Anyone else here engage in "post therapy"?

[ElboRuum]

You've heard of letter therapy, right? If you don't know what this is, it's a bit of a coping tool where if you are agitated by another person's actions or words, you write a letter to that person, generally as nasty as you would have if in the heat of the moment said it to their face. You read it and reread it as many times as you like, but when you are done, you throw it out. I suppose the idea is to allow the heat of the anger to subside long enough for you to process it and look at it in retrospect without incurring the obvious social hazards associated with barking nasty shit into people's faces.

Post therapy is kind of like that, only with an added dimension. You write the post, you read it and read it. Then you reassess it and maybe edit a bit here and there, just to see if somewhere in all that there is more than just irritation. Sometimes there is, so you may edit it again, maybe to add a bit more invective, other times to bring the tone out of the rafters.

But here is the challenge: backing out of the reply page, essentially throwing out your nastygram. Because there it sits, the post button. It's like a calculus you are struggling to make sense of. Here, on this page, may be a perfectly legitimate viewpoint, but it comes from irritation, and its purpose is to rebuke another poster. It may be justified. It may not. Is it worth expressing? Or is it a better thing to simply let it go? And there it sits, that post button. Is it too strident? Am I playing with a hide? Or in extreme cases, a boot? Is the point worth making or is it merely adding more entropy to the already severe chaos? Decisions, decisions.

Most of the time, you'll decide to back off.

Why post this here? Because of late, I've been tiring of the "lather, rinse, repeat" we all know and loathe because I know that I want to address different topics of interest, not just here, but in GD as well as other groups, yet the board keeps getting swept up in these tiresome border skirmishes at the edge of HoF space. I post this here because, well, some people seemed obsessed with what we say about what if only to say, see what the "boy's club is saying about yada yada", what do you expect from that place, etc. even though we all know its more generally directed. But for possession of the Y chromosome, we seem to be the focus of their outrage most of the time. So I feel like it would be most appropriate to get input here on this.

Long story short, I want to know if I'm the only one who engages in this sort of last second "back off the button" consideration.