16-Year-Old Explores Narcissism, Abuse (with Kit Seigler)

Yes. Is there, so you advocate for your no contact strategy, and you've already mentioned that if you, that the narcissist wants you to stay and that the solution is, of course, no contact.

Is there a way to not go no contact and not fail, like to stay with a narcissist and not be abused?

Yes, of course there's a way.

And actually, the vast majority of intimate partners of narcissists and friends of narcissists and so on remain within the relationship and suffer.

If you're willing to sacrifice your personal autonomy, your independence, your agency, if you're willing to suspend your separate existence as an external object, if you're willing to be consumed, subsumed, and digested by the narcissist, if you are willing to become an actor or actress in a role within a script that has nothing to do with your life.

If you are willing, therefore, to become an extension of the narcissist or a pawn on his chessboard or something like that, if you are willing to develop what is known as symbiosis, a symbiotic relationship with the narcissist, whereby you merge with him and fuse with him and you become a single organism with two heads.

And if you're willing to give up on your self-efficacy, your ability to act in the environment and on the environment in a way that guarantees favorable outcomes.

If you're willing to make all these sacrifices, you definitely can remain with the narcissists and spend your entire life with you.

The narcissist would try to discard you in many, many ways, and very often will.

But he's likely to go back to you.

If you are that good, if you're that good at vanishing, if you're that good at suspending yourself, if you're that good at pretending that you have no existence except an existence mediated through the narcissist, then the narcissist would find you a valuable asset. He would discard you time and again and he would hoover you time and again.

Hoovering is the attempt to reintroduce you into his shared fantasy.

So absolutely there is a way.

It's all a question of cost benefit analysis, the kind of price you're willing to pay, and the benefits you believe you're getting from the narcissist or from the relationship with the narcissist.

Now, crucially, depending on your specific psychological makeup and or your own mental health issues, such a relationship may be deemed and considered functional and even beneficial.

So we can't generalize. We can generalize.

If you are utterly healthy, mentally, utterly healthy, if you insist on yourself, self autonomy and independence and agency and so on so forth, if you would like to have a life of your own, apart from the relationship with the narcissist, for example, if you insist on having friends and maintaining contact with your family, and having your own income, and having a career, and so on, well then, no contact is advised.

The narcissist would not allow any of this.

Absolutely not.

It flies in the face of the shared fantasy.

Within the shared fantasy, you have no existence whatsoever except as a maternal figure.

You're reduced to a single psychological function and a series of other external functions like providing services and giving sex and so on so forth.

So you are a combination of service provider, an actress in a script.

And okay, if it fits you, because, you know, narcissists are very good at generating drama. Their lives are very adventurous and colorful.

And if this is your thing, you like drama, you like adventure, you like risk, you're a risk seeker, you're a thrill seeker, your novelty seeker, if you're a bit psychopathic, and so on so forth, the narcissist may be a perfect match.

He's game for anything.

He has no boundaries.

His reality testing, his ability to gauge reality appropriately, is totally short.

So this kind of person you can do anything with, I mean, sexually, you can do anything with a narcissist.

Sexually, you can do anything with a narcissist as far as adventurousness. You can do anything with a narcissist as far as entrepreneurship and enterprise.

You can imagine the craziest harebrained schemes and the narcissist would go for it. We'll go for it because when the narcissist is embedded with you in the shared fantasy, you are both invincible. You both become omnipotent.

The narcissist is godlike in his own eyes. He's a legend in his own eyes. He's godlike.

So he bestows this divinity on you as well. You are divine by proxy, vicariously.

And are you two godlike figures roaming the earth and there's nothing you cannot do. It's limitless.

And this feeling that life is limitless. Everything is possible that you wake up in the morning and you don't know what's next. There's no routine. There's no road. This appeals to some people. This could be very attractive.

And so these kind of people may be the, they're suited to be the narcissist partner. Why not?

I apologize.

There's another type of partner of the narcissists, which may actually benefit from the relationship with the narcissist.

And these are people who require external regulation.

Now, we all regulate and modulate psychological processes internally.

For example, we regulate and modulate our sense of self-worth, our self-esteem and self-confidence. We regulate and modulate our perception of reality, judgment of reality, and so on so forth. Everything takes place inside. In this sense, we are totally self-sufficient. Internal regulation is enough. You don't need much more than that. You need information. You need information from the environment, of course. You need the raw material of data. But the processing is totally internal.

Now there are types of people, for example, people with borderline personality disorder, people who are co-dependence, people with dependent personality disorder, and other people, other types of people, these are all mental health pathologies, some of them severe. These people cannot regulate their internal environment.

For example, the borderline cannot regulate her moods. Her moods are labile. She goes up, she cycles up and down. The borderline cannot regulate her emotions. Her emotions overwhelm her, drown her, threaten her from the inside. They're too strong for her. They're too intense.

And so the borderline suffers from a deficit in self-regulation.

And then she finds a narcissist. And the narcissist eagerly agrees to regulate the borderline from the outside because it gives him control over her.

And so there's a match made in heaven or in hell. There's a match here, definitely.

And this is the process of external regulation.

Similarly, there's a class of covert narcissists, the inverted narcissists. And they are unable to regulate their sense of self-worth except through another narcissism.

So they are covert narcissists, but their self-esteem and their self-confidence and their self-appraisal and self-image, the self-perception, they all depend crucially on input from the narcissists and on whatever is happening to the narcissists.

So they get their narcissistic supply via another narcissist.

And so here's another example where there is a match. There's definitely a match.

If you're a narcissist and you're a constant failure, consistent failure, you can't obtain supply. Just can't obtain supply because you're a loser. I don't know what. You're socially anxious or socially shy. The million reasons. You're introverted. You can't obtain supply by yourself.

So you team up with another narcissist and that other narcissist obtains the supply for both of you. And you bask in the glory, in the reflected glory of that other narcissism.

So here's an example of a match.

So generalizing and saying that all people should go no contact with narcissism has to be qualified.

All mentally healthy people should go no contact with narcissism.

Got it.

That makes sense.

My next question is about transactional analysis because it's one of my favorite fields actually.

And I remember I was listening to one of your videos and you mentioned Games People Play and how you enjoy that book and I'm currently taking notes on it. What's your opinion on transactional analysis as a whole? Like what do you think of it?

Transactional analysis is one member in a big family. And this is the family of the schools in psychology that believe in self-states.

Now let me explain a bit.

Until the 1960s, more or less, everyone and his dog in psychology believed that we have a self. We have a unitary core. We have a personality that never changes through the lifespan. We are who we are. We are at some point in time, 18 years old, 21 years old, 25 years old, there's a debate. At some point in time, you become fixated. You become fixed forever to the day you die.

And then they came up with this idea of a unitary self and a unitary ego and, you know, like there's this nucleus, nucleus or I don't know, inside you. And if you could put your finger on it, you capture your entire nature and totality.

So this is one group, one family of schools in psychology.

And then there's another family to which I belong and I adhere to. And that's a family of schools in psychology that believe that there is no such thing as a self. There is no such thing as an ego. There is no such thing as a personality. There is no such thing as a personality.

It's nonsensical. It's counterfactual.

Any clinician who works with patients would tell you that there is no such thing.

People are malleable. People are mutable. People are changeable. People are reactive. People are much more like a river than a pond or a sea. People flow all the time.

And this flux generates a family of self-states.

So we have this ensemble, theater troupe of self-states.

Now each school in this family of schools, each school has another name for it.

So ego states, sub-personalities, pseudo-identities, self-states, etc.

But they all mean the same thing.

What they mean to say is that when we are confronted with changing environments, we change. We're not the same.

The environment, in other words, has the capacity to transform us in a way that is fundamental.

And this transformation is never fixed. It's temporary and it's reactive and it's transient. It's going to go away as the environment changes yet again.

So there is this belief that we have this kaleidoscopic internal picture of multiple fragmented wannabe selves, self-states, and they take over from each other as the environment changes.

So this is the general philosophical picture.

And within this, as I said, there are various schools.

So you have, for example, the internal family system school, IFS. Internal family system is actually way more developed than transactional analysis, intellectually speaking.

And it also deals with parts, they call it parts actually, parts of the individual. Parts that interact with each other.

And these parts regulate each other, protect each other, inform each other, collude, and then attack each other, and so on so forth.

So they have this map or this dynamic of parts within the individual and it is the mapping or it is the acquaintance with the dynamics between these parts that give us the psychology.

Transactional analysis is not very different to this.

Transactional analysis comes up with parts in the personality that are labeled, you know, child, this, that.

And these parts interact, they have internal regulatory system, they have inhibitory functions, inhibit each other. They have disinhibitory functions, they sometimes encourage each other or amplify, magnify, and so on so forth.

I'm a great believer in this perception of the individual, this perception of human psychology.

I think we are all collections, compendiums, anthologies of parts.

And these parts have evolved over the lifespan to react to changing environments, and they remain inside, and they are in the repertory. In the repertoire and they're there and they're dormant, they're latent and they are triggered from time to time. They come alive, they take over, they function, and they go to sleep again.

And I do believe all these parts have interact with each other on a regular basis.

This, what I'm describing is not the same as multiple personality disorder. It's not the same as dissociative identity disorder because in the vast majority of dissociative identity disorders, not in all of them but in the vast majority, there is a problem of amnesia. The parts don't remember, they don't have a common database of memories.

So this is not the case with typical healthy human psychology.

The individual contains many parts.

Yes, that much is true, and many of these parts are so developed that they could be perceived as personalities.

And this is why they are called self-states.

But they all share resources. They all share the same memories. There's no amnesia. They all share the same memories. There's no amnesia. They all share the person's intelligence, for example, which is a common resource. And so on.

Multiple part theories, like transactional analysis, like internal family systems, like Bloom's work on cellar states, like theories about ego states. In all these theories, we are talking about a group of parts that work together very well.

That's why I'm using the simile of a theater troupe. It's like 30, 40 actors, and together they stage a play. And the play works, and it's convincing and everyone enjoys, everyone in the audience enjoys. And the play is recognizable. You would never mistake a Shakespearean play for a Tennessee Williams play. The play is recognizable.

So it's a theater, it's a production with multiple actors.

Whereas the old perceptions, Freud's perception, Jung's perception, even to some extent perceptions in object relations, behaviorism, of course, the old perceptions were that we are some kind of maybe black box and maybe not, but be that as it may, we're a single unit, unbreakable, unchangeable, and not differentiated.

And if we happen to fragment, for some reason, then something is wrong. That's a mental illness of some kind.

If we fragment, if we show inconsistency, if our behaviors change, if our values change, if our beliefs change, if the way we react to the environment changes, if the type of interactions we're engaging with other people, interpersonal interactions change, we are mentally ill.

That was the old perception, the old school.

But today we think this is nonsense, total nonsense. We think this changeability, this mutability, is exactly a sign of mental health, a sign of adaptability. The ability to adapt, the ability to adapt, the ability to react appropriately to the environment.

On the very contrary, mentally ill people are rigid. Rigidity is the core of mental illness.

Mentally ill people don't have functioning parts. They have a problem.

So for example, the narcissist has only the false self. That's all he has.

And the false self is a narrative, a single narrative, very cohesive narrative. And the narrative is your God. End of story.

There are no parts inside the narcissist that contest the narrative. There's no opposition.

Mental illness is like a dictatorship. There's a single tyrant and there are no dissidents. And there's no opposition party. Because the tyrant is in control. The dictator is in control. It's a dictatorship, mental illness.

While mentally healthy people, that's a democracy. You have many parties, you have debates, you have coalitions, that's mental health.

How about the covert narcissist?

Because they have...

Here's what I want to suggest we have three minutes left. All right, we need to do is we need to hang up and you wait five minutes, okay, because it needs to record. So you wait five minutes and then you click on the same link and we meet again. Okay. Is that okay with you? Yeah.

Okay.

See you soon. Yes. You survived the first part. Congratulations. You're resilient. You go up one level. Hooray.

****REDACTED

I forget what my question was that I was about to ask.

Those were the territory. Yes.

It's left back there.

So in the terms of T.A. Do you see a way to win the mind games that a narcissist plays, or is it just impossible with a narcissist?

Because there's a winning in T.A. Like, a winning of, like, just not participating, finding a way to take their game and get around it. Is there a way to do that with narcissistic games?

I think the common misconception, the common mistake, is to assume that the narcissist is playing mind games.

For example, if he's gaslighting and so on.

Narcissists don't recognize you as a separate object. Object in psychology is a human being.

So narcissists don't recognize you as a separate object. They don't recognize you as an external object. They cannot conceive or perceive your externality and separateness.

What they do instead, they immediately generate an internal object. I call this process snapshoting. The clinical term is introjection.

They immediately generate an internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind. And then the narcissist continues to interact with the internal object, never with you.

As far as the narcissist is concerned, your existence is irrelevant to the psychological processes or the psychodynamics of the relationship. Everything takes place inside the narcissist's head or mind.

The narcissist goes through a scripted process of converting you into a maternal figure and then testing with narcissistic abuse and then converting you into a persecutory object into an enemy, devaluation, and then getting rid of you as a symbolic enactment or reenactment of the separation individuation in early childhood and all, everything I've just mentioned has nothing to do with you.

Because the narcissists cannot perceive you as external and separate, the narcissist cannot acknowledge that you have a mind.

Actually, whenever you demonstrate conclusively that you have a mind of your own, the narcissist reacts with rage and aggression.

This is narcissistic injury. This is a challenge. This is humiliating. It's shameful.

So, narcissists cannot play mind games because you don't have a mind. Only the narcissist has a mind.

However, the narcissist does play mind games with his internal objects.

In this sense, narcissism is very, very, very close to psychosis or psychotic disorders.

Otto Kernberg, the psychoanalytic father of the field, Otto Kernberg said that narcissism is a defense against the emotional regulation of the borderline and that both narcissism and borderline are pseudo-psychotic conditions, almost psychotic condition.

That's why the word borderline. It's on the border between psychosis and neurosis.

So the narcissist is psychotic in this sense.

Now the difference between a classic psychotic and a narcissist is that the psychotic confuses internal objects with external ones. The psychotic endows internal objects in his mind with external existence.

So if the psychotic hears a voice, he believes the voice in his mind, he believes the voice is coming from the outside. If the psychotic has a visual hallucination in his mind, obviously, he believes that it is real. He believes it's out there. And the psychotic acts on these hallucinations. They motivate the psychotic to act.

The narcissist is exactly the opposite. The narcissist believes that external objects are actually internal. Not internal are external, but external are internal.

But it's still a kind of reverse psychosis.

So narcissists, for example, never gaslight. That is nonsense online. They never gas lie because they fully believe their own fantasies and confabulations. They're fully committed to the veracity of what they're saying, they never future think. They make you promises and they believe they're going to keep this promises. However, outlandish the promise is and impossible even to realize, but they believe they will because they're godlike.

So they don't future fake, they're not gaslight.

Actually, narcissists rarely lie. When they do, when they do deviate from reality and from the truth, it's because they have deceived themselves first, and now they are committed to an alternative version of reality.

So all these strategems and strategies on how to outmaneuver the narcissists, how to out-manipulate the narcissists, and how to leverage the narcissists' momentum against him, and all these martial arts kind of approaches to this is nonsense.

Whatever you do and whatever you don't do is completely irrelevant to the narcissist because you are.

You are irrelevant to the narcissist.

And once he got rid of you or once you got rid of yourself, I mean, once you walked away, you're utterly interchangeable. You're dispensable. You're commodified. You're like a commodity, like a grain of rice, indistinguishment from another grain of rice.

He doesn't need you. He doesn't need your idiosyncrasy. He doesn't need your peculiarities. He doesn't need the things that make you special.

On the very contrary, he needs the things that don't make you special. He needs the things in you that do not differentiate you from anyone else.

Because you are supposed to play a role in his life that doesn't belong to you, the role of his mother or caretaker. It's not a role that reflects you. It's a role that reflects his autobiography, his needs, his demands, his expectation. It's all about him.

You exist as a handle or an excuse to restart a process.

So if I were to compare the narcissist's intimate partner or friend to chemistry, you are not an element, you're a catalyst. A catalyst in chemical reactions is a substance. In whose presence chemical processes start. The presence of the catalyst makes the chemical processes start, but the catalyst never participates in the chemical process. The catalyst remains untouched.

It's the same with the narcissist's intimate partner. Her presence, or his presence, trigger the narcissistic internal dynamics, including the shared fantasy and many other dynamics.

But she or he remains untouched by the narcissist. Untouched.

You catalyze the narcissist's internal world, but you are never part of it.

Okay. So you state in your videos that narcissistic abuse, I remember specifically there's one where you describe very definitely that it's like creating a mirror in the place of the victim, making the victim cause the abuse, or well, not cause the abuse, but cause abuse, become a narcissist for a moment.

And is there a way, and this is a coping mechanism for their childhood, is there a way for a narcissist to find a different coping mechanism and just, like, do something else other than that?

Again, this kind of question, which is very common, reflects underlying biases and underlying hidden assumptions which are wrong.

For example, the assumption that the narcissist is an adult.

The narcissist is not an adult.

A really, really advanced narcissist is four years old. The vast majority of narcissists are two years of, two to three years old.

You couldn't expect a two or three year old to come up with a multiplicity of strategies. You would be lucky if a two-year-old came up with a single strategy.

And these strategies...

Is it possible to teach?

Sorry?

Is it possible to teach?

No. Narcissists never learn.

Because narcissists never learn, they keep repeating the same mistake again and again, same patterns of behavior, same interactions, and this is called repetition compulsion. The clinical term is repetition compulsion.

And narcissists are incapable of learning, partly because they are not adults. And partly because the reality testing is impaired, you know, is short. They don't gauge reality properly because they can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And partly because they're grandiose and you can't teach them anything because they already know everything. They're godlike and their omniscience. They know everything. They're nobles. So there are many resistances to learning, many ways to reframe lessons in a way that would not challenge the narcissist. We call it egosyntonic reframing.

So there's egosyntonic reframing. The narcissist takes, for example, if a narcissist makes a mistake or is somehow defeated or loses something or is a failure in something, the narcissist would reframe the whole situation so that it doesn't challenge his self-perception as infallible, perfect, bod-like. He would rewrite history. He would impose delusions on the situation. He would create a fantasy within which the failure was an inevitable part of his success. It was a precondition for success or some some other nonsense language.

You can't teach a narcissist.

The strategy that a narcissist seemingly has adopted is actually neurobiological. We know that mammals, especially apes and primates, go through identical phases in the interaction between mothers and children. And these phases include separation, individuation, and everything. So we are up to age four, we're indistinguishable from chimpanzees. And chimpanzees, by the way, have the same IQ as four to six years old. So chimpanzees go through a process when they're born and interact with their mothers, they go through a process that's utterly indistinguishable from the human process. So when the child at the age of two or three or four freezes, freezes because the child is exposed to trauma, to abuse, to terror, the child is mistreated in a variety of ways, including being spoiled and idolized and pedestalized, the child is instrumentalized, the child is parentified. There's a million ways to abuse a child. It's a very delicate, it's, you need fine tuning as a parent in order to not abuse a child. Abuse is much more common than non-abuse. So when the child freezes at age two, let's say, which is the most common, that's the average age of a narcissist, emotionally speaking, when the child freezes at this age, he is still deeply into the neurobiological part of personal development. In other words, it's not a chosen strategy. It's imposed by biology, by heredity, by genetics, by brain structure. The brain is still evolving. The evolution of the brain is terminated at age 25. May I ask, how old are you?

I'm 16.

16. Your brain is about 70% developed. 30% of your brain has not developed yet properly. So it's a long process. And so what happens with the narcissist is, he gets stuck at a very early age. And his responses, the repertoire, the repertory of his responses is the outcome of essentially biology. And then what he does, he develops an imaginary friend as a child, and this imaginary friend is Superman, Marvel Comics type of superhero and godlike and everything. And he begins to worship this imaginary friend because his imaginary friend makes him feel protected, makes him feel safe. And then he...

One moment, excuse me. I, sorry, there's an alarm going on. Yes, continue.

It's an alarm because you are interacting with the narcissist. Be careful there. So, the child at this age chooses to create a giant fantasy. It's called a paracossum. And within the giant fantasy he has this godlike or superhero type of imaginary friend, and this friend protects him, plans off the abuse, provides him with a firearm, renders him untouchable and invulnerable, and he cannot feel pain in him, because he has this imaginary.

But gradually the child reaches the realization of the decision to give up on himself. The child says, I am so small, I'm so helpless, I'm so vulnerable, I'm so hurting, I'm in pain, all the time I'm in pain. I'm not, it's not working, the child says to itself, non-verbally or pre-verbally. It's not working.

The child says, okay, but my imaginary friend is perfect. He knows what to do. He's always there for me. He's always protective and so on.

So what I'm going to do, I'm going to sacrifice myself. I'm going to kill myself. It's essentially suicide. It's mental suicide.

And I'm going to be reborn as the false self. I'm going to be reborn as this imaginary friend. I'm going to merge with him.

And by giving up on my separate identity, I'm going to become this false self.

Again, it's a failure in separation. The narcissist doesn't have a single experience of separation.

He never succeeds to separate from his mother. He never succeeds to separate from the false self, which is his imaginary friend. He later never succeed to separate from the father.

Narcissists don't have a concept or an experience of separating from another person.

So when the narcissist sees you and wants you as an intimate partner, for example, he can't do separation. He can't do separateness.

He can do merger. He can do fusion. He can do takeover. He can do control. He owns you. He possesses you.

But he doesn't do separation. He doesn't recognize the fact that you have your own wishes and dreams and hopes and fears and emotions and cognitions and history, personal history, and people, friends, family, can't do any of this.

It's not that he's an idiot and doesn't realize that you have a family or friends, but he doesn't feel it. There's no emotional correlate.

Now we know from psychology that when we have a cognition, when we're cognizant of something, if there's no emotion to go with it, we don't internalize it.

So if you know something and you can't experience emotions, this knowledge will have no impact on you.

Impact, what we call insight, in psychology has an impact only through the mediation of emotions.

That's why our memories are intimately connected to emotions. Each memory is connected to emotions. Without emotions, we're unable to remember.

You know, the narcissist as a child has learned that to have emotions is a vulnerability. If you have emotions, you experience pain.

The narcissist as a child learned to connect positive emotions like love with pain and hurt and a breach of boundaries.

The child was treated as some kind of object, objectified.

So the child reached a conclusion, emotions are bad. I should never experience emotions. It ends badly. I don't want to end this way again. I don't want to go through this path again.

So narcissists are incapable of experiencing positive emotion, only negative one.

And because they are incapable of experiencing positive emotions, they have no memory. They have severe dissociation, they have enormous gaps in memory. And so on and so forth.

So you're dealing with a seriously disturbed child.

And of course, this kind of entity, because as I said, it's not a full-fledged human, this kind of entity which lacks empathy, which lacks positive emotions, which lacks the experience of separateness, which confuses internal and external, this kind of seriously deficient and defective entity is not in the position to develop alternative strategies or to consider options.

I mean, what are you talking about? This is a two-year-old.

Yeah. Two-year-old.

That makes sense.

You get a narcissist really angry and you will see the two-year-old. The narcissist will throw a temper tantrum. Maybe cry even. You will see a two-year-old in action. Absolutely.

Is the child of a narcissist, if a narcissist has a child, are they bound to have apersonality disorder? Like is it necessary?

No, okay.

No.

Actually, even children who experience what we call adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, even children who experience more than four ACEs, which is a threshold, even these kind of children, only a very small minority develop personality disorder, luckily for us.

So we have about 1%, maybe a bit more of the general population with narcissistic personality disorder. Another 1% with psychopathy, which is probably a biological issue, not a psychological issue. And anywhere between 1 and 3%, there's a huge debate, of people with borderline personality disorder, which also probably has a lot to do with the brain and with genetics.

So the answer is that the overwhelming vast majority of children exposed to abuse to adversity in a variety of ways grow up to be balanced and healthy and functional.

Of course they may develop anxiety and depression, but as far as personality disorders, they are much more rare than we are led to believe.

There is a lot of brouhaha and a lot of, you know, this is a key word. Everyone and his dog is an expert on personality disorders. Nowadays, there's a lot of money in it, and it attracts all kinds of unsavory characters, and so on and so forth.

But the truth is that a very small percentage of the population have personality disorders. If you put together all personality disorders, all of them, we are talking about 10% to 15% of the population.

So the answer to your question is children are very resilient and there's no need to worry that much about it.

Of course, if the child is born with a genetic predisposition, for example, to schizophrenia or to borderline personality, or if a child is born with a brain abnormality, for example, there was hypoxia, lack of oxygen during birth, these kind of children are vulnerable and they're likely to develop personality disorders, but there are not many of them.

Okay.

Does it go the other way around?

So if there's a narcissist, is it more likely that their parents have some sort of disorder? Or is it just that they're, like other than the genetic factor from just the psychological perspective?

Yeah, that's a good question.

While only a small minority of children develop personality disorders, even in abusive dysfunctional families, the majority of children who have personality disorders have had dysfunctional abusive parents.

So we call it the dead mother. The dead mother is a metaphor. The dead mother is a mother who is emotionally absent, depressive, selfish, manipulative, etc.

There are fathers who are like that.

By the way, when we say in psychology, mother, we are not referring to genitalia. It doesn't matter what you have between your legs. That doesn't make you a mother. A mother is someone who fulfills maternal function. And that could be definitely a man. So, maternal figures.

So, a majority of, for example, majority of people with narcissistic personality disorder have had one or two dysfunctional abusive traumatizing absent parents. The figure is even higher with psychopathy and almost total with borderline, like all borderlines I did.

Okay.

So, yes, and we could even say that narcissism or personality disorders definitely in Cluster B.

Cluster B is unique, by the way. Cluster B is a unique cluster because Cluster B involves a heightened level of hereditary transmission. Cluster B is dramatic and erratic, so Cluster B is relational. It has to do with relationship. And Cluster B is very comorbid.

In other words, very often we find patients with multiple Cluster B personality disorder. It's very rare to find a single Cluster B.

That's not the case with Cluster C, for example. In Cluster C, you can have a Schizoid, someone with Schizoid personality disorder and nothing else. It's very common. Paranoid personality disorder and little else.

So it's unique. Cluster B is pretty unique.

And within Cluster B, we believe the etiology, the causation of the personality disorders has a lot to do with bad parenting or wrong parentage abuse. Extreme forms of abuse like incest and sexual abuse in childhood.

They lead very frequently to borderline personality disorder.

Other forms of abuse which are subtle and usually not perceived as abuse by society. They're very pernicious and insidious.

For example, being overprotective of the child. It's a form of abuse. Not allowing the child to interact with reality and with peers, denying the child a peer experience. That's extremely abusing. Not letting the child separate from the parent and develop boundaries. That's very abusing. Forcing the child to realize or to actualize the parents' unfulfilled wishes and dreams that's abusing.

There are many forms of abuse. Many, many forms of abuse.

And yes, absolutely, this is in the background of all, I can generalize and say all cluster B personalities.

Interesting. Is it thus possible to, like if you realize, oh, I have a personality disorder and my parents have similar issues. Is it possible to break the cycle of this generational thing if you know, like if you're aware?

Well, definitely there is intergenerational transmission of Cluster B personality disorders, and for two reasons.

The first reason is known as modeling. Modeling is an element in what is known as social learning theory. Social learning theory in psychology.

And the idea is that children use their parents as role models.

And so they see the parents, they see the way the parents act, and then they emulate the behavior.

And then gradually they appropriate the behavior that they have emulated and they make it their own and they identify with it. They feel authentic. When they're actually reenacting the parental behaviors, they feel authentic. They feel it's their behavior.

And the same goes with introjects. The same goes with voices.

At the beginning, mommy tells you this is wrong, don't do this, and you know that it's mommy's voice. But when you're 16 years old, you think it's your voice.

So this process is known as modeling, and role models, all this thing.

So this is one reason.

Second reason is that recent studies are beginning to demonstrate pretty conclusively that mental illness or mental illness is contagious.

The same way germ-based diseases are contagious and viral diseases are contagious. Mental illness is contagious.

Of course, mental illness is not transmitted via viruses or bacteria. There are other vectors in question, but it is definitely contagious.

There had been a study very recently a few months ago, huge study with tens of thousands of people, students actually in primary school and mid school.

When there was a single individual with mental illness in the class, the entire class was infected, the entire class began to behave in a similar way.

So there's a lot of peer transmission.

We know that a huge part of the process of socialization, a huge part of becoming a member of society, knowing how to behave, sexual scripts, behavioral scripts, a huge part of this is communicated via peers, not actually parents, but peers. Peers are the most important for your education.

And so if one or more of your peers is mentally ill, when your defenses are down, you're vulnerable, you're just starting out and you're disoriented. You don't have your bearings in. It's easy to emulate.

So if you put together modeling and contagion, intergenerational transmission seems to be a fact.

And now what can you do about it?

Depends. If you have acquired, actually acquired a personality disorder, again depends on which.

If you have acquired, let's say, narcissistic personality disorder, you're in trouble. We don't have effective methods to deal with it. We can modify behavior in the short term, nothing much more than that.

If, however, which is the vast majority of cases, you developed a narcissistic style, which is distinct from narcissistic disorder. Every disorder has a style. So you have a borderline style, psychopathic style, narcissistic style. Style can be modified. You can modify your behaviors. And even some of your traits and cognitions, the way you perceive things, analyze things, and so on, this is treatable and reversible, and with very good prognosis.

Unfortunately, full-fledged personality disorders, which have already taken hold metastasized within the mind, it's like stage four cancer, you know. There's very little you can do. Not in all of them, but in the vast majority of them, there's very little you can do.

Borderline personality disorder, for example, remits spontaneously around age 45. So if you wait long enough, you're going to lose the diagnosis. Also, there is effective treatment modality for borderline, which is dialectical behavior therapy. DBT. It's very effective.

But that's not the case with narcissism. And with psychopathy, forget about it. You cannot even modify behavior. Psychopathy is nothing you can do. Absolutely nothing.

And of course there are many self-interested people, including so-called professionals, therapists, and so on. They're self-interested because they make money out of them.

And they go online and they spew nonsense about how they can heal and cure narcissistic personality disorder and so on.

The environment online is very contaminated, very polluted. And one should be very, very careful.

I would recommend actually to completely ignore information online. One should be very, very careful. I would recommend actually to completely ignore information online and to stick to studies, academic studies, textbooks, and this kind of thing.

Because about 90 to 95% of the so-called information online is misinformation, and sometimes catastrophically so.

I had a question off of that, but I appear to have forgotten.

You're beginning to dissociate. The contagion is happening.

It's dissociate. The contagion is happening.

Dissociating.

Yes, I'm, yes.

I could just move on to the next question that I have written down.

Okay.

What is the best way, this is a question from one of my friends because I've told some of my friends who are also interested in psychology. Hey, guess what? I get to do an interview. So one of my friends has asked, what is the best way to properly set boundaries? And I've added to that and said, is there a way to do so with a narcissist in a way that will actually get them to uphold those boundaries or are they just never going to uphold those boundaries?

Narcissists would never accept your boundaries, first of all because you don't exist as a separate entity.

Of course.

And a boundary is perceived as a challenge. And then there's a power play. It starts, triggers a power play between you and the narcissist. A power play that you cannot win because the narcissist holds the ultimate weapon. He devalues and discards you and that's the end of a story.

He doesn't care. He doesn't care who's next to him, you or someone else. It's meaningless. You're interchangeable. You have no cards in this poker game. He's holding all the cards. And his hand is always a full house.

You can never win with the narcissist. You can never win with the narcissist because there's nothing that you have that he wants and needs. He wants and needs many things, but anyone can supply this thing. There's total interchangeability of the supplier. So it's a buyer's market, so he doesn't care.

More generally, boundaries are statements. They're a form of communication. They should contain two parts.

This is my red line. This is what I'm not willing to accept.

And if you transgress, if you cross this red line, this is the punishment.

So every good boundary contains a statement which is clear, unequivocal, a statement that cannot be interpreted in more than one way, is unambiguous, and together with this statement, another statement which has to do with the punishment with a sanction are you going to sanction someone if he transgresses and you would do well to have a graduated form of sanctions so you say if you do it once this is the punishment if you do it twice this is the punishment if you do it twice is a punishment you do it three times I leave you for example.

And you communicate this clearly, not aggressively, not even perhaps assertively, just matter of fact, just matter of fact, you know, matter of fact, you know.

And this is it, this is my red line, I can't live with a breach of this boundary, I can't survive with it, I'm going to make me feel very bad, so talk about yourself, don't talk about the other part, don't say you make me feel bad, It makes me feel bad. I need this.

Make it about you, not about the other party. Make it about the other party. You're being accusatory. It's like you're accusing the other part.

Just make it about you. I need this boundary because it makes me feel good, makes me feel calm, reduces my anxiety, etc.

And because I need it and because it's indispensable and you don't give it up, give up on it.

So if you transgress, if you break this boundary, if you cross the line, I would be forced to act this and this way.

And if you do it more than once, you know, it's going to escalate. And the punishment is going to escalate as well.

Clarity, non-aggression, make it about you and include a punishment.

And most important, if you do include a punishment, carry it out to the end.

Never just threaten. If you threaten, be prepared to act. If you are not prepared to act, do not threaten.

And if you think you cannot punish someone in any way whatsoever, do not establish a boundary.

Even if a boundary is very important to you, if you feel you cannot punish a transgressor, you cannot punish someone who crosses the line, don't impose the boundary.

Boundaries must come with actionable and forcible punishments. Punishments you're willing to impose. You're not afraid to impose.

Okay. Do they have to be, like the punishments? Do they have to be...

I don't know, I subscribe to Carl Rogers' positive regard. Do they have to be, like, I don't know, punishment is a fierce word in my head.

The clinical term is sanctioned.

Yes, boundaries must include sanctions, of course.

Because boundaries are combinations of positive reinforcements and negative reinforcement.

So the carrot is that if the boundary is maintained, you will continue to be friends with someone, you will continue to be intimate partners.

The carrot is implicit, but there must be a stick.

Positive and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement alone will never work.

By the way, we are running out of time on this one also. Do you have additional questions?

I have a few more.

A few more, then we're going to do the same thing, five minutes.

All right, yep. Okay, see you soon.

All right, so question remaining number one. Is reformation achievable or is it impossible for a narcissist?

Reformation?

Yes.

So...

I think I answered that you can modify behaviors in the short term.

Yes, but nothing further than that.

So just the short term behaviors.

Yes, you could modify some abrasive behaviors, some antisocial behaviors, especially if you challenge the analysis's grandiosity.

Prove to me that you can change and so on so forth. People need you, you know, you need you. You make people feel much better if you behave this way.

So if you cater to the analysis's brandiosity, certain perception as godlike, then maybe you can induce some behavioral changes, but it's in the short term and they default back. They revert to default behavior.

This one was sitting there when I asked originally, but I opted to wait a little bit to ask it.

Did when we talked about the uncanny valley feeling, did I give you the uncanny valley feeling?

Again, it's very important to understand that narcissism is a healthy component of at least two periods in life.

Early childhood, that's between the ages of 18 months and 36 months, where narcissism, known as primary narcissism, is critical because it is narcissism that allows the child to develop self-esteem and needed self-confidence to take on the world.

The child becomes grandiose for a child of two years of age, to let go of mommy and explore the world all on its own, the child needs to be grandiose. Child needs to be narcissistic.

Narcissism is very helpful in the first two, three years of life.

And the second period is adolescence where narcissism is also very crucial.

Because the adolescence, narcissism allows the adolescent to develop a self-perception or self-image that protects the adolescent from the slings and arrows of the social environment and so.

The adolescent is experimenting, according to Eric Erickson. The adolescent is experimenting.

This experimentation is risky. this experimentation is painful. And it involves a lot of rejection and a lot of hurt emotions and suicidal ideation quite often and so on.

So you need protections against this.

So I think majority of adolescents are clinically narcissists, but that's a good thing. I see this, and most scholars see this is a good thing.

Yes.

And so adolescents would give almost everyone the uncanny valley reaction. They would provoke or trigger the uncanny valley reaction.

They would provoke or trigger the uncanny valley reactions, almost in everyone.

And if you ask adults, including young adults, they will tell you that they feel uncomfortable around adolescents.

They know how to cope with adolescents.

That adolescents make them feel disoriented.

That adolescents are crazy. That are young.

And this is the narcissism manifesting in adolescents and making everyone around the adolescent walk on axles and tiptoe and not be sure how to behave and feel like you know like their failures in not having managed the adolescent appropriately especially parents feel like their failures and parents feel that they've let down the adolescent.

But it's all healthy, healthy narcissism.

The second and last phase in life where narcissism is healthy.

If narcissism persists beyond age 18 or 21 or 25, depending which scholar you talk to, definitely if it persists beyond age 25, then it's a pathology and not a small pathology, but a very severe pathology.

Okay. That makes sense.

What, uh, okay, so this question is kind of silly now that I think about it because we've spoken on it before. So I'll skip that one.

What is, in terms of TA, what is the need that the narcissist is trying to appeal to? Is it just the narcissistic supply? Or is it the three or four S's?

I'm sorry, on. Is it the four S's?

Yes.

So on the surface, the narcissist is looking for the four S's, one of which is supply.

But it's actually a combination of two of the four Ss, one of which is supply.

But it's actually a combination of two of the four. And the reason it's a combination of two of the four is that if you have two of the four, you qualify as a mother.

So if you provide safety and you provide supply, then you're a mother.

That's what mothers do with their children. They adulate the child, admire the child, and they're there. They're safe. We call it secure base. Mothers are secure base.

If you provide the narcissists with services and safety then again you're a mother figure.

The only problem arises with sex.

But when you realize that the psychosexuality of narcissists is very distorted, very unusual, you understand that narcissists connect sexuality intimately with the mother figure.

In other words, narcissists are very incestuous in their mindset. And they're not only incestuous, but they're very experimental sexually.

So they would gravitate to kink and BDSM and all kinds of group sex and so on.

And they're auto-erotic, so they are self-referential when it comes to sex. They regard themselves as the ultimate sex object. They're attracted to themselves. They're having sex with themselves, basically.

So even the incest fits into the maternal model.

And then you begin to realize that the supply and the sets and the services and all this is actually about looking for mommy. It's a two-year-old. It's a two-year-old looking for a mother.

And because it's a two-year-old looking for a mother, the attributes of the intimate partner or the friend or the colleague, because they're looking for a mother everywhere in all interpersonal relationships, the attributes and the characteristics of the other person are not relevant at all.

The other person could be very young or very old, could be very stupid or very intelligent, could be very empathic or dyssapathic. All this doesn't matter.

Because all the other person has to do is to play the maternal role by providing two of the four Ss, the maternal role, and then the shared fantasy is activated, catalyzed, and then the narcissist can try to resolve the unresolved past somehow.

And it fails. It fails and it goes through it again and again ad infinitum. This is called repetition compulsion.

So this is what the analysis is looking for, a mother.

Okay.

You've stated in one of your videos that psychology, I don't remember exactly how you phrased it, so correct me if I'm wrong, that it cannot be studied in a scientific way because, like, the situation of each person is so convoluted that you can't, I suppose what I got out of it was that you can't eliminate all the variables to focus on just one.

But then in that same video, you referenced Pavlov, and so that got me a little confused because he was very scientific with his studies. So was he not psychological? Is that not?

I don't think Pavlov's experiments have anything to do with psychology. I think they have a lot to do with ethology. Ethology is the science that studiesthe behavior of animals.

Okay.

And Konrad Lorenz. I don't think anything to do with psychology. There's a lot to do with anthropology.

And I think this attempt to usurp, to hijack other disciplines, such as biology, such as zoology, such as ethology, it's a strong indication of the status of psychology as a pseudoscience. Not much different to astrology.

The problem with psychology is this, the raw material. You study something. Every science studies something.

The physical sciences purport, claim to study the physical world. There's a debate about this. We'll leave it aside.

But that's the claim that studying the physical world biology studies biological organisms.

So what does psychology study according to psychologists who want to be scientists?

And by the way, I'm a scientist. I have a doctorate in physics. So I know the difference between a real science and a pseudo-science.

So if you ask us the type of psychologists, the group of psychologists that want to believe that they are scientists when they grow up. So they will tell you that they are studying the mind.

Put aside the question of what is the mind, which no one can answer.

It's like imagine a physicist would not be able to define what is the sun.

No one knows what is the mind. No one has the vaguest ideas. What idea? What is consciousness? No one knows if the unconscious exists or not. I mean, it's all metaphors.

When we use metaphors on a consistent, structured basis, there's a name for that.

Literature.

This is literature. Psychology is a branch of literature.

And now, because it deals with entities that cannot be captured lexically in a dictionary by definition and cannot be captured experimentally. No one has ever spoken to an unconscious. No one has ever bottled up the mind. I mean, you cannot capture this experimentally.

So you are, as a psychologist, you're reduced to observing the alleged mind, you, impacts of the alleged entity mine.

So there are two allegations here.

The first allegation is there is a mind, and the second allegation is that your observations of human behavior emanate from this alleged entity.

The argument becomes weaker and weaker as you progress in psychology.

Okay, let's assume for a minute that I'm willing to play ball. I'm willing to admit that there's a mind. I have no idea why. Maybe I'm drunk, but I'm willing to admit that there's a mind. And I'm willing to admit that observations of behaviors, of observed behaviors, have to do with this mind. Let's assume that I agree.

There's a problem even here because the mind is mutable. We are not observing something that is invariable. Invariable, invariance in science is critical.

In other words, the object that you study must not change. Must not change. The only reactions allowed are reactions to the experiment, to the probing of the object.

If you don't probe the object, the object is the same. Today, tomorrow, in 10 years and in 10,000 years. It's the same object. That is science.

And that is, of course, this could never be attributed to the mind. The mind is malleable, mutable in constant flux.

And what is even worse? The very experiment changes the mind.

When you conduct an experiment, you already impacted cognitions, emotions, memories. You have already changed the mind of the studied subject.

So there is a problem known as a hypergeneration, a problem with generation of hypothesis. There's an undergeneration of hypothesis.

We cannot generate hypotheses, testable hypotheses, because we never deal with the same subject, with the same object, with the same raw material.

And even if I were to conduct an experiment on you right now, and repeat the experiment tomorrow, the very same experiment with the very same you, is it really the same you?

No, because it's been a day.

So things have happened to my mind.

In a day, you broke up with your boyfriend. You had a horrible dream. Someone died. You're not the same person. You can never, ever be the same person.

Consequently, there is what is known as the replication crisis. We cannot replicate more than 80% of studies in psychology.

So what do we do?

There were three answers in the history of psychology.

The first answer was, let us ignore the mind and all this nonsense. Let us study the brain. We need to study the brain. We study the hardware. We study the wetware. We study neurons and neuronal paths, and we will reach enlightenment.

So there was a long period in history of psychology, especially in Germany, where you had laboratories, and people were studying brains, autopsies. They were conducting autopsies on the brains of mentally ill people, and they were trying to correlate brain structures, brain deformities, brain abnormalities, with observable behaviors prior to death.

That was the first answer.

Then, Freud erupted on the scene, and Breuer, not only Freud, but there were Janet, Breuer, many of them. And they shifted. They said, we don't need to study the brain. We should study behaviors. We should study behaviors, and we should reverse engineer.

We're going to observe behaviors, and we're going to reverse engineer these behaviors and come up with the mind.

The only way to know about the mind, to learn about the mind, is to observe behaviors and reverse engineer.

So this was the second big period in the history of psychology.

The brain was forgotten, relegated to neuroscience later, and instead everyone and his dog was observing behaviors in one way or another, in psychoanalysis, in behaviorism. All these people were observing behaviors. Never mind how scientific it looked, the scientific trappings. They were all observing behavior and trying to correlate them with an entity that no one could define, no one could ever capture, and no one could truly experiment on, which was the mind.

Okay, so this was a failure. This was a failure.

And now we live in the third period in the history of psychology, where eminent scholars are saying, working with the brain was a mistake. We should leave this to the exact sciences, to live it to neuroscience. Working with the mind was definitely a mistake. It was a lot of nonsense. It's not scientific.

So we need to work with populations. We need to study populations. If we study many people, if we crowdsource, if we study millions of people, thousands of people, hundreds of people, cohorts, you know, and if we use statistics, which makes us look very scientific, then we can come up with conclusions which are scientifically viable and rigorous.

So this is the third approach and the currently dominant approach.

Everyone is banding about all kinds of obscure mathematics. It makes them feel very elevated and very scientific because they're using mathematics.

They don't realize mathematics is a language. You can say nonsense in English, and you can say nonsense in mathematics as well. That doesn't make you a scientist.

The study of population has a few advantages on the study of individual minds, and a few advantages on the study of a brain, which I'm not going to right now. It's a very long philosophical discourse. It has a few advantages.

But these advantages have nothing to do with psychology.

Because the information that we glean out of population, studies of population, have nothing to do with the mind. They have to do with behaviors.

So this is a behavior approach. They have to do with behaviors.

And they are highly context dependent and context sensitive.

In other words, if you experiment on 100 American college kids and then you experiment on 100 members of the Taliban for the same age, you are not likely to get identical results.

So if you are not likely to get identical results, that proves it's not a science.

This is something to do with culture, something to do with society, something to do with period in history, something to do with religion, you name it. But science, it is not. Science, it is not.

The same problem you have with the individual, that the individual changes all the time, and you cannot test the same individual twice.

There was a very wise Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and he said you cannot enter the same river twice.

So you cannot test the same individual twice. So you cannot test the same individual twice.

The same problem exists with populations. You cannot test the same population twice.

And if you compare populations in various parts of the world, they never, ever give the same outcome.

End of the pretensions to science.

Psychology is not a science. It is a form of structured literature.

A very interesting discipline. I'm in it for 30 years. It's a fascinating discipline because human beings are fascinating. Infinitely fascinating. I find human beings much more fascinating than the universe.

I have a theory in physics that I wrote in astrophysics about the universe. So I'm the father of a theory about the universe.

And I find the universe too simple compared to the human mind or human beings.

So it's a fascinating, but why call it science?

Do you know what this is? This is what is known as scientism.

Scientism is that everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law, they want to be scientists.

Because there's prestige and much more important. There is money in science. There are grants and funds and all kinds of, you know, so there's a lot of money.

If you pretend to be a scientist, there's money for your laboratory or there's money for your class or there's a chair funded by some idiot. This is the reason.

That makes sense. That makes sense.

Yeah, that's, okay. That should be all of my questions.

Okay. We've reached the end.

We've reached the end.

My end? I hope my end.

You're too young to reach my end. Okay. You're too young to, you know, to reach your end.

Okay. It was a pleasure.

Yes, it was.

I will merge the three parts of you and upload you to my YouTube channel.

All right.

Should I identify you by name?

Yes.

Can you identify my name? Yes.

Can you identify me by the name I have written in here, Kit?

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

And could you send me the recordings so that I can make my video essay?

Yes, I can definitely.

Awesome, awesome.

Do I have your email?

Yes, I've emailed you for the link.

Okay, then I'll upload it to File Mail or whatever, wait transfer or something, and I'll send you to me.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Okay.

It's been a pleasure.

Yes.

Take care.

You as well.

Bye-bye.