depends how crappy, you arnt going to suffer as much if you were white, and not AA whom are likely to be repeat offenders of crimes, due to systemic racism and “policies”. and in what socioecomic region you grew up in. plus daughters dont get the same bad rap as men do(especially in the usa where men are expected to be independant at adulthood). i seen posts in other platform, thier sibling/parent has alot of contempt for thier family member if not outright spite, they actually wish thier family member to fail and get off on it, very strange as its quite unique in the us and the west and very common. its complicated as its not entirely the fault
i seen posts where siblings/parents ignore a childs potential issue, and assume that they are intentionally not doing anything with themselfs. on one post in another forum, a older woman ask why thier slightly younger sister wasnt doing what the OP (thinks people should be doing at thier age35+), completely ignoring the enabling, adhd, and health condition of said sister , turns out the OP was ragging ont he sister for quite some time and why she was so dependant on the parents.
Fuckin… wut?
It took me quite a while to climb out of that pit. Even now decades later I’m realizing how much they did to me. They didn’t know it and didn’t care but they shortened my life with their neglect. I had never looked up rheumatic fever. When I was fourteen I was third in free style swimming in my region. I got sick with a sore throat and ear ache. My parents waited three days to take me to the doctor. The 80 year doctor just said it was a minor ‘red throat’ I went back home and two days later my I started bleeding from my ears. Three days after that they finally took me back to the doctor. I had a high fever and was really out of it. I was out of it for a few days and in the hospitals for fourteen days.
After that I started getting slower in swimming. I couldn’t no longer keep up with the times I had when I was younger. I was getting tired all the time and was having pain in my chest. My mother insisted I was too old for that and fool that I was believed her. In truth I had heart problems related to that fever. They had the money and I had insurance but they decided that their money was more important and the only reason why they went to the doctor when they did was because someone came by the house and saw the bloody paper towel next to my ear and freaked out. I didn’t learn that for thirty years just like I didn’t learn they called SCAN which was child services at the time. Of course they talked them down and I was in my late forties before I found out.
I had a heart attack when I was in my mid thirties. Now in my mid fifties I’m looking at severe problem with my heart valves. If I lose my job I’m dead in the Land of the Fee. I have tried to raise my children better but I still have difficult emotional problems and I can tell you right now I don’t hate much but even though they are dead I will always hate them.
sometimes the parents are so shitty, that the children turns out that way(and the child gets blamed for it because they are grown up but unable to do this or that as an adult), and the parents get mad when they get the consequences of it. i think strep goes like this strep throat to scarlet fever to rheumatic, which is the most serious.
I honestly don’t know if this is genuinely supposed to be a shitposting community, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask
Figure it out
Honestly, I used to feel the same. But now… Not so much.
Shitty childhoods often develop into isolating behaviors. Isolating behaviors keep you from connecting with other people. Those people often give you hell, because you don’t have the skills to connect and they’re afraid of you. Which means you learn behaviors to keep others away from you.
Those people often give you hell
I imagine the post was getting at the idea of intentionally being harsh to nice people, not talking back to people who are assholes.
One of my pet peeves is strangers being overly rude or dismissive or whatever when I try to do small kind things. Like you don’t need to acknowledge me for holding a door open, but don’t make eye contact with me and give me a stank face you fuckin creep lmfao.
A reason isn’t an excuse (or free pass).
It could be considered a mitigating consideration, but thats not an automatic freedom from consequences.
A reason is literally an excuse.
If every time your parents offered you ice cream as a child, they beat the hell out of you, you’d soon start associating ice cream with with abuse. You’d expect it, as a matter of survival.
When you got older, someone offering you ice cream would trigger that fight or flight mechanism.
Mitigation is quite literally freedom from one consequence, in place of another.
A reason is literally an excuse.
Not by default, though i will say i phrased my reply poorly, what i should have said was.
a reason isn’t always an excuse
They are similar, but the implications and potential usages of each are different.
A reason is an potential explanation for an action/outcome etc.
An excuse is an attempt to use a reason to mitigate some or all of the consequences of an action.
An excuse always has a reason as a basis, but not all reasons are excuses.
The main difference is intent,
As an example, two kids get in to a fight, kid a is asked “why were you fighting?”
They say “they hit me so i hit them back”.
That can be both a reason and an excuse depending on the intent of the speaker.
As a statement of subjective fact, that would be a reason.
As an attempt to dodge punishment or consequences, it would be an excuse.
It can also be both.
If every time your parents offered you ice cream as a child, they beat the hell out of you, you’d soon start associating ice cream with with abuse. You’d expect it, as a matter of survival.
When you got older, someone offering you ice cream would trigger that fight or flight mechanism.
While potentially true, I’m not sure how it’s relevant.
Mitigation is quite literally freedom from one consequence, in place of another.
That’s not what mitigation means either.
“Just because you got burned doesn’t mean you get to go around setting everyone else on fire.”
A quote I remember often.
The thing about trauma is that it hijacks the default mode network and makes everything look like a threat. The word is hypervigilance, and it filters everything you perceive through the lens of danger.
So when “hurt people hurt people,” it’s not usually because “I’m in pain so I must make others suffer.” Often it’s because they see a phantom of whoever hurt them in the past, and it’s overlaid on every interaction they have.
The default mode becomes defensiveness and self-preservation, and often the impulse is to preempt any potential pain by reacting to it before it even happens.
Therapy can help, but blaming people for their trauma and treating them as a fundamentally bad person because of how it manifests in their behavior doesn’t.
My quote wasn’t intended to be a solution for people with genuine problems. It can be a reminder to take a step back if one can.
Yeah, trauma or other defensive behavior can be like wagon ruts. That’s the well-worn path the brain defaults to and it can be really hard to lift that heavy wagonload of trauma out of that deep rut. Creating other roads and lightening the load is a job for therapy.
Absolutely humans are deeply affected on conscious and unconscious levels by all kinds of things that are out of their control - both experiences and brain chemistry. Absolutely it is a privilege afforded to only a few to have access to the support and resources needed to become aware of their situation and create deep change for themselves.
It’s also true that if you do a bad thing you did a bad thing. That does NOT mean you are a bad person, it does NOT mean all the things you can’t or couldn’t control are your responsibility, it does NOT mean that you even were fully aware of what you did.
But if you do a bad thing you are responsible for what you did. YOU did it. It is your responsibility to get on a path that will allow you to recognize and change that behavior.
It is nobody’s job to be perfect or beat themselves up for mistakes. It is everyone’s job to work towards being better - to themselves and to the people around them.
Part of that is understanding that you are responsible for your actions. You may genuinely not have been capable of making a better choice at the time - but if you did it = it’s on you to own the mistake.
Makes me think of the fact that boys that are sexually abused as children are far more likely to grow up to become pedophiles than boys who are not sexually abused as children.
They should still be in prison if they ever act on their pedophilia.
They should still get help for the trauma they have experienced.
I’m willing to bet that almost all of them are fixable as long as they have not offended, but saying that, I also say that it’s practically inexcusable if they did.
is everyone here larping as if we were on facebook or some shit like that?
That’s the intentional irony I envisioned with this post. It’s going how I expected. “Be better”
Larping?
Been that way for a while
Explain to me in one hastily written white board that you do not understand childhood trauma.
On the one hand there’s truth to that: your behavior is your responsibility.
On the other: people in this country are seriously uneducated in regards to childhood trauma. I mean good grief. If someone is behaving poorly, there may be deep reasons for that and maybe get them some help.
I think the point is though that after you move out you are in control of your own destiny, and can choose to be a better person than your parents, or just repeat their patterns in your life. I’m not negating trauma.
I.e. had a guy doing Renos at our place, super guy, very kind. As the renos went on we got to chatting. His dad was an abusive alcoholic and he’d left home. I commented how he was doing amazing in spite of his upbringing, and his response was (paraphrased) “I went through stuff, but one day I had to choose not to be my dad, and not let what he did hold me back any longer. You can wallow and drown in the poor me pool, or climb out of it”
What country ?
It’s all about attitude. You can’t choose your trauma, but you can choose how to see it:
- A normal experience that you “got over” and refuse to allow yourself (and by extension others) to say is or was “that bad,” may even lead to believing that it’s “your turn” to inflict it on anyone who arbitrarily deserves it
- A horrific experience that you never want another child to ever go through
Luckily, I grew up with parents who saw it the #2 way and raised me with love
You cannot always understand or even know your own trauma and in many cases, not all for sure, as you didn’t see it as trauma or completely suppress it and hide it from even yourself
No, but it should inspire compassion and patience. Childhood abuse literally changes the structure of their growing brains, you don’t fix that in a day.
Learning changes the structure of growing and non-growing brains. So does trauma.
Shit was rough. Break the cycle. Be the change you want to see.
Explanation, but not excuse.
But then, is there any excuse to be a shitty person. I can only thing of a couple of edge cases.
is there any excuse to be a shitty person
By definition, no. Because if there’s a good justification for it, it’s not that shitty.
E.g. It’s okay to be shitty to Nazis.
The problem is also “shitty person” is kind of subjective. Some people would consider perfectly harmless things to make you a shitty person.
Everyone makes mistakes.
If you had a reasonable childhood count yourself lucky - your mistakes will probably be reasonable. If you suffered from severe trauma/abuse or you have mental health challenges then you are likely to make different kinds of mistakes.
It is everyone’s job to work towards being better. You do something shitty then YOU did it - your childhood didn’t do that, you did. It also might be true that you don’t even recognize how shitty it is because you were taught it was “normal”.
We all are responsible for our actions, but some folks have been surrounded by kindness from birth so kindness is natural and easy. Other folks have to work really hard and make a lot of mistakes to learn that their behavior isn’t ok.
Yes, we are all responsible for our actions.
Equally true = some folks face enormous challenges because of background or brain chemistry, while others have it so easy they don’t get why anyone would struggle.
Fyi you don’t have to have had trauma or abuse to have behavioral issues that are untreated or undiagnosed.
This is me! 🙂 I could make you a long list of things wrong with my parents / things they did wrong, but last I checked humans are going to be human (not perfect). My parents love me and they did the best they could. I had a WAY better childhood than most.
However 40 years of undiagnosed female ADHD didn’t go well. I didn’t feel like I deserved to be struggling so I pretended that I wasn’t. THAT didn’t work.
Eventually got knowledge and support - things are looking up for sure. Just - boy oh boy a lot of energy wasted and failures that could have been avoided if I knew then what I know now.
Grateful I know now, but folks who are struggling and don’t know why have my heart for sure.
No, but understanding how a shitty childhood can often lead to a shitty adult can help prevent it.
Yes and maybe you’ll be able to bring up some compassion for shitty people when you understand them a bit better
If you read only the black text, the sign is telling people it’s perfectly fine to be victims of their circumstances.
Jokes aside, I reluctantly agree with the sentiment that one or two commenters have expressed that it’s awful privileged to assume it’s within the capacity of those who endured childhood trauma to just “be better”.
At every moment of every day, I carry a wound with me that tells me I’m not good enough, that I’m both physically and mentally in danger, and that everyone and everything I trust will turn on me at a moment’s notice.
It’s a bit like handling a curve on a bike or car. On good days I feel like gentle tug of inertia trying to pull me from the path I’m steering toward. In this metaphor, the curves are the little challenges that are thrown at you socially. I see the edge of the mental road and all the darkness that lies beyond it, but I can handle it with grace and move in the direction I’d like. On bad days - most days, honestly - it’s not so gentle of a pull. I’m sliding right into panic and fear because of the trauma that was built into me. It takes a considerable effort and a lot of energy to not be antisocial, to not indulge in things that protect my wounds.It sucks. And it’s not because I’m not being better, it’s because my starting point is farther back and with fewer resources.
(And time, apparently, as I’m rushing to finish this comment - apologies if that rush comes through with incomplete thoughts.)
I’m sympathetic, I’ve got my own pull telling me I’m terrible and that I don’t deserve love, that if I’m not perfect everyone will abandon me. But I also recognize my responsibility to minimize harm. It wasn’t easy, but I learned how to step away when I’m feeling destructive emotions and I’ve spent years working to heal the wounds (actually just recently started EMDR, but I also learned CBT techniques years ago).
Damage done because of trauma is still damage done.
I’m glad my intent is coming across, even though I wasn’t very clear with it. I didn’t explicitly say that it’s not acceptable to harm others if you’ve been harmed: it’s not, and I aspire to not do damage to others, even as I sometimes poorly navigate my way through life.
I felt compelled to jump in to give a more human face to how challenging it can be to get from one point to another.I’m in a very similar situation. I’ve struggled for a long time to find a workable therapist. Fragile trust, ADHD, and CPTSD. I’ve done some CBT work, and found a therapist I really trust. I’m now in the beginning phases of EMDR.
Yeah, I’ve also got the fun ADHD + CPTSD combo lol. And yeah I mostly feel the need to talk about the responsibility to minimize harm because of the ways I’ve been hurt by people with BPD.
And yeah, I haven’t gotten to the part of emdr with the lights, but I’m hopeful. I’ve heard amazing things from my friend’s brother.
Hi friend, fellow member of the ACE high score club here. I also find the simplification of these kinds of topics triggering. It’s hard to see people boil down the complexities of CPTSD and other childhood trauma-related conditions in ways that can feel cold or indifferent to the challenges that come from living with them.
The frustrating truth I’ve found is that both things can be true at the same time. We didn’t ask to be born into a situation that changed our developing brains so much, and we didn’t sign up to carry the consequences of the choices our caregivers made on both our bodies and our minds. It’s not our fault this happened, and it’s not fair that we should have to work so hard just to appear “normal” to others and be accepted by them.
Unfortunately, though, the naked truth underneath the pain is that, regardless of how fair it is or isn’t, it’s up to us to address the reality we find ourselves in. We have to do the hard work that got dropped on us if we want to live in a way that isn’t agony all the time. There are people available to help, but no one else can save us. It’s like managing any other diseases that randomly pop up and decide to ruin lives. No one asked for MS, either, but they still have to either address it or do nothing and suffer.
I completed a year long CBT course, and it was really hard at first. It focused on maladaptive behaviors that impact how you treat others. Much of it discussed anger or rage toward others and how to look at your emotions differently so you don’t harm your relationships. I’m very skilled at masking, and my FFFF response is fawning most of the time. Because of this, I got frustrated about thought these lessons didn’t apply to me. I already know how to contain my emotions and play nice with others, I thought, so what is this doing for me?
Over the months, I realized I was saying and doing all those damaging things not to the people around me, but to myself internally all the time. I was taking all my anger, resentment, pain, and feelings of inadequacy on myself. It hit me like a truck. I absolutely did need to learn that material, I just didn’t see where I needed to apply it.
I’m sorry for the long diatribe, but your comment really resonated with me. I could feel your suffering as I was reading. I just wanted to share so you feel supported and understood, and I hope you’re able to make progress and find some peace as you continue to navigate this. If you’d ever like to talk, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’ll be thinking of you.
Thank you. I really appreciated your comment, and I agree with you.
I’m in much the same boat. Perhaps not so practiced in wielding the tools or so ingrained in reaching for them, but… trying. It’s reassuring to see and hear from folks who share their stories.Currently in the beginning phases of EMDR therapy, and trying to get to that point where the harms of the past hold less power. The outward manifestation toward others tends to be fairly pro-social, but I’m still struggling with the inner thoughts a lot. Hoping with effort and practice that changes.
You’re very welcome, and I’m glad it was helpful. I’ve heard such great things about EMDR! I hope it’s helpful for you. I was in therapy working my way up to it for a while, but my therapist never came back from maternity leave and wasn’t able to refer me. She was awesome, though, and I’m sure I’ll be able to pick back up where I left off.
Try to be kind to yourself. You’re clearly doing the work, so I hope you reap all the rewards.
I’m glad my childhood raised me to be a pathological people pleaser utterly terrified of anyone’s disapproval. Nobody complaining about these sorts of people
Not yet. But when the day comes when you decide you don’t want to live like this any more, you’ll get a lot of “you’ve changed” and “why are you being so cruel to me” from the people who have grown accustomed to your lack of boundaries.
So fucking true.
One day you’ll emerge, fed up with being steamrolled by everyone. There’s a strong assertive raging badass inside of you who won’t take shit from anyone.
Deep down inside, everyone has their Office Space moment just waiting to bloom!
I’m a people. And you can please me by giving me french fries.
On one hand, I am the same way. On the other hand push that further in the same direction to get BPD, and people absolutely complain about people who have it. I guess also my wife complains about my people pleasing sometimes…
Oh you’re one of those? People pleasers are the worst
I mean, kind of glossing over how strong childhood trauma can be. Feels like they’re saying “just get over it already”.
Unless people are trying to use that as a free pass for acting shitty somehow.
That second part shows you get it
