Okay, Paschoshim, I'm using this forced timeout from my channel to discuss a series of topics which have attracted my attention over the years, but I just didn't find the time.
So today I'm going to discuss how to raise your child to be a narcissist.
Now, why would you want to do that?
Well, according to the new scientist, you should. On the 9th of July2016 BC, before Corona, new scientist, which is a relatively respectable science magazine in the United Kingdom, came out with a cover story. And the title of the cover story was "How to be a Successful Narcissist".
The article encouraged parents to teach children to be narcissists because narcissism is a positive adaptation. It helps you to succeed in life. It renders you more self efficacious.
In the hills of this venerable scientific journal, I'm here to the bridge and to the rescue to teach you how to raise your child to be a raging, flaming, malignant, winner narcissist in 20 easy steps.
My name, for those of you who don't care to know, is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and countless other books that I've written and never bothered to read. I'm also a former and current professor of psychology.
Let's delve right in, shall we?
Pathological Narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or even early adolescence.
Now, there is a study called Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACE. It lists ten ways to abuse a child. Unfortunately, it misses the mark by a wide margin. The source of abuse and trauma is immaterial. The perpetrators could be parents, teachers, other adults or peers.
But what is much more important, many behaviors which are perceived as expressions and manifestations of parental love are actually forms of abuse.
So pampering, smothering, idolizing, pedestalizing, spoiling, engulfing, enmeshing, fusing with and merging with the child, parentifying the child, instrumentalizing the child, all these are forms of abuse.
A much better definition, comprehensive and flexible, much better definition of abuse would be any breach of the child's emerging individuality and boundaries.
The child seeks to separate from his parents and then to individuate, to become an individual, anything that prevents the child from forming boundaries, anything that invades the child's internal space, anything that does not allow the child to become a person, any of these behaviors is abuse.
So what are the 20 ways, no less, which would lead your child to become a successful, well-adopted, victorious and triumphant narcissist in today's utterly sick and sickening civilization?
To raise a narcissistic child, you need to be a toxic parent. Andrei Green, the famous psychoanalystcalled it, in 1938called it, a dead mother. It's not a physically dead mother, although physical absence could lead to narcissism in your child. A dead mother is someone who is emotionally unavailable because she is selfish or narcissistic herself or because she is depressive or because she is insecure, clinging and needy or because she is manipulative, archivalian and exploitative or, or. A dead mother is a form of toxic parent.
Father similarlycan be toxic parents.
Guilt-shripping your child, jealousy, emotional blackmail, these are famous behaviors of toxic parents, but there are many other forms of misconduct which are subtle, subterranean, occult, hidden and clandestine. I can't think of any other synonyms, sorry.
Okay, what can you do? What can you do to transform your innocent, angelic, beautiful child into me?
Start by criticizing your child all the time. Never give your child any heartfelt or sincere compliment. If your child does well, tell your child, that's good, but you could do a hell of a lot better. Don't praise the child's efforts, emphasize the child's faults or underachievement. Reframe and cast your children's accomplishments as not good enough.
Donald Winnicott, the famous pediatrician turned psychologist, Donald, turned child psychologist. Donald Winnicott said that a healthy, balanced child is raised by a good enough mother.
Well, don't be a good enough mother and don't let your child thinks that he or she is good enough. It's never good enough. Always use the democles sword. Always foster the harsh inner critic in your child.
Make your child believe that he's inadequate, insufficient, a failure, a loser, ugly, stupid, etc.
In other words, generate inside your child a bad object.
I recommend that you watch my videos on the bad object and how the bad object prevents happiness in life because an unhappy child is likely to become a narcissist in a compensatory manner.
In other words, a child would attempt to compensate for his profound unhappiness, for the grief of not having become. The child would tend to compensate by becoming grandiose, a narcissist, distorting his cognition and reframing reality.
Next thing, a very close ally of constant harsh sadistic criticism is make fun of your child.
Don't have fun with your child, but humiliate your child, mock and ridicule, laugh at your child, especially in public if you can. Don't do it overtly, do it passive aggressively. Pretend that it's nothing but a joke, that it is a way, an expression of your sense of humor.
Make sure though that the child picks up the undercurrent of denigration, the assault on his self-esteem and self-confidence, the destabilizing of his sense of self-worth.
In other words, communicate with your child in a way that other people won't perceive.
Establish a communication channel with your child, which is highly private and firewall and then jab at your child. Insult your child, put your child down, use anything you can.
Your child's weight, the way he looks, the way he moves, how he puts on his socks, how he brushes his teeth, how she doesn't, is socially inept. Appearance, self-esteem, target these, especially in teenage years. You're bound to produce a wonderfulflourishing narcissist.
Make your child feel guilty. When your child screws up, when they fail, when they are defeated, they know it and it knows at them.
Children are very susceptible, insensitive and vulnerable. They know that they are not yet adequate, they are not yet accomplished, there's a way to go.
And so harp on it, amplify it, magnify it, make them feel guilty and ashamed, leverage guilt and shame. Cast the child as a total failure. Make the child responsible for your failures or for the failure of your marriage or relationship.
Heat on the child mountains and mountain ranges of shame and guilt.
Guilt-tripping your child, creating within your child a reservoir of shame is a surefire way to generate or to create a narcissist. Smother your child's emotions, don't allow your child to express what he feels. Don't let your child manifest or show what's going on inside him. Don't let your child cry, stop crying. There's no reason to cry, you crybaby.
Children's emotions are complex. They overwhelm the child. They're difficult to manage. Children need support and succor. They need to be attended to and listened to.
Instead, tell your child to bottle it up. Shame your child every time he shows emotions.
Intermittently reinforce your child, show him love, but when he tries to reciprocate, push him away.
In this way, you will teach your child to associate emotions with pain, feelings with rejection and hurt.
So the child is going to bottle up his positive emotions. He's going to lose access to themand together with his access, lost. He is going to develop an empathy deficit. He's going to lack empathy.
And that's a great definition of a narcissist.
Instrumentalize your child. You as a parent, you have broken dreams. You've always wanted to be a ballerina, a star athlete, a pianist, an authoror an actress, but you never quite made the cut.
Push your child to realize your dream. Self-actualize through your child. Live vicariously. Appropriately your child's life. Make it your own. Impose yourself, your failed fantasies on your child, rendering your childan instrument, a tool, objectifying your childand in the process, dehumanizing your child.
You can also try to parentify your child, render your child your own parent. Place, heapresponsibilities on your child. Demand that your child fulfill parental functions. Treat your child as a confidant, confiding your child.
Create coalitions with your child against your spouse. Use your child as a substitute, intimate partner. Parentify your child, thereby creating in the child a sense of addictive responsibility, people pleasing in the need to always obtain positive feedback via self-sacrifice.
The next thing you can do to render the project successful is try to dominate your child.
Whenever the child demonstrates or expresses autonomy, independence or agency, put the child down. Be quiet. Listen. If I want your opinion, I'll give it to you. You're so stupid. You don't know what you're talking about. I have much more experience than you do. I know much better. I'm superior. I'm godlike. I'm infallible. Say it often. Take away your child's rights to self-speech, self-expression, self-actualization, self-realization. Don't allow your child to become.
Whenever the child conforms, whenever he well behaves, whenever he succumbs, whenever he's obsequious, whenever he's obedient, praise the child. Positively reinforce the child's need to please you and negatively reinforce any attempt by the child to separate from you and to go her own way. Encourage submission. Discourage expression.
And never ever trust your child. Never. Never allow yourself, never allow your child to have privacy.
Insist on having access to your child's smartphone. Read your child's diary if they keep one. Follow all the texts and chats. Research their room. Find out their secrets and expose them. Don't give them any territory, any privacy, any room. Don't allow your child to have personal space and time. Invade your child. Take over your child. The hostile takeover. Penetrate every corner of your child's life. The ruse. Browse. And generally undermine your child's attempt to become a person, separate from you, an individual. The same vein.
Never let your child speak their mind. Never let your child express their thoughts. Never allow your child to ask questions freely and without fear.
Curiosity. Criticism. Disagreement. Challenges. They are forbidden in your household. Don't allow your child ever to contest what you're saying. Don't let your child talk back to you. Constantly tell them this is a forbidden topic. We don't talk about that. Teach them to hide things from you.
And then unearth and uncover and expose their behavior, their secrets. And taunt them and punish them for that. Push them away. Encourage them to create a parallel life, a hidden world. And then penalize them cruelly and harshly for having done so in the first place.
Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. Always stress your child. Always emphasize performance. Create the equivalent of a cult. Cast anything as a failure and underachievement.
Any extra curricular schedule over all activity should be jam-packed. Let your child have no leisure, no life, no friends. Put way too much pressure on your child to perform. Push the child to the point of danger and risk. Make the child want to please you at any cost, even at the cost of the child's health. Or wish to live, actually.
Always compete with your child. Is your teenage daughter prettier than you? Are you proud of that?
Wrong. Wrong. Don't be proud of her. Be jealous of her. Be envious of her. Compete with her. Try to seduce her boyfriends. Don't allow your children to overdo you. Don't let any of your children accomplish more than you had accomplished.
Even if you push your children to realize your unfulfilled dreams, it should be on your own terms and conditions.
They are nothing but extensions of you. They are nothing but instruments. They don't have a will of their own or shouldn't have a will of their own. And they should never exceed you. They should never put you to shame. They should never overshadow you. You should always be the center of attention, the life of the party.
So compete with your children. And because you are overendowed, you're likely to win.
But demonstrate to them, make clear to them that you're jealous, that you're envious. If your child shines through personality, accomplishments, appearance, don't regard this as your success. Regard it as your failure.
Still your children's thunder because you can't stand someone else being in the limelight even once in a while.
Gradually, your children will dim and diminish just in order not to incur your wrath just so that they can please you because your children do love you. Be selfish. Be selfish. Everything has to be about you. Even your child's birthday party is not about your child. It's about you. It's about your success as a parent. It's about your amazing skills as an organizer.
Don't take time for serious self-reflection instead of criticism. You're doing the right thing. You're molding and shaping your child to be a winner, to be a narcissist. Don't be humble. Don't be humble. Don't diminish yourself.
On the very contrary, magnify and amplify yourself at your child's expense so that your child can learn from the best how to be a narcissist and always of course play the victim.
This goes hand in hand with guilt-tripping, emotional blackmail and atmospheric incest. Playing the victim can take a serious toll on your child.
Children have auto-plastic defenses. Children tend to feel guilty for everything that happens around them. It's a form of magical thinking.
If you divorce your husband, if you divorce your spouse, the child is likely to assume that you're divorcing him because of something the child had done.
Children take responsibility where none belongs to them. Children feel guilty because they're the center of the world. They're a bit narcissistic to start with.
Make sure to let your child know how much you have suffered and how much you have sacrificed and what a burden the child is and how much you are at the child's mercy and the extent of your suffering. Make sure to leverage your victimhood to manipulate the child.
Be Machiavellian. Create stratagems and situations to enhance the child's guilt and shame, thereby gaining additional control incrementally until at the very end your child is nothing but your puppet.
But how do you communicate your victim? Anger. Anger. Lose your temper all the time. Convey to the child how tired and overworked you are and how unacceptable your suffering and sacrifices are brought on by the child.
So make the child responsible for your state of mind, for your emotions and for your temper tantrums. Feats of rage, especially if they're sudden and abrupt, will do the job. Scream over spilled milk. Scream over anticipated spilled milk. Scream over nothing. Make the child cower. Make him become hypervigilant. Make him walk on actions and be terrified of you. Don't be a secure base. Foster in the child an insecure attachment style, avoidant, fearful, dismissive. Pick fights with the child.
So discord. Always be toxic. In family events, in birthdays, on holidays, make sure to provoke a fight, spoil for a fight, and involve your child in your conflicts.
Of course, the best by far is to pick fights with your intimate partner or spouse and make sure the children witness these parental fights. Escalate. Every disagreement, blow it out of proportion. Make sure that the children witness yelling matches. Children are likely to believe that this is all their fault.
And the more you demonstrate to the child how discordant and dissonant your relationship is, the more the child will feel guilty and ashamed.
And the lesson would be, the lifelong lesson would be relationships, a bad relationships end in disharmony, pain, and hurt.
On the other side of the equation, until now, hitherto, I love the word, until now, I've described classic abuse. This is classic abuse terrain, criticizing beating the child up, physical breach of boundaries, sexual abuse, incest, real and ambient. These are all forms of classical abuse.
But as I said at the very beginning, when we were all much younger, there are other forms of abuse which are not perceived by the environment as abusive. These behaviors are not perceived as abusive.
On the very contrary, they are perceived as manifestations and expressions of unconditional love and yet they do constitute abuse.
For example, being overprotective. Don't allow the child to assume risks, to take on the world and to explore it. Shield your child, protect your child from everything, prevent your child from engaging in any activities, I don't know, going on trips. Instill in your child a fear of the world. Teach your child to catastrophize. Tell your child that reality is hostile and people are bad and evil and gender in your child and anxietydisorder.
And then blackmail your child because you will have become the only safe object in your child's world.
Now you can make your child do anything for you. If you love your mommy, you would do this. Do it for daddy. Use your child and use your love as a manipulative tool. Offer love in exchange for performance. Withdraw it hurtfully. Reject the child when he does not obey or doesn't obey fast enough. Don't let your child make any decisions.
On the very contrary, take over the child's decision-making process. Let yourself become the only reality testing for the child.
The child needs to interface with reality only through you.
So a properly raised child, a child who would become a narcissist, would ask you, "Mummy, is this true? Is this real?"
Because such a child will have been denied access to reality. Child will learn that they always have to do what you or other people want in order to receive love.
And always, of course, introduce competition into the scene. Not only should you compete with your own children, but you should encourage your children to compete among themselves.
In other words, you should foster sibling rivalry.
Sibling rivalry is a great tool to raise narcissists.
So have a favorite child, a golden child. Choose oneand then make sure that all the others know about it. Have a better relationship with your golden child than with any other childand sacrifice the other child's other children's interests in favor of the golden child.
Give love ostentatiously to your favorite child and deny it conspicuously to all the others. Don't love your children equally. Let them know that there's a hierarchy. Use gifts, use compliments, use comparisons. Show your preferences. An equal treatment will lead to competition between siblings and to a lack of solidarity.
And isn't this a great definition and determinant of narcissism?
And finally, neverever say you're sorry. Never apologize. Never acknowledge any mistake. You're infallible. You're godlike. Nothing is ever your fault. Never admit to having misbehaved. It's always someone else's responsibility and guilt, alloplastic defenses.
Your childsubjected to all thisis likely to become either a people pleasing, people pleasing co-dependent or a narcissist. You're likely to lose your child in both cases. They're likely to cut ties with you when they're grown up. Don't chase them. Don't attempt any further contact. Don't apologize for the way you've raised them, for you have raised them well.
Narcissists in today's pathological and pathologized society and environment, narcissists are winners. You did your best for your children by denying them mental health, by ruining their ability to bond, by confining them to a constricted life and by teaching them that competition, animosity, hostility, anger and envy are the roadblocks to success. A life lived in the glow of narcissistic supply. A false self acting as a shield to isolate the child turned out from the slings and arrows of the cruel fate of those who've turned out neurotypical and normal.
You have done your best for your child. Don't be ashamed of having turned him into a monster in a civilization that rewards monsters and raises them to the top like the scum on a sea.