Life and Death Cycle in Cluster B Personalities, Relationships (Skopje Seminar, Day 3, Lecture 1)

So, just to clear up a few things from yesterday, very briefly, I promise no, no, no more than half an hour. So, someone asked me yesterday about retraumatization. I don't know if she's still here, but she asked me about retraumatization. And then I mentioned, um, I mentioned a few studies, and uh, people didn't catch, catch hold of the names. This is Tuen, by the way. TW and Campbell. They did seminal work a few years ago on narcissism in young people. But for, can you say anything? Yeah. For and Kak, not Kjak, but Kak, for and Kak, 1985, they were the two scholars who came up with the idea of retraumatization. They said that the patient needs, needs to reexperience the trauma, not only to discuss the trauma, not only to process the trauma, not only to reflect on the trauma, and so on and so forth, but the patient actually needs to reexperience the trauma in order to induce healing.

While I disagree with this notion in the vast majority of patients, I think with narcissists, that's absolutely the only option. I don't believe that we can gain entry or access to the narcissist mind by talking to the narcissist, by, by analyzing things, by contemplating. That's not how narcissists work. A narcissism is a fortress. It's a fortress. We need to lay siege to this fortress, and then we need to penetrate the fortress the way we do in the way they did in classical sieges in the Middle Ages. And the only way to penetrate the fortress of the narcissist is to force the narcissist to experience the very trauma or set of traumas that gave rise to pathological narcissism in early childhood.

Effect is doing the partnership, hopefully? >> No, no, not, not really. Not really. So, I mean, the borderline is can be pretty traumatizing, both pretty and traumatizing, usually. But, um, no, that's that's far from that. The traumas, the traumas that I'm talking about are early childhood traumas. So, they're perceived through the eyes of a child, not through the eyes of an adult. That's a critical difference. When we attempt to retraumatize the narcissist, we first regress the narcissist to an infantile state and then we induce, induce the trauma.

Be that as it may, my cold therapy is based on the work of FA and Kak in 1985. Retraumatization in the FA Kak sense is very, very powerful, a very powerful therapeutic tool. And in the case of the narcissist, what it does? It destroys the false self. Destroys the false self. The narcissist no longer requires narcissistic supply. Narcissist loses grandiosity. However, the lady who asked the question, are you still here? By the way, I can't see her. I don't, I'm not sure if she's here. The lady who asked the question also mentioned that this could be dangerous. And she was, she's right. It could be dangerous because the narcissist is regressed to a borderline state. When we strip the narcissist of the defenses and we take away the narcissist's cognitive distortions regarding his, his or her self-concept, the end result is that we create a laboratory borderline. We create a borderline in the clinic. And of course, one, one of the features of borderline personality disorder is suicidal ideation. 11% of people with borderline personality disorder commit suicide successfully. Another 30 to 40% attempt suicide, and virtually all borderlines contemplate suicide. They have suicidal ideation. Suicide, suicide is a major theme in borderline personality disorder. Psychopath, psychopath is 1%. Narcissist is 1.7%. Borderline, there's a debate, but probably between 2 and 3%. But that's very misleading because anywhere between 25 to 40% of people with borderline personality disorder also have narcissistic personality disorder. So the comorbidity is very high, and so this distorts the picture. The probably the real number is 2%. Probably. And of these, 11% end their lives. The leading cause of death in, in borderline personality disorder is suicide, actually.

So to strip the narcissist of the defenses by regressing the narcissist to an infantile state and then subjecting the narcissist to the traumas that the child had experienced on the one hand has therapeutic effects. Of course, the narcissist loses the false self, etc. But on the other hand, carries very serious dangers. So cold therapy, if ever applied, should be done under strict controls and probably in inpatient settings, in an institution where the narcissist belongs. Anyhow, I think anyhow, >> you would have to increase your voice. Some hearing impaired. I'm sorry. >> Okay. Microphone management. Um, hello. So, um, so my understanding is, so we take away the false self, and then underneath that, there is no self. So if you do that in your therapy, then do you then have to build a self? Because that would also be a false self. So where do they get a self from?

>> They don't. The, when you regress the narcissist this way and strip away the false self, what is left behind is emptiness, which is a diagnostic criterion of borderline personality disorder. So what we create in effect is, is a borderline, a lifelong borderline. But this lifelong borderline is, um, we think, we believe in clinical psychology, is better suited to, um, to function better, more functional, and more re, more grounded in reality and able to access positive emotions. And I mean, there are benefits to being a borderline over a narcissist. However, there's also a price, and the price is this emptiness and and emotional dysregulation and tendency to, I mean, mood mood disorders or depression and so on. There's a price to pay for not being a narcissist. Narcissism, as I told you, is actually OT Kberg told you, pathological narcissism is a defense against borderline personality organization. It's a defense against it. You take away the defense, you're left with a borderline personality organization. It is true that 11% commit suicide, but that means that 89% do not commit suicide. And in borderline personality disorder, there is spontaneous remission. Spontaneous remission after age 45. So 81% or 82%, depending on the study, of people with borderline personality disorder lose the diagnosis after age 45, which leads us to believe that it is a brain abnormality rather than a mental health condition. And additionally, in narcissistic personality disorder, we do not have effective therapies at all. We can modify behaviors in the short term, but nothing much more. While in borderline personality disorder, we have several extremely efficacious, very effective therapies. So, for example, dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT, has a success rate of 50%, 50% with borderline personality disorder, success defined as losing the diagnosis. So within one year, a borderline that is subjects herself to dialectical behavioral therapy, therapy for one year, has a 50% chance of losing the diagnosis. There's nothing remotely comparable in narcissism. Nothing.

In short, when we transition the narcissist to a borderline state, we are giving the narcissist hope. Hope that does not exist in narcissism, but does exist in borderline. Additionally, the, this newly created borderline is very unlikely, actually, to commit suicide in the long term and so on, because the defenses, the narcissistic defenses that had existed, they kind of created resilience in the individual. It's not exactly a classical borderline, you know, adolescent borderline or so. There's been 40 years or 50 years of defenses, and the, they created a form of resilience in the, in the individual. When you weigh the pros and cons, I think of, I think that's my personal opinion, overall, it's better to lose the narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis and to become a borderline rather than to remain a narcissist. I think narcissism is absolutely the worst imaginable sentence on any human being. Worst imaginable, because, uh, not to be able to experience reality and love and positive emotions and so on and so forth. It's a serious sentence. I would say it is solitary confinement. Yeah.

>> Sam's question here. Yes. >> Yes. >> Um, hi Sam. >> Hello. >> Hi. I wanted to ask about cold therapy. Is it dangerous? Because it may not be practiced by non-specialist practitioners. For retraumatization, like, as a clinical psych, that's my bread and butter. So whether it's EMDR, brain spotting, internal family systems, or even all exposure therapies, you have to retraumatize them where the window of tolerance for the pain and anxiety and the trauma is between seven and 10, you know, where it's very, very high. So if it's done in a, um, specialist clinical type setting by an experienced psychologist, is it still harmful? Because that's what we tend to do with trauma patients.

>> The, uh, the kind of retraumatization that is, that is habitually, habitually deployed, habitually used in multiple therapies. I mentioned yesterday that psychoanalysis started as a retraumatization therapy because in psychoanalysis, the patient is forcibly, forcibly regressed and made to reexperience hidden, dissociated trauma. And then there is abreaction. Abreaction in psychoanalysis is a strong emotional, totally dysregulated, life-threatening, potentially reaction in the, in the psychoanalytic clinic. So retraumatization is a key feature of many, many. But in cold therapy, the retraumatization is, is not, um, is not, uh, the, is not about debriefing or reviewing or processing or, it's about what we call in, in psychology, vividness or revividness. It's, in effect, inducing flashbacks. Cold therapy induces flashbacks. So it creates an artificial post-traumatic stress disorder, temporary post-traumatic stress disorder. And then there are flashbacks. The flashback is the trauma. And of course, there is no therapy that artificially and intentionally induces flashbacks. Flashbacks, that is considered unethical. Um, if cold therapy is administered by a qualified, highly trained therapist and so on and so forth, I personally believe that it, it should not prove dangerous because, um, the window, the window of dysregulated suicidal ideation is usually three, four days. At the end of these three, four days, the whole process takes, the initial test level one, cold therapy level one is about a week. So within cold therapy level one, there are three, four days of suicidal ideation and worse, and the therapist needs to spend 24 hours a day with the, with the patient. And then following that, there's no risk, absolutely no risk. So it's a price to pay. What to tell you, narcissism is resilient to treatment, resistant to treatment, is treatment resistant. So, or you don't treat it, which is the default. Currently, the default is, any clinician would tell you, the default is we don't treat it. They're difficult patients. They're horrible people. We don't want to work with them and so on. I think this is unethical. In my view, this is unethical to reject a patient because this patient is beyond hope and is difficult and is not pleasant and it's, it's uncomfortable. I think that's humanistic, um, lack of ethics. I, I, so I think we, it's incumbent upon us. We have the obligation to develop treatment modalities. And if it means that the therapist has to work very hard and to spend 24 hours with a difficult, unpleasant person, then so be it. You know, therapy is not a walk in the park. Is not a, no one, uh, no one promised a therapist a garden of roses. Yeah. But many therapists are very spoiled, I'm sorry to say. They don't work with narcissists. They don't work with borderlines. They don't work with this. They don't work with that. I mean, and I find this unethical. So, I reject the claims that cold therapy is unethical. I reject this completely. I don't think there's any other option. But cold therapy does not cure or heal narcissism. That's complete nonsense. It's, it removes one aspect of narcissism and creates an artificial borderline which is much more resilient than classical borderline. If the narcissist >> in a second I'll take >> if the narcissism is really difficult to treat, is, you know, let's say almost impossible, and borderlines aren't that easy either, uh, what is about managing them in a healthier, uh, >> managing, yeah, narcissist >> reduce their impact on others by actually directing them to some kind of a >> passion. Define them. >> Yeah. Let's say, let's say, let's say a borderline, if they are productive in life and then they've got their own passion and niche where they are successful, they are actually putting all their efforts on that line. Does it actually, uh, reduce the impact on others, including their family?

>> Most, most borderlines are functional. The vast majority of borderlines are completely functional. They function in all settings and so on and so forth. Borderline is a problem mainly with emotional dysregulation and the intensity of relationships. The relationship is very intense, and within the relationship, there is a vacillation. There's an oscillation between idealization and devaluation because the borderline has twin anxieties. She has two, two types of anxiety. She has abandonment anxiety, and then she has engulfment anxiety, too much intimacy. She reacts badly to intimacy. She craves intimacy. She dies for intimacy. She can love like no one else. Her relationships are super intense and so on. But then the partner reciprocates and offers intimacy and love, and the borderline panics. She panics, and she runs away. I'm saying she, of course, half of all borderlines are men. She panics and and runs away. So the core problem is these twin anxieties, the emotional dysregulation that they create, the intensity of the relationships, the idealization, devaluation. We call it approach-avoidance, approach-avoidance, repetition, compulsion, and so on and so forth. None of this has anything to do with functioning in other settings. The borderline could be very successful professionally, and many of them are actually artists and, you know, so on and so forth. And borderline is not comparable to narcissism. Not comparable. Borderlines hurt people. But the kind of harm they inflict is recognizable, is, um, exaggerated harm. Like if you have a girlfriend who is normal, and then you have a healthy, and then you have a girlfriend who is a borderline, and the borderline will will hurt you much more than the normal healthy girlfriend. But the kind of pain you will experience with the borderline will be a multiplication of the kind of pain you have experienced with a normal healthy person. So it's something that you can recognize as human. You understand? It's just much more intense. But it's human. What you experience with the narcissist is not something you will experience with any other type of human being because, to a large extent, is not human. I keep saying it's politically incorrect, but the narcissist, in any meaningful sense, is not human. It's a contraption. It's a device. It's, um, kind of machinery set in motion. It's, uh, they're inexorable algorithms. It's an algorithmic, algorithmic machine. And these algorithms grind you and process you and and reduce you to dust. Basically, it's taking away your sense of being, your sense of existence. We call it negation in psychology. The narcissist negates you. The narcissist vitiates you. This is not something you're likely to experience with borderline. On the very contrary, by the way, the intensity of the borderline will make you usually feel more alive, not less alive. Much more alive. Partners of borderlines describe the experience as technicolor, full of color. Of course, there's a huge, a lot of pain with borderlines because of these ups and downs, mood liability, cycling, intensity, approach-avoidance, unpredictability, so on and so forth. There's a lot of pain. Don't misunderstand me. I don't recommend this kind of relationship to anyone. But nothing comparable to narcissism.

Similarly, when, when highbrow, high-faluting therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists, my colleagues included, in hallowed, in hallowed institutions tell me that my cold therapy is highly unethical, that what I'm doing is irresponsible and so on and so forth, and my only response is, "Okay, so what's your alternative?" Okay, it's unethical, it's dangerous, it's, okay, I agree. What's your alternative? And then there's a big silence. And I, I think this is actually, this default position is unethical in my view. Okay, last thing. Uh, last two things. Ah, it's cold. I'll, I'll, um, I'll put it up to five. It, it's now, it's now on five. It's okay. This is called cold therapy. Cold therapy. Cold. By the way, you do know, you do know that there is, um, cold therapy, like, put you in cold water. You know that. Wim Hof. Wim Hof. I think, huh? Wim Hof. Puts you in cold water. This is cruel, unethical, and bloody dangerous. Amen. Although I think now that if you put the narcissist in cold water, it might have some impact somehow. You know, maybe it's a shorter way of administering cold therapy. Very cold therapy. Okay, now it's up to five. I hope, I hope it's okay. Two more, two more things, two additional things. I'm sorry if we're a bit meandering and discussing all kinds of, but I see that it, it interests you to discuss topics that are not exactly on the agenda. So I'm catering to your needs because I'm highly submissive and codependent. Now, another issue I would like to raise is culture-bound syndromes. Culture-bound syndromes or culture-bound, uh, diagnoses or disorders are diagnoses that pretend to be clinical entities. So we have a diagnosis, and it looks like a clinical entity. In a minute, I will explain what is a clinical entity. And then when you dig deeper, you discover that the diagnosis relies on social conventions, social norms, social mores, cultural, cultural norms, conventions, and so on. So, one prime example, of course, is homosexuality. Homosexuality until 1973 was considered to be a mental illness. There were therapies for homosexuality. People went to therapy in order to get rid of their homosexuality. These therapies, some of them were coercive therapies and really, really bad for you. Included brainwashing and cult-like settings and don't ask. Religion got involved, of course, because, uh, there was money in it, and, um, so people until 1973 were diagnosed with, it was also a criminal offense, mind you. So if you were homosexual, you could end up in prison. If you don't believe me, you can ask Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing. But apart from the criminal aspect, homosexuality was pathologized until 1973, and then in 1973, '73, it was removed from the DSM. And if you think this is ancient history and why am I bothering you with these stories? You are all enlightened and and tolerant nowadays and so on and so forth. Than BDSM. BDSM is a sexual practice which is consensual, doesn't harm anybody. BDSM has been pathologized until 2014. Actually, in 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has been published, and for the first time, it did not include BDSM. In 2022, the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases has been published, and for the first time, it did not include BDSM. That means that until 2020, until the pandemic, BDSM was considered to be, um, a mental illness or mentally ill practice, mental, me, path, pathological behavior and so on and so forth. BDSM, of course, I mean, it may come as a shock to you, but 5% are active practitioners of BDSM, and 15% consume BDSM pornography and or contemplate and or have experienced the BDSM practice at least once in in their lives. >> It's another therapy. >> Well, depends how good your sexual partner is, but, uh, yeah, I mean, sex can be therapeutic, definitely. Try it at home. I. So culture-bound syndromes are a major problem because, uh, clinical psychology reflects social mores and conventions and norms and and so on and so forth. And we have a lingering suspicion. We have a lingering suspicion all the time that a lot of the diagnostic manuals, a lot of the text in diagnostic manuals is influenced by by the prevailing culture and and social expectations and demands. In other words, there is a lot of politicking, a lot of political influence. Political doesn't have to be political parties. Political means simply public opinion. There's a lot of political influence, a lot of cultural influence and so on and so forth, which essentially falsifies, uh, falsifies these diagnostic manuals. So who knows? I'm a strong advocate of removing antisocial personality disorder from the DSM, from any, from any diagnostic manual. I think I don't think it's a mental illness at all. I think we dislike psychopaths because they are bad people. But I think evil and bad people, that's maybe a crime, that may be, you know, socially frowned upon, and but has nothing to do with mental, mental health in my view. So here's one example. Narcissism has almost been removed from the DSM-5 for these exact reasons. Because if you look at the definition, at the diagnostic criteria of narcissism in the DSM-3 and the DSM, even more so in the DSM-4, they are relational. In other words, the criteria are behavioral. They, they are context-dependent. They depend on other people. Like the psychop, the narcissist exploits other people. Exploitiveness is a diagnostic criterion, which I find shocking. Why would exploitiveness be a diagnostic criterion? I mean, that means 93% of us are mentally ill. We all exploit people. It's, I find it a bit shocking that these types of, of this type of language can creep into what is supposedly a medical textbook, you know, and anything that is relational is automatically suspect because, as I told you yesterday, imagine that I came to you as a medical doctor this time and I told you, um, I suspect that you have cancer, but I can't be sure until I, I see how you interact with your family. Imagine, or I can't diagnose your tuberculosis because you have fewer than three friends. I mean, you see how ridiculous this sounds. A clinical entity is absolutely objective and independent of context. End of story. That's a clinical entity. The minute a clinical entity is contextualized, it's not a clinical entity. It's an opinion. It's social, social appropri. It's anything you wish, but it's not a clinical entity. And unfortunately, many, many mental health, so-called mental health diagnosis, mental illnesses are highly context-dependent. Schizophrenia is not context-dependent. Bipolar is not context-dependent. But these are also not mental illnesses. These are medical conditions. So we had this discussion yesterday. This is called culture-bound syndrome. For those of you who want to learn more about this debate, culture-bound syndrome, I'm responding to your questions. By the way, behind the scenes, you're flooding me with emails. So, I'm, um, I'm outing you now. Next is a polythetic problem. Someone asked me about the polythetic problem. What the hell is wrong with this? One second. The polythetic problem is the following. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual editions 2, 3, and 4, and the text revisions, the diagnosis is based on a list. It's a bullet list, basically, and depends on the, on the diagnosis. Usually, there are anywhere between five and nine criteria, depending on the, the diagnosis. In the case of narcissistic personality disorder, the nine criteria. Here's the problem. Imagine that these are the criteria. Okay, these are the criteria, and imagine that patient number one comes to you. You're clinicians now, your therapists, your diagnosticians, and so on. And it's the beginning of the day, and patient number one comes to you, and you identify, having conducted structured interviews and having spoken to the person and having administered the utterly idiotic narcissistic personality inventory and so on and so forth, you identify that this patient has these diagnostic criteria 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay. Until now, this patient is obviously a narcissist because he, this patient has met five of nine criteria. So he can be, patient can be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. Now, imagine that a minute, I mean, you finish the first session, and there's a second patient. A second patient comes into your clinic, and you administer structured interviews, and you talk to the patient, and again, you use the utterly idiotic narcissistic personality inventory, and you get the following result. This patient, the second patient, satisfies these criteria. So now you have two patients. One of them satisfies criteria 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The other one satisfies criteria 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. They have literally nothing in common. Nothing in common except criterion five, which could be a minor criterion. No, they have nothing in common, and yet both of them are going to be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, although they have nothing in common. This is called the polythetic problem. It's a major problem in the DSM. So I hope I've explained this one. Last point, people ask me, at least two of you ask me. And here is the deal. I am, uh, available and open to give seminars in any civilized country. I'm available and open to give seminars. The seminars are free. They're sponsored by Cambridge and well, in this case, Southeast University, but generally Cambridge. And, um, the seminars are free, and but, uh, so you can organize a seminar in your own country. I will come to that country. You don't bear any cost, and I will also give the seminar free, but you have to pay for the lecture hall, and you have to pay for a professional video, videographer, professional video recording. These are your costs. Obviously, this is the deal. So the two of you, I have no idea who you are, who were contemplating organizing a seminar. Those of you who may wish in the future to organize a seminar, please go ahead. You just let me know in advance, a bit in advance, and I will be there, and I don't charge anything for seminars and lectures. That has been a policy of mine long before Cambridge. So I've never, never charged for seminars and lectures. I believe that education should be free. All my books are free. All my videos are free. Everything is free with one exception, and you want to talk to me, there's a cost, but otherwise, all my intellectual property is completely free, and I never, ever charge for lectures and seminars and this kind of thing. Obviously, I will not travel far just to give a single lecture. So I will travel to give a seminar, or I will travel to give three lectures or four lectures, but generally, all these will be free, even if I'm invited to give four lectures, all four lectures will be free. Seminars free. I give three-day seminars, five-day seminars. I recently gave an eight-day seminar in Romania. It's all free. Okay. Okay. No, no, this was not, this was not to convince you of my magnanimity, which obviously exists, but it was just to inform you of the terms and conditions that there is no cost involved in in inviting me over, but there is a cost in securing a lecture hall and and a professional videographer. Uh, you could, you could usually secure lecture halls in universities free of charge. So most universities will allow you to use the lecture hall for a minimal fee or or something free of charge or something. Community centers and and so on and so forth. Anyhow, up to you. One of, one of you was from the Netherlands, the other from, I don't remember where. I'm, I'm, I'm available. Okay. The, if I have to travel, if I'm obliged to travel, then then a seminar, that would be a total of eight hours. So you can divide the eight hours, a minimum of eight hours. So you could have like three lectures, or you could have a one-day seminar, or you could have a three-day seminar, five, eight, but minimum is one-day seminar or three lectures, and that would induce me to travel. Obviously, I will not travel for a single lecture and and back. Okay.

Today, we're going to discuss the outcomes of, uh, studies, the results of studies that have been conducted over the past at least 40 years, since the 1980s. We're talking by now, um, hundreds of studies. Some of these studies are tiny, with 30 participants. Some of these studies are 33,000 participants. So some of these studies are more valid statistically, more significant statistically, and some of these studies are less significant statistically. But they all provide, basically, there's congruence. There is agreement between these studies. So this is a powerful indication that we are onto something. Even when the significance is a bit compromised, we're still onto something. What I've done, I've summarized for you, as usual, as I'm doing in this seminar. I've summarized for you, um, the outcomes, the results of these studies. So when I say something, it's based on studies. Uh, nothing in this seminar is speculation, although I have my own speculations and so on. I don't bring them into this seminar very often. I'm telling you things based on studies that I personally find objectionable or disagree with, but that's where the evidence has led. So I'm taking you where the evidence, uh, has taken you. Um, the question that I'm going to tackle today is, how do you know if you're healing? How do you know, how do you know if you're in the process of recovery? You're doing all kinds of things. You're going to seminars. You're talking to people. You have good friends. You go to, you, you attend therapy. You go to therapy. You, you do everything. You're doing everything you can. You even finally speak to your mother, I mean, which is a major sacrifice in most cases. So, you're really flailing and struggling to recover and to heal. And you talk to your best friends, and they tell you, you know, "You look much better, and things are going well," but you can't really trust them. It's a lot of it is pep talk. And, you know, they're not exactly qualified clinicians. And so, how do you know that you're on the right track? How do you know that your healing and recovery is taking place? It's not your imagination. It's not placebo. It's not nonsense that your family and friends, well-meaning family and friends, are superimposing on you. How, how do you know objectively? And there are actually signs of actual recovery and healing. There's quite a few of them, and I'm going to review all of them today. And these signs emanate from, they come from results of studies. So studies starting at least in the '70s, actually starting studies have tracked, tracked people who have been exposed to abuse and followed longitudinally, followed over time their functioning and mental health and other psychological factors and parameters. Now, initially in the '70s and '80s, most of these studies were focused on PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorders. So, most of these studies have dealt with victims of natural disasters or wars, like the Vietnam War. So, we have a huge literature on recovery and healing from PTSD, from post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, there are two myths about PTSD. Myth number one: it's lifelong. It's not. PTSD is not lifelong. Well over 70% of the cases of PTSD spontaneously resolve within six months or less. Well over 70%. There are many treatments for PTSD. They're all very, very efficient, very efficacious, and only a tiny percentage of people remain stuck with PTSD for the rest of their lives. And these are usually people who have had comorbidities. In other words, these are people who, who were already damaged, somehow damaged by the wrong upbringing, bad parenting, dysfunctional families, um, criminal record, exposure to prison, stress, inability to process stress appropriately. So, we, they, they had before the PTSD, they had acute stress disorder and so on. So these are called premorbidities. And so initially in the '70s and '80s, in the wake of, of, uh, of Vietnam, most of the studies focused on PTSD. And then Judith Herman in 1992 came up with the idea of C-PTSD, complex trauma. Complex trauma, I told you, I think yesterday or the day before, is a kind of alleged trauma, because I hate the word trauma. I think it's become debased, but alleged trauma, so-called trauma that is experienced, uh, when you're exposed to repetitive behaviors that are in some ways damaging or hurtful, repetitive. So they include intermittent reinforcement. So some of these behaviors are also unpredictable. Then you develop complex trauma. Complex trauma today is widely, widely accepted. It did not make its way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So you cannot find complex trauma or C-PTSD in the DSM. You can find the echoes of the diagnosis in the ICD, and you can find an echo, single echo, in the DSM. So I think in the DSM-6 and the ICD-12, we're going to see complex trauma diagnosis, and I, I'm all for it. I think it is definitely a clinical entity. So starting in the '90s, the studies shifted a bit, and now most of the studies deal with complex trauma. People who have, who have had a relationship with the narcissist, people who have experienced narcissistic abuse, never, ever develop PTSD. End of story. But they do develop sometimes, more rarely than you think, C-PTSD, complex trauma. Consequently, we, we know what recovery and healing looks like in people with C-PTSD or people who have been exposed to extreme abuse. And these are the signs. I'm going to simply review each and every one of them. It's very useful for you, for those of you who are more want to be more rigorous. I think it's very useful for you to take notes because this is a checklist, and it's a checklist that you can use all the time. Like, you can use this checklist every week and ask yourself, "Am I making progress? How many of these signs do I, how many of these boxes do I tick?" You know, if you tick three boxes, then your healing is at an early stage. But if you tick 17 boxes, then your healing is in full blossom. And then you attend a seminar with some Vaknin and you go back to three boxes. So this is an example of complex trauma. You look traumatized, all of you. Okay. Don't be traumatized. You're my shanim. Okay. Do you know what shanim is, by the way? >> No. No. No. No. Don't. No. No. Hebrew speakers. >> Little rabbit. No. That's shanim. Shashanim in Hebrew means, well, originally in the Bible, it meant lilies of the field. And then today, in colloquial Hebrew, in vernacular Hebrew, it it means roses, you know, that's shanim and panim. It's a completely different category. Are little rabbits. And the problem with panim, they eat shanim. Shanim eat panim. Little rabbits eat roses. So it's a bit of a problem to put the two of you together in the same room. Okay. Okay. The checklist number one. No internal voices that are disparaging. No disparaging introjects. No voices inside your head that put you down, criticize you harshly, not constructively. Voices that, um, demean you and denigrate you and humiliate you and shame you. If you still have voices like this, you are not healing. You're not recovering. So this is probably, by far, the, the major test, the existence of what we call disparaging introjects. You can identify these voices easily. You do something, and the voice kicks up and says, "You see, you're such a loser. You always get things wrong. You're always, you know, you're so stupid," and so on. That could be your mother's voice, for example. I'm kidding you not. Many mothers are like this. Could be someone else's voice. Could be a teacher's voice, or even a public figure, a role model, and so on. Um, you contemplate, you, you're planning to do something. You, you're, you're enthusiastic. You're full of zest and life and mojo and and you want, want to start something new and so on. And there's a voice that tells you, "Don't, don't delude yourself. You always, you're a loser. You always, you always end up failing. And when you fail, you feel so bad. So why, why do you want to fail again? Why, why do you want to try again and fail again? And why do you want to make yourself feel bad? You know, just don't do it." Or there's a voice that tells you, um, "You're completely delusional. You're so ugly. No one would be attracted to you. No one would look at you. Don't even try to date. You know, stay at home, have fun, drink wine, watch Netflix. Don't even try to date because you're really repulsive." And so when you have such voices, when you have such voices inside you, these are voices that are known as disparaging introjects. And they are strong indicators that you are still very, very far from healing. Because when you have healed, or when you have recovered, I don't like the word healing at all in any context, but when you have recovered sufficiently, these disparaging introjects usually are silenced, or they disappear altogether, or they appear extremely rarely, and then there is an authentic voice which is essentially self-loving. And the clinical term is self-compassion. The authentic voice is self-compassionate. Now, we know from recent studies of self-esteem, as I told you yesterday, that self-esteem relies, um, among other things, on self-compassion. You cannot have self-esteem without self-compassion. And you cannot be healed or recovered without self-esteem. So, when you're healed or recovered, you have a stable sense of self-esteem. And it's never low. It's never, I mean, if it's too high, it's also bad, but it's never low, and it is stable. The, the key feature is stability. Actually, narcissists use narcissistic supply, attention, adulation, admiration, or being feared, even being noticed. Narcissists use this to stabilize their sense of self-worth because narcissists fluctuate widely. Low self-esteem, high self-esteem. And this is called the self-esteem discrepancy, or a discrepant self-esteem. That's a key clinical feature of narcissism. They have a, um, usually a low implicit self-esteem and high explicit self-esteem. And they oscillate all the time. And to stabilize it, they need other people. So if a narcissist thinks he's a genius, he's going to ask you, "Am I a genius?" And you're going to say yes. I mean, please say yes. You're going to say yes. And that stabilizes the narcissist's, uh, sense of self-worth. If you have an unstable, an unstable sense of who you are, and this instability is triggered by introjects, is triggered by voices, then you're very far from healing, from healing. So that's the first checkbox. The second one is ego dystonia. Ego dystonia is when you feel uncomfortable with who you are. Not with what you're doing, but with who you are. So you don't like yourself, yourself. You reject yourself. Sometimes, in extreme cases, there is self-loathing, not only, not only self-rejection, but self-loathing. You're disgusted with yourself. You, all these are pathological. I mean, many of you experience this on a daily basis, and you think it's normal. It's not normal at all. It's pathological. And this is this condition is known as ego dystonia. Ego dystonia is pathological. The healthy condition is known as ego syntonia. Ego syntonia is when you are okay with who you are. You feel comfortable. You feel good with who you are. You wouldn't want to change too many essential things or too many substantial things. You're okay as you are. This is a major sign of healing. People who are healed and recovered, their ego, they have ego syntonia, not ego dystonia. Again, everything, everything has a malignant form. Exactly like in a body. In a body, we have a healthy cell. The cell is completely functional, completely healthy, and then something happens, and the cell becomes cancerous. There's a malignancy. It's the same with everything I'm saying. Narcissists, for example, are too ego syntonic. In other words, the ego syntonia, syntonia in narcissism is too high. Um, this is also bad. But I'm not talking now about the kind of ego syntonia the narcissist has, which is delusional, obviously. But I'm talking about the ego syntonia that normal people have, relatively normal people. And this kind of ego syntonia is simply, "I'm okay with who I am. I don't want to change anything, you know, super substantial. I don't want to be someone else." I, for example, one of the, one of the ways to ask yourself, "Do I want to be someone else?" I don't want to be someone else. So there's no ego dystonia. One indication of ego dystonia, if you find it difficult to to answer this question. You're not sure whether you like yourself or not. You're not sure whether you're comfortable with yourself or not. One of the ways to test ego dystonia is how hesitant you are. When, when you hesitate when you make decisions, or when you think about the world, or where you try to form opinions and judgments and so on, and you are hesitant, you're not, you're always not sure, always takes time, always analyze and reanalyze and overthink and overanalyze and then disagree with yourself. And then this is a strong indication of ego dystonia. Hesitancy, the clinical term is hesitancy. So hesitancy is a strong indication of ego dystonia. When you are not sure, in other words, who you are, then of course you can never be sure of your decisions and choices and judgments and opinions and thoughts and even emotions. So when you're divorced from yourself, it's another form of ego dystonia because why would you divorce yourself? Why would you be distant from yourself to the point that you are hesitating all the time? Why would you be distant? Because you don't like yourself. The only reason to be distant from you, from yourself, is that you don't like yourself. You don't find yourself palatable or acceptable. So when you put this distance from yourself, it creates hesitancy. If you're far from yourself, if you're far removed from yourself, you can never be sure that your decisions and choices and opinions and judgments really reflect who you are because you are far from yourself. And all this complex is known as ego dystonia, and essentially pathological. We treat ego dystonia in clinical settings. Many people with mental illnesses have ego dystonia. And many, many victims of abuse, especially narcissistic abuse, develop ego dystonia. They internalize, they identify with the aggressor. They internalize the abuser's point of view. So the abuser is telling you, "You're bad, you're unworthy, you're unlovable, you're stupid, you're ugly, you deserve punishment." In other words, the abuser is creating what is known as a bad object. And then what the victim does, the victim internalizes the bad object. The victim agrees with the abuser. We found in studies that depending on the exposure to the abuse, this process is inevitable. Even if you're the strongest, most resilient, most accomplished person in the universe, Hillary Clinton, if you are exposed, if you, apologies, if you're exposed to abuse on a prolonged basis, you will ultimately, as Feny suggested, you will ultimately identify with the abuser's point of view. You will ultimately internalize the bad object that the abuser is handing to you, and you will begin to believe what the abuser is saying about you. So ego dystonia is an outcome of adopting the abuser's point of view of you. Ego dystonia is the perpetuation, the continuation of the abuse by other means. Even when the abuser is long gone, the abuser is still in your head telling you that you are a bad object. You're unworthy, definitely not lovable. Okay, so ego dystonia is the second checkbox. Uh, and hesitancy is an indicator. Next, um, hypervigilance, suspiciousness, paranoid ideation that persists, that persists in a variety of settings. So, not, not that you're paranoid about your abuser, that's actually an adaptation. It's a positive adaptation. You should be paranoid about your abuser. You should have paranoid ideation. You should be suspicious. And you should be very hypervigilant when it comes to your abuser. That's a positive adaptation. But when you are constantly paranoid, constantly hypervigilant, you know what is hypervigilant? You scan everyone. Scanning. That's hypervigilance. When you're constantly like this, you're always suspicious in all settings, with your abuser, at work, with your children, in this seminar, everywhere. You're always, abuser, sorry, um, suspicious, and so on and so forth. In this case, we probably you have, there's a pathology involved or a pathological process, and it, it means that you have lost your ability to trust. You cannot trust people, and you cannot trust situations, and above all, you cannot trust yourself. Obviously, if you're constantly hypervigilant, you can't, can't trust yourself. So the, the inability to trust, as indicated by hypervigilance, paranoid ideation, suspiciousness, avoidance, avoidant behaviors, withdrawal, constricted behaviors, constriction of life. All these are strong indicators that you are very far from healing. The first thing that is restored when you are truly healed is your ability to try again. Your ability to trust again, your willingness to take on, to take on pain, to experience pain again. When you're healed, you be, you feel sufficiently resilient and sufficiently strong to risk experiencing pain again. If you are terrified of pain, terrified of hurt, terrified of breakups and and abuse and whatever. If you're terrified, if there is, there is fear, then it's a strong indication that you're not, you're not healthy, you, you haven't healed, you're not strong enough, you're not resilient enough. The ability to trust is crucial. The next indicator. So again, these are summaries of studies. Yes. And all these things have names, names in clinical psychology. Not, I'm not imposing on you, uh, many of these labels, but they all have labels. Okay. So the next, uh, checkbox or next indicator is whether you constantly doubt your judgment, constantly second-guess yourself, constantly question yourself, constantly. So it looks like indecisiveness. That I mentioned hesitancy. Remember that I mentioned hesitancy? It's an indicator of ego dystonia. But it's not hesitancy because hesitancy has more to do with decisions or choices. Uh, it's doubting your capacity to really gauge reality, to really evaluate what's happening, to really, uh, perceive other people appropriately. So you doubt, you doubt your judgment of other people. You doubt your ability to, your reality testing. You doubt whether you perceive reality appropriately. You feel all the time a bit, a bit detached from reality, as if you are somehow embedded in a kind of ongoing nightmare. And the clinical term for this is depersonalization or derealization. So you feel a bit derealized, a bit depersonalized, a bit not there, a bit not there, a bit, and everything around you looks a bit unreal. And then you can't trust your, yourself. You can't trust opinions and judgments. You can't, you, you look at someone and you say, "I don't, I no longer trust my ability to to evaluate or to gauge whether this person is evil or good. This person is good for me or not." And, and so you are totally disoriented. And this disorientation is an indication that you're far from healing. Yeah. The next checkbox is a derivative of previous ones. When you feel that your reality testing has been restored, then it's an indication of, of healing. And I will explain now reality testing a bit, a bit more deeply. I will not take long. But reality testing has, basically, two components. Reality testing is mediated via cognition. So it's a cognitive process. In, in early work, in Freud's work, and reality testing was recognized as an ego function. It was a function of the ego, but, you know, no one has captured an ego. No one has studied an ego.

No one has spoken to an ego. Well, with my exception. So, uh, ego is a metaphor. There's no, no such thing, really. There's no such thing as ego. It's a metaphor. It's a just a label or a handle to describe a group of cognitive processes. So, a constellation of cognitive processes.

So, one of these cognitive processes is reality testing. Reality testing, um, has two components. Number one, you evaluate or appreciate or analyze reality in a way that allows you to make predictions that come true. So, you, you create a theory. This is called a theory. You're able to create theories about reality, and then these theories yield predictions, and these predictions come true more often than not, statistically come true. This is the first element in reality testing.

And the second element in reality testing is that you're able to tell when your cognition is distorted. You're able to tell that you, you think something and you say, "Ah, no, that's nonsense. That's wrong." In other words, the baloney test. Carl Sagan, Carl Sagan called it the baloney test. So, the ability to tell nonsense, to say, "This is nonsense." These are the two elements of reality testing.

When your reality testing is impaired, and in all victims of narcissistic abuse, the reality testing is shattered, not impaired. I mean, dead, dead in the water. So, when reality testing is impaired, in this case, you cannot generate theories about the world and trust your own predictions. The world becomes utterly random. Your world becomes totally random, indeterminate, uncertain. Most victims report a sense of extreme uncertainty and, um, and so on. And you develop something known as ontological insecurity or epistemological insecurity, depends on. So, Giddens, Giddens called it ontological insecurity.

So, ontological insecurity is, you don't feel, you don't feel continuous. You don't feel that you're continuous. It's as if your life has broken into shards, into pieces, and you feel like you're trapped in a kaleidoscope, like there's some forces, outside forces that are shaking a kaleidoscope, and you're trapped inside the kaleidoscope, and so every, every second, everything changes and so on. This is a, a good description, I think, of ontological insecurity and, uh, loss of reality testing.

And at that point, you begin to develop cognitive distortions. Now, all this is common in narcissism. All this pertains 100% to narcissism, which demonstrates the contagion, the contagion effect, demonstrates that narcissism is infectious. When you are exposed to narcissism, you become a narcissist, not only externally, not only behaviorally, but you become a narcissist also, essentially, psychologically, mentally, you become a narcissist because narcissists have ontological insecurity. They don't have a self. As I told you yesterday, the self is the organizing principle that provides a sense of continuity. "I am today who I have been yesterday and who I would be tomorrow." The, the self is just another word for ontological security. Because a narcissist doesn't have a self, the narcissist experiences his life as so many colorful pieces that fit together within some kind of kaleidoscope.

And the narcissist, of course, has an external locus of control. In other words, the narcissist believes firmly that forces, bigger forces, other people, and so on, are determining his or her life. That's why narcissists have aloplastic defenses. They accuse, they blame other people. When the narcissist fails, or when the narcissist is defeated, when the narcissist gets something wrong, he will instantaneously accuse other people. He will accuse, uh, institutions. He will accuse, um, governments. He will accuse his family and friends. He will accuse his spouse. He will accuse his children. He will accuse his neighbors. Always accuses other people. This is known as aloplastic defenses. But he accuses them because they made it happen. They made the failure happen. They made the defeat happen. They misled him into getting the wrong answer. So, this is called external locus of control. Narcissists are controlled from the outside.

Because a narcissist is controlled from the outside, the nar, narcissist cannot develop a sense of continuity. He is not the master of his own house. There's no continuity there. Similar thing happens to the victims. And one of the major tests for healing is whether you have this sense of continuity, whether you have cognitive distortions, and whether you can appraise, you can theorize about reality in a way that would yield predictions that make you feel safe. Because if you get things right, and if your predictions come true all the time, it makes you feel safe. It's a sense of safety. Uncertainty creates a lack of safety. Certainty, predictability, create a sense of safety.

So, cognitive distortion, by the way, I keep saying this. If I, if I use terms and phrases that you don't understand fully or are not acquainted with, that's legitimate. Not all of you are clinicians and psychologists. So, those of you who don't know the term or the phrase, please ask me, and I will ignore your question. No, please ask me. And I'm sorry, that's that's YouTube. Please ask me and I will answer your question. I get my scripts crossed sometimes.

So, cognitive distortion is simply, um, when you reframe or rearrange reality in a way that supports a bias. There's some bias and or concept that is biased, and then you rearrange reality to fit the bias. One, uh, major example, example of, of cognitive distortion is grandiosity. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion. The narcissist has a self-concept. The self-concept is counterfactual, fantastic, unrealistic. The self-concept is delusional, crazy self-concept. And what the narcissist does, he falsifies reality. He reframes it. He plays with it to support this delusional, unrealistic self-concept. So, that's an example of cognitive distortion.

Now, those of you who are versed in psychoanalysis, especially the work of Anna Freud, not Sigmund, but his daughter, those of you who are well-versed in Anna Freud's work would immediately say that psychological defense mechanisms are actually cognitive distortions, and you would not be wrong. Psychological defense mechanisms. The main role of psychological defense mechanisms is to falsify reality in order to avoid inner conflict, in order to avoid dissonance. So, they involve cognitive distortion.

Okay. The stronger your defenses, the more your cognition is distorted, the less able you are to create theories about reality, theories that work, the more, the further you are from healing. That's an indicator.

Next, a sense of agency and a sense of self-efficacy. Now, don't confuse this with self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is a delusion. Narcissists consider themselves to be self-sufficient, which is extremely ironic because narcissists are highly dependent. I mean, the most extreme form of dependency I can think of is narcissism. And yet, they believe themselves to be strong and resilient and self-contained and self-sufficient, and they don't need anybody, and so on, so forth. An example, of course, of cognitive distortion, an example of delusionality.

Um, a sense of agency simply means that you are the master of your own decisions, choices, and actions. Especially actions, you're an agent. You have agency. You, you control what you're doing. You decide what to do, and then you do it. That's a key feature. You decide what to do, and then you do it. In victims of narcissistic abuse who are not yet recovered and not yet healed, there's a disconnect between decisions and choices and actions. So, they may decide to do something. They may choose to do something, but then they would not do it. They don't do it. And then when they don't do it, the, the intro, the disparaging introjects kick up. They like, come alive. They come alive, and they say, "You see, you see, you're useless. You see what a failure you are. You always make decisions and you never, you never act. You're useless. You," and so on. So, it's a, we call this process self-reinforcement. There is a negative self-reinforcement in, in victims of narcissistic abuse.

So, a sense of agency is very important. It's the ability to make decisions, adopt choices, and then carry out actions that conform to these decisions and choices and reflect them fully. Self-efficacy is something different. And people, even, even scholars in institutions confuse agency and self-efficacy. They're not the same. Self-efficacy simply means that you're able to extract, to extricate positive outcomes from the environment in which you are embedded. So, self-efficacy is about guaranteeing or garnering or harvesting positive outcomes, taking into account the people around you, human environment, the physical environment, other, other constraints, and so on, so forth. You are able to optimize your behavior in a way that ultimately you get what you want, and in a way that is not self-destructive and self-defeating.

So, major tests of healing is whether you are agentic, whether you have agency, and whether you are self-efficacious. Victims are non-agentic. Victims are non-agentic. In other words, victims have lost their agency. Either they cannot make decisions and choices, or when they do, they rarely act on these decisions and choices. They are paralyzed. They're disabled. There's no agency, and they have lost their self-efficacy. They have become actually, in effect, self-defeating or, in extreme cases, self-destructive. Whatever they do, they secure negative outcomes, not positive outcomes. So, they don't have self-efficacy. And, and they do it because, as I said, they become self-defeating and self-destructive. And they become self-defeating and self-destructive because they've internalized the abuser's point of view. You see, you're beginning to see, I hope, the chain. There's a chain here. Each link, each link leads to another link, which leads to another link. And so, if you kind of yank the chain, all the links operate simultaneously.

Okay. Next is what we call autonomous motivation. Autonomous motivation is when you do things because you want to do them, not because society tells you to do them, not because there are expectations by other people, not because, uh, it is imposed on you in some way, not because you, you hate it, you hate to do it, but you have to do it. All these are non-autonomous behaviors. Non-autonomous. We discovered, for example, just as an anecdote and to introduce my favorite topic, we discovered that most casual sex is non-autonomous. In other words, in the majority of casual sex encounters, one-night stands, and so on, the sex is non-autonomous in the sense that the sex seeks to please the partner, or reflects social expectations, or there was some imposition, coercive sex, or whatever, but it's not, majority is non-autonomous. Which explains, by the way, why especially women who participate in casual sex regret the sex and are ashamed of what has happened in the, in the majority of cases, 70 to 80% depending on the study, not men, women. So, I gave you casual sex as an example of non-autonomous behavior.

Autonomous behavior is a strong indicator of a healthy, mentally healthy person. A mentally healthy person does only what they want to do, as long as they are not harming people. Of course, that's overriding constraints. They don't act because people expect them to act in a certain way, or even because society tells them to act in a certain way. They filter it. They filter it through their own values and their own beliefs and their own personal history and so on, and then they make an autonomous decision.

Next, no catastrophizing. Healthy people do not catastrophize. To catastrophize is to expect a worst-case scenario and then to perceive the scenario as reality. In other words, catastrophizing is confusion between reality and fantasy. You're beginning to see the impact of the narcissist. Yes. Catastrophizing is when you confuse a fantasy, the fantasy of the worst-case scenario with reality. You're reacting to the fantasy, the worst-case scenario, as if it were happening. You're reacting also bodily as if it were happening. People who catastrophize, catastrophizing is a form of anxiety disorder. People who catastrophize, they have bodily reactions. They have tachycardia. They sweat more and, and so on. Their bodies react as if they are there, as if this is happening. So, I could catastrophize and say, um, something really bad is going to happen, and then, uh, I'm reacting as if it is happening. This is an indicator of ill, ill, ill health. So, healthy people don't do this. Imminent doom.

Next thing is, you remember what we're doing? By the way, that's a checklist of whether you're healed or not. And you can go through this checklist daily or weekly. It's a very useful checklist because you just go through it daily or weekly, and you see incremental, incremental accomplishments, incremental progress, or the opposite, regression of some kind. So, it gives you control, which in itself is very important, a sense of control over what's happening to you. All this is grounded in studies. So, this is not YouTube nonsense. It's all grounded in studies.

Now, the next thing is anticipatory anxiety. We distinguish, uh, there are various types of anxiety. There is even a condition called generalized anxiety. Generalized anxiety is when you are, in principle, anxious. Your constitution is anxious. You're always anxious, and you're looking for reasons to be anxious. Like, you're asking yourself, "Why am I anxious? Why am I anxious?" Or, "Probably I'm sick," or "Probably my, my girlfriend is going to leave me," or so you're always anxious, and then you're looking for reasons, and you're inventing narratives to justify the anxiety. This is known as generalized anxiety disorder. Okay.

So, there are many types of anxiety, and, um, there is a type of anxiety known as anticipatory anxiety. Anticipatory anxiety is anxiety where you anticipate something, and the anticipation, or the anticipated event, causes anxiety. It's reverse. It's not that you have anxiety and then you look for a reason, but you first think of a reason, and then it creates anxiety. That's why it's a specific type of anxiety. I'll give you an example of anticipatory anxiety. In borderline personality disorder, the borderline imagines that she's about to be abandoned, is about to be rejected. She imagines it. Nothing happened, but she imagines it. And then the scenario causes her to be anxious. And then, by the way, she becomes anxious, and then she becomes aggressive. She externalizes aggression. She's reacting to the, to the anxiety. She's reacting to the imagined event that had caused the anxiety as if it were real. So, it's a form of catastrophizing, as if it were real, and then she becomes aggressive, and actually, she creates the abandonment. Her misbehavior and misconduct, which often involves violence and acting out and crazy things, and don't ask, these actually bring about the, the abandonment ultimately.

So, if you have anticipatory anxiety, if you keep imagining bad things, and this creates in you anxiety, that's a sign that you're not healed and you're not recovered yet. The difference between catastrophizing, for those of you who are wondering, the difference between catastrophizing and anticipatory anxiety is that in catastrophizing, you don't have, there's no necess, there's not a requirement, there's no, it's not a condition that you develop a reaction to the catastrophizing. So, in cat, you could, you could catastrophize without anxiety. You just catastrophize. Uh, for example, there are people who, when they plan to do something, they immediately create plan A and plan B and plan C and plan Q and plan Z, and you know, they create like 19, 20 plans just in case plan A goes wrong, B, and B of course will go wrong, then C. This is a form of catastrophizing, but it does not involve anxiety. Actually, there's no anxiety there. What, in this particular case, there is obsession, compulsion. This kind of person is obsessive-compulsive. But the reaction is not anxiety, it's obsession, compulsion. Catastrophizing, therefore, does not always lead to anxiety. Anticipatory anxiety is a subspecies of catastrophizing that leads to anxiety. And it is a strong indicator that you're not healthy. You're not healed, because anxiety is not real. It's not a reaction to a real threat. In other words, anxiety is a form of divorce from reality. It's counterfactual. Is not, is anxiety is proof that you are not yet grounded in reality. That you're not in reality.

For those of you who haven't seen that, that's an, that's a new diagnosis. Anticipatory religious anxiety. New diagnosis. It's like, I like to say, there's an ancient German word I've just invented. You. By the way, there is gash. Yes, you're gash. I love this word. It sounds so really German, you know. It's a gish. Okay. Evidently, I have something with Germans. I'm sorry. Okay. So, catastrophizing, anticipatory anxiety, because they reflect the fact that you are not back in reality. You're not grounded. You're living in your own mind. You are inhabiting your own mind, and you're reacting to whatever processes are happening in your mind. And this, of course, a sign of being grounded in reality is the major sign of being healthy. That's why mindfulness is such a powerful set, set of modalities, because being grounded in the here and now is a very powerful sign that you're healed, that you're healthy, that you're back. You know, anything that takes you away from reality is a pathology by definition. That's why we have psychosis and delusional disorders and narcissism and so on. They all take you away from reality.

Which raises the question, what is our civilization? Our civilization is based, like 90%, on running away from reality, denying reality, detaching from reality. So, there's good grounds to say that our civilization is a very sick civilization. It's a very pathological civilization, and maybe mental illness in individuals is just a reflection of the mental illness of the civilization they are living in. You know, the same way that I think psychopathy would have been overdiagnosed in Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany induced in many of its citizens a form of conforming psychopathy, a form of. So, mental illness is not always individual. It's very often a reaction to society, to culture, to period in history, to gender relations, and, and so on, so forth.

Okay. Next. No addictive cravings. Addiction is, of course, unhealthy. Um, and in this particular case, it's not the addiction itself. It's cravings. Cravings is when you imagine the addiction, and this imagination causes in you an irresistible impulse. That's the definition of craving. So, I'll give you an example. If you're an alcoholic, you would imagine the drink, the next drink. And this imagining of the next drink would create in you an irresistible impulse to drink, and that is cravings. Cravings are signs of an addiction and also unhealthy indicators that you are not healed. You're not, uh, addictive cravings can take many forms. Let me give you a surprising form that I think most of you don't associate with addiction. Nostalgia. Nostalgia is actually a form of addiction. It's a craving. It's a craving for a totally imaginary past. It's not real. So, it's not, it's not memory. Nostalgia is not memory. You know, some of you are from former Yugoslavia, and, and they are these people who are Yugo-nostalgic. They miss, I'm not kidding. They miss Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia is a great place, by the way. So, they miss Yugoslavia. They have Yugo-nostalgia. That's a form of craving. It's because they are, they became addicted to Yugoslavia. You could get addicted to a period in history. You could get addicted to an ideology. You could, addiction is a way of relating to the world. Sometimes addiction is a way of relating to yourself. For example, narcissism, pathological narcissism is self-addiction. There's no self there, but you understand what I mean. Self-referential addiction. Self-referential addiction.

So, addiction can be externalized. Addiction can be internalized. Everything in psychology can be externalized or internalized. For example, aggression. Aggression can be externalized. Psychopaths externalize aggression. Aggression can be internalized. When aggression is internalized, it has a name. It's called depression. So, everything can be externalized and internalized.

And that's a good question, Lush. Where's the? You have the mic. You stole the mic again. In every city, we end up in the, in the local prison because he's stealing the mics. Uh, what about creativity? Uh, it's, you can crave, to create, to paint, to write, to, uh, well, is that a bad or good thing? Because you kind of get lost in it. You can do it for hours. Uh, it's kind of flow. Is that a craving? Is it a bad craving?

First of all, we are in a seminar of clinical psychology. Uh, I have to cater to two types of audiences, about 20 or 30 clinicians and laymen and laywomen, and I have to kind of, so some of the things I'm going to say would sound very, very strange to lay, lay persons, and this is one of them. Creativity is strongly associated with mental illness. We don't use good and bad in psychology. Ology. There's no such thing as good or bad. There's no such thing as right or wrong in psychology. This is the realm of morality, ethics, uh, religion has no place in clinical psychology. Moreover, nothing in clinical psychology is wholly good or wholly bad or or bad to good. And I, I don't know if I gave you the example of depression in Auschwitz. Yes. So, if you were, if you were an inmate in Auschwitz and you did not develop depression, then you were mentally ill. Yeah. In Auschwitz, depression was a strong indicator of mental health, not mental illness. If you were in Auschwitz and you were happy-go-lucky, joyful, cheerful, probably you were completely wacko. You're nuts. Yeah. Uh, so depression depends on context. In some contexts, depression is a, is, is actually mentally healthy, is the right response. That's why in psychology, there's no such thing as good or bad. In some civilizations and cultures, possibly our civilization, narcissism is positive. It's a positive adaptation. It's a good thing. Good thing. Yeah, it's the right thing. In Nazi Germany, psychopathy was absolutely the right thing. I mean, if you were hiding Jews in your house, endangering your entire family, you were probably crazy. You're probably crazy. Definitely self-destructive, at the very least. Yeah. So, it all, it's all contextual. It all depends on context. Another reason why I say that psychology is not a science but a pseudoscience. It all depends on, on context.

Coming back to your question, creativity is associated with elements, psychological elements that are also, uh, elements in mental illness. There was a psychologist by the name of Hans Eysenck, and Eysenck suggested that creativity is linked to something called psychoticism. He had a model. He had a model. It's called the PEN model, model of personality, and he said that psychoticism, um, creativity has to do with psychoticism. Psychoticism is not exactly mental illness, but not very far from it. Um, we also have multiple studies that show that, uh, when people are mentally ill in many ways, they're more creative, and, and most creative people could be diagnosed with mental illness in one way or another. There's a close association between the two. That doesn't mean that creativity is bad or good, or if it makes you feel good, it's a great thing. If it doesn't make you feel good, and it's a bad thing, but creativity is not a sign of healing and not a sign of recovery. It, it does not appear on this list. We do not consider creativity to be any indicator of a healthy state of mind, of healing, of recovery, or anything of the kind. Many, many crazy people are extremely creative. The guy, the guy who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary, the first volume, to be precise, there were three volumes. He wrote the first single-handedly. He wrote the first volume all by himself, and he wrote it in a cell in a mental asylum. That's the guy who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary. That's one example.

There is another question here. Yes. Can you make a distinction between nostalgia and ruminating?

Nostalgia and ruminating. Thank you. No, they're not connected. Ruminating is when you are focused on a problem and never consider the solutions. So, you're constantly rehashing or recycling, reconsidering, reanalyzing, rethinking, and starting again. And you cannot stop. And the, the entire content is the problem, about the problem. But in rumination, there's no consideration of any possible solution at all. It's not solution-oriented, and it's compulsive. It's what we call clinically an intrusive process. So, rumination is an intrusive process that is problem-focused and excludes consideration of solutions. In other words, has nothing to do with nostalgia. Nostalgia is an addiction to a real or imagined period. So, it is a time addiction to time. So, you could have addiction to alcohol, addiction to coke, addiction to seminars with some Vaknin, and so on. And one of the addictions would be addiction to time, a specific period in time, and that would be nostalgia. But nostalgia is definitely addictive. It's, in most cases, counterfactual. In other words, delusional. And in this sense, nostalgia has strong resemblance to unhealthy pathological addiction. Nostalgia also reduces your ability to act. It has impact on what? On self-efficacy. It reduces your capacity to act. The, the more nostalgic you are, the less action-oriented you are. This is very common in addictions. Addictions are substitutes for action. The addict, in rather than acting in the world and in reality, acts within the addiction. So, the addiction provides a structure. Addiction provides a narrative. Addiction provides goals and, and goal orientation. And so, addiction is a simulation of life. Rather than go to university and obtain a degree, the addict plans the day to steal money and then buy the next fix. But this is a goal orientation, and it provides everything that life provides. It provides a structure, order, purpose, direction, meaning, and so on, so forth. Addiction, therefore, you could, you could think of addiction as displaced life, like you could not cope with life. You cannot cope with life. It's too much for you. So, you construct a simulation of life that is tiny, constricted, self-contained. And within this simulation of life, you get up in the morning, you have that your day structured. You have goals, you have purpose, you know what to do. There's certainty. And so, within this simulated life, you, you feel good. This is the problem with addiction. It makes you feel good. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. Addiction has a powerful psychological component. The problem is not only the body. Actually, in most cases, the problem is not the body. Most of these substances are not physiologically addictive. For example, coke. Coke is not physiologically addictive. Cannabis is not physiologically addictive. But they create psychological addiction, not to the substance, but to the lifestyle. So, it's displaced life.

If you are addicted, for example, if you, if you keep, if you're nostalgic about the good times you had with the narcissist, to reduce it to human speech, imagine that you're obsessed with the good times that you had. You miss the good times. You miss the narcissist's laughter. You miss the narcissist's sex. You miss, this is an indication that you're not healed. You're addicted to certain elements in the, in the relationship, and you can't let go. You crave, you crave these elements, and it's an indication you're not healed.

Um, the next, um, indicator is separation insecurity. Didn't want, I offered, didn't want. Okay. The next indicator is separation insecurity. Separation insecurity is the clinical term for what people call abandonment anxiety or separation anxiety. It's when you're afraid to be abandoned. You're afraid to, you're afraid to be alone. Cut a long story short. You're afraid to be alone. If you're afraid to be alone, you're not healed. If you are still dependent on the presence of other people, on their company, on their availability, on access to them, on what they have to say or don't have to say, on, then you're not healed. A major sign of someone who is mentally healthy is that a mentally healthy person can endure periods of being alone. Can endure them. He's not terrified of them. He's not obsessed with company. He's not, but definitely can enjoy being with himself or herself for a while, for a few hours, for a few days, for a few months. The ability to cope with aloneness is a, a strong sign of mental health.

Okay. Um, now we come to a real clincher, a serious. When we talk to victims of abuse, and definitely when we talk to victims of narcissistic abuse, they keep ending up with the same type of partner. So, they've just exited a relationship with a narcissist. They find a new intimate partner, and it's another narcissist, and another narcissist. So, when you have, when you have type constant mate selection, let's see the term, type constant mate selection. In other words, when you select partners, intimate partners, friends, even business partners, when you select the same type over and over again, as if you have learned nothing from the abusive relationship, it's an indicator that you're not healed. Definitely. You are actually caught in a repetition compulsion. And repetition compulsion is not healthy. Ask Sigmund Freud. Same type partner.

We distinguish between two types of relationships. One type of relationship is the narcissistic relationship, and one type of relationship is an anaclitic relationship. It is such a pleasure to erase things, such a sense of power. Poof, you're gone. That's a psychopath, by the way, not a narcissist. All human relationships, according to psychoanalytic literature at least, are either narcissistic or anaclitic. Narcissistic relationships are relationships where you, where you seek a partner that basically reflects you. A partner that would resonate with you. A partner who reminds you of yourself in a way. You want to fall in love with yourself via the partner. You sometimes want to have sex with yourself via the partner, in the case of the narcissist. Yes, you're autoerotic. So, these would be narcissistic relationships. And you have anaclitic relationships. These are relationships where you seek partners who are not you. Partners who, for example, remind you of your mother or father. So, when you seek a partner that reminds, and you're men, and you are looking for a partner who reminds you of your mother, you're looking for an anaclitic relationship. But it doesn't have to be a mother or father. It could be anything that is not you. Now, generally speaking, these are healthy relationships, or less unhealthy relationships. And the, these are healthy, and these are not healthy relationships. When you keep, when you keep selecting the same type of partner, and again, let it be clear, intimate partner, business partner, good friend, any relationship, when you keep selecting, selecting the same type of person, the relationship could be either narcissistic or anaclitic. You may be selecting the type of mate that reflects your mother. You may be selecting your mother all the time. Yeah. So, it's anaclitic. In both these types of relationship, narcissistic or anaclitic, repetition, choosing the same partner, repetition compulsion is an indicator of pathology. Even if you're, even if you have a narcissistic, so in narcissistic relationships, there is always, sorry, there is always repetition compulsion. Obviously, you keep selecting partners who are you. So, you keep repeating. It's narcissistic relationships always involve repetition compulsion. Therefore, they are always pathological. Anaclitic relationships could be pathological if you keep selecting the same, or they don't have to be pathological if you keep selecting people who are not you, but also do not resemble each other. So, in an anaclitic relationship, your first partner could reflect your mother, your next partner reflect your father, your third partner reflect a good friend from the past, and your fourth partner reflect a show business, a film star. Yeah. So, these are all anaclitic relationships, but if there is a variety, then they're basically healthy. There is no relationship where you choose someone without resonance. There is no relationship where you choose someone who does not remind you of someone. No such thing. Even if you believe so, always if you dig deep, your mate selection, your selection of business partner or friend or whatever, always resonates with someone in your past. All relationships are narcissistic or anaclitic. There's no third kind. Okay? But narcissistic relationships are repetitive. If you keep choosing the same mate over and over and over again, it's a repetition compulsion. And in many cases, it's an indication that you're developing a narcissistic pattern of mate selection. In other words, that you're choosing these partners because you are using them to regulate yourself. You're choosing these partners because these partners cater to some psychological needs that you have.

Look, if you fall victim to a narcissist, if you, if you team up with a narcissist, you end up having an intimate relationship with a narcissist, and it ends up, it ends badly. All relationships with narcissists end badly. It ends badly. There's narcissistic abuse. This, that it happened. Accidents happen. You move on. You choose someone who is not a narcissist. That's okay. But if you keep choosing narcissists over and over and over and over again, six, seven times, five times, four times, 20 times, it says something about you, not about the narcissist. Says something about you. It means that you need narcissists. You need a narcissist to regulate something in you. You need the narcissist to cater to your psychological needs. You need the narcissist as an external regulator, for example. So, that's why borderlines, people with borderline personality disorder choose almost exclusively narcissists as partners, as intimate partners. Almost exclusively. Why? Because the narcissist is very willing and happy to serve as an external regulator of the borderline. The narcissist is happy to take over the borderline's mind. Narcissist is a control freak. Narcissist loves to control the borderline. So, it's a perfect match. The borderline wants to be regulated and controlled from the outside. The narcissist wants to control and regulate someone from the outside. And they fit, which is the discovery of John L. Carter. Yes.

Just a second. I, I cannot hear you. I was wondering in the army. I'm a bit impaired. What you were just saying. If I look at the recovery signs, I work with a lot of, uh, borderline patients. It seems like that's just the way they need to heal. It seems like one, the recovery signs is just what they need to learn. So, I'm wondering the link with narcissistic abuse and the borderline symptoms, if you understand what I mean.

Uh, dysfunctional relationships are common in narcissism. Common. This is a list of recovery and healing from toxic dysfunctional relationships in general. Applies to borderlines, apply borderline abuse, narcissistic abuse, psychopathic abuse, and, and so on. Any toxic dysfunctional relationship. When you are out of the relationship, trying to recover and heal, this would be the checklist. So, yes, it applies to. If I understood your question correctly, I'm sorry. If I didn't, then come to me later. It's a little bit more like, um, I really recognize the, um, severe symptoms from the borderline personality disorders in, in this list. Yes. That's, that's pretty true because borderlines, borderlines do not satisfy this list, and most of the time. So, this could serve also as a diagnostic list for borderline. Yes. True. Okay. We're midway through the list. Believe it or not. I hope you recover and heal from this list at some point.

The next, uh, test of whether you are on your way to recovery and healing is if, uh, whether you develop maternal or paternal, mainly maternal impulses. When you meet people, not necessarily as intimate partners, when you meet people, do you react as a mother would? Do you become instantly, instantaneously protective? For example, protective? Do you try very hard to see the good sides in people? It's a form of idealization, of course. Try to idealize people. Um, do you immediately become giving, unconditionally giving? Do you want to give? Do you have the, the compulsion, the impulse to give? All these are indications of maternal impulses or parental impulses and so on, so forth. They are not healthy. I know that people think that it's great to give, and it's wonderful to see the positivity in other people and so on, so forth. That's, that, I agree, unless this is compulsive. Except in the case where this is compulsive. Like, if you relate to other people always this way, and you cannot help it but relate to them this way. If you're compulsive about it, that's a sign that you're far from healing. By the way, for the clinicians among you, these are known as narcissistic transferences. Narcissistic transferences were first described by Heinz Kohut. And one of the narcissistic transferences is the idealization transference. Idealizing transference. And there are many others, but three others, actually two others, there are three in total. But narcissistic transferences manifest in daily life. When you see someone, you react to them as a mother would. This is not healthy, actually. And if you keep doing this, then you need to work on it. It's an issue to work on. As long as it is compulsive, there's nothing positive about it. As long as it is compulsive. The test is not in the, the test is the whether you can help it or not. If you can turn it on and off, in other words, if you're selective, discriminate, if you're discriminant, so you turn it on with some people, you turn it off with other people, then it's perfectly okay. But if you can't help it, anytime you see, for example, a young man, you would immediately become a mother. Anytime you would see someone, you immediately would want to give and, and embrace and engulf and help and, and it's compulsive. You can't help it. Even if there's no good reason to do this, even if the other person is not interested, never asked for it, and so on, so forth. If you're imposing this on other people, then we are talking about something unhealthy. This is what brought you, in the majority of cases, this is exactly what brought you to the relationship with the narcissist because the narcissist converted you into a maternal figure. The narcissist played on this. The narcissist leveraged this. The narcissist amplified and magnified it. You came across the narcissist, and you wanted to be the narcissist's mother. You wanted to mother the narcissist. You wanted to embrace the narcissist. You wanted to hug the narcissist. You want to love the narcissist. You wanted to help the narcissist. Wanted to cheer up the narcissist. You believe that your love could make a difference. You believe that that the narcissist, narcissism is just a love deficit, you know, and you can cure and heal, and all these are delusional, delusional thoughts, and compulsive as well. And this is what brought you into a relationship with the narcissist. Narcissist plays on this. Narcissist, I told you yesterday, he introduces to you. The narcissist introduces to you. The narcissist introduces to you his or her inner child. Fictitious, simulated inner child, exactly in order to trigger your maternal reflexes and instincts. And no, it's not limited to women. Of course, men react identically. It's not maternal instincts are universal. Men, women, they are gender indifferent. So, this is what a narcissist does. As long as you react this way, you will fall prey to narcissists and worse con artists and, and so on.

Yes. Uh, thank you, Sam. Um, I'm not sure if it's okay to, uh, share it personally. How personal I should be. And, um, coming from parental abuse, um, I like to help my narcissistic mother so much that I want to go back to her past and fix her childhood traumas so that she can mature to be a healthy adult and start parenting, and I could be parented instead of being parentified, instrumentalized, and family counselor because it creates survivor's guilt in me, as you had mentioned before. I think I'm suffering so much from this guilt because how can I, um, participate in life and enjoy it while my parents are deadorn and how, so my question is probably, how to, is it possible to overcome survivor's guilt? How can I not feel selfish for enjoying life while, um, seeing that my parents are suffering and even not aware of their deadness?

If you want to fix your mother or your parents, then you are parentifying yourself. It's a form of parentification. This is what parents do. Parentifying yourself. You're continuing the abuse by other means. You are accepting the role of being responsible for their well-being. Say to yourself, "I am responsible for, well, for their well-being. I am responsible for their happiness. I'm responsible for their mental state." You assume responsibility. There's, of course, pathological. It's continuation of the pathology. So, the only way to avoid parentification, although this is not related to any of this, but I will answer you all the same. The only way to avoid the parentification is to accept that you are never ever responsible for the happiness or well-being of any adult. Period. No adult. That includes your parents. If you have a child who is five years old or three years old or six years old, to you are to some extent responsible for the happiness and well-being of that child. Children deserve this sacrifice. You can become, you can parent a child, but you should never ever parent an adult. You should never assume responsibility for someone's happiness and well-being and state of mind, finances. I mean, you're not responsible for anyone. Uh, if someone threatens you, for example, let's take an extreme case, someone tells you, "If you leave me, I will commit suicide." Unfortunate. You're not responsible. It's not your job to prevent that other person from committing suicide. It's your job to look after your best interests without harming others, of course, actively, but you cannot be responsible for other people's decisions and so on. Similarly, your mother and father have suffered psychological damage, maybe I'm not quite sure, I don't know the situation. Be that as it may, um, they're adults, and, uh, you bear no responsibility for them. It's very difficult for you to accept that you are not responsible. You have been conditioned to believe that you're responsible, not only for them. You've been conditioned to believe that you're responsible. Period. So, you would always apply this principle to everyone around you. Everyone meaningful, significant, you would always think that you are responsible. You know, and you have this in marriages and in relationships where one of the, one of the diet, one member of the diet, spouse or or even children and so on, they assume this responsibility, and they are, they are what we call regulators. They regulate, for example, the family unit. So, you have, for example, you can have, for example, a family where everyone is fighting with everyone, and there's one child, and this child is the peacemaker. This child is going to everyone trying to make peace, trying to negotiate, trying to introduce compromises. This child assumed the role of a peacemaker. You understand? That's an example of assuming responsibility for other people's state of mind and well-being and happiness. So, this pathology is not limited to, is not dependent on age differences, age differentials. It could affect, could inflict itself on very young people, like children. But, and then you have types of families where this is actually encouraged. They're known as, I suspect that these questions are much more interesting than, than the seminar. I'm beginning to suspect. Yeah. You have two types of families.

No, one second. I didn't finish it. I didn't finish the answer. Yeah, I didn't finish. It will not be long. It's like another 45 minutes. The, the, there are two types of families that actually encourage this, and they are known as pseudo-mutual and pseudo-hostile. So, in pseudo-mutual families, there is a pretension, a pretension that the whole family is united. The members of the family love each other, that being in the family is a pleasant experience, that this family is a role, is a model to be emulated, and so on. But deep inside, there are very bad dynamics, and the family is actually a horrible place, a nightmare. And so, this kind of family is known as pseudo, pseudo-mutual family. The pseudo-mutual family imposes on the members, imposes on the members an obligation to act, to pretend vis-à-vis the external world, like, "We don't launder the dirty laundry in public. We don't share with people." So, everyone is forced to act the part of a big happy family. Yeah. And of course, this places responsibility on the members of the family. They are responsible for the public image of the family, for the external communication of the family, and by extension, they're responsible for the happiness and well-being of all the members of the family, because if they betray the family, it's like a cult. If you, they betray the family, then everyone will be unhappy. So, their acting is a way to assume responsibility for the happiness and well-being of the members. This is the pseudo-mutual. The pseudo-hostile family is, um, the exact opposite. It's, uh, a family that uses conflict and negative emotions and so on to regulate the behavior and, and of, of the members of the family. So, there's a lot of aggression. This is a family with a lot of, of aggression, as a regulatory mechanism. They use aggression as a regulatory mechanism. It's deeper than that. I have a video dedicated to pseudo-mutual, pseudo-hostile families. And again, in this kind of family, there is a script, and you have to follow the script, and if you don't follow the script, you're responsible for the unhappiness of the other members. But of course, there are many other types of families. In many, in many developing countries, one member of the family goes abroad. He works abroad, and he sends back money to the family. These are called remittances. He sends remittances to the family. So, this guviter, this outside worker, the guy who went abroad, he is now responsible financially for the family. And of course, the remittances guarantee the happiness of the family. Like, if you're Mexican and you went to work in the United States, you're sending back money to Mexico, and the Mexican family who receives the money, they're happy when they receive the money, and they're very unhappy when they don't receive the remittances, when they don't receive the money. So, by implication, you're assuming responsibility for the happiness of the family economically, via money. So, all these, all these situations are highly pathological. Highly pathological. And, and, uh, I would advise you to stop thinking this way because you're parentifying yourself.

Yes. Boy, you wanted to ask something? Uh, Sam, can I add one thing? No. Okay. I mean, this is a seminar, not a, not a private, uh, not a private therapy. Yeah. Yes. I wanted, I wanted to ask, will there be in today's session a separate part just for questions and answers? Because I have a few which are a bit out of sync. There's, there'll be a whole session today, entire session dedicated to questions on. Because then I will leave this for later, like about nostalgia and some other, because you already continue to something else. Okay. No, now we must stop. One second. One second. Uh, there will be a whole session. Just a second. Remember, you're not responsible for other people's happiness. Yeah. One second, guys. Guys and girls, uh, the last session today, the entire last session will be dedicated to questions and answers. Okay. So, we finish today's material one and a half hours at the end of the day, maybe two, and if you give me supply, maybe longer, will be dedicated to questions and answers. So, write down your questions. Don't go home. Don't go away. The weather is bad. I had a deal with God and stay here and ask your questions, and I promise to answer them. Okay? But we can't interrupt the seminar repeatedly with multiple questions because it's very disruptive. People lose a train of thought, and it's a mess.