Note to Self: "That's just how I was raised"
People say that using the justification, "That's just how I was raised" is just about the lamest excuse for limited, stunted, immoral, or prejudiced thinking ever, because it indicates a complete failure to revisit one's way of life since the development of the capacity to do so.
The problem is that people only seem to apply this to things they were consciously told.
If you develop an attachment style or soak up any other behavior pattern as a toddler or older child who has not yet developed the capacity to move beyond it to a healthier, more consistently relevant way of functioning, and fail to do anything about this as an adult, you are saying about your entire unconscious way of behaving, "That's just how I was raised." And it's still just as lame.
If something you picked up as a child causes you to act like an asshole, you have a responsibility as an adult to delve into it, revisit it, and correct or heal it.
Personally I get rather tired of watching people who lie, cheat, avoid conflict, backstab, abuse and exploit other people getting all irate about people who perpetrate these awful tragedies in the news. Face it: they're assholes because they did not take the aforementioned responsibility. In short, they're assholes for the same reason you are.
If the whole point is to say, "I'm less of an asshole than that person," well hopefully it's a worthy goal in the context it's in--but I doubt it.
A friend of mine recently said about people with an ongoing behavior problem, "They're either idiots or assholes. They're idiots if they still can't see the pattern in their behavior, or they're assholes if they see it and how it affects the people in their lives but don't care about that enough to change it."
The problem is that people only seem to apply this to things they were consciously told.
If you develop an attachment style or soak up any other behavior pattern as a toddler or older child who has not yet developed the capacity to move beyond it to a healthier, more consistently relevant way of functioning, and fail to do anything about this as an adult, you are saying about your entire unconscious way of behaving, "That's just how I was raised." And it's still just as lame.
If something you picked up as a child causes you to act like an asshole, you have a responsibility as an adult to delve into it, revisit it, and correct or heal it.
Personally I get rather tired of watching people who lie, cheat, avoid conflict, backstab, abuse and exploit other people getting all irate about people who perpetrate these awful tragedies in the news. Face it: they're assholes because they did not take the aforementioned responsibility. In short, they're assholes for the same reason you are.
If the whole point is to say, "I'm less of an asshole than that person," well hopefully it's a worthy goal in the context it's in--but I doubt it.
A friend of mine recently said about people with an ongoing behavior problem, "They're either idiots or assholes. They're idiots if they still can't see the pattern in their behavior, or they're assholes if they see it and how it affects the people in their lives but don't care about that enough to change it."