On a less entertaining note, three out of four student awardees sitting at my table had to take anti-anxiety meds to be able to go on stage to receive their awards. They weren’t expected to say anything, only walk across the stage and receive their certificates.
At the same time, my Ukrainian exchange students of the same age who spent the last three years hiding in bomb shelters don’t have anything remotely similar to these issues.
And I know exactly why. The Ukrainian students were never told that the option to freak out over little daily things to the point of needing to be medicated exists. The American students, though, were given this as the primary behavior model. These are all young women. It’s a highly impressionable cohort. If they grow up surrounded by endless manifestations of performative frailty, they accept it as a norm. These are patterns of behavior they perceive as normal.
What’s worse, young men are becoming increasingly coopted into this model of behavior as well. It starts as performative but after a while it becomes real. That’s how we end up with people who grew up in complete safety and comfort yet exhibit the symptoms of a very battered psyche.
This is the opposite of the “talking cure.” People talk themselves into having psychological dysfunction. The anxiety and the other symptoms they exhibit are completely real and very painful. But they are all caused by how we all collectively narrate to ourselves our encounters will small issues of daily life. We value emotional dysregulation so it proliferates. We don’t value resilience, so it fades.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment