Mastodawn

eggshells all the way down

Curiously, this is something parents are often on the lookout for with their kids - especially younger and less verbal kids. Watching for physical and emotional queues is the difference between knowing when your kid is genuinely upset and just hungry or sleepy. The tenor of a wail can be the difference between “I’ve lost my ball under the couch” and “I’ve seriously injured myself, get me to a doctor asap”. You’ll also notice little kids adopting coping mechanisms - self-soothing by sucking on a hand or clucking a toy can indicate stress even if your child isn’t crying. Flinching from a seemingly harmless object can indicate some kind of pain or trauma (recoiling from food because you’ve got a sore throat, flinging a book because it has a scary picture, etc).

Kids get older and they start learning how to read queues from their parents in turn. And that’s a normal, healthy way to grow, even if what you’re discovering about your family is that they’re chronically stressed or ill-tempered.

“I noticed my mom was upset, so I tried to cheer her up” is an emotional development you should want to see in your children. Because you’re going to be around people who are upset the older you get. And developing empathy is a good thing precisely because it means you’re looking outside yourself and recognizing others as people like yourself.

In theory, it sets off a positive feedback loop. You’re grumpy, and your parents notice, so they try to cheer you up. They’re grumpy, and you notice, so you try to cheer them up. And the net result is less stress, more love, and a stronger bond between family members.

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sp3ctr4l

Curiously, this is something parents are often on the lookout for with their kids - especially younger and less verbal kids.

… Not the kind of parents the OP image is talking about, no, they’re not doing this much or at all.

They’re too busy.

From their erractic, extreme emotional shifts.

They’d actually be more likely to mock and punish a child displaying those early coping mechanisms.

I am kind of amazed you managed to describe the opposite of what this image is saying.

What a truly blessed life you must have lived.

Its about a disregulated, unpredictable emotional environment at home, for young kids, causing various kinds of ultimately self-destructive coping mechanisms… as survival mechanisms.

The negative feedback loops.

This isn’t about developing empathy, its about growing up in an environment that teaches you that other people’s emotions are fundamentally time bombs that can go off, and cause very real problems, so you learn how to defuse them.

Empathy?

No no no, that never happens to or for a kid in this kind of environment, at least not within the household.

The household is an ongoing threat management training simulator, which bomb do I need to defuse now, and how, and if I can’t, how do I brace for impact and aftermath… empathy might be a thing they experience and can then maybe eventually internally model, if they know other people and kids, from stable families, but its typically not fully experienced or developed untill years after they get out of that home, and manage to surround themselves with better examples of people.

And even still, the kid, now adult, learns micro expressions and tone shifts and that kind of stuff as primarily a threat assesment paradigm.

Takes years and decades to unlearn all that CPTSD, retrain your brain, and it usually never fully goes away.

By the way, to anyone who actually grew up in an environment the OP describes:

Your entire comment reads as an obvious misdirection from the topic at hand, that’s trying to sound neutral and cool, and intelligent, but is insincere, self-aggrandizing by way of obviously shifting the topic to … whatever it is you wanted to talk about.

It’s insulting, and triggering / re-traumatizing.

The abused person’s lived experience?

Nah, not important, there’s this other thing to talk about, blah blah blah blah blah blah, anyway, what were you talking about?

… Most of the other people who’ve been absued like this… well, they’re too non-confrontational to tell you how they really feel.

Because that’s been trained into them.

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FosterMolasses Mar 5

Seconding this reply, because that was the most blatantly tonedeaf comment I’ve read in ages. Checked moderation history to see whether they were being intentionally dense as it was approaching gaslighting territory and whaddaya know? lmao

If I had to guess, people like this crave empathy to abuse so no surprise to see them advocate for it.

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sp3ctr4l Mar 5

If I had to guess, people like this crave empathy to abuse so no surprise to see them advocate for it.

While I am hesitant to ‘diagnose’ this from just the comment I replied to alone…

Yes, that’s narcissism you’re describing.

Narcissists tend to be incapable of validating themselves, so they do things to garner attention and validation from others, which can lead to many other chains of behaviors, mechanisms, feedback loops.

This would also explain the … entirely abstract explanation of empathy, while simultaneously totally failing to excercise any actual empathy:

Its a theoretical concept to a narcissist.

Also immensely ironic to give a lecture about empathy, while failing to exercise any.

… and that’s coming from me, an Autist, a kind of person who is generally maligned and stereotyped as having “low eq” and not understanding interpersonal social dynamics.

No, no, I understand them better than most, its just that normies have a much higher default threshold for tolerating narcissistic behavior, and are also much more blind to it, so then the normies will think that calling out narcissistic behavior is ‘overreacting’.

On a larger scale, that’s how you end up with the overconfident leading the blind.