To think being well-adjusted is a privilege no one acknowledges enough?

Oh dear.

I refer you my post of 20.03.

I agree. Self confidence and self belief are so important aren’t they.👍

I don’t think this is contradiction in terms of you don’t understand nuance- or maybe much at all tbh.

Are you saying unless your acknowledgement is immediately visable to everyone - including random strangers online- you aren’t acknowledging it? Try and make some sense please

More contradiction,

You “don’t display it” but it’s somehow evident.in what you do?
How does that work?

Not sure why you brought your colour into this, this thread is about the apparent privilege of being well-adjusted.

I am white

do you know whether or not I acknowledge my white privilege?

no. It’s the same thing. It is not something you display to the world, but comes though quietly in your values actions and decision making.

Perhaps @Backedoffhackedoff just wants them to understand of heir level of privilege. That would make fortunate people less judgmental to others. That's what I think anyway.
Not all fortunates are like that but I think some can be.

Talk about contradictory.

You do want them to do something: to acknowledge it.
And precisely how would they do that so you would notice and they would pass your test?

I consider myself well adjusted but I have siblings that clearly are not. What happened there?

I am thankful of my perception of my upbringing but do listen and empathise with my siblings perceptions of their experience.

I am thankful for being allowed to be a free thinker, for being given a level of decision making and autonomy when I was a teenager because I did have thoughts and ideas that my parents didn’t seem to have from my perspective but they never imposed on me a view or ideology.

I do actually mentally give thanks to my upbringing for that.

Sorry, who are we blaming now?

I find the assumption that people who had a tertible childhood can choose to be happy quite astounding tbh. Yes you can choose to bury your feelings bit of course you are not going to be as happy if you were beaten, shamed or put down.
Easier to be positive and do well in life if you were treated kindly and suppirted

I don't know anyone who is 'well-adjusted' - I know plenty of people who have had a lot of shit to deal with who have made the best of it. I think that's pretty standard.

What research has shown is that if you have a foundation - a parent, a grandparent, some reliable adult - who is deeply connected to you, providing ongoing support, no matter how flakey that support is, you have at least the baseline requirements for making something of your life. For that reason, people who enter foster care early, move around a lot and have contact with their birth family severed struggle massively - many end up in jail, with addictions and/or have ongoing issues.

So, if you had a family of some sort, that stayed the same from birth-18, even if that family was pretty fucked up, you were doing well. It is then up to you to make something of that and that's where outcomes vary massively.

IMO, it's important , if you know you are fortunate as a family, that you should bring up your children to appreciate this and understand how much easier things are for them than for others.
Albeit a long time ago, I went to a small girls' school in a very middle class area. Most people were very comfortably off (not rich). I do remember some smug attitutes , where the children had somehow picked up the idea that they had 'earned' their comfortable lives through their own virtues. Hard to describe but rather insufferable to experience.

I son't know much about the posh public schools but often think it must be a problem in those places. I wonder if anyone is telling children in public schools how much they have to be grateful for?

Sorry. It wasn't meant to be insufferable.

It is something I ponder a lot. My dc have had it handed to them on a plate. It isn't fair. It seems unreasonable that school is set up to reward and praise those who have it easy.

I genuinely mean it when I say I don't know how you level these things up. The things that give the greatest advantage are v difficult to share out in a way that material stuff can be ie food banks, libraries. You can't even out not being scared or never knowing true fear or pain.

I was not bragging as such. I was agreeing that it is a privilege and luck.

My dc grandparents had horrendous childhoods and there was a lot of grief and loss and physical punishment.

I do think turning it around in a couple of generations is an achievement.

Our teens know having their utterly soft and devoted mum and dad together is better instinctively!

On the odd occasion we have a bicker they tiptoe around offering to make teas to check the marriage is still intact! (As they have got older more of their friends live with separated parents and we think they think it sounds “less good).

It’s one of the few cute things they still do.

This.

Many people are totally unaware of this. They might therefore say you are being unreasonable due to their ignorance of trauma response.

Love a mn humble brag

I agree.

YANBU. I realised this mid twenties when I brought a friend home and she was amazed at the relationship I had with my father. She couldn't believe he'd listen to me and have a debate about things. She had a very difficult background. Up to that moment I took it for granted that this was what fathers were like. It really made me think.

It was quite apparently very similar, without going into details.

YABU. Not everything is about 'privilege. That sounds like yet another excuse for people to take no responsibility for their own lives.

I truly believe inter generational trauma is very prevalent and destabalising.

This is veru poignant for me right now. Currently seeking ( more emdr) for childhood trauma. Violent mum with severe mh issues.
Mind you i do think she was parented by parents who lived tbrough the war ...grandad was in pow camp in suffered terribly. They were violent to her...i expect through their trauma.
I do love them all and miss them. Mum died. I forgive them.
I am doing ok now ...job, house, car, dh, dd but i am scarred, haunted by a vicious inner critic that tells me im useless and reminds me of my troubled past.( single mum, lots of bad relationships, eating disorders and the rest%) I carry shame with me. Seeking treatment but no matter now succesful i ami will always criticise myself. That is down to trauma.

Sounds like a fascinating series of lectures

@lilyofthevaIIey I am not arguing for one moment that someone who has been the subject of a traumatic experience or traumatic childhood should take on a victim mentality and just sit back and think "fuck it, I was abused, I'm a victim and that's my lot in life". How many traumatised people ever start out like that? Very few I would imagine.

However, for many abused children the hardwired, instinctual patterns of behaviour they learned to keep themselves safe, to self-comfort, to survive in the absence of any safe dependable adult can lead to harmful and dysfunctional behaviours in adult life that are incredibly difficult to re-programme. I've never met an addict who loved their life and wished they could remain addicted. All of them want something better for themselves but without years of support and encouragement and surroundings that are conducive to recovery, they fail or relapse. And that's just addiction, there are of course plenty of other damaging behaviours out there that occur as a result of traumatic childhoods.

I went to a series of lectures by one of the Chief Medical Officers in Scotland who spent years researching why the poorest socio-economic groups in Scotland had such shockingly poor life expectancy and it boiled down to generational trauma. With intense intervention, he believed the cycle could be broken in 3 generations. Gabor Mate, a doctor who has spent decades treating addicts, says the same thing.

Just out of interest, how do these addicts access this treatment?