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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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