Transcription
It's a howling void. It's an it's a black hole. It's an emptiness. And it tends to feed on other people because the only way for the narcissist to experience his or her own existence, to regulate his or her sense of self-worth, to somehow convince himself or herself that the fantasy is a is a reality. The fantasy is the main defense mechanism in narcissism. Reality is too much; reality is intolerable, unbearable.
There's a word that we hear a lot these days, narcissism, but it's not always being used correctly beyond the pop psychology and internet buzz. What does it really mean to be in a relationship with a true narcissist? Can you escape from such a relationship? Who is the narcissist? And how does a narcissist come to be in the first place?
In this interview, I have with us Professor Sam Vaknan, an internationally recognized expert on narcissistic personality disorder and the man who coined the very term narcissistic abuse and author of malignant self-love, narcissism revisited. According to Professor Vaknan, narcissism is not just about arrogance or vanity but a profound disruption in the formation of the self. For instance, when a child is raised in an environment where a parent is emotionally absent, neglectful, overbearing, or where the child is treated as an extension of the parent rather than as an individual, something vital is interrupted. Instead of a healthy, stable sense of identity, what remains is what Vaknan calls a howling void. A black hole where the self should be, and in its place a fragile construct that feeds off the attention, emotions, and perceptions of others in order to exist. These people, men and women, equally require excessive admiration, agilation, attention, affirmation, and are interpersonally exploitative, devoid of empathy, and constantly envious of others. What a dream, right? Well, millions of people become entangled and entwined, married to, in parental relationships with, raising children or become the children of narcissists.
And so, in our conversation with Sam Vaknan, we explore how narcissists create a kind of alternate reality to survive. One in which they are idealized, become special or persecuted, and they don't live this fantasy alone. They pull others into it, and what begins as a relationship can become something like a cult of two based not on truth but on survival. And I see these patterns playing out all around us in relationships, families, in public life, and in the first part of this two-part episode, all throughout social media. I will put a link to that episode in the description of this one. I invite you to listen closely. Here is my interview with Professor Sam Vaknan from his office in Scopia, Macedonia.
Well, thank you so much for being a part of my efforts to reach people out in this great big world with all the things that are going on. Um, I thought that maybe it would be a wonderful way to start it by starting on a kind of a macro level. And and I'll preface that by saying while I do most of my content creation around Mount Everest and music and things like that, I've had a guest on a number of occasions, the the late Nathan Schwarz Salant, uh a Youngian uh analyst, a a brilliant man, and we talked about presidents and things like that. And he enlightened me to so many things, and the more I have heard about it and the more I see it in the news and and talked about, I've become more fascinated with it and seen it in reality actually touching my life as well, and so I thought for those people who are out there who might not have any connection to the actual term or what it means, maybe you could start kind of like hold our hands as as a a kindergartener like what is it? What what is it? And I know that you were at the you know you were at the groundbreaking of of this and started many of of the terms that are used today. So I' I'd kind of like to hear that from you if you're okay with that.
No, of course. Thank you for thank you for having me and uh on on such a short notice. I know that you know it's one day to the next. Um I actually quote Schwarz Salant in in my work in my work in my book and and so on so forth. I highly highly valued his value his work and I think he had inordinate insights into the soul of the narcissist. We don't use the word soul in psychology, but I think it's apt in this case. Um narcissism is a disruption in the formation of the self. In early childhood, usually prior to age 36 months, we are all very busy becoming. We're all very busy forming ourselves. We all very busy emanating if you wish. We are born as a bit of a raw material with a few templates like the language template and others. We gather cues from the environment, information, stimuli; our relationship with mother is very crucial. Maternal figure actually doesn't have to be a mother. Anyone who fulfills maternal functions is very crucial. And then we begin to notice that we are not the world, unlike the unlike the po the song. Yeah. We are not the world and that we are not mother and that we are not. The initial impulse to become we to become ourselves is but is v is via negation. We negate the world. We don't say we are but we say hey we are not we are not mother we are not the world. In essence, identity and the self are negative formations. They are about exclusion, not inclusion. Initially, who you truly are is a mystery to you, definitely until well into late adolescence. But who you are not becomes very clear by age three. Now if someone interrupts this process in a variety of ways, if your mother is emotionally absent, depressive, narcissistic, egotistic and selfish, psychopathic, um neglectful, overprotective, you name it. If there is if if the parents get parenting wrong, then there is a perturbation. There is a disruption in the formation of the self. And what we get is an individual who is ironically selfless. It's someone without a self. Now that has massive implications, massive lifelong implications because if you don't if you don't have a self, if you don't possess a self, a functional one, then you're unable to tell to tell other people apart. You don't you don't you don't have clear boundaries. This is where I stop and you begin. This is where you stop and you cease to be and I begin. These are boundaries. If you don't have a self, you don't have boundaries. If you don't have boundaries, you are unable to tell that other people are separate and external to you. You begin to perceive other people as internal objects, as manifestations if you wish, as figments of your mind and your imagination. And then if you are unable to perceive other people as not you, then of course this would disable this would incapacitate you as far as empathy. You won't be able to develop empathy because empathy requires the recognition of the other as an other as not you. So it's a cascade. No self, no boundaries, treating other people as extensions or internal objects, no empathy, and then exploitiveness, abuse because there's no empathy. Um, some autistic features, inability to interpret social cues and emotional cues appropriately. Lack of access to positive emotions because positive emotions have been are associated with have been associated with with hurt, with pain. The first love object, the mother in this case, has been frustrating and neglectful or overpowering and domineering or whatever. So, it's associated with pain or unpleasant uh emotional effects, emotional outcomes and so on. So here by the end you see the narcissist emerging fully like Botticelli's Venus emerging fully from the single assumption from the single psychological or psychodynamic fact that there is a missing self. Instead of the self, what we do have is what we call the empty schizoid core. It's a howling void. It's an it's a black hole. It's an emptiness, and it tends to feed on other people because the only way for the narcissist to experience his or her own existence, to regulate his or her sense of self-worth, to somehow convince himself or herself that the fantasy is a is a reality. The fantasy is the main defense mechanism in narcissism because reality is too much; reality is intolerable, unbearable. So, but then you have to convince yourself that your fantasy is not a fantasy. It's a reality. Your fantasy about yourself. That's the grandiosity. So, the you have to convince yourself that you are justly grandiose, that your grandiosity is justified. And you have to convince yourself that the alternative reality that you had constructed in order to avoid the real the real McCoy, that alternative reality is actually true. So then you start to coerce people around you to to recruit them into the shared fantasy and and then to impose on them your will and wish. Um you want them to lie to you. You want them to deceive you and tell you that your false self, this seat or repository of grandiose, fantastic, inflated self-concept. This false self, you want them to tell you is not false, is true. And you want them to tell you that your fantasy has all the hallmarks of reality and therefore is indistinguishable from reality and therefore is reality. And then they should deny themselves. They should suspend their judgment. They should lie to you and they should lie to themselves. They should cease to become who they are. You take away their identity. They become indeed zombified extensions of you of the narcissist. It's a sequence and it's an inevitable ineluctable sequence and it is an inexorable sequence. You can't divorce one of the elements. You can't isolate one of the elements. You can't treat any single element because they are all intricately and intimately interconnected. They all lead to each other. And this revol evolution is inevitable and inexorable as I said unstoppable. It's an unstoppable machine in which the narcissist is the main victim. The narcissist is caught caught in this unfolding plot. The narcissist feels derealized, unreal. The narcissist feels that he's in some kind of movie, some kind of theater production. It's some kind of Truman show. And but he can do nothing for himself or for others. And he has to make use of others. He has he's forced to abuse others. He because the fantasy is the primal force in narcissism. And and it is the fantasy that molds the narcissist and forces the narcissist or drives the narcissist to co-opt and to recruit and to take over. It's a hostile takeover of other people and and so it is like ripples in a pond. There is the initial stone, the disruption of the self, and then you have concentric waves which consume larger and larger greater and greater number of people. It could be a nation state; in some cases it could be a whole continent; in some cases Adolf Hitler. So these ripples they go outward and they consume anyone in their path and it and I'm using the word consumed judiciously because it's the equivalent of digestion. Nothing much is left. You're hollowed out as a victim of a narcissist. You're hollowed out; you disappear only to reappear as an internal object, a mental representation, an avatar in the narcissist mind, subject to manipulation. And so this is in a nutshell uh what narcissism is all about. And that that's why there's a huge difference between being a narcissist and being an a-hole. There's a huge difference between having narcissistic personality disorder and having what Kernberg called a narcissistic style. Many people have a narcissistic style. Many people are haughty, arrogant, obnoxious, disempathic to some extent, insensitive, trample over other people, driven, competitive, ambitious. I mean many people are like that, but they are not narcissists. They are not their apparatus, their machinery is intact. They have a self. They can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. They are empathic to some extent and so on. And so they have a narcissistic style, but they are not narcissists.
You mentioned that. That's absolutely mind-boggling what you're saying, and and I've listened and watched a lot of your talks, and the one thing that shocked me but then after thinking about it didn't surprise me at all said if a narcissist is in prison, everything disappears; they immediately conform because if they continued behaving that way they'd probably be dead in two weeks. So they obviously know what they're doing, but if they they are unable to stop themselves or there's some internal machine ticking and driving them, and then when they realize it's life or death for them, bang, they just they go right back into the mainstream of society. This raises um a serious moral moral conundrum, a moral dilemma. You see, in in clinical psychology, we tend to assume that mental illnesses are nobody's fault. I mean, you acquire a mental illness the way you acquire cancer or diabetes. You know, it's not your fault. You're a victim. In other words, mentally ill people are victims of their diseases. The same way a cancer patient is a victim of the cancer. Yet, it doesn't seem to be the case with narcissists. While definitely pathological narcissism is a very very serious mental illness, the father of the field Otto Kernberg suggested in the 70s that pathological narcissism is second only to schizophrenia as a mental illness. So it's a serious mental illness on the one hand. On the other hand, the behavioral control is absolute. Whereas in all other mental illnesses, the lack of behavioral control is a major clinical feature. These people can't help their behavior. Never mind how hard they try, how hard they how hard they want to, and so how much they want to, they can't control their behaviors. And that's a major distinguishing feature of mental illness. You know, that's why we have the insanity defense where we say they couldn't tell right from wrong or they couldn't control their impulses. Not so in the case of of narcissism where clearly the narcissist's behaviors, choices, and decisions. Many cognitive processes are utterly contextualized. They're utterly dependent on the environment. The narcissist can turn off all narcissistic behaviors in specific environments such as prison or the army. He can turn them off because they become counterproductive, self-defeating, and self-destructive. If a narcissist were to behave contemptuously, arrogantly, and so on in a prison cell together with eight other prisoners, he wouldn't leave. He won't leave to see the morning. So it seems that the narcissist is fully in control of behaviors. So what I'm suggesting is that in the case of pathological narcissism and I think only in the case of pathological narcissism and psychopathy, these are the only two cases. The behaviors are a choice. The behaviors absolutely can be turned on and off, can be controlled and so on so forth; not so the motivations, not so the psychology behind the behavior. So whereas the narcissist can make a decision with regards to what to do, the narcissist has no idea why he is doing what he's doing. So the lack of control in the case of pathological narcissism is not external, is not behavioral, it's internal and mainly emotional; mainly and in this respect Kernberg Otto Kernberg was right again when he suggested that narcissism is just another form of borderline. In borderline personality disorder we have what we call emotional dysregulation. It's when the borderline cannot control her emotions. Her emotions overwhelm her, drown her. Her emotions are in control. So we call it emotional disregard. It's a major clinical feature of borderline personality disorder. And I'm suggesting that suggesting it's the same in narcissism. In pathological narcissism, the narcissist is a hostage of his own or her own repressed emotions or explicit emotions, negative emotions such as rage or envy or whatever. However, the expression of these emotions via behavior, the behavioral translation of these emotions is under the control of the narcissist. The narcissist can hate you and decide to not attack you because you're bigger and stronger and you're going to send him to a hospital. But if you are weaker and smaller, he will attack you. So clearly the narcissist is utterly in control of his behaviors, which is not the case in borderline. Borderlines are not in control of their behaviors. They act out. Narcissism in this sense is the only mental illness we are aware of where behavior is utterly cognitively controlled on the one hand and at the same time there's a background of emotional dysregulation and extreme disregulation of of self-esteem and self-worth and self-confidence. So it's a disregulated internal world which somehow mysteriously gives rise to a highly regulated external behavior, and we have no precedent of this anywhere in psychiatry or clinical psychology. It's very reminiscent of quantum mechanics where you have a trillion zillion particles behaving behaving totally chaotically. There's a total chaos there, and they give rise to this laptop and to you and me. This chaos gives rise to order. We are structures. We are ordered. There's order in you and me. And yet if we if we go down deeper and deeper, another layer, we end up with elementary particles which are utterly chaotic which go every which way. I mean, there's no rhyme or reason or or logic or anything. It's a mess. And this mess gives rise to you and me. And we're highly organized. It's the same in narcissism. Internally, there's quantum mechanics. Internally, there's all these particles clashing, exploding, bloody mess. I mean, total disregulation. It's an enormous mess. However, externally the narcissist is very often goal oriented, is in control of his behaviors, is exploitative, even the abuse has has its own logic and and so on so forth. This discrepancy between what we call a semi or pseudo-organized personality and this internal dysregulation is unheard of. I'm not aware of any other disorder with this.
Incredible. Thank you for explaining that.
Oh, may I add one one insight? I'm terribly sorry. I apologize. I have this tendency. Um, I think the reason is the false self. The false self is an exoskeleton. The false self is like an external skeleton. It's an external structure which is highly orderly. It's it's reminiscent of a religion. It's it's highly structured, highly ordered, highly predictable, highly, and this structure is holding is containing the the ephemeral and chaotic and and protean mass which is the narcissist. So what we come across, what we interact with, what we see, what we observe is not the narcissist. It's the false self. That's to explain how this comes about.
Perfectly said. So if we were to look at the person or the people that that human being is interested in bringing into his or her realm, society has a way of calling them victims. However, I think that there is an element, perhaps a significant level of willingness for the so-called victim to enter into the realm, to kind of buy into whatever the fantasy is and lose him or herself in that relationship. Um, and I would imagine extricating oneself from that cult of what how whether it's a nation or or the entire world or a marriage would be almost impossible, to but possible because I don't think anything's impossible, but so that person isn't particularly a victim, but however when they're out of it, boy they're a shell of the person they were before. I just jumped all over the place, but that can you talk about kind of that other side of the coin?
Yeah. The only reason to call these people victims is because of the lack of self-disclosure. It's as if I were to sell you a stock. And I'll tell you this is this is a great company. It's going to have a fantastic future and so on so forth. Only I neglected to provide you with the financial statements. So, okay, you opted into the fantasy. So, so what I'm trying to say is that what the what the narcissist is is a conman. It's a con. The narcissist's fantasy is a con. Is a swindle. You're provided with just enough information to lure you in, to bait you. But then when you are in it, you begin to realize that you know you're way over your head and out of your depth and you're going to suffer greatly because of a lack of self-disclosure, imperfect information. Now, the way the narcissist baits you and lures you in is by pushing reflexive and instinctual buttons in you that are usually invisible to most people but become visible to the narcissist because he uses something which I was the first to describe called cold empathy. Cold empathy is a combination of cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy, but not emotional empathy, not affective empathy. So what the narcissist does, he scans you on the first meeting. He scans you, and he's able to decode you and decipher you. He knows you better than you've ever known yourself within minutes. Literally within minutes. It's a predator with an X-ray machine. Wow. And and then having honed in, having zeroed in on your weaknesses and and hopes and dreams and frailties and shrinks in your armor and fears and you know, having honed in on all these, he's able to penetrate your defenses, invade your mind and train you, and train you means synchronize your mind with your brain actually with his brain. That's a fact. That's not a conspiracy theory. And then he's able to take over you. It's a hostile takeover. But all this is done with insincerity, with a lack of disclosure, with partial information. So you're presented with a positive as with the alleged positive aspects of of the fantasy, but not with its costs, not with what are the minimum requirements from you to suspend your very existence and so on so forth. So in this sense, it's a con. And I'll give you one example, one instrument the narcissist uses to bait you or to lure you
In, especially in intimate and romantic relationships. But before I proceed, it's important to realize that the narcissist uses the strategy or the artifice of fantasy, shared fantasy in all interpersonal relationships. So it is not confined to intimate romantic relationships. It's in the workplace. It's with neighbors. It's in a political party. It's when becoming president. It's it's always the shared fantasy.
Narcissists are unable to relate to other people and interact with them except through fantasy because the narcissist does not exist. Narcissist is an absence masquerading as a presence. It's a piece of fiction. The false self is a concoction. It's a movie. It's a projection. It's not real. It's a fantas—it's a fantasm. It's a fatamogana. It's a mirage, you know. So, it can't rely on the truth. It cannot be founded on reality. It has to drag you away from both. It has to be false because the self is false. And the stories this false self spins are also false by definition. If the starting point is false, everything that follows is false.
So I'll give you an example. In an intimate relationship, in a romantic relationship, and I will use a heterosexual couple, although this equally applies to same-sex couples. The narcissist, when he comes across a potential for an intimate partner. And remember that as far as a narcissist is concerned, the intimate partner does not exist as a separate external object. She exists merely and only as a prop or an actress or a participant in his shared fantasy. So he is auditioning her. There's a process of auditioning, and he says, "Well, she's great. She's great for the role. You know, it's a role." So it's role-playing. She's great for the role. And now I need to convince her to abandon reality and herself, to negate everything she has known and lived hitherto, to give up on her family and friends, and to join me on the Robinson Crusoe island, which is my shared fantasy. Okay, how do I do that?
So what the narcissist does, he provides the potential intimate partner with access to a simulation of a suffering child. To the potential intimate partner, it appears as if the narcissist is a suffering child, broken, hurt, crying, in need of help and protection and a hug and a lot of love. This is irresistible. This is an irresistible proposition, not only to women, also to men. When you see a baby, what is your first instinct? To coo, to hug, to protect. You would be very protective of a baby, wouldn't you? And you're a man. The narcissist pretends to be a baby. It triggers all these protective maternal or parental instincts in the intimate, the potential intimate partner and hooks her. This is why it's very difficult to break up with a narcissist because you have a feeling that you're abandoning your child or at the very least abandoning a child, and not only just any child but a child in dire need; a child, and you are the only raft in this ocean, and you know you can't just let this child drown, and it's like the Titanic, you know, you need to save the kid. So that's an example of a bait. Narcissists use multiple baits of similar magnitude because this is a seriously invasive bait; what the bait I just described is seriously invasive, and it pushes really, really sensitive buttons. It's pretty—it's a merciless, it's a disempathic and merciless and pitiless uh bait, but narcissists have many more, many additional baits, and they use all of them in concert to attract you to the shared fantasy.
In this process, two things happen. First of all, the combination of all these baits is such that you develop an addiction. You become a junkie. You're unable to let go because so many aspects of you are being tackled, gratified, manipulated, remodeled, redefined. I mean, it engages the totality of you, and you're unable to walk away because you have a feeling that you are leaving yourself behind. There's a new definition of who you are. You are—you are rendered a new version of yourself, but it's not of yourself. You're rendered a false version of yourself. You—the shared fantasy demands that you abandon yourself. It's an act of abandonment. You abandon yourself, and you find a ready-made version of you which resembles you faintly, and you get attached to this version because the narcissist knows to manipulate you expertly. That's the first thing. And the second thing is the narcissist idealizes you. At the very beginning of the shared fantasy is a stage called love-bombing. Narcissist idealizes you. And then you fall in love with your idealized version. In this idealized version, you're a perfect entity. You're hyper-intelligent. You're drop-dead gorgeous. You're amazing. You're unprecedented. You're unique. You are—you're the world. You're godlike. It's very difficult to let go of this. It's very difficult to let go of this because that's exactly how a mother sees her baby. A mother in the first 6 months idealizes the baby exactly this way. Mothers would tell you, "Isn't he cute?" when the baby is the ugliest thing ever. You know, because raising babies sucks. I mean, don't tell anyone, but raising a child is the most horrendous task. I mean, it's slavery. The only way for the mother to survive this—because mothers tend to do it. Even in today's egalitarian world, women are in charge of raising children still. So the mother has to self-deceive, and she deceives herself by idealizing the baby. What the narcissist does to you, he—he acts as your mother. He idealizes you the same way a mother idealizes a baby. And you regress. You become an infant again. It's like a second childhood, and it's innocent, and it's perfect, and it's amazing, and it's oceanic, and it's all-consuming in a good way, and it's—you're immersed in it. You don't want to let go. I call it the dual mothership. You become the narcissist's mother because he presents this wounded child, this injured child, this child in need of protection. So, you become his mother. At the same time, he becomes your mother by idealizing you. He renders you a baby. He regresses you. You lose your faculties. You become a toddler. You're no longer an adult. That's why you lose your—you give up your agency, your independence, your personal autonomy. They're all gone because now you are 6 months old. You're a baby. And—and then the shared fantasy starts. And then within this shared fantasy, it's a cult. You're absolutely right. It's we against the world. And if you want to leave this cult, you need to be debriefed exactly as we debrief members of real cults, you know, big cults. So, you need to be debriefed. And if you're not debriefed, you will be lured back inexorably. You won't be able to stop yourself. You will go there again and again. Never mind how many times you break up. This process is called hoovering.
So this, in a nutshell, is a shared fantasy. It has many more devices and intricacies. It's an incredible thing, and it is important. There are two things that are important to understand. Number one, there is nothing you could have done and nothing you could have refrained from doing that would have changed the outcome of the shared fantasy, which is devaluation and discard. Nothing you could have done. Devaluation and discard are hardwired, built-in features of the shared fantasy which have nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. That's lesson number one. Lesson number two, the narcissist is as much a victim of the shared fantasy as you are. He's unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy to start with, but is also driven by the shared fantasy sometimes against his will. So he's as much a captive of the shared fantasy as you are. That's why narcissists do not gaslight. Narcissists cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. So how could they gaslight you? Narcissists do not future-fake. The promises the narcissist makes you—he believes in them fully. He has every intention to carry them out, to fulfill them. That later on he reneges on these promises is a feature of the shared fantasy, not a feature of the narcissist. What I'm trying to say, I think, is do not confuse either the narcissist or yourself with a shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is a third entity. There's you, there's a narcissist, and there is the shared fantasy which drives—which is driving both of you like a slaveholder. So you—it's a—it's always a manager but without the benefits. Okay.
Um, so one more question on that, and then I want to move and ask you a little bit about social media and—and because that is an important aspect of one of the reasons I wanted to speak with you. However, in advance of that, take the person, the part of the manager, if you will, and he or she is able to escape and somehow get away, break that bond, I would imagine that the process of rebuilding is not impossible, but it must leave that person with a sense of shame or a lost sense of self-belief. That's got to be hard. And that's probably why people stay in really horrible marriages or relationships and just die old people unfulfilled. I would—it—it must be almost impossible to get out, and that is—there—can you rebuild? Can you get back to 100—whatever 100% was before you met that person?
First of all, as a general principle, if you make a choice or a decision, it is because you consider the alternatives to be much worse. Otherwise, you would not have made this choice or decision. If you choose to stay in the shared fantasy, it's because you think, you believe that the alternatives are inferior to that. So, when you exit the shared fantasy, there is multiple grief. You grieve the child whose mother you have been. You grieve the mother that you have just lost. You grieve the loss of your own identity, who—who you used to be. You grieve the fantasy that now is replaced by intolerable, unbearable reality. You grieve, of course, the loss of the narcissist as a potential partner, as someone you loved, someone you were attached to or bonded with. And you grieve what could have been and would never be. You grieve their lost potential. And so on and so forth. And I can continue. There is multiple grief which does not exist in normal, healthy relationships. If you're in a healthy relationship, and you break up, that's one of the most heartbreaking, traumatic experiences imaginable; a grief, but it doesn't have this multiplicity of grief. You don't grieve your healthy partner as if he were your child. That doesn't happen in healthy relationships. So, and if you do, you've had a narcissistic relationship fantasy. So there's a grief you have to overcome this first. Then, having overcome the grief, you suddenly realize that you have been regressed. You've been thrown back in life to age two or three. You're—you're an infant. You're a toddler. You've lost most of your adult capacities, including the capacity to cope. And so you need to go through the stages once more. You need to grow up once more. You need to start from zero once more. You need to raise yourself. You need to be now your—you need to mother yourself, to be your own mother and raise yourself from scratch basically and become an adult again.
Next thing you discover, having surmounted this phase, next thing you discover is that the narcissist is in your head; there's a voice in your head, and we call it an introject that keeps talking to you, keeps criticizing you, keeps putting you down, keeps disagreeing with you, keeps—there's this voice, and it's ever-present. It wakes you up at night. It talks to you in the most unexpected moments. It—it—it depresses you. It causes your anxiety, and you can't get rid of it. Never mind what you do. You can't get rid of it. It's there. This—this is a result of the neuroscientific process called entraining. And so you need to—you need to delete or expunge this internal voice, this introject. And there—here you need professional help. Having gotten rid of the—of the internal voice, you now have the task of reconstituting your identity, who you used to be. And then you discover, I think, the most harrowing discoveries of all. You can never be the same again. There's no going back to the point of no return where you have entered the shared fantasy. It's a point of no return. There's no return. The only thing you can do is construct a new identity for yourself, acquire a new sense of self, and—and who you are and what makes you you, your beliefs, your values, your this or that. But it's going to be seriously contaminated and tainted by the experience you've had. For example, if you used to be a trusting person, it's very likely gone for good. You will never be a trusting person again. You will—you may even, in all likelihood, develop what we call paranoid ideation. You'll be a bit suspicious, a bit, you know, paranoid. Not a bad thing in today's world, but not who you used to be. Usually, if you—in your past used to be outgoing and extroverted, and you may discover that you've turned into an introvert. If you were happy-go-lucky, cheerful, joyful, and so you may discover that you're very depressive. These features are not going away. They are an integral part of who you are, the new you. There's a new normal, a new version of you. And regrettably, this narcissistic contagion, this infection that you have caught from the narcissist has impacts which are lifelong. The same way any disease has impacts which are lifelong. It doesn't mean that ultimately you will not feel, you know, fully functional and integrated in society and, you know, relatively content, and the prognosis is actually very good. If you are creative, if you take the initiative, you may even leverage your experience and, for example, help other people or—or write a movie script or whatever. You may—this experience is an asset. If you—you—it can look at it as a liability, but you can look at it as an asset. It all depends on your propensity. Are you—do you always see the glass half full or the glass half empty? This is who you are.
So I would say that the experience of the shared fantasy, exactly like obtaining money, becoming rich, amplifies who you are. We know that when you make a lot of money, you become a billionaire, it amplifies who you are. It doesn't change you. And similarly, when you've gone through this type of crisis or trauma, it tends to amplify who you are, and—in many respects, and of course it takes away the relational aspect. So, for example, I mentioned trust. Trust is not who you are. Trust is a relational aspect, like who you are in relation to other people. These aspects of damage—these aspects of damage. But who you are, you can remold yourself so that your experience becomes an asset, and you can leverage it, and it makes you a better person, more—more rounded, more experienced, more sage, wiser.
In a nutshell, I'm—I'm giving now a seminar, a three-day seminar in Skopje. So, I think it's time—the right time. I'm giving a three-day seminar in Skopje, North Macedonia. The seminar is free, utterly free, no entrance charge or anything fee. And uh the seminar deals with what science has to say on—well, science as far as psychology science, but what psychology, let's say, has to say on—on healing and recovery from narcissistic abuse. And I'm using the word science or psychology, the discipline of psychology, because most of the advice online by self-styled experts is—and I'm being very charitable—highly problematic. So I think it would behoove people to do some research among—in reputable sources, academic and—and other but reputable, well-established, and then—and that's what I try to do. I—I picked up all the literature, and I created this three-day seminar uh which teaches mainly clinicians, but also, you know, everyone—everyone is welcome, victims of abusers or whoever—um, I try—I would try to teach what a rigorous method of recovering and healing—because there is one, and I think it's—and I'm not—I'm not in it to make money—seminar is free, all—everything I do is free; my videos are free, absolutely everything I do is free. I never charge for seminars, lectures, ever. So, I—I'm trying to spread the word because I think—I think narcissistic abuse is possibly the most horrible experience imaginable because you came across a dark power whose main task was negating you, making you unexist, not unalive, but unexist. So, take away your existence. I don't think there's anything—not even divorce. Maybe the death of a child, I don't know. But I think it's—it's somewhere up there. And that's why I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse because I thought that it should be distinguished from all other types of abuse. All other types of abuse are goal-oriented. I want your money. I want to have sex with someone. I want you—they're goal-oriented, there—or, you know, the abuse could be sadistic, so I want to inflict pain on you, and I enjoy it; the abuse could be about control, the abuse—but it's about something; it's focus is laser-focused. Narcissistic abuse is all-pervasive, permeates everything, leaves nothing untouched, then it's about making you disappear; it's the main aim of narcissistic abuse. The second phase—the first phase is to test whether you would be a good mother or not. I'm going to abuse you, and if you stick around, you're a good mother. But the second phase is to make you disappear, leading to devaluation and discard. And so it's a reenactment, in the demented mind of a narcissist, a reenactment of early childhood conflicts which have nothing to do with you, and you're paying the price. And so I do think that we need to consider narcissistic abuse as a separate subdiscipline in abuse studies, not to compare it to any other type of abuse. They don't come close. Thanks for listening and watching. I will provide links to how you can find more information about Sam Vaknin and social media links where he can be reached. Do a good deed. Don't ask for anything in return. Make the world a better place, one tiny step at a time.