1KHO 949: Raising Kids in a Narcissistic Age | Chuck DeGroat, Who You're Becoming

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Ginny Yurich (1:30)

I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. Today, I'm sitting across from a person that I have been a fan of for a very long time. I intersected his work with a book called When Narcissism Comes to Church, Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse. I've also read the life-changing Healing What's Within, Coming Home to Yourself and to God When You're Wounded, Fury and Wandering. And Chuck DeGroat has a brand-new book out called Who You're Becoming, The Slow and Courageous Work of Cultivating Character in a Narcissistic Age. Chuck, thank you for taking the time to be with us today.

Chuck DeGroat (2:04)

Well, it's so good to be with you.

Ginny Yurich (2:07)

So we are fellow Michiganders having a conversation about what is going on in culture. If we could kick it off there, you're a therapist, a pastor, a professor, a consultant, more than 25 years of experience in the spiritual abuse space. So you have been studying what's going on with people for several decades. And one of the things that you talk about in this brand new book called Who You're Becoming, is that there are some cultural shifts going on.

I would love to talk about a couple of those cultural shifts, especially from the perspective of being a parent and in some ways a little bit wanting to safeguard your children. So what you're talking about is the rise of being performative, and also the rise of narcissism, both.

Chuck DeGroat (2:49)

Yeah, yes, that's right. Yeah, and I feel that too. I've got two daughters.

They're both married now, and we were living in San Francisco with the rise of the iPhone, this world of technology, this mirror that you put up in front of you. Look at me, look at me.

I've got videos from back in the day, the girls in front of the computer recording themselves. So it's a very different world. Certainly, than the one I grew up in. I was born in 1970 And so, and yeah, there is this sense, right, that my orbit, gosh, growing up, it was like, jump on our bike. And our whole world was within a few square blocks, right? And yet, one of the things I noticed when my daughters got to be a little bit older was, oh, wow, there's something about what's going on right now that is connected to how they're being perceived by someone else that they barely know, perhaps connected over Snapchat, or maybe it's Instagram or something like that, depending on kind of when we were allowing them to engage these kinds of things. And that's impacting how she feels about herself, or what's going on tonight in terms of her mood at dinner. And so it's a wild new world that we're living in now, right, where there is more of a pull to be performative, to show up in ways that please and gain approval and get likes. And I don't know that we've all fully sort of digested, because it's still so new, what it really means and like the longer term implications for our development, our character development, our brain development, et cetera, right?