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

Okay. We are now in the second part of the seminar, organized by Baba Jura, the narcissism coach in Budapest, beautiful city in Hungary. And now we move on to the second part. And the second part is how to cope when you're in a relationship with a narcissist.

The first part we dealt with the psychology of the narcissist and what drives him to be in a relationship with you at all. And the second part will deal with how you can survive this and what you need to do during the relationship and after the relationship.

There's a bit of a change in the seminar. This is the first part, was automatically terminated by YouTube. They didn't think I have anything to contribute, so they cut me off. I hope they don't do the same to the second part.

And then the third part, I will be open to answer your questions.

So the third part will be a chat part. I will come online, you will write your questions on the chat, the right hand of my screen, and I will respond to your questions. So that's a bit of a change in the seminar. Lecture, lecture, and then questions and answers. And that's because of the exigencies and limitations of YouTube, regrettably a monopolistic platform almost.

So let's continue now to the second part and see what you can do about the narcissist.

So we ended the first part by discussing hoovering. The reason the narcissist hovers you. The narcissist comes back, returns to you, tries to lure you back into a new shared fantasy or the continuation of the previous shared fantasy because the narcissist cannot get rid of your idealized internal representation in his mind. He can get rid of you externally by devaluing you, by discarding you, and by replacing with someone else that's getting rid of the external object, but he cannot get rid of your internal object, your introjecting his mind.

And so this creates a problem for him. He needs to try again with you or with someone else, something known as repetition compulsion.

What can you do to prevent the narcissist from ever getting in touch with you again, from ever hoovering you or attempting to hoovering?

With some of these attempts, border on stalking and harassment and can easily lead to unpleasant or even dangerous situations.

So many people, former intimate partners would like to avoid this.

Now I want you to know something before we continue.

The minute you have entered a relationship with the narcissist, the rules of the game are over. Everything is fair in love, war, and a relationship with the narcissist. You can't be nice and pleasant and kind and generous and compassionate and considerate and affectionate. You can't be you. You can't be empathic. You can't have pity. You can't have mercy. These things don't work with the narcissist.

You need to a large extent become a narcissist in order to get rid of the narcissist and hope that this contagion effect, because narcissism is contagious, hope and pray that this contagion effect will not be everlasting, will not change you fundamentally, essentially in ways which are irreversible.

Living with the narcissist, and just cohabiting with the narcissist, let alone having an intimate relationship with the narcissist, is playing with fire. It's a risk.

So the sooner you extricate yourself, the higher the chance that you will not get infected for life, like with some kind of Epstein Barr virus.

So to prevent hoovering, there is only one technique. It's known as narcissistic modification.

Narcissistic modification is when the narcissist, when you shame and humiliate the narcissist in public, in front of people he looks up to or considers useful or significant.

I'm going to repeat these elements.

Motification is not narcissistic injury. Narcissistic injury is when you challenge the narcissist's grandiosity, and this generates narcissistic rage, but it's self-limiting, self-limiting episode.

The narcissist is hypervigilant, is likely to be very angry at you and resentful, but ultimately, narcissistic injury is short-lived and you move on.

Narcissistic mortification is something completely different. It is dismantling narcissist defenses immediately, abruptly, and totally, leaving him exposed, skinless, vulnerable, threatening his inner balance, his peace of mind, driving him deep into suicidal territory and extreme depression and anxiety, literally on a dime within minutes. The narcissist would never ever want to experience this again, so he's likely to avoid you.

I repeat the way to obtain, way to get to narcissistic mortification.

You must humiliate or shame the narcissist in public in a way that destroys completely his grandiosity. Two, must be in public, cannot be in private. Three, it must be done in the presence of witnesses, witnesses which are important to the narcissist, useful to the narcissist, sources of supply, peers, people he looks up to, role models, people he would like to emulate when he grows up, etc.

Meaningful people, significant people. If you do this, then you do it atrociously enough. You're never going to hear from the narcissist again.

For example, I don't know, picking up a guy and going away with him and having sex with him. This is extreme mortification.

The kind of challenging the narcissist undermines the narcissist's claims with incontrovertible evidence in public in front of important people. That's narcissistic mortification. You do that and you will never hear from the narcissist again. You will never be overt.

Now, there are some of you who, for some oblivious reason, love the narcissist, want to stay in the narcissist's life, want to keep him, so to speak, keep him around. It's a form of addiction, of course. It is self-destructive. It is a form of self-harming if you're a borderline, exactly like using a razor or burning yourself with cigarettes.

Choosing a narcissistic intimate partner is absolutely a form of self-mutilation and self-harm. I recommend strongly against it.

I am the father of the no-contact compounded strategy. Twenty-seven techniques would go into it a bit later.

No-contact is the only strategy I recommend, not even gray rock, nothing, only no-contact.

But if you insist, and you know the client is always right, if you insist to stay with the narcissist, there are two opposing strategies which are useful.

Number one, you can be like his dead mother. Those of you who haven't watched the first part, I strongly encourage you to watch it because it provides the context, the psychological context of everything I'm saying.

The narcissist chooses his intimate partner to act as a maternal figure in order to try to reenact, to replay an early childhood conflict which prevented him from separating an individual from his original mother.

He wants now to separate from you and become an individual. And to do this, he needs to devalue you and replace you. That's a way of separating, of course.

So the first strategy, if you want to keep him around, if you love him, if you can't live without him or you had convinced yourself that you can't live without him, if you are addicted to his presence, his infectious smile, his amazing handsomeness, yes, I'm talking about myself, if you're like that, one strategy is be like his dead mother. Be cold, rejecting, selfish, absent, unsafe, triangulate, cheat on him, betray, be approach avoidant, intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold, therefore you come the next day, be fake, pretend and let him know that you are.

B, recreate his dead mother. This would lead the narcissist to trauma bond with you the same way he had trauma bonded with his biological, original mother.

He would feel compelled to reenact with you early childhood conflicts. Of course, if you are sufficiently faithful to the contours and the characteristics of his original mother, this will result in devaluation and discard and replacement. He would need to separate from you and try to individuate. He would need to dump you. That would be a symbolic act of separating from his original mother through you. You will have become his original mother, so he discards you, he devalues you, he separates from you.

But it also guarantees this strategy of acting as a replacement, as a substitute for his mother, also guarantees hoovering, unless mortification occurs.

So if you don't mortify him and you act as his dead mother, I mean, not dead mother in the physical sense, you act as this emotionally unavailable mother. If you don't hoover him and you act as his abusive mother, if you don't mortify him, I'm sorry, and you act as his abusive mother, he's going to hoover you. He's going to be back, for sure. Money-back guarantee, and I'm not getting paid for this seminar.

So this is strategy number one. Very few people can do this. It's not for the faint of heart. You need to be cruel, rejecting, selfish, egotistical, absent. You need to betray him. You need to be horrible, the same way his original mother had been. You need to not let him go. You need to subjugate him. You need to mummify him. You need to suppress him. You need to threaten him. You need to play mind games with his mind. You need to, it's a power play. It's a tough existence, but it guarantees that he will never, ever leave your life permanently. He will always be there. He may take a break. For a year or two, with another girl, he's going to be back. Or with another, I mean, this applies to female narcissists as well. So he or she will be back, because the lure of interacting with a mother figure is irresistible.

So this is the first strategy. Be his dead mother.

Second strategy, be the opposite of his dead mother.

Conform to his snapshot. Make sure that you are perfect, ideal, never challenge him, never argue, never criticize, never disagree, never deviate from the snapshot, never diverge from the snapshot. Suspend all your autonomy. Do not be independent. Be dependent. Do not have agency. Don't stop. Seize everything that implies that you are independent. Don't have friends. Avoid friends. Don't have a social life. Cut all contact with your family. Become utterly dependent on him.

This also guarantees that he will stay in your life. Because he is playing, remember, for the first part, he's playing the mother role as well. It's dual mother.

These are the two techniques, Guo-Sou model, in big terms, big picture techniques, to keep the narcissist in your life or at least coming back all the time. These are not the techniques that I recommend, nor do I recommend that you seek the narcissist's presence in your life as a strategy or as a goal.

I think this is self-defeating. It could drive quite a few people to suicide. I don't think it's a good idea at all, but some of you are beyond help, honestly, and you have your own repetition, compulsion, and you keep reverting to narcissistic partner.

There's nothing we as a mental health community can do to help you because you need to tackle much deeper issues, such as borderline traits, self-harming tendencies, and so on.

What are the strategies that you can safely deploy when you are in the relationship? There's quite a few of them, and I came up with most of them in the mid-1990s, except gray rock.

Gray rock is not my technique, but it's a brilliant technique.

I'm going to review techniques for surviving and prevailing when you are in a relationship with a narcissist, and you either don't want to abandon the narcissist because you see the inner child in the narcissist and you fell in love with it, or because it's financially comfortable to be with a narcissist. It's a kind of sugar daddy, and you're kind of a gold digger.

I hope no offense is taken.

Or because you have common children, and you believe erroneously that remaining married with a narcissist and providing the children with a father figure is a thing to do. It's a serious mistake. I would not want any child to have a narcissistic father or mother around. It's better to have a single parent household.

So many of you convince yourself, give yourself good reasons why to stay with the narcissist. It's a psychological defense mechanism known as rationalization.

If you find yourself trapped financially, legally in some countries legally, it's very difficult to divorce, or divorce is socially sanctioned, frowned upon by society. So there could be quite a few reasons why you can't simply let go of the narcissist.

So you're forced to cohabit with the narcissist, or even if you divorce, you have shared custody, and there are many such situations in life.

Well, in this case, there's a series of coping strategies that you can adopt.

Number one is deflection.

Deflection is redirecting the narcissist's aggressive impulses and frankly attention toward third parties.

So you find a common enemy, a common cause, some institution that you both hold in contempt and decry, social activism, your mother, his sister, I don't know, you find someone or something in which you both use as a decoy so that when he starts to be aggressive with you, or pay attention to you, which is a prelude to aggression in a majority of cases, you can redirect his attention to this decoy and say, did you hear what happened today with, and that'll be enough to set him off.

And he will go on a rant against this imaginary or real enemy or so his boss, his co workers, I don't know, find someone or something could be an institution, which the narcissist would find as a more rewarding result, target the new.

This technique is called deflection.

The next technique is shared psychosis or shared fantasy.

The narcissist, when you enter his shared fantasy, assigns a role to you.

Clinically, it's called emergent role, an emergent role.

So he assigns to your role, find out what is this role? Does he want you to be sluggish? Does he expects you to be motherly, overtly motherly?

Because psychologically, you are his mother, even if you don't act maternal, Lee, as a maternal figure, you're still his mother.

But does he want you to be overtly maternal? Does he expect you to be his business partner? Does he believe that you could be a power couple? Does he want you to betray him?

Like Judas is carried? Does he want you to be a trophy so that he can be seen with you and be proud to be seen with you?

What is the emergent role in his shared fantasy?

Find that out. It's not so difficult to stop him asking what he wants. Find that out.

And to the best of your ability, conform to that role. As long as you conform to the role, you don't deviate or diverge from the role, too ostensibly or too ostentatiously, I'm sorry, you're likely to remain on his good books. And he's unlikely to reach the devaluation and discard phase until much later.

Some of these roles are beyond the pale. He may want you to have group sex with his friends, for example.

So unless you're absolutely willing to do that, I mean, that's beyond the pale.

But the vast majority of roles are socially acceptable. They're sublimated, they're socially acceptable. And they're quite easy to fulfill. It's like acting, you know, method acting, consult Al Pacino. Act the role in a shared fantasy, thereby sustaining the shared fantasy for as long as you can.

That's the second strategy.

The third strategy is to provide narcissistic supply.

Narcissist's main goal is narcissistic supply. His main narcissistic supply imbues his life, the pursuit of narcissistic supply imbues his life with direction, with meaning, with purpose. It's an organizing principle and a hermeneutic principle, an explanatory principle.

Narcissist makes sense of his life by pursuing supply and by convincing himself that the pursuit of supply is a noble deed, or that the pursuit of supply is for the greater good, or that the pursuit of supply is likely to yield favorable outcomes.

In other words, it's a self efficacious strategy.

So Narcissist has many justification narratives as to why he's pursuing supply.

You could become a source of supply. Make sure you provide calibrated, not over the top because he would interpret it as faking, calibrated, reasonable, high grade narcissistic supply. You give it to him and he's yours forever. You will have become his pusher.

Narcissistic supply is a drug and the narcissist is a drug addict, is a junkie. Make sure you are his monopoly pusher. You are the source of narcissistic supply so that he keeps coming back to you for more and more and more in an ever escalating spiral.

That's by far the most efficacious strategy by the way for coexisting with a narcissist.

The next strategy has to do with withholding or intermittent reinforcement. Provide him with supply, play the role in the shared fantasy and then seize abruptly. This is called intermittent reinforcement, quote unquote, good and bad. It caters to the narcissist's splitting defense. It enhances a process in the narcissist's mind known as dichotomous thinking.

Narcissist divides the world exactly as an infant does. Because infants do it. The narcissist divides the world into anathemas, into polls, into contradictions. He sees the world in terms of stark contrasts. There are no nuances. There are no subtleties. There are no gray areas. You are either my friend or my foe, my enemy. You are with me or against me. You are so. It's easy to leverage this.

By providing the narcissist with intermittent reinforcement, you make the narcissist addicted to you. You actually create trauma bonding. This is the core of trauma bonding.

Your withholding would lead the narcissist to cajole, to beg, to cater to your needs, to pay attention to you. Then you give him what he needs. Supply.

You play a role in the shared fantasy. He becomes even more addicted. Then you withdraw the drug and he runs begging to you. It's cruel, but it works.

We use this with pets, dogs, cats. We do this to great effect. It would work with the narcissist to perfection.

No need to be afraid that he will dump you during the withholding phase.

If you are sufficiently astute and you do this in a way that is not too overt and too cruel and too sadistic and so on, if you don't challenge his grandiosity while you're doing this, if you're simply available one day and not available the next day, that would create in the narcissist enormous abandonment, anxiety, separation, insecurity, and this intermittent reinforcement will trauma bond him to you and he would gradually become more and more addicted to your ability to undo the pain, to undo the frustration.

So you first frustrate him and then you hold the key as to how to unfrustrate him. You cause him pain or hurt and then you soothe him and the narcissist falls prey to this strategy and becomes seriously addicted to it.

The next strategy is the famous gray rock.

As a source of supply, you need to provide the narcissist with instant gratification by being immediately responsive and in an over the top way, responsive, visibly and ostentatiously. You also need to be highly excitable, a bit of a drama queen, introduce color into his life and because the narcissist is exactly like the psychopath, novelty seeking, and he exactly like the borderline is a bit of a drama queen or a drama king.

So he needs you to collude in this. He needs you to be his partner in staging these theater productions ongoing, sempiterno theater productions. If you render yourself gray and boring and non-responsive and inert and object-like, you will frustrate the narcissist mightily. You will frustrate him to the point that he would want to avoid you and ultimately devalue and discard you.

So you will have facilitated the objective of avoiding the narcissist in a way that is not confrontational, that is not aggressive, that doesn't put you at risk.

That's the gray rock technique.

The next technique is mirroring. It's a bit of a dangerous technique. It should never be attempted with the narcissist who has a history of violence or someone who is a psychopathic narcissist.

But with the run-of-the-mill narcissist, it should work.

Whenever the narcissist does something that you disapprove of, whenever he mistreats you or maltreats you, whenever he abuses you, whenever he's verbally abusive or aggressive, simply do the same to him.

Mirror him. He walks off in a huff and puff, walk off in a huff and puff. He breaks something, breaks something similar. He shouts at you, shout back. He's aggressive. Be aggressive. He demeans you, debases you, humiliates you and degrades you. Do exactly the same. He shames you in public. Do the same. Whatever he does, mirror him, reflect him, copy him, imitate him, emulate him.

Trust me. This would be sufficient negative reinforcement for him to stop all these behaviors.

He may choose to avoid you, even discard you, but he will definitely not repeat the abrasive and antisocial behaviors that bother you so much.

A very effective cousin of Gray Rock is the background noise technique. Act as a background noise. Ask no questions. Simply ask no questions. Never criticize the narcissist. Never disagree with him.

When he addresses you, confine your response to the issues broached by him. Let him determine the agenda and the content of your verbal intercourse. Do not introduce new topics into the conversation. You're not there to think if he wants your opinion, he will give it to you.

Most importantly, don't show, don't provide him with clues as to your independence, agency, autonomy, and self-efficacy. You are nothing but an avatar.

Any attempt to initiate a conversation, to introduce new topics, to disagree, to challenge, to compare, to give advice, to suggest help, to be empathic, to try to soothe. These are bad ideas because they remind a narcissist that he is in need of advice and help in soothing, that he is inferior in some way, that you have something to give which he needs or wants or doesn't have.

You're challenging his grandiosity, his superiority. Never initiate, never be proactive. These react meekly, compliantly, and subserviently.

Now the mother and father of all strategies and the only, absolutely the only strategy that I ever recommend is no contact.

I created the no contact strategy in 1995. Now, many people tell me, no, you didn't.

My grandmother walked out on my grandfather in 1910. Yes, no contact is not about walking away. No contact is not about breaking up. No contact is not even about avoiding contact.

No contact is a set of 27 strategies. Only when they are put together, they're efficient.

If any of these 27 strategies is breached, you are not maintaining no contact. If you follow him on social media, that's not no contact. That's a breach, a violation of no contact if you stalk him on social media. If you work in the same company, you can't maintain no contact. Even if you live in the same city, in my view, if it's small enough, that's against no contact.

If you answer his phone calls, if you share visitation and custody, if you, I mean, no contact is a very brittle and fragile strategy.

Any violation, any breach, any countermanding behavior, any, is gone because the narcissist uses any contact with you as a form of fuel. It fuels him. He is re-energized by any contact.

Even the most flimsy contact is misinterpreted by the narcissist. It's permission to re-enter your life and he's going to do it full force. He's going to stalk you or harass you.

So no contact is no contact. Use all contact. Be sure to maintain as much contact with your abuser as the courts, counselors, mediators, guardians or law enforcement officers, officials, mandate.

In other words, don't go against the institutions. Don't go against the establishment. Don't go against the courts, the police and so on. That's going to end badly for you.

So if they insist that you should be in touch with your narcissist, obey. But that's unfortunate because it's going to feed him. It's going to feed him. It's going to refuel him, recharge him, and the cycle is going to start all over.

Regrettably, our law enforcement agencies and our judicial system all over the world are not cognizant of narcissistic dynamics and narcissistic abuse. So they force you very often to be in spurious and unnecessary contact with the narcissist.

They force you because they have this image of, you know, maybe it can work out this time or maybe you could work together as adults to raise your children properly or whatever.

Narcissist is not an adult. The narcissist is a child. It's a case of arrested development.

But the courts and the police and guardians and evaluators and mediators and counselors and even diagnosticians and therapists, mental health, supposed professionals, they don't get it. They don't understand it.

The only therapy is to avoid the narcissist in your life to the maximum possible extent, which is 100% as a minimum.

Do not contravene the decision of the system. Try to work from inside the system to change judgments, evaluations, rulings, but never rebel against these decisions or verdicts or statements or never ignore them. Don't turn the system against you and against your interest because you're going to lose.

The narcissist is superb at calling institutions and mental health professionals. He will immediately leverage all of them to crush you.

Should you show any sign of rebelliousness and defiance and reactance? So don't do that.

But with this single exception, the minimum mandated by courts and others decline any and all gratuitous contact with the narcissist. None. When I say none, I mean none. Not digital, not electronic, not by phone, not on social media, not in the street, not in the workplace, not in common family gatherings, not on Thanksgiving. None is none.

Which part of none do you find difficult to comprehend?

Do not respond to the narcissist's pleading, romantic, nostalgic, flattering or threatening messages via any form, you know, like through Instagram, email. He's going to find a way under the earth to get to you one way or another. Delete unread.

It's the best strategy. It's very tempting to read and your anxiety levels skyrocket every time you see a message from him because you perceive him as a threat. Don't delete unread, sight unseen.

Usually the narcissist will try to make sure to ascertain whether you had read his messages, read receipts and so on and so forth. Don't just delete them.

If at all possible, my recommendation is to block the narcissist absolutely everywhere and to relegate all communication to your representatives, your lawyer, your accountant, your therapist even.

You don't talk to the narcissist directly and you leave him no venue of communication, no channel, nothing, dead in the water, incognito mode.

Return every single gift that he sends you, he sends you money, wire it back. Don't accept anything from him.

When I say anything, I mean anything. Not a flower, not a bracelet, not a birthday present, not a Christmas present, not an offer to go on a trip. Nothing is nothing is nothing.

Never accept anything from the narcissist directly or through third parties because he may attempt to send gifts to you via, for example, your children or your neighbors or your colleagues, turn them down, accept nothing.

You refuse to let the narcissist enter your premises. Don't let him enter your premises. Do not even respond when he rings the intercom or when he calls from downstairs or when he's parking in your street. Do not allow him ever a foothold within your home, your new home.

If he comes for the children, visitation or some kind of custody arrangement, he stays out. He waits at the threshold. He's not invited in.

You don't give him coffee. You don't talk to him. You pantomime, body language, minimal, if possible, someone else, I don't know, a neighbor, the cleaning lady, the help, the lawyer, someone else, someone else.

If you can, meet in a neutral place. Make the meeting brief. Something like one second, if you can manage, walk away.

No communication, no conversation, no chatting, no contact, no comparing experiences, no reminiscing, nothing.

Transactional, brief, to the point. Neutral place is the best, but if you can help it, he never ever enters your home.

Do not talk to him on the phone, on WhatsApp, on Viber, on Facebook Messenger. Don't chat with him. Don't talk to him. Block him. Hang up the minute you hear his voice. Make clear to him in a single, polite, but firm sentence that you are determined to not talk to him, that you will not repeat this next time.

He's just going to hang up.

If you block him everywhere, he will not be able to communicate with you. He may come physically. He may try attempt to meet you physically. He may ambush you on the way to work. He may come to your workplace. He may come to your home.

Some narcissists, paranoid stalkers. It's inevitable.

The ideal would be to relocate, to move to another city, not to leave a forwarding address. Change a job or a workplace. Definitely change your phone number and all your contact details to the best of your ability. It's not easy, but if he does, ignore him. And when I say ignore him, it means don't look at him. Not even a cursory look, not even a hidden occult look. Just don't look at him.

Absolutely do not react to his good morning. Absolutely no communication, no chatting, no words exchanged. Nothing. He is made of air. He is transparent.

Do not answer any missive, any letter, any email, any DM, direct message, anything from him. He's a ghost.

So why would you respond?

Do not visit him on special occasions. Do not go to his bedside in emergencies. He is sick, bad for him. He probably has a replacement already for you. You're not his mother. You're not his mother. He's not your child. You're not his nurse, nursemaid. You're not his health.

His gun is out of your life. Make it so. Make it so.

Do not respond to his questions, his requests. He's pleased, forwarded to you via third parties, fourth parties, flying monkeys, resting monkeys.

Don't. He's dead, in effect, to you.

If there are third parties who constantly harass you, brings you messages, try to put you back together, question your judgment and the validity of your opinions about him, undermine you, cut them off. Disconnect and detach from third parties whom you know are spying on you at his behest.

No flying monkeys. Let them fly elsewhere. You're not a jungle. Cut them off.

These people may believe that they have your best interests in mind, but they are detrimental to your mental health and very often physical health as well.

Do not discuss with him your children, except as mandated by the court.

So you need to provide him with medical records. Medical records it is. You need to provide him with, I don't know, their school records. School records it is.

Don't venture beyond that. Don't volunteer information. Do not make your children a common beautiful experience which you can share. Do not share your children with him.

Try to isolate them, actually. Try to defend them, protect them, serve as a firewall.

He is not good influence. He is going to eff up with their minds as well.

So provide the children with an example, a counter example of how a human being can be. Not selfish, not egotistical, not callous, not ruthless, not cynical, not hateful. Show them that there is an alternative.

Do not bed mouth. Do not bed mouth your former partner, narcissist as he is.

But make sure that your children have firm boundaries. They know how and when to say no, and they know how and when to identify abuse. Warn them against actions, not against him so that they can say, they can set their food down and not collaborate.

But otherwise, your children are yours. He happened to have contributed the sperm or the egg if it's a female narcissist. Nothing much besides that.

So don't make your children a back door, a Trojan horse into your life. Do not gossip about him with any third party. Expose his abuse to your closest friends and family once, and that should be the end of it.

Do not make him a topic of conversation starter, a topic of commiseration. He's gone. If he's not gone from your mind, he will insinuate himself into your life. Make sure he's gone everywhere.

Do not ask him for anything, even if you're in dire need, even if you don't have food, even if you don't have shelter, even when you become homeless, he is the last person to ask for help. And actually, he is not on the list of people who should ask for help.

When you're forced to meet him, do not discuss your personal affairs. Do not discuss his personal affairs. You're not friends. You're not intimate partners. You have nothing in common and nothing together.

Luckily for you. Don't make that different. Don't change that.

So don't share with him your latest accomplishments at work, your new boyfriend, your newfound intimacies, your family news. It's not his business.

And don't ask him for his. It's not your business. Keep your businesses separate. Relegate any inevitable contact with him when and where possible to professionals, your lawyer, your accountant.

Insist on your boundaries. Resist abuse. Refuse to accept abusive behavior. Demand reasonably predictable and rational actions and reactions.

Insist on respect for your boundaries, predilections, preferences, priorities. Demand a just and proportional treatment.

Reject or ignore unjust and capricious behavior. If you are up to the inevitable confrontation, always reacting kind, let him taste some of his own medicine.

Let us show your abuser that you're afraid of him. Do not negotiate with bullies. They are insatiable. Do not succumb to blackmail. If things get rough, disengage, involve law enforcement officers, friends, colleagues, and threaten him if need be, legally, of course.

Do not keep your abuser secret. Secrecy is the abuser's weapon.

But don't make your victim mood a career. And don't make your victim mood your identity.

You are not a victim. You had been victimized. And you had survived evidently.

So be a survivor. Put your abuse where it belongs in your therapy sessions and move on with your life.

Never give him a second chance. React with your full arsenal to any transgression. Be guarded. Don't be too forthcoming. Gather intelligence, but never give it away. Be yourself. Don't misrepresent your wishes, boundaries, preferences, priorities, and red lines. Be firm, but never aggressive.

Do not behave inconsistently. Do not go back on your word. Be firm and resolute. Stay away from quagmires, from conundrums. Scrutinize every offer, every suggestion, no matter how innocuous. Do not trust him. Not in the least. He does not have your best interest in mind because to him you had never existed.

Prepare plan B. Prepare backup plans. Keep other people informed of your whereabouts and appraised of your situation, appraised of your situation.

Be vigilant and doubting. No need to be hypervigilant and paranoid, but at least be vigilant and doubting. Don't be gullible. Don't be suggestible. And always better safe than sorry.

Do not regret what you had missed.

Often the abuses, proxies, flying monkeys, and others, they are unaware of their role.

So expose him to them. Inform them. Demonstrate to them how they are being abused, misused, and plain used by the abuser, but do it once. Do not make it a habitual conversation because then you will keep the abuser in your life. Trap your abuser. Treat him as he treats you. Involve other people. Bring it into the open.

Nothing like sunshine to disinfect abuse, but again, don't make it the core and the essence of your life.

This is when you are with a narcissist and when you break up with a narcissist, but long after the most persistent narcissist is gone and nowhere to be found, long after he's dead even, he's still with you.

You remember for part one that a relationship with a narcissist is a process of entraining, brainwashing, and mind-snatching, mind control. He is inside your mind. His introjects, his voices are inside your mind.

And the idea is to silence them. It's still debatable whether you can get rid of them altogether. But I think you can silence them.

You need to reverse the rules. Throughout your relationship with a narcissist, his voice was the dominant voice. His voice resonated in your mind, criticized you, demeaned you, degraded you, uplifted you, gave you hope, false hope usually, made you dream. The voice was addictive, all pervasive, ubiquitous. It's a voice that you couldn't get rid of because you did not want to get rid of it. You were trauma-bonded, intermittently reinforced. You were in the throes of what is colloquially known as the Stockholm Syndrome.

So the voice became crucial to the maintenance of your internal world, to the inner peace of mind. You couldn't and wouldn't get rid of it.

So throughout the relationship, he was vociferous. He was vocal. He was there in your face or inside your head. And you were the muted one. You were the silent one. You were the recipient. You were the passive side. It was the active side.

The road to healing, the route to healing and recovery is by reversing the rules, muting the narcissist's voice and introject and rendering your voices active and vociferous, making such a racket, so much noise with your own voices that they would drown out the narcissist's pernicious attempts to again take over your mind long after his gone.

So the first thing you need to do is to realize what had happened. You need to identify which of these voices is an authentic voice, your voice, really you. Which of these voices don't belong to you? They're not your voices, but they belong to relatively benign figures in your life.

Maybe your mother, your father, maybe a grandmother, maybe a good neighbor, maybe a role model, maybe a peer with whom you had befriended.

So you have your own voice, the single authentic unitary voice that is you. You have a multiplicity of other voices, benign voices, helpful voices, voices who give you support and advice in times of need, voices who guide you and constitute a part of your socialization and conscience. These are voices which you wouldn't want to get rid of.

And you have a group of voices which are enemies, internal enemies inside the gates, barbarians ought to ravish you and destroy you, ravage you and destroy you, pillage you. These are voices.

And these voices could be, for example, the voice of a sadistic harsh mother. And it is definitely one of these voices is definitely the voice of the narcissist.

These are unfriendly voices. They ought to destroy you, they ought to get you. They would love to see you commit suicide or, or languish or in agony. These voices you need to get rid of.

First and foremost, you need to get rid of the voice of the narcissist. Why? Why is this a top priority?

Because the narcissist, cunningly, albeit unconsciously, had collaborated with all the other enemy voices in your head. He had co-opted them. He organized the coalition of these voices and he led them in charge battle. He made war upon you using, leveraging and abusing parts of you, these introjects.

So if you had, for example, a really hateful mother who envied you, put you down, destroyed your life, the narcissist would collaborate with her voice in your mind. He would install, implant his voice and his introject would work with her introject in a combined attack, attack vector on you.

So you need to destroy the narcissist's voice because it's the head of this coalition of forces of the apocalypse inside your mind. He is in charge of pulling together all the negativity, the negative voices, the self-defeating and self-destructive voices, self-trashing voices, masochistic voices, sadistic voices inside your mind. These voices coalesce around the narcissist's voice. It amplifies them and they amplify it. It's a coalition of the willing, but willing demons. It's to borrow religious metaphors. It's a bit demonic.

So you need to get rid of this voice and thereby silence the others.

A narcissist creates a theater play, a movie. He scripts it. He creates a script and then he directs it. You are an actress in the best case in his theater play, in his movie. And very often you're not even that. You're just a prop, property, prop like in a theater. So you're on the table on the stage or the gun that will be shot in the third scene. It's just a prop or an actress. And you hand over control to the narcissist by agreeing to participate, by consenting to his shared fantasy and agreeing to fit into his illusion or hallucination of a life. You actually are suspending yours. You're leaving up on your separate existence. You're merging and fusing with him. You're becoming an extension of him.

And so the current advice actually online is catastrophically wrong.

Because what it does, it freezes these roles. It tells you that you had been the victim and he had been the abuser. There was nothing much you could do about it.

And so this freezes the roles. It leaves you in a bad place where the control of your life is external and external locus of control. And the abuser is all empowered and you are helpless. It fosters learned helplessness.

Most of the current advice that I see in forums and by self-styled experts on YouTube and so on is disastrously wrong advice because it perpetuates the victim's stance and the helplessness of the victim and the passivity of the victim and elevates the abuser into a position of unmitigated power over you, freezing the locus of control externally and not allowing you to get rid of your voice.

Because if you're helpless, who are you? What can you do about it? Nothing much.

You need to do exactly the opposite. You need to reverse the roles. You need to write the script. You need to direct the movie and the theater play.

It's your play from now on. It's your movie from now on. It's your script.

He becomes the actor. He becomes the prop. Whether he's physically present or not is immaterial. He's still inside your head, it's an introject.

You demote him. You demote him and you subjugate him. He is a nobody and a nothing. He is utterly under your control because you make the script.

You don't like him. Make another script where he's omitted or no longer included. The power is all yours. You have access to your mind that he doesn't.

This foreign body inside your mind, you can silence it. You can render it dormant simply, absolutely simply, by changing the story or the narrative or the theater play or the movie that you're participating in, own the narcissist by appropriating his roles and then constellate and integrate these parts of you that are benign, that are helpful, friendly, that are loving, that are caring, that are compassionate, that are affectionate.

By reducing the narcissist, you're actually disabling and silencing the other voices, the bad voices, the enemy voices, the Trojan horses, the fifth column inside your head.

It's very reminiscent of the religious allegory, Satan and God. God demoted, Satan used to be an archangel in some traditions. He used to be a top guy and even in some traditions he was God's right hand. Then he rebelled, he became a narcissist in a faith.

What God did, he demoted, he wrote a new script. He wrote a new script where Satan was no longer his right hand, no longer an angel or an archangel. He demoted him. He threw him down to earth. He forced him into a demeaning role, subservient role. Satan lost his power in the heavenly kingdom. He regained it among us human beings, but that's not God's frame of reference.

So if you do the same to your narcissist, he may still victimize other people, of course, but he will have no access to the heavenly kingdom known as your mind.

You should do to the narcissist what he had done to you. He devalued you. He discard you only because he needed to use you as a maternal figure to separate from and become an individual.

Do the same. Do the same. He played the maternal role with you. He had played it with you. He pretended to be unconditionally loving mother. He idealized you and made you fall in love with your idealized image.

Do the same. Separate from him. Become your own person. Individuate.

This is the road to recovery and healing.

We value him and then discarding in your mind. The narcissist actually uses multiple voices in your mind, which is another problem because most people think that the narcissist speaks with a single voice. That is not the case. He uses a multiplicity of voices and he implants these voices.

This interjects inside your mind using abusive training. I again encourage you to watch part one.

But his voices trigger your voices. That's the source of his power. The source of his power is that he knows how to trigger you internally. He has called empathy. He scans you for vulnerabilities and then he leverages these vulnerabilities against you. He's like a shark. You're bleeding in the water. He finds the wound and then you're gone piece by piece.

So he knows how to trigger your voices and you need a map. You need a map of the narcissist's voices in your mind and this map is a mirror image of these voices in you.

Now there's three voices. I call them D, L and G. D for death, L for life and G for God.

So if you look at the interactions, his death voice, the voice of death in him triggers your life voice. So his death voice triggers your life voice. His God voice triggers your God voice and his life voice triggers your death voice.

Now I'll explain this now because these are the three interactions with the introjects that you're having with him and these are also the keys to how to neutralize him in your mind. So his death voice comes across through narcissistic abuse. He abuses you. In this sense he's trying to kill you. He's trying to destroy you as a separate autonomous entity. He's trying to put you on suspended animation in a vegetative common state. He wants you comatose. He wants you to be an Egyptian, ancient Egyptian mummy. He wants you to be a stable immutable object so that he doesn't experience abandonment anxiety and has enough time to separate and individuate from you. That's his death voice.

Narcissistic abuse is a death voice because it's intended to kill you, mentally at least. When he uses his death voice, it provokes your life voice. It provokes your survival instincts. You try to fight back, sometimes unsuccessfully, but to definitely try to fight back. Life and death clash. Narcissistic abuse and survival clash. That's the first layer.

The second layer, his God voice and your God voice. His God voice is his grandiosity, his narcissistic grandiosity and it provokes in you your narcissistic defenses. This is the vector of contagion. That's how the narcissist contaminates you and infects you with his narcissism. You react to his grandiosity with your grandiosity. He makes you a narcissist. He pushes you to become more and more narcissistic or even psychopathic. You feel it. You keep telling yourself I'm changing. I've never done this before. It's not like me. Yes, it's not like you. He's transforming you. You're shape shifting. He's a werewolf and he's rendering you a werewolf or a vampire, a vampire by biting, biting not your real neck, but your proverbial neck, injecting into you the viruses that constitute narcissism.

First and foremost, lack of empathy and grandiosity and you're reacting to his narcissism by becoming like him. That's the God God voices.

And the last one is the life voice in him provokes the death voice in you.

When he tries to separate from you and to individuate, he has to dump you. He has to devalue you and dump you, discard you. It's the only way to symbolize separation and individuation from a new mother, you.

So his life voice, because this is about life, separating individually, individuating is becoming alive. So his life voice provokes in you, triggers in you, your death voice.

First of all, you feel bad being devalued and discarded. You feel depressed. Some of you feel suicidal even.

And you try to make up for it by self-sacrificing. You try to placate the narcissist. You try to bribe the narcissist by denying yourself, by sacrificing yourself, by people pleasing him, narcissists pleasing him.

So this is death. You're killing yourself. You're eliminating yourself as a provocation, as a trigger. You're telling yourself, if I become background noise, if I cease to exist, if I go into a comatose state, I'm not going to provoke him. He's going to be nice and loving again.

So his need to separate, individuate, which is a need to live again, to be alive, pushes you to be less and less alive, more and more death.

What are these voices? What are the messages of these voices, the death voice, the God voice, and the life voice?

The message of the death voice is, you are not lovable. You are unworthy. You're inadequate. You're a failure, a loser. You're better off dead. We are better off. The world is better off if you were dead. You can be loved, and you are deserving of life only, even when you're perfect, which is, of course, impossible.

Perfectionism is an ever receding target. It's setting yourself up for failure. It's frustration.

So terrified of failure, underperformance anxiety.

The narcissist rejects, disowns, sabotages and avoids all aspects of life, rendering himself invulnerable by being dead, dead within and dead without. It's a form of rigid, proud, defiant, sadistically self-punitive and self-denying ideology.

The narcissist acts entitled, contemptuous. He gives up on them. He denies his body, his health, his sex, his romance, intimacy, all positive emotions, relationships, family, academic degrees, career, country, language, success, reputation, business, social life, friends, you name it. He disowns everything.

In the words of Cleckley, he rejects life. It would be nothing left to take, because the narcissist had discarded everything, given up on everything. So there's nothing left to take from him. And there's nothing he could lose. He has nothing to lose.

So the death voice is silenced and appeased and ameliorated.

The proximity to actual death via self-denial deceives the death voice, because the death voice says, oh, mission accomplished. I want the narcissist dead, and he's killing himself anyhow. He's constricting his life. He's limiting in life in a way that he's not alive.

So it's acceptable to me. My mission is accomplished, implicated. I'm content to let the narcissist decay and decompose inertly, however slowly.

The narcissist sacrifices himself to his death voice.

And this is, of course, how narcissism is formed in the first place. The false self is the embodiment of the death voice, because the false self tells the child, you must die for me to live. For me to exist, shield you, protect you, and gratify you, you must first sacrifice yourself.

Now, this is the narcissist's death voice.

When the narcissist tries to separate and individuate from you, your death voice is triggered and provoked. And your death voice is exactly the same content. You're not lovable. You're unworthy, inadequate, failure, all this. And you react exactly the same way as the narcissist does.

You give up on things. You give up on smiling, on happiness, on joy, on children, on money, on autonomy, on independence, on agency, on a job, on your girlfriends, on your family, on your social life. You give up and give up on your habits. You give up and give up and give up. You're killing yourself.

When the narcissist threatens to devalue and discard you, you try to bribe him by activating your death voice. You're telling him in effect, listen, you want me dead. Death is the ultimate separation individuation. You want me dead? I'm going to kill myself. I'm going to kill myself symbolically. I'm going to stop living. I'm going to isolate myself, constrict myself. I'm going to become atomized. I'm never going to see anyone, never going to talk to anyone, never going to do anything. I'm going to be a mommy, Egyptian mommy. I'm going to obey you perfectly. I'm going to die.

And the narcissist, and you hope that by dying, the narcissist will not feel the need to separate from you by discarding you.

It's a classic reaction of victims of abuse.

The God voice is grandiose. It includes magical thinking. If I only think about it or wish it strongly enough, it will affect reality. It will happen.

And the God voice is also a form of mental illness. It's a cruel, false self, but it's constantly challenged by reality, the God voice. It's challenged by reality.

And so we have narcissistic injuries and narcissistic mortifications. When the narcissist exercises his God voice, it triggers in you your God voice. You feel threatened somehow.

So you react with your own grandiosity, with your own magical thinking.

And finally, the life voice is about creativity and cooperation. Creativity and cooperation is about relating to other people. It's about social interactions. It's about making new things.

But the life voice is intermittent, a hazard corroded by aging. Often it's too late. It fails.

The narcissist as he declines in body and mind, cognitively.

The same with you. If you remain with a narcissist long enough, you will enter this inexorable slippery slope to decadence, decay and decomposition. The narcissist will drag you down with him.

Start for your life. Avoid this and numerous other entrapments and risks which are entailed in the relationship with the narcissist.

So now I'm open to take questions. If you want to ask questions, I can't read all the previous comments. I will read them later.

But since we are live right now, I would need you to type questions. There's no other way for me to see your questions unless you type them right now. Type a question and I will do my best to respond. If you have any questions, of course. That's not a question. These are blue hearts. No, one purple heart. And many, many kisses.

Okay. Stop now. Do not type anything anymore. Do not type anything because I will lose the questions. Stop now. I will answer these questions and then you can type again.

Okay. How to build the life voice. You don't build a life voice. The life voice comes naturally with mental health and life.

The problem with many intimate partners of narcissists is that they too come, they too hail from dysfunctional environments. They too have a problem with self-love. They too are sometimes grandiose.

There is a resonance between the narcissist and his source of supply and his intimate partner. The narcissist knows this and he uses your vulnerabilities, your dysfunctions, your mental health problems against you. He leverages this against you.

So you don't build the life force and definitely you should get away from the narcissist because the longer you're with him, your life force is depleted and you deteriorate, as I said, sometimes imperceptibly. You transition from the life force to the death force.

Now, the life force gets enhanced, increases, the more you use it. So it's a use it or lose it thing. You create anything from music to children, your life force is enhanced. You cooperate with other people, your life force goes up a notch. You have a social life, you have friends, you have family, you have a purpose and a meaning, you have a goal, all these things enhance the life force.

You stay with the narcissist, you're doomed. He will drag you with him into the death force because the narcissism, pathological narcissism is a form of slow motion dying, slow motion dying.

Narcissist is dead. He just doesn't realize it yet. Let's catch up with him.

Okay, let me see what else.

Yeah, the reverse cycle is, I mentioned it in the, so listen to it when it's released on the channel. I did mention it there, so I'm not going to it again right now.

The narcissist's death voice, his anger, narcissistic abuse and so on and so forth, he says later that he doesn't mean it because it creates intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold, good and bad.

So you expect pain and sadistic abuse and then he says, no, I didn't mean it actually, I'm sorry. And then you say, oh, actually it's good. I can trust him again. He loves me. And then he repeats.

And so this creates trauma bonding. It's a form of intermittent reinforcement.

The longer you're with the narcissist, 30 year relationship is long on the long side, the longer you're in the narcissist, the more entrenched the introjects are in your mind. Your problem will not be to break up with him or to walk away. Your problem will be that he's inside your head.

So you would need to use these techniques. After 30 years, I would recommend help. Introject therapy, shadow therapy, reappraisal therapy, exposure therapy. There are various therapies where we eliminate introjects.

But after 30 years, you are totally infested. Your mind is totally pawned, taken, doesn't belong to you. You need help. You can't do it by yourself.

I mentioned it. How do I make sure my child doesn't turn into a covert narcissist like his father?

I mentioned it in the stream. I said, you need to give the child a counter example so that when the child grows up, he can choose between being a covert narcissist or healthy person.

And the overwhelming vast majority of children would choose to be healthy.

Does ghosting cause narcissistic response?

Ghosting depends. If it's part of the death voice, it will create a life response. So you will feel relieved or happy even.

But if ghosting is done as part of grandiosity, I don't need you. I'm stronger than you. It's a power play. Then it will provoke your God voice. This is a God voice.

Ghosting that is done grandiosely is part of the God voice. So it will provoke provoking you the God voice. You become narcissistic also. You react grandiosely or with a power play of your own.

The first part is available, will be available on the channel. I think part of it is already available on the channel. I will not talk about pedophilia right now because there is a long video that I made about pedophilia and you can find it on my channel and it's not part of this seminar.

Ooh, so many hearts. I'm having a heart attack.

The trauma of leaving the narcissist when she is needing you.

There are several assumptions in this question.

First of all, there is the assumption that she needs you. If she's a borderline, she needs you for the regulation of some of her psychological functions. She outsources the regulation of her internal world to you as an intimate partner. So then she would really need you.

And when you leave, she will have a massive crisis and so on.

But if it's a crisis, she doesn't need you. She needs what you can give her. So she needs your participation in her theater play or a movie. She needs money. If she's a Goldie, she needs attention. If she's into that, she needs what you can give her. She never needs you.

And because she needs what you can give her, you're easily replaceable.

This is one of the main issues with victims. They refuse to accept that they're utterly interchangeable and immediately interchangeable.

If I'm getting my internet via an internet service provider, I can switch into another internet service provider literally overnight. You're nothing but providers. Your service providers, sex, supply, services, the three S's. That's what you provide.

And there are many, many, many alternatives to you. An infinite number, actually. You're not special in the narcissist's eyes because the narcissist does not see you. He does not regard you as a separate entity and as an external object. You're nothing but an internal representation.

It's easy for the narcissist to move on. Startle response is one of the diagnostic criteria of post-traumatic stress disorder. And yes, it indicates some trauma. I have no idea which could be anything. You could have watched an accident as a two-year-old and it's an imprinted trauma and you're reacting with a startled response.

But if the startled response is intimately connected with touch, usually it indicates physical abuse, beating or sexual abuse. Here's a flower to remind you of life. Thank you, dear.

Yes, only the mother. Only the mother is associated with narcissistic pathology. And the reason is very simple.

Oh, I lost one minute. Yeah. Only the mother is involved in the narcissistic pathology because you can separate only from the mother.

All these dynamics, symbiosis, separation, individuation, are exclusively with the mother. A father can damage the child in other ways. For example, by providing the wrong role model, by socializing the child wrongly, by not providing the child with safety and support, etc.

So father has several functions, but none of them have to do with the formation of pathological narcissism. So it's exclusively the mother, unfortunately.

Bipolar disorder can be diagnosed, it can be co-morbid with narcissism and covert narcissism, but it's rare. Much more common is dysthymia and cyclotemia, two types of depression, quality depression. So depression is much more commonly diagnosed with narcissism in all its forms and anxiety disorders. Although anxiety disorders are much more common in borderline, but they are also common in narcissism and even psychopathy.

How long does it take to form the introjects, the narcissist introject? It depends how forceful is, how needy you are, what was your childhood like? Did you have a good enough mother? That's a buttress, that's a protection against the introjects. Did you have a good father? It's also a protection against the introjects. So it depends, there are too many variables here.

But introjects can be formed in as little as three days. If the victim is extremely vulnerable, she is totally dysregulated, for example, she's a borderline. The introjects can form in a matter of days, literally. It's an exceedingly dangerous process.

Yes, these techniques apply to people with narcissistic style. We make a distinction in psychology between narcissistic disorders and narcissistic style. This distinction was made by a psychologist called Sperry, SPE-R-RY. And so he suggested that some people are subclinical narcissists.

And today we have the concept of dark triad or dark personality or dark tetrad, various dark personalities, where people are not narcissists, but they are almost narcissists subclinical under the clinical, cannot be diagnosed, but they're still highly narcissistic.

And yes, these techniques apply to these people. CPTSD or complex trauma in childhood can lead to multiple outcomes, not necessarily narcissism. Actually, statistically, the majority of children exposed to what we call A-C-E, adverse childhood experiences. So majority of children exposed to A-C-E remain totally healthy, lifelong. Only a very small minority develop mental health disorders, depending also on the severity of the abusing in early childhood. Some of them become narcissists, some of them become borderline, and some of them become codependent.

So the etiology, the reason, the causes for these three disorders is the same. The reason the narcissist resonates so powerfully with the codependent, the reason the borderline is attracted irresistibly to the narcissist is because we all come from the same family. We all had the same experiences. We are brothers in arms and sisters in arms. We immediately resonate with each other because we have the same common causality. It's called in psychology, etiology.

So codependency, narcissism, borderline, these are abused children who chose different strategies of coping with the abuse.

Actually, there's a guy called Grozstein, psychoanalysts. He said that borderlines are children who had tried to become narcissists and had failed or were not allowed to become narcissists. Their grandiosity was suppressed somehow.

So they failed and they remain stuck in borderline.

Yes, narcissism is ADHD is often misdiagnosed as narcissism and vice versa. I have actually two videos, if I remember correctly, exactly about this topic.

Generally speaking, by the way, it's a reasonable idea, I think, to search the channel. You know, there's a magnifying glass thingy. You click on it and then it tells you search the channel. Type the keyword, type ADHD, and you will see a list of the videos that I've made on the topic.

You must keep your child out of your uncomfortable relationship with your ex. It's generally good advice, even if your ex is totally healthy. The child should never be involved, converted into intermediary, parentified. The child should not be your ally against the other parent. You should not bed mouth the other parent to the child. The child should be isolated from any conflict you may have directly or indirectly with a partner.

How do you handle the people who don't see the behavior that you're dealing with? They think your partner is a wonderful person. It's very common. Narcissists present a facade. They present one facet to the external world and they're charming, they're amazing, they're altruistic, they're charitable, they're wise, they're intelligent. And then you get to meet them in person as an intimate partner, a neighbor, a friend, doesn't matter. And you discover that they're narcissists.

And the reason is not because the narcissists are cunning and skimming and they want to deceive. The reason is that when the narcissist is not invested emotionally in obtaining supply, they don't care to be narcissists.

Narcissism, apological narcissism is a technique, a very evolved adaptation, a very evolved technique to obtain supply. If I see you, if I'm a narcissist and I see you, and I don't think I could get any supply from you, I'm not going to be narcissistic with you. It can't give me supply, I don't care about you. And I may even appear to be charming, but if I can extract supply from you one way or another, my narcissism kicks in.

So narcissism is in a dormant, hibernating state with people who are not potential sources of supply or potential intimate partners in a shared fantasy. It kicks in, it's activated by the presence of potential sources or potential partners.

How does a narcissist deal with his money? He spends it. In the narcissist's mind, money is a symbol of love. So he symbolizes love. So if he becomes rich or makes money and so on, the universe loves him. It's a substitute for loveability.

Many narcissists will tell you, I don't care if I'm loved, I don't care if people love me, I'm rich. It's like I'm not lovable, but God loves me. The universe loves me.

Now in the 17th century, this was official. The Puritan churches in the United Kingdom, the very same people who had established the United States of America, they believed that if God loves you, he will make you rich. And if you are rich, God loves you. It's proof that God loves you.

How narcissistic is this? Are narcissists more prone to commit serious offenses?

No, actually. Because narcissists depend on people for narcissistic supply, they are unlikely to be antisocial in this way.

Many narcissists are actually pro-social, communal.

I coined the phrase pro-social or communal narcissist to describe narcissists who contribute to society. They're very creative, they're leaders, they're innovators, they're thinkers, they're gurus, religious leaders and so on.

And so many narcissists are like that. Many narcissists are proud of being morally superior.

Psychopaths commit serious offenses and serious crimes.

And unfortunately online, there is a God-awful confusion between psychopaths and narcissists. And this is one example.

I'm sorry, I'm reading many things which are not questions. What determines the switch from honeymoon face to the shirt fantasy?

The honeymoon face is part of the shirt fantasy.

The narcissist first creates the shirt fantasy in his mind, then he needs a partner. So he uses love bombing and grooming and honeymoon, which is part of the honeymoon face. He uses that to condition the partner, to take over her mind and co-opt her, make her wish, make her want to be a part of the shirt fantasy.

So the shirt fantasy is a little like a shop, you have a store, a bookstore, a record store and a store. And then you want customers to come in. So you advertise. Love bombing and so on is advertising, but the store, the shirt fantasy exists before.

Narcissist creates the shirt fantasy and then he says, okay, who am I going to lure into my blue beard cave?

If the mother keeps rescuing the narcissist after every fail in his life, he won't hit rock bottom. Am I right?

Yes, of course. If you enable the narcissist, if he has bad habits like drug consumption or alcoholism or some other forms of addiction or, and you enable this, you help him. If you tolerate without pushback, if you adopt some of the techniques like background noise and gray and so on, then yeah, he will never hit rock bottom. You will be the cushion. You will be the buffer. You will absorb the blows. You will absorb the energy and he will never experience rock bottom.

To experience rock bottom, the narcissist needs to be mortified by you. You need to mortify him and abandon him. It's the only way for narcissist to experience rock bottom, actually.

Do they love their actual mothers? These are incapable of love. Get this out now of your dictionaries. Delete it in the lexicon. They are not capable of loving at all because they learn to associate love with negative outcomes.

So they don't want these outcomes anymore. So they don't love.

Do they love their actual mothers?

They are bonded with a mother for life because they didn't separate from her.

The role of a good enough mother is to push the child away, not to keep him hers forever.

So the narcissist is strongly bonded with his mother, which is paralyzing.

He is disabled in this sense. He is a disability, but there's no love there. He's utterly incapable of love. He is incapable, though, of a shared fantasy, which he mislabels as love. He experiences it as love. It's not love, but he calls it love.

The shared fantasy he does have, starting with his original mother, by the way.

Why are neurotic cerebral narcissists so annoying?

Thank you, dear. Childhood is an intensely a lifetime because of the novelty.

Does the narcissist lose the childhood novelty?

The narcissist is a lifelong child. Clinically speaking emotionally, he's a child. He never grows up, ever, period, never, until he dies.

And there is literally no way to make him grow up. That's why my cold therapy, the new therapy that I invented, is a child therapy.

I think the huge mistake of other therapies is that they're trying to work with the narcissist as if the narcissist were an adult, which is not he's a child.

But the problem is he's a dead child. He's a child who killed himself. He created a false self, and then he committed suicide. He sacrificed himself to the false self.

So it's not a child. That's why the narcissist can literally not experience reality in any way, not even via novelty, because he's dead. He's totally dead inside. There is utter emptiness there. It's impossible to communicate because how do you communicate an absence? All our language is geared and aimed to describe objects, things that exist.

But the narcissist doesn't exist. He's an absence. He's not even a vampire. Vampires exist.

Have you made a video about cluster B disorders in woke people? Yes, actually. They have made several videos about victimhood movements and lifelong victims. And victimhood is an identity and so on and so on. And there's a playlist on my channel. There's a playlist titled victims and victimhood. Bon appetit.

Can subclinical people be cured? They don't need to be cured. They are subclinical. They don't have a diagnosis. They are just, for example, if they are subclinical narcissists, they're assholes. They're grandiose. They're jerks.

But there's nothing to cure because they still have empathy, access to emotions and so on. They're just insensitive or...

The overly emotional narcissist is called borderline.

Yes. When I say there is a question, what if grandma is the one who raised the child? Is she responsible for his narcissism?

The answer is yes. It doesn't have to be the biological mother, the mother who contributed the egg. It has to be the female person who had raised the child from age six months onwards.

So if this female person were the grandmother, then yeah, he would separate, individuate from her or he would fail to separate, individuate from her.

Even a father, even a male who fulfills the role of a mother from age six months is a mother, in psychological terms. It's designed to do with whether you have a penis or a vagina, whether you are a biological mother or the person who fulfilled the role of a mother from age six months to age 24 months.

Very good question. How do you start to tell the difference between his voice in my head and my God voice?

Your God voice loves you. Your God voice is positive about you. Your God voice tells you you're great, you're perfect, you're amazing, you're unprecedented, you're fascinating, you're beautiful, you're this, you're that. Your God voice would never be negative.

The narcissist's voice in your head would be only negative. Even though he had idealized you at the beginning, the narcissist's voice in your head, all of them by the way, would be negative.

The voices of the narcissist in your head are activated mainly during the devaluation and discard phase. Before that, you have idealization.

So before the voices are activated, you have a period of idealization where the narcissist gives you access to his mind. During the idealization phase, you access the narcissist's mind. He doesn't access your mind, you access his mind in order to see yourself, to fall in love with yourself as an idealized image.

Then you start to deviate from the snapshot.

Narcissist gets very angry to you. Then he activates the introjects in your head. So they are mostly negative. They will tell you, you're bad, you betrayed me, you're failure, you're inadequate, you're wrong, you're stupid, you're crazy, this kind of thing. Your God voice would never say this thing, ever.

This in Poland, the only one I know is Dalia Zhukowska and the fact that I'm collaborating with her shows what I think about her, I think. She has her own YouTube channel where there's excellent material in Polish about cluster B personality disorders, narcissistic abuse and so on. I've made a few videos with her and I hold her in high regards. I know that she constantly reads and updates herself and so on. I don't recommend therapies, but the fact that I work with her, I think is a recommendation.

Is it common for narcissists to see other people as machines? Yes, actually.

Narcissists regard themselves as machines. They regard themselves as robots. Narcissists would often brag and say, wow, I'm as efficient as a computer, or my mind is so full of information like Wikipedia, which is essentially a computerized tool. Or it would sound like a robot or indestructible. I'm like a warplane.

They compare themselves to machinery and devices because machinery and devices are invulnerable, cannot be destroyed, and they are like artificial intelligence and this kind of advanced computing like extended reality or metaverse, because they dream of integrating with superior technologies, which would render them more superior. And of course, they see other people as machines, but inferior machines, analog machines. So yes, they can't see other people as separate because they had never separated themselves. They can't see other people as people. So they see other people as objects, and some of these objects are perceived as machines.

Why do more men have borderline and more women, I assume, have borderline and more men have narcissism? They don't. It's 50-50. It used to be that way until about 10 years ago. So in the third edition and fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, it was written that men constitute about 75% of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. That's no longer true.

And then Diagnostic, the fifth edition published in 2013, 10 years ago, they already said that it's 50%. I actually think that women are becoming more narcissistic than men, and many of them are becoming psychopathic. I'm seeing it in my practice, and I'm seeing it in the streets, and I'm seeing it when I travel, my seminars, my students, quite a huge population, I would say, thousands of people. I have a strong feeling, anecdote, not supported by research, just my feeling, my intuition, that women are becoming more narcissistic and psychopathic than men. It also makes sense because women are taking over the roles of men. Women are becoming what men used to be. So women are the new men.

They engage in male behaviors, like extramarital affairs and casual sex. They drink like men. They work like men. Women under age 30 make more money than men. They earn more. Fact. So of course they become men. And as they become men, they would be more narcissistic, more psychopathic.

Among borderlines, it's also 50-50. It's a myth that it's only...

But I had suggested that the way borderline manifests in women is not the same way that it manifests in men. And I suggested a new diagnosis, covert borderline.

So I think men, borderline men, are more narcissistic than borderline women. But that's another issue, covert borderline.

You can watch the few videos I made and the presentation I made, McGill University, about the covert borderline. I'm ignoring questions where I have multiple videos about the topic. I encourage you again to go and search the channel. Magnifying glass, click, search the channel. Use the key words.

And regarding borderline, there's a whole playlist with 74 videos. I mean... I keep losing my place. I don't know why. What am I doing? Wow. I don't know where I was. Give me a sec. I lost my place. Okay.

There are too many here. I'm limited by time. But I lost my place. I'm going to just speak up wherever. Under what conditions will they accept that they are wrong about how they speak to you and always trying to reflect on you as a wrongdoing one?

Narcissists will admit that they're wrong in two situations. That the locus of grandiosity is about being wrong. I will explain this in a minute. And where they hold the locus of grandiosity is about being moral. Morally superior. The locus of grandiosity is a very, very important concept. Very misunderstood. Very misrepresented online by self-styled experts. Everyone and his dog is an expert now. And don't be impressed with academic degrees. Even if someone has an academic degree, narcissism is a field. Cluster B is a field. If he's not in the field, his academic degree is meaningless. Or her academic degree is meaningless. So there's a lot of mess, god-awful mess about narcissism online. And one of many problems is the locus of grandiosity.

Narcissists want to be the ultimate. So they want to be the ultimate, ultimately rich person. The ultimately powerful person.

But they can also be the ultimate failure. The ultimate loser. The ultimately unfortunate person. As long as it's ultimate, unprecedented, amazing, unique, it's okay. The narcissist can be the ultimate victim. We all know victims who are actually narcissists. And they are using their victimhood to get supply.

So if the narcissist's locus of grandiosity is about being wrong, like he could say, my mind is so crazy. I can never get anything right. And this is his claim to fame. This is his grandiosity. Then he will admit being wrong.

Similarly, if the narcissist's claim to fame, if his grandiosity, is about being super moral, more moral and ethical than any living human being, then he would, with false modesty, he would admit to having made a mistake. And it's like he would tell you, you see, you see what an amazing person I am. You see what a greatly moral and ethical person I am. I'm admitting to my mistakes. It makes me superior.

Because by admitting to my mistakes, I'm morally superior. So that's the answer to your question.

How do we diagnose NPD? We use specialized tests, which I'm very skeptical about. The most common is known as NPI, narcissistic personality inventory. Better ones are NMPI and so on. So there are tests. The problem with many of these tests, not all of them, but the problem with many of these tests, they rely on the honesty of the narcissist. Not bad as a joke, wouldn't you agree?

So they rely on what we call self-reporting. The narcissist has to report about himself sincerely and honestly.

And so the test relies on this.

So I think the better way to diagnose NPD is to spend some time with a person, with a patient, as a therapist or counselor or psychologist, spend some time with a patient. Someone with narcissistic personality disorder cannot hide it. Trust me. Never mind how hard it tries. Finally, it will erupt somehow. He will compete with a therapist or will challenge a therapist. He will humiliate a therapist. He will make special demands because he's entitled. He will brag. He will ultimately a trained diagnostician will be able to say, well, this guy has, or this girl, they have NPD or suspected NPD.

And then there is something called structured interviews. So there are ways to diagnose.

Regrettably, NPD is a new topic, relatively speaking, a new topic. It was introduced to the DSM only 40 years ago. 40 years in terms of science is nothing.

So there are not too many people who know what they are talking about when they discuss NPD. And that includes most YouTubers, literally most of them. They spew nonsense in commercial quantities. And they mislead all of you.

I am flabbergasted at this phenomenon. I started the whole thing in 1995. I've been alone for 10 years.

But in my worst nightmares, I did not expect this to happen. Total contamination of the field by nonsense and worse than nonsense.

So I don't know if there are diagnosticians I can trust. But yeah, there should be. There should be. You should ask about their experience. You should ask, are you experienced? Did you ever diagnose NPD? How many did you diagnose? How do you diagnose? What happens if modification doesn't get treated? How does the spontaneous course of development look like? Lifelong depression. No, not lifelong depression.

I have made several videos about modification where I answer your question. So I refer you to this.

Why does the narcissist believe that they exude power and control over you when they discard you? Even when you remain in no contact and do not respond to their every attempt to communicate?

They believe that because they are right. Their introjects are inside your head. They can activate these introjects, they believe, given access to you, even fleeting minute access, even a split second. They have inside your head activation switches that can activate these switches. That's the danger.

And anyone who has been a victim of narcissists will tell you this, that even one minute encounter with a narcissist is very destabilizing, very anxiety producing. You know, it's a shocking experience. Even one minute meeting with a narcissist who had discarded you.

Why?

Because they have these introjects. They have this power over you. They're inside your head.

How do I feel about radical feminism?

Is not honestly the topic of this seminar. But again, there is a playlist on my channel titled Contemporary Sexuality. And my make my view very clear, my dim view, very clear.

Sam, my both partners at Food Fetish, do you know where this is coming from?

Well, first of all, I have food fetish. So I'm an authority on the topic. And we are not sure. We are not sure because fetishism is an understudied taboo topic in many respects. The part of the body could be boobs, could be feet, could be anything. Ears. The part of the body represents the totality of the body, something called cynic talk. So it's interacting with the part is like interacting with the whole body. And this could be either because of early exposure to the part in a sexual context, because it feels much more safe to interact with the part and with the whole fear of intimacy, for example, fear of performance. Because arousal is mediated through the part. In other words, there are arousal issues.

And the part is like a trigger or like a switch. Because kink in general is appealing to some people. And this is considered the epitome of kink. And many other reasons I have, however, I believe I may be wrong. I apologize if I think I have a video about fetishism, where I explain food fetishism, other fetishisms.

Again, such a joke. If there is alcoholism and NPD, what and how should be treated first?

I know that alcoholism is a result of how it should be treated. That's a major question, the major question.

In rehab centers, in rehab centers, we have dual diagnosis. We have a alcoholic who is also a narcissist, or an alcoholic who is also a psychopath, or much more frequently, an alcoholic who is also a borderline.

So we are asking ourselves, what should we treat first?

The borderline, the alcoholism, the what?

The answer is that treating alcoholism is a lost cause, largely. More than 80% of alcoholics, 80, 8-0, revert to drinking in the year after the rehab.

The other 20% develop alternative addictions, including love addiction, by the way. They fall in love compulsively.

And that's why we recommend to alcoholics who are in rehab to avoid any relationships for one year.

But we do know for sure that if we don't treat the underlying personality disorder, the recidivism, the rate of going back to alcohol is 100%.

So the tendency today is to treat the personality disorder while limiting consumption, or eliminating consumption.

And only then to move to the alcoholism itself.

But we consider primary as primary, we consider the personality disorder.

If the narcissist is a child, why are they often promiscuous? Who takes over during the act? Who told you that promiscuity is not childish? It's absolutely childlike. I don't know how many children you've seen. Children masturbate, children explore each other's body parts, children, you know, children do everything and much earlier than people believe.

Promiscuity is absolutely childlike, because it's unbounded. It's grandiose, it creates a sense of empowerment. And it's, it has very little real interaction in it. Very often, it's almost an anonymous act, so to speak. And it's an objectifying act. Promiscuity involves masturbating with the partner's body, in essence.

So all these are absolutely childlike features, infantile features, adults don't do this.

By the way, just not to exaggerate the phenomenon, only about 20% of women are promiscuous. And promiscuity is usually a phase, usually a phase, although regrettably, socio-sexually free, more free women, women who are promiscuous, socio-sexually unrestricted women.

Although the promiscuity disappears, the underlying psychology doesn't.

So they are far more likely to divorce, far more likely to cheat, and they have much less stable relationships, lifelong.

So you may wish to rethink any attachment to a promiscuous person. It bodes ill for the relationship.

Is there any hope for co-dependence for healthy life?

It's like we can be okay or even thrive only when we are connected to narcissists, like they are our antidepressant, as if there is no life without them.

I think you're confusing a few issues. The vast majority of co-dependence don't end up with narcissists.

There is a subtype of co-dependence who end up only with narcissists, and they are actually narcissists. They are a form of, it's a form of covert narcissism. It's also known as narcissist codependent, co-narcissist, or originally inverted narcissist, which is a diagnosis that I created. So inverted narcissists are co-dependent narcissists who derive their supply from another narcissist, from an overt narcissist.

The vast majority of co-dependence don't end up with narcissists. However, they end up with other types of intimate partners.

The co-dependent uses the intimate partner to regulate her moods, her emotions, her effects, to feel safe. And so the partner gradually is perceived as an integral part of the co-dependence mind, the co-dependent perceived department, as a part of her mind. It's called external re-regulation.

And this is a generalized problem. It's not only with the narcissists.

Now the prognosis, the treatment outcomes for both co-dependence and borderline is actually extremely good. About 80% of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, they lose the diagnosis by age 45. DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is extremely successful with borderline personality disorder.

Curing, and I'm using the word curing completely, healing, 50%, 5-0% of the patients with BPD.

In codependency, the numbers are even better. So yes, it's absolutely treatable. Prognosis is excellent.

And I would urge you, if you feel that you're co-dependent and end up with dysfunctional, bad, abusive partners all the time, I would urge you absolutely to go to therapy. It's a good investment.

I have time for one more question. One more question. I'm sorry, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds here. I wouldn't need a seminar, I would need a lifetime. But you know what, maybe I'll make another live thing. And just for questions and answers. Live, just for questions and answers.

Right, if you're interested.

Wow, this thing jumps. I was reading a question and then it jumped.

Not using social media is making us happier. Short answer very much so. It reduces depression and anxiety massively and increases depression and anxiety usage. Using social media increases depression and anxiety, but especially among young people and people under age 65.

I have dozens of videos about social media, many of them were Richard Grannon, available on my channel. So search the channel.

Okay, I will take one last question. What is the upper limit of success in cold therapy? I'm not sure what is upper limit.

Cold therapy is a new treatment modality and we're still in the experimentation phase. There have been 72 patients until now.

The treatment goals are very limited. Cold therapy eliminates grandiosity, the false self and the need for supply, narcissistic supply. That's all it does. It doesn't change the narcissist in any other way. He's still lacking empathy, still very bad in relationships, still abusive.

I mean nothing changes. He just doesn't need supply anymore. Makes him more independent in a way.

I'm not sure that's a good thing, but these 72 patients are very happy, except one.

71 patients are very happy. Their lives have changed dramatically. Most of them had major depression all their lives. They don't have it anymore.

The oldest one, the earliest patient was about 10 years ago. He didn't have a single episode of depression and he was an extremely depressive person. He wouldn't leave bed, wouldn't take showers for months. So he never had it again and he's off antidepressants. He's off medication.

So cold therapy is also verifications with major depression, but I was in the process of certifying a few hundred therapists around the world. I started in Vienna in 2017, then in Brazil in Sao Paulo, then in Hungary and so on. I was in the process and then the pandemic struck. So I have to reinvent the wheel. I have to start from scratch and that's a great pity because we were ready to launch you know therapists all over the world and start to work and there would have been a lot more data to answer your question.

The success rates, success rate defies belief, mine included, but the sample is very small so cannot be normatively validated. In other words, it's statistically dubious because it's a small, very small sample and self-selecting.

These are people who came to me. It wasn't applied to the general population so I didn't give you an answer, a cohort answer.

Okay guys, I am grateful to you for being here and I will most definitely, I see your reactions, I will most definitely announce a live event, just questions and answers.

So prepare your questions and maybe we'll make it a habit, maybe we'll make it a habit.

So if I see that there's a good uptake of these live events, question and answer events, I will make it a habit. Once a month maybe we will have a two, three, four hour event with questions.

But at this stage I have to call it today and thank you very much for being here.

Stay well, stay away from narcissists, not including me, not including me.