 Hi, and welcome to the FlowGrow experience. We come to you live on 99.9 FM and online streaming at www.lcc or.ie, Lyric City Community Radio, your city, your station, your voice. Hello and welcome. This morning we're having the live chatters with Sam Vakneen. Sam is a professor in psychology and he is author of the book Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited, published in 1999. Sam has coined the phrase and was first to coin the phrase narcissistic abuse in the early 90s. He is one of the world's leading spokesperson on narcissistic personality disorder and really has the academic background and backing knowledge to back it. Good morning Sam, how are you? Good morning Sam, how are you? Good morning, thank you for having me. Yeah, I've been I've been watching your work now for some time and I find it quite striking and I find it rather controversial. A lot of what you talk about is is controversial and I suppose narcissism is one of those things. It's a topic, it's a very current topic and it's a word that's thrown around a lot. But you define narcissism in a certain way that's unlike everybody else and you know how other people are using it. It seems to be used as an umbrella term to describe all-round selfishness but through your work I've kind of ascertained that there's something more to narcissism than that and it goes a bit deeper. Do you want to share a little bit about narcissism and what it means to you? It's not what it means to me, it's what we teach in universities. Unfortunately people on YouTube including self-styled experts including people with academic degrees have corrupted and distorted the term beyond recognition but everything you see on my videos is what we teach in every university around the world about narcissism. Narcissism is a healthy variant and a pathological variant. The healthy variant underlies self-esteem, self-confidence and a well-regulated sense of self-worth. The pathological variant is probably a compensation compensatory, it compensates for a deep-set sense of inferiority and inadequacy. Now the compensation can take various forms as the grandiose form of the overt narcissism. The overt narcissism is not aware of any compensatory effect, he really believes his own inflated self-image and self-perception and then there's the covert narcissist who is more attuned to the fact that he's compensating for a lack for a deficiency. We are beginning to think that the overt narcissist is actually a subspecies of the psychopath. It's a psychopathic kind of mutation and the covert narcissist, the compensatory narcissist, seems to be the only real narcissist. At any rate these are people who try to project an image of perfection, brilliance, infallibility and then try to convert you to this missionary religion, private religion, trying to make you confirm and affirm that their view of themselves is not counterfactual, is not fallacious, but it's true and if you don't agree to collaborate in this charade then they shred you, they punish you and abuse you and torment you until you do. So it's a coercive tactic. So it's a kind of a mind dance. So once we start to engage with narcissism or a narcissistic personality we engage in a mind dance. I've heard you describe co-dependence as kind of a hidden narcissist. You know that they're hidden in some way because they're colluding with the narcissistic kind of affair. Can you tell me a little bit about that? So there has to be, like for the narcissist to exist there has to be another, right? There has to be like somebody to, like so if one is God there has to be a worshiper, right? Well yes, but a worshiper doesn't have to be a co-dependent. Co-dependent, some co-dependents, not all of them by a long stretch, but some co-dependents are attracted to narcissists. Majority of borderline, people with borderline personality disorder are attracted to narcissists, but the narcissist is indiscriminate and promiscuous in his choice of mate, in his mate selection. So the narcissist doesn't care if you're empathic or not empathic, if you're a psychopath, if you're a narcissist, if you're a borderline, if you're a co-dependent, as long as you are willing to provide the narcissist with sex, supply, narcissistic or sadistic, and services, the three S's, as long as you're willing and able to provide these, he doesn't care who you are. It is grandiose, it is grandiose of victims to assume otherwise. Victims simply can't digest the fact that they're utterly interchangeable and dispensable and indistinguishable and commodified, they can't digest this. So they aggrandize themselves by saying that they are special, that they are empaths and super empaths and galactic, intergalactic empaths and other such total nonsense, total unmitigated nonsense. It's a form of self-aggrandizement because when the narcissist does to you, he reduces you to dust, interchangeable dust modes. You are just a number, a statistic, you're a supplier, the equivalent, for example, of an internet service provider. You're just providing with the narcissist with what he needs and you are really, really indistinguishable from your predecessors and your successors. The narcissist forgets you the minute you're no longer useful or functional. And many, many, many victims, the vast majority of victims, I would say, are actually unable to assimilate this and to accept this. So they're creating this morality place and these narratives where the narcissist had targeted them or they were special in some way or, but it's all clinically unsupported by any evidence and it's sheer unmitigated nonsense. So when you're talking there, I have an image of, you know, the Joker and Harley Quinn, you know, this kind of dynamic. But I just wanted to ask you a little bit about narcissistic supply. So you're talking there a little bit about, you know, this space of a kind of a void, like a space of consumption. Like, how does that come about that level of, you know, not actually like, you know, feeling, you know, you know, what's offered, how does that actually come about in an individual? How can an individual just see another person as a source of resource, as a source for resources, rather than an actual human? How does this come about this severing of empathy, so to speak, or, you know, thankfulness even? I think we're all, we've all become like this. I think we have all become consumers of other people and what they can afford us, what they can give to us. I think this used to be an outlier or an aberration, maybe 30 or 40 years ago. But I think it's the commonality right now. I think everyone, definitely the younger generations, people under the age of 35, everyone regards other people as service providers, functionalities, and everyone makes the calculus of what's in it for me, and why do I stand to gain from that? Then how far am I willing to sacrifice or compromise my resources? And what is the exchange here? Am I being played? Am I getting the upper hand? So relationships nowadays are power plays, glorified power plays. And I'm sorry to say that the typical relationship that used to prevail 40 years ago when I was young is no longer in existence. I'm hard pressed to find such an example anymore. People are transactional. They negotiate and then they transact to have a relationship. Intimacy is threatening relationships, ominous. People regard relationships as a double whammy. On the one hand, relationships obstruct, impede, and destroy careers. So it's either career or relationships. You have to choose. And relationships are guaranteed to lead to abuse one way or another, even if it is passive abuse via emotional absence and sexual sex withdrawal. It's still a form of abuse. So people say to themselves, especially the young, especially people under the age 35, they say to themselves, why on earth would I want this? Why would I want a relationship? According to studies by Q Center between 2019 and 2022, people today regard relationships as much less desirable than a career. Careers are regarded as 2.2 times more desirable than having a relationship. In other words, if people have to choose between a career and a relationship, two-thirds of the time, they're likely to opt for a career in lieu of having a relationship. That's the situation today. So catching feelings is a bad thing for you. It's like a virus. You don't want to catch feelings. That's why casual sex had exploded, had become a supernova phenomenon. That's why between 45% and 60% of adults in industrialized societies are lifelong singles. That's why 31% of adults never had an intimate relationship. That's why 45% of adults never had sex in a committed relationship. These are the new figures. This is the situation right now. We don't trust each other. It's the age of distrust. So narcissistic supply has become the norm. Yeah. So you're just kind of, I know you've described narcissism as a, it's kind of like a culture of discard. It's like once use is no longer of use, that something becomes discarded. And how you're describing society there is one of discard, that people no longer place an emphasis on the value of contact or connection or the warmth of of, you know, togetherness or like, you know, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about like that change in value that like you described how it was when you were younger? You know, do you feel that this is a value of value of benefit to our society or do you feel it should change? We are a consumerist society. So we consume people the way we consume smartphones and so on. And there's new version, a new version every year. So we discard people and move on to the new version. Some of us discard people after one night, you know, one night stand. About 22% of all adults engage exclusively in one night stands. They don't have anything longer than one night stand. These people are called socio sexually unrestricted. But this is their lifestyle. They put an emphasis on career and work and accomplishments, and they have sex exclusively with strangers in one night stands. Now, as a consumerist society, we place emphasis on growth, economic growth, I mean. So we measure our well-being and our happiness in terms of economic growth individual and societal. So, for example, we are very concerned with GDP growth, growth of gross domestic product. We are very concerned with inflation because inflation retards growth. It sort of diminishes the value of our earnings. So our consuming power is reduced. We are very, very concerned with economic questions with money issues, with wealth accumulation and formation. And we are very, very terrified of sharing. Sharing means diminishment. If you share, you are less, not more. And so sharing has become an anathema. And relationships are about sharing. So they have become a threat. And feelings lead to relationships. So people avoid feelings by, for example, drinking. They drink in order to avoid feelings, in order to avoid feelings, especially when they have sex. So drinking today is coupled with sex. It's inextricably associated with sex. Well over 82% of sexual encounters today take place after heavy drinking. So there's no question of right and wrong in psychology or even in other fields of the humanities. There's a question of efficacious or not efficacious. In other words, is this an efficient way to live? And the answer is no, it's not an efficient way to live. Because for example, the rate of depression had tripled. The rate of anxiety disorders had quintupled. Suicides have gone up 50%, especially by the way among teenage girls. Yeah, we have those statistics here also. Yeah. So it's killing us. Simply it's killing us. It may be efficient on the level of society as a whole in terms of money, in terms of wealth formation. It definitely is very, very helpful to the elites, the economic elites, the financial elites. There are 10,000 people. That's 10,000, not 10 million. There are 10,000 people who together hold 51% of the wealth of the planet. These people of course want you to be single because when you're single, you're not distracted by family, by children, by a boyfriend, by a husband, by an intimate partner. When you're single, you have a lot more time to watch YouTube. When you're single, you have a lot more time to be on Facebook and that translates to money. They are monetizing your eyeballs. These people want you to be single. They don't want you to have an intimate relationship. They don't want you to have a family. Today economic growth and capitalism had become the avowed enemies of mental health and mental welfare. It's as simple as that. You have to choose. You have to make a choice. And yet you have an insurgent of research online for attachment, attachment disorder and relationship, your attachment style, people looking for solutions and relationship, looking for advice. It's one of the biggest markets online, relationship advice, relationship counsel. People are looking for that. They're looking for connection. They're looking for content, contact. I know in Ireland we have one of the highest rural isolation rates in Europe. People suffer greatly from loneliness. It's a kind of a symptom of this age of distraction. I know that people have a yearning. There is a yearning for contact and for relationship and for reaching out. I just think that it's that people don't really know how to perhaps change the system as it exists. And I know that there is a huge insurgence of new age and new age communities that have become deviant. I suppose they're not following mainstream and they're reverting to the romanticism of paganism and going back to the old ways. But I don't think that that's necessarily going to do it either. What do you feel can fill this vacuum? And how can we even address capitalism or this age of distraction and the emptiness it's created within society and people? For every person who is looking for intimacy and relationship advice, there are 10 people who are looking to be a victim. Victimhood is the big, the big game, much bigger game. People are invested in identity politics in victimhood because they begin to constitute an integral part of their new identities. They form a worldview. Victimhood had become a worldview, a way to interpret the world, to imbue it with meaning, to make sense of what's happening. In an age of uncertainty, irrationality, conspiracy theories and victimhood are the staples. They've always been throughout human history. So I don't think people are really looking for relationships because had people been looking for relationships, they would not have been a collapse of 50% in marriages. The marriage rate has gone down 50% since 1980. Relationships have collapsed utterly. Well over 45% of adults in industrialized societies are singles. So these are choices. There's an inability to compromise. There's a total lack of intimacy skills and relationship skills. So people, I think we call this in psychology action substitution. If you don't really want to have a relationship, what you do instead, you research relationships. And that gives you the feeling that you're doing something about relationships. But you're not. Rather than go out there and risk vulnerability and risk pain and embrace hurt as an engine of growth and development, which is what mature adults do. The infantile adults of today sit at home alone with Netflix and a pet and they do research. They surf the internet. They join forums and they discuss relationships day in and day out, night in and night out, rather than actually engage in relationships, rather than do, you know, a consultant is someone who failed as a doer. So people are much more into advice and support and feeling a victim and castigating and criticizing and echo chambering and the loneliness gap is ever growing and long before the pandemic, but long before the pandemic people don't have relationships. They are afraid. People are terrified. So this whole kind of tinder net revel tinder, you know, and all of that dating kind of revolution and hiding behind the screen and, you know, just kind of having your, your data input, you know, but you're not really presenting yourself direct contact. But would you not say that a lot of it has to do with the conditioning that we grow up with, you know, that lack that that we haven't learned how to communicate, you know, correctly, you know, I find that in relationship and engagement and it can be just an intimate relationship or it could be in, you know, everyday relationships, a lot of the problems that arise within relationships is often our inability to communicate, you know, what's vulnerable. And there's so many different perceptions out there. So many different mindsets, so many different ways of looking. But I think most of the time trouble arises when people can't communicate their needs, their wants, their, their true feelings. Do you know? There are several basic problems, but problem number one is risk aversion. Simply risk aversion. There's nothing more risky in life than having a relationship. A relationship can break your heart, can drive you insane, can destroy your wealth, can take away your children. Nothing is more threatening than a relationship. You need to really be brave to have a relationship. And most people today are risk averse. They are risk averse medically. They are risk, they, the insurances of thriving business. I mean, we are, everything is built around mitigating risk. And when something happens, we are infuriated. How did we let it happen? And everything must have a solution. And if it doesn't have a solution, someone is to blame and we need to decapitate him. So we are in this risk averse situation, and, and relationships fell victim to this. The second thing is we look around and we see other people's marriages. Nothing to write home about. Other people's marriages are miserable. The models, the classical models of relationship had failed, had failed. And the younger generations have a look at their parents' marriages and their grandparents' marriages and they're not impressed. And so they avoid, they avoid the mistakes of their elders. They don't understand that the fault is not with the institution. The fault was with the psychological dynamics of the people who had entered into these contracts, marital contracts and relationship contracts. There is a process of infantalization. A process of infantalization first described in the 1940s. It's been 80 years. It's been ongoing for 80 years. We are, we are regressing. Puberty starts three years later today than in the 1980s, according to Twenge and Campbell and other scholars. So Puberty starts three years later and it ends a whopping 10 years later. So today people are adolescents until age 25. Clinically, that's how we define adolescence. And one third to one half, depending on the country, live with their parents, cohabit with their parents until age 35. I repeat this incredible number. Until age 35, one third to one half still cohabit with their parents and rely financially on their parents. Now people say, yeah, but that's a very difficult period. There's been the great recession and there's been COVID. May I remind this spoiled Bratish generation that there was World War II. There was the great depression and they were much worse than anything life is throwing at us today. And yet no one at that time thought of parasiting on their parents. No one at that time thought of not having a relationship. These are excuses. These generations are spoiled because they had never had to fight for a living and they had never had to fight for their lives in a war. They have a lot of money, too much money and they have the unconditional support of their parents. Their parents are incapable of loving them so they give them money. And so we have generations of Bratish, temper tantrum, spoiled, corrupted people who are incapable of having relationships with themselves, let alone with other people. Yeah, okay. So yeah, no, I would tend to agree that on that level that people do tend to stay at home with their families way too long. And I do think that helicopter parenting and, you know, kind of over protective parenting has a lot to do with that. But just getting back to narcissism and, you know, what creates a narcissist? You know, what is the template, the background, the foundation that creates, you know, the narcissist? Because from listening to your videos, I feel that it's something to do with, you know, discard or not being wanted or rejected. And this creates something within an individual if the foundation is right or if the environment is right for narcissism to grow and develop. As far as I ascertained, narcissism is something to do with the defense structure. But you describe it as an emptiness within and that the narcissist is completely empty. Can you expand a little bit on that? Yeah, none of the... First of all, we have been described... We have been discussing narcissism to this very minute. We've never strayed. It's all narcissism. Everything I've described is narcissism. These people who are unable to form relationships, they're narcissistic. There are studies that show that narcissism among college students, for example, has skyrocketed. These are narcissists. It's a narcissistic society and civilization. And we are witnessing the impacts of narcissism. Moreover, narcissism is now glorified and glamorized. They are scholars who think that narcissism is wonderful. Only two days ago, the leading psychologist in Russia came out and said, we should all be narcissists. We should envy narcissists. They should be our role models. In 2016, new scientists published a cover story, parents teach your children to be narcissists. Scholars like Kevin Dutton and Makobi and so on, they use the term, the phrase, high functioning narcissists. They think narcissism is a great thing. It's the next evolutionary step. We are glorifying and glamorizing narcissism. We are even electing narcissists to political positions. The president of the United States, the president of Brazil, narcissists are taking over. Narcissists are taking over because we envy them and we want to be like them. So we have been discussing narcissism to this very second. We've never strayed. Pathological narcissism is a reaction to any bridge of emerging boundaries in the child. When the child is not allowed to separate from the parents and to become an individual without fear of punishment, then we have a narcissist. Now, the bridge of boundaries can be in two vectors, in two ways. One way is by spoiling the child, idolizing the child, pedestalizing the child, instrumentalizing the child regarding the child as an instrument of gratification and parentifying the child, forcing the child to act as a parent. So in all these cases, the child is not allowed to separate from the parent. The alternative is the classical forms of abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse. These are also exemplars. These are also examples of bridge of boundaries because this kind of abuse, sexual abuse, for example, is a total bridge of boundaries, bodily and mental. So all these forms of misparenting or dead parenting or not good enough parenting, all these forms lead to to pathological narcissism. Narcissism is a defense mechanism that part is true. And it is a form of private religion where the child creates an imaginary friend within an imaginary universe known as a paracrossan. And he creates an imaginary friend and that imaginary friend is everything the child is not. That imaginary friend is omnipotent or powerful, all-knowing, omniscient. That imaginary friend is brilliant and perfect and lovable and blameless and flawless and blemishless. At the same time, the child is receiving messages from the parent, I'm going to love you only if you perform. I'm going to love you only if you conform to my expectations. So this is conditional love. The imaginary friend that the child creates, known as the false self, provides the child with unconditional acceptance and with protection because it's godlike. Because it's godlike, the child needs to effectuate human sacrifice. Like every primitive religion, this divinity, this newly newfangled deity that the child comes up with demands human sacrifice. So the child sacrifices the only human it has access to himself. The child sacrifices himself. This is known as the true self. So child gets reads of the true self and fully identifies with the false self. Henceforth, for the rest of the life of the narcissist, there's an emptiness or a void or a black hole where the true self used to be. And there's an external apparition, the false self, which the narcissist mistakes for himself. Moreover, the narcissist, because he commits this mistake of regarding a figment of his imagination as reality. And then identifying with this external figure, the false self, the narcissist continues to do this in all his future relationships. He breaches his intimate partner's boundaries. He does not allow her to separate. He regards her as an extension. And he confuses her external existence with her representation in his mind known as introject. So he begins to interact not with her, but with her representation in his mind. I call it snapshot. Can I break that down? I've heard you talk about the snapshot. So the snapshot is like basically he has an idea of her. He has an idea of what she is. He has an idea of what she embodies, what she offers, and that this is a figment of his imagination. Am I getting that right? Think of it this way. There's a photo and then the narcissist photoshopped the photo. That's the process of idealization. Now he's doing this because if he has an ideal partner, it reflects on him favorably. If he succeeded to secure an ideal partner, infinitely beautiful, drop dead gorgeous, amazingly intelligent, then it says something about him, doesn't it? So he idealizes himself actually by idealizing her. And so he creates this photograph of her. Literally. That's why I call it snapshot. He creates this avatar and he continues to interact with this internal representation because he refuses to accept that she is imperfect, that she is not flawless, that she is fallible, that she is sometimes stupid. You know, we are all sometimes stupid. He refuses to accept this. And when she begins to diverge or deviate from the snapshot, she becomes a threat, what we call a persecutory object. And then he begins to hate her. And then he devalues her. He says she has changed. I don't know what happened to her. And then because he can't admit that he has committed a mistake. So it's not his fault. Something has happened to her. She had been corrupted or changed or something, influenced maybe. And then he discards her because she threatens the precarious balance of his inner world. His inner universe is populated with his avatars of everyone significant in his life. And so if one of these avatars proves to be false, it casts in doubt all the other avatars. It's very, very threatening. It's life threatening. So the need to devalue and discard is a survival strategy. So what does that hide then? What's that space hiding? Like what's behind that space? Why be afraid of that? Why be afraid of that dislocation? What's behind that space? If we go back to the narcissist's childhood, the narcissist ironically had been abandoned by the very parents who had not allowed him to separate. When the parent does not allow the child to separate, they prevent the child. They don't allow the child to evolve, to grow, to develop. In other words, they don't love the child. So it's a form of abandonment, ironically. The merger and the fusion, what we call the symbiosis, the merger and the fusion with the parent implies an abandonment of the child. Because the parent's implicit message is, you don't exist. You are a part of me. You are an extension of me. You have no separate existence. So it's like killing the child. It's a form of assassination. And so there is a huge, a tremendous underlying separation in security. That's the clinical term for abandonment anxiety. The narcissist is afraid to be, again, rejected, abandoned and so on. In this sense, narcissists are not very dissimilar to people with borderline personality disorder. Kernberg in 1975 had suggested this, that they are actually variants of the same thing. And so the narcissist is exactly like the borderline. He's terrified of abandonment, but his solution is different. The borderline solution to abandonment anxiety is to project herself onto the intimate part. So the intimate partner becomes dominant and she becomes his extension. The narcissist solution is exactly the opposite. He becomes dominant and the intimate partner becomes his extension. That's why narcissists fit perfectly with borderlines. The borderline wants to become an extension and the narcissist loves to convert it into an extension because the minute you become a photograph, the minute you become an avatar, you are forever mine. You will never abandon me because you're in my mind and I'm in full unmitigated control of my mind. And the minute you deviate, the minute you deviate from this, you're threatening me. You're threatening me because at that very second you are broadcasting to me, I'm autonomous, I'm independent, I'm a gentic and I may well abandon you. And so narcissists keep testing you all the time. Will you really abandon me? I'm going to behave egregiously. I'm going to misbehave. I'm going to abuse you. I'm going to torture you. I'm going to humiliate you. I'm going to do everything inconceivable to you. I'm going to test you. Do you really love me unconditionally despite all my misconduct? And then if you pack your things and go away, well, you're not the one. It's kind of looking for a divine mother, a divine, omnipotent mother. Not necessarily divine and omnipotent, the narcissist role, but a mother. Yes, a mother figure. To that level of unconditional love, yeah, it's quite divine. The mother he never had. No, good enough mothers provide unconditional love, all good enough mothers. So the mother he never had is trying to parentify his partners. He's trying to convert them into maternal figures. By the way, not only women, for example, when the narcissist is engaged in a business transaction, he has a business partner. He's going to convert the business partner into maternal figure. Moreover, the narcissist acts as a maternal figure in the love bombing stage, in the grooming stage. The narcissist is broadcasting to you, telling you, informing you, you're perfect. And I love you unconditionally. So the narcissist in the initial phases of every shared fantasy, which is the only form of relationship, intimate relationships that narcissists have, narcissists can engage only in shared fantasies. There's no other form. In 1989, this was first described by a psychologist called Sander, so it's not my invention. So in a shared fantasy in the initial phase, the narcissist becomes your mother. You see yourself through the narcissist's eyes and you fall in love with yourself. You develop extreme self-love because you see yourself through a mother's eyes. And that mother is the narcissist. So the narcissist becomes your mother and you are able to experience for the first time in your life, maybe, unconditional love for yourself. It's addictive. It's absolutely addictive. But then the narcissist switches and says, okay, I've been mother to you long enough. Now I want you to be mother to me. I have mothered you. Now I want you to mother me. So it's a dual mothership or dual maternal role situation. And in this sense, it's very regressive because if the narcissist plays a maternal role, it means you must play a child's role. You must infantilize yourself. You must regress. The only way for you to fit into the shared fantasy is to become a child again. Child in every sense, including vulnerable and helpless and dependent. So the narcissist offers you a fustian deal. He says, listen, I think you're perfect. I think you're amazing. And I want you to see yourself this way through my eyes. I'm going to act as your mother. I'm going to give you unconditional love. The only thing you have to do is you have to stop to exist as an adult. And you have to reemerge or resuscitate or revive as a child. Totally dependent on me, my extension. That's the only thing I'm asking of you, to suspend your animation. So how does one create a mind pivot? Because I know that you yourself, you're self-acclaimed narcissist. And yet at the same time you're doing all this work, that's promoting awareness around the disorder. So how does one create a mind pivot? Is it through recognizing? Is it through the recognition of how it actually processes through the mind, how it actually exists as a disorder? Or is it actually possible to create a mind pivot? Can you become, can you be a narcissist that becomes not a narcissist? You're talking about mind pivot with the narcissist or mind pivot in his victim? That's the one, the narcissist themselves through awareness, through self-recognition, through observing these states. No, it has zero impact on the narcissist. Narcissists cannot have insight. Insight requires a cognitive element and an emotional element. And narcissists have no access to any positive emotions, only to negative affectivity, only to negative emotions. So because they have no access to emotions, they cannot couple emotions with cognitions, with thoughts. So their awareness remains only called and cognitive, like reading a book or watching a movie. It has no real impact on the insight. So there's no way to transform a narcissist, a renderer narcissist, not a narcissist. Narcissist is the essence. Okay, and this is one effect the victims then, of course, because they find that mind-blowing, they find that hard to believe, yeah, that this state of that non-emotional state, that I suppose they think that their love can heal them or something. Is this something to that effect? Yes, I call it malignant optimism. Victims have this malignant optimism. It's grandiose, of course. There's an element of grandiosity in this. So their narcissism, the victim's narcissism, resonates with the narcissist's narcissism. That's why they bond. And so she says, I'll give him love, I'll give him acceptance, I'll give him the warmth he never had. He's a child. I can see the child in him, the crying child. I will hold him and embrace him and contain him and he will grow and he will heal, he will heal and so on. These are all utter, unmitigated narcissists, blood and ash. There's no way to transform the narcissist, meaningfully. Even my cold therapy, which is a treatment modality that I had developed with first-hand information, mind you, even that therapy, all it does is eliminates the grandiose aspect of narcissism, but not the rest. There's no way to touch narcissism because it is the core, it is the empty core. That's a black hole. So it's a hopeless quest to try to transform the narcissist. Now, with regards to victims, I think the best way to look at it is to consider victims as addicts. They had become addicted to the intoxicating sensation of seeing themselves idealized. So it's this laser focus on the victim at the initial stages of the shared fantasy. And then this photoshopped image of the victim, the narcissist provides the victim with access to this idealized image, what I call the wall of mirrors. The victim doesn't fall in love with the narcissist. It's not possible to fall in love with the narcissist. Narcissists are obnoxious assholes. How can you fall in love with them? You don't fall in love with any narcissist. I mean, the first five minutes you see is an asshole. You fall in love with yourself. You fall in love with yourself through the eyes of the narcissist and then he becomes an indispensable venue or conduit. It's like if you want to watch television, you need to have a television set. So if you want to see yourself idealized, you can do it only through the narcissist. So he becomes your pusher. Think of it as a drug addiction. He becomes your pusher. It sounds very like heroin. Yes, he is your pusher and you're addicted to this self-gazing, naval gazing and constant infatuation and limerence with yourself, with your idealized self. So this is why when you break up with the narcissist, you have not only a heartbreak, but you also have withdrawal symptoms akin to cold turkey because you no longer have access to this idealized image. You have been reduced again to your old pedestrian mundane self and that's a huge fall from grace. It's an expulsion from the garden of Eden. You're expelled. Yeah, when you're talking there, I feel like the story, the Greek classic of narcissists and echo and when you're talking, I can almost see the diminishment of a person's self through echo. She becomes diminished, more diminished, more diminished and there's that kind of feel to what you're talking about. But how do we help the victim? Is this going to be a repetitive cycle then, like addictions, like all addictions? Are victims going to keep rolling into different relationships with narcissists? I'm the messenger of the bringer of bad news always. First of all, it's my pleasure to discourage people and humiliate them, so I hold them in contempt. But jokes aside, the reality is this. Most victims of abuse and especially narcissistic abuse are likely, extremely likely actually to be revictimised multiple times and that is regardless of their level of awareness and knowledge, as you heard. Sam, so when we're talking about victimhood and I suppose this is, as you say, like victimhood is, it's a big deal now. There's a lot of economy around victimhood and it's something that's quite pervasive in society, as we discussed earlier. I'd like to know how to assist victims or in observing the red flags regarding narcissism. So what would a victim need to look out for if there is this repeat pattern of rolling into abuse or abusive relationships or narcissistic behaviour? Revictimisation happens for a reason. The narcissist caters to the psychological needs of the repeated victim. The narcissist provides what we call ego boundary functions. In other words, the narcissist allows the victim to regulate her internal environment, for example her moods, her emotions. And so the narcissist becomes an extension of the victim's mind and what we would call an external re-regulator. The victim becomes dependent on the narcissist or the abuser, not only narcissists. The victim becomes dependent on the narcissist for her day-to-day functioning and equilibrium and the homeostasis of her mind. Without the narcissist she becomes dysregulated, overwhelmed, she drowns, she's disoriented and she develops amnesia, deep personalisation, derealisation. In other words, she becomes dissociative. There are grave consequences to breaking up with the narcissist and there are even worse consequences for being alone because the typical victim of the narcissist has a very low tolerance for uncertainty, for loneliness, for emotionality and so on. So she crucially depends on other people, not necessarily only intimate partners, but for example family members. She's crucially dependent, end of story. And so I would reverse the current, the orthodox wisdom. The current wisdom propagated by numerous self-styled YouTube experts is that you have to look for red flags and warning signs when you meet someone. But I think you have to look to yourself for warning signs and red flags. You have to monitor your own reactions. You have to pay close attention and observe your moods or the lability of your moods. Your emotions, what kind of emotions are you experiencing? Do you feel submerged, assimilated? Do you feel that you're merging and fusing with the other person? Do you feel that the other person is starting to have control over your moods, can make you feel bad, can make you feel good with a single word or a single gesture or a body language or a facial micro expression? Do you find yourself on the first date sort of deferring to his judgment and his decision-making? He decides where you go, he decides what you do. Do you find yourself walking on eggshells? Do you suddenly spectate? In other words, do you observe yourself from the outside and trying to conform to his expectations of behavior and proper conduct and his code of appropriate comport? So if you are beginning to mold yourself pretty consciously, if you're beginning to mold yourself, for example, you hesitate to be independent or to do anything autonomous or even to go to the loop on your own because you see that he's very jealous and so monitor his behavior, observe his behavior when it comes to people he perceives to be inferior to him, people he holds in contempt like waiters, cab drivers. And so is he being, does he put them down? Is he being contemptuous? Is he being, does he humiliate them? Does he rejoice and is cheered by pain that he causes others? Could be psychological pain of course, yes? So if he's this kind of a person, it's a warning sign. If he does not respect your boundaries, and this could be very, very small things, very, you know, things you tell him to not do and then he does them. And I'm not talking about sex, I'm talking about holding your hand, opening the door for you, telling you which side of the passenger seat you should occupy, placing you at the dinner table where he wants you to be because the light compliments you to his mind, ordering food and drinks without consulting you because he knows that you're going to like them. These are bridges of boundaries. He does not regard you as a separate person, as a separate entity, he's taking over you, he's assimilating you, his body's snatching and mind's snatching you. Now all these things, all of them without a single exception, happened within the first hour of the first date. So why do people deny, why do people ignore these warning signs and flags? Because might it be because there's there's a history of that, you know, like some a lot of a lot of people who engage with narcissistic relationships have narcissistic parents, right? They've grown up with that level of complacency. They've grown up with that level of non identity or floater identity where they just dovetail. Might that have a lot to do with it? I know I'm intervening there now, but you know, they perfectly respect your boundaries. Yeah, desensitization is the clinical term for what you're describing. They're desensitized to these behaviors. They don't regard them as misbehaviors. They're regarding, regard them as foibles or, you know, boys be boys or something. So, yes, that's one aspect, but I think even much more so is what we call the loneliness gap. People have been exposed to inordinate amounts of loneliness, extended periods, protracted periods of time, where they had been utterly lonely, with the exception of a pet and Netflix. And people are not built to survive this way. And so they, they pounce, they pounce on the first opportunity to not be alone. This would explain, for example, the rising preponderance of casual sex. Because casual sex is a lot less about sex. The sex, the sex in casual sex sucks. It's very bad sex. But it's not about sex. It's about having a warm body next to you. It's about a dose of affection. It's about being seen if even casually. It's about fake intimacy, if only for a night. Casual sex is an antidote to loneliness, short doses of antidote to loneliness. So people are terrified of loneliness. And when they see a possibility, however remote and however unappetizing, to not be alone, they pounce on it. And they deny, ignore, reframe, lie to themselves, self-deceive, create narratives, become delusional and engage in fantasies, anything. Just to not go back to your pet and Netflix is the only social option. Wow. So it's kind of like we're filling a void. So there is this, in essence, it's filling a void. But what is the worst thing that could happen if we face that void? What's the worst thing that could happen to face it, to become the void, to embody that space? Like what is the worst thing that could happen? The flip side of this question is what is the purpose or what are the functions of socializing with other people? And the most important function by far is self-calibration. We use other people to gain, to be seen. And through the gaze of other people, we gauge, we evaluate and appraise ourselves, our appearance, our behavior, our beliefs and norms, our goals. So other people calibrate us, they center us and they ground us. When we have very low periods, and some people go for decades without seeing other people, I mean, I'm not talking about the pizza delivery guy, without having any meaningful relationship. And even a one-night stand is a meaningful relationship. You can't believe the hype that it's meaningless and emotionless. There are emotions there and it's fraught with meaning. It's fleeting, it's ephemeral, but it's meaningful and it's emotionful. But many, many people go many years and decades without even a one-night stand, nothing, no contact. So they become dysregulated. Even healthy people become dysregulated because we derive many regulatory functions from the outside, from other people. So they become less centered, less boundaryed, less sure of themselves. They begin to doubt themselves. They become aggressive, but because they don't have to, they become aggressive because they are sad and frustrated. But because they can't take out the aggression on anyone, there's nobody there. They take it out on themselves and this is what we call depression. So they develop depression. They become very anxious because being lonely, and especially if you believe that you're going to end up like this, if you believe that you're going to be a lifelong single and you're going to die alone, which 45% of adults are, you know, it's not a small number, your chances are one in two. It's much, much worse than Russian religion. So people are terrified of ending up this way and to cut a very long story short, they go nuts. They go insane. When we isolate prisoners, when we put prisoners in isolation, which is a cruel and unusual punishment in many jurisdictions, it's forbidden in many jurisdictions, they go crazy. They go technically crazy. Now 45% of our adult population live in isolation, especially after the pandemic. The last remaining thread, the last remaining of opportunity for human contact was the workplace. But people now work from home. They don't see anyone to a three dimensional. They don't smell anyone. They don't taste anyone. They don't enter, they don't penetrate anyone. They're totally atomized, they float in space, and they're unable to gain bearings, they can't regain their bearings. People serve, other people serve as a set of coordinates. They allow us to locate ourselves within the map, within the map of the world. This is called the theory of a working model, an internal working model. That's a clinical term. So we develop a theory of mind and a theory of the world, but we can't do this without other people. There's no such thing as individual. It's a myth. It's a nonsensical myth that took, led psychology astray. There's no such thing as individual. An individual is the intersection of multiple relationships. It's like a Venn diagram. You have these two circles and the intersection of these two circles is you. So it's relational. And in the absence of relationships, there's no you. You lose your functioning ego and you become a narcissist because one of the best definitions of narcissism is someone who has no functioning ego. He is no functioning self. Ironically, narcissists are selfless. They don't have a self. And because they don't have a self, they take yourself. They borrow yourself. They ask you to lend them your selfhood because they don't have one. And so they sort of garner or collect narcissistic supply and then they construct these kaleidoscopic hive minds, which is the phone cell. And so if you stay alone for a long period of time, you end up being narcissistic and psychopathic. Simple. Okay. So basically you're saying that humans need to be living in communities that we're community based and that I suppose this is a function of being a mammal and having by nature mammals or community beings. And our world is devoid at the present of this contact. And I suppose, as you talked about earlier, the family structure as well. People are more younger. People are living at home with their parents. So there's kind of like an infantilizing process taking place of society where you know, people are becoming more codependent, but in a negative way, like from what I've heard you speak of. So what is the solution? How do we change? How do we move the cogs in another direction? How do we create awareness? How do we create change? What is the life solution? What is available to us? The very question is imbued with the myths of Western society. Because the number one myth of Western society and the most pernicious one, the most dangerous one and the myth that had led in my view to all the to the panoply of ills that we are facing anywhere for anything from climate change to gender conflict or gender vertigo is the myth that there is a solution for everything, that there is always hope. There are numerous problems which cannot be solved ever. They have no solution and there are numerous situations with absolutely no hope. This is one of them. We are drifting apart from each other because we had constructed the world where loneliness pays. It has a premium. In 1980, in 1980, twice as many people were in committed relationships and the rate of marriage was double 50% higher. No, let me think. Yeah, 50% higher what it is today. Additionally, a typical person had 10 close friends. The picture today is this. 45% are lifelong singles, 31% are lifelong singles, another 15% are singles at the moment. People have a single close friend, not 10, one, it's a 90% drop. Dating has collapsed by 60% within a decade. Who cups have collapsed by 25% within the last five years? Even though we have dating apps and everything, people don't hook up anymore even. So something of this magnitude that happens within a decade because this or everything I've just described happened within the last 40, 30 years and most of it happened within the last decade. Something of this magnitude is what we call a positive adaptation. In other words, the world had changed and we needed to change ourselves really, really fast if we had to survive, if we wish to survive. As if all of us wish to survive, that's precisely what we did. We had transformed ourselves really, really, really fast because the changes were ominous and life-threatening. Now why would we want to be lonely? Excuse me, why would we want to be alone? And first of all, this distinction is very important. Alone is a state of being. Lonely is a state of mind. It's a reaction to being alone. And it's a socially dictated reaction, what we call a sublimated reaction, socially acceptable reaction. Why would we want this? Why would we seek it? Well first of all, because we can. Technology had empowered us to the point that we are right now absolutely 100% self-sufficient. What you're doing right now with me would have taken an investment of $50,000 in 1980 and half a million dollars in 1960. You're doing it with me and I'd be shocked if it cost us more than a single dollar. So technology had empowered us to the point that we had become godlike. We can publish books. We can make movies. We can do anything from home. We are utterly self-sufficient. We don't need other people. There's no reason to pay the premium of interacting with other people because other people take energy. Other people require compromises. Other people create friction and conflict. These are the costs of interacting with other people. We don't want to pay this cost anymore because we don't have to. We can survive perfectly well on our own. The mental correlate of this is going crazy, but going crazy for example via substance abuse and so on. Going crazy is such an incremental process, such a glacial process that we don't notice it. It is so slow that by the time we realize, oh my god, I'm a cat lady, it's too late and there are too many cats around. So while the benefits of being lonely are immediately discernible because you can do anything you want with anyone you want or with no one and you can entertain yourself and you can create and you can work and you can make money and you can travel and you can go out with friends, there are numerous benefits to being alone. The costs of being alone are very long in coming and utterly not discernible. So we don't realize it before it's too late and then when it's too late we desperately thrash about looking for intimate partners and we can't find them. I will describe to you, I'll tell you just about one mismatch. Men look to settle down between the ages of 25 and 27. That is the apex of men's desire to settle down, believe it or not. Women look to settle down between the ages of 32 and 35. That is the apex of women's wish to settle down, probably the biological clock and whatever, they want children or whatever the reason may be. There's a total mismatch because by the age of 32 the majority of men lose their will and wish to settle down and by the age of 42 97% of men do not want to settle down vehemently do not want to settle down. So there's an enormous mismatch when men want to settle down, women don't want to settle down because they're pursuing studies and a career and they want to travel and they want to go out with friends and they want to f-around. When women want to settle down there are no men left, there are no men who are interested. So by the time you're 35 your chances to get married are substantially or even hitched, not married. Chances of finding a partner are substantially diminished by the time you're 40. So what you're describing there is that our lifestyle choices have basically affected our biology and have impacted on our current world, its reproduction levels, its family structures and I suppose since you spoke about it earlier our inability to share. And yet is there not a drive in every human to do better, to be better, to be a better human? Like are we not impacted by our choices, by this loneliness you speak of? Is there enough this also like you know okay there's hope is the delusion of the ego but is there not also a drive to better oneself or to change fundamentally? People don't consider intimate relationships as bettering themselves, they consider intimate relationships as serious threats. When they are in college having an intimate relationship is a death sentence, later when they are developing their careers falling in love is a death sentence and then when they do look for an intimate partner they don't have the skills, intimacy skills, relationship skills because they spend 15 years, 15 years having sex with total strangers in a totally intoxicated state, inebriated sex is not a good preparation for intimacy and a long-term relationship trust me. So people regard intimacy falling in love they call it catching feelings, the phrase for falling in love is catching feelings, catching feelings sounds like a virus, sounds like a serious disease like COVID-19. So people begin to regard other people as a threat, as a menace because they can fall in love with other people, they don't want to fall in love. Today Hannah Rossin to the feminist she wrote that today to fall in love is like to be a teen a pregnant teen in the 70s, it's as bad. Then she said the best thing that had ever happened to women is the hookup culture because it allows them to satisfy their sexual desires without paying any emotional price or career price. When young people, young I mean under age 35 I asked what do you value more career money or a committed relationship, 70% say career and money, only 30% say a committed relationship. So the presumption that not being alone, having an intimate partner, being in a relationship, loving someone are hopefully in a form of personal growth development and betterment these are 1980s, 1990s sentiment, it is so passe. Today the opposite is true, to better oneself, one absolutely needs to remain alone. One absolutely needs to remain single, it's the only hope of progress making more money, bettering oneself and so on. Now the statistics define this it's a counterfactual belief because the statistics show that married couples make a hell of a lot more money than singles and that married couples are a lot healthier than singles and live much longer than singles, married by the way, not cohabiting, not committed. So it's not true that cohabitation and committed relationship but not marriage is the same like marriage, it's not as far as the effects. So it's good to be married, shockingly, even a bad abusive marriage has greater benefits than living alone in terms of health, income and so on. These are the statistics, unpalatable maybe, but I'm a scientist, I'm data-driven. But people don't want to hear that because they are not willing to pay the price of being with someone. There's huge costs involved in accommodating yourself, in compromising, in deferring and in delaying gratification, there are huge costs involved and people have not matured, they haven't grown up, they are incapable of everything that adults are supposed to do. And then when you're 35 and you go out to the marketplace, you've left finally the parental nest and you go out to the marketplace, you're ill-equipped, there are dating assignments in universities in the United States as part of classes, you get credits, they teach you how to date and they teach you how to date at age 24, 25 and 27 because you don't have a clue how to date and you get credits for that. You earn credits and there's an exam, you have to pick up your classmate. That's kind of like a progression there, it's kind of like teaching your nation nationalism and how to be nationalistic while teaching your nation how to mate, you know? Kind of, they are so clueless, so absolutely clueless when it comes to interacting and so gender roles are dead, which is not entirely a bad thing because a big part of gender roles was about dominating women, subjugating women and abusing women, of course. So what the family is called the patriarchy. So gender roles are dead but instead what had emerged is not new gender roles, which would have been very welcome, but a uni gender world where there are only men with some of them with penises, some of them with vaginas, as we have today. Women, according to studies by Lisa Wade and the college, the famous college survey and numerous other studies, women are describing today themselves in totally masculine terms. Seven out of eight adjectives chosen by women to describe themselves are stereotypical chauvinistic masculine terms. Not merely masculine, but chauvinistic masculine. Women are emulating and imitating chauvinistic, bullying, narcissistic, psychopathic, so-called alpha males. Can you give me an example of that, how that would show up or manifest? Like for me when you're talking, I mean, I'm trying to use this as a reference point, I go to a certain kind of new culture of this divine feminine rising, which is this whole culture of women taking on the patriarchy, women seeking revenge on the patriarchy. By the way, for me, being a woman is just that. It's just about I'm born this way, but it doesn't really affect, you know, how I view the world or how I view men even. It's just I'm born this way. But for me, more importantly, it's about being a human being. I'm a human being, and you're a human being. And I think that that's a better approach from my point of view. What do you think, like, is the best approach to gender? And do you feel that if men and women could meet in this regard, do you feel that men have been demasculinised? Have men been, has their male been taken from them in some way from this attitude that women have towards men? No, men have not been demasculated. Our studies don't show this. Men still describe men still describe themselves largely stereotypically as they used to do in the 70s and 80s and 90s. So there's been no change, no shift. This is called in in the literature the Stormed Revolution. The Stormed Revolution because only half of the revolution took place. Women became more masculine, but men did not become more feminine. So we ended up having only men. Men with two different sets of genitalia. Now, I think we should make a distinction between gender roles, social scripts and sexual scripts. Gender roles are dictated by society and culture largely. We have situations even in primitive societies, so-called primitive society, like for example, in big parts of Africa, where I'd lived for four years, in northern Albania, which is a seriously backward country. So where women take on classical male gender roles and are treated as male, they're allowed, for example, to sit with men in a cafe and smoke. So gender roles are a choice dictated by society, culture and circumstances. In big parts of Asia, big parts of Africa, some parts of the Middle East, big parts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe and so on, women would find the idea that they cannot be men very funny. They wouldn't understand exactly what you're talking about because it's very fluid. Gender fluidity did not start in the United States. It's been around for thousands of years in the so-called more primitive parts of the world. So I'm not talking about classical gender roles, but there is no question that we have a difference in biological equipment. There is also no question, which I'm saying as a medical doctor, that we have massive differences in physiology, hormones, and brain activity, operation of the brain and so on. There are differences. There are hundreds of substantial differences between men and women, biologically grounded. Now this should be, should translate into new gender roles. The new gender roles should take into account social scripts. So for example, the current social script should include equality, total equality, and total equity. No glass ceilings, total wage equality, I mean everything. No question about this. So the social script had adopted and had changed, at least in theory. Sexual scripts were annihilated, so we don't have any more, any sexual scripts left. And the outcome is a radicalization among men. Some of them gravitate towards the most extreme and pernicious forms of toxic masculinity. And the double standard is more entrenched than ever among these men. So this is one group and the other group are lost, dumbfounded, shocked by the alacrity of the transition, by the speed with which it had happened. And they don't know what to do, because no one tells them what to do. Everything is negotiated one-on-one. It's not necessarily a good thing to negotiate everything from scratch one-on-one, not necessarily a good thing. And so these men, for example, they derive their notions of sexuality from pornography, because there are no sexual scripts left, and there's no sex education to speak of anywhere in the world, by the way, with the exception, maybe, of the Netherlands. Then people derive, I mean, men gravitate, I mean, look to pornography to tell them what to do, because they're lost. And so we have this radicalization of masculinity on the one hand. And on the other hand, women, definitely as a group, I mean, the statistics are absolutely unequivocal. Women as a group had taken on a stereotypical, chauvinistic, bullying, narcissistic, and psychopathic stereotype of a man that tried to emulate this, that tried to become this kind of man, which, by the way, the vast majority of men holding contempt and disgust, we had rejected this kind of men. We think they're horrible and obnoxious, yet they had become the role models of the modern woman. So we find heightened levels of dominance and aggression among modern women. We find reduced, severely reduced, or suppressed, or denied, emotionality and empathy. There's a huge decline in empathy. There is a doubling of narcissistic personality disorder, diagnosis among women, and a quadrupling of psychopathy diagnosis among women, and so on and so forth. So it's very sad because what we should have done, we should have created new gender roles founded on new sexual scripts, social scripts, I'm sorry. And these two put together should have created a new sexual script. How should you behave with each other? Men with women and women with men. So maybe the new sexual script, for example, would imply equality in initiating sex. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe it would have implied, I don't know what it would have implied because we don't have a sexual script. And so today, if you have casual sex, you have a huge chance of being sexually assaulted. 27% actually. So casual sex has become a danger zone plus the sex sucks and is bad because men in casual sex try to imitate pornography. They choke you, they force you to have anal sex. I mean, it's just horrible because they don't know any better. There's no sexual script. I mean, someone in the 1950s knew what he had to do. He had to invite the girl and then he had to take her to a diner and then they had to go to a movie and then he could try to grope her in his car. That's called a sexual script. We don't have this today. And everyone is drifting and lost, women included, but the drifting, that's why women participate in hookup culture. Hookup culture is the epitome of toxic masculinity. Absolutely, the reification of toxic masculinity. These are misogynistic men, I mean seriously misogynistic to the point of violence. Misogynistic men, for example, in fraternities, in college fraternities, who get women drunk and drugged, subject some of them to gang rape and others to sexual assault. End of story, that's the hookup culture. And women participate willingly in the hookup culture. Why? Because they want to be men, liberated, emancipated, empowered. They don't understand. They're buying into the male chauvinistic script. So what you're saying is it's a concept. It's a conceptual space. It's not an actual active space of feminine empowerment or female empowerment. But I suppose that just from listening to you today, the listeners will, I mean, I myself have found this to be very revelatory. And I suppose the statistics and the facts speak for themselves. They're very truthful and in a way highlighting error and highlighting truth. And this truth, hopefully, will reverberate and touch and contact people's lives and perhaps wake people up. And I think you yourself are very, in how you speak of like society and of women and equality for both men and women. I think that's very honourable. And I just wanted to say thank you so much for giving us your time with the FlowGrow experience and sharing your wisdom and your knowledge and your mind. And thank you very much. It was an honour speaking to you. Thank you for having me and it was a pleasure. Thank you. Bye bye.