 I hope I'm recording. I hope I'm recording, but I guess I'll know at the very end. You're recording, aren't you? Yeah, we are recording. Yes. The worst comes to worst. You can send me your file. Let me just make sure we are. Let me nervous now. Yeah, we're recording. Yeah. The worst comes to worst. You can send me your file and I'll upload it to my YouTube channel. Yeah, I will send it to you. Yeah. And then you can cut out whatever you want if you feel we said something weird. No, I never edit. I upload raw. Oh, wow. Nice. I'm a big believer in authenticity. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. We are very happy that you are joining us here today. I'm happy to join you. Thank you. And we think that your views on narcissism is very interesting and it has helped us so much in our healing process. I'm glad I could be of help. I agree. I think my views on narcissism are interesting also. Yes. Oh my God. And we also want to shed more light on this topic here in Norway because we think that we have had a lot of people coming to us and say that, oh, we're experiencing the same thing. And it's not. Would you characterize Norwegian society in general as narcissistic? No, not at all. The opposite. The opposite of narcissistic? Okay. Yeah, but I've been living 20 years in LA in Los Angeles. So you kind of almost have to be a narcissist or have the traits to survive, but I'm back now in Norway. I just went through a horrible relationship and I couldn't do it anymore. So, and then when I got back, I realized Mari here also been through the same thing. So we started after watching, she introduced me actually to your videos. And after watching that, we started on podcasts about the topic because it's not in Norway. And everybody's in shock here. They didn't even know such a thing existed almost. I'm 44 years old and I've never experienced it until one year ago. Sounds like the most is safe haven. Yeah. Yeah. And we think that the way you explain these personality traits is very fascinating and eye-opening. And when we watched your videos, I was like, oh my God, this, it helped me a lot. Yeah, she started sending me your videos and we both got obsessed like looking at it every day. We've seen probably all of your videos. Thank you. I appreciate. I do suggest, however, that we transition from narcissistic supply, which I'm enjoying greatly to the interview itself so that other people can benefit as well. Yeah. Yes. We hope so. Yeah. And I just love the way you explain it. You're so rational about it. There's no switch. It's straight to the point. Yeah. There is still narcissistic supply for me. Let's transition from compliments to conversation. What is it that you would like to discuss? I'm at your disposal. So I would love to know why can't the narcissists love you? And we also want to know why the relationship with a narcissist is so complicated. It's always so much drama and it can never be like. Yeah. These are actually two easy questions. The answer to your question, Diana, narcissists cannot love you because narcissists are incapable of having any positive emotions. It's not that they do not have positive emotions. They possess positive emotions like every other human being. It is that they are denied access to these emotions. They are incapable of accessing these emotions. And the reason is that in early childhood, they have learned to associate positive emotions with shame, with hurt, with pain, with rejection, with being ignored, abandoned, neglected, instrumentalized, or parentified. In short, they learned to associate positive emotions. For example, loving mommy. They learned to associate it with negative outcomes with bad feelings. So they have learned via conditioning. Clinical term is operant conditioning. They have been conditioned to suppress and repress their positive emotions. Consequently, they are incapable of loving anyone or actually anything. They can never emotionally invest in anything, a process known as catexis. They cannot correct anything. Catexis is a much larger term. It incorporates love, but it also incorporates a persistent attention, emotional investment in projects and goals, attachment, attachment to places, attachment to language, attachment to your personal history, to your family, and so on. So catexis is incapable of any of these things, not only love. Catexis is incapable of attachment, incapable of bonding, and so on and so forth. So this in a nutshell is the answer to your question. It's not that they are malevolent or these are psychopaths. People, especially people online, especially self-styled experts online, often confuse narcissists with psychopaths. Psychopaths are scheming. Psychopaths are scheming. They're manipulative. They're goal-oriented. Narcissists are just who they are. Very often the outcome is the same. Having a relationship with a psychopath and have a relationship with a narcissist may end up feeling the same, but it's not the same in the sense that the psychopath is out there to exploit you somehow. He wants something from you, could be sex, could be money, could be access, could be power, could be fame, could be anything, could be your home or your money, could be anything. And so the psychopath is goal-oriented and once the goal is accomplished, he loses all interest in you. He loses all interest in you even in the negative way. He wouldn't stop you. He wouldn't hoover you. He wouldn't kill you. He would just let you go. The narcissist on the other hand creates a fantasy and it's known as the shared fantasy and then he embeds you in this fantasy. He wants you to play a role in this fantasy and if you refuse to play this role or if you're not up to the role, then he gets very angry and frustrated and aggressive and then he values you and discards you. There are psychodynamic reasons for devaluing you and discard you. You represent his mother in the relationship and he wants to separate from you, but again, there's a difference between narcissists and psychopaths. Narcissists are not malevolent. They're not malicious. That's a myth. Psychopaths are. Malia, can you remind me of your question? Yeah, that's kind of big question I think, but we want to know why the relationship is so complicated. The drama. It's not complicated at all. It is the victim's complicated relationship. The narcissist expects full obedience. He expects you to conform to your role in the shared fantasy. He expects you to not deviate and not diverge from the idealized image of you that he has in his mind. It is known as introject, internal object. So if you are compliant, if you're submissive, if you obey, if you follow instructions, if you're a good soldier, the relationship is exceedingly simple and very frequently rewarding. It is when the victim displays signs of independence, autonomy, agency, having a life of her own, deviating and diverging from the idealized image that the narcissist has of her. Disagreeing with the narcissist, criticizing the narcissist, offering advice, offering help, being nice to the narcissist. And no, no, that's a very bad strategy. Well, and this complicates the relationship. So all the complications in the relationship with narcissists are brought into the relationship by victims, not by the narcissist. But Sam, just one thing then. Why would they choose? Like why would my mind choose me when I don't know how to cook or clean or, and then that's what he wanted? Why would you choose someone who's opposite of what you want? Narcissists are looking for four things in an intimate partner and not only in an intimate partner, by the way, almost in everyone, four things. And they are the four issues. So sex, services, supply, narcissistic, or sadistic, and safety. If you are able to provide two out of these four, then, then you get the job. Lucky you. You get the job. So if you offer, for example, sex and safety, you get the job, even if you don't know how to cook. If on the other hand, if on the other hand, you offer cooking and personal assistant, personal assistant roles and chauffeur. And, you know, if you offer services and you provide them reliably on call with no murmur and no injections and so on. And at the same time, you offer safety, so services and safety. Even if you refuse to have sex with a narcissist, you would still be his intimate partner. Only, only two or four, every two or four, every combination of two out of four is sufficient for the narcissist. Now, of course, there are several types of narcissists. There's a word and there's covert, also known as vulnerable, fragile narcissist. There is somatic narcissist and cerebral narcissist and so on and so forth. So if you are unable to offer sex, but you cook well and you are a stable intimate partner, so you create a sense of safety, you're likely to attract a cerebral narcissist, because cerebral narcissists are not into sex. They aggrandize themselves via intellectual accomplishments. If, on the other hand, you're a borderline, for example, you emphasize your appearance and your sexuality, but you're not very good at cooking and you're not very safe. But still, you provide the narcissist with narcissistic supply, you tell him how great he is, how amazing he is and you're given the best sex ever. So you fulfill two out of the four, but you're likely to attract a somatic narcissist. The somatic narcissist places emphasis on his body and the uses he can make of his body. He was a bodybuilder. Bodybuilder, sex, anything that involves the body. That's so crazy, yeah. I think I gave all those four things to she did also. But somehow, nothing was good enough. Even if I gave all those things, there was always something that he complained about and caused more drama. I didn't say that if you give these things, you would have a long-term relationship. I said that if you give these things, you would qualify as an intimate partner. However, all relationships with narcissists end up with devaluation, not always with discards, but always with devaluation. And the reason for this has nothing to do with you. The reason for this is the fact that the narcissist has had a very complicated relationship with his mother, and you represent his mother. You're a maternal figure, and he has to reenact these early conflicts and drama with his mother, with you. It's a second chance at a second childhood with a second mother. And so what he had wanted to do with his original mother was to separate from her and become an individual. And he had failed. He never succeeded to separate from his biological mother. He never succeeded to become an individual. And here you are, and he says, well, that's my second chance. I'm going to separate from this woman, and I'm going to become an individual. And because she is my second mother, this time I will get it right. And so to separate from you, he needs to devalue you. Devaluation has nothing to do with you. It's an internal integral process in the narcissist's mind that would play regardless of your behavior, choices, decisions, and so on. This is something the victims don't understand. The narcissist, the dynamic of the narcissist's relationship with his intimate partner, these dynamics are dictated from the inside. They are not reactive. They're not what we call exogenous. They're not reactive to outside factors. Therefore, who you are is completely irrelevant. It is a myth. It is a myth online that narcissists are attracted to empathic women, loving women, caring women. That is nonsense. That is not true. Because narcissists don't care about empathy and they cannot do intimacy. So they don't give a, you know, on whether you're intimate and empathic. They focus on the four S's. And then they need you to be able to emulate a maternal figure. A maternal figure doesn't have to be caring and empathic. Actually, the narcissist wants you to be not caring and not empathic, rejecting. He wants you to be his mother. His mother was a rejecting figure. What we call in psychology a dead mother, emotionally absent, selfish, depressive, a user, an exploiter, neglecting and so on. So he wants you to be the same because this would make the devaluation phase easier for him. If you are intimate, if you are loving, if you are caring, it infuriates him. You're frustrating him by being nice. When you're nice, it's frustrating because it doesn't allow you to devalue you. Allows him to devalue you. Here I am. I want to devalue you and you're nice to me. You're doing it on purpose. You are passive aggressive. You're not letting me devalue you. You bad partner. So people online are getting it completely wrong, completely reversed. Most YouTubers and so on, they're getting it completely wrong. It's another launch. And they're getting it wrong because the victims want to aggrandize themselves. The victims are also a bit narcissistic, not all of them, but many of them. And so they want to feel special. They want to feel that they have been chosen. They want to feel that they are super empathic, amazingly caring, incredibly loving, unprecedentedly soft and accepting and so on. But that's nonsense. The narcissist would devalue you in any case, and he would prefer if you help him to devalue you, which is precisely why narcissists are attracted to borderlines. Borderlines are drama queens. Borderlines introduce into their relationships. Borderlines introduce into their relationships a lot of, you know, bad events. They misbehave. They are dramatic. They're unpredictable. They're frustrating. They're infuriating. Some of them, not all of them, cheat habitually. This is great. That's exactly what the narcissist needs, because it makes it easier for him to devalue the borderline and get rid of her. And then to feel for a while, for a little while, that this time he got it right, he separated from mommy and he can be his own man. And so narcissists, or a woman, 50% of all narcissists are women. Everything I'm saying applies equally to women nowadays, unfortunately. It's a new phenomenon. It's a new phenomenon because women were underrepresented only 40 years ago. 40 years ago, 76% of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder were men. There was almost no women involved. Today, one third of psychopaths are women. And one half of narcissists are women. And about 60% of borderlines are women. So women are taking over cluster B diagnosis. And of course, a vast majority of hysterics are women. So if you look at the overall picture of cluster B, the majority are women, not men. Everything I'm saying applies to women. And it's true what you said. I felt like even though I learned how to cook, almost like he was happy for a week, but then he was back to like, there's something else is wrong, or you just cook one time and you think you're this and that, and it never ends. Like whatever you do is like, it's like kind of one of the videos we're talking about being a robot. Like you want me to be a robot? Like it was like nothing is good enough. Like, oh my God. But what's with the cooking? Why this obsession with cooking? No, because he because I can't. And then he felt like I was cooking, cooking defines you as a woman or as a person or what? I don't know why. I was stupid. I don't know why. I can never But I you know what happened was because my last relationship, I was the opposite. So I was thinking maybe that was wrong. So I was thinking, Oh, maybe he is right, because I was confused from the last because the last one was a covert narcissist, which I didn't know he was until I was with this one. After this one, I realized, Oh my God, like they were the same in a different way, like different types of narcissists. So I was just in shock. And I'm probably narcissists right now myself like they're like, no, it's been since February. No, but it's been since February. But I feel like I got some of those traits. Like that's why it's scary to watch you. I can tell like the stuff you're saying, I can feel it. I feel everything you're saying. Well, when you're trying to defend yourself against the narcissist coercion, because the narcissist coerces you to conform to your idealized image in his mind. And then he coerces you to participate in the shared fantasy. And then it coerces you to be a bad partner. And then he coerces you to become an enemy, the secretary object. It's all about coercion. The entire relationship with the narcissist is from a to z 100% coercion. You are punished. If you don't conform, you're penalized. If you're too independent, it's all punitive. It's a punitive relationship. So to defend yourself simply, protect yourself. You react in kind. This is known as reactive abuse. You react in kind. You become abusive. You become narcissistic. You even become psychopathic. This is all an attempt to survive within the relationship to somehow maintain your boundaries. Somehow not allow him to take over totally brainwash you to the point that you no longer exist. The narcissist wants to abscond with your existence. He wants you to not exist anymore because he creates an internal object that represents you in his mind. And then he continues to interact with this internal object. And then you become a nuisance because you keep contradicting the internal object. So he wants you to become like the internal static, dead, literally dead. The ideal intimate partner for a narcissist was depicted in a film, the famous film, Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's film. Norman Bates runs a small motel and his mother is dead. So what Norman Bates does in the morning, he walks up to her bedroom, he kept the body, he mummified the body of his mother. He walks up to her bedroom, he washes her, he takes her out of bed, and he seats her on a chair facing the window. That's in the morning. In the evening, he walks up to her bedroom, he kisses her on the forehead, he puts her back to bed, and that's the ideal partner for a narcissist. Yes. And whenever you show signs of life, that's a challenge. It undermines the internal object. Now narcissists are, as Kernberg has observed, not Wagner, narcissists are psychotic. So narcissists live inside their minds. Whenever you threaten any element in the narcissist's mind, you threaten the totality of the narcissist's universe. You are not just threatening the image of you in his mind, the internal object that represents you, your avatar. You're not just doing this, you're undermining the principle of action, the organizing principle of the narcissist's world. Because what have you? If you don't conform to your idealized internal object, then something is wrong with the internal object. The internal object is not getting you right. But wait a minute. If something is wrong with one internal object, maybe something is wrong with all internal objects. And if something is wrong with all internal objects, there's no universe for the narcissist, because he never exists in the outside. Narcissists never interact with external objects. So Kernberg said, Otto Kernberg is kind of the father of the field. Kernberg said justly so. And I humbly continue this work. But Kernberg said that narcissists are, narcissism is probably the second most extreme form of mental illness after schizophrenia. And I tend to agree. I tend to fully agree. I think people, including experts, including scholars, including everyone, they're underestimating what is narcissism. They say, oh, narcissists, there's an awful, sorry for the word. It's just an awful. It's a jerk. It's just a jerk. And you have to learn how to live with jerks because they are multiplying and reproducing nowadays. So you just have to know how to live with them. You can manipulate the narcissists. Easily, it's not a big problem. They minimize. And possibly they minimize because many of them are narcissists. It's not a conspiracy theory. The narcissists are overrepresented in the medical professions. That's a fact. So do psychopaths. So it's also a fact. These are the studies of hair and baby up and Campbell and Twenge. So it's not a conspiracy theory to say that narcissists who happen to be psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists and authors of books about psychology, books about psychology, that they would minimize narcissism. But narcissism is a severe, super severe mental illness. Combining elements from literally every other known mental illness. The narcissist has elements of bipolar disorder. He has elements of schizophrenia. He has elements of borderline personality disorder. He has elements of anti-social personality disorder, psychopathy. He has elements of paranoid personality disorder. He has elements of schizoid personality disorder. He has elements of depression. He has elements of anxiety disorders. The narcissist is the DSM. He is a walking talking version of the diagnostic and statistical manual. Literally every mental illness known to humanity combined becomes narcissistic personality disorder. It's a really, really serious mental illness. How can they function like they live normal lives? They wake up in the morning, they go to work, they do all activities and they seem very normal and it's very easy to ignore the red flags in the beginning also. It's also crying when you're watching a movie with them. They're crying like, whoa, you would think they're empathetic or empathic. That's puzzling to me. They have learned as children to emulate normalcy, empathy and even to imitate emotions. Narcissism is an extreme form of mimicry. It's very much like an insect which pretend to be another insect or an insect that pretends to be a leaf or a branch of a tree. This is mimicry, extreme form of mimicry. So narcissists have learned these skills in order to survive. I'm not the first to say this. There was a guy called Harvey Cleckley and Harvey Cleckley in 1942 wrote a magnificent masterpiece. It's titled The Mask of Sanity. He said that narcissists and psychopaths, they were a mask and it's a mask of sanity. However, I disagree that their lives are normal. The lives are not normal. They are very itinerant, very pathetic. They transition between many jobs and many marriages and many relationships. They have severe difficulties with intimacy. I wouldn't say their lives are normal. Moreover, it's relatively easy, if you know what you're doing, it's relatively easy to expose the narcissists behind the mask. The narcissist is hyper-vigilant. In other words, the narcissist keeps looking. Who is insulting me? Who is attacking me? So he's a bit paranoid. He has paranoid ideation and he scans all the time. He scans using something that I dubbed called empathy. So he scans everyone to see where the attack is going to come from. Where are the slides and the insults and the humiliation? Where's the humiliation going to come from? And so on and so forth. He's shame-based. Narcissism is shame-based. So it's very easy to say something to the narcissist if you know what you're doing. Even if you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to say something to the narcissist and he suddenly switches. He literally switches. It's like multiple personalities or dissociative identity disorder. He suddenly becomes enraged, impulsive, reckless, defiant, consumatious, rejects authority, utterly out of control and so on and so forth. Now this process is known as switching and I propose a theory based on Philip Bromberg's work that actually narcissisms, they have self-states. They don't have a self. They don't have a unitary self but they have a fragmented self and they have self-states. And what happens is with every stimulus from the environment, they switch between one self-state to another. And the same with borderline. Now this makes it much easier to explain narcissism. If you insist that a narcissist has a unitary self, then how do you explain the amazing switching between what looks definitely like different personalities? But if you accept that he has self-states which are mutually exclusive, albeit communicating, the self-states are communicating, not like in multiple personalities. Multiple personalities, the different altars, the self-states don't communicate. They don't share memories. They don't have the same identity. In a narcissist, the assemblage of self-states have common memories. They access the same databases and so on. But depending on the stimulus from the environment, one of the self-states will take over. The most effective, self-efficacious self-state will take over. So you could see the narcissist transitioning from a self-state that imitates empathy and intimacy and emotions and cries and movies, whatever you. You can see a narcissist suddenly switching to a self-state which is psychopathic, callous, ruthless, merciless, you know, and will do anything, trample on people, kill, steal. I mean, you can see this. Anyone who is living with a narcissist will tell you this. Anyone else. And any therapist who has ever worked with a narcissist will tell you this. That's interesting, Mary. And then, so when they say, well, mine said he loved me after he was over, but when they say they love you, is that just something they're saying or they don't even know what that is? They mislabel, they mislabel internal processes as do borderlines. There's a problem of mislabeling. It's called attribution. The clinical term is attribution error. So they misattribute internal processes to emotions. So for example, if an narcissist would tell you, I love you, when he's actually telling you, I miss what you used to give me. And if borderline tells you I love you, she's actually saying, I miss the sense of safety and regulation that you afforded me when we were together. Because when I was with you, I felt stable. I felt safe. I felt at peace. You took care of my emotions. You took care of my moods. You took care of my reality. You were my reality. And borderlines often say, you're my life. You're my world. And it's true. This is called external regulation. So you just have to translate. There needs to be a dictionary. Great idea, by the way. I should get to work on it. It needs to be a dictionary. Like when he says this, he means this. So when he says, I love you, he means I miss the things you used to give me. And as I love how you said, there's nobody's a victim. Like we are participating in this also, in this drama, whatever you want to call it. So what advice would you give, not victims, but us, like recovering from all the trauma we've been through with a narcissist? First of all, it is expressly untrue that you don't realize that something is wrong until much later. People realize that something is wrong in the first meeting, usually within the first few minutes. It is just that they are compelled to deny. They're compelled to deny it, to reframe it, to tell themselves all kinds of stories, to convince themselves that it's passing, it's special circumstances, it was tired after work, or he had a difficult childhood, or victims lie to themselves all the time. Victims serve deceive all the time. From the first minute, they come across a narcissist. Actually, studies have shown that when you are not inclined to develop an intimate relationship with a narcissist, when you just meet a narcissist socially, or you come across a narcissist at work, so there's no question of being intimate partners. Studies have shown that people feel ill at ease, they feel uncomfortable within seconds of coming across the narcissist. This is known as the uncanny value phenomenon. Narcissists and psychopaths, but no borderline. Narcissists and psychopaths make you feel uncomfortable within seconds. If you're not into, I'm looking for a partner. Loneliness is a poison. Loneliness drives you to compromise to the extent of denying yourself and denying all the information that you're getting from the environment. You're falsifying the environment in order not to be alone anymore, or to have a partner, or to fall in love. Some people are in love with the process of falling in love. They're in love with love. This is the first thing. It is not true that you don't have all the information you need within the first five minutes. You do. Second thing is if you have already been traumatized by a narcissist once or more, and frequently it's much more often. A typical victim of narcissists would usually go through three to five relationships with narcissists. And eight and ten are not uncommon. And of course the reason is simple. Victims of narcissists are usually themselves. They usually come from an environment which has been in some way deficient or defective, problematic in some way. The narcissist and the victim share the same background. Absolutely the same background. Narcissist is a victim of abuse. I'm going to repeat this. The narcissist is a victim of abuse as in early childhood. So that's why the narcissist knows how to resonate with you in a way that no other person can. Because he knows where you're coming from. He has been there. He's done that. He is you. He is you. And this leads to processes known as a measurement or merger or fusion when you become, two of you become one in a kind of cult. Become one. Because the boundaries between the two of you are porous. They are permeable. And they're permeable because you recognize if you wish a twin soul, if I hate this phrase, but kind of just to illustrate. So you need to give up on many things in order not to fall again in the trap of a relationship with the narcissist. You need to give up on being understood. You need to give up on being accepted. You need to give up on the excitement and the drama. You need to give up on many things which are very critical to you. So many, many women, and it's especially women, refuse to compromise. They say, yeah, you know, he may be abusive, but he loves me in a way that no one else has ever loved me. Or I see myself through his gaze, the way I've never seen myself through any other man's gaze. I see myself idealized. It's irresistible. It's a mother's gaze. The narcissist's gaze is a mother's gaze. It's a way a mother looks at a newborn baby. A mother needs to idealize the baby because raising children sucks big time. So you need to like to yourself that they are wonderful creatures. They're not wonderful creatures. They're narcissists. Babies are narcissists. That's not me. That's ignorant for it. So your first relationship with a narcissist is with your children. They've been narcissists for two, three years, and yet you head to lie to yourself that they're not narcissists, that they are adorable, that they are ideal. So this is a kind of training or relationship with narcissists. But you need to sacrifice a lot because for victims, for most victims, to be with a narcissist is to feel alive. They make you feel alive. It's precarious. It's risky. It's dangerous. It's painful. It's hurtful. It's dramatic. It's unpredictable. It's indeterminate. It's uncertain. It's horrifying. It's a horror movie, but you feel fully alive. Every cell of you is in your body and in your mind is alive. You're on fire. Absolutely on fire. We have a name. You also feel, I felt that he loved me, he didn't never say it, but he did things to me and took care of me. So I felt, I thought that that was love. I just said that victims fall in love with how they are seen by the narcissist and they fall in love with being understood and being accepted like no other. But this is a projection, of course. He couldn't care less about you if you were a narcissist. I'm not sure he was diagnosed. I mean, people go around and everyone that he's like is a narcissist. So I'm not sure he's a narcissist, but if he were truly a narcissist, he couldn't care less about you. You're utterly, but I mean utterly interchangeable, dispensable and fungible. You meant nothing to him. You meant nothing to him. The only thing that meant a lot to him is what you gave him. And then what you gave him became a nuisance and an annoyance because it impeded his ability to devalue you. So don't idealize the narrative. Don't rewrite history in your own mind. This is the trap of the victims. But I understand that being with a narcissist is a technicolor experience and being with everyone else is black and white movie. I understand that. I understand that. The narcissist has this capacity and border lies even more. I myself have had relationships only with border lies all my life. And I'm quite an authority on the topic. And I know everything there is to know. I think I believe, but I can't help myself. When I'm with the borderline, I'm alive and totally alive. And when I'm not, I go through the motions of robotic. I'm not depressed. I'm very creative and so on, but I'm not alive. I don't feel alive. I know the border line will end up hurting, destroying me, cheating on me, doing horrible things. I know she will do this. Again, it's not up to her. This is an autonomous process. It has its own reason. But I can't help myself. I can't help myself because, and this is a name, it's an addiction. Victims develop addiction through exposure. It's exactly like an alcoholic. I don't know if you are aware. The recidivism, the remission rate, the relapse rate among alcoholics is 83%. That means that eight out of 10 alcoholics, never mind how many times they went to rehab. Never mind how many families they've lost. Never mind how much time they've done in prison. Never mind how many people they've killed when they drove while drunk. Never mind all this. Eight out of 10 will go again to drink. They can't help themselves. Yeah. So victims of narcissists are addicts, the junkies. And you should have a 12 steps, a 12-step program when you raise your hand at the beginning of the meeting and you say, hello, my name is Diana, and I'm addicted to narcissists. And this is also why we've all kind of been scared of dating again because I'm like, I mean, I feel like I'm just going to pick the bad one. Everything I think is going to be wrong. No, it's up to you. If you feel overly, if you feel overly alive, if you feel dramatic, if you feel that it's not real, if you feel like you've found yourself in a movie, because it doesn't feel real. It doesn't feel real. This effervescence, this feeling of transcendence. It doesn't feel real. It feels a bit hallucinatory. The minute you feel this, make it your last date with that person. But you're addicted to this. You can't help yourself. So it means like you just have to go with the ones that are boring? You have to accept that life is comprised of the mundane and the routine and the pedestrian and losses. Life is made up of losses. You have to accept life. This is a rejection of life. To team up with a narcissist is because you're rejecting life and you're rejecting reality. No, I tend to do that. A narcissist offers you fantasy. That's his main contribution to your life. And then you end up saying unconsciously, you end up saying, I hate reality. I've always hated reality. And I found a solution. Here's a guy who is selling fantasy. I'm going to buy a fantasy from him. And that's how you end up with narcissists. Narcissists, their victims, psychopaths and their victims, borderline and their victims, all of them without exception, reject life. It's a joint venture at rejecting life and replacing it with fantasy. And of course, fantasy never works because reality has a nasty habit of intruding upon fantasies and challenging them and destroying them. So fantasies never work. Not even in the short term, but they never work. And so it's heartbreaking. The heartbreak of the narcissist when he loses you is that he has lost the shared fantasy. Not you. Who doesn't care about him. They lost the shared fantasy. But admittedly, your heartbreak also includes an element of grieving over the fantasy, mourning the fantasy, what could have been, what could have been the idealized image of him, you know, how you wanted him to be. Both victims and narcissists force each other, coerce each other to become what they are not. Narcissism is about absence. It's not about presence. The victim is trying to convert the narcissist into what he has never been and will never be. She rejects him as he is. The victim rejects the narcissist as he is. She says to him, as you are, you're not good to me. I want you to not be anymore. And I want you to be reborn, resurrected. It's almost religious. I want you to be reborn as someone else. And the narcissist tells you exactly the same. As you are is not good enough. I'm going to idealize you. I'm going to take a snapshot of you. I'm going to photoshop it when I idealize you. And then I expect you to disappear as you are and to reappear in the shape of the idealized image. And narcissists' fantasy and your collaboration, your collusion with him in his fantasy is about killing each other. It's a death fantasy. It's a death cult. You are trying to kill the narcissist as he is and to make him into a different person, an ideal person, the person you would have wanted him to be. In your imagination, nothing to do with him, actually. And he's trying to do the same to you. It's a joined death cult. The narcissist operates on the fanatic principle, on the on the on the death force, not on libido, not on the life force. He is operating on the death force because the narcissist has been assassinated as a small child. The narcissist is a walking, talking corpse. It's a zombie, real, real zombie. Are they just just going to go ahead and continue doing this till they die? Like just because they can't stay with one partner throughout life, right? Well, I've never investigated narcissists in the afterlife, but I guess they're going to do that until they die. They can stay with one partner. There's something, a concept that I was the first to describe is called the island of stability. Narcissists and psychopaths have one island of stability and all the rest is chaos. For example, they have a marriage which lasts 40 years, but they change, they change 25 jobs. So the island of stability is the marriage and the chaos is the career or the professional life or opposite. They work in the same company for 50 years and they become the chief executive officer of the company, but in the meantime, they divorce and remarry six times. So the island of stability is the career and the professional life. So it's possible for the narcissists to remain with the same partner in the long term. And if he's cerebral, he will not cheat on. If he's somatic, he will. There's no type constancy. Narcissists oscillate between somatic and cerebral. When they collapse, when they are unable to secure supply, they change from cerebral to somatic and from somatic to cerebral and so on. So it's guaranteed that you will be cheated on at some point because he will become somatic at some point. If you're willing to live with this, open marriage or if you're willing to live with this, then you could have a very long relationship with the narcissist if you are his island of stability. But then you become fixated in the role of the mother. It's extremely unlikely that you will have sex with such a person because of the insist, element of insist in his mind. You become more and more of a mother. So it will be very difficult for him to have sex with you. And he will begin to develop with you the dynamics of that he used to have with his mother or that the child has with his mother. So expect rebelliousness, teenage rebelliousness, except all the dynamics of which a mother goes through. He will have just a child, like a child. And he will remain attached to you for 40 years, but he will be your child for 40 years. Wow. Well, that's not a relationship. That's not something I want to... I wouldn't generalize. There are women who find this a very attractive proposition. I wouldn't generalize. I would be very careful. There are quite a few women who find this and men, by the way, who find this an attractive proposition. By the way, the dynamic with a female narcissist is identical. It's not about a father. It's about a mother. It's always the mother, not the father. Okay. So she also has problems with the mother. Even if the mother is perfect and truly loving and truly caring and so on, she would have trouble separating from them. That could be an issue with the father. So she doesn't dare to separate from the mother because she has bad relationship with the father. But it's always the mother. So when a female narcissist teams up with a man, with an intimate partner, or with a woman, I mean, with a partner, and she would become... She would maternalize the partner. She would convert the partner into a mother figure. And so she could stay with the partner for 40 years, but he or she would be a mother figure. It's identical. And this is my work on dual mothership. That's the concept. Yeah, we saw that one. We watched your video. We're making a podcast here in Norway. It's actually going really well. Everybody's interested because the topic hasn't been spoken on here in Norwegian. And I was going through something in me because I was not sure if I wanted to make a podcast because I was afraid that my ex would hear it and I don't know how he would react. But I decided to do it anyway for me and to help other who are or have been in the same situation. Is your ex violent or aggressive? Yeah. He is not violent, but he is aggressive. Aggressive. That's something. If your ex hasn't been violent or aggressive, it would have been interesting to bring him on camera and talk to him. If he's aggressive and violent, so better. Yeah. But he has a new girlfriend, so... That's an aggressive act. He has moved on. He moved on right away. Yeah. Only one month after we ended it. I told you, you meant nothing to him. Yeah, yes. I know. But that takes a little time to process, you know? He assumed that you're a human being to him. He assumed that he recognizes your separateness, that you're an entity. You're not an entity. You're a function. It's like I would never get attached to the electrician that comes to fix my electricity. No question of attachment here. It's ridiculous. I don't even see him as a person. I'm not asking how's your family and what, you know? No, of course not. It's just here to fix my electricity. You're a service provider. Think of yourself as a... That's the same as with the narcissist, yeah. That takes some time, you know, to to cope and process. By the way, that's the best case. That you're an electrician. That's the best case. He could consider you're not as an electrician, but as a refrigerator, as an object, totally objectified in the human eye. So then he would not even see you as a human figure that provides services. He would see you as an object, a total object. Yeah. You're like a bus. You're like a bus. It's very uncomfortable to miss the bus, but you can rest assure another one is coming. Yeah, yeah. Oh my god. That's so true. Miss another one is coming, yeah. I think Ludacris has a song about that, yeah. That is really enlightening to hear you speak about this topic. We're a big fan of you. And are you okay with we're taping this for our podcast, just the voices that we put on? Yeah. You can do anything you want with the images, with the voices. Thank you. And of course, you'll give me permission to post this on YouTube. Of course. We need it on camera. You can also do whatever you want. Thank you. If you have any further questions, I'm here. And if not, it's been a true pleasure. Thank you very grateful to have this chance. Thank you very much. It's a good initiative to educate people who are not exposed to the message, to educate them about narcissistic abuse, because narcissistic abuse is unlike any other type of abuse. That's the reason I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse in 1995, because I couldn't find anything remotely similar to this. All other types of abuse focus on a dimension. So financial abuse focuses on your money, physical abuse focuses on your body, verbal abuse and psychological abuse focuses on your mind. Abuse is dimensional. It's goal oriented. It's highly specific. It's like laser. Only narcissistic abuse focuses on eliminating you as an independent, autonomous and agentic entity. It's the only total abuse, only form of total abuse that we are aware of. So yes, it's a risk. It's a danger. And it's a danger because the numbers of narcissists are increasing exponentially. That's not me. These are studies by Twenge and Campbell, many others. The numbers are increasing exponentially. Society is built now to reward narcissists. So if you're a narcissist, your chances to end up on top, successful, said to them are much higher. Even in 2016, the famous science magazine, New Scientist, came up with a cover in July 2016. And the cover said, parents, teach your children to be narcissists. And their whole group of academics, they are glorifying narcissism. They're glamorizing narcissists. They're saying that narcissism and psychopathy are very good evolutionary steps. We need narcissists and psychopaths. And they're high functioning. And they can show us the way they can protect us. Quite a few academics are saying this. Kevin Dutton, Makobi, I can give you many names. It's very dangerous because it's becoming an ideology and the equivalent of a religion. The narcissism is a private religion. Narcissist Godlike is a divinity. It's a confluence of ideology, religion, social functioning, and interpersonal relationships. This could be a defining feature of our future if we don't fight back. And already I'm very afraid it's too late. Already I'm afraid. Okay guys, was a pleasure. Thank you. We love you. Bye bye. Bye bye. Let me see how this works.