Disclaimer: I tend to type as a stream of consciousness, so it may sound like I'm rambling.
I feel like our side doesn't get deep enough into the correlation between bad behaviors as an adult and what the kid experiences growing up.
It was 1985, and Dr. Vincent Felitti was mystified. The physician, chief of Kaiser Permanente’s revolutionary Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, CA, couldn’t figure out why, each year for the last five years, more than half of the people in his obesity clinic dropped out. Although people who wanted to shed as little as 30 pounds could participate, the clinic was designed for people who were 100 to 600 pounds overweight.
That's definitely a problem that requires looking in to.
But the 50-percent dropout rate in the obesity clinic that Felitti started in 1980 was driving him crazy. A cursory review of all the dropouts’ records astonished him — they’d all been losing weight when they left the program, not gaining. That made no sense whatsoever. Why would people who were 300 pounds overweight lose 100 pounds, and then drop out when they were on a roll?
Why ruin a great thing?
“I had assumed that people who were 400, 500, 600 pounds would be getting heavier and heavier year after year. In 2,000 people, I did not see it once,” says Felitti. When they gained weight, it was abrupt and then they stabilized. If they lost weight, they regained all of it or more over a very short time.
Binge eating is considered a symptom of a larger problem.
The turning point in Felitti’s quest came by accident. The physician was running through yet another series of questions with yet another obesity program patient: How much did you weigh when you were born? How much did you weigh when you started first grade? How much did you weigh when you entered high school? How old were you when you became sexually active? How old were you when you married?
Getting really close there, doc.
“I misspoke,” he recalls, probably out of discomfort in asking about when she became sexually active – although physicians are given plenty of training in examining body parts without hesitation, they’re given little support in talking about what patients do with some of those body parts. “Instead of asking, “How old were you when you were first sexually active,” I asked, “How much did you weigh when you were first sexually active?’ The patient, a woman, answered, ‘Forty pounds.’”
There it is. The poor woman was raped by her father when she was 4. 4 fucking years old (she confirms in the next sentence), her life was forever changed for the worse. Maybe this can explain A FEW of the mask Nazis, but that's it. Horrendous childhood trauma, which should be punished by... well, I don't want to get visited by the police.
This is what I mean by stream of consciousness.
It wasn't only rape; physical and emotional abuse were also factors that contributed to people becoming obese in the doctor's findings.
Public health experts, social service workers, educators, therapists and policy makers commonly regard addiction as a problem. Some, however, are beginning to grasp that turning to drugs is a normal response to serious childhood trauma, and that telling people who smoke or overeat or overwork that these are bad for them and that they should stop doesn’t register when those approaches provide a temporary, but gratifying solution.
It's the subconscious mind protecting the conscious mind - do something to keep taking your mind off all the bad shit that happened to you.
I'll use my own childhood trauma to try to open some eyes to the horrendously bad shit that "parents" do to their children, and why some may exhibit not-negative anti-social behavior.
My dad was a narcissist; I've had time to process his death early January 2020. I was extremely emotionally hurt and distraugt the last time I saw him alive, hooked up to life support because a stroke had nuked his brain (wasn't his first one). I was bawling my eyes out in the hospital, and again when the priest was speaking at his memorial service. I was hurt, but I also felt a sense of relief. What relief, you may wonder. My dad was quite sick - contracted e-Coli from eating raw food when on vacation, around 1982-83. Didn't seek treatment immediately, because he's a "real man" (which is why we have such a high death rate). He had it treated again in the mid-90s, I guess because the initial round of antibiotics wasn't enough.
My memory is pretty shitty, but I think it progressed to kidney failure around 2010 or so. I don't remember what lead up to the diagnosis, but the doctors put him on the strongest antibiotics around, which didn't work, and ended up landing him on the transplant list. That evolved into other problems, like needing a heart valve replaced, a PICC line in the arm for IV antibiotics because he had some kind of vegetation in his heart, some kind of skin disease brought on by other medication he was taking, and during his last couple months, he was even mumbling to himself, which he hadn't done before, probably because his various illnesses were breaking his mind.
Because he was a narc, other people had to suffer for it. I remember he was pissy over something, and I think he blamed me for him getting sick. I say 'I think' because saying that should be incomprehensible for a rational, thinking person - who blames someone for getting sick when they weren't even in their life yet (I was born in 1985)? How can any parent say that to their son, blaming them for getting a life-threatening disease? Oh wait, because he was a narcissist, whose mission in life is to ruin life for those around them. Whether it was pulling me out of a baseball game crying my eyes out while he was my "coach," or threatening to kick me out because I was doing poorly in high school, which led to me temporarily enlisting in the Navy Delayed Entry Program, which was itself a very small shit show.
He told me he wished I had talked to him before doing so, so he could have talked me out of it, and he also was worried that I would be peeling potatoes. Wait... what? I scored a 70 on the ASVAB, opening a lot of doors for me. I was absolutely terrible at math, but I somehow scored a quartermaster job, and even a slot in the SEAL Challenge, which was laughable as I was less than 110 lbs and was doing far less physical activity. That guy actually thought that I was just going to peel potatoes for a few years, as if I was some drooling retard that had trouble wiping his own ass.
He also believed I should have easily grasped everything in school the first time around; no, life doesn't work that way, and you're hampered when you're basically forced to stay up late to watchh movies like Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard when you're about 6 years old. This is showing a kid lots of killing, hearing 'fuck' a lot and staying awake late, none of which are good for a developing mind.
He also seemed to be of the opinion of if you're not doing something the way he wants you to, you're wrong and he's going to yell and scream at you, getting red in the face, and causing you to feel like you're going to die.
I should probably get to something like a point so I don't ramble on forever. I realize now that I'm mourning the father I wish I had, and not the man that he was. The best things he did for me was introduce me to Ender's Game and FreeRepublic.com. Other than that, I was never taught anything; I had to ask a classmate when I was a kid how to tie my shoes.
My mother wasn't much better - she was a compulsive gambler, estimated to have pissed away around $500,000 over 20 years. Every time me or my sister interrupted her, she would call us cunts then beat us. She's the reason we lost our house.
I guess my extremely convoluted point I'm trying to make is that for problems we see on the surface, there may be underlying abuse that people are hiding. It's even worse with narcissist parents, who are the people that are always supposed to have your back for as long as you live. When they betray that unspoken trust, what do you have left? You become a husk of a person, desperately seeking something to fill the void. Drugs, alcohol, food, whatever. Too much of it stems from abuse as a kid. I'm lucky in that I'm not addicted to anything; people may say I play video games a little too much, but it's better than going broke buying alcohol.
Oh, and my younger sister picked up their bad traits, she's unfortunately a narcissist as well.
Thanks for posting this, /u/SoMuchWinning45. The ACE study may be the most important lesson about the human condition modern science has to offer; it makes the point that childhood experiences are critically important in life. This large (over 17,000 people in the cohort) study from the 1980s deserves all the attention it can get.
Jesus' teachings about "not offending children" are strongly illuminated in light of the ACE findings.
Here is more from the article you posted -- all emphasis mine:
When the first results of the survey were due to come in, Anda was at home in Atlanta. Late in the evening, he logged into his computer to look at the findings. He was stunned. “I wept,” he says. “I saw how much people had suffered and I wept.”
This was the first time that researchers had looked at the effects of several types of trauma, rather than the consequences of just one. What the data revealed was mind-boggling.
The first shocker: There was a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism.
The second shocker: About two-thirds of the adults in the study had experienced one or more types of adverse childhood experiences. Of those, 87 percent had experienced 2 or more types. This showed that people who had an alcoholic father, for example, were likely to have also experienced physical abuse or verbal abuse. In other words, ACEs usually didn’t happen in isolation.
The third shocker: More adverse childhood experiences resulted in a higher risk of medical, mental and social problems as an adult.
To explain this, Anda and Felitti developed a scoring system for ACEs. Each type of adverse childhood experience counted as one point. If a person had none of the events in her or his background, the ACE score was zero. If someone was verbally abused thousands of times during his or her childhood, but no other types of childhood trauma occurred, this counted as one point in the ACE score. If a person experienced verbal abuse, lived with a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, his ACE score was three.
Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4. Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with four categories of ACEs had a 240 percent greater risk of hepatitis, were 390 percent more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema or chronic bronchitis), and a 240 percent higher risk of a sexually-transmitted disease.
They were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.
People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.
“Some of the increases are enormous and are of a size that you rarely ever see in health studies or epidemiological studies. It changed my thinking dramatically,” says Anda.
Two in nine people had an ACE score of 3 or more, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more. This means that every physician probably sees several high ACE score patients every day, notes Felitti. “Typically, they are the most difficult, though the underpinnings will rarely be recognized.”
The kicker was this: The ACE Study participants were average Americans. Seventy-five percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7.5 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 percent were black. They were middle-class, middle-aged, 36 percent had attended college and 40 percent had college degrees or higher. Since they were members of Kaiser Permanente, they all had jobs and great health care. Their average age was 57.
As Anda has said: “It’s not just ‘them’. It’s us.”
We need to think: why does this person get scared at loud sounds? Why do they get scared whenever anyone yells? The answer might go back to childhood, and terrible parents. It should hit home to our side that not everyone should have kids, and if someone wants to be child-free, they may have a damn good reason for making that decision.
Yes, but the problem isn't necessarily terrible parents; it's ANY serious trauma. Death of a parent, for example; growing up in a war zone or other dangerous area; being molested by someone other than a family member, etc. Even good parents cannot always protect children from pain and trauma.
But yes, emotionally damaged parents are the most common cause of emotional damage to children.
FractalizingIron posted this article as part of a different thread: https://greatawakening.win/p/15K6uw3F3q/brazil-bolsonaro-twitter-musk-my/
Disclaimer: I tend to type as a stream of consciousness, so it may sound like I'm rambling.
I feel like our side doesn't get deep enough into the correlation between bad behaviors as an adult and what the kid experiences growing up.
It was 1985, and Dr. Vincent Felitti was mystified. The physician, chief of Kaiser Permanente’s revolutionary Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, CA, couldn’t figure out why, each year for the last five years, more than half of the people in his obesity clinic dropped out. Although people who wanted to shed as little as 30 pounds could participate, the clinic was designed for people who were 100 to 600 pounds overweight.
That's definitely a problem that requires looking in to.
But the 50-percent dropout rate in the obesity clinic that Felitti started in 1980 was driving him crazy. A cursory review of all the dropouts’ records astonished him — they’d all been losing weight when they left the program, not gaining. That made no sense whatsoever. Why would people who were 300 pounds overweight lose 100 pounds, and then drop out when they were on a roll?
Why ruin a great thing?
“I had assumed that people who were 400, 500, 600 pounds would be getting heavier and heavier year after year. In 2,000 people, I did not see it once,” says Felitti. When they gained weight, it was abrupt and then they stabilized. If they lost weight, they regained all of it or more over a very short time.
Binge eating is considered a symptom of a larger problem.
The turning point in Felitti’s quest came by accident. The physician was running through yet another series of questions with yet another obesity program patient: How much did you weigh when you were born? How much did you weigh when you started first grade? How much did you weigh when you entered high school? How old were you when you became sexually active? How old were you when you married?
Getting really close there, doc.
“I misspoke,” he recalls, probably out of discomfort in asking about when she became sexually active – although physicians are given plenty of training in examining body parts without hesitation, they’re given little support in talking about what patients do with some of those body parts. “Instead of asking, “How old were you when you were first sexually active,” I asked, “How much did you weigh when you were first sexually active?’ The patient, a woman, answered, ‘Forty pounds.’”
There it is. The poor woman was raped by her father when she was 4. 4 fucking years old (she confirms in the next sentence), her life was forever changed for the worse. Maybe this can explain A FEW of the mask Nazis, but that's it. Horrendous childhood trauma, which should be punished by... well, I don't want to get visited by the police.
This is what I mean by stream of consciousness.
It wasn't only rape; physical and emotional abuse were also factors that contributed to people becoming obese in the doctor's findings.
Public health experts, social service workers, educators, therapists and policy makers commonly regard addiction as a problem. Some, however, are beginning to grasp that turning to drugs is a normal response to serious childhood trauma, and that telling people who smoke or overeat or overwork that these are bad for them and that they should stop doesn’t register when those approaches provide a temporary, but gratifying solution.
It's the subconscious mind protecting the conscious mind - do something to keep taking your mind off all the bad shit that happened to you.
I'll use my own childhood trauma to try to open some eyes to the horrendously bad shit that "parents" do to their children, and why some may exhibit not-negative anti-social behavior.
My dad was a narcissist; I've had time to process his death early January 2020. I was extremely emotionally hurt and distraugt the last time I saw him alive, hooked up to life support because a stroke had nuked his brain (wasn't his first one). I was bawling my eyes out in the hospital, and again when the priest was speaking at his memorial service. I was hurt, but I also felt a sense of relief. What relief, you may wonder. My dad was quite sick - contracted e-Coli from eating raw food when on vacation, around 1982-83. Didn't seek treatment immediately, because he's a "real man" (which is why we have such a high death rate). He had it treated again in the mid-90s, I guess because the initial round of antibiotics wasn't enough.
My memory is pretty shitty, but I think it progressed to kidney failure around 2010 or so. I don't remember what lead up to the diagnosis, but the doctors put him on the strongest antibiotics around, which didn't work, and ended up landing him on the transplant list. That evolved into other problems, like needing a heart valve replaced, a PICC line in the arm for IV antibiotics because he had some kind of vegetation in his heart, some kind of skin disease brought on by other medication he was taking, and during his last couple months, he was even mumbling to himself, which he hadn't done before, probably because his various illnesses were breaking his mind.
Because he was a narc, other people had to suffer for it. I remember he was pissy over something, and I think he blamed me for him getting sick. I say 'I think' because saying that should be incomprehensible for a rational, thinking person - who blames someone for getting sick when they weren't even in their life yet (I was born in 1985)? How can any parent say that to their son, blaming them for getting a life-threatening disease? Oh wait, because he was a narcissist, whose mission in life is to ruin life for those around them. Whether it was pulling me out of a baseball game crying my eyes out while he was my "coach," or threatening to kick me out because I was doing poorly in high school, which led to me temporarily enlisting in the Navy Delayed Entry Program, which was itself a very small shit show.
He told me he wished I had talked to him before doing so, so he could have talked me out of it, and he also was worried that I would be peeling potatoes. Wait... what? I scored a 70 on the ASVAB, opening a lot of doors for me. I was absolutely terrible at math, but I somehow scored a quartermaster job, and even a slot in the SEAL Challenge, which was laughable as I was less than 110 lbs and was doing far less physical activity. That guy actually thought that I was just going to peel potatoes for a few years, as if I was some drooling retard that had trouble wiping his own ass.
He also believed I should have easily grasped everything in school the first time around; no, life doesn't work that way, and you're hampered when you're basically forced to stay up late to watchh movies like Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard when you're about 6 years old. This is showing a kid lots of killing, hearing 'fuck' a lot and staying awake late, none of which are good for a developing mind.
He also seemed to be of the opinion of if you're not doing something the way he wants you to, you're wrong and he's going to yell and scream at you, getting red in the face, and causing you to feel like you're going to die.
I should probably get to something like a point so I don't ramble on forever. I realize now that I'm mourning the father I wish I had, and not the man that he was. The best things he did for me was introduce me to Ender's Game and FreeRepublic.com. Other than that, I was never taught anything; I had to ask a classmate when I was a kid how to tie my shoes.
My mother wasn't much better - she was a compulsive gambler, estimated to have pissed away around $500,000 over 20 years. Every time me or my sister interrupted her, she would call us cunts then beat us. She's the reason we lost our house.
I guess my extremely convoluted point I'm trying to make is that for problems we see on the surface, there may be underlying abuse that people are hiding. It's even worse with narcissist parents, who are the people that are always supposed to have your back for as long as you live. When they betray that unspoken trust, what do you have left? You become a husk of a person, desperately seeking something to fill the void. Drugs, alcohol, food, whatever. Too much of it stems from abuse as a kid. I'm lucky in that I'm not addicted to anything; people may say I play video games a little too much, but it's better than going broke buying alcohol.
Oh, and my younger sister picked up their bad traits, she's unfortunately a narcissist as well.
Thanks for posting this, /u/SoMuchWinning45. The ACE study may be the most important lesson about the human condition modern science has to offer; it makes the point that childhood experiences are critically important in life. This large (over 17,000 people in the cohort) study from the 1980s deserves all the attention it can get.
Jesus' teachings about "not offending children" are strongly illuminated in light of the ACE findings.
Here is more from the article you posted -- all emphasis mine:
When the first results of the survey were due to come in, Anda was at home in Atlanta. Late in the evening, he logged into his computer to look at the findings. He was stunned. “I wept,” he says. “I saw how much people had suffered and I wept.”
This was the first time that researchers had looked at the effects of several types of trauma, rather than the consequences of just one. What the data revealed was mind-boggling.
The first shocker: There was a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism.
The second shocker: About two-thirds of the adults in the study had experienced one or more types of adverse childhood experiences. Of those, 87 percent had experienced 2 or more types. This showed that people who had an alcoholic father, for example, were likely to have also experienced physical abuse or verbal abuse. In other words, ACEs usually didn’t happen in isolation.
The third shocker: More adverse childhood experiences resulted in a higher risk of medical, mental and social problems as an adult.
To explain this, Anda and Felitti developed a scoring system for ACEs. Each type of adverse childhood experience counted as one point. If a person had none of the events in her or his background, the ACE score was zero. If someone was verbally abused thousands of times during his or her childhood, but no other types of childhood trauma occurred, this counted as one point in the ACE score. If a person experienced verbal abuse, lived with a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, his ACE score was three.
Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4. Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with four categories of ACEs had a 240 percent greater risk of hepatitis, were 390 percent more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema or chronic bronchitis), and a 240 percent higher risk of a sexually-transmitted disease.
They were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.
People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.
“Some of the increases are enormous and are of a size that you rarely ever see in health studies or epidemiological studies. It changed my thinking dramatically,” says Anda.
Two in nine people had an ACE score of 3 or more, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more. This means that every physician probably sees several high ACE score patients every day, notes Felitti. “Typically, they are the most difficult, though the underpinnings will rarely be recognized.”
The kicker was this: The ACE Study participants were average Americans. Seventy-five percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7.5 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 percent were black. They were middle-class, middle-aged, 36 percent had attended college and 40 percent had college degrees or higher. Since they were members of Kaiser Permanente, they all had jobs and great health care. Their average age was 57.
As Anda has said: “It’s not just ‘them’. It’s us.”
We need to think: why does this person get scared at loud sounds? Why do they get scared whenever anyone yells? The answer might go back to childhood, and terrible parents. It should hit home to our side that not everyone should have kids, and if someone wants to be child-free, they may have a damn good reason for making that decision.
Yes, but the problem isn't necessarily terrible parents; it's ANY serious trauma. Death of a parent, for example; growing up in a war zone or other dangerous area; being molested by someone other than a family member, etc. Even good parents cannot always protect children from pain and trauma.
But yes, emotionally damaged parents are the most common cause of emotional damage to children.
For the sake of this thread, I'd rather stick with horrible family. Shitty parents can ruin a kid for a long, long time.