Right. I'm recording as well.
So we are ready to say our first hello.
Yes. So welcome Narc Troopers, narcissistic abuse recovery collaborators.
Today, I am honored to have as my guest, the single most impactful professional in the field of narcissistic abuse, who has shaped my own personal recovery more than anyone or anything over the past five plus years.
He is the grandfather of all studies of cluster B disorders and has coined much of the language used today by mental health professionals to talk about NPD and narcissistic abuse.
He's the author of the very first book on narcissistic abuse from almost 30 years ago entitled Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and he is a professor at several institutions of higher learning all over the globe. He's produced the largest library of lectures in this field over just about anybody else.
He has a cohort of diagnosed narcissist for continued research that is also the largest in the world, and all of these substantial accomplishments speak for themselves.
So without further introduction, welcome Dr. Sam Vaknin.
Thank you.
Please call me Sam, would be a much better use of the time.
Thank you for the kind introduction.
Thank you.
And you can call me Jenna.
Okay, Jenna. That's a deal.
All right. Well, let's jump in.
I think with all of the mental health professionals and self-proclaimed experts that you find online, they're all dispensing advice on how to stop trauma and PTSD and all of this kind of thing, following relationships with narcissists.
What do you think is the one single most helpful thing that we need to remember if we are in recovery?
In my view, the one, the most pertinent thing to remember, most important thing to remember, is that the voices that speak to you within your mind, within your head, are not yours. They're not your voices. They're not your authentic self. They're not who you are.
In all likelihood, the voices you interact with in your mind are voices implanted there by the narcissist in a process known as entraining.
And these voices are self-negating, self-defeating, self-hating, self-rejecting, self-loathing. And they usually collude and collaborate with previous voices in your life. Previous introjects, that's a clinical term. Voices of other people who have kind of misjudged you somehow, put you down, criticize you, negated you, and so on.
So there's this coalition of voices which are trying to drag you down. They produce anxiety and depression and so on.
Then there are two possibilities. Some victims react to this barrage of sadistic, harsh, internal criticism. Some victims react by becoming narcissistic. They develop grandiosity, they become aggressive, they emulate the narcissist actually.
That's one solution, and the other solution is depression. Depression is a form of self-directed aggression.
And so victims end up being either depressed and anxious or narcissistic and aggressive.
But these outcomes are alien. They come from the outside. They come from the exposure to the narcissists, from the narcissists' influence on you, the process of relentless brainwashing coupled with extreme abuse in a variety of forms, verbal, physical, otherwise, which have demolished your defenses and your ability to recognize who you are, what is real and what is not, and what kind of functioning is permissible, and what kind of functioning is counterproductive and perhaps socially unacceptable.
So you're lost. At the end of the game, at the end of the process with the narcissists known as shared fantasy, you're essentially lost. You're lost to yourself, you no longer know who you are.
And you've also lost the orientation within reality, something known as reality testing. You're unable to judge reality appropriately.
And this is very disorienting and very, very frightening.
I'm just putting, I'm just recording this on my, on my iPhone as well because I really, really distrust technology. It's my paranoid ideation when it comes to technology.
So there's a sense of loss, loss of self, loss of others, the narcissist included, and loss of reality.
When you listen to these voices, ignore them, you would do well to ignore all your internal voices initially, and you would do well to seek help, external help, objective help, neutral help, help that would assist you to gain, regain perspective and find your authentic voice, because your authentic voice is being drawn by these malevolent voices inside you.
I think that's one of the most difficult things is to be able to develop that discernment to know their voice, the narcissist voice from your own when you come back to reality.
Because I think a lot of people don't know how to acclimate to the real world after they've been away. It's like being in a coma. It's like being abducted by aliens or something.
So you come back and you really are out of your elements, you're out of your skin.
And the thoughts that you're having, it's very difficult to know whether they belong to you or whether they've been implanted there by the narcissist.
Because it's very insidious. It feels like it might be your conscience. It feels like it might be your own inner voice, your inner child speaking to you, and it just gets very muddled up in there.
So that's very, very challenging.
But I agree with what you said about trying to get help to help you figure out where your authentic voice is and the narcissist voice ends.
I think it's very challenging to find trained professionals who know about this, who even know what entrainment is in this context, and can help you.
Do you have any suggestions there about where a person can go?
I would look for trauma specialists.
We tend to mistakenly gravitate towards relationship specialists.
What you have had with the narcissist was not a relationship.
By any extension of this word that I know, lexical or otherwise, you did not have a relationship. You're exposed to an exceedingly traumatizing set of circumstances and experience.
And you would do well to seek a trauma specialist.
Trauma specialists are well trained and qualified, and they know how to deal with disorientation, sense of dislocation, dissociative reaction, for example, loss of memory. They know how to deal with a loss of sense of self, which is very, very common in PTSD, for example. They know how to do with flashbacks, which overpower you, overwhelm you, and drown you, basically. They know how to reconstruct a resilient self, able to withstand the onslaught of the trauma and its after effects.
So they are well equipped to deal with this.
Regrettably, most people in the wake of a relationship with the narcissist, they seek regular normal therapy with a regular run-of-the-mill therapist, and they deal with relationships issue.
He was inconsiderate, orshe was dysempathic or not compassionate enough.
That was not the core problem.
That was not the core problem.
That was not the core problem.
The core problem is that narcissistic abuse is a structured attempt to negate you, to vitiate you, a structured effort with stages and phases and transitions that is aimed at removing your sense of agency, your independence, your personal autonomy, your ability to function, that is known as self-efficacy.
It is a concerted effort, concerted endeavor to convert you into an internal object in the fullest sense of the word, only internal within no external dimension or existence.
In order to become an internal object, you need to suspend animation.
In addition to suspending your judgment, in addition to suspending your emotions or ignoring them, you need to suspend animation. You need to denude.
When you want to convert someone into an internal object, you need to denude them of their externality and of their separateness. You need to convert them into an extension of yourself as a narcissist.
That's what the narcissist does. It converts you into an extension of himself, or at best an actor or an actress within a script known as the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy is everything to do with the narcissist and nothing absolutely to do with you. You're just a probe. A probe.
So you're being massively objectified, ultimately objectified.
All these things have nothing to do with relationships, the way we know them. All these things have to do with classic trauma.
Trauma has all these are.
When you're confronted with a natural disaster or an accident, all these things happen actually. They happen in rapid succession, so you don't feel them. They're indiscreet in the sense that they're not discrete.
But all of them happen.
And similarly, when you're exposed to an 18-year-old, 18 years of such a relationship, so-called pseudo-relationship, all these things happen again, but in a much more complex way.
And that is why it is known as complex trauma.
But all these elements exist in a one-off trauma, like a natural disaster or an accident or the death of a loved one, and in a protracted trauma, a complex trauma.
So you need to see a trauma therapist, a symbolist. And there are many of them.
Yes, I think sometimes you don't know what to do because you don't understand what's happening to you at those times.
So you find yourself with providers who have zero training or understanding.
And I think sometimes that can be counterproductive and do more harm than it helps because the advice that they have is generic and meant for relationships, as you said, which is inappropriate as far as dealing with the issues that actually need to be looked at in those situations.
And it's just really hard, I think, for people to find the right place to go because they don't know where to start.
And they may cycle through four or five different places for help before they land on something that is really meaningful for them.
I think there are three mistakes that therapists commit when they deal with narcissists or with partners of narcissists or with friends of narcissists or people who've been exposed to narcissists.
I'm saying exposed because narcissism is the equivalent of a viral disease and there's contagion.
There are vectors of contagion proven in literature and numerous studies, including recent studies, that have demonstrated that if you're exposed for a few minutes in a classroom to people with cluster B personality disorders, you develop cluster B-like behaviors and even traits.
That's a few minutes exposure. These are studies, recent studies. I have it on my YouTube channel, if you wish.
So what therapies fail to understand, to appreciate, I think, is number one.
The narcissist himself or herself, half of all narcissists are women nowadays, by the way, the narcissist himself or herself is the victim of trauma. It's a post-traumatic condition.
Now that's very important to understand because it endows the narcissist with an inordinate access to traumatized people.
The narcissist shares a background of trauma with his victims. That is part of the hold that the narcissist has on the victim.
This sharing, this feeling of resonance, this instant recognition of each other.
So this is something therapists fail to appreciate. They treat the narcissist as an obnoxious a-hole.
And he is, of course. Narcissists are obnoxious a-holes.
But they're obnoxious a-holes because they are compensating for something. They're defending against something. They're defending against shame and humiliation and against anger, rage, and almost rage, and against trauma and abuse in childhood, and so on and so forth.
That's number one.
When you are dealing with someone who has cohabited or has had an intimate relationship or has had a friendship or even in the workplace has been exposed to the narcissist, you need to single out and you need to focus on this resonance, this trauma resonance and very few therapists are doing this.
Number two, most therapists, the vast majority of therapists, consider narcissists to be adults. That's why all treatments fail with narcissists because we treat them as adults.
Narcissists are not adults. The mental age or the emotional age of a narcissist, typical narcissists, is around six years old. Some of them are two years old. some of them are nine years old. No one is older than nine years.
Why is this important?
Because the narcissist triggers in you, the maternal instinct. Whether you are men or woman is irrelevant. We all have a maternal instinct. We all smile at a baby. We're all protective of babies, regardless of what kind of genitalia we carry. I mean, it's not a gender thing.
So the narcissist provokes you the maternal instinct.
Because the narcissist is truly a child.
It's an interaction which is multi-layer.
When you interact with the narcissist, you become the narcissist's mother. This is why it's so difficult to abandon the narcissists, because what mother can abandon her child? It's heartbreaking.
And this, the failure by therapies to recognize this dimension of the relationship, the maternal dimension, is, as you said, is very counterproductive, it presents serious problems.
Well, go ahead.
If you tackle the relationship as if it were a relationship between two adults, you're getting it all wrong.
And finally, the third point, I said there are three points where they are solely mistaken.
The third point is to try to apply what we know about relationships in psychology, couple therapy, this kind of thing, to try to apply it to relationships with narcissists.
These are the wrong tools because that's not a relationship at all. It's a fantasy, it's a dependency.
There are many, many pathologies involved. It's not a fantasy. It's a dependency. There are many, many pathologies involved.
It's not a relationship in any way, shape, or form. It's wrong to apply to it, for example, techniques borrowed from couple therapy or marital therapy.
Yes.
I have found that many of the things that you've talked about, dual mothership, for example, sort of explains the multi-layered characteristics of these relationships, and that it's not just, you know, with most of the people that I have talked to, yes, they functioned as mother, but the narcissist sort of parentified them. And it was that two-way thing.
I know in my case, my narcissist was my mother also. And I would do these little dances and just be a child because I didn't have that when I was growing up.
And he would say, look at her go and actually just really reinforce and validate that because for the first time in my life I was seen and heard by a parent figure while at the same time I parented him as well and that's just very difficult for a lot of people to wrap their minds around.
How could that be possible?
But it's very possible.
In fact, it's pretty much the dynamic, I think, that you have so aptly spoken of many times over.
So I want to ask this, you know, I think that people in today's world have co-opted the term narcissism and everybody's a narcissist and they use the words so freely, so liberally, to describe, you know, just anybody and everybody. You see it on television, you see it everywhere.
And I don't think they have any idea what it is. They have just, it's misinformation, disinformation, little partial bits of tidbits of things they think they know, but it really is off.
And I know that there was a time when things like ADHD and autism spectrum disorders were not understood by people either, like 20 years ago. We didn't know what that was, really. Now we have a name, and I think that most people have some basic understanding of what it is.
I would like to see, you know, that happen with narcissism for us to have a better, deeper understanding of that.
Where do you think all of this is going to be with this disorder 10 years from now, 5 years from now?
The situation is very grave because the overwhelming, the vast majority of information online is wrong, simply wrong.
Flies in the face of what we know from studies.
That's why academics, myself accepted. Most academics refuse to be on YouTube, for example. They don't have YouTube channels. They don't talk to the public. They don't because they've given up.
The space has been usurped and hijacked by self-styled experts, some of them with academic degrees, self-styled experts who know nothing about narcissism and pretend to be world-class experts on narcissism.
I even heard some of them saying that one in six people are narcissists.
No one who knows anything about narcissism would say something. This is proof positive of utter, profound, unmitigated abysmal ignorance of the condition.
And yet, this particular person and these people are considered to be the leading experts on narcissism by the hoi polloi, by the masses.
Because the masses don't know better.
And when documentary filmmakers make films and when the media seeks interviews, they gravitate towards YouTube self-styled experts. They don't go to universities.
There's also a hatred. There's a hatred of expertise and intellectuals. There's a hatred of knowledge and universities nowadays. Absolutely. There's anti-intellectualism.
So it fits into a much bigger trend. Everything is corrupted, not only the word narcissism, the word gaslighting is corrupted. Everything is corrupted.
This is known as therapy speak. People borrow terms from clinical psychology and from therapy. They totally mutilate these terms, distort them, molest them, destroy them, and then use them wrongly.
Now, if someone has a degree in psychology, someone is a PhD in psychology, for example, it doesn't mean anything because psychology is a vast field and normal field. You need to be an expert on narcissism. Your degree in psychology means nothing.
Means nothing.
So someone who is an expert on schizophrenia has nothing to say about narcissism and should not be listened to. And so on.
So we have these situations online as well because people, and that's the corrupting influence of money. There's a lot of money sloshing around.
A lot of money sloshing around.
And what these people do, they maintain the undisputed victims of narcissists. They maintain them in a victimhood status.
They maintain the victim. They encourage the victim. They complement the victim. They make victimhood a very attractive proposition.
Victimhood makes you special. Victimhood endows you with rights. Victimhood makes you special. Victimhood endows you with rights. Victimhood, you know, becomes your identity.
There's competitive victim. There are all kinds of self-aggrandizing nonsensical labels like empath and super empaths and galactic empath and I don't know what, a yokei empath and I don't know.
So it's successful.
I don't think the clinical construct of narcissism is going to recover. Honestly.
What did you mean by that?
I mean there is no way we could regain and retake the true, clinically defined meaning of narcissism. This is not going to happen. It's not going to happen.
And even in autism, by the way, there's a lot of distortion, a lot of nonsense, not by them.
When the masses led by charlatans, con artists, take over an element of clinical psychology, that element is doomed, absolutely doomed.
Like the word ego, for example. Take the word ego, which is a clinically defined construct. You can't use the word ego just like that.
They took the word ego, and now everyone and his dog is talking about ego, eliminating the ego, overcoming the ego. He has a big ego, he has a small ego.
They have no idea what they're talking about.
So the word ego would never recover. There's no way we could go back to our pristine, accurate understanding of the word ego. That's dead in the water. That's finished.
And this contamination is not limited to psychology.
Take the word energy.
Vital energy, cosmic energy, all kinds of.
Energy is an exceedingly well-defined concept in physics. I should know. One of my PhDs is in physics.
And yet the masses use the word energy in a way that has nothing to do with physics.
Pretending, they pretend that it is physical.
When they say life energy, they mean it in a physical sense, like there is some physical thing there.
But of course, there's no such thing as life energy.
So science is corrupted, not only psychology. All the disciplines have been corrupted. When the masses gained access to the vocabulary of the sciences, they hijacked this vocabulary and they corrupted it unrecognizably.
But having said all this, narcissism is not merely a clinical entity.
Narcissism is an organizing principle of society. Narcissism is a hermeneutic principle.
It's a principle that allows us, a concept that allows us to make sense of the world.
So, narcissism helps us to understand not only human behavior, but for example, collective behavior. For example, history. Make sense of certain disciplines such as show business, the entertainment industry, even the medical profession.
So narcissism started off as a clinical entity, but I agree that it has applications which are not clinical, applications in sociology, in anthropology, applications that are not clinical, not in clinical psychology. I agree with it.
And in this sense, I think narcissism is a very, very important thing, because it helps us to make sense of the postmodern world.
It's also a kind of private religion.
Because narcissism, the narcissist, regards himself as godlike, and he worships himself. It's a one-man church.
So there are strong religious undertones in pathological narcissism.
And while I agree that narcissism should not be confined or limited to clinical psychology, I still hold that only people who are qualified to do so should discuss narcissism.
I agree.
I wanted to ask what does that say about our current society, that where, at least it appears that narcissism is on the uptick growing exponentially and that most of our world leaders from, well, we can name a lot of them, seem to have some cluster B disorder.
And I don't know if it's just because my awareness now is like it's on my radar and I'm looking for it. Like if I see a car that I've never seen before, a Tesla or something, and then after that I see them everywhere. Is it like that?
Or do you feel that our culture, especially here in America, has moved in that direction so that it seems to me that we glorify these traits that it's all about winning, empathy, compassion, mercy, authentic feelings and all of that don't really matter as long as you win, as long as you get lots of money and lots of things and have that kind of power and sway, then nothing else matters.
Am I seeing those Teslas, or is it really true that we're living in an increasingly narcissistic world?
First of all, it's important to distinguish between narcissists and psychopaths.
Psychopaths are interested in power, access, money, sex, and so on. Not narcissists.
Narcissists are interested in narcissistic supply. End of story.
Narcissists may decide that the best way to obtain supply or secure supply is to be rich.
So then they would make money, but they would make money in order to garner narcissistic supply.
Everything else is secondary, everything else is means to an end, while the psychopath would focus on making money.
So it's goal oriented.
Narcissists only goal is narcissistic supply. It's attention. It's all about attention.
We need to ask ourselves, why have people become so obsessed with attention? And the answer usually in psychology is that we become obsessed with something that we lack, something that we are not getting.
And then the next question of course is, why are we not getting attention?
And I think the simple answer is there are too many of us. Simply.
It is not a coincidence that narcissism has exploded together with the population.
I think it's becoming more and more difficult, bordering on impossible, to be seen, to simply be seen, to be noticed, to be cared for, to be, to have your interests, your best interests, vouchsafed and guarded by someone, to be important to someone.
It is becoming very difficult because there are too many of us and we are competing.
Ultimately attention is a scarce resource. It's a scarce resource because we are limited beings.
Ultimately, attention is a scarce resource. It's a scarce resource, because we are limited beings. We are not God.
So if I have 100 units of attention, I can give them to you or I can give them to someone else.
And if you're not seen, you're dead.
This is something very primordial. The baby needs to be seen in order to survive. A baby that is not seen is a dead baby.
So to be seen as a survival instinct and a survival strategy, and when we're not seen, we panic. We absolutely panic.
That's why prisoners get numbers. Their names are gone. They become numbers. They're not seen.
This is the major punishment, by the way, not the denial of freedom.
The major punishment is having lost your identity, having become commoditized, having become a unit, indistinguishable from others. That's the main punishment in prison.
So I think there is a panic about being seen, being noticed, because there are too many of us competing for scarce resource.
And I think this gave rise to narcissism.
And of course, technologies cater to narcissism.
The technologies did not create narcissism. They simply cater to these newly emergent needs.
And people escalate. As they compete for attention, they need to escalate.
Because, you know, in order to stand out, you need to do crazy things. You need to be crazy.
In other words, you need to be Cluster B.
What is Cluster B? Cluster B is drama. Cluster B is grandiosity. Cluster B is color. Cluster B is insanity.
Cluster B is, whether we like it or not, they attract attention. They're great at attracting attention.
Borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder. It's all about attention.
Even the psychopath uses attention, leverages attention to obtain goals. It's all about attention.
So when people felt the need to be noticed, to be seen in a meaningful way, seen in a meaningful way, to attract attention, within increasingly more virtual environments, not real, they settled on cluster B personality disorder as a survival strategy.
It's very important to understand that in clinical psychology, nothing is bad or good. This is not theology. This is not philosophy. This is not ethics. Clinical psychology is a set of observations which are neutral.
So depression, for example. Is depression bad or good? It's a wrong question in clinical psychology.
If you're in Auschwitz and you're not depressed, something is wrong with you. The appropriate reaction in Auschwitz would be to be depressed.
In other words, depression in Auschwitz indicates mental health, not mental illness.
So everything is relative. Cluster B personality disorders in current day society, they are not negative. They are positive adaptations, exactly as depression was a positive adaptation in Auschwitz.
We have created a world that has normalized Cluster B. If you want to succeed, if you want to be noticed, if you want to prevail, if you want to survive, you want to procreate, if you want to, you need to be Cluster B. That's a positive adaptation.
If you're not Cluster B, you're left behind. If you're Cluster B, you become president.
It's as simple as that.
It's true.
And, you know, I have noticed that, you know, what you said about technology reinforcing this, that, you know, the future, when it's been normalized and if it's a positive adaptation, and if anything, narcissists are all very adaptable. That's just one of the hallmark features of the disorder so that, you know, they can adapt to anything and shape shift and do all of that.
So let's think about AI for a second and the role that that can play.
We've talked about cures. I don't think society is looking for treatments or cures because, like you say, it's been normalized, it's been accepted. And if it's a positive adaptation, it's saying that, you know, in a way it's evolving, not devolving. It's not something that needs to be cured because it's a way of being resilient and changing with society and adapting in ways that you're going to be successful. And that everybody should probably try to be more narcissistic if they want to be successful and competitive.
But with AI, you know, the similarity between narcissist and robots.
You talk about your uncanny valley thing where, you know, I looked at robots in pictures of them in Japan recently, and they're really just indistinguishable between humans at this point.
So is there a possibility you think that we're going to have more of what Elon Musk is doing with Neuralink or like some kind of chip to put into the brain to do something with the sort of cognitive issues and brain issues.
Well, first of all, I think like you said, society doesn't really see their needs to be a cure because they don't see that it's really a problem. But if they did, and if we did make advancements in trying to do something, I know you've had like cold therapy that has had some success in at least behavior modification.
Do you think AI? We could partner with that.
I've often fantasized about this.
Like, yes, there's going to be a chip and we can implant that somewhere. And then suddenly they're going to be a regular, neurotypical person with a constellated self and functioning identity and ego.
Do you see that happening at some point? And why not, if no?
In psychology, we have heard from the very beginning two competing approaches, a reductionist approach, which is essentially medicalized, essentially pseudo-scientific.
And a reductionist approach says, one of these days, we're going to find the array of genes that when expressed produce narcissistic personality disorder or whatever else. Or one of these days we're going to find the proteins or the pathways in the brain or the hormones or the enzymes or what have you. One of these days we're going to find a magic cure, a silver bullet, a push button, you know, and we're going to resolve this, we're going to reduce it to medicine.
We're going to realize that psychology is a sham. It's a pseudoscience, which, by the way, I agree for it. And we'regoing to reduce it all to the brain.
And once we reduce it all to the brain, it's a complex organ, but in a hundred years, we will know how to treat it. And so everything is a disease of the brain.
There was even a huge debate about addiction. There was a school that said that addiction is a brain disease, not a behavior. I was dead set against it starting 30 years ago. I keep saying that addiction is absolutely a choice, not a brain disease.
And today I'm happy to say that scholars are coming around to my way of thinking, and they're beginning to discard the nonsense that it is a disease of the brain.
But it's an example of the reductionist approach. Addiction is a super complex behavior, possibly the most complex we know. And it involves multiple choices all the time. And yet they try to reduce it to some disturbance in the brain that could be medicated away.
So this is the reductionist medical, medicalized approach.
And the other approach is holistic, that what we call psychology, which is not a science and can never ever be a science.
But it's good literature.
What we call psychology is the totality of the human system, and that we are so far from knowing everything about the human system that anything we say today is hubris and nonsense combined.
And even in principle, we can never know the totality of the human system because we are observing ourselves.
And there's a lot of work in philosophy, my other PhD, there's a lot of work on philosophy, why self-observation always has its limitation.
There's been work by Kurt Gödel and others, that the system observing itself will always be wrong somehow.
So in principle, we can never know ourselves to the point that we could medicate away disorders, which are systemic.
So that's why I don't believe in a cheap or any this kind of solution.
Narcissistic personality disorder is the totality of the personality. It's not a bacterial infection. It's a totality of the personality.
Take away the narcissism. What you live behind is an absence and nothing.
That's why I believe that focusing on nothingness as a philosophy could help narcissists.
But essentially the narcissist is a shell constructed around a void and emptiness.
Take away the shell. What's left behind is nothing.
So, no, I don't believe in the possibility to resolve this.
But I do believe that artificial intelligence is merely a manifestation of a much bigger trend.
We have been trying to monetize and commoditize and trade attention.
We've converted attention to a commodity.
And then we traded units of attention via social media and in other ways.
We try to quantify attention.
For example, with likes on Facebook. We try to quantify attention and then we try to allocate attention using algorithms.
So this was a technological solution to the redistribution of attention in a way that would be possibly more equitable and would allow everyone to feel that they're getting attention somehow.
But today, that's not enough. That's not enough because we discovered that even when people do get much more attention than they used to, they're not happy because they compare themselves to other people who are getting more attention.
So there is envy and competitiveness and what we call relative positioning.
People are not after absolute attention. They are after relative attention. They want to get more attention than others.
And so now the solution is to commoditize reality, to create artificial environment, alternate universe, digital, technological, electronic universes, where you could obtain infinite attention.
Infinite attention is not possible in reality. Infinite attention is absolutely possible and could be built into virtual reality.
Artificial intelligence is one step in the redefinition of reality, repackaging of reality, commoditization or commodification of reality, and the creation of an alternative universe where there's human intelligence and artificial intelligence, real reality and artificial reality, real attention and feigned attention or simulated attention, everything will be simulated.
We're entering the world of simulation. We are converting the world into a simulation.
People have given up on reality and people have given up on other people.
Because reality and other people are ornery. Reality and other people are onerous. Reality and other people are unpleasant, unbearable, intolerable, enough.
People want to be alone. And they want to be alone, they want to isolate themselves within an alternative universe, within an alternate reality, where all their needs will be instantly and swiftly satisfied, including the need for infinite attention.
That's the situation, and the visual intelligence is just a step in that direction.
I think that the parallel between the shared fantasy with the narcissist, escaping into that and surrendering to it, being consumed by it and all of that, is very similar to our desire to flee reality now.
That's why narcissists are so successful.
Exactly.
Narcissists are masters of fantasy. If humanity has made a collective decision, humanity made a collective decision to transition from reality to fantasy, who is better to guide humanity than narcissists?
Absolutely.
Because that fantasy, whether it's virtual reality, alternate reality, or the shared fantasy, it is a fantabulous technicolor musical where you're dancing on clouds and swirling and everything is yummy and it's just a delicious escape from...
And you're the superstar.
Don't forget that you're the superstar. You're a dealer.
Yes, you get all the attention that you need, all everything that you ever dreamed of. It's a dream come true.
And real life is difficult, disappointing.
Absolutely.
After you've been in that with a narcissist and you come back to reality, you look around and everything is so black and white, people are so vanilla and they're terrible.
The fantasy is easily the preferred choice as far as being easier and helping you feel validated and seen and happy.
There's just a kind of, I think it's a false bliss that's not real because nothing in that is real, but it sure can fool you, just like virtual reality and alternate reality and all those video games.
Well, there are philosophers like David Chalmers who claimed that simulations are real, and they have a point.
Simulation is real.
In which sense, it is real. What is real?
It's real. It's just another reality, the one that we were not used to so much.
But I think even that approach is mistaken.
The fact is that childhood is a fantasy.
Actually, there's a name for that. It's called paracosm. The clinical term is paracosm.
Childhood is a fantasy. Actually, there's a name for that. It's called paracosm. The clinical term is paracosm.
Childhood is a paracosm. Paracosm is another word for an elaborate, systemic, all-encompassing, ubiquitous, or pervasive fantasy.
So, childhood is a paracosm. The child goes through many, many fantasies on the way to reality.
Fantasy is a defense in childhood against reality. Mother is a fantasy in childhood.
Then the child has an imaginary friend that most children have imaginary friends. Children have what is known as transitory objects. These are objects, for example, teddy bears, and these transitory objects are alive in the eyes of the child. They are alive. And so on so forth.
I think what is happening is that humanity is regressing to childhood.
That is the power of this collective fantasy.
Because what this collective fantasy offers us is a second childhood, which is a really irresistible proposition, and exactly the proposition the narcissist typically makes.
The narcissist, exactly as you mentioned, is your mother, is your father, loves you unconditionally.
So here comes humanity. The totality of humanity equipped with the best, most modern technology, and tells you listen, you can survive in a second childhood, within which you live as many imaginary friends as you want. They're called avatars. You will gain all the attention and unconditional love that you need. We will generate it, in bits and pieces, will generate it within the machine, but you will not feel the difference and so on.
One thing that very few people know, except neuroscientists, is that the brain is unable to tell the difference between reality and non-reality.
The neuroscientific reason that pornography is so powerful and so prevalent is that the male brain cannot tell the difference between real life three-dimensional sex with a partner and the images of pornography. That's a fact. The brain cannot tell the difference.
So between you and me, in which sense this simulation will lose its reality?
You will feel it's real. It's like the Truman show or the Matrix. You know, you won't be able to tell the difference.
And Chalmers says, and with this I agree, that as long as you are unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, the fantasy is as valid as reality and is experienced the same.
There was a guy, Turing, Alan Turing, mathematician and so. And Turing designed the Turing test. And he said, here's the test. If a computer passes these tests, the computer is human.
So the substrate of the computer, the computer is based on silicon, and you are based on carbon. So we are carbon entities and computers are silicon entities.
But if they are indistinguishable from us as far as intelligence and the expression of emotions and writing poetry and giving therapy and arguing with you and talking and you know, then tell me in which way this computer is not human. What sets it apart?
Nothing. We are simply transitioning to a childhood where everything is possible. Everything is limitless. Everything is so wonderful. Everything is, you get attention and unconditional love and the most super intelligent creature is your imaginary friend. That's artificial intelligence.
We are constructing artificial intelligence as a parent.
This is something that is often overlooked. We are not constructing artificial intelligence as if we are the parents and the artificial intelligence is the child.
We are constructing artificial intelligence as if we are the children and the artificial intelligence will be the new mother or the new father.
There is a parental imputation when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Already people treat artificial intelligence as much more intelligent than most humans, which happens to be true. Well, increasingly so.
I am an educator, and I've taught high school and college level courses for over 40 years. And I do think that young people are surrendering. They're not adulting.
You know, more of them are just quite comfortable with concepts like being an in-cell or living in their mom's basement forever or, you know, just being on video games for their go-to source of happiness in their life.
And their relationships are strange and fractured and not complete. And they are like more and more like children. There's kind of a learned helplessness.
Like I can't make decisions, decide for me, me and I don't know, I can't think that way when you challenge them.
And, you know, the narcissist, there's something very childlike which is very seductive. And their magical thinking, they believe it.
And so to them, that is real. And like to my students, they're video games. That's real to them.
It's like a substitute for a reality that they're not equipped to function in and they're not really given a chance to be successful in so they just opt out all of them you know and through this other way of thinking theyare sort of not participating in life, but yet they feel like they are.
Yes, I agree. Nothing I disagree with in anything you've said.
And this element of seduction is very important because technologies are designed with seduction in mind.
This is where the affinity between the narcissist's shared fantasy and technology is.
The affinity is undeniable.
It is a fact that most technologies have been designed by people with mental health disorders. I'm serious.
Narcissists, schizoids, especially schizoids.
It's well known. There are multiple studies that show that among programmers and coders, computer programmers and coders, the prevalence and the incidence of, for example, schizoid personality disorder is dramatically higher than in a general population.
These are solitary activities, and schizoid people love to do these things.
Technology is the offspring of mentally ill people, people with severe personality disorder.
And this is why it resonated so well with a population that is increasingly becoming more mentally ill by our previous definitions.
Once we have normalized some of these things, they will disappear from the DSM.
Indeed, there was a huge debate whether to include narcissistic personality disorder in the DSM. They wanted to remove it in the fifth edition.
Didn't you say in Europe they have a completely different way of categorizing these things that kind of turns it on its head here in the way that we're thinking about it, like they're, I don't remember all the details, but it's like what we do with the DSM is not necessarily the gold standard for the world. They have their own way of doing it in Europe and in other countries.
Yes, actually, in all countries, with the exception of the United States, some parts of Canada and some parts of the UK, the rest of the world is using another book, not the DSM.
That other book is known as the ICD, International Classification of Diseases. It's in its 11th edition.
In the ICD, there are no personality disorders. There is a single personality disorder and then with different manifestations, different what is known as trait domains.
So the emphasis in the ICD is not on discrete clinical entities, discrete diagnosis, but the emphasis is on traits, the traits you have.
So you could be antagonistic. If you're antagonistic and if you are dissocial, and if you are obsessive-compulsive, if you put these three together, what you get is the equivalent of narcissistic personality disorder in the DSM.
But it's a much more flexible system because it's Lego-like. You can combine different, and you begin to approximate the true subtlety and complexity of human psychology. Human psychology or the psychology of human beings cannot be reduced to bullet points, lists of bullet points, which is the DSM.
So, yes, I think the DSM is about 20 years behind the cutting edge knowledge, the bleeding edge information that we have, about 20 years.
And also it's massively compromised by commercial interests in the insurance industry, pharmaceutical industry.
And that's why in the DSM you have something very, very bizarre. You have a disagreement. You have two ways to define narcissistic personality disorder, for example.
You have one way, which is the official way. And then there's what is known as the alternate or alternative model, which sounds very much like a dissenting voice in the Supreme Court.
And it's like this clash of two views of narcissism within the same book, and the two views have nothing to do with each other. Like, they're mutually exclusive.
And the second, the alternate of the alternative model, resembles very much the ICD because it places emphasis on traits, on domains, on dimensions, not on, it's not a bullet list, it's like a story.
It resembles very much a Dostoevsky text or something. It's beautiful.
In my work, I use only the alternative book. I find the older diagnostic criteria to be between insufficient and wrong, utterly wrong, because we've advanced a lot since the year 2000.
Can we talk about diagnosis for just a second? Because it kind of goes with what we're talking about.
And I do think the DSM is used primarily to help insurance companies have codes so that they can charge you. And so they just kind of like put things into that order.
So I think that the narcissist has this disconnect from reality that we're talking about and can provide this wonderful escape for their people that they pair with.
But, you know, you hear people saying, well, I'm going to look at this checklist to see all the markers so that I can see, is my boyfriend a narcissist, is my mother a narcissist?
And they go through the little checklist, you know, oh, well, they're entitled and grandiose. And oh, well, they don't have any empathy.
And so what I want to think about is that, you know, I think you had said that most overt narcissists are sort of misclassified in that DSM, and they're probably more psychopaths than they are narcissists, and that the true narcissist is probably always covert.
And if that's true, then when you're trying to watch for markers and indicators and signs that someone might have this disorder and you're trying to like diagnose everybody you know, you can't because covert narcissist, their mask doesn't slip. Their persona is bulletproof and they don't have necessarily any anger or outbursts or lack of civility. They could be the most charming, charismatic, intelligent, successful and, you know, just altruistic person that you could ever meet.
So how do we think about all that?
As far as categorizing and looking for signs, if you're covert narcissist, whether somatic or cerebral or whatever, I think it's almost impossible.
They can even slide by their therapist and mental health trained professionals miss it and don't even know what they are.
First of all, to set the record straight, the idea that overt narcissists or grandiose narcissists, what you should be called phallic narcissists, are actually psychopaths or a variant of psychopathy. That's not my idea at all. This is actually the trend in current literature. More and more and more, more of this the way we think. Okay. And that's not my innovation at all. I've innovated a lot, but that's one of them things I innovated.
The second point is that there's not type constancy. Overts become covert when they collapse, for example. When an overt narcissistic is faced with a crisis, a severe crisis known as narcissistic mortification or collapse, narcissistic collapse, they transition to covert for a while. They become covert for a while, and then vice versa.
So there's no type consistency. That's why all this typology is nonsensical. Any therapist would tell you, any clinician would tell you that someone can present as an overt narcissist. And then during the therapy, there may be a phase of borderline. And then at the end of therapy, when there's a conflict, the person becomes totally psychopathic. You know, and in between, she's a bit histrionic trying to seduce the therapist. And, you know, it's all these boxes are flying the face of reality. They are counterfactual. It's total nonsense. Everyone is everything. If you have a personality disorder, you're everything.
For example, it's very common for narcissists to have severe paranoid phases where they could be easily diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder.
This is nonsense all these. All these distinctions, they're nonsense, you know.
So the only question is the emphasis.
Some people are more psychopathic, of course. Some people are more narcissistic. Some people are more borderline. That's true. That much is true. More dysregulated. That much is true.
But underlying entity is one and the same.
Once your personality has been tempered with, once the integration of yourself, the process of creating the formation of the self has been disrupted, you will demonstrate throughout your life all the manifestations of a disordered personality.
At one stage you'll be schizoid, another you'll be narcissist, later you'll be psychopath, then you would be borderline, then you would be paranoid, then you'll be schizotypal.
It's a single entity. I agree with the ICD. Completely. Actually, I've been saying it long before the ICD.
Okay.
That's point of one.
Point number two, with your permission, is that we make a distinction between disorder and style.
Now, very, very, very few people have narcissistic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder is not a spectrum, as nonsense spewing self-styled experts are telling you.
Narcissistic personality disorder is like pregnancy. Either you have it or you don't have it. And there are no gradations. There are no, it doesn't come in increments. It's not, if you have it, you have it fully. If you don't have it, you don't have it, period.
However, you could have narcissistic traits or a narcissistic personality style, which is an attenuated form, subclinical form of narcissism.
It's someone who behaves narcissistically from time to time, special occasions, special circumstances in certain environments, but cannot be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. It's not that severe.
Now there you have a continuum. There you do have a spectrum.
In the style, you could have a severe style bordering on NPD, or you could have just, you know, from time to time, some trades. So there you have a continuum.
Now, all this creates enormous confusion, not only among people, lay persons, but among therapists. Enormous confusion, because they see someone with an obnoxious, in your face, narcissistic personality style, and they diagnose this person with narcissistic personality disorder.
The disorder is one of the worst mental illnesses in the world.
That's not Sam Vaknin. That is Otto Kernberg and others.
Narcissistic personality disorder is almost as bad as schizophrenia and in some respects worse. That is again Otto Kernberg.
Otto Kernberg suggested that narcissistic personality disorder and borderline, they are actually forms of psychosis. That's why he used the word borderline. It's on the border, on the border with psychosis.
So it's a really bad disorder. And for example, in order to diagnose someone with NPD, it's very important to prove that that person is incapable of perceiving other people as external. Is incapable of perceiving other people as separate?
There are ways to prove this, but you must prove this.
It's not enough that this person is boastful, arrogant, partly stupid, insensitive, lacks empathy, this not compassionate, exploitative, envious. This kind of person has a name. There's a label for that. It's called asshole.
Narcissistic personality disorder is not only about these behaviors. They are typical, but not only about these behaviors.
It's much more profound. It's a much deeper thing.
For example, narcissists don't have an ego.
The irony is narcissists are selfless. They don't have a self.
So we have ways to demonstrate the existence of a core identity, which is cohesive, an internal organizing principle which puts everything together.
We do it habitually in borderline personality disorder. There are tests for something known as identity disturbance or identity diffusion.
Narcissists have exactly like borderline. They have identity disturbance, identity diffusion.
But as distinct from the borderline, they're unable to perceive other people as out there. They perceive them as totally internal, which is highly psychotic.
So before you dwell on someone's obnoxious nature or repulsive conduct, these are really not, this is not proof of pathological narcissists. There are numerous people actually who are obnoxious and repulsive and they are not narcissists at all. There's no hint of pathological narcissists.
So yes, many people are misdiagnosed. Many people are not diagnosed. There's a bloody mess. I agree with you.
I have one last thing. One last thing with your permission.
Yes.
If you are a medical doctor who is a surgeon, you are not allowed to operate on your relatives. A husband cannot operate on his wife.
The reason is emotional involvement. Emotional involvement impairs professionalism.
So you cannot diagnose your husband just because you hate his guts. Actually, you cannot diagnose your husband because you hate his guts. You also cannot diagnose your husband because you love him.
Such emotions distort professionalism.
That's why all these lay diagnosis when everyone says, yeah, I'm not qualified to diagnose, but I've had 40 years or 14 years with this guy, and I've observed him all this time, and he is definitely a narcissist.
You cannot do this because you are in the fantasy. You're emotionally involved. You are not an observer. You have an axe to grind one way or another.
And by the way, that's true. Even if you are a qualified diagnostician and clinician, even if your business is diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder, you cannot diagnose people you love or people you hate or people who have any emotional reaction to. You simply cannot. It's not professional.
I have one last question, and it's in regard to the in training and the addiction that comes with these relationships.
You know, it's kind of like being in a cult in the way that you need to be deprogrammed. And it's also like being addicted to a drug that you have to go through withdrawal and try to maintain sobriety.
Forthe people who have been in relationships with a person with NPD, is there ever a finish line where they can say, that's it? I'm healed. I'm okay. Everything's good. I'm totally recovered. I'm going to move on. I'm free. It's over. That's it.
Or is it more like I'm thinking like being an alcoholic. You're never really not an alcoholic. You're just achieving sobriety for maybe decades. But you still have that addiction.
Do you think there's a finish line for those who have been in these relationships that they're ever going to be able to just be totally cured or free of it or recovered? Or is it an ongoing, lifelong thing that we're going to have to atone with?
The prognosis is very good. There is definitely a finished line.
However, people conflate and consequently confuse two things.
Healing and change.
You could heal from the relationship, but you would be a changed person. You would never be the same.
And that's why people say, ah, that means that I'm not healed. That's not true.
You could be a fully functional, happy, contented, happy-go- lucky even person after a relationship with a narcissist, but you're not going to be the same person that you used to be before.
Definitely. We have an impact long-lasting, but everything changes us. You know, every event in our lives, every set of circumstances, every environment we're exposed to, other people, we are constantly, we're in flux.
That's why I'm dead set against the concepts of individual and the concept of personality. I think they are nonsensical concepts because they imply immutability. We are mutable, we are changeable creatures.
So the narcissists are going to have, is one of these causes and has its effects, but yeah the problem with narcissism is in the recovery process you have to cope with multiple axes or multiple dimensions.
First of all there's the grief, and it's complex grief because you're grieving the narcissist you used to love, you're grieving the fantasy. The fantasy was your reality for a long time.
You are grieving yourself, you've lost yourself, so you're grieving yourself, and you're grieving the child because you used to be a mother within the fantasy. You're grieving the child and you're grieving a mother that you've lost.
There are five layers of grief. Imagine. Simultaneously losing your child, your mother, your reality, your loved one, and simultaneously.
It's the most extreme form of grief that I'm aware of and it creates something known as prolonged grief disorder.
That's problem number one.
Problem number two. It's very difficult to really detach from the narcissist emotionally, even if you have detached physically because of this child mother relationships or dual mothership.
The narcissist regresses you. He regresses you to infancy and he becomes the mother you've never had. The unconditionally loving and accepting mother, the mother who truly sees you for who you are and then finds you perfect, idealizes you, which is irresistible.
And on the other hand, you suddenly had an impromptu child, an improvised child. Out of the blue, you had a child, full-fledged and developed. And he was yours. And he was yours in ways that cannot be imagined in a healthy relationship between mother and child.
The narcissist creates what is known as a symbiotic relationship, a kind of enmeshment, and almost a meshing.
And so this is difficult to give up on your child and to give up on your mother. It goes beyond the grief.
You need to disentangle and dismantle the enmeshment. It's a hugely complicated process.
And finally, you have to confront reality, and reality is drab and dreary and demanding and non-forgiving.
You are even likely to be castigated and chastised for some of your behaviors. It's difficult. It's almost impossible to communicate the quiddity, the essence of the shared fantasy to other people who have never experienced it.
It reminds me of Auschwitz again. There was a writer and author by the name of Katzetnik. Katzegnik was a former prisoner in Auschwitz. And Katzetnik in German means concentration labors, concentration camp.
So he wrote a series of books and he said Auschwitz is a planet, another planet. And no matter how many books I write, I would never be able to bring you to my planet to visit.
It's the same after narcissistic abuse. It's another planet. It's the planet of the little prince, by the way. If you want an approximation in literature, it's the little prince.
And so it's a planet and you're there. And you're not a guest in the planet. You're a constituent of the planet. It's like a massive organism that has assimilated you somehow. You've become an integral part of it.
And so you're ripped apart. It's a feeling of being ripped apart.
Now we undergo a process of being ripped apart. It's called birth. You're reborn.
When you leave the shared fantasy, it's as if you've left the womb. The shared fantasy is a huge womb. It's a uterus. It's a matrix. The word matrix means a womb.
So you're forced to be born, which is probably the most massive trauma anyone can experience. You're forced to be born into reality and you are as helpless as a newborn.
You have to start from zero, to cut a long story short, you have to start from scratch.
It's exactly like people who find themselves in an accident and then they become quadriplegic, they can't use their arms and their legs and they have to learn over many years, they have to learn to regain the use of the arms and the legs. You have to learn to walk again. You have to learn to speak again.
The narcissist uses these processes of entraining and brainwashing. The narcissist even distorts your language, your very language. Words don't mean the same anymore after the narcissist.
Because the narcissist inducts you into a cult that is solipsistic, its own rules, its own dictionaries, its own vocabularies, its own reality.
And when you exit this cult, yes, you need to be deprogrammed. There's no other way.
You need to regain actually your separateness and you need to individuate. You need to become an individual again because prior to that you have been a member of an organism with two heads, kind of cerberus, a member of an organism with two heads.
And now you were ripped apart from this organism, which is a process of birth. You were given birth to and you need to become your own organism.
You need to relearn this because you will have forgotten everything by the time you're out of the shared fantasy.
Shared fantasy is a dissociative experience because the narcissist is dissociated.
The shared fantasy is an extension and reflection and emanation of the narcissist. The shared fantasy is the narcissist ectoplasm.
So whatever the narcissist has experienced, you're going to experience by proxying. And whatever the narcissist has never experienced, he will not allow you to experience.
The narcissist never separated from his mother, so he will never allow you to separate from him. He doesn't do separating.
The narcissist, on the other hand, is enmeshed and symbiotic, so he will consume you. He will assimilate you. You will become an ingredient, a component.
And that is to regain this personal autonomy and sense of agency and self-efficacy.
This is a huge struggle.
Add to this degree, add to this, you know, everything else I mentioned, it's a few years work.
Even short exposure to analysis, for example, two weeks. A two-week exposure, in my view, requires a two-year therapy.
I say that every week with an analysis requires a year of therapy and I don't think I'm exaggerating. Every week after two weeks it becomes a bit habituated. I mean, everything that happens after two weeks or two months or two years is more of the same but the initial exposure, the viral load, the initial viral load is such that immediately you need, like one year or two years of therapy.
So it's destructive. After that you become desensitized. I mean, you become used to it.
But initially, it's an alienating, a strange experience is like finding yourself trapped in a surrealistic nightmare. Unable to extricate yourself, no matter what you do. It's quicksand, mental quicksand. I don't know what other metaphor to you or simile.
Well, I know that a lot of people who are told, well, this is an opportunity to work on yourself and give birth to yourself and have agency over your own life and yada, yada, yada.
And I can't think of anyone I know who went through this, who said, oh, goody, what a, you know, it's like having a mulligan in golf. You get a do-over. You get a second chance.
And I don't think it's perceived that way.
And I think you're, you know, you're always spot on. I trust everything you say 100%, because in five years and three months, I have never heard you say anything that did not resonate as truth.
And not just with me, but with many others and with research and on and on and it takes such a long time people get weary along the way of having to be the author of their own life and to do that whole, like you said we river, not a pond, and that we're constantly moving and flux and changing, evolving, and adapting and learning to be resilient.
And it's exhausting.
And it's really hard to fuel ourselves, to keep, to motivate ourselves to keep going on this project to create a life that is authentic.
Even the most patient person would run out of fuel at some point here and there because it just takes so long.
And I wish I had encouragement to say, you know, it's going to be okay soon or it'll be over soon.
Because isn't that what gets us through the worst things in life?
Like you go to the dentist or childbirth or something like that and you tell yourself, it's going to be over in 30 minutes or it's going to be over in a couple of hours.
And for this, it's like, when is it going to be over? Five more years?
Because I've been in this arc of this redemption arc or whatever you want to call it, in this recovery arc for over five years.
And sure, I see progress, but I figure it'll be five more.
And at my age, I may not even live to see the finish line.
And so it's really that I think is the biggest challenge that, you know, you just have to keep going and trusting this process that we're evolving and adapting and learning to be a human, which we were not in that relationship, not really.
Can I end with kind of a, this isn't really a personal question, but I want to say you have created such a huge, vast amount of content just on a daily basis, right?
It's formidable as I don't know anyone else who does that.
And you just show up and you do it every day.
And so I just personally, since you are my number one authority and person that I look to for truth and for inspiration and for guidance, how do you do that? Like I can't, I don't know anyone else that can manufacture that kind of commitment. Is that what it is? Or to do this every day?
Because there are a lot of us out there who depend on it. New content every day, something that we can see and hear, your voice, your face, your words, keep us going in that long journey.
Thank you.
How do you do that?
My typical viewer is actually a clinician. I have 17,000 clinicians following me on LinkedIn alone.
And I know from comments and reactions that the vast majority of my view is actually therapies, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, academics and so on so forth.
Ordinary people, laymen or lay persons would find it a bit difficult to cope with my material because it's academic.
But I know that people who watch my material then go on to translate it in popular terms, and reach much wider.
I do that.
I distill many of your words into something easily digestible in small pieces for Leibon because I'm a teacher. I'm an academic.
Yes, yes.
Many people do that.
Exactly what I do.
How do you do it?
Yes, so I'm about to answer your question. I never answer straight because I like the sound of my voice.
I love the sound of your voice.
I'm joking, okay.
But before maybe I would like to make two very brief, I promise, comments.
Number one, even Jesus needed help resurrecting himself. Do not do this at home. Do not attempt to do this by yourself.
Number two, you must make a distinction between crisis and trauma.
What you have had with a narcissist was trauma, not a crisis.
Crisis is a growth engine. Crisis is good for you. Crisis is an opportunity to develop, to change, to become another person or a better person.
Definitely crisis teaches you things. It's a learning opportunity and so on so forth.
Crisis, that's why when we isolate children, when we are overprotective, when we are not allowing children to experience life, the friction of life, the difficulties and harshness of life, we are not doing them a favor. We are preventing, we are thwarting and stunting growth.
But don't confuse this with trauma. Trauma is not good.
I disagree completely with the school that says that trauma is a growth opportunity.
Devastation, scorched earth is never a good idea.
And this is what narcissistic abuse is all about.
You should seek crisis in your life. You should venture out. You should exit your comfort zone. You should take risks. You should seek novelty. All these are good things. You should venture out. You should exit your comfort zone. You should take risks. You should seek novelty. All these are good things. You should be curious.
This would lead to crisis and crisis would lead to your growth.
But do not criticize yourself. Do not castigate or yourself for having failed to kind of recover because what you've gone through was not a growth-inducing experience to use a British understatement.
Okay, how do I do it?
I get up in the morning and I'm very curious about something.
Now I do this not only in psychology, I'm very active in physics. There's a group of scientists all over the world who are working on my theory I created in physics, in astrophysics, basically.
So I do this in physics, I do this in economics, I teach economics and business management, and so there's a whole field of disciplines.
But the process is the same. I wake up in the morning and I have a question and I don't know the answer. It still happens.
And then that makes me very curious and then I conduct research I find a possible answer or a group of answers, visually exclusive answers, never mind I find a universe or a space of answers and then I feel compelled to share this.
I want to share my findings. I have the hidden assumption, utterly counterfactual and erroneous, regrettably, that everyone is curious.
One of the biggest impediments in current civilization is that people lost their curiosity. They're not curious anymore.
But I tend to assume that they are, and I want to share this with them. Share this new discovery.
Sometimes I can't find answers, so I come up with my own answer.
But even then I want to share it. I want to share this exploration, this path of discovery.
It's exactly like circumnavigating the globe with Magellan or with Columbus or, you know, there's a whole universe out there.
So I wake up in the morning and I say, I don't know, is there any proof that parents could have a positive influence of their children?
So I go online. I do research.
And then I discover, for example, that fathers are almost completely irrelevant until age three, which runs against everything you hear and read online.
Because today it's politically incorrect to say this. Mothers and fathers are equal partners.
The truth is that fathers are relatively irrelevant until age three and very relevant after them.
Actually, mother is most relevant until age three, and father is most relevant after age three. Mother is less relevant.
And then mother and father are not relevant at all. And peers become relevant.
These are the facts.
And so they were a surprise to me as well.
And I wanted to share this sense of surprise. I wanted to share this unexpected serendipitous discovery.
You know, the joy of finding a new world.
And that's what drives me.
I don'tme. I don't care of how many views I get and so and so forth. I do it absolutely for myself. It's a form of journaling. This is my diary.
And, you know, I even feel a sense of intrusion when people read my diary. It's private. What are you doing here?
So honestly, I don't care how many views and I thought I've had a huge fight with YouTube not to place advertisements, ads on my videos. It escalated to very ugly, a very ugly conflict. I refused to place ads. I didn't want money to make money on this.
And all my books are free. Online, if you wish, if you can find, it's not about money. I don't need money, luckily, but it's not about money. And it's not about viewerships and not about being popular, but none of this.
Honestly, I'm not pretending none of this. It's the gratification of having enriched myself that I'm in this sense a fuller person, and I have proof of it, my latest video.
I'm talking to myself. This process is known as self-supply. I am proving to myself that I'm being augmented daily, augmented daily, and it's a diary and a journal.
I let people, you know, I make them privy to this diary and journal, because I use YouTube as a platform.
But making 1,600 videos private would raise many questions on YouTube, I think.
Well, I just want to say that, you know, I think we, those of us who have intellectual curiosity and who find great gratification in learning something and sharing it with others, I think we're a dying breed. There's not a lot of us left who get that.
And explaining that to a younger person or to actually just to most people in general, I don't even know if they would be able to comprehend.
Like, what is that? Like, what are you talking about?
But I get it because I'm put together that way. And I think that's why I do it. I want people to know. If it helps ease suffering, that's great.
But I just think I want to combat ignorance. And I want people to know what I know.
I've often thought, if I could just, you know, put my finger in their ear and just download or upload everything, all of my experiences and what I know and maybe what you know and a few other important people in the world, like what they know, then that would be great if everybody knew all these things that we know and that each other knows.
That's a teacher fantasy.
Yeah, it's a teacher.
I'm a teacher, definitely. I've been teaching most of my life.
But I don't think people are incurious. I don't think people have lost their curiosity only when it comes to knowledge.
They have lost their curiosity about other people as well.
Exactly.
They're in curious. There is a culture of in curiosity. Like to not be curious is the bontan. can discuss it in another video I think I know why but it's a fact that they're not curious.
I mean other people are whole universes you can explore another person for the rest of your life and never get to learn 10% about them but they're not curious. They don't care.
Well, I'd like to think it's infectious and that our love and passion for knowledge and enlightenment and understanding would be contagious.
You know, not sure if that happens that often.
That's malignant optimism.
I think so.
Malignant optimism.
Well, thank you, Sam, for being here with me today. I've loved every moment.
And, you know, for a long time, I've thought about reaching out to you, but I just thought, oh, you know, it was kind of intimidating. And, you know, just it was just a little much because you're just, you're the biggest fish in my pond.
Actually, whether people realize it or not, when it comes to this subject, you are the quintessential big fish.
So of all the authorities on this, I trust you the most. And I hope other people can discover your wonderful lectures and learn from them and just, you know, listen to them or watch them.
It's kind of you. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. And hopefully we can talk about some of these other things again.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
Thank you. Bye.