| > 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. |