YOU: Plaything in Narcissist's Playground (with Brad Carr)

With the entrainment, does that require that you are together, much like the band, the rock band must be together. If you get away, you leave the room, does that fade awayand come back in when you're in the room with the narcissist?

Yes, entrainment is intermittent. When you're not exposed to these repetitive sounds, which must be rhythmical and predictable and so on, when you're not exposed to them, you're not entrained. So yes, it requires the narcissist's physical presence and his constant spewing out of verbal abuse, which is highly structured, highly repetitive, and ritualized.

I'm curious, I know there aren't studies, there are studies on entrainment, but as you said, there aren't necessarily studies on this specific kind with the narcissist in a pure verbal way. I wonder, what do you think about the possibility that if there were music involved, say, the narcissist in a pure verbal way. I wonder, what do you think about the possibility that if there were music involved, say the narcissist were a dance teacher and they could lead a group of people that could be touching partners as the rotating partners, they could be giving counts at a rhythm and then also giving critique and praise throughout the room and kind of running the room in the pathological narcissistic space. Would this be more powerful?

We definitely have documented what is known as a cult personality or a group personality. We know that when individuals are embedded in groups, they lose a large part of their personal autonomy and agency and critical faculties, ability to think critically. And we know that they suspend many psychological processes, for example, decision making is relegated to the group or to the leader of a group, and so on and so forth. So yes, it would be a lot easier to entrain a group actually than it would be to entrain an individual, owing to peer pressure and in-group dynamics.

And that's why, of course, you have the phenomena of cults and the phenomena of political parties that resemble cults, and the phenomenon of charismatic and demagogic leaders, and so on so forth, because there is an intersection, intersectionality, excuse me for the expression, there is an intersection, intersectionality, excuse me for the expression, there is an intersection and a confluence of both individual processes, of entrainment and brainwashing, if you were, or whatever, and group dynamics which are conducive to this. So it's as if the narcissist, when he's in a group, he is multiplied. He is amplified by the group. The group is like an amplifier. If we hark back to music, it's like an amplifier of the narcissist's voice, messages, beliefs, values, and above all, of the narcissistic fantasy, known in clinical terms as shared fantasy.

And this seems to touch a bit on, as you were saying earlier, that you view narcissism as a sort of a religion, and maybe you want to pull on that thread a little bit more, because it starts to sound a bit like a church.

Indeed. Let's go back to the origins of narcissism. What is known in psychology is the etiology of narcissism. The causation. What has caused narcissism? So first of all, we should make a distinction between healthy narcissism and pathological narcissism. Healthy narcissism is the foundation of self-esteem and self-confidence. That's why it's healthy, of course. If you were deprived of healthy narcissism, if you were denied healthy narcissism, you would never explore the world as a child. For the child to abandon mummy and to venture out into the world the child needs to be highly grandiose so narcissism is a critical force in personal development in in the early years of childhood which is why it can become easily corrupted and malignant, because it's there. It's already there very early on. And so this is the first distinction, healthy and pathological. Could you remind me of the question?

I'm sorry. I wondered the way. And you had mentioned earlier how you view narcissism as something like a religion? Oh right, religion. How does it kind of tie?

Yeah, when I hear religion, I shut off. Sorry about it. I'm rabidly anti-clerical.

So what happens then?

The child is exposed to a basically abusive, depriving, traumatic, adversarial environment. This is known as adverse childhood experiences.

And again, abuse could be classical, like physical, sexual, emotional, emotional, psychological, verbal, but abuse could take subtle forms, could be surreptitious.

For example, if the child is pedestalized and idolized, this creates expectations which weigh on the child and makes the child very anxious and so on.

If the parent is overprotective and isolates the child from reality and from the child's peers, that's also a form of abuse.

If the parent instrumentalizes the child, you know, I couldn't realize my fantasies and dreams, you are the one to do, you know, I couldn't be a great pianist, you're going to be a great pianist.

And if the parent parentifies the child, if the parent is infantile and forces the child to act as the parent and so on, there's a variety of abusive situations.

And in all these situations, the child, or may I remind you, is about two years old, the child withdraws, the child withdraws inward, it's an avoidant reaction.

And what the child does, because the child is in pain, the child is shamed, the child is hurting, child is traumatized and so on.

What the child then does, the child invents a protector, a protective figure, an imaginary friend, who has all the hallmarks, or which has all the hallmarks, of a god. Everything the child is not, this imaginary friend is.

The child is helpless. This imaginary friend is omnipotent.

The child cannot predict the behavior of the adults around the child. This imaginary friend is omniscient.

The child is hopeless, is mired in the equivalent of depression. And this character, this imaginary friend, is, you know, looking forward and very energetic and so on.

So this imaginary friend is known as the false self.

And the false self basically is a primitive divinity. It's a divinity.

If you are all powerful and if you are all knowing and if you are, you know, you're God, the child comes up with a primitive religion where there is a divinity and there is the worshiper of the divinity, which is a child.

And the role of the divinity is to protect the child, to defend the child, to deflect the hurt and the pain, to isolate the child from an environment that had become intolerable and unbearable, which are exactly the roles of God in religion.

And so this is a primitive religion.

And then the child, exactly like in Earth's wild primitive religions, the child goes into human sacrifice. The child sacrifices himself to this God, to this new deity.

And this human sacrifice is when the child eliminates the true self and remains only with the false self.

When the child merges with a false self, becomes one with the false self by denying and destroying himself.

So it's human sacrifice.

And then the narcissist proceeds through life, and he's a missionary. He's trying to convert you. It's a religion.

He says, I'm the greatest, I'm a genius and this, and I want you to agree with me. I want to convert you to the cause. I want you to tell me that my fantasy is not a fantasy. I'm not daydreaming and I'm not delusional. It's all true.

So it's very missionary. That's what religious zealots do. They try to convince you of things.

So this is what the narcissist does. It's a mission.

So it's in my mind, narcissism, because it's a primitive reaction in early childhood, is essentially religious. It's a religious reaction.

Only the God is highly idiosyncratic and the worshiper is a bit young, but it's a religion.

And when the narcissist grows up, he's a religious zealot. He's a religious fundamentalist. But his religion is not Christianity or Islam, or his religion is his own greatness, his own godlike qualities and traits, his own amazing accomplishments in his mind at least, his own fantasy, fantastic landscape.

And that is known as grandiosity.

His own grandiosity is his religion, an inflated, fantastic self-conception, or self-perception that he compels you to agree with or curses you and penalizes you if you disagree with.

And this reminds me too in your work you've talked about some of the roles, career roles that narcissists are attracted to, things like clergy, teaching, corporate management. What is the role of the career for the narcissist and this mission?

A common misunderstanding about narcissism is that narcissists want to be the best, they want to be the greatest, the richest, and so on so forth.

They don't. They want to be unique. Uniqueness is the key.

So a narcissist can brag about being the greatest failure ever. Or he can boast about being the ultimate victim.

And narcissists can leverage his own weaknesses and failures and defeats as ways to obtain attentionand narcissistic supply.

Narcissists are promiscuous in this sense. They don't care. As long as you provide them with supply, they will sell you anything, tell you anything, expose themselves, anything.

So the narcissist is concerned with narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is any form of attention, positive or negative.

The language in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is very very misleading because it gives the impression that narcissists consume and subsist on positive feedback, adulation, admiration and so on.

That is not true. A narcissist would feel great, being feared and hated. Because it's a center of attention.

That's why narcissists develop paranoia. Paranoia is a form of narcissism because what's the narrative of paranoia? I'm sufficiently important to be the center of a malign conspiracy and malevolent intent. You know, I'm so critical.

So they would gravitate to professions that guarantee attention, whether negative or positive.

So yes, they would gravitate to politics and to show business and they would gravitate to clergy and medical professions.

That's all true because these guarantee positive attention.

But they would also gravitate to professions that guarantee negative attention.

For example, a criminal, but a mastermind criminal, not just any criminal, a mastermind criminal, a Moriarty. So that's an example of a profession that would guarantee attention.

In short, narcissists don't care about money. They don't care about power. They don't care about any of this.

Money and power are means to an end. And the end is narcissistic supply. Attention.

Feedback and input from the environment, human environment, allows the narcissist to regulate his internal environment, to stabilize his moods, to control his emotions, so he needs this. It's like a drug addiction, substance abuse, he's a junkie.

And so when people see, for example, a politician who is power hungry, super ambitious, ruthless and callous, and just horrible, and we all have the same person in mind when I say this, when they observe such a politician, they say, oh, he is into power, he's power, you know, is Machiavellian, he's obsessed with power.

No, he's obsessed with attention.

And when we see a businessman who makes a business acquisition, they say, ah, it fits in with this strategy, no, he seeks attention through this business acquisition for example when he tweets.

So narcissists are one-track-minded and there is a huge confusion between narcissists and psychopaths.

A psychopaths would go after the money or after the sex, or after the power, or after the access, or after the luxury life.

That's a psychopath.

A narcissist is a much more primitive protozoan, a much more primitive one-cell organism. He is into supply. Yes, supply I feel good, no supply, I feel bad. End of story. Not a complicated creature, easy to manipulate, and very gullible, consequently.

So that brings me to something else that surprised me in reading your book.

You wrote about how narcissists like to educate their friends, some more subtle narcissists like to be in sort of an educator role.

So it sounds like, you know, a narcissist, would they teach for free? Would they, you know, if they could manage a business and have influence over a whole business for free and have people sort of reporting to them, they would do it for the authority rather than to make money and things like that.

There's a variant of narcissism known as prosocial or communal narcissists. That's a narcissist whose locus of grandiosity is his good deeds.

This kind of narcissist presents himself as altruistic, charitable, helpful, utterly uninterested in money and power, and so on. And this is his grandiosity. He brags about it. His charities are sensational. His altruism is all over the front pages of the papers or internet. He is out there with all this.

And this is how he garners and harvests narcissistic supply.

And yes, this kind of narcissists would give things for free, would do things for free, would go for long stretches of time without any discernible compensation, just to be able to claim that he is outstanding as a saintly figure. We have Mother Theresa as an example.

So that's that kind of person. And not only Mother Teresa, but others.

So it's a small fraction of narcissists, but yes, they do exist, absolutely.

It reminds me of another thing from your writing too.

I think you wrote something along the lines of, beware of narcissists bearing gifts. What is that about?

Narcissists are transactional. They've learned as children that they can be loved only if they perform, if and when they perform.

So they've learned to associate love giving and love receiving with performance and transactions and business. They do business with love. They also associate love with pain, so they are wary of love.

But at least if love comes with gifts, then, you know, it's a compromise.

Similarly, they believe that if they give you a gift, you owe them. The gift giving is conditional, and then they expect you to perform.

And your performance when it comes to the narcissist, again, we must distinguish narcissists from psychopaths. This is not the same animal.

Your performance, as far as the narcissist is concerned, is to suspend your critical thinking, your ability to judge, your reality testing, your ability to gauge reality and evaluate it properly, to suspend all this at the service of the narcissist's fantasy, to collaborate or collude with the narcissist in his fantasy, to become a participant in this paracosm or virtual alternative reality of the narcissists and to pretend that it's real that it's not a fantasy.

The deal is this: I'm giving you a gift as a narcissist, now you have to deny yourself, you have to not be what you are.

When I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse in the late 80s. When I came up with the phrase narcissistic abuse in the late 80s, I was the target of attacks by my peers at the time. They were not my peers at the time, they became my peers later, but my psychologists and psychiatrists and so. They said, there's no need for another variant of abuse. It's enough to say abuse. Why you need to say narcissistic abuse?

Because narcissistic abuse is about negating you. It's about making sure that you do not exist as an agent, taking away your agency, your personal autonomy, your independence, your critical thinking, ultimately reducing you to an inanimate state, which is the equivalent of an Egyptian mummy or a zombie.

This is nothing to do with other forms of abuse.

All other forms of abuse are either goal directed or goal focused.

So I could abuse you financially, I could abuse you legally, I want something from you. That's a psychopathic abuse or emotional abuse, which is essentially the equivalent of a temper tantrum or an eruption.

So in domestic violence, for example, the abuser is usually someone who has very poor impulse control, has very poor anger management, and is unable to kind of rule in, rein in his behavior.

And these are the two forms of abuse that we know of.

There is the expressive abuse, abuse that expresses your inner landscape, you are rageful, you are this, you're that, you abuse, and abuse that is goal-oriented.

That's not narcissistic abuse at all.

Narcissistic abuse is an attempt to render you an NPC in a video game. You're an NPC in a video game.

It's an attempt to remove your third dimension, to reduce you into a two-dimensional representation of a human being, and then to plug you into the fantasy somewhere, and to expect you to remain there, inert, immobile for the rest of your life. And never ever to contradict the narcissists, to disagree, to criticize, to point out things, to provide advice or suggest it, that's humiliating.

So you are supposed to remain silent. It's supposed to remain silent.

And this silence is the abuse. This is a kind of silent trauma or silent form of abuse.

And gradually, you lose your identity. You lose your core identity. You lose your core identity because identity is a muscle. It's a use it or lose it proposition.

If you are not allowed to be you on a consistent basis, you will end up not being you, and not being anything for that matter, but an extension of the narcissism, a figment in his imagination, a player in his video game, some actor in his movie, or something like that.

And so this is a horrible form of abuse because it's desiccating. It's a kind of desiccating abuse.

It's like the famous skull shrinkers, you know. There were tribes in the Amazon, they were shrinking skulls, you know.

This is narcissistic abuse, shrinking your skull, taking away the brain, totally unnecessary when you're on the narcissist partner. And leaving you there is an animated puppet. Very often, not even that.

Yes, I've heard you compare it to warfare as well. Sort of an analogy there?

It just occurred to me that another great analogy would be ventriloquist. You're like the ventriloquist dummy in narcissistic abuse.

Well, I think what we both share is a background in the army.

That's true.

I think you said, you know, typical abuses, because it's targeted, it's more like conventional warfare, whereas narcissistic abuse, because it's total, it's sort of a nuclear warfare. It's complete destruction rather than hitting targets.

Yes, it's a what came to be known as total warfare. It's total warfare. Where there's no distinction between civilians and combatants and where the weapons used have such a destructive capacity that nothing is left behind.

So Israel now has been accused of this kind of warfare in Gaza you know and that's what the narcissist does. The narcissist is out there to annihilate you and he needs to annihilate you.

And he needs to annihilate you because if he were to let you be, if he were to let you have your agency and autonomy and independence and independent opinions and freedom of action and so on, then you would challenge his fantasy, because in his fantasy, you're completely different to what you are in reality.

Your representation in the narcissist's mind, known as the introject, has very little to do with you. It's either idealized at the beginning of the relationship or devalued at the end of a relationship, but it never has much to do with you.

And so when you make a decision, when you take a trip, when you have your own friends, when you disagree with the Nassi, you are challenging the avatar. You are challenging this representation in his mind.

And that could destabilize the whole edifice. The whole house of cards could come tumbling down. It's an existential risk.

The narcissist cannot accept this. He needs you to shut, you know, shut the fuck up. He needs you to just sit in the corner and that's it. He needs you to be there because when you're out there, he can deceive himself into believing that the fantasy is real and he's not delusional.

So you're there as the equivalent of an insurance policy or something, a rider or something. You're not there to fulfill any role. You're not expected to be active. You're not there to be the narcissist co-equal. No way. That's not the issue there.

You are there as a kind of hedge. It's kind of hedge the narcissistic fantasy is expansive and ever more delirious and so even the narcissist finds it difficult to deceive himself on a regular basis.

But then the narcissist says, is my fantasy, am I crazy? Is this too delusional? Is this fantasy really out there?

And then he looks at you at the corner, sitting at the corner, and says, no way. No way, because he is in my life. That means fantasy is real. He is real. So the fantasy is real.

You provide the narcissist with what is called the mask of sanity. That's a phrase coined by Hervey Cleckley. The first person to describe psychopathy and narcissism in depth was Hervey Cleckley. And he coined the phrase the mask of sanity, which is the title of his book, 1942.

And the narcissist needs you because you are the mask of sanity. If you were to go away, the narcissist would be left all alone with himself. And there's a limit to self-deception. Reality pushes back. And at some point, he would become psychotic.

So this leaves me wondering about another distinction that I've heard you make.

You've talked about the four S's and supply being one of them. And then within that, there's narcissistic supply and then there's sadistic supply.

I'm starting to connect the dots, but what role does sadistic supply play in this equation for the narcissist?

Let's start with the role of narcissistic supply.

Narcissistic supply is any attention, any feedback or input from the human environment that buttresses and sustains and upholds the narcissist inflated fantastic self-concept.

His grandiosity, grandiosity is a cognitive distortion in the sense that grandiosity distorts your perception of reality, impairs your reality testing.

So the narcissist needs to prove to himself that his reality testing is all right, is okay, is intact.

And the way to do this is via narcissistic supply.

I give you an example. I'm a narcissist. I said I'm a genius.

Now that's a fantasy. But then I go to you and I say, am I a genius? And you say, of course you're a genius.

And then I know that I'm a genius. I can calm down, I can relax. It's anxiolytic. It reduces my anxiety.

This is narcissistic supply in a nutshell.

Without going into many details because there's various types of supply, it's a big mess.

And then there are about 2 or 3 percent, no one knows the real number, but probably around 2 or 3 percent of narcissists who also say this.

These are known as malignant narcissists. A malignant narcissist is the delectable combo of narcissists, psychopath and sadists. It was first described by Otto Kernberg, one of the fathers of the field.

A malignant narcissist being a sadist would derive sadistic supply, and it would allow him to sustain the fantasy if he were to torture someone, if he were to hurt someone, inflict pain on someone and witness the reaction.

If I torture you, if I inflict pain on you, and the pain is visible and I reduce you to a crying heap, that's power. So I have power over you. So if I have power over you, that means I'm superior to you. That means I'm godlike.

And so this is sadistic supply. Narcissistic supply via the infliction of pain.

And with being close to a narcissist, must a person always end up being abused? Are there relationships that are exceptions?

No.

There are no exceptions. Abuse is an integral part of the relationship with the narcissist for various reasons.

The narcissist goes through the stages of the shared fantasy compulsively and automatically. It has nothing to do with you. This is a totally internal dynamic.

And it was called by Freud, repetition compulsion. So it's compulsive.

However, you have to play a role.

And in the shared fantasy, for example, in intimate relationships, your role is a mother. You have to be a substitute mother.

And yes, this applies to same-sex couples and it applies to women as well as men. The partner is always a mother figure, a maternal figure, a substitute mother.

But the narcissist is also paranoid. He is hyper-vigilant. He's always on the alert. He's always looking for slides and insults and attacks. He's fragile. He knows he's fragile.

And he has to defend against incursions and against invasions and against challenges so he's always on his toes he's always you know prime prime for action prime for aggression actually.

And so you're in the fantasy there was a first date and you hit it off and you're the narcissist next intimate, next victim, next intimate partner. You're in the fantasy now, officially in the fantasy.

So then the narcissist has to test you because your role in the fantasy is a mother, but are you a good mother?

Remember the narcissist has had a very bad experience with the previous mother.

So he needs to test you.

How should he test you? By abusing you.

He pushes the envelope. He misbehaves egregiously, his misconduct is utterly off the charts and if you stick around after all this it means you love him unconditionally you have passed the test.

So I'm giving you one example of a dynamic which causes abuse and which has nothing to do with you.

Similarly, inevitably, as you share a life together, even in a long-distance relationship, you share some time together.

Inevitably, there will be situations where you will diverge or deviate from the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind.

These deviations and divergences represent threats, risks.

As I told you, if you undermine the internal object, you undermine the fantasy and so on, the whole edifice would come crumbling down.

So the narcissist is very protective of his internal space. It all goes down here. Nothing happens outside.

And so gradually, you become a, you are transformed in the narcissist's mind from an idealized, unconditionally loving mother figure, to an enemy.

You, you, you, because you constantly challenge the internal object.

It's as if you hate the narcissist, as if you want the narcissists to suffer.

So you become an enemy. From friend to foe, you're converted in the narcissist's mind to what is known as a persecutory object.

And then he abuses you, of course, he punishes you.

So there are so many roots and causes for abuse in the relationship with the narcissists that it's utterly ineluctable. It's totally inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it. And you have nothing to do with it.

It's one of the mistakes of victims. They think they've been chosen. They think they're special somehow.

They think you have nothing to do with it. You're utterly incidental. You're a placeholder, nothing much more than a placeholder. And very interchangeable.

In this process, what is the role of lying and the abuse of language in general?

It seems that would catch up with the narcissists, the people would catch them in their lies, and yet it seems perhaps it's also just a compulsive issue.

Putting aside normal run-of-the-mill lies, we all lie between three and six times a day, by the way. Even if you think that you never lie, you lie between three and six times.

Actually, in major studies we found that there is not a human being who doesn't lie, and the lowest level was two lies a day. In a typical date, you lie six times within the first 15 minutes. These are facts.

So, narcissists lie, of course, but I'm not talking about run-of-the-meal lies. Like, how are you? I'm great. What do you mean I'm great? You're depressive, you're suicidal, I'm great. That's a lie. These are white lies and so.

But narcissists don't lie where it matters. That's a common misperception.

Psychopaths lie. Narcissists confabulate.

Now, let me explain the difference.

Whereas the psychopath knows the difference between reality and the fantasy that he is trying to impose on you, the narcissist does not.

The narcissist confuses, honestly, sincerely, the fantasy with reality.

When the narcissist makes you a promise, it's because he believes he's going to carry it out. So he is not future faking.

When the narcissist tells you something about their past, it's because they've had a memory gap and they try to bridge it with a plausible story, which later in their minds became a fact.

Narcissists lie a lot less than psychopaths and never where it matters because they believe in the fantasy as much as they want you to believe in it.

They believe their own confabulations and stories and prevarications and fantasies and so on. They are delusional. They're seriously mentally ill.

Narcissists are even more mentally ill than borderline, people with borderline personality disorder, and they are definitely more mentally ill than psychopaths.

Psychopathy is mostly a social problem, much less of a mental illness. It's when you're obnoxious and not nice and don't play by the rules and you break the rules as a matter of course, and you're a rule unto yourself, your law unto yourself.

Okay, so yeah, it's a problem for society and others. You may become a criminal, some psychopaths do, but psychopaths are normal in this sense.

A psychopath is an exaggerated you. Like you want sex, a psychopath wants six. You want money, a psychopath wants money.

The only difference is, maybe you would lie six times in the first 15 minutes. He would lie 15 times in the first six minutes.

That's the difference between you. Quantitative, not in my view qualitative, not so the narcissist.

Kernberg himself suggested that narcissism is on the verge of psychosis. It's a psychotic disorder. These people are seriously, seriously, out of touch. They're no longer with us. They're really, really sick.

And so as you would not accuse someone with psychosis when they hallucinate, you would not accuse them that they are lying to you, when they say there's an Egyptian goddess in the corner, you wouldn't say what a liar you are. Of course there's no Egyptian goddess. They're psychotics. You know, they're sick. They're crazy.

As you would not accuse someone who is on drugs, you know, on LSD. Someone who is tripping on LSD would tell you that the room is full of red and yellow colors. And you would say, what a liar you are. Of course it's not. You wouldn't do that because he's on LSD, he's tripping.

It's the same with the narcissist. The narcissist is psychotic, he is hallucinating, is delusional, he's tripping on his own internal LSD.

And so he doesn't lie. Lying is a Machiavellian ploy, manipulative, intended to obtain a goal.

You don't lie just for the sake of lie, unless you're really sick, that's called pathological lie, but generally you lie because you want to accomplish something.

Narcissists don't lie. It's like they say, wouldn't it be wonderful to live in this fantasy? Shouldn't we just give up on reality? I mean, it's so great there. You know, come join me.

And in this fantasy, I'm Godlike, I'm going to marry you, I'm going to have six children with you, we're going to travel, we're going to, whatever.

And then none of this happens.

And then they say, what a liar. They lie to me about everything.

Or the narcissist might tell you, I used to be a fighter pilot, when actually has been a lowly mechanic, yeah? And then you discover this and say, what a liar this guy is. He's never been a fighter pilot.

A narcissist believes that he has been a fighter pilot, or could have been a fighter pilot, or was on his way to becoming a fighter pilot, or something. The sincere belief in the fantasy and the confabulation.

Whereas a psychopath would lie to you that he has been an investment manager when he's never been an investment manager because he wants your money, that's the difference, and he knows that he has never been an investment manager.

Can we tell the difference when a narcissist is confabulating versus not?

Ah, when he's confabulating?

Mm.

It's difficult.

Narcissists are very convincing.

Yeah.

And very often you want to believe.

Yeah.

Because, for example, you're lonely. You know, you're lonely and you want companionship and you want a boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, and you suspend judgment. You say, who cares?

And sometimes his fantasy resonates well with your fantasy.

I'll give you an example.

The first stage of every shared fantasy involves something called love bombing.

In the love bombing phase, the narcissist idealizes you.

So, narcissists dates and someone who potentially is an intimate partner, and the narcissist tells this person, you're amazing, you're unprecedented, I've never felt this way, you're hyper-intelligent, you're drop-dead gorgeous, you're this and you're that.

I've never felt this way. You're hyper intelligent. You're drop dead gorgeous. You're this and you're that.

So there's idealization. You can do no wrong. You're perfect. Your perfect entity. Deserving of unconditional love.

The narcissist becomes your mother as well.

This is a principle that I call dual mothership. You become the narcissist's mother and he becomes your mother.

At that point, people with a certain psychological profile would fall in love with themselves, would fall in love with their idealized version via the narcissist gaze. And the narcissists gaze would become addictive.

These people were deprived of self-love or deprived of parental love or they're just broken or damaged or they're vulnerable, a vulnerable point in life, something just happened, and they're in need of love.

And so here the narcissist comes and says, I'm going to present to your version of yourself, which is worthy of love. And I'm going to allow you to fall in love with this version of yourself.

This version of yourself may have little to do with you, but it's lovable. So I will allow you to fall in love with it.

But you can do this only through my gaze. I have the monopoly on access to this idealized version of you.

You want to access this version of you? You want to fall in love with yourself? You want to fall in love with yourself? You want to get infatuated with yourself.

You must do it through me.

And my price is this. My price is participate in my fantasy, see me the same way, co-idealization, and so on so forth.

So as you see sometimes fantasies resonate.

The narcissist comes to you and says, I'm going to make you feel like you've never felt before. I'm going to make you feel lovable and perfect and amazing and this and that and you say, I need this. At this moment in my life, I need this, or I need this generally, because I've never felt it before or whatever.

So you collude with the narcissist, you become absolutely an accomplice in the fantasy.

That's what I keep telling victims, and that's why victims hate my guts. I keep telling them, you have contributed to your predicament, absolutely.

And as long as you refuse to admit this and take responsibility for your choices and decisions and wrong turns in the road, you will never recover and you will never heal.

Because recovery and healing requires ownership and honesty, and authenticity and remaining stuck in I'm a victim, I'm an angelic, I'm an empath, whatever that means, I'm perfect, and the narcissist is all bad and evil and demonic and that would not get you anywhere. They will not get you anywhere.

Additionally, it's a narcissistic attitude known as splitting. It's a splitting defense. It's a primitive defense mechanism, where one party or one side is all bad and I'm all good. This is infantile.

But victims find it very difficult to accept this because they want to believe that they've done nothing wrong and they've done nothing wrong.

It's not saying they've done something wrong. I'm saying they've had a contribution, they participated somehow.

If you're a member of a cult, you can't just say, I've come across a former member of a cult who became a whistleblower and a very famous whistleblower. And now he's a, I think, documentary filmmaker. He goes around making it seem that it's all the cult leaders fault. He was innocent and pure as the driven snow.

That's nonsense. It's complete nonsense.

A relationship with the narcissist is a cult. It's a religion. A club. Compare it. You need to belong to it. You need to choose to belong to it. It requires membership.

So to pull on this, this thread of what the victim can do a little bit, so if the narcissist is lying and they're having a hard time spotting that, they're sort of addicted to the fantasy, they're probably becoming socially dependent on the narcissist.

What if they're having doubts, what could a victim do to sort of check reality at some point?

Don't misunderstand what I said, and I apologize if I've misled you in some way.

The narcissist is a great actor, and it's very difficult to spot the confabulations and so on so forth, on the one hand.

So the details are murky, and they take time to emerge.

The details, not the fact that the narcissist is a narcissist. That becomes evident within the first five to ten seconds.

Now, many people would deny this. They would say, this guy, you know, if you date something, this guy or this girl, they were so compassionate, so empathic, so amazing, so attentive, so this, so this, that's not the issue.

There are tails, you know, like in gambling, there are tells. Poker, I don't know if you ever played poker. The poker. You know, the cards are meaningless. You observe your opponents, you know. There are many tails. The narcissists come replete with 300 tells, if it's well composed.

And this creates something called the Uncanny Valley Reaction.

Uncanny Valley Reaction was first described in 1970 by a Japanese roboticist, Japanese, of course, who else, roboticist named Masahiro Mori.

Masahiro Mori said, when a robot approximates a human being, when a robot becomes more and more android, we become less and less comfortable.

When a robot is immediately distinguishable as a non-human contraption or device, we are not uncomfortable. It's okay.

But if a robot were to resemble a human being 99.99%, like the famous androids in Blade Runner, then you would feel highly uncomfortable, and he called it the uncanny valley reaction.

It's the same with narcissists and psychopaths.

When you first come across a narcissist or a psychopath, you feel that something's wrong. You feel that something is awry, something is off-key. It's like they're not put well together somehow. It's like a work in progress, so half-baked, or I don't know how to explain this, but there is definitely a documented reaction to what happens.

You denied it for a variety of reasons. You denied it because it's socially unacceptable to judge people so soon. You denied it because you're lonely. Unacceptable to judge people so soon. You denied it because you're lonely. And one you would compromise, or anyone you... I can come up with another 200 reasons you denied it. You bury it, you repress it, you ignore it, this feeling of unease, this unsettling presence that is there.

And I said that there are many tails, for example, how the narcissist relates to other people who are not you, the waitress, the cab driver, the doorman or bouncer or whatever. How does he relate to them? Is he being too solicitous, too pleasant and kind and smarmy even? Or on the other hand, is he being aggressive and dismissive and contemptuous? Both these represent a pathology.

Is he very controlling or microcontrolling in ways which are very difficult to pinpoint and blame him for?

For example, when you go to the loo or the toilet, he asks you, where are you going? When will you be back? He chooses the food and the drink for you from the menu without consulting you. He takes your keys and drives your car. He understands all kinds of tiny small things, which could even be interpreted as good manners. And actually, they represent control.

Whenever he's challenged, even in a minor way, his reaction is disproportional. He chooses a wine and the waiter says, sir, I think I have much better wine for the same price. You should see the reaction.

So you do have the information, all the information you need.

You know what it reminds me? I mean, Israeli.

We twice in our history as a state, we have had a problem with the conception.

We have had the conception that Arabs are primitives who would never ever dare to attack the state of Israel because they would fail and be defeated ignominiously.

And then they did in 1973.

And we had the conception or preconception that Hamas would never cross the border and so on, because they're getting suitcases full of money and they are happy, happy-go-lucky. Why would they risk all this?

And then they did cross the border on October 7th.

This is the problem when you're dating a narcissist, when you're working with a narcissist, or becoming friends with a narcissist.

You have a conception. You don't pay attention to the intel. You're not paying attention to the intel. Your eyes are not open, your ears are not open. You are blind, deaf and dumb by choice.

Because you don't want to see this. You don't want to see the Hamas crossing the border, so you don't see it.

Although you have had like a million warnings.

And the same with the narcissist.

He behaves, he's nice for 10 minutes and then he does something totally crazy, upsetting and discombobulating.

And then you sit back and say, but yeah, but he's been nice for 10 minutes. I mean, why pay attention for this? You know, it's nothing. It's nothing.

You keep saying it's nothing. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen to me. My eyes are open. I'm okay. I'm, you know, it's nothing. It's nothing. You keep saying it's nothing. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen to me. My eyes are open. I'm okay. And then then there are the barbarians are in the gate, at the gate, beyond the gate.

So if a victim reflects and and recognizes this, if you change your behavior, a narcissist will notice. If you, you know, if you reply a little slower, if you're, you know, you don't reply, you know, they're sensitive often.

So what, what does someone do to step back and start to clear their mind a little bit and make sure that they've got things figured out? Or does it trust your gut, go no contact?

The minute you feel something's wrong, something is wrong. Our intuition is wrong 50% of the time about non-human issues. So our intuition is wrong about the stock market, about who's going to win the elections, and 50% of the time. That's a flip of a coin, it's meaningless. But our intuition is right about other people more than 90% of the time.

We are right about other people, more than 90% of the time. We are right about other people, more than 90% of the time. Because that's our machinery, you know, we're built like that. To survive, we need to read people properly. People who cannot read people properly have a pathology, have a problem. Ironically, people with too much empathy cannot read people properly. They say irony.

But by and large, the vast majority of the population, the average Joe and Joe S, they can read people properly. And so trust your intuition and gut instincts. Do not pay much less attention to what is visible, to what is observable, to what is happening. Pay less attention to this. And much more attention to this internal voice inside you that tells you something is wrong. I don't feel comfortable. I don't feel it is. I'm becoming a bit paranoid. Pay attention to this and then just walk away. There are no gradations and no compromises and no consensus building and no politeness and no manners and all in this situation. Just walk away. And then you will see the true face of the narcissist, by the way. Just simply walk away. It's not worth the aggravation later on.

The longer you interact with the narcissist, the more you become an element or an ingredient in his fantasy, and then saying goodbye might trigger much more serious reactions. So if you date the narcissist once, he is likely to offer to see you again. If you date him twice, he wants to cohabit. If you date him three times, you're getting married. And if you date him four times, you're planning on three to six children, depending on the narcissists. And I'm kidding you not, by the way. That's the alacrity and the speed, which is a major warning sign. So it shows you that you are getting deeper and deeper into the as an integral part of the Nassiz fantasy.

Now to take you away from it would mean to give up on the fantasy and to demolish it. The Nassiz is much more emotionally invested at this stage. He is cathected, that's a clinical term. He's much more emotionally invested and his aggression is likely to be much bigger.

So if you date him once and walk away, okay, you're a bitch. If you date him four times you walk away, you've ruined his life and he's going to get, he's going to go after you. And it's four times, not 40. Let it be clear.

For those listening to you, I would add your rules of going no contact. Incredibly useful, I think, for people who do need to make these separations, but may also have the narcissist in their life in some way.

One of the notes in those rules of contact, rules of no contact, is that secrecy is the abuser's weapon.

It seems people, when they've been through an experience like this, they want to hide it, they're ashamed.

What is this place for secrecy?

There's a compliment to this. There's another sentence that says that Sunshine disinfects abuse.

What I meant to say with these two sentences is that the narcissists or the abuses power over you is the fantasy.

He makes you feel that any exit strategy is betrayal, is a form of betrayal. You're betraying him. And that you are ruining something beautiful.

He invests in your aesthetic sense. It's like you've created something amazing together, like a cathedral or something together. And now you're pulling the rug from under him and it's all going to crumble, having invested so much in it and so on.

So you're both an aesthetic criminal, like burning a work of art, you know, in a museum or throwing acid at something. On the one hand, and on the other hand, you are a traitor.

You're also a mother who is abandoning her child, you're also many other things.

But these are the two crucial features.

And so you feel ashamed of yourself. You feel ashamed of yourself for three reasons, for the aforementioned two, but also because you begin to realize how stupid you've been.

And to end up with a narcissist, you need to be gullible or suspend judgment or something. Not very clever.

It is a criticism over you. I mean, being in a situation with the narcissist means that something is wrong with you. However unpalatable it is to hear.

So people deny that and they feel ashamed of it and they repress it and so on so forth.

And this plays right into the hands of the narcissist.

As long as you keep quiet, you're an accomplice in the fantasy.

It's exactly like legally, if you keep quiet on a crime, you become an accomplice. If you know about a crime, you have to report it, if you don't report it, you go to prison, simple as that. There is a responsibility.

And so you become more deeply embedded in the fantasy.

Now we all, emotions are in the interplay with all of us.

So even if you resent the fantasy and you hate the narcissists, the longer you're with him, there's habituation, there is emotional investment. It can't be denied. There are good moments, you know, rosy. It's called rosy retrospection the good moments and so on the longer you stay the more infected you are it's simply contagious.

Now what do you do when you're sick? You go to see a doctor.

What does it mean you share with the doctor you're sick? You go to see a doctor what does it mean you share with the doctor and if you go to see a medical doctor and you keep mum you don't say a word nothing much will come of it right.

Going to a doctor means medical doctor means that you have decided to make public your condition. The public is small. It's the doctor and the nurse.

If you need help or if you are in a... You need to make it public. You need to talk to your friends and to your family and to your colleagues and maybe to professionals and so on you need support you need to make it public not only for the advice that you're bound to get or help that you're about to receive assistance and so but you need to go public because it breaks a taboo.

Fantasy comes with a taboo or mehata vendetta, you know, it's like the mafia. You don't talk about these things to the cops. So you keep it, and it's like the vow of silence. If you break the vow of silence, there will be vendetta and you will die.

There's a taboo attached to the fantasy. Breaking the taboo is a powerful symbol of liberation and regaining of agency.

Even if you don't get any good advice, no help, no nothing, and everyone even mocks you or even if you're disbelieved, very often the reaction would be disbelief.

Oh, he's such a nice guy. Come on. Something else will be wrong with you. And he will try to convince people that you're the crazy one. The smear campaigns and so on.

It's an arduous path. It's not easy.

But the very fact that you have exited the confines of the fantasy and involved third parties is liberating. Empowering and the taboo is gone.

The moment the taboo is gone, you are in the position to walk away so this is one thing.

Second thing is the other sentence sunshine infects abuse in the sense that abuse is either criminal in many cases it is criminal or it's frowned upon socially. It's socially unacceptable.

And narcissists are actually pro-social. They're conformist.

Because narcissists need other people. They're dependent on other people. For narcissistic supply. They're not like psychopaths. Psychopaths are loners.

A psychopath is a loner. He's a hunter. He's a predator.

A narcissist is a two-year-old dependent baby. Big baby in an adult body.

So, narcissists would not risk the approbation and chastisement of society. So if you go public, the very exposure would constrain the narcissist. It would change his behavior. It's a form of behavior modification. Like I'm going to tell the whole world of what you're doing. You may end up in prison or you may end up being shunned by society, even by your peers and so forth. There's a price to pay.

And this price is doubly problematic. There's on one hand the narcissist is a coward. Most narcissists and bullies are cowards.

But. On one hand, a narcissist is a coward. Most narcissists and bullies are cowards.

But on the other hand, losing your pathological narcissistic space, the way we started, losing it, is a major problem because you have to find a new one, cultivate new sources. It's a long process.

And in this long period, until you have established a new space in this long period you're deprived of narcissistic supply. You're in a state known as narcissistic collapse. If this has been done in public, you're in a condition known as narcissistic mortification, which drives you as a narcissist to develop suicidal ideation, emotional dysregulation, you resemble a borderline to a large extent.

In short, there is hell to pay. Once your partner in crime, your partner in the fantasy, decided to blow the whistle on you, which is essentially what happens, you're exposed and your gone and you're done. Because that's it. The taboo has been broken and sunshine disinfects your abuse. You are disabled, you're deactivated, as an abuser.

You know, Sam, if, let's say you get away and then you look back and you realize that your friends, other people around the narcissist are being abused? Is it like the matrix? Can we find people and unplug them? Or do we have to let it happen? What is the path there?

As I told you earlier, the abusers' fantasy is very addictive.

Starting with the love bombing stage where you fall in love with an idealized, perfect version of yourself, which is highly addictive.

And people buy into the fantasy, because most fantasies make sense, afford you an outlet from reality, and ostensibly lead to better outcomes.

People confuse fantasy with dreams and dreams with planning.

They confuse often.

Daydreaming is actually good because it leads to planning.

But fantasy is not good because it leads away from reality.

It is what we call it non-efficacious.

It reduces self-efficacy.

Reduces your ability to operate in the environment and on the environment in order to extricate outcomes.

If you daydream about a new product and then you team up with some engineers and you make the new product, that's great. It leads you closer to reality.

But if you fantasize that you are the world's leading genius, not having graduated high school, it's a serious problem because it leads you away from reality.

However, people confuse.

They confuse fantasy with daydreaming, daydreaming, with planning and so.

So they think the fantasy might take them places. It's a good thing. Great.

And when you try to give them the red pill, you know, blue pill, red pill, you mentioned the matrix, when trying to give them the red pill, they refuse and they turn on you.

Yes.

They turn on you because you are taking away the only thing that gives them solace, the only consolation, the only redemption and absolution and the only promise.

People who find themselves in the matrix are people who have already given up on reality. Already.

These are people who find reality already unbearable, intolerable, unacceptable. These are people who have rejected reality. They've made a choice.

The last realistic choice they've made is to enter the matrix, to get plugged in. They chose to be plugged in. No one forced them.

When you disconnect them and offer them the red pill, you're the enemy.

So while I understand the natural inclination to warn other people and to expose the narcissists to other people, it's a savior complex. It's in itself a pathology.

Yes.

I'm going to rescue you. I'm going to save you. I'm going to fix you. I'm going to heal you by protecting you from the narcissist. I have this knowledge and I'm going to protect you from the narcissist.

And it rarely works, it makes you enemies, and it gets you involved in warfare, in battles that are not yours. So you become the narcissist enemy, smear campaigns, these, dead, worse.

I mean, you don't need this. You need all your resources and energy for yourself. You need to be selfish now.

In the aftermath of a relationship with the narcissist, you need to be selfish now. You need to reconstruct your identity because it's been taken away from you. You need to separate from the narcissist in your mind, not physically, because the narcissist is in your mind.

And because you have developed a very symbiotic relationship with the narcissists, and you need to unplug.

And then you need to individuate, you need to become you again, and the narcissist regressed you to an early stage.

Narcissus made you a baby. He was your mother. You became a baby.

And so you need to grow up again. You need to retrace everything from age two.

You have a lot of work to do. You can't go around saving other people. You are not saved. You're not saved.

You know the famous metaphor? It's famous when you're in a crashing plane, I mean first put the oxygen mask on you and then take care of your kids. First put the oxygen mask on your face. Take a few gulps, recover, and then take care of your kids.

Yeah.

Well, Sam, thank you so much for this interview.

Before I ask my last question, where should people look for you online?

Should people find me online?

Yes. It's very difficult to avoid me online, which most people want to do. I have a channel titled very creatively Sam Vaknin on YouTube. And if you Google Sam Vaknin, you'll be avalanched.

So, yes, you're prolific. Yeah, I've been doing this for 30 years. Yes. Nothing else to do, you know?

Well, Sam, my final question is that I've heard you speak quite eloquently about the power of self-love as sort of a bedrock for our well-being. What would you like people to know about self-love? What can we do to foster that? What is the value of it?

Well, people confuse, as usual, self-love with narcissism or selfishness. To love yourself is to be egotistical and dyspathic and so. But of course, narcissism is the exact opposite of self-love.

Pathological narcissism is when you hate yourself, and then you create an image or a facade that is exactly opposite to who you are. It's a denial of who you are because you hate who you are.

You feel that you're inferior, so you project a facade that you're superior. You feel that basically you're an idiot, so you're trying to convince everyone you're a genius.

We call this process compensation. Pathological narcissism is a compensatory mechanism.

But what is it that you're compensating for? Your self-hatred.

You perceive yourself as bad, unworthy, inadequate, and so on. And then you say, I don't want other people to see me as I truly am. I want people to see me as I wish I were.

And so you create what Freud called the ego ideal, and then you are on a missionary, religious path or trajectory, try to convince everyone, convert everyone to the cause of believing your false self.

That has nothing to do with self-love. The opposite of self-love is narcissism.

Self-love involves several elements, knowing yourself, so self-awareness and so on, accepting yourself, exactly as you are. No daylight between who you are and who you would like to be. You are the best version of yourself, as far as you're concerned.

Of course, you can always better yourself. But as you are right now, you did your best and that's it, you accept it.

If I had to summarize it in a single sentence, which is not easy for me to do because I love the sound of my voice, I would say that self-love is about being your best friend.

Think about how we would like your best friend to be and be that to yourself.

Now why is self-love important?

Because it's a defense. It's not a psychological defense, but it's like defending, protecting you. It's protective.

Oh, that's the word. It's protective.

If you lack self-love, you're vulnerable. You're vulnerable to people who offer you substitute self-love, like narcissists. You're vulnerable because you're bound to sabotage yourself, self-defeat and self-destruct, because you don't love yourself. You're vulnerable because in the absence of self-love, it's very difficult to maintain a sense of self.

So you're beginning gradually to dissipate, like the famous painting by Dali, Galatea, molecules. So, you know, self-love is the glue that holds yourself together.

That is not Vaknin, that is Jung. Jung suggested that narcissism and introversion are critical to the formation of the self, to what he called the constellation of the self.

So you don't have a self gradually if you don't love yourself for a very long period of time, you don't have a self.

And you are admirable to outside influences that shape you and reshape you and you begin to shape shift. You begin to be ephemeral, you know, fuzzy like a cloud. You become a cloud.

Self-love is the glue that holds this together, but self-love is also the glue that holds your relationships together.

If you don't love yourself, there's no way on earth you can love other people. The first experience of love is self-love. It is like a training camp, a boot camp.

If you didn't go through this boot camp, you would never make it to the infantry. So self-love is the boot camp of love.

If you didn't go through it, graduated, no way. You're never going to love.

You are going to convince yourself that you're in love or that you are loving or that, but it's not love. This will be substitute. This will be imitations, cheap imitations, and they will get you in trouble.

The inability to identify true love, especially in other people, is the recipe for disaster in personal life.

I would trace 80% of all personal catastrophes and 90% of mental illness to self-love blindness. Or what Ross Rosenberg calls self-love deficit.

Self-love is a guide. It's like a light in the darkness and so and so forth, but it allows you to relate to other people via love.

I have a whole playlist on my YouTube channel. It's called Life's Wisdom. It's not a grandiose title, as you may notice, but it contains several videos on self-love.

And rather than rehash myself, I think people should just go there and they can find what we know scientifically about self-love, some philosophical ruminations, some grandiose statements inevitably, and so on so forth. They can find this cocktail mixture there and maybe get better acquainted with this.

There is a belief in modern society that we are all consumables, we are all the equivalent of products. We consume each other.

And so when you consume other people you begin to consume yourself. The way you relate to other people is the way you are going to end up relating to yourself.

If you abuse other people you will end up abusing yourself. If you consume other people you will end up consuming yourself. If you hate other people you will end up hating yourself.

It's a boomerang. You're going to pay the price for your choices on how to relate to other people.

If you are incapable of loving other people, you are incapable of loving yourself, and the opposite is also true.

Only if you're capable of loving yourself, you're capable of loving other people.

And in the absence of love, not love in the stupid romantic sense of the 18th century and 19th century. I'm not talking about this kind of love. This kind of love is not love, actually. It's what is known as limerence or infatuation. It has nothing to do with love.

Love is a very mature complex of emotions, which takes decades to develop and usually targets highly specific individuals. It's sort of fuzzy thing, sort of diffuse thing.

So it's a lot of work. Love is a lot of hard work, a lot.

But in the absence of this, you can accomplish nothing really.

You can end up being a billionaire. You can end up being famous and a celebrity and this and that.

But none of this would feel real.

It is love that makes the world feel real.

In the absence of love, nothing feels real.

And I think the reason is that love is intimately connected with identity, and love also provides us with continuous memories.

We know that when we are in pathological states of mind, our memory is discontinuous. We know there are memory gaps. This process is called dissociation.

So, for example, if you have borderline personality disorder, you're dissociating.

And when you don't have continuous memories, you don't have identity. Identity is just another name for your album of memories.

If you're incapable of loving, you're incapable of memory.

We now know that the only way to retain long-term memories is to associate them with emotions and that the most powerful emotion that induces in us contiguous and continuous memories is love.

What do you remember most vividly?

Your love for your children, your love for your dog, your love for your wife or husband, your love.

Most vividly you remember your love for your wife or husband, your love.

Most vividly, you remember your love.

You remember other things, a great restaurant, you know, a one-night stand. You may remember these things, but they're not really vivid and they fade away with time.

Love keeps memories full of color, full of potency.

And when you don't have it, your memories fade away, and then you fade away. There's no identity without memory.

Well, Sam, thank you for that beautiful explanation for this interview, for your lectures, your book, and for your rules for goingno contact. You've had a tremendous positive impact in my life, and I'm so grateful for this time.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me on the opportunity. Take care.

I'm Brad Carr, and I hope that this episode helped you find clarity, freedom, and true self-love. To support efforts like this to raise awareness about narcissistic abuse, please be sure to subscribe to the channel. It helps a lot.