Pratique du Shadowing: On Narcissism 4: Nancy McWilliams - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

Création de la leçon...
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In the clinical literature on narcissism, you see a lot of commentary about how there are really two versions of it,
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the arrogant version and the kind of depressed, depleted version.
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We've called them different things.
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I think Gabbard calls it the oblivious narcissist who's the one who's, I'm wonderful and everybody should worship me,
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and the hypervigilant narcissist who's the one who's, where are my next self self-esteem supplies coming from.
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I need affirmation that I'm okay.
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There seems like there's something tautological about being like some people can be described as X, we'll say grandiose, and then you say,
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oh well, they are that.
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But it somehow doesn't get to the essence of what the thing is.
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Right.
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That's why I really don't like the DSM descriptions of personality disorders.
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Starting in 1980, they tried to shift the DSM to having criteria that were able to look at external behaviors.
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You can get more agreement among experts that way than if you're trying to infer what's going on inside.
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But for a therapist, it's more important to know what's going on inside.
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The DSM pretty much describes the more arrogant version.
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But that arrogant version is a defense against another self-state in which the person feels terrible about themselves.
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And so their issue is all about self-esteem maintenance.
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And they use inflated self-esteem to defend against insufficient self-esteem.
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So they're easier to understand
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if you think of them as a person who came of age in such a way
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that they were always having to get narcissistic supplies, as we say in the trade.
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They need evidence of their being important and powerful and beautiful and well-known.
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What would the DSM call the deflated narcissist?
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They don't really have a category of that.
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But somebody would show up as a...
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We'd probably diagnose them as having a depression.
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Not all depressions are alike, but the narcissistic version of depression is, I'm empty, I don't know who I am.
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Help, I need somebody to make me popular and famous and powerful.
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And where am I going to get that?
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And I don't see where, so I'm depressed.
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That's very different from other kinds of depression, which for example involve the fear that I'm bad.
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It's more of a guilty depression.
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The narcissistic version of a depression is a shamed depression.
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If you've got certain capacities and you have narcissistic psychological tendencies,
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then if you're successful you tend to look very grandiose, but therapists see a lot of people who either were successful
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and lost it and then they don't know who they are
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and they don't know what life is about
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or who wish they had it and are very empty and come to us saying things like, you got to make me popular, you got to make me,
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if only I were beautiful and rich and connected then I'd be fine.
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And they don't have a concept of anything else
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that would make them okay how you get this way is
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that somehow your truer qualities your more authentic qualities especially your feelings were not fully accepted
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and recognized by your family of origin and for whatever reason
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that created in you the sense that you you had to be false in some ways or you had no value.
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Now one version of how to create a person with difficult narcissistic problems is to be super critical all the time.
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You know, why an A?
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Why not an A plus?
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And the child will always feel I'm not good enough
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and get desperate to be good enough because that's the only way that the kid feels valuable.
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But another way to do it is to say you're wonderful, you're terrific.
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If your teacher criticizes you, I'm going to go and tell her a thing or two.
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We're seeing a lot of that in Western cultures these days because we've tried to overcorrect for the previous version.
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But the kid can get the same message there because
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if a kid feels that the parent needs them to be perfect and is distorting them into a perfect being,
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they're not getting any message that their ordinary,
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flawed, naughty, problematic qualities are part of them and acceptable because they're a human being.
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So you can create somebody with a big problem in their
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core sense of who they are by any kind of distortion to try to make them into the child
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that a parent needs to reflect well on the parent.
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In the literature again and again we find that people tell us histories
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that make it sound to us like they were treated as, the jargon is narcissistic extensions.
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The parent needs them to be an extension of the parent that sheds a great light on the parent.
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Now we all do this to some extent with our kids, we want our kids to make us look good as parents.
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But if that's the chronic constant message, you have to be perfect so that your parent will look perfect.
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The kid gets to learn that you're fulfilling a function for your parents' self-esteem, but who are you?
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So there's an emptiness about it.
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And The most painful thing about the emptiness is the inability to really love other people as they are.
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People with narcissistic issues in relationships tend to be chronically critical
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in trying to improve their partner rather than deeply loving a person as he or she is.
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Very often people with a lot of narcissistic problems can idealize other people.
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And that's the closest they get to real love.
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And in relationships, they fall in love,
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meaning that they go through that early phase of idealizing the other person that we all do when we fall in love.
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And then, you know, when they realize that the person they are in love with is a human being, they start getting critical.
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And it's because they really don't have the concept of having been loved for who they are.
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So they can't love others for who they are.
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But they use the term love and they'll talk about somebody being the most wonderful this or the best that.
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And so idealization is sort of the closest that they can get.
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They criticize other people for not taking care of them.
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In fact, a real problem in relationships with a narcissistic person is that people who are
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very narcissistic in their personalities tend to have this idea that if I'm in relationship with you,
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you should simply divine my needs and meet them.
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I shouldn't have to ask because I feel shame about asking.
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Shame is really at the root of narcissistic problems if I say to them when they complain about somebody,
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well, did you make your needs explicit?
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What I get back is, what do you mean needs?
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You see the shame and the contempt for their, being a person with needs.
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And in couple therapy, I'll try to get them to actually say, here's what I would need from you.
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But it's really, really hard for them.
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They would prefer to stay in the position of, you did that wrong, you're just a loser.
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Especially acknowledging one's dependency on other people.
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It seems to be quite terrifying for people who are brought
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up not being fully affirmed as who they are to feel dependent on somebody else.
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I'm talking about normal human dependency now, not people who are pathologically unable to take care of themselves,
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but normally people were interdependent.
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We require the forgiveness of our friends and partners when we make mistakes.
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We feel gratitude when people meet our needs.
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If you're brought up that you have to be perfect and grandiose, whatever way you got that message, whether it was from the culture at large or from your parents,
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but where it's over learned that you have to be a a false self, a grandiose kind of a person.
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You can't genuinely apologize because that's admitting a flaw.
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You can't genuinely thank because that's acknowledging need.
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And so the two things that are really the most important to repair and sustain relationships are out of your capacity.
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So you end up doing things like apology substitutes, which tend to leave other people cold.
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Like, you know, if I am nasty to my husband on Monday and I make him a really nice dinner on Tuesday,
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he's not gonna warm up to me unless I also say, I'm making you a really nice dinner tonight because I feel bad about how I treated you last night.
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If I just make him the dinner and then get pissed off
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that he doesn't realize that this is my way undoing what I did, you can see that the relationship doesn't improve at all.
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And the same with thanks.
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You know, it's a different transaction.
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If I go to a teacher who's helped my kid and
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if I say thank you so much for how you've helped my daughter, then if I go in and do a kind of thank-you substitute,
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like nice job with my kid, very well done, as if I'm in a position of superiority dispensing praise.
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So it's sort of painful to watch people with narcissistic psychologies
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try to sort of get along in a world in
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which they don't know how to apologize and they don't know how to thank
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because they can't acknowledge their interdependence on other people.
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that we later diagnose as narcissistic, they don't even know their feelings because they haven't had people name them.
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Their feelings are unformulated.
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So they often can identify that they're in a rage or they're feeling envy, but some of the more nuanced feelings they can't even find in themselves.
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What's an example of a nuanced feeling?
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Being sad, being regretful, finding oneself having mixed feelings about something, feeling tender.
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It's not like the older descriptions of neurosis where you have unconscious sadness, for example.
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It's more like you don't even know what sadness is.
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Nobody ever helped you grieve.
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So when you're feeling sort of a painful sense, you don't even know how to deal with it, what to call it.
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You tend to be critical of yourself
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and then critical of anybody else who's sort of open about sadness or limitation or dependency.
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And you suffuse yourself with contempt because you're feeling this thing that you don't understand.
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But we have learned over the past hundred years that there are some people who can't find their anger, even though they look angry to other people,
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because they literally don't feel it.
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In fact, there's been some research done in Canada where they've used fMRIs on people who are so-called alexithymic,
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which is a fancy word for they don't know what they're feeling.
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They have no words for affect, is really what the Greek term means.
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And if you take fMRIs of their brain, they really aren't feeling what everybody else will say they're feeling.
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They'll be in a group and everybody will say, you're angry!
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And they'll be acting what all the rest of us would think of as angry.
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They literally don't know that that's what's going on.
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Something isn't hooking up in their brain.
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I think we'll learn a lot more about the neurology of this eventually,
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but that's very different from I can find my anger if I just am honest with myself.
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Well, I can say a few things about treatment.
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There's always been controversy about how to work with people with narcissistic dynamics,
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dynamics and partly it's because they can have such different presentations.
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They can be devaluing or they can be idealizing or there's some other ways that they sometimes relate.
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All of these are their ways of trying to have a relationship but they differ in what they require.
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There are basically a couple of ways of framing it.
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One important theorist, Heinz Kohut, basically said we all have this and
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if you have a good enough family you can idealize a parent
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and then slowly realize that they're human and that's a kind of natural trajectory.
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And where you run into narcissistic problems is if the parent isn't good enough to idealize in the first place,
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so you can't take in the sense of identification with a good enough person, or when they, later in the process,
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when they resist your seeing them as human, like in kindergarten when they come home and tell you that their teacher knows more about dinosaurs than you do,
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and you have to continue to be seen as the wonderful, perfect parent of the three-year-old,
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if you can't take their de-idealization, then they'll get stuck.
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And that's a way of thinking of it as a normal developmental process that people get stuck in.
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And therapy involves just helping them along that, get back on that developmental path.
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And the other main approach to it construes it as more
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of a getting off the path at the very beginning and using radically maladaptive ways of dealing with development,
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especially devaluation of anything you might envy.
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And if you frame people like that, you kind of have to slowly take apart their tendency
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to devalue and show them the needs and the shame and the envy underneath that.
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And how you work with patients depends on whether you're going from one theory or the other, how you see the particular patient,
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because some patients are better candidates for one than the other, and also to some extent the therapist's own personality, because especially with this kind of difficulty,
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it's really important that the therapist be fully authentic.
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You have to integrate who you are with how you understand any particular patient.
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So you can't do really good psychotherapy by applying a formula to anybody.
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Good enough?
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Good enough object.

Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon

Cette leçon d’expression orale de niveau C1 s’appuie sur la vidéo « On Narcissism 4: Nancy McWilliams ». Les mots qui reviennent le plus souvent : narcissistic, parent, feeling, version. Cette vidéo contient 168 phrases et 2321 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 16:57. Le locuteur parle à un rythme régulier d’environ 137 mots par minute, confortable pour le shadowing. 86 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais ; le reste mérite d’être vu avant de commencer.

Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo

Les 15 mots les plus avancés de la vidéo, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :

MotPrononciationSens
narcissistic adjectif/ˌnɑɹ.sɪˈsɪs.tɪk/narcissique
idealize verbe/aɪˈdɪəlaɪz/idéaliser
esteem verbe/ɪˈstiːm/respecter
grandiose adjectif/ɡɹæn.diˈəʊs/grandiose
narcissist nomnarcissique
arrogant adjectif/ˈæɹəɡənt/arrogant, orgueilleux
envy nom/ˈɛnvi/envie, jalousie
sadness nom/ˈsædnəs/tristesse
therapist nom/ˈθɛɹəpɪst/thérapeute
devalue verbe/diːˈvæljuː/dévaluer
diagnose verbe/ˈdaɪ.əɡˌnoʊs/diagnostiquer
emptiness nomvide, néant
idealization nomidéalisation
nuance nom/ˈnjuː.ɑːns/nuance, détail
criticize verbe/ˈkɹɪtɪsaɪz/critiquer

Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez

MotSens
bring up verbeélever
end up verbese terminer, se finir
get back verberetourner
get off verbedescendre, faire descendre
go through verbetraverser
show up verbeapparaître, se montrer se pointer

Des phrases à répéter

Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :

  • We've called them different things.
  • I need affirmation that I'm okay.
  • We'd probably diagnose them as having a depression.
  • What I get back is, what do you mean needs?
  • You can't genuinely apologize because that's admitting a flaw.

La grammaire de cette vidéo

Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :

StructureDans la vidéo
Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une choseperson who came · people who either · people who are
Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le faitcan be described · were treated · been loved
Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenantWe've called · we've tried · you've helped

Prononciation à surveiller

Le locuteur utilise 80 contractions et formes réduites, comme don't, I'm, you're. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.

  • Les sons « th »: therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, authentic /ɔˈθɛn.tɪk/, alexithymic /əˌlɛksɪˈθaɪmɪk/, pathologically /ˌpæθ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪk.li/, psychotherapy /ˌsaɪkoʊˈθɛɹəpi/
  • Les sons « sh » et « zh »: affirmation /æfɝˈmeɪʃn/, distortion /dɪsˈtɔːʃən/, limitation /lɪmɪˈteɪʃən/, insufficient /ɪnsəˈfɪʃənt/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/
  • Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: narcissistic /ˌnɑɹ.sɪˈsɪs.tɪk/, dependency /dɪˈpɛndənsi/, developmental /dɪˌvɛləpˈmɛntəl/, alexithymic /əˌlɛksɪˈθaɪmɪk/, criterion /kɹaɪˈtɪɹ.i.ən/

Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :

  • /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: jargon /ˈdʒɑː.ɡən/, neurology /n(j)ʊ(ə)ˈɹɒləd͡ʒi/, pathologically /ˌpæθ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪk.li/, trajectory /tɹəˈd͡ʒɛktəɹi/, apology /əˈpɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/
  • /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: narcissistic /ˌnɑɹ.sɪˈsɪs.tɪk/, grandiose /ɡɹæn.diˈəʊs/, arrogant /ˈæɹəɡənt/, therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, criticize /ˈkɹɪtɪsaɪz/

Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo

  1. Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
  2. Répétez phrase par phrase à vitesse normale, en reprenant chacune jusqu’à ce que votre rythme corresponde à celui du locuteur.
  3. Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme narcissistic, idealize, esteem.

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.

Technique du shadowing : lire le guide complet étape par étape →