You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 178. Nathalie Martinek.mp3
Nathalie Martinek:
I speak a lot about interpersonal narcissism, which doesn't mean I'm pathologizing people and calling them narcissists. It's the way we try to preserve our ideal self-image through a number of different behaviors, which can involve diminishing someone else, trying to overpower someone else, criticizing, doing all sorts of power plays like gaslighting, making yourself superior. So many different approaches we take to try to have a sense of control and even control the way others perceive us so that their perception matches our ideal self-perception. Understanding that this is what we do can hopefully make it easier to just see through the behavior into what's driving them.

SPEAKER_02: You must be some kind of therapist.

Stephanie Winn: Today my guest is Natalie Martinek, PhD. She's the author of the blog Hacking Narcissism. She's a coach and consultant regarding things like toxic workplace dynamics, as well as a writer, as well as a former developmental biologist. So I'm interested in hearing that story of that career change. Natalie, welcome.

Nathalie Martinek: Thank you for having me, Stephanie. It's great to be here.

Stephanie Winn: Thanks for joining me. I was just saying before we start recording that I've probably done more episodes of my podcast with Jake Wiskirchen than anyone else. And it was shortly after I recorded my conversation with him and his mentor. Christian Conti that they sent well Jake sent me one of your articles and it was on understanding Envy in the workplace and I thought your insights on that were so keen They were very much in fitting with the conversation that I've been having with Jake and Christian so I'm excited to talk with you today because I feel like you know, there's a lot of content online about narcissism. I'm sure you have your gripes with how it's discussed in sort of the popular media, as well as some really interesting insights. And I feel like this element of envy and really understanding how that shapes interactions is one that maybe doesn't get as much airtime.

Nathalie Martinek: I agree. So I'm looking forward to getting into it with you.

Stephanie Winn: Likewise, but first can you tell us the story of how you went from getting a PhD in developmental biology to being a writer and consultant on narcissism? How'd that happen?

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, it's not a linear path at all. So I'd always been interested and curious about human behavior, especially in relationships, like romantic relationships. I ended up pursuing my interest in biology and ended up in developmental biology, which is a study of the development of organisms, not just humans, but all model organisms going from the nematode all the way to human in terms of evolution. And I studied the matrix, the extracellular matrix, which is the non-sexy stuff that, you know, nobody's interested in because everyone wants to know what's going on inside of the cells. And I was studying the tissue or the matrix around the cells, which have this powerful activity to influence how cells behave. And so in doing that, I looked at how cells move around the developing fruit fly embryo and what happens when you screw up some of those genes. And then I moved on into doing a postdoc in cancer research. again, looking at how cells move, but this time how cancer cells develop and metastasize and move around the organism and pretty much take it down. And while that was happening, I also was noticing how toxic behaviors were spreading around my institution and seeing how people behave, the favoritism, negligence, bullying, Yeah, unethical behavior overall, and most importantly, how it infected me and how I started to assimilate into the culture. So again, it's how the culture influences behavior, which sort of parallels how the extracellular matrix, the tissue structures around the cells and tissues influence the cell's behavior. And then I left because once you see all this stuff, I had an epiphany that it was not good for me. I was experiencing moral injury, burnout, depression, you name it. And I left and had to figure out what the hell I was gonna do with the rest of my life and ended up looking at parenting and providing information for parenting, evidence-based information on parenting. And that just led to, other experiences of working in part helping practitioners who work with families around their children's development how to work in partnerships. I started doing a lot more relational practice work and so looking at the dysfunction of human behavior in certain contexts and as well as the the processes and approaches involved in helping engage people to work together through a process to help problem solve in their life. They're very, you know, we need those skills. And when you're in environments that lack those skills, you see the dysfunction and toxicity. So that's how it all kind of comes together. And yeah, that's a little bit of the story.

Stephanie Winn: I love a good analogy and interdisciplinary thinking. I didn't know there was such a thing as an extracellular matrix. I guess if you'd asked, I would have assumed that everything in the body was made of cells. But you're saying that between the cells, there's almost a slight connective tissue.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, it's a connective tissue. So you've heard of collagen. It's very popular. Yeah, so they turn, they become these fibers, fibrils and fibers. And so the protein I was studying had a role, has a role in organizing those fibrils. And when you don't have them organized properly, you have, you know, a bit of mayhem and the organism at times won't live. So it's pretty important.

Stephanie Winn: And then you experienced that some of these unspoken, unnamed things that were driving the way that human societies were organized felt like that invisible connective tissue.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, yeah, especially in Australia where I was finding as a Canadian that there was more unspoken than spoken. So I didn't quite know where I fit with people because people, at least where I was working, weren't up front with their feelings, only wanted to put forth what they wanted you to know and see and had to see them. And when I sense I wasn't getting the truth or honesty, I could feel gaslit that, you know, you're telling me you're complimenting me, but I'm feeling like you don't actually want to compliment me, but you're doing it to make it seem like you're friendly and supporting me. But you really don't. But I'm not sure because you're not saying these things, but I'm sensing this. So, a lot of that. So, exactly what are the unspoken invisible factors that actually influence people's behavior?

Stephanie Winn: Well, now you're naming this cultural element. And that that part fascinates me because I think amongst English speaking countries, it's you know, I mean, we have the US, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, we have all these English speaking countries. And as a podcaster, I have the pleasure and the privilege of talking to people around the English speaking world, which is really quite fun. But it's kind of easy to assume that because we share a language that we can share certain implicit assumptions. But we know that there are cultural differences that, you know, Brits think of Americans as crass, for instance. And so I haven't spent any time in Australia, but you were a Canadian who moved to Australia. And so after having lived in Australia for however many years you've been there now, what What have you noticed about the cultural differences that affect how you were perceiving those interactions?

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, I think coming from Canada, there's, you know, the self-deprecating aspect in every, I guess, English-speaking culture where you mock, like, you know, we mock ourselves that we are too polite and we say sorry to a person who's, you know, So, that's the Canadian way. We're polite and, you know, haha. And Australian is very much known for its tall poppy syndrome, that you can't really big yourself up, you can't even speak truthfully about what you're good at because you might be construed as arrogant and overconfident. And so I found it difficult moving from Canada to Australia because I figured, well, they're both Commonwealth countries. We both speak English. They seem so similar. But there was that part where I didn't quite know what I was allowed to say or not say. I didn't feel like I quite fit anywhere because I couldn't tell. The feedback I was getting from people didn't feel honest because people are not upfront with their emotions, how they truly feel. There's a lot of impression management, at least where I was. And so I didn't have that experience growing up in Canada and going through grad school. You get direct feedback about things. You know where you stand. There's no guessing game. So I didn't have that level of assertiveness around me. I had this kind of Yeah, sneaky, but I don't think people are intentional. They're just very conscious about what they put forth and how they want you to perceive them. So those were the differences I found at least initially when I got here. And I think that still stands. But the tall poppy syndrome is very much, it's very present here. And I should probably explain what that is. that you can't, so in this culture it's very clear who the favorites are and they get appointed and anointed by the authorities, that these ones are allowed to shine, so they get awards and acknowledgements and recognition. and there are those where they're not allowed to do that, but if you appoint yourself or you have, you know, a level of authority in something and you start getting attention, but you haven't been appointed by the right authorities, you know, get ready to be cut down. So you can't get too big for your britches because yeah, you'll get cut down because you haven't been recognized by the right authorities.

Stephanie Winn: So that's a little bit about Top Puppy. That's your feeling as a Canadian of sort of how Australia is in general?

Nathalie Martinek: Just my experiences, and also when you look at, you know, who gets elevated and if they get too big and they start speaking out on their own, you know, going off script, then they will get cut down. So we see examples of this throughout, you know, politics, sports, you know, different industries. And so you get the message that, okay, you got to watch yourself.

Stephanie Winn: I feel like this is a good segue into Envy and if I can sort of frame it in a certain way. In the work that I do with parents of ROGD kids, coaching and my course ROGD Repair. We look at the developmental themes of adolescence and young adulthood a lot. And one thing that's been coming up lately that I've been meaning to do a lesson on is the superiority-inferiority complex, because those things almost always go together. If I have deep down a sense of inferiority, then I'm gonna look to others as being better than me. I'm going to envy them. And I'm also potentially going to feel justified in attacking them because I don't see them as my equals and I don't see myself as capable of reaching that level. So I don't have empathy for them. And so from that sort of immature state of mind, You know, the tall poppy is, I think, a good visual metaphor of someone being on a pedestal, someone being seen as greater than. And when someone, when we view someone as in that position relative to us, regardless of how that person sees themselves, we lose our capacity to care for them, to recognize the path that they even took to get there, the fact that they might've had their own struggles to achieve that level of success, and that even from that position of what appears to be success, that there are difficulties that come with that as well. So I think that sort of comparison and the immature mentality around superiority and inferiority For one, it's a developmental stage, it's just psychological immaturity, but it can linger into adulthood. Yeah. And I feel like that's where I want to go with you today, is your insights into that instinct to cut someone down because we, on some level, see them as better than us.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, so it's juicy because I speak a lot about inferiority and superiority as function of feeling shame. So when we're feeling not great, like everything you said, inadequate, inferior, insignificant, all our fears, anxieties about not fitting in, getting excluded, getting ousted, all of that stuff, we, yeah, you look to, if you start to, that's the place where you start to compare yourself to others. And if the other is superior, you know, getting all the things that you would want to have, then they can become the object of your hate. It's easy to externalize your self-loathing so that you start to feel a little better about yourself. try to bring them down to your level in some way, even though they don't even know you exist, potentially. And so superiority is the flip side. If you have to feel like you're better than everyone, well, you're possibly compensating for feeling lesser than in general. So they, yeah, they go hand in hand. Whereas, you know, the happy medium is I'm confident in myself, I'm happy for people to do their own thing, don't have to necessarily agree with how they go about it, but I'm doing my thing, they're doing their thing, we can each be great or adequate, mediocre, whatever, but their existence doesn't really affect how I feel about my existence and I'm okay with that. So that's somewhere, you know, we could try to strive, but we do fluctuate. But I think we, many of us fluctuate between feeling inferior and superior, especially I find highly educated people such as myself who've gone through, you know, doctorate You can get very attached to your intellect or the perception of intellectual person because of your credentials or background. So you can go into support, superiority is a way of protecting your self-image when you're starting to feel insecure. So that can be, you know, that has been my default for many years because I don't want to ever, I didn't want to ever admit that I wasn't good enough or failing in some way. So I would just find ways to, you know, criticize someone as not as great as what I've done here to make myself feel better.

Stephanie Winn: And it sounds so silly when you say it out loud, but I think the point is that these things are occurring unconsciously so much of the time, right? These are drivers of behavior. These are the parts of the iceberg that are under the water. And it takes maybe a certain type of person or a certain level of awareness to recognize that these sort of things are happening and that they can explain certain things that are bothering us in our interactions, hurting our feelings or causing pain.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, absolutely. It is mostly unconsciously driven. I speak a lot about interpersonal narcissism, which doesn't mean, you know, I'm pathologizing people and calling them narcissists. It's the way we, exactly what you're just saying, we try to preserve our self-image, our ideal self-image through a number of different behaviors, which can involve diminishing someone else, trying to, you know, overpower someone else, criticizing. doing all sorts of power plays like gaslighting, making yourself superior, so many different approaches we take to try to have a sense of control and even control the way others perceive us so that their perception matches our ideal self-perception. And often, majority of the time, this is unconscious because we're reacting to the sense of inadequacy or insecurity, inferiority. And so understanding that this is what we do can hopefully make it easier to just see through the behavior into, you know, what's driving them. Ah, there's the shame again. You don't have to act this way. I'm not trying to make myself better than you. I don't think you're trying to make yourself better than me. Let's try to relate. But something about the interact, what's happening in the interaction is triggering that shame in somebody. And that's the kind of immature response to feeling shame versus, oh, I'm noticing I'm triggered by what you're saying, or I'm like, you know, getting a bit stirred up or disturbed by what you're saying. I need to look at that for a second and not try to project that on you in order to control you to make myself feel more comfortable again.

Stephanie Winn: And I'm noticing that the way you're talking about this sounds so different from a lot of the pop psychology stuff out there about pointing the finger at the narcissist in your life as if you have zero narcissism. You're talking about it as a we problem. This is what we do as humans. Relational narcissism, what are the ways that our narcissistic drives show up in our interactions? And at one end of the spectrum, we have narcissistic personality disorder. And then there's everyone else in between, right? There is how this shows up, and it is context-driven somewhat, right? At the personality disorder end of the spectrum, we have something that's deeply embedded in every aspect of a person's character, but it's more or less contextually triggered for that, you know, not clinical narcissism level. And it reminds me of the time that someone called me a narcissist. Because I've certainly pointed the finger at, you know, people that I have seen as having really toxic character traits. But I'm remembering the time that someone I met on the internet and talked to on the phone once for five minutes decided a year and a half later to try to expose Stephanie Wynn.

Nathalie Martinek: Whoa.

Stephanie Winn: And I think I've told this story a few times now on the podcast, but what had happened was that I ended up on the phone with this person from X or Twitter for a few minutes over some gender critical activist thing. And during that phone call, I asked, do you know who I am as a sincere question? Because I was confused because I thought she knew who I was. And then she was talking to me like she didn't know who I was. And I have a podcast, so a lot of people know who I am. They know my story. So a year and a half later, she was like, she asked, do you know who I am? And it's like, okay, that's, you know, context versus character here, right? But I appreciate how you're kind of, you know, as much as you're talking about things that are toxic, you're also kind of depathologizing it and looking within at how these things can be triggered situationally.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, going back to exactly what you said, you know, it's context specific. Some people, it's their full time gig, and it doesn't matter where they are and who they're with, this is how they are. Whereas if you're in a distressing environment, like I'm thinking back to the example I shared, you know, where I noticed the culture was in, I was assimilating to it, and expressing toxic behaviors that were just the normal, just the way things were. I wouldn't have acted that way in places where I felt more at ease and more secure. I wasn't like that in my friend groups and my squash team and all the other social things that I was doing. At least I didn't think I was or I wasn't told I was. But in order to survive in these kinds of environments, you kind of take on the traits that will get you ahead, and sometimes those traits are more on the narcissistic end, because those are the kind of survival strategies. Yeah.

Stephanie Winn: Well, ironically, it takes, you know, ego strength, psychological maturity, it takes a mature relationship with shame to be able to say these things, right? To say that, wow, when I was in that environment, I took on some of that. And I want to talk to you about shame, actually, because you You said something on your blog about shame.

Nathalie Martinek: Yes. I see shame a little bit differently than how it's been described up until I guess I just put my spin on it. It is described as a moral emotion, it's a social emotion, it is a sort of measure, a gauge of how you're doing in relation to others and how well you're complying with norms. It's a way to get us to check ourselves and make sure we're not behaving or conducting ourselves in ways that would make our family, you know, bring disrepute to our family and friends, that sort of thing. That comes from, you know, a number of different cultures. But shame is a moral emotion, and when you're feeling shame, so say you broke, you know, you find out you shouldn't have been wearing red on Wednesdays, you should have been wearing blue, and you didn't know, but you feel shame as a result, even though you had no idea. What you've done is you've violated some rules that you had nothing to do with, and because of that, you now feel ashamed because, you know, you didn't conform. So a constructive way of working with that is to kind of go, wait a minute, I have nothing to do with these rules. I didn't know what those rules were. Nobody told me. I didn't know that there was anything. So why am I feeling bad about myself? I didn't actually violate anything moral. I didn't, you know, violate myself. I didn't cross any lines that should make me feel bad. It has nothing to do with me. It's these external rules and values that have nothing to do with me. So the shame is because I didn't live up to someone else's standard, but I lived up to mine at the same time, so it doesn't really matter. So that's what I call shame one. You know, I broke someone else's rules that I never contributed to creating, and they're pissed at me. I didn't live up to external expectations, and I immediately feel like I've done the wrong thing, even though I didn't, you know, didn't know better. Shame two, So, again, shame is about a measure of how aligned you are with how morally congruent you are with your principles, with what you believe is important in life in order to conduct yourself well, you know, treat others well, you know, invite respect from others. So, I see it more as, you know, that is more of a mature way of looking at shame versus I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, I worry that if I don't do X that I'm going to be excluded. So, it has a different way of looking at shame as a gauge of how aligned I am with my moral compass. So, shame two is I violated my own moral principles in order to live into external values. So, for example, if we look at COVID and a whole bunch of doctors who had to start, you know, dealing with very sick people, highly infectious, didn't know much about this thing. didn't have protective equipment, had to triage to see who would get a ventilator and who wouldn't based on, you know, their known comorbidities. So they basically are telling people they're not going to have access to life-saving interventions, and others will, but we don't know if that will actually help them. So they had to deal with all these uncertainties, And the feeling, you know, feeling threatened that if they didn't do those things, then they would lose their jobs, they'd lose, you know, they wouldn't finish their degrees. So their pressure to, you know, do some potentially unethical things, which violated themselves and also potentially or actually caused harm or death. So you're dealing with this sort of dual role of being a victim of, you know, violating things that you know are really important and, you know, moral for you, and hurting someone else. So you're the perpetrator of that harm. So that is what contributes to what's known as moral injury. So shame two is about in order to live into this external expectation, norms, values, principles, I have to violate my own. And so shame three is I know what I need to do in order to live into my moral principles, and that might mean I have to disrupt the expectations someone has of me. So especially if I'm in a relationship, toxic, dysfunctional, type of relationship where there's the power imbalance where someone is the dominant force and I'm always expected to do what they want and have to compromise myself. Well, this time around, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to say no to them. So I prepare myself on how I'm going to execute that. I do it. I execute it. I feel great because I'm like, I'm doing what's right for me. I'm not being an ass. I'm doing what is necessary so that they don't have the level of dependency that they had on me because it's unhealthy. And yet, after my three seconds of feeling good about myself for having enforced a boundary, I now start feeling shame because I've let them down. They're pissed at me. They're putting on guilt trips and that sort of thing. But what that is is not necessarily my shame because I lived into my moral principles. I aligned myself with them. I align my actions with my principles. They're just pissed because I'm no longer supplying them with what they need. And I'm feeling that in me thinking it's my own emotion, but it's not. There's the emotional contagion that flows between us, especially if they're the dominant sort of person who dictates how things have unfolded in our relationship. now that I've gone against them, they're feeling their shame that they're not getting what they want, and they're putting them in their own insecurity, and I'm picking up on it because I'm used to being influenced by their feelings and responding to that. So now I'm thinking it's my feelings, but they're not. They're theirs. I'm just too kind of merged with them. So shame three is being able to recognize not only what is your moral principles and to act accordingly, but also to not allow the other person's response to then influence you to go back against what your actions that allowed you to align with your principles in the first place. So you have to resist going back to placating them in order to restore the status quo.

Stephanie Winn: It seems to me like in order to be able to self-regulate in the ways that you just described, a person needs to have some conscious awareness of what their values are, where they've gotten these values. Is this something I've internalized from my culture? If so, do I agree with my culture on this, right? Am I picking up on how this other person feels and do we share the same moral compass or do we have a different understanding? And all of that is very hard to do consciously, because again, there's just so much of this that's occurring underneath the surface. And I think the way I heard you describe it sounded kind of free of any value judgment or presupposition as to whether the culture or the other person is correct or incorrect, because it really can be any of the above. And I think on the spectrum of liberal to conservative, not in the political sense, more almost philosophically, you know, that the liberal bias is that Who needs the old ways? If there is a cultural norm, it's probably useless. Let's just keep breaking boundaries, right? And the conservative bias is that we have cultural norms for a reason. They are keeping things intact that we can't just do away with. And even if I don't know the reason why we have that rule, I'm sure there's a good reason. You know, these are biases that we tend to have, and some of it's influenced by culture, some of it's influenced by temperament, some of it's age. You know, we tend to be liberal as we're younger and more conservative as we're older because life experience shows us, oh yeah, those rules did exist for a reason. But there's not, I think the point is that that there's no across the board rule as to whether the norms and morals of the people around you are gonna be valid and congruent with your inner compass or not, right? Which is precisely why that level of awareness that you just described is so helpful to be able to have that conversation with yourself. But I think it's so unconscious so much of the time.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, shame, you know, what we talked about earlier, the inferiority-superiority flux, it's this automatic reaction, whereas what we're talking about here, you need to have awareness in the moment, like, oh, I'm feeling shame, what is going on here? I can go into my, you know, normal reaction or I can pause and go, okay, I'm feeling it, it's really uncomfortable. what's going on. And that's when you start to make sense of, I'm feeling this because I didn't live up to something external, or I'm feeling this because I didn't actually follow what my intuition was saying I needed to do. And it's not about criticizing, it's just congruence. Is this aligned? Am I doing what I'm supposed to do? Because we do have our conditioned values and our responses versus the ones where we choose. We have more conscious intention in how we respond to a feeling, a situation, another person's behavior. So it does take maturity and it's a process to developing emotional and moral maturity. So, it's kind of the chicken and egg. But I think if you keep feeling a certain shame around a person after you've had even a pleasant conversation, but you come away feeling like crap about yourself after, you have to go, okay, what is actually going on between us that's unspoken? that is polluting my interaction, that I come away feeling really horrible about myself. I need to look at this more closely and see if there are any patterns that I haven't been picking up on. And that way I can start to distinguish between what I'm doing and how I'm co-creating a dynamic with this person and what they're doing with me and being able to distinguish between what I can own and take control over and what has nothing to do with me.

Stephanie Winn: And I imagine that's where your insights on toxic envy come in.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, maybe a little bit. Yes, because we all have envy. I mean, it's a human emotion. It's important. It is a way shower for a number of things. Do we want to get into it?

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, well, when you say we all have envy, you know, for me, I will say ego, excuse me, envy is a very ego dystonic emotion for me. And I've explained this concept before on my show. It's one of the things that I say, you know, there's so many concepts from psychology that have made it into the pop culture lexicon. Ego-syntonic to ego-dystonic spectrum is a concept from psychology that has not made its way into popular culture and for a reason. how fused is my sense of self with my dysfunction, with my diagnosis or my symptoms? You know, if my diagnosis were to be resolved tomorrow, would some new problems appear in my life that this is currently protecting me from? So these are the questions that people don't really want to ask when it comes to pop psychology stuff. Anyway, I like to talk about egocentronic, egodistonic issues. And for me personally, Envy is very egodistonic. I don't think of myself as an envious person. I think of myself as someone who's very much on my own path. I have my own original goals. I don't look at other people and think that I should be on the same path they are. And so when I notice Envy, I have shame about it. I'm like, that's not me, right? That emotion itself is discordant with my own moral compass. So I just want to kind of say that as a starting point. And I think the problem I see with shame is when it's fused with the ego. If we can detach shame from our ego, then there's nothing to fear, right? Because our sense of self isn't threatened by that. So I'm just giving that as sort of an example that like, you know, my ego feels very uncomfortable with any envy that I notice. And so I just want to empathize with any listeners who have that same reaction when you say, oh, we all feel envy. They're, you know, some of us are like, no, no, I'm not an envious person.

Nathalie Martinek: Well, that's again, when we say I'm an envious person or I'm not an envious person, that's your identity. You're attaching that to ego versus I feel envy from time to time. It doesn't make me an envious person. It's just an emotional state that I enter. Something is triggering it. I need to be curious about what's going on in me that is wanting me to think badly about someone else because they're being really awesome or getting a lot of attention. What is going on in me? So, shame and envy go together. I think we have a bit of a problem trying to, you know, categorize things, these states, and make them quite distinct, discrete, and they don't work that way. Emotions are like forces and they are like magnets that, you know, magnetize different emotions as well. So when you're feeling shame, or are we feeling envy, shame is there, and often anger too, or resentment. So, and sometimes contempt. So there's like, you know, a little cluster of emotions that all complement each other. But none of these emotions are good or bad. They're, in my mind, in my eyes, they're neutral. They're just states. They're just feelings, sensations. They come with narratives, and I think the narratives are the problem, because those are the narratives that are conditioned narratives versus what is the maybe higher purpose of these emotions. What are the messages that they're trying to get us to notice and then act on? like what I described with shame. Shame is about, you know, congruence with my moral principles. There's nothing good or bad about that. It just is. Whereas envy has its own message that is neither good nor bad. It's just is. And I would just, you know, go on to describe that with any emotion. It's just being able to cut through the narrative crap and go get to the message, the kind of quieter message behind it. But what is this trying to tell me about myself? What is it trying to get me to do differently or realize that my ego is not letting me hear because it's too busy protecting itself and defending itself from these threats?

Stephanie Winn: Can you give an example of a narrative or a message?

Nathalie Martinek: OK. So Envy. So I see, you know, I'm listening to your podcast, Stephanie, and I'm like, holy shit, she's amazing. She knows her stuff. She's so articulate. And so I admire you. But then there's a part of me that's like, oh, I wish I was like that. And, you know, well, maybe I'm going to start looking for fault in what she's saying so that she could come back down to my level. Because what's happened is… Because I'm a tall poppy. you're a tall poppy and I can't, you can't, I can't have that. You need to be at my level. So I'm going to find faults to kind of bring you down so I can start to feel better about myself. So that's a function of envy because there's a hierarchy. And what envy does is if we, you know, and it's primal, if we go back to, you know, maybe our, you know, hunter-gatherer whatever days. tribal days, we had a tribe and we had to protect the tribe. So, and there's different members fulfilling different functions, responsibilities, roles, and you can't have the wrong person in the wrong role. You can't have somebody ascending without having developed the competent skills, maturity, or whatever it is, the protocols and that. in that tribe because it disrupts the whole social order. So envy is sort of this hierarchy protection emotion. So it's not just personal, it's collective as well. Same with shame, it's like I need to not only check my own morals but am I behaving, conducting myself in a morally upright way according to the standards of this group. So, envy is protecting the hierarchy. So, I'm seeing you, Stephanie, as, you know, disrupting my place in the hierarchy. How dare you do that even though you didn't know I existed. So, I need to find a way mentally to bring you down to my level and so that I can feel more at ease because my shame is saying I'm not good enough. So that's the function of shame. And I feel like what you're talking about is very similar to what I talk about. So I feel like you're now trespassing on my territory. So that's where sort of anger comes in, this sort of resentment that how dare you trespass? How dare you violate this territory that is mine, my property? Now you're violating it. You're coming in and taking up my space. So that's what NV, the condition NV, gets us to do. It's a sort of, like I said, status hierarchy within a hierarchy protection. Because, you know, what we do is we like to know where we stand. And so we put ourselves in a hierarchy, even though a hierarchy may not exist. Because that's what we do. We default to the hierarchy. It's what we know. So, what is the message of Envy? Well, you're doing your great thing and it's just telling me, Nat, hey, you're doing great stuff too. Just get better at it. Just work on it. It has nothing to do with Stephanie. This is just a sign of what you want. you know, maybe you see the quality in her that you want to develop more of in yourself. You think you already have it, but maybe you don't. This is a signal that this is the area that you would like to develop further, and that's what you need to do. So if being articulate is important to you and it will help you, you know, succeed with your goals, your mission, your vision, then work on that. It has nothing to do with her. She was just showing you what is important to you right now. And in doing that, you could use that as a way to improve yourself in that area. But what I also see Envy as is, so having been the object of Envy, which is what I wrote about in, you know, a Substack article. pushes me to get better at what I'm doing. And not only that, it pushes me towards a desire to innovate, to go beyond how everyone else sees this thing into what else are we not seeing? How else might I describe the thing? What aren't people not talking about that is present there, that needs to be talked about, that will introduce maybe something new and useful to the world? So envy, for me, the invitation is go be useful, go serve others. That's the ultimate higher kind of purpose of envy. And it's not what we talk about. We just see it as something shameful, but we experience it. It's a normal emotion. It is a protective factor. It's a, you know, status hierarchy, all that stuff, but it really is. you know, stay in your lane, focus on your lane and become really good at what you're doing, but not just for the sake of being good, be useful, give back to others, be of service to others.

Stephanie Winn: Well, I can't speak to how someone experiences this who has, you know, like, let's say pathological narcissism pervading every aspect of their life. But for, you know, someone on more kind of normal human when it comes to narcissism and envy and shame and all that kind of stuff, you know, I notice that the more different someone's talents are from mine, The easier it is to appreciate them, you know if they're really good at something I would never even think to do like I'm thinking about a show I was watching and some some qualities a certain actress has who's very different from me and the characters she plays are so different from my personality and You know that I am I'm admiring from a distance you know someone's good at something that I I don't even need to think of myself as being good at that I just don't have that quality in me and it's it's the people who are closer. to our skills, right? Like you were giving an example of what it would be like for you to compare yourself to me while we're both writers and speakers and public intellectuals, and we both do coaching and consulting. So it's when there's that similarity that you're really tested to, as you say, stay in your lane, hone your own unique gift even more precisely. And I would add to kind of humanize the other to remember that just because we're seeing them shining doesn't mean that they don't have to struggle through the muck in the same ways that we do. We're just happening to see this sort of one side of them. But then I can extrapolate from there and imagine how someone with a narcissistic character structure, with that underlying emptiness of not knowing who they really are, I can see what a conundrum that would be. Because I know my strengths well enough to know I don't need to be seen as something I'm not. I don't need to be complimented at being good at something that I don't even see in myself, right? But if you don't know who you are, and if your entire sense of self is reliant on being admired by everyone all the time, and that's the only way you can feel real, then it's like, in your mind, it's like you have to be good at everything. You can't, it's not enough to just stay in your lane and get better at your own unique gift.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, you create your own hell of ambition to have to like constantly strive and be on top and get the attention and have the admiration and showcase your talents and gifts. It's never ending. And I see this a lot with women. I've seen this actually within like women, educated women within a spiritual community. And everyone is trying to be like more spiritually great than the next, but we're all on the surface like, Oh, you're so amazing. Oh, that's so wonderful. I'm so happy you experienced that when nobody's actually happy. So yeah, you're just constantly striving, striving, striving. It's never ending. And so for the kind of narcissistic person or the one who's has that void and trying to fill it, it's unfillable because it's rooted again in shame. It's, they're not good enough. It's, I'm not good, you know, until I've achieved X, I don't deserve to have happiness or I'm not fulfilled. So lots of conditions. Whereas if we build better relationship with shame, as we've, you know, I've been talking about before, That emptiness just goes away because you start feeling okay with yourself and you recognize the things that you haven't been living up to haven't necessarily been the things that you decided were important to live up to. So you start to recalibrate your value system based on what you've come to learn is important versus what others say is important.

Stephanie Winn: Many of you listening to this show are concerned about an adolescent or young adult you care about who's caught up in the gender insanity and therefore at risk of medical self-destruction. I developed ROGD Repair as a resource for parents just like you. It's a self-paced online course and community that will teach you the psychology concept and communication tools the families I've consulted with have found most helpful in understanding and getting through to their children, even when they're adults. Visit rogdrepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code sometherapist2025 at checkout to take 50% off your first month. That's rogdrepair.com. Yeah, so say more about how covert envy shows up.

Nathalie Martinek: So covert envy is covert. It's, you know, not obviously hostile. It's obscured by praise, admiration, compliments, but there's the, you know, the praise is the wrapper, the kind of the candy that's like really bitter and sour is the biting undermining of, yeah, of you. Or, you know, questioning your credibility and your authority in general. So, again, Envy is about, you know, it's a status-checking mechanism. Make sure the right person's in the right place according to the standards of a hierarchy. And like you said, it's much easier or more prevalent in an in-group or in a group of people who have similar skill set, education level, who might even know each other. But Covert Envy, so I'll share from my experience because recently I started talking more about scapegoating at work and again, I'm doing it in a way that makes it very specific to workplaces and compared to the established scholarship on envy, specific, not envy, on scapegoating by Rene Girard and a few others that talked about societies more groups of people. So I started writing about it and it's taken off and my visibility skyrocketed in a short period of time. And so that got a lot of people's attention and they're like, who is this chick? Who is she? Where's she come from? We don't know anything about her. She doesn't actually come from an established lineage. Where's her TED talk? Where's her book? Where's her, you know, podcast? Who the hell is this woman? So no one said that to my face, but that's like the kind of sense I'm getting. That's the vibe. That's the vibe behind all the commentary. So, I started getting these private messages and some public comments on my posts and I started noticing a pattern because at first they looked really like it's so great, people are noticing what I'm writing, it's resonating, this is wonderful, people are telling me this is helping them immensely, framing their experience of being scapegoated, giving them some relief. Amazing. And I have another set of, you know, comments, which is like, oh, I love your work. We do similar things. By the way, did you know about, you know, Rene, do you know about, I've heard about Rene Girard's work. You know, have you heard about that? So because I haven't necessarily referenced these established lineages because I come from an observational lens and I analyze what I see and look for patterns, I don't necessarily know who was written on the topic before because I'm like my my life is my lab and my experience is, you know, what I like to analyze first as well as others. And then once I've kind of put together my thinking, my thought process, laid out patterns, et cetera, then I'll look at, okay, what else is established around this? Am I saying anything different? Am I noticing what has already been published? Or, and what am I, am I extending anything new? So, the covert, you know, what I call the covert envy is the praise, the expression of admiration, the compliments, and then the subtle discrediting, the questioning my authority, the attempts to set up a virtual coffee to pick my brain, or to form a collaboration even though they know nothing about me and I know nothing about them. So there's, and this is so, and I've also noticed it in a gendered way. So the women will try to form connections and, you know, we work in the same thing. We should get together and talk about how we might collaborate. Whereas I'm very discerning about who I'm going to collaborate with. And just because you tell me you love my stuff, but you give me some vague acknowledgement of what you like. You're just like, I've read your post on scapegoating. It's really great. It's similar to what I've been seeing and doing in my own coaching work. Yeah, we should get together and compare notes, even though I don't want to compare notes with that person. I'm not interested in meeting new people to talk about stuff because I'm just putting my ideas out there, but they're coming across as if this is the next step that I should be doing. There's an expectation that this is, you know, this is what we do now. You know, this is what you're expected to do now. And so it makes me wonder, why are you coming across this way? Why do you praise me and then take a dig at me or tell me how else I should be seeing things? Or you praise me, compliment me, and then seek out a collaboration. And when it's clear that you're admiring my work, it's not a two-way situation here, and there's something for you to gain more than there's something for me to gain from this exchange. So you're wanting something from me. but you're acting as if we're already on equal footing. And not to say I'm superior, we're just doing different things, but they're trying to make us similar and then create an opportunity to really take something from me and where I'm not gonna get the benefit of that interaction. I might, they might have lots to say, but I haven't seen them talk about the stuff that I've been talking about. So I'm bringing in something maybe unique, maybe original, maybe reframed. they want it, they want it for themselves, because they're saying, shit, if I had this, maybe I could get more attention or get this kind of recognition or validation. Maybe, you know, I'll get more clients, there's something in it for them. So in trying to reaching out to me and trying to like get in proximity closer proximity to me they might be able to access this essence that they're admiring and wanting more of but at the same time they want to take something from me and use it for themselves so it's a way of taking me down in the process. So, it's more, like I said, covert. It's not obviously hostile. They're not publicly degrading me. They're doing the opposite, but there's a sense of like, ooh, I want to take what she has and make her not have it anymore. I want to equalize things by starting to put out what she's putting out, but I'll do it in my way, but make it seem like it's my stuff because we're the same. I know this stuff too. I've had it all along. I just didn't say it like she did, but I've known this stuff all along. So you hear those kinds of things come out in the comments. Is that making sense?

Stephanie Winn: I'm imagining the comments now on what you're saying. So, and that's kind of meta.

Nathalie Martinek: I'm sure you've experienced this. I could give examples of comments.

Stephanie Winn: I've been doing a podcast for three years now. So increasingly when I'm talking to a guest, I can picture the YouTube comments of what people are going to want to say, which could be, Not necessarily always, but could be driven by the very dynamics that you are describing. But a bad faith interpretation of what you're saying is, who is she to interpret some friendly person reaching out, saying, hey, I like your ideas. We should grab coffee, as indicative that they're envious and that they want to cut her down, you know, that you sound paranoid, that you sound full of yourself. And that's not how I'm hearing it because I can see what you mean, right? I can see that. I don't know the situation, but I'm imagining someone wants that proximity to you right it's it's almost this and it's a female friendship dynamic right it's this like if I can be her friend or get some of her time then I'm just as valuable as she is. And it's not actually that you have a sense of superiority, but it's that this person might be projecting their unconscious sense of inferiority and needing that validation from you that you see them as worthy of your time. I mean, there's all kinds of dynamics that could be going on there.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah. And what you spoke about just now, that's the shame element. I need you to validate me. I need to know that I'm on the right track and I'm looking up to you in this moment because you seem to have it all together. I don't know your story. You seem like an overnight sensation, but I don't know the suffering that you've endured for decades to get to this point. I don't know that, but I need your validation. So that's the shame thing. So the beauty about talking about covert envy in the way that I've done it is that there's a pattern. So there's three criteria. And when the comment satisfies that criteria, then I can go, there's envy. It's unconscious. They're not malicious. They're not trying to hurt me. But it's this thing. It's a response to the shame and the desire to have what they see as valuable. to them. So the three criteria are, so there's an upward comparison, so the other person has or does something that you value. There's a status anxiety, so that other person's presence creates discomfort or insecurity about your own standing within this fake or whatever hierarchy, artificial hierarchy. And then the third criteria is a desire to reassert the hierarchy. So there's a subtle attempt to contain or diminish or redirect the other person's momentum to restore this internal sense of order, of what is the right status order.

Stephanie Winn: And I want to name this this element that's coming up for me as I'm listening to you, which is and it's tinged with sadness a little bit, because as I've experienced, mind you, for most of my life, I did not experience any kind of public attention. And then I've had public attention for a few years now, and it's changed my life in numerous ways for better and for worse. I feel like I've stabilized in my relationship to having some degree of notoriety. At first, it was really unsettling. I was afraid of being recognized in public, which hasn't happened too often. I've gotten a little bit more used to it now, just being on the scale of, you know, a small podcaster. But one thing that has changed for me is I do feel a little bit less trusting of people's motives in approaching me for things. And I've noticed it's impacted my friendships. You know, I've noticed sometimes that it seems like maybe a friend wants something from me that might have something to do with the recognition that I've gained. And when I found myself in that situation where I'm like, I really hope I can trust this person's motives, but right now it feels like This isn't just about our personal friendship. This is maybe about what I can do for their career or something like that. It makes me sad to notice that I have that trust issue. And then that I think about you know, the few people I know who have more public attention than I do and how I treat them as friends. Because, you know, as I'm noticing the people who seem like I'm like, is there a little bit of envy? Is there something you want from me? Is there, you know, and then I'm like, oh, am I am I doing that to my friend who's a published author? You know,

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, it's good to, you know, check yourself, check ourselves, because you don't want to do to someone what you don't want done to you. I've had experiences of being knowledge-vampired by people I trusted. And knowledge vampirism is a concept I came up with that is somewhere between intellectual property theft or knowledge theft and plagiarism. So it's in this murky kind of gray area where because you trust someone and I'm someone who's always deeply examining things. And I want to soundboard it with somebody else and just check my thinking. And over time, and they're asking questions because they want to know more about something for themselves. So over time, they start to slowly absorb what I've been sharing with them that didn't come from any other source to the point where they believe they knew this stuff all along. And then they start to kind of distort it or reframe it and put their spin on it so it's as if it was theirs all along and my version is wrong and then they kind of take credit for it and want to make, you know, publicize it as their own. And this happens, it's so common and it's insidious and it happens because you're with someone you trusted and you're sharing things that are not necessarily published and you didn't know to value as it's like a body of knowledge and you never put conditions around, you know, this person's, the other person's usage of that information or not usage of that information. So this happens a lot in, you know, academic research. I know someone whose PhD thesis was stolen by someone else, handed over, like everything. And it, yeah, it's common. And so there is a reason to be more, you might use the word less trusting, I would use more discerning. Because if you have something people want, envy shows its face. And that's what it does. And people use these covert ways and not necessarily intentionally. That's what makes it even harder to call out. It's unconscious. It's reactive. It's, you have something I want. This is important. Or, you know, they might be more on the covert narcissistic end of the spectrum where they're like, I've I've already granted you the gift of my attention. I gave you attention on your stuff so you could talk about it. I'm just receiving what I deserve because you got my attention, and my attention is really important. you know, act that way. They don't necessarily think it, maybe they do think it, but they act that way. So in their mind, there's been a fair exchange. Meanwhile, they're taking your stuff and going off and publishing it without your consent and removing, erasing your entire contribution to their knowledge base. And so this is why we need to be discerning with people, even with people we trust, because they don't know when they can succumb to the force of envy to get what they want out of things, because it is a powerful force.

Stephanie Winn: I'm imagining a debate between you on the one hand and Nina Paley, who I've interviewed about her ideas of what she call it copy left. She's like very anti copyright. She doesn't Okay. She doesn't believe in intellectual property and I think it's her attitude and Nina, I apologize if I'm misrepresenting you. Please, you know, come back on and misrepresent, excuse me, represent yourself and wow, that was an interesting slip. And, you know, I'd be interested in seeing a debate between these two very different perspectives because Nina is sort of anti copyright laws and anti the idea of intellectual property. And I think what I was going to say is I think that her model of knowledge is much more like open source, like we're all influencing each other all the time. And, you know, and so I can imagine not not to put it all on Nina. I'm just thinking of her views as kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from yours. And I'm imagining Some of the pushback that you might get on these ideas and some of the comments people might leave on my youtube channel Which is you know? Like how can you say that someone's stealing your ideas aren't we all just? exploring ideas together and bouncing ideas off of each other and and Sure, a conversation, you know, we grow through every conversation, but what makes it vampirism, I guess, is, you know, and then I'm also thinking, playing devil's advocate here, like someone could accuse me of that, because I'm kind of like you when you say you're an observational person, like a lot of what I'm just speaking is just my perspective on things, and I'm not always thinking about my influences, and I've been accused of stealing people's ideas, actually, Here, I'm going to put all my accusations on the line. Someone called me a narcissist, as I was talking about earlier. Someone on social media accused me of stealing someone else's ideas because I said this conspiracy theory I have, which is basically about this idea of lab-grown breast milk. And what are they doing with all the healthy breasts that they're amputating from 14, 15, 16-year-old girls? Well, does it have anything to do with Bill Gates' stem cell research and what he's doing with the lab-grown breast milk? I'm putting two and two together, and I don't remember where I learned these pieces. And then someone was like, Joey Bright was the first person to point that out, and you're stealing her ideas. And Joey's like, yeah, Stephanie, I mentioned that idea to you a few years ago on the phone. And I immediately was like, that could totally have happened. And I am not trying to steal Joey's ideas. I don't always remember where I hear things. It's not my strong suit, right? So I'm not trying to take Joey's idea and claim it was mine. I'm like, if I got this idea from Joey, then I'm happy to give her credit. But it makes me anxious to think that people are going to be expecting me to always cite all my sources when I'm just riffing off of whatever my Swiss cheese brain is putting together in the moment. So that's my devil's advocate position. And how would you argue with that?

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, I think we need to make a distinction between ideas and a body of knowledge. So, ideas, sure, they could be free, we're all plucking things from the sky, we're all influenced by each other, that's just like, you know, an idea. But a body of knowledge is, are you going to accuse a scientist who discovered something through their research in a lab as, you know, hoarding knowledge because it should be free? when they went through an entire investigative process to arrive at a conclusion about things through their own rigorous investigation process methods and things like that. So that's a different story than what we're talking about here is ideas. And so what I'm talking about is more of the analogy to the scientists in a lab. I've taken an observation, got very curious about it, and examined it deeply with rigor, tested it out, iterated, refined, and came up with the kind of finding that I'm presenting. And part of that is bouncing ideas of people. I'm still, because I'm getting different perspectives. And when someone has offered something to me that is unique, that is really influenced, you know, my, the outcome, of course, they're going to get named. But otherwise, I kind of close myself off and go into my zone, like the covert envy thing, how I took a whole bunch of comments and analyze and look for patterns. not because I'm not trusting anyone, it's just that I was noticing something odd overall, and then, you know, came up with this covert envy thing, which I haven't really seen before. So someone might claim, that's so-and-so stuff. It's like, well, I wouldn't know, I'm only, I'm kind of, you know, tunnel vision, only looking at my own stuff. But it's not just an idea, it came from, you know, testing out theories and, you know, forming hypothesis, testing out theories, noticing patterns, testing, testing, testing. So that's my distinction between, you know, stealing an idea and taking someone's body of knowledge that have come as a product of, you know, a deep investigation.

Stephanie Winn: Well, and the idea that you would, through your own process of observing and analyzing and thinking and writing, that you would stumble upon something, phrase something a certain way that resembles what some other thinker came up with, I think there's this kind of you know, credentialism in our culture that there's this not some knowledge is official. And yes, when it comes to the scientific process, some knowledge is more official than other knowledge. But when it comes to the soft sciences, you know, social psychology, the stuff that we're talking about, it is really just a lot of observation. Right. And The idea that we should always have to credit some other thinker when, yeah, there could be people who've had very similar ideas or observations. It doesn't necessarily mean that we read their work.

Nathalie Martinek: Yep.

Stephanie Winn: Or maybe we did 10 years ago and it, you know, there's a lot kind of downstream of that. Right. And I try to name my influences when possible, like when I can remember that this particular book really influenced me or something like that. But so much of how I think is just kind of a combination, like you say, of observation, assimilation, connecting the dots.

Nathalie Martinek: Yep, yes. There is the credential, it's like the credential thing that you talked about, the credentialism, that you need to have come from a very specific lineage or be able to piece together a lineage of scholarship and, you know, approved authorities for you to have the right to talk about your thing. And that is exactly what I saw with the covert envy expression among men, not women, men. So they would challenge me on, you know, the intellectual level, whereas women would kind of challenge me on the kind of connection level, or, you know, express a need to, or desire to want to connect with me, whereas the men would be like, have you read about X and Y and Z? Or, you know, what are, can I see your PhD thesis? You know, because they think my PhD has something to do with what I'm writing about now, because that's what it should be, apparently. I should only be allowed to talk about things based on the things I studied in my doctorate or my postdoc. You can't talk about things if you don't have, you know, the credential to back it. So it's a very interesting situation about how we perceive authority, who's allowed to have authority, who determines what makes an authority. And so, yeah, that's how envy plays out. You know, trying to reduce your level of authority because your authority challenges them. It makes them uncomfortable because you're presenting something that challenges a perspective. And instead of getting curious about that, you know, why am I challenged? Why is this bothering me? They come after me and try to undermine me, discredit me, diminish me. And again, it's very subtle, but it's there because it meets the three criteria.

Stephanie Winn: Can you go over those three criteria one more time?

Nathalie Martinek: Yes. So I want to make sure I'm saying it properly so I'm looking at it. So three terms, upward comparison, status anxiety, and a desire to reassert hierarchy.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, just thinking about the comments section.

Nathalie Martinek: And it's not a bad thing. Like I said, it's a protective mechanism. We're all, you know, we have our little territory that we're comfortable with. We have our knowledge base and our favorite figures and figureheads for, you know, that represent certain knowledge bases. And we turn to them and we're trying to protect them too, even though they might not know we exist. And so we wanna, you know, vet these new faces. Who are they? Who are they to speak on these things? Because they're, risking, you know, not only what I know, but who I listen to, who I take seriously. So, you know, it's a disruptive force that I might bring sometimes because of the way I frame things. I like to take ideas, question them, you know, examine them and present different ways of seeing them, not because I'm trying to be a shit stirrer. It's just, I'm very curious about things and then I don't always accept the way the, I guess, mainstream way of describing something when I've experienced it a bit differently.

Stephanie Winn: I wonder what the connection here is with the rise of parasocial relationships, right? This sense that, well, the relationship you, listener, right now are having with me and Natalie in this moment is a parasocial relationship, right? You feel like you know us, but you don't. I mean, there's a small percentage of listeners who actually personally know me, but most of them, you know. To be fair, I meet listeners all the time because anyone can hop on my calendar and I get multiple discovery calls in a week and I'm always meeting people who listen to this podcast and they're lovely, intelligent people with their own lives and I'm often honored and flattered to find out who is listening to this podcast. So I don't mean this in an insulting way whatsoever, but just as you, the listener, are having a parasocial relationship with me and Natalie right now, I, as a listener of the books and podcasts that I listen to, I'm having parasocial relationships with the people who I take inspiration from. And some of those people have become friends because I have the privilege of being in this role where I can extend a podcast invitation to accomplished authors and so on. And some of them remain parasocial. But when I think about that comment section, I think we're seeing oftentimes some of the darker side of the parasocial relationships. It's that person who might experience covert envy toward you or me for having a voice, for being articulate, being accomplished enough to have an online presence that people pay attention to whatsoever. And then they feel like they can get a little piece of it. They feel like they can feel close to us in some way by leaving that sometimes rather rude comment or comment that is meant to insult your intelligence or disagree with you in some way. And I think that sort of dark side of the parasocial relationships, you know, it's those commenters, the ones who are taking the time to try to use something like a YouTube comment section to gain feelings of superiority, Those aren't the people who are hard at work on their own projects, right? You're hard at work on your blog. I'm hard at work on my podcast. You and I are not going to other people's YouTube channels and being like, how dare you assert blah, blah, blah. Don't you know that this is what's more correct? So it's like a distraction, right? Oh, what's that book, The War of Art? Martin Pressfield, is it? Do you know the book I'm talking about? It's a great book. I think Pressfield is the author, Martin or Steven or something like that. The War of Art is about the process of working through what he calls resistance, which another way of framing that would be like your own personal demons, like for fighting your demons to bring your gift into the world and materialize whatever it is you're here to do. And he talks about how resistance can take all these forms like distraction and things like that. So to me, it feels like those are the people who are caught up in resistance, distraction, who are battling their demons, right? Because they feel like the best use of their energy is leaving that covertly envious comment on your blog or my YouTube channel as opposed to putting their nose to the grindstone and getting to work on their book or their podcast or whatever they're supposed to be doing.

Nathalie Martinek: And for some, they want your attention. So putting a provocative, insulting comment out there, they're hoping you'll see it. And then they'll be significant in your eyes, even if it's just for a split second. It's the desire to be seen by others, even if it means doing it in a really negative way. So, by putting a comment where everyone can see it, it's like, look, I'm getting attention. Even if no one responds to me, I'm still getting that need met in some way. But like you said, it's like, why did you bother writing anything? Just, you know, go get shit done. Just focus on yourself.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, that like negative attention is better than no attention. And you know, for what it's worth, I don't know if listeners know this, but the way that YouTube settings work, and I think X is very similar now, is if you leave a nasty comment on my channel, or even a single comment that indicates that you might be a problem in the future, I can mute you forever and your comments will never appear to anyone else. And you know what? You won't know because your comments will continue to appear to you, but no one will respond and no one will like them. And so that's what I do every single time I have a problem commenter on my YouTube channel. I'm like, congratulations. You're muted. You are now talking into the void. You will hear your own voice echo and that will be it. Was it worth it? I hope so. I don't know. I think muting people on X has a similar effect or maybe muting isn't the right word.

Nathalie Martinek: I think muting is a great function, and the blocking as well. But I think one of the greatest fears humans have is the fear of insignificance, that they don't matter to anyone. And so for people who are wrestling and struggling with shame, there can be these behaviors, like the resisting behaviors. that are seeking attention, and this is the way, the strategy they're using to get it. It's like the low-hanging fruit strategy. Let me just chuck an insult. So when you mute them, they go back to being insignificant. It reinforces their, you know, I don't matter to anyone. So, I feel for people in that state because I've been in that state. I get into those states every so often. It's horrible, but it is like our existence doesn't matter. It's like, you know, this primal, horrible narrative to hold and the feeling to hold in yourself. So it does drive people in social media and the parasocial way, parasocial relationships has made it almost normal to do stuff like that, which is a problem because it's turning all of us into sociopaths. It's what Josh Slocum talks about as Cluster B Society. Cluster B, like this is just our normal now. We're just a bunch of sociopaths and enabled by these machines that we use instead of checking ourselves. doing what you said earlier, why am I behaving this way? What's going on for me that I want to lash out at this person I don't even know? Because she said, I used to love everything she said and then she said this one thing that I totally disagree with and now I hate her and renders everything that she's ever said, you know, a lie. I feel betrayed, you know? So create these crazy stories about people we barely even know.

Stephanie Winn: It's sad, because it's so lonely in that world. There's no depth of relationship there. And I appreciate you naming how you, too, experience that. And I go to that dark place occasionally, too. And I think the difference between someone like you or I and someone with a personality disorder is the ability to, like I was saying earlier, to detach our shame from our ego, to be able to observe it. And that's not me. That doesn't have to define me. And then we can self-correct. We can clean it up. I was wondering if I was going to talk about this on my podcast. I guess this is the time. It's coming up now. I deleted so much of my ex history. I had four years of posts on ex, and I spent a whole week just deleting half of it. it was all the impulsive over shares the any like religion spirituality politics curse words you name it if it if it seemed unprofessional i took it away and i i was i was in such a good place when i did it i felt so detached that i was actually able to experience that repulsion toward how my own online presence came across. Like, I was able to almost see my online presence as someone else. And I'm like, oh, man, I seem really unhinged, you know, like, I'm like, I'm coming across as emotionally unstable. And it's not actually how I feel. I mean, this is just how I'm typing onto a screen on my phone at 10 o'clock at night because I'm quote tweeting something and I'm, you know, saying holy cow or whatever. But, you know, say holy cow enough times and it makes you sound like you're really emotionally reacting to everything. Yeah. And I'm not, actually. That's not how I carry myself in professional settings. I'm actually pretty chill in a lot of ways. So I was so grateful to have gotten to that point where I was able to just be kind of zen about it and just Does this need to represent me? No, this doesn't represent me. This is just a two-dimensional caricature of an aspect of my personality that could never fully represent me. And I don't need that validation from it. But I think another shift was that I internalized my locus of control a little bit because I've expressed how frustrating and disappointing it is, how on social media people can be so uncharitable and jump to conclusions. and all that kind of stuff. And I was wanting people to be different. And it's like, no, people aren't going to be different on social media. You cannot expect that when you put your thoughts out there to a general audience of God knows who at God knows what hour, that they're not going to judge you. They are going to judge you. And so I was like, I could continue to be upset that that's human nature. Or I could just be smart about it and not give people so much to judge. Yeah.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, again, being discerning and intentional about what you put out there of yourself. But, you know, back when you were tweeting those things, and I could say the same thing about myself, I thought I was totally reasonable at that time. And, you know, I sounded great. And, you know, and I look at all the attention that tweet got, you know, like, I'm on the right track here. So it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, these behaviors come out, you know, it's context specific. And there's things about social media that concentrate more of our maybe demonic traits and make it normal. So it seems like we're being reasonable. But if you were to try that stuff in a workplace context, you know, people would look at you like you're crazy. So, yeah.

Stephanie Winn: Well, context is the word, isn't it? Because, you know, and I teach about this in my course, too, that fundamental attribution error, right? That we all want to be seen in relation to our context. We want people to know, well, of course I reacted this way because this is what was going on. You would react that way under those circumstances, too. That's how we want to be seen. But that's not how we judge, right? We don't give people that charitable context rich perspective. We judge people's actions as if they're all indicative of their character, not that they're indicative that it's 10 o'clock at night and they've got a crying, screaming baby. And, you know, like that's not what we're.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, we're not interested in that. We want the quickest, easiest way to assess somebody and affirm our either state of mind, beliefs about them, you know, our goodness, our superiority in the moment. Yeah, all these little games that we don't know we're playing with ourselves and other people. But yeah, the social media world is just very intense, intensified, concentrated, and Yeah, not necessarily the best place to check reality.

Stephanie Winn: And you're on, I think you're, I think I just followed you back today on X. Are you new there? Are you diving into those? What are you doing? I'm gonna look right now to see what you're doing with… I'm doing nothing on X, very rarely.

Nathalie Martinek: I used to be very active, more in the med Twitter community, doing a lot, talking about burnout, moral injury. suicide of physicians and doing a lot of, you know, advocacy in that area. And then they all went to Blue Sky and I stayed on Twitter to follow them. And then, you know, had other interests and pursued them on different platforms, mainly on Substack. So I'm not very active on X.

Stephanie Winn: How long have you been doing Substack?

Nathalie Martinek: Four years this month or last month. Yeah, it's my fourth year. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it's been going well and you know, the theme is relational interpersonal narcissism and all the offshoots of that and I love diving into emotions and I'll be spending more time writing about envy because there's more to share on it.

Stephanie Winn: Mm-hmm. How's that been going with the substack?

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah, it's been going well. You know, you get your spurts of, you know, big subscribers coming in, big number of subscribers and then like stagnation and then dips and then you're wondering, uh-oh, what am I doing wrong? That has nothing to do with me necessarily. There's algorithms, there's who knows what, so many other factors that be on my control and then, you know, then you get you go through that cycle again. So it's been great. There's been slow and steady climb. I started with like, I don't know, 60 people from another list and then gradually organically grew. So it's nice to see the success and the spread of the stuff and the, I guess, the recognition and the support of the stuff I've been putting out there because you just never know how people are going to take things. What's next for you? Good question. I've got a few workshops again on shame, envy, scapegoating coming up. I'm very fascinated with scapegoating, but also because it's something and it's also driven by envy and shame, not surprisingly. And the impact it has on so many people, because it's not just the one person that's involved, it's the entire system. It's a system based kind of elimination of a threat. And some people in it are aware of what's happening, but most people aren't until it happens to them, and then they start to see more of the indicators. So it's not something that's going to stop happening anytime soon, because right now, you know, there's a loss of trust in institution, and this is kind of what happens in lower trust cultures. And it's not just bullying, which is more again, obvious, this is something insidious that happens over a period of time. And the person who's the target, the scapegoat, doesn't necessarily know that they are the scapegoat until they're way through the process, and they're near the kind of exclusion and elimination part of it. And it's so destructive to their identity. So I think it's an important thing to keep talking about, raise awareness of, but as well as the preventative measures that we can take on individually. And so I've been speaking more about kind of a newer concept or a way of coined relational intelligence that draws from evidence base that I've been participating in for many years. So that's on the horizon, this concept of relational intelligence and why it matters and how it can be a preventative measure, not only to being a scapegoat, especially if you've been scapegoated several times before, But also it's leadership skills that incorporates emotional intelligence, social intelligence, but is being very attuned to the power dynamics and structures and the real hierarchy versus the listed hierarchy of power. So you're saying there's hope for group dynamics. There is, I think so, but we have to stop looking to a system to correct itself and take accountability. It won't. We kind of have to step in and do our own thing and do our best to build trust in a world, in a time when trust is low, suspicion is high, and we need to do what's necessary to restore the trust between each other.

Stephanie Winn: I feel like that's a really good ending note, but I'm going to ruin it by adding on to it and say… Well, because I tend to end up scapegoating in groups. It's a recurring theme. If I'm in a group, I'm going to end up scapegoating unless I'm in charge. Then you get to scapegoat. No. No, I'm a good leader. I'm a good leader. I do a really good job of bringing people together. but I do it sporadically. I hold space, I bring lots of different kinds of people together for social gatherings and things like that. But I mean, in terms of, I think I have to have a high degree of freedom and spontaneity, as well as diversity. Like I tend to, I tend to be a social butterfly kind of on the edges of multiple different kinds of groups of people. And that's, you know, so when we have gatherings, I'm bringing people together from different walks of life. And I mean, you can tell anyone, anyone who listens to this could tell from the types of people I have on my podcast, like I've had people talk about psychedelics on this podcast. But, you know, I'm also going to interview a guy with a very critical perspective on psychedelics soon who comes at it from a faith-based perspective. So I really like bringing together a diversity of viewpoints. And I know I sound full of myself when I say, no, I don't scapegoat, but I'm serious. I know how painful it is to be the scapegoat and I'm just very wary of group dynamics.

Nathalie Martinek: Yeah. So if you see it, you're tuned into it, you know, you know how to prevent it. Or at least notice when there's signs because someone else is stepping in trying to be an authority and demonizing someone else. And yeah, and then trying to kind of get others to turn as well. So yeah, if you're the leader and you can spot it, you can stop it.

Stephanie Winn: Well, I'm curious what you come up with when you do publish that book or whatever comes of that. Because I think I do have some cynicism about just what happens when you put groups of people together for very long.

Nathalie Martinek: I do too. I think it's bad. That's why I'm not part of any community. I have only, you know, small groups of friends, small groups, because as we get bigger, we default to hierarchy. It's just how we are. We like to stratify. We like to know who's who, who's got status, who do I have to get cozy with. So to be safe, to be protected, to get my needs met. So this is human nature. So instead of like being ashamed of it, we need to just be aware of it and the risks to to that, to cohesion, to fulfilling, you know, shared purpose, that we don't need to get our egos involved and feel so resistant. But, you know, that takes a lot of relational intelligence.

Stephanie Winn: Relational intelligence. All right. I feel like there's a book there or something.

Nathalie Martinek: Well, I just published the first thing on it last night, so it's on my substage. And I did publish a book recently, it's an e-book format right now, on the scapegoating playbook at work. Oh, that's out. So it was a compilation of the posts that I put out on LinkedIn plus a whole big section introduction explaining, setting the scene of how this unfolds in the workplace.

Stephanie Winn: So that PDF, it's an e-book. Is it on Amazon?

Nathalie Martinek: It should be on Amazon at some point soon. I will turn it into print and audio as well. E-book was just the easiest, fastest way to get it done. Yeah, so it's on through my website, but it's also on various online sellers around the world like Kobo and Booktopia right now.

Stephanie Winn: We'll have to make sure to include that link in the show notes. And I'd like to read it once it's in audio format. That's the way that I digest. Okay, I will have to do it. Thank you so much for joining. It's been a pleasure. Yeah.

Nathalie Martinek: Thanks, Stephanie, for having me. It's been Great, just not knowing where we're going to go and where we ended up going. And your wealth of knowledge, it was really a pleasure to hear your synthesis and summaries and bringing from your honest experiences. So, thank you.

Stephanie Winn: Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy, and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrman, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.