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🤯 Neurodivergence & TRUTH TELLERS in narcissistic families (SCAPEGOAT origin story)

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SoulWords—Rabbi Shais Taub avatar
SoulWords—Rabbi Shais Taub

Transcript

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hey there this is rabish hayab I want to share with you a thought that might for some of you make a lot of things make sense and it's based on the story of The Emperor's New Clothes you know that story it's uh it was made famous by Hans Christian Anderson the Danish author but it's actually an old Legend it goes back way before then basically these scammers come and uh they know the king is a fool and that he is very vain so they trick him by saying this these clothes are so beautiful and so magnificent only a real incredible person can see them and of course the king doesn't want to admit that he can't see them so there's nothing there it's really a pantomine there are no clothes at all um but the king won't admit that he doesn't see the clothes so that everyone else has to go along with it when he's parading around naked and they have to pretend they also see the clothes until this one little boy says Hey the emperor is wearing no clothes and everybody laughs at the king so I think that story explains a lot about about narcissistic families and the scapegoat now I'll tell you first of all standard disclaimer I'm a rabbi this channel soulwords is a channel about Jewish mysticism and spirituality and its application to our lives um I'm not a mental health professional it happens to be sometimes when we're studying certain texts we apply them to day-to-day life and we end up sort of foraying into areas of mental health and and family systems there was a class that I gave several months ago where we analyzed a Biblical text and we ended up speaking about narcissistic abuse and specifically uh the unique trauma that is picked up from living in such a system and uh we spoke about the role of the scapegoat that video blew up it's actually the most popular video on this channel and because of the comments on that video I had an Insight which actually related to another video that we had posted a few months ago about neurodiversity about neurodivergent thinkers um about people who are wired a little bit differently than the majority of people um and I'm going to explain how those two things the scapegoat and neurodiversity both connect to each other and how then they connect together to the uh Emperor's no new clothes Emperor's no clothes new clothes he's not wearing clothes okay very very quick review the the the scapegoat so we spoke about this at length and you can watch that uh that class it's a it's a much longer class but the idea that in a family where you have a narcissistic parent there's one rule which is the narcissistic parent can never be wrong The Narcissist would rather die than be exposed for having any flaw which every human is imperfect every human has a flaw but the narcissist can never have a flaw they have to be perfect and uh so then who's going to bear the shame and the blame when things go wrong you know if the family's running late let's say it can't be the narcissistic parent who's making everyone late so who's going to be the one who made everyone late well someone is elected they call them the scapegoat I mean they don't call them the scapegoat but when you look at it it's clear that they are the scapegoat and this is the one who's always wrong now often times in the same family there's a golden child who can do no wrong who's always perfect and then you have the scapegoat who can do no right in fact if the scapegoat ever does do something good like accomplish something get good grades win an award they'll be punished for it and you're gonna think why would anyone punish their kid for doing well well you have to understand the number one rule in the narcissistic family is that this narcissistic parent has to be perfect someone's got to carry that shame and blame which is the the scapegoat child so if the scapegoat child ever does well they're going to be severely severely punished and and shamed for that in the comments of that video which again went very viral um I learned a lot you know there's a rabbi saying that I've learned much from my teachers even more from my colleagues but from my students I've learned most of all so in the comments I learned something people were talking about why a kid becomes the scapegoat why how do they get chosen as the scapegoat and something I kept seeing over and over again the comments was the truth tell that this the scapegoat is the truth tell uh they are the one who threatens to expose the farce of this narcissistic game where the narcissistic parent has to everyone has to pretend that they're perfect and and because the the scapegoat is the truth teller that's how they become scapegoated okay that's why they become punished with being scapegoated fine but I started thinking about that well why are they the truth teller are they just so rebellious are they looking for trouble like any child wants security why would they do anything to jeopardize their security I mean if you're talking about an adult you're talking about Woodward and Bernstein investigative journalist going and blowing the lid off the Scandal okay that's one thing but why would a child elect to be the truth teller and something clicked for me I told you there was this other class we had on this channel uh about neurod Divergence about people who are wired differently you know ADHD and autism and stuff like that and I even I'll mention again that I mentioned in that class that I identify with having this feeling of being wired in a way where you feel like you're constantly missing the rules that everybody else seems to know just the basic rules for how adults function or even since I was a kid so even the rules that the kids had how to function in a society I didn't have those rules and um had to sort of like learn them by intense study and then like memorize them because they're never natural to me and things that are intuitive to others I'll give you an example silly example small talk everybody knows if you want to be nice to people you have to say how's the weather uh you know what time did your flight come in silly stuff that really is totally irrelevant but everybody does it okay um a neurod Divergent person not all night neurod Divergent person people because obviously this is not a monolithic Community but um nura division people often have a lot of trouble with that because it's like so silly and useless why are we doing this why are we playing this game like do you really want to know what time my flight came in it was 9:15 oh great it was 95 no actually I was joking it was 11:32 like does it make a difference to you now that you know it's 11:32 okay and then there's other stuff that's even more bew wildering to a neur Divergent person which is um White Lies and people do it all the time it's almost like uh neurotypical people cannot survive without constantly lying to each other like they're constantly lying to each other and anyone who doesn't lie is considered mean and that's what often happens in neurodivergent people often get labeled as Curt or rude and then they lose out on social opportunities now obviously nobody wants to lose out on social opportunities because even if you're bad at socializing you want people even if you're an introvert you want to have relationships and it becomes very very lonely um and there's a lot of Shame self-hatred like why do I turn people away why do I turn you know why do I make people angry at me um I mentioned also in that class about why I think there's this huge correlation which needs to be studied more between addiction and neurodivergence uh I mentioned in that class something called the allostatic load which basically means the the amount of Burden that's placed on a a person uh in a given situation so anybody when they're going through like a high stress situation then there's going to be a lot of extra burden on the alistic load but a neur Divergent person can have a very heavy alistic load just from going through day-to-day life because they're constantly trying to pick up on stuff that makes no sense to them and play along with this game that if you don't play along with you get penalized you get excluded from from society uh and people get hurt I mean that's even worse than that it's you it's not just oh I don't want to miss out on social opportunities it's I have a conscience and I feel bad when I hurt people but I'm constantly hurting people and I don't want to hurt people right so there's this incredible emotional burden that a neurod Divergent person will often have just getting through day-to-day life and that's why I think there's a high correlation between neurodivergent people and addiction because if you have this really high allostatic load just from going through day-to-day life and doing something we call masking masking is trying to pretend to be like the majority of people um so that you f fit in that's exhausting that's exhausting and so when you're exhausted you need to numb and there comes addiction or a lot of addictive behaviors which are about numbing and and and zoning out and just basically getting relief from this really intense Al estatic load that you're carrying just from trying to fit into society um so this all came together for me and I realized it's possible and would love to hear from you in the comments I'm not really interested in studies or statistics as much as I'm interested in anecdotal uh personal reports I would love to hear if this resonates with you um that's really fascinating to me here's what I'm thinking the scapegoat kid the truth teller why is he a truth tell not because he's being rebellious and he wants to expose the truth I think maybe in a lot of cases he's just neurodiverse urgent and either he doesn't know how to play along with the farce that everyone else seemingly knows how to play along with or maybe it's just he he's trying to play along with it because he knows everyone wants him to play along with but eventually when you're masking all the time it slips you know you can go out and about in the street and you can mask for a few hours when you come home eventually it slips and if you're living with people if you're in the family eventually it slips and I'm thinking maybe the little kid in The Emperor's New Clothes who says Hey the king's not wearing any clothes he not doing it cynically he's not trying to bust the king he's just he's this little neurodivergent kid and he's like hey what's up the king's not wearing your clothes like no big deal I'm not judging you know I'm just King's not wearing clothes but you have to understand if you do that in a narcissistic family that is a capital crime and especially because a narcissist can't imagine that anyone's innocently telling the truth because narcissists specifically have a knack at telling the truth in particular ularly cruel ways in fact if a narcissist is shmoozing with you they're gathering information and they're gathering information to use later to hurt you so when they tell the truth later it's specifically designed to be done in a cruel hurtful way and then they always have the great deflection of well you can't take the truth right so when the neurode Divergent person who in in a funny way the neurod Divergent person is like the exact mirror opposite of the narcissist The Narcissist tells the truth that makes people squirm because he wants to see you squirm the neur Divergent tells the truth that makes people squirm but he doesn't know that it makes you squirm until like a month later when you tell him and he feels awful about it he feels awful he feels guilty I wasn't trying to make anyone squir him oh no he has a conscience of course he has a conscience um so when the little truth teller says hey this narcissist just just messed up he's not trying to bust anyone he's not trying to shame and blame he's just saying the truth but for a narcissist a that's the worst crime because you're exposing the narcissist's weakness and B from a narcissistic point of view the narcissist can't even imagine that anyone would ever say an uncomfortable truth innocently without any malicious intent because that's exactly what narcissists do all day is say uncomfortable truths deliberately with malicious tent right so here they're getting their signals crossed in a really tragic way that leads to a disastrous outcome where the narcissist thinks that the little truth tell the little neurode dierent kid is undermining him and trying to call him out and bust him and really he's just slipping with his mask and saying saying the truth and he didn't think there was anything wrong with it and now he's getting punished for the capital crime of exposing the fart that's what I think might be going on or at least in a lot of cases I would love to hear from you if you want more of the long version of these Concepts this is the talk about neurodiversity and this is the talk about scapegoats and narcissistic families neurodiversity and scapegoats in narcissistic families okay check out these videos thanks for watching comment below tell me if this resonates with your experience I want to hear