Wow. This—and other comments of yours in this thread—actually made a small mental shift of some sort happen in my head. I was raised by … rather inadequate parents, and I learned from a young age to constantly try to predict what my mother was thinking and feeling because she was and is extremely emotional and inconsistent. Gradually her personality rubbed off on me as a result—my model of her was much larger with much more information content, due to its complexity, than any other model of anybody.
As a teenager trying to figure out all my trauma from the numerous ways my parents were emotionally abusive / neglectful / inattentive to me, I first developed multiple dissociative alters which were almost universally female, and then eventually realized that they were all parts of my ultra-complicated mental model of my mom, split off relative to her different mood states—and they’d all splintered into me! A huge portion of my personality was just… hers.
And all this because I had to figure out what was going on in her head instead of just being told. (Along with e.g. being constantly insulted, manipulated, yelled at, etc.) As a result I have extreme social anxiety now and constantly fear that other people are secretly judging me or that I’m going to break social protocols I’m not aware of if I do basically anything—and this makes me extremely irrational whenever other people are involved—because I’m projecting her onto them.
Knowing this doesn’t help me resolve all the infinite variety of individual cases, but it’s very interesting to see that to a great extent it’s about her failure to provide me with any kind of clarity and certainty about what was important, what was not, and how I ought to behave about important things. (To her, everything is important, and disagreeing with her about anything is very bad; so much for my ability to trust myself to figure things out.)
Knowing this doesn’t help me resolve all the infinite variety of individual cases,
Man I wish it did. My life and work would be soooo much easier. But yeah, it definitely does not.
but it’s very interesting to see that to a great extent it’s about her failure to provide me with any kind of clarity and certainty about what was important, what was not, and how I ought to behave about important things.
Sort of? The only caveat here is that this phrasing implies there are absolutes, and IME whenever families deal in absolutes, it’s as a form of deceptive manipulation.
Clean communication doesn’t include appeal to absolute values or priorities, but to the parent’s desires or goals. “I want you to do X”, not “It’s important you do X. Or, “I think you should X because Y”, not “You should X” (or even “You should X because Y”!).
When adults deny their “I”, they also deny the significance of the child’s “I” and the relationship between those I’s. The implicit message is: “individual goals or priorities don’t matter” / “I don’t care what your priorities are”. And “if you need to get people to do something, appeal to universal correctness instead of asking, negotiating, or otherwise communicating”.
(Again, for anyone reading this as a parent—I’m not promoting a theory of parenting here, just saying what thought process usually works for adults to fix the entanglements that create their insecurities, self-consciousness, procrastination, indecision, etc., etc.)
I’m not sure that appeals to universal correctness are that big a deal though. They’re the way all social mores are understood in most cultures: as morally obligatory for all members of the community, period. But people don’t all have terrible childhoods in traditional cultures.
They’re the way all social mores are understood in most cultures
And that’s precisely why they’re so easily (and commonly) abused for deception and manipulation.
But the real issue is their being absolute, rather than things you can weigh and trade off (see e.g. your earlier mention of your mother’s attitudes). Absolutes are thought-stoppers and give you no room to make your own judgments.
So in the context of being a functional, emotionally-free-to-choose adult, universals and absolutes are always a red flag worth checking. Anything that can be claimed as a universal can also be derived (as an adult) from one’s desires, values, reasoning, etc., and is a term to be weighted in your utility function, not a true absolute driving utility to zero or infinity.
(And if there is any emotional objection to questioning the absoluteness of a principle, that’s a double-extra sign of manipulation to be investigated, since a truly universal value would still make sense even when deeply questioned.)
people don’t all have terrible childhoods in traditional cultures
I wouldn’t know; my bias is that I work with people who have problems now, and some of those problems can be linked to their upbringing. I literally can’t even say for sure that bad parenting causes problems, all I know is that fixing mental models of bad parenting fixes problems for the people that have them. And in that context, absolutes and universals are always a big red flag.
People who are taught everything that way have a lot of trouble figuring out what they want, because they’ve never really thought about it… or if they tried, they couldn’t get very far because it kept getting shut down by critical voices.
Again, I can’t say that’s a cause of problems with people in general, since If I tried to do that kind of reasoning from the people I see, I would also have to conclude that bad parenting makes children more intelligent, talented, and sensitive!
(In reality, the causation probably goes the other way: intelligent and sensitive kids are perhaps more likely to be damaged by shit parenting because they take in more, think more deeply about it, and more acutely feel the effects of it. Maybe create broader associations and generalizations, for that matter.)
Anyway, within the context I’m speaking of, healing this kind of damage requires practice hearing one’s own feelings, wants, desires, values, all that kind of thing—and thinking in terms of universals, absolutes, and other abstractions is the exact opposite of listening to one’s own self. That’s why it’s a red flag to me.
My point is that “people should be able to come to their own conclusions rather than be taught absolutes” is a very WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) perspective to take. The standard position throughout most human history and cultures is “you agree with your elders because they know best”, and this is an absolutist claim. I am not willing to say most people in human history across cultures were abused or damaged by this.
The way you’re saying this just doesn’t parse to me. I don’t understand how you can believe that a therapy aimed at imagining better parenting isn’t implying something about what parenting is bad.
I am not willing to say most people in human history across cultures were abused or damaged by this.
Neither am I, as I explained at great length in my previous reply. Not sure what that has to do with anything, though.
In the context I mentioned—i.e. the context of a person who has motivation and decision-making problems, absolutes in one’s upbringing remain a red flag that require investigation, since they’re most likely a problem.
Perhaps the context isn’t sufficiently clear? I’m saying here that if I’m working with somebody and they mention an absolute, I’m going to want to investigate it. I’m not saying random people need to scour their childhood for random mentions of absolutes. I’m saying if an absolute or universal comes up in the context of fixing a specific problem, it’s extremely likely to be one of, if not the source of the issue(s) at hand. (And so should always be investigated, if not expunged.)
The way you’re saying this just doesn’t parse to me. I don’t understand how you can believe that a therapy aimed at imagining better parenting isn’t implying something about what parenting is bad.
The same parenting can be perceived by people in different ways. One person perceives, “my parent is an asshole” and isn’t bothered, while the other perceives, “I am the asshole” and becomes neurotic. (Extreme over-simplifcation here.)
The other complication is that it’s not outward overt behavior that matters, it’s what the adult seems to be implying about the child that has the most emotional impact. So no matter what the supposed philosophy of parenting is, one can probably find both loving and abusive ways to implement that philosophy. That’s why I mostly try to avoid promoting a particular philosophy, or make any claims that damaging parenting is universally damaging, even if it seems so within the population whose problems I hear about.
Okay. I think I finally understand. What you’re saying is that you think the damage here comes from children internalizing negative ideas about themselves, which can happen in any mode of parenting, but in your experience always seems to crystallize around some ideal held as absolute which they feel they’re not living up to, thus making them bad etc.
So it’s not absolutes themselves necessarily that are the problem, it’s absolutes that make the child feel unworthy, and which thus, being absolute, are not modified or healed by experience but must be actively fought with therapeutic techniques.
Yes. I’m also saying it’s common for human beings to use absolutes as a means to disclaim responsibility for their own choices or motives while emotionally blackmailing others to do what they want. This has less to do with the absoluteness of the proposition, and more to do with the concealed message that “you deserve to feel bad about yourself if you don’t comply with my (concealed/disclaimed) wishes”.
I call this an “FBI message”, i.e. “feel bad if”. People tend to focus on the seemingly factual/reasonable part of a communication or idea like, “you failed at X”, and then feel bad about themselves because, well, that sounds like a fact. But the implicit, unspoken part of the communication was “You deserve to Feel Bad If you fail at X.”
In the case of absolutes, they’re a red flag because they usually conceal an unquestioned FBI message: the absolute part is like a stealth wrapper for the toxic payload. So ironically, the more reasonable, obvious, and factual-sounding the wrapper is, the worse it is for you, because it keeps you from questioning the toxic payload: feeling bad about yourself.
There are lots of justifications our minds use to rationalize feeling bad about ourselves, but these justifications are smoke screens to keep us from being aware that the only real reason to feel bad about ourselves is to send costly signals to other people in order to influence their behavior. Feeling bad about ourselves doesn’t perform any directly useful function for the individual at all!
In an abusive environment, sincerely feeling bad about yourself communicates to the abuser that their goal has been achieved of crushing your spirit, so they will hopefully be satisfied and don’t keep escalating. But once you’re out of that environment, feeling bad about yourself no longer serves any useful purpose whatsoever, as it’s costly by design and can be thought of as a button for “Quick! Turn down the volume on all of my individuality and its expression!”
Anyway, it’s definitely possible to communicate something as an absolute or universal without tacking an FBI message on it. But the kind of people who conceal their motives using absolutes are nearly always sending FBI messages along with them, so in that context ANY absolute is likely a carrier for one and should be detained and investigated. ;-)
Wow. This—and other comments of yours in this thread—actually made a small mental shift of some sort happen in my head. I was raised by … rather inadequate parents, and I learned from a young age to constantly try to predict what my mother was thinking and feeling because she was and is extremely emotional and inconsistent. Gradually her personality rubbed off on me as a result—my model of her was much larger with much more information content, due to its complexity, than any other model of anybody.
As a teenager trying to figure out all my trauma from the numerous ways my parents were emotionally abusive / neglectful / inattentive to me, I first developed multiple dissociative alters which were almost universally female, and then eventually realized that they were all parts of my ultra-complicated mental model of my mom, split off relative to her different mood states—and they’d all splintered into me! A huge portion of my personality was just… hers.
And all this because I had to figure out what was going on in her head instead of just being told. (Along with e.g. being constantly insulted, manipulated, yelled at, etc.) As a result I have extreme social anxiety now and constantly fear that other people are secretly judging me or that I’m going to break social protocols I’m not aware of if I do basically anything—and this makes me extremely irrational whenever other people are involved—because I’m projecting her onto them.
Knowing this doesn’t help me resolve all the infinite variety of individual cases, but it’s very interesting to see that to a great extent it’s about her failure to provide me with any kind of clarity and certainty about what was important, what was not, and how I ought to behave about important things. (To her, everything is important, and disagreeing with her about anything is very bad; so much for my ability to trust myself to figure things out.)
Man I wish it did. My life and work would be soooo much easier. But yeah, it definitely does not.
Sort of? The only caveat here is that this phrasing implies there are absolutes, and IME whenever families deal in absolutes, it’s as a form of deceptive manipulation.
Clean communication doesn’t include appeal to absolute values or priorities, but to the parent’s desires or goals. “I want you to do X”, not “It’s important you do X. Or, “I think you should X because Y”, not “You should X” (or even “You should X because Y”!).
When adults deny their “I”, they also deny the significance of the child’s “I” and the relationship between those I’s. The implicit message is: “individual goals or priorities don’t matter” / “I don’t care what your priorities are”. And “if you need to get people to do something, appeal to universal correctness instead of asking, negotiating, or otherwise communicating”.
(Again, for anyone reading this as a parent—I’m not promoting a theory of parenting here, just saying what thought process usually works for adults to fix the entanglements that create their insecurities, self-consciousness, procrastination, indecision, etc., etc.)
I’m not sure that appeals to universal correctness are that big a deal though. They’re the way all social mores are understood in most cultures: as morally obligatory for all members of the community, period. But people don’t all have terrible childhoods in traditional cultures.
And that’s precisely why they’re so easily (and commonly) abused for deception and manipulation.
But the real issue is their being absolute, rather than things you can weigh and trade off (see e.g. your earlier mention of your mother’s attitudes). Absolutes are thought-stoppers and give you no room to make your own judgments.
So in the context of being a functional, emotionally-free-to-choose adult, universals and absolutes are always a red flag worth checking. Anything that can be claimed as a universal can also be derived (as an adult) from one’s desires, values, reasoning, etc., and is a term to be weighted in your utility function, not a true absolute driving utility to zero or infinity.
(And if there is any emotional objection to questioning the absoluteness of a principle, that’s a double-extra sign of manipulation to be investigated, since a truly universal value would still make sense even when deeply questioned.)
I wouldn’t know; my bias is that I work with people who have problems now, and some of those problems can be linked to their upbringing. I literally can’t even say for sure that bad parenting causes problems, all I know is that fixing mental models of bad parenting fixes problems for the people that have them. And in that context, absolutes and universals are always a big red flag.
People who are taught everything that way have a lot of trouble figuring out what they want, because they’ve never really thought about it… or if they tried, they couldn’t get very far because it kept getting shut down by critical voices.
Again, I can’t say that’s a cause of problems with people in general, since If I tried to do that kind of reasoning from the people I see, I would also have to conclude that bad parenting makes children more intelligent, talented, and sensitive!
(In reality, the causation probably goes the other way: intelligent and sensitive kids are perhaps more likely to be damaged by shit parenting because they take in more, think more deeply about it, and more acutely feel the effects of it. Maybe create broader associations and generalizations, for that matter.)
Anyway, within the context I’m speaking of, healing this kind of damage requires practice hearing one’s own feelings, wants, desires, values, all that kind of thing—and thinking in terms of universals, absolutes, and other abstractions is the exact opposite of listening to one’s own self. That’s why it’s a red flag to me.
My point is that “people should be able to come to their own conclusions rather than be taught absolutes” is a very WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) perspective to take. The standard position throughout most human history and cultures is “you agree with your elders because they know best”, and this is an absolutist claim. I am not willing to say most people in human history across cultures were abused or damaged by this.
The way you’re saying this just doesn’t parse to me. I don’t understand how you can believe that a therapy aimed at imagining better parenting isn’t implying something about what parenting is bad.
Neither am I, as I explained at great length in my previous reply. Not sure what that has to do with anything, though.
In the context I mentioned—i.e. the context of a person who has motivation and decision-making problems, absolutes in one’s upbringing remain a red flag that require investigation, since they’re most likely a problem.
Perhaps the context isn’t sufficiently clear? I’m saying here that if I’m working with somebody and they mention an absolute, I’m going to want to investigate it. I’m not saying random people need to scour their childhood for random mentions of absolutes. I’m saying if an absolute or universal comes up in the context of fixing a specific problem, it’s extremely likely to be one of, if not the source of the issue(s) at hand. (And so should always be investigated, if not expunged.)
The same parenting can be perceived by people in different ways. One person perceives, “my parent is an asshole” and isn’t bothered, while the other perceives, “I am the asshole” and becomes neurotic. (Extreme over-simplifcation here.)
The other complication is that it’s not outward overt behavior that matters, it’s what the adult seems to be implying about the child that has the most emotional impact. So no matter what the supposed philosophy of parenting is, one can probably find both loving and abusive ways to implement that philosophy. That’s why I mostly try to avoid promoting a particular philosophy, or make any claims that damaging parenting is universally damaging, even if it seems so within the population whose problems I hear about.
Okay. I think I finally understand. What you’re saying is that you think the damage here comes from children internalizing negative ideas about themselves, which can happen in any mode of parenting, but in your experience always seems to crystallize around some ideal held as absolute which they feel they’re not living up to, thus making them bad etc.
So it’s not absolutes themselves necessarily that are the problem, it’s absolutes that make the child feel unworthy, and which thus, being absolute, are not modified or healed by experience but must be actively fought with therapeutic techniques.
Yes. I’m also saying it’s common for human beings to use absolutes as a means to disclaim responsibility for their own choices or motives while emotionally blackmailing others to do what they want. This has less to do with the absoluteness of the proposition, and more to do with the concealed message that “you deserve to feel bad about yourself if you don’t comply with my (concealed/disclaimed) wishes”.
I call this an “FBI message”, i.e. “feel bad if”. People tend to focus on the seemingly factual/reasonable part of a communication or idea like, “you failed at X”, and then feel bad about themselves because, well, that sounds like a fact. But the implicit, unspoken part of the communication was “You deserve to Feel Bad If you fail at X.”
In the case of absolutes, they’re a red flag because they usually conceal an unquestioned FBI message: the absolute part is like a stealth wrapper for the toxic payload. So ironically, the more reasonable, obvious, and factual-sounding the wrapper is, the worse it is for you, because it keeps you from questioning the toxic payload: feeling bad about yourself.
There are lots of justifications our minds use to rationalize feeling bad about ourselves, but these justifications are smoke screens to keep us from being aware that the only real reason to feel bad about ourselves is to send costly signals to other people in order to influence their behavior. Feeling bad about ourselves doesn’t perform any directly useful function for the individual at all!
In an abusive environment, sincerely feeling bad about yourself communicates to the abuser that their goal has been achieved of crushing your spirit, so they will hopefully be satisfied and don’t keep escalating. But once you’re out of that environment, feeling bad about yourself no longer serves any useful purpose whatsoever, as it’s costly by design and can be thought of as a button for “Quick! Turn down the volume on all of my individuality and its expression!”
Anyway, it’s definitely possible to communicate something as an absolute or universal without tacking an FBI message on it. But the kind of people who conceal their motives using absolutes are nearly always sending FBI messages along with them, so in that context ANY absolute is likely a carrier for one and should be detained and investigated. ;-)