[HBlix]

If you had a childhood full of physical abuse, and your right leg was frequently broken until it became malformed, then the solution might involve crutches. All of which is to say, just because the damage done is in the past, doesn’t mean that it can’t have lasting effects you can’t just wish away. The developing human brain, it has been shown time and again, undergoes permanent changes associated with abusive environments. Those are real, physical changes that may require interventions beyond talking or therapy. It’s not just learned insecurity, it’s the biochemical changes wrought by years of stress during a formative period.

[jschwartzi]

The thing you're missing is that it is learned insecurity that is associated with the biochemical changes, and that by doing the work to unlearn the insecurity as the author did you can reverse the biochemical changes. You can't make the statement that the biochemical changes are the cause of the insecurity, only that they are associated with it. And that's very important, because an "if-then" statement does not imply the converse. That is, if you reverse the biochemical changes you do not necessarily make the learned insecurity go away.

A broken leg is way less complicated than the synapses that form your perception of yourself, and far better understood. You can't really conflate the two without committing a logical fallacy. Treating the broken leg and the brain changes as identical in complexity is akin to treating the construction of a rivet the same as the construction of a Boeing 737.

The fact is that you can change, and you can feel better, but you also have to put in the work to change yourself. It's the hardest thing you will ever do if you grew up in a dysfunctional family because it requires you to deny years of your experience in favor of the received wisdom of how the world really works, and not everyone can do this. But if you do the work the reward in the end is that you're not permanently crippled by addiction to psychiatric medication.

[HBlix]

Some people can change to some degree, some can’t. Some people for example can recover from PTSD with time and talk therapy, and if you insist on others doing that they’ll end up killing themselves. Not taking medication is just as much of a fallacious “one-size-fits-all” solution as insisting that everyone take medication.

[jschwartzi]

Parent was originally dismissing the complexity of the situation mentally and emotionally by insisting that there's just a simple biochemical thing that needs to be changed, like adding more gasoline or oil to a car engine to make it run longer. The reality is way more complex than that.

Change is really fucking hard and there's no silver bullet solution.