Growing up in a environment that isn’t conducive to social adaption gives you a free pass to be not socially adapted, but it also means it is now your personal responsibility to fix that.
“Just because you got burned doesn’t mean you get to go around setting everyone else on fire.”
A quote I remember often.
The thing about trauma is that it hijacks the default mode network and makes everything look like a threat. The word is hypervigilance, and it filters everything you perceive through the lens of danger.
So when “hurt people hurt people,” it’s not usually because “I’m in pain so I must make others suffer.” Often it’s because they see a phantom of whoever hurt them in the past, and it’s overlaid on every interaction they have.
The default mode becomes defensiveness and self-preservation, and often the impulse is to preempt any potential pain by reacting to it before it even happens.
Therapy can help, but blaming people for their trauma and treating them as a fundamentally bad person because of how it manifests in their behavior doesn’t.
My quote wasn’t intended to be a solution for people with genuine problems. It can be a reminder to take a step back if one can.
Yeah, trauma or other defensive behavior can be like wagon ruts. That’s the well-worn path the brain defaults to and it can be really hard to lift that heavy wagonload of trauma out of that deep rut. Creating other roads and lightening the load is a job for therapy.
Absolutely humans are deeply affected on conscious and unconscious levels by all kinds of things that are out of their control - both experiences and brain chemistry. Absolutely it is a privilege afforded to only a few to have access to the support and resources needed to become aware of their situation and create deep change for themselves.
It’s also true that if you do a bad thing you did a bad thing. That does NOT mean you are a bad person, it does NOT mean all the things you can’t or couldn’t control are your responsibility, it does NOT mean that you even were fully aware of what you did.
But if you do a bad thing you are responsible for what you did. YOU did it. It is your responsibility to get on a path that will allow you to recognize and change that behavior.
It is nobody’s job to be perfect or beat themselves up for mistakes. It is everyone’s job to work towards being better - to themselves and to the people around them.
Part of that is understanding that you are responsible for your actions. You may genuinely not have been capable of making a better choice at the time - but if you did it = it’s on you to own the mistake.
Makes me think of the fact that boys that are sexually abused as children are far more likely to grow up to become pedophiles than boys who are not sexually abused as children.
They should still be in prison if they ever act on their pedophilia.
They should still get help for the trauma they have experienced.
I’m willing to bet that almost all of them are fixable as long as they have not offended, but saying that, I also say that it’s practically inexcusable if they did.
I’m glad my childhood raised me to be a pathological people pleaser utterly terrified of anyone’s disapproval. Nobody complaining about these sorts of people
On one hand, I am the same way. On the other hand push that further in the same direction to get BPD, and people absolutely complain about people who have it. I guess also my wife complains about my people pleasing sometimes…
Same for age, wealth, status, gender, education, height, weight, hair color, surname and any other inane metric yould care to list. People just need validation and respect, yet don’t recognize it’s a two way street. Not difficult.
Nobody is asking for a free pass, but mental healthcare and just a general recognition of the lack of free will that we all suffer in this deterministic universe does require us to think in terms of consequences that might actually work to make the world a better place.
I’m other words, when has saying, “be better” ever persuaded anyone?
At least don’t fuck over the people that actually stand beside you. Everyone else is fair game.
Buncha times
Be good. Stop being bad. Okay you can go…
You’re against using the phrase “be better” ? Because it’s overly reductive, lazy and lacks any real tangible call to action? Is that why?
That’s part of it. The other part is who would actually benefit from being told this? Only someone who already wants to self improve and is motivated not to disappoint you.
What other words are you
Doesn’t seem like good ones
Explanation, but not excuse.
But then, is there any excuse to be a shitty person. I can only thing of a couple of edge cases.
is there any excuse to be a shitty person
By definition, no. Because if there’s a good justification for it, it’s not that shitty.
E.g. It’s okay to be shitty to Nazis.
Everyone makes mistakes.
If you had a reasonable childhood count yourself lucky - your mistakes will probably be reasonable. If you suffered from severe trauma/abuse or you have mental health challenges then you are likely to make different kinds of mistakes.
It is everyone’s job to work towards being better. You do something shitty then YOU did it - your childhood didn’t do that, you did. It also might be true that you don’t even recognize how shitty it is because you were taught it was “normal”.
We all are responsible for our actions, but some folks have been surrounded by kindness from birth so kindness is natural and easy. Other folks have to work really hard and make a lot of mistakes to learn that their behavior isn’t ok.
Yes, we are all responsible for our actions.
Equally true = some folks face enormous challenges because of background or brain chemistry, while others have it so easy they don’t get why anyone would struggle.
Fyi you don’t have to have had trauma or abuse to have behavioral issues that are untreated or undiagnosed.
This is me! 🙂 I could make you a long list of things wrong with my parents / things they did wrong, but last I checked humans are going to be human (not perfect). My parents love me and they did the best they could. I had a WAY better childhood than most.
However 40 years of undiagnosed female ADHD didn’t go well. I didn’t feel like I deserved to be struggling so I pretended that I wasn’t. THAT didn’t work.
Eventually got knowledge and support - things are looking up for sure. Just - boy oh boy a lot of energy wasted and failures that could have been avoided if I knew then what I know now.
Grateful I know now, but folks who are struggling and don’t know why have my heart for sure.
is everyone here larping as if we were on facebook or some shit like that?
Larping?
That’s the intentional irony I envisioned with this post. It’s going how I expected. “Be better”
its not your fault for turning that way. but its your fault for keeping that way.
It took me quite a while to climb out of that pit. Even now decades later I’m realizing how much they did to me. They didn’t know it and didn’t care but they shortened my life with their neglect. I had never looked up rheumatic fever. When I was fourteen I was third in free style swimming in my region. I got sick with a sore throat and ear ache. My parents waited three days to take me to the doctor. The 80 year doctor just said it was a minor ‘red throat’ I went back home and two days later my I started bleeding from my ears. Three days after that they finally took me back to the doctor. I had a high fever and was really out of it. I was out of it for a few days and in the hospitals for fourteen days.
After that I started getting slower in swimming. I couldn’t no longer keep up with the times I had when I was younger. I was getting tired all the time and was having pain in my chest. My mother insisted I was too old for that and fool that I was believed her. In truth I had heart problems related to that fever. They had the money and I had insurance but they decided that their money was more important and the only reason why they went to the doctor when they did was because someone came by the house and saw the bloody paper towel next to my ear and freaked out. I didn’t learn that for thirty years just like I didn’t learn they called SCAN which was child services at the time. Of course they talked them down and I was in my late forties before I found out.
I had a heart attack when I was in my mid thirties. Now in my mid fifties I’m looking at severe problem with my heart valves. If I lose my job I’m dead in the Land of the Fee. I have tried to raise my children better but I still have difficult emotional problems and I can tell you right now I don’t hate much but even though they are dead I will always hate them.
This isn’t a fucking shitpost oh my God. This community is where bots come to get Lemmy cred.
I mean, it’s gaining the exact responses I expected it to lmao. I’d say it’s worked well as a low effort piece of cringy bait. I even used the shitty “be better” cliche. Also hilarious to call me a bot given my post/comment history.
500+ posts annd 2000+ comments in six months is bot behavior, that’s exactly why I said it.
I mean, I’m an active user. Do you really think I’m a bot?
I look at the content and frequency of your posts and liken it to Gallowboob, who I’ve seen the actual dude, so not a bot, but the way the account is used is not the same as a regular person would use the account.
I would concede I’m definitely not a “regular” person. But also definitely not a bot lmao. The content should be making it pretty clear I’m not a bot.
Explain to me in one hastily written white board that you do not understand childhood trauma.
On the one hand there’s truth to that: your behavior is your responsibility.
On the other: people in this country are seriously uneducated in regards to childhood trauma. I mean good grief. If someone is behaving poorly, there may be deep reasons for that and maybe get them some help.
I think the point is though that after you move out you are in control of your own destiny, and can choose to be a better person than your parents, or just repeat their patterns in your life. I’m not negating trauma.
I.e. had a guy doing Renos at our place, super guy, very kind. As the renos went on we got to chatting. His dad was an abusive alcoholic and he’d left home. I commented how he was doing amazing in spite of his upbringing, and his response was (paraphrased) “I went through stuff, but one day I had to choose not to be my dad, and not let what he did hold me back any longer. You can wallow and drown in the poor me pool, or climb out of it”
What country ?
Bojack? Is that you?
Your post is great OP. There are so many entitled people in this thread arguing that their life gives them a reason to not be a good person. Its lovely that they’re all outing themselves for who they really are.
There will always be someone out there who had it worse than you did. Many of those people choose good. Being a good person is an active choice that you have to make every day, and it is not the easy choice. It’s work.
You don’t want to make the effort and try and leave this world a little better than you found it? Fine. But at least own up to it. Don’t blame circumstance. It’s you. It’s the choice you are making.
I fall into the “no free will” camp. I don’t think people should get a free pass, however. The goal should be rehabilitation and prevention.
If any punishment is involved, it should not be anything beyond what is most likely to correct the behavior and/or discourage others from engaging in the problematic behavior… if we can even agree on what is considered problematic behavior.
Figuring out the rehabilitation and deterrence is also hard, and we’re usually just happy to punish in such as way as to minimize cost or maximize profit so… I doubt we’ll figure it out anytime soon. That and people’s egos can’t handle the whole “no free will” thing.
I made this post strictly to incite horrible arguments/statements in the comments. Both my title and the photo itself are reductive and cringe. This is a shitpost.
having an abusive childhood is the main reason why i’m extremely sympathetic now, and probably part of why i’m also a massive doormat
It’s all about attitude. You can’t choose your trauma, but you can choose how to see it:
- A normal experience that you “got over” and refuse to allow yourself (and by extension others) to say is or was “that bad,” may even lead to believing that it’s “your turn” to inflict it on anyone who arbitrarily deserves it
- A horrific experience that you never want another child to ever go through
Luckily, I grew up with parents who saw it the #2 way and raised me with love
You cannot always understand or even know your own trauma and in many cases, not all for sure, as you didn’t see it as trauma or completely suppress it and hide it from even yourself
