Scrooge: Post-traumatic Embitterment Disorder

the US. Yeah, it is a juggernaut. Which is kind of why we want to sit here and look at a couple of classic Christmas stories this season and plumb the depths of Christmas and see if there's a bit more to it. So we thought we'd start with Old Scrooge. We're talking about the eighteen three Charles Dickens classic Christmas Carol. Yes, a Christmas Carol, which, if you like me, you've you know, you've encountered this story more than just about any other story.

It's you end up reliving at every Christmas as you grow up. Different film adaptations, maybe you have to go to a play version of it. Um Like, for my part, I don't think I've ever actually read it, Like I have no desire to read it because I've I've I've suffered through enough of it on the screen. I mean, and that's not to say I don't appreciate some of the adaptations. I love the musical Scrooge um and and could easily belt out some tunes from it right now.

But yeah, that's that's my go to Scrooge by the way. But yeah, it's just you. You can't avoid. It's just nailed into your head, it is, And uh so probably for for a lot of you guys out there listening to this, this is all gonna sound familiar, but we're gonna go through it anyway. We're talking about a miserly old geezer named Ebeneezer Scrooge, and he is visited by myriad ghosts on the eve of Christmas, including his dear friend who's now a ghost, Jacob Marley, and then the

ghost of past present in the future. And these visitations cost Scrooge to rethink his relationship and behavior to those around him, particularly his employee Bob Cratchet, and his family, including his infirmed son Tiny Tim. Yes, God blesses everyone's it's the catchphrase that resonates with everyone. Um it's uh yeah, it's like you said, it's a story of spirits of time. Travel. Uh, you could you could say that this is an early

time travel story. I mean, you wouldn't be wrong, because each of these traumatic spirits takes Scrooge, and the first one says, hey, let me take you into the past. This is how screwed up your past is. And then the ghost of Christmas Present says, hey, let me take you out into the present. This is how screwed up your life is right now. And then the ghost of Christmas Future says, We'll just wait till what I have to show you. This is how bad it's gonna get.

And uh, and of course the the ghost of Christmas Future is also generally wrapped up in a personification of death as well, because that's the icing on the cake. This is how bad the future is gonna get. Oh, and you're going to die and nobody's gonna care. You know what. This is such a bleak story when you

get down to it. Yes, But you know what, I think all Christmas stories should be bleak because even when you when you strip away all the consumerism and the nonsense and the and the fake happiness, like any winter like Deep Winter Festival is ultimately about hey, everything's getting colder. We can't grow food anymore. Things are dying. Is the Is the sun going to come back? Is the spring

gonna come back? Are we going to survive? And it's about finding some reasons to survive and the pit of despair, like even the Christmas story with the Birth of Jesus and all. I mean, you could say that that all boils down to the idea off you have this dark world that's really doomed, and then there's this one light that kind of emerges to ultimately redeem everything. But it

comes out of a dark night. You're right, And we talked about this in the episode That Dark in which there is the sort of inward move into the dark, into ourselves and exploring this terrain. So it really is

kind of perfect Christmas Fair in a way. I wanted to mention that Dickens wrote the novella in record time, just six weeks, financing and arranging for the publishing, because nobody else would publish it and um and the reason why he could tear through it so quickly is because Christmas Carol is actually a territory that he had covered before.

There's a story based on Gabriel Grub, a character in the story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton, which appeared in Dickens's first published novel, The Pickwick Papers, and in the story a grave digger determined not to make merry at Christmas is kidnapped by goblins and convinced to change his ways. That sounds amazing. I want to see that in this Christmas. I thought that would have publish. But um, ultimately we're dying might. Here is a tale

of greed and generosity, personal gain versus humanitarian gain. So we're gonna try to cover a little ground today. Using Scrooge as our basis. We're gonna look at something called post traumatic embitterment disorder. Uh, the unconscious like a fair rap and epiphanies, yes, and and the little drugs at

the end, just a little drugs perhaps part of the epiphany. Yeah, but let's start with post traumatic embitterment disorder because this may be a thing with a capital T. Indeed, um, you know to you already mentioned some of the misery of Scrooge, but it does It is important to point out that he was orphaned as a child. His mom died giving birth to him, and his distraught father abandoned him. Um, so that is you already have like an ample scar

loaded into the psyche of the young Scrooge. And then he ends up falling in love with this woman, uh, and then abandons her in the name of financial game because he doesn't have enough money, didn't have it, have have that portion of his life squared away enough to continue on with the the particulars of this romance, so

he just lets it go. That's right. So when we meet Scrooge on the stage, his pain has intensified, This bitterness has intensified, and intensifies particularly each Christmas Eve because at this point it's been seven years since Jacob Marley, his only friend, has passed, and this really ushers in these ideas of bitterness and death and um, you could say that that Scritches really grappling with this at this point when we see him, this this end game of

just embitterment that he's put himself into. Yeah, you know, as you as you watch any adaptation of this or or read it, it's easy to just take it taken these different examples of his awfulness and take those A is just you know, fleshing out his characters. Is this is what Froude is like. He yells at people who

are own money. He you know, he chases children away, He refuses very very nastily to give any money to charity, all these different things, you know, impolite and and rude or down a rude to relatives and employees and all this. But you could also see this as like this is the apex of his his misery and bitterness towards others. You could say that like that that he has has just this is the nastiest scrooge has ever been, and

he has really isolated himself as a result. So what if he became so stressed out about your losses that you could barely function and you became obsessed with those perceived losses, which is a lot of what he's doing right. He's going over old terrain and trying to figure out what happened to him and feeling very bitter about that. Now.

According to Dr Michael Lyndon, a German psychiatrist, this is a concept named post traumatic environment disorder or pte D, and in his two thousand three paper, Dr Lindon noted that pt e D is similar to post traumatic stress disorder PTSD, except that those with PTSD suffer intense fear

and anxiety after experiencing a life threatening event. But those with pt e D who are bitter, he says that they were hard working and mentally healthy people until a true ring event destroyed their core values and shattered their basic beliefs. So in a sense, you could say that, I don't I don't know. I would say that Scrooge was mentally healthy, but perhaps the breaking point for him was when he did lose Jacob Marley, who might have been sort of his last real connection too to what

it felt like to have a good working relationship. Yeah, and probably a model too of what he should be doing with his life and and what is the correct path to take now. Lyndon first began to piece together this idea of post traumatic embitterment disorder when he observed it in disillusioned and embittered patients after German reunification. And uh, and it's it's worth noting that it's we're talking about a mixture of depression, helplessness, hopelessness, all all sort of

swirled up into one. It's easy to to just think of bitterness as uh, to just dismiss it. It's just kind of an easy negative character, a trade like oh something something crappy happened to this person. They're just bitter. They're just bitter, Like it's a choice that you make, you know, to to be bitter instead of be happy

about something. But in one of the articles we were looking at, psychologist A Stephen A. Diamond, I thought he had a really nice, like just robust explanation of bitterness itself, not even getting into post traumatic embitterment disorder. But he said that it is a kind of morbid characterological hostility towards someone something, or towards life itself, resulting from the constant repression of anger, rage, or resentment regarding how one really has or perceives to have been treated, a pro

longed resentful feeling of dis empowered and devalued. Victimization. Yeah, victimization is key here because there's a lot of blame on other people. Are circumstances. Yeah, yeah, So scrooges in this situation where yeah, he's looking at all these institutions around him, he's looking at the culture around him, and to him, he's not the you know, he's not the the nasty guy that's just not going with the Oh. He has been pushed into this corner by the circumstances

in his life. Uh, and and and here he is, you know, looking up at it as if you know, from a pit. Now, the core criteria pt D are one a single exceptional negative life event which precipitates the onset of the illness. So again, perhaps Jacob Marley to the present negative state developed in the direct context of the event. Three the emotional response is embitterment and feelings of injustice. And four repeated intrusive memories of the event,

so again obsessing about it. Five emotional modulation is unimpaired. Patients can even smile when engaged in thoughts of revenge. And six no obvious other mental disorder that can explain the reaction. So that's where it gets a little bit murky because Lyndon found that pte D patients also suffered from a suite of other emotional complaints. Um, some of them just had general adjustment disorders, some of them had general depression or something called this just by mia, and

then there were anxiety disorders as well. So it's kind of a poop poop platter here. Yeah, And therefore it's also easy to misdiagnose it then, to say, oh, well, this person is just suffering from from a generalized anxiety disorder, and you're not necessarily treating the root cause of of

what's going on. But what definitely some of the hallmarks here are isolations like you get you become so obsessed with how you feel that you have been wronged in life that you began to think about these details and blame people and and really cut off your social connections. And bitterness can have some severe physiological ramifications as well, it seems, um, and of course that's kind of forecast by the third ghost who points out, hey, you keep

down this path, it's going to kill you. Right. According to Carston Wash, a professor in Corcodia Sor, a professor in the Concordia University Department of PSI Cology and a member of the Center for Research and Human Development, quote, bitterness may forecast patterns of biological disregulation, a physiological impairment that can affect metabolism, immune response, or organ function and physical disease. It's kind of a downer, yeah, but this

is Christmas. If you if you engage in cognitive behavioral therapy, it could be really helpful. That's what Lyndon had found. Um, the problem is that a lot of people don't seek help when they're in a situations, especially if you have cut yourself off from almost everyone around you. Because I again, look at Scrooge, who's reaching out to him like a few people. Basically his nephew is the main one who's saying, hey, come have some human companionship. Uh, you know, be be

a decent person. Uh you know, I'm I'm here. And that's like the one of the few remaining lifelines that's still being thrown to him. So, yeah, you're in a situation like that, You're you're not getting a lot of lifelines anymore. It's true. All right, let's take a quick break, and when we get we're gonna take a quick detour

into the unconscious. All right, we're back. Yeah, let's discuss the unconsciousness of heaven user Scrooge, right because as we know, again he has had all these different life events stacked up one after the other, and so obviously that's going to not just color his worldview, but that is going to color his unconscious And we'll dip right back into that. I know we've talked about it before, but David Eagleman in his book Incognito, the secret life of the brain.

He claims that the brain is running the show incognito and that this consciousness, this I feeling, is just kind of this bit player that is on the sidelines of this vast network of circuitry. And so he says, we're not at the center of ourselves. Instead, we're like the Earth in the Milky Way and the Milky Way in the universe, and we're far out on that distant hearing little of what's actually transpiring. Yeah. Philosopher and cognitive scientists Dan denn It puts it this way. A person is

approximately one trillion little cellular robots, an army. We emerge from that. Consciousness emerged from that. So the Scrooge that we encounter is is due to uh, you know, a lot of storms raging underneath the surface, and where he himself is only encountering surface level Scrooge. So what's interesting about this is that along comes this tour through his past, present in future, which you could say would be it might be a dream, or it might actually be ghosts

that are visiting him. In any case, there has been this idea put out there that it is a kind of psychotherapy of the unconscious that is uncovering all of these things for Scrooge. Okay, so these are manifest manifestations. These are like yung Gian figures that are emerging from his subconscious h and he's forced to to to actually

confront them. Yeah, especially if you consider that every Christmas Eve for the past seven years he's had this crisis, and for those seven years, perhaps um all these things have been going under the cover of his consciousness and they now show up in this kind of form. So the idea here is that these spirits goes aliens immune, and the manifestations, whatever you want to call them, uh,

that they are providing a form of psychotherapy. Yeah. The American Psychological Association says there's several approaches to psychotherapy, including cognitive behavioral which we already mentioned, interpersonal and other kinds of talk therapy, and that helps people sort of work through their problems. It's grounded in dialogue, a lot of talking. Again, it provides a supportive environment that allows you to talk

openly with someone who's objective, neutral and non judgmental. And I don't know that you would say all the spirits are non judgmental, but I remember them being a bit dispassionate and being sort of like here, here's this, here's that. Yeah,

I mean, especially the last one is rather dispassionate. Uh but but yeah, Well, it's easy to think back on those three spirits and just focus on the fact that they are showing him things and showing him these visions of things that have been and things to come and things that are. But there is a lot of talking.

There's especially with the first two spirits. So the last one doesn't really say much, but with the first two especially, there's a dialogue going on between Scrooge and the ghost, and you could you could easily say that that is a kind of psychotherapy. They're saying, look at these look at these events, look at what happened here. How do

you feel about that? Now? This is interesting. Psychiatrist Stephen E. Wars has presented on this particular topic a number of times, and he goes so far as to suggest that Jacob Marley is Scrooge's primary physician, referring Scrooge to psychological spirit guides. Yeah, he does. He does have the interaction with him where he's like, Scrooge, yeah, it's terrible, you don't want this. Yeah, he's saying I screwed up, my path ended up being

the wrong one. I can't really help you, but here are three specialists they can Yeah, and you had mentioned Stephen Diamond. He says that in UNGI in terms, we could say that his unconscious self scrooges, unconscious self starts speaking to him on that cold and lonely Christmas Eve via his dreams. Dreams, as Freud found, are the via riggia or regal road to the unconscious and can be understood as forms of communication from the unconscious. Yeah. I

think that's a solid interpretation. I like that. Yeah, so you could make the case, yes, that these uh, these spirit guides were taking him through an accelerated pace of psychotherapy and order for him to arrive at an epiphany. And as we all know, epiphanies are. They're kind of weird things. They seem again like those sort of aha moments, when in fact they have been bubbling under the surface.

On that note, let's take a quick break and when we come backphanies and we're gonna hit rock bottom here, Yes, all right, we're back. Epiphany's epiphanies are the stuff of great stories. Um, well, at least there's the stuff of stories. Um, you're in a constantly encountering characters who have that just extreme aha moment, right, um and uh, and you do see that in Scrooge. Right, he wakes up from all of this and he realizes I had it all wrong.

I'm changing my life. And you see this in an other Christmas stories to um, um, you see this in It's a Wonderful Life too, Right, he has that epiphany where he realizes, hey, life is worth while living. It's worth climbing out of the pit. Four. I am going to survive this horrible season. But the pit that's the important part. That's the rock bottom that you usually have to hit in order for you to be able to get a handle on what it is you need to confront.

And you know he's another fictional character, uh, semi fictional character who hit rock bottom before before everything got rolling. Dante Dante. Okay, you know he reaches this this dark point. That's why he has to go through hell and then purgatory and finally haven't all right. So you see there's

a rich literary tradition here. John Skalski and Brigham Young University psychology professor Sam Hardy conducted an in depth study of fourteen people who experienced profound, sudden and lasting change. I will take issue with sudden though, right UM it says that the parallels they found with participants in Scrooge is that they all had hit rock bottom in their lives, and they all had a trusted friend like Marley who opened up their perspective on their perceived life tragedies, allowing

them to recast and recover from them. Now I want to throw in here that rock bottom doesn't necessarily mean I was in in a gutter or I was at the bottom of a grape. It can just mean like you've reached like maximum stress level, maximum emotional psychological angst over a particular thing. Yeah. Again, these are these are huge life events. A lot of them had to do with money. To write, like, people were uh pretty tied to their associations with money and their status with money,

and then the kind of world we built for ourselves. Indeed, and when they were um, when that was taken away from them or they lost that fortune, than they had to confront what it meant to be that person that they were inhabiting. So that's what's interesting about this. UM. You can find more information out about it in the Humanistic Psychologists that the January issue. But we brought it

up because we thought, well, Scrooge, he's definitely hit rock bottom. Indeed, now in that study that there's also something I like to think of as a Marley factor is that the most study participants described the presence of a living, trusted other person during their experience. So again the can sort of give that value to Marley. Yeah, and again that's that person who can provide that perspective shift because we

all need that. Right when you're down in the dumps, you've hit rock bottom, you need someone to say it's okay like you, You're you're breathing right now. There's there's food available to you hopefully, So when you know someone to say, you can go on. Yeah, you can say Marley's a sponsor. I guess you know it could be. So he hasn't really kicked his condition, since he is presumably a denizen of Hell, right, doesn't have a motivation

to anymore. He's just shackled, right, He shackled to his ledger book right something along to some sort of symbol symbols of his his preoccupation with money and book keeping. The chains he forged in life. And I do want to mention another reason that I love that Scrooge musical, the film Addictation with Albert Finney, is that Scrooge actually goes to Hell. In it, there's an actual hell with

like big beefy demons walking around, big beefy demons. Yeah, it's like it's big, like muscular, red painted demons busking around. And there's a scene with ghosts flying through the air. Okay, So why didn't NBC air that instead of Peter Pam Live? As much as I like seeing Christopher walking like sort of oddly drunk dancing as a pirate, I don't know. Maybe that could be the next one, because the whole thing is like they have to do live productions of

musicals or plays, right, they could do Scrooge. It's a it's it's a musical, and it's got some wonderful numbers in it. So do that next year. Maybe I'll watch it. They could, and they should. Now there is something a little something called altruism that Scrooge was able to finally tap into when he had his epiphany. Tap into is putting it ladly, because he really he didn't just turn on the tap. He'd like hacks into the keg with

an axe. He just goes crazy, given out stuff, right, and that's always the big scene where he's it's toys for everyone, it's giant turkeys for everyone. It's just because it's built up a right. He has all of this do gooderie. He could have been doing, all this altruism that that he that he could have been engaging with, and he hasn't for years and years, I mean for much of his life. And we've talked about this before.

We've talked about altruism and happiness and this idea that your brain is reward system is actually gonna light up when you engage in acts of altruism. Psychologist Lizabeth Dunn and Laura acne In, along with Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, conducted a two thousand and eight study in which participants were given either five dollars or twenty dollars to spend. By the end of the day, half were instructed to buy for themselves, the other for someone else,

and that evening. People who had been assigned to spend money on someone else reported happier moods over the course of the day than did those people assigned to spend money on themselves, which I think makes sense. Yeah, I mean at the very base of it, like not even getting into the act of it, you're you're thinking about someone else. It's taking you out of your own uh you know, default mode network and in your thoughts of

self and putting you into thoughts of another. And ultimately that's one of, in my opinion, one of one of the benefits, the one of the pros that comes with the holiday season is an emphasis on, at least to some extent, thinking about other people. Right, and you in a way you're empowered because you feel like you're making an impact or positive impact on someone else. Yeah, if

you're able to get of them something that they need. Yeah, after the experience is done, you have the memory of the experience and the feeling that you did something, and also kind of the open ended question you can almost you almost end up sort of fantasizing about how they feel about what you did, just to bring it all back to kind of a selfish gene area, but as opposed to just buying something and then there you are with the thing you bought, and how does that feel?

Feeling like an empty husk? Yeah, that's right. Now, there is an alternate take on how Scrooge achieved this epiphany. Yes, yeah, this is uh, this is one that I've I've blogged about before, and it really it all comes back to the saucepan, because after, you know, after he wakes up, he's had the epiphany. This is directly from Dickens a Christmas Carol. He says, there's the saucepan that the gruel was in, cried Scrooge, starting off again and frisking around

the fireplace. There's the door by which the ghost of Jacob Marley entered. There's the corner where the ghost of Christmas Presents sat. There's the window where I saw wandering spirits. It's all right, it's true, it all happened. That's right. That's that's a Scrooge who is just having his epiphany and seems to be in a bit of an altered state. Yeah, and and so I have to ask what was in

the saucepan? Why? Indeed does when Marley appears, he initially tries to just miss it by saying, oh, it's you're just something I ate, some bit of uh, you know, a bad potato or whatever. Um, But perhaps it was something different. Than bad potato. Perhaps it was um a psychedelic substance, hallucogenic substance that gave him this experience. And if we refer back to some of our podcasts that

we've done on let's see the scientists in the Shaman series. Uh, we did an episode about psychedelics UH being administered to prepare one for death and and the various research that has gone into the potential non recreational uses for these substances. And you see a couple of prime candidates as to what might have been that gruel, something that would have blown opened the doors of perception, right, and then something that might have made him feel as though he were

one with fellow man. Yeah yeah, and and made and give him gave him a lasting or you know, change in personality. UM. So, one possibility here is that there was DMPT in the group. U. D MT, of course, is in naturally occurring psychedelic compounds that's found in plants such as Iowasa vines in South America, and as with all natural psychedelics of stuff has factored into shamanistic rituals

for thousands of years. UM under shaman's guidance, individuals partook of these perception altering elements and endured intense and sometimes harrowing mental journeys through time and space. They encountered unreal entities, shades that departed loved ones, and they saw the world around them as if for the first time, and perceived deep truths about themselves and the cosmos. Uh. And finally, as the effects of d m T would wear off or the or the the iowassa, what have you, they

immerge from their mental journey transformed. Now what does that sound? Right? That sounds like Scrooge after eating a little gruel? Yeah? Yeah, yeah.

And you know, as we discussed in that in that podcast episode of the pair of podcast episodes, Scientists and the Shame and Research is A. John Hopkins Medical Center and other esteemed of medical research labs continue to study the effects of d MT and other psychedelics not only do it better understand how our minds work, but also to learn how these substances can help us treatmental illnesses, UH, deal with addictions, and maybe even find a bit of enlightenment.

So I guess that that goes to future would be a bit of a bad trip. Part. Yes, you could say that, but I mean that's it's kind of a bad trip. I guess it's kind of kind of relative because, uh, everything we've we've read about, uh, the intense experiments, experiences of d M. T or Ayahuassa. You know, you're you're often dealing with really harrowing encounters. I mean, stuff that's gonna change you, stuff that should not be taken lightly

at say a fish show yea indeed now. And the other possibility is that it could have been sold cybin

magic mushrooms right. Two thousand eleven study of John Howkmins University gave high doses of psilocybin to fifty one test subjects, and thirty of these individuals experienced measurable personality changes that lasted more than a year and what changes will According to researcher Dr Katherine McLean uh in uh in an episode of the Secular Buddhist podcast, which I highly recommend everyone check that out, openness was affected out of all

measurable personality traits. And again that's ultimately where we find Scrooge. Suddenly he is open to the world. He blasts up in those windows and talks to a random child. He's blasting open his own windows to let the world back in which allows him to finally listen to what Jacob Marley has to say. And I thought maybe we could walk ourselves out of this episode with this quote from uh from Marley. After Scrooge says what do you do? And why are you walking around like a ghost, he says,

you're always a good man of business. Jacob and the ghost of Arley, his legs bound by a chain of ledger books and cash boxes, replies business mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business. Yeah, yeah, So there you have it

at Christmas, Carol Scrooge. That's our take on the man and his condition, drawing in some some science here and there. But of course we'd love to hear from everyone else out there. What's your take on Scrooge in his predicament and how do you tie it into your own experience of the holidays. Indeed, and if you guys would like some more from us, you can visit stuff that blow your mind dot com. That's right, you'll find all the podcast episodes, all the blog posts, um, all the videos.

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