Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Don’t Use Drama to Offset Depression (Dysphoria, Dysthymia)

1. 00:02 In political science and civil discourse, we are not supposed to say the n word or the f word. In psychology, we have the dwords. The dwords, depression, dysphoria, dysmeia, and above all, drama. Today we’re going to discuss how we use drama, how we introduce drama into our
2. 00:29 lives in order to offset and fight off depression, dysphoria, dysmia, and other manifestations of simply being down or feeling down. A few definitions first. My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of
3. 00:48 psychology. And that, you’re right, was not a definition. Definition number one, dysmeic disorder. In the fourth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual, dysmeic disorder was a mood disorder characterized by symptoms that are less severe but more
4. 01:08 enduring than those in major depressive disorder. In the DSM5, the designation persistent depressive disorder is a consolidation of distemic disorder and chronic major depressive disorder. So distemic disorder is simply lowgrade background noise dysphoria or lowgrade
5. 01:33 background noise depression. It’s always there. It’s low intensity but it’s all permeating and all pervasive and in it leads to phenomena such as anhedonia the unab inability to experience pleasure. Dysphoria is a more general term. It’s a mood characterized by generalized
6. 01:55 discontent and agitation. Okay. So these are the phenomena that characterize the lives of something like onethird of the population. The prevalence and incidence of depressive disorders have has quadrupled have quadrupled among young people went up five times. And in the wake of
7. 02:20 the pandemic about one/ird to 40% of the adult population also suffer from depressive illnesses and anxiety disorders. One dysfunctional coping strategy when you’re confronted with this black dog, this evil within this allconsuming corrosive range of effects that characterize
8. 02:47 depression debilitating your behavior, your ability to act, and your pleasure in life, your wish to live in extreme cases. when you’re confronted with all this monopoly of pretty threatening and self-destructive and self-defeating um manifestations.
9. 03:08 One way to cope with all these and again it’s a dysfunctional way and in extreme cases a pathological way is dramatization. Dramatization is attentiong behavior such as for example exaggerating the symptoms of an illness to make it appear more important than the occurrence of
10. 03:28 the same illness in another person. In psychoanalytic theory, dramatization is the expression of repressed wishes or impulses, especially in dreams. Drama queens and drama kings. People who use drama as a management tool in relationships or imbue their lives with
11. 03:50 drama, create drama in their lives, introduce drama into their reality. Um, all these situations involve several psychological needs and psychological processes which I will deal with later in the video. But I would like to emphasize a few initial points. First of
12. 04:12 all, drama or dramatics or dramatization. These are forms of displacement. When you cannot cope with your own internal conflicts, when you cannot selfregulate, when you cannot drown the den and noise inside you, when you’re overwhelmed. One way to cope with this
13. 04:35 internal havoc, internal mayhem is to externalize it by creating a drama outside. By introducing uncertainty, indeterminacy, fear, unpredictability into your relationships, into your environment, you’re actually displacing the problem. You cannot cope
14. 04:57 efficaciously with what h with what’s happening inside you. So you introduce a crisis outside yourself with which you convince yourself you’re able to somehow cope. It’s the externalization of the problem. The internal the external crisis the external havoc the external tumult
15. 05:21 they create such an overflow of data information stimuli resistance conflict and so on that they drown out the internal problems. I’d like to say that the internal noise is canceled out by the external noise generated by the drama. So this is displacement.
16. 05:46 Second point I’d like to make is that drama brings attention. Drama and attention are inextricably connected. And because drama engenders attention, attracts attention, harvests and garners attention. Because drama generates u neediness and clinginess and rights
17. 06:06 and commenurate obligations in others because drama is also about victimization or selfattributed victim status. These are all the elements of drama. Drama is self soothing. When you’re being dramatic or when you’re being involved in a drama, a dramatic situation, when you’re
18. 06:28 dramatizing or you are the recipient of a drama or the unwilling or unwitting participant in a drama, there’s a lot of attention. You there’s attention from the outside, there’s attention inside the drama by the other participants. And this attention to some extent is
19. 06:49 self soothing especially when it’s coupled with a victim status especially when it yields certain specific rights and obligations on other people and so on. So there’s an element of self-coming and self soothing in the drama. It also the drama also
20. 07:08 serves as an organizing principle of reality and as an explanatory hermeneutic principle a principle that imbus life with meaning makes sense of what’s happen what’s happening and provides purpose and direction. Next thing I would like to mention with
21. 07:30 regards to drama is that most dramas, not all but most dramas involve an enactment of the forbidden, the dangerous, the threatening. So via the drama we channel urges, wishes, drives, fears, phobias
22. 07:53 um that we cannot cope with internally. We externalize them. We give them an existence. We we we we imbue them with an external existence. We materialize them. We we actualize them. It’s like ectoplasm in in a in a in a spiritualist um meeting. So by enacting
23. 08:20 our fears, our anxieties, our dread, um our phobias, by giving them, imbuing them with external existence, we are able to exercise them. We are able to drive them away or we are able to minimize them somehow. We become maybe disillusioned or disenchanted.
24. 08:45 We wake up in a way or we discover our power. We get empowered. So an enactment of the forbidden, the dangerous and the threatening is at the core of many religious rituals. And he and one of them is exorcism when allegedly the exorcist drives out demons.
25. 09:12 Every drama involves these elements. These unspoken, non-verbal, ambient, atmospheric elements um that are mildly sinister, minutace,
26. 09:32 ominous. They’re there and not there. and they permeate the the dramatic space that this theater production. It’s it’s like walking on eggshells is like being on a on the edge of a cliff. You’re about to fall. It’s very much a dreamscape. It’s what’s what’s happening
27. 09:57 in nightmares. So this enactment is very crucial in the dramatic space and it allows to release negative energy. Negative effects such as for example rage, anger, envy, fear, hatred can be released via this dramatic enactment. In truth, there is a treatment modality.
28. 10:23 There’s a psychotherapy known as psychodrama where we use drama exactly to purge and expunge and cleanse the patient of all these negative effects, negative environment, internal environment, landscape. Next, the last thing I want to mention
29. 10:42 before we transition to the main body of the video is the drama bond. You know this trauma bond or trauma bonding. I suggest a new concept drama bond or drama bonding. I think drama bonding has to do with the lack of a secure base and our desperate
30. 11:02 attempts to find one. Drama bonding is an extreme birectional collaborative selfharming attachment. It is fostered by traumatizing, unpredictable intermittent reinforcement, object withdrawal and structural narrative fantasy, uncertainty, indeterminacy and
31. 11:23 insecurity involving a power asymmetry. It leads to anxiety, desperation and acting out. I will dwell on all these elements later in the video. Drama has a lot to do with self-love deficit as Ross Rosenberg calls it. If you are unable to love yourself unconditionally,
32. 11:50 you would seek unconditional love from others. And you usually you would usually choose people who are in themselves broken and damaged and offer the semblance of unconditional love and because they are codependent in nature. They’re clinging. They’re needy. They
33. 12:16 extort. They control from the bottom. Lack of self-love. Deficient self- loveve. The inability to love oneself unless one performs. When you’re unable to love yourself unconditionally and you love yourself only conditionally, only when you only when you meet certain performance
34. 12:38 standards, at that point you would seek unconditional love elsewhere. You would you would seek um unconditional love supplements. You would seek to supplement your unconditional self- loveve and then you are likely to end up in highly dysfunctional destructive relationships
35. 13:01 and this is usually because there’s a misidentification of drama with intensity of emotions. We erroneously believe that the presence of drama, the presence of drama in a relationship indicates strong emotions and the presence of drama in life
36. 13:23 indicates some kind of accomplishments. At least at the very least the generation of memories. But it’s all wrong. Of course, drama is a simulacum. It’s a simulation. self-medicating with drama, supplement, supplementation with drama leads nowhere. The dramas are fantasies.
37. 13:44 They’re shared fantasies. They do not impinge or on reality. They don’t touch reality. They’re divorced from reality. It is precisely the source of their power. Because the drama is divorced from reality. It can and does offer an alternative which on the face of it caters to one’s
38. 14:05 psychological needs and is very rewarding but in reality it’s a fake. It’s a falsehood and it generates a lot of helpless rage and grief in the participant um in the drama or the recipient of the drama bec precisely because it does not feel real precisely because it doesn’t
39. 14:31 touch the individual. Drama is out there. Individuals involved in drama often describe themselves as petrified by fear and therefore unable to actually interact emotionally fully in the drama or they describe themselves as observers having been inured by the drama having
40. 14:53 been desensitized by the repetitiveness and the intensity of the drama they become observers detached uninterested or disinterested uninterested I’m This indifference to the drama is late stage four stage cancer. Uh but dramas can be can provide a sense of
41. 15:21 safety and security through drama bonding which is one of the topics I discuss as we proceed in this video.