Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all about parenting, good communication, family
relationships all over the world through the lens of self-government
and in this video I'm going to be talking about understanding the narcissism trend.
Narcissism definitely is on the rise. We have to be asking ourselves why is this happening. I know that
there are many psychologists, therapists who have noticed an increase in narcissistic cases in their
offices and there are reasons why some of this might be happening. Now, I don't pretend to know
the answer to everything but I do see some trends and I talk to a lot of families who come to me
trying to get coaching and help with their family problems and I have noticed that there are some
key things that are taking place societally that are probably trending people toward narcissistic
tendencies. There are things that we can do about it so let's take some time to understand it here
in this video. So, narcissism is definitely on the rise. Let's understand what narcissism actually
even is so that we can better understand how to identify it and what to do about it or
maybe even to try to reverse the trend, that would definitely be a positive outcome for
increasing our knowledge about narcissism. Narcissism is a type of psychological
abuse and it actually falls into the category of personality disorders. So, personality disorders are
really hard to break and they can create all kinds of relationship problems, fractured families.
There can even be safety problems that result because a person is so absorbed in their
narcissistic tendencies that they don't even fully think clearly. So when a person is a narcissist,
they really are focused on controlling certain things in their life. So, they are controlling
usually certain people to try to get certain outcomes and they use different strategies for
controlling people. I have a whole other video just on those strategies so be sure to look at
that video. In this video though, what I'd like to talk about is trying to reverse the trend. Let's
talk about personality disorders, narcissistic personality disorders. There's actually three
you've probably heard them referred to in different terms. So, there's just regular narcissism
which sounds like it's no big deal compared to the next level, which is being a sociopath and then
the final level being a psychopath. So, narcissism being on the rise is really frightening because
not only do we have a whole bunch of people not valuing others because they're just trying to get
stuff out of other people and use people to get things they want, which is your basic
run-of-the-mill narcissism. But then we also have the problem that that narcissism could start
trending towards something even more extreme like sociopathic behavior or psychopathic behavior,
which we definitely don't want to see increasing but sadly, there is a lot of that that's going on
right now as well. So, let's understand the differences between those three things.
The best description of the difference between narcissism, sociopaths and psychopaths is actually
in this book here. So, there is a book and I'm going to refer to this multiple times by Shannon Thomas
and she's a therapist and it's called Healing From Hidden Abuse and she really has spent a
lot of time and effort focusing on trying to help people heal from narcissistic relationships, the
trauma, the psychological abuse that has happened because of this hidden type of abuse which is what
narcissism is. It's usually hidden we're going to talk some more in other videos about what it looks
like so that you can see how hidden it truly is. So, Shannon talks about how a narcissist is a person
who will run over you with their car and just in order to get what they want. Then a sociopath
is a person who will run over you in their car and then they'll make a little smile like
that kind of felt good. I kind of liked that and she says but a psychopath will run over you
in their car and then they will back up and run over you again just to make sure the job
is really well done. Scary, right? Scary and this is the mentality of so many people that are around us
night right now. So, let's talk about how this has happened, how have we created an environment where
narcissism is starting to almost seem somewhat normal or commonplace and where so many people
are not feeling safe in their relationships or with friends or co-workers or sometimes even in
their church groups because there are these people that are trying to systematically control them
and doing so in really devious even hidden ways. So, we're going to talk more about toxic behaviors
related to narcissism and what is leading to narcissism but before we do, click the
subscribe button now you don't want to miss any more great videos related to narcissism or other
behaviors and improvement on this channel so click subscribe now. So, a narcissist is most often formed
by another narcissist. So, usually if one parent is a narcissist and they have chosen someone as their
target, then that target child oftentimes becomes a narcissist. Although it can also happen with the
allied child. Usually a narcissist sociopath or psychopath, they have their people that they use
to try to make their manipulations work and to try to inflict the most pain on their targets. So, they
pick a target person or it could even be a target group although usually it's easier to control one
person so they'll pick one or two people and then what they do is they show them all the bad, they
attack them, they do these devious things to them and nobody else knows about it. In fact if they
talk about it, people might think you're insane, that person's a great charismatic kind of a lady
or a guy and they would never believe it. In fact they probably think the person who is questioning
whether this treatment is okay, they might think that that person's a little bit crazy actually.
This is what it looks like and that target person sees okay, that's how you gain control, you have to
play these games so I've got to start learning how to play the games so that they adopt
the same games that are being used on them and they start using them on other people. They usually
don't turn and use them on the narcissist that was attacking them. Instead what they do is they start
practicing those skills on other people until they become the next generation of narcissist. Now the
ally is a person that the narcissist chooses to be their friend, the person that they show their
very best to. It's like oh, I am the most amazing person, I care about everybody, no one would ever
think bad about me and hey, how about you work with me on this, this, this and we're gonna both see that
that person who is our target person is actually a villain. So, they're gonna use this ally, this
person they like the best they're going to dote on that person, give them everything and then they're
going to point their energy towards somebody else. Not too long ago, a friend of mine who is in a
blended family found out about a situation where her children were going to the other parents home
and the one parent was becoming an ally with one child and then attacking the other child to the
point of really extreme abuse. This is the type of thing that happens the one child feels like oh,
I'm getting all this money and all this stuff and the thing is is the target person still loved the
narcissist because they were still trying to get the affection of the narcissist. So, this is how the
narcissist will get two people trained oftentimes for how to become the next narcissist. So, this is
a big thing. The more narcissists you have in your society, the more narcissists that you could have
afterwards. So, it's just like a breeding ground for more narcissism. Especially if nobody's setting it
straight, nobody's calling anybody out on it. So, one thing that we have going for us I should
really say against us I guess in our society right now that's breeding more narcissism is emotional
entitlement. So if we have narcissists training other narcissists and as a society in general,
we're saying if you have an emotion, if you have a feeling, you've got to get it out on somebody
you know you've got to dump those things out in order to be healthy, in order to be okay
then guess what we're doing? We're opening the door to bullying and narcissistic manipulations
because we're saying hey, you get to be emotional at somebody else which then means that other
people aren't sure if they should be shutting this down or if this is good for the person
and so they start taking abuse and then when they start becoming psychologically abused, they lose
track of the fact that this is not normal. So if we normalize emotional dumping on other people
then we are in essence normalizing a lot of the negative effects of narcissism and what people
are willing to put up with and not so that's not a healthy thing. Another thing that we're
doing socially which really is not great and it of course relates to the entitlement but just
having laziness. Okay so in our society when we are embracing the laziness of the children,
embracing the laziness of our spouses or ourselves, we start to develop more of that
entitlement. So just overall laziness, not working hard because we might live in an affluent society
where there's plenty of you know stuff for everybody and so it doesn't seem like we need
to put forth a ton of effort. Well at that moment, we open the door to narcissism, feeling
like we deserve to be in control of all kinds of stuff we deserve to have all kinds of stuff
so that is really dangerous when your society trends away from being a hard-working society
and finding the value in work and trending toward I just deserve and somebody better do it for me
then that makes it so that they're become more narcissists around us. Another thing
that's happening socially and within the family unit actually that's leading to more narcissism
is coddling and spoiling children. So when we coddle children and we give them everything they
want to make them happy, we spoil them, we don't ever want them to be crying, we want to you know
dote on them every little thing, we actually are bringing up a narcissist. There was a time when
I went to China years ago to do some teaching and I remember at the time people were talking about
the little emperor syndrome. So, there was one child in most Chinese families and oftentimes
it was a boy because that's what they chose to keep because they could only have one. Now I know
things have changed now but that's how it was at the time back in 2010 when I went there and they
would say you know there's this problem here. We need help with our parenting because we've got
these children that are having this you know real disrespective parents they're not doing what they
are telling them to do but I noticed that everyone around the child the grandparents and usually
multiple grandparents are helping raise the child and then the parents too. They are all treating the
child like royalty doting on the child because they only have one. So, they're putting all
of this extra attention on the child, the child gets anything that they want and then it shouldn't
surprise them that the child becomes very strong-willed and becomes very narcissistic. So,
spoiling children is not a good thing even though it can be tempting to do especially if you have
an only child but still, working with that child and expecting a lot of things out of the child in
a healthy way because there's also the unhealthy expecting that leads to depression and stuff. We
don't want to go there but expecting that they mature, they learn they grow, they learn adult
skills, those kinds of things are all really good expectations to have on a child as they're growing
and that would be some really good training. Another factor for increase in narcissism is
actually a lot of the increase in instability when it comes to mental health issues. The more
people who are autistic, the more people who struggle with different processing difficulties,
the more narcissism we're going to see because oftentimes when a person develops narcissism,
they also have processing differences from other people. So if you're working with someone
who processes things in a different way, maybe has a disability, you need to make sure that you
are keeping them grounded as far as having good communication, good expectations, you're
talking to them about things, you're not allowing them to control you or somebody else because
they have more of a tendency to trend toward narcissistic behavior. So, just keeping that in
mind is going to be important. Now here's something affecting narcissistic numbers that might surprise
you and that is the bonds within the family. So when a family is more closely bonded together,
that actually usually decreases narcissism. So, we are having a problem right now with broken
family bonds, people are their own islands, they're kind of out for themselves and this actually would
have a tendency to increase narcissism because the people in the families are not caring about how
their behaviors are affecting other people, they're just trying to get what they want which is kind of
at the root of all of narcissistic behavior. The increase in narcissism is ruining our happiness,
our safety, our productivity, our relationships. We've got to be so careful. We really need to
improve our relationships. So if you've enjoyed this video that I know you will really appreciate
the next video which is understanding narcissistic behavior and relationships.
In that video, I'll be talking about some of the things that people do to others and what
it does to our relationships when it comes to narcissism. This will be a list of things you
won't want to miss because this will help you be able to identify narcissism in your daily life.