Azure Flame
Permabanned
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2010
- Messages
- 2,317
- MBTI Type
- ESTP
- Enneagram
- 8w7
"Oh yeah? Well my life sucked way more than yours ever did!"
is this a typical E4 thing?
is this a typical E4 thing?
It is not possible to judge how much other people have truly suffered, so those E4s should probably learn to keep their mouths shut.
How terrible of them to say such a thing! They must keep their mouth shut and dare not express an accurate display of their sentiments! Especially when it can be used to guage a reaction from the other party, allowing the accuracy of their statement and beliefs to be measured in the process!
The sufferings of the world of today are nothing compared to the sufferings of people from earlier time periods or third world countries. People who talk about how much more they've suffered comparatively to others and who would actually use that as some form of emotional currency to prove some self righteous point are living in some sort of fantasy realm in which they feel they are justified in representing another human being's own struggles in life as being less painful as their own without having complete knowledge of what it is actually like to have been that other person (typical unhealthy 4 behavior). It is a form of psychologically belittling another person due to not having a healthy love and gratefulness for their own life experience, which results in that person not being able to fully experience and enjoy the present. Any perceived "accuracy" of measurement via gauging another person's reaction to statements such as these is pure fiction, other people have no idea what other people have truly experienced, especially people with radically different personalities. Even if the enneagram 4 in question has obviously led a cripplingly painful life experience it is still useless to ruminate on past sufferings and think that they justify anything.
/just my opinion
"Oh yeah? Well my life sucked way more than yours ever did!"
is this a typical E4 thing?
This response has made me wonder whether this topic has stirred a raw nerve within you but I will come on to that later. To express a few points:
1) I said "allowing the accuracy of their statement and beliefs to be measured" NOT "allowing the accuracy of their statement and beliefs to be measured accurately"! It gives the person complaining some feedback and provides a rough guide about whether their complaints have any basis in reality.
2) The level of misery endured by past generations has nothing to do with the situation. Saying "others have it worse" does not disprove the statement "I have had it worse than you have had it" when used in a one-on-one conversation.
3) Psychologically belittling another is usually not the motive but a side effect act of self-preservation - avoiding the trivialisation of one's own experiences.
and
4) All this seems straight out of a psychologist's textbook, mixed with what appears to be poor understanding of the subject on your part. If I were to hazard a guess based on the way you expressed all this... I would say you taught yourself to believe this out of a sense of resignation where you determined any other viewpoint is unjust and underneath it all you don't want to believe all this. /just my opinion.
1. Okay..rough guide, perhaps justifying their complaints, signifying what exactly? Is comparing one's subjective sufferings with another person's in the unconstructive manner perceivably being expressed by the OP (i.e. "ghetto syndrome") really the best way of communicating with another person to reach a form of validation?
2. True, I just added that to add some context to what I feel is a discussion about a rather trivial and not very useful human behavior/way of communicating.
3. Psychologically belittling others, even if a side effect of an act of self preservation and not the motive, is still a behavior best avoided for harmonious social relations, as it is in my opinion, a form of emotional displacement/projection.
4. I can see why you might think that, but I could also see your own response to my posts as having hit a nerve of their own with you, clouding your understanding of my motives and the content of what I was trying to get at. In my opinion, sometimes the most true and valuable things to teach oneself and believe are the things that we do not want to. It makes sense that this could appear as resignation.