Emotional dysregulation - unable to control vs unwilling

In My Humble Opinion
41

That’s a fair response.

What I’ve noticed is that, for whatever reason, there’s a certain percentage of the population that just have as extremely strong aversion to the feeling of being taken advantage of. How this belief often manifests is an empirical belief that there must be some extraordinary benefit that amasses to people who claim certain statuses (ie: Black people must get so much special treatment in admissions/the workplace or trans people are so admired in schools that teenagers are faking being trans to get those cool points) because what else could possibly motivate people to stoop so low as to manipulate other people into falsely claiming those statuses if it were not for some extraordinary reward.

The problem is, once you try and empirically test any of these claims by talking to people who are part of these groups, you realize that, in actuality, people in those groups don’t really get shit worth talking about and certainly not enough that manipulating other people is the primary reason. Where I think you need to be left with is the understanding that the byproduct might be manipulating other people but the root cause is actually manipulating yourself.

I forget whether you’ve been a parent or not but I’m sure we’ve all had experiences with children close to us where something in life is hard so we make up all the reasons why it’s ok for us not to do the hard thing: Maybe I’m just naturally bad at math or maybe I don’t have what it takes to develop healthy eating habits or maybe I was just naturally born ugly and nothing will ever make me pretty or maybe I’ll always be the screwup who hurts everyone around me etc etc etc.

I believe one of the core duties of a parent is helping children navigate through this maze of self-doubt and develop the confidence to tackle the challenges of life as something we fundamentally owe our children and I also believe that shit ain’t easy and it’s not a matter of snapping your fingers and everything is fixed but a grinding process of one step forward, two steps backward messiness for which ultimately patience is the only virtue that will keep you sane. Part of what makes parenting so difficult is bearing the brunt of the outcomes of those self-limiting beliefs as children spray their collateral damage of their insecurity onto 3rd parties who did nothing to deserve it and to love them anyway by understanding they are not doing it because they enjoy hating other people, but because they can’t bear the pain of hating themselves.

Of course, none of this shit ends in childhood, we take all that damage with us for the rest of our lives and we all, to varying extents, suffer from the fallout of that. But you are not a parent to these people, you can set healthy boundaries and understand that you can extend empathy without extending sympathy. If the primary emotion you’re feeling is judginess, is there a way to transmute that feeling into disappointment that this particular person was not able to fight this particular demon of theirs this particular time in front of you? You can still seperate the actions from the motives, regardless of whatever motives, the action was uncool and it’s a personal choice within you whether to forgive them of the action or not but I find personally I’ve never gotten much profit from peering too deeply into the why vs the what.

There are certain friends in my life I give a lot of grace to their actions being hurtful to me because deep down, I see they’re a good person struggling and as long as that genuine desire is there, I’m willing to grant the patience and grace to help them at least a little bit along that journey. For everyone else, I can’t save the world. Life is hard and people are fucked up and I can feel bad and also wish them all the best on their separate journey. Unlike you where you are required to interact with people trying to get something out of you, I have much more freedom to set up my own personal boundaries. But I wonder if you can do a better job leaving work at work and doing a better job in your personal life to have more of a “man, that sucks, shit’s fucked up for you. In an ideal world, something would have happened in your childhood that helped you see past your excuses but also, parenting is hard and it’s not my business to know what your life story is but hope you figure your shit out” attitude?

42

Thank you for this post clearly explaining what I was unsuccessfully trying to convey.

I imagine some persons undoubtedly have that belief. I am not one of them. Instead, I tend to perceive a great many (certainly not all) people as lazy, basically dishonest, and work/responsibility averse with a considerable sense of entitlement. Some people would consider the attributes I list as evidence supporting some diagnosis or another. I disagree.

Also, contrary to your suggested belief, I feel a great many people are willing to live pretty miserable existences if someone enables them to do so. Especially when the work available to them is pretty shitty and would not support a tremendously higher quality of life.

And has there there ever been a parent who, in response to folk saying how delightful their kids are, respond/think, “You should see how they are at home!”? IMO not every one of those kids has a dysregulation issue. That’s all I’m saying.

43

OK, that’s your belief, I suspect we agree more than disagree on this. My question was not on your belief, my question is why do you care? The world is a fucked place full of terrible people interspersed by brief moments of kindness and joy, so what? You build a circle around you of the people you care about and let the rest of the world take care of itself. Where does this caring come from? The process of introspection can help you go into your own mind and realize that the caring might not come from the place you think it comes from and instead, comes from you trying to push something else down and understanding and uncovering that can lead to greater self-happiness and self-integration.

44

That’s pretty much what my wife and I do. We are very comfortable in our home and with a relatively smal circle of friends/family.

I often muse over why so many people think and act differently than I do. Why do so many people belief so strongly in something as irrational as religion, while putting so little thought into their purported beliefs? Why are people selfish? How could anyone support Trump? That sort of thing. The way my mind works simply makes me find interest in how/why my and others’ minds work. Are they or I right or wrong? Can we BOTH be right/wrong?

I’m not sure how much I CARE - or that my OP suggested I do. I’m merely seeking input to help inform my opinions.

IME, it is hard to escape current thinking about emotional selfcare, reasonable accommodations, neurodivesity, etc. Maybe not enough was done in the past; maybe too much is being urged in the present. I think most folk who aspire to being decent members of their society would think/care about such issues to at least some extent.

45

My belief is that it is an extremely large percentage. Are there people who do not have that aversion? I haven’t met any. I’m not one of them.

We all abhor cheaters, especially when their cheating takes away from us or ours.

But I do not buy that aversion has anything to do with trans hate, racism, or any of that.

I highly doubt you’ll find many who disagree with, including @Dinsdale. Yes, we teach grit, tenacity, resilience, getting back up off the canvas, by demonstrating it, by encouraging it, even by the stories we tell and read.

Of course we also want our kids to grow up wise enough to set achievable goals, and to accept that sometimes tagging out is the best choice (yeah talking to you Joe Biden, we know you’re a Doper!)

I think these are things virtually every parent hope to instill.

Well consider the fact that your job has given you a fairly biased sample. To my experience “some” is a very far way away from “a great many.”

To continue the riff above, I see nearly all families as trying to teach that grit and modeling it as a value, across cultural subgroups, economic strata, and demographics. The exceptions are notable, and likely a fair number of them make appearances in courts like yours at some point.

I don’t see many who aim to be miserable. Even if some seem to have that condition as their center of gravity.

46

What is 1% of the population? A great many people?

47

I see it less than that. Much less. My own experience anyway. Obviously your job will have your mileage varying. Maybe mine is tilted the other way?

48

But, like, why is this phenomena mysterious? Like, some people believe that the reason they’re alone is because they were born so ugly that nobody can ever find them attractive and yet we also can’t deny that physical attractiveness plays a big part in relationships. Some people believe the reason they were passed up for a promotion was because the boss was unfairly prejudiced against them but we also can’t deny that prejudice plays a big part in the workplace. Some people believe their emotional regulation issues are so hard to overcome that it’s not worth trying and yet we know this is a spectrum for everyone. Trying to pin exactly what percentage is “objectively” responsible in each individual cases of these things happening is a fools errand.

I’m sure you’ve had alternate paths you’ve considered in your life that were averted via a self limiting belief that you weren’t talented enough for it/wouldn’t have enough time to devote to it/wouldn’t be motivated enough/etc and we don’t have access to the alternate universe where you did the opposite and we could have empirically tested that claim of whether you truly could have made a go of it or not so you can either stew in your “whatifs” all day long or do what we all know we need to do which is to just not think about it.

See, but this is what I mean by an empirically false belief. It’s very easy to inadvertently consume right wing propaganda that gives a cartoon version of how these efforts “fail” by piling on scads of unearned benefits on marginalized groups in ways that cause them to try less hard than the rest of society which is simply an empirically false version of the world if you talk to anyone on the ground implementing or being affected by these movements.

I’ll refer you back to the previous analogy of people who believe they’re too ugly to find a partner. To the extent that society is helping these people, it’s doing so by educating people on fatphobia, ableism, eurocentric beauty standards, the impact of mass media etc. It’s movements to show more diverse bodies in advertising and television shows. It’s making it more ok for people outside the norm of beauty to tell their stories and be listened to and considered as full fledged human beings. What it isn’t is a forcible redistribution system where individual people who are ugly are assigned mates by the state to redress past wrongs. It is not credits or additional payments made to ugly people as a form of compensation.

Every difficulty conventionally attractive people face with dating was and still is faced by ugly people. The difference is, the additional difficulty ugly people face used to be, say, an 100 and we’re now at a 75 with the eventual goal in the ideal future to bring it down to like, a 50. Nobody sane is even arguing it should be a 0, after all, physical attractiveness does matter, but if we can bring it down to the point where we’re not piling on unfair additional difficulty, then that’s the job.

Similarly, the movement for people with emotional dysregulation is like, trauma informed communication/care, an awareness of triggers, education of neurodiverse communication skills, etc. To the extent that this helps people perform closer to the standards of those without emotional dysregulation, it’s helpful. But it’s not a movement to lower the standards for these people, just an attempt to ease the burden of helping them reach that standard.

Are there movements like HAES (Health at every size) that have convinced some people to stay obese that otherwise wouldn’t? Yeah, probably, but also so what? We live in a capitalist society in which there are millions of movements that encourage people to stay obese of a million different reasons. They’re self-limiting beliefs, people are going to latch onto any excuse they can to validate that belief. Part of your own personal responsibility is to navigate through the increasing thicket of voices telling you you don’t need to try and to find that inner wellspring to try anyway and it’s hard and unfair but also life.

Similarly, are there parts of the movement you mentioned that stop some people from managing their own emotional regulation? I have the same attitude, yes, but also the rest of society is also doing that. You keep on claiming that this is the outspring of some cool, dispassionate inquiry but even if it is or not, it doesn’t matter. What we choose to spend our days thinking about in many ways matters more than how we choose to think about it. The items in the front of our minds gain outsized importance in our life and we naturally believe they have a disproportionate effect on the world.

49

I do see most parents (including myself, at times) want to teach that, but the execution may be lacking and sometimes even counterproductive. In my case, I had noticed my child had anxiety about certain things – and I had, without even realizing I was really doing it, been shielding her from those things. It wasn’t until we started talking to her current excellent therapist that I started really making a conscious effort to expose her to the very things that were causing her anxiety so that she could realize it wasn’t so bad (we do things like explicitly talk about her state of mind before and after she does the thing) and that there were rewards to be gained from it (hey, you played that game you were anxious about playing – and it was fun!). One of my friends told me that she heard about an expensive, well-regarded program for anxiety (unfortunately I don’t remember the name) where basically how it works is that the therapists spend all their time convincing the parents they don’t have to keep their kid in cotton wool, and I believe it.

Yeah, this is interesting. (I’ve really enjoyed all your posts on this topic!) On one hand, here’s an anecdote: when my kid was diagnosed ASD, I realized that I was probably ASD too. And I noticed that I started trying to use it as an excuse: “oh, I don’t want to make that phone call because it makes me anxious, because I’m probably ASD.” I mean, that’s true, but it wasn’t helpful, and I had to reframe it as “okay, yeah, I may have a harder time making phone calls than Boss, so I need to take a deep breath or run through a script or whatever and just do it.” (Which is what I was doing before that time, only I didn’t have those words for it.)

And on the other hand, thirty years ago, before these movements, or even ten years ago, I would not have had the tools that I mentioned above to help my child with her own emotional regulation. So on the whole I’m grateful that I’m bringing up my kids now rather than before these movements were a thing.

50

None of us are perfect parents, and the desire to teach grit and resilience is balanced by the need to protect our children from getting too hurt. We have to them fall and get back up and we have to catch them before they get seriously hurt. Of course our own issues get in the way!

I long had the line with my wife that we were not going to make the mistakes our parents made; we’d make our fresh new ones instead!

Plus side is my belief that most of the time our kids have enough intrinsic strengths that they survive our parental failings fine.

51

All of that is wonderful and many parents try real hard. But our conventional upper middle class outlook is showing.

Many don’t try hard or don’t know how or can’t be bothered. Many are abusive, distant, or just absent.

Lotta kids don’t get taught these things. At age 18 they’ll still be 18 though. Then they’ll try to muddle along as emotionally incompetent adults.

52

Maybe yours is that you think good parenting resides in that demographic?

I see a wide swath of parents, some parenting through multiple challenges. Yes, across demographics there are a few horrible people, but the overwhelming majority across the board are trying their honest best.

53

Sorry. I’m typing on my phone and totally flubbed that part. Your complaints about what I wrote are spot-on. What I meant was rather different.

As you say SES is not tightly correlated to good parenting. Plenty of abusive or emotionally absent manager class dads & moms. Fat cats whose kids are raised by nannys and boarding schools and as a result are f-ed up adults are a cliche for a reason.

My real point was that we bring the attitude of good parents to the thread and unless you’ve experienced bad parenting or its results up close and personal its kinda hard to accept parents could be that bad / indifferent.

One of my nieces is a professional foster parent. Substantially every child she’s ever had (30+ in total that I know of) was/is in her care due to at best indifferent parenting and at worst abusive. The indifferent ones outnumbered the actively abusive easily 10 to 1 in my estimation. Kids getting some food and little attention. And what attention they got was mostly negative. I’ve seen a lot of badly damaged 4yos. It’s heartbreaking.

54

Ah. Agreed. But again it is easy to get a view distorted by negative selection bias. (Like I think @Dinsdale has.)

Those neglectful and overwhelmed parents definitely exist. My own experience though is that the vast majority of even horrible parents are not of the intent to be horrible? They are trying their best, but for a wide variety of reasons, their best ain’t good.

55

I’m hoping you are correct. I often wonder how my views on many things may change when I retire in a couple of years. (I hope they do!). Mine is not a “happy” job. (Tho I’m not complaining. It pays well and has supported a comfortable life.) I often wonder how folk like longtime social workers or prison workers avoid adverse effects on their personalities/outlooks.

I also suspect a portion of my (for lack of better words) lack of compassion towards the most unfortunate reflects my frustration and disappointment that our incredibly wealthy society so poorly provides for the least fortunate. And that - IME - the systems set up ostensibly to assist them really do such a poor job of doing so.

OTOH, is there sort of a flip side to negative selection bias, in that if you do not regularly deal with unfortunate persons, it is easy to imagine they do not exist? I could imagine that folk who do not regularly interact with needy/disadvantaged populations might underestimate the magnitude of the situation, and may lack direct info upon which they base their beliefs.

56

For me, it took active work on my part to to detach and provide necessary care to my patients. The whole environment was pretty toxic, as many (?most) staff attitudes could be pretty dark a lot of the time. I recognized that the abyss was gazing into me. Fortunately I have a great support network, and believe me, I used it.

57

Yeah - I was thinking of you as I wrote that. In my job, I almost have to depersonalize the claimants, because I have to apply the law, rather than make decisions based on my personal sympathies/dislikes. (A tough situation occurs when a person with close case has a majorly dishonest, annoying, and/or inept lawyer. Really requires a mindfuck to basically ignore the asshole - who is going to get $ they didn’t earn if you pay the claimant. I’ll be glad when I do not need to even think of such attorneys again. Not helped when the claimant themself comes across as - uh - not entirely forthcoming.)

58

There are so many things I woul have changed about raising my kids if I knew then what I know now.