Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissistic Abuse: Phase 2 (Live Questions by Mark Thomas Beare, MPIT originator)

1. 00:01 I’m in Macedonia and it is Christmas here. Yes, you heard me correctly. Macedonians are happy golucky and they love to celebrate everything at least twice. According to the Christian Orthodox calendar, um Christmas is celebrated now, today and tomorrow. So, merry Christmas if you
2. 00:29 are Provos love, if you’re Orthodox Christian, and of course if you’re Macedonian. And today, um, I’m going to continue
3. 00:43 oblquely, um, the live from yesterday. Yes, yesterday was a historical moment. I went live for the first time in my life, which proves to you that I’ve been dead until now. I came alive yesterday. I resurrected exactly like another Jew whose name shall go unmentioned.
4. 01:09 Regrettably, during the live, YouTube took it upon itself to erase unilaterally to delete. Hundreds of questions. More than 1,400 people participated in the live. I don’t know if it’s a big number or a small number, but that’s a number. And all of
5. 01:29 them were posting furiously. And then YouTube just cleaned the screen and I lost all these questions. Now one of the people who participated in the life is the estimable Mark Thomas Bear. Mark Thomas Bear is the originator of the MPIT theory MPIT
6. 01:52 theory which I think is the next big thing in the narcissistic abuse recovery space. The Vaknin Rangeloska Foundation, which I’ve co-founded with my wife, has published his book recently and it’s available on Amazon and for download elsewhere.
7. 02:10 Okay. So, Mark was among the unfortunate ones. His questions were summarily dismissed, deleted, erased, eradicated, and obliterated by the powers that be. No, not Donald Trump. YouTube much stronger than Donald Trump. And so I reached out to him and he uh
8. 02:33 graciously resent me the questions and I’m going to respond to these questions today. That’s why I said this is a kind of extension of the live yesterday. As to your other question, uh we’re going to probably be having additional lives in the future. And when
9. 02:51 I’m saying we, uh, when I say we, it’s the lives are not on my channel. The lives are on another channel which has nothing to do with me. Not directly and not indirectly. That other channel is called Narcissism Summaries. Go look it up and subscribe to it and follow what
10. 03:11 they’re doing. I greatly admire their dedication and hard work and I decided to help them by uh work by kind of going live from time to time on and through their channel. So let’s go back to Mark’s uh questions. Mark seemed to Mark seems to be very exercised by the fact that the
11. 03:36 narcissistic abuse recovery space is replete with and swimming in a lot of nonsense, misinformation and worse outright manipulation by people who are less than scrapulous to use an understatement. So all these questions revolve around this theme. Uh
12. 03:58 but they afford an entry into some very
13. 04:04 valuable tools which victims of narcissistic abuse can leverage and use in the in future. So the first question he asks, what’s the biggest missing missing piece in the narcissistic abuse recovery space that keeps survivors stuck? And what’s the
14. 04:23 simplest stepbystep fix you would teach if you could redesign the entire field? A field which may I remind you I’ve launched in the 1980s and 1990s. So I think the greatest fallacy in the field of narcissistic abuse and narcissistic abuse recovery, the
15. 04:44 greatest fallacy is what I call the morality play. Narcissists are demons. The victims are angels. Narcissists have agency. The victims are passive passive recipients of abuse. There is a unidirectional splitting. Splitting is an infantile defense mechanism and it’s
16. 05:08 pathological. It’s indicative of a deterioration in mental health and victims are splitting left, right and center. Splitting simply means that you divide humanity into all bad and all good. Some people are all good, some people are all bad. And that’s what
17. 05:25 victims are doing. This unidirectional splitting morality plate is the number one two and three fallacy in the recovery space and I’m a lot less optimistic than Mark Thomas bear because Mark implies that there is a stepbystep uh fix that is teachable a teachable
18. 05:47 moment that could somehow transform the field. I’m a lot less sanguin about this because I think it would be difficult to fix the field. It would be difficult to fix it because it fits so snugly with the victimhood social ethos. We live in a period in history where victimhood is
19. 06:10 the organizing principle. Victimhood is the explanation. Victimhood makes sense of life and reality. Victimhood imbuss one with meaning and provides affords a trajectory, a path forward, a purpose and a direction. Victimhood is the name of the game. And the current
20. 06:33 narcissistic abuse recovery space is replete with this is is absolutely immersed in this. It’s a victimhood space for self-styled, self-d designated victims, real victims, so-called empaths, which are actually, in my view, covert narcissist, and so on and so
21. 06:52 forth. There’s no way to fix this leaking ship. It’s a cesspool. It’s an absolute toxic environment, and I’m not quite sure how one could extricate oneself from it. Um, the next question is, if you could if you could give survivors one test to spot diluted, plagiarized so-called
22. 07:20 recovery cont content, a test that in under one minute would sign signal and designate and identify such content. What would this test be? Well, there’s I think a simple rule of thumb huristic. Any text that aggrandizes you is fake and wrong. Any text that tells you that
23. 07:46 you are flawless, blameless, that you have had no contribution to your predicament, that there’s nothing you could have done, that it’s a force of nature, that your abuser is unique in some sense, that you know what you’ve what you’ve gone through is
24. 08:00 unprecedented. Any text that elevates you, enhances you, aggrandizes you, um, renders you a bit superhuman or inhuman or unhuman or whatever, this kind of text is fake and wrong. Any pretentious use of therapy speak is suspect. when you see videos replete
25. 08:23 with people who do not possess any credentials and let it be clear having a PhD in psychology is not a credential. It’s not proof of expertise because psychology is a giant field. that you have a PhD in physics does not mean that you’re an expert on narcissism or and many many
26. 08:45 self-styled experts on narcissism possess a PhD in psychology psychology yet they have zero credentials in the field of personality disorder disorders that renders them charlatans and con artists and one of the ways to identify these people is that they use a lot of therapy
27. 09:04 speak they emphasize their alleged clinical experience they lie outright about their accomplishments in the field and their standing and so on and so forth. The next uh question is what falsifiable claim should the recovery space adopt so it stops rewarding slogans? What would
28. 09:26 be the simplest this is wrong check?
29. 09:32 I don’t think anything simple is good. I think complexity is irreducible. Very very few things are more complex than personality disorders. Very very few things are more complex than the human mind. Very very few things are more complex than interpersonal
30. 09:52 relationships, especially intimate ones. Very very few things, if anything, are more complex than the human brain and the human being. So to reduce all this into three sentences, three bullet points, three tips, three I don’t know what. Whenever you see a reduction,
31. 10:12 whenever you see something like that, you know, 10 ways the narcissist does this. Uh five signs you are this. I mean, this is this is wrong. This is fake. This is ignorance masquerading as knowledge. Anything shorter than 10 minutes is likely to be wrong. Anything
32. 10:31 that is summarized, anything that is telegraphed, anything that claims to be comprehensive, anything that is bulletpointed, anything that is pneummonic is equally suspect. Recovery and healing demand a lot of patience, an inordinate amount of time, numerous
33. 10:54 resources, and exquisitely hard labor. It is a process, not an event, and it cannot be reduced to 2 minutes and 10 tips. The final question by Mark is, what’s one falsifiable prediction? What is one falsifiable prediction about recovery that the field should adopt? Something
34. 11:18 we should reliably observe when people are actually exiting the shared fantasy. And what would count as evidence that we are wrong? Well, as I’ve just said, when someone is asking for a single test, the there’s no such thing. Complexity is irreducible. However, I can provide you
35. 11:39 with 23 tests. When you have no disparaging introjects traceable back to the abuser or to the flying monkeys of the abuser, that’s a good sign. When there are no voices in your head that replicate the abuser’s speech, the abuser’s messages messaging,
36. 11:58 the abuser’s signals, the abusers’s content, that’s a good sign. When there is no ego destiny, discomfort and no hesitancy in decision making. When there’s an ability to trust, when ability, the ability to trust is the capacity to trust is restored.
37. 12:15 When you no longer doubt your judgment, that means you’re no longer gaslit and your reality testing is restored. Um, when the independence of your thinking and your of your reality testing is restored, when there are no cognitive distortions, when you regain a sense of agency and
38. 12:37 self-efficacy, when your motivation is autonomous, it’s about you. It’s not heteronomous. It’s not about what people expect of you and what would people say. That’s a good sign. When there’s no catastrophizing, imminent doom, when there there’s no
39. 12:55 anticipatory anxiety, when there’s no addictive craving or sentimental nostalgia coupled with separation, insecurity, abandonment anxiety, when you don’t seek the same type of partner, when you transition from what is known as narcissistic mate selection to anacic
40. 13:16 mate selection, you start to vary the types of partners you choose. When there is no when you don’t develop or display or experience maternal impulses or parental impulses there is no what cohort used to call narcissistic transferences when there is no us only you. When you
41. 13:39 no longer think of your relationships as a single organism of a merged and fused collective. When you have a separate independent mind, autonomous of your own, no merger, no fusion in a shared fantasy, intact boundaries, no enshment, no engulfment.
42. 14:00 It’s a good sign when you do when you no longer attempt to read the minds of other people or to please them. When you are no longer self-sacrificial, when your people pleasing impulses are gone, when you do not allow yourself to be emotionally blackmailed, disrespected,
43. 14:18 your boundaries breached, when your defenses are no longer infantile, for example, you no longer split people into all good and all bad. You don’t project things. When you do not self- idealize and you do not self-devalue. When you are just being realistic about
44. 14:36 yourself. When you regain introspection and self-awareness fully acquainted with your positive sides and negative sides strengths and limitations. When you are capable of conducting a SWAT analysis of yourself. When your functioning is restored socially at the workplace as a
45. 14:55 parent. When you regain empathy, able to interact with other people, develop interpersonal relationships, fall in love. When you do not emote by proxy, when you do not experience emotions only via other people or via, for example, a movie, when you allow yourself to
46. 15:16 experience emotions independently of anything and anyone and whenever you feel like it. when you are not averse to trust as I mentioned but also when you don’t dread intimacy when you’re not not afraid of getting hurt when you realize that pain and loss are drivers and
47. 15:36 engines of personal growth and personal developments. They’re the greatest teachers and you embrace them. And finally, when you get rid of your victimhood stance, when you assume personal responsibility for your choices and decisions and contributions to what
48. 15:53 has happened to you, these are the signs of healing and recovery from any type of abuse, but especially from narcissistic abuse. Another question I I want to answer respond to a question in the live that has been mysteriously deleted by the cabal of YouTube
49. 16:13 um had to do with objects and introjects. An object is something external, something out there. An introject is the representation of an object in the perceivers’s mind. So if you are interacting with a person who is significant to you, is meaningful,
50. 16:35 you’re likely to create an introject of this person. You’re likely to create an avatar, a representation of this person in your mind, and you’re likely to to continue to interact with both the object and the introject. As opposed to border lines, narcissists possess
51. 16:52 introject constancy. Border lines are not capable of maintaining a stable regulated intrajict which represents someone out there for example the intimate partner. Narcissists are capable of maintaining stable permanent intrajects. They are capable
52. 17:15 of introject constancy or intraject permanence. Introject permanence is the persistence of caffected introjects long after the external objects that they represent are deaected and gone. Let me translate this to English. Introject constant. Constancy simply
53. 17:38 means that the narcissist are able to continue to interact with an internal object as if this internal object were the external object that it represents even after the external object is long gone and no longer interests the narcissist in any way. So um
54. 18:03 these are the some of the questions that I’ve missed in in the last live through no fault of my own. Of course I have aloplastic defenses and um maybe I um in the next live I’ll be able to take more of your questions. In total, you posted well over 1,000
55. 18:22 questions. And at any given moment, there were 1,400 more, almost 1,500 of you online at any given moment. So, it was pretty hectic and chaotic, and it was my first experience. I must have gotten it wrong somehow. My answers have been over long possibly, and verbose.
56. 18:41 I’ll try to restrain myself. I love the sound of my voice and so it’s addictive. I can’t stop as you noticed. Uh but I hope some of you got some benefit out of the live. Let me know your your input even if it’s negative. I’m in process of learning.
57. 19:01 Um and you know, merry Christmas as I said.