Who goes up on this? That is psychopathic, that's right.
Sam, let's talk about the area that Mary and other women that are alienated mothers, would they be attracted to a narcissist's psychopath because they may have experienced that in their own family.
I keep hearing this from your perspective, people are not, these women are not attracted to a nice guy like me. They're attracted to what they grew up with in a narcissistic world as a child.
The narcissist is attracted to anyone who would provide him with supply, so with attention.
So a narcissist is indiscriminate. In other words, a narcissist is promiscuous, is indiscriminate. It's not true, it's a myth that a narcissist prefers co-dependence or prefers weak women or prefers strong women or is no preference.
His only preference, his only test, can you provide him with supply?
Is with you. You can be a narcissist, you could be a psychopath, you could be co-dependent, you can be disabled, you could be a marathon runner.
But if you can provide him with supply, he's with you.
The other side, on the other side is different.
There are specific types of women who are attracted to narcissists and psychopaths and these are women who suffer from a deficit of self-love and they suffer from a deficit of self-love because they had never, not all of them, but as a generalization.
They suffer from a deficit of self-love because they had never received unconditional love from their parents, mainly the mother usually, but not only.
And so they were unable to develop a view of themselves as lovable.
They don't, and so here comes a narcissist and he creates this idealized image of the woman and the woman falls in love with her idealized image.
But it's fake though, sorry to interrupt you.
An narcissist world is fake, it's not real though because it becomes evil after the narcissist psychopath takes off his mask and then you realize it's not real unconditional love.
You don't, these women don't love the narcissist. They don't love the psychopath. They love the way the narcissist sees them. They love the way the narcissist idealizes them.
This is called love bombing or grooming. They fall in love with themselves through the eyes of the narcissist.
It is the first time these women experienced self-love.
They had never experienced self-love and here comes a narcissist and he offers them a Faustian deal, a deal with the devil.
He says, listen, I'm gonna make you experience self-love. I'm gonna make you feel lovable for the first time in your life. I'm gonna give you the unconditional love that your mother hadn't given you, that your father hadn't given you. I'm gonna give you this unconditional love and I'm gonna regard you in terms of a divinity, of a deity.
In my eyes you're perfect, you're amazing, you're unprecedented, you're intelligent, you're brilliant, you are, you know, but the only condition I have is that you will allow me to treat you any which way I choose.
Right, you're an idiot and then there's the evil side of it too.
People, the women don't realize that's part of what you just said is part of the deal.
After 27 years of extreme abuse, I finally met someone and fell in love. So I experienced love with a narcissist and like Sam says, you fall in love with yourself. I mean, that's the first time I ever noticed myself look in the mirror and I thought, who's that girl? You know, like wow, that's me? I've never seen that. I was 60 years old when I finally noticed who I was because of being put down by a psychopath all those years. I lost my identity but I was still me. I still took care of everybody but mentally I didn't think I was worthy.
So yes, I could understand, you know, for 27 years my mind was playing games on me and then for 27 months I got to feel what it was like to be a woman but then at the end of that he ended up, he had a wife.
So, narcissistic supply, that's what I was and I thought, whoa, scary, but I ended it for 15 months, no contact, like Sam always says, no contact, no contact, right Sam?
But Sam, you're exactly right there. It's that promiscuous trait of a narcissist psychopath with just what Mary just mentioned. The guy was married and he still hit on Mary and wanted his supply.
Yeah, it's very simple. If she can provide it, you can easily compare it to substance abuse.
Mary is the pusher because she can provide him with the drug of his choice and the drug of his choice is attention, simple.
So, he's a junkie. He's a junkie and junkies have no moral. A junkie would steal from his own mother, a junkie would sell his daughter, you know, he would do anything for the drug, the same with the narcissist.
And coming, there's a point I think which might be of interest to your listeners if I may.
Right, go ahead.
And that's how narcissists and psychopaths view their children because I think it ties in with the parental alienation concept, you know.
That was my next question.
So, narcissists and psychopaths see their children in four ways as competition and I'll elaborate a bit with your permission, I'll elaborate on each of these.
As competition, the narcissist, that's typical of narcissists, not of psychopaths.
Narcissists regard children as competition because children compete for attention, children compete for the time and resources of the intimate partner, of the spouse, of the mother.
So, narcissists begin to regard the children as competing with him for scarce resources and he regards, he begins to regard the children as enemies.
That's the first thing and then narcissists abuse children and so on, precisely because of this, they hate children.
A narcissist is a child, it's a person whose growth and personal development had been stunted in early childhood and never grew up, it's a Peter Pan. He's two years old, he's three years old, he's easily competes with toddlers, you know.
Second thing is a nuisance.
So, the narcissist regards children as encroaching on his time, on his freedom, on his liberty and encumbering him with obligations and responsibilities, duties and chores, which narcissists detest.
So, children become a nuisance and narcissists can become very aggressive toward children in trying to neutralize the nuisance value of children.
The third thing is sources of supply.
As, as the children grow up a bit when they become like adolescents, anywhere between ages 10 and 18, they become sources of narcissistic supply. They begin to adulate the father, to emulate the father, to give the father attention. I'm saying father because, but it's equally applicable to narcissistic mothers, yes.
So, at that point, the children suddenly are no longer a nuisance, they're no longer a competition, they're sources of supply.
You pee and the narcissist is all over them and he appropriates them and he renders them, he converts them into extensions of himself.
He, they, they, they, he begins to treat them not as independent personalities or individuals, but as extensions.
So, he doesn't allow them to separate and to become individuals. He kind of hems them in, he suffocates them.
And they can't recover from that.
No, they can't.
They're always, always hoping, oh, maybe when they become 18, they'll come and realize what's happened.
There is no point of return from this, am I correct?
The damage, the damage is lifelong.
And then the fourth, which leads to the fourth point.
The fourth point, and fourth point is typical of psychopaths.
The first three, these are narcissists.
The fourth point is a psychopath.
The psychopath regards children as a tool or an instrument or a weapon, actually. He weaponizes children, he or she, weaponize, weaponize the children to induce damage, to inflict damage and induce pain in the person who had frustrated him, which happens to be the spouse, the ex-spouse, or the intimate partner or whatever.
So the children become weaponized. That's the psychopathic thing usually.
And that's deliberate. The psychopath knows what he's doing there.
Absolutely. Yes. It's a strategy. It's a strategy. There's long-term planning and deliberation, which go into it.
There is brainwashing. It's a process called entraining, by the way. I encourage you to watch my recent dialogue with Richard Grannon on the topic of entraining.
So the psychopath brainwashes the children and trains them and, and converts them into weapons, guided missiles. They become guided missiles. Absolutely. Cruise missiles. Aimed exclusively at the intimate partner.
So parental alienation is real, right? The parental alienation syndrome is contested.
I'm a professor of psychology and I'm taught, I'm told to not teach it because it's wrong, but the phenomenon of parental alienation is real. It's made, it may not be a syndrome, but there are parents who deliberately, intentionally, with forethought and malice, turn children against the spouse, against the former partner.
This is a well-documented phenomenon.
Well, you're a professor of psychology from a psychological perspective.
How does this happen in their desire to turn against the other parent? Is this something that they're like children, their brain hasn't developed? Is it mental illness?
Because the normal person wouldn't think that way.
There are two aspects to your question.
There's the question of why does the parent do that?
The psychopathic parent or narcissistic parent, why do they do that?
And then there's the question of why does the trial do that?
Because the child does become a weapon. The child, for example, develops extreme aversion to the other parent. The child begins to attack the other parent indiscriminately. The child refuses to listen to countervailing arguments and facts. The child inhabits a fantastic space generated by the alienating parent.
And within this fantastic space, the child refuses to exit this space or consider any alternatives.
So there is a tacit collaboration between the child and the alienating parent. And we should ask ourselves, why?
Because some of the children are not that young, you know, some of them are 15 or 16 and they're capable of critical thinking and yet they suspended.
So there are two very important, I think, perspectives or angles, if I may.
The alienating parent is usually a narcissist or a psychopath who had suffered an injury, a mental injury, narcissistic injury, or, and they never forgive. They hold a grudge, they have narcissistic rage. They want to absolutely eradicate, eliminate, and if possibly execute the source of injury, the source of the frustration. They consider themselves godlike. And any challenge to their grandiosity is perceived to be inexcusable, unforgettable, and unforgivable, and worthy of the most extreme punishment, disproportionate punishment.
And children are the perfect way to inflict the ultimate pain on a parent. And so weaponizing the children is a perfect strategy.
So it has to do with narcissistic injury in the classic reaction known as narcissistic rage.
With a psychopath, it's more goal-oriented. The psychopath usually wants something from the other, from the parent, from the other, from the co-parent.
So the narcissist would say, okay, I'm going to turn the children against you unless you sign off our common property to me. Or I'm going to turn the children against you unless you have sex with me.
So the psychopath is much more goal-oriented. The narcissist is not goal-oriented. There's no way to bargain with the narcissist, to placate the narcissist, to make him forgive whatever imaginary infringement. The narcissist is hell-bent on destroying you because you had caused him injury and he's in a state of unbridled rage.
So this is the parental side.
Now what about the child? Why does the child collude and collaborate in this?
Because the child is in pain. The child is in pain and the child's world, in the case of divorce, the child's world had disintegrated and had been rendered meaningless. The child seeks meaning. The child needs to make sense of what had happened.
And so the only way to make sense of what had happened is a morality play where one of the parents is the devil and the other parent is the angel.
So now everything makes sense. Suddenly the world is again meaningful. Suddenly everything is imbued with sense, direction, meaning, and everything falls into place and justice can be restored by punishing the demonic parent somehow.
So it's a morality play. We call this splitting. It's a splitting defense.
Splitting defense mechanism means that what we call dichotomous thinking. Everything bad, everything good. Someone is all bad, someone is all good. Someone is white, someone is black.
So the child says this parent is all bad, all black, all wrong. This parent is all good, all white, all true.
And this is called splitting. It's very common in adolescence because adolescents are narcissists actually. The period of adolescence involves a very heightened degree of narcissism. So these are narcissists in fact.
And narcissists engage in splitting habitually.
So it's very easy to turn a child against the parent by leveraging the child's narcissism and encouraging, fostering, and egging on the splitting defense.
And then the child says, oh my God, now I understand everything. Now I understand everything that happened. My father is the devil. He is demonic. He is evil. He is corrupt. He is a horrible person. And my mother is the ultimate victim or vice versa, doesn't matter. Is the ultimate victim?
And now all falls into place and I can rest in peace, so to speak, or at least sleep peacefully because I can wake up in the morning and I know whose side I should be on. The side of the good and the angels.
May I comment?
Hold on, hold on, hold on, Mary. You're watching the Andy Martin show. We're at special presentation tonight with Sam Vaknin. Mary Kovacs is along and in our remaining moments.
So all right, Mary, go ahead. Sam, I just want you to know that I married an alienated child. He was alienated at nine months never to see a father again. So even his mom remarried at 14. After 14, he was discarded in the family and he went on to becoming a really serious bully.
But anyways, at 25, we found his father, but all he heard was that his father was a monster growing up. And when we found his father, two months before we were to meet him was murdered. After that, I was severely punished for bringing him false hope, bringing his father to light, bringing him to his mind and stuff.
So for punishment, he did the exact same thing. He turned around. Iaround, I knew every move an alienator would do to keep the family. He wouldn't even let me answer the door for his mom and his new stepfather.
So dealing with an alienated child, adult child, is so dangerous. Mentally, emotionally, psychologically, they mess you up because you get blamed for everything their mother did or whoever the alienating parent is.
So I highly recommend that parent alienation be more open out to the world, to the courts, to everyone to understand that they're psychologically abusing young children to grow to be psychopaths.
The problem, Mary, is a lot of people, and I've seen it for the year and a half, we've been doing shows on parent alienation.
The problem is most people are like, oh, it doesn't concern me. So I'm not interested in this.
If I'm not affected by it, now all the opioid deaths worldwide, well, it doesn't concern me. It's a social issue.
But I wanted to ask Sam about it. We've got a lot of work to do to get it there.
I wanted to ask Sam about this.
The narcissist psychopath hates and demonic, like you mentioned, but this is so, you know, the alienating parent is the one that's fooled all the way along because if the narcissist or psychopath can do this, alienate the children from the mother or the father, vice versa, that person never loved the person that they had children with in the beginning.
Am I right, Sam? There was no love or empathy there from the beginning on this process.
Yes.
Love and hate in psychology, at least in the science of psychology, flip sides of the same coin. We call this ambivalence. It's very easy to transition from love to hate. And given enough frustration and anger, people do transition from love to hate.
However, I agree with you that this alienating parents or parents who resort to such strategies, especially the ones who do so deliberately and intentionally, are people who are incapable of true love. They're incapable of true love. They misinterpret other emotions and other behaviors as love. For example, they misinterpret dependency as love. They misinterpret manipulation as love. They sometimes misinterpret mere presence as love. Just being there is kind of love. So they don't understand love. They've never experienced love. They are a love challenge, definitely.
I would like to respond to something Mary has said, actually.
Children who are alienated get emotionally invested in the alienating narrative. The alienating narrative, the narrative offered by the alienating parents, helps them to make sense of the world, reduces their anxiety, and allows them to function.
So children get invested in this narrative.
This process is called cathexis. They get cathected in the narrative. Later on in life, it's a struggle to get a more, to obtain a more balanced view, to hear the other side, to talk to the other parent.
The child is already enmeshed and embedded and invested in the narrative. That's the first thing.
The second thing is that children with parents who have gone through a process of alienation would try very hard to find a substitute set of parents.
Because who wants to have two parents who are at conflict? Who wants to have two parents who keep fighting with each other, hate each other's guts, turn you against each other? No one wants such parents.
So these people go through life later on when they grow up. They go through life looking for substitute parents, surrogate parents. So if it's a boy, the boy will grow up and as an adult, he will be looking for a mummy. He will never be able to have adult relationships. He will try to convert his intimate partner into a mother figure, a maternal figure, and vice versa for a girl. She will have daddy issues because they will be focused not on having full-fledged, mature adult relationships. They will be focused on healing their internal wounds by finding substitute mother or substitute father.
That's the second thing. And the third thing is, whatever is done to you as a child, you're going to do to others when you're an adult.
The narcissist was not allowed to develop boundaries as a child. People become narcissists because as children, they were not allowed to separate from mummy. Mummy didn't allow them to become individuals. Mummy was selfish or overbearing or depressive or absent. We call it the dead mother, not good enough mother.
So these narcissists were not allowed as children to separate and individually become separate individuals.
So when they team up with an intimate partner later in life, they don't allow her to separate and become an individual. Whatever is done to you as a child, you're going to do in the future to others.
If you're alienated as a child, you're going to reenact these dynamics in your own family.
Absolutely.
That'll come from the form of control, isn't it, Sam? You will control the person and not allow them to be an individual.
Yes, you will try to assimilate the person, to merge with the person, to fuse with the person. We call it symbiosis. You will try to assimilate the person, to make that person disappear because if the person in your life, if your intimate partner, is an independent, autonomous entity, she can walk out on you. She can abandon you the same way your mother had done.
You don't want this to happen.
So you want to convert her into an avatar, a representation, an inner internal object, an image, a symbol, not a real person. And whenever she shows any sign that she's a real person or being a real person, you're going to repress her and punish her because she should not be a real person because it threatens you.
So it's what parents who alienate children, who turn them against the other parent, they're damaging these children for life because these children are going to reenact these family dynamics in their own family later on. It's inevitable. It's inevitable.
So what's your own outlook on putting children onto the stand?
I'm sorry, you were cross-talking and I...
Mary, we've got to watch our time here. Otherwise, we're not going to be able to upload it on our show tonight.
Just one quick question. Tomorrow, when the children get put on the stand, will that damage some even more, the adult children?
Yes, of course.
We're forcing the child to take a stance or to adopt one of the parents as the preferred parent, and so on and so forth is composite damage.
Can they suffer psychosis or anything?
Psychosis is very extreme, but they're damaged in attachment. Their attachment capabilities are damaged. They develop insecure attachment styles and then they undermine their own sabotage, their own relationships because they're trying to force the family, the dynamic of the family of origin onto the family they are creating, and they ruin everything time and again. We call it repetition compulsion. They keep repeating the same pattern over and over, and even if they are aware that they are making these mistakes, they can't help themselves. It's compulsive. It's who they are.
When you eliminate the child, it's who the child is. You're not just affecting behavior or trait. You're changing the child, transforming the child, and yes, of course there's therapy, but why should your child go to therapy for the rest of his life? It's a horrible thing to do to your child.
Well, I have been. 44 years I've been going to therapy.
Well, is that recommended? Is that what you want for your child to attend therapy for 44 years?
But it just keeps reoccurring. I don't go daily. It's just year after year or something happens.
I don't know you well, but you also sound to me like you keep repeating the same dysfunctional patterns in your relationships, and I'm sure that you had been conditioned to do so.
I only had two.
Okay, well, two is apparently.
Sam's right. You were with a narcissist the second time around, too.
Yeah, well, there's no third. You know, 27 years for one, 27 months.
Never say never.
James both. Never say never.
But Sam, you were a self-progressed narcissist. Were you evil and demonic at one point in your life? Yes, you were.
What made you reverse course from prison?
I went to prison, and then when I exited prison, I said no more because I'd lost everything. I was a very, very, very, very rich guy. Seriously. I lost all my money. I lost my wife. I didn't have a family like children, but I lost my wife, all my money, a reputation. I was very well known in Israel, and so I lost my reputation.
I said, no more? I've hit rock bottom. I said no more. I'm going to study what's wrong with me, and then I'm going to teach the rest of the world.
I was the first ever in 1995 to describe the phenomenon of pathological narcissism online, and I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. Then I taught many generations.
For nine years, I had the only website on narcissistic abuse anywhere. I taught generations of people, and then they carried it on.
This is on my brainchild. It's not because I wanted to atone. I'm not pretending. I didn't want to atone or anything, but it wasn't working for me.
I said, narcissism is a seriously bad strategy. It sucks. I'm not going to do this again.
I chose to obtain supply, attention, and so on in socially acceptable ways and by helping others. I think that's a solution for narcissism, to teach them to obtain supply, because they can't be remedied. They can't be cured. They can't be healed.
It's too late. Narcissist is someone who's been seriously damaged in childhood, but you can redirect narcissism, make it a force for good, redirect this energy.
I'm living proof of this. I've redirected my seriously negative energy, and I've rendered it seriously positive. I've transformed the lives of millions.
Why not? Every narcissist can do this.
Narcissists need to hit rock bottom, like you do in psychopath, because otherwise, if times are good, then it's not going to happen.
As an empath, I hit rock bottom too. I was falsely arrested with the prison twice. I lost everything, everything, including my children. I am here today, 16 years later, advocating to prevent people from falling into the same situation.
I teach people what you teach people, but I teach them in an empathetic way. There's hope for us.
I think all in all, yes. I think there's hope for personal transformation.
People say prison is a bad idea because you go in innocent, you come out a criminal. Not always.
I think if you go in with a criminal mindset, you come out a worse criminal than you had been.
But if you go in with a different mindset and you let prison do its work, it can be transformative.
And that's what happened.
Yes, that's so true. I went in as an innocent person, came out fighting even twice the innocent.
How long were you in prison for, Sam?
Just a year, but it was a crucial year. During this year, I'd written Malignant Sorrow: Narcissism Revisited, which is the first textbook ever for narcissistic abuse. I'd written many other books in prison. I'd written a total of seven. One of them, Short Fiction, was published and won Israel's number one literary prize.
So this year has been productive, transformative.
Prison is the best thing that ever happened to me. Honestly.
Me too. Me too.
And I'm innocent.
But I wrote a book, too. It'll be out in the spring, A Journey of Love. I'm going to send you a copy, Sam, when I get my book released, one to Andy. And I'm so grateful that you're here today. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Sam.
Yeah, we are.
One final question. Yes, we are running out of time.
One final question. Why is the narcissist then psychopath?
I see that in my family. Why do they need to alienate their own family in the sense that a brother will alienate their sister's children? Why do it in the family type of thing?
They don't make any distinctions between family or not family. They have no emotional attachments to anyone.
To anybody, yeah.
Yeah, they alienate because it's a many manipulative techniques, technique, divide and roll, or they want to obtain some goal or they want to obtain attention.
Drama queens, you know, they create drama. So they are self-focused to the exclusion of all others and that you happen to be family. It's your bad luck. It's nothing to do with them.
And they alienate your whole family. They won't call you. There's no contact.
They won't call you in contempt in any case.
Narcissists and psychopaths hold everyone in contempt. You're inferior by definition. So they consent to talk to you sometimes.
Grandparents, cousins, uncles. My mother hasn't seen my children just as long as me.
It's a pandemic. It's like the virus doesn't make any allowances, you know. It's a pandemic, it's a virus. It's a mental virus.
That's right, exactly. We got to go, Mary. Our time is up. Thank you.
My wine is up also, so good timing. We've been watching the Andy Martin show with Mary Colak and Sam McEnany, professor of psychology and an expert on narcissism, psychopaths, and we'll invite you back again.
Sam, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Sam.
Both of you, take care.
Okay, take care. I'm going to send you the recorded part.
Okay, bye.