To think that not everyone has the tools to make great life choices?

[malificent7]

I hear a lot of talk on mn about life choices. Especially in the context of benefit recipients or single parents.

I used to make very poor life choices. I suffered abuse from mum and in my teens/ early 20s, from my ex.
I therefore made bad decisions and suffered from horrendous mental health.

This resulted on me rebelling against my mum, not doing medicine asshe wanted me to ( regret this now,), turning to booze and choosing a bad dad for dd.

Since emdr therapy, I have been making much better choices but my upbringinghas definately has held me bk.

Aibu to think that if a person from a relatively affluent middle class family can make poor life decisions, so can anyone if their mh is poor. Not everyone can choose a decent partner, not to be an addict or a decent career.

I do feel like i threw a lot of my opportunities away as a young woman.

I disagree, DH grew up in awful abusive surrounding, very poor mining village - made good choices and now is very successful.

it’s bloody obvious what is a good choice and what isn’t.

Of course its obvious.

However, you have to be invested in your own welfare.
If you were made to feel lower than pond life by people who should have cared for you then it is indeed very difficult not to internalise this.

Consequently it is difficult to make good choices for somebody whom you dislike. Even if that person is yourself.

That is not to say that adversity precludes success in all instances. Circumstances differ and factors will mitigate if you are fortunate.

And if you're not? Well, It's almost impossible to be sexually/physically/emotionally abused by your biological father for instance and grow up with the positive or even neutral self regard which is necessary to choose well for yourself.
You are far more likely to simply choose the path of least resistance wherever that may lead you.

Some people are able to better themselves, but there is a whole host of factors to consider.

Just because your husband made it in life it doesn’t mean that it’s possible for others, like everything in life.

A bit like people smoking 60 cigarettes a day and living to 100 and someone never smoking and dying young of cancer, nothing can be universally applied.

If you’re in poverty you are so much more likely to stay there than not.

Your sense of self worth can definitely be eroded to such a degree that you don't find yourself worthy of the 'good choices'They don't even appear on your radar. They are alien to you.They belong to people who are worth more than you, those who don't actively dislike themselves

I totally understand and empathise with this. Our mental health services are so woefully inadequate that there isn't the support that there should be for,people who feel like this.

But the fact remains that no-one can change that mindset apart from the person who who feels it. Even if there were more support, other people can give you strategies to cope, tools to use, therapy and medication but no-one can do it for you because your mind isn't theirs. Until that moment when you realise that it's you who have the power to control it, however hard it's going to be, change can't happen.

It's not black & white, and it's certainly not easy. Some people need years, some not so long, some never manage it sadly. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage people to try.

yes of course, not everyone has the tools to make good life choices. people know when they're making bad ones for the most part tho. or do you reckon your abusive mother and ex had no idea what they were doing.

Well done OP for breaking with bad stuff from your past.

It’s really hard for people from relatively stable upbringings to understand just how poor dysfunctional parenting can be. I helped to set up a church on a housing estate and some of what I saw people had faced was heartbreaking.

Off-topic, but this is one reason political solutions often don’t work. Politicians of all stripes underestimate just how poor some people’s life skills are….

If it were a mindset that would indeed be simpler, but it is more or less an intrinsic and firmly held belief by the time said person reaches maturity.

It is no simpler to effect a change in the self belief of somebody who dislikes themselves due to being abused than to make a secure person detest their very being.

Ask any psychiatrist, personality disorders are almost impossible to resolve.
And those who consistently make bad choices on the whole have disordered personalities and attachments as the result of childhood adversity and a lack of historical factors which mitigated their effects.

It’s pretty naive to think domestic abuse only happens in working class families

Yes it is. And I can tell you NOW exactly what wrong choices I made and where it all went wrong.

You know when it's not so bloody obvious? When you're in the middle of it just desperately trying to make through another day. When you've had years of abuse (mental,physical,emotional,neglect) from your care giver. When you've been sexually abused by your cousin and grandfather. Then sexually abused by 6 classmates and are told it was all your fault, and all the many ways it was your fault. When you're then knowingly sent to a maths tutor known for abusing young teens. Her excuse? I was fat so she thought I'd be safe. I wasn't. Drip , drip ,drip abuse on top of abuse , shame on top of shame, blame on top of blame. And at some point it does become too much, and you believe you deserve it ,and even if you don't what's the fucking point because nothing changes, no matter what you do,how you change, how you adjust your behaviour or clothes or whatever it's never good enough, never the right way, always end up at the same point. When you do the right then and get laughed at or shamed or punished for it. When you don't do it but the same happens. When you ask for help but you are shamed and laughed at and punished for it. When you don't, and try to cope yourself (in the wrong ways) and get the same .Then it's not so fucking obvious that there even are choices, much less good or bad. It's not so fucking obvious what live and care are, who has your best interests at heart, who to listen to, whom or what to seek comfort and solace from. The rules are always changing, the goal posts are moving and your place is in the wrong.

Trust me, it's not so obvious then.

I trust you and I agree with every word you wrote.

I'm not sure. There will be others with near identical upbringing to you who have made different better choices.

DH and I had bad fathers growing up. His was absent and mine was emotionally abusive. We in turn have made it our mission to be nothing like them in our parenting.

I think personality has a lot to do with it.

This is just horrendous and I am so sorry for you and anyone else who has been through this. I am a bit (smugly, sorry) at the other end of the spectrum - I am super resilient and just keep going (but literally nothing like the above has happened to me). By contrast I have an immediate relative who is entirely the opposite. Same family, same upbringing but whose mental health is just so completely different that an entirely different approach has emerged. There are lots of things that can be true at once - trauma is so so insidious, as are bad patterns of behaviour from parents, they slip into the psyche in such a way that it can be impossible to see and counter objectively, at the same time you can be or not be a resilient person who can recover /recover more easily. To be sure there are some complete plonkers out there who wouldn’t know a good decision if it announced itself with a sign and they are numerous(!) but usually it is so much more difficult than that.

I agree OP. Only knowing what one flavour of bad gives you no idea what good even looks like. You can’t see which choice is good and which is bad. You start life off the rails and in a forest.

And it’s not so simple as resilience/personality + good choices = success because just a bit of bad luck can still completely derail your life (again). No one’s mentioned luck, but it has a huge impact on success or failure. Privilege also affects success by creating opportunities- who you know affects life chances as much as any other factor.

Yes.. resilience. It's so subjective though, depending on someone's perception,perspective,experience,knowledge and understanding.

Some people might say I'm resilient because:

I'm still here.
I can still find happiness and joy in things.
I broke the cycle with DD.
I have a home,a partner and a child... and while not excellent we're good,we're ok.
I have a job that I'm really good at and I do make a difference.
I'm fairly well adjusted and functional.
I still have hope and empathy.

I hide it all very well.

A lot would think I'm not resilient at all (particularly in a bad patch ) because:

I still get flashbacks sometimes.
I can breakdown from something stupid.
I get anxious.
I still get the urge to self harm.
I still get the urge to do stupid/reckless things.
I still "whinge" about it.
I still blame my past/make excuses.
I'm not successful. The job I mentioned gets paid very little and is very under appreciated.
I still panic and meltdown sometimes.
I'm tired. So so tired.

I'm still fat.

YANBU

What those who like to talk about choices often forget, is the impact of other people's choices upon the person in question.
And if you're surrounded by people who make bad choices that impact on you negatively and defend those choices and tell you those impacts are your fault, then it's quite hard to know a good choice from a bad choice.

I was totally discouraged from going to university because my step father had issues around people who were more intelligent than him and who earned more than him. Anyone who went to university or did an office job in our house was a posh arse who had ideas above their station and I'd best not be thinking that he was going to let that happen to me! I wasn't clever enough anyway and was too lazy. He knew, he was a hard working man who knew how life works and university wasn't for the likes of me, a little job, a husband and a kid was what we do.

And because he had that attitude about everything I wanted to do, and because my mother was so desperate to keep hold of him so never challenged him (it wasn't the philosophy of her family, who according to him were all toffee nosed snobs that were up their own arses) I didn't go to university, didn't quite get to married before the kid came along and the father's choice to bugger off affected what I could then achieve, along with more about how unreasonable and awful I was because I 'made' him leave.

I did make different choices though, I stayed single and brought up my daughter, I did courses and have dragged myself up to middle management - all be it in hospitality so not as grand as it sounds, and now I'm doing Ok. I didn't think though, at any of the choices I was making at the time "This is a good/bad choice" I grew and developed as a person and made a lot of both choices through fear more than anything, and the only difference between a good choice and a bad one is success. If you succeed it was a good choice and if you fail it wasn't.

By the time my sister was of an age to be thinking about university my step father had one foot out the door anyway and my mum had completely changed and far from being desperate to keep him, was desperate not to! My sister went and has a masters now and a great job.

We made different choices because although we had the same parents, we had completely different childhood experiences - because of the behaviour and choices of other people.

Whilst it's bloody obvious what good choices are to a well adjusted adult, try telling that to a fragile 16 year old with self esteem on the floor who was bullied at her posh, famous private school.
She did very well academically but rebelled against her pushy parents and chose not to go to med school as she wanted to be her own person.

Said teen gains the impression from her peers and culture that in order to be valuable as a women she must be attractive and get a man. Told she was ugly everyday she was catnip to a very abusive man and grateful for any shred of attention.

Said man nearly killed her but she started a new" life", self esteem even worse.
Several flings later she reaches 30, all friends with families. She meets man who says he wants kids and loves babies... turns out to be crap dad. Woman has no idea what a good man or relationship is. Women also is diagnosed with bipolar etc.

Finally woman has EMDR...changes life, meets amazing man, starts making better decisions. Agrees to have no more kids and gets an ok career but regrets not doing medicine...mum was right!

But bad mistakes as a mixed up young teen can and do spiral.

There comes a point where we have to take responsibility for our actions and seek the help we need to improve our life chances.

This is all well and good but obviously not everyone can. Or else they'd be doing it.

So, what do you do with them?

the only difference between a good choice and a bad one is success. If you succeed it was a good choice and if you fail it wasn't.

👏👏👏 Spot on. Tons of choices looked good, but weren’t. Like getting on the property ladder in Nov 2006. Bad choice as ended up upside down on the mortgage for the next ten years and then was forced to sell the house for a lower price than we’d paid for it- wiping off equity plus all the extra savings we’d sunk into it as it was a fixer upper.

If the crash had not happened, we’d have flipped that house and made an easy quarter million on top of our deposit and renovations investment as the couples a few years before us and after us were able to do.

Was told by many good choice to buy a home. Scrimp and save your deposit in your twenties, buy a home and you’ll never lose money. Get a fixer upper because you can get sweat equity by fixing it up- scrimping pennies to replace the roof, put in new windows, get the wiring up to code, etc. You’ll make enough to buy a family home outright by your 50s! Snort.

Didn’t happen. Was a bad bad choice to buy a property. And it was all down to luck. Bad luck to be first time buyers right before the biggest crash in home values in the last 500yrs.

This is all well and good but obviously not everyone can. Or else they'd be doing it. So, what do you do with them?

You support them, prop them up, make sure there are resources for them, you give them tools and strategies to help them cope. You catch them when they fall and encourage them to let go of their demons. All stuff which sadly is in very short supply right now.

And you hope, sincerely, and keep,hoping that one day they will see how amazing they are and that all the other stuff doesn't have to destroy their lives. But you still cannot make them see that, it comes from within.

YANBU.
And just because some people have overcome shitty childhoods/experiences, doesn't mean we all can.

The same water that softens the potato hardens the egg.

Yanbu. I don't think some people understand what it can be like. I'm not going to into my childhood but I found myself at 17 having to be completely self reliant with no self esteem and no self worth. I didn't believe I deserved anything. People like me didn't have good lives. It sounds stupid now but as a teen I literally didn't think it was an option. It's hard to explain but I just knew that I was shit. I had been taught that from my very earliest memory right until I left at 17, I was taught nothing but that for 17 years why wouldn't I believe it?

Clearly some people are stronger than I was and it didn't affect them the same way but I was a child so I'm not going to be all oh maybe I should have been more resilient like they were and maybe I wouldn't have made bad choices. They didn't even feel like choices to me at the time, looking back I was clearly traumatised, just so lost and so sad that I sleepwalked through life from 17 until I was maybe 22?

I don't know if that even makes sense, it doesn't make sense to grown up me, I look back now and think wtf about some of the things I did but at the time I just didn't know. I didn't know what life could be like, I didn't know that people like me could ever be happy, I really believed I was defective, that I deserved everything that had happened to me, that that was all that there was for people like me.Its hard to do something when you don't even know it's an option.

But drink/drugs/crime can be the best choice available to a person for their circumstances, so they are not always bad choices when there are nothing but worse alternatives.

Just to add to my post and make me sound even dumber I didn't even know I had an abusive childhood until my brother went to counselling and said something like 'people with abusive childhoods like ours' and I thought about it that night and just cried for hours at the realisation that that is what it was. I was a grown ass adult and didn't even know, I thought I had just had the childhood I deserved, I'd just accepted that that was just life for people like me. When you are that messed up it's hard to see the wood for the trees nevermind plan a whole bright future for yourself.

I don't know if that even makes sense, it doesn't make sense to grown up me, I look back now and think wtf about some of the things I did but at the time I just didn't know. I didn't know what life could be like, I didn't know that people like me could ever be happy, I really believed I was defective, that I deserved everything that had happened to me, that that was all that there was for people like me.Its hard to do something when you don't even know it's an option.

What made you realise different?

Because that's the point isn't it? That realisation that things can be different. That you can have what you deserve and want. That people who had shit lives can turn it around. That life doesn't always have to shit just because it once was.

I can't begin to describe my life up to the age of 17. It's unbelievable to most people. Even those closest to me, including DH of almost 40yrs, have difficulty seeing the me I am now with what I try to describe to them.

But I count my blessings regularly that I had that lightbulb moment. That what had happened to me wasn't me, it was them. I didn't want to be the person they tried to make me, so I wasn't. And in that moment my life was changed. When I made mistakes they were because I had made a mistake and not because that's what they told me. When I failed it was because of me, not them. When I was happy and I achieved, that was me in spite of them. I'm not saying for a moment that it was easy, or that I didn't have dark places on the way to my life now, but it can be done. And I feel very strongly that we should be helping people much more to shed that previous life. That instead of going over and over it trying to understand what other people did or didn't do, should or shouldn't have done, something that we never have any control over, we should be helping them to get rid of those people from our thoughts, minds, and lives. Helping them to be the person they want to be and not what others told them they would be.

It's too huge, there are too many variables, too many broken people, not enough resources. But we still have to try.