Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Healing Narcissism: Cold Therapy Seminar, Part 2 (Purchase Entire Series), Vienna, May 2017

1. 00:05 Okay, we’re in the dictionary phase, but luckily that’s all that’s left. And we
2. 00:11 finish this, we’ll begin to talk business.
3. 00:19 So, dead mother, sorry, not my invention. the insensitive psychologist
4. 00:26 who coined this term dead mother or dead mother complex. What he was trying to do is capture the
5. 00:33 interaction between a child and a nonresponsive mother. A mother who is not available and when she is she’s
6. 00:40 unpredictable, not sensitive to the needs of her child, not reacting properly,
7. 00:47 etc., etc. So he called it the dead mother. He said, “She’s as as good as dead or as bad as dead or whatever.”
8. 00:53 They called it the dead mother complex. It’s a shortand for narcissistic, self-p preoccupied, unavailable mothers. Sorry, you coined the term.
9. 01:04 I’m sorry. You coined the term. I forgot. I forgot. I’ve heard of it. Yeah, I forgot to but if you
10. 01:12 online, I relegated my brain to Google. Emotional disregulation
11. 01:19 is the inability to regulate one’s reactive emotions. Emotions in reaction
12. 01:25 to events in the outside to other people and to internal processes. So emotional disregulation simply means that you cannot regulate them well. And there are two types of emotional disregulation.
13. 01:37 Lability and impulse control or lack of impulse control. Actually
14. 01:43 liabilities you we all know such people hot and cold up and down
15. 01:49 depressed abalantiant we’re not talking about bipolar disorder but you know this
16. 01:56 kind of people nobility typifies characterizes certain cluster B personality disorders most notably borderline personality disorder
17. 02:08 but is quite common among certain types of narcissists
18. 02:14 for example the covert narcissist. So we have liability that’s simply v vicissitudes ups and downs and in
19. 02:26 effect it can be uh conceptualized as a as a mini mood
20. 02:32 disorder kind of a mood disorder. And then we have impulse control actually more precisely lack of impulse control.
21. 02:39 It’s the inability to control one’s impulses. Freud will be delighted
22. 02:45 because Freud postulated the existence of the Eid and uh the ego’s constant
23. 02:52 need to control the Eid and to suppress the Eid and to channel the Eid and to regulate the Eid and what have you. And presumably these people are unable to do that. They cannot control their urges,
24. 03:03 their impulses. In the case of the narcissist, for example, we have narcissistic rage which is an impulse
25. 03:09 control problem. Um, but we have other impulse control issues
26. 03:16 which we’ll tackle later. So, emotional dysregulation. Next concept is betrayal or trauma
27. 03:24 bonding. It is the very bizarre bond, very
28. 03:30 bizarre attachment that forms between a dependent and an abuser.
29. 03:38 Any dependent and any abuser, for example, attachment can and does form between
30. 03:45 abused and traumatized children and their abusers. Actually shockingly
31. 03:52 studies especially recent studies for example by McFarland showed that children can bond healthily children can b can create secure attachments
32. 04:04 to uh abusive and traumatizing parents. Shockingly it seems that the important
33. 04:11 part uh important point is the predictability. If the child’s if a child can predict
34. 04:17 the caregivers’s behavior even if it is abusive and traumatizing it seems that it can form some kind of attachment even even secure attachment. So betrayal and trauma bonding are the
35. 04:30 bonding and attachment between victim and abuser victim and victimizer. It is also known colloquially or popularly as the Stockholm syndrome because in 1971 there was a bank heist. There was a kidnappers I mean burglars entered the bank and they kidnapped four workers of
36. 04:50 the bank. Four employees of the bank and one of them employees was a woman. I
37. 04:56 mean actually two were women, two were men. One of the two women bonded with one of the kidnappers actually had sex with him. fell in love with him. Uh called her mother and asked her permission to marry him. Uh attacked the police on interviews via radio and so
38. 05:15 on. Radio interviews, television. She attacked the police. She said the police were brutal, inconsiderate and so on and so forth. Supported the kidnapper, demanded his release and so on so forth. Was a whole love affair
39. 05:28 encapsulated in several days. And that came to be known as the Stockholm syndrome. Colloqually we are talking about trauma bonding. We need to bond with our abusers. We need to bond with
40. 05:41 our uh traumatizers because that way we feel that we have some control over them. Attachment and bonding are about
41. 05:52 survival. The child bonds. The child attaches to the parent or the caregiver
42. 06:00 because that way the child secures the caregivers’s presence and the caregivers’s services and this is called
43. 06:08 proximity seeking behavior. The child has develops proximity seeking behaviors
44. 06:15 in order to attach to a caregiver in order to secure the caregivers’s presence and services. When the
45. 06:21 caregiver is not present, when the caregiver is absent or goes away, the
46. 06:27 child reacts with enormous anxiety. And this is what we know as abandonment anxiety or separation anxiety. When
47. 06:36 children are very very young before the age of six months, they do not form a
48. 06:42 representation of the caregiver inside themselves. They don’t have they don’t internalize the caregiver. More
49. 06:50 technically, they don’t introject the caregiver. So when the caregiver leaves the room, as far as the child is
50. 06:57 concerned, the caregiver vanished forever. It’s like the caregiver died. And this
51. 07:03 is this is known as object inconstancy. Problem with object constancy.
52. 07:11 So attachment and bonding to to encapsulate the whole topic. Attachment
53. 07:17 and bonding are conditioning behaviors. These are behaviors that the infant
54. 07:23 develops so as to condition the caregiver to give him care.
55. 07:30 When the caregiver refuses to give care, frustrates the child, is absent or is
56. 07:36 too self-centered to cater to the needs of the child, the child develops two
57. 07:42 problems. object inconstancy, the the conviction that the caregiver is
58. 07:50 vanished forever and of course the deadly fear, the mortal fear because if the caregiver
59. 07:56 vanishes when you are 6 months old, you’re in serious trouble. You’re in deadly trouble. So the fear of
60. 08:03 death and the second problem is abandonment anxiety or separation anxiety.
61. 08:09 Again, when you look at narcissists, when you look at narcissists,
62. 08:15 they all have severe abandonment anxiety and they all have severe problems of
63. 08:22 object constancy. They do not form they do not succeed to form the
64. 08:29 conviction, the inner conviction that people will remain in their lives forever or for a long period of time or reliably. They are all they all the time assume
65. 08:41 that people who are in their lives will vanish and therefore they react with
66. 08:47 abandonment anxiety. Now this is very typical of borderline personality disorder but the less known fact that
67. 08:53 this is also very typical of narcissists as opposed to border lines. Border lines react with liability. But narcissists
68. 09:01 react by appropriating the object, by owning the object, by possessing the
69. 09:07 object. Narcissists are are so afraid that people will abandon them, leave
70. 09:13 them, vanish, disappear that what they do, they enslave the others. They take
71. 09:21 over the other. they eliminate the others independent existence.
72. 09:28 If you eliminate someone else’s independent existence, there is no risk that that someone else will leave you
73. 09:36 obviously. So they do it in two ways. They take the mental snapshot that I described and
74. 09:43 they internalize it and then from that moment the person becomes an extension of the narcissist.
75. 09:49 From the moment the narcissist took the mental snapshot of that other person, that other person becomes an extension
76. 09:56 of the narcissist, an integral part of the narcissist. Exactly like another hand or another
77. 10:02 leg. You know, that’s one strategy. And the other strategy is the suppression of
78. 10:09 the autonomy and the independence of the other party, forcing the other party to merge and fuse so as to counter constant
79. 10:19 abandonment anxiety and object inconstancy. Obviously, certain intimate partners are
80. 10:27 more aminable to such treatment. It is much easier to for the narcissist to
81. 10:34 eliminate the independent existence of a codependent for example. Codependence
82. 10:40 will be much more aminable to suppress their autonomy and independence and existence than healthy people. So naturally narcissists gravitate or select for the kind of intimate partners who would agree to vanish as independent
83. 10:58 entities and to reappear hocus pocus as extensions of the
84. 11:04 narcissist. So betrayal and trauma bonding. The fact
85. 11:12 that narcissists have severe abandonment anxiety and the fact that they have objectings constancy
86. 11:18 is should be widely considered as proof positive that they are children
87. 11:24 because adults definitely healthy adults don’t have this. Well-balanced adults
88. 11:30 don’t have this at all. Actually all adults don’t have this even not well balanced. This is this the this object
89. 11:38 in constancy and and abandonment anxiety results of trauma bonding are unique to
90. 11:44 childhood. If we have them in adulthood, they are indicative of serious infantile
91. 11:50 structures that survived into adulthood. And if we have this and this and that
92. 11:56 and this and a whole list of whole huge inventory of infantile structures in a
93. 12:02 single person, why not to call that person a child? What justifies not calling that person a child if the inventory is huge? As is
94. 12:13 the case with the Naris, we have externalized disorders and
95. 12:19 internalized disorders. It’s a distinction suggested a while ago between disorders that are oriented
96. 12:28 that express themselves to the to the world to the outside and disorders that express themselves internally. Obviously
97. 12:35 narcissism is an externalized disorder because what the narcissist does it
98. 12:41 annexes it appropriates the world renders the world an internal object
99. 12:48 then then acts upon this internal object as though he is acting upon the world
100. 12:54 but he needs constantly input from the outside world to support
101. 13:01 this totally fantastic view of the So there is also dependence on for
102. 13:08 example narcissistic supply and this makes narcissism an externalized disorder. In other words, you can’t take a narcissist disconnect him from the world and he if he do if you do he will not survive. If you if you isolate a
103. 13:21 narcissist from the world and don’t allow the narcissist to receive supply and so on, he will crumble like the like
104. 13:28 the proverbial vampire. He will simply fall apart. We can take a psychopath and
105. 13:35 put him in a cell isolated cell for 26 years and nothing will happen to him. But if you take a narcissist and put him in an isolated cell for 26 days by the end you will have someone with psychotic
106. 13:48 micro episodes you will have someone who is decompensating someone who is falling apart. That’s the
107. 13:54 difference between narcissist and for example psychopaths one of them. So narcissism is an externalized disorder.
108. 14:01 Disorder that depends on the world for its manifestation and expression. Colin Ross suggested uh in a series of articles something called
109. 14:13 the trauma model of mental illnesses or the trauma model of mental health disorders. He said long before me that
110. 14:22 most uh mental health disorders can be construed as and thought of
111. 14:29 as post-traumatic conditions. So he preceded me by a lot and I learned
112. 14:35 a lot from his work. Colin Colin Ross trauma model of disorders.
113. 14:42 A very important element again all these elements will appear when we discuss the techniques. A very very important
114. 14:48 element is dissociation and dissociation is related to
115. 14:58 it’s not the same as but is related to depersonalization and derealization and I will briefly
116. 15:05 discuss each of these three and there is amnesia of course amnesia is a form of dissociation there are several forms of
117. 15:12 dissociation and one of them is amnesia So I will discuss all three and at the
118. 15:19 end I will explain to you why I’m torturing you with these uh with these terms.
119. 15:25 Dissociation is the suspension of contact with the world input
120. 15:32 input contact with the world suspension of feedback from the world for a prescribed period of time. It could be
121. 15:38 seconds and it could be hours could be months
122. 15:44 and it could be permanently. For example, in dissociative identity disorder. So dissociative is simply a
123. 15:50 suspension of contact with the world. You sit, you sit, you do something and
124. 15:57 you wake up kind of kind of wake up six seconds later and you say what have I
125. 16:03 done in this six seconds you don’t know for these six seconds you’re disconnected from the world. That is
126. 16:09 dissociation. Now it happens to each and every individual and human being alive
127. 16:15 probably the dead ones as well happens and but it happens and it happens
128. 16:21 multiply uh it was even described by Freud in his famous book psychopathology of everyday life. It happens to everyone
129. 16:29 multiply hundreds of times a day but it happens for a split second you know one half of a second one second all the time you are listening to me I bore you to death you dissociate you
130. 16:42 dissociate you heard the beginning of a sentence and the end of a sentence what did you say in the middle you dissociated dissociation if you dissociate more regularly for longer periods of time then you have a
131. 16:53 dissociative problem if you have amnesia if you’re completely forgots, you know, memories that you should have had. That’s a a more serious problem. If you have fugue where for weeks or months you
132. 17:06 lose your one identity and you develop another or leave another through another identity, that’s even more etc etc.
133. 17:12 There are gradations of dissociation. Depersonalization is the feeling that
134. 17:19 you are not you. To summarize it, uh to make it very brief, the feeling that you’re not you
135. 17:25 for seconds or minutes or hours you feel that you are not you.
136. 17:32 You don’t feel that you are someone else. You just feel that you are not you. It’s a very bizarre feeling as
137. 17:38 though you for example uh many patients describe it um as uh not existing.
138. 17:47 Not existing. It’s difficult to verbalize it. It’s simply not being you. You are fully
139. 17:53 aware. You’re fully functional. You’re fully I mean you can drink tea and listen to seminars and so on. But for a
140. 17:59 period of time, you don’t feel that you’re yourself. You don’t feel that you’re someone else. That that’s another disorder. It’s called kotaro. You don’t feel someone else, but you don’t feel that you are you. Derealization
141. 18:10 is you feel that you are you, but you feel that the the that reality or the
142. 18:16 environment is not real. Narcissists constantly describe constantly say that
143. 18:22 they feel that they their life is a movie and like they are actors in a movie like they are watching a movie.
144. 18:30 This is derealization. Narcissists if you interview narcissists
145. 18:37 many of them if not all of them will constantly say that my life is like a movie. I’m watching it. I’m acting in
146. 18:43 it. I’m participating in it but I’m not really involved. I’m detached. I’m like an observer. I’m like someone in the audience and uh sometimes I admire the actor what he’s doing and so on. It’s
147. 18:54 very bizarre and it’s it’s it’s the realization. Now narcissists have all three and altogether I personally call
148. 19:03 it the discontinuity problem. Narcissists are discontinuous. They are not one. They don’t have a one continuous existence with memories that
149. 19:15 connect this existence that with a glue that holds this existence together in a
150. 19:21 linear fashion. But is derealization then some sort of
151. 19:27 acknowledgment um of the false self. I will come to the false self. Yes.
152. 19:33 Because the false self is is a form of uh of uh dissociation. Yeah. I’ll come to that. Yes. Good question. But I’ll
153. 19:39 come to it. you see it as time distortion kind of so if I’m not here in the place it doesn’t exist
154. 19:45 in dissociation we have something called lost time in dissociation but that’s unique to dissociation in depersonalization and the realization there’s no loss time narcissists have all three they have dissociation they
155. 19:57 have depersonalization and they have derealization and that means they don’t feel like the same person every minute narcissist for example
156. 20:08 would they are usually very shocked when they are punished for something. They don’t feel responsible. They feel that
157. 20:14 someone else did it. Um they they would argue with you. You tell
158. 20:21 them for example, but yesterday you said this and today you are saying something different and they would argue with you. They would say I could never say what you tell me that what you tell me that you what you tell me that I said. It it
159. 20:33 doesn’t sound like me. I could never say that you know. Um and they are they are
160. 20:39 also discontinuous in terms of uh acting memory in terms of uh the the kind of
161. 20:46 memory that retains personal identity. So they have in other words to summarize severe identity problem.
162. 20:57 Narcissists have very severe identity problem. Now victims
163. 21:03 victims are using uh a term in in the mid 90s 1995 I I
164. 21:12 borrowed a term from a movie gaslight and I called it gaslighting. So 10 years later it became a mantra. So victims victims walk around and say he’s gaslighting me. He’s gaslighting me.
165. 21:23 Well sometimes the narcissists of course are gaslighting. Sometimes they are knowingly distorting reality and making
166. 21:31 the other party feel that she’s crazy or she doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she’s lying. And this is
167. 21:37 gaslighting. Gaslighting is intentionally making your intimate partner believe that he or she is crazy,
168. 21:45 losing it, etc. But many of the times, a lot of the
169. 21:51 time, the narcissist actually is not gaslighting. He really does not remember. He has already constructed an alternate reality, a virtual reality, a new
170. 22:04 reality which has nothing or very little to do with his previous reality and so
171. 22:10 on. Indeed, cold therapy borrows techniques as you will see borrows
172. 22:17 techniques from the treatment of multiple personality. Actually when I say that cult when I say
173. 22:25 that pathological narcissism is a post-traumatic condition I am also saying that all the reactions to trauma
174. 22:36 exist including the fragmentation and fracturing of the self.
175. 22:43 You can easily consider the existence of a true self and a false self as multiple
176. 22:50 personality as dissociative identity disorder. Pathological narcissism can be
177. 22:56 reconceived, reframed and redescribed as a form of multiple personality as a form of dissociative identity disorder.
178. 23:07 Therefore, call therapy borrows techniques from the treatment of multiple personality
179. 23:14 in order to integrate to integrate the narcissistic personality and we will
180. 23:20 discuss it much later and that’s a very interesting part of call my favorite part of call therapy because uh as you
181. 23:28 will see the false self is used in a very I think interesting and and creative way to integrate the the rest of the narcissist.
182. 23:40 But dissociation and dissociative identity disorder and multiple personal they are reactions to trauma. If the n
183. 23:47 if narcissism is post-traumatic condition, why not have multiple personality? Why the self not to to
184. 23:53 break apart? Of course it breaks apart. Of course it breaks apart. Hence the false self. Finally, developmental trauma disorder
185. 24:05 is a new concept, very new and very appealing.
186. 24:11 Actually, what I’m suggesting actually is is to consider uh pathological narcissism as a developmental trauma disorder. As you
187. 24:23 will hear, I will just find it and read it to you. I thought the original text is much
188. 24:29 better than anything I could I could say. So I’ll read to you the original text
189. 24:47 de developmental um trauma disorder was um suggested by Cook and Blousein.
190. 25:00 They wrote a series of articles between 2003 and five, but they did not come up with developmental trauma disorder.
191. 25:07 That’s a new development from 2010. And here is how they describe developmental trauma disorder.
192. 25:16 In developmental trauma disorder, there are problems with relationship boundaries, lack of trust, social
193. 25:23 isolation, difficulty perceiving and responding to others emotional states, and lack of empathy,
194. 25:30 sensory motor developmental dysfunction, sensory integration difficulties,
195. 25:36 somatization, and increased medical problems. Poor effect regulation, difficulty
196. 25:43 identifying and expressing emotions and internal states, difficulties communicating needs, wants and wishes in
197. 25:49 an effective manner, amnesia, depersonalization, discrete states of consciousness with
198. 25:57 discrete memories effect and functioning and impaired memory for state-based
199. 26:03 events. Problems with impulse control, with aggression, pathological self soothing
200. 26:10 and sleep problems. Difficulty regulating attention. Problems with a variety of executive functions such as
201. 26:17 planning, judgment, initiation, use of materials, self-monitoring, difficulty processing new information, difficulty focusing and completing tasks, poor object constancy, problems with cause
202. 26:30 effect thinking and language development, etc., et, etc. Fragmented and disconnected autobiographical narrative, disturbed body image, low
203. 26:41 self-esteem. I know that you’re smiling, but low self-esteem is at the core of narcissism, excessive shame, and
204. 26:49 negative internal working models of the self. This is an excellent description of narcissism. Where did you find it? It is in the in the article by uh Cook
205. 27:00 and Blast. You can put it in the USB. No, it’s this is you can find it online.
206. 27:08 Okay. It is called developmental trauma disorder. The idea of cook and blasting
207. 27:15 is that children who are exposed to to trauma as adults develop to be this kind of adults. But when I read it, I said this is narcissism. It’s simply narcissism, you know. So if this is
208. 27:28 narcissism and also a trauma disorder and that that gave me the original idea in 2010 when I read the article original idea to start with call therapy that’s how it started. Okay.
209. 27:50 Let us So now the dictionary is finished and we start the actual work.
210. 27:56 Let us go back in time to the narcissist’s childhood.
211. 28:02 What’s happening to the narcissist? Narcissist is a child at that stage. He is yet to become a narcissist. He’s just
212. 28:09 a child. He’s cute. He has pinchable cheeks. He’s, you know,
213. 28:17 walking and running, smiling. It’s mommy and everything. Don’t forget ever that narcissist used to be babies. Very very few babies have severe attachment problems from
214. 28:29 birth, temperamental problems, characterological problems from birth. And these are extremely difficult babies. But that’s a tiny tiny tiny fraction of babies. Extremely tiny fraction. For example, reactive attachment disorder which characterizes
215. 28:45 such babies is considered is uh one 10,000th of a
216. 28:53 percent. of babies. So we talking like a one baby in a million. It’s extremely rare. This is not these are not the babies that become narcissist. The babies that become narcissist start life as cute, adorable,
217. 29:10 chubby cheicked, beautiful babies, utterly healthy babies.
218. 29:16 The problem is of course in the interaction between these babies and their care caregivers. They’re primary attachment figures.
219. 29:27 They’re objects as we call it in object theory. By the way, it’s very telling that in a
220. 29:34 major in a major school of psychology, mothers are called objects. I always found it to be a little how to put it
221. 29:42 psychopathic. Anyhow, and so the problem is this. The child
222. 29:55 the child displays attachment behaviors or technically proximity seeking behaviors. The child for example cries or the child uh smiles at mommy, cries
223. 30:09 when he is able to runs towards mommy etc. These are all proximity seeking behaviors. They’re very primitive
224. 30:15 behaviors. They intended to provoke primitive reactions in the mother. They intended they are intended to provoke
225. 30:21 the primitive part of the mother to elicit in the mother behaviors which are very animalistic
226. 30:28 to protect the child to engulf the child to hug the child to hold the child. These are very primitive reactions. We have them in chimpanzees and we have them in human beings. So the child uses
227. 30:39 proximity seeking behaviors to elicit to derive to cause the mother to react
228. 30:46 that way. If the mother is unpredictable, narcissistic, self-centered and so on, these proximity seeking behaviors will provoke or elicit
229. 30:58 unpredictable outcomes. Sometimes she will she will slap the child. Sometimes
230. 31:04 she will hug the child. Sometimes she will ignore the child. Sometimes she will not let him go. Some child times
231. 31:11 she will push him away. Sometimes she will shout. Sometimes she will sing a song etc. That this unpredictability
232. 31:22 is very frightening to the child. It it is it is terrorizing because the child
233. 31:29 depends for his existence and survival on the primary caregiver.
234. 31:35 Definitely at the age of 6 months he depends on her. One year even two years
235. 31:41 the dependence is complete for food, for nourishment and above all
236. 31:47 for emotional connection and bodyto body contact. There has been a series of
237. 31:54 experiments known as the chimpanzeee or monkey experiments conducted by Harrow.
238. 32:00 And in these experiments, chimp chimpanzeee babies
239. 32:06 preferred uh contact bodily contact with a mother to food. They gave up food. Some of them died of hunger because they had to make
240. 32:17 a choice between bodily contact and food and they chose bodily contact to such an extent that they died of hunger.
241. 32:25 That’s how such that’s how much such connection is needed. So if the mother is frustrating, it is a lifethreatening condition and therefore it’s terrorizing and the child is in a constant state of terror. In 2010,
242. 32:43 in a very interesting experiment, two leading voices in attachment theory, Hazen and McFarland, 2010, conducted a test.
243. 32:54 They uh interviewed mothers until they found a group of mothers who were both
244. 33:02 sensitive to the child. They cared about the child. They were sensitive to the child needs. They knew to identify what
245. 33:08 the child wants, how the child reacts, the inner processes of the child. So they were sensitive to the child, but
246. 33:15 they also because of their character problems and personality problems were unable to respond to the child in a in
247. 33:21 an appropriate manner, in a predictable manner. So they were on the one hand frustrating mothers but they were not
248. 33:28 did not frustrate the child because they didn’t understand the child. They understood the child fully. They were
249. 33:34 sensitive mothers. Sensitive and frustrating. And the test was the idea the experiment was what is more important for the mother to be sensitive
250. 33:45 or for the mother to be responsive? Because there was a huge debate in attachment theory. What’s more
251. 33:51 important? Is it more important for the mother to be sensitive to the needs of the child or is it more important for her to respond even if she responds wrongly because she’s not sensitive? What’s more important? And the test the
252. 34:04 experiment was unequivocal. It is much more important to respond. It does not matter if the mother reads the child’s is reading the child correctly. As long as she responds
253. 34:16 predictably, reliably, as long as she is there, as long as
254. 34:22 she’s not absent, everything is okay. Even if she misreads, misidentifies
255. 34:29 the child’s cues and proximity seeking behaviors. For example, the child wants
256. 34:35 to hug her and she gives him she gives him to eat. Child wants to hug her and she feeds him. So this is inappropriate response. It’s insensitivity. But as
257. 34:46 long as she is responsive, that’s all it takes. The sensitive mothers who were
258. 34:52 nonresponsive, the children were terrorized. It is the response that counts. Not
259. 34:58 reading the child correctly. Okay, let let’s take advantage. Let’s take advantage of these five minutes to
260. 35:04 for questions. Just on this point about um being sensitive and responding and not responding. Um, could you get a narcissist mother who sort of responds
261. 35:17 but and is able to respond and have a good relationship with the child but not really understand the feelings. Is that possible? How does that happen? The the response must be predictable and
262. 35:29 must be loving and caring and safe. Not every response. A mother that slaps the
263. 35:35 child every time is also responding. Sorry, I meant sorry. He appears to be caring. Narcissistic mothers are
264. 35:41 incapable of maintaining a stable response. Incapable. Um, a narcissist mother would be preoccupied with something. The child will approach and she will show him off
265. 35:52 or slap him or you know. But doesn’t that buy into the idea with this new generation of cell phon
266. 35:59 preoccupation that there’s a greater people are too busy to go away. I’m busy
267. 36:06 on my phone. Go away. I’m busy on the phone. Go away. I have to work. Go to work. Go away. So
268. 36:13 the the disintegration of the nuclear family and the changing changing gender roles where women assume roles that traditionally were men’s and so on so
269. 36:25 forth in my view explains for example the rising incidents of narcissism in among the young generations. Twin Campbell published a series of
270. 36:37 studies. uh last one was in 2008 about the incidents and prevalence of narcissism among college students in the United States and uh it was on the rise. I think one of the reasons it’s on the rise is that
271. 36:52 women, however well-intentioned and however well-meaning and however healthy, including healthy women, are simply absent by definition because uh to be
272. 37:03 responsive, you need to be present. And if you’re absent by definition because you have to go to work simply and the child is raised by a nanny or in a daycare center or whatever, that in itself is traumatizing.
273. 37:15 That in itself is a problem. So yes, our modern society and the allows uh I mean
274. 37:24 in my view fosters narcissism. I think so it’s a price we’re paying but
275. 37:30 uh agree on the other hand you know if you you can’t suppress you can’t confine one
276. 37:36 gender to the role of child rearing and deny them deny that gender all the other opportunities and possibilities. Perhaps the solution is uh
277. 37:47 perhaps women are in at fault in a sense because it’s a choice to make and I
278. 37:53 think women have been trying to do everything at once thereby compromising the quality of of everything
279. 37:59 simultaneously inappropriate now but just ask us about the um the kibutas that to me was an
280. 38:06 ideal situation people who really give this to the kibut is an amazing example because it was studied very thoroughly it didn’t work. It was studied very thoroughly in the kibbutim not now but in the past in the
281. 38:18 kibbutim children were raised not by their natural parents but in uh in centers. So all the
282. 38:25 children were taken away from their parents I think at the age of six months and moved on to a centralized facility
283. 38:32 where they were raised by nannies in effect governances and nannies and so on and uh there have been studies of the
284. 38:39 effect this has this has had on the children and the results were a bit
285. 38:45 counterintuitive. The children were very healthy. They did not show signs of narcissism or anything. They were very
286. 38:51 healthy and uh but they were healthy because they bonded with the nannies. They they formed attachments with the nannies and so on and when the parents visited them which was once a week they
287. 39:04 formed uh at the parents because it was limited in time were able to dedicate full attention to be to behave
288. 39:12 predictably and so on so forth. So also the parents were okay. They were in other words exposed only to positive
289. 39:19 attachment figures to the nannies in the center and to the parents once a week. So they didn’t have negative attachment figures in their life. So the kibbutim is an exception. But generally I think
290. 39:31 uh I think uh women if they want to have a
291. 39:37 child should realize that this is a choice they’re making and it requires
292. 39:43 some trade-off or sacrifices. And perhaps not all women should have children. No, because we have come to to
293. 39:50 develop this myth that all women should have children. And perhaps men men told you that this is a determinant of your femininity. This is a male thing, not a not a a female
294. 40:02 thing. Uh women adopted the male point of view, internalized it and came to came to identify themselves with it. But it’s utterly male chauvinistic view that
295. 40:13 bringing children to the world is uh is what makes you a woman and consequently women are trying to do too many things at once I think and uh are not doing
296. 40:25 either any of them well it’s a mess as far as the young generations it’s a mess
297. 40:33 anyhow any other questions Okay.
298. 40:46 Yes, please. Okay. [Music]
299. 41:00 is still
300. 41:14 nobody but no other people
301. 41:25 and everybody can be narcissist. psychopath. I have no if they don’t harm others. Is do you
302. 41:31 understand? They don’t harm others. Exactly. Okay. If you if you find an island and put all
303. 41:39 the narcissists and psychopaths on that island and they don’t hurt anyone. Yes.
304. 41:57 No, don’t worry. But this is not the reality.
305. 42:03 The reality is that narcissists and psychopaths are everywhere. And they are harming others. But but
306. 42:11 there is another issue. Narcissism is not good for the narcissist. Narcissist. Narcissism is a is a a problem for the narcissist. Narcissists
307. 42:23 are, for example, incapable of of being ever being happy. They are they have functioning problems. They don’t function well. They are very
308. 42:34 self-destructive. Ultimately, even if they if they have achievements and accomplishments and they succeed,
309. 42:40 ultimately they destroy everything. they have uh difficulties in interpersonal intimate relationship. Even if they don’t harm the intimate partner, they have difficulties in the relation. So
310. 42:52 narcissism is a a problem for the narcissist, not only for other people. So that is why we we are trying to
311. 42:58 develop uh ways of helping the not only helping society but helping the
312. 43:04 narcissist himself. So you remember Hazen and McFarland 2010
313. 43:11 made the discovery that it’s not very important for the mother to be sensitive to the child to read the child correctly
314. 43:17 the child’s needs and so on child’s cues but it’s far more important for her to be responsive in a predictable linear
315. 43:25 stable manner and of course lovingly not not by slapping the child or anything.
316. 43:31 Yeah. So here is their conclusion. When alarmed, the child seeks proximity
317. 43:39 to a caregiver and to its safe base. But proximity to a frightening caregiver
318. 43:46 increases the alarm. That’s a very important insight. What is happening in narcissism? [Applause]
319. 44:04 Here is the caregiver
320. 44:10 and here is the child. So the child uses proximity seeking
321. 44:17 behaviors to provoke or the the mother or to elicit from the mother behaviors
322. 44:24 which would form the attachment pattern. So the mother would feed him, hug him, kiss him, cuddle him, cuddle him, you name it. this and this forms an attachment, a
323. 44:36 bond between the child and the mother. By the way, on a biochemical level, it’s a pity Claudia is not here right now, but on a biochemical level, when mother and child interact bodily, when they touch, when skins, their skins touch,
324. 44:47 for example, there is a release, a cascade, a cascade of hormones which are released in the mother and which cause her to bond. The only other time there
325. 44:58 is an identical cascade is when the mother climaxes sexually with a man.
326. 45:04 It’s actually a sexual experience. Complete sexual experience. Oxytocin is one of them. It’s a cascade.
327. 45:11 We are talking about well over 20 hormones starting with the hypocmpus and hypothesis and so on and going down.
328. 45:18 It’s a cascade and it happens only on two occasions in the mother’s life. when she’s hugging her baby and has skin-to-skin contact and when she is having an orgasm during sex with the
329. 45:30 man. So clearly the picture is clear. It creates very um very strong attachment
330. 45:37 and bonding between the child and the and the mother. When the caregiver is frustrating, is not predictable, let alone, not loving,
331. 45:49 but is a minimum, not predictable, self-centered, unreliable, unstable, and so on so forth. There is terror. The child begins to be afraid of the caregiver. It’s a very frightening situation because, as I said, the child depends
332. 46:05 for his life on the caregiver. So, the child is terrorized. Now the child has two options. He can continue to approach the caregiver and for a while the child
333. 46:16 does it. He continues to approach the caregiver again and again and again. It’s very difficult for the child to
334. 46:23 give up on the caregiver. It’s almost unheard of. The child tries again and again and again. But if the caregiver
335. 46:31 continues to frustrate and be unpredictable and therefore frightening in McFarland’s term, if we have a
336. 46:38 frightening caregiver, some children, a small minority of children, develop an alternative
337. 46:46 caregiver, imaginary caregiver,
338. 46:52 let’s call it virtual caregiver. You know that you know that many children have imaginary friends imaginary friends they talk to them and
339. 47:03 so on. So similarly when the child cannot have despite all it all its
340. 47:09 efforts despite all the behaviors despite all its cuteness and what what have you the child cannot secure the
341. 47:16 affection and the love of the caregiver. Some small minority of children
342. 47:22 generate a virtual caregiver, imaginary caregiver.
343. 47:29 This caregiver has two has two functions. One
344. 47:35 to love the child but it has another function. One is to love the child and
345. 47:41 therefore to visiate or anni or eliminate the need for this caregiver.
346. 47:48 But it has another function to protect the child
347. 47:54 to love the child and protect the child. And it protects the child in a variety
348. 48:00 of ways. We will not go into it right now. We’ll go into it later. But suffice it to say
349. 48:08 that it has a protective function. But how can an imaginary caregiver
350. 48:17 protect the child? How can he protect the child? It has to it has to be the imaginary caregiver has to be more than the original caregiver.
351. 48:30 The child idealizes the original care. The child idealizes the mother. For the child, the mother is perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, infallible.
352. 48:43 Yes, that’s how children see mothers until you know much later but at the beginning that’s
353. 48:49 how they see mothers. So the virtual caregiver should protect the child from
354. 48:56 the real caregiver. So the virtual caregiver should be more
355. 49:02 than the real caregiver clearly because if he is not more if it is not more than the mother then it cannot protect the child from the mother. So the virtual caregiver should be
356. 49:18 everything the child is not. The child is small.
357. 49:24 The virtual caregiver is big. The child is helpless. The virtual caregiver is
358. 49:31 omnipotent. The child doesn’t know why mother reacts this way. Cannot read the environment properly. The virtual caregiver is omniscient. knows everything. The child is uh hurting in
359. 49:45 pain. The virtual caregiver cannot experience pain, is invulnerable,
360. 49:52 has no vulnerabilities, no pain, no hurt. In other words, no emotions, etc., etc. So, the virtual caregiver
361. 50:04 protects the child by having a list of qualities
362. 50:10 certain qualities, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, by the way,
363. 50:16 and so on and so forth. And when you look at this list of qualities, what comes to mind?
364. 50:23 The false self. Who? The false self. The false self, of course. But what comes to mind when you say God? Yes,
365. 50:30 it’s God. This is God. Narcissism, therefore, is a private
366. 50:38 religion. Simply it’s a primitive form of religion proto proto religion. It’s a private religion of the narcissist. And the false self is the god of the narcissist. God is supposed to protect us.
367. 50:56 False self protects the narcissist. God is supposed to love us. The false self
368. 51:02 loves the narcissist. God is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient, etc., etc.
369. 51:09 The false self is perfect, brilliant, omnipotent, omniscient, etc., etc. Narcissism is a proto religious reaction to abuse and trauma.
370. 51:21 It is a private religion. That’s an important insight because we
371. 51:27 know a lot about the psychological dynamics of religion. So if we take this insight, if we take
372. 51:34 this information, this knowledge and apply to narcissism, we acquire new tools and we will do it much later as you will see in the seminar. Now this is the protection part. Okay,
373. 51:48 false self. So virtual caregiver as you all guessed is the false self. Yes, the false self protects the child by being God. False self is God. Therefore, it
374. 51:59 protects the child. But the false self should also love the child.
375. 52:05 But pay attention what is the false self? It’s a construct inside the child.
376. 52:13 It is the child. So we are talking about narcissism in the most basic and
377. 52:19 classical sense. Self love, self-infatuation. It is the child loving himself.
378. 52:28 In other way and in object theory we say that if the object the external object frustrates the child reverts to the internal object in language of object theory. Yes. So
379. 52:39 the child begins to love himself because no one else will love him. No one else will love him and he begins to love
380. 52:45 himself. But there is a difficulty in this. There is a serious difficulty because the child believes that he is a
381. 52:52 bad object, worthless object. Let’s retrace. Let’s go back for a
382. 52:59 minute. I’m a child. I want my mother to love me. She doesn’t. She rejects me.
383. 53:06 She pushes me away. She frustrates me. What do I How do I judge the situation?
384. 53:13 How do I interpret the situation? I can say mother is bad. Mother is bad. It’s a bad mother. But this is not an option
385. 53:20 available to a child. Not available to a child. I therefore can only say I am
386. 53:26 bad. Mother is right not to love me. Mother is right to push me away. Mother is
387. 53:34 right to frustrate me, not to care for me. Mother is right. I am the bed object. I am not worthy of love. I’m not worthy of caring. I am the bad object. But wait a minute. How can the false self love a bad object?
388. 53:57 I mean, if I’m a bad object, no one can love me. Not my mother, not God,
389. 54:04 not the false self. I am unlovable in principle. No one can love me.
390. 54:12 And so the only option left to the child is to
391. 54:21 kill the bed object, to bury it, to vanish.
392. 54:29 And that is exactly what’s happening. The true self of the child is suppressed,
393. 54:35 eliminated effectively, functionally eliminated. It’s there, but it has no psychonamic function. There are no inner processes related to the true to the true self. It vanishes because and
394. 54:48 together with it all the bad and worthless aspects of the child vanish as
395. 54:54 well. What is left is one big void,
396. 55:00 a vacuum. And this is what I wrote in my book. There is no one there.
397. 55:08 There’s no narcissist. There’s no one there. It’s an empty void. It’s a vacuum.
398. 55:15 Somewhere, somewhere here, there is an oified, fossilized
399. 55:22 true self cowering in the corner, crying child somewhere here.
400. 55:28 But it is isolated with a firewall. There’s a firewall here. And it has no
401. 55:35 access to any internal process. And it does not generate any external process. It’s not like the unconscious.
402. 55:43 The unconscious is a dynamic entity. The unconscious generates processes. The true child does not generate processes. Now the false self is free to love the
403. 55:58 child. But for the child to feel that it exists, now that there is no true self, for the child to feel that it exists, it comes
404. 56:11 to identify itself with a false self. The child says, “I don’t exist anymore.”
405. 56:19 But the false self exists. I’m sure of it because it loves me. It protects me.
406. 56:25 It’s there. I know it’s there. I’m sure it exists. I don’t exist. So I will become the false self. From
407. 56:34 that second when this identification or misidentification is made, the narcissist becomes the false self and there is nothing there except the
408. 56:46 false self. This is very important to understand because people talk about narcissist
409. 56:52 like there is a narcissist who has a false self. No, there is a false self who has a false self. I mean, that’s it. There’s a false self. Period. There’s nothing
410. 57:04 there. The aim of call therapy is to demonstrate to the narcissist that
411. 57:11 even if we eliminate this, he will experience existence. But we’ll
412. 57:19 come to it later. In this sense, cold therapy is an existential therapy. But we’ll come to it later.
413. 57:45 We all we all stand on the shoulders of giants of course and uh I’m no
414. 57:51 exception. So stand on the shoulders of giants. I
415. 57:57 didn’t say I’m a giant. I said I’m a I’m standing on shoulders of giants. So in 1985 a seminal paper was published by
416. 58:04 FOA and Kak and immediately the academic establishment they were professors. Yes.
417. 58:10 I mean they were part of the academic establishment but the academic establishment attacked them. Suppressed
418. 58:17 the paper in effect. Suppressed in the sense that they will not cite them and so on. suppressed the paper in effect
419. 58:24 and almost immediately in 1990 there was another school that came into being just
420. 58:32 to counter what F and Kak said. There was a war in between 85 and 93. There
421. 58:39 was a war between F and Kak and the others and the others won. What for and Kazak suggested in 1985 and I think it was a brilliant insight in my
422. 58:50 view is that the only way to treat victims of trauma and abuse is to
423. 58:58 traumatize them and abuse them again and then to show them or to demonstrate
424. 59:04 to them that even though they are being traumatized and abused nothing happens they survive they’re okay
425. 59:12 they for and kak said that once If you revictimize, reabuse, retraumatize the
426. 59:18 victim. The victim will come to understand
427. 59:24 that abuse and trauma can be endured, can be survived.
428. 59:30 And immediately the magical properties of the trauma, the mythical dimensions of the trauma, the personal mythos generated by the victim will collapse.
429. 59:45 And so this generated of course a firestorm. Everyone said that they are you know crazy and it’s a dangerous
430. 59:53 method and this and they were attacked and you cannot find
431. 59:59 uh Kak and FA literally vanished. I mean they were very respected professors and so on at the time. There is a sequence of publications from 73 to 85 but after 85 they were almost denied. I mean they
432. 60:11 were denied access to academic journals and so on just because they dare to suggest that perhaps if we revictimize
433. 60:19 and retraumatize victims we will solve the problem. So don’t don’t let anyone tell you that academ is a place for free
434. 60:27 speech. It is a place for free speech if you agree but not if you disagree. Anyhow what is the aim of revictimization? And
435. 60:39 before before I continue, as you probably all of you know, many of
436. 60:45 you know, call therapy is founded the operational principle of call therapy is
437. 60:51 to retraumatize the narcissistic patient to force the narcissistic patient to go
438. 60:57 through the very traumas that created the false self in the first place. But it is done in a very special way and truly very special because that’s not available in any therapy. And it is done in um
439. 61:13 I don’t know which word to use cruel daring in a way that that um creates a lot of questions and a lot of doubts and
440. 61:20 a lot of suspicion um and I will come to it later. At this stage let’s talk about revictimization.
441. 61:26 Revictimizing or retraumatizing the victim has three usually three outcomes.
442. 61:33 According to Forzak and numerous other studies by the way that is agreed on on on the entire profession retraumatizing
443. 61:41 has three very favorable outcomes, very good outcomes. First, it helps to resolve
444. 61:48 early childhood conflicts. What happens in retraumatization?
445. 61:54 You had a trauma as a child, you now go through this trauma again. And when you
446. 62:00 had a trauma as a child, you could not resolve the trauma because for example, mother was frustrating. There was no one to talk to, no one to negotiate with. You were not in position to negotiate
447. 62:11 and mother was a frustrating object. So you couldn’t resolve the early trauma. But now if you go through it again, for
448. 62:18 example, the therapist can be your mother and you can resolve the early trauma. The outcome of the trauma this
449. 62:24 time will not be the same as the outcome of a trauma in your early childhood. So
450. 62:30 resolution of early traumas, it achieves closure. Retraumatization achieves closure.
451. 62:38 And perhaps most importantly, when people are traumatized,
452. 62:45 they develop a series of counterproductive strategies. Whether they are traumatized in war, whether they are traumatized by rape, whether they are traumatized by domestic abuse, whether they’re traumatized as
453. 62:56 children, it doesn’t matter. All traumatized people have a series of counterproductive strategies that they develop. One of them is avoidance. They avoid situation,
454. 63:10 they avoid situations, they avoid people, they avoid places which could trigger them. So gradually they have
455. 63:18 what we call constricted life. Gradually their lives become more and more
456. 63:24 limited, more and more closed, more and more constricted. They avoid more and more. They they so many of them become
457. 63:32 socially isolated. Many of them don’t develop intimate relationships. Many of them don’t go to certain places. Many of them don’t do certain things. Many of them develop obsessive compulsive behaviors, rituals to cope with their
458. 63:44 trauma and so on so forth. So this is avoidance. The second coping strategy is helplessness. They develop what we call
459. 63:52 learned helplessness. They they throw themselves at the mercy of the world. They say, “Look, I’m as helpless as a
460. 63:58 baby. Help me.” So they are they become needy. They become clinging.
461. 64:06 They become they blackmail emotionally blackmail other people. This is learned helplessness. So that’s a second strategy. And of course the most famous strategy is known as depression.
462. 64:19 Depression is a strategy used by trauma victims. And uh retraumatization has been proven because retraumatization has been an
463. 64:31 accepted principle and it appears in literature throughout. The difference is that for and kak said that you should retraumatize without a safe environment not in a safe
464. 64:44 environment and all other schools say that you should push the trauma victim
465. 64:52 to experience the trauma but in a safe holding engulfing encompassing
466. 64:58 environment environment where the patient feels accepted loved cared for et so the idea is that The therapist should create a safe environment for the
467. 65:09 victim where the victim can then reexperience the trauma, express himself
468. 65:15 about the trauma, reframe the trauma, give it a different meaning and thereby
469. 65:21 recover for Kak said no the patient should go through a trauma period and
470. 65:27 it’s not the therapy’s job to create a safe environment. He should not and that was a big debate. Yeah. and they lost.
471. 65:35 But are we talking about an event specific trauma or an interpersonal dynamic trauma? All all types of trauma. Kak mentioned war, domestic abuse, all kinds of trauma, right? But as it pertains to cold
472. 65:46 therapy, are you are you referring to creating that? Oh, we’ll come to it. What what what constitutes trauma? Because the first
473. 65:53 thing in cold therapy, we have to identify the trauma. So we’ll come to it when we discuss trauma identification. You look very nervous. You look very nervous. Yeah. You knew it was coming, didn’t
474. 66:04 you? So, retraumatization
475. 66:10 is a currently used technique all the time. It’s not new, but it is used in
476. 66:18 safe environments, safe holding environments. Uh, and it achieves these results that I
477. 66:24 mentioned. It provides closure. It resolves early conflicts and
478. 66:30 eliminates the need for strategies like helplessness and depression.
479. 66:42 The difference between current uses of retraumatization and cold therapy.
480. 66:49 And now at this stage I’m not going into what constitutes trauma. We’ll come to that. um by the end of the seminar you
481. 66:57 will know everything there is to know. So, but what cold therapy does that
482. 67:04 current retraumatization protocols do not do is that first of all
483. 67:11 uh we in call therapy we retraumatize the
484. 67:17 patient but in a controlled manner or a tiered manner as a kind of escalating
485. 67:24 hierarchy and in that sense call therapy is very similar to exposure therapy.
486. 67:30 It’s a little like exposure therapy. So there is a hierarchy and we traumatize
487. 67:36 the patient or retraumatize the patient in a tiered or controlled way
488. 67:43 and I call it stressing or trauma simulation. And then the second thing
489. 67:50 which will traumatize most of you I assume is that cold therapy definitely
490. 67:58 generates a hostile non-holding environment and it does so using
491. 68:04 specific techniques. Of course it’s not a wild savage environment. It’s not a jungle you know but it’s definitely a
492. 68:12 hostile non-holding environment. It is there is a series of techniques which I will talk about discuss which are aimed
493. 68:20 at traumatizing the patient in an environment very close or very similar
494. 68:28 to the original environment where he was traumatized. I will try to explain the philosophy behind it.
495. 68:35 The idea is this. You cannot truly experience the trauma. You cannot truly
496. 68:42 exercise the demons associated with the original trauma if you do it in a cozy
497. 68:49 self cozy safe nice environment.
498. 68:55 You can discuss trauma cognitively. You can analyze trauma. You can reframe
499. 69:01 trauma. You can do many things with trauma. But the only thing you cannot do with trauma in a safe environment is
500. 69:08 reexperience it emotionally. Emotionally to experience trauma or
501. 69:14 reexperience trauma, you must be in an environment which is conducive to trauma.
502. 69:22 You must be an environment which reminds you very much of the environment in which you
503. 69:28 experience the original trauma. And I think there’s a lot of confusion in current trauma therapies between metat
504. 69:37 trauma, metat trauma, discussing the trauma, analyzing the trauma, reframing
505. 69:43 the trauma, the language elements of the trauma, metat trauma and the trauma.
506. 69:53 I mean I can sit with Holocaust survivors and discuss the structure of Aits and how many SS guards and horrible
507. 70:00 things that they have seen and how they worked in the in the crematoria and and I mean and it all be it will be heartbreaking and it will be shattering and so on but it will not be Awitz never
508. 70:14 ever not if the environment is safe and so on. If I have to treat Holocaust
509. 70:20 victims, I will take them back to Awitz and put them in barracks. There the
510. 70:26 chance of reexperiencing the trauma is absolute. Now, on purpose, I used a very extreme
511. 70:33 example because I wanted to radicalize you. I wanted to provoke emotional reactions in you and thoughts. But this does not detract from the
512. 70:46 content of what I said. Trauma can be experienced only in traumatic environments.
513. 70:52 It can be discussed in non-traumatic environments. But I doubt very much
514. 70:58 whether the effect is the same. Very much. If I sit with a therapist on Fifth
515. 71:04 Avenue and he has uh cozy ambient music
516. 71:10 and plush carpets and very nice fans and decorative cupboards. and we discuss my
517. 71:17 trauma with uh and I’m in a three-piece suit and we discuss my trauma. I don’t
518. 71:23 think it will have the same emotional resonance or impact or results or outcomes as
519. 71:30 if I am traumatized. If the if I’m in a hostile environment and the therapist is hostile to me as my mother was hostile
520. 71:36 to me and I’m in a in an absolutely traumatizing ambiencece I think there my
521. 71:42 chances of going through the trauma truly are much higher of course needless
522. 71:48 to say this is a very dangerous method to borrow from the movie. Yeah. Needless
523. 71:54 to say there are suicide risks in some cases. Needless to say, the whole situation must be expertly managed.
524. 72:04 But that we need to expertly manage something doesn’t mean that we should not do it because uh we have AB reactions in psychoanalysis as well.
525. 72:15 Actually the first trauma- based therapy was psychoanalysis. the the foundation of psychoanalysis,
526. 72:21 the belief, the philosophy of psychoanalysis is that people are who they are because they have been
527. 72:27 traumatized and the aim of psychoanalysis is to bring the trauma to the surface and to
528. 72:33 create a reaction. That’s so that’s the first trauma therapy and there have been numerous
529. 72:39 documented cases of people who reacted very badly to psychoanalysis at the beginning when they didn’t know how to control yet reacted very badly to psychoanalysis and so on because they reexperienced the the trauma. If you
530. 72:51 read if you read um transcripts of the initial psychoanalysis sessions,
531. 72:58 transcripts by Freud uh prototcripts by Bler, transcripts by Jung, if you read
532. 73:05 the fency, if you read the initial transcripts, you see that actually psychoanalysis at the very beginning was
533. 73:11 very hostile. The therapist sits back and he is a kind of godlike presence and he’s pushing subtly subtly and structurally he’s
534. 73:23 pushing the patient to reexperience a trauma. So trauma based therapies are not new
535. 73:30 and even hostile environments are not new. But for some reason when we became more and more politically correct when we became tree huggers when we became you know we we began to be you know we
536. 73:44 don’t do this and we don’t do that and this this is not right and we need to man up you know. Yes.
537. 73:52 Yes sir. Yes. Um what I was thinking is that a therapist who is going to administer
538. 73:58 um such a strategy would have to do it um uh okay with the patient with the
539. 74:04 patient knowing or without the patient knowing and in in that particular case
540. 74:11 the environment would have to be um really constructed uh conducively so
541. 74:17 that all the elements are there um and then when the the patient steps in and then I I suppose you’d have um standby personnel to you know to to to assist in
542. 74:29 in case there is some violence or there is some hostile um reaction. Um so I I
543. 74:36 see this particular um um therapy really being skillfully
544. 74:43 um administered with all the elements um you know
545. 74:49 reminding the patients of the past etc. So, um, and so
546. 74:55 I I I I just see it really really being um um
547. 75:05 well, I I guess gross um yes, you know, uh raw um you know, so so the
548. 75:12 expectation then can be anything, you know, I but I guess the main thing is to
549. 75:18 have the patient react react um any you know in any way however it comes out and
550. 75:26 um and then so so now my question is
551. 75:32 would the therapist do this um with the knowledge of the of the patient or it
552. 75:39 will just be administered at some point in time um just to get a reaction um at
553. 75:46 some point no it’s usually without the knowledge of a patient we have already a body of 40 40 people who went through cold call
554. 75:52 therapy. It’s usually without the knowledge of patient and I don’t think you need any support stuff. The therapists um
555. 75:58 especially in certain in certain areas are trained to cope with uh with these
556. 76:04 kind of reactions. For example, therapists who work with uh dissociative identity disorder, they are trained to
557. 76:10 cope with these reactions because um the various alters, the various personalities in the multiple
558. 76:17 personality spectrum. Some of these personalities are uh for example violent personalities or so therapists who deal with dissociative identity disorder have developed protocols and tools to cope
559. 76:30 with emergent personalities alters that could be violent or suicidal
560. 76:36 or dangerous and so on. So we have these protocols. It’s no need to to invent the
561. 76:42 wheel here. We have protocols how to deal with such type of reactions. But I
562. 76:48 think it’s a bit too early to discuss cold therapy in any of these terms because you don’t know what is cold therapy yet. I’m just introducing the fundamentals and the basics using psychoanalytic uh
563. 77:00 parlance or jaun. Normally you would have resistance
564. 77:06 to to call therapy. You will develop resistances to call therapy because it runs against the grain of what it what
565. 77:14 it is to be a therapist. Over the last uh century, we have developed the self I
566. 77:20 mean therapists have developed the the self-image that they are proxy parents.
567. 77:26 There is even an issue of transference and how to cope with transference and so on. Proxy parents in the sense that they
568. 77:33 will provide the patient with everything that he had missed as a child or as a they will provide uh help and support
569. 77:40 and care. So therapy, therapy, psychotherapy had had become a caring profession, a profession of caring, a profession of love, profession of empathy and so on.
570. 77:53 I think this is a cultural thing. I can point to cultures in the world and
571. 77:59 I have lived in in many of them. I’ve lived in Africa and so on. I can point to cultures in the world where the
572. 78:06 healer the healer is antagonistic by definition. The process of healing is
573. 78:14 considered to be a dialectical process of antagonism. I mean the healer is the
574. 78:20 anti antithesis to the patient’s thesis. So I can I can
575. 78:26 point to many cultures where therapy or psychotherapy even though it’s not called psychotherapy it’s called a witch
576. 78:32 doctor or whatever you name it shaman I can point to many cultures where caring
577. 78:38 loving empathy are not an integral part of psychotherapy at all on the very
578. 78:44 contrary the psychotherapist role is to antagonize and to conflict and to
579. 78:50 confront for some and and actually psychotherapist started that way here in
580. 78:56 this city in this city almost exactly 100 years ago. It started it started
581. 79:02 this way. It started as a conflictive uh process not as a whole. I mean Freud
582. 79:09 would have been completely devastated and shocked if someone told him listen you should be a caring loving empathic
583. 79:16 you know it would be what it would be you know it was completely this is a new
584. 79:22 development and if I may say so without insulting twothirds of the audience it’s an American development
585. 79:28 for fear of lawsuits perhaps sorry for fear of lawsuits I mean possibly this but I don’t think so no
586. 79:34 America generally is Americans generally develop this you know culture which is
587. 79:40 commendable culture and you know in a way wonderful of um being sensitive to
588. 79:46 other people’s needs empathy caring loving and so on so forth and that is a great thing but for example it’s a very
589. 79:52 bad thing if your surgeon would hesitate to cut you open because he has empathy and I don’t know what you know it should not be a general principle it should be applied where
590. 80:04 needed I therefore I therefore think that many of the
591. 80:10 objections to something like cold therapy and to FOA in Kazak’s paper, many of the objections were actually
592. 80:16 cultural objections, not scientific, not clinical, not but cultural. In our
593. 80:22 culture, we don’t do these things. In our culture, we don’t traumatize patients. In our culture, we’re
594. 80:28 empathic. In our culture, we provide a safe environment. It’s a cultural thing. Who said the safe environment is necessary? It’s a precondition. who who
595. 80:35 is the authority and when was it tested by the way we have no control group all therapies provide a safe environment so I have no control group I don’t have a therapy which does not provide a safe
596. 80:46 environment to say wait a minute the clinical outcomes here are much better than here so we should pro provide a
597. 80:52 safe environment this is a maxim axiom and we can never test axioms so by definition it’s not scientific so I refuse to accept that a safe holding
598. 81:04 environment is an underlying condition for every possible psychotherapy. Completely rejected out of hand. I mean
599. 81:11 completely and I think in some situations because you see narcissists
600. 81:17 are not only trauma victims. They have layers and layers and layers of defenses. If you do not penetrate these
601. 81:25 defenses, you will never get to the true self. You will never get to the core of the narcissist. Maybe a trauma victim who is not a narcissist, maybe this kind of trauma
602. 81:36 victim can benefit from a holding and safe environment. But a narcissist cannot benefit from a safe and holding
603. 81:43 environment. Immediately the narcissist will convert the treatment into a power play mind game. Immediately will compete
604. 81:50 with the therapist. There are huge defenses involved. to penetrate these defenses you must use TNT not uh massage
605. 82:01 you know that’s we’re talking about narcissism never forget it’s not it’s clear it’s must be clear therapy is not
606. 82:08 a universal therapy not like cognitive behavior therapy it’s not universally applicable it’s unique to narcissists
607. 82:17 developed for narcissist only for narcissist by mistake it works on mood disorders which might explain why some scholars say that narcissism is a depressive disorder. There there’s a school that says that narcissism is actually a depressive disorder. So, but that’s it.
608. 82:34 Yes. Dr. Um is it to say that during those um
609. 82:40 years um you had a lot of um persons who advoc like a lot of advocacy um persons
610. 82:47 who who who were advocating for get rid of the the the chain. Do not hold them
611. 82:53 in the in those in those cells anymore. Let them out of the hospitals. Get them out. I mean you had a lot of advocacy
612. 83:00 for fresh air. Um getting out um do not hold them anymore. I mean back in in you
613. 83:07 know over a hundred years ago. So perhaps was was that the age where um um
614. 83:14 persons were were were beginning to um
615. 83:21 recognize that persons, you know, who who were experiencing these um types of um um
616. 83:31 therapy being in these holding cells or asylum or hospitals or what have you, you know, to let them No, let’s try something different. Let’s be a little
617. 83:42 bit more humane to them. Um, and so on and so forth. That what it’s true that coercive
618. 83:48 therapies, coercive therapies such as the ones used in inpatient settings in mental asylums and so on in the 50s and
619. 83:54 40s and 30s, not now. Coercive therapies are went out of favor, but they went out of favor uh I mean the humane explanations came later. The two main the two main developments that led to the abolition of many mental asylums and so on were psychopharmarmacology,
620. 84:10 the availability of drugs which allow you to control for example psychotic disorder in the wild in the community
621. 84:18 and budgets simply budgets were being cut. So because there were drugs to control uh very difficult conditions in
622. 84:26 the community and because budgets were being cut mental asylums have been abolished. later the rationale had to be
623. 84:32 that we did it for humane reasons but I don’t think that was historically it was not the main issue we don’t find for
624. 84:39 example humane arguments in literature prior to the abolition of mental asylums we find them only later after um psychopharmarmacology had a huge effect first of all by allowing us to
625. 84:52 treat in the community but secondly by medicalizing many problems many problems which which were not considered medical conditions have become medicalized simply because the drug the fact that the drug is efficient proves that it is a medical issue not the other way
626. 85:09 because in tuberculosis first you had the condition and then people try to find cure but here uh they actually
627. 85:16 experimented with with drugs and they discovered oh this works on schizophrenia oh this works on this this and then well it it must mean that
628. 85:23 depression is a medical condition or schizophrenia is a medical condition so it’s very psychophomicology is very Um
629. 85:30 and so there’s a lot of uh a lot of this literature and so on. For example, autism, autism spectrum disorders,
630. 85:38 schizophrenia, depression, all these huge piles of literature, mountains of literature are today obsolete. No one bothers to read them because, you know, give them a pill.
631. 85:49 Okay, we take a break now.