Reply to If you come from a FUNCTIONAL family, why resent/dislike people from dysfunctional families?

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Reply to "If you come from a FUNCTIONAL family, why resent/dislike people from dysfunctional families?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Because I realize that there are at least two sides to every story and I only know your side.  I can't really tell if you are the victim or the source of the dysfunction.
Because I am familiar enough with mental health issues that I know they can cloud your perceptions.[/quote]

But it's not your job to assess whether or not someone else is "a victim". And with family dysfunction, often everyone is the source of the dysfunction and in a way it's no one's fault, really. Like in my family, my parents were abusive and neglectful. They are in that way the "source" of my difficulties. But I can also recognize that their behaviors were also caused by being raised by abusive, neglectful parents. And I can also see how as a teenager and young adult, I had a ton of dysfunctional behaviors that negatively impacted other people. In this scenario, everyone is kind of a victim, because you can't choose your parents and if you have don't get what you need emotionally as a young child, it's unsurprising if you don't know how to act. On the other hand, every adult is also responsible for their own behavior and is responsible for changing that behavior if it is harming others.

You are viewing this from a black and white perspective (black and white thinking is a sign of poor mental health) and assigning roles like "victim" and "dysfunctional" to situations that are much more fluid and nuanced. And I have a hard time understanding why someone from a healthy family and childhood would fall into what to me are obvious traps -- thinking this way will actually cause YOU more strife in life than if you practice empathy and also understand that other people's struggles are not yours to judge or assess.

Like you are not describing a functional approach to dealing with someone who is struggling.[/quote]

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