Face "egotism". You've tried very hard

In the last lecture, we talked about the first of the three main sources of suffering in modern people -- self-objectification, the problem of being a person and not treating yourself as a person. In this lecture, I'll move on to the second source of suffering, which is self-centered suffering.

In contrast to self-objectification, egocentrism is a word that we should all be familiar with. Selfish, self-righteous, arrogant... In our everyday language, these words are often associated with self-centeredness, describing in a demeaning way how superior and unpopular a person is.

But when we talk about self-centeredness today, that's not exactly what we mean. In fact, when I talk about egotism, I don't even use it as a negative term. Egocentrism is just a psychological phenomenon, which can be common in individuals and even in the whole society, and the existence of any phenomenon will cause some effects.

In this lesson, we are going to talk about what self-centeredness is, and what it can do to our personal mental health.

In modern psychology, the term "egocentrism" or "ego centrality" was first coined by the Swiss developmental psychologist Piaget. When he observed the behavior of children, he found a very interesting phenomenon, that is, relatively young children seem to be unable to distinguish themselves from the outside world is different, they will feel based on their own, everything around them, including himself, is his self. Therefore, when there is any good around, they will think that it equals to my good, this good must also happen because of my good; On the contrary, if there's anything bad around, they think that means I'm bad, and it's because I'm bad that things are bad.

If a child is able to develop healthily, this instinctive self-centrality will gradually disappear with age, but it will come back to haunt us in different ways in the future. For example, as we grow up, most of us are able to understand that the outside world is different from ourselves, but we may still not be able to completely separate subjective thoughts from objective facts.

Most of us get used to seeing things from our point of view, especially when it comes to judging whether an event or a person is "normal." Your judgment is often based on whether the event or person is behaving and thinking the way you expect them to. If we don't do what we expect, then something is wrong and abnormal, which is a classic failure to separate the subjective from the objective.

There is no need for an objective situation to conform to our subjective preferences, and if it does not conform to our subjective preferences, there is nothing wrong or wrong with it -- this may sound very simple and reasonable, but in real life, many people simply can't remember or do it at all.

I've seen this happen in the hospital. Some family members think that if the doctor doesn't cure their parents, then the doctor is not responsible, competent or even a good person, which is a fairly typical result of self-centered thinking. He did not take into account the limitations of modern medicine, the uncertainty of the medical process, and the fact that no matter how powerful medicine is, it has never prevented anyone from dying. He just felt that as long as the objective outcome was not what he wanted, or someone was at fault, and of course he didn't know medicine so he was right, it had to be the doctor's fault.

What's more, there will be a lot of people have a kind of expansion of the ego centricity, they think that their own alone should be able to change the people around, things, and surroundings should be service for me or against me, even thought that individuals have unlimited subjective initiative - it's reached the degree of narcissism. Here, too, I don't think narcissism is a morally good or bad thing. It's also a psychological phenomenon that has psychological consequences.

What are the psychological and emotional problems in your personal life and the negative effects in your work and life caused by self-centeredness and narcissism?

First of all, egocentric thinking itself can cause widespread emotional stress. Because the parties are rigid in their thinking, starting from themselves, it is difficult to realize that the objective facts will change due to various conditions. In most of the time, the objective facts are not transferred by personal will, can not get rid of the natural law, so it will cause a lot of psychological conflicts.

For example, many of my visitors, including many of the people around me, actually have a hard time accepting the basic fact that sometimes things will go well and sometimes they won't. They believe that if things go "right," they should always go right, so whenever they don't, there must be something terribly wrong with them, with others, or with the world. That way, every single thing that goes wrong in their lives -- whether it's failing a test, failing to get a job, failing to land a limited edition, or a boyfriend not answering a text -- is a major mistake. They have a very low tolerance rate for error in their lives and have a lot of negative emotions to deal with when things go wrong.

But the objective fact is that things usually have ups and downs, and if they see every natural fall as a "gully", they can literally cripple themselves psychologically throughout their lives.

If this way of thinking develops further, to the point of narcissism, it can lead to widespread feelings of guilt and self-worthlessness.

Yes, we may all think that narcissism is about making us feel good about ourselves, but there's another hidden form of narcissism that's widespread among people: it's about making us feel bad about ourselves. Narcissistic person often feel has influence on everything around, the more negative experiences growing up, or in a very bad environment of people, they may feel instead, all bad things around, is caused by their own, as we said before piaget study of children.

With such a person, something like this might happen:

For example, he is speaking PPT on the platform, and suddenly someone goes out, he feels that he is not good at speaking, so that person left? Did it not occur to him that the man might have gone to the bathroom?

For example, his business is not progressing smoothly, sent to the leaders of the text message has not been reply, he will desperately from his own body to find the reason, is not they despise me, do not want to reply to me? I can't even sleep from night to night. It happened that has nothing to do with us, we are a lot of times it's hard to know, such as led his wife divorce with him, suddenly leadership completely not in the mood to see mobile phone, or the business line this year the situation is bad, but this trend to the end of the year you can see, we even want to broken head also can't think of at the time of these reasons. Thus, the person will struggle with endless self-attacks of "How am I so bad?" and "I screw up everything?" as if everything that goes wrong around him is a reflection of his incompetence, until he is completely depressed.

And it's especially unfortunate that this negative narcissism is often reinforced by the people around them, because these people are the perfect "blame game." Whether in a family or a business, when problems arise, the people around you are likely to be happy to have someone to blame for the whole thing. As his feelings of guilt and worthlessness continue to be recognized around him, he sinks deeper and deeper, making it difficult for him to engage in objective self-reflection.

If one is trapped in such egotism or narcissism for too long, one's reality check begins to go awry. A lot of times he doesn't know what's going on, and he doesn't have an objective view of his own or other people's abilities and limitations. He can become extremely socially sensitive or emotional, always guessing how others are looking down on him, even when they tell him it doesn't make sense. Because he is extremely self-centered, which means that even his negative beliefs about himself are unshakable.

Or he may be caught up in endless work and study, trying to be the best at everything. Because he believed that he was the main cause of the development of everything around him, as long as he worked hard, things will be good, similarly, if there is anything bad, it must be that he did not work hard enough, until he died of exhaustion. Even worse, they sometimes force their subordinates, partners, and children to do the same. It's a nightmare.

With all this talk about the problems that egotism and narcissism can cause, maybe some of them are happening to you right now, or you're observing them in people around you. But I have to say, it's really hard to get rid of egocentrism or narcissism. It's not just that it's a mental habit from childhood that's easy to use; But also because, once we accept that we are not the center of things, that we cannot influence everyone and everything around us, we have to face the fact that we are limited, and sometimes even powerless and insignificant.

Apart from the fact that we can take responsibility for ourselves as much as we can and try to influence the people and things around us in the current of our times, most of us have a very limited impact on the world as a whole. We are neither as strong as we want to be, nor as special as we think we are, and things around us rise and fall all the time, not as we want them to be, and even when they change, they may not take care of us at all.

Face really have to say some of the cruel reality, so if you want to use self center, narcissistic to resist, even in that "even his pot back, also want to believe in yourself is the universal" way to resist, I personally is understandable, after all, sometimes reality is not so ideal, also is not so good. There's nothing wrong with us using psychological strategies to make ourselves feel better.

But the cost of such a strategy is huge. It can make us lose touch with reality and miss the opportunity to respond effectively based on reality. It traps us in feelings of guilt, worthlessness and anxiety until we are completely exhausted. It can also hurt those around us when we unconsciously seek scapegoats or force others to be perfect.

Continue to be self-centered, or try to be less self-centered, here, I don't feel like I'm the one who can make the choice for you. The best I can do is to share with you one such phenomenon, some of the mechanisms behind it, and how it might affect us.

If I had to give you one piece of advice, I would advise you not to make a quick decision after this lecture, listen to it first, and then figure it out for yourself to see what you think and what you plan to do. Later we will also provide some simple ways to adjust self-centrality, if you are interested, please try them.