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

[HealthyHomesMatter]

So many “personality traits” are just trauma responses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.