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.

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.

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.

I agree with all of this 100% and I dont see how it's even helpful at all to be grading people's trauma and sorting people into "lucky" and "unlucky" piles. How on earth does that help anyone? comparing yourself to others and how they are doing is a completely fruitless and pointless exercise.

Its also completely subjective - someone could be brought up in a loving privileged home and have severe mental health issues - should they feel "privileged" compared to someone brought up in a poor family who has naturally excellent mental health? where do we draw the line and whom should we label as a 'victim" and do they even want to be labelled that way? I suffered significant trauma as a child and no thank you. I am not a victim and I find it massively unhelpful and patronising to be told I ought to be one. That is not a healthy or empowering way to live.

Because saying it's a privilege to have 2 present parents pisses off all the single parents/blended families.

Nevermind there have been actual studies that show growing up in an intact nuclear family leads to better outcomes on average.

I suffered significant trauma as a child and no thank you. I am not a victim and I find it massively unhelpful and patronising to be told I ought to be one. That is not a healthy or empowering way to live.

You see, I dislike this dislike of the word victim. If a six year old girl was sexually abused, is she not a victim? If the trauma has damaged her (which it undoubtedly will have), is sending her the message that she isn’t a victim helpful? Is that not gaslighting her?

I had childhood trauma and I spent years beating myself up. It was only once I realised that I was a victim, and what happened to me wasn’t my fault, that I could let go of the guilt and shame and begin to move past it.

Sometimes the word ‘victim’ isn’t a dirty word. We shouldn’t make victims feel shame.

Victim /ˈvɪktɪm/

noun
person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.

Strongly agree with OP.
I think - and while I can't imagine how hard it must be to recover from real trauma - that can, in some ways, not be easier to recover from, but it's something recognisable. Sometimes trauma is caused by what is lacking rather what is there and sometimes it's hard even to recognise what has happened so you internalise and wonder what is wrong with you when you come from a seemingly normal situation when in fact it is highly dysfunctional and damaging.
I hope I haven't offended anyone who has suffered abuse or escaped from dangerous situations or whatever as it's not what I mean to do.

Victim might be an apt description at the time (eg you could be a victim of a crime for example- like your example) but I am referring to its use as an identity for the rest of your life which is what the OP is referring to.

I have personally been the victim of crimes in the past but that is not how I describe myself now and I wont ever. To label someone as a victim for their entire life is to remove their power from them. Its disempowering

Yes another threewordposter who doesn't get back.

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Honestly, I agree.

There’s a thread running at the moment about a 6yo not wanting to go to school and so many people are saying he needs emotional support and a reward from school and intervention from a specialist and I’m just thinking - no, he’s six, he needs to do as he’s bloody told and go to school 😂

I don’t think all this self absorbed self analysis is ultimately helpful.
I remember a study where people who were waiting for counselling for something did worse in their recovery than people who weren’t expecting it. Tell people they have problems and they will internalise that.
Struggling with life events is just the human condition.
What a pathetic and unresilient society we have become. One may think that decades of peace and prosperity would build a happy society but seems to do the opposite. A self pitying and hopeless population that lashes out at each other. Mouse paradise anyone?

I don't think being well-adjusted is a privilege. I think it is something that everyone should have and we should teach healthy behaviours, relationships, resilience etc at school. It would be far more useful than trigonometry or the history of the Tudors.

Also most people will experience something traumatic in their life. Whether or not they have a 'trauma response' is often down to their coping skills. Well-adjusted people with good support networks can have a traumatic experience and not have a trauma response, or only have one for a short period of time. Whereas, those who have not been fortunate enough to be raised in secure, loving and safe environments are more likely to have enduring trauma responses.

Agree with this and find that this is the attitude of most people who have been through something really seriously traumatic, they won't be the ones whining about privilege.

Absolutely!

Specifically designed user name.
Slightly controversial OP.
Original poster never return.

AI generated bullshit click bait.

You can spot them a mile off.
It's the most boring thing about MN.

Always think about my youngest DC who has SEN and what his life would have been like had he been born into a poorer less educated family. I have been told the way he behaves is largely down to how he has been raised and that this behaviour could easily be far worse had he been raised in a shouty, sweary, violent sort of household. He’s calm, he doesn’t flip out and have tantrums/meltdowns whatever, he’s just a really chilled out kid.

He also has a reading age of 8 at 5 despite technically being non verbal. I’m an academic so we have hundreds of books scattered all over and regularly visit the library which he loves. He’s constantly absorbed in books. It may be the same book on a loop for a while at bedtime but that’s fine because at least he’s reading. He also passed the phonics screening with full marks. I don’t think his outcome would have been so great educationally if born into a less educated house.

People misunderstand. Being “stuck” in the place/time that the event happened is the very definition of ‘trauma’. People who are stuck are not wallowing, they are traumatised. You can’t just have an epiphany and decide “I’m not going to be traumatised anymore, I’m going to move on”. It takes a LOT of work.

You’re not making trauma your identity. The traumatic experiences gave you your identity. It shaped you. It taught you countless behaviours and coping mechanisms that are completely unhelpful in an environment that is now safe.

Those unhealthy behaviours once were the very thing that kept you safe and kept you alive. Learning, accepting, and trusting that they’re no longer needed is a long process. Changing your neural pathways, learning to manage the resultant anxiety, overcoming your subconscious brain, is a massive undertaking.

It's not as simple as saying “I’m going to choose to not be traumatised”. If only it were that easy.

Sooner or later, you have to take responsibility for yourself.

Endlessly blaming everything on your past experiences doesn't wash for most people. Serious trauma is one thing, but the normal bumps and troughs of life... no.