It is a balancing act and false positives are not cost free and the optimal point is unlikely to be at either extreme.
A person that could get it over with self-sufficiently is also less likely to suffer a great deal to being told they are not self-sufficient. I guess it could be interesting if there is a great assymmetery there.
The advice seems to say “room now, debrief later by somebody else” which seems to suppose that that later application elsewhere is actually beneficial.
There is an important part to the “I am here, if you need me” that leaves really open the possiblity of “No, I don’t need you”. I would rather have help rejectable than control whether you get helped by covering up your need for help.
Parents are unlikely the explicit goal to create trauma for their child. The main way I can imagine being traumatised would be to dig in and make existing trauma worse by poking it. But if there was existing trauma then he was not fine at that moment. And holding psychological scars for two years is not getting off scratch-free.
A person who’s suggestible and who you tell “You are not competent to evaluate whether or not experience X damaged you psychologically” might regularly go back to thinking “Did X damage me psychologically?” and suffer psychologically from that. To the extent that there’s a strong cultural push to the suggestion or it’s given by people with a lot of authority like parents, it might even have an effect on people who are not very suggestible.
The advice seems to say “room now, debrief later by somebody else” which seems to suppose that that later application elsewhere is actually beneficial.
It suggests that if someone suffers from distress it’s useful to give them therapy to help them deal with their distress.
There are many different ways to do therapy with many different theories of action. Research suggests that attributes such as the empathy of the therapist and the relationship between the therapist and patient are more important than the theory of action of the therapy. As such it doesn’t make sense to rule out trauma-based therapy. As described in one podcast from Spencer Greenberg, that trauma-based therapy just might not be any better than therapy that’s about banishing demons.
There is an important part to the “I am here, if you need me”
I have no problem with communicating that and I don’t think anyone here voiced any criticism of that frame. It’s a very different frame from suggesting that people’s own experience of whether or not they need help shouldn’t be trusted.
Parents are unlikely the explicit goal to create trauma for their child.
Just like the doctor in the middle ages didn’t have an explicit goal to make things worse for their patients by applying leeches.
In general, the situations where parents do something that’s traumatizing for their child are often those where the parent is strongly emotionally triggered and doesn’t have the skills to deal well with the situation.
A parent hearing that their child suffered from sexual assault can be hugely emotionally triggering and produce a sense in the parent that they have to do something about it. It’s very hard for the child to defend from that sense of “something has to be done to process this”.
The main way I can imagine being traumatised would be to dig in and make existing trauma worse by poking it.
Studies show that you don’t need existing memories of sexual assault to get someone from psychologically harmful sexual assault memories when you do psychological interventions that dig around.
Unskilled psychological interventions that try to dig into possible repressed trauma got us cultural phenomena like the Satanic panic largely fed by fake memories.
I understood that the problem is that there is a kind of automatic reaction of “oh you were assaulted, now I am going to help you very intensely for 2 years” where the unconditionality or uncontrollability and the harm from the conduct that results are the problems. Thus the problem is “I am here, whether you like it or not” and not going “I am here, if it helps you”
It sucks that people would have legitimate fears for getting such support.
I could also imagine that some parents would put the well-being of their child in front of their own psychological comfort. Doing psychological pressure in the name of easing that “something has to be done about this” is not help. I would love for it to be the case that children could rely for their parents to be on their sides in difficult situations like this. If the child models that the parents can not or will not take it in a level-headed or constructive way I guess hiding and soloing the recovery is more constructive way forward. But I would be disappointed in such parents. And I would like the children to be able to have the trust that such disclosure will benefit them. That there is coverup is a tell that things are not going according to my utopia. Like if somebody goes “Off-course I didn’t tell my layer” that is in contradiction with the design of client-attorney priviledge similarly if somebody goes “Off-course I didn’t tell my parents” I will go “wait, why not and why is that a given?”.
A lawyer is usually a trained professional. Most parents just aren’t at a comparable skill level. It takes emotional awareness to distinguish between parents themselves getting triggered and the child needing help from the parent.
There are certainly good parents who actually provide effective support to their children and who are then likely to be trusted by their children in cases like this, but it’s not surprising if someone has a parent that’s not trustworthy in this case.
It is a balancing act and false positives are not cost free and the optimal point is unlikely to be at either extreme.
A person that could get it over with self-sufficiently is also less likely to suffer a great deal to being told they are not self-sufficient. I guess it could be interesting if there is a great assymmetery there.
The advice seems to say “room now, debrief later by somebody else” which seems to suppose that that later application elsewhere is actually beneficial.
There is an important part to the “I am here, if you need me” that leaves really open the possiblity of “No, I don’t need you”. I would rather have help rejectable than control whether you get helped by covering up your need for help.
Parents are unlikely the explicit goal to create trauma for their child. The main way I can imagine being traumatised would be to dig in and make existing trauma worse by poking it. But if there was existing trauma then he was not fine at that moment. And holding psychological scars for two years is not getting off scratch-free.
A person who’s suggestible and who you tell “You are not competent to evaluate whether or not experience X damaged you psychologically” might regularly go back to thinking “Did X damage me psychologically?” and suffer psychologically from that. To the extent that there’s a strong cultural push to the suggestion or it’s given by people with a lot of authority like parents, it might even have an effect on people who are not very suggestible.
It suggests that if someone suffers from distress it’s useful to give them therapy to help them deal with their distress.
There are many different ways to do therapy with many different theories of action. Research suggests that attributes such as the empathy of the therapist and the relationship between the therapist and patient are more important than the theory of action of the therapy. As such it doesn’t make sense to rule out trauma-based therapy. As described in one podcast from Spencer Greenberg, that trauma-based therapy just might not be any better than therapy that’s about banishing demons.
I have no problem with communicating that and I don’t think anyone here voiced any criticism of that frame. It’s a very different frame from suggesting that people’s own experience of whether or not they need help shouldn’t be trusted.
Just like the doctor in the middle ages didn’t have an explicit goal to make things worse for their patients by applying leeches.
In general, the situations where parents do something that’s traumatizing for their child are often those where the parent is strongly emotionally triggered and doesn’t have the skills to deal well with the situation.
A parent hearing that their child suffered from sexual assault can be hugely emotionally triggering and produce a sense in the parent that they have to do something about it. It’s very hard for the child to defend from that sense of “something has to be done to process this”.
Studies show that you don’t need existing memories of sexual assault to get someone from psychologically harmful sexual assault memories when you do psychological interventions that dig around.
Unskilled psychological interventions that try to dig into possible repressed trauma got us cultural phenomena like the Satanic panic largely fed by fake memories.
I understood that the problem is that there is a kind of automatic reaction of “oh you were assaulted, now I am going to help you very intensely for 2 years” where the unconditionality or uncontrollability and the harm from the conduct that results are the problems. Thus the problem is “I am here, whether you like it or not” and not going “I am here, if it helps you”
It sucks that people would have legitimate fears for getting such support.
I could also imagine that some parents would put the well-being of their child in front of their own psychological comfort. Doing psychological pressure in the name of easing that “something has to be done about this” is not help. I would love for it to be the case that children could rely for their parents to be on their sides in difficult situations like this. If the child models that the parents can not or will not take it in a level-headed or constructive way I guess hiding and soloing the recovery is more constructive way forward. But I would be disappointed in such parents. And I would like the children to be able to have the trust that such disclosure will benefit them. That there is coverup is a tell that things are not going according to my utopia. Like if somebody goes “Off-course I didn’t tell my layer” that is in contradiction with the design of client-attorney priviledge similarly if somebody goes “Off-course I didn’t tell my parents” I will go “wait, why not and why is that a given?”.
A lawyer is usually a trained professional. Most parents just aren’t at a comparable skill level. It takes emotional awareness to distinguish between parents themselves getting triggered and the child needing help from the parent.
There are certainly good parents who actually provide effective support to their children and who are then likely to be trusted by their children in cases like this, but it’s not surprising if someone has a parent that’s not trustworthy in this case.