Narcissist’s Celibacy as a Religious Principle (ENGLISH responses)

Uploaded 3/5/2020, approx. 6 minute read

Summary

Narcissists create an ideology that elevates sexual celibacy or sexual abstinence into a religion, which is a private religion with one God, the false self, and one worshiper, the narcissist. Eastern religions and mystical sects use sexual abstinence as the internalization and use of a positive life force to induce a transformation that elevates the person to a higher level. In contrast, Western tradition perceives sex as dirty, prohibited, taboo, negative force, to be suppressed, ignored, and ashamed of, which leads to a cycle of shame and guilt. Narcissists are conflicted about sex, and they treat other people as objects, commodify, objectify, and dehumanize them.

Tags

Where am I seeing the true self?

Well, of course the cerebral narcissist realizes that he’s not having sex.

So this is a very good definition of asexuality.

So he knows he’s not having sex.

I explained before that he creates an ideology that elevates sexual celibacy or sexual abstinence into a religion, in effect.

Everything in narcissism is religious in nature, as I always say.

Narcissism is a private religion with one God, which is the false self, and one worshiper, which is a narcissist.

It’s not surprising that this religion also came with sexual abstinence as an element.

But still I think that one must make a very, very clear distinction between Eastern religions, mystical cults, mystical sects, and so on.

And that would include, when I say Eastern, that would include many Middle Eastern, even, for example, the Kabbalah in Judaism, and so on.

And Western, which would mostly include North Europe and the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

Sexual abstinence exists in all of these, but for totally different reasons.

In Eastern religions traditions, including mystical traditions, sexual abstinence is the internalization and the use of a positive life force, internalizing it in order to induce a transformation which elevates the person to a higher level.

The sexual energy, whatever it is, they use the term energy, which is a physical term, but still, the sexual energy is considered to be a positive thing. Something that, if used and leveraged properly, can get you to higher planes.

And actually in all these traditions, at some stage, sex itself is used, not sexual abstinence, but sex is used to obtain some outcomes.

So sexual abstinence is just an aspect of using the positive life force sexual energy. You can use it by abstaining, and then it remains inside you and fertilizes you from the inside.

Actually, you’re having sex with yourself.

Or you can externalize it, for example, in the tantric tradition and other traditions, have sex with others, and also induce a very positive transformation in yourself towards a state of enlightenment.

So sex was never perceived negatively. If you go to India, there’s no negative perception of sex. In any way, shape, or form.

This is not the case in the West.

When I say the West, I mean, as I said, North Africa and Glusaksa. Their sex is dirty, dirty, prohibited, taboo, negative force, to be suppressed, to be ignored, to be ashamed of. There’s a lot of shame and guilt associated with sex, which have no place in the East at all.

So from the outside, it looks like all these traditions focus on sexual abstinence.

But the reasons are completely different, completely different.

Unfortunately, we’re embedded in the Western tradition.

And via modern transportation and modern communication, especially recently, Western tradition had become the global tradition.

So sexuality, even in Eastern countries, China, India, Middle East, and so on, had become Victorian sexuality, dirty sexuality. You were not supposed to put books by female and male authors on the same shelf. This is inappropriate and so on.

So it’s extremely unfortunate.

Sex was outsourced in the Victorian tradition.

We live in the Victorian tradition. I mean, the so-called sexual revolution did not release us from the Victorian tradition.

The sexual revolution just legitimized sexual practices, but had nothing to do with the emotions attendant upon sex.

So now we have a much worse situation than in the 19th century.

In the 19th century, the emotions and the practices went together. There was congruence. There was ego-syntony.

Today, the practices and the emotions don’t go together.

So today we practice, and then we feel ashamed. We practice, then we feel guilty. And shame and guilt induce us to practice even worse, which makes us even more guilty.

So we are caught in a cycle of shame and guilt.

Additionally, in the 19th century, it was perfectly clear that it’s legitimate to outsource sex. So prostitutes, lovers, they were totally acceptable part of life. Lovers in 19th century Britain, not to mention 18th and 19th century France, and even Netherlands, even Germany, even absolutely, those were known. I mean, you had a wife, you had a mistress. And you had children with both. I mean, it was absolutely acceptable.

There were even in the law books, in law codices, you had special status for mistresses and their children, what they can inherit, what they cannot inherit. I mean, prostitutes were utterly acceptable. Sex workers were utterly acceptable. Every man went to a prostitute once a week because you don’t do sex with a wife. She’s not dirty. The prostitute is dirty. Everything was well organized, well structured, totally crazy, but structured. There was no ego destiny. There was no bad feeling. There was no discomfort. There was no guilt, no shame, no nothing.

We created this since the 1960s because we changed the way we behave, but not the way we think about how we behave and not the way we feel about how we behave.

So today a woman would have a one-night stand, but after that she would feel like a slut. She would feel ashamed and guilty and bad.

Or a man would have casual sex and hide it from his wife, deceive. Cheating is a modern phenomenon. We think it always existed. It’s not true. There was no concept of cheating in the 19th century or the 18th century. Men didn’t cheat. The woman knew, the wife knew.

I mean, there was no cheating. Cheating is modern.

Many of our sexual practices today that we think existed forever are totally new inventions. No more than 50 years old, 100 years old, totally new.

And we created a very sick sexual environment.

This goes hand in hand with the rise of narcissism.

What happened is as narcissism exploded as a social phenomenon, not only individual phenomenon, society became narcissistic and developed narcissistic attitudes to sex.

And this leads me to the last point.

Narcissists are very conflicted about sex, like modern society. They’re very conflicted about sex.

On the one hand, they want to engage in certain sexual practices. On the other hand, it contradicts, for example, their ideology or their values.

Their sense of grandiosity challenges their grandiosity, and so they feel ashamed or guilty.

There is a lot of dissonance and conflict in the narcissist’s soul, even the somatic narcissist.

And of course, narcissists treat other people as objects, commodify, objectify and dehumanize them, which I think is the common practice today in the world.

I don’t know if you know the latest statistics, but it seems that 50% of people engage in casual sex and majority of them is the only form of sex.

Casual sex is narcissistic. Nothing wrong with it. I’m not judging it. It’s bad, it’s good, but it’s narcissistic because you don’t know anything about the other person.

81% of men interviewed after one night stand remembered only one item of information about the woman they had sex with, her first name, nothing else.

Even if they had a few hours conversation before, they remembered nothing except her name.

20% of casual sex, the people don’t know their names. It’s totally anonymous.

We have entered a narcissistic society with narcissistic practices, but our mental equipment, emotions, cognitions, is still Victorian.

And this is the…

Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp

Summary Link:

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

Narcissists create an ideology that elevates sexual celibacy or sexual abstinence into a religion, which is a private religion with one God, the false self, and one worshiper, the narcissist. Eastern religions and mystical sects use sexual abstinence as the internalization and use of a positive life force to induce a transformation that elevates the person to a higher level. In contrast, Western tradition perceives sex as dirty, prohibited, taboo, negative force, to be suppressed, ignored, and ashamed of, which leads to a cycle of shame and guilt. Narcissists are conflicted about sex, and they treat other people as objects, commodify, objectify, and dehumanize them.

Tags

If you enjoyed this article, you might like the following:

How You BEHAVE is NOT Who you ARE (Identity, Memory, Self)

Sam Vaknin argues that core identity (the self) is distinct from behaviors: identity is an immutable, continuous narrative formed early in life, while behaviors, choices, and roles can change across time. He discusses clinical, legal, and philosophical implications, including dissociative identity disorder, concluding that even when behavior changes dramatically the

Read More »

Unconditional Love in Adult Relationships (Family Insourcing and Outsourcing)

Professor argues that ‘unconditional love’ means accepting a person’s core identity, not tolerating all behaviors, and distinguishes loving someone as they are from trying to change or control them. He traces modern misunderstandings to Romanticism’s idealization of partners and the outsourcing/insourcing shifts that hollowed family functions while turning the home

Read More »

Sociosexual Narcissist: CRM vs. Agency Models (Clip Skopje Seminar Opening, May 2025)

The speaker opened with multilingual greetings and briefly noted living in the Czech Republic and Poland. The main content summarized models of narcissism: sociosexuality and the contextual reinforcement model (narcissists seek novelty, destabilize stable contexts, and prefer short-term interactions), and the agency model with five elements—focus on agency, inflated self-concept,

Read More »

Baited, Ejected: YOU in Narcissist’s Shared Fantasy (CLIP, University of Applied Sciences, Poland)

The speaker explained Sander’s concept of the “shared fantasy”—a mutual, addictive narrative created by narcissists and their partners that becomes a competing reality and relates to historical notions like mass psychogenic illness. The talk detailed how narcissists recruit and bind targets through stages—spotting/auditioning, exposure of a childlike self, resonance, idealization

Read More »

Psychology of Fraud and Corruption (Criminology Intro in CIAPS, Cambridge, UK)

Professor explained financial crime as a white-collar subtype, focusing on fraud and corruption and arguing that many offenders show significant psychopathology rather than ordinary greed. Key psychological features include magical thinking, impulsivity, entitlement, narcissism, psychopathy, impaired reality testing, dissociation, lack of empathy, grandiosity, and compulsive behaviors (e.g., kleptomania) that make

Read More »

Abuse Victims MUST Watch This! (with Psychotherapist Renzo Santa María)

Professor Sam Vaknin argued that narcissistic abuse causes distinct, reversible trauma by imposing the abuser’s deficits on victims—eroding identity, agency, reality testing, and inducing internalized ‘introject’ voices that perpetuate suffering. He recommended initial self-work (identifying and silencing alien internal voices, rebuilding an authentic internal friend, body-focused interventions, and delaying therapy

Read More »

“Bad” Relationships Are Opportunities (with Daria Zukowska, Clinical Psychologist)

Professor Sam Vaknin discussed dysfunctional relationships and reframed them as learning opportunities rather than “lost time,” emphasizing that growth requires emotional insight and embodiment in addition to cognitive understanding. He explained that negative self-concept arises from internalized hostile voices, can be countered by developing an authentic, supportive inner voice, and

Read More »

Narcissism: BIBLE Got There FIRST! (FULL VIDEO in Description)

The speaker discussed narcissistic traits as described in the Bible, emphasizing its detailed characterization predates modern diagnostic manuals like the DSM and ICD. They highlighted the diagnostic criteria from the DSM and the lack of narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis in the ICD, noting regional variations in terminology usage. The lecture

Read More »

Why Narcissists MUST Abuse YOU (Skopje Seminar Opening, May 2025)

The seminar, organized by the Vaknin Vangelovska Foundation, provided an in-depth, research-based exploration of pathological narcissism, its impact on victims, and the complex dynamics of the shared fantasy between narcissists and those they manipulate. Key topics included the distinction between narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic style, the contagious nature of

Read More »