Self-help After the Narcissist: Regaining Yourself

Start with the earliest one and make your way up in time. Measure your progress with each and every one of the videos that you watch. Take notes, copious notes, repeat, listen again, read the notes, wait a bit, let everything settle down, process what you have heard and learned, and move on to the next video.

Today I'm going to provide you with a checklist, a guide to the totality of the course, to all 47 videos. And so you would do well to listen to this checklist or to this guide when you start the course and when you end the course and maybe even in between.

So let us delve right in.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the only author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever written on narcissistic abuse. I'm also a professor of clinical psychology in several universities and high education institutions around the world.

Okay Shoshanim, let us delve right in. I'm sorry, I'm still sick. Yes, even professors of psychology get sick. And maybe they're sick to start with.

Okay.

Abuse, trauma, recovery, healing. These are buzzwords, keywords in every attempt to become more self-aware and somehow to mitigate the damages and the brokenness that emanate from a relationship with a narcissist.

But these abuse, trauma, recovery, and healing are states of mind. They are not objective realities. They're states of mind.

And you must make the transition from submissiveness to humility.

Now many people confound and conflate and confuse the two.

To be submissive means to give up on your self-control, to abrogate it, to transfer decision-making and choice-making and independent thinking and critical thinking, to transfer all these functions to someone else. To say, from now on, I am mindless. I am an unthinking servant at your service and obedience.

This is submissiveness. It is the abrogation of responsibility.

Humility is the exact opposite of submissiveness. It is the assumption of responsibility. Humility is about recognizing your limitations, your shortcomings, your flaws and the mistakes you have made and the contributions you have made to your predicament. This is humility and it is an absolute precondition for any recovery and healing.

Sometimes it takes time to extricate yourself from a relationship with a narcissist. It requires a duration and an endurance. It's a test of character, resilience and mettle.

While you're immured and embedded in the relationship with the narcissist, whether you're trying to get out or not, whether you've convinced yourself, counterfactually, that there's no exit strategy, there are eight coping strategies.

I developed seven of them and I regret to say, not the eight, which is possibly the best.

No contact. No contact is not about walking away and never ever communicating with a narcissist again. That's an important part of going no contact.

But no contact is a set of 27 strategies.

And you would do well to find a video that deals with the rules of no contact. This video goes into great length and depth as to how to implement these strategies in order to utterly remove, erase, delete, vanquish the narcissist from your life for good.

The second strategy is grey rock. When you render yourself sufficiently uninteresting and uninterested in the narcissists so that he gives up on any narcissistic supply or gratification that you may have provided and just walks away and tries to find an alternative to you, which is exactly what you want.

Deflection is when you find a common enemy with a narcissist, and you deflect. It's like a decoy. You deflect the narcissist aggression towards this common enemy in a way from you.

Mirroring, I really apologize for this respiratory effects, special effects.

Mirroring is when you mirror to the narcissist, his behavior, when you force him to become aware of his misconduct by simply behaving the same or misbehaving the very same way.

Be careful with this strategy, especially if the narcissist is also a psychopath or a malignant narcissist because these can become violent.

Then there's the shared psychosis colluding and collaborating with a narcissist in his shared fantasy, telling him that his false self is not false, that he is not grandiose, that he is indeed godlike and superior. And participating in his happy family you are my mother kind of self-delusion.

The next thing is to provide supply. Narcissists would do anything for supply. The obtaining of supply, the securing of supply lines, and the maintenance of a regular flow of narcissistic supply is the only concern of the narcissist.

And so if you were to become a reliable, trustworthy source of high-grade narcissistic supply, you could do anything you want with the narcissist.

It's a Machiavellian strategy. It's manipulative, but it would give you full and total control over the narcissist.

The next strategy is withholding or being punitive.

And that is when you withhold narcissistic supply from the narcissist, you give him a taste of his own medicine, intermittent reinforcement. Hot and cold. I'm here for you. I'm gone. I'm about to abandon you. I love you forever. Here you are the greatest of all. You are a slime and a sleaze bag. And so on.

It works.

And this is the eighth strategy intermittent reinforcement.

Never be stable, never be predictable, never be regular. Don't let the narcissists take you for granted. Be there and then vanish kaleidoscopically like a shimmering light on the water.

This is if you're forced to share your life with a narcissist or if for some masochistic reason you have chosen to stay in the relationship.

I strongly recommend to go no contact.

And no, it doesn't matter if your narcissist is your son or your daughter or your mother or your father. An abuser is an abuser and is an abuser. And all narcissists should be treated the same way.

Once you've broken up with the narcissist, once you have let the narcissist go, once you have re-established your boundaries, at least in the sense that you said enough is enough, you put your foot down.

At that point, healing starts.

You will be overcome by enormous grief. This is known as prolonged grief because it seems to never end.

You will develop phenomena such as psychological phenomena, such as rumination, obsession, compulsion.

To truly let go and abandon the narcissist requires a lot of mourning.

The no contact rules are helpful here because the less you're exposed to the presence of the narcissist, the less you interact with the narcissist, the easier it would be for you to overcome the grief.

The problem with the grief that follows the breakup with the narcissist is that it involves multiple layers of mourning.

You are grieving your own discarded, delusional, idealized self to which you have had access through the narcissist gaze. You're grieving the narcissist as your mother, as a narcissist has assumed a maternal role and provided you with what seemed to have been acceptance and unconditional love.

You are grieving the narcissist as your own child, the narcissist's inner child. So you're also grieving as a mother who has lost her child.

You are grieving the narcissist as this perfect lover, the one, the twin flame, the soulmate, call it what you wish.

You are grieving over the betrayal, over the loss of innocence, the inability to love or trust again. That's what you believe at this stage.

And you are definitely grieving the fantasy, the dream of a shared beautiful future going together into the sunset, happy ever after.

As Kubler-Ross and her descendants have realized, grief is a cycle and it has six stages, and you may revisit many of these stages, time and again.

There's denial, there's anger, there's bargaining, there's depression, there's acceptance, and then there is hope. There is always hope.

Don't be discouraged, don't be disheartened, don't give up, there's always hope.

And above all, get rid of your victimhood identity.

It's easy to sink into this, I'm a victim, I'm angelic, I've done nothing wrong, I'm a random target, I've contributed nothing to this, I'm not responsible for anything. And he or she, the narcissist, they are demons. They are evil emanations. They came into my life in order to destroy me and kill me and exploit me and ruin me and this and that.

Don't fall for this narrative.

Take responsibility for your actions, your choices, your decisions and your contributions. You were there. You were there. You were part of what has happened.

So realize this in order to derive lessons and for this to never happen again.

The next important step is abandon the narcissist's inner child.

When you first met the narcissist to lure you in, to bait you, the narcissist exposed you to an inner child, a crying, traumatized child, a child in need of protection, a child who is in a corner in the dark extending his his or her hand to you and this triggered in you a maternal instinct even as a male, even men are protective of babies and children so the inner child the narcissist's inner, took your hand and led you into the maze, into the labyrinth.

Let go of this inner child. It's a phantasm. It's ectoplasm. It's an emanation. It's an apparition. There's nothing there. There has never been. It's a simulation. Let go of this child. You have never been this child's mother because the child is a disguise for an empty black hole, all devouring, rapacious and predatory.

Reverse the roles. From now on, you script your life. You direct your existence.

The narcissist becomes an actor, a prop, whether it is physically present or not, whether it is merely a voice in your head, an introject.

Reverse the roles. Own the narcissist by appropriating his functions, and then constellate and integrate your parts, your psyche.

And that way, the narcissist will have become a submissive blotch or stain on the wall, nothing more.

It is very important to realize that the narcissist has regressed you, driven you back to your infancy, by acting as a parental figure, the narcissist made you into a child.

And so again, you have experienced the symbiotic phase with the mother. You have gone through a period of merger and fusion with the mother. You have gone through a period of merger and fusion with a maternal figure.

You need to separate from the narcissist and you need to become an individual again. You need to go through a process known as separation, individuation.

You have been catapulted back to the womb by the narcissist and you need to be born again.

Separation involves the silencing of the narcissist's voice in your mind and the activation of your own or reactivation of your own authentic self, your own authentic voice, your own authentic introject.

How can you tell the difference between the narcissist's voice and your voice?

The narcissist's voice is not your friend. It is disparaging. It is critical. It is hypervigilant. It is paranoid. It's very hostile. It's sadistic.

Your voice loves you. Your voice is concerned with your well-being. Your voice is realistic. Your voice is like the voice of a best friend.

Silence the former and adhere to the latter.

At that point, you can individuate. You have lost your identity in your relationship with the narcissist. He has taken it away and replaced it with something else. With your part in his script, you have acquired a false identity in order to conform to the narcissist expectations and to meet, to cater to his needs within the shared fantasy, regain your authentic lost self, individuate.

Once a narcissist's voice has been silenced, both abuser and savior, mother and child, all of them are gone. And the only one left behind is you.

Your authentic voice at this stage is disembodied. There's still a disconnect between the voices in your head, including your authentic voice, and your body. Because your body is still processing and experiencing the trauma.

So you need to go through a phase of embodying.

Individuation requires mind-body work, owning your voice also by somehow reconnecting it to your body.

And again, everything I'm telling you right now is a checklist. You can find detailed instructions on how to do each and every one of these things in the videos in the playlist titled narcissistic abuse from healing and recovery.

Okay, once you have regained your authentic self, once you have become reacquainted with your core identity, once you have reestablished the continuity that has been disrupted by the narcissist presence and demands, you need to reconstitute three lost functions.

Self-mothering, in other words, self-love, self-saving, in other words, your sense of agency and self-efficacy, and the choosing and affirming of life, negating your depression, resisting your anxiety, eliminating your catastrophizing, and rewriting or reframing your automatic negative thoughts and your negative schemas.

Learn to love yourself. Self-parent, become your own parent, your own good parent.

Self-love involves four elements. Self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-trust, and self-efficacy. Learn much more about each and every one of these elements on the playlist.

Regain the following truths. The relationship with the narcissist has reprogrammed you. It's like an occult.

Your mind is no longer your own because it is infested and infiltrated by counterfactual falsities and statements.

So you must regain the following utterly true facts and statements. Beliefs. You need to believe in the following.

Narcissistic abuse challenges, assumptions about the world, about people, your theory of mind, and about relationships, your internal working.

Here are statements about the world, about reality, about other people, about relationships and about society, which are supported by science, well at least supported by psychological studies.

You must believe these. You must regain your footing.

Number one, people are rational and self-interested to some extent, but most people are just good. They may be irrational, they may be self-destructive, but the vast majority of people are good at heart. They are essentially good.

Number two, justice, order and structure are fundamental to the universe, reality, and people in it are by and large trustworthy. Don't be naive but don't be paranoid, look around, be aware of your surroundings and of yourself, but do not become hypervigilant. Do not become the narcissist.

Number three, the world is not hostile. At worst, the world is indifferent, but it is extremely rarely hostile.

Number four, one good deed deserves another.

Versus the narcissist version, no good deed goes unpunished.

If you try hard enough, if you're sincere, if you invest, if you commit, things will work out.

Success is not guaranteed, but sometimes the effort, sometimes the path, sometimes the journey are success itself, reified.

Number five, you gain credit with people when you behave well. This credit is not forgotten, nor ignored, and is very likely to be repaid.

Number 6. Reality is a shared experience. This is known as intersubjective space. Reality is a shared experience. People are very much alike.

Number seven, being alone is worse than being together. Except if you are with an abuser, of course.

Number eight, you deserve love.

Number nine, you can trust yourself. You can trust your judgment. You can trust your reality testing. You can trust yourself love.

You have come across a consummate, an apex predator. So you were not prepared for it. You were susceptible. You were defenseless. No one has taught you the ropes because very few know them.

Give yourself a break. Forgive yourself.

Number 10. There is always a way to undo wrong and evil because they are rarely intentional. Regret, remorse, guilt, shame and conscience are common to almost all people, narcissists and psychopaths, accepted.

There's a nine-fold path to healing, and you should pay attention to all nine dimensions of the process of recovery.

Number one, your body. Your body requires attention, self-empathy, regulation, control and protection. Your health matters and counts.

Your mind, your mind requires authenticity, which we discussed, positivity and mindfulness being embedded in the present, not letting yourself fantasize about the future, daydream endlessly, and not mourn and grieve the past, ruminate, and so on so forth.

Past orientation and future orientation are dysfunctional, only the present matters. You're here, you're now. End of story.

Functions. You need to become a vigilant observer, not hyper-vigilant, not paranoid, not suspicious, not on your toes, but observing all the time, absorbing all the time, learning all the time.

You need to become a shielding sensor. You need to protect yourself from hostile introjects, toxic people. You need to cleanse your external environment and your internal space. And you need to be a reality sentinel. You need to reality test all the time. Am I fantasizing? Am I being delusional? Am I wrong?

Ask yourself these questions again and again and again because in the wake of narcissistic abuse, you're disoriented, you're befuddled, you're confused beyond words. You're not sure where you are. And even worse, you're not sure who you are.

Make seven resolutions for a narcissus free life. Print them out if you need to. Place them on the refrigerator with a magnet. I mean, do what you have to. Repeat them as a mantra, morning and evening before you go to sleep.

These are the seven resolutions which should guide your life. Henceforth, if you follow them, you will never ever fall for a narcissist or a psychopath again.

Number one, I will treat myself with dignity and I will demand respect from others. I will not allow anyone to disrespect me.

Number two, I will set clear boundaries and I will make known to others what I regard as permissible and acceptable behavior and what is out of bounds.

Number three, I will not tolerate abuse and aggression in any form or guise. I will seek to terminate such misconduct instantly and unequivocally.

Number four, I will be assertive and unambiguous about my needs, wishes, boundaries and expectations from others. I will not be arrogant, but I will be confident. I will not be selfish and narcissistic, but I will love myself, I will care for myself, I will be confident I will not be selfish and narcissistic but I will love myself I will care for myself I will have compassion for myself.

Number five, I will get to know myself better all the time it's a lifelong project.

Number six, I will treat others as I want them to treat. I will try to lead by way of self-example.

And finally, number seven, if I'm habitually disrespected, abused, or if my boundaries are breached and ignored, I will terminate the relationship with the abuser forthwith.

Zero tolerance. No second chances will be the maxims of my self preservation.

Follow these seven principles and your life will look completely different and not only with the narcissist.

And now head over to the playlist and start by watching the oldest video, make your way up, progress across time to newer and newer videos until you come to the very end of your healing and recovery process and the very beginning of a new you.

Good luck.

The narcissist abscondes with your identity, steals your essence, implants in your mind a self-disparaging, harshly critical voice.

You find yourself laboring under a regime of internal slavery. You feel as if there is no way back to yourself, as if you have become someone else. You feel estranged, alienated, disoriented.

Is there a way back? Is there a formula for regaining yourself, for resurrecting?

This is the topic of today's video. The Nine Principle Path to Resurrection After Narcissistic Abuse.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of the first book ever about narcissistic abuse, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. A professor of clinical psychology.

Nine principles to resurrection.

And yes, the prognosis is good you will recover you will fully heal do not confuse change with healing you will be a changed person we are all changed and transformed by our experiences positive and beneficial as well as adverse.

And so you will have changed, but you will be fully recovered, utterly and totally functional, happy again or at the very least content, you can go back mentally, emotionally, psychologically, cognitively, you can go back to the point before you have met the narcissist.

You will of course carry with you forever the traumatic memories and the pain, the pain of having been objectified, having been commodified and commoditized, having been rendered an insignificant other.

That is a pain that will never go away. It's a form of grief and mourning which is prolonged.

But all the rest can be reconstructed. You can renovate yourself using these nine principles.

And they are divided into three groups the body the mind and functionality

Let's start with the body.

You need your body. You need your body as a collaborator in your process of healing.

And there are three principles attendant or pertinent to your body: attention, regulation, and protection.

Let's review these principles one by one.

Attention

Pay attention to your body. Be aware, monitor your breathing, your pulse, your perspiration, your exertions, your muscles, be attuned to your body.

Gradually develop a friendship and intimacy with every fiber and every tissue that comprise this magnificent receptacle that is your body.

It's a form of self-empathy coupled with self-soothing and self-comfiting.

Make your body your ally by getting to know it to perfection.

Number two: Regulation

Control your bodily processes. Breathe in, breathe out. Regulate to the best of your ability, your pulse and your breathing.

Think positive thoughts if need be. Fantasize and daydream if necessary, but focus on maintaining a strict regime of self-control and self-regulation.

Become your body's master, not your body's slave. It is a relationship of a parent and a child. There's a lot of love. There's a lot of recognition. There's a lot of intimate knowledge of each other.

But you're still the parental figure in this relationship.

Pay attention to your body. Every message it is sending you, every signal it is conveying, every information it is trying to share with you, directly and indirectly.

But at the same time, put limits, place boundaries, maintain mastery over the processes, the physiological and physical processes that make up your daily behavior.

And finally, protection.

Protect your body. It is in need of protection. It has been assailed and assaulted by the narcissist.

Narcissistic abuse causes multiple physiological, medical, and biological disruptions, some of which last very long.

Your body needs a friend, your body needs a doctor, a medical doctor in-house. Your doctor needs your body, your body needs your presence. Needs your presence to protect it.

Eat well. Exercise. Do not over-exert yourself. Do not punish your body. Do not be self-destructive. Do not hate your body, reject it and loathe it. Do not blame your body for anything.

It is doing its best under the circumstances.

Remember, your mind is incharge. Your mind is in charge. Your body is merely a reflection of psychological processes in your mind.

So place your mind above your body. And together, the mind-body complex, make it work for you.

Think of it as raising a child. You have a plan. You have principles. You have boundaries. You have rules.

Apply them. Apply them rigorously, but with a lot of love, compassionately, affectionately.

At the end of the day, your body is all you have. And your mind resides in it. It's not much good to have a healthy mind in an unhealthy body as the Romans knew.

So this is the first module, the three principles of your body, attention, regulation, protection.

Let's move on to your mind.

Your mind is compromised. Your mind is infected.

Narcissism, pathological narcissism is contagious. There's a contagion. There's a vector of transmission between the narcissist and you.

Your mind has been invaded by a Trojan horse. It is full with the narcissist's voice, the narcissist's intermittent reinforcement, the narcissistic fears and phobias attendant upon the narcissist's presence in your life and his misbehavior.

Your mind has been co-opted by the narcissist and he turned it against you.

For very long stretches of time, you felt that both your mind and your body have betrayed you and you began to be angry at them, even aggressive. You didn't recognize yourself anymore. You were terrified by the rapid dwindling of who you used to be and the emergence of a chimera, the emergence of some monster that you felt no affinity with, and yet was still you.

And so it's time to regain your mind and retake it. It's been subject to a hostile takeover. It's time to reverse the process.

Authenticity, positivity, mindfulness.

Let's review this principle one by one.

Authenticity.

Whenever you listen to your inner voices, or whenever you are conducting a dialogue with yourself, or whenever you're listening to a television show, reading something on the internet, or a book, whenever you're exposed to content whether generated internally or generated externally, stop. Stop. Do not absorb the content until you've asked yourself, is this me? Does this reflect who I am? Or even does this reflect who I should be, who I want to be?

And then if the answer is maybe, reject the content. If the answer is no, of course, delete, erase the content as if it has never existed. If the answer is yes, tread carefully.

Messaging from the inside, your internal voices, and from the outside, things people say to you, even good friends, even family, are suspect. Are suspect.

Remember you are the world's leading expert on yourself. No one knows you better than you do. Even if you think that you're not self-aware, even if you think that you're not self-aware, even if you think that you're not very good at recognizing yourself and not very good at being your own best friend and having your back, even if you mistrust and distrust yourself, because the experience of life has proven that you are not your best friend. Perhaps you're your own worst enemy.

Even then there is a degree of intimacy and acquaintance and knowledge that no one else possesses.

So ask yourself time and again, is this me? Is this voice inside my head that's telling me what to do, criticizing me, negating me, is this my voice? Is this person who is saying these things to me? Is he representative of who I am? Does it resonate with me in the appropriate manner?

Gradually, as you begin to be a lot more discriminating about internally generated content and externally generated content, you will reemerge. You will reemerge from the sludge of narcissistic abuse.

Suddenly your contours will be visible again. Day in and day out, you will feel more of you, more like you.

Suddenly, snippets of recognition, memories will emerge and you will be able to put them together in a coherent and cohesive framework which will amount ultimately to your core identity rediscovered.

The authenticity filtering, the requirement, the principle of asking all the time, is this me? Is this really me? Or is it what society expects of me? Is it the voice of my father, the voice of my mother? Is this harshly critical, negating, vitiating voicemine, all the narcissists? What my friends are telling me, my family cajole me, are these voices I should listen to? Do they resonate with my quiddity, with my essence? Or are they perceived as alien, somehow artificial or superficial? Even supercilious? Are these voices motivating or are these voices depressive? Do these voices put me down or let me sore and thrive?

Here's a simple principle. Here's a simple rule of thumb, actually, heuristic.

How can you tell if a bit of information, an internal voice, an external voice, are authentic or not? How can you tell if you should embrace the content of the information that you're exposed to?

If it is loving, if it treats you with compassion and consideration, if it is not self-rejecting and not self-loathing and not harshly self-critical and not sadistic, it's a voice that is probably authentic.

If the voice you're exposed to internally or externally, seeks, to drag you down, to put you down, to reduce you, to diminish you, to degrade you, to humiliate you, to shame you, to guilt trip you, that's not an authentic voice.

What do you do with non-authentic voices?

You shut them off. You shut them out. You do not listen to them.

Actively.

Not listening is an active predisposition or disposition. Exactly like listening. You should put an effort into not listening to these voices, negating them if necessary, verbalize this, say aloud, I am not listening to you, you're not my friend, you do not seek my well-being, you do not want me to thrive and flourish, you do not want me to be happy, and so go away.

You know in the Middle Ages in rites of exorcism the priest would say go away Satan, go away demon. It's the same, essentially.

Essentially, it's the same.

Verbalize this rejection. Verbalize it. Do not listen to these voices.

Gradually, as you fend them off and shut them out, these voices will recede and ultimately will be no more.

And what will be left behind are the authentic messages and signals and information and data and knowledge that comprise who you are, your true essence, your authentic self.

So this is principle number one, authenticity.

Number two, positivity.

Positivity is not naivety. Positivity is not gullibility. Positivity is not stupidity.

Positivity doesn't mean that you have to be a sucker. Positivity doesn't mean that you have to lie to yourself, deceive yourself into optimism.

That's not positivity, that's stupidity. That's being dumb.

Positivity means that you accept and realize that everything and everyone in life, in reality, in the universe, has a positive aspect and a negative aspect.

No one is all good, no one is all bad, nothing is all right, nothing is all wrong. No situation or circumstance or environment are all good and none of them are all evil.

This is splitting. It's an infantile primitive, misleading defense mechanism.

Don't do that.

When I say positivity, I mean seek out the positive aspects and dimensions and elements and ingredients and components of everything and everyone around you.

Don't ignore the negativity. Don't lie to yourself. Don't deceive yourself. That's not the aim here. Don't become polyanna-ish.

But do not on the other hand regard the world cynically, negatively, hatefully. Do not convince yourself that the world is a hostile, dangerous, hateful place. Acquire or reacquire some balance, or at least semblance of balance. Whenever you're down, whenever you're depressed, ask yourself, have I overlooked, have I ignored some positive aspects or elements of my situation whenever you come across someone and the interaction is less than pleasant discomforting maybe even threatening ask yourself have I overlooked or ignored some positive aspects in that person? You could spread positivity and by spreading positivity you are likely to get it back. Tenfold. Spreading positivity is just being civil. It's just about being civil. Being kind without being self-sacrificial, being compassionate without being self-harming. It's possible to do this. This balance is attainable and when you become more attuned to the interplay between positivity and negativity in the universe the Yin and Young when you begin to accept the gray zones and nuances and subtleties of existence, you will have self-medicated in a way, you have healed yourself the ability to realize that nothing is totally negative nothing is absolutely evil nothing is irredeemable no one is beyond absolution and redemption and recovery the, this realization makes the world more habitable, makes life more tolerable, makes existence less burdensome, more bearable. Again, this is not naivety psychopaths and narcissists are mostly evil or at least act in ways which are mostly evil there's no point in pretending otherwise there are some people who are mostly evil but there are many people who are mostly evil, but there are many people who are mostly good. Actually, the vast majority of people are mostly good. Inject positivity into your life is an exercise, as an assignment, as a task. Whenever you find yourself gravitating towards a splitting mechanism, a decotomous thinking, black and white thinking, stop, go back, observe yourself, and say, I'm watching the world through the wrong tinted glasses glasses that distort reality provide me the wrong information I'm going to now reacquaint myself with the world explore it discover it in a way that is far more balanced. The third element is mindfulness. If you're stuck in the past or if you're stuck in the future, you're doomed. You're doomed. Because the past is full of regrets and mistakes and remorse and negative affectivity, negative effects such as sadness and so on. The past will drag you down. When we recall the past, we tend to naturally gravitate towards nostalgia and depression and so. Past orientation is debilitating, paralyzing. Similarly, if you're a habitual fantasist, if you reside in fantasy and daydreaming, daydreaming involves planning, so it's more healthy, but fantasy. Then your divorce from reality. The future you inhabit has its roots in your actions in the present. If you're stuck in the future and you're ignoring the present, you will never get there. You will never get into the future. So both past orientation and future orientation are not good for you. They are dysfunctional. Focus on the present. Remember the three principles of the body? These three principles ground you in the present. If you have to listen to your breathing, if you have to be aware of the pulse of blood coursing through your entire body, if you regulate your body functions if you then you are grounded in the here and now you're grounded in the present mindfulness is about being grounded in the present in your present body in your present mind in your present circumstances, in your present mind, in your present circumstances, with the people who are present in your life. And it is from this groundedness, from this immersion in present tense that you can then launch yourself into the future and even revisit the past. But the present is your foundation. It's your anchor in the stormy sea of your life. It is a present that keeps you tethered to this globe and to yourself, more importantly.

Do not allow yourself to drift or to float away.

Remain grounded.

So, a brief recap.

The three principles of the body, attention, regulation and protection, the three principles of the mind, authenticity, positivity and mindfulness.

And there are three functions.

So this is the nine principle puff, the nine principle puff, three body functions, three mind functions and three systemic functions, body and mind and the three functions of these vigilant observer shielding sensor, reality sentinel.

Let's review them one by one.

Vigilant observer.

Always observe yourself, observe others, observe reality and do it vigilantly, not hypervigilantly, do not be a paranoid, do not be suspicious, do not be cynical, but vigilant in the sense that be ready for surprises, be prepared for transformations, observe not passively but proactively. Observe via curiosity and investigation.

It's another way of saying, be the scientist of your life.

Regard your life as a research topic and you are the scientists creating theories, testing them, and then creating better theories according to the outcomes.

Observe, investigate, explore, discover, be an active participant in your own life.

Do not let your life slide by the kind of background noise or someone else's theatre production or movie.

Do not enter anyone's fantasy, anyone's reality.

Stick to yourself, Stand your ground.

And then observe. And observe with alertness, intelligence, acumen, astuteness.

Don't be a passive receptacle or recipient or container of data.

Process it, make sense of it, and then investigate further.

The scientific method.

The shielding sensor, you need to filter out the kinds of inputs from the inside and from the outside that are harmful to you.

Certain voices inside you are your enemies. They don't want you to be happy, these voices. They don't want you to thrive. They are not interested in your well-being. They want to take you down. They want to punish you.

These are known collectively as the internalized bad object.

Censorship, do not allow them to express themselves. Definitely not really.

Certain voices from the outside. People masquerading as true friends, betrayal, don't let any of this get to you, do not attribute a truth value and do not give power, do not empower any such voices, any such input, any such feedback, any such information, censorship, internal and external.

The shielding sensor, your sensor should have your best interest in mind. Your sensor should seek to maximize your well-being.

Your senses should be able to provide an environment that is free of censoriousness, free of harsh criticism, free of sadistic put-downs, free of self-loathing, free of self-rejection, free of self-trashing, free of self-harm, free of self-defeat, definitely free of self-destructiveness.

These are the roles of the censor.

The sensor is like a firewall, internal and external.

And the aim of the sensor is to shield you, not to shield you from life itself, not to shield you from reality, to shield you from the pollutants and the contamination and the effluence of those who wish you ill, those who consider you a target for their frustration, aggression, envy, hatred, anger.

The sensor simply keeps out in a kind of benevolent confirmation bias.

It does not allow, the sensor does not allow, entry to anything that could degrade your internal environment and your mind.

And finally, the reality sentinel.

It is very easy for the victim of narcissistic abuse to drift away from reality.

If you ended up being a victim of narcissistic abuse, it means you're prone to fantasy. You're amenable to the chance of fantasy. You find fantasy irresistible, and you find reality less than tolerable, undesirable, boring.

And so you need a reality sentinel you need a guardian, a custodian, an internal voice who would tell you you're drifting away you're floating you're again fantasizing, you're again being grandiose, on the very contrary, self-degrading.

You are not grounded. You're not grounded. Your reality testing is getting impaired.

Stop. Stop. Observe. Absorb the information and process it.

Reality is there. The reality Sentinel, the reality guardian.

The role of this function is to maintain your reality testing. At all times to remind you that you cannot fully trust your grasp of reality. That you do need to reestablish the bridge to reality and the bridge to the world and the bridge to your own life.

You need to rebuild these bridges day in and day out. You need to maintain them and you need to cross them to visit the realms, the territories that they connect to.

You need to visit reality. You need to visit life. You need to visit the universe and you need to visit your internal landscape. You need to be grounded in reality and you need an advisor, a consultant, an inner voice in charge of your reality testing. And you need to listen to this voice.

It's easy to accomplish actually. It sounds as if it is easier said than done, but it's possible to do this.

You can accomplish this. You can attain, can create this reality sentinel.

Initially, you may need to obtain feedback from, for example, mental health practitioners and professionals, or very good friends who you trust, or family members who love you. Their feedback, their input, would gradually help you to construct and design and put together the reality Sentinel.

But at some stage, some point, you can do this on your own.

Whenever you feel that there is some conflict, whenever you feel uneasy between the way you think, the way you imagine, the way you remote, internal processes, and reality, whenever you feel there's a discrepancy, there's daylight between reality and what's going on inside your mind, trust reality. Your mind should be subordinate to input which is objective or input from reality.

Whenever reality contradicts your mind, whenever reality conflicts with your mind, whenever reality undermines challenges, even sabotages your mind, you should opt for reality.

Remember, reality is always a composite, always an agglomeration of positive and negative.

If you are getting information from the outside which is wholly negative, completely negative, it's not real. It's a fantasy.

If you are getting information from the outside that is completely positive, it's not real. It's a rose-tinted glass fantasy.

Reject information, reject data, reject signals, reject talk, speech acts, reject anything that's coming from the outside and anything that's coming from the inside, which is wholly negative or wholly positive. What's left is reality.

And then if what's left conflicts or contradicts or undermines or challenges, any element of your mind, your is wrong because reality is always right.

Sticking to reality being grounded in the present filtering out information that is fantastic, these are the building blocks of mental health.

So the three functions are a vigilant observer, a shielding sensor and a reality sentinel.

Let me summarize everything for you.

It's the nine principle path, the three body principles, attention, regulation, protection.

The three mind principles, authenticity, positivity and mindfulness, and the three systemic functions, vigilant observer, shielding sensor and reality sentinel.

Good luck. I hope someone takes this video and converts it into a course or a book or something in a much more elaborate manner.

Take care.