BAnd that's a NORMAL interaction for this family. Like no: they weren't the kind of Toxic Horrible that you'd make a good movie out of for Lifetime but this is still what this girl was surrounded by - hypercritical, perfectionist, totally lacking in validation or celebration by her family - not "never good enough" in the sense of being endlessly berated, but definitely never good enough in the sense that the driving underly of the family was "well you could do better" . . . etc etc and you could see every bit of it reflected in how her anorexia worked.
Yeah, I think there's an unfortunate pendulum swing from "let's blame everything about this kid on their parents and home environment" to "well clearly this illness was caused by GENES ~handwave and the parents get an A+ for Good Parenting and don't have to feel guilty or change their behaviour." There are good parents who do a great job and their kid effectively gets struck by lightning, there are abusive parents who basically torture their kids, there are regular parents who struggle to do a "good enough" job but for whatever reason wind up making choices that are disastrous but not that conscious -- it's not like they were hiding a vowel from the kid's building block set.
Based just on personal observation there is a huge unwillingness to accept the role that luck, good or bad, plays -- which is just human, we like to think we have control over the things that happen to us, but this is multiplied exponentially when it comes to mental illness. It must be the parents! No, it must be the kid! No, it must be the genes or the Alar in the apple juice! There's a certain kind of insanity in trying to find The Absolute Root Cause of something so that not only can we assign the proper blame to various actors, but also fantasize about ending it once and for all. Anorexia is caused by 10% shit parenting and 20% adolescent rebelliousness and 30% genes and 40% lack of this vitamin, hallelujah. I think this is caused in large part by the mechanistic thinking resulting from the so-called Decade of the Brain, but people really are terrified by the idea that you can do all the "right things" and life can still fuck you over.
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Date: 2017-08-04 05:35 am (UTC)Yeah, I think there's an unfortunate pendulum swing from "let's blame everything about this kid on their parents and home environment" to "well clearly this illness was caused by GENES ~handwave and the parents get an A+ for Good Parenting and don't have to feel guilty or change their behaviour." There are good parents who do a great job and their kid effectively gets struck by lightning, there are abusive parents who basically torture their kids, there are regular parents who struggle to do a "good enough" job but for whatever reason wind up making choices that are disastrous but not that conscious -- it's not like they were hiding a vowel from the kid's building block set.
Based just on personal observation there is a huge unwillingness to accept the role that luck, good or bad, plays -- which is just human, we like to think we have control over the things that happen to us, but this is multiplied exponentially when it comes to mental illness. It must be the parents! No, it must be the kid! No, it must be the genes or the Alar in the apple juice! There's a certain kind of insanity in trying to find The Absolute Root Cause of something so that not only can we assign the proper blame to various actors, but also fantasize about ending it once and for all. Anorexia is caused by 10% shit parenting and 20% adolescent rebelliousness and 30% genes and 40% lack of this vitamin, hallelujah. I think this is caused in large part by the mechanistic thinking resulting from the so-called Decade of the Brain, but people really are terrified by the idea that you can do all the "right things" and life can still fuck you over.