Tripping into your Identity - Part 5
Chapter 7: Dealing with Difficult People and Things
How to Train a Narcissist
A word of caution, do not make the mistake of surrounding yourself with people who only tell you what you want to hear, and will validate whatever you want them to; people who are unflinchingly intent on affirming your beliefs and suffering, regardless of reality’s stance on the matter. These people are often suffering from their own form of identity crisis, and are among the most likely to attempt to validate themselves and experience a sense of control and value in their lives by imposing on the discovery, understanding, and development of your own identity.
While we absolutely need the support of others at times, we do not need sycophants, enablers, ideologues, or people whom, through a vicarious attempt to feel a sense of control and validation over their own lives, will direct us toward accepting their self-interested approximation of our self-actualization. In other words, people like this attempt to claim they know what is best for us, and who we should be. While often well intended by people who don’t qualify as narcissists, this manipulation is undoubtedly narcissistic in nature, and tends to rub off on those who fall victim to it.
When we assume the identity position asserted by a person who engages in this behavior, we deal a significant blow to our true identities – exacerbating our waning sense of agency over our lives, and learning to regain a false and performative sense of agency by engaging in the exact same behavior with others, as was enacted upon us. It is a contagious, self-perpetuating tragedy of imposed identities and desperation for reclaiming lost agency, and alleviating the pain of our fractured, helpless selves.
When we surround ourselves with this kind of influence and behavior, we are essentially just recruiting people to train us how to eventually become self-aggrandizing, emotionally and intellectually incontinent, fractured, and stunted narcissists who stand no chance at ever learning to be the agents of our own lives and identities. We learn how to see people as mere extensions of ourselves (instead of the individuals they are), and to experience a spurious sense of fulfillment, control, and power by encouraging them to “dance” just as we were taught to; to imagine that we know them better than they can know themselves.
We learn to fear and resent those who will not dance in this manner, or who voice their disapproval of the dance, as the continued practice of this twisted charade has only served to further tear our true identities apart and deepen our insecurities. If we succumb to this, those who will not dance at our request are seen as threats to our value and identity; to our very existence, as their refusal to dance is likely to be interpreted as invalidation of our identity, and how we express it. As a result, our social circle becomes populated only with those who will dance like us, and readily affirm and validate the worst in us (and each other) at a moment’s notice.
We have unknowingly joined and propagated an echo chamber of total insecurity and utter dependence on external validation and affirmation. Once firmly enmeshed in this cult-like echo chamber, the entirety of our worth becomes contingent on external validation (the approval of others), and the success of our propagation of this behavior and way of thinking onto others. We begin living to be validated, and we achieve security in our decisions and behaviors by successfully teaching and converting others to do the same. In effect, we are proselytizing our harmful and helplessness-inducing beliefs and behaviors to avoid feeling insecure about them. We imagine that if we can get others to believe what we believe, and behave how we behave, then we must be doing something right.
“Why would others do it if it were wrong?”
If it wasn’t obvious, this is not a winning strategy in achieving self-actualization. Interestingly, the people who engage in this behavior are extremely likely to vehemently claim the exact opposite. After all, they need your validation, affirmation, participation, and acceptance in order to feel any sense of security and self-worth.
Put as simply as possible, it is best to avoid people who seek to impose or encourage the adoption of a particular identity onto you. Especially for those who are in states of deep suffering, the adoption of a “new” identity can bring feelings of tremendous relief and what may temporarily feel like an emotionally verified and valid decision. This occurs because the abandonment of any identity in a state of suffering is likely to at least temporarily bring feelings of relief, pleasure, novelty and, most importantly, a sense of agency over your helplessness. And why wouldn’t it? You’ve engaged in a form of agency by throwing your old and miserable identity away, and replaced it with a brand new one!
Unfortunately, these feelings are almost always temporary and, in the long run, the adoption of this false identity is likely to leave you in a far worse position than you were in before adopting it. Eventually, your true identity will reject what you attempted to force onto it, and increasing levels of helplessness and suffering will be felt as a result. Have you ever tried to cram a puzzle piece where it didn’t belong? Well, there are few ways more certain to induce severe helplessness in yourself than trying to cram an identity puzzle piece that doesn’t actually belong to your puzzle. The worst part is that, the more often you do this, the harder it becomes to see your puzzle at all, or figure out which pieces belong, and which pieces don’t. Remember, nothing good can be built on a foundation of lies.
Please make an extra effort to keep this in mind when selecting a therapist to assist you on your journey. I’m sorry to say that, in the last five to ten years, a great deal of psychological literature, treatment, and thought have been thoroughly corrupted and destroyed by ideologically-influenced, bought and paid for, woefully incompetent, and correlation-obsessed social science. The results have been absolutely horrifying, and things appear to be getting worse rapidly.
I won’t get into too much detail here, but I will tell you this:
If your therapist suggests adopting a new identity to replace the one that is causing you suffering, or readily affirms your own desire to do so, find a new therapist immediately.
If your therapist repeatedly validates your personal truths and lived experiences at the expense of reality, then I suggest you run as fast as you can, and never look back.
Lastly, if your therapist encourages you to be “yourself” in the name of authenticity and affirmation, no matter the implications on reality, or the cost to you or others, then get the hell out of there.
We’ll cover authenticity much more in chapter 8 but, for now, let’s cover a few basics.
Healthy authenticity has absolutely nothing to do with doing whatever you feel like doing in a given moment; it is not strictly desire-oriented. It is all-too-easy for your brain to desire or believe something in total opposition to your authentic self and wellbeing, to reality, or in opposition to the healthy development of your authenticity. There are countless reasons this can occur, especially within a disconnected and suffering mind that seeks to escape itself (pain) by any means necessary. These desires, on their surface, do not define us, but they are clues to important aspects of our existence and relationship with ourselves.
Should someone come along and readily affirm anything and everything we believe we feel about ourselves, especially in moments of distress, then we are all but ensuring the development of our own delusions and misguided attempts at discovering ourselves. In the worst cases, we are learning to depend almost solely on our desires to plainly inform us of who we are, and where we should go.
Discovering your authenticity, and both understanding and developing it in pursuit of a meaningful and fulfilling life, is a skill that requires time, brutal self-honesty, a solid foundation of morals, values, and wisdom, and a healthy relationship with yourself. It is nowhere near as simple as looking inwards and immediately accepting and expressing whatever it is you think you see, or want to see, then finding someone who will affirm your beliefs and desires, regardless of their truth content. Have you ever had a desire which, only a short time after having it, realized was an absolutely terrible, or even dangerous idea? Would you have benefited from having a trusted person in your life readily affirm that desire solely because you desired it?
It may be difficult and painful to accept, but a person in a deep and chronic state of suffering is not capable of fully knowing their identity, as it is exactly the broken relationship and unhealthy communication (or lack thereof) they have with their identity that prevents them from understanding it. Discounting parent/child relationships, the only person less capable of knowing, directing, and affirming your identity is a person other than yourself, and that includes a trained professional.
As well-meaning as they may be, a person who claims to know your identity well enough to affirm and direct it for you, solely because it’s in alignment with what your thoroughly disconnected self may want to believe about itself, stands no chance of helping you. Worse, they will almost certainly exacerbate your suffering tremendously. Even if what you believed about yourself turned out to be a fully accurate representation of some part of your identity, a therapist still has no place affirming or negating it.
Our identities are not determined by singular elements of our being, they are a collection of everything that we are. When we attribute the entirety of our identities to one element of our being (age, sex, race, appearance, etc.), and have yet to develop the skill of gaining and accepting our value primarily from within, then we rest our entire sense of self on the potential affirmation or negation of that singular element, on others. This is like cooking a meal for someone, then resting your entire sense of self on whether or not they enjoy the food. This is an absolutely disastrous trap to position ourselves near, especially for those who are struggling to know and love themselves without external validation.
People who have conditioned themselves into requiring external validation, compliance, affirmation, and participation in order to validate their identity, will inevitably not only compulsively search for these things, but forcibly try to manifest them in social settings as if their lives and very existence depended on it. They will also purposefully situate themselves around those most likely to grant this validation, particularly those who do not possess the ability to even conceptualize a position in opposition, such as children, or other people experiencing severe identity crises. Perhaps worst of all, these people will come to villainize, resent, and even attack anyone who refuses to affirm their identities in the ways they have come to depend on to sustain their self-worth, and believe they are entitled to. They will, on some level, rest what they mistakenly perceive as the entirety of their existence on the actions and beliefs of others.
In essence, they are holding their entire lives hostage to the attention and opinions of others.
While you may very well be capable of accurately knowing certain elements of your identity even in a deep and chronic state of suffering, a singular person other than yourself (again, discounting parent/child relationships) is not capable of achieving this in a meaningful or complete sense, and they should not try. It is not the role of a good therapist to ultimately affirm or negate elements of your identity, it is their job to help you learn how to skillfully and honestly do this for yourself, in adherence with reality. Requiring external validation is not a skill that should be developed or relied on, especially by a person who already struggles to provide validation for themselves internally.
Again, as much as we may wish it weren’t true, fully knowing oneself is not possible when we are thoroughly disconnected from and in conflict with ourselves, just as it is not possible to truly know others who we are in conflict with, and have been thoroughly disconnected from. When we deeply resent ourselves and others, we quite literally lose the ability to empathize with, express compassion towards, and understand them on a meaningful level, and we are practically guaranteed to develop a heavily-corrupted misunderstanding, instead. Repairing this conflict and coming to truly understand, as well as develop our authentic identities is a long process and, as I stated several times, we attempt shortcuts at our own peril.
Moving from childhood to adulthood is, among many other things, the process of coming to develop, know, and understand our identities, with the necessary guidance of our parents or guardians. If we find ourselves in deep depression and anxiety during this time (or any other), we are extending the time it will take, and making it more difficult to know and understand them. This doesn’t mean we are incapable of knowing anything about ourselves during this time, it simply means that the information has been corrupted, stifled, and/or ignored to the point where it becomes extremely difficult to know what is true, and what isn’t; to know what is authentic, and what is likely a temporary product of our suffering. Please try to be patient with discovering and understanding your identity, and try to understand that everyone spends decades coming to know themselves on a level that even begins to approach self-actualization. This is simply a necessary part of the human experience.
Another hard-to-swallow truth is that some components of our identity are, effectively, negotiations.
Say I believe myself to be a kind and polite person, but everyone I come into contact with is utterly convinced that I’m a total jerk because of the horrible ways in which they unanimously agree I treat people. Well, it may just be the case that I’m a jerk, and I need to confront this potential truth about myself.
If I can’t be honest with myself and confront it, then I can’t address the problem. This doesn’t mean that we allow other people, via consensus, to have the final say in determining who or what we are, but it does mean that we can use their input to help ourselves make a more informed and reality-adherent determination. Sometimes, they may just be correct, even if we desperately don’t want to believe and accept it. If I find a therapist who reinforces the identity I wish to assert, instead of the identity I actually have, then the ultimate result will be a catastrophic worsening of the schism inside of me. Investing in and committing to an identity that doesn’t truly belong to you will always result in suffering, and those who contribute to and encourage this investment will do you serious harm.
This is one of many reasons why we need to surround ourselves not just with people who reflect what we want to see in ourselves, but with whom we can also trust to be brutally honest with us; who can offer us a much-needed dose of reality that may be evading us, or that we are unknowingly avoiding. We need people with intellectual and emotional honesty and integrity. If a dishonest or ideologically-possessed person whom we don’t really know or respect tells us we’re perfect and awesome, and that they can help us come to know our own identity, it means far less than if an honest person with integrity, whom we have great respect for, were to say the same thing. It’s sort of like telling a complete stranger you love them, versus your closest and dearest friend – it destroys and confuses the value of what is being expressed to use it so flippantly and without regard for what it truly means to love someone.
If there is a person in your life whom, no matter what, will simply tell you what you want to hear, then I could not recommend avoiding that person enough. A person who truly cares about you will be willing to have the uncomfortable conversations and provide honest feedback, even if it might hurt you and evoke shame in the moment. Again, their opinion does not necessarily determine reality, but it can be used to help give you the best chance at seeing it clearly for yourself.
Keep in mind that we do not want people whose priorities lie in taking care of us, we want people who want to see us take care of ourselves, and this includes our therapists. Learning to develop and achieve agency, as opposed to having someone else attempt to do it for you, is just like driving a car. When you’re being driven, you are guaranteed to miss certain crucial details, as well as fail to learn certain skills that you would have learned if you were driving yourself. Many of these things may seem insignificant to someone being driven, but their significance cannot be missed once you are in the driver’s seat, and they are integral to learning how to drive well on your own.
There is no such thing as a person who can care for you (in any complete sense) better than you are capable of caring for yourself, and you would do well to avoid people whose words and actions communicate otherwise. Unfortunately, people who aren’t good at taking care of themselves are drastically more likely to attempt to unnecessarily take care of others in an effort to affirm their value, and experience a sense of agency which is likely missing in regards to the care of themselves. Remember, we are always seeking to replace our helplessness with agency, including in ways which can harm ourselves and others. Just like it’s unwise to take driving advice from someone who can’t drive, it is unwise to take self-care advice from someone who cannot care for themselves.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Your Inner Social Circle (Friends and Family)
Surround yourself with people who share your values and goals, and reflect your best version of yourself. Avoid people who don’t, and who put you down unnecessarily.
Easier said than done, especially if we’re deep in depression. Depressed people have a tendency to not enforce boundaries or, at the very least, to grossly misdirect the energy that would normally be used to enforce them, and to allow others to disparage and convince them of things that are harmful. After all, if you’re depressed, you’re likely thinking similarly harmful things about yourself, so maybe they’re right? To make matters worse, depressed people often don’t have much fight left in them, and so they shrug it off and try to pretend it wasn’t a big deal. It is a big deal, and no one deserves to be attacked without reason, especially not by people you care about, and who claim to care about you.
As we begin to love ourselves more by practicing some of the tools in this book, it will become easier to surround yourself with people who recognize these good things, and easier to avoid the people who cannot. For some, this may mean distancing yourself from friends, relationship partners, and even family. It’s not easy, but it can, unfortunately, be necessary. We cannot let other people ultimately determine the entirety of our value.
Surrounding ourselves with people who share our values and goals is actually a very natural process that will largely play itself out as a result of your efforts to connect with people. When meaningful connection occurs, it’s pretty hard to miss, and connection is always established as a result of one or more shared values and interests. When we surround ourselves with these people, we are far more likely to uphold what we value, as the examples of our own values, as well as ones we’d like to hold, are being set for us constantly by the people we allow into our circles. Essentially, the circle is reinforcing itself in positive ways, and making it easier for each person in the circle to hold fast to their values, and to support each other in theirs.
The same thing can be said about the goals we set for ourselves. When the people in our circles share a common goal, they are extremely likely to both support and rely on each other to see them reached. These things are baked into those who are secure in their worth. Most of us want to see the people we care about succeed, and are often willing to invest our time and energy to help facilitate their success, especially when what they are trying to achieve is something we also want for ourselves. We want to see that it can, in fact, be done, and so we do what we can to see it happen. If we select them carefully, then the people in our circles will do the exact same for us when we need it. This is why it is so important to ensure that the closest people in our circles share many of our values and goals, as well as refrain from tearing us away from them and/or putting us down.
By now you might be thinking, “How the hell am I supposed to find people who meet these rare and seemingly endless criteria of sharing values and goals, while also being brutally honest and challenging me when necessary?” I get it, I really do, but remember, people are not simply a collection of their worst traits. Nobody is close to perfect, and we can’t expect every single person in our social circles to perfectly align with these criteria at all times. The goal is to do our best and to get as close as reasonably possible, not to aim for perfection. We want people we are proud to call our friends; people who are worth accepting and dealing with their faults when they inevitably arise.
The people in our social circles will, as a result of being human, disappoint us, hurt us, and fail to live up to our expectations. It’s inevitable, and we shouldn’t necessarily remove them from our circles at the first sign of trouble. Would you want to be friends with someone who was ready to throw you away the moment you disappoint them? As with all things, a balance is required here. If a person in your circle is constantly engaging in toxic behavior, hurting you, and draining your energy, then it might be time to take them out of the circle, if even temporarily. You don’t necessarily need to burn the bridge forever, but you cannot allow them to constantly stand in your way either. Knowing when it’s appropriate to remove someone from your circle requires the practice of establishing and enforcing boundaries. We will cover boundaries more shortly but, for now, let’s talk about some of the things that can get in the way of our self-love.
Negative rumination
Are you constantly practicing negative creativity and criticizing yourself? If your brain insists on criticizing you, then perhaps you require different methods of communicating with and listening to it. There are many ways to do this, but my recommendation is to find one or more mindfulness exercises, and commit to developing your skill with it. Meditation is an incredibly powerful tool for learning to quiet and direct your mind towards positivity or neutrality, and away from negativity. It’s also exceptionally good at teaching us how to spend more time in our bodies instead of our minds, despite what the name “mindfulness” would imply. Of course, it’s a skill, which means many people will fail miserably when they begin learning it, but don’t let this discourage you. Keep practicing it and you will get good at it eventually. I promise you, there is no such thing as a person who can’t become good at meditation.
When I first started meditating, it felt impossible to achieve anything other than a drastic increase in negative thinking, as I was opening myself up to the vulnerability of finally listening to my thoroughly beat down self. Worse, it felt like it took me so long to make progress that I quit practicing entirely on numerous occasions over the years. I figured meditation just wasn’t for me; that I was unique and special, and apparently had no use for it. I was dead wrong, but I wouldn’t come to discover this until I practiced consistently for several months and experienced a moment in which my mind wasn’t going crazy for at least a full 10 seconds! I am Buddha now, and all shall fear me. Seriously though, keep practicing and I promise you will get good at it. Remember, anything you practice, whether good or bad, will result in a development of that skill.
Physical exercise is another excellent tool for avoiding negative rumination, as it’s almost impossible to exist in your head when you’re gasping for breath. Seriously, try it. When mindfulness fails me, I will sometimes just burst into a round of pushups or a standing sprint and, within 30 seconds, I feel much better. This has an absolute ton of other benefits as well, so I definitely recommend finding a version of this that can work for you.
Cold showers or ice baths are another amazing tool to achieve this, as well as to experience an absolutely massive and prolonged boost in dopamine, energy, mood, and tolerance of discomfort (a potentially invaluable tool for dealing with anxiety, depression, and trauma). For anyone interested in trying this, I highly recommend checking out the Huberman Lab Podcast for more information. There are many ways to incorporate cold water therapy into your life, so I recommend finding one that, at the very least, doesn’t sound awful to you. Just try it, and I promise you’ll be amazed at how great you feel afterwards.
Lastly, breathwork can (often extraordinarily quickly) powerfully eliminate anxiety in its tracks, as well as train our bodies to achieve comfort and agency on a level deep enough to combat the firmly engrained helplessness in our nervous systems. There are practically an infinite number of breathing exercises which have conclusively demonstrated profoundly positive effects on a person’s ability to quickly achieve a state of calm and relaxation, as well as a variety of other potentially desirable states. My personal favorite breathing exercises are the “physiological sigh”, and “box breathing”, but there are countless others which many people swear by.
The Physiological Sigh: This one is incredibly easy to do, and excels at delivering an almost immediate reduction in anxiety and stress. Begin by inhaling through your nose and, just as your breath begins to slow and your lungs are about to fill, sharply inhale again – forcing extra air into your lungs. Once your lungs are full, slowly release your breath through your mouth, observing your deflating chest and stomach as you exhale, until your lungs are completely empty. That’s it! Repeat a few times, or until you feel better.
Box Breathing: Box breathing, like the physiological sigh, is also painfully simple to do, and highly effective. Begin by inhaling through your nose to a count of four, attempting to take a complete breath during those four seconds. Once the four seconds are over, hold your breath for another four seconds. Then, release your breath through your mouth over the course of four more seconds. Finally, count to four once your breath is fully exhaled. Repeat the process until you feel better. Box breathing! (4x4x4x4)
Really, practically anything that forces you out of your mind and into your body can be used as practice in familiarizing yourself with both the process, as well as how it feels to make the transition from mind to body, and I do mean anything. Why do you think so many people with major depressive disorder so frequently resort to things like self-harm or euphoria-producing drugs? Among other things (often an attempt to overcome numbness), it forces them out of the pain of their mind and into the sensations of their body. Like with many of the things we do in deep states of helplessness and suffering, it provides us with a temporary sense of agency, and the resulting dopamine and adrenaline rush can easily cause us to become addicted.
When your mind is in a state of absolute helplessness and misery, purposeful physical pain can feel euphoric in its place. But please, in case it wasn’t obvious, do not resort to self-harm, as this will ultimately just worsen the disconnect and relationship between your thinking and feeling self, and make your journey that much more difficult. Remember that the goal is to achieve agency over our helplessness and become friends with ourselves, and we certainly wouldn’t expect someone to be our friend if we’re physically hurting them constantly. We don’t want to damage ourselves - we just want to alert ourselves to the presence of our bodies.
With that said, it is perfectly acceptable and even necessary to regularly place ourselves into states of manageable discomfort. Discomfort is an ineradicable part of the human experience, and one of the best methods of strengthening ourselves against it is to learn how to both embrace and overcome it. Of course, we aren’t simply seeking out discomfort in a vacuum. We’re searching for discomfort which, by successfully overcoming, rewards us with something greater than what we expended by confronting it; something that carries us forward and strengthens us in the long run. The goal is always to continue moving forward, and so the kinds of discomfort we choose to face must be in pursuit of that goal.
People who have made every attempt to avoid discomfort of any kind, often because their depression and anxiety have encouraged them to retreat from it, will find a great many things to be discomforted by. It turns out that avoiding discomfort actually weakens us so that more and more things cause us discomfort. For those of you who find yourselves in a position like this, try to take solace in the fact that the extent to which you feel limited is inversely proportionate to that which you stand to gain by overcoming your limitations. In other words, the more burdened you feel by your limitations, the more you stand to gain as you lean into these struggles and eventually overcome them.
Social Media and External Influence
I know we already covered this a bit, but it’s important that we explore some of the other ways social media does tremendous damage to us. Unless you require them for work, or can strictly and reliably limit your use, my advice is to delete your social media accounts and never look back. Since that may reasonably prove to be an impossible task for most people, I’ll just say this: Among countless other disastrous consequences, social media teaches you to gain self-worth externally, and only externally. It trains your brain into feeling and believing that your value must always be proven and confirmed by sources other than yourself. If it wasn’t obvious, this will utterly destroy your chances at learning to love yourself on your own, and provide yourself with a stable sense of self-worth. Please try to understand that, whether intended or not, the repeated experience of feeling rewarded for being recognized, valued, and validated by others will almost certainly encourage you to seek this route as often as possible, and eventually teach you to rely on it.
The more often you engage in something, the more your body and mind will attempt to adjust to its presence in your life. Living a heavily social media-fueled life will force your body and mind to adapt to that environment in many ways and, since the body and mind are not the least bit equipped to prosper in that environment, the adaptations you incur will necessarily develop your skill of living life in an unlivable manner. Essentially, you are instructing your body that it must work to thrive in an environment in which thriving is not at all possible.
Would you want to swim in a pool filled with people who are attempting to drown you every second? If not, then instead trying to force yourself to adapt to an unwinnable situation, perhaps you should just get the hell out of the pool? Of course, this doesn’t just apply to social media, and I would argue that if you find yourself swimming in any “unswimmable” pool, then there must come a breaking point in which you come to accept that the pool cannot, and should not be swam in; it should be left behind.
Social media also teaches us how to incorrectly believe that other people are, in fact, perfectly represented by their presence on social media, as no one is constantly sharing things they don’t want people to see – the exact opposite. That friend who only posts good things, they’re pure good and have it all figured out. They wake up every morning looking perfect, and they pour themselves self-actualization flavored cereal for breakfast. They are the epitome of agency. That friend who posts only negative things, they’re a perfect mess, and we’re lucky we aren’t that messed up. They wake up and experience total helplessness before even getting out of bed...
Abuse social media often enough and I promise you that, eventually, your entire being will become subservient to this corrupt mockery of reality, and you are almost guaranteed to be utterly unaware of it. You will eventually convince yourself that what you are observing is representative of reality instead of what it actually is: purely what others believe and want you to see, including people that actually want to see you suffer, or don’t care about you at all (despite often claiming the exact opposite). Not only that, but you will learn to require and depend on it for your own validation, even if you’ve convinced yourself of the exact opposite. This is an extremely common occurrence.
Your thinking self could be perfectly convinced you understand that the reality of social media is not as it seems, that you are fully aware of its dangers and the effects it has on you, that you determine your own value, and that you love and live for yourself first. In actual reality, your feeling self has slowly become utterly dependent on the validation of others, and lives primarily for them – eagerly awaiting their input (positive, neutral, or negative), approval, and validation. This is an addiction trap that even the most self-aware and intelligent of people fall into constantly, but you will rarely, if ever hear them admit to it because they often aren’t able to. In most cases, they aren’t remotely aware that it’s happening. The process is so slow, insidious, unnatural, and emotionally volatile that it is all but impossible to understand and accept what is happening for many people.
Remember the section entitled “How to Train a Narcissist”? Well, here’s the first and most reliable step to unknowingly becoming an external validation-seeking, reality-denying narcissist:
Excessively use social media every day.
Despite social media’s ability to “connect” us with each other, it rarely does so in a way which develops meaningful connection. Instead, the impersonal and comparative nature of it fosters a mindset which adjusts to just those things: the impersonal and comparative. The kind of connection that social media allows for is, at its best, a woefully incomplete and corrupt simulation of human interaction. With an increasing compulsion to compare ourselves strictly, or at least largely to each other’s unnatural, simulated, and misrepresentative social media identities (instead of our real identities), we begin to look at and obsess over ourselves in ways which rarely occur in the natural world, and result in an astounding number of personality and identity disorders. While a drastic increase in narcissistic and anti-social behaviors appear to be the most likely occurrence of using social media excessively, they are far from the only negative effects we can expect.
Do you believe you are above these negative impacts and that your awareness of them prevents you from succumbing to them? The power of cognitive dissonance cannot be underestimated and, the more intelligent and creative a person is, the better they will be at constructing complex mental structures that carefully direct their perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs towards where they desire them to go; to where they’re comfortable, instead of where reality dictates they should. In other words, the more thoughtful, introspective, resourceful, and intelligent a person is, the more deeply and firmly they are likely to unintentionally embed themselves into an inescapable nightmare of social media-born external validation requirements, narcissism, and a wide range of personality and identity disorders. I have witnessed it happen more times than I can count, to a degree I would have never thought possible, and to people I was certain were intelligent and disciplined enough to avoid it. No one is immune.
Remember, protecting ourselves is a skill too, and the longer and more frequently we’ve done it, the better we get at it. Some of our defenses are so unbelievably vast and complex that it becomes all but impossible for us to see the flaws deep in the core without them being repeatedly pointed out to us. Even then, sometimes we’re just not ready to hear the truth, and so we can’t. Luckily, psychedelics are exceptionally good at pointing these flaws out to us.
Unfortunately, many of us will have to work hard to undo the negative impacts that living a digital and social-media influenced life have had on us. I can’t tell you exactly how to do this for yourself, but I can give you some basic advice that may help in your pursuit and maintenance of self-love.
Avoiding and Overcoming Common Barriers to Achieving Self-Love
Sharing Yourself
When sharing any part of yourself with people, avoid basing your worth on their response, even if it’s a good one. Where your value is concerned, it doesn’t matter in the slightest if they love or hate what you put out - that’s not the point of sharing. We can hope for a positive response because it feels good and gives us a sense of positively contributing value to the world, and be disappointed by a negative response because it feels bad and fails to meet expectations, but none of this is necessarily relevant to your worth. You share because it makes you feel good to share yourself with others, not because you need proof that you are worth sharing. Keep sharing yourself and you will eventually get good at it, and figure out a way to do it so that it makes both you and the people you’re sharing with happy, without any need for compromise.
Expectations that exceed what you are currently, but not necessarily permanently capable of
Imagine you base all, or even most of your self-worth on how much you believe you are supposed to produce, but you cannot produce it. What happens to your self-worth? All of us are capable of incredible things, but many of us make the mistake of focusing on a goal that is too many steps away from where we currently are, and so we inevitably disappoint ourselves and others when we fail to meet it, then beat ourselves up as a result. Failure is a necessary part of moving forward, but we still want to reduce unnecessary incidents of it where we can.
Do not let other people ultimately decide what you should be doing or aiming for. While other people can and will help inspire and push us toward our goals, they are not the ultimate arbiters of what we should be doing, and we cannot afford to base our love and value for ourselves on whether or not we meet their expectations and desires for us. Our abilities will necessarily increase as we continue moving forward, and a person who has moved forward for long enough will, not so surprisingly, find themselves closer and closer to their goals.
So, what determines a good goal, or a good place to start? I believe that the best path forward is one which is ambitious enough to inspire and excite you, but grounded enough so that you are likely to make some amount of progress towards it before running into your first failure.
The ultimate goal is to increase our agency, which means we should set our goals up to ensure the best chance at experiencing agency, instead of helplessness. This will likely take some practice, as even goal-setting itself could be considered a skill. People who are not practiced in it are more likely to set goals for themselves which do not carry them forward as expected. Again, this is why failure is necessary – we simply cannot know what to change about our goals until we find ourselves with a reason to modify them. Don’t focus too much on choosing the right goals, just choose one, pursue it, and adjust if necessary. You’ll get better at it each time.
Loudness and Persistence are not necessarily signs of truth – Beware of the people who petulantly engage in it
It is typically the case that the loudest and most persistent voices, both in real life and online, are the voices we eventually come to believe and embrace. If a group of people scream loudly enough, and often enough, we tend to assume that there must be some truth to what they are saying. Why else would they be so certain of their convictions, and aggressive in how they share them? If you’re a salesperson, then you know exactly why.
Strength of conviction has absolutely nothing to do with truth. It is often the case that the people who demand to be heard, believed, and paid attention to, especially under threat of punishment, are exactly the people whom we should be most wary of. That doesn’t mean they are wrong solely by virtue of how they communicate their beliefs and desires, but the manner in which they go about it can be extremely revealing of red flags which we would do well to be mindful of and cautious around as we pursue self-love.
A person who is confident and comfortable in their beliefs is very unlikely to feel compelled to convince others of their beliefs through constant, petulant, and aggressive pressure, and even less likely to threaten you with punishment or the suppression of your own beliefs if you refuse to accept what they are demanding. If you find yourself surrounded or influenced by people like this, I strongly advise you to distance yourself, as the impacts they can have on your mental and physical health are significant and potentially disastrous.
People who consistently express themselves in this way almost certainly do not value themselves, and tend to lead lives governed by resentment and external validation. To them, virtue and self-worth are performative displays which can only be fulfilled with the attention and approval of others. If they cannot force you onto their team, receive your support and praise, or have their beliefs and behaviors validated, then they will fail to validate their actions and value in the only ways they know how (externally), and they will suffer as a result. For a person who does not value themselves, there can be no greater sense of virtue than to proudly and eagerly sacrifice their being, and be seen as an infinitely virtuous martyr. If you are struggling with self-love, then beware of this person, as they require and actively seek out participation from those who are suffering as they do.
Remember, people suffering in states of helplessness like depression and anxiety are very likely to seek for feelings of agency in their lives by imposing themselves onto others and collecting external validation from anyone who will give it to them. When the world doesn’t serve them, their resentment and fear grow, and poisons almost everything they think, feel, and do, as well as the people around them. If they can get you to play their game, then they gain confidence in their own beliefs, as well as their methods of imposing them and recruiting others to participate. They feel validated in everything they do to continue pursuing their goals of forcing your compliance, participation, and validation. As soon as you agree to play their game, the means to their ends have been condoned and further encouraged. The validation of their identity comes only from external sources, and they will eventually rub off on you if you engage often enough and come to equate their actions and beliefs with genuine virtue. Do not allow these people to convince you that playing this game will result in anything but further suffering for you and the people in your life.
Authority and Consensus do Not Confer Truth
Authority is not to be trusted based solely on its existence. Authority is typically achieved by repeatedly proving one’s actions and beliefs to have merit and value, but their appointment to authority does not grant them infallibility in any way and, in many cases, they will be appointed to authority for reasons having nothing to do with merit or value. In fact, it is often the case that, once a person achieves a position of authority, they become complacent, and less deserving of their authority, over time. They often demonstrate a belief that the mere existence of their authority somehow grants them a permanent ability to perceive and determine truth, forever. It does not, and their opinions should be questioned in the same way you would question anyone else’s. Trust and respect are ongoingly earned, not unilaterally and permanently awarded.
The exact same thing can be said about group consensus. The number of people who believe something to be true has absolutely no relevance on whether or not it is actually true. It is entirely possible that the entire world population, minus one person, could believe a thing to be true, and the lone dissenting person is actually the only one who holds the truth. If you don’t know the story of Galileo, I highly recommend looking it up.
Truth is not solely determined or sustained through consensus, ever, and it doesn’t matter how many “experts” or people of authority agree. A belief is true based solely on the content that established it and the degree to which that content can exist in harmony with reality, not on how many people will agree to what is being asserted.
I mention these things because both people in authority, as well as group consensus, can be unbelievably powerful influences on what we think, feel, believe, and do, including in regards to our own self-worth and love. We must be prepared to contend with these forces without allowing our value to be externally dominated in the process. These traps are real and dangerous to our self-worth, and they are increasingly common in our society.
You can learn to love yourself for the things you did to survive when you didn’t love yourself
Remember all those things you either currently or used to hate about yourself? Those things are what you and your body did to survive the suffering you were experiencing. That doesn’t mean we excuse them altogether and avoid responsibility, but I promise that you will be surprised to learn how many of them you will come to appreciate and be thankful for. You were suffering tremendously, and so maybe you did something that you felt was wrong. What I want you to try to understand is that many of those things could have been infinitely worse, and perhaps we did them to protect ourselves from something we may not have been able to come back from. Perhaps we did them to protect hurting the people in our lives instead. Whatever the reason, there is room for both forgiving and appreciating ourselves for some of the things we did to survive.
Am I worthy of love?
Well, there is a test you must pass to be worthy of love. Ready to take it?
Question #1: Are you capable of good?
Put your pencils down, the test is over. Let’s score the result.
If you answered yes, then you are worthy of love. That’s literally all there is to it. If you answered no, then you either aren’t aware of your own capabilities, or you aren’t human. Which one do you think is more likely?
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There are many other things we may need to work on in order to reverse the effects of excessive social media use and/or external influence as they relate to our achieving self-love, but I can’t possibly cover them all here. Hopefully what I have covered will help guide you through your own space. This section was a long one, as self-love has become more and more difficult to achieve in recent years, and the number of things that get in the way of it continues to grow. I want to leave you with a message of hope though; a journal entry I wrote to myself shortly after I rediscovered what it was like to find love for myself:
“When you inevitably find self-love, you are given the gift of being shown all the things you’ve always loved about yourself, and that other people have always loved about you. It’s almost like a “loot box” for your soul – you get incredible rewards, but you can’t be certain what they’ll be until you open it. The longer and more severe your self-loathing was, the more loot you have to look forward to once you open that box.”
Lastly, if you want my favorite guide to self-love, I recommend reading Brene Brown’s “The Gifts of Imperfection”. I consider it a must read for every single person who struggles to love themselves.
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Of course, social media is not the only thing that makes achieving self-love exceptionally difficult. A big component of learning to love ourselves is being aware of when we are allowing others to determine our value, regardless of the setting. Being aware of when this is happening, as well as learning how to respond to it, requires the development and practice of boundary setting.
Boundary Setting and Enforcement
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”
-Prentis Hemphil
If someone is getting in the way of our self-love, then we must learn to both erect and enforce our boundaries with them. This is one of the many reasons social media is so disastrous to our mental health – it so thoroughly overwhelms us with external influence that we cannot possibly hope to erect and enforce boundaries against everyone we interact with. Human beings simply did not evolve to manage these kinds of unnatural and incomplete interactions, particularly in so great a number, on a daily basis. Even if we begin with many strong boundaries in place, we will allow them to collapse so slowly over time that we often don’t even notice they’ve collapsed.
Our boundaries must hold strong if we are to survive. We need to learn to erect our boundaries in the appropriate locations, notice when they are being crossed, then enforce them. Some people will require us to erect large boundaries, very far from ourselves, as allowing them anywhere near us may cause us harm, while other people may allow us to erect boundaries very close to ourselves, as it feels good to welcome them into more of our space and achieve some level of intimacy and vulnerability. Either way, we must learn to notice when they are being crossed, as well as enforce them to prevent ourselves from being taken advantage of and harmed.
What are some of the negative and hurtful things you allow people to say or do to you, but are perhaps too concerned with avoiding conflict, or uncertain as to how to handle the issue? We all have them and, so long as we live, there will never be a shortage of moments that test our boundaries. Setting and practicing boundaries is a skill, and it’s a skill that depressed people in particular struggle to utilize and improve, as loving oneself is key to skillfully erecting and enforcing boundaries. If you aren’t in a good relationship with yourself, then protecting yourself with boundaries often feels pointless. In the worst cases, we can even believe that we deserve to have our boundaries broken.
Like with most things, I recommend starting as small as you need to, both in how you erect, as well as how you enforce your boundaries. Even if we don’t realize it, we’re all setting and enforcing boundaries to some degree, even if not to the degree we would like to reach. Try to identify some of your hardline boundaries (the things you won’t let anyone get away with), and observe yourself enforcing them. Which parts of enforcing them are you good at, and which parts need some work? What can you take from what you’ve already been doing and apply it to a new practice routine? The ultimate goal here is to take any opportunity for practice, even the smallest, and try to make some kind of improvement to it.
When I began working on my own boundaries, I knew I would need to start very small, as I’ve been a people-pleaser all my life, and it pains me greatly to risk hurting or upsetting anyone for almost any reason. My step was to learn how to not care so much about potentially upsetting someone so long as it was a result of enforcing my reasonable and necessary boundaries. So, what about the space leading up to that step? How did I use Informed Personalization to improve my ability to erect and enforce boundaries?
I had an idea. I had recently been taking walks around my neighborhood while listening to music to get some exercise and sun, and I realized that I could be singing to myself or beating my hands on my thighs to the rhythm of the music, right up until I came into the view of another person. Every time this happened, I would have this feeling of, “I should stop singing or tapping, as it might look weird and I could embarrass myself, or maybe I’m making someone uncomfortable, or maybe I should say hello, or do this or that…” Whatever it was, it was pulling me out of my body and into my mind, and decreasing the enjoyment I was experiencing. In these moments, I was living for these strangers. I had no boundaries up whatsoever; I was simply ready to capitulate to whatever I could imagine might be expected or desired of me, by whomever I encountered during my walk, at a moment’s notice.
I realized it was a perfect opportunity to challenge myself in a way that, at the time, I knew I was ready to tackle. It was a small ask of myself (a step I was ready for), but still an important one, so I went for it. I thought, “What if I just pretend that the people I encounter don’t even exist unless they, for some reason, demand their existence be acknowledged in some way?” Essentially, my plan was to continue singing, drumming, or doing whatever else I felt like doing, without considering the potential judgement of others.
At first, parts of me protested. “What if I look or sound like an asshole?” “What if I embarrass myself?” “What if I put myself off of going for walks in the future?” I told myself, “Who cares? Just try it and see what happens. I mean, what’s the worst thing that could actually happen?” So, for the next couple months, that’s exactly what I did, and absolutely nothing even remotely negative occurred. What did happen, was that I experienced a feeling I had forgotten I could even experience. I felt a profound sense of authenticity and agency; I felt complete, powerful, and joyous. How the hell could such a simple exercise produce such unbelievably positive and powerful results? Was this what it felt like to truly live authentically and develop it in a healthy way?
This simple exercise opened up a whole new world for me. What if I tried doing this in other areas of my life? Is this what setting and enforcing boundaries looks like? This isn’t so bad! All I’m doing is being myself, and if other people don’t like it then, well, that’s fine! I don’t need them to like it, and I don’t care if they don’t. I like it, I’m ultimately adhering to my values, and I’m not hurting anyone.
After practicing it for a couple months I realized that, without even trying, it was carrying over into other areas of my life, whether it be at the grocery store, a party, in relationships, etc. Not only that, but the energy I was apparently giving off was contagious, and other people not only picked up on it, but were drawn to it. I realized something that I felt should have been obvious to me: most people admire and are attracted to healthy authenticity, even if it’s being displayed in a way that doesn’t necessarily appeal to their personalities.
When a person is being themselves; being authentic, it’s hard not to notice, admire, and want it for ourselves. It makes us want to spend more time around that person, which is exactly the opposite outcome I was convincing myself would result from my not being “careful” to not offend or upset anyone for any reason. I was trying to manage people’s perceptions of me, and the results were actually worse than simply letting go of that need for control, and just being myself.
So, not only had I dropped the enormous weight of trying to control my environment and people’s perceptions of me (pretending to be authentic), but it was actually working much, much better at achieving the same result I sought while carrying all that weight, and all because I erected and enforced some basic boundaries. I was putting in less effort, but getting far superior results. I was working smarter, not harder.
I was practicing boundary setting and enforcement, as well as self-love and authenticity, and all it required was pretending I was alone while taking walks. That was the space between my steps, and it was space that I had previously convinced myself would be excruciatingly difficult, if not impossible to cross. I won’t say it was effortless but, compared to what I expected, it was…wait for it… A WALK IN THE PARK!