Insanity
Insanity is believing everyone else is Insane.
It is easy for this condition to exist when a person is born into an insane family environment even though the larger environment outside it may be generally sane.
The double irony of this condition is that a person born into insanity becomes part of the problem... but they also have the exact thing necessary to solve it... experience.
The challenge of this condition is the struggle against one's own instincts... against one's own identity... against the self. This is a problem because it goes against the natural instinct to survive and defend ourselves against threats... but because the threat is ourselves, it results in guilt, depression and suicidal thinking. In religion, this kind of problem is known as Ancestral Sin (the idea that individuals inherit the judgement for the sin of their ancestors) and has connections to the concept of Original Sin (the idea that humans, through birth, inherit a tainted nature).
Another thing that complicates matters is that their own insane family isn't the only one of its kind... and so when they eventually leave that family and see the rest of world, they must learn on their own how to identify things that are NOT insane. Having experience with insane things only helps a person identify the things that they HAVE seen... not all the insane things out there that they HAVEN'T yet seen, so it is still possible to fall victim to other forms of insanity.
The challenge of using one's own natural experience with insanity is the trauma it's paired with which compels the person to protect themselves even when the "identity" that is being protected is insane.
A traumatized person who also has insane behaviours needs people who are immune to both... those who can be around them while simultaneously accepting the person but not enabling the insane behaviour. With dysfunctional adults, this means letting them fail without participating in the failure. With dysfunctional children, it's possible to control their environment and therefore to speed up the learning process. This is not possible with adults unless they do something extreme (aka. illegal), and so the only way to help them is to let them fail... and then be unconditionally available to help them recover.
Editor note - things to read to see if they have any relevance to this journal entry:
How to Break a Generational Curse – Knox Presbyterian Church
Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne and the legend of the Kennedy curse - The Washington Post
Ancestral Versus Original Sin | St. Mary Orthodox Church of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts
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