cog dis

I think a lot of the dilemmas I find myself caught in come from the cognitive dissonance between what people say and what they do.

All these years of reading shrink books and self-help crap and thinking that the ideas proposed therein were anything but fantasy and idealism; all these years of thinking that what people said they believed had anything to do with what they were actually doing.

I realize I'm a little old to be just picking up on all this (as if I only just now realized there's no such thing as the tooth fairy!)

I was reading something somewhere that seemed to explain it: Some kids, I think the writer referred to them as those with a more difficult temperament (meaning, less obedient and compliant) tend to stand up to their parents more, question them more, and thus grow up to have a clearer sense of their own needs while simultaneously being less willing to knuckle under to the expectations of others. In other words, they tend to develop fairly clear boundaries by 'pushing back' against their parents.

Whereas others of us, those of an 'easier' temperament (read: More gullible, more compliant, more eager to please), tended to knuckle under to the parents' whims and grow up the be the 'victims' in any one-down situation. Which, over the long run leads to a lot of frustration, anger and resentment at always trying to be 'good' while everyone around you is getting away with murder, sometimes literally.