Horrible Families Raise Horrible Adults (with Familias Horribles) - Vaknin Transcripts

Vaknin Transcripts

Horrible Families Raise Horrible Adults (with Familias Horribles)

Summary

In this insightful podcast discussion, Professor Sam Vaknin delves into the complexities of narcissism, distinguishing between healthy narcissism and pathological narcissism, which arises from early childhood abuse and dysfunctional family dynamics, primarily influenced by the mother. He explains the roles of siblings in narcissistic families, different narcissist types, and the intricate psychological mechanisms like projective splitting and fantasy bonding that sustain narcissistic abuse. Vaknin also clarifies common misconceptions about narcissists versus psychopaths, the challenges of healing, and emphasizes the rarity of true narcissistic personality disorder amidst widespread misinformation. Horrible Families Raise Horrible Adults (with Familias Horribles)

Tags

Abuse, Meaning, narcissism, narcissist, Personality, Psychology, Reality, Sam Vaknin, Trauma, Vaknin Summaries

October 22, 2025

Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Horrible Families Raise Horrible Adults (with Familias Horribles)

00:00 Do you mind? Do you mind if I start? Oh, you can start. Yeah. Yeah, perfect. We can both do it
00:06 this computer. Okay, we both perfect. Okay. Amazing. You can stop us whenever you want. Whenever you can say, “Wait, wait, wait a minute. Whatever. Please, we want you to feel
00:17 I don’t think it will be very easy to stop you.” Okay. Okay. Um, let’s start. Hello.
00:26 Hello. Welcome to Horrible Families Familia Ribles, the podcast where we
00:32 name what was unspeakable at home and we do it with science, compassion, and zero
00:39 sugar coating. I am Alysia Marowitz and I start this project because I am a
00:45 survivor of narcissistic abuse by my parents. For years, I left invisible and
00:52 blamed myself. This space was born to give words to that pain, to validate survivors, and to offer information based in science and practical tools to
01:03 healing for healing. Yes. And I’m Ariana, Lisia’s daughter. Our mission is
01:09 to break the normalization of abuse in the name of family, to bring clarity about narcissism and psychopathy in family systems, and to remind you that you’re not alone. If you’re listening
01:20 today and anything resonates, your experience matters and your boundaries matter. Here with us today is Professor
01:27 Sam Vagnan, one of the leading voices in the study of pathological narcissism, offering unparalleled insights into the inner workings of narcissistic minds and devastating effects on those around them. His career and publications are so extensive and impressive that we cannot
01:44 possibly cover them all here, but we will do our best. He has served as a professor and visiting professor of
01:50 psychology and management in several universities and institutions. And he’s the author author of an extraordinary
01:57 body of work spanning narcissism, personality disorders, philosophy, economics, international affairs,
02:03 fiction, poetry, you name it. Yes. Professor Vaknan, who holds a PhD in
02:09 physics, is also the originator of the Cron field theory. He’s best known for his groundbreaking book, Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revised, one of the earliest and most influential works
02:21 to bring awareness to narcissistic personality disorder and its profound impact on victims. Since then, he has
02:28 published more than 50 books and ebooks and contributed hundreds of articles to
02:34 leading outlets worldwide, including Financial Times, Sunday Times, Psychology Today. He has also appeared
02:41 in documentaries such as I psychopath and channel 4’s ego mania. Professor Vakning, thank you so much for being here with us today. We’re honored to learn from you. Thank you for the opportunity and I
02:53 suggest that you call me Sam. It would be a better use of time. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you.
03:00 Um Yes. Well, Sam, before we begin, my name we would
03:08 Thank you. Thank you. It’s just for respect, but uh thank you for letting us
03:14 uh call you Sam. It feels closer. Before we begin, we would like to give you some
03:21 context. Clinically speaking, uh we would like um clinically speaking,
03:28 how do we how do you define narcissism? Mhm.
03:34 Narcissism is um a healthy the healthy foundation of
03:41 self-esteem, self-confidence, the ability to regulate one’s self-worth
03:48 and to some extent empathy. Um, one need one needs to recognize oneself, one needs to be self-aware and one needs to self-love in order to be able to love other people and in order
04:01 to be able to identify oneself in other people which is a great definition of empathy. So healthy narcissism is universal. All people have healthy
04:14 narcissism. It’s what we call a trait. Narcissism is a trait. Okay.
04:20 Now, all traits are hereditary. Traits are genetic. So, they’re transmitted
04:26 from mother or father and father to children. And so,
04:34 this creates a big confusion between narcissism, which is a trait, and disorders of narcissism. When narcissism goes right, when narcissism becomes pathological. And so people say narcissism when they actually mean to say
04:50 pathological narcissism. Oh, this is very interesting. It’s very much like the connection or
04:57 the relationship between a healthy a healthy cell in the body and the same
05:03 cell when it becomes cancerous. Wow. So pathological narcissism is a
05:11 situation where the fundamental elements in healthy narcissism be either become
05:17 exaggerated or become distorted owing to external influences usually in
05:25 early childhood. These influences include abuse and trauma and so on. Again this creates a major confusion
05:33 because people say no narcissism is genetic. The trait narcissism is genetic, is
05:40 hereditary, not the pathology. The pathology is the outcome of
05:46 environmental influences including abuse and trauma. And this leads to the next confusion.
05:52 This when I say confusion, confusion, confusion, I’m referring to self-styled experts online who have no credentials
05:58 in the field and make a lot of nonsensical statements. Mhm. So the third confusion is when I
06:06 say that it’s pathological narcissism is the outcome of early childhood abuse and
06:12 trauma, adverse childhood experiences. That’s a clinical term. Many people say
06:18 it’s not true. My narcissist has had a loving mother. He’s had a wonderful
06:24 family. It’s absolutely not true. There’s no trauma in his in his personal history. There’s no abuse. It’s because
06:31 we in clinical psychology define abuse very differently. There is there are the classical forms of abuse. There is physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse,
06:42 verbal abuse. These are the classical well-known forms of abuse. But there are
06:48 dozens of other ways to abuse and these are not known are not famous and so
06:54 people are abused. For example, a mother a mother who is overprotective,
07:01 a mother who is um who spoils the child, pampers the child, idolizes the child,
07:08 pedestalizes the child, is not a good mother. Is not a good mother. She is an abusive mother because she is isolating the child from reality and from fears.
07:21 And by isolating the child, she’s preventing the child from developing, evolving, growing, and becoming an
07:27 adult. That’s not a good mother. Similarly, a mother who treats the child
07:34 as her husband, a mother who parentifies the child, a
07:40 mother who who who infantilizes herself, she becomes an infant or a toddler or a
07:46 child and she expects her child to act as a mother or a father. Now, I’m saying
07:53 mother and of course immediately there’s a question, why do I not mention father? That’s a good question. And that’s because fathers have minimal influence up to age 36 months. Fathers are
08:07 unpleasant to say largely irrelevant up to age 36 months. Wow. It is the mother that um forms the child. It’s a mother that shapes the
08:18 child. It’s the mother that brings the brings the child into being. The child becomes
08:24 becomes through the mother. The mother is therefore the only critical influence
08:30 up to the age of three years. Later on, the father becomes important. The father teaches the child skills, teaches the child how to behave in society, teaches the child um all kinds of um scripts, what we call
08:46 scripts. So the father is a very important education and influence. But that is after age 3 years old when most of the formation of the child is
08:57 pretty finished. So it’s it’s a mother definitely. This is the common view in psychology.
09:03 Balby Freud somevakin you name it. We all think it’s Yeah. Wow. So that’s why I’m giving examples of mother. So a mother who parentifies the child. A mother who who forces the child
09:15 to become a parent, a parental figure because she is helpless. She is infantile. She is immature. And the child has to be the mother. Child has to be the father. Uh a mother who
09:27 instrumentalizes the child. This could also be the father. Parents who instrumentalize the child.
09:34 They force the child to realize their own unfulfilled dreams and wishes and
09:41 fantasies. So the mother wanted to be an actress. She failed and she forces the child to
09:48 be an act. an actress or an actor. The father wanted to be a pianist, didn’t make it. He forces the child to be a pianist. And very famously, medical doctors force their children to become medical doctors. Same with lawyers.
10:04 Same with lawyers. If you don’t believe me, go to any clinic and any law firm
10:10 and you will see mother, father, children, grandchildren. They’re all in the firm. This is this is instrumentalization. Instrumentalization. And of course, it’s
10:21 a form of abuse. So the problem when people say you are wrong. My my narcissist had a wonderful
10:28 family. They are wrong. The family appears to be wonderful,
10:34 but it’s actually been an abusive, dysfunctional environment for the child because the child was objectified. The
10:41 child became an object, an extension. Yes. something to be used in some way children the main role of the mother I’m giving you a long answer because I’m taking
10:51 into account what you said that you would like to discuss families yeah yes yes please thank you so a good mother what constitutes what
11:00 wineot the famous pediatrician and psychoanalyst he he coined the phrase good enough mother
11:07 one of the main roles of a good enough mother is to push the child away to
11:13 frustrate frustrate the child. When the mother frustrates the child, and I’m talking about 6 months old, one
11:20 year old, the mother frustrates the child. The child wants something and the mother doesn’t give it to him. The mother sometimes is absent physically, leaves the room. The mother doesn’t um
11:31 obey all the child’s demands and wishes and temper tantrums and aggression and
11:37 so on. A mother who stands firm and frustrates the child teaches the child that she is
11:45 separate from him. That they’re not one. They’re not one entity. The child The child who is preverbal, it’s the child who is not yet capable of talking. But the child says to itself,
11:58 so to speak, the child says, “Who is this who is frustrating me? It must be
12:05 something external to me. It cannot be me. I’m not frustrating me. So it’s not
12:11 me. The child begins to develop the concept of me, not me. Internal,
12:18 internal, external. So this is the first time that the child begins to grasp the externality and
12:27 separateness of the outside world and people in it. And this is accomplished only when the mother frustrates the child. Similarly, the mother needs to push the child away. She needs the child to separate from
12:43 her. And when the child separates from her, the child becomes an individual, divided individual and then becomes an adult. So these are the roles of the mother. A
12:55 mother who refuses to let the child go, refuses to allow the child to separate
13:01 because she is insecure or she is immature or she is selfish or she is
13:09 narcissistic or she maybe is emotionally absent and neglectful.
13:15 She doesn’t care about the child. She doesn’t pay attention to the child. she relegates the care of the child to the
13:21 grandmother or to some money or something. This is these are all ways in which the
13:28 child is not allowed to separate because even when the mother is neglectful
13:34 that means the child she is not there for the child to separate from her. For
13:40 the child to separate from the mother she needs to be there. If she is not there, if she is absent, if she is
13:48 neglectful, if she has abandoned the child, if she’s traveling all the time, if she’s, you know, never with the
13:55 child, the child cannot push back. The child cannot separate from her because she’s not there. Yeah. All these situations lead to what we call a failure in separation,
14:07 individuation. That is the child remains stuck
14:13 in what used to be called by Mala the symbiotic phase. The child remains stuck
14:19 in a symbiosis. The child remains one with the mother merged with her fused
14:25 with her single organism with two heads never to separate and that leads to the
14:32 formation of pathological narcissism. So this is this is the general this is
14:38 the general background because a mother who doesn’t allow the child to separate is abusive the child experiences the whole thing as you would experience prison more or
14:51 less. Yes. Yes. Yes. So the child is is traumatized
14:57 is traumatized and the child reacts like you do like we
15:03 all do nowadays. Nowadays the world is a horrible place. It really sucks. So what do we do? We escape to fantasy. We have
15:11 movies. We have you know political fantastic political agendas. We have all
15:17 kinds of narratives. We have influences. We have we have astrology and we have
15:23 the esoteric and we have these are all fantasies and we are escaping into fantasy as adults. Imagine now if you’re a child, much less capable than an adult, much less powerful, very helpless and powerless and at the
15:40 mercy at the mercy of other people. And yet you’re being abused. You’re not allowed to become
15:48 you’re not allowing to emerge as your own person. You’re not allowed
15:54 to separate from your mother. She punishes you. She emotionally blackmails you. She And so you begin to feel
16:02 suffocated. You begin to feel incarcerated in some kind of prison. And as a child you escape into into a
16:10 fantasy. The fantasy has an imaginary friend. And that imaginary friend is everything the child is not. The child is helpless. Child is helpless. The imaginary friend is all powerful, omnipotent. The child is at a loss. The child is
16:28 mystified by the behavior of the adults. The imaginary friend is all knowing on
16:36 the child is being told the child gets the impression that he that it is
16:44 inadequate that it is somehow unworthy. Yes. While the while the imaginary
16:50 friend is genius, brilliant, amazing, perfect, a perfect entity. In short, the child creates a private religion with a god, with a godhead. The imaginary
17:02 friend is essentially a divinity, a god. And then this god, like the ancient gods in pagan religions like the artex,
17:14 this god demands human sacrifice. And the only human the child has is
17:20 itself. It’s the only human the child has access to. So the the child sacrifices itself to this divinity to this god.
17:32 And that’s when we say that the child loses the true self and becomes becomes
17:38 the false self. The imaginary friend is this false self. And from that moment on, this kind of child lives in fantasy. Totally divorced
17:50 reality, gave up on reality, renounced it, and is immersed and embedded in fantasy for the rest of his or her life.
17:58 And this is what we call pathological narcissism. Wow. dog. Um Sam,
18:08 it’s just that um the difference that you have explained are crucial to
18:14 understand um because there’s a lot of misinformation.
18:20 Uh as you said, we have a lot of distractions. Social media is one of them. We try to do the opposite to we
18:28 try to inform and obviously there is a lot of misinformation. But as a survivor, I um have learned a lot in just this this ma this time this
18:41 conversation. So um this is what happened
18:47 uh what happened with when is different uh siblings because uh for example in my
18:55 family you have described my brother right it could that be the golden child
19:02 or just narcissist I have been always the rebellious one um
19:11 because I w I never wanted to follow those um mandates. I don’t know if that
19:19 makes sense. H I had to to survive, but they knew from the beginning that I I wasn’t
19:28 buying it. It was very hard. It took me decades to finally cut, but I was always
19:34 the scapegoat, so to speak. So, does that make sense? So, what happens? Why
19:40 some of the siblings uh one sibling gets to that point h and the other
19:51 doesn’t what happens because it’s like different roles. Yeah. So
19:59 first let’s start with the facts of 100 siblings in sibling studies and we have twin studies and we have sibling studies. Okay. Of every hundred siblings studied,
20:10 only 2% became narcissists. 98% did not become narcissist. And that
20:17 did not depend on whether they were golden children or scapegoats. Okay, great. So this is strong proof or
20:25 strong indication, not proof but strong indication that there is some genetic hereditary predisposition, some template that is ready to be
20:36 activated. But the activation is through abuse and trauma.
20:43 The the template is there. It’s ready to be activated. It’s like an empty word document. Empty word document.
20:51 What you write in this document is the abuse and the trauma. But not not every
20:58 child has this word empty word document. Only 2% of them do. Right. Okay. That’s interesting.
21:05 So that’s the first thing to to observe. Second thing
21:11 when mothers and or fathers have favored
21:17 children. Mhm. Um we need to we need to embed it in um a theory in psychology. Not a theory actually it’s a result of very solid observations. We discovered that in
21:34 families there is role allocation. Everyone is assigned a role. It’s called
21:42 emergent role. The the clinical term is emergent role. Everyone in the family is assigned a role. You are the fixer. You’re the problem solver. You’re the genius. You are the crazy one. You are
21:53 the one who can never be trusted. You’re antisocial. You are. So everyone gets a role. So there is role assignment even
22:01 among the spouses. mother and father there is role assignment. Mother is better at I don’t know fixing things at home and father is better at making money. So there’s always role
22:12 assignment. Two of the roles there are many two of them are very famous online at least and
22:20 that is the scapegoat and the golden child. But there are others actually. Yes. And it is not true to say that
22:28 narcissism is more common among the golden children or among the scapegoats. It’s completely untrue. It’s equally
22:35 distributed. And I will tell you I will explain now why. Yes, there are two ways to induce
22:42 pathological narcissism in a genetically predisposed child. There are two ways to
22:48 accomplish this. Imagine that we were able somehow. We are not able but imagine in the future we would be able to isolate a group of genes and we would say okay this child has a propensity to
22:59 narcissism. This child is susceptible to narcissism. So there are two ways to convert this
23:05 child into a narcissist. One way is to idolize the child to
23:13 pamper this child spoil the child overprotect the child pedestalize the child. Tell the child that he can do no wrong. That he is always right. That he is superior to other children.
23:24 Isolate the child from peers because they are inferior. Not allow the child to interact with
23:31 reality because reality would undermine these claims. Reality would push back. So in this kind of environment we get a
23:38 narcissist. Okay. But there is but there is another trajectory and the other trajectory is
23:45 to abuse the child to neglect the child to abandon the child to tell the child that they are unworthy they’re inadequate they’re stupid they’re ugly we call this bad object internalization it used to be called primitive super ego
24:01 bad object internalization. So now you see that there are two developmental paths that lead to narcissism. The first
24:09 one is the golden child, right? And the and the second one is the
24:15 scapegoat. That’s why you have equal number of narcissists among golden children and
24:22 scapegoats because both ways both ways lead to Rome to the wrong.
24:30 Yes. Yes. Yeah. Rome. Yes. Yes. But it’s important to uh add that the first path, the path of idolizing, pedestalizing, the first path
24:42 typically leads to what we call an overt narcissist. Mhm. And the second path typically leads to
24:50 what we call a covert narcissist. Now, I would like to make immediately a
24:56 clarification. All narcissists are sometimes overt and sometimes covert. But there is but there is a dominant type like some narcissists are overt 70%
25:09 of the time and some narcissists are covert 90% of the time. So that’s why we say that they are types
25:16 but in reality all narcissists are both. Uh-huh. And so the golden child would tend to be
25:24 overt, grandio, defiant, in yourrface, self assured, self-confident,
25:30 charismatic and so on. He would tend to be this kind of narcissist, life of the
25:36 party, center of attention, uh, performative, performanceoriented, and so on. Um the golden child would become this kind of narcissist and the
25:47 uh scapegoat would become a covert narcissist. In other words, a narcissist who is shy, fragile, vulnerable,
25:54 insecure, jealous, envious, extremely
26:00 soothing with bitterness, aggression, resentment, passive aggressive,
26:06 and generally a snake in the grass. So, oh my god, these are the two these are the two
26:12 types. But what you what you hear online from self-styled experts is wrong because they say only the golden child becomes a narcissist. That’s completely untrue.
26:25 Very interesting. I have never heard of this explanation. Yes.
26:31 Thank you so much for informing. I want to explain the mechanism from the m from the from the parents point of view. Now I have described what’s happening to the child. So I will now describe how
26:42 the parent sees it. Yes. Yes. Okay. There is a primitive defense infantile defense mechanism. There is a defense mechanism that is at work when you are 2 years old up to the age of two years old and it’s called splitting. Splitting is a defense mechanism. It’s
26:58 when you divide people into all bad and all good. You say this person is all good, can do no wrong, perfection, and this person is all bad, evil, never does
27:09 anything right. And so, so when you divide people this way, when you demonize some group of people and you
27:17 eulogize another group, when you elevate another group, that’s splitting. That’s exactly what the parent does. the mother
27:25 or the father of a golden child and a scapegoat. What they do? They split.
27:31 The golden child is all good and the scapegoat is all bad. But this is not classical splitting because what the parent does, the parent
27:44 attributes to the golden child everything the parents want parent wants to be. So the parent says the golden child is a genius. It’s because the parents want
27:55 parent wants to be a genius or the parent says my child is so handsome, so beautiful. It’s because the parent either consider themselves to be beautiful or they want to be beautiful. So everything positive is attributed to
28:11 the golden child. Everything negative in the parent, everything the parent rejects in themselves reject in
28:18 themselves. Everything the parent is ashamed of every everything the parent doesn’t want to accept about themselves
28:25 they are they project they project it onto the scapegoat. So this whole thing
28:32 is called projective splitting because there is projection here. The
28:38 parent actually the parent divides divides herself. Let’s talk about mother
28:44 for example but it applies to father. The parent divides herself. She says this side is
28:51 everything good about me. I am drop deadad gorgeous. I’m super intelligent. I’m amazing. I’m this and that. And my
28:59 son is exactly like me is also handsome and genius and I don’t know what this
29:06 side of me, the left side, I don’t admit that it exists.
29:12 Maybe I’m stingy. Maybe I’m nasty. Maybe I’m aggressive. Maybe I’m repulsive.
29:18 Maybe. But I don’t admit it. I I repress it. I reject it. I bury it. What to do
29:26 with this part? I can’t live with it. It creates dissonance. Creates an unpleasant feeling. Ego deston. What to do with this part that in me that I don’t accept? This part in me that I
29:38 reject. What to do with it? I have to give it to someone. I want to give it to someone. I’m going to give it to my
29:45 daughter and she’s a scapegoat. So that’s an example of projective
29:51 splitting. Beautifully explained. Um
29:58 can this happen because listening to this explanation um you describe how I felt that I was I
30:05 couldn’t exist exist because it the moment I did that I became a threat.
30:12 Right. Danger to break the system or whatever. But because I was a pianist
30:19 and a good one. Oh, play for others. You are a concept. So they have also these
30:26 things. But it’s also like an extension of them that part of
30:34 if the mother if the mother owns you and you’re a piano prodigy, it reflects on
30:41 her. So this process is called co- idealization. Co- ideidalization is when the mother or father idealize you, but
30:49 they don’t idealize you because they think you’re great. They don’t idealize you because they see you as an
30:55 idealized. They idealize you because by owning an idealized object, they become
31:02 idealized. It’s a little like if I have a fleshy car, you know, I have a fleshy
31:08 car or very expensive gadget or or a beautiful wife. It shows that I’m, you know, because I
31:15 have a fleshy car, I have a trophy wife. So, this process is known as qualization. But it goes much much deeper. I don’t know how deep you want to go, but it goes much much deeper.
31:26 Go deep. Um, yeah. Down the rabbit hole. So um depends if the mother and father are narcissistic. I I want to emphasize not
31:37 all abusers not all abusive parents are narcissists. Not all toxic parents are
31:44 narcissists. A very small minority are actually. So how I want to ask you right there um
31:53 because there are a lot of abusive parents, mothers, fathers. How do we what is the line or
32:02 what is the how do we know because abuse all kind of abuse like in my house every
32:11 type of abuse so how do we know it’s a good I would like to know can we know can we know yeah yeah yeah we you know course it’s a good question so there are two tests
32:23 basically the first test does your family have a
32:30 fantastic narrative? Does it have a story like a movie script? A movie script or a theater play? And all of you must play your parts. All
32:41 of you are actors in this fantasy. Everyone, the parents, the children, everyone actor in the fantasy.
32:49 And if you deviate from your role in the script, you’re punished. So in families where the parents are narcissistic, there is what we call the
33:01 shared fantasy. It’s a form of uh what we call mass psychoggenic illness. It’s
33:07 a form of what used to be called mass psychosis or shared psychosis. It’s it’s a story. It’s a fantasy that has no connection to reality. It’s counterfactual. It’s confabulated.
33:18 Sometimes it’s even completely crazy. But everyone participates in this
33:24 ongoing narrative, ongoing piece of fiction, ongoing movie, ongoing theater production. Everyone participates in it.
33:31 Everyone is well-defined roles. The roles also tell you what you are able to say, what you’re not able to say, how you are a how you’re supposed to behave, what is proscribed, what you are not
33:44 allowed to do, what is prescribed, what you obligatorily should do. So it it it
33:50 micromanages your life. You’re under um under a magnifying glass. It’s it’s a
33:56 micromanagement. In other words, you don’t have what is called degrees of freedom in the narrative. You are not allowed to improvise. You’re not allowed to be spontaneous. You’re not allowed to
34:08 become. You’re not allowed to be separate from the narrative or maybe to
34:14 change it or maybe to challenge it. Absolutely not. The narrative is narrative is the overriding organizing guiding principle of the life of the
34:25 family and it is a fantasy and the fantasy usually includes several
34:32 elements. It includes grandio elements where for example the parents would tell you uh that they are special or that you are special in a in a unique way like
34:44 superior somehow. So grandio fantasy. Yes, the fantasy fantasy usually includes
34:50 identification of common enemies where the entire family should confront these enemies. This could be other
34:56 family members, but they’re always common enemies. The So, the narrative is a bit paranoid. There’s paranoid ideation. The narrative includes incentives to comply with the narrative
35:08 and punitive measures if you don’t comply with the narrative. And these are wellnown. So, you you anticipate them.
35:14 In other words, the narrative is anticipatory. It it it informs you. It tells you what’s going to happen. The
35:20 narrative also makes sense of your life, imbuss your life with meaning, gives you
35:26 purpose and direction. In other words, the narrative is directional. The fantasy is directional. Like, I don’t
35:33 know, uh, we’re going to make a a band and we’re going to make a fortune. Or you’re going to play piano and you’re going to be, you know, it’s it’s always leads to some outcome. its direction. So
35:45 a family with such a fantasy is most definitely run by narcissist the parent and narcissist. The second test I said thank you for I said there are two tests. So the second test
35:56 is uh when the parents are unable to accept the separateness
36:04 and externality of the children. When they do not allow the children to
36:10 be independent, autonomous, to have agency, to make decisions and choices of their own, to act alone, to have friends, to have friends, to interact
36:23 with other family members who do not accept the fantasy or mock the fantasy or ridicule the fantasy and so on. So
36:30 the parents cannot accept that the children are outside them that they are
36:36 external and that they are separated. And what the parents do they convert the children into internal objects.
36:44 The parents in their minds create avatars. They create snapshots. They create
36:52 representations. The clinical term is introjects. They create representations of the children in their minds.
36:59 And the parents expect the children to never ever deviate from the internal
37:05 object. Never contradict the internal object. Never challenge, never undermine, never act in a way that would
37:13 remind the parents that the child is not an internal object. So never to be
37:19 autonomous, never to be independent, never to make decisions and choices on your own and so on so forth. So this
37:26 inability to tell the difference between internal object and external object is
37:32 unique to narcissist and to psychotic and to psychotics.
37:38 So in that’s why Otto Kerbeck who is the father of the field and my intellectual
37:44 father as well Otto KB suggested that narcissistic disorders of the self including borderline are actually forms of psychosis they are pseudocs psychotic
37:56 they on the verge of psychosis that is why we use the word border border line it’s on the border with psychosis
38:03 borderline by the way in many schools of psychology borderline personality disorder is considered a narcissistic disorder, a form of narcissistic disorder.
38:14 So um the psychotic person, the person with
38:20 psychosis, the person with for example schizophrenia, they are not able to tell the difference
38:26 between inside and outside. When the psychotic person has a voice in
38:32 his in her mind, she has a voice. She says, “It’s not in my mind. It’s out
38:38 there. Can’t you hear it? You can’t hear the voice. I hear it. It’s coming from outside, but it’s in her mind.” When the psychotic person has an image in his mind, some image, they don’t see it in their mind’s eye. They see it in the
38:54 outside. This is called hallucination. They see the image as if it is out
39:00 there. Yeah. People don’t realize that narcissist are exactly the same. When
39:06 the narcissistic parents looks at you, he doesn’t see you. He sees the internal
39:12 object. So the psychotic person confuses the
39:19 internal object with external reality. The psychotic person thinks that the internal object is real. The narcissist
39:26 is reverse psychotic, inverted psychotic. The narcissist confuses the
39:32 external object with internal reality. The narcissist’s parent says to her to
39:39 herself, “My child exists only in my mind, only in my imagination, only in my fantasy. She doesn’t have a real existence out there.” And this leads to
39:51 something pretty shocking. She needs to kill you. Metaphorically, she needs to kill you. Yeah. Yeah. Because you you do have autonomy. You do have independence. You make choices. You make
40:07 decisions. You have friends. You go to school. You travel. You challenge the internal object all the time.
40:14 Yes. This creates enormous dissonance. And the mother wants you dead.
40:20 In her mind, she kills you. She kills you. She mummifies you. She
40:26 makes you into a mummy. And that’s the internal object that she continues to interact with.
40:32 This is the core feature of narcissistic abuse. I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse in the 80s. Yes. I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse
40:43 because it is not like any other form of abuse. Period. Narcissistic abuse is
40:51 about killing you and then converting you into a mummy. Egyptian mommy. Aztec tech mommy income mommy whatever converting you into a mummy and interacting with a mummy not with you
41:02 anymore. Think of it as a spider. The spider captures a fly. The spider
41:09 injects the fly with poison. The fly dies or is doesn’t die. Actually, the
41:15 fly is paralyzed. The flies don’t die. They’re paralyzed. The spider then wraps
41:21 the fly. Wraps it Yes. with a web and the fly is deanimated. The fly is
41:28 frozen. It’s alive. It’s alive, but it’s frozen. At that moment, the fly became a
41:36 part of the spider web. And the spider web is the fantasy of the mother and the father. For you, for you to participate in the fantasy, for you yes, for you to not create dissonance in your
41:52 narcissistic parents, they needed to kill you in their mind. Not in reality, but in their mind. They needed you to die in their mind. And only then they could wrap you up, make you a part of the fantasy and feel at
42:09 peace. They feel consonant. Is that why then
42:15 it’s so hard to finally leave like
42:22 establish the zero contact like I did. There’s no separation. Leaving physically it’s not very important. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
42:35 Yeah. Here. Here. Here. So the the the child of a narcissistic
42:42 parent is not allowed to separate not allowed to become not allowed not allowed to acquire a dimension of being not allowed to individuate not allowed
42:54 there there’s a variety of techniques as I said the mother or the father can emotionally blackmail or they can
43:00 threaten or they can punish or but the the message you’re getting as a child is if I want to separate from mommy I’m
43:08 I’m bad. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And if I want to leave, if I want to individuate, and this could be also when
43:15 you are 40 years old, like if I want if I leave my mother, I’m a bad daughter. I’m a horrible daughter.
43:21 You know, this kind of thing. So this brainwashing, it has a clinical
43:27 name. It’s called entraining. Entraining. when when um the parent or
43:33 the abuser uses sounds including verbal sounds like words repeatedly so that ultimately there’s a synchronicity of brain waves
43:44 between yours and your parents. So, and this is not a conspiracy theory
43:50 and this is not a metaphor. There’s an actual coordination of brain waves. This was discovered 12 years ago. Wow. We we discovered 12 years ago neuroscientists discovered they were
44:03 investigating a rock band rock bands and they discovered that when the rock band starts to play all the brains of all the the members of the rock band the drummer
44:15 and the the bass player and all their brains became indistinguishable.
44:23 Wow. Yes. They couldn’t tell whose brain it was because all the brains were giving identical waves.
44:30 And this is known as entrain entrainment. This is again a neuroscientific fact.
44:37 Mhm. I applied entrainment in my work because I suggested that the messages that
44:43 narcissistic parents send all the time repeatedly are like mantra. They are
44:49 like music. They are they’re rhythmical. There’s a rhythm there.
44:55 They’re repetitive. They’re And this is what we do in brainwashing, of course. So, Yep. Yeah. So, ultimately, your brain is synchronized is emitting the same waves like your par
45:08 your like the abusive parent. Your brain is your mother’s brain. Period. If she’s
45:15 the abuser, that makes it even dramatically more difficult to separate.
45:21 Exactly. On a neuroscientific ground on on real ground on biological neurobiological ground. In addition to that
45:29 as a child you are you can’t resist the fantasy. It’s very difficult for a child to resist the fantasy because children don’t have what we call reality testing. They don’t know reality very well. So
45:40 they accept any story as real. I mean yeah it’s real. That’s why children believe in you don’t know in
45:46 Santa Claus Santa Claus and so on. So as a child you you are firmly embedded in
45:52 the fantasy. You believe in it. You participate in it which gives you a sense of importance caters to your grand as a child. That means it triggers your own pathological narcissism or pathizes your
46:04 narcissism actually to some extent. And so ultimately you reach a situation
46:12 where there are major incentives to not leave the fantasy even not connected to the parents. In other words, you are
46:19 doubly invested. You are doubly affected. You’re doubly attached. You’re attached to the parents, but you’re also
46:27 definitely attached to the fantasy. Definitely. We see situations, we witness situations in clinical practice where the parents are dead. They’ve died but the children
46:38 can’t let go of the fantasy. They continue the fantasy somehow. So
46:45 this double double bond is very difficult to break and uh narcissists
46:53 create this dreamlike environment. We the clinical name is paracosm.
46:59 They create a paracosm. They create create an alternative reality, a virtual reality
47:05 within which all your psychological needs are catered to and satisfied. You acquire a sense of safety
47:12 because you learn to equate the fantasy with total safety. They give you a sense
47:18 of what we call secure base through the fantasy. Whereas a healthy parent is the
47:24 secure base. The parent is secure base. In narcissism, the parent is insecure. The
47:32 parent is not safe. You learn to be afraid of the parent. But the fantasy is safe. The fantasy. Exactly. So you attach, you bond with the fantasy as if the fantasy is your mother. You
47:45 have the same relationship with the fantasy as if the fantasy was a parental figure. Now when you grow up and you
47:52 come across a narcissist, what the narcissist does, he re-triggers the fantasy. He gives you a he gives you
48:01 a sense of safety. Yeah. By acting by acting parental. He gives
48:07 you a sense of safety by becoming a parent. And he converts you into a maternal figure.
48:14 So the narcissist creates recreates the family environment in what we call the
48:21 intimate intimate intimacy shirt fantasy. He creates an environment that
48:27 actually regresses you, infantilizes you, pushes you back to early childhood. And all the
48:34 triggers buried in your mind are activated one after the other, one after the other until you are an infant.
48:41 You’re again two years old and three years old and you are embedded in a family fantasy with a narcissist. He’s your mother and you are his mother as
48:53 well and you are unable again to let go and that’s why it’s very difficult to break up with narcissists. Unusually difficult. It’s not trauma bonding. Trauma bonding
49:04 is something we can discuss later. It’s not trauma bonding. It’s I would call it fantasy bonding. disappoint the fantasy. So, with with everything that you’re
49:15 explaining beautifully, I can’t help but ask myself because
49:22 when a child has grown up with a narcissist and is in this has this
49:28 fantasy that they’re trying to break away from, but it’s difficult to, how likely is it that that narcissist child
49:36 will pass down these dynamics to their children even if they have zero contact
49:42 because as you said that’s not enough and there’s this intergenerational trauma. How likely?
49:49 Not very likely. Not very likely actually. Okay. Okay. As I mentioned she can breathe.
49:56 Yeah. I make peace I make peace between you. Yeah. Not very likely because of the reason I mentioned only 2%
50:04 1.7% is the exact figure of of people become narcissist and only narcissists
50:11 would propagate the same dynamics. Okay. The other the other 98% end up as
50:17 completely healthy adults. So I mean maybe not healthy some of them
50:23 become borderline or codependent. So they can become but they would not become narcissist and only narcissist propagate the dynamic of the shared fantasy and all this right only narcissist okay so it’s actually pretty rare if you go online you get the impression that
50:38 everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law is a narcissist but that’s not the case that’s absolutely the case
50:46 narcissists are very very very rare yes we have we have people with narcissistic
50:53 style That’s something else. Yes, people who are obnoxious, uh don’t have so much empathy, exploitative these are not nice people. Some people
51:04 have what we call dark personality like the dark triad personality. These are not narcissists.
51:11 Dark triad personality is someone who has subclinical narcissism, subclinical
51:17 psychopathy and machavelianism. In other words, is someone who could not be diagnosed with narcissism,
51:24 could not be diagnosed with psychopathy and is diagnosed with machavelianism. So this is the dark personality. But all these people they give you the impression that they’re narcissist
51:35 because you know other people are layman. They are superficial. It’s on the surface. Ah this guy he sucks. You
51:42 know he’s obnoxious. Yeah. He’s abrasive. He’s unpleasant. He’s impolite. He doesn’t care about other people. or is exploitative is en envious. So that must be a narcissist. Of course it’s not true. Narcissism is a
51:55 profound a profound obliteration and devastation of the soul. Profound. Ottobeck suggested and I fully agree
52:06 that it is the second worst mental illness after schizophrenia. Second worst. Everything inside is destroyed
52:14 beyond reconstruction. There’s an inner black hole, a huge emptiness that
52:20 consumes everything and everyone. There’s inability to tell external from internal. There is addiction to fantasy
52:27 and rejection of reality. This is not this is rare. This is extreme. Okay. So, as you said, the other people are there could be bad people or
52:38 Yeah. Yeah. Not nice people, unpleasant people, bad people. No, they’re not bad. Maybe unpleasant people and so on. They have
52:44 what narcissistic style that was first described by Lens Perry. The shirt fantasy was first described by Sander. I like to give credit to people who came up with these ideas because I I came up
52:56 with many ideas and they are stolen and no one gives me credit and makes me very angry and I would like to others. Yeah.
53:04 So the shy was first described in 1989 by sender and lens
53:10 um was the first to suggest that we should make a distinction between people with personality style and people with
53:16 personality disorder and later it was adopted by the giants in the field like Theodoro Milan and others. So today this
53:22 is the the common. You must also realize something which is
53:28 a bit you know narcissistic personality disorder is
53:34 described in the diagnostic and statistical manual which is the diagnostic manual used in the United
53:40 States. Yeah. Yeah. Part of Canada. Yeah. Good.
53:46 It’s an ornament decoration. Yeah. Yeah. And uh that’s so it’s used mostly in North America and some parts of United Kingdom, Australia, some parts and so on. 80% of humanity do not use the DSM. They use another book.
54:02 That other book is called International Classification of Diseases and you should get it as an as well.
54:10 Yeah. In the International Classification of Diseases, ICD, ICD addition 11, there is
54:17 no narcissistic personality disorder. Oh my god.
54:23 So, oh my god. Um, yes. Theodo Milan who was one of the giants of the of psychology said that he
54:30 doesn’t believe there is such a thing. He said narcissistic personality disorder is an American invention. He
54:36 said and he was an American. He was an American. So, it’s a debatable diagnosis. However,
54:44 even the ICD admits that if you take various traits, these are called traits
54:51 do trait domains. If you take various traits and you combine them in a highly
54:57 specific way, you get someone who in the DSM would be
55:03 called narcissist. In the DSM, they would call it narcissistic personality. So, but the ICD is like Lego. The
55:10 approach of the ICD is Lego. I’m a clinician. I’m a therapist. You come to me. I don’t diagnose you according to the ICD. I don’t diagnose you. I study
55:22 you and I say what are her qualities? What are the traits and I make a list of
55:28 the traits and I create a profile of you as a as a patient as a client. I create
55:35 a profile of you which is unique to you. Only you have this profile idiosyncratic. So it’s like a Lego approach I think much more realistic than the DSM
55:46 much more and so if you take the trait of dissociity which in the DSM is known as
55:53 antisocial behavior you take the trait of antagonism you take the trait of negative effectivity you take the trait
56:00 of anastasia anastia is obsessivempulsive behaviors you put all of them together you get someone who
56:06 resembles a narcissist a narcissist resembles But
56:12 that’s it. There’s no such diagnosis in the in the book 80% of humanity use.
56:19 Just to be clear. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this because we we agree that
56:26 the because I I studied psychology in Spain. I have a bachelor’s in psychology and I agree the DSM is extremely
56:33 limited. That’s why we joked it’s a decoration over there because of exactly what you explained. It has many has many
56:40 problems and we go into it right now, but it’s an exceedingly problematic uh diagnostic manual.
56:47 A lot of the information is very old and out of outdated completely. Um it’s
56:53 categorical in many ways. It has categories like you could put people in drawers and shelves. The criteria. Yeah. For example, I keep saying that uh any clinician would tell
57:04 you, any therapist would tell you that someone who has narcissism also has borderline, also has psychopathy. Any
57:12 clinician would tell you this. Uh someone comes to a clinician is diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. On Monday, he’s a narcissist. On Wednesday, something bad happened. He
57:23 becomes a psychopath. On No, a borderline, I’m sorry. A borderline. He loses it. is emotionally disregulated,
57:29 is you know suicidal maybe and then he becomes angry and on Friday he’s already a psychopath. It’s all
57:36 these distinctions are idiotic. I’m sorry count counter and stupid and they were they
57:43 were imposed on the profession by the insurance companies pharmaceutical industry.
57:49 They do not reflect clinical reality. Absolutely not. Yeah. That’s why when you tell me about parents coming back to your is
57:56 when you we try to hair to do this hair spplitting and fine-tuning your my parents were narciss if your parents
58:03 were truly narcissists then you have experienced a lot of psychopathy and you have experienced many borderline episodes where where they lost it and they were consumed by Yes. So it’s not true it’s not true to say that you know my parents were
58:20 narcissist your parents were mentally compromised maybe mentally ill
58:26 and part of the manif one of the manifestations of this mental disruption mental illness was probably narcissistic
58:34 defenses in action what we call pathological narcissism but on their part definitely they had mood disorders
58:41 maybe they had substance abuse substance use disorders Maybe they had compulsions and obsessions. Maybe they were pathological gamblers. Maybe they were borderline and they emotionally
58:53 disregulated. Maybe they sometimes had suicidal ideiation or threatened suicide. Maybe maybe maybe
58:59 there is no profile that is completely contoured and separated. It bleeds the disorders bleed into each other. Yes. Yeah. But those those tests that you um share here with us
59:18 can can you they’re indicative of someone who they’re can both can you do both can for
59:25 example I was listening to you and oh all this oh all this can that this is indicative of someone who is a
59:31 narcissist but it does not mean that they are also not borderline and psychopaths and so on.
59:37 Exactly. You have a parent, you could have a parent who is a borderline mainly and mostly and sometimes is a psychopath
59:44 but has no trace of narcissism. So what I’m saying is you can identify a
59:50 very strong narcissistic component but it would never mean that this is the only mental health issue. Never. I yeah I understand. I have never come across uh in my
60:02 practice I’m 30 something years in this record. I have never come across someone who could be diagnosed with a single
60:09 diagnosis. That is complete unmmitigated nonsense. It’s never happened and we will will never happen. Human beings are complex. Parents are even more so. When a parent gives birth,
60:22 when a mother gives birth, I’m saying parent because to some extent is a father but mostly the mother. It
60:28 triggers it triggers old templates, old relational um models. It triggers
60:36 enormous amount of I don’t need to tell you your mother. If the mother is
60:42 narcissistic then what will be triggered are essentially
60:48 narcissistic coping mechanisms and narcissistic strategies. So for example
60:55 um imagine that the mother is a is a narcissist and she had experienced narcissism in
61:02 her parents via parentification. They were immature. They were insecure.
61:08 They were infantile and she had to take care of them. She had to cook. She had to wash. She had to bring them medicines. She had to she had to take care of she was the parent. They were the children. Imagine
61:20 when she gives birth the parentification module is triggered.
61:26 Yes, she is very likely to parentify the child. This has massive implications
61:32 because what the child does early on the child internalizes the parent. Melanie
61:38 Klene, there was a woman Melanie Klein who was not a psychologist by the way. Melanie Klene was among the founders.
61:46 She was the mother of object relations school theories and she suggested that the child goes through phases
61:53 internalizes the parent then introjects the parent. In other words, the child creates a representation of a parent in
62:00 the child’s mind and the reason the child is doing this because the child is terrified of abandonment.
62:06 So a child creates an image of the parent in in their mind so that when the parent is away the child can interact
62:13 with the image with a representation and feel safe. Okay, that’s the foundation.
62:19 Okay, so children introject ch children internalize and incorporate and introject the mother. In this example
62:26 that I’m giving, if the mother is parentifying, the child will introject an infantile
62:33 mother, a childlike mother, an immature and insecure mother. The maternal
62:40 introject, the internal object in the child’s mind that represents the mother in reality would be a mother who is a child, not a mother.
62:52 That would force the child to become the parent not only in reality.
62:58 Yes. Not only in reality but also in his own mind. Yes. The child would create a self-representation. What what um what uh co described in ego
63:11 psychology the child would create a self-representation which would be responsive to the
63:17 maternal introject. If the maternal introject is a baby because the mother is insecure and immature and infantile
63:25 and so on. If the mother is a baby in the child’s mind, the self-representation would be that of
63:31 an adult parent. Yeah. That child would never have a childhood.
63:39 Think about it. If at the age of two, if at the age of two or three, you create an image of yourself, you perceive
63:45 yourself as a parent because there are no parents, the mother is a is a baby, the father is
63:52 a baby and you’re the parent, then you create an image of yourself inside your
63:58 mind that precludes and eliminates childhood. You can’t afford to be a child because someone has to be the adult, you know. So this has this has massive lifelong uh
64:12 implications. The the self objects as cohort called it the self objects have a
64:19 catac cat cataclysmic influence on the nature content and contours of the self.
64:26 Yes our it’s not true that the self is like I have a self, you have a self, she
64:33 has a self. It’s completely untrue. The self is relational. Everyone is saying Lakan said it in
64:39 psychoanalysis. Um Fairbear said it and and others Grip and others in object relations in all
64:46 schools of psychology. We by now agree even Bandura in social learning theory, social cognitive learning theory. Everyone agrees now that what we used to call the self or the ego is actually a
64:59 reaction to interactions with other people and the internalization of these people. Even our unconscious is actually the voices of other people according to
65:10 Lakhan and others. So if we the child is surrounded by parents
65:16 who are dysfunctional, immature, selfish, narcissistic, absent, you name it.
65:22 It’s not true that the child can say okay you know that’s their problem. I’m creating a self. It’s not true. The self
65:30 emerges from these from these parents. The parents create the self not the child. The child cannot create the self. The child is two years old. Child even doesn’t perceive itself as
65:41 separate. It doesn’t yet understand that. It’s the parents that create the self and created in their own image like God, you know, created us in his own. You believe in God.
65:52 The parents are gods. The child perceives them. Yes. Yeah. Child also perceives them as gods. Infallible. And so the pair agreed itself and and uh Jung
66:04 had a big debate with Freud because this what I presented is essentially the Freudian approach. Yes. By the way, by the way, I I I am eclectic. It’s not that I’m psycho. No, no, no, no. Please. Okay. Because if you look at Bandau’s work, who is definitely not a psychoanalyst
66:20 and also there is the process of modeling. Process of modeling has a massive influence
66:26 on formation of self. So uh there was a debate between Jung and and Freud and uh today I would say that the debate has been decided in favor of Freud because object relations is an extension of Freud not and and so Jung
66:42 suggested that the process of constellation and integration of the self is independent of the outside. It’s
66:50 um on the very contrary he said that it is a result of introversion and narcissism. It’s internal.
66:57 Well, don’t think so at all. We think Yung has been seriously wrong about this. We don’t think so at all. We think we are completely shaped from the from the outside. It is the mother’s gaze
67:10 that communicates to the child, you are not me. You’re not me.
67:17 How come you’re not me? You can see you can see yourself in my eyes. So, you can’t be me. It’s a mother gaze. The
67:24 biggest trauma in life is not being born. You’re born, of course, it’s a major,
67:31 but it’s Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s essentially a physical trauma. But the biggest psychic trauma is the first
67:37 time you apprehend your mother’s gaze because at that very second you realize
67:43 I am not mother. If I see myself in my mother’s eyes, I am not in someone’s eyes. I am not that
67:50 someone. I’m not mother. The world breaks breaks in two. There’s a major schism, this enormous
67:56 psychic cat cataclysmic trauma and we never recover from it because we
68:02 seek to reconnect all the time. We complete each other. We seek we seek this merger and fusion and symbiotic experience. And the the narcissistic
68:14 parent denies all this to the child. Denies all of it. And so the child is
68:20 never a child and never an adolescent and never an adult and the child is
68:27 never itself is never a doesn’t have personhood is never never became never
68:34 and so there’s a lot of grief enormous grief because the child grieves what it
68:40 could have been and would never be. The child grieves not not being able to become.
68:46 the child grieavves the lack of freedom. there’s a huge grief and I think and I
68:53 suggested in my work that pathological narcissism can be captured if we say
68:59 that it is a prolonged grief disorder that it is a grief reaction in a way
69:05 what do we do when we grieve very often when we grieve we imagine we fantasize you know sometimes we hear the voice someone died
69:16 someone you loved died so we hear the voice of that person ghosts. You imagine
69:22 you you go back in time into your memories, which is essentially time travel into fantasy. You go back in time. There’s a lot of fantasy involved with grief. Grief is a fantasy defense. And so I think essentially that’s that is pathological narcissism. It’s a grief
69:38 reaction. But the only thing is the narcissist wants you to share his grief or her grief. It’s like misery loves company. Why should I be miserable alone? I want you to be miserable also.
69:50 Yes. To grieve with me. Grieve with me. You don’t want to grieve. You don’t want to grieve with me. You are evil. I will
69:56 punish you because Yeah. This is devastating.
70:04 Um it is devastating to the child. Definitely. Nothing much is left of the child. I regret to say it is possible in
70:11 later life to to I’m 56. Can I be fixed?
70:17 It’s possible. It’s possible to function in a life and it’s possible to but the the scars are there. It’s uh Yeah, of course. Yeah, I know that.
70:29 I have. It’s a bad experience. Definitely. Don’t do it at home.
70:35 Yes, I I have them. So this is a question that
70:41 that is possibly more devastating for the people that are watching us who are victims of parents like this.
70:49 Uh no read it this one. A lot of them ask themselves
70:55 did my narcissistic parent or did my parent who treated me this way ever love
71:01 me? So, are narcissistic parents capable of love even for their children?
71:08 The short answer is no. But because I love the sound of my voice, I will add a few things. Um
71:15 um it’s no. But narcissists are capable of what used to be called cexis. They’re
71:21 capable of emotional investment. They’re capable of psychic investment. So narcissistsffect not their children. They connect the internal object that represent the child. So they invest emotional energy, psychic
71:36 energy in the avatar or the snapshot or the internal object or the intro or the
71:42 representation of the child in their own mind. Never in the child itself. So not even it’s not only about love. Love is of course completely out of the question. It’s not even investment.
71:56 Not even commit. Not even commitment. The narcissist may may appear to be
72:03 committed, may appear to be investing in you as a child, but only if you are performative, if you perform. So the the
72:12 so-called love, it’s all conditional on performance. And it’s very clear because when you fail, you’re penalized. You’re
72:19 punished. And you’re punished most typically by emotional absentism.
72:26 you’re punished by the parent becomes cold, silent treatment, doesn’t talk to you, um, ignores you and so. So, narcissists in general are incapable of positive
72:37 emotions. Narcissists have access only to negative emotions. They are capable of rage, anger, envy, hatred, all
72:45 negative emotions. And even I would say intensely so they have a borderline intensity of negative emotion. That’s
72:52 why they have narcissistic rage which is an episode of dysregulation. In effect
72:58 it’s I have seen that but they don’t have access to positive emotions because they’ve learned very
73:04 early on to associate positive emotions with pain with rejection with hurt. And
73:10 so they bury these emotions because they expect the worst. They catastrophize. They catastrophize the emotions. Yes. And they expect the worst. So what they do instead they create an alternative reality fantasy virtual reality and within the fantasy they experience
73:26 simulated emotions emotions by proxy within the fantasy because it’s safe. It
73:33 it doesn’t really interface with reality but it interfaces with other fantastic objects. So for example um if a narcissist has a shared fantasy with you. Yeah. He would create an image of
73:45 you a representation of you that would become an object an internal object within the fantasy and he would love he
73:52 would fall in love. He would be infatuated with or he would love the internal object within the fantasy
73:59 because it’s safe. It’s not you. So yes remove it it’s removed from reality
74:06 and therefore there would be no real life consequences no pain no hurt no rejection no abandonment this is why Kenberg insisted and I fully agree that pathological narcissism is a borderline defense defense against borderline
74:22 what I’ve just described is the borderline’s world it’s the borderline who is terrified of abandonment the
74:29 borderline is terrified of rejection and so Not. And so the narcissist is defending against this. Yes. Disconnecting from reality, creating a
74:40 fantasy where he becomes invulnerable and immune because nothing is happening
74:46 in reality. Nothing can happen to him. No consequences, no outcome in reality. Yes. Yes. Wow.
74:53 These are some questions that the audience in their own words Yeah.
74:59 re ask over and over. So we have write down some of them just to give them some
75:07 Yeah. Yeah. So like for example, did they know they were hurting me?
75:15 That’s a complex. It’s much more complex than it sounds. The narcissist is fully aware. Narcissists are fully aware of
75:21 their actions. They absolutely know what they’re doing at at all times. Yeah. The vast majority of narcissists are also fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
75:33 They’re not they’re not psychotic in this sense. They’re not the you know Uhhuh. they know what they’re doing and they know what’s going to happen. They know the outcomes and people say they just don’t care.
75:45 It’s not supported by by research. It’s not supported by studies is not it. The studies don’t show that they don’t care. What studies show is that they reframe.
75:56 So they say, for example, I’m shouting at you. I’m criticizing you. I’m being being verbally abusive. I know I’m doing
76:03 this and I know it’s going to hurt you, but I’m doing it for your own good. I’m
76:10 doing it because I love you. Yet, there’s an immediate reframing. It is
76:16 the factist always reframe almost almost without exception that shows us
76:22 that they do care. Because if you don’t care, like a psychopath, they don’t bother to refrain. A psychopath would
76:28 shoot you in the head and he would not give you any explanation. Yes.
76:34 Psychopaths don’t care. And that’s a perfect example of how self-styled experts online confuse
76:40 narcissists with psychopaths. Uhhuh. There’s a lot of confusion online. A lot. Huge amount. And so, um, the narcissist did care about you, but not
76:53 in the way you wanted to be taken care of, not in the way you wanted him to care about you. And he didn’t care about
76:59 you because of you. He cared about you because of what we call his self-concept.
77:06 He had a a concept about himself. He had a narrative about himself. He had a story about himself that he wants to
77:13 sustain and maintain by refraraming what he does in a way that would sustain the
77:21 story. So for example, some narcissists they are known as pro-ocial narcissist or communal narcissist. They say we are
77:29 good people, we are moral, we are ethical, we are reliable, we are trustworthy and so on. This is their
77:36 narrative, their self- aggrandizing narrative of course because narcissist pro- social communal
77:43 but narcissist and then anything they do which may challenge this self-concept which may
77:50 challenge this view of themselves they would invent a contort themselves in a
77:57 million ways and invent convoluted justifications and explanations as to why they’re doing this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For the greater good. For your greater good. Tough tough love.
78:09 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they believe this. They they believe this narrative what they’re telling you. Wow.
78:15 Again, there’s a a gigantic confusion online between nar narcissists and psychopaths. People say that narcissist gaslight and Yes. and lie. Gaslight and lie. These are psychopaths, not narcissist.
78:32 Narcissist. Narcissist do not Yeah. I would like to to to understand
78:38 the difference with psychopath. Yes. Narcissist do not gaslight from you. Narcissist do not gaslight and they are not pathological liars. To gaslight you need to have intention. It needs to be part of a plan. It’s machavelian. It’s manipulative. And you need to be able to
78:56 tell the difference between fantasy and reality because if you can’t tell the difference then you you you don’t know how to
79:02 gaslight. Mhm. The narcissist cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
79:08 The narcissist really believes is fantasy. He’s not gaslighting you. He is inducting you. He’s introducing you into
79:15 the fantasy. But he believed in you as much as he expects you to believe in it. Mhm. This precludes gaslighting because there’s no it’s the intention is not to
79:26 manipulate. The intention is to create something together. And definitely the
79:32 narcissist can’t tell that he’s gaslighting because he believes everything he’s saying. If the narcissist makes you a promise when he
79:40 makes you the promise, he has every intention to fulfill the promise, to keep the promise. So narcissists do not
79:47 future fake. If a narcissist tells you this is not reality, this is not real,
79:53 this is real, it’s not because he’s trying to mislead you, manipulate you, take your money, have sex with you, or
79:59 whatever. It’s because he really believes it. Narcissists, in other words, are delusional.
80:07 They’re delusional, whereas psychopaths are not. That’s why narcissists usually
80:14 don’t lie. Well, they lie like all of us, you know, but they don’t lie more than usual. They don’t lie more than usual because they have there’s another mechanism at work which is doesn’t happen in
80:25 borderline and doesn’t happen in psychopathy and it’s a mechanism known as confabulation. Interestingly, confabulation also happens in psychotic disorders which is another reason to think that narcissist
80:38 they’re a bit psychotic. Mhm. So, um what is contabulation? Confabulation is the outcome of
80:45 dissociation. Dissociation is a memory memory gaps. In borderline personality disorder, we
80:52 have much more complex forms of dissociation. We have depersonalization, derealization, amnesia and so on. But in
80:59 narcissism, we have only one form of dissociation. The narcissist forgets. He
81:05 has memory gaps. So here it is. The narcissist gets up in the morning. It’s 8:00. He’s brushing
81:11 his teeth. Next thing he knows is in the office. And what the hell happened? I
81:17 forgot what I did in between. And he says, “Ah, probably.” That’s my mom. Probably I brushed my teeth. I drank my coffee. I entered my car and I went to the office. Probably. Yeah, makes sense. How else would I get in the office? Makes sense.
81:35 And then he comes to believe it. for him it becomes a fact. And if you come to
81:41 the narcissist and say, “Excuse me, Mr. Narcissist, you brush your teeth and then I picked you up and took you to the
81:48 office.” He would deny it. He would say, “You’re lying. You’re manipulating me. You are you are delusional. You’re sick. You’re crazy.” He would deny it because he is
81:59 emotionally invested. He’s affected in the confabulation. Confabulation therefore is an attempt to bridge memory
82:07 gaps by creating plausible, probable, likely narratives.
82:14 It is not it is not lying. Although if you are on the outside, it appears that
82:21 he’s lying. And similarly, if you’re on the outside, it appears that he’s gaslighting you.
82:27 But narcissists don’t do this. Psychopaths do this. So, so my sorry, no, go ahead. Sorry. Uh, my question would be then
82:38 from the outside, is there a way to identify if they are
82:44 narcissists living in the fantasy and in this confabulation or if they’re psychopaths that are gaslighting you and
82:50 lying to you? Is there a way from the outside? Psychopaths
82:57 create um targeted fantasies. Uh they are we say that psychopaths are goal
83:03 oriented. So they’re target they can create for example a fantasy of investment where you’re going to make a fortune and that would be a fantasy or they create a fantasy that
83:14 they fell in love with you, they’re infatuated with you and you should have sex with them. So that’s
83:20 so the psychop psychop the psychopath’s fantasy or psychopath knows it’s a fantasy. He’s know he knows he’s lying
83:26 to you. He knows he’s manipulating. He knows he’s gaslighting you and he knows what is real. He never loses sight. The
83:33 psychopath never loses sight between what is real and what he’s telling you. Whereas a narcissist does. So the
83:40 psychopath’s fantasy that he uses to manipulate you and get get something out of you. The goal orientation is very
83:47 limited. It is it revolves around the goal and only around the goal and it expires.
83:55 Once the goal is accomplished is gone. The psychopath is gone. The fantasy is gone. The narcissistic fantasy is totalitarian. It’s total. The
84:06 narcissistic fantasy is all consuming. It applies to everything.
84:12 And it’s not goal oriented. The narcissist would create a story with you that he fell in love with you, he
84:18 wants to marry you, he wants to have children with you, then he will travel to Spain because it’s a lovely country
84:24 and and so on so forth. And all this is part of a huge narrative or kind of
84:30 movie that doesn’t necessarily lead to any goal. He doesn’t, for example, want to take your money or want, you know,
84:37 it’s like there’s a story and he wants you to fit into the story. It’s very childish. It’s very childlike. The narcissist wants you to be his
84:48 mother. Basically, it’s I call it the dual mothership. He becomes your mother, you become his mother, you know. So, the dual mothership fantasies are all pervasive.
85:00 They are they are total fantasies. They they are not goal oriented. They never expire. By the way, the fantasy with Nazis never expires. It goes through phases like idealization, devaluation,
85:14 discard, and then hoovering. But even after your long gun and the narcissist doesn’t hoover you, your fantasy survives in his mind. It’s there. And and so is these are massive
85:26 differences. The psychopath fantasy is not a fantasy. It’s a manipul manipulative narrative, manipulative ploy, you know. Yes. In this respect, governments do this. uh
85:37 religions do this not only whereas the narcissist comes to you and
85:43 says listen I have constructed for you another planet a whole new reality
85:49 which includes everything you ever wanted in every field you ever wanted money sex career you name it it’s all part of the fantasy and this is very reminiscent of
86:02 the concept of the metaverse which is now being developed by meta The metaverse would be an environment, a
86:09 cyber environment, not a real environment, an artificial uh environment, virtual reality where you
86:16 would log into in the morning and you would exit just to go to sleep because in that environment you could have sex, you could buy pizza, you could work,
86:28 your workplace would have a representation in the metaverse and you you would go to the virtual office and you would do your work there. You could play with other people, talk to them, make friends, everything in the
86:41 metaverse with goggles and haptic gloves. And so this is the narcissist. The narcissist gives you a metaverse. You never have to exit. Whereas the psychopath wants your money. He doesn’t
86:54 care if you work in an NGO or if you are love animals. I he couldn’t care less
87:00 about this. He wants your money. The fantasy very clearly about money, not he doesn’t care about the rest of you. He
87:06 cares about your money. Psychopaths are very laser focused. Whereas the narcissist is a light bulb.
87:13 Yeah. Light. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have answered so many of these questions that our audience have. They just
87:25 But oh my god, I’m just blown away. Sam and they say for example are they sick?
87:35 Are they ever going to change? You have kind of answer all this. Is zero contact
87:41 the only way to heal? If I would ask you can we heal?
87:48 Can I heal? Can we heal? Whoever has been in this fantasy and in this under this um oh my
87:59 god I don’t even know how to call it stress fear despair
88:07 dystopia so dystopic lens uh but always remember utopia means in
88:15 Latin no such place that’s the meaning of the word Ohia in Lat utopos in Latin means no such place.
88:26 Oh, so this utopia is a form of fantasy. Utopia is a
88:32 fantasy. Exactly like this dystopia. The narcissist imposes a dystopic fantasy on you. The prognosis for victims of narcissistic abuse is excellent.
88:43 Actually, it’s very good. And uh healing is complete in the overwhelming vast majority of case. I don’t have numbers but I would not be surprised if it’s 99%.
88:54 If the victim enters the fantasy with her own mental issues, with her own
89:00 mental health baggage, for example, if she has borderline personality disorder, if she’s codependent, has dependent personality disorder and so on, then we should then separate the issues. You can
89:13 recover from the fantasy, but your issue still remain. Uh-huh. Yes.
89:19 Exposure to the narcissist as short as 30 seconds. These are studies. Exposure
89:25 to a narcissist even via video. Even via an email message.
89:31 Video or email message. Yes. Exposure as short as 30 seconds already
89:37 induces in you changes both physiological and mental. This is known as the uncanny valley reaction.
89:44 Y and so of course exposure to a narcissist over 30 years is a bit more serious
89:51 and it would take you many years to recover but recovery is virtually guaranteed. So the news okay the news are good regarding okay okay regarding the narcissist himself um many many treatment modalities many
90:09 therapies are effective in modifying the narcissist behaviors so we are very good
90:16 at modifying abrasive behaviors antisocial behaviors obnoxious aggressive behavior we can and do
90:23 succeed in therapy to modify many narcissistic behaviors which make the narcissist very difficult
90:29 to be with and so this improves the relationship to some extent and so on. Some people are trapped. They can they
90:36 cannot leave the narcissist or they have to interact with the narcissist. They have common children or whatever you know. So right the narcissist we can we can file the sharp edges. We
90:48 can make the narcissist more smooth and cutiepie. Yeah. But we cannot touch the core the we cannot touch the core of pathological narcissism because it’s not nice to say it’s not politically correct but narcissism is the narcissist. If you
91:04 take away the narcissism there’s nothing nothing left behind. So you can’t really you can’t really change
91:11 this very deep set this deep these deep set distortions these coping and strategies that became totally habituated and automatic. is you
91:22 can’t it’s too late. You can’t do separation individuation after adolesence. Yes. After adolescence is a lost thing. You
91:28 can never do it do it again. So many thing a lot of the damage is irreversible.
91:35 A lot of them. Yeah. That’s unfortunate. unfortunate for them because it’s unfortunate for them because these
91:42 are people very often with high potential and uh and they don’t get to realize this potential and they’re
91:49 trapped they’re as trapped in the fant actually they’re more trapped in the fantasy than you are more and for life
91:56 yes and they do feel that something’s wrong it’s a myth online that narcissists are
92:02 always egoonic always happy golucky it’s not true at all narcissist feel do feel from time to
92:08 time, especially when they crash, when they hit rock bottom or when they experience something called narcissistic
92:14 collapse or narcissistic motification. These are processes that have been described in the literature.
92:20 Narcissistic motification, the big authority is Libby. These are processes where the narcissist is forced to come
92:28 face to face with who they are because the defenses collapse. There’s a process known as decompensation. All the defenses collapse. Tuck tuck and the narcissist finally and faces the mirror
92:42 and sees himself as he is like in the alien alien movies you know when the human form goes away and the alien
92:49 remain the narcissist sees himself or herself as they are in the mirror and so there are moments in the life of the narcissist where the grief comes to the surface
93:01 and there are moments where the narcissist wishes that he or she were someone someone
93:07 These are fleeting moments. These are very brief moments. They are immediately compensated in the sense an immediately
93:13 reestablishes grandiosity and so on so forth. But they do exist. And it’s wrong to say they don’t exist.
93:19 They absolutely do exist. We even have clinical names for these things. Collapse modification, injury,
93:26 injury, you know. Yes, Sam. This has been the richest
93:34 conversation we have had about this subjects. Thank you. I am blown away. Really, it has been uh
93:42 not a master class, the next and the next Yeah. level.
93:48 Thank you. And we we are um deeply honored by you
93:54 um trusting this space. Yeah. and accept our invitation.
94:01 Um, you know, our podcast is mostly in Spanish and there’s not so much information in Spanish and we want to
94:08 bring the translation. Yes. You’re you going to subtitle this or?
94:15 Yes, subtitles. Yes, of course. Of course. In our channel. Yes. You you you share it the way you want.
94:21 We’re gonna um when when you’re well I’ll tell you later but um
94:28 no I am I am deeply grateful. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. It’s always always uh
94:34 always good to talk to people who are more receptive and reactive like you and uh it’s good to to reach a segment
94:42 of a population which usually I don’t reach which is Spanish speakers. So you’re doing me a service not not the
94:48 other way. It’s just that it’s just that I I am a bit sad and melancholy because
94:57 the field has been corrupted. It’s been corrupted by by money. It’s been corrupted by self-start experts who
95:03 absolutely don’t know what they’re talking about. They have no credentials in the field. Never published anything, you know, yet claim to be experts.
95:11 There’s a lot of corruption. Uh also the word itself narcissism is is molested.
95:19 it’s uh abused so to speak. So I’m bit sad about what has happened
95:25 to the whole thing because I was alone for 10 years. I started the whole thing and I was all alone for 10 years.
95:32 The next the next one was 10 years later. I had the first website, the first six support groups and the first YouTube channel. I was alone for for these years and then people started to
95:43 join and the first ones who joined were conscientious and they wanted to learn and so on but then then there was an
95:51 avalanche which was motivated commercially. Yes, there are a lot of con artists and worse
95:57 and I’m really very sad what is happening in this space. Yes, worried
96:03 we agree. We agree that’s why we we do our best. I mean, I’m sure we will make mistakes and we have made mistakes along
96:10 the way, but we really do our our best to bring the most accurate information
96:16 possible because we agree. I mean, it it’s extremely problematic to be
96:24 uh uh defund ah sharing information that is incorrect
96:30 and furthering this issue. So yes, but I know that we’re not perfect, but
96:36 it’s not only really try. It’s not only narcissism. There’s the same same phenomenon in ADHD in autism.
96:44 Uhhuh. Autism is even worse. Yes. Oh yes. Mega. Oh yeah. Yes. Where can people find you? We’re going to our audience.
96:55 It’s very difficult to me. Difficult to avoid. We’re going to put all your information in the description. Just type Google uh just Google something. It’s you will immediately
97:06 they will know how to find your books.
97:12 There’s a a Wikipedia page dedicated to me like entry. I have a Wikipedia entry that can go there as well.
97:18 Okay. We we willing add that to the description. Anyways, so thank you. Thank you so much Sam. Thank you. Thank you for having Thank you for everything. Thank you everyone for watching, for listening.
97:32 Um, this has been amazing. So, see you next week. See you next week. Let’s stop the the recording, but don’t don’t leave. One second.

Summary Link:

https://vakninsummaries.com/horrible-families-raise-horrible-adults-with-familias-horribles/

https://vakninsummaries.com/ (Full summaries of Sam Vaknin’s videos)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html (My work in psychology: Media Kit and Press Room)

Bonus Consultations with Sam Vaknin or Lidija Rangelovska (or both) http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/ctcounsel.html

http://www.youtube.com/samvaknin (Narcissists, Psychopaths, Abuse)

http://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings (World in Conflict and Transition)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com (Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html (Biography and Resume)

Summary

In this insightful podcast discussion, Professor Sam Vaknin delves into the complexities of narcissism, distinguishing between healthy narcissism and pathological narcissism, which arises from early childhood abuse and dysfunctional family dynamics, primarily influenced by the mother. He explains the roles of siblings in narcissistic families, different narcissist types, and the intricate psychological mechanisms like projective splitting and fantasy bonding that sustain narcissistic abuse. Vaknin also clarifies common misconceptions about narcissists versus psychopaths, the challenges of healing, and emphasizes the rarity of true narcissistic personality disorder amidst widespread misinformation. Horrible Families Raise Horrible Adults (with Familias Horribles)

Tags

Abuse, Meaning, narcissism, narcissist, Personality, Psychology, Reality, Sam Vaknin, Trauma, Vaknin Summaries

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