 Welcome back kiddos, and I'm calling you kiddos because I could be your great, great grandfather. Coming to think of it, maybe I actually am. Now people have been asking me, do I have a single shirt? Like in every video I'm wearing the same shirt, but of course I have a single shirt. I had to sell all my other shirts so that I can provide you with ad-free videos. As you can see, if you look closely, I also had to sell my shaver, and that's why I have bristles. The next thing, I'm going to sell my eyeglasses, and then you're going to get some really, really weird videos coming. So, having dispensed with this critical issue, which had been raised by many of you, like Freddy Krueger, or like a bitcoin, the man you all love to hate, me, is back, Osam bin Vaknim. Yesterday, Brookings Institute published an opinion poll. They asked 6,000 Americans whether they would wear masks, and a whopping 64% of their respondents said that they would not wear masks. And when they were asked why they would not wear masks, they answered because it's my right as an American to not wear a mask. And up until here, it's okay. It's debatable. You could argue with such people. But then, there was a twist. They asked people, if by wearing a mask, you would prevent someone's death. You wear a mask, someone gets his life back. You don't wear a mask, that guy or girl die. Someone's life is in your hands. Just by wearing a mask, you can save someone's life. Would you do that? And the same 64% said, no way. And then, when they were asked why, they said because masks are inconvenient. Can you do digest this? 64% of Americans in a relatively random sample, well, not exactly random, but not very far from random, 64% of Americans said that they're going to sacrifice someone's life. They don't care if someone dies as long as they feel convenient. The mask is inconvenient, so the hell with other people's lives. Now, forget for a minute the issue of whether masks are needed, not needed, good, bad, helpful, not that. That's not the issue at all. The question here is narcissism. Ego-centricity taken to absolute extremes bordering on psychopathy. If I know that by inconveniencing myself, I would save one person's life, of course I would inconvenience myself, but that's not the view of 64% of Americans. And so today we're going to discuss the pro-social communal narcissist. I described this narcissist the first time in the year 2000. I was the first to describe this narcissist for a very simple reason. I was the only one discussing narcissism 20 years ago. There was no one else. So I had to come up with this subtype as well. I noticed in my observations and correspondences and budding database of people diagnosed with NPD, I started to notice that some narcissists actually are charitable. They are givers. They are very helpful. They are very supportive. They affords a core. They are there for you. I said to myself, this doesn't sit well with narcissism. How can I reconcile the two? Narcissism is about not wearing a mask even if someone were to die because of your inconvenience or convenience. Yet there is a group of narcissists, not too many mind you, who would go to extremes to please and help other people. So I came up with the communal or pro-social narcissist, which is essentially an altruistic narcissist. Now these narcissists, they use many, but they use two prominent psychological mechanisms. One is known as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when you filter information in a way that upholds and supports and buttresses your prejudices, your biases, your deficits, your premonitions, your opinions and your judgments and your values. Anything that contradicts or confronts with these, you filter out, you ignore, you repress. That's confirmation bias. And the second is called motivated reasoning. It's when you have a motivation to do something and then you say to yourself, why am I motivated to do this? And then you invent a whole story, rationalize your motivation. You create, you intellectualize it. You create a narrative which explains why you are doing what you're doing. So before we go into the topic of altruism and narcissism, how can they fit together? I would like to quote Richard Dawkins in his famous book, The God Delusion. In The God Delusion Dawkins quotes Amos Zahavi. And he says, the Israeli zoologist Amos Zahavi suggested that altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance and superiority. Anthropologists know it as the potlatch effect. Only a genuinely superior individual can afford to advertise the fact by means of a costly gift. Through costly demonstrations of superiority, including ostentatious generosity and public spirited risk taking, this is how you establish your superiority. If Zahavi is right, says Dawkins, conspicuous generosity is a way of buying unfakably authentic self-advertising. Some narcissists are exactly this, ostentatiously, conspicuously, self-advertisingly generous and charitable. Look at me, look at me, look at me, look how good I am, look how loving I am, look how altruistic I am, look how kind and pleasing what sacrifices I'm making. They donate to charity, they lavish gifts on their closest, they abundantly provide for their nearest and dearest. And in general, these narcissists are open-handed, they are instinctively benevolent. One could even say compulsively benevolent. Indeed, there are three types, and we'll discuss all three in this video. The first one is the communal, pro-social, altruistic narcissists. The second one is a compulsive giver. The third one is a pathological charmer. And a subtype of the pathological charmer is the people-pleaser. All these are forms of virtue signalling. Virtue signalling is an act or a series of acts or a pattern of behaviour which signals to other people that you are virtuous. That you are benevolent, that you are benign, that you are helpful, that you are a saint in effect. And recent studies in Canada established a very strong link between virtue signalling and, hold your breath, psychopathy. Psychopaths and narcissists engage in ostentatious virtue signalling. Many political activists, shall I whisper, Black Lives Matter, many political activists, many politicians, many public intellectuals, many coaches, many humanity-loving experts or self-styled experts, they are constantly virtue signalling. Look how much I love people, look how much I'm empathic, look how much I'm helping everyone. This is virtue signalling. It's a strong indicator of actually underlying narcissistic psychopathy. How can this be reconciled with a pronounced lack of empathy and the pernicious self-occupation that is so typical of narcissists? I mean, ostensibly, if you are self preoccupied, if you are egocentric, you can't be altruistic. These are mutually exclusive, no? No. The act of giving enhances the narcissist's sense of omnipotence. If I give means I'm superior to you, I have something you don't have. I have something you want. So I'm more powerful than you. I'm above you. And if I have a lot, I'm omnipotent. It enhances, giving enhances the narcissist's fantastic grandiosity and the contempt that he holds for others. The narcissist's giving is contemptuous giving. He disdains you as he helps you. His help comes with strings attached and these are the strings of derision, of mockery, of humiliation. It is easy to feel superior to the supplicating recipients of one's largest. Now, narcissistic culturalism is about exerting control. It's about maintaining control by fostering dependence in the beneficiaries. We all know the mothers and fathers who make sure that their offspring are around them. Should I whisper again, Donald Trump? And these offspring remain around them because of the giving. These parents give. And if you dare to confront them or to disagree with them or to go against the grain or against their values or beliefs or to challenge them or to criticize them or disagree with these kind of parents, they disinherit you. They dump you. They discard you like you had never existed. Their giving is conditional as is their love. They give you in order to enslave you. But narcissists give for other reasons as well. The narcissist flaunts his charitable nature as a bait. He impresses others with his selflessness and kindness. He lures people into his lair. You know, it's an integral part of grooming. It's an integral part of love-bombing. What is love-bombing? It's not giving emotions. He entraps people, the narcissists. He manipulates. He brainwashes them into subservient compliance and obsequious collaboration. People are attracted to the narcissist's larger-than-life posture. And then, when they get close to him, they discover his true colors, his personality traits. But that's usually far too late. The narcissist's motto is, give a little to take a lot and give a lot to take everything. That's his creed. He gives in order to take and he gives only when he can take. He never gives unconditionally. He never sends his bread over the water. He has no horizon. He cannot delay gratification. He doesn't predict or countenance the consequences of his actions. He's impulsive. He's defiant. He's totally reckless and callous and ruthless and relentless. And so, if he gives you, he wants something. If he's giving, if you're the recipient, if you receive anything from the narcissist, be on your toes. Be aware. Caviar tempto. This does not prevent the narcissist from assuming the role of the exploited victim. Or the sacrificial lamb. You know, the famous mother type who keeps telling her son, look how much I've sacrificed for you. I sacrificed my life for you. You owe me. I mean, she doesn't say you owe me, but it's the unsaid part of the sentence, the implicit part of the sentence. I've sacrificed so much for you. Now it's your turn to sacrifice so much for me. It's a transaction. It's transactional love. Narcissists always complain that life and people are unfair to them, that they had invested much far more than their share of the profit. And in this sense, there is very close affinity between narcissism and passive aggressiveness or negativistic personality disorder. The narcissist feels that he is the scapegoat, that his relationships are asymmetric and imbalanced. Narcissists always feels, I explained it in a previous video, that the narcissist has a problem of waiting. He gives wrong waits to things. If he has bad memories, they outweigh good memories. If he has bad intimations or bad emotions, they outweigh good emotions to the extent that good emotions become inaccessible, totally repressed. And similarly, if he gives, he weighs what he gives, weighs much more than what he receives, always. So the narcissist's husband is likely to say, she's getting or she got out of our marriage far more than I did. Or I invested in my marriage much more or in their relationship. It's a common refrain. Or I do all the work around here and they get all the credit and the perks and the benefits faced with such misperceived injustice. And once the relationship is clinched and the victim is hooked, the narcissist tries to minimize his contributions because he had contributed until now, no, now he deserves just to take. So his investment is minimal, it's goal oriented and it ceases abruptly when he had secured his prey or his victim. The narcissist regards his input as a contractual maintenance chore and the unpleasant and inevitable price that he has to pay for his narcissistic supply. He resents the fact that he has to pay this price. After many years of feeling deprived, feeling wrong, discriminated against, feeling at the receiving end of injustice, some narcissists lapse into sadistic generosity or what I call sadistic altruism. They use their giving, they use their charity as a weapon to taunt and torment the needy, to humiliate them, to chastise them, to demean and debase them. This is very common in religious settings where you have a sadistic clergyman or a sadistic preacher or priest or whatever and they use the bully pulpit to kind of torment and torture their community or specific members of the community. In the distorted thinking of the narcissist, donating money gives him the right, gives him the license to hurt people, to criticise them, to berate the recipients. The narcissist feels that his generosity, his charity elevate him to a higher moral ground and give him the right to preach and to hector and to dictate and to set rules. Most narcissists, and by the way, this is also true if the giving is not directed. A narcissist can say for example, all my life I have been sacrificing, now you owe me, or all my life I have been giving to others, now you owe me. It's like there is this universal global lifelong ledger and the narcissist expects you to pay the price for every good deed that he had done and whose beneficiary is where other people. So be very, very wary, very cautious and very afraid of people who tell you how to live, people who create a system of rules or a system of dictates or guidelines on what's the proper way to live. Because these people are usually, they usually have a victim mentality, a victim stance. They feel that life owes them and now they are going to extract from life and extricate from life and milk life and squeeze life until life gives them back what life owes them. They've gone through a lot, they've suffered a lot, they've sacrificed immeasurably and now they are entitled, they deserve and they're going to be aggressive about it. Most narcissists confine their giving to money, their material goods. Their munificence is an abusive defense mechanism intended to avoid real intimacy. So you would have the spouse who gives his wife or his husband, never mind, money and that's it. Like I've given you money, what else do you want? What? I gave you money, you also want intimacy? You're glutton. You know? It's like I'm buying your absence with my money. Go take the money, go shop, go do whatever you want. Keep me alone. Their big hearted charity renders all their relationships, even with their spouses, even with their children. Business-like, structured, limited, minimal, accounting-type, non-emotional, unambiguous and non-ambivalent. A relationship with a narcissist is always called, always calculated, always schematic and always by a ledger. I did this for you yesterday, now you owe me. I did this for you two years ago, now you owe me. I've invested in you ten years, now you owe me. I allowed you to become a medical doctor, now you owe me. By doling out bountiously, the narcissist knows where he stands. His giving is an entry in the ledger and his accounting, double-entry mind always calculates, always calculates. So giving allows him to position himself in the ledger. He sees the discrepancies, he can calculate them. He knows what he is owed, he knows where he stands. He doesn't feel threatened by demands of commitment, emotional investment, empathy, intimacy. In the narcissist's wasteland of a life, even his benevolence is spiteful, sadistic, punitive and distancing. There's a proverb of the Inuit in Greenland, by gifts one makes slaves, by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs, wonderful thing. And there is a book titled Debt, the first 5000 years. It was written by the late David Greber, it was published in 2011. And there's an interview there with an Inuit hunter. And the Inuit hunter says, up in our country, we are human. And since we are human, we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say, thank you for that. What I get today, you may get tomorrow. There are two types of narcissists, stingy in men or compulsive givers. Most narcissists feel abused and exploited when they have to pay money in order to satisfy the needs and wishes of their nearest and dearest. The vast majority of narcissists are actually stingy. Even when they spend money, they spend it their way on their priorities, on their preferences and wishes. And according to their view of the future, their narrative, their construct, they're going to lavish money on you, but the wrong kind of money. And they're going to buy you things you don't want and send you to places you don't wish to be in and so on, or force you to study when you don't want to study and so on. But it's always their way. You may be the recipient of a lot of money and a lot of largesse, but it's going to be their way. Compulsive givers. To all appearances, the compulsive giver is an altruistic, empathic and caring person. People look from the outside and say, wow, he gives her so much. Actually, he or she, the narcissist, is a people-pleaser and a codependent. A compulsive giver is trapped in a narrative of his own confabulation, how his nearest and dearest need him. They need him because they're poor, or they're young, or they're inexperienced, or they're lacking intelligence, or they're ugly, or they're otherwise inferior to him, inferior. That's the key. He wants to feel superior by giving. Compulsive giving, therefore, involves pathological narcissism because it involves the reassertion or assertion of superiority. It buttresses. It underlies grandiosity. The ostentatious munificence, magnificence and largesse of codependent compulsive givers is intended to secure the presence and attachment of their loved ones. They bribe people. They pay people to be next to them, to be near them, to be with them. They don't believe they have such low self-esteem and such a labile sense of self-worth. They can't believe that people would want to be with them except if they pay them, except if they endow them with something, with money. This is their way of fending off looming and, in their mind, inevitable abandonment. By giving inexorably, these people aim to foster in the recipient a kind of addictive habit and to prevent the recipients from leaving them. In reality, it is a compulsive giver who is actually aggressive. He coerces, he cajoles, he tempts people, he seduces people around him to avail themselves of his services or money. He forces himself on the recipients of his ostentatious giving. Many of the beneficiaries of his generosity or magnanimity don't want it, but he kind of coerces them. He insists, he's persistent. He makes a nuisance of himself. He's unable to deny anyone their wishes or requests, but sometimes he dictates to them that they should have wishes and requests, even when these are not explicit or expressed. Even when these wishes and requests are figments of his own imagination, his own neediness and grandiosity. Inevitably, this kind of person, this narcissistic compulsive giver, he develops unrealistic expectations. He feels that people should be immensely grateful to him and that their gratitude should translate into a kind of obsequiousness, obeisance, that they should be subservient and subjugated to him because he's giving. You know, you won't come across such people, the boss, the giving boss, the giving mother, the giving father. The only condition is that you behave with humility, that you subjugate yourself, that you prostrate yourself, that you kowtow, that you kneel in front of them, that you genoflect. Internally, the compulsive giver sithes and rages against the lack of reciprocity that he perceives in his relationships with family, with friends, with colleagues. He says, I'm giving so much, I'm receiving nothing. They are so ungrateful. He mutely castigates everyone around him for being so ungenerous. To the compulsive giver, giving is perceived as sacrifice, taking is exploitation. When they take from him, they're exploiting him. And so he gives without grace, always with visible strings attached, always with the sour face, always grimacing. No wonder the compulsive giver is always frustrated and often aggressive and given a white birth. In psychological jargon we would say that the compulsive giver has alloplastic defenses with an external locus of control. This simply means that the compulsive giver relies on input from people around him to regulate his fluctuating sense of self-worth, his precarious self-esteem, his ever-shifting moods. It also means that he blames the world for his failures. He feels imprisoned in a hostile and mystified universe entirely unable to influence events, circumstances and outcomes. It's the plating of people and occurrences. And so the compulsive giver avoids assuming responsibility for the consequences of his actions. And yet it is important to realize that the compulsive giver cherishes, relishes his self-conferred victimhood. He nurtures his grudges by maintaining a meticulous accounting of everything he had given and had received. Empath, should I whisper, empaths? This mental operation of masochistic bookkeeping is the background process of which a compulsive giver is sometimes unaware. But he is likely to vehemently deny such meanness and narrow-mindedness. I, no way. I am big-hearted, I'm golden-hearted. I never keep accounts. A compulsive giver is an artist of projective identification. He manipulates people around him into behaving exactly the way he expects them and wants them to. He keeps lying to people. He keeps telling them the act of giving is the only reward that he seeks. Giving is its own reward, such people say. I don't want anything more than that. I don't even want your gratitude. Giving to you is my satisfaction, my gratification. And all the while, that's a lie, of course. All the while, the compulsive giver secretly yearns for gratitude and reciprocity. He rejects any attempt to rob him of his sacrificial victim status. He will not accept gifts, or money, or help, or advice, or tips, or sakhore. And he avoids being the recipient of beneficiary of compliments or anything positive. And this false asceticism, withholding, fake modesty, pseudo-humility, their bates, don't fall for them. It's a show. It's not real. He uses these things to prove to himself that his nearest and dearest are nasty ingrates. There, it's his way of setting you up for failure. It's his way of testing you and making sure that you fail the test. Had they wanted to give me a present, had they wanted to help me, they would have insisted. The compulsive giver bellows triumphantly. His worst fears and suspicions yet again confirmed. He's happy. He's happy because he casts you in the role of rogues, of takers, of exploiters, of nasty mean characters. And by comparison, in contrast, makes him look good. And gradually, if people fall into line, they begin to feel that they are the ones, they are the ones who are doing the compulsive giver a favor by succumbing to his endless and overwhelming charity. When you ask the recipients of the compulsive giver, the son with his father, the daughter with her mother, the employee with his boss, all of them compulsive givers, they will tell you what can we do? They would sigh. It means so much to him. It means so much to her. And she or he has put so much effort into it. I just couldn't say no. The roles are reversed and then everyone is happy. The beneficiary is benefit and the compulsive giver goes on feeling that the world is unjust and that people are self-centered exploiters. As he has always suspected, everyone falls into place. It's a classic, classic projective identification scenario. And the narcissist has a very peculiar relationship with money. When the narcissist has money, he can exercise his sadistic urges freely and with little fear of repercussions. Money shields the narcissist from life itself, from the outcomes and consequences of misconduct, misdeeds and misbehavior. It insulates him. It's a warm and safe room or cocoon, like a benevolent blanket, like a mother's good night kiss. Money is love substitute. We know it in psychology. Money is undoubtedly a love substitute. And it allows the narcissist to be his ugly, corrupt and dilapidated self with impunity. Money bites the narcissist's absolution. You know, in the Middle Ages, there was something called indulgences. You paid money to the Catholic Church and they gave you a piece of paper saying, all your sins are forgotten when you go to heaven. That's money for the narcissist. It buys him absolution. And he's an egustintonic Frenchie for forgiveness and acceptance. With money in the bank, the narcissist feels at ease with himself, free, arrogantly soaring supreme about the contemptible unwashed masses, with money lining his pockets. The narcissist can always find people poorer than him. A cause for great elation coupled with ostentatious disdain and bump justness on his part. The narcissist hates weak people. They detest the poor. They want to trample on them and crush them and see them dead. Money gives them this power. The narcissist rarely uses money to buy, corrupt and intimidate outright. He's more subtle than that. But he uses money to humiliate, to put people in the right place, to take them down a peg or a notch. Contrary to common stereotype, the narcissist's avarice, his greediness seldom devolves into conspicuous consumption. Actually, in my survey of narcissists, there's close to 1,900 people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in a database that I had constructed over 25 years. And I found that many narcissists, they wear 15-year-old tattered clothing. They have no car, no house, no property. And it's so even when the narcissist can afford better, when he has money. Money has little to do with the narcissist's actual physical needs or even with his social interactions. It's true that the narcissist leverages looker, leverages money to acquire status or to impress others. But most narcissists conceal the true extent of their wealth. They hoard the money, they accumulate it. And like the misers that they are at heart, like the stingy characters they are, they count the money daily and in the dark. Money is the narcissist's implicit license, background noise, background enabler. So it's a license to sin, a license to abuse. It's his permit, it's his promise, it's his fulfillment, all at once. Money unleashes the beast in the narcissist and with abandon encourages him, seduces him to be himself. These obnoxious, mean, nasty, vulgar, very often aggressive and violent person. Narcissists are not necessarily tight-fisted though. Many narcissists spend money on restaurants and trips abroad and books and health programs. Some narcissists buy gifts, though reluctantly, and as a maintenance chore. Narcissists addictively gamble, they speculate in the stock exchange, let's say, the loose fortunes. Narcissist is insatiable, always wants more, always loses the little that he has. But he does all this not for the love of money, for he does not use money to gratify himself or to cater to his own needs. No, he does all this, he doesn't crave money, he doesn't care for money. He wants power, money gives him power, bestows power on him that matters. The legitimacy to dare, to flair, to conquer, to oppose, to resist, to taunt, to defy, to torment. This is what money gives him. So Narcissist is stingy with others. Maybe sometimes he is not stingy with himself. Maybe sometimes he is not tight-handed or tight-fisted with other people. But all this money he spends on himself, money he spends on others. All this is within a narrative of empowerment, a storyline of superiority, a script of dominance, suppression, content, humiliation, subjugation. Money equals sadism. In all these relationships, the Narcissist is either the vanquished or the vanquisher, either the haughty master or an abject slave, either the dominant or the recessive. The Narcissist interacts along an up-down axis rather than along left-right axis. His world is not lateral, not horizontal, it's vertical. His world is rigidly hierarchical and abusively stratified. And that's why Narcissists find it very difficult to network. And when they do network, it's with a power asymmetry. When the Narcissist is submissive, he is contemptibly submissive. He is a dormant. And these are the covert Narcissists. When he is domineering, he is disdainfully domineering. His life is a dedication, a symphony of sadistically taunting, tantalizing, humiliating and frustrating other people. And he pendulates, he swings between oppressor and oppressed. I discuss this in other videos when I explain the transitions from overt to covert and so on. To subjugate another person, one must be capricious, unscrupulous, ruthless, obsessive, hateful, vindictive and penetrating. One must spot the cracks of vulnerability, the chinks in the armor, the crumbling foundations of susceptibility, the pains, the trigger points and mechanisms, the Pavlovian reactions of hate and fear and hope and anger. Cold empathy is this. It's this scanning device, a radar, a vulnerability radar, as John Lachkar called it, the visport. And money liberates the Narcissist's mind and unleashes this cold empathy. It endows him with a troquility, detachment and incisiveness of a natural scientist. He observes the insects that are other people. With his mind free of the quotidian, of the pedestrian, of the daily, of the mundane, the Narcissist can concentrate on attaining the desired position, to be on top, to be dreaded, filled, shunned, admired, adulated, whatever. He wants to be obeyed, he wants to be deferred to. And he then proceeds with cool disinterest to unscrumble the human jigsaw puzzle, to manipulate the parts, to enjoy anguish, their anguish, as he exposes other people's petty misconduct, as he harps on their insecurities and failures, as he compares other people to their betters, as he mocks their incompetence, their hypocrisy, their stupidity. Narcissist cloaks his misdeeds in socially acceptable garb. That's why I called it the pro-social Narcissist, or the communal Narcissist. But then, when you think that he had changed, that he had improved, that he had become, you know, more human, he draws the dagger. He just wants you to get close enough to him, to stab you. He casts himself in the role of a brave, incorruptible iconoclast, a rebel, a fighter for social justice, an activist for a better future, for more efficiency, for good causes, an altruist, an empathic and selfless benefactor, a public intellectual who loves humanity, a coach who will tell you how to make it until you fake it. And the other way. But it is all, trust me, all about his sadistic urges, really, about his need to fill Top Dog. It's all about death. It's all thematic. It's not about life. There's no Libido or Eros there. It's all inanimate. And still, antagonizing and alienating potential benefactors is a pleasure that the Narcissist cannot afford on an empty purse. When he's impoverished, he is altruism embodied. The best of friends. When he is poor, he's the best of friends. He's the most caring of tutors. A benevolent mentor and guide, a lover of humanity. An empathic fierce fighter against narcissism, sadism, racism and abuse in other forms. The Narcissist adheres. He obeys, he succumbs, he smiles. He hugs and embraces you. He agrees all heartedly. He gives you a warm fuzzy feeling. He praises, he condones, he idolizes, he applause. He's perfection. He's perfection. He's too good to be true because it's not true. He's the perfect audience, a mirror, a whole of mirrors. There's nobody there. You see yourself. He is a black screen and you project yourself on that screen and fall in love with yourself. He admires you. He adulates you. He's a worm. He warms his way in. He's an amoeba. Spilling, spineless, chameleon, adaptable in form, slithery, flexibility, reified. To behave this way for long is unbearable. Hence the Narcissist addiction to money. Money is the freedom from the need to act. Freedom from the need to not be yourself. All forms of power and money liberate. It is his evolutionary ladder from slime to sublime and henceforth to mastery. From zero to hero takes a lot of investment and money. And the Narcissist puppets are on the receiving end. The recipients of the Narcissist tainted in conditional largesse similarly equate money with love. Craving love, they settle for money. With so many strings attached to the Narcissist's so-called gifts the people around him end up entangled, dangling like dysfunctional marionettes, like puppets in the Narcissist's theater of the observed. Psychodynamic dimensions of money, end of giving, a myriad as a whole literature. And they're crucial to maintaining the victim's precarious inner balance. People embark on great feats of self-deception and cognitive dissonance in order to justify the sacrifices that they make in their self-dignity, self-respect, and perception of reality. They have to make these sacrifices in order to remain on the Narcissist's good books. It's a sorry state to be in need of the Narcissist's charity. Self-awareness is never far under the surface. The victim struggles in a state of constant dissonance. Gradually the human props in the Narcissist's stage plays, they rebel outwardly or inwardly. They become passive-aggressive, bitter, depressed, and paranoid. People around the Narcissist never mind how much he had given them, how much he had helped them, how much money he lavished upon them. They feel alienated, humanized, objectified, misunderstood. They seek to free themselves by becoming conchumacious, unruly, counter-dependence, like clinging to the Narcissist and emotionally extorting all they can. In other words, the Narcissist fosters co-dependence in his circle. And these reactive behaviour patterns are ingrained and they're very hard to break. Gradually, over time, they ossify into the moles in which the Narcissist victims fester and putrify, writhing in agony and crumbling whenever the Narcissist inflicts on them abuse in its many forms. The victims become brittle, fragile. If they do not extricate themselves in time, these victims, I mean, you can be a survivor or a victim, these people become victims and they gradually acquire many of the traits and behaviour patterns of their own Narcissistic abusers and tormentors. They form with the Narcissist a shared psychosis. I call it a shared fantasy. A mini-cult of domination and subjugation that is mediated via the ubiquitous dollar sign. It's dangerous to stick around. That's why in 1995 I insisted on the no-contact principle, strategy, with all its 100 rules. No-contact strategy is 100 rules for inflammation. So I insisted on this because even one day with the Narcissist is not safe. The Narcissist can reach inside your mind and tear you apart if he knows what he's doing in less than an hour. The Narcissist is confident that people find him irresistible. His unfailing charm is part of his self-imputed omnipotence. Some Narcissists are charming for a certain period of time. But for the Narcissist to believe that he is charming all the time is an inane conviction. Counterfactual is not true. But the Narcissist behaves as if it were true. Narcissist behaves as if he were charming all the time. And this is called pathological charming. And this type of Narcissist is the pathological charmer. The somatic Narcissist and the histrionic flaunt the sex appeal, the virility of femininity, sexual prowess, musculature, physique training, good looks, or athletic achievements. This rebel Narcissist seeks to enchant and entrance his audience with intellectual power techniques. Many Narcissists brag about their wealth, their health, their possessions, collections, spouses, children, personal history, accomplishments, family tree, you name it, in short anything that garners them attention and renders them alluring. Other Narcissists broadcast the message and actually one of you, just like you, struggling and failing sometimes are accomplishing things so untrustworthy, unlikable. Bill Clinton, anyone? Both types of Narcissists firmly believe that being unique, because they are unique, they are entitled to special treatment by other people. They deploy their charm offensives to manipulate their nearest and dearest, or even complete strangers. They use these people around them as instruments of gratification. They charm them into collaboration and cooperation. They charm them into providing supply. This process is called co-optation. Exerting personal magnetism and charisma become ways of asserting control and obviating other people's personal boundaries and wariness. The pathological charmer feels superior to the person that he captivates and fascinates. As far as the pathological charmer is concerned, charming someone means having power over, controlling her, subjugating her, rendering her submissive. It's all a mind game intertwined with a power play. The person to be enthralled is an object, a prop, a mere prop, and of dehumanized utility. In some cases, pathological charm involves more than a grain of sadism. It provokes in the Narcissists sexual arousal by inflicting the pain of subjugation of the beguiled, and the beguiled cannot help but be enchanted. It's like in the fairy tales, childhood fairy tales. I again implore you to read the wonderful book by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim is an amazing story, by the way. He claimed at the time to have been a child psychologist, and today we know that he was lying. But he still wrote a wonderful book analyzing fairy tales. The pathological charmer engages in infantile, magical thinking. He uses charm to help maintain object consistency and to fend off abandonment. In other words, to ensure that the person that he had bewitched won't disappear on him. It's like he bewitches the person, he enchants the person, and that person freezes. It's a sub-variant, sub-type of what I call snapshotting. Some Narcissists like to surprise people. They drop in unannounced, they organize events or parties, unbidden. They make decisions on behalf of unsuspecting parties. And this variety of pathological charmers believe that their mere presence guarantees the gratitude and delight of the intended targets of their generous and spontaneous campaigns. Pathological charmers react with rage and aggression when their intended targets prove to be impervious and resistant to their lure and charm. It's a narcissistic injury, being spurred, being rebuffed. When someone sees through the narcissist, when the narcissist's motivation is transparent, makes them feel threatened, rejected, denuded. Being ignored amounts to a challenge to their uniqueness, entitlement, control and superiority. Narcissists wither without constant narcissistic supply. When their charm fails to elicit supply, they feel an old, non-existent, dead. Expectedly, pathological charmers go to great lengths to secure the aforementioned supply. It is only when their efforts are frustrated that the mask of civility, congeniality, charm, the mask drops and reveals the true face of the narcissist, a predator on the prowl, unshaven and with a single shirt. Hint, hint. There's a subtype of pathological charmer, they are known as people-pleasers. Briefly, people-pleasers dread conflicts. They wish to avoid conflict. They are conflict-averse. And so they have a need to believe that they are universally liked. They are always pleasant, always well-mannered, always civil. The conflict-averse people-pleaser, at the same time, is also always evasive, always vague, hard to pin down. Sometimes obsequious and obeying and submissive, but generally a spineless non-entity. These qualities are self-defeating, of course. They tend to antagonize people rather than please them. Uriah Heap in David Copperfield is a people-pleaser at the beginning. He's a covert narcissist until the mask falls and you see the covert narcissist. Conflict-aversion is only one of several psychodynamic backgrounds for the behavior known as people-pleasing. Some people-pleasers cater to the needs and demands of others as a form of penance, a form of self-sacrifice. They are masochistic people-pleasers. Many people-pleasers are co-dependent and they strive to gratify their nearest and nearest in order to allay their own abandonment anxiety and the ensuing, intense and at times life-threatening dysphoria. They say to themselves, if I'm nice to him, if I please him, if I cater to his needs unthinkingly, unstinkingly, all the time, he won't leave me, he won't break up with me. She won't leave me. So, pleasing is a form of insurance policy, a guarantee. And a few people-pleasers are narcissistic. Pleasing people enhances their sense of omnipotence, grandiosity, as I mentioned before. They seek to control and disempower their charges. They say, she so depends on me, she so looks up to me, you know. Even their pity is a form of self-aggrandizement. Only I can make her life so much better. She needs me. Without me, her life would be hell. They are misanthropic altruists. They are compulsive givers. All people-pleasers use these common coping strategies. One, dishonesty in order to avoid conflicts and unpleasant situations. They prevaricate, they confabulate, or outright lie. Number two, manipulation to ensure desired outcomes, such as an intimate partner's continued presence. Number three, foster independence. Codependent people-pleasers leverage their ostentatious helplessness. And they manifest weaknesses in order to elicit the kind of behaviors and solicit the benefits that they handle for. While narcissistic people-pleasers aim to habituate their targets by bribing them with gifts, monopolizing their time, or isolating them socially. Number four, strategy. Infantilization. Displaying childish behaviors in order to gratify the emotional needs of overprotective, possessive, paranoid, narcissistic, and codependent individuals in the people-pleasers milieu. And number five, self-punishment, self-defeat, self-sacrifice. To signal self-annulment, prostration, submissiveness in the pursuit of people-pleasing. My next video will deal with all this in sex. Sex within committed, romantic, intimate relationships. How all these features feature in these kind of relationships with a narcissist. Okay kiddos, I hope you had fun. And this is me bidding you farewell. You pleased me a lot and you allowed me to compulsively give to you. And that makes me one very happy and superior narcissist.