one of my fav anecdotes: a old retiring teacher was asked, what have you noticed over the decades? She said, “in all decades, kids assume their technology was always around, and kids also assume they are the first people in history to experience love, heartbreak, betrayal, grief”
People may want to roll their eyes at this, but as both a parent and child therapist, I can tell you that it’s quite true.
Education for the K-12 set is, right now, despite regional differences or differences between public or private or whatever, a truly whole different world than what I think the typical gen X and millennial mind (let alone anyone older) can fully grasp. I think it’s this lack of understanding and empathy of the situation, and instead the rather narcissistic rage or avoidance or denial of it all, that is a not an insignificant part of the general problem of why students are arriving to college already so disillusioned, jaded, and checked out.
And it’s our job to understand this and try to change things in the K-12 experience, not theirs.
Point: you can’t trust anyone.
Counterpoint: well, you can’t trust SOME people, but most people are people who you can trust enough.
Point: but still, SOME people you can’t trust at all. This may be a small minority of people. Percentage-wise, what do you think that would be?
Counterpoint: probably no more than 10% of people, really, if I were to guess.
Point: OK, but that’s … still millions of people. Millions of people. Who you should not trust at all, whatsoever.
Counterpoint: … yeah.
fin
People who pour themselves into intellectual work often have a spouse that takes care of their daily tasks and well being to an absurd infantilizing degree. As they say, "Mother is the necessity of invention."
…a talkative analyst may evoke an “intruded upon” transference, while a quiet analyst may evoke the patient’s childhood experience of neglect.
— Stephen Seligman
Paying Attention and Feeling Puzzled: The Analytic Mindset as an Agent of Therapeutic Change