I posted my last entry in part because, although I was steeped in only the Christian point of view for most of my life thus far, lately I’ve been willing to give ear to almost anything but what I grew up with. The people who I admire who create content online watch videos they disagree with and react, instead of my system of posting videos that I actually like and using them as a jumping-off point for something I wanted to write about.
However, when I had to tell my doctor and social worker that I had found 45 minutes of content on Total Depravity alone and that now I could explain it better, they didn’t actually seem that interested at all. It was almost like they were saying, “We don’t care about your native culture at all.” It may have been more that I was beating a dead horse. The doctor sent me away with a hand-written note. Unfortunately I couldn’t decipher it because it was in perfect cursive, so he actually re-wrote it in print. So it seemed important.
“We repeat what we do not repair.”
Repetition Compulsion
Discussed in Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”
Also discussed by Erik Erikson and Bessel Van der Kolk
Basis of play therapy for children
*Be aware this concept has been used in appropriately to blame victims. People have perverted the concept and applied it in misguided ways especially towards women. Be careful about any sources of information you use to read about it. Nevertheless it is a very helpful concept to consider.
Handwritten note from doctor
In a discussion on repetition compulsion, my doctor likened my watching R.C. Sproul videos to a war veteran who watched their friend die on the battlefield, and who then spent hours looking at pictures of the late friend, scouring their old facebook page, etc. The veteran would be doing that because, subconsciously and without realizing it, they were hoping that they could change an outcome that they could not change.
Why do I share this with you, the reader who I do not know but who I imagine will stumble upon this humble blog years down the road?
Because it seems like I’m going to have to post less actual videos of viewpoints that traumatized me. In the end, this will probably actually serve to diversify what I do post about. After all, the majority of humans in the world do not ascribe to any form of Christianity, much less to a document written in the year 1689.
So what am I going to post about, now that I’ve spent most of this post on avoiding Ligonier Ministries?
Well, I found this video recently:
I was identified female at birth and have spent my life glad that I was, so leaving a cult and being thrown into a world that has a lot of trans people in it came as a shock. This was the best and also the most concise introduction to gender that I have ever found. What I really took away from the video more than anything was the amount of scanning and science that they had to do before they figured out that “Hey, those trans people’s brains actually do match their gender identities; maybe they haven’t been making this stuff up for laughs.” And how much suffering could have been spared if they had just trusted people’s subjective experiences in the first place?
And how much suffering could I spare myself if I just trusted my own subjective experience sometimes? That I actually am tired when I feel tired, that my emotions are real, that my childhood hurt, etc?
I would elaborate more but apparently nobody actually knows what the doctor’s order says about when I can use the unit’s iPad, so they’re having me turn it in now.
Reference
Forrest Valkai. (2021, January 21). Sex and Sensibility [YouTube video]. Retrieved September 26, 2021 from https://youtu.be/szf4hzQ5ztg
