Leo D.M.J. Aurini - December 21, 2012


Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

126.06414

Word count

2,162

Sentence count

215

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Narcissism, Codependency, and Cynicism on Christmas. Narcissism and codependency are two of the most common mental disorders in modern times. They are the root cause of our cynicism towards the holiday season.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas.
00:00:07.000 Now, it's no secret that there is a great deal of cynicism around the holiday season nowadays.
00:00:15.000 Heck, it goes back decades.
00:00:19.000 Charles Schulz was the first to point this out with his Peanuts Christmas special.
00:00:24.000 Now, Schulz was always an extremely observant fellow. Peanuts, the comic strip, is extremely dark and cynical if you pay attention.
00:00:34.000 The very first comic strip went,
00:00:37.000 There he is, good old Charlie Brown. How are you doing, Charlie Brown?
00:00:41.000 He walks away, God, I hate him.
00:00:45.000 The guy saw human nature for what it was.
00:00:49.000 And if anybody were going to see the progressive commercialization of Christmas, it would have been him.
00:00:56.000 And that's exactly what the Peanuts special is about.
00:00:59.000 Nowadays, it's even more so.
00:01:01.000 In fact, I'd wager that a great deal of this war on Christmas tends to stem from bitterness that Gen X and Millennials feel regarding the holiday. 0.51
00:01:14.000 It always seems to fall a little bit short.
00:01:17.000 It seems a little bit too much tinsel and not enough warmth of the home and hearth itself,
00:01:25.000 but a historical racial memory that very few of us have experienced.
00:01:32.000 And to explain what I mean by that, look at The Hobbit.
00:01:35.000 Reading about Bilbo Baggins and his life and his home seems to evoke something that we can all recognize,
00:01:44.000 but none of us had when we were young.
00:01:48.000 At least not many of us did.
00:01:50.000 It's a little bit hard to project my own experiences as to a norm.
00:01:58.000 But given the data I've seen, the lacking edge of warmth seems to be a universal trait that we all feel regarding our homes.
00:02:08.000 That our homes were never really homes the way our grandparents might have been, but just a rental unit.
00:02:17.000 Just a place that we lived.
00:02:19.000 Something missing.
00:02:21.000 And I was lucky with my childhood compared to a lot of people.
00:02:26.000 And so I think there is something going on with this entire distrust, this cynicism towards Christmas.
00:02:37.000 But before we can get to that, we need to look at personality disorders.
00:02:43.000 Narcissism.
00:02:46.000 Now, I covered this more extensively in my video on narcissism.
00:02:51.000 So I won't go into too much detail here.
00:02:53.000 But narcissism, what it boils down to, is two things.
00:02:57.000 Image and shame.
00:03:00.000 The narcissist craves attention so badly.
00:03:07.000 It's called narcissistic supply.
00:03:10.000 Anything that will feed into their image of themselves.
00:03:15.000 And on the inside, they are filled with shame.
00:03:18.000 They don't want to be caught for what they actually are.
00:03:23.000 They don't have any pride or dignity.
00:03:27.000 They are ashamed of who they are on the inside.
00:03:31.000 And so on the outside, they try and project this image.
00:03:34.000 Some of them will lie.
00:03:35.000 Some of them will exaggerate.
00:03:36.000 They tend to create cults of personality.
00:03:38.000 Because they constantly need that narcissistic supply.
00:03:42.000 That supply of validation.
00:03:44.000 Saying that you are awesome.
00:03:45.000 You are the king.
00:03:46.000 You are whatever.
00:03:48.000 And so these narcissists, they tend to react violently if they get caught in their delusions.
00:03:55.000 They go into a narcissistic break.
00:03:57.000 A narcissistic rage.
00:03:58.000 It's a very primal lizard sort of a thing.
00:04:05.000 Many of them will brag about being narcissists.
00:04:07.000 Because, you know, they are not describing what narcissist actually means.
00:04:11.000 They are creating their own image.
00:04:13.000 And it's all about the surface.
00:04:16.000 It's all about what others see them as.
00:04:21.000 And the thing about the narcissist.
00:04:22.000 The reason why they are so destructive to be around. 1.00
00:04:25.000 The reason why they are not just a silly fool. 1.00
00:04:27.000 They are not just a silly girl at the strip club enjoying the attention. 1.00
00:04:32.000 They are actively destructive people. 0.99
00:04:34.000 Because in their quest to be the greatest whatever they want to be.
00:04:39.000 They have to put others down.
00:04:41.000 And so their ideal source of narcissistic supply.
00:04:45.000 Will be somebody that they can constantly push down and insult.
00:04:48.000 And say you are not as good as me because of this.
00:04:50.000 Constantly criticize.
00:04:51.000 And this is where we get to codependence.
00:04:55.000 Now, codependence originally goes back to alcoholism.
00:05:01.000 The recognition that it's not just the alcoholic with the problem.
00:05:05.000 But it's the family and the friends that support this habit.
00:05:12.000 But over the years, codependence has been refined a little bit.
00:05:16.000 It's now a sort of masochism.
00:05:19.000 It's when you allow one of these people.
00:05:23.000 One of these schedule 2 type personality disorders.
00:05:25.000 But primarily the narcissist.
00:05:27.000 When you allow them to feed off you.
00:05:30.000 Now the thing is that codependence isn't a mental disorder precisely.
00:05:37.000 It's a series of learned behaviors.
00:05:41.000 At the core of it, being codependent actually speaks rather highly of the person doing it.
00:05:48.000 It tends to involve a lot of a white knight complex.
00:05:51.000 A knight complex trying to save the other person.
00:05:53.000 A martyr complex trying to suffer for the other person.
00:05:58.000 You know, constantly bailing them out if they're in trouble.
00:06:03.000 Constantly accepting their abuse and not retaliating.
00:06:06.000 But the reason it becomes an issue. 0.99
00:06:10.000 It's not just normal human behavior of loving people and sometimes putting up with shit from them. 0.98
00:06:18.000 It actually becomes pathological. 0.97
00:06:21.000 In that you can begin seeking this out.
00:06:24.000 You can go and seek out these behaviors because it's what you're used to.
00:06:28.000 If you had schedule 2 type parents, there's a good chance that you learned to be codependent.
00:06:39.000 And there is something very attractive about the push-pull.
00:06:43.000 It's the same mechanism with gambling.
00:06:46.000 The random, unpredictable rewards.
00:06:49.000 That with a schedule 2 type person.
00:06:52.000 When they're nice, you feel wonderful, but they're not predictable.
00:06:56.000 And so you get a bit of an addiction to their unpredictability.
00:07:00.000 They're alternating hot-cold, kind-cruel.
00:07:04.000 And particularly, if you grew up with narcissistic parents, then you will seek this out in the future.
00:07:16.000 Now that said, let's talk about narcissism on broader levels.
00:07:21.000 The Last Psychiatrist has argued consistently and very convincingly that we live in a narcissistic culture.
00:07:30.000 And it shouldn't take too much explanation for you guys to see that.
00:07:35.000 Look at what we have out of Hollywood.
00:07:38.000 It's all glamour.
00:07:39.000 It's all image.
00:07:41.000 We have people that are famous merely for the sake of being famous.
00:07:46.000 The Lindsay Lohans or whoever, Rich Eris.
00:07:51.000 The inn company.
00:07:54.000 I don't really follow Hollywood, folks.
00:07:57.000 We've got shows, the reality TV shows, where the person that can misbehave the worst is the one that's rewarded.
00:08:05.000 The one that can be the most destructive, self-centered person is rewarded.
00:08:10.000 Not with positive attention, granted.
00:08:13.000 We're not exactly giving these people knighthoods.
00:08:15.000 But narcissists don't need positive attention, necessarily.
00:08:20.000 They can feed just as easily off of negative attention, which is what these people do.
00:08:25.000 And if you...
00:08:28.000 Let's look at the high-end Hollywood.
00:08:30.000 If you look at the low-level stuff that trickles down to us proletariat...
00:08:34.000 Well, what's the message in all of that?
00:08:37.000 The message in all of that is that you have to be this image.
00:08:42.000 This artificial plastic construct.
00:08:44.000 This Disney princess lifestyle that has no bearing on reality.
00:08:49.000 Consider for a moment the ideal Hollywood life and then think about The Hobbit again.
00:08:56.000 A book written by a good author.
00:08:58.000 You can feel the fakeness in the Hollywood.
00:09:05.000 We see these music videos where there's all these people, they're beautiful, they're going to these awesome parties and they're having so much fun.
00:09:12.000 They all have expensive cars and expensive clothing.
00:09:15.000 And none of us get to live that.
00:09:17.000 It's a fantasy realm.
00:09:20.000 It's a dream.
00:09:21.000 It's not even internally coherent.
00:09:24.000 No more than a narcissist's projected identity is coherent.
00:09:34.000 So it's the world we find ourselves in.
00:09:36.000 We're constantly feeling inadequate.
00:09:39.000 That life isn't quite as exciting as it should be.
00:09:42.000 Not quite as flashy and colourful as it ought to be.
00:09:46.000 These are the products of a narcissistic culture.
00:09:50.000 Where we're all trying to be an image rather than being ourselves and living like actual human beings.
00:09:59.000 And the horror of it is because everyone else is doing it, you can't find real people to associate with.
00:10:07.000 We're all going down together, folks.
00:10:11.000 But now let's go back for a moment.
00:10:18.000 Let's go back to the codependent.
00:10:24.000 Because one interesting thing that you'll find about codependence is that as they mature, many of them start behaving like narcissists.
00:10:38.000 Now, they're not true narcissists.
00:10:41.000 A true narcissist is so wrapped up in the pattern.
00:10:45.000 It's similar to a black hole.
00:10:47.000 Once it falls past the event horizon, it can't get out again.
00:10:51.000 And the narcissist falls through a personal event horizon where they would have to be so vulnerable and open up the part of them that's ashamed to overcome the narcissism.
00:11:04.000 But the ego that prevents them, that doesn't want to look inside, can never be curled back to cure the excessive ego.
00:11:14.000 So they're trapped.
00:11:15.000 You know, maybe there's a soul somewhere in the eye of that maelstrom, but you can't really find it from the outside.
00:11:26.000 Every demon walks around in its own hell.
00:11:33.000 But the fake narcissist, the codependent manifesting the narcissist, is not a true narcissist. 0.95
00:11:42.000 They are putting up a shell.
00:11:44.000 They're putting on a persona.
00:11:46.000 Because they've been the victim of the narcissist all this time.
00:11:49.000 So they try and become the victimizer.
00:11:52.000 It's the only two roles that they've learned.
00:11:58.000 And so I think you see that with a lot of people nowadays.
00:12:01.000 That in this narcissistic culture, we always felt like we were inadequate.
00:12:07.000 That we weren't cool enough.
00:12:08.000 We didn't get invited to the right parties, even though those parties don't exist.
00:12:13.000 And so then you see the people manifesting and becoming douchebags, becoming, trying to be cool, trying to manifest all of this stuff.
00:12:23.000 Well, deep and down, they're not finding it satisfying.
00:12:26.000 There's still something wrong.
00:12:33.000 Now, let's bring this back to Christmas.
00:12:40.000 Christmas songs.
00:12:42.000 Every major Christmas song was written during the childhood of the Baby Boomers. 0.98
00:12:52.000 The Baby Boomers, the most narcissistic generation to ever live. 1.00
00:13:02.000 And so all these songs, they seem to speak about fireplaces and warmth and a tight-knit family and a community.
00:13:10.000 All this stuff that we see in The Hobbit that rings hollow to us when we think about our modern era.
00:13:16.000 We listen to these Christmas songs, and it's almost insulting because we've never got to experience anything like that.
00:13:26.000 So, we have these Baby Boomers, the most narcissistic generation ever. 1.00
00:13:33.000 What did they do to their kids?
00:13:36.000 Most of us became latchkey kids.
00:13:40.000 Most of us were just, here's some really bad advice.
00:13:44.000 I'm too selfish.
00:13:45.000 I'm living my own life.
00:13:47.000 You're an accessory to validate me.
00:13:53.000 And so now, Christmas dinner.
00:13:57.000 So often, it's not an excuse to...
00:13:59.000 It's not this warm, familial, get-together, have some drinks, and have a great time.
00:14:04.000 There's always this edge of make sure you behave.
00:14:09.000 Even though the family's shattered and broken, we're all going to get along.
00:14:14.000 We love you.
00:14:15.000 Pretend that you're somebody else.
00:14:16.000 And so that, I think, is where the cynicism regarding Christmas comes from.
00:14:30.000 That the culture, the culture that our parents handed over to us, is that of the narcissist.
00:14:38.000 And us, being warm, normal people, inducted into this, not knowing anything better, wound up with a bit of codependence.
00:14:49.000 We so much want approval in our culture, and yet we can never actually find that approval.
00:14:56.000 And Christmas, which is supposed to be the warmest and most familial of the holidays, really, really rubs that in.
00:15:06.000 That all we want is some happiness and some family and some warm times.
00:15:12.000 Instead, it has to be a psychodrama.
00:15:16.000 Instead, it's two months of Christmas music.
00:15:19.000 It's advertisements all over the place.
00:15:22.000 It's pictures showing these people having a wonderful time that you can never live up to.
00:15:26.000 That no experience can possibly live up to.
00:15:29.000 And this is what drives the cynicism.
00:15:33.000 It is the natural reaction of a codependent that's beginning to wake up to what's going on.
00:15:40.000 A solution for the codependent is not to renounce the traits that make them codependent.
00:15:53.000 The traits that make a codependent a codependent are positive traits.
00:15:57.000 They're caring about somebody.
00:15:59.000 They're being willing to sacrifice for somebody.
00:16:02.000 But the trick is learning not to fall into psychodramas.
00:16:07.000 To learn to care about people that care about you back.
00:16:12.000 And so, when it comes to Christmas, I'd say it's up to our generation to reinvent it, to bring it back to its roots.
00:16:27.000 And in the meantime, with all the nonsense we have to deal with, pull back.
00:16:34.000 Don't get involved in a psychodrama.
00:16:37.000 Pull back.
00:16:39.000 Find your center.
00:16:41.000 If your family's pissing you off, bring a book to read.
00:16:46.000 Let it fall off you like water off a duck's back.
00:16:52.000 Don't get angry and fight and join one of the anti-Christmas crowds.
00:16:57.000 No, we should be bringing it back to the source.
00:17:01.000 Anyway, Merry Christmas to all of you folks.
00:17:05.000 Hope you have a good time.
00:17:07.000 Irene out.