It's fascinating/sad how ingrained this is in our culture. My mom constantly berates herself for every shortcoming she can conjure from my childhood. It seems like it's never enough (even though I speak in truth) that a_it's in the past and b_I'm not worried about it anymore and haven't been in years. She's starting to come around now that she's learned how many kids in our neighborhood have been in therapy (there's a neighborhood shrink list no less!), that her friends are perfectly good parents/people and it doesn't mean that something can't go awry for other reasons. But, regardless, that burden she carries makes it all but impossible for everyone to move forward into a healthy future.
Which turns into a cycle, hindsight or not. Sigh.

It's actually funny that you mention hindsight bias. I just finished up a chapter in my psychology class on it.

I didn't know it at the time, but I feel like a lot of ideas were planted in my head by the therapist I was seeing a few years back. The more she talked about how "controlling" my parents were, the more I began to see it. Looking back, now I know that my parents were simply being authoritative, not authoritarian.

I am not sure if I really understand hindsight bias so this comment but be off, but...

I think I have accused others of hindsight biased when, really, they were right and I was in denial. I've had people confront me about my eating, and I've said things like, "Nothing is wrong. Just because something was wrong last year, you're looking for things to be wrong. If someone else were to have eaten x, you wouldn't be concerned. You're just looking for evidence to prove that something might be amiss with my eating."

That type of conversation has occured a lot. In hindsight, it is me who sees that the other people were more right than I was. Something was unusual about my eating and they were actually speaking the truth.

So when someone is telling you something that you don't fully see at the time.... when do you stop and beware of hindsight bias and when do you look for evidence that they are right, admitting that you are may not be seeing things clearly?

Now,

I think the question is really tricky with EDs because usually the illness make a sufferer almost incapable of realizing that they have an eating disorder. I'm not positive that what you're describing is hindsight bias exactly, because I'm not sure if people knew at that point that you actually had an ED or just suspected, but these kinds of arguments are common in EDs and in general.

I guess the most recent presidential election is a good example of hindsight bias. Right after the results came in and President Obama won, some people were eager to say how "obvious" it was that Obama was going to win because A, B, and C happened. Part of the problem is that when A, B, and C happened initially, it didn't point to a huge victory for Obama. The other part of the problem is that it ignores events D-Z that may have indicated Obama wasn't the front-runner. But all you point to and think about is A, B, and C.

To distill it down (perhaps a little too much), hindsight bias is basically looking for examples from the past to confirm what you already know and ignoring everything else. Some of my therapists first made a wrong assumption that the "outcome" was not just an ED, but that my parents somehow screwed me up. The hindsight bias came into play when basically we explored my childhood cherry-picking for everything that confirmed this assumption and disregarding or minimizing the rest.

It's kind of a theorem in science that you shouldn't make your facts fit the theory!

This struck home so strongly with me. I remember having to see an psychologist at a clinic I was at for a while (I never really liked his approach or clicked with him, and only went to the sessions required by the clinic policies), but literally, when he started taking my history, the moment I said I had been several anorexic, he said, not asked, simply stated: "So your mother was a chronic dieter." My mother has never said one word about her weight in my living memory--and trust me, I would remember anything about that! When I think of my mom and weight, I think of her stashing a scale behind her laundry basket to be brought out every once in a while; I think of her being totally unfussed about putting on a few pounds over the winter; I think of her exulting over the fabulous new ginger-sesame dressing she's trying with her fresh salad; I think of her driving twenty minutes out of her way to buy a butter-pecan tart; I think of her sewing her own clothes in beautiful fabrics that make her feel good...in short, the idea of my mother dieting is a total farce. That said, I realize I'm very, very lucky not to have grown up with a mother dealing with mental issues around weight. And there is nothing that makes me shut an ED book faster than reading that apparently I became anorexic and bulimic because of my over-controlling parents or because I was sexually abused. Undoubtedly these factors are true for a portion of the population; to slant everything from this perspective, though, makes it easy to regard every parental decision or constraint as abusive and damaging. More to the point, hindsight thinking also completely, I feel, obliviates the consideration of other factors like biology, comorbid disorders, etc. It's interesting how so much of the work therapists do is about flipping the lid on misplaced beliefs--but if they're giving it a particular spin from day one, you end up having to flip THOSE beliefs later on in therapy!

Peregrine,

*Standing up and shouting amen, hallelujah, you sing it, sister!*

Carrie

Gee, what could've possibly made my family a bit on the dysfunctional side? Let me think- oh, yeah, perhaps it was the underlying biochemical imbalance that manifested itself in me as an ED but manifested itself in numerous other relatives as depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, etc.

Things in my environment likely contributed to my developing an ED rather than some other problem, but they didn't cause it...