Perspective; A word with many meanings, depending on who’s speaking it. Namely, the bane of, “that’s just ONE perspective.”

Let’s talk about the real definition of the word, how it pertains to post-traumatic stress development, where attention vs. willful ignorance comes into play, and how no one can ever have your irreplicable perspective. Trust your guts, Fuckers. You know where you’ve been. 

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Transcript / Blog Version:

So, trauma warriors, welcome back! My therapist wanted me to say that – seems pretty lame to me. I prefer “Motherfucker” for empowerment, I don’t know about you. But I hope you’ve been considering the phases of stabilization, and processing in your own experience. And maybe even finding some guidance for bringing yourself back to earth, via those broad conceptual phases of recovery. If not, meh… not sure you want to be on earth right now, anyways.

Just kidding. Sorry for the repeated anti-fascist perspective. I realize not everyone sees things the way a lifetime of living through punk rock has formulated my outlook and life narratives.

And that’s what we’re here to talk about today. Perspective. How our experiences and life educations stack up to create everything that we know about the world. How we interpret it, react to it, and foresee it panning out (or, more likely, not panning out at all) in the future.

If you’re not new to the trauma game, I’d bet that you’ve collected a bit of a hatred for the word “perspective.” A disdain, at the very least. Because it’s one of those words that has acquired a dual-meaning in a lot of prior traumatic environments and interactions. Read, being told: “That’s just YOUR perspective.” regarding anything that someone else doesn’t agree with or want to pay attention to.

Meanwhile, the word carries another meaning when they try to lure you into accepting theirs. This is THEIR perspective, and clearly it is the truth. While yours is JUST a perspective, and it amounts to victimizing lies.

Amiright? Or is it just my family and relationship history?

Well, let’s get into it today – what does the word ACTUALLY mean, if we were to all agree upon one definition that isn’t plagued by someone else’s ideas of their infallible observation skills and ability for omnipotent understanding?

Well. Perspective, by definition, is a collection of your perceptions, strung together to make something meaningful out of the individual events. You take your perceptions, formulate words that tie them all together, and you have a perspective.

Perceptions, being what you’ve noticed about your world. Your sensory events. Your experiences that you’ve paid some attention to, are your perceptions. If you don’t pay any attention to them, you don’t perceive them. Your system doesn’t absorb the stimulation. This becomes important in a few minutes.

But, from your perceptions – which I like to visualize as a mess of brain cells, all containing individual visual, audio, and tactile events – your brain draws up its overarching perspective. I like to visualize this as a neat bridge going over the top of the disorganized neurons down below. The “bypass” to get the “jist” of the story, without having to plunge into the entire tale.. Which would be overwhelming to do every single time you need to remember that your perspective is “I wear shoes every day,” for instance. You don’t need to revisit individual perceptions of shoelace interactions from the past… you just need to put on your shoes.

So perspectives are the meaning, the instructions, or, the story that you draft from individual perceptions…. But now consider that you do it across a lifetime.

Our thoughts create our early realities in our brains, our brains use those thoughts to create our physical realities in the world, and those material factors feedback to reinforce the drafted realities in our brains. Sealing them in as “forever knowledge.”

In this way, perspective creates everything. Our lives are simply based on interpretations of our lives. And those continue deepening, as we validate our prior interpretations with new events that are verified somehow in practice. Usually, by keeping you alive. That’s enough for your brain to decide “yep, we got it right the first time around” and continue building on that initial perspective thread.

Meaning, your perspectives define your next set of perspectives.

Because our perspectives pave the ground for our next set of perspectives. We don’t, for instance, have a perspective that we are forgettable to our parents… and then drop that view entirely when a new event takes place. It will, instead, be framed by our prior perspective that abandonment is possible. “Oh, I’m not forgettable TODAY, when I do X, Y, and Z correctly.”

Know what I’m sayin?

Our perspectives define our perceptions – what we will and won’t notice or pay attention to – and they also corrupt our perceptions, by forcing those new sensory events to fall into line with our prior views.

THEN, our views build on top of each other, by limiting our access to other, alternative, events and perceptions. Which continue to keep us trapped in and reliving our original narratives.

Across a lifetime.

So let’s consider that point again now. Across a lifetime. When we’re talking about perspective and perception, this means very different things, depending on if you’re an adult or a child. A perceptual event might be a “splash in the ocean” for an adult, but it’s a tsunami in a dixie cup for kids. Those experiences are going to be weighted and framed very differently, dependent on the past volume of similar perceptions and related perspectives.

Perspective also means very different things for ALL of us, even within the same age group, because all of our past perceptions cannot possibly be the exact same. So, neither can the perspectives that we’ve already been creating from those experiences.

The stories we form to keep chugging along – our understanding of the world – can be similar within one household, for example… but never precisely the same.

How YOU were treated is different than how your siblings were treated, for example. By the family, peers, and broader society. And those differences only grow with increasing discrepancies between the perceptions and perspectives in question.

No one else can ever, ever, have exactly the same perspective. Probably even if you were conjoined twins, there would be differences in what was perceived, paid attention to, and the message that was derived from it all, across an entire existence.

Which is to say… NO, your parents aren’t going to “get it” when you talk about your early life… because for them it wasn’t early life. They had a buttload of past experiences under their belts already, for one. Those could have created counter-perspectives to protect against the one you accidentally wound up with, having seen and known very little. With a mostly-empty brain, each event is a much bigger deal than when you have a stack of alternative experiences to compare them to.

And they also, most likely, weren’t paying as much attention to the things in question as you were. Maybe that time you were forgotten at school pickup was a hugely impactful experience for you – you spent a lot of time processing it afterwards. But it was just a ping in the oopsy-bucket for them, while they were far more focused on whatever it was that made them forget about you. They didn’t give it much thought afterwards and it seemed like a non-event to them.

But it wasn’t… to you. From your perspective.

This attentional trap is critical, because where we put our focus? Creates our inner worlds. And our inner worlds go on to create our outer worlds – our lives.

So we learned through the literature, for instance, that obsession – or, unwavering attention – has a lot to do with our mental ailments. Obsession with any time orientation or event distorts our perception of reality. Similarly, ignorance of time or events will also distort what we believe to be true.

Obsession with the past creates depression. Obsession with the future creates anxiety. Obsession with the present moment VERSUS the never-coming future creates ADHD.

Obsession with a past traumatic event? Creates PTSD.

Obsession with protecting oneself against the painful perspectives of others? Creates gaslighters.

But… besides the ways that our past experiences are often dismissed and corrupted by others – how is this perspective talk all trauma-relevant in our broader conversation?

Well, first of all, trauma is transmissible. Our perceptions of our parents’ behaviors will inform our perspectives. And our perspectives are the root of post-traumatic stress. So, parents with their own traumatic pasts? Accidentally pass along similarly traumatized viewpoints, whether or not those original traumas were ever discussed, through their behaviors and narratives. We TAKE ON their perspectives, which form our later perceptions and life stories.

Secondly, PTSD, as we keep saying… is based in our own cognitions. We perceive fear and that fucks with our brains. But it’s the perspective we form after a shit event that becomes a torture device in our own brains, not so much the traumatic event, the perception, itself.

We gather up all the information we can – we probably replay that memory in our heads so we can reaaaaalllly examine it… and then we ruminate on it, trying to stitch together a story between what we previously knew to be true and this unexpected event that falls outside our prior perspective of reality… to create a whole new perspective of how this thing possibly happened.

And that’s where our fear and shame comes from. The PTSD cruxes that hold us in place, until we re-examine those views and form better ones that allow us to move forward.

The final big t-word point to hammer in, is the fact of perspectives dominating other perspectives. When you grow up in a family system of any sort, you’re surrounded by an echo chamber. The same agreed and acted upon perspectives… coming from all ends. Every mouth, repeating its own story, as that story fits with the broader family narrative. And YOUR perspective? Might challenge those other ones.

And if they just don’t pay attention to it… it may as well have never happened. So that’s what they do.

Which is my way of saying, if you’ve been gaslit for your entire life about “your perspective” equating some sort of fairytale you drafted for sake of terrorizing yourself while claiming victimhood… eh, you’re not alone. And it makes sense from a neuropsychobiological perspective, why they wouldn’t want to or be able to see things from your vantage point.

But we’ll get to that later.

For now, start to believe your own historical perspectives, motherfucker.

Examine the ones that you carry now, because they CAN be distorted by a library of prior perspectives that need to be rewritten for your own benefit, now that you have a lifetime of other experiences and educational opportunities to re-analyze things. You don’t need to carry the family stories, you get to rewrite them. That’s your right as a holder of perspectives, which aren’t up for debate after you’ve already debated them adequately, yourself.

And when you hear someone pull out the “that’s just your perspective” card… feel free to think of this community and have a hearty laugh. I know I do at this point. That’s about all you can do, anyways. You can’t force them to understand what they refuse to pay attention to, and you’ll die trying.

Besides, you don’t need them to believe in your perspective, because you, your Self, are enough to validate it, all on your own. And if you need help – if you ever feel view-corruption coming on, your brain flipping back into a shame spiral of death – remember… you’re not alone and you don’t have to go through it alone.

Hit up your trauma-experienced therapist. Hit up your healthy-brained friends. And if you don’t have any of those right now – if no one WILL be able to see your perspective except you in your current social circle… Yeah, I get it. There’s a community for that.

Til we talk next… Hail your Self.

Hail your perceptions and perspectives.

And own that shit, because NO ONE has had the same life of experience that you have.

Which makes you irreplicable and irreplaceable, not dismissable.

Hail Archie, and the truly unreplicable perspectives he gave me.

And cheers y’all. I’ll see you next week.