 Hello and you're very welcome to mind you, where I dive into how different people use different ways to self-care. I'm Brian Barnes from Brian Barnes Wellbeing, where I partner with people to create unique well-being solutions. Today I'm delighted to be talking to Professor Sam Vakman. Sam is a professor of psychology on the Faculty of Sea Apps. He is a prolific He is a counsellor to victims of narcissistic abuse and people with cluster B personalities. He is the author of Malign and Self-Love Narcissism Revisited. He is the host of his own YouTube channels with over 350,000 subscribers and he has a huge passion for serving and mining others. So Sam, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. You forgot to mention that I have brown eyes, the critical feature of my appeal. Bambi, Bambi like brown eyes. Critical feature of my appeal. Took me ages to secure them. It took a lot of work. That's been your biggest kind of work. Thank you so much for joining me with those beautiful brown eyes and you're so welcome today. Can you start off by telling me a bit about yourself and how you got here? Well, it started in prison. I was sentenced to three years in a correctional facility, aka prison in Israel for securities fraud. At the time I was a businessman, one of the biggest in Israel. And prior to that I've been a physicist. So I've betrayed my profession and my destiny, my intellectual destiny for money. And then money, I was in my early 20s, my late teens and early 20s as a millionaire. And I lost it. I simply lost control over myself. I committed crimes and I was sentenced to prison. I lost my wife. I lost all my properties and money and everything. I lost everything. I lost my reputation and it was very well known in my country of origin, which is Israel, as an intellectual. And so I lost everything. I hit rock bottom and then under the rock. And I felt that if I were not to get to grips with what has happened to me, it would happen again. And I couldn't face this again. It was too much. As it were, I was on the verge of committing suicide. So I knew that it's a life of death question. So I had all kinds of texts smuggled into prison, into the prison confines, the area. And luckily I was imprisoned with a psychiatrist. He was my cellmate. And he taught me the rudiments of personality disorders. And then as a condition for my parole, I was asked to, I was, I was a demand. I was required to attend therapy. And I attended therapy with an Orthodox Jew, believe it or not. And he furthered my knowledge about cluster B personality disorders. The first time I've ever heard of these was 1995. It was the second time I've been diagnosed with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. The first time was when I've lost my first love and fiancé. So I re I penetrated my thick skull that there's a connection between cluster B diagnosis, personality disorders diagnosis, and personal losses in life. If you're diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, bad things happen to you. You lose the people you love. You lose all your money. All your accomplishments are officiated and negated. You end up in prison. I mean, really bad things happen to you. So cluster B dooms you to what Freud called the repetition compulsion, you're compelled to repeat your mistakes, and then pay the price and then repeat your mistakes and then pay the price. So I dealt, I started to delve deep into the extant, extant texts. I was shocked to discover that nothing new has been written since 1974. It was 1995, mind you. And so when, when I was paroled 1996, I wrote a book. I wrote it in prison. Actually, I wrote it on the upper bunk of my cell by candlelight. And the manuscript is still exists. And then this became malignant self love narcissism revisited my, my first book on personality disorders and the first book that described narcissistic abuse, which is a phrase that I coined in the early 90s. And I decided this, this will be my calling. This will be my mission to educate both sides of the aisle to educate people with cluster B personality disorders, which include narcissistic, anti social, also known as psychopathy, histrionic and borderline personality disorder. So to educate these people on the one hand, and to enlighten their victims on the other, on the other hand, to allow the victims to mount effectual defenses against the vicissitudes and exigencies of their cluster B partners. And so this has been my life's mission since 1995. I've been, I've been the first. I initiated the whole field. I coined most of the language in use today. Many of the things you've heard, I actually coined I coined, you know, flying monkeys, I coined somatic narcissists, ribbon loss. I had to coin the whole new language because there was no language to describe these unfathomable experiences. Now, narcissistic abuse is not just any form of abuse. It is not about stealing your money. It's not about having sex with you illicitly. It is not about subjecting you to legal torture. It's not about absconding with your pension funds. This is what psychopaths do. Narcissists, narcissistic abuse is about negating your existence. It's about vitiating. It's about annulling you. It's about making you disappear and reappear as a, as a figment in the narcissist shared fantasy. So converting you into an obstruction into a symbol and denuding you of any independence, any autonomy, any agency, and any ability to act separate from the narcissists. This is really an extreme form of abuse because it consumes you. It subsumes you and it leaves nothing of you but a shell. And then it's a long way to recover from this. Yeah. Very long way. The word parasific comes to mind. Would you agree that it's a kind of a parasific? Oh, absolutely. I keep saying that narcissists are scavengers and they're parasites. But one common mistake is to attribute malevolence or malice to narcissists. I think people are confusing. People often confuse narcissists and psychopaths. Psychopaths are premeditated. They're deliberate. They're gallerated. They're ruthless. They're callous. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. These are psychopaths. Narcissists are deluded little children. The mental age of a narcissist is anywhere between two years and nine years in the most advanced case. You know, they're kids. They're simply kids. And then they drag you into their fantasy defenses, into their shared fantasy space. Yeah. And they coerce you into playing the role that they want you to play in the shared fantasy. But there's no malice. There's no evil. They're not evil. They're running on a program. Yes. They're like a virus or a tiger. Yeah. People say, but yeah, but they have choices. They can make choices. They can, it's a decision making process involved. They know right from wrong. Yeah, but they're compelled. It's a compulsion. Yeah. That's the meaning of a compulsion. Psychopaths are not compelled. Psychopaths do make choices and decisions. Psychopaths are really evil. They're bad people. Narcissists are lost people. They're lost. And they want you to get lost with them because they feel so insecure, so unsafe, so frightened, so terrified, like small children in the dark. They want company. Yes. They want company. Yeah. The small children in the dark. Yeah. They whistle in the dark and they want you to whistle with them. Yeah. And they want you to whistle their tune. Yeah. No other tune. And that again, like for people that kind of, I suppose we come to this now in a minute, I'll ask it to kind of let's say, you know, even just to summarize it, like you have, you know, again, that theory of, you know, the dual mothership and the shared fantasy and the fusion and that those dual kind of maternal figures. And again, that kind of almost, you know, parasitic kind of robotic kind of pre-programmed actions of the narcissist. And, you know, even though, you know, like there's so much kind of, you know, damaged onto people, as you said yourself, victims, you know, like to change your perspective on it. Now it can be difficult, Sam, as you can imagine, if someone has crossed paths with someone, you know, that is kind of, you know, narcissistic bush, you know, I suppose it does help to kind of almost, you know, have some compassion towards them. Yeah. Here's the difference. Here's the distinction, which might be of help to victims too. I think victims will be relieved. And the path to healing and recovery would be expedited. If they were to grasp, truly grasp the narcissistic dynamic. Yeah. And so here's the difference between the narcissist and the psychopath. The narcissist is a victim of abuse. It's as simple as that. The narcissist's ability to resonate with his victims, to exploit them, to leverage their vulnerabilities, to penetrate the defenses, and to render them figments in his shared fantasy is because he is one of them. He himself. And I say he, it could be she, of course. The narcissist himself is a victim of abuse. Narcissism is a post traumatic condition. Yeah. So because he is a post trauma victim, he resonates with post trauma victims, with other post traumatic victims. And so he picks up on broken people, damaged people, vulnerable people, because he can resonate with them. He understands their language. He can tap into their inner host dynamics, fears, hopes, priorities, preferences, wishes. He knows the code. He is one of them. Yeah. He is one of them. He is just, he just chose another strategy. The strategy he chose was to emulate the abuser, rather than remain a victim. Yeah. But he's one is a victim. The psychopath is not the same. The psychopathy is probably a brain abnormality. Probably. Psychopaths spring up everywhere and anywhere. Psychopaths are not the outcomes of early childhood abuse and trauma. Not. They are really evil people. They are malevolent and malicious. They're dangerous. Because they are, I hesitate to say the word, but I would say in human, they're not human in any, any sense of the word that I understand. They're not human. Narcissists are human. For example, narcissists crucially or critically depend on input from other people known as narcissistic supply. Narcissists are codependence actually, they depend on narcissistic supply that renders them pro social, communal. They collaborate with other people in order to extract supply from other people. They end up hurting people. They end up damaging and breaking people. They end up doing horrible things. Narcissists. Don't misunderstand. I'm the guy who coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. So give me a break. Give me some credit. Yeah. I know. I know what they're doing. But they're doing these things because it's a default behavior. Because deep inside, they are so massively immature that they are terrified. It's a panic reaction. It's about control. It's about extracting whatever is possible from the environment. It's a short term view of life. It's like, use it or lose it. Yeah, almost a panic. I use a sensation of panic and hunger and anxiety. Yes, it's an anxiety reaction. Absolutely. Yeah. Psychopaths are called premeditated, calculated. I know I've spent time with them in prison. You know, I got to know them. These are different animals. Different animals. Absolutely. Nothing in common. They don't depend on other people. They are lone wolves. Psychopaths. Yeah. They don't care about other people. They don't. The narcissist, at least within the shared fantasy, cares enough to manipulate you. He cares enough about you because he needs to manipulate you. He needs to obtain favorable outcomes. He needs to be self-efficacious. So he needs to have something in common with you, to establish some common ground or some common agenda. That's why relationships with narcissists resemble cults. They're very cult-like, cultish. Relationships with psychopaths resemble predation. Psychopaths are predators. They just eat you alive. Yeah. That's it. And Sam, again, kind of, you know, talking about that shared fantasy, the diffusion, that dual mothership, like, as you said, that comes into the relationship with a narcissist because there's, you know, first of all there's idealization and then there's that kind of devaluation and individuation and discard. So that dual mothership kind of part. Narcissists are unable to perceive reality or interact with it. The phase of separation and individuation, which is anywhere between 18 months to 36 months of life, is critical because separation means that you recognize that there is a world out there except your mommy, that the symbiotic phase where you are merged and fused with mother, where you believe yourself to be a part of mother and mother is a part of you and mother is the world. So the world is a part of you and the world is inside you. That's psychotic. Yes, psychosis essentially. The child is psychotic. And then there's a phase called separation and individuation. You separate from mommy because mommy frustrates you and you realize that she's external to you. Well, if mommy is external to you, then many other things are external to you. So there's an external world. Narcissists never make it past this phase. They never succeed to separate from mommy, because mother is a dead mother, not not physically dead, but emotionally absent. A dead mother is a phrase coined by Andre Green, the psychoanalyst. It's a dead mother. It's an absent mother, depressed mother, narcissistic mother, self-centered mother, parentifying mother, instrumentalizing mother. It's a bad mother, not good enough mother to paraphrase Winnicott. Yeah, yeah. So this kind of mother doesn't allow the child to separate from her and to become an individual and therefore to take on the world, to explore the world. So the narcissist never had a chance to come across reality. He remained stuck in his internal world. And his habitual, his habitual object relations is internalizes external objects. So if the narcissist comes across a potential intimate partner, he would immediately convert her to a representation in his mind in internal object and introject. She would become a symbol in his mind, an abstraction. And he would continue to interact with his internal object rather than with the external object because narcissists don't do reality. That's not some vacuum. That's Otto Kenberg. Otto Kenberg suggested that borderline is a form of narcissism and that narcissism is a form of psychosis. And he was, he was bloody right. It is a form of psychosis. Narcissism is a psychotic, not psychopaths. Psychopaths are well embedded in reality. They have extremely strong reality testing. Actually, psychopaths have more reality, stronger reality testing than normal healthy people. That's why they're able to manipulate people so easily. The narcissist is lost, is delusional. He's on the verge of hallucinating. He's totally immersed in his inside his mind, unable to perceive the separateness of the world and everyone in it. So when he comes across someone, he really likes someone who triggers him somehow because he she resembles his mother. So at that moment, he tries to internalize her because he doesn't do reality. He wants her to give up on her reality. He snapshots her, he interjects her. And he continues to photoshop the snapshot, which is a process known as idealization. And then he continues to interact with the ideal object in his mind that represents the external object, which is the intimate partner. Mind you, the intimate partner colludes with the narcissist. She likes to be idealized. She likes to see herself or to perceive herself through the narcissist gaze as an ideal, perfect, super intelligent, drop dead gorgeous person. So they collude, it's a collusion. And they create a shared fantasy. And in the shared fantasy, she is the narcissist's mother. And he is her mother. They mother each other. They regress each other to infancy. And they become each other's mother. It's much more complicated than this. But this is the essence. That's the nature. Yeah. And Sam, again, like, I honestly believe that your work and, you know, like the research you've done in this, as you said, it's, you know, like, it's very helpful for people that have cross paths with, you know, narcissists, narcissists closer to be personality, to make sense of it to kind of, as I said, like, you know, I've used it myself as a Rosetta stone to kind of translate the past and to make sense of it and to translate what happened in that relationship with the narcissist. As you said yourself, victims, victims of narcissists and closer to me personalities. Now you did talk about building up defenses. So I suppose looking at the good news, because again, I know you've done a lot of research and a lot of work and hundreds of other videos on, you know, solutions and building up skills and a kind of a toolkish on, you know, to cut to kind of navigate out of the database and out of that kind of nightmare situation. So looking at some of those, let's say tools that you talk about Sam, kind of those kind of self care, self love tunes, you talked about self awareness, self acceptance, self forgiveness, self trust, self efficacy, could you dive deeper into, you know, what some of those tools might look like? This first thing, first thing is you have to accept responsibility for your contribution to what happened. Yeah, that's critical. If you're stuck in a victim hood mindset, a victim styles, you don't, you don't because you're perpetuating the narcissistic abuse by other means. That's point number one, regain agency, regain control of your life, take responsibility and analyze what had happened, realize we have gone wrong, made wrong choices, decisions, and make sure you never make them again. But if you claim, if you claim that you're angelic, you're blameless, you, you were subject to a force of nature, a tornado, or, I don't know, that's tsunami. There was nothing you could do about it. What's there? So you're bound to repeat this mistake again. Point number one, point number two, there's a voice inside your head, installed and implanted by the narcissist, clinically, it's known as introject. The narcissist, inhabited and colonized your mind. Even after he's long gone, and I'm using he, it could be she, I repeat, even if the narcissist is long gone, physically, is still, is still in your mind, still there. There's been my mind snatching process here. You need to cleanse your mind, you need to purge it. You need to distinguish between authentic and non authentic voices, you need to identify the narcissist voice, and you need to silence it as aggressively as you can. And if you need helping doing so, go to therapy, attend therapy. It's critical. Number three, you need to ask yourself what in you predisposed you to participate in the shared fantasy. For example, maybe you like fantasies, maybe you prefer fantasy to reality. Maybe you find your life and reality unbearable. Ask yourself why? What can you do about it? The fact that you've ended up with a narcissist in a shared fantasy is not a coincidence, nor is it an accident. Do not delude yourself into thinking that you were an innocent bystander. You were not. So ask all these difficult questions. They are very difficult, of course. And the last thing, and of course, I have to compress everything. But the last advice piece of advice is that you have to separate and individuate what the narcissist has done to you. He regressed you to early infancy. By becoming your mother, he has rendered you an infant. He has removed all the adult defenses and cognitions and everything he has regressed you. And so you need to start from scratch. You need to separate, you need to individuate, you need to mature, and you need to become an adult again. You can't do any of this alone. Don't be grandiose, and don't kid yourself. You can't. You need help. This is the first act of surrender. You need to surrender. You need help. So seek help. Luckily, the prognosis is very good. All these processes and, you know, are fully reversible. You're going to be okay. If you just, if you just acquire humility, you need to be humble. In the face of what had happened to you, you need to be humble. That's all. I love that sound. And wow, again, there's so much in there. I know you have talked again, again, coming back to that voice that you said, that's kind of, you know, that kind of, you know, like that parasitic kind of voice in your head. You've talked about, you know, replacing that good voice kind of, you know, like having, let's say, people free time, having, you know, a busy kind of fulfilling outer life and mindfulness. And, you know, like replacing that voice with a good voice. Yes, the narcissist hijacks everything in you that is not friendly to you. If you have had other interjects, which were critical, self-defeating, self-handicapping, even self-destructive, the narcissist voice, the app that the narcissist installs in your mind, co-opts and colludes and collaborates with these other voices. The narcissist creates a coalition, a coalition of unfriendly enemy, hostile voices in your head. So if you had a mother, for example, a mother who was very, very critical of you, a mother who berated you and demeaned you and criticized you and, you know, the narcissist would team up with the mother interject, with your mother's voice in your head, and would create a coalition with her. The narcissist amplifies all these. And it is all about control because the narcissist doesn't trust you when you're strong. If you're strong, you can walk away. If you're strong, you can abandon him. He's a two-year-old. He's a two-year-old. He's terrified. And so he needs you to be weak. He needs to break you, housebreak you if you wish. He needs you to become a pet. He needs to tame you. He needs you to become an extension of him. He needs to be in 100% control of you. And so he becomes your reality testing. You begin to doubt your own judgment. And so you begin to ask him, is it real? Do you think the same? Do you agree? He becomes, he becomes your interfacial reality. He isolates you. He isolates you from family, from friends. And finally, he isolates you from your own kernel, from your own essence, from your own core. And he becomes your identity. These are very harrowing, mind-controlled, brain-washing, and training techniques that the narcissist uses instinctively, reflexively, and unconsciously, by the way, not maliciously. Yeah. But that's what the narcissist does. It's a parasite, you're right. You need to detox. It's like a drug. There's also a strong addictive aspect, because the narcissist exposes you to your idealized image. And you fall in love with this image. It's a bit narcissistic. You fall in love with this image, and it's very difficult for you to let go. And you can, you see yourself through the narcissist gaze, as you have never seen yourself before, you feel unconditionally loved and accepted. This is a combination of maternal love, self-love, infatuation, narcissistic, grandiosity. I mean, it's irresistible. Yeah. Yeah. You need rehab. You need to detox. Absolutely. And again, thank you for pointing out some of the ways to do that there, Sam. And again, you know, I suppose it's kind of walking steady on one city ground. Now, I suppose starting from scratch and, you know, bringing in all those self care, kind of tools, self awareness, self acceptance, self forgiveness, self efficacy, you know, and kind of reprogramming yourself and, you know, navigating out of this. That's a lot of work. And I know that myself. Now, Sam, the icing on the cake is having kids with a narcissist, let's say, you know, like, it's the ultimate icing on the cake and that kind of co-parenting piece. So not only are you trying to start from scratch yourself and to navigate out of this, and to walk steady on one city ground, but you've to co-parent with the narcissist. What are the best ways to approach that? Do you think? It's a tough one. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tough one because it involves ambivalence. Yeah. Children are, well, wanted, wanted children, acts of love, and reification, reifications of love and mementos of love. So whenever you interact with your children, ineluctably, even if you don't want to, you're interacting with the narcissist. Yeah. Even if it's gone, long gone, the child is a reminder of the narcissist, and your time with the narcissist, and the acts that have led to your concept, to the conception and everything, you know. So there's some pivalence there. You love the child and you hate the child. You need to own up to it. You need to own up to it. All these, all these women or men who say, I love my children, but I hate my partner. That's squaring the circle. That's not true also. It's a lie. Self deception. So ambivalence, you have to overcome ambivalence. Point number two, you have to defend your children. Your children are the top priority. Your partner is long gone, at least emotionally, if not physically, hopefully both. Your children are left behind. You need to defend them. You need to protect them. Narcissists are not bad parents. They are not parents. They are a danger, a clear and present danger to your children. You need to do everything in your power to isolate the children. Now I hear all this nonsensical, yeah, but my child needs a father. Yeah, your child needs a father, but not the narcissist. Yeah, yeah. So there is a lot of self deception going on and desperate attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance by lying to yourself about all kinds of things. Actually, you want to keep in touch with the narcissist, and you use the children as an excuse, for example, yes. Or you want to spy on the narcissist, you want to stalk his life. You want to know, does he have a new girlfriend? Does he ever? So you use the children to do that. There's a lot of adulterated motivation going into common children with the narcissist. You need to really become self aware. And you need to realize that the optimum is to isolate your children from the narcissist, disconnect them, and for them never to have one further minute of contact with the narcissist. Now this is an unattainable goal, regrettably owing to the legal system. And also, Sam, because you mentioned, let's say, you know, the child needs to see their father, if the narcissist is the mother, like that maternal role is so kind of protected and, you know, nurtured by society and the legal system. And you know, so, you know, yeah, it's there, there are a lot of conflicts involved dissonances in clinical terms involved in co-parenting with the narcissist. Because we apply wrongly, we apply normal, healthy, habitual models of parenting to the relationship with the narcissist. For example, we say, okay, he's the father, you know, they need to have a father. That's wrong thinking. The narcissist is not an adult. Would you safely deposit your children with a two year old? Would you really acknowledge? Would you really accept a two years old role in your life in your children's lives? Would you allow a two year old to become the role model for your children? Of course you would. Yeah. But again, it's a two year role in an adult's body. The body is irrelevant unless there is interest, which makes it even worse. Yeah. But the mind is, is, you know, the mind social modeling, Bandura, Bandura's work, social modeling. This is what's relevant. The narcissist is incapable to provide modeling, which is the main function of parenting, is incapable of providing of providing life real life experience because he's devotion reality. Is there is a huge risk of introducing the children into a shared fantasy, exploiting, leveraging and abusing them in a variety of ways, sexually included. It's a dangerous game. It's playing with fire. So I wouldn't go there. It's not in short, in short, I don't believe in cooperating. Yeah. I believe in getting rid of the narcissist period, not cooperating, cooperating predisposes people to make the wrong decisions. Now, okay, that's an ideal. So let's say in real terms, if that's not, you know, if that's not an option, if that's not possible, you know, that whole idea of parallel parenting quarters, a level of indifference, and, you know, kind of formality. Do your best, do your best to isolate your children, do your best to inoculate your children, have frank conversations about boundaries, about right and wrong, about what to expect. Don't vilify the other parent, of course, that would reflect badly on you. But equip your children. Don't weaponize the situation, but do provide your children with weapons. Yeah. Yeah. And then hope for the best. Your children will be exposed to you as a model, and to your partner, the narcissistic partner is a model. And hopefully by the time they're 16 or 18, they will will have made the right choice. But that's if you're compelled legally and otherwise to cooperate. But if it's any way whatsoever, you can avoid cooperating, do not cooperate. Do not fall for the tribe and the nonsense of they need a father or they need a mother. No. Yeah, okay, I hear you. And that's again, yeah, that's, you know, there's huge nuggets in there of advice and information to people who again, are kind of walking steady on unsteady ground. Sam, I have a quick quote for you. I know, again, you have done a lot of research in physics and chronons. I'm reading a book, a biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. And there's a quote actually from Leonardo da Vinci. He says, observe the lights, blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first. And that which was there is no more. And I think that read that quote really resonates with what we're talking about, which is kind of, you know, observe the light, you know, kind of, kind of to be in the now and to ground yourself and to come back to scratch and to, you know, talk to walk steady on unsteady ground. Yes, we need to constantly reevaluate reality. And that is especially true with the narcissist, because the narcissist creates an alternative, augmented virtual reality, which is very convincing. Yeah, very convincing. That's why cults are very successful enterprises. And you need to wake up. And sometimes you don't want to wake up because the fantasy is much preferable to reality. Or because you feel safe in the fantasy, there are many incentives to remain in the fantasy. We've had fantasies. We've had global continental fantasies. The 1930s and 1940s in Europe, where one huge shared fantasy of a narcissistic man called Adolf Hitler. Yeah. No, this is serious danger. It's not a joke. Narcissists are able to extrapolate their fantasies and convince people that reality is inferior to anything they have to offer. And so why not, you know, and that then your children get dragged into this and they because it becomes a one family cult or and then the children collaborate with a cult leader, which is a narcissistic parent. And there is a sensation of we against the world. And so on and so forth. It's you need to break this cycle early on. The only way to break this cycle is humility and self awareness. These are two extremely difficult demands. Very few people on this earth have either to be frank. But for the sake of your children, you need to attain these two. Humility and self awareness. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Sam, sharing all that information with me and pretty much providing a masterclass in the work that you've done on the origins of narcissism, how it plays out in relationships, and those, you know, really good tools and practical tools on how to kind of, you know, navigate your way out of there. And, you know, about self care and self love. And I know we touched on that earlier on briefly about, you know, like, your self care. And I know you said you don't really do self care. But I would argue that, you know, like the, the amount of work that you share and how generous you are, you know, like, help so many other people. So does that not give you a sense of, you know, well, a sense of well being and being able to share all the good work that you do that helps so many other people? Yeah, that's the only, the only light in my existence, the ability, the ability to share my thoughts and the knowledge that it does affect people in a beneficial way. But otherwise, no, I don't self care. I am a narcissist. Don't forget that. Yeah. I'm a narcissist. So I don't self care. I inhabit a totally fantastic world. I'm divorced from reality. I don't care for my body. I don't care for my mind. I'm reckless. I endanger everything from my freedom to my property. I am I am what? How big luckily have how big luckily in the 1940s wrote a magnificent masterpiece, the mask, the mask of sanity. So while I'm able to this to discourse or to analyze things very cerebrally and analytically and very convincingly, and there's value to some of the things I'm saying, maybe to most of the things I'm saying, none of this applies to me. Freud said that intellectual insight in the absence of emotional resonance does not yield transformation. And he was right. I have all the intellectual insight in the world. The large degree degree I'm the father of the field of narcissistic abuse. I've all the insight in the world. All the I mean, all the intellectual insight. But I don't have any emotional resonance because I don't have access to emotions and narcissists, positive emotions. Consequently, there's no transformative process. There's no transformation. I am as bad today as I've been in my 20s or 30s, maybe even worse, in many ways worse. So it's a bit like terminal cancer. It's a cancer of the soul. Stage four, not as much you can do, except right to a will. And my will is my YouTube channel. Well, Sam, again, look at the work that you do again, like that metaphor of Rosetta Stone comes to mind that, you know, can do is help so many people kind of translate and make sense of what's happened in the past, what's happened, you know, like in the recent present. It makes me happy. I'm happy. I'm happy to hear that. Thank you. And thank you for doing all that work. And Sam, where can people find it? Well, just stand back and go go. It's difficult to avoid. You're everywhere. You're everywhere. And again, look at I've watched, you know, I've watched a lot of your videos and rewatched them. And again, just that work that you do again, just to kind of make sense of all this. And again, I would encourage everybody to check out Sam's YouTube channels where there's not hundreds of videos on, you know, everything that we talked about, Sam's book, Malignan self love narcissism revisited. Thank you so much again for just being so honest and so kind and so generous with your time. It's been a true pleasure. Me too, Sam, and with your time and your, you know, all that work that you've done and best of luck with everything that you do in the future. Thank you. Thank you. It's very kind of you. Take care.