Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

In the microplastics thread, so many were ready to assign blame for so many pervasive ills to the prevalence of microplastics.

Meanwhile we have known about the devastating effect of interpersonal trauma in childhood and just shrug or worse, say “well that’s how my parents did it and I’m fine.”

Foundationally there is no problem more urgent than eliminating interpersonal alienation at every possible interaction and eliminating alienating systems.

You can’t innovate your way out of the problems a society with no trust causes.

View on HN

> “well that’s how my parents did it and I’m fine.”

Broadly speaking, I've noticed a couple of different responses to going through an extended bad experience over which one has no control (for example, a shitty childhood).

Upon reaching adulthood, one response is to say, "Wow, that really sucked, I will take steps to avoid ever having to experience that again, nor visit it on my children/partner/loved ones".

Another (probably more common) response is to say, "I survived and I'm ok, it must not have been that bad. Maybe it even made me stronger/tougher/more worldly/etc".

Needless (I hope?) to say, people who tend towards the latter attitude are far more likely to repeat the same mistakes that they previously suffered from. Unfortunately this kind of attitude also seems to frequently be tightly interwoven with identity, making it all but impossible to dislodge. Thus the cycle repeats.

We often downplay the prevalence of dissociation as well - sometimes formative experiences are not necessarily even apparent. Then when they have a kid it comes flooding back, the same cycles repeat as the underlying emotional blindness is still unaided.

I love that "and I'm fine" line. I see it a lot in contexts where someone is defending something that seems barbaric to me, which I would consider a very clear sign that they are not fine.

It leads to a lot of, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means," at least in my internal dialogue.

You're in a tangled philosophical thornbed with that internal dialog. It isn't a strange thing to think but as far as I can see functional humans are all barbaric. In the small scale, the practice of eating meat leaps to mind. I love a good chicken burger but let us be real about what it takes to produce one. Not pretty.

So we might have an existence problem if we go to find someone who doesn't defend barbaric practices and describe themselves as "fine". Everyone defends some barbaric practices, and some subset of them will be fine.

I'm vegan, and I would be quite functional if the rest of the world was simply right instead of wrong

An additional anecdote: I see it in responsibility rejection and/or attempted erasure:

- I'm fine, therefore you are also fine (it's not my fault you can't deal with this)

- I'm fine, therefore you are also fine (you exist only as an extension of me, and I'm fine)

It can also be survivorship bias: "we never used seat belts and we were fine" can only be said by someone alive.

I'm trying to be open-minded reading through this thread. I don't understand much of it at all. Everything's in English, follows grammar rules, etc. But semantically it all seems empty. I have a large vocabulary, and I haven't had to look up any of the words that aren't modern psych jargon (and few of those).

It's difficult to understand what you even mean by trauma. I understand it perfectly in a medical context, these are acute and potentially deadly injuries that must be treated immediately. In this thread? I can't make sense of it. Not 10 comments above yours, there was someone suggesting that "abuse" and "trauma" don't even correlate perfectly... which sort of seems insightful, but also confuses things even more. I could at least deal with the idea of some hidden psychiatric illness that originates from physical/sexual abuse, but if even that's the case... then what should I be taking away from this?

I can't speak for the others, but I definitely don't know what you mean. Not even slightly.

I think the way relational trauma is understood today, at least as applied to children, is that the event breaks the person's internal sense of self and of safety.

Children are SO vulnerable, and their brains understand this on a lizard level. "Those people are huge and I am very small" is obvious, even to an infant. They know, instinctively, that their parents are what stand between them and death.

When a parent abuses a child, violates a child, the child doesn't doubt the parent's goodness or rightness. They can't afford to. It's much too dangerous. If the person standing between you and death isn't safe, nothing and nowhere is safe.

So they doubt themselves, their own goodness, their own rightness. The operating system gets installed with major bugs. It can't trust its own programs, its own judgment, whether it's even real and has a right to keep existing. It's broken on such a deep level that it can't recover on its own.

I think sometimes abuse doesn't lead to trauma if there are strong enough mitigating factors. She's now deceased (death totally unrelated to this) so I can't ask her, but I don't think my sister experienced our abuse as trauma like I did, because she internalized very early on that dad was unreliable and unsafe, so it didn't shake her sense of self and her own judgment. I have theories about why she was able to do that and I wasn't, but there's only so much to be gained by speculating in her absence.

I made my parent comment intentionally vague because I didn't want to cause debate about it, but the context where I normally hear people saying, "My parents did it to me and I turned out fine," is talking about spanking their children. So my response is, essentially, "Are you fine? You're standing here defending the idea of hitting a child. To me that's a very strong indicator of not being fine." I thought it was a common enough conversation for people to know what I meant without spelling it out and opening that can of worms, but that's probably culturally contextual.

Hope this at least clears things up a bit.

Very well said

It’s finally recognizing that the centuries of generational interpersonal trauma that was normalized has been catastrophic for the world

You have to recognize the problem before you can solve it

Would we even have an "I'm going to get mine no matter what happens to anyone or anything else, now or in the future," mindset if we all grew up with healthy attachments?

I know scarcity would still exist. It's not like better parenting would make things perfect. But I hope all the internal healing work people are trying to do is part of the necessary process to turn the tide on this as a systemic problem.

I think you're being a bit unfair with "I'm fine".

Rumination is a real thing and for a lot of people they don't find it useful, or in fact actively harmful, to draw attention to the fact repeatedly.

Yes, dealing with past trauma is exceptionally difficult and it takes an exceptional amount of work to deal with

Much like cancer, Parkinson’s disease, etc…

You must overcome your fears to liberate yourself from your own anxieties

And the goal of therapy and other treatments is to in fact be fine. Also a common result of child sexual abuse is to feel uniquely specially damaged in a way no one could understand. Cut off from humanity, while in fact the experience is one some percentage of people share and while it's bad it's not something that renders your life hopelessly bad. Letting go of that feeling of specialness is hard but very beneficial. In some families the abuser is the only person to be warm or kind to the victim. Their only experience of comforting touch, which is needed, becomes a weirdly special secret.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com