Shared Fantasy with Narcissistic Canines and Other Narcissists (with Raquel Petersen Gesteira)

These pack dynamics, do you think they explain behaviors such as trekking all the way back home from thousands of miles away or saving a baby when the house is on fire, because such things have been documented?

I think in a they're very pack driven, very much so. So they have very clear references of places, people, and individuals that they consider to be part of their own pack unit.

So dogs that grow up in family dynamics with children in between, if they're raised properly, absolutely they will defend everybody.

And this is another argument that a lot of people in dog training have.

They think they are training for defense, like a lot of people do protection training.

But a dog that's really confident and has that drive, you don't need to train him. He'll do it naturally.

It's just he has to be very confident to do that but he will protect his unit in his own way if the situation arises.

So if it's a baby, a tree's the house is on fire, the dog would save the baby because baby belongs to the pack, it's part of the pack, the dog will try to get him out.

Yes, if this is a dog with strong nerves, which we call them strong nerves, or it's confident enough.

Because I think one of the things in the human element, if you get 100 people, you're probably going to get three or four people that are really confident.

Everybody else is just going to be a follower or not going to be sure enough.

It's not different in dogs.

So you're going to have those dogs that are going to be able to take on the difficult challenges.

The other ones are just going to be around it and make sure everything's okay, but they're not going to be the one to jump into the fire.

But yes, they will do that.

And I think it's kind of like the same with places. A lot of dogs get lost. I've seen that, and they can find their way back home if they're in the vicinity or they're familiar with the territory.

But yes, yes, that is true.

A propos of territory, dogs are supposed to be territorial.

Yes.

And you've just said about five minutes ago that if you were to transfer a dog from one family to another, or from one unit to another, whatever, from one owner to another, they adopt, they adjust.

How do they give up on the previous territory so easily?

It depends because, well, it depends on how it's raised.

If you raise a dog right, it's your territory, not theirs. Of course, they're going to recognize as the territory that they inhabit. But if you raise them right, they're going to understand that at the end of the day, it's yours.

But let's say the dog is raised very wildly. People don't put in the left rules, just leave him be and they take over the territory is his.

But, the owner dies. Somebody has to take that dog out of that place, ship it somewhere else. It's going to try to adapt and adjust and he's probably going to try to take over the next territory that he's put in because they do migrate. So, not willingly sometimes, but they do it for survival. Remember, it's all about survival. The owner's not there, territories left, somebody took him out of there, out, you know, against his will. He just has to do, try to make it better somewhere else.

Why would he protect the territory that belongs to you? Why would the dog protect the territory?

What would it when we in my job as a dog trainer I always tell people that this is not the dog's job, it's my job.

Now, a lot of people don't agree with me because you can't put a dog, a lot of people want a dog to protect their territory.

The challenge is when you give the dog the territory to protect, I'm giving him everything. I'm giving him the top position in this hierarchy. And it's not just the territory. He gets to decide everything. Who comes in, who comes out, who gets the food. He can come at me if I challenge him.

And this is something that doesn't work for domestic dogs. If you want to live with a dog in an apartment like I am, I can't just give that to them because otherwise I can't get any visitors here. I can't do anything. Delivery, people are going to get bitten.

So you have to, protection training usually, which is not my field. I don't do protection work, but protection dogs have to learn the middle ground. It's very difficult because dogs do not, they don't have a multi-color world. It's just black and white. I'm the leader or you are. You defend me or I defend you.

So the in between is very difficult for them. That's why a lot of people that want to dabble in protection, they don't do it right. Eventually the dog will hurt somebody because they don't know how to define that.

If I pick up a puppy and raise it, it's not going to naturally protect me and my territory.

I have to raise it to protect me in my territory.

Depends. You might have a dog with weak nerves, which we would consider in the human world, a person that's not very confident, a shy person, somebody that doesn't see himself as ready enough to do that kind of work.

That dog is not going to perform well if you allow that dog to take on that role. He's not going to know what to do. He's going to get nervous. He's going to bite the wrong person. He's going to bark too much. He's going to be too much, too agitated.

In a sense, if you want a dog to protect you, the dog has to have a lot of skills. He has to be silent. He has to be confident. If danger is coming towards him, he cannot freak out and be, ah, somebody's coming.

So a weak nerve dog, if you put him in that position, he's just going to put you at double risk.

So not, not every dog is equipped for that. That's why they need a unit. That's why a lot of them are not, not, most of them are going to be behind.

When I say behind is there's going to be a couple of dogs that are going to know exactly what to do. And the other ones are just going to help them.

Right.

Some of the back dogs that we call them, some of these dogs are just alert dogs. There are dogs that are just going to be surrounding the area and going to come back and say hey there's something on that side go over there and try to fix it for me but he's just going to be that part that dog so there's a lot of elements that make a good pack but not every single dog will be able to perform that.

That's why we have to recognize who they are and understanding the kind of dog you have will kind of define what kind of future you're going to have with that dog.

And when you match dogs with people, you have to understand both because a lot of people, unfortunately, they get dogs with very strong nerves and very weak people.

So this is what happens the dog takes over everything And then that person's life become they become a hostage of the dog now they cannot go anywhere the dog is the one that defines even the walking path.

The dog doesn't want to go right. The person goes left.

So it's kind of like the same thing that you see in what we call toxic relationships. It's just the person is completely taken over by that relationship.

Now, I've met people that quit having relationships, quit dating, quit receiving guests. I heard so many crazy stories about people that gave up everything for their dogs, like sleeping in the bed.

I had a friend that quit, broke up her relationship with her boyfriend because he wanted to have sex with her she didn't want the dog to be out of the room and he said I'm not comfortable I don't feel comfortable with this the animal is here and she's like well but she sleeps here every night he's like yeah but I just need a few minutes and she's like no I want the dog so see what I mean? Like I heard stories like that from men and women.

So it's not a gender thing.

A lot of people getting to relationships with dogs in a way trying to replace something that didn't work in a human world.

My relationships with humans didn't work. I don't trust humans anymore. Humans are all bad. Dogs are all good. Doesn't matter how crazy things they do in my house they're never going to leave because in a way even if you get a German Shepherd and he's in your house he's a hostage to you now he can't leave you so there's no abandonment anymore it doesn't matter if my life is a mess I got somebody now.

So this is one of the dysfunctiones that happens in a dog training world because we go into these people's homes and we expect to see a healthy thing going on with the dog and it's not there. It's not there. The dog became a replacement for relationships that in a human realm did not work.

That's one of the reasons why I started to study this because a lot of dog trainings kept saying well maybe we need to suggest that our clients go see a therapist.

I said, sure, I understand that, but I want to understand that too, because I want to do my job in a better way. I want to see the signs right when I get in.

And the first sign, which is the first thing that caught my eye, was that detachment from reality.

I started to see people not really looking into the reality of the fact with the dog and say, oh, no, that's fine. This is just like, he doesn't bite anybody. It's okay. Oh, he's just in a bad mood today.

You know, the same thing that we see victims of, for example, narcissistic abuse that they keep validating and justifying all the bad things that the partner does simply because they just don't want to deal with it. They don't want to deal with the reality which is in the case of a dog I have to fix this I have to do it different.

They don't want to lose that illusion of the perfect relationship.

Very interesting.

There has been a steep rise in pet ownership.

Yes.

Especially cats, but second place is dogs.

Why do you think that is? You mentioned one reason.

These are substitutes relationships.

Yes. Far less complex because you can idealize the pet, you idealize the pet. You can generalize the pet. You can say all dogs are the same, you know, and they're wonderful.

And then it makes it a lot easier to manage the relationship because you're essentially having a relationship with yourself.

But I think there may be another reason, and I would like to get your input on this, at the same time that there's a steep rise in pet ownership, there's an even steeper rise in the race of narcissism in the general population.

So it would seem that narcissists would get on well with pets because they're both transactional.

They speak the same language, basically, language of inter-relationship, interpersonal relationship. So they can understand each other easily.

I mean, dogs as you describe them, have a narcissistic mindset, not in the grandiose sense. They don't think they're gold but they're transactional and they are not very emotional they're hypo emotional and they're very territorial protective of territory and they establish hierarchies and all these are very common among narcissists. These are narcissistic behaviors, definitely.

And so I think the more narcissistic people become, the easier they feel about owning a pet because it's the kind of relationship they can make sense of.

They can't make head or tails of relationships with other people, but they can fully understand a dog or a cat.

On a superficial level, yes.

They think it's that easy because what makes them gravitate to dogs or cats or any kind of pets is that I don't have to give myself too much. I don't have to put in a lot of effort. He's just going to be here. People are difficult. I have to understand them, do with their emotions, skater to their needs. Dogs and animals are not going to be like that. I'm just going to have them here. Give me everything I want and I really don't have to do much back.

This is their superficial idea of that relationship.

This is maternal unconditional love.

Yes. Narcissus generally seek maternal, unconditional love.

They're trying to coerce the intimate partner to provide unconditional love.

And they do it by testing the partner.

They abuse the partner. They traumatize the partner. They cheat on the partner.

And it's like a kid who says now let's see if mommy really loves me. I'm going to misbehave. I'm going to throw a temper tantrum, going to destroy the whole house and let's see if she if mother will stick or will stick around. let's see if she if she abandons me.

If she abandons me, that means she was a bad mother to start with. If she sticks around, if she stays, despite everything I'm doing, then probably it means that she's a good mother who is capable of providing unconditional love, love that is not conditioned on performance.

And so I think the same relationship is with pets. Like pets provide you with, well, dogs provide you with unconditional love. That's what you believe.

You convince us.

Well, I think people think that that's what they're going to get from dogs, but that's just not true.

Yeah, they idealize the dog.

Absolutely. Yeah, they idealize the dog.

The same way they idealize the intimate partner.

This is a shared fantasy. What you have with a pet is a shared fantasy.

You love bomb the pet, you idealize the pet, then you expect unconditional love from the pet.

And so it's a shared fantasy.

Only this particular shared fantasy can last forever because a pet is incapable of essentially pushing back or talking back or arguing with you or criticizing you, disagreeing with you as a narcissist and so on.

So it's the ideal partner.

Let me tell you this. This is interesting that you touch on that because the cycle, idealization, devaluation, and discard also happens in the pet world.

Because after the share fantasy is created and they bring the dog in, now they're going to start seeing, I think it's crazy because it's the same process.

Now the dog peed on your carpet, peed on your bed, parked at the neighbor, started doing, now he's not perfect anymore.

Now they want that internal object, like you say all the time, that they created that snapshot of a dog in their heads but the dog in reality now is creating chaos in their lives so it's very common in our world to see people get a dog and the dog doesn't last a year because it becomes a problem now they give the dog away and they get another dog and another dog literally the exact same process as you see the narcissist doing with their intimate partner they value the dog and discarded them.

And relationship with the cats are very interesting, because with dogs what you have is a shared fantasy, obviously.

You idealize the dog.

And then if the dog turns out to be unruly or somehow independent-minded, if you wish, have a personality of its own, would not succumb to all your wishes immediately and so on so forth, then you would devalue the dog and discard the dog as he would with an intimate partner.

With a cat, it's a lot more elaborate, I think, because cats, it's difficult to idealize cats. And people don't really idealize kids they admit that cats are psychopathic they are self-centered they are you know so it's there's no bonding here in the dog sense.

I think with the cats, you have the exact opposite dynamic.

You have submission. It's a submissive relationship, where the cat is most definitely the ruler. The cat rulesthe roost. Cat rules the territory.

And the owner of the cat is at the disposal of the cat. He's a servant to the cat. It's a co-dependent relationship, actually, with the cat.

What I see, I've met people that had dogs and cats. The cat absolutely runs the house entirely.

And the cat sometimes is the only individual in the household that can actually discipline the dog.

Now, I've also seen, because I know you talk a lot about stages, right? A narcissist can be psychopathic at times. He can be borderline at times.

And this is another question that I have for you is the dynamic between two narcissists because I see them modifying or being in different positions in the dog world.

I've seen that sometimes they don't want to because a lot of people do the value and discard the dog really quickly in a year but some people attack they don't want to be alone right because we know all the Cluster B suffered from that.

So because they don't want to go through, if they discard the dog, now I don't have anybody.

So what can I do to avoid the devaluation and discard?

I have to switch reality. I have to switch roles.

And to a certain extent, they become more submissive.

So how does that play out?

I know it's not a straight line of behavior. They fluctuate, but I have seen that also some people that are usually some of these people, they can be actually quite rude and to a certain extent, anti-social in a human world yet you're completely submissive to the dog.

It's almost like two sides of a coin.

In the dog relationship they are like doormats, literally the dog does whatever he wants with that person.

Even more common with cats.

I've had the opportunity to observe people with cats close, from up close.

I've never come across an owner of a cat who dominated the cat. I've never come acrossa single case.

And I think definitely it's a submissive codependent relationship.

The transitions between Cluster B and not only Cluster B, the transitions between personality disorders, because a narcissist, for example, could become a paranoid. And paranoid personality disorder is not clustered. It's another cluster.

So the transition between personality disorders, that many narcissists become schizoid. Schizoid personality disorder is cluster C.

It's when the narcissist cannot obtain supply, a state known as narcissistic collapse, and the narcissist starts to avoid the world, to withdraw, and then isolates himself and begins to self-supply and so on, so on for all intents and purposes, develops schizoid personality disorder.

So these transitions are because personality disorders defend against other personality disorders.

So in life, typically, you start with the equivalent of borderline personality disorder as a child. You're emotionally dysregulated, you're a bit morbid. Suicidal ideation is pretty common in this age group and so on.

It's all an outcome of dysfunctional households, abusive and traumatizing or otherwise negligent and so on.

But also households that idolize and pedestalize the child, households that instrumentalize the child, or parentify the child, any mistreatment of the child, any wrong upbringing, leads to ultimately, in a minority of the children, luckily, leads to the emergence of a personality disorder.

But the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the book we use in the United States, is 20 to 25 years behind the current knowledge. It's an antiquated book. Absolutely wrong.

Whereas we have a much better diagnostic book called the ICD, the international classification of diseases, where there are no personality disorder, no differential diagnosis.

What you have is a list of traits. And then like Lego, you combine the traits to get a specific idiosyncratic profile of an individual.

So if you take antagonism and desociality and anankastia, you get an anankastia, is compulsive, compulsion obsession.

So if you combine these three, you get the equivalent of a narcissism.

But it's not called narcissists, It's like the equivalent of a narcissist.

And this is a much more realistic view of humanity.

We're in flux. We're constantly flowing between states.

The child begins with a borderline state and then to defend against the borderline state, because emotional dysregulation is unbearable. It's intolerable.

So to defend against the borderline state because emotional dysregulation is unbearable, it's intolerable, so to defend against it, it's also frightening.

The child develops narcissistic defenses.

So every narcissist has a borderline template, a borderline foundation.

Otto Kernberg, the father of the field, suggested that narcissism is a defense against borderline, and I fully agree.

So here's one example where we cannot say someone has narcissistic personality disorder. It goes hand in hand with a borderline foundation.

And when this narcissist is confronted with stress, anxiety, humiliation, shaming, narcissistic injury, and above all, mortification, in other words, being shamed and humiliated abruptly, especially in public, when all these happen, the defenses of the narcissists crumble.

And what's left is the infantile foundation of borderline.

And the narcissist becomes indistinguishable clinically from a borderline.

He begins to emotionally dysregulate. He develops suicidal ideation, mood disorders such as depression, which are very common in borderline, and so on and so forth, becomes a borderline.

And then if the narcissist cannot secure supply, a regular, uninterrupted flow of quality narcissistic supply, attention, adulation, admiration, whatever, then he becomes a schizophrenic.

And if the narcissist cannot obtain supply, sometimes the solution is to become a paranoid.

Because when you are paranoid, you're at the center of a malevolent conspiracy. You're very important. It is a self-aggrandizing posture.

Paranoids are very grandiose because they think they matter. They think they're important.

Theories after me. I mean, look at me.

Yes, I've seen that.

It's show off. It's a look at me posture.

So this is also a solution in narcissism.

So it's absolutely counterfactual, not to say stupid, to insist that the personality disorders are demarcated, their differential diagnosis. That is completely, completely untrue.

Yeah, the paranoid part of it is very true. I've come across people, I mean, I'm nobody to diagnose anybody, but I've seen that play out.

All of a sudden, there's a paranoia there and everybody's after me, everybody's out to attack me, and you just put it perfectly. It brings that supply back to them.

It's all of a sudden not the most important person. That's why everybody's after me.

This is called self-supply. When you come to take the supply in the outside world, you supply yourself.

You become your own, I call it self-audiency. You become your own audience.

And one of the major self-supply solutions is paranoia.

Oh my gosh.

If you convince yourself that everyone is after you or some group is conspiring against you or whatever, it's narcissistic supply because you're at the center of attention. You're in the limelight.

This is so, you know what, this is so perfect because in the dog training world after the digital era, a lot of people started putting out content. I mean, I've had my youtube channel for 10 years. A lot of people started posting their training videos and stuff all that stuff online.

And obviously when you start to do that, you expose yourself. So now you're talking openly about how you're training a dog and you're showing all that stuff.

And there's always a divide or some people are going to be against discipline or against punishment, blah, blah, blah, about all that stuff that you know about.

And you see kind of like a trend in the dog, which is everywhere, but in the dog training world, it happens this way.

They put out videos purposely kind of overboard, too much.

You know, we know the information. I've always been very open about what I post online, and I'm very transparent.

But some people kind of push that boundary to a point where he's going to get a backlash, and that becomes that supply.

All of a sudden, I'm in the center of attention. Everybody's attacking me. Look at me. All these people are trying to destroy me, blah, blah, blah.

Ohmy God.

Being provocative is a way to elicit narcissistic supply from the environment, of course.

And you know what I hear?

Being obnoxious.

Some of these people, the younger generation especially, they actually came to me and say, oh, I don't like that stuff when it's too boring. I like to post stuff that's provocative.

They come out and they just say it to you.

I mean, it took me a long time to understand this process. And you helped me a lot because I always heard you say they show you who they are in a way they do show you if you pay attention if you know what to look for in the beginning is right there you see that they gravitate to that space of chaotic conversations all the time especially online they gravitates that if everything is stable and it's just it's just boring they just don't want to be there.

And this brings me to another question that I want to ask you.

But I haven't answered your first one.

Oh, I'm sorry. Please, I'm sorry. You're in the driver's seat.

I've learned to keep my word with dog trainers. I mean, I don't want them on my wrong side.

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So, reality. You asked about reality.

Yes.

What is this concept of detachment from reality? You can't wrap your mind around it and so on so forth.

You can't wrap your mind around it because you're embedded in reality.

Here I'm a bit of an iconoclast and a bit off the mainstream. What I'm about to say is not the mainstream.

I believe that to remain immersed in reality, to remain embedded in reality, to be able to continuously interact with reality, you need to invest a lot of energy.

It's an energy-consuming enterprise. It doesn't come naturally.

I disagree that it comes naturally.

You have to filter out a lot of information, so you have to be highly selected. Then you have to frame this information within theories, theories of the minds of other people.

This process is known as mentalization. What makes other people tick? Theories about the world, theories about relationships.

You have many, many theories. You're like a huge university internally. You have many theories.

And these theories are known as internal working models.

That internal working models, these theories, require maintenance, investment and application.

You need to apply these theories all the time. It's a hugely time and energy consuming process.

When you're exposed to stress, anxiety, when you feel threatened, even when people disagree with you, vocally and vociferously, ostentatiously, when you're humiliated and shamed, in short, when you experience what we call in psychology,violence, your energy levels drop.

You allocate energy to cope with the emergency, with the exigency, and you are left with very little energy.

And because you are left with little residual energy, you can no longer maintain the models that allow you to interact with reality, allow you to remain in reality.

As long as everything goes smoothly, relatively smoothly, of course, as long as, you know, there are hiccups here and there, but more or less everything is okay, you have a lot of energy available, and you deploy this energy in activating and operating your internal working models so that you are able to cope and exist in and subsist in the world, in reality.

But when you're in bad shape, this no longer works.

Energy is finite. The energy you have is finite.

So it no longer works. You know, simply don't have enough energy.

At that point, your perception of reality is going to flicker, you know, on the old televisions, the black and white... when you get this flicker.

Your perception of reality is going to begin to flicker. You're going to gradually lose touch with reality.

We don't perceive reality as it is. We perceive reality as it is processed through our models, internal models.

And if these internal models are deactivated owing to a lack of energy, then you don't perceive reality. End of story.

What you do perceive at that point is the internal dissonance or the internal conflicts.

And this is the permanent state of the narcissist. This is what, because a narcissist has to invest huge amounts of energy in maintaining a self-concept, a self-image or a self-perception that has nothing to do with reality. That is grandiose and inflated and delusional and counterfactual and frankly crazy.

To maintain this self-perception or self-concept, we call it self-concept. To maintain this self-perception or self-concept, we call it self-concept. To maintain this self-concept, the narcissist invests every grain, every watt, and every element of energy that he has.

It consumes everything. It leaves no energy for any other task, not for relationships, not for reality, not for anything.

The narcissist constantly scans for insults and slides and challenges and attacks and disagreements and criticism that may undermine the grandiose counterfactual delusional self-concept.

And that's a full-time job. It's not time left or energy left for anything, not even for other people, not for reality.

So the narcissist's solution is to say, I don't have energy to cope with external reality and I don't have energy to cope with external people, external objects.

External objects means people out there. I don't have this because I'm very busy maintaining this totally delusional crazy view of myself, you know, and I'm very fragile. And if I were to fail in this, I would fall apart. I would crumble.

So I need to do this. Like, this is the core of my existence. I don't have energy to cope with external objects, with other people.

So what I'm going to do? I'm going to convert them into internal objects. As internal objects, they are anyhow part of the scenery, they're any of a part of my mind, which is the recipient of all my energy.

Similarly, I can't cope with reality because it requires a lot of energy. So I'm going to pretend that reality is not real and there's no need to invest any energy in it. Instead, I'm going to create a fantasy within my mind.

And again, it's a figment of my mind, an element, an ingredient, a component of my mind, and all my energy goes towards sustaining my mind, so anyhow it's going to benefit from the allocation of energy. It's simply an allocation problem.

And so everything happens inside the mind of the narcissist. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens externally.

And in this sense, and I'm about to finish, I see the treatment, but in this...

No, no, I'm just because I have, I want to, I want you to continue that.

No, no, I'm verbose. I tend to over over pick. I love the sound of my voice. What can I do?

So, and this leads to what we call a paracosm, which is an alternative reality, a virtual reality, within which the narcissist exists, and only within which the narcissist feels alive or feels that outside of it, the narcissist feels dead.

Now, this is very, very reminiscent of another type of mental health disorders, known as psychotic disorders. This is a form of psychosis.

Because what happens in psychosis? A psychotic person, you know, what happens?

The psychotic has a voice in his mind. There's a voice in his mind. He says, it's not in my mind. There's a voice in his mind. He says, it's not in my mind. It's coming from the outside.

The psychotic has an image, see something in his mind's eye. He says, it's not inside my head. I can see it. It's out there.

So the psychotic confuses the internal space with the external space, which is exactly what happens to the narcissist.

The narcissist confuses the external space with the internal space.

It's the opposite direction of psychosis. Psychosis is from the inside out and the narcissist is from the outside in.

But the confusion is the same.

And that's why Otto Kernberg, the aforementioned Otto Kernberg, suggested that narcissism is a form of pseudo-psychosis, almost psychosis.

It's a very, very, very serious mental illness.

People think that to be a narcissist is to be an a whole or an obnoxious person. That's not the core of narcissism. That is actually little to do with narcissism, because many narcissists are charming and very manipulative.

That's not narcissism.

Narcissism is possibly the second most egregious and dangerous and destructive mental illness after schizophrenia.

It's that bad. It's that bad.

And people don't realize it. They team up with narcissists. They sleep with narcissists. They create couples with narcissists. They have children with narcissists.

It's just a bit arrogant and a bit insensitive and a bit obnoxious. What to do?

Everyone has idiosyncrasies. Everyone is special in some way.

You know, so that's his specialty. He's a pleasant person. It's not about that.

It's very, it's a seriously mentally ill person and dangerous in this sense.

This is so profound because I've met people like that before and in the beginning it's just like you said you think oh it's just a weird guy it's just a weird person that's just a little bit rude or a little bit unpleasant but the closer you get to these people, you start to understand that there's really something deeper than that.

And the question I was going to follow up is, is that the reason why some of them or a lot of them display depression? And they go through these cycles of, I've heard some of them go at least they say I'm super depressed and then all of a sudden they go through this cycles of they just don't want to be with anybody else and they just down all the time they feel bad all the time is that a state that they go through?

Because what you just described is unbearable. It's just putting all that in to maintain that image and not having energy for anything else.

Does that really what's behind the characteristics that they display which is they start a lot of things they don't finish anything they start up a bunch of projects they don't finish anything they don't last in jobs and in relationships and friendships everything is it's constantly being recycled and recreated i can only imagine how mucheffort that you have to put in to be constantly going through the motions.

And is that why they become depressed all the time? Or is there a perpetual state of depression behind that?

Before we proceed, on the other hand, I don't want to exaggerate the number of narcissists.

You would find online nonsense like 16% of all people are narcissists, one of six, and other such nonsense.

We should distinguish between people with narcissistic personality disorder, which are the people I'm talking about, and only about them. I'm not referring to other types of people.

And people with a narcissistic style.

These are people who are eh-holes and jerks and obnoxious and dis-empathic and insensitive and exploitative and envious and everything, but they're not narcissists.

They don't have this devastation of the inner landscape. They don't have this wasteland between their ears.

They have a self. They're embedded in reality. They perform. And they do have a modicum of empathy, emotional empathy, effective empathy, and so on.

But they have a narcissistic style.

They're not someone you would like to have a beer with in a pub or, you know, date, maybe.

And the third category is what is known as dark personalities, dark triad and dark tetrad personalities, which are not narcissists and they are not psychopaths.

Again, if you go online, I was shocked to see people with PhDs in psychology spewing nonsense and saying the dark triad is narcissists plus psychopath.

No, they're not. They are subclinical. In other words, these are people who cannot be diagnosed with narcissism or with psychopathy, but they have a combination of a narcissistic style, psychopathic style, and Machiavellianism. And sometimes sadism.

So these are different groups, and you can't generalize from one to the other.

And I focus entirely on the first group, people with narcissistic personality disorder. These are the mentally ill people. And they are anywhere between 1 to 3% of the general population.

Even in studies, regrettably, studies that I read and review, the wannabe scholars who offer the studies confuse the three groups egregiously. So it's a mess out there.

Second comment I'd like to make, half of all narcissists are women.

We used to think that women in the 1980s and up to the year 2000, more or less, we used to believe that 75% of people with narcissistic personality disorder are men.

And there was a reason for that, because narcissism is very manly, it's very masculine. It's about competitiveness, it's about ruthlessness, and callousness, and ambition and envy. And these are male things, you know, used to be at least.

But today we know that the number is probably evenly divided and that women are underdiagnosed for cultural reasons, cultural and social reasons.

We don't expect women to be narcissists, so we diagnose them with borderline.

Similarly, in borderline, the division is half and half.

Only, we don't expect men to be emotionally dysregulated. So we say, oh, it's not emotional dysregulation, it's a narcissist, so.

But it's half and half.

Coming back to your question, after this long detour, but essential detour, I think, to dispel some myths.

There was a school in clinical psychology a while back, like a few decades ago, that suggested that narcissistic personality disorder is indeed a reaction to depression. It's a form of depressive disorder. There was a school. It's no longer accepted.

But it is true that narcissists react with mood disorders, especially depression, but not only depression.

For example, there is something called narcissistic elation, which is a form of euphoria.

And so if you need to compare narcissism to any mood disorder, the closest would be bipolar.

They kind of oscillate between a manic phase where they can do no wrong, and they're amazing, and they are at the top of the world, and they're going to conquer the universe, and so that's a a money phase where they come up with her brain schemes that never mature and never, you know, end anywhere. And they constantly change jobs and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and you name it. And they're all over the place.

And so this is a manic phase in narcissism.

And then definitely you have the depressive phase where the narcissists becomes, as I've said earlier, several times, a schizoid.

In other words, avoidant, the narcissist withdraws from the world, isolates himself or herself, and constricts his or her life.

And this is a reaction to failure. Failure to obtain supply, narcissistic supply, and that is known as narcissistic collapse.

Or having been shamed and humiliated abruptly, especially in public, and this is known as narcissistic mortification, or having been challenged and criticized or disagreed with, and that is known as narcissistic injury.

So in all these three conditions, if they are sufficiently harsh and severe, or if they're sufficiently regular, the narcissist would withdraw from the world, isolate himself in order to avoid further damage to the fragile structure, the house of cards, the precarious balance that passes for personality with the narcissists.

So yes, depression is an integral part of narcissism, but also you have mania, you have manic depression also.

And I think we failed until very recently. We failed to grasp this dimension of narcissism.

The effect of mood disorders on the narcissists' conduct, emotions, cognitions was very, very neglected. You can't find anything about mood disorders such as depression in the literature, even the primary literature, such as, for example, Freud or Kohut or Kernberg, you can't find anything. There's no mention of depression or anything.

The first time depression made its entrance was in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, where they finally accepted that narcissists are not happy-go-lucky all the time, that they are not what we call egosyntonic, happy with who they are, comfortable in their own skin all the time. And that there are vast, long periods of time where they are extremely unhappy and dysphoric, and you know, want to die in suicidal ideation sometimes.

So we're beginning to create a much more nuanced view of pathological narcissism than we had only 20 years ago, much more nuanced view.

For example, the whole concept of covert narcissists, vulnerable, fragile, shy narcissist, is relatively new.

It was first suggested in the 80s, which is pretty new.

Take into account that narcissism, pathological narcissism, was first described in 1897 by Havelock Ellis. That's like 130 years ago.

And yet the first time we had an inkling of covert narcissism was only 40 years ago.

Like 90 years, we didn't get it.

That there are narcissists who are actually very shy and terrified, like the equivalent of social anxiety, and that they're very passive-aggressive and they're very envious and they're seething with resentment for having failed to secure supply. They're in a constant state of collapse and they are therefore depressed all the time and so all.

We've completely failed to isolate this variant of narcissism.

And so the field is in my view still adolescent. I don't feel that we know everything there is to know. I think we're extremely powerful. I think it's as somebody from the outside trying to understand. I think right now, whoever jumps on the internet will find just about everything, just about every opinion, because it became also a trend. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody has a different point of view. There's a lot of narcissists online with their own channels and talking about their own experiences. For covert narcissists there's another like it's almost is a separate trend a lot of people talk about that and then some of the discussion forums.

I think there are generic explanations, but I always came back to you because you're the only one that really made me understand in detail what this means.

I was the first.

I was the first.

I opened the first website on narcissistic personality disorder. I started my work in the 80s. I opened the first website in the 90s and I published my book in the first edition in 1999.

When I came on the scene, there was nobody else. And there was nobody else for 10 years. Like I've been alone for 10 years.

And I opened all the major support groups, the first support groups ever, by myself, six of them over this period of 10 years.

And I had to invent a whole new language because there was no language to describe any of this.

Narcissistic abuses, a phrase that I coined, somatic narcissists, cerebral narcissists, you name it.

I mean, 90%, not 100, but 90% of the language in use today, that includes hovering, flying monkeys and so on was invented by me.

Yeah, I always go back to your material because I think it's the most rich.

I simply have a much longer experience, much longer view and unfortunately what I see today online is a corruption of the field completely.

And I'm very unhappy with it. Very unhappy.

I would generalize and say that something like 95% of the information online is nonsense, is rubbish, is misinformation.

And I'm very unhappy with that. It's a huge problem.

I think there is a way to market everything and people just jump on and they see a possibility of reach and you know money grabbing stuff and that's what they go in for unfortunately.

But I want to ask you something about the dynamic between two narcissists.

I hear a lot of people say that it's impossible for two narcissists to maintain a relationship long-term.

But at the same time, I also heard you say, I was watching one of thesewe over it last night, you're talking about the contagious effect of being around a narcissist.

So which one would be the most, the correct statement or close to correct statement?

Maybe two narcissists cannot sustain a long-term relationship. However, a narcissist is going to in a sense contaminate the other person and make that other person to a certain extent his mirror or become a narcissist in a way in order for them to sustain that relationship long term.

Because I kind of see couples that I've been around couples that when they started I kind of figured one of the people one of let's say the guy was narcissistic and I see the complete transformation of the person long term like after four five six years you see that woman become just like him and to the point that you say, which one is the original narcissist? Where did it start?

Because as of right now, I just can't tell. It's almost like they became the same.

On the outside, you see that it's almost like a theater because in between them is very tried. There's really no, not much going on between that you can tell.

If you go to their home and you be around them too much, you can tell they're completely separate individuals. There's no intimacy. There's nothing there. Like you say, it's an absence, like on both sides. Now it's not a presence. It's an absence. it's a double absence.

So how does that play out? Is it possible for two original narcissists to gravitate to each other and be around them forever or I mean long term or what we see is the effect of contagion.

Two narcissists of the same kind cannot coexist. It's a train wreck.

So, for example, Donald Trump and Elon Musk will not last long.

Oh, yes. I agree with you.

These are two narcissists of the same kind. They are known as overt, grandiose narcissists. In the case of Elon Musk is probably also a sadist, but in the case of Donald Trump, it's only overt, grandiose narcissism.

And they will not last long. Similarly, two covert narcissists will not last long. Two somatic narcissists will not last long. Two cerebral narcissists will compete for narcissistic supply.

I'm more intelligent than you, no, I'm more intelligent, and so.

So the general rule is two narcissists of the same type is a train wreck waiting to happen.

But two narcissists of different types can and do survive in long-term relationships, sometimes very happily.

So for example, if you have an overt, grandiose narcissist and what is known as an inverted narcissist. It's another phrase I coined.

An inverted narcissist is a type of a covert narcissist. And what she does, she obtains her supply from the primary, the main narcissist in the relationship.

So the main narcissist, the overt, grandiose narcissist in the couple, is, for example, very famous. He's a celebrity.

And so his wife, who is an inverted narcissist, also a narcissist, she would get her supply from the fact that she is his wife.

Oh, okay.

You get it? It's like in Germany, in Germany in the 19th century, when you were married to a medical doctor, they called you Frau Doctor. I mean, you could have been a cleaning lady, but you were frau doctor.

So this is vicarious supply, supplied by proxy. That's an example of a relationship that has longevity, vitality, the members of the couple feed each other.

The primary overt, grandiose narcissist is out there, harvesting narcissistic supply, eliciting and generating and garnering it, brings it home, and then his partner, who is an inverted narcissist, essentially a covert narcissist, consumes this supply and she has her supply and he has his supply and it's the same supply.

So that's an example.

Another example is a cerebral narcissist having a committed relationship with a somatic narcissist.

The cerebral narcissist is asexual, completely uninterested in sex, whereas the somatic narcissists can think of nothing else but sex.

And it fits the cerebral because the cerebral doesn't want to provide the somatic narcissist with sex. He finds it, you know, a waste of time or he's asexual.

So he says, great, she can find sex elsewhere. That's wonderful. I'm off the hook. I'm off the hook here.

This is something that I want to ask. I'm sorry to interrupt because this is very interesting. I've noticed that trend too.

Is that in the mind of a cerebral narcissist, is he really okay with the fact that his counterpart is going to be sexually satisfied by somebody else as long as it doesn't cause a narcissistic injury or a mortification for him socially?

The only time the cerebral would feel very bad about this is if his partner were to compare him unfavorably to her lover so she would say wow my the new guy I'm with you know the new guy I'm having sex with is even more intelligent than you are wow that's narcissistic injury.

Then the cerebral narcissist would put his foot down and terminate the relationship. her relationship.

But otherwise, it's a maintenance chore. And the cerebral narcissist is very happy to outsource it. No problem there.

Oh, you know, it's funny because I read in some of these forums of online, a lot of women and even men talking about their experiences with cerebral narcissists in the life without intimacy completely. like people that go through years and years in a marriage or relationship and there's no intimacy at all I'm not even just talking about sex itself I'm talking about touch and conversations and you know anything that resembles intimacy is completely out the window.

It's just not there.

And it's very crushing, I mean, destroying to these people that they're just, it completely invalidates the person on the other side because they go through all those stages.

They feel rejected and they feel worthless. And it takes a long time. Some of these people never really recover. The longer they stay in a relationship like that, they just go for the rest of their lives in therapy, trying to figure this out. What did I do?

When in the fact of the matter, it's got nothing to do with you, it's just their narcissist just doesn't feel that, like you said, it's a chore, it's something that they just don't want to be bothered with. They just want to be there.

This was always a question of mine, like how can this be? How can you be in a marriage or in a committed relationship?

You just want to be?

That's all there is?

You just want to be.

The world knows that I'm okay.

It's a defense, social defense, to a certain extent.

The intimate partner does not exist. She is not an external object, as I said. She's internalized. She's an internal object.

And then the intimate partner becomes a potential threat.

Because the minute the intimate partner is introjected, the minute she is internalized, the minute the narcissist creates a representation of the external intimate partner in his mind, the narcissist prefers to continue to interact with the internal object.

And then the external object becomes a threat because she may deviate from the internal object. She may diverge from the internal object. She may challenge the internal objects. She may disagree with the internal object. She is independent. She has her own friends and family. She makes decisions. She has her own job. She travels.

In all these cases, it's a reminder that she is not the internal object, so she's threatening the inner balance of the narcissists from the moment the partner has been introjected, which is about after 10 minutes.

From that moment on, the intimate partner is a nuisance, not to say a threat.

And to manage the intimate partner, I'm referring to the real intimate partner, the external object. To manage her, the narcissist resorts to a variety of strategies.

He tries to subdue her. He tries to annihilate her or eliminate her as an agent. He tries to take away her agency. He tries to outsource her. You go find your sex and whatever outside. Don't bother me with this. so on so forth.

So there's a variety of strategies and they're all intended to preserve the integrity of the shared fantasy by keeping the internal object as close to the external object as possible.

This fails, of course. Of course it fails. And then it leads to devaluation and discard, which is exactly what the shared fantasy is all about. It's about getting rid of the internal object.

Now, speaking of the shared fantasy, I know it's a cycle, right? It happens all the time.

Now, I've seen a lot of people talk about the discard is not necessarily a physical discard, especially when we talk about the social dynamics.

I mean, the narcissist needs to portray a social image, a specific image, and being sometimes married secures that.

Is it true that they can actually discard a person completely and still be married to her?

As I just said, narcissists do not relate to external objects, so whether you are there physically or not, whether you are there physically or not is besides the point.

The important discard takes place in the narcissist's mind.

The narcissist discards the internal object.

And then if the external object resists or objects or protests, then there's a need to get rid of the external object as well.

But if the external object is compliant and submissive and collusive, collaborates with a charade, then the narcissist devalues the internal object and continues to coexist or cohabit with the external object.

Anyhow, she has never existed as an external object. Doesn't matter.

That's what victims fail to understand.

They were never relevant.

They were never relevant.

The narcissists did not choose them because they were amazing and kind and nice and empathetic and this complete nonsense.

They were not chosen. They were there and they were available to collaborate in the formation of the shared fantasy and they provided the narcissists with the four Ss, which is essentially sex, supply, services, and safety. Two of the four.

And if you provide the narcissists with two of the four, the job is yours, so drop it's a job.

You know, I was, victims self-aggrandize, honestly, victims self-aggrandize, they make them so special.

Because to be rejected like this is a narcissistic injury, and it triggers narcissistic defenses.

So if you're rejected like this, if you're discarded and devalued this way, you need to make sense of it somehow.

And you need to compensate yourself for this horrible insult, for this horrible humiliations.

To do that, you become grandiose. It's one of the vectors of contagion. You mentioned contagion.

Yeah.

Narcissus triggers in you narcissistic defenses such as grandiosity.

When the narcissist rejects you, humiliates you, criticizes you and so on and so forth, this triggers in you a narcissistic defense.

He says, you're stupid and you say to yourself, I'm not only am I not stupid, but I'm much more clever than him, which is self-aggrandizing statement.

He discards you, and then you say he discarded me because I'm an empath.

Another nonsensical term.

Yes.

I'm an empath. And I'm not only an empath, I'm a supergalactic supernova empath.

I'm kidding you not. They have these hierarchies. They compete. They attack each other.

This has a name in clinical psychology. It's known as competitive victimhood.

So the victims of narcissists are driven to defend themselves by becoming narcissists.

This is reactive narcissism. And this is the contagion.

The narcissist places you in an impossible situation where if you persist in being normal and healthy, you're going to keep going to suffer all the time.

And then you have to develop a thick skin, the thick skin of narcissism.

So you become a narcissist. And then as a narcissist, you give as good as you get. You give him a taste of his own medicine. And maybe that will somehow domesticate him, like a dog, housebreak him, somehow quellthe inexorable attack on you.

The narcissist's aim is to de-animate you, to render you an Egyptian mummy.

The narcissist's ideal partner is someone who is immobile, deaf, dumb and blind, 100% dependent, and unable to contradict or challenge the narcissist in any way, shape, or form.

And the ideal is if you were a corpse.

So there is a famous movie, Psycho, Hitchcock's famous movie, Psycho, where Norman Bateskilled his mother, and then he embalmed her. It made her like an Egyptian mummy.

And then every morning, he takes her out of bed. He places her on a chair facing the window. And every evening he comes, he bathes her, he washes her and he puts her in bed she's dead it's an Egyptian mummy that is the narcissist ideal partner.

So if you let the narcissist in, due time you will be dead internally, if not externally.

Dead. Totally dead.

Yeah, I...

It's a survival thing.

I remember when I heard you say that for the first time that comparison to the movie Psycho. I was like, whoa, this is nuts.

I remember watching that movie when I was younger and I was like I thought it was so shocking to see that and it took me a long time because I watched that movie as a kid to understand that now it takes me to one other question.

I heard a lot about cognitive therapy a lot of these narcissists they say that this is the treatment for them.

But I heard two different opinions about it, and I want your input on this, which is some people say that cognitive therapy can teach them how to, how, basically learning how to function, basically understanding what people expect out of them, which is kind of like learning how to imitate people or read their reactions or present them what they want to see.

On the other hand, some, the narcissist take that opportunity to just learn how to manipulate better so what is the is there any treatment?

I don't know that's the only thing I've heard cognitive therapy you don't deal with the past you don't deal with the history or the roots of the problem you just self-aware narcissists online are con artists they're scammers all of them no exception.

They're scammers because they play on the need to have hope.

People need to have hope.

The flip side, you know, there's a coin. One of the sides of the coin is the victim's self-aggrandizement. I've been chosen. I've become a victim because I'm a special person.

And the flip side of this coin is narcissism is not hopeless. It can be cured. It can be healed. It can be.

Anyone who goes online and says that they are self-aware narcissists, they're going to therapy, they're a much better person, and they're out to help the victims. They love the victims. They're out to help them.

They're conning you. They're manipulating you. And they're laughing all the way to the bank, or multiple banks in many cases. End of story. There are no nuances.

Yeah.

So, and why is that?

There is a panoply of therapies. I have a playlist on my YouTube channel dedicated to 12 therapies, which somehow we use to tackle narcissistic personality disorder.

And so the best we can do with the most powerful therapies we have, the best we can do, is to modify certain behaviors. We can, and it has been tried and success, in altering behaviors of narcissists which are antisocial or psychopathic, abrasive, unpleasant and so on.

So we can teach the narcissists to behave differently and to become more palatable, more acceptable, more livable with other people and so in other words to function socially and teach a narcissist social functioning the way we teach for example people with autism spectrum disorder.

The problem with narcissists is that it doesn't last long and so when there's a need for maintenance sessions, like the narcissist reverts like a boomerang, you know, reverts to fall.

So all the time you need to do the same thing every six months. But if you do it every six months then you can have a different narcissist you can have a narcissist who is now not obnoxious not insulting not aggressive not you know with more self-aware or aware of certain behaviors and so on.

So yes a certain transformation in people with narcissistic personality disorder however short term is possible.

However none of the core features of narcissistic personality disorder is touchable, let alone, amendable.

None. Not the lack of empathy, not the virulent envy, not the tendency to exploit people, not the aggression, none of these clinical features, not the lack of functioning self, not the inability to distinguish external from internal and treat people like extensions.

All these are untouchable, simply untouchable. We cannot make a dent, nothing, zero impact whatsoever, completely.

There is a debate, of course, which of the therapies is better at modifying behavior and so some would say CBT. I disagree I think therapies like schema therapy and so on more powerful transactional analysis to some extent and so on. But yeah, CBT could be good.

If the motivation of the therapies, the psychological background for some of the behaviors, is actually problems with self-esteem, what we call self-esteem discrepancy, when the narcissist internally feels inferior and compensates for it by pretending to be superior. When the narcissist holds himself in contempt and projects it and holds other people in contempt, in all these situations, CBT, cognitive behavior therapies, might work and sometimes do work.

In other situations, schema therapy and so on.

There's no shortage of therapies. There's therapy developed by Karpman himself, which is pretty powerful.

So there's no shortage of therapies.

But to say that there has been any fundamental, essential, meaningful change in the narcissists, as these people do, these self-aware, that's a lie. That's a con. Simple.

And there are many con artists out there, especially in this film. Many.

They include people with academic degrees, PhDs in psychology, professors of psychology, who have never ever written a paper on psychology, never participated in any international conference on psychology, never taught narcissism, I'm sorry, not psychology, never written a paper on narcissism, never participated in conferences on narcissism, never taught narcissism, ever anywhere.

And yet they claim to be experts on narcissism.

There are many swindlers out there, and an academic degree is no guarantee that they're not scamming you.

So walk very carefully, it's a minefield.

And don't be gullible.

Don't be gullible. Stop with this.

This is what got you where you are to start with you know yeah just I think don't be naive you know I think um it in the field is so confusing if especially for people that don't know much about it and jumping in now, especially people that think their partners are narcissistic, they want to go into therapy and all that.

I think most of the therapists really don't know what they're dealing with. It's so new. It's so some of these people.

It's very much a debate that they say that it's there's no point in doing let's say couples therapy when the therapist is not specialized in this field so they don't understand what's going on eventually the the victim comes out of it even worse and then the narcissist manipulates the entire situation so i think it's a it's a very difficult place to be in when you're trying to figure this out

At the same time I do see something that you point out all the time which is the rise of the victims the impacts and all that that that became another, maybe another different kind of narcissistic wave altogether, because now all of a sudden there's a different realm and their chosen ones and they're special. And they milk that to an extent that it's crazy.

I think I can give you three litmus tests.

If you come across someone who claims to be an expert or claims to want to help you or whatever, and this person tells you that you have done no wrong, that it's not your fault 100%, that you have been angelic and immaculate, and you have contributed nothing to your predicament and so on, that's a con artist.

If you come across someone who tells you that victimhood, or to be a victim, that the fact that you've been victimized means that you are now a victim. In other words, someone who tries to sell you identity politics.

Like now you're a victim. What has happened to you defines you, has changed you, made you into a new person that's a con artist.

If you come across someone who invalidates you on the other hand who tells you it's nothing or it was only a fault or that's also a con artist so these are the three litmusses.

And if you apply these litmusses, suddenly 99% of YouTube will disappear.

Because they're trying to sell you victimhood.

They're trying to sell you on perfection, like you are a perfect entity who has done no wrong. And they are trying, on the other hand, they're trying to tell you perfection, like you're a perfect entity who has done no wrong.

And they are trying, on the other hand, they're trying to tell you that it was only awful and you need to change yourself somehow.

That's the self-help industry. The self-help industry, the message is, something's wrong with you and you need to fix yourself.

That's equally, it's an equal scam. It's also a scam.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

You have made bad choices. Your decisions were wrong. You betrayed yourself by not running away as soon as you felt uncomfortable.

On the one hand, on the other hand, of course, you're not guilty for what has happened to you, no excuse for abuse, and so on and so forth.

And what has happened to you is narcissistic abuse is one of the most harrowing experiences imaginable.

And you deserve sympathy, of course, and so on.

On the third hand, having been victimized doesn't mean that this should define the rest of your life, on the very contrary.

You need to fight this concept of, I'm a victim, this victimhood identity, and so on, so forth. You need to be balanced and calibrated.

There is a defense mechanism known as splitting. Splitting is an infantile defense mechanism. It's a defense mechanism that is deactivated when you're about two to three years old.

And splitting means that you have a black and white thinking, what we call dichotomous thinking. And you say, this person is all bad, and I'm all good.

So when you say the narcissist is all bad, it's a demon, and I've heard that too. And I'm all good. What you're doing is you're splitting because no one is all bad and no one is all good. So you're splitting.

And here's the irony. Splitting is the main defense mechanism in narcissism. It's the narcissist defense mechanism.

You're becoming a narcissist. When you're claiming that you're an empath or a supergalactic nova empath, and that makes you super special and amazing that you've been chosen because you are so unique, etc, what is happening to you is you're turning into a narcissist and of course at the same time you're saying the narcissists is evil and wicked and demonic and beyond redemption and so on that is also splitting that is also something a narcissists would say and the narcissists is saying this about you.

Rest assured, because narcissists play the victim all the time.

It's so ironic because it's, I was reading a discussion on this forum and this is exactly, you see people all the time trying to how do I get revenge on a narcissist how do I do this how do I do that it's always at the same time that you're portraying yourself as this empath angel and angelic and benevolent.

I mean the amount of questions on a daily basis directed towards how do I get revenge? How do I create a narcissistic mortification for him? How do I make him do this, this, this, this, and that?

I actually went in one time and I said, you were asking all the wrong questions. If this is still your focus, you're doing exactly what they want you to do. You're becoming one of them.

Iactually met, saw a person that I haven't seen in years. I saw that person the first we went to a cafe he sat down it was the first thing at his mouth oh I'm an empath by the way and I was like okay

I mean it's almost like this divide you're talking about all good all bad it is ironically the core of their narcissistic personality and the by the way they operate and there is no clinical construct of empath it's online nonsense it's hype

There are many many such constructs online that have no basis, foundational ground in clinical psychology.

So there's not such thing as empathy.

There's no such thing as shy borderline or quiet borderline.

There's no such thing as emotional flashback.

These are all nonsense. These are all hypes.

And thelist is much longer we have to finish because it's one and no one will survive beyond this trust me I'm same

So thank you so much it's been oh my gosh such a delight to talk to you.

It's such an amazing teacher. I learned so much from you and I really appreciate your time. I know you're busy.

Would you like me to send you the recording because you haven't

Yes.

Yes. Please you. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure. Take care.

I learned a lot for you. I learned a lot about dogs and their psychology and so really honestly.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye. Bye.