A person's sub-culture, by which I mean the community that he or she identifies with and spends most of his or her time within, is such a powerful determinant of any one's emotions and behavior, but it is rarely discussed by psychologists and psychiatrists, and it is not given the influence that it deserves.
Psychiatry has become so biological over the past twenty years. It is difficult to get any psychiatrist to talk about anything other than brain chemistry when they discuss a diagnosis or treatment. Psychologists are more varied. They consider a great many family influences and the role of interpersonal relationships, and see how they greatly affect how people think, feel and behave.
Yet, the values, mores attitudes and behaviors of those who anyone sees himself as most like, do so much toward determining what they feel is the right thing to do, or think, or aspire to.
If both your parents are are collecting checks for disability, and your brother is selling drugs and your seventeen year-old cousin is having her second child, and you three best friends have already dropped out of high school, it will be very difficult for you to "pull yourself up by your boot straps" stay in school, go to college, look for, expect to get, and find a well paying job.
By comparison, if you go to a high school from which 98% of the kids graduate, and 94% of those go to college, you will probably not only expect to go to college, you will go. You may feel badly that you are going off to State U, instead of Yale, but you expectations and aspirations will be so different from the person in the previous paragraph.
Now, this all seems pretty obvious. What may not be so obvious to many people is that if almost all of the kids who live the lives in the first paragraph switched cribs with the kids in the second paragraph before they were fourteen months old, all of their lives would live up to the expectations of the new subculture. I think that many people would not believe that, but I am sure of it. Here in America, people still like to believe that kids are born smart or not so smart. That's not the case. 94.768% is learning how to learn, living up to expectations, and seeing how the world around you works.
I see so many smart, attractive, personable adolescents and young adults who all do marvelous things and live healthy, prosperous, creative enjoyable lives, if they get the opportunity. But some of them have no one to show them the path, many even have people around them who are negative and discouraging.
I get great satisfaction when I can be part of the process that helps someone find a way to use their talents and skills. But it is often disheartening to see how some people have so many more obstacles to fight through and overcome. Forging a life is difficult enough for anyone. The journey is much more difficult without a guide, or with someone stepping on your head.
We now also have so many examples of how growing up in a very religious community influences the way someone thinks, sees cause and effect and expects change. What is "normal in that community may not fit in well in San Francisco, and vice-versa, with an emphasis on the"vice."
No one can get from here to there alone; not John Wayne, and not Clarence Thomas. Our thinking, feeling and behaving is constantly being influenced by those around us, not matter how much we try to resist. Even the act of resistance is created by the living in the community.
None of this may be groundbreaking, but as John says: Copy, Transform, Combine (repeat).
The more things get brought to light, the better.
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