I just wanted to say to you, if it's all right, I need to get a better understanding of this journey that you took. If you don't mind, 1995, from what I understand, was a pivotal moment in human history, let alone in your history.
My daughters are saying goodbye. They see me enough. They want to go listen now.
1995, you had a book that started, well, your journey with everyone. That book has changed a lot of people's lives.
But what has it been like for you, since you essentially, in 1995, came out with what? The Malignant Self-Love Book?
I was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder twice. I found myself in a situation where there was no literature. There was academic literature which dated to the beginning of the 20th century, believe it or not. There were some studies conducted in the 70s. But there was no literature, definitely no popular literature.
I wanted to understand my disorder. I wanted to put myself out of the rock bottom situation I found myself in.
So I started to study. And then the first thing I discovered is there was no language. There was simply no language.
I was trying to explain, was trying to describe internal dynamics in myself. I was trying to commit to paper, relationships, what happened in my interpersonal relationships, intimate relationships, workplace relationships, etc. And there was no language, simply.
So the first thing I did in 1995 was invent a whole new language.
So the bulk of the language in use today, for example, narcissistic abuse, but not only, was actually either, I either invented it, I either coined it, or I borrowed from early psychoanalytic literature, psychoanalytic literature in 1930s, up to the 1960s, I borrowed terms and phrases from that literature and I adapted them to the study of narcissism.
So today, about 90% of the language in use is the language that I came up with in the 90s. I did it first and foremost to capture my experience, initially.
So today, much is a derivative of your exploration into understanding or setting a language for what you were going through.
Yeah, it started like that.
90%.
I'm going to make sure I understand 90% of what everyone is batting around came about because the language is easily 90%, if not more.
I mean, flying monkeys, hoovering, somatic narcissists, cerebral narcissists, inverted narcissists, narcissistic supply, false self, devalued and discard, narcissistic abuse. These are all my creations or adaptations of early, early psychoanalytic literature.
In 1995, you're a professional at that time, yes, right?
I was actually a businessman.
You're a businessman. No, you're not a physicist.
Right. That's right. I'm telling you that's right. I'm just saying everything that I've been reading about you. You would consider me a stalker.
I've been studying you. I haven't got much sleep since we've been talking.
I just want to tell you this. I'm trying to wrap my brain around this much.
Before that timeframe, there was no one that could help you with the language. Were you seeing a therapist or anything like that at that time? Nobody could.
I was diagnosed by two therapists, but you must realize that the first time narcissistic personality disorder had appeared in any meaningful text was 1980. That's not a long time ago.
No, that is not.
Okay. You're blowing my mind.
Say, okay, that's not long ago.
Not long ago.
So the first time I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder was 1985. There was five years after NPD made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. No one knew anything about NPD. Nothing. There was nothing. There was no literature, no scholarship.
No, nothing. It was Virgin Land, Terra Incognita.
When I attempted to describe to people what's going on inside me and what it is that I'm doing to my so-called nearest and dearest, my insignificant others, my non-intimate partners. When I was trying to convey this, when I was trying to communicate, I had to resort to phrases half a page long. And then I said, what the heck with it? I mean, I must come up with a language. So I did. I did come up with a language.
Of course, a lot of times in the past since then, the field had evolved beyond recognition. There are many dozens of new contributors and hundreds maybe of new contributors and so on. But I think my initial work was pioneering and I think it had transformed society in several ways.
For example, today, the concept of narcissism is an organizing principle. Today, when you try to explain someone's behavior, politics, corporate misbehavior, the law, law enforcement, victimhood movements. Today, narcissism serves as the principle of organization of social and individual interactions. I see it in movies. I can't watch any movie. I can't watch any documentary without coming across the word narcissism in the first five minutes. Narcissism is this, that.
So today, narcissism is a buzzword and a key word. It is by far the hot bottom topic in psychology.
If that's the case, does it seem like the very concept of what it stood for when you started has been watered down, deluded or confused?
Yes.
Narcissism, of course, pathological narcissism is a clinical entity. In other words, it's a diagnosis in clinical psychology, abnormal psychology. And now it's been exactly as you say, it's been diluted or watered down and it became a pejorative. It became a curse word. It became a way to demean and devalue other people you don't like. Institutions they don't like.
Politicians, whatever it may be. It could be any structure. You can label it that way and people could run with it in many directions.
But when it came to your life, it began to give you an opportunity to explain what you were putting others through. Would you say, how did you say insignificant others? Is that what you said?
Yeah, that's what I said.
That's a new hashtag. You need to put that on one of your postings. That's a hashtag. You should start. That's a whole t-shirt line that you merchandise lines. You can start right there.
The insignificant others.
What were you doing to others? If you had a way to describe it succinctly, shrink wrap, how would you describe back then the Sam of 1995, 80, 85 to 95 before you?
Nothing has changed. It's a common myth. It's a common myth that insight and learning and knowledge cause transformation. It's not true. I know everything there is to know about narcissism I wish to believe. And yet nothing has changed in me. I'm exactly the same as I had always been. And what I do to other people, especially intimate partners, but not only business partners, what I do to other people is that I objectify them. I take away their vitality. I reduce them. I reduce them to a function, an instrument, a tool, the device. I make them lose the ability to conceive of themselves as separate entities, with rise, wishes, preferences, priorities, and so on. I assimilate and digest them. I bodysnatch and mindsnatch.
Do you think over from the inside?
Okay. So do you find yourself affecting other individuals, thought patterns, desires, motivation? And if so, do you affect other people's thought patterns?
Because when you walk into a room or when you begin to just talk with them?
Everything I say applies to all narcissists, especially to psychopathic narcissists, but I zombified them. I take away their vitality as I just said. I render them zombies. They go through the motions. They say the right things, but there's no sparkle in their eyes. There's no spark in their eyes anymore. There's no blood flow.
It's zapped. It's zapped. It's not in their eyes anymore.
So then I ask you this because you're educating me beyond belief. This is like an audience of one. So just bear with me. You're going to see me being giddy because dude, I just fit.
You're like in my Petri dish. I just want to just check you out. I just find you fascinating.
Um, I'll throw a word at you and you tell me what you think.
The word affection. How do you view the word affection in any, any connotations or thoughts that come with that from your perspective?
I'm incapable of experiencing positive emotions because in my world positive emotions are intimately linked with negative emotions and negative emotions are life threatening or dysregulated.
Got it.
So if I allow myself to experience anything positive, the gates of trauma will open, we will open wide for you on dy, on dy, on dysregulated.
The gates of trauma for you will open up.
So therefore you have to navigate and pivot away from those.
I have to repress my positive emotions because if I allow myself to emote, I will have opened the gates of my early childhood trauma and I will drown. I'll become dysregulated. Technically I'll become borderline.
Andwhen you say you, when a person say you, when a person, let's say it's me, let's say I'm doing that. If I start to move toward being borderline, what does that mean for those?
There's a lot of beginners down this journey or dealing with narcissism, listen and watch NARC abuse, what my daughters and I provide for people. It's a public service channel. If I start moving toward borderline, what does that mean? What does that mean for me and the people around me?
There was a scholar by the name of a roaster. He said that borderline personality disorder is a failed attempt to become a narcissist. It's when you fail to become a narcissist as a child that you end up being borderline.
Okay.
Now what happens with the narcissist is reverse engineering. When you expose the narcissist to stress, especially a challenge to the narcissist grandiosity, humiliation, especially public humiliation, the narcissist goes through a process called narcissistic injury or narcissistic wounding. Another much, much more profound process is called narcissistic mortification.
In these two processes, the defenses of the narcissist crumble, disappear. And consequently, the narcissist is exposed to a tsunami of negative emotionality, including shame, guilt, fear, etc.
At that point, he becomes technically a borderline.
So narcissistic rage, narcissistic rage is a borderline state of narcissism. At that point, he becomes a borderline in the sense that he can no longer control his emotions. They become dysregulated. They take over. He's overwhelmed. He drowns in them and he flails around and he lashes out.
And he, so he becomes very injurious to other people, dangerous to other people.
Now, in some cases, a psychopathic state emerges. So the transition is from narcissism to borderline and then to psychopathy.
Now that's not a steady pattern that will happen all the time then, but it can lead to a psychopathic aspect from the borderline. A derivative of it will, but they can move into that area.
Or let me rephrase that. I'm going to go back to me.
I could go from being borderline and then move to that psychopathic state or borderlines or people in a borderline state, let alone with borderline personality disorder. All of them have a psychopathic self state.
Okay. It's a protective state. It's a savior state. It's a rescuer state.
The psychopathic state.
Yes. The psychopathic state helps to defend and protect the borderline from abandonment, from humiliation, from rejection, from fear, from shame, from guilt.
So when the borderline experiences stress, when she feels that she's about to be abandoned, abandoned anxiety, when she can no longer regulate her emotions, suddenly she becomes a secondary psychopath. A secondary psychopath is a psychopath with emotions and empathy. So she becomes a secondary psychopath and she begins to behave like a psychopath would.
It's the same with the narcissist. When the narcissist is challenged, his grandiosity is challenged and undermined when he's devalued, when he's humiliated, exposed, whatever. Then he then transitions to borderline and then the borderline experiences dysregulated emotions and the narcissist becomes a psychopath, a temporary psychopath.
When they get into that, excuse me, he made it back to me. So I get into a secondary psychopath state.
Excuse me, just correct. As a narcissist, you're incapable of empathy and emotions. So you will transition to a primary psychopath, not secondary.
Okay. Got it. And now once I'm in that state, everybody in my sphere, everybody that I come across, I'm going to super duper lash out.
As a psychopath, in the psychopathic self-state, you are defiant. You are contumacious. You hate authority. You are reckless. You're impulsive. You're aggressive in the psychopathic self.
Huge emotional pushback and defiance will come to the fore is kind of what you're saying.
Defiance aggression.
Correct me if I understand you.
Yes. Defiance aggression, hatred of authority and rules, impulsivity, recklessness. You will do crazy things that will endanger people around you.
Right. Right. Right.
And now is it possible that I would de-escalate or come down from that?
You do always. This is a temporary sub-state. It's a temporary sub-state. Having reestablished your grandiosity as a narcissist, because when you become a psychopath, you terrify everyone around you.
You set everything back in order, as it were.
Yes. You feel God-like.
Because everyone is terrified of you.
And so your grandiosity is restored. And once your grandiosity is restored, you don't need to be a psychopath anymore. You can go back to being a narcissist.
If this becomes a pattern that a person can have, if this is a pattern that I have from childhood and I've perfected it, I can set the world or the universe in my own mind.
I'm just saying this. You're the expert. Again, an audience of one. You're enduring my weirdness here.
Okay. So then I can pretty much set the world back in order.
If I don't think everything's going my way and I'm about to get exposed to childhood trauma and emotions or whatever it may be, all I have to do is when I get to that psychopathic primary stage, if I'm understanding you correctly, I can pretty much set the world back in order and I could be God-like and put everything back.
And now everything's okay. Because I've made sure everybody's afraid of me or what I could do to them, leave them, abandon them, affect their finances.
You feel omnipotent. You feel all powerful. All powerful.
And then you don't need to be a psychopath because your grandiosity has been restored. You're a narcissist.
Yeah.
I can go back down to being a narcissist as it were.
This pattern of existence is not just one or two people on the planet.
Have you recognized that it's an ongoing pattern that's growing?
Well, we should distinguish very carefully, and this distinction is lost on many self-styled experts and so on.
We should distinguish between narcissistic personality disorder, malignant narcissism, which is a confluence of psychopathy and narcissism, and narcissistic style.
Now, the concept of narcissistic style was first described by Lee Sperry. Lee Sperry is a scholar, Theodore Millon, another guy. I'm taking notes.
Okay.
Lee Sperry and Theodore Millon described the narcissistic style. Narcissistic style is simply someone who is an a-hole, just an a-hole. He tramples on everyone. He's insensitive. He cracks the wrong jokes at the wrong time. He's exploitative. He's a bit abusive and so on and so forth, but he doesn't amount to a full-fledged narcissist.
It is estimated that up to 15%, 1-5% of the population have narcissistic style. The figure is much higher among the young, among people under the age of 25.
Really?
Yes.
Just real quick before you keep going, the narcissistic style, we're not talking to somebody that's going to give a major pushback. They're just being a major jerk.
Yes.
Okay. All right. Go ahead. You were...
Jerks. That's the word. Jerks. This is much more common among the young than among the older generations.
There are studies by John Twench and Keith Campbell and many others that had demonstrated that this kind of narcissism, narcissistic style, had exploded among the young and is five times higher than 40 years ago. So it seems to be the style, the personality style, the dominant personality style of young people, possibly because of the influence of social media.
Social media.
I was going to say that. Yeah.
Possibly.
Possibly.
We don't know. We don't know which is the chicken, which is the egg.
Yeah.
But one thing is for sure. You're going to get chicken in one way or the other. Either scrambled or you're going to get it cooked, one or the other.
So either way, social media could be feeding that, but that's something... That's a whole other show.
But when...
So that's narcissistic style.
And then you have narcissistic...
The other one....
reality disorder.
Okay.
Narcissistic personality disorder is diagnosed in about 1% of the population.
1%.
Okay.
And there are nine diagnostic criteria, and there is an alternative model of narcissistic personality disorder in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's a severe, a very severe mental health disorder.
Kernberg, Otto Kernberg, one of the leading scholars in the field, thought that narcissism is a form of psychosis, psychotic disorder. So it's a really, really a very bad affliction.
And then you have the combination of this with psychopathy. And that is malignant narcissism.
With all due respect, please bear with me. When you... Because I'm writing this down. When you get to this aspect of the NPD, before we get to the one you just mentioned, the NPD...
Now, the first one we said, you know, we're talking about a major jerk. How would you, in a few words, describe this for those who are just trying to understand and who will watch this later?
Everything is more extreme. In the narcissistic style, there's a deficit in empathy. In NPD, there's no empathy.
The narcissistic style would try to leverage people, to use people to obtain goals. The narcissist would trample and destroy people in the pursuit of power.
Everything is simply more extreme. So for example, the narcissistic style would be mildly envious of other people's accomplishments and so on. The narcissist would try to destroy people in the envies.
So we're talking about somebody that does some major demolition to somebody's life. They're not coming in and just kicking a few things around and throwing on the table. They're not benign. By any means, they're not benign. They're coming in driven by envy or something like that and fueled with anger and other things. And they're trying to make sure you don't exist.
Entitlement, they're very intelligent.
For example, people with narcissistic style are not entitled. People with NPD are entitled. Entitlement simply means that you think you deserve some things, special treatment, to talk to the top people, whatever, without any commensurate achievements, without any investment, without any effort. So you believe you deserve to have a PhD without having invested a minute in studies.
And everything that comes with the PhD, you want the PhD, you want the money, you want the prestige. But you don't want to invest in your studies. Don't work for it. That's entitlement.
Now, that's not a parent or a part of a narcissistic style, though, correct?
No.
Okay, got it. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
You were going to say.
So these narcissists, these one percent of population, and today there is a trend in academia and universities where I teach psychology in several universities, colleagues of mine in other universities, they try to espouse the view that narcissism and psychopathy are positive evolutionary adaptations, that it's good to be a narcissist, that we need narcissist in positions of power and authority like chief executive officers, president of the United States.
All I can do is strongly oppose this ignorant view. This is enormous ignorance. This is not knowing the first thing about narcissism.
I'm surprised by that.
Yeah. Kevin, Kevin, double my Kobe. I can give you many names. High functioning, high functioning narcissist. It's cool. So, wow. Productive, productive narcissist and high functioning narcissist and productive psychopaths.
I don't even know what to say to that.
There's a whole library of books saying that psychopaths are the best thing that ever happened to humanity because they can make tough decisions. They're great military leaders and surgeons. I mean, it's a great thing. We have psychopaths. We should encourage them and egg them on and breathe them as it were.
Yeah. In a way. So I don't think these people know what the heck they're talking about, honestly, because for example, narcissists, they start off very convincingly and very charmingly. They co-op everyone around them. They create counts, personality counts and so on, but they end up badly. Everything around them goes up in flames. Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, everything goes up in flames at the end. There's no such thing as a productive, high functioning narcissist. It's nonsensical myth, you know, and not backed by the most of the literature, most.
So that's a problem. A malignant narcissist are really, really by far the most dangerous. They are even more dangerous than psychopaths because.
Is this a part of the psychopathy part that you're talking about? The malignant, are they in there? Is this the whole difference?
Narcissists are confluence, combination psychopaths and narcissists in the same. Got it. Okay. They are by far the most dangerous brief and you are talking to one right now. They're the most dangerous brief.
Why is that?
Because a proper psychopath, what we call faux one psychopath, a proper psychopath, he is goal oriented. He wants money. He wants sex. He wants power. He gets what he wants. He doesn't bother with you. He's not going to harm you. So he's very goal oriented.
Yeah. He's ruthless. He's callous. He has no scruples. He's impulsive. He's defiant. He is aggressive. It's all true, but at least he's human.
The psychopath is human because you want sex also, don't you? You want money, you want power. It's a human aspiration. It's just that on the way to his goal, he would be less scrupulous than you, less moral than you.
He's chopping down trees through the forest to get to where he wants to go instead of just walking through the forest and enjoying the trees. He's looking at it and going like, you know what? That tree don't need to be there. It's in my way.
But you're both headed to the same destination.
Driven by the same as it were natural human impulse or desires.
Not so the malignant narcissism. Not so the narcissist when it is combined with psychopath.
Because when the narcissist is combined with psychopath, then this type is not driven by goals. It's driven by impulses, dysregulated emotions, envy, hatred, lack of empathy.
So it's like this kind of narcissist has all the tools of the psychopath, lack of morality, right. And leverages the psychopath to accomplish narcissistic gratification.
Goals and gratification, right.
Everything, the horse has been let out of the pen when the two are combined and it's off and running.
Now, in the process of it being off and running they are combined. Can they mask it? And people have no idea they're like that? Can they be overly charming to the point that someone could end up thinking they can have a relationship with them, do business with them? Depends. I wouldn't generalize.
People online tend to generalize and say yes. I wouldn't generalize. Depends.
I think it depends on thespian skills, on skills of acting. Some of us can act well, some of us cannot act well. For example, many narcissists, they're too grandiose. They say, why would I invest any effort in acting? Who are you that I would invest an effort for you? Okay. I'm sorry. That's pretty good.
I get you. Why do I need to act?
Who the heck are you?
Why would I act for you?
I mean, do what I'm going to do.
I am my way with the highway.
I mean, a few. Why would I act for you? I don't need to act.
That's a waste of my time. And it demigrates me.
It means I'm inferior to you. It means I want something from you. It means I need something from you.
If I have to manipulate my basic way of living as a malignant psychopathic narcissist, then I've wasted my time. I don't have to. I just take it from you.
I am who I am. Somebody else, if I have power to go and take it from you, bring it to me. I am who I am.
It's my way or the highway. You don't like it. Efoch. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
****REDACTED
Yeah.
So why would I need to act for you? I mean, I'm superior to you. Vastly superior. Why would I need to demean myself and humiliate myself and humble myself to act for you?
Right.
To even waste my energy to go that route.
Now, is that considered a psychopath? No, go ahead. You're going to say, please.
Similarly, many, many narcissists and psychopaths do not lie. They're brutally honest.
Oh, wait.
Hold on a second. Hold on.
Wait.
Why would I need to lie for you? I mean, to lie is to invest an effort. Do you deserve this effort?
Do they brag about the fact that they don't lie?
****REDACTED
I do. I never lie.
Why do I have to lie?
I never lie because no one deserves the effort that I have to put into lying, you know?
****REDACTED
No. I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So why would I need to lie for the sake of ants? I mean, you're all ants. You're a colony. Why would I need to?
So I never lie. So these online myths that narcissists always lie, that they always act. It's expressly untrue. Some narcissists act, some narcissists lie. And I don't think it's much different in the general population.
So, but if there is any tendency, it's the tendency to not act, to not lie, because to act and to lie is to kowtow to you, is to succumb to you, is to kneel in front of you, is to render you superior. You don't deserve my lying. You don't deserve my acting. You don't deserve the time and effort it takes to act and lie because you're inferior to me.
Would there be any moment that they feel that they may authority or power than them?
This could happen with narcissists. Narcissists have role models that they idolize and idealize, but never with psychopaths and never with psychopathic narcissists.
All right.
When it comes to a psychopath, just do me a huge favor, because I know somebody's going to ask me this.
Your definition of a psychopath is what?
First of all, it may come as a shock to many people.
Psychopath is not an accepted diagnosis. It's not a clinical. It's clinically rejected. It's not accepted. It is espoused by a group of scholars, which are outliers and outcasts even, like Robert Hare and others, bad. These scholars claim that there is a very extreme form of antisocial personality disorder that is so extreme that it needs to be differentiated. It needs to be separated. They call this extreme form psychopath, but you won't find the psychopath, for example, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's not there. The word doesn't exist.
Psychopath is simply someone who is extremely antisocial in the sense that he disrespects social mores, rules, and conventions. He's defiant. He's impulsive. He abhors and rejects authority. He's impulsive. He's reckless. Above all, he's reckless. He doesn't care. Their devil. He just goes. He acts on a whim.
That's one of the major identifying factors that they're reckless.
Yes.
Psychopath.
Okay.
But it's not a clinical term you're saying?
Psychopath and psychopath are not clinical terms.
It's thrown around.
You can make a series of movies by just making sure you throw that word in there.
Yeah, I know. Villain, as long as you can say the villain is that everybody's going to fall in love with the villain and I want to see him be crazy again.
True, yeah.
And so it becomes a comment. It's almost thrown around, like you said earlier at the beginning, at narcissism.
There are two types of psychopaths according to the proponents of psychopathy. The proponents of psychopathy are an outside group. They are not in the establishment.
So according to them, there are two types of psychopaths, primary psychopath and secondary psychopath.
Secondary psychopath is a primary psychopath who has emotions and empathy.
Okay.
That's all.
Primary psychopath is a secondary psychopath without emotions and empathy.
So because borderline has emotions and empathy, when she becomes a psychopath, she becomes a secondary psychopath.
When the narcissist becomes a psychopath, he becomes a primary psychopath because he has no emotions and no empathy.
No emotion.
No action.
No action.
All right. Okay.
Now, I have, listen, I'm telling you, professor, Sam, I do my research and I have, I get into it because, but you, man, I could, I'm glad you're not a woman because I might want to take you out because I want to bear that in mind for the next. Don't you don't even start with me. I want to pick your brain.
So here we go. This is all, everything is from your Instagram page and of course your videos. I got to smash up stuff. I just want to get a deeper understanding victimhood, victimize versus being a victim.
Get some light on that for those who maybe have an inclination to lean toward victimhood.
What do you, what do you mean by saying you've been victimized? You're not a victim.
Let's start with a few facts.
There are recent, recent studies that had uncovered the fact that some people have a tendency to feel like victims, even when they're not.
There is a new construct called TIV, interpersonal victimhood. TIV, it was discovered by Gabay and others. There are other studies.
And so it would seem that Cartman with a drama triangle and so on and so forth.
And so today we tend to think that some people are more prone to believe themselves to be victims, more prone. They have a tendency, a proclivity.
And so this is fact number one. Fact number two, when victims organize and when they create victimhood movements, victimhood oriented movements, these movements tend to be hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths.
This is, okay, time out. That's mind blowing what you just said.
This is also established in a series of studies.
And essentially get hijacked by a narcissist movement.
Okay. In psychopaths.
Okay.
The third, the third fact, these are facts. These are all established by recent studies, 2020, 2021.
The third fact is that victims of trauma, people who had been exposed to trauma and when they enter the post-traumatic condition, they tend to display narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors.
In other words, they become temporary psychopaths and narcissists.
Consequently, there is a very dominant movement in psychology today headed, spearheaded by Judith Herman, the woman who coined the phrase complex trauma or complex PTSD.
Judith Herman suggests to eliminate the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder because she claims that it is a form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
And she says, and many others say, and I say, and many scholars say that it's impossible to distinguish the victim of a trauma from an active borderline, grandiose, narcissistic psychopathic state.
Whoa. So these are the three facts we can start with.
Now, as to your question, what's the difference between being victimized and being a victim?
Everyone is victimized in a lifetime. I've been mugged. I've been mugged twice, actually. My mother had abused me horribly as a child.
I mean, everyone is victimized. There's no, you can't go through life unscarred. Life is the agglomeration and conglomeration of losses. You know, you break up, you divorce, you're victimized.
So to be victimized is simply a synonym to being alive. To become a victim means to adopt the state of victimhood as your defining attribute, as part of your identity, to convert what had happened to you into your identity.
Got it.
Not to say, for example, I'm a woman who had been victimized, but to say, I'm a victim. It's like, I will ask you, who are you?
So you could say, I'm a man. I have a podcast. I'm a victim. It becomes part of the identity, a defining feature of who one is, one's essence.
It becomes a driven part of the personality and the character of the person.
Yeah. They're identifying their existence and not what happened to them, but they're identifying it. What, what has happened as their existence.
Take a Holocaust victim. You can ask a Holocaust victim, why? So he would say, he would say, I'm an accountant. I'm a father. I'm a husband.
But some of them would say, I'm a Holocaust victim. What kind of thing is this?
Holocaust was a horrible event. And of course, survivors are entitled to be wounded and traumatized as well.
But is this who you are? It's not who you are. It's what had happened to you.
So when you answer a Holocaust victim, you reduce yourself, you demean yourself, you perpetuate the abuse.
Because if you identify yourself as a victim, as a constant perpetual victim, you carry your abuses, your abuser with you in your mind.
Because in order to be a victim all the time, you need to have your abuser in your mind all the time. You're just perpetuating the abuse by remaining an eternal victim.
This aspect that you're bringing to the fore. This is not something that a lot of people will find easy to swallow.
Yes, they call it victim blaming, victim shaming, victim, I don't know what.
But even this, I mean, look at these phrases, victim blaming, as though they are nothing but victims.
When I tell someone, you're not a victim, you've just been victimized. And you had contributions to your own victim books, which you should study in order to avoid them in the future, to avoid the same pitfalls.
So that person doesn't say you're shaming me as a woman, or you're shaming me as a 40 year old, or you're shaming, she says you're shaming me as a victim. That means she's only a victim.
Victim shaming means that I'm shaming someone who is only a victim, nothing else. And that, of course, is sick. It's pathological. You are never one thing. You're a panopoly of things, you're a kaleidoscope, your spectrum of things, your father, you're a man, you're black, you're, I mean, there are many, you're looking at many aspects that can make up who we are as a person.
And from your perspective, what you're highlighting is that we don't have to pigeonhole ourselves by what someone else did to us.
But we can look beyond what they did and get them out of our head. And we can create new memories, new concepts, we can structure and move on with our life. Even though it may be challenging and difficult, I know you're understanding that, but overall, you're saying, it's not a matter of victim blaming and shaming from what you're laying out right now.
There's a bigger picture involved in which a person may not see themselves as a victim, but because of the way society often puts people in a position to only be a victim.
Now, I'm just going to tell you this right now. I'm going to throw this in. Nobody's expecting me to say this and I know you're not, but I'm just going to say this. I wasn't planning on saying it.
That's a common concept and construct that you're talking about right now in many minority neighborhoods. I'm just going to tell you, I grew up in one and it's like there, you know, some of the old guys sitting in the barbershop or sitting on the street corner watching kids go by and go like, no, you're not a victim now. Just because somebody treats you a certain way, you can be whatever you want to.
But when you flip that around, it can sound kind of funny to others that may hear it, but there are a huge swap, a huge group of individuals that can understand what you're saying.
A simple maxim, simple maxim.
That was my street ghetto explaining what was in my head that just popped in my head.
But go ahead.
You were saying a simple maxim as long as you're a victim, the abuse continues simple as long as you remain a victim, your abuse is continuing.
Only you can stop the abuse by refusing to be a victim or any mistreatment can either be minimized or eliminated by the way we handle and perceive what has transpired.
The one concept of resistance, including peaceful resistance, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc.
The whole concept of resistance is about refusing to be a victim.
People that that have lived with you, individuals that you called earlier, your insignificant, whatever the case may be, others that have come in across your path, live with you, interacted with you over time.
They could either live as they see themselves as a victim or they could see themselves as a common ground between you and them and live together.
If they continue to live with me, they're making a choice, aren't they?
I read some of the stuff you said about that.
I find you fascinating because the minute they've made a choice, they're no longer victims. Even if I victimize them, they're no longer victims because they've made a choice.
It's important to understand victims. I believe that the label victim should be applied much less liberally.
I understand a child two years old victimized by his parents. That I understand. That's a victim. That's a real victim. A grown-up woman who chooses to stay in a relationship with her abuser despite the abuse, allow me to doubt her victim would stop us.
That becomes an opportunity for us to do another show if I could so convince you to do that.
Anyhow, I just wanted to drop that in front of you to keep in mind because I truly want to dissect that, but I'm not going to throw away what's in front of me that I have to ask you about. I'm going to say a word. The word is boundaries.
Give me your perspective on that word that is often mentioned in the community of those who talk about narcissism.
Boundary, the boundary is where I stop and you begin. Simple. Where I stop and you begin.
I can let you enter. I can let you enter like crossing the border into a foreign country.
You need a visa. You need to qualify. You need a negative PCR test recently. You need to be vaccinated. Then I may let you cross it. But even then, it'll be for a limited period of time and you have to exit.
That was good.
That was really good. Simple.
If you refuse to exit, you're violating the law.
You can't set up camp and just take over and take over the territory.
You have to recognize my separateness.
The problem in narcissism is that there is a process in childhood. It's called separation individuation. It's when the child learns to separate from mummy and explore the world.
Now, when the child separates from mummy and explores the world, the child is grandiose because you have to be seriously grandiose as a two-year-old to abandon mummy and go into the street. You have to be seriously grandiose. It's intimately linked with narcissism.
Separation individuation is intimately linked with narcissism.
If the process gets disrupted, what remains is the narcissism.
But the separation individuation fails. There's a failure. You don't know how to separate. You remain a narcissist, but you don't know how to separate.
The minute you come across an intimate partner, for example, you are still a narcissist, but you want her to become part of you. You want her to become an extension.
You don't know how to separate from her. You can't regard her as a separate entity.
You take a snapshot of her. You internalize the snapshot. You interact with the snapshot. She ceases to exist. And if she reminds you that she does exist by being independent and autonomous, it infuriates you. You want to suppress her autonomy and independence. You want her to vanish as a separate entity because you don't do separation very well. You don't know how to do it. It changes you.
You don't know how to do it. You never learned.
You never learned that from your mother.
So you are grandiose, but the grandiosity didn't have an outlet because you were not allowed to separate.
Got it.
You were not allowed to separate from mummy.
So you don't know how to separate from your spouse.
So I got to ask the question. So if that's the case, let's say it's me. I don't know how to separate. Do I start to sense when there's a possibility I start to perceive, oh, here comes some separation, or they're going to ask me to look at it a certain way. Do I go into a certain mode and try to cause havoc so that I don't have to have that separation? Do I make pushback?
Anytime your intimate partner, for example, your business partner remind you that they are actually separate from you. They're autonomous. They have their own needs. They're independent. They make decisions. They have agencies and certifications.
They don't look at the things the same way I do.
They give you advice. Give you advice.
Right.
Right. What happened?
You react with panic. You don't have the tools, the basic tools to cope with such a situation.
You must assimilate them. You must digest them. You must break their spirit.
I must have them agree with me and not come at me.
You must have them disappear as separate entities. Of course, if they are, if they are not separate entities, if you're a part of you, they can never disagree with you because they're part of you.
Yeah, of course not. No, because they are part of me.
So that's it.
What's the disagreement? What's the disagreement?
You show me, anytime you show me independence, I will break your spirit.
Wow. Anytime you show a sign of autonomy, I will ruin your day. I will penalize you. I will provide you with negative reinforcements. I will torture you and bully you just to take away your separateness.
I don't want you to be separate because I don't know how to deal with separateness.
Okay.
So separateness opens the door for what then?
I don't want separateness. I don't want this person, the children, work mate, a business partner to have this separate mindset because once that happens, it says, what about me?
Can abandon me.
Got it. Got it. Can abandon me.
Yeah.
You could find something better. You could see something better.
We're not going to have commonality. Common ground is gone because the only ground that I know is my ground and you have to understand, you need to be on my ground, not your ground.
And we get along just fine, is the mindset that I would be having.
You need to be in my head. You need to be inside my head. I need to internalize you.
Are you blowing my mind right now, Sam?
No. Okay.
So you need to be inside my head.
Yeah. Does that mean I'm pretty much inside my head?
Yeah.
You don't exist anymore.
Bingo. The real you doesn't exist anymore because I continue to interact with the you inside my head with the avatar. It's called introject with the introject or internal object.
Got it. So I take a snapshot of Paxton, I internalize it and I begin to interact with the snapshot because it's a controllable object which will never abandon me.
Right.
Not the person, the Paxton in front of you per se.
The Paxton in front of me had just vanished.
Snapshot. The snapshot is what you function and deal with every time you see Paxton.
And then Paxton, you, the real you, you disagree with me or you go take a leak or I don't know what you, you show signs of life.
Right. You show signs of life.
Okay.
You show signs, I show signs of life and then you will do what?
It threatens the snapshot. It threatens the snapshot because the snapshot is static and fully under my control and you're not.
So you become an enemy. It's called the secretary object. You become a bad object, an enemy because you're threatening the snapshot by being independent and autonomous.
I'm essentially ruining your life.
If I start to show you're threatening me seriously. Yes. You're threatening me because you threaten to disassemble my entire internal world because you should understand this.
If you destroy one snapshot, yeah, it's like a brick and wall. The whole wall keeps, the whole photo gallery is shot.
If I go to one, then then it's going to play out in other aspects.
Either snapshots work or they don't work. If you prove to me that your snapshot is not working or the other snapshot will stop working.
So chain reaction, chain reaction.
It's very, very serious threat. Very.
And now go to enormous lengths to eliminate you as a separate entity.
Because you, in other words, the snapshot doesn't work when it comes to Paxton.
Then you got to get rid of me because the other snapshots come under threat.
Yes. It's easier to get rid of you than all the snapshots in my head.
There are two ways to get rid of it.
One way is to devalue you and discard you. And the other way is to destroy you.
Wow. If I render you a mummy, Egyptian mummy, you know, it's okay. If I kill you and mummify you, it's okay. You will never threaten the snapshot.
There's a famous movie by each cycle. His mother, he mummified his mother.
Got it.
And every morning he puts her next to the window and puts her to bed in the evening and kisses her forehead and so on. This is a kind of mother who doesn't threaten his snapshot.
Okay. So at first I will try to eliminate your separate existence.
I'll try to break your spirit, put it short, in other words, put me, put me, put me in my corner as it were.
It doesn't work at devalue you and discard you because you're too much of a threat.
If it escalates, then you have to go into a whole nother level to destroy.
Depends how resilient you are, how much you push back, and whether you want to go through that or just discard me and move on to something else.
No, I would put every narcissist will do the considerable effort before the devaluation of the discard.
Got it. Before that. Okay.
There'll be huge, huge fights and conflicts and so on.
Well, wait, a lot of ruin in people's days just to get to that point of saying, okay, then you know what, then I'll just discard you.
If I can't put you back in, but I need you to conform to my structure.
I need you to conform 100%.
There can be no divergence of deviation.
You're doing it to me.
I say, oh, you have no idea. You know what?
I don't know if I'm going to be all right the rest of this Saturday out here.
I'm used to doing this to people.
Hey, look at you smiling. Yeah. Okay. So now, what am I looking at? I'm looking at a clock over here and make sure, just bear with me. I'm going to do this real quick.
No, no, no. Don't be under pressure. Go ahead. I'll give you the key.
Okay. Here we go.
People simply don't have patience to watch more than one hour.
I hate to tell you this. All my shows are at least an hour, maybe a little bit more, but I agree with you, but you're going to, your audience.
Okay. So here we go. Here we go. Prize to price approach versus the long-term commitment. I hope you can, it's a posting that you have. I'm not going to pull it up right now, but you talk about some view life in a short-term way, the prize to a price, and they're not willing to make a commitment. I hope that makes some sense to you.
If it doesn't, we can kick, we won't kick the tires on it. Does that make any sense? Do you remember that posting? It's a rough time.
As a society, we had removed the incentives for long-term commitment. Sex is an incentive for long-term commitment between two people. For example, the availability of regular sex is an incentive.
Today, you can have regular sex without any commitment. Economic incentives are important in long-term commitment.
Today, actually, you don't need anyone, whether a woman or a man, you're totally independent economically. So there's no incentive there to team up with anyone.
We have reached a situation, to cut a long story short, we have disincentivized intimacy and disincentivized long-term commitments. There is no reason to commit. There's only, there's no prize, only price.
If I get married, if I, if I get married, I risk half my property and half my income for the rest of my life. And what am I getting in return? I'm getting sex, which anyhow I can get using Tinder. I'm getting, what am I getting?
Honestly, what am I getting? Not much. I can have children with women without getting married, without even being committed. 40% of all children are raised in single mother families.
I mean, we have great and, and consequently today, the younger generations, they have zero, they have zero intimacy skills, zero relationship skills.
Yeah.
And they actually are terrified of intimacy. And they, the distance, they don't want relationships, marriage rates have collapsed, relationships, the rate of relationship is collapsed. Dating is down by 60% in the last 10 years dating.
And the dominant, the dominant sexual practice, it's called sexual script. The dominant sexual script is hookups.
Only 18, only 19%, only 19%, that's one 9% of people under the age of 25 ever had sex in an intimate relationship. Wow. 81% of people under age 25 had sex or had only casual sex, never had any kind, any other kind of sex.
No long-term commitment, no relationship.
No. They don't know how to do it.
Structure.
They don't know how to do it. They don't have the skills.
Which is an outworking of not having the skills to have.
It's a use it to lose it. Use it to lose it.
If you hook up all your life, if you hook up all your life, you don't know to do sex in intimate relationships. If you have no intimacy.
I found that posting in regards to this fascinating what you're talking about right now. I just wanted to throw that at you because I wanted my audience to be able to hear that.
They could always go to your Instagram page and watch your videos to get more on that.
I'm going to run this by you. I'm going to throw this word at you and you tell me what you think.
The word is addiction.
I think again, like victimhood, we should make a distinction between addiction and addicted people. People who are addicted are people who are reacting pathologically to a chemical substance or to a process like falling in love.
You can be addicted to falling in love. You don't have to be addicted to Coke or something. There's chemical addiction and process addiction.
Some people react in a pathological way to addictions. And so they are the addicts.
But addiction is actually a healthy process. How do I know? 40% of the brain is dedicated to addictions. 40% of our brain is intended to foster and gender encourage buttress create addiction. Why? Because a mother needs to get addicted to a baby. A man needs to get addicted to a woman. Addiction is the force of life. It is what binds us all together. There are dozens of hormones which are intended to create addiction. They are addiction hormones. Addiction is a healthy process, including, by the way, addiction to substances. For example, we can get addicted to food. So addiction by itself is healthy and normal and facilitates life and bonding and facilitates social interactions and so on. Some people are pathologized. They have a sickness. So they react to addiction in a sick way. These are the addicts. But we generalize. We said addiction is bad. Addiction is not bad. Addiction is healthy. It's good.
Just when you don't know how to manage addiction, then it's bad. You can love a woman. You can love a woman and be addicted to her. That's good. That's love.
But if you become a stalker, that's bad. That's a problem.
That's a problem. You don't know how to manage the addiction.
When it comes to this term, or here, I'll throw it out to you. Triangulation. What does that mean from your perspective and from your studies and what you know, the facts?
Triangulation is any attempt to introduce a third party could be another person, could be an institution. Any attempt to introduce a third factor or third party into a two-way relationship, into a dyad, into a relationship in order to obtain favorable outcomes in the relationship, whether emotionally or financially or otherwise. That's triangulation.
So if I have a relationship with someone and I want to get a rise out of them and I flirt with the third party, that's triangulation. If I want to obtain financial benefits from someone and I use my accountant to kind of interfere or intervene in the couple dynamics, that's triangulation. If I use an institution, if I'm a minority and I want to obtain favorable outcomes from the majority and I co-opt Congress or some institution, that's triangulation.
All of this is triangulation, is whenever we use third party factors.
Now, there was a guy called Cartman. Cartman described what he called the drama triangle. And he was the first to explain that in the drama triangle, the two original parties and the third party interchange, they change roles all the time. The victim becomes rescuer, the rescuer becomes abuser, the abuser becomes victim.
He demonstrated how the three parties change roles all the time. It's not true. It's not fixed.
Okay, that's fascinating. It's not fixed then. One person can begin to initiate the triangulation. Somebody else could end up coming right behind them and moving them right along and end up taking that spot that they initiated and take it further.
For example, I can feel abused in my relationship. I want to make my wife jealous because she neglects me or ignores me. I start to flirt with another woman at that stage. My wife is the abuser and the victim. The third party is the rescuer.
But then the dynamics change. I really fall in love with the third party or something or I have sex with her or something. Then my wife becomes the victim. This is what I did to her was abusive. She becomes the victim from the abuser. I used to be the victim. And the third party now becomes the main, has a main role because I fell in love with her. So it's shifting all the time.
It's shifting all the time.
Okay. Cartman drama triangle.
Drama triangle. Okay, now we're really going to take a stretch here and you're going to have to, all right, this is from your page. I just put it on here. If part of it is in my head, I just wanted to get you to talk about it. Let's see what happens.
Two paths to self-destruction. Does that ring a bell? I'm sorry, I didn't pull it up on my screen over here. Two paths.
There are many paths to self-destruction. I don't, I don't remember that particular post and what I had in mind, but there are many paths to self-destruction.
Okay, let's talk about many paths to self-destruction.
Self-destruction is any attempt to reorganize your internal landscape, your mind, or your life in a way that would produce outcomes that are less than optimal and definitely less beneficial than they are right now.
So right now you have outcomes, you secure results, and then you reorganize your life or your mind. And the results that you get much worse than the results you had before the reorganization.
That's a good definition of self-destruction.
The self-destruction masquerades. Very often it doesn't look like self-destruction at all.
For example, if you persist in a job that you hate, that's self-destructive or technically self-defeating, there's a form of self-destruction.
But from the outside, people are going to praise you. They're going to praise you.
You're going to work every day. You're looking good. You're looking good.
But that's a form of self-destruction.
If you're in the wrong marriage and you don't exit, you don't do anything about it, it's a form of self-destruction. If you study something which you hate, and there are numerous forms of self-destruction, the irony is that most of the pathways to self-destruction are socially commendable, socially acceptable. Society encourages you to self-destruct.
Consider, for example, social media. Social media is an enemy of intimacy, enemy. Mark Zuckerberg makes money every time you're watching the screen, every time you're using Facebook. He makes money because you're exposed to advertising. If you pay attention to your daughters, these five minutes that you're with your daughters, they're a net loss to Facebook. Facebook doesn't want you to be with your daughters.
Okay. Okay. No, I'm just going to, I got it for everybody to hear. I know you may have heard that, but everybody that will see this, that's a part of my audience will know.
I got to repeat that for everybody. That was awesome what you just said. They are a net loss. We are a net loss.
Intimacy.
We're talking about, we'll just say Zuckerberg right now.
If we're spending time as a net loss for Facebook or any other social media platform, let alone television.
It's a financial fact.
No, that's a fact. That's a very good point.
Facebook has an incentive to encourage you to let go of your family, of your friends, of your intimacy, of your church, of your neighborhood, of your neighbors, of your to addict you to the screen.
So here's an activity that is widely used and so on. No one would consider it self-destructive, but it is self-destructive in the extreme. It is camouflaged. It's disguised. It's one of the most self-destructive activities I know. It's worse than drugs actually in many ways because in drugs, if you drink alcohol, most people are social drinkers. They do it with other people.
You have a social dimension somehow. You end up having sex. I mean, alcohol brings people together. Social media break people apart. It's even much more self-destructive than alcohol and drugs.
And yet we dedicate billions and tens of billions of dollars to fighting off crack and coke and heroin and I don't know what, which is, of course, okay, but we don't do it. We don't lift a finger when it comes to this, which is far more pernicious than any drug ever invented.
Wow. You definitely give rise to thoughts that many people will not, they may not have heard before and they will not forget.
Here we go. We're going to be ending at some point, but I've got to put this word in because too many people would want to come after me and I don't have that problem, but they would if I don't ask you about the word gas lighting.
Gas lighting is a common phrase that's used often just as much as narcissism. Your perspective on that word, was that one of the words you got started with? Is that one of the words you came up with?
I did not invent the word. I did not coin it, but I borrowed it and I was the first to use it in the context of narcissistic abuse, yes, in 95.
Gas lighting or ambient abuse. It's any attempt to convince you that something is wrong with your mind, that you misremember, that you misunderstood, that you got things backwards, that you dissociated, you just forgot, that you're an maniac, that you were drunk. Any attempt to convince you that your perception of reality is wrong. Any attempt to impair your reality testing in clinical terms.
Gas lighting is much more common than you would think.
Studies by Dan Ariely and others have demonstrated that people frequently lie, and when they lie, they automatically gaslight other people because they want them to believe the lies. And this is all people, not only narcissists.
Gas lighting seems to be an integral part of the repertory of human communication.
Now, narcissists and psychopaths. Narcissists gaslight a lot less than psychopaths.
Psychopaths tend to gaslight a lot more. Psychopaths are goal-oriented, and when they gaslight, they want to convince you to do something. They want to push you to do something.
So by falsifying your reality, they cause you disorientation, and when you are disoriented, they push you to do something you wouldn't have done had your perception of reality prevailed.
Narcissists would gaslight when they are in the throes of narcissistic injury or narcissistic mortification, but they would gaslight for usually one reason, to restore grandiosity, usually.
So narcissistic gaslighting is actually a lot more rare than psychopathic gaslighting. And as I said before, gaslighting is much more common than you know.
Advertising is a form of gaslighting. Marketing is a form of gaslighting. Political propaganda is a form of gaslighting. Messaging, I mean on television, on mass media is a form of gaslighting.
These are all forms of gaslighting.
That's the good one. Because it's the algorithm that decides for you what is reality, not you.
And so the minute someone confiscates, appropriates your ability to determine what is reality, they're gaslighting you.
Yeah. When you search Sam Vaknin on Google, Google is gaslighting you because they choose the results for you. They determine your reality. They don't let you determine your reality. They determine it for you in an opaque way. It's not transparent because gaslighting can never be transparent.
Opaqueness, opacity is very crucial in gaslighting.
So gaslighting is an integral part of technology. Everything by the way, you're using your laptop, you're being gaslit because the operating system is not transparent to you. There are numerous thousands of decisions taking place every time you open your laptop which are not transparent to you. You don't realize these decisions are taking place.
And that's why people keep saying that computers actually have a mind of their own. They do things you never told them to do.
What is autocomplete, autocorrect, autocomplete and autocorrect are forms of gaslighting. They decide for you what you should type or what you should be searching for, you know.
So it's very common phenomenon.
The psychopath leverages gaslighting to obtain goals.
See you on the difference. He drives you crazy so that you have diminished capacity. When you have diminished capacity, he then makes you do things that he wants you to do. The narcissist does it to you, does the same to you because when you have diminished capacity, the narcissist can feel superior to you. He says, you see how crazy you are? You see how crazy? And then he can feel superior to you. And this restores his sense of grandiosity.
So gaslighting can be used by either one of those psychopath or narcissism for the purpose to restore grandiosity if need be.
Narcissist is to restore grandiosity. Psychopath is for goal orientation, to obtain goals.
Goal orientation, okay.
So when somebody is married to living with, dealing with, working with, grew up with generational narcissism, whatever it may be, they're doing it to hold on to the power per se.
If I understand you correctly, please correct me. I'm just, you know, you're the expert.
Narcissists and psychopaths create virtual realities. They create an ambience, an environment, which is not real. It's a fantasy, a shared fantasy in the case of the narcissist.
In their head, in their head?
No, for you, for you. They convince you that reality is not as it is, but as they want you to see it.
And within this reality, they impose rules. They guarantee, they create outcomes. They force you to behave in specific ways. And so you gradually lose touch with reality.
You, they become your reality testing. When you want to know if something is real, you go to the psychopath and you ask him, is telling me is it real or am I just imagining it?
They become the thermometer in the room. They are the ones telling the temperature of everything. They are the thermometer and the thermostat that regulate.
And so the thing is, this is the dynamic of a cult. This is a cult dynamic.
Wow.
So narcissists and psychopaths create mini, mini cults or micro-cults with one or two people, three people, four people, family, children, whatever it may be, parents, grandparents.
What's a cult?
A cult is the suspension of reality.
In a cult you believe things that are not real because the leader told you to believe them.
And whenever you want to gauge reality, you go to the leader and you say, is it real or am I just imagining it?
And this is the dynamic of a narcissistic family.
Okay.
So they can pretty much tell you whatever they want to hold you within the cult. They can tell you that you don't love them or whatever the case, just to let you recognize, well, you did that.
So that means you don't love me.
Well, the first thing they do, the first thing they do, they isolate your social.
So they're going to tell you your mother doesn't love you. Your father actually stole money from you. Your sister is just taking a hike on you. Driving a wedge, wherever they don't trust your best friend. She's pretending to be a best friend, but she tried to seduce me.
You know, isolate, isolate, isolate. Then you're totally isolated. You become an island.
And then they create an alternative reality. And because you can't consult anyone else, you can't calibrate yourself because you're not in touch anymore with family, with friends, with neighbors, with colleagues.
Many narcissists and psychopaths would sabotage your work, your workplace, because they wanted to be financially dependent.
So you end up having nobody around, no one to ask.
So the narcissist and psychopaths becomes the Northern Star, the compass, the only reference.
That's it. The only reference, the only emotional reference, spiritual reference, everything.
They become that on purpose, is what you're saying.
Yes, that's intentional.
The overall reason they want to do that is for what, Sam, for those who are beginners to try to understand this.
They want to control you. They want to control the intimate partner, in the case of a narcissist, to prevent abandonment, in the case of a psychopath, to obtain goals.
Goals could be anything, whatever it is.
If you're a rich woman, the psychopath would target you for your money. If you're a beautiful girl, they would target you for your sex, whatever. The narcissist would just want to make sure that you want to abandon you.
So he converts you into a snapshot, and then he begins to isolate you, break your spirit, and denude you of anything that made you independent.
If that's the case, before we end this today, truly appreciate you doing this more than you will.
Thank you.
And of course, I'm glad we hit there. My daughters are glad you hit the record button after they left the room.
But I think you're the only person that has actually met them. So they were happy to stick their head in and say hi to you before we start it.
But I'm going to ask you this. If that's the case, that a narcissist psychopath moving in those areas can do that, how does a person regain their life before they entered that cult life?
They have to leave.
No contact. The only effective strategy is no contact.
There are many strategies for managing the relationship within the relationship. There's gray rock, there's background noise. There are many. I've invented all of them except gray rock.
So I've invented seven techniques, and gray rock was invented by someone else. And I invented no contact as a set of 23 strategies. And that's the only set that works.
You have to run for your life. The narcissist and the psychopath are sucking your life away, your vitality. It is nothing. They will leave you as a husk. Nothing will be left of you.
You have to run away. You don't feel it. It's incremental. It's pernicious. It's like slow acting poison. These toxins will be with you for years after you had left the narcissist.
For years.
For years. It's a trauma that takes years to undo. But the sooner, the better. You just have to run away. You just have to cut your losses. You just have to sacrifice everything and everyone and just pack your things. Get the heck out of there. There's no way for you to end this profitably. There's no way for you to manage. Don't kid yourself. You can manage in the short term. You can gray rock. You can mirror. You can be background noise. That'll work for a week or two or three. The poison is acting while you think you're extricating yourself, while you think you're managing your narcissist.
You just need to just walk away. End of story.
Now, there's a set of 23 strategies called No Contact. I have a video available. I invented the No Contact strategies in 1995. It's not simply walking away. It's much more complex than this.
But you need to follow this. It's a recipe. It contains about 60 steps and you need to follow all of them from one to 60. That's your only hope.
And then you need to deprogram yourself because you had been an account. You need to deprogram yourself with the help of professionals, with the help of friends, online forums, this kind of interviews, other interviews. You need to deprogram yourself. You need to recreate your social network. You need to acquire new friends. Or reacquire old friends. You need to get back in touch with your family.
It's like the 12-step program. You've been addicted and you've been hijacked and you've been co-opted and you had become a cult member. And you had been administered a very potent, very strong poison, which also happens to be an addictive drug.
There's no way around it. There is no trying to talk oneself or keep checking with others.
Should I try to do this? Should I do this or do that? It gets to the point, would you say, got the losses?
You have to cut the... I mean, everyone is a malignant optimist. Everyone says, if I only do this, if I only do this... Everyone is the perfect excuse. I can't live right now because my kids are small or I can't live right now because I can't live. It's my mother. I have to talk to her.
Everyone has these perfect excuses why to stay in touch with the narcissists.
But... Stay in touch is deadly, is what you think.
Deadly to the body as well.
We have documented, numerous documented studies.
Bad for the body.
Extremely bad for the body. Long term.
We have numerous...
Long term bad for your body.
Long term, yeah. Enormous damage to the immune system, enormous damage to cardiovascular system. Enormous, enormous.
Wow. I have a video.
I have a video about the body effects of trauma, of this kind of abuse. It's bad. It's really bad.
The video that you're talking about right now is on your YouTube channel?
Yeah, they're all on my YouTube channel.
They're all on YouTube channel.
23 strategies, 1 to 60 in regards to no contact.
Yeah, and there's another one about the effects on the body.
And effects on the body.
Seven techniques of...
What again? Seven techniques.
There are eight techniques of coping with narcissists. I invented seven and some other guy invented gray rock and gray rock is by far the best by the way. Really?
Okay.
So if you have to...
Well, you're talking about a temporary aspect. Yes. Or an occasional aspect, gray rock.
But we're talking severing and stopping the addiction and the potent poison. Cold turkey.
Cold turkey.
Cold turkey. Cold turkey. Not easy. I mean, I know you know this. I mean, you spearheaded this in many different ways, but you know, a lot of people find that extremely difficult, but it's a reality. That is reality.
What they're trying to hold on to is not reality, is what you're saying.
Because the reality has been falsified. They're living in a cult. The reality is real. It's a fantasy or it's a lie. And it's addictive.
The love was never real. The relationship was never real is what you're saying. It was a complete facade and a person bought into it.
Yeah. It's called in clinical terms, shared fantasy. It was first described in 1989 by Sander, not by Vaknin. So the shared fantasy is an elaborate virtual reality universe to which you are introduced by a love, loving and grooming.
What happens is a process called co-idealization.
The narcissist idealizes you and makes you fall in love with your own idealized image.
Okay. Okay.
They make you, you're good, Sam. You're good. You need your own TV show.
They make you fall in love with your own idea of love.
Yes.
Idealized image of yourself.
If you ask women, what did you most like about your narcissist? They would say, I liked the way he loved me. I liked the way he saw me.
Many, many women would answer this.
They wouldn't say I love the narcissist, but I love the way the narcissist saw me.
I get you. I've heard it.
I've heard it when I interview people for my show. That is true.
Narsis idealizes you.
And then he shows you this idealization and it's irresistible because in this ideal view of you, you're perfect. It's exactly what you wanted to see.
And it's exactly.
Wait, and it's coming back perfectly to that man or woman. And it's exactly the taste. It's the perfect recipe of love because it's exactly what you've been waiting for.
Actually, technically, you told him the recipe per se. Technically, you're falling in love with yourself.
Technically. With an idealized version of yourself. That's why it's so difficult to break.
Because you're not in love with the narcissist. You're in love with what the narcissist can do for you. And what the narcissist can do for you is time and again, show you this idealized image of you with which you had fallen in love.
They can show you that they can pull it out at any moment.
It's almost like a mirror. They can just put, Oh, wait a minute. They're getting too close to me. Let me pull this mirror out. See, I love you. And we'll back down.
A person can back down and think, well, they really love me. And then they go back to being, well, mean and difficult. They can withhold it.
We call it intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold.
They can withhold this image, but you're addicted to this image. You will do anything for the drug, you know?
Hot and cold.
Getting a hit on what actually is you. You're getting a hit on yourself.
Yes. You're getting a little shot of yourself every now and then.
They give you the hold you in place and they still feel grandiose because they can manipulate you. You're part of the cold. You're part of the cold. You have blown my mind, Sam. Sam, we better stop here. I don't want to, but it is important for me.
I told you, you know, you're only 18. You can't relate to this as a senior citizen myself.
I have tonight.
You've been around since 1995, but you're still 18.
So you're, what's the name? Jack Benny. You're Jack Benny 39. You're just like forever 39.
You're an amazing man. I wish, you know, I'll tell you this much. I wish my dad was around because if we would have you buy our house and we sit on a porch and we'd be talking for hours in your brain of all of this information.
I'm going to, I'm going to do this before we go. I want to do this. Normally when I have people on my show on Instagram, these lives, I ask them certain questions before we end the show. I technically play a game with people. We're not going to do that, but I'm going to ask you these two things.
1995, you embarked on the malignant self-love, the narcissism revisited everybody. You got it. You need to get a copy of the book. Everybody get a copy of the book.
Cause I said, so put the pizza down. You guys know what I say. Price of a pizza. Come on, seriously.
Your, your mental health and learning about no contact and go to Sam's YouTube page, make it happen, watch it, learn, vote a class.
I enjoyed this audience of one, just you and I, um, and doing this with others, maybe listening in, uh, as I stream this audio live to my page, I'm going to tell you this, please just bear with me from the age of five to 15, what was Sam like? What was young Sam like?
Wait now, just in a couple of words, three words or something like that. How would you describe Sam or a sentence when you were between the ages of five and 15 before you became professor Sam?
Well, were you a professor back then?
Were you walking around like a professor?
I started, I attended, I started to attend university at age nine. So you're not, you're not that far off the mark.
Oh, I became, I became a junk professor at 17. So you're not that far off the mark.
Okay. I quit.
I was, I was a bookworm. I was, books were my escape. My mother was torturing me physically and psychologically. And so I used to escape to the library, spend all my days and sometimes nights books were my, my alternative universe, my alternative world.
And, um, I spent all my life with books, 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day, just reading and reading and reading, trying to escape from essentially my mother. And that's how it was well into, well into age 17 when I joined the army.
You joined the army at age 17 from the age of 17 to present day. This moment in time that we're sharing together from that age of 17 till now, so much has transpired.
But if someone had to ask you describe Sam between the ages of 17 and when he's sitting there taking his time and explaining things to Paxton 2021 from when you were 17 to now this moment in time, who is that Sam? How would you describe it?
The exact opposite of the previous Sam.
I became an adventurer, a businessman, a secret agent, a criminal, professor. I had transformed my life into a movie, the kind of movie I would like to watch when I'm 90 years old and about to expire.
So the exact opposite, the previous Sam was a bookworm. The Sam afterwards was an adventurer. The adventurer in every possible way, all over the world.
And to these very days, you see, you find yourself living a life in which people want to spend time with you so that they can learn from you, pick your brain. They can find ways to get to know you better without being too nosy or intrusive.
A number of things I've heard people say, we've only, my daughters and I only been doing this since August of last year. We're coming up on a year and it is an honor to be able to talk to you.
But the most pressing question that I tossed and turned over that I wanted to ask you is one that I know my father would have said, Hey, ask him this question and I'm going to do it. I thought about not doing it, but I'm going to ask you, do you have a nickname, Sam?
Sam is my nickname. My real name is also.
Oh, okay. I'm listening.
Shmuel. What was that?
Shmuel.
That's the Hebrew for Samuel.
Shmuel. Did I say it right?
Shmuel. Yeah.
Shmuel. All right. So your nickname is Sam.
So I am kind of close to you because I use your nickname then.
All right. We're like twins. We're like twins. Listen, you've been a.
Except for the age. Except for the age, you're much younger.
Okay.
You know, you didn't have to go back there. I was going to let that alone, but thanks for calling me.
You're the one. You're the one who introduced it.
You said I'm 18.
I'm going to go get my discount at a restaurant for getting this.
You said I'm 18, you're the one.
Yeah. Hey, you're 18 until we're done. Then you go back to your real age.
I didn't realize this provides though. I think we have to call it a day because we are going to lose most of our audience by now.
We got to go. All right.
Hey, it's been fun, my friend. Thank you so much. I am honored to meet you and my daughters are out there, but you know, hey, I'll do this. They're waiting.
Wait, no, no, hold on one second. We're going to do this.
What was regards to they're coming.
Wait, they're coming in or they're saying by, Hey, we'll see you later, my friend. Take care.
Okay. Take care. All right.
Bye. Bye. I'm stopping the recording.