Here on WS the subject of “injustice or wound collecting” usually comes up in connection to a mass shooting by someone who has built up a long list of perceived injustices creating resentments they act on. But plenty of people collect injustices/wounds and never act violently. Instead, they just make the lives of family or others like government entities (DSS) miserable. It
seems possible that whoever is writing the FB posts (and
perhaps all the adults in the family) are collecting every “injustice or w0und” social services has “inflicted” on their family. Even things that are normal actions (providing glasses for a child)
appear to be turned into something bad upon which to ruminate. IMO JMO MOO
The article linked below provides this definition of a wound/injustice collector:
“What kind of people meet this criteria?
Anyone who, because of a personality disorder or character traits (e.
g., insecurities, paranoia, fear,
xenophobia, or due to emotional instability), inflexibly seeks to collect wounds and slights for a purpose that usually has negative social consequences or is self serving. This can be anyone from a spouse, to a terrorist, to a mass killer.”
IMO For some wound/injustice collectors it allows them to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. JMO
I am in
no way “diagnosing” anyone, but here are some characteristics described in the linked article that injustice/wound collectors
can display and some of which (but perhaps not all) we
may have seen with this family IMO:
- They never forget and they never truly forgive – often they quiet down only to revive the same subjects another day. There is no closure.
- They are hypersensitive to slights even when they are accidental or unintended.
- They seek slights where others have been victimized in order to piggyback on to those slights.
- They mistake good intentions for bad or for evil and there is no leniency for honest mistakes. This is particularly true of those who are clinically paranoid.
- Wound collectors tend to focus on one person, a group (e.g., Hitler and Jews), or an institution. Or they may focus on society in general (Unabomber and his hatred of technology).
- For the wound collector, there is no fixing of things, only the collection of slights.
- There is no forgiveness on their part, no balanced look at life; they are always looking backward instead of forward.
- For the wound collector, time does not heal all wounds. In fact, time allows them to collect even more wounds.
- Wound collectors tend to have a very pessimistic view of life and people.
- At times, when there aren’t sufficient wounds for them to collect, some have been known to purposefully go out looking to be wounded by artificially creating situations so that they are slighted.
- Wound collectors tend to perceive the world as either you are with them or you are against them and any attempt to ameliorate or explain slights only enrages them further.
Wound Collectors
Entire post is MOO JMO, not intended as a diagnosis, but a possible theory.
