Narcissist in Your Life? You Need to Hear This! (with Maia Ece Ergönenç)

The shared fantasy is something completely different.

The shared fantasy is a fantastic narrative, very reminiscent of a movie. It's a fantastic narrative, and in this narrative, the narcissist is perfect, he is godlike, in this narrative.

That's his grandiosity.

He is cognitively distorted. He doesn't perceive the world correctly. He has a self-concept, which is totally crazy and inflated.

But he needs people to tell him that his false self, that his self-concept and self-image, which are self-perception, which are totally crazy, he needs people to tell him that he's not crazy, that they're real.

So he goes around and he finds, for example, an intimate partner.

Now, her job is to enter the fantasy of the narcissist and to collaborate with the narcissist and to make the narcissist believe that the fantasy is reality, not a fantasy.

So the shared fantasy is shared. It is the narcissist and the other party, could be intimate partner, could be girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, the narcissist's children, the narcissist's best friend, whoever is in the fantasy with the narcissist shares the fantasy with the narcissist.

The narcissist says, I'm a genius, no? I'm amazing genius.

And the other party in the shared fantasy should say, yes, of course you're an amazing genius.

That's the job of the partner in the fantasy.

Just like validation and admiration he needs...

Yes.

It's a little more than validation because it has to do with something called reality testing.

It's like telling the narcissist you are not crazy, you're not insane. You are not imagining things. You are not delusional. You know, everything is true. Everything you think is true about yourself, about others.

So it's about restoring reality testing. Restoring the narcissist's belief that he's perceiving reality correctly.

So it's a little more than validation. It's more powerful than validation.

The minute this happens, the minute the narcissists finds you, let's assume the narcissist has found you.

Okay, and you are the...

He chose you.

He chose you, and now he thinks you can be a partner in the shared fantasy.

That minute, you become the narcissist's mother. The narcissist converts you into a mother figure, a maternal figure. And the narcissist expects you to be his mother.

At the same time, the narcissist offers you to be your mother.

So there is what I call dual mothership.

You become the narcissist's mother, and you begin to see the narcissist as a child. You begin to perceive the narcissist as a wounded child, a child in need, a child who is looking for love, a child who's crying, a child is traumatized, a child who is wounded and injured and traumatized, and you want to hold the child, you want to protect the child, you want to love the child.

So the narcissist makes you his mother.

At the same time, the narcissist becomes your mother. He regresses you. He infantilizes you. He makes you a baby again.

And then he loves you the way a mother should. He loves you unconditionally. Or at least he convinces you that he loves you unconditionally.

Actually, he doesn't. But he's good, you know, he's good at convincing. So he convinces you that his love for you is unconditional because you are perfect. So he idealizes you.

He love bombs you. He tells you that you're amazing. You're drop dead gorgeous. You're hyper-intelligent. You're the best thing that ever happened to him. He never felt this way with anyone else, etc., etc. You can do no wrong.

And so now that he has idealized you, you became a baby. Because that's what mothers do with babies. They idealized them.

And he became your mother. He's giving you unconditional love. And he is giving you access to your idealized image through his eyes. He makes you fall in love with your idealized image.

Through his gaze, you fall in love with the way that he sees you. You become addicted. He sees you, he's so focused on you, like laser, and he makes you like a goddess, and you become addicted. You need it. You need it all the time. You want to be seen as a goddess, you know?

It's intoxicating.

So all these mechanisms are working.

At the same time, he's your child, at the same time he's your mother, at the same time you're his mother, at the same time you fall in love with yourself through his gaze.

So you become dependent on him because only he can give you access to your idealized image. He has the monopoly of this.

So gradually there is bonding. It is colloquially known as trauma bonding, but there is bonding that is taking place.

At this stage, the narcissist accomplished goal number one.

You belong to him. You're his property. You're his extension. You belong to him. You're his property. You're his extension. You're an internal object.

And you will stay. You will stick around in the fantasy because he gives you so much. He gives you the feeling that you are a child again. He gives you a second chance with a good mother. He gives you if you fall in love with your image, etc. It's difficult to leave.

So now that he feels comfortable that you're there, the next stage, he needs to find out if you are truly a good mother, because his original mother was not a good mother. She was what we call a dead mother.

Dead mother is not dead physically, it is dead mentally. A dead mother is a mother who is selfish, a mother who is depressed, a mother who is absent emotionally, a mother who is cold, a mother who is psychopathic.

So these kind of mothers, they cannot give emotional sustenance to the child. This, they destroy the capacity to attach. So they create insecure attachment style and so on. These are dead mothers.

So now he has to see whether you're a good mother, good enough mother or dead mother. He needs to test you.

How to test you?

He abuses you. Oh that's why he abuses you, he's testing you, he's pushing. He abuses you. He's testing you. He's pushing the envelope.

If you stick around, if you don't leave, you don't abandon him, never mind what he does to you, then you love him unconditionally and you're a good mother.

So the first stage of abuse has to do with testing. He's testing.

He will cheat on you and then he will wait. Will you leave me? If you leave me, you're a bad mother. But if you stick around, if you stay, it means you love me, never mind what I do to you. It means you love me unconditionally. It doesn't depend on my behavior or my performance, and that means you're a good mother.

Now I feel safe that you're a good mother. We can move on to the next stage.

And the next stage in the shared fantasy is about separating from you.

What happened to the narcissist in his early childhood is that he was not able to separate from parental figures, especially the mother. He was not able to become an individual.

So now he's trying again with a new mother. There's a new mother. He's trying again. And he's trying again by separating from you.

What he failed with his original mother is trying with you.

But how to separate from you? Why to separate from you? You're perfect. You're idealized. You're godlike. You know, why to separate from you?

So he needs to change the way he sees you.

If you're perfect, if you are super gorgeous, if you're hyper-intelligent, if you're amazing in bed, then why to leave you? It doesn't make sense to leave you. It doesn't make sense to separate from you.

So he needs to begin to see you in a different way.

So he begins to devalue you. He begins to see you as a negative person.

He is mine, yes.

Someone who can do no other.

Sorry?

He is mine, yes.

He's changing the internal object from idealized to persecutory.

So in his mind, you're becoming stupid, ugly, hostile, enemy, bad, making wrong decisions, having bad friends, bad influence, everything is bad about you. It completely converts the internal object from ideal to idealized to devalued, to bad object.

And then, of course, because now you're a bad object, of course, it has to separate from you. And he discards you.

It is a symbolic, symbolic reenactment replay of the early childhood experiences, the early childhood conflict.

And that's why the shared fantasy is totally not dependent on you. You have nothing to do with any of this.

It's inexorable. Inexorable in English means it's moving ahead and you cannot stop it.

So it's inexorable and it's automatic and it's autonomous. And once you set it in motion, you cannot stop it.

So never mind what you do. You could be the best partner, most loving, most amazing, most compassionate, most empathic, most everything. You will be devalued and discarded because this has nothing to do with you.

It has to do with the mechanism of the shared fantasy. It's like this huge device that is playing in a narcissist's mind and takes over.

This is more or less the picture. More or less, there are many other intricacies and complications, but that's more or less the picture.

Narcissism isn't obvious, it's insidious. And if you don't know the patterns or if you haven't encountered such a pattern before, it's very hard to understand the cycle and the beginning and the discard.

So this causes, I think, cognitive dissonance or the victims or the survivors.

But when I realized after the search, they are like using a playbook, they are in all continents, in all genders, in all races, they are always using the same words, same phrases, same actions, but even the words are same.

So they are making a playbook or how can they be same like that?

Playbook is a bad word because a playbook implies that you're in control of the process. It's conscious choice.

They don't know anything. Nothing.

They are completely captive, the hostages of the project, the mechanism. It's a mechanism, it's a device.

The narcissist is like a programmed robot. The program is very, very limited program. It's not like artificial intelligence where the program can develop and acquire new skills and new information.

No, the program is very, very limited.

It's a tunnel program.

Before, and they will do this after every time until they die, until they die.

And they are not aware of their motivations. They are aware of the behavior but they're not aware of their motivations.

And when they say something which is counterfactual, which is not a fact, they don't know that they are lying. They believe it.

So that's why we say that narcissists don't gaslight. Narcissists don't lie. They confabulate. There's a big difference.

Confabulation is a clinical term in psychology. Confabulation is when you lie but you believe your own lies, when you fantasize and believe the fantasy, when you make a promise and you believe you will keep it.

So narcissists don't future fake, all these gaslighting, future faking is psychopathic. This is what psychopaths do.

Because a psychopath can tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Narcissists cannot.

A psychopath can tell the difference between internal and external. Narcissists cannot.

A psychopath is goal-oriented. He wants something specific from you.

A narcissist wants all of you. A psychopath would use you and walk away.

A narcissist would not even use you. He would use your internal object within a theater production, within a movie that is playing in his head. You're not relevant at all there.

So that's why I'm laughing when I see online victims and saying, a narcissist chose us, we were chosen. I was chosen because I'm kind and I'm empathic, I'm nice.

No, you're irrelevant and you're interchangeable. And you're nothing to the narcissist.

And I think we choose the narcissist because I saw something.

The narcissist invites everyone to their shared fantasy. But they take the ones who accepted invitation.

As long as you stay, you accept the shared fantasy. But when you want to discard, they will change the narrative and they will continue the shared fantasy.

So it's not about you.

No, not about you.

But something is about us. Self-love or self-respect is about us and we must strengthen that part.

For example, when you say internal objects, if a narcissistic mother doesn't have consciousness and lack of object relations, the baby and the mother relations, how can be?

Because the baby becomes the narcissist or have another disorder.

So here is something. There is good reason to believe that narcissistic personality disorder, and there is a big difference between narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic style. And many people online confuse the two.

But let's say someone with a disorder, with narcissistic personality disorder, these are rare people. We're talking about 1 to 3% of the population, maybe.

So there is good reason to believe that narcissism is hereditary. In other words, it involves genetic mutations. There are also good reasons to believe that narcissism involves brain abnormalities, structural abnormalities or functional abnormalities of the brain.

However, unfortunately, we don't have any serious studies that support these assumptions. We don't have any studies that support this.

We do have a lot of studies over 120 years that connect childhood abuse and trauma to the emergence of pathological narcissism later in life.

So this is the current state of knowledge. There are so-called studies, they are laughable, and of course they don't constitute any proof of anything.

Right now, we cannot connect narcissism to genetics and we cannot connect narcissism to brain abnormalities. Although I repeat again, I firmly believe that these are true, that these elements exist.

So when a mother is a narcissist, what she has with her child is a shared fantasy.

And ultimately, she would devalue the child and discard the child, exactly like in a typical shared fantasy later in life.

The child would not be able to separate from such a mother.

Because the mother perceives the child as an internal object, not external. And the child consequently will not be able to individual, to become an individual. And the child will not be able to learn object relations because the first object relations is with mother.

The deficiencies, the damage is massive, very massive.

A child of a narcissistic mother has to somehow compensate for the absence of the mother, in effect.

And to compensate for this, the child uses fantasy and imagination and so on.

And in some cases, comes up with a false self.

For example, in borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

Not all children react this way, which is why I believe that there is a genetic component.

So we can have 10 children grow in the same family with the same mother, and only one of them would become a narcissist or a borderline, while the other nine would be perfectly healthy.

But the mother is crucial.

Even if you are born with a genetic predisposition to become a narcissistic, that you have the genetic template, it is the environment that triggers, expresses these genes. These genes are triggered by the environment.

So it's a kind of epigenetic view.

One thing I think is important to clarify, what is abuse? What is the mother not good enough? When is she failing? What is abuse?

So when we say abuse, we immediately think about sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse and so on. And these are of course forms of abuse. And they're very traumatizing forms.

But there are many other forms of abuse. Many are very traumatizing forms but there are many other forms of abuse.

For example, a mother who is overprotective, protects the child too much, this mother does not allow the child to be in touch with reality and with peers. Some big damage is abuse.

A mother who idolizes the child, spoils the child, pamper the child, pedestalizes the child, tells the child, you're perfect, you can do no wrong. Everyone else is guilty. You're never guilty. That's bad preparation for life. That's abusive.

A mother who instrumentalizes the child. A mother who says, I had a dream to be an actor, actress. Now you will be the actress. So you will realize my dreams, my fantasies that I fail to realize. It's using the child as an instrument.

A mother who parentifies the child, a mother who says, I'm helpless, I need you, you should be my mother. I cannot be your mother, but you will be my mother.

So this is called parentification or adultification. That's also a form of abuse, and I can continue. There are many, many forms of abuse.

Many people say, why do I keep sayingmother, mother, mother, why not father?

Because, first of all, I'm not alone. The biggest scholars, like Bowlby and so on, they said the same. Freud, many others.

The thing is that until age 36 months, the father has minimal role, maybe nothing, close to nothing, until 36 months. The mother is the absolutely dominant figure.

And when I say mother, it has nothing to do with the sex of the person, with the genitalia. When I say mother, I mean the person who is fulfilling maternal functions.

So if you grow up only with your father and you have no mother, your father is your mother. It doesn't matter what you have between your legs. What matters is what functions you fulfill.

So this is what when I say mother.

But until age 36 months, the mother is critical, and only the mother. Only.

And it is the damage until age 36 months that gives rise to pathological narcissists.

After age 3, the father enters the picture. The father teaches skills. The father socializes the child. The father teaches the child how to behave in society. The father teaches a child's sexual scripts, and so on.

So the father then becomes a dominant figure.

And if the father is bad, dysfunctional, then of course there is damage to the child as well.

But it's not the same kind of damage.

Daddy issues do not give rise to narcissism. Mommy issues gives rise, but daddy issues not.

If you have issues with your father, you will suffer, you will have many mental health problems, absolutely.

But narcissism is not one of them.

If you had issues with your mother, there is a likelihood, not very big, but likelihood, that you may develop narcissism.

That's the difference.

That's why I keep saying mother, mother, mother.

And I have two sons, so it's very important to know about these disorders and psychology.

And one of the other questions, you told about the shared fantasy and the toxic cycle, and it's going like a circle, it starts love bombing and then the bad part starts, then the Hoover comes sometimes. And it can develop hundreds of times again and again.

But if you discard the narcissist, not him or her or your parent, it doesn't matter. When you discard the narcissist, does it change something? Do they understand something is wrong with them or they're just perfect voice?

It's a perfect entity, it's Godlike. Everything is your fault.

This is called alloplastic defense. Alloplastic defense means everything is your fault.

No, there's no chance of transformation.

There is never a chance for transformation.

Elsewhere narcissists, they are talking about these, for example.

There is nothing like that?

We can in therapy modify narcissists, the narcissists behaviors. Teach the narcissists to behave differently, to be less antagonistic, less antisocial, less abrasive, less unpleasant, less exploitative. We can teach the narcissist to behave differently.

This is called behavior modification. However, it doesn't touch the core of narcissism.

So, the narcissist remains disempathic and callous and so on, and it's short-term.

So if you teach a narcissist, if you modify the narcissist behavior, you have to do it every six months, like maintenance of a car, you know? If you don't do it, he goes back. He goes back tothe way he was. And you have to start from zero.

By the way, half of all narcissists are women.

Until the 1980s, until 25 years ago, we believed that three quarters of narcissists were men and one quarter were women. We believe that.

But now we know that thisone quarter were women. We believe that. But now we know that this was actually a cultural gender bias, and in effect, half of all narcissists are women. So whenever I say he, it's a she also.

Yeah, of course.

So the narcissists, there are ways to modify the narcissists behavior. For example, you can challenge the narcissist's grandiosity. You can tell him, ah, you can't do that. And he will prove to you that you can do it. He can do it. And then his behavior will change.

So it's easy to manipulate narcissists because they are two years old. The mental age, the emotional age of a narcissist is two years old.

And then people say, wait a minute. If he's two years old, how can it be president of the United States?

Because there is a distinction between what we call episodic memory and semantic memory.

The narcissist is discontinuous. He doesn't have continuity. He has memory gaps, these are known as dissociative gaps. He doesn't have a core identity. He doesn't have a functional self. He cannot read other people properly because he lacks empathy and he has no positive emotions, has no access to positive emotions.

So he's very, very deficient person, but he has good semantic memory.

Episodic memory is memory of your life. Semantic memory is memory of how to do things.

So he has very good semantic memory, how to be a professor of psychology, how to be a president of the United States, how to drive a car. He has all this, you know?

But he doesn't have episodic memory and he doesn't have a self.

Autobiographic memory. For example, from the morning to the night, they have gaps in their memory.

Yes.

Narcissus have huge memory gaps. I think from my work, I've been doing this for 30 years, and I've worked with well over 200 people who were diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. And I have the world's largest database of narcissists. I have 2,300 people diagnosed with narcissistic personalities, sort of, who were interviewed and are interviewed in intervals. So I have a longitudinal database.

So what I see convinced me, what I've seen convinced me that the dissociation in narcissism is even more severe than in borderline.

In borderline personality disorder, if you are exposed to stress or to tension or to anxiety or to abandonment, real or imagined, or to rejection, if you're exposed to what we call egodystony, if you're exposed to something unpleasant, something as a borderline, you will dissociate, you will forget it, you will bear it.

The narcissist has dissociation all the time. All the time.

And in tests that I conducted, with myself included, I think narcissists forget about 90 to 95% of their lives. Completely forget. They have no access.

Not a good thing.

Sometimes, forgetting is a good thing sometimes.

Yeah, but then you cannot have an identity.

Yes, you don't have an identity.

If you don't have memories, they don't have identity.

Can it be because of the multiple personality disorders?

Because they have, I think, two identity, a good one who serves everyone, his or she is very helpful to everyone, perfect identity. And there is someone very bad and void or monster. There are two. Maybe their memories don't combine together. Can it be like this?

No.

The dissociation in narcissism is a post-traumatic reaction. We know that people who have been traumatized, they develop dissociation.

And while the borderline has three forms of dissociation, the narcissist has only amnesia. The narcissist has something that all human beings have. He has a persona. Persona is the mask that you wear when you interact with other people. So this is common, even in healthy people.

The persona of the narcissist is a positive thing because he wants to elicit narcissistic supply.

So these are not two personalities, these are simply a persona.

And in this sense, you also have a persona. And I, and everyone has a persona.

However, it is true that narcissism involves something which is very reminiscent of multiple personalities.

Because all narcissists have a true self and a false self.

The false self is the narrative of the narcissists' godlike qualities and traits and accomplishments and so on. So it's a fantastic narrative.

But it functions like a self.

And then the narcissist has a true self. And the true self is basically very young and inactive. We say that it is psychodynamically inactive.

But still, every narcissist has two selves.

In this sense, yes, you could say that narcissism is a form of dissociative identity disorder, which used to be known as multiple personality disorder.

And very often the narcissist has something that resembles switching in borderline, switching between self-states, so the narcissist can transition instantly from full of rage to being nice and holding and compassionate and so on.

So these switches, the switching is indicative, I think, of dissociative structure of personality, which is therefore the same like multiple personality.

Does it make the memory gaps, maybe, the splits or the switches maybe?

All these, everything I've described is a post-traumatic reaction.

When we are exposed to trauma, our personality fragments and breaks down, we have dissociative gaps and so on.

So the root of all this is the trauma.

The dissociation characterizes all the self-states of the narcissist.

It's not that when he transitions from one self to another self, he has perfect memories of one self and perfect memories of another self. No, it's not like multiple personality.

In multiple personality, dissociative identity disorder especially in the extreme forms, because there are many forms, in the extreme forms when you transition from one personality to another you don't have the memories of the first personality you have the memories of the second.

But you have the memories. They're there.

It's not the case with the narcissist.

Wherever the narcissist transitions, he doesn't have memory, or he has very little memory.

It's not that he transitions and he has excellent memories here and excellent memory is there and he makes like a bridge. He moves from one.

No.

He has dissociative memory gaps here and memory gaps here. And whatever happens, he's always with memory gaps.

And this is why I say that it is even more extreme than borderline.

Because the narcissist has these huge memory gaps, he confabulates. He needs to explain to himself and to others what has happened.

And so he comes up with plausible stories.

He says, I was at home, and the next thing I remember, I was in my car.

Okay, I was at home, then I was in my car. What happened?

Ah, probably I got up, I brushed my teeth, I ate breakfast, and I went to my car. Probably. It makes sense.

Wait a minute, if it makes sense, it's a fact. So that's a fact. And don't argue with me. You have a video that I didn't do any of this? The video is wrong. I remember it clearly. I remember it 100%.

So when you argue with a narcissist about what had happened, he will insist that his version of reality is the only one, and it is reminiscent of gaslighting. It looks like he is gaslighting you, but he is not gaslighting you.

He simply believes that his reality is correct, it's true.

He is protecting his reality that time.

Sorry?

He is protecting his reality that time.

Yes, he's very defensive.

In general, narcissism is a fragility. It's fragile. It's vulnerable.

So the narcissist is always defensive.

The narcissist, for example, is hyper-vigilant.

The narcissist all the time is asking, is she insulting me? Is she criticizing me? Does he disagree with me? Who will attack me now? It's always under-defensive.

Narcissus has paranoid deviation. They are a big paranoid.

And these are defenses. They are a big paranoid and so on.

And these are defenses. These are because the narcissist cannot afford the truth or reality. They're too much for him.

And he needs to protect himself.

And so the psychopath gaslights you because the psychopath knows the difference between reality and fantasy. Then he pretends the fantasy is reality. And he tells you, your perception of reality is wrong and you're crazy, you're mentally ill.

That's a psychopath.

But the narcissist believes that what he's telling you is the absolute truth.

So there's a big difference here.

Gaslighting has to be premeditated and goal oriented. That's the definition of gaslighting. There has to be intent, the intention.

The intention is to destabilize you, to make you distrust yourself, to lose your belief in your ability to gauge reality, and you become dependent on the psychopath.

The gaslighting makes you dependent.

And then the psychopath can take your money, have sex with you, whatever.

That's all the narcissist.

The narcissist, simply, as you said, exactly, defense, protects his fragile internal space and his fragile view of reality.

Narcissists know that something is wrong. People ask me if narcissists know that something is wrong.

Yes, they know that something is wrong. They can't put their finger in it and they would deny it, of course, if you tell them something is wrong with you, they would deny it.

But deep, deep, deep, deep inside, of course they know that something is wrong. If all your relationships fail all the time, no matter what, how narcissistic you are, ultimately, even, you know, the most thick-headed, thick-skulled narcissist, you realize that something is wrong.

Yeah.

They can see the cycle maybe, but in their fantasy world, they are not guilty, so they all need to change and they continue the habit.

Yes, but that's a compensation. That means they feel that something is wrong and then they say, no, nothing is wrong. It's her fault. It's his fault. It's nothing wrong. The nothing is wrong part is a defense. It's a compensation.

Deep inside, the narcissistic is fragile and, you know, suspect that something is really wrong.

And my last question.

We cannot discard our parents, maybe, but we can discard our co-workers, siblings, maybe, and our partners.

When we understand that there is something wrong and there's a cycle and there is gaslighting, manipulation or something else, what do you advise to the ones who watch us now?

First of all, we can definitely discard our parents. That's a miss. That's an excuse in my...

When I hear people saying, I cannot discard my son, he's my son. She's my mother. I cannot discard my son, he's my son, she's my mother, cannot discard it.

That's nonsense. Complete nonsense. It's an excuse to stay in touch.

The victims are very creative and very imaginative, trying to find a reason to stay in touch. Trying to find a way to stay in touch.

Even fighting in court is a way to stay in touch. Even sharing custody is a way to stay in touch. Everything is a way to stay in touch.

So she's my mother. That's an excuse to stay in touch.

You want to stay in touch. You want to stay in touch because you did not become a victim by accident.

You have a highly specific psychological profile and you have a need to be a victim. There's a need there. And it's satisfied only by the narcissists.

So you become addicted and that's what we call trauma bonding.

So trauma bonding is a form of self-harming. All victims of narcissistic abuse are self-harming people. Some people self-harm with cigarettes. They burn themselves. Some people cut themselves. Some people use narcissists instead of a cigarette. Or they use narcissists instead of a razor. And that's the way they self mutilate.

So I haven't seen my parents since 1996. My father died a few days ago. And I haven't seen them. Of course you can discard your parents. No question about it.

Only a fool ignores discarding? No contact.

I've heard, I've developed when I started all this. I started this whole mess in 1980s. So I came up with the language that is used today and so on. Many of the words and the phrases hovering and narcissistic abuse and so on, I invented this in the 1980s.

And at the time, I invented a single strategy and I called it no contact strategy, with 27 rules. So it's not so simple. No contact strategy with 27 rules. So it's not so simple. It's 27 rules.

Later on, I developed another six. So in total, I developed seven.

And then there was another guy, and he developed Grey Rock, which is an excellent strategy.

There's another person developing.

It's an excellent strategy. It's not mine. There's another person developing. It's an excellent strategy.

If you have to be in touch with the narcissists for some reason, and this should be extremely rare cases, then Grey Rock is your technique.

In all other cases, you must immediately go no contact.

And if you want to know how to go no contact, there are 27 rules, you can go on my YouTube channel and there's a video. The no contact rules. And just follow these rules.

Understand that you are your worst enemy. You're looking for any reason and excuse to remain in the shared fantasy. It's addictive. It's intoxicating. Even the drama is intoxicating. Even the drama. Even the ups and downs. Even the intermittent reinforcement. Even the unpredictability. Even the fear. Even fear is intoxicating.

It's all chemicals, biochemicals. You became addicted to all this mess. You're an addict.

So don't look for excuses to stay in the bar. You know? Walk away. Walk, walk out.

Even if it's your mother, even if it's your son, even if it's your daughter, even if it's your father, your husband, your children, your pastor, your boss, you need to walk away, you need to go no contact.

And the reason is that narcissism is contagious.

If you don't go no contact, gradually your personality will be transformed into a vet of a narcissist.

And in CPTSD, in complex trauma, we know that there is this contagion effect and that victims develop narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors and later on traits.

The narcissist invades your mind. He brainwashes you. He installs in your mind an application, an introject, and he takes over you, and then he uses you as a puppet. And he's inside your mind, even after he has left physically. He's still inside your mind. He's still talking to you. He's still brainwashing you. He's still denigrating you and manipulating you and so on so forth.

The more you're exposed to the narcissists, the more damage there is, and the longer the recovery and the healing. Cut it as soon as you can.

And you should know the following. You know that it's a narcissist and you have known it from the first 10 seconds of your meeting, of your first meeting.

You were just denying it.

Yeah.

Intuition tells the reality, but we don't want to see it.

Yes, and you suppress your intuition.

Because you are lonely or because you are civilized, and it's not nice to judge people or because I don't know because of what is known as the uncanny valley reaction.

We have studies of this reaction and it is conclusively, they conclusively demonstrate that we have an adverse reaction to narcissists and psychopaths within the first few minutes. And this is known as the uncanny-value reaction.

So listen to your intuition, to your gut instinct, and walk away as soon as you can, before you're infected, survivors.

And your body effects also, you have infections or bloating, or depression, fatigue. You have so many other things coming.

Intuition tells the truth in the first part and you start to believe the exterior world, not the interior one. You start to stay in a folk area.

I think there are two critical weapons against narcissistic contagion.

One is to trust yourself. Your intuition is wrong 50% of the time when it comes to problems in the world. So about 50% of the time you're wrong. Your intuition is a flip over coin.

But your intuition about other people is right 90% of the time. When it comes to other people, your intuition is right. You should trust it immediately, without thinking.

Number one, that's your main weapon, main protection.

Number two, social network, family, friends, people who can talk to, people who can confide in, therapies, I know, surround yourself with people and share. Surround yourself and share.

So this is also another protection, massive protection. That's why narcissists try to isolate you.

Some main strategy of a narcissist to isolate you they criticize your family they push away your friends they make sure that finally you're all alone with the narcissist and you're dependent on the narcissist if not financially then definitely emotionally otherwise and so so fight these two things.

Victims don't trust themselves. That's how it starts. You don't trust yourself. You don't trust yourself to be your own good friend. You don't trust yourself to be alone. You don't trust yourself.

So you need always you need someone else. This neediness is bad. Leads you to bad places, not only with narcissists. It's bad generally. It's a strategy. It's bad.

That's right. And thank you, Professor Sam Vaknin.

And if you want to learn more about narcissism and the other personal disorders, please go to Mr. Sanaknan's YouTube channel and there are hundreds of videos about everything you can find.

Thank you for attending. It was an honor for me. Then see you later.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your time and for having me.