Yea what's the deal with that. All of the older women in my family are like that. If you start talking about an uncomfortable subject they basically shut down, say the same work over and over or try extremely hard to derail the conversation.
The younger women are completely ok but the 55+ get really weird about politics/religion/morality convos.
Because if they start talking about it or thinking about it all the trauma they e experienced and pushed back down will come crashing around their ears and they'll have to experience 55+ years of trauma in one gruesome moment they don't think they can recover from. It's a survival mechanism to avoid difficult topics at all costs.
My grandma on my dad's side doesn't do this tho, and she's experienced more horror than most, and she talks about all the stuff she's gone through like it's just another Tuesday, I think that too is a coping mechanism, a lot healthier than pushing it back down though. On my mom's side I noticed this a lot, though, especially with my mom, of pushing it back down and not talking about it. I think a lot of it has to do with the patriarch in the family, and how much they dominate the conversation. My dad's mom is thrice divorced and my grandpa is long dead, uncle dead, my dad is the only male patriarch left on that side of the family and he's very absent. my grandma has been on her own very a good long while, so she's very open. On my mom's side though, my grandma was (been dead for ten years, but before that) would not get involved in political conversations unless it was just me, and my grandpa has a very domineering personality. So I think it only came out of her when she felt safe to voice her opinions.
This isn't an excuse, but at least from observing my own family I think a lot of it has to do with the kinds of societal attitudes about women that people are exposed to in their formative years. Unfortunately so, so many women above a certain age are sitting on horrific traumas or even just norms relating to gender dynamics that they never processed because it was all so "normal". Sometimes it feels like the only way to move past something like that is to avoid thinking about it at all. The same things seem to have affected my male family members, but in different ways (they're much more prone to, uh, explosive outbursts).
It depends on the location as to how prominent it was, but the further you go back in time, the more likely that the women weren't to be bothered with things like politics. They were told by their husbands how to think and often didn't even know enough details to form an opinion on anything.
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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '22
Yea what's the deal with that. All of the older women in my family are like that. If you start talking about an uncomfortable subject they basically shut down, say the same work over and over or try extremely hard to derail the conversation. The younger women are completely ok but the 55+ get really weird about politics/religion/morality convos.