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NancyLebovitz comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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If you're willing to explain what went wrong, I'm interested in what went wrong.
I've come to believe that a lot of went wrong in my case wasn't so much the moderate level of emotional abuse as the lack of positive relationship.
I have always been reasonably intelligent (my current IQ (not from internet tests) hovers somewhere around mensa levels) and I have always been incredibly curious. These two traits has led me to always figgure out on my own, all the things I was supposed to learn in shcool in advance; I have always been at least a year ahead in mathematics and natural sciences, and I still am.
This does of course pose a slight problem when I have not been the same way in many, many other areas, and the kicker is that my parents never ever have heard of motivational psychology.
This has, as of my current analysis, led me to in my childhood and early teens believe that I was a lazy no good slob who was somehow broken in the "free will" department. Not that these beliefs ever were overt, it seems that it makes a lot of sense in hindsight as I have always been prone to dips in my self esteem.
It is only in the recent few months of discovering LW that I have found out: "Hey, I'm not broken, just ignorant." And fortunately ignorance has a cure.
If my parents had raised me to have a work ethic instead of not having one, I would probably have been in substantially better standing by now. I am a so far a nigh genius who can only barely coerce himself to work with anything not immediately interesting.
A waste? probably. Are there still hope for me? definitely.
Much of it is mitigated by the fact that I am 19 years old and my parents truly are loving and caring, but none the less they raised me suboptimally.
Also, if your parents thought that your being intelligent was extremely important, you may have concluded that you'd only get praise for what you could do easily.
That is a very good hypothesis.
I don't have a source handy, but it's kind of a cliche in current popular psychology, followed by a recommendation to only praise children for effort, not talent.
It seems to me that praising for talent and praising for effort both are risks for Goodhart's law (any measure which is used to guide policy will become corrupt).
I am nowhere near introspective enough, nor do I know enough psychology. The only thing I know is that it is fixable.