Comment by munificent
2 years ago
> I have had people (including the friend from the first paragraph) suggest I need to "work on my childhood trauma" but really and honestly I can't think of a single thing that was legitimately traumatic.
Let me just copy/paste an older comment of mine:
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Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. There's a big couch taking up half the living room, but one of the legs is broken. When you were really little, it tipped over when you sat in it, so you just learned to walk around the couch over to the not-very-comfortable armchair and sit there instead.
This was so long ago that you don't even remember learning not to sit in the couch. You don't think about how much room that couch is wasting or how much time you spend walking around the couch to get to the chair. Sometmies you stub your toe on the way around, but everyone trips every now and then. You've been doing this so long that it is completely unconscious. Hell, you can and do navigate the room in the dark.
Friends ask you about your living room furniture and you—completely honestly as far as you know—say it's all fine. You describe your chair in detail. It's not perfect, but it's serviceable. Certainly lots of other people have furniture that's in worse shape. At least you don't have any of those problems.
Then you sit down with a therapist for a few hours and they say, "Hey, what's up with that couch?"
I understood the concept already, thanks.
But thank you for providing readers an example of the kind of condescension I was describing.
And then others can read your own comment history about the 'minor' traumas and the impacts that has had on relationships in your own life.
At least from your writing I believe you're a very introspective person. The trouble with introspection is that it is an imperfect mirror. We tend to self find solutions for our problems, but we do so at the risk of completely missing the blind spots in our life.
Coming back at the previous person with the term condescending is concerning. At least my observation is you believe you have covered all of your bases, but this gets problematic in cases of omission. Yea, your parents did not hit you, but that does not mean they taught you how to have healthy relationships, for example, something that leads to a lifetime of trauma in some people due omissive ignorance.
The last paragraph is a really good insight. We tend to view a "good" upbringing as purely the absence of trauma, but it requires the active presence of teaching important skills and modeling healthy relationships.
Simply never being in a car accident while growing up doesn't mean you spontaneously know how to drive a car.
Honestly, I've always been doubtful of therapy and how well it could work for me but your comments made it click for me. Thank you!