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

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

#191

Post by walljm »

rjbwork wrote: post #175
zaphar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religious Faith and Belief are choices. They have to be because they are fundamentally about unprovable things. So in one sense they are absolutely practical. However if you don't want to choose a religion then it may not be practical for you. It is in no way the case though that Faith is something that just happens to you. It's a personal choice.

I don't think it's a choice. If you don't believe something, no amount of trying to make yourself believe it is going to make it so. A whole lot of people raised in a religion who are now atheists can attest to the extreme mental turmoil trying to do so during the deconversion process can cause. You either believe, or don't believe in any given brand of supernatural unobservable phenomenon.

I wouldn't want to assume the details or the difficulty someone else has or is going through related to this.

What I have found helpful, when I went through something like this, is to distinguish between the "feeling" of certainty and the "choice" to put my faith in something. A lot of the time, we talk about "faith" and we conflate those two. I can choose to trust something and not feel confidence in it until after the fact. How much confidence I feel in a choice varies for a lot of reasons, but I may still choose to accept the risk and act on the little information I do have because I don't have better alternatives.

In that sense, you can choose what you believe. Or at least, you can choose what you put your faith in.

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

#192

Post by taurath »

Narhem wrote: post #98
taurath wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a larger club than you might imagine, and even to the deepest depths of nigh-unimaginable mistreatment there are people who have worked through it.

The sad part is the best way to deal with it is pretend it never happened. Feel so defeatist but that'd the reality of being a man.

It’s both - you have to go on living an aspect of your life as if it didn’t for a while in order to survive, and then when you have reached a safer point it becomes time to start unpacking it. Burdens are sometimes carried without us knowing it.

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

#193

Post by taurath »

lanstin wrote: post #115
Narhem wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad part is the best way to deal with it is pretend it never happened. Feel so defeatist but that'd the reality of being a man.

That is a useful coping strategy for a child but if you can get away from the abusive family or whatever group, as an adult you absolutely can be free to deal with the effects until you know yourself as a free, powerful, and normal human being, with a life you are contented by.

The concept of normal is a childish notion, having to do with a lack of appreciation for the complexity of others

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

#194

Post by taurath »

smeej wrote: post #78
taurath wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every kid hands up having a separate childhood even in the same house, because the caregivers/abusers will change over time. Often one kid tends to take the brunt of the abuse, and the family roles end up reinforcing that.

My brother and I talk a lot about this, how we're only 5 years apart, but the first 5 years of my childhood and the last 5 of his are full of completely different types of abuse, and we weren't really treated the same during the years we were home together. The worst things that happened to me happened before he was old enough to form memories, and his were after I left the house.

Mine is 2 years younger but it resulted in post traumatic stress and high dissociation for me, and not nearly as bad effects for my sibling. We were treated different, had different roles, we are different in that I’m neurodivergent and he is not, and also he had a much more available social group of his age.

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

#195

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

sleno wrote: post #87
igorramazanov wrote: post #36

Attachment Theory is an interesting subject on the matter. A few useful books which helped me with both understanding and healing (there're still problems, but it gets better): 1. Love Sense, Sue Johnson. 2. The Power of Attachment, Diane Pooler Heller. 3. Understanding Disorganized Attachment: Theory and Practice for Working with Children and Adults, David, Shemmings and Yvonne Shemmings. 4. The Body Keeps the Score…

Could you summarize some practical takeaways from all these books? To be honest I've become a bit skeptical of how much this sort of stuff helps. From what I see, our society has become much more well-versed in all this psychology-therapy-trauma material in the last 20 years, yet despite this we're taking more anti-depressants and seeing more therapy than ever. Mentally and spiritually we seem to be doing worse than…

Survival is not the same as thriving. Survival is the bottom rung on Maslow's hierarchy and below that is death.

Being versed in the terminology of a subject is not the same as being an adept practitioner.

The next few generations will become better practitioners while us graybeards (encompassing down to those in high school now) will suffer from the consequences of not receiving a better education in mental wellness and lacking the structural supports necessary for that.

There are still a lot of barriers to widespread mental wellness from taking root in American culture: homelessness, poverty, class, conservatism, regressive religions, et cetera.

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

#196

Post by NateEag »

smeej wrote: post #190
kombookcha wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a lot of self-selection going on with the cathegory of estranged parents who blame their kids. If you're the sort of person to reflect on your behaviour, take responsibility and change it because you realise you're hurting others, you're a lot less likely to end up with estranged kids in the first place. If it does happen anyway, you're probably also less likely to be self-soothing with listicles abou…

There wouldn't be any way to collect this data, but if you could, I guarantee the overwhelming majority of "apologies" from parent to child over the course of these relationships would start with, "I'm sorry you ..." rather than, "I'm sorry I ..." I'd be pleasantly surprised to find out sincere apologies ever happened.

I would probably try talking to my parents again if they actually gave me an apology for something they did and left it at a straight owning of their error.

In my family of origin apologies usually started by owning something the apologizer did, but invariably moved on to a "but" that made the recipient the butt of the apology.

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

#197

Post by smeej »

NateEag wrote: post #196
smeej wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wouldn't be any way to collect this data, but if you could, I guarantee the overwhelming majority of "apologies" from parent to child over the course of these relationships would start with, "I'm sorry you ..." rather than, "I'm sorry I ..." I'd be pleasantly surprised to find out sincere apologies ever happened.

I would probably try talking to my parents again if they actually gave me an apology for something they did and left it at a straight owning of their error. In my family of origin apologies usually started by owning something the apologizer did, but invariably moved on to a "but" that made the recipient the butt of the apology.

This is the reason I have a relationship with my mom and not my dad. She did eventually try to understand why she thought the things she did were OK at the time she did them (and that's actually been helpful for me to understand over time), but she began by apologizing and saying anything that affected me the way it did was wrong for her to do, even if she didn't realize it at the time.

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

#198

Post by smeej »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #166
smeej wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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, th…

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.

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

#199

Post by lanstin »

taurath wrote: post #193
lanstin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a useful coping strategy for a child but if you can get away from the abusive family or whatever group, as an adult you absolutely can be free to deal with the effects until you know yourself as a free, powerful, and normal human being, with a life you are contented by.

The concept of normal is a childish notion, having to do with a lack of appreciation for the complexity of others

The experience of abuse, especially directed at oneself rather than towards everyone, can lead to an idea that one is uniquely, shamefully bad, cut off from others, abnormal in an essential way, as opposed to the idea of everyone is in the same boat, we share a common humanity etc. Normal in the latter sense is what I meant - in opposition to being on the other side of a glass from which one can observe humanity without feeling connected to it. Probably a sort of dissociative symptom.

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

#200

Post by AndrewKemendo »

smeej wrote: post #198
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

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 abu…

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

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