The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]

The list of "Reasons for Estrangement" in that first article is sorely lacking in anything that acknowledges the parent might be at fault.

Absolutely agreed. Even foster care itself is inherently traumatizing, no matter how good the foster parents are.

I was wrongfully taken into foster care for a couple months (due to police being called in a false accusation; the police took me without any investigation and handed me over to DFCS — my parents are actually wonderful and I couldn't have asked for a more supportive childhood), and it's positively ridiculous how severely it affected me.

My brother and my uncle both died when I was eight years old, and I was threatened, stalked, and assaulted by an obsessive ex-boyfriend in my early 20s (which ultimately led me to immigrate overseas to hide from him because nothing else worked) — and yet my brief stint in foster care was FAR more traumatic and affects me much more deeply to this day. Everything else barely rates a mention next to foster care. I don't expect I will ever again experience something as psychologically damaging.

I wasn't abused. My parents did everything right both before and after foster care, and my foster parents were fine. It was simply the forcible separation from my family at a young age that messed me up.

Of course, most kids who are taken into foster care aren't like me; they experience abuse at home and are in danger, and foster care is necessary to protect them. But how do you solve childhood trauma in these kids when saving them from abuse is, itself, a source of severe childhood trauma?

Pure "woundology" may indeed make things worse. There's another book which I haven't read yet about the dangers of therapy and underestimating the people's intuition and resilience - "Bad Therapy, Why the kid's aren't growing up", but the podcast with the author seemed reasonable.

It gives lots of evidences on what you've just said.

Just simply living a life, focusing on goals and targets, making mistakes and learning from them - this works too. In my case, personally, I just couldn't ignore the problems anymore. I've also made this mistake of dwelling into wounds burning out people around me and being unavailable for them instead of trying to focus more on something good.

I think, we barely scratched the complexity of human psyche, and there lot's of moving parts in person's development. There might be a bit of dehumanization and modern over-materialistic somewhat arrogance perspective - how can I stop feeling what I feel, so I could continue my business as usual?

A few things why religion helps, out of the head:

- it's an empirical study of human psyche over thousands of years

- highlights importance of intentions behind actions

- emphasizes on connection with the world

Sounds totally reasonable?

The universal practical tip would be "just live your life, pay attention and genuinely try to make good out of it", but if being specific and speaking from personal experience and a keeping it small:

- studying violence (the last book in the list) significantly reduced anxiety, risk seeking behavior and moral rigidness (e.g. what is it: "social anxiety" or "embodied situational awareness"?)

- "woundology" and focus on trauma/pain without keeping healing as a target in mind, will, most probably, just make it worse; but studying the topic still has advantages

- try to pay attention to intuition, it seems like psyche tries to heal itself naturally or at least to draw an attention to yet not understood problem/information gifted to a person about the world/life; try to find out what is the center of what draws you onto it (or maybe scorns you off way more than you yourself would expect normally): Eugene Gendlin's Focusing is a quite good tool for that

- combine both inner and external healing - with a grain of salt, as some people I've met have better outcomes with focusing on actions/thoughts (CBT), while for me a deeper body/intuition oriented inner work seems to suit better; but it's good to try and keep both in mind

- it's ok to reach for medication when it's really bad as a temporal support on the path; don't replace everything with meds, but don't reject them completely either - it's always possible to get back on track later

- things seem to get better over time, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment: new realizations, some knots are untying, sometimes something changes radically and sometimes for the good, and it's difficult to predict that; it's obvious since it's like a personalized empirical search - it needs practice and time, although a possibility of a downward spiral is here as well

- relationships have a degree of power to both devastate and heal

Everyone "misses out" on things either due to choices they make or events/accidents that are out of their control. Being a parent can be rewarding but it also comes with a lot of expense, worry, and sacrifice. There are a lot of things a childless person or couple can do that would be difficult or impossible for someone with kids, and a lot of things that they will never have to deal with (e.g. serious illness or death of a child, the possibility that the child "fails to launch" or even becomes a criminal, etc.).

I have no regrets but parenthood is a fork in the road in life and there is "missing out" on both sides of it.

You could be seeing correlation and not causation. People with psych issues want to get better. Those that are intellectually curious tend to read up on underlying causes and possible solutions.

I will say, that while I've read a lot of these sorts of books, they've mainly helped me identify my predispositions in temperament, my blind spots, etc. If you really press a therapist on the question, they will tell you that the only real way to 'treat' this is having loving and stable friends and romantic partners. I imagine being religious can help as it grants you easy access to a welcoming community, and frankly 'god' is the ultimate parental figure for those that believe.