Thanks for sharing that book The Continuum Concept! I’ve had this idea for a while that a huge amount of trauma—and even philosophical underpinnings of ideologies—are actually rooted in subconscious, innate expectations that were dashed in childhood. Looks like this book can give me some fodder for this theory.
Example of what I mean: the belief in a loving god is a generalization of the desire for a loving parent. People who didn’t have a loving parent may be more likely to seek a religion with loving gods as a subconscious compensation. I did, anyway. That’s a testable prediction—are people with bad childhoods more likely to become religious? Given how trauma seems to coincide with greater willingness to join cults, it seems plausible.
That said, I am a bit skeptical of the book’s apparently highly general universal claim (haven’t read it yet of course) about what is best in parenting, which looks as if it’s just sort of posed and argued for without any experiment. Actually, how much of the theory of parenting has been experimentally tested?
As I said, I can’t really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly “use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting” in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others’. Mostly books tended to give advice like “love yourself” or to “love”, “protect”, “care for” etc. one’s inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn’t experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-Dependency” deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin’s work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, “functional parenting” not meaning actual parenting, but “what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don’t need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.”)
Thanks for sharing that book The Continuum Concept! I’ve had this idea for a while that a huge amount of trauma—and even philosophical underpinnings of ideologies—are actually rooted in subconscious, innate expectations that were dashed in childhood. Looks like this book can give me some fodder for this theory.
Example of what I mean: the belief in a loving god is a generalization of the desire for a loving parent. People who didn’t have a loving parent may be more likely to seek a religion with loving gods as a subconscious compensation. I did, anyway. That’s a testable prediction—are people with bad childhoods more likely to become religious? Given how trauma seems to coincide with greater willingness to join cults, it seems plausible.
That said, I am a bit skeptical of the book’s apparently highly general universal claim (haven’t read it yet of course) about what is best in parenting, which looks as if it’s just sort of posed and argued for without any experiment. Actually, how much of the theory of parenting has been experimentally tested?
As I said, I can’t really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly “use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting” in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others’. Mostly books tended to give advice like “love yourself” or to “love”, “protect”, “care for” etc. one’s inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn’t experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-Dependency” deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin’s work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, “functional parenting” not meaning actual parenting, but “what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don’t need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.”)