[steve_adams_86]

If you're intent on getting off the internet, Gabor has several books worth reading.

One trouble with his writing and speaking on the subject isn't that I think he's wrong or does a bad job at all, but like anything in psychology, you aren't going to read it and "get there", so to speak. What Gabor describes is often years of critical reflection away from fully making sense. I guess from my perspective I don't get the sense that he's aware of that; he speaks with ease, confidence, and a tone that suggests this can all be so easy.

Take for example the simple notion that your anxieties are a feedback loop, deeply entrenched through decades after being initiated in your childhood. This isn't far fetched, but for many of us, the idea we had hard times in childhood that could cause real trauma is far fetched. It doesn't seem to make sense, and you might almost feel silly or guilty for entertaining the thought. Your parents loved you, right? You had food and clothes, a cool bed shaped like a fire truck, etc.

It takes a long time to navigate those things and uncover what might have gone wrong (if in fact something ever did), and to assess that with family in a way that's constructive and as factual as possible (if that's even an options). The very nature of these things causes us to pretend it never happened, and for adults, the reason it was never addressed could be because they didn't notice it or recognize its significance. This gives everyone the sense that everything was "fine".

Of course there are more acutely traumatic experiences in childhood, and that's easy to point out yet still can be so difficult to recognize as a harmful, frightening, overwhelming thing. You build up these defences, excuses, explanations, etc. Nah, there's no way you had childhood trauma.

Maybe this is incredibly obvious to most people. It wasn't for me, and I found myself putting down his books and thinking... Well shit, if it's that simple, what's wrong with me? Why can't I get past X or Y if I'm endowed with this knowledge? I don't expect miracles, and I didn't, but I suppose his writing brought me very close to the problem yet left me feeling so far from the solution. It's almost like you're looking at the peak of a mountain straight ahead of you, yet the only way to the top is to back track an enormous distance, navigate around the base from far away, doubt yourself the entire way, and climb the mountain from an approach on the opposite side you're currently on.

To his credit, he acknowledges his own lack of progress and deficiencies, and how it's always an ongoing project. Of course it is. I suppose I have the sense that he underestimate how hard it is to get the the point where you can leverage the paradigm he's offering, even though it seems a stone's throw from solutions.

Regardless, I highly recommend his books. I'd just add the caveat that if it resonates with you, don't expect to make meaningful progress on any new ideas for a while. And that's okay. These things always take time – especially if you've been living with it for decades.

[vasco]

I guess you can say I just haven't reflected enough but I really have a hard time with the whole branch of thinking that blames all our patterns and activities on some hidden childhood trauma, and more generally with the obsession over finding the "original sin" cause for the patterns. It just feels like a cop out to have an explanation to something one can't deal with as if we have to blame the universe for our nature.

I find it more interesting to focus on developing modes of thinking and making our immediate environment more conducive to leading a good life, by recognizing bad thought process patterns and actions or people that lead us to do those bad things. Explaining the reason or understanding it always felt completely useless to me and it's why I can't really give the time of day to most of these theories of the mind or however you'd call them.

[steve_adams_86]

> original sin

You’re not wrong, this kind of thinking can actually be a diversion from solving problems. I mean, if you can blame things you don’t necessarily remember and perhaps even your parents, there might be some sense that you can pass the buck and therefor responsibility for getting better or doing better.

At the same time, I think the idea isn’t necessarily that some huge traumatic thing had to occur. In fact it could have been fairly innocuous or mild. What people do though, sometimes, is reiterate certain events to such a degree that their psychological response and the neurological pathways it follows become excessively worn in. Those pathways become easier to follow and more likely to be followed. Getting anxious about this, feeling stupid about that, feeling shame about that. The more it happens, the easier it is to feel it.

It isn’t so much that we blame a single event and move on, but that we try to understand the source of various developments. Try to understand what experiences informed certain behaviours.

At the end of the day, whether you were 6, 16, or 26, any event which shaped you is still your responsibility to address in this current moment. There’s no blame to pass or responsibility to offload. We can’t blame the universe for our nature because if we’re unhappy with the way we are, we’re still the only ones who can do something about it. Whether it was caused by childhood trauma or aliens. The end result is your personal accountability in every moment.

There does seem to be credibility to the idea of minor traumas being very influential during formative years. It doesn’t have to have happened to all of us of course, but as children we do internalize things like crazy. One major theme I see is when caregivers are present but emotionally unavailable. When kids are isolated in this way, it seems very benign on the outside yet also seems to be able to cause major issues in kids early on and late into their lives. It becomes much less common to be influenced by experiences in the same way by the time we hit puberty, for example. We internalize much less and confront things we’re uncomfortable with, if not with peers or family then with ourselves. In our formative years we simply lack that ability.

[anemonous]

I get that and I thought a similar way before first picking up a book on childhood trauma (a partner of mine insisted, he said this would help) and, while reading, taking a long hard look at my childhood and realizing some things. I later read more similar books and none of them offered an easy way out. Plenty of hard way, though, and while some of those might start out with blaming your parents, the end goal is always to not need blame anymore.

Many of the things I started going through with these books and later on a therapist are probably something I could have dealt with, without first identifying the trauma. But it would be the kind of "could have done it", like I also could have done learning advanced math by just reading some books instead of going to university. In theory it works, for some people it works, but for most of us, taking some classes and having homework and exams is what makes it actually possible.

Permit me an example: Imagine this - you placed an empty bottle somewhere in a corner on the ground. You were busy with chores, it was in the way, you'll deal with it later. Your partner walks in and accidentally knocks it over. You forget about your chore. Your entire mind is filled with the need to apologize, hide, try to make up for putting that bottle there. You watch your partner sigh, pick it up, put it away and proceed with whatever he was doing, but you still can't focus on anything over the intense feeling of guilt and fear. It will take a few minutes to let you get back to work and probably at least an hour for the feeling to entirely go away. What do you do with this shit? I didn't know. I just knew situations like this far too well and they happened a lot.

Reading a book on trauma gave me several clues that had gone right past me for at this point about 13-15 years of my adult life. First off, I didn't understand this was a limbic response. In hindsight, if you need a textbook example for freeze responses, I'm right here. Then I had to understand what I was afraid of. That was tough, because up until reading anything on this, I did not understand "someone shouting at me and calling me stupid for several minutes" to be something that would cause panic. For a little kid, it definitely does. And in this moment, mentally I reverted to little kid mode. I needed to handle whatever the almighty parent throws at me. In my case, handling it was suffering through it and either crying in my room when it was over or later dissociating to escape the pain.

So basically, I had a flashback. Plain and simple. While I consciously knew that would never happen, something inside of me expected my partner to go nuclear on me for being so inconsiderate and lazy and I would not be able to do anything. I would just stand there and take it until he's finished shouting and I'm allowed to go to my room and cry.

My partner doesn't shout at me. Never has. This made it so hard for me to understand, what was going on. Telling me that I was overreacting and just consciously understanding I was safe was helping a little, but it was painfully slow. Also, was I overreacting? Wasn't this how people feel when they have done something wrong? Understanding, what I was actually afraid of (my dad) and that this situation was not normal (it was emotional abuse), jump-started recovery. I suddenly knew what I had to compare reality to. I knew better what to tell myself to soothe and ease out of panic. I could start doing some of those cliche exercises to low-key trigger that fear, walk through it and come out the other end to actively understand I'm still okay. I could also imagine rescuing myself or reliving the situation today and react as the self-reliant adult I am. All the (not) fun stuff.

Going from there, I gradually discovered more and more flashbacks that kept eating up my mental capacity, so I could isolate the triggers and deal with the emotional mess they caused, one at a time. And lo and behold - if you are not busy dissociating on a daily basis, you can actually have real emotions. It's great!

At this point, the amount of blame involved is very little. Sometimes I use a little blame to get out of the shame-cycle. It usually starts with feeling guilty for not replying to some shaming message my parents sent me, starts spiraling into feeling like I'm the worst child ever and then ends with "Screw you dad, I've handled your emotions long enough. We're not doing that again." That is part blame and I hope that I will eventually be able to do without it. It's a work in progress.

[Apocryphon]

Which books of his would you recommend one start with?

[steve_adams_86]

I found Scattered Minds very interesting in the context of ADHD. I don’t deal with addiction, but the next one was The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. It’s a very compassionate and holistic perspective on addiction that covers far more of the manifestations of addiction than most books I’ve read. Gabor has great intuitions about how the social fabric of addiction, recovery, and prevention.

I read Hold On to Your Kids and enjoyed it, but I prefer many others in the category quite a bit more. I agree with what he says and I think it’s worthwhile information. Perhaps I just prefer another format in the context of childhood psychology. If you have young kids you might find that you enjoy it, though — it’s certainly worth taking a look.