10 Ways to Defeat the Narcissist (Compilation)

My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism.

In 1995, when I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse, I also came up with two coping strategies.

If you wanted to get rid of your narcissists, I suggested no contact. This strategy is tackled in another video on my channel.

The other strategy I developed, I dubbed background noise.

If you insist to stay with the narcissist, if you have no choice, if you have common children, if there are financial complications, if for some reason there is no way for you to exit the toxic remit and charmed circle of the narcissist, then I suggested to adopt a strategy called background noise.

As background noise, you ask the narcissist no questions.

Because if you ask the narcissist a question, it means you doubt him. It means you undermine his authority. It means that you may have thought of something that he had omitted to think of. It means that potentially you're more clever than you. You see things differently. These are all narcissistic injury. So ask the narcissist no questions.

Second principle of background noise.

Never criticize the narcissist, never disagree with the narcissist.

The narcissist is always right. The narcissist is omniscient. He knows everything there is to know, even if he doesn't know it.

The third principle of background noise is to confine your responses to the content of the question, the query, or the prompt by the narcissist.

First of all, never initiate a conversation. Only when addressed talk.

So when you are addressed by the narcissist, when you ask your question or broach as a subject, limit your responses and reactions to the subject matter raised by the narcissists.

Do not expand the conversation. Do not introduce new topics or new issues. Do not initiate or embark upon tangents which the narcissist didn't think of.

Always be there as an echo, always react, never proact.

So, if you look at these three principles, never ask questions, never criticize and disagree, and never ever expand the topic of conversation beyond the limitations and boundaries set by the narcissists in his initial address, you see that background noise is a very simple technique, a very simple strategy.

Simply never initiate, never be proactive, always react, always be compliant or even to some extent be subservient, always be an echo, always record what the narcissist says and then play back to him when he wants to hear it.

As most narcissists would say, had I wanted your opinion, I would have given it to you.

My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

All told, there are three ways to manipulate the narcissism.

You can withhold narcissistic supply from him until he comes, hat in hand, begging for more. And then you can name your price and dictate the terms.

A second technique is to constitute yourself as a reliable source of high-grade supply, and thereby fostering the narcissist dependence and adherence to your minutest needs and wishes.

You would be amazed how attentive the narcissist can be to a good source of narcissistic supply.

And then there's a third technique to take active part in buttressing and upholding the narcissist's grandiose fantasies, to collude in a shared psychosis with him, and thus render him amenable to your wishes and priorities as long as they seamlessly conform to his delusional narrative.

Right.

The irony is that narcissists who consider themselves worldly, discerning, knowledgeable, shrewd, cunning, erudite, and astute, well, these exact narcissists are actually more gullible than the average person.

This is because narcissists are fake. Their self is false. Their life is a confabulation. Their reality test is long gone.

Narcissists live in a fantasy land, all their own, in which they are the center of the universe. They are admired, feared, held in awe, and respected for their omnipotence and omniscience.

In short, narcissists are prone to magical thinking. They hold themselves immune to the consequences of their actions or inaction.

Therefore, they consider themselves to be beyond punishment and the laws of man.

Narcissists are easily persuaded to assume unreasonable risks and to expect miracles to happen. They often find themselves on the receiving end of investment scams, for example.

Again, because they are risk-prone, reckless.

Narcissists feel entitled, entitled to everything, money, power, honors, even though these are incommensurate with their accomplishments or toil.

The world, God, the nation, society, for their families, co-workers, employers, even neighbors owe them afree exalted luxurious existence.

They are rudely shocked when they are penalized for their misconduct, or when their fantasies remain just that. Fantasies.

The narcissist believes that he is destined to greatness, or at least the easy life. He wakes up every morning, fully ready for a fortuitous stroke of luck.

That explains the narcissist's reckless behaviors and his laced lack of self-discipline. It also explains why the narcissist is so easily duped.

By playing on the narcissist's grandiosity and paranoia, it is possible to deceive and manipulate the narcissist effortlessly.

Just offer the narcissist's narcissistic supply, admiration, adulation, and he is all yours. Hark on the narcissistic insecurities and on his persecutory delusions and he is likely to trust only you and cling only to you for their life.

Both paranoia and grandiosity impair the narcissistic reality test and engender cognitive deficits.

Paranoia and grandiosity lead to the erection of complex and wasteful defenses against usually non-existent threats and enemies.

Narcissists attract abuse. They are haughty, exploitative, demanding, insensitive and quarrelsome.

Narcissists tend to draw opprobrium and provoke anger and even hatred solely lacking in interpersonal skills, devoid of empathy and steeped in irksome grandiose fantasies, narcissists invariably fail to mitigate the irritation and revolt that they induce in others.

Successful narcissists are frequently targeted by stalkers and erotomanias, usually mentally ill people, who develop a fixation of a sexual or emotional nature on the narcissist.

When inevitably rebuffed by the narcissist, these people become vindictive and in rare cases even violent.

Less prominent narcissists, less successful ones, end up sharing life with codependents and with inverted narcissists.

The narcissistic situation is exacerbated by the fact that often the narcissist himself is an abuser.

Like the boy who cried wolf, people do not believe that the perpetrator of egregious deeds can himself forepray to maltreatment.

People tend to ignore and discard the narcissist cries for help. They disbelieve his protestations. They assume that he is guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around.

So how does the narcissist react when he finds himself on the receiving end of abuse?

Well, like all other victims. He is traumatized. He goes through the phases of denial, helplessness, rage, depression, and finally acceptance.

But the narcissist's reactions are amplified by his shattered sense of omnipotence.

Abuse breeds humiliation, and humiliation breeds helplessness, and to the narcissist's helplessness, he is a novel experience.

Hitherto, he considered himself all-powerful, godlike. Abuse reminds him that he is all too human and sometimes less than human.

The narcissistic defense mechanisms and their behavioral manifestations diffuse rage, idealization and devaluation, exploitation.

These defense mechanisms are useless when confronted with a determined, vindictive, or delusional stalker.

The narcissist is flattered by the attention that he receives from the abuser or the stalker renders him even more vulnerable to the former's manipulation.

Nor can the narcissist come to terms with his need for help. He cannot acknowledge that wrongful behavior on his part may have contributed and precipitated somehow the situation.

The narcissist's self-image as infallible, mighty, all-knowing, this self-image as him being far superior to us. This exact self-image won't let him admit to any shortfalls, any mistakes, any needs, even need for advice or for help.

Narcissists consider themselves self-contained, self-sufficient.

As the abuse progresses, the narcissist feels increasingly cornered, his conflicting emotional needs to preserve the integrity of his grandiose false self, even as he seeks much needed support. While these conflicting needs place an unbearable strain on the precarious balance of his immature and disorganized personality.

Decompensation is the disintegration of the narcissist defense mechanism. It leads to acting out. Temper tantrums, outbursts, loss of control.

And if the abuse is protracted, it leads to withdraw, and even in extreme cases, to psychotic micro-episodes.

Abusive acts in themselves are rarely dangerous.

Not so the reactions to abuse, above all the overwhelming sense of violation and humiliation.

So narcissists are actually classic victims of abuse in many cases.

Yet it does not provoke in them self-awareness let alone remorse or empathy of which they are largely incapable. It is wasted on them.

Yes, even abuse is wasted on the narcissist.

And now I'm inviting you to a tour of the narcissist.

As we tour the narcissist's mind, you will understand why each of these techniques is working.

So this is actually the second part of the lecture is to explain to you why these techniques are working and to allow you with this deeper understanding to use these techniques more effectively.

The reason the narcissist is very effective at manipulating you, controlling you, and inducing in you emotions and moods, is because exactly like you, the narcissist is a victim.

Narcissism is a post-traumatic condition.

The narcissist has been the victim, usually, of his parents.

As a victim, the narcissist shows a specific, a highly specific solution.

But the fact that the narcissist chose a specific solution does not mean that the narcissist is not a victim. He is as much a victim as you are.

The reason the narcissist victimizes you is that he wants company. As long as you are.

The reason the narcissist victimizes you is that he wants company. As long as you are not victimized, you are alien to the narcissist.

Narcissist wants to feel at home, among his own kind. He wants to be among victims because he is a victim.

So he converts and transforms everyone around him into a victim, simply to feel at home.

And of course, the clinical concept is comfort zone. The narcissist's comfort zone is among victims.

The narcissist will victimize you, never mind what you do. Never mind what you do not do. Never mind how often you do or do not do what you do or do not do. Never mind if you are, because you don't even have to be for the narcissists to victimize you.

And here's the worst part. When the narcissist converts you to an image of himself, he's doing you a favor because he is superior. He is godlike. He is bringing you up to his level.

What does it say in Genesis, the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible? God created man in his own image. The narcissist creates you in his own image.

He is furious at your lack of gratitude. Here he is investing in inferior you.

He's very close to God. Sometimes they change places.

And here he is. Having chosen you. And who has selected you. He could have chosen anyone.

That's right. And here, but he chose you. And here he is, molding you, shaping you like Pygmalion and Galatea.

And how do you react? You're unhappy. You claim to be abused and victimized.

You're too stupid to realize the enormous gift you are receiving.

You must understand this. The narcissist is very angry at you. All the time, either because you are too retarded to appreciate his gifts, which is usually the case. Or if you are intelligent, you are too ungrateful.

The narcissist's partner is in a binary state. Retard or ungrateful. And usually ungrateful retard.

And so the narcissist says to himself, to mold my partner, I must resort to extreme and radical measures.

Americans call it tough love. They tried it in Iraq. This is tough love. It's for your own good. You will thank me one day if you survive.

But there is a problem and now I'm going to take you into the soul, the psyche and the mind of the narcissist.

There was a sociologist by the name of Giddens, and in the 1990s, Giddens came with a concept called ontological insecurity.

The narcissist is in a state of ontological insecurity.

What is ontological insecurity?

It's when you don't feel continuous. When you don't feel that your yesterday, your today is a continuation of yesterday and your tomorrow will be a continuation of today.

Obviously, if there is no continuity, it is impossible to develop an identity.

The narcissist is possibly the only form of human who has no core, no identity, no kernel.

In 1995 I proposed that narcissism is a form of multiple personality disorder because the narcissist has two selves. True self which is a traumatized very very young child who is paralyzed by fear and hurt. So this child is dysfunctional and has no effect on the psychodynamics of the narcissists.

And there is the false self, which is godlike. We'll come to it a bit later.

Two selves, yes, true and false.

Technically, it's multiple personality disorder because it's a person with two personalities.

But I was wrong. It's the second time I admit something today. I don't know what's happening to me. I was wrong because in multiple personality known today as dissociative identity disorder. In dissociative identity disorder, there is continuity.

The person with multiple personalities has many personalities, but each of these personalities has perfect memory and perfect identity. And each of these personalities has total continuity.

So, if someone with multiple personality has six personalities, and one of these personalities is Sam, Sam comes out, talks to the therapist, and then four months later, Sam comes out again. Sam will remember the conversation with the therapist.

The six personalities have total continuity, total memory, total identity, not the narcissist.

Narcissists forget or have no access to almost 80%, at least according to my studies, 80%, 80%, at least according to my studies, 80% of their memories.

Every minute you are confronted with a new person, new narcissist, which has nothing to do with the person a minute before.

Narcissists suffer from something called dissociation. Dissociation is breaks in memory, missing time.

So the narcissist misses seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, but misses all the time. He dissociates, he dissociates all the time. He is not continuous.

How to live like that?

What the narcissist does is called, in clinical terms, confabulation.

The narcissist invents stories to cover the missing parts.

The narcissist says to himself, I remember picking the golf club and I remember the ball going to the hole. But I don't remember anything in between.

So let's see. Probably, probably. It's logical that I hit the ball with the golf club.

Probably. It's logical. It makes sense. It's plausible. But I do not remember it.

And this is called confabulation.

Very often, the narcissist gets the confabulation wrong.

So people think he's lying or gaslighting. He is not. He's confabulating.

Here's your problem as victims or partners.

The narcissist is like the river of Heraclitus. You know, Panta Rhei, you cannot enter the same river twice.

You cannot talk to the same narcissist twice. You do not have a relationship with the same person. You do not communicate with the same human being.

Not only there is no one there, there's nobody there, but the emptiness itself is fragmented and fractured to pieces. It's like an empty, beautiful, empty palace with no inhabitants and the walls themselves are cracked and falling down.

Partners of narcissists cannot digest this.

There are two things that victims of narcissists cannot accept and cannot digest.

One, the narcissist does not exist. There is nobody home. There is no person there.

I mean, probably many of you know that I'm a narcissist, yes? I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personalities, twice, over 15 years. It's pretty safe I'm one.

So you look at me. Here I am, joking, talking, drinking coffee, drinking water, smiling at Barbara.

What am I missing?

Some of you may think that I'm reasonably okay looking, those with myopia.

So it is impossible for you to grasp that there is nobody here behind this lectern.

Trust me on this, there is nobody here. You're experiencing mass delusion, where we come to it.

This phenomenon is known as the Uncanny Valley.

The second thing that victims, or intimate partners of narcissists find difficult to accept, that to the narcissists, they are not special. They are commodities, as interchangeable as grains of rice.

The narcissist is with you, married to you, has children with you, had experiences with you, told you that he loves you a million times. How many times you made love? He cried, intimacy.

The minute you stop functioning, he replaces you. Because you are a commodity.

The narcissist loves his wife and he also loves rice. And very often he cannot tell the difference.

Victims find it shattering because their individuality is challenged.

So this is the first thing, ontological insecurity, dissociation, confabulation, nobody home. No one there.

Sorry, before I go to the second thing.

Stop communicating so hard. You cannot negotiate with a non-entity. Your agreements mean nothing because no one signed them. You are talking to him, you are talking to yourself.

It's a ghost, less than a ghost. It's a pretension. It's a piece of fiction.

The false self is a piece of fiction. It's a bad movie. It's a script.

Why do I resemble a human being so well? How do I give this almost perfect rendition of a human being?

I observed many of you for a long time. I have 190 IQ. I used it.

You are not complex. They're very basic life forms. You are easy to manipulate because you have three or four basic modes. Your user manual is pretty rudimentary.

So, you know, it's not too difficult to deceive you into believing that I'm human.

It helps that I'm made of carbon, like the next generation of artificial intelligence.

When the final Androids hit the Earth, they will be made of carbon, they will have superior cognitive skills. I hope they will be more handsome than me, but they will be me.

I am it. I am this thing. I am in many respects your future.

I think this is the horror at the core of narcissism. This is why narcissism had become a global phenomenon.

From Nepal to Australia and from Egypt to Canada. There is a universal resonance because I think you recognize that this life form, narcissists, probably is the future.

I didn't say that. Japanese roboticist said it. In 1970, Masahiro Mori said that when robots become indistinguishable from people, people will become very frightened, phobic and anxious.

And he called it Uncanny Valley.

Everyone feels uncomfortable around the narcissists. We have proved it in studies.

People don't know that they are with narcissists in the same room and they will react with extreme anxiety and discomfort.

Why?

They feel that something is missing. Something is off key. Something is imitated, not real, something is fake.

I'm telling you all these things for you to accept that it is not possible to have a meaningful emotional life with the narcissists. And no amount of manipulation will change this. The next thing you need to understand about the narcissist is that narcissists, like people with other mental health problems, they are capable of what we call paradoxical thinking.

The first person to describe paradoxical thinking, for psychologists was Bateson. He called it double bind. And then L, Lang was a famous British psychotherapy, Audi Lang, and he called it the incomplete not. Paradoxical thinking is simply the ability to have, at the same time, contradictory thoughts and contradictory beliefs. You can't do that. You cannot think at the same time, wow, this guy is evil and this guy is wonderful. You cannot think at the same time I believe the world is good and the world is horrible. You cannot have conflicting cognitions and conflicting values and beliefs. This creates in you something called dissonance. And you solve the dissonance by getting rid of one of the horns, one of the sides, one of the thoughts. Not so the narcissists. Narcissists can, at the same time, at the same moment, have conflicting thoughts, contradictory thoughts, contradictory emotions, contradictory values and contradictory beliefs. So who are you talking to when you communicate with the narcissus? And when you manipulate the narcissists, who are you manipulating? He can say at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Babala is wonderful, and at 3.15, Barbara sucks. He changes his views, his commitments, his promises, his contracts, everything changes constantly and dramatically, because he has paradoxical thinking.

Why does he have paradoxical thinking? Because he doesn't exist. The essence of existence is the stability of cognitions, values, and so on. And these are known as shamas schemes. So everyone has shem, amalgams, collections, collections of emotions, cognition, beliefs, values, and they are stable and they are solid. Under stress, they can break down, but still, normally they're very stable. It makes all of you more or less predictable, reliable. And of course, it allows society to function. Narcissists and psychopaths, by the way, have none of this. They go with the flow. And they react to internal dynamics by changing themselves so completely that they are utterly new. It is utterly disorienting. It's like shape-shifting, you know in science fiction movies, shape-shifting. It's chimera, chimerical. And it's very, very disorienting and sometimes frightening and always infuriating. Intimate partners and victims of narcissists spend huge amounts of time trying to nail down the jelly. But yesterday you said this, but you promised this, but didn't we agree total waste of time the third thing you need to know about narcissists the narcissist starts as a reflection it's the only human being that starts its conscious existence as a reflection. The narcissist constructs his sense of self, the false self, by reflecting himself from other people. Healthy people, healthy people have a stable core, they get input from other people, and they reject most of it. And they reject most of this input for good reason. This stability of the core remains for life. Regulation of sense of self-worth, regulation of moods, regulation of emotions. It all comes from inside. If you find yourself on a lonely island, alone on an island, nothing will happen to you as far as your sense of self. Even alone on an island, you would still feel that you are you. Not so the narcissist. The narcissist is the totality of the reflections of other people. The narcissist's mind is like a hive of bees. Your mind is like a surface, uninterrupted surface. Everything fits in. What doesn't fit in, you discard. After 20 years, 30 years, you are absolutely smooth and seamless. The narcissist mind is like a hive of bees with hexagons, millions of hexagons. And to each hexagon, the narcissist collects. His reflection in her eyes, in her eyes, in his eyes, in his eyes, in his eyes, in her eyes, collects millions of reflections, and then processes these reflections, puts them in the hexagons. And what happens when there are no reflections? Narcissus feels, when he is not surrounded by people who reflect him, the narcissist feels that he does not exist. You remember the technique of withholding? This is connected to this. If you withhold, you don't reflect, if you don't reflect, you threaten the narcissist very existence.

In the relationship with the narcissist, you have 100% of the power. The narcissist has zero.

The genius of the narcissist is to convince you that he has 100% of the power. And you have zero. The narcissist does have empathy. It's called called empathy. Cold empathy is empathy, but without emotions. It's goal called empathy. Called empathy is empathy, but without emotions. It's goal-oriented. So if I see someone crying, I would recognize that she is sad. I would recognize this. She is sad. So I do have empathy. I have cognitive empathy. cognitive empathy but you will say wow she said I remember being said it's a bad feeling can I do something for her emotional resonance she, I remember being said. It's a bad feeling, I want to help. The narcissist says, or the psychopath, she is said, I know what it means to be said. Not from personal experience, but I know, I read in books, I observed, I know what it means to be said cognitively.

Now, if I play my cards right, probably at the end of the night I can have sex with her because she is broken, she is vulnerable. Her defenses are down. It's an opportunity. Called empathy is empathy used to find your vulnerabilities and then use these vulnerabilities to obtain goals. Narcissistic supply, sex, money, power, contacts, whatever. So, never ever show the narcissist any emotion. Starve, starve the narcissist called empathy of information. Do not provide information to the narcissists called empathy. You want to cry? There's always the toilet. You're happy. Keep it to yourself. It's like the Miranda warning. Any emotion you show can and will be used against you. And this is called empathy. Similarly, never ever offer the narcissist help or advice. It's extremely difficult. Many of you love the narcissists. It's a different lecture. What's wrong with you?

But many of you do. And when you love someone, I heard, you want to help. You want to prevent bad things from happening to that person. You want to guide the person in the right direction, if you know the right direction. Or you just want to hold. Hold the person.

These are critical mistakes with the narcissist. person in the right direction if you know the right direction or you just want to hold hold the person these are critical mistakes with the narcissist i repeat never ever offer help advise guidance or holding for

two reasons one the narcissists will interpret your behavior as weakness, as vulnerability, something he can leverage, something he can use to obtain goals in the future. We'll begin to fake the need for help. Second thing, if you offer the narcissist help and advice, he will think that you are humiliating him. It's narcissistic injury. The narcissist doesn't need help from you. Nassiz doesn't need help from anyone. He's above help. He's omnipotent. He's all powerful. Narcise doesn't need advice from you. He's omniscient. He knows everything. A narcissist will drive his car for six hours before his wife will ask someone for help. Because he cannot find the place. If you are offering the narcissist advice or help, you are saying to the narcissist, you are in need of advice and help. I have something you don't have. For example, I have information you don't have. Narciss willdon't have. For example, I have information you don't have.

Narcissist will react very badly to this. We'll never forgive you for offering help and advice.

You well know by now, it's something that I described in the mid-90s, a cycle of idealization, devaluation, discard and replacement.

There is a technique that makes use of this cycle.

The narcissist first idealizes you, then the narcissist devalues you, then the narcissist discards you, and then the narcissist replaces you with someone else.

To manipulate the narcissist, you reverse the cycle.

Reverse it.

Remember, idealize, devalue, discard, replace. The technique is replace, replace, replace, discard, devalue, idealize.

Replace the narcissist with someone, visibly, triangulate.

Then discard him, not only triangulate with someone, but also discard the narcissist.

As you discard him, devalue him.

I don't know. You're not a man, example.

And finally, idealize him.

That's it, he's yours.

So it's reverse of the cycle.

Simply reverse the cycle.

Now, many women came to this behavior intuitively.

The maximum effect, maximum impact, if it is all done in one sitting, in one situation, happened to me recently.

The next thing you should know about the...

So as you see, I'm describing the world of the narcissist and from each aspect of the narcissist's personality, I'm giving you some technique or some approach that might work.

The narcissist is a victim of abuse. That's why he became a narcissist.

As a child, the narcissist was terrified of pain, of abuse. That's why he became a narcissist. As a child, a narcissist was terrified of pain, of hurt, of unpredictability.

So he created the false self.

Narcissists don't have relationships. They have power plays. It's all about power. All of it is establishing a balance of terror, a matrix of power.

The narcissist from the very beginning after the love bombing phase.

By the way, the love bombing phase is not telling you, it's not about telling you that the narcissist needs you, it's about telling you how unique you are. The narcissist is trying in the love bombing phase to convert you into narcissists, to taste how it feels to get narcissistic supply.

So the love bombing phase is simply to give you the taste of this drug so that you become junkies as well.

But the minute the narcissist acquires you, the minute the narcissists hoovers you, the minute you belong to the narcissist in his mind, the narcissist's message to you is, I don't need you. There is nothing you have that I want or that I need or that I cannot get anywhere else. Don't think you have any power over me because you don't. You do not have power over me. And I can dump you tomorrow and find someone else in minutes.

This is precisely the essence of relationships with narcissists.

In the first phase, the narcissist tells you how special you are.

In the second phase, the narcissist tells you how not special you are.

You're amazing. You're unique. You are the love of my life. I never had this experience with anyone. I never felt so deeply.

You know what? I never felt at all. You are the first and only. The things you do to me.

And this is the love bombing phase and makes you feel very very unique one in the world. There's only one you. You can offer nothing I need.

And what you offer, I don't need.

If I'm a cerebral narcissist, I'm above sex. Sex is for plebeians. If I'm any kind of narcissists, I'm above emotions. Love is for stupid people, weak people.

And if it's not you, then someone else. You should be honored and grateful that I've introduced you into my exciting and adventurous life.

It is this pendulum of conflicting messages that totally unsettles and destabilize the victim.

The narcissist fully expects to lose you. He already behaves as though he had lost you. You're always temporary. Even if you are 30 years together, you're still temporary.

Narcissists have something called anticipatory loss anxiety.

From very early age, narcissists have something called object inconstancy or object impermanence.

Again, for those of you who are in psychology, object permanence is a term coined by Jean Piaget, a child psychologist in the late 60s. And object inconstancy is a term coined by Margaret Mahler, she was a psychoanalyst actually, she was a doctor, but expert on child psychology.

You know, when a baby at a very early age, before the first year of life, between five months and one year, when mother leaves the room, the baby starts to cry. Because out of sight, out of existence. If the baby doesn't see mother, mother stops to exist.

Gradually, the child creates a representation of mother inside his mind. When mother is in the room, the child interacts with mother. When mother is outside the room, the child interacts with the representation of mother.

This representation is known as Imago.

So with a narcissist, there is a problem at this phase. And what happens is the narcissist interacts only with the representation.

Can you think why? Why would the narcissist prefer to interact with the representation and not with you?

I gave you the clue. I gave you the answer actually.

If I am afraid to lose you, I would prefer to interact not with you, but with your representation.

You can always walk away out of my life. I don't control what you do and what you may do, but I have full control over the representation inside my mind.

So the minute the narcissist sees you and decides that you are potentially a good source of supply, a shocking process takes place, and you're not even aware of it.

The narcissist snapshots you, takes a snapshot with his mental camera. He meets someone, he thinks she can supply, provide supply, at that second he takes a snapshot.

From that second, I want you to understand this. It's extremely difficult to believe. I know. From that second, all the time, the narcissist interacts never ever with you, always with a snapshot.

In a minute you will understand why the narcissist has at some point to devalue you, although in many cases the cycle repeats itself many times, but such a cycle must exist.

The narcissist has you and a snapshot. But you are not the snapshot. You have your own life. You develop. You study. You travel. You have lovers, maybe. Don't tell anyone. I mean, things happen to you. You initiate things. You are, in other words, dynamic.

The snapshot is static. You start from the same position. Over overlapping.

And then what happens? You move away. Snapshot is here and you're here.

But the narcissist is emotionally invested in the snapshot, controls the snapshot, talks to the snapshot.

So you gradually become less and less relevant as you diverge from the snapshot.

At some point, you become a threat.

The differences between you and the snapshot are so enormous that even the narcissist cannot deceive himself that the snapshot is accurate.

At some point, you challenge the snapshot. You all know that point. You've all gone through it because the narcissist starts saying things like, You have changed a lot. You're not the same woman I fell in love with. What's happening to you? You need help. You're going through a crisis.

He is describing the gap, the abyss that is opening between you and the snapshot.

At that point, he must get rid of you. Must get rid of you.

Because the snapshot matters to him much more than you. He's protecting the snapshot. He has zero tolerance for abandonment, zero tolerance for loss, because he is a baby. It's a baby. Baby with no object consistency.

So he gets rid of you.

How to get rid of you? By devaluing you.

How to justify to himself that he idealized you yesterday and is devaluing you today?

What? He made a mistake. When he idealized you, was he mistaken?

No way. Narcissus is never mistaken. You changed. You are not the same person.

The person he's devaluing is not the person that he idealized.

So this mechanism, which is technically known as introjection, this mechanism explains the cycles.

What is the technique?

So everything I'm telling you, there is a technique. The technique is to animate the snapshot.

Remember, the narcissist has in his mind a representation of you as you used to be, let's say, when you met.

So you have two options. To go back to that time and become who you used to be, to give up on your personal progress and development.

You will be shocked how many partners do exactly this.

They started to study in the university, they stop. They are successful in business. They close the business. They should have. They unwind the changes.

That's one technique.

The second technique is what we call brinkmanship.

It's to animate the snapshot to extreme. That means to challenge the snapshot. To provide the narcissist with a new snapshot.

But how can you do that? You already has a snapshot of you by not being you.

You must change so radically and dramatically that the narcissist will have the feeling that he had just met a new partner.

Change everything from hairstyle to clothing, to lovers, to behave totally differently, different priorities, different everything.

And the narcissist will say, wow, I'm falling in love with you again. You're so different.

I've had couples restart sex after 15 years. I've had divorced couples who went back to living together with this technique.

Next thing you should know.

Narcissism feels to the narcissist like religion feels to an extreme American fundamentalist. Or a member of ISIS.

Narcissists are religious fanatics. They are members of a very special religion.

This religion has one god and one worshiper. And it's the only religion in the world where the god is the worshiper but the inner experience the emotional correlate the cognitive aspects are utterly identical to a religious experience.

Let us try to understand why.

It's my favorite topic so I don't care if you are not interested.

To live with a narcissist. To be with a narcissist is to be a member of a cult. The narcissist is the leader of the cult and you are the member.

The narcissism religion is missionary. Christianity sent missionaries in the 19th century to Africa to convert the natives. The natives were happy. Some of the missionaries were tasting.

But exactly like Christianity sent missionaries to Africa to convert the natives, exactly in the same way, the narcissist is trying to convert you to his religion.

What is narcissistic supply?

It's to worship the narcissist.

When the narcissist is asking you to give him supply, he is asking you to worship his God, him.

So there is a very interesting branch, new branch, of teaching the victims to cope with narcissists the same way we cope with religious fundamentalists.

I'm kidding you not.

When you meet a fanatic Muslim or a fanatic Jew or a fanatic Christian, instinctively you know what not to say.

Yes?

You will not mock Muhammad unless you are Danish. You will not attack God in the presence of a fundamentalist Christian. You will not attack Jesus in the presence of fundamentalist Christian.

So you know intuitively, instinctively, no one taught you, no one told you, but you know what not to do. You know what not to say.

And if you are inside the church or inside the mosque or insideto do. You know what not to say.

And if you are inside the church or inside the mosque or inside the synagogue, you definitely know that some things are never done, some things are never said.

Well, when you live with a narcissist, you are living with a religious fundamentalist. Some things you never do, and some things you never say.

You never challenge the God of the narcissist, which happens to be the narcissist. You never challenge the attributes of that God.

God is all- knowing. God is all- powerful. God is perfect. God is brilliant.

You don't challenge this. It's bad taste. It's impolite to tell me that I'm not God. It also means you are delusional. I am God.

But still, it's a church.

So, seriously, if you begin to look at narcissism as a religion and understand that you are living with that religion's extreme fundamentalist, you will automatically, instinctively, intuitively, know what to do and how to behave.

How does narcissism become a religion? Why does it have religious aspects?

The child is abused by his parents, mostly his mother, but not only, by his parents.

Now, this abuse has many forms. It can be classic, sexual abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse.

But abuse is any situation where the child is not allowed to separate from the parent and become an individual. When the parent does not allow the child to develop his or her own boundaries.

A healthy child with a healthy parent, the child stops here, the parent starts here. There's a boundary between them.

In the case of a narcissistic parent usually, the child is not allowed to build Donald Trump's border wall. The child is not allowed to make a distinction between herself or himself and the parent.

So you know the mother who always wanted to be an actress and she failed and she forces her daughter to become an actress. That's abuse.

You know the mother who spoils the child and tells him that he can never do anything wrong. It's abuse. It's abuse because it doesn't allow the child to conflict with the environment, thereby creating a boundary.

So there are many, many forms of abuse.

How does a child react to this?

He creates an imaginary friend, a piece of fiction, the false self. The false self is everything that the child is not.

The child is small. False self is infinite.

The child cannot guess what the parent will do next. The parent is unpredictable.

The false self knows everything, is omniscient. The parent is unpredictable. The false self knows everything. He's omniscient.

The child is helpless. The false self is all-powerful.

The child is receiving conditional love. If you do this and this, I will love you.

So the child knows that if he fails, he a bad object he will not be loved he is unworthy.

The false self is perfect. The false self is everything the child is not.

But look at the list of the false self, perfect, knows everything, all powerful, brilliant. There are only two entities in the world which have this description.

One is Donald Trump and one is God. And Donald Trump has orange hair.

So, the only God is left.

So seriously, the child actually invents God and creates, the child creates a private religion.

This God, the false self, protects him from the parent, absorbs the pain and the hurt, isolates the child like a firewall.

The false self is a child's god.

But you know, it's a very primitive God. It's the God of the Old Testament. It's a very primitive God.

And like the God of the Old Testament who asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the false self asks the child to sacrifice something.

The false self is a god and wants human sacrifice.

But what human sacrifice? What can the child sacrifice? Who can the child sacrifice? Who can the child sacrifice?

Himself. Only himself.

That's precisely what the child does. He sacrifices himself to this new god, the false self. He sacrifices his true self to the false self.

I think of saying he's a false self. He worships the false self.

But the false self is a very greedy and hungry god. Like the Moloch, one human sacrifice is not enough.

This god demands additional human sacrifices.

And this is where I'm happy to say, you come in. You are these additional human sacrifices.

The narcissist has to sacrifice you to the false self.

And this is precisely why in 1995 I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse.

Why did I need to say narcissistic abuse? Why not abuse?

Because narcissistic abuse is total. The narcissist's only way to sacrifice you to the false self is to eliminate your separate existence.

He must, the narcissist must annihilate you.

The narcissist abuse is not functional or instrumental. It's existential.

You must die so that the false self is gratified and satisfied.

Because if the false self is not satisfied and not gratified, the narcissist will not exist.

So ladies and ladies, when you team up with a narcissist, it's either him or you. It's a war to death. One of you must die, at least psychologically.

Indeed, victims and intimate partners of narcissists describe a feeling of inner death.

It's very interesting because there was a scholar by the name of Otto Kernberg. In 1975, Kernberg invented the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

When we observe victims of narcissists from the outside, we cannot tell if they are victims of narcissists or if they are patients with borderline personality disorder.

This void, this inner death, is common to victims of complex PTSD and to patients with borderline personality disorder.

And it leads to lability, ups and downs, and to emotional dysregulation, which is subject for another lecture.

Four brief points and then I will open the floor to questions.

Point number one.

The narcissist has an external locus of control.

In other words, the narcissist, ironically, believes that his life is determined from the outside.

Consequently, the narcissist blames everything on the outside. And this is known as alloplastic defense.

So this is the sequence. My life is determined from outside, so I'm not responsible. It's all by fault. Not guilty. They did it. He did it. She did it. Yuk, yuk. Not me.

So locus of control is external, defense is alloplastic.

This is very interesting for you, because if you are willing to play a kind of dangerous game, you can become the narcissist's locus of control.

But you have to be very sharp, astute and know what you're doing.

First of all, you must allow the narcissist to blame you for everything. Allow, encourage it, to blame you for everything.

So you come to narcissists, it's my fault, I made a mistake, it was wrong, I shouldn't have done it, oh, poor you, you're suffering because of me, etc., etc.

This has two beneficial effects.

If you say it, the narcissist doesn't have to say it. It introduces the abuse.

But much more importantly, gradually, the narcissist, out of convenience, will begin to regard you as the locus of control, as the external locus of control.

And he will become extremely codependent on you.

It's totally counterintuitive technique, but it works.

Narcissus will say to himself, everything that's bad is her fault. Probably everything that's good is her fault. Probably everything is her fault. Probably she controls everything. It's a kind of a conspiracy theory. He will develop a kind of conspiracy theory.

Don't forget, the narcissism is a religion. And you can apply for the job of God. All you need is a long white beard.

Okay, next point, magical thinking.

One of the reasons no therapy works with narcissists, all therapies fail with narcissists, possibly the reason, the major reason, is the therapist insists to treat narcissists as adults.

They strike an alliance with the narcissist.

They negotiate with the narcissist.

They argue with the narcissists.

They reason with the narcissists.

They ask the narcissist to promise things.

The narcissist is not an adult.

There is no narcissist alive whose mental age, well, alive, dead ones maybe, but there's no narcissist alive whose mental age is higher than, let's say, 11.

So it's a mistake to treat narcissists as adults.

My new therapy, call therapy, is built on this insight.

All the techniques in call therapy are based on child psychology.

But one of the things that children have is called magical thinking.

Because children have magical thinking, the narcissist has magical thinking.

Magical thinking is the belief that internal processes affect reality.

So you know the famous phenomenon that children blame themselves for bad things that are happening to the parents. That's magical thinking.

Or children expect miracles. Or believe in fairy tales. Or have imaginary friends. These are all forms of magical thinking.

And of course, false self is a major feat of magical thinking.

But if you take magical thinking and add to it grandiosity, godlike, I'm godlike, and add to it immunity, because I'm God, no one can touch me, if you mix this, you get a very explosive mixture.

Because of this mixture, the narcissist, for example, is reckless. He takes risks, crazy risks, because he believes in magic. He is immune. No one and nothing can touch him. There are no consequences to his actions. He's God. God can do anything, no?

So he's reckless.

So when you call that long? Risk taker.

And he is gullible. Stupid. Believes everyone and everything. It's easy to deceive, to cheat and to come.

No. There is no one more stupid than the person who thinks he is not. That's another Jew by the name of Socrates. Episenician.

So the narcissist believes that he knows everything, cannot learn anything, and no one can be more clever than him.

And this is the dream client of a con artist.

You can make use of this. You can make use of this.

If you want the narcissist to do something, you convince him that it was his idea. Everything comes from him.

You want to put an idea in his head, you ask for his advice, even if he's totally unqualified.

You push him to perform miracles. You say that you expect him to do this because he can do anything.

It's very easy to manipulate the narcissists using his grandiosity, magical thinking, and belief that he is immune to the consequences of his actions.

And you use the narcissist's entitlement.

You tell the narcissist, you deserve this. You want him to take risks? You want him to leave you alone?

All you have to say, for example, you deserve someone much better than me.

Truth, the narcissist will say, I really do.

Or you deserve the easy life. You shouldn't work so hard.

Or your luck will, you're very lucky, your luck will carry you through.

I mean, it's extremely easy. Just be creative.

The reason I'm giving you a two and something our lecture is because Barbara paid me a lot of money.

But if Barbara hadn't paid me a lot of money, the lecture would have been extremely short. It would have contained a single sentence.

Manage your narcissist as you manage your four-year-old. End of story. You saw how much money you could have saved?

That's a narcissist for you. You can never trust.

Last point, anyway. Last point, and I will open to questions.

One thing, people, including, by the way, the vast majority of professionals, including the leading experts on paranoia, what they don't appreciate, is that paranoia is a form of narcissism.

There are two critical elements in paranoia. Without which you cannot be paranoid.

Point number one, I am the center of attention. Someone is paying me attention. And I am sufficiently important for someone to want to harm me.

Take away these two elements and there's no paranoia.

But what is, what is, I'm the center of attention? Grandiosity. It's a form of narcissistic supply.

And what is, he wants to harm me. The CIA is after me. What is this? It means I'm very important. I can be important to the CIA, if I'm a nutcase, or I can be important to my neighbor. But it doesn't matter. I am important. My neighbor is sitting at night obsessed thinking how to kill my dog. I'm the center of my neighbor's universe, the focus of his thoughts.

This is classic, grandiose narcissism. Absolutely.

No wonder most narcissists are paranoid. It's just the other way that's not been recognized that most paranoids are actually narcissists.

Now, persecutory delusions, paranoia technically is called persecutory delusion because it's a delusion of persecution. Persecutory delusion lead to a behavior called hypervigilance.

Hypervigilance is when I scan the room and I say, I'm giving the most important lecture of this new century and this guy is blowing his nose that's an insult he's humiliating me so he barely, you're not, just kidding, this is an, so a classic narcissist might think like this he's scanning for disrespect, insults, attacks.

So for example, you tell me good morning, say me good morning, tell me good evening, no tell me good evening, let's be realistic, good evening, what do you think I don't know it's evening? You think I don't know it's evening? You think I'm stupid? I need to tell me it's evening.

This is a hypervigilant reaction, and it's very often utterly ridiculous, as in this example.

Good evening.

This guy thinks I'm too stupid to notice it's evening. Can't believe some people. I mean, horrible.

So this is paranoia, persecutory delusions and hypervigilance.

You can make use of it. You can make use of it by enhancing, and not ameliorating, not reducing, but enhancing the narcissists, persecutory delusions and hypervigilance. In various ways.

So for example, you remember the technique of deflectiondecoy, where both of you hate the mother-in-law? So you can use this common enemy to enhance the paranoia and to enhance the hypervigilance.

What for? The higher the paranoia and to enhance the hypervigilance.

What for? The higher the paranoia, the more the hypervigilance, the more the narcissists will need you as an ally. It will create what we call in French folie à deux. So both of you will be in this paranoid, persecutory delusion, and you will feed it, and the narcissist will get closer and closer to you.

This is very common in communities, for example, like the militias, the paramilitary militias in the United States, in the Appalachian Mountains and so on. It's common in some terrorist organizations.

For example, we have psychological studies of the Carlos terrorist organization in the 70s, and Baader Meinhof and the Red Guards in Italy. And in all these, there were women and men in cells, and they had this dynamic going.

So there are studies in Germany, Baader Meinhof. Some of the leaders were women. And they used these techniques exactly to control highly narcissistic men. Same in the Manson family.

So this is the technique I recommend if your narcissist is a serial killer or a terrorist. And if not, and you use this technique, he will end up as one.

Okay, guys, what's left of you? I'm open to questions.

Narcissists use two strategies, two behavioral patterns, in order to manipulate people, to do their bidding.

They either please people, cater to their needs, act as best friends, loving, compassionate, empathic. It's all, of course, a fake, feigned simulation, but it's still people-pleasing behavior emulates real people-pleases, or they terrorize people.

Today we're going to focus on people pleasing.

Now just to make clear, the majority of people pleases are not narcissists. They're not.

And yet all people pleases, narcissists or not, are easy to manipulate. It's easy to get them to do what you want them to do. It's not that they are gullible, it's not that they are pollyannaish, but they are driven. They're driven by the need to satisfy, gratify, and please others.

And so this is the topic of today's video. Three steps to manipulate a people pleaser. As evil a title as I could come up with.

And apropos evil, my name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever of narcissistic abuse, and a professor of clinical psychology, which pleases me no end.

Okay, Shoshanim, Shepim, Katzonim, etc., etc.

First, I advise you to realize that the video is divided in two parts.

The first part is a general introduction, and the second part I go much deeper into the psychology of people pleasers.

All in all, it's a pretty short video, by my standards, but still it would be perfectly okay if you were to watch only the first part. It's entirely up to you.

It's important to realize or to understand that people pleasing is a phenomenon that involves grandiosity and catastrophizing.

Why grandiosity?

People pleasers are submissive. People pleasers are meek, they're humble, they're modest, they're there to serve.

So why use the word grandiosity?

Because people pleaser make the assumption that other people are going to be devastated, that other people are going to be harmed, that the well-being of other people is going to be compromised if the people pleaser were to say no. If the people-pleaser were to deny his or her services, something bad would happen to the recipients.

So there is this grandiosity, this hidden message or hidden assumption that you as a people pleaser, you hold the well-being, the internal regulation, the moods and the emotions of other people in your hands. You're in charge. You're in charge of other people being happy. You're in charge of other people's happiness.

Now that's as grandiose statement as I've ever heard. And the people pleaser's message is, I am that important to other people's lives, I am that crucial to other people's well-being, that I really must perform. I must do my beat. I must contribute. I must please.

So this is the grandiosity part.

The second part has to do with catastrophizing.

Again, there's an occult hidden message, hidden assumption.

And that is, the people pleaser tells himself or herself, if I were to say no, there would be disastrous consequences to me, especially emotionally, but maybe also in other ways, I may end up making enemies and there will be disastrous consequences to others who could have benefited from my actions, choices and decisions.

So this assumption, this underlying assumption, that were the people pleasers cease to be a people pleaser, where the people pleaser stop pleasing other people, some disastrous, cataclysmic, apocalyptic consequences would follow.

This is of course catastrophizing a cognitive distortion.

Grandiosity is also a cognitive distortion.

So we can generalize and say that the people pleaser's mind is cognitively distorted. The reality testing of a people pleaser is all shot, impaired. He doesn't or she doesn't grasp reality appropriately.

The people pleaser grasped reality or perceived reality in a way that elevates the people pleaser into a position of power on the one hand and by doing so renders the people pleaser responsible for other people's happiness, other people's well-being, other people's gratification, and other people's accomplishments.

This is where the people pleaser positions himself or herself.

It's a choice actually. It's a choice that's emotionally gratifying, anxiety reducing, and self-aggrandizing.

There are automatic thoughts at the core of the people pleaser's.

People pleasing involves what is known in cognitive behavior therapy as are automatic thoughts, not necessarily negative.

Most people pleasers have been parentified as children. When they were young, they were forced to act in the role of a parent, even to their own parents. They fathered the father, they mothered the mother. They were the adults in the room as children.

They were never allowed to experience childhood. They were never inducted into a trajectory of healthy self-growth and self-development. They were playing a role from the very inception of life.

People Pleasing, therefore, is a role-playing that's to do with role playing and role theory.

But these automatic thoughts which are at the core of people pleasing, especially among parentifying children, are the following.

Number one, my happiness is always at someone else's expense. It's a zero-sum game. If I'm happy, that's because I've made someone else unhappy. Or it's because I could have made someone else happy and did not.

Number two, I have to earn my happiness. I don't deserve it. I have to work hard. I have to justify any gratification, any gift, any receiving, any... Whenever I take something, whenever I seek to be happy or content, I have to work hard to justify this. I don't deserve this automatically.

It's because maybe I'm not lovable, or maybe because I'm a failure making other people happy, or maybe because my destiny and my mission in life is to make other people happy. And any minute that I spend on myself is a dereliction of duty.

Whatever the reason may be, there is this self-perception that happiness is not out there for the taking, but has to be somehow gained, somehow earned.

Number three, I have to somehow bribe people to stay with me, collaborate with me, help me, and tolerate me.

Because I'm not lovable, or because I'm a freak, or because I'm a difficult person, or because I'm unique, even positively, unique, but in any case, I'm an exception. I'm an outlier.

And therefore, I should be treated as an outcast. And so when people agreed to be with me, spend time with me, when they agree to socialize me, let alone become friends or in a couple, when they agreed to work with me, help me. I should be grateful. I should be grateful, and I should demonstrate my gratitude by giving them something.

It could be something tangible, a material possession, it could be my time, it could be my resources and energy, it could be something self-sacrificial, denying myself happiness and gratification in order to bring it on in the people who share my life.

I am a bad object, says the people pleaser. I'm unworthy, I'm unlovable, I'm crazy, I'm inadequate, I'm dissolute, I'm hopeless, I'm irredeemable, and so on so on so forth.

Number four, I need to compromise on my boundaries and rights, owing to all the above.

Because I'm such a difficult person to be with, because the experience of being with me, the experience of helping me, the experience of loving me is so onerous and so unrewarding, I have to give up on my boundaries. I have to compromise on my rights. I have to be easygoing. I have to accept, I have to be submissive.

Why all that?

In order to somehow mitigate the difficulty of being with me.

If I were to be unboundary, if I were to not insist on what's mine and what I'm owed, maybe this would allow people in my life to remain in my life and to not abandon me or reject me.

Now, having taken all this in mind, you could see how easy it is to manipulate people pleasers.

The main motivation of a people pleaser would be to please you, of course.

So here are the three steps to manipulating people-pleasers.

All you have to do is this.

Number one, communicate your expectations, either overtly, explicitly and verbally, or behaviorally with body language, micro-expressions, and so on.

Either way, make clear and make sure that the people pleaser has understood what is expected of him or her.

Your expectations become the rule. Your expectations rule.

And so they must be gratified. They must be met and they must be actualized.

Number two, communicate pleasure when your expectations are met.

But don't overdo it. Always leave place for more.

Render the process inexorable, unattainable. Be pleased, demonstrate that you're happy and content and gratified, but do it in a way that sows doubt in the people pleaser's mind whether he or she have done enough for you.

Number three, communicate profound, unmitigated disappointment, even heartbreak when the people pleasers fails to meet your expectations.

Whenever there's a gap between what you wanted, what you have wanted the people's pleaser to do and what the people pleaser opted to do, at the end whenever there's such a gap, communicate to the people pleaser that you're so so so devastated, you're so sad, you're so sorry, you're angry, you're so heartbroken even, that maybe, just maybe, you're on the verge of abandoning the people pleaser and rejecting the whole relationship.

Do these three things with the people pleaser and you will have found a lifelong servant, not to say slave, catering permanently to all your needs, selflessly, self-sacrificially and without complaint.

That is the popular part.

Now, onto the psychodynamics and psychology of people pleasers a little more in depth.

Yes, I'm alive. I survived the Trump video. You didn't get to me. You're going to make more videos.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the Bible of Narcissism, the book that coined all the language in use today. I'm also a professor of psychology.

Two days ago, I released a video about the way constructs reshape reality, reframe your memories in order to uphold, to buttress and to support a specific self-state which is responsive to environmental cues.

Now this was a mouthful, so I'll remind you.

The environment sends you stimuli. The environment provides information and data.

A specific self-state is selected. The self-state activates a construct.

The construct interfaces with reality, gathers the information, filters it, reframes it in order to conform to the self-state.

And then the construct also changes your memory. It kind of represses some memories, emphasizes other memories, creates a selective memory environment.

So it alters the perception of reality, it alters your memories, and then it induces in you behaviors that tend to uphold the self-state.

This is done via introjects. The introjects are internal voices in your head that send out a stream of automatic thoughts.

The constructs activate, trigger specific introjects.

Then the automatic thoughts shape your behavior, and you create, in the environment, you create to generate specific outcomes.

Your behavior has consequences. And these outcomes or consequences tend to support, to uphold, to prove right, the self-state and its associated constellation of constructs.

I recommend that you watch that video. There's a lot more there. It's a one-hour video, one of my shortest.

But many of who have written to me to ask, can you giveme, can you give us an example? Can you give us an example of how this works in reality?

So today I'm going to do exactly this. You are warned. Today I'm going to discuss how this mechanism works with people pleasers and with children, adults who had been parentified as children.

And so these people have specific automatic thoughts. These automatic thoughts are at the core of the identity of people pleases and formally parentified children. What are these automatic thoughts? Well, here they are. Number one, my happiness is always at someone else's expense. I call it the zero-sum automatic thought. If you are happy, someone else is unhappy. Your happiness is someone else's sacrifice. Your contentment, your joy, your cheer is someone else's distress or burden. So there's a zero-sum game. If you love people, if you like people, if you want to please people, if you feel that you are someone's mother or someone's daddy figure, you are going to withhold your happiness. You're going to suppress your joy and cheer and contentment in order not to inflict undue burdens, sacrifices and unhappiness on your nearest and dearest. That is automatic thought number one, and it comes from an introject, a group of interjects, possibly, for example, a harsh, critical mother, or a withholding, absent mother, or a selfish, essentially, dead mother mentally. Okay, the second automatic thought at the core of people pleasing and formally parentified children is, I have to earn my happiness. I don't deserve happiness. I have to work hard for it. I have to justify it. I have to demonstrate that happiness is due, is my due. Happiness is not an ambient thing. Happiness is not something that everyone around me should strive to provide me for. Happiness is not something I should pursue, because if I pursue happiness, it is at someone else's expense. Happiness is hard work. So these people identify happiness with tasks, with assignments, with labor. The more the busier they are, the more difficult life is, the more onerous the tasks, the more they have to do, the happier they feel. Because surely having invested so much work, happiness is coming to me. So these people would tend to become, for example, walkaholics, they would tend to develop addictions, a variety of addictions. Addiction is perceived by the addict as work. You ask any junkie, and he will tell you how much work there is in securing the drug and then using the drug and so forth addiction involves ceremonies routines routines addiction creates a social circle around the addict so addiction is an organizing principle a life structuring affirmation at these people people pleases formally parentified children, they tend to become addicts because the addiction is perceived as labor, hard labor, and toil is the prerequisite and the antecedent of happiness. There's no happiness without toil. It's a little like in the Bible. You know, when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, God promised them a life of toil, compensated for by giving birth to children. Okay, happiness including childbearing and child rearing, you have to work for it. You have to earn it and deserve it. Number three, automatic thought, number three.

Somehow I have to bribe people. I have to bribe people around me. I have to somehow corrupt them by offering them something. I have to compensate them for being with me. I have to bribe people to stay with me. I have to bribe people to stay with me. I have to bribe people to collaborate with me. I have to co-opt people to help me. I have to make sure that people tolerate me because they give them something in return. And I need to do all this because I'm a bad object. I'm unworthy, I'm unlovable, I'm crazy, I'm inadequate, I'm dissuute, I'minadequate, I'm dissolute, I'm hopeless, and so on and so forth.

I am such a deal, I'm such a delinquent proposition that for people to have anything to do with me, they somehow must be given something in return, must be compensated.

So this is the third negative automatic thought and the fourth automatic thought is I need to compromise, life is a compromise, I need to compromise on my boundaries, I need to give up my rights, I need to do all this because of the previous three automatic thoughts.

I'm unworthy, my happiness is always at the expense of someone, and I have to earn my happiness.

So I need to give up on boundaries, on rights, on demands, on expectations. I can't force myself on the environment. I need to minimize myself. I need to minimize myself to the point of vanishing. I need to be an apparition. I need to become a function. I can't be a full-fledged human being.

Because if I be a full-fledged human being, this in itself is a burden on other people. This in itself requires an exertion of other people just to accept me. I'm inexorable. I'm a plague and a devastation. I need to keep myself hidden or cult in a way.

These are the automatic thoughts at the core of people pleasing, at the core of formerly parentified children.

And these automatic thoughts pervade all areas of life, all types of functioning, all acts, all decisions and choices, all cognitions, and all emotions.

In sex, for example, someone with this mindset would allow her partner to do anything to her, even a casual partner, even a total stranger. She would have no boundaries. She would let him do anything he pleases. She would not dare say no. Because in her mind, she has no right to say no.

If she were to say no, she would make the partner angry justifiably. She would deserve punishment because she is a bad object.

So she would succumb to unwanted sex with an undesirable partner, because that's just the way it is. She doesn't deserve any better. She has no rights. She doesn't have even the right to impose a boundary. It's nice of him to just be with her and give her some attention, and this is in sex.

In the family, such a person would be a doormat. She would cater to the needs of others to the point of self-depletion and utter exhaustion. She would sacrifice her health, physical and mental, just to guaranteeharmony, consensus.

These people are conflict-averse.

These automatic thoughts are co-opted by the constructs within these people, the construct inherent in these people, they activate, they trigger specific introjects, for example the harsh mommy introject or the rejecting absent daddy introject or the critical teacher introject.

So the constructs in these people, constructs within these people, they would trigger specific introjects.

And these introjects will spew out, will generate the aforementioned four automatic thoughts.

So the constructs activate the introjids. The introjects begin to generate automatic thoughts.

Your happiness is someone else's expense. You have to earn your happiness. You don't deserve it. You have to bribe people to stay with you, collaborate with you, help you or tolerate you, and you need to compromise on your boundaries and rights.

These are the automatic thoughts. The constructs latch onto these automatic thoughts, appropriate them, snatch them, and they use them to manipulate the behavior. I'm sorry, they use these automatic thoughts generated by the introjids.

The constructs use them to manipulate or affect the behaviors of the people pleaser and the formerly parentified child.

People pleasing and formally parentified child, these are the self-states.

So the people pleaser has a people-pleasing self-state, which then uses a group of constructs, which then activate specific introjects, which then generate the automatic thoughts, which then affect the behaviors of the people pleaser and the formally parentified child.

I hope it's a bit clearer now.

You can apply it to every situation and every person you have ever met.

This is a universal model.

A self-state responsive to the environment, self-state responsive to circumstances, a self-state responsive to other people.

This self-state selects constructs. Constructs are ways of organizing the world. Constructs are ways of imbuing the world with sense and meaning, interpreting the world, explaining what's happening.

So the constructs falsify memory, reframe memory, and they also suppress lots of information, information that conflicts with the self-state, challenges the self-state, will be filtered out.

The construct is like a membrane.

And then these constructs would affect your behavior, affect the behavior of these people, to conform to the self-state.

They do this by activating introjects and flooding the subject, flooding the person with automatic thoughts.

Automatic thoughts affect behavior, behavior affects reality, reality conforms to the self-state, everyone is happy, there's no dissonance, no conflict, no anxiety.

This is how things work.

So next time you come across a people pleaser, next time you come across a promiscuous person who can't say no, next time you come across someone who has been parentified as a child and insists on being your mother or your father, because that's the only thing they know how to do.

Next time you come across these people, realize that these are self-states, they have other self-states.

When they are in the people pleasing self-state, the promiscuous never say no self-state, the parentifying self-state, when they are in these self-states, they have specific constructs inside, that activate specific introjects, that flood them with automatic thoughts that they cannot resist.

These automatic thoughts are like programming, like algorithms.

At that moment the self-state takes over and the person becomes a puppet, a machine, a robot, a computer.

We spend most of our lives in this automatic state, which is why many philosophers and psychologists and neuroscientists doubt the existence of free will.

I have a video dedicated to this.

Be forgiving because people know not, know not what they are doing.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

To a narcissistic boss or employer, the members of his staff, his employees, are sources of narcissistic supply and nothing else.

Their role is to remember events that support the grandiose self-image of the narcissists, to regulate the narcissistic supply, to adulate, to adore, to admire, to agree, to affirm, to provide attention and approval, and generally to serve as an audience.

The staff or employees are supposed to remain passive.

The narcissist is not interested in anything, but the simplest function of mirroring his grandeur, his achievements, his status.

When the mirror, the employee, acquires a personality and a life of its own, the narcissist is incensed.

When independent-minded, an employee is perceived to be a kind of danger, and is in danger of being sacked by his narcissistic employer, an act which demonstrates the employer's omnipotence, control over the employee.

The employee's presumption to be the employer's equal is rejected and vehemently and emotionally resented by the employer.

An employee should not try to befriend a narcissistic boss or a narcissistic employer.

Friendship is possible only among equals.

And to the narcissist, his employees and his staff are his inferiors. They are his property. He lords over them. He is superior to them.

Therefore, how can he be their friend?

Trying to become a narcissistic boss's or employer's friend constitutes aninjury to the haughtiness and pride and arrogance of said boss or employeran injury to the haughtiness and pride and arrogance of said boss or employer.

The narcissistic boss or employer is willing to accept his employees as underlings, as subordinates, whose very position serves to support his grandiose fantasies, but nothing else and nothing about.

The grandiosity of the narcissistic boss and employer is precarious and tenuous. It rests on fragile foundations.

Any hint of equality with the employees, any disagreement, any criticism, and even any expression of an unfulfilled need, threatens the narcissist profoundly.

The narcissist is exceedingly insecure deep inside. It is easy to destabilize the narcissistic impromptu personality, his false self.

His reactions, however disproportionate and rageful, are merely in self-defense.

So, classic narcissistic behavior is when idealization is followed by the devaluation.

So at first, the narcissistic boss or employer idealizes the new employee.

The new employee can do nothing wrong. He's perfect. He's brilliant. He is attuned to the narcissistic needs.

But then devaluation follows as a result of minor disagreements, or merely because time has eroded the employee's capacity to serve as a fresh source of attention and narcissistic supply.

The veteran employee is taken for granted by his narcissistic employer and boss. He becomes uninspiring as a source of adulation, admiration and attention.

The narcissist always seeks new thrills, new stimuli, provided through and via the attention given by new employees.

The narcissist is notorious for his low threshold of resistance to boredom. His behavior is impulsive. His biography is chaotic precisely because of his needs to introduce uncertainty and risk into what he regards as stagnation or slow death.

In other words, routine.

Narcissists abhor routines.

Most interactions in the workplace, though, are part of the rat. They are routine.

And thus constitute a reminder to the narcissist that he is, quote unquote, stagnating, shackled, imprisoned, unappreciated, unable to realize his untapped potential.

The routine workplace deflates the narcissist's grandiose fantasies.

So narcissists do many unnecessary, wrong, and even dangerous things in pursuit of restoring and stabilizing their inflated self-image.

Narcissists feel suffocated by intimacy or by the constant reminders of real nitty-gritty world out there.

It reduces them. It makes them realize the gap between their fantasies and reality. It is a threat to the balance of their personality structures, the false self, which is invented and confabulated and concocted, and the true self, which is dilapidated and dysfunction.

So they treat routine and everyone connected to that routine as a menace.

Narcissists forever shift the blame, they pass the buck, and they engage in cognitive dissonance. They pathologize the other by projecting onto him or herfrailties, weaknesses, failures.

They foster feelings of guilt and shame in their employees and their subordinates and use this guilt and shame to manipulate them.

They debase and humiliate their staff in order to preserve their own sense of superiority.

They are pathological liars. They think nothing of confabulating or pathologically telling lies because their very self is false. They are their own confabulation.

So what can you do with a narcissistic boss and employer?

Number one, never disagree with the narcissist or contradict him.

Number two, never offer the narcissist any intimacy.

Number three, look awed and inspired by whatever attribute matters to the narcissist.

For instance, if he regards himself to be a professional, pretend that you are dumbstruck, that you are amazed by his professional achievements.

If he considered himself good-looking, comment on it, repeatedly.

Never remind the narcissist of life out there, of the routine. And if you do, connect it somehow to his sense of grandiosity.

You can aggrandize even ordering office supplies, the most mundane thing conceivable.

You can say for instance, these are the best art material any workplace is going to have, or we get these office supplies exclusively because of you and your connections and so.

Aggrandize the narcissist.

Do not make any comment which might directly or indirectly impinge on the narcissist's self-image, omnipotence, superior judgment, omniscience, skills, capabilities, professional record, or even omnipresence.

Bad sentences start with, I think you overlooked this and that. I believe you made a mistake here. You don't know that. Do you know that? etc. Or you were not here yesterday. You cannot, you should not. These kind of sentences are interpreted by the narcissist as rude impositions and they react very badly to these injurious restrictions and hints at their lack of omnipotence and lack of omniscience.

Manage the narcissistic oaf. Notice patterns in his bullying. Is he more aggressive on Monday mornings? Is he more open to suggestions on Friday afternoons? Is he available to flattery? Can you modify his contact by appealing to his morality, superior knowledge, good manners, good looks, cosmopolitanism or upbringing?

Manipulating the narcissists is the only way you as an employee can survive in such contaminated and tainted workplace.

I'm Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

This is the first in a series of 10 videos about how to survive a relationship with the narcissist and how to cope with the psychopath.

First, it's important to understand that there is nothing special about the body language or behavior patterns of abusers who are not narcissists and psychopaths.

Not all abusers suffer from a personality disorder. Regrettably, most victims find themselves trapped long before they have become aware of any meaningful warning sign.

Also important to remember is that abuse is a multifaceted phenomenon. It is a poisonous cocktail of control freakery, conforming to social and cultural norms, and it includes latent sadism.

The abuser seeks to subjugate his victims, but also to look good and save face in front of family and peers.

Many abusers simply enjoy inflicting pain on helpless victims.

My advice to you is to disengage, detach, terminate the relationship, get as far away as you can.

But assuming that you want to stay on with your abuser, assuming that you want to maintain this sick relationship, maltreatment can, to some extent, be mitigated, ameliorated, and even avoided.

Abusers react to the slightest provocation, real or imagined, and they react with disproportionate wrath and rage, and often violence.

It is important, therefore, never to openly and repeatedly disagree with your abuser or contradict him.

If you do, your abuser is bound to walk away, but only after he has vilified and harmed you in every which way he can.

Abusers feel threatened by real sharing and by common decision making.

So, never offer your abuser any intimacy. It is a sure way of turning him off and his aggression on.

Abusers perceive intimacy or the offer of intimacy as a prelude to manipulation.

Internally, they have a dialogue that says, actually a monologue that says, what is she getting it? What does she really want? What is a hidden agenda?

Abusers are to some extent narcissistic. They have narcissistic traits.

So admire and adore them openly.

But do not lie to them or exaggerate. This would be perceived by them as coming and will provoke your abuser to feats of paranoia and jealousy.

Look awed by whatever matters to your abuser, for instance by his professional achievements, or by his good looks, or even by his success with other women, but don't overdo it.

The abuser tries to transform his personal space into the exact opposite of his real life.

At home, he is the master of a fantasy of perfection and harmony, and the undisputed recipient of adulation and obeisance.

Any reminder that, in reality, his life is a drab, dead end, subject to routine, that he is a failure, or a tyrant, or a swindler, or a wannabe, sometimes hated by his own oppressed family, any such reminder, is likely to be met with unbridledhostility, and worse.

Never remind your abuser of life out there, and if you do, connect it somehow to his sense of grandiosity. Reassure him of the permanence of your obedient and self-sacrificial love to him.

Do not make any comment which might directly or indirectly impinge on his self-image, on his omnipotence, omnipotence, judgment, omniscience, skills, capabilities, professional record, or even omnipresence.

He wishes to be godlike, treat him as such. Listen attentively to his words and never disagree, contradict him or offer your point of view.

You are there merely to witness the abuser's train of thought, not to derail it with reminders of your separate and autonomous existence.

Be saintly, be patient, be accommodating, and endlessly giving with nothing in return.

Never let your energy be depleted. Never let your guard down.

Your abuser is likely to be provoked to extremes by signs of your personal autonomy and independence.

So you should conceal your thoughts and plans, make no overt choices, and express no preferences.

Never mention your emotions, your needs, your earnings, your wages, your profits, your trust money.

Tell him how much you rely on him to reach the right decisions for both of you.

Play dumb, but not too dumb, or it may provoke his suspicions.

It is a thin line between pleasing the abuser and rendering the abuser a raving paranoid.

Never give your abuser cause to doubt or suspect you.

Surrender all control to him. Deny yourself access to property and funds. Do not socialize. Drop all your friends and hobbies. Quit your job and your studies and confine yourself to your abode.

Your abuser is bound to be virulently jealous and suspect illicit liaisance between you and the least likely persons, your family included.

He is likely to accuse you even of incest. He envies the attention you give to others even to your common children.

Place him on a pedestal and make sure he notices how you ignore, spurn and neglect everyone else.

To your abuser, you are an object, no matter how ostensibly revered and cherished one.

Hence, the battering.

He monopolizes your time and your mind as well as your body.

Beating up on you is his way of saying, I possess you, your mind.

He makes for you even the minutest choices, what to wear, what to cook for dinner, when and where to go out, and with whom.

In extreme cases, your abuser regards even your body as his to share with others if he sees fit.

It is an onerous existence, consistently tiptoeing on eggshells. Neither is it invariably successful.

The submissive posture delays the more egregious manifestations of abuse, but cannot prevent them altogether.

Choosing to live with an abuser is like opting to share a cage with a predator or a nest with a snake.

No matter how domesticated, nature is bound to prevail.

You are more likely than not to end up as the abuser's next meal.

Bear that in mind, remember my advice.

The only way to treat an abuser is not to treat him at all, to disengage, to go away.

And this is the topic of our next video.

I'm Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

This is the second in a series of videos about how to cope with a narcissist or a psychopath in an intimate relationship. Be sure to watch the previous video.

Today we will discuss what I call the conflictive posture.

Contrary to its name, the conflictive posture is actually about avoiding conflict, by minimizing contact and by insisting on your boundaries.

It is about refusal to accept abusive behavior by demanding from the abuser reasonably predictable and rational actions and reactions.

It is about respect for you and for your predilections, emotions, needs, wishes and priorities.

A healthy relationship requires justice and proportionality. You should reject or ignore unjust and capricious behavior.

Conflicts are inevitable, even in the most loving and mature bonds, but the rules of engagement are different in a liaison, in a relationship which involves abusive conduct.

There, in such a sick relationship, you must react in kind. You must let your abuser have a taste of his own medicine.

Abusers are predators. They are attuned to the subtlest emotional cues of their prey. You.

Never show your abuser that you are afraid or that you are less than resolute.

The willingness to negotiate is perceived by the abuser as a weakness.

Violent offenders and bullies are insatiable. Do not succumb to blackmail or to emotional extortion.

Once you start compromising, you won't see the end of it.

The abuser creates a shared psychosis, in French a folie à deux, with his victim. It is a narrative, a confabulation, a story, an overwhelming feeling of the two of us against the whole hostile world out there.

Well, don't buy into it.

Feel free to threaten him with legal measures. Feel free to disengage if things get rough or to involve law enforcement officials, judges, friends, neighbors and colleagues.

The abused feel ashamed. They feel somehow responsible, guilty and blameworthy for their own maltreatment.

The abuser is adept at instilling these erroneous notions in his victims. He passes the buck. He makes them feel responsible for whatever has happened. He says openly, look what you made me do.

So, above all, do not keep your abuse a secret. Secrecy is the abuser's weapon.

So you should share your story with friends, colleagues, neighbors, social workers, judges, the police, the media, the courts, your minister, anyone who would listen.

Don't make excuses for him. Don't try to understand him. Do not empathize with him, for he surely does not empathize with you.

He has no mercy on you. You, in return, do not bother to have misplaced pity on him.

Never give him a second chance. React with your full arsenal to the first transgression. Teach him a lesson he is unlikely to forget. Make him go elsewhere for his sadistic pursuits or to offload his frustrations.

The abuser sometimes uses third parties, his family, his peers, in order to torture and torment and taunt you.

Well, often the abuser's proxies, his long arms, are unaware of their role.

You should expose him to them. You should inform them. Demonstrate to them how they are being abused, misused and plain abused by your abuser.

Trap your abuser. Treat him as he treats you. Involve other people. Bring it into the open. There is nothing like sunshine to disinfect abuse.

There are a few techniques which work wonders with abusers. Some psychologists recommend to treat repeat offenders as one would toddlers.

The abuser is indeed a kind of immature brat. He is dangerous. He is endowed with privileges and capabilities of an adult, but he is still an immature brat with temper tantrums.

Sometimes ignoring these temper tantrums is a wise policy, but not always, and actually not very often, and actually definitely not in the home.

In the next video, we will discuss specific techniques and strategies for dealing with narcissists and psychopaths.

I'm Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

This is the third video in a series about coping strategies and techniques with narcissists and psychopaths in intimate relationships. Be sure to watch the rest of the series.

Today we will map out techniques of coping with narcissistic and psychopathic abusers.

Not all these techniques apply to all abusers. Watch the other videos in this series to decide which technique to adopt in which situation.

Right now we're just going to map the territory.

The first technique is to mirror the abuser's behavior. Mirror his actions. Repeat his words.

If, for instance, he is having a rage attack, rage back. If he threatens, threaten back. Incredibly try to use the same language, the same content. If he leaves the house, leave the house as well, disappear on him. If he is suspicious, act suspicious and jealous. Be critical, denigrating, humiliating, go down to his level.

The other technique is to frighten him.

Identify the vulnerabilities and susceptibilities of the narcissistic and psychopathic abuser, and strike repeated escalating blows of them.

If a narcissist has a secret or something he wishes to conceal, use your knowledge to threaten him.

Of course, do so legally and only after you have consulted an attorney.

Drop cryptic hints that there are mysterious witnesses to the events and recently revealed evidence.

Do it cleverly, do it noncommittally, gradually, in an escalating manner, and of course again in a legal way.

Let his imagination do the rest.

You don't have to do much except utter a vague reference, make a nominous allusion, delineate a possible turn of events.

Needless to add that all these activities have to be pursued legally, preferably through the good services of law offices and in broad daylight.

If done the wrong way, they might constitute extortion or blackmail, harassment and a host of other criminal offenses. They can also backfire and provoke the narcissistic and psychopathic abuser into violence and aggression.

I repeat, not all coping techniques are applicable to all situations and to all abusers. Listen and watch the other videos in this series to make up your mind which technique applies when and to whom.

The next technique is to lure the abuser.

Offer the abuser continued narcissistic supply.

You can make a narcissist do anything by offering, withholding or threatening to withhold, narcissistic supply, adulation, admiration, attention, sex, all, subservience, or even the appearance of being fearful.

Play on his fears of abandonment is the next technique.

If nothing else works, explicitly threaten to abandon your abuser.

You can condition the threat. You can say, if you don't do something, or if you do do something, I will desert you.

The narcissist perceives the following sentences as threats of abandonment, even if they are not meant as such.

He perceives every confrontation, every fundamental disagreement or protracted criticism as a sign of abandonment. He perceives abandonment when he is completely ignored, or when you insist on respect for your boundaries, needs, emotions, choices and preferences, or when you retaliate, for instance, when you shout back at him.

All these in the narcissists' mind equate abandonment.

Finally, this is the technique that I recommend the most and always.

Refuse all contact.

Be sure to maintain as much contact with your abuser as the courts, counselors, mediators, guardians or law enforcement officials mandate.

But no more. Do not contravene the decisions of the system.

Work from inside the system to change judgments, evaluations or rulings, but never rebel against the system.

The courts, the police, never ignore them. You will only turn the system against you and against your interests, and you will be labeled the abuser instead of the victim.

But with the exception of this minimum, mandated by the courts, decline any and all gratuitous contact with a narcissist or psychopath.

Do not respond to your abusers pleading to romantic, nostalgic, flattering or threatening email messages. Return all the gifts that he sends you. Refuse inventory to your premises. Do not even respond to the intercom. Do not talk to him on the phone. Hang up the minute you hear his voice while making clear to him in a single, polite but firm sentence that you are determined not to talk to him ever again. Do not answer his letters. Do not visit him on special occasions or in emergencies when he is sick. Do not respond to questions, requests or please forward it to you through or via or by third parties.

Disconnect from third parties whom you know are spying on you at your abuser's behest.

Do not discuss with your abuser your children. Do not gossip about your abuser. Do not ask him for anything, even if you are in dire need and dire straits.

When you are forced to meet your abuser, do not discuss your personal affairs or raise them. Do not discuss his personal affairs or raise them as well.

Relegate any inevitable contact with him, when and where possible, to professionals, to your lawyer, to your accountant, to the police, to judges or to court officials.

But is there anything you can do to avoid abuses to start with? Are there any warning signs, any identifying marks, rules of thumb, to shield you from the harrowing and traumatic experience of an abusive relationship?

We have a special video which deals with these issues. Be sure to watch it.

I'm Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant SelfLove: Narcissism Revisited.

No one should feel responsible for the narcissist predicament.

To him, others hardly exist. He is so enmeshed in himself and in the resulting misery of this self-preoccupation that he notices no one else. Other people are subjects, on which he projects his rage, his wrath is repressed and suppressed, a mutating aggression, and finally his ill-disguised violence.

How should the narcissist's closest, nearest and dearest cope with his eccentric vagaries?

The short answer is by abandoning him, or at least by threatening to abandon him.

The threat to abandon the narcissist need not be explicit or conditional, for instance, if you don't do something or if you do it, I will ditch you.

It is sufficient to control the narcissist, to completely ignore the narcissist, to insist on respect for one's boundaries and wishes, or to shout back at him.

The narcissist takes these signs of personal autonomy to be a harbinger of impending separation, and he reacts with anxiety.

The narcissist is tamed by the very same weapons that he uses to subjugate others.

The specter of being abandoned looms large over everything else.

In the narcissist's mind, every discordant note presages solitude, the resulting confrontation with his own self.

The narcissist is a person who is irreparably traumatized by the behavior of the most important people in his life, his parents, role models, or even peers.

By being capricious, arbitrary, and sadistically judgmental, these people molded the narcissist into an adult who fervently and obsessively tries to recreate the trauma in order, this time around, to resolve it.

We call this a repetition complex.

Thus, on the one hand, the narcissist feels that his freedom depends upon reenacting these early experiences.

On the other hand, the narcissist is terrified by this prospect.

Realizing that he is doomed to go through the same traumas over and over again, the narcissist distances himself by using his aggression to alienate, humiliate and in general to be emotionally absent.

This behavior brings about the very consequence that the narcissist so dreads, abandonment.

But this way at least, the narcissist is able to tell himself and others that he was the one who had fostered the separation, that it was fully his choice and that he was not surprised by it.

The truth is that, governed by his internal demons, the narcissist has no real choice. The dismal future of his relationships is preordained.

The narcissist is a binary person. The carrot is also the stick, in his case.

If he gets too close to someone emotionally, he fears ultimate and inevitable abandonment. He thus immediately distances himself, acts cruelly, and brings about the very abandonment that he had feared in the first place.

In this paradox lies the key to coping with the narcissist.

If, for instance, he is having a rage attack, rage back. This will provoke in him fears of being abandoned, and the resulting calm would be so total that it might seem to you eerie.

Narcissists are known for these sudden tectonic shifts in mood and in behavior.

Mirror the narcissist's actions. Repeat his words. If he threatens, threaten back, and credibly try to use the same language and content. If he leaves the house, leave the house as well. Disappear on him. If he is suspicious, act suspicious. Be critical, denigrating, humiliating, go down to his level, because that's the only way to penetrate his thick defenses.

Faced with his own mirror image, the narcissist always recoils.

We must not forget that the narcissist behaves the way he does in order to engender and encourage abandonment.

When mirrored, the narcissist dreads imminent and impending desertion, which is the inevitable result of his actions and words.

This prospect so terrifies him that it induces in him an incredible alteration of conduct.

He instantly succumbs and obsequiously tries to make amends, moving from one cold, bitter, cynical, misanthropic, cruel and sadistic pole, to another he becomes warm, loving, fuzzy, engulfing, emotional, modeling and saccharine.

The other coping strategy is, of course, to do abandon, to give up on the narcissist. Dump him and go about reconstructing your own life.

Very few people deserve the kind of investment that is an absolute prerequisite to a life with a narcissist.

The corporate narcissist is a full-time, energy, and emotion-draining job, which reduces people around the narcissists to insecure nervous wrecks.

Who deserves such a sacrifice? Definitely not the narcissist.

No one to my mind, not even the most brilliant, charming, breathtaking and suave narcissist has a right to demand such self-sacrifice.

The glamour and trickery were thin, and underneath them a monster lurks, which irreversibly and adversely influences the lives of those around him for the worse.

Narcissists are incorrigibly and notoriously difficult to change.

Thus, trying to modify them, to heal them, to cure them with love, is doomed to failure.

You should either accept them as they are, or avoid them altogether.

If one accepts the narcissist as he is, one should cater to his needs. His needs are part of what he is.

Would you have ignored a physical handicap in someone? Would you have not assisted a quadriplegic?

The narcissist is an emotional cripple. He needs constant adulation. He cannot help it.

So if one chooses to accept the narcissist, to live with him, to remain in an intimate relationship with him, it is a package deal. All his needs, demands, requirements included.

I'm Sam Vaknin, and the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

What should you do if your husband is a narcissist and is having an extramarital affair? It's cheating on you and betraying your trust.

Well, the answer is that narcissists are people who fail to maintain a stable sense of self-worth. Very often somatic narcissists, these are narcissists who use their bodies and their sexuality to secure narcissistic supply, tend to get involved in extramarital affairs.

The new conquests, sexual conquests, sustain their grandiose fantasies, and their distorted and unrealistic self-image.

It is therefore nigh impossible to alter this particular behavior of a somatic narcissist.

Sexual interactions serve as a constant, reliable, easy to obtain narcissistic supply. It is the only source of such supply if the narcissist is not cerebral, in other words, if he doesn't rely on his intellect, intelligence, or professional achievements from narcissistic supply.

Pure somatic narcissists deemphasize their intellectual capabilities in favor of their physical attributes, sexual prowess, and ability to conquer the opposite sex or the same sex in case they're homosexuals.

One way of coping with this situation is that you should set up rigid, strict and very well-defined rules of engagement.

Ideally, all contacts between your spouse and his lover should be immediately and irrevocably severed.

But this is usually too much to ask for.

So you should make crystal clear when is she allowed to call, whether she is allowed to write to him at all, and in which circumstances. What are the subjects she is allowed to broach in her correspondence and phone calls? When is he allowed to see her, and what other modes of interaction between them, are permissible?

Clear and painful sanctions must be defined in case the above rules are violated. Both rules and sanctions must be applied rigorously and mercilessly and must be set in writing in unequivocal terms. Fairness is important, but so is rigorousness and strictness.

The problem is that the narcissist never really separates from his sources of narcissistic supply, until and unless they cease to be sources.

Narcissists never really say goodbye. The narcissist lover is likely to still have an emotional hold on him, long after the affair is officially over.

Your husband must first have his day of reckoning with her.

Help your narcissistic mate or husband or intimate partner by telling him what will be the price that he stands to pay if he does not obey the rules and sanctions that you have agreed upon.

Tell him that you cannot live like this any longer, that if he does not get rid of this presence, of the echoes of his past, really, he will be squandering his present. He will be forfeiting you.

Don't be afraid to lose him. If he prefers this woman to you, it is important for you to know it. If he prefers you to her, your nightmare is over.

If you insist on staying with a somatic narcissist, you must also be prepared to serve as a source of narcissistic supply, an alternative to the supply provided by his lovers. You must brace yourself.

Serving as a source of narcissistic supply is an onerous task, a full-time job, and a very ungrateful one at that.

The narcissist's thirst for adulation, admiration, worship, approval and attention can never be quenched. It is a Sisyphian, mind-numbing effort, which heralds only additional humiliating, critical, disgruntled tyrants by the narcissists.

That you are afraid to confront reality is normal. You are afraid to set clear ultimatums. You are afraid that he will abandon you. You are afraid that he will prefer her to you. And you may well be right.

But if this is the case, and you go on living with him and tormenting yourself, it is unhealthy, you are living a deception.

If you found it difficult to confront the fact that it is all over between you, that your relationship is an empty shell, that your husband or intimate partner is with another woman in the fullest of the word, do not hesitate to seek help from professionals and non-professionals alike. Friends are a great source of support and assistance.

But do not let the situation fester into psychological gangrene. Amputate now while you can.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Narcissists are often vindictive. They stalk, they harass, they intimidate, and basically there are only two ways of coping with vindictive narcissists, either to frighten them or to lure them.

Start with frightening them.

Narcissists live in a constant state of repressed aggression, envy, hatred and rage. They firmly believe that everyone else is precisely like them.

As a result, they are paranoid, suspicious, scared, labile, and unpredictable. Frightening the narcissist is a powerful behavior modification tool. If sufficiently deterred, the narcissist promptly disengages, gives up everything he fought for, sometimes makes amends.

To act effectively, one has to identify the vulnerabilities and susceptibilities of the narcissist, the chinks in his armor, and strike repeatedescalating blows at them, until the narcissist lets go and vanishes. Example, if the narcissist has a secret, one should use this fact to threaten him. One should drop cryptic hints that there are mysterious witnesses to the events and recently revealed evidence. The narcissist has a very vivid imagination. Let his imagination do the work for you.

The narcissist may have been involved in tax evasion, in malpractice, in child abuse, in infidelity and adultery. There are so many possibilities which offer a rich vein of attack.

If done cleverly, noncommittally, gradually and increasingly, the narcissist crumbles, disengages, detaches and disappears. It lowers his profile thoroughly in the hope of avoiding hurt, pain and criminal persecution.

Most narcissists have been known to disown and abandon a whole pathological narcissistic space. In other words, they have been known to relocate, in response to a well-focused campaign by their victims.

Thus, the narcissist may leave town, change his job, abandon the field of professional interests, and avoid friends and acquaintances, only to relieve the unrelenting pressure exerted on him by his victims. I repeat, most of the drama takes place in the paranoid mind of the narcissist. His imagination runs amok. He finds himself snarled by horrifying scenarios, pursued by the vilest certainties that form in his mind, in his fertile, fibrine mind. The narcissist is his own worst persecutor or prosecutor. You don't have to do much, except utter a vague reference, make an ominous allusion, delineate a possible turn of events. The narcissist will do the rest for you. He is like a small child in the dark, generating the very monsters that paralyzing with fear. Needless to say, emphasize and repeat, that all these activities have to be pursued legally, preferably through the good services of law offices and in broad daylight. Done the wrong way, they might constitute extortion, or blackmail blackmail harassment and a host of other criminal offences. Be very careful because you would be treading a thin line between legality and illegality should you choose to frighten the narcissists. The alternative is of course to lure the vindictive narcissist. The other way to neutralize him is to offer him continued narcissistic supply until the war is over and had been won by you.

Desdled by the drug of narcissistic supply, the narcissist immediately becomes tamed, forgets his vindictiveness and triumphantly takes over his new property and territory. Under the influence of narcissistic supply, the narcissist is unable to tell when he is being manipulated. He is blind, dumb and deaf.

You can make that narcissistists do anything by offering withholding or threatening to withhold narcissistic supply. Adulation, admiration, attention, sex or subservience are the tools, the weapons in your arsenal in coping with vindictive dangerous stalkers and paranoys. My name is Sam Battenin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisitor. Today we will discuss stalkers. Stokers are not made of one cloth, some of them are psychopaths. Other stalkers are schizoids, narcissists, paranoys, or an admixture of these unsavory mental health disorders. Stokers harass the victims because they are lonely, or because it is fun. These are latent sadists, or because they cannot help it, they are clinging, codependent, or for myriad different other reasons. Clearly, coping techniques suited to one type of stalker may backfire or prove to be futile with another. The only denominator common to all bullying stalkers is their pent-up rage. Stoker is angry at his or her targets and hates them. He perceives his victims as unnecessarily and churlishly frustrating. The aim of stalking is to educate the victim and to punish her, hence a catch-22 of coping with stalkers. The standard and good advice is to avoid all contact with your stalker, to ignore him, even as you take precautions. But being evaded only inflames the stalker's wrath and enhances his frustration.

The more the stalker feels sidelined, ignored and stonewalled, the more persistent he becomes, the more intrusive and the more aggressive.

So what to do?

It is essential, therefore, to first identify the type of abuser, your face-fuel.

Start with the erotomaniac.

This kind of stalker believes that he is in love with you, and that regardless of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the feeling is reciprocated.

In other words, he believes that you are in love with him.

He interprets everything you do or refrain from doing as coded messages, confessing your eternal devotion to him and to your relationships.

Erotomaniacs are lonely, socially inept people.

They may also be people with whom you have been involved romantically, your former spouse, a former boyfriend, or even a one-night stand. They could also be colleagues or co-workers.

The best coping strategy with erotomania is to ignore him. Do not communicate with him or even acknowledge his existence.

The erotomaniac clutches its flaws and often suffers from ideas of reference. He tends to blow out of proportion every comment or gesture of his loved one.

So avoid contact. Do not talk to him, return his gifts unopened, refuse to discuss with him anything or discuss him with others, delete his correspondence.

Then there is the narcissistic stalker.

He feels entitled to your time, attention, admiration and resources. He interprets every rejection as an act of aggression which leads to a narcissistic injury.

He reacts with sustained rage and vindictiveness. He can turn violent because he feels omnipotent and immune to the consequences of his actions.

Your best coping strategy with a narcissistic stalker is to make clear that you want no further contact with him and that this decision is not personal.

Be firm. Do not hesitate to inform him that you hold him responsible for his stalking, bullying and harassment, and that you will take all necessary steps to protect yourself.

Narcissists at bay are cowards and are easily intimidated. Luckily, they never get emotionally attached to their prey, and so they can move on with relative ease.

And there is the paranoid stalker. This is by far the most dangerous of the lot.

He lives in an inaccessible world of his own making. He cannot be reasoned with. He cannot be cajoled.

He thrives on threats, anxiety and fear. He distorts every communication to feed his persecutory delusion and enhance his anxiety.

The Paranoids conduct is unpredictable and there is no typical scenario, but experience shows that you can minimize the danger to yourself and to your household by taking some basic steps.

If at all possible, put as much physical distance as you can between yourself and the paranoid stalker.

Change address, phone number, email accounts, cell phone number, and lease the kids in a new, different school. Find a new job, get a new credit card, open a new bank account. Move states if you have to.

Do not inform your paranoid ex about your whereabouts and about your new life.

You may have to make painful sacrifices, such as minimize contacts, even with your family and best friends.

And even with all these precautions, your abusive ex is likely to find you, furious that you have fled and evaded him, raging at your new-found existence, suspicious and resentful of your freedom and personal autonomy.

Violence is more than likely to ensue.

Unless deterred, paranoid former spouses tend to be harmful, even, in some cases, lethal.

So be prepared. Alert to your local law enforcement officers. Check out your neighborhood domestic violence shelter. Consider owning a gun for self-defense, or in the very least, a stun gun or mustard spray. Carry these with you at all times. Keep them close by and accessible even when you're asleep or in your bathroom.

Erotomaniac stalking can last many years. Do not let down your guard, even if you haven't heard from him, for a while.

Stalkers leave traces. They tend, for instance, to scout the territory before they make their move.

A typical stalker invades his or her victim's privacy a few times long before the crucial and injurious encounter.

So is your computer being tampered with? Is someone downloading your email? Has anyone been in your house while you were away? Any size of breaking and entering, missing things, atypical disorder, or even too much order? Is your post being delivered erratically, some of the envelopes having been opened and then resealed? Mysterious phone calls are abruptly disconnected when you kick up?

Your stalker may scout your home, sitting in a vehicle opposite your door there.

So in all these, if all these signs, if some of these signs exist, your stalker must have dropped by and is monitoring you.

Notice any unusual pattern, any strange event, any weird occurrence.

Someone is driving by your house morning and evening? A new gardener or maintenance man came by in your absence? Someone is making inquiries about you and your family?

Maybe it's time to move on.

Teach your children to avoid your paranoid ex and to report to you immediatelyany contact he has made with them.

Abusive bullies often strike where it hurts most: at one's own children.

Explain to your children the danger without being unduly alarming.

Make a distinction between others whom they can trust and your abusive former spouse or ex whom they should avoid.

Ignore your gut reactions and impulses because they are often misleading.

Sometimes the stress is so onerous and so infuriating that you feel like striking back at the stalker.

So don't do it. Don't play his game. He is better at it than you are and is likely to defeat you.

Instead, unleash the full force of the law whenever you get the chance to do so. Restraining orders, peace bonds, spells in jail, and frequent visits from the police tend to check the abusive's violent and intrusive conduct.

The other behavioral extreme is equally futile and counterproductive.

Do not try to buy peace by appeasing your abuser.

Submissiveness and attempts to reason with him only whet the stalker's appetite.

He regards both as contemptible weaknesses, vulnerabilities that he can exploit.

You cannot communicate with the paranoid because he is likely to distort everything that you say to support his persecutory delusions.

He has a sense of entitlement, he has grandiose fantasies.

You cannot appeal to his emotions or reason he has none. At least no positive emotions.

Remember, you cannot appeal to his emotions or reason he has none. At least no positive emotions.

Remember, your abusive and paranoid former partner blames it all on you. As far as he's concerned, you recklessly and unscrupulouslywrecked a wonderful thing that you both had gone.

He's vengeful, seething and prone to bouts of uncontrolled and extreme aggression.

Don't listen to those who tell you to take it easy. Hundreds of thousands of women paid with their lives for heeding this idiotic advice.

Do not take it easy. Do not calm down. Do be hypervigilant.

Your paranoid stalker is inordinately dangerous, and more likely than not, is with you for a long time to come.

Finally, there is an antisocial or psychopathic stalker.

Though ruthless and typically violent, the psychopath is a calculating machine, how to maximize his gratification and personal profit.

Psychopaths lack empathy, and may even be sadistic, but understand well and instantly the language of carrots and sticks.

So your best coping strategy is to convince your psychopath that messing with your life or with your nearest is going to cost him dearly.

Do not threaten him. Simply be unequivocal about your desire to be left in peace, and your intentions to involve the law should he stalk, harass, or threaten you.

Give him a choice between being left alone and becoming the target of multiple arrests, restraining orders, and worse.

Take extreme precautions at all times and meet him only in public places.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Like borderlines, narcissists have something called abandonment anxiety. They are terrified by the thought of being abandoned. They are like children, who are afraid that their parents, when they are out of the room, will never come back again.

They lack object constancy. In other words, narcissists believe that when people are out of sight, they are also out of mind. They do not believe in permanence, in reliable long-term relationships, in bonding, in attachment.

And they don't believe in these things because they've never experienced them, either as children or as adults.

Okay, so then narcissists have abandonment anxiety. Then why do they abusetheir nearest and dearest, their so-called loved ones?

After all, if you abuse somebody, the chances of being abandoned by that person are much higher. If you abuse your wife, she's likely to walk away. If you maltreat your girlfriend, she is likely to find another boyfriend.

Why abuse? Abuse ostensibly and intuitively should increase the chances of abandonment and therefore increase the narcissist's abandonment anxiety.

Yet all narcissists, without a single exception, abuse.

Granted, they abuse in different ways. Some of them abuse verbally, some of them use a brutal sense of humor or brutal honesty. There are million ways to abuse, and multifarious forms of aggression.

But whatever the narcissist and whoever the narcissist, narcissists always abuse. And especially those they are supposed to be intimate with.

Well, here's a counterintuitive paradox. Abuse serves to decrease the narcissist's abandonment anxiety. It reduces the anxiety. It ameliorates. It alleviates.

How come? the anxiety, it ameliorism, it alleviates. How come?

Well, first of all, when you abuse someone, when you devalue someone, you feel superior to them. They, the receiving end, the recipients of abuse, are inferior to you, the abuser.

Abusers are in position of authority. They dole out abuse.

So devaluation leads to a sense of superiority, and superiority restores the narcissist's sense of grandiosity, restores the grandiose fantasy, the narrative that underlies the narcissist inflated sense of self.

But why would the narcissist need to restore his grandiosity? Where did it go? Why, who ruined it?

The abandonment anxiety. The narcissist has abandonment anxiety. And superior beings, perfect beings, godlike beings, should not feel anxiety.

The very fact that the narcissist feels anxiety undermines his sense of grandiosity and his sense of perfection and superiority and godlike qualities.

So it goes like that. The narcissist feels abandonment anxiety. This challenges his sense of perfection and superiority.

He then devalues his spouse or girlfriend or intimate partner or significant other.

By abusing and devaluing her, he feels again superior. By feeling superior, he restores his grandiosity, and by restoring his grandiosity, he eliminates, or at the very least reduces his anxiety.

Point number one.

But abuse has other functions.

For example, pre-emption.

The narcissist assumes that he will always be abandoned. Loss is guaranteed. Things will go badly. Relationships will break up and terminate.

The narcissist assumes that he will be abandoned, hence his abandonment anxiety.

And so if he is anyhow going to be abandoned, he might as well control the process. He might as well bring about his own abandonment. He might as well precipitate the abandonment, cause it, lead to it, generate it, foster it.

If he does, then he is in control. If he were to be abandoned because of his own doing, if the abandonment was of his own making, then he, in his eyes had initiated his abandonment.

He is in control. He is not abandoned. He is simply fulfilling a goal or a target.

So preemption, restoring a sense of control over circumstances and over other people. Inducing abandonment as a way of lying to yourself and saying, well, actually, I have not been abandoned. I sought it. I wanted it.

This is called cognitive dissonance.

The third function of abusing others is uncovering the truth.

The narcissist assumes that people are faking it, that they are not as good as their word, that there are hidden agendas at play, that his wife or his girlfriend, or his intimate partner, or his significant other, are just pretending to love him, claiming to be loyal, claiming to be supportive, but when push comes to shove, their true face will be revealed. The mask will fall and they will be uncovered as who they are, disloyal, cheating, unfaithful, unreliable, unpredictable.

So how do you prove this? How do you prove this working hypothesis?

By abusing people. When the narcissist abuses the significant other, he is testing her.

He pushes her to the corner and he wants to see how will she react.

Will she, for example, abandon him? Will she cheat on him with another man? Will she walk away? Will she attack? Will she counterattack?

He ferrets out information about him, abuse is a kind of probing, its kind of test or testing process.

It's as though the narcissist had put his significant other in a lab, and then he is conducting all kinds of tests, laboratory tests.

Abuse is a controlled experiment at revealing the truth about your intimate partner.

Is she as steadfast as she claims? If she is loyal, will she still be there? Even if I'm a jerk? Even if I'm abusing her, maltreating her, humiliating her, insulting her, privately and in public? How far can I go? To what extent can I annihilate her? To what extent can I extinguish her as an autonomous entity and still she would stay around?

So it's a test.

And finally, of course, abuse is a form of behavior modification.

Abuse is a signal. It's a communication mode.

By abusing someone, you're telling them that you're unhappy with their behavior.

And you are signaling to them, sometimes violently and always aggressively, that they should alter their behavior if they want to not be abused.

The thing is that abuse works. Abuse actually works most of the time.

Most spouses, intimate partners and significant others would alter and modify their behavior in order to minimize abuse.

So abuse is an efficacious, efficient method for modifying your partner's behavior.

Because it works, it is so commonplace among narcissists and psychopaths.

Okay, so how do you deal with it?

What are the coping styles which have proven to be efficient with protracted, unlimited abuse? Abuse as a feature of the relationship, as a fixture, as an attribute of the relationship.

Well, there are five, essentially, coping styles.

The first one is submissiveness, by being submissive, by accepting and adhering to every rule, every capricious move, every arbitrary decision, every criticism, by avoiding disagreement, by being conflict adverse, you can minimize or reduce at least the incidence, the frequency, and the prevalence of abuse in the relationship.

Some incidents.

The second coping style is exactly the opposite. It's conflicting. It is the counter-dependent coping style.

It is a refusal to accept the abuse, refusal to accept authority, challenging the abuser, arguing, disagreeing, criticizing, provoking fights, raising hell. That also works to some extent in reducing the abuse.

Ultimately, the abuser would institute a policy of no contact and would go away, would become absent, either physically or emotionally, and definitely conversational. If the partner, the intimate partner, causes the abuser pain every time the abuses, makes the abuser pay a price for his misconduct, the abuser, very much like a dog in Pavlov's experiments, would learn not to abuse.

But that is of course a conflictive stance, which means that nothing much is left of the relationship except constant conflict, constant warfare, constant fighting.

And then we have mirroring.

Mirroring is a third copy of the start.

Mirroring doesn't mean that you do exactly what the abuser does. He shouts, you shout, he says a word, you repeat it, and so on. That's not mirroring.

Mirroring simply means that you hurl back, you throw back at the abuser, his verbiage, his sentences, the words he chooses, and so on and so forth, you throw them back at him, rearranged in a way to provoke a certain dynamic.

So, for example, if the abuser says, I would like to go and do something. And you don't want to go and do something. If you say, no, I don't want to go out. You know, if you want to go by yourself or something. You're likely to be abused.

Criticized. You know, you never do anything with me, you are no longer interested in me, you don't want to be with me, I knew I could not trust you, this relationship is going to hell, you are ruining it for both of us, etc., etc., etc., the well-known refrain.

One possibility is mirroring, reflecting these sentences back at the abuser, but in a way which would create in the abuser, a dynamic, for example, would create in him abandonment anxiety.

So by saying, well, you may well be right, you know, the relationship is really going to hell, and we seem to disagree on many, many things, and so on, that's precisely why I want to go out.

Actually, you're repeating his verbiage, but by repeating it in a certain order, you're provoking abandonment anxiety.

As you provoke in the abuser in negative emotions, such as anxiety or fear or depression and so and so forth, gradually the abuse or the incidence of abuse will decline.

Mirroring is a very complex coping style because you need to fully understand the abuser's psychology and you need to fully understand the abuse of psychology and you need to know how to rearrange his abuse and then reflect the abuse to him in highly precise ways, his precision art.

If you do that, if you're adept at mirroring, you can achieve surprising results, including it up to the point of the abuse disappearing completely.

And then there is collusion.

Collusion is actually to amplify the abuse up to the point of caricature.

So if the abuser says, you know, you're so stupid, you don't think about what you're saying, you're always wrong and so on so forth, in a collusive or collusion coping style, you would say, you know what, you're right, I'm really very, very stupid. You are so intelligent, you're so decisive, you're so strong, You're always so right, etc., etc.

You exaggerate. You will overemphasize his words to the point of rendering them humorous and caricaturistic, to the point of rendering the abuser a cartoon figure and this would usually unsettle the abuser, drive him back, he would be able then to look to see himself.

You would be reflecting him and he would be able to see himself and this usually would have positive feedback on his behavior that you would be able to see himself, and this usually would have positive feedback on his behavior, that you would be creating a feedback loop which would reduce his abusive behaviors.

The last coping style, which is not exactly one of my favorites, and should be advised against, except perhaps as a last resort, is displacement.

Directing the negative energy of abuse from yourself and someone else.

So if your abuser begins to attack you, criticize you, disagree with you, vehemently and aggressively, humiliate you, chastise you, etc., you can then direct this negative energy, this rage, this discomfort, you can direct all these negative emotions, it's someone else that you can both denigrate and demean and criticize and so on. Someone you agree on. Another scapegoat or another victim.

But this is both an immoral choice and could backfire in the sense that you would gradually become an extension of the abuser and an abuser yourself.

So displacement is a kind of shared psychosis, a situation where you and the abuser form a dyad, form a kind of a cult of abusing other people. It's not recommended, of course.

But it's also a coping style I hate to mention. And it does happen more frequently than you know when an abused spouse teams up with her abuser to abuse a third party, abused by proxy.