r/learners_cabin

A few weeks ago I read, 'Why has nobody told me this before?' ' by Julie Smith. And after reading that, I felt as if I was able to understand and express myself better. And so searching for similar books, i was recommended 'What happened to you?' by Dr. Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey, which, although i did not find super similar, but by the end of it, I understood and realized a couple of things that make them alike, and most importantly, the lesson that, in trying to make situations better, we are likely sabotaging ourselves and factually making the situation worse.  

I've recently been reading a lot, as I'm trying to get a better understanding of the best books on trauma and psychology, since in my view there is considerably more to be learned from them for both the benefit of ourselves and for the people we engage with and care about. after reading this book, I went ahead and listened to a thorough examination of this book on Dialogue: Conversations on Books, and by hearing the main points explained in the context of ordinary situations, it made the ideas more real and lively for me. 

Here is what i learned:

- The title of the book, 'What happened to you?', is the concise gist of the entire book. The book hinges on one simple change in our phrasing: instead of asking, "What is wrong with you?" the book instructs us to ask "What happened to you?" when i first read about this spin in phrasing, i thought the book had no substance. But after thinking to myself, before any further reading, I came to realize that in phrasing lies half our problems. If you yourself notice, the initial question, 'What's wrong with you?' seems to put the entire blame on the person themselves, on their identity, on the kind of decision they make, and on their weaknesses. It makes the person totally disconnect from the world and forces the inside of their own head to find the flaw. The second question, by contrast, places the issue in their past, in their experiences, in their surroundings, in what was done to them or withheld from them. It doesn't just force you into your head but helps you realte your identity with the outside context that shaped it. The authors's view is that almost every behaviour we pathologize or attribute to other people's identity, and even to ourselves, becomes fully understandable only when we know what sort of experiences the person had to live through and what they have undergone. Your behavior, 'why you react this way,' is not what is to be resolved, but rather what got you to be this way and drives you to act out in certain ways, is the issue that is to be dealt with. and you can't deal with a response by attacking it.

- The trauma is not defined by the event that causes it. If you tell someone that I behave in this eccentric way because this thing happened to me in the past, it will still not explain why you behave the way you do, because all you have managed to say is that event X happened and I started behaving this way. This is not an explanation. It was this point that had the greatest impact on me. the author gives a clear clinical explanation of what a trauma is: trauma has nothing to do with how severe the event looks from the outside, but everything to do with how overwhelming it was for the particular nervous system that went through it at the particular stage of development that system was at. Two children can go through the same event, and yet one will recover soon while the other can potentially carry it in their adult lives. Why do you think this is? The only reasonable explanation has to be that somehow the context played a role, and one child had more complicated context, and the child was not able to adjust to the traumatic event fully in that context. The author says that one child experiences more stress and pain from the same event than another child does is not because one is weaker, but because their nervous systems were in different states and had different resources available at the time. Therefore, dismissing a person's experience on the grounds that "it wasn't that bad" is not only unkind but also neurologically illiterate.

- The author gives some neuro-functional explanation of why we see discrepancy between people even if they experience the same event. She says that the brain grows in a bottom-up manner, and trauma interferes with this process at the stage at which it happens. meaning that the brain's lower areas that control heart rate, breathing, and the stress response are all more primary and are developed first, providing the basis for all the higher functions. If a child suffers from ongoing stress or trauma during early life, these lower areas end up being set to expect threats. They then become overactive, highly alert, and easily disrupted. The issue is that this adjustment remains in place even after the threat has gone away and continues into situations where it is no longer required. And it seems to be the reason why people who have experienced trauma may seem irrational, overreactive, or haphazard in circumstances that do not appear threatening to other people. Their nervous system is reacting to a simple reality wihle it is in it’s most safeguard settings.

- The most insightful lesson of the book is that healing, or dialing back of the nervous system, according to the author, is not a matter of thinking. It is relational and rhythmic and healing, just like the reason behind the setting in of trauma, also goes from the bottom up. The author makes it clear you can't get someone to give up their trauma, for the simple reason that you cannot reason with your nervous system if its settings have been set to a certain environment or condition, like a state of threat. What actually leads to healing in the lower brain is- repeated, rhythmic, and relational experience. This is the human like point in the point because it means that healing will include things like movement, music, breathing, safe touch, and most importantly a consistent connection with another person who is themselves regulated. Although therapy can be of some use, it is most effective after the nervous system has first been calmed down by means that are more fundamental. Realising this alters the way in which we can support someone who is having difficulties since it is less a question of finding the right words and more a matter of being a steady and regulated presence.

The main point of the book is surprisingly simple in that whenever you stop asking what is wrong with someone and begin to ask what happened to them, almost every aspect of the way you respond to them changes, and that very change enables healing.

Learners' Cabin is on Substack, where we have content like this and book reviews. Subscribe/follow is always free.

Michael Easter, in his book 'Scarcity Brain,' explains that the addictive nature of today's apps and games, be it endless scrolling or gacha elements in games, is not simply due to people having weak willpower but rather because it is the result of deliberate design. To support this argument, he refers to the "scarcity loop," which, according to him, is an old survival mechanism consisting of three constituent parts: a desirable opportunity, an uncertain reward, and the possibility of quickly repeating the action. He believes that this loop, which once helped humans to locate food in the primitive times more efficiently, has been put to new use in the present age, either intentionally or not, by modern technology in order to keep people engaged.

A study published in the journal PLOS ONE has directly examined this particular mechanism of 'scarcity loop,' except that it was done not in an app, but in the best version of the loop that we have in reality: gambling.

Study Overview:

Zendle and Cairns (2018) carried out a survey of 7,422 gamers regarding the amount they spent on loot boxes, these being undisclosed and randomized, real-money purchases in video games where players do not know what they are getting until after they have paid and bought it. The researchers recorded how much money each person spent on loot boxes and then compared this data with a standard clinical measure of problem gambling symptoms.

Results:

The greater the amount of money a person spent on loot boxes, the more severe their problem-gambling symptoms tended to be.

The relationship was found to be particularly stronger in the case of loot box purchases than it was with other ordinary in-game purchases like in-game currency, since in the latter the customer knows precisely what they are paying for.

The factor that differed between the two was the element of randomness and not the amount of money spent, beacuse other than the element of an undisclosed or an unpredicatble item of purchase, all other mechanisms were more or less the same. Purchases that were predictable were linked much less to problem gambling than were those that were unpredictable.

The most important point in relation to the author's case is that the study identified unpredictability as the active mechanism among the scarcity loop's three components. In the experiment there were two purchases, the same game, the same amount of money, and the same player, the only variation being whether the reward was known beforehand or remained a matter of chance. It was this single difference that correlated with gambling-level compulsive behaviour.

How this supports the book's claim:

The author claims that this kind of loop is not just a feature of casinos but has in fact been subtly integrated into everyday technology, such as social media feeds and in-game loot boxes, since unpredictability is the factor that keeps the brain engaged long after even when the activity itself has stopped being enjoyable, because there remains the allusion of something better just around the corner or after a scroll. The study more or less makes it concrete, which is the evidence that this is not just a metaphor. The same psychological principle that underlies slot machines, the element of reward uncertainty, which thereby acts as the motivation to keep going, is clearly present in video games, which most people would not regard as gambling (unless it is explicitly marketed as one), and it causes symptoms similar to those seen in gambling among the people who are most exposed to it. It is precisely this point that makes the author's notion of "scarcity loop" more than an analogy and into a verifiable mechanism falsifiable by a simple test: whenever the element of unpredictability of the reward is found, a tendency towards compulsive behaviour tends to appear.

You can read the research for yourself (Source): Zendle, D., & Cairns, P. (2018). "Video game loot boxes are linked to problem gambling: Results of a large-scale survey." PLOS ONE, 13(11), e0206767.

So at this stage in my life, where many of my friends are starting to have children of their own, I have been considering the topic of parenthood for the past few months. Of course, this isn't really what the book is about, instead, the book is concerned with parenting in a forward-looking way. The book deals with identifying and recognizing the mistakes made and tendencies to repeat them. It deals with the experience of growing up and realising that some of what had seemed normal during your childhood was in fact a kind of emotional neglect that you didn't realize because then it had no name and that was how it was supposed to be.

I've been reading a lot lately, working through books on parenting and behavirol psychology since I think there's considerably more to learn from them than most people acknowledge. Recently I listened to a detailed discussion of 'Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents' by Lindsay Gibson on Dialogue: Conversations on Books, and hearing its key insights broken down in relation to everyday situations made a lot of things suddenly legible that had previously went unnoticed.

Here's what I got out of it:

-The first and the central point that the author makes is that, just beacuse a parent is emotionally immature (they don't know how to manage and treat their own emotions), it does not follow that they are a bad parent. Because such parents generally offer the basic material needs like food, shelter, and education, even though they are unavailable at the emotional level or in understanding. At the societal level, nobody would call such a parent lacking in any important respect for the child. The author's claim is that a child can grow up in a household that is functionally normal and yet still suffer emotional loneliness, the kind of isolation that results from never really feeling seen or understood by the person who should have known you best. This book is a classic because it makes the case of the importance of recognition of the 'emotional needs' of a child, on par with the material one.

- The author specifies four kinds of emotionally immature parents, with the intention to enable recognition of the type that you might have already encountered in your childhood and also to make you aware of your own tendencies. first there is "The emotional parent" who is erratic/unpredictable, intense at one moment and withdrawn the next. there is "the driven parent" who is concerned with achievement and performance and relates to the child in terms of results rather than feelings, this type is usually imposing something that they themsleves had lacked and now wants to achieve through thier kids. third is "the passive parent" who completely avoids conflict, leaving the child to deal with difficulties on their own without any support, this kind is mistaken in their motto of 'nature over nurture'. the fourth kind is "the rejecting parent," who meet their child with indifference and a sense of irritation whenever the child causes somethings or gets into a situation that breaks the mundane cycle. The common feature of these four types is that they all relate to their child in terms of a role or a function rather than as a person. According to the author, a child who is never seen as an individual, with their own set of beliefs and relations, ends up with a certain kind of confusion regarding who they really are.

- The author distinguishes between the two coping mechanisms that children of emotionally immature parents end up using based on their personality. There are internalizers and externalizers. Internalizers take the confusion inside themselves, they become very sensitive to the emotions of others, they are extremely responsible and take accountability for their actions even when they have no consequential part in the action. Internalizers suffer from constant self-doubt, believing that whatever goes wrong has to trace back to themselves and somehow must be their fault. Externalizers, on the other hand, direct the confusion outwards. They look for stimulation and distraction that can let them avoid reflecting on themselves and repeat their parents' emotional patterns in their own relationships without realising it, because they have lived unreflectively, they have no sense of what other ways there are to go through life. The author (funnily) anticipates that since internalizers are the ones who look for explanations, most people who read this book will be able to see themselves in the first group, and they are the targeted audience.

- The idea that is most useful in practical terms is what the authors refer to as "the healing fantasy." this is the unconscious belief, which one carries into adulthood, that if only you find: the right words, the right moment, or the right way of framing things, the parent will concede and give them what they needed when they were a child. Because of this fantasy, people keep trying to bridge the relationships where they cannot get what they are looking for, whether it be with the parent or with people who occupy similar place or role to them. according to the author, the healing fantasy is not a hope but a trap, it is only by recognising this fact that one can begin to move on rather than keeping on seeking the kind of approval that was never going to be given.

The main idea of the book is not that your parents were villains or that your childhood had been a experiment gone wrong, but that emotional neglect leaves behind a certain kind of imprint, a subtle one, which is difficult to articulate and often mistaken for a personal defect. the first step in avoiding passing this self-blame on or in not repeating it is to understand its origins. It seems like useful knowledge for anyone who is seriously considering what kind of parent they would like to be.

Learners' Cabin is on Substack, where we have content like this and book reviews. Subscribe/follow always free.