Very profound and heartbreaking video. Definitely check it out!
This is why stuff like “thinking positive” doesn’t work on a lot of ppl.
If you’ve been abused/neglected/etc it goes way beyond just “thinking happy thoughts.”
Also, a commenter made a great point:
“It’s sad and everyone understands when it’s a child, but these same children become adults and people just expect them to be fully functioning and well-developed. There is no compassion then.”
EXACTLY.
We are just blamed and told to just “suck it up” and “forget about the past” and “just move on.” Anyone who’s ever been abused knows it’s not easy to just “forget about it.” It wouldn’t be called trauma if it could just be erased and forgotten in the blink of an eye. This is why I refuse to take “advice” from ppl who have NO clue what it’s like to be abused and grow up abused. Most of the time the “advice” comes from a place of condescension and admonishment, NOT compassion.
You know the saying “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes…” Bc ppl who HAVEN’T had that happen to them like that commenter said above, have NO COMPASSION. This is why I can’t talk to “normal” ppl. Very few ppl understand, let alone actually CARE.
And this isn’t about me. Like that commenter said, ppl have no compassion for the abused kids when they turn adults. Ppl think, well you’re an adult now so whatever bad thing that is happening (depression, anxiety, anti-social, etc) is ALL YOUR FAULT. It’s not like you wave a magic wand and at 18 or 21, suddenly the abuse and trauma goes away.
And it’s not like these abused kids (nor me) were given therapy or love and attention to change things. They’re likely maladjusted adults (like me). Maybe I’m too far gone…
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Heh, yeah that stuff can be pretty brutal the first time you see it. It’s my field, what I studied in college… then right after college I got a job in Child Welfare and saw plenty of these stories first hand.
I had a healthy childhood, by these standards anyway. I just read a story by Kurt Vonnegut about a future where adult children are allowed to sue their parents for neglect, which exists primarily to discourage people from having children. It’s one of those not enough food/no clean water dystopias
the standards for raising children kept moving up right about until the early 2000s. Most of us were abused by modern standards. Now though, the standards are sinking and have been for awhile. Which is why the birth rate is on the decline as well.
I don’t think it’s too late for most anything though. Too late to be an olympic athlete? yeah. Same goes for getting into a prestigious university, it’s too late really young for stuff like that.
It’s never too late to do something. Most writers don’t write their first book until their mid 30s, and first time authors exist in every demographic group. My mother in law went back to school at age 50, and she’s now engaged in professional research.
i hear what you’re trying to say, but i’m at a point where i literally loathe humans. it’s not just the ppl who abused or neglected me as a child. that was a long time ago. but it’s when you repeatedly reach out a hand for help, for someone, anyone, to help, to care, or to give a damn, but each and every single time, all you get is kicked in the face, over and over again.
i’m tired of the human species. we suck. yeah sure, maybe there are some good humans out there, but where are they? no one has bothered to help me my entire life. my former friend has cerebral palsy. no one has ever bothered to help her in any way her entire life either. all we’re ever told, coldly is, “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” and “think positively.” well thinking positively doesn’t get the groceries from the store up the stairs. thinking positively doesn’t get the laundry from the laundromat up the stairs. people need actual help, and it’s not like it’s such a huge task to pick up a friend from the grocery store, or the laundromat, and drive them home every once in a blue moon.
or help us get up when when fall. when i fell down, NO ONE fucking got up to help me. dozens of ppl saw me, and did a single person help? it was a nasty fall. i couldn’t walk for 1.5 YEARS after that happened. when my friend with cerebral palsy falls downs, does anyone help her? over her entire lifetime, she falls down a lot, about 1 really bad fall/year, and NO ONE stops to help her. this is the society we live in. spare me the “there’s lots of good people in this world!” yeah, where are they?
well, I regret if I said there were lots of good people. I don’t think that’s true, they’re very rare and sometimes hard to find. People can be, for lack of a better words, monsters. I’ve seen it up close and first hand.
meanwhile, I can only really account for myself. If there is a way I can help, I’d be honored. For now, I’m here to tell you I hear you and understand. What little comfort that is, I hope you’ll take it.
This reminds me of something I was reading not too long ago. It has been posited that severely neglected babies who suffered from failure to thrive were sometimes mistaken by their parents as changelings (the sickly offspring of a fairy that is left in place of the human baby the fairies kidnapped). In reality, it was just the human baby becoming emaciated and lethargic due to lack of proper care, whether by deliberate neglect or the parent(s) being unable to function well enough.
Placing the children in foster care was supposed to rescue them from the same neglect that took place in some institutions, but at times, the foster care system is just as bad.
Children are precious and should never have to go through this. I hope the babies in that video got better.
who in their right mind thinks their kids are changelings? these types of ppl should NEVER be allowed to have children in the first place.
This is part of the old fairy beliefs. The idea that a child with a particular illnesses, or perhaps neglected to the point of illness, was actually not a human child at all.
Like abandoning a disabled child to death from exposure in ancient Rome, it is part of the culture.
that is horrible. at least suffocate the child or something so it’s a quicker death. that’s asshole-ish AND cowardice. if you’re going to kill a kid, at least do it quickly. letting it slowly die on it’s own is cruel. it takes days to slowly die this way.
so many kids have been abused by the foster care system, both by the institutions that house these kids before they get adopted, as well as the foster families.
Even if all the explanation was not there, their expression difference tells everything.
Everyone has compassion for babies who are abused/neglected/has behavioral and social problems. But the moment that kid turns adult, nobody gives a sh*t about them. If they reach a hand out for help, they get kicked with “just think happy thoughts” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” And again, it’s not like most of those abused/neglected kids received any help when they were kids, so they 100% turn out to be maladjusted adults.
I didn’t watch the video, because I try not to bring myself down when I can avoid it.
But I have heard of experiments like that.
As someone who feels pretty messed-up and suffers from intense social anxiety and subterranean self-esteem, I recognize that it’s not about just “thinking happy thoughts”.
On the other hand, when I was younger, I did take inspiration from the lead characters in action movies at the time (this was the ’90s), who almost always modeled stoicism.
Braveheart is an obvious example. I think practicing controlling yourself when everything in you just wants to blow a fuse is incredibly powerful over time.
And, conversely, I think the recent pop psychology fad, with its obsession with “trauma” and triggers and “getting help” might be doing more harm than good, by turning people into hypersensitive, hyper reactive nervous wrecks.