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All right, we are recording now.
Okay, awesome.
So welcome, I'm gonna go ahead and just pull up my notes here and I'll do our official introductions.
Welcome to today's podcast. I'm Yami, I'm a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach and one of the professional facilitators at Circles.
Today we're going to be addressing one of the most profound questions that I often hear survivors ask, and I'm sure you've heard as well, Professor Vaknin, survivors ask as well, which is how long does healing take?
And I'm thrilled to explore this with none other than you, Professor Sam Vaknin, a leading expert on narcissism and narcissistic abuse. His work includes the groundbreaking book, MalignantSelf-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and has literally transformed the way that we understand narcissism and its impact on survivors.
But before we dive in, I just want to thank Circles for making today possible. Circles is a support platform dedicated to helping individuals navigate the aftermath of narcissistic abuse and other emotional challenges through live, audio-based, professionally facilitated group sessions and compassionate peer community.
Circles empowers members to reclaim their strength and rebuild self-worth.
So again, welcome Professor Vaknin. We are so honored to have you here today.
Thank you. Call me Sam. That way you will get my name right. It's Vaknin.
Vaknin. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Sam.
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Sam. So healing from narcissistic abuse, as you know, is a uniquely complex journey. In your opinion, why is healing from narcissistic abuse so uniquely challenging compared to other forms of trauma?
Because narcissistic abuse is a unique form of abuse.
When I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse in the 1980s, my peers asked me, why do we need to invent, why do we need to come up with another form of abuse? Isn't it enough to say abuse?
And I explained to them, I try to, that no, it is not enough to use the classical forms of abuse as proxies for narcissistic abuse, proxies for what narcissists do in relationships.
And let it be clear, narcissistic abuse is not limited to intimate relationships or romantic relationships. Narcissistic abuse is common in all interpersonal relationships of narcissists with good friends, with family members, with their own children, with their spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends, in church, neighbors. That's the way narcissists relate to other people. They abuse them.
Narcissistic abuse is special because it is not about obtaining some goal or securing some goal. It's not goal-focused, not goal-oriented.
It's about deanimating the victim. It's about suspending the victim's independence, the victim's personal autonomy, the victim's agency, the victim's ability to act outside the ambit or the circumference of the shared fantasy with the narcissist.
So the narcissist needs the other person in whatever capacity, as I said, best friend, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend. The narcissist needs the other person to become a prop in a theater production, an object, an instrument, a tool of gratification.
The other person in the shared fantasy, and this is the clinical term for what's happening between a narcissist and any other person, it's a shared fantasy. The other person in the shared fantasy, the other participant, has to follow a rigidly prescribed script. Cannot deviate or diverge from this script. And whenever she does, she is penalized.
So it's a highly punitive environment. And so at the end of the process of narcissistic abuse, the victim feels annihilated. She feels that she had lost herself, that she no longer exist in any meaningful sense, except as an extension of the narcissist or through the gaze of the narcissist.
She becomes highly dependent on the narcissist for her sense of being, not only for her functioning, but for her sense of existing at all.
So narcissistic abuse takes away from you, your core identity, who you are, your values and beliefs, your personal history, isolates you from family and friends, embeds you in a coercively controlled environment, forces you to pretend that the narcissist's fantasy is actually reality, and if you don't, you're penalized, and therefore coerces you into suspending your judgment, your ability to form opinions, your capacity to act independently and in an agentic manner, and so on.
You become a puppet to the narcissist puppet master.
So this is why narcissistic abuse is so special.
If you're abused by a psychopath, the psychopath wants something from you. He wants your money. So he's going to con you into giving him your money. Or he wants to have sex with you. So he's going to end up, you know, having sex with you, coercively or otherwise, maybe rape you. He wants to have something from you.
The psychopath is goal oriented.
And of course, you would need to recover from this kind of abuse.
But at least it's a kind of abuse that makes human sense. It's a kind of abuse that is limited as a single dimension, doesn't affect the rest of your personality or the rest of your identity or the rest of your activities or the rest of your social circle.
You can isolate the area or the field in which you have been abused and then somehow cope with it, reframe it, recover from it.
That's not the case with narcissistic abuse.
All of you, your totality has been impacted beyond reconstruction.
It is exceedingly difficult to recover because you are not there anymore.
There's no agent. There's nobody there to do the recovery and the healing.
You have been obliterated. You've been eliminated. You've been wiped and erased. And you've been replaced with a kind of zombie or a kind of automaton or robot that looks like you, sometimes talks like you, convinces other people that it's still you, but it's not you.
It's mind snatching. It's a form of mind snatching.
Yeah, you've mentioned a few key things here.
I was taking notes because I was just in awe by your response.
If I had to summarize, it sounds like the way that you're describing these relationships is extremely parasitic, right? Stripping ones of one identity, their autonomy, and I have some questions regarding the process of healing that we'll touch on in just a few minutes.
But you mentioned something key here that I don't think I've heard anyone else say.
You've mentioned that the difference between psychopaths and narcissists, in your opinion, is that even in those dynamics, there's a specific goal.
You know, for a very long time, I've been under the impression that the goal for the narcissist is to serve one's own self of identity and ego.
So would you say that that in essence is the goal for the narcissist or do you feel like it's completely goalless? Just want clarity for those who are listening.
No, there is a goal, and the goal is to sustain a fantastic narrative that buttresses and upholds the narcissist inflated grandiose self-concept or self-perception.
So in your opinion, that is the main goal, which is the only goal.
Seek narcissistic supply in order to maintain a fantastic space known as a paracosm, within which they can regard themselves as god-like, I'm sorry, and godless, as godlike.
And so the narcissist forces you to tell him, to agree with him, to comply with the fantasy, to say, it's not a fantasy, it's reality, you really are godlike. You're really a genius. You're really drop dead gorgeous. You're really this.
So the narcissist forces you to suspend your judgment, to no longer be. You can't have your independent opinion. The narcissist says, if I want your opinion, I'll give it to you.
So you vanish in any meaningful sense of agency. You no longer have agency.
Absolutely.
And I've heard you describe this in previous podcast episode and YouTube videos as almost like a Trojan horse, right, a mind virus, where the survivors often internalize the narcissist attitude, identity, voice opinions as their own, something that you've called, and I know the industry calls introjection.
So how can survivors learn to silence that voice so that they can begin to move forward in their healing process?
The narcissist installs in your mind an app.
so that they can begin to move forward in their healing process.
Think of your mind as a smartphone. And the narcissist installs in your mind an app.
He does this using two clinical psychological processes. One is known as entraining.
Entraining is the synchronizing of brain waves in a physical sense. The synchronizing of brain waves by using repeated sounds or rhythmical sounds.
The narcissists uses verbal abuse, which is highly repetitive, in order to synchronize his brainwaves with yours.
Now, entraining has been discovered 15 years ago. It's a fact in neuroscience, it's not a conspiracy theory.
And we know that repetitive rhythmic sounds, for example, music, cause entraining.
So we studied, for example, rock bands, and we discovered that all the members of the rock band became a single brain. They synchronized their waves so that we couldn't tell anymore whose brain was it. They all were identical.
Narcissus uses verbal abuse to accomplish the same.
At that point, you're vulnerable. He opens a portal. There's like a portal opening in your mind, is able to reach into your mind and install an app in it.
That app is what is known as introject. It is essentially the narcissist's voice and it is through this voice that the narcissist is able to control you.
It's mind control because what this app does, it collaborates with other apps.
So the narcissist introjets collaborate with your mother's introject. If your mother was hostile to you, if she was highly critical, if she was sadistic, if she was narcissistic, then she...
The narcissist introject would collaborate with her introject.
And then you would have two voices telling you the same.
One of them is highly authoritative. That's your mom, your mother.
And one of them is a recent newcomer, but still amplified by your mother's introject.
So the narcissistic introject creates a coalition, or what is known as a cluster, introject cluster, a coalition of introjects.
How to cope with this? How to manage this?
First of all, how to identify it.
It's very simple to identify, actually. If there's a voice in your head that keeps putting you down, criticizing you, demeaning you, degrading you, humiliating you, shaming you, attacking you, that is not your authentic voice, that is a voice that is coming from the outside and that is a voice that is essentially hostile and your enemy.
You need to silence this voice.
And the fact is that the simplest way to silence this voice is to tell it to shut up.
Simply tell it to shut up.
You have a voice in your head that tells you, you're really not good at doing this, are you?
You should say, shut up. Just shut up. I'm interested in what you have to say.
I wish it were that simple, Professor Sam.
It's actually that simple because it is the repetition of this, the repetition of this, that would create essentially a counterbalance to the introject, in a way you would be self-interjecting, if you wish.
We have no other major tools except this repetition.
And we know in Eastern religions and Eastern mysticism, they have mantras. They have a mantra is exactly this. It's a kind of self-programming against this voice. You need to get rid of this voice.
Because if you were, for example, to attend therapy, and this voice is still active in your mind, the voice would collude somehow with the therapies to prevent the therapies from obtaining favorable outcomes. The voice would somehow sabotage the therapy, undermining.
So getting rid of this points.
I agree 100%.
I think that repetition, not just in terms of self-chatter, because to your point, I like the way that you described it. You know, this app, almost like the software being downloaded and finding similar apps to connect with.
I like to, in my groups and sessions, call that unconscious wounding or wounded programming that kind of gets rooted in their identity, right?
It's a kind of malware.
Yes, exactly.
And it's not just through repetition of self-talk. I think through being exposed to new experiences as well, right?
We'll come to that in the healing process.
Yes, absolutely. Like communities that mirror and model to us, perhaps things we didn't see in childhood, like unconditional love or care looks like support, kindness without necessarily a goal attached to it, a goal that's self-serving or to achieve some specific outcome.
So you also describe the healing as a process that's three distinct phases.
And I love this because I feel like for individuals who are asking the question that we're here to answer today, you know, what does the timeline look like?
This helps give them a roadmap for their own individual journey, which is, you mentioned physical separation, silencing the narcissist introject, which we've talked a little bit about so far, and then individuation, which you mentioned directly.
So can you expand on that? Can you share more about what that means and why it makes the healing journey so nonlinear?
First of all, I wholeheartedly concur. You can't do it on your own. You need help. You may need professional help if the situation is extreme, but a good friend would do. A grandma who still loves you, social network, going online and with people who have had the same experiences, sharing, sharing is caring and so.
So yeah, you need to embed yourself in a social fabric one way or another and you need to derive healing energy from other people. It can't be done on your own. Can't.
So I wholeheartedly recommend this, what you've just said, work with other people, find people who afford you with compassion and empathy, talk to other people, sunshine disinfects abuse, talk about it, expose it, share it, and so.
So all this goes without saying, of course, and it's good that you have mentioned it because I fail to mention it.
But coming back to the issue of healing, I think we should, I think one of the reason people are very confused is that we should distinguish three elements in healing or three types of healing.
First of all, there is the grief. You're grieving multiple, in multiple dimensions.
In the aftermath of narcissistic abuse, you are grieving the narcissists, you're grieving the relationship, you're grieving the fantasy that's gone. You're grieving your child because the narcissist forces you to become his mother. You are grieving your mother because the narcissist has become your mother.
So there are multiple dimensions of extreme grief and they collude and they amplify each other.
So there's this element of grief.
We believe that any grief, any grieving process, any mourning that lasts longer than one year is pathological.
And so here we have the first indication of time, time indication. So your grief should last a maximum of one year. Anything above one year is actually known as prolonged grief disorder. Prolonged grief disorder is in the diagnostic and statistical manual, actually, and requires professional help.
So this is the grieving process.
Then built on the grieving process, there's functional recovery. The ability to regain personal autonomy and independence, decision-making capacities, act, the ability to act, to be proactive, the ability to pursue goals, set goals and pursue them, the ability to embark on new projects, the ability to make a new life, maybe move away, maybe find a new job, maybe, whatever.
So there's functional recovery. Functional recovery lasts longer than one year. The functional recovery may last, you know, two or three years, may take two or three years.
And that the reason for that is that the narcissist has incapacitated you. The narcissists have rendered you, had paralyzed you, rendered you, disabled you.
Narcissistic abuse induces disability in the recipient or the victim.
So you're disabled.
And you need to regain these faculties and these abilities.
It's like having survived a major crash and you need to regain your locomotion.
So this takes two or three years, it's a process of learning.
And this leads to the third element and that is the CPTSD effects, the effects of complex trauma, narcissistic abuse.
There's very little debate, induces trauma. It's a traumatic experience or traumatizing experience.
So there are effects, post-traumatic effects. These last much longer. These may last as a minimum five years.
And I regret to say that sometimes they last a lifetime. There's no way to get rid of them.
So we should distinguish these three things.
You know, there's the grieving, there's the functionality, and there is the trauma or the complex trauma which could be a lifelong thing.
And so these are the elements of healing.
Now, within healing, the last element that you mentioned is individuation.
Now, try to explain what it means.
The narcissist regresses you, he infantilizes you, he forces you to give up on your adulthood.
So it's a reverse process, you're going back to the womb, you become the narcissist's child and he becomes your parental figure.
At the same time, the narcissist expects you to become his mother or her mother, so a maternal figure.
But let's focus on the victim.
So the victim is regressed into an infantile, womb-like state.
At the end or the aftermath of the narcissistic abuse, the victim is two years old. She had been denuded of all attributes and hallmarks of adulthood.
And so she needs to go through childhood again. It's a second childhood.
She needs to separate from the narcissist as a maternal figure. It's a process known as separation, individuation. She needs to separate from the narcissists.
They have become one. There's a meshment. There's what used to be known as a symbiotic phase. There's a symbiosis.
She became one with the narcissist. It's a single organism with two heads.
So think of it as Siamese twins.
The victim needs to perform an operation to separate herself from her Siamese twin, the narcissist.
And then, having separated herself, or himself, half of all narcissists, the women, having separated herself, she needs again to become an individual.
She needs to regain a sense of selfhood. She needs to reacquire what is known as ego functions, for example, reality testing.
Reality testing is a good example because what happens when you're with a narcissist, you're inside a fantasy.
So you gradually lose touch with reality. And reality is mediated only through the narcissist.
So you would ask the narcissist, is this real? Should I trust this person? Do you believe that?
And the narcissist becomes your reality. It's like he is a firewall between you and reality. Whatever he lets in is your reality. Whatever he keeps away is not your reality.
When people mistakenly say that the narcissist gaslights his victims.
Narcissist doesn't gaslight.
Narcissist believes the fantasy. He is incapable of telling apart reality in fantasy.
But the effect is the effect of gaslighting. The effect is the same.
So reality testing is known as an ego function. It's a function of the ego, function of the self.
And the fact that you have lost it is proof conclusive that you have lost yourself. You have no self anymore.
You need to grow up exactly as a baby does. You're a baby. In the wake of the narcissistic abuse, you're a baby. And you need baby steps to grow up and become the adult that you used to be, only wiser, hopefully.
And that is known as individuation.
That is powerful, because oftentimes we hear survivors literally say things like, I don't get it.
I used to be so smart, right? They're kind of, you know, shaming themselves, criticizing themselves. I used to be so capable. I don't understand why now I can't, you know, insert whatever or whoever they were before the trauma.
And often I say to clients, you have to rediscover who you are outside of your wounding and trauma.
And I think that's exactly what you described. I really love how you explain, though, that it regresses us and takes us back to childhood. I never quite saw it that way.
And that understanding that the healing is a journey, right, a journey back to wholeness.
It can take, you mentioned a few timelines here. You talked about functional recovery, that it can take two to three, five years for some five or more. And for others, there might be a lifetime of recovery.
So understanding that, understanding that there is no specific timeline, what would you say to survivors who might have heard that are listening and are feeling a little bit hopeless as a result? How do you help suggest or help them measure progress if not tied to a specific timeline?
Well, first of all, there is no distance greater than between you and yourself.
When you set out to explore yourself or to find yourself that's the greatest distance you will ever traverse.
What a narcissist does the narcissist estranges you from yourself it creates a strangement between you and yourself and this estrangement is a distance measured in years.
You need to rediscover yourself.
However, on the other hand, what is more delectable and what is more delightful and what is more amazing, what is more fascinating than discovering yourself?
It's a good reason to wake up in the morning. It's fascinating. It's exciting. It's thrilling. It's amazing. It's a good reason to wake up in the morning. It's fascinating. It's exciting. It's thrilling. It's amazing.
And maybe you will find out things about yourself that you would not have found out in the absence of narcissistic abuse. Maybe it's a catalyst. Maybe it's a trigger for a new kind of journey. You don't need to look at it as all negative.
Traumas. Life is about loss. The major engine of growth, personal growth and personal development is loss and pain. These are the major engines and suffering. We grow through loss, through pain and through suffering.
So narcissistic abuse is not all negative.
Second thing is, as I said, there are hallmarks, there are milestones.
For example, grief. You should ask yourself a year later, am I still grieving? If you are, you need help. That's pathological.
Functional recovery is, it's very rare that you would need more than two or three years. If in two or three years you're still not functional.
For example, you're afraid to make decisions. Or you have cognitive distortions. You misperceive reality and you discover that repeatedly. Or your capacity to make reasoned arguments, capacity known as syll logistic capacity. Your capacity to make recent arguments is affected. You're no longer rational. You're no longer able to deduce things.
So there's a problem with functionality. Then again, you need help. That shouldn't take more than two or three years.
So you do have milestones.
The only element of healing where you don't have milestones is CPTSD, complex trauma.
And you don't have milestones there because it critically depends on a variety of variables that are idiosyncratic, unique to each individual. So we cannot generalize.
Complex trauma, if I'm honest with the viewers, which is recommended usually, complex trauma is lifelong.
However, the prognosis is excellent. That you have complex trauma doesn't mean that it has to be psychodynamically active. In other words, you can have a background of complex trauma that does not affect your performance, your functioning, your even your effects or your cognitions. It is psychodynamically inactive, dormant, latent. It's in the background.
And I think this is the maximum we can expect because PTSD and CPTSD are unfortunately lifelong conditions.
But you don't have to be hobbled. You don't have to be obstructed by this.
The prognosis is excellent, actually.
Trauma therapies are among the most effective therapies we have, with the exception of DBT in borderline personality disorder. Trauma therapies are highly effective.
So I think optimism is definitely in place in this case.
Yeah, and I mean, even though you do mention that with CPTSD, there are no milestones, one could say on an individual level, some milestones they could look at, to your point, are subsiding in certain symptoms.
For example, less black and white thinking, perhaps some of those somatic symptoms that come with it, like constant feelings of anxiety and being on pins and needles not being so constant, feeling more regulated often than not.
So I love that you gave us a roadmap for each of these different phases, what one can look out for as milestones in terms of their healing.
You mention often, this actually is a perfect segue to one of my last questions for today, which is talking a little bit about the mind-body connection and some practical strategies that people can use to achieve some of these milestones.
So you've mentioned in a lot of your videos before, the importance of somatic-based therapies, trauma-informed therapies like the ones that you just mentioned for healing. What are some other practical strategies that you recommend for getting through each distinct stage?
The body is very important because it is the repository of the trauma, as has been observed by Van der Kolk and to some extent Gabor Maté and others. It's a repository of the trauma. It's the container.
On the one hand, but you can leverage the body to reduce the impact of the trauma or reframe it in a way that renders it, as I said, inactive, and so on.
So at the first stage, you need to focus on your body. You need to cultivate it, appreciate it. You need to become friends with your body.
Separately, you need to acquire authenticity. You need to get rid of everything that has been imposed on you, everything that's been installed in your mind, as I said. You need to become you, much more you than...
The reason you found yourself in a relationship with a narcissist is because there have been deficiencies. Deficiencies in self-love. Deficiencies in self-acquaintance, self-awareness, deficiencies, deficiencies in self-love, deficiencies in self-acquaintance, self-awareness, deficiencies in authenticity. There has been something there.
Your main task in the recovery and healing process, and even I would say lifelong afterwards, is to be vigilant, to be self-observant, to become not only your best friend, but your ongoing therapist.
You need to become aware of the pitfalls and the vulnerabilities, and you need to ask yourself, why did I end up being there?
And you do not, one thing you should never do is assume the victimhood mindset. I was an angelic, passive recipient of some force of nature, which was the narcissist. I had nothing to do with it. I contributed nothing to it. I am as innocent as a driven snow. Not my fault. I wasn't there. This is wrong.
You have contributed to your predicament either by who you were or by actively participating.
You need to assume responsibility and accountability and bravely confront your contribution to the situation, so that it never happens again.
This is another element I have on my YouTube channel I have a playlist it's titled narcissistic abuse healing and recovery and there are more than 100 videos there.
But there are several, there are 506, that summarize the steps in healing and recovery and provide frameworks.
For example, I have something called the nine-the-nine path or the nine-fold path.
The nine-fold path are nine elements that you should emphasize in your healing and recovery.
I have videos dedicated to individuation, videos dedicated to suppressing the introject of the narcissists, videos which deal with therapy, and so and so forth.
Rather than rehash the whole thing, I think I could recommend those who are interested and so on. I could recommend simply going to the playlist and watching, especially the summary videos, because we have like summary videos, watching the summary videos at the very least. And then applying whatever is applicable.
There's a lot of work. There's a lot of work because narcissistic abuse inflicts systemic damage. It's total.
Narcistic abuse is a total immersive experience. Every dimension of you, every aspect of you, your cognitions, your effects, your ability to regulate, self-regulate, your everything is affected.
So the work, there's a lot of work on the one hand.
And on the other hand, as I said before, it is not by accident that you found yourself involved with a narcissist.
So there's a lot of work to do there too, your vulnerabilities and so.
Absolutely.
And I know that can be hard to hear for survivors.
I like to remind individuals that there's a difference between being victimized and re-victimizing oneself beyond that experience, right?
So just because at one point we might have been victimized, at one point we might have been even nurtured in narcissistic environments that made it so that we were more vulnerable to these circumstances doesn't mean that we have to repeat the pattern.
To your point with self-awareness through reprogramming is how I'm going to summarize a lot of what you said healing is possible.
And I think some of the main takeaways from today is something that you just said actually is key that narcissistic abuse is systemic. It literally impacts every single aspect of our well-being, every single aspect of our lives.
You said that it regresses us. We have to rebuild ourselves from the ground up.
And that starts with taking responsibility not for what happened to us, but for the healing that happens after.
So if you're someone who's watching this, hearing this, and you're navigating the effects of narcissistic abuse, it's important to remember that healing is possible.
Consider joining a circles group or following up with Professor Sam's on Professor Sam's YouTube channel and accessing the wealth of resources that he has available to you.
And Professor Sam, if individuals want to access your channel, how can they find you? Do they just Google your name or is there a specific channel name for them?
Sam Vaknin, like YouTube, Sam Vaknin, my name. Or you could Google Sam Vaknin, YouTube, and you will find the channel.
But of all the channel, I would focus on the playlist titled narcissistic abuse, healing, and recovery. The rest of a channel has to do with the clinical dimensions of narcissism and is geared at clinicians mainly.
Okay, great. Thank you so much for that, Professor Sam. It was a simple pleasure interviewing you today. Have a great day.
You too. Take care. Bye.
Bye.