 hmm I love chilled blood sorry wine not blood wine wine I swear not one of you believe me my name is Sam Vaknin I'm the author of Malignant self-love narcissism revisited and a wine-gazzling professor of psychology today we are going to discuss a controversial topic for a change victims of childhood abuse children who are abused and traumatized especially during the formative years before the age of six tend to hate themselves lifelong not only do they tend to hate themselves but they want everyone around them to hate them they provoke people to hate them they feel comfortable and relieved they feel much less anxious when they are despised disdained held in contempt rejected humiliated degraded and yes you're right it's a form of masochism that children who have been abused in the early years of childhood love to be hated is not my insight it's been suggested by a much greater authority Donald Woods Winnicott the pediatrician turned psychoanalyst and one of the forefathers of child psychology possibly together with Piaget and unafroid they are it they are child psychology so Winnicott suggested that abused and traumatized children don't dare to hope for love they dare not hope for love they anticipate rejection they predict with absolute certainty disappointment they know what's coming and to protect themselves against this against hurt against loss against disappointment they hate other people ostentatiously visibly they hate as a form of spectacle is as a performance they act out their hatred or as Winnicott called it anti-social tendencies they desire to be hated in return it is their way of testing the waters can you hate me without resorting to maltreatment and rejection can these people can these institutions hate the child without punishing the child without rejecting the child without humiliating the child it's a test but it's a lifelong test it's a masochistic test it's self-destructive it's self-defeating to understand why abused children resort to this self-defeating strategy we need first to discuss the twin concepts of trauma and the other let's start with trauma Winnicott himself said that there is no such thing as trauma there are painful events dangerous events unsettling events all around us life happens and it's harsh and it's nasty and it's brutish it's all true no one is denying this but Winnicott said that the trauma is the way we react to these events it is a subjective thing not an objective thing of course is right 10 people can be exposed to the very same event and only two of them would be traumatized and the other eight would walk away happy go lucky so it is our reaction to events which constitute constitute the trauma epic tattoos who preceded Winnicott by a few millennia epic tattoo said men are disturbed not by events but by the views which they take of these events a clever man Albert Ellis the founder of rational emotive therapy the forerunner of cognitive behavioral therapy so Albert Ellis who established as I said our ebt said that experiences cause no specific emotional reactions the individual's belief system produces the reaction indeed this insight is integrated into rational emotive behavioral therapy and then there was Harry Stuck Sullivan he said that people are products of their environment including traumatic environment Boris Cyranoic studied trauma in depth and he reached a conclusion after decades that trauma consists of the injury but also or mainly of the representation of the injury in one's mind adult interpretations of events that is the most damaging post-traumatic experience for children children go through life or at least through the formative years pretty oblivious to the meanings the meaning of what's happening around them they sail through life absentmindedly so to speak to pay attention to highly specific things but the vast majority of the swirling environment goes unnoticed by them it is the way adults react to events to occurrences to mishaps to accidents to fights to trauma the way adults react that imprints itself on the child's mind the child is traumatized by the way adults react to what is happening did when a court was brave enough to suggest that incest in itself is not a trauma the child is traumatized by the way other by the way adults around the child react to the incest the police teachers court evaluators psychologists neighbors his other parent people around react to the incest they're horrified they're terrified they are awestruck they are dumbfounded they are in pain they rage all these reactions imprint themselves on the very tender mind malleable mind of the child and they are the ones that create the trauma not the incest itself that's again not some value there's Donald Winickle I fully agree with him of course and I fully agree with Boris Cyrilnik adult interpretations of events are the most damaging post-traumatic experiences for children Dorothea Rao ROWE said that when we are wrong or when something bad happens to us when we are traumatized by some event or something we tend to self-blame we tend to feel guilty ashamed and helpless these are the very foundations of trauma we can summarize this segment by saying the trauma is an environmental subjective thing not an objective thing the child looks around gauges adult reactions to what is happening and then develops trauma this is point number one point number two the assemblages of traumas and abuse in the life of an abused child in the life of a mistreated child these assemblages begin to constitute these child's self or self-states in other words in other words the child is formed by his experiences of trauma and abuse there's nothing new in this even Freud 120 130 years ago had suggested that the young mind the brain is molded by experiences of trauma and abuse and and generations of scholars after Freud had fully agreed including the latest discoveries in neuroscience trauma and abuse shape the brain the brain is neuroplastic to a large extent and so if trauma and abuse shape the brain and if trauma is a subjective experience reactive to the environment one could safely say the traumatized children abused children are shaped by the reactions of their environment to the objective events that are happening Georg Hey Egel was a German philosopher says that said that consciousness of self depends on the presence of the other Jean Paul Sartre decades later said that the perception of the world including the perception of other people changes when another person appears we absorb that other person's concept of the other and assimilate it into our own concept in other words we are totally shaped we shape shift as people enter our immediate presence we are heavily influenced by other people their reactions their beliefs their opinions their views their speech acts and of course their actions let us summarize these two segments together children who are abused and traumatized in childhood develop trauma and post traumatic conditions because of the reactions of the adults in their immediate environment the self-states of such a child develop in accordance with input from the outside the child shapes itself forms itself mold itself to reflect the other other people around the child come to define the child and if they react to the trauma in a way that in itself is traumatizing the trauma is actually multiplied I'd like to read to you something by Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan is my speeding image we look like identical twins but we couldn't be further from each other in our thinking still you know even a clock that is dysfunctional shows the right time twice a day and I must admit that Jacques Lacan had shown the right way the right time more than twice in his career so I want to read to you something from and about Lacan Lacan therefore concluded that each one of us is a self only because we have a concept of the other for Lacan the other is the absolute otherness that lies beyond the self it is the environment into which we are born and which we have to translate or make sense of in order to survive and thrive an infant must learn to assemble sensations or into concepts and categories in order to function in the world he or she does this through gradually acquiring an awareness and understanding of a series of signifiers signs or codes but these signifiers can only come to us from the external world of course the a world that lies beyond beyond the self therefore we they must have been formed from the language or what Lacan prefers to call discourse of the other in other words in other words the others form us we import from the outside the meaning and the sense of the world and it becomes us Lacan says we are only able to think or to express our ideas and emotions through language and the only language we have is that of the other the sensations and images that translate into the thoughts of our unconscious must therefore be constructed from this language of the other or as Lacan stated the unconscious is the discourse of the other so we have established I think to our satisfaction that what we call self or I call self stays are actually formed by interactions with other people and they interpret interpret the world for us they tell us wow this is traumatic or wow this is a great team that has happened to you you should be happy we tend to conform to these expectations and messages Charles Horton Cooley called it the looking glass self he said that we view ourselves based on how we imagine that other people view us Heinz Kohut another one another another psychology who is not among my favorites Heinz Kohut said when a child's needs are not met a fragmented self emerges consisting of the narcissistic self and the grandiose self Eric Byrne who is a favorite of mine said that we harbore we contain lifelong throughout the lifespan child adult and parental ego states and finally Fritz Perls the founder of Gestalt therapy said that a sense of reality can is created through perception the ways we view our experiences and not the events themselves I'm about to launch into a personal confession and to do so I need to fortify myself with a dose of Donald Woods Winnicott I'm going to read to you something that he had written about hatred he said the child of a broken home or without parents spends his time unconsciously looking for his parents and so feelings from past relationships are displaced onto other adults the child has internalized the hate and sees it even when it is no longer present and so in this new situation in or in new situations the child needs to see what happens when hatred is in the air Winnicott says what happens is that after a while the child so adopted so the child who finds himself in new environments gains hope and then he starts to test out the environment he has found and to seek proof of his guardians ability to hate objectively there are many many ways for the child to express hatred and prove that he or she is indeed not worthy of being loved this worthlessness is the message that was imparted by earlier negative parental experiences from the child's point of view he is attempting to protect himself from the risk of ever having to feel loved or to be loved because of the potential disappointment that accompanies dead state of being so children who are victims of abuse love to be hated they're used to be hated they expect hate they make make everyone around them hate them that's their comfort zone they provoke people they misbehave they become antisocial they test everyone constantly and this is the case with children who later become mentally unhealthy mentally unwell for example narcissists i read to you something i've written and published 25 years ago when no one heard of narcissism and i was the only narcissist worldwide to come out of the closet and to admit to having been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder he took another 15 years for another narcissist to do the same so during these 15 years i was mr narcissism i was the target for all the hatred in the world all the victims of narcissistic abuse a phrase that i coin hated me as a stand-in for their spouses or boyfriends or mothers or fathers i was the dark board and everyone was sniping at me this is still the case to a large extent today and that at that time 25 years ago i published this kind of confession i said if i had to distill my cotidian existence in two pithy sentences i would say i love to be hated and i hate to be loved hate is the compliment of fear and i like being feared it imbues me with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence i am veritably inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces they know that i am capable of anything i am godlike i'm ruthless i'm devoid of scruples i'm capricious i'm unfathomable i'm emotionless i'm asexual i'm omniscient omnipotent and omnipresent i'm a plague a devastation an inescapable verdict a monster i nurture my ill repute stoking it and fanning the flames of gossip it is an enduring asset as far as i'm concerned of course he who loves to be hated and hates to be loved also loves to hate and hates to love he fears intimacy the narcissist's emotional complexity ambivalence towards significant others is notorious his so-called love often comes laced with bouts of vitriolic or even violent abuse and aggression but the narcissist's hatred is atypical rampant barris suggested in 2005 that hate is a stable experiential state that it is an emotion and that it involves a goal driven motivation to diminish or utterly eradicate the well-being of the target of hate but in contradiction to this definition the narcissist's hatred is not stable it is a transformation of resentment and therefore an aggressive reaction to frustration it's much more like a dollar dollar's aggression frustration aggression hypothesis in 1939 the narcissist does not care about his victims well-being he just wishes to remove the fount of frustration altogether and expediently and so by the lights of barris and rambo the narcissist's hatred doesn't qualify as hate at all but of course that's wrong the narcissist does hate abundantly so the narcissist resents his object dependence on his sources of narcissistic supply and by reading himself of the constant presence of these sources he seeks to ameliorate and mitigate the irritation and the anxiety that they cause him his dependence on other people irritates him and makes him anxious and he wants to remove these other people from from his life of course even as he hatefully acts against his sources of supply his fans his followers his subscribers his lovers he is terrified of losing them and he attempts to placate and to bribe them into staying and fulfilling their function and this is the famous approach avoidance repetition compulsion expounded upon much later by vatslavik but hate and fear i are also sure generators of attention we underestimate this aspect of virulent negative affectivity just go online on social media and you will see how much attention you can reap by being viciously aggressive overtly violent ostentatiously envious etc it is all about narcissistic supply of course the drug which we narcissists consume and which consumes us in return and so coming back to me of course i attack sadistically people authority figures institutions my hosts my fans i make sure that they know about my eruptions and learn to hate me even people who start out loving me i want them to end up hating me i purvey only the truth and nothing but the truth but i do it because i'm a sadist the truth hurts i love to see the discomfort and pain that it causes i tell it bluntly in an orgy of evocative baroque english the blind rage this induces in in the targets of my vitriolic diatribes this blind rage provokes in me a surge of gratification satisfaction inner tranquility not obtainable by any other means i like to think about their pain of course but that is the lesser part of the equation it is my horrid future an inescapable punishment that carries the irresistible appeal to me like some strain of alien virus it infects my better judgment and i succumb i even give up on narcissistic supply i give up on on available offered sex i reject sexual advances i reject friendships all in order to make people angry at me and hate me because then i know my punishment is guaranteed my self-destruction is all but done in general my weapon is the truth and the human propensity to avoid the truth intactless breaching of every etiquette i chastise hector berate snub and offer a proverb i must self-proclaim germaya i harangue from my many self-made puppets i bully i understand the prophets i understand toquemada the truth is a powerful hurt inducing weapon i weaponize it the way many others did throughout history i bask in the incomparable pleasure of being right i derive my grandiose superiority from the contrast between my righteousness and the humanness and fallibility of others but it is not that simple it never is that simple with narcissists fostering public revolt and the inevitable ensuing social sanctions fulfill two other psychodynamic goals the first one i alluded to it is the burning desire the need the drive to be punished to be hated to be rejected in the grotesque mind of the narcissist his punishment is equally his vindication by being permanently on trial the narcissist claims the high moral ground and the position of a martyr or a victim misunderstood discriminated against unjustly roughed outcast by his very towering genius or other outstanding qualities to conform to the cultural stereotype of the tormented artist or the mad genius the narcissist provokes his own suffering he is thus validated suffering is his hallmark his badge of honor is only accomplishment in many cases the grandiose fantasies of the narcissist in this way acquire a modicum of substance the narcissist can tell himself if i were not so special they wouldn't have persecuted me so paranoia is a form of narcissism paranoid is at the very center of attention malign attention but attention all the same the persecution of the narcissist is his uniqueness he must be different for better or for worse the streak of paranoia embedded in the narcissist makes the outcome inevitable his persecutory delusions are translated into actions that guarantee their own validity the narcissist is in constant conflict with lesser mortal beings his spouse his shrink his boss his colleagues his neighbors his pastor he is forced to stoop to the intellectual level of these midgets the narcissist feels like gallivore a giant strapped by lily pushens the life of the narcissist is a constant struggle against the self-contented mediocrity of his surroundings he stands out he is special and if no one else would tell him that he tells himself this is called self-supply this is the narcissist fate and destiny which he accepts though never stoically it is a calling a mission and a recurrence in his stormy life to be hated is to be real to be hated is to be true to be hated is to be right to be hated is to be just to be hated is to be virtuous and above all to be hated is to be noticed and to be hated is to validate the narcissist's view of the world as a hostile jungle malicious full of malevolence and greed and envy to be hated is a badge of honor deeper still the narcissist has an image of himself as a worthless bed dysfunctional extension of others a bed object internal bed object and so narcissism is compensatory in constant need of narcissistic supply the narcissist feels humiliated by this need the contrast between his cosmic fantasies and the reality of his addiction dependency his clinging and neediness and his often failure the grandiosity gap between reality and fantastic self-image that's an emotionally wrenching and harrowing experience it is a constant background noise of devilish demeaning laughter harsh unforgiving unremitting unrelenting inner critics sadistically in pursuit of the narcissist sitting in judgment of him in a tribunal that never adores and is never satisfied and presents no evidence the voices say you're a fraud and an imposter you're a zero you deserve nothing you're a failure and a loser if they only knew how worthless you are and the narcissist attempts to silence these tormenting voices not by fighting them but by actually agreeing with them unconsciously sometimes consciously the narcissist says to these voices i do agree with you i am bad i am worthless i'm deserving of the most severe punishment for my rotten characters and bad habits addictions in the constant fraud that i've become i will go out i will seek my doom i will make everyone hate me and destroy me now that i've complied with you voices my introjects will you leave me alone will you leave me be and of course they never do