Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. 10 Signs: YOU are Broken, Damaged, Scarred

1. 00:03 People often say to me, disheartened by relationship difficulties,
2. 00:10 I am simply not relationship material. They sometimes say, I’m broken. I am damaged. I am not fit to be with other
3. 00:22 people. But of course, there are several underlying assumptions here. One is that
4. 00:28 there are bad relationships and good relationships. And that’s quite true on the face of it. But it’s important to
5. 00:36 understand that there is no such thing as a wasted relationship. Time is never
6. 00:42 wasted. Being in a relationship is a learning process and you can learn from bad ones
7. 00:49 as you can from good ones. No one is universally adapted to all relationships. We each must strive to find an optimal
8. 01:00 or even suboptimal match. Many of us fail. Let it be clear. Many of us fail.
9. 01:08 But worse, many of us compromise. Today I would like to discuss
10. 01:15 damaged, broken people. Now there are two types within this
11. 01:21 group. people who are damaged and broken because they have mental health issues.
12. 01:27 For example, people with borderline personality disorder, with dependent personality disorder, narcissistic
13. 01:34 personality disorder, mood disorders, and so on. Obviously, they’re damaged and broken by their own internal dynamics. and people who are damaged and broken
14. 01:46 because they have been exposed to people who are damaged and broken because they have been abused because they have been
15. 01:52 mistreated. And so these two groups seem to be mutually
16. 02:00 exclusive. There is the saying hurt people hurt people.
17. 02:06 But the truth is that regardless of how we ended up being
18. 02:13 broken and damaged, all broken and damaged people share the same clinical features. And I’m going to discuss these in today’s video.
19. 02:25 My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I’m in Paris and I’m a
20. 02:33 professor of psychology. Before we proceed, if you want a paid consultation
21. 02:39 with me face tof face, or if you want to organize a free seminar or a free lecture, I do not charge a speaker fee in Paris, please contact me, sambakin@gmail.com. I’ll place the address in the
22. 02:55 description. How do we know if someone is damaged or broken or scarred for life or temporarily? Because
23. 03:06 sometimes it’s just kind of rebound effect. It’s just a temporary phase, a transient phase in the wake of a horrible relationship or um a trauma of some kind or even a natural disaster. So
24. 03:21 there are transient um brokenness. There’s transient brokenness and there’s permanent
25. 03:27 brokenness. But they both are indistinguishable clinically speaking. And so how do we know? We observe like everything else in psychology. We observe habits. Everyday habits, behaviors, reactions
26. 03:44 reveal a lot about the past and they tell us if someone is
27. 03:52 dysfunctional, if someone is broken, someone is damaged
28. 03:58 behind seemingly normal behaviors. They’re very often unhealed emotional
29. 04:04 wounds from difficult experiences. And so today I’m going to discuss these
30. 04:11 patterns that you should and can observe if you wish to make up your mind in a
31. 04:19 due diligence process whether you want to be with someone or not. Whether you want to develop a relationship with
32. 04:25 someone or relationship of any kind as a friend, as a co-orker, as an investor, as a romantic intimate partner, as
33. 04:33 whatever the case may be. And so the first issue I think which is very
34. 04:41 critical is trust. Trust is a key differentiator. A key difference between people who are
35. 04:52 who have it all together, people who who are well put together, people who are
36. 04:58 healthy and normal and people who have been impacted
37. 05:04 by abuse and trauma. So
38. 05:10 first let me say that it is normal and even I would say advisable to be
39. 05:18 cautious to ask questions to delve deeper to investigate and in some cases interrogate. These these are all all healthy behaviors.
40. 05:30 Um but if this these kinds of behaviors persist indefinitely,
41. 05:36 if you question everyone’s motives all the time, if you are constantly
42. 05:42 suspicious, constant permanent paranoid ideation, if
43. 05:48 you are hypervigilant, then something’s wrong. It means that your brain is aroused. There’s arousal,
44. 05:56 what we call hyperarousal. It’s on the con. It’s constantly defensive. It’s
45. 06:02 working overtime. People who have been betrayed,
46. 06:08 they hurt. The pain is indescribable because betrayal is perceived as a total
47. 06:15 rejection of everything. The betrayed person is and could have been a
48. 06:21 rejection not only of a relationship but a rejection of the person in the relationship. And the mind creates
49. 06:28 protective membranes and protective filters to prevent similar pain in the future.
50. 06:34 And so these kind of people, children who have experienced broken substantial
51. 06:40 promises uh or inconsistent care, neglect, abandonment, classical abuse,
52. 06:47 uh parentifying, instrumentalizing children who have been traumatized, they often develop this type of defensive
53. 06:55 posture, a pervasive mistrust and distrust of other people. It’s a prime
54. 07:02 indicator that something is seriously wrong. If you constantly analyze other people’s
55. 07:09 words, you strive for the hidden texts, you
56. 07:16 blatantly and repeatedly ignore what you are being told in favor of some conspiracy theory as to what is behind the scenes, the ulterior motives to read
57. 07:27 between the lines and so on so forth. um
58. 07:33 that’s an indication of of some kind of problem. Uh the thing is that mistrust and distrust is a positive adaptation in
59. 07:45 certain circumstances. When you are in a relationship with someone who is an abuser, someone who
60. 07:52 gaslights you, someone who manipulates you, it’s it pays dividends to be to
61. 07:59 walk on eggshells, to be cautious, to be careful, to be suspicious, and even to be param. And then it becomes a habit.
62. 08:07 There’s habituation. And then this kind of habit blocks the
63. 08:14 possibility of genuine authentic real loving compassionate connections.
64. 08:23 Recognizing this pattern of mistrust and distrust is crucial in the treatment of broken
65. 08:31 and damaged people. The next indicator is emotional
66. 08:37 absentism. emotional um I would say distance.
67. 08:46 When you are too casual about relationships with other people, when you maintain space, when you never share
68. 08:54 any kind of meaningful information about yourself, including information that is
69. 09:00 utterly innocuous, not dangerous. And when this is not random but it is a pattern and even to some extent you are aware that you are doing this when you have become a master
70. 09:12 at being present without being available. Keeping all conversations on the surface, superficial, light, and when
71. 09:23 things get too personal or too intimate, redirecting the in in the exchange or fleeing, running away.
72. 09:34 There is a invisible but impermeable boundary
73. 09:40 around such people as if they are peering at us through a glass darkly.
74. 09:47 It’s very protective against potential hurt on the on the one hand but on the other hand it prevents any meaningful bonding or attachment or even meaningful
75. 09:58 discourse meaningful conversation. These kind of people are
76. 10:06 flimsy. I would say they’re entertaining. They can be fun. People enjoy their company,
77. 10:13 but they’re fleeting. They are here here now and gone tomorrow. And no one is the
78. 10:21 worse off of that. These people are clearly anxious. When
79. 10:27 relationships deepen, when intimacy rears its head,
80. 10:33 when things are taken beyond a certain point, these people become absolutely
81. 10:39 terrified and the anxiety is overpowering and creates a a flight response.
82. 10:48 They keep people who are damaged and broken sometimes keep other people at arms
83. 10:55 length because they have learned to associate closeness and togetherness with pain.
84. 11:03 The pattern becomes so familiar that these walls this solitary confinement feels like safety not like isolation. And that’s
85. 11:14 the second clinical feature. Of course, there’s the classic abandonment
86. 11:20 anxiety. The clinical term is separation insecurity.
87. 11:26 People who are damaged and broken have difficulties to maintain what we call object constancy, the the ability to trust other people,
88. 11:37 to be there, to remain present, to not run away, to not abandon, to not
89. 11:44 reject. And another group of damaged and broken people have difficulty to maintain
90. 11:50 introject constancy. They are very bad at internalizing the presence and the features and the
91. 12:01 characteristics of other people creating an internal representation of these people so that they never feel alone. In some mental health disorders such as
92. 12:12 borderline personality disorder, there is a failure at the in the formation of
93. 12:18 introjets. The borderline is incapable of creating avatars or representations
94. 12:25 or handles or snapshots or introjects of other people in her mind. And so when they’re not there physically, they’re gone out of sight, out of mind. And this creates a lot of anxiety and
95. 12:38 sometimes even rage and aggression. So the brain in in in this case has been
96. 12:47 has been conditioned by repeated neglect, rejection, and abandonment. There’s a
97. 12:54 sinking feeling that if someone doesn’t text back right away
98. 13:01 or if someone is on the phone for too long or if someone is on a trip and it gets extended by one day, they’re about to vanish altogether, never to be seen again. This is a form of overanalyzing or overthinking. The brain goes into a
99. 13:18 loop. It expects erh the disappearance of the
100. 13:24 counterparty. It expects other people to just vanish. And the brain scans constantly for signs that someone is pulling away. Someone is
101. 13:36 about to break up, someone is about to go, never to return. And this is this is vigilance. This hypervigilance
102. 13:47 stems from significant losses or from relationships in the past that were highly unpredictable, including relationships with intermittent
103. 13:59 reinforcement as the main feature of the relationship. The fear manifests in a variety of ways. Like everything else in human psychology,
104. 14:11 there are numerous guises and disguises of the very same thing. Some broken and
105. 14:17 damaged people check in excessively. Some scarred people, people scarred by
106. 14:24 previous relationships need constant reassurance and they become clinging and needy.
107. 14:30 Others end relationships abandon and reject preemptively. I’m gonna abandon
108. 14:36 you before you abandon me. The body keeps the score. The nervous
109. 14:42 system remembers the in intolerable pain, the excruciating pain of having
110. 14:49 been left, having been so utterly and totally rejected. The conscious mind knows the situation is different. The conscious mind is not in control. The limbic
111. 15:01 system is if you wish. The protective mechanism is there to protect the
112. 15:08 individual to spare the individual from repeating these past hurts because at the time they were perceived as life-threatening and critical.
113. 15:21 Another interesting sign um in the case of people who have been damaged or hurt in previous relationships is what we call autoplastic defenses. It’s a
114. 15:32 tendency to assume blame and responsibility and to hold oneself in charge of other
115. 15:39 people’s happiness and well-being. This is setting yourself this is setting
116. 15:45 yourself up for failure. If you’re in charge of other people’s happiness and well-being, then you will constantly
117. 15:51 fail, guaranteed. And so there’s a stream of apologies.
118. 15:58 Sorry, I shouldn’t have done it. forgive me time and again, hundreds of times a
119. 16:04 day. In the majority of cases, an apology is not called for.
120. 16:11 It is a bit of a grandiose defense, a bit of a narcissistic defense because there is this assumption in internal hidden subtle unconscious
121. 16:23 assumption that you are in control. There is such a terror, such a fear of
122. 16:30 losing control that the individual assumes imaginary control over other
123. 16:36 people. And then when things go all right, when they go bad, he feels or she feels guilty because
124. 16:44 they’re in charge. They’re in control. They’re the masters. They should have gotten it right.
125. 16:51 Apologizing for everything. When you reflexively say sorry for anything, for
126. 16:59 taking up space, for having entered the room, for having needs, for expressing emotions or opinions, anything, sorry,
127. 17:06 sorry, sorry, I apologize, forgive me. And this habit develops when people
128. 17:12 learn have learned that preventing conflict means taking blame. Whether the
129. 17:18 blame is deserved or not, conflict aversion is there. So
130. 17:25 by apologizing there is a preeemption of conflict. We see for example children who are
131. 17:33 raised in unpredictable environments. They develop this kind of response. They develop autolastic defenses. Constant
132. 17:40 apologizing becomes a preemptive strike against potential anger or potential
133. 17:46 rejection. When you apologize, automatically it’s a strong indicator that you are terrified. You’re afraid. You’re anxious about what might happen
134. 17:58 if you were not to apologize. Ask yourself, was there actually a
135. 18:04 mistake? Was there anything I could have done? And if the answer is no, then why are
136. 18:10 you trying to minimize yourself? Why are you trying to make yourself
137. 18:16 microscopically small? So small that you’re no longer noticeable and therefore cannot serve the target of anyone’s eye or wrath or anger or rage.
138. 18:31 This kind of awareness can break the cycle of unnecessary guilt, can roll back autoplastic
139. 18:38 defenses and rebuild a sense of deservingness. It’s a bit of a work, but all the problems that I’m mentioning are actually treatable and the prognosis is
140. 18:49 pretty good. So, I advise you to attend therapy to cope with all these issues.
141. 18:55 The next one is a classic. If you’re unable to set boundaries on the one hand, you’re wide open to invasion, intrusion, penetration,
142. 19:06 takeover, hostile or not. If you’re this kind of person who is unable to put your
143. 19:12 foot down and insist on what’s good for you and punish, penalize or reject
144. 19:20 what’s bad for you. If you have no boundaries, that’s a sign of brokenness.
145. 19:27 And on the other hand, if your boundaries are too rigid and I would even say punitive and sadistic, that’s a sign of brokenness. The middle ground in terms of boundaries, the middle ground is very
146. 19:37 important. Saying yes when you actually feel like saying no is not about being nice. It’s
147. 19:46 not about placating other people. It’s not even about averting conflict. It’s a survival strategy. Something you have
148. 19:52 learned when you have felt that setting limits could be absolutely dangerous and
149. 19:58 life-threatening. And so you keep saying yes. Your
150. 20:04 calendar fills with commitments that drain you completely. Your own needs remain unadressed. You neglect important things and people in your life
151. 20:16 because you are absolutely absolutely horrified by the idea of saying no. You
152. 20:23 catastrophize the negative response. They think that saying no would bring on
153. 20:30 a cataclysm, a disaster and a punishment the likes of which has never been heard
154. 20:36 of. This pattern emerges when early boundaries or boundaries in early life
155. 20:43 when not respected or were even perceived as aggressive when you were not allowed to separate
156. 20:49 from for example your parental figures. When you were not allowed to become an individual, when you were emotionally
157. 20:56 blackmailed into remaining merged and fused in a symbiosis with your parents.
158. 21:03 When approval seemed to be conditioned on compliance and love was a mere derivative of servitude. The temporary relief of avoiding conflicts masks the long-term exhaustion
159. 21:19 of living for others. This is a big part of what is known as
160. 21:25 people pleasing. People pleasers struggle with the belief that their
161. 21:31 value comes from what they do for other people rather than for from who they are. It’s the service that renders you
162. 21:40 lovable, not the servant, not you.
163. 21:46 You need to break this pattern. Start small. Say no to minor things and grow from there.
164. 21:58 All this is part of a larger pattern of conflict avoidance. Conflict avoid avoidance emanates from conflict aversion. Aversion is the
165. 22:09 effective part. It’s simply a feeling that conflict is an issue of survival.
166. 22:16 that any conflict can and will escalate to the point that it will be out of control and will absolutely consume
167. 22:24 everything and everyone you included. Conflict is perceived is perceived as
168. 22:30 life-threatening and it needs to be avoided at any cost. When tensions rise, you change the subject. You’re not only being polite.
169. 22:41 You’re not only being nice or kind or diplomatic. You you’re afraid your body
170. 22:47 pay attention to your body at such moments where your body is reacting.
171. 22:53 Whenever there’s disagreement, whenever there’s criticism, whenever you have a different opinion,
172. 23:01 um at that point your body is reacting as if you’re faced with a tiger, with
173. 23:07 some kind of danger. It triggers an instinct to escape the situation or at least to change it or
174. 23:14 reframe it by capitulating submissiveness. Many people who avoid conflicts grew up in environments where disagreements escalated unpredictably to the point of physical violence very often. Whereas
175. 23:30 peacekeeping became their responsibility. They were in charge of keeping the peace. They
176. 23:36 were in charge of keeping the peace by disappearing altogether, by subjugating themselves, by becoming submissive, by
177. 23:44 not being. Even healthy debate can trigger the same physiological stress response as these
178. 23:51 genuine threats in early childhood or in bad relationships, in abusive
179. 23:57 relationships, toxic relationships. And so
180. 24:04 become self-aware. Ask yourself, I’ve just said that I agree with this. I’m agreeing externally. But do I really agree with this? Am I
181. 24:16 also agreeing internally? If there is a discrepancy, a dissonance between external agreement and internal disagreement, you’re trying to avoid conflict. You are completely shutting down in
182. 24:32 conversations which are less than pleasant conversations which implies some kind of
183. 24:40 tension or stress or disagreement. It’s a protective response. It’s a
184. 24:46 flight response or a freeze response and or a fawn response. It’s a
185. 24:52 protective response that makes perfect sense given previous history, relationships in
186. 24:58 which expressing who you are, anything your opinions or emotions
187. 25:05 was penalized. Whenever you exposed yourself as independent, agentic, personally autonomous, you were punished. It was a
188. 25:16 punitive environment which denuded you and denied you your core identity
189. 25:24 and the actionable parts of your core identity. Decision making, choice making, having family, having friends,
190. 25:32 traveling, working. So isolation comes hand inhand with conflict aversion.
191. 25:40 You need to learn to distinguish safe disagreements from danger. There are of course
192. 25:47 situations where a disagreement could and does escalate. For example, if you find yourself in prison, don’t make a
193. 25:54 habit of it. But otherwise, most disagreements are pretty safe and you need not have this
194. 26:03 fightorflight response. You need not have this hyper arousal, adrenaline,
195. 26:09 cortisol, stress hormones. You don’t need to have any of this. It’s a sign that the s the self-regulatory systems in your body are malfunctioning.
196. 26:22 Similarly, averting conflict, avoiding conflict
197. 26:28 goes hand in hand with deflecting praise, brushing off compliments. That’s not a
198. 26:35 sign of modesty. When the compliments are warranted when you deserve, when
199. 26:42 you’re deserving of the compliments and you absolutely refuse to accept the compliments, you minimize them. You mock
200. 26:49 the you mock them. you ridicule them, you you reframe them so that they appear to be erroneous somehow. When you constantly deflect
201. 27:00 uh praise, when you constantly change the evaluation of you from
202. 27:07 positive to negative, this is not modesty. It is your brain rejecting information
203. 27:15 that contradicts your self-image as a bad object. There’s a cluster of voices inside you
204. 27:23 that keeps informing you how un how unworthy you are, what a loser and a
205. 27:29 failure you are. And someone praises your work, it conflicts with a bad object. And you need, you have been
206. 27:37 taught, you have been conditioned by your parental figures, role models, teachers, God knows who, peers even, you
207. 27:44 have been conditioned to uphold the bad object, to validate the bad object, to justify the bad object. And so praise and compliments challenge the bad the bad object. Immediately you point out flaws or redirect the credit elsewhere.
208. 28:01 You know, I didn’t do much. He did it. And this automatic deflection develops
209. 28:07 when childhood accomplishments were dismissed or when receiving positive attention
210. 28:15 felt unsafe because sometimes it was immediately followed with negative attention by negative attention. So
211. 28:22 um intermittent reinforcement. The nervous system has learned to protect you from the vulnerability of
212. 28:28 being seen at all. It was preferable to not be seen, to not
213. 28:34 be noticed, than to be the recipient of attention, sometimes positive and sometimes life. The discomfort you feel when you are
214. 28:45 praised is real. Your body even tenses. Your face flushes. Your your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure. Hormones are secreted. These
215. 28:57 are real. It’s a real bodily reaction. However, there are very simple techniques to counter this. Say thank you without diminishing
216. 29:09 yourself. Try try it. Retrain yourself.
217. 29:15 All these issues, I repeat, can be resolved usually in therapy and the prognosis is excellent.
218. 29:22 And they they all involve what I just called the internal bed object.
219. 29:29 It used to be known early on in psychoanalysis as the primitive super ego.
220. 29:36 And colloquially people use the phrase harsh inner critic.
221. 29:43 By the way, this is Paris. Like 99% of the time there are sirens,
222. 29:49 you name it. fire, ambulances. I mean, the whole city is like on the verge of
223. 29:55 falling apart. Okay. Harsh inner critic. That’s a phrase currently in use. It’s a
224. 30:01 voice or actually constellation of voices inside your head. They’re known as introjects. And these voices hold you
225. 30:10 to impossible standards, set you up for failure. Only these voices would expect this.
226. 30:16 Anyone else you ask would tell you that these standards are stupidly high like
227. 30:25 they’re unattainable. But these voices insist. These are not just high expectations.
228. 30:32 It’s the internalized voice of critical voices of critical figures from your past. And sometimes your defense against these voices is to become a perfectionist
229. 30:45 because perfectionism has two benefits. Number one, you never finish the job
230. 30:51 because it’s never perfect. Imperfection guarantees lack of completion. And as
231. 30:58 long as you delay the completion of the work, you can’t be subject to criticism and denigration and ridicule. And the
232. 31:06 second advantage of perfectionism, should a task be completed finally in
233. 31:12 the distant future, imaginary future, you will have been rendered by the
234. 31:18 completion of the task, you’ve been rendered a perfect being. Perfect beings
235. 31:24 are never exposed to criticism and ridicule. They meet these high standards of the internalized bed object, the internalized disparaging and crit crit
236. 31:36 critical voices. So perfectionism is a protection against
237. 31:42 external criticism that has been internalized. External criticism that had become embedded in your mind and now is operating from within rather than from without. If you criticize yourself
238. 31:54 first, if you are harsh on yourself, if you criticize yourself the hardest, no
239. 32:01 one else judge, no one else’s judgment is going to hurt you. You’re going to outdo them all. You’re going to be your
240. 32:07 own biggest critic. This inner crit critic believes that it is keeping you
241. 32:13 safe, that it is success, keeping you ensuring your success. It’s like a tough
242. 32:19 love voice. So sit down, sit back and listen. Just
243. 32:26 listen to the way you talk to yourself, to your self-t talk. Would you speak to
244. 32:32 someone the way you you’re talking to yourself? Would you would you apply the same
245. 32:38 standards, the same implacable implacability, the same harshness? Would you be that critical? Is that the way you communicate with other people? Probably not. The critic developed to help you survive
246. 32:55 difficult circumstances. But if you want to heal and if you want to silence the critic and replace the
247. 33:01 replace it with a loving self-loving authentic voice, you need to recognize
248. 33:07 the existence and the speech acts of the harsh inner critic and silence it because it’s a
249. 33:18 liar. The harsh inner critic is sadistic. It’s an enemy. It’s It wants
250. 33:24 you dead emotionally and otherwise. It’s not a friend. And it lies. It does not hesitate to lie, to reframe reality, to to invent all kinds of things. It’s it
251. 33:35 has it it tries to impact your reality testing, tries to divorce you from
252. 33:41 reality. For some people all this is too much and they develop what we we call emotional numbness as I was telling you emotional numbness or reduced effect display.
253. 33:57 When you feel disconnected from your emotions disconnected from any emotions
254. 34:03 you’re not just chilling it’s not just you know I I’m impervious
255. 34:09 I’m impermeable I’m invulnerable I couldn’t care less. That that’s that is not the true the truth. Emotional
256. 34:16 numbing is a sophisticated defense mechanism of the brain. When emotions are felt to be overwhelming,
257. 34:23 they become too dangerous to experience, let alone express. And the mind learns to disconnect this module
258. 34:31 and to render you detached from threatening waves, threatening effective
259. 34:38 ways. So emotion dysregulation actually precedes emotional numbing and emotional
260. 34:46 numbing precedes the the reduced expression of emotions facially and body
261. 34:52 language and and this is known as reduced effect display. All these are common in people who are broken and
262. 35:00 damaged. People who have been seriously impacted by relationships which have
263. 35:07 shattered them, taken away from them their core identity and their
264. 35:13 self-confidence and self-esteem and sense of selfworth and ability to regulate everything, emotions, moods.
265. 35:21 And so this protective response usually comes about when expressing
266. 35:28 expressing emotions has been punished. Like every time you express emotions, it
267. 35:34 was followed by some kind of punishment. Banishment, silent treatment, uh physical punishment, psychological
268. 35:40 torture, verbal abuse, you name it. Whenever you express emotions, expressing emotions is being true to
269. 35:47 yourself. Whenever you’ve been true to yourself, whenever you sustained your identity, whenever you shoved it, rubbed
270. 35:55 it in people’s faces, so to speak, they came all they came back at you. They they took you down. They trampled on
271. 36:02 you. You so you’ve learned to suji emotions and their expression effects
272. 36:09 with punishment with rejection with being overwhelmed and with the absence of any kind of support. The brain essentially created a circuit breaker that trips before emotions become too
273. 36:22 intense. Numbness is experienced as being flat, feeling
274. 36:30 flat, having trouble identifying even how you feel or if you’re feeling at all.
275. 36:36 Experiencing emotions physically, tension, fatigue without the corresponding feelings. It’s like your
276. 36:44 body does the emoting, not your mind. And this protective barrier did serve
277. 36:50 you once. Everything in this list used to be adaptive. Everything in this list
278. 36:57 guaranteed your survival to this very minute. You’re alive because you have been using these things.
279. 37:03 But it’s time to let go. The danger has passed. Your tormentors and abusers and
280. 37:10 torturers are long gone. You need to reacquire life. You need to
281. 37:16 embrace life where once you have rejected it. You need to develop a core identity. And you need to be you without
282. 37:22 fear and bias. And of course this is a tall order. And
283. 37:29 some people say rather than be me, I’m going to do me. Or in other words,
284. 37:36 rather than be, I’m going to do. Action displaces being.
285. 37:42 Like if I’m active, if I’m busy, I don’t have time to think. I don’t have time to
286. 37:49 be hurt. I don’t have time to experience pain and I don’t have time to be overwhelmed and disregulated by emotions
287. 37:56 and labile moods. None of this. I have a packed schedule. I have an endless to-do
288. 38:03 list. I am overwhelmed not by uh emotions but
289. 38:09 I’m overwhelmed by my schedule and itineraries. This is not productivity. This is an
290. 38:16 escape route from uncomfortable inner internal processes.
291. 38:23 Things are happening inside you that are noisy in a way. And to drown the
292. 38:29 internal noise, you create external noise. It’s a drama. Actually, it’s a drama um survival strategy or coping coping strategy.
293. 38:40 Constant busyness is a form of drama and it is accentuated by and incorporates
294. 38:47 drama. Like when you see very busy people, workaholics or chief executive officers or I don’t know what they’re
295. 38:54 very dramatic about their business. Their busyiness constitutes their being. Take away the
296. 39:01 business and nothing is left. And that’s precisely the idea behind being busy
297. 39:07 that it should it should displace existence. Stillness feels threatening motions
298. 39:16 feels healing. This these people self-medicate with action. They have
299. 39:22 actionable existence. This pattern emerges when difficult emotions became overwhelming without
300. 39:29 adequate support or internal coping tools. maybe too early in life, maybe at
301. 39:35 a moment at a time of vulnerability or sickness or something. And so the the
302. 39:42 these emotions drowned the individual. The brain learned that activity provides
303. 39:48 relief from internal distress. Ironically, we advise people with
304. 39:54 depressive disorders, including major depressive depression, to be active because it’s therapeutic.
305. 40:02 So ask yourself, how do you respond to unscheduled time,
306. 40:08 leisure, sudden leisure, even canceled plans? You had a plan, it’s canceled. Do you feel
307. 40:15 anxious when your time is empty? When you confronted with this void into which
308. 40:23 you might resonate finally? Do you feel terrified, terrorized when you are faced with an
309. 40:30 empty afternoon? This awareness isn’t about judging uh your busy life or your schedule or your
310. 40:37 work or your job. But you need to understand what drives your addiction to
311. 40:46 being busy. What forces you to invent
312. 40:52 out of whole cloth completely unnecessary activities and actions and
313. 40:58 commitments and investments and so on. What is it that drives you to fill your
314. 41:04 life to the brim so that you’re no longer able to experience it fully and truly? You need to begin to gradually build tolerance for being rather than
315. 41:17 doing, for not doing. And of course, the risk when you give up on busyiness is that you do have these
316. 41:28 empty hours and and in these empty hours, you may introspect and self-reflect and become
317. 41:35 self-aware. You may suddenly be overwhelmed or or flooded with emotions.
318. 41:41 Your mood might go up and down. Um and worse come worse comes the worst of all
319. 41:49 is that someone may share these leisure moments with you and show you affection and compassion
320. 41:55 and god forbid intimacy and love. You see the opposite of of intimacy is
321. 42:03 busyness. The opposite of love is indifference. The opposite of intimacy is busyness.
322. 42:11 When you are busy, you don’t have time to be intimate, which is my big beef with social media. They keep you so busy that you’re unable to have a life. You’re unable to be intimate. You don’t
323. 42:23 have a time to be intimate with anyone. But that’s an aside. So
324. 42:29 the broken damaged people perceive affection, love, compassion and
325. 42:36 empathy as threats, not as promises, not as good things, but
326. 42:43 as menacing, ominous developments. Pulling away when someone shows genuine
327. 42:50 care or interest in you isn’t about being independent. Insecure attachment style is not
328. 42:58 healthy. It’s not about, you know, being a lone wolf, self-sufficient,
329. 43:05 the hallowed malbor. No, it’s not about this. It’s a protective system. It is an indication of weakness, not of strength. It is activate. It’s it’s this
330. 43:16 protective system is in action because there is a perceived vulnerability in you. This reflexive distancing, it happens
331. 43:28 unconsciously. And sometimes you ask yourself why
332. 43:35 my relationships feel so uncomfortable. Why when on the face of it intimacy is growing, love is display exhibited. I am engulfed by compassion and caring
333. 43:48 and empathy. It’s palpable and it makes me
334. 43:54 really really ill. It is really uncomfortable. Why is that?
335. 44:01 You see, we often say that damaged, broken, hurt people
336. 44:07 uh find it difficult to love. But I think it’s the opposite. They find it difficult to accept love. They find it difficult to be loved. And that’s why they don’t love in advance. They
337. 44:18 preemptively don’t love because they cannot be loved in return.
338. 44:25 When you’re struggling with emot with accepting emotions, accepting affection, accepting other people’s compassion and
339. 44:31 caring for you, care for you. When you experience love in a way which is
340. 44:39 inconsistent, conditional, entangled with pain and hurt and harm, harmful
341. 44:46 kind of self mutilation, then something is very wrong with you. Your brain categorizes even completely healthy and commendable and recommended
342. 44:57 attachments as potentially dangerous and it and again
343. 45:03 your body is signaling to you. Your body talks to you constantly and ferociously
344. 45:09 and I would say viferously. You notice physical discomfort when there are tender moments,
345. 45:16 when there’s intimacy, when there’s real opening up and vulnerability, you feel
346. 45:23 acutely uncomfortable. Even you feel even something really bad is going to happen. You catastrophize these moments and you find yourself creating conflicts when the
347. 45:35 relationships deepen, introducing drama, undermining it somehow.
348. 45:41 And when you recognize this pattern, it would help you to explain why part of you craves connection, craves intimacy, while another part seems determined to undermine it.
349. 45:52 You are self-sabotaging. It’s a form of self-defeating behavior.
350. 45:58 And in the long run, it’s self-destructive. I mentioned perfectionism
351. 46:05 as a reaction to impossibly high standards embedded in the bed object.
352. 46:11 But it’s also a protection. When you exhaust yourself in order to
353. 46:17 meet these impossibly internalized high standards, it’s not just because you’re being ambitious. It’s a defense, as I said, against
354. 46:28 criticism and rejection. But it takes you also takes you out of the game. You
355. 46:34 are too exhausted, too depleted to do anything else, to think anything else, to feel anything
356. 46:40 else, and to interact with anyone else. Perfectionism leads to compulsive addictive behaviors
357. 46:49 such as walkism. The flawless presentation, the spotless home, the stellar performance, they not only
358. 47:00 allow you to feel worthy to regulate your sense of selfworth via narcissistic
359. 47:06 supply, but they also occupy you. They also pervade you and permeate you and
360. 47:14 monopolize you and colonize you so that God forbid you don’t have the minute necessary
361. 47:20 to be loved or to be vulnerable or to be intimate.
362. 47:27 And so perfectionism is a double-edged sword because it
363. 47:33 fulfills multiple um psychological needs. And it develops
364. 47:39 when love or acceptance seem conditional on performance or achievement. You become performative, a performative being because you’ve
365. 47:50 learned that the only way to secure empathy and attention and compassion and love and caring and so on starting in
366. 47:57 early childhood was to perform to meet the standards to to comply with
367. 48:04 expectations uh expressed implicit and explicit
368. 48:10 expectations achievements, attainments, accomplishments. ments were the currency, the coinage of the realm. You wanted emotions, you traded them for accomplishments. Children who received attention primarily for accomplishments learned
369. 48:26 that perfection equals safety. The need to be seen is overriding.
370. 48:35 And in many households, in many families, you’re not seen unless you’re doing something successfully.
371. 48:42 May I add Perfectionism whispers in your ear, tells you you will finally be enough
372. 48:50 when everything is just right. But you’re never there. The finish line keeps moving for reasons that I’ve explained earlier. And you need to break this cycle. You need to recognize that
373. 49:02 you have inherent value by virtue of existing. There’s never been anyone like you before. There will never be anyone
374. 49:09 like you ever in the whole history of the universe. You need to you need to realize how unique you are. Not in the
375. 49:16 grandio narcissistic sense, in the factual biological sense. You are special because you are you.
376. 49:25 And then taking off from there, you will realize that your value is independent
377. 49:32 of your personal biography. Your value is independent of your accomplishments and achievements and your contacts and your access and your money and your
378. 49:43 power and all these are not relevant to your value as a human being. They are
379. 49:49 relevant to your value as a social being. I’m not denying this. But they
380. 49:55 are not relevant to your value as a human being. The minute you internalize this insight,
381. 50:02 a great calm will prevail. Your anxiety will have dwindled to nothing and you will be open to introduce other people into your life
382. 50:15 recognizing that first and foremost we’re all human and this is where our
383. 50:21 value lies.