When the Attribution Bias Makes Things Seem More Desirable

Just a reminder that the purpose of this discussion aims at stimulating thought and self awareness as tools to help those in recovery from trauma learn how to make safer choices. To make the discussion a bit lighter, we've defined Cognitive Biases as “CranioRectal Inversions” (CRI).

In the context of spiritual abuse and how biases effect us, I thought of other instances that strike me as similar to the Cheerleader Effect but involve more of what is actually a type of Attribution Bias. (There's more to come about that bias in posts to come.) There are several subtypes of this type, but I see the effects of what we see, believe is available, and find desirable as a consequence as similar to some of the factors that may be in play in the Cheerleader Bias. We also can tend to be more open to considering owning the same things that they do because the association connotes the idea that those things are somehow better than equally good alternatives.

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Daffodils of Integration: First Promise of Joy through Recovery

(Photo Credit)

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 in

my Quick Revisit of the Stages of Recovery.
But only if you want to.)

James Taylor's melancholy Fire and Rain which laments the unexpected loss of a friend, and I now think of the loss of integration of trauma when I hear him sing “sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.”

In a way, that is what trauma does to us. Our dreams break apart, perhaps because they weren't very realistic but sometimes because we don't have time to realize them because we're so busy trying to figure out how to put ourselves back together. Sometimes, we just can't recover all that we've lost. Sometimes, we lose our ability to fly because the pieces lay on the ground, smashed and broken because of what happened to us. We become no longer whole. We dis-integrate.

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A New Springtime: Daffodils Reclaimed (A glimpse into Stage Three of Recovery)

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 in

my Quick Revisit of the Stages of Recovery.
But only if you want to!)

I wonder what I thought when I was old enough to find those scattered daffodils in the woods behind my parents' house. I must have been quite young, for in my mind, I seem to have always known that they were there. 

I had a good sense of what belonged to my family and what did not, for that is all wrapped around how I treated them. I must have asked permission to pick them, though I remember only being concerned about whether the property owner wanted them. Yet still, in their own way, they were mine. I saw what no one else saw in them. And I remember that excitement of going to look for their blooms when I saw daffodils bloom at my neighbor's house.

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