Scott Barry Kaufman is a Psychologist at Columbia University, a writer and podcaster. Why is victim culture so common in the West? Everyone’s been hurt, so it’s easy to claim victimhood, so why has it become a core identity and how do we honour pain without being defined by it? Expect to learn where a victimhood mentality comes from, what predicts whether someone is likely to fall into the victimhood trap or mindset and if modern culture is contributing or incentivising victimhood, the most harmful myths around identity and trauma, how you cultivate psychological flexibility in moments of deep emotional pain, the big difference between authenticity and self-esteem, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What does it mean to give up hope for a better past?
Sooner or later, you have to give up all hope for a better past. What's that?
Yes. Isn't that a great quote? It's probably my favorite quote out of all quotes in the history of the world. The psychotherapist Irving Yalom talked a lot about that and the importance of taking that existential perspective with his patients. I think for all of us, it's really important to recognize that
we shouldn't be prisoners of our past as much as we keep ruminating over and over again that we wish something was different that's not going to change the thing no matter how many times we ruminate about it it's not going to change it so what i really want to do is help people practically and hopefully move forward with their lives i mean it's a great point that
If you're kind of railing against something that happened in your past, hoping that you can enact some kind of control over it or alter what it was that occurred, you are fighting a losing battle. That's just not going to happen.
Chapter 2: How can we move beyond being prisoners of our past?
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think for a lot of us, we get stuck on a certain frequency. And I think sometimes therapy is not helpful with that. And that shouldn't be a controversial thing to say at all. If I had to choose, I would choose Irv Yalom as my psychotherapist. Who?
Because Irv Yalom is the psychotherapist who has that quote, sooner or later, you have to give up all hope for a better past. Yeah.
Talk to me about the intersection of psychotherapy and identifying with our pasts.
Well, there are a lot of different orientations out there for psychotherapy. There's an orientation called trauma-informed therapy that I criticize a little bit because a lot of therapy is going and talking about your past. And I think that it's possible that if you're viewed only through the lens of your trauma, you can forget that you have other things that you can provide to the world.
You forget that you're allowed to have a future. You're allowed to have a great future. And not all trauma-informed therapy is bad. Of course, there's nuance here. But I think a big part of the message I want to give in this book is that if we only view you through the lens of your victimhood, your potential takes a backseat to your pain.
I have to say, I did twice weekly psychotherapy for about a year. Fascinating. It taught me more about myself than 1500 to 2000 sessions of meditation. You know, it's like inviting somebody into a house you've lived in your entire life, and then walking around and pointing out rooms that you didn't know existed. And those rooms connecting to other rooms that you didn't know existed.
And you're going, oh, the fuck like I wondered why the kid they threw the back of the kitchen and oh that's that leads into that leads into the living room and that's how that thing's connected to that thing and the veils really do fall from your eyes but it creates a fucking ton of open loops it's basically here is a thing that happened and
And maybe this is why, and this is how it impacts you in the present. But if you're sort of action-oriented, if you're a bit of a ruminator, if you're a little bit sensitive, dude, the fucking temptation to become a victim is so...
strong and i saw this i'm still seeing this in myself and that's why i was so excited to speak to you about your book largely so that you can uh you know detox me i need to be exercised of uh of the the stuff that i'm fighting with do you know what orientation your the psychotherapy was that you underwent yeah i could ask yeah it was like psychological yeah A little bit, yeah. It was a little.
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Chapter 6: How can we cultivate psychological flexibility?
It's created a whole cold falling and has so much popularity. But I don't believe that's how the brain works. So our trauma story is stored in our brain. It's not stored in our body. What we have in our body, for sure, is survival stress. We have in our body lots of... We can obviously feel the stress involved with assaults, with various things that happen to us.
But the word trauma, that really is the narrative that we've cognitively and consciously put on a series of things. And you can see it change too. You can see situations where a person never thought they had trauma and then they go to therapy and then they get convinced by their therapist that that what happened was trauma, so then they changed their whole narrative.
So you can see how fluid our notion of traumatic experiences are. So when I say that trauma has a high heritability, well, it is interesting because there is research showing that people who have a genetic peculiarity towards the personality trait neuroticism do tend to see the world differently than people who are low in neuroticism. They tend to see threat everywhere.
Whereas people who score low in neuroticism don't tend to see the threat everywhere. You could have twins. Well, you could have siblings who are not twins. You could have siblings who don't share a lot of genes, not identical twins. And they both could have experienced the same exact thing in their childhood from their parenting style.
And one is like, I had a traumatizing childhood, and then you see this case. And then the other child is like, what are you talking about? We had such a great childhood. And it's like, well, what's the truth? In a lot of ways, the truth is in the eye of the beholder. And you also see that with attachment styles.
So I talk about it in the book, but the genes for neuroticism color the extent, what you focus on in your relationship. And so it focuses your attention on various aspects of the relationship. And it makes you ignore maybe some of the better, lovely aspects of relationship that you just can't see because you're so focused on, will they leave me? Will they leave me? Will they leave me?
Does that make sense? And I hope that was somewhat sensitive.
No, yeah, it does. It does. Um, I mean, I remember you talk a bit about epigenetics and I can't remember who it was I was speaking to, um, might've been, uh, Roy Baumeister.
And he was saying that if a mother goes into poverty during pregnancy, so if a mother who's pregnant loses her job, which is a pretty reliable way to go into poverty, you get epigenetic changes inside of the baby that is being carried inside of it. So ancestral trauma
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