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Yep. Pretty common for sin to feel good in the moment. That's the whole "trick" of it.
Childhood trauma does not entitle you to a lifetime of unlimited compassion from others.
I've been seeing this meme more and more across wide swaths of social media - and from all corners. People are starting to point backwards to "childhood trauma" (ill-defined, subjective, and often shrouded in mystery) as the root of all their problems. This is neo-Freudianism but, somehow, with less rigor and logic.
The entire process of adolescence and early adulthood is the process of recognizing that when bad things happen to you, you have some level of control in how you react to them. Yes, there are some things that are incredibly and objectively traumatic. They will take time to heal, but you have the tools and capability to fuel that healing process if you developed emotional maturity.
When people fail to do this, they not only become unreliable, they become socially dangerous. Most of the men in prison right now had a childhood of neglect and abuse to at least some degree. They are repeating the patterns they were exposed to. Sadly, many of them lack the IQ to even sort their emotions into reasonable buckets, let alone manage them constructively. Should we extend our inexhaustible supply of compassion there way, let them out, and hug them until they've changed? Alarmingly, about half of the voting population would YesChad.jpeg this idea.
This is all part of the rot and incipient counterproductive nature of "therapy culture." It invites negative feedback loop rumination on bad feelings, the opposite of personal agency, all while promising constant absolution from responsibility that one can presume and demand of others. It's a kind of inverted religion; a kind of satanism, if you will. A self-referential cult of the victim ego.
Returning to Aella, and the sexy-rationalist-e-girl archetype, perhaps you had some level of childhood trauma. Let's assume this trauma was real and not cultivated by a very online life that invites all of us to make emotional mountains of molehills. You're (self-proclaimed) like, really, really smart or whatever. Perhaps you ought to take the time to sort through your own emotional baggage and then move beyond it. In her tweets, she is literally calling for internet friends and strangers to defend her honor to other (mostly) internet strangers. This is an obvious sign of emotional immaturity. She is outsourcing emotional regulation to other people through the odd mode of chivalrous honor codes.
(Side note: I bet Scott does it)
It....kinda should though?
We have good evidence to believe that free will is mostly BS at this point but even if you aren't about that line of thinking it is still true that childhood abuse ruins your life outcomes. We have some knowledge of things like the impact on your brain chemistry and psychological development, we can point to incredibly poor outcomes and paucity of truly effective treatment.
People just don't get better without a lot of good genetics, supportive nursing and lucky life events the majority of the time.
Doesn't mean you have to accept or interpersonally tolerate them, but you should have empathy and compassion.
It is in all likelihood not her fault and her brain is fundamentally broken and society does not have the tools to force her to do what is required to get better.
Citation needed.
Citation needed. Also, there's literally a cottage industry in within hollywood that does nothing besides making films about people who overcame their childhood to do amazing things.
Citation needed.
Citatio--nevermind.
Let's say you come back with bulletproof evidence for all of your claims. Think through the implications. How do we as a society ever hold anyone accountable for anything? What "counts" as trauma? Who decides? How do you account for individual variation in the ability to cope with negative emotions?
The whole point of our legal system is that it is based on the premise that there is the law and only the law. Your personal circumstances have little to do with how you are judged against the law*. "Your honor, I had a really hard childhood. I think you should take that into account during this armed robbery trial." That would be pants-on-head insane because it would mean every single law and every single interaction with it would be an inherently subjective exercise. There would, in effect, be no laws. No laws, no society ... you get the picture.
Compassion and empathy do not outrank truth.
By implication, you're also preemptively condemning literal children to a life of low expectations and patronization. "Damn kid, your mom was a crackhead and dad beat you? Well, don't feel bad about being semi-homeless for a while, it isn't your fault." Or, in this specific Aella case, "Sure, sure, honey, you're a multi-millionaire with a massive online following, but you go right ahead and have a public meltdown." Why not encourage them to rise to their potential? Why not deliver the much, much better message of "despite what has happened in your past, you can create a good life and be a valued, pro-social member of whatever community you choose**"
Pairing all of this with your initial dubious claims we have yet another example of the satanic nature of current therapy. It's the embodiment and fulfillment of the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations. It takes otherwise healthy people who may need some encouragement and turns them into fragile, dependent slaves to the cult of "self-care", "triggers", "boundaries", etc. Many are literally permanently drugged and then reminded that such drugging is "necessary" to keep them ..... stable? I'll take volatile but responsible and competent over "stable", flaccid and burdensome.
Admittedly handling this well requires some flexibility of thinking that is going to be challenging for the general population, but just like how HBD claims doesn't mean we have to treat *ethnic group * like ass, just because free will is limited doesn't mean that we can't punish people for misbehavior, arrange society in various desirable ways, and so on.
Let's start with the free will statement. The strongest form of the argument is something like this: we have good data on things like efficacy of treatments, causes of various things, outcomes given various adverse childhood experiences and so on.*
We can cobble together some genetic data and presentations, certain kinds of childhood experiences like gross sexual exploitation, family history of other mental illness, family history of substance abuse, etc and say "this kind of person is enormously unlikely to ever overcome their circumstance." Can we do this for most people? Well not right now anyway, but for certain kinds absolutely yes.
Should we allow them the chance to make their own mistakes instead of doing something first? Different question. Should we let them run roughshod over things? No, but different question.
This definitely applies to certain patterns of child abuse.
A better example is probably opioid abuse. Medication assisted treatment (this is not safe injection sites) originally started as highly stigmatized and disliked but has grown to be approved by most in medicine because what we've found is that once addicted (rarer then you might think) most people just don't recover.
Free will need not apply. The thing is too dangerous.
Look for other options.
We know that external locus of control and efforts at getting people to help themselves work for those who can, so we should try, but thought leaders should be aware that some populations and situations just aren't going to get fixed without outside intervention.
*Simplest place to start if you want to examine the research base is ACE studies.
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You can have some empathy for her(it does seem like her childhood was pretty bad) without approving of any of her decisions, or even refraining from judging her choices.
oh yeah you can say she's a fucking moron and I dont want my daughter doing that ....and at the same time, her life made her that way and you can feel bad for her.
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Sorry, I can't choose to not judge Aella as a nasty hoe even though she had a rough childhood because I lack the free will to choose otherwise.
Yeah fair, being judgmental IS probably more determined by your life history and cultural context, however thinking she is a nasty hoe (I mean, I do too...the shower thing? Eesh) is not incompatible with having empathy for her and awareness of the life history that likely brought her to the set of beliefs you find odious.
Sorry, my lack of free will prevents me from choosing to feel empathy
And someone with different genetics and life experiences might be able to do so.
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I stopped reading at this point. Thinking that free will is a solved debate makes me not take any of your other arguments seriously.
That's highly antagonistic given literally the next words of that sentence.
Ahh. As I said, I stopped reading ahaha. Yeah perhaps it is antagonistic.
I do have a lot of sympathy for child abuse, but as the person says you can't have infinite compassion. Infinite compassion for anything will ruin you.
Compassion and empathy do not require acceptance or being a door mat.
While saying "nope no free will" is probably excessive, we do have a lot of evidence that things like bad childhood experiences are incredibly difficult to overcome and likely only in the most optimum of circumstances.
You can say "just get over that shit" but they rarely do, particularly with very bad or multiple bad experiences.
This is my nomination for one-liner Motte And Bailey of the year (so far).
I see forensic patients at time and had some of my training is in a forensic setting.
Two things can be true at the same time.
I hate you and I am quite happy if you spend the rest of your life in prison. You deserve it.
I have compassion for you, will take care of your medical needs, and feel bad about the circumstances that led to your criminality.
In another setting it might be something like "I love you and I'm sorry your father abused you, but the way you treat me is not something I can tolerate and I will not have you be part of my life."
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Does what?
Posts a thoughtful essay on defending Aella while also discussing the many sided argument about her public persona, her personal history, and how we should think about judgement in the twitter sphere.
Or some fucking bullshit like that.
Sounds on brand alright.
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I agree with most of your arguments, but I have to jump in with #notalltherapy here. I have been helped quite a bit by therapeutic modalities, even though it took me years to find ones that worked with good practitioners.
Unfortunately, like with most fields, good therapists are few and far between. In general I'd estimate 90%+ of therapists out there provide negligible effects, or actively make their clients worse off. And indeed, much of the issues are the "cult of ego" stuff as you point out.
That being said, the truly good therapy that's out there can be life changing. Especially if it's focused on somatic practice and "emotional armoring" in the Reichan sense.
Very much agree on trauma not being an excuse to hurt others, though.
Your choice of words alone in that sentence suggests a verbal IQ (if not general IQ) in the top 5% (and I'm probably underestimating). You're posting on a niche forum that hyper-indexes on good argumentation. The most liked posts on here routinely surpass 500 - 1000 words.
Therapy didn't help you, you helped you. I know, that's an outlandish claim to make. I don't know your whole story. How could I be so presumptuous blah blah blah. But this is yet another part of therapy culture I find so contemptuous. For the success stories out there - like yours - I believe 99% of them are just that person improving their life. The therapist was in no way necessary. But the therapist then takes the credit. And invites well-intentioned and genuinely praiseworthy people - such as yourself - to proclaim the advantages of therapy. At best, at the absolute best, you could maybe view a therapist as a coach in the sports sense. They help you stay disciplined, offer nurturing advice, whatever. But who went out and did the thing? You did.
Where therapy isn't a satantic self-religion, it's a grift. Where it isn't a gift, it's non-sexual emotional prostitution. Where it isn't even that (in the academy) it's a rent seeking non-scientific field that shits out pop self-help books backed by "TeH scIencE" and propagated over social media. Evil turtles, all the way down.
Semi-related tangent: Can't find the article / essay, but I remember a ACX style post about how most alcoholics who aren't a) extremely low agency (i.e. retardation levels of IQ) and b) past the point of the dangerous chemical addiction wherein cessation can be fatal, will self-resolve their alcohol consumption to manageable levels over the course of their life. Alcoholics Anonymous is more or less a placebo. I'd love to find that article again as I have enough people in my personal orbit who essentially have been functioning alcoholics for several years at a time, become completely sober for several years, and then resolved to totally responsible occasionally social drinkers after about a decade mixture of the preceding two phases.
Ahaha I appreciate it. I honestly can't give therapy too much credit - Jesus Christ saved my life more than anything. That being said, going to therapy and learning especially about somatic modalities (paying attention to what you feel in your body, your emotions etc) is a big part of what led me to Christ. So perhaps I can say He can work through these tools.
I actually agree with the emotional prostitution part. Ironically I wasn't able to get a ton out of therapy until I did a bunch of research on my own, learned to sort of discern who is actually wise and who is full of shit, and then pick from there. If you aren't able to do that discernment yeah, you're kind of screwed sadly.
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Or, more relevantly, most people in therapy don’t need to be there, and doing therapy on a healthy person can’t help, might hurt.
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I don't know if she's capable of that, though. Again, doing untrained psychoanalysis over the Internet, but by all accounts her method of dealing with her traumatic upbringing was "do a shit load of LSD and permanently fry my brain" which is not really helpful. And if she does have to face it all and acknowledge that she does bear responsibility for her choices, plus confront her past, I do think she's liable to crack right open and maybe not be fixable.
I hope she gets help. I don't know if she wants it or if anyone in her life is in a position to tell her to do so (the main fault of the nice rationalist EA people is that they are too damn nice and so fearful of appearing judgemental or telling people how to live their lives or seeming to be unaccepting that they will hum and haw and tie themselves into knots while literal rapists are taking advantage of the culture to get away with being abusive and manipulative). I don't think anyone in her circles feels capable of telling her "this is not a good choice" or that she would listen to anyone who did tell her that.
If she's compounded her trauma through years of maladaptive behaviors, then the question has to be asked: to what extent is she culpable for her own behavior? If that answer is "below the level of generally agreed upon adult responsibility" then we're talking about involuntary psychiatric commitment.
But we're not talking about that because she's obviously a high agency, capable individual. That's my whole point - she's making these choices on her own. And, thus, my compassion is effectively zero because I know she can change but she chooses not to.
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