 Ok, so this talk that I'm going to do for you I going to lay out a problem and I'm going to lay out a solution. This is bordering on being a little bit of a social taboo, I'm not really quite sure how this situation has built up to the point where you can't actually, ac yn ymdegwyd yn y ffordd cyntaf, yn y ffordd cyntaf yng Nghymru, yn y ffordd cyntaf yng Nghymru, yn ymdegwyd yn ymdegwyd, yn ymdegwyd, yn ymdegwyd, yn ymdegwyd, yn ymdegwyd, yn ymdegwyd, yn ymdegwyd. Mae'n ddwy o'r cyntaf yn y Llywodraeth a'r ysgrifennu, sydd wedi'u gwirioneddau o'r ddiweddau sydd yn gwybod i'r ddiweddau o'r ddym ni'n ei wneud o'r ddod. Yn ymddangos y gallwn i'r ddod, mae'n gwybod o ddod yn yr unigolion. Mae'r ddod, mae'n diweddau i'n mynd i ddod, mae'n tyfnol y cwybod o'r ddod, mae'n ddod yn yr unigolion. Mae'n ddod o bobl, yw bobl yn ymarhyn, yw bobl yn y gallu gobl. Yng Nghymru yn ymdegwyd. So, narciss are typically described as being male, and therefore narcissistic abuse is something that men do to women. And then when you look online on the forums, on the, you know, in the cyber sphere of psychology, whether this is Facebook or Instagram or wherever you look, you will see it's mainly when narcissism is raised, it will mainly be female participants talking about men. Now, I've been in this field since 2012, and the vast majority of my client base has been female. Most of the people who come to my seminars, it's women, probably to 80 to 90%. Occasionally, and I really don't know why this is the case because the research doesn't back this. As an aside, just so you know, there's very, very few, there are some but very, very few gay people showing up and talking about this. Relative to the number of women who are talking about experiencing this in heterosexual relationships with men. So, I don't know, I mean, I've had gay clients, and I've spoken to people online who've been in gay relationships. It's usually men, I get very, very few women, very, very few women coming to me and saying, oh, I've got problems with my girlfriend and it looks like this. Some men have come through, but very, very few. My point about this is that the filter through which this particular psychological order is perceived currently is highly gendered and it's skewed in an odd way. Now, in the literature, very infrequently, will women be labelled as NPD? Usually, they will get a different diagnosis, though this is changing. And diagnosing NPDs is a whole other tricky thing anyway because why isn't NPD going to show up to therapy to be diagnosed? If they are offered a questionnaire, why would they answer it honestly? They're very easy to trick, by the way, the questionnaires for psychopathy and narcissism. They're available freely online, many of them, and you can trick them if you just do the questionnaire and imagine that you want to be seen as a psychopath, you will be. If you want to not be seen as a psychopath, then you won't be, and similarly for narcissism. Usually, women get a diagnosis of BPD, histrionic, or less frequently, antisocial personality disorder, which from now on I'm going to refer to as psychopathy, to avoid confusion and people hear antisocial and they think, oh, that's somebody who's self-isolating. But actually it means somebody who anytime they're in contact with another human being, the contact is exploitative, it's poisonous, it's toxic in some way, and that's why it's called antisocial. So I'll just say psychopath, we all understand what a psychopath is. Histrionic would usually be sort of determined as an extremely infantile, vain, reaction seeking, and hypersexualised modality of functioning. BPD would typically be emotionally labile, self-destructive, fragile, also very reaction seeking, sometimes hypersexualised infantile and vain as well, what else is typically borderline. There's a lot of push-pull in the relational style, push-pull relational style. So emotionally labile, self-destructive, fragile, push-pull, push-pull meaning I want you whilst you don't want me when you want me I don't want you. I'm going to enter your space and accelerate the intimacy of our relationship if you accelerate and increase the intimacy of the relationship I feel smothered and pulled away. Why are you so indifferent to me? I'm coming towards you. Why are you pulling towards me? Oh, you're smothering me. That's push-pull. So you never really know where you are. The classic view on the internet, and I think it's partly based on the psychological world as well, unfortunately it shouldn't be this way, is a very cosmopolitan magazine, Oprah Winfrey chat show view of narcissistic psychopathic men. So the classic view of narcissistic psychopathic men is, in my opinion, a very dangerous because it gives people the wrong impression of what it looks like and very simplistic trope. It's a culture-bound trope, and it is American Psycho. I was going to say by Chuck Palin Hurrick, by Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho. So your Patrick Bateman, as portrayed by Christian Bale, successful, wealthy, powerful and predatory. So I'm not going to write all that down because there's too many words. Successful, wealthy, powerful, predatory, alpha male. A guy who is an alpha in his own environment. So why is this problematic? And why is this this, just this, which is the tip of the iceberg, by the way, on this issue? Why is this problematic? This is problematic for two reasons. These tropes, these ideas are kind of archetypal. So what we can see here are culture-bound archetypes. It's never comfortable when a non-American talks about American culture, especially when he's talking predominantly to Americans. But in my humble opinion, these tropes, not this trope, this trope is an American trope, this archetype of the narcissistic psychopath. You know, I like the fact that American Psycho was played by Christian Bale because then we also get the overtones of his character in Batman. The Christopher Nolan version of Batman, that Bruce Wayne, right the way, you know, the guy riding around in a tuxedo in the red sports car. It's a trope. It's this silly idea of what the ultimate wealthy alpha male looks like. Let's deal with the problems of this trope first. So emotionally labile, infantile, self-destructive, vain, reaction-seeking, hypersexualized, using a lot of push-pull in their relational style. And fragility. There is something, so there is the proper material on borderline personality disorder. And then there's Richie's hypothesis, my hypothesis of how borderline personality disorder plays out. As I'm talking, if I remember, I'll distinguish between the two because I know some of you have studied psychology. So I'll try not to blur my own personal hypotheses with what's in the literature. The push-pull relational style, that's something that I focus on. That's when I see this, I start thinking borderline. The reason why this I think happens is because of emotional ability. And I think that actually what you have with many borderlines is a counter-dependent personality type. Meaning that love is something that even though they crave it, they're terrified of it at the same time. We'll come back to that. This, as an archetype, is a trope. There are many women out there who believe that this is how to behave. That this is actually just what femininity is. There's been a bunch of memes, if you look, if you want to know where people are up to in terms of what they generally think at a culture-wide level, it's good to look at memes. It's good to follow memes on Facebook and on Instagram. There's been a bunch of memes that have come out in the last four or five years that are frequently attributed to Marilyn Monroe. A lot of them are misquotes. They're quotes that she never said that didn't come from her, that other people have ascribed to her. But you'll notice that it is this idea of talking around protecting the notion of womanhood with being infantile, vain, reaction-seeking and sometimes self-destructive and drawing a complex equivalent, drawing an equality and equality, not inequality between femininity and self-destructiveness. That's a problem with drawing an equivalence between being infantile, cute, childlike, pouting, manipulative and femininity. That's a problem because I think that this has become internalised and that femininity has become equalised with a very toxic notion of what femininity is. All of these things... As a man. Learn more at the link below or visit 21university.com This coming together, right? When I get a client who comes to me and they say, I don't know whether I have PTSD, complex PTSD or whether I actually have borderline and many people who are diagnosed with borderline and histrionic personality disorder are misdiagnosed because the cluster of traits between complex post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder overlaps very, very heavily and so they get misdiagnosed. What I tell them to look out for when it's a personality disorder to me and all of these, by the way, incidentally I use the American definitions which is the diagnostic and statistical manual which I find to be the most useful. So the abusive exploitative personality types in the DSM and the American DSM are called cluster B and I use this instead of the World Health Organization or the other options because I find it the best and most useful definition. This is not in the DSM. This is my humble opinion. When you're trying to figure out whether somebody actually has a personality disorder or whether it's just a traumatised infantile response to something that occurred to them in childhood because these are the kinds of things that happen when people are sexually abused, all of them. If there's sexual abuse in childhood you're damn sure they're going to be hypersexualised for life. It's highly likely that they'll be addicted to the act of sex, the physical sensations of sex but more that their ego is intrinsically linked to them having value as a sexually desirable object. It's a break in the self-perception in the area of sexuality and if I'm not a sexually desirable object, I'm not anything at all. It's not that I'm not lovable, it's that I cease to exist. I drop out of existence if I'm not a sexual object. If somebody actually embraces that and they've had a traumatic break with reality you can see why clinging desperately to being a sexually desirable object becomes such a thing and can become such a hysterical attachment because without that it's death. If I'm not sexually desirable, I don't exist and in the unconscious, nonexistence is equated with death. What I look for is entitlement and exploitation. I would say that if somebody demonstrates all of these but doesn't have the entitlement and isn't neurotically compelled to exploit then this would be post-traumatic stress or complex post-traumatic stress and it's fixable, it's healable. This is somebody who is emotionally immature because trauma freezes and they will have experienced trauma at a certain age and it's frozen in their development, it's frozen in their maturity. They're emotionally immature, they're emotionally completely illiterate, they don't want to deal with any of their own feelings so they're trapped in a cycle of projecting outward because they can't deal with their own feelings so they become emotionally illiterate. Illiterate, oh my god. What happens when the person who's trying to spell illiterate can't spell illiterate? Illiterate. They become emotionally illiterate. What they're going to do is they're going to keep projecting outwards. Illiterate, there we go, we've got there in the end. Which leads to projection. Projection is, most people know this but I'm going to say it just in case, projection is I do not want to accept a part of myself or a feeling in myself because I find it unacceptable to my self image but it is there, so in order to deal with it I'm going to project it outward and frequently it will be projected onto my intimate partner. Now, if there is entitlement and exploitation and all of this and all of this I think you're talking about a full blown personality disorder that is in the cluster B. The chances of that being responsive to therapeutic intervention or negotiation or any kind of adult to adult communication is nil. I personally don't think that that can happen if we've gone there. So I don't think that what we're dealing with actually is a huge tidal wave of people becoming narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. I don't think that's what's happening but I do think it's nearly as bad as that because if your cultural coordinates are all of this is my right all of this is what makes me attractive and sexy and interesting then the strategies that I use in life and in relationships will be based on this. So that's why that trope is dangerous. Why is this trope dangerous? The trope of Patrick Bateman, capitalist's wet dream is, what did I say, successful? Success, wealth, power and his predatory. Patrick Bateman or Christopher Nolan's Bruce Wayne Christopher Nolan chose to make Bruce Wayne a laughable character, a dope a billionaire playboy in his external perception of him. Why is this a dangerous trope? Who else does this sound like? Or what was the most popular piece of pornography that was consumed by most women in the western world in the last five years? Fifty shades of grey. Who does this sound like? Christian Grey. Why is this a problem? Because you've got women probably, probably likely overdiagnosing through the cyberspace through the cybersphere, men in their lives as actually having a full blown pathological personality disorder that is narcissistic and psychopathic that says that men are like Patrick Bateman that's successful, they're wealthy, they're powerful their predatory, their alpha males who drive around in red sports cars and bang everything that they can get their hands on. So they would also be hypersexual and highly promiscuous. Promiscuous and unfealing because they are psychopaths, right? But also I want this. So this is bad and desirable all at the same time. This alpha male is the ultimate goal and he is my worst enemy all in one. Now why is that then an issue? Because if I am highly emotionally labile extremely entitled and have a push-pull relational style the chances are high because of my emotional mobility my perceptions will be skewed. This is not... I don't think this is talked about all that much in the literature but I doubt there will be many psychologists who disagree with me that if somebody is very emotionally dysregulated they have very poor internal boundaries very low impulse control and their emotions are going up and down all the time that their perceptions are going to become warped over time. And then they'll start projecting parts of themselves that they don't want outward. Parts of themselves that are bad and desirable because good goals don't want Patrick Bateman or Christian Gray that's only bad goals would want that. That's bad. I'm not allowed to want that. I'm not allowed to want what it is that I truly want. There's something wrong with this. So what happens is projection. And I think what we've got is an epidemic of women diagnosing men as being the thing that they really really should not want because of desire. So I don't want to get too psychobabbly on you but what this would mean is if you have somebody with a very very fragile sense of self who possibly has been sexually abused now sexual abuse to be clear in childhood it might be actual physical sexual abuse of varying degrees and varying levels that we don't need to get into here but it can also be a boundary breaking unwarranted level of sexually flavoured attention from the wrong source that also is abuse. If a mother or a father is looking at a little girl or a little boy looking at talking to talking about them in a way that is inappropriate that is boundary breaking and it causes huge problems in the personality when they grow up. It's really tricky because that person can't actually then say well I was sexually abused they can only say it was kind of icky for me growing up one would look at me funny when I was not wearing clothes and they can't quite figure out what it is that's gone wrong but we're told well unless you are actually physically assaulted it's not an assault, it creates problems. I suspect a very very large number of people are walking round with this as an issue because of boundary broken hyper sexualised attention in childhood that was completely inappropriate. When the entitlement and the exploitation creeps in the emotional liability creeps in what can start to happen is if you look at a guy imagine that you're a girl who has this going on inside and you look at a guy and you like him and you start to feel desire for him but you're projecting as well you start to project bad attributes onto him bad and desirable because it's the same. This idea people say it's outdated the ultimate man is a bad boy the most desirable man is always going to be a bad boy it's not outdated it'll never be outdated it's biological because bad in this context is only bad in a I didn't write it down. Some psychologists are calling this a culture bound syndrome when I say some, there are many many very well respected psychologists who are saying we need to stop calling narcissism a personality disorder it isn't, we need to stop calling broadline, histrionic, psychopathy a personality disorder they're saying they're not personality disorders they're responses to trauma it's a coping mechanism to deal with a hostile environment from childhood not a personality disorder there's also many people are saying it's entirely culture bound these terms that would mean the disorder only has meaning in the culture in which it's found it has meaning in the United Kingdom somebody has a narcissistic personality disorder that has meaning but in other countries and other environments it might not have the same meaning it might not have the same implications that might just be the way you are the way you're supposed to be bad in this context what would bad be? bad may only be bad in a certain cultural environment once certain cultural coordinates have changed so what I suspect the reason why bad and desirable in the idea of the bad boys come in is because bad implies taboo so what's a taboo? what is it you're not allowed to do that's so bad that guys like this or girls who think that guys are like this well maybe they're not what is it that they're doing that is so bad that is so attractive