Tiffany Norton is at the Comedy center for Sunday night. There's a gentleman who's on TikTok who's a. coach about narcissistic family dynamics. And oftent people who suffer from this particular disorder won't seek treatment.
Tiffany Norton is at the Comedy center for Sunday night. Hope you guys had a great weekend.
Tonight I really want to talk about family relationships. There's a gentleman who's on TikTok who's a. coach about narcissistic family dynamics. He suggests that we don't really understand the concept of free will. And oftent people who suffer from this particular disorder won't seek treatment.
When you're talking about the possible toxic effects of living in these kind of dynamics, here's a little list. And just check in with yourself and see. In the book she has you do a journaling exercise where you rate it 1 through 5.
Possible toxic effects on you from being raised by a parent with narcissistic personality disorder or extreme self absorption. Much of the time I feel out of sorts or off balance. I am often distracted, have a lack of focus and find it hard to concentrate. I'm struggling with keeping optimistic about the future.
All right, number 12. I am very dissatisfied with my accomplishments now. The narcissism comes from deep seated insecurities that they have just walled over. So if you're feeling dissatisfied with your accomplishments, that might be part of why.
We're talking about family relationships because I'm going through a deal right now. My, my parents are aging, right. And there's a lot of stress. And so I'm trying to be gentle with everybody involved, but it's. Sometimes it's kind of high stakes.
These might be some defense mechanisms that you have developed over the years. These are, these are designed to protect yourself. Displacement is often used when you cannot directly attack a particular target. Withdrawal can be both conscious, unconscious, but in either case it's a defense mechanism.
Projection. Now that's when we hear a lot about, when we're talking about people that suffer from npd. Projection was defined in an earlier chapter as getting rid of something unacceptable about yourself by unconsciously projecting it onto another person. You then have verification for how you respond to that person.
Overvaluing yourself can also result from toxic buildup when you protect your inner self from feeling inadequate. Become aware of devaluing yourself either to others or to yourself. How can you strike a balance between these two sides and become more appreciative of your strengths.
Are any or most of these behaviors and attitudes reflective of me? Have I been criticized for any of these? If you do any of the following, you are taking advantage. Talk to professionals. Cadre is a great resource.
Hello. Hello, everyone. It is Sunday night. Tiffany Norton here, Comedy center. What's going on? Hope you guys had a great weekend. I'm gonna pop right into something right away. Now, this is a book that we've been talking about on and off again. And I'll explain why I keep coming back to this because I keep going back and finding new nuggets. But tonight I really want to talk about family relationships, which, no surprise there. Right? But specifically, what I want to talk about is there's a gentleman who's on TikTok who's a.
He talks often about narcissistic family dynamics, and he actually coaches people that had narcissistic parents and like the diagnosed kind. But that word gets tossed around a lot, and it doesn't. We're all, you know, to a certain extent, narcissistic. I mean, we, you know, we live in our own brains. Right, But. And I think I'll try to do some research on it for next week. But this author, Robert Sapolsky, and I've. I've mentioned him before, but he. He makes an argument that we don't really understand the concept of free will the way that we think we do.
And this gentleman on TikTok that I listened to was bringing that up, and I read the book he was referring to, and I kind of missed this nugget. So I was happy that he brought it back up. He basically identified the fact that when you're asking yourself if, you know, your narcissistic family member can change or, you know, you're analyzing their behavior or maybe you went through a breakup and now you're binge reading everything about narcissism, you think everybody's a narcissist and everything's narcissistic and whatever.
Right. But the question you should ask yourself is this was his suggestion is could they change even if they wanted to? I mean, can they actually have a different brain and a different experience? And the answer is no. You know, the, The. The way that we develop through childhood, whatever defense mechanisms are, when you're dealing with someone who's very narcissistic or has, you know, a highly combative person, that's a defense mechanism, more than likely from childhood. Right. But certain people will work on that kind of stuff and go to therapy and talk it through and try to make sense of it.
And. And oftent people who suffer from this particular disorder won't seek treatment. And here's some interesting reasons why. Okay, so I'm going to go through little list, but tonight we're talking again. Children of the self absorbed, if you haven't gotten your copy yet, should. But when you're talking about the possible toxic effects of living in these kind of dynamics, here's a little list. And just check in with yourself and see. And in fact, in the book she has you do a journaling exercise where you rate it 1 through 5.
Like very accurate, you know, not accurate at all. Right. But we're not gonna do that tonight. Possible toxic effects on you from being raised by a parent with narcissistic personality disorder or extreme self absorption. Okay. They may not have the diagnosis, but absorbed. Right. Toxic effects. Number one. And this is how it manifests as the child. So these are first person. I have to wait. I have high to extreme high levels of stress much of the time. Check. Number two. I am or have been told that I'm easily irritated and frequently cranky.
Not so much. But sometimes I frequently experience disturbed sleep such as upsetting dreams or insomnia. Oh, yeah, yeah. I get that. Much of the time I feel out of sorts or off balance. Not so much lately, but I definitely have. I am often distracted, have a lack of focus and find it hard to concentrate. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes My overall enjoyment is usually defleated. Now lately mine has been. Yeah. And I've been trying to work on it. Number seven. I have a lot of intrusive, unpleasant thoughts.
Yeah, that's. That's part of what I'm trying to work on too, you know. And what are the strategies for interrupting an upsetting thought or disrupting thought? You know, you got to try to disrupt the disruption and you know, talk nicer to yourself. But we'll talk strategies in a sec. Number eight, I am usually disorganized. No, not so much on that one. But that's also, I think, because that's a coping mechanism I've developed over the years because I have attention deficit disorder. And if I'm not highly organized, I lose things.
So I don't know. Number nine. I have considerable disfection with my physical self sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Number 10, my relationships are not satisfying or enriching. You know, they can be. And then, you know, sometimes it, it's. It, it's. Anyway, we'll keep going. Life's meaning and purpose is often missing or not satisf. I'm kind of relating with that one right now. I'm. I'm. I'm struggling with keeping optimistic right. About the future and, and trying to plan out some things that I'm going to be excited for so that I have something to kind of work for.
But, you know, I'm working on it. It's almost summertime, so that's good. All right, number 12. I am very dissatisfied with my accomplishments now. That one's huge. I think when you are personally dissatisfied with your own accomplishments, where, what is that like, what's that about? And when you've been raised in an environment where you had a person in your life with some of these traits, you may not have received praise. In fact, you may have received rejection the more successful you were. And it's hard to understand from the child's perspective, but if you understand it from the narcissist perspective, the narcissism comes from deep seated insecurities that they have just walled over.
Like if you can imagine a wing of a house and you just drywalled one end of it closed and just never used it and acted like it wasn't there. That's, that's kind of what's going on internally. And so they cannot acknowledge these things because acknowledging these things about themselves being not perfect, being not, you know, the smartest. Da da da da. By doing that cracks a hole in that, that old room. And it, you know, in that room there's stuff that's, that's being hid and it's being hidden for a reason because they do not want to face it.
And so when you touch on that kind of stuff with people, you expect, you know, you're going to get a strong reaction because they're literally protecting themselves. And so when you're a. And let's say that you're perceived to be more successful than that parent, that parent becomes a rival to you. They, and I'm not sure that they're even capable of viewing it any other way. And I'm saying that repeating that because I wanted to, I want you to understand that it, they can't operate a different way.
They can't change it. So if you're feeling dissatisfied with your accomplishments, you know, that might be part of why. Oh, hey, be happy. Welcome in. Good to see ya. We're just talking a little bit about one of my books, Children of the Self Absorbed. Not my book. I didn't write it. But we're talking about family relationships because I'm, I'm, I'm going through a deal right now. My, my parents are aging, right. And there's a lot of stress. And so I'm trying to be gentle with everybody involved, but it's.
Yeah, sometimes it's kind of high stakes. Right. Okay. So in this. Okay, I'll go to the next part. All right, cool. So if you've been raised in a self absorbed family or if you have a high conflict person that was, you know, your caretaker or whatever, these might be some defense mechanisms that you have developed over the years. Okay. And these are unconscious. You're not. These are, these are designed to protect yourself. Right. So one is displacement. Displacement is often used when you cannot directly attack a particular target.
Rather than taking whatever is on yourself, you put it on another target that is safer to attack. Family members are often the later or the latter targets. You've probably heard the example of a working man getting yelled at by his boss, becoming angry, going home and yelling at his wife for some minor or non existent act. That's displacement. It's not safe to attack the boss, so the anger's got to get displaced somewhere. And if you're the spouse or the child or whatever it might be you. Okay, so.
And then she gives a little reflection, something to think about or journal on. Think about an ins. An incident when you were unfairly accused, treated disrespectfully or ignored, or when you felt minimized or dismissed and were not in a position where you felt you could protest or complain about the treatment. Now reflect on what you did with your feelings about this treatment. Well, that's not necessarily a fun one to reflect on, but it's. It's probably a good idea. Right. Because you build up a lot of resentment.
Yeah. Okay, so that's one under the defense mechanisms displacement. Okay. Denial. We're familiar with denial. Denial is an unconscious mechanism that protects you from unacceptable and unpleasant truths about yourself. It is not a simple disagreement with what someone's saying about you. What they say may be accurate or inaccurate, but in either case you don't have to agree with it. The form of denial we are talking about here is deep seated, inaccessible to you. And you don't know if it's valid or invalid.
Yourself has decided that is much too dangerous or for its continued survival for you to be aware of or accept what is hidden. So again, talking about like the spaces in those rooms, right? Blocking ourselves off. Yeah. And denial is a powerful one. I think we all probably familiar with that. Withdrawal. Withdrawal can be both conscious, unconscious, but in either case it's a defense mechanism. I withdraw. That's me. And is usually an emotional or psychological flight from present danger. While physical withdrawal is usually a conscious act.
Psychological and emotional withdrawal is usually more likely to be a non conscious or unconscious level. You're frustrated. You can't air the frustration you've tried, it's not working. They're not communicating with you. You're not, you don't feel heard back or, or you're not being mirrored back your experience. And yeah, then you're gonna want to withdraw. And if you, if you are in a situation where, you know, it's your caretaker or your caretaking for someone, you can't necessarily physically withdraw, but people can always emotionally withdraw.
Right? So we're only talking about this just to kind of, you know, just get thinking about these things. And are, and are we using these strategies in. And if we are, are they helpful and you know, that kind of thing. Projection. Now that's when we hear a lot about, when we're talking about people that suffer from npd. Narcissistic personality disorder. Right. And I've seen a lot of stuff online about this and that's why I don't, even though this comes from a deep personal place, because I have family members with this disorder.
I, I always recommend go, go to somebody with like real letters and like a real book, you know, some of the tick tock stuff I've heard, even though I've got the one guy I like. Anyway. Okay, projection. Projection was defined in an earlier chapter as getting rid of something unacceptable about yourself or your. I'm sorry, unacceptable about your essential inner self by unconsciously projecting it onto another person and then reacting to the other person as if that person had exhibited what was projected.
All right, for example, if you were angry, you might project that anger onto another person as if that person was the one who made who the one who was angry. Like, have you ever said that? Well, you were the one, you were the one yelling at me. And they're like, I didn't yell at you. This is another way in which yourself can be protected from unpleasant awareness. Your shame, guilt, inadequacy, fears, and other negative and upsetting and dangerous aspects of yourself can be managed by putting them on to another person.
You then have verification for how you respond to that person. Since that person now seems to you to have the unacceptable characteristic that you cannot admit to yourself that you have. You don't accept it in your in essential inner self and you cannot accept it in the other person. So that's projection. Okay, and let's see here. Okay. Oh, yeah. Okay. So that was pretty much that. Okay, there we go. Perfect. So now she's going on and talking a little bit about acts against oneself. When we're in these, when we're using these kind of coping mechanisms growing up in these situations, you know, unpacking a lot of the stuff, it's, it's, it's not easy because we internalize a lot of the things that we did not like about the way that we were treated.
And we will continue to pass those things on if we, if we don't, you know, break the cycle, as they always say. Right. Okay. Helplessness. Helplessness is discussed separately from hopelessness because it has more negative connotations for self perception than does hopelessness. Lack of hope carries with it an implication that there are some outside influences that are preventing the person from being effective. Whereas helplessness is totally within the person. This person at this time does not have the wherewithal to be effective.
This. Thus helplessness is seen as a personal inadequacy and also as a failure. Here are some examples of helplessness in including feeling, saying or doing the following things. Here's a little list, couple ideas. Not knowing what to say or do that would be helpful to another person. Seeing an injustice or an unfair act, but not being able to stop it. Helplessness. Yeah. Being unable to prevent abusive acts on yourself. Disappointing yourself or someone else. Repeating the same mistake as such as choosing intimate partners who betray you.
Fun Helplessness. Right. Devaluing yourself. Devaluing yourself is particularly destructive response to toxic buildup. The world confronts you every day with your inadequacies, ineffectiveness, lack of ability and other negative qualities. When in addition to these, you yourself fail to appreciate your positive qualities. This failure only increases the negative effect on your inner essential self. So the roots of your devaluation, she's saying, is of yourself are located in your earth family of origin experiences together with your other past experiences.
Your self perception is most heavily influenced in its development by the reactions to you by others in your environment. That's your family, right? Your family and other significant people in your world. Early on you may have internalized some negative self self perceptions and these led you to devalue yourself. You may even focus more on what you perceive to be negative personal qualities than on your positive ones. Devaluing is not a form of modesty, being self effacing or shunning the limelight.
You know that's being like humble, right? This is. It is much more negative than these. And if you give any of these as an excuse, you're fooling yourself. You can be any or all of these things without devaluing yourself, right? So reflection again. Here's what she wants you to ponder. Become aware of devaluing yourself either to others or to yourself. How often do you minimize your qualities, actions, and achievements? Are you fearful of being thought of as arrogant or boastful? I am. How can you strike a balance between these two sides and become more appreciative of your strengths and other positive qualities without appearing arrogant or boastful?
Okay. She also lists a couple of behaviors, says these are some of the behaviors and attitudes that can be a reflection of overvaluing oneself because there's also. Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped. So overvaluing. Right. There's devaluing. Oh, I'm terrible. Oh, I'm the worst. Oh, I don't deserve it. Oh, God. Oops, he bumped my thing. Sorry, sorry. Hope no one's got vertigo. Anyway, overvaluing. Overvaluing yourself can also result from toxic buildup and. Toxic buildup, she's referring to this, this, this build up over time of you never really processing that where some of these defense mechanisms got installed.
And over time, it builds up. It's like dust, you know, and it collects and it collects and it collects and it puts a film on you and it affects everything, but you, you kind of can't see it until you wipe the film off. You know what I mean? Anyway, overvaluing yourself can also result from toxic buildup when you protect your essential inner self from shame and feeling inadequate by inflating your characteristics, actions, and accomplishments. In this instance, bragging and playing one upsmanship are common behaviors and attitudes.
Cutthroat competition, jealousy, envy, power struggles, and other negative reactions are examples of overvaluing oneself. And doing so hurts you, it hurts others, and it hurts your relationships. All of these can result from perceiving a strong need to project to protect your essential inner self. These are some of the behaviors and attitudes that can be a reflection of overvaluing oneself. If you do these things, never admitting mistakes or errors, as if you never commit these, feeling that you would not make errors if others did what they were supposed to do.
So the errors are actually their fault. Thinking that your contributions are more important than others and inflating your contributions or discounting those of others. Well, of course, we always think our contributions are the most important. Anyway, I never touched that. Anyway, everybody thinks they're the. Yeah. Anyway, Failing to accept personal responsibility. Well, no, that one, I don't. So I, I. Yeah. Continually boasting and bragging about your accomplishments, possessions and so on. Now, we all know people like that, right?
You know, the name droppers, the label wearers. Oh, what's that? You know, like, we get that, right? That's just compensating these behaviors and attitudes are associated with under developed narcissism and the fears of abandonment and destruction. The inability to understand and accept that others are also worthwhile and also unique, together with the need to protect the self from imagined dangers, leads to self absorption that negatively affects your relationships and prevents growth and development for those parts of your essential inner self that need them.
So here's the reflection on this one. Are any or most of these behaviors and attitudes reflective of me? Any of the ones I just listed, Have I been criticized for any of these? Could it be that I cannot see these behaviors and attitudes as reflective of me? Am I refusing to see or admit that some of these are descriptive of me? You know, I think we've all had the experience too. And just because some of these things are like, I've done that, you know, just because you've done something doesn't necessarily mean I don't like anybody to leap ahead.
You know, if, and if you think that you're maybe, maybe this is something that really does apply to you and, and you're thinking about maybe I should talk to professionals. Sure, absolutely. And Cadre is a great resource. They've got lots of good people that you can. Lots of good information and, and connections and stuff, you know, so definitely reach out if this is something that's, you know, bothering you. Right. Okay, so let's see. I did that one. Taking advantage of others. Okay. Taking advantage refers to the exploitation of another person or persons for your gain.
You perhaps unconsciously have a need to show your superiority, power, control, or manipulative ability. And you do this at the expense of other persons. Taking advantage demonstrates your contempt for the other people, implying that they are weak, unworthy, or of lesser value. You may think that you never take advantage of someone in this way, and perhaps you're right. But if you do any of the following, you are taking advantage. Okay, so here's the list. Telling a child to do something for you that you could do for yourself, such as getting the child to fetch something.
Now I kind of see where she's going with this one. I remember having to run and fetch a lot of things. I, I definitely remember doing that, you know, but it certainly is, and that's probably a behavior I did to my child. And I don't even. And you know, I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, I thought that one was interesting though. Making plans or social engagements without consulting with your spouse, partner or other family members. Well, okay, that's taking advantage of putting your name on reports and the like when you contributed little or nothing to their development.
So taking credit, right? Taking credit where it's not due, taking what others have or what you give them with no reciprocation, expecting to receive preferential treatment all or most of the time. Now, I have a friend that, you know, I'd known since grade school, and we're going to kind of wrap it up on this, but you know, that once and, and, and I was just embarrassed at, at how rude he just threw the kind of.
