 Okay, so let's have a little chat about some things that are relevant. We're gonna have a little chat about psychology and a little chat about narcissism and I Think it's become almost a trend. It's like popular to talk about how catastrophic things are and how we're facing Societies or collapse and all the rest of it. I'm actually much more optimistic than that But there's something that I need to say about narcissistic personality disorder and The phenomena of the fascination with narcissism that has just exploded over the last eight years I mean that the number of searches the amount of videos on YouTube you'll find on narcissism and it really has become Something of an obsession. I think I released a video when I was in America So that must have been December saying stop watching narcissism videos online. I Probably should have said stop obsessively watching narcissism videos online. I I'm gonna say one of those catastrophic culture-ending things now, but you know take it with a pinch of salt We're gonna be okay Most people will be okay. Some people are fucked, but some people are always fucked When it comes to narcissism, I think we've hit a point where Narcissism light Self-obsession and culturally induced narcissism is now so high I'm no longer convinced that Narcissism is actually a relevant label anymore said in other words if Everybody's fundamentally a narcissist. Nobody's a narcissist. It's like if everybody wins a trophy the trophy is meaningless So if everybody's famous, nobody's famous, right? So I think we've hit that point now I don't think when you look at the traits of narcissism And entitlement arrogance and extremely confrontational and bullying demeanor Obsession with a with a false sense of self and so on I Don't think that you can really distinguish that anymore from the baseline of what your average person is like in Normal society now am I saying malignant narcissism has gotten into everything and everyone No, I Think what I'm saying is that the majority of what drives people online to look at narcissism as a topic is Failed romantic relationships Second and it's a fairly distant second by Relationships with family members that are fundamentally narcissistic So let's just break down those two subjects of narcissism and then we'll look at psychology as a whole If you look at the romance thing You have a bad relationship with a fella your relationship with you with your ex-wife in my case ex-girlfriends Really awful relationships where there's a lot of abuse. There's a lot of exploitation. There's a lot of gaslighting There's a lot of psychological manipulation and you say Why is this happening? Why is this person Handling me like this. What what are we doing here? And you come across the concept of Narcissism you come across the idea of narcissistic personality disorder and let's be clear. It's an idea These are models psychology only offers you models. There's no blood tests or Neurotransmitter sample we can take that indicates narcissism. There isn't a brain scan that shows you if somebody has a narcissistic personality disorder It's relational you can only detect the coordinates of narcissistic personality disorder in Relation to other people and the way in which that individual handles other people So when it comes to romantic relationships, I would say this Is the problem that you faced in the individual or is it in the culture if it's in the culture Then the idea that that person has Narcissistic personality disorder, which is a description of an individual fault Because disorder is a way of saying fault the machine's faulty the robot's not working properly. Are they ordered? Is there personality in order or is it in chaos? Is there personality in order or is it disordered? Well, who's to say what's ordered for one who's to say what's disordered? That's a perfectly valid question to ask psychologists can't answer that question meaningfully I don't believe because you can't extract Your subjective judgment of what is orders and what's disordered from your culture? So therefore you could say well, these are all Culture-bound syndromes. We're trying to describe a culture-bound syndrome Therefore, it's not a legitimate personality disorder. You're just from a narcissistic culture Let me ask you another question a provocative question Can you see in culture in the dating scene or the relationship scene? coordinates in mainstream media social media Entertainment music that would Entrain or Inculcate or brainwash or hypnotize people passively to behave in a way in a relationship that was abusive That was exploitative that was boundary breaking or that was cruel Do you ever hear music that encourages? Let's say for example women to treat men like idiots Do you ever see adverts on TV that associate a woman treating a man? like an object to be discarded as a sign of strength do you ever see in Normal culture the idea that if a man can shag Tons of goals that means he's a real man and a man who doesn't shag tons of goals He's not a real man. This one's an alpha. This one's a simp. Do you see that? So what I'm saying is if the culture is fundamentally narcissistic I'm not denying that there are some people Who are very very sick and they and they do fulfill the coordinates for what the DSM would define as malignant narcissistic personality disorder But they're pretty rare like full-blown malignant narcissistic personality disorder. That's pretty rare But just treating people narcissistically is extremely common Especially in romance. Isn't that interesting? Isn't it interesting where? you know, there's a level of Politeness or boundaries or a social code that you would use if you went speak to your manager in the bank Not that we're allowed to speak to managers in banks anymore Everything's done online or you went to a hospital and was treated by a doctor or you went to a restaurant and spoke to somebody There's a level those boundaries you would treat people with basic respect and politeness But for some reason in relationships, that's not a thing When it's a man and a woman and it's the dating game. It's the seduction game. It's the relationship game Those rules don't seem to apply. Why? Why? How have we had these boundaries covertly eroded and what does it mean? Where's it gonna lead us to if somebody's being exploitative and Treating you as a commodity where can you see that they were trained to think that that was a good thing to do That's what a strong independent healthy human being does they acquire Multiple women they acquire multiple men and then they just pick them up because I'm strong I can do that. So this is a good thing for me to do. Do you see that? I see that I see it everywhere. I Have social media. It's a very unusual one. You won't have heard of it. It's called in Insta Instagram Instagram. That's the one it's called People are openly tick tock. There are people on there I can show you openly bragging about how abusive they are to the multiple partners They have and it gets tons of views and tons of likes. I would say in other language This is something that is socially rewarded behavior Okay So if that's the case and you come to me and you say my girlfriend wasn't very nice to me She has a problem. I would say well, maybe she does comrade and maybe she doesn't maybe she's from a very Effing sick culture that thinks that that's okay Or you come to me you say my man was abusive to me. He has a problem Maybe he does or maybe he's from a very very sick culture that thinks that that's okay I Think that's the majority of what drives the online obsession with narcissism Secondarily, you do have family relationships. So I would ask similar questions if a mother treats her children as Though they are extensions of her as though they are parts of her as though they are If effectively not separate from her is There anything in her culture or in her upbringing that caused her to believe that that was the right way to handle raising children Is there anything that makes her feel like she's entitled to speak to her children there that way or treat them that way If a father is doing it Is there anything in his culture that he modeled that made him think the right way to handle your children is as though They are things as though they are possessions as though they're things to extract money from or attention from or narcissistic Supply or whatever it is If the answer is yes Then I would say Narcissistic personality disorder is not a relevant diagnosis. That's a culture-bound phenomena now to psychology Psychology is the study of the individual mind. We have a term for a different field of study There is the study of culture and group mind. It's called sociology. That's a separate field of study What I think we're seeing right now for multiple reasons on multiple levels is kind of The late stages of psychology as we've known it up until now What's written into the source code of psychology? Well, you can't For various reasons you can't extract psychology now from Freud. You can't extract psychology from some very old-fashioned and often frankly sexist and Classist ideas That come from a different period of time a different way of looking at the world That is not the way we look at the world now And then you have the science issue the fact that psychology and psychologist will not let go of this obsession Of trying to pretend that there are science When a psychologist or somebody with a psychological degree or a masters or a phd or whatever it is says I have the final answer on this subject because I have been ordained By the high priests and priestesses of psychology and I have these letters after my name You have to say what does that mean? What does it mean? It's not a science. You don't have the final word on anything All of your presuppositions are culture bound. There aren't any of your suppositions that are culture bound The only area of psychology I can see That is purely scientific and would pass the test for what we considered We could consider to be science would be extremely limited and it would probably be uh, mr. Pavlov Making dog's dribble and mr. Skinner putting rats in t-shaped mazes But actually we have another field of of authentic science that that would fall into It's called neuroscience. It's called neurobiology they're not in that area offering Insights that is distinctively about human nature in the human mind. They're not really offering great insight As psychologists, they are as neuro biologists from a separate discipline But as psychologists, they're not offering great insight about for example How the human being responds to trauma what the nature of narcissism is what the nature of being abused by our narcissists and I think we've fallen inside of a kind of a black hole Or a snake eating its own tail And we've fallen into the mouse or the bum hole of the snake eating its own tail And now we're really struggling to get out and you stay trapped in this cycle when you insist on A fake scientific view and let me be absolutely clear To claim that psychology is a science or that you're doing science as a psychologist is pure Fraudulence it's it's charlatanism. It's charlatanism. No psychologist can ever say to you based on science I can tell you absolutely you have this personality disorder or this mental health issue without It falling into another discipline like medicine Where you can scan somebody and you can see you can observe You can draw blood for it and you can take tests or you could say this person is brain damaged Or you could say this person's hormonal system is out of whack We can see it and we can rebalance it Observably that's medicine. That would be medicine. That would be neuroscience. That would be neuro biology It's not psychology I just want to warn you two things be careful Be careful who you're listening to and to the psychologists out there You don't need to do this. There's no reason whatsoever for you to make claims to have powers that you don't have You can be open and honest and say hey look, these are just all models depression is a model and I don't know that it's better than a model of depression that we could find amongst I don't know The the Cherokee or Navajo they may have a way of saying what depression is and a way of treating it That actually under scientific conditions would be better than our one. I don't know So what I'm saying is these models that we have they are just models they work Kind of but it's not like psychologists are doing an amazing job of making people better right now It's not like the world is full of joyful happy switched on bright-eyed critically thinking emotionally regulated people getting on with good strong lives and enjoying themselves in the time they have on earth, is it? But there are plenty of people who are Paying psychologists or who have paid psychologists who really just didn't get any better And you know what happens they walk away and they blame it on themselves Because psychology encourages you to think in terms of the individual and it's a mistake And it's a counter scientific mistake. We are tribal creatures. We exist inside of cultures. There's been innumerate experiments done by psychologists that show That what people do in any environment even if they're total strangers massively impacts your behavior Massively impacts your thinking and massively impacts the way you feel internally hugely because we're tribal creatures So the idea that we're going to keep it on this individualistic level again. It's dangerous. It's false It's It's fraudulent the people who espouse this are need to be careful That they're not going to be called out for being charlatans because quite honestly They're making claims that they can't back up You you can't you can't state unequivocably like this is the way it is and this is the solution Which we know because they very they get real quiet on the solutions. They're big on telling you what's wrong This is the other thing i want to warn you about be very very careful with material that appeals to your intellectual vanity Be very very careful with sitting there Consuming and consuming and consuming material that tells you all the multifarious ways in which human beings are wrong That fills the dsm year on year with syndromes and symptoms and disorders Whilst you sit there going stroking your chin and going. Ah, yes, I understand more Things that appeal to your intellectual vanity. They're okay. It's okay It's not like you're doing anything dangerous by doing that But it's not real learning and you're not making any progress doing that You're basically having your ego stroked And it's actually encouraging narcissism. And this is why what we see now is broad scale Narcissism, narcissism light not malignant narcissistic personality disorder. So The final thing I wanted to say to you is if you are trying to recover from a narcissistically abusive relationship in your personal life as an adult or one with a family member It would be worth exploring other models because these are just Models you could say that the person I don't know is possessed of devils or they're evil or they have they're possessed by Wetticoe or I don't know and then work from that point of view That wouldn't be my favorite way of doing it. My favorite way of doing it would be to say, okay, what's happening systematically here? Let's stay out of why Psychology loves why you know what why gives you when you ask why I feel bad. Why do you feel bad? Well, I feel bad. I think because my mom didn't love me It just creates stories and if you feel bad and ask why questions, you're gonna create a whole load of sad stories Your story counts. You deserve to be heard whatever happened happened and you should explore that with another adult I think that's a healthy thing to do once Maybe twice You don't sit there and practice that over and over again It's a misunderstanding of what human beings are. We are quite machine-like We are quite repetitive in ways that offend our system and offend our egos We are not gods and goddesses We are machine-like creatures that repeat that which we are conditioned to do we will continue doing That which we are in the habit pattern of doing we will continue doing if you go once a week To tell your therapist a load of why stories of why you're sad and why your life doesn't work And then after 10 years you go, hey, I don't know why I didn't get better I would say well, what did you practice doing? What are you practicing doing? What are you conditioning yourself to do? Terrible things happen to people all the time But the correct response to that I would suggest is not practicing Sad stories around why that thing happened So you're just going to live a sad life You're creating more of the same thing that which you focus on is going to grow stronger Nobody's saying shove it to one side. I'm the guy who's trying to teach you emotional literacy I've been trying for five years now So they get blood out of the stone getting people to face their own emotions and how they actually feel You have to deal with how you feel you must grieve for what you've lost So that you can move on so that you can move on. That's so you stay there So be very very careful with this stuff ask yourself. What am I practicing? Don't bother with the why questions Beyond one session maybe Ask how how do you feel? I feel sad. I feel impotent. I feel like I can't move forward in my life. Okay How What do you mean? How What does that mean? How are you sad? How do you do sadness? How do you do impotence? How do you do frustration? What could you do differently? What could You Do differently There's no getting out of this But through that it sucks It sucks. We all want a magic pill We all want mummy and daddy to swoop down and save us or superman or superwoman to come down and save us But no one's coming. It's just you and your problems year on year on year What can you do do something even if it's the smallest thing? Do it every day focus on what you do want Do you want to be sad and impotent and frustrated in your own life? No, what do you want? Well, let's take the opposite. I would be more cheerful. I would be more optimistic I would be more potent and able to do things and instead of feeling frustrated I'd be fulfilled Okay, so what am I practicing? I'm practicing focusing on the things that make me happy cheerful Potent self-empowered and that make me feel fulfilled. Maybe I should be spending my time doing that Maybe that would be more useful If you're in a hole You don't get out the hole by walking around in the hole saying whole whole whole whole How big is the hole? It's two by two. How deep is the hole? It's up to my waist How long has the hole been there for as long as I can remember whole whole whole whole get out the fucking hole Get out dig your way out do something, but it must be you So there's some uncomfortable things here. It's you that means an internalized locus of control Do take action Nothing is going to change by you talking and talking and talking and thinking and thinking and thinking about it Nothing. I'm very pessimistic about that Those people I respect who differ with me on that particular point I don't see much use In talking about these things beyond a certain point, you know three hours four hours of chat if you've got a lot of trauma Yes, but every conversation has to move from there's the terrible thing It's in your past you're out of control of it We presume because if you're in control you wouldn't let it happen Past terrible out of control past terrible external locus of control Can we move to present? Can we move to future? Can we move to not terrible and internal locus of control? There's a very moderate goal not awful Not catastrophic not dramatic Stuff that you do that you're in charge of That is in your present moment because you can't touch the past It's fuck all you can do without a time machine But you could control what's happening in the present and then through doing that you can control what you're going to make more of in the future I'm happy to talk to you about narcissism and borderline personality disorder. I know people still have questions for me I'm I'm happy to talk about it But I think in future when people ask me about it I'm just going to say to them Could you go and watch this this video that you're watching right now first? So, you know exactly where I stand on it. I don't see much use in focusing on the problems and splitting them up all different ways I think it's uh I think it makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we're in control. It appeals to our intellectual vanity and basically what it is is um It's a coping mechanism that I can't remember the name of intellectualization we're intellectualizing problems that really need they can't be dealt with here They have to be dealt with here. We're moving around our grief. We're moving around our loss Be easier to just own the emotions have the emotional literacy Grieve for what's been lost and then move on Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and for your attention and I look forward to being together soon Oh, by the way, if you haven't done it yet, please consider joining my membership site over on spartanlifecoach.com. Cheers