Narcissist's Inner Child: Bait or Soulmate? (Compilation)

Now, the inner child concept is not new. I'm going to mention right here quite a few of the thinkers and scholars throughout the history of psychology who have dealt with and dwelt upon the inner child concept and then I'm going to proceed and discuss the idea of inner child and how it is different to regression in the narcissistic dynamic of the shared fantasy.

So Eric Berne came up with the ego child state and script decisions.

I'm going to mention this like a bullet like a series of bullet points so that you can do your own research online. Okay, I'm not gonna go deep into any of this.

Alice Miller was the first to link child abuse and psychopathology.

Vivian and Arthur Janoff primal therapy. An element of primal therapy is the inner child.

John Bradshaw, of course, who popularized the idea of inner child in Homecoming, his book in 1990.

Carl Gustav Jung did not use the phrase inner child, he used the phrase divine child. It was an archetype, a symbol of wholeness in the psyche.

Hugh Missildine wrote the book, Your Inner Child in 1963.

Jeremiah Abrams, reclaiming the inner child in 1990.

Lucia Capacione wrote Recovery of Your Inner Child, 1976. She started her work in 1976. The book was published in 1991.

Lucia Capacione, or Capacione, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.

Charles Whitfield, healing the child within, 1987.

And finally, Penny Park, rescuing the inner child in 1990.

So as you can see, the inner child has been with us for a very, very long period of time, for many decades.

Coffee break.

In the internal family system, the model of internal family system, there are multiple inner children. They're all exiles, they're all dissociated from the conscious mind.

Because these inner children carry with them negative affectivity, they carry with them shame, the memory of trauma and hurt, and so on and so forth.

We find the inner child concept in ego therapy, in schematotherapy, and in psychosynthesis.

Okay, having reviewed the literature briefly, let's talk about the inner child.

The inner child is a metaphor, I repeat, it's not real, it's a literary device. It's intended to induce transformation by confronting us with a part of ourselves which is deemed to be inaccessible or suppressed, repressed or dissociated, someone.

So the inner child is a repository of potentials, very positive potentials, and positive traits such as curiosity, joyfulness.

But it is also a reservoir of hurt and shame and trauma and anger and fear.

And so it's not true to say that the inner child is a positive construct.

It's a nuanced construct. There's no splitting there. It's a nuanced construct.

Part of the inner child is helpful, conducive to growth, and a big part of the inner child prevents growth, retards growth, and affects our decisions in ways which are self-defeating and self-destructive.

The inner child is a sub-personality, a complex, self-state that is not always beneficial. Actually in the vast majority of cases is not beneficial.

So the connection with the inner child, the ability, if you wish to tame and domesticate the inner child, this is a precondition for mental health.

But don't confuse an inner connection with the inner child with regression.

Inner child dialogue, the ability to do inner child work, that is not regression.

Regression, I will describe it in a minute, is a negative thing. Regression is defined in the APA dictionary, American Psychological Association dictionary, is defined as return to a prior lower state of cognitive, emotional or behavioral functioning.

This term is associated particularly with psychoanalytic theory, denoting a situation in which the individual reverts to immature behavior or to an earlier stage of psychosexual development.

And this happens when the individual is threatened with overwhelming external problems or internal conflicts.

So regression is a dysfunctional reaction to stress, anxiety, trauma, threats, an environment which is not conducive to self-efficacy.

And it is dysfunctional, regression is dysfunctional, because it's a default to an earlier phase of development with much less, much fewer cognitive skills, much more stunted and thwarted emotions, or even no access to emotions, and behavioral functioning which is not adult.

Regression leads to infantilization, which the APA dictionary defines as the encouragement of infantile or childish behavior in a more mature individual.

How can we tell if someone is regressed?

Or if someone regresses, regression could be spontaneous, it could happen in the individual out of a set of internal dynamics.

When forces and processes inside the individual psyche conflict, they can induce spontaneous regression.

Regression can also happen in an environment which is total, restrictive, ominous, threatening and so on.

So in such an environment, regression can occur, for example, in prison, in the military, in hospital, in isolation, etc.

And regression can be induced by a third party.

The narcissist induces in his intimate partner regression and infantilization as a condition for entering the shared fantastic space.

So the contract, the Faustian deal that the intimate partner of a narcissist strikes with a narcissist is, I'm going to deny my adulthood, my agency, my autonomy, my independence, my self-efficacy. I'm going to deny all these things. I'm going to repress them. I'm going to suppress them. I'm going to fight them.

And I'm going to become a baby. That's the intimate partner.

I'm going to suppress them, I'm going to fight them, and I'm going to become a baby. That'sbaby.

That's the intimate part. I'm going to become a baby again. I'm going to regress. I'm going to be an infant. And you're going to be my mother. You're the narcissist. You're going to be my unconditionally loving, accepting and caring mother. You're going to solve my problems, regulate all my moods, control my emotions, and stabilize them.

Because that's what good mothers do. You're going to be my good enough mother.

And so the narcissist makes regression a condition for the shared fantasy.

And you can tell that someone has regressed spontaneously or inductively. You can tell that someone is read, but by observing certain features.

For example, following regression, there's a marked rise in impulsivity. There's a lack of impulse control, impetuousness. Neediness, dependency, extreme separation insecurity, irresponsibility, aversion to commitment and intimacy, rejection of adulthood, rejection of adult chores, responsibilities, and even rejection of mature, reciprocal sex.

When you see all these things in an individual and they are new, this individual hasn't been like this before, then you should know that the individual has been regressed.

Narcissus are like that all the time. So there's no regression in narcissism. The narcissist is in a constant, permanent, regressive state. He is stuck between the ages of two and nine, depending on the narcissist.

But the narcissist's intimate partner, even borderlines, are much more mature and mentally older than the narcissist.

So the narcissist needs to regress them to his level.

If the narcissist is two years old, he would feel highly uncomfortable with an adult. So he would need to regress his intimate partner to two years old.

If he's nine years old, nine years old, he would need to make sure that his intimate partner's maturity matches his.

But in the intimate partner, this would foster behaviors which were hitherto unseen, new behaviors.

And there would be marked change in personality and reactivity and reactance. And it would surprise bystanders and onlookers and friends and family. They would say, you have changed. You're not the same. Something is happening to you.

Yeah. Something is happening to the narcissist's intimate partner. She's becoming a baby. She's being baby-fied.

At the same time, of course, may I remind you, the narcissist insists that his intimate partner act as a mature, adult, loving, caring, balanced, stable, secure base, good enough mother.

Now, healthy adulthood involves good enough parenting of the inner child. You cannot be a healthy adult if you deny your inner child, if you deny the childlike aspects of you, we all have these traces and remnants and vestiges of childhood in us.

To deny them is to deny part of who you are, to betray yourself. And this creates dysfunction and mental illness.

So the only way to be healthy as an adult is to maintain a line of communication with your inner child, a joyful acceptance of the gifts that the inner child brings to the table.

But the adult parent is in charge of the inner child. The adult parent provides discipline and structure in order to the inner child. The adult parent never lets the inner child take over. He never dissociates the inner child, he never rejects the inner child, he never ignores the inner child, but he does not let the inner child take the lead.

This is a great definition, by the way, of mental health.

It's not the case with the narcissist. It's not the case with regression.

In narcissism, and in regression, the inner child takes over. The adult is sidelined. The adult is repressed, rejected, ignored. The adult becomes a burden.

Inner child is unbridled. The inner child has no discipline, no inhibitions, no limitations. The inner child is very similar to the id in Freud's model. The inner child is instinctual, reflexive. Inner child is not aware of the consequences of its own actions. He has a very impaired, undeveloped, reality testing.

If the adult were to grant the inner child dominion and control over the totality of the personality, consequences would be dire, and indeed this is what happens to narcissists.

The same happens to the narcissist's intimate partner once she has been regressed, because regression involves putting the inner child in charge.

Regression involves the parentification of the inner child, surrendering to the inner child, control over one's life, coercing and cajoling others into fulfilling a parental role.

And this leads to repetition compulsions, dysfunctions, impaired reality testing, and mental illness.

Now I'm going to break down this very dense and complex paragraph for you to understand.

The narcissist wants his intimate partner to be simultaneously a child, the narcissist child, and an adult, an adult, the narcissist parent, a narcissist mother.

Narcissist broadcasts signals to the intimate partner.

You're going to be my mother, but you're also going to be helpless, dependent, in need, and so on, and I'm going to be your mother too. So I'm going to be your mother, you're going to be my mother.

But how can this be accomplished?

By converting the inner child into a parent, so parentifying the inner child.

What the narcissist does is this.

The narcissist pushes, cajoles, convinces, persuades, coerces, threatens, makes it a condition, expresses his expectations. In a hundred ways, he makes sure that his intimate partner regresses, loses her adulthood, and becomes a child, becomes an infant.

Stage one.

Stage two, this infant, this newly found infant that used to be the adult intimate partner, this newly found infant takes over and becomes the parent of the intimate partner.

So the narcissist regresses the intimate partner. The narcissist renders the intimate partner a two-year-old and then the narcissist allows this two-year-old to take over the intimate partner in a parental role.

The narcissist parentifies the inner child of his intimate partner.

It is in this role, in this parentified role, that the intimate partner's inner child acts as the narcissist mother.

Now this is beyond mind-boggling. You need really to focus it.

The narcissist pushes his intimate partner to become a child, because the narcissist wants the intimate partner to be dependent on him, to not abandon him, to be helpless, to lose their independence and intimacy, to conform to the snapshot, to the internal object, interject in his mind.

This is coercive snapshoting.

So he pushes his intimate partner.

And finally, mission accomplished, success, fireworks, the intimate partner becomes a child.

But wait a minute.

The narcissist also wants his intimate partner to be his mother. How can this be accomplished?

The narcissist converts his intimate partner's inner child into the parent of the intimate partner. He parentifies the partner's inner child.

So now the intimate partner is in a new situation. There is a child, her own inner child, who had become her own mother, her own parent.

The intimate partner's regressed infant. The infant that she had become following the regression now takes over her in the role of a mother or the role of a parent.

And because now the intimate partner is controlled by a parentified child, this parentified child can also act as a parent to the narcissist.

Because as far as the narcissist is concerned, his intimate partner is an extension of himself. She is not a separate entity.

And this is how the narcissist tries to square the circle, to accomplish the impossible.

He converts his partner into a child, and then he converts that child, the new child, that used to be his partner, he converts his child into a parent, and then this child is instructed to parent the narcissist.

It's a kind of Manchurian candidate in reverse.

But of course, all this leads to crazy making behavior, which is not reasoned, which is not rational, and which does not conform to the reality principle, which is ego-less, because it's pre-ego.

This leads to pre-ego, a pre-ego state.

So it leads to repetition compulsions, repeating the same mistakes over and over again because there's no learning involved.

It leads to dysfunction. It leads to impaired reality testing and ultimately to mental illness.

Now some of it has been described in literature. I recommend that you find books about the Peter Pan syndrome, about the Puer complex, it's Jungian, the Puella complex, and the Puera A Eternus or Puella Aeterna.

There have been quite a few Jungian scholars and authors who have written, and there's a famous book titled Puer Aeternus, and I recommend that you give it a read.

At this stage, the narcissist and his intimate partner are stuck in the shared fantasy.

The intimate partner's parentified inner childparents the intimate partner and parents the narcissist.

The narcissist's inner child is permanently there, always active.

Narciss is a child and it's a parentified child because it pretends to be an adult.

So the narcissist's parentified child parents the intimate partner and the intimate partner's parentified child parents the narcissist.

That's what I meant that the shared fantasy is an interaction between two inner children. Two parentified inner children.

The intimate partner's parentified inner child parents the narcissist and the narcissist's parentified child parents the intimate partner.

The narcissist inner child is all there is to the narcissist.

There is only the inner child. There's nothing else there. There's no adult overlay. There's no adult veneer. There has been no development.

And so the narcissist is his inner child. The narcissist is the same as the parentified inner child that he has.

With the intimate partner is different because there is a memory of the period of adulthood that preceded the regression.

And this leads to many conflicts inside the intimate partner.

That's why intimate partners of narcissists feel very conflicted all the time. They're in a constant state of dissonance between what they used to be the adult and what they had become the parentified infant who is parenting the narcissist.

Shari Botwin is a trauma therapist and she's the author of Thriving After Trauma: Stories of Living and Healing, great book. And she made list, she compiled the list of dysfunctional behaviors and cognitions and emotions attendant on regressive states, regressing to infancy.

So I'm going to read to you the list.

Do you often feel like a victim? Do you let others dictate how you feel? Do you struggle to set boundaries in relationships? When you get upset in situations in the present, are the feelings you are having all about that day or related to things from your childhood? Do you frequently find yourself reliving experiences that already happened? Do you feel safer when you pull walls up?

Luckily, regression is reversible.

Once you have exited the shared fantasy, you're going to regain your adulthood on condition that you get rid of the narcissist introject in your mind, the internal object in your mind that represents the narcissist and keeps in training you, keeps brainwashing you, into remaining in a child state, remaining infantilized.

If you get rid of this voice, if you take a few additional steps, which I describe in my recovery and healing playlist, then your chances of regaining the upper hand over your inner child, of becoming a loving parenting adult to your inner child, of reestablishing boundaries and discipline and structure and order internally, your chances are great. The prognosis is very good.

The narcissist doesn't have this blessing. The narcissist can never recover, so to speak, from his childlike state, or shall I say childish state.

The narcissist is the child. The child controls the narcissist because there's nothing to the narcissist except the child.

And the narcissist's child is very, very, very young. He doesn't understand reality. He doesn't perceive social cues or sexual cues, exactly like someone with autism spectrum disorder.

It cannot maintain any meaningful interaction with adults, and that includes intimate relationships. It is terrified by adult commitments and chores and expectations and demands and exigencies and vagaries of life.

It rejects life because it is not skilled to cope with life. It withdraws more and more inwardly, traumatized by life's events, various environments, mistakes, poor decision-making, horrible choices that lead the narcissists to indescribable situations, dangerous situations.

And so the narcissist in a child experiences constant loss, defeat and failure. The narcissist spends a lot of time in a collapsed state because the narcissist is a child.

And when the narcissist finds finally an intimate partner or somebody he thinks could be an intimate partner, he wants her to be his playmate. He wants her to be a child like him.

And at the same time, he wants her to be the kind of child who could parent him.

So he converts his intimate partner into a child, he regresses her to an infantile step. And then he demands that this new child who is about to become his intimate partner should parent him. He parentifies his intimate partner's inner child.

And that's all there is to it. This narcissistic abuse is child's play.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

And today we are going to discuss the inner child, the theory, the practice, the underpinnings.

Is it real? Does it exist? What's the meaning of the inner child? Is it just another hype, media hype or internet hype? Or is it a useful therapeutic and theoretical tool?

Now, students of SIAS, this is Unit 6, Part 1. Postdocs in CIAPS, this is Unit 7, Part 1. And Postdocs in Nigeria, this is Unit 8, Part 1.

Don't get confused.

So, inner child work, theory and practice.

There is always a discrepancy between chronological age and emotional or mental age.

In everyone, even the healthiest person sometimes feels much younger than he or she is, or much older.

These gaps are shifting. These gaps are changing with time, with circumstances, with the environment, with constraints, with stressors, etc.

But they're always there.

When the gap, when the abyss is inordinately big, when the difference between chronological age and emotional and mental age is enormous, we call it regressive infantilization. In other words, regressing, going back to infancy.

Now this used to be called in psychoanalytic literature, Puer Aeternus, the eternal adolescent. Or much later, when it was popularized, it was called the Peter Pan syndrome.

This kind of gap happens when the child is not allowed to separate from the parent. He's not allowed to establish personal boundaries. It's not allowed, in other words, to become an individual.

The primary objects, the caregivers, in most cases mother, later father, these caregivers objectify the child, idolize and pedestalize the child, or instrumentalize the child, use the child, for example, to realize their unfulfilled wishes and dreams and fantasies, or parentify their offspring, forcing the child to become a parent in effect.

And at any rate, they violate the boundaries of the child, the emergent, nascent boundaries of the child by behaving this way or via more classical forms of abuse.

We all heard of sexual abuse, psychological abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse. All these forms of abuse do the same. They breach the child's boundaries. They don't allow the child to separate.

The ego, Freud's term, or the self, which is more of a Jungian-Kohutian term, so the ego or the self, they constellate, they are put together, various parts come together in a process known as introversion and which involves narcissism, but the ego and the self come together, they constellate, and then they integrate.

But the ego or the self cannot constellate and cannot integrate unless there is repeated exposure to bruising painful reality.

Yes, you heard me correctly. You need to be exposed to reality as a child, because reality pushes back.

And as reality pushes back against you, a clear boundary is formed. This is the boundary of the self. This is the limess, the point beyond which you start and reality ends.

The more you conflict with reality, the more you have this tactile experience of the outside, the external, the easier it is for you to form, to establish, to coalesce and to congeal the internal.

Internal, an experience of internality, an experience of having something inside, crucially depends on an experience of the outside.

And so exposure to reality and a good reality testing, they're critical to the formation of the ego and the self.

Actually, Freud said that the ego's main role is to interact with reality.

And that's where external object relations come in.

External object relations are simply put relationships with people. People are a part of reality. People are external. People help you to become. They help you to become who you ultimately are. They form your identity by not being you.

And so, absent these, when the child has no contact with reality and not contact with other people, the child feels estranged from his own life.

The child has no self, no functioning self. He has identity disturbance. He has a fragmented self-states. He has pseudo identities, whatever you want to call it.

But he doesn't have a central core. Where a core should have been, there is emptiness, and we call it the schizoid empty core.

So this kind of child feels that he or she doesn't exist.

And when you don't exist, you can't have a life. You can't own your life.

And you keep asking, whose life is it anyhow?

Unable to inhabit his own life. This child, alienated, confused, becomes an adult and the adult retreats into familiar modes of infancy and remains fixated there, which leads us directly to the concept of inner child.

The concept is much older than you can imagine. It goes back at least to Ferenczi, an early psychoanalyst, the disciple of Freud.

And Ferenczi was the first to suggest that there is a childlike element inside each and every one of us.

But of course, the inner child construct had been popularized by John Bradshaw. He brought it to popular culture.

More recently, Richard Schwartz gave it a more systematic treatment with the inner family systems model.

And I encourage you to watch the video that I have made about the inner family system in conjunction with narcissism. There's a good introduction to inner family system in that video.

So in popular psychology and in analytical psychology, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic therapies, the inner child is the childlike aspect of an individual. It includes what you had learned as a child before puberty.

The inner child is a kind of semi-independent figment, a fragment that remains inside you.

Sometimes it is described as sub-personality. It is subject to the waking conscious mind, but it doesn't fully intrude there. It doesn't fully become conscious.

And of course in counseling and so on so forth, we use inner child.

Margaret Paul, Erica Chopich and others which I will mention later, they had leveraged the construct of inner child to induce healing.

Carl Gustav Jung suggested archetypes. He suggested the concept of archetypes. He said that we are born with ready-made templates, ready-made kind of empty blank word documents. There's the software there, which is Microsoft Word, but nothing is written in the document. But the templates are there. And these are the modes, the ways that we relate to the world. And he called this archetypes.

And one of the archetypes is the divine child much much later someone called Emmet Fox called it the Wonder Child or the Wunder King, wunderkind. So the wunderkind is actually a genius child but it can also mean this inner divine child. Emmet Fox actually died before Jung. Jung outlived him by 10 years, but he's considered to be a member of a much later generation of thinking.

And then there was primal therapy. Vivian and Arthur Janov had developed primal therapy. I recommend that you read the books, The Primal Scream and the Feeling Child. And they also built upon this concept. And one of the things that they had hinted it in primal therapy was being reborn, in effect, becoming your own parent, but they didn't go far enough with this.

Reparenting the inner child in therapy, the credit for this belongs to Lucia Capacione. In 1976, she suggested it for the first time and then much later in 1991 she had published a book, Recovery of Your Inner Child. And there she suggested that we should re-parent, we should become our own parents.

She was a very talented therapist. She used journaling, she used art, and she used a technique called the nurturing parent and then another which is called a protective parent. And she was actually a pioneer of the internal or inner family systembecause she invented something called the inner family work.

And she said that there's an inner family, including representations of a nurturing parent and a protective parent, or sometimes an abusive parent, absent parent, what Andre Green called the dead mother. And these take care or interact with physical, emotional, creative and spiritual, whatever that means, needs.

So there's always representations of parents, she said. There could be a critical parent. There could be a loving parent, but they're always representations of parents, she said. There could be a critical parent. There could be a loving parent, but there are always representations of parents.

In this sense, she had hinted, we are all eternal inner children. Whenever we retreat into, whenever we invade or revisit our internal space, our inner space, we actually become children. We infantilize once again, once more.

Charles Whitfield called it The Child Within and published a book, Healing the Child Within, Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families in 1987.

There was another, Penny Park. Penny Park had written, Rescuing the Inner Child, and she suggested a whole new program of contacting the inner child and recovering it.

But by far, the main voice was John Bradshaw. He had his own television show, and he had published books such as homecoming, reclaiming and championing your inner child as early as 30 years ago. He was an educator, a self-help guru, and a bit of a pop psychologist.

And he was an inner child in his Bradshaw way. He wanted to point to unresolved childhood experiences and early what Freud called early childhood conflicts.

And he said that these unresolved situations linger and create dysfunctional effects. It's a childhood problem that carries over into adulthood and impacts functioning.

The sum of mental, emotional, memories, all these, this is stored in the unconscious. From conception to pre-puberty, and then it's there and it has like pent-up energy. That's again a Freudian concept actually.

Because Freudian suggested that such repressed memories and so on and resolved conflicts, they have their own energy. And it's there, seething like a volcano, like lava, like magma, you know, about to erupt at any minute.

And in psychoanalysis, we actually encourage this eruption. It's called abreaction.

Okay.

So this is what Bradshaw popularized, the concept of a buried, repressed, denied, ignored, unconscious in a child, replete with unresolved conflicts, unresolved situations and circumstances, and an unknown influence on adult functioning or actually malfunctioning.

Much later there was psychosynthesis. In psychosynthesis, the child is a sub-personality. It's an important sub-personalities, and it is surrounded by other sub-personalities, and this led directly, finally, to internal family system therapy, which I deal with in another video.

And internal family therapy, the internal family system model says that there is not one inner child subpersonality, but multiple inner child subpersonalities.

So internal family system created a multiplicity of inner children and there's a wounded inner child. These are called exiles, wounded inner children. They tend to be excluded, repressed. They don't reach consciousness or waking thought.

Because there's a need to avoid or to defend against the pain that these memories, these inner children carry with them.

And there's a method there, how to gain safe access, and so on.

Today I want to mention another school of thought.

It's known as developmental needs meeting strategy, dNMS. It's psychotherapy was developed by Shirley John Schmidt and it is a trauma therapy, basically.

People who had been exposed to verbal, physical, sexual, psychological abuse. They're traumatized. They have attachment wounds, usually inflicted by parental rejection, neglect or opposite, enmeshment, fusion, spoiling, pampering and so on so forth.

Trauma, early childhood usually, trauma, but not necessarily. Any traumatized person.

The DNMS is what we call an ego state therapy, because there is an assumption that the degree to which developmental needs were not adequately met in childhood is the degree to which the client is stuck in childhood.

In other words, if your needs in childhood were met 50%, you are stuck in childhood for the rest of your life 50%.

If your needs in childhood were met 90%, only 10% of your adult life will be still stuck in childhood.

The degree of stuck in stickiness in childhood depends critically on how well your needs as a child were catered to by good enough parenting.

And the model aims to identify ego states, ego states that are ostensibly fixated in the past, and the idea is to get them unstuck, and to remedy it, to meet these unmet developmental needs.

I don't want to expound too much on the therapy element of the DNMS. I want instead to discuss a few concepts in DNMS.

First of all, the concept of maladaptive introject.

In DNMS, DNMS accepts the Kleinian view of internal objects, many of which are actually introjects.

For example, Minnie had become my introject by now. Minnie in her coffee.

And there are maladaptive introjects. These are wounded, injured ego states, and they mimic abusive, neglectful, hurtful, dysfunctional primary objects. For example, parents.

And these ego states cause trouble because they are in a constant state of neediness, they are wounded, they are sources of inner pain and hurt, and they lead to an increase in undesirable, self-defeating, sometimes self-destructive and self-trashing, behaviors, beliefs, and emotions.

According to Daniel Siegel, a state of mind can become an ego state when a positive event or a negative event is experienced repeatedly.

When you go through the same experience again and again and again, it would tend to elicit the same state of mind.

And if this happens really copiously and recurrently, this state of mind will rigidify, solidify, and become an ego state.

Same with trauma. When the trauma is overwhelming, it creates an ego state. It fractures the ego in effect, fragments it.

And this is what I had discussed in my previous videos when I when I previous videos which dealt with self-states and pseudo identities.

So mortification for example creates an ego state in the narcissists, creates a self state, a pseudo identity, and it isvery close to the true self. It's a window of opportunity for the narcissist.

The DNMS says that ingrained states of mind can become sub-personalities, parts of the self, ego states with a point of view.

Some parts form by reacting to other parts actually. Others form by introjecting people.

So the dynamic is both external. We bring things from the outside like important figures in our lives, messaging, environment, expectations, process of socialization, which is introjected as well. That's from the outside.

And some things are actually internal.

The interaction between the ego states, the self-states, whatever you want to call them, the sub-personalities, these interactions sometimes generate new ego states and new sub-personalities. They tend to multiply and proliferate, as God had asked them to do in Genesis.

Okay, introjection is unconsciously internalizing another person's behaviors, ideas, values, points of view. In short, another person's voice.

An introject is an internal representation of another person.

So in introjects, the DNMS says, an introject can form during positive relationships and during negative relationships.

And they link it to mirror neurons and so on so forth, a part of DNMS, which I hold very dimly and I'm not impressed with.

But the DNMS is very good at describing the various self-states and parts of the self as family members.

They work cooperatively or they antagonize each other, antagonistically. They have competing agendas and this creates internal conflicts.

And so the DNMS is great at mapping out the relationship between these entities.

And one of these entities is, of course, the inner child. The inner child can be healthy and happy and sated and satisfied and gratified and complete and whole, in which case it does not need to express itself via conflict. It does not need to disrupt functioning in order to attract attention. It has no unmet needs, so it can lie dormant.

Or the inner child is wounded, damaged, abused, and is crying out for attention, crying out for a figure, a parental figure to help.

We'll come to it a bit later when we discuss the reaction to the inner child, the reactions of outsiders to the inner child.

Healthy parts of the self, they are reactions to positive, affirming relationships with role models who are loving and attuned and sensitive and empathic.

Healthy parts of the self live in the present. They are not that impacted by the past. They feel and manage emotions properly, both positive and negative.

With the narcissists, for example, the self-states manage only negative emotions. They have no access to positive emotions.

Healthy self-states manage only negative emotions. They have no access to positive emotions.

Healthy self-states, healthy ego parts, healthy sub-personalities, whatever you want to call them, these figments, these elements, these entities, internal objects.

When they're healthy, they hold positive beliefs about the self, about the world.

They are essentially not naive, not gullible, but pretty optimistic, and they engage in appropriate, desirable, goal-driven behaviors. They are self-efficacious. They secure positive outcomesfrom the environment. They have an adaptive point of view.

And many of these introjects are actually adaptive. Internal representations of past incidents of caring, supporting people.

The wounded part of the self forms in response to traumas, negative, wounding relationships, injurious relationships, with role models who were abusive, neglectful, rejecting, enmeshing, absent, etc.

And these wounded, sick, pathologicalstates, subpersonalities, internal objects, they live in the past. They are stuck because they can't extricate themselves from painful emotions.

They hold negative, irrational beliefs about self and about the world, and they engage in unwanted, inappropriate, dysfunctional, self-defeating behaviors. They have a maladaptive point of view.

They can be reactive introjects, they can be maladaptive interjects, and they both hamper and obstruct proper goal-oriented functioning.

The reactive parts form in reaction to significantly wounding experiences, such as in the case of the narcissistic injury or mortification, and in the case of a child, any extreme abuse.

People are aware of the problem behaviors or beliefs or emotions of these reactive parts.

And these reactive parts hold raw emotions, anxiety, terror, anger, sadness, grief, despair, shame, guilt, hopelessness. They hold reactions to specific traumatic experiences and they cope with painful emotions with pain avoidant behaviors.

They withdraw. They avoid. They drink. They overeat. They self-medicate, the self-soothe.

Some of these reactive parts, they cope with painful emotions via self-punishing behaviors, cutting, self-mutilation, starving, isolating, avoiding the world, the schizoid solution.

Some rebel with risky or self-destructive behaviors, like drinking, smoking, engaging in indiscriminate, promiscuous or unprotected sex.

Some try to manage somehow.

The person is hurting, is in pain, and these parts are trying somehow to cope.

These are attempts, failed attempts at adaptation.

And so they try to strategically please people.

So they are people pleasers, pleasing behaviors like complying or overachieving, performing. So they become perfectionist.

Some try to prevent attacks by other people, attacks from other people by engaging in aggressive behaviors, putting up a facade of strength, intimidation, control, power, they become abusers themselves, psychopaths, narcissists, borderlines in the secondary psychopathy phase, and some try to control other parts of their self.

By warning them, threatening them, commanding them, or some kind of admonition or hectoring, intended to encourage behaviors that please others or discourage behaviors that upset others.

So you see, the whole universe of maladaptive techniques and strategies intended to keep the inner peace.

There's a lot of pain there and no way to release it in socially acceptable ways.

In other words, no way to sublimate the pain.

Maladaptive interjects are parts of the self that form when there is a significant role model who is physically and emotionally wounding, abusing, rejecting parent, dead parent, absent parent.

So a maladaptive interject has intrinsically good nature, true nature, but has unwillingly to wear kind of mask or costume.

So the maladaptive part is a good, healthy part, masqueradingas the wounding, hurtful, avoidant, neglectful, rejecting parent or role model.

It's a very curious construct because it's a healthy part pretending to be an unhealthy part.

The mask is a recording of past wounding experience.

And when the mask is activated or the recording is played, the wounding message is directed to reactive parts who perceive the wounding experience from the past as still happening in the present.

It's a kind of internal flashback, if you wish.

Now I would like to discuss the current knowledge.

This has been a review of the history of the concept of subpersonalities, inner internal objects, self-states and so on, one of which is the inner child.

I would like to now describe the current state of knowledge with regards to the inner child.

And I would rely heavily on a book that is on your reading list, for those of you who bothered to review the reading list.

So the book is Psychotherapy and it is by Jeffrey Smith. I think it's published by Springer. Have a look at your bibliography.

Psychotherapy and let me see the full title. Psychotherapy: A Practical Guide.

Yeah, that's the one I'm looking at the bibliography.

Psychotherapy: A Practical Guide, Jeffrey Smith.

So I would like to read to you the abstract of the chapter, Working with Inner Child, pages 141, 151.

This is the abstract.

When patients act more like children and relate to the therapist as a parent, the usual conceptualizations are transference or regression.

A more natural and direct way to work with this phenomenon is to think of the patient as having an inner child who is influencing the adult patient's thinking and reactions.

We describe how a compassionate and positive approach to the inner child is extremely helpful in combating the shame that usually stands in the way of work with dysfunctional people.

The patient shows intense and young ways of reacting and feeling and is ashamed of it.

Okay.

I would like to read to you the key points in this chapter because it's a great summary of the current state of knowledge of inner child, especially inner child therapy.

The key points.

Number one, the inner child concept covers the same ground as transference, but does so with more understanding and compassion.

Number two, many dysfunctional people involve childlike patterns frozen from the past that continue to influence the patient's assumptions about the world and reactions to the world.

Number three, patients cover up their childlike reactions owing to shame, so transference is easy to miss.

Number four, reasonable-looking, but dysfunctional patterns with child-like characteristics are signs of an inner child. These are easy to miss and are the most common source of treatment failure in psychotherapy.

Persistent anger or acting out that will not stop can point to an adult temper tantrum.

What makes adult temper tantrum so challenging is that therapies mainly offer understanding, while the child expected much more than understanding.

Dealing with the gap is how patients learn acceptance and compromise.

With adult temper tantrums, manipulation, and addictive behaviors, the therapist should first be sure the behavior has been contained and safely established and then respond with persistent understanding of the child's point of view and true compassion.

The corrective emotional experience approaches, corrective emotional experience approaches both the behavioral and emotional sides of dysfunction.

Unfamiliar, healthy interaction brings up affects where they can heal and point the way to new behaviors that need to be practiced.

To be precise, says the author, we don't really have an inner children.

What we do have is a mind on the lookout for circumstances that match those experienced early in life and then naturally fetches the appropriate reactions out of procedural memory.

The end result looks and feels like a child taking over the adult.

So why not picture it and speak of it that way?

The more we gain awareness of the extent to which childlike thoughts and assumptions lace our adult conversation, the better we will understand our patients and the different contexts and ways of viewing the world that they hold insight.

Let me be clear about one thing.

Childlike, playful behaviors, the child's curiosity, the child's bright eyes, sense of wonder, they are part of healthy adult psychology and healthy adult life.

These are things you should never get rid of. These are the healthy parts of childhood, the functioning parts of childhood, is surviving to adulthood and we should all be extremely happy when and if they do.

It is when childish behavior patterns and procedural learning about life become locked in, inaccessible to growth, then we are talking about dysfunction.

Childlike patterns become something called entrenched dysfunctional patterns or EDPs.

As children, we all had to cope with problems.

And because we were children, we were small, we were helpless, most problems, the vast majority of problems looked very, very insoluble, very overwhelming. Most problems looked beyond our reach and capacity to resolve them.

When we confronted problems as children, we very rarely thought we had the necessary will and resources to actually solve the problem and restore harmony into the environment.

So a family where the parents, for example, are preoccupied with a sick sibling, in such a family, the child stops growing. He stops growing emotionally. He wants to remain a child in order to secure his parents' attention, take it away in a way from his six siblings.

That's an example of a problem and the kind of solution a child is likely to find.

It's when children cannot revert, cannot resort to adults, when they cannot talk to adults, because the adults are not there. The adults are neglectful or abusive or terrifying.

So the child cannot talk to adults about his or her problems. The child finds solutions which are, not surprisingly, childish solutions.

So a child that grows in a healthy environment, in a healthy family, whenever the child is confronted with a problem, he can go to the adults, and the others will help.

But when he can't, he invents bizarre solutions.

Like I will stay a child forever, and my parents will love me forever, and never abandon me. Which is, by the way, the narcissist solution.

Needs cannot be eliminated, but when the child cannot complain to the parents, cannot ask for this support and help and wisdom, when it's inappropriate, counterproductive or even terrifying, frightening, the child stops in effect to process these needs.

The child says, I can't, my parents are not meeting my needs.

So the only solution is to not have needs.

And of course these needs are there. Unmet needs. They're there. They're ossified. They're frozen. They're blocked. They're blocked by fear, by guilt, by shame.

And the inner child remains in a cave, ensconced and cocooned with these unmet needs. And he's waiting for someone to come along and understand and fulfill these needs.

And so the difference between pathology and healthy growth is that when a child undergoes a healthy, normative, functional trajectory, childlike patterns gradually evolve and become adaptive to adult life.

But when the child's growth is stunted and his development is arrested, when he is raised in a pathological dysfunctional environment with seriously problematic primary caregivers and primary objects who have their own problems, maybe they're narcissistic, maybe they're codependent, maybe they're terrified, anxious, whatever the case may be, the affected areas stop growing.

Maturation. Maturation is arrested. Thinking, wishes, patterns of reaction remain fixated as they were long ago.

And then we have a hybrid. We have an adult part that functions perfectly, for example, in professional settings, in business. And we have another part, which is, I don't know, two years old, six years old, 11 years old, and that other part is still a child, with child's thinking, childish solutions, childish demands and requirements and temper tantrums and so on so forth.

And so the experience of wishes, of wishing, the experience of having a need in dysfunctional childhoods, in dysfunctional environments, this experience, I have a wish, I have a need, I want something, this experience is painful and frightening, terrifying.

Because you as a child, you expect to be brushed off, you expect to be bitten up, you expect to be ignored, you expect to be told off.

And so the child tried to suppress wishes and needs, and of course fails. There's no way to suppress childhood wishes and needs.

And there's a new layer formed, the dysfunctional layer. And this dysfunctional layer tells the child, listen, you're still expressing wishes. You stillhave needs. This is bad. This is wrong. You shouldn't have wishes. You should not have needs. This is bad. This is wrong. You shouldn't have wishes. You should not have needs. You're very selfish. You're very self-centered. You're very needy. You're very clinging. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should be ashamed of your personal desires. You're not okay. It's wrong and it's dangerous and it's counterproductive and it's going to hurt you, it's going to cause you pain.

So there are always two layers.

The underlying layer, the foundation stone is the unmet needs, the frustrated wishes, they are the underlying layer.

And to keep them repressed and denied and buried and forgotten, the child creates a second layer.

And this second layer, dysfunctional layer, is values, internalizing values. And these values tell the child, it's wrong to express a wish. It's wrong to have a need. It's wrong to be selfish and self-centered. It's wrong to be clinging and needy. It's wrong to ask other people for anything. It's wrong to be happy in effect.

This one you're happy. Your wishes and needs are fulfilled.

So the wishes and needs remain static. They remain an unfulfilled state.

And this is what we call, this is what we mean when we say, unfinished business from childhood.

The child, the adult, the inner child in the adult, still depends on other adults. We depend on other adults.

And so when the inner child in an undeveloped dysfunctional adult, when an inner child fails to elicit unconditional love acceptance and the immediate gratification of wishes and needs from the outside from other adults their intensity of reaction is disproportional.

Let me repeat this.

An adult who had grown up, who had been raised in a dysfunctional family, dysfunctional environment, would tend to have a wounded inner child.

That wounded inner child, this part of the adult, this wounded inner child, would look to other adults to solve his problems, to gratify his wishes, to cater to his needs, to do so unconditionally, like a mother's love.

And when these other adults refuse to do so, the wounded child elements, the inner child, throws a temper tantrum, becomes rageful, vindictive, and in any case, reacts extremely disproportionately.

Even if it's shame or guilt or depression, sadness, it's likely to be extremely disproportional and all-pervasive because it's a child who is reacting, not an adult.

And this inner child, to avoid these egosyntonic states, because it's a child who is reacting, not an adult. And this inner child, to avoid these egosyntonic states, to avoid this very unpleasant and discomforting experiences of anger, envy, hatred, frustration, shame, guilt, the inner child wants to avoid this.

So the inner child tries to manipulate and influence grown-ups, adults to solve his problems magically.

This inner child is a child. So obviously, it has magical thinking.

So the narcissists, for example, has an inner child. It's a wounded child. It corresponds to the true self.

And this inner child tries to manipulate all the adults in the narcissists ambit, all the adults around the narcissists, to solve the narcissists problems magically, to accept the narcissist unconditionally, like a mother, to cater to the narcissists' needs instantly to gratify his desires forthwith.

And when they fail to do so, because they have their own agendas and they are real adults, healthy adults, and they maintain boundaries, the narcissist erupts, narcissistic rage. Or he may be mortified.

So one way or another, his reaction would be disproportional, either and self-destructive.

The inner child is trapped in an adult body and interacts with a part of the mind that is adult, butadult body and interacts with a part of the mind that is adult, but he doesn't like, the inner child does not like adulthood. Adulthood is all work and not play.

So these kind of individuals have the imposter syndrome. They feel that they are frauds, they are pretending to be adults, but actually they're not.

Because the inner child is overpowering, demanding, insistent. The inner child is like a real child all over the place. It doesn't let you out of his sight for a minute, constantly tagging at your dress or whatever it is.

And so here's a list of some things the inner child, an inner child does, in a dysfunctional adult. This is not a healthy inner child, which healthy people have. This is an unhealthy, wounded, injured, inner child. In a child in pain, crying, unsatisfied, ungratified, denied, rejected, abused.

This inner child resides in an adult body and does not allow the adults to function properly.

So what does it do?

It seeks things from adults, from other people that these people cannot do.

Because it has magical thinking. It has no reality testing.

And the wishes and desires and needs of the inner child, the wounded inner child, are unrealistic, they're magical.

Second thing, the feelings of the inner child are more intense than expected.

So when the inner child faces, the wounded inner child faces conflicts, discord, disagreement, frustration, disappointment, reactions are nuclear.

The inner child has especially intense feelings about meaningful others, like an intimate partner.

These feelings could be anything, but they're there. They could be negative.

For example, in the case of the narcissists, most of these feelings are actually negative. He converts people into bad, to secondary objects and then becomes paranoid, aggressive, and so on.

So these are hateful, or envious, these are negative emotions, but they're intense, the intensity.

The inner child, the wounded inner child, has splitting defense mechanisms because he's a child, his defense mechanisms are primitive, infantile.

So he sees everything in black and white. He seeks perfection. He divides people to good and bad, helpful or not, enemies or friends.

And he wants to resolve issues magically. He wants to get from point A to point Z without going through B, C, D, etc.

He seeks shortcuts. He wants things to transpire in an enchanted way without commensurate investment, without effort, without work, without building anything, without investing, without committing, without compromise.

The wounded child has numerous beliefs about perfection, a perfect body, and he would tend to believe that perfection means success.

So when we see communities like incels and big towels and so, they have seriously wounded inner children because they believe that, for example, bodily perfection leads to scoring with cheeks, which is in itself a very puerile adolescent way of discussing the issue.

So the belief that perfection in anything, in something, a lot of money, perfect body, perfect looks would lead to outcomes, can affect the environment.

The inner child is excessively upset over any limitation, any boundary, any rule, and any reality testing.

So if the inner child finds that some people can't do certain things, he gets very angry. He's angry about circumstances that he cannot control.

If the outcome is not guaranteed, someone had failed, someone had let him down.

This inappropriate anger and self-destructiveness combined with the persistent failure to access effective adult solutions to a problem.

The inner child has no access to the space of adult solutions. He has no access to the adult mind. He has no idea how to be an adult.

Self-destruction doesn't end. It becomes a vicious loop, a vicious cycle.

The anger doesn't dissipate because there are no efficacious, self-affectionate outcomes. These are childlike patterns of thinking.

And the disconcerting thing is that it could be sitting with an adult, such an adult. And he's an adult for like 80% of the time, and suddenly is a child. And the transition is mind-blowing.

And this is almost like switching in multiple personality disorder, like switching between altars in dissociative identity disorder. It's like there are two people there, two persons, two personalities. And the adult switches to child and back.

And it's very discombobulated.

I mean, well-adjusted, healthy adults, they freely and comfortably mix childlike behaviors with adult ones. There's no transition, it's seamless. It's like their adulthood is imbued, painted over the veneer paintbrush with childlike elements.

But when the dysfunctional adult switch to the inner child switches to the inner child, the child has nothing to do with the other. These are totally separate, clear, distinct self-states. The child lacks healthy experience with other people.

Starting with the caregivers, with the primary objects, with the parents. He didn't learn healthy modes of interaction.

For example, he doesn't allow to compromise. The only thing he knows, my needs are not acknowledged, my needs are not met.

So he can't do acceptance. He can't accept that adults are not there to meet his needs. He can't compromise. He doesn't do substitutes. He wants this and only this and he would never accept anything else.

And he demands understanding and compassion. And he becomes aggressive if he doesn't get them.

But other relationships are not like that. There's not complete emotional and physical protection and acceptance. Everything is conditional in adult relationships.

You mistreat your wife, she leaves you, she abandons you. That's the way it is. It's a give and take.

And of course, give and take, negotiating, compromising, modus vivendi. These are adult concepts. The inner child has no access to these.

You know, the other people offer the dysfunctional adult understanding, perhaps, sometimes, empathy.

But the dysfunctional adult doesn't want understanding and empathy. These are disappointing substitutes. They're inadequate. They don't cater to his pain and the unresolved conflicts inside of him.

They want their needs met. They don't want you to understand their needs or to empathize with their needs. They want you to fulfill their needs. They want you to double down on their wishes. They want you to leave everything, drop everything, and cater instantaneously to what they ask you to do and do it perfectly. You should do it perfectly.

So otherwise, there's grief, there's disappointment, there's loss, devaluation in the case of narcissists.

Childhood had failed in these people and they carried over this collapsed state into adulthood.

And it's a serious problem because it informs the emotional landscape. Their emotional part is the wounded inner child.

The cognitive part had developed. They could be geniusesin science. They could be chief executive officers, presidents of countries.

But the emotional side is stunted and needy and magical thinking, very primitive.

So when we see such behavior in dysfunctional adults, we have to ask ourselves, is this destructive or abusive? Or is it simply communicating extremely intense emotions?

Sometimes when the dysfunctional adult is taken over by the wounded child, the emotions communicated would be very intense, overpowering, and would ignore the other, would ignore the audience.

And so this could appear to be very selfish, very abusive, or even destructive, but that's not the intent.

People, spouses, mates, intimate partners, business partners, colleagues, when you are with a dysfunctional adult, with a wounded child, you need to tolerate intense expressions of feeling, and you need to have a very clear perspective where passion and desire end and destructiveness begins, where intensity ends and aggression begins.

And you need to provide a sense of safety, safe zone, safeYou need to restore control to the dysfunctional adult, to allow the dysfunctional adult to express himself or herself. Without the fear that if he or she expresses themselves, express themselves, they're going to destroy something or they're going to alienate you.

You have to provide a safe holding environment where it is safe and secure for the dysfunctional adult to trot out, to take out the wounded child and to allow it to manifest.

And this is called containment.

Why do we need this concept or construct of inner child?

Well, because of the shame.

When you interrogate patients in a clinical setting, they finally, not at first, but they finally admit that they are very ashamed. They feel very shameful about themselves.

And when you dig deeper and drill down, they're ashamed about the wounded child. They're ashamed about the young self.

And they're not compassionate, and they're not forgiving, and they're not positive about the young part, about the inner, the wounded child part.

And it's clear that the distorted thoughts, distorted cognitions, lack of emotions or distorted emotions, destructive behaviors, dysfunctional behavior, all these reinforce shame, but all these can be also attributed to a wounded problematic child inside the adult.

So one way or another, we reach the same outcome, overpowering shame.

Schema therapy has a concept, it's called limited reparenting. I refer you to studies by Raphael, Raffeli.

So there is limited reparenting. When you are with a dysfunctional adult, you have to offer something that is of a parental nature. You have to offer acceptance, warmth, understanding, containment. You have to propose solutions. You have to take some steps to cater to needs and wishes, practical steps. You have to become a parent.

Dysfunctional adults parentify adults, other adults. If you're married to a dysfunctional adult, he will try to convert you to his mother or father. If you're working with a dysfunctional adult, he will try to convert you to a father figure. They parentify people.

So if you reject the re-parenting or the limited reparenting, it's a loss, then you're going to lose the dysfunctional adult. You're going to lose him or her. You're going to become an enemy.

But don't try to fulfill everything, because this would lure the dysfunctional adult into a trap. You should meet some demands and you should provide a safe zone within which the dysfunctional adult can fulfill other needs and wishes that you are not catering to.

And within the safe zone, the safe zone provides an opportunity to grow up and mature, because you remember the beginning of the election when we were both much, much younger, brushing against reality makes you grow up.

You need to provide a safe zone within which it is safe for the dysfunctional adult to brush against reality. That would make him grow up. The wounded child will grow up.

You need to be clear when you are in a relationship, any kind of relationship with a dysfunctional adult, you need to be clear about what you can and will fulfill, which needs you will meet and cater to, which wishes you will see realized, what actions you will take, and what actions you will not take.

You need to make clear that you are only a partial solution and that the dysfunctional adult needs to take care of the rest within the safe zone.

In the safe zone, this adult will not be rejected, humiliated, abandoned, abused. So this is a window of opportunity for him or her to grow up.

And there will be disappointment when you make these statements, when you set the boundaries, the personal boundaries, there will be disappointment, there will be anger, there will be temper tantrums, like a child.

Any of you who are parents, you know that this is childish behavior. That's how children behave.

But they grow up. They learn to accept.

The wounded child cannot trust. This is a post-traumatic condition. Child had been traumatized. He cannot trust. He cannot trust you. He cannot trust you and he cannot trust himself. And he cannot trust the world. He cannot trust fate or destiny. He cannot trust responsiveness from anyone.

Instead, the inner child, the wounded child, says, I cannot trust anyone, so I need to manipulate it. I need to control them. I need to disregard them.

And it would make you feel unseen. It will make you feel that you're objectified, that you are a tool, an instrument and you are to the wounded child.

But don't forget, the wounded child is coupled with an adult.

Try to interact with that adult. Try to create a coalition with the adults so as to heal the wounded child. And try to find what the adult part can provide the child part with.

This manipulative behavior is inevitable in inner child therapy, in inner child work, and when you are married to someone with an inner child, wounded inner child, or working with one, this mistrust, this manipulativeness, or sometimes withdrawal. That's a schizoid empty core.

When the inner child had given up on itself, when it had suspended and absented itself, what's left behind is an emptiness, a void where the child used to be.

And these kind of people, they avoid this kind of dysfunctional adults. They avoid people altogether. They take care of their needs via food, medication, drugs, self-harming behavior, or objectifying people for sex.

So they mistrust other people. They say, I don't want to be in touch with other people. It's too painful and I'm not getting anything out of it. My needs are not fulfilled, my wishes are not realized.

So I'm going to deal with objects. Objects are safe. I can exert control over objects. I cannot exert control over people. I cannot exert control over people. And I can objectify people if I need to. I can go to prostitutes if I need sex, or I can have casual anonymous sex.

So to trust an external object, they need to convert that external object into an inanimate object. Inanimate object.

They don't feel that people around them, even a wife or children or intimate partner, lover, they don't feel that these people are safe and reliable, because they cannot be controlled and manipulated 100%.

EDPs, the dysfunctional layers, they are ways to avoid the pain of having to trust someone when you cannot be sure that this someone is willing and trustworthy.

It's terrifying, isn't it, this infinite uncertainty?

The wounded child needs to take emotional risks and no amount of intellectual conviction that it is safe can ameliorate the anxiety attendant upon emotional risk.

When you take emotional risk, you become very anxious. When you open yourself up, when you become vulnerable.

That's why in one of my previous videos I've explained, there's no such thing as meaningless sex, none, even a quickie.

The minute you're vulnerable, the minute you're exposed, the minute you're defenseless, there is emotional risk. And no amount of intellectualizing can help you with that.

And that's why many people get drunk before they have casual sex.

So we need to consider how to help the dysfunctional adult develop trust.

Because trust is emotional. It's not intellectual.

Never mind how many times we prove ourselves to be responsible, reliable, we don't betray, we don't cheat, it still means nothing.

Because we can do it next time. There's no end to it.

We need to develop trust by satisfying some of the needs.

And we need to develop trust also by demanding that the dysfunctional adult switches from inanimate objects to animate objects, to real-life people, to external objects. We need to force the dysfunctional adult to develop external relations.

So these two layers, if you remember, there's the layer of the unmet needs, disappointment, frustration, the layer of shame and guilt and self-hate.

This second layer is an internalized voice. And it says, who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? You have no right to feel pain. You have no right to rage. You have no right to be angry.

But of course it's wrong. The child has a right, has a right to rage and to be angry. The child has been mistreated.

And we need to show the child compassion and we need to agree with the child to legitimize the child's negative emotions.

This child had been broken on the will and the only way to restore this child is to let the child know that we are validating the child's experiences. We acknowledge that the child's self-generated shame, longstanding expectation of disappointment, is not outlandish. It's real because what happened to the child was real. The abuse and everything.

Carl Rogers called it corrective emotional experience. Rogers was the great humanist and the father of humanist psychology, the psychotherapy. He said that the experience of therapy, which is analogous to the experience of love.

Experience of therapy is experiential.

The effects of therapy, they're experiential. They're result of experience. They're not intellectual.

When you want to transform someone, it's a human being.

And so you need to develop healthy reactivity, if you are someone's spouse, for example. You need to develop reactive patterns which are healthy. And you need to generate experiences and memories highlighting your partner's unhealthy reactions, dysfunctional behaviors, but also providing an alternative model for growth, a safe zone anew.

The corrective emotional experience is not passively experiencing a healthy interaction. Passive repetition of healthy interaction, no matter how many times it's repeated, doesn't lead to change.

Where the interaction between the dysfunctional adult and a therapist or a spouse or a colleague, when the interaction goes against the patient's expectations, or when the patient tries something new and unfamiliar, that's when the breakthrough comes.

It is the contrast between the patient's usual, unhealthy ways of interacting and a new way on an experiential level.

And this raises emotions and challenges implicit assumptions. This is what we call growing up.

There is something called affect avoidance model.

The corrective emotional experience brings pathways for accessing EDPs, the dysfunctional layers.

On the emotional side, new experience propels feelings into the room as effects, where a context of connection provides healing.

On the behavioral side, as distinct from the emotional, the patient practices a new behavior or is forced to become aware of a dysfunctional behavior.

And the end result is healing. It's a new form of interpersonal behavior.

Affect avoidance model says that all the pathology we have, I'm not talking about pathology that is the outcome of biological or brain conditions or whatever, all the behavioral pathologies we have. These are results of instinctive avoidance of actual or predicted negative affects.

I want to read to you an excerpt about this model, affect avoidance model, which is very interesting.

The field of psychotherapy integration has long sought an explanatory model for therapeutic action across orientations.

We take advantage of advances in the neurobiology of memory and emotion to propose such a model for psychopathology and its treatment.

To remind you, it's an excerpt about affect avoidance model.

These pathologies are generated by the brain's evolutionally architected systems for prediction and mitigation of danger, and they are triggered by core emotional circuits.

Although generally, avoidance of negative core emotion is adaptive as a mechanism of coping with threat, this same process may lead to the entrenched dysfunctional patterns that comprise psychopathology.

Avoidance of predicted negative core emotion is proposed as a mechanism of resistance to therapeutic change, in that the aim of psychotherapy is appraised as potential loss of important protections.

Let me summarize.

Adult reactions are always more self efficacious than child reactions.

It's always good to be an adult in an adult world.

It's a serious disadvantage of agency and efficacy to be a wounded child in an adult world.

Adults are not understanding usually. They're not compassionate. They're not accepting.

You throw a temper tantrum, they throw you out of the room or job.

It's always good to be an adult.

Our values, social values and mores, militate against childlike behaviors and affects, and this creates shame, anger, self-punishment and repression.

The wounded child is intrusive, it's out of control. It hinders and obstructs adult functioning. It impedes and intervenes and invades. It's bad. It's bad for the adult.

And so the adult to survive needs to reshape child content in order to induce growth and integration.

And this is what inner child work is all about.

Okay, children, I hope you understood all this.

And as usual, if you didn't, please use, I beg you on my knees, on your knees, depends on you, look, I beg you to use the university email system.

Please, my private email is, by definition, private.

Please use the university email system.

It also helps me to get to your messages much faster because they're segregated on my outlook program.

Okay, be well and stay well, which is much more difficult.

Today we are going to discuss a relatively complex topic for a change, but fascinating, in my view at least.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and other books about personality disorders. I am also a professor of psychology.

By the way, yesterday there was an article in Daily Mail, an interview with me, and I think it's one of the best encapsulations of narcissistic abuse that I've ever seen.

Surprising for a tabloid, but you know, you find pearls in unexpected places.

I recommend that you go and read this article. It was published on the 25th, which is yesterday. It was authored by Eve Taufik.

Today's topic is the child, the psychotic child, how we evolve from a state of psychosis to mental health and how when things go awry, when they go wrong, we end up being narcissists or borderlines or psychopaths.

Start with the fact that psychosis is the natural state in childhood.

Eysenck coined the term psychoticism. He suggested that it's a personality trait and that it leads to creativity, or is affiliated somehow with creativity.

Psychoticism is the state that all of us are in when we are children. And children are extremely creative. Anyone who has had children and is unhappy can tell you this.

So what is psychosis?

Psychosis is when it's very difficult to tell apart yourself from the world. When they are merged, infused and intermeshed, and you can't, you don't have boundaries. You don't know where you stop and the world starts. You expand outwards and consume the world and assimilated. And so you become one with the world.

This oceanic feeling that many gurus and mystics keep alluding to is, I am sorry to say, clinically, a psychotic state.

Psychosis involves a mechanism called hyper-reflexivity. And this mechanism makes it very difficult to tell apart the difference between internal and external, internal objects and external objects. Internal voices, introjects and external voices.

That is why psychotics hear voices, and they experience hallucinations, which are actually projections of their internal world onto reality.

So this is psychosis.

And all children are psychotic.

Because when children are born, when they're newborn, they can't tell the difference between inside and outside. They can't tell mommy apart from themselves because they have no selves.

The child, until probably age 18 months and maybe even 24 months, the child cannot separate herself from the universe. She perceives the universe as part of herself and herself as part of the universe. It's a single organism, a single entity.

That's why children react very badly when mommy leaves the room. That's why children need to develop object constancy.

In other words, the innate belief that objects continue to exist even when they cannot see the objects.

So psychoticism is a state where the child is totally fused with his or her environment and doesn't realize that there's anything external to it.

But what happens if the environment is frustrating? What happens if the environment is terrifying, painful, hurtful, damaging? What happens if the child is in a constant state of terror and horror because, for example, his parents, his mother is a dead mother in the language of Andre Green, a dead mother, a mother who is absent, selfish, narcissistic, depressed?

What happens then when the child's most basic need to be seen, to be noticed, to be catered to, to be sheltered, to be fed, to be cuddled? What happens when a child is neglected and abandoned? When a child is chastised for being herself or himself? What happens when the child is not allowed to evolve and grow and develop boundaries and separate? What happens when the external environment is terrifying when it is comprised of various forms of abuse and trauma, instrumentalizing the child, idolizing the child, I don't know, cosseting the child, parentifying the child?

What happens then?

The transition from psychosis to health is impeded.

Now what is health? What is a good definition of mental health?

When you can tell the difference between yourself and others, when you can tell the difference between yourself and the environment, when you realize that the environment is signaling to you, sending messages to you and you know how to read them properly.

If you don't, you may have autism spectrum disorder. If you fail to do this, you may be a narcissist.

All forms of mental illness involve inability to separate yourself from the environment and or inability to read cues from the environment, signals, messages, properly.

The child gradually transitions from a merger and fusion with mummy, which mommy is the world.

The healthy child gradually transitions from the psychotic state to separation individuation. He gradually breaks apart from mummy. And mummy represents the world, so he breaks apart from mommy.

And he is able and willing to explore other objects, other entities, and to acknowledge and accept, however traumatic this is, this may be, that he is not one with the world, that he is separate.

That's the healthy progression, but it can be interrupted by a frustrating, avoiding and punitive mother.

And when such interruption happens, the child cannot complicate the separation from the mother, in other words from the world. The child gets stuck.

The child becomes grandiose.

When he wishes to separate from mommy and to explore the world, he becomes grandiose. He has to take on reality. That calls for a lot of suspension of disbelief and grandiosity.

So when the mother is frustrating and hurtful, the child remains stuck in its grandiosity without the ability to actually exercise it on the environment.

The child transitions in this case to a borderline personality organization, borderline personality structure.

When separation individuation is hindered, especially by the mother's behavior or misbehavior, the child gets stuck between psychosis and reality, which is an excellent description of borderline personality disorder. It's not my description, it's Otto Kernberg's description.

That's why borderline is called borderline on the border between psychosis and neurosis.

So the child remains stuck, unable to progress outward towards reality and to fully embrace it. And unable to retreat, unable to go back to mommy and merge and fuse with her. Go back to the womb, as it were.

In this netherland, in this twilight zone between psychosis and reality, we have all the makings of borderline personality disorder.

Now in borderline personality disorder, internal objects are perceived as external. In other words, there's the element of psychoticism. The inner dialogue, the introjects are perceived as external, as kind of voices or people out there, objects out there. When they're actually internal.

There is a false self in borderline personality disorder. It starts as an external entity.

The borderline develops a special friend, usually an imaginary friend in a paracosm. We're talking about a child, remember.

So the child simultaneously remains stuck in the psychotic phase, where internal objects are external, but in a desperate attempt to extricate herself from this condition, she creates an external object, totally imaginary, external object, which is essentially the false self.

Unable or not allowed by the dead mother to progress efficaciously towards reality, to immerse herself in reality, to explore external objects safely from a safe base, the borderline gives up on reality by creating an alternative imaginary reality with which it can interact safely because it's clandestine, it's secret. It's not visible to anyone.

Allow me to summarize the borderline phase.

The child, every child, starts off as psychotic. The child cannot tell the difference between external and internal, inside and out. The child is one with the world, and the world is one with mommy, and the world is one with mommy and the child is one with mommy. There's no distinction, no separation.

And this is a great description of psychosis. It involves a mechanism called hyper-reflexivity.

Then, around the age of 18 months, the child begins to move away from mummy and explore external objects.

As the child explores external objects, he forms a theory of the world and a theory of other minds. He forms what is called the internal framework. He is able to create a model of reality, which to reality very much.

And if the child is allowed to, in a healthy way, the child becomes separate from mother and becomes an individual, a new person. The child forms his own personhood, what Jung called the self or whatever.

I will not go right now into the question of whether there is a self or there's an assemblage of personas. Leave that for a minute.

There is this kind of identity which forms by interacting with the world. When the child is allowed to interact with the world, he stops being psychotic. He becomes healthy.

But if this process is disrupted, this leads to borderline. The child remains stuck in the psychotic stage and tries to compensate for the lack of access to reality by inventing her own imaginary reality, a paracosm, where she has an imaginary friend, the false self.

So the borderline's false self is perceived as external and as real. And only much, much later in the disorder is it somehow internalized, but never fully.

That's why the borderline needs the intimate partner to act as a reification and an extension of the false self. He becomes her false self.

Okay. And this false self is a self fragment. It's a self figment.

And it is the borderline's only connection to reality. It's not real reality, it's an imagined reality, it's a virtual reality, it's a concoction, it's a narrative, it's a movie, it's a piece of fiction, but it's still much more real than psychosis.

In the creation of the false self, the borderline accepts that there is at least one object, one entity, the false self, which is not her.

So she is able to somehow, start haltingly and pathologically, the process of separation.

She accepts that she is not the world.

There is a false self who is out there in the world.

So there is a world. It allows her to separate. It prevents full-fledged psychosis.

Because in a full-fledged psychosis, there is no self and there is no world. In borderline, there is a false self self which is the world.

So it's closer to health than psychosis. It is indeed a transitory phase.

When the child experiences trauma and abuse in early childhood, the child transitions from psychosis to borderline personality disorder, to borderline personality organization.

I'm sorry. What happens if the parent impedes or hinders or attacks or prevents even this minor transition to health.

What happens if the parent isolates the child, penalizes, punishes the child every time she shows autonomy and independence and self-efficacy?

What happens if the parent puts down the child whenever she doesn't perform as an extension of the parent?

What happens in other words?

If the parent is active, an active agent of suppression, what happens when even borderline, even the borderline defense, even this desperate attempt at pretending that there is a world out there via the agency of the false self, what happens if even this, even this is considered by the parent too much, too much of a threat to the parental authority or parental needs.

so we have psychosis we have borderline if the trauma and abuse persist, there is a transition to a third phase.

This third phase is the narcissistic organization of the self. Is the proto-narcissistic personality disorder, the nucleus of NPD, NPD is a mirror image of BPD.

Why? Why isn't NPD more of BPD? Why is narcissism not an exaggeration of borderline? Why is narcissism not borderline 2.0?

Because borderline has failed. The borderline solution, the child starts as a psychotic. Then, subject to trauma and abuse, the child tries on the borderline solution.

When the borderline solution fails as well, when the parent doesn't allow the child to even become a borderline, the child says to herself, borderline has failed, I should try something different and I should try something that is the opposite of borderline. I should try something that is the mirror image of borderline because borderline didn't work. Mami doesn't accept borderline. So I'll try something else. Maybe it will be palatable to Mami. Or maybe I can even get rid of Mami altogether because I will become self-sufficient, self-contained, solipsistic, captured within a universe which I fully control. My own like the little prince

So these are trial and error heuristic procedures where the child flails about attempting to find a solution to the impossible situation where the parent won't let him go.

The child wants to go away, wants to separate and individuate because it's a biological drive, and yet he's not allowed or she is not allowed.

So the child tries on all kinds of solutions. He tries to be a borderline, semi-psychotic, you know, with a reality that is not real, that is actually a false self, doesn't work. He says, okay, let's move on, let's try another solution, let's try to be a narcissist.

And narcissism is a mirror image of borderline.

While in borderline, internal objects are external, because the borderline retains psychoticism, retains thepsychotic element.

In narcissism, external objects are internal.

While the solution in borderline is pseudo-psychosis, the solution in narcissism is fantasy and delusionality.

While the borderline assumes that her internal environment is actually external, she actually projects. It's an infantile defense mechanism.

In narcissism, there is the opposite assumption that external objects are actually internal. It's a fantasy defense. It's the belief that you are the world. Not the world is you. You are the world. The world is at your service. Everything out there you created. It's a godlike perception or self-perception. I made the world. I created the world. So everything in the world is an extension of me. External objects are actually internal. I made them happen. It's magical thinking. I created them.

And so fantasy and delusionality.

The false self in borderline starts off as an external object, special or imaginary friend. In narcissism, there's a reversal of this. And the false self starts off as an internal object.

Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion.

The false self starts off as an internal object.

The narcissist feels, identifies with the false self.

The narcissist believes that the false self is real and he is the false self.

So it starts off as internal.

But then the false self like the golem in the Jewish stories takes over like Frankenstein's creation. It takes over. It starts off as internal and then it usurps numerous ego functions, ego boundaries functions and other functions. It becomes the interface with the world.

So the false self becomes the sick, pathological equivalent of the ego.

And then the narcissist vanishes. The false self becomes the sick pathological equivalent of the ego, and then the narcissist vanishes.

The false self subsumes the true self, pushes it to the corner, represses it, and deactivates it.

True self is disabled, the narcissist vanishes, and all that's left is the false self.

So while the borderline starts off with a false self which is utterly distinguishable from her, distinguished from her, it's an external object, And only much later she internalizes some of it. She still uses external objects to regulate herself. She uses her intimate partners.

The narcissist goes the other way, exactly the opposite way. He starts off with an internal object, which he believes that he can control, an internal object that helps him to extract narcissistic supply from the environment, and then it goes awry.

The external object becomes super strong, overpowers the narcissist and consumes the narcissist. And nothing is left but the false self.

Deep inside, the narcissist resents this palace revolution, this coup d'etat. He hates the false self for this hostile takeover.

And he needs other people to tell him that the false self is real that he is the false self that nothing bad has happened that he hadn't disappeared and this is what we call narcissistic supply this secondary solution because the primary solution is the transition from psychoticism to borderline, borderline personality organization.

When this fails, when the parent doesn't allow the child to become a borderline, the child progresses and adopts narcissism.

What happens when narcissism fails? What happens when events narcissism. What happens with narcissism faith? What happens when even the narcissistic defenses that the child tries to adopt are, for example, punished severely? When the child is mocked and ridiculed and humiliated and mortified and attacked and abused in every conceivable way whenever the child shows any hint of grandiosity or even accomplishments. What happens when the child is not allowed to compete with the parents' own grandiosity? What happens when the parent himself is a narcissist and the child is perceived as a challenge or a competitor?

This solution fails in this case.

What happens when reality mediated via the parent?

Because the parent is the agent of socialization. The parent brings reality and society into the child.

That's why the parent becomes an introject, also known as conscience.

So it is, the parent stands in for reality in society.

So what happens when reality intrudes so badly and so harshly that an inner critic is formed, a superego is formed, that wouldn't let the narcissistic solution manifest fully?

What happens when reality cannot be refrained?

What happens then is the false self remains internal, internalized. It cannot be externalized.

The externalization of the false self is the culmination of the narcissistic solution.

It is at that point that we can say ironically that the narcissistic solution has worked and has been successful.

When there is interference in the narcissistic solution, the false self remains internalized, which is another way of saying, when the child is not allowed to become a narcissist, she remains stuck in the borderline phase.

So psychosis progresses to health, but if interrupted, psychosis progresses to borderline.

If the borderline solution is penalized or hindered or obstructed, the child attempts to become a narcissist.

If the child is not allowed to become a narcissist, the child remains stuck in the borderline phase and later on as an adult becomes someone with a borderline personality disorder.

If the child is allowed to progress and adopt the full-fledged narcissistic personality disorder, the child disappears altogether and all that's left behind is the false self.

So this issue of emptiness, nobody's home, is common to both borderline and narcissism.

Kernberg said that borderline and narcissistic character disorders or personality disorders are essentially two faces of the same coin.

I cannot agree more, I fully agree.

They both emanate from and they are both attempts to resolve an empty schizoid core.

This void, this black hole, this emptiness is in the shape of the mother who should have been a good enough mother, but never was. Her absence is internalized.

Healthy children internalize the presence of the mother.

Sick children, children who later become borderlines and narcissists, they internalize the absence of the mother.

And it is this howling absence, this eternal deep space that controls their lives and becomes a substitute for what should have been a core identity.

That's why borderlines have identity disturbance. And that's why narcissists are clinically dissociative, so dissociative that it's dissociative identity disorder.

Narcissists have two selves, at least.

And so when some children, not many, when they fail with a borderline solution, they fail with a narcissistic solution, they become rebellious, they become defiant, they become reckless, they develop something called reactance, a small percentage.

Majority remain borderlines, a sizable minority become narcissists, and a tiny minority become psychopaths.

When the parent wouldn't allow the child to resolve the lack of separation, individuation, the merger and the fusion, to resolve it by resorting to an imaginary reality like the borderline, or by resorting to an imaginary self, like the narcissists, some children rebel, become contumacious, they reject authority, and they transition to psychopathy.

Now, in psychopathy, only external objects exist.

You remember, in borderline, internal is confused with external objects.

In narcissism, external objects are confused with internal objects.

In psychopathy there's no such confusion because there are no external objects left. In psychopathy there's no internal objects of any shape, kind or form. There's only external objects.

And there is no false self because there's no self of any kind.

Reality testing is actually intact, much better than with the narcissist or the borderline.

Psychopath is much better equipped to assess reality and function in it.

It's because he has only external objects.

Now, is there anything we can do about this progression, about this sequence?

Yes, actually. There is something called decompensation.

Decompensation is when all the defenses crumble.

The narcissist false self is disabled.

This is what I do in cold therapy. I disable the false self.

The borderline's imaginary friend is deactivated.

We can put a lot of stress, a lot of force on the defenses and resistances of narcissists and borderlines, and then disable them.

And then the narcissists and borderline remain defenseless. They remain exposed, face to face with their own disorder.

Now there are several therapies which create artificial decompensation.

And decompensation creates regression.

If you decompensate the psychopath, he becomes narcissist.

You decompensate the narcissist, he becomes borderline.

You decompensate the borderline, she becomes psychotic.

Remember the sequence? Psychosis, borderline, narcissism, psychopathy. It goes both ways.

It progresses this way, but it can regress the other way. Psychopathy, narcissism, borderline, psychosis.

We can affect regression in therapy and we can fix the failures.

We can give the inner child a second chance.

So we can lead very carefully this regression all the way back to the psychotic phase and then as therapists using transference we can somehow encourage the inner child, who is now regressed to the psychotic phase, to try again.

This time, as therapists, we provide a safe base, a safe and secure environment, a holding, containing environment.

We allow the child to start again from scratch, from the psychotic phase to progress to health, not to borderline because there's no need.

We are not challenging the child, the inner child. We are not merging with the inner child or fusing with it.

At least not if we are good therapists. We just create the environment where the patient feels safe to regress from psychopathy to narcissism, from narcissism to borderline and from borderline to psychosis.

And then we hold the patient's hand as parental figures and we encourage the patient to try again to become healthy by separating from us and becoming an individual.

But this is a topic for the next video.

Good after morning, Shoshanim.

I have just been appointed to be editor-in-chief of yet another academic journal. I'm now editor-in-chief of eight academic journals and a member of the editorial board of another 90. 90% of these are peer-reviewed, and about one-third of them are open access.

So who says narcissism doesn't pay?

I like to tease you.

Okay, shanpanim, bonbonim, chmadm, shosanim, and every other nym.

Today we are going to discuss the narcissist's inner child, and how this alleged, ostensible, inner child, captures you and renders you a hostage.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignan Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I am also a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University and currently a professor of clinical psychology and of business management in CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, in Cambridge and Birmingham, of all places in United Kingdom, Ontario, Canada, and with an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria, where else?

Okay, the narcissist's inner child.

The narcissist uses his or her childlike features to attract you, to bait you, to lure you in, to induce you and induct you into the shared fantasy.

The narcissist dangles in front of you. He is endearing, charming, somewhat immature and infantile features, characteristics, and dimensions of personality.

It is as if the narcissist is communicating to you, I am a delectable child.

And this proves irresistible, especially to women, with their, so they say, maternal instincts, but also to men.

We are all protective of children. We all love children. We are all charmed by children. We, oh, well, the vast majority of us, let's say.

And so when the narcissist gives you a glimpse, affords you access to his inner sanctum, where there is a child in pain, hurt, traumatized, crying for help, you find it, as I said, irresistible, you're inexorably drawn and you can't help yourself.

You're conditioned to react the way you do because of societal injunctions, norms and habits. Children, provoking us, triggering us, reflexes, instincts, drives, and preordained structured behaviors.

The narcissist knows this.

And so he becomes a child when he is with you.

And it is a child who is endowed with magnetism and charisma and intelligence and captivating laughter or giggle.

And you just can't help yourself. You want to hug the narcissist. You want to hold the narcissist. You want to contain the narcissist. You want to merge with the narcissist. You want to be the narcissist ever-lusting mother providing him or her with unconditional love.

Narcissists actually use the child bait much more than they use the sex bait. Sex bait is a borderline thing. Child bait is a narcissistic thing.

And you know, narcissists infantilize ostentatiously and visibly they talk in a childlike or baby voice. They use language that is more typical of infants than of adults. They cuddle.

So they display cues, baby cues, which elicit maternal behavior in men and women alike.

And so this is all part of a stratagem.

Now, narcissists, distinct from psychopaths, are not conditioned, are not premeditated, are not cunning and scheming. Narcissists act unconsciously.

All these behavior is an unconscious behavior the way some other animal species display colors or behave in specific ways as if in order to attract mates.

The narcissist is invested emotionally, cathected in a shared fantasy, and he needs you to be a partner in this fantasy.

And the only way to draw you in, and the only way to make sure that you remain within the shared fantasy, addicted to it, embedded in it, reified by it, integrated, assimilated by it, as if it were kind of matrix or primordial womb, the only way to ascertain this, only way to make sure this happens, is by becoming your child.

The narcissist becomes your child.

And it's very difficult to abandon a child. It's very difficult to leave a child behind, especially a needy, damaged, broken, hurt, bleeding child.

The narcissist regresses not only himself, but he regresses you as well.

You are two orphans in the dark woods. You are gretel to his hansel. The witch is out to get you and eat you alive. And you need to stick together.

We embryos stick together. You need to stick together in order to confront the vagaries, exigencies, vicissitudes and especially dangers of a hostile outside world. It's a cult-like setting. We against them. We against they, we against the world.

And so the narcissist creates in you what is known as mass psychogenic illness, used to be known as mass psychosis, or folie à deux.

You become united, merged and fused against a perimeter of risk and danger and you fend off enemies real, ostensible, and utterly imaginary, time and again.

By doing so, you become a single organism with two heads.

The narcissist is capable to obtain this, capable to implement this strategy because you both share the same background of abuse and trauma in early childhood or a dysfunctional family with adverse childhood experiences, ACEs.

So the narcissist regresses to childhood, becomes a child, infantilizes, even his tone of voice changes, even his body posture, his body language, everything, he becomes like a big baby.

And as he babyifies himself, he also regresses you into infancy and beyond.

And so you become a baby as well.

And then your two babes, two babes in the wood, two orphans holding hands as they traverse the dark forest at night.

And so this makes it very difficult for you to break up with the narcissists because you feel as if you were a mother abandoning her child and you fight for the relationship.

You fight for the relationship the same way some parents don't divorce because of the kids.

You know, when you talk to people and say, you are evidently unhappy with each other. Why don't you divorce? And they say, well, we don't want to divorce because of the kids. It's the same with you.

You don't want to abandon the narcissist because of the narcissist in a child, because of the kids, the two kids that are the narcissist and yourself. You've both become kids in a shared childhood fantasy.

How would it be, how is it possible to break out of this without detesting yourself, loathing yourself, hating yourself, feeling ashamed and guilty for having inflicted yet another round of pain and hurt on this child, this bleeding, wounded, damaged child.

This infantilization or co-infantilization, regression to early infancy, the symbiotic phase in early infancy, this is a stratagem used by narcissists to make you feel guilty and ashamed to abandon the narcissist because you are not abandoning an adult. You're abandoning a kid in need.

But this is all a facade. Everything with narcissists is mere appearances. There's no substance there. It's nobody there. It's a vast emptiness, all consuming the equivalent of a black hole.

So there's nobody there. It's an absence masquerading as a presence. And everything you think you know about the narcissist is wrong. Absolutely everything. And this is no exception.

You think you're in touch with a childlike element or a childlike being or a childlike entity within the narcissist. You're not. The narcissist's true self is long, dead and gone, deactivated and dysfunctional to the point of having vanished. It never emerges, not even in therapy.

It is a myth, nonsensical myth, that the narcissist's true self somehow erupts under certain circumstances. It's complete nonsense. There's no true self there. There's nothing left behind except a huge crater in the volcanic eruption that is a narcissistic childhood.

And the true self never emerges.

What you're witnessing is an elaborate choreography, a simulation, a bait and a lure intended to drag you willy-nilly into a shared fantasy, and then entomb you there, mummify you like an ancient Egyptian mummy, and keep you there inanimate, the external equivalent of the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind.

So the narcissist actually does not have an inner child.

The narcissist does possess dynamics which are typically identified with an inner child.

But in the strictest clinical sense of the word, the narcissist does not have an inner child. There's nobody there, not a child, not an adult.

I mean, please get it through your thick defenses. There's nobody there.

Now, behaviorally and emotionally, the narcissist is a child. So it's not as if the narcissist is an adult with an inner child.

Narcissist doesn't have an inner child. He doesn't have an inner nothing, anything. It's all empty.

But he is behaviorally and emotionallya child, especially behaviorally, because narcissists do not possess, do not have access to their positive emotions, only to negative affectivity, hatred, envy, rage, anger, and so on.

Narcissists are incapable of positive emotions, not even joy, not even love.

So the narcissist is a child behaviorally.

Now, we used to call this in psychology arrested development. We no longer use this term. Today we call it developmental delay, a kind of developmental disorder.

But the fact is that the narcissist developmental age does not conform to his chronological age.

Developmental age is a measure of development which is expressed in an age unit or age equivalent.

For example, someone who is a four-year-old child may have a developmental age of six in terms of verbal skills, for example.

Emotional quotient, emotional intelligent, EQ also enters the formula or the equation that yields the developmental age.

The narcissist developmental age is not expressed in integers. It is a fraction.

Whereas the narcissist is, for example, 40 years old, he is behaviorally, and to some extent emotionally, two years old. So that's two divided by 40. If he's lucky, he's six years old.

Narcissists are severely behind their chronological age, which makes it easier for them to emulate, imitate, and mimic children.

They don't have to go far. They're anyhow children in the bodies of adults. They anyhow, behaviorally, retarded, so to speak.

So there's no problem for them to present to you a facade of a childlike, delightful, endearing person. Part of the charm of the narcissists, the boyish charm, in case it's a man, or the girlish charm, if it's a woman.

Narcissists suffer from developmental amnesia. Developmental amnesia is an impaired ability to form memories of past events. This is known as episodic memory.

Narcissists have severe difficulties with autobiographical episodic memory. Usually this is the outcome of brain injury or brain trauma sustained early in life.

And my claim is, I insist that the brains of narcissists have been damaged in early childhood, have been physically, physiologically, electrochemically, damaged in early childhood by the abuse and trauma that they have suffered.

There is an enormous body of evidence, studies, and so on and so forth that links abuse and trauma to changes in the brain, some of which are irreversible, most of which are reversible with neuroplasticity, but some of which are irreversible.

And this damage to the brain caused by abuse and trauma preconditions the narcissists to dissociate.

The narcissist's solution to memories which are painful and intolerable is simply to forget them. Amnesia, developmental amnesia.

This is especially true if the injuries, if there is a physical injury to the hippocampus, but not to the surrounding medial temporal lobe structures.

But I suggest that early childhood or adverse childhood experiences, especially early childhood trauma and abuse of the kind suffered by the narcissists, are liable to inflict enormous damage on memory pathways, the dopaminergic pathway, the hippocampal pathway, and the HPA axis.

So, narcissists very likely suffer from developmental amnesia.

Memory for factual information, known as semantic memory, appears to remain largely intact.

So narcissists would recall encyclopedic information, the names of people, dates and so on so forth, but would fail to recall crucial events in his own life, or her own life.

So this is developmental amnesia.

And because the developmental age is sore regress, and there is developmental amnesia, there is a maturational crisis.

Maturation crisis is caused by life-changing events. And it is encountered usually during the typical course of development, and it stops the development dead in its tracks.

This is why narcissists do not possess a constellated, integrated self or ego, use whatever term, makes you feel better. They don't possess this core identity, this executive locus that manages the various self-states, reactions to environment and so, so forth.

They don't have this core. They're very fluid, they're very kaleidoscopic. And this is also typical of borderline.

This is because of the maturational crisis and the resulting developmental amnesia.

And so this requires a significant psychological behavior and other adjustments, this developmental crisis, also known as normative crisis, usually is a huge problem.

And because the narcissist has enormous resistance to learning, to therapy, to any outside authority, to morality, and so on so forth, the maturational crisis is likely to persist, well into the narcissists very late life and unto death.

Only death do us part, says the narcissist to his mental health disorder.

So don't be impressed with the narcissist's childlike features. They are a theater production. They are movies staged for your benefit. They're not real. There's nobody there. There's no adult there and there's not child there. There's nothing there.

Behaviorally, the narcissist is a Peter Pan. Peter Pan definitely. He never grows up. behaviorally, but internally, it's a hollow grave. It's a walking, talking cemetery.

The narcissist is dead inside because he has died as a child, having been subjected to the most excruciating and extreme mistreatment in a variety of ways.

And so do not get attracted to the narcissist's alleged inner child which is non-existent. Do not feel as if you're the narcissist mother or father and by abandoning the narcissist you're a bad person, you're evil, because the narcissist is this hurting, crying, bleeding child who needs you, who clings to you. You're the narcissist rescuer. You're his savior. You're her fixer and healer.

Don't think this way, because it's simply not true. It's counterfactual.

Had you been able to gaze into the outer darkness, which is the inner world of the narcissist, you would have fled screaming to the hills and never ever looked back.