We’re back in the parsha of identifying the main ‘narc’ traits that are underpinning so much of what is wrong in the world generally – and in the way we relate to others, and ourselves, specifically.

Today, we’re going to try and finish off the discussion we’ve been having over the last three posts about CRITICISM – probably the most toxic, and the most difficult ‘narc trait’ to deal with, on an ongoing basis.

You can read the last three posts on the subject of CRITICISM, by clicking the links below

NARC TRAITS INTRO – DEALING WITH NARC ABUSE

BRESLOV VS NARC TRAITS: CRITICISM

AZAMRA ANTIDOTE TO INNER CRITIC

EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS

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Let’s briefly recap about what Rebbe Nachman, in lesson 2:8 of Likutey Moharan, taught us about ‘rebuking’, aka criticising, others:

Though rebuke is of great import, and all Jews are obliged to rebuke each other when seeing that the other is not behaving properly….nevertheless, not everyone is capable of rebuking.

As Rabbi Akiva said: “I wonder if there is anyone in this generation who is capable of rebuking.”

And if Rabbi Akiva said this about his own generation, how much more so is it so in our generations?!

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When the rebuker is not capable of rebuking, then not only is his rebuke ineffective, but he is also causing a sense of malodorous repulsiveness in the souls hearing his rebuke.

This is because his rebuke arouses the stench of the evil deeds and bad character traits of those he is rebuking….

By thus causing them a sense of malodorous repulusiveness, he thereby weakens their souls, on account of which the effluence from all the worlds that are dependent on these souls ceases.

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What is Rabbenu teaching us, here?

First of all, that NO-ONE can ‘rebuke properly’ today.

Or to put it another way: no-one can ‘criticise’ someone else, and expect that criticism to be helpful.

Rabbenu spells it out:

Your rebuke / criticism will be ineffective, and you’ll just cause the person you’re criticising to feel ‘toxic shame’ (aka, a sense of ‘maladorous repulsiveness’.)

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Here’s where a lot of people’s yetzers are probably waking up, and making the following argument:

Ok, great, we shouldn’t just tear people down, and rip them apart, stam. But how are people ever going to change or improve, if we can’t give them constructive criticism, about what they are doing wrong, and how they can do it better?!

What’s wrong with ‘constructive criticism’, where you are just helping the person to improve?!

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Let’s restate what we just learned, above, from Likutey Moharan 2:8:

No-one can ‘criticise’ someone else, and expect that criticism to be helpful.

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If we’re just a little bit honest, we’ll see that this is what plays out, almost every time we try to ‘help’ other people with our ‘constructive criticism’.

(And that includes our kids…)

Because we live in such a ‘narc shaped world’, so many of us are on the super-defensive about being criticised, even ‘constructively’.

That’s for a few different reasons.

First of all, and as Rabbenu teaches us, most of the people offering ‘constructive criticism’ to others are usually not coming from a good place, middot-wise.

There’s a massive yetzer attached to making ourselves feel ‘bigger’ by putting someone else down, even if we believe we’re criticising ‘constructively’.

And the other person ALWAYS picks up on that vibe, subconsciously, no matter how much it’s packaged as ‘constructive’.

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How many times has someone who really does care about you, and really does love you, made you feel ‘bad’ by pointing out something you could be doing better, or different?

It’s human nature, it’s how we’re built, that we usually just feel insulted, or shamed, or ‘taken down a peg’, when someone points out what we’re doing wrong.

There are some exceptions to this, of course.

When it’s purely a technical skill, like learning to drive a car, or learning how to bake a pavlova, then of course, there’s a lot more leeway for demonstrating the right way of doing things.

But attitude is still everything….

And how many times did you get put off, or upset, when a ‘teacher’ made you feel stupid, for not doing something they were teaching ‘the right way’?

We’ll come back to this example in a mo, as it’s a good one for highlighting the fundamental differences between ‘constructive criticism’ and ‘positive encouragement’.

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So, the first reason ‘constructive criticism’ is rarely ever truly ‘constructive’ is because it often acts as a ‘narc Trojan horse’ – an excuse to lord it over people, and to have that secret satisfaction of pointing out what they are doing wrong, whilst pretending that we ourselves never make the same sort of mistake.

A person has to be very self-aware, and constantly working on their own middot in a determined way, to even begin consider ‘constructively criticising’ someone else.

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Next, Rabbenu also taught us in Lesson 2:8:

“[B]y virtue of prayer, sins are forgiven, for prayer atones….”

In other words, you want someone else to improve and to change? You want your teen to be more thoughtful? Then, instead of ripping them to shreds for being ‘selfish’ etc, spend some time praying for them, to be able to get on top of their yetzers.

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When we pray for someone else, we strengthen that person’s soul.

When the other person’s soul is continually strengthened, then at some point, they may be able to deal with so-called ‘constructive criticism’.

(To put this in different language, this is part of the spiritual process of moving from mochin de’katnut to mochin de’gadlut.)

But only once most of the ‘triggers’ for their INNER CRITIC have been immobilised and taken offline.

Again, this is not the work of five minutes.

It takes a ton of dedicated hitbodedut, asking God for help, self-awareness and hard work, to reach the stage where the INNER CRITIC has been reduced enough that a person can receive ‘constructive criticism’ without taking it personally and melting-down into their particular stress response.

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So in the meantime – dial down the ‘constuctive criticism’ and instead, put your effort into praying for the other person to improve and change!

Do your 7 Tikkun Haklalis every day, as the Rav is asking us to do, and do it in the zchut of the people you love.

That’s what I do.

And I really see it helps so, so much.

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Before we continue, let me tell you what happened to me at the Israel Museum last year, when I took an oil painting class taught by an old school ‘Lefty’ in her 80s, whose social life pivoted around demonstrating against Bibi.

She had a lot of major narc traits and middot, and that came out in her teaching style.

A couple of people left my class before I finally had enough myself, and each time, the teacher would be totally ‘surprised’ that people had been so insulted and hurt by her remarks and comments that they didn’t want to come back again.

These people left even though the Israel Museum was still taking their money, because you can’t get a refund, past a certain point in the course.

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So, how this teacher operated was she had ‘favorites’ that she would boost one week – and then a couple of weeks later, she’d make sure to take that ‘favorite’ down a peg or two, publically.

The teacher gave almost zero real advice or tips on how to actually paint, and just told everyone they’d learn from doing.

But then, if you did it ‘wrong’ – she’d tear you to pieces in front of the rest of the class.

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That’s what happened to me.

The last class I attended, we were in one of the wings of the Israel Museum with our easels, assigned the task of trying to ‘copy’ some painting by a Grand Master.

My stress response was already turned on and sky-high, because I was worrying I was going to accidentally get my oil paints on the expensive parquet…. Or somehow flick paint on a Van Gogh or Rembrandt and then get arrested, or something.

Long story short: I was in MAJOR flashback mode already, feeling like I was back in British school and waiting to be publically shamed because I hadn’t pulled my socks up high enough.

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In the meantime, the instructions from the teacher was to just ‘try to copy the picture’ we’d chosen.

I was trying to copy some portrait of a woman in a dress – done by a Grand Master – and I noticed that the face seemed to have quite a greenish tint, so I painted half the face with shades of green paint.

I had no idea how I was going to transition that ‘green’ to more skin colour, but hey, I was trying to ‘learn as I go along’, like the teacher said.

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At the end of the class, the teacher got all the canvasses together and began her public critique of the work, aka ‘CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM’.

Except, it really wasn’t.

When she got to my green face attempt, instead of reassuring me I was on the right track, and that I just needed to tone it down with some orange, or some red, or whatever the right colours should have been – she ripped into me.

She told me I clearly had problems following instructions, and she was looking forward to seeing how I was going to be able to ‘rescue the mess’ I’d made of my canvas the next week.

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I never went back to find out.

I imbibed such a heavy dose of ‘toxic shame’ from that teacher, I decided it wasn’t worth the money to keep torturing myself like that, just to get three hours of painting practise a week.

And I’m a 50 year old woman, who can usually hold my own with old narc crones trying to score points for ‘Team Kaplan’.

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If you’d ask my teacher, she’d tell you she was only giving ‘constructive criticism’….

Of course.

So, now let’s spend the rest of this post drilling down the difference between ‘positive encouragement’ – that we all need – and ‘constructive’ criticism – that basically, nobody needs.

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The main point to keep underlining again and again and again, is that anytime the discussion moves to the GLOBAL PERSON, instead of just focussing on a specific situation or task – that’s a narc trait, and it should be curtailed.

And that’s also true when it comes to compliments and saying nice things.

My narc teacher would routinely give OTT compliments like, wow, you are Vincent Van Gogh!!!

These types of compliments ‘sound good’ but they are not helpful, not useful and not real.

Narcs typically use OTT, phoney, ‘global compliments’ to run the interference for when they start criticising a person globally, and tearing them down.

If you take the time to start to notice this stuff yourself, you’ll start to figure out that most NARCS also compliment, occasionally, to try and train and manipulate people to jump through their hoops, in order to get that scant crumb of ‘approval’.

We’ll maybe write about this another time, but setting up ‘favorites and scapegoats’ is a very popular narc tactic.

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The golden rule for ‘constructive criticism’, if you still want to engage in that, is that before you point out anything that needs improving, you should spend five times as long pointing out what the person is actually doing right.

And that means empathising with the learning journey the other person (and all of us….) are actually on.

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People educated with the Western mindset don’t like to believe this, but the truth is that the OUTCOME is not in our hands, or under our control.

So the real focus of any encouragement has to be on the PROCESS, and not the OUTCOME.

We may well come back to that topic another time, but in the meantime, here is the song MASA (in Hebrew), to keep reminding us about this point:

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It’s a huge ‘narc trait’ to put all the emphasis on the outcome, the ‘appearance’, instead of the struggle to get there.

And if this is true for life generally, it’s true a million times over for all those ‘social media’ accounts that like to pretend their houses are always so clean…. that 5 layer cream cake got made so effortlessly, with no flops…. Their holiday was ‘totally perfect’, with no mosquitoes, sunburn or dodgy restaurants….

This is one of the key ways social media encourages and amplifies destructive narc traits.

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So, NARCs ignore the process, and focus on the outcome.

In our narc-shaped world, so much store is set on presenting an appearance of perfection and ‘success’, where mistakes are simply not acknowledged, and normal difficulties and struggles are whitewashed, ignored or papered over.

But the PROCESS is the whole point, not the OUTCOME, which is actually only in God’s hands, however it may look externally.

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With my painting example, IFFFFF the teacher had begun by framing her comments about my green-faced picture with some reassuring stuff about how learning to paint takes a very long time, and is not a five second job, even for ‘Grand Masters’, I would already have been feeling way calmer and relaxed.

I wouldn’t be getting the vibe that ‘there was something wrong with me’, personally, or that ‘I’d done something wrong’.

Instead, i’d be gettting the message that this is really hard, so don’t worry if you didn’t do it right!!! It takes a lot of practise!!!

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Next, my teacher could have made an effort to praise the effort, the time spent, the attempt, the journey – even if the outcome was pretty bad.

Because painting anything for three hours, even something not very good, is still a big thing to do.

And then, if there was objectively something good in the painting, that should have been the teacher’s next focus.

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And then, and only then, she could have turned her attention to the green face problem, and said something like this:

Don’t panic about the green face! Next week, spend a bit of time trying to even it out with some orange, or red, (or whatever….) and you’ll see it’ll look way more human by the end of next week’s class! You are doing OK, Rivka, don’t worry! Even Grand Masters didn’t become Grand Masters overnight!

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If something like that had happened, I probably would have learned to paint last year.

As it was…. I had the heebie-jeebies even thinking about returning to that painting class, for about two months afterwards.

That’s what happens when you get ‘constructively criticised’ in front of a whole bunch of people, by a narc pretending to be a teacher.

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OK, to to conclude this next tranche, our job is to ENCOURAGE OTHERS, and to help them to make their best efforts, and to not give up.

That doesn’t mean we make false, flattering ‘global’ statements, or ‘love bomb’ the other person – these are narc traits.

But it does mean we ‘look for the good points’ in what the other person is doing.

We have empathy for the person, and the process they are going through.

We give a ton of encouragement, from a humble place of knowing that we also make mistakes, cock up, and can’t and don’t do ‘everything right’, or ‘everything perfect’.

And most of all, that we put the emphasis on the PROCESS, instead of the OUTCOME.

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Honestly?

Even ‘positively encouraging’ can sometimes be OTT, and veering too close into ‘controlling others’, and trying to ensure they do things ‘perfectly’.

Especially, when it comes to our kids.

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We are going to start talking about ‘control’ in the next post on overcoming narc traits.

It’s another one of those things that is so normal, in our narc shaped world, that we don’t understand just how poisonous it can be, to walk around with the false idea that everything is somehow ‘in our control’.

God is in control, not us.

There’s a lot to unpick on this topic, so watch out for that.

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In the meantime, let’s end this post with some homework, to start dialling-down all the criticism in our dalet amot.

BEGINNERS’ LEVEL:

For the next week (at least….):

Don’t praise anyone ‘globally’, or criticise anyone ‘globally’.

Including your spouse, your kids, other family members – and most of all, yourself.

Take all the talk about ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’ totally off the table, and just focus ON praising or criticising specific traits, actions, behaviors.

How does this ‘switch’ start to change your stress levels, and your interactions with other people?

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If you want to do this a bit more seriously, maybe buy a journal, and write things down as you go along.

The following more challenging levels should be built on the foundation of the BEGINNERS LEVEL – do these as well as, not instead of.

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INTERMEDIATE LEVEL:

Remember how someone gave you a word of encouragement, that somehow turned everything around, or gave you the koach to continue, when you were going through a rough patch?

Each of us can give that gift to someone else.

All the time.

Over the next few days, look for opportunities to encourage someone else.

And also (perhaps, even more importantly….) yourself.

Our ‘narc shaped world’ has trained us to constantly look for the bad and zone in on it.

How about if we flip that on its head, and start ‘looking for the good’, instead, as Rabbenu teaches in Azamra?

And the first place to start doing ‘Azamra’ is with ourselves, and our close family members.

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ADVANCED LEVEL:

If you are really serious about doing the hard work of uprooting toxic crticism, try to pay more attention to how much criticism you are giving and getting.

How much criticism are you giving to others – and also, yourself?

How much criticism are you recieving?

How does this criticism make you feel, when you get it?

How do others react to being ‘constructively criticised’ by you?

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All this is just an ‘information gathering’ exercise, right now.

All of us have this problem in some way or other – all of us!

The only real difference between an ‘unfixable narc’ and a good person with bad middot is that the good person acknowledges there is a problem, tries to make teshuva, and continually works on improving themselves.

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Remember, it’s the PROCESS that matters, not the OUTCOME.

Simply engaging in the process of trying to figure this stuff out is awesome!

Kol Hakavod to you, dear reader, that you took the time to actually read this post.

Next up: We’ll take a closer look at CONTROL, and specifically, CONTROLLING OTHER PEOPLE, which is another major ‘narc’ characteristic that needs to be tackled and uprooted.

See you then.