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]Sounds like you’ve had some interactions with rather rude and insensitive people and you are generalizing it to others.  No, I wouldn’t say “many people from loving, functional families” (your words) behave the way you are describing.  If you are socializing with people that use “cutting” words towards others, find a better group of friends! [/quote]

Sometimes it comes out of nowhere. I had a friend for several years who I thought of as being a kind person. But once I was having dinner with her the week after a school shooting, and we were talking about what could possibly be done to prevent these shootings. And she said, "You know we used to lock up people with mental problems, we should do that again."

The thing was, I'd mentioned to her in the past that there is serious mental illness in my family (my mom is bipolar, my brother attempted suicide when I was in HS). I'm sure she didn't think of me as one of "those" people because I'm very mentally healthy now. But I had serious issues in my 20s due to these problems, had dealt with depression and anxiety, etc. She probably didn't realize that she was advocating for a policy that would have taken my rights away (and my mom's, and my brother's) because of a mental health diagnosis. And it's not even clear that mental health issues like depression or bipolar are the cause of those shootings -- mentally ill people are MUCH more likely to be harmed, or to harm themselves, than to harm others, statistically. But she just tossed this off like "oh the problem is mentally ill people and if we just lock them up, we'll solve it." It was so callous and ignorant.

You encounter attitudes like this a lot. Then irony here: years later this same friend was dealing with PPD and came to me to talk about it specifically because she knew I had experience and a lot of empathy dealing with mental health issues. It was interesting to me that when she was struggling, she viewed my background as beneficial to her, specifically. But when she wasn't, she viewed people like me and my family as "the problem." I've thought about that a lot in recent years.[/quote]

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