Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
126.06414
Summary
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
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Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas.
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Now, it's no secret that there is a great deal of cynicism around the holiday season nowadays.
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Charles Schulz was the first to point this out with his Peanuts Christmas special.
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Now, Schulz was always an extremely observant fellow. Peanuts, the comic strip, is extremely dark and cynical if you pay attention.
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There he is, good old Charlie Brown. How are you doing, Charlie Brown?
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And if anybody were going to see the progressive commercialization of Christmas, it would have been him.
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And that's exactly what the Peanuts special is about.
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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.
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It seems a little bit too much tinsel and not enough warmth of the home and hearth itself,
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but a historical racial memory that very few of us have experienced.
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And to explain what I mean by that, look at The Hobbit.
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Reading about Bilbo Baggins and his life and his home seems to evoke something that we can all recognize,
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It's a little bit hard to project my own experiences as to a norm.
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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.
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That our homes were never really homes the way our grandparents might have been, but just a rental unit.
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And I was lucky with my childhood compared to a lot of people.
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And so I think there is something going on with this entire distrust, this cynicism towards Christmas.
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But before we can get to that, we need to look at personality disorders.
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Now, I covered this more extensively in my video on narcissism.
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But narcissism, what it boils down to, is two things.
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Anything that will feed into their image of themselves.
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They don't want to be caught for what they actually are.
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They are ashamed of who they are on the inside.
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And so on the outside, they try and project this image.
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Because they constantly need that narcissistic supply.
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And so these narcissists, they tend to react violently if they get caught in their delusions.
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Many of them will brag about being narcissists.
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Because, you know, they are not describing what narcissist actually means.
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The reason why they are so destructive to be around.
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They are not just a silly girl at the strip club enjoying the attention.
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Because in their quest to be the greatest whatever they want to be.
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And so their ideal source of narcissistic supply.
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Will be somebody that they can constantly push down and insult.
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And say you are not as good as me because of this.
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Now, codependence originally goes back to alcoholism.
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The recognition that it's not just the alcoholic with the problem.
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But it's the family and the friends that support this habit.
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But over the years, codependence has been refined a little bit.
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One of these schedule 2 type personality disorders.
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Now the thing is that codependence isn't a mental disorder precisely.
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At the core of it, being codependent actually speaks rather highly of the person doing it.
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It tends to involve a lot of a white knight complex.
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A knight complex trying to save the other person.
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A martyr complex trying to suffer for the other person.
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You know, constantly bailing them out if they're in trouble.
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Constantly accepting their abuse and not retaliating.
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It's not just normal human behavior of loving people and sometimes putting up with shit from them.
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You can go and seek out these behaviors because it's what you're used to.
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If you had schedule 2 type parents, there's a good chance that you learned to be codependent.
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And there is something very attractive about the push-pull.
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When they're nice, you feel wonderful, but they're not predictable.
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And so you get a bit of an addiction to their unpredictability.
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And particularly, if you grew up with narcissistic parents, then you will seek this out in the future.
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Now that said, let's talk about narcissism on broader levels.
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The Last Psychiatrist has argued consistently and very convincingly that we live in a narcissistic culture.
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And it shouldn't take too much explanation for you guys to see that.
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We have people that are famous merely for the sake of being famous.
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We've got shows, the reality TV shows, where the person that can misbehave the worst is the one that's rewarded.
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The one that can be the most destructive, self-centered person is rewarded.
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We're not exactly giving these people knighthoods.
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But narcissists don't need positive attention, necessarily.
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They can feed just as easily off of negative attention, which is what these people do.
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If you look at the low-level stuff that trickles down to us proletariat...
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The message in all of that is that you have to be this image.
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This Disney princess lifestyle that has no bearing on reality.
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Consider for a moment the ideal Hollywood life and then think about The Hobbit again.
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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.
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They all have expensive cars and expensive clothing.
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No more than a narcissist's projected identity is coherent.
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That life isn't quite as exciting as it should be.
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Not quite as flashy and colourful as it ought to be.
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These are the products of a narcissistic culture.
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Where we're all trying to be an image rather than being ourselves and living like actual human beings.
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And the horror of it is because everyone else is doing it, you can't find real people to associate with.
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Because one interesting thing that you'll find about codependence is that as they mature, many of them start behaving like narcissists.
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A true narcissist is so wrapped up in the pattern.
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Once it falls past the event horizon, it can't get out again.
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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.
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But the ego that prevents them, that doesn't want to look inside, can never be curled back to cure the excessive ego.
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You know, maybe there's a soul somewhere in the eye of that maelstrom, but you can't really find it from the outside.
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But the fake narcissist, the codependent manifesting the narcissist, is not a true narcissist.
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Because they've been the victim of the narcissist all this time.
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And so I think you see that with a lot of people nowadays.
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That in this narcissistic culture, we always felt like we were inadequate.
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We didn't get invited to the right parties, even though those parties don't exist.
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And so then you see the people manifesting and becoming douchebags, becoming, trying to be cool, trying to manifest all of this stuff.
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Well, deep and down, they're not finding it satisfying.
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Every major Christmas song was written during the childhood of the Baby Boomers.
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The Baby Boomers, the most narcissistic generation to ever live.
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And so all these songs, they seem to speak about fireplaces and warmth and a tight-knit family and a community.
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All this stuff that we see in The Hobbit that rings hollow to us when we think about our modern era.
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We listen to these Christmas songs, and it's almost insulting because we've never got to experience anything like that.
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So, we have these Baby Boomers, the most narcissistic generation ever.
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Most of us were just, here's some really bad advice.
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It's not this warm, familial, get-together, have some drinks, and have a great time.
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There's always this edge of make sure you behave.
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Even though the family's shattered and broken, we're all going to get along.
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And so that, I think, is where the cynicism regarding Christmas comes from.
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That the culture, the culture that our parents handed over to us, is that of the narcissist.
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And us, being warm, normal people, inducted into this, not knowing anything better, wound up with a bit of codependence.
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We so much want approval in our culture, and yet we can never actually find that approval.
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And Christmas, which is supposed to be the warmest and most familial of the holidays, really, really rubs that in.
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That all we want is some happiness and some family and some warm times.
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It's pictures showing these people having a wonderful time that you can never live up to.
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It is the natural reaction of a codependent that's beginning to wake up to what's going on.
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A solution for the codependent is not to renounce the traits that make them codependent.
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The traits that make a codependent a codependent are positive traits.
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They're being willing to sacrifice for somebody.
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But the trick is learning not to fall into psychodramas.
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To learn to care about people that care about you back.
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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.
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And in the meantime, with all the nonsense we have to deal with, pull back.
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If your family's pissing you off, bring a book to read.
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Let it fall off you like water off a duck's back.
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Don't get angry and fight and join one of the anti-Christmas crowds.
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No, we should be bringing it back to the source.