When Psychology Doesn’t Fit Your Life

I remember the exact moment I stopped taking parts of psychology seriously.

We were being taught Freud’s Oedipus complex — the idea that every boy, deep down, wants his mother and sees his father as a rival.

You could feel the discomfort in the room.

People shifting. Half-smiling. Pretending it made sense.

And I just sat there thinking:

This is bullshit.

Not because it’s shocking.

Not because it’s controversial.

But because it assumes a world that simply didn’t exist for me.

Try Applying That to My Childhood

My mother didn’t stay my mother.

She transitioned.

So let’s actually follow the theory through, properly — not in a textbook, but in a real life.

Am I supposed to desire the person who gave birth to me?

Am I supposed to compete with them?

And if that same person becomes, in another sense, my father…

what exactly am I competing with?

What role am I even in?

Go on—map that out neatly.

You can’t.

This Is Where Psychology Falls Apart

The problem isn’t that Freud was wrong.

The problem is that theories like that pretend life is structured, predictable, and clean enough to fit inside them.

It isn’t.

Not when you grow up in a house where identity shifts.

Not when the person you’re meant to understand as one thing becomes another.

Not when there are no clear lines—just confusion, tension, and silence.

That doesn’t sit neatly in a lecture.

That lives in your body.

Humour Was the Only Way In

I used to joke about it.

Say the uncomfortable thing out loud. Watch people laugh because they didn’t know what else to do.

But underneath that, there was something else:

No one had an answer.

Not the tutors.

Not the theory.

Not the system that was supposed to explain how people develop.

Some Lives Don’t Fit the Model

This isn’t about attacking psychology.

It’s about telling the truth.

Some of us didn’t grow up with a “mother” and a “father” in the way those words are supposed to work.

Some of us grew up in something far more complex — and far more confusing — than any theory accounts for.

And when you realise that…

You stop trying to force your life into someone else’s model.

So Keep the Theory

Freud can keep his framework.

It just doesn’t work here.