Monday was very warm!

I wore sandals and capris for my walk and to pick up A. It was over 70 on our porch. Wow! So much snow melted and dried right up, not even leaving significant mud around here.

I walked with M.

R. went out to the house and got a bunch of the wifi access points set up. Woot!

I drove A. in and retrieved her; I probably won’t be doing either of those things tomorrow, altho you never know.

I worked a bit more on the lego enterprise.

I made peanut butter. It turned out slightly better this time, but it looks like this is a pretty stable way for me to do this. It takes forever getting the skins off but the resulting flavor and texture is good and I actually eat the results. Trader Joe’s unsalted has slightly better texture still, altho I like the flavor of mine a bit better. I did about 20 ounces of peanuts this time, and it was just about perfect for two of the marmalade jars, which is what I’ve been putting it in. It’s a little shocking how fast I go through it tho. I listened to some podcasts while getting the skins off the roasted peanuts.

Narcissism and sports coaches

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10687005/

“ We propose that in a competitive context narcissistic coaches could inspire and motivate their athletes to raise their performance. ”

“ narcissistic coaches seem to reinforce athletes’ perceptions that competition provides them with an opportunity to show off their skills, which in turn accounts for athletes’ better performance in comparison to athletes who do not train with narcissistic coaches. The findings point to a potentially functional side of narcissism in coaching.”

I mean. Or a negative side to competition. But I’m reasonably certain that everyone who knows me expected me to make that observation. I am a broken record.

“ In the sporting domain, we propose that a key contextual variable capable of harnessing a narcissistic leader’s (i.e., coach’s) beneficial side is competition.”

“ A controlling interpersonal style can be damaging to athletes’ psychological well-being, while hindering their capacity for self-regulation and intrinsic motivation17. Narcissistic coach’s controlling style was found to be related to athletes’ lower need (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatedness) satisfaction and more positive attitudes about doping13. Relatedly, the controlling style of narcissistic coaches predicts their moral disengagement, an antecedent of antisocial sport behavior”

They got sooooo close!

“ Coach narcissism was positively associated with athletes’ performance, with rowers who trained with more narcissistic coaches evincing faster end times than those who trained with coaches scoring lower on narcissism.”

“ athletes who trained with coaches higher on narcissism perceived the competition as an opportunity to self-enhance to a greater extent than athletes who trained with coaches lower on narcissism. Finally, athlete perceived self-enhancement opportunity, in turn, plausibly accounted for the positive relation between coach narcissism and athlete performance”

If I understood this correctly, the athletes could tell their coaches were narcissistic, and the more narcissistic the coach was, the great the perceived opportunity for self-enhancement by the athlete. I’m not here to trash-talk Dutch rowers, and also this goes a long ways to explain a multi-decadal allergy to sports competitions. Also, holy shit. I now feel like I should go back and reread Alfie Kohn, because in all those pages on competition and why it isn’t great, I don’t think anything along these lines was ever mentioned. And it really _should_ have been mentioned, because this is clearly the Temptation! Yes, I’m being verbally abused / neglected / psychologically abused / wtf, but I’m getting better at my sport! Ugh!

“ As neither coaches nor athletes had discretion in whom they trained with, it was unlikely that narcissistic coaches would have attracted athletes who were better performers prior to the competition.” If true, very interesting all by itself.

OK, why was I looking at this at all? I mean, once I saw it, it was 100% walkitout catnip. Someone doing something quantitative with narcissism! And trying to understand what the rewards of narcissism might be. I mean, that 2022 paper suggested that 20% of the folks soaking up (expensive) talk therapy might be npd or whatever. The implication that narcissists are the kind of high achievers who can afford that/have the clout to demand that/have family members who will insist that they get help vs just giving up on them is tantalizingly obvious but demands a lot of further explanation.

Once I read through the thing, it just got more interesting the further into it I got. I’m now really fascinated by narcissistic desire for “the best”. I am soooo opposed to “the best”. I’m a satisficer. I’m a 80% of the results for 20% of the efforts. I’m anti Harvard. I love commodity. Some of this is not totally true, because I often have idiosyncratic desires that can land me in niches associated with “high quality” or whatever, and I am absolutely capable of resolving group conflict around which of a number of choices to pick by going up the quality ladder until people are afraid to go any further. (Playing chicken by price tag! LOL) I am the way I am because I know in some detail the problems that come with bespoke, with “high quality”, with “creme de la creme” etc. I like replaceability, substitutability, good interfaces, and good value for resources put into it, and those are rarely associated with “the best”.

In unrelated observations (joke), I got a new Tom Binh backpack. I spent some more time on manybaggers, and I love the idea that it is at the intersection of OCD and autism, mostly because I had already identified that I had a lot of strong feelings in the leadup to a vacation that were pretty control-freaky. So, sounds about right, basically. The new backpack is aubergine. As long as I’m mentioning purple things, I ordered a spyderco with a purple handle. I’m ludicrously excited about this, altho it obviously will not be traveling with me on airplanes (I’m pretty committed to carryon only, because I have had it up to here with checking a bag).

I also read some great stuff about mentalizing therapy and NPD. Obviously, mentalizing therapy fits very neatly with what I refer to as “mechanical empathy” — it’s not quite the same, but it’s closely related. There are a variety of definitions of empathy — feeling another person’s feelings, or cognitively figuring out what their feelings are based on their nonverbals. “Mechanical empathy” is my term for deliberating about a person’s circumstances, beliefs, goals, etc., and trying to calculate how a given event or change will cause them to feel. If all you know about two people is that one is deathly allergic to peanuts, and the other one’s favorite food is peanut butter, you know they are going to react really differently to being handed a Reese’s peanut butter cup, even if you know absolutely NOTHING about their feelings about chocolate, milk chocolate, or Reese’s in general, or things like when they last ate. But if you know all those other things, too, you can predict with quite a lot of confidence how they will feel when handed a Reese’s peanut butter cup.

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20210017

One of my remaining major questions is whether the performance orientation of narcissism can extend to performing mentalization, or what I call mechanical empathy. It could? But I suspect the hope / expectation is either it doesn’t, or, if someone gets really good at it, we’ll all just pretend we don’t care and stop asking questions.

ETA: Lots of fun poking around at studies that attempt to figure out whether it’s CPTSD, BPD or something else. Also, martial arts turns out to be surprisingly helpful to people with CPTSD. OK, maybe not surprising! There’s some really good stuff out there.

I did a little poking around at the origins of EMDR and, unsurprisingly, NLP is lurking in the background, LOL. That’s fine. Everything has to start somewhere.