Oh crumbs CZ....this has all got my thinking on ultra-high-thought-density mode. I will try not to go on and on and on like the Duracell Bunny.
Firstly your blog....what an absolute delight to read! Your instinctive acceptance of individuality is just perfect. And in your acceptance of your nephew for who he is...rather than trying to make him conform to what "society" dictates he must be, you created an environment for your wonderful and unique nephew to flourish and become all that he is in total fullness. You have given him the love and support to develop as he should. And embracing the child they are...and adult they become should be every parents primary aim.
Because little humans are all so different. Right from birth in my opinion. I was very aware of it in my daughters. One needed so much more comforting than the other from the word go. I had mastered one baby....when the second one came along...in my stupidity, I thought I knew all about babies and how to look after them, to sooth and comfort them. Wrong. My second daughter responded totally differently to life...and I felt very quickly as though I was having to learn all over again.
So I totally agree that in all of us there is at the very least an element of genetic predisposition to certain character traits. I suspect that actually a great deal of "what we are" is down to our predetermined nature. Of course the influence of our environment must mould our personalities from the very beginnings of consciousness. And studies of identical twins would illustrate that.
So now to thinking about the way children are parented....the nature of the
parents personality is going to have a HUGE influence over parenting style. (This is a subject very close to my heart....since my own parenting style was viciously attacked and degraded by my NH and his NFOO) A child who is naturally anxious, for example, in the parenting hands of someone with no empathy or time for anxiousness, will not become comfortable with themselves and have to deal with their feelings alone. An autistic child ( I also have an autistic nephew..now 12 years old) whose ways are not acknowledged will likely become a fairly permanent inhabitant of Boo`ya moon. (What a lovely gentle description of his experience)
And now thinking of Nparents. Aaaaaargh! yuck yuck yuck. I have to say that even with cast iron solid non-N genetics, the experience of Nparents and their complete lack of empathy and ability to consider the well-being of anything that is not them is going to be a most profoundly difficult experience. If parenting should create an environment for an individual to be unconditionally loved and accepted...this is what Ns try their darndest to NOT do.
My NH and his NFOO told me continually in no uncertain terms what a useless parent I was because, in their view, I lacked "discipline". Discipline to them means that when a tiny baby cries, you leave it to sort itself out. You are teaching it to be self-disciplined and quit bugging you. Discipline means that when the Ngranny makes a fish soup so revolting and teaming with slimy sea life that it made ME want to run from the room screaming....the 5 and 6 year old cousins will be fed same from a spoon by the enabling wives (NOT ME!!!!) until they are physically sick....as apparently discipline just means "doing as I say whether it is completely insensitive or not....I will impose my will"
Well, I would have no part of that. If my daughter cried I held and comforted her. If she didn`t want to play with the NFOO cousins she was welcome to cower on my knee. And I was so horribly victimised as a result. I was creating "issues" in my daughter by "wrapping her in cotton wool". It was early days in the NFOO for me back then....and I tried to point out that in fact
they were creating issues by not letting her be herself. Oooops! A big mistake.
So taking into account the enormous differences in parenting styles generally...even before you add the terrible Nparents into the mix....it stands to reason that the development of psychological disorders has its roots in a very complex set of criteria. Nature and nurture combining in any number of different blends....producing infinite outcomes as each set of genetics and circumstances interact over the course of a lifetime. and each outcome is probably unique.
Which (sorry CZ...I am still going...!!!
) brings me to another point that has been crystallising in my mind of late. The whole classification of NPD and other disorders bothers me. Seems to me (understandably) that there is an emphasis on putting disordered people into boxes and giving them labels because it is so nice to give worrying things a name. Comforting to pretend that the label itself is somehow a beginning of a solution. But the disorders are wholly categorised by their SYMPTOMS. An N will present differently to a B. We can observe their behaviour and say "Yes....he is an N because he does such and such"...and to a certain extent there are explanations of why they do such and such.
But for me....I am wondering if it might not be better to think about what is happening in the person to cause the symptoms. What I am wondering is if the same problems are the root cause of very different symptoms in very differnet people. That a certain problem in psychology....or even in the brain might present as an N in one individual...and a B in another for example. Of course I am not limiting this idea to Ns and Bs....but perhaps they are a good example. Especially because there is a greater predominance of female Bs and male Ns....which might suggest that individuals are expressing the same set of brain functioning issues differently. Add to this the complex nature of brain functioning (as demonstrated very well by the complex subject of neurotransmitter biochemistry as discussed in the lecture concerning depression by Robert Sapolsky you posted the other day)....and one could easily see how one specific innate disfunction...or set of dysfunctions of the brain due to genetics could lead to multiple outcomes in behaviour as individuals learn to deal with the different environments they inhabit.
I am not saying this very well. And I suspect that psychologists are way ahead of me here anyhow. I guess I am wondering if there is not a little too much emphasis at looking at the multitudinous different types and subtypes of
behaviours and how different they are, rather than understanding the commonality of what has gone on in their heads to cause the behaviours.
Having seen how commonly some Ns behave in minute detail in some ways would suggest to me that there is a fundamental commonality to their brain function that can not be explained by environment. If an NH in the UK is saying the same things in the same damned words as his counterparts in the US and Australia and everywhere on the planet....it could originate from the same psychological flaw or brain disfunction. For example..NS common strange use of language is significant to me in suggesting an actual structural brain issue.
Aaaaaarghhh...see what happens when I read too much. Hush now JW....and go and wash the dishes!!!
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