Change Your Inner Dialog, Narrative Plot
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2020-12-30

Inner dialog: be somebody+do something of your life.

Translation: Don’t be yourself and treat your life as raw material or a passive object.

Relative positioning (like social media): Anxiety, depression.

Introjects: voices (example: inner critic or superego which could be prosocial or sadistic).

Socialization and its agents (parents, role models, peers and their pressure to conform, institutions, mass media).

Map of Happiness.

Subject inner dialog to scrutiny as you would a scientific theory:

Attribution

Ego-syntony (not happiness!)

Fuzziness

To qualify as a "psychological" (both meaningful and instrumental) plot, the narrative, offered to the patient by the therapist, must be:

a. All-inclusive (anamnetic) – It must encompass, integrate and incorporate all the facts known about the protagonist.

b. Coherent – It must be chronological, structured and causal.

c. Consistent – Self-consistent (its subplots cannot contradict one another or go against the grain of the main plot) and consistent with the observed phenomena (both those related to the protagonist and those pertaining to the rest of the universe).

d. Logically compatible – It must not violate the laws of logic both internally (the plot must abide by some internally imposed logic) and externally (the Aristotelian logic which is applicable to the observable world).

e. Insightful (diagnostic) – It must inspire in the client a sense of awe and astonishment which is the result of seeing something familiar in a new light or the result of seeing a pattern emerging out of a big body of data. The insights must constitute the inevitable conclusion of the logic, the language, and of the unfolding of the plot.

f. Aesthetic – The plot must be both plausible and "right", beautiful, not cumbersome, not awkward, not discontinuous, smooth, parsimonious, simple, and so on.

g. Parsimonious – The plot must employ the minimum numbers of assumptions and entities in order to satisfy all the above conditions.
h. Explanatory – The plot must explain the behavior of other characters in the plot, the hero's decisions and behavior, why events developed the way they did.

i. Predictive (prognostic) – The plot must possess the ability to predict future events, the future behavior of the hero and of other meaningful figures and the inner emotional and cognitive dynamics.

j. Therapeutic – With the power to induce change, encourage functionality, make the patient happier and more content with himself (ego-syntony), with others, and with his circumstances.

k. Imposing – The plot must be regarded by the client as the preferable organizing principle of his life's events and a torch to guide him in the dark (vade mecum).

l. Elastic – The plot must possess the intrinsic abilities to self organize, reorganize, give room to emerging order, accommodate new data comfortably, and react flexibly to attacks from within and from without.

NEW CHANNEL Nothingness: Antidote to Narcissism
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTg79xJ1-pDFkg-aBe9KXLw

Nothingness: Antidote to Narcissism Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vzBf9QvClo&list=PLsh_y_ett4o3RTSj7sW28ykk51HfHMNXQ

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