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1. 00:02 In one of the first iterations of the phrase narcissistic abuse, which I coined in the 1980s, I considered using the phrase ambient abuse, atmospheric abuse. It’s an abuse that is diffuse, all pervasive, all permeating and yet cannot be traced to a
2. 00:26 single source, a single occurrence, a single event, and a single type of misconduct. Ambient. Today I’m going to discuss the environment that the narcissist creates, how this environment is intended to set you up for failure, and your reaction to this set of adverse
3. 00:50 circumstances, to this dystopian ecosystem. My name is Sam Baknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self- Love, Narcissism Revisited. I’m also a professor of psychology. the idealization phase which involves love bombing and so on. This phase actually sets you up for failure
4. 01:16 because the expectations that are associated with your idealized version in the narcissist’s mind. These expectations can never be met. They’re not realistic. These expectations are fantastic, counterfactual. They’re not grounded and the expectations of you are
5. 01:40 constructed in a way that you are very likely to fail the narcissist, to disappoint the narcissist, to let the narcissist down. You can say it in his face, in his body language, in his verbal choices. Idealization is about setting you up for failure.
6. 02:00 The narcissist tells you that you are drop deadad gorgeous and then you must maintain this standard. He tells you that you are hyper intelligent and all the time he’s trying to ent trap you with trick questions. He tells you that you are a perfect being that you are
7. 02:18 godlike or divine. Of course, no one can measure up to this kind of idealized version of themselves. And so you fail. And failure, your failure is critical within the shared fantasy because failure um sets you sets the stage failure prepares the stage for devaluation. It is your
8. 02:44 failure that justifies the transition to devaluation and discard. Failure is critical in order to uh transition to devaluation and the devaluation and discard phases of the shared fantasy. Without failure, it will be very difficult to make sense of this
9. 03:05 sudden abrupt about phase of this um
10. 03:12 transition that is unheralded. No harbingers, no anticidence, a transition that comes out of nowhere. One minute you can do no wrong and your perfection ray, the next minute you are human trash. So it is your failure that facilitates this smooth transition from an idealized
11. 03:37 version to a devalued version and fully accounts for the following discard. But your failure also challenges the narcissist because remember the idealization phase involves co- idealization. As the narcissist idealizes you, as you become ideal in the narcissist’s
12. 04:01 mind, as you gain access to your idealized version through the narcissist’s gaze, through his eyes, even then it’s all about the narcissist. The narcissist uses the ideal rendition of you, the idealized rendition of you, uses it as the fundamenter
13. 04:23 of his or her own idealization. It’s like owning a fleshy car. Um, owning a fleshy car implies that you are something special. Owning a trophy wife implies that you are irresistible. teaming up um with a hyper intelligent person uh testifies is an evidence to your own
14. 04:46 genius. So idealizing you is also
15. 04:52 a part of self idealization of the narcissist. The narcissist idealizes himself by collecting, appropriating, owning and possessing ideal objects. You being one of them. So your failure challenges the narcissist because the transition from idealization to
16. 05:14 devaluation theoretically should be mirrored uh by the transition from self idealization to self-devaluation. The sequence is this. The narcissist idealizes you. You become an internal object. He owns you. He possesses you. And by possessing you as an ideal
17. 05:34 object, the narcissist idealizes himself. Then you fail to meet the narcissist’s expectations. You fail to conform to your idealized, utterly unrealistic version. Having failed, the narcissist devalues you and discards you. But at the same time, he has to devalue
18. 05:57 and discard himself. He has made the mistake of idealizing you. His judgment must have been erroneous or the um there were hidden things that
19. 06:12 he was not aware of or whatever the case may be. The ideal object that has helped the narcissist to idealize himself has suddenly turned sour. Suddenly gone south. Suddenly this idealized object is no longer ideal. And this is one of the main motivations
20. 06:31 for the narcissist to re idealize you and hoover you. Because as long as you remain in the devalued stage, as long as you become a pcary devalued internal object, the narcissist cannot idealize himself. This internal devalued object is a part
21. 06:52 of the narcissist and therefore renders the narcissist imperfect. He needs to regain his perfection by perfecting you, by idealizing or re idealizing you and hoovering you. All these phases of the shared fantasy take place in a dystopian total
22. 07:13 allervasive all permeating environment. The narciss the narcissist shared fantasy by definition is divorced from reality. It’s an ecosystem and a habitat unto themselves. It’s a planet far away at the very end of a galaxy and you are trapped there with a narcissist in his
23. 07:36 fantasy in a narrative in a script in a movie in a theater production which increasingly more so are divorced from what is real. And so it’s a total environment and in this sense it’s very reminiscent of other total environments such as the army or a hospital or a prison.
24. 08:00 And there is a word to describe your reaction to this totally dystopian, totalitarian, all-incclusive, everything excluding everything excluded environment. An environment which is which amounts to a kind of incarceration, an environment which is dreamlike and
25. 08:23 therefore nightmarish. The reaction to this types of environment is known as solstalgia. Yes, solstalgia. You heard it correctly. It’s a fusion of the word solace and the Greek suffix for pain. algaia. Solstalgia is a new coinage, a neologism. Um, and some experts are beginning to
26. 08:51 say that solstalgia can explain the harmful effects of a an adverse environment on mental health. Whenever you find yourself trapped helpless and hopeless in an ecosystem in a habitat in an environment upon which you have no control and which you cannot change in
27. 09:15 any meaningful way your mental health is likely to suffer. Solostalgia was coined in 2003 by the Australian philosopher Glenn Alrech. The term refers to human distress caused by environmental changes to one’s home or surrounding leading to a loss or lack
28. 09:36 of solace and resulting in feelings of pain or sickness. Alrech’s ID builds off Ziggman Freud’s classic 1919 essay thus unheim Freud’s essay in 1991 919 argued that anxiety is the outcome of something that he called the unheim an element it’s a kind of unhomelike
29. 10:09 the unheim is commonly translated into English with the word uncanny. Uncanny and we have for example the uncanny valley reaction uh which was first described by a Japanese roboticist in 1970 and I have quite a few videos dedicated to it. So solstalasia
30. 10:31 is an uncanny reaction to an environment which is suddenly perceived as alien estrange stranged hostile strange um surrealistic nightmarish uh an environment environment which fosters helplessness learned helplessness which is hopeless which is allincclusive. Ive which is boundary
31. 11:00 which is uh an environment which is limiting and constricting of freedom of one’s identity of one’s personal autonomy and independence of one’s agency and so on. This kind of highly restrictive suffocating environment creates an uncanny reaction and unheim
32. 11:24 reaction. In Freud’s words, Freud argued that seeing familiar objects or environments become unfamiliar was deeply unsettling. It could sometimes challenge one’s beliefs about themselves. according to Jacob Lee, chair of the American Psychiatric
33. 11:43 Association Committee on Climate Change and Mental Health. Now, solstia is not like nostal nostalgia. I have a video dedicated to the psychology of nostalgia on this channel. Um, so nostalgia can be relieved. Nostalgia is about the past and since one cannot
34. 12:07 effectively revisit the past and one can never ever change the past, nostalgia is unrequited. There’s no way to mitigate or amilarate nostalgia. Solstalgia can be relieved by simply changing the environment, reverting, going back to a more familiar
35. 12:30 setting, a setting where one regains a sense of mastery and control. So nostalasia arises because home itself may have changed and is no longer recognizable as him as homely. Now solstasia is not a mental health a recognized mental health diagnosis or
36. 12:54 problem but it’s as Susan Clayton says a professor of chair is a professor and chair of psychology the college of worester as she said it is a useful term for recognizing the emotions associated with loss or damage to places that are personally significant and that is
37. 13:14 precisely what the narcissist does within the shared fantasy He isolates you. He divides you away from family and friends and social support networks, from familiar settings and surroundings. He then proceeds to construct meticulously and with attention to detail an
38. 13:37 environment which is so fantastic, so detached from reality, so unreal, so um so realistic in many ways that you find them yourself within this environment feeling more and more alienated and a strange wandering wandering through the unfamiliar through
39. 13:59 the unheim through the uncanny feeling increasingly more terrified on the one hand and strangulated on the other. It’s a kind of shortness of mental breath or psychological breath. So Clayton says that it is solstalgia is a source of stress that contributes to
40. 14:25 mental health problems just as grief about the loss of a loved one is not a mental health problem but people can still benefit from help in coping with those emotions. I believe that the narcissist shared fantasy is a self-contained, self-sufficient environment and that it
41. 14:45 is so different to anything that is familiar. so different to any previous experience that it is unsettling and uncanny and nightmarish and surrealistic and therefore create a reaction of acute discomfort and solstalgia. There’s been a recent review published
42. 15:11 uh online, a scoping review published online in the prestigious academic journal BMJ mental health researchers from Switzerland. They reviewed the literature, various studies looking at the relationship between solostia and mental health issues. They found 80 studies. Amazingly,
43. 15:33 19 of them were included in the review. So, and these inclin all encompassed 5,000 participants from Australia, Germany, Peru, and the United States. There were five quantitative studies included in the analysis, and they revealed positive associations, positive
44. 15:52 correlations between solaria and mental health problems including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and somatization. probably put together this would amount to what we know as complex trauma. There were 14 qualitative non-quantitative studies in the review
45. 16:13 and they conformed pretty well with the quantitative studies. They provided evidence that solstalgia is to quote the researchers, the Swiss researchers, solstelgia is a useful construct to understand the emotional responses of persons affected by environmental
46. 16:33 changes. In general, the findings were very much in line with what we expected, said Susan Fischer, assistant professor of planetary health in the University of St. Gallen um in the Institute of Psychology of Zurich. She said people with a lot of placebased
47. 16:52 feelings of loss were more likely to also have mental health problems. I’m suggesting to expand the scope and meaning and definition of solstalgia and to apply solostia not only to situations where the physical ambiance and environment has been altered beyond
48. 17:12 recognition but also to situation where the psychosocial environment has been tempered with and has been changed so that it had been rendered unrecognizable and even I would say ominously ominously unrecognizable which is the essence and the core of the experience
49. 17:35 of the shared fantasy by non-narcissists. They feel trampmed trapped. They are regressed and infantilized into the womb. But the womb itself, the womb itself, the womb that is the matrix that is provided by the shared fantasy is in itself alien, unfamiliar,
50. 17:57 a little unreal and and very surrealistic. And so Fischer and her group found associations as I said um between changing environments and solstalasia this sense of discomfort and and even pain or hurt. Natural disasters didn’t didn’t were not
51. 18:23 were not highly correlated with solstia but ongoing environmental change which was perceived as deletterious and destructive this did create solostia and the the authors of the study wrote this suggests that solstalgia might either be more intense or salient in
52. 18:45 scenarios of ongoing environmental destruction as opposed to one time events or in scenarios which are clearly humanmade and not attributable to any other causes, for example, the weather. This is directly pertinent and applicable to what the narcissist does,
53. 19:06 the changes in the environment, the newly engendered ecosystem. These changes are ongoing. It is a process of destruction of the old and the new doesn’t make up for it. Doesn’t compensate for the annihilated old reality. And these are not one-time events or scenarios.
54. 19:32 They’re ongoing which is the complex element in complex trauma. And finally, it’s all man-made. The victim of the narcissist who is embedded in the shared fantasy, having lost her mind, having absconded with her identity, having become someone completely different, a bit more
55. 19:52 robotic. The victim of the narcissist feels that it’s all man-made. It’s not really natural that the narcissist is responsible pretty directly to what’s happening. There is even a misattribution of malice or malevolence or premeditation previous intent to the narcissist which
56. 20:16 is not the case. And so the authors say this notion fits in well with longstanding evidence in trauma research according to which interpersonal traumas are more likely to cause complex trauma CBDSD. and they give various examples and and so on so forth. They say that some
57. 20:43 people might be more vulnerable than others to emotional distress caused by changing environments. Clato says this. Individuals who feel a stronger sense of connection or attachment to the world have experienced direct impacts of changing environments, for example,
58. 21:03 climate change. and they feel more vulnerable due to where they live. These people experience greater distress. People who hear more about climate change in the media, older adolescents and young adults as well as women may also be more vulnerable. Can we measure solaria? Is it
59. 21:27 measurable? Can it be quantified? Is it a quantitative dimension? There are several scales for measuring solstalgia surprising uh including the environmental distress scale, the scale of solstalgia, the brief solstalgia scale and the nine item subscale of the EDS. We can use these
60. 21:49 scales in my view to measure the distress, the subjective distress of victims within the shared fantasy of the narcissist, victims who experience narcissistic abuse. So the findings when it comes to solstia, the findings are surprisingly consistent.
61. 22:11 The scales are therefore validated and there’s great value in assessing solasia in people who are subjected to um environmental environmental changes which are perceived as minutious perceived as threatening. Um clinicians as I said don’t recognize
62. 22:33 formally solasia as a mental health condition. uh but they do use it uh when they try to rent to give help or when they try to evaluate people who have been exposed to environmental changes they use solostia is a useful tool and it’s linked as I said to grief and indirectly to
63. 23:00 nostalgia but I think solstia could be developed further developed and applied to situations of abusive relationships or toxic relationships. The subjective reaction of stress, distress, anxiety and dissonance. These reactions in the victims can be grouped together within
64. 23:26 the conceptual framework of solstia. And so many people uh who find themselves embedded or trapped more precisely in such relationships are likely to react with what is easily identifiable as solstia. uh I when solstalasia is exclusively applied
65. 23:53 for example to climate change which is the situation today I think it is an underestimate of the potential of solaria explanatory potential and the hermeneutic potential and the organizing potential of solaria. I think there are additional dimensions
66. 24:12 which have yet to be developed and solstalgia can be eased. I mentioned earlier that nostalgia cannot be effectively treated but solstalgia can. Um there are ways to ease the burden of solstalgia using cognitive behavior therapies mainly. Clayton says that in a more general way,
67. 24:38 social connections and getting involved in actions to address the environment may help to keep the anxiety from undermining mental health. Solstasia is known as an eco emotion because initially it’s been linked to climate change and environmental cons
68. 24:56 concerns. So we have eco grief, eco anxiety, eco shame, eco guilt, you name it, eco everything. But that’s very restrictive and also in my view very wrong. Um, grief is a universal phenomenon. Someone experiencing high levels of grief according to Fisher might find that
69. 25:20 restoring or conserving the environment uh including the psychosocial environment is helpful in regulating these emotions. So I wanted to introduce this idea into the discourse and the narrative of narcissistic abuse. Uh I think it could be a very productive and fertile ground
70. 25:42 which could yield treatment modalities later on. We need to accept that the narcissist creates a paracosm, an alternative reality, a virtual universe and then hijacks the victim and transports the victim or teleports the victim into this alternative reality
71. 26:05 into this other universe. And this abrupt dislocation is accompanied by repeated exposure to the to the less familiar, more alienating, more estranging, more nightmarish and more surrealistic dimensions and aspects of this new unrecognizable planet or universe.
72. 26:31 And the victim tries to acclimate herself to habituate to somehow survive in this newfound environment. And this generates a lot of anxiety and distress. And because she recognizes that the planet is not real, that it is an extension or projection of the
73. 26:52 narcissist’s mind, she also the victim also develops subjective distress. coupled, I think, with aggression and rage and anger and grief, negative effects. Negative effectivity is a critical feature of solostia that hadn’t been studied, hasn’t been studied yet.
74. 27:15 And I think once solstia comes to uh comes to characterize or or encapsulate the reaction to this alien planet of narcissistic abuse, the shared fantasy far away in the remotest reaches of the galaxy of the human mind. Once solstia is applied rigorously, I think it it
75. 27:39 would give us a rich yield of ways to help victims of narcissistic abuse by reintroducing them into familiar comforting homely reality. The reality they have left behind, their identity included from the unheim, the uncanny to the himly, the homeland and the domestic and
76. 28:04 the soothing.