Introducing the Unf*ck Your Thinking Series by Hacking Narcissism
Introducing the Unf*ck Your Thinking Series by Hacking Narcissism
Retrain your thinking habits
This week’s newsletter is the beginning of the Unfuck Your Thinking, Unfuck Your Life series. It’s a MASSIVE topic, and one I’ll be digging into over the coming weeks and months. This series is available to paying subscribers only – you can upgrade to a paid subscription below. I’m excited to share new insights, research, and thinking with you.
Dear Readers,
I’m going to make a few broad sweeping statements about you, present a rationale for these statements and then describe a new experimental series to help us all think better. My aim for this series is by helping you think better, you will be able to navigate and accept uncertainty, complexity, paradox in human interactions and life events with greater ease and peace. If you choose to come along on this experimental and learning journey with me, and I really hope many of you do, I’m going to be leaning on you to help me understand how this series is helping or hindering your progress toward better thinking, analysis processes and decision making goals. As I introduce a framework and how to use it to help us view any given situation at multiple levels simultaneously, I will also be learning alongside you on this experimental journey to unfuck our thinking.
Here we go…
You are irrational, biased and impulsive. You’re also rational, objective and reflective but you can’t be both at the same time. When I say ‘you’ I also mean ‘me’. You are capable of taking actions driven by your desires that move you away from or toward your personal, interpersonal and professional goals.
Being biased, prejudiced, impulsive and selective can protect you from life-threatening danger. The problem is most of our daily interactions and situations are unlikely to be life threatening, except our bodies and minds don’t know the difference.
Each of us evolved the capacity to protect and defend ourselves and others from danger. Our earliest relationships during childhood, educational, social experiences influenced and shaped our ability to navigate diverse situations with relative success. Learning from outcomes and consequences of actions helps you develop wisdom and attunes you to your moral compass and core values.
There are some situations that are easier to navigate where the action you need to take is clear and is more likely to lead to a desired outcome. Situations that are triggering, confounding or upsetting will take effort to respond in the way that addresses the needs of that situation without violating your principles or making things worse for the other person involved. When our actions are attuned to the needs of the other person, our own needs and resolves the upsetting situation we grow in self-confidence, wisdom and maturity.
A contributing factor to mis-attuned responses to a situation that reinforces rather than liberates you from conflict is an intolerance to uncertainty, difference, unfamiliar and discomfort and a need for control. These feelings stem from SHAME and our primal instinct is to self-protect against discomfort rather than critically analyse it. A common reaction to these feelings is to distance from or overpower the threat. This can result in the suite of narcissistic behaviours to control and overpower the other person or the situation that is experienced as the threat.
This is an irrational reaction. Yet, is prevalent in our interactions on social media, in personal and professional relationships among those of us who believe we are critical thinking, reasonable people. It’s what fuels culture wars, political feuds, AI algorithms, audience capture and feeds an addiction to outrage, surprise, chaos and othering that ironically are antithetical to the sense of being in control, certainty and peace that we crave.
This, and its many manifestations are sources of stress, pain and suffering. We are creatures of habit. When you discover a habit is harmful to our wellbeing, you’re likely to start a process to break that habit in exchange for a different behaviour that aligns with your goals and ideals.
In order to break these habits, you need to create space to view your emotional state and corresponding narratives simultaneously, analyse them both and use the results of your analysis to direct your next action. This is tough to do in the moment when you want to leap into action as the rescuer. But as I discussed in this article, if you want to use your energy more effectively, hack narcissism and live more closely by your values, change is necessary.
How does this relate to hacking narcissism?
We are products of our relationships and social connections. Our thinking, feeling, and behaviour is influenced by these connections, norms and expectations. As much as you might like to believe you have free will and can operate autonomously, you are already influenced and controlled by your internalised belief system derived from authorities across your lifespan, your connections and contexts.
You are also shaped by how others need and expect you to be and the ideal self-image and identity you uphold. You (and I mean we) can be utterly loyal to the ways you see yourself and your beliefs that you won’t always know when you aren’t practicing what you preach. You can be enslaved by and slaves to our fantasy self, fantasy life and fantasy relationships because of the beliefs we hold about them. Having accurate, realistic, honest and truthful self-perception requires a number of mental and relational supports to distinguish between what external authorities reflect back to you to shape you in their image and what your inner authority knows to be your true nature. Hacking narcissism requires a desire, interest and commitment to discovering the self-image idols and the idol worship of beliefs that obscure your real self.
Some of those beliefs will change as a result of your learning and maturation process and some will remain fixed. Because of your existing belief system, it’s difficult to approach any moment as a blank slate because you’ve already decided what’s happening and what you need to think or do about it before you’ve had enough information.
It’s acting before thinking that reinforces unhelpful self-protective and shame-based responses that keep you locked in delusion, drama with others, and yourself.
One of the ways to break this habit of acting before thinking is to develop your reflective functioning skills. Reflective functioning, also known as mentalizing described by Peter Fonagy, is our ability to understand ourselves and others in terms of mental states. Mental states are feelings, desires, wishes, goals, attitudes. These are necessary for successfully navigating social interactions within a variety of contexts. We have constructs that we draw on to make sense of any situation and our immediate constructs are the collection of our beliefs, values, norms, experiences, memories, education and other content that influence how we view any situation and how we feel about it.
An inability to apply reflective functioning in interactions with others is associated with narcissistic behaviours and being trapped in seeing yourself, and others who you view in an inferior position to you, as powerless victims of circumstances.
To break free from the web of suffering requires you to build your reflective functioning skills using a number of tools to help you critically appraise anything that challenges or affirms your beliefs. These skills involve critical thinking, sensemaking, objectivity and detachment, emotional regulation, neutrality and decision making. The result is better attunement, attachment and connection to others, self-worth and an ability to practice what you believe is the best way to express your principles.
What is the Unfuck Your Thinking Framework?
You can think of this framework as a set of interacting and interdependent frameworks. The first framework I’ve been talking about is Karpman’s Drama Triangle (listen to the recording in the article). The second framework is a variation on the Empowered Triad that I named the Liberating Triad. The six roles described in the frameworks form the foundation to improve access to critical thinking, inner and interpersonal conflict resolution and informed actions without violating your moral principles or values.
This premium series introduces a narrative analysis and critical self-examination approach with additional frameworks to the ones mentioned above. I originally developed this as a program and trialled it for Safe Space Health as an anti-Saviour coaching and peer to peer support model to prevent occupational and activism burnout. I decided to release it now because I feel we need to sharpen our intellectual tools to combat misinformation, outrage addiction, narcissistic behaviour, feeling offended and triggered shame responses that project emotional slime all over our social media feeds, text messages and our connections instead of helping each other understand and navigate life’s challenges better.
I will also invite a special contributor to describe the neuroscience of thinking, habit change, addiction, trust and narcissism for those who love to know the neurological and physiological mechanisms driving thinking, reasoning and behaviour.
This is available to paid subscribers only. Annual and Founding members will be able to access monthly Zoom calls with me to sharpen their toolkit in these Masterclasses.
Our first and only Zoom call is in the first week of August. Annual and Founding membership subscribers will receive an invitation to the Masterclasses separately.
Free subscribers can see a preview of this premium article. Upgrade now to access the full article that introduces the first activity of the series.