Sam, are you saying that narcissism is a choice?

Well, to some extent it is.

Obviously, when you’re a child, because typically narcissism evolves between the ages of four and nine. Obviously, at this age, you’re not autonomous enough, even objectively, you’re not autonomous enough to make choices of any kind.

But there is one realm in which you are king, even though you are four-year-old, even though it’s a four-year-old, there’s one realm which is totally under your control. And that is your internal, your mind. No one can touch your mind.

When you talk to torture victims, victims who’ve been tortured in various dictatorial and authoritarian regimes, they keep telling you, they touched my body, they destroyed my body, but they couldn’t touch my free thinking, my mind.

It’s the same with a narcissist. As a child, a narcissist’s body is tortured.

There are attempts to invade his mind via psychological abuse and verbal abuse, but the child’s refuge, sanctuary city, only refuge, and only shelter, is within himself.

So the child withdraws in, inwards, and establishes a citadel, a fortress, impregnable and impermeable to the outside.

And in order to cope with the demands of reality, and in order to interact with other people, his abuses included, he creates an imaginary friend. And that imaginary friend is everything the child is not.

The child is helpless. This imaginary friend is omnipotent. The child cannot predict the future because adults around him are narcissistic or unpredictable or crazy-making.

So the imaginary friend is omniscient, knows everything. The child is told consistently that he is a bad and worthy object or that he is deserving of love only conditionally.

The imaginary friend is perfection, is a perfect being.

And of course, immediately it springs to mind that the imaginary friend is God. It’s omnipotent, omniscient, perfect, that’s God. It’s a good description of God.

Spinoza would have agreed. So it’s a good description of God.

And in this sense, what the child creates at age four is a religion. The child comes up with a private religion where there isn’t a God, a God-like figure, a divinity. And the child worships this divinity.

He allows this divinity to intercede on his behalf with the outside world and with his abusers.

And it’s a decoy, all the pain, all the hurt, the false self.

The name of this imaginary friend is the false self. All the pain and the hurt reside with the false self.

The false self firewalls the child.

The child is one step removed from all the vagaries of life, from all the torture that is in torment that is inflicted upon.

And so it has a decoy function, but this is actually also the function, for example, of the church. It’s an intermediary between us and God.

So it’s a private religion. And there’s one worshiper, that’s a child, and there’s one divinity, that’s the false self, this imaginary friend.

And of course, like in every religion, there’s also human sacrifice. And the human sacrifice here is the true self.

The child strikes a phaustian deal with the false self.

The false self is very demonic, is very devil-like, satanic in a way.

So the child strikes a phaustian deal with this entity, with this divine entity.

The child says, listen, I will sacrifice myself to you, but you protect me. You not only protect me, you make me great. You make me overwhelmingly great. You make me infinitely great.

And these are the root causes of grandiosity.

So this is the deal, that this is the phaustian deal, that the narcissist has to live with for the rest of his life.

Because that’s, that he strikes this deal when he’s four, but it’s still absolutely valid when he’s 40.

A deal with the devil, Sam, you said it’s almost demonic.

Well, the false self is a kind of, I said it’s a phaustian deal.

You can’t strike a phaustian deal with God. So it’s a phaustian deal.

The child sacrifices his true self. In other words, the child sacrifices himself, he sacrifices his soul to this false self, this divine entity.

And that would mean that this divine entity is devilish. It’s like the devil in, you know, in the middle, middle ages or in guesses work.

Yeah.

And Sam, I know you’re doing work with cold therapy, I think, where you’re treating people as narcissists, as children, not as adults.

You said that’s one of the problems with traditional therapy with narcissists, which makes a lot of sense.

But how come before your work, there has not been a cure for narcissism per se?

I have no idea, honestly.

Seriously. I mean, I am shocked that no one had realized that narcissists are actually children.

Everyone admits throughout the literature that narcissism is a case of arrested development.

Everyone says long before me that narcissism is a dysfunctional form of attachment, which is attachment is formed in childhood, not later.

So everyone admits from the earliest thinking about narcissism, starting with Freud in 1914-15, you know, it’s the earliest thinking.

I mean, everyone says that narcissism is a childhood affliction and yet no one, not a single theorist, theoretician, not a single therapist or practitioner ever thought about the simple idea that if narcissism is a case of arrested development and there is a trapped child inside, we need to use child psychology.

And I’m pretty shocked by this omission. And I think it’s telling. I think it’s telling because, you know, for a very, very long time, child abuse was a taboo topic. Like you couldn’t really talk about sexual abuse, child abuse.

Freud was castigated and penalized in effect for daring to talk about the role of children and child abuse in the family, in the middle class family.

And well until the 70s, the topic of child abuse was taboo.

And then when we did finally grudgingly started to tackle the topic of child abuse within a man’s castle, within the home unit, the household unit, we did it in a very absurd and circumspect manner. We didn’t really attack the problem head on.

So I think that’s the first reason.

The second reason, I think we are terrified to admit that appearances are not substance. Our entire society is based on signaling, on signals. When we see an adult, we would feel very unsafe.

I mean, if I were to tell you that some adults are not adults, you would feel very unsafe because you wouldn’t know how to trust people, who you can trust, and with what.

We are utterly based on signaling.

There is a policy, there is a cognitive deficit, cognitive bias called base rate deficit or base rate bias.

We discovered in studies, including very recent studies by Dana Rael and others, we discovered that people believe in face value, 95% of all statements, immediately, uncritically, without checking anything, without talking to anyone, immediately accept 95% of everything they’re told, however outlandish.

And this is well documented. It’s called the base rate. You can look it up.

And so people need to trust and to believe. If we undermine the foundation of trust, if we undermine the value of signaling, we are undermining actually our social contract and our ability to operate in teams and cooperatives. We undermine the foundations of the success of our species.

So I’m actually doing exactly this by claiming that some adults are not what they see. I’m actually saying signaling sucks. You cannot trust people.

It’s deceptive.

It’s subversive. It’s a subversive message because it says you can’t trust what you see.

You are seeing another, but it’s not another. It’s the same, like saying, listen, some people are inherently evil and malicious, but you can’t identify them. I’m not giving you any tool to discern who is evil and malicious. I’m just telling you, some people are evil and malicious.

Imagine the impact is going to have on you.

And we are facing this with a pandemic, with COVID-19, because we are being told there’s something in the air that’s going to kill you.

But we are not given tools to identify this something. Look at the impact this had. Look, it destroyed our civilization literally.

So saying some people are malicious and evil, some people are children, but there is no way to tell who these people are is exactly like saying there’s a virus in the air and it’s going to kill you, but there’s no way to tell where it is.

You know, personally, I didn’t know the person I was with was a female COVID somatic narcissist, but my instinct told me to get away. And that’s what I did.

But what I, you talk about this a lot in your seminars as well.

The people that I, in my experience, I see so few people co-dependence leaving narcissists and so few.

And you’ve said yourself, and I’m going to quote you, it’s a big, big problem. What are your thoughts on that, Sam?

Well, everything is a choice and choices reflect needs. When the codependent remains with the narcissist, she remains because the narcissist caters to very profound needs that she has.

And because no one else can do it better, he’s the best provider, is a best practice provider.

And she realizes this. She had tried so-called normals or neurotypical people before she had tried psychopaths, teacher and she settles on the narcissist because he does the work best.

The problem is that her needs are pathologized. So it is wrong to focus on separating the codependent from the narcissist. It’s much better, much more profitable, much more appropriate to tackle the pathology, the fact that her needs are pathological and to try to somehow tackle these needs.

By the way, this is something we do very successfully. For example, borderline personality disorder, which is a form of codependency in a way. Borderline personality disorder, we have an exceedingly successful therapy, possibly the second most successful after CPT. And that’s dialectical behavior therapy, DPT. DPT is very successful with borderlines. Within one year, 50% of borderlines lose their disorder.

So what is more profitable? To try to separate the borderline from her much needed narcissist or to try to get rid of her borderline personality disorder so that she no longer needs it.

I think the emphasis is wrong because today we are focusing on teaching internet partners of narcissists either how to cope with them one way or another, survival strategies, manipulative strategies, and so on, or to go no contact.

In other words, how to separate from them.

I invented all these strategies by one. The only one I did not invent was Gray Rock, which is a wonderful strategy, by the way. And my only regret actually has come up with it.

But I did. But I invented all the rest. I invented mirroring, I invented no contact, I invented all these techniques.

And yet I’m saying that this is the wrong focus. The focus should not be on the narcissist. The narcissist is a symptom akin to fever, akin to temperature. It’s a fever.

The fact that you have a narcissist in your life says that something is wrong with you, not as a value judgment, not that something is wrong with you morally. But it means there’s some dynamics in you, some psychological dynamics in you, a problematic, and you need a problematic person to cater to them.

It’s almost like the focus that I see with people who are still in narcissistic relationships, the focus is all on the narcissist. And I admit the same thing happened to me.

But now what I do is I focus on the work that I need to do on myself. And I own that. I think that’s very, very important because you’ve also said numerous times, stop demonizing the narcissist. You’ve said that on a number of occasions.

Yes, because people are converting this into a morality play. Good versus evil. The devil versus God. I don’t know why. It’s totally out of control, it’s all there. It’s a defective, problematic human being that you’re living with.

And you need to work on yourself so that you don’t need this person anymore in your life.

It’s kind of like alcoholism, Sam, that alcoholism is the tip of the iceberg that what lies beneath that alcohol isn’t really the problem. It’s the same sort of thing.

Yes, exactly. And I actually suggest in the new work that I’m doing, I branched out, I’m not dealing with other personality disorders with addiction.

So I came up with a new theory of addiction, which is making the rounds right by the way. And in my new theory of addiction, addiction is actually the natural state. It’s actually a healthy, natural state.

It’s just when addiction combines with mental health disorders that it gets out of control and help us functioning and happiness.

But I asked the very, the very simple question, which again, to my utter shock, no one has ever asked.

If addiction is an abnormal state, if it’s a pathological state, why 42% of our brain is dedicated to addiction? 42% of all the structures and surfaces of our brain are dedicated to fostering, to creating addiction, and then to processing the outcomes of addiction. Why would our brain be built this way if addiction was the wrong thing for us?

It’s the same like saying 10% of our brain is dedicated to thinking, but thinking is pathological. Nature never invents structures that are not necessary.

Addiction has multiple very crucial and very beneficial functions. But when it combines with mental health disorders, it becomes alcoholism or substance abuse or blood addiction or sex addiction or internet addiction.

We get addicted to the most unbelievable things. Addiction is a mode of relating to the world, to anything in the world. It’s not true that there is something inherent in alcohol that makes you addicted.

This whole theory that alcohol is a brain disorder is here unmitigated nonsense.

Alcohol has obviously effects on the brain, but it also has an effect on the liver. Would you say it’s a liver disorder? Of course not.

Alcoholism, the use of alcohol for addiction is simply an environmental choice.

By the way, when we cure the alcoholism, the person gets addicted to sex. When you cure the sex addiction, the same person gets addicted to pornography.

It’s cross addiction, absolutely.

Yes, addiction is a state of being, not a particular choice of the addictive substance or circumstance or people over it.

What do you say, Sam? You came up with a no contact. I personally did that, and it was quite difficult because I think if a person doesn’t understand hoovering, for example, that you think that the narcissist is coming back because he or she loves you. Of course, that’s not the case.

My choice was at the time to say absolutely no contact.

What are your thoughts there, Sam, in terms of breaking off or getting free from the narcissistic relationship?