And now, I'm inviting you to a tour of the narcissist mind.
As we tour the narcissist mind, you will understand why each of these techniques is working.
So this is actually the second part of the lecture is to explain to you why these techniques are working and to allow you, with this deeper understanding, to use these techniques more effectively.
The reason the narcissist is very effective at manipulating you, controlling you, and inducing in you emotions and moods is because, exactly like you, the narcissist is a victim.
Narcissism is a post-traumatic condition. The narcissist has been the victim, usually, of his parents.
As a victim, the narcissist chose a specific, a highly specific solution. But the fact that the narcissist chose a specific solution does not mean that the narcissist is not a victim. He is as much a victim as you are.
The reason the narcissist victimizes you is that he wants company. As long as you are not victimized, you are alien to the narcissist. The narcissist wants to feel at home, among his own kind. He wants to be among victims because he is a victim. So he converts and transforms everyone around him into a victim, simply to feel at home.
And of course, the clinical concept is comfort zone. The narcissist's comfort zone is among victims. The narcissist will victimize you, never mind what you do, never mind what you do not do, never mind how often you do or do not do what you do or do not do. Never mind if you are, because you don't even have to be for the narcissist to victimize you.
And here's the worst part. When the narcissist converts you to an image of himself, he's doing you a favor because he is superior. He is God-like. He is bringing you up to his level.
What does it say in Genesis, the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible? God created men in his own image. The narcissist creates you in his own image. He is furious at your lack of gratitude. Here he is investing in an inferior you. He is very close to God. Sometimes they change places.
And here he is, having chosen you, having selected you. He could have chosen anyone, but he chose you.
And here he is molding you, shaping you like Pygmalion and Galatea.
And how do you react?
You're unhappy. You claim to be abused and victimized. You have to stupid to realize the enormous gift you are receiving.
You must understand this. The narcissist is very angry at you all the time, either because you are too retarded to appreciate his gifts, which is usually the case, or if you are intelligent, you are too ungrateful.
The narcissist's partner is in a binary state, retard or ungrateful, unusually ungrateful retard.
And so the narcissist says to himself, to mold my partner, I must resort to extreme and radical measures.
Americans call it tough love. They tried it in Iraq. This is tough love. It's for your own good. You will thank me one day if you survive.
But there is a problem.
And now I'm going to take you into the soul, the psyche and the mind of the narcissist.
There was a sociologist by the name of Giddens. And in the 1990s, Giddens came with a concept called ontological insecurity. Ontological insecurity.
The narcissist is in a state of ontological insecurity. What is ontological insecurity? It's when you don't feel continuous, when you don't feel that your yesterday or your today is a continuation of yesterday and your tomorrow will be continuation of today.
Obviously, if there is no continuity, it is impossible to develop an identity. The narcissist is possibly the only form of human who has no core, no identity, no kernel.
In 1995, I proposed that narcissism is a form of multiple personality disorder, because the narcissist has two selves, true self, which is a traumatized, very, very young child who is paralyzed by fear and hurt. So this child is dysfunctional and has no effect on the psychodynamics of the narcissist. And there is the false self, which is godlike. We'll come to it a bit later. There are two selves, yes, true and false.
Technically, it's multiple personality disorder, because it's a person with two personalities. But I was wrong. The second time I admit, I admit something today. I don't know what's happening to me. I was wrong, because in multiple personality known today as dissociative identity disorder, in dissociative identity disorder, there is continuity. The person with multiple personalities has many personalities. But each of these personalities has perfect memory and perfect identity. And each of these personalities has total continuity.
So if someone with multiple personality has six personalities, and one of these personalities is Sam, Sam comes out, talks to the therapist. And then four months later, Sam comes out again, Sam will remember the conversation with the therapist. The six personalities have total continuity, total memory, total identity, not the narcissist.
Narcissists forget or have no access to almost 80%, at least according to my studies, 80% of their memories. Every minute you are confronted with a new person, new narcissist, which has nothing to do with the person a minute before.
Narcissists suffer from something called dissociation. Dissociation is breaks in memory, missing time.
So the narcissist misses seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, but misses all the time. He dissociates all the time. He is not continuous.
How to live like that? What the narcissist does is called, in clinical terms, called fibrillation. The narcissist invents stories to cover the missing parts.
The narcissist says to himself, I remember picking the golf club and I remember the ball going to the hole, but I don't remember anything in between. So let's see, probably, probably it's logical that I hit the ball with the golf club.
Probably it's logical. It makes sense. It's plausible, but I do not remember it.
And this is called confabulation.
Very often the narcissist gets the confabulation wrong. So people think he is lying or gaslighting. He's not. He's confabulating.
Here's your problem as victims or partners.
The narcissist is like the river of Heraclitus, you know, Panta Rhei. You cannot enter the same river twice. You cannot talk to the same narcissist twice. You do not have a relationship with the same person. You do not communicate with the same human being. Not only is there no one there, there's nobody there, but the emptiness itself is fragmented and fractured to pieces.
It's like an empty, beautiful, empty palace with no inhabitants and the walls themselves are cracked and falling down.
Partners of narcissists cannot digest this. There are two things that victims of narcissists cannot accept and cannot digest.
One, the narcissist does not exist. There is nobody home. There is no person there.
I mean, probably many of you know that I'm a narcissist. Yes. I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personalities twice, over 15 years. It's pretty safe. I'm one. So you look at me. Here I am joking, talking, drinking coffee, drinking water, smiling at Barbara.
What am I missing? Some of you may think that I'm reasonably okay looking. Those with myopia.
So it is impossible, impossible for you to, to grasp that there is nobody here behind this lectern. Trust me on this. There is nobody here. You're experiencing mass delusion, we we come to it. This phenomenon is known as the uncanny valley.
The second thing, the second thing that victims or intimate partners of narcissists find difficult to accept that to the narcissist, they are not special. They are commodities as interchangeable as grains of rice. The narcissist is with you, married to you, has children with you, had experiences with you, told you that he loves you a million times. How many times you made love, he cried? Intimacy.
The minute you stop functioning, he replaces you because you are a commodity.
The narcissist loves his wife and he also loves rice. And very often he cannot tell the difference.
Victims find it shattering because their individuality is challenged.
So this is the first thing, ontological insecurity, dissociation, confabulation, nobody home. No one there. Sorry, before I go to the second thing.
Stop communicating so hard. You cannot negotiate with a non-entity. Your agreements mean nothing because no one signed them. You are talking to him. You are talking to yourself.
It's a ghost, less than a ghost. It's a pretension. It's a piece of fiction. The false self is a piece of fiction. It's a bad movie. It's a script.
Why do I resemble a human being so well? How do I give this almost perfect rendition of a human being?
I observed many of you for a long time. I have 190 IQ. I used it. You are not complex. You have very basic life forms. You are easy to manipulate because you have three or four basic modes. Your user manual is pretty rudimentary.
So, you know, it's not too difficult to deceive you into believing that I'm human. It helps that I'm made of carbon like the next generation of artificial intelligence.
When the final androids hit the earth, they will be made of carbon. They will have superior cognitive skills. I hope they will be more handsome than me, but they will be me. I am it. I am this thing. I am, in many respects, your future.
I think this is the horror at the core of narcissism. This is why narcissism had become a global phenomenon from Nepal to Australia and from Egypt to Canada.
There is a universal resonance because I think you recognize that this life form, narcissists, probably is the future.
I didn't say that. Japanese roboticist said it. In 1970, Masahiro Mori said that when robots become indistinguishable from people, people will become very frightened, phobic and anxious. And he called it uncanny valley.
Everyone feels uncomfortable around the narcissist. We have proved it in studies. People don't know that they are with narcissists in the same room and they will react with extreme anxiety and discomfort.
Why? They feel that something is missing. Something is off key. Something is imitated, not real. Something is fake.
I'm telling you all these things for you to accept that it is not possible to have a meaningful emotional life with the narcissist. And no amount of manipulation will change this.
The next thing you need to understand about the narcissist is that narcissists like people with other mental health problems, they are capable of what we call paradoxical thinking.
The first person to describe paradoxical thinking, first psychologist, was Bateson. He called it double bind.
And then Laing, Laing was a famous British psychotherapist, R.D Laing, he called it the incomplete knot.
Paradoxical thinking is simply the ability to have, at the same time, contradictory thoughts and contradictory beliefs.
You come to that. You cannot think at the same time, wow, this guy is evil and this guy is wonderful. You cannot think at the same time, I believe the world is good and the world is horrible. You cannot have conflicting cognitions and conflicting values and beliefs.
This creates in you something called dissonance and you solve the dissonance by getting rid of one of the horns, one of the sides, one of the thoughts.
Not so the narcissist. Narcissists can, at the same time, at the same moment, have conflicting thoughts, contradictory thoughts, contradictory emotions, contradictory values and contradictory beliefs.
So who are you talking to when you communicate with the narcissist? And when you manipulate the narcissist, who are you manipulating?
He can say at three o'clock in the afternoon, Balbala is wonderful. And at 3.15, Balbala sucks. He changes his views, his commitments, his promises, his contracts, his everything changes constantly and dramatically because he has paradoxical thinking.
Why does he have paradoxical thinking?
Because he doesn't exist. The essence of existence is the stability of cognitions, values and so on. And these are known as schemas, schemes.
So everyone has schemas, amalgams, collections, collections of emotions, cognitions, beliefs, values, and they are stable and they are solid. Under the stress, they can break down, but still, normally they're very stable.
It makes all of you more or less predictable, reliable. And of course it allows society to function.
Narcissists and psychopaths, by the way, have none of this. They go with the flow and they react to internal dynamics by changing themselves so completely that they are utterly new.
It is utterly disorienting. It's like shape-shifting. You know in science fiction movies, shape-shifting. It's chimera, chimerical. And it's very, very disorienting and sometimes frightening and always infuriating.
Intimate partners and victims of narcissists spend huge amounts of time trying to nail down the jelly. But yesterday you said this, but you promised this, but didn't we agree? Total waste of time.
The third thing you need to know about narcissists, the narcissist starts as a reflection. It's the only human being that starts its conscious existence as a reflection.
The narcissist constructs his sense of self, the false self, by reflecting himself from other people.
Healthy people have a stable core. They get input from other people and they reject most of it. And they reject most of this input for good reason.
This stability of the core remains for life. Regulation of sense of self-worth, regulation of moods, regulation of emotions. It all comes from insight.
If you find yourself alone on an island, nothing will happen to you as far as your sense of self. Even alone on an island, you would still feel that you are you.
Not so the narcissist. The narcissist is the totality of the reflections of other people. The narcissist's mind is like a hive of bees.
Your mind is like a surface, uninterrupted surface. Everything fits in. What doesn't fit in, you discard. After 20 years, 30 years, you are absolutely smooth and seamless.
The narcissist's mind is like a hive of bees with hexagons, millions of hexagons. And to each hexagon, the narcissist collects his reflection in her eyes, in his eyes, in her eyes, collects, collects millions of reflections and then processes these reflections, puts them in the hexagons.
And what happens when there are no reflections?
Narcissist feels when he is not surrounded by people who reflect him. The narcissist feels that he does not exist.
In the relationship with the narcissist, you have 100% of the power. The narcissist has zero.
The genius of the narcissist is to convince you that he has 100% of the power and you have zero.
The narcissist does have empathy. It's called cold empathy. Cold empathy is empathy, but without emotions. It's goal-oriented.
So if I see someone crying, I would recognize that she is sad. I would recognize this. She is sad.
So I do have empathy. I have cognitive empathy.
But you will say, wow, she is sad. I remember being sad. It's a bad feeling. Can I do something for her? Emotional resonance. She is sad. I remember being sad. It's a bad feeling. I want to help.
The narcissist says, or the psychopath, she is sad. I know what it means to be sad. Not from personal experience, but I know. I read in books. I observed. I know what it means to be sad, cognitively.
Now if I play my cards right, probably at the end of the night, I can have sex with her because she is broken. She is vulnerable. Her defenses are down. It's an opportunity.
Cold empathy is empathy used to find your vulnerabilities and then use these vulnerabilities to obtain goals. Narcissistic supply, sex, money, power, contacts, whatever.
So never, ever show the narcissist any emotion. Starve. Starve the narcissist's cold empathy of information. Do not provide information to the narcissist called empathy. You want to cry? There's always the toilet. You're happy. Keep it to yourself. It's like the Miranda warning. Any emotion you show can and will be used against you.
And this is cold empathy.
Similarly, never ever offer the narcissist help or advice. It's extremely difficult.
Many of you love the narcissist. It's a different lecture. What's wrong with you?
But many of you do.
And when you love someone, I heard, you want to help. You want to prevent bad things from happening to that person. You want to guide the person in the right direction, if you know the right direction. Or you just want to hold. Hold the person.
These are critical mistakes with the narcissist. I repeat, never ever offer help, advice, guidance or holding for two reasons.
One, the narcissist will interpret your behavior as weakness, as vulnerability, something he can leverage, something he can use to obtain goals in the future.
We begin to fake the need for help.
Second thing, if you offer the narcissist help and advice, he will think that you are humiliating him. It's narcissistic injury. The narcissist doesn't need help from you. The narcissist doesn't need help from anyone. He's above help. He's omnipotent. He's all powerful. The narcissist doesn't need advice from you. He's omniscient. He knows everything.
A narcissist will drive his car for six hours before his wife will ask someone for help because he cannot find a place. If you're offering the narcissist advice or help, you are saying to the narcissist, you are in need of advice and help. I have something you don't have.
For example, I have information you don't have. Narcissists will react very badly to this. I will never forgive you for offering help and advice.
You well know by now, it's something that I described in the mid-90s, a cycle of idealization, evaluation, discard and replacement.
There is a technique that makes use of this cycle.
The narcissist first idealizes you, then the narcissist devalues you, then the narcissist discards you and then the narcissist replaces you with someone else.
To manipulate the narcissist, you reverse the cycle. Reverse it.
Remember, idealize, devalue, discard, replace. The technique is replace, replace, discard, devalue, idealize.
Replace the narcissist with someone, visibly, triangulate. Then discard him, not only triangulate with someone, but also discard the narcissist.
As you discard him, devalue him. I don't know. You're not a man. Example.
And finally, idealize him. That's it. He's yours.
So it's reverse of the cycle. Simply reverse the cycle.
Now, many women came to this behavior intuitively. The maximum effect, maximum impact, if it is all done in one sitting, in one situation, happened to me recently.
So as you see, I'm describing the world of the narcissist and from each aspect of the narcissist personality, I'm giving you some technique or some approach that might work.
The narcissist is a victim of abuse. That's why he became a narcissist.
As a child, the narcissist was terrified of pain, of hurt, of unpredictability. So he created the false self.
Narcissists don't have relationships. They have power plays. It's all about power. All of it is establishing a balance of terror, a matrix of power.
The narcissist from the beginning after the love bombing phase.
By the way, the love bombing phase is not telling you that the narcissist needs you, it's about telling you how unique you are.
The narcissist is trying in the love bombing to phase to convert into a narcissist, to taste how it feels to get narcissistic supply.
So the love bombing phase is simply to give you the taste of this drug so that you become junkies as well.
But the minute the narcissist acquires you, the minute the narcissist hoovers you, the minute you belong to the narcissist in his mind, the narcissist message to you is, I don't need you. There is nothing you have that I want or that I need or that I cannot get anywhere else. Don't think you have any power over me because you don't. You do not have power over me. And I can dump you tomorrow and find someone else in minutes.
This is precisely the essence of relationships with narcissists.
In the first phase, the narcissist tells you how special you are. In the second phase, the narcissist tells you how not special you are.
You're amazing. You're unique. You are the love of my life. I never had this experience with anyone. I never felt so deeply. You know what? I never felt at all. You're the first and only. The things you do to me.
And this is the love bombing phase and makes you feel very, very unique. One in the world. There's only one you.
You can offer nothing I need. And what you offer, I don't need. If I'm a cerebral narcissist, I'm above sex. Sex is retards. If I'm any kind of narcissist, I'm above emotions, love is for stupid people, weak people.
And if it's not you, then someone else. You should be honored and grateful that I've introduced you into my exciting and adventurous life.
It is this pendulum of conflicting messages that totally unsettles and destabilizes the victim.
The narcissist fully expects to lose you. He already behaves as though he had lost you. You're always temporary. Even if you're 30 years together, you're still temporary.
Narcissists have something called anticipatory loss anxiety.
From very early age, narcissists have something called object inconstancy or object impermanence.
Again, for those of you who are in psychology, object impermanence is a term coined by Jean Piaget, child psychologist in the late sixties. And object inconstancy is a term coined by Margaret Mahler. She was a psychologist, actually. She was a doctor, but expert on child psychology.
You know, when a baby at a very early age, before the first year of life, between five months and one year, when mother leaves the room, the baby starts to cry because out of sight, out of existence. If the baby doesn't see mother, mother stops to exist.
Gradually, the child creates a representation of mother inside his mind. When mother is in the room, the child interacts with mother. When mother is outside the room, the child interacts with the representation of mother. This representation is known as imago.
So with a narcissist, there is a problem at this phase. And what happens is the narcissist interacts only with the representation. Can you think why? Why would the narcissist prefer to interact with the representation and not with you?
I gave you the clue. I gave you the answer, actually.
If I am afraid to lose you, I would prefer to interact not with you, but with your representation.
You can always walk away out of my life. I don't control what you do and what you may do, but I have full control over the representation inside my mind.
So the minute the narcissist sees you and decides that you are potentially a good source of supply, a shocking process takes place and you're not even aware.
The narcissist snapshots you, takes a snapshot with his mental camera. He meets someone. He thinks she can supply, provide supply.
At that second, he takes a snapshot from that second, I want you to understand this, it's extremely difficult to believe, I know, from that second all the time, the narcissist interacts never ever with you, always with a snapshot.
In a minute you will understand why the narcissist has at some point to devalue you, although in many cases the cycle repeats itself many times, but such a cycle must exist.
The narcissist has you and a snapshot, but you are not the snapshot. You have your own life. You develop, you study, you travel, you have lovers maybe, don't tell anyone. I mean, things happen to you. You initiate things. You are, in other words, dynamic.
The snapshot is static. You start from the same position, overlapping and then what happens? You move away.
But the narcissist is emotionally invested in the snapshot, controls the snapshot, talks to the snapshot. So you gradually become less and less relevant as you diverge from the snapshot.
At some point you become a threat.
The differences between you and the snapshot are so enormous that even the narcissist cannot deceive himself that the snapshot is accurate. At some point you challenge the snapshot.
You all know that point. You've all gone through it because the narcissist starts saying things like you have changed a lot. You're not the same woman I fell in love with. What's happening to you? You need help. You're going through a crisis.
He's describing the gap, the gap, the abyss that is opening between you and the snapshot.
At that point he must get rid of you, must get rid of you because the snapshot matters to him much more than you. He's protecting the snapshot. He has zero tolerance for abandonment, zero tolerance for loss because he is a baby. It's a baby. Baby with no object constancy.
So he gets rid of you.
How to get rid of you?
By devaluing you.
How to justify to himself that he idealized you yesterday and he's devaluing you today?
What? He made a mistake? When he idealized you, was he mistaken?
No way. Narcissist is never mistaken. You changed. You are not the same person. The person he's devaluing is not the person that he idealized.
So this mechanism, which is technically known as introjection, this mechanism explains the cycles.
What is the technique?
So everything I'm telling you, there is a technique. The technique is to animate the snapshot.
Remember, the narcissist has in his mind a representation of you as you used to be, let's say, when you met.
So you have two options, to go back to that time and become who you used to be, to give up on your personal progress and development. You will be shocked how many partners do exactly this.
They started to study in a university. They stopped. They are successful in business. They closed the business, etc. They unwind the changes.
That's one technique.
The second technique is what we call brinkmanship. It's to animate the snapshot to extreme. That means to challenge the snapshot, to provide the narcissist with a new snapshot.
But how can you do that? He already has a snapshot of you by not being you. You must change so radically and dramatically that the narcissist will have the feeling that he had just met a new partner.
Change everything from hairstyle, to clothing, to lovers, to behave totally differently, different priorities, different everything. And the narcissist will say, wow, I'm falling in love with you again. You're so different.
I've had couples restart sex after 15 years. I've had divorced couples who went back to living together with this technique.
Next thing you should know, narcissism, narcissism feels to the narcissist like religion feels to an extreme American fundamentalist or a member of ISIS.
Narcissists are religious fanatics. They are members of a very special religion. This religion has one God and one worshiper, and it's the only religion in the world where the God is the worshiper, but the inner experience, the emotional correlate, the cognitive aspects are utterly identical to a religious experience.
Let us try to understand why.
It's my favorite topic, so I don't care if you're not interested.
To live with a narcissist, to be with a narcissist is to be member of a cult. The narcissist is the leader of the cult and you are the member.
The narcissism religion is missionary. Christianity sent missionaries in the 19th century to Africa to convert the natives. The natives were happy. Some of the missionaries were tasty, but exactly like Christianity sent missionaries to Africa to convert the natives. Exactly in the same way, the narcissist is trying to convert you to his religion.
What is narcissistic supply? It's to worship the narcissist.
When the narcissist is asking you to give him supply, he is asking you to worship his God, him.
So there is a very interesting branch, new branch, of teaching the victims to cope with narcissists the same way we cope with religious fundamentalists. I'm kidding you're not.
When you meet a fanatic Muslim or a fanatic Jew or a fanatic Christian, instinctively you know what not to say. Yes?
You will not mock Muhammad unless you are Danish. You will not attack God in the presence of a fundamentalist Christian. Jesus, you will not attack Jesus in the presence of fundamentalist Christian.
So you know intuitively, instinctively, no one taught you, no one told you, but you know what not to do. You know what not to say.
And if you are inside the church or inside the mosque or inside the synagogue, you definitely know that some things are never done, some things are never said.
Well, when you live with a narcissist, you're living with a religious fundamentalist. Some things you never do and some things you never say.
You never challenge the God of the narcissist, which happens to be the narcissist. You never challenge the attributes of that God. God is all-knowing. God is all-powerful. God is perfect. God is brilliant. You don't challenge this. It's bad taste. It's impolite to tell me that I'm not God. It also means you're delusional, I am God.
But still, it's a church.
How does narcissism become a religion? Why does it have religious aspects?
Very briefly, the child is abused by his parents, mostly his mother, but not only by his parents.
Now, this abuse has many forms. It can be classic, sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse. But abuse is any situation where the child is not allowed to separate from the parent and become an individual. When the parent does not allow the child to develop his or her own boundaries.
A healthy child with a healthy parent, the child stops here, the parent starts here. There's a boundary between them.
In the case of a narcissistic parent, usually, the child is not allowed to build Donald Trump's border wall. The child is not allowed to make a distinction between herself or himself and the parent.
So, you know, the mother who always wanted to be an actress and she failed and she forces her daughter to become an actress, that's abuse.
You know, the mother who spoils the child and tells him that he can never do anything wrong. It's abuse. It's abuse because it doesn't allow the child to conflict with the environment, thereby creating a boundary.
So there are many, many forms of abuse.
How does a child react to this?
He creates an imaginary friend, a piece of fiction, the false self. The false self is everything that the child is not. The child is small. False self is infinite.
The child cannot guess what the parent will do next. The parent is unpredictable. The false self knows everything. His omniscient. The child is helpless. The false self is all powerful.
The child is receiving conditional love. If you do this and this, I will love you. So the child knows that if he fails, he is a bad object. He will not be loved. He is unworthy.
The false self is perfect. The false self is everything the child is not.
But look at the list. Look at the list of the false self. Perfect. Knows everything. All powerful. Brilliant. There are only two entities in the world which have this description. One is Donald Trump and one is God. And Donald Trump has orange hair.
So seriously, the child actually invents God and the child createsa private religion. This God, the false self, protects him from the parent, absorbs the pain and the hurt, isolates the child like a firewall. The false self is the child's God.
But you know, it's a very primitive God. It's the God of the Old Testament. And like the God of the Old Testament who asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the false self asks the child to sacrifice something.
The false self is a God and wants human sacrifice. But what human sacrifice? What can the child sacrifice? Who can the child sacrifice?
Himself. Only himself. That's precisely what the child does. He sacrifices himself to this new God, the false self. He sacrifices his true self to the false self. He worships the false self.
But the false self is a very greedy and hungry God. Like the Moloch, one human sacrifice is not enough. This God demands additional human sacrifices.
And this is where I'm happy to say you come in. You are these additional human sacrifices.
The narcissist has to sacrifice you to the false self. And this is precisely why in 1995 I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. Why did I need to say narcissistic abuse? Why not abuse?
Because narcissistic abuse is total. The narcissist's only way to sacrifice you to the false self is to eliminate your separate existence. You must, the narcissist must annihilate you. The narcissist's abuse is not functional or instrumental. It's existential. You must die so that the false self is gratified and satisfied.
Because if the false self is not satisfied and not gratified, the narcissist will not exist.
So ladies and ladies, when you team up with the narcissist, it's either him or you. It's a war to death. One of you must die, at least psychologically.
Indeed, victims and intimate partners of narcissists describe a feeling of inner death.
It's very interesting because there was a scholar by the name of Otto Kernberg. In 1975, Kernberg invented the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. When we observe victims of narcissists from the outside, we cannot tell if they are victims of narcissists or if they are patients with borderline personality disorder.
This void, this inner death is common to victims of complex PTSD and to patients with borderline personality disorder.
And it leads to lability, ups and downs, and to emotional dysregulation. It's a subject for another lecture.
Four brief points and then I will open the floor to questions.
Point number one.
The narcissist has an external locus of control. In other words, the narcissist ironically believes that his life is determined from the outside.
Consequently, the narcissist blames everything on the outside.
And this is known as alloplastic defense.
So this is the sequence. My life is determined from outside, so I'm not responsible. So therefore not guilty. They did it. He did it. She did it. Not me.
So locus of control is external. Defense is alloplastic.
This is very interesting for you because if you're willing to play a kind of dangerous game, you can become the narcissist's locus of control, but you have to be very sharp, astute and know what you're doing.
First of all, you must allow the narcissist to blame you for everything. Allow, encourage it to blame you for everything.
So you come to the narcissist. It's my fault. I made a mistake. It was wrong. I shouldn't have done it. Oh, poor you. You're suffering because of me, etc.
This has two beneficial effects.
If you say it, the narcissist doesn't have to say it. It reduces the abuse, but much more importantly, gradually the narcissist out of convenience will begin to regard you as the locus of control, as the external locus of control. And he will become extremely codependent on you. It's totally counterintuitive technique, but it works.
Narcissist will say to himself, everything that's bad is her fault. Probably everything that's good is her fault. Probably everything is her fault. Probably she controls everything. It's a kind of a conspiracy theory. He will develop a kind of conspiracy theory.
Don't forget the narcissism is a religion and you can apply for the job of God. All you need is a long white beard.
Okay. Next point, magical thinking.
One of the reasons no therapy works with narcissists, all therapies fade with narcissists, possibly the reason, the major reason is the therapist insists to treat narcissists as adults.
They strike an alliance with the narcissist. They negotiate with the narcissist. They argue with the narcissist. They reason with the narcissist. They ask the narcissist to promise things.
The narcissist is not an adult. There is no narcissist alive whose mental age, well alive, dead ones maybe, but there's no narcissist alive whose mental age is higher than let's say 11.
So it's a mistake to treat narcissists as adults.
My new therapy, cold therapy, is built on this insight and all the techniques in cold therapy are based on child psychology.
But one of the things that children have is called magical thinking because children have magical thinking. The narcissist has magical thinking.
Magical thinking is the belief that internal processes affect reality.
So you know, the famous phenomenon that children blame themselves for bad things that are happening to the parents. That's magical thinking. Or children expect miracles or believe in fairy tales or have imaginary friends. These are all forms of magical thinking.
And of course false self is a major feat of magical thinking.
But if you take magical thinking and add to it grandiosity, God-like, I'm God-like, and add to it immunity because I'm God, no one can touch me. If you mix this, you get a very explosive mixture because of this mixture.
The narcissist, for example, is reckless. He takes risks, crazy risks because he believes in magic. He's immune. No, no one and nothing to touch him. There are no consequences to his actions. He's God. God can do anything. So he's reckless.
And he is gullible, stupid, believes everyone and everything. It's easy to deceive, to cheat and to come. No, there is no one more stupid than the person who thinks he is not. That's another Jew by the name of Socrates.
So the narcissist believes that he knows everything, cannot learn anything and no one can be more clever than him.
And this is the dream, dream client of a con artist. You can make use of this. You can make use of this.
If you want the narcissist to do something, you convince him that it was his idea. Everything comes from him.
You want to put an idea in his head. You ask for his advice even if he's totally unqualified.
You push him to perform miracles. You say that you expect him to do this because he can do anything.
It's very easy to manipulate the narcissist using his grandiosity, magical thinking and belief that he is immune to the consequences of his actions.
And you use the narcissist's entitlement. You tell the narcissist you deserve this. You want him to take risks.
You want him to leave your life. All you have to say, for example, you deserve someone much better than me. True, the narcissist will say, I really do.
Or you deserve the easy life. You shouldn't work so hard. Or your luck will, you're very lucky. Your luck will carry you through.
It's extremely easy. Just be creative.
The reason I'm giving you a two and something hour lecture is because Barbara paid me a lot of money. But if Barbara hadn't paid me a lot of money, the lecture would have been extremely short. It would have contained a single sentence. Manage your narcissist as you manage your four year old. End of story. You saw how much money you could have saved?
That's the narcissist for you. You can never trust.
Last point anyway, last point and I will open to questions.
One thing people, including by the way, the vast majority of professionals, including the leading experts on paranoia, what they don't appreciate is that paranoia is a form of narcissism.
There are two critical elements in paranoia without which you cannot be paranoid. Point number one, I am the center of attention. Someone is paying me attention and I am sufficiently important for someone to want to harm me.
Take away these two elements and there's no paranoia. But what is, what is, I'm the center of attention. It's a form of narcissistic supply and what is, and what is he wants to harm me. The CIA is after me.
What is this? It means I'm very important. I can be important to the CIA if I'm a nutcase, or I can be important to my neighbor, but it doesn't matter. I am not. My neighbor is sitting at night obsessed thinking how to kill my dog. I'm the center of my neighbor's universe. The focus of his thoughts.
This is classic grandiose narcissism. No wonder most narcissists are paranoid. It's just the other way that's not been recognized that most paranoids are actually narcissists.
Now the persecutory delusions, paranoia technically is called persecutory delusion because it's a delusion of persecution. Persecutory delusion lead to a behavior called hypervigilance.
Hypervigilance is when I scan the room and I say, I'm giving the most important lecture of this new century. And this guy is blowing his nose. That's an insult. He's humiliating me.
So a classic narcissist might think like this. He's scanning for disrespect, insults, attacks. So for example, you tell me good morning. What do you think? I don't know. It's evening.
This is a hypervigilant reaction and it's very often utterly ridiculous. As in this example, good evening. This guy thinks I'm too stupid to notice it's evening. Can't believe some people. I mean, horrible.
So this is paranoia, persecutory delusions and hypervigilance. You can make use of it.
You can make use of it by enhancing and not, not ameliorating, not reducing, but enhancing the narcissist's persecretary delusions and hypervigilance in various ways.
So for example, you remember the technique of deflection decoy, where both of you hate the mother-in-law. So you can use this common enemy to enhance the paranoia and to enhance the hypervigilance.
What for? The higher the paranoia, the more the hypervigilance, the more the narcissist will need you as an ally. It will create what we call in French folie a deux. So both of you will be in this paranoid persecutory delusion and you will feed it and the narcissist will get closer and closer to you.
This is very common in communities, for example, like the militias, the militias and paramilitary militias in the United States, in the Appalachian mountains and so on. It's common in some terrorist organizations. For example, we have psychological studies of the Carlos terrorist organization in the seventies and Baader Meinhof and the Red Guards in Italy.
And in all these, there were women and men in cells and they had this dynamic way.
So there are studies in Germany, Baader Meinhof. Some of the leaders were women and they used these techniques exactly to control highly narcissistic men. Same in the Manson family.
So this is the technique I recommend if your narcissist is a serial killer or terrorist. And if not, and you use this technique, he will end up as one.
Okay, guys, what's left of you? I'm open to questions.