Davis Aurini - Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas

Dec. 21, 2012 - Davis Aurini

17:06

Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas

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	Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas.
	Now it's no secret that there is a great deal of cynicism around the holiday season nowadays.
	Heck, it goes back, goes back decades.
	Charles Schultz was the first to point this out with his Peanuts Christmas special.
	Now Schultz was always an extremely observant fellow.
	Peanuts, the comic strip, is extremely dark and cynical if you pay attention.
	Very first comic strip went, There he is, good old Charlie Brown.
	How are you doing, Charlie Brown?
	He walks away.
	God, I hate him.
	The guy saw human nature for what it was.
	And if anybody were going to see the progressive commercialization of Christmas, it would have been him.
	And that's exactly what the Peanut Special is about.
	Nowadays, it's even more so.
	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.
	That always seems to fall a little bit short.
	It seems a little bit too much tinsel and not enough warmth of the home and hearth itself.
	But a historical racial memory that very few of us have experienced.
	And to explain what I mean by that, look at The Hobbit.
	Reading about Bilbo Baggins and his life and his home seems to evoke something that we can all recognize, but none of us had when we were young.
	At least not many of us did.
	It's a little bit hard to project one, like my own experiences, as to a norm.
	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.
	That our homes were never really homes the way our grandparents might have been, but just a rental unit, just a place that we lived.
	Something missing.
	And I was lucky with my childhood compared to a lot of people.
	And so I think there is something going on with this entire distrust, this cynicism towards Christmas.
	But before we can get to that, we need to look at personality disorders.
	Narcissism.
	Now, I covered this more extensively on my video on narcissism.
	So I won't go into too much detail here.
	But narcissism, what it boils down to, is two things.
	Image and shame.
	The narcissist craves attention so badly.
	It's called narcissistic supply.
	Anything that will feed into their image of themselves.
	And on the inside, they are filled with shame.
	They don't want to be caught for what they actually are.
	They don't have any pride or dignity.
	They are ashamed of who they are on the inside.
	And so on the outside, they try and project this image.
	Some of them will lie, some of them will exaggerate.
	They tend to create cults of personality because they constantly need that narcissistic supply, that supply of validation, saying that you are awesome, you are the king, you are whatever.
	And so these narcissists, they tend to react violently if they get caught in their delusions.
	They go into a narcissistic break, a narcissistic rage.
	It's a very primal lizard sort of a thing.
	Many of them will brag about being narcissists because, you know, they're not describing what narcissist actually means.
	They're creating their own image.
	And it's all about the surface.
	It's all about what others see them as.
	And the thing about the narcissist, the reason why they're so destructive to be around, they're not just a silly fool, they're not just a silly girl at the strip club enjoying the attention.
	They're actively destructive people, because in their quest to be the greatest whatever they want to be, they have to put others down.
	And so their ideal source of narcissistic supply will be somebody that they can constantly push down and insult and say, you're not as good as me because of this, constantly criticize.
	And this is where we get to codependence.
	Now codependence originally goes back to alcoholism.
	The recognition that it's not just the alcoholic with a problem, but it's the family and the friends that support this habit.
	But over the years, codependence has been refined a little bit.
	It's now a sort of masochism.
	It's when you allow one of these people, one of these Schedule II type personality disorders, but primarily the narcissist, when you allow them to feed off you.
	Now the thing is, the codependence isn't a mental disorder precisely.
	It's a series of learned behaviors.
	At the core of it, being codependent actually speaks rather highly of the person doing it.
	It tends to involve a lot of a white knight complex trying to save the other person, a martyr complex trying to suffer for the other person.
	You know, constantly bailing them out if they're in trouble.
	Constantly accepting their abuse and not retaliating.
	But the reason it becomes an issue, it's not just normal human behavior of loving people and sometimes putting up with shit from them.
	It actually becomes pathological in that you can begin seeking this out.
	You can go and seek out these behaviors because it's what you're used to.
	If you had Schedule II type parents, there's a good chance that you learn to be codependent.
	And there is something very attractive about the push-pull.
	It's the same mechanism with gambling, the random, unpredictable rewards, that with a Schedule II type person, when they're nice, you feel wonderful, but they're not predictable.
	And so you get a bit of an addiction to their unpredictability.
	They're alternating hot, cold, kind, cruel.
	And particularly, if you grew up with narcissistic parents, then you will seek this out in the future.
	Now that said, let's talk about narcissism on broader levels.
	The last psychiatrist has argued consistently and very convincingly that we live in a narcissistic culture.
	And it shouldn't take too much explanation for you guys to see that.
	Look at what we have out of Hollywood.
	It's all glamour.
	It's all image.
	We have people that are famous merely for the sake of being famous, the Lindsay Lohands or whoever rich heiress, the in company.
	I don't really follow Hollywood folks.
	We've got shows, the reality TV shows, where the person that can misbehave the worst is the one that's rewarded.
	The one that can be the most destructive, self-centered person is rewarded.
	Not with positive attention, granted, we're not exactly giving these people knighthoods, but narcissists don't need positive attention necessarily.
	They can feed just as easily off of negative attention, which is what these people do.
	And if you look at the high-end Hollywood, if you look at the low-level stuff that trickles down to us proletariat, well, what's the message in all of that?
	Is that you have to be this image, this artificial plastic construct, this Disney princess lifestyle that has no bearing on reality.
	Consider for a moment the ideal Hollywood life and then think about The Hobbit again, a book written by a good author.
	You can feel the fakeness in the Hollywood.
	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, and they all have expensive cards and expensive clothing.
	And none of us get to live that.
	It's a fantasy realm.
	It's a dream.
	It's not even internally coherent.
	No more than a narcissist's projected identity is coherent.
	So it's the world we find ourselves in, where we're constantly feeling inadequate, that life isn't quite as exciting as it should be, not quite as flashing colorful as it ought to be.
	These are the products for narcissistic culture, where we're all trying to be an image rather than being ourselves and living like actual human beings.
	And the horror of it is because everyone else is doing it, you can't find real people to associate with.
	We're all going down together, folks.
	But now let's go back for a moment.
	Let's go back to the codependent.
	Because one interesting thing that you'll find about codependents is that as they mature, many of them start behaving like narcissists.
	Now they're not true narcissists.
	A true narcissist is so wrapped up in the pattern, it's similar to a black hole.
	Once it falls past the event horizon, it can't get out again.
	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.
	But the ego that prevents them, that doesn't want to look inside, can never be curled back to cure the excessive ego.
	So they're trapped.
	You know, maybe there's a soul somewhere in the eye of that maelstrom, but can't really find it from the outside.
	Every demon walks around in its own hell.
	But the fake narcissist, the codependent manifesting the narcissist, is not a true narcissist.
	They're putting up a shell.
	They're putting on a persona because they've been the victim of the narcissist all this time.
	So they try and become the victimizer.
	It's the only two roles that they've learned.
	And so I think you see that with a lot of people nowadays.
	That in this narcissistic culture, we always felt like we were inadequate, that we weren't cool enough, we didn't get invited to the right parties, even though those parties don't exist.
	And so then you see the people manifesting and becoming douchebags, becoming trying to be cool, trying to manifest all of this stuff.
	Well, deep and down, they're not finding it satisfying.
	still something wrong.
	Now, let's bring this back to Christmas.
	Christmas songs.
	Every major Christmas song was written during the childhood of the baby boomers.
	The baby boomers, the most narcissistic generation to ever live.
	And so all these songs seem to speak about fireplaces and warmth and a tight-knit family and a community, all this stuff that we see in the Hobbit that rings hollow to us when we think about our modern era.
	We listen to these Christmas songs, and it's almost insulting because we've never got to experience anything like that.
	So we have these baby boomers, the most narcissistic generation ever.
	What do they do to their kids?
	Most of us became latchkey kids.
	Most of us were just, here's some really bad advice.
	I'm too selfish.
	I'm living my own life.
	You're an accessory to validate me.
	And so now, Christmas dinner, so often, it's not an excuse to, it's not this warm, familial get together, have some drinks, and have a great time.
	There's always this edge of make sure you behave.
	Let's, where, like, even though the family's shattered and broken, we're all going to get along.
	We love you, pretend that you're somebody else.
	And so that, I think, is where the cynicism regarding Christmas comes from.
	That the culture, the culture that our parents handed over to us, is that of the narcissist.
	And us being warm, normal people, inducted into this, not knowing anything better, wound up with a bit of codependence.
	We so much want approval in our culture, and yet we can never actually find that approval.
	And Christmas, which is supposed to be the warmest and most familial of the holidays, really, really rubs that in.
	That all we want is some happiness and some family and some warm times.
	Instead, it has to be a psychodrama.
	Instead, it's two months of Christmas music.
	It's advertisements all over the place.
	It's pictures showing these people having a wonderful time that you can never live up to, that no experience can possibly live up to.
	And this is what drives the cynicism.
	is the natural reaction of a codependent that's beginning to wake up to what's going on.
	A solution for the codependent is not to renounce the traits that make them codependent.
	The traits that make a codependent a codependent are positive traits.
	They're caring about somebody, they're being willing to sacrifice for somebody.
	But the trick is learning not to fall into psychodramas, to learn to care about people that care about you back.
	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.
	And in the meantime, with all the nonsense we have to deal with, pull back.
	Don't get involved in a psychodrama.
	Pull back, find your center.
	If your family's pissing you off, bring a book to read and let it fall off you like water off a duck's back.
	Don't get angry and fight and join one of the anti-Christmas crowds.
	No, we should be bringing it back to the source.
	Anyway, Merry Christmas to all you folks.
	Hope you have a good time.

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