Lose Your Narc Online Retreat with Mary Kane (LINKS in DESCRIPTION)

Summary

The transcript is a conversation between a woman who has been a victim of narcissistic abuse and Professor Sam Vaknin, an expert on narcissism. Vaknin discusses the nature of narcissism, its historical context, and the language he developed to describe it. He explains that narcissism is a form of self-love that is compensatory for deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and shame. Vaknin also describes the phases of a relationship with a narcissist, including love bombing, grooming, shared fantasy, and eventual devaluation and discard. He emphasizes the importance of boundaries, self-awareness, and the dangers of defining oneself as a victim. Vaknin also touches on the rise of narcissistic traits in women and the societal implications of this trend. The conversation concludes with Vaknin offering advice on how to protect oneself from narcissistic abuse and the importance of not perpetuating victimhood.

I don't even think I can begin to thank you, first of all.

Years ago, a few years ago, I'm getting a little choked up, it's just been such a journey. Like, you were the first guy I popped up on a video when someone sat me down and said, you're dealing with a narcissist. And I was like, what are you talking about? And the more she talked, I'm like, are you talking about my mother or my stepdad? I thought we were talking about a coworker.

And so I went right home from that event. I used to be a seminar manager and I was all over the country, but I happened to be here in St. Louis. So I came right home to my event, from my event, did a search, you

popped up. You talked about being the author of this book here. And here we are a few years ago.

A few years later. I can't thank you enough.

And you know, it's been a few narcissists later, and a lot of pain later. And here we are having this conversation. And I'm just so grateful. But I don't even think I can speak to all of your credentials, but I know from just following you for years, that you're an author and a professor and very well studied and the, I would say, godfather here of narcissism and helped us coin and create a language, which is so important when you're going through something to have a language to describe it. You're that guy who gave us that, that language. So thank you so much. So, but please share with us here now. Tell me more about your, your background, if you will.

Well, as you've indicated, I'm an author and professor and everything else. I've also been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

There was at a time when narcissism was utterly unknown. It was first introduced to the diagnostic and statistical manual, which is the Bible of psychiatry. It was first introduced into this revered book in 1980.

And I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in 1985. So no one knew anything about narcissism.

Narcissism has been first described by Zicon Freud. And that was like 1914, 1915, when the first, when first world war had just erupted.

So, and then there was a period of about 50 years where people like Jung and people like, uh, like Kohout and people like Kernberg and many others had studied narcissism and it was involved and it was a hot bottom topic. And then it vanished.

It simply vanished.

I would say from 1974, when Christopher Lash published the cultural narcissist, Alexander Loewen published a book about narcissism. It was, there was the end of it.

No one has heard of narcissism since it's gone AWOL.

And, uh, when I came on the scene, I was diagnosed with a disorder twice. I, I didn't have a handle. I didn't have a language to describe my inner experiences. I didn't have a language to describe the experiences of people around me.

So-called nearest and dearest and intimate. I felt that something was profoundly wrong with me. I felt that people around me are suffering with this absolutely no language.

I mean, when I say no language, I mean not a single word, that the diagnosis of, of the logical narcissism had been described clinically, but in a very dry and, and sort of academic way. So it didn't apply to daily life at all.

So what I had to do, the first thing I had to do in 1995, that's when, when most of the current experts and, and coaches and so on were teenagers.

So in 1995, the first thing I had to do was to invent a language. So I coined narcissistic abuse. I coined cerebral narcissism, somatic narcissism, devalue and discard. And, and many other, most, most other terms that you've heard of, hovering, flying monkeys, et cetera, et cetera.

I then borrowed terms from psychoanalysis and from other fields, like psychology, anthropology, sociology, and so on. I borrowed terms like gaslighting, like narcissistic supply.

And I had, I adopted them. I adopted them to reflect the new realities.

So the current usage of these terms is more or less mine, what I, what I had contributed. And that was a language.

Now the minute there's a language, consciousness crystallizes. Suddenly your experiences make sense. Language, language structures the mind, not the other way around. Language is a tool with which you shake people, with which you give them experience.

If in the absence of meaning, there's no experience. Experience has to contain an element of meaning. And language is the tool through which we convey meaning.

So the minute there was a language, suddenly there was an eruption. At the time, I maintained the only website on narcissism and the only six support groups for narcissism, for victims of narcissism. And there was no internet then. And yet I had 250,000 members.

So you can imagine, you can imagine the pent up pain and hurt and fears and trauma-borne data. Everything was pent up. Everything was, and there was no release.

And suddenly there was a name for it. There was a release. Of course it was an irony of history that the narcissists had to do this.

I mean, but that's how it all, it all started. And then 10 years later, the second website opened and then there was another launch, you know. So wow.

I mean, I'm thinking about or imagining that you're managing 250,000 people basically. How was that for you?

Frankly, it's more or less like an SS officer would manage a support group for Holocaust victims, more or less. It was poignant. There was something there which at once was abnormal or unnatural.

And on the other hand, these mostly women, about 80% of them were women. They finally could have put a face to the abuse they had suffered. And that face was mine.

So I suffered greatly. I became the blank screen upon which they projected their anger and rage and wrath and aggression and fear and hate and hurt and pain and agony. And I had to absorb these toxic emanations from the victims. And I've done that for 10 years single-handedly.

There's nobody else there to help me. So I wasn't a friend of these women in these support groups. I was the enemy, definitely. I was demonized. I was castigated. I was hated even as these women were using my language to describe me, consuming the services I had to offer, always free of charge. I've never charged for my services.

Till this very day, I provide everything 80%, 90% free of charge. So even when they were on my platform, my guests basically, they felt they were justified in seeking retribution upon this symbol of narcissism, this reification of narcissism in the form of poor me.

But okay, victim stands aside. I learned a lot from the victims and from the survivors.

These interactions had taught me a lot about narcissistic dynamics and so on. I was able to develop my work.

Similarly, I'm working now mostly with borderlines, by the way. I've transitioned to borderline. So I'm working mostly with borderlines and making headway and understanding borderline in a similar way.

It is one of the hugest mistakes of the psychological profession, that being arrogant and vinglorious as they are, and they mostly are, they refuse to talk to people online. They refuse to participate or monitor support groups and forums.

The psychologist thinks they have nothing to learn from laymen and from victims and from survivors.

There is this academic ivory tower where they cower and avoid the real world.

I've never been that academic. I've always dealt head in and learned a lot.

I have a couple of questions.

One, I think it's fair to say that most people would say that, well, I'll say it this way. If I say to myself, ooh, am I the narcissist? Someone who knows a lot about narcissism would say, oh, you couldn't be. You would never ask yourself that question. You're too self-reflective. You had to ask yourself that question at some point, and you were diagnosed, and you seem to be reflecting on lots of things in your own experience.

How is it that you as a narcissist went from that point, point A to point B there? How is that?

The online world, especially YouTube, is a cesspool of myths, nonsensical assertions and claims, idiotic misinformationand so on and so forth.

I would say that anywhere between 90 and 95% of all the so-called information available is utter rubbish.

One of the myths, for example, is that narcissists, the grandiosity of narcissists is about being the best or the most perfect. It's absolutely manifestly untrue.

Another myth is that narcissists are not self-aware. That is equally untrue. The vast majority of narcissists are self-aware. Many of them would self-label as narcissists.

The difference is that they're proud of it. They're emotionally invested in their narcissism. They do not regard it as a maladaptation, a dysfunction, a scourge, a social problem, an individual problem. They regard the narcissism as the next step in evolution, as a competitive edge or advantage, as something that endows them with superiority.

So they're emotionally invested in their narcissism. They would say, for example, I'm abrasive, but I get things done, or I always pick my mind, or it's my way or the highway, so they're defiant. They're contumacious. In other words, they reject authority. They are impulsive. They are reckless if they're on the psychopathic end of the spectrum, but they're always proud. That's the main issue in trying to treat narcissists.

They don't see where the problem is. Even when they're fully aware of everything they are and everything they had done and every wrong they had committed in the eyes of others, they would tend to devalue the others. They would tend to say, you think I did wrong, but you're an idiot. They would tend to devalue you. Who are you to say I did wrong? You're far inferior to me, intellectually, otherwise.

So aggrandizement, grandiose defenses, and other defenses, which we're not going to right now, cognitive biases and impaired reality testing, there are numerous problems associated with narcissism.

They prevent the narcissist, not from realizing that he's a narcissist, but from realizing that it is a problem.

Do you think their response is fueled by shame?

Masterson and others had suggested long ago in the 80s that narcissism is a compensatory reaction. And there are two types of compensatory reactions.

The reactions, one is compensation for a deep held feeling of shame and inadequacy. And the other is compensation for what Adler called an inferiority complex.

The most recent cutting edge research in narcissism tends to show that real narcissists are compensatory. And narcissists who are not compensatory, they're actually not narcissists, they're variants of psychopaths.

So we have made a god-awful mess confounding and conflicting all these subtypes.

As Millon said, and others, Millon, Theodore Millon, one of great minds in personality theory and personality disorders, many others, as they have insisted all along, narcissism must be compensatory.

But there's a compensatory element. The narcissist aggrandizes himself and creates a fallacious and delusional, inflated, fantastic self-image and self-reception because he feels that he is lacking. He is inadequate. He had been told, he had been, it's been inculcated in him. He had been indoctrinated to believe that he is bad. That he is worthless. He had received conditional love, which meant if you don't perform, you're not lovable. To be loved, you need to perform.

So the narcissist had learned to perform.

The narcissist is an absence staging a theater performance. It's not a presence. There's nobody there. There's no existence. It's what is called in psychology, eschizoid, empty core. Or as Kernberg called it, the big emptiness. There's an emptiness. There's a void. There's deep space, howling deep space. There is a black hole in the core, like in our galaxy. There's a black core, and this black core is staging constant theater performances, which are essentially intended to manipulate the environment into negating the black hole. But it never works, because whatever the environment provides is consumed by this black hole.

I think your end of the conversation had been cut off. I hope we don't go offline. I hope we don't go offline. So much for Zoom as a replacement to face-to-face contact.

There you are. Hi. Hi, you're back.

I'm back.

I want to do it negating.

Yeah, negating the black hole. But it's hopeless, because the black hole consumes everything that comes from the outside and leaves no trace of it. So there needs to be, can I interrupt?

I didn't know if you resumed recording or not.

Yes, I'm recording.

Okay, great.

So it's an endless quest. It's futile. It's a futile quest, because it can never be slaked, or sated, or satisfied. It's a sempiternal, perpetual, perpetual mobility, in effect.

The narcissist needs to pursue narcissistic supply, and in some cases, sadistic supply.

So as to somehow balance, counterbalance, negate the black hole inside him. But it never works. It never works. And he is on this quest to the very day he dies.

Well, that's sad.

You know, I wonder. I know that narcissists attract good people, you know, like me, like I'm a good person. I'm very competent. I'm a caregiver kind of person, you know, I'm a leader. I have something that other people want. People want to follow me kind of person.

And, but down to earth and all that. But I have kids, I have grandkids, I have businesses, I have a lot of fun energy. And I'm also deep, like, I'm that person that the narcissist attracts.

And so what does a person like me do, who that my inclination is to love people, you know, and you want to love this person, you know, because they love Bob June, you think this whole thing's real. And then they go away. And I'm like, there's still prey for them. I don't even know. They're such an asshole. They are so horrible. And I want to hurt them so bad.

Where, you know, there's all these roller coaster emotions to navigate and to reconcile. And, and like, how do I get back to my true self, my true self would never think that about that person, you know, and then when you start watching more videos, and reading more books, you find out, oh, this person had a horrible childhood, too. You know, we just ended up on the opposite ends of the spectrum of the stick. That was possible. And they went that way. I went this way. Glad I went this way, because I don't want to be an empty shell of a person.

But anyway, I just don't know how to reconcile that. And, and I'm, I'm now coaching some people and just trying to love them up and get their energy and their thoughts and give them a new language to move towards instead of, you know, so stuck in where they've been. And I love, I've done that for years and lots of other arenas. So it's just my nature to do that.

But I see that they want to love, you know, they want to love people. And this is such a what's the word dissonant situation, like, it just doesn't, it cannot fit into who they are at all.

So they try to make sense of it anyway, and try to make sense of themselves, like, who am I in this? And how do I continue to, to be this nice loving person?

Like, let's start by setting the record straight on a few of the things you've said.

Narcissists are not attracted to any specific type. They are attracted to anyone who provides them with supply.

Actually, narcissists end up very frequently with psychopaths. Narcissists end up with covert narcissists, which is even a more pernicious variant of narcissism. Narcissists end up with borderlines very frequently, very often. There's a whole discipline of borderline narcissistic couples, which was invented by or conjured up by my good friend, John LaCharchen.

So narcissists end up with other mentally disordered or personality disordered people as frequently as they end up with co-dependence, or so they don't select for type.

That is completely not true. If you give them supply services and sex, I call this the three S's. Three S's, yeah. If you provide them with sex supply and services, the supply could be sadistic or narcissistic. If you provide them with what I call the E2A, E2A is exclusivity, availability, and adulation. If you provide them with these things, they don't care if you're a psychopath, if you're a co-dependent, if you're another narcissist, if you're covert narcissist, or actually the most frequent combination is a borderline.

So in a borderline today, we are reconceiving of borderline as a form of psychopathy, actually. So dysregulated, emotionally dysregulated psychopathy, known as factor two psychopathy. So not nice people.

Narcissists are attracted to not nice people, absolutely. And statistically, I would say, I would say the statistically narcissists are mostly attracted to not nice people.

But there is, of course, there are, of course, nice people who get caught in the web of narcissists.

And Ross Rosenberg had observed that these people, what these people have in common is a deficit of self-love. And so this is a narcissist power over you or over people like you. There's a deficit of self-love.

And what the narcissist is offering you is not to love a person, but to love yourself. There's no person there. There's nobody there. It's an emptiness. It's an empty schizoid core. It's a black hole. There's no one there.

So what the narcissist does, he lures you into a hole of mirrors. He idealizes you. And then when you are in the hole of mirrors, you see your idealized version reflected in all these mirrors. And it's irresistible. It's irresistible because for the first time in your life, you feel that you are lovable. Because you are idealized in this hole of mirrors, you're flawless. You're good. You're perfect. You're amazing. You're super intelligent. You are drop dead gorgeous in this hole of mirrors.

So you fall in love with yourself.

For many of the victims of narcissists, the first ever time they had experienced self-love was with the narcissist. They could love themselves. They could love themselves through the eyes of the narcissist. They loved the version of themselves, which was preferred by the narcissist.

This is the love bombing phase and the grooming phase. It's when the narcissist tells you, you didn't love yourself hitherto. It's because you don't know yourself. You're actually stunning. You're actually amazing. You're actually unique. And then you begin to believe him.

And you say, well, if I'm all that, I am worthy of love. Let me love myself finally through his eyes.

This is what makes it almost impossible to break up with a narcissist.

Because you're not in love with a narcissist ever. You're in love with yourself through the eyes of the narcissist.

And how does one break up with oneself?

It's difficult to break up with you.

So the narcissist captures you, renders you a hostage, traps you in his spider web in his all of mirrors, because he allows you to relate to a version of you, which you would have liked to be. He realizes your fantasies and your hidden dreams for you. He's a dream machine. He's a kind of device that allows you to inhabit a dreamscape. And this is called, in technical terms, clinical terms, it's called the shared fantasy.

You enter the shared fantasy. It's almost impossible to exit, almost impossible to exit, because to exit, you need to give up on this new image of yourself. You need to go back to being dreary, pedestrian, mundane, not so beautiful, not such a clever person, not amazing, not stunning, not fascinating. And above all, not loved, not lovable. And who wants to be a part of that?

And who wants that? When there is an alternative offered freely by the narcissist?

A lot more fun over there.

A lot more fun over there. Absolutely. It's Nickelodeon, you know, it's a lot more fun.

So this is the source of the power of the narcissist. The narcissist love bombs you in groups, and then he takes it away, gives you a taste of it, and then he takes it away. And you know, he has a monopoly. He's the only supplier in town. He is the sole manufacturing facility.

It's a little like Pfizer with the vaccine. So there's only two or three guys who produce vaccines. That's it. You got to play by their rules. He's the only one who produces this sensation in you. And now you've got to play by his rules. And these rules become more and more onerous. As he tests you, he has his own dynamics, of course. As he tests you, as he pushes the envelope, as he tries to transform you into a bad per secretary object, as he pushes you to misbehave, projective identification, there are other dynamics at play. And you're always threatened with the withholding of this perfect, fantastic environment that he had created you to start.

So very few people can resist this. It's a cult. Technically, it's a cult. You've become a member of a cult.

And so you need to be deprogrammed. Sure.

So I've worked in the deaf industry, like in cemeteries, and I'm ordained minister, and I've seen, I've been to lots of funerals. And I have noticed, and I have preached this really, that when someone dies, we do miss them, right? But I've always felt that you miss who you get to be with that person.

And that's where the heaviest part of the grief is.

And so it wasn't until, so I had a loved one hovered by a narcissist. That was my latest situation in the past couple of years. And I loved who I got to be with that person. And I did feel loved. And I did feel that I learned about self-love through that relationship. And I was already on my way there. I've had years of therapy and I surrounded myself in the seminar industry with people that were highly developed and really committed to bettering themselves. And they were in therapy or they had coaches. I'm in that culture all the time. So I was already kind of on my way, but this relationship really led it blossom. But when it got taken away, I was completely grief-stricken, completely grief-stricken. And it wasn't until that thought came back to me as a professional, like, oh, I'm just missing who I used to be. You're grieving for yourself.

You're mourning yourself. I'm mourning myself.

And so I had to step on a different path of like, how do I still find these parts of myself anyway? And how do I love myself anyway? And I was in a triangulating gross phone call with these characters last year. And they were just lashing out. And I remained centered in that conversation and just said, I have to thank you. I now love myself. I have to thank you.

And that was a big one. I'm 51. And that's a long time coming to be able to say to an abusive person, thank you for giving me this opportunity.

So just a second. Don't worry.

You said you're a minister.

Yeah. So who's the second? You asked me why narcissism is addictive. Actually, what you were asking is why narcissism is addictive to the victim. It's addictive to the victim, first of all, because it's the first experience of self-love. And it's overwhelming. And it's new. And it's hard to give up on.

But there's a second reason.

The second reason is narcissism is a religion. And like all religion, it has explanatory power. It imbues the world with meaning. And it provides prescriptive guidelines, how to behave, what to do and what not to do, proscriptive guidelines. It's a total religion.

I'll try to explain this in a few minutes, if you would like me to.

When the narcissist, as a child, the narcissist invents a God, a divine figure. That God or divine figure is the false self. The false self is omnipotent or powerful. The false self is omniscient or knowing. The false self is perfect. The false self is God.

The child unbeknownst to the child, because the child is four years old, five years old, unbeknownst to the child, the child comes up with a private religion.

This private religion has a divinity, which is the false self.

And like all ancient pagan religions, this divinity demands a human sacrifice. And so the child has no access to other humans. He has access only to himself.

So the child sacrifices himself to this Moloch, to this divinity. He kills, the child kills his true self.

At that moment, a religion, paganistic, ritualistic, animistic, old, ancient type religion, pre-monotheistic religion, private religion had been created, where there is a divinity, which is the false self, and a single adherent or single worshipper, which is the narcissist, the narcissistic child.

And the human sacrifice is the true self. From that moment, the narcissist becomes a missionary, exactly like missionaries in Catholicism or Protestant missionaries, he becomes a missionary. He's trying to convert everyone around him into his private religion. He wants you to tell him that he is perfect, that he is omniscient, that he is omnipotent. He wants you to believe in his God.

He's a missionary on a mission, and he's trying to convert the heathen, the natives into his religion.

And like all missionaries, he's very zealous. He's very committed. He is one-track-minded, and he becomes aggressive if you kind of flout the dogma.

So he's, and this is the religious essence of narcissism.

And so when you enter the narcissist's unbeaten orbit, you convert into his religion. You become the second worshiper, the second adherent.

It is very difficult to give up on religion.

One of the most difficult things, to give up on religion.

And when you leave the narcissist or break up with the narcissist, or he discards you and devalues you and so on, you are cast out. You're cast into the outer darkness. You are expelled. You're excommunicated.

Like in Catholicism, you're excommunicated. You're thrown out of the church. You ostracize the church of the narcissist. You no longer have access to his divine nature and divinity.

And so you're out there in the cold, and you have lost, you have lost your self-love, you've lost your lover, and you've lost your religion.

So this is another reason that narcissism is very addictive. It's a cult. It's a religious cult, a one-man cult, but it's still a religious cult, all the whole world.

I see how that can work out.

You know, it's interesting, just going back to my own youth. I was raised in Catholicism, and I was the kid who always asked a lot of questions about everything about religion. And I would say it really loud to get smacked in church, you know, by my great aunt, who was a nun, who I loved and adored, but I still had questions. And so luckily I am the person I am, you know, like I don't think I would have survived what had just happened.

I've been through numerous narcissists, work, co-workers, parents, boyfriends, but this last situation was the worst, and it's ongoing. And I don't think I would have survived it if I was attached to religion or wasn't the questioning person that I am.

So thank God for that, or thank the nearest deity, whichever one is closest I'll take.

But either way, so hey, I think we jumped into some really heavy stuff, and I love it.

I want to talk about some more practical things, though.

I think the folks who are going to really be jumping onto this video, may not know some things about just basic terms, you know, which some of which you've already mentioned.

So if we could go back, and then I also want to talk about something I think you said, that thoughts and words are like dynamite. Does that sound familiar?

I may have said it, I talk a lot, I can't remember everything.

It might have been in one of your comedy skits, right?

But you said thoughts and words are like dynamite and should be handled carefully with wisdom and understanding.

And another statement, the same recording I heard, narcissism gives us information we need to know. And I think it's a long line to what you were just talking about, that self-love and reflecting some things.

I think it's so predictable. I can predict what the next step of these people are typically.

Truer, they're rigid. They're rigid.

So I teach a little module and have in the seminar industry for years on momentum. And when I heard you say about thoughts and words are like dynamite and they should be handled carefully, I thought, that's a great formula.

Your thoughts plus your words, plus your actions, plus your beliefs, plus your feelings equal your results. And your results can either equal one of three things, your momentum towards what you want, or chaos, or somewhere in the middle where it's just rigidity, like you just mentioned, rigidity.

So I wondered if you could speak to that.

I feel like, man, I have a lot of thoughts going on just from what you just said.

I feel like a narcissist takes you away from yourself, from any momentum that you have in your own life. And they use all these tactics that we're going to talk about here in a second.

And what I'm teaching my new friends that I'm helping out is this formula.

But it requires that you sit with what do you actually want? What is your philosophy? What on how you should be treated and who you are? And what is your why for your life? Like what's your vision for your life?

If you don't sit with that, someone can take you all over the place. A narcissist in particular, they can grab you and throw you all over the place and take you away from the light in your life.

You touched on a core issue known as identity disturbance in clinical terms.

Many of the people who end up with narcissists don't have a stable core identity. They don't have an inner shining guiding light. They're in flux. They're in constant transition. They never arrive. They change beliefs and values and wishes and preferences and priorities and likes and dislikes and friends and locations. And I mean, they change them like you and I change socks. And many of these are mutually exclusive. Like today they can be vegetarian. Tomorrow they are meat eaters. The next day they are. So there's no stability, no core identity. And this is called identity disturbance.

The narcissist leverages this, takes advantage of this. The narcissist offers you a pheustian deal, a deal with the devil. He says, listen, suspend your own life. Anyhow, your life sucks. Your life is boring. Your life is dreary. Your life is getting you nowhere.

Your life, there's no inner stability in you. There's no you, no core. You're constantly flowing like a river, you know, pantave, everything flows.

And so narcissist, why don't you get rid of this? It's not working for you. Why did you suspend your own life? Why don't you live my life? Come and live my life.

Because my life is exciting. My life is amazing. My life is going somewhere.

I do have a core. I'm stable and strong. I'm strong enough for both of us. I can carry you on my back. You won't feel the road and the bumps and everything. I'm your shock absorber. You know, I'm going to take you to the rainbow. And in the process on the way, you're going to get to know yourself the way I see you. And then you're going to really love yourself. I really like yourself.

So that's an added bonus. And all you have to do is believe in me, unreservedly. Suspend your critical, critical judgment. Suspend your skepticism. Suspend yourself, actually, totally. And open yourself up like a field of potentials, like a space. And let me feel you in. Let me penetrate you in every possible way. And let me inhabit you.

And so narcissism, pathological narcissism, is body snatching. It's a viral load. It's a virus. It's a viral load. It takes over, takes over your mind. It takes over your body.

And like the matrix makes you believe that you are in a given reality, which is magnificent and wonderful and fantastic, and you would never give it up and so on. But it's not real. It's a simulation.

But some people don't have self-love. And some people, most people, their lives really suck. The world is really ugly. The world is ugly and bad and evil and not a good place to be in nowadays.

This potentially is the second worst period in history, if not the first.

There's a debate. People don't want to live in reality. They do drugs. They drink. They engage in promiscuous sex. They don't want to do reality anymore. Reality is passe. It's gone. It's yesterday's newspaper.

So here's a narcissist, and he has the perfect solution. This is forget reality. It's overrated. I'm going to give you a fantasy, and I'm a great fantasy master.

And who would say no to this perpetual state of dream?

The narcissist is a matrix.

So this is where it all comes from.

So you have this body-snatching situation happen, and then you start experiencing some odd things.

You know, you have the love bombing situation first and the shared fantasies. And then let's talk about what happens next.

Like there's gaslighting, then there's discard, and there's triangulation, and then flying monkeys. And tell me more about how that happens.

How does the person who's been body-snatched start receiving all that?

So we should distinguish between the phases of the shared fantasy, as they were described first in 1989 by Sander, sort of my invention. So we should distinguish between the phases of the shared fantasy and the techniques, because you kind of mix the two in your questions.

So your question. Techniques are used all the time. Triangulation is a technique. Gaslighting is a technique. Gaslighting is when the narcissist causes you to doubt your own perception of reality. Triangulation is when the narcissist introduces third parties into the relationship in order to get a rise out of you, an emotional rise out of you, jealousy, whatever it is, and to manipulate you, consequently. These are techniques, and there are numerous such techniques. Sure. And they're used throughout the shared fantasy. They are not limited to one period or one.

And then there are the phases of the shared fantasy. And phases are predictable, rigid, immutable, invariable. They're always the same. It starts with love bombing. Then there is a phase after the love bombing where he prepares the ground. He actually creates your idealized version. And by idealizing you, he idealizes himself. If you are ideal, if you are drop dead gorgeous, or if you are super intelligent, and you belong to the narcissist, then the narcissist owns something which is super intelligent and drop dead gorgeous. So that says something about him. So he aggrandizes himself by aggrandizing you.

And this process is called co-idealization.

So love bombing goes hand in hand with co-idealization. When the narcissist love bombs you, tells you how out of this world you are, how unique, how amazing it's on, he's actually talking about himself, not about you. He's saying, wow, look what a person I possess. It's like bragging that you own a shiny new car, sports car.

So it's co-idealization.

The second stage is grooming, where the narcissist delves down into practicalities. He's shaping your behavior.

So first, the love bombing, he shapes your self-view, the way you perceive yourself, your self-image and self-perception. He causes you to believe in your own idealization.

The second phase is grooming, where he begins to impact your behaviors. He's using a variety of techniques, for example, intermittent reinforcement, which is withholding love and giving love and then withholding affection and giving affection, etc. It's called intermittent reinforcement.

Holy, bullying, extortion, emotional extortion. There's a variety of techniques and he grooms you. He alters your behavior at first imperceptibly and then very perceptibly. He alters your behavior so that the behavior can support the shared fantasy. Then you move into the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is a fantastic space with a fantastic narrative, unrealistic narrative about who you are, who the narcissist is, and who you are together. You are this couple, we against the world. So that would be a paranoid shared fantasy. Or we have the biggest love story ever. That would be a romantic shared fantasy.

There are various types of shared fantasy. So you enter the shared fantasy, you comply with the behavioral edicts and behavioral dictates of the narcissist and you enter the shared fantasy. At that stage, when you enter the shared fantasy, the narcissist begins to abuse you. He begins to abuse you egregiously, radically. He begins to undermine everything that he had done in the love bombing phase. He begins to hurt you and humiliate you and shame you and destroy you brick by brick.

Why?

Because he's testing you. He's testing you and he's converting you into a bad per secretary object. So he's testing you to see if you could serve essentially as his mother, as a maternal figure. He wants to see whether you will love him unconditionally. Never mind what he does to you. Would you still love him?

So he escalates. He pushes the envelope. He goes outside the box.

The abuse becomes extreme and abuse itself becomes fantastic. Fantasmagoria.

And this is all a test. If you do not fail this test, you qualify to be his new mother because you love him despite his abuse. You love him unconditionally. The abuse is another role.

And the second role is to convert you into a bad object. The narcissist needs to believe that you are a bad per secretary and a potential enemy.

Why?

Because when the narcissist first meets you, the first encounter, the narcissist takes a photograph of you, a mind photograph of you. It's called snapshotting.

So he takes a snapshot of you. He internalizes the snapshot and he idealizes the snapshot. He continues to interact with the snapshot.

But if the snapshot is all good, if the snapshot is idealized, what to do with the bad parts? The snapshot can be only good, never bad. What to do with the bad parts? The bad parts belong to you.

So he needs to foist. He needs to attribute the bad parts to you. He needs to convert you into a bad object.

And the reason he needs to do this is because inevitably you diverge from the snapshot. You have a life of your own. You make independent choices. You grow. You study. You make new people. You travel. You diverge from the snapshot. The snapshot is static. You're dynamic.

So he needs to abuse you so that he can think badly of you in preparation for the next phase.

The next phase involves devaluation and ultimately discard.

But it crucially depends on your reaction. If you bargain with a narcissist, if you begin to complain, if you make demands, if you insist on commitment and investment and honesty, if you doubt him, if you criticize him, if you disagree with him, he's going to devalue and discard you.

But to devalue you and then to discard you, he first needs to prepare the ground. He needs to think of you as a bad per secretary object, an enemy.

So he does that in the previous stage.

Another stage is set. It's all ready for the final scene, final act.

If you negotiate, if you bargain, if you complain, if you disagree, if you criticize, you're dead meat. You're gun. You're abused, discarded, devalued.

That's another type of narcissistic abuse. And you're gun. He pushes you away. He might even push you to cheat on him.

He uses a technique called projective identification. Projective identification, he pushes you to become bad, to become abusive, to be a cheater, to do bad things to him, to betray him, etc.

So he wants you, he wants to push you away.

This is if you bargain, but some women, a small minority, they don't bargain. They don't bargain. They accept. They submit. They suspend their existence. They gradually vanish.

And these women, the narcissist keeps around. He does not actually devalue and discard them.

You can find narcissists who had been married for 30 years and 20 years. They are married to this kind of women, women who never reached the bargaining phase because they're too insecure. They're too codependent. They lack self-love to an extreme degree. They're borderline. I mean, and they never reached the bargaining phase.

So he keeps them around and he keeps the shared fantasy around them. And he can go on forever, simply forever, until the woman is so depleted that she develops psychosomatic disorders or body dysfunctions. I mean, problems with her health, health, illness, and she can die, literally die by digesting and assimilating the toxicity, the constant toxicity of the narcissist because the abuse never stops.

The narcissist needs to test you daily, hourly, needs to make sure daily and hourly that you will never abandon him, that you're a good maternal figure, that you will love him unconditionally, that he can do to you anything he wants, that you are an extension of him, that you are a possession of him.

He needs to abuse you to verify all this. It never stops. If you don't push back, if you don't bargain, you're simply absorbing the toxicity, the poison, the venom, and you finally die, literally.

So these are the two possible outcomes. And this is where the shared fantasy ends.

And the narcissist begins the cycle again.

A tiny minority of intimate partners, women, mostly, they cause the narcissist something called mortification, narcissistic mortification. It's when they shame the narcissist in public, in front of people he values or people he needs.

So the three elements must exist. Shaming the narcissist in public, in front of peers, or people whose opinions he values, or people he needs for something.

This leads to a process called narcissistic mortification. The false self is disabled. The false self is inactivated.

And the narcissist experiences all the primordial shame and pain and hurt from his childhood. And he almost dies. So then the narcissist will avoid this woman as the plague. He would never come near her again.

But only a very tiny minority of women do this. Very tiny minority.

I might have done that.

It's a very easy way to get rid of a narcissist forever.

He will never hoover you. He will never, ever hoover you after mortification.

You select the situation and shame him publicly.

I've never met this narcissist, but they've wreaked havoc on my life. But I turned this narcissist in for abuse in a couple of different public arenas. She's never going to be my friend. Good. I feel really terrible about it.

But still, I had to go through a lot to be that person. Like, whoa, I guess you don't turn in a narcissist for anything. I learned that lesson.

So I am committed to, I will not tolerate observing abuse or hearing about abuse. And I'm actually a mandated reporter. And so I'm mandated to report that stuff.

So don't want me to know about it. Don't tell me.

So anyway, let's talk about, so if you went through those phases, then what happens?

Then you're gone from his life. If you ended just with the value and discard without modification, usually, but not necessarily, not always, but usually, very usually, at some point, could be years later, the narcissist will try to hoover you.

That's, again, a word I coined over it. And it's simply an attempt to bring you back into a new shared fantasy, to re-idealize you, re-idealize you and bring you back into a new shared fantasy.

And the same process starts from zero.

And now the thing is that the narcissist, remember that the narcissist takes a snapshot of you. And the snapshot is static. It's in his mind.

So even if he were to try to hoover you 10 years from now, in his mind, you are unchanged. Because he's not interacting with you. He's interacting with your snapshot, which never changes.

So if he comes back to you 10 years later, and you tell him, sorry, I have a boyfriend. He is shocked if he's betrayed.

Like what?

Or I don't live anymore. I don't live anymore in the same place. I've moved away to the West coast, you know. And he would be like, what? Because in his mind, you're frozen in time. You're frozen artifact. And you have no life of your own in his absence. He is your life. He's your life giver. And when he withdraws himself, he had withdrawn your life support system. You're like in a state of eternal vegetative state, coma. And it is a narcissist who wakes you up with this kiss, like your famous story. You're the princess, he wakes you up with this kiss.

And in between these kisses, you're asleep, sleeping beauty. That's how he sees it.

Narcissists generally have extreme difficulty telling apart external objects from internal objects. They internalize external objects. They take snapshots and they internalize these snapshots.

The clinical term for these snapshots is internal objects or introjects. So he internalizes these snapshots. And he lives inside his mind. He inhabits his mind.

He's like a ghost inside the machine. He's inside his mind.

And he's interacting with all these internal objects. He is having dialogues with them. He is having arguments with them. He is making peace with them. He's making love to them.

And he's totally inside his mind.

And so you have no independent existence outside his mind. He confuses external and internal.

We have one more condition where there is a confusion between external and internal. And it's known as psychosis.

Someone with psychotic disorder confuses internal and external.

The narcissist is the same. And that is why Otto Kernberg in 1975 suggested that narcissists and borderlines are actually forms of psychotic disorders, the forms of psychosis.

Because the boundary between out there and in here is exceedingly blurred. And the narcissist has severe difficulty to tell reality apart from fantasy.

And he has what we call impaired reality testing. His reality test is shotgun. You become a figment. He converts you into a figment, an artifact in a narrative. And because you're embedded in the narrative, and the narrative is starting by definition, when you write a script, the movie script is starting. When you shoot a movie, the movie is a finished product. The movie doesn't evolve on itself afterwards. You're a character in the movie. Wouldn't it be shocking if you opened Netflix and one of the characters would come out of the screen and talk to you? You expect the characters to be fixed every time you watch the same movie. They do the same things.

The narcissist's shared fantasy is a movie. Every time he watches the same movie with you, he expects you to be the same character, to act the same, and never to step out of the screen and terrify the bejesus of them.

Okay.

That would scare me.

Well, I have to ask, earlier you said that narcissism is a religion, right? And it feels like as the person who's been victimized and had to deal with narcissism repeatedly, that the study, like just to get the language around it that you've provided, right? Like it's so important, but the study of it, it feels like I'm in a religion to have to study it. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And so, however, and it's ongoing. I've been in the chat rooms. In fact, I started, anything I'm doing right now, I started because I saw these chat rooms as being very toxic and missing some things like, hey, what's your philosophy on how you should be treated?

You know? And I come from the self-development world, right? So I felt really out of place, but I also, I observed and was like, ooh, this is dark. This is awful. So I went away from it.

And I'm just peeking back in to like interject some things and hopefully make some change there.

But finding your videos and getting that language around things.

And then, so I started off by telling you, someone sat me down to say, hey, you're dealing with a narcissist. That was a co-worker. And I had invited him to live in my home as he got on his feet. He had a bedroom at my house.

I got him the job that he got. I got him on the best team, which is my team. And he was a great part of the team. And I missed one event and my team was destroyed. And I was here in St. Louis. The team was in California and we were on separate events and I was the manager. And now someone else is managing and he just destroyed the team.

All right. And then I learned about narcissism that weekend. And I go watch your videos and I start studying it. I start making it my religion now, right? And feeling like I'm getting a new degree in psychology.

But I'd say many months later, I end up in California on a big boat at an event with him. And we're not really working together. It's a huge event.

But there was some passing. And anytime we would pass, he would try to like get eye contact with me and lower his voice a little bit and try to lure me into this conversation to get a little closer to him and apologize for his behavior.

And all this stuff. And because I had some education now and a language, I knew that motherfucker's trying to hoover me. Fuck you. If I didn't have that knowledge, I would have been like, oh, he's being so nice. Oh, I should forgive him. And I was like, I can forgive you from way over there. I don't need to be in your vicinity.

But I think the language and knowledge is so important. And some people say, knowledge is power. And I'm like, no, knowledge is everything. Like you need to know what you're dealing with.

And you said something earlier about giving language to this. And so I'm gluten intolerant. And if I have celiac disease, and if I have gluten, all kinds of hell breaks loose. And if I have stress on top of that, more hell breaks loose.

So before I had a language for that, I would just feel like I was never going to return to normal.

And I can compare this to that now.

And now, like if I have gluten, I had gluten recently. And so probably five or six weeks ago, and it takes about four to six weeks to feel better. And it takes about four to six weeks to feel better.

So I'm just like going, okay, I can look this guy in the eye now before I'm like looking all over. I can't really even read, you know, so like to try to read your book was like really difficult until that cleared up.

But the minute I realized and it might take me a couple weeks to realize I've had gluten. But the minute I realize it, okay, I have a plan for this.

Like, I have tools in place.

I would like to comment on what you had said.

I have two problems with the chats, forums, support groups, online self-styled experts, coaches, and so on and so forth, including self-styled experts with academic degrees who capitalize immorally on this phenomenon, in my view, sacrifice their integrity. Definitely their professional integrity is their academics.

And the whole thing is an abomination, in my view.

Here's the two problems, here are the two problems, I think, in this whole online community, which ironically, I probably launched many, many decades ago. But here are the two problems.

Problem number one, when you cast yourself as victim, and that becomes your identity, you're not in the position to introspect. You're not in the position to ask yourself, what had been my contribution to all this? Why did what did I do wrong? Where did I go wrong? What should I avoid next time around?

You're not in the position to derive life lessons and to consider the possibility, at least, that you may have had a hand in your predicament.

So many victims enter, majority of victims online, enter this defensive stance.

I'm an angel. Nothing's wrong with me. I'm blameless and flawless. I've been targeted. It was a force of nature. The Gnosis was a force of nature. Gnosis is a demon. I've been possessed.

I mean, it's like this. I'm flawless. I'm blemishless. I'm like, and they get very, very aggressive when you try to tell them, listen, maybe you should think, what did you do wrong? Or I mean, I did nothing wrong. I was just there. And they become very defensive and aggressive and, and they become abusive, actually. They become abusive. They become narcissistic, ironically.

And so this is problem number one.

And many of them are aggrandizing and glamorizing the victim status. They invent idiotic labels like empaths and super-empaths. They make victimhood a badge of honor, a reason to live for, an identity.

So this is identity politics, in effect. It's very bad.

Perpetuating your victimhood is the safest way to be a victim again.

That's the first problem.

And, and, sothis is an issue that I have with victims and with enablers of victims, people who leverage the victimhood of real victims to make money, for example, out of these victims, perpetually, for years, you know.

And I think a good service is very, a good service would be to restore modicum of sanity into this whole scene, you know, to explain that the relationship with the narcissist is a dance, that everyone has contributions to any kind of relationship, even with the most egregious abuser, that it's not good to define yourself by what had happened to you, because then you become passive and you lose, you lose control over your life. You give up control over your life.

You have an external locus of control. You're unable to plan. You're unable to, to act as an agent. You lose agency and you're not self efficacious.

So this is a major loss to define yourself as a victim is to suspend yourself. Exactly what the narcissists had done to you is to perpetuate the abuse.

If you remain in a victim mindset, that's where the narcissist had put you. The narcissist had rented you a victim. He wants you to remain a victim and you're doing his work for him.

So this is my beef with the current victimhood industry online especially.

I am lucky. I went from Catholicism into just searching and getting a degree in philosophy and studying world religions, but landing in a metaphysical community. And I've been at the healing arts for a long time since my twenties. And I've taught that stuff and at colleges and wellness centers and all over the place. And I happened to go to a church that had a woman minister that was a very strong woman. And, but I came to her, I showed up as a victim and she kind of spanked that language out of me. She was very much into, she actually taught public speaking. I took some of her public speaking classes and she taught leadership and that set me on that path of learning about leadership and stepping into your leadership and owning your shit and all that.

And so when I show up into those chat rooms myself, well a year ago when I was much more like beaten down and just like distraught, it only took me a minute to go, whoa, whoa. I think I'm in the wrong place, but good. It's validating to see you all here.

But actually just maybe two days ago, I said to someone similar to what you just said about the dance. I said, if, are you in a dance with a narcissist? And she said, yes. And I said, well, what happens if you walk off the dance floor? And she goes, what do you mean? I go, you can walk out of the dance. Like if you were actually at a dance and you walked off a dance floor, he'd be standing there by himself and you'd be off getting a glass of punch or whatever at the dance.

And so you can choose to step out of the dance. And I know it takes a little work and takes some self-love and self-love is the answer to all of this, but you're going to have to own your shit.

And to another point I heard you make recently, I don't know how recent you made it, but I heard it recently is that you can be victimized, but you don't have to stay the victim.

And actually I'm making a shirt like that. So by the way, I own a t-shirt company. So when I actually launched these videos into the event, in my event, I'll have some different shirts and one of them is going to say that I may have been victimized, but I am no victim. Thank you.

And I want to spread that message. I really do want to give people tools that they need. And I historically, no matter what job I've ever been in, I'm a toolmaker. And if I see a problem, okay, what kind of tool do we need? What's the tool we need to make for that? And I make the tool. And so I'm just showing up here like that too.

So I have to ask like, if you could say, you know, hey, person who is victimized by this narcissist, here is a bucket of tools. What would the tools be for them to heal?

The first thing is, in my view, to never tolerate a breach of boundaries. So if boundaries are breached in any way, shape or form, you walk away.

Generally, as a general Swiss knife tool, you feel uncomfortable. Something is done that you don't agree with. You need to be hair trigger. You need to walk away hair trigger. The slightest thing, no second chances, no third chances, no attempting to fix things. Just walk away immediately.

Second thing, trust your intuition. Trust your gut. They're, in the case of relationships, and definitely in the case of narcissists and psychopaths, they're more right than wrong. You may miss a few good people. It's extremely unlikely, but you'll miss a hell of a lot of bad people.

So trust your intuition and gut. You feel uncomfortable for some reason, be polite, take your back, walk away on a first date, for example.

The third thing I would say, never go long term before you go short term. People have a tendency to do this. They make long term plans and they invest in long term things. Before they did the short walk, be gradual, be incremental. I call that the instant relationship. It's happening a lot.

Yeah.

Be gradual, be incremental, build brick by brick, not an entire wall at once. Meet yourself to little things, then to little bigger things, then to little, little bigger things.

I mean, never go all the way, immediately, and so on. These are tendencies that are very common among typical victims of narcissistic abuse.

The next thing is, never accept roles that are roles in life, to play a role that is not natural.

If you're with a man and he wants you to be his mother, walk away. It's not natural to ask this. If he pushes you to mother him, walk away. If he pushes you to be his daughter, walk away. If he pushes you to be his business partner, walk away. It's not about business. Business may come much later, much, much later.

Right now, it's not about business. If he pushes you to marry, that means to become his wife, after three days, walk away. If he pushes you to be a mother, after one month, walk away.

These are abnormal roles. They are abnormal either because of the time frame, or they are abnormal because they are abnormal. Two adults should not mother or father each other. They should not play parental roles.

Any attempt to allocate abnormal roles to you, are natural roles. These are red flags. You walk away. Never be with someone because of the alternative.

Many people end up being together because they are terrified of the alternative. The alternative is loneliness and being alone, dying alone. I don't know what.

Never be with someone because of the alternative. Be with someone because of who he is. Not because of any alternative.

If you don't want to be with someone because of who he is, choose the alternative, whatever it is. Whatever it may be.

These are common sensical rules that any granny would have given her granddaughter a hundred years ago and 500 years ago. It's nothing very wise or sagacious about anything I said.

And yet, in the modern world, we have lost sight of all these things. We simply lost sight of this cumulative wisdom. There's a lot of cumulative wisdom that we had lost sight of.

If we just implement this traditional corny, cliched advice, advice, or tips, we'll be fine because this is the wisdom of the ages. We'll be absolutely fine if it's too good to be true. It's not true.

For example, we'll simply be fine. I have four relationship tips. Let me see if I can find them somewhere here. I have four relationship tips that I usually give, but I'm not sure I can find them right now. Anyhow.

We have time to fetch those later and we can put them in the comments when we actually do the...

Back to your never tolerated breach in boundaries. That implies you actually have to have some boundaries.

It seems like there's this generation after generation after generation of toxic families not teaching that stuff. My mom didn't teach that stuff. She taught quite the opposite of that.

I grew up as an object. I have no boundaries going into...

I left home at 16. I can't do this with you folks anymore.

I had that much going on, but I left home pregnant at 16 and went and raised my baby by myself.

It took me years to get into six more years to get into a psychology program where I was being taught.

I literally checked myself into a hospital to learn how to be a healthy adult. Someone teach me. I know there's something better out here.

Luckily, I went out and I kept seeking out really neat people to surround myself with to teach me this stuff that I'm writing on this card that you just said.

Where does someone start?

They have to start at therapy. They're not going to start in those chat rooms. Those chat rooms aren't teaching them.

What are your boundaries? Think about your philosophy. What do you want in life? Who are you? Value yourself enough to spend some time with this.

I'm looking at the list that I wrote that you said. The foundation of the people I'm seeing in those chat rooms, and even myself, was so shaky that they didn't have a philosophy of what's good for them, what's bad, and what their own worth is.

We have this, but what about the person?

I found the relationship rules. Would you like me to read them to you before you answer?

Yeah.

If it feels wrong, it is wrong. If he's trying too hard, if it involves too much conspicuous and ostentatious effort, it is false. If it's too good to be true, there is only one reason for that. It is not true.

Finally, in today's world, believe nothing. Trust no one. Verify everything. Remember the 1990 rule. Everybody lies 90% of the time, and we tend to believe them 90% of the time.

By the way, this was established in studies. It's called the base rate fallacy, amazingly.

These are the four rules.

I will now relate to your last question. It's very true.

People who lack self-love and lack boundaries are like wide open cities to an invading army.

Where do you start? You build fortifications? You acquire artillery? You call the cavalry? What do you do when you're a wide open city and there's an invading army on the way? Or at your gaze? And there's no gaze? What do you do?

Well, I think the first thing is, in this case, the first thing is to catastrophize.

Now, all psychologists will tell you that to catastrophize is a bad thing. You should never catastrophize. Catastrophizing means predicting a catastrophic future, which is not always fully founded on facts and reality. So it's a bit fantastic.

I suggest in this case, if you don't have self-love and if you don't have boundaries, I suggest to catastrophize. I suggest to frighten yourself, to ask yourself what could go wrong and then to imagine something that is 100 times worse than what could go wrong.

The more of a horror show you create in your own mind, the more protected you will be.

It is ersatz. It is substitute boundaries. It's not real boundaries.

But fear is as good as boundaries in protecting you. Be very afraid. Be very afraid if you don't have self-love and boundaries because in today's environment, for example, dating environment, it's 80% predators. If you go on dating apps, if you go to clubs, these are predators. Everyone there is a predator.

So if you don't have self-love, if you don't have boundaries, you're in seriously bad shape and in trouble already without having met anyone. Assume the worst. Expect the worst. Catastrophize to your heart content and then be very afraid.

That's an interim measure until you learn to develop self-love and boundaries, which is done usually in therapy.

But fear is good enough in protecting you.

You don't want to live in fear all the time, but it can be a tool, of course.

It can be a tool.

No. Fear, I mean, when you're trying to date or when you try to find a new intimate partner. Not generally speaking. When you're trying to do business with other people.

I mean, if you have no boundaries and no self-love, everyone will take advantage of you. It's a cruel world. That is what happens. That's true. It's not the world that used to be when I was growing up and possibly when you were growing up. I don't know. And it's a hostile jungle, predatory world.

The number of narcissists and psychopaths has exploded. It's documented. There's about five times more narcissists today than in the 80s, according to studies by Twenge and Campbell and others. So they're all over. They're in positions of authority. They're gaining ground. They're gaining the upper hand. They are gatekeepers. They hold the keys to your job and to your happiness and prosperity and wellbeing and health and so on. It's a tough, dangerous, vile, primitive, hostile jungle world out there. And it's almost universal. It's not nice to say it's politically incorrect. There are good people everywhere. Yes. Where are they? I'm still looking. I'm right here, Sam. Right? And look what happened to you. What happened to you?

Perfect illustration. Unbelievable turn of events, for sure.

Had you been more afraid? Had you been more afraid? Imore afraid?

I think some of it might have been preventable.

True. I had been conditioned by the culture I was in to not live in fear.

And I remember sitting in my first psychology class when I was full of fear, by the way, full of fear, first psychology class, and the teacher says, we're only born with two fears, fear of falling and fear of loud noises.

And I'm like, well, what are all these other fears about?

And so I systematically start getting rid of every fear, fear of flying, fear of heights. I became a chimney sweep. I flew a hundred thousand miles a year. I got on stage as I sang in public. I'm a singer, but I would never sing in public. And now I sing in public all the time. And public speaking, I went to 48 public speaking events per year for five years.

So I like faced my fears head on. I'm not going to be told what to fear.

Whoops, that didn't work out.

Another thing that victims do very often, they confuse, they tend to confuse things that have to be earned with things that do not have to be earned.

So for example, trust has to be earned and they tend to trust immediately.

Yeah. They don't go through a process. They trust has to be earned. You should never trust anyone until they've earned it.

And opposite, they may withhold things that should not be withheld and should not be earned, but should be natural, even on a first encounter, but they withhold these things.

So victims tend to confuse what has to be earned with what can be given safely and naturally, or even on a first encounter.

So they have victims typically have behaviors which are known as approach avoidance or the very, their attachment style is very insecure and it tends to undermine and sabotage their relationships and sometimes lead to abuse by kind of projective identification.

But if you are a perpetual victim, if this had happened to you several times, I'm sorry to say something's wrong with you.

You need to look at yourself mostly, forget your abusers and so on. I mean, it would teach you nothing if you try, well, a little, if you try to analyze your abusers.

Something's wrong with you, with your mate selection process, with your decision making process, but something's wrong with you. You need to study you, focus on you, learn you.

And personally speaking, I am that person and I was that person. And so I've spent the past few years looking at that. And the partner I chose was actually studying narcissism with me because he was that person too. And so we were sharing your videos, you know, but he got hovered like at the last hour that he was supposed to be, you know, really super severing everything and moving towards his group, his new tribe that he had created.

It ended with threats and everyone was ghosted. And from that point forward, I was like, okay, I have to look at myself fully. And, and I actually went back to, luckily, when I first pulled up your video, there was a second video that came up by a different person.

And that person's videos, his YouTube channels were usually funny. And so when I did a search on narcissism, he had a video on narcissism and I watched it and it wasn't funny. It was actually kind of spanking the so-called impact, the person who has attracted and saying, you need to look at your part in this.

So luckily for me, thankfully for me, my first dose was you and your very, very informative straight shooting videos.

And this other man, JP Sears is his name. JP Sears had a bunch of funny videos that me and my sales team would watch. So because his name was already in my search queue, it came up.

That's the only reason I wouldn't have thought he would have had a video on that subject.

But because he did, and he was saying, Hey, you need to look at yourself. I already had that as my foundation for learning about narcissism, thankfully.

But I still ended up in this weird situation and this toxic abusive situation.

And so in the past year, I still go to that, like, what's my part in this? Where am I as a leader? How can I lead my life and like owning my shit?

You know, if I'm going to point at a student or client or my children or a friend and say, own your shit, then I have to do it myself.

We are one and a half hours into the show and people tend to get very tired of this time.

Do you have one last question?

Maybe, uh, I do want to speak to the subject of, we've mainly talked about women being the victims here. And, and that's my love one that was Hubert was, was a man who has a female narcissist. And since then, I've met many men who are the victims of female narcissists. In fact, we're going to have on this same conference, a man who's written a book on that subject. And, and I have a client right now who is a man. And, I would just like to you to speak to that a little bit.

Well, we used to think it used to be until about 10 years ago, until about 75% of all diagnosed people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, about 75% were men and about 25% were women. And we weren't quite sure why we thought maybe culture encourages narcissism in men because it encourages them to be ambitious and competitive and ruthless and callous and so on. So maybe culture, ex narcissist on, to become narcissist or maybe because, women are less prone to, to overtly express their narcissism. So they would tend to suppress behaviors which are narcissistic and they want to get along more in the network. They display empathy, even if you don't feel it and so on. So maybe that was, we weren't sure why, but about three quarters of people diagnosed with NPD were with narcissistic personalities or the women. And then it started to shift gradually.

And in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual edition five, which was published in 2013, they already say that they think it's probably 50 50. And from anecdotal, absolutely from anecdotal experience, myself, my colleagues and so on, it would seem that actually the number of women is either equal to the number of men, narcissists and perhaps exceeding it now.

There is a general trend among women, especially women in the West, but not only the West in China, in Russia, in Israel, inand so on. We have studies in 21 countries at least. It seems that women in general are adopting narcissistic and psychopathic role models. Women want to become narcissistic and psychopathic men. They emulate men who are bullies, womanizers, aggressive, and so on. And so women are adopting more and more narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors because it makes them feel that they are more competitive with men or they are more men like.

Generally, there's something called the stalled revolution. It's a clinical term. The stalled revolution is described in literature, academic literature. We have seen a situation where women describe themselves nowadays in exclusively masculine terms. They almost don't use any words which are associated with traditional gender roles.

So today, most women describe themselves in traditionally masculine terms.

And so women want to be men, but they want to be the wrong kind of men. Narcissistic, psychopathic, winner, not loser, not beta, alpha, this, that, they are gung-ho, you know.

And this creates a situation where more and more of them are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. And more and more of them engage in behaviors which used to be exclusively identified with narcissism such as lack of empathy, abrasiveness, exploitativeness, adultery, rates of adultery, for example, skyrocketed among women and so on, objectifying other people, abuse, classic abuse.

So today, it's no longer true that most narcissists are men. Narcissism is equally spread among the genders and the behaviors are indistinguishable.

Women narcissists are as bad as men narcissists. The only perhaps minor difference is that in women, narcissism goes hand in hand in some case, in a big minority of cases with borderline personality disorder.

While in men, if there are comorbidities, there are comorbidities if the narcissism is diagnosed with something else, so it's diagnosed with psychopathy or it's diagnosed with mood disorders or and so on, so on.

But that makes the situation even worse because the combination narcissist and borderline is the worst I can imagine, simply the worst combination imaginable.

Borderlines are essentially secondary psychopaths and you put these two together, it's hell.

So if anything, women who are narcissists would tend to be more narcissistic than men who are narcissists, especially women, especially women who are also borderline.

So it's not a pretty picture at all.

And men are shamed for crying abuse.

So yes, men will not report abuse. Men will refrain from reporting abuse or even sexual assault.

Women are much more promiscuous, so they engage in behaviors which are classic masculine gender roles, like they would curse and they would drink. Drinking among women exploded completely out of control. The promiscuity among women is off the charts. The number of sexual partners, lifetime sexual partners, has tripled in the last 20 years among women. And women now are that shy, that shy away from men in number of sexual partners. And women tend to be more promiscuous than men, ironically.

Men are more romantic nowadays. The picture is not good. It seems like contagion, like narcissism and psychopathy, had infected women. And this, of course, creates enormous alienation between the genders. There's a gender war. Men are avoiding women. Women are avoiding men.

And the small minorities who continue to interact, they interact dysfunctionally. They interact, for example, via casual sex. There are non-committed relationships. There's no marriage rates that collapse. Childrearing and childbearing has collapsed. So all the functional intimacy skills are gone, literally gone. Dating has vanished. There's no dating anymore. Dating has vanished.

The predominant interaction between men and women nowadays is hookups, hookups. Picking up total strangers for casual one time, one night stands. That's the predominant form of interaction nowadays. It's a sorry state that potentially is threatening the species. It's not a joke.

Because to reverse this, I don't see how. I don't see what force can reverse. It's nothing to do with equality.

Of course, women should have total equality of access, of voting, of wages. No one is disputing this, of course.

But the prevailing mores, what we teach in academe and so on, I'm not a fan of Jordan Peterson, who is not a statement. But he is right about this. We had poisoned the minds of the new, of the younger generations, poisoned them utterly, misled them egregiously and horribly.

And there is no way back from that, in my view. And it is this divide between men and women.

It is a much, much bigger threat than any COVID.

And people say, oh, we don't need more children. There's an overpopulation. That is nonsense. The thing we need most nowadays is children. Why? Because we are all getting much older.

Now, 25% of the global population is old. 25%, these are old people. They cannot work anymore. They don't produce anything. They just consume. Who's going to provide them with health care services, with pensions? Who's going to take care of these old people, which are fast becoming the majority in Eastern Europe, in China, in Japan? Who's going to take care of these old people?

We need young people to produce and work and contribute. We need children, actually, more than ever in human history.

And yet, the number of children and the number of marriages, or any other similar arrangements, has nose dived. There's no other way to describe it. Nose dived.

Youngsters have zero intimacy skills. Zero intimacy skills.

Why?

Because an overwhelming majority of people under age 25 never had even a single intimate relationship. They had 19 sexual partners, but not one intimate relationship.

And one third of them still live at home with mommy and daddy.

It's a shocking picture, but you still, you know, it sounds dooming to try to turn the ship around, but you still do what you do.

And people like me are showing up to do what I do, whatever that is, to shed light on stuff, maybe give people some tools.

And that's the best you can do, I guess.

Yeah, we need to speak up. We need to do the little that we can.

But I'm very, frankly, very pessimistic. Don't forget that there is a whole army of women, mainly women, not only women, but mainly women, whole army of women, who are graduates of the narcissistic abuse school.

These women's intimacy skills had been compromised by trauma, even if they had them to start with, and many of them don't. These intimacy skills are damaged very often beyond repair. Don't forget that there's an army of men for graduates of divorce. Divorce tends to discriminate against men.

Right.

So these men are wounded and traumatized. Are we talking small numbers?

No, serene. Put together, it's a majority of the population.

In the year 2016, it was the first year in human history where a majority of women and a majority of men never came across a single individual from the other gender.

Spent the whole year not meeting, not having sex, not dating, not hooking up even with another man or woman. Ever since then, that's the situation.

Since 2016, majorities of men and women are totally segregated. They never meet each other for any purpose, even one night stand.

Consequently, the frequency of sex has declined dramatically.

So sex, reproduction, children, family, dating, human interaction.

And now what are we talking about? We're talking about keeping people away from offices. They should work from home.

The last vestige, the last remnant of human interaction is about to be taken away from us.

We will be rendered atomized zombies at home all the time, never leaving home, never seeing another face except on Zoom. It's a dystopian, horrible future.

Terrible consequences ahead.

Unsustainable, unsustainable.

I haven't worked a corporate job in a long while. Even my seminar gig, I was just all over the country meeting people all over the country.

But I believe we have to create our own reality and even own that shit. And I have businesses. I have opportunities in the sales arena to go out and create relationships.

And in every relationship, whether it's business or a new neighbor or whatever, my policy and philosophy is to give people reasons to know, like, and trust me. And I plan to teach that to my clients.

And I do teach that to my clients.

But moving forward in this whole new arena that I'm stepping into, my goal is to do no harm. That chokes me up.

That means big things are ahead.

Because, you know, I have such passion about this now and greater understanding, not perfect understanding, but greater understanding about what is what my part can be in this.

So I just want to thank you for being my mentor, whether you knew it or not.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time. And I actually started this conversation with you about doing this last November, but I had a few different missiles launched at me. And thank you for your patience on that.

Thank you.

Thank you. I do.

And after we end recording, I would like to just chat with you one more second about the event if you don't mind. Okay. So thanks for coming on today.

Let me just pause the recording.

Lose Your Narc Online Retreat with Mary Kane (LINKS in DESCRIPTION)

Narcissist Needs You to Fail Him, Let Go (with Azam Ali)

Victim: How to Avoid Becoming a Psychopathic Narcissist

Faces of Narcissist's Aggression

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

Narcissist’s Two Rejections Giving, Love, And Abuse

Abuser In Your Mind Self Stalking

Narcissist Codependent Resonance, Common Roots (plus Gender Wars)

Why Dating Narcissists is Addictive (With Diana and Mari)

Trust Your Gut: Victimized, not Victim (Interview with Caroline Strawson)

Narcissism and Abuse Clarified with therapist Jose Espinosa