How Narcissism Makes Sense to Narcissist (with Enkhbayar Jargalsaikhan and Lidija Rangelovska)

It seems that I'm recording.

Hello.

Okay, great.

I'm recording.

Yes, hello.

So nice to see you both.

It's so surreal because I always watch the YouTube videos and now I'm in the interview.

Well, I'm happy that you're watching the videos and thank you for translating our book to Mongolian.

That's unexpected and welcome.

Thank you.

Yes.

Well, this is the first time I'm interviewing the author of the books I translated.

So I'll try to do my best, but I'm a little nervous to be honest.

Don't consider this an interview. Consider it a talk.

We're talking. We're discussing this.

Okay.

Right.

I'd like to introduce both of you to the people who will listen to this talk.

So Professor Sam Vaknin is the author of Melignin Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited book. And Lydia, I need to pronounce you.

Lydia Rangelovska is the publisher and editor of also Narcissism Revisited, Melignin Self-Love: Narcissist Revisited book.

Okay.

I have a surprise. I've just received a copy of Mongolian copy. That's so beautiful.

Yes.

Oh, it is beautiful.

Wow.

This is volume one.

Yeah.

Wonderful.

I think Mongolian, we use Cyrillic same as Russia and some other countries and we have our traditional letters, but we don't use it yet. This is public writing.

Wonderful.

Wonderful to see this.

Thank you.

I like that you enlarge.

I like that you enlarge Narcissus, how he sees himself, the photo.

The image.

Yes.

Yes.

We did.

That one.

Yes.

Wonderful.

It looks wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thanks.

Okay.

I was thinking how to start this conversation, but then I thought, okay, maybe we can start with you, Sam, and your story because you are the person who wrote this many years ago and it actually starts with your own story, right?

Yes.

I was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder twice and it had a very negative effect on my life. Actually, it destroyed my life.

So, I came to regard it as an enemy. It's an enemy within.

It's not an identifiable enemy without, but it's within and that makes it an even more dangerous enemy than usual.

So I started to study narcissism.

When I completed my studies in 1995, I wrote Malignant Self-Love as a manuscript.

Just to be clear, at that time, no one has heard of narcissism. No one was talking about narcissism.

It was a totally dead topic.

The last book to have been published was in 1974 by a guy called Alexander Loewen. No one paid any attention to narcissism. It was not considered to be a major problem or an issue, something to be studied or of any interest or it was considered to be a Freudian relic, a relic of Sigmund Freud.

And today, it's a bad taste to study Sigmund Freud. He was not a scientist and therefore you should not study him.

It's wrong to study him.

Psychology today is pretending to be a science which it is not and can never be.

But because of this pretension, we have lost many treasures of psychology. We have lost well over 100 years of psychology that are now not being taught in universities and frowned upon and so on.

So I studied narcissism and in 1997, Lydia has opened for me a website and on that website I uploaded the manuscript of Malignan Self-Love: the first edition of Malignan Self-Love. We made it free, free of charge. People could just read whatever they wanted. And this was the first mention of narcissism online.

We maintained the first website on narcissism for up until 2004. The second website was opened in 2004. We have owned and moderated the first six support groups for narcissistic abuse. I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. I coined most of the language in use today because there was no language. There was no way for victims or for narcissists to describe the experience, the inner experience of being a narcissist and the experience of the victim or the survivor together with a narcissist.

So there was a need to invent a whole new language.

And this is how this global movement of narcissism and narcissistic abuse started. Actually started in Skopje in North Macedonia from a single computer with a website. And then unbelievably, well over 250,000 people wrote back informing us that the material has touched their lives, transformed their lives, made it possible for them to make sense and understand what was happening to them.

They should realize that 1997 was the very beginning of the internet. Almost no one was on the internet. So 250,000 people then is like a few million people today.

It's a giant, not a lot.

So we realized that there would be a need for more structured help.

And the first thing we've done is to publish the book.

In 1999 was the first edition of the book.

I did not want to publish the book. I did not want to continue with narcissism.

I had other pursuits and Lydia literally fished out of the garbage can the manuscript of Maligand so far. She saved the book.

Otherwise, there would have been no book. And I'm not quite sure there would have been a global movement of narcissistic abuse.

So it's all thanks to Lydia, not to me.

Because it's because I was also touched by a book. It explained a lot about we were talking while he was writing the chapters that I published one by one on the internet. He was translating from his notebook what he was going through. And I was uploading them.

Yeah, it was tough because I didn't know anything about internet, about HTML language. I had to learn it.

But the will to explain it, to share it was from this distance. Great idea.

So I was interested.

I had my own story. He had his own life before we met. I had my life that was really not in a very good 90 years of the decade in the beginning of the 90s facing the collapse of the environmentally insecure, not safety troubles with people that they behaved in a very bizarre way. So I had some personal losses of very close people.

They turned out to be like nine in one year. That was too much.

And there was different dynamic that I shared. As I was receiving the material from Sam, I identified.

So many others did also identify with themselves in certain situations. They said, "Help." And that is how we continue. That was something that gave and continued the will to proceed with the publishing, to make the book.

And it should have been for the people who wanted to understand that it's not all about that.

So we encouraged, as I say, as personal growth to everyone.

We were given tools to self-love ourselves in a more positive manner, not in a selfish manner.

Sorry.

No, please go.

Sorry.

Now this is the 10th edition, right?

The book is the 10th edition. And it came to Mongolia and now it's going to spread through Mongolia because this is the word I also listened just a few years ago. And everyone starts to talk about narcissism and I didn't understand what it was. And I didn't understand.

I was actually very close to a person who had narcissistic personality disorder, but for sure narcissistic. And then I start to understand, I start to search and I found you on YouTube and I start to listen. And then I was dreaming about translating and then finally it's here. And I don't think they have many books actually inMongolian about narcissism. And I think it's going to be one of the first books on narcissism in Mongolian language.

So I think that would you say that in Mongolian society, there's a problem with narcissism? Would you say it's a more or less narcissistic society because there are such societies in the world?

Well, I think you mentioned about this is a disease of capitalism and Mongolia is still a numeric culture, but a city grows and people stay more in the city civilized. I think we are becoming more narcissistic. I see it everywhere.

Now I can kind of spot people sometimes when I talk, I can kind of spot it.

So I think this is going to be very, very helpful.

But again, because we don't have a lot of resources, people really don't understand what is narcissistic personality disorder and what is narcissism.

So if you can explain to people about it.

The greatest obstacle to coping with narcissism, managing narcissism and then healing from narcissistic abuse, the greatest obstacle is the absence of language, an inaccessible language inability to express yourself.

Words shape consciousness. The minute you have a word, the world makes sense. Words are meaning in the absence of words. Everything that's happening to you is meaningless. And if it's meaningless, then you are not able to design any efficacious strategies, techniques and ways to cope with your environment.

That's why we place so much emphasis on literature, on science. These are actually language tools.

None of these disciplines of human endeavor actually touch or describe reality. They describe our language.

So the first very important thing is education. Helping people as to what is narcissism. What's the difference between gradations of narcissism?

Because there's healthy narcissism, there's narcissistic style and then there's narcissistic disorder. They're not the same.

Not everyone who is a bit selfish and a bit dysempathic, doesn't have empathy and a bit insensitive, not everyone like that is a narcissist. These are narcissistic traits. They call them narcissistic style in clinical literature, but it's not the same as narcissistic disorder. And it's definitely not the same as narcissistic personality disorder, which is a type of cancer of the soul.

So education and the dissemination of language. And that's why what you're doing is very, very important.

We give people the tools to communicate their internal experience and establish communities or around this experience and then support each other on the road to healing and recovery.

Narcissism is a healthy thing. Everyone is a narcissist at age two, between ages two and four, and everyone is a narcissist between ages 12 and 18.

And if they are not narcissists in these two age groups, then something is very wrong with them.

They grow up to be people pleasers. They grow up to be co-dependence.

And so narcissism is healthy in adolescence and even more healthy in childhood.

And we, all of us have healthy narcissism. It is the foundation of self-confidence, self-esteem, a sense of self-worth, and even your ability to position yourself comparably to other people within society.

But pathological narcissism is something completely different. Pathological narcissism is infantile. It's the inability to perceive other people as separate from you because you as a child were unable to separate from your mother.

You did not complete the separation/individuation phase. You did not become an individual.

So what narcissists do, they convert other people into internal objects. They internalize other people. And then they continue to interact with these internal objects, not with people out there, but with the representations of these people in their minds.

And if you don't recognize that someone is not you, if you don't recognize that someone is separate to you, if you think everyone is your extension, if you think that everyone is inside your mind, then there's no place for empathy.

Empathy is only with outside entities.

There's no place for understanding, compassion, affection, attention. There's no place for taking care of catering to other people's needs and hopes and dreams and expectations.

Other people become instruments. They're instrumentalized.

And if they don't conform to the internal object in your mind as a narcissist, then the narcissist becomes aggressive and punitive.

The narcissist punishes people for not conforming, for deviating, for diverging from the internal object.

So narcissism involves what we call externalized aggression.

Narcissists in the same family like psychopathy, cluster B, personality disorders.

Many narcissists are actually on the verge of psychopathy and they're known as psychopathic narcissists or malignant narcissists.

And there is a lot of comorbidity. Comorbidity means that we diagnose two conditions in the same person.

So comorbidity is very common between psychopathy and narcissism and between borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

The narcissist is unable to maintain relationships. He has very problematic attachment style. He is incapable of intimacy because he has learned as a child to associate intimacy and love with pain and hurt and rejection.

All narcissists have been traumatized and abused as children.

Now, there are many ways to abuse a child.

You can abuse a child physically, you can beat the child up, you can abuse a child sexually, of course, and so on.

But you can also abuse a child.

If you don't allow the child to separate from you as a parent, if you don't allow the child to establish boundaries, if you don't allow the child to come across reality, reality provides feedback, reality modifies, reality induces growth and development.

So if you isolate the child, if you pamper the child, if you smother the child, if you spoil the child, if you pedestalize the child, if you idolize the child, all these are forms of abuse because the parent then uses the child as some kind of instrument, for example, to realize the parents' unfulfilled dreams and wishes. Or when the parent forces the child to become a parent, this is known as parentifying, and then the child is the parent's parent. That's also abuse.

So parenting is a fine-tuning enterprise. You need to get it right 100% because if you get any element wrong, that is traumatic and abusive because the child is defenseless. The child doesn't have a self, doesn't have any protection.

It's a very delicate creature. It's very strange because I used to ask this question, do narcissistic personality disorder burn or actually they become?

So according to the book he wrote, they actually become narcissistic. They start to have narcissistic personality disorder because of abuses.

But then as you mentioned just right now, abuse can be different forms.

And I can see, just as an example around here, when I see some people, they send their children to very expensive schools and every, like, whole day they send them to different courses. Like, they have to be perfect children, as you mentioned, wonderkind in a way.

But at the same time, do they really care about them emotionally? So that's the fear I have.

And then in the future, I guess there are going to be many more narcissists or what do you think?

Well, I will let Lydia answer them, but I will just make a comment before she does.

narcissistic personality disorder and pathological narcissism more generally, yes, they are the outcomes of improper upbringing, wrong parenting, not good enough parenting, abuse and trauma in a variety of ways, not letting the child become his or her own person, not allowing personhood to emerge in many ways.

But there are studies that indicate that some people, some children have a propensity, a disposition to develop narcissism.

Because we have, for example, studies with twins, twins who are raised by the same parents and so on, one of them becomes a narcissist, the other doesn't.

So these are strong indications that there is some genetic or hereditary component.

And that the abuse and the trauma trigger these genes to express.

And then the person becomes acquires narcissistic personality disorder.

But it is equally true to say that if you are not abused, and if you're not traumatized, even if you have the genes, multiple genes, the predispose you to become a narcissist, you will not become a narcissist.

So the parental contribution is super critical.

We can talk about society and increasing narcissism in society and culture.

This is visually the 90s, what I witnessed.

And when I saw the different cultures influencing my environment, I was born in socialist country.

And suddenly after that Yugoslavia dismantled, capitalism was introduced, as you said before earlier, the influences that and it was like imposed on us to behave like business people, only business matter.

So where are the human elements got lost?

The people became more workaholics.

They were spending more time to be with other people discussing business only, not interested really in the other affairs with their wives, children, that help did not stop between us.

I didn't like that. I didn't like that.

I found myself alone.

And when, when I was asked to meet Sam, it was like, okay, you know what?

Finally, he is clever.

You can talk to him about, say how delusional she is.

So it was him.

It's not that I was not acquainted with narcissism as a term because we had some lessons in philosophy classes and we were learning about many authors.

So I knew about narcissism, but I didn't know about the dynamics.

And when nineties happened, when I started to actually ask myself, what was the motive of other people to behave in certain ways, I had to connect it with the misfortune of those times.

I mean, from very good people, they were suddenly overnight transformed in something they were not as I knew them for 20 years, 50, 40 and so on.

I am talking about my generation, younger and much older than me.

So the only connecting thing was the response to the environment.

It's those who were pretty sure about steady, safe, about their family, about their partners, children, about their coworkers.

They were very stable. They were very rational. They were making one good decisions for them, for the closest one, for the society as well, because I saw it also happening in the politicians that were changing all the time.

So the empathy vanished, empathy vanished, selfishness, materialism, popping.

And the children of those generations of parents that belong to that generation.

So I can see now these are the children that there were kids at the time, right?

I mean babies, formative years.

I see them more narcissistic.

I can compare because I lived with some children.

I had friends who had children then and I know what happened.

After 23 years, after 30 years, I know what happened with them.

So I can make the difference between children that were born in unstable families, insecure, usually because their parents were not giving them proper care.

They were not supporting them to, and they didn't teach them how to learn from the science, from other people that are in a living in their environment.

In the 90s, my generation already got their universities and they were looking to go abroad and they went, 70% of my generation in my school only went abroad.

They thought they will be the businessmen and whatever the capitalism introduced.

But this year in June, I met some of them and they were disappointed.

They said going there was like a black hole. It was not me and they returned.

Okay.

So they couldn't actually allow themselves to belong to some capitalistic society and they were pretty angry as they described it. They were pretty angry that they lost the human elements of not only being alone, but not having anyone that will support them, that will have the same opinion and will be more helpful by being, and then this world pop up.

They are not merciful people there.

So mercy contains many elements, I mean, psychodynamically, to someone to become a good person. That good person doing good to others first to themselves, then to others, to the environment, and this is how we all should expand.

So just to finish, being selfish, being suppressing emotions by only to not be ashamed that you did not reach someone else's expectations is abuse. That is my term. Understanding.

I will provide now a bit of a historical context and a bit of a more sweeping overview.

Lydia provides the personal touch, which unfortunately I cannot, but whenever there is uncertainty, there is anxiety. Whenever there's no way to reduce anxiety efficiently, there is fear.

There is anxiety is a very uncomfortable inner feeling, and there is a sense of diffuse threat that you cannot pinpoint. That's why we call it anxiety.

People try to reduce anxiety in every way possible, and then if they fail consistently because the environment produces anxiety, induces anxiety all the time, then what they do, they withdraw. They withdraw from the environment, and they withdraw using essentially two mechanisms, addiction and narcissism.

Addiction and narcissism are two escapist mechanisms, mechanisms of avoiding shunning reality and developing a fantasy defense or using leverage in fantasy.

Capitalism doesn't care. Capitalism is about maximizing profits.

If there is profit to be made in manufacturing and consumption, then capitalism would emphasize manufacturing and consumption, would encourage you to consume, would build factories, consume more, would build factories. This process is known as interpolation.

Capitalization is a concept introduced by Louis Altmusser. It's how society tells you how to behave.

Capitalism follows you. Everyone says capitalism is to blame, capitalism is you.

Then if there is profit to be made in addiction and there is profit to be made in spectacle, in appearances, capitalism will follow you there, of course.

This is precisely what has happened.

The capitalism of the last two or three decades is a capitalism of addictions, including addictive consumerism and a capitalism of spectacle, display, theater.

We see social media, for example. This is a form of spectacle. The underlying motivation is an escape from reality. Uncertainty has become unbearable, and it has become unbearable for two reasons.

Not only one. It is objectively unbearable. It contains a lot of uncertainty, a lot of change, technological and otherwise.

Genders, gender roles are being redefined. The concept of family has been essentially destroyed. Institutions are falling apart. You can't trust anyone. Everyone is corrupt.

So objectively, the environment is unbearable, intolerable.

But there is a second reason.

We tried everything. We tried Nazism. We tried communism. We tried capitalism. We tried—you name it, we tried it.

We cannot come up anymore with new ideas. There are not new ideologies or new ideas left. We know that the situation is unsolvable. There is no solution. It's the first time in human history.

Because in the '30s, you could lie to yourself and you could say, "The solution is communism." Or, "The solution is Nazism." Or, "The solution is fascism." Or, "The solution is capitalism." Or, "liberalism." Or, "democracy." Or, "You could lie to yourself."

There was a lot of self-deception. Technology is a virtual reality. It distorts your thinking and makes you conform to a vision of the future that keeps you alive.

In short, there's no hope. I think for the first time in human history, there's no hope.

But I mean no hope, period.

So if you put the two together that the environment changes all the time, is in flux all the time, and therefore it's very threatening, you have to adapt constantly.

Literally every day you have to adapt.

On the one hand.

And on the other hand, you have no good reason to adapt.

What for?

There's no hope.

Why to invest all this effort in staying alive?

No good reason to stay alive.

So you escape. You escape into drugs and into alcohol and into movies and into social media and into virtual and artificial reality and into escape. Constantly escape.

And of course capitalism provides you with the means to escape. That's all.

It's a follower.

Capitalism never initiates social movements or it's a follower. It goes where the money is. And where is the money? Where you are.

It follows you like a shade, like a shadow.

And this is the world we live in. It's a shadow world. It's a world where the shadow rules.

Is there a way out?

The real answer?

No.

There is no way out.

Because the problems have to do with human nature. Not with anything that humans have constructed. Not with society. Not with ideologies. Not with means of production. Not with Marxism. Not with capitalism.

This is all nonsense. This is all transitory.

Capitalism will be forgotten a thousand years ago. They were saying Rome has been forgotten a thousand years after it failed.

That's not the issue. We are discovering and we started with Freud. We are discovering that the problem is us.

We have seen the enemy and it is us.

Not anything we have produced but it's us. Something is wrong with us.

And so we are going to continue to generate incomplete detrimental destructive solutions. We are so destructive simply.

But we can be more aware.

So my hope, I had a hope.

I have always had hope.

It's not connected to people. It's a hope that we, it's embedded in us.

In each one of us.

We have our characters. We have good people. Not all of them are narcissists.

So if we just find out the good in us. It's easy to get drunk, to use drugs, to prostitute and whatever. You have to survive.

But to let also the good aspects in us to prevail.

We all have gift for something. If we cannot, if we can't find it now.

During the school actually, during the school years. Everyone discovers what sub talent.

Why not to go ahead with it? Why the teacher is jealous and these are excuses, right? Why the narcissistic teacher is envious and will not give a chance to the talented person, to the talented kid.

Because such thing existed. They always existed.

But now knowing more about narcissism, people get more aware, they are becoming more aware of their own qualities.

And the thing that we all need is to just succeed. To succeed not in making money. By stealing someone else's ideas for example.

But to make money of your own work, of your own expression, of your own potential.

When you realize that you are good in something, you are good in publishing, right? And you are doing good thing, you are happy. You are personally happy with yourself. You are, other people will see it, you know. They will be encouraged. Just by looking at you as an example of your own success.

Success is not to make a million dollars. Success is to do what you are good at.

So this is my hope.

But it's personal. It's personal. It's not that it's.

It's personal and it's also narcissistic.

It is.

But it's healthy not.

Lydia is saying actually the solution is with individuals.

This is a narcissistic thing to say.

Narcissism, what is narcissism?

And I did say that there is healthy narcissism.

What is narcissism?

Narcissism is when you give up on the world.

When you say I am the solution. I am the world. I should affect my destiny, my happiness. I all the gifts and all the solutions are inside myself.

Now this is not Lydia. This is Martin Luther in the 16th century. The big revolution of Protestantism was not the negation of Catholicism or the Vatican or the Pope. That was not a big revolution because there have been similar movements before.

The big revolution was when Martin Luther said the seat of the divine is in the individual. We don't need priests. We don't need churches. We don't need any of this apparatus or mechanism or institutions.

Each human is divine. The seat of the divine is in the individual and it is the individual's role to make a better world by following God's commandments and so on and so forth. And God will bless you as an individual if you work hard, for example. This is known as the Protestant work ethic. If you work hard, God will choose you and bless you. And the very fact that you are rich proves that you have been chosen by God, that you have been blessed by God.

Catholicism is the prototypical individualism. In the 16th century, we transitioned from collectivism to individualism. Even the concept of copyright. You had to pay me to publish the book. Why? This is a new practice. It's less than 200 years old.

Until the 18th century, there was no such thing as author. You published a book. Everyone was copying it and distributing it and so on.

They didn't have any obligation even more to identify the author. There was no individual.

I think that's actually known. There's no individual.

The concept of copyright and author is the individual.

So we have transitioned to individualism in the 16th century and we never looked back. And it only got worse and worse and worse.

Collectivism suppressed the individual.

But this is a misunderstanding, misapprehension.

Collectivism, religion, for example, did not need to suppress the individual because there was no concept of individual. You defined yourself through your affiliation with a group. You did not exist alone. You were embedded in a family, in a community, in a clan, in a tribe and ultimately in a nation.

Ask any Japanese.

So collectivism, because today proponents of individualism, the prophets of individualism, they say collectivism was bad because it did not allow the individual to express himself. There was no need for the individual to express himself. There was no concept of self. The word self in psychology was first used at the beginning of the 20th century. That's very recent. There was no perception of self.

In the 17th century there was a book written about depression, 17th century. That's 400 years ago. A book written about depression by Burton. The author's name was Burton. It's a book of well over 800 pages. You can't find the word self in the book.

There's also things. I, me, mine, self, they're not in the book. It's new. It's totally new in the future.

I have so many questions. Now I'm thinking coming up with questions and losing it.

I guess some people are listening to it right now. I'm going to put subtitles and probably some people are thinking, but what is the actual narcissism? What does the personality disorder do to other people? What is the damages? What are the damages? What are the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder?

I know you wrote about nine characteristics, but if you have five of them, you could diagnose yourself, not yourself, but you could be diagnosed as narcissistic personality disorder.

But I also heard that it is changing now.

This book needs to be advised.

That's what I heard also from you from the videos.

So what are the characteristics and what kind of damage they actually do to other people?

I think I'm very curious about your dynamics because you've been together for such a long time and I've been with a narcissistic person and it was very, very difficult.

After just breaking up, I realized, okay, I was there. I'm glad now I'm not there.

So I will cover the academic part and Lydia will tell you how difficult it is to and how long suffering she is with me.

I'm a narcissist. I can't suffer.

Academically, speaking from the discipline's point of view, narcissism is when you treat other people as objects.

I think that's the best definition of narcissism, pathological narcissism.

When you treat other people as objects, objects of gratification, instruments to obtain goals, etc.

When you can't empathize with other people in the sense that you don't see them as human, they are things. You thinkify them. You make them things.

Now this requires several behavioral traits, for example, exploitativeness, the tendency to exploit people, a lack of empathy, I mentioned, inability to access positive emotions.

Narcissists are capable only of negative emotions such as envy or rage, anger or, you know, and so on and so forth.

So we have nine such criteria described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is a book used in the United States, mainly for insurance purposes.

And if you meet five of these nine, then you can be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

Of course, if you stop to think of it for a minute, you will see how nonsensical it is.

Because if you meet criteria one, two, three, four, five, you're a narcissist. And if you meet criteria five, six, seven, eight, nine, you're a narcissist.

But these two narcissists have nothing in common. One to five and five to nine, they're not the same people. And yet they are diagnosed with the same disorder.

So this led to the development of an alternative model of narcissism, which will be the diagnostic landscape in the next edition, in the sixth edition of the DSM. It is already incorporated in the ICD.

ICD is International Classification of Diseases. It's a book published by the World Health Organization. And it codifies all the diseases of humanity, bodily and mental.

And so it's much more advanced than the DSM. Also it's much less influenced by money. Insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries have a huge effect on the DSM, not a good one.

So in the profession, we take the ICD much more seriously than the DSM, although the DSM, because of America's power, media power, the DSM is much more well known.

Now the alternative model is what we call a dimensional model. It says that narcissism is a spectrum. It's a dimension.

And that you could have varieties of narcissism, which are less pernicious, less problematic, more problematic, and so on and so forth.

Companies maintain their identity or sense of identity and sense of self-worth by deriving input from other people.

This is known as narcissistic supply.

They are incapable of intimacy because they are not capable of perceiving other people as separate from them with their own needs and hopes and dreams and wishes and so on and so forth.

They have problems with empathy. They have problems with aggression. They have problems with depression.

And there are two types of narcissists.

There is overt or grandiose narcissist. It's a narcissist whose self-perception and self-image is fantastic, inflated, unrealistic, not based on any real life accomplishments.

Miguel Omanayako, that's the overt grandiose narcissist.

And we have another type known as covert or vulnerable or shy or fragile narcissist.

That's a narcissist.

Sorry?

The victim's victim mentality, right?

Yes, that kind of narcissist fails to obtain supply. It's a constant failure to obtain supply. It's known as collapse.

So it's a form of collapse narcissism.

And consequently, he develops victim mentality. He becomes very passive aggressive. He's very cunning and scheming and manipulative. He's as decent-pathic, lacking in empathy as the overt or grandiose narcissist.

But he often has something called pseudo humility. He pretends to be humble, helpful, healer, savior, rescuer. These are very dangerous types because they fake and imitate empathy. They pretend to love other people, to support them, to...

And they actually then inflict damage. When they get close to you, when they feign intimacy, which is not there, then they inflict damage.

The grandiose overt narcissist is a bit stupid. It's a kind of Donald Trump narcissist. In your face. That's who I am. I'm perfect. I'm amazing. I'm brilliant. I'm this. I'm that. And you're stupid. And you're a loser. I'm a winner.

So the covert narcissist, you don't see him coming. He's like a snake in the grass.

What?

I really don't like this.

Most of the people are like that because they are in the fight. They didn't define themselves. If... why to be sneaky? What is wrong with you that you are with the other? What is...

What are you ashamed of? Like you left dreams and someone else is just lives in a particulate and has like very easy life.

Now, what was that?

Go lucky thing? Happy go lucky. Happy go lucky?

Fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it, you know?

Fake it till you make it, you know?

These are the Americanisms.

Okay.

So people in people's nature is to envy because we all have to compare with the other and to know more about ourselves. It's what narcissists need is narcissistic supply, the other's input.

We also need other's input, right?

We need to know, we exchange opinions, we communicate, we come up with some idea, we realize that idea.

Same does the narcissist.

But what is the difference? That I will make it for most of us not only I to benefit, but many other people to benefit. All be involved.

Not all the narcissists, narcissists, they see everyone as an object. It's their function to supply him with ideas, someone else's function to give him money, someone else's money to invest in his business and nothing with no responsibility to get something in return. At least even thank you. They don't say it. They just withdraw, they vanish.

And when of course other people will also vanish, they gave part of them something was produced and there were some money for everyone.

But the narcissist took them all for himself. And he doesn't know what to give people with ideas, with money, with they live and the narcissist fails. He will lose all the money. He doesn't know. He doesn't have the brains, how to use it. It is part of self-destruction, what I call it the dark side.

We all have the dark side. You call it shadow.

I discovered later.

But the point in all this narcissism thing is that narcissists think and they are actually convinced that they matter only.

We do. We do.

Okay. We do.

Okay. So to, since he said this, you asked before, how can we are together?

When she says this, that only he matters, I learned from my parents.

I had an abusive mother.

I'm not going to talk about it.

She was asking, you must do this, have to do this. It's for family. It's for all of us to be more happy.

Okay.

So give me what do you want me to do?

I will make it just to see your smile on the face, to be satisfied and that, but then leave me alone.

This is my narcissistic pattern that I learned.

So, but with that in time, I built boundaries.

She was not fair for something. She was like a snake, right?

Trying, you know, from the other door.

That you will do also this and you will do also this.

But I rejected her for many things.

I withdraw. I was not talking to her for years, even though I was teenager, I was angry at her, but I did not abandon her.

I did not, I did not, I was there for still keeping her pleased because she did have some positive things.

She had some good intentions, not to me, of course.

I will give, I will supply her, but what she gets, she will give to others.

So I sustain her image of a good mother, but she knew very well that she was not good to me.

However, she heard it and that's it about her.

That's the same dynamic that I learned from her that I am having with Sam.

Okay, you are the captain, you know the best. Okay, what is that that you want?

I agree with it. I will please you, I will do it, but I will also enjoy that. You will not, you just reject me, abandon me or whatever, dismiss me, but I will insist that I will stay here. I will help you, but also you will help me when I need.

So it's a, it's a like a blackmail also.

I'm not happy with that, but there is a relationship that is fair. transactional.

But transactional for good for both of us.

Okay, that is because of my upbringing.

I was good to everyone until today I'm good with everyone.

But when they cross the line, when I see the hint of not being fair and there is nothing I ask for favor, right? And there is nothing in return.

That person is, you know, I can't trust that person anymore. I can't rely on that person anymore.

And that's it.

What boons us is that he is honest, even brutal. That is the real bondage.

It's not the trauma bond that I had from the trauma bond that I had.

I learned something, but with him, I, I, I implement the all the knowledge that I had in the past, not only from home, but with many other people.

So it's a good feeling to live with yourself knowing, being aware that snakes, that people provoke you for different reasons.

And you should be smart to know where to engage and who to help.

Is it for both of you?

Is it for mutually beneficial?

Yes.

Is it mutually beneficial?

So I think that my living on self-love is that product of me and them.

It's our only child, but we don't know.

Yeah.

So there are two types of, you said cerebral narcissists and somatic narcissists.

Cerebral narcissists are very smart.

I know such people here as well.

And sometimes I think it's really pity sometimes because they're amazing.

They really have a lot of knowledge, speak so many languages, but they sometimes really act like a child, vulnerable child.

And it is very hard to be with a child as an adult.

So I guess that's, does it apply to also somatic narcissists?

Yeah.

Well, this, that's a long question.

I will try to break it up and then I would like to talk a bit about envy, shame and dissociation.

These are critical features of narcissists.

When the child is exposed to trauma and abuse, the child has two options.

He can merge with the abuser.

This is a process known as identification, introjection, incorporation.

So he can merge with the abuser.

He can become one with the abuser.

And this kind of child grows up to be a narcissist.

The other option is to cater to the needs of the abuser, to please the abuser.

This kind of child becomes independent or people-pleaser when it grows, when it grows up.

The child who becomes a narcissist, he, as I said, emerges or fuses with the abuser, but he's still suffering pain. He's still being punished. He's still being ignored or being violated. He needs to isolate himself from these impacts.

And yet at the same time, he needs to be an abuser.

So he constructs a God-like imaginary friend, a God-like imaginary friend known as the false self.

Right.

And he creates the equivalent of a private religion.

The false self is God-like. It's all-knowing. It's all-powerful. And it protects the child. It defends the child against the abuse of parental figures or caregivers.

So when the child is beaten up or sexually molested or instrumentalized or parentified or whatever, it's not happening to the child. It's happening to the false self.

This is a decoy mechanism.

Decoy. It's happening not to me. It's not happening to me. I'm not here. I'm not here. I'm not here as known as dissociation. It's happening to him, to this, to the false self.

And then the child, because this is a God, the false self is a God, the child sacrifices himself to this God. This is human sacrifice, like in primitive religions. He sacrifices himself. He sacrifices his true self to this God.

And by sacrificing himself to this God, he becomes one with his God. He becomes one.

From that moment on, all that's left is the false self, this imaginary friend, this piece of fiction. It's a story. It's a narrative. It's not real.

The child himself vanishes forever. It can never be recovered. He's dead. A zombie fight, if you wish.

Now, the false self is Godlike. So it needs to be superior. It needs to be perfect.

So the child asks itself, what am I good at? What am I good at?

If I take my assets, my advantages, and leverage them, develop them, invest in them, then I'm going to be perfect. Then I'm going to be superior. If I'm intelligent, and I study a lot, and I learn a lot, then I'm going to be superior to other people. I'm going to be almost perfect, or perfect, actually. I'm going to be a walking, talking encyclopedia.

So this is the cerebral narcissist.

Other children are tall. They look good. Girls get attracted to them when they are teenagers, or boys get attracted to them when they're teenagers, and so on and so forth.

So they say, my asset, my advantage, is my looks, my body. That's how I'm going to become superior.

That's how I'm going to become perfect.

So I'm going to exercise a lot. I'm going to lift weights. I'm going to body build. I'm going to have sexual conquests. I'm going to have sex all the time. It will confirm to me that I'm perfect, that I'm superior, that I'm irresistible.

So the child makes a decision very early on between ages four and six, makes a decision.

These are my assets, and that's the only way I can become superior and perfect.

And they become cerebral or somatic.

But there is no time constant.

When the cerebral phase collapses, for some reason, he becomes somatic.

And when the somatic fails, for some reason, for example, he cannot get sexual apartments for some reason, or he had an accident. He's disabled.

So when the somatic fails, he tries to become cerebral, which is very funny.

They look like clouds. He tries to become cerebral. And he thinks he suddenly believes that he's a genius. He's a philosopher. He's a psychologist. He's I don't know what.

And you see these clumps of muscles online who suddenly become public intellectuals because they have failed the somatics.

And so you see all these bodybuilders and all these, you know, and they are online and they pretend to be big intellectuals and big but they don't have the capacity.

So it's very clownish.

So this is to answer your question about somatic and cerebral.

There's a dominant type and a recessive type, latent type.

And when the dominant type fails, the other type takes over. And then flip-flop. It's a flip-flop situation.

Separately from all this, I think it would be good to discuss envy, shame and dissociation. These are three critical forces in law system.

When the child is abused and traumatized, the child feels helpless and very ashamed of himself.

When you fail to defend yourself, when you fail to stand up to yourself, when you're bullied all the time, you feel ashamed, don't you? It's a very shaming reaction. Failing it. Failing generally.

Yes, she's right. Failing in general is painful.

And this is fear failure. You're failing to protect yourself, your body, your mind, your soul, everything. It's a massive failure.

There's another failure here. You're failing to become who you could have been. You're failing to realize your potential. You get stuck. You get stagnated. You remain a child forever. And yes, you're right.

The average mental age is about two. So you're an adult. You watch adults around you. And you can't reach the level. It challenges your sense of perfection. It undermines your grandiosity and this creates a lot of shame and vulnerability and fragility.

So shame is a critical function.

And narcissism is compensatory. It compensates for the shame.

If you feel inside that you're weak, you will pretend to be strong. If you feel that you're stupid, stupid, you will pretend to be a genius like me. If you saw whatever you feel that you're ugly, you will go on sexual conquest to prove to yourself that you're not ugly.

Narcissism is totally compensatory.

Now we know there was a big debate for 40 years. Now we come to accept that this 100 percent compensatory, even in grandiose narcissism.

So this is shame.

So just to say, as the things in the environment change and people are becoming anxious, they can't, they're afraid of the future. They come with very bizarre ideas what to do, who they are.

So you know, this is that stage when of, and then you compare with the others. You find out that something is wrong with you.

So you also, your narcissistic defenses pop up. So it's a loop, you know, one goes into the other.

Yeah, this is known as relative positioning.

I've come to it in a minute.

The second thing is ending.

Obviously if you feel inferior, inferiority complex, you feel incomplete, you feel inadequate, you feel imperfect.

You envy other people. You envy other people for their accomplishments, for their looks, for their wives and girlfriends or boyfriends, for their property, whatever.

Envy is actually a diagnostic criteria in narcissism. It's one of the nine diagnostic criteria.

Envy motivates not only covert narcissists, but also grandiose narcissists. And it is the twin of shame.

This is an intolerable situation. How can you survive with constant shame and constant envy and the need to disguise them, camouflage them with behaviors and traits that are not fully yours?

You know that you're acting. It's a lot of acting here.

So how can you survive this situation?

You forget. You simply delete. A lot of forgetting. And this amnesia is known as dissociation.

Narcissists have enormous memory gaps. Because they have huge memory gaps, every situation that caused them shame, every situation where they were envious, every time they were criticized, every time someone disagreed with them, every time they thought they were being insulted, this is known as hypervigilance. Every two minutes they have to dissociate. They end up not remembering, disremembering 80% of their life. That's why they need someone next to them.

Yes. That is my role to know to rely, to remember all the details of their lives.

Yes.

So that is exhausting. And not many women can tolerate that. It's a burden. This is part of something known as external regulation.

Like the borderline, the narcissist hands over internal processes to his intimate partner. He expects her to act as his memory, as his narcissistic supply, as his social. She becomes integrated in his mind as an external supplier, exactly like internet service provider.

So this is, he's saying there's hard drive.

Yes, like external hard drive. It's an example.

Ihave his external hard disk.

So this is dissociation and that makes the situation even more unbearable because to justify, to explain to people the memory gaps, the narcissist creates confabulations. Confabulations are not lies. Confabulation, well, they appear to be lies. They're not lies. Confabulations are stories that make sense to the narcissist. The narcissist says, I forgot the last five minutes. What could have happened? What is likely to have happened? What most probably has happened? What's what plausibly had happened? And then he creates a story and it becomes reality for him. He bridges the memory gaps. He bridges the memory gaps with mini stories that he comes to believe are reality. And when they are contradicted by evidence, just to sustain the false image.

Yes. And that we, I call it reframing.

So there was a situation that didn't fit you or you forgot that it happened. You remember some snippets, thoughts, and then you make your own story. I mean, you like a narcissist and they, well, but this happened.

So you can't, you can't change the mind of a narcissist.

He believes that.

So this, I saw how desperate they are to be them, to stabilize, to stabilize themselves, to be the identity that they are, that they're having control because they know and they are aware very much so of their dark side.

They call it these dark trials, the urges that they cannot control.

And it's easy for them to flip.

So the narcissist, I, they are so predictable when they flip and when any people doing the story, be sure to expect to be blamed, to be accused, and even to be taken to court.

They are so convinced in their narrative. It's unbelievable.

Sorry to.

No, no. When your life is 80% confabulation and 20% reality, then you live in a story.

And this story is known as fantasy, it's a fantasy defense.

But if you inhabit an alternative universe, it's known clinically as Paracosm. If you inhabit a Paracosm, an alternative universe, which is composed of 80% invention, invented thing in 20% reality, then your partner must join your universe.

Because if your partner is 80% reality and you are 80% fantasy, you will not survive as a couple.

There will be a lot of friction, a lot of debates, a lot of anger, a lot of you're lying and not like, no, I'm not lying.

Yes, I'm lying.

So your partner must make the choice to join your fantasy.

And this is known as a shared fantasy.

There is a process called coercive snapshotting.

I will not go into all, but she joins the fantasy in effect.

Even if she thinks she had not joined the front, even if she thinks she's embedded in reality, if she survives with the narcissist, she has joined his fantasy.

So she has to lose herself as well as part part of reality testing.

If she has to give up on her independent view of reality on the independent gauge of reality.

Now victims mistake this, they say it's gaslighting is not gaslighting.

Disgusting is intentional, goal oriented.

Consequently it is psychopathic.

When the psychopath gaslights you, he knows what is reality and he knows that he's lying. He knows that he's manipulating.

The narcissist believes his fantasy. He is the fantasy. He doesn't know that he's lying to you. He firmly believes that it's all true and real.

When he promises you to marry you the second time you meet, to marry you and have children with you, he is not future faking. He is not lying to you in order to get you to bed to have sex with you.

That's the psychopath.

The narcissist really believes that he will get married and have children with you because he is in the fantasy. And he doesn't remember, so the next day he may tell you, let's try it out for a few years and see how it goes.

Yesterday he offered me marriage and he doesn't remember. So he would congratulate. He would say you must have imagined it, you were drinking a lot.

And then you produce a recording, you produce a recording on your smartphone where he says I'm going to marry you and we are going to have three children and you are debating the names of the children. And he would still demand.

Yeah, they are desperate.

He would say you took it out of context.

Right, that's true.

So there's, I think there's a misunderstanding among a lot of people, especially here because we don't have a lot of resources.

I talked to a few people and then they say, ah, narcissists, they are the people who deeply fall in love with themselves. They're the people who only love themselves.

And this is, I think this is very wrong according to the book, your book.

Usually those are the people who have no idea how to love themselves.

Therefore they didn't know how to love others.

So I think it's even much worse.

They don't have a sense.

They can't call themselves because they are selfless.

Ironically, and most of the people who are saying that they are reverting to more obvious type of narcissist.

I mean, the somatic one because they want to be beautiful.

Even there, there's no sense.

I mean, most of these people are referring to somatic drugs.

Narcissism is early childhood failure to develop self structures, including the ego. Narcissists don't have an ego.

They have superego. They don't have an ego because they have a false self-exer.

So narcissism is about a failure to develop a self.

There is no self-love because narcissism is a huge reservoir of shame. Narcissism is a reaction to shame.

There's self rejection, self-loathing, self hatred, self destructiveness. Narcissism is the exact opposite of self-love.

And why they need someone to love them is actually that they are choosing empathic partners in life because they have really, they love themselves. They care about themselves, you know, a normal person and the jealousy and envy that they can't do it to themselves. They just take it as it is from the other. They consume the other. They consume, they see what the other does, how he is taking care of himself, herself in the world. They copy it.

So when you have an example of someone who loves yourself, every time you want your music, whenever a narcissist will feel self-destructive, self-hated, okay, they go to that source and they are joyful again, wonderful again, accepted, they belong. So they compensate with the other's emotions because they don't have, they can't relate to positive emotions.

So many women will say that the narcissist drain them. Emotionally they became dead, they died. And they call them vampires, they suck the life out of them.

So these are just, you know, how people express such dynamic.

And to answer your question.

And this is actually where, why, what is the real reason of envious narcissist?

Because they know they can't do it. Because they don't have emotions. That is how come they have, I will destroy the other, just move to you, retake me, to remind me that I am emotionless.

And to answer your question, the narcissist cannot love anyone.

And you also can never love a narcissist.

I will explain the second part.

And then I will talk about the first part.

This would be a big surprise to many victims.

When I say you can never love a narcissist. It's a big surprise, but I will explain why.

First of all, the narcissist is not real. There's nobody there. It's an absence, pretending to be a presence. The narcissist does not exist. It's a void. It's a black hole. You can never love something.

And if you love the narcissist, what you think is the narcissist, what you are in love with is an idealized image of an intimate partner that you created in your own mind. It's not the narcissist. You fell in love with a fake hero, a fiction character.

That's the first reason.

There's an even bigger reason to seduce you and lure you and captivate you and get you addicted.

What the narcissist does, he puts a mirror to you.

A mirror.

And in the mirror, you see your idealized self.

In the mirror, you are perfect.

You're amazingly intelligent. You're irresistible. You're drop dead gorgeous. You're unique. You are incredible. You're unprecedented in the mirror.

What do you fall in love with?

You fall in love with your idealized image in the narcissist mirror. You fall in love with yourself.

Through the narcissist gaze, the narcissist provokes in you your own narcissism. And you develop a narcissistic love for yourself.

That's why it's addictive.

The narcissist has a monopoly on this mirror. He is the only one with this mirror.

So you think he's the only one with this mirror. If he takes it away from you, suddenly you have to face the fact that you are not perfect, that you have shortcomings and failings and who wants to face this after having experienced perfection.

It's a drug. It's a drug.

Actually, that's your validation.

How you see yourself in his eyes is your narcissistic supply.

Because we all doubt that we are never good enough. How we look, how we perform, that's why we are all narcissists.

Yeah, narcissistic. That is the healthy narcissism because it motivates us to change our mind and so on so forth, to regulate emotions.

But of course, if you were raised in a dysfunctional family where you did not receive a lot of love, you were criticized all the time.

So you develop what we call a bad object.

You feel that you are unworthy, inadequate, ugly, stupid, because your mother told you for example, this kind of person is much more vulnerable, much more susceptible to the whole of mirror effect.

Yes.

This kind of person, when she sees herself in the mirror and she is suddenly not ugly, not stupid, not unworthy, not inadequate, superior, amazing. She cannot resist this.

That's why borderlines for example, are very attractive to narcissists.

It's a mechanism of combining. That's the trauma bonding.

By the way, half of all narcissists are women.

So when I say he, so she and so on.

Today they call themselves, it's not seven gay men, but now they are.

So I have some question came up. So this mirroring, so when you spend a lot of time with a narcissistic person, I forgot the word, the term, but contagious narcissist, you become a part of it. And actually you become kind of a narcissistic or you become a kind of narcissist, but not really.

How does it work?

However, however you accept it.

Like that you accepted the shared fantasy.

Yes.

That's the thing. That's true. People who are exposed to narcissists suffer trauma.

Yes.

This is not an acute trauma. The trauma known as PTSD. It's not. It's another type of trauma known as complex trauma. CPTSI is now people with CPT is D and all. Everyone who is exposed to a narcissist, intimate partner, friend, family, neighbor, priest, doctor, medical doctor, everyone exposed to a narcissist.

Even by the way, sometimes within a few minutes stuff is trauma. It could be many, many, many trauma. Then he would just feel uncomfortable after meeting the narcissist, you would feel disgusted. You would feel uncomfortable. You're feeling ill at ease. You're the one for wash yourself. You will feel like you dirty. Something bad happened here. I met some entity. It's not human. I don't know. You feel bad.

And we call this ego destiny. You feel ego.

So even a short exposure to narcissist causes trauma and of course, very long exposure causes massive complex trauma.

Now, complex trauma involves elements, psychological elements, psychopathological elements from borderline personality disorder. So it involves emotional dysregulation. Your emotions are so strong, they overwhelm you. You're incapable of managing your emotions. They come, they come suddenly. They take over you. You freeze.

You, this is known as startle response.

You, so your emotions are stronger than you. This is known as emotional dysregulation.

This element is borrowed from borderline. You become narcissistic in the sense that your empathy goes down. Your ability to empathize goes down. You become very defensive, arrogant, more arrogant. Your self perception and self image become a lot less realistic, more inflated, more grand yours.

These are all narcissistic defenses. You become dissociative. You begin to forget things a lot. Deny. Or deny things, but also forget, simply forget. So this is dissociative.

And. Forgetting things because this is really resonating with me in a way. Start to forget things.

It's an narcissistic defense. It's an narcissistic defense.

The narcissist renders you, converts you into a cluster B basket. You become partly borderline, partly narcissist and partly psychopath. So you will become vengeful.

For example, you become vindictive. You become violent or at least externally aggressive. You will become defiant. You will become contumacious, rejecting authority. All these are features of complex trauma to the point that many scholars, including the woman who coined, who invented, discovered complex trauma, to determine many scholars, myself included, we propose to consider all cluster B personality disorders as post-traumatic conditions with emotional dysregulation, not as personality disorders.

So the victims then, depending on the exposure, depending on the type of narcissist, covert narcissist have much worse effect than overt because they create confusion, disorientation.

So depending on many factors, the effects can last a few months, but it's common for the effects to last many years, five years, six years.

Okay. That's a good, because.

And another thing is just your permission.

Another thing, very important.

The narcissist implants in your head, puts in your head a voice.

This process is known as introjection. You introject the narcissist. There is a voice in your head that represents the narcissist. There's an internal object, which is the representation of the narcissist in your mind. And the narcissist uses something called entraining. Entraining is simply verbal abuse that keeps repeating itself over and over until you are essentially brainwashed.

And then there is this voice of the narcissist. And even when he's dead, physically dead or gone, you broke up. You never see him again. You're not contact. You got married, remarried, and you have six children. And your voice, his voice is inside your head.

And the problem is this. The narcissist voice inside your head, the narcissist is your enemy. Remember because you broke up with him. You are now the enemy. You are a persecutory object. You want you dead. You want to finish. You want to be in prison. You want to whatever.

The narcissist voice inside your head is an enemy voice. And it collaborates with all the other enemy voices in your head. It creates a coalition.

So if your mother was an enemy, for example, the narcissist voice would collaborate with your mother's voice and they would create a coalition in trajectory, in trajectory, coalition. And these voices will attack you together.

So when you hear the narcissist voice in your mind, at the same time, you will hear your mother telling you he is right. He is right about you.

So if the narcissist tells you, for example, you're so naive, you're such a people pleaser, you're so stupid. Suddenly there will be a second voice, which is essentially your mother's voice who will tell you, you see, I told you the same. You see, I'm right.

This is the power of the narcissist.

So in effect, we all have introductions from, and we remember from our childhood because we had to respond to mama's knees to what the mother will say. Don't go there. Don't do this. Don't behave like this. Don't cross the street without whatever. All the people, all the people you met in your life. That's what you are talking about. That's what you are talking about. You are defined by other people in your developing years and people that you met when you were experiencing mostly trauma, mostly trauma, because that is hard to overcome.

So if you don't know how to self-care when you're in pain, what you should do, which in a rate, if actually would sustain your identity, your character that you chose before, you will not feel a victim to that extent. You will be more defined as a person.

So when the narcissist will come in your environment, you have to meet, and you have sense for you.

Basically you develop a sense of who you are.

When you will meet a narcissist, charming, whatever, or overt, you will ask yourself, "What's wrong? These are the red flags, you know, what women are talking about."

But when you will meet a psychopath, you don't have to exchange your words. If your senses are in balance, attuned with your emotions, with your reasoning, with your personality, okay?

When you will meet a psychopath, you want to run. You don't need to say a word. You will feel fear. You will be afraid.

That's why, Sam said, you sweat and you want to take a shower after that, like you are dirty. Many people experience that.

And what I'm saying to my clients and counselor for CPTSD is to go back to their own senses.

And to try to experience many more other things and to reconnect them, to reframe them with the introject, the experiences that they had before.

So they will, you know, like negate. The positive experiences today will negate the back introjects from before.

So in this way, we called it, I call it, reframing. It's a pretty good new start.

And many, because you said that you feel some resonance, that's why I'm giving you this.

Many people should just be, from time to time, remind themselves, "Okay, you are living with a narcissistic husband." You know, it is expected from him.

I know now everyone, what Sam said in the beginning, they have a definition, a language, right? They can define and they will know with whom they are dealing and how to protect themselves.

We all have that power because the life in us pushes us to just survive. And you will survive a narcissist.

As simple as that, no need to complicate things, no need to go, you know, to make a lot of drama because this border is a borderline job. Not the normal persons or victims. No victim says that is suffering. He is saying, he said to you, my long, or he introduces me like long suffering, why? I don't see it as I'm suffering. I'm learning from it. I am thankful because I discovered my dark side. I know what I made of.

So who gets the best part of the cake? Let's share it.

And again, it's a question of calculus.

So mathematical question.

If the vast majority of introjects inside your head are negative, the narcissist would have a much easier job of taking over you and you will have a much more difficult job of getting rid of his voice in your mind because he would have many more allies inside your mind.

But if you're upbringing and childhood and later life, majority of the voices inside your head are loving and caring and supportive and helpful.

Then the narcissist would have a much more difficult job to take over you.

You will probably get rid of a narcissist much earlier and the narcissist voice inside your mind will be silenced by the others, especially by your authentic voice.

Every human being has a single voice, which is that person, not mother, not father, not family, not friends. That person's voice is known as the authentic voice.

So it depends.

I have also, I'll ask you three questions, I think, because before I forget.

So the second grade supply or first grade supply and who really becomes first grade and who becomes second grade, first of all?

And second, I read a lot on your book and listen that narcissism never heals, which is quite sad.

But then now you said this contagious narcissist people can heal after a few years or a few months, which is a good news.

And the third question is, what is the difference, really difference between psychopathic person and narcissists?

I think there's a difference between empathy because I recall you talked about cold empathy, narcissistic people have some sort of empathy called cold empathy, but psychopaths have no empathy at all.

Is this true?

No, I'll start with the last question.

Both narcissists and psychopaths have cold empathy.

The difference between narcissists and psychopaths is that psychopaths are goal oriented and the goal could be sex, money, power, access, luxury, life, whatever.

The narcissist is not goal oriented.

His only goal is narcissistic supply.

So the narcissist is a junkie.

The psychopath is operative, functional entity that maximizes or optimizes outcomes. The narcissist is a junkie and he's after supply.

So therefore the psychopath is not dependent on other people. He is ironically not pro-social and communal as the narcissist.

The narcissist depends on other people for narcissistic supply.

So he must work with other people. He must please other people. He must somehow interact with other people. He is integrated with other people. He hates other people. He holds other people in contempt because he's godlike and superior.

But unfortunately he's dependent on other people for narcissistic supply.

The psychopath is not.

The psychopath very often is a loner, a lone wolf. He doesn't care about other people because there's nothing they can give him except for example money.

So he doesn't care what they think about him. He doesn't need supply.

None of this.

Thus many of the features of narcissism do not exist in psychopathy.

Online there are many self-styled experts. It's a catastrophic phenomenon. They are spreading misinformation, left, right and center. It's a disaster.

And some of these experts have academic degrees. Some of them are even psychologists but they are not experts or masters.

So some of these so-called experts are saying that all psychopaths are narcissists. That is rank nonsense.

Only a small percentage of psychopaths are also narcissists.

The overwhelming majority of psychopaths are not.

They're grandiose but they are not narcissists.

So no dependency on other people and the psychological composition or landscape of narcissism is not the same like psychopaths.

For example, psychopaths don't have dissociation, don't engage in fantasy, do not have the same kind of shared fantasy like the narcissists.

The differences are huge. I would even say that psychopathy should not be a mental health issue, should not be defined as a clinical entity.

A psychopath is simply someone who refuses to play by the rules. He appears to play by the rules and doesn't care about other people.

But he recognizes, for example, that other people are external to him, not like the narcissists. He is firmly embedded in reality.

Psychopath is very grounded in reality.

Narcissist is not.

Psychopath couldn't care less what you think about him. Narcissist will fall apart if you don't give him supply.

These are critical differences.

So I think psychopathy is wrongly defined as a mental health issue. It's a social problem, not a mental health problem.

So this is with regards to your second.

Regards to your first question.

In my early work, I suggested that not all supply is the same. Depends who is the source of narcissistic supply.

If I get a compliment from Albert Einstein, it's not the same if I get a compliment from my neighbor. Obviously, if Einstein says you're a genius or my neighbor says I'm a genius, it's not the same. It doesn't have the same impact. It doesn't last as long.

So I suggested that there are grades of narcissism. I also suggested that there is fake supply. Fake supply is when you pretend to give me supply, but I realize that you are trying to play me, to game me, to deceive me, to manipulate me. You're giving me supply to manipulate. This is fake supply.

There is no grade supply that comes from idiots and I don't know what. It means nothing to me.

On the contrary, it may even insult me. So there's negative supply.

Negative supply is something that looks like supply, sounds like supply, but actually causes me narcissistic injury.

So there's a whole theory of supply. It's very detailed.

I forgot what was the second question, which proves that I'm not a genius.

Do they heal so they never heal?

Oh, healing, healing, yeah, true.

The victims of narcissistic abuse do not become narcissists.

Everyone has narcissistic defenses. Every human being alive and many human beings dead have narcissistic defenses.

So the narcissist triggers your narcissistic defenses. The narcissist also provokes psychopathic behaviors and the narcissist de-stringulates you emotionally so you look a lot like a borderline.

But it doesn't mean that you become a borderline or that you become a narcissist or they become a psychopath.

No.

CPTSD is transitory and that's the difference between CPTSD and borderline personality disorder. That's why it is nonsense.

No, it's not.

Borderline is lifelong. It amirates. It's mitigated in the patient's 40s. When the patient is 40, 45, borderline goes down, but it's lifelong. It starts at age 12.

CPTSD is always transient. It lasts a few months, a few years in extreme cases and then it disappears. It reverses completely.

Very good news, sir.

Yeah, it is.

Prognosis is very good.

So will narcissists have a heal?

No. Narcissism is not a new fashion. You can take off your clothes.

Narcissistic personality disorder is the personality.

This is who the narcissist is.

That's the essence of the narcissism.

If you take away the narcissistic personality disorder, nothing is left behind.

There's also nothing to work with with a patient that is outside the disorder.

That's why the DSM says that narcissistic personality disorder is all pervasive.

It permeates everything, every emotion, every cognition, every effect, every field of functioning, every area of life, every behavior, every trait, every reaction, every everything is affected and defined by pathological narcissism.

There's no way to take it away because then there would be no patient left.

So narcissism cannot be healed.

What can be done is to modify some abrasive and antisocial behaviors of the narcissist, to teach the narcissist, to be more socially acceptable, to sublimate, to convert some things into socially acceptable behaviors and so on and so forth.

Even then, it's very short term effect.

You work with the narcissist for three years and you are very happy and you become the narcissist yourself.

I healed the narcissist.

He now knows how to behave in society.

He's not insulting people. He's not exploiting people. He's not manipulating people. He's not abusing people.

Wonderful.

In essence, he's no longer a narcissist.

I modified all these behaviors.

If you're lucky, this lasts for six months or until the narcissist is stressed or until he thinks that you've insulted him.

It's nonsense. It's simply nonsense. There's no way to change a narcissist and victims will do well to stop with malignant optimism and what shadow the underneath narcissism Instagram calls pathological hope.

They will do well to get rid of this.

It's a take it or leave it. Take it or leave it.

That's the narcissist forever. You want to take it?

Take it with your eyes open. Build your defenses. Enhance your positive interjects. Put up a firewall and survive next to the narcissists benefiting from his good side because for example, some narcissists are intelligent and can teach you everything. Some of fun.

Some of fun.

But don't tell yourself I'm going to transform the narcissist with my love. I'm going to heal. I'm going to heal his inner child and his wounds.

This is grandiose. This is grandiose to think that you could have any impact on the narcissist were tens of thousands of scholars and therapists have failed.

You think that you would be the one. This is grandiose.

You can change it.

So the last question because I set my time and I can see I have 10 minutes left.

I feel like we can talk more on this subject.

If you agree, maybe we could talk another time. Possibly.

Yes.

Thank you.

So how do we prevent our children to become narcissists in the future?

That's really good.

Okay.

I had my own problems. I wanted to resolve. I went into child psychology much deeper and there was a summit of resilience.

What was important not to be more resilient, resilient to narcissists, resilient to psychopaths, resilient is simple to learn.

Children should be encouraged to learn at all times. Their parents should be aware, should be aware what are their expectations of the child and not to enforce them, impose them.

In effect, when I face parents, I tell them, look, you are both narcissistic. We all are.

But if I will know what is your narcissistic trait, I will tell you how not to express it to your child.

So awareness of narcissism by both parents, defining the traits and influences on their children so they will protect the child of pain, of emotional pain, of emotional pain and to let the child, to encourage the child to experience more and more things by explaining at the same time what is going on there.

So if this is a cup, this is a cup made of this, too small as detail.

Because for the child to get first the orientation of the environment.

So to recognize the objects, to recognize the environment so they can have their self of being capable of sustaining themselves, to be aware, to just get to teach the child to self care, to be more aware of the environment.

What was boundaries?

So just a second.

This is the first stage between two, four, five years.

The boundaries, they will, what he mentioned, when the child after two years will start to be exposed to others, to their peers, they are going into the world, they will have to socialize.

So the parents should enforce, I mean, make it more pleasurable, social gaining to allow their friends with their children to come to them, they will go to them to meet, to have some times together, to be more happy, to make, why interesting things.

Not as I witnessed and as I see, they take their mobiles, they put cartoons, now you see it.

So the children should be engaged in the conversation, never mind if it is tough or not, if they will not understand and if they will ask the parent to explain, yes, the parent to be, to explain it, not to spare the child of being hurt.

Because this is the way how the child will experience what is hurt, will learn what is hurt, then the mother should tell the child, this is how you will protect whenever you will see that someone, a child with a stone in the hand, you don't stand, you don't ask what is his attention, you will just put yourself out of the way, of his way.

You understand, these are the things that the mother, mother, because the child has most confidence in the mother, the child knows that the mother will never abandon her, him.

When the child trusts the mother first, actually trust anyone who cares, but the mother should also make that distinction, to make that distinction, not to show the child that he cannot, that the child should not trust the guy with the stone in the hand, you understand, to show the differences, mother's role, father's role, to teach the child in the formative years to get a sense, to develop the senses from the environment when the child will enter the second phase, when they start to socialize, will be ready to enable, will be enabled to make the difference, what is good, what is right, okay, so they will, the child will be more, will have more, trust, confidence, the self-esteem will be good enough, so, and also in this age, when they are socializing, it's very narcissistic trait, but if they are not a nurse, they will not see what they are made of, they are very competitive.

So their parents should regulate the competitiveness, competitiveness, that doesn't mean if the guy has a, some toy, that they should buy it to their children, they should say, but he likes it, why would you like to have that?

So there are ways of doing that, but for a child not to become a nurse later, is to teach him how to care of himself, herself, with the emotionally, to enable the child to connect with others, because narcissists don't connect with anyone, because that is also part of the environment, not only the objects, but also the people.

So, and how to be fair in effect?

Yes, the child should be provoked, they see, when with, in social media, they have fights and so on, yes, you should fight for yourself, I will teach you how to fight, you know, it's not like, okay, you should not fight, the parents should teach the child how to preserve what they think of them, that was validated by the parents and the others until then.

So it's never changing.

Parenting is complicated though, by social media, the online environment, social media were constructed around narcissistic traits, social media carried shame by comparing yourself to others, social media encouraged envy, of course, with likes and so on, so forth, social media encouraged grandiosity.

So there is a problem with exposure to the online world, which complicates parenting, even good parenting makes it almost, I would say, impossible.

Suicides among young people have increased by 48% in the last decade.

Wow.

48%.

These are the children of the transitional generation.

This number is nothing compared to the following numbers.

Depression is increased by 300%, anxiety is increased by 500% among young people.

What's happening to the world?

I think we have relegated the role of parenting to technology companies.

Starting with television, long before internet, long before internet mothers used to put children in front of television.

That's true.

The TV raises the children.

Now the computer raises the children.

Well, okay, so we have only two minutes because I said the timing, I think it ends, right?

So thank you so much.

I also have a lot of new information just talking to you, aside from the books.

And I really would like to talk to both of you again.

Let me know if you have time.

You can also arrange if you wish, you can arrange a public podcast.

So you can invite people to a place and it can be projected on a screen.

I could give a lecture, for example, something like that.

And they could ask questions, the audience can ask questions.

So it's done in many countries.

You can just put many people in a hall, a lecture hall and a screen and project the image on the screen.

So today technology helps us to connect.

Yes, that's the adventure.

And thank you so much.

I'm so happy it's going to end.

And then let's talk again and the opening of the book is on Thursday, next Wednesday.

And I'll send you next week.

Thank you very much.

We're very excited.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

A nice day there.

Bye for now.

Bye.

Look at this.