Give Up Hope For A Better Past
Cognitive Scientist and author, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, breaks down Vulnerable Narcissism, the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, and the need for compassion and complexity.
My transcribed conversation with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman now continues from the first part.
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist exploring intelligence, creativity and the depth of human potential. He's the founder and director of the Center for Human Potential and founder of Self-Actualization Coaching.
Dr. Kaufman holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Yale University and has taught at Columbia University, Yale, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Psychology Today and Harvard Business Review, and he is the author and editor of over ten books.
Kimi: I also wanted to ask; mindset can be taught. Mentality can be taught. Is vulnerable narcissism something that can be taught? I've heard a lot.
Scott: What have you heard? Tell me what you've heard.
Kimi: So for narcissism, generally (I'm always on these YouTube streets watching every video on narcissism—I think it's fascinating) a lot of them say that it has something to do with trauma that is rooted in your childhood.
Is that true or am I in too deep on these YouTube streets?
Scott: So there's just so much to unpack there. You brought up the word trauma. What we have to understand is that everything in life is a mix of nature and nurture—everything. You have a lot of people who have a certain set of genes that don't make them as sensitive to their environment and may have gone through the same exact experiences in life as someone with the genes that cause them to be temperamentally more sensitive to everything that they experience in their life, who then are more likely to create a trauma narrative around it.
So we have to understand trauma is also just a narrative. There's no part of the brain that's like "that's the trauma", that becomes unlocked after an experience. It's about your interpretation of what you experienced, and you can always reframe variance in a different way. This idea that the 'body keeps the score' is some way of erroneously separating the body from the brain—the mind and body are deeply, deeply intertwined.
And it turns out that if we cognitively process what has happened to us and frame it in more empowerment oriented ways, our body changes, our nervous system changes.
Kimi: I believe that. I definitely believe that when I had adopted a victim mindset, (I don't know a lot about biology) but I had a response to every single act of microaggression. And the more I leaned into forgiveness over a year or so, that changed [my physical response] dramatically. And so I do think you're absolutely right. Like, I haven't been the same as I was back then.
So you're saying with vulnerable narcissism, you can absolutely tap into that—like at any point in life—just like you can also can you tap out of it?
Scott: Well, I want to make something clear. There is no tapping in or tapping out process. These processes take time and work. Something that might be useful here is the distinction between the event itself—the traumatic event.
There are things that we all can agree are traumatic events—abuse, sexual abuse, rape, physical abuse, combat vets who've been through certain things. So there are traumatic events, but then there's the trauma reaction, right? Or the trauma narrative that we've taught. These are two separate things. Not everyone who experiences a traumatic event becomes traumatized by it.
There's also nothing wrong—there's no victim blaming here. There's nothing wrong with you. If you did interpret it as a traumatic event, if you were traumatized by something, of course we need compassion for that. I just want to be clear that all this is a process. People with PTSD, for instance, our research shows that it's possible to simultaneously have post-traumatic stress disorder and work toward post-traumatic growth.
These things can cope. These things can coexist. It's possible to go through PTSD and also at the same time process the traumas and process things in a more productive way by, for instance, having a notebook and just writing about your emotions 5 to 10 minutes a day and writing about the meaning around the event and finding a new found meaning and how it has changed you, and how you want to be changed moving forward—how you want to grow.
There are things you can actively do, and what I mean by the passivity mindset is someone who maybe has experienced trauma and was traumatized by it and they somehow are committed to staying in that mental prison their entire lives. I want to be very clear. There are things you can work on every day, little by little, to slowly help you get out of that mental prison.
But it's not an on/off switch and it doesn't happen overnight. But I really do believe in the potential for growth, and I will stand by that statement.
Kimi: Thank you for clarifying that. When you say we can have incidents happen to us and we have an ability to react to that. I'm thinking of the word 'resilience' as fitting into there.
Is that something that's correct to say, is that what you would define resilience as?
Scott: Resilience is your ability to bounce back from an environmental stressor. But post-traumatic growth, which I was just mentioning, is something that is not only bouncing back, but actually growing from the experience.
So this emerging field, which I wrote about a lot in my most recent book, Choose Growth, is all about choosing. Regardless of what has happened to you, you make the conscious choice that you're going to grow from it.
At some point you have to give up all hope for a better past.
And I want to give credit to one of my mentors who came up with that, and that's the great existential psychotherapist, Irving Yalom, who's now 93 or something years old. But he wrote The Gift of Therapy among other seminal books in our field. And that's from him, but I say it all the time.
Kimi: I think we're kind of in the ballpark of talking about the mindset of victimhood. And I think you said that the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood can also be somewhat interchangeable with some traits of vulnerable narcissism. Did I get that correct?
Scott: You're absolutely right. I think they're almost the same trait.
But we're just collecting the data. There must be, at least conceptually, a huge overlap between the traits of vulnerable narcissism and the traits of TIV.
It might actually be mixed. You might also see a bunch of grandiose narcissistic traits associated with the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, because there's also the more extroverted outwardly, constantly-seeking-one's-victimhood [quality]. Those who score high for vulnerable narcissism tend to be more introverted, that's why some people call it ‘closet narcissism’. They tend to not be very assertive, but they ruminate all the time about how they deserve more things without actually going out there and doing anything to get along the lines of what a normal human would do to obtain those things.
You know, like sitting there and dreaming about, "Oh, I should be famous" or "I should be rich" and resenting others, but not actually doing anything.
Kimi: I think this is a word that has fascinated me recently, besides resilience. I'm fascinated by the concept of shame. I keep finding this word everywhere that I look up narcissism—it somehow always stems back to shame. Is this a reality? Is this another reason why maybe there are people that feel entitled?
Scott: Well, you won't be surprised to hear me say nothing comes down to any one thing. But I will say that vulnerable narcissism is strongly, strongly correlated with the emotion of shame. Strongly correlated.
And it's one of its strongest correlations, in fact. So the idea there is that people who screen grandiose narcissism, well, they tend to score low in shame. They tend to have no shame. Wow. I mean, they tend to walk around with this puffed up like, you know, I'm entitled to everything because of my inherent superiority.
But people who score high in vulnerable narcissism and those are the ones that tend to end up on the therapist's couch. It tends to be more of an internalizing disorder versus an externalizing disorder. So internalizing this, they're really suffering at their own hands because they tend to have a lot of grandiose fantasies that most of us have.
It's perfectly normal and human, but they may have grown up, and this is where the developmental antecedents come in. Maybe when they were much younger, they were taught that every time they expressed a need, it got shot down. So they cried, and the parent ignored them, or whatever it was.
So they started to develop a shame for expressing basic normal human needs and particularly expressing ambition. So I think there's a lot we can do to help people with vulnerable narcissistic traits. I think we can have a lot of compassion for it. In fact, I would be in favor of renaming it. The word narcissism carries such an aggressive connotation to the person, and that's not helping the person at all by labeling them as a narcissist. I would actually rather rename it in some way.
I feel like the field of psychology needs a new name for it. I thought of one; 'vulnerable preoccupation', but I don't think that really gets at it either in a compassionate way. But whatever it is, there is a phenomenon where the person does feel shame for their grandiose fantasies.
So they keep it all inside, but they also start to get more and more resentful of others. And that's so tragic because we all are capable of great potential. And the more we keep the stuff inside and the more we start to develop these self-defeating mindsets and behaviors, the less likely we are to realize those grandiose fantasies.
Kimi: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. Thank you again for breaking that down. I'm also curious; with the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, I read in the Scientific American piece that you wrote a couple of years ago, that there is a tendency for revenge among individuals who exhibit these traits.
Is that something you think in our current age gets confused for justice? And how do we differentiate between revenge and justice with this being a disorder?
Scott: What a great and complex question, because the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood—that's the technical name for it in the field—is correlated with lower levels of forgiveness in one's daily life.
Now that is a prominent correlation in the psychological literature, but what we're talking about here is an interpersonal tendency. [What] we're talking about contextually, this person and this way of being, or this personality, is that they have a personality that doesn't forgive across many situations in their life. And that's what I'm talking about. I think that perhaps we need to be really careful in distinguishing that from people who face a monumental injustice in their life.
And we are fighting for that injustice to be rectified—that's important. It's important to seek justice when you have faced a really terrible thing. Not just for the individual, but as a community, I certainly would rather live in a society where we all care deeply about injustices and help people, and are aware of it when it happens.
Now, with me saying that, some people will say, "well, that sounds woke!" But I think part of the problem is that if anyone talks at all about an injustice, people will paint them as woke. I like to say I'm progressive, but not woke. You know, I think that we need to [care about injustice] and I really believe in caring about injustice where it happens.
But I define woke as viewing everything through that lens. And I don't view everything, in every situation, through that lens. So how can we distinguish between the trait and the legitimate state of injustice that people may go through? We shouldn't allow, as a society, for something to happen, like if some innocent homeless person walks down the street and let's say they get attacked, beaten and killed by a mob of just horrible humans.
It's not woke for me to say that was wrong. Do you see what I'm saying?
Kimi: Absolutely. [Returning to the point about letting go of all hope for a better past, forgiveness and justice] Are you saying that it is possible to accept that the past is the past, like when a slight that has happened against you, we can't undo that. And it is also a separate and possible thing to seek justice for that?
Oftentimes whenever I talk about my story, the two [an event of injustice and forgiveness] get confused as forgetting the past or that forgiveness is saying it wasn't as bad as it was.
But are you saying that they are two separate things? Like, the internal processing of the event—choosing to no longer ruminate on the past—and then seeking justice for where things actually went wrong—those can be two separate things?
Scott: What I'm saying is that it is a call for us to hold lots of seemingly contradictory things in our head at one time, which might be an impossible task for some.
Because the way I think about this is—I'm a cognitive scientist, but I'm a humanistic psychologist. And as a humanistic psychologist, I really want to hold all the messiness of the full complexity of being human and not reduce people. So, on the one hand, I think that we need a lot more grace and forgiveness for human imperfection in our society today.
Yeah, I think that we need that within ourselves, so we don't have so much [pressure for] perfectionism within ourselves, but also with others and be able to hold our own fullness for humanness and also hold the fullness of others. So that's on the one hand—a need for a lot more grace and forgiveness in our society. But then secondly, a point I made today is to eventually move forward with our lives.
We need to not hold onto our past as the factor that is holding us back, and ultimately move on with our lives. We do have to give up hope for a better past. That doesn't mean we forget our past. That's the other thing I want us to hold in our head. At the same time, it doesn't mean we forget our past and it doesn't mean that we don't fight for a better future for ourselves and others.
There are some people that are committed to seeing things as incompatible when they don't have to be. And I would add one extra layer of complexity to this—that it's still possible, with all this, to have loving kindness for you and for your enemies.
I practice Metta regularly with my friends (Sharon Salzberg, who is one of the legends who brought Metta to the West) and I will meditate. So if someone makes me really mad, or I feel jealousy, or I feel like I've been wronged, I'll meditate on my love for that person.
And in fact, if we wish for that person that they get well, we're actually making a wish for a better society and a better world, right? It's only a net positive for that person. You have an angry, antagonistic, hostile human going around being angry and hostile, that's not good for society.
Clearly they're not mentally well—that's not a wellness indicator. And holding all of these things in mind at one time is what I'm all about. But I don't think that a lot of people are committed to that—to taking these seeming contradictions and integrating them. It's hard.
Kimi: K. L. asks a very interesting question. If we stop using the word ‘victim’ for a year, would humanity be worse or better?
Scott: I don't know if it's a good thing to use the phrase 'victim mentality'. That's what I'm struggling with right now. It might be better for us to not use terms that connote that we're somehow downplaying the experience that someone is having.
So, I do see the phrase 'victim mentality' being weaponized by the right a lot right now, as a way to immediately dismiss anyone who complains on the left. Again, I don't like being political, and I'm not even getting political with that. I'm just making an observation that I see this happening a lot now.
And I don't like it. I don't like reducing anyone to a single characteristic. I don't want to do it to the right. I don't want the right to do it to the left. Maybe it might be a positive good [to not use the 'victim mentality' phrase.] And I'm struggling with that because I use the phrase victim mentality and I'm thinking maybe I need to not do that.
I'm in the process of thinking deeply about all this stuff as well. I struggle with trying to find the words without using certain terms that have been co-opted by certain movements. But yeah, I love what K. L. says: 'survivor' and 'victor' might be other good words to use.
Thank you for reading through the second part of the transcribed conversation I had with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. You can learn more about his work here, and be sure to grab a copy of his latest book, Choose Growth.