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

I do think some people can get ‘stuck’ on their upbringing. I have a friend who had a really very normal 80s/90s childhood. She has various mental health conditions and spends an inordinate amount of time navel-gazing and reading essays and books to try to koi unpick her childhood to explain why she’s like she is, and at some point I kind of feel like she’s wasting her time. She’s talked to me a lot about it and the biggest issue seems to be slightly emotionally repressed parents, not to an abusive extent and not even unusual by the standards of the time, but she is fixated on this childhood and how it is shaping her life 30 years on. Yet her parents are still very active in her life, help her a lot with childcare etc.

So I wonder if it’s also that some people just don’t have that need to look back and make sense of things in the same way, whereas others need to find a reason and can’t move past till they do.

It's interesting that you have used inequality between the sexes as a privilege that society has attempted to tackle. This is certainly true, but even when this has been tackled by some heavy duty legislation and significant focus and resource, male privilege has not been completely erased. It's also a relatively easy privilege to tackle because it's easy to identify people that are in the under privileged group and to target interventions accordingly. Even then, do men and women live in a meritocracy? Not really. The same can be said for race. Again, an area where an awful lot of focus and resource has been directed but still obvious inequalities exist. You then look at other obvious privileges such as money, class, intelligence, family and social networks, disability, education etc and it becomes obvious that it would be impossible to correct all of these privileges, let alone tackle the more complex ones like trauma.

It's so multi faceted and complex that you quickly begin tying yourself up in knots working out who is the priority for support in a meritocracy once you acknowledge that often support and help offered to one group will often be at the expense of another when opportunity and funding is finite. Of course what you outline regarding development traumas would be useful for many but so would funding better quality education for everybody, more money pumped into disability services and support, more money targeted at poorer families to access learning and development opportunities... The list is literally endless.

Prisons may be full of people who have experienced trauma but they are also full of men offen with SEN, that have grown up in poor families, from specific races, with poor education and lacking a positive social network and role models. Pretending that trauma is the key to tackling all of this is misleading and we need to prioritise what we want to tackle as we don't have enough money or resource to tackle everything. Even suggesting money should be focused at the start of life makes sense, except when you realise the role of parents and the need to pump resource into adults to achieve change for parents.

To make your argument reasonable, I would say to be in a place of peace, and to be able to react within the status quo is a privilege.

Despite your background or trauma or anything, if you can reasonably fit in, it is a form in privilege in my view. However I think the question becomes what does your society define well adjusted as?

I find it interesting that people move to larger cities to fit in, so they may just be a little quirky or want something different to the rest. Again, if I can say to be well adjusted enough to make the move and precipices enough to afford to move - that could be seen as a privilege too.

Are you a professional in this field, or merely interested?

Oh look, it’s the one-sentence drop and plopper with the pseudo-insight from Instagram again.

I've noticed that people who had a very difficult start in life and often overprotect their children. Those children, from my experience, sometimes grow up rather limited / damaged and not all that nice (in my mind). That is a type of trauma too, I think.

One of my parents was a refugee from somewhere quite scary and I have often thought that families with one or both parents like that have more psychological problems. In my mind, people with a solid British background on both sides are more likely to be well-balanced. Is that true or am I just looking at it from a wierd perspective?

Yeah, I don’t know. I grew up in a bin fire. Absolute chaos. Not knowing what I was going home to every afternoon, abusive, alcoholic mother, weak, enabling father.
But I told no one. Got on with things. Three As at a level, good degree, own business, happy marriage. So I am well adjusted, but that is something that I did.

I am not denying that circumstances can fuck people up, but also personal responsibility is a thing.

So many people are mentioning trauma and saying almost everyone has it. I want to question this. Yes, everyone faces one type of hardship or another.
But I think trauma has a particular meaning, along the lines of having felt powerless when your life was threatened. I don’t think most people have experienced this.
I don’t think we can just make up our minds to overcome trauma.
I agree with OP that some people are lucky with their genes and upbringing and hence are well balanced.
I suspect they don’t fully recognise or appreciate their good fortune.

its a really complex area and an age old debate. It’s not my specialist area but I know a fair bit.

Environmental factors have a huge impact. Neuroscience shows how early experience shapes how our brains wire up and how our physiology develops. How genes (bar those for things like eye colour) are expressed are influenced by environment too. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We develop for survival.

But it is possible to build new connections in the brain and calm your baseline physiology but if you’ve had lots of developmental trauma/ACEs then it’s a lot harder work.

I’ve seen kids with rhe same privalge and happy family and one go off the rails. One do well. It’s the old nature v nurture argument.

DH and I were watching some reels on social media the other day. Up popped a video of someone enacting the things their mother used to say/do. You know the over the top, victim personality type people? DH turned to me and said 'Before I met you and your mother, I assumed this type of thing was made up for entertainment'.

He is a really well-rounded, calm, sensible but easy going man, who was raised by a family of supportive people who encouraged him to be him. I... was not. He acknowledges that life just comes more easily to him. He doesn't get anxious or worry about small mistakes he makes, or feels guilty if he feels he isn't being the perfect child. It is a privilege to be that way. Every day I have to work harder than him to regulate my emotions and mental health issues. Of course, I should work hard to be a decent person in society. But it is amazing how vastly different our upbringings were, and how much easier he finds life than me.

Very true @IslandAdventure. I couldn't agree more, great post.

I often think of a couple I know. One is from a MC family, educated parents and wealthy relatives. Her partner was once an asylum seeker, constantly displaced as child and arrived alone as a young man with nothing. The woman was abandoned by her father and left with an alcoholic and emotional abusive mother. They lived in a nice house that became filthy, there was often no food. Extended family got involved and she went back and forth to an aunt's house, they ensured she was financially secure. She worked very hard to rise above this and fit in with her peer group, gained a qualification and holds down a good job. Her partner has a loving family, parents back home that he talks to all the time, constant love and moral support, 2 brothers in different countries that he visits as often as he can. He is loved in a way she is not. He worked very hard in MW jobs, paid his way through college and now has a good job and social standing. Who is the more privileged? You could debate it forever. Love v security

Oh look….yet another 3 word username throwing out a one sentence hot take and then leaving the room. Boring.

What about innate skills and personality though? Could they affect how well someone copes with trauma?

I wouldn’t use that phrase, but I definitely think secure attachment is a privilege. Insecure attachment is difficult to even understand if you have secure attachment imo

Growth from trauma is absolutely possible and happens often. But for some it’s much harder than others due to a very complex picture of risk and resilience factors.

For example a baby born to parents who have unresolved childhood trauma, use drugs to self medicate, where there is horrific domestic violence, who isn’t fed well, not taken to the dentist, isn’t able to fully engage in education and spends the majority of their childhood in fight/flight/freeze has got a HUGE job ahead of them as an adult to even get the basics sorted. That person simply can’t be expected to function in the same way as someone with half their developmental trauma without a huge amount of input.

Without input, it’s highly likely the trauma will continue down through each generation.

All that child did, was be born into that family. Their brain and physiology literally wired to survive within that system

It’s obviously hugely complex, the risk/resilience arena. Two siblings growing up in the sane household will have different risk/resilience profiles because their experience is unique. One example is the sometimes protective factor of an older sibling.

Women are now (a bit) more able to access the same opportunities as men. Because we recognised the impact of the patriarchy and (white) male privilege. We raised awareness and changed systems. Still work to do but progress has been made.

Extra support for those without the same privilege as others makes sense if we want meritocracy. If we want as many people as possible to reach their potential. Prisons are full of people with varying degrees of developmental trauma. 90 % or so if I remember correctly.

That doesn’t dissolve adults of their responsibility and accountability or mean that behaviours should go without consequences. But the more we understand, the better able we are to shape a society that works for more people rather than just the privileged.

In terms of development traumas: My focus would be on peri-natal psychological support and much more resource going to families with children under three - really quality interventions that support parents with providing attuned parenting for their children despite their own traumas. Better access to high quality psychological interventions for adults. Better access to high quality psychological interventions in schools. More resource for Social Services to do more proactive and preventative work.

We spend way too much at end of a human beings life but really if we switched that the other way, we’d be far better off and we wouldn’t need so much later on. So much harm is done in the early years. I say this as someone heading towards later life at a rapid pace too. But that is what the research suggests.

Being 'well-adjusted' isn't a privilege. The language of privilege is really misplaced here. Privilege is a right or set of rights that has been granted to some people and not others (by an institution, a nation, a powerful person or class, or in some cases by society).

It suggests social injustice, and puts the alleged privilege-bearer on the defensive, feeling the need to give way in relation to their own interests in order to compensate for the alleged moral wrong of their advantaged position.

None of this is remotely fair or accurate in relation to being 'well-adjusted'. You could call the good adjustment 'lucky' if you want, but even that is unfair, since 'well adjusted' isn't just about the absence of trauma, it is also about whatever intrinsic personal attributes helped to shape that person's response to the life events they have been through. These may include a whole range of good, bad and neutral characteristics, including, say, a willingness to keep on plugging away in the face of adversity, or just a rather unquestioning, low ambition approach to life.
Are each of these characteristics to be regarded as privilege? In that case every single one of us has a cluster of 'privileges' - personal characteristics which may help us in certain situations. It's completely absurd. None of us has free will, we are all shaped by a huge multitude of internal and external factors, many of which will help us in specific contexts and hinder us in others.

I'm so sick of this endless, endless desire on the part of so many people to find ways of creating a special victim identity for themselves, and in the process creating a myriad of 'privileged' people whose job it is to 'make allowances' and find ways to signal their allyship.

I'm reading a book about resilience at the moment. Recommended to me by a psychologist so not some influencer waffle.

In a nutshell, it says that it's not the trauma or lack of which sets resilient people apart from those who are not, but rather how adaptible they are and how they learn and grow from adversity.

The point is... Get on with life!!!!
That way lays privilege.

Jesust Christ. The amount of people who miss (or maybe avoid) the point and just want to be combative is just ridiculous.

Acknowledgement does not have to equate to excuses being made.

Trauma can be motivating though, like anger. My Dad got PTSD from the military. Went on to be really successful as more driven than most people

I absolutely agree and I actually felt this as an adolescent. Some of my peers were really resentful of me as both my parents worked - I was lower middle class and went to a state school in a deprived area. I was a mess emotionally but they could only see class privilege. I was class/materially privileged but lacked the privilege of a secure and loving family (and still do).

They're privileged because they were able to generate their own privilege. The ultimate privilege surely 😂