How trauma influences worldviews

[trenton]

I am noticing a pattern in my past trauma. Traumatic family situations and events commonly lead to misguided moral and political beliefs on the basis of limited experience. When trauma plays a role in our beliefs about society, it tragically serves to worsen our collective suffering due to the skewed, but emotionally charged perspectives we take. This can happen in any political issue, but especially terrorism considering how skewed of a perspective someone might have as a consequence of losing a loved one to 9/11. Our emotional pain creates a very stubborn bias and makes us close-minded. This is problematic because it not only perpetuates our own suffering as we cling to emotionally charged beliefs, but it often leads to well-meaning people misguiding others. Tragically, the most misguided beliefs tend to be the most emotionally charged, making them difficult to change.

I will give examples from myself. I have had a lot of misguided beliefs and attitudes about sex, drugs, and domestic violence. I grew up in a very dysfunctional family and was led to adopt many dysfunctional beliefs as a consequence. If the pattern continues, then I likely have many misguided beliefs about child support, the failure to pay child support, gang activity, misattributed paternity (which my father falsely claimed for one of my half brothers), women, men, adultery, how families with multiple male and female sex partners operate, the psychological effects said families have on children, many other issues involving dysfunctional families and how it causes children to hate themselves for issues they have no control over, and somewhat ironically autism. Other people often blamed me for my weird behavior which they continue to do and I morally blamed myself as a consequence.

One example is my initial close-mindedness to psychedelics. I was afraid of this subject because of what people like my mom and dad did with drugs. My fear of drugs was reinforced by society spreading the well meaning, but misguided black and white advice of "just say no." This attitude led me to believe that psychedelics were just as bad as opioids. In fact the government still treats them like a schedule 1 substance, making them as bad as heroin. When I eventually watched Leo's videos on the stigma of psychedelics, it helped me to heal some of my trauma. I had adopted a lot of dysfunctional beliefs about drugs because of what happened with my parents, but I am now able to look at the situation from a broader perspective. Looking at my trauma from this broader perspective helps to heal the pain.

With this meta frame in mind for all of my beliefs, I would like to discuss some of the beliefs I have picked up about society as a consequence of my upbringing. A common pattern is that I assume certain things to be more common than they actually are in an effort to trivialize my trauma. The reality is that even if a thing is common, it does not make the hurt feelings go away. A well meaning person might tell you "others have it worse than you," but this does not help and it makes me feel neglected.

1. Beliefs about Child Support

One belief I have about child support is that a common tactic for avoiding paying child support is to switch your job in order to avoid getting taxed directly out of your paycheck. When my dad went to court, the judge was angry that he did not have a consistent paycheck. One of the loopholes or means of exploiting our current system is to switch jobs constantly. Our current court system is very poor at detecting and punishing this kind of behavior and getting the payment needed. Is the U.S. court system better at detecting this behavior than I currently believe?

I am unable to find statistics on how many fathers flee the state to avoid paying child support. My gut tells me that it is common, but thinking about this logically it probably isn't common. Here are some of the statistics I did find about child support.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/us-child-support-statistics-2997994

According to this site, only about 60% of child support is paid. This partially confirms my reality that dad fell behind on child support a lot. However, the reality of my case is that dad owed hundreds of thousands on child support. He paid far far less than 60% of what was owed. It seems that I was an exceptionally rare case of a really really bad father. I used to feel guilty for loving him and having a few happy memories with him, especially since he neglected my sisters and showed favoritism toward me.

Apparently, there are around 13.6 million single custodial parents in the U.S. I am unable to find how many people live with a mother and father. My gut tells me not that many, but logically I think otherwise. It is amazing how much trauma skews your view of reality. I used to beat myself up for believing that somehow mom and dad would get back together and we would be happy. The heartbreak and betrayal makes me cold and less willing to love myself and others. This is mostly due to the fear of being emotionally wounded as a consequence of loving others. I therefore lied to myself by saying "I don't care," as if I do not love them anyway, but feel hurt. It appears that my true nature is always love, but my ego wants to reject this even though it is blatantly obvious. Most of my suffering comes from denying that my true nature is nothing but pure love.

Part of the problem with child support laws and the problem with our laws in general is that they have fixed fines. Fixed fines are problematic if they do not account for inflation or if they hurt some families more than others for the same crimes. This allows the wealthy to become less fearful of breaking the law due to the consequences not being sufficiently felt.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-child-support-enforcement

The required payment for child support isn’t that much. It is only about 500 dollars a month. I pay that in rent for living with my grandma. Failing to pay child support also results in penalties that don’t make a lot of sense to me. First of all, how does putting someone in prison for failing to pay child support solve anything? How are the fines going to help if they can’t pay enough as is? I don’t understand how any of this in the legal system is helpful, but I’m not sure how the situation ought to be handled either. The children are just screwed in this situation and there is nothing they can do about it.

Deep down I felt that my father should have gone to prison for the rest of his life. I didn’t call the police on him for his drug dealings because one I loved him, and two I believed that putting him prison forever would only serve to hurt my family more. I believed that he was paying more for child support than he actually was because he and his mom told me that my mom was greedy and trying to exploit him for money. This is a common lie about child support. My mom was struggling for money and started pawning electronics to pay the bills. I thought that she would struggle even more if he were in prison. Maybe this was selfish of me because I was not thinking about all the other families he was hurting with his gang. After he died it occurred to me to tell the police what I knew about the gang, but my grandma was unwilling to cooperate by giving the name of the man we saw with dad.

I never understood what putting dad in prison would accomplish. Would the consequences have been better for my family if I reported all his behavior to my mother or to the police? Can somebody help me understand? I felt that I was forced into secrecy because my parents wanted to use me as a legal pawn against each other. I was therefore unable to discuss this with anybody and I was alone in trying to determine what was best for the family. I was closed, quiet, and not very sociable because the information I gave about either side was critical for determining the fate of the family. I wanted to talk to someone but couldn’t.

The reason I sided with dad was because mom refused to listen to me when my siblings and I begged her to evict our abusive stepfather for our safety. The information I gave my dad had tangible legal consequences for my mother. I told dad that mom was a drug user. Dad complained about this in court to get out of paying child support even though he was a dealer. I will add my beliefs about domestic violence later.

There is one possibility that troubles me. It is possible that my dad was maliciously manipulating me to get a legal hand over mom. He preached the bible to me and told me the bond between father and son was sacred. He threatened to disown me if I told mom where he worked. He insisted that if anything bothered me about mom and stepdad, that he would be available for me. The reason I think he was trying to be good was because of what happened with my stepfather. We cried as I told him that I had thoughts of murdering my stepfather. He wanted to get me out of the situation and tried to drive away with me, taking me away from mom. Apparently, this was an attempted kidnapping. I felt that my father loved me, and I loved him despite the emotional manipulation with which he used me as a legal pawn against mom. Otherwise, a lot of our relationship felt hollow and fake to me. “Father” felt like a term used to socially condition love. I therefore questioned my love for my family, wondering how much was genuine and how much was social conditioning. I also had a lot of suicidal thoughts and believed that I was a terrible person despite doing everything in my power to be good.

Feel free to add your own findings on child support. I hope to add more trauma related beliefs later. I think this topic is critical for understanding people who seem close-minded and cold from a less judgmental perspective. Heartbreaking stories have a pretty big impact on how we think about the world.

Try to find the issues which personally impact you the most, and pay attention to how emotional, ideological, and close minded you get. I want to confront these emotions that sit at the core of our identity. Some of it might boil down to childhood trauma like how you were raised.

My goal in learning about politics is to be the best person I can be and to think as objectively and as unbiased as possible. When discussing issues that go to the core of my ego, I notice that my mind does not want to accept beliefs which make me angry because of the injustice that I personally faced. This issue seems to be critical for mastering the mind and our emotions as we learn to be as open minded as possible even when it is emotionally taxing.

[trenton]

The death penalty is a good example.

It is easy to be against the death penalty if you had an easy life. If you watched as your children were sadistically burned alive it would be hard for you to let go of your resentment.

In the case of the death penalty an isolated incident could easily be the cause of a broad enough outrage to keep the death penalty. In fact I would be hated for diminishing the suffering someone felt from this intense trauma. It ruins your life to have a loved one brutally murdered. It makes sense that this would strongly distort your entire worldview.

People want to have their perspective validated. This makes it very easy to take a single event that happened to you and then use it to reject other world views completely.

Rape can be a similarly brutal example.

Take for example a child who was sexually abused by a religious authority figure. There are several ways people could interpret the event, shaping their entire worldview.

1. The child could develop a tough kid attitude and become a life long criminal.

2. The child may reject Jesus and become a Satanist in defiance to the church.

3. People may be morally outraged and divorce themselves from religion entirely.

4. People may argue that the corruption of the church and the truth of the bible are separate issues. Therefore, church corruption does not invalidate the bible. Someone whose child was raped probably wouldn't like this argument.

5. The child might have an existential crisis and commit suicide.

In any case, it is easy for someone not personally affected to look at multiple perspectives. Trauma is what makes people close minded after they take their first interpretation of an event. This first interpretation shapes their worldview and it is hard to question it for them. Tragically, questioning these interpretations may be a key to healing trauma.

Trauma is a strong source of childhood vows that become the basis of your worldview.