Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video.

1. 00:06 hello everyone good morning this is a seminar organized by the
2. 00:12 inimitable barbara jura the narcissism coach in budapest hungary hungary is in
3. 00:19 europe europe is on earth and earth is part of the solar system
4. 00:25 and if this is not enough today we are going to discuss astrophysics in mental health because the narcissist is a black hole and this is a cosmic object as some of
5. 00:38 you know so the seminar is a total of
6. 00:44 six hours the first part is two hours then questions and answers
7. 00:50 one hour and there’s a break short break then a second part of two hours
8. 00:57 and then questions and answers for yet another hour you can post your questions to my right to the right of my screen there’s a chat function
9. 01:09 and you can type your questions there i promise to review them and to ignore all the questions i don’t
10. 01:15 want to answer because that’s the kind of guy i am who am i actually
11. 01:22 my name is sam vaknin i’m the author of malignant self-love narcissism revisited
12. 01:29 and i’m a professor of psychology in uh southern federal university in westovendon the russian federation of all places and i’m also a professor of
13. 01:40 psychology and a professor of finance in the outreach program of the cias
14. 01:46 consortium of universities center for international advanced and professional studies phew that was long now
15. 01:57 kids and cadets listen well the first part is focused on the narcissist psychology and the psychodynamics
16. 02:08 of his relationship with you so it’s a deep dive
17. 02:14 into what makes the narcissist stick in your relationship with him and how
18. 02:20 does this affect your psychology so the first part is entirely dedicated to the psychology of relationships with narcissists on both
19. 02:31 ends the narcissist and its hapless victim recipient survivor whatever you want to
20. 02:38 call yourself that’s the first part the second part of the seminar about two and a half hours from now
21. 02:46 um the second part will be a new stream another stream and it will be about two
22. 02:52 two and a half hours from now in the second part i will deal with coping strategies
23. 02:58 coping strategies within the relationship and even more importantly in my view
24. 03:04 coping strategies after the relationship had ended coping strategies of in the
25. 03:10 aftermath of the of the relationship so stay tuned
26. 03:16 either for both parts or for the second part if you are pragmatic people if you’re practically
27. 03:23 oriented and you don’t give a fake about what psychology has to say about narcissists and their victims then switch off and come back in about two two and a half hours time there’ll be a new stream
28. 03:34 dedicated to practicalities how to kind of how to stream if you are curious about what’s going on
29. 03:41 in the narcissist mind and what his mind does to your mind
30. 03:47 then you’re in the right place and definitely with the right guide which happens to be
31. 03:58 so without further ado um by the way good morning to all of you from all over the universe the known universe and without further ado let’s dive
32. 04:09 right in as you all know relationships with narcissists go through predictable
33. 04:16 a predictable cycle it starts usually with love bombing love bombing
34. 04:22 and if the narcissist is psychopathic there’s a stage called grooming it then evolves into a honeymoon
35. 04:30 and i call this whole thing dual mothering or dual mothership i will come to it a bit later
36. 04:37 then there’s a process of idealization actually co-idealization
37. 04:43 an introjection snapshotting then there is the inevitable devaluation
38. 04:50 then there is discard and then there is replacement and repetition compulsion these are the
39. 04:56 phases of the cycle of the relationship with the narcissist and i will dwell on each and every one
40. 05:03 of these phases and explain to you in depth the psychology
41. 05:09 the engine behind this inexorable inevitable ineluctable cycle
42. 05:16 why does the narcissist keep doing it why does he keep finding new intimate partners idealizing them and then
43. 05:24 devaluing them discarding them why go through all this what’s the benefit
44. 05:31 and so i will explain to you that the narcissist actually cannot help himself and this is why it’s called the
45. 05:38 repetition compulsion before we go there a few things about
46. 05:44 narcissism narcissism is cons widely considered to be a personality disorder now if there
47. 05:51 are two words in psychology i hate most it’s personality and disorder i think
48. 05:57 the personality is a fictitious construct that has no ground no grounding in any
49. 06:04 studies or anything we know about human beings personality ostensibly is lifelong it’s fixed it’s immutable but of course it’s nonsense people are not
50. 06:15 like lakes they’re like rivers people flow people evolve people change
51. 06:21 sometimes they change within months there’s no such thing as personality similarly i disagree with the word
52. 06:28 disorder but not to make this too academic i think that narcissism narcissistic
53. 06:34 personality disorder and even narcissistic style people who are which were just
54. 06:40 narcissists a-holes jerks i think that these people are actually had had experienced complex trauma in childhood
55. 06:52 they are the said outcomes the said reactions to cptsd complex trauma
56. 07:00 now this complex trauma must have happened in the formative years in psychology the years between six
57. 07:06 months and six years this period in human life is when we are
58. 07:12 essentially formed we use metaphors such as core identity or self or ego
59. 07:21 superego in eid if you’re a freudian these are all of course metaphors no one had captured an ego or a self in a
60. 07:28 bottle these are allegories similes but something happens
61. 07:35 in in these first six years of life and if you’re exposed during these years
62. 07:41 to a dead mother dead not in the physical sense but dead
63. 07:47 in the emotional psychological sense a mother who is absent a mother who is
64. 07:53 selfish depressed a mother who is dysfunctional mother who parentifies you
65. 07:59 as a child forces you to become her parent a mother who instrumentalizes the child uses the child to realize her wishes and fantasies and dreams a frustrated mother
66. 08:11 and so on and so forth a mother who spoils the child and prevents the child from getting in touch with reality
67. 08:17 and so a mother who hinders the child’s personal development and growth mother
68. 08:25 who does not allow the child to develop personal firm boundaries a mother who
69. 08:32 refuses to let the child go refuses to allow the child to separate and become an individual in a process known as separation individuation all
70. 08:43 these things are very traumatic because the child cannot become
71. 08:49 there’s no way the child can feel separate from his mother and so he just
72. 08:55 dies he dies mentally and emotionally and both people with borderline personality disorder and people with narcissistic personality disorder are actually victims of childhood abuse
73. 09:09 now i know that many of you would scoff or be startled by the idea that narcissists are victims but of course they are they are narcissists are children
74. 09:21 who had chosen a specific solution trying desperately to cope with an
75. 09:27 environment which had been toxic and not conducive to growth
76. 09:33 narcissists are abused children who never ever grow up there are a few things characteristics characteristics of narcissism pathological narcissism because there is
77. 09:44 also healthy narcissism but we in our seminar today we’re going to limit ourselves to the pathological kind
78. 09:51 and when we observe pathological narcissists in in their habitat which is the relationship with you
79. 09:57 we we come across certain specific behaviors first of all
80. 10:03 narcissists self-soothe they have self-soothing behaviors and this this
81. 10:09 self-soothing behaviors are usually in the form of addictions so narcissists very commonly are addicted to alcohol or to drugs or to the internet or to pornography or to work workaholism or to shopping or to
82. 10:25 traveling whatever they do it’s addictive and the reason they need to self-soothe
83. 10:31 is because of something called prolonged grief syndrome prolonged grief syndrome
84. 10:38 means that the narcissist mourns and grieves his childhood his
85. 10:44 lost childhood he is constantly sad dysphoric about what he could have become he mourns and grieves his lost potential
86. 10:56 the fact that he had never become an adult that he was never allowed to evolve and
87. 11:02 to develop think of it it is indeed a sad story the narcissist background is sad and so he needs to soothe himself all
88. 11:13 the time another thing common to narcissist is repetition compulsion
89. 11:19 they tend to repeat the same behaviors regardless of outcomes someone said erroneously but never mind that the hallmark of craziness
90. 11:30 is repeating the same thing the same behaviors over and over again expecting different results well that’s the
91. 11:38 narcissist for you the narcissist says repetition compulsion in his relationships for example the
92. 11:44 narcissist would select an intimate partner and then go through the same mistakes he had committed in previous
93. 11:52 relationships the devaluation the discard the callousness the ruthlessness the cruelty the sadistic abuse etc he just can’t help it that’s the meaning of
94. 12:03 the word compulsion compulsion means he’s compelled to do what he does it’s not he doesn’t control
95. 12:10 his behaviors the second thing the next thing is by the way say hello to minnie
96. 12:17 the next thing is dysfunctional attachment most narcissists have avoidant or insecure attachment styles more likely avoid an avoidant
97. 12:28 dismissive avoidant dismissive attachment styles are attachment styles which are not
98. 12:35 conducive to bonding they are not real attachment actually i’m proposing another style of
99. 12:41 attachment i call it flat attachment i think narcissists are incapable of getting really attached to anyone really bonding with anyone really
100. 12:52 committing to anyone and really investing in anyone and there are many reasons for this
101. 12:58 but suffice it to say that they are incapable they also don’t have access to positive emotions early in childhood the narcissist had learned that positive emotions such as
102. 13:11 love lead to pain result in hurt so he doesn’t want to do this anymore he
103. 13:18 doesn’t want to love anymore and he’s afraid to tap into his negative emotions a positive emotions i’m sorry because his positive emotions are marinated in a reservoir of
104. 13:30 historical pain and hurt if he were to love again he would feel very threatened
105. 13:36 so he’s incapable of emotions and there are other reasons why he’s incapable of bonding and attachment i will touch upon this a bit later the next thing you need to know about the narcissist
106. 13:47 is that he is discontinuous there’s no continuity there no coherence
107. 13:53 no cohesion no core nothing stable the narcissist is shape-shifting
108. 14:01 mutable exactly like a river he has dissociative
109. 14:07 self states he he appears to be different persons it’s like his
110. 14:14 shape is shifting or switching between personalities he does he has no memory of the vast
111. 14:22 majority of his life he experiences his life as something out there he is merely the observer the spectator the director of a movie or an actor on a
112. 14:35 stage in a theater play called my life so he doesn’t experience his life
113. 14:41 directly but only indirectly through the mediation of a narrative that makes it
114. 14:48 very easy for him to forget things so he does all the time he dissociates
115. 14:55 in a desperate effort to not appear dissociative to not appear forgetful to
116. 15:02 not appear demented and senile in a desperate effort to cover up for these memory gaps and identity lapses the narcissist lies
117. 15:14 he confabulates he invents stories which are plausible and probable but need not be true and
118. 15:22 then he comes to believe his own lies and he defends his lies against any attempt at unraveling them or exposing them for what they are
119. 15:33 and many people perceive this to be gaslighting but gaslighting actually is a psychopathic behavior gaslighting
120. 15:40 implies premeditation intention goal orientation
121. 15:46 the narcissist’s only goal only wish only purpose in life and the soul engine of meaning is narcissistic supply that that’s all he
122. 15:57 wants he doesn’t need to gaslight you but he ends up doing it because he lives in concocted fictitious
123. 16:05 narratives that have little to do with what had really happened you must remember that the narcissist is a case of arrested development he is an infant he is he has infantile
124. 16:17 defense mechanisms such as splitting the narcissist spends most of his life
125. 16:24 in regressive infantilism he is maybe two years old he is maybe four
126. 16:31 years old in the best case he’s nine years old but he’s never an adult not
127. 16:37 even an adolescent so narcissists avoid shirk
128. 16:43 adult chores and adult responsibilities they are peter pans the peter pan
129. 16:49 syndrome they are eternally stuck in an early phase of life unable to extricate
130. 16:55 themselves and later unwilling to extricate themselves and they fully expect you to cater to their needs
131. 17:02 as children do and they throw temper tantrums if you don’t they’re like spoiled brats
132. 17:09 part of a reason for this is cognitive distortions the narcissist does not perceive reality properly
133. 17:17 the narcissist distorts reality cognitively the prime example is grandiosity
134. 17:26 the narcissist perceives himself as godlike perfect brilliant omniscient or
135. 17:32 knowing omnipotent or powerful and of course it’s a wrong self-perception he is not like that
136. 17:39 but he fully believes that he is so he’s he distorts reality
137. 17:45 he fakes it he refrains it he reforms it and reshapes it
138. 17:51 to cater to his need to perceive himself as godlike it’s a kind of private religion if you wish
139. 17:58 and this creates cognitive distortions gradually the narcissist drifts away
140. 18:05 drifts away from reality reality clinically we call it impaired reality
141. 18:11 testing he becomes more and more delusional more and more adrift and detached from
142. 18:19 what we all healthy people consider to be the real the essential he lives more and more inside his head inside his mind
143. 18:30 inhabiting an internal space with representations of people out there
144. 18:36 known as internal objects or introjects he retreats and withdraws into the
145. 18:42 safety of this boundary space known as mine and these are the only
146. 18:49 boundaries he does have so it’s perfectly
147. 18:55 perfectly logical to say that narcissism is a form of mild psychosis otto kernberg had suggested this in the 70s the narcissist also suffers
148. 19:06 from emotional or effective dysregulation but not like the borderline
149. 19:12 the borderline experiences empathy and she experiences strong emotions these
150. 19:18 emotions overwhelm the borderline take over her subdue her she drowns in these emotions
151. 19:25 she’s unable to function anymore because she’s flooded with its with a tsunami
152. 19:32 of feelings and effects and memories and so on that’s the borderline the narcissist
153. 19:38 is different his emotions and his effects are also dysregulated but in a different way he
154. 19:45 has something called inappropriate effect and reduced effect display in
155. 19:52 other words the narcissist experiences only an extremely limited set
156. 19:58 of emotions known as negative affectivity he experiences envy he experiences anger experiences all the negative emotions and in an attempt to fit into society somehow he either
157. 20:15 demonstrates or shows inappropriate emotions inappropriate effect for example he may laugh at a funeral or he may find a tragedy very comic
158. 20:28 and on the other hand he may suppress all emotional displays reduced effect display so he would appear to be unflappable with a poker face
159. 20:39 untouchable impermeable invulnerable sang-foia etc etc
160. 20:46 the narcissist doesn’t have acting out he doesn’t act out the way the borderline does he doesn’t just fly off
161. 20:53 the handle and does crazy reckless things like the borderline he he rarely loses control because
162. 21:00 pathological narcissism is focused on control it’s a control
163. 21:06 adaptation it’s a positive adaptation in early childhood in an environment that had been chaotic and hectic and unpredictable in and dangerous and ominous and threatening so narcissism is about control where the borderline loses control
164. 21:23 when she switches into the secondary psychopathy mode when she anticipates humiliation and rejection and
165. 21:29 abandonment she just loses it the narcissist doesn’t he actually actually if anything tries to reassert control reassume control
166. 21:42 usually by preempting abandonment he abandons first crawling and so on but
167. 21:48 the narcissist exactly like the borderline his episodes of decompensation
168. 21:54 decompensation is when the narcissist defenses crumble fall apart when he can
169. 22:00 no longer lie to himself and tell himself that he is godlike that is a divinity or a deity that is
170. 22:07 perfect and brilliant and handsome and amazing and a professor of psychology so
171. 22:13 he cannot tell himself all these things and then he falls apart he falls apart
172. 22:20 and in two ways the mild form is known as narcissistic injury and the extreme form is known as narcissistic motification when the
173. 22:31 narcissist decompensates he doesn’t act out he doesn’t go crazy what happens instead he develops a mood disorder he becomes depressed and anxious this
174. 22:42 happens also to psychopaths we are beginning to discover the stereotype or the fearless psychopath is just that a stereotype it’s not true psychopaths
175. 22:53 actually experience long periods of anxiety disorders same with the narcissist
176. 23:01 the analysis is emotional dysregulation in the form of inappropriate and reduced effect has
177. 23:08 profound implications the narcissist is unable to perceive
178. 23:14 external reality properly for the reasons that i had explained but he is also unable to perceive
179. 23:21 internal reality properly he has impaired internal reality testing and of
180. 23:28 course he has empathy deficits he has only called empathy the cognitive reflexive part but not the emotional part of empathy so the narcissist begins
181. 23:39 to lose to get lost he simply he’s disoriented
182. 23:45 he can’t evaluate or appraise reality externally properly
183. 23:51 and gradually he doesn’t understand his internal reality properly
184. 23:57 he loses touch with both the external and the internal and this is even more extreme than
185. 24:03 psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and paranoia the narcissist in your life
186. 24:09 is likely to be not only a small kid but a very very terrified and scared
187. 24:16 small kid because it’s a kid who doesn’t understand the world out there
188. 24:22 and doesn’t understand what is happening inside him
189. 24:28 it is important to understand when it’s important to grasp with the narcissist that his whatever shreds of identity
190. 24:36 that he does have they are negative he is a negative identity
191. 24:42 he defines himself in contradistinction to others he defines himself by contrast by
192. 24:50 comparison with others via relative positioning if he is envious i am as good as or not as good
193. 24:57 as this or that person so he’s constantly comparing himself he said he’s likely to say i’m never going to be like my father
194. 25:08 he was a loser i’m i i am i think my boss is deficient i’m
195. 25:15 much better than him he constantly compares himself to other people in his early life in his late life in
196. 25:21 his present in his past and even in the future even people he had never met like
197. 25:27 political leaders figures from history and this creates something called negative identity
198. 25:33 and a negative identity is about rejecting rejecting other people
199. 25:40 rejecting their their assets and rejecting their liabilities rejecting their good traits and characteristics and rejecting their flaws and deficiencies it’s about rejecting the
200. 25:52 narcissist defines himself acquires a kind of sense of identity i
201. 25:59 call it pseudo identity by rejecting other people but rejection becomes an organizing principle reject rejection in the narcissist’s
202. 26:10 life makes sense of his existence imbues it with meaning and direction gives it
203. 26:17 structure it’s a method of operation an mo modus operandi so the narcissist
204. 26:23 begins to reject everything everyone especially himself
205. 26:29 narcissism is an extreme form of self-loathing
206. 26:35 there’s been a big debate in the psychology of narcissism whether narcissists are happy-go-lucky
207. 26:42 whether they’re they’re ego syntonic whether they like themselves they’re comfortable with themselves
208. 26:48 whether they are proud of their narcissism and the answer to all this is yes in the case of the overt narcissist but we are beginning to realize that the overt narcissist is actually not a narcissist is a psychopath and the only real form
209. 27:05 of pathological narcissism is what used to be called until now covert narcissism or compensatory
210. 27:13 narcissism so the compensatory narcissist is a narcissist who hates himself
211. 27:19 loathes himself consider him considers himself secretly inferior as an inferiority complex allah
212. 27:28 adler and so this kind of narcissist compensates by pretending that he is
213. 27:37 great that he is god-like that is all-knowing all-powerful perfect brilliant flawless infallible that’s his compensatory mechanism
214. 27:48 so this self-loading and this self-loading compels the narcissist forces the narcissist
215. 27:56 to display to put on a display of superiority haughtiness arrogance and yes rejection but as i said
216. 28:07 rejection metastasizes it spreads you can’t control it if you relate if you relate to the world via rejection that you you will end up rejecting yourself and this is the irony of narcissism
217. 28:24 deep inside the narcissist despises himself contemptuous contemptuously relates to
218. 28:32 himself deep inside the narcissist has autoplastic defenses
219. 28:38 very similar to the neurotics defenses he blames himself he shames himself
220. 28:46 there have been scholars such as masterson who insisted that pathological narcissism is a form of dysfunctional coping strategy with shame it is based
221. 28:57 on shame and the inability to process shame as a child and so
222. 29:04 this would lead the narcissist to have a neurotic core the inside of the
223. 29:10 narcissist is actually neurotic and this is the original observation of otto kernberg in the 70s he said that narcissism and borderline which he he thought were one and the same
224. 29:22 narcissism and borderline are on the border that’s why you call the border line on the border between neurosis and
225. 29:29 psychosis and i couldn’t agree with him more he was a great visionary who is now
226. 29:35 being vindicated the narcissist says auto plastic defenses internally but
227. 29:41 because he rejects people all the time he has alloplastic defenses externally
228. 29:47 he blames people his wife his boss his neighbor his colleagues his friends you name it the state government secret agencies if he is if he’s a
229. 29:58 paranoid so he blames everyone for everything wrong in his life for every defeat for every failure for every
230. 30:04 mishap for for every erroneous decision and choice and so
231. 30:11 he adopts alloplastic defenses he attacks other people he he blames other
232. 30:17 people for for everything that’s wrong in his life but this creates an external locus of control
233. 30:24 if you keep blaming other people for everything that’s happening to you it’s like admitting
234. 30:30 that your life is out of control it’s like saying other people are controlling my life
235. 30:37 it’s like confessing to being a play thing an object something that has no agency no self-efficacy and no autonomy indeed
236. 30:49 this is exactly how the narcissist feels he feels that people are envious of him if the people hate him if his people are angry at him and he’s right on all three counts by the way
237. 31:01 and people in his mind how to get him the how to control his life they’re out
238. 31:07 to demote him they’re out to hurt him the how to pain him they’re out to destroy his life
239. 31:14 everyone is an enemy everyone is a secretary object
240. 31:20 one of the reasons that the narcissist sees only bed around him only envy and anger
241. 31:29 one of the reasons the narcissist is able to experience only negative effects and negative emotions
242. 31:35 is because of a process called bed object interjection bad object introduction means the narcissist as a child had been told that
243. 31:46 he is bad that he isn’t worthy that he is a failure that he is a loser that is good for nothing and had come to expect as a child conditional love
244. 31:58 if he performs he gets love if he does not perform according to maternal or paternal expectations he doesn’t get love he this gradually
245. 32:09 had convinced the narcissist even as a child that he is not lovable he cannot be loved
246. 32:16 so he internalizes this bad object as a child the narcissist
247. 32:22 in the making has two choices he can either say mother keeps telling me that i’m bad
248. 32:29 that i’m unworthy that i’m a failure that i’m a disappointment but mother is wrong that’s option number one option number two
249. 32:40 mother keeps telling me all these things and because she’s mother she’s always right no child no child would choose the first option no child would think bad things about
250. 32:52 mommy and the reason no child would do that because it’s because the child depends
251. 32:58 for his life on his mother he cannot afford to think of mother as a bad malevolent evil
252. 33:05 object he cannot afford to think of mother or father as defective deformed sick dysfunctional so his he internalizes the bad object he
253. 33:16 says i’m bad mother is right i’m dead father is right i’m unworthy they’re both right
254. 33:23 i’m a disappointment and this is called bad object introduction but if you feel that you’re bad that you’re a loser that you’re a failure that you’re a disappointment that you cause disillusionment and
255. 33:35 disenchantment in everyone that everyone hates you isn’t angry at you etc you don’t want to be yourself
256. 33:41 the narcissist does not want to be him himself he wants to be a false self he wants to
257. 33:49 be someone else and this process is clinically clinically known as estrangement he gets estranged from himself the way some couples get estranged from each
258. 34:01 other so estrangement is an attempt to put distance
259. 34:08 between the narcissist and his internal bed object because the internal bed object is harsh
260. 34:15 sadistic it’s an inner critic it’s a superego that keeps chastising castigating tormenting hectoring preaching criticizing the narcissist
261. 34:26 it’s painful it’s hurtful it’s an annoyance it’s it’s unsustainable so the
262. 34:32 narcissist puts distance in this process of estrangement between his his himself
263. 34:38 and himself and the solution to this is the false self the narcissist catheters the false
264. 34:45 self he invests emotional energy in a piece of fiction in a narrative in a story in a deity in
265. 34:54 a divinity known as the false self and he sacrifices to it its true self but of
266. 35:00 course if you do this if you divorce yourself if you remove yourself from the sin
267. 35:06 if you convert yourself from an existence from a presence to an absence
268. 35:12 if you become a void if you become an emptiness this is terrifying this is this is perceived as dying it’s
269. 35:23 a process of dying where healthy people spend their life spend their lives becoming the narcissist spends his life unbecoming
270. 35:35 voiding annihilating himself self-eliminating
271. 35:41 and this is of course a catastrophe so the narcissist tends to catastrophize he tends to expect doom and gloom he has a negative pessimistic view of the world
272. 35:54 he’s likely to be extremely cynical and he believes everyone is precisely like him everyone is callous and ruthless and merciless and petitious and cruel
273. 36:07 and relentless in pursuing goals so he catastrophizes because he catastrophizes
274. 36:13 his anxiety levels rise the narcissist is a very anxious person
275. 36:19 and to cope with his anxiety the narcissist engages in rituals he becomes obsessive compulsive and one of these rituals is addiction
276. 36:31 so most narcissist addicts the narcissist is afraid
277. 36:38 to confront his life he’s afraid to experience his life firsthand
278. 36:44 he has an imaginary friend an intermediary the false self and he inhabits a fantastic universe known as paracorsam
279. 36:55 the narcissist does not experience life instead he lives in the future
280. 37:03 he is afraid to come in touch to get in touch with his past with his emotions with his personal history so he deletes he dissociates his
281. 37:14 past the same way borderlines do he is he cannot live in the present
282. 37:20 because of the process of estrangement so he inhabits the future he’s future oriented goal-oriented but this is of course compensatory when you refuse to inhabit your present
283. 37:34 when you refuse when you decline to contemplate your past you’re actually rejecting yourself it’s a form of self-rejection
284. 37:45 um scholars such as harvey clinkley jeffrey seinfeld others they kept insisting
285. 37:56 that the narcissist narcissism is about the rejection of life about an emptiness that is all pervasive
286. 38:04 a kind of black hole if the psychopath is a neutron star the narcissist is a black hole
287. 38:11 and the borderline is a supernova some narcissists um are unable to maintain
288. 38:23 a continuity of life this way so they’re very erratic the they drop everything they start new projects and then stop they start new new relationships and then bailout
289. 38:35 they dick affect they remove emotional energy emotional investment so we see these narcissists as
290. 38:42 desolatory itinerant unpredictable unexpected and unexpectable and
291. 38:49 so we we tend to confuse this kind of narcissism with borderline
292. 38:55 i’m telling you all this about the narcissist because if you have a narcissist as a partner
293. 39:01 you need in my view to understand what’s going on inside this mind
294. 39:07 this mind which is demented and deranged and on the verge of psychosis and crosses the border very often
295. 39:13 this mind which is tortured and tormented this mind which is estranged
296. 39:19 this absence which pretends to be a presence this black hole
297. 39:25 which if you are not careful enough and you cross the event horizon will consume you
298. 39:31 and never let you out you need to understand the dangers of living with someone like that the only
299. 39:37 way to do that is to gain access to the user’s manual which i’m trying to do right now and right here in this confined time and space you see
300. 39:48 it is impossible to love other people if you do not love yourself narcissism is not about self-love it’s the antonym it’s the exact opposite of self-love it’s the ultimate form of self-rejection the narcissist is a child kills itself
301. 40:05 commits mental suicide and invents another guy another image
302. 40:12 the fourth self by the way of course everything i say applies to female narcissists as well
303. 40:18 today about half of all narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis are female so women have
304. 40:25 caught up with men so you can’t love if you don’t love yourself
305. 40:31 all love all love is self-love when you love
306. 40:37 another person you can see yourself through the eyes of your lover
307. 40:44 the gaze of the lover defines you allows you to apprehend yourself
308. 40:50 as an external object because your lover sees you as an external object
309. 40:56 you’re able to perceive yourself to self-perceive as boundaries
310. 41:02 the lover’s gaze helps you to create boundaries to delineate them to become
311. 41:08 to regulate your sense of self-worth internally to take on the world to
312. 41:14 become a better version of yourself all these are precluded in the case of pathological narcissism narcissist doesn’t have access to all this because he’s incapable of truly loving another person we will talk about it a bit later
313. 41:30 he is able of interacting with an intimate partner but not in the way healthy people do
314. 41:37 narcissism is not self-love no self there’s no self to love
315. 41:44 the narcissist has no ego has impaired reality testing and so he outsources
316. 41:50 his ego boundary functions the mind of the narcissist is the combination
317. 41:57 the collage the kaleidoscope of all the observers the people who observe the narcissist all the sources of narcissistic supply put together
318. 42:08 engender generate and create the narcissist’s mind it’s a hive mind it’s a swarm swarm mind it’s not a single unitary entity and it shape
319. 42:19 shifts all the time so if there is no self there if there is no ego there
320. 42:26 you can’t the narcissist cannot self-love because there is no self and because he cannot self love and because he thinks himself of himself as unlovable
321. 42:38 most narcissists would tell you i prefer to be feared than to be loved and narcissists find expressions of empathy compassion affection and love
322. 42:49 very awkward very embarrassing and sometimes repulsive they reject such expressions so the narcissist has an incapacity to love
323. 43:02 in clinical terms we say that there is a failure to generate self-objects or object representations
324. 43:10 the narcissist can invest in you his energy his resources even some emotions
325. 43:17 he can perfect in professional terms but he can never love you
326. 43:23 you have never been loved you had been born there was love bombing but love bombing
327. 43:29 has nothing to do with love because love bombing treats you as an object and converts you into a symbol an introject an internal representation
328. 43:40 in the narcissist mind it’s all about killing you transforming you love bombing is about
329. 43:47 getting rid of the real you and replacing it with some image
330. 43:53 we’ll come to it a bit later narcissism is a form of self-loathing the child rejects his helpless self and his lack of self-efficacy the child
331. 44:04 is ashamed of of this of this learned helplessness the child is terrified all the time
332. 44:11 because he cannot predict the arbitrary and capricious behaviors of adults around him he doesn’t understand their expectations and he knows that their love is intermittent
333. 44:23 intermittent and comes in bursts the child is subjected to intermittent reinforcement early on and so the child
334. 44:30 withdraws he creates the false self which is everything the child is not
335. 44:36 the child is helpless the false self is all-powerful omnipotent the child cannot
336. 44:42 read or predict the adults around him the false self is omniscient all knowing the child is told that he is bad and unworthy and flawed the false self is perfect
337. 44:54 the child often is castigated as stupid the for self is brilliant etc etc
338. 45:02 narcissism can be easily described as a form of dysthymia dysphoria permanent depression
339. 45:10 a prolonged grief over an internalized bad object that could have been loved could have been allowed to develop to separate to individually to become a
340. 45:22 lovely charming amazing intelligent adult
341. 45:28 it is this denial of self-actualization this denial of potential that is at the
342. 45:34 core of pathological narcissism a prolonged grief response to what could have been
343. 45:40 to the lost potentials to a life unlived
344. 45:46 and so now we move from the narcissist’s inner landscape to your relationship with the narcissist we know in psychology that when people have unresolved issues
345. 46:03 unsettled accounts open conflicts they tend to recreate them
346. 46:10 they tend to repeat them this is called repetition compulsion a phrase coined by of course whales sigmund the freud
347. 46:22 we all engage in repetition compulsion compulsions big and small but the narcissist’s life his psychology
348. 46:30 is one giant repetition compulsion the entire relationship with the narcissist your relationship with the
349. 46:37 narcissist is intended to recreate the dynamics of the conflict with the narcissist mother
350. 46:45 during the formative years the narcissist unconsciously keeps hoping that this time around with this different mother which is you
351. 46:57 the outcome might be different the power matrix may turn out
352. 47:03 differently he and the mother could be equipped could could have the
353. 47:10 same power could negotiate could compromise could coexist
354. 47:16 so the narcissist chooses you because of your potential to become
355. 47:22 mother to mother him and to be a good enough mother a mother who would love him unconditionally
356. 47:29 and he tests you he subjects you to tests he abuses you
357. 47:35 one of the main reasons for narcissistic abuse is to test whether you’re a good enough mother
358. 47:42 whether you’re going to continue to love the narcissist despite his picadillos his misbehaviors his
359. 47:50 his maltreatment of you are you gonna love him no matter what and if you do then you’re a good enough mother and you qualify to be his intimate partner
360. 48:01 so again we revert to this definition erroneous definition of what
361. 48:08 is to be crazy to be crazy is to engage in the same behaviors time and again expecting different outcomes
362. 48:15 and that’s precisely what the narcissist is doing is trying to resolve resolve the early conflict with his mother which had left him wounded and scarred for life
363. 48:26 he’s trying to salvate what freud called the archaic wound and what joan lochkar calls the vulnerability spot of the vulnerable spot the visport he’s trying to
364. 48:38 he’s trying to heal through you through your agency he’s trying to convert you
365. 48:44 into a mother a maternal figure and then re-enact with you his childhood it’s a second child a second chance at being a child
366. 48:55 and the narcissist vainly hopes and i will explain a bit later why vainly but vainly hopes this time to be able to separate from you and to become an individual he hopes to complete
367. 49:11 the separation individuation phase and here i must explain or revisit
368. 49:19 the issue of separation individuation essentially there are two phases of separation individuation in human
369. 49:26 life the first one is between the ages of 18 months and 24 months
370. 49:33 during the separation individuation phase the child
371. 49:39 begins to venture out into the world the child begins to give up on the idea
372. 49:45 that he and mother are one and the same there’s a single organism with two heads
373. 49:51 maybe this process this psycho psychological phase is called symbiosis used to be called
374. 49:57 symbiosis so then the child exits the symbiotic face he begins phase he begins
375. 50:04 to realize that mother is a separate entity that he and mother are not the same there’s a lot of terror it’s a traumatic realization because if mother is not the same as the
376. 50:16 child she may abandon the child and indeed during this period the child develops separation insecurity also known as abundant or separation
377. 50:27 anxiety is terrified that because mother is not is separate from him she will
378. 50:33 also go away and never return but gradually he overcomes this terror this fear and he begins to initiate separation actually he walks a few steps away and
379. 50:46 runs back to mummy this is separation the good enough mother is a safe base a secure base
380. 50:55 the child knows she’s not gonna punish him for trying to separate she’s not gonna just walk away she’s not gonna disappear on him when he when his back is turned as he ventures out into the world into the world grandiosely taking on reality
381. 51:12 she’s gonna be there for him if he fails she’s gonna be there for him if he wishes to return to the base and recuperate and recharge
382. 51:24 that’s the good enough mother the bad mother the dead mother the selfish mother the insecure mother the absent mother she does not let the child separate she penalizes the child for any
383. 51:37 display of autonomy and independence and agency and self-efficacy and
384. 51:43 gradually the child learns to please mommy he needs to stay tethered to her attached to her in an
385. 51:51 invisible umbilical cord as though he had never been born he needs in other words to go back into the womb he needs to be unborn he needs to kill
386. 52:03 himself only that way mother will remain in his life happy and
387. 52:09 loving her love is conditioned upon his death mommy loves him only when he does not exist only when he ceases
388. 52:21 to show any signs of independence and autonomy only when he has no boundaries only when they are enmeshed merged infused the bed mother
389. 52:34 the dead mother the phrase dead mother was coined by andre green in 1978 the dead mother won’t allow the child to become a live child
390. 52:45 in a way the dead mother engages in lifelong miscarriage
391. 52:52 she aborts her child’s attempts to become an individual
392. 52:59 someone else not her an adult and so the narcissist pathological
393. 53:06 narcissism is the outcome of aborted aborted separation individuation
394. 53:12 separation individuation phase gun or rye the good enough mother pushes away the
395. 53:18 child encourages the child to become to transform into an adult the bad
396. 53:25 mother keeps him around her possesses him converts him into an object and he never
397. 53:31 overcomes this so he tries again with you his intimate partner
398. 53:38 but how does he bring these outcomes about how does he convince you to become his mother
399. 53:44 how does he engage you in what sander called in 1989 the shared fantasy he creates a fantastic space fantastic space exactly
400. 53:55 which reflects the space in his mind his mind is a fantastic space where he creates an external fantastic space and
401. 54:01 then he invites you in enticingly alluringly in the love bombing and maybe
402. 54:07 grooming stages a honeymoon permanent honeymoon never to end and
403. 54:13 invites you in and you can’t resist but very early on it becomes clear
404. 54:20 that he expects you to be much more than an intimate partner he expects to to expect you to be his mother he expects you to mother him to fulfill some maternal functions
405. 54:32 and so at this stage some potential intimate partners walk
406. 54:39 away but the majority don’t and the question is how come
407. 54:45 why don’t why do people lose their sense of self-preservation and self-defense in the face of the
408. 54:52 narcissist shared fantasy what is he offering to them that is so irresistible
409. 54:58 and the answer is he offers self-love now that sounds
410. 55:05 totally counter-intuitive i’ve just said earlier that the narcissist is incapable of loving
411. 55:11 himself mainly because he has no self but also because he perceives himself as a bad and worthy object so how can he offer you self-love well through the dual mothering or dual
412. 55:23 mothership mechanism and here’s the deal that the narcissist offers you as an intimate partner he
413. 55:30 says you’re going to be my mother you’re going to mother me and this time you’re going to allow me
414. 55:37 to separate an individual and i’m going to separate from you by devaluing you i’m going to individuate by discarding you
415. 55:48 and i’m gonna do so from an empowered position not as a helpless child anymore
416. 55:54 but like as a boundary adult so it’s a bad deal on the face of it because the narcissist
417. 56:01 lets you know pretty early that if you don’t conform uh he’s gonna dump you he’s gonna
418. 56:08 devalue and discard you he needs to do that there’s no other way to reenact to replay the separation
419. 56:17 individuation phase except by separating from you and by individuating so he needs to
420. 56:23 devalue and discard you this is a compulsive