438 karma · joined September 16, 2024
https://nccpr.org/the-evidence-is-in-foster-care-vs-keeping-...
I was given an ADHD diagnosis as a child before it was in vogue. From my (admittedly) biased perspective I was given this as a result of hyperactivity which might have stabilized on its own given enough time, but my caretakers reacting poorly to my early behavior caused long-lasting traumatic symptoms which happen to line up with many symptoms of ADHD. So I just assumed that ADHD was the case the whole time. I started to suspect something was off when stimulants did not help my problems, but unfortunately it was not enough to escape the sphere of trying to solve my issues with ineffective ADHD-centric solutions until long into my adulthood.
Childhood trauma on top of misdiagnosis on top of continuing familial issues was an awful combination for me and I can't say that I've made that much progress from therapy, only that at this point I can survive with full awareness of the reality of how I was treated. It felt like I had been living in an alternate reality for decades and now I can't stop thinking about what I've found out.
If one or both of your parents shut down your emotions all throughout your childhood, you have will likely have far bigger issues than anything an identity check can solve.
Your options when dealing with truly obstinate family memebers in real life? Stop. Give yourself permission to disengage. There isn't another option. (https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing...)
All of this is integral to me working with my current therapist, so I don't see what it has to do with depression not fixing itself.
One of my therapists said it was normal in her circle for people not to get onto someone's case if they're mentally unwell and have chores piling up, because it makes sense they don't have as much effort to give to all aspects of life. At the time I didn't understand this statement, because up until then my only contacts were people who, although they didn't go as far as "bullying" me into compliance, had told me in effect that how I felt about my life was irrelevant to whether or not I was fulfilling every single one of my adult responsibilities. What ultimately worked for me wasn't those contacts who said there were no excuses, but my therapist who decided not to frame my decisions in terms of "excuses".
For me this kind of thing hurts because:
1. There's not any room for compassion or slack. I'm not talking about people who take advantage of others' goodwill. Even if you try to help with this "no excuses" mentality, the other person could start to worry if the next inadvertent slip-up or setback counts as an "excuse" they'll be looked down upon for. This kind of thought will linger and reduce the effectiveness of the intervention.
2. Your feelings aren't listened to, or if they are it's only at a level superficial enough to obtain compliance. This is bad enough on its own. What might not be obvious is if the person has had a life marked by repeated instances of their feelings being shut down or not listened to, especially in childhood, this approach only backfires that much harder. These are emotional patterns that have been established in critical periods/over a long period of time that are being relieved at a much higher intensity than the average population. And most importantly, you can't know for sure if something like this applies until you get to know the person better, which is why a lot of one-off prescriptive advice towards strangers is ineffective.
3. The advice-giver is often successful/came out of hardship themselves, so by being looked down upon as irresponsible it gives the impression that you're being excluded from the in-group of mentally well/recovered people. Avoiding exclusion from a group is one of the biggest sources of strife today, as modern politics and social media indicate. And being mentally stable is often one of the most important groups to be included in for people who know they're depressed, so it hurts even more.
The only solution I see is to find the right therapist. Some people might not when their future depends on them finding one, and they give up too early. I can't see how that would be fixed except maybe having a mediator that pairs you up with therapists they recommend and asks if you feel an improvement each week. You'd be surprised, but I had nobody to do this for me. So I ended up losing years worth of time sticking with incompetent therapists because "going to therapy" like everybody told me to seemed more important than "fixing my life."
As cruel as it sounds, I was in no position to think critically about my own treatment because my mental state only allowed me to see checking off the box of self-care to get people off my back as the ultimate goal. It's the nature of the problem of mental healthcare. If I had been given a simple questionnaire to rate my treatment providers on a scale of 1-10 in various dimensions, I would have been put in front of someone else within a month or two.
When people claim the contrary it's feels more of a test to see if you can be perceived as responsible enough for your own actions to be worth helping. An individualistic mindset like that isn't very productive at alleviating depression.
This was my childhood.
Unfortunately for some the narrative of the perfect family is too precious for others to step up and intervene. It's taboo to accuse someone of being a bad parent, even if it's the truth.
Even away from my abusers for decades, the resulting issues have continued into my adulthood and led to near daily struggle that seems to have no end. With my family I've had to choose my battles and my therapist is the only one who both believes me and is trained to give me the support I require to mentally survive in the adult world, one I would otherwise be unprepared for. Without a good enough job I wouldn't be able to pay them and that support would evaporate.
Imagine if a huge percentage of the drama and anger that shows up online is rooted in formative trauma that nobody will ever admit out loud, and as a result we're distracted by trying to address completely unrelated sources of outrage.
It's less blame/resentment (though I admit I'm still working on it) and more that pretending my childhood was just fine and my parents were absolved of everything just because they tried their hardest was exactly what kept me trapped in a vicious cycle for far too long. Some things go beyond "just" bad parenting and into the level of abuse and potentially lifelong physical/mental conditions. Only by admitting to myself that yes, I was not at fault for all my own misfortunes and maybe someone else did share the blame, was I finally able to start healing.
One of my goals is to isolate the healthy parts of blame from the all-consuming and unproductive ones, which I'm still working on.
For my case (and I speak for nobody else), I don't want to have children until I'm 100% certain I will not make the same mistake as my forbearers and pass down their trauma to my offspring. Some of that decision-making is out of my hands until I've had enough therapy and healing. That's just what abusive parenting does to a person's psyche.
And for what it's worth, I can't predict how my perspectives on parenting will change if I become a parent myself, but even in that case I will never stop believing my own parents were abusive. No model of how the world works makes sense to me without that understanding anymore.
I would bet that some young people will be as reflective and independently minded as you were to integrate the material into their experience and be better off for it. Some (like me, because I was thin-skinned) won't and it will stress them out or traumatize them instead. Does that make them lesser human beings for not being capable of bettering themselves from seeing the unfiltered truth on their own?
For all the benefit of 4chan, and I do say there is some benefit only after having grown into an adult with better critical thinking skills and years of therapy, it self-selects for a certain type of poster capable of lurking enough, following the norms and having a thick skin. Not everyone will clear that bar and it's unreasonable to think that all young people will turn out like yourself having immersed themselves in it. Some could end up wasting a lot of time baited into petty arguments, or worse.
Not disagreeing with you, but you might want to sit down for this...
https://www.ft.com/content/d84c8502-d413-4a26-a59c-494af1197...
I am doing better these days but I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out if I got help sooner, instead of spending years and years searching for the wrong kind of help. It doesn't help that society is talking more about this and inadvertently leading people to believe that these problems are just the way things are, without considering upbringing and environmental factors.
At the same time, blaming the wrong problem is different then spending all one's time blaming the right problem, which is different than letting go of the past and doing the best one can with one's life. It is nearly insurmountable for me but I try to put forth an effort each day.
It would be nice if a beets background worker could be kicked off when new music is detected to avoid the sequential nature of the commandline and see all the waiting tagging actions at once. This[0] is supposed to do that but it appears deprecated in favor of something else[1].
That being said, the "beets way" works pretty well past the import stage, so I haven't felt the need to move off it for local music.
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
Is extension support only meant to work with a Google account signed in or am I missing something?
EDIT: I tried loading the store page in desktop mode but I can't install the non-Lite uBlock Origin, I guess because this Chromium version doesn't support Manifest V2 anymore. I'm still on Kiwi Browser which supports MV2.
Another bugbear for me personally: rounded corners. Ask online and it feels like people just parrot the idea that rounding is "more friendly and pleasing" over and over, as if blind repetition of an ideal makes it true. But I've never looked at a picture of old webpages or UI frameworks with sharp corners from 20 years ago and go "that's unfriendly." It feels like with this one, a couple research papers came out a while back showing that rounding makes users spend less energy on element identification, and then used that outcome to conclude "well, I guess a huge swathe of UI design is now a solved problem."
Subjectivity died with the need to squeeze out every last drop of "efficiency" out of every UI design. And no, I don't think that rounded corners are friendlier and more pleasing than all alternatives. In fact, I believe they are a staple of the web and modern UI design in general homogenizing into a bland, unremarkable mess, and are thus irritating. I just border-radius: 0; everything globally and call it a day.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.