You are still here watching yet another video about narcissists?
Something is wrong with you?
Yes, something is wrong with you. It has a name in clinical psychology. It's called obsession, compulsion.
But why are so many millions? Why are they obsessed with narcissists and compelled to watch an endless stream of videos about the same topic over and over and over again from a million self-styled experts who mostly have no idea what they're talking about. Why is that?
Today, I'm going to analyze this phenomenon. It's going to be a brief video, I promise. I'm going to torture you more than you deserve.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever about narcissistic abuse and a professor of clinical psychology in CIAPS, Cambridge, United Kingdom and Southeast European University.
Okay, let us delve right in.
When you're sick physically, something's wrong with you, you go to a doctor. And then some of you, not all of you, but some of you, go to another doctor. This is known politely as a second opinion.
But how many of you go to 100 doctors or 1,000 doctors? And how many of you visit and revisit doctors for the same problem, for exactly the same situation, over five years, seven years, ten years, none of you.
But this happens very frequently with narcissistic abuse.
You have emerged from a harrowing, torturous, horrible relationship with a narcissist. You've endured and experienced what I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse.
And then you go online and you talk to people and you listen to people, many of them, self-styled experts, coaches and other jokes, and you listen to them.
But that's not enough. Not enough to listen to one or two or three or four. You listen to hundreds.
And it's not enough to listen to them for a month or two or three. You listen to them for years.
Actually, gradually, you find yourself doing nothing but listening to videos about narcissism.
That's unhealthy. That is as unhealthy as narcissistic abuse. It's the perpetuation of narcissistic abuse by other means.
The narcissist introjects, the narcissist's voice is inside your head and it pushes you to suspend your life and pursue knowledge about narcissism, which is a vicarious way of staying in touch with the narcissists.
When victims find comfort in this endless loop, in this repetition, in this compulsion, it's a little like liturgy, a little like a prayer. You know, when you pray in church, it's a religion. It's a prayer intended to counter the religious-like injunctions of the narcissist in your head. It's like a counter spell. It's like you're under some kind of black magic. You have been bewitched and enchanted. And the only way to remove this spell cast over you is with counter spells.
So you start to talk about demons. You go nuts. You're losing it, you're losing it, over exposure.
Listening to narcissism video has so many functions that obsessive-compulsive behaviors when they develop are perfectly understandable.
For example, narcissism videos make sense of the world and what has happened to you. Make sense.
This is known as hermeneutic function. They help you to understand, comprehend what has happened to you in terms that appear to be scientific and objective.
You share experiences with others, you compare yourself to victims, and you listen to self-styled experts who tell you that nothing's wrong with you, you're angelic, you contributed nothing to your predicament, you don't need to worry, you don't need to analyze you so, you might as well stay a victim because the longer you're a victim the more money they make.
So making sense of the world, their hermeneutic function.
Next, whatever has happened to you appear to be so random like a thunderbolt from a blue sky. It's so disorienting because it starts differently.
It starts with love bombing. It starts with attention. It starts with caring or simulated caring and compassion on behalf of the narcissist.
The narcissist appears to be your best friend. The person who understood you as no one has done before, had done before.
And then suddenly there's this ominous, terrifying transition from lover to hater, from friend to foe, from idealization to devaluation.
Initially, you could do no wrong. You were drop deadgorgeous, hyper-intelligent, amazing, unprecedented.
And then a few days later, a few weeks later, a few months later, a few years later, you could do no right. You're horrible, you're ugly, you're stupid, you're good for nothing, etc.
And these contrasts are very destabilizing. This intermittent reinforcement creates trauma bonding, and above all, it's very chaotic. It's very kaleidoscopic. You can't make sense of it.
So, watching narcissism videos helps you to introduce structure and order and to superimpose them on randomness.
This is exactly the role of conspiracy theories.
We live in an uncertain, indeterminate, unpredictable, terrifying universe, world, reality.
And to make sense of it, we develop theories about reality, which have nothing to do with reality, theories known as conspiracy theories.
And so watching videos of narcissism, time and again and again and again and again is a form of conspiracy theory.
There's a morality play. Narcissists are the agents of evil. Some would even say they are demons, and you are on the side of the angels.
You have a mission, maybe, to educate others. You find meaning. Your life acquires meaning.
Not only does it acquire meaning, you garner attention. There's some narcissistic supply in it. You interact with others. It gives you a good feeling, not only that you are helpful, but also that you are powerful.
In other words, watching narcissism videos, time and again and again and then in the comments section or in forums, interacting with others, that's a very empowering experience.
The essence of narcissistic abuse is disempowerment. The narcissist drives you to feel helpless, hopeless, infantile. He regresses you to early childhood, becoming a parental figure within the shared fantasy.
So now you take your power back. And one way to take your power back is to use narcissism videos to impose, as I said, a conspiracy theory on what has happened to you, and then to share this new realization, this new discovery with others.
It's a form of self-soothing, self-comfiting. It reduces your anxiety.
Not only your anxiety about what has happened to you, not only your anxiety about the narcissists, not only your anxiety about the future, but your anxiety about the world.
Because narcissistic abuse challenges your belief in the world as a just and orderly and structured world.
There's no justice. There's no order. There's no structure. They're just monsters lurking in the dark.
You know the old maps, the ancient maps where it says, here be monsters. This is how you feel when you're in the terra incognita of narcissistic abuse.
So watching narcissism video places everything in context and suddenly your anxiety diminishes, your self-soothe and self-comfort.
And it becomes a compulsion.
We know that anxiolytics, whether medication or techniques for anxiety reduction, we know that they become addictive, it's an addiction and a compulsion. You can't stop.
And one of the reasons you cannot stop is that there's always variation. There's always variance between your experience and the experiences of others. There's always daylight between what you have come through and what others have had to endure.
And so you are looking for the perfect feat, for the precise feat.
Your reality testing is all short. The narcissist totally destroyed your ability to trust your judgment of reality. Sometimes you think you're crazy.
And so you need to talk to others. You need to compare your experiences, your inner landscape, inner processes, your behaviors. You need to calibrate or recalibrate yourself.
Somehow you need to find yourself again in this wasteland and devastation left by the narcissist and inhabited by his voice.
And so you need a perfect feat you need to find soulmates you need to find people who have gone through exactly but I mean exactly like not 99.9%, but 100%. They've gone through 100% what you have gone through.
These are fellow travelers and you need to traverse the same path, the same journey, in order to restore your trust in your capacity to gauge reality.
And so that way you regain access to the world and access to yourself as someone you can trust.
You've been entrained. You've been brainwashed. If your narcissist was a malignant narcissist, you've been guss lit.
It's a major problem to regain or restore these faculties. You need the help of others.
But you can't get help from other people who have not shared your experience. The only way to get help or assistance or succor from other people is if you have had identical experiences.
So you keep digging, you keep watching videos, you keep joining forums, you keep posting comments, desperately attempting to find like-minded people in the echo chamber of your torture.
And that's another reason to not let go of YouTube. And the panoply, the plethora of offerings it has to give you on narcissistic abuse and narcissism.
Accuracy, scientific foundation, a scientific foundation, they don't matter. You're not really interested in accurate information. You're looking for information that would validate your experience and your reactions to your experience.
You're looking for information that would affirm you, empower you, hold you afloat at some point, allow you to recover and heal.
And if this information happens to be misinformation, fake information, wrong information, disinformation, who cares? You don't care as long as it does the trick, as long as it works.
The same applies to politics, by the way. People consume fake news and misinformation. And many of them we have discovered actually know these are fake news and disinformation, but they still consume them because it makes them feel good.
It's about feeling better about yourself. It's about feeling better, safer, more secure in the world. It's about restoring your trust in other people, in the goodness, essential goodness of other people.
So who cares if a self-styled expert sells you on some information that is utterly contradicted by everything we know in academia? You don't care.
You know, you're not about to become a psychologist or a psychiatrist. You're not an academician. You're not a scholar. You don't care if this information is correct. You care if it works. You care if this information has the capacity to restore you.
And the veracity, the factuality, the essential truthfulness of the information are irrelevant. And that's of course why you gravitate towards self-styled experts who spew utter nonsense.
But the kind of nonsense that make you feel great about yourself, that makes sense of what has happened to you, the kind of nonsense that elevates you grandiosely and renders you the angelic victim, it's a form of watching narcissism videos is a form of self-medication.
And very often, it's a placebo effect. It's not real medication. It's not really information. But it has a placebo effect.
In other words, it's healing. It's nurturing, it's calming, it's restorative.
And so you go for it, and you can't stop.