YouTube link here. No kitties at all this time!
This week, we don’t talk about ghosts. So that’s good. We do talk politics, but only a little. Also, Tony saw a weird movie, and we find out the Betty White is listening. Enjoy!
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So, without spoiling anything about the election results, I think I can still say that my impression about the reactions of the two parties is different from William’s. One side seems very unhappy and there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, and a lot of articles analyzing what went wrong. The other side seems pretty happy. And a lot of news articles are focusing on the good news aspect for that side. One article that I glanced at featured a leader of that party striding through the halls of congress with a big grin on his face.
Holidays–I’ve always been positive about the holidays, in contrast to a number of my friends who sort of look on them as Tony does, and actually just generally try to ignore them. As a kid, one thing that I really liked was that there were huge get-togethers with extended family, all the friends of extended family, and all the folks that worked with my family. So there wasn’t that much focus on my own immediate nuclear group, and I think that made the whole thing less intense in a way?
As an adult, and with my own kid, I mostly have tried to demystify the holidays. It’s not about any particular day; in fact, we can choose a different day if it’s convenient. And it’s mostly about having time when we can all cook together in a leisurely way, play games, sit and read, eat yummy things, and all that kind of thing. As far as I can tell, my son seems to really look forward to the holidays too.
Parenting is abuse. I agree in a way, and this is something that I’d say my therapist agrees with as well. But, I think when you state it like that you miss out on the other side of the equation. If we say that our parents (and any other influences from childhood, like daycare) shape us, then they definitely shape our neuroses. We’re going to learn our neurotic behavior from them, just like we learn everything else. But that means that we learn our healthy behavior from them as well. And the degrees of those things are going to be different in different households.
This is kind of reminding me that I just finished the latest “Rivers of London” book, and one thing that I like is that the main character just drops into the narrative things that his therapist says. I like how ordinary this makes therapy.
I agree with what William was sayin about nuclear families, though I understand Tony’s point that negative influence can come from whatever environment (and however many caretakers) the child has. But I think with the nuclear family there is an inherently neurotic overinvestment in the child meeting some kind of ideal that reflects the goodness of the parents. I think more caretakers help defuse that.
I suppose it’s true. Parenting is abuse only in the sense that parenting is everything, at that age. All your trauma usually comes from them… but so does your support, your comfort, your understanding of the world, your capacity for love, etc.