Asymmetrical Information

At the risk of being laughed out of here for mentioning an infomercial guru, Anthony Robbins has been saying the same thing for years and it made intuitive sense to me. He argues that you don't make your life better by consciously dwelling on and hashing over bad things that happened to you. Instead you consciously choose to focus on making plans and taking action to reach your cherished goals. As you make progress towards your goals you feel increasingly strong, capable, and optimistic. And the pain which was once burned into your neurons fades because it isn't emotionally replayed over and over.

"Aha! Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Look at me! I'm being repressed!"

-- anarcho-syndicalist peasant, played by Michael Palin in Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

Wait... "Megan McArdle's" ancestors were WASPs? I didn't think WASPs could buy a name like that! ;-)

*LOL* at Paul's comment.

Seriously, though, I don't think it's a one-size-fits all kinda thing.

And on this subject... I may be a layperson, but I am one who has AT LEAST his fair share of knowledge... and I can think of a number of times when ignorance, or even just silence, would've had vastly preferable results.

Just sayin'.

It's not only trauma, but other issues following from that trauma. If it was never affirmatively acknowledged by anyone but its sufferer (or perhaps not even by them), there might well be value in talking it out... and that only if the sufferer is unhappy as a result of lifestyles developed as the result of forming coping skills to deal with the PTSD, and needs to identify the causes behind those coping skills in order to get the full benefit from changing them.

[Some of the coping skills I developed as a child to deal with this or that - and there were a few this's and that's - have proven to be a tremendous disservice to me as an adult. I've seen it from the other side, too - I've been put at a disadvantage by the coping skills of my partners in all manner internpersonal relatinships.]

There's also the question of how one deals with the problems that disclosure - such as that made in therapy causes.

If someone acknowledges their experience and takes responsibility for doing the legwork associated with getting over it - whether that takes the form of regressive therapy or learning tennis - why should it matter which approach is adopted, so long as it brings progress?

One wonders if a healthy balance between the two - as defined by the one doing the healing - isn't called for. Hm.

I can't remember the last time I've felt this vindicated.

One half is Irish -- the other half arrived on the Mayflower.

Megan,

I was merely teasing—heaven knows that in America anyone whose family has been here for more than about two generations gets to be a mutt anyway. When my birth mother and sisters found me, I learned that I'm in fact not German/Scandinavian at all (an assumption that had been based on circumstantial evidence), but English, Scots, Shoshonee, and Potawatami. Believe me, I never would have guessed.

Ob. substantive point note: I've also always thought that it was intuitively obvious that temperance was a desirable quality. I needed only the "letting it all hang out" of my compatriots during college to confirm it.

We are a totally different culture than we were just two generations ago. My parents remembered a time when having all siblings survive to adulthood was remarkable. We lost 13 million people to influenza in 1913 (somewhere around then). We lost more than 500,000 servicemen in WWII. Three of my elementary school classmates died from polio. Remedy: its life and life only.

We now live in a time of extreme risk avoidance. This has been foisted upon us by our old friend Chicken Little. Except now the con men have figured out how to make old CL pay off in a big way.

The article was one of the best you'll ever see. The NYT is truly the best ever. Like every other institution it shines in some areas and kinda goofs in others. It is unfortunate that this article will be quickly forgotten because it stomps on too many toes.

Watch for MM's forthcoming article in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association: "The 2x4 as Therapeutic Tool" (g,d,&r).

Oh, pshaw, that article steps on no toes at all. The final conclusion is: repression is good for some folks and there might be something there, we think.

Personally, I couldn't agree more with that faint conclusion. What I read out of this research isn't that people are harmed by talking, but that some people are, at heart, repressors, and some people are, at heart... not. The ones that are not tend to be the ones who end up in therapy. If they aren't greatly helped, the hypothesis might be posed that it's simply because non-repressors aren't as naturally resilient as repressors... but that doesn't stop non-repressors from needing someone to unburden themselves to.

I speak with some measure of personal experience here. (See? Here I go, expressing myself yet again...) One of the qualifications for clinical depression is the reoccurrence or obsession over unpleasant thoughts! For those of us who deal with this on a daily basis, an inability to "repress" feelings of sadness or grief is usually an alarm bell signalling action ("Time to go for a walk, time to hug a loved one, time to do something you enjoy, time to listen to music, break free of this dangerous pattern NOW"). Psychologists may be a bit fru-fru, but I doubt so many of them have lost the original vision that therapy was intended to make the patient feel better.

Psychology is embracing different forms of recovery more and more as time goes by. Repression may be the wave of the future, but that certainly doesn't justify a backlash on expression, nor does this article advocate one. Nothing tosses me off into a negative, viciously circling thought pattern better than having one of my well-meaning betters tell me to "buck up and stop whining" (I'm not the only spineless little whiner to feel this way); if my therapist were to start that crap with me, I'd be doomed.

On a less impassioned note: I find it hard to believe that a generation of medical professionals who have embraced pharmaceutical treatments for mood disorders would consider the repression of negative feelings a threatening concept. I mean, really. It is to snort.

Megan:

Actually, the Irish Catholics have it all over Protestants when it comes to self-repression. On the other hand, Protestants have it all over Catholics (at least in Ireland) when it comes to repression of others.

Either way, expertise galore. And BTW I'm descended from a long line of Irish Catholics. If you think guilt is the sole province of the Jewish mother, behold the Irish Catholic sometime.

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