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Its Where I Am focuses on the various mental health struggles that people all around the world face every day. Each episode covers a different facet of mental health with a new special guest. It's Where I Am airs on 91.5 Jazz & More every second Saturday of the month.
Announcer 0:00
This is a KUNV Studios original program.
Wesley Knight 0:04
You are listening to special programming brought to you by It'sWhereIAM.com. The content of this program does not reflect the viewers' opinions of 90-1.5 Jazz and more University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
Zandra Polard 0:45
Good morning, Las Vegas. This is Zandra Pollard. It's where I am is the name of the show. We deal with mental health and wellness. And today we have a special guest, Stu Gosh. Stu Gashazir, who is the author of the Four Narratives: Overcoming Self-Destruction in a Postmodern World. We're gonna jump right in and invite Stu to say hello.
Stuart Kosh 1:14
Hi, everybody! It's great to be here. Thank you for the introduction, Zandra. Love Vegas. Love what you do.
Zandra Polard 1:21
Thanks. Now you've been on the show before. We were focusing on one of your Lifetime movies. Was it Lifetime?
Stuart Kosh 1:32
Yeah, I've been a well. You know what? Actually, it was a BET Plus. Oh, that's right. BET.
Zandra Polard 1:40
But before you did Lifetime, and then you did BT. Is that correct?
Stuart Kosh 1:44
Yes, and then in Amazon as well.
Zandra Polard 1:46
Nice. Yeah. So you did a couple of Christmas movies. Yes.
Stuart Kosh 1:52
Yes, Christmas movies. All Christmas movies, actually.
Zandra Polard 1:56
Oh, okay. So, do you want to remind us of what those are in case we want a pre-Christmas here.
Stuart Kosh 2:03
Yeah, it is a Lifetime movie, and it's a Christmas high note, and that's that's streaming. You get that on the Life Lifetime. I guess it's Lifetime Network. You know the app. You got to be honest, I don't have it. BT Plus is never going to be alone for Christmas. Never be alone for Christmas, and that's also streaming on the BT Plus platform. And then Amazon is a rock bottom. is a It's like a family come together movie, starring that guy from American World War in Paris, actually.
Zandra Polard 2:40
Okay. Well, I didn't see Rock Bottom. I saw the other. That one was
Stuart Kosh 2:45
newer.
Zandra Polard 2:46
Okay. Well, when did that one come out? Last Christmas.
Stuart Kosh 2:49
I want to say 2024.
Zandra Polard 2:50
Oh, okay, okay. But you were highly recognized. Come
Stuart Kosh 2:54
out,
Zandra Polard 2:55
yeah. Yeah, two of them. You were like getting a lot of publicity for the first two.
Stuart Kosh 3:01
Yeah. Hey, it was doing all right. You know, these these networks, yeah, they're TV networks and stuff like that. So it's not like necessarily big numbers or anything, but yeah, Macy Gray was in the was in the the the BT Plus movie, and they released a song for the movie that was actually on Spotify, which was pretty cool. Yeah,
Zandra Polard 3:22
yeah, I remember. I was singing it. I don't remember it right now, but I remember seeing it. Oh yes, and then you know when a lot of my friends were talking about the movie, without knowing that I knew you were, you know, my kind of not my involvement, but you know that I knew you and that you were involved. So that was a great feeling to know it was doing well with people that I know. So anyway, so now fast forward, you have written this amazing book, and I mean it's amazing because I really connected to it, honestly, I was going through something, and you told me you were going to send me a copy. It was supposed to be signed. It is not signed.
Stuart Kosh 4:11
Yeah,
Zandra Polard 4:12
yeah, but it's okay because I've been highlighting and writing in it. It's called the Four Narratives: Overcoming Self Destruction. in a post-modern world. Life happened, and I look over. There's your book. I start reading it. When I tell you, it was at the right place at the right time. I was going through, or I am going through, a lot of chaos, to be honest, and a lot of trauma, and this book was helping me to understand more of who I am and why I was having so much chaos, and that I was using this maladaptive behavior, basically. I was doing something that wasn't working, and it was because of how I learned to survive. And these are things that you said in your book, but they were like epiphanies for me, right? It's like wow, you know. And even in the book, there were things where I'm like wow, highlight, highlight, highlight. So I don't want to give it away. I don't know what you want to say, but I'll let you start talking about the what is it called? Four
Stuart Kosh 5:29
narratives.
Zandra Polard 5:30
The four narratives, right? And you name it. But I was looking for the name of them, so here they are: pseudo altruist, infallible, egoist. egoist, self-sequestered anomic, and hopeless fatalist. Now, did I say that right?
Stuart Kosh 5:49
Yeah, it was all that was all spot on. Okay, I mean, some anomic is a French word, so there might be a French guy out there say, "Hey, you need the accent anomic. Oh, anomie, but other than that, yeah, that's good. You got it. You nailed them.
Zandra Polard 6:03
Okay, so who is that? The framework of
Stuart Kosh 6:06
yeah. So this is a really good way to just segue right into what everything is in this book. Is the four narratives they're derived from Emile Durkheim. He's one of the founding fathers of sociology. Created functionalism, which is like rather than say things are good or bad, they're functional or you know not functional. But he also create he also looked at suicide and suicide rates in industrial societies, particularly among Protestant men who weren't married, and found they were struggling with anomie. They didn't see themselves as part of society because they didn't have kids, and a lot of them were committing suicide. So he came to these four types of suicide: altruistic suicide, egoistic suicide, fatalistic suicide, and anomic suicide, to kind of articulate why people end their own lives, or feel that they're either too integrated into society or not integrated into society at all. And what's really interesting is he said that this Imam Durkheim guy. He said a society will become so industrialized, so cut off, so disconnected from everyone. Everyone will feel alienation from this division of labor that exists in modern industrial postmodern societies, and and and they'll all struggle with anomie, and they'll fade off into just everyone slowly start killing themselves. Pretty bleak, right? What I argue is that this has happened in society where societies have gone crazy. If you look at Nazi Germany, for instance, in 1930s, right? He was an invaluable egoist, Hitler, selling himself as a pseudo altruist, and then became a self-sequestered anomic and a hopeless stateless, locked in a bunker, talking about, I guess we're not the superior race. We're supposed to all die. He he he maladaptively integrated this narrative that brought him to the very place that he ended his own life. Yes, the whole society went with him. Now, why is this? Why why does this happen? Well, we live in these societies, these complex, systematic, regimented societies, and there's so much programming. Everybody has to be programmed to do the same thing over and over again, or doesn't work, society falls apart. And so you can say to yourself, "Okay, I'm going to just be an emotionally avoidant person, right? And just avoid my emotions associated with the injustice, the systemic problems that exist around me, right? I can just emotionally avoid, or I can reason with my emotions and just inadvertently become addicted to them simultaneously, and then look at everything around me personalized through the eyes of the victim, become a misanthrope, and then become the hopeless fatalist and the self-sequestered genomic. Now I say the self-sequester genomic, the pseudo-altruists, the infallible egoists, because these people are in fact actually fallible. They're not totally self selfless service. You know, they're not totally selflessly serving the world. Okay, they have decided themselves to sequester. It's self-sequester genomic, and I guess I didn't say anything about the fatalists kind of creating their own dilemma, but they they see themselves as hopeless.
Zandra Polard 9:27
Okay, but that's that's
Stuart Kosh 9:28
a that's a that's a that's and just real quick, that is just one truth. That's not to say they aren't. It's not valid, but that is just one truth.
Zandra Polard 9:38
So in the book, at some point, which I did not highlight this part, so you're going to have to tell us what do these archetypes mean for the layperson who is listening?
Stuart Kosh 9:50
Yeah. So most people, when we fall into these these these four narratives, right? When I when I talk about how we fall into them, we can look at like emotionally of how can. People are emotional. We just kind of break down the the variables here. Yeah, and let's do it one by
Zandra Polard 10:05
one. Like, what is like in your book? You give an understanding by relating these archetypes to kind of like professions, right? Yeah. So, what is the pseudo altruist? Who was that first? If I didn't know which pseudo altruist meant, what
Stuart Kosh 10:28
is that? So yeah, yeah, yeah. I I like this word. If you break down the the four the four narratives first, rather than the archetypes, right? Okay. The pseudo altruist. We have the altruist is if you look it up, it's somebody that gives selflessly, you know, and and not just give selflessly, they give at their own expense. That's the altruist, right? Okay. So a pseudo altruist is someone that's saying, "Hey, I'm giving at my own expense, but really, there's a payoff. And that's a that's a big philosophical debate that many people have gotten into is: is altruism really a thing? Can people really truly be 100% altruism? Altruist because yeah, they they they get off on helping people,
Zandra Polard 11:11
right? Right, psych 109 Yeah, you
Stuart Kosh 11:14
give somebody a a $20 bill, and they you think they're homeless, and then they walk into their BMW, and you're mad. Well, what happened to the selfless service? Well, I don't feel bad, so now I don't want to help. Ah, that's nice. That's it. This is this this this equation here. I feel bad, so I help.
Zandra Polard 11:33
Right. Well, the
Stuart Kosh 11:34
contrapositive in in in legal, like if you look at this through the terms of like like argument and logic and legality, right? Is I feel bad, so I help. If I don't help, I don't feel bad, and that's the flip side of the pseudo altruist. Is they become someone who's hopelessly, who's hopeless and and self sequestered because they feel nobody understands. They're burnt out at this point, you know. So now I don't help and I don't feel bad. Just stay by myself.
Zandra Polard 12:05
Okay. So it's
Stuart Kosh 12:05
really interesting. We set ourselves up for this, right? Is a is a banana as a fruit, but a fruit isn't necessarily a banana. You would have to say if it's not a fruit, it's not a banana. Almost feel like I need a PowerPoint.
Zandra Polard 12:16
Yeah, because you're starting to lose me a little bit. Now look, I want to go through all four. So that's one second
Stuart Kosh 12:25
one. Yeah, yeah. So the so that there's the ego altruist and then the infallible egoist, right? These two kind of play. They go. They kind of play. They play into each other. So somebody could say, you know, I am infallible in that, like, I am never wrong, and it's all my opinion. Let me tell you my experiences. Let me tell you. Let me tell you all about it. If you knew what I knew, buddy, right, right. And the invaluable egoist might say, like, "Hey, I need to be the perfect provider for my family. Somebody that can work a nine to five. That not excuse me. Forget that. Not not just a nine to five, but like a 16 hour work week. I need to be put in or 16 hour work day to make an example.
Zandra Polard 13:13
Right? They feel like they have to make an example of themselves. Yeah, they have to
Stuart Kosh 13:18
act. They have to present. They have to. Yeah, and even says in the back of my book, the the the message to the the final word to the reader is: you do not need to be unforgettable to matter. You do not need to suffer to justify your existence. You do not need to burn out to prove you are alive. You do not need to disappear to stay safe. Well, that was my
Zandra Polard 13:41
ending, but okay.
Stuart Kosh 13:43
Thank you. But I'm sorry to yeah, I'm sorry to take the the Steve at the the sales, but but the the the interesting thing right there is that this infallible egoist is burning out, like you were saying, and the whole point is almost to present as someone that can go do anything and be anybody, and and and is is the charismatic go-to guy, the person that's got the greatest, you know, great advice. They might even premise the the the the the infallible egoist. They might premise everything with a credentialing statement. I don't know if you've ever met these guys.
Zandra Polard 14:21
Oh yeah, and I don't want to give evidence. I don't want to give evidence.
Stuart Kosh 14:27
Yeah. Hey, you know, I'm just saying. My point is, um, you know, my my, you know, they'll give these credentialing statements at the beginning. Yeah, and it's, uh, it is about status. You know, this infallibility. Yeah. But like, what's interesting is for most people because the altruist is so alluring because we live in a society where you know we have hey mr. J C you know our number one altruist the guy that died for all of our sins and not to say that we yeah not to say yeah and not to say that we're all going to church we're we're primarily. You know, secular, but there is a remnant of the Protestant post-work ethic here in the United States, where you know people are acquiring wealth, accruing wealth rather, and it's for status to say like, hey, God has blessed me. God really wants this for me. Look at me, right? So we have to present these ways, you know, and and it's yes, it falls back. The infallible egos usually falls back to I'm doing all of this for my family, right? Like how many presidents have been elected that are single, right? It's all for the family. You got to sit there with your family, with the kids up there, take the pictures, wave, you know, kiss babies, yeah.
Zandra Polard 15:43
And the third,
Stuart Kosh 15:43
so it's just
Zandra Polard 15:44
oh,
Stuart Kosh 15:45
and then and then yeah, and then and then what happens here inevitably though, is um, and you can start out as a hopeless fatalist and a sequester genomic, and then kind of you know um work backwards and say it's pretty hopeless to be this infallible, it's it's pretty stupid to be an infallible egoist or pointless or whatever. And yeah, I'm not going to give myself selflessly. But the hopeless failist, there's someone that's just burnt out from giving selflessly constantly or seeing that as problematic. You know, seeing these people at stake. You know, seeing through it all. You know, a lot of us recognize there's a pattern out there, and we but we don't know exactly what that pattern is. And a lot of people have recognized that people who quote unquote don't care about others, those are the guys that make it. So I have to be this hopeless fatalist, this archetype that you know doesn't think about anybody but themselves. You know, which which which is you know which is a counterintuitive. This individual wants to say that they're more congenial, but in actuality, they're very upset and misanthropic, and upset with the world, and that's what that's what that's what's created the fatalism, right? And then over time, it's nobody understands,
Zandra Polard 17:11
right?
Stuart Kosh 17:11
Right, and so you can run these all together. It's like, hey, I deserve this, I need it, but you know what? F it because nobody understands, and those are the four narratives playing out.
Zandra Polard 17:23
And then you gotta give them, like I said, positions. Like, you know, we have the nurse, we have the policeman, we have the rock star, and the what's the other one? Police nurse. So we
Stuart Kosh 17:37
got the
Zandra Polard 17:37
rock star. Yeah,
Stuart Kosh 17:38
we had the nurse and the policeman. That's those are the pseudo-altruist archetypes derived from that narrative, right? So the policeman and the nurse, from the infallible egoist, you have the salesman and the actress. From the hopeless fatalist, you have the rock star and the single parent, and from the self-sequester genomic, you have the phantom and the orphan.
Zandra Polard 17:59
Yes, and I love that. Go ahead. I'm sorry. You break each one down. So, what spoke to me when I started highlighting? You wrote, her generosity appeared endless, but it came at a cost. Her needs went unnamed. Her anger went underground. Her exhaustion became normalized. She felt sorry. She felt indispensable, yet strangely unseen. And then the next paragraph, you say, she learns that being needed is not the same as being valued, and that really spoke to me. And as I went on in the reading, which it's a short book, it's not, you know, it's only 100 and something pages, but it's very powerful what is being said. So that spoke to me. But as I read more, I understood what I was doing and how I needed, yeah. And then when those phone calls start coming in about what somebody needed, it was like, you know what, I'm not taking that call right now, or explaining, you know what, I'm not going to be on the phone for a while. You know, the best way I can support you in this moment is for you to know that I am not answering phone calls, and that you will need to find a way to make whatever happens happen. I can't do it for you at this time because I am doing some healing for myself. I'm taking care of myself, and I need you to value me as I value myself in taking this time, and not only that, it goes on to compare the relationships between other people, which you or yourself, yeah. Which you can figure out for yourself, because it's going to be different for everyone. Is that archetype? Is that you and your spouse? Is that you and your child or your mother? Is that you, or is it two other people? Is it your mom and your dad? You know, it was really deep for me because I saw a lot of people in it, but mostly I saw myself. And this
Stuart Kosh 20:27
is where it gets crazy. Yeah, it's a this is um these archetypes they exist. You know, like we even professionally, like we said, you know, the policeman a lot of the times, ends up with a nurse. You know, sometimes that happens. Yeah. So yeah, why? Why? And then we look at kind of like you say the puzzle pieces and how they fit, how they, how they, how they fit. But even going back to what you said about a healthy integration of the, you were compassionate in your boundary setting, and the nurse knows no boundaries, has no boundaries. That's that's why she's so needed because everybody can just suck her dry. But you you you did a healthy integration of how to compassionately ask for the compassion you need to recharge for others instead of saying "f it,
Zandra Polard 21:23
yeah, because had I not read the book, yeah, it would have been a different outcome.
Stuart Kosh 21:29
Right, and then you would have been then you would have been a self sequestered anomic.
Zandra Polard 21:33
Yes, because I just realized that I was so depleted from being pulled on from so many different people, you know, and that for decades it had not stopped. And the pattern of when I'm depleted, how I will escape in some way. And I also realized that I'm some of all of these archetypes, right? It's not just set in stone. I'm not just the nurse. I have bits and pieces of all of them, but mostly, what am I seeing? You know, and in my struggle, what
Stuart Kosh 22:13
the baseline?
Zandra Polard 22:14
Yes, and in my struggle at the time, where am I, and who am I identifying with? I'll I'll let you go on from there.
Stuart Kosh 22:24
Yeah, that's what's really important about Dirk. This guy Durkheim, he was really saying, you know, there's kind of like this guy did this kind of suicide, and this guy, and it could be like what what it was. It's maybe all four, maybe all four are happening simultaneously.
Zandra Polard 22:40
Yeah.
Stuart Kosh 22:41
Um, and then there's a lot of you know figurative death, and in what what's called in the book self erasure, where we lose our sense of self because we're so stuck helping other people, we turn into that that wife in coming to America with Eddie Murphy, and he's like, "What music do you like? I like what you like. Yeah, what the hell are you? I like what you. Yeah, see, he's like, "I want a real person, right? I want a real somebody that knows who you know. And yeah, and
Zandra Polard 23:19
but Stu,
Stuart Kosh 23:20
man, yeah, yeah.
Zandra Polard 23:21
I gotta interrupt you because the show is almost over. I can't believe
Stuart Kosh 23:25
it. Oh man, yeah,
Zandra Polard 23:26
yeah. I mean, this book goes into like I thought I was going to be reading about addictions. Like it gets there, but it's like you have to understand why a person could be addicted because it really to me I got more personality stunt and hopefully integration to growing into their integrated self. Right, so it's like I thought I was gonna be reading about suicide and and drug abuse, but it still deals with that. But it's it's not straight on. When you read it, you can understand how someone may come to think of those things or taking on an addiction, which I thought was very clever. I thought the writing was very clever.
Stuart Kosh 24:21
Well, that was the whole goal: was that addiction isn't necessarily alcohol or or substances. It could be hoarding. And if you look at this baseline, if I'm a hopeless fatalist and a self-sequestered anomic, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna eat some food. I'm gonna shut the drapes. I'm gonna let the cats pee on the couch. Whatever.
Zandra Polard 24:41
Yeah,
Stuart Kosh 24:42
I'm by myself. Yeah, and then and you might look at oh my gosh, right? But then and then a person who's like, I gotta be somebody for everybody, and I'll bend, you know, the mother's little helper, my little in the morning or something with the coffee, you know. So yeah, and it speaks to, you know, not you know like. A damaging, a damaging interpretation of some kind of subconscious psyche that everybody has, but rather this is a this is a helpful way of looking at yourself as not broken, but perfectly ready to be integrated.
Zandra Polard 25:19
Yes,
Stuart Kosh 25:20
like ready for step two.
Zandra Polard 25:22
You know, I don't want to give away any more of the book than I have. There is so much more to it. I really encourage you all to read this book. It's called "The Four Narratives: Overcoming Self-Destruction in a Postmodern World" by Stuart Kosh. I mean. mean, if I had 50 copies, I have 50 people to give them to. Trust me, and this is not my only read. I'm telling you, Stewart Kosh, Stewart, I'm going to read this book probably a couple more times because I do want to take some more notes and highlights and more things, because like I said, it came when I was in a in a dark place, and it wrapped its arms around me and made me feel stronger. So I thank you. I thank you for coming on the show. Do you have any last words? Please give information on on how to get the book and whatever else you want to say.
Stuart Kosh 26:28
Yeah, poor narrative, Kosh. We have a nonprofit that we're trying to start here. So right now we don't have the status because we don't have the work. We need individuals to come, and we help with VA disability claims. We help with SSI, SSDI disability claims. We want to help people with vocational rehabilitation applications, etc. So we have a lot of like services as well as the book, the foreign narratives, which can be purchased on Amazon, Kindle, anywhere you can find books, really.
Zandra Polard 27:03
Okay, so now what about this phone number you're speaking of? What is the phone number?
Stuart Kosh 27:07
Oh, well, the form. Yeah, you can give us a call. It's on the website 209-847-0824 And what is the website?
Zandra Polard 27:16
You didn't mention the four
Stuart Kosh 27:18
narrative.
Zandra Polard 27:20
Oh, okay. The
Stuart Kosh 27:20
four narratives. Yeah, four narratives. Stuart Kosh. The website's going to come up.
Zandra Polard 27:25
Oh, and you'll
Stuart Kosh 27:26
see that we have. Yeah, yeah. We have a lot of services, holistic services for creating. Not, you know, I don't look at this as an addiction, an addiction cure. I look at this as no developing a better sense of self.
Zandra Polard 27:42
Exactly, that's what I got from it, which is why I'm glad that I did not know about the website first before I read it, because I totally got it the way it's supposed. What the intent of it?
Stuart Kosh 27:54
Nice.
Zandra Polard 27:54
Yeah. Thank you. So let's give the website and the phone number one more time.
Stuart Kosh 28:00
It's just thefournarratives.com Stuart Kosh, and the book on Amazon and anywhere else you can get you can book get books really, Palmetto Publishing,
Zandra Polard 28:13
and the phone number
Stuart Kosh 28:15
209-847-2804
Zandra Polard 28:18
and this is author Stuart Kosh. That's K-O-S-H Kosh. Thank you, Stuart. I love you. You are a dear friend. Thank you for this gift. I will be expecting a signed copy to be mailed to me. And thank you.
Stuart Kosh 28:38
Thank you, then, Sondra. We'll talk soon. All right.
Zandra Polard 28:41
Sounds good. All right, everyone, it's where I am. Hey, we're here every second Sunday at 7:30 a.m. This is Andre Polard. Have a great day and be well. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai