Andy, I actually agree with about 80% of what you say here.
On 1/29/07, Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Maturity comes from a sense of safety in childhood. Children who don't feel
safe (are beaten, abused in any form, including and especially sexually) who are
scared all the time, cannot grow up emotionally. They become frozen at the time
of the trauma, whatever the age. Their bodies grow and their cognitive ability
grows, but emotionally they're stuck at the age of the trauma, even if it's
passive trauma.
This is likely but not inevitable. When my daughter was a toddler, we
were living in New Haven, CT, where my wife was a graduate student at
Yale. An anthropologist as well as a dad, I talked about this issue
with some folks at the Yale Medical School. I was told that doctors
are continually amazed by kids at the tales of the normal
distribution: those who grow up in great environments and turn out
rotten anyway and those who grow up golden in lousy environments.
>
> It also speaks to the fact that we don't have a choice of who we fall in love
with, because when we fall in love we're simply recreating the conflicts we grew
up with. None of us realizes we have a conflict until we hit a crisis point.
That's why crisis is good, because it shakes people out of the doldrums. Al Gore
uses this concept in his movie on global warming when he has the cartoon frog
heating up in a beaker of water. The frog will just sit there until the water is
hot enough that it jumps out.
I haven't yet seen the movie; but the usual image of the frog in the
beaker is that the water slowly gets warmer until the frog, who hasn't
noticed what's going on, is cooked, i.e., dead.
>
> The bottom line is, maturity comes out of a sense of safety in childhood, and
there is precious little safety for children out there. It's bad enough here in
the U.S. Just imagine what it's like for those poor kids in Iraq or Palestine or
South America with their never ending revolutions or in Africa, that was
originally ripped to shreds by Europe. And now we want to traumatize even more
people by invading Iran. We need to be spreading peace, not war, helping
societies improve. Instead our mature war mongering selves only want to beat
everything into submission.
Can't help asking: Is this why you keep pounding away, insisting that
we all accept your view of things?
> Think Mrs. Robinson.
Ah, Mrs. Robinson. Very attractive that one. But among my adolescent
fantasies, Emma Peel remains supreme.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
