Dear Freud: Focusing on the root cause is pointless

Dear Freud,

Please accept my most sincere apologies. I made fun of you many times. I complained about you all the time. And you were right! The Oedipus Complex explains almost all of the problems that people have now. Why is it that every single time I ask someone what bothers them, it comes back to their opposite-sex parent not spending enough time with them?

Well, it’s not quite true that the Oedipus complex explains most problems. It’s better to say that it is the preferred explanation. Almost every psychologist knows that everything Freud claimed was wrong and was sourced from his cocaine-fueled fever dreams, but most people cling onto the idea of trauma from parental issues so strongly that it’s hard to imagine anything else as an explanation for our problems by now.

This isn’t really Freud’s fault. It’s just a modern idea that’s the most adjacent to his ideas. And people have noticed! That’s why images like this exist, after all:

And how could these theories not be accurate? How is it that so many men in their twenties want a maternal figure for a girlfriend? How is it that so many women chase after distant men to prove to themselves that they’re worthy of attention?

This is where Freud and these ideas are right: of course these issues come from childhood. Of course they come from weak parental relations. And how could childhood trauma not affect you later? Yes, it is the source of the issue. The problem is that focusing on the root cause will simply make the person want to kill themselves. I do not mean this figuratively.

Childhood trauma is naturally an unfixable problem. It is far in the past. It occurred to a child that typically did not understand what was happening to them and thus could not shield themselves from it. Usually, the reason why it happened is unclear to the child, and the reasons can only be pieced together to a limited extent after the fact. There is no combination of words and no treatment that can undo the events. And so what do we do as we explain our problems to each other? We fixate on exactly this! We fixate on something we cannot change, and thus make our problems unfixable too by definition. If the cause of a person’s issue is unfixable, how can their actual issue be fixable? There is no progress to be made. When someone sees their lack of progress with this mentality, they will eventually see no way out of their pain, and will simply want to kill themselves.

The focus on trauma is so focused on the past that it can only damage someone’s efforts to heal. It doesn’t matter if the root cause is accurately diagnosable through these modern trauma theories. It’s useless! What trauma causes, in my opinion, is a sort of bad thinking habit. When a past event negatively affects someone, a similar present day event can affect them in the exact same way. The actual problem is this habit. All similar events after the first reinforce the habit of thinking in this way. By the time someone has experienced, say, five more events that mirror the details of their original trauma, it is usually the more recent events that bother them more than their original trauma. And if they can see what the underlaying pattern in their thoughts is, they have a chance of resolving what is causing them so much pain. They can see that their uncontrollable, irrational thoughts are not because of an unfixable initial trauma, but because they learned to think this way across the many traumas.

And then, after seeing the habit for what it is, they may finally see past the initial trauma and instead what really goes through their heads, that it did actually morph over time, that they did heal a little even though they didn’t see it at the time, and that there is hope.