Something about attachment styles? Meditation maybe? Do I just go read the Dale Carnegie book?
What has helped you? Gimme whatever you got
My #1 rule is to just assume that everyone I encounter is having a bad day.
It's usually true!
A cheap easy basic rule for new relationships is to listen more than you speak, and to ask questions about the person and show interest in who they are. Of course it'd be weird if everyone tried to do that at the same time, but it is a good starter tip all the same.
Beyond that: vulnerability.
The contemporary world discourages vulnerability. The ruling class wants atomized insulated and alienated consumers and workers that consume products and never come together in significant numbers in any threatening way.
It is dangerous to open up to the wrong people, but if you take the risk of being vulnerable with someone that you can trust, that can lead to them opening up to you as well, and from there, your emotional breadth and depth may improve. That's another way to describe being a warmer person, I think.
@muddi's advice is very good. I'd suggest one thing: hold back your urge to speak immediately. Take your time to speak. Consider what you say.
I guess this depends what your issue is, exactly, but if you're snarky and rude like me, this is how I act as kind as I mean to be.
Just do it ironically all twee-like with supreme commitment to the bit and then let the Mother Night clause handle the rest.
“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
What has helped me the most in that regard was, as always, estrogen.
Weed, meditation, psychedelics in that order of most first
I'd imagine psychedelics would help more if you do more self reflection/meditation/mental health repair work with them but I mostly trip for recreational reasons
Don't the attachment styles theorists think they're fixed? Or do they include interventions?
I had a week off and boy was I warm. But now I’m back at work and I just don’t have the bandwidth…
Years of being marginalized as a kid, noticing that it was sometimes other people being marginalized, wanting to not do that to them myself, recognizing how every interaction has a dimension of social valuation. Mostly.
Much of it is from having an emotionally unsupportive home, and a school environment where the whole cast of characters could change every few years, so for the sake of my mental health I had to get good at making friends.
Maybe some of it is from reading a lot and being a lot better at listening than talking. Maybe I was better at listening because I wasn't such a great conversationalist because my world was oriented around books and games and stuff more than organic human interaction. Maybe good fiction is something that improves your empathy by putting you in a different person's shoes.
the dale Carnegie book sucks. I read it and it did nothing for me
Death to America
Meditation is good. Just stare at a wall and get really bored and then when you're done the world becomes more interesting and appealing in comparison, and that includes other people. A constant stream of entertainment and stimulus tends to make people disinterested and judgemental of others because we expect them to constantly be justifying our attention, the same way we might expect from a video game.
