When the iPhone 3 came onto the market, I bought one. I bought one as a birthday gift.

And then I noticed that it sucks. It’s a rudimentary device. You couldn’t even copy paste on the iPhone 3.

And yet, everyone I spoke to, everyone who had bought or owned an iPhone 3, was praising the gadget, claiming that it’s far superior to anything else in the market.

Now, this was counterfactual. It was not true.

So why were people doing this?

Cognitive dissonance. They bought the device. They invested a lot of money.

As usual, Apple products are like nine times what the price they should be. And then they couldn’t admit that they have made a mistake. Buyers remorse.

So instead, they reframed. They lied to themselves and to others that the devices are great. It’s the same with parents. They have children.

Children suck. They take the life force out of you.

Trust me, I’ve raised three plus one, my three brothers and my sister. It’s possibly the most horrendous experience imaginable.

Very much like prison.

But there is cognitive dissonance. Parents must defend their decision. They don’t want to be seen as idiots.

So they keep saying children are the greatest thing, the greatest light, wonderful creatures. They brought happiness into our lives.

I am sorry, but there isn’t a single study, one which disputes the assertion that childless people are much, like much happier than people with children.

End of story. All the studies we have, dozens of them, or in all cultures and all societies imaginable, show clearly that parents are less happy than childless people.

This is an example of a more general phenomenon.

People were writing to me, abuse is not love.

First of all, I think it’s pretty insolent to give me lectures about abuse. I’m the guy who first described narcissistic abuse. I even coined the phrase narcissistic abuse in the nineties.

So to teach me what is abuse is a bit over the top and arrogant. I never said that abuse is love or that love is abuse. I said that people who are abused tend in many cases to identify it with love.

They misperceive abuse as love. I also said that based on studies, abuse is much more common in loving, caring, committed relationships.

And if you stop to think about it for a second, you will see that it makes sense. If your partner had given up on you, he wouldn’t bother to abuse you. That he keeps abusing you means he’s somehow emotionally invested in you.

Now this investment is sick, pathological, wrong, but it’s there. Abuse does indicate emotional investment and commitment in relationships, whether you like it or not.

More generally, you tend to reject the truth because you can’t stand to face it. But the truth sets you free. Everything else enslaves you.

Haven’t you learned this lesson in the past few years? The truth sets you free.

I’ve mentioned in several videos that incest is a trauma, but it is a trauma not because of the act itself. I’m sorry again. It’s a trauma because of the way society reacts to incest.

Now this is not Sambacne. This is the greatest pediatrician and child psychoanalyst to have ever lived after Jean Piaget. This is Donald Winnicott. Donald Winnicott is the one who said that the trauma of incest is societal.

The child sees how everyone around all the other adults react to the incest and then internalizes the traumatic response.

The truth in psychology doesn’t always go hand in hand with your common sense intuition and anecdotes. Your neighbor and your aunt and your granny and your children are not a representative sample. They are just your granny and your aunt and your neighbor and your children.

This is not how science is conducted. This is not how studies are affected. This is not how we learn the facts.

Truer scholars are committed to facts and truth, never mind if they risk being cancelled out.

So on my channel there is no place for political correctness, fakes, falsities, lies, pretensions, new age nonsense and so on. On this channel there is only one queen to which I am an obedient servant. It is the harsh queen of truth.

Okay Shoshanim, I hope you got it. I want to tell you something. A bit tongue in cheek but still very true.

Remember these sentences.

Stress mobilizes. Anxiety paralyzes. Dedication galvanizes. Addiction euthanizes. Envy kills.

Emulation fulfills. Grieving is overcome. Depression overcomes. Striving attains. Perfectionism detains.

Memorize these five sentences and you have 99% of the psychological knowledge you need for life.

Today we are going to discuss a relatively complex topic for a change but fascinating in my view at least.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and other books about personality disorders. I am also a professor of psychology.

By the way yesterday there was an article in the Daily Mail, an interview with me and I think it is one of the best encapsulations of narcissistic abuse that I have ever seen.

Surprising for a tabloid but you know you find pearls in unexpected places.

I recommend that you go and read this article. It was published on the 25th which is yesterday. It was authored by Yves Taufik.