10 Ways Narcissist Corrupts How You See the World, Others – Part 1 (EXCERPT Skopje Seminar, 2025)

Summary

The speaker discussed how narcissistic abuse profoundly alters a victim's perception of reality by destroying their internal theories of mind and relationships, leading to an epistemic crisis. This abuse causes victims to develop distrust, see the world as hostile and meaningless, and lose the ability to find meaning in life. The speaker emphasized the narcissist's goal of infantilizing the victim, leaving them disoriented and vulnerable, and highlighted the importance of meaning for survival, referencing Victor Frankl's logotherapy.

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  1. 00:00 to you 10 10 ways the narcissist changes your perception of reality and of yourself. And then I want to warn you against six mistakes. And then I will release you to go probably take the first flight out of Macedonia as I see. And then those of
  2. 00:20 you who are mocistic enough or already in my shirt fantasy and don’t know it will probably come back tomorrow for more.
  3. 00:37 Here are the 10 ways the narcissist destroys the way you saw the world before you met him. It is a destruction not only of your interiority, not only of your internal state. It’s not only snatching away your identity and replacing it with something
  4. 00:54 else. It’s not only taking over your brain, not as a metaphor physically as you will see tomorrow. It’s not only that. It’s he makes you distrust everything you thought you knew, everything you believed, the tenets of your inner morality. It’s a moral
  5. 01:12 injury. So, I’m going to read to you the 10 ways the narcissist does this. Narcissistic abuse challenges your assumptions about the world. Hidden assumptions, implicit assumptions, or explicit assumptions. In philosophy, we call it the hidden text and the overt
  6. 01:32 text. We usually deconstruct the hidden text to make sense of the world. Okay? So, he he challenges these assumptions. He challenges these assumptions and by challenging these assumptions he destroys two very important instruments that every human being has. Every human
  7. 01:52 being alive has I don’t know about the dead. It’s another study. So the first one is known as theory of mind. A theory of mind requires a process called mentalization or mentalizing. Theory of mind is when we create a theory about other people, what makes them tick,
  8. 02:18 how do their emotion, how do they experience their emotions? Um what are the internal dynamics of these people? The tool we use to create a theory of mind later becomes empathy. So we start as children as babies we start by mentalizing. At that stage we have only what is known
  9. 02:43 as reflexive empathy. Mommy smiles at baby. Baby smiles at mommy. And then probably okay I’m not going to eat. My sense of humor runs away with me sometimes. So mommy smiles at baby, baby smiles at mommy. That’s reflexive empathy. The baby begins to mentalize mommy.
  10. 03:07 What is this thing? What is she thinking? He tries to make sense of her. And he creates a theory about mommy. And then he creates theories about other people. And then he creates a general theory of what it is to be human. And it’s called the theory
  11. 03:23 of mind. Okay. The second mechanism that all of us have, it’s called internal working model, IWM. It was first proposed by Balby. The internal working model is a theory. Again, it’s a theory about how relationships work. So, we have an internal working model about intimate
  12. 03:45 relationships, internal working model about workplace relationships, generally how relationships work. What the narcissist dies does, he destroys these theories. He destroys your theories of mind and he destroys your internal working models and he leaves you bereft.
  13. 04:05 He leaves you with no tools to make sense of the world. We can say that the narcissist creates in you an epistemic crisis. It’s as if you are regressed to a stage that you are too young to understand other people and too young to infantile to make sense of the world.
  14. 04:33 The reason the narcissist destroys these models is because he wants you to be a baby. He wants to regress you. He wants to infantilize you. He wants you and I will explain tomorrow why for what purpose. But the epistemic crisis, the damaging of your epistemic tools, your
  15. 04:56 ability to understand the world and other people has to do with this with the need to regress you and to infantilize you. Be that as it may, there are 10 damages.
  16. 05:14 The narcissist causes you to believe 10 things that are not true. Number one, people are irrational. They are self-interested. Most people are exploitative and even and even evil. He causes you to believe this thing. In effect, the narcissist creates a
  17. 05:38 cult. A cult. We against the world. Everyone outside the cult is evil, wicked, hostile, exploitative, untrustworthy. It’s you and me, baby, against the world. So, it’s a cult mentality or what we call a cult mind. But to accomplish this, the narcissist needed needs to
  18. 06:01 convince you that other people are dangerous to you, hostile, and so on. Number two, justice, order, structure
  19. 06:12 are rare in the universe. Chaos, uncertainty, indeterminacy reign. They are in control. Reality and people in it are untrustworthy because of this unpredictability. Number three, the world is hostile. At best, it is indifferent to you. There’s no meaning. It’s a meaningless world.
  20. 06:40 The narcissist creates something epistemic crisis and at a later stage he creates a doxastic crisis. This is for the clinicians. Yeah. A doxastic crisis means a crisis of beliefs. You no longer trust your own beliefs. And axiological crisis, a crisis of values. So you don’t
  21. 07:03 trust what you see. the input, the information. You don’t trust your beliefs and you don’t trust your values. You’re completely disoriented. Exactly like a baby, a newborn, which is exactly where the narcissist wants you to be. Number four, no good deed goes unpunished.
  22. 07:25 Even if you try hard, even if you’re sincere, things rarely work out. You need contacts and you need luck. Everything is pretty random. The narcissist takes away from you meaning, your ability to inject meaning into the world. Victor Franco, Victor Franco
  23. 07:49 was a psychiatrist and he was sent to Awitz because he was a Jew. They were sent to Awitz and most people in Awitz survived an average of six months if they were not zahanlong if they were not treated specially before. So these guys survived three and a half years.
  24. 08:14 Do you know what it means to survive in Avitz three and a half years? It’s a miracle. It defies belief. When Victor Frankle was asked repeatedly, “How did you survive? What kept you alive?” He said, “I invented a meaning for my life.” And the meaning was to testify
  25. 08:34 about the Holocaust. And later on the meaning was to heal people. And he became a therapist. And he invented logootherapy. Logootherapy is a treatment modality. And the idea is that people don’t need food, they don’t need water, they don’t need air, they don’t
  26. 08:54 need sex. I mean they need all these things but they are not like they can you can survive long time long period of time without these things. But what you cannot survive even for an extremely short period of time is meaning. What you cannot survive is meaninglessness.
  27. 09:11 If there’s no meaning in your life, you die. If there’s no water, you survive 5 days. If there’s no food, you survive four months. If there’s no sex, you survive 64 years. But if there’s no meaning in your life, you’re unlikely to survive long.
  28. 09:29 So what the narcissist does definitely, it takes away the meaning in your life. Not only the meaning of your life, but the ability to generate meaning takes that away from you. Suddenly everything looks meaningless. purposeless and so and that’s of course why people
  29. 09:52 end up adopting meanings for example in religion you know you adopt a meaning in religion you can argue if religion is purile or whatever but definitely people who believe people who have faith They
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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

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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

The speaker discussed how narcissistic abuse profoundly alters a victim's perception of reality by destroying their internal theories of mind and relationships, leading to an epistemic crisis. This abuse causes victims to develop distrust, see the world as hostile and meaningless, and lose the ability to find meaning in life. The speaker emphasized the narcissist's goal of infantilizing the victim, leaving them disoriented and vulnerable, and highlighted the importance of meaning for survival, referencing Victor Frankl's logotherapy.

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