And clearly some people have it easier than others. Those who have not been kicked in the head do not spend much of their life energy looking over their shoulder, leaving them more free for effective work and healthy relationships.
But pointing to relative privilege, OBVIOUSLY, doesn’t raise anyone. Acts of self hatred and self abnegation do not heal in others patterns of trauma, developmental deficits, or give them access to better opportunities. If they have an educational deficit, for example, as is common in most cities and many rural areas, what helps is education tailored in an intelligent (which is to say SINCERE) way to their actual needs. Charter Schools are useful.
Checking your privilege is only useful for building an unwarranted and factually sanitized sense of self importance. Who needs the germs of facts–which promise only the diseases of confusion and self doubt–when a system has been perfected for perennial and effort free moral superiority?
Enough preaching. This started as a personal note. Preaching, clearly, is one of my best and most cherished defense mechanisms.
You can hate yourself for hating yourself. This was the observation I wanted to make.
From a neurophysiological perspective, trauma acts to create social isolation by taking the relevant social parts of the brain off-line. This gets processed as a sense of banishment and feeling hated. It FEELS like you were cast out for a reason.
But you can then get attacked by your residual social brain, which sides with what feels like the “masses” who cast you out for crimes unspecified. You are first convicted, THEN you put yourself into a perennial trial a la Kafka, who likely suffered from something like this process (Der Prozess).
It is all very interesting, and I do feel interest, curiosity, and relative kindness–of the sort you would afford a stranger–are the path back.