 I hope you won't regret it by the time I finish. Today we are going to discuss seriously disturbed people, people with personality disorders. And within personality disorders we are going to discuss a subgroup known as cluster B. It has another name, it's also known as the Erotic Personality Disorders. It even has another name, it's known as the Dramatic Personality Disorders. And the reason it has all these names is because people with cluster B personality disorders are shockingly erotic and dramatic. So, there are four personality disorders in this cluster. But before we go there, what is a personality disorder? The very phrase personality disorder makes two underlying assumptions. One that there is such a thing as personality. And the second thing is that this thing, personality, can somehow be disordered. As if all personalities are ordered and structured and some people are disordered and chaotic and probably in politics. So, personality disorders are patterns, patterns of dysfunction across the lifespan that are rigid. They cannot be modified or they are not amenable to modification or intervention. There are two books, two books that help us diagnose people and make a lot of money. The first one is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. The second one is the International Classification of Diseases published by Wells, the WHO, the World Health Organization and Armed of the United Nations and the Illuminati. I'm joking, it's not Illuminati. I'm joking a lot by the way throughout my lecture. So, you need to be really on your toes to see whether I'm serious or not. Sometimes even I don't know. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was first written in 1952 at the request of the insurance industry in the United States. Pharmaceutical companies and the insurance industry insisted on classifying mental health disorders, creating lists of criteria so that they can reimburse therapies, psychologists and other GISs. So, that was the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and it was a hefty 100 pages. Today's edition, a mere 70 years later, today's edition has well over 1000 pages. Either we all became 10 times more mentally sick or there's a game going on. Now, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5, text revision, which was published a few weeks ago, actually, is a curious hybrid. It copies verbatim the fourth edition and yet at the very, very end where no one is likely to ever go, it says actually the DSL-4, the fourth edition is wrong. We should think, we should reconceive our personality disorders as something on a spectrum or a dimension, not categorical, not according to lists, but something that can go from zero to zero on some kind of a line. So, this is called the alternative model and here's the problem. The alternative model of personality disorders has nothing to do with the diagnostic criteria in Edition 4, which are copied into Edition 5. Consequently, for many personality disorders, we have two ways to diagnose according to the DSL. We have two ways to diagnose which have nothing to do with the job. Absolutely nothing. The ICD is much more advanced because it is not subject to special interest and to money. And so the ICD actually, Edition 11, which theoretically should be published next year, but actually has been already published in 2019, Edition 11 actually unifies all personality disorders, something that I've been advocating for well over 30 years, unifies all personality disorders, into essentially a single clinical entity with emphasis. So, you'll be diagnosed with a personality disorder with narcissistic emphasis or antisocial emphasis. That is exactly the reality in therapy. I treat people. When you're in clinical settings, that's exactly what's happening. No one is pure. There's no pure case. And people switch between various personality disorders in the same volume. So you don't have a pure narcissist. Usually you have a narcissist who is also antisocial, a psychopathic narcissist or a malignant narcissist. Or you would have a narcissist who is a bit dysregulated, so there would be a comorbidity of narcissism and borderline. It's always a mixture of something. It's always very salad. And there's transitions, there are transitions between the various personalities. So you could start working, start off working with the narcissist and then under stress or pressure. Next time you're meeting is literally a borderline. It's extremely common. Any practitioner would tell you. So, there are four personality disorders in cluster B. But remember, these differential diagnoses, these distinctions are very artificial. They're counterfactual. They're useless to a large extent. Even, I would say, extremely misleading. Now, the four personality disorders in cluster B are, according to order of grandiose and clear megalomania, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder. The extreme form of antisocial personality disorder is colloquially known, colloquially known, not professionally, as a psychopath. A psychopath is not a clinical term, despite what you were led to believe. It's not accepted by the Committee of the Diagnostic and Statistical Network, let alone a sociopath, which is totally pipe. Okay, but there are extreme antisocials, and we would call them from now on psychopaths, because it's easy that everyone knows the word, and because it sounds very frightening, and not, or not, to survive. And because I promise you the equivalent of Netflix, so... I'd like to focus on two of these, and I'll explain to you in a minute why. The reason I'm going to focus on narcissistic and borderline personality disorder is because I don't think the other two are actually disordered. I don't think antisocial personality disorder is a mental illness at all. I think it's a tendency to defy society, contumaciousness, resentment or rejection of authority, defiance, reactance, in your face, my way or the highway, you know? But that's a character, what used to be called character, before psychology attempted to become science. Psychology is pseudoscience, but don't tell anyone. So before psychology attempted to pose as a science, we have word like character and temperament that can find in old textbooks. Character, temperament. Yeah, it's a character. It's just a guy, usually, usually it's a guy, who doesn't like the way things are. He is a normal to himself. He doesn't listen to anyone. He disobeys, he's reactant. In other words, he defies, he's reckless. All this is very bad, especially for the psychopath, but it's not a mental illness. It's what we would call perhaps a culture-bound syndrome. Syndrome that society rejects. We can even think of settings where psychopathy is advantageous. For example, the military, or maybe policing. Not to mention politics, of course. Or surgeons, there's an over-representation of psychopaths among medical surgeons. Among chief executive officers or folks, 500. 5% are psychopaths. That's the famous study by hair and baby up. 5%. That's five times the incidence in the general population. So it seems that psychopathy is an adaptation, often negative adaptation. These people end up in prison. Or positive adaptation in certain settings, but it is an adaptation, in my view, not a mental illness. Similarly, dysrheonic personality disorder. Dysrheonic personality disorder, I think, was invented by a group of Victorian males, Victorian white males, who really dislike it when a woman flirts and is a bit cockatish and seeks attention and so on and so forth. They really don't like that, because they feel it's threatening. So they created the diagnosis of dysrheonic personality disorder. Give me a dysrheonic any time of the day. So I'm excluding these two so-called disorders, because I think they should be totally contested. They do not remind you of your constituent mental illness or a clinical entity in any sense at all, that I know. That leaves us with no statistics and borderline personalities. Now, you want to go online and find a million videos and two million pages about it. When I started, I did the only website. In 1995, when I was doing dinosaurs in Budapest, I had the first website on narcissism and for 10 years I had the only website. But now, there's an explosion. Everyone in this dog is an expert on narcissism, and especially the dog. So it's not a big problem to go online and find all the information that you want and that's not what I'm going to do today. I'm not going to give you a list of criteria. You can ask questions later, which I will ignore, but I'm not going to give you a list of criteria. I'm just going to introduce it to some new thinking about this disorder. So a narcissist, I don't know if it's acceptable in good company in Budapest, but a narcissist is a glorified way of saying asshole. It's a jerk. A borderline is essentially emotionally dysregulated, and we are thinking of replacing the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder with emotional dysregulation disorder. The key feature of borderline is emotional dysregulation. She is unable. She, because until recently, majority of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder were women diagnosed, of course, by men. And so, I'm not going to use she, but today it's 50-50. 50% of the diagnosis today are male and 50% are female. Maybe because majority of psychotherapies today are female. So, borderline is overwhelmed by her emotions. Her emotions are like a tsunami. She's carried away by these emotions. Consequently, she can't control her behavior. She has no impulse control. She acts recklessly. A process known as acting out. She decompensates her defenses from us, including internal defenses, against this wave that she can't serve. She can't serve this wave. She drowns in the wave. So, this is emotional dysregulation. It's a key feature of borderline. We'll discuss borderline a bit later. And in your questions, you can ask about borderline. It's my favorite topic. I'm going to introduce you some new ways of looking at it. A lot of it is my work, but a lot of it became mainstream over the decades and talk a lot when people get so bored that they say, okay, okay, you're right. And it goes mainstream. So, narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder are the outcomes of early childhood trauma. Early childhood trauma and abuse. We know this because we have correlation studies, for example, the famous case, adverse childhood experiences study, which is the biggest in history. So, we know that there's a strong correlation between early childhood abuse and trauma and later in life development of narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. Now, BPD for short, otherwise the lecture will be six hours, BPD for short can develop as early as age 12 and can be diagnosed as early as age 12. NPD should not be diagnosed prior to age 18, and that's because there is a phase in adolescence which involves very marked grandiosity and a decline in empathy. In other words, adolescence very often resembles narcissism. So, we should never diagnose someone before the age of 18 and the new revision would say that we should never diagnose someone with NPD before the age of 21. So, it's okay, I qualify. Now, if we have a common etiology, etiology is causation, if we have a common etiology and if you solve a dwelling because we can find nothing else, by the way, it's the sole factor that appears in all the cases, almost all the cases, the sole factor. We do have a genetic component in borderline. There is a genetic influence in borderline. If you have a borderline relative of the first or second degree, the chances of developing borderline are five times higher. So, there seems to be a genetic component. There is brain abnormality in borderline. Brain abnormalities. They have been well-documented. So, it seems that there are other factors that influence borderline, but the only factor that is common to all borderlines without exception is child abuse and especially, actually, sexual abuse in child abuse, about 40% of the case. So, if this is the case, why insist that these are personality disorders? They resemble, to my mind, a lot, post-traumatic conditions. So, I'm beginning, I started about 35 years ago, I started to look at these disorders as the outcomes of trauma, post-traumatic conditions. And then there was a woman, Judith Werner, and she came up with a concept of CPTSD, complex trauma. Complex trauma is a trauma that is the outcome of repeated exposure. PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is when you're exposed to a single event, an airplane crashing, a lecture by Sam Bachman, you know, these are traumatic events, and very few people recover. So, this is PTSD, but complex trauma is, if I were your professor, and you would have heard many lectures, that would have been complex trauma. Sorry. Judith Werner, the mother of the field of complex trauma, is now advocating openly to eliminate the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and to replace it with complex trauma. I've been saying it long before Judith Werner, but it doesn't matter. So, yes, I agree. I think it is post-traumatic conditions. Why is it important for these semantics, splitting hairs? Why does it matter how we call it? Personality. The reason is very simple. We don't know how to treat personality disorders. That's a dirty secret of psychology. They are actually extremely bad at treating personalities, with very few exceptions. Now, ironically, one of the exceptions is borderline personality disorder, where we have TBT, dialectical behaviour therapy, which is verifications, but otherwise we suck at treating personality disorders. Not so with trauma. We are very good at treating trauma. The prognosis for treatments of trauma, therapies of trauma, prognosis is excellent, actually. So, if we just reframe, if we change the way we think about narcissism and borderline, and we begin to pay attention to the trauma aspects, maybe we can help these people. It's not semantic. It's not a semantic argument. It's a very, very prussian argument. And should we make this switch, I think we'll be able to help a lot more people than we're doing nowadays. When I say that these conditions are post-traumatic, I'm talking in effect about three aspects of trauma. I and others' problems. I'm talking about three aspects of trauma. The first one is known as dissociation. The second one is known as attachment, attachment-style problems with attachment. And the third one is known as disregulation. These are the three aspects, I mean, there are many other aspects. But within the context of NPD and BPD, these are the three critical aspects. I will now review each and every one of them, even if you don't want to. And then we'll move forward. Let's start with disregulation. Disregulation is the most visible aspect. So when you come across a borderline, she is likely to display disregulation even in daily interactions. Your name is specific as anxiety. And very often people with borderline personality disorders are also diagnosed with anxiety disorders. But a lot of the so-called anxiety that the borderline shows, in day-to-day interactions, do you want coffee? A lot of this is actually not anxiety. It's kind of emotional disregulation. Borderlines, for example, are triggered by words, locations, smells. Very much like Marcel Poust, Remembrance of Things Past, you know, how the book starts. He walks across a house and there's a wafting smell of cookies, Madeleine cookies. And the gates of memory open. This is borderline. By the way, it was a very interesting case. He stayed at home all his life. He was sick and so on and so forth. But if you read his work, he strikes me a lot like a borderline. Anyhow, borderlines are triggered all the time. It doesn't take much to trigger a borderline. Disregulation is a permanent feature of borderline. Now, disregulation pushes the borderline. And when I say borderline, also the narcissist, but in a bit of a different way. The narcissist is also disregulated. The difference between the narcissist and the borderline is the coping strategy. How the borderline copes with the emotional disregulation and how the narcissist copes with the emotional disregulation is different. This difference in coping strategy defines the disorder. Another reason to think that these are not actually personality disorders, but different reactance modes to trauma. Okay, we come to it in a minute. So, when you're disregulated all the time, you have two options. One option is to harm yourself. And I'm kidding, I'm not joking. One option is to harm yourself. So in borderline, for example, we have a phenomenon like self-mutilation. Suicide like the Asian, suicidal actions. 11% of people with borderline personality disorder successfully commit suicide. 11%. So, our number. What is the reason to self-harm or self-mutilation? Several reasons. One of the most important of which is to drown out the disregulation. It's like the famous torture method in the Turkish Ottoman police. Those of you who have never been to the Turkish Ottoman police. So, what's the way to cure a headache is... Yeah. So, the borderline self-mutilates and self-harm in a variety of ways, by the way. Sexual self-trushing, for example, which is very common in borderline, is a form of self-harm. Even, I would say, teeming up with a narcissist is a form of self-harm. Even, I would say. An extremely common type of couple. First described by my good late friend, John Lushkar. So, there's a lot of self-harm. Self-harm drowns the disregulation. You know, if you have a headache and you beat your head with a hammer, for a minute you will forget the headache. Try it at home. So, that's function number one. Function number two is to feel alive. The borderline feels dead. Narcissist also feels dead. There's an emptiness inside, first described by Otto Kander, and others. Later, he was known in the object relations school in the United Kingdom. The empty schizoid core. Country, and others. So, there's an emptiness. There's a black hole. There's a void in narcissists and borderlines. And so, when the borderline self-harm, the self-missing needs, she comes alive. She suddenly feels alive. And there are other reasons. So, this is one option. How to open disregulation. The second option is to outsource the regulation. We call it external regulation. The borderline says, you're my intimate partner. You will stabilize my moods. You will regulate my emotions. You are my stable rock. You will never abandon me. So, this is externalizing the regulation, outsourcing it. In a minute, we will see that it leads not always to favorable outcomes, but this is a solution. So, we have internal regulation and external regulation. Internal regulation via self-harm and external regulation by outsourcing of inner functions and inner processes to, for example, an intimate partner. Sorry. Sorry. This was an example. It's a regulation. It's unlawful. Sorry. The apology is temporarily accepted. We shall see about it later on. So, the narcissist also chooses the same solution. Narcissists are very self-destructive. They are masochistic in many instances. They self-sabotage. It's one moment that you give a country to a narcissist. It will end up with a pandemic and an attack on the capital. So, narcissistic stories end badly. They end badly because narcissists are self-defeating. It's a form of self-harm. Similarly, the narcissist outsources regulation. The narcissist wants or seeks attention from other people. This narcissistic supply. This attention is used to regulate the internal environment of the narcissist, especially his sense of self-worth. So, both the borderline and the narcissist are doing exactly the same. They internally regulate via self-harm and they externally regulate by outsourcing regulatory functions. The narcissist is by seeking attention, the borderline, by seeking a stable presence in a life who will never abandon it. However, this produces anxiety. Why? Whenever you're dependent on something or someone, you're anxious. Even if you don't feel it. If you're dependent on the government, you're anxious. If you're dependent on your spouse, you're anxious. Any dependency creates anxiety. End of story. Now, the twin mechanisms of regulation create twin anxiety. One of them is known as separation in security. Separation in security is commonly known by self-styled experts on YouTube as abandonment anxiety. That's not the clinical term. Clinical term is separation in security. But it's also known as abandonment anxiety as separation anxiety. Second anxiety is known as engulfment anxiety. So we have twin anxieties which correspond to the twin ways of regulating the internal environment. What is abandonment anxiety? The fear of being abandoned. What is engulfment anxiety? The fear of not being abandoned. Engulfment anxiety is when the borderline, for example, feels that she is merging with her partner. Her partner is digesting her, assimilating her, consuming her, subsuming her, and then she's gradually vanishing into her partner without a trace. This is engulfment anxiety. So the borderline constantly pendulates, she's like a pendulum, constantly pendulates between approach because the approach, when she approaches an intimate partner, her abandonment anxiety goes down. But then the partner reacts. He's loving, he's caring, he's all over her and she feels engulfed. She feels enmeshed. And she wants to run away. And this is avoidance. Approach, avoidance. We'll talk about it a bit later. Twin anxieties exist also in narcissism, of course. Everything I'm saying, everything I'm saying in this lecture lies through narcissism and borderline. But in different forms. In different forms. It's like zebra and horse and mammals. Yes? But one of them is stripes. Just I hope. So the twin anxieties reflect a reality. And now really it's a different part. I'm going to try to focus. I will give you a cue to make the check. Between anxieties produce they reflect a very interesting reality which I take credit for. And this reality is this. Object constancy versus introject constancy. I'll try to explain. Object is you. It says a lot about psychology not objects. Object relations. Okay. Because we are nice people. So. Object constancy is the ability to maintain a stable representation of someone in your mind when they are away, when they are absent. We develop object constancy as babies if mother is a good enough mother in the language of Winnicott. So if mother is good enough we would tend to trust that mother would be there even when she leaves the room. At the beginning we want and we cry a lot as babies because of you or another. And then gradually we learn that mother leaves the room but she also re-enters the room unfortunately for me in my case. So. Object constancy. We learn to create a representation of other people in our minds and when they are away we interact with this representation we feel safe. This concept is called a secure base. We have a secure base in our mind. This representation of another person in your mind is known as an internal object. Now we have various types of internal objects. The most important of which is the introject. The introject is the outcome of a twin process known as internalization, introjection or together identification. So. An introject is simply how to put it, a voice. The voice of mother voice of father important peers, role models teachers, gurus, etc. These voices are in your mind they speak to you all the time and they stand in for these people, even when these people are not dead, for example. So many of you still carry arguments with your dead mother. It's very common. Now. Object constancy is a tree condition for appropriate attachment. We come to it in a moment. My contribution was to suggest that while there is object constancy and object inconstancy object inconstancy is when the mother is not good. She is what Andre Green called dead mother. Not really dead but like emotionally dead. So she is depressive. She is absent. She is selfish. She is narcissistic. She is withholding. She is avoidant. She is this kind of mother that the baby cannot develop object constancy because mother is unpredictable. Mother is capricious. Mother is arbitrary. So the baby doesn't develop. And this is known as object inconstancy. So we have object constancy in healthy people and object inconstancy. My contribution was to suggest that the exact same thing happens with introject. We have introject constancy and introject inconstancy. And I proposed that what happens in borderlines is that they are unable to maintain introject constancy. When the other person is away, the introject of that person inside the borderline's mind fades, disappears. That's why borderlines are very hysterical when it comes to the physical presence of their intimate partners. The borderline insists on the physical presence of the intimate partner. And when the partner is away on a business trip stalking on the phone shows interest in another person laid off in it, doesn't it? The borderline falls apart because she cannot maintain stable representation of the intimate partner inside her mind. Her introjects are unstable, not constant. So they fade. Every therapist will tell you that when you work with borderlines you tell them take something of your husband if she's married. Take something of your husband. Take a car chief. Take, I don't know, in his eyeglass case take something of him when you go out. And when his introject begins to fade touch it. Just touch it as a stand-in for the partner. Because we've come across cases I'm sorry to say where borderlines ended up having sex with strangers because they could not maintain a stable introject of the husband. They simply could not remember the husband to that minute. They struggled to recall the face. And I'm not talking after two years of separation. I'm talking after two hours of separation. Is that better? So in borderlines there's introject inconstancy. In narcissists there is object inconstancy. And they are mirror images in this sense. I mentioned approach of avoidance. Borderlines approaches when she avoids. I hate you, don't leave me. That is borderline sentence. And I mentioned that this is the outcome of between anxieties. Abundance designed in government example. This is known in psychology as a repetition compulsion. It's repeating a pattern of behavior that is dysfunctional leads to better outcomes but you can't stop yourself from doing it again and again. So approach of avoidance is a repetition compulsion which is very common in the borderline. And in both borderlines and narcissists finally acknowledged by the DSM after decades of debate there is a deficit of empathy. We used to think erroneously that borderlines have a lot of empathy and narcissists have not empathy. We now know better I was the first to describe empathy in narcissists. I coined the phrase cold empathy. Narcissists do have empathy there is no emotional resonance with empathy there is no emotional correlate. Narcissists and psychopaths must have empathy because otherwise how will they abuse people how will they call people how will they cheat people deceive them if you don't have empathy you need to really read people well to do this but at the same time you need to have zero emotional reaction to it. So that's narcissists and psychopaths. Others have been claiming not before change they've been claiming that borderlines are the same they don't have empathy or they've reduced empathy and for many decades there was a raging debate and now the DSM accepted this that there is a reduction in empathy in borderline another reason to think that all these disorders are actually one and the same only with different coping strategies that's all. We need to get approach avoidance introjecting constancy objecting constancy etc lack of empathy when you put all this together it's clear that in intimate relationships there will be massive problems with attachment borderlines and narcissists have insecure attachment style we distinguish between secure attachment and insecure attachment secure attachment I think there are three people in the world who have it and they only in Kathmandu the rest of the population has insecure attachment my practice at least and they are not statistic actually strangely insecure attachment is fear of intimacy another name for fear of intimacy so you could be fearful you could have a fearful attachment style you could have an avoidant attachment style you could have a dismissive attachment style which is to be rude and reject people and so on there are numerous types of insecure attachment styles there are actually four basic ones but you can combine them so permutations are about 16 or 20 insecure attachment styles and borderlines and narcissists have insecure attachment styles because they don't have the first rudiment of attachment they don't have what it takes they don't even have one out of four or one out of six elements they have nothing like zero so they cannot attach now the narcissist compensates for a lack of attachment with a fantasy defense narcissism pathological narcissism is a fantasy defense the diagnostic criteria open with the word the pattern of fantasy it's a fantasy defense not fantasy, it's a defense mechanism first we strive by third fantasy is a defense mechanism and what the narcissist does he uses fantasy in everything and especially in his intimate relationships he creates a shared fantasy and he invites into the public into the shared fantasy you are very wise you are very wise to live now and for inviting to my share so the narcissist compensates for insecure attachment by offering the intimate partner a fantasy inviting her into the fantasy and then inhabiting the fantasy together and within the fantasy the intimate partner is being transformed dramatically very dramatically the borderline solution is also a shared fantasy but while the narcissist's shared fantasy is a type of cult we against the world the borderline fantasy is we are one I'm one with my intimate partner there's no no daylight between us we're a single organism with two heads and the narcissist's fantasy is it's just you and me because we are so special both of us so it's just you and me against the world that is hostile doesn't understand us and so the essence of the narcissist's shared fantasy I mentioned dissociation dissociation and you see that I don't have time to touch on these topics at length but each and every one of these topics if you go on my youtube channel and make me a richer on all of this channel each and every every single thing I've mentioned is like 2-3-4 videos a total of 4-10 hours and now this is a song and the reason the videos are so long is that I love to hear my voice I've been totally honest with you didn't appreciate it okay I'm from Indonesia forgetting one is called depersonalization the feeling that whoever is performing actions or acts is not you autopilot observing yourself from outside as though you're an observer movie as a movie with you as an actress dear realization which is the third form of dissociation this is unreal dream life like marriage fantasy life and so on and so forth dissociation is a classic outcome of trauma and so if I'm right and others are right and narcissism and borderline are post traumatic states we should find a lot of dissociation and indeed one of the diagnostic criteria is dissociation similarly narcissists dissociate a lot they cover up for the dissociation with something called confabulation confabulation looks a lot like lying but it's not lying because the narcissist believes in it it's just the narcissist trying to make sense of the memory gaps and says well I must have done this it tends to reason that I've done this it probably happened this way and then he repeats the story and then he begins to believe the story and then he would fight you tooth nail and claw if you try to challenge the story and then other people say that narcissism is a liar it's not a liar it's a desperate attempt to paper over the memory gaps both these disorders are highly highly discontinuous now I've developed a model called the self state model it's based on the work of William Palmer and I'm not going to enter it right now thank you I will go into it right now I similarly developed a second model called IPAN Intra-psychic activation model those of you who want to learn more about the self state model and the IPAN it's a psychic activation model just go on my channel play the keywords and you will receive an advertisement for coke if you're lucky I will really not go into it right now I will finish and let you ask questions by describing I developed three models two I've just mentioned the third model that I've developed combines for all the knowledge we have about personality disorders it allows us to predict new personality disorders or states that resemble personalities so in my model there are two effects between covert and collapsed states we have an overt narcissist that's Donald Trump we have a covert narcissist who should remain unnamed and we have a collapsed narcissist that's a narcissist who fails to obtain supply he cannot obtain supply so he collapses he falls apart so there are these three states two reality principles people who confuse internal objects with external objects and people who confuse external objects with internal objects this I will explain a bit I will dwell on it because it's very important a psychotic state involves a principle of action a mechanic of the soul known as hyperreflexivity hyperreflexivity is that the psychotic mind expands outwards and becomes the world because the psychotic has no boundaries nor limits the psychotic doesn't know where he ends and the world begins it doesn't know actually that he ends and the world begins it doesn't make these distinctions so as the psychotic expands outwards a little like the big man it creates a universe at that moment psychotic is unable to tell the difference inside his mind internal objects and objects out there external objects because the distinction is meaningless if, as the song says we are the world if you are the world what's the meaning of internal external? there's no such thing right? right because I said so from that moment on the narcissist is internal and external so he has a voice in his head it's coming from the ceiling he sees something in his mind it's standing in the corner in the corner it doesn't make this so this is an extreme case the narcissist is not very far from it shockingly that's not some bad name that's autocannon the narcissist is not very far from it external objects with internal objects it's like mirror psychosis reverse psychosis I remind you, the psychotic confuses internal objects and thinks that they are external the narcissist thinks that external objects are actually internal no, it's not correct so for example when the narcissist comes across a potential internet problem let's say here he would look at that he would take a snapshot of that take a photo of that literally, a snapshot and then he would internalize the snapshot it would become an internal object that minute the snapshot becomes an internal object from that from the moment the internal object is created the narcissist continues to interact only with the internal object not with the external object all interactions henceforth are with the internal object but he is confused he thinks the internal object actually stands in for the external object he believes in other words that the external object is actually internal so when the external object begins to behave independently challenge the narcissist disagree with him start to study in Covino University have new friends when this happens there's a gap opening between the snapshot and the partner she becomes independent and she changes but the snapshot is not stable so there's a gap opening this creates huge anxiety in the narcissist a normal anxiety and then he has to devalue the partner in order to regain on their status but it's important to understand that narcissism is a form of psychosis it's a reverse psychosis it's psychosis is internal external narcissism is external internal with a borderline the situation is even more complicated again that's not some bad name that's autokernel that's why it's called borderline on the border between psychosis and neurosis so with a borderline situation it's even more complex remember that the narcissist can create a snapshot and internalize it and then you are his forever for you but the borderline is incapable of doing even this you remember when you were much younger I told you about introjet inconstancy do you find introjet inconstancy funny? no I find it so while the narcissist has refuge can find refuge in a stable a stable pattern if you wish a stable representation of internal objects if he is safe among these internal objects he knows how to manipulate them he can interact with them with the person the borderline can't do even this she can't do even this her only the only way for the borderline to feel safe regulated and so on is to literally maintain the physical presence of her internal body she needs him captive absolute prisoner 24-7 every second dead or alive she needs him by the side so her dependency on the intimate partner is total total because if he is gun not only is he gun but her mind is gun taking her mind with him she doesn't have a representation of him in her mind so she is hysterical she is absolutely hysterical about this presence and she reacts even to imaginary abandonment even to anticipated abandonment even to she interprets many things misinterprets many things many behaviors as abandonment because for her abandonment means dying dying literally becoming mindless without a mind you could say that the borderline outsources her mind her intimate partner and he can abscond with it he can just walk away with it imagine how terrifying this is what the narcissist does he internalizes you he converts you into an avatar character action figure in his mind and then he doesn't care about you anymore he plays video games with you in his mind he shouldn't set you on anything safe more easy than the borderline and these are gradations of course as the borderline and as the narcissist these are gradations and the psychotic underlies them all that is why Herbert said these are pseudo-psychotic states they are near-psychotic and he was absolutely right so these are the two reality principles confusing external and internal internal and external traumatic bridges this is my third one there are two I did not discuss the two traumatic bridges are collapse and modification collapse I mentioned is when the narcissist cannot obtain supply or when the borderline cannot ensure the continued presence of an intimate partner these are collapse states when there is a collapse there is a transition from one type to another so when the narcissist collapse switches from overt to covert when and back from covert to overt he can also switch from somatic to cerebral when the borderline collapses she would also switch between states of borderline which I was the first to describe covert borderline and so on so there is switching between types modification is much much more stable in the case of the narcissist modification is public humiliation in front of peers or significant others that is sudden unexpected and that involves the destruction of a shared fantasy so the destruction of a shared fantasy in public in front of meaningful others and which involves shame and humiliation not modification narcissistic modification was first described my memory doesn't fade me in 1957 and it is in the narcissist it's like dying as close as I can describe it feels like dying and it is very life-threatening very life-threatening the borderline goes to modification but the borderline's modification is private it is the outcome of abandonment that is final intentional with intention malice malicious final and abandonment that kind of takes away our ability to find another intimate body so this will be modification in public modification states lead to paralysis collapse states lead to transition from time to time modification states paralyze completely why? because all the defenses are disabled the narcissist's force self and the borderline's force self they both have force self the force self of the narcissist and the borderline are disabled by modification it has no defenses left both of them then the narcissist becomes actually borderline modification renders the narcissist borderline because he has no defenses a process called de-compensation the narcissist de-compensates he has no defenses and he begins to dysregulate heavily he becomes borderline when the borderline is subject to modification she becomes a secondary psychopath that is the most recent for the cutting edge research she becomes a secondary psychopath a facto tool psychopath with a modicum of empathy and a lot of emotion so in both cases there is a massive transformation now there was a guy called Rothstein, psychoanalyst who said that borderlines are failed narcissists the child exposed to abuse and trauma child attempts to become a narcissist but when the child fails the child remains a borderline life on borderline so obviously if the narcissist is regressed by modification it will regress to the previous stage which is borderline so it's like abuse borderline narcissists and bad narcissists borderline because of abuse the modification this constant back and forth regression between developmental stages it happens to the narcissist inside the borderline dozens of times in a lifetime dozens of times so these bridges are very important because they facilitate the change and transformation and finally in my model there are three cognitive distortions cognitive distortions are not cognitive distortions cognitive deficit is a problem with cognition usually an organic problem with cognition is a problem with thinking epistemic problem cognitive distortion there's no problem with cognition but there's a filter that changes the information that's coming in in a highly specific way so grandiosity is a cognitive it's kind of a filter or membrane grandiosity is a cognitive distortion the narcissist can take all the information and then fit it into a grandiose fantastic narrative so this is distorted to fit into the narrative it's a kind of refraining grandiosity and dissociation is a cognitive distortion and paranoia someone asked about paranoia who was the paranoia here? you? right paranoia is a cognitive distortion and why do I mention paranoia in the context of narcissism and borderline first of all you should know that borderline is a grandiose exactly like narcissism they both have grandiose I'm mentioning paranoia because paranoia is narcissism what does the paranoia say? he says I'm the center of a conspiracy that how to get me I'm sufficiently important to warrant the attention of the CIA you know so it is a self-aggrandizing narrative otherwise how can you be a paranoid? paranoid means they're how to get me me because I'm substantial and consequential so it's a form of narcissism actually that's why I'm mentioning paranoia as a cognitive a cognitive distortion I try to give you really because the field is vast and I could talk for several days I do actually talk for several days people they have tents and camper vans and catering services go by this kind of thing I have seminars that last 8 hours 8 days up to 16 hours a day I warn you, I can talk about it but having tried to do this way I try to give you a thought of something of what's going on today in the field the debates we're having the arguments what we agree on of course I've over-emphasized my contributions was without saying and so on but the field is in front of me there is a lot going on today we're even disputing the very concept of personality the very concept of identity or identity and that is my model the IPA model to intersect the activation model actually disputes this concept they're counterfactual so there's a lot going on psychology is a very a new structure starts with chairs and guns psychology is a very exciting field now I think more than ever I've been in this field for 3 decades and I know that you didn't know from the beginning I've read a lot so I think this is possibly the most exciting period in psychology I regret that psychologists are trying to be physicists I'm a physicist also so I can compare I regret that they're trying to be physicists custom not in a good way and the more they try to be physicists the more pseudoscientists they become and that's very regrettable but there's always a hardcore also we we try to get rid of the pretensions to science and just focus on human beings and how they operate and what can we learn from them and how we can observe them without effecting and so on and so forth so psychology is a branch of literature just to ask you was great psychologists possibly the greatest scholar as great as Freud was Freud was a literary genius not exactly a reader of scientists despite his training as a neurologist 7 of the 10 most important psychologists until the end of the 1960s were not psychologists at all Melanie Klein did not have any degree in psychology Winnicott was a pediatrician Freud was a neurologist so psychology was a much more open field because he did not pretend to be a scientist and consequently until the 1960s there was a flourishing of psychology the likes of which has never happened since what we have been doing since then is narrowing narrowing to statistics and laboratories and white codes money has a lot to do with it because if you look like a physicist you pretend to be a physicist and use mathematics that no congressman can understand you get money you'll take money for grants and research but that's not psychology that's not psychology it's unconscionable that in many universities including in Europe recently statistics is about 40% of the curriculum it's extremely good I happen to be a physicist with specific training in mathematics I can tell you statistics is what you want it to be so I wouldn't have chosen statistics as the tool if I were forced to choose any branch of mathematics I'm not sure I would have chosen statistics it's a mess it's simply a mess and those of us who are trying to reintroduce a human dimension a literary aspiration into the field we are considered clowns because we don't come up with statistics or numbers and that is bad news for society they discarded the baby with the bathwater with the bathroom the department with two cities to go so nothing much is better today it's forbidden to teach anything before 1960 you can't be sure object relationship anyway simply forbidden of course you can't mention further mention further out just can't mention that's the method I fit in because I know statistics in mathematics I teach in the outreach program of Princeton yeah it's okay I survived but I survived against my will and saw his heart but I'm seriously thinking of digging the field this is really on the other hand there's a lot of creative thinking going on maybe it's fighting those of you who are who are ages, not three digits okay ladies and some gentlemen if you have any questions if you have any answers I'll be ready to question someone send me a do send me a list of questions where are you? who asked this question? not just who asked all these questions? no I asked some any of you have questions that she replicated she called me but I got it from other ladies from other those who were clever enough not to attend I have one question yes sometimes an artist can use silent treatment silent treatment and what is the reason and what is the reason it's also part of the process known as intermittent reinforcement intermittent reinforcement is important both love and hate intermittent reinforcement creates dependency on the source of the river so if someone is cold with you, when he is cold you would wait for the hot he becomes the source for the hot so silent treatment is part of this cycle and it's a form of impression and it is intended to communicate via silence all kinds of messages it's supposed to modify your behavior supposed to question and cause you to question your reality so it's an integral part of the gas line question your reality supposed to regulate your moods and emotions in a way that would create dependency by intermittent reinforcement so it has multiple functions it's a very cruel thing I think it's one of the most cruel forms of abuse because your imagination is doing their use there's nothing out there it's your imagination that is trying to what did I do wrong? what would I do differently? so it's self-torture it provokes self-torture it's very cruel are they aware of this like it's often called massacists are aware of their behaviors mostly they just don't see it as a pathology they don't think it's seen and most of them are proud they're proud that they are a bit they reframe their behaviors as something to be proud of so they say for example I'm tough I'm the next stage in evolution people are inferior to me if everyone was like me things would be much better they affect they invest emotional energy in their disorder they fall in love with their disorder they get attached to it they idealize it it's an apartment it's work, it's government it's football club it's a natural reaction of the massacist because the massacist it's a fantasy defense to be able to have a fantasy you need first to idealize the participants of the fantasy because you can't have a fantasy where people who are imperfect flawed, stupid, ugly you need to have a fantasy to be perfect so the massacist idealizes everyone and everything for a while after a while they just idealize the other person yes, there are other dynamics in romantic relationships in internet relationships the massacist partner is a mother figure so he needs to get rid of his mother he didn't complete the separation that is original one the mother substitute and then he needs to devalue her and he needs to discount her this is a symbolic separation he is doing it to symbolize the separation but he idealizes everything and yes, he tends to devalue and distort the things he wants to move on but it's always a fantasy massacist don't live in reality they are not in reality and very often massacist fantasies appeal to so many people that they become for example leaders, political leaders because they are able to create a shared fantasy for millions fantasy is very appealing because reality sucks I don't know how many of you noticed but reality is breaking news so fantasy is very attractive very appealing proposition massacist or massacist fantasy who can resist it we don't like that so we are leaving an increasingly more massacistic civilization society because reality is becoming less variable and what content do we have we can commit suicide and raise our way among certain age groups we can kill ourselves while being alive so substance abuse is skyrocketing we can kill ourselves mentally so depression is up 5 times and anxiety disorders are up 3 times than 40 years ago we can isolate ourselves so we are as good as they don't see anyone and no one sees us in 1980 a typical person in the united states had 10.1 good friends I don't know what is the 0 10.1 good friends so I don't want to speculate if it's a male I know so you may move the chair so I know you want it I can see it so in 1980 a typical person in the united states had 10.1 good friends in 2018 0.1 it's a formal time you isolate yourself with 2 gates and 1 net fields or 2 net fields and 1 gate and you essentially did you did it for all intents and purposes if at the same time you also abuse substances and so on and so forth of course it slows things down there is a willpower of the courage to commit suicide on track but in numerous ways and they are becoming more and more and more prevalent in today's society society reality is such that fantasy has become irresistible and very fine in technology so we have fantasy based technologies today they are all fantasy based we are about to have the metaphors it's 100% fantasy it's like you're going to disappear into a computer screen and never exit literally never exit because you could order food, you could work you could excuse the expression of sex, you could do anything within the metaphors and you would never edit that's total fantasy and of course it's reminiscent of the matrix matrix is a fantasy system is it bad there are people like for example the philosopher David Chalmers who says that no it's not bad if we can survive in fantasy or in a simulation what is the distinction between this and reality why does reality have a privileged status he says why shouldn't it have a privileged status if you spend all your life attached to a computer screen or in a matrix and then you die you wouldn't even know that it's not real you would think it's real simulation would be convincing fantasy would be overwhelming so what's the big deal what you have to be based in reality asks David Chalmers the answer is that first of all if you're not in reality you're not sophisticated some of the outcomes will go against you you will not succeed to obtain results but much more important a fantasy defense always leads to narcissism when a fantasy defense becomes exaggerated it always invariably results in narcissism and of story there's no other outcome that's why studies by Twege and Campbell show that the incidence of narcissism pathological narcissism among college students is up by almost 500% in other words pathological narcissism among college students has quintupled in less than four days why because they're much more exposed to fantasy and because they're parents parents parents doesn't often actually result in narcissism but narcissism to parents when you react to such parents in the fantasy defense then you become narcissistic and we are creating a narcissistic civilization because we are placing new genesis and a lot of money on fantasy that's where we're going to end in a narcissistic shared fantasy believe me it's the worst place imaginable to be it's hell it's absolute hell I'm somewhat familiar with your work and it really resonates with me for a reason but I wanted to ask so you talked a lot about what leads to narcissism do you personally know anyone or maybe not personally anecdotally fine with me who has ever overcome narcissism in a way that is not just that they are functional or they act kinder but that they genuinely feel different or maybe like have you overcome your own narcissism ever because it's no one fact that people always need to counter I'm very tempted to say yes but I promise to be truthful this leads to a problem known as the intersubjectivity problem do we really have access to another person's mind? of course we do we have to rely 100% on self-reporting if you cry and I ask you why do you cry the obvious answer you've been listening to me for 2 hours but there is a reason to cry but it could be that you are sad of the subject I have to rely on your self-report I have to rely on what you tell me there is no other way so if you are a truthful person and even there I have to rely on how would I know if you are truthful and ultimately it all relies on self-reporting because if I ask your friend is she truthful they also rely on her self-reporting there is no end to this this is called the intersubjectivity problem we cannot access another person's mind so what we do we lie we create a big lie we pretend we pretend that because we share the same physiology we also share the same structure of mind and processes of mind and so on and so forth there is no way to prove this consequently there is no way for me to answer your question I don't know what is happening inside your narcissist mind I have to rely on his self-reporting which is a practice I strongly discourage in the case of narcissists one of the biggest criticism there is a test for psychopathy it's called PCLR the main test for psychopathy it's called PCLR the PCLR has two parts one of them is asking the psychopath questions the second part is asking the psychopath's wife and children question how it goes the psychopath we all know is one of the most truthful people on earth he would never lie he would never misrepresent himself psychopaths are very truthful so the first part of the test is to ask the psychopath did you ever torture animals me? no I never did you ever steal something from another person no I'm very moral I've never done it and then you ask his wife who is probably terrified of him is he a good man? oh he's a great man this is the test I'm kidding you that's the main test for psychopathy so we have to rely on psychopathy so the answer to the first part of the question is there's no way of knowing if there's been any real transformation anyone let alone a narcissist it's important to know narcissists speak therapy because they modify behaviors they want to be more sophisticated the only reason for therapy is because he thinks he can maximize the outcomes he actually comes to therapy to learn how to be a more efficient narcissist he wants to he wants the therapist to take away the things that affect his function and performance so yes we do know how to modify the behaviors of narcissists we know how to render narcissists less anti-social less abrasive less unpleasant easier to live with we know how to teach narcissists to do this sometimes we use their grandiosity to challenge them let's see if we can do it we know how to do it and this part works so successful but the core issues absolutely are unpatched so I find this important I'm 62 or a professor of psychology prestigious universities I contributed to the field and I repeat the same pattern with every woman I meet shared fantasy and then she abandons me, she cheats on me I'm mortified I want to die take six months I recover and I've learned all my lessons I repeat everything it's not learning the classes so this is the the thing we face we can modify behaviors now I invented the new treatment model cold therapy and cold therapy allows me to destroy some parts of the apparatus some parts of the machinery of narcissists mainly the force set there's no need for narcissistic supply and the grandiosity is gone but these are not the core issues of the narcissists these are these are the issues that bother society but the emptiness it doesn't go away emptiness doesn't go away, the need for fantasy fantasy defense doesn't go away the lack of empathy doesn't go away the damage down to even apartments doesn't go away none of this goes away so who more identity of narcissists or borderline borderline is more prone to acting out and promiscuity, reckless behaviors drinking so there are no statistics but the borderline overall is more likely than the narcissists which is narcissists also as opposed to what you watch online narcissists have an island of stability so usually when the narcissist has been married for 40 years and has kids and grandkids but he has changed 20 jobs or you have a guy who is working in the same company since he was 16 and he is now the chief executive of offices 57 years later but in the meantime he got married, remarried and divorced nine times so there is an island of stability surrounded by a portion of caves maybe you could read the questions yes I have another question it was on the list that we know some of those people have very shallow affect and emotions or most of them and is it connected to the lack of consciousness they have or remorse they feel so how remorse is connected to feelings because maybe we think it's a moral issue but these people cannot really feel deep and cannot attach to people so that's why it's hard for them to feel remorse is it connected or it's just some morality and feelings are connected or not shallow affect is much more typical of side effects and even I suggested that side effects have flat effect shallow affect is also linked to something called reduced effect reduced effect display is not showing emotions poker face not reacting emotionally to any changes this is typical of psychopaths not narcissists narcissists can and often are very animated they imitate or mimic emotions very much they don't experience positive emotions narcissists have no access to positive emotions of any kind for example but they do have access to negative effect and affectivity negative affectivity are negative emotions like envy anger, rage they have access to them and they experience these emotions very powerfully so it's not true to say that narcissists have shallow affect they have what we call negative affectivity negative affectivity is half the spectrum of emotions is felt very powerfully very strongly overwhelming reaction so in this sense they are like negative border lines they are like border lines but they are overwhelmed only by negative emotions a border line can be overwhelmed by love what she thinks is lovely but a narcissist will never be overwhelmed by love because he does not experience love but he will be overwhelmed by anger and he will do crazy things he will lose impulse control he will be reckless in this sense he is like a negative border line remorse and regret they are linked to two underlying emotions shame and guilt I refer you to the works of Masterson narcissism many scholars believe that narcissism is a shame reaction the child was shamed by the parent the child felt the shame he is unable to cope with the parent I hope I say for this shame the child became a narcissist but the narcissist does not dare to touch his shame in modification the narcissist is humiliated he is shamed so he gets in touch with his shame that is why he becomes borderline and suicidal because he is in touch with his shame I have been modified several times in my life twice in the last three years I am clinically modified as I speak to you right now I am in a modified state right now as I speak so it's a little like it's a lot like a lot like dying a lot like falling apart disintegrating and it is because I got in touch with the underlying reservoir of shame that gave rise to the narcissism it's as if I lost my narcissism defense and I became a child all over again and a child who experiences the full power of the shame that is inside child is defenseless of course against the shame that's why there is suicidal ideation so shame and guilt the narcissist doesn't dare to experience shame and guilt because it will be life-threatening consequently he is incapable of remorse and regret but everything you said is multiple side parts actually that is another question sorry what happens after survival of the modification the narcissist reacts to modification by becoming a borderline suicidal borderline suicide borderline and then he begins to there are two ways to react there are two ways to react one is called external and one called internal external reaction to modification is to say these people are evil they wanted to get me they are horrible people I was a victim and the internal reaction to modification is I made it happen I pushed them to do it I engineered the whole thing I was the puppet master I was in control in both cases it restores the grandiosity because in the external modification you are a victim so you are the good guy you are morally imprived so the grandiosity locus is in your morality and physical and in the other solution you are the puppet master you make the truth so these are the two solutions to modification it takes time these narratives because they are not very convincing so you have to deceive yourself as a master you have to deceive yourself into believing you now if you are not highly intelligent it takes shorter period of time but if you are highly analytic like me I am highly analytic I have enormous difficulty to accept either of the two solutions because I know they don't sit well with all the facts so I am struggling with modification much longer and the risk in my life is much enhanced than in a typical master because of my intelligence and analytical skills so intelligence is not always an asset in the last system not always but therapy can help to cold therapy creates modification cold therapy is a process of creating artificial modification controlled modification and then through the modification bring the narcissist out of it so in the first few days of cold therapy there is extreme suicidal ideation and I need to be with the patient in the same room or in the same apartment if the patient is good looking I am happy to do it they are not asking I don't believe that so so it's simulated modification so I came to this insight of cold therapy because I have been modified before and I realized the only window to change is modification all the defenses are down there is a risk of suicide the narcissist is terrified he is like a child again clinically developmentally the narcissist is about 2 years old when he is in modification talking to you now is a 2 year old clinically developmental generally by the way even in normal life the narcissist is about 2 years old as far as emotional literacy, emotional intelligence ability to interact as a narcissist narcissism is a form of arrest in development it's a regressive state that's right it's a regressive state and so narcissists are children after a child and they are more or less in some respects 2 years old in other respects 6 years old they are very developed narcissists the least affected by my disease but you know any narcissist is about my disease now and the vast majority of them are too now they usually disguise it because they have skills they don't disguise it but under conditions of extreme stress the compensation the modification the blues sweater falls many other things and what is left is a terrified 3 year old who has to hope head on with a replay a reenactment of the original trauma with his mother and the shame the helplessness the helplessness the helplessness provokes shame when you're helpless it's very shameful it's humiliated imagine you're my age but you're experiencing the emotions of a 2 year old who is terrified humiliated ashamed of course it pushes it's very dangerous many shared fantasies and in motivation many shared fantasies and in multiplication because of the narcissists if the narcissist chooses the wrong internet partner the interplay of the pathologies leads to defiance the partner defies the narcissists and then she wants to hurt the narcissists so for example if the narcissist teams up with a psychopath if the internet partner is a psychopath or even a borderline who is very frequently in the psychopathic state now there are new studies relatively new studies that show that there are all borderlines become psychopathic when they are exposed to abandonment and rejection but some borderlines are way more psychopathic than other borderlines and they are comorbid so they're psychopathic in both this is the typical partner of the narcissist the narcissist goes for psychopathic borderlines at least this narcissist goes to psychopathic borderlines and then the potential for modification is announced because she would reject or resent being transformed into a figment of her fantasy she would insist on her autonomy and defiance and finally she would create what we call the secondary object she would begin to see the narcissist as an enemy and she would want to attack the narcissist she would want to hurt the narcissist and very often the way she does it is to cheat on him with another guy in full view humiliating him so it ends badly if there is a wrong means of action not all narcissists choose they spare partners but many of them do most common after the disintegration of an intimate shared partner most common like I think 90% I'm treating narcissists with notification and from the outside wow, so the ultimate condition is compared to schizophrenia it's really terrifying to be open now I see there was a question how can I survive living with a narcissistic person how can I survive why would you want to survive why would you want to survive with a narcissist the only thing with a narcissist is to walk away what if you can't walk away I never bought this I can't walk away because I am the narcissist what way the narcissist the question should be phrased differently how can I survive as a narcissist not with a narcissist there is no situation where you cannot walk away I don't buy any of this I can't walk away because she is my mother so I haven't spoken to my mother in 2016 I haven't seen her in 2016 so I can't walk away because she is my son so I can't walk away because we have children you also have an attorney and an accountant of course you can walk away there is no situation where you cannot walk away it's a bullshit it's because you want to remain in touch with a narcissist somehow because there is a vestige of the shared fantasies still vivid and alive in the mind because you hope maybe that even Hoover will take you back the reasons for staying in touch with a narcissist are unholy reasons all of them so the only solution is no contact of course you can manage your life with a narcissist if you insist but why would you insist? It's sick it's pathologic walk away which type of person can be with narcissist which type of person can be with narcissist anyone can be with narcissist narcissist doesn't care he wants narcissistic supply narcissist wants four things they want sex they want sex they want services they want safety if you give them two or four two out of four then you are an intimate partner but the narcissist prefers as preference for certain types because they fit much more easily into the shared fantasies takes a lot less work to get them to be in the fantasy so if I interact with a healthy woman I would have to work very hard to convince her to enter my fantasy and never exit because that's not easy but if you are borderline you are already in a fantasy state you are in a fantasy about me actually if you are borderline you are fantasizing about me because your fantasy is intimate partner centered centered around the intimate partner so it's much easier for me to recruit you to convert you into my fantasy so I prefer you of course same with co-dependence all these mental health disorders they are one step removed from the narcissist's fantasy while healthy people attend sexually I can get any person to be in my fantasy fact I've done it but it takes a lot more work with the healthy person why would they do it you are saying there is a self-aware narcissist they should reject them avoid all relationships in order to avoid that's not a self-aware narcissist that's a moral narcissist which is a bit like honest politician the decision to abstain from having relationships is a moral decision it's about not threatening other people it's not a conservation of any narcissist with diamond however in my case for example I decided to be child decided to not have children I think I'm trying to convince myself it's a moral decision but probably I just wanted to travel a lot too and you know children are serious inconvenience but narcissists don't make these categories they even need they're hungry, they're predators they're hungry animals like I've been modified now I'm in great need of an intimate partner right now it's a compulsion I'm compelled to do it I don't see it let me listen to a lecture by Sir Martin about child fantasy and see if it's okay to recruit an intimate partner no I'm hunting I'm hunting I'm a predator I'm an intimate partner I need an intimate partner because I need to recover from the notification I need to put myself together again the best I can describe it is a compulsion but not something that a narcissist can control it's sort of controlled reaction away from a narcissist how many years to try how many years to try to cover your friend if you modify the narcissists you will never leave if you do not modify the narcissists he remains with your introject the introject is in his mind and the introject is always idealized that's a problem it evaluates you and it discards you but the introject remains here idealized it creates a dissonance because the introject is here you're done so he needs to put you back together the introject this process is called re-idealization he re-idealizes you or in clinical terms he affects you the rest of the emotion so he re-idealizes you to make you match the the introject make you match the snapshot and then his dissonance goes down his anxiety goes down when you're done and it discards you and they demand demand correspondence with the outer world and when he doesn't have this he is very anxious so over it is very common for this reason he re-idealizes you when the cycle starts again so it's been a few years Masters would re-idealize you and over it go at any moment where there are no other introjects active so he doesn't have another internet partner whose introject is dominant and active then your introject is still active and you need to make the match that's why Masters is over in between relationships very good and they are in between relationships it's this has been described before the info which is curious that they are implying another country many others these dynamics of the economy of the telelogics is very fascinating because it has very big explanatory power it explains a lot so I took it and applied it to Masters and it explains a lot over it is an attempt to silence the introject by matching it up with an external object so external object is you it is to idealize you it re-idealizes you matches you up with the introject so it is done the other question was already mentioned that how can someone overcome being a narcissist how can someone overcome being a narcissist that's so much of course I didn't submit it but someone else also had this question it's not a narcissist it's not a common cold you don't overcome being a narcissist you don't like is it possible to overcome the trauma that you were talking about at the beginning to overcome the trauma that is at the center of it because the child with trauma is a child with trauma it's what we call the formative it's a word in the forms a word in the shapes it's so possible to eliminate this word you are this one so that's not the way to go about it how do you survive the surface of narcissism I hate to be I hate to be a bearer of bad news but it's a sentence it's a life sentence narcissism is a total solution while for example other disorders are highly specific narcissism is what the DSM calls all pervasive it permeates everything narcissism affects everything every dimension of your life every field, every area every type of function your cognitions, your emotions in short narcissism is you while normally it's not good to say that the disorder is the person it's not good to say because it's not true the disorder is the person in some cases the disorder is the person so in both borderline and narcissism the disorder is the person there's no meaning to asking the question how can I not be a narcissist it's like asking how can I not be so you learn to modify behaviors if you are if some narcissists decide that being moral is their grandiose they are grandiose by being moral this is called communal or pro-social narcissists it's a narcissist who is proud of being moral so that's his claim to fame that's his grandiose so if you are like that then you will not get married you will not have relationship you will not have children you will not have sex and you will publicize this it will be ostentatious you will let everyone know what a great person you are if you have made these personal sacrifices because you realize that you are a narcissist and this would be this would be all narcissistic supply the morality it's possible to reframe yourself this way it's possible to program yourself this way people think that grandiosity is about being the best or being the most not true grandiosity is about being unique so for example you can say I am a unique victim I am an amazing loser nobody is a loser like me when my company failed it was the biggest bankruptcy in the history of the united states yeah so grandiosity can be about failure can be about anything so grandiosity is manageable it's like a party you can play with it so you can convince yourself you can program yourself to be grandiose by being altruistic charitable moral and then you will be famous for being moral you will be famous for being... so I for example my grandiosity is that I teach people about narcissism and many people make the mistake if you don't want to believe me go and see the comments on my video everybody will say you can't be a narcissist no way you are a narcissist look, you love people teach them, you kill them I'm glad you're good at talking about you know I leverage my grandiosity I sublimated sublimation is converting a drive or an urge into a socially acceptable form I sublimated my narcissism which is pathology, antisocial pathology I sublimated it into socially acceptable form and now the locus of my grandiosity I'm the great teacher I'm the great teacher because I stop the door I mean all the others were teenagers when I stopped it, so I'm the great teacher that's my grandiosity it's a win-win you win, I win, we're all win you can find a win-win formula but you will never get trained in football yes are these persons with disorders determined how they are determined I mentioned that childhood abuse now just to clarify what I mean by abuse and trauma when I say childhood abuse and trauma you see a mother beating up a child with a broom or a broom beating up the mother with a child so abuse and trauma any behavior that violates the child's boundaries and does not allow the child to separate from the parent and become an individual so of course physical abuse violates the child's bodily boundaries so it's okay it's abuse, sexual abuse violates the child's physical bodily boundaries of course it's abuse but spoiling the child tempering the child idolizing the child pedestalizing the child there also forms of abuse because the parent doesn't allow the child to be in touch with reality when you spoil the child to temper the child isolating the child from reality and from the consequences of the child's actions so you're not allowing the child to grow up people grow up by having friction with reality and by experiencing losses if you prevent this if you don't allow the child to do this then you're abusing the child if you're parentifying the child you're forcing the child to be a parent feeling that's abusing if you're using the child as an instrument that's abusing so there are many types of things any other questions? I have a question about working life I'm not suggesting it's something obvious if you find this reaction is more obvious than modern life so what's remain criteria for modern life? I'm sorry just to sort what's remain criteria for modern life criteria for modern life? criteria for modern life criteria for modern life include the emotion of this regulation that line including the emotion of this regulation self harm impulsiveness but narcissists also can't handle it narcissists don't self harm in the same way physically modern life self harm physically the body narcissists don't act out they don't lose it they're not impulsive modern life do they act out and then they are reckless they don't protect themselves so it could be unprotected sex it could be under the influence it could be spending all your money all your savings in one day so they are reckless impulse issues you go there and so on so if I could find the criteria for modern life these are the main words that I just mentioned okay your trauma is enough? okay if no other questions then thank you for suffering me and I would like you to come after this and if not my services are here thank you very much