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Originally Posted by autotelica
I don't know why you didn't think that was articulate, Anti.
Maybe my therapist goes about it the wrong way? 'Cuz she totally goes heavy on the "blame game" stuff when we talk about the past. While it is true she is working only on the material I've given her, she talks about my father in ways that make me feel defensive on his behalf. The same with my twin sister.
Actually, when she talks about how "mean" people have been to me, it triggers my tendency to see both sides of the story--which then neutralizes my negative reactions to the "villains" and makes me downplay the inherent "goodness" of the protoganist--me. For instance, she often plays up the importance of having been bullied. The more she does this, the more I see things from the point-of-view of the bullies and the more understandable/defensible their behavior becomes to me. Which totally negates the purpose of the exercise--which is to let me see myself as a victim of circumstance.
Apteryx, I agree with you about different strokes for different folks. Obviously the past and delving into the "why" are not my strokes. I was just curious if I'm the only one who feels like this.
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I think it's good you realize you're doing this. It sounds like you're playing devil's advocate and you have a little bit of bias against whatever interpretation your t gives you. I guess since you realize you're doing it, you realize that perspective of seeing things primarily from the point of view of the bullies is biased. I think it's good you can see the bullies' point of view, but it's good if you can see yours as well. As an adult, you can understand and defend why they were bullies, but you can also understand how it hurt you and caused you to react in an unhealthy way.
For example, perhaps as a child it caused you to deny to yourself that you were being hurt because admitting that you were being hurt just hurt too much back then. If you figure out that (or some other example) was true, then as an adult, you can change your reactions. For example, as an adult you might allow yourself to feel hurt feelings more since there's not as much danger of getting bullied anymore, and that might let you interact with people in a more emotionally honest way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by autotelica
It's because I am so detached that perhaps I think it is overvalued sometimes. (Which is why I would never have children).
I see people all around me that had bad things happen to them growing up. Or they lived in a tar-paper shack, the youngest of eleventy-billion children, with parents who were crazy/drunk/ill-tempered/strict/absent, and they also had bad things happen to them. And they have turned out "fine."
Now I use the quotation marks because "fine" is subjective and can be masked. Looks don't always tell the full picture. But I also don't think "everyone is a little crazy" either. Some people are clearly more jacked-up than others, and I don't think it all goes back to how they were raised.
If person A can be raised by horrible caregivers and not be negatively affected and person B can be raised in fair-to-middling caregivers and turn out to be a living trainwreck, doesn't this undermine generalizations about the importance of "feeling loved and valued", at least a little bit? And I don't see how seeing yourself as being deprived of love isn't a horrible indictment against your parents/caregivers. That's laying some pretty heavy blame. I guess for me to feel comfortable doing this, I'd have to know that my parents' child-rearing wasn't merely questionable, but that it was really really bad. Which would mean that it would be pretty obvious as such, and I probably wouldn't need a therapist telling me it was.
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Understanding how your negative experiences from your parents growing up hurt you doesn't have to be an excuse or a way to blame your parents, it can be just an explanation. If person A or B reacted differently, it could be due to person A's biology being different from person B, or a lot of slight differences in their experiences. So if your siblings did well and you didn't, it doesn't mean something is wrong with you, or that something is wrong with your parents, just that the combination of biology and nurture didn't work well for you. If it's still affecting you, understanding why it didn't work well can help you change it.
I don't think not feeling loved and valued is
necessarily a terrible indictment of one's parents. Maybe the parents just had a gentle but detached personality. Nothing wrong with that, they just didn't know how to express feelings the way the kid needed for that particular kid to feel very well loved. It would have been better if the parents could have helped the kid feel loved, but the parent isn't a terrible person for not being able to do it.
I agree with you that being detached could lead you to undervalue the significance of the effect of your parents on you (not to mention undervaluing the effects of any person on another person). I think the opposite of being detached is paying more attention to the affects of people's emotions on each other. In a way, observing people's emotions, including your own, can be kind of like scientific observation I think (?). But in a way it's different because you have to use your subjective experience of emotions to understand them, and subjective experience is a different way of knowing things than scientific observation (I think?).
Sep 24, 2012, 05:23 PM
This is an old thread. You probably should not post your reply to it, as the original poster is unlikely to see it.
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