Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting to hear about this from the perspective of someone in this community. I’d be happy to see more posts like this on EA forum.
This was the most interesting part to me:
It wasn’t some meaningful part of the larger story of my life, replete with a buried darkness in my soul coming to the forefront, or a unique challenge driven by terrible circumstances. I have had to push back in therapy repeatedly on these subtler and more interesting attempts to make something of the event. The truth is sober reflection makes it all look like little more than a meaningless tragedy.
This is kind of relatable. My own past abuse — and the effects it has had on me — both do not fit existing narratives very well at all. People (including therapists) don’t seem to get it, and that makes it harder to figure things out and make progress.
I agree, I think there’s some holdover influence from psychoanalysis where the basic intuition seems to be that there’s always some deeper explanation for mental illnesses relating to underlying complexes or misdevelopment or something, and that therapy is finding and fixing those, but I don’t think this was ever a sensible idea to default to. Sometimes the reason someone is an alcoholic is as dumb as “I was a little bored at the wrong time to be a little bored, and alcohol is a socially normalized way to address this”.
Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting to hear about this from the perspective of someone in this community. I’d be happy to see more posts like this on EA forum.
This was the most interesting part to me:
This is kind of relatable. My own past abuse — and the effects it has had on me — both do not fit existing narratives very well at all. People (including therapists) don’t seem to get it, and that makes it harder to figure things out and make progress.
I agree, I think there’s some holdover influence from psychoanalysis where the basic intuition seems to be that there’s always some deeper explanation for mental illnesses relating to underlying complexes or misdevelopment or something, and that therapy is finding and fixing those, but I don’t think this was ever a sensible idea to default to. Sometimes the reason someone is an alcoholic is as dumb as “I was a little bored at the wrong time to be a little bored, and alcohol is a socially normalized way to address this”.