LE Botanica Presents: FREE Knowledge

Hey Soul Fam!

I want to take a moment to touch upon codependency and breaking down what that means from a psychological level because this has been such a huge theme in the last year. Codependency is not to be confused with BEING codependent. Being codependent is something completely different and the definition of codependent is what most people think of when they hear the term codependency used, yet these terms should not be used of thought of in conjunction of one another. 

Hey Soul Fam!

This week during Thankful Thursday we discussed colorism by way of the Clarke Doll experiments and the documentaries: Dark Girls, Dark Girls 2, and Light Girls. For those of you who do not understand this concept, colorism is prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group. Yet before we get into that I want to go over a few terms. These terms need to be defined so that their clear and distinct differences can be understood, since many people tend to use these terms interchangeably and some terms may not be known at all. Prejudice is defined as a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience. Discrimination is defined as the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex. Stereotyping in the context of social psychology, is an over-generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups. Lastly, racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized. Racism is also defined as the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.

Hey Soul Fam!

This week during Thankful Thursday we Narcissist. We’ve all dealt with narcissist to some degree and we all carry narcissistic traits within us because in all actuality narcissism is a spectrum. In psychology there’s a scale used to evaluate this called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which was developed by Robert Raskin and Calvin Gall in 1979. The one thing about narcissist though is that they tend to share common character traits, but someone with actual narcissistic personality disorder is rare. Most of the people we encounter on a day to day basis exhibit narcissist traits to some degree but often don’t score high enough in the spectrum to make them fall within the parameters of the disorder.