 Do I have to record it also? Yeah, I don't know if you're recording, I'm recording. Yeah, I'm recording too, I'm recording too. Okay, so that makes two of us. Okay. The recording duo. Yeah. First of all, I would like to say thank you again, Professor Bagning, for your time. Thank you for having me. I really do appreciate. Please call me Sam throughout this conversation. Thank you. Thank you very kind. I really do appreciate you agreed to do this interview. I would also like to apologize from the beginning because I'm not very fluent in English. As you said before, I will try my best. Your English is far better than my Spanish. Well, thank you. And well, this video will be uploaded in both channels, in yours and in mine. So for all of you who follow me. This interview will be in English, but I will put subtitles down below. And well, again, it's such an honor to have you with us, Professor. Thank you for having me. Sam Bagning. I have heard some of your interviews and I think you have very powerful thoughts. Thank you. And first of all, I'm going to do a short introduction for the people who follow me that maybe don't know you. I think that's. There are many people who don't know me. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking the same, but just in case. Professor Bagning is a former psychology professor. He also has a PhD in physics. He has written many books, one of them called Malignan self love narcissism revisited. He has been diagnosed twice with MBD and he has a very successful YouTube channel where he explains many theories and research about narcissism. In general. So. Professor Bagning. My first question is. What is narcissistic abuse? Can you describe it? Yes. Narcissistic abuse abuse is a phrase that I coined in the late 80s. And I felt the need to come up with a new phrase. Because they have the abuse. Has preceded the 1980s. People have been have been abused since the dawn of humanity. And I felt the need to coin a new phrase to describe this particular type of abuse because narcissistic abuse is unlike any other type of abuse. All other types of abuse. And there are many. All other types of abuse are goal oriented. Financial abuse is intended to obtain money. Legal abuse is intended to obtain a favorable verdict in a court. Verbal abuse is intended to humiliate and shame and demean someone. Degrade someone. Physical abuse is intended to express. Uncontrolled anger. Maybe to cause physical damage. Sexual abuse is intended to gratify certain needs, including sex sexual need, but not only. For example, the need for power. But all these types of abuse. Have to do with a specific goal. The goal could be a psychological goal. Could be an objective goal like money or fame or access or power. But it's always about a goal. Narcissistic abuse is not about the target of the abuse. Narcissistic abuse has to do with the narcissist. Narcissistic abuse has to do with the narcissist. Not with the target of the abuse. Narcissistic abuse is the narcissist way. To gain control over a specific target could be an intimate partner could be a friend could be a colleague colleague or worker. To gain control in order to convert the target into a source of narcissistic supply within a shared fantasy. So it's about fulfilling the narcissist needs where the target is incidental. The target is not chosen. The target is not special. The target is not unique in any way. The target doesn't fulfill a job description. The target just happens to be there in the vast majority of cases. Simply happens to be there. Narcissistic abuse is an attempt to eliminate the target psychologically to take away the target's independence or personal autonomy, agency, ability to act, self-efficacy, friends, family, social network to take away everything from the target. And to render the target totally dependent upon the narcissist and available to participate with the narcissist in a kind of cult based on fantasy. And that is known in psychology as the shared fantasy. So it's unique. It's unique in the sense that the aim is not to take something from the target, but to eliminate, to negate, to destroy the target, to vitiate the target completely. It is therefore the equivalent of a nuclear war, a total war, compared to conventional war or compared to act of terrorism. Narcissistic abuse is the nuclear version of abuse. Very well described. I completely agree with you and you put the words perfectly in that definition. From your point of view, a narcissist can suffer from narcissistic abuse. Can narcissists suffer from narcissistic abuse? Can narcissists be abused narcissistically? Abused, yeah, a victim as well. Narcissists start off as a victim. The etiology of narcissism has to do with early childhood abuse and trauma. Now there is no proof. There are no serious studies that show that narcissism has a genetic component like borderline. There are no studies that show that narcissists have brain abnormalities like the psychopath. So it seems that the main etiology of narcissism is childhood abuse and trauma. Now there are many forms of abuse and trauma. You can abuse the child physically, you can abuse the child sexually and verbally and psychologically. These are the classical forms of abuse. But if you spoil the child, if you pamper the child, if you instrumentalize the child, if you use the child as an instrument to realize your own dreams and wishes. If you parentify the child, if you force the child to act as your own parent. All these are forms of abuse. When you spoil the child, you isolate the child from reality and from peers. You don't allow the child to get feedback. Reality is the main engine of growth. Reality is what drives us forward in a path of self-development. If you isolate the child, if you don't allow the child to suffer the consequences of his or her actions. If you don't allow the child to interact with peers because you're overprotective. If you keep telling the child that he's the greatest and can do no wrong and it never makes mistakes and so on. You're preventing the child from growing up and you're not allowing the child to separate from you as a parent and to become an individual. A process known as separation individuation. So abuse is any situation where the parent prevents the child from becoming a separate individual and the parent penetrates, breaches the boundaries of the child in any possible way. Physical, psychological, denying the child agency and autonomy and independence, isolating the child instrumental. In all these ways, the child is not allowed to form or to defend boundaries. So there are numerous ways to abuse and almost all narcissists have been abused as children. So they start off as victims. They start off as victims. Only then they make a choice. They say, I'm not going to be a victim anymore. I'm going to be the victimizer. I'm not going to be abused. I'm going to be the abuser. And because these are children, when they make these decisions, they're children, usually between the ages of 18 months and 36 months. So these children regard mother and father as godlike. These are godlike figures. They are infallible. They make no mistakes. They're all powerful. They're all knowing. So when the child says, I'm going to become my abuser, the child is actually saying, I'm going to become as godlike as my mother. I'm going to become as all powerful as my father, as omnipotent, as omniscient. So the child creates a false self. The false self is everything the child is not. The child is powerless and helpless. The false self is all powerful. The child cannot predict the behavior of the adults around the child because they are in their own way disturbed. They're problematic. But the force said knows everything is all knowing omniscient. So false self can can predict the behavior of adults. The child is less than perfect. The messages, the signaling from the child's parental figures, mainly the mother at the beginning. The signaling is you're a bad object. You're unworthy. You're imperfect. You're a failure. You don't perform as I expect you to. You're unlovable. You don't deserve to be loved. These are the messages. And the false self is exactly the opposite. The false self is you're perfect. You're Godlike. You're brilliant. You never make mistakes and so on and so forth. So the false self is what we call a compensatory mechanism. It's intended to compensate for the child's real circumstances and experiences. And here we have a strange situation. The narcissist starts off as a victim and then chooses to become an abuser. But because the narcissist starts off as a victim, he has intimate knowledge of the psychology of the victim. So the narcissist has been through it. Sorry. He has been there. He's been there. He's done that. So the narcissist has the capacity to infiltrate the defenses of the victim. And to convert her into his shared fantasy because the narcissist has been a victim. He knows all the vulnerabilities and the soft sports and the hot buttons of the victim because he used to be a victim. And then he is able to victimize his targets much more efficiently than typical abusers. Now, the vast majority of abusers are not narcissists. They don't even suffer any mental health problem. The vast majority of abusers are not diagnosed with any mental health issue. They are just power hungry. They play with power. They are power players and so on. But a small percentage has personality disorders or other types of mental health issues, mood disorders and so on. And the narcissist is uniquely qualified by virtue of having been a narcissist, a victim. So this is the power of the narcissist. He resonates with the victim. There is resonance and we call it trauma bonding because the victim is very self-destructive in the majority of cases. And the narcissist resonates with this self-destruction in a way that creates bonding. Trauma bonding is a form of self-harm. It's like cutting in borderline. It's a form of self-harm. And the narcissist comes to the victim and says, I'm going to be your mother. I'm going to love you as a mother does. I'm going to idealize you the same way a mother idealizes her baby. All I need you to do is to give up on your autonomy, to let go of your independence, to give in to me, to allow me to be your mother with all the authority and the power that a mother has. So the narcissist regresses his victim, infantilizes the victim, causes her to become an infant again and offers her motherhood by idealizing her and by loving her apparently unconditionally at the beginning of the relationship during the love-bombing phase. But at the same time, the narcissist insists that the victim should act as his mother. He wants the victim to become a maternal figure because he has unresolved conflicts with his original mother and he wants to resolve them through the relationship with his victim. So it's extremely complicated. It's not as simple as the narcissist is a bad guy, the victim is a good guy. It's much more complex than this. Much more complex. Yeah, that explanation is much more deeper than we used to find online or many self-help books that we find nowadays in the market. So I appreciate your opinion on that subject. My second, well, third question is, in your opinion, what are the biggest misconceptions of narcissism nowadays? I don't know if I don't know where... I don't know where to start because I would say that about 90% of the so-called information online is misinformation. I simply don't know where to start. Let's take two issues, gaslighting and future faking. Gaslighting is a situation where you are made, someone coerces you or forces you to distrust your own perception of reality. So you begin to doubt, ask yourself whether you're crazy. You begin to ask yourself, am I crazy? Am I misperceiving what's happening? Did I really get it wrong? Is this memory false? You know, you begin to doubt yourself. Now everyone online, all these self-styled experts, they say that narcissists gaslight. Narcissists don't gaslight. In order to gaslight, you need to be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And gaslighting is premeditated. It's intentional. It's a control and manipulation strategy. It's Machiavellian. Narcissists believe their own lies. They believe their own confabulations. Narcissism is a fantasy defense. They cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. When the narcissist tells you, you are amazing, you're hyper-intelligent, you're drop dead, gorgeous. I've never had anyone like you and I'm going to marry you and have three kids with you and we're going to live happily ever after. It's not because he's manipulating. It's because he believes this. He's not future-faking. He believes his own intentions and promises, however fantastic they may be. Then counterfactual. Because narcissists have what we call impaired reality testing. They're unable to perceive reality correctly. That's why narcissists are grandiose. Because they don't perceive reality correctly. They think they're the greatest. The most amazing, geniuses, brilliant, drop dead, gorgeous, whatever. Because they don't perceive reality correctly. If you don't perceive reality correctly, you cannot gaslight. Because to gaslight means you know what is reality and you make other people doubt it. And psychopaths gaslight, not narcissists. That's point number one. And by the way, just to refer to the clinical literature. In clinical literature, gaslighting requires an asymmetry of power. So you cannot gaslight if you're equal. You can gaslight only if you have some advantage of some kind. You're a therapist, you're a teacher, you're a boss, you're a famous figure, celebrity. Then you can gaslight. In clinical literature, not online. There's a lot of narcissism. So I gave you two examples of future faking. Narcissists never future fake. They believe their own nonsense, their own promises. And gaslighting, which narcissists never do because they themselves don't know what is reality. And if you go online, you get the exact opposite information. Another very common nonsense, piece of nonsense, is that narcissists are not self-aware. Narcissists are actually very self-aware. They are perfectly aware of their actions. They are absolutely aware of some of the impacts that their actions have. The narcissists are not self-aware, they are not aware of their own motivations and psychodynamics. But who is? Very few people are. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So I would say, yes, if you talk to a narcissist, they're going to tell you, I'm a very tough guy. I insult people because I speak my mind. What they do, they glorify, they glamorize their misbehavior. They misbehave and they say, yes, I'm misbehaving, but it's not misbehavior. It's the way everyone should behave. I'm the only one who's behaving properly. For example, I am brutally honest. I'm hurting people. My honesty is hurting people, you know? But that's the way everyone should be. Everyone should be brutally honest. Even if it hurts people, it's okay. And so they justify their own misbehavior. But they are fully aware. It's not true that they are not. So I gave you three examples, but I can give you another 20. I mean, it's a serious problem to misinformation about. Very serious. Yeah, yeah. I like that you said about, explain the thing about awareness in narcissism, because that was another question I wanted to ask you and you answered perfectly. When I kind of prepared the interview, I don't know. I thought maybe he's aware, just as you said, he or she is aware of their behavior, but who is aware, properly aware of the motivations behind that. It's common to not be aware. Another problem is that victims, many victims, defend against the pain and against the hurt. Because victims perceive what has happened to them as a kind of accident. So they reject, they reject personal responsibility. They say it's not my fault. I've done nothing to deserve this. I did not contribute anything to this. None of my actions should have led to this. Whatever has happened is because I, you know, I was targeted, became a target. And so the first problem that happens with victims is that they perpetuate their victimhood. Their victimhood becomes an identity. They become professional victims. It's an identity. Because when you're a victim, you're entitled to special treatment. You get attention. You can even make money. And many of them do make money. That's point number one. Problem number one that you spend the rest of your life perpetuating your victimhood because victimhood in today's world, victimhood pays. We have victimhood movements, you know. Victimhood is organizing principle of modern life. The second problem is victims tell themselves that they're special. That they're unique. That they've been chosen. So there is this idiotic movement of, of so-called empaths. And actually there's no such clinical entity, of course. So they self-aggrandize. They say the narcissist chose me because my empathy is amazing and super, super sensitive. Or he chose me because I'm a kind person and very, very helpful. Or he chose me because of my love. He felt that my love can fix him or heal him and so on so forth. These claims have nothing to do with reality. The narcissist chooses his partners. And this could be a friend. It would be an intimate partner. It would be the narcissist chooses people. Not because of who they are. Not because of who they are, but because of what they can give him. Narcissists are looking for basically four things and I call them the four S's. Sex, supply, could be narcissistic supply, could be sadistic supply. Safety, because narcissists have abundant anxiety like borderlines, separation and security. So safety and services, all kinds of services. So if you give the narcissist two out of these four, you qualify to be a partner. If you give the narcissist sex and services, you can be a partner. If you give the narcissist supply and sex, you can be a partner. If you give the narcissist safety and services, you can be a partner. And who you are is not relevant because narcissists, for example, cannot identify empathy in other people. They have never experienced empathy. So they don't know that even if you are empathic, they wouldn't realize it. And if you are nice and kind, they perceive it as a weakness. They perceive this as a weakness. They would hold you in contempt. It will not attract them to you on the very contrary. It will push them away because you're contemptible. And if you are helpful and useful, the narcissist sometimes would be aggressive. Because if you offer the narcissist advice, it means that you think the narcissist is stupid. And if you offer the narcissist help, it means that you think that the narcissist is not Godlike, is not all powerful. He needs help. So sometimes offering advice and help is met with aggression. The narcissist reacts to this aggressively. The victims are deluding themselves into thinking that the narcissist has chosen them because of some traits, some personality parameters, none of this. They happen to be there and they were willing and able to provide the four S's or at least two of the four S's. They were willing to provide sex. The narcissist took it. They're willing to serve the narcissist. Allowed them. They were willing to supply the narcissist. Of course, the narcissist encouraged this. And all of this was done within a fantasy, a fantasy of love, a fantasy of a relationship. And most victims cannot let go of this fantasy. They're grieving the fantasy. They're grieving the fantasy. They're grieving themselves in the fantasy because the narcissist idealizes the victim. And then the victim sees herself through the narcissist's eyes. She sees her idealized self through the narcissist's gaze and she falls in love with herself. It is self infatuation. The narcissist allows the victim to interact with her idealized version. With her image of herself in his eyes. And she finds this addictive. She is, she cannot let go of this. There are many addictive elements in the shared fantasy. And this creates, of course, bonding. And it's very difficult for the victims to let go and to make sense of what happened. They need to tell themselves that they're special. It's a narcissistic defense, ironically. The victims, the victims become grandiose. Yeah. So in that point, maybe what is narcissistic abuse can create more narcissists? Maybe not in the other age because obviously we don't treat, we don't create personality disorders at 30 years old, for example. But it creates some kind of narcissism in their victims. Is that correct? It creates narcissistic defenses. It doesn't create, it triggers narcissistic defenses. Yeah, defenses. And it induces narcissistic behaviors. And this is what Lenz Perry called narcissistic style. So narcissism is infectious. You're right. Personality disorders cannot emerge after a certain age. There's a debate. What's the age? Because, for example, Twenge and Campbell and other scholars, they say that up to 25 can happen up to 25. Others say 18, even the great Kernberg, 18. But whatever the case may be, definitely when you're 40, you cannot acquire narcissistic personalities. This is not COVID-19. But what could happen is that you could adopt a style, the style of the narcissist. You could become a lot less empathic. And we know, for example, the traumatized people are less empathic. And today we know that borderlines are less empathic than we thought. So this has been amended in the text revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5, that borderlines are less empathic than we thought because they're traumatized. So trauma yields this empathy, reduces empathy. So you'll be less empathic. You will be a lot more aggressive. You will be a lot more defensive. You will be probably abusing reactively. You will be likely to be abusing. You are likely to be grandiose. Try in an attempt to make sense of what has happened to you. You are likely to somehow create a narrative which renders you somehow special. So there are grandiose, this grandiosity and so on. Luckily, all these are transient phenomena. The unfortunate thing is, if you're exposed to the online environment, to YouTube and so on and so forth, all these behaviors and traits and your own victimhood take much longer to resolve than had you not been exposed. People think that if they go online and they talk to other people who have had the same experiences, that there is a healing process. Actually studies show that it is exactly the opposite. It perpetuates the trauma. Today we know, for example, that the worst thing you can do after trauma is to discuss the trauma with the victim, to debrief the victim. It's the worst thing you can do. We have studies that show that venting, complaining constantly about what has happened to you, doesn't allow you to heal. So exposure to online environment actually prolongs the trauma and perpetuates the abuse. There is no positive aspect in anything, not one positive aspect in anything that's happening online. So today millions of victims suffer unnecessarily. What should have lasted one year of brief, three years of trauma, now can take 20s. I know people who are 20 and 30 years online, stuck, absolutely stuck in the phase of the breaker. Well, that's very interesting because do you think as PTSD, how do you say PTSD? It can be complex, it can be related with that. And how do you say, be online and consuming all this content about narcissism can even get worse. The CPTSD can even get worse. It's a form of re-traumatization. You're re-traumatized. We used to think that if someone had a trauma, the first thing you need to do is talk to them about the trauma, discuss the trauma. Allow them to relive the trauma, to re-experience the trauma in a safe environment, the clinical setting, the therapy. But today, absolutely we know, and these are the new guidelines, that the worst thing you can do is discuss the trauma. You should absolutely not discuss the trauma. Initially, of course, much later, years later, you should discuss the trauma, but not immediately. And what is happening online is exactly this. It's a form of debriefing. There is something called trauma dumping. Trauma dumping is when many traumatized people come together and they share their traumatic experiences. That's not helpful. It appears to be helpful because it tends to validate your experiences. You say, I'm not alone and I'm not crazy. I'm not alone and I'm not crazy. So you think you're misled. You think, oh, that's part of healing. Realizing that I'm not alone and I'm not crazy is part of healing. No, it's not actually. This is not the point of healing. This has to do with something else known as reframing. So this is a CBT technique. Never mind. It's reframing. It's not healing. To heal from narcissistic abuse, the focus should be on yourself and on the voices, the introjects, the voices that the narcissist implanted in your mind. What the narcissist does to you, using a technique known as entraining, the narcissist exposes you essentially to brainwashing, essentially. Now, none of this is intentional, unlike the psychopath. It's just what the narcissist does. The same way a tiger devours an antelope. The tiger doesn't sit and said, let me look at Wikipedia if I should devour antelopes. He just devours antelopes. A virus penetrates the cell, replicates itself and infects other people because it's a virus. Not because the virus read a textbook or consulted with Anthony Fauci. It's a virus. It's the same with the narcissist. The narcissist does whatever he does reflexively, instinctually. It's nothing to do with premeditation or planning. That's a psychopath. So the narcissist entrains you. He brainwashes you. In clinical terms, what the narcissist does, he generates because he regresses you to infancy. He brings you back to infancy. He is able to replicate a process in an infancy known as introjection. Introjection, internalization, identification, incorporation. It's a four-stage process. The narcissist replicates this. And he introjects himself into your mind and he leaves a trace. He leaves a voice inside your mind. Even when the narcissist is gone physically, no longer there. His voice is active here. And his voice in your mind pollutes and collaborates with similar voices in your mind. So if you had a mother who kept telling you that you're a failure and a loser and ugly and stupid and so on. The voice of the narcissist will find out the voice of your mother and will collaborate with it. Will amplify, will enhance it, will create a coalition, a constellation of introjection, a construct inside your mind. To heal from narcissistic abuse, you need to focus on this. You need to eliminate the narcissist from your physical environment. And then you need to eliminate the narcissist in your mind. And if you're exposed to other people, they actually amplify the voice of the narcissist in your mind because they themselves keep raising the topic of the narcissist. They keep discussing the narcissist. They demonize the narcissist. They mythologize the narcissist. They make the narcissist sound as some semi-good or all powerful entity, dark entity that is, you know, and sometimes they say this. They say it's a demon or it's a devil. This is not healthy environment. Absolutely not healthy environment. Unfortunately, not healthy. And very unscrupulous and immoral con artists and charlatans, many of them with academic degrees. Use this environment to make a lot of money and perpetuate the victimhood on purpose. You could see how they make sure that you continue to be a victim, never recover. I can see that because I know what they're doing. These are people with degrees. There are many others who are just, you know, ex-victims. They want to make some money or they want to be famous. So there are many, none of these people is holy. None of them is truly healing. I mean, it's a really bad scene out there. I'm talking about the English speaking. I have no access to other languages. I know other languages, but I watch only English speaking videos. Well, yeah, in Spanish, I think it's the same, almost the same. So, yeah, well, I talk about narcissism, but I don't consider myself a con artist. So, you know, I'm making fraud or something. I try to reflectionate and talk about it, but not to keep people in victimhood. But anyway, that's another debate. And that's very interesting as well. Well, from your point of view, what is the common trait that has every type of narcissist? If you had to choose one, what will it be? I'm not going to give you the common answer, the common answer and an accurate answer. Is that all types of narcissists and quite a few types, subtypes, all types of narcissists have called empathy. What I, what the phrase that I coined is called empathy. It's cognitive empathy plus reflexive empathy without emotional empathy. So they are able to read other people. They're able to understand other people. They're able to spot weak points, vulnerabilities and so on and so forth, but they don't react emotionally to this. So, narcissists would see you crying and the narcissists would say, cognitively would say, this person is crying. That means that this person is sad. There's like a table, big table. This person crying means he's sad, but then the narcissist would not feel sad for you. The narcissist would say, maybe because right now this person is sad and broken and vulnerable. Maybe I can use this somehow. Maybe I could make this person my source of supply or partner in a shared family. And the psychopath would look at you and say, this person is crying. This person is sad and I can have sex with him because now she, her defenses are down. I can have sex with him. So now the psychopath is goal oriented. But that would not be my answer, although it's perfectly accurate. All narcissists don't have called empathy, not the full-fledged emotional component. My answer would be different. And I've spent 30 years starting this topic and I myself am a narcissist, but usually I think a bit of an advantage, a bit of an edge. There are other self-aware narcissists online. I was the first in 1995. So now there's a new generation of self-aware narcissists online, but they don't have the academic background. They don't have the knowledge and the training. So they're missing that part. I think I'm the only one who is self-aware and also teaches psychology. Yeah, I also think the same. Maybe there's another person that I'm not aware of, someone else who is like that. And this gives me a bit of an advantage. So I would say that, and of course I've worked with well over 2,200 narcissists in the last 30 years. I have a huge database and so on. So I think what is common to all narcissists is the inability to perceive other people as external and separate. They don't have the conception of externality and separateness. And this is because narcissists are incapable of interacting with external objects. What they do, they convert everyone immediately. For a second, they convert into an internal object. And then they continue to interact with internal object. And why is that? Because narcissists were never allowed to separate and individuate from the mother. They have no experience of being separate from another human being. They've always been enmeshed, melded, merged, fused. It used to be called, we used to call this in clinical literature, the symbiotic phase, symbiosis. So the narcissist and the mother remain a unit to the day the narcissist dies. And because the narcissist has never had the experience of separating and becoming an individual, he cannot understand the separateness and individuality and externality of another person. And I think this is what is common. Because of that, the narcissist doesn't have empathy. Empathy is a secondary effect, not a cause. The cause is, if I cannot see you as external and separate to me, how can I ever empathize with you? Empathy is excluded. How can I understand your autonomy? You're an autonomous person and different. How can I accept that you have emotions and your own emotions? Your emotions are not my emotions. If you do have emotions, they're mine, because you are an internal object in my mind. Everything that's happening to you, your cognitions, your emotions, your wishes, your dreams, you find everything in their mind. I realize that you are an internal object inside my mind and there are other objects. I do realize that you are separate from other internal objects in my mind. So you are like a character in a video game. How can I empathize? Does anyone empathize with a character in a video game when they shoot them and kill them? No one does it. No one empathizes with it. Oh my God, the poor character. I just shot him. No one does it. Yeah, I understand that. Very interesting topic. Well, do you think there is a sort of political correctness against talking about narcissistic abuse? For example, the use of labels, putting at the same level what the abusive does and the victim does, etc. First of all, we should realize that narcissistic personality disorder is a diagnosis that is acceptable only in the United States and China. The rest of the world does not accept this diagnosis. The 11th edition of the ICD. The ICD is a book published by the World Health Organization. The ICD is International Classification of Disease. The 11th edition, published in 2022, doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder. It has a single personality disorder with various traits. So in this single personality disorder, there is a trait called dissociality and another trait, affectionism. And so you can describe a narcissist using the ICD, but you cannot call him a narcissist because there's no such thing in the ICD. Similarly, in other countries, there's no narcissistic personality disorder. Only the DSM in the United States and the CCMD, the third edition in China. That's it. So we need to understand it at first. The second thing is, if anything, I think narcissism is the only field where political correctness is suspended. For example, you cannot talk about autistic people the way you talk about narcissists. Narcissists are totally demonized, totally hated. Hate speech against narcissists is allowed. You try to talk about borderlines the way you talk about narcissists. And let's see what happens to you. Your account will be canceled. It's not allowed. Definitely you're not allowed to talk about autistic people the way you talk about narcissists. I made a video a few weeks ago. I just made a literature review. There are new studies that show that autistic people and people with ADHD, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder. I'm explaining what is ADHD for your viewers, not for you. I know that you know. Okay, sorry. Go on. So there are new studies that people in the autism spectrum disorder and ADHD are actually a bit narcissistic and a lot psychopathic. And that they take over victimhood movements. These are new studies, interesting, fascinating. And I made a literature review. I received warnings from YouTube. Warnings that I'm violating community guidelines. But online you have videos that say how to destroy the narcissist in seven steps. How to kill the narcissist. The narcissist is a demon and so on. And no problem whatsoever. You have thousands of such really. So I think narcissism is the only exception to political grace. Moreover, narcissism is weaponized. Political opponents accuse each other that they are narcissists. People go to prison and they are described as narcissists. Their narcissistic behavior led them to prison. So it's an all out campaign against narcissists. And now recently to the best of my knowledge, I've been the first to initiate this, but I may be wrong. But in my footsteps, let's say, many people are now saying that actually many victims, self-styled victims are essentially covert narcissists. Because in the last three years, four years, there have been studies in Israel, four studies in Israel. There have been two studies in British Columbia, in Canada, and other studies that have shown that victimhood is closely associated with dark, dark personalities, dark triad. So today we're beginning to think that many victims are actually essentially subclinical narcissists, subclinical psychopaths, manipulative, they use competitive victimhood and virtual signaling to manipulate, to become entitled, to gain new rights, to force others to behave in specific ways, and so on and so forth. Only now we're beginning to talk about this. And even now, if you do this, you get an avalanche of attacks that you are victim blaming and blame shifting. And I don't know what, even now it's forbidden. The only group of people that you're allowed to do anything you want to, including incite to murder, to kill them, is narcissists. Only, literally, you can find videos inciting to murder. Yeah, in Spanish as well, there are some videos like how to destroy a narcissist and things like that. How to take revenge on a narcissist. Yeah. This would never be allowed with any other mental illness. Imagine a video saying how to destroy the life of someone with bipolar disorder. Or how to take revenge on a depressive person. Imagine. Yeah. It's shocking. Yeah. Pretty shocking. Shocking. Yeah. Narcissists are ill people. It's a disease. It's a sick people. Sometimes when I think, at least in my case, when I use the term narcissists, it's not only narcissistic personality disorder, but narcissistic personality style is different. But I know what you mean perfectly. Yeah. I wanted to ask you that, by the way. What are the difference between a person who has MPG, narcissistic personality style, or they are simply a holds. What you call a hose or jerks are actually narcissistic style. The first to describe the distinction between the disorder and the style was a guy called sparing S P E R R Y. Later on, Theodore Millen, one of the fathers of the field. Theodore Millen adopted sparing classification and taxonomy and incorporated it in his masterpiece personality disorders in modern life. And today this is common to, to realize that narcissism is a spectrum. And we start with healthy narcissists. Everyone has healthy narcissism. It's the foundation of self esteem and self confidence and so on. Healthy narcissism starts in early childhood and stays with us for life. And then we gradually progress until we reach a zone called narcissistic style. These are people who are exploitative, lack empathy, but not fully. For example, they are very empathetic with family members or loved ones and so on so forth, but they are not empathetic with employees or so on. They are divided discriminating empathy. They are usually in your face. They're defined, they're arrogant, arrogant, but very few of them are grandiose. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion. Grandiosity is when you perceive reality wrongly. People with narcissistic style don't have this problem. They are simply arrogant, but they do perceive reality correctly. They are capable of teamwork, for example, when the narcissist is not. They are open to criticism and disagreement when the narcissist never is. They are not likely to externalize aggression where narcissists given specific situation can and does. Now people with narcissistic style, for example, are not prone to narcissistic injury and narcissistic modification. The real narcissist does, someone with NPD does, narcissistic injury is when your grandiose perception and self-image are challenged in a way that some damage has been done. So you need to repair it somehow. You can repair it by a display of narcissistic rage, thereby establishing control, asserting control over the environment, for example, by terrorizing. And another way to re-establish it is what I was the first to describe, self-supply. So you can supply yourself. You can somehow reconstruct your grandiosity by convincing yourself that they are wrong and you're right. They think you're not a genius, but you are a genius or whatever. And narcissistic modification is unique to people with NPD. It never happens in the style. It's when you are shamed or humiliated in public in front of meaningful peers or significant others. That happens only to the narcissist and it leads to a borderline like clinical personality organization. So what happens is the narcissist is mortified in public and then essentially becomes a borderline. He emotionally dysregulates, he develops suicidal ideation and so on and so forth. This never happens to someone with style. Someone with style is capable of intimacy, has identity, does have an identity. Whereas narcissists have problems in all these areas. So if I have to summarize the difference, someone with narcissistic personality disorder imports everything from the outside. Everything comes from the outside. The sense of self-worth, identity, self-esteem, everything comes from the outside. Everything is important. You could say that the narcissist outsources regulation so that other people regulate the narcissist. Someone with narcissistic personality disorder. Interpersonal functioning of the narcissist. There's no empathy and no intimacy. He's very impaled and the narcissist is antagonistic. He's grandiose and he's a compulsive attention seeker. None of this applies to someone with narcissistic style. Someone with narcissistic style regulates from the inside, not from the outside. He doesn't, for example, is not dependent on narcissistic supply, for example. He's not grandiose. He is capable of intimacy. He is capable of empathy. He does not seek attention compulsively all the way, enjoys it a lot. But he's not addicted to it. He's not a junkie of attention. Attention junkie. His identity and his self-direction are not dependent on other people. So it's really, these are two totally disparate, separate clinical entities or clinical phenomenon. NPD is not an exaggeration of the personality style. It's something completely different. And this is why it's very dangerous when online people go and say he's a narcissist. When actually this is someone with narcissistic, as you said, it's an A-hole. It's a junk. Yeah, an A-hole. Yeah. I see. Thank you for your answer. You know what? Upon reconsideration to make it simpler for your viewers, someone with narcissistic personality disorder doesn't have a self, doesn't have an ego. He is ironically selfless. There's no self there. The formation of the self was disrupted. The self was unable to constolate and integrate. So there's no core. There's an emptiness exactly like the borderline. And the second point, someone with narcissistic personality disorder has problems with attachment, attachment problems. And the narcissist is incapable of attachment because as a child, the narcissist was attached to a frustrating object to an abusive object. So he is afraid of attachment. He associates attachment with pain, with hurt, with rejection, with frustration. So he's afraid of attachment. The second problem where he cannot attach is that he cannot perceive other people as external. So what is there to attach to? So these are the two major differences. No self and no attachment. The personality style has a self and can attach. There's a major difference. Yeah, I see. I see. I see now. The next question is why when we talk about narcissism, we also have to talk about psychopathy. Because in many ways we have to get into that to explain both of the constructs, you know. Why when we have to talk about narcissism, we ended up talking about psychopathy as well. Psychopathy is more sexy. More sexy, yeah. Well, again, we have a huge confusion online. I have seen people with PhDs in psychology, but no expertise in narcissism. It's important to understand you can have a PhD in psychology and not be an expert on narcissism. Psychology is a huge field, a normal field. If you're an expert on IQ, on IQ, and you have a PhD, it doesn't mean you know anything about narcissism. But people don't realize it. They say, but she has a PhD in psychology. So I've seen these self-styled experts say that all psychopaths are narcissists. That is rank nonsense. A small minority of psychopaths also have narcissistic personality disorders. And this is known as comorbidity. However, narcissists and psychopaths share a few things in common. They have a few things in common. Number one, grandiosity. Grandiosity is one of the parameters that we use, one of the dimensions that we use to diagnose psychopathy. For example, in the PCLR test, Robert Hayes, PCLR, there's a grandiosity dimension. But grandiosity is not narcissism. It's not the same. Grandiosity is a trait or cognitive distortion that is common in narcissism, in psychopathy, but also in borderline. Also in bipolar disorder. Also in paranoid personality disorder. Sometimes in schizoid personality disorder is that psychopath and narcissists are both grandiose, doesn't make the psychopath a narcissist. The second thing that is common, that is shared, is antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior includes defiance, recklessness, consumatiousness, rejection of authority. And sometimes acting out, externalized aggression. This is the antisocial cluster. Now, it is true that psychopaths are always antisocial. And some narcissists are also antisocial. They are known as malignant narcissists. 3% of narcissists are also psychopathic. They are malignant narcissists. But the vast majority of narcissists are not antisocial. They are actually pro-social and even communal. Why? Because the narcissist depends on other people for narcissistic supply. If you're antisocial, you don't get supply. Rarely gets supply. You end up in prison, maybe, but you don't get supply. So the narcissist strategy requires collaboration with people, somehow, some form of collaboration. And we call it pro-social behavior. The psychopath, on the other hand, doesn't depend on other people for anything. He's a loner. He's a lone wolf. He doesn't need supply. He holds people in total contempt. He regards them as objects. He objectifies them. He ignores them if they are not useful. He steps on them and kills them if necessary to obtain a goal. He has no connection to people whatsoever. So he is never pro-social. He's always antisocial. Whereas the vast majority of narcissists are exactly the opposite. They work with other people in order to extract supply. Even if it's only one person, the narcissist's intimate partner in the shared fantasy, it still requires some kind of interaction and creates some kind of dependency. Psychopath doesn't have any of this. So people confuse psychopathic narcissists, which used to be known as malignant narcissists, with psychopaths, with narcissists. Yeah, I completely agree with that. Well, my next question was, what is a malignant narcissist? But I think you have already explained. A malignant narcissist is a narcissist who, in order to obtain narcissistic supply, uses psychopathic methods of action, modes of action. So he is psychopathic when he is looking for supply. So he would be, for example, consummations. He would reject authority. But he would reject authority in a very ostentatious manner. He would reject authority in public, like some kind of performance. It would be performative rejection because he needs an audience. He would want everyone to know that he's rejecting authority because he's brave and courageous and amazing and unique. So he would be defined. He would be reckless, risk taker, novelty seeker, thrill seeker. He would be sometimes, and he would be very often aggressive. He would externalize aggression. So outwardly, phenomenologically, the malignant narcissist appears to be a psychopath. But he's doing all this to obtain supply, which makes him a narcissist. Whereas the psychopath is using the same behaviors, the same behaviors, the same methods of operation to obtain sex or money or power or access or contacts or something. The narcissist wants only supply. He doesn't care about money or about power. If the narcissist cares about money, it's because money can obtain, can get him supply. If he's rich, beautiful girls will admire him. So the narcissist regards everything as a tool, a means to obtain supply. Even if the narcissist becomes a politician, it's not because he cares about power, but because power will get him attention. The psychopath will become a politician because he wants power. The narcissist will become a politician because he wants attention, which is going to get only his power. Yeah, it's totally different. Yeah. Understood, understood. I understand that point of view. Okay, my next question is, from your point of view, how is social media influencing the narcissism of young people and not only young people, but people in general? Do you think it fosters the grandiosity and some kind of racing up in that continuum of narcissism? First of all, I think that history shows that technology follows trends, rarely creates them and follows them. So narcissism has been rising before social media. And then social media came on the scene because it caters to narcissism. It provides narcissism with tools. So narcissists wanted social media because they needed social media to be better narcissists, more effective as a tool of self-efficacy. So social media is a late development. Narcissism has been rising at least since the 1980s, at least according to studies by Twenge and Campbell and others. It's a very late development. Social media came to full blossom in 2015. It's a very late phenomenon. That's point number one. Point number two, social media legitimizes narcissism, but I don't think creates narcissism, doesn't foster narcissism. It makes it more visible and it rewards narcissism. For example, the like on Facebook is a tool to reward narcissism. Social media encourages comparison and relative positioning. How am I doing relative to someone else? I got 200 likes, you got a thousand likes. So social media drives narcissistic behaviors, narcissistic self-evaluation. Social media escalates behaviors. It's the attention economy. It's based on attention. So in order to garner attention, in order to harvest attention, you need to escalate your behavior because you have many competitors all the time. And this leads to escalation on a mass basis. Everyone is escalating. Because if you don't escalate, you will never be noticed. So it does lead to escalating behaviors. I don't think social media has created a single new narcissists. That's not the way narcissism is formed. Narcissism has to do basically with trauma, not with conditioning. Social media is based on addiction and conditioning. But social media legitimized narcissism, made it an organizing principle of life, and gave goals to narcissistic goals to people who are not narcissists in principle. And rewarded narcissism, dopamine-wise, if you wish, rewarded narcissism on a very primordial level, on a brain level. So whoever is a narcissist has no reason to not be a narcissist. So it prevents proto-social behavior modification. And whoever is not a narcissist has reason to emulate and imitate narcissists because of the reward system. And everyone, narcissists and non-narcissists, have reason to escalate in order to obtain attention or to secure attention. These are the impacts of social media. Yeah, very well put, all together. It makes a lot of sense. Well, the next question is a bit, there's a huge debate here, but I would like to know your opinion. Can narcissists change? It depends how you define change, of course. If you're talking about behavior modification, yes. Several treatment modalities, such as, for example, schema therapy, transactional analysis, to some extent CBT. CBT is less effective. They can modify the narcissist's behavior. The narcissist can become following treatment. The narcissist can become less abrasive, less antisocial if he has been antisocial. More considerate of people because the narcissist is convinced in therapy that this is more efficacious, more efficient. If you're nice to people, they do your bidding. They're better sources of supply and so on. So, yes, you can modify the narcissist's behaviors. You need to repeat this time and again because the narcissist tends to forget and relapse. It's very similar to addiction. This is exactly what happens in addiction. When you're an alcoholic, you go to rehab and after rehab, you don't drink for a few months. But the relapse rate, the relapse rate in alcoholism is between 80% and 90% within one year. 80% to 90% of alcoholics who spend time in rehab start to drink again within one year. It's identical to narcissism because narcissism is addiction to narcissistic supply. It's an addiction. Narcissism is two things. There's one thing that narcissism is not and there are two things that narcissism is. Narcissism is not a personality disorder and it is a post-traumatic condition and it is an addiction. Now, this is the worst combination. Post-trauma and addiction when you put them together, this is almost untreatable, intractable, because the addiction solves many problems which are provoked by the trauma. And so substance abuse that is post-traumatic is literally impossible to treat. You can modify behaviors in the short range and you need to repeat the treatment time and again and again and again. And that is the maximum that you can obtain with narcissism. Nothing else is touchable at all by any modality that I'm aware of. Anyone who claims online that they have treated narcissists or healed narcissists or cured narcissists are criminal con artists. Period. And I don't care if they happen to be therapists with six PhDs. They are criminal charlatan con artists. End of story. Well, thanks for your answer. Very clear. Now, my next question is, do you think is there a relationship between narcissism and gender? Does sexism or matismo, as we say in Spanish, any influence on that? Until the 1980s, 75% of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder were men. Even in the text of the DSM3, Edition 3, and then the text revision and then Edition 4, you still find the language that 75% of men. There has been a lot of sexism in psychiatry and psychology well into, I would say, 2010. And consequently, for example, borderline personality disorder was utterly gender biased, utterly was diagnosed overwhelmingly among women. Same with histrionic personality disorder. When we know today for sure that all these disorders, narcissistic borderline histrionic are equally represented. Men and women are equally represented. 50-50. And we, the only exception perhaps is psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder was whether there is a preponderance over representation of men. And that is maybe because psychopathy is not a mental illness. But a social choice, the choice to reject the law or to reject society or to, it's a kind of lifestyle choice. I don't believe that psychopathy is a mental illness at all. I don't see any hint of mental illness there. There is a rejection of morality, of rules, of regulations, of specific lifestyles. Psychopaths are dangerous. Psychopaths cause huge damage to society. Psychopaths should end up, many of them should end up in prison. I agree with all these. But what does any of these have to do with mental illness? I have no idea. But where there's real mental illness, the other class to be personality disorders, men and women are equal. So yes, there has been sexism, but no longer, no longer. And in the text revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Man, Edition 5, published 2022, they corrected the language. And now it says 50-75%. It's still difficult for them. 50-75% are men and women. So they reduce a bit the percentage of men. They hinted that it's equal because now you have the opposite problem. If you say anything negative about women, you're a sexist and you are, you know, so to say that women are now equally, women are narcissists, equally. That is to be misogynist. You hate women. That's why you're saying this. It's a mind field. You can't say anything without someone getting insulted and offended. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I wanted to ask you before about political correctness. I know we are talking about mental illness, personality disorders, but in my opinion, there are also personality styles that can be very tricky and hard to, difficult to live with, a person with that. And in my opinion, there is a bit of, at least in Spanish, not in English, but political correctness about saying specific things. That's why I wanted to ask you that. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right outside the English speaking world. So for example, in Europe, therapist refuses to give you a diagnosis of borderline or narcissism. It's never done. Absolutely never done. Even in the United States, a growing number of therapies and so on would never give you a diagnosis. They would never tell you, you have borderline personality disorder. It's considered stigmatizing. And I see some justification because I think the DSM is counterfactual. It's not real. First of all, it's important to understand that the DSM and the CCMD, yes, these books were under the, written under the influence of the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies. They don't reflect, absolutely, this I can say with certainty, they don't reflect current clinical knowledge, period. A lot of it is wrong. Second thing, any practitioner would tell you that the same patients, one day is a narcissist. The next day is a borderline. The third day is a psychopath. The fourth day is a paranoid and the fifth day is a schizoid. Any practitioner, I don't know, any therapist would not say this. And this is coupled with mood disorders, one day depression and one day a lot and so on. So all these distinctions, what is known as differential diagnosis, this is counterfactual. That's not how human beings work. Human beings are not ponds, they are rivers. Human beings flow. The very concept of self, the very idea of personality. They are nonsense. There's no such thing. There are no such things. These are idealizations that help us to teach in university, but no one who works with people believes that people are fixed in stone, that someone has an immutable, unchangeable core that you can call a self. No one who has worked with people would agree with the concept of personality as a set of attributes and traits that define you throughout life, life span. No one would agree with this, who has had any contact with human beings rather than with books. And there is a gap. There is a big divide between academia and practitioners, people in the field. Academia has become fantasy space, perhaps because most academics are narcissists. It's a fantasy space. I don't know what they are talking about, which alien species, but they're not talking about homo sapiens. And then there are the practitioners. Practitioners, for example, could tell you that all narcissists are sometimes overt and grandiose and sometimes covert and vulnerable and fragile and shy. All practitioners would tell you this. It's not true that a narcissist is either grandiose or covert. There is no type constancy. Similarly, all narcissists are sometimes cerebral. They derive narcissistic supply with their intellect and sometimes somatic. They derive narcissistic supply through their sex, through the body. So there's no type constancy. And similarly, in borderline, there's no type constancy. So a borderline could be aggressive, acting out, crazy making, and then she would have a period where she would not be promiscuous and she would not be reckless and she would be shy and she would be avoidant and she would be schizoid. Everyone who has worked with borderline would tell you this. You know, a borderline can sleep with, if she's a woman, she can sleep with 20 guys in one year and then she can have five years without a single sex, without a single incidental sex. So it's nonsense. Yeah, we are flow. Sorry. Mm hmm. No, sorry. Sorry to interrupt you. We are flow. We are not static. Yes. Say, yeah. Okay. My last question is how usually do narcissistic people get older? What happens to narcissists when they get older? Sorry. What happens to narcissists when they get. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How they get older. Exactly what happens here, if the narcissist is antisocial, if it's a malignant narcissist, exactly like psychopaths and exactly like borderlines, it gets better. In borderline we have spontaneous remission. 81% of people with borderline personality disorder spontaneously lose the diagnosis after age 45, even without treatment. About half of people with psychopathic personality disorder, antisocial personalities, half of psychopaths, no longer engage in psychopathic behaviors, definitely not criminal behaviors after age 45. About half. If they have been treated, the number shoots up to 75%. By age 55, the vast majority of psychopaths are totally pro-social. The overwhelming vast majority. Same applies to psychopathic narcissists. They mellow, they ameliorate, they become more normal, so to speak. And by their 50s, when they're in their 50s and 60s, there's no proof. What I'm saying is speculation based on my experience. But I think most of them lose the diagnosis completely. They're no longer narcissists. They're much softer, much kinder, much more attuned to people, much more considerate. They're not a psychopathic, of course. They're still exploitative. They still live in fantasy. They're still aggressive, but it's much more standard, much more normative. In other words, they're not anomic, but they're normative. This is not the case with classic narcissists, both overt and covert. And again, every narcissist is overt and covert, different periods. Classic narcissists, let's call them classic. They used to be called phallic narcissists. Classic narcissists get worse with age. They get worse. But there is a conundrum here. There is a riddle, a puzzle, which we cannot resolve. Most classic narcissists lose their sources of supply as they grow older. Women, if they're men, women abandon their spouses and intimate partners abandon them. It's much more difficult for them to obtain supply because they're old. They have competition from younger narcissists. It's much more difficult to obtain supply. They're exposed. Many of their tricks and gimmicks and misbehavior and misconduct is exposed, revealed. So they are mortified. They are shamed and humiliated in public. And so do they become worse narcissists? Even more narcissistic because of these problems that they cannot obtain supply. So they are collapsed in a collapsed state or because they're mortified. In short, is the aggravation in narcissism in old age reactive, circumstantial, with a response to the changing environment? Or does it come from the inside? We don't know. There's no answer to this. But we do know that all these things are described are happening. The narcissist ends life, isolated, bitter, angry, delusional. It switches from fantasy to delusional disorder, paranoid, very paranoid. So he switches from hypervigilance to paranoid ideation, schizoid on a permanent basis, depressive, develops depressive illnesses and anxiety disorders. Really bad picture. Just look at me. I wouldn't say that. Okay. So, I was, I don't know how to say in English, but thanks for your time. Thank you for that name. It has been such an honor for me, really. And for my community, I think they will be really, really thankful for your time and your, your knowledge about this topic. Thank you for having me. Thank you for your courage and patience. Well, I was a bit nervous, I have to say, but it has been a wonderful interview. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. See you again in regards to all the Spanish speakers. Even the narcissist. Even the narcissist. Thank you. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye.