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So one of the things that I think a lot of people don't really realize is just how messed up a bunch of families are, especially in ways that aren't intuitively obvious. There's a reason that the stereotypical 'instance' of a therapist is some elderly man saying "Tell me about your mother." - the way kids are raised can really screw up their relationships with reality. Kids are fairly hardwired to love their parents; they are basically unable to conceive of the fact that their parents
dislikedhatedabusedwere not ideal to them.There are basically 2 & 1/2 ways that I have seen how kids can react to severely traumatic experiences, which boil down to what I'll call relitigation, reproduction, and repression (note that these probably have real names, I'm not a psychologist).
Relitigation
In this situation, kids basically attempt to reproduce the situation that is too traumatizing to process in such a way that they are now in control of it. The stereotypical example here is of a man who was severely beaten as a boy, so beats his wife/kids as well. This is where the stereotype of bullies having low self-esteem, or being victims, tends to come from. There was a very sad picture posted last week of a man's boss yelling at him, who yelled at his wife, who yelled at her kid, who yelled at his cat; this is that behaviour.
Reproduction
This is the "1/2" of the above (I spent a lot of time wavering on whether to include it as part of the first category); in this situation, the child in question basically 'accepts' that the situation at hand is how love is expressed, and attempts to replicate it in their own life. The standard example here tends to be the girl who was sexually abused tends to end up as someone who overtly sexualizes herself; a warning sign of sexual abuse amongst teachers and similar mandatory reporting professions tends to be kids who do sexual things to get what they want (think, for example, of a 10-year-old who begins to strip if you tell her 'no' - it sounds horrifying, but I've seen it happen).
Repression
Unlike the popular conception, repression doesn't mean completely blocking out an experience; instead, under a repressive system, a child will instead block out all emotional valence from a bad experience. From my experiences in this category, you end up with children who tell 'funny' stories that absolutely do not hit the mark. Things like:
"Yeah, I was kind of mouthy when I was 7; at one point, when I was being a brat, my parents threatened to drown me if I didn't stop swearing. I called them 'shitheads' to their face, and after 5 minutes in the sink, I'd learned my lesson."
or
"When my dad decided (at age 5) that it was time for us to learn about the birds and the bees, he got me and my younger brother to watch one of his pornos."
Although that may sound horrifying to anyone with a normal childhood, that is just sort of the way that people with highly distorted childhood's think. They can recognize that it's weird, but they tend to think of it as 'funny' as opposed to 'awful'.
So the reason I bring all 3 of these up is that all 3 of them can become, in the parlance of rationalists, 'Trapped Priors'. The problem with a lot of them is that they're self-reinforcing; someone stuck in the reproduction mindset will tend to find people who are not interested in mimicking their abusive past boring, for example. The major area in which therapy is actually useful is in breaking these patterns; in an ideal situation, a therapist will identify what the negative pattern is, identify a way to counter it, and, well, train the individual in question to do so.
The problems with it are fairly straightforward:
I think that what we're seeing is the fairly standard loop of humans identifying a 'miracle cure-all', applying it way too broadly, and badly, and then eventually reaching the stage where we recognize it as a useful tool, and not an 'all the time' sort of thing. We've seen this before with radioactive material, and we'll see it again; it seems to be a familiar loop our brains get caught in.
This is interesting, and I appreciate you writing it.
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