 That's me recording in progress is me Okay, I'll start my son Thank you for coming on I'm really looking forward to talking to you and getting your perspective on some of these questions that I have for you Um Narcissism is totaled as the latest buzzword I'm curious how many people in the population actually have this personality disorder Narcissistic personality disorder is diagnosed in about 1% of the general population and 5 to 6 percent of the clinical population population in Inpatient settings outpatient settings in therapy and so on so forth about five to six percent However, if we add to this What is known as narcissistic style? People who are who have narcissistic traits they behave as narcissists do But they are they don't they cannot be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder because a few bits and pieces are missing So they are known as subclinical Narcissism if we add these to the mix then we're probably talking about five to six percent of the general population Now take into account the following narcissists rarely attend therapy narcissists are very resistant to being diagnosed and Narcissism is under diagnosed in certain population groups such as minorities women and so on so forth So five to six percent is a lower lower limit probably it's more like 10 to 15 percent It's interesting that you mentioned women because I always read that it affects significantly more men than women But in my coaching business in my education, I found that it's more around half What do you say about that right now? It's half and half years in the 1980s when the diagnostic and statistical manual added narcissistic personality disorder as a diagnosis at that point 75 percent of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder were men But that was in 1980 Up to 2000 more or less And then after the year 2000 we started to have an increase in the incidence and prevalence of Narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy antisocial personality disorder among women And today half of all people diagnosed with narcissism are women and about one-third of all psychopaths are women And that's a gigantic leap. It's enormous increase Yeah Can we do that? Before you proceed can we just establish a protocol Well, each one of us is talking later. Let us avoid interjections such as Because it's very disrupting. Okay. Can we do this? Okay Okay, yeah nodding is great Yes, please No, I was just gonna ask do you think that There are more narcissists and psychopaths around today or do you think that it's just that more people are getting diagnosed? No, there is definitely an increase in the Dissemination of narcissism and psychopathy for example in a series of studies of Young people people under the age of 25, especially in the United States, but not only There has been an increase of three to five four three to five times higher than nine the 1980s Narcissism therefore is spreading Psychopathy is increasing. It's an absolute phenomenon. It's not the outcome of growing awareness or More pervasive diagnosis diagnosing procedures. It's real. This epidemic or pandemic is real So there are studies by Quinke, Quinke, Campbell and others so For people who are unsure about whether or not they're dealing with a narcissist or a psychopath What would be the difference between someone who's just a jerk and someone who is narcissistic? A very useful way to tell a narcissist apart is to apply the Alternative model in the diagnostic and statistical manual Most practitioners nowadays do not diagnose narcissism using the famous Nine bullet points or nine diagnostic criteria in the DSM4 These are no longer used by most practitioners What what is taking place instead what what is substituted for it is the alternative model Which is a dimensional model a descriptive model So you can apply this model yourself You don't need to be a diagnostician because it's very it's as I said, it's descriptive. It's literate. It's like literature So this model says that narcissists have a problem with self-functioning in other words Their identity is defined from the outside They derive their sense of identity the sense of self from the outside and when they are not surrounded with people They fall apart. They disintegrate. They they become dysfunctional and so on Additionally narcissists are sometimes grandiose and then at other times they are inferior. They feel inferior so they are huge swings in a sense of self-worth and Self-esteem huge swings in self-esteem We say that the sense of self-worth of narcissists is Disregulated the same way the emotions of the borderline are Disregulated the narcissists cannot form a stable sense of who he is and And how worthy he is he needs constant input from the outside and he solicits this input Coercively he insists on getting this input, which is known as narcissistic supply The second thing is that the narcissist constantly seeks approval But even as the narcissist seeks approval and depends on other people for this adulation and admiration affirmation even despite this dependency the narcissists constantly Criticizes people constantly demins them and humiliates them and so on so forth because he applies very high standards to other people even as He would sometimes tend to apply low standards to himself So there's a double standard with narcissists The second the next thing is that in my interpersonal functioning of narcissists Then the interpersonal function very disrupted. So for example, narcissists are incapable of emotional empathy However, narcissists are capable of empathizing with people cognitively and reflexively In other words, the narcissist is going to scan you on the first meeting even first date It's going to scan you It's going to form a picture of you or who you are your vulnerability is your weak points your needs Your wishes your dreams your preferences your priorities everything about you It's gonna and he's gonna use empathy to do this But it's a very strange kind of empathy and I coined the phrase cold empathy It's empathy devoid of the emotional component. There's there are no emotions there So the narcissist is going to see that you're crying And the narcissist is going to say to himself. She is crying. That means that she said But he's he's not gonna feel sad for you It's just gonna note the fact that you are sad and If the narcissist is a bit psychopathic a hybrid known as malignant narcissists Then the narcissist would say she's crying. She said that's an opportunity for sex So there will be a leveraging of your vulnerabilities The next thing is in a total inability to maintain intimacy The narcissist doesn't see you is not truly interested in you He's He's protectiveness is perfunctory. It's like by road. It's it's rehearsed. It's robotic He doesn't really display any positive emotions Except during the love bombing phase in the shared fantasy where this is actually performative. It's a performance So there's no intimacy there the narcissist Constantly gauges what you can give him not what he can give you So the narcissist wants to take from you the four s's sex safety sadistic and narcissistic supply and Services, and if you provide two out of these four you're in you've got the job But there's no intimacy there and finally there's the issue of personality traits narcissists are very antagonistic They constantly seek conflict They introduce aggression into totally unnecessary situations and environments They're grandiose and they seek attention compulsively Now all these things even if you're not a diagnostician You are liable to notice within a few you know days or weeks weeks if you're slow. I Would even say within a few minutes You just have to observe how the narcissist treats other people The way he treats other people tells you who is the way he treats you is a performance is acting you can't trust it So don't pay attention to how he's treating you pay attention to how he's treating other people and then we'll get the true picture who is now one one last comment The diagnostic and statistical manual is the diagnostic the diagnostic book in the United States The Chinese have adopted a version of the diagnostic and statistical manual known as the CCMD and So only narcissistic personality disorder as a diagnosis Diagnosis exists only in the United States and in China It does not exist in the rest of the world It's an American Chinese phenomenon something to do with superpower says I think But when you go to Europe for example, there is no such thing as narcissistic personality disorder In Europe and in the rest of the world they use a book published by the World Health Organization This book is known as ICD international classification of disorders and In this book, there's a single personality disorder single diagnosis of personality disorder With different aspects and manifestations and emphasis So narcissists for example Would be someone diagnosed with personality disorder of a Dissocial nature Dissociality and someone with unencastia unencastia means rule-based perfectionism So in Europe, you would never be diagnosed as a narcissist you will be diagnosed as Personality disordered person who is the social and unencastic That's important to understand Interesting, you know in your book believe and self-love you propose some amendments to the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder and when I read your proposed amendments It was amazing because it's it was so accurate It just encapsulated it perfectly because the DSM criteria just kind of misses the mark a little bit but with your amendments it's like It was amazing to read that Well, I'm glad to say that I published my my proposed amendments in in the year 2000 when you were still a baby baby And I'm glad to say that most of these proposed amendments directly or indirectly I'm not quite sure that I've contributed to it But most of these proposed amendments are now reflected in the alternative model of narcissistic personality disorder in the diagnostic and statistical manner So today a lot of the work that I've been that that's That I started to do three decades ago today is reflected in the mainstream for example, I was the first to propose in 1997 that all personality disorders are one and the same that the differential the differences that the fact that there are different diagnoses is a mistake and Actually, a narcissist is one day grandiose and overt and in your face and defined and the other day the same The same narcissist is vulnerable and shy and fragile and covert and crying in the corner Yeah, and then on the third day that narcissist has emotional dysregulation and throws a temper tantrum and loses it and Clinically, it's a borderline and then the next day He's a psychopath and he stills all your money and then on the day after that he becomes paranoid Etc. All these distinctions between personality disorders and the DSM are wrong and Artificial and they date back to the 1970s the United States is stuck in the 1970s and While the rest of the world has moved on And I would say the state of the knowledge reflected in the ICD 11 is 2022 while the state of the knowledge reflected in the DSM is The year 2000 more or less So the United States is a quarter of a century behind the rest of the world Okay, so the other personality disorders in class to be that are related to narcissistic personality disorder You say all just variations because the narcissistic personality disorder encapsulates A number of the different traits within each personality disorder that's listed there. Is that what you're saying? No, what I'm saying is that all personality disorders A, B and C all three classes Are a single personality disorder. Now I've been saying this since 1997 and this is today the accepted wisdom All over the world except the United States and China If you look at at the narcissist one day the narcissist is a schizoid the other day He is a paranoid the next day. He's a borderline The third day is a fourth day is a narcissist and then the fifth day is a psychopath It's ridiculous to say that there is type constancy. It's completely untrue any Any clinician will tell you this any therapist who has ever worked with people with personality disorders would tell you There's no such thing Consequently, what is happening is known as comorbidity Comorbidity is when we are forced to diagnose multiple personality disorders in the same person And so this this comes ridiculous because you come across patients who are diagnosed with like 2030 mental health diagnosis simultaneously And that's nonsense. That's out and I mean we had a lot I mean all over tiktok you hear self-aware narcissists that I'm also borderline and I'm also a psychopath and I'm also this But you're right They all display all of the different times and I've certainly witnessed that in my own narcissists in my own studies Going back to something before about empathy The difference between cold empathy and then emotional empathy What does it mean for a person to lack emotional empathy? How does that affect their interpersonal relationships and how does that inhibit the narcissist's ability to Effectively act in relationships Well, as I said the lack of the emotional component in empathy simply means that There is no emotional resonance narcissists and psychopaths who possess emotional cold empathy They're They're gone oriented So when they succeed to decode or decipher your state of mind When they realize or understand that you are sad or that you're happy or The the next question is how can I use this? How can I make good use of it? She said Can I sleep with her because she said Can I take her money because she said Are her defenses down and can I exploit her in some way? So there's no emotion there There's no a typical healthy person would say she said that makes me feel sad a bit I feel sad as well. There's a kind of emotional resonance Healthy people revisit their own states of mind when they come across yours So when someone come across you and you're crying they would they would Elicit in their own minds The occasions when they have cried They had cried and they would say well when last time I cried I was sad so probably she said And then they would feel sad because of the memory of that event or because of you know, but there's always an emotional reaction narcissists and psychopaths are predators If they see you bleeding It simply means your food You're praying And so the lack of emotional resonance Leads to enhanced exploitativeness and an attempt to Leverage your weak points and your vulnerabilities and your frailties and your shortcomings In favor of a goal now the goal could be in the case of a psychopath could be money or sex or access or whatever In the case of the narcissist, it's narcissistic supply So if the narcissist sees you crying for example He's going to act the savior of the rescuer or the healer To your distress is going to regard you as a damsel in distress. It's an opportunity To show himself in a good light So But it's all goal-oriented. The idea is to obtain something from you And most people most healthy people Resonate with your emotion and they want to give you something. So if you're crying, they want to give you a hug They want to comfort you. They want to soothe you. It's it's instinctual almost. You know, it's reflexive. You can't help it But the narcissists and psychopaths want to take something from you not to give you anything If they give you a hug, they want it to lead to sex as simple as that Yeah The narcissist responding to the damsel in distress really depends on the phase of the relationship, doesn't it? In the last one phase when they're still trying to win you And there's the co-ide they they then they're going to respond that way. But once the evaluation stage, it's different. Is that right? Yes, this kind of reactivity Playing for example the the rescuer or the savior or the messiah or the healer or the fixer Um, it's typical of the first phases of the of what is known as the shared fantasy The phase where the narcissist love bonds you Narcissist groom or the psychopath grooms you There's an attempt To brainwash you in effect using a mechanism known as in training Um, there is a strong push to merge and fuse with you symbiotically so that you become a single entity There's a dual mothership situation where the narcissist is acting as your mother and you expect you to act as his mother They there's an expectation that you should mother each other And during these initial phases The narcissist is going to adopt adopt roles that will get Get the business done and trap you and trap you In the shared fantasy and cause trauma bonding, which is a form of self harm so Yes, narcissists are going to be nice and kind and likable And helpful and useful and everything Only in the initial phases of the shared fantasy Once the narcissist has acquired you once you have become his possession He takes you for granted Because he knows That you are you have become an addict. You've become a junkie of the shared fantasy He knows that you're trauma bonded He knows you're extremely Unlikely to walk away and above all he knows that he has implanted his voice inside your mind He has Introjected himself into your mind and now your mind is infected and infested with his voice And through his voice, it's a control mechanism. It controls you through his voice And his voice inside your head Collaborates with other voices inside your head with other interjects The narcissist creates coalitions with other voices in your head And they become a constellation And then he simply takes over your mind by the way physiologically takes over your mind Studies have studies have shown that in the process of Studies have shown that in the process of entraining Um brain waves Brain brain waves of the abuser and the abused brain waves more generally Um are coordinated. They become one. So your brain waves become one with the narcissist He's he takes over your brain literally And then he's inside your mind and he doesn't need to worry anymore I'm sorry How conscious is this process How conscious is this process? No more love bombing phase the shared fantasy the co-idealization No more conscience. Is it conscious or is it like unconscious It's no more conscious than a tiger a tiger devouring an antelope Or a virus penetrating the membrane of a cell These are embedded predatory strategies That the narcissist goes through Now the narcissist Recasts everything reframes and everything he writes narratives is a storyteller So the narcissist convinces even himself That everything is real the fantasy is real The narcissist in other words clinically is delusional So that's why narcissists never future fake. That's not true When the narcissist makes you a promise about the future he believes this promise Also, narcissists never gaslight that is also not true When the narcissist tells you anything he believes in it when he lies to you about his past He believes his own lies a process known as contrabulation Psychopaths gaslight Psychomers know what they're doing Psychopaths psychopaths go through these phases Consciously deliberately in a premeditated manner. They gaslight you into submission They make you doubt your insanity Intentionally In order to render you vulnerable So psychopaths do all these things Consciously narcissists do exactly the same Unconsciously now of course as far as the victim is concerned. It doesn't matter Who cares if the narcissist is conscious or unconscious the outcome is Yeah, destructive What types of narcissistic personality disorder like we've got the covert narcissist or the overt narcissist always here Can you elaborate a little bit on that? There are several types of narcissists have been typologies of narcissism suggested throughout the the last few decades Um, it's widely accepted nowadays to distinguish between overt grandiose narcissists and covert vulnerable shy fragile narcissists The Covert narcissist is usually a collapsed narcissist. It's a narcissist who is unable To obtain narcissistic supply keeps failing at obtaining narcissistic supply So this kind of narcissists Is introverted Is passive-aggressive seething with envy Machiavellian manipulative Um and covert in the sense that it's his subterranean. It's very difficult to spot The overt narcissist is a donald trump type is an in-your-face defined reckless Contrary to a small talk. Yeah, authority hating type Um, so over you see the overt narcissists coming But you rarely see the covert narcissists coming. That's why covert narcissists are snakes in the grass. They are much more dangerous than than of the overt variant Now we have recently come to the conclusion that There's no type constancy Subject to life prices and trauma and stress And collapse failure to obtain supply Subject to these conditions in these situations Narcissists overt narcissists tend to become covert And sometimes covert narcissists become overt for example When narcissists are exposed to narcissistic modification Narcissistic modification is public humiliation in front of meaningful others In the presence of significant others So when narcissists are exposed to narcissistic modification Most narcissists become covert for a while The not the covert narcissist is usually but not always schizoid in other words a hermit socially inactive avoids people So narcissists wounded wounded narcissists Injured narcissists who've been humiliated in public or shamed somehow or whatever. They become schizoid as well. They become covert So today we don't think there is a type constancy We don't think the overt is always overt and the covert is always covert We think these are two styles of narcissism That are adopted by the narcissist depending on circumstances. All narcissists are both covert and overt Another debate In psychology that has been going on for like forever Is whether narcissism is compensatory or not Do narcissists feel good with themselves? Are they happy or lucky? Are they comfortable with who they are? This is known as ego-syntony. Are they ego-syntonic? and so For a long period of time The belief was that narcissists are actually Oblivious to their own shortcomings and so on and so forth totally unaware And consequently they're happy-go-lucky. They're very pleased with who they are Today we don't think that's the case Today we believe that all narcissists are compensatory. In other words, all narcissists have an inferiority What abla called an inferiority complex They have a bad object In other words, they have a set of voices constellation of voices internally that keep informing them how Unworthy they are how inadequate they are What loses there and so and to compensate for these internal internal voices which are intolerable To compensate for these voices the narcissist creates the false self A facade A facade mask or series of mask a persona And he uses the false self to obtain feedback from the environment Which will counteract the internal voices So if the internal voice tells the narcissist, you know, you are seriously stupid The narcissist is going to pretend that he's a genius And then other people are going to tell him that he's a genius And then the narcissist is going to go back to that voice and say you see a wrong. I'm not stupid. I'm a genius That's the compensatory mechanism and today we believe that all narcissists are compensatory And the situation is that we are beginning to think that overt grandiose narcissists are actually psychopaths not narcissists We think we we got the whole the whole taxonomy the whole classification completely wrong For example, in borderline, we have emotionally dysregulated borderlines But very often they become psychopathic. This is known as secondary psychopathy Um Narcissists who are over how does that happen? When when the borderline come Experiences abandonment real or anticipated When the borderline experiences the opposite engulfment and measurement Take being taken over by the by the intimate father So in these two situations The borderline essentially disintegrates her defenses shut down And she becomes a secondary cycle So we're beginning to to Reconceive of the whole field of cluster b personality disorders And we're beginning to understand that cluster b disorders are actually post traumatic conditions And that they have a lot more in common than what separates them And that perhaps it's a single thing a single clinical entity Maybe with the exception of psychopathy. We're not sure but it's a single clinical So there's a it's the field is in flux and there's a huge mess and numerous debates and who is who and what is what And so on and so forth, but I would say generally if you want to put it in Yeah, if you want to put this in a historical context There's been a huge debate between two giants of the field Heinz Kauhut and Otto Kahnberg Kauhut is the father of the current approach in American psychiatry It's an approach that divides mental states into discreet clinical entities Diagnosis it's an approach that is heavily influenced by the needs of insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies And Consequently the diagnostic and statistical manual but have has ballooned from 100 pages in 1952 to 1100 pages in 2022 So It's because there has been a proliferation of new diagnosis all the time. This is kauhut's approach kauhut had a huge debate with kahnberg Kauhut said narcissistic personality disorder has nothing to do with borderline personality disorder Kauhut was the one who coined the phrase narcissistic personality disorder so america United states is kauhutian follows kauhut Kahnberg on the other Otto Kahnberg suggested That narcissism and borderline and so on. They are one and the same. They are single clinical entity And he created spectra and dimensions and so kahnberg's thinking Was much more modern And much more applicable in my view to mental health than kauhuts although They both they both did their big work the major work in 1974 75 So today the rest of the world is kahnberg Is kahnberg and united states possibly china canada are essentially kauhut But I think the world is going to end up being kahnbergian kahnberg because kahnberg Regarded the human the human soul if you wish the human psyche as a continuum as a canvas Not as discrete units in on the supermarket shelves But as a painting a huge painting And then if you look at the left hand corner of the painting it's narcissism And if you look at the right hand corner, it's um, I don't know schizophrenia and if you look, you know But it's a single painting And this is the approach of kahnberg which I think is far more advanced and far more accurate than kauhuts My sense definitely So what causes narcissistic personality disorder? What are the theories? There's a lot of misinformation online about every conceivable aspect of pathological narcissism A lot a lot. I would say 95 95 percent of the information online is Anywhere between inaccurate and utterly completely wrong And that applies also to people with phd's When someone has a phd in psychology people say but but he's he has a phd in psychology He knows what he's talking about Or she knows what she's talking about. That's nonsense psychology is a huge field If you have a phd in psychology, it doesn't mean that you're an expert on narcissism Not at all For example, I am not an expert So There's a lot of there's a lot of mess online. There's a lot of money sloshing about and it attracts charlatans and call artists Now borderline personality disorder Has a pronounced genetic component We know for example that if you have a first degree reality With borderline personality disorder Your chances of having borderline personality disorder are five times higher So there's clearly a genetic component. We also know that borderline personality disorder and psychopathy antisocial personality disorder we know that they They have there are brain abnormalities associated with these disorders This is not the case with narcissism There are a few ridiculous studies That tried to find some brain abnormalities in narcissists among narcissists These studies are based on a tiny sample The diagnostic procedures in these studies are dubious, and I'm being charitable It's nonsense. It's rank nonsense. We at this stage I'm not aware of any brain abnormalities linked to narcissistic personality disorder period except If and when The narcissist is also a psychopath In which case there are some brain abnormalities similarly Similarly, there is no study That demonstrates genetic heritability of narcissistic personality disorder period none so we The majority of serious theoreticians and practitioners We tend to believe that narcissistic personality disorder is the outcome of what is known as adverse adverse childhood experiences ACE Narcissism is a combination of two unfortunate outcomes of improper upbringing bed parenting especially bed mothers Because the mother has the greatest impact up to age 36 months, which is a period when pathological narcissism forms So unfortunately, it's the mothers not the father But there are two main issues with With narcissism. First of all, there is a disruption In the formation of a sense of self There is a case of arrested development There's no constellation or integration Of the self or what Freud used to call the ego never mind which word to use. There's no sense of self. There's an absence There's an emptiness there There's a void where a human being should have been That's the first problem. The second problem is disrupted attachment Because the parental figures are less than adequate This kind of children fail to develop attachment in a proper way. So they grow up to have insecure attachment styles Now you put together A lack of self ironically narcissists are selfless You put together a lack of self combined with an inability to attach Properly and securely inability to experience develop and nurture intimacy You put this two together and what you get Is a very defective half-baked human being And this is essentially narcissism Now abuse in early childhood has been linked time and again in literally hundreds of studies To the emergence of narcissistic personality disorder in later life But there is a misunderstanding about what constitutes abuse A great definition of abuse is when the child is not allowed to separate from the parent When the child is not allowed to develop boundaries To fight back And when the child is therefore forced To merge with the parent as a survival strategy to become one with the parent either physically through incest or psychologically So this kind of child is never becomes an individual It's not individuation This kind of child remains merged and fused and meshed With a parental figure real or imagined inside his mind an introject That's a great definition why because it encompasses dozens of behaviors If you abuse your child sexually or physically or verbally or psychologically definitely You are breaching the boundaries of your child. You're disrespecting your child You're not allowing your child to become an individual you're humiliating your child And you're imbuing your child with a reservoir of shame that is lifelong but If you are spoiling your child If you're pedestalizing your child if you're idolizing your child if you're pampering your child If you're instrumentalizing your child Forcing your child to realize your own unfulfilled dreams and wishes If you parentify your child if you expect your child to act as your own parent These are all forms of abuse What does it mean to spoil a child? It means to prevent the child from getting in touch with reality Because reality is bruising Reality is painful reality pushes back on the child And that's the only way to personally grow and evolve and develop and become an adult If you're spoiling the child if you're pampering the child If you're pedestalizing and idolizing the child, you're not allowing the child to interact with reality You're not allowing the child to grow up You're not allowing the child to evolve and develop into a full-fledged adult In short, you're not allowing the child to separate from you So the definition of abuse Is a lack of separation individuation induced by bad parenting And compasses dozens of behaviors Some of which don't look Don't appear to be abusing But actually a variant perniciously abused And that is the source That is the psychological root and source of narcissism in general Pathological narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder All the rest, genetics, this, that, is nonsense at this stage It may be substantiated in the future For example, I believe there is a genetic component It hasn't been proven yet, but I do believe there is one And I think I can prove that there is one You take five kids and you take twins And the twins are abused Simultaneously by the same parent in the same environment One of them becomes a narcissist, the other doesn't Non-identical twins You take five siblings And these siblings are exposed to the same upbringing By the same not good enough mothers and dead mothers Dead mother is a phrase in psychology Which describes a mother who is absent emotionally And unable to provide for the child's needs So you take five siblings and they are raised by dead mothers and so The same dead mother And yet only one of them becomes a narcissist The other four are perfectly healthy So I think there is a genetic component But you can't see this until there are studies to prove it So right now, all we know is that adverse childhood experiences In an environment with bad parenting is the source of narcissism So I wanted to talk a little bit about this concept of narcissistic abuse And what makes narcissistic abuse different from other forms of abuse I started my work on narcissism in the mid 80s And the beginning of the 90s or maybe the maybe 1987 I'm not quite sure Somewhere around that period When dinosaurs still roam the earth and everything I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse And I remember that at that time Practitioners and professionals and some they asked me Why did you have to coin? Why did you feel the need to coin the phrase narcissistic abuse? Why not say abuse or abuse by narcissism? Why narcissistic abuse? Because narcissistic abuse is unlike any other form of abuse Now we are acquainted with many forms of abuse Even legal abuse, even financial abuse Even, I mean, of course verbal, psychological, sexual, physical There are as many ways to abuse someone as there are ways to interact with some So but all these forms of abuse Are directed at a specific target To a specific goal If I abuse you financially, I want your money If I abuse you physically, I want to beat up your body If I abuse you verbally, I want to f up with your mind There's a target there And the target is identifiable, discernible, and specific And the abuse is like a laser beam It homes in on the target in order to destroy it Or manipulate it Or obtain something or whatever It's not the case with narcissistic abuse It's the only form of abuse that we are aware of That targets everything without a single exception So it's like a cluster bone Narcissistic abuse targets your mind, your past, your future Your physical health, your mental health, your finances Your relationships, you name it Narcissistic abuse targets everything And the goal of narcissistic abuse is also different to the goal of other forms of abuse Other forms of abuse Wish to preserve the target of abuse Abuses in other forms of abuse Never eliminate the target of abuse Because they would like to continue to abuse So take for example domestic violence Battering A man typically would beat up a woman to pulp Would send her to a hospital But he would never kill her It's extremely rare that he would kill her Because he wants to beat her again He wants to relive the wonderful experience Of beating a woman to a pulp So he needs to preserve the target Similarly, other forms of abuse preserve the target Narcissistic abuse is very reminiscent of murder Or serial killers The narcissist wishes to eradicate, obliterate, eliminate, negate Utterly destroy, devastate the target To the point that she sees us to exist in any meaningful way And the reason for this is that the shared fantasy Which is how the narcissist interacts with people Not only intimate partners, friends, family The shared fantasy is a series of kabuki ritualized steps Which lead inexorably to devaluation and discard So devaluation and discard are baked into the shared fantasy Because the aim of the shared fantasy Is to reenact the early childhood conflict With the mother of origin, with the biological mother So it's compulsive It's what Freud called repetition compulsion It's a compulsion So the narcissist is compelled to destroy you He first converts you into an enemy in his mind This is known as per-secretary object And then he needs to destroy you He needs to destroy you Because it's the only way he can separate from you And become an individual The way he failed to do with his biological mother So you are like a sacrificial lamb He has to sacrifice you In order to please the deity, the divinity That is the false self More generally, narcissism is a bit like religion It's a religion, it's a private religion Where there is a god figure, a godhead And the godhead is the false self Because the false self is godlike It's omniscient, it's omnipotent It's like god, it's perfect And the narcissist feels compelled to sacrifice Human sacrifice to this god So the first sacrifice is the true self of the narcissist And then the narcissist goes through life Sacrificing other people to the false self Including and especially his intimate partners So narcissistic abuse is the psychological equivalent of murder Assassination simply And therefore it stands out Now people mistakenly believe that most abusers are mentally ill That is actually not true The vast majority of abusers are not mentally ill They cannot be diagnosed with anything They just say this to cruel people Whatever, you know The case of narcissistic abuse involves mental illness So and it's extremely rare because any practitioner would tell you That mentally ill people tend to not abuse It's the famous sentence Hurt people hurt people Actually is limited to narcissism And borderline These are the only two mental illnesses Where there is damage to others Psychopathy is debatable Because we are not quite sure it's a mental illness It may be a lifestyle Or it may be a personality style Whatever But narcissists and borderlines Harm other people, they hurt other They cause pain and devastation to other people And these are the only cases For example people with psychotic disorders Are very docile They almost never hurt people Contrary to the Popular images of Joker and so on So narcissistic abuse is one of the rare cases in psychology Where mental illness translates into interpersonal relationships Which are harmful to the partner To the point of physical or mental death It's a very serious form of abuse That's why it's on fire And that's why it's a buzzword That's why it's like all over the place People are talking today about narcissistic abuse People today focus on narcissistic abuse Much more than they focus on borderline abuse For example Because it's a much more serious phenomenon Naturally You need to die You need to die It's my narcissistic abuse Just one last sentence For the narcissist to survive For the narcissist to become an individual For the narcissist to exist You need to die You need to be sacrificed to the narcissist for itself Within a ritualized ceremonial pseudo-religious shared fantasy Yes, go ahead So narcissistic abuse encapsulates all types of abuse It can be financial, economical It can be psychological, emotional, sexual And it includes the narcissistic relationship cycle The activation of my discard And often a hoover Can you tell me a bit more about the relationship cycle And the re-entering of the cycle, the hoovering? Narcissists are clinically speaking Developmentally speaking Narcissists are children With an average mental age of four years old Many of them are two years old Some of them are six years old But the average is about four years old Narcissists are therefore incapable of adult perception of the world They are not fully able to tell reality apart from fantasy The way children cannot Children have imaginary friends Children have paracossians, imaginary universes Children identify with characters in books And so on Because children are unable to distinguish reality from fantasy And children are not capable of carrying out adult chores and responsibilities and so on They actually avoid adulthood in many ways So the narcissist is a child That's the first thing that's important to understand That's why therapy, psychotherapy, fails with narcissists Because we are trying to apply adult-based psychotherapies to children The only way to work with a narcissist in therapy is to use The only way is to use child psychology If we want to obtain any outcomes with a narcissist We need to use child psychology Not yet no one does And consequently there's dismal failure in working with narcissists That's the first point The second point is narcissists is caught in what Freud called the repetition compulsion There are other names for it There are physies and so on, never mind It's simply the need to reenact time and again Early failure So if you fail in something, if you fail to attach If you fail to be loved If you fail to separate from an important figure such as mother If you fail to become an individual Failure generally pushes us to try again And again And the more we keep failing, especially if we are narcissists And we think we are godlike The more we keep failing, the more we are incentivized and motivated to try again And this becomes a compulsion, the narcissist cannot help it The narcissist has failed with his mother Narcissism is a crisis of separation and individuation The narcissist was not allowed to become a person Was not allowed to acquire personhood The narcissist is not self Narcissist is not ego The narcissist is a work in progress without progress So the narcissist feels compelled to go back to his shadow And try again This time with a bizarre conviction that he's gonna succeed Why is he going to succeed? Because this time he has found his ideal mother You, his intimate partner Or his friend or whatever So the narcissist converts people around him To maternal figures In his mind they become mothers And he says to himself Oh great, I found a new mother Now I can go through all the phases of childhood with this mother And I can become a man or a woman, doesn't matter I can become my own person And so the structure of the relationship Especially intimate relationship Structure is rigid, ceremonial, ritualistic And therefore reminiscent of religion So the narcissist starts by converting you into a mother He love bombs you, the way a child love bombs his mother He love bombs you, he then needs to He needs to convert you into a maternal figure So he idealizes you Mother in the eyes of the child is ideal She is flawless She is godlike She is infallible And she is always available And she is the only guarantee for the child's survival If the child fails to attract the mother's attention and attachment This kind of child is dead So the narcissist converts you into a mother figure by idealizing you You begin to notice that this is what a child does Not an adult And then having idealized you The narcissist strikes a bargain with you Makes a deal with you Says listen, you're going to be my mother You're going to be my good mother You're going to love me unconditionally No matter what I do You're never going to abandon me And you're always going to love me That's your part of the deal And my part of the deal I'm going to do the same for you I have idealized you So you can do no wrong And I'm going to love you the way a mother does When I love you unconditionally My love for you will know no bounds With the greatest love in history And you will be my perfect partner forever And this is the concept of dual mothership Which I've described So there's a dual mothership contract The partners mother each other But to accomplish this The narcissist needs you to become a child Because how can the narcissist be your mother If you're an adult It wouldn't work So he needs to regress you to childhood He needs to infantilize you Part of the dual mothership package Package deal Is that you will give up on your agency On your independence On your personal autonomy And on your adulthood You will become a toddler or an infant Allowing the narcissist to love you Unconditionally and in an idealized form Because as a baby you're idealized You've done no wrong You can't do wrong, you're a baby Similarly the narcissist is an infant He's really an infant He doesn't have to work at it He's an infant And you accept him as an infant Act the mother Okay but The point of the exercise is to separate from you The whole point Is to convert you into a mother So that this time The narcissist will succeed in separating from you And becoming an individual Isn't it So to separate from you The narcissist needs to devalue you The narcissist needs to convert you into an enemy Of a secretary object An inferior product Something he needs to get rid of you It's the only way to separate from you The same way the child Between the ages of 18 months and 36 months Gets rid of mother The child gets rid of mother and explores the world The child becomes aware of the existence of other people And develops what we call object relations So The narcissist begins the process of separation By converting you in his mind From an idealized object To a devalued object Or a secretary object And then he discards you And this is a symbolic reenactment Of the separation, individuation phase In early childhood This is the inexorable ineluctable Which is another word for inevitable Progression of the shared fantasy There is nothing you can do about it I am listening to victims Who are self-flagellating Self-chastising They keep saying if I only behaved this way If I only loved him more If I only did this, if I only did that The shared fantasy has nothing to do with you You're a placeholder You're interchangeable You're commodified and commoditized You're meaningless You're meaningless to the narcissist You're not special You haven't been chosen Get rid of these self-aggrandizing nonsense You're just a placeholder An avatar An icon An actress, if you wish And so whatever there is no strategy Or choice or decisions that you could have made That would have altered the outcome of the shared fantasy And the progression of the shared fantasy End of story You, regardless of your conduct or misconduct You would have been devalued and discarded Because the narcissist needs to do this for himself The devalued and discarded has nothing to do with you It is settling internal accounts It is a kind of catharsis Kind of psychotherapy for the narcissist I'm getting rid of my symbolic mother You know It's a therapeutic tool The shared fantasy is a kind of self-administered therapy Yeah So what called the narcissist the radio one and come back for them? It never works The shared fantasy never works And the shared fantasy never works Because in order to convert you into a mother At the beginning of the shared fantasy The narcissist creates an internal object inside his mind That represents you The narcissist doesn't idealize you The narcissist never interacts with you at all The narcissist interacts exclusively with the internal object in his mind that represents you So he idealizes this internal object And then he devalues this external internal object And then he discards you because there's no use for you anymore The internal object is devalued and so on and so forth But this presents a problem The narcissist does not interact with external objects In this sense the narcissist's narcissism is a mirror image of psychosis The narcissist doesn't interact with external objects only with internal ones So getting rid of you physically Breaking up with you Dumping you doesn't work Because the internal object remains in his mind You are gone physically but you have never been there physically as far as the narcissist is concerned The narcissist catexes the narcissist's emotional investment And all the psychodynamics of the narcissist revolve around the internal object And that internal object doesn't go away when you do The narcissist can dump you but he can never dump the internal object He can break up with you but he can never say goodbye to the internal object So he remains stuck with an internal object And now there's a problem This internal object is devalued and persecutory It's an enemy The narcissist remains stuck with an enemy inside his mind that he cannot get rid of The only way to get rid of this enemy It's terrifying by the way to have an enemy inside your mind that you cannot get rid of The only way to get rid of this enemy Is to bring you back to re-idealize the internal object So he brings you back He re-idealizes the internal object and he gets rid of the dissonance He gets rid of the persecutory enemy internal object by re-idealizing it But he cannot re-idealize it just like that He is not psychotic He doesn't have hallucinations The only way to re-idealize the enemy is to bring you back to have a physical presence of you So this is a cycle which can go on forever by the way If it's not interrupted in some way So there are ways to interrupt this There are ways to prevent over it For example, modification is a way to prevent over it If you modify the narcissist, if you shame and humiliate and expose the narcissist In public, in front of peers, meaningful others, significant others and so on and so forth The narcissist will never hover you He will never hover you because there would be a match then Between the persecutory object and who you really are You will have become his enemy in public So now there's a match, there's no dissonance And it doesn't need to bring you back The problem with Hooverie is that there is a The problem in public? Yes, it has to be public The problem in Hooverie is that there is an internal object which is Bad enemy object And there is an external you And you did not act as the narcissist's enemy So there's a discrepancy There's a dissonance There's a... You know, again, the narcissist cannot put the two of you together But if you do act as a narcissist's enemy Then you conform to the devalued persecutory internal object And there's no need to re-idealize you or to hover you So modification works Similarly, if you are the first to break up with the narcissist, the first to dump him But in a way that is humiliating and shaming and ostentatious And irreversible And involves real damage and harm to the narcissist And so on and so forth Then you will have fit in With the devalued internal object And there will be no need to re-idealize you or to hover you That's... Then these are the mechanisms The narcissist never grows Never evolves Beyond the age of Two, four, six years old Never The vast majority of narcissists are anywhere between three and four years What about become... Sorry? What about becoming self-aware? There's so many self-aware narcissists on TikTok Giving people hope All narcissists are aware of their actions The majority of narcissists are aware of the impact of their actions on other people And here I disagree with the DSM The DSM says that narcissists overestimate or underestimate their impact on other people I don't think so at all I think narcissists are aware of what they're doing They're aware of their behaviors and misbehaviors And they're perfectly aware They just don't care Simply don't care However, extremely few, if any, narcissists Are aware of their psychodynamic processes and motivations So narcissists are not aware of their internal space The internal world And there's a good reason for it It does not exist The narcissists is an absence pretending to be a presence There's a void there A black hole An emptiness So there's nothing to be aware of There's no self So narcissists are aware The same way a robot is aware A robot is aware of its environment A robot is aware of its tasks And a robot is aware of its impacts That's how robots can put together cars In factories But robots have no awareness of an internal world Of a self Of an ego Or even of a mind Robots are perfectly aware of the environment And their part And functioning in the environment But only the external environment Not the internal And so all the self-aware narcissists are online And some of them are con artists They claim they're getting better They're healing They're going to therapy and so on They tell gullible victims what they want to hear They're telling gullible victims what they want to hear Some of them Yes, exactly They're calling Yeah Not all of them The others confuse and conflate Awareness of action And even awareness of choices and decisions With true self-awareness True self-awareness is based on a stable Self-regulated sense of self-worth Self-worth is a compendium of self-esteem Self-confidence Self-knowledge So you need to know your limitations Strong points and so on and so forth You need to know where you start And other people begin Boundaries None of this applies to the narcissists So narcissists can never be self-aware because there's no self However, as I said Robotically, they can be aware of what their actions in the environment Robots do this I don't see any difference You know the underlying unconscious processes They just see what they're actually doing They don't understand why They don't understand Definitely don't understand why And even when they try to theorize as to why It's their narcissism speaking So it's not a trustworthy religion It's a manifestation and a demonstration of narcissism in action Narcissists, for example When they're in a covert phase Narcissists like very much to act as victims Now people think that narcissists Victimize Self-victimize Sorry, narcissists adopt victimhood styles Only in relation to other people So people think that narcissists would say I've been victimized by my wife Or I've been victimized by my boss Who doesn't appreciate my talents That's not true Narcissists also feel victimized by their own Drives and urges and personalities Personality and choices as well So a narcissist could say I can't help it My narcissism is destroying me My narcissism is driving me to make bad decisions And hurt people And I hate it That is self-victimizing That is another victimhood stance It's to say I am distinct from my narcissism My narcissism is like a third party That is victimizing me My narcissism is victimizing me Not my wife, my narcissism And it's a perfect example of narcissism reaction Of course Because a narcissist feels a victim Of everyone and everything Including his own narcissism And this is known as alloplastic defense Alloplastic defense is the tendency To blame other people The world at large The universe Your own mental illness To blame something For your own decisions And the consequences of your actions So if you see a self-aware narcissist online And he says I'm a horrible person My narcissism drove me to hurt people I regret it so badly This is why I'm online Because I'm trying to help Victims to protect them against people like me That is narcissism in action That is grandiosity coupled with alloplastic defense I am not to blame My narcissism is to blame It's like a sleepwalker A sleepwalker A sleepwalker A few self-aware narcissists And it's interesting because that's what they say A sleepwalker would kill someone And then blame his sleepwalking He would say I didn't know what I was doing I was sleepwalking Or like from miscarious people They say it wasn't me I was drunk I had sex with multiple partners Because I was drunk It wasn't me It was the alcohol Yeah Yeah Yeah My narcissism made me do it 100% When these relationships ever work There are people that stay In many decades long relationships With narcissists What's going on there Where there isn't a physical discard There's so many myths And misconceptions and nonsense About narcissism That I could spend my entire life Actually I am spending my entire life Trying to debunk them One of the myths One of the myths Is that narcissists constantly cheat They engage in infidelity By the way their studies Show exactly the opposite But never mind Another myth is that Narcissists are incapable of stability They are itinerant And desultory And unstable And unpredictable and so on and so forth That is borderline That's not narcissism And so Most narcissists Not all But most narcissists Structure their lives So that they have an island of stability Surrounded by an ocean Of uncertainty and indeterminacy The island of stability Caters to their need To feel safe Need for safety And the ocean Royaling ocean of uncertainties And indeterminacies And accidents And this ocean Caters to their need To experience thrills They are thrill seekers Adventures and so on So they organize their life this way So typically you find a narcissist Who has been married to the same woman For four decades But in the meantime has changed 62 jobs So the island of stability is the marriage And the intimate partner And the ocean Is the career You can find exactly the opposite You can find a narcissist Who has been Who has been toiling With the same company For 40 years Has reached the level of a chief executive officer In this company Started to work there when he was a teen So he's stable His career is stable And in the meantime Got married Divorced and remarried Six times So the island of stability is the career And personal life And interpersonal relationships are the ocean This is the typical structure of the life of a narcissist Because of the dual need The need for safety on the one hand And the need for adventure on the other Narcissists have this They are novelty seekers and so on In this sense narcissists are anti-social The diagnosis The ICD The other book The other diagnostic book Suggests that narcissists are Dissocial There's a trade called dissociality And the ICD Actually Combines narcissism and psychopathy They don't make distinction between narcissists and psychopaths They say both of them are dissocial One of the manifestations of dissociality In narcissism according to the ICD Is this need for thrill seeking Risk taking Adventures Defiance Rejection of authority Contrumatiousness and so on So it's not true That the narcissist's life is one unmitigated chaos That is the borderline Not the narcissist The narcissist is, as I said, a core And chaos around This reflects the narcissist's inner environment The narcissist doesn't have a core identity The narcissist doesn't have a cell Did not develop an ego The narcissist is dissociative Narcissists forget a lot They have memory gaps For which they try to compensate By confabulating and people misperceive this as lying So they have memory gaps In the absence of continuous memory You cannot develop a core identity So the narcissist is an emptiness Exactly like the borderline There's what we call an empty schizoid core The narcissist is an emptiness With a shell And the shell is the false self A false self is grandiose False self Falsifies Not the self But the false self falsifies reality Using cognitive distortions Such as grandiosity So there's nobody there That's what people are especially victims They can't Victims cannot accept two things Number one, they were not special And they were not chosen They can't accept this No, it shows me because I'm empathic I'm nice, I'm kind, I'm this, I'm that Portion It shows you because you were willing And able to provide the four s's Sex, services, safety, supply And because you were willing and able And eager sometimes To participate in a shared fantasy Because reality is too much for you You don't like reality You want fantasy The narcissist is a major fantasy pusher Like a drug, you know, pusher So, and the second thing victims cannot accept Is that they fell in love with a shimmering mirage With a fatem oregano There is nobody there in any meaningful psychological way None, nothing There's a narrative, a piece of fiction A movie called the false self And it surrounds, it envelops An emptiness, a void Deep space This is the narcissist It's an animated shell A simulation if you would And victims can't accept this They feel stupid for having fallen for it So their own grandiose defenses kick in I saw something in him His inner child called out to me again I couldn't walk away I felt that I felt that he has been changing with my love And all kinds of self-deceptive Self-deceptions intended to somehow restore ego-syntony But the truth is you fell in love You fell in love with a black hole Masquerading, pretending to be a human being And this black hole distorted reality around it The same way a black hole distorts a gravity field A real black hole distorts a gravity field Moses distorts reality And you were sucked in, you were sucked into the black hole Now does a black hole in space care If you're a planet or a star or dust or gas A black hole in space, in deep space A real black hole, astrophysical black hole Swallows everything, even light It doesn't care what it swallows It doesn't, it digests and processes Everything that comes into his remit, into its ambit It processes exactly the same A black hole swallows light Digests planets and stars and other black holes Everything in a huge suction sound And processes them exactly the same This is the narcissist And you, you, what are you therefore as a victim You are what is known in warfare as collateral damage No one wants to be collateral damage Everyone wants to be the target You are not a target, you are collateral damage The narcissist, solipsistically Has been enacting his own drama You just happened to be there Your bad luck So when the victim feels like they see the goodness in the narcissist Is that just like a positive projection Where they're projecting themselves onto the narcissist And filling in the gaps It's an attempt not to feel like the idiots that they were When they made the choice It's a grandiose attempt to set DC To say I haven't been incautious And a little stupid and gullible And vulnerable I haven't been any of this thing I saw something in him that others cannot see It's a narcissistic difference Narcissism rubs off its infections You couldn't, you couldn't have seen anything in the narcissist Because there's nothing there There's nothing there There is a child Two, three, four year old child And the narcissist uses this child Trots out this child Brings it into the open in order to captivate you Get you addicted Play on your maternal instincts Maternal even for men Even men are protective of children So a narcissist would use this in a child But this in a child is a corpse The true self is atrophied and dead The narcissist takes out an animated corpse of a child And this is what you fell for And you can't admit it You simply can't admit how needy you are How broken you are How damaged you were How vulnerable How easy it was to infiltrate you and convert you to the cause It was a cult You became a cult member And you know cult members? What's the tip of cult members? I have listened to many cult members I've recently given an interview to a cult member Mark Vicente Cult members have one thing in common They blame the cult They never blame themselves Never I never came across a cult member who said I was a moron I am seriously stupid to have fallen for this idiotic narrative of the cult It's my fault I take responsibility for it I have made wrong decisions and adopted bad choices The cult leader I use the cult leader as much as he used me You know, I haven't heard and I've been working with cults and uncults and about cults for decades I have never come across a single victim of a cult Who blamed or who assumed responsibility for his or her own actions Not one They all blame the cult and the cult leader It's the same with narcissistic abuse Your relationship with the narcissist is a cult And you blame the cult You blame the cult You blame the cult leader You blame circumcision You blame anything and anyone except yourself And this is known as alloplastic defense And it is a major hallmark of narcissism So you've become a narcissist That's what narcissists do Narcissists are never responsible Never accountable Everyone else is to blame They are innocent They are victims And so are you You've become a narcissist You've been infected I find that a lot of victims of narcissistic abuse Actually try to take on a lot of responsibility They take on the responsibility for all of the behaviors of the narcissist Because the narcissist is continually telling them If you do this, I'll act right I'm doing this because you did this I'm angry because of this I hate you because of this I did this because of you And I find that a lot of victims take on a huge amount of responsibility In these relationships But not for their own basic mistakes No, not for their own For the narcissists Yes Yes, that's the maternal That's part of the maternal That's the dual mothership The narcissist keeps saying I'm a child It's up to you as my mother To regulate me To stabilize me To make me feel good You are the one who should teach me proper behavior You should model You should act in a way that I would imitate properly And so So the narcissist As a child would You know, if a mother were to confront Her four-year-old child Imagine, a mother confronts a four-year-old child Says You are horrible You misbehave all the time You hurt me The child would say Mother, I'm four years old, you know It's really up to you You will be adult in the room You should take responsibility Everything that's happening to me Is I've probably learned from you Or I'm reactive to you somehow It's all you Yeah, which is exactly what the narcissist does Yes, because he's a child He's not lying about that He's a child He's a child It's easy to trigger the narcissist And so Yeah You said before that in the beginning of the relationship The narcissist needs their partner to regress mentally in age Is that the aim of the psychological and the emotional abuse And all of the control and all of the power dynamics To make that person regress through that No The regression is accomplished via the love bombing And the idealization Okay When the narcissist idealizes you He gives you access to this idealized image or version of yourself And you fall in love with this version of yourself You get self-infatuated So you want to continue to see yourself You want to continue to see yourself as an idealized image Through the narcissist gaze You fall in love with the way the narcissist loves you You fall in love with the way the narcissist sees you It's irresistible Because now you're perfect Yeah You're drop dead gorgeous You're hyper-intelligent You're amazing You can resist this It's irresistible So this phase gets you addicted And inducted into the shared fantasy And the narcissist broadcasts to you maternal messages Your ideal I love you understand Your ideal I love you unconditionally No one has ever loved you like this And no one will ever love you like this And so on and so forth These are maternal messages The mother has to idealize the baby Because raising children sucks And babies suck big time They're horrible This is one of the worst imaginable experiences in human life Comparable perhaps to a penal colony It's really bad experience The mother needs to lie to herself About the baby She needs to idealize the baby somehow And this is what the narcissist does to his intimate partner or friend or whatever The narcissist idealizes them And then he proves to them that his love is unconditional And he grants them access to the idealized image And they are addicted There's bonding here Immediately There's utter addiction The narcissist uses narcissistic abuse For two functions And it has two functions The first function of narcissistic abuse is to test you Are you really a good mother? Are you going to love me unconditionally? Never mind what I do to you Never mind how I misbehave Never mind how egregiously evil I am And how much I harm you and hurt you Are you still going to love me? Because real mothers do In the narcissist's mind Mother loves never mind what Whatever the narcissist does He deserves your love because you are his mother And mother's love unconditionally But how can the narcissist convince himself That you're a true mother? Maybe you are fake Maybe you're pretending Maybe you're gold digger Who knows? Narcissist to convince himself That you really love him as a mother does And the only way to accomplish this Is to test you So he abuses you He pushes the envelope He abuses you even more And you keep loving him And he keeps abusing you And you keep loving him At a certain point the narcissist says I've done to her everything imaginable She still loves me So okay, she passes She's qualified As a maternal figure Because her love is clearly unconditionally That's the first function of narcissistic abuse The second function of narcissistic abuse Is in the devaluation thing Where the narcissist needs to push you To behave in ways That would uphold this view of you As an enemy Or a persecutory object Now this process is known as Projective identification Finally it's really interesting It's known as projective identification If I believe that you're an abuser If I expect you to be an abuser I would push you and provoke you and so on So that you abuse me And then I feel validated Because that's what I thought about you to start with So if I need to devalue you If I need to consider you a persecutory object, an enemy I need to abuse you So that you begin to push back You begin to shout back at me You begin to undermine me You begin to behave passive-aggressively You run out You break up for a while You do bad things to me Of course this is reactive abuse But in my mind In the narcissist's mind It serves to confirm your persecutory nature So now you're behaving exactly as he has expected you to do And now it's clear that you've been faking it all along You were not a real unconditional mother Here you are shouting at me Humiliating me Arguing with me Disagreeing with me Criticizing me You don't love me It's a baby Look at my facial expressions I'm doing it on purpose It's just a baby Throwing a temper tantrum Because mommy doesn't love me Because she refuses to give me the chocolate bar And I'm going to behave badly with mommy To attract her attention And then I will see if she truly loves me Because a real mother would love me never mind one And if I want to get rid of mommy Then I'll behave really badly Until she leaves me alone Which also happens It's these are childlike defenses Infantile defense Self-fulfilling prophecy Another thing is splitting Splitting or dichotomous thinking Is a primitive infantile defense mechanism The narcissist is incapable of relating to other people As nuanced totalities Other people are either all bad or all good They are never something in between They are not gray shades It's either all Either you're all bad or you're all good So when the narcissist wants to separate from you And individually And so he needs to make you all bad It's not that he can say Listen, she has some good points She has some bad points And I think the bad points Should we should dissolve the relationship Because I cannot cope with the bad points She has some great points She's amazing But you know her bad sides The narcissist is incapable of this The narcissist is going to say She has only bad points She's totally corrupted and evil And disloyal and hateful And abusive And he's going to paint you black Because he has a splitting way of relating Similarly in the idealization phase You're perfect You could do no wrong You could be no wrong Everything about you was perfect The way you look, the way you talk The way you speak, the way you... You name it, the way you cook The way you don't cook maybe If you don't cook it proves you're independent You know, everything is recast And rewritten to uphold and buttress the idealized image Even bad things, even seriously bad things Your argumentative, for example Your argumentative and opinionative The narcissist is going to rewrite this In the idealization stage And he's going to say She is so hyper-intelligent That she is often misunderstood But in the devaluation stage He's going to say She is opinionating He's going to say She is opinionated argumentative Because she's stupid She can't get nuances So, all good and all good This is splitting I was going to say I'm laughing Because I've been that character In both sides of a narcissist To question All people in the narcissist's life The shared fantasy is applicable Not only to intimate partners But also to friends and family Shared fantasy is the way The narcissist relates to the world So he's going to coerce his boss To become his mother And that's why when you talk to employers They say that narcissists are very high maintenance They're difficult people Difficult employees Because a narcissist keeps demanding Special treatment Special attention Special concessions So the narcissist wants to be the favorite Or favorite child The golden child of the boss All of the colleagues are at the scapegoat He's the golden child This is the shared one So it's not only intimate partners Everyone is going through this Being ideal Therapists are going through this Therapists will tell you That the narcissist comes into therapy And idealizes the therapist And then Questions later The narcissist devalues the therapist Yeah, the therapist Yeah Can any headway be made in therapy With a narcissist? Yeah, I think we should make this our last question Because otherwise the viewers are going to split us We're going to say that we are all bad One hour and 45 minutes That's seriously inconsiderate It's too interesting, that's too much Yeah, can any headway be made with a therapist With therapy and narcissists? Depends how you define them That's very fine In all ages And remember the mental or psychological age is always Three to six So regardless of chronological age You're dealing with a child But in all chronological ages It's possible to modify the behaviors of the narcissist So behavior modification is possible We can teach the narcissist To reduce abrasive behaviors To control the expressions of his grandiosity To act a lot less antisocialy and psychopathically To be less defiant, impulsive, reckless Contrumacious, etc We can teach the narcissist We can domesticate or tame the narcissist The way you do with a wild animal You can, you know, you can Elephants and tigers in circuses Are not elephants and tigers in nature However, exactly like a tiger in the circus It's a tiger The fact that the tiger in the circus Enacts certain procedures or doesn't Doesn't render him, doesn't render it less of a tiger So you can teach the narcissist To behave in specific ways, condition the narcissist Induce positive reinforcements, negative reinforcements, and so on It won't be usually in long term So you would have to repeat the procedure time and again You have to repeat the therapy time and again You can teach the narcissist, for example, not to be insulting or rude Okay, so for six months, he would mind his manners And then there will be a relapse It's similar to addiction because narcissists are addicts They're addicted to narcissistic supply Anyone who's worked with junkies and I can tell you this There's a relapse rate is enormous The relapse rate in alcoholism After three months rehab is 80% within one year They start to drink again within one year Same with the narcissists Core changes are impossible There is no way to affect core changes in narcissism Period It's a lifelong condition But I think some mistakes are being made And if these mistakes were to be corrected Perhaps we would have a better prognosis Mistake number one In all treatment modalities that I'm aware of The narcissist is treated as an adult There's an attempt to strike a therapeutic alliance There's negotiation about goals This is nonsense The narcissist is a child We need to use child psychology Point number two Narcissism may be manifested or expressed By a certain determinants and dimensions of the personality But at the core it's a post-traumatic condition And we need to apply trauma therapies to narcissists I have attempted to do exactly this I combine child psychology with trauma therapies More precisely, re-traumatization therapies For Nosak others And I combined these two I didn't invent much that was new I just combined these two methodologies or treatment modalities And I came up with what I call cold therapy And cold therapy I think standard a chance At the very least of dismantling the false self And getting rid of the need for narcissistic supply Compulsively for narcissistic supply and grandiosity But even these modest goals are in doubt And once they've been accomplished Let's say the false self is gone Grandiosity is gone No need for supply Let's assume That's not narcissism That's an element of narcissism For example, grandiosity Grandiosity is common in many other mental health disorders In borderline, in psychopathy, in bipolar disorder So getting rid of the grandiosity part Is restoring some cognitive functioning And doing the cognitive distortion Restoring in reality testing to the narcissists But that's not narcissism That's not even 10% of narcissism That's why many self-styled experts online Confuse narcissism with psychopathy They say all psychopaths are narcissists Which is rank nonsense Only a minority, a small minority of psychopaths are narcissists All psychopaths are grandiose Exactly like narcissists But it doesn't make them narcissists Grandiosity is not the same as narcissism It's an elementary narcissism So cold therapy Succeeds to get rid of Should succeed to get rid of Grandiosity But even cold therapy Would have no impact on the core Poor dynamics of narcissism The damage is done It's massive There are problems without solutions And there are diseases without cures We need to accept this This is the American mindset The American mindset is If you just throw money at it or whatever Everyone can change Everything can, everyone can change Every problem can be solved Every disease can be cured That's counterfactual It's not true And narcissism is a great example It's been a pleasure to talk to you Professor, thank you so much for your time I appreciate it My pleasure I hope the recording is decipherable We'll discover in a few minutes And I will be uploading it to my YouTube channel Yeah, sure Okay, take care, Claire All right, thank you Take care, Claire You guys stop the recording, Claire Oh yeah, all right, recording is mine It's all mine I like to control the recording Here I am, I'm stopping it Take care That's okay I understand I'll go back and edit out some of the bits Where there was a bit of interference Or whatever was there Or in the beginning when you told me to stop saying Uh-huh, uh-huh We'll take that bit out Okay, next time, next time we will know Yes, next time, hopefully we have a better internet connection But thank you I honestly think that you're amazing I find you incredibly inspiring And I've really, really enjoyed talking to you I could have listened to you for the rest of the night Thank you Well, thank you so much All right, see you again We'll stay in touch Yes, definitely