Narcissistic abuse is so overwhelming, so annihilating, so negating, that it is akin to a massive natural disaster.
In the face of natural disasters, we tend to adopt a position of helplessness. There was nothing we could do. It's stronger than us. It's bigger than us. It's God ordained.
And so there is this fatalism, this determinism, this surrender to the inevitable.
And the narcissist becomes a godlike figure, center stage.
The survivors of narcissistic abuse very often adopt a position of victimhood, a new identity, which tends to explain what has happened to them, make sense of the world, impute with meaning, purpose and direction.
Being a victim is a full-time job but the truth is anything the narcissists can do you can do better, I will explain in a minute why.
You know the famous song Annie Oakley, "Anything you can do I can do better." That's how you should comport yourself with the narcissist.
This song should play and replay in your mind time and again, realize the narcissist's fundamental inferiority and your inextricable superiority.
I promise to explain why.
Why do I consider the victim far superior to the narcissist?
The reason is very simple.
When the narcissist first comes across you, when you first meet, on a date, elsewhere, the narcissist takes a snapshot of you. He creates an image of you inside his mind, an internal object, a representation of you in his head, and he continues to interact with this introject, with this internal object.
Now, what does it mean?
It means that the snapshot, the avatar of you, your representation in the narcissist's mind, is a Trojan horse. It's what we call in computing a back door. It means that you have access to the narcissist mind.
The narcissist installs an app in his smartphone-like mind, which represents you.
This process is known as introjection.
So the narcissist in due time installs his introject in your mind and continues to talk to you via this introject, continues to interact with other parts of your mind, with other internal objects in your head via the introject.
Even when the narcissist has exited your life, even when the narcissist is long gone physically, the voice of the narcissist still resonates internally in cahoots and interaction with other voices, with other introjects.
But the fact of the matter is, long before the narcissist has installed his introject in your mind, long before he has installed his app in your smartphone you have had an introject in his mind you have had had access to his operating system via the snapshot via your representation in his mind.
Now, the narcissist uses your introject in his mind, your idealized image in his mind, your voice in his mind.
The narcissist uses the internal object that represents you in his mind in order to regress through a womb-like matrix in order to go back in time and become a child again with you as the maternal figure as a new substitute surrogate mother.
This provides you with enormous leverage. You are the narcissist mother, psychologically and psychodynamically. Psychologically and psychodynamically speaking, you have all the powers that a mother has, including the power to define or redefine the narcissist identity, to cause the narcissist to split so that you become all good and the narcissist becomes all bad.
You have tremendous power as a mother. Remember, the narcissist is a child to start with.
And when he is in interaction with the internal object that represents you in his mind, he is an infant or even less than an infant, an embryo.
So your power is nearly infinite.
And if you were to use your maternal potency, your access to his mind as a mother figure, there's a lot you could accomplish.
You could discipline him. You could redirect his energies, including negative affects, negative emotions, like anger, like envy, like hatred. You could shape the world for him. You could constitute a narcissist reality testing. You could take over critical executive functions as a mother would, because good mothers lead, good mothers are not friends with their children, good mothers are not equal to their children, good mothers and good fathers are leaders.
So you could assume the leadership position and the narcissist would not resist because he is a child and he does want you to be his mother, at least in the initial phases of the shared fantasy.
And remember all this is a fantasy and because it's a fantasy it's not subject to the laws of physics or nature, it is not an extension or a derivative of reality.
A fantasy is a consensual story. It's a piece of fiction which both of you, the narcissist and you, co-author. You have equal authorship of the fantasy, and therefore you have the absolute unmitigated power to remold the fantasy, to reshape it and to rewrite it.
Use this power via your maternal function.
Behave as a mother would with a two-year-old. Try it. I know it sounds implausible. I know you're afraid that the narcissist might retaliate somehow, punish you, even become violent perhaps.
No, none of this would happen. If you were to act as a mother would, assuming the narcissist is to be around two years old, psychologically and emotionally speaking, you won't believe the outcomes.
That's point number one.
Interjection and regression.
The fact that you already have a presence within the narcissist's mind, a self-inflicted presence as far as a narcissist is concerned.
Through the process of snapshot, you have a Trojan horse.
Open the belly of the horse, and let your soldiers out and take over the territory.
Number two, repetition and entraining.
Repetition and entraining.
Repeat, construct a set of sentences.
In a minute I will describe how to do this. Construct a set of sentences. In a minute I will describe how to do this. Construct a set of sentences. Write them down. Memorize them and then repeat them endlessly. Time and again and again and again. Repetition, repetition.
Remind you of something? Yes, a hypnotic state, a trance.
The more you repeat something verbally, the more you synchronize the brain waves of the listener with your brainwaves.
This is known as entraining.
The narcissist does this to you.
The narcissist verbally abuses you.
And typically uses the same vocabulary to do this. He repeats mantras and slogans of abuse, maltreatment, he demeans you and degrades you, humiliates you and shames you, exposes you and criticizes you using the same verbiage, the same language time and again, thereby essentially brainwashing you, indoctrinating you, and training you.
But you can do exactly the same to him.
Actually, narcissists are far more susceptible to entraining than you are.
Because when the narcissist trains you and brainwashes you, he has to overcome the fact that you have been in touch with reality until you have met him.
The narcissist has never been in touch with reality.
Narcissus has inhabited a landscape of fantasy throughout his or her life, a paracosm.
So it's much easier to delude and mislead the narcissists, to cause the narcissists to completely lose reality testing. It's much easier, in other words, to gaslight the narcissists.
Narcissists are more gullible than the typical average population.
So the sentences you have to construct belong to one or four groups.
And in each and every one of these categories, you need a few sentences. Like each category should have like four or five sentences.
The sentences should reflect your goals.
What do you want to achieve? Do you want to modify the narcissist behavior? Do you want to control the narcissist? Do you want to prevent the narcissist from doing something? Do you want, on the other hand, to cajole and incentivize the narcissists to behave in specific ways? Do you want a narcissist gone? Do you want a narcissist to be more present? Etc.
Define your goals. First of all, define your goals in the relationship and then shape the sentences that you are going to use in the brainwashing and training process. Shape them to reflect these goals.
And these sentences belong in one of four groups, as I said.
Number one, challenge the narcissist's grandiosity. Challenge.
Grandiosity is the cognitive distortion, the wrong, erroneous self-perception and self-image, which is fantastic and inflated.
The narcissist relies on this self-image in order to support, uphold and buttress his false self.
By challenging the narcissist's grandiosity, you undermine the very foundations of the fortress narcissism.
So, grandiosity challenging, but grandiosity challenging could be a positively motivating force.
For example, you could say, I know you are capable of doing this, I know only you are capable of doing this.
It never occurred to me that you couldn't do this. You are so talented. You're so amazing. You're so powerful.
Aggrandize the narcissist and then implicitly challenge the aggrandized image.
Tell the narcissists, I assume only you can do this, or it never occurred to me that you couldn't do this, or you're definitely capable of doing this, or I've seen you doing similar things, or nothing is too difficult for you, etc.
So challenge his grandiosity and in the same time reshape his grandiosity so as to yield motivation, to motivate him, to prove to you that his inflated, fantastic self-image is neither inflated nor fantastic.
This way you can lead the narcissists to the water and make him drink.
Narcissists find challenges to their grandiosityirresistible.
Immediately, their critical thinking and paranoia are suspended, and they are laser focused on proving to you how truly godlike they are.
Category number one.
Category number two.
Ideational misattribution.
When you want the narcissist to do something for you, make him think that the idea was his.
When you want him to behave in a specific way, or not behave in a specific way, make him think it was his initiative.
Misattribute things, misattribute ideas, misattribute requests and wishes to the narcissist, make it appear that everything is coming from the narcissist, that is the found and the source and the origin of everything original, everything daring, everything rational, everything amazing, everything fascinating, make him the prime mover and the prime cause of the universe and more specifically of your relationship.
So, you've had an idea, do not share it with the narcissists. This would be perceived as an imposition and a narcissistic injury.
Because how is it possible that you have had an idea and a narcissistic injury because how is it possible that you have had an idea and the narcissist didn't have the same idea earlier that implies that you're more clever than a narcissist smarter than a narcissist more creative than a narcissist is narcissistic injury.
Never share an idea with the narcissists.
Wait two or three days and then come to the narcissist and say, do you remember that a few days ago you gave me this idea?
Because narcissists are highly dissociative. They will absolutely say, yes, of course I remember.
This process is known as confabulation. It's as simple as that.
Narcissists fall for the most egregious, blatant flattery. They are like children, utterly incapable of spotting, faking, spotting con artistry.
So they are very, very naive and gullible and vulnerable to manipulation. They're actually the victims of Machiavellianism.
So go to the narcissist and simply state the fact that the idea you're about to share, the request you're about to make, the wish you're about to expound on, actually came from the narcissists.
And it took you a few days to process it and then you realize how amazingly ingenious the idea was, how perspicacious and insightful the narcissist approach is.
And because a narcissist only dimly recalls his autobiographical past because the narcissist has disrupted episodic memory, the narcissist is likely to believe you that the idea was his, that the request came from him and that the wish was always been his.
And when I say he's her, yeah, half of all narcissists are women.
Okay, next.
Fake helplessness, it's called feigned helplessness. Fake helplessness. Pretend to be helpless. Helpless, lost, discombobulated, confused, terrified, provoking the narcissist, the savior, rescuer, hero, fixer, healercomplex.
Let him play these roles, to his satisfaction. Let these roles elevate his grandiosity and support it.
By faking and feigning helplessness, you are motivating the narcissist to act on your behalf and in your favor and to adopt your goals and your wishes and your dreams and your request as his.
It's the only way to make you happy, only way to make you healthy, only way to make you stay with it.
So this is the third category of sentences, sentences which express helplessness and imply that the only solution is the narcissist intervention, the narcissists sacor, the narcissists help, the narcissists advice, the narcissists wisdom, omnipotence, omniscience, and godlike, panoramic and synoptic view.
Agrandize the narcissists so as to render him essentially your slave.
These narcissists find the savior, rescue, or healer, fixer function to be irresistible.
And finally, the fourth category of sentences is the mass psychogenic sentences or the cult-like sentences.
It's the sentences that say, the narcissists and you are against the world. It's us versus them.
Find imaginary or real enemies and adversaries and foes and redirect the energy of the narcissist against them in a way that would benefit your goals, in a way that would gratify your wishes and fulfill your requests.
Use the cult-like setting to again trigger in the narcissists, the protector instinct, the leader instinct.
You are the cult leader, you're the follower, the worshiper, the member, create what used to be called in French, folie d'e, create shared psychosis, mass psychogenic illness in current usage.
So these are the sentences, the four categories of sentences.
Write down these sentences and then simply repeat them. Time and again and again and again and again.
Condition the narcissists, this is called operand conditioning, condition the narcissists with positive and negative reinforcements.
Teach the narcissist that if he responds in a certain way to your sentences, he is rewarded, and if it does not respond in the desired way, he is not rewarded.
So, condition him.
I'm sorry to say, but it's a little like housebreakinga pet. You need to tame and domesticate the narcissist.
Now, this is the first element in entraining and brainwashing.
This is the second element, sorry, in entraining and brainwashing the narcissists.
To remind you, the first element, play the mother. Play the mother to the narcissist child.
The second element, construct a set of sentences and repeat them endlessly, ad infinitum.
The third element, create a narrative, a story line, a piece of fiction, a script that accords 100%, corresponds 100%, and confirms 100%, the shared fantasy.
A narrative that is egosyntonic, ego-congruent, a narcissistic that supports, a narrative that supports the narcissist's view of himself, a narrative that allows you to become in the narcissist's mind an inseparable part of him, an integral part of his essence.
This narrative should have survival value. It should reflect a positive adaptation.
In other words, the narrative must incentivize the narcissist to interject you as a mother figure and allow him to assimilate the aforementioned sentences.
So the narrative is a two-fold function to buttress and uphold and cement the shared fantasy within which you are a maternal figure, and on the other hand, to allow you to manipulate the narcissists verbally through the process of entraining.
Now we distinguish between three types of such narratives, such manipulative, Machiavellian, goal-oriented narratives.
There's the anxiolytic narrative.
It's a narrative that mitigates and ameliorates the narcissists separation insecurity, abandonment anxiety.
Narcissists have a problem with object constancy. Narcissists have actually been abandoned as children, neglected, mistreated, abused, traumatized.
And so they have this fear of undergoing the same experience with a new maternal figure, construct a narrative that is anxiolytic, a narrative that reduces this anxiety, this insecurity.
Such a narrative is going to have enormous power with the narcissists.
And within the narrative, embed injunctions, expectations, requests, wishes, dreams, goals within the narrative, an integral part of the narrative, an inseparable part of the narrative, so that when the narcissist accepts the narrative, he also unwittingly ends up accepting all the manipulative elements within the narrative.
Now I keep saying manipulative, manipulation and so forth. Manipulative and manipulation are not negative things. Every human being alive manipulates other people. Manipulation is simply how we get other people to do things we want them to do.
And so in this very broad definition of manipulation, we are all manipulative.
Now, the next type of narrative is the triumphant antagonistic narrative.
A narrative of justice restored, omnipotence affirmed and confirmed.
The narcissist prevails superior and supreme.
His worth is unveiled and discovered.
He is rewarded as he should always have been, etc., etc.
The triumphant antagonistic narrative similarly reduces the narcissist anxiety and other negative effects such as anger and envy. So it has a very, very positive effect on the moods of the narcissist and on his internal cohesion, on his ability to somehow maintain the precarious balance of his so-called personality and absent or disrupted self.
So the triumphant antagonistic narrative again should include your expectations, your wishes, your requests, your dreams, your goals, all of them embedded in the triumphant antagonistic narrative.
And finally, there is the grandiosity enhancing and the grandiosity congruent narrative.
It's a narrative that elevates the narcissists apotheosis, a worshipping of the narcissus, placing the narcissists at the center of attention and the life of the party.
The narcissus becomes a godlike figure. Everyone around are worshippers within a new church. It's a kind of private religion. It's a primitive religion, but it's still cult-like and sect-like.
That's another very important type of narrative.
And actually, this narrative allows you to obtain your goals, realize your expectations, fulfill your wishes much more than the previous two if you're willing to go this way if you're willing to flatter the narcissists worship the narcissists submit to the narcissists then you would end up having ultimate power over the narcissist unmitigated power power that extends infinitely, narcissists would do anything for you. Absolutely anything.
This, of course, is what co-dependence do. It's precisely how they emotionally blackmail the intimate partner, who is a narcissist. And this is what borderlines do at the initial phase of the shared fantasy.
Okay. Finally, I promised you four ways. There's the fourth way.
Is to use the narcissist peer network. To use the narcissists social network.
Now, many narcissists do not have a social network, and therefore, this point is moot. But quite a few narcissists do have a social network.
Now, many narcissists do not have a social network, and therefore, this point is moot.
But quite a few narcissists do have a social network of peers, colleagues, you know, churchgoers, members of the family, and so on.
Convert these people into your flying monkeys. Leverage peer dynamics and the hive mind of the crowd.
The in-group, the narcissists belong. His group personality, his cult personality, not the personality that he presents indoors with you, but the personality that he presents to the world, what was called mask by Jung or persona by you, I'm sorry, or mask.
So use this, there's an outsourcing of cognitive processes and there's the acquisition of social identity in peer dynamics.
The narcissist wants to belong. He wants to be accepted. He wants to have a surrogate family.
The narcissist regulates his sense of self-worth and self-esteem and self-confidence via the group.
Members of the group, which a narcissist somehow admires, looks up to, wishes to emulate, they serve as role models.
There's a lot of peer pressure to conform. There's operand conditioning within the group. There's normative regulation. There's a formation of negative identity. If you belong to the group, you define yourself in opposition to people outside the group, in the outgroup.
The group becomes a social reference point.
Use all this. Use the power of the group. Convert people in the group into your flying monkeys and use them against the narcissist or with the narcissist or in conjunction with the shared fantasy. Introduce them into the shared fantasy if you need to.
Make sure they hear your side of things, your version of the events or end of their relationship and mobilize them and motivate them to become rescuers, rescuers and saviors and heroes and healers and fixes.
No one is amenable to such an appeal. It's irresistible. It's in our nature because we all feel very protective of children. We have all had the experience of being protectors and healers and saviors and rescuers and rescuers, albeit usually only with children.
Appeal to that, infantilize yourself, play a child role, play a mother role with a narcissist, and play a child role with the narcissist peer group and social network so that they come to your defense against the narcissist.
Leverage the peer group.
Put all these four together and you are definitely in the position to do to the narcissist what he is doing to you. And I claim that you can do it much more successfully.
Now, the second part of the video is an analysis of the science, presentation of the latest findings in the field, and what do we know about brainwashing and training and indoctrination?
So enjoy this part.
This morning I've been asked by a journalist what are the secrets of brainwashing and indoctrination, why do they work so well, how come so many people become oblivious to reality, to the truth, to facts, and even reject them angrily when confronted with incontrovertible evidence? What happens to the brain in these situations? And how do people revert if ever?
So I'm going to answer the first part of this question because the other two parts are reserved for the television interview that I'm going to give next week.
But I would like to respond to the first part in a bit of a more expansive way.
The question was, what are the mechanisms that allow people to brainwash and indoctrinate other people?
Well, number one, repetition. Repetition is a very powerful tool.
Verbal repetition, especially if the text is identical, almost identical, all the time, verbal repetition creates a process known as entraining.
Entraining has been discovered about 12 years ago by neuroscientists. And entraining simply means that when you're exposed to the same stimulus, same sound, your brainwaves synchronize with the brainwaves of the person who is producing the sound.
Now this has been proven with music. People who play music together, their brainwaves become so synchronized that they're indistinguishable from each other on an EEG machine.
And it stands to reason that if you're exposed repeatedly to the same mantra, to the same slogan, to the same verbal abuse, to the same commands, to the same injunctions, time and again, every day, multiple times a day, day in and day out, month in and month out year in and year out, it stands to reason that you are being entrained.
Training is a physical phenomenon, physiological phenomenon. Your brain waves get altered, modified, and synchronized with the brainwaves of the brainwasher or the abuser.
So repetition and entraining are the secret of brainwashing and indoctrination.
No wonder most religions, all religions actually, and most political ideologies use slogans, mantras, specific words that have to be repeated every day, time and again.
This is known as prayer. Praying to God is a form of brainwashing. It's a form of entraining.
The next reason is that the narrative offered in the brainwashing or indoctrination scheme, the narrative is egosyntonic.
In other words, the narratives make you feel good about yourself, about your place in the world, about your future prospects, about your morality, about your standing and relative positioning, about your accomplishment, about anything and everything altogether.
So brainwashing and indoctrination include texts, repeated texts, that make you feel good about yourself.
This is known in psychology as the pleasure principle.
Recently, we have connected the pleasure principle into the dopaminergic pathway in the brain. It's addictive.
You become addicted to it because the brainwashing narrative, the indoctrination schemata, allow you to fall in love with yourself, allow you to experience self-love in a safe environment, an accepting environment. We'll come to it in a minute.
The third reason is that to succumb to brainwashing, to accept doctrines and indoctrination, is a survival strategy. It's a positive adaptation.
There is a motivation, an inducement, an incentive to introject, to assimilate the voices, to absorb the narrative, to appropriate it, and to own it, and to feel authentic through it.
Let me put it more simply.
If you're being brainwashed and indoctrinated in a cult or in a dictatorship or in a group and you resist the brainwashing and you oppose the indoctrination, your survival is at stake very often. Your freedom, maybe even your life.
It is dangerous to oppose brainwashing and indoctrination because these are group activities, not individual.
And so to comply, to submit, to obsequiously follow the messaging of brainwashing, the signaling, including virtual signaling embedded in indoctrination, these are all positive adaptations because they enhance your survival chances, on the one hand, and they reduce your anxiety, on the other.
You need to be a lot less hypervigilant or even paranoid.
And finally, brainwashing and indoctrination make use of the most ancient, infantile mechanisms of upbringing.
So brainwashing and indoctrination recreate early childhood within the family.
There's a regression to a womb, to a matrix, to a uterus, to infancy, via the process of introjection.
Introjection is an infantile mechanism. It happens only in childhood.
So brainwashing and indoctrinationuse introjection.
They embedding you. They install in you, in your mind, a voice.
This voice becomes yours. It's an alien voice. It's coming from the outside.
But you're mistaken to believe that it is yours because it pays to believe this.
When you conform to a group, you have the power of the entire group at your disposal.
So it's a positive adaptation, and you agree to infantilize.
Part of the deal when you join a group, when you're brainwashed, when you're indoctrinated, is that you agree to give up on your personal autonomy, independence, decision-making powers, self-efficacy, agency. You give up on all these things.
You become a child, dependent again on parental figures.
The parental figures conduct the brainwashing and the indoctrination.
You become a child or an infant. Once again, you absorb these voices via introjection, and then you follow these voices because you mislabel them and misidentify them as yours, as authentic.
All this is part of what is known as peer dynamics.
You become integrated into the mind of the group, group think, into a hive mind, like a colony of bees or a colony of ants.
There is an in-group personality, a cult personality.
You outsource your cognitive processes.
And in return, what you get is a social identity.
It's like you're saying, guys or girls, I want to belong to you, and I'm willing to suspend my critical thinking. I'm willing to give you the right to think for me. I'm willing to give you the right to decide for me. I'm going to give you the power over me.
In return, give me your identity. Allow me to belong to you. Accept me.
Belonging and acceptance are very powerful motivators because they're reminiscent, they trigger early childhood experiences in the family.
The people who brainwash you, the people who indoctrinate you, they act as parental figures.
And everyone around you who has accepted the brainwashing and succumbed to the indoctrination, they become your siblings, your brothers and sisters.
So the whole setup is actually a surrogate family.
By belonging to the group with its brainwashing program, with its indoctrination, with its propaganda, by belonging to this group, you actually end up regulating your self-esteem, sense of self-worth and acquiring self-confidence.
It's as if by belonging to the group you have multiplied yourself. You have become multiple copies of yourself.
Because indeed, the minds of the group members or the cult members are indistinguishable from each other.
Remember, in training. There's a lot of peer pressure, a lot of operant conditioning, a lot of normative regulation. And all these drive you to become the same or similar to everyone else. They homogenize you. They make you indistinguishable, a cog in the machine, a commodity, replaceable, interchangeable, and disposable, and yet deceived into believing that you are somehow important by proxy.
Somehow, the value of the group reflects on you. Somehow just by belonging and by being accepted, your social identity is elevated.
This is known as negative identity. Negative identity consists of the rejection of other people, the exclusion of other people.
I am superior, I am elevated, I'm unique because I am not the others. I'm not the out group. I am not someone else.
So you define your identity in contradistinction and in rejection of someone else's identity. And this is known as a negative identity.
The group is what is called a social referent. It provides you a reference group like an archimedean, a comedian point, a pivot, an axis around which your mental life, your psychological life can revolve.
As you can see, brainwashing and indoctrination come hand in hand with many rewards. These are irresistible propositions, especially for people who feel inferior, people who are empty, their lives are empty, they have no goal and no direction and no purpose.
They feel inferior, as I said. And yet, they are somehow grandiose. They somehow aspire to uniqueness and to being recognized.
And so the group, the in-group provides a perfect solution, but it comes at a cost, the cost of suspending your mind, being brainwashed, indoctrinated, and trained, and becoming one of many, when the uniqueness belongs to the group.
The group is unique, and you are unique by virtue of belonging to it, but not as an individual.
It's a strange combination, but it works.