Alicorn is correct that this advice somewhat misses what my problem is about, but thanks for your advice.
I don’t have the psychological make up to be a social worker, but I do what I can to stop child abuse, from being vigilant to encouraging attitudes and behaviors that I think will help curb and prevent it.
I think my problem might be an inability to compartmentalize at times about some things. On the one hand, you do want to feel and empathize with your neighbor about their troubles, but you can’t react to every news article as though it happened to someone you know.
Most of the time, I suppose I do compartmentalize successfully, and I guess I would have to admit in these cases I’m willingly refusing to think about something as real. Perhaps I am in a certain spot in my life, as a young mother, where ‘child’ is such a strong and immediate symbol in my brain that I cannot shuttle such symbols in a sentence to their proper desensitized compartment.
If you think about it, you’ll realize that most pieces of emotional information we come in contact with must be treated as not-real … this isn’t exactly escapism though.
So I think I’ve answered my own question. I can try harder to compartmentalize (though it certainly does rub against some grain to deliberately distract myself from empathizing with a child—one solution is to just imagine that child as a grown adult, which he indubitably is by now ) and continue to avoid such triggers to the extent that I can.
Apologies for the self-help thread, it was ill-considered. Maybe somehow it ties into the theme of the post, if I could be so lucky.
… On second thought (I’m adding this sentence a few minutes later), I do ‘lack the mental/emotional tools for processing references to child abuse in a constructive way’ as Mass Driver wrote, and learning how to build tool-kits to fix problems is relevant to this blog.
Alicorn is correct that this advice somewhat misses what my problem is about, but thanks for your advice.
I don’t have the psychological make up to be a social worker, but I do what I can to stop child abuse, from being vigilant to encouraging attitudes and behaviors that I think will help curb and prevent it.
I think my problem might be an inability to compartmentalize at times about some things. On the one hand, you do want to feel and empathize with your neighbor about their troubles, but you can’t react to every news article as though it happened to someone you know.
Most of the time, I suppose I do compartmentalize successfully, and I guess I would have to admit in these cases I’m willingly refusing to think about something as real. Perhaps I am in a certain spot in my life, as a young mother, where ‘child’ is such a strong and immediate symbol in my brain that I cannot shuttle such symbols in a sentence to their proper desensitized compartment.
If you think about it, you’ll realize that most pieces of emotional information we come in contact with must be treated as not-real … this isn’t exactly escapism though.
So I think I’ve answered my own question. I can try harder to compartmentalize (though it certainly does rub against some grain to deliberately distract myself from empathizing with a child—one solution is to just imagine that child as a grown adult, which he indubitably is by now ) and continue to avoid such triggers to the extent that I can.
Apologies for the self-help thread, it was ill-considered. Maybe somehow it ties into the theme of the post, if I could be so lucky.
… On second thought (I’m adding this sentence a few minutes later), I do ‘lack the mental/emotional tools for processing references to child abuse in a constructive way’ as Mass Driver wrote, and learning how to build tool-kits to fix problems is relevant to this blog.
My reply was more ill considered, I will restrain myself in the future if I feel tempted to say anything like this.