 Okay, another creative glorious weekend with the inevitable blue professor Sam Vaknin. And today we are going to construct together a dictionary, narcissism to English dictionary. Now if you go online, you can find a bazillion videos telling you what the narcissist means when they say one thing and what they don't mean when they say another thing. This is not this kind of video. Today what I'm going to do, I'm going to connect some of the most common phrases, stock phrases of the narcissist with the dynamics of the relationship. So I'm going to map the narcissist's utterances, the narcissist's speech acts, the narcissist's words and phrases with what's happening in the relationship with you. Now this is a compilation, there are four parts. The first part is what I've just described. The second part has to do with victims. It is the outcome of monitoring forums and support groups of victims of narcissistic abuse all over the internet for several years. These are just my impressions, they are anecdotal. And the third part is a video about the speech of the narcissist, the hidden structures, the coded messages in the narcissist's speech. The fourth part is a general introduction to how the narcissist uses language in order to abuse and to accomplish other aims. So a very rich, smogged board, a buffet of narcissism, language and speech. And who the hell am I? My name is Sam Baknien and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited. The first book ever about narcissistic abuse. I am also a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies. Got it kiddos and kidettes, let us delve right in. First of all, before we start, why is it that you find it so difficult to decipher what the narcissist really means? Why is it that you have no problem with other people? They say things and sometimes you see behind the facade or the cascade of words. Very often you decode other people's states of mind. You understand their hidden motivations, their agendas. You manage yourself well in a variety of environments and settings and circumstances. You don't have any problem reading between the lines. Why do you keep failing with the narcissist? Because of the love bombing phase. In the love bombing phase of the shared fantasy, the narcissist introduces you to his dead inner child, the true self. It's the body of a child, it's the corpse of a child. And this child is tearful, cowering in the corner, shielding his eyes with his palms, quavering and shaking, even though technically or clinically already dead. And this is heartbreaking. This is heart-rending, especially for women. And the second thing the narcissist does, it puts you in touch with his bad objects. Bad objects, I'm sorry, the introjects in his mind, the voices in his mind that hate him, deprecate him, attack him, put him down, humiliate him, shame him. This assemblage of voices that want him gone, they want to take him down, want him dead. These are enemies, internal enemies. So when he introduces you simultaneously to the dead inner child, the true self, and the bad objects, the voices that conspire against him, it induces in you a maternal reflexive bonding. You bond with the narcissist as a mother, and this is not something you can control. You can't help with it. This is a reflex. It's instinctual, it's animalistic, it's primordial, it's atavistic, it's beyond, way beyond the veneer, the thin veneer of civilization and impulse control and ego and superego forget all this. This comes from the stem brain, and so when the narcissist introduces you to his dead inner child, you become a mother instantaneously, and you pity the narcissist. You pity him for his crucible, for the predicament of having to endure the bad object inside himself. And so this is a trap. This is a trap, and it blinds you. It blinds you to the narcissist's real state of mind. It blinds you to the narcissist's strategies to the shared fantasy. It blinds you to the narcissist's egregious misconduct and abusive behavior. It blinds you, like a mother. You idealize the narcissist. The way a mother idealizes her newborn, you want the narcissist to be happy. You love the narcissist, you care for the narcissist. You want to corset him, you want to cocoon him, you want to prevent him from enduring further pain and hurt, and this is what a mother does. And so you're not at liberty nor are you capable anymore. You're incapacitated. You're unable to truly listen to what the narcissist is saying. Not the words, the context, not the context, the meta text, the subtext, the hidden text as opposed to the overt text. Now in this channel, there's a video about overt text versus hidden text, and I recommend that you watch it, but the narcissist disables your ability to discern the former and exposes you only to the latter. You develop what is called concrete thinking. It's a form of autistic, it's a form of autistic defense. You pay attention to what the narcissist is saying, not to why is he saying it. You ignore the motivations and attitudes and goals of the narcissist, and instead you take him at his word, and this is known as the base rate fallacy, a variant of the base rate fallacy. Okay, enough with the with the background. What does a narcissist mean when he says the following seven sentences? Number one, I love you. I love you as a very common sentence actually. The narcissist keeps replaying this sentence and repeating it from day one, from date one, from meeting number one. Remember that the narcissist is incapable of positive emotions. He has no access to his own positive emotions because they carry with them a lot of hurt and a lot of shame from early childhood. Love is pain, so the narcissist avoids love. So what does a narcissist mean when he says, I love you and does he truly believe it? The answer is yes. The narcissist does believe that he's in love with you. He mislabels his true emotions, which are essentially a form of dependency. Now remember, love bombing is the first phase in what I call the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is based on work by Sander in 1989. So the shared fantasy is coupled with a principle that I've discovered, the principle of dual mothership. The narcissist is trying to convert you into a mother and then establish with you a fantasy of mother child. Even if the narcissist is the dominant figure, even if he takes over all decision making, even if he serves as your external regulator, he stabilizes your moods, regulates your emotions, it has nothing to do with it. He still perceives himself to be your child and you are his mother. It's a form of parentifying. And so when he says, I love you, what he's actually saying is, I want you to become my mother. I want you to love me unconditionally. I want you to accept me regardless of my behaviors or misbehaviors. I want you to share my fantasy with me because reality is intolerable, unbearable, too painful. I want you to shield me and cocoon me and firewall me from my internal shame. I want you to tell me what I want to hear about myself. I want you to reflect to myself. I want you to reflect to me my glory, my grandiosity. I want you to be source of secondary supply. I want you to fulfill your roles, the four S's, sex, services, supply and safety. Above all, perhaps safety. I want you to allay and mitigate my anxieties, especially my abandonment anxiety, separation and security. It's a list of needs and a list of expectations and a list of demands. It has nothing to do with love. It's about using you. You're an instrument. The narcissist is instrumentalizing you when he says, I love you. Love in the narcissist's mind is a conditioning mechanism. It's a way to ascertain your constant presence in his life. The next sentence narcissists say a lot is, you have changed. You're not the same and there is a tinge of disappointment in their voice. A hue of disillusionment and disenchantment, you let them down. What does a narcissist mean by that? Well, remember coercive snapshotting. The narcissist, when he first meets you and firstly decides that you could be his intimate partner, he takes a snapshot of you. He creates a representation in his mind of you out there. Narcissists are incapable of discerning and interacting with external objects. They convert all external objects into internal objects and that's what the narcissist does to you. He has converted you into an internal object and this internal object, the snapshot, the introject in clinical terms is photoshopped. He idealizes you and then he expects you to conform to the idealized snapshot. He expects you to never deviate, never diverge, never contradict, never disagree with, and never conflict with the internal object, the avatar that represents you in his mind. He coerces you in multiple ways to conform to this idealized internal object and this is coercive snapshotting. He penalizes you if you dare to display agency and independence and personal autonomy and thereby deviate from the snapshot. And this of course, all this of course leads to devaluation and separation from you which is the aim of the shared fantasy. It's all been about separating from you as a maternal figure, completing the separation individuation of early childhood that had failed with the original biological mother. So when he says you have changed, this is in preparation for the devaluation and separation. This is the first phase in converting you into a persecutory object, an enemy, someone who threatens his internal stability, equilibrium and happiness. He has failed to coerce you into becoming this natural, so now he needs to get rid of you because you're a constant reminder of failure and you're a threat to the other internal objects. The next sentence that narcissists are fond of repeating is I am. I am something. I'm the most honest person I know. I'm a winner. I am very good at what I do. I am trustworthy. You can trust me. I am. And there's like a gazillion, you know, endings to this sentence. I am. I am postulates the existence of a self. It is a form of self reporting and yet the narcissist doesn't have a self. He doesn't have an ego. The process of the formation of the ego and the constellation and integration of the self in early childhood up to early adolescence. This process has been disrupted by dead, bad parenting in a very dysfunctional, unhappy family environment or the absence of a family altogether. So this self reporting is false, is fake. It is a desperate attempt by the narcissist to pretend that he or she exists. But narcissists don't exist. Narcissism is about absence, not presence. So when this narcissist says I am, any sentence that starts with I am or I typically am is fallacious. It's misleading. Not intentionally. Again, the narcissist desperately attempts to, first of all, first and foremost, deceive himself. The narcissist's deceptive speech is first and foremost intended to self-regulate, to accomplish self-regulation. It's not about you because you don't exist. Narcissism doesn't care about you. Everything is about him or her. So I am is the kernel and the nucleus of grandiosity. Grandiosity is a misperception of reality. It's what we call a cognitive distortion, coffee break. And so when the narcissist says I am something, it's usually an self-aggrandizing, fantastic, inflating proposition. I am the most honest person I know, for example. So this is the foundation of grandiosity and this is where the narcissist begins to divorce reality, which makes it extremely difficult for you to understand what he's saying, what he's truly saying, because it's not grounded in the world. It's not grounded in the universe as you know it. It's grounded in some phantasmagoria that is unfolding and unfurling in his demented mind. Demented, yes, narcissism is a severe mental illness. The next sentence is they are, you are, talking about other people. So the previous sentence was I am. And the next sentence is you are or they are. This is of course projection. There are parts in the personality of the narcissist, in the disrupted self of the narcissist, in the self-states of the narcissist, their portions, their segments, their figments, their elements, their components, their ingredients that the narcissist cannot tolerate. There are parts of the narcissist that the narcissist, portions that the narcissist rejects because they challenge his self-perception, which is inflated and fantastic because they hamper his functioning. So if the narcissist is weak, he's going to reject his weakness. If he is homosexual, he's going to reject his sexual orientation. If he is abusive, he's going to reject this knowledge that he's abusive and cruel and mean and sadistic. If he, if his self-image is a good person, he's going to reject these parts of himself. If he misbehaved, he's going to reframe it, he's going to reject his misbehavior. What does he do with all this trash? What does he do with all this self-negating garbage? What does he do with the parts of himself, the organs, the psychological organs that he cannot tolerate, that challenge him, that undermine him, that humiliate him, that shame him? What does he do with all these internal parts of himself, character traits, behaviors, predilections, proclivities, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, frailties, shortcomings, limitations, failures. What does he do with all this? It's unbearable. He takes these things and he throws them at you. He projects them onto you, he attributes them to you. He's not weak, you're weak. He's not being abusive, you're being abusive. So this is known as projection. When the narcissist starts a sentence with I am, this is grandiosity. When the narcissist starts a sentence with they are or you are, this is projection. The next sentence somewhat tangentially associated with this previous tool is this is wrong. The narcissist has a set of rules, rigid rules that he had come up with. He is a law unto himself, exactly like the psychopath, exactly like the psychopath. The narcissist is contumacious and defined, he rejects authority. He collaborates with teams, he is pro-social, is much less criminalized than the psychopath, but this is because he is a junkie, he's a drug addict, he needs to obtain and to secure a narcissistic supply from the environment, something the psychopath doesn't have to do. But exactly like the psychopath, he holds people in utter, unmitigated contempt and disdain and so he has these huge tables of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate what is right, what is wrong, how people should behave and how they should not behave, how should he behave and how he should not behave, etc. Everything is rigidly dictated and so when he says this is wrong, he means to say this doesn't sit well or comply with my expectations, with the rules I have promulgated, with the environment I have engendered, when he says they are wrong or this is wrong, it means they are useless, they are inefficacious, they are oppositional, they are stupid, they are obstructive, they are passive-aggressive. So wrong, when the narcissist says this is wrong, don't get it wrong, it's not about accepted morality, it's not about common, typical, ethical standards, it's not a form of self-recrimination, self-flagellation, remorse and regret, no it's not, it's like saying it's not going my way, this is wrong means in narcissism speak, it's not going my way, this is right, wow this is the way I want it to be, so this is very psychopathic in effect, it's a bit of anti-social type of speech. The next very common phrase or phrases that narcissists use in daily discourse, daily intercourse, intercourse by the way is conversation, get your minds off the gutter. So a typical sentence is I don't remember having done that, I don't remember having said that, it doesn't sound like me at all, you must be wrong, the truth is this. So when the narcissist says this, when the narcissist insists that he hasn't done something, hasn't said something, that there's no way he could have done or said these things because they don't sit well with who he is, with his self-perception or self-image. It's not typical, I would have never said that, I would have never done that, I never lie, I never steal, I never plagiarize, I never do these things, I never sleep with other people's girlfriends or wives, I never do these things, it's not like me, I'm a good person, I'm an angel, I'm a victim, I don't remember having done or said this and the truth is not this, this is the truth, this is because the narcissist dissociates and then he has memory gaps, he forgets things that he has said, he forgets things that he has done and to bridge over these memory gaps, he creates narratives, stories, fables and this is why it's known as confabulation, the narcissist bridges over the memory gaps by inventing stories or confabulations which are reasonable, make sense, plausible, probable or likely. He says, I don't remember having done that but probably I have done this, I don't remember having said that, you misunderstood me, I must have said this, this doesn't sound like me at all, I think you're mistaken but I may have done this, the truth is this, you're getting it wrong, the truth is this, these are all forms of compensatory confabulation trying to overcome constant amnesia, endless amnesia, an amnesia that wipes out something like 80 to 90% of the narcissist's life. When the narcissist is confronted with hard evidence of misdeeds, misbehavior, misconduct, hard evidence, receipts, recordings, you know, things you can't deny, the narcissist would reframe them, he would create a meta narrative, a hyper story in which he will incorporate the hard evidence in a way that is self-vindicating, self-validating, self-justifying and supportive of the narcissist's grandiose, inflated and fantastic self-perception. Finally, another very common sentence is, if you refuse to do this, it means that you don't love me, it means that you're not my partner, it means that we are not in this together, it means that you want to abandon me, it means that you're betraying me, it means if you refuse to do this, it means this is a form of course of verbal abuse and an integral part of intermittent reinforcement, a control mechanism which conditions the victim, an intimate partner in this case or could be a friend, could be a business partner, could be a family member, everything I'm saying applies to all types of interpersonal relationships that the narcissist has. So it's a form of conditioning you to not refuse because it's verbal abuse, it's penalizing, it's punitive, so you want to avoid it, it creates in you the incentive to avoid this outcome and so you comply, you become obedient, you become submissive, you begin to develop dissociation yourself. Narcissism is contagious as I keep saying. The narcissist uses, leverages his disappointment and disenchantment and disillusionment with you as a weapon, he weaponizes them, he causes you to want to please him, to want to conform, you want peace, you want to avoid conflict, he renders you conflict a verse and this sentence is one of the main instruments. Now, I spent the past two decades, actually, historically I'm the one who opened, the first opened, owned and moderated, the first, six support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse. I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse in the 90s and then I opened six support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse with well over 250,000 people as members and I'm talking about the very beginning of the internet. Ever since then I've been monitoring the gradual degeneration and deterioration in the ethics, ethos narratives in forums and support groups of victims of narcissistic abuse. Now, let it be clear, I've worked with hundreds of victims of narcissistic abuse as clients, I've been exposed to thousands in seminars and lectures and comment sections and so on and what I'm about to say in the next clip does not apply to all victims of narcissistic abuse. Of course, most victims of narcissistic abuse just want to move on, they want to heal, they want to understand what has happened to them but it doesn't become an obsession or a rumination, it's just a phase. I'm talking about the hardcore group of self-declared, self-described victims of narcissistic abuse who are online in forums that are steeped in vicious sniping, lack of empathy, sadism, cruelty, vindictiveness that lead me to believe that these so-called victims and especially the so-called empaths communities are actually covert narcissists, they are professional victims. What's happening there is competitive victimhood, it's a language, victimhood is a language, it's a form of signaling, deceptive signaling very often, it's a form of signaling that is intended to elicit from other people, concessions, benefits, special treatment. So, narcissists use victimhood, victimhood is a language and that's why I'm including this clip, this short clip in this video. So, bear in mind it applies only to a slice, the online vociferous malevolent slice of self-described victims of narcissistic abuse who I suspect extremely strongly based on literature, scholarly literature as well are actually not victims at all, but frustrated, collapsed, covert, in many cases, narcissists.