 Shalom. A yom nafondim le ladun ve la sohbe kam a sugyoche. Oh, wrong country. Terribly sorry, old chaps. Today we are going to deal with several issues with regards to the way the narcissist sees you. You see, he doesn't see you as a single person. He sees you as two women. If you were to assimilate, grasp and accept this insight, you will be able to make sense of everything that has happened in your relationship and you will be able to plan ahead much more wisely and perspicaciously. Look it up. Today's smogas board, buffet, includes everything from cheating to modification to, I mean, it's a beautiful concoction of every dish in the narcissistic cuisine. Stay with me and you will not regret it. I promise. And of course, a narcissist's promise is something you can take to the bank. So here we go. First of all, we must deal with a super crucial issue, my shirt. You remember the blue shirt I wore in previous videos? You are speculating whether I actually have more than one shirt. But the blue shirt was the black shirt. I dyed it blue to fool all of you. And admittedly I succeeded to fool most of you. You thought I had two shirts. Never. Only one. Now, having dispensed with this ultra critical issue, I want to alert you to three very important tenets or principles of the narcissist's inner economy, the economy of his mind. First of all, the narcissist regards your love, your love for him as a weakness, a vulnerability that he can exploit, that he can leverage to obtain supply, to obtain sex, to obtain services. If he is a sadist, he regards your love for him as an opportunity to hurt you. At any rate, it's an intrusion point. It's an entry point. It's a chink in your armor. It's the crack, the crack in your defensive walls. It's the part of the firewall that's not working. He's going to insinuate himself through your love into your heart and into your mind. Your love is your, your weakness, your vulnerability. Your love is the way he's going to harm you and hurt you. That's how we see it. Second point. Many women had written to me, I've never cheated, I never considered cheating. Live aside the veracity of such claims. I have my doubts. But there's a process of escalation in a relationship with the narcissist at a certain stage. He loses interest. He appears to be indifferent. He doesn't care. He doesn't mind. He is absent, if not physically, then emotionally. And it's very painful, especially after the love bombing or the grooming phase. Intimate partners of narcissists, he's insignificant others. They fail to grasp. They don't understand what had happened. What did they do wrong? Most of them think, what did I do wrong? And they, they flail all over the place. They thrash about. They try to, and so they try to get a rise out of the narcissist. And still it's not working. So they escalate. They start small. They go, they up the ante. They raise the stakes. It's like in a poker game. And finally some of them end up cheating on the narcissist just to get a rise out of him. To get an acknowledgement that they still exist in this world. That they still matter. They still, they can still move him to tears, to pain, to shouting and screaming, to hurt, to violence, to aggression. Anything is better. Anything is better than being ignored, than being transparent, than being, than not being seen by the narcissist. Narcissism drives his intimate partners to temporary insanity in a way. With his constant non-being. With the emptiness that he is, with the void that he is. It's like, it's like you try to reach out. You try to touch the narcissist. You try to, and your hand goes through, through nothingness. And, and it looks like he's there. You know, it looks like you could, he's tactile. You can touch him. You can smell him. You can, you know, you can have sex with him even. But there's nobody there. This drives most people crazy. And so many, many intimate partners of narcissists escalate. Some escalate sexually. They end up cheating ostentatiously, conspicuously to hurt the narcissist in his presence sometimes. And some of them end up doing other things which are the equivalent of cheating or betrayal. Or emotional affairs. Non-physical, but still affairs. Or a bad mouthing. Bad mouthing the narcissist to his colleagues and friends and family. Or other forms of betrayal. And in the majority of these cases, it's a cry for help. It's a cry for attention. It's an attempt to communicate to the narcissist and to signal to him, look, I'm still here. I'm still alive. You can't treat me as though I'm, as though I were in obstruction or a symbol or a snapshot or an inner representation or an internal object. I'm not. I have my life. I'm independent. I'm autonomous. I'm flesh and blood, flesh and blood. The third point that's important to understand is the narcissist grieves not you. When there's a breakup, when there's betrayal, when there's cheating, when there's, you know, the farewells and goodbyes. The narcissist, because many of you have written to me, he was heartbroken. When I left him, he was heartbroken. He mourned me. He grieved the relationship. He became an alcoholic. He started to consume drugs. He was all over me. He was trying to hoover me. He really, really missed me. He felt bad. He felt horrible. Forget all this. This is all in your head. The narcissist does not grieve you. He does not mourn over you. You never existed. You're utterly replaceable, interchangeable, commoditized, commodified and fungible. Anyone would have done as well as you did. There's nothing special in you. There's a source of supply. All sources of supply are interchangeable. All service providers, people who can give the narcissist the three Ss, sex, supply, narcissistic and sadistic, and services, anyone who can give him this package deal is equivalent, identical to anyone else. There's nothing special about you. There's nothing to mourn specifically about you. There's nothing to grieve that is irreplaceable in you. You're not special. You're not unique. What the narcissist grieves and mourns, and he does, he grieves and mourns, is the shared fantasy. He grieves and mourns his investment in the shared fantasy. We call it sunk cost. He feels very bad. He feels heartbroken over how much he had invested, how much the cost of the shared fantasy, and the inconvenience of having to start all over again. It's about him. It's not about you. He's mourning and grieving his own failure, the discomfort, the instability, the uncertainty that had been introduced into his life. He's grieving and mourning the change, the flux, not you. His mourning is also very different to the grieving and mourning and heartbreak of normal people. When you closely scrutinize the way he mourns, the way he is heartbroken, his sadness, his tragic dramatic posturing, it's aggressive. It's much closer to fury and wrath and anger than it is to pain and to sadness. And this leads me to one of the topics of this conversation. Women are the only one who can modify the narcissist, because the narcissist re-frames their cheating, their betrayal, as a total rejection of his entire being. When a woman abandons a man, any man, by the way, not only a narcissist, when a woman abandons a man, he feels that he had been rejected as a man, as a lover, as a companion, as a guru, as a husband, as a father, as a provider, as everything. Romantic breakup is a total rejection. That's why it's ranked way up there as one of the major traumas. Divorce is the second worst possible trauma. There's a trauma scale. And the first is the death of a loved one, parents, children. Second is the divorce and breakup. It has massive, massive, all-pervasive biological, physiological, neurological effects on the body. And, of course, on the mind, because it is the only form of total rejection. When the narcissist is rejected by a man, if he's heterosexual, of course, when a narcissist is rejected by a man, that man is likely to have rejected specific functions and rules that the narcissist had failed to provide. So a man can reject the narcissist as a business partner, or as a collaborator, or as a friend. When a woman rejects the heterosexual narcissist, she rejects him as everything, in every capacity, in every dimension, in every aspect of his personality. It is this total rejection that brings on modification. Now, I want to introduce some order into the myriad videos that I have created on the various aspects of relationships with narcissists and so on and so forth. Before I go there, I want to reiterate the concept of narcissistic modification, which is not mine. I did not invent it. Narcissism modification was first described in the 1950s and elaborated upon recently, actually, by other scholars. I advise you to watch the videos on my channel specific to modification. I think there are two or three of them. Generally speaking, mortification is when the narcissist defences crumble. His grandiosity is challenged to such an extent, undermined so thoroughly that he can no longer maintain it, and he is forced to see himself in the mirror exactly as he is. Words, shortcomings, failings, inadequacies, deficiencies, is forced first time to see it all in sharp relief, the contours of his invalidity, how crippled he is, how partial, a partial human or even non-human. This is a harrowing experience. It leads to the disintegration of the false self, at least temporarily. Then the narcissist is like a turtle without the shell, utterly defenseless, skinless. In effect, after modification, the narcissist regresses to a borderline state. We know from various scholars that borderline personality disorder is failed narcissism. When the child tries to develop narcissism and fails, child becomes borderline and co-dependent. So when the narcissist loses his false self and his grandiosity, the firewall that protects him from the world by falsifying the world, by reframing the world, when he loses this, he is defenseless and he becomes a borderline. His emotions come to the surface. The first time in his life, he is in touch with his emotions. They are highly dysregulated, they go up and down, his mood is the same, they are labelled, and he is on the verge of utterly disintegrating. That's modification. Now there are two forms of modification, external modification and internal modification. External modification is when the cause of the modification is external, surprisingly. And that would be, for example, a cheating spouse. A cheating spouse can cause external modification. A betrayal in business by a very loved and dear friend or partner, even that could cause modification. But it comes from the outside and it challenges the totality of the narcissist. That's why in 99% of the cases, it has to do with an intimate partner. There's internal modification. It's when the narcissist suddenly realises how, as I said, deficient, inadequate, problematic, crippled and so on. And this creates modification. The sudden realisation that it is not Godlike, it is not omniscient, omnipotent, or knowing, or powerful, perfect, brilliant, good. This realisation that is evil, in effect, the narcissist cannot cope with this. It also creates modification, but this time it comes from the inside. So not surprisingly, it's called internal modification. So we have external and internal. Remember that. Now let's go through the phases. There's grooming and love bombing. During the grooming and love bombing, the narcissist usually provides a fake image of himself, which is grandiose, good, perfect, loving, empathic, etc. And this is coupled with false promises, simply put. The narcissist makes false promises. He promises to commit. He promises to have a long-term relationship. He promises to act in certain ways within the relationship. He promises to do certain things or to accomplish certain goals. These are all false. The reason he makes these false promises, because had he not made them, no one would want to be with him. Because the narcissist is a taker. He just takes. He takes sex. He takes supply. He takes pain. He consumes your pain. He takes your services. He forces you to service him in a variety of ways. So he's a taker. The narcissist is almost a 100% taker. Even when he gives, he gives in order to be adulated, in order to be admired. There's never giving without ulterior motives or hidden agenda. No one would accept this kind of deal. No one would accept this kind of relationship or transaction. So the narcissist has to lie to make false promises. That's the grooming and love bombing. And then there's shared fantasy. And within the shared fantasy, there's narcissistic abuse of type 1. You remember the previous video? I made distinction between two types of abuse. The two phases of narcissistic abuse. So during the shared fantasy, there is a type of narcissistic abuse that is intended to test, to test the partner, whether she can assume a maternal role or a parental role, whether she can become a good mother or father with unconditional love, unconditional acceptance. So the narcissist abuse in this stage is very egregious and very hurtful. And it's intended to push the partner to the limit and to see how far the narcissist can go without being abandoned, abandoned and betrayed. And there's a reenactment of early childhood conflicts. At this stage, women make a choice. Some of them decide to give it up, to withdraw. And some of them decide to stay and bargain with the narcissist, reason with the narcissist, try to contract, try to talk, to talk it over. It is at this stage that such people usually go to couple therapy, marital therapy. So the first type of women, they give up on the narcissist and they give up on the relationship. They cheat. If they can take anything from the narcissist, like money or favors or whatever, they cheat discreetly. If not, they cheat openly. In any case, they withdraw. They upset themselves from the relationship. The narcissist reacts to this sudden detachment with stalking. He begins to stalk. He feels that he is losing his intimate part. He feels that she is drawing away from him, that she is drifting away from him. He guesses, usually very accurately because narcissists are possessed of cold empathy. They can scan you brilliantly. So he guesses that she has someone else. He guesses that she is cheating on him. He feels that she is gradually vanishing from his life and he begins to stalk her, a Rotomanic stalking. In the second case where the woman bargains, reasons, argues, debates, tries to convince, persuades, cajoles, begs, urges, the couple to go to therapy, etc. In the first case they are stalking, in this case there is the second type of narcissistic abuse. If the woman cheats and withdraws, the narcissist stalks her. If the woman bargains and demands, the narcissist embarks on a second round of abuse of narcissistic abuse. This is narcissistic abuse type 2. And this type of narcissistic abuse has one goal in mind to jettison the demanding, nagging woman. The intimate partner who makes demands, who insists, who wants to restructure the relationship, infuse it with life, spice it up or whatever. The intimate partner who consumes or threatens to consume the narcissist's precious time or resources. She's gone. That's not part of the deal. The narcissist never had any intention to make good on his promises, on his false promises. So in the first case, the narcissist stalks the intimate partner because he thinks he could over her. He could over her, draw her back, even separate her from her new love interest. And in the second case, he just wants her gun. He wants to get rid of her. And so these behaviors are intimately connected with modification that I mentioned before. Because the narcissist vacillates, oscillates, pendulates between internal and external modification and back. Internal, external, external, internal, internal, external. Why? Why does the narcissist vacillate? And how can you vacillate between external and internal? Well, the narcissist reframes. He offers, he creates narratives where external modifications become internal and internal modifications become external. He vacillates and in a minute I will explain how he does that. But the reason for vacillating is that the shared fantasy is egocintonic. He loves the shared fantasy. He is in the fantasy. He is deluded and deceived by his own lies. And so for him it's a shock when the intimate partner exits the fantasy abruptly or crawling or both. When this happens, when she cheats on him, betrays him, bad mouths him, whatever. When she wants, wants him gunned, when she starts to withdraw and detach, he feels wronged. He feels that she is not okay, that she's bad, that she's malicious, that she's malevolent. He feels that he doesn't deserve what she's doing to him. He feels a victim. And so if, if in shared fantasy the intimate partner wants out, the narcissist feels an external, experiences an external modification. Is he? He says to himself, we have a wonderful couple. We have a wonderful relationship. Why does she want out? She's really bad. She's malicious. She's malicious and I'm the victim. So this is external modification. In the bargaining phase, when the intimate partner tries to bargain, tries to restructure and revive the relationship, makes demands, insists that the promises may be kept. At that stage, the, the narcissist feels bad. He feels trampled on. He feels, he feels ego, ego distal. He feels that, he feels that, that he realizes that he didn't keep his promises. So he feels bad about himself. I'm sorry. He feels bad about himself. He feels that he is, he is the abuser. He did something wrong. He didn't keep his promises. He knows deep inside that he had misled his intimate partner. He dreaded, he dreaded the moment when she would try to cash the check and he knew this moment is coming. So when she sits opposite him and says, but you promised, but you said, but you committed yourself, he knows that she's right and he knows that he's wrong. He knows that he's the evil one. He knows that he's malicious, being malicious and malevolent and intentionally and deliberately hurtful. He knows this. So in the bargaining phase, when he's trying to get rid of the demanding partner, he experiences internal modification because he realizes that he is the cause of the separation and the breakup. In the shared fantasy phase, when the intimate partner wants to break up with the narcissist, the narcissist feels that he is the victim and therefore experiences external modification. In the bargaining phase, when the intimate partner wants out of the relationship, after the bargaining had failed, the narcissist blames himself. He knows that he brought the relationship to this stage. He broke it up. He made this nightmare happen. And so if he is very bad internally, he experiences internal modifications. So the narcissist oscillates more shifts between internal cognitive modification. I'm bad. I'm evil. I'm the one who rejected her. I'm the one who humiliated her. I'm the one who ignored her. I'm the one who made her feel unlawed. And he vacillates between this internal modification and an external emotional modification. The internal modification is always cognitive. The narcissist thinks these things, but he doesn't feel them. He says to himself, I acted badly. It's wrong what I had done, but he doesn't feel it. He doesn't feel remorse or regret. There's no emotional correlate, no emotional resonance. Just cognitive realization, analytical realization that he had done something wrong. And it's more like, wow, I failed. I should have dragged it longer. I should have made some gestures. I should have, you know, I should have managed it differently. I mismanaged the whole thing. So it's a cognitive thing. But the external modification is an emotional one, not a cognitive one. He experiences emotionally the source of the external modification, for example, the cheating spouse, as bad, evil, threatening, rejecting, malevolent, malicious, psychopathic even. So when he swings between internal and external, remember, internal modification is during the bargaining phase. External modification is during the shared fantasy phase, when he also swings between cognitive and emotional states. So let's summarize. Shared fantasy, the partner wants out, she cheats, she betrays, she badmoutes, she misbehaves. That leads to external modification, which is emotional in nature. The narcissist feels that he is wronged, that he is victimized. Then bargaining phase, the partner wants to try again, restructure the relationship, insist that the narcissist keeps his promises. At that stage, the narcissist gets rid of her, abuses her to get rid of her. And when he does this, he experiences internal modification. But the internal modification is cognitive, analytical only. There's no emotional, nothing emotional is happening. Got all this? Okay. How does he move? How does he swing from external to internal and back? He reframes. He simply reframes. He talks to himself. He says, well, maybe she cheated on me, but it was my fault. I'm the one who rejected and humiliated and ignored her and caused her pain. So she cheated on me. It's a way of reasserting control. It's not external. No one has power over me. No one has power to hurt me, except me. She cheated on me. It hurts like hell. It's a horrible feeling. But I did it to myself. So it's okay now. I did it to myself. I'm still Godlike. I'm still omnipotent. That is reframing and it's conscious reframing. The master literally talks to himself, sometimes allowed, facing a mirror. He says to himself, you know what? You did it. You did it to yourself. So this is the motion from, this is when he moves from external to internal. Similarly, when he wants to move from internal to external, he says to himself, I acted badly. I mismanaged the whole situation. I could have done better. I have difficulties with the way I handle things. And then he says to himself, but actually what could I have done? There was nothing much I could do. She is an evil entity. There's nothing you can do with this kind of woman. She's promiscuous. She's drunk. She's horrible. She's neglectful. She's irresponsible. I mean, he convinces himself that she is at fault. So he wants to swing from internal to external modification. And so this pendulum is going on until the relationship is over. In reality, the narcissist is able to convince himself of these things. We call this process reframing. And actually we use reframing in therapy, in cognitive behavior therapy. The narcissist is able to reframing because there is a kernel of truth in both versions. Consider, for example, when the narcissist moves from internal to external, the narcissist says to himself, starts. The narcissist starts his opening position. His gambit is, I did it. I made it happen. I misbehaved. I tortured her. I caused her pain. I ignored her. I didn't love her properly. I didn't pay attention to her. So she cheated on me. Okay? That's internal modification. But then he says, but wait a minute. She cheated on me. She is immoral. She is evil. She is incorrigible. She is promiscuous. She is, so he's, he's convincing himself to move, he's pushing himself from the internal modification position to the external modification position. But he would have failed had there not been a kernel of truth, some element of truth in both versions of the events. In reality, women do reject, do humiliate and do abandon the narcissist as a way to exit the shared fantasy or to end the bargaining phase. And so this misbehavior misconduct by women, the cheating, the betrayal there, it renders the external modification possible and plausible. The truth, of course, is that intimate partners misbehave this way reactively after the narcissist had rejected and abused them egregiously. So very often the position that is closer to reality, closer to the truth, would be the internal modification. But had the intimate partner not misbehaved, the narcissist would not have been able to swing to an external modification. There must be something there to allow the narcissist to latch onto some kind of misconduct, some kind of wrongdoing that becomes the nucleus of an external modification. So the narcissist hunts for everything his intimate partner did wrong to be able to construct an external modification. Following abuse, following the narcissist abuse and rejection during the shared fantasy, you know, narcissist abuses. In the shared fantasies, the narcissist abuses actually, I mean this is the worst period, the peak, the apex, the epitome of the abuse. The abuse maxes out, reaches a maximum during the shared fantasy because the narcissist really needs to make sure that his intimate partner can function as a parent. And needs to know that his unconditionally love will not be rejected, will not be abandoned, etc., etc. I explained all these previous videos. So this is maximal, maximal maltreatment and mistreatment. And when the intimate partner has had enough of it, and exits the shared fantasy by cheating, by simply packing up her things and living, by stealing money, by badmouthing the narcissist, by having an emotional affair, by, I mean, there's a million ways to exit the shared fantasy. When the narcissist realizes that he had lost her, that he had lost her, she's no longer his. He begins to stalk her during this phase. In the bargaining phase, he abuses the women in order to push them away. He wants the woman to cheat on him ostentatiously. He wants the woman to dump him so that he has a clean conscious, a clear conscious. I didn't do anything. She did it. So in the shared fantasy, the abuse is intended to reenact the early conflict with the narcissist's mother, usually. And it helps him, the abuse helps him to revert to, from one type of modification to another. Because everything is, the abuse itself is grounded in, is the only real element, if you think about it, in the shared fantasy. Shared fantasy is constructed about false things, fallacies, falsities, prevarications, confabulations. It's all fake. That's why it's called fantasy. It's all fantastic. There's nothing there. The only real thing, tangible thing, sometimes very tangible, in the case of physical abuse, is the abuse. So the abuse, in a way, helps the narcissist, grounds the narcissist, helps him revert to reality and allows him to swing between external and internal. This is, this, I wanted just to clarify this very important dynamic. A few minor comments about other issues and then we go to two other topics in today's buffet. In today's, I'm receiving many comments from you and so on and so forth. I want to clarify. Today, who does the talking? Who is the one who is talking? Who is the personality? Who is the celebrity? That matters much more than what he or she has to say. The content, when I was young, when I was young, you remember dinosaurs and all this, when I was young, content talks. The slogan was content talks. Generate good content and no one cares who you are. Today is not true. Content is utterly real. Who you are matters. Celebrities are famous for being famous and nothing else. The vacuous posts of the vacuous celebrities garner millions of views when the most amazing groundbreaking thought by the world's leading philosophers are lucky to receive 200 views. That's the world we live in today. So it's not my fault, so to speak, when people say you're not getting views because your content, it's not the content. I'm not a celebrity. Had I been Sam Kaudashian, trust me, I would have had millions of views. And the content makers and content creators who succeed to garner tens of millions of views and so on, they are very good at transforming themselves into celebrities. There is a celebrity element in them. The content is much less important. Very frequently, the content is erroneous, mistaken based on wrong information, faulty research, not updated, 50 years old, 50 years back when most of the content online, including narcissistic abuse, is an abomination, a travesty. But the people pervading this content, they are mini celebrities or mega celebrities, and people flock to watch their videos, not for the content. You can also see in the comments section, people are commenting on my hair. The bulk of the comments is actually on my hair, my shirt, mini, here she is, and like 1 in 10 comments is about the content of the video. People are looking for entertainment, not for enlightenment or education on the contrary. They resent the truth. They don't want to hear the truth. They want to hear fuzzy things that support their view of themselves. This is called confirmation bias. And I propose bias, many of you have written to me that I'm wrong to mention Donald Trump all the time, and they accuse me of bias. Here's the deal. Wherever and whenever I see a narcissist, I'm going to point him or her out. And I don't care if it's a professor of psychology, the president of the United States, or anyone else. When I see a narcissist, I have to ring the alarm. Narcissists are dangerous, destructive, deadly, poisonous, toxic. If I were to see a snake and the snake had orange hair, I would still alert you that there's a snake inching and angling towards your heel. And if I were to see a snake discussing rules for life, I would still indicate that it's a snake. I am irreverent when I see narcissists. They deserve no respect. You should never play by the rules with narcissists, ever. Point at them, shame them publicly, reduce them to rubble, eliminate them, clean them away. It's the only way. And the positions they hold, that's precisely the problem. Because people like you don't protest, don't dare, or even support them. They are where they are and the world is the way it is. I'm accused of bias. I was the first to introduce narcissism to the discourse in American politics. I was the first to write an article in July 2008 suggesting that political candidates be analyzed in terms of narcissism. And I took Obama as an example. I published an essay which was replicated in well over 3 million websites and was titled Barack Obama, Narcissist or Mealy Narcissistic. It was July 2008 before he became president. Similarly, before Trump became candidate, I published an essay. I gave an interview, I'm sorry, to the website, American thinker. And I warned that Trump is a malignant narcissist, a grandiose narcissist, a dangerous man. On my other channel, Vaknin Musings, you can find videos 3 and 4 years old predicting exactly what's happening today. Watch the video, Donald Trump, Narcissist in the White House. Trump, Obama, Democrat, Republican. I'm not biased. I'm not biased. The only group of people I'm strongly biased against are narcissists and psychopaths, especially those masquerading as good, empathic, loving, supportive people. The overwhelming vast majority of coaches, self-styled experts, public intellectuals and politicians. Meaning is a very important issue. And our world is infused with meaninglessness. Viktor Frankl had invented a whole new therapy around meaning, logo therapy. And we have a pandemic now, a meaningless pandemic, because a virus has no meaning. It does nothing in effect. It enters cells and replicates just to enter more cells and replicates, just to enter more cells and replicates. There's no other goal. There's no direction. There's no narrative. There's nothing. There's no story behind it. A virus is the reification of meaninglessness. And we are plagued with a pandemic of meaninglessness. So narcissism is an organizing principle. It explains the world in this sense. You can understand the world. You can infuse it with meaning if you apply the narcissistic scalpel. If you ask yourself questions about the narcissists and psychopaths that surround you. So today I want to read segments from two books in answer and in direct answer to many of the comments I had received. Many of you protested, that you never cheat, you never lie. Yeah, or as we used to say when I was young, yeah, yeah, yeah, heard you. Okay, Why We Cheat, a book by Farrick F.C. Fang, Fang, like Fangs, and our tour Casa de Val. Forgive me. So the book is titled Why We Cheat, but it's a great book. I want to quote, read a quote from the book. Not all people cheat, but it is astoundingly common. And people are much more inclined to cheat if others around them are cheating. Although it is comforting to think that most people are essentially honest. Cheating defined as acting dishonestly to gain an advantage is actually astoundingly common. In a 1997 survey, management professor Donald McCabe of Rutgers University and Linda Kleep Trevino, a professor of organizational behavior at the Pennsylvania State University, they revealed that about three-fourth, three-fourth, you hear me, 75%, of 1,800 students at nine state universities admitted to cheating on tests or written assignments. In 2005, sociologist Brian Martinson of the Health Partners Research Foundation in Bloomington, Minnesota and his colleagues reported that one-third of scientists, one-third of scientists confessed to engaging in questionable research practices during the previous three years. It's a euphemism for plagiarism and falsifying lab results. Humans are surprisingly quick to cheat when the circumstances are conducive. In 2008, behavioral economists Dana Reilly of Duke University and his colleagues described what happened when they asked college students to solve math puzzles for cash rewards. When the researchers changed the experimental conditions such that the students assumed the examiner could not detect cheating, the average self-reported test score rose significantly. So when the student thought that he could get away with cheating, he cheated. The researchers determined that the scores were not inflated by a few students who cheated a lot, but rather by many students cheating a little. If cheaters used a simple cost-benefit calculation, one might predict that people would cheat as much as possible, not just a little bit. Yet in a Reilly study, students on average reported six correct answers when they got only four correct answers right, even though they could have raised their scores to a maximum of 20. In addition, no simple relation exists between the magnitude of the reward and the likelihood of cheating. When a Reilly's team increased the cash reward, the amount of cheating actually declined. A Reilly suggested the students felt guilty when they cheated more, or when they received larger amount of cash through dishonest behavior. Another possibility is that the students thought they would be less likely to attract attention if they cheated only a little. That's my favorite explanation. I'm continuing from the book. In 2011, a Reilly and behavioral economist Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School reported that people who score higher on psychological tests of creativity are more apt to engage in dishonesty, a connection that is perhaps not surprising, considering that creativity and tactical deception are both products of the neocortex. These scholars submit that creative individuals are better at self-deception. They come up with more inventive rationalizations for cheating as a way of making themselves feel better about doing it. As Proust observed in Remembrance of Things Past, his famous book, by the way the longest book ever written, it is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves that we cease to notice that we are lying. Or, as George told Jerry in Seinfeld 75 years later, it's not a lie if you believe it. Ironically, the creativity and intelligence that we regard as instinctively human might have arisen alongside our ability to deceive. We are who we are because we cheat. Unchecked dishonesty can promote the perception that one must cheat to remain competitive. And certain observations have led the reality to refer to cheating as infectious. Social contagion may help explain the high prevalence of cheating in relatively small groups of people. For example, 125 Harvard students were recently under investigation for cheating on the final examination in an introductory government course. More than half of these students were told to withdraw from school for up to a year as punishment. It is statistically unlikely that nearly half the 279 students in that class are sociopaths, given the low prevalence of sociopathy about 3% in males and 1% in females. A more plausible explanation is contagion, infection. A widespread bending of the rules probably led students to conclude that collaborating with other students was okay. A class was called Introduction to Congress, so perhaps students were simply identifying too much with the material. One of our books, Why We Cheat? Authors, Farrick, C. Fang and Autoor Casadeval published by Scientific American Mind in 2013. Actually, this particular quote is from an article in Scientific American Mind in May June issue. And I want to end with a quote from another book. This is your brain on parasites by Kathleen McAuliffe. Revulsion and disgust at physical things such as overflowing toilets shares much of the brain's circuitry with moral outrage. Both physical disgust and moral outrage are associated with the brain's anterior insula and amygdala. This may explain why moral judgments are so often coupled with disgust. Visceral disgust, that part of you that wants to scream jak when you see an overflowing toilet or think about eating cockroaches. Visceral disgust typically engages the anterior insula, an ancient part of the brain that governs the vomiting response. Yet the very same part of the brain also fires up in revulsion when subjects are outraged by the cruel or unusually unjust treatment of others. That's not to say that visceral and moral disgust perfectly overlap in the brain, but they use enough of the same circuitry that the feelings that they evoke can sometimes bleed together, warping judgments. While there are shortcomings in the design of the neural hardware that supports our moral sentiments, there's still much to admire about it. In one notable study by a group of psychiatrists and political scientists led by Christopher T. Doze, DAWES, subjects had their brains imaged as they played games that required them to divide monetary gains among the group. The anterior insula was activated when a participant decided to forfeit his own earnings so as to reallocate money for players with the highest income to those with the lowest. A phenomenon aptly dubbed the Robin Hood impulse. The anterior insula, other research has shown, also glows bright when a player feels that he has been made an unfair offer during an ultimatum game. In addition, it's activated when a person chooses to punish selfish or greedy partners. We have a part of the brain that reacts to injustice and to selfishness. These kinds of studies have led neuroscientists to characterize the anterior insula as a fountainhead of pro-social emotions. It is credited for giving rise to compassion, generosity and reciprocity. Or, if an individual harms others, remorse, shame and atonement. By no means, however, is the insula the only neural area involved in processing both visceral and moral disgust. Some scientists think the greatest overlap in the two types of revulsion may occur in the amygdala, another ancient part of the brain. Psychopaths, whose ranks swell with remorseless cold-blooded killers. Psychopaths are notorious for their lack of empathy, and they typically have smaller than normal amygdalae and insulae, along with other areas involved in the processing promotion. Psychopaths are also less bothered than most people by foul odors, smells, feces and bodily fluids, tolerating them as one scientific article put it, with equanimity. I would like to add here that psychopaths are much more likely to play with body excretions, feces, urine, insects. Coming back to the book, people with Huntington's disease, a hereditary disorder that causes neurological degeneration, are similar to psychopaths in having shrunken insulae, and they too lack empathy, though they don't exhibit the same predatory behavior. Possibly owing to damage to additional circuits involved in disgust, however, they afflicted a remarkable in showing no aversion whatsoever to contaminants. For example, they think nothing of picking feces up with their bare hands. This is Huntington's disease. Interestingly, women rarely become psychopaths. The disorder affects 10 males for every one female, and they have larger insulated men relative to total brain size. This anatomical distinction may explain why women are the sex most sensitive to disgust. It may also have bearing on yet another traditionally female characteristic, feminine characteristic. As befits women's role as primary caretakers, women score higher than men on tests of empathy, a very useful trait for gauging when a cranky baby has a fever on its own. Why moral and visceral disgust became entangled in our brain in the first place is hard to explain, but British disgustologist Valerie Curtis puts forward a scenario that, while impossible to verify, certainly sounds plausible. Evidence from prehistoric hemp sites, she notes, suggests that our ancient ancestors may have been more concerned about hygiene and sanitation than commonly assumed. Some of the earliest artifacts from these sites include combs and middens. Designated dump sites for animal bones, shells, plant remnants, human excrement and other ways that might attract vermin and predators are common in all these campsites. Early humans, she strongly suspects, would have taken a dim view of peers who were slobs about disposing their garbage. People who sped, people who defecated wherever they pleased or made no effort to comb the lice out of their hair. These inconsiderate acts exposed the group to bad odors, smells, bodily waste and infection, triggered revulsion and so by association, the offenders themselves became disgusting. To bring their behavior into line, Curtis thinks, they were shamed and ostracized. And if that failed, they were shamed, which is exactly how we react to contaminants. We want nothing to do with it. Since similar responses were required to counter both types of threat, the neural circuitry that evolved to limit exposure to parasites could easily be adopted to serve the broader function of avoiding people whose behavior engendered health. Complimenting this view, Curtis's team found that people who are the most repulsed by unhygienic behavior score higher than average on a test of orientation towards punishment. That is, these kind of people are the most likely to endorse throwing criminals into jail and imposing stiff penalties on those who break society's rules. From this point in human development, it took just a tad more rigidity of the same circuitry to bring our species to a momentous place. We became disgusted by people who behaved immorally. This development, Curtis argues, is central to understanding how we became an extraordinarily social and cooperative species, capable of putting our minds together to solve problems, create new inventions, exploit natural resources with unprecedented efficiency, and ultimately lay the foundations of civilization. It's the book, This Is Your Brain on Parasites, How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society. The author is Kathleen McAuliffe. He was published in 2016. Again, highly recommended. I dedicated this video to modification, trying to put it in the context of evolution and human history, and the interaction with the narcissist. These reactions we have to immoral people who don't keep promises, who are unjust, who abuse people, who are selfish. These reactions are visceral and moral. They come from the most ancient reptilian parts of our brain, in effect. We can control them. They are likely to accrue and accumulate in a relationship with the narcissist and psychopath. Gradually, you become sensitized. You begin to be repelled by your partner. This is another dynamic that the narcissist with his cold empathy spots. He picks up your signals. He realizes the revulsion that you are experiencing every time that he is himself. He tries to act. He tries to not be himself. But how long and how often can you do that? There are glimpses. The mask slips, snippets, shards of his true personality penetrate and emerge. And the more you are exposed to the real being or entity inside the narcissist, the more terrified and repelled and revolted and disgusted viscerally and morally, you are. Gradually and incrementally, you come to the point of not regarding the narcissist as human at all. That's why many people use metaphors like demons or machines or non-human, non-men. The language breaks down. Language fails to describe when we attempt to describe one category of objects, human beings in terms of others. The narcissist gives the perfect appearance of a human being, but he is not in any meaningful sense of the word. And you pick up on it. You fall in love. You enter the shared fantasy with a simulacrum, with a disguise, with a projection of a full-fledged, highly attractive, irresistible human being. But then you discover it's a hologram. You discover it's a hologram. It's a Truman Show. It's a theater production. It's fake. It's a movie. But by then it's too late. You have been reduced to two dimensions. You remember the movie? I shrank the kids. That's what happens to you. To extricate yourself from a shared fantasy is far more difficult than to enter it. And no bargaining will help you. You need to escalate. You need to do something drastic. Cheating is one option. Other things. Narciss will not let you go as long as he thinks that you can fit into a shared fantasy. You need to convince him otherwise. You need to modify him. There's no other way for you out. You're hostage. You need to absolve and release yourself from the camp where you're being held. You have fallen in love with the Stockholm Syndrome, with your abuser, trauma-bonding, with your kidnapper. You need to wake up. You need to wake up. And you need to do harm to the man who had enslaved you. And then you need to walk away and restart your life. Much wiser, I should hope.