December 2013 – Page 3 – Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

Do you think that reassurance-seeking is always a bad thing? Because some of your posts seem to imply it.

realsocialskills said:

I didn’t realize my posts sounded that way, but I see what you mean now that you point it out.

No, seeking reassurance isn’t always a bad thing. It can be really good to seek reassurance, and I think everyone needs to do that at least occasionally. If you are afraid that something is wrong, it’s ok to want to check. And it’s ok to do that with the expectation that things are probably ok and that you just need to hear it.

What’s bad is when people seek *unconditional* reassurance. When people seek unconditional reassurance, they want to be convinced that things are ok at all costs – even if things are horribly wrong. That’s dangerous, and destructive. (And particularly dangerous if the thing that’s wrong is the result of something they’re going, but it’s destructive even when the problem is in no way their fault).

Some things that are not necessarily appropriation, depending on how they’re done (but can get into really dangerous territory really quickly):

Learning from another culture
Admiring another culture
Seeing things in another culture that are better than in yours, and trying to figure out how make what you do more like that
Learning values from another culture that are better than yours, and trying to incorporate what you’ve learned into your culture
Learning musical or artistic styles from another culture
Learning how to make food associated with another culture

Pretending that what you’re doing is literally the same thing people in a culture you admire do is always obnoxious appropriation, though. Here are some examples:

Claiming to be a member of a culture you’ve only read about because of how strongly what you’ve read resonates with you
Using religious ceremonies lifted from other religions completely out of their context (eg: Christians who are really into seeing Jesus as a Jew often do this with modern Jewish rituals; white environmentalists often do this with Native ceremonies)
Saying that you must have some distant relatives from the culture you’re interested in, or that you must have been a member of that group in another life, and acting as though this makes you yourself in this life a member of that group
Reading a book written by an anthropologist describing their perspective on the childrearing practices of a group they spent a few months with, then claiming that you’re raising your kids just like that culture does