Hello and you're very welcome to mind you where I dive into how different people use different ways to self care.
I'm Brian Barnes from Brian Barnes Wellbeing where I partner with people to create unique well-being solutions. Today I'm delighted to be talking to Professor Sam Vachman. Sam is a professor of psychology and the faculty of C-Apps. He is a prolific writer. He is a counselor to victims of narcissistic abuse and people with cluster B personalities. He is the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. He is the host of his own YouTube channels with over 350,000 subscribers and he has a huge passion for serving and minding others. So Sam, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. You forgot to mention the brown eyes. That's a critical feature of my appeal.
Bambi, Bambi like brown eyes. Right. Yes. Critical feature of my appeal.
Took me ages to secure them. It took a lot of work. That's been your biggest kind of work today.
Thank you so much for joining me with those beautiful brown eyes and you're so welcome today.
Sam, can you start off by telling me a bit about yourself and how you got here?
Well, it started in prison. I was sentenced to three years in a correctional facility or AKA prison in Israel for securities fraud.
At the time I was a businessman, one of the biggest in Israel. And prior to that I've been a physicist. So I've betrayed my profession and my destiny, my intellectual destiny.
For money. And then money, you know, I was in my early twenties, my late teens and early twenties as a millionaire and I lost it. I simply lost control over myself. I committed crimes and I was sentenced to prison. I lost my wife. I lost all my properties and money and everything. I lost everything. I lost my reputation and I was very well known in my country of origin, which is Israel, as an intellectual.
And so I lost everything. I hit rock bottom and then under the rock. And I felt that if I were not to get to grips with what has happened to me, it would happen again. And I couldn't face this again. It was too much as it were. I was on the verge of committing suicide. So I knew that it's a life or death question.
So I had all kinds of texts smuggled into the prison, into the prison confines, the area. And luckily I was imprisoned with a psychiatrist. There was a psychiatrist. He was my cellmate and he taught me the rudiments of personality disorders.
And then as a condition for my parole, I was asked to, I was, I mean, it was a demand. I was required to attend therapy and I attended therapy with an Orthodox Jew, believe it or not. And he furthered my knowledge about cluster B personality disorders.
The first time I've ever heard of these was 1995. It was the second time I've been diagnosed with borderline end narcissistic personality disorders. The first time was when I've lost my first love and fiance.
So I, I, it penetrated my thick skull that there's a connection between cluster B diagnosis, personality disorders, diagnosis and personal losses in life. If you're diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, bad things happen to you. You lose the people you love. You lose all your money, all your accomplishments, officiated and negated. You end up in prison. I mean, really bad things happen to you. So cluster B dooms you to what Freud called the repetition compulsion. You're compelled to repeat your mistakes and then pay the price and then repeat your mistakes and then pay the price. So I delved, I started to delve deep into the extant, extant texts. I was shocked to discover that nothing new has been written since 1974. It was 1995, mind you.
And so when I was paroled, 1996, I wrote a book, I wrote it in prison actually. I wrote it on the upper bunk of my cell by candlelight and the manuscript still exists.
And then this became Malignant narcissism, not narcissism revisited. My first book on personality disorders and the first book that described narcissistic abuse, which is a phrase that I coined in the early nineties. And I decided this would be my calling. This would be my mission to educate both sides of the aisle, to educate people with cluster B personality disorders, which include narcissistic antisocial also known as psychopathy, histrionic and borderline personality disorder.
So to educate these people on the one hand and to enlighten their victims on the other, on the other hand, to allow the victims to mount effectual defenses against the vicissitudes and exigencies of their cluster B partners.
And so this has been my life's mission since 1995. I've been the first I initiated the whole field. I coined most of the language in use today.
Many of the things you've heard, I actually coined, you know, flying monkeys, I coined somatic narcissists, rebel, I had to coin a whole new language because there was no language to describe these unfathomable experiences.
Narcissistic abuse is not just any form of abuse. It is not about stealing your money. It's not about having sex with you illicitly. It is not about subjecting you to legal torture. It's not about absconding with your pension funds.
This is what psychopaths do. Narcissists, narcissistic abuse is about negating your existence. It's about vitiating is about annulling you. It's about making you disappear and reappear as a figment in the Gnostic shared fantasy.
So converting you into an obstruction, into a symbol, and denuding you of any independence, any autonomy, any agency, and any ability to act separate from the Gnosticates. This is really an extreme form of abuse because it consumes you, it subsumes you, and it leaves nothing of you, but a shell.
And then it's a long way to recover from this. Very long way.
The word "parasitic" comes to mind. Would you agree that it's a kind of a parasitic?
Oh, absolutely. I keep saying that Gnostasis are scavengers and they are parasites.
But one common mistake is to attribute malevolence or malice to Gnostasis. I think people are confusing. People often confuse Gnostasis and psychopaths.
Psychopaths are premeditated. They're deliberate. They're gall-oriented. They're ruthless. They're callous. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. These are psychopaths.
Gnostasis are deluded little children. The mental age of a Gnostasis is anywhere between two years and nine years in the most advanced case. They're kids. They're simply kids. And then they drag you into their fantasy defenses, into their shared fantasy space. And they coerce you into playing the role that they want you to play in the shared fantasy.
But there's no malice. There's no evil. They're not evil. They're running on a program.
Yes. They are like a virus or a tiger. People say, "But yeah, but they have choices. They can make choices. It's a decision-making process involved. They know right from wrong.
But they're compelled. It's a compulsion. That's the meaning of a compulsion.
Psychopaths are not compelled.
Psychopaths do make choices and decisions.
Psychopaths are really evil. They're bad people.
Gnostasis are lost people. They're lost.
And they want you to get lost with them because they feel so insecure, so unsafe, so frightened, so terrified, like small children in the dark. They want company.
Yes, they want company. They're small children in the dark. They whistle in the dark and they want you to whistle with them. And they want you to whistle their tune, no other tune.
And that, again, for people to kind of, I suppose we come to this now in a minute, I'll ask you to kind of, let's say, even just to summarise it, you have, again, that theory of the Jewry mothership and the shared fantasy and the fusion and those Jewry maternal figures. And again, that kind of almost parasitic, kind of robotic, pre-programmed actions of the narcissist.
And even though there's so much damage done to people, as you said, there's victims, to change your perspective on it.
Now, it can be difficult, Sam, as you can imagine, if someone has crossed paths with someone that is kind of narcissistic, but I suppose it does help to kind of almost have some compassion towards them.
Yeah. Here's the difference. Here's the distinction, which might be of help to victims. I think victims would be relieved and the path to healing and recovery would be expedited if they were to truly grasp the narcissistic dynamic.
And so here's the difference between the narcissist and the psychopath.
The narcissist is a victim of abuse. It's as simple as that. The narcissist's ability to resonate with his victims, to exploit them, to leverage their vulnerabilities, to penetrate the defenses and to render them figments in his shared fantasy is because he is one of them. He himself, and I say he, it could be she, of course, the narcissist himself is a victim of abuse.
Narcissism is a post-traumatic condition.
Yeah. So because he is a post-traumatic victim, he resonates with post-traumatic victims, with other post-traumatic victims. And so he picks up on broken people, damaged people, vulnerable people, because he can resonate with them. He understands their language. He can tap into their innermost dynamics, fears, hopes, priorities, preferences, wishes. He knows the code. He is one of them. He has just, he just chose another strategy. The strategy he chose was to emulate the abuser rather than remain a victim.
But he's a victim. The psychopath is not the same. The psychopath is probably a brain abnormality. Probably.
Psychopaths string up everywhere and everywhere. Psychopaths are not the outcomes of early childhood abuse and trauma. Not. They are really evil people. They are malevolent and malicious. They're dangerous because they are, I hesitate to say the word, but I would say in human. They're not human in any sense of the word that I understand. They're not human.
Narcissists are human.
For example, narcissists crucially or critically depend on input from other people known as narcissistic supply. Narcissists are co-dependence actually. They depend on narcissistic supply that renders them pro social, communal. They collaborate with other people in order to extract supply from other people. They end up hurting people. They end up damaging and breaking people. They end up doing horrible things. Narcissists don't misunderstand. I'm the guy who coined the phrase narcissistic abuse.
So give me a break. Give me some credit. I know. I know what they're doing, but they're doing these things because it's a default behavior because deep inside they are so massively immature that they are terrified. It's a panic reaction. It's about control. It's about extracting whatever is possible from the environment.
It's short term view of life. It's like a use it or lose it. Yeah. Almost a panic. I use a sensation of panic and anxiety.
Yeah. It's an anxiety reaction. Absolutely.
Yeah. Psychopaths are called premeditated, calculated. I know I've spent time with them in prison. You know, I got to know them. These are different animals.
Absolutely. Nothing in common. They don't depend on other people. They are lone wolves.
Psychopaths are not the outcomes of early childhood abuse and trauma. Not. They are really evil people. They are malevolent and malicious. They'reThey don't.
The narcissist, at least within the shared fantasy, cares enough to manipulate you. He cares enough about you because he needs to manipulate you. He needs to obtain favorable outcomes. He needs to be self efficacious. So he needs to have something in common with you to establish some common ground or some common agenda. That's why relationships with narcissists resemble cults. They're very cult-like, cultish.
Relationships with psychopaths resemble predation. Psychopaths are predators. They just eat you alive. That's it. And Sam, again, kind of, you know, like talking about that shared fantasy, the diffusion, that dual mothership, like, as you said, like that, that comes into the relationship with a narcissist because there's, you know, first of all, there's idealization and then there's that kind of devaluation and individuation and discard. So that dual mothership kind of part.
Narcissists are unable to perceive reality or interact with it. The phase of separation and individuation, which is anywhere between 18 months to 36 months of life, is critical because separation means that you recognize that there is a world out there except your mommy.
The symbiotic phase where you are merged and fused with mother, where you believe yourself to be a part of mother and mother is a part of you and mother is the world. So the world is a part of you and the world is inside you. That's psychotic.
Yes. Psychosis, essentially. The child is psychotic.
And then there's a phase called separation and individuation. You separate from mommy because mommy frustrates you and you realize that she's external to you.
Well, if mommy is external to you, then many other things are external to you. So there's an external world.
Narcissists never make it past this phase. They never succeed to separate from mommy because mother is a dead mother. Not physically dead, but emotionally absent. A dead mother is a phrase coined by Andrei Green, the psychoanalyst. It's a dead mother. It's an absent mother, depressed mother, narcissistic mother, self-centered mother, parentifying mother, instrumentalizing mother. It's a bad mother, not good enough mother to paraphrase Winnicott.
Yeah. So this kind of mother doesn't allow the child to separate from her and to become an individual and therefore to take on the world, to explore the world.
So the narcissist never had a chance to come across reality. He remained stuck in his internal world and his habitual, his habitual object relations is he internalizes external objects.
So if the narcissist comes across a potential intimate partner, he would immediately convert her to a representation in his mind, an internal object, an introject. She would become a symbol in his mind, an abstraction, and he would continue to interact with his internal object rather than with the external object because narcissists don't do reality. That's not some wackening. That's Otto Kernberg. Otto Kernberg suggested that borderline is a form of narcissism and that narcissism is a form of psychosis. And he was, he was bloody right. It is a form of psychosis.
Narcissism is psychotic, not psychopaths. Psychopaths are well embedded in reality. They have extremely strong reality testing. Actually, psychopaths have more reality, stronger reality testing than normal, healthy people. That's why they're able to manipulate people so easily.
The narcissist is lost, is delusional, is on the verge of hallucinating, is totally immersed in his, inside his mind, unable to perceive the separateness of the world and everyone in it.
So when he comes across someone he really likes, someone who triggers him somehow because she resembles his mother.
So at that moment he tries to internalize her because he doesn't do reality. He wants her to give up on her reality. He snapshots her, he introjects her and he continues to Photoshop the snapshot, which is a process known as idealization. And then he continues to interact with the ideal object in his mind that represents the external object, which is the intimate partner.
Mind you, the intimate partner colludes with the narcissist. She likes to be idealized. She likes to see herself or to perceive herself through the narcissist's gaze as an ideal, perfect, super intelligent, drop dead gorgeous person. So the collude, it's a collusion and they create a shared fantasy and in the shared fantasy she's the narcissist's mother and he is her mother. They mother each other. They regress each other to infancy and they become each other's mother. It's much more complicated than this, but this is the essence. That's a natural.
Yeah. And Sam, again, like I honestly believe that your work and the research you've done in this, as you said, it's very helpful for people that have cross paths with a narcissist, close to being personality, to make sense of it. As I said, I've used it myself as a Rosetta Stone to kind of translate the past and to make sense of it and to translate what happened in that relationship with the narcissist.
As you said yourself, victims of narcissists and close to being personalities.
Now, you did talk about building up defenses.
So I suppose looking at the good news, because again, I know you've done a lot of research and a lot of work and hundreds of hours of videos on solutions and building up skills and a kind of a tool kit to kind of navigate out of the abyss and out of that kind of nightmare situation. So looking at some of those, let's say tools that you talk about, Sam, those kind of self care, self love tools.
You talked about self awareness, self acceptance, self forgiveness, self trust, self efficacy. Could you dive deeper into what some of those tools might look like?
The first thing is you have to accept responsibility for your contribution to what had happened. That's critical. If you are stuck in a victimhood mindset, a victim stance, you don't. You don't because you're perpetuating the narcissistic abuse by other means. That's point number one, regain agency, regain control over your life, take responsibility and analyze what had happened.
Realize we have gone wrong, made wrong choices, decisions and make sure you never make them again.
But if you claim, if you claim that you're angelic, you're blameless, you were subject to a force of nature, a tornado or tsunami. Then there was nothing you could do about it was there? So you're bound to repeat this mistake again.
Point number one, point number two, there's a voice inside your head installed and implanted by the narcissist.
Clinically it's known as introject. The narcissist inhabited and colonized your mind. Even after his long gone, and I'm using he, it could be she, I repeat, even if the narcissist is long gone physically is still in your mind, still there.
There's been my mind snatching process here. You need to cleanse your mind. You need to purge it. You need to distinguish between authentic and non authentic voices. You need to identify the narcissist's voice and you need to silence it as aggressively as you can.
And if you need help in doing so, go to therapy, attend therapy. It's critical.
Number three, you need to ask yourself what in you predisposed you to participate in the shared fantasy.
For example, maybe you like fantasies, maybe you prefer fantasy to reality. Maybe you find your life and reality unbearable. Ask yourself why? What can you do about it?
The fact that you've ended up with a narcissist in a shared fantasy is not a coincidence, nor is it an accident. Do not delude yourself into thinking that you're an innocent bystander. You were not.
So ask all these difficult questions. They are very difficult, of course.
very difficult, of course.
And the last thing, and of course, I have to compress everything. But the last piece of advice is that you have to separate and individuate what the narcissist has done to you. He regressed you to early infancy by becoming your mother and he has rendered you an infant. He has removed all the adult defenses and cognitions and everything. He has regressed you.
And so you need to start from scratch. You need to separate, you need to individuate, you need to mature, and you need to become an adult again.
You can't do any of this alone. Don't be grandiose and don't kid yourself. You need help.
This is the first act of surrender. You need to surrender. You need help.
So seek help. Luckily, the prognosis is very good. All these processes are fully reversible. You're going to be okay. If you just acquire humility, you need to be humble.
In the face of what had happened to you, you need to be humble. That's all.
I love that, Sam. And, wow, again, there's so much in there. I know you have talked again.
Again, coming back to that voice that you said, that kind of, you know, like that parasitic kind of voice in your head, you've talked about, you know, replacing that good voice, kind of, you know, like having, let's say, people free time, having, you know, a busy kind of fulfilling out your life and mindfulness and, you know, like replacing that voice with a good voice.
Yes. The narcissist hijacks everything in you that is not friendly to you. If you have had other introjects, which were critical, self-defeating, self-handicapping, even self-destructive, the narcissist's voice, the app that the narcissist installs in your mind, co-ops and colludes and collaborates with these other voices.
The narcissist creates a coalition, a coalition of unfriendly enemy hostile voices in your head.
So if you had a mother, for example, a mother who was very, very critical of you, a mother who berated you and demeaned you and criticized you and, you know, the narcissist would team up with the mother and would create a coalition with her.
The narcissist amplifies all these. And it is all about control because the narcissist doesn't trust you when you're strong. If you're strong, you can walk away. If you're strong, you can abandon him.
He's a two year old. He's a two year old. He's terrified. And so he needs you to be weak. He needs to break you, house break you, if you wish. He needs you to become a pet. He needs to tame you. He needs you to become an extension of him. He needs to be in 100% of you.
And so he becomes your reality testing.
You begin to doubt your own judgment. And so you begin to ask him, is it real? Do you think the same? Do you agree?
He becomes, he becomes your interface with reality. He isolates you. He isolates you from family, from friends. And finally, he isolates you from your own kernel, from your own essence, from your own core.
And he becomes your identity.
These are very harrowing, mind controlled, brainwashing and training techniques that the narcissist uses into instinctively, reflexively and unconsciously, by the way, not maliciously.
But that's what the narcissist does. It's a parasite, you're right. You need to detox. It's like a drug. There's also a strong addictive aspect because the narcissist exposes you to your idealized image and you fall in love with this image. It's a bit narcissistic. You fall in love with this image and it's very difficult for you to let go.
And you can, you see yourself through the narcissist gaze as you have never seen yourself before. You feel unconditionally loved and accepted.
This is a combination of maternal love, self-love, infatuation, grandiosity. I mean, it's irresistible.
Yeah. Yeah. You need rehab. You need to detox. Absolutely.
And again, thank you for pointing out some of the ways to do that there, Sam. And again, I suppose it's kind of walking steady on one steady ground now. I suppose starting from scratch and bringing in all those self-care kind of tools, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, self-truth, self-efficacy and kind of reprogramming yourself and navigating out of this. That's a lot of work and I know that myself.
Now, Sam, the icing on the cake is having kids with a narcissist, let's say, you know, like it's the ultimate icing on the cake and that kind of co-parenting piece. So not only are you trying to start from scratch yourself and to navigate out of this and to walk steady on one steady ground, but you have to co-parent with the narcissist.
How the best ways to approach that, do you think? That's a tough one.
Yeah. Yeah. Because it involves ambivalence.
Yeah. Children are what wanted, wanted children, acts of love and reification, reifications of love and mementos of love. So whenever you interact with your children ineluctably, even if you don't want to, you're interacting with a narcissist.
Yeah. Even if it's gone, long gone, the child is a reminder of the narcissist and your time with the narcissist and the acts that have led to your concept, to the conception and everything.
So there's ambivalence there.
You love the child and you hate the child.
You need to own up to it. You need to own up to it.
All these women or men who say, I love my children, but I hate my partner. That's squaring the circle. That's not true also. It's a lie. Self-deception.
So ambivalence, you have to overcome ambivalence.
Point number two, you have to defend your children.
Your children are the top priority. Your partner is long gone, at least emotionally, not physically, hopefully both. Your children are left behind.
You need to defend them. You need to protect them.
Narcissists are not bad parents. They are not parents. They are a danger, a clear and present danger to their children.
You need to do everything in your power to isolate the children.
Now I hear all this nonsensical, yeah, but my child needs a father.
Yeah, your child needs a father, but not the narcissist.
Yeah. So there is a lot of self-deception going on and desperate attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance by lying to yourself about all kinds of things.
Actually, you want to keep in touch with the narcissist and you use the children as an excuse, for example, yes. Or you want to spy on the narcissist. You want to stalk his life. You want to know does he have a new girlfriend? Does he have a new...
So you use the children to do that. There's a lot of adulterated motivation going into common children with the narcissist.
You need to really become self-aware and you need to realize that the optimum is to isolate your children from the narcissist, disconnect them and for them never to have one further minute of contact with the narcissist.
Now this is an unattainable goal, regrettably owing to the legal system.
And also, Sam, because you mentioned, let's say, you know, the child needs to see their father. If the narcissist is the mother, like that maternal role is so kind of protected and nurtured by society and the legal system.
So, you know.
Yeah. There are a lot of conflicts involved, dissonances in clinical terms, involved in co-parenting with the narcissist because we apply wrongly. We apply normal, healthy habitual models of parenting to the relationship with the narcissist.
For example, we say, "Okay, he's the father." You know, they need to have a father. That's wrong thinking. The narcissist is not an adult. Would you safely deposit your children with a two-year-old? Would you really acknowledge, would you really accept a two-year-old role in your life, in your children's lives? Would you allow a two-year-old to become the role model for your children?
Of course you would. Yeah.
But again, it's a two-year-old in an adult's body. The body is irrelevant unless there is interest, which makes it even worse.
But the mind is, you know, the mind, social modeling, Bandura's work, social modeling. This is what's relevant.
The narcissist is incapable to provide modeling, which is the main function of parenting, is incapable of providing real life experience because he's divorced from reality.
There is a huge risk of introducing the children into a shared fantasy, exploiting, leveraging, abusing them in a variety of ways, sexually included. It's a dangerous game. It's playing with fire.
So I wouldn't go there.
In short, I don't believe in co-parenting. I believe in getting rid of the narcissist, period, not co-parenting.
Co-parenting predisposes people to make the wrong decisions.
Now, okay, that's an ideal. So let's say in real terms, if that's not an option, if that's not possible, you know, a whole idea of parallel parenting, where there's a level of indifference and, you know, kind of formality. Do your best. Do your best to isolate your children. Do your best to inoculate your children.
You have frank conversations about boundaries, about right and wrong, about what to expect. Don't vilify the other parent, of course, that would reflect badly on you.
But equip your children. Don't weaponize the situation, but do provide your children with weapons. And then hope for the best. Your children will be exposed to you as a model and to your partner, the narcissistic partner, as a model. And hopefully by the time they're 16 or 18, they will have made the right choice.
But that's if you're compelled legally and otherwise to co-parent. But if there's any way whatsoever you can avoid co-parenting, do not co-parent. Do not fall for the tribe and the nonsense of they need a father or they need a mother.
No. Yeah, okay. I hear you. And that's again, yeah, that's, you know, there's huge nuggets in there of advice and information to people who again are kind of walking steady on on steady ground.
Sam, I have a quick quote for you. I know again, you have done a lot of research in physics and chronons. I'm reading a book, a biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. And there's a quote actually from Leonardo da Vinci. He says, observe the lights, blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first and that which was there is no more.
And I think that read that quote really resonates with what we're talking about, which is kind of, you know, observe the light, you know, kind of, and kind of to be in the now and to ground yourself and to come back to scratch and to, you know, talk to walk steady on unsteady ground.
Yes, I mean, it's a concept to reevaluate reality. And that is especially true with the narcissist because the narcissist creates an alternative augmented virtual reality, which is very convincing.
Yeah, very convincing. That's why cults are very successful enterprises. And you need to wake up.
And sometimes you don't want to wake up because the fantasy is much preferable to reality or because you feel safe in the fantasy. There are many incentives to remain in a fantasy. We've had fantasies. We've had global continental fantasies. The 1930s and 1940s in Europe were one huge shared fantasy of a narcissistic man called Adolf Hitler.
Yeah. No, this is serious danger. It's not a joke.
Narcissists are able to extrapolate their fantasies and convince people that reality is inferior to anything they have to offer.
And so why not, you know?
And then, you know, children get dragged into this and it becomes a one family cult. And then the children collaborate with the cult leader, which is a narcissistic parent.
And there is a sensation of we against the world and so on and so forth. You need to break this cycle early on.
The only way to break this cycle is humility and self-awareness.
These are two extremely difficult demands. Very few people on this earth have either to be frank, but for the sake of your children, you need to attain these two, humility and self-awareness.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Well, Sam, thanks for sharing all that information with me and pretty much providing a masterclass in the work that you've done on the origins of narcissism, how it plays out in relationships and those, you know, really good tools and practical tools on how to kind of navigate your way out of there and about self-care and self-love. And I know we touched on it earlier on briefly about, you know, like your self-care and I know you said you don't really do self-care, but I would argue that, you know, like the amount of work that you share and how generous you are, you know, like helps so many other people.
So does that not give you a sense of, you know, a sense of wellbeing and being able to share all the good work that you do that helps so many other people?
Yeah, that's the only light in my existence, the ability to share my thoughts and the knowledge that it does affect people in a beneficial way.
But otherwise, no, I don't self-care.
I am a narcissist. Don't forget that.
Yeah. I'm a narcissist. So I don't self-care.
I inhabit a totally fantastic world. I'm divorced from reality. I don't care for my body. I don't care for my mind. I'm reckless. I endanger everything from my freedom to my property.
I am what Harvick wrote a magnificent masterpiece, the Mask of Sanity.
So while I'm able to discourse or to analyze things very surrebrillingly and analytically and very convincingly and there's value to some of the things I'm saying, maybe to most of the things I'm saying, none of this applies to me.
Freud said that intellectual insight in the absence of emotional resonance does not yield transformation. And he was right. I have all the intellectual insight in the world. To a large degree, I'm the father of the field of narcissistic abuse. I have all the insight in the world. I'm in all the intellectual insight, but I don't have any emotional resonance because I don't have access to emotions, mono sys, positive emotions.
Consequently, there's no transformative process. There's no transformation.
I am as bad today as I've been in my twenties or thirties, maybe even worse, in many ways worse.
So it's a bit like terminal cancer. It's a cancer of the soul.
Age four, not much you can do except write your will. And my will is my YouTube channel.
Well, Sam, again, look at the work that you do, again, like that metaphor of a reset of stone comes to mind that, you know, does help so many people kind of translate and make sense of what's happened in the past, what's happened, you know, like in the recent, kind of present.
It makes me happy. I'm happy to hear that. Thank you.
And thank you for doing all that work. And Sam, where can people find it?
Well, it just types of back me to Google. I mean, the difficult to avoid. You're everywhere. You're everywhere.
And again, look, I've watched, you know, I've watched a lot of your videos and re-watched them. And again, just that work that you do again, just to kind of make sense of all this. And again, I would encourage everybody to check out Sam's YouTube channels where there's not hundreds of videos on, you know, everything that we've talked about. Sam's book, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited. Thank you so much again for just being so honest and so kind and so generous today. Thank you. It's been a true pleasure.
Me too, Sam. And with your time and your, you know, all that work that you've done and best of luck with everything that you do in the future. Thank you. Thank you. It's very kind of you. Take care.