You've never felt anyone else's emotions. How do you know what's stronger or not? You're intense, I'll grant you — but the idea that your entire clan was perennially just one bad breakup away from going on the warpath seems like hateful propaganda made up because someone didn't understand the way trauma can intersect with mental illness to me.
Mental illness can absolutely be hereditary. You can be genetically prone to depression, or bipolar disorder, or addictive tendencies, or a hundred other mental or mood disorders. And trust me, I'm not minimizing its impact. It sucks, and it's hard, and it makes life a lot harder and more complicated than it needs to be. And sometimes you look at other people and you're resentful that it looks easy for them, like, man, how fucking dare that person be happy? That's normal too. But there is nothing that's not treatable, not manageable. Not every disorder or illness can be overcome, but they can be lived with if you get the support you need for it — and what everybody needs is going to be different.
But from what you've told me, it seems like your entire civilization has been constantly at war for — what, centuries? That sort of trauma is compounded, learned behaviours about grief and loss and pain passed down to children who haven't experienced those things for themselves but had to learn the weight of them anyway. Parents who are violent or neglectful because it's the only way they learned how to cope with their own feelings creates children who are violent and neglected. Those circumstances aren't ideal for anyone to grow up with a healthy understanding of emotion, especially if you're inclined to strong occurrences of it.
But it doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with you, or broken, or bad.
Sometimes you have to break a bone to set it straight. Sometimes you need to lance a wound to cut out an infection. It's okay to bleed — the important thing is to let the people you trust help bandage you up afterwards.
Over time, you'll bleed less. And then one day you'll wake up and something that would've left a gaping wound in you will have barely bruised, and you'll realize that's what came from handling knives. It could take you a month. It could take you a decade. You could still be struggling with this at the end of your life.
And that's okay. I told you, trying's the important part. If you're better than you were yesterday, that's good enough. And you're already doing that.
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Mental illness can absolutely be hereditary. You can be genetically prone to depression, or bipolar disorder, or addictive tendencies, or a hundred other mental or mood disorders. And trust me, I'm not minimizing its impact. It sucks, and it's hard, and it makes life a lot harder and more complicated than it needs to be. And sometimes you look at other people and you're resentful that it looks easy for them, like, man, how fucking dare that person be happy? That's normal too. But there is nothing that's not treatable, not manageable. Not every disorder or illness can be overcome, but they can be lived with if you get the support you need for it — and what everybody needs is going to be different.
But from what you've told me, it seems like your entire civilization has been constantly at war for — what, centuries? That sort of trauma is compounded, learned behaviours about grief and loss and pain passed down to children who haven't experienced those things for themselves but had to learn the weight of them anyway. Parents who are violent or neglectful because it's the only way they learned how to cope with their own feelings creates children who are violent and neglected. Those circumstances aren't ideal for anyone to grow up with a healthy understanding of emotion, especially if you're inclined to strong occurrences of it.
But it doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with you, or broken, or bad.
Sometimes you have to break a bone to set it straight. Sometimes you need to lance a wound to cut out an infection. It's okay to bleed — the important thing is to let the people you trust help bandage you up afterwards.
Over time, you'll bleed less. And then one day you'll wake up and something that would've left a gaping wound in you will have barely bruised, and you'll realize that's what came from handling knives. It could take you a month. It could take you a decade. You could still be struggling with this at the end of your life.
And that's okay. I told you, trying's the important part. If you're better than you were yesterday, that's good enough. And you're already doing that.
The rest is — fucking ephemera.
Just trust me, and breathe through it.