And this is what many victims do. And that’s another example of contagion, another example of how narcissism spreads.

Victims adopt the same position. It’s not my fault. I had nothing to do with it. I was an angelic victim. I’m perfect. I’m immaculate and so on and so forth. That’s a narcissistic position.

And so there’s no place for apology. Forgiveness has two components. One component is self-directed and the other component is other-directed.

To forgive others is much easier than to forgive oneself and often accomplished.

We move on. The vast majority of us move on and we learn to forgive, not in the active sense like, “I understand you. My heart goes out to you. I pity you. I have mercy on you and so I forgive you.”

No, that’s not typical forgiveness. Typical forgiveness is to say, “I’ve moved on and you’re no longer important in my life. You’re no longer meaningful. You are not a carrier of meaning. You’re insignificant.

So this is other forgiveness.

And because you’re insignificant, I don’t want revenge. I don’t want justice restored. I don’t want anything further to do with you. Period. You’re insignificant.

So that is what we mean when we say forgiving others effectively.

It is almost impossible to forgive oneself if one has elevated grandiose narcissistic defenses.

For example, if you consider yourself inordinately smart or intelligent, it would be very difficult for you to admit that you have acted stupidly. If you consider yourself irresistibly attractive, it would be impossible for you to admit that your charm did not extend to a particular individual.

So when we can’t forgive ourselves is because we impose impossible unrealistic demands and expectations on ourselves.

We are actually narcissistic. We are saying we are special. We are unique. We are super handsome. We are amazingly intelligent.

So how come did this happen? How did I allow this to happen?

It’s a challenge to this self-image of fantastic perfection. That’s why self-forgiveness is very difficult because to forgive yourself, you need to admit your flaws, your shortcomings, your disabilities, your brokenness, your vulnerabilities. You need to admit to all these things. You need to admit that you’re less than perfect. And those who are capable of doing it, healing is this dual forgiveness, rendering your abuser insignificant and rendering yourself less than perfect.

If you’re capable of these two feats of these two accomplishments, then you are capable of healing.

Regrettably, the vast majority of people are not capable of healing because they’re not capable of either.

They go on a vengeance spree. They become vengeful. They seek to restore justice as if they were in charge of cosmic justice.

So they remain attached to the abuser, at least emotionally, they remain attached to the abuser via this lack of forgiveness. And they can’t forgive themselves because that would mean that they’re less than perfect and they have an image of perfection of themselves.

So these are sick dynamics, they’re unhealthy dynamics.

In addition to all this, cluster B abusers install in your mind a voice. They implant in your mind an app, like an app on a smartphone. In other words, they force you to create an introject. They force you to create an internal object in your mind that represents them.

So you have an internal object of your narcissistic abuser, you have an internal object of your borderline partner. And this internal object remains with you long after the physical separation from your partner. And this introject inside your mind is active, it speaks to you, it criticizes you, it puts you down. It’s your enemy, it’s an enemy. It’s a harsh inner critic and it’s with you.

The narcissist long having exited your life is still inside your mind, still inhabits your mind. It’s a parasitic infection.

And you need to deprogram yourself, exactly like after a cult, cult members are deprogrammed. You need to deprogram yourself because being with a narcissist or a borderline is being a member of a cult.

So you need to deprogram yourself and then you need to separate from the narcissist or the borderline.

Because when you’re with a narcissist on the borderline, you are inside a shared fantasy. And inside this shared fantasy, you merge with a narcissist, you fuse, you become one. This is a process called enmeshment and engaugment. You become enmeshed with a narcissist.

So when a narcissist is gone physically, you’re still enmeshed with him emotionally. You need to separate from the narcissist.

First thing is to silence the inner voice that represents a narcissist in your mind or the psychopath or the borderline.

Second thing, you need to separate from the narcissist. You need to do exactly what a child does at age 18 months. You need to separate from mommy. You remember the narcissist becomes your mother. You need to separate from your mother and again to become an individual, to rediscover yourself, your authentic self, because your self is contaminated now. The narcissist has contaminated yourself by isolating you from reality and from social support networks, from your family, from your friends, from your job.

By doing this, the narcissist has taken over your identity, your core identity, your feeling of who you are and has redefined it in his own image. And you need to recapture your authentic self prior to the narcissist.

Now, all these tasks cannot be done alone. You can’t accomplish them on your own. You need help with these things.

So professional. Okay. And therapy is what’s like therapy would be a good point in your perspective. Like that would be a good start.

Coaching in some cases, sometimes just a good friend or a very wise or very wise granny, you know, but you need external help. This cannot be done from the inside.

If you convince yourself, if you want to convince yourself that you’re capable of doing this on your own, this is proof that you are contaminated.

Okay. This is a narcissistic grandeur statement to say, I don’t need anyone. I can do this on my own.

That’s the narcissist speaking. Not you.

Okay. This is so interchangeably ironic that a victim of cluster B and cluster B themselves have similarities in their behavior pattern.

I think people tend to forget that cluster B personality disorders are the outcomes of abuse.

Oh my goodness.

Okay.

Okay.

These people are victims of abuse.

Okay. They have chosen solutions which are antisocial, dysfunctional, evil, but they are victims of abuse.

When a cluster B person, when a narcissist abuses his intimate partner, it’s one victim of abuse, abusing another victim of abuse. That’s why they resonate. That’s why they bond. That’s why there is trauma bonding.

The narcissist trauma bonds with the victim’s trauma. It’s the bonding of the traumas.

They recognize each other. They select a secret handshake. They come from the same, from identical environments.

Only they chose different solutions. Some of them chose as children to become submissive. And so they become codependent or people pleasers. Some of them chose to emulate the abuser. They said, I’m going to be the abuser. I’m never going to be the victim again. From now on, I’m going to be the abuser. That’s the narcissist and the psychopath.

Some of them are unable to regulate their reactions to the abuse. Their emotions took over, drowned them, overwhelmed them, and so on and so forth. And these people became the border lines.

But what’s common to all cluster B personality disorders and all victims of cluster B personality disorders is that they’re all, without a single exception, victims of abuse.

Oh, okay. Wow. That is, wow. I have never ever heard it tied in that way. And that is new information. And it gives insight, I think, into the idea that I think a lot of cluster B behaviors are not necessarily diabolical. As you’re saying, they are defensive. And that allows for a little bit more forgiveness.

I think there is a little bit of caution tape placed over that though, in being careful as to placing forgiveness in understanding and recognizing and realizing that you cannot change someone else. You cannot love someone. We can pity captive animals in the zoo, the tigers in the zoo. We can pity them, these tigers. But we would never enter the enclosure. Never mind how much we pity them and how much we understand them and how much we sympathize and empathize with the tiger, with a poor tiger who has been taken away from Africa, from his freedom is limited, his pacing, his pacing, his cage, his fear, his fear is falling apart. I mean, it’s horrible to behold. And how our hearts, our hearts are, you know, go out. And we feel such compassion for the tiger. But we would be seriously foolish to enter the enclosure and pet the tiger.

So we can objectively look at the narcissists and the borderline and say these are unfortunes. These are people who have been abused as children. These are people whose genetics predispose them to be mentally ill, like borderline and psychopaths. These are people whose brains operate differently, like borderlines and psychopaths. These are people who regulate themselves from the outside.

Narcissists require narcissistic supply to survive, to regulate a sense of self-worth, to feel alive. The histrionic needs attention. The borderline needs control or safety from the outside. I mean, they don’t exist inside.

Narcissism, cluster B, is not about presence. It’s about absence. There’s nobody there. These are voids. These are black holes.

And so we can observe them and we can feel great pity and heartbreak at who they might have been and would never be.

At the potential, the wasted potential, the tortured children who had become this.

And yet we would be extremely unwise to get any nearer and to try to establish a bridge or a bond or an attachment or a connection or a relationship with these people.

Regrettable as it may be, these people should be isolated. Not actively, not in prison, but isolated socially. They are not good people, but not because they choose to be bad people.

Psychopaths do sometimes, but narcissists don’t, borderlines them. They’re not good people because this is who they are constitutionally. The same way a virus is not a good entity, not a good creature. You can say, yeah, but a virus doesn’t have decision-making powers. A virus doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong.

Well, a narcissist, the ability to make independent decisions to control his impulses and borderline the same control impulses and so on. It’s severely limited and his ability to tell reality from fantasy is non-existent.

So it’s very much like a virus. He’s on automatic pilot.

Actually, if you talk to borderline patients, many of them will tell you repeatedly, I feel like I’m an automatic pilot. An autopilot. These are semi-conscious entities comprised mostly of absence in search of someone to suck into the maelstrom and the black hole, which is essentially insatiable.

Okay. Stay away. So statistically, they are who they are. They’re not going to necessarily recognize that a change needs to be had. Or even if they did recognize that, there is no motivating factor to change.

Is that correct? Sometimes they’re very motivated to change, but they’re in capable of change.

Except borderline. Except borderline personality.

In borderline personality, first of all, we have an effective therapy, which is not the case with any other personality disorder.

So we have dialectical behavior therapy, which was developed by a borderline. And so we have DBT. That’s very effective.

And borderline ameliorates with age. So that after age 45, the majority of borderline lose the diagnosis and can no longer be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

So the prognosis for borderline is very good, actually.

But you have to be patient. You have to wait a long time.

Okay. Wow. That’s insightful. Okay.

Okay. I wanted to end on a quote from your book and just ask you to clarify the ending of this.

So you said, “In the narcissist world, being accepted or cared for, not to mention loved, is a foreign language. One might recite the most delicate haiku in Japanese, and it would still remain utterly meaningless to a non-speaker of Japanese.”

Wow. “This does not diminish the value of the haiku or of the Japanese language, needless to say, but it means nothing to the non-speaker.

Narcissists damage and hurt, but they do so off-handedly and naturally as an afterthought. They’re aware of what they are doing to others, which I was curious about, but they do not care. And they truly do not care. They truly do not care.

Caring requires empathy, requires the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and presume how that person might be feeling.

Mind you, none of us has access to another person’s mind. If you cry and I cry, I would have to rely on your self-reporting as to why you’re crying. And then I would have to assume that you’re not a liar. I don’t have access to your mind.

It’s all a facade, even among healthy people. It’s all a facade with an extreme reliance on self-reporting.

With a narcissist, there’s nothing behind the facade and very often there’s no facade. There’s nothing behind the facade and definitely there’s no ability to experience deductions.

So for example, the narcissist can see you crying and then the narcissist will say, “In 6143 previous cases when I saw people crying, they self-reported as sad. So if she is crying, there is a 99.9996% probability that she’s sad.

Okay, now I know that she’s crying and she’s sad. That’s where it ends.

The narcissist cannot elicit, cannot provoke in himself an emotion that is supposedly the equivalent of your emotion.

In short, the narcissist has cognitive empathy, reflexive empathy, collectively known as cold empathy, but he has no emotional component. He cannot resonate with you. He can make deductions the same way an artificial intelligence robot might do in the near future. He can look at you, he can analyze your behaviors, compare them to other people’s behaviors, then go through the self-recording of those other people and say, “Well, that must be her internal state.”

But he doesn’t have a corresponding internal state in himself because he has no internal. He has no interiority. He has no internal anything. There’s nothing there. I don’t know how often I have to repeat this because it defines language. There is nothing and nobody there. It’s a shell and there is nobody and nothing there. Nobody to react to you, nobody to understand you, nobody to empathize with you, nobody to emulate your moods or your emotions, nobody to hold your hand, nobody to provide support, nobody to… there’s nobody there. It’s a machine very, very, very similar to artificial intelligence. It simulates human behavior and human speech, not perfectly.

And that’s why people feel ill at ease with the narcissist. They feel uncomfortable with the narcissist because his simulation is not 100% accurate. It’s like there’s glitches, glitches and bugs. Something is off. So it’s a programmable artificial intelligence robot who simulates human beings with varying degrees of success and that’s where it ends. That’s all.

So it’s statistical and mathematical. It’s strategical instead of diabolical. It’s mechanical.

By the way, many healthy people, they have sex the same way. In sex, this is common. In sexual performance, this is common. People simulate sex. They saw it in pornography, they read about it and they simulate it. They go through the motions, you know, but actually there’s nothing there. There’s nothing behind the sex.

So with the narcissist, it’s not only sex but everything. Everything is assimilated.

Oh, Sam, you are wonderful and you are so knowledgeable and you are…

I fully agree. I’m beyond grateful for this. I’m so grateful for the time. I’m so grateful for the insight and thank you for having me. I’m so excited to have you for our lunch episode. So thank you so much again.

Thank you. And I wish you great success with everything you’re doing.

Thank you and same to you.

Take care.

It was nice talking to you. It was nice having you.

Don’t give me your permission to upload it to my channel. Please do. And I apologize for the additional editing. I’m so sorry.

All right. Don’t worry about it. Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.