Ladies, and ladies, and ladies, and a few brave gentlemen. I hope you get out of this life. You have all come here, presumably, to learn how to survive, how to manipulate the narcissist and live to tell about it. I'm not sure it's possible, but we will try.
The lecture will be divided into two parts. One of them is about 15 minutes, and one of them is about two hours and 15 minutes.
And the reason I'm dividing this lecture in this unconventional way, in all seriousness, is to allow those of you who want to live after 15 minutes, especially those who came from Vienna.
The first 15 minutes, I will tell you the only eight ways proven to manipulate the narcissist.
Over 25 years of study, both my studies and other studies, we have come to the conclusion that there are only eight effective ways to manipulate the narcissist.
So with those of you with an American mindset, I'm going to give you these eight ways in the first 15 minutes.
The rest of the lecture would be to explain to you why these eight methods work, to take you on a tour of the narcissist mind.
It's not Disneyland. It's a horror chamber. It's a concentration camp.
So those of you who got what they wanted in the first 15 minutes can live. After that, I guarantee you it's going to become extremely unpleasant. Those of you who survived the entire lecture will have a grasp of what it is to be a narcissist.
And using this deep understanding of what it is to be a narcissist, you will be able to better survive, and if you wish, better manipulate the narcissist.
One of the major problems of the information available online and offline is that the people who offer this information are not narcissists. They don't know really what makes the narcissist tick. They are offering the perspective and the experience of the narcissist victims. It creates a feel-good atmosphere. Like-minded people who went through similar experiences always like to congregate together, but it's not very efficient.
Today, at the end of this lecture, you will have become efficient with the narcissist because you will gain a deep understanding of what it means to be one.
Our bodies are made of flesh and blood, but our minds are made of dreams. Our brains do not trust our senses. Information that gets from the environment to the brain is processed by the brain to ignore the senses.
We are all in a constant dream state. We are not in direct contact with reality, but we are in contact with our minds.
The narcissist interferes with our dreams.
In life, we do not learn from experience. We learn from trauma. We learn from our wounds.
The narcissist is a master of recognizing your wounds and making use of them. The narcissist interferes with your dreams and resonates with your wounds.
There is no greater intimacy than this.
Partners of narcissists say that it is very difficult to find new partners because the intensity is much lower.
Once you have experienced the narcissist as an intimate partner, all other intimate partners appear to be black and white movies. The narcissist is a color movie, an intense, amazing experience, unparalleled, unprecedented, unrepeatable.
Remember that the narcissist interferes with your dreams and resonates with your wounds. There is no greater intimacy ever than this.
Before we go into the mind of this pretty unique creature, let me, as promised, tell you what are the eight techniques. There are eight techniques. I invented seven of them, and I'm very sad to say that someone else invented the eight. It's devastating. I've never recovered from that.
But let's keep it between us.
By far, the most effective technique is no contact.
The minute you have identified someone as a narcissist or with pronounced narcissistic traits, you walk away. And yes, you walk away even if it is your mother or father or son, let alone husband or wife. You just walk away. You maintain no contact, direct or indirect.
If you are forced to communicate, you communicate via service providers like lawyers and accountants and courts. You receive no gifts. You answer no phone calls. You do not become friends. You do not follow the social media accounts of your ex-partner. You don't talk to friends of your partner, to your partner's mother. You go no contact. This is by far the most efficient technique.
And today, recommended by most mental health practitioners and family therapists.
What if you have children together? You minimize content. You work through third parties. You never discuss personal issues, not connected to the children.
What if you have a very successful and profitable business together? You dismantle it. You go. Your sanity and survival are more important than any business. What if it is your mother?
Same. Son, same.
This is toxic. You walk away.
In all my years, decades of work in the topic, I have never heard a good reason not to go no contact. If you don't go no contact, it's because you do not want to go no contact, because the narcissist still fulfills some emotional needs.
So then if you are still in contact, there are the other seven techniques.
A very effective technique which I did not invent is called gray rock. It is providing the narcissist with minimal, minimal, minimum response, pretending to be boring, one dimensional, a bit stupid, not interesting.
Gradually, the narcissist, presumably, will lose interest in you and move on to the next source of supply and works very fast, usually within months.
All you have to do is respond minimally, not to the point, ignore, stare, do nothing.
Next technique is called deflection or decoy technique. It is to find a common enemy, the neighbor, the boss, his sister-in-law, the favorite mother-in-law, someone you can agree with the narcissist is a common enemy. Then you and the narcissist become allies against this common enemy. It could be an institution, the ruling party, the church, the United States, it's a favorite. You just find a common enemy and then you become friends of the narcissist.
So this technique is decoy.
The next technique is called mirroring. It should never be used with a psychopathic narcissist.
Psychopathic narcissist has no impulse control, tends to be violent, and is defined.
But with regular narcissists, it works miracles.
You simply mirror the narcissist. Mirroring is a very bad term that I chose because in a mirror, everything is opposite, reverse.
But actually it's copying, imitating the narcissist. He shouts, you shout. He humiliates you, you humiliate him. He cheats on you, you cheat on him. Whatever he does, you do.
The famous song, anything you can do, I can do better. This is the essence of the technique.
It has two effects.
Escalation. Narcissist is a coward, like all bullies. And escalation. When the narcissist faces escalation, he backs off.
Second effect, it creates in the narcissist self-awareness. The narcissist is not introspective. He doesn't have self-awareness.
So mirroring helps the narcissist to see himself in the mirror, to see what he's doing.
For those of you who study psychology, who are into psychology and like very much psychological phrases, this technique is actually a form of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning.
So it conditions the narcissist to behave. We use operant conditioning in domesticating pets. Only pets are a pleasure.
The next technique is known as shared psychosis or shared psychotic disorder.
This technique has other names, delusional narrative, Stockholm syndrome, trauma bonding, etc. It is exactly the opposite of mirroring. Whatever the narcissist does, you exaggerate.
So the narcissist says, I solved this problem in work today, at work today. All my stupid colleagues and my idiot boss could not solve it. I came in five minutes, I solved it.
In shared psychosis, the response would be, why did it take you five minutes? You are such an amazing genius. Normally it would take you two minutes. And why do you spend your time in this stupid job with these retards? You deserve a lot better. You are a genius of global proportions. Not recognized yet, but you create a caricature. You caricaturize the narcissist's grandiosity and behaviors. You make caricature out of the narcissist's grandiosity and behavior.
And in literature, this is known as parody. You parody the narcissist.
This has the amazing effect that the narcissist becomes modest. A typical reaction, well, don't exaggerate, you know, I'm not such a genius.
And it's therefore a technique of behavior modification.
You enter the psychotic world of the narcissist and you enhance it. You amplify it so that even the narcissist sees how crazy he is.
The next technique is closely allied, closely connected to this technique. It is to provide the narcissist with calibrated, reasonable, but very high grade narcissistic supply.
Narcissistic supply is of course attention, essentially attention. Attention could be positive, but also negative. Any attention is narcissistic supply. It's a mistake to think that only positive attention.
So to tell the narcissist, I admire you. You know so much. You're amazing. You're more sexy than Wikipedia is a form of high grade narcissistic supply.
But to say to the narcissist, I'm terrified of you. You frightened me. You are so strong and so ruthless and so cruel. That is also high grade narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is a drug and the narcissist is a junkie.
The technique is simple. You become the pusher. You just provide the drug, the fix, the dose. This creates extreme dependency and actually narcissists with a very high, with a source of very high grade supply become co-dependent or even borderline. Narcissists are dependent personalities. Make sure they depend on you. You provide good supply. You can name your price.
Like in Harlem.
The next technique is known as withholding.
Opposite of the first of the previous technique. In the previous technique, you give supply. In this technique, you withhold supply. You do not give supply. You withhold communication, silent treatment. You withhold sex. You withhold sexual exclusivity.
This is known as triangulation. So you withhold critical elements, elements that are critical to the narcissist self-regulation.
By withholding these elements, the narcissist, you force the narcissist to court you, to try to force you to extract what you are withholding. You withhold sex. Suddenly he's very interested.
You withhold communication. Suddenly he constantly tries to communicate. You triangulate with another man. He becomes jealous and possessive. Withholding is a very powerful technique up to a point. It must be combined with the previous technique, never alone.
So short bursts of high grade supply, short bursts, short periods of withholding, supply withholding, supply withholding. And this is known as intermittent reinforcement.
If you review, if you have a look, a fresh look at the techniques that I've described, what strikes you? All these techniques, intermittent reinforcement, conditioning, trauma bonding, what strikes you? These are exactly narcissistic behaviors. That's exactly what the narcissist does to you.
In other words, the only way to manipulate a narcissist and survive to tell about it is to become one.
In a minute, we'll talk about it. This kind of acquired behavior is known as narcissistic psychopathic overlay.
Our studies show clearly all over the world that partners of narcissists over time, as they are traumatized and victimized, develop pronounced narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors. Narcissism, ladies and gentlemen, is far more infectious than the coronavirus and far more widespread. And there is no way to quarantine the victims.
So this is precisely coming back to the beginning.
Why my only recommendation is no contact. Always has been my recommendation since I invented it. And to this very moment, only no contact.
You remain in contact with the narcissist. You're playing with fire. You're playing with your soul, with your sanity. You will end up being narcissists and psychopaths.
These behaviors, the narcissistic psychopathic overlay, these behaviors are transient. They're temporary.
Victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder display behaviors which are identical to borderline personality disorder.
As the trauma heals, these behaviors vanish, except two things that never, ever recover.
The ability to trust other people and empathy.
Victims of narcissists, people with long exposure to narcissists and psychopaths develop empathic deficit that never recovers.
Similar empathic deficit, we can find among alcoholics, among drug addicts, among people with chronic illnesses, among people with terminal illnesses.
Is this the way you want to end up? Why play these games?
What is the aim of manipulating the narcissist? Don't even pack your things. Don't bother. Walk away.
This has been the 45 minute, 15 minutes that I promised. And now I'm inviting you to a tour of the narcissist mind.