience, calculated thought is far superior to fruitless panic. In this way one could be considered "stronger" than the other even though both are technically undesirable (because constant rumination over everything is actually terrible, for example).

Real example based on real self-doubt across multiple friends I know.

by Kye24 minutes ago|

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You seem to be talking past me.

by LoganDark18 minutes ago|

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I'm trying to say that the reason it's not defined carefully is because people who worry about this don't usually have concrete objective definitions. "Stronger" sounds better to someone who hates that they're "weak", because the costs are less obvious. (Consider breaking down in front of everyone all the time, embarrassing yourself constantly, never knowing what to do, irritating everyone by being inconsolable, etc. vs always being composed, manipulating situations to avoid embarrassment, always being prepared with plans and never depending on others. Despite the fact that the latter is a constant never-ending source of work that mostly never gets used, on top of being incredibly lonely, the former feels worse because everybody sees it as worse.)

Both examples can be incredibly emotionally mature, they just express it in different ways. Like, both are much more mature than me. This might be surprising because panic does not seem mature, but it does often have a good reason, even if it's something like sympathy or wearing abusers out, etc.

by Kye3 minutes ago|

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This still sounds like you're trying to justify "weak" and "strong" as useful categories.

>> "Consider breaking down in front of everyone all the time, embarrassing yourself constantly, never knowing what to do, irritating everyone by being inconsolable, etc. vs always being composed, manipulating situations to avoid embarrassment, always being prepared with plans and never depending on others. Despite the fact that the latter is a constant never-ending source of work that mostly never gets used, on top of being incredibly lonely, the former feels worse because everybody sees it as worse."

These are not emotionally mature ways of handling things. These are called maladaptive coping strategies.