Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Your Therapist Ignores Your BODY At YOUR Peril (Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube Channel)

1. 00:01 It is very lamentable that medical doctors and psychiatrists reject the accounts of victims of abuse, pathologize them with some concocted cockamini medical condition and send them home with pills. It’s very very wrong to do that. To refuse to recognize
2. 00:25 the psychological background of symptom disorders or somatic symptom disorders is wrong both diagnostically but also as a practice. We invalidate the the victim by converting her into a malinger or a faker or into someone with a neurologically
3. 00:49 recognized neurological condition which does not exist. In the vast majority of cases of victims of abuse, medical tests yield nothing. And there’s no reason to insist on reductionism. Everything is the brain. Everything is the body. Yes, it manifests through the body. Yes, it
4. 01:10 involves the brain, but it’s not reducible to either. It’s a psychological condition, holistic. And so today victims get very little suck and help and understanding and acceptance from the medical professions because there is a refusal to to acknowledge there is a denial of
5. 01:35 the pathway between psychology and body mind and body. It’s as if the mind is nothing but a bodily function when manifestly and expressly and patently it’s not. It cannot be reduced to the body only. It can work through the body. It can talk the mind can talk through the body. The
6. 01:58 mind can manifest through the body but it’s not conccommittent. It’s not coextant. It’s not the same as the body.
7. 02:08 There are subsets of functional neurological disorders which include functional movement disorders and functional seizure seizures and functional sensory disorders. It’s all very true and yes the doctor the medical doctor the psychiatrist who is also a
8. 02:23 medical doctor they have to invest a lot of effort in testing eliminating diagnosing writing down anesthesis exploring like detectives theology perosing the symptoms constructing all kinds of tests to see how the patient functions in a variety of settings and
9. 02:43 circumstances and environments and reactions to other people and so they have to work hard. They have to work hard because conversion symptom is a simulation. Conversion disorder is a simulation. It’s an imitation. The patient cannot verbalize sufficiently or doesn’t dare to
10. 03:04 acknowledge or to be conscious of what is happening to her, the abuse, the trauma. The patient denies the abuse and trauma. And so this hidden this hidden buried repressed knowledge has to manifest somehow has to be communicated somehow has to erupt somehow. And when
11. 03:25 the patient does she imitates other conditions other conditions which are medical and have nothing to do with trauma and abuse thereby attempting trying to convince herself that the problem is not trauma, the problem is not abuse. The problem is a brain. the
12. 03:42 problem is a spine, the problem is whatever their body is a problem. It’s a form of autoplastic defense. It’s like the patient says um nothing bad is happening to me. Nothing wrong. I’m being treated fairly and and squarely and nicely and you know
13. 04:01 it’s my my problem. I’m the one I’m guilty. I’m to blame. My body, my body is wrong, is is working, you know, in all the wrong ways. I’m defective. I’m deformed. I am the core of the problem, not the solution. And so, it is displacing the blame and
14. 04:21 the guilt, shifting it to the victim. And the victim is the one who is doing this via somatic symptom disorders. It’s as if the victim is assuming the responsibility and the accountability for the abuse, internalizing it, digesting it and letting it poison her s her poison her
15. 04:43 body and the body rebels. The body not only keeps it score but it rebelss. Somatic symptom disorders is a rebellion, an eruption of the body against this unjustified assumption of responsibility for being mistreated, for being abused, for being traumatized, for
16. 05:06 being tortured, for being tormented. Um there are there’s a great number the problem with conversion disorders and somatic symptom disorders that the number of symptoms is huge because the patients or the victims are very creative and any any part of the body
17. 05:28 any organ any system any limb any surface area any anything can serve as a communication channel. Anything can be recruited to express the inexpressable to communicate and discuss the horror of abuse and trauma. So the number of symptoms is literally unlimited in
18. 05:54 functional neurological disorders and conversion disorders and somatic symptom disorders. The symptoms are very real. Their experience is real. They have impact on the impact adverse outcomes adverse impacts on the body. But the origin the eiology is much more complex
19. 06:12 because it involves a dominant component dominant ingredient of psychology severe psychological trauma. The neurological dysfunction is idiopathic but theology is very often psychological. core symptoms are sensory and motoric, but they still
20. 06:38 try to somehow symbolically communicate the trauma and abuse background which was Freud’s initial insight that it is a language actually. So limb weakness, paralysis, non-epileptic seizures, movement disorders, tremors, donia, spasms, uh myiocclonus, jerky movements,
21. 07:01 loss of vision, double vision, dysphonia, whispering speech, slurred or stuttering speech, sensory disturbances, hemisensory syndrome, altered sensation down one side of the body, numbness, inability to sense touch, dizziness, balance problems, pain, extreme slowness
22. 07:20 and fatigue etc etc and of course sleep disorders. It’s it’s an endless array and require very lengthy and profound investigations which many doctors assue because they don’t want to they don’t want to get involved. They want to be invested. They want to dispense pills
23. 07:38 and collect the commission on the side. Of course, stressful life events and childhood neglect were found time and again in numerous systematic reviews and meta analysis time and again to be significantly more common in patients with functional neurological disorders
24. 07:55 than in in the general population. Patients with functional neurological disorder, conversion disorder, somatic symptom disorder, call it as you will. Patients with somatization with somatic symptoms, there is almost invariably a background of adverse childhood experiences,
25. 08:16 stressful life events, childhood neglect, childhood abuse. Even when the patients report counterfactually and erroneously no stressors, they have buried and denied what’s happening to them to the extent that they’re happy golucky. You say, “My
26. 08:35 partner is the best partner in the world when we’re talking about a narcissist, an abusive narcissist or I’m to blame. I’m constantly sick and so on. He’s he’s a saint for having stayed with me.” And they deny. There’s a lot of denial. Denial of course is a psychological
27. 08:51 defense mechanism. As Bessel Vander Cork so famously put it, the body keeps the score, the title of his seinal work, a great book recommended indeed. The reservoir, the repository of your trauma, your abuse, your pain, your hurt, the uncertainty, the intermittent
28. 09:18 reinforcement, the unpredictability, the terror, the shocks. All these don’t go away. They reside within your body and they transform your body in ways which are sometimes counterintuitive. They render your body an enemy. They estrange you from your body. You feel
29. 09:43 alienated as if this body that you have inhabited sometimes for decades is no longer familiar to you. And this is the topic of today’s video. The video is divided in three parts. These are actually three different videos. The first video, the first part
30. 10:02 is a general introduction to somatization. The second part is how narcissistic abuse specifically impacts your body. And the third part is a sum summary with some additional insights. It’s much shorter. So visit any part of the video that fits you and
31. 10:25 get to know your body under the duress and the distress of narcissistic abuse, the most egregious and extreme form of malreatment known to humanity. My name is Saknin. I’m the author of Malignant self- loveve and narcissism represented the first book ever on
32. 10:46 narcissistic abuse. I’m also a professor of psychology. Before we proceed to remind you, I’m giving a seminar for three days about scientific evidence-based ways ways to heal and recover from narcissistic abuse. All kinds of techniques and practices. Three whole
33. 11:09 days free of charge. All you have to do is be there physically. Now, there’s a link in the description of the video. Click on the link and you will have all the all the details where, when, how, etc., etc. If you have any queries or any questions, the link also leads to my
34. 11:29 email addresses and feel free to write to me. I promise to respond for a change. Okay, kiddos and let’s delve right into your bodies. As I said, the first part of the video is a general introduction to what is known as somatic symptoms or somatization. The second part deals with
35. 11:57 narcissistic abuse specifically with and describes all the impacts and effects that narcissistic abuse has on your body. Generally speaking, we can divide the impacts of trauma and abuse in its various forms and definitely the impacts of narcissistic abuse uh in two parts.
36. 12:21 Sleep disorders and somatic symptoms. Sleep disorders as the name implies is when you’re having difficulties with sleep. You may oversleep actually. You may be ravaged by insomnia. Whichever the case may be, sleep in sleep or in the absence of sleep, your
37. 12:45 trauma and abuse try to manifest somehow to express themselves. But this is not the topic of today’s video. The topic of today’s video is the rest of your body apart from the sleep system. Sumatization. According to the American Psychological Association dictionary,
38. 13:04 somatization is the expression of psychological disturbance in physical bodily symptoms. The first use of the word has controversially been attributed to vianese psychoanalyst Wilhelm uh to describe what is now called conversion. I’ll discuss conversion
39. 13:24 disorder or conversion symptoms in a minute. Some investigators continues the dictionary use the word in reference not only to the physical symptoms that occur in almost every type of anxiety disorder but also to the expression of symptoms in such psychosomatic disorders as
40. 13:41 psychoggenic asthma and peptic ulcers. Now I’m not going to discuss psychosomatic disorders in this video because they are not reactive. They are not the outcomes of abuse. they have a different ideology. Summatization disorder however is often
41. 14:01 the result or the consequence of extreme anxiety, extreme tension, stress, duress, distress and therefore as a place in this video again we revert to the dictionary of the American Psychological Association which defines somatization disorder this way.
42. 14:24 In the text revision of the fourth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual, the DSM, a somatform disorder involving a history of multiple physical symptoms, at least eight, one of which must be a pseudonurological symptom of several years duration for
43. 14:42 which medical attention has been sought, but which are apparently not due to any physical disorder or to the effects of a substance such as a medication. The complaints are often described in vague yet colorful or exaggerated terms by the patient who often appears anxious or
44. 15:01 depressed. Among the common complaints are feelings of sickliness, difficulty in swallowing or walking, malaise, blurred vision, abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, painful or irregular menstruation, sexual sexual indifference, painful intercourse, pain
45. 15:21 in the back or joints, shortness of breath, palpitations, heart palputations, and chest pain. Somatization disorder was eliminated from the fifth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual and was superseded by somatic symptom disorder which is defined this way. Somatic
46. 15:42 symptom disorder is a disorder characterized by one or more significant bodily symptoms for example pain that cause distress. Somatic symptom disorder also replaces such diagnosis as somatization disorder requiring only one or two symptoms for diagnosis rather
47. 15:59 than the much higher symptom count. So four pain symptoms, two gastrointestinal symptoms, one sexual, one psycho neurological. Let’s go back in history to the inevitable Ziggman Freud who came up with the idea or with the diagnosis of conversion disorder.
48. 16:22 In the diag in the fourth edition of the DSM, conversion disorder was described as a somatoform disorder in which patients present with one or more symptoms or deficits affecting voluntary motor and sensory functioning. And these symptoms suggest a physical disorder but there is
49. 16:42 no evidence of um a medical condition. Similarly there is evidence instead of a psychological involvement. In other words the physical symptoms are there but there is no medical background medical condition to justify them. Only some kind of psychological involvement
50. 17:04 or psychological background. These conversion symptoms are not intentionally produced, says the dictionary. They’re not feigned and they’re not under voluntary control. Symptoms in conversion disorder can include paralysis, loss of voice, blindness, seizures, globus falingos, a
51. 17:25 lump in the throat, disturbance in coordination and balance, and loss of pain and touch sensations. Generally speaking, we distinguish between motor conversion symptoms and sensory conversion symptoms. I’ll come to it in a minute. The formal criteria for the
52. 17:42 disorder in the fifth edition of the DSM um refer to it as functional neurological symptom disorder. And they primarily emphasize that there must be clear clinical evidence of symptom incompatibility with recognized neurological pathology before we can make a diagnosis of FNSD,
53. 18:08 functional neurological symptom disorder, which is another name for conversion disorder. that there may also be psychological involvement in the onset of the symptoms or that stress or trauma of any sort either psychological or physical may have ideological relevance is recognized
54. 18:27 as among associated features that if found support diagnosis. The absence of faking, the absence of pretending, the absence of feigning, however, is no longer a required criterion for diagnosis due to the clinical challenge of reliably discerning its absence.
55. 18:48 So it seems that Ziggman Freud’s conversion disorder with its con attendant conversion symptoms has become enshrined and embedded in the fifth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual but with an emphasis on a neurological background. The
56. 19:07 question is, are all these symptoms the outcomes of some true neur neurological dysfunction or deformity or abnormality? Or in the absence of such an abnormality, are they the outcomes of stress and distress? Is there some psychological background or involvement?
57. 19:28 The DSM recognizes that conversion symptoms or functional neurological symptom disorder could be definitely the outcome or the consequence of stress, anxiety, distress, which are common reactions actually to abuse and trauma. So, I’m giving you the background, the
58. 19:53 diagnostic background for what I’m going to say in the second part of the video. In the second part, I’m going to focus on you, how your body reacts to narcissistic abuse, but I want to ground it in the orthodoxy in the mainstream psychiatric thinking.
59. 20:13 I mentioned that there are two types of conversion symptoms um two type of neurological dysfunctions. One is moto, one type is moto conversion symptoms and the other type is sensory. We start with a moto con conversion symptoms. The dictionary defines it as
60. 20:31 one of two types of symptoms of conversion disorder, the other being sensory conversion symptoms. Examples of moto conversion symptoms include impaired coordination and balance, paralysis or weakness confined to a specific area of the body or limb,
61. 20:48 difficulty in swallowing, aphonia, loss of voice and urinary retention. Sensory conversion symptoms include loss of touch or pain sensation, double vision, blindness, deafness, tinitus and hallucinations. Let’s go back a bit into much older history.
62. 21:12 As I mentioned, Wilhelm who was a German psychoanalyst was the first to introduce the term somatization. Another psychoanalyst Paul Bri was the first to characterize what is now known as somatic symptom disorder. Bri actually reported that several of his
63. 21:33 clients have been unwell most of their lives. They’ve been complaining of a variety of symptoms in various organ systems and Bri kept scheduling appointments, hospitalization, test, nothing has been discovered and the symptoms continued. Bri was forced into the conclusion and
64. 21:54 we are talking of 19th century. Bri was forced into the conclusion that there is something like a somatic symptom disorder by the way also known as Bri syndrome. The conversion disorder came a bit later. It was formally it was a formally diagnosed psychiatric
65. 22:15 disorder. Initially, people reported abnormal sensory experiences and involuntary movement problems during periods of high psychological stress. It took Freud to realize the connection. Individuals diagnosed with conversion disorder presented with highly
66. 22:35 distressing neurological symptoms and Freud was a neurologist. He noticed that these people report numbness, blindness, paralysis, convulsions, and he couldn’t find an organic cause. He traced all of these to psychological triggers. Today, we do the same when we diagnose
67. 22:56 functional neurological disorder, a similar diagnosis as I mentioned. However, in functional neurological disorder in the fifth edition of the DSM, there is no need in the criteria, no need to prove that there is an antecedent psychological stress or you
68. 23:18 could diagnose functional and neurological disorder or neurological disorder even in the absence of psychological stress, abuse and trauma. That’s not that has not been the case with conversion disorder where a psychological intrusion or invasion or
69. 23:35 trauma or abuse or whatever has been a necessary diagnostic criteria without which you could not diagnose conversion disorder. It is still though the mainstream thinking is still that functional neurological neurologic disorder the symptoms arise in response to
70. 24:00 stressful situations affecting the patient’s mental health.