Hey let's talk about the dangerous pseudoscience that a lot of safe spaces use.

And how in practice from a psychological point of view you're basically making a boot camp for self harm.

BF Skinner was a psychologist who specialized in something called "operant conditioning." This has been used in training to develop conditionalized responses, it's also correlated with self-harm.

And liberal countries use it in schooling for children and of course the military.

I don't need to tell you about how both of these institutions have a huge problem with self-harm it's pretty common knowledge by now. So let's talk about safe spaces and how it's being used there by people who believe in pseudoscience.

So let's say someone is upset because of some kind of social antagonism, ie: something problematic.

They go to the safe space and immediately they hear two things.

"Your feelings are valid"

"What they did is unacceptable"

Congratulations, someone felt pain and trauma and you just positively reinforced it. What you should do is to actually comfort the person and show real compassion instead of these idiotic liberal platitudes.

Also when you tell someone it's unacceptable then hopefully they're God.

Hopefully they can snap their fingers and magically make it disappear forever.

Because if they can't then you've just created an impossible expectation.

Which is constantly reinforced over and over again.

This means that they will constantly feel helpless, and they will receive positive reinforcement for feeling helpless, which means that you've created a cyclical habit of trauma that is amplified each time it's positively reinforced.

So don't do that.

Let's talk about what you should actually do if you're not either very ignorant or genuinely evil.

1. Listen to people, take the time and effort to listen to them and understand them in a real way. Observe who they are and what their good qualities are. Observe their strengths as well as their vulnerabilities. Develop an understanding of their characteristics.

2. Reinforce their strengths instead of their vulnerability, tell them what you admire about them, and tell them that they can use these things to overcome and develop emotional independence and combat helplessness. Positively reinforce strengths.

3. Invalidate the social antagonism. Don't say that it's unacceptable, say that it doesn't matter. Say that it doesn't make them any less valuable or important to the world. That they shouldn't listen to what a bunch of idiots think. Overtime this makes it less traumatic.

There is more to it but these basic three things can make people feel better and actually make them stronger and develop agency when facing antagonism or adversity. That's how you do it. You build people up and show them their own abilities and how they can use those abilities.

Thanks for reading and please never use pseudoscience around vulnerable people.

Also you can look up BF Skinner for sources, as well as cognitive behavioral therapy. It's not 100% CBT since I adapted it for informal social environments. But science is the same though.