Manipulate the Narcissist and Live to Tell About It? (Lecture in Budapest)

Summary

Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the manipulation of narcissists, the prevalence of narcissistic traits in society, and the impact of aggression on children. He emphasizes that the only effective way to deal with a narcissist is to go no contact, as staying in contact can lead to adopting narcissistic behaviors oneself. He notes that narcissism is on a spectrum, with healthy narcissism at one end and narcissistic personality disorder at the other. Vaknin also observes that narcissism and psychopathy are becoming more socially accepted and even encouraged in certain contexts. He mentions that narcissists can recognize each other but not psychopaths, and that psychopaths prey on narcissists. Lastly, he discusses the impact of aggression on children, stating that witnessing or experiencing physical or sexual aggression can lead to destructive or self-destructive behavior, while verbal aggression tends to perpetuate verbal abuse within the family structure.

Ladies and ladies and ladies and a few brave gentlemen. I hope you get out of this alive.

Who are about to suffer? That's the translators. They are going to translate these lectures, so we should thank them in advance.

You have all come here, presumably, to learn how to manipulate a narcissist and live to tell about it. I'm not sure it's possible. But we will try.

The lecture will be divided into two parts. One of them is about 15 minutes, and one of them is about two hours and 15 minutes.

And the reason I'm dividing this lecture in this unconventional way, in all seriousness, is to allow those of you who want to live after 15 minutes. Especially those who came from Vienna.

The first 15 minutes, I will tell you the only eight ways proven to manipulate a narcissist.

Over 25 years of study, both my studies and other studies, we have come to the conclusion that there are only eight effective ways to manipulate a narcissist.

So with those of you with an American mindset, I'm going to give you these eight ways in the first 15 minutes.

The rest of the lecture would be to explain to you why these eight methods work.

To take you on a tour of the narcissist's mind. It's not Disneyland. It's a horror chamber. It's a concentration camp.

So those of you who got what they wanted in the first 15 minutes can leave. After that, I guarantee you it's going to become extremely unpleasant.

Those of you who survived the entire lecture will have a grasp of what it is to be a narcissist.

And using this deep understanding of what it is to be a narcissist, you will be able to better survive. And if you wish, better manipulate the narcissist.

One of the major problems with the information available online and offline is that the people who offer this information are not narcissists.

They don't know really what makes the narcissist tick. They are offering the perspective and the experience of the narcissist victims.

It creates a feel-good atmosphere.

Like-minded people who went through similar experiences always like to congregate together.

But it's not very efficient.

Today, at the end of this lecture, you will have become efficient with the narcissist.

Because you will gain a deep understanding of what it means to be one.

Our bodies are made of flesh and blood. But our minds are made of dreams. Our brains do not trust our senses.

The information that gets from the environment to the brain is processed by the brain to ignore the senses.

We are all in a constant dream state. We are not in direct contact with reality, but we are in contact with our minds.

The narcissist interferes with our dreams. If we do not learn from experience, we learn from trauma. We learn from our wounds.

The narcissist is a master at recognizing your wounds and making use of them.

The narcissist interferes with your dreams and resonates with your wounds.

There is no greater intimacy than this.

Partners of narcissists say that it is very difficult to find new partners because the intensity is much lower.

Once you have experienced the narcissist as an intimate partner, all other intimate partners appear to be black and white movies. The narcissist is a color movie, an intense, amazing experience, unparalleled, unprecedented, and unrepeatable.

Remember that the narcissist interferes with your dreams and resonates with your wounds. There is no greater intimacy than this.

Before we go into the mind of this pretty unique creature, let me, as promised, tell you what are the eight techniques.

There are eight techniques.

Someone invented seven of them, and I'm very sad to say that someone else invented the eight.

It's devastating. I've never recovered from that.

But let's keep it between us.

By far, the most effective technique is no contact.

The minute you have identified someone as a narcissist or with pronounced narcissistic traits, you walk away. You walk away even if it is your mother or father or son, let alone husband or wife. You just walk away. You maintain no contact, direct or indirect.

If you are forced to communicate, you communicate via service providers like lawyers and accountants and courts. You receive no gifts, you answer no phone calls, you do not become friends. You do not follow the social media accounts of your ex-partner. You don't talk to friends of your partner's mother. You go no contact.

This is by far the most efficient technique.

And today, recommended by most mental health practitioners and family therapists.

What if you have children together?

You minimize contact. You work through third parties. You never discuss personal issues, not connected to the children.

What if you have a very successful and profitable business together? You dismantle it. You go. Your sanity and survival are more important than any business.

What if it is your mother?

Same.

Narcissist is toxic. You walk away.

In all my years, decades of work in the topic, I have never heard a good reason not to go no contact.

If you do not want to go no contact, it is because you do not want to go no contact. You do not want to go no contact.

Because a narcissist still fulfills some emotional needs.

So then if you are still in contact, there are the other seven techniques.

A very effective technique, which I did not invent, is called gray rock.

It is providing the narcissist with minimal response, pretending to be boring, one-dimensional, a bit stupid, not interesting.

Gradually, the narcissist, presumably, will lose interest in you and move on to the next source of supply.

It is a very, very effective technique and works very fast, usually within months.

All you have to do is respond minimally, not to the point, ignore, stare, do nothing.

The next technique is called deflection or decoy technique.

It is to find a common enemy, the neighbor, the boss, his sister-in-law, the favorite mother-in-law, someone you can agree with a narcissist is a common enemy.

Then you and the narcissist become allies against this common enemy.

It could be an institution, the ruling party, the church, the United States, it is a favorite.

You just find a common enemy and then you become friends of the narcissist.

So this technique is called deflection or decoy.

The next technique is called mirroring.

It should never be used with a psychopathic narcissist.

A psychopathic narcissist has no impulse control, tends to be violent and is defiant.

But with regular narcissists it works miracles.

You simply mirror the narcissist.

Mirroring is a very bad term that I chose because in a mirror everything is opposite, reverse.

But actually it's copying, imitating the narcissist.

He shouts, you shout. He humiliates you, you humiliate him. He cheats on you, he cheats on him. Whatever he does, you do.

The famous song, anything you can do, I can do better.

This is the essence of the technique.

It has two effects.

Escalation, narcissist is a coward, like all bullies.

And escalation, when the narcissist faces escalation, he pecks off.

This is the essence of the technique.

Second effect, it creates in the narcissist self-awareness.

The narcissist is not introspective, he doesn't have self-awareness.

So mirroring helps the narcissist to see himself in the mirror, to see what he is doing.

This is the essence of the technique.

The narcissist is the reflection of the mirror. And the narcissist is the reflection of the mirror.

I never know when the Hungarian part ends.

For those of you who study psychology, who are into psychology, and like very much psychological phrases, this technique is actually a form of operant conditioning.

So it conditions the narcissist to behave.

We use operant conditioning in domesticating pets. Only pets are a pleasure.

The next technique is known as shared psychosis, or shared psychotic disorder.

This technique has other names, delusional narrative, Stockholm syndrome, trauma bonding, etc. It is exactly the opposite of mirroring.

Whatever the narcissist does, you exaggerate.

So the narcissist says, I solved this problem at work today. All my stupid colleagues and my idiot boss could not solve it. I came in five minutes, I solved it.

In shared psychosis, the response would be, why did it take you five minutes? You are such an amazing genius. Normally it would take you two minutes. It would take you two minutes to solve it. And why do you spend your time in this stupid job with these returns? You deserve a lot better. You are a genius of global proportions. Not recognized yet. You create a caricature. You caricaturize the narcissist's grandiosity and behaviors. You make a caricature out of the narcissist's grandiosity and behaviors.

And in literature, this is known as parody. You parody the narcissist.

This has the amazing effect that the narcissist becomes modest.

A typical reaction? Well, don't exaggerate. You know, I'm not such a genius.

And it's therefore a technique of behavior modification.

You enter the psychotic world of the narcissist and you enhance it. You amplify it.

So that even the narcissist sees how crazy he is.

The next technique is closely allied, closely connected to this technique.

It is to provide the narcissist with calibrated, reasonable, but very high grade narcissistic supply. It is to provide the narcissist with well calibrated and reasonable, high grade narcissistic supply. It is to provide the narcissist with well calibrated and reasonable, high grade narcissistic supply.

Narcissistic supply is, of course, attention. Essentially attention. Attention could be positive, but also negative. Any attention is narcissistic supply. It's a mistake to think that only positive attention.

So, to tell the narcissist I admire you, you know so much. You're amazing. You're more sexy than Wikipedia.

It is a form of high grade narcissistic supply.

But to say to the narcissist, I am terrified of you. You frighten me. You are so strong and so ruthless and so cruel. That is also high grade narcissistic supply.

Narcissistic supply is a drug and the narcissist is a junkie.

The technique is simple. You become the pusher. You just provide the drug, the fix, the dose.

This creates extreme dependency.

And actually, narcissists with a source of very high grade supply become co-dependent or even borderline. Narcissists are dependent personalities. Make sure they depend on you. You provide good supply, you can name your price.

Like in Harlem.

The next technique is known as withholding.

The opposite of the previous technique.

In the previous technique, you give supply. In this technique, you withhold supply. You do not give supply. You withhold communication, silent treatment. You withhold sex. You withhold sexual exclusivity. This is known as triangulation.

So you withhold critical elements, elements that are critical to the narcissist self-regulation.

By withholding these elements, you force the narcissist to court you. To try to force you to extract what you are withholding.

You withhold sex, suddenly he is very interested. You withhold communication, suddenly he constantly tries to communicate. You triangulate with another man, he becomes jealous and possessive.

Withholding is a very powerful technique.

It must be combined with the previous technique.

Never alone.

So short bursts of high grade supply, short periods of withholding.

Supply withholding.

And this is known as intermittent reinforcement.

If you review, if you have a look, a fresh look at the techniques that I've described, what strikes you?

All these techniques, intermittent reinforcement, conditioning, trauma bonding.

What strikes you?

These are exactly narcissistic behaviors. That's exactly what the narcissist does.

In other words, the only way to manipulate a narcissist and survive to tell about it is to become one.

In a minute we'll talk about it.

This kind of acquired behavior is known as narcissistic psychopathic overlay.

Our studies show clearly all over the world that partners of narcissists, over time, as they are traumatized and victimized, develop pronounced narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors. This is the only way to make a narcissist partner. It's the only way to make a narcissist partner.

Narcissism, ladies and gentlemen, is far more infectious than the coronavirus. This is why narcissists are so afraid of coronavirus. And far more widespread.

And there is no way to quarantine the victims.

So this is precisely coming back to the beginning, why my only recommendation, only, is no contact.

Always has been my recommendation since I invented it.

And to this very moment, only no contact.

You remain in contact with the narcissists, you're playing with fire.

You're playing with your soul, with your sanity.

You will end up being narcissists and psychopaths.

These behaviors, the narcissistic psychopathic overlay, these behaviors are transient, they're temporary.

In terms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, display behaviors which are identical to borderline personality disorder.

As the trauma heals, these behaviors vanish.

They accept two things that never, ever recover.

The ability to trust other people.

An empathy.

Victims of narcissism, people with long exposure to narcissism and psychopaths develop empathic deficit that never recovers.

And that's why there's a lot of narcissists who do not have the ability to trust other people.

Similar empathic deficit, we can find among alcoholics.

How do you find them?

Among drug addicts.

Drug figures.

Among people with chronic illnesses.

Among people with terminal illnesses.

Is this the way you want to end up?

Why play these games?

What is the aim of manipulating the narcissists?

Don't even pack your things. Don't bother. Walk away.

This has been the 45 minute, 15 minutes that I promised.

And now I'm inviting you to a tour of the narcissist mind.

As we tour the narcissist mind, you will understand why each of these techniques is working.

So this is actually the second part of the lecture is to explain to you why these techniques are working and to allow you with this deeper understanding to use these techniques more effectively.

This is because the narcissist is very effective at manipulating you.

The reason the narcissist is very effective at manipulating you, controlling you and inducing in you emotions and moods is because, exactly like you, the narcissist is a victim.

The narcissist is a post-traumatic condition.

The narcissist has been the victim usually of his parents.

As a victim, the narcissist chose a specific, a highly specific solution.

But the fact that the narcissist chose a specific solution does not mean that the narcissist is not a victim.

He is as much a victim as you are.

The reason the narcissist victimizes you is that he wants company.

As long as you are not victimized, you are alien to the narcissist.

The narcissist wants to feel at home, among his own kind.

He wants to be among victims because he is a victim.

So he converts and transforms everyone around him into a victim.

He wants to feel at home.

And of course, the clinical concept is the comfort zone. The narcissist's comfort zone is among victims.

The narcissist will victimize you, never mind what you do. Never mind what you do not do. Never mind how often you do or do not do what you do or do not do. Never mind if you are.

Because you don't even have to be for the narcissist to victimize you.

And here is the worst part.

When the narcissist converts you to an image of himself, he is doing you a favor.

Because he is superior. He is godlike. He is bringing you up to his level.

What does it say in Genesis, the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible?

God created men in his own image. The narcissist creates you in his own image. He is furious at your lack of gratitude.

Here he is investing in an inferior you.

There's a phone ringing. No, don't worry. I'm not available.

So here he is investing in an inferior you. He is very close to God. Sometimes they change places.

And here he is having chosen you, having selected you. He could have chosen anyone, but he chose you.

And here he is molding you, shaping you like Pygmalion and Galatea.

And how do you react?

You are unhappy. You claim to be abused and victimized. You are too stupid to realize the enormous gift you are receiving.

You must understand this.

The narcissist is very angry at you. All the time.

Either because you are too retarded to appreciate his gifts. Which is usually the case. Or if you are intelligent, you are too ungrateful.

The narcissist's partner is in a binary state, without or ungrateful. And usually ungrateful without.

And so the narcissist says to himself, to mold my partner, I must resort to extreme and radical measures.

Americans call it tough love. They tried it in Iraq.

So this is tough love. It's for your own good. You will thank me one day if you survive.

But there is a problem.

And now I'm going to take you into the soul, the psyche and the mind of the narcissist.

There was a sociologist by the name of Giddens. And in the 1990s, Giddens came with a concept called ontological insecurity.

And Giddens is a sociologist. The narcissist is in a state of ontological insecurity.

What is ontological insecurity?

It's when you don't feel continuous. You don't feel that your today is a continuation of yesterday and your tomorrow will be a continuation of today.

Obviously, if there is no continuity, it is impossible to develop an identity.

The narcissist is possibly the only form of human who has no core, no identity, no kernel.

In 1995, I proposed that narcissism is a form of multiple personality disorder.

The narcissist has two selves.

Because the narcissist has two selves.

True self, which is a traumatized, very, very young child who is paralyzed by fear and hurt.

So, this child is dysfunctional and has no effect on the psychodynamics of the narcissist.

And there is the false self, which is godlike. We'll come to it a bit later.

So, she has selves, yes, true and false. Technically, it's multiple personality disorder because it's a person with two personalities.

But I was wrong. It's the second time I admit something today.

I don't know what's happening to me. But I was wrong because in multiple personality, known today as dissociative identity disorder, in dissociative identity disorder, there is continuity.

So, I was wrong because I was wrong because dissociative identity disorder. The person with multiple personalities has many personalities.

But each of these personalities has perfect memory and perfect identity. And each of these personalities has total continuity.

So, if someone with multiple personalities has six personalities, and one of these personalities is Sam, Sam comes out, talks to the therapist, and then four months later, Sam comes out again. Sam will remember the conversation with the therapist.

The six personalities have total continuity, total memory, total identity. Not the narcissist.

Narcissists forget or have no access to almost 80%, at least according to my studies, 80% of their memories. Every minute you are confronted with a new person, new narcissist, which has nothing to do with the person a minute before.

So, if you are a narcissist, you have no access to the person a minute before.

Narcissists suffer from something called dissociation. Dissociation is breaks in memory. Missing time.

So, the narcissist misses seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, but misses all the time. He dissociates all the time. He is not continuous.

How to live like that?

What the narcissist does is called, in clinical terms, confabulation.

The narcissist invents stories to cover the missing parts.

The narcissist says to himself, I remember picking the golf club, and I remember the ball going to the hole. But I don't remember anything in between.

So, let's say, probably it's logical that I hit the ball with the golf club. Probably. It's logical. It makes sense. It's plausible.

But I do not remember it.

And this is called confabulation.

Very often, the narcissist gets the confabulation wrong.

So, people think he is lying. Or gaslighting. He is not. He is confabulating.

Here is your problem as victims or partners.

The narcissist is like the river of Heraclitus. You know, you cannot enter the same river twice. You cannot talk to the same narcissist twice. You do not have a relationship with the same person. You do not communicate with the same human being.

Not only there is no one there, there is nobody there.

But the emptiness itself is fragmented and fractured to pieces. It's like an empty, beautiful, empty palace with no inhabitants. And the walls themselves are cracked and falling down.

Partners of narcissists cannot digest this.

There are two things that victims of narcissists cannot accept and cannot digest.

One, the narcissist does not exist. There is nobody home. There is no person there.

I mean, probably many of you know that I'm a narcissist, yes? I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personalities. Twice. Over 15 years. It's pretty safe, I'm one.

So you look at me. Here I am, joking, talking, drinking coffee, drinking water, smiling at Barbara.

What am I missing? Some of you may think that I'm reasonably okay looking. Those with myopia.

So it is impossible for you to grasp that there is nobody here behind this lectern. Trust me on this. There is nobody here. You're experiencing mass delusion.

When we come to it, this phenomenon is known as the uncanny valley.

The second thing that victims or intimate partners of narcissists find difficult to accept, to the narcissist, they are not special. They are commodities. As interchangeable as grains of rice.

The narcissist is with you, married to you, has children with you, had experiences with you. Told you that he loves you a million times. How many times you made love? He cried. Intimacy.

The minute you stop functioning, he replaces you.

Because you are a commodity.

The narcissist loves his wife and he also loves rice. And very often he cannot tell the difference.

Victims find it shattering because their individuality is challenged.

So this is the first thing, ontological insecurity, dissociation, confabulation, nobody home. No one there.

Sorry, before I go to the second thing.

So, stop communicating so hard.

You cannot negotiate with a non-entity.

Your agreements mean nothing because no one signed them.

You are talking to him, you are talking to yourself.

It's a ghost, less than a ghost. It's a pretension, it's a piece of fiction, the false self is a piece of fiction.

It's a bad movie. It's a script.

Why do I resemble a human being so well? How do I give this almost perfect rendition of a human being?

I observed many of you for a long time. I have 190 IQ. I used it. I made use of it.

You are not complex. You are a very basic life force. You are easy to manipulate.

Because you have three or four basic modes. Your user manual is pretty rudimentary. You can't hear me or you don't understand what I am saying.

Because we are having difficulties. I will increase my voice.

Your user manual is rudimentary.

So it's not too difficult to deceive you into believing that I am human.

It helps that I am made of carbon.

Like the next generation of artificial intelligence.

When the final androids hit the earth, they will be made of carbon. They will have superior cognitive skills. I hope they will be more handsome than me. But they will be me. I am it. I am this thing.

I am, in many respects, your future.

I think this is the horror at the core of narcissism. This is why narcissism has become a global phenomenon.

From Nepal to Australia and from Egypt to Canada.

There is a universal resonance.

Because I think you recognize that this lifeform narcissist probably is the future.

I didn't say that. Japanese roboticist said it.

In 1970, Masahiro Mori said that when robots become indistinguishable from people, people will become very frightened, phobic and anxious. And he called it uncanny valley.

Everyone feels uncomfortable around the narcissist. We have proved it in studies.

People don't know that they are with narcissists in the same room and they react with extreme anxiety and discomfort.

Why?

They feel that something is missing. Something is off key. Something is imitated, not real. Something is fake.

I am telling you all these things for you to accept that it is not possible to have a meaningful emotional life with a narcissist.

And no amount of manipulation will change this.

The next thing you need to understand about a narcissist is that narcissists are like people with other mental health problems.

They are capable of what we call paradoxical thinking.

The first person to describe paradoxical thinking was Bateson. He called it double bind.

And then Laing was a famous British psychotherapist. He called it the incomplete knot.

Paradoxical thinking is simply the ability to have at the same time contradictory thoughts and contradictory beliefs.

You can't do that. You cannot think at the same time, wow, this guy is evil and this guy is wonderful. You cannot think at the same time, I believe the world is good and the world is horrible. You cannot have conflicting cognitions and conflicting values and beliefs.

This creates in you something called dissonance.

And you solve the dissonance by getting rid of one of the horns, one of the sides, one of the thoughts.

Not solve the narcissist.

Narcissists can at the same time, at the same moment, have conflicting thoughts, contradictory thoughts, contradictory emotions, contradictory values and contradictory beliefs.

So who are you talking to when you communicate with the narcissist?

And when you manipulate the narcissist, who are you manipulating?

He can say at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Barbara is wonderful and at 3.15 Barbara sucks.

He changes his views, his commitments, his promises, his contracts, his everything changes constantly and dramatically.

Because he has paradoxical thinking.

Why does he have paradoxical thinking?

Because he doesn't exist.

The essence of existence is the stability of cognitions, values and so on. And these are known as schemas.

So everyone has schemas, amalgams, collections of emotions, cognitions, beliefs, values. And they are stable and they are solid.

Under stress they can break down, but still, normally they are very stable.

It makes all of you more or less predictable.

And of course it allows society to function.

Narcissists and psychopaths, by the way, have none of this. They go with the flow and they react to internal dynamics by changing themselves so completely that they are utterly new.

It is utterly disorienting. It's like shapeshifting. You know in science fiction movies, shapeshifting. It's chemical. And it's very, very disorienting and sometimes frightening. And always infuriating.

Internet partners and victims of narcissists spend huge amounts of time trying to nail down the jelly.

But yesterday you said this. But you promised this. But didn't we agree?

Total waste of time.

The third thing you need to know about narcissists?

The narcissist starts as a reflection.

It's the only human being that starts its conscious existence as a reflection.

The narcissist constructs his sense of self, the false self, by reflecting himself from other people.

Healthy people have a stable core. They get input from other people and they reject most of it. And they reject most of this input for good reason. They know themselves much better than other people know them.

This stability of the core remains for life.

The regulation of sense of self-worth. The regulation of moods. The regulation of emotions.

It all comes from inside.

If you find yourself alone on an island, nothing will happen to you as far as your sense of self. Even alone on an island, you would still feel that you are you.

Not so the narcissist.

The narcissist is the totality of the reflections of other people.

The narcissist's mind is like a hive of bees. Your mind is like a surface. Unbroken surface. Everything fits in.

What doesn't fit in, you discard. After 20 years, 30 years, you are absolutely smooth and seamless.

The narcissist's mind is like a hive of bees with millions of hexagons. And to each hexagon, the narcissist collects his reflection in her eyes. And then processes these reflections, puts them in the hexagons.

And what happens when there are no reflections?

The narcissist feels when he is not surrounded by people who reflect him.

And the narcissist feels that he does not exist.

You remember the technique of withholding?

This is connected to this.

If you withhold, you don't reflect. If you don't reflect, you threaten the narcissist's very existence.

In the relationship with the narcissist, you have 100% of the power. The narcissist has zero.

The genius of the narcissist is to convince you that he has 100% of the power. And you have zero.

The narcissist does have empathy. It's called cold empathy. Cold empathy is empathy, but without emotions. It's goal-oriented.

So if I see someone crying, I would recognize that she is sad. I would recognize this. She is sad.

So I do have empathy. I have cognitive empathy.

But you will say, wow, she is sad. I remember being sad. It's a bad feeling. Can I do something for her? It's emotional resonance. She is sad. I remember being sad. It's a bad feeling. I want to help.

The narcissist says, or the psychopath, she is sad. I know what it means to be sad. Not from personal experience, but I know I read in books. I observed. I know what it means to be sad cognitively.

Now, if I play my cards right, probably at the end of the night, I can have sex with her. Because she is broken, she is vulnerable. Her defenses are down. It's an opportunity. Cold empathy is empathy used to find your vulnerabilities. And then use these vulnerabilities to obtain goals. Narcissistic supply, sex, money, power, contacts, whatever.

So never ever show the narcissist any emotion. And then use these vulnerabilities to find the narcissist. Starve. Starve the narcissist cold empathy of information.

Do not provide information to the narcissist called empathy.

You want to cry? There's always the toilet. You're happy. Keep it to yourself.

It's like the Miranda warning. Any emotion you show can and will be used against you.

And this is cold empathy.

Similarly, never ever offer the narcissist help or advice. It's extremely difficult.

Many of you love the narcissist. It's a different lecture. What's wrong with you?

But many of you do.

And when you love someone, I heard, you want to help. You want to prevent bad things from happening to that person. You want to guide the person in the right direction if you know the right direction. Or you just want to hold the person.

These are critical mistakes with the narcissist.

I repeat, never ever offer help, advice, guidance or holding.

For two reasons.

One, the narcissist will interpret your behavior as weakness, as vulnerability. Something he can leverage, something he can use to obtain goals in the future. He will begin to fake the need for help.

Second thing, if you offer the narcissist help and advice, he will think that you are humiliating him. It's narcissistic injury. The narcissist doesn't need help from you. The narcissist doesn't need help from anyone. He's above help. He's omnipotent, he's all powerful. The narcissist doesn't need advice from you. He's omniscient, he knows everything. The narcissist will drive his car for six hours before his wife will ask someone for help.

Because he cannot find the place. You are offering the narcissist advice or help, you are saying to the narcissist, you are in need of advice and help. I have something you don't have.

For example, I have information you don't have. The narcissist will react very badly to this. He will never forgive you for offering help and advice.

You well know by now, it's something that I described in the mid-90s, a cycle of idealization, evaluation, discard and replacement.

The narcissist's first idealizes you, then the narcissist devalues you, then the narcissist discards you and then the narcissist replaces you with someone else.

To manipulate the narcissist, you reverse the cycle.

Remember, idealize, devalue, discard, replace, devalue, discard, replace.

The technique is replace, replace, discard, devalue, idealize. You replace the narcissist with someone, visibly, triangulate, then discard him, not only triangulate with someone but also discard the narcissist.

As you discard him, devalue him, you're not a man. And finally, idealize him. That's it, he's yours.

So it's reverse of the cycle.

Simply reverse the cycle.

Now many, many women came to this behavior intuitively.

The maximum effect, maximum impact if it is all done in one sitting, in one situation.

It happened to me recently. The next thing you should know about the... So as you see, I'm describing the world of the narcissist and from each aspect of the narcissist's personality, I'm giving you some technique or some approach that might work.

The narcissist is a victim of abuse. That's why he became a narcissist.

As a child, the narcissist was terrified of pain, of hurt, of unpredictability.

So he created the false self.

Nasties don't have relationships. They have power plays.

It's all about power. All of it is establishing a balance of terror, a matrix of power.

The narcissist from the very beginning, after the love bombing phase...

By the way, the love bombing phase is not telling you... It's not about telling you that the narcissist needs you or... It's about telling you how unique you are.

The narcissist is trying in the love bombing phase to convert you into narcissist. To taste how it feels to get narcissistic supply.

So the love bombing phase is simply to give you the taste of this drug so that you become junkies as well.

But the minute the narcissist acquires you, the minute the narcissist hovers you, the minute you belong to the narcissist in his mind, the narcissist's message to you is, I don't need you. There is nothing you have that I want or that I need or that I cannot get anywhere else.

Don't think you have any power over me. Because you don't. You do not have power over me. And I can dump you tomorrow and find someone else in minutes.

This is precisely the essence of relationships with narcissists.

In the first phase, the narcissist tells you how special you are.

In the second phase, the narcissist tells you how not special you are.

In the second phase, the narcissist tells you how special you are.

You are amazing. You are unique. You are the love of my life.

I never had this experience with anyone. I never felt so deeply. You know what? I never felt at all.

You are the first and only. The things you do to me.

And this is the love bombing phase and makes you feel very, very unique.

There is one in the world. There is only one you.

And then the shocking transition to the exact opposite message.

Actually, you don't have anything I'm interested in. You can offer nothing I need.

And what you offer, I don't need.

If I'm a cerebral narcissist, I'm above sex. Sex is for guitar. If I'm any kind of narcissist, I'm above emotions. Love is for stupid people.

Weak people.

And if it's not you, then someone else. You should be honored and grateful that I've introduced you into my exciting and adventurous life.

It is this pendulum of conflicting messages that totally unsettles and destabilizes the victim.

The narcissist fully expects to lose you. He already behaves as though he had lost you. You're always temporary.

Even if you're 30 years together, you're still temporary.

The narcissist has something called anticipatory loss anxiety.

From very early age, narcissists have something called object inconsistency or object impermanence.

For those of you who are in psychology, object impermanence is a term coined by Jean Piaget, a child psychologist in the late 60s.

Object in permanence is a term coined by Jean Piaget, a child psychologist.

Object in constancy is a term coined by Margaret Mahler, an expert on child psychology.

Now, when a baby at a very early age, before the first year of life, between five months and one year, when mother leaves the room, the baby starts to cry because out of sight, out of existence, if the baby doesn't see mother, mother stops to exist.

Gradually, the child creates a representation of mother inside his mind. When mother is in the room, the child interacts with mother. When mother is outside the room, the child interacts with the representation of mother. This representation is known as imago.

So, with a narcissist, there is a problem at this phase and what happens is the narcissist interacts only with the representation.

Can you think why? Why would the narcissist prefer to interact with the representation and not with you?

I gave you the clue. I gave you the answer, actually.

If I am afraid to lose you, I would prefer to interact not with you, but with your representation.

You can always walk away out of my life. I don't control what you do and what you may do.

But I have full control over the representation inside my mind.

So, the minute the narcissist sees you and decides that you are potentially a good source of supply, a shocking process takes place and you are not even aware of it.

The narcissist snapshots you, takes a snapshot with his mental camera.

So, he meets someone, he thinks she can supply, provide supply.

At that second, he takes a snapshot. From that second, I want you to understand this.

It's extremely difficult to believe. I know.

From that second, all the time, the narcissist interacts never ever with you, always with a snapshot.

In amenity, you will understand why the narcissist has at some point to devalue you.

Although, in many cases, the cycle repeats itself many times, but such a cycle must exist.

The narcissist has you and a snapshot. But you are not the snapshot.

You have your own life. You develop, you study, you travel, you have lovers maybe.

Don't tell anyone. I mean, things happen to you. You initiate things.

You are, in other words, dynamic.

The snapshot is static. You start from the same position. Overlapping.

And then what happens? You move away.

The narcissist is here. But the narcissist is emotionally invested in the snapshot.

The narcissist controls the snapshot, talks to the snapshot.

So you gradually become less and less relevant as you diverge from the snapshot.

At some point, you become a threat.

The differences between you and the snapshot are so enormous that even the narcissist cannot deceive himself that the snapshot is accurate.

At some point, you challenge the snapshot.

You all know that point. You've all gone through it.

Because the narcissist starts saying things like...

You have changed a lot. You're not the same woman I fell in love with.

What's happening to you? You need help. You're going through a crisis.

He's describing the gap, the abyss that is opening between you and the snapshot.

At that point, he must get rid of you. He must get rid of you.

Because the snapshot matters to him much more than you. He's protecting the snapshot. He has zero tolerance for abandonment. Zero tolerance for loss. Because he is a baby. It's a baby. A baby with no object consistency.

So he gets rid of you.

How to get rid of you?

By devaluing you.

How to justify to himself that he idealized you yesterday and is devaluing you today?

What? He made a mistake? When he idealized you, was he mistaken?

No way. Narcissist is never mistaken. You changed. You are not the same person. The person he's devaluing is not the person that he idealized.

So this mechanism, which is technically known as introjection, this mechanism explains the cycles.

What is the technique?

So everything I'm telling you, there is a technique.

The technique is to animate the snapshot.

Remember, the narcissist has in his mind a representation of you as you used to be when you met.

So you have two options.

To go back to that time and become who you used to be. To give up on your personal progress and development. You will be shocked how many partners do exactly this.

They started to study in the university. They stop. They are successful in business. They close the business. They unwind the changes. That's one technique.

The second technique is what we call brinkmanship. It's to animate the snapshot to extreme. That means to challenge the snapshot.

Brinkmanship is to work on the edge. To provide the narcissist with a new snapshot.

But how can you do that? He already has a snapshot of you by not being you.

You must change so radically and dramatically that the narcissist will have the feeling that he had just met a new partner.

Change everything from hairstyle to clothing to lovers to behave totally differently. Different priorities. Different everything.

And the narcissist will say, wow, I'm falling in love with you again. You're so different.

I've had couples restart sex after 15 years. I've had divorced couples who went back to living together with this technique.

I want to leave you some time to ask questions. That's why I'm looking at my watch.

When did we start? What time we started? What time did we start the lecture? Anyone still alive? 5.15?

Because I want to place for lectures.

Next thing you should know.

Narcissism feels to the narcissist like religion feels to an extreme American fundamentalist.

Narcissism is not just a narcissist, but a fundamentalist. Or a member of ISIS.

Narcissists are religious fanatics. They are members of a very special religion. This religion has one God and one worshiper. And it's the only religion in the world where the God is the worshiper.

But the inner experience, the emotional correlate, the cognitive aspects are utterly identical to a religious experience.

It's not true.

Let us try to understand why.

It's my favorite topic, so I don't care if you're not interested.

To live with a narcissist, to be with a narcissist, is to be a member of a cult.

The narcissist is the leader of the cult and you are the member.

The narcissism religion is missionary. Christianity sent missionaries in the 19th century to Africa. To convert the natives. The natives were happy. Some of the missionaries were tasty. The natives were happy. Some of the missionaries were tasty.

But exactly like Christianity sent missionaries to Africa to convert the natives. Exactly in the same way, the narcissist is trying to convert you to his religion.

What is narcissistic supply? It's to worship the narcissist.

When the narcissist is asking you to give him supply, he is asking you to worship his God, him.

So there is a very interesting new branch of teaching the victims to cope with narcissists the same way we cope with religious fundamentalists.

Do you commit a fanatic Muslim, or a fanatic Jew, or a fanatic Christian? Instinctively you know what not to say. You will not mock Muhammad unless you are Danish. You will not attack God in the presence of a fundamentalist Christian. Jesus, you will not attack Jesus in the presence of a fundamentalist Christian.

So you know, intuitively, instinctively, no one taught you, but you know what not to do. You know what not to say.

And if you are inside the church, or inside the mosque, or inside the synagogue, you definitely know that some things are never done, some things are never said.

Well, when you live with a narcissist, you are living with a religious fundamentalist. Some things you never do, and some things you never say. You never challenge the God of the narcissist, which happens to be the narcissist. You never challenge the attributes of that God. God is all-knowing. God is all-powerful. God is perfect. God is brilliant. You don't challenge this. It's bad taste. It's impolite to tell me that I'm not God. It also means you are delusional, I am God.

But still, it's a church.

So seriously, if you begin to look at narcissism as a religion and understand that you are living with that religion's extreme fundamentalist, you will automatically, instinctively, intuitively know what to do and how to believe.

How does narcissism become a religion? Why does it have religious aspects?

Very briefly.

The child is abused by his parents, mostly his mother, but not only by his parents.

Now, this abuse has many forms. It can be classic. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse, but abuse is any situation where the child is not allowed to separate from the parent and become an individual. When the parent does not allow the child to develop his or her own boundaries, a healthy child with a healthy parent, the child stops here, the parent starts here. There's a boundary between them.

In the case of a narcissistic parent usually, the child is not allowed to build Donald Trump's border wall. The child is not allowed to make a distinction between herself or himself and the parent.

So, you know, the mother who always wanted to be an actress and she failed and she forces her daughter to become an actress. That's abuse.

You know, the mother who spoils the child and tells him that he can never do anything wrong. He can do no wrong. It's abuse because he doesn't allow the child to conflict with the environment, thereby creating a boundary.

So there are many, many forms of abuse.

How does a child react to this?

He creates an imaginary friend, a piece of fiction, the false self.

The false self is everything that the child is not.

The child is small. False self is infinite.

The child cannot guess what the parent will do next. The parent is unpredictable. The false self knows everything, is omniscient. The child is helpless. The false self is all-powerful.

The child is receiving conditional love. If you do this and this, I will love you.

So the child knows that if he fails, he is a bad object. He will not be loved. He is unworthy.

The false self is perfect. The false self is everything the child is not.

But look at the list. Look at the list of the false self.

Perfect. Knows everything. All-powerful. Brilliant.

There are only two entities in the world which have this description. One is Donald Trump and one is God. And Donald Trump has orange hair.

So seriously, the child actually invents God and creates, the child creates, a private religion. This God, the false self, protects him from the parent. Absorbs the pain and the hurt. Isolates the child like a firewall.

The false self is the child's God.

But you know, it's a very primitive God. It's the God of the Old Testament.

And like the God of the Old Testament who asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but the false self asks the child to sacrifice something.

The false self is a God and one's human sacrifice.

But what human sacrifice? What can the child sacrifice? Who can the child sacrifice?

Himself. Only himself.

That's precisely what the child does. He sacrifices himself to this new God, the false self. He sacrifices his true self to the false self. He worships the false self.

But the false self is a very greedy and hungry God.

And like the Moloch, one human sacrifice is not enough. This God demands additional human sacrifices.

And this is where I'm happy to say you come in. You are these additional human sacrifices.

The narcissist has to sacrifice you to the false self. And this is precisely why, in 1995, I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. Why did I need to say narcissistic abuse? Why not abuse?

Because narcissistic abuse is total. The narcissist's only way to sacrifice you to the false self is to eliminate your separate existence.

The narcissist must annihilate you. The narcissist's abuse is not functional or instrumental. It's existential. You must die so that the narcissist lives. You must die so that the false self is gratified and satisfied.

Because if the false self is not satisfied and not gratified, the narcissist will not exist.

So, ladies and ladies, when you team up with the narcissist, it's either him or you. It's a war to death. One of you must die. At least psychologically.

Indeed.

Victims and intimate partners of narcissists describe a feeling of inner death.

It's very interesting because there was a scholar by the name of Otto Kernberg. In 1975, Kernberg invented the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. He said that the distinguishing feature of borderline personality disorder is a deep sense of inner death and emptiness.

When we observe victims of narcissism from the outside, we cannot tell if they are victims of narcissism or if they are patients with borderline personality disorder.

This void, this inner death is common to victims of complex PTSD and to patients with borderline personality disorder.

And it leads to narcissism, up and downs, and to emotional dysregulation, subject for another lecture.

Four brief points and then I will open the floor to two questions.

Point number one.

The narcissist has an external locus of control. In other words, the narcissist ironically believes that his life is determined from the outside.

Consequently, the narcissist blames everything on the outside.

And this is known as alloplastic defense.

So this is the sequence. My life is determined from outside, so I'm not responsible.

So by default, not guilty.

They did it. He did it. She did it.

Not me. So locus of control is external, defense is alloplastic.

This is very interesting for you because if you're willing to play a kind of dangerous game, you can become the narcissist's locus of control.

But you have to be very sharp, astute and know what you're doing.

First of all, you must allow the narcissist to blame you for everything.

Allow, encourage it to blame you for everything.

So you come to the narcissist, it's my fault, I made a mistake, it was wrong, I shouldn't have done it. Oh, poor you, you're suffering because of me, etc.

This has two beneficial effects.

If you say it, the narcissist doesn't have to say it.

Introduces the abuse, but much more importantly, gradually the narcissist out of convenience will begin to regard you as the locus of control.

As the external locus of control.

And he will become extremely codependent on you.

It's totally counterintuitive technique, but it works.

Narcissist will say to himself, everything that's bad is her fault. Probably everything that's good is her fault. Probably everything is her fault. Probably she controls everything.

It's a kind of a conspiracy theory. He will develop a kind of conspiracy theory.

Don't forget, narcissism is a religion. And you can apply for the job of God.

All you need is a long white beard.

Okay, next point, magical thinking.

One of the reasons no therapy works with narcissists, all therapies fail with narcissism.

Possibly the reason, the major reason.

Is the therapist insists to treat narcissist as adults.

They strike an alliance with the narcissist. They negotiate with the narcissist. They argue with the narcissist, they reason with the narcissist. They ask the narcissist to promise things.

The narcissist is not an adult. There is no narcissist alive, whose mental age, well alive, dead ones maybe, but there's no narcissist alive whose mental age is higher than let's say 11.

So it's a mistake to treat narcissists as adults.

My new therapy, cold therapy, is built on this insight.

And all the techniques in cold therapy are based on child psychology.

But one of the things that children have is called magical thinking.

Because children have magical thinking, the narcissist has magical thinking.

Magical thinking is the belief that internal processes affect reality.

So you know the famous phenomenon that children blame themselves for bad things that are happening to the parents. That's magical thinking. Or children expect miracles. Or believe in fairy tales. Or have imaginary friends. These are all forms of magical thinking and of course false self is a major feat of magical thinking.

But if you take magical thinking and add to it grandiosity, godlike, ungodlike, and add to it immunity because I'm god no one can touch me, to mix this you get a very explosive mixture.

Because of this mixture, the narcissist, for example, is reckless, takes risks, crazy risks. Because he believes in magic. He's immune. No one and nothing can touch him, there are no consequences to his actions. He's god, god can do anything no?

So he's reckless, risk taker. And he is gullible, stupid. Believes everyone and everything. Easy to deceive, to cheat and to calm.

No, there is no one more stupid than the person who thinks he is not.

That's another Jew by the name of Socrates.

So the narcissist believes that he knows everything, cannot learn anything, and no one can be more clever than him.

And this is the dream, dream client of a con artist.

You can make use of this.

If you want the narcissist to do something, you convince him that it was his idea. Everything comes from him.

You want to put an idea in his head, you ask for his advice. Even if he's totally unqualified to give this.

You push him to perform miracles. You say that you expect him to do this because he can do anything.

It's very easy to manipulate the narcissist using his grandiosity, magical thinking and belief that he is immune to the consequences of his actions.

And you use the narcissist's entitlement, you tell the narcissist you deserve this. You want him to take risks? You want him to live your life?

All you have to say, for example, you deserve someone much better than me.

True the narcissist will say, I really do.

Or you deserve the easy life, you shouldn't work so hard. Or your luck will carry you through.

It's extremely easy, just be creative.

The reason I'm giving you a two and something hour lecture is because Barbara paid me a lot of money. But if Barbara hadn't paid me a lot of money, the lecture would have been extremely short. And would have contained a single sentence.

Manage your narcissist as you manage your four year old. End of story.

You saw how much money you could have saved?

That's the narcissist for you, you can never trust.

Last point anyway.

Last point and I will open to questions.

One thing people, including by the way, the vast majority of professionals, including the leading experts on paranoia, what they don't appreciate is that paranoia is a form of narcissism.

There are two critical elements in paranoia. Without which you cannot be paranoid.

Point number one. I am the center of attention, someone is paying me attention. And I am sufficiently important for someone to want to harm me.

Take away these two elements.

But what is I'm the center of attention, grandiosity.

It's a form of narcissistic supply. He wants to harm me, the CIA is after me.

What is this?

It means I'm very important. I can be important to the CIA. Or I can be important to my neighbor.

But it doesn't matter, I am important. My neighbor is sitting at night obsessed thinking how to kill my dog. I'm the center of my neighbor's universe. The focus of his thoughts.

This is classic grandiose narcissism. No wonder, most narcissists are paranoid. It's just the other way that's not been recognized, that most paranoids are actually narcissists.

Paranoia technically is called persecutory delusion, because it's a delusion of persecution. The secretary of delusion leads to a behavior called hypervigilance.

Hypervigilance is when I scan the room and I say I'm giving the most important lecture of this new century and this guy is blowing his nose. That's an insult. He is humiliating me.

So a classic narcissist might think like this. He is scanning for disrespect, insults, attacks. So for example, you tell me good morning. Tell me good evening. No, tell me good evening, let's be realistic. What do you think, I don't know, it's evening? You think I'm stupid? I need to tell me it's evening.

This is a hypervigilant reaction. And it's very often utterly ridiculous, as in this example. Good evening. This guy thinks I'm too stupid to notice it's evening.

I can't believe some people, I mean horrible.

So this is paranoia persecutory delusions and hypervigilance, you can make use of it.

You can make use of it by enhancing, and not ameliorating, not reducing, but enhancing the narcissist's persecretary delusions and hypervigilance.

It's a good thing that he has to do. He has to do it in his own way. So he has to do it in his own way.

In various ways.

So for example, you remember the technique of deflectiondecoy?

Where both of you hate the mother-in-law?

So you can use this common enemy to enhance the paranoia and to enhance the hypervigilance.

What for?

The higher the paranoia, the more the hypervigilance, the more the narcissist will need you as an ally. It will create what we call in French folie a deux.

Folie a deux is when two people go crazy together. So both of you will be in this paranoid persecutory delusion and you will feed it and the narcissist will get closer and closer to you.

This is very common in communities, for example, like the militias. The paramilitary militias in the United States, in the Appalachian Mountains and so on. It's common in some terrorist organizations.

For example, we have psychological studies of the Carlos terrorist organization in the 70s. And Badr Meinhof and the Red Guards in Italy. And in all these, there were women and men in cells and they had this dynamic way.

So there are studies in Germany, Badr Meinhof? Some of the leaders were women and they used these techniques exactly to control highly narcissistic men. Same in the Manson family.

So this is the technique I recommend if your narcissist is a serial killer or terrorist.

And if not, and you use this technique, he will end up as one.

Hey guys, what's left of you? I'm open to questions.

My question is, from the outside, how can you tell if the person is psychopath or narcissist?

Actually, it's far easier than sources online make it appear.

You check for two things.

Does the person seek input from other people?

The vast majority of psychopaths are totally uninterested in other people. They would not solicit narcissistic supply. Narcissists are pro-social. That's why many of them end up managing corporations, running countries, because they work with other people.

The majority of psychopaths are known wolves. They have pronounced narcissistic traits, but this is missing. They are not interested in narcissistic supply.

Second thing, narcissist is diffuse all over the place. So, for example, if the conversation is about politics, he knows about politics, then it's science, he knows science, then it's medicine, he's an expert on medicine. It's all over the place. And it leads nowhere beyond narcissistic supply. He gets supply, he's happy.

This is it. It's clear that this is what he wants.

Psychopath is goal-oriented. So if he wants to have sex with you, it would be extremely clear that this is his goal.

He's like a laser, he's very focused. Everything he will do, everything he will say with you and with himself will lead somehow to sexual relations with you at the end of the night.

This is his goal, or if he wants your money.

So he's goal-oriented.

Narcissists are not goal-oriented.

And finally, psychopaths are a lot more impulsive and much less interested in other people's opinions, social conventions and mores.

They are a law unto themselves. They are the law.

Narcissists will be much more aware of etiquette, what to do, what not to do.

On the contrary, many narcissists will use it to emphasize how civilized they are, how educated, how polite.

I say that psychopaths are shortcut people, people who look for shortcuts.

If you have a million dollars in your bag and you have one psychopath to your left and one narcissist to your right, the narcissist will work two months to convince you to give him the million dollars.

He will try to get married with you. He will try to convince you that he has the greatest investment scheme in Mexico City. He will work very hard for two months to get your money. And he will not try to get your money because he wants your money, but he will try to get your money for narcissistic supply.

For example, that he controls you.

Getting your money is proof that he succeeded to control you. That's the supply.

Ironically, the minute he gets the money, he will lose interest in you and the money.

So it's the chase, the process.

The psychopath on your left will most probably shoot you in the head and take you back.

For a million dollars, even I would consider this.

The psychopath is call oriented and goes through shortcuts, antisocial shortcuts, criminal in many cases.

By the way, I hope all of you know that there is no such thing as psychopath and no such thing as sociopath. These are media labels. They are not clinical diagnoses.

We don't use these terms in university. There is a group of people who are trying to promote psychopathy to be a diagnosis, a separate diagnosis. They have been rejected.

This lobby has been rejected for well over 30 years.

So we use psychopath, sociopath as the colloquial way, as the media hype way of saying antisocial personality disorder.

Similarly, of course, there is no such thing as empathy. There is a lot of nonsense online. A lot of nonsense online. It's a sewer.

It's a sewer and I would advise you to stick to serious texts and so on and so forth. It's not so difficult to get.

Instead of going to google.com, go to scholar.google.com. And if you are watching videos on YouTube, there are quite a few people who are professors of psychology and so on and so forth.

And try to distinguish between those who are commercially oriented and corrupt their trade, corrupt their knowledge and those who are more about education.

I would advise you to check out my blog. It's a blog where you can find out more about it.

The word psychopath was coined in the 19th century, so it's a very old word. And since then it's been abused and misused and victimized.

Next question.

If traumatized child becomes narcissistic, where do all those feelings go that the child still had?

Unfortunately, most people are informed by very old knowledge or very wrong knowledge.

We no longer make a distinction between cognitions and emotions, between thoughts and emotions.

Today we regard emotions as cognitive processes, which involve a multitude of senses, input from the senses, but also thoughts.

So, it's not that when the child is, the average age of creating the false self is four. By age four, it's not that the child has emotions and he must somehow bury them or suppress them.

The child has thoughts. Some of these cognitions, some of these thoughts, have emotional content. And in the old classification, we will call them emotions. But they're thoughts. There's only thoughts. We have nothing but thoughts. And thoughts can be suppressed, manipulated, reframed.

We have this very old image of emotions as something that is immutable, unchangeable.

But if emotions are thoughts, you can do to emotions whatever you do to thoughts.

Consider the thought, I want to kill my husband.

Many of you have it. But you don't act on it. You suppress it, you reframe it, you manipulate it somehow.

Same thing exactly with so-called emotions.

The child creates an alternative cognitive system.

What happens to the previous thoughts?

Like the vast majority of thoughts, they have been repressed.

Even a healthy person represses very close to 99% of his or her thoughts. So these are repressed thoughts.

Freud at the time, when we were much younger, said that repressed thoughts maintain energy of some kind. And this energy erupts somehow. Even their thoughts are stored in the unconscious, and the energy of these thoughts drives processes in the unconscious.

We no longer believe this. We no longer believe this because, for example, with CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy.

We take thoughts, and we eliminate them. There is no reaction. There is no integration of the patient. No somatic symptoms.

In a typical CBT treatment course, we eliminate many more thoughts than in typical psychoanalysis. We are heavily influenced by Freud, whether we want to or don't want to. All of us, laymen and professionals, are heavily influenced by this father figure. And he was a genius. A literary genius, probably.

But he had this obsession of converting psychology into a branch of physics.

Psychology is not a branch of physics. He is not a branch of physics, and will never ever be a science.

This is sad news for psychologists, because they very much want to be scientists when they grow up.

Psychology will never ever be a science.

When you deal with raw material, like the human mind, experiments, for example, are not repeatable. The number of hypotheses that you can generate is very minimal. And the number of variables that you are dealing with is so enormous, there is no method on earth to cope with this.

At its best, psychology is a supreme form of literature. The best psychologist ever probably was Tostoevsky.

So when we talk about emotions and so on, be very careful. These are inventions.

The reality is very simple. We think, we can unthink. And we can do that probably since the age of six months.

For reasons I'm not going to right now, I'm pretty convinced that we can unthink starting at six months. And once you unthink, that's probably the end of the story.

The fourth self is also a form of literature. It's a movie.

So I told you, how did I start the lecture?

We are made of dreams. We're all made of dreams, nothing else.

What we think is reality is so heavily filtered, so manipulated in internal models in the brain. We are so motivated by our internal environment rather than external.

We have no access to each other. It's nonsense.

Social pretension. We know nothing about others. We make assumptions, of course.

But these are assumptions. There's no way to say how many of you are robots.

I have to take your word for it.

And if you're well programmed robots, you yourself will believe that you're not robots.

There's no end to this.

So don't even go there.

The child feels bad, the child invents false self.

It's not that some part of the child went somewhere. There are no parts. There's nothing.

We are dreams and stories, narratives.

So we invent a new narrative and that's the end of it.

The problem with the narcissistic narrative is that it is both dysfunctional and harmful to others.

Otherwise, who cares?

Because all of you have narrated. You all tell yourselves I'm good hearted, I'm beautiful, I'm attractive, I'm stupid.

We all have this negative automatic thought. The narcissist narrative covers up for the narcissist's absence.

Your narratives discover your existence, my narrative covers up for my absence.

So in this sense, I am what is called false advertising.

Because what's the first thing we inform each other? Hello, I exist. Forget all the rest. What's the first thing when you see each other? I exist.

At that very second, I perpetuate a deception. Just? I don't know you, I don't know you. You're looking at me? Just by looking at me, I have deceived you.

I don't need to do anything.

Because hello, I don't exist.

So this is why we regard narcissism as a pathology.

I have a question.

Hello, to each other. Hi, to each other.

Two groups.

You see, in your language there's already a problem.

Nautisticush. Nautisticush is cute, you know.

Nautisticush, come here.

It doesn't sound frightening or problem. It sounds like a baby.

So the question was, and I think many of us want to ask this question, is there...

How...

What's the positive outcome where if you take into consideration your story that you're happily married and you somehow awoke to this reality and did something about it? What was your wake-up call and what is this...

What did you do and what can we do if you want to have a relatively normal life with narcissistic ass victims?

There are quite a few assumptions in this question.

I don't know if it's true or not.

The narcissist comes to recognize that he has a problem.

Because, first of all, contrary to misinformation online, the vast majority of narcissists do realize that they are narcissists or that they have narcissistic traits.

And that's why the information is so important.

The narcissist comes to recognize that they have a problem.

But they are proud of it.

They are proud of it.

There is a concept in psychoanalysis called cathexis.

What is cathexis?

Cathexis is emotional investment.

So, the narcissist protects his disorder. He is emotionally invested in his disorder. He is proud of his disorder. He believes that he is the next stage in evolution. He believes that he is superior. He believes that his accomplishments and his creativity are because he is a narcissist.

If he stops being a narcissist, he will not be creative. He will not be president of the United States.

So, the narcissist is married to his disorder much more than he is married to you.

There is a concept called collapsed narcissist.

Again, online you will find the term failed narcissist. You will find that it is not a bad term. It is a failed narcissist. It is a wrong term.

Failed narcissist is a phase in the development of borderline personality disorder. It is a borderline personality disorder.

The correct term is collapsed narcissist. The correct term is to fail, fails to obtain supply, fails in everything. Any hit, rock bottom, he crashed.

In my case, I had a private jet at the age of 21. I sold it to Donald Trump, by the way. I had a private jet at the age of 21. I was heavy multimillionaire. I was professor of physics at the age of 17. I started university at the age of 9. I was very famous in my country in Israel. I had everything.

Until I had nothing. I lost absolutely everything. Including my fiance. It wasn't enough.

Because I recovered very fast. I made millions within two years. And I lost them. And it wasn't enough. I made millions. I was arrested. And my trial was like five years... I was arrested and the trial was five years later.

When I was arrested, they confiscated all my property. And by the time the trial started, I had $40 million.

So I had no reason to change.

My formula was working. Whatever it is that I was, I was doing, I was working. I had to change.

For example, consider Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a grandiose narcissist. Not malignant, but a grandiose narcissist.

Why on earth would he change?

I mean, give me one reason that Donald Trump would change.

Multimillionaire. Television star. President of the United States. Orange hair.

Why would he change?

No incentive. I had no incentive.

But then I was arrested. And I was in prison. And I lost everything and I lost the woman that I was...

I mean, in my terms, loved.

It's not love, it depends on the supply. Love.

And that was a major crisis. It was the second time that I was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

And I said, well, you know, I must find out what it is. And there was nothing. Nothing. No literature. Nothing.

I opened the first website for...

I had to invent the language. I was trying to describe to other people what's happening to me to warn victims and to give them tools to express, because the victims had no language. They didn't know how to express them.

It was unprecedented what they were going through. They couldn't compare their experience to anyone else. No one understood.

Sorry, can I just wrap it up for the others?

No.

It was always the same. It was always the same.

It was always the same.

We had to direct with with...

No one knows. No one knows, we just came here.

So this is how I started to read about narcissism and so on and so forth.

And then 20 years later, I discovered that it had zero effect on me. 20 years later, I was sufficiently qualified to judge.

And I discovered that all my knowledge, arguably, I'm the most knowledgeable person on the planet, on this topic. Nothing. It's not a thing.

So I started to develop therapy.

There was no one else, nothing else.

But of course, for me, it's too late. It's too late.

Anyhow, the narcissist hits rock bottom and only then.

In July 2016, the famous academic magazine, Jonny, New Scientist, published in the United Kingdom, had a cover story. And the cover story was, parents teach your children to be narcissists.

In the past 10 years, there are scholars, academics, professors, who are glorifying narcissism and psychopathy.

Concepts like productive narcissist. High-functioning psychopath.

They say this covers Maccoby, Dutton, others. They say that in today's world, it's positive adaptation to be narcissist and psychopath.

When I went to teach in Russia, I had demand from many, many, many people, many, most of them women. And here is what they asked me.

How can we, can you teach us how to become narcissists and psychopaths?

The self-esteem educational movement in the United States teach, they teach children, 91% of all school children went through this curriculum. They teach them that there is nothing they cannot do. They can do anything. If you just put your mind to it, you can do it. You are special, you are unique.

There is the phenomenon of life coaches, career coaches, and not mentioned names, they are very well known. And the message of these people is wake up the inner giant in you.

And of course, there are technologies that enable narcissism, like social media.

But one thing that is overlooked is that there are technologies that enable psychopathy.

For example, some of the dating applications are utterly psychopathic. So, it's a losing battle. The future is a narcissistic psychopathic civilization. And narcissists and psychopaths will rise to the top. Are rising to the top.

I've simply tried in this lecture to teach you how to survive in this new brave world.

If you think I or anyone can do anything to stop this, you're wrong.

So, two questions.

The first one being, without the percentage of narcissists in the world population.

The second one being, whether narcissists recognize other narcissists or pray, whether they are aware of this distinction in themselves and in others.

Officially, the percentage of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in the general population is 0.97%, 1%.

In inpatient and outpatient populations, people suffering from mental problems, the percentage of people with personality disorders is, depending on the country, 10 to 15%.

So, the third question is whether narcissists are aware of this distinction in themselves or whether they are aware of this distinction in themselves or whether they are aware of this distinction in themselves.

So, contrary to, again, online misinformation, narcissists are not overrepresented in prison.

Psychopaths are.

It's like the movie with Charlie Chaplin.

There's a movie with Charlie Chaplin, the great dictator. He plays Adolf Hitler and he has a secretary and he talks for half an hour and the secretary pushes one button and then he says, punked and she types for half an hour.

And with the translation, I feel the same. I say one word and it's two hours.

So, there are only two populations where psychopaths are overrepresented and these are chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies and prison population, criminals. These are studies by Robert Hare and Babiak.

So, these are the official figures.

I believe the real figure is something like five times more higher.

My own personal statistics because I have a database of 1,700 people diagnosed with narcissistic personalities. They answer a questionnaire of 700 questions. So, I have a million data points and I compare this size to the general population size of forums, of victims, of these and making basic assumptions about family size, household size.

Adjusting, I get something like five percent, so I think prevalence of narcissism really is about five percent today.

But officially, one.

Yeah, whether they recognize each other or not.

Oh, narcissists recognize other narcissists, but not psychopaths.

So, narcissists fall prey to psychopaths.

So, the chain of food is like this.

Psychopaths eat narcissists, narcissists eat all others.

There was a group of scholars in the 90s, Morningstam, Guentherson and others, that suggested that there is a subtype, subtype of bridge, a bridge between psychopaths and narcissists. And that's the psychopathic narcissist, which is me.

And we get the best of both worlds. We are what we call in the United States, twofer.

Twofer means you pay for one, you get two.

If you date me, you get two.

One psychopath, one narcissist.

The psychopathic narcissists, they have antisocial behaviors coupled with grandiosity, to summarize. And they are coterminous. They are the same like what Kernberg called malignant narcissists.

So, when you hear malignant narcissists, it's actually psychopathic narcissists. They are the elite force. They are the elite of the profession. There are very few of them.

To qualify, to qualify, you need to work hard.

So, there are a few.

Because they are very, very few, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Committee decided to keep the two diagnoses separate, not to unite them.

So, psychopathic narcissists can recognize both psychopaths and narcissists.

But grandiose narcissists cannot recognize psychopaths, and psychopaths eat them for breakfast, eat them alive.

I belong to both clubs.

But look at me, I'm a smiling narcissist, a psychopathic narcissist.

And what can you do if you are aware of your condition, you have come to your wit's end, and can you unthink these?

How can you step out of this anyway, in any way? Or how can you improve your life?

I'm sorry, how can you step out of the victim role, if you are once you're aware of a victim role?

You mean as a victim, or as a victim?

I'm not sure I understand the question, no contact.

No, I disagree. I hear it a lot from victims.

This is excuse.

Excuse.

You will not starve, you will have bread, you will have water, you will have where to be, go back to your mother.

Onlypossible reason to be in extremely indirect contact is if you have common children.

The truth is that victims, many victims, like to be victims. This is their comfort zone. They know how to be victims. They are experts at victimhood. They are professional victims.

Victimhood becomes their identity. They are victims, this is their identity.

So it's not about going no contact with a narcissist, it's about going no contact with yourself.

When you leave the narcissist, very often you have to leave yourself as well, behind. That self that you have, you have to leave it behind.

Your existence with a narcissist is already ritualized, it's a ritual. It is exoskeleton, it provides structure, it's predictable, it makes sense of the world, it provides meaning.

You can predict, it provides predictability, you can predict, you know the rules, you know the ropes, all this together is called comfort zone.

I say it unequivocally, there is and cannot be any reason whatsoever, ever not to go no contact. End of story. End of story.

Okay, simple, if you don't go no contact, it's because you don't want to go no contact and you have to ask yourself, why you don't want to go no contact?

The human brain is very creative and trauma bonding is as shape-shifting as the narcissist.

I'm with him because of the children. I'm with him because of the children. I'm with him because he's having a bad period, I will wait until things get better, then I will leave him. I'm with him because I don't know how to make money. I'm with him because he controls all the money. I'm with him because I'm used to him. Even I'm with him because no other man will be much better than him.

Why bother? Yes, he's bad, but you know, they're all bad.

So the human mind is creative and giving you many, many excuses.

The other group of people who are as inventive about why they can't stop doing something are alcoholics and junkies.

You ask alcoholic, why do you drink? I don't drink, but you drink. It's not really drink, it's just two or three a day. And it's not every day, it's just when I'm this. And it's not when I'm that.

I mean, alcoholics lie, deceive, cheat, tell themselves stories, tell other stories, I mean, alcoholics and junkies. And victims addicted to the narcissist, they're all addicts. This is addictive behavior. I have no idea why you should invest another second in someone who has been diagnosed at least with narcissism.

I think you will have to come to the microphone.

Are there any steps or phase or stages? Is it a spectrum?

Yes, it is a spectrum. Everyone has healthy narcissism.

Healthy narcissism is also known as primary narcissism. It is a foundation of self-esteem, self-confidence and so forth.

So this is healthy, and then you start to get less and less healthy.

And of course, you have people with the guy who described the spectrum. His name is Theodore Millon. Theodore Millon wrote a book in the year 2000, Personality Disorders in Daily Life. And there he describes the spectrum.

So you have healthy narcissism, narcissistic style, narcissistic behavior, narcissistic personality, narcissistic disorder.

So of course, online, the vast majority of claims that someone is a narcissist, they are nonsense.

You have a fight with someone. Today, you don't call him an asshole, you call him a narcissist.

But that's not a clinical idea. There are very few people who are narcissists, actually, extremely few.

But that's not a clinical idea.

My question is also from the victim's side, that if your only advice method is no contact, then why the strategies and whether or not we also become damaged and distorted by using these strategies?

The strategies are because you refuse to listen. That's why the strategies. You refuse to go no contact.

For example, we tell people not to smoke. Don't smoke.

But many people refuse to listen, they smoke.

So we tell them, okay, if you smoke, come once a year for screening of the lungs, if you smoke.

These are strategies in case you insist not to implement the only proper cause of action.

And I think the second part, I answered already, yes, of course.

By implementing these strategies, you are becoming a narcissist. A narcissist, at least.

You are using the narcissist's own strategies against him.

But, you know, it's like, I don't remember who said it, I think Nietzsche said it.

If you stare into the abyss, sometimes the abyss stares at you. And of course, very often you fight monsters and you become one.

But that's your choice. To stay, to stick around the narcissist, capture the narcissistic coronavirus, is your choice.

I noticed that in the vast majority of your examples, you refer to a narcissistic person as a male. Is there a reason for this? Like, is the majority of narcissistic people male, or what is the ratio between women and men, and if there is a difference between female and male narcissists?

Thank you.

Up until the year 2000, the statistics we had were that 75% of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder were men. And this is despite the fact that the majority of people who went to therapy were women.

We could therefore, based on these two facts, we could therefore pretty much assume that almost all narcissists are actually men.

Things have changed since then. And today, depending on the country, in a growing number of countries, 50% are men and 50% are women.

This led to a revision of the text in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition, June 2013. The text was revised and now it says that 50 to 75% are men. 50% to 75%.

The growing number of women narcissists is part of a much bigger picture about changing gender roles.

Men, women, I'm sorry, have adopted male behaviors and male traits in increasing numbers. And today, the vast majority of women under the age of 40 or 45, depending on the country, the vast majority of these women are indistinguishable as far as our studies, indistinguishable for men, as far as behaviors, choices, cognitive functioning, sexual functioning, etc.

I can give you as many statistics as you want. I don't know, one-night stands. Women have almost as many one-night stands as men. It was unheard of only 20 years ago. You name it. Women became men. Women became men in the, I mean, women have adopted the positive aspects of masculinity, for example, competitiveness, but unfortunately also the negative sides of masculinity, they've adopted the entire package.

For some very strange reason, women were really strange. I don't know why women did not discriminate, did not distinguish the positive sides from the negative side.

So parameters like promiscuity or narcissism, which used to be exclusive male behaviors and traits are now equally represented among women. And today, for example, the rate of adultery among women is equal to men. As I told you, one-night stands or casual sex is almost the same, not yet the same, but mental style.

Psychopathic behaviors have exploded among women. Psychopathic, not narcissistic.

Including criminal behavior.

So while 20 years ago, the answer would have been that women obtain supply in different ways, women narcissists obtain supply differently to male narcissists.

Today, I don't think there's any distinction anymore.

I'm sad to say this because gender differences were the spice of life in some respects, not talking about equality, but about differences.

Now, one thing we know from studies of suppressed minorities.

So we have, of course, numerous studies about the Jews, studies, numerous studies about black Americans, Native Americans, minorities in the USSR. So we have a huge body of knowledge about what happens to minorities, suppressed minorities.

And we know that when a minority has been suppressed for a very long time and then acquires new freedoms, they don't know how to use these freedoms. They become extremely narcissistic and psychopathic.

Possibly there's hope.

Women have been enslaved for thousands of years, mistreated and abused institutionally for thousands of years, and have developed the weapons of the weak among them, passive aggression, which is a variant of narcissism.

I want to believe that once everyone, everyone, including men, gets comfortable with the new status quo, I want to believe that these manifestations will abate.

But history says exactly the opposite.

Narcissistic and antisocial behaviors among suppressed minorities, which have acquired new freedoms, these behaviors actually go up.

So my optimism has no foundation in history. If we judge only from history, women will become equally, if not more, represented in crime, in extreme narcissism, in destructive activities.

Thank you very much for your presentation. It really was no Disneyland.

And reflecting on the eight methods that you described to us, I would like to touch on the extreme aggression, whether it has any use in, or whether it has any facts in raising children, like what is it?

Sorry? After discard, sorry. Aggression has effect on children, of course. Before discard, after discard, narcissists, not narcissists, aggression always has an impact on children. Because the children cannot integrate aggression into a view of the world. The children are constructing a view of the world, and they cannot integrate aggression well into that.

One of the ways they integrate aggression is by internalizing it. So they either become aggressive or they become suicidal. If the aggression is systematic, repeated, etc., etc., these children have much higher chance of becoming criminalized, externalized aggression, or self-destructive could be anything. Drugs, I don't know what, self-destructive. If the aggression is within the family structure, they see aggression in the family, the chances of them becoming abusers, physical abuses. In the future, in their own families, are higher than 50%.

So aggression is intergenerational, carries forward.

There is a distinction, also we should make distinction between physical aggression and other forms, like verbal aggression. Both forms carry forward.

So a child exposed to physical or verbal will abuse physically or verbally his wife, his children.

But as far as self-destruction and criminalized behavior, verbal aggression has very little effect, only physical and sexual.

So let's summarize.

If the child witnesses physical or sexual aggression, or if the child is victim of physical and sexual aggression, then this child will become destructive, either destructive or self-destructive.

If the child witnesses verbal aggression or is victim to verbal aggression, the child will express verbal aggression only in the family structure, so when he has a family. And is not likely to develop criminalized behavior or self-destructive behavior. One of the reasons we think is that the child can oppose verbal abuse much better than physical abuse. A helplessness is much bigger in physical abuse than in verbal abuse. But if the child witnesses verbal abuse between two adults, mother and father, then it's a different story. It carries forward to his family. And the effects are the same if he witnesses physical aggression between two adults, significant adults. And if he experiences physical aggression, the effects are the same. If there is passive aggressive aggression, if aggression is in the air, if the adults are not aggressive physically, not aggressive verbally, but they hate each other, then it's clear. I mean, they don't talk, silent treatment, even this has effect on the child. And this is precisely why we think that divorce is always better than bad relationship for children. And also the reason why we appoint primary custodian, one parent who is in charge, is because not to continue the marriage in other ways. But also depends on the age. If the child is 18, 16, it's a different story. The child is four. There is a period, a very dangerous period, called formative years. This is four to six years. Okay. To all the survivors, thank you for coming. It was a pleasure to talk to you. And I hope to see you again. Thank you for the translation. ###

Manipulate the Narcissist and Live to Tell About It? (Lecture in Budapest)

My Name is Sam Vaknin: Narcissists, Psychopaths, Abuse

Adolescent Narcissist: "Donovan"

Narcissistic Abuse and Victim Aggression (Interview in Bronson Men)

Collapsed Covert Narcissist: Dissonances, Indifference, No Boundaries

Doormat Covert Narcissist Turns Primary Psychopath

Insider View Of Narcissists Shared Fantasy With YOU (+ Psychopath's)

Insider Tips: Rid Yourself of Your Toxic Partner (with Sarah Davison)

Coming to Grips with Your Narcissist (with Coach Eleanor Schuyffel, Coaching Comeback)

Narcissist’s Relationship Cycle Decoded and What To Do About It - Part 1 of 3

BEWARE! "Healers" of Narcissism Ignorant or Swindlers, No Cure