Pratica di Shadowing: On Narcissism 4: Nancy McWilliams - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

Creazione lezione...
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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.

Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione

Questa lezione di conversazione di livello C1 si basa sul video “On Narcissism 4: Nancy McWilliams”. Le parole che ritornano più spesso: narcissistic, parent, feeling, version. Questo video contiene 168 frasi e 2321 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 16:57. Chi parla mantiene un ritmo costante di circa 137 parole al minuto, comodo per lo shadowing. Il 86% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese; conviene studiare le altre prima di iniziare.

Vocaboli chiave di questo video

Le 15 parole più avanzate del video, con pronuncia e significato:

ParolaPronunciaSignificato
idealize verbo/aɪˈdɪəlaɪz/idealizzare
esteem verbo/ɪˈstiːm/stimare
grandiose aggettivo/ɡɹæn.diˈəʊs/grandioso
narcissist sostantivonarcisista, narciso
arrogant aggettivo/ˈæɹəɡənt/arrogante
envy sostantivo/ˈɛnvi/invidia
sadness sostantivo/ˈsædnəs/tristezza
therapist sostantivo/ˈθɛɹəpɪst/terapeuta, terapista
devalue verbo/diːˈvæljuː/svalutare
diagnose verbo/ˈdaɪ.əɡˌnoʊs/diagnosticare
idealization sostantivoidealizzazione
nuance sostantivo/ˈnjuː.ɑːns/sfumatura, dettaglio m sottigliezza
criticize verbo/ˈkɹɪtɪsaɪz/criticare
contempt sostantivo/kənˈtɛmpt/disprezzo
tendency sostantivo/ˈtɛn.dən.si/tendenza

I phrasal verb che sentirai

ParolaSignificato
bring up verbomenzionare, nominare
end up verboandare a finire, finire
get off verboscendere
go through verboattraversare

Frasi da ripetere

Frasi brevi e complete del video che puoi riutilizzare nella conversazione di tutti i giorni:

  • 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 grammatica di questo video

Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:

StrutturaNel video
Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosaperson who came · people who either · people who are
Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo facan be described · were treated · been loved
Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adessoWe've called · we've tried · you've helped

Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione

Chi parla usa 80 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come don't, I'm, you're. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.

  • I suoni “th”: therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, authentic /ɔˈθɛn.tɪk/, alexithymic /əˌlɛksɪˈθaɪmɪk/, pathologically /ˌpæθ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪk.li/, psychotherapy /ˌsaɪkoʊˈθɛɹəpi/
  • I suoni “sh” e “zh”: affirmation /æfɝˈmeɪʃn/, distortion /dɪsˈtɔːʃən/, limitation /lɪmɪˈteɪʃən/, insufficient /ɪnsəˈfɪʃənt/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/
  • Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: narcissistic /ˌnɑɹ.sɪˈsɪs.tɪk/, dependency /dɪˈpɛndənsi/, developmental /dɪˌvɛləpˈmɛntəl/, alexithymic /əˌlɛksɪˈθaɪmɪk/, criterion /kɹaɪˈtɪɹ.i.ən/

I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:

  • Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: narcissistic /ˌnɑɹ.sɪˈsɪs.tɪk/, idealize /aɪˈdɪəlaɪz/, grandiose /ɡɹæn.diˈəʊs/, arrogant /ˈæɹəɡənt/, sadness /ˈsædnəs/
  • /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: grandiose /ɡɹæn.diˈəʊs/, arrogant /ˈæɹəɡənt/, sadness /ˈsædnəs/, devalue /diːˈvæljuː/, dynamics /dɑɪˈnæm.ɪks/

Come esercitarsi con questo video

  1. Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
  2. Fai shadowing frase per frase a velocità normale, ripetendo ognuna finché il tuo ritmo coincide con quello di chi parla.
  3. Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come idealize, esteem, grandiose.

Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?

Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.

Tecnica dello shadowing: leggi la guida completa passo dopo passo →