 The American stand-up comedian and writer, Hawi Kondabulu once wrote The last place the colonizer leaves is your mind Those of you brave enough or self-hating enough Are about to watch a talk or an excerpt an extended excerpt from a talk I've had with Azam Ali Azam Ali is a very famous Iranian singer from Iran and in this talk I Suggested to her a new way of looking at narcissistic abuse The narcissist enters a shared fantasy with a maternal figure is intimate partner You know this by now and he does this only in order to separate from the intimate partner which represents the mother He failed to separate from his biological mother. He failed to accomplish separation Individuation from his mother of origin So now he tries it again a second chance a second time with his substitute mother his intimate partner so far So well-known nothing new The new thing in this conversation Is when I explained that the intimate partner is expected to help the narcissist By acting the part of a rejecting betraying mother The narcissist Coerces her to behave this way and if she refuses He tries to punish her and if this doesn't help he devalues and discards her So either way whether you collaborate or you resist You will end up in exactly the same spot devalued and discarded but During the talk I described dynamics that have been neglected Online by scholars and even by myself in my previous videos. Now, you don't have to watch the entire video You can skip from one question to another because the first half of the video more or less I Deal with things that you've been exposed to those of you who are loyal viewers Those of you who have watched my previous videos Those of you who have watched the videos or in my shared fantasy playlist You know these things. There's nothing new there The second half of the of the conversation is new and so just skip the questions at your leisure and focus on the Exchanges between me and Azam Ali Which? Present a new angle on narcissistic abuse. It was a long interview and I went very deep into the shared fantasy concept coercion Coercive snapshotting the narcissists need The narcissist needs you to fail him To let him go and so ironically if you're a good partner You're the wrong partner for the narcissist. I wish you an interesting hour with me and as I'm Ali and Feel free to comment and ask questions and so on so forth. I will of course ignore them as I always do Okay Okay, so we can dive in now So what what brought me really to narcissism just to give context in case in the event that I Mention anything in this interview is It's the first time I'm even speaking about this publicly, but my father left when I was four years old and my mother was Very much like your mother. She was a dead mother and And I never thought that my father had that kind of influence on my life because he left and it took many many years For me to to realize that those four years were enough for him to have an impact on my interpersonal Relationship with relationships with men. So I chose my father over and over again Until of course I married my husband and he's wonderful So that's sort of the context of why I came to you and I can tell you single-handedly your work has helped me to Realize and fully understand and comprehend What kind of personality I was really dealing with so I thank you for that And that's one of my that was really what the reason I wanted to interview you and also I I Realized as soon as I read your book that the word narcissist is one of the most misused words in the English language And that it really is a clinical identity narcissism a serious mental health disorder So I in and in this interview I think one of my goals is besides having you enlighten everybody on the topic is I think in this age of social media, we need to be extremely vigilant because Because you know narcissism Narcissists are everywhere on the internet now and because of anonymity. It's it's an ideal place for them to target Victims so we'll start with like the most basic So there's so many confusing typologies and I myself sometimes get confused, you know over covert sadistic Cerebral and even after listening to many of your lectures I I can't say I even understand the difference between let's say a sadistic narcissist and a psychopathic narcissist So can you in your own words tell us what is narcissism? What are the various forms and how is a narcissist form? I try to introduce some structure and order into the mess The situation nowadays the situation nowadays reminds me of the 19th century where there was when there was a proliferation of elements chemical elements But there was no periodic table So there were all over the place these elements and no one knew how they were interconnected same with elementary particles until the 60s we had an accumulation an inventory of elementary particles in physics and There was not table. There was no system of elementary particles now there is I Narcissism is first and foremost a failure to transition from self preoccupation To other preoccupation In clinical terms, this is called a failure to transition from self-object to to object relations But in typical healthy developmental path The child Starts off fused with the mother merged with the mother and this used to be called the symbiotic phase So child and mother were one Mother brought the world to the child mother was a reification of the world So the child identified with mother also as a way to identify with the world and to explore the world Safely and this is called a secure base mother is a secure base Then around the age of 18 months The child starts to separate from mother and the reason for the separation is that mother frustrates the child She doesn't always meet the child's demands However vocal so the child gets frustrated This frustration teaches the child that he is not mother But there is something or someone out there Who keeps frustrating him so that is a break a schism in the world as it's a breakdown of the universe Suddenly the child realizes to to its consternation and shock and trauma That there are things out there Which are Uncontrollable and external the concept of external is exceedingly traumatizing Because it is a threat. There's no control over the external So what the child does? He begins to a gradually abandoned mother And this process is known as separation individuation the child separates from mother And gradually becomes an individual by by creating boundaries And then maintaining the boundaries narcissists or children who would become narcissists as adults They fail the separation individuation phase They never succeed to separate from mommy And that's because mommy is perhaps Insecure and doesn't allow them to separate Perhaps if she's selfish And appropriates and expropriates them consumes them in a way There could be perhaps she instrumentalizes them she uses them that the mother uses the child Perhaps the mother parentifies the child so the child has to be to act as a parent or as a substitute spouse In all these cases the child Fails to separate Because the child fails to separate it does not become an individual because it does not become an individual He has no boundaries and because he has no boundaries. He doesn't recognize the separateness and externality of other people So this precludes Relationships with other people this precludes what we call object relations This is one of the core elements of narcissism now I'm not defining narcissism right now as it is defined as being defined in the diagnostic and statistical manual In the diagnostic and statistical manual there's a list of symptoms And a list of a descriptive list a dimensional list of behaviors And if someone meets these symptoms and behaviors, then he's a narcissist. He's for example incapable of empathy envious exploitative Etc. Etc. If someone is like this then he's a narcissist But these are the symptoms. That's what the disease I'm now describing The etiology of the disease So the first issue is separation individuation the second issue Because the child never becomes an individual The child fails to develop a self Or an ego So ironically narcissists are selfless They don't have a self or an ego Narcissism therefore In existential terms Is the opposite of existence its absence Narcissism is absence where all people healthy and even mentally ill are present They have a core core identity. They have a self however deformed and thwarted. They still have a self They have an ego if you use Freudian Freudian model. They have something The narcissist Is an absence It is what we call the empty schizoid core and this applies also to people with borderline personalities So these are diseases of absence Because the narcissist cannot exist in principle The narcissist needs to borrow his existence From the outside He needs to import An existence from other people So what he does he latches on to other people And he coerces them To provide him with a sense of existence To help him to regulate His internal environment for example his sense of self-worth The borderline coerces her intimate partners to regulate her moods and her emotions So these people use something called external regulation People around the narcissist Becomes subcontractors And their job is to keep the narcissist alive or at least To allow the narcissist to experience existence however vicariously Now this is life and death And that's why narcissists Are essentially very aggressive About obtaining narcissistic supply About maintaining the shared fantasy. They create fantasies And they introduce you into the fantasy where you have to play a role And any defiance And any divergence and deviance From these allocated screens Results in aggression devaluation and discard So this is the second element in narcissism And the third element in narcissism Is what I would call alien artificial intelligence By no definition that I'm aware of what it is to be human Is the narcissist human These are not even partial humans And I'm not saying this in order to be pejorative or derogatory or You know, this is not hate speech. This is simply the fact If you have no empathy If you have no access to negative to positive emotions If you are exploitative If you are unable to accept other people as external objects separate from you If you treat all people as instruments Instrumentalize them and objectify them Treat them as objects if you Compel people to participate in a fantasy which is divorced from reality and then penalize them if they insist on Remaining grounded in reality These are not human behaviors The narcissist is more like an agency of some kind or an artificial intelligence program Narcissists emulate and mimic empathy Positive emotions because they are manipulative. They're Machiavellian But there's no inner resonance. That's why narcissists have called empathy cognitive empathy reflexive empathy, but no emotional empathy So they are users and takers But and they do all this pretty automatically All this demonizing online of narcissists is this malevolent scheming That's that's confusing narcissists with psychopaths Psychopaths are malevolent malicious scheming goal oriented and ruthless and callous That's psychopaths Narcissists are the same But automatically unconsciously Essentially, this is their essence They can't help it They don't sit around making plans on how to subjugate you. They just subjugate Because that's what they do And so I've The way I describe narcissism now you won't find it in any textbook and in any In any diagnostic manual, but this is the core and essence of narcissism These are empty shells who suck your essence in order to feel alive And coerce you into specific roles in order to maintain a fantasy within which They are godlike omnipotent omniscient and so one last comment Narcissism is the exact equivalent of a primitive religion It is a primitive religion When the child is exposed to trauma and abuse by a parental figure And abuse can also mean smothering pampering idolizing the child Any denial of boundaries any breach of boundaries Any any isolation of the child From reality for example Developing a sense of entitlement in the child all these are forms of abuse When the child is exposed to trauma and abuse The way The ancient israelites were exposed to god's wrath god's trauma and abuse god The god of the old testament is a parental figure But it's a very abusive parental figure. It's a violent aggressive I would almost say malevolent parental figure Controlling manipulative threatening So when a child is exposed to this kind of parental figure The child reacts The way moses did The child develops a religion Because the parental figures are godlike. They're divinities So the child develops a religion and in this religion the child comes up with a private god A private deity known as the false self And then the child Human sacrifices The child sacrifices himself his true self To the false self So this is human sacrifice And then the child merges with the false self And becomes empowered By his or her Exclusive privileged relationship with this newfound deity Narcissism is therefore a primitive religion And this is the force and power of narcissism That's why it is so Such a phenomenon that captures the imagination invokes fears And is Almost inexplicable because we are using the wrong tools We are using the tools of science We are using the tools of psychology In an attempt to explain Narcissism When actually it's a theological phenomenon It's a private religion developed by a terrified child With a deity That's so fascinating. I mean it is even if you've been fortunate enough never to be in a relationship With a narcissist. It's such a fascinating subject and I think one of the main reasons I love your lectures and you know You know when you look at your statistics on youtube and there are those people who watch and listen all the way to the end That's me So, you know what what I love about yours is you don't vilify the narcissist You know, it's such a if you're someone like me that you don't adapt you don't subscribe to binary thinking You don't think in terms of this is good. That's evil And that's why self-help groups just don't work because they are really cesspools of vitriol and hate So I really appreciate your approach to it, which makes it incredibly. It's really better Your book is better than any sci-fi book I have ever read in my life And I really appreciate also that you touched on the subject of abuse because I think that's another word that is Quite misunderstood that there are so many various kinds of abuse. So I appreciate that you touched on that I quickly want to just touch on something else Before I do that, I just want to say because there is a war on vocabulary and pronouns these days that Even though you're using he and she they're all interchangeable I quickly want you to just if you can touch on what healthy primary narcissism is and when does it become pathological because you Have said it's very essential in healthy development Um, so if you can just quickly just touch up I'll be brief on this one Okay in the first 18 months of life The child as I said Cannot tell the difference between itself and the world. So the child is the world. It's like the famous song, you know We are the world So highly highly narcissistic song. So we are the world And then because the child cannot tell the difference between itself and the world the child invests It's emotional energy in itself As far as as far as it is aware. He's investing it in the world because he is the world So he redirects his emotional energy at itself Sexual energy as well. So there's auto erotism. The child is sexually attracted to itself And the child falls in love with itself All the emotional energy goes goes into the self This is known as primary narcissism And it for example facilitates the formation Of a coherent self across this known as constellation or integration And so on so forth later on in life The child takes the same mental energy the same emotional energy known as cathesis So the child takes this mental energy and redirects it Rather than invest invest it in itself The child redirects it to the outside And this is the primordial foundation of object relations So rather than falling in love with himself if only love if was in love with another person Rather than being sexually attracted to itself he becomes sexually attracted to another person So there's a redirection of this energy Now if the child gets stuck At a developmental phase for example if the child cannot complete separation individuation Then the child remains enmeshed Remains engulfed and consumed by the maternal figure usually And so the child cannot The child having become an adult Cannot really tell the difference between itself And the rest of the world and so he remains stuck in a narcissistic phase Healthy narcissism aware in healthy people Is a remnant of the original self directed emotional energy That allows you to maintain or stabilize or regulate a sense of self-worth And especially self-confidence and self-esteem The difference between primary narcissism Which is healthy And secondary narcissism, which is pathological Is that primary narcissism Operates on the reality principle It recognizes your limitations for example And your strengths It adheres to boundaries Primary narcissism realizes where you stop and other people begin So primary narcissism is grounded in reality. It has something called reality testing While secondary pathological narcissism is grounded in fantasy It's an extended fantasy defense gun or eye So secondary narcissism Impairs the reality testing Narcissists cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy That's why narcissists actually never gaslight They never lie That's not true. Psychopaths do this Narcissists believe their own nonsense They believe their own confabulation Confabulations and stories and promises. They never future fake They make your promise They believe the promise They they introduce you into their fantasy because they believe that fantasy is a reality So there is an enormous confusion that severely impaired reality testing with narcissists And there are no boundaries The narcissist has no boundaries because he has no self So the narcissist Internalizes you he introjects you he converts you Into what I call a snutch old An internal object And then he continues to interact with the internal object as if you have never existed So even if you're married to a narcissist He would take a snapshot of you Then he would photoshop it he would idealize it And then he would continue to interact with the snapshot and ignore you completely You will come to the narcissist's attention If you deviate from the snapshot If you diverge from the snapshot you challenge the snapshot Undermine the snapshot with your independence With your agency With your personal autonomy And that would enrage the narcissist because he would feel threatened And he would then devalue you and discard you he would consider you an enemy The narcissist prefers the internal object to you always Because you don't exist External objects don't exist for the narcissist as far as the narcissist is concerned So secondary narcissism Is fantasy Primary narcissism is reality And because you are grounded in reality with primary narcissism You are self-efficacious In other words, you are capable of obtaining positive outcomes And securing favorable results In your environment Acting in your environment and on your environment Primary narcissism Reality-based Self-efficacy The ability to operate Successfully in your and to make your life a success secondary narcissism fantasy Impaired reality testing Therefore an inability To operate in reality and on reality in a way which secures good outcomes favorable outcomes So narcissists are failures by definition even when they are temporarily successful They're going to destroy everything. They're very self-destructive Because not because not necessarily because they're malicious or malevolent But because they can't read reality properly. They can't read social cues sexual cues other people. They have no empathy They're devotion reality It's a delusional disorder But there are also psychopathic narcissists, right? Yes, about three percent of narcissists are what we call malignant narcissists They are psychopathic narcissists and these are narcissists who Obtain narcissistic supply By deploying psychopathic methods psychopathic techniques psychopathic strategies So they are likely to be for example reckless and defined and conchumacious opposed to authority and impulsive When in the pursuit of narcissistic supply And they are going to trample over people. They're going to abuse people exploit people ruin people hurt people You name it just in order to obtain supply The psychopath is going to do exactly the same thing But in order to obtain sex or money or power or access or luxury life So psychopaths are goal oriented The narcissist is also goal oriented, but he's he has only one goal and that is not narcissistic supply So it would be good actually at this point I was going to get into the Have you go into the phases but since you ended there Can you tell us what is narcissistic supply? The narcissist inhabits a fantasy as I said And his fantasy is founded on a cognitive distortion. The cognitive distortion is known as grandiosity It is an inflated fantastic self-image The self-perception that is counterfactual defies reality and is extremely difficult to uphold Because reality keeps challenging the grandeur of self-image obviously So the narcissist needs you to tell him That his self-image is accurate That his false self is not false That if he considers himself to be a genius he is a genius Or handsome. He is handsome. He needs external. He needs input from the outside to regulate and to stabilize his belief In the fiction that undermines his life the fiction known as grandiosity In clinical terms, we say that the narcissist regulates his sense of self-worth via input from the outside And this input is known as narcissistic supply Well, if you could just describe what you call the three s's and also the difference between narcissistic supply and sadistic supply Actually, there are four s's the narcissist First of all, there's this myth That the narcissist is attracted to specific kinds of partners. That is not true The narcissist couldn't care less if you're empathic Because he doesn't do empathy. He couldn't care less if you're kind because he's not kind And he couldn't care less if you offer him intimacy because he wouldn't know what to do with it So all this self-aggrandizing mythology That if you have fallen victim to a narcissist, it means that you're empathic and kind and amazing and angelic That's utter sheer unmitigated nonsense Narcissists are promiscuous When it comes to the selection of partners They are partner promiscuous. In other words, they go with anyone If you give the narcissist, if you provide the narcissist with two out of four s's The narcissist would willingly team up with you and become your intimate partner And the four s's are sex services Personal assistant chauffeur cook cleaning lady Sex services Supply sadistic and narcissistic and safety to to allay to reduce to mitigate the abandonment anxiety If you provide the narcissist with two out of these four You could be a psychopath. The narcissist would be with you You could be another narcissist and the narcissist would end up having a couple with you It's it's a myth. It's nonsense that there is type constancy Sadistic supply is the narcissist realization That he is about to experience pain and punishment By inflicting hurt And abusing another person So it's not it's not What people think people think that sadistic supply means that the narcissist enjoys inflicting pain on other people That is sadism the sadist the classical sadist derives gratification From humiliating other people from inflicting pain on other people from torturing other people. That's the classical sadist not the narcissist the narcissist derives anticipatory gratification The joy of anticipation He knows that if he hurts you you're gonna hurt him back If he misbehaves you're gonna punish him And it is the anticipation of this masochistic pleasure that I call sadistic supply The narcissist acts sadistically torches you hurts you Causes you pain humiliates you shames you Debases and degrades you all this is true All this is true but he does this in order to make sure to experience masochistic punishment So this is a sadistic supply not sadistic supply we discuss It's the attention attention granted by other people That allows the narcissist to regulate his internal environment So this is a good time to get into I mean, I really when I first heard your one of your lectures on The stages the is it five or six stages? I can never remember it feels like more But it's so it's so Fantasmic the whole experience when you have a relationship with a narcissist that you don't realize how how Surreal it is until you try to explain it to someone else And then you realize there's no language to really explain what it is But you have created that language So if you could just kindly take us through the different stages You mean of the shirt of the shirt fantasy to the discard No, the whole thing is a shirt The whole thing is known as a shirt. It has seven. It has seven stages I will not go right now to each and every one of the stages. I'm describing in broad brushstrokes What's happening when the narcissist? Decides that you could be an intimate partner The narcissist love bonds you He loved bonds you And the aim is to create something for which I call the whole of mirrors What the narcissist does he idealizes you And then he exposes you To the your idealized image. He exposes you to your own idealization So you begin to see yourself through the narcissist gaze And it's very intoxicating and it's very addictive Because you see yourself through the narcissist as an ideal figure Super intelligent drop dead gorgeous amazing amazing unprecedented and it's you know, no one can resist this. It's irresistible So the narcissist gets you addicted to his gaze And he maintains a monopoly on this gaze So if you were to break up with the narcissist, you would no longer be able to see yourself As this idealized godlike figure And you become addicted At that point the narcissist draws you in He uses he leverages the love bombing and the whole of mirror effect And he draws you in the whole of mirror works Because the narcissist sees you the way a mother sees her child A mother idealizes her newborn baby When the mother has a new baby, she idealizes the baby Otherwise, she wouldn't survive motherhood. It's a very onerous onerous task So she idealizes the baby and she loves the baby unconditionally The narcissist does the same He idealizes you and then he offers you unconditional love in other words The narcissist becomes your mother But for this to work You need to become a child If the narcissist is your mother You need to become a child to benefit from this So the narcissist regresses you Infantilizes you Forces you to become an infant So that then you can regard the narcissist as your mother And get attached to the narcissist and bond with the narcissist as if the narcissist were your mother At that moment, it's too late for you You have been infected You are coral coral and you there's no way for you to live now because You have a second childhood with a mother figure And you're being idealized and you fell in love with your own idealized image You're experiencing intoxicating self-love Now the narcissist leverages these newfound assets And compels you to become his own mother It converts you to a mother figure So now there is dual mothership. He is your mother and you are his mother And you have entered together the shared fantasy. This is the essence of the shared fantasy Within the shared fantasy The narcissist creates a snapshot of you creates an internal object that represents you in his mind and interjects This internal object because you are his mother This internal object is totally idealized Mother is all good Mother is always all good So your representation in the narcissist mind is all good because your mother But life compels you forces you to deviate from this natural to divert from this natural You have your own friends. You have your own family. You make your own decisions You go on a trip. You have your own job. I mean you deviate from this natural. This frustrates the narcissist The way He used to be frustrated as a baby with mother so it frustrates the narcissist and so He begins to be to get angry. He begins to be aggressive And then he converts you in his mind to a frustrating bad object You are he transitions you from all good mother to all bad mother A frustrating mother a hateful mother And in other words an enemy a persecutory object So then he needs to separate from you the whole The whole exercise the shared fantasy Is about reenacting the narcissist childhood And allowing him to separate this time successfully So he has converted you into a persecutory object an enemy and now He can safely separate from you because you're bad You're a bad object So he devalues you And then he discards you And this is a symbolic reenactment of the separation from the original mother Now there's nothing you can do about this This is an inexorable process that unfolds and unfolds inside the narcissist mind Nothing you could say Nothing you could do no behavior you could adopt Would have had would have secured any different outcome This is going to happen regardless of you Because it's all happening inside the narcissist mind and his interactions are with the internal object And this is the end of the shared fantasy the discard phase where the narcissist experiences separation from the maternal figure And for a brief moment He believes that he's on the verge of individuation of healing and completing The original unresolved conflict with his mother with his real mother biological Of course, it doesn't work It doesn't work And then the narcissist needs to go through the same cycle again sometimes with you So he re-idealizes you and starts from zero and this is known as Hooverie and sometimes with others Narcissus is doomed specifically Is doomed To repeat the original conflict with his mother the mother who did not allow him To become himself did not allow him to separate an individual. He is doomed to repeat this with umpteen women If he's a man By the way, same dynamic applies to a female narcissist Also with her mother not with the father So The female narcissist converts her male counterpart Into a maternal figure and of course it applies to same sex. It's this dynamic is universal It's just The members of the couple If if one of the members of the couple is a narcissist He forces The other one to become a mother And he himself becomes a mother and this is the dual mothership And this is how it goes time and again prepare to omit mobility What you always say Freud calls repetition compulsion. Yes. This is the narcissist's variant of repetition compulsion Yeah, but uh, so you're saying basically the mother is the only one who can really um Is the the mother is the only one who helps us to individuate. It's not the father No, not the father. The father is not relevant to this Okay, actually one very important thing that I want to touch on here. Thank you for taking us through the stages So if the ultimate goal of the narcissist is To keep repeating the cycle in order to separate and individuate And he's doing this over the course of an entire lifetime Unsuccessfully, I mean it's going to take a tremendous amount of energy You know because he needs other people to collaborate with them and eventually No one is going to collaborate because people want to To express, you know, express their own autonomy and agency So what happens once they are able to if they if the process is interjection and they they snapshot you in order to Only deal with your interject Because they need you to remain stable across time So even if they get rid of the external object, the internal objects are still there So they never really go away. So what happens? You have said that these They accumulate a library of idealized objects or interjects As you say and these remain psychodynamically active To the extent that sometimes even if they're having sex they could Feel as if they're having sex with multiple partners So what happens to all these interjects that he's Accumulated over the time over time and how does this affect future relationships? And how does it not even lead to a complete psychotic state? It does But before I go there, uh, I it's clear that I I That I haven't been clear The narcissists The only reason the narcissist has intimate relationships Is not love Is not children is not family Is is not intimacy None of these things The only reason the narcissist enters a dyad a couple Has intimate relations is in order to separate and individuate. It's a compulsion It's a compulsive thing. It's a repetition compulsion. So The narcissist if you are the narcissist intimate partner He wants you to make it easier for him to separate from you He wants you to deviate from the from the snapshot He wants you to undermine the shared fantasy. He wants you to be the the bad guy He wants you to become the enemy. He wants you to become a secretary of it This is the source of sadistic supply. He pushes you to reactively abuse him He wants you to abuse him So he abuses you sadistically. So then you abuse him reactively and that's great. That's precisely what you want He wanted you to justify The transition from an idealized mother figure To a total devalued enemy And so the more autonomous you are The more independent The more agentic The more insistent the more The more you disagree with him or criticize him the more you abuse him reactively The more conflictive you are the more aggressive you are the better That's exactly what he's looking for He's looking for someone to make the separation easier If you are kind and nice and compliant and codependent and submissive That makes it a hell of a lot more difficult to get rid of you And getting rid of you is the point of the shared fantasy So this is very important to understand most victims don't understand that So this is projective identification then that's what you just Yes, it forces you to behave in a way that that recreates his comfort zone And conforms to his expectations Exactly Now what happens if you're kind and nice and empathic and submissive and compliant what then Well that makes the narcissist very unhappy And then he says she's doing it on purpose She is passive aggressive She is being nice in order to frustrate me She's being kind kind because she hates me There's no winning there's no way for you to win If you are the narcissist's enemy if you abuse the narcissist great Then he can get rid of you in with the clean conscience If you don't Then you must be passive aggressively undermining It also means you're his enemy you're his enemy in any case He's going to convert you into a secretary object in any case There is no winning strategy with analysis period Victims can't can't digest this and they don't understand that they are totally interchangeable. They are fungible The identity of the victim is totally irrelevant. The victim is a placeholder from a terminal figure That's all That's all You also coined Oh, I'm so sorry. I thought you were finished. I'm finished. Yes. Um, so one of the most As I mentioned at the beginning you've created so much of the terminology and one of them is narcissistic abuse which everybody Utilizes that now But I would really like for you to just quickly tell us what is what are the various Forms of narcissistic abuse overt and also ambient emotional and mental torture tactics that narcissists employ to Also, as you say impair your reality testing as a victim so that they can because at the end You say it's just about power and being able to manipulate you To control you So if you can just talk about the various kinds of narcissistic abuse so that people who Maybe have experienced it and don't know that they have can relate to it Narcissistic abuse has two distinguishing features The first distinguishing feature the narcissist wants to kill you Kill you in the sense that he wants to take away your independence your personal autonomy your agency He wants to disable you deactivate you and render you inanimate The closest I can come to illustrating this Is the scene in psycho the first the famous movie by hitchcock? Were norman base His mother has died Yet he keeps mummified the mummified body of his mother And then every morning he takes her out of bed He washes her up and he puts her in front of the window and every evening He comes up and he puts her in bed and he kisses her forehead That's a narcissist ideal partner That's how he wants you to be So this is the first all bar and distinction distinguishing feature of narcissistic abuse All other forms of abuse without a single exception are dimensional So financial abuse legal abuse I don't know physical abuse sexual abuse verbal abuse They are all limited to a single dimension And they don't constitute an attack on your existence They constitute an attack on some aspect of you some dimension of you but not on the very fact that you exist Narcissists cannot tolerate the fact that you exist Because they don't do separateness. They've never experienced separateness Separateness threatens them You they need to annex you then you need to become an extension You need to become an internal object So your externality Your extraneous features are threats The narcissist needs to eliminate them So this is the first the second distinguishing feature Is that narcissists narcissistic abuse? Is the entire repertory of abuse known to mankind? Entire So in narcissistic abuse you would find sexual coercion You would find verbal abuse You would find Very often physical abuse however, however attenuated but some forms of physical abuse You you would find financial abuse. You would find legal abuse I mean you name it It's in narcissistic abuse typically typical abusers Have um an mo A modus operandi method of operation. So if you are a financial abuser You are likely to continue to abuse people financially, but you're not going to beat them up You're not going to beat them up if you are a physical abuser. You're going to beat your wife up Uh, but you're not for example going to resort to verbal abuse. So just as an example Yeah, every every abuser has a preferred method of operation The narcissist makes use of every kind of abuse known to mankind It's total coercion and mitigated There's no risk respite There's no way out. It's it's everything is abusive. Good morning is abusive every the narcissist converts every human interaction every exchange every speech act every every element of body language every expression and micro expression everything is at the service of Putting you down of abusing you of the animating you of rendering you inert and inanimate It's terrifying and people do react By freezing It's a trauma response a post traumatic response narcissistic abuse is traumatizing But what about the because all the you know verbal abuse physical sexual all of that Is is you know, it's such an obvious form of abuse. But what about the more ambient forms of abuse that You're not sure if they are abusing you but they are over a period of time I mean, I know you said gas lighting is not unique to narcissists I mean, it's not something narcissists do perhaps psychopathic narcissists But there's so many other forms of ambient abuse if you can just talk about that I think the the only form of ambient abuse that narcissists use Is the fantasy itself the shared fantasy because they coerce you to renounce reality It's a little like the Inquisition in Spain, you know, they coerce you to renounce your religion so the the narcissists forces you on pain on pain of penalty and humiliation and you know A silent treatment or he forces you to say you're right This is not real. This is real. Your fantasy is real reality is not free My family hate me Because you said so The narcissist becomes the reality test of the victim So that the victim Would accept and endorse and embrace and adopt Everything the narcissists say never mind how outlandish and counterfactual Narcissist therefore create an immersive Total environment, which is the shared fantasy Where they develop a shared psychosis They they become Answering your previous question. They do become psychotic When you renounce reality to that extent It acquires psychotic Jews or elements And then they force you to become psychotic as well and this is known as shared psychosis or shared psychotic disorder So this is the ambient abuse. It's not like the psychopath the psychopath Would make you doubt your own real perception of reality He would make you doubt your own judgment and opinions. This is gaslighting Then a psychopath would falsify things for example falsify the future or falsify the past The psychopath would coerce you openly would you know would be violent or aggressive Psychopaths are far more direct Narcissists don't actually say okay now. I'm going to create an an ambience Of terror intimidation and abuse This is coercive control That's a behavior typical of psychopaths What this narcissist does He tells you This is reality from now on You don't want to be in my reality. Do you hate me? Are you not my friend? Do you want me to walk away? Do you want me to not talk to you? Do you want me to punish you? Do you want me to abuse you? so Gradually you you become a slave It's a process of enslavement So if it's for the narcissist relationship is as you say a state of mind that is not based on reality It's a fantasy world and and therefore they will never recognize your individuality or your separateness and In order to do that they have to subsume you and in order to internalize you So they're not really interested in any sort of intimacy because You know as you you just described right now The fact that you are based in reality you are an agent of reality and therefore you are I love in one of your lectures you say you are a trojan horse You know you are you have invaded their reality and if you don't collaborate um They it's the biggest challenge to their grandiosity And they will have to discard you But the question I have then is this this whole process must be so excruciating So why is it hard for the Narcissist Why is why are they unable to abandon the fantasy world and inhabit reality if they keep repeating the cycle and Each time I mean we didn't even get into you've given me so much of your time already We didn't even get into mortification and and all of that, but um It must be so devastating for them. So why are they unable to abandon the fantasy world? With what tools the narcissist never separated from his mother he never became an individual He doesn't have a self he doesn't have the interface with reality known as the ego What are the tools at the disposal of a narcissist to cope with reality or to integrate in it? Zero none Would you expect an infant An 18 months old infant to embrace reality and operate in it and on it Effectively you wouldn't Narcissists are stuck In the mental age Of two to nine years old nine years old is a highly developed most Almost I would say high functioning losses the vast majority of losses Are stuck at the age of two years old And the same expectations you have From a two-year-old you should adopt And then you would have flourishing relationships with narcissists The great mistake of therapies for example Is that they Interact with the narcissist as if he were an adult They have adult expectations from the narcissist They try to strike an alliance with the narcissist They try to develop a treatment plan with the narcissist. Are you kidding me? That's an 18 months old They should deal with I mean if if you want to be successful with narcissists in therapy you should apply Child psychology That's an infant sitting in the chair You know and so They have no capacity to cope with reality or to operate in it and on it zero none No tools no instruments nothing. They have never grown beyond this age And Fantasy is a defense That starts around age six months according to melanin client Starts around a it's a very primitive defense. It's very much like splitting And projection is one of the family of primitive defenses So this is a primitive defense and it's understandable to an infant And indeed indeed narcissists Use all these defenses for example. They split Splitting or dichotomous thinking is black and white thinking Today you are the narcissist's best friend tomorrow. You're your his worst enemy Something is either all good or all bad. There's no gray. No midi graph. This is this is splitting narcissists also project a lot They project on to you states of minds moods Emotions and characteristics and traits that they find unacceptable in themselves All these are defense mechanisms Typical to age two and the vast majority of them disappear after age two Not with the narcissists So we know that the narcissists is stuck at a very early age And so the fantasy is the only place the narcissists can survive in and the reason the narcissists can survive in the fantasy is the control Is utterly in control. He can rewrite the fantasy Rewire the fantasy reinvent the fantasy demolish the fantasy The problem is you're in the fantasy with him So if he were to alter the fantasy or Transform it you would need to adapt And if you don't adapt the narcissists would need to separate from you And this is precisely why the narcissist introduces you into the fantasy. He knows it's going to end badly He wants it to end badly Because he wants to separate from you That is what victims don't understand Victims say But why did he push me? Why did he destroy everything? Why did he because that's what he wanted? The aim of the shared fantasy Is to lead to a catastrophe Which would allow the narcissists then to devalue and discard you as the enemy That's the that's the entire game. That's the only purpose of this whole exercise Well, uh My goodness, it's so it's so fascinating. I wish I could talk to you forever. I want to um Just bring it to so you have said there's absolutely no cure for narcissism So what would your advice be to survivors of narcissistic abuse or anyone who might be in a relationship with a narcissist And is having a hard time leaving Number one is not your fault There is nothing you could have done period period period Don't analyze Don't study don't read Don't think what could have been Don't blame yourself. Don't say if I only had behaved differently. Forget all this This is an inexorable process that is independent on you. You have nothing to do with it. You're interchangeable You are just an excuse a trigger So don't feel bad. It's you. It's not your fault Second thing It's never been real It has never been real It's been a dream. It's a dream state Or a dreamscape It's a fantasy. You've watched you've been watching a movie You've been watching a bad movie That's all. It's a bad movie. It's over Lights are on and time to leave the cinema Cinema theater, you know Realize that what you have had with the narcissist Was a piece of fiction a movie a theater play a script It was never real. You were never there except in the narcissist mind And the narcissist solipsistically Was interacting with himself only with himself And going through automatic motions In a script That will repeat itself after you And had repeated itself before you So That's number two number three The narcissist did not choose you And the narcissist therefore did not choose to discard you Everything the narcissist had done has been dictated Decades before you've met the narcissist You were not chosen or targeted by the narcissist You just happened to be there And you were amenable To the narcissist dual mothership offer Maybe you should look into your own issues And see why you were rendered vulnerable But as far as the narcissist is concerned You just happened to be there You were no more than a coincidence And then the narcissist inducted you into the fantasy And then you fulfilled your role And you're out Like an actor or actress You know the run on Broadway is finished and you're fired You go on to the next production So Ask yourself Why did I end up being there To start with Because the narcissist transacted with you It was a transactional transaction He offered to you A second chance at a childhood He offered to become your mother He offered you an idealized image of yourself Which you found irresistible And then you colluded and collaborated with the narcissist In the unfolding of the shared fantasy Even though you grew increasingly uncomfortable And even though you were in pain Why? Why did you do any of these things? Look deep into yourself Do not exempt yourself from your contribution to what had happened If you say I'm an angel And I'm a magnet And things just happened to me And it's none of my responsibility And I had zero contribution to this And it's a force of nature or a natural disaster In which I've never been involved and never asked for You are setting yourself up for failure And I repeat Because you are also You're also subject to repetition compulsion You found yourself with the narcissist Because both of you are into repetition compulsions So accept your personal responsibility and your contribution to your predicament Look deep into yourself and reform yourself So that it never happens again That's all I have to say to victims of narcissistic abuse Maybe one more thing You have been victimized But you're not a victim A victim is an identity Your victimhood is not your identity Your victimhood is an event that happened to you If you were mugged tomorrow You would not become a mug victim for the rest of your life A mugging victim for the rest of your life Even if you were raped tomorrow You would not define your identity as a rape victim Rape is a horrible thing But it's an event It's not a dimension of your identity The victimhood and victimhood stunts are debilitating Paralyzing, disabling And they are exactly This is exactly how the narcissist wants you to feel The narcissist wants you to experience his own indispensability Like now that he's gone I will never be whole again His voice is inside my mind I've been compromised forever I'm a victim from now on I've been stabbed and I've been branded You're not the narcissist's property And this incident in your life, however long it may have been Is just a part of your life Not the totality And it's not who you are Thank you so much for that Because I think I relate to it And it's one of the reasons I have never done well In talk therapy or even self-help environments Because in order to function there You have to have a victim mentality And I'm sure you get a lot of grief for asking people to Seek and search for their own role in why they ended up there I'm sure people call you a victim-blamer Quite more than you like to know for that But I think it's such an important component Of this conversation I want to end with I want to come back to your philosophical side And end here And I'm going to embarrass you Maybe you don't get embarrassed But I want to read two very beautiful ideas As a lover of language The way you describe insight and empathy Are so beautiful that I really want to end On this positive note After traveling through the horror house Of narcissistic personality disorder Actually I'll read three quotes One is a quote that you said Which for me encapsulates the utter sadness and grief That you yourself as a narcissist would feel You said in one of your interviews That the conflict between the absence that I am And the presence that I wish I were Is a conflict that is ongoing I was denied as a child I was not allowed to become So I never became and I remained An unfulfilled promise or a dream That brings so much tears to my eyes And I think that Having empathy and being able to understand That actually even you as a narcissist suffer Is also a very critical component Now I'm going to end on these two And if you want to add anything to it I just want to end on your poetic side On your poetic side On insight I love this Human life is a process of becoming The environment acts upon our genes And helps us to become We are being formed as we go along So we are never the same from moment to moment Which is why psychology can never be a science Life is a process of becoming via insight Insight into who you are And insight into others Because it is insight that creates empathy And empathy crucially depends on Having insight into yourself Because who else is empathizing If you don't know yourself You cannot empathize Empathy depends on an eye who empathizes And such a self cannot constolate or come together Without an immeasurable amount of cumulative insights Which gradually form into your identity Having an insight to yourself Allows you to have insight into others And this is called theory of mind On empathy you said Learning is a derivative of comparison We learn by comparing Social media is founded on this concept Knowing is not enough You need to emote to induce dynamics and change At the base of all this is empathy It is the bridge and the crossing to other people It is only by comparing yourself with other people That you calibrate yourself That you gain realistic insight about the world Because other people are your reality testing They are your viewfinder who help you to focus And empathy is another word for directed insight When you have insight into yourself When we have insight into ourselves We call it insight When we have insight into others We call it empathy If that's not literature I don't know what is I'm forgiving or paraphrasing some of it But I never heard anybody describe Insight because often when I talk about psychology And my interest in it people say Well I'm not interested in any of that stuff But I think developing insight is also critical If you have been victimized Because I don't think of myself as a victim Even though I've lived a traumatic childhood I have this beautiful We every individual human being has this gift The biggest gift is that we can create ourselves every day Every day we can create ourselves anew And to do that we need insight and empathy And I really thank you for that I thank you for your immense contribution To the field of psychology I think your book personally should be a textbook in schools I thank you for helping me even if that was not your Even if you didn't set out to help people You do know how many people you have helped And I'm so grateful I want to perhaps interject with one last sentence I'm a bit as you've indicated before I'm embarrassed But I'm also effusive things Perhaps because I haven't meant to him So I feel a discrepancy between my motivation and the way I'm perceived People keep telling me you can't be a narcissist That's not true You're so empathic, you're smiling, you're cute You're this, you're that And that's embarrassing because I am committed to truth And I'm committed to reality My roots are as a physicist, I'm a scientist So I feel it's a wrong theory Like it's a wrong theory And okay But what I wanted to say is something else The meeting between the narcissist and his victim Is a meeting of two hungers The victim is hungry for love And intimacy and acceptance And the narcissist is hungry for existence The narcissist tries to become through the victim The narcissist tries to exist through the victim But the said irony is that the only way for the narcissist to exist through the victim Is to abscond with her existence And the only way for the narcissist to become through the victim Is to deny the victim her own becoming And on the other end of the equation The only way for the victim to obtain love from the narcissist Is to stop being, to not be And the only way for her to maintain intimacy with the narcissist Is to become as much of an absence as he is And this is the predicament and the conundrum Of the shared fantasy This is a meeting of two irreconcilable incompatible hungers Thank you so much, Sam I cannot thank you enough for your time You've been so generous and for this conversation I hope one day when I'm somewhere where you are I don't, I know you're in Europe right now, yes? Or do you have, you're originally from Israel So hopefully I travel a lot to Europe So hopefully sometime I'll be in your area And would love to invite you to one of my concerts It would be an honor to meet you in person Thank you, kind of Thank you so much, thank you, Sam Bye-bye