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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I had a lovely childhood, and nothing traumatic ever happened to me.

I think that's the point. Lovely != perfect. Not that I'm trying to be pedantic here...but "perfect" says a lot. If you think you had the "perfect" childhood you're essentially claiming that there is no possible way your childhood could have gone better. It's just sort of myopic thinking that there aren't other ways to enjoy life and that might reveal other things, such as a lack of empathy or perhaps masking something else.

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What do we think the author means when he uses the word "perfect"? He uses the words "in denial" and "deluded." He's implying that everyone's childhood contains some flaws that make later psychological introspection beneficial.

In that sense, he's obviously right. That's why "nobody's perfect" is such a bland truism, just as "no one's childhood was perfect."

So the real problem comes down to equivocation. The author means one thing when he says "perfect" and the reader understands it as another: "I had a lovely childhood, and it was filled with memories that I cherish, and it lacked any of those traumatic things you see on TV." Neither meaning refers to "perfect" in the sense that someone can get a 1600 on their SAT test.

My main beef is there is a mindset of some people that think that everybody has serious trauma in their childhood (maybe repressed memories or in denial). However plenty* of people have great childhoods.

I think it is normal for someone to say that they had a "perfect childhood", just like someone might say "There is nothing worse than" or "I would never" etc. Yes, we often could say things more precisely. But most people regularly say things that are 100% incorrect if we were to treat their words as logical truths.

I guess I feel he straw-manned the statement, and that the subtext of Daniel's statements is that he denies that anyone can have a childhood without trauma, and even if they think they did, he says they didn't!

Edit: I think the reason this pisses me off is because I have a friend who is a psychologist and when you get him drunk he gives every single one of his acquaintances a mental diagnosis label! I have seen the same pattern with other psychologists: they act as though they are all seeing, that they can always discover issues if they dig deep, and their reading of someone is correct (even against the consensus of everybody else).

* 33% of people in a statistically invalid web poll selected that they had a "perfect childhood": https://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/did-you-have-a-perfect-c...

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