 Ten days ago, I've had a second talk with Conor Ryan, and in this talk Conor Ryan mentioned an article published in Scientific American a few months ago. And this article captures the flux in the field of pathological narcissism, the fact that they are raging debates, one could even say wars, as to what constitutes a narcissist. Is narcissism overt and grandiose? Is narcissism covert and shy and vulnerable and fragile and passive-aggressive? Is narcissism pathological narcissism some kind of compensation for a bad object, for a constellation of voices that inform the narcissist that is unworthy and unlovable and inadequate and so on and so forth, inferiority complex? Or is narcissism the exact opposite? The belief, the firm belief and conviction that the narcissist is godlike, infallible, omniscient, omnipotent, and in general a kind of divinity. There's a raging debate between clinicians in the field, therapists, psychologists, licensed social workers, psychiatrists, and theoreticians in academe, such as myself. But these are just two facets of the same coin. It's like the famous story with the elephant, where four wise men are blind for that or they are blind to start with, I don't remember. And they are instructed to describe an elephant. So one of them touches the elephant's legs, the other touches the elephant's trunk. The third one touches the elephant's tail. And the fourth one touches the elephant's, explicitly deleted. So they come up with four different descriptions. But it's a single elephant. And the elephant in the room is the fact that clinicians are much more likely to come across narcissists who have hit rock bottom. They are much more likely to come across narcissists in crisis, in a life crisis. So they are much more likely to be exposed to the fragile, brittle nature of pathological narcissism. And they are much more likely to diagnose or misdiagnose their clients with covert, fragile, vulnerable, shy narcissism. So clinicians are exposed to covert narcissism, whereas theoreticians are exposed much more to the overt, grandiose, defiant, antisocial, pseudo-psychopathic face of pathological narcissism, the one captured essentially in the diagnostic criteria of the DSM. What we need to do is to reconcile these two views and to realize that all narcissists are sometimes overt and sometimes covert. When narcissists collapse, when they are unable to obtain supply, when they are mortified, when they are severely narcissistically injured, they tend to become covert for a while. And then they rebound and become overt again. So there's not tight constancy, there's only tight dominance. Covert narcissists is typically overt. Covert narcissists is typically covert. And yet they can switch places when life's exigencies, vicissitudes and circumstances force them to confront their own shame in adequacy and delusionality. This is a very important observation because what we have done in the field of pathological narcissism, more generally in cluster B personality disorders and definitely in personality disorders in general, is we over-specialized. We nitpick, we divide and subdivide and then divide again. And so we create niches, we create niche clinical entities which do not conform to reality because we human beings cannot be put into a drawer. We are unclassifiable if you wish. We cannot be captured with definitions. We are in flux, we are like a river and any clinician would tell you that a person may present with pathological narcissism on the first meeting and may even be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder only to emotionally dysregulate during the therapy and resemble a borderline and then transition to becoming a psychopath when he acts out and so on and so forth. We are all everything. We are all mental patients and all clients and all people with mental health issues display a kaleidoscope, a panoply, a rainbow spectrum of all mental health issues. It's even the distinction between personality disorders and post-traumatic disorders is artificial. Even the distinction between personality disorders and mood disorders may be wrong where mood disorders may be just a facet of personality disorders. We need to begin to have a holistic view of psychology and this emerges from my talk with an inimitable one and only one, Irish if I recall correctly, Conor Ryan. So stay tuned and enjoy the show and those of you who survived to the very end, let me know. As well. I'm recording. Okay. Okay. Posterity aways. I think I'm recording as well. Okay. Brilliant. Okay. So, Sam Vacline, thank you so much. My most requested guest to come back and talk to again, the guest that has the most views on my channel and people must be traumatized over there. I said, yeah. Okay. So let's talk today, what we would talk about is intimate relationships. We touched on it last time and before we do that, we spoke in November of 2023. Are there any updates, any developments in that time period that have struck you, that have shocked you, that have changed your perspective? It's only been three and a half months. Anything that springs to mind? I'm not sure in which sphere of life, what sphere of life we are referring to. If you're referring to politics, for example, then there is definitely been resurgence, not to say an insurgency of narcissists, avowed narcissists, open narcissists, proud narcissists, people who have converted narcissism into an ideology, ironclad ideology with explicit values. I've just read an article by a lady in France, she published a book and she says, you need to be selfish. You need never have children. You need never get married. She was talking to a female kind of audience, a public and that's an example and she's fitted and celebrated. She's like, yeah, you're right, girl, I mean, go for it. So that's one example and then, of course, you have the likes of Trump and others in Argentina and in Israel and Turkey and I mean, you name it, there's a murky wave of narcissism washing all over us and I think the difference lately is the narcissism started off as a clinical entity, mental health issue. Then it became an organizing principle of life. Then it became an explanatory principle. You made sense of reality through narcissism. You said, for example, these guys are narcissists. That explains his behavior, politicians, people in show business, entertainment industry. So narcissism helped you to decipher the world, became an explanatory principle. But now narcissism is becoming the equivalent of a religion or an ideology if you are secular minded. It's not an organized, it's a prescriptive discipline. It tells you what to do in order, for example, to succeed. So you have coaches and so on, online, names withheld and they tell you, be a narcissist. And you have even, I think I mentioned it last time, you even have pretty respectable magazines such as Scientific American, I'm sorry, New Scientist and they came up with a cover story, parents teach your children to be narcissists in July 2016. So it has transitioned from the periphery into the mainstream and now narcissism is bent on, narcissism guarantees success and accomplishments, narcissism leads to self-efficacy. If you're not a narcissist, something's wrong with you. For example, if you're not selfish, you're altruistic, you're charitable, so either you are virtue signaling, you're fake, you're being fake or something's wrong with you because you should put yourself first. And so you need therapy. And so narcissism is permeating academia and literature and now you have a whole class of respectable scholars who say that psychopathy and narcissism are the next stage in evolution. That high-functioning narcissism and high-functioning psychopathy is socially beneficial and so on and so forth. So if you regard narcissism as a kind of inevitable byproduct of human progress and human development and evolution, then you know, you accept it, that's it. But if you don't, if you realize like I do that narcissism is an aberration, a malignancy, then it's really terrifying to watch narcissism take over, it's tentacles, it's tentacles all over, it's like a horror movie, it's like an alien invasion or something. So it was an article relatively recently that came up in the, appeared in the Scientific and American and Clinical Psychologists at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, Elza Ronningstam was quoted as follows, pathological narcissism is characterized by an inability to maintain a steady sense of self-esteem. Those with this condition protect an inflated view of themselves at the expense of others when that view is threatened, they experience anger, shame, envy and other negative emotions. Now what I'm hearing and I want to get your perspective on that as well is the people in their orbit are going to suffer, right? Is there anything that you would add to that or disagree with that? Yeah, Elza Ronningstam is a true authority, not a fake YouTuber who claims to be an authority but a true authority. She has been working in the field of narcissism since the early 1990s, started together, I mean I started at the same time, she's been working since then. She published seminal works on narcissism already in 1996 for example and she is a true, she knows what she's talking about but her description of narcissism is geared towards a popular audience so it's more relational, it's like what narcissism would do to you, aware of narcissism, you know, kind of thing. Narcissism is a lot more complex, these are the outside, the external manifestations of internal dynamics which are exceedingly complex and potentially the most complex we know of, at least someone like Otto Kenberg thought so, he thought that borderline and narcissistic personality disorders or disorders of the self are so complex that they are at times indistinguishable from psychosis or psychotic disorders. It's a really, really bad thing, narcissistic personality, it's not just about being an able or a jerk, it's really bad out there or in there. So for example, the narcissist is unable to tell that other people are separate from him, that they're external, which is utterly psychotic feature, consequently he treats other people as extensions or instruments or tunes, you know. The narcissist imposes a fantasy defense on reality, he divorces reality and he supplants it, he replaces it with fantasy, that's okay but then he tries to coerce you into fitting into this fantasy and affirming it and if you refuse to confirm to tell him that the fantasy is not fantasy or if you refuse to play a role according to his fantasy script, you're penalized, he becomes aggressive and he, you know, it could escalate and end very badly. So these are two examples of how people around the narcissist are affected. I think if you're looking for a metaphor, the narcissist is a black hole, now other physicists by training have a PhD in physics. So a black hole, you can't see a black hole, the only thing that comes out of a black hole is some kind of tenuous radiation, which is literally undetectable, light cannot escape a black hole, so you can never see a black hole. But how do you know there's a black hole out there? Because everything around the black hole misbelieves, everyone around the black hole is in some kind of crazy-making cycle, there are all kinds of stars and all kinds of galaxies and all kinds of, you know, everyone goes haywire around the black hole and that tells you there's a black hole there. The narcissist is the same, even if you are unable to diagnose someone with narcissism because you need tests and structured interviews and so on, still the reactions of people around the narcissist ought to tell you that something is wrong with this person because he dysregulates other people, I'm saying he is a she, half of all narcissists are women. Narcissists dysregulate other people, they strip away the defenses that other people have built, lifetime of defenses, habits, everything breaks down, when the narcissist enters the scene, there's a collective meltdown, not only of individuals but of institutions. Have a look at Donald Trump for example, you know, there's an institutional meltdown, everything melts down and so there's this issue of being unable to recognize the externality and separateness of other people, it's known as an othering problem. Another issue for example which she alluded to is that narcissism is a disruption in the formation of a self, there's a problem that self is not fully integrated, not fully formed, it's as if the narcissist is a kind of a kaleidoscope with all kinds of shards flying in space and nothing coalesced into a core identity, the narcissist is trying to compensate for this, but pretending to be someone who is not, which is a false self and then he comes to you and says, I am this false self, right, and if you say no, you're not this false self, he beats you on the head, or metaphorically speaking, and sometimes not metaphorically. So this lack of core, of course does not allow the narcissist to regulate his sense of self-worth. He's a Romington user of the term self-esteem, it's misleading, it's not self-esteem, it's self-worth. Self-worth is comprised of self-esteem and self-confidence and self-efficacy and many other selves. When you don't have a self, anything that starts with self is absent, like self-esteem, you can't have self-esteem, you don't have self-worth, you can't gauge your worth, you don't know if you're worthy, you're not worthy, and so on. So we often say that narcissists have distorted internal objects. For example, the vast majority of healthy people, they have something called good object. A good object is a group of voices, constellation or coalition of voices, internal voices, that keep informing you that you're okay, you know, you're lovable, you're doing well, everything is okay, you have your shortcomings, you have your limitations, you have your deficiencies and lacks, you need to work on it, so you are given a realistic assessment of who you are, which is part good and part bad, in other words, there's no splitting, you're integrated, you're the shades of grey, this is a good object. The narcissists, non-narcissists, there's a good object, all narcissists are divided into groups. One group has what is known as a bed-object. A bed-object is a group of voices, coalition, constellation of voices, they're known as introjects, and these voices internally keep informing this kind of narcissists, you're bad, you're unworthy, you're inadequate, you're losing your failure, ugly, you're stupid, you're unlovable, and these kind of narcissists tries to compensate to silence these voices by pretending to be the exact opposite of what these voices are saying. If the voices are saying you're not lovable, this narcissist is going to counter it and say, I'm not only lovable and irresistible, or if they say you're stupid, the narcissist is going to say, I'm a genius, I'm a genius professor of psychology, for example. So a bed-object generates compensatory narcissism, but there's another type of object which I find even more pernicious, and that is the idealized object. The idealized object is when a child is raised by his parents or his or her parent, and the child is idolized, pedestalized, the child can do no wrong, he's perfect, he's amazing, he's godlike, he's, you know, this kind of child grows up to believe this. He believes this, he internalizes this object, this idealized object, and these are the really, really bad narcissists. These are the narcissists with no boundaries, no inhibitions, no adherence to social mores and norms and rules, nothing. In short, these are psychopathic narcissists actually. They're a bit psychopathic, and a portion of these, a percentage of these narcissists are known as malignant narcissists, and malignant narcissists are really dangerous because a malignant narcissist is a narcissist at the core, although there's no core, but you know what I mean, at the basis is a narcissist, the foundation, and on top of that, like a wedding cake, you have a psychopathic layer and a sadistic layer, sadist, and so this is the gift that keeps giving if you're, if you happen yourself to be, you find yourself in the ambit or orbit of these kind of narcissists. So you can't reduce narcissism to three sentences in scientific American, so hyper complex. You touched on it there, but I wanted to ask you about tips for the parent of a narcissist, a teenager diagnosed with NPD, right? There was a book written many years ago when we talked about Kevin, which I think awakened the Western world to the issue. So what you're talking about there kind of extrapolates on this idea that a parent may have filled the child with a sense of their own magnificence, which could develop into something clinical, would I be right? First of all, to set the record straight, in the case of Kevin in the book, Kevin has been rejected by his mother as a baby, the exact opposite. She rejected him, she refused to breastfeed him, she refused to touch him even. She went through the equivalent of postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety and she got up. So that's, that's a case of bed objects actually, not idealized object. It's a perfect ratification of a bed situation. But yeah, if a child keeps getting told that he is, that, you know, he is the embodiment of magnificence and magnificence and especially if the child is denied access to reality. When you tell a child you can do no wrong, what you're telling the child is, don't listen to reality. This reality pushes back. Reality is harsh. Reality keeps telling you, you are mistaken or you're stupid or you should deal. And so the parent is informing the child, don't listen to reality. Reality is wrong. You're always right. And so this is to cut the child off reality. That's why it's abusive, pampering, spoiling, pedestalizing, idolizing. These are forms of abuse. They're not good parenting. These kind of parents are also usually overprotective. So they isolate the child from peer groups. They don't allow the child to be exposed to peers or at least not meaningful. Or at least homeschooling. Would homeschooling come into that equation? Homeschooling could come into this or you're not allowed to play out or I'm going to join you. So there are kinds of helicopter parents who join the kid. Wherever the kid goes, they're there. Never give the kid a long time, especially not with peers. Chastise and castigate and attack other role models such as teachers. So teacher is always wrong. Teacher hates the kid. She's envious of the kid. So they inject a streak of paranoia, paranoid ideation. So this kind of child is totally thwarted and distorted. And it reminds me of the Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo wrote a book, not a novel. And in this book he describes a phenomenon which in the 90th century was quite prevalent and they were known as compachycosis. Compachycosis where children were abducted as babies by itinerants, gypsies, sorry for the word. And then the children were inserted into bottles and they grew up inside the bottle and they took on the shape of the bottle. And then they became circus freaks and circus attractions and they made a lot of money for their owners and so on. This was a real phenomenon. Compachycosis. What was that again, Sam? Tell me the name of that phenomenon? Compachycosis. Compachycosis. Compachycosis. So the child with an idealized object is this kind of child. It is put in a bottle of the parent's making and it acquires the shape of the bottle. Now the parent projects onto this kind of child, unfulfilled wishes, expectations spoken and unspoken. The parent dictates the child's behavior, micromanages the child and instrumentalizes the child. The child's role is to bring glory to the parent. The parent secures narcissistic supply vicariously through the child and the child is penalized. So the child learns penalized if he fails. So the child learns to link love with performance and he has a perception of love as totally transactional. So it's a really upchild at the very end of this cycle. And these kind of parents are as bad as parents who commit incest or physical abuse or whatever. Even to some extent more punishments. One of the reasons this kind of parenthood is a lot more threatened is because it's socially acceptable and even socially condoned. You know we have this education system where every child is amazing. Every child is perfect. Every child is the greatest talent since Einstein, if not earlier. No child can do wrong. There are consolation prizes for everyone. Everyone is a winner. No one is a loser. So the education system, especially I must say in the United States, isolates children from reality and embeds them in a fantasy bubble of their own grandeur, this kind of education system fosters grandiosity, is a cognitive distortion and collaborates in cahoots with parents who find this because they want every parent wants to believe that their children are amazing and incredible, super intelligent and I know that. So there's a collusion here. A collusion to create a fantastic space where the child would never ever find who he truly is. Who he truly is, warts and all. So it's really bad out there because this practice as I said is part and parcel in the fabric of modern society and modern education and modern parenting skills and modern everything. Parents are told your children are sensitive. You should never berate them. You should never shout at them. You should never, God forbid, beat them up. And so I strongly disagree. I think these are all pedagogical tools. They are all educational tools that should be available to a parent. I think the child should be confronted with reality. I think suffering and pain and loss are the greatest engines of personal development and if you deny them to the child, he will never develop. But suffering is unavoidable. They will encounter pain, suffering when they go out into the world in any capacity, even in the playground. They're going to encounter. So that's why these kind of parents make sure that they don't have the opportunity to encounter losses. But you're right that once this child is out of the family, I don't know how to call it, next shall we say? Bubble or whatever. This kind of child is going to suffer disproportionately more than well constructed, well-constellated children. So would you be recommending some kind of clinical intervention or some kind of therapeutic intervention or just coaching parents? It depends. First of all, it is extremely bad practice to diagnose narcissism, pathological narcissism, prior to age 21 and some authorities like Twenge and Campbell say 25. Because the brain for example is not completed until age 25. Critical parts of the brain are missing until age 25, including major executive functions. Second thing is grandiosity is a good healthy thing in adolescence. Adolescents need to be grandiose in order to break away from the family and take on the world. You know you need to be seriously grandiose to think at age 14 that you can succeed in the world or you can say goodbye to mommy and daddy and that's healthy, that's good. Narcissism at this age in adolescence is actually adaptive, it's very good. So it's bad practice to diagnose narcissism prior to age 21 at the very least. So why did I mention this? Because prior to age 25, even if you appear to be a narcissist, you are likely not a narcissist. You probably have a bad object or an idealized object or some problem with externalization and all kinds of things which are treatable, simply treatable. At around age 25, things begin to settle down, coalesce and become fossilized and ossified. And after age 25, it's pretty hopeless. If you had acquired narcissistic personality disorder around the age of 25, are you pretty much a lost case? And yeah, there are many self-interested, self-enriching people online, offline, books, book authors, even with academic degrees, even with PhDs in psychology who are lying, simply lying, that pathological narcissism is treatable. Behaviors can be modified. You can modify the narcissist's behaviors by giving a variety of incentives, for example, by challenging the narcissist's grandiose. You can accomplish this. Are you that weak, that you can't? And then the narcissist, just to show you, to spite you, is kind of fulfills the therapeutic expectations. But otherwise, with the exception of minor behavior modification, modifications of abrasive behaviors, antisocial behaviors, which are minor and fleeting, this 100% remission, relax after a while. With this exception, which is pitiable, you can't touch narcissism after age 25. You can't touch it. It's doomed. That's it. And that is the truth. This is the unvarnished truth that any clinician would tell you, you know, in four eyes, like in a pub, when he's a bit drunk, they would tell you, yeah, narcissists are hopeless. So in modern treatment today, in 21st century, in 2024, those practitioners and clinicians that are treating people are offering treatment or diagnosing, you're intimating that they are fully aware. Of course, that this is not true. I say again, you can use chemotherapy, you can use the MDR, you can use some forms of CBT. There are definitely treatment modalities, including Curnberg's treatment modality, transference therapy and so on. There are treatment modalities that do have an effect on narcissists, they mellow them, they ameliorate the condition, they reduce abrasive, criminalized even, antisocial behaviors. I mean, yeah, you can kind of finesse the narcissist, fine tune the narcissist somehow. But you can't touch the core. There's no healing there, absolutely none, zero, nothing, this condition is a form of conditioning. You challenge a narcissist's brandiosity, a narcissist will do anything. If you challenge a narcissist to be a moral person, he would become hyperboral. If you challenge him to be altruistic and charitable, for example, if there's a charity competition, if you organize a charity competition, you know, the narcissist would want to come on top by making the greatest contribution in human history. So he would plunge $5 billion just to show you that he's the greatest of them all. And then he would say, wow, what a charitable person, amazingly altruistic, no, it's just manipulation via grandiosity. You can make the narcissist do almost anything by challenging or leveraging the narcissist's cognitive distortions, the narcissist's sickness and pathology. And this raises the question, how ethical is this? For example, if you come across someone with psychosis and they believe that they are Jesus Christ, or a lesser figure like Napoleon, by agreeing with them, by colluding with the delusion, you can make them do things, you know, but it raises the question of ethics. When I was a very young man, which was when the last dinosaurs were dying, there was a guy in Israel, Friedberg, and he invented an amazing way to treat what used to be called at the time, paranoid schizophrenia. Amazing way. There was a guy who came, and I witnessed this particular occasion, this particular instance, there's a guy who came and he said that the Mossad, which is equivalent of the CIA in Israel, he said that the Mossad was chasing him, was after him, was conspiring against him. They wanted to kill him and whatever. Of course, this was a case of paranoid schizophrenia, extreme mental illness. So what the therapist did, he organized a court. He created a court, a simulated court, and there was a judge, and there was a prosecutor, and the prosecutor was prosecuting the Mossad for persecuting the patient, and the patient has his own defense attorney, and there was a court, a trial, and the Mossad was found guilty and instructed by the judge to not persecute the patient anymore. And this is a great way to assuage anxiety, paranoid ideation, and so on. But it does raise the question. I think it's, I personally feel it's unethical. It may be efficient, it may reduce the patient's anxiety, paranoid ideation, may have a beneficial effect on the patient, but it perpetuates a pathology. And anything that perpetuates a pathology, in my view, is not okay. Morally, ethically, not okay. And today, the only way to treat narcissists is to perpetuate a pathology, even enhancing, amplified. Is this ethical? I don't think so. Speaking of treatment, right? Before we talk about treatment, let's talk about intimate relationships, because this seems to be the most triggering for people who are watching these videos. The idea that you would embark upon an intimate relationship with somebody who's a narcissistic abuser, you may not know it, and all of a sudden, you're knee deep in it. Would the narcissistic person have difficulty, say, pair bonding, for example, or would they just be like the rest of us? As I said earlier, narcissists are incapable of perceiving other people as external or as separate. So the only form of relationship and the only form of intimacy a narcissist can have is with, not even with himself, because he has no self, but with structures, voices, objects inside himself. It's the only kind of intimate relationship you can have. What he does in order to have an intimate relationship with you, he converts you into one of those objects or constructs or whatever you want to call inside his mind, introduces you into his mind, incinerates you into his mind, and then he continues to interact with your representation in his mind. And so the narcissist defines himself and regulates himself through you. And in this, the narcissist is similar to someone with borderline personality disorder. He uses external regulation. So for example, if the narcissist wants to feel great about himself, he wants to idealize himself, he will first idealize you because if you are ideal and the narcissist owns you as an internal object that makes him ideal. For example, a narcissist would date a woman and he would say, she's dropped dead gorgeous. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. By insisting on this, by idealizing, what is he saying? He is saying, I'm the owner of a drop dead gorgeous object. I'm the owner of the most beautiful thing the world has ever seen and that makes me special. That makes me unique. So even this, even the process of idealization is about the narcissist, not about you. It's like owning a car, a flashy car or it's a status symbol. So narcissists interact only with themselves through you. Narcissists also need your gaze. They need to see themselves through your eyes. So they use your gaze to regulate themselves. But this is not a safe method. So what they do, they falsify your gaze. They attribute to you cognitions, thoughts, emotions and so on that you may not have at all. So they would say, for example, oh, he admires me. He thinks I'm a genius. Maybe you think I'm an idiot. Maybe what you truly think is that I'm a blowhard idiot. But as a narcissist, I would attribute to you certain emotions and thoughts and beliefs and so on and so forth that are conducive to my own idealization and grandiosity. And there was no evidence to indicate that the person had those feelings in the first place. You're a placeholder. You're just a placeholder. There are massive processes of projection. The narcissist projects onto you parts of himself that he cannot tolerate, that he rejects. So you become a repository of the narcissist's bad emotions, bad object, self-castigation, self-criticism, self-rejection, self-loathing. They're all projected onto you. So if the narcissist is weak, he's not weak, you're weak. He attributes this to you. So this is called projection. Narcissist splits you. One day you can do no wrong, the next day you are. You can do no right. Or bad, or good. Black and white. This is called splitting. You are subjected to a roller coaster of totally infantile defenses, defenses which are typical of infants, babies. And the narcissist instrumentalizes you to the maximum. You have a job. It's a job description. It's not an intimate relation. You have a series of jobs. For example, you should recall the narcissist's moments of glory. And by recalling these moments of glory, you regulate the narcissist's flow of narcissistic supply. That's a job. Another job, you should confirm to the narcissist that his false self is not false, and that his fantasy, the shared fantasy, is not false. That's another job you have. And there are many others. And you're busy all the time. And it's exhausting. It's depleting. Because essentially you become a maintenance worker. And your maintenance job is to make sure that the fragile, brittle, breakable, vulnerable thing that is the narcissist, because it's not a self. It's a thing. It's never impacted by reality. You're a buffer. You're a firewall. And if you don't do your job correctly, you're penalized very heavily. You're devalued. So it's a transactional thing, because as you recall, the child who later becomes a narcissistic adult is exposed to transactional love. The only kind of love he knows. He associates love with performance. And he associates love with pain. Pain or as a punitive thing. So this is the way he constructs the shared fantasy. And the base requirements from you is to not be, to suspend yourself and to reappear as a fictional character within a narrative that is self-aggrandizing and overprotective. A narrative whose main role is to prevent narcissistic injury or God forbid, narcissistic modification. And you are the guardian of the narcissist. That's why I have this principle of dual mothership where the narcissist actually tells you, you're going to be my mother and I'm going to be your mother. You're the mother. You're the guardian. You're the custodian of the narcissist. Dangerous life-threatening shame. It is your job to feed the narcissist with so much misinformation and fake news that will prevent him from ever getting in touch with his internal shame, which could destroy him and kill him. So that would be narcissists. That's what they call narcissistic supply, right? Yes, that's narcissistic supply. And you would be a source of narcissistic supply. And the narcissist would use a narcissistic supply to regulate his internal environment and to buttress the fortress that he has constructed around the shame, isolating it somehow. It's mainly shame. Their other negative effects and other negative emotions is eroding some, mentioned them like anger, envy and so on. Narcissists are not capable of positive at all, not even one of them, not love, not forget about all this. They're capable only of negative. Well, that's quite interesting because that would intimate them that if somebody is experiencing love for another human being that they couldn't possibly be. Unfortunately, we're heavily dependent on self-reporting. How would you verify that what this person is experiencing is love? There's no objective test or anything. One of the funny things you see online in doing any research on narcissism is that people are always wondering, are they themselves narcissistic or clinically narcissistic? And one way to offer yourself comfort would be to remember the times that you did experience a deep sense of love or you are perhaps you are in love with somebody. How do you know that he was love? How do you know that he did not mislabel something else? For example, dependency. Dependency is often mistaken for love. It's a problem with emotions because we utterly depend on self-reporting. The thing is that narcissists firmly believe that they experience highly intense love. If you talk to the narcissist, I'm going to tell you I love the way no one else can love. I love so deeply and intensely and profoundly that I doubt anyone else is capable of this. So they insist that they are capable of loving and that they've experienced love and that they are offering love and that they are creatures of love and everything. They masquerade as borderlines actually. But what the narcissist labels love is nothing whatsoever to do with love. Not a Venn diagram where there's something in common. It's like two circles. It's nothing whatsoever. What the narcissist labels as love is a process known as narcissistic elation. It's an oceanic feeling of merging and fusing with a mother figure who then affirms the narcissist's grandiosity, the narcissist's perfection, the narcissist's loveability. So this is called narcissistic elation. It's the merger of fusion, symbiotic, with a mother figure or with a real mother, by the way. When the infant reacts to a real mother, that's narcissistic elation. And narcissists misidentify this as love. And when you dig deeper with narcissists, which I've been doing for 30 years, when you dig deeper with narcissists, you come up across paradoxes of thinking and so on. So they would tell you, I know I'm in love because of the way it makes me feel. You ask the narcissist, how do you know you're in love? Or because I've never felt this way. But wait a minute. Love is not about you. Love is about the other person. True love is about the other person. It's more about how you make the other person feel, not yourself. Narcissists are takers. They measure everything in terms of give and take or take and take and performance. So when the narcissist chooses what you might call erroneously an intimate partner, I call them insignificant others. When the narcissist chooses an insignificant other, it's not because of who she is. There is this law, self-aggrandizing law among the victim communities, the so-called empath communities that they're special. That's why the narcissists chose them. They were chosen because they're hyper empathic and they're amazingly kind and they're nice and that's what she is. Narcissists does not choose the partner on the basis of who she is. Narcissists don't do empathy. They wouldn't identify empathy if it fell on their head. Narcissists choose you because of what you can give him. Narcissists are looking for sex, supply, sadistic and narcissistic, safety, object constancy, your constant presence, even addiction, I would say, to the narcissist. So safety and services. If you give the narcissist two of these four, sex and services, services and safety, any two, you qualify. You could be tall or short, dark or long. You could even be a psychopath. You could even be another narcissist. It's meaningless. They don't care who you are. They care you're a service provider. I don't care who owns my internet service provider. I just want internet flowing through my computer. So it's a highly performative and or performance oriented, goal oriented approach. But the victims feel so commoditized. They feel so marginalized. They feel that they've been so interchangeable and dispensable that they react with a narcissistic defense. They say, it's not true. I was very special to him. I was empathic. I was nice. I was kind. I loved him. I saw through. I saw his inner child. They try to make sense of what has happened to them. And what has happened to them is simply they happen to be there, period. And they happen to be givers rather than takers. So maybe that's the only qualification. You have to be a giver or a people pleaser. Yeah. Are you hearing any background noise at all when we're in this conversation? Narcissus is coming. No, from my side. Nope. Okay, cool. I have a builder in doing some work. Okay, so. No, nothing. Nothing is coming. That's fantastic. Okay. Let's talk about combating the narcissist. Now, I don't know if you have seen this, but I've noticed a lot of stuff online, how to manipulate the narcissist, how to fight the narcissist. And I'm wondering about, okay, well, is this a good idea, folks? I mean, what are we doing here? How to attack the narcissist? How to defeat the narcissist? How to torture. I saw something that, okay, what's your perspective? Nonstatist are very gullible and extremely prone to manipulate. I mean, to being manipulate. They're very manipulable. Yeah. They don't have actual defenses against manipulation and worse because they consider themselves to be so superior, so godlike, so perfect. So no one can pull the wool over a narcissist's eyes because no one is intellectually superior to the narcissist. The narcissist is world savvy, is worldly, is experienced, is super knowledgeable, is so narcissists, the grandiosity of the narcissist is a cognitive distortion. Cognitive distortion in clinical terms means that you misperceive reality simply. When someone misperceives reality, it's an easy target, an easy victim and an easy mark for con artists. So narcissists very often fall for swindlers and con artists and they're easy marks. Well, they would fall for flattery and, for example, for example, yeah, love bombing, flattery, get rich, quick schemes. Yeah, they're easy marks. So actually, most of these videos are correct. I've watched, of course, my share. They're pretty accurate. It's true that you can do this to the narcissist. If you take into account that the mental age, emotional age of a narcissist is probably anywhere between two and four years old, I'm not sure it's such a major accomplishment to con the narcissist or manipulate the narcissist. I would be ashamed of doing this. You're manipulating or conning or abusing a child, in effect. No, it's a very bad child. It's an affairious child. It's a horrible child, but it's still a child. You're taking advantage of this child's naivety, naivete, this child's gullibility, this child's lack of experience with emotions. Narcissists can be very experienced in business and politics and what have you, but when it comes to emotional processing and so on and so forth, they're children. So yeah, sure, you can manipulate a child to do your bidding or punish the child. And if you're proud of it, what's for you? Yeah. So how would you start then? What would you do? What would you do? You're talking love bombing. Well, first of all, you have to identify someone as the narcissist. Once you've done that, then flattery, love bombing, that type of thing. But what would that give you? What would you achieve by doing that? I mean promotion, perhaps. You can do, you can make the narcissist do anything you want. There are two vectors of attack. If I boil all these two million videos, there are two vectors of attack. One is grandiosity and the other is paranoid ideation, paranoia. So you can use these two vectors to manipulate the narcissist, to make the narcissist do, and I mean literally anything you want, literally anything you want. So if you cater to the narcissist's grandiosity, flattery is one example, but it doesn't have to be flattery. For example, you can pretend to be helpless. And by pretending to be helpless, you aggrandize the narcissist. You are my only hope. Only you can save me. Only you have the solution. You're amazing. I don't trust anyone else. It's a way to cater to the narcissist's grandiosity, which does not involve flattery in effect. That's a co-dependence do this. Co-dependence often use this form of emotional blackmail. You know, I will die without you. If you leave me, I will die. This kind of thing. So this is a vector of attack by a grandiosity. And another vector is paranoia, to create an ambience or an environment that would trigger the narcissist's paranoid ideation, fear, and would cause the narcissist to behave in ways which would be self-defeating or self-destructive even if you want to punish the narcissist, for example. These are the two vectors. And a combination of these two is even more like a combination of these two is known as paranoia or paranoid personality disorder. It's when your grandiosity combines with your paranoia. And you say to yourself, I'm such an important person. I know so many secrets. I'm so unique. My skills are unparalleled. So this means that people are conspiring against me. This means that I'm at the focus and the center of malign attention. And so the paranoia feeds the grandiosity. And the grandiosity feeds the paranoia. And you can construct a perfect scenario which would push the narcissist to behave in ways which conform to your goal or your own. And con artists do this. But in intimate relationships, it's important to understand that narcissism is infectious, literally infectious. You get infected via a process called entraining. When the narcissist verbally abuses you or verbally repeats the same message over and over again, and ultimately synchronizes your mind with his mind. And that is not a metaphor. The brain waves synchronize. It's been discovered recently in neuroscientific studies. So he synchronizes your brain with his brain via entraining. He creates a fantasy which is irresistible because it might cater to some of your needs or some of your fears and so on. So he takes over, hijacks your mind. He takes over your mind. And your only defense at some point is to out-narcissize the narcissist, to simply become a bigger narcissist or even a psychopath. So we say in clinical terms that exposure to narcissism, pathological narcissism triggers narcissistic defenses. And because narcissists traumatize a form of trauma known as complex trauma, trauma that is kind of regular and low-key, but ambient all the time there. So because narcissists do this all the time, you begin to develop a post-traumatic condition. And as we know by now, post-traumatic condition, complex post-traumatic conditions are indistinguishable from personality disorder. That's why someone like Judith Herman, Judith Herman is the mother of the field of complex trauma. She coined the phrase CPTSD. Judith Herman advocates to merge complex trauma with at least borderline personality disorder. She says you need to eliminate borderline personality disorder because it's a form of complex trauma. And so the narcissist traumatizes you. Gradually, you become borderline. Your emotions become dysregulated. You are doing crazy things. You act out. You go bananas. After that, you become narcissistic. You push back. Narcissist tries to humiliate you. You humiliate back. There's competition. You're more intelligent than the narcissist. Narcissist won't tell you. So there's a kind of, you know, you become more narcissistic. There's reciprocity going on. Yeah. And finally, you become psychopathic. You become defined. You become reckless. You become engaging dangerous behaviors. You lose sight of laws and regulations and rules and inhibitions. So the narcissist pushes you from borderline to narcissistic to psychopath. And after the narcissist exits your life, you remain stuck with this for a while, luckily. It's a transitory phase. But for a while, you are indistinguishable from a narcissistic to a psychopath or borderline. So that's why I say that narcissism is contagious. And when you're thinking about healing from the trauma and you mentioned that you used the word trauma there, what steps would you recommend to start that process? Are you talking immediately booking an appointment with a therapist? What kind of self-work can you do? Yeah. I strongly advocate to do some self-work before you attend therapy. And the reason is simple. Through the process of entraining and other processes, the narcissist embeds in your mind, installs in your mind, and up. It puts places in your mind a voice, his voice, his introvert. He injects himself into your mind. And from that moment on, he speaks to you through your mind. Not only that, the narcissist forms coalitions with other voices with the same message. So for example, if you had a bad mother, a mother who kept telling you that you're worthless and you are stupid and you're this, the narcissist, her voice inside your head would create a coalition with the narcissist voice and they would magnify each other and attack you from inside. So this voice is with you even after the narcissist has exited your life. If you were to attend therapy immediately, this voice would co-opt the therapy. It would take over the therapy. And actually, the therapist would end up interacting with the narcissist in your mind, not with you. So there are a few steps you need to take there all on my website. On my YouTube channel, there's a playlist titled narcissistic abuse, healing and recovery, where I detail all the steps and so on. But in a nutshell, you need to get rid of this voice and then you need to separate from the narcissist and become yourself again. Why is that? Because within the shared fantasy, you strike a bargain, a covert contract with the narcissist. He becomes your mother, you become his mother. In order for the narcissist to become your mother, he regresses you. He infantilizes you. He pushes you to become an infant, back to the womb. So when the narcissist is gone, you need to grow up again. You need to grow up and separate the way a child separates from his mother. And then you need to individual. You need to go through these phases by yourself. And only then you should attend therapy. I explain how to do all these things in detail, in great detail. There's one over 50 or 60 hours on this playlist. And I want to repeat it here. Just go to the playlist and listen to the sequence of videos on how to do it. But yes, it's a crucial point. Do not attend therapy before you eradicate the narcissist's voice in your mind and you have separated from the narcissist. You are no longer an infant, no longer a child, no longer dependent. I've heard you mentioned before body language, outward physical identifiers of narcissism. What would you look for? What body language would betray a narcissist if you like it? Depends if it's overt or covert. The overt narcissist is voting. And to save all of us time, Donald Trump. So look at Donald Trump. That's the overt narcissist. He's voting. He's contemptuous. He's exclusionary. He excludes people. Doesn't bring them to him, but kind of stands apart. He's mysterious. He creates an air of mystery or mystique. And he's presumptuous. So Donald Trump. Female equivalent. All these distinctions between male and female narcissists were very pertinent in the 1980s. But today studies by various, Lisa Wade and many others, have shown that women adopted a masculine identity. In 1980, women described themselves using adjectives. And eight out of nine adjectives were feminine. Caring, empathic, loving, affectionate. Today studies today. I mean in the last 10 years, women describe themselves in masculine terms. Eight out of nine adjectives nowadays are masculine. Competitive, ambitious, a winner, tough, rough. So today there is no clinical difference between men and women in terms of narcissism. And I suspect in all other ways. So it's meaningless to us. That's why I never make these gender distinctions in my videos. And where were we? What were we discussing? We're talking about body language. I have body language. Yes. So it applies to women as well. When it comes to the covert narcissists, this is really bad. Whereas you see the overt narcissists coming. You can't mistake Donald Trump for a humble, altruistic person unless you are legally blind. But the covert narcissists can put on a very convincing display of a side of humility. We actually have a name for it in clinical psychology. It's called pseudo humility. It can put us as a side of humility, of self-deprecation, of self-awareness, of being charitable and altruistic, of being a savior or a fixer or a healer, and above all, of course, of being a victim. That's the typical body language of the covert narcissists. He is slouched. He is hurt. He is agonizing. He is in need of help. He is very affectionate and compassionate and empathic. He communicates this. And I think the key is how ostentatious it is. So if you see an ostentatious display of positive traits, it's likely a covert narcissists. And indeed, there are new studies that demonstrate that social activists and people who engage in virtual signaling are actually dark personalities. In other words, people who have subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism, and Machiavellianism. This is known today as competitive victim. So all these so-called victims and all these movements were hijacked by covert narcissists mainly and some psychopaths and some overt narcissists. And these covert narcissists are pretending to be the victims. Victimhood is a form of entitlement. Period. Regardless of how voracious it is, regardless of how true it is, you could be victimized. Everyone is victimized. I've been victimized. You've been victimized. Or if you're alive, you've been victimized at some point, but it doesn't make you a victim. Victimhood is an identity, not a history, not a personal history. So victimhood is very narcissistic. It's entitled. It's competitive. It's arrogant. It's self-aggrandizing and so on. But it also is making a request of other people to change their behavior around them. This is the problem. You used the word entitlement. That is a very good way to describe it, because if I claim victimhood status, and it means everybody else has to adapt. Yes, you claim a right. When you're a victim, you make a claim to certain rights. And rights impose obligations on other people. Whenever right, there's a corresponding, commentary obligation. So if you have a right, they have to modify their behavior in order to accommodate your right. So anything from political correctness, correct speech, you name it. All victimhood movements have lists of grievances and derive rights from these grievances, which impose obligations on society at large. This is a formula. And it's a narcissistic formula, of course. We should help victims. We should help victims, of course. We should help them with therapy, we should help them with police if it's a crime. I mean, we should help victims. Society should be geared to help victims. But society should not accommodate victimhood as a lifelong pursuit or a profession. And no, victimhood does not give rights philosophically speaking. You as a victim don't have rights just because you have been victimized. To be clear, we're not saying that there's no justification. The crime, if you like, that was committed against could be perfectly legitimate. It could have been dreadful. But the point is that you don't live your life as a... And you don't make demands on other people. It doesn't give you the right to make demands on other people. None. I know it's shocking maybe to post-modern years. Let me ask you about one thing then, so that one thing that jumps to mind. There is a debate about reparations, right? So you may see... Perfect example, yeah. And the Holocaust, by the way. The Holocaust industry. Yeah. So there is a comparison there. Yeah, it's deadly ground to even discuss. But clearly the reparations issue, the problem with the reparations issue is that there's nobody alive today that can be... that repair can be done when it comes to, for example, slavery. And the Holocaust, there's maybe a handful of survivors left at this point. When an event of having been victimized, an event of victimization, is converted into a narrative, an ideology, a manifesto of grievances and rights like the Declaration of Independence in the United States, which was a classic victimhood thing, you know, read it again. So when this is done, we are transitioning into a pathological area. And also, to my mind, an unethical area. This is an unethical one. The fact that you've endured victimhood, the fact that you've been victimized, does not give you the right to take from other people. Because they may perceive this as being victimized. It does not give you the right to victimize others. You take one dollar away from me. I'm sorry, you victimized me. You don't owe you anything. So there are, of course, society should accommodate retributive justice, retribution, restorative justice, even retribution as its place as a kind of a soothing mechanism. And of course, money should somehow change hands and so on and so forth. But that's between the direct victim and the direct victimized. Anything that exits this circle is illegitimate. I'm ethical and reflect pathology. And when I say reflect pathology, it's based on studies. There's not some vacuum. Studies by Gabai in Israel, studies in British Columbia, studies in Taiwan, by now there's a whole literature in the last four years. There's a whole literature about competitive victims, certain entitled victims, how victims manipulate other people to take away from them all kinds of things and so on. There's a whole literature on this. But because it's politically incorrect, it doesn't gain the exposure, which I think it should have gained. I think it's these amazing breakthroughs in the circle. And they're brave. These people are brave. Really, it takes bravery. And it takes courage. You could lose your job over such things. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So what do you feel about a narcissist's propensity to change themselves without treatment, without an intervention? Say they identify themselves as narcissistic and they identify narcissistic traits. How would they change? Would they change? Would they want to change? What's your perspective on that question? So we must distinguish between antisocial, the antisocial dimension of narcissism, which exists with majority of narcissists in a very pronounced way among psychopathic narcissists. But it exists in all narcissists. The antisocial dimension aspect ameliorates with age that is almost inexorable. And nothing needs to be done. It simply vanishes on its own. Narcissists are far less criminalized in late age. By the way, psychopaths as well. Narcissists are far less antisocial, far less abrasive, more accommodating, etc. So this happens. The social aspect of narcissism, the ability to function within society in ways which are not powerful or deleterious to other people, this takes care of itself. However, the core is immutable to death, the point of death. And the core is inability to perceive realities, it is cognitive distortions, grandiosity, fantasy. This is lifelong. And it doesn't resolve spontaneously. And it doesn't resolve with therapy. And therefore we should accept that there are people like that. That's it. People who live in fantasy and think they're gods. And if you disagree with them or challenge them, they punish them. So better stay clear. Yeah, we're talking about managing them as opposed to confronting them or treating them. When managing them requires the manipulation, manipulative vectors to mention, grandiosity and paranoid. That's the only way to manage them. But I wouldn't even, I would attempt to isolate, not to manage. I would attempt to, I, when I started my work in, and especially in 1995, I came up with a set of 27 strategies and I titled them No Contact, which today is a very, no one knows that I invented it, but I invented this trend. And I still think it's the best. I think it's the best. I mean, no contact, simply no contact, even if it's your mother, even if it's your son or daughter, or whatever, no contact. Well, it is, it is an ideal strategy, but it's unfortunately in the society we live in, it's sometimes that may not be possible. Sometimes you're reporting, you're working alongside people, you just simply can't just. Yes, that's why I came up with seven other strategies. Gray Rock was born. It's not mine. It's not mine. It's a second most powerful strategy. It's wonderful. I'm regret that it's not mine, but it's not mine. Can you give me another one or two? Mirroring, you know, there's a lecture on my website, on my YouTube channel, I'm sorry, which kind of, it's a lecture I gave in Budapest, where I kind of delineate the strategies and how the Nazis reacts, or actually how the Nazis experiences these strategies internally and reacts to them. So, but if at all possible to go no contact, and very often it is possible, for example, if you're divorcing a nurse, you can limit the interaction to intermediaries such as lawyers and accountants. You can refuse to communicate directly. If you are cooperating with the Nazis, you can use safe houses or third parties to shuttle the child between them. You know, you can put buffers and partitions enhanced and increase the separation gradually. And when people tell me I can't go no contact because I'm financially dependent on the Nazis, that is something I do not countenance or accept. In any way, shape or form. Absolutely. If you have a common child, I understand. If you're, or if someone tells me it's my mother, how can I do this to her? I don't accept this. I don't accept this. This is about self-reservation, survival. Nazis is threatening your survival, at least mentally, not because they're bad. I'm often confronted with the question of Nazis is evil. They're no more evil than viruses. Or, and I make a distinction between purposefulness and intentionality. The narcissist is purposeful. He has a purpose, like the psychopath. He's goal-oriented and the goal is not cystic supply. But yes, so he has a kind of game plan. But purposefulness is not the same as intentionality. The psychopath is intention, psychopath has intentions. If he hurts you, he wants to hurt you. If the narcissist hurts you, it's a problem. It's a side effect. He doesn't get off. He doesn't, you know, he doesn't arouse him to hurt you the way it arouses the psychopath often. So a virus. A virus has a purpose. Viruses are very good. They go through a protocol, they invade the cell, they convert the cell into a factory, they replicate it. We didn't all look very intelligent. When we were fighting the COVID-19 virus, people were talking about the COVID-19 as if it was some kind of intelligent, sentient enemy. But no one in his right mind, at least, would impute intentionality to the virus. And that's a narcissist. A narcissist is an automatic pilot. He's a programmed robot. I compared the narcissist to artificial intelligence 30 years ago. And I think that it falls, the seemingly falls. It's a form of artificial intelligence. Now today, when we confront or we come across or interact with artificial intelligence online, many of us have a feeling that our interlocutor is a human being. Intentional and decent. Of course it's not. It's a program. A program out of control sometimes, but it's a program. And the same with the narcissist. It's a machine. It's a robot programmed by bad mothers, bad fathers, to take on the world in highly specific ways. Actually, narcissists are very rigid and constricted. They're unable to extemporize and improvise. They are highly predictable because they are. So there were debates in philosophy in the 18th century, do animals have awareness, consciousness, or are they machines? And many philosophers said animals appear to be conscious and so on, but they're actually machines. They're pre-programmed machines. And many pet owners would disagree. But when we come to the narcissist, I insist on this. It's a pre-programmed machine. It's a highly sophisticated, complex machine that gives the erroneous impression of being a human being. It's a simulation. It's a great simulation of a human being. And in 1970, there was a roboticist, Masahiro Morin, a Japanese, and he said that the time will come when we're going to have robots indistinguishable from human beings, androids. And he said when this should happen, everyone would feel ill it is, and he called it the uncanny valley reaction. He said the closer robots will come to resemble human beings, the more and more people will feel discomfort and ill it is and so on. And this is the narcissist. This is the first android. It's a perfect emulation, imitation, simulation of a human being. And yet we feel uncomfortable. Something's wrong. Something's off key. We often deny this gut feeling, this intuition, often because of social reasons or because we are lonely and we want to have a partner or whatever the reason may be, or because it's my mother or my father, we deny this. But no one can deny really that when you're in the presence of a narcissist something doesn't click. Something is not right. Something doesn't fit. And I have this experience as an artist. I meet people and I am my most charming self. I'm outgoing and I'm a pathetic, I'm super kind and I don't ask. And I see how uncomfortable they are, how ill it is, how reluctant to engage, how reticent, how I see that I provoke this in them. And of course if the other party is obligated socially, if the social expectation is, then they suppress this. They suppress it and actually they're forced to act. They're forced to pretend. They're forced to fake. They become fake. I infect them with my fakeness. This is social contagion of mercy. That's the picture.