Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)

Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)

BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism, and Masochism) is both a sexual preference and a lifestyle. Many monogamous couples are into BSDM and it requires lots of trust in the partner and good communication skills to negotiate pitfalls and preferences.

One common mistake is that the submissive (or bottom) partner is a masochist. It is utter nonsense engendered by grossly inaccurate renditions of the scene by the likes of "Fifty Shades of Grey". In reality, many submissives are also dominant with other people or in different circumstances.

Masochism revolves around self-sabotage and self-destruction. The masochist has been taught from an early age to hate herself and consider herself unworthy of love and worthless as a person. Consequently, he or she is prone to self-destructive, punishing, and self-defeating behaviors. Though capable of pleasure and possessed of social skills, the masochist avoids or undermines pleasurable experiences. He does not admit to enjoying himself, seeks suffering, pain, and hurt in relationships and situations, rejects help and resents those who offer it. She actively renders futile attempts to assist or ameliorate or mitigate or solve her problems and predicaments.

These self-penalizing behaviors are self-purging: they intend to relieve the masochist of overwhelming, pent-up anxiety. The masochist's conduct is equally aimed at avoiding intimacy and its benefits: companionship and support.

Masochists tend to choose people and circumstances that inevitably and predictably lead to failure, disillusionment, disappointment, and mistreatment. Conversely, they tend to avoid relationships, interactions, and circumstances that are likely to result in success or gratification. They reject, disdain, or even suspect people who consistently treat them well. Masochists find caring, loving persons sexually unattractive.

The masochist typically adopts unrealistic goals and thus guarantees underachievement. Masochists routinely fail at mundane tasks, even when these are crucial to their own advancement and personal objectives and even when they adequately carry out similar assignments on behalf of others.

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Men are giving up on women and resorting to other men for intimacy and sex.

Homosexuality, homoeroticism, same sex attraction, and MSM (Men having Sex with Men) have been increasing year on year all over the world. This is not only the outcome of gay practices becoming more acceptable. In my view, this is because there are no women left

Women dress like men, curse like men, drink like men, are as promiscuous and aggressive as men, are as narcissistic and dysempathic as men, cheat on their spouses and intimate partners at the same rate as men do, have become primary breadwinners, are taking over many traditional blue collar and white collar male vocations, are single mothers, and are better educated than men.

Unigender: there are only men with penises and men with vaginas. No women. So, some men go for the original - why opt for the imitation?

Freud predicted all this mayhem inadvertently when he described "penis envy". He said that women feel incomplete without the male appendage and unconsciously attempt to emulate men.

But what even he could not have predicted is the convergence of gender roles and the resulting "gender vertigo". In a world without women, homosexuality is an increasingly rational choice: the genitalia are familiar, the emotions and reactive patterns clearer and more predictable, tolerance is higher, and mutual expectations way more realistic and thus much easier to gratify

Consequently, men are ignoring and discarding women in droves and in a variety of ways. Most women now go without a man for years at a time and are reduced to picking up strangers in bars for one night stands.

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Narcissists find it nearly impossible to locate willing sources of secondary supply (admiring and subservient "intimate" partners). For two reasons:

1. The rising awareness of narcissistic abuse which, ironically, started with my pioneering work in 1995.

Women have been given a toolkit to spot narcissists and avoid them. They were also advised to go no contact with narcissists already in their lives.

2. Women themselves have become much more grandiose and narcissistic. They compete with male narcissists for narcissistic supply and mistreat narcissistic men in the same ways these men had abused them previously.

The result is a sea of solitary narcissists in desperate search online and in developing countries for willing and submissive counterparts. In vain: the Internet has rendered the entire world a global village. This is one time the narcissist regrets that his reputation precedes him.

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Some cultures do not have a word for "emotion". Others equate emotions with physical sensations, a-la James-Lange, who said that external stimuli cause bodily changes which result in emotions (or are interpreted as such by the person affected). Cannon and Bard differed only in saying that both emotions and bodily responses were simultaneous. An even more far-fetched approach (Cognitive Theories) was that situations in our environment foster in us a GENERAL state of arousal. We receive clues from the environment as to what we should call this general state. For instance, it was demonstrated that facial expressions can induce emotions, apart from any cognition.

A big part of the problem is that there is no accurate way to verbally communicate emotions. People are either unaware of their feelings or try to falsify their magnitude (minimize or exaggerate them). Facial expressions seem to be both inborn and universal. Children born deaf and blind use them. They must be serving some adaptive survival strategy or function. Darwin said that emotions have an evolutionary history and can be traced across cultures as part of our biological heritage. Maybe so. But the bodily vocabulary is not flexible enough to capture the full range of emotional subtleties humans are capable of. Another nonverbal mode of communication is known as body language: the way we move, the distance we maintain from others (personal or private territory). It expresses emotions, though only very crass and raw ones.

And there is overt behaviour. It is determined by culture, upbringing, personal inclination, temperament and so on. For instance: women are more likely to express emotions than men when they encounter a person in distress. Both sexes, however, experience the same level of physiological arousal in such an encounter. Men and women also label their emotions differently. What men call anger – women call hurt or sadness. Men are four times more likely than women to resort to violence. Women more often than not will internalize aggression and become depressed.

More: https://samvak.tripod.com/sense.html

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May 1 (May Day) was a pagan holiday in many cultures long before the first congress (1889) of the Second International, a socialist gathering, appropriated it.

May 1 was being celebrated by the Celts. They considered it the day when the supernatural invaded the earthly and placed living things in great jeopardy. To protect their precious livestock, they used to herd it between two bonfires in what became known as the Beltane (or Belltane) festival. The Romans honored the spring goddess Flora on May Day.

May 1 is still celebrated throughout the countries of the former communist bloc and in many other places in Europe and Asia as a kind of Labor Day while in North America, Labor Day is celebrated in September.

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I have a riotous, subtle, ironic, and sharpened sense of humour. I can be self-deprecating and self-effacing. I do not recoil from making my dilapidated Ego the target of my own barbs. Yet, this is true only when I have Narcissistic Supply aplenty. Narcissistic Supply - attention, adulation, admiration, applause, fame, celebrity, notoriety - neuter the sting of my self-directed jokes. In my more humorous moments I can present myself as the opposite of what is widely known to be true. I can unfold a tale of fatuous decisions followed by clumsy misbehaviour - yet, no one would take me to be fatuous or clumsy. It is as though my reputation protects me from the brunt of my own jocular modesty. I can afford to be magnanimously forgiving of my own shortcomings because they are so outweighed by my gifts and by my widely known achievements or traits.

Still, the gist of what I once wrote stands: "A narcissist rarely engages in self-directed, self-deprecating humour. If he does, he expects to be contradicted, rebuked and rebuffed by his listeners ('Come on, you are actually quite handsome!'), or to be commended or admired for his courage or for his wit and intellectual acerbity ('I envy your ability to laugh at yourself!'). As everything else in a narcissist's life, his sense of humour is deployed in the interminable pursuit of Narcissistic Supply."

I am completely different when I lack Narcissistic Supply or when in search of sources of such supply. Humour is always an integral part of my charm offensive. But, when Narcissistic Supply is deficient, it is never self-directed. Moreover, when deprived of supply, I react with hurt and rage when I am the butt of jokes and humorous utterances. I counter-attack ferociously and make a complete arse of myself.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/journal39.html

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Punishing the wayward narcissist is a veritable catch-22.

A jail term is useless as a deterrent if it only serves to focus attention on the narcissist. Being infamous is second best to being famous - and far preferable to being ignored. The only way to effectively punish a narcissist is to withhold narcissistic supply from him and thus to prevent him from becoming a notorious celebrity.

Given a sufficient amount of media exposure, book contracts, talk shows, lectures, and public attention - the narcissist may even consider the whole grisly affair to be emotionally rewarding. To the narcissist, freedom, wealth, social status, family, vocation - are all means to an end. And the end is attention. If he can secure attention by being the big bad wolf - the narcissist unhesitatingly transforms himself into one. Lord Archer, for instance, seems to be positively basking in the media circus provoked by his prison diaries.

The narcissist does not victimise, plunder, terrorise and abuse others in a cold, calculating manner. He does so offhandedly, as a manifestation of his genuine character. To be truly "guilty" one needs to intend, to deliberate, to contemplate one's choices and then to choose one's acts. The narcissist does none of these.

Thus, punishment breeds in him surprise, hurt and seething anger. The narcissist is stunned by society's insistence that he should be held accountable for his deeds and penalized accordingly. He feels wronged, baffled, injured, the victim of bias, discrimination and injustice. He rebels and rages.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/corporatenarcissism.html

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Professional victimhood is fast becoming a pandemic, mediated by social media and other online services.

Being a perpetual and proud victim as a pivotal part of one's identity serves many important psychological needs from attention seeking to possessing a sense of accomplishment. Surviving abuse is often the only notable feat of such sempiternal sacrificial lambs.

Gradually, ingrained and all-pervasive victimhood begins to shape behavior. Many victims themselves become abusively self-righteous and intolerant of others.

Victimhood is a potent organizing principle. It imbues one's personal history with meaning, sense, and purpose; accounts for and excuses failures and setbacks; and predicts one's future trajectory with uncanny accuracy.

Victim-stance is often aided and abetted by self-interested or misguidedly sympathetic friends, life coaches, counsellors, therapists, social workers, law enforcement, courts, guardians and other parties. Thus sanctioned and sanctified by the agents of society, victimhood becomes entrenched and, therefore, an ideology.

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Whenever the narcissist does experience emotions – rage, envy, sadness, craving, dependence – he lives to regret it. The narcissist’s emotions are invariably negative and frequently result in self-defeat and self-destruction. Gradually, the narcissist learns to withdraw ever deeper, to disengage ever more thoroughly, to numb and deaden himself, and to render himself a rigid robot-like zombie.

The narcissist's positive emotions come bundled with very negative ones. This is the outcome of frustration and the consequent transformations of aggression. This frustration is connected to the Primary Objects of the narcissist's childhood (parents and caregivers). Instead of being provided with the unconditional love that he craved, the narcissist was subjected to totally unpredictable and inexplicable bouts of temper, rage, searing sentimentality, envy, prodding, infusion of guilt and other unhealthy parental emotions and behaviour patterns.

The narcissist reacted by retreating to his private world, where he is omnipotent and omniscient and, therefore, immune to such vicious vicissitudes. He stashed his vulnerable True Self in a deep mental cellar – and outwardly presented to the world a False Self.

But bundling is far easier than unbundling. The narcissist is unable to evoke positive feelings without provoking negative ones. Gradually, he becomes phobic: afraid to feel anything, lest it be accompanied by fearsome, guilt inducing, anxiety provoking, out of control emotional complements.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq33.html

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The morning after a torrid one night stand, replete with countless deep French kisses, the man offers his nocturnal partner a tame farewell kiss on the lips. She recoils in horror: "What are you doing? Get away from me!" How to account for this ostensibly irrational behavior?

Signaling.

French kisses during casual sex are a part of the total physical intimacy engendered during the encounter but have no emotional correlate. One night stands essentially amount to using the body of an animate partner - frequently, a stranger - to masturbate with. There are zero feelings, except maybe some generalized tenderness and a fuzzy affection which dissipate the minute the act is over.

In the light of day and out of the purely sexual context, a kiss carries a message, it constitutes a meaningful signal regarding the existence of underlying reciprocated emotional intimacy. It is misleading and coercive, an intrusion on sacred personal space and, therefore, a form of harassment.

Every single human action, gesture, and movement carry multiple, context-dependent semiotic connotates and denotates. Sex is not an exception.

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Grandiosity is a self-defeating cognitive deficit: the more the narcissist fails, the more delusional he becomes. Fantasy - a psychological defense mechanism - gradually becomes the sole reality of the collapsed narcissist.

Healthy, normal folk modify their self-perception & modulate their sense of self-worth to accord and be commensurate with real life accomplishments or setbacks.

Unable to accommodate & integrate challenges to his godlike False Self, the narcissist retreats into an inner realm which is almost psychotic in its absence of a reality test.

This divorce from the world leads the narcissist to make spectacularly bad and self-destructive decisions.

The narcissist's grandiosity is entrenched because it serves multiple psychological needs and functions. One of them is to mask the fact that, far from being admired and adulated, the gullible and self-preoccupied narcissist is derided, humiliated, mocked, taunted, betrayed, abused, cheated on, robbed, and utterly disrespected by everyone in his life and by those who merely cross paths with him - often to his face. Yet, he ignores this constant molestation and collaborates with the charade.

Ironically, it is precisely because of his grandiosity that the narcissist has no trace of self-respect or personal boundaries. Being possessed of cold empathy and sometimes high intelligence, the narcissist is usually aware of what transpires around him: his woman is cheating on him with other men or flirting in his presence, his business partner is robbing him blind, his audience is turning a cold, contemptuous shoulder to his interminable ramblings.

Yet, he is afraid to challenge his molesters because if he does, he would be confronted with the fact that he is perceived and treated by everyone as a bumbling fool of a clown. Such a realization will denude him of his narcissistic defenses and drive him even to suicidal psychosis. So, he keeps mum, denied that he is being mistreated, and obstinately maintains the delusion that he is revered in the face of a tsunami of evidence to the contrary.

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Trying to help an international conference out of the beaten path lift off the ground.

I am a member of the Organizing Committees of more than 60 international conferences, summits, meetups, and congresses in 50 cities around the world on topics of mental health, psychology, psychiatry, brain studies, and neuroscience. Details here:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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Narcissists lecture, never talk; seek to impress, never to communicate; ignore other people's input or actively suppress it rather than listen.

The narcissist is so invested and immersed in extracting narcissistic supply from his interlocutors preferably by dazzling them with his brilliance, that he is oblivious to their body language, verbal cues, interjections, events around him, or the environment at large.

The narcissist expostulates and pontificates, opines and defines, edifies and rectifies, rants and raves and rambles for hours on end, ceaselessly and breathlessly - and always from a position of pompous self-importance and verbose superiority and faux authority.

People - his mum and numbed audience - find his exhibitionistic, delusional, and coercive grandiosity so repellent and off-putting that they shun his unilateral company altogether.

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The somatic narcissist regards his body as an object to be sculpted and honed (via extreme diets, multiple cosmetic surgeries, bodybuilding, or weightlifting). When coupled with psychopathic tendencies, the somatic appropriates other people’s bodies and treats these as “raw materials” to be dismembered, tampered with, altered, invaded, or otherwise abused.

Somatic narcissists are often portrayed as sex addicts or histrionic. They are thought to possess “manic defenses” (avoidance of feelings of discomfort, loneliness, and inadequacy by seeking states of hyperactivity, arousal, and excitement). They are also prone to cognitive biases such as sexual overperception (misinterpreting even innocuous female behaviors as indications of sexual interest and flirtation, a mild form of erotomania)

But really somatic narcissists derive their narcissistic supply not so much from the sex act as from the process of securing it: the conspiracies and assignations, the chase and conquest, the subjugation and habituation of their targets, and even from dumping and discarding their prey, once having extracted the attention and admiration they had sought. These extracurricular activities endow them with a sense of omnipotence and all-pervasive control. Their sway over their paramours and would-be lovers proves to them (and to others) their uniqueness, desirability and irresistibility.

Somatic narcissists also seek almost compulsively to induce their partners to climax. Orgasms – their frequency, duration, and intensity - are a measure of virility and “success” and, therefore, a form of narcissistic supply.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/journal21.html

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Interview granted to Forbes Magazine February 2007

Q. How do you define prodigy?

A. A prodigy (or Wunderkind in German) is a young, precocious person whose achievements far exceed the accomplishments typical of his peers and age group.

Q. There seems to be a lot of attention paid to child prodigies, but what happens when these folks mature? Do many mature into adult leaders in their fields? What are the biggest challenges facing child prodigies as they age?

A. Recent studies seem to indicate that prodigies grow up to become narcissistic under-achievers.

Q. Why is it that most child prodigies fall into the fields like math, chess or music, rather than a field like literature?

A. Fields like literature require maturity and life experience. Prodigies, no matter how gifted, rarely possess the requisite emotional spectrum, an acquaintance with the nuances and subtleties of human relationships, or the accumulated knowledge that comes from first-hand exposure to the ups and downs of reality.

In contrast, the manipulation of symbols - in mathematics, music, or chess - does not require anything except the proper neurological "hardware and software" and access to widely available objective knowledge.

In a way, prodigies can be compared to computers: both excel in symbol manipulation and fail to impress in other, more fuzzy undertakings.

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Narcissists hate details. They are too self-important and their lives too cosmically significant to be wasted on frivolous trifles and trivia. They are above the fray of the quotidian and concern themselves with strategy, not tactics. They lay out in sweeping, synoptic terms the big picture and leave it to lesser mortals to fill out the yawning gaps and iron out the glaring inconsistencies.

Any attempt to involve the narcissist in the minutia of decision-making and the give and take of human endeavor is perceived by him as a humiliating, ill-intentioned, and deliberate challenge to his grandiose self-perception (his False Self). The narcissist's unwillingness to dirty his hands with the routine, the pedestrian, and the mundane virtually guarantee that his harebrained schemes, hastily laid plans, and convoluted stratagems will go awry and end in failure.

His coercive delegation of tasks, the cascade of often contradictory instructions, the grandiosity and aggressive superiority that characterize his expectations and fantasies - all these alienate and infuriate his bosses, collaborators, partners, suppliers, customers, and employees as well as his intimate partners.

Some of them end up acting passive-aggressively and spitefully undermining the joint enterprise. Others, worn by the narcissist's aloofness and godlike detachment from reality, simply give up: they go through the motions robotically, awaiting the inevitable meltdown.

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I never was a child. I was a "Wunderkind", the answer to my mother's prayers and intellectual frustration. A human computing machine, a walking-talking encyclopaedia, a curiosity, a circus freak. I was observed by developmental psychologists, interviewed by the media, endured the envy of my peers and their pushy mothers. I constantly clashed with figures of authority because I felt entitled to special treatment, immune to prosecution and superior. It was a narcissist's dream. Abundant Narcissistic Supply - rivers of awe, the aura of glamour, incessant attention, open adulation, country-wide fame.

I refused to grow up. In my mind, my tender age was an integral part of the precocious miracle that I became, my only asset and sole competitive edge. One looks much less phenomenal and one's exploits and achievements are much less awe-inspiring at the age of 58, I thought. Better stay young forever and thus secure my Narcissistic Supply. Plus, my life is my parents' punishment. Childless and a sad failure, I keep hoping against hope and counterfactually that they care enough to be hurting now.

So, I wouldn't grow up. I never took out a driver's licence. I do not have children. I very rarely have sex (15 sexless years constituted the last arid stretch). I make it a point to not settle down in one place or one domicile (this one is my 15th country in fewer than 40 years). I reject intimacy. I have no friends, not even one. Until 2011, I lived only in rented apartments.

In short: I refrain from adulthood and adult chores. I have no adult skills. I assume no adult responsibilities. I expect indulgence and fawning admiration from others. I am petulant and haughtily spoiled. I am capricious, infantile and emotionally labile and immature. To wit: I am a 58 year old spoiled rotten decrepit brat.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/journal22.html

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Russia's post-1998 fledgling middle class is described as young, materialistic, consumerist, well-educated, well-traveled, community-orientated, entrepreneurial and suffused with work ethic and a desire for social mobility. It is almost as if the recurrent economic crises serve as a purgatory, purging sins and sinners alike and creating the conditions for the revival of a healthier, longer-lived, bourgeoisie.

But being middle class is a state of mind more than a measure of wealth. It is an all-encompassing worldview, a set of values, a code of conduct, a list of goals, aspirations, fantasies and preferences and a catalog of moral do's and don'ts. This is where transition, micromanaged by western "experts" failed.

The mere exposure to free markets was supposed to unleash innovation and entrepreneurship in the long-oppressed populations of east Europe. When this prescription - known as "shock therapy" - bombed, the West tried to engender a stable, share-holding, business-owning, middle class by financing small size enterprises. It then proceeded to strengthen and transform indigenous institutions.

None of it worked. Transition had no grassroots support and its prescriptive - and painful - nature caused wide resentment and obstruction. When the dust settled, Russia found itself with a putative - and puny - middle class. But it was an anomalous beast, very different from its ostensible European or American counterparts.

To start with, Russia's new middle class is a distinct minority.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/brief-middleclass01.html

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I am so intolerant of uncertainty and anxiety that I abuse people and push them to the limit in order to reveal their true characters, vices, intentions, and weaknesses, destructively stress testing them. I engineer situations and escalate conflicts so as to expose the facts and separate them from the hype.

Knowing what's real and what is not provides me with a sense of relief and safety in a hostile world where people are never what they seem to be and impression management blends into deception.

Ironically, these unconscious procedures often result in life-threatening pain as I push my women to ostentatiously cheat on me, my colleagues to volubly hate and undermine me, audiences to recoil at my sadistic and abrasive harshness, and institutions to persecute me. So, I trade agony and frustration for erstwhile anxiety.

Anxiety can have genetic roots or be related to medical conditions (example: alcoholism). But some anxiety is psychogenic.

A fatalistic fear of being liable to lose control over one's self and one's life produces anxiety. So do dissonances: simultaneously holding two contradictory thoughts, beliefs, or emotions (ambivalence) about oneself, others, and the world. Automatic thoughts can result in anxiety, too.

No one can tolerate anxiety for long. People seek to reduce and ameliorate it in numerous ways: compulsions, addictions, acting out, self-destructiveness, abusive conduct, and psychological defense mechanisms. Alas, in our fast-paced, interconnected, shape-shifting, amoral world, anxiety is all but guaranteed - as are the dysfunctional behaviors that fail to cope with it.

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This just arrived from @sabinabozjak Thank you so much for this heartwarming gift!

I look very different now outwardly, but the portrait captures my essence well.

We are all acquainted with the tales - many apocryphal, some real - of how art critiques, curators, collectors and buyers were fooled into purchasing "works of art" created by monkeys. The animals "painted" by dipping their paws in pigments and running to and fro over empty canvasses.

There are numerous such striking examples of the fluidity of what constitutes art and the dubious expertise of art "professionals"

There is no other masterpiece so studied, analyzed and scrutinized as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Yet, when it was stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1912, forgers passed 6 replicas as the original, selling them for a fortune. The painting was rediscovered in 1915.

Henri Matisse is revered as the father of Fauvism and of modern painting in general. Yet, one of his more famous tableaux, Le Bateau (The Boat), hung upside down for 2 months in 1961 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Not one of the art critics, journalists, 116,000 visitors, or curators has noticed it.

Perhaps the most famous case of artistic misjudgment involves Vincent van Gogh whose work has hitherto fetched the highest prices ever paid in auctions. Despite his connections with leading painters, gallery owners, art professors and critics - his brother owned a successful art dealership in Paris - van Gogh sold only one piece while alive: "Red Vineyard at Arles." His brother bought it from him. By the time he died he had painted 750 canvasses and 1600 drawings.

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In the concentration camp called Home,

we report in striped pajamas

to the barefoot commandant,

Our Mother orchestrating

our daily holocaust.

Burrowing her finger- -nails through my palms,

a scream frozen between us,

a stalactite of terror

in the green caves of her eyes

there, sentenced to forced labour:

to mine her veins of hatred

to shovel her contempt

to pile scorn upon scorn

beating(s) a path.

At noon, Our Mother

leads us to the chambers

naked, ripples of flesh

she turns on the gas

and watches our hunger

as her food devours us.

Poetry of Healing and Abuse https://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html

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Jewish mysticism believes that humans have a major role: fixing the results of a cosmic catastrophe, the shattering of the divine vessels through which the infinite divine light poured forth to create our finite world. If Nature is determined to a predominant extent by its contained intelligences, then it may well be teleological.

Indeed, goal-orientated behaviour (or behavior that could be explained as goal-orientated) is Nature's hallmark. The question whether automatic or intelligent mechanisms are at work, really deals with an underlying issue, that of consciousness. Are these mechanisms self-aware, introspective? Is intelligence possible without such self-awareness, without the internalized understanding of what it is doing?

Kant's third and the fourth dynamic antinomies deal with this apparent duality: automatism versus intelligent acts.
The third thesis relates to causation which is the result of free will as opposed to causation which is the result of the laws of nature (nomic causation)

The antithesis is that freedom is an illusion and everything is pre-determined. So, the third antinomy is really about intelligence that is intrinsic to Nature (deterministic) versus intelligence that is extrinsic to it (free will)

The fourth thesis deals with a related subject: God, the ultimate intelligent creator. It states that there must exist, either as part of the world or as its cause a Necessary Being. There are compelling arguments to support both the theses and the antitheses of the antinomies.

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Abuse and attachment, trauma and bonding form parabolic relationships: up to the vertex (the low point of the parabola), one member of the pair (abuse, trauma) sustains and enhances the other (attachment, bonding). Beyond that point, the former weakens and undermines the latter.

The exact location of the vertex depends on individual experience, personal history, personality, cultural and social mores, peer input, and expectations.

To simplify:

Up to a point, people - men and women - are attracted to abusers. When the maltreatment reaches the traumatic vertex, the emotional reaction flips and the hitherto victims are repelled by the gratuitous cruelty and are, therefore, ejected and catapulted out of the dyad, couple, or bond.

This means that good guys and decent women don't stand a chance in the sexual and relationship marketplace. They always amount to distant and unattractive second or rebound choices.

Nice guys and solid, stable gals are there to pick up the pieces, relegated to the unglamorous role of the sanitation workers of lopsided romance.

They are rarely anything more than pedestrian providers and co-parents or, if they luck out, intimate companions in between their spouses's extramarital affairs with other, more abusive and, therefore, more thrilling and appealing others.

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Pathological narcissism has been compared to Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). By definition, the narcissist has at least two selves. His personality is very primitive and disorganized.

Living with a narcissist is a nauseating experience not only because of what he is - but because of what he is NOT. He is not a fully formed human - but a dizzyingly kaleidoscopic gallery of mercurial images, which melt into each other seamlessly. It is incredibly disorienting.

It is also exceedingly problematic. Promises made by the narcissist are easily disowned by him. His plans are ephemeral. His emotional ties - a simulacrum. Most narcissists have one island of stability in their life (spouse, family, their career, a hobby, their religion, country, or idol) - pounded by the turbulent currents of a dishevelled existence.

Thus, to invest in a narcissist is a purposeless, futile and meaningless activity. To the narcissist, every day is a new beginning, a hunt, a new cycle of idealization or devaluation, a newly invented self.

There is no accumulation of credits or goodwill because the narcissist has no past and no future. He occupies an eternal and timeless present. He is a fossil caught in the frozen lava of a volcanic childhood.

The narcissist does not keep agreements, does not adhere to laws, and regards consistency and predictability as demeaning traits. The narcissist hates something one day - and consumes it passionately the next.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/journal20.html

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I am this inimitable combination: a selfless healer & a narcissistic sadist.

I made my pioneering work on narcissism available FREE since 1995. It helped transform the lives of millions around the world & spawned thousands of imitators, wannabes, & some excellent contributors.

I have cured dozens of clients with my Cold Therapy. These patients swear by me & by my methods.

Yet, in my private life & in my interactions with one & sundry online & offline I am a deliberately vicious bruiser & a habitual psychopathic abuser (when I am not cracking jokes or acting the guru)

I increasingly find this duality disconcerting. The dissonance is too great. I no longer understand myself fully: Is this a case of a multiple personality or merely the unique cocktail that is me? I suffer from several personality disorders, including Borderline, as well as depression. Is this why I am one minute angel & the next minute the Devil?

Lability reflects emotional dysregulation: being overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of tidal waves of unbridled feelings. But in my case, my entire personality shifts on a dime. It is not mere narcissistic rage, a common response to challenged grandiosity. My core evaporates & a whole new being emerges from the abyss.

People sink into depression on first meeting me & then flee in horror. This is because they sense a cosmic void coupled with an extreme and potentially malevolent disembodied intelligence. When we, as a species, finally make contact with extraterrestrial aliens, we are likely to react the same way. There is something in me that is not human at all.

I share a resume with Hannibal Lecter of "Silence of the Lambs": we are both geniuses, shrinks, & psychopathic narcissists. But Lecter & Hitler are discernibly HUMAN: caricatures & extrapolations of traits & behaviors that all humans share. Evil is profoundly & manifestly human.

I am not. I am a howling emptiness, an absence, a depersonalized overpowering intellect. I am a machine of sorts, an emanation, an apparition.

And no one is more taken aback & terrified by this emerging realization than me.

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People are usually awed by my erudition, synoptic view, and analytic capacity. But they also consider me to be a pompous asshole, full of himself, insensate, a quintessential loser, and inordinately stupid and delusional.

The women in my life do not hesitate to pick up men in my presence and spend the night with them. Or vanish and reappear at will. Or humiliate me in public or in private. Or undermine my work. Or dump me cruelly. Or commit any set of transgressions that no other man would tolerate. Men ostentatiously and overtly steal both my ideas and my women and then proceed to mock and taunt me to my face. Everyone lies to me repeatedly, not bothering even to hide the fact that they are prevaricating. But, the majority simply ignore or shun my stifling presence.

Ironically, it is precisely because of my grandiosity that I have no trace of self-respect or personal boundaries. I am afraid to challenge my molesters because if I do I would be confronted with the fact that I am perceived and treated by everyone as a bumbling fool of a clown. Such a realization will denude me of my narcissistic defenses and drive me to suicidal psychosis. So, I keep mum, deny that I am being mistreated, and obstinately maintain the delusion that I am revered in the face of a tsunami of evidence to the contrary.

Grandiosity is a self-defeating cognitive deficit: the more the narcissist fails, the more delusional he becomes.

I failed in every single thing I have ever attempted to do, in every type of vocation or avocation or business, in multiple countries on 5 continents - even though I am almost always granted the best conceivable start.

My work has spawned multiple cottage industries and memes in several fields, but I never benefitted from it. I mentored and shaped young men who became prime ministers and business tycoons in several countries but did not extract a red cent out of these serendipities.

A more colossal cockup of a life I cannot imagine.

Yet, it took 42 years for this realization to sink in and intrude upon my firewall of grandiosity. I have been called a loser and a fool on more than one occasion but proceeded to devalue the sources of such truths.

Similarly, I botched both my marriages unspeakably. Over the decades, dozens of women I had dated or who merely met me were reduced to fleeing within hours or days of the encounter, often to the arms of other men they knew or even with total strangers, in a desperate attempt to extricate themselves from my claustrophobic presence. The longest of them lasted 18 torturous months.

And yet , counterfactually, I still believe that women find me irresistible by virtue of my genius mind and are willing to overlook the rest of the distinctly repulsive package and the toxic miasma that I am.

No matter how many countervailing bits of information or biographical incidents are proffered by the Universe - my surrealistic grandiosity prevails.

Notoriety carries a devastating price. 100,000,000 people visited my websites and watched my videos since 1995.

Here is what women the world over know about me. This prejudiced information either prevents them from making any contact or renders them paranoid and hypervigilant to the point of bolting within an hour or two of meeting me, having read into my words and actions their fears and biases about who I am.

So what do these women think they know regarding my personality and history?

1. That I am a monster psychopathic narcissist with no hope for change or healing.

2. I am old and neglected (fat and flabby)

3. I am a fraudster and ex-convict with a fake diploma from a mill. This is untrue: my Ph.D. is very real and I hold professorships in several academic institutions in a few countries. I hold additional academic graduate degrees that I rarely mention in public.

4. I am poor (or at least not fabulously rich)

5. My Genius is so extreme that it borders on insanity. Women are afraid that I will consider then intellectually inferior if not outright stupid. They try to assert themselves and this makes them look derisively grandiose.

6. I have a murky past.

7. I am a liar (because of 1)

8. I am married to a very unhappy woman who seems to dislike me (as she herself says in multiple documentaries and videos)

9. I am an asexual cerebral (as I admit in many videos). This is of course the outcome of ignorance: all cerebral narcissists go through somatic phases and, when they do, they bring to bear their creativity and inventiveness on their sexuality.

Only women who have known me up close for months see a different side of me that defies almost all the points above (well, I am flabby). But the catch-22 is that my reputation so precedes me that no one dares come close enough for long enough to find that out.

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The smile of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is a Victorian romantic invention. The Victorians idealized women and romanticized them as fragile, mysterious, and forbidden objects. But, for 300 years, the Mona Lisa was considered by art critics - from the contemporaneous Vasari onwards - as a masterpiece of realism and innovation. It influenced painters throughout the centuries, from Raphael through Caravaggio to Rembrandt.

This tiny painting on a poplar wooden plank (canvas came later) crammed numerous new techniques into its claustrophobic space:

1. Monumental background, combining, as was the ideal of the Renaissance, the works of Man (bridges, roads) and wild Nature of which Man is a part. Hints of classicism comprising the human form and acts of creation, both human and divine.

2. Sfumato: using graded tones and shading to yield a misty, hazy, and soft look that denotes timelessness and ethereal unearthliness.

The family name by marriage of the real Mona Lisa was Gioconda which means "happiness". Hence her smile. Da Vinci commonly introduced into his works of art such allusions.

The painting, started by the artist in 1506 (or maybe 1513) was completed by his apprentices after his death in 1519. It had a turbulent history over the centuries: bought by a French king, it occupies its own room in the Louvre palace. The eyebrows and eyelashes faded over the years. It was stolen in 1911 (police suspected Picasso), mutilated, caricatured, and puzzled over by generations which read into it their fantasies and fears. Men committed suicide, having fallen in love with her and she still receives ardent fan mail.

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My mother was broken, I now realize from the hindsight vantage point of my 58 years. She tortured me physically and psychologically as both toddler and teen, for 12 harrowing horror years in unspeakable ways.

I remember vividly that, even as a 4 year old, I wanted to save her, to fix her, to put her back together, to make her whole and happy. She had such a beautiful smile and a way with storytelling and fun games. In between her monster phases. Gradually, the darkness took over and there was nothing left of her and I failed to rescue the first significant woman in my life. I haven't seen her since 1995.

Since then, I have been trying to mend broken women in all my Humpty-Dumpty relationships. Trying to undo the damage and salvage the goods. Trying to salve their gaping wounds with affection, attention, love, patience, and hope. Save them from their jagged selves.

But, of course, it was and is all hopeless. These women keep shattering my heart, sometimes to the point of suicidal ideation. They cannot help it. They are not evil. They are just not all there, no self to control, bundles of raw impulses and tidal emotions in which they drown silently, like a frozen scream.

I pick up the shards - mine and theirs - and move on in my Quixotic quest, a knight errant in an arrant night, my weapons rusted and crumbling, my step heavy with years, my vision clouded with tears. But I keep trying because what else can I do? My mother needs me, trapped in her abysmal soul, distressed. I cannot ignore her siren call. Even when it ineluctably spells doom.

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I learned about the human heart from the greatest and the best: it beats 60-100 times a minute; more than 100,000 times a day or close to 40,000,000 a year. Every minute or so, it pumps 6 litres of blood throughout our body - 8-9 red tonnes a day, 3500 scarlet tonnes in a typical year. If you live to be 80, that is like moving around 250,000 tonnes of thick, viscous liquid: the capacity of 25,000 10-tonne tankers.

But where in all this is the exhilaration of love, the stabbing pain of being cheated on? The heartbreak of being abandoned? The agony of your child having a terminal illness? The fears and hopes and shattered dreams and the terrible beauty of a life consumed? Where, in the human heart, this pneumatic wonder, are we?

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In my 20s and 30s I kept choosing women who were guaranteed to abandon me emotionally and then cheat on me with other men: borderlines, psychopaths, and narcissists. These recurrent betrayals resulted in major depressive episodes and suicidal ideation.

By age 35 I had learned my lesson: I should avoid women altogether because I keep selecting for the kind of women who further my entrenched agenda of utter self-annihilation.

I then met a beautiful woman who was promiscuous and had a past that was just turbulent enough to sustain my interest and attraction. But her main asset, as far as I was concerned: she had reached an identical conclusion to mine, having gone through similarly destructive relationships: no men.

So, to be together we needed to render each other gender-free. Within a few years, we took the sex out of our relationship and proceeded to eradicate her femininity and my masculinity until there was no trace of them left to menace our togetherness.

My incompetence with women was an instance of my general social inaptitude and awkwardness. I disastrously failed in everything, everywhere, and with everyone because I hold people in contempt and loathe the idea of socializing. I ended up in prison.

So, I withdrew from the world entirely: to my books, my film collection, my writing and reading and other solitary activities. My wife did the same, though she maintained a rich social life of her own to compensate for my seclusion.

For well over a decade I survived as a hermit in one of Europe's poorest countries, content if not happy with the sheltered and monastic life I had designed for myself.

Then, a series of circumstances conspired to push me back into the world: my only source of income dried up and my wife drifted away from me and began to rediscover her femininity. She lost interest in me in my work and became more narcissistic and impatient. I felt rejected and that I may lose her to other men. I had to act to make a living and hedge my marital bet: I was forced back into a world I had hitherto hated and avoided.

By that time I had completely forgotten WHY I had designed such a schizoid and constricted and barren lifestyle for myself. The mists of time obscured the excellent reasons I have had to opt for a life of suspended animation.

A woman had convinced me that I can choose life again and that she - despite her considerable psychological problems - is the right partner for me. I thought I could square the circle, have my cake and eat it, too. I threw all caution and all the lessons of my early life to the winds.

Of course it ended in exactly the same way: cruel abandonment with life-threatening trauma as a consequence.

Later I met other women who - even though we have had no sexual or intimate connection - were able to drive me to near death by re-enacting the drama of abandonment and sadistically eloping with another man ostentatiously and humiliatingly.

And I again failed in all my endeavors and ventures in multiple countries, with several business partners, in a few fields.

This five year foray into the world served as a stark reminder of how ill-equipped I am to succeed in anything, to maintain relationships, to cope with the exigencies and vagaries of life. How self-destructive and defeated I am when I try to emerge from my cocoon. How absolutely fatal women are to me.

The shrink-wrap existence that I had created was actually an optimal life support system, perfectly tailored and custom-made to my needs: no lethal women, no venturing outside my book-lined kingdom, no doomed attempts at success.

But the problem is of course that I had lost my partner in this shared psychosis long ago. I have been all alone and lonely for many years now, well and truly and profoundly.

But to find a new woman in my case involves not only heartbreak, but possibly death itself. It necessitates exposure to a highly contagious environment without even the rudiments of an immune system.

Checkmate.

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Fictophilia: falling in love with a fictitious character in a novel, film, or work of art.

Human brains are hopeless at telling reality and fantasy apart: the same cerebral areas light up and with the same intensity whether you are merely thinking about coffee or actually drinking it. Porn and actual sex are indistinguishable in the brain (hence porn addiction). So, our wetware makes no distinction between real people and imaginary ones. We can easily fall for a digital or printed protagonist and have a crush on him or her that rivals any torrid passion.

Erotomaniacs straddle the twilight zone: they maintain utterly concocted and intricately elaborate love affairs with real persons who they never have met or communicated with.

But the truth is that even "real" people are figments of our creative imagination: they are phantasms, narratives, the blood and flesh equivalents of fictional characters. We idealize them our love interests or objects of infatuation, we fill in the gaps, project onto them our inner world, and interact only with the outer layer, the shell.

We use sex and language to try to penetrate the inaccessible minds of our loved ones, but to no avail: it is always skin-deep and ultimately deceptive. More than half of all intimate partners admit to cheating on each other: the ultimate form of betrayal and deception. The real figure is probably much higher. That is how real our relationships are and how well we know our significant others. When push comes to shove, we all inhabit our bubble universes, doomed to the silent solipsism of our humanity.

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Promiscuity and alcohol abuse - often linked - are now veritable pandemics among women of all ages. The rates of cheating are now almost equal between men and women. Casual sex - hookups and one night stands - is fast becoming the exclusive sexual practice among socially isolated females addicted to social media. The picture is still worse among men, but the gap is closing fast or reversing with some behaviors and lifestyle choices.

Cheating and promiscuity are now common reactions to neglect, abuse, rejection, monotony, or indifference in ostensibly intimate relationships.

Promiscuity and cheating are so widespread because sex has been reduced to a mere mechanical-pneumatic exercise, an emotionless act of masturbation with near anonymous and objectified partners, reminiscent of porn. Devoid of its function as an expression of intimacy and love, women no longer feel guilty or ashamed to engage in this largely meaningless purely physical activity.

Add to this the ease of finding sexual partners online; the veritable supernova of growing abuse of all manner of substances; the tsunami of broken and abusive relationships; the virulent collapse of inter-gender communication; the dysfunctioning of social institutions; social atomization, isolation, and anomie; and the evaporation of inhibitory social and religious mores - and you get the perfect storm of everyone copulating with everyone recklessly and with utter disregard for consequences: medical, moral, social, psychological, and for the traumatic effects on their loved ones.

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Why do people become parents in the first place? Do we have a moral obligation to humanity at large, to ourselves, or to our unborn children? Hardly.

Raising children comprises equal measures of satisfaction and frustration. Parents often employ a psychological defense mechanism - known as "cognitive dissonance" - to suppress the negative aspects of parenting and to deny the unpalatable fact that raising children is time consuming, exhausting, and strains otherwise pleasurable and tranquil relationships to their limits.

Not to mention the fact that the gestational mother experiences “considerable discomfort, effort, and risk in the course of pregnancy and childbirth” (Narayan, U., and J.J. Bartkowiak (1999) Having and Raising Children: Unconventional Families, Hard Choices, and the Social Good University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, Quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Parenting is possibly an irrational vocation, but humanity keeps breeding and procreating. It may well be the call of nature. All living species reproduce and most of them parent. Is maternity (and paternity) proof that, beneath the ephemeral veneer of civilization, we are still merely a kind of beast, subject to the impulses and hard-wired behavior that permeate the rest of the animal kingdom?

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/parent.html

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I advise all my female clients who find themselves in SEXLESS relationships to make medical tests for sexually transmitted diseases and infections and to carry the results with them to show to potential sexual partners.

Additionally, in sexless unions, the chances that your partner is having unprotected sex with third parties is higher than normal. If you do end up making love to him or her, such tests are a very good idea: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

You never know when the opportunity may arise to share the results with an interested male party.

My philosophy is that every woman has a RIGHT to regular lovemaking.

Sex is truly crucial to a woman's mental and physiological health and denying it to her amounts to debilitating ABUSE.

A woman who is denied sex with her primary partner has the perfect moral (and, in most religions, also religious) right to secure her needs outside the relationship.

She owes it to herself to make sure that she has who to have sex with or to secure sex whenever she can (of course, only with partners she finds attractive and compatible). Sex is not a luxury. It is like breathing, eating, and drinking: essential not only to the woman's wellbeing, but also for her health and survival.

The best, of course, is to avoid deception and agree to allow each other to have other sex partners in an open marriage, open relationship and with a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

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People are concerned with beauty, with meaning, or with symbols.

Some people are focused on aesthetics. They seek to increase or preserve beauty around them and are concerned with values and aspects of the material world that enhance appearances (e.g., symmetry or attractiveness)

Others emphasize meaning. They strive to find harmony, connectivity, purpose, and the proper interpretation of events, circumstances, and their environment.

Yet others are preoccupied with symbols and concepts: their creation and manipulation. They are more analytic or synoptic and thrive on the abstract.

Once you classify yourself, it can lead to much clearer life goals and an elevated self-awareness.

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Narcissists go through an ineluctable cycle in their relationships, especially intimate ones:

Approach

Always based either on self-deception (idealizing the partner) or on outright fraud by the prospective mate. This inevitably leads to

Frustration

When the dissimulation wears thin, is hard to maintain owing to countervailing information (confirmation bias no longer effective), or is exposed, it results in

Aggression and Abuse

These are multifarious: anything from rejection and silent treatment to verbal put-downs, withholding sex, and down to physical and sexual abuse. Few partners - mainly codependents - take this mistreatment lying down. So, the final leg of this tortuous tour is

Abandonment and punishment

The partner acts out: cheats, ostentatiously avenges herself, dumps the narcissist, abandons him emotionally (becomes emotionally absent and indifferent), or undermines him passive-aggressively.

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I have no friend or intimacy with anyone, man or woman. My only playmate is my brain. It is a vast repository of information and allows me to manipulate knowledge in the most delightful, unexpected, and synoptic ways. It keeps surprising me. I have little incentive to interact outside my mind, so varied and rich and multifarious is this magic kingdom.

But sometimes I envy normal people. For example: I envy the men who took all my women away from me because they love to dance, or drink, or socialize, or fuck, or party, or banter, or sire children, or raise a family, or do all those things that humans do, the oxygen of life. My women were suffocating. These men were breaths of fresh air.

People instinctively trust and are drawn to normalcy. They know what to expect from others who are like them: they feel validated and mirrored, they can have anxiety-ameliorating and stress-free fun. They can be fearless and let their hair down, not walk on eggshells, or feel inadequate or vaguely menaced.

My inhuman intelligence renders me abnormal. People reflexively recoil. They equate genius with madness and madness with danger. They become paranoid or depressed, often traumatized - never mind how charming or helpful or entertaining I have been with them. The constant mechanical hum of my cerebral apparatus drowns all my vital signs and terrifies or repels people.

So, from infancy, I had no choice but to befriend myself. I became utterly self-sufficient, emotionally and in every other way.

I am often asked if I would have given up my mind in return for the pleasures and joys of a normal life. In a heartbeat. Give me one day of a woman's company, a man's friendship, a party, a drink, small talk - and you can take away for good this neocortex golem which all but hijacked its alleged master: me. I have been exhausted and converted into a mere shell by it. Enough.

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No one comes close to me in understanding the narcissistic pathology. Sad fact. I know myself in and out, every cell, each iota. So, how come I stay the same and keep repeating self-destructive behavior patterns, making cataclysmic errors, and opting for bad decisions and choices?

Learning requires humility and insight.

I am grandiose. To have to learn something is to imply that I am less than perfect, not omniscient. The need to edify myself is an unvarnished challenge to my grandiosity.

As Freud noted, for a cognitive insight to work its magic, it must be accompanied by an emotional correlate.

Consider the insight: "I keep choosing women who are liable to dump me sadistically and cruelly because that is what my mother did to me and I hope to replay the unresolved traumatic conflict with a different outcome (repetition compulsion)." In a normal person, such an incisive realization about himself (=insight) will produce a change in future behavior and a more healthy and less self-destructive pattern of mate selection.

Such a shift towards healthier strategies is mediated via emotions and states of mind such as self-love, the need for intimacy, object love (=love for others), goal orientation, hedonic adaptation, happiness, and so on.

But the narcissist has access only to negative emotions, all of which are externalized (have to do with his outer environment, not with his inner world): envy, rage, hatred, and so on. These emotions determine impulse control and goal setting but are not involved in personal growth, development, and transformation.

So, never mind how well and intimately I am acquainted with my every nook and cranny - I am utterly incapable of learning, changing, or of substantial behavior modification.

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Another painting by the supertalented teen @_b_elena_b_ : sakura (Japanese cherry blossoms)

A recent report by the UN's IPBES threatens us with the disappearance of biodiversity via the extinction of more than one million species within a few decades.

Like all bureaucracies, environmental organizations are out to perpetuate themselves, fight heresy and accumulate political clout and the money and perks that come with it. They are no longer a disinterested and objective party. They have a stake in apocalypse. That makes them automatically suspect.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist", was at the receiving end of such self-serving sanctimony. A statistician, he demonstrated that the doom and gloom tendered by environmental campaigners, scholars and militants are, at best, dubious and, at worst, the outcomes of deliberate manipulation.

The situation is actually improving on many fronts, showed Lomborg: known reserves of fossil fuels and most metals are rising, agricultural production per head is surging, the number of the famished is declining, biodiversity loss is slowing as do pollution and tropical deforestation. In the long run, even in pockets of environmental degradation, in the poor and developing countries, rising incomes and the attendant drop in birth rates will likely ameliorate the situation in the long run.

Yet, both camps, the optimists and the pessimists, rely on partial, irrelevant, or, worse, manipulated data. The multiple authors of "People and Ecosystems", published by the World Resources Institute, the World Bank and the United Nations conclude: "Our knowledge of ecosystems has increased dramatically, but it simply has not kept pace with our ability to alter them"

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/nature.html

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Social media have become the playground of predatory narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists who post extreme and, at times, illegal porn and revel in the reactions to it, thus garnering vicarious narcissistic supply. Via such postings, they express their rabid misogyny by objectifying women and subjecting them to humiliating subjugation and to aggression bordering on outright violence.

Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, some of the content is illegal and can land even an accidental viewer in hot waters. Relatively innocuous search terms such as “family”, “wife”, “sister”, or “daddy” often yield sleazy and actionable photo and video results, displayed automatically on the user’s screen and saved to his or her browser cache without any warning or consent. Yahoo's Tumblr was not alone in this. Twitter, Minds.com, Instagram, and Facebook, although to a lesser degree, also host porn on a massive scale.

Porn addiction ties well with the narcissist’s fantasy sex life. Social media enable and legitimize a host of sexual fetishes and paraphilias, including pedophilia. Via these platforms, the narcissist finds an eager audience and a sense of empowerment and immunity, aided and abetted by his anonymity.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/journal67.html
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The average meteor - a piece of a steroid or planet, or dust left by passing comets - is the size of a baseball and is moving through space at 50,000 kilometres per hours.

Hence the myth that meteors burn upon entry due to friction with the Earth's atmosphere. The truth is that meteors do not burn - they vaporize due to "ram pressure". Meteors do heat - to more than 3000 degrees Fahrenheit or 1649 Celsius - and, as a result, they glow. But this is not due to friction.

The meteor's advancing front compresses the air and raises its temperature. It is this seething air that, in turn, vaporizes most meteors, transforming them into shooting stars, 100 kilometres above.

Larger meteors splatter into exploding fireballs. But they all finally become meteorites - cold shreds of meteors found on the ground.

Cyclopedia of Factoids https://samvak.tripod.com/factoidsindex.html

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To reel in his or her next "intimate partner" (source of secondary supply and service provider), the narcissist parades his or her "inner child": the wounded, tearful, tortured True Self. The male narcissist harps on the nurturing maternal instincts of his prey and the female variant of the subspecies provokes the paternal protective impulses of her quarry.

But isn't such display of vulnerability and pain an admission of imperfection and the undermining of the narcissist's inflated grandiosity and fantasies?

There is no imperfection involved. The narcissist grew up being a victimized child. This child is now a fossil. An exhibit. An old newsreel from before the time of the narcissist's apotheosis. Having become a divinity, the narcissist merely recounts the time he or she had been a mere mortal.

The narcissist's interlocutors misinterpret what he or she says to mean that the narcissist is STILL a broken, vulnerable child in need of maternal or paternal love and protection - not that he had merely been one once upon a time. And this misinterpretation costs them dearly.

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Why do second and third marriages end in a divorce much more often than first marriages?

Because, beyond a certain age (35-45 would be my guess), women and men are irreparably damaged goods. They carry with them baggage from previous relationships that renders them incapable of maintaining functional new ones.

Hurts, abuse, grievances, lack of closure, fears, unresolved conflicts, and the narcissistic defenses that they elicit are the scarred residues and festering detritus of previous botched marriages and painful liaisons.

Hampered by such emotional mayhem, men and women crave long-term intimacy, companionship, and love. But disabled as they are by their past, they settle for hurried sex and fleeting flings strewn across the arid Sahara that their lives become.

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DEFIANCE

There is a difference between DEFIANCE (an antisocial/psychopathic behavior typical of antisocial narcissists) and ASSERTIVENESS (healthy self-esteem coupled with self-awareness and enforced personal boundaries). Defiance is dysfunctional.

MOTIVATION

Motivation is rarely fully revealed in planning.

In other words: motivation is like background noise. When the opportunity presents itself and the circumstances are right - motivation pushes you to do things even if you had no conscious intention or plan to do them to start with!

HABITS

People often confuse habits and identity.

Example:

Many promiscuous people can be are ultra-conservative with potential sexual partners (habit), frigid, and have sex very rarely (habit). But this is because they are terrified of their sex drive.

This is just an example how observing only habits and actions can be very misleading.

So we must never conflate or confute identity and habits, personality and actions.

EGO DYSTONY and EGO INCONGRUENCE

Our self-awareness and the awareness of our environment is very selective.

We suppress information that makes us feel bad or uncomfortable, challenges our beliefs about ourselves, others, or the world, undermines narratives that regulate negative emotions (such as guilt or shame) in order to preserve ego syntony, or contradicts our self-perception.

Such ego incongruent information creates ego dystony.

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Addicts are slaves to their addictions? No such thing as an addictive personality in my new theory of addictions and addictive behaviors.

Addictions are the natural state, the baseline. We start off by getting addicted (to mother, her milk) and continue to develop addictions throughout life (habits, love, automatic thoughts, obsessions, compulsions). Addictions are powerful organizing and explanatory principles which endow life with meaning, purpose, and direction. Addictions provide boundaries, rituals, timetables, and order.

Addictions are ways to regulate emotions and modulate interpersonal relationships and communication. Addictions are the exoskeleton and scaffolding of life itself: our brain in programmed to constantly get addicted. A high is the desired permanent outcome. Addictive states must serve some evolutionary purpose and are therefore beneficial adaptations, not maladaptations.

In the process of socialization we internalize inhibitions and introjects ("superego") against certain addictions so as to render us functional and useful in human communities and environments. Other addictions - mediated via institutions such as church and family - are encouraged for the same reasons. Non-conforming and defiant addicts are conditioned to self-destruct and to defeat and loathe themselves.

Addictions are individual, their proscription and inhibition social. No wonder that they are associated in clinical and abnormal psychology with antisocial or even psychopathic and sociopathic traits, behaviors, and personalities.

The addict seeks to alter his perception of reality. Addictions are both intersubjective theories of mind and of the world. Many addictions come replete with or in the context of ideologies. Addictions spawn subcultures and provide social milieus.

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It is inappropriate to use words like "evil" in a clinical discussion. Religion and morality automatically imply judgment of right and wrong which is not what psychology is all about.

Psychopaths are antisocial and goal oriented. People are their collateral damage. There is no malice involved, just indifference to the effects their actions or inaction may have on others.

Some narcissists and psychopaths are also sadists and they derive gratification from inflicting pain on victims.

Narcissists seek to devastate or annihilate sources of frustration and narcissistic injury.

Borderlines hurt people with their lability and reckless acting out.

All these types ruin the lives and mental health of people around them, including their "nearest and dearest". But evil implies premeditation. Cluster B personalities are off-handed about their misconduct and the hurt they cause which is an ineluctable byproduct of their lack of empathy, impulsivity, and aggression.

All cluster B personalities seek to punish transgressors: people who stand in their way (antisocial personality disorder), threaten them with abandonment (Borderlines), or challenge their grandiosity (narcissists). But they do not perceive these destructive acts as evil - rather as a necessary evil.

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The need for drama is a much neglected aspect of the somatic narcissist. The chase, conquest, breakups, infidelities on both sides, crises, heartbreak, ghosting, hoovering, and triangulation are far more important than the sex itself.

Masochistic narcissists also find the self-destructive pain and devastation wrought by such relationships utterly irresistible.

In fact a woman can repel the somatic narcissist sexually and still retain his undivided attention if she is a drama queen and especially if she plays the hard to get, promiscuous, dissolute, and traitorous slut.

Narcissism is about control. Power plays and mind games are at the core of all of the narcissist's interpersonal relationships and interactions. Sex is just the denouement of a complex dynamic of who is on top.

Learn more about somatic narcissists here:

https://samvak.tripod.com/journal21.html

https://samvak.tripod.com/faq29.html

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When travelling alone in a foreign place, people resort to either of two default behaviors - or to both of them, alternating:

MCDONALD EFFECT

Finding themselves in unfamiliar territory, people default to old, well-established, true and tested patterns of behavior, choices, and brands. This is exactly the allure of the likes of McDonald: home away from home.

So: if you pub crawl, visit museums, or sample gourmet food at home - you may end up doing the same in Rome.

ROMAN HOLIDAY

But as often, being away from home also means freedom from prying eyes, prurient neighbors, peer pressure, and social control. It legimitizes a side of you that is inhibited or suppressed: drinking, promiscuity, having a fling, cheating, antisocial or petty criminal behavior, aggression, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, adventurousness, shopaholism, recklessness, gambling, or any number of frowned upon behaviors.

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Women who are traumatized by past abusive relationships (CPTSD), or suffer from emotional dysregulation owing to personality or mood disorders have very low tolerance for situations & circumstances which are ambiguous, vague, uncertain, or unpredictable.

The abuser's intermittent reinforcement (hot-cold, approach-avoidance) & rejection create exactly such an ambient environment.

Broken and wounded women cannot cope with ambivalence (love-hate relationships), cognitive dissonance (simultaneously holding two conflicting thoughts or beliefs), or frustration, or boredom & inner emptiness.

They react to all the above with overwhelming anxiety & panic & ultimately, with debilitating depression.

To extricate themselves from this relationship morass, to put an end to their increasing misery, such women act out recklessly. In most cases, they end up cheating on their men ostentatiously & flagrantly.

The message to their abusive intimate partners implicit or explicit in their egregious misbehavior is: "I cannot leave you because I do not have the courage & the heart to hurt the needy & tortured child that I see in you. But, can't you see that I am damaged goods & you should dump me?"

By behaving dissolutely & cruelly, the injured woman also convinces herself that breaking up with her partner is for his own good: she is so corrupt and hopelessly shattered that she would be doing him a service by exiting his life or a disservice by staying in it. Her misbehavior legitimizes initiating the breakup & strengthens her resolve: "I am doing it for his sake, because I love him and want him to be happy with a good woman which he deserves!"

It is easy to lose sight of the chain of events as we engage in a morally righteous judgment of the infidelity. It is the abusive partner who triggers such women & causes them to disintegrate, decompensate, and bed a stranger in a desperate attempt to flee what had become a torture chamber, a prison cell, and a madhouse combined.

His rejection and denigration drive his weak & disordered partner to suspend her values, boundaries, rules of conduct, & commitments to herself - indeed, her very identity - and reduce herself to behaviors that shock even her.

She is fighting for her survival and self-preservation, attempting to square the circle: flee without guilt, abandon without hurt, cheat without shame, do the right thing.

She ends up deceiving and breaking hearts and minds all around.

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The True Self (inner child) of SOME narcissists is masochistic. It seeks to recreate the maternal abuse & rejection in the narcissist's adult relationships.

On the face of it, the narcissist reenacts the unresolved conflict with his Primary Object (typically, mother) with the misplaced hope of obtaining a different outcome: resolving it painlessly & favorably, finally being loved & accepted unconditionally.

But in reality the masochistic narcissist chooses broken, dysregulated women who are guaranteed to cause him life-threatening agony as they dump him cruelly & sadistically, usually in favor of other men.

These women deem anything & anyone preferable to the narcissist's injurious & ostentatious absence & rejection. It is not that they do not want to be with the narcissist. On the contrary: they cannot stand NOT being with him any longer. So, they flee, rendering themselves incompatible & unsuitable & even more damaged than they are.

The masochistic & self-destructive narcissist uses the twin defense mechanisms of projective & introjective identification (see my YouTube channel) to coerce his intimate partners to abandon him traumatically exactly as his mother did. Painful love is his comfort zone & the only kind of attachment & bonding he recognizes.

And so the intimate partner betrays the narcissist, cheats on him, or discards him. The painful part is now out of the way: the demons of the past are exorcised, mother's egregious maltreatment is validated & legitimized: All women are like mother & treat me the same! She is not a monster! I am the bad, unlovable object, who is justly punished!

Ironically, as the curtains descend on the end play drama, the narcissist is available to settle into a long term relationship with the very woman who wronged & pained him so. Only to find out in most cases that she is long gone, unnerved & freaked out by the creepy nature of the narcissist's nauseatingly sick mind games & asphyxiating power plays.

The narcissist is not a sick puppy but a rabid stray dog. With a miasmic admixture of emotional blackmail & intermittent reinforcement, the narcissist holds his women hostage in his claustrophobic Bluebeard dungeon cave, shackled to the Bosch-like hell of his writhing psyche. Few women are willing to risk a second vampiric bite.

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What can we learn by observing people in extreme or traumatic circumstances - for example when they are exceedingly drunk or immediately after a natural disaster or when they have just received horrible news?

Very little, it turns out.

By definition the personality is comprised of traits, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, inhibitions, and behaviors under NORMAL circumstances. One's personality consists of the TYPICAL and the RECURRENT, not the one-off and the aberrant.

There is very little useful to learn from observing people in extreme conditions - so we rarely do.

This is why we ignore experiments in psychology which simulate extremely stressful circumstances. We even castigate them as unethical partly because of the paucity of useful information that they produce.

And this is why there is no official diagnosis of "psychopath" in the DSM: psychopaths have been observed and tested almost exclusively in outlier settings such as prisons or corporate boards. The diagnosis is promoted mainly by self-interested and media savvy psychologists like Hare, Dutton, and Babiak: they sell diagnostic tests, seminars, and consulting time.

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Psychopaths nurture and cultivate an image of themselves as free-spirited, daring, non-conformist geniuses who are grievously misunderstood and mistreated by Lilliputian society and its mindless cohorts.

This grandiose and romantic self-narrative legitimizes three classes of antisocial behaviors:

DEFIANCE

In your face, devil may care, fuck it all, fuck you all, I need no one, obey no one, make my own rules, take no shit from anyone, happy go lucky, there's no tomorrow, carpe diem kind of guy (or, more rarely, gal).

REACTANCE

You won't tell me what to do or how to behave or what to choose or decide. You will not restrict my freedom to say what I please and act as I see fit. I will do exactly the opposite of what you tell me to do (contrarianism). By trying to control me, my space, my time, my thought processes, my opinions, choices, speech, or actions - you make me hate you and be furious at you. So, you have only yourself to blame if I abuse and traumatize you (alloplastic defenses).

PASSIVE-AGGRESSION (NEGATIVISM)

I am going to undermine and sabotage your hopes, expectations, and demands because you are mistreating and disrespecting me. I am going to act stupid (pseudo-stupidity), procrastinate, evade, forget, neglect, and be ornery. This is your punishment for failing to realize my innate superiority and do it justice.

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Broken and wounded, fresh out of a union with a narcissist or a psychopath, it is a bad idea to self-medicate with a new, rebound relationship.

A break of at least one or two years may be needed in order to regain one's balance and restore a modicum of self-knowledge free of the abusive partner's brainwashing and shared psychosis.

But is unhealthy to choose distrust of others and self-isolation as one's new way of life. At a certain point the transition from victim to survivor requires new intimate partners.

Distance relationships provide an optimal mix of intimacy, reversibility, and personal space.

Face to face, in the flesh, and live-in relationships can be demanding and sometimes degenerate into a replay of injurious conflicts and abusive, traumatizing misconduct. They are also logistically harder and more heartbreaking to terminate.

Distance relationships are far more manageable and flexible: timing is controlled and negotiated, the depth of any single interaction can be fine tuned, geography makes sure that the repertory of reactions is restricted: the partners can hang up or break up at will - or escalate from distance relationship to a more committed and complex liaison.

In some important respects, distance relationships are like simulations or movies: they provide all the thrills and few of the costs. That is why they are the best way to test the waters.

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Investing in a relationship may have become an irrational strategy in this day and age:

Prenups made communal property obsolete.

Divorce is the not so new normal and is much easier than it used to be. Children are accustomed to it and have learned to expect and accept breakups as an ineluctable and preordained part of life.

Sex is cost-free and has been reduced to mutual masturbation, stripped of all its attendant emotional and cognitive components. Hookups and other forms of casual sex as well as porn rule.

The pool of available partners is practically infinite. Mate selection is no longer affected by scarcity and the fear of remaining alone. People have become disposable, dispensable, and interchangeable.

Digital identities on social media and dating sites are largely fake: people flood each other with accurate information on the trifling aspects of their lives - but lie egregiously about all critical issues, from their appearance to STDs. It renders intimacy all but impossible.

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The narcissist's hypervigilance means that he experiences as rejection the very presence of someone better looking, more intelligent, endowed, educated, accomplished, or prominent.

Similarly, the narcissist feels threatened and wounded in situations which require a relaxation of control or a transfer or sharing of power or when he is not the exclusive centre of attention (examples: being employed or having a love affair). The narcissist reacts to such implicit injury in a variety of ways: reckless acting out (from unbridled shopaholism to promiscuous triangulation), narcissistic rage, contumaciousness (defiance), and passive-aggression are the four most common. I call them the "Reactive Repertory". These behaviors serve multiple purposes simultaneously:

1. Narcissistic injuries are ego discrepant, ego dystonic, and ego incongruent. Put plainly: the narcissist feels anxious, down, impotent, and miserable. The Reactive Repertory restores the narcissist's grandiosity and his delusional euphoric fantasies.

2. The narcissist used the Reactive Repertory to punish the source of his malaise by abusing and traumatizing him or her cruelly or sadistically.

3. To restore his sense of wellbeing and regulate his moods, the narcissist attempts to get rid of the frustrating object which causes him narcissistic injuries. The Reactive Repertory guarantees such an outcome.

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In the movie "Dreamcatcher", four childhood friends, exposed to an alien, disguised as a retarded child, develop psychic powers. Years later they reunite only to confront a vicious extraterrestrial life-form. Only two survive but they succeed to eradicate the monster by incinerating it and crushing its tiny off-spring underfoot.

Being mortal ourselves, we cannot conceive of an indestructible entity. The artifacts of popular culture - thrillers, action and sci-fi films, video games, computer viruses - assume that all organisms, organizations and automata possess fatal vulnerabilities. Medicine and warfare are predicated on a similar contention.

We react with shock and horror when we are faced with "resistant stains" of bacteria or with creatures, machines, or groups able to survive and thrive in extremely hostile environments.

Destruction is multi-faceted. Even the simplest system has a structure and performs functions. If the spatial continuity or arrangement of an entity's structure is severed or substantially transformed - its functions are usually adversely affected. Direct interference with a system's functionality is equally deleterious.

We can render a system dysfunctional by inhibiting or reversing any stage in the complex processes involved - or by preventing the entity's communication with its environs. Another method of annihilation involves the alteration of the entity's context - its surroundings, its codes and signals, its interactive patterns, its potential partners, friends and foes.

Finding the lethal weaknesses of an organism, an apparatus, or a society is described as a process of trial and error. But the outcome is guaranteed: mortal susceptibility is assumed to be a universal trait. No one and nothing is perfectly immune, utterly invulnerable, or beyond extermination.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/dreamcatcher.html

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Breakfast in Marbella.

Cold Therapy takes me all over the world (I do "house calls" for those who can afford it).

Unwinding on a palm trees studded promenade in Marbella after a particularly tough day of Cold Therapy.

Water - not champagne yet - in the penultimate day of Cold Therapy in Marbella.

For this Cold Therapy, the client provided a dedicated Michelin 3-star chef: an alchemist of food, a culinary Picasso. More than 20 cuisines in 6 days, lunches and dinners. Yes, the upturned spectacles are mine: Sam Vaknin was here!

The intensive phase of Cold Therapy (6 days) has ended. Both client and me are recovering

More about Cold Therapy: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq77.html

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Men have casual sex mostly for two reasons: 1. The woman makes clear that she is available or 2. They find the woman attractive. Period. They make no bones about it and feel no need to spin complex stories to embed the sex in some exculpatory context.

Women have casual sex for dozens of reasons including pity and gratitude. Few women admit to having casual sex for its own sake. They all come up with extraneous narratives to justify the copulation: anything from "I was drunk" to "he was nice to me"

Why this difference between the sexes?

Women dread being labelled a slut. The yarns they proffer render the merely carnal more intimate and, therefore, palatable and socially acceptable.

But there is another reason: body image issues. Even the most drop dead gorgeous woman is somewhat unhappy with her body. This pernicious variant of an inferiority complex and self-devaluation renders women less choosy and leads them to prefer "safe" beta males who are unlikely to reject them: attention from the wrong man is still vastly preferable to no attention whatsoever.

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Assertiveness and defiance should not be confused.

Assertive people are self-aware and know themselves well. Defiant people have little self-acquaintance.

Assertive people have clear and firm boundaries ("where do I stop and others start"). Defiants constantly test the boundaries of others, pushing as far as they can get without a backlash.

Assertives discuss topics - defiants attack personalities ("ad hominem") Assertives are for (positive and constructive) - defiants are against (negativistic and contrarian)

Assertives collaborate and they are goal-oriented (focused on accomplishing) - defiants network aggressively and compete (focused on winning)

Assertives are self-constructive: they aspire to and attain personal growth and development. Defiants are self-destructive and self-defeating.

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Rules of attraction for one night stands

People are either broken and wounded (traumatized) - or healthy and functional. They either have brains, or brawn (beauty), or both, or neither.

The wounded and broken prefer as partners for casual sex "safe" counterparts who are unlikely to reject them: nonthreatening pick ups (no brains and no brawn or beauty). The healthy and functional select mates with brawn or beauty for a single roll in the hay.

People with brains only or brains and brawn or beauty are very unlikely to be chosen as casual sex partners.

Picking up someone highly intelligent is a deterrent: you have to be on your toes, shine, compete, and risk humiliating rejection if you do not measure up. Anxiety, narcissistic injuries, and depletion are often the only rewards.

If you have only brains and zero brawn or beauty, the potential mate has to be a sapiosexual and must be exposed to your cerebral charms over an extended period of time in order to overlook the unappetizing rest of you and consent to have sex.

Chances of that happening in a world of attention deficits, media imagery of bodily perfection, and instant gratification are slim to none. Most nerds and geeks end up being incels: involuntary celibates. They rarely get laid, if ever.

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I find modern men and women bizarre.

You have to BEG them to say "I love you" (and they very rarely do) - but they fuck each other at the drop of a hat.

People under the age of 40 are terrified of emotions and intimacy and consequently regard sex as a meaningless chance physical activity.

This is where the generational gap shows clearly:

My generation valued the constant expression of emotions like love as a way to strengthen and maintain relationships.

We dinosaurs were saying "I love you" all the time, morning, evening, and in between. It felt wonderful.

And we thought that sex has aspects and dimensions beyond the mere physical.

Maybe that is why we went extinct.

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Both narcissism and art are private languages translated into universally accessible representations intended for public consumption

But the intrinsic creative value of a work of art does not depend on its interaction with the audience. Narcissistic creations (like advertising) do: they derive their meaning and value from the number of eyeballs they attract and the behaviors they elicit and engender.

Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited" in the Cannelions Creative Academy June 19, 2019

https://www.canneslions.com/learn/young-lions/creative-academy

Press release for my presentation (June 19, 2019) in Canneslions.

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The vanity of youth: 21 years old, private jet, multimillionaire, meetings with Senator Lautenberg and Vice President of the USA, Mondale, in Washington, 3000 USD suits, partnerships with the richest men on earth, celebrities as "friends", and a howling emptiness and lonely existence even then ... Sam Vaknin, plus ça change ...

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Indifference, neglect, and ignoring are forms of rejection, abusive devaluation, and discard. People find the narcissist "cold", "inhuman", "heartless", "clueless", "robotic or machine-like"

Early on in life, the narcissist learns to disguise his socially-unacceptable indifference as benevolence, equanimity, cool-headedness, composure, or superiority. "It is not that I don't care about others" – he shrugs off his critics – "I am simply more level-headed, more resilient, more composed under pressure… They mistake my equanimity for apathy."

The narcissist tries to convince people that he is compassionate. His profound lack of interest in his spouse's life, vocation, interests, hobbies, social and sexual liaisons, and whereabouts he cloaks as benevolent altruism. "I give her all the freedom she could wish for!" – he protests – "I don't spy on her, follow her, or nag her with endless questions. I don't bother her. I let her lead her life the way she sees fit and don't interfere in her affairs!" He makes a virtue out of his emotional truancy, neglect, absence and abandonment, misleadingly equating them with “freedom”, “liberty”, and liberal open-mindedness.

All very commendable but when taken to extremes such benign neglect turns malignant and signifies the voidance of true love and attachment. The narcissist's emotional (and, often, physical) absence from all his relationships is a form of aggression and a defence against his own thoroughly repressed feelings.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/indifference.html

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23 years old Sam Vaknin. The title: "The Genius Who Knew Too Much". Surrounded by tottering towers of books, a lonely, quizzical figure clad in an expensive suit.

I have been cruelly, gleefully, vindictively, wildly disproportionately, & sadistically betrayed by every significant person in my life, both man & woman. Every single one. No exception: from my mother to the present minute.

Women dread me and flee my presence in horror, acting out recklessly and egregiously. Men envy me, seething with resentment bordering on hatred. Everyone feel narcissistically injured and devastatingly humiliated by my superior intellect and intolerance of fools, frivolity, and small talk.

So, they stab me in the back, especially when I am at my most wounded, vulnerable, and broken. Repeatedly and in the most abhorrent ways imaginable.

In 58 years, there has not been a single redeeming exception to this predictable pattern.

So, I have learned to avoid the company of Man (and Woman) and to stick to my only loyal friends: my books. I rely on them for stimulation and comfort and object constancy. At least books never abandon me, or cheat on me, or undermine me, or mock me, or conspire to ruin me.

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There are three types of narcissistic mirroring.

1. Narcissistic REFLECTION

When people REFLECT to the narcissist his FALSE SELF. When they AFFIRM and APPLAUD his grandiose fantasies.

Read these articles on my website (follow the link at the end of this post)

Narcissists, Narcissistic Supply and Sources of Supply

The Dual Role of the Narcissist's False Self

Grandiosity, Fantasies, and Narcissism

2. Narcissistic MIRRORING

When the partner of the narcissist moulds herself in order to CONFORM to the narcissist's values and requirements.

3. MIRRORING

A technique used by abused partners to cope with the narcissist. Consists of imitating the narcissist' behavior.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/narcissistpsychotherapy.html

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Multiple studies have shown that women have one nights stands for two main reasons: (1) Emotional connection and support; and (2) The man's personality: the man had been "nice" to them, was "interesting", or had been perceived by them as an exciting "bad boy"

Men have one night stands for mainly ONE reason:

The woman made herself available

More in-depth studies demonstrated that the men merely masturbated with and in the woman's body ("masturbatory aid"). After the act, virtually none of the men recalled details about the woman (not even her full name). Only 20% of men studied said that they would NOT fuck a heavily drunk woman, though a majority of the men in these 20% admitted to having done it in the past. Perhaps because they interpret the woman's heavy drinking as preparation for sex. Women admitted in studies that sometimes they get drunk to overcome inhibition and to pave the way for sex.

Women need to get drunk to have casual sex if they perceive themselves as "doing something wrong" (as acting sluttish or cheating on their partner). Women also drink in order to bed a stranger if they are overly shy, typically owing to a body image (somatoform) problem or deficient social skills.

45% of men said that they preferred casual sex to all other forms of sex. This may be the influence of porn.

Most men regarded the time they spent with the woman before the one night stand - however brief - as an "investment": something they had to do reluctantly because women demanded it as a socially acceptable pretext and excuse to copulate.

The men would have much preferred to simply get on with it, but knew that they had to talk to the woman, woo her, and feign interest and empathy.

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I test all my women to see if they will love me unconditionally, as my mother didn't: I abuse them in a variety of soul-shattering ways, informed by my vastly superior intelligence and by my knowledge of clinical psychology.

I want to see how far I can push my women and how many of their buttons I can depress before they abandon me cruelly, always by cheating on me with other men and rubbing it in my face.

I test my intimate partners REPEATEDLY because I want them to FAIL: to prove to me that all women are unreliable sadistic sluts and thus restore me to my comfort zone

This way I also avoid intimacy because intimacy grants my women the power to devastate me by hurting and abandoning me. So, I preempt and hurt and abandon them first. Pain aversion leads ironically ineluctably and always to excruciating self-inflicted, at times life threatening agony.

Having abandoned and hurt me horribly, these women had become accurate replicas of my mother and I now know HOW to love them. Their betrayal renders them irresistible to my inner child.

Perhaps luckily for me (and for her), no woman has ever taken me up on my offer to have another go, to give me a second chance.

Fighting for their survival and sanity in the torture chambered madhouse hall of twisted mirrors that I create for them within days, all the women in my life ended up committing the most insane and publicly ostentatious acts of self-trashing and self-destruction, just to make sure that the road back to me is blocked forever.

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Some people tend to react to frustration, uncertainty, and insecurity in three dysfunctional ways:

1. Catastrophising

We imagine the worst and then react to our fictional scenarios, not to reality.

2. Escalation

Our reactions to frustration and bad, dissonant, and ego dystonic emotions are disproportional and extreme.

We launch nuclear weapons where a handgun would have sufficed.

3. Aggression

Anticipating pain or rejection, we lash out to preempt what we perceive to be the inevitable (a misperception of reality brought on by catastrophising). Aggression wears many forms. For example: withdrawal of communication or verbal abuse.

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Healthy narcissism develops in infancy and is the indispensable foundation of one's sense of self-worth (self-esteem and self-confidence). It is a form of private language with a narrative aimed at an internal audience of one.

Healthy narcissism is, therefore, an organizational and hermeneutic (interpretative) principle of the personality.

Pathological narcissism is a private religion with the False Self as the godhead and the True Self as the sacrificial lamb. The single worshipper in this faith is the narcissist.

The audience is external and its feedback is used to regulate the narcissist's sense of self-worth and fulfil his ego functions.

Both forms of narcissism require creative acts and creativity in both maintenance and exegesis.

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We often confuse priorities with wishes, plans, obligations, and emergencies.

Priorities imply no choice but to act in a certain way as long as the priority is in place. Priorities constrict one's freedom of action and limit one's free will. They are very much like values or laws or mores and rules of conduct.

We can, of course, eliminate priorities, add new ones, or reorder them

With wishes, emergencies, plans, and obligations there is a choice on HOW to act and WHETHER to act.

We might feel guilty or ashamed or frustrated if we fail to meet our obligations, realize our plans, and fulfil our wishes.

But failing to conform to our priorities provokes a deep dissonance and all manner of psychological dysfunction. It is perceived as a far more profound and fundamental abrogation of duty.

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Maybe I should just accept that I am a quadriplegic man - paralyzed and amputated - and stop trying to run and jog all the time.

I don't know how to interact with people, men or women. I do not have the minimal set of skills and capacities.

I am sending the wrong signals, behaving the wrong ways and then I get cruelly and sadistically abused and traumatized in retaliation or simply because people shun me or flee my presence in horror and disgust.

For 15 years (2001-2016), I have met no one, man or woman. I kept only to myself: just me, my books, and my collections. I rarely exited my tiny library-studio.

I was not happy, but was not unhappy, too. I was definitely not traumatized.

And I had many moments of deep satisfaction in my total isolation: when I completed writing something, downloaded a work of reference, or finished reading a book.

Intuitively, I knew that I should avoid people because I will hurt and reject them and then they will do the same to me.

Maybe I should give up on people and especially on women and go back to my previous existence. Time to accept that the period 2015-2019, when I attempted to re-enter and rejoin the world, was my greatest failure and an egregious case of delusional self-deception.

Time to accept myself for who I am. No one else did, does - or ever will.

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I must make it HARD on myself, painful, nearly hopeless: my relationships with men and women, projects, jobs, EVERYTHING.

In life, everybody try to go from 0 (zero) to 100.

But, I first go from 0 to 30. Then suddenly, I destroy everything down from 30 to -100 (MINUS) 100.

I suffer horribly and work extremely hard to salvage from the self-inflicted ruins what I can and to move the needle from -100 (minus 100) back to 0 (zero). I usually fail: most men, women, workplaces, and institutions want nothing further to do with me after my bouts of abuse and rage.

In the meantime, while I am busy cleaning up my post-nuclear mess, other people benefit and profit from my work or from my abused women: they start to build on my foundation of 30.

Others steal my ideas, romance and fuck my women. I am too busy recovering from my self-sabotage to even notice.

This is how it goes:

I have a doll, I smash her, and other kids get to play with my doll.

When these other kids are gone, I try to glue my doll back together, to fix it.

Usually, I fail: I cracked my doll too badly to be mended.

Even if I succeed, I still end up with a badly damaged, ill-assembled doll.

I never get to simply be happy with my new and shining and beautiful doll. Not even for a minute.

Of course, it is even worse for the doll: it is the one who gets broken and reattached.

No wonder all my dolls - women or men or institutions or workplaces - refuse to risk another go with me and end teaming up with others.

All my life is cracked and broken and precariously held together by glue.

And I create this state of affairs, time and again.

And it is the same in all my relationship: with men, with women, with institutions, and with workplaces.

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There are three types of sex: functional, intimate, and loving.

Functional sex is masturbatory, mechanical, cursory, clinical, impersonal, and goal-oriented

Intimate sex follows a period of intimacy (even with a stranger after a few hours) and reflects closeness, affection, tenderness, and a level of comfort and familiarity which engenders trust and a sense of security and safety.

Loving sex is a natural continuation of the wish to merge or fuse with one's lover also on the physical level and to communicate to him or her total intimacy and a host of overwhelmingly positive emotions. It also involves an elevated level of trust and a feeling of personal safety and naked vulnerability.

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Overanalysis is one of the more pernicious legacies of Freud: the counterfactual insistence that human action and inaction have emotional, environmental, and biographical antecedents that can be unerringly unearthed and reconstructed.

Freud firmly believed that he was charting a new "physics of the mind", a science, akin to the natural sciences. Other branches of the social "sciences" developed similar grandiose pretensions and the medicalization of psychiatry rendered psychology an ostensible branch of medicine where causes invariably lead to effects.

The truth, of course, is radically different.

People are irrational. They often act without rhyme or reason, against their best interests, ignoring the consequences of their actions or inaction, and under a bewildering array of interacting internal and external stimuli too numerous or complex to identify or enumerate.

Overanalyzing is counterproductive. Most people are suggestible, aim to please and to conform, and prone to false memories. It behooves psychology to be way more humble and focus on dispensing good and tried advice on various life issues. It is as much a wannabe science as it is a form of glorified literature and should know its place.

The Japanese call it: mono no aware.

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Weakness of character is indistinguishable from evil. Weak people cowardly sacrifice moral principles and values, are often highly suggestible, are eager to please and conform at any cost, and unthinkingly follow the mighty and the rich wherever they may lead them.

The main preoccupation of the weak is how to abrogate responsibilities and obligations and surrender their freedom of action and free will to strong men and institutions.

Weakness entails corruption, compromise, deception, and dependence as well as the ability to morph and shapeshift in order to fit in. The weak are amorphous and fuzzy, they cannot be trusted because they have no core or identity. They are easily swayed and end up committing the most appalling transgressions against themselves and others, even their nearest, dearest, and loved ones.

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A common misconception about narcissists is that they strive to be the best, richest, most powerful, and brightest of them all. They most emphatically do not.

Narcissists are, indeed, grandiose and emotionally invested in feeling and in appearing to be superior and unique.

But the locus of the narcissist's grandiosity - his or her "claim to fame" - can be anything and anywhere. The narcissist just wishes to stand out: as a good son, a victim, an altruist, a hedonist, an arsonist, an academic, a fisherman, or a fireman. Anything goes as long as the narcissist can lay claim to excellence or to any kind of distinction. Grandiosity can be pedestrian or charitable, criminal or morally righteous, desultory or committed - as long as it sets the narcissist apart and above all others of his or her kind.

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In clinical practice, we are likely to come across this cluster of issues frequently:

Problems with the client's psychosexuality

Body image issues (in extreme cases, somatoform or body dysmorphic disorders)

Grandiose narcissism (with all the associated alloplastic defense mechanisms)

Antisocial behaviors; and

Ineffective, dysfunctional, and self-destructive strategies to cope with negative "emotions" (boredom, frustration, narcissistic injuries, anger, envy, and so on)

These strategies include substance abuse, but there are many more.

It is all interconnected.

Boredom and frustration for example are "emotions" that trigger antisocial behaviors in certain people.

Addictions are intimately related to grandiosity.

Grandiosity compensates for inferiority and alloplastic defenses get rid of ego dystonic emotions like shame and guilt.

Inferiority manifests also via body image issues and rigid self-control (for example: over latent promiscuity)

Rigid self-control generates boundary issues and leads time and again to decompensation (being overwhelmed) and acting out, and so on.

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Our expectations, beliefs, automatic thoughts (cognitions), and guiding values shape our lives. But, equally as importantly, they drive people to act the way we anticipate, via a process called projective identification (the stimulus we provide) and introjective identification (the reactions to our signals)

Prophecies are often self-fulfilling because people aim to please and conform and are suggestible. They pick up cues and act on them compliantly, even if the required course of action conflicts with their own opinions and judgments.

Wherever and with whoever we may find ourselves, we attempt to reconstitute our comfort zone: the set of default environmental parameters and human behaviors that we grew up with and on and which we find comfortingly familiar. Within the comfort zone, we operate with maximal agency and efficacy to mould people and circumstances to cater to our needs, both emotional and physical.

The comfort zone could be a negative ambience: an abusive or painful relationship, for example. But it is always predictable, manageable, and certain. As a rule, comfort zones ameliorate anxiety and reduce stress and apprehension.

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The link between depression and aggression has long been hypothesized. Scholars suggested that depression is nothing but internalized aggression, directed at structures of the Self.

But we may need to reconceive of depression as a form of externalized aggression as well. After all, it has massive adverse impacts on the lives, moods, actions, thoughts, emotions, and even personalities of people around the depressed person, especially on his nearest and dearest.

Some patients wield their depression as a manipulative instrument or punitive implement. They leverage feelings of guilt and shame in others or induce a penumbral state of mind that consumes those exposed to the patient's tenebrous mood - or to buttress their entitlement to special treatment and concessions.

Continued: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/journal50.html

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A useful test to tell apart healthy sexual fantasies from narcissistic ones is to pose the question: would you be equally satisfied having sex with a sophisticated inflatable robotic doll as with a flesh and blood partner? If the answer is "yes", then, in all likelihood, we are dealing with a narcissist.

The mass media and the internet give rise to "instant celebrities". This "equal opportunity elite" fills the void created by the failure of previous institutional elites: the aristocracy, scientists, politicians, businessmen, financiers, athletes (doping scandals), and even artists and musicians. Contemporary technology finally ushered Wallace's "era of the common man", replete with a revolving, itinerant, "flash in the pan", "15 minutes of fame" elite.

The narcissist's inability to listen and pay genuine attention stems from his overriding need to sustain his grandiosity and to rehearse his next lines, retort, or clever response while his interlocutor - really his audience - is talking. After all: why should the narcissist waste his precious time on listening when he is omniscient?

The narcissist seeks to restore object constancy by resorting to devaluation (thus re-establishing the balance of power with the abandoning object); by fostering dependence in the frustrating object (for instance: via giving); and by making use of anachronistic behaviors (which treat the object as though he were still a child).

Targeted intimacy is also exclusionary (excludes everyone outside the "cult"); ephemeral (dissipates when no longer useful); and goal-oriented (intended to manipulate the recipient of the intimacy and its ostensible beneficiary).

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Eating disorders and personality disorders - a video presentation in an international conference I helped organize this month in Dublin: 3rd International Conference on Neurology and Brain Disorders (swipe left).

More about this topic:

https://samvak.tripod.com/faq65.html

https://samvak.tripod.com/personalitydisorders64.html

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Over the decades, astrologers of all stripes pored over my natal chart. Many of these efforts were made available online over the years (Google Sam Vaknin+astrology)

In my late teens, Israeli graphologists analyzed my handwriting in Hebrew and were utterly befuddled by the results. So much so that they granted extensive interviews to the mass media, expressing their bewilderment. One of these cries of astonishment is reproduced above. The graphologist did not know whose the handwriting was.

The headline reads: "Everything else is dwarfed by this person's brain". She continues:"All criteria of normal and abnormal are rendered bankrupt (by this person)". "This person can be a child or an old man ... staggering intellectual capacity ... layers upon layers organized with great details ..."

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Addictions, post-traumatic behaviors, and pathological narcissism are strongly correlated: narcissism is a reaction to childhood trauma and abuse and PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder) leads to lifelong substance abuse. Indeed, CPTSD (Complex PTSD) is indistinguishable from Cluster B personality disorders with a dominant dimension of narcissism (such as Borderline). Narcissism is an addiction (to narcissistic supply)

All three mental health issues resemble Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly: Multiple Personality Disorder). In all three cases a personoid (personality-like) mental construct or structure takes over the Self: the Addictive Personality, Post-traumatic Personality, and the False Self (in narcissistic disorders), respectively. When the trauma threshold is crossed - when the person is exposed to a number of triggers simultaneously - all three are expressed and feed on each other.

The usurping personoid construct is dissimilar in some important respects to the person's "normal" personality: it is devoid of inhibitions, lacks empathy, sports little to no impulse control, is unable to delay gratification, engages in dichotomous thinking (splitting or idealization-devaluation), has poor judgment of future consequences (reckless), and is infantile and aggressive.

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Traumas can be habit-forming and constitute the core of a comfort zone. Trauma victims often engage in variations on the same set of self-defeating, self-destructive, and reckless behaviors because they seek to re-traumatize themselves in order to reduce anticipatory anxiety.

Traumas fulfil important psychological functions and may become addictive as the victim gets habituated to intermittent reinforcement, operant conditioning, and abusive misconduct ("trauma bonding" and "Stockholm syndrome"). One of the most critical functions of traumas is to help make sense of the world by perpetuating a victim role. Traumas are powerful organizing and hermeneutic (interpretative, exegetic) principles.

Regrettably, treatment modalities (psychotherapies) for PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder) and CPTSD (Complex PTSD) focus on behavior modification and prophylaxis (prevention). They rarely if ever deal with the aetiology of the trauma or with its compulsive and adaptive aspects and dimensions: the trauma's survival value.

Trauma victims are taught how to avoid triggers and to refrain from certain types of decisions, choices, and attendant conduct. But they are rarely forced to confront and exorcise the demons of trauma, the ghost in the machinery of pain, bewilderment, disorientation, and a labile sense of self-worth that give rise to the horrible tragedies that keep unfolding and recurring in these patients' lives.

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Paranoia is used by the narcissist to ward off or reverse intimacy. The narcissist is threatened by intimacy because it reduces him to ordinariness by exposing his weaknesses and shortcomings and by causing him to act "normally". The narcissist also dreads the encounter with his deep buried emotions - hurt, envy, anger, aggression - likely to be foisted on him in an intimate relationship.

The paranoid narrative legitimizes intimacy repelling behaviours such as keeping one's distance, secrecy, aloofness, reclusion, aggression, intrusion on privacy, lying, desultoriness, itinerancy, unpredictability, and idiosyncratic or eccentric reactions. Gradually, the narcissist succeeds to alienate and wear down all his friends, colleagues, well-wishers, and mates.

Even his closest, nearest, and dearest, his family - feel emotionally detached and "burnt out". The paranoid narcissist ends life as an oddball recluse - derided, feared, and loathed in equal measures. His paranoia - exacerbated by repeated rejections and ageing - pervades his entire life and diminishes his creativity, adaptability, and functioning. The narcissist personality, buffeted by paranoia, turns ossified and brittle. Finally, atomized and useless, it succumbs and gives way to a great void. The narcissist is consumed.

Counterintuitively, with paranoid intimate partners, it is better to share everything and to be utterly and unmitigatingly honest. No matter how bad and hurtful, reality always comforts them because it is so much less egregious and menacing than their own suspicions, paranoid scenarios, and hypervigilance. The paranoid's best friend is reality and his worst enemy is his rampant, morbid, catastrophizing imagination.

Example of a paranoid dialog:

https://samvak.tripod.com/journal60.html

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Prowling

The little things we do together

to give up life.

The percolating coffee,

your aromatic breath,

the dream that glues

your eyelids to my cheek.

We both relent relentlessly.

Your hair flows to my end,

a natural cascade,

a velvet avalanche

buries my hands.

In motion paralyzed,

we prowl each other's

hunting grounds.

Day breaks, our backs

turned to the light

in dark refusal.

Poetry of Healing and Abuse

https://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html

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I do not COMPETE with other men for my women. I do not FIGHT to keep my women in my life or CAJOLE them to make love to me.

I do not engage in power plays or triangulation (when the woman uses another man to provoke a reaction out of me). If a woman feels so miserable with me that she needs and wants another man - I do not prevent her. I let her find her own solution to her misery.

I do not BEG my woman to stay with me. I do not get down on my knees and beseech her to please not abandon me for another man.

It is up to the woman whether she cheats on me - and only up to her to make this choice.

I just make crystal-clear to my woman that she is free to choose and to decide and that I totally accept her free will.

I don't keep my woman in a cage. Not even a gilded one.

It is not the same as indifference. I am doing everything I possibly can to make my woman happy. And more.

But if I fail to make her happy and she is so miserable with me that her only way out is to go into the night with another man - there is nothing I can - or WILL - do about it, never mind how much it hurts me (and it always does - horribly). I will not stop my woman.

When my woman settles on another man, I tell her exactly the same thing each and every time: "If you need to fuck another man to alleviate your misery with me, go for it! Don't let me stop you from pursuing your peace of mind and happiness by whatever means you deem necessary." My woman is free to secure her comfort, wellbeing, and happiness any way she sees fit: I will not stand in her way, even if what she chooses to do kills me.

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Paranoid ideation is common among people with pronounced fantastic grandiosity which is a defense against a dysregulated (labile) sense of self-worth & a vanishingly low self-esteem. Yet, counterintuitively, such people are much more prone to reckless behaviors involving strangers in dangerous situations.

How can we reconcile this apparent conflict between psychodynamic (paranoia) and behavior (risk-seeking)? In such patients, paranoid ideation is provoked by socially stressful situations, emotional intimacy, self-imputed inferiority (challenge to grandiosity), & risk of loss (perceived disadvantage or weakness)

Paradoxically, therefore, such people would feel most threatened in the presence of their INTIMATE partners & nearest and dearest. But, they would trust total strangers as "safe" even in the most precarious, dangerous, & reckless situations (for example: when they are totally drunk or in a room together alone)

Their threat perception is not affected even when the stranger makes his nefarious intentions known - because there is no risk of intimacy or attachment involved. They are far more likely to end up having sex with a total unknown than with someone they love, for instance - & the sex would often be unprotected and in compromising circumstances

They are bound to shun & avoid all forms of intimacy with potential mates, including sex aversion, & compensate with instant faux "closeness" or "affection" & promiscuity with strangers.

Similarly, people with these psychological defenses would trust even known criminals, bums, or junkies over their friends & loved ones because they can feel equal or superior to these losers &, thus, their grandiosity is upheld & their self-esteem is restored.

People with paranoid ideation tend to suspect & fear anyone who has the perceived power to deny them something that they crave & depend on - or to take it away from them. Because they are focused on highly specific potential losses, they ignore the fact that strangers can sexually assault or even kill them. Such misjudgment and misperception of risk is enhanced by alcohol or drug abuse ("alcohol myopia").

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"For what qualities in a man," asked the youth, "does a woman most ardently love him?"
"For those qualities in him," replied the old tutor, "which his mother most ardently hates." (A Book Without A Title, by George Jean Nathan (1918)

Women look for FIVE qualities in men for a long-term relationship: 1. Good Judgment; 2. Intelligence; 3. Faithfulness; 4. Affectionate behavior; 5. Financial responsibility and wherewithal.

Women look for TEN qualities in a male partner for casual sex or a sexual affair: 1. Nice body (but not too muscular); 2. Has money and not stingy; 3. Kindness; 4. Interested in them (finds them interesting); 5. Sexually desires the woman and shows it with flirting or small touches - but not aggressively; 6. Protective (but not possessive or jealous); 7. Attentive (puts the woman and her needs at the center of attention, doesn't overshadow her, compete with her, or ignore her); 8. Has a sense of humor; 9. Loves life and finds people interesting: knows to have a good, adventurous time, fun, and quick to socialize; 10. Easy going, not brooding, or overly serious and nerdy, not too intelligent or scholarly "boring"

Men seem to place a premium on these FIVE qualities in a woman for all purposes: 1. Physical attractiveness and sexual availability; 2. Good-naturedness; 3. Faithfulness; 4. Protective Affectionateness; 5. Dependability.

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The cerebral narcissist strikes a deal with his intimate partner: I will be your Father - You will be my Mother.

1. "I will be your Father"

I will provide for you, educate and guide you, help you, protect you, and discipline you. I will always be there for you, forgiving with unconditional parental love, no matter what and even if and when you misbehave.

As your Father, we cannot have sex, but you can have it with others. Like every possessive father, I will react with rage and pain to this betrayal, but will do nothing to prevent you from cheating on me, or even encourage you to do so in order to keep you in my life and under my control.

2. "You will be my Mother"

You will love and accept me unconditionally, regardless of my egregious abuse.

You will take care of all my needs. You will not expect me to behave as an adult or shoehorn me into adult roles, chores, and obligations.

You will never abandon me, but will not demand sex and intimacy (both of which I find threatening). More about the cerebral narcissist:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq29.html

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/journal21.html

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Following a series of rebellions, the British North American colonies achieved self-government in 1848. But the economic situation was dire. The colonies, immersed as they were in the 1847 global depression, could no longer rely on protective tariffs once the British repealed the Corn Laws. Famished and disease-stricken Irish immigrants flooded the new state. Young men in Canada West left in droves for the United States due to a shortage of agricultural land

The 1849 Gold Rush brought tens of thousands of gold diggers from the USA to Canada. Riots erupted in Montreal. A Rebellion Losses Bill, intended to compensate some of the victims of the 1837-38 rebellion, further drained the country's dilapidated resources

By 1849, many Canadians were clamoring to join the United States. An Annexation Association was founded to promote unification with the prospering southern neighbor. The two versions of an Annexation Manifesto were signed by the entire business community in Montreal and Quebec and by the nationalists, who, contrary to their name, were republicans who preferred the USA to the British crown.

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Some people reject happiness and embrace misery. They belong to either of three groups:

1. Masochists

The masochist has been taught from an early age to hate herself and consider herself unworthy of love and worthless as a person. Consequently, he or she is prone to self-destructive, punishing, and self-defeating behaviors. Though capable of pleasure and possessed of social skills, the masochist avoids or undermines pleasurable experiences. He does not admit to enjoying himself, seeks suffering, pain, and hurt in relationships and situations, rejects help and resents those who offer it. She actively renders futile attempts to assist or ameliorate or mitigate or solve her problems and predicaments.

These self-penalizing behaviors are self-purging: they intend to relieve the masochist of overwhelming, pent-up anxiety. The masochist's conduct is equally aimed at avoiding intimacy and its benefits: companionship and support.

2. Eternal Victims

Victimhood can become an identity and organizing principle that endows the world with meaning and predictability. Surviving abuse is an accomplishment that victims are proud of, emotionally invested in, and loth to relinquish, the foundation of their fragile and labile self-esteem. Some victims regard themselves as damsels in distress or sleeping beauties, princesses awaiting rescue by a knight in shining armor in a fabulous, mythical, morally righteous, or grandiose narrative.

3. Comfort Zone

Being a victim can become a profession of sorts: the abused know the ropes, the unspoken rules, codes of conduct, and are adept at foreseeing forthcoming maltreatment. They have evolved coping strategies and manipulative techniques in order to adapt to and survive in the toxic environment. They feel threatened in non-abusive situations and environments and with "nice people".

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The narcissist's grandiosity renders him gullible and open to exploitation and abuse. I have written about it extensively here: https://samvak.tripod.com/journal68.html

But there is another aspect of the narcissist's behavior which makes him oblivious to cues, information, and events in their immediate environment: his singleminded, solipsistic focus on extracting narcissistic supply from existing and potential sources.

Narcissists are so obsessed with supply that they fail to notice as people around them conspire to take advantage of them or cheat them.

The pathetic narcissist drones on endlessly and self-aggrandizingly as his intimate partner aggressively flirts with another man and then departs with her new conquest on an assignation (happened to me more times than I can count). He keeps lecturing and showing off even as his audience smirks and mocks the bumbling fool for his clownish mannerisms or is bored out of its collective mind. In a desperate attempt to impress, he shares ideas and proprietary information that is then plagiarized or stolen. He is utterly unaware of anything else but the compulsive pursuit of his next fix of attention and (mostly imagined and delusional) adulation. And this one track mindedness is his undoing: defenseless and driven, he opens himself to attack and harm, hurt and pain, humiliation and defeat that sometimes threaten and undermine his very survival.

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The child prodigy compensates with grandiose, fantastic, and inflated self-efficacy ("I can do anything if I just apply myself to it") for a deficient sense of agency ("the life I am living is not mine"). The child prodigy suppresses his true self because his parents's love is conditioned on the performance of a false self.

Consequently, the child feels that her life has been hijacked. She makes up for it by excelling and becoming proficient at what she does thus regaining a modicum of mastery and control, however illusory. Such attempts to carve out a parent-free enclave or niche often lead to pathologies such as eating disorders or substance abuse.

As an adult, the child prodigy becomes narcissistic, defiant, self-destructive, and manipulative. She adopts one of several narratives: 1. I am the sleeping beauty princess in need of saving from my monstrous tormentors (codependent) or 2. I am the Law and no one will tell me what to do and how to do it, I know best and one day I will shine again (antisocial-narcissistic) or 3. The world doesn't deserve me and is too hostile, so I withdraw from it (paranoid-schizoid) or 4. I am broken, unfixable, and so free to act any which way (entitled-borderline).

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Severely traumatized victims of abuse (with PTSD and CPTSD) often become avoidant. But they also display psychopathic and narcissistic traits and behaviors. These are reactive and transient: they vanish without a trace once the victims are nurtured back to health in a holding and loving environment and go full-fledged no contact with their abuser

The psychopathic and narcissistic overlays (these acquired responsive learned traits and behaviors) do not amount to personality styles and disorders. They just serve to counter the abuse or contain it and restore eroded self-efficacy and a sense of agency in the traumatic space. In this sense, they are actually healthy and indicative of resilience.

The victim becomes self-centred, dysempathic, defiant, goal-oriented, reckless, lying, or aggressive just in order to survive in the pathological environment and the multifarious assaults on her identity and individuality.

Theodore Millon wrote this in his seminal "Personality Disorders in Modern Life": "Many readers will be surprised that some of their best qualities express characteristics associated with the antisocial personality ... a capacity for self-sufficiency, ambition, competitiveness, and a constructive pursuit of individuality and self-determination"

Scholars like Oldham, Morris, Maccoby, and Dutton uphold this view that a modicum of psychopathy is actually healthy and a prerequisite for survival and success in certain situations, environments, and professions.

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Common dissociative states include sex, sleep, watching films, daydreaming, driving, hypnosis, and alcohol-induced blackouts. They all have several things in common:

Paranoid ideation (an outcome of disorientation and loss of control)

Belabored self-efficacy (to appear to others as present and functioning)

Emotional quarantine (fending off emotions to avoid being overwhelmed and dysregulated)

Automatism (auto-pilot) and boredom

Time loss and attention deficits

Will substitution (obeying others who are perceived as more present)

Amnesia (impairment of memory creation and storage, both short-term and long-term)

Exceptionalism (accomplishing feats or behaving in ways which one finds surprising, shocking, or alien)

Cognitive deficits and impaired reality test

Empathy inversion (empathy reduced for nearest and dearest and enhanced for strangers)

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Default or base behaviors

We learn what behavior (or misbehavior) works (is efficacious), what guarantees the maximal efficient results. We then repeat the mis(behavior) time and again, almost automatically and uncontrollably (compulsively). We revisit these (mis)behaviors even if we vowed and promised and swore and pledged and declared that we will never ever do it again!

Triangulation is an example of a default base behavior: involving third parties in whatever way in order to manage outcomes in a relationship

Default base behaviors are learned and afterwards compulsive and automatic (autonomous). They are common among trauma victims (in post-traumatic states) and individuals with diminished impulse control.

Default or base behaviors are adaptive (they work perfectly). "So, why not do it again", says the executive unconscious. The conscious part cannot control these behaviors or interfere.

Once one is triggered, one acts that way. Nothing can or will prevent it. One just goes ahead and does it, as though one were hypnotized or in a trance.

So, the therapeutic goal should be prevention: to make sure to avoid triggering.

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Little known facts about earthquakes & temblors:

The epicenter of an earthquake is not the same as its hypocenter (focus, point of origin within a fault-line). The epicenter is the point on the surface of the Earth directly above the focus. Dangerous, shallow-focus quakes originate 0-70 kilometers below the surface

Less damaging deep-focus tremors occur between 70-700 kilometers down. Subduction zone earthquakes (like the one that gave rise to the lethal tsunami on December 26, 2004) occur when one tectonic plate moves under another (subducts)

There are interplate and intraplate quakes, which take place along plate boundaries or within the fracturing crust of a single plate, respectively

Earthquakes are not rare at all - several hundred earthquakes occur every day. There are about 1 million of them annually - of which 50,000 can be felt without the aid of instruments. Tremors of the magnitude of Kobe in 1995 (which caused an estimated damage of $100 billion ) are measured 20 times in an average year

The Encyclopedia Britannica (2005 edition) describes a "swarm" of such events thus: "In the Matsushiro region of Japan, for instance, there occurred between August 1965 and 1967 a series of hundreds of thousands of earthquakes, some sufficiently strong (up to local magnitude 5) to cause property damage but no casualties. The maximum frequency was 6,780 small earthquakes on April 17, 1966"

The Pacific ocean is the unhappy recipient of well over 80 percent of all the energy released by earthquakes worldwide. Japan alone suffers from 1500 tremors annually (of which two thirds are greater than 3.5 in magnitude). Fault lines abound and new ones are discovered frequently. One fault line runs under 125th street in Manhattan, New-York

Still, in the last 5 centuries, all earthquakes combined killed less than one tenth the victims of World War II - and this includes the 240,000 who died in the 1976 Tang-Shan, China event.

Earthquakes are composites of:

I. Primary (or compression) and secondary (or shearing) body waves (that travel in the rocks under the surface of the Earth at speeds of up to 7 kilometers per second and frequencies of between 20 Hertz and one vibration per 54 minutes); and

II. Two types of surface waves, named after British physicist Lord Rayleigh and British geophysicist A. E. H. Love (with frequencies of 1-0.005 Hertz)

Some earthquakes are caused by human activities (such as the filling of water reservoirs behind dams, injecting water into deep wells, and underground nuclear tests). More than 600 tremors were recorded in the decade following the filling of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona state border

Some earthquakes produce low-pitch sounds and light effects (flashes, streamers, and balls). Water in lakes and reservoirs oscillate causing flooding (a phenomenon called seiche). Seiches were observed in Scotland and Sweden following the Lisbon quake of 1755. Similarly, the Alaskan tremor in 1964 produced seiches in Texas and throughout the southwestern parts of the United States

Measuring the magnitude of earthquakes is more a fine art than an exact science

Charles Richter developed his eponymous logarithmic scale in 1935. It measures the amplitude (the height) of seismic surface waves. Each unit represents a tenfold increase in the energy released by the tremor. An earthquake of magnitude 9 is, therefore, 1000 stronger than a tremor of magnitude 6. The Kobe earthquake measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, the San Francisco tremor of 1906 was 8.3 (as was the earthquake in the Mississippi Valley in 1811), and both the Alaskan quake of 1964 and the South Asian underwater temblor of 2004 were around 9 (9.2 in Alaska to be precise)

The Richter scale is used mainly by the media. Professional seismologists use the Moment Magnitude Scale (MMS) which takes into account the properties of the area and the amount of slippage (displacement). It captures the total energy of the tremor. The Kobe earthquake measured 7 on the MMS, the San Francisco tremor of 1906 was 7.6, and the Alaskan quake of 1964 was 9

Then there is the still-used 12-grade Modified Mercalli Scale (adapted in 1931 by American seismologists H. O. Wood and Frank Neumann from the original Mercalli scale, proposed in 1902 Italian seismologist Giuseppe Mercalli). It measures the impact that an earthquake has on the natural and man-made environment to gauge its magnitude. The Europeans have a similar 12-grade scale, called MSK.
Seaquakes are earthquakes that start on land and then travel into the sea at the speed of sound (about 1.5 kilometers per second)

Quakes occur even on the moon which has no plates, volcanic activities, or ocean trenches. The five seismograph stations of the Passive Seismic Experiment set up between 1969 and 1977 as part of the United States Apollo Program detected up to 3,000 moonquakes every year. Mars, on the other hand, seems not to have quakes at all!

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Male vibe is not the same as man vibe.

Some men have problems dating women or getting laid because even when women find them irresistible - they find women excruciatingly boring

The only thing they want to do with a woman is to fuck her. A huge turn off for many women (though not all)

Such men are willing to invest some time to pretend that they are interested in the woman, to woo and to court her - but not too much. They want to get to business ASAP.

Women feel that they do not interest these men and that all these men want is to fuck them.

So, they do not get the "MAN vibe" from these men - only the "MALE vibe"

Most men ARE interested in women, love to spend time with them, get to know them, talk to them, have a good time with them, and so on. Most men find women fascinating and love their company. This is the MAN vibe.

The "MALE vibe" men are different. If they cannot fuck the woman or are not sexually attracted - they lose all interest and would never spend even one additional minute with her. They make women feel objectified and dehumanized. They come across as dishonest and painfully rejecting.

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Women - online and in my life - have been using me as a punching bag ever since I taught them what is "narcissistic abuse" (a phrase I coined) and gave them the entire language that they are using now to describe both their suffering and the men who inflicted it.

Women often cannot get back at their abusers for practical or emotional reasons: joint finances or custody, going no contact, a violent ex.

So, they attack me - often viciously - as a stand in for their abusive partners, or parents, or colleagues, or children or whatever.

I am the world's acknowledged monster psychopathic narcissist abuser. I am the uncrowned king and representative and embodiment of every man who has ever abused a woman anywhere on this Earth

So, women lash out at me, cheat on me ostentatiously, punish me, betray me, humiliate and mock me publicly, badmouth me, call me names, undermine me, and seek to annihilate me and cause me sometimes life threatening pain and harm. And they misbehave in these hurtful ways never mind how helpful, supportive, compassionate, and dare I say empathic I have been to them in person or online. "You are just like my husband or ex, you remind me so much of him, you are vile, sick, dangerous, an abuser, fake, manipulative, selfish!" - they write to me or heckle me in seminars or scream at me in heated fights in my fraught relationships. Even my wives and lovers have joined this chorus: women I gave everything I had to.

Abusing me empowers these victims and survivors, provides them with closure, with a sense of restored justice.

The irony is that I have spent the past 25 years giving these women a voice with my pioneering - and freely available online - work. More than 100,000,000 people visited my websites (70% women) and watched my videos over the decades. Between 1995-2004 I had been the lone voice on the topic. There was no one else with either a website or support groups. Just me.

But instead of gratitude, I reaped the whirlwind of hatred and derision, fear and shunning, cruel punishment and pain - even from the women who claim to love me.

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These 2 award-winning film directors have Down Syndrome. Clearly, they are very far from the stereotype of retarded (intellectually disabled or intellectually challenged) "mongoloids". Other people with Down Syndrome hold advanced, even post-graduate degrees.

Something is wrong here: Down Syndrome is supposed to be a genetic clinical entity, as immutable and identical across all sufferers as tuberculosis. Yet, incredibly, the variance in intelligence, accomplishments, and self-efficacy among Down patients is great.

The situation in our understanding of trisomy 21, its ramifications and manifestations is reminiscent of how we misconstrued and misunderstood autism spectrum disorders until a few years ago. At first we thought that autists are retarded. Then we accused bad mothering as the etiological determinant. Then we considered it a disorder of communication (wrong processing of environmental cues). Inner noise. Being overwhelmed by stimuli. Any number of crackpot theories. Today we realize that autism is a neurological problem.

Down Syndrome may be a neurological disorder as well and may result in extreme emotional dysregulation, even lability (like in Borderline Personality Disorder or CPTSD or Highly Sensitive People and superempaths). People with Down syndrome are known for their heightened affect. It is a promising line of inquiry well worth pursuing because it may yield treatment modalities (therapies) and educational programs that may unlock the creative potential in these loving, childlike innocents.

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Intimate partners of narcissists often remain in the relationship because they pity the narcissist or mother him or can't find the strength to hurt him by abandoning the ghost ship.

But even the most loving and dedicated spouses and mates give up at some point, confronted by ceaseless rejection and abuse that undermine their sanity and threaten their survival. They develop what I call "escape velocity" and break free from the gravitational pull of their absent and painful companion.

No amount of sobbing or charm can reverse the partner's decision to eject once the escape velocity had been attained. Sometimes the partners act out - cheat on the narcissist promiscuously, or otherwise betray his trust publicly, ostentatiously, and egregiously - just to make sure that there is no way back.

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The collapsed histrionic is usually a woman with body image (somatoform) issues and a low sense of self-worth. Yet, she still needs men and uses them to regulate her flagging self-esteem and deficient self-confidence. This creates a permanent dissonance and anticipatory anxiety as such a woman expects fully to be rejected and humiliated by men

Low self-esteem often leads to an impaired reality test: the collapsed histrionic misreads environmental, social, and sexual cues and often ends up being mocked, shunned, abused, or sexually assaulted by men

She compensates for her insecurities with brazen defiance and grandiosity as well as substance abuse, all of which compound her ability to properly gauge reality

Her feelings of inferiority and inadequacy lead the collapsed histrionic to social withdrawal and reclusiveness. She also rarely dates men and when she does, she picks up "safe" males - weak, ugly losers - who are very unlikely to painfully reject her.

More about Histrionic Personality Disorder: https://samvak.tripod.com/personalitydisorders17.html

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In two dozen countries over 4 decades, men have been picking up my women and going into the night with them.

Men do not hesitate to approach the woman I am with directly, IN MY PRESENCE, and invite her to dump me and accompany them.

I ask myself two questions.

QUESTION ONE

How do men KNOW that they can pick up my women directly, while I am present, without even acknowledging my existence, and that I will NOT put up a fight for my rights and my woman?

I don't know the answer.

Such misbehavior is infinitely disrespectful and breaks every code of conduct among men

Men NEVER do that to other men

But men did and do it to me ALL THE TIME

The disrespecting men are actually saying with their misbehavior: "You are not man enough to prevent me from taking your woman away from you. Even your woman does not consider you a man." My misbehaving women are acting as though I am not a man at all - definitely not their man!

Actually, my women behave as though I am not there!!! They interact with the other man, flirt, and then go off together - all while ignoring me completely

My women use other men to get to me, assert their independence, and to satisfy their unmet emotional and sexual needs.

I get that.

But how do MEN - even TOTAL STRANGERS - know that they can take my women from me IN MY PRESENCE and I will NOT RESIST, PROTEST, or TRY TO STOP THEM in any way, shape, or form?

How are men - even TOTAL STRANGERS - NOT AFRAID and know that they can approach my women DIRECTLY and with impunity and totally humiliate and disrespect me WHILE I AM WATCHING the whole process unfold?

That is the part I don't get.

QUESTION TWO

Why don't I fight back when men approach my women, flirt with them and go into the night with them? Why don't I tell these men to fuck off, or else ... Two reasons:

A. I do NOT COMPETE for my women with other men.

My woman is stupid enough to give up on a treasure like me and go for another, much more inferior man? Well, maybe she is too stupid for me, maybe I should not be with her anyhow.

It is like a compatibility test

I would not want to be with a woman who chooses another man over me because it means that she is too retarded to appreciate me and what she has with me.

B. The second reason I do not resist is this:

I abuse and reject my women and withhold sex from them.

I feel that I have NO RIGHT to prevent them from satisfying their emotional and sexual needs with other men

I feel that my women have the RIGHT to get their emotional and sexual needs met with other men.

I just wish they were all more discrete and didn't disrespect and humiliate me in public and rub my face in it.

But I guess going off with another man is my woman's way of saying:

Fuck you, Sam, I do not depend on you.

I will do whatever I want with other men.

I will get a reaction out of you, and hurt and humiliate you in public, the way you have hurt me.

I have a very sick dynamic with women: we punish each other in an escalating spiral of pain and rage.

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Feminism aside, women are still defined by the male gaze. They leverage it to derive a sense of feminine identity and to regulate their self-esteem. This is a narcissistic-histrionic feature that is common to all women, no matter how vehemently they deny it

When a woman doesn't get this critical affirmation from one man, when she is thoroughly ignored and rejected, she moves on - sometimes swiftly - to another man who does "see" her

The most extreme form of abuse by far is to deny a woman this gaze: to look through her, as though she were made of air, transparent, non-existent. To negate, erase, and delete her as an autonomous person and a woman by steadfastly pretending that she does not exist and by not catering to her deepest psychological needs and anxieties

To fight and to argue - even to actively mistreat a woman - is to acknowledge her existence. It is survivable and human and women adapt to such unfortunate circumstances

But the disdainful, chilling, reptilian x-ray vision of the psychopathic narcissist evaporates his partner, layer by layer. She starts to doubt not only her sanity, but her very existence

Subjected to such vitiation, most women seek to reaffirm and reassert their autonomy and being via another man - any man

To restore their shattered sense of wellbeing, they act out, desperate to regain a foothold in a reality rendered surreal and shifting by the psychopathic narcissist's devastating combination of soul-destroying contempt and all-pervasive non-acknowledgment: the absence of his gaze.

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Traumas with the same structure or emotional content resonate with and either amplify or ameliorate each other ("trauma resonance"). This is even more pronounced if the traumas involve the same person and are proximate in time

Typically, the traumatized person reacts with "trauma displacement": she reprocesses the more inactive or less recent experience (via flashbacks, nightmares, obsessive or intrusive thoughts, various emotions, anger, sadness, rumination, and so on). This way, she represses or reframes the new trauma, especially of there is no other effective way to cope with it.

Avoiding triggers is very counterproductive. On the contrary: healing is predicated on obtaining desensitization and closure via repeated exposure to the the people or circumstances who caused the trauma, even to the point if controlled retraumatization (a technique in Cold Therapy).

More here: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/trauma.html

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Some women have a predominant metaphor of their lives, very resounding and powerful:

I am hurt, tortured, and broken. I am looking for a man, a knight in shining armor, a savior to support me, comfort me, and heal me.

These women broadcast, implicitly and explicitly, to everyone, but especially to men:

I am the sleeping beauty, the damsel in distress, the princess in the tower, held hostage and mistreated by callous, cruel, evil, or insane men. I need help and rescue!

Men - protectors and competitors by nature - react very powerfully to this message and chivalrously rush to their aid.

When a man refuses to play this game, insists that the woman acts as an adult, assumes full responsibilities and makes timely decisions - it is often perceived as cold-hearted abuse by such women. "Princesses" get cold feet and are overwhelmed to the point of acting out when they are treated as equals and are expected to perform with no allowances for their rescue fantasies.

They reject, abuse, and punish men who decline to participate in their dramas, the theatre productions of their lives. They have no idea how to cope with men who do not respond to their distress cues.

More generally, women actually hate being treated as MEN who happen to have vaginas and when they are expected to behave as men do and to perform to the same standards and with the same alacrity.

Women perceive this as abuse because, feminism aside, they still need to feel small and protected.

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Cold feet: the remorse that accompanies a - usually major - decision (like getting married or acquiring a home). It often leads to passive-aggressive, reckless, immoral, or destructive behaviors intended to undermine further action and reverse course.

The recipient of such mistreatment is traumatized: he feels rejected or abandoned or betrayed or cruelly and unjustly abused or damaged. Trust is shattered.

But cold feet have little to do with the target: the jilted fiancee or the dumped lover or the defaulted seller. Cold feet represent complex inner dynamics of avoidance, repetition compulsion, prior traumas, low self-esteem, a labile sense of self-worth and inadequacy, fear of the unknown, and emotional dysregulation (being overwhelmed)

However, if you keep attracting into your life people who get cold feet, there could be a problem with your selection criteria - or with you. It behoves you to look into why you keep choosing the wrong folks - or what in you gives them cold feet.

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Children have a right to know the overall state of affairs between their parents. They have a right not to be cheated and deluded into thinking that "everything is basically OK" – or that the separation is reversible. Both parents are under a moral obligation to tell their offspring the truth: the relationship is over for good.

Younger kids tend to believe that they are somehow responsible or guilty for the breakdown of the marriage. They must be disabused of this notion. Both parents would do best to explain to them, in straightforward terms, what led to the dissolution of the bond. If spousal abuse is wholly or partly to blame – it should be brought out to the open and discussed honestly.

In such conversations it is best not to allocate blame. But this does not mean that wrong behaviors should be condoned or whitewashed. The victimized parent should tell the child that abusive conduct is wrong and must be avoided. The child should be taught how to identify the warning signs of impending abuse – sexual, verbal, psychological, and physical.

Moreover, a responsible parent should teach the child how to resist inappropriate and hurtful actions. The child should be brought up to insist on being respected by the other parent, on having him or her observe the child's boundaries and accept the child's needs and emotions, choices, and preferences.

The child should learn to say "no" and to walk away from potentially compromising situations with the abusive parent. The child should be brought up not to feel guilty for protecting himself or herself and for demanding his or her rights.

Remember this: An abusive parent IS DANGEROUS TO THE CHILD.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/abuse13.html

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The abuser often recruits his children to do his bidding. He uses them to tempt, convince, communicate, threaten, and otherwise manipulate his target, the children's other parent or a devoted relative (e.g., grandparents). He controls his - often gullible and unsuspecting - offspring exactly as he plans to control his ultimate prey. He employs the same mechanisms and devices. And he dumps his props unceremoniously when the job is done - which causes tremendous (and, typically, irreversible) emotional hurt.

Co-opting

Some offenders - mainly in patriarchal and misogynist societies – co-opt their children into aiding and abetting their abusive conduct. The couple's children are used as bargaining chips or leverage. They are instructed and encouraged by the abuser to shun the victim, criticize and disagree with her, withhold their love or affection, and inflict on her various forms of ambient abuse.

Threatening

Abusers are insatiable and vindictive. They always feel deprived and unfairly treated. Some of them are paranoid and sadistic. If they fail to manipulate their common children into abandoning the other parent, they begin treating the kids as enemies. They are not above threatening the children, abducting them, abusing them (sexually, physically, or psychologically), or even outright harming them - in order to get back at the erstwhile partner or in order to make her do something.

Most victims attempt to present to their children a "balanced" picture of the relationship and of the abusive spouse. In a vain attempt to avoid the notorious (and controversial) Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), they do not besmirch the abusive parent and, on the contrary, encourage the semblance of a normal, functional, liaison. This is the wrong approach. Not only is it counterproductive - it sometimes proves outright dangerous.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/abuse12.html

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The abuser perverts the system - therapists, marriage counselors, mediators, court-appointed guardians, police officers, and judges. He uses them to pathologize the victim and to separate her from her sources of emotional sustenance - notably, from her children. The abuser seeks custody to pain his ex and punish her.

Therapists, marriage counselors, mediators, court-appointed guardians, police officers, and judges are human. Some of them are social reactionaries, others are narcissists, and a few are themselves spouse abusers. Many things work against the victim facing the justice system and the psychological profession.

Inevitably, many victims blame themselves for the dismal state of affairs. The abused party may have low self-esteem, a fluctuating sense of self-worth, primitive defense mechanisms, phobias, mental health problems, a disability, a history of failure, or a tendency to blame herself, or to feel inadequate (autoplastic neurosis). She may have come from an abusive family or environment – which conditioned her to expect abuse as inevitable and "normal". In extreme and rare cases – the victim is a masochist, possessed of an urge to seek ill-treatment and pain. Gradually, the victims convert these unhealthy emotions and their learned helplessness in the face of persistent "gaslighting" into psychosomatic symptoms, anxiety and panic attacks, depression, or, in extremis, suicidal ideation and gestures.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/abuse2.html

How abusers con the system and manipulate it: https://samvak.tripod.com/abusefamily10.html

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According to the Alternative DSM V Model for Personality Disorders (p.767), the following criteria must be met to diagnose Narcissistic Personality Disorder (in parentheses my comments)

Moderate or greater impairment in personality functioning in either identity, or self-direction (should be: in both)

Identity

The narcissist keeps referring to others excessively in order to regulate his self-esteem (really, sense of self-worth) and for "self-definition" (to define his identity.) His self-appraisal is exaggerated, whether it is inflated, deflated, or fluctuating between these two poles and his emotional regulation reflects these vacillations. (Finally, the DSM V accepted what I have been saying for decades: that narcissists can have an "inferiority complex" and feel worthless and bad; that they go through cycles of ups and downs in their self-evaluation; and that this cycling influences their mood and affect)

Self-direction

The narcissist sets goals in order to gain approval from others (narcissistic supply; the DSM V ignores the fact that the narcissist finds disapproval equally rewarding as long as it places him firmly in the limelight.) The narcissist lacks self-awareness as far as his motivation goes (and as far as everything else besides)

The narcissist's personal standards and benchmarks are either too high (which supports his grandiosity), or too low (buttresses his sense of entitlement, which is incommensurate with his real-life performance)

Impairments in interpersonal functioning in either empathy or intimacy (should be: in both).

Narcissistic Personality Disorder Alternative Model in DSM 5 (in parentheses my comments)

Empathy

The narcissist finds it difficult to identify with the emotions and needs of others, but is very attuned to their reactions when they are relevant to himself (cold empathy.) Consequently, he overestimates the effect he has on others or underestimates it (the classic narcissist never underestimates the effect he has on others - but the inverted narcissist does)

Intimacy

The narcissist's relationships are self-serving and, therefore shallow and superficial. They are centred around and geared at the regulation of his self-esteem (obtaining narcissistic supply for the regulation of his labile sense of self-worth.) The narcissist is not "genuinely" interested in his intimate partner's experiences (implying that he does fake such interest convincingly.) The narcissist emphasizes his need for personal gain (by using the word "need", the DSM V acknowledges the compulsive and addictive nature of narcissistic supply). These twin fixtures of the narcissist's relationships render them one-sided: no mutuality or reciprocity (no intimacy).

Pathological personality traits

Antagonism characterized by grandiosity and attention-seeking

Grandiosity

The aforementioned feeling of entitlement. The DSM V adds that it can be either overt or covert (which corresponds to my taxonomy of classic and inverted narcissist.) Grandiosity is characterized by self-centredness; a firmly-held conviction of superiority (arrogance or haughtiness); and condescending or patronizing attitudes.

Attention-seeking

The narcissist puts inordinate effort, time, and resources into attracting others (sources of narcissistic supply) and placing himself at the focus and centre of attention. He seeks admiration (the DSM V gets it completely wrong here: the narcissist does prefer to be admired and adulated, but, failing that, any kind of attention would do, even if it is negative.) The diagnostic criteria end with disclaimers and differential diagnoses, which reflect years of accumulated research and newly-gained knowledge:

The above enumerated impairments should be "stable across time and consistent across situations ... not better understood as normative for the individual’s developmental stage or socio-cultural environment ... are not solely due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., severe head trauma)."

More info here: https://samvak.tripod.com/npdglance.html

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The narcissist's best friend: always listens attentively, never argues, never disagrees

Gregariousness and (lack of) Self-confidence

When one's sense of self-worth is unstable, a good way to regulate it is by obtaining narcissistic supply (attention, affirmation, adulation, admiration, being feared, or hated). The narcissistic individual acquires a sense of reality and roots and counters his desultory groundlessness and inherent instability by feeding on reactions to his False Self. Thus, the narcissist's gregariousness is instrumental in buttressing his grandiose, fantastic, and inflated self-image and self-esteem.

Still, such behavior is not confined to narcissists. In anomic societies and periods, when institutions are rendered suspect by incompetence, corruption, and insularity, people tend to react by forming mobs and crowds. This mass-gregariousness sustains their sense of identity and aids in the regulation of their perceived self-worth. It is a narcissistic defence against dislocation and alienation.

A prime example of such reaction can be found online. As experts, scholars, institutions, and gatekeepers failed to ride the tigers of modern technology and the new media, users congregated and formed their own social networks and repositories of "knowledge" (mostly culled from raw data and primary sources, as in the case of Wikipedia, the "encyclopaedia" that anyone can edit). In a way, they "crowdsourced" their self-esteem.

The narcissist and his "friends" https://samvak.tripod.com/journal85.html

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Star Trek? No! Aldo Coppola in Krasnodar! (@aldocoppola_krasnodar)

Amazing interior design combines space age aesthetics with mirrors and soft, warm colored surfaces to yield the most otherworldly experience!

The latest in instruments, cosmetic and dermatological treatments, beauty products, and medical devices, this center of excellence, relaunched in April 2019, deserves a visit (or more), if only for the daring and creative innovation which seamlessly combine with the most exacting professional standards and functionality.

Wow!

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A day in the country: thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating company and a range of issues dissected and discussed - from international affairs to philosophy, medicine, and psychology.
A rare respite. Heartfelt thanks to my gracious hosts.

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Love and rage are twin emotions: the one ineluctably evokes the other. True and profound love, being irresistible and intractable, implies a modicum of helplessness and even hopelessness. This background frustration invariably results in aggression.
As a relationship progresses, rage gains the upper hand: betrayals, big and small, as well as narcissistic injuries, conspire against the powers of love to forgive and reframe.

The only antidote to rage is effective and honest communication. Alas, it is so rare, obstructed as it so frequently is by power plays and emotional blackmail.

Love cannot win this race. It succumbs to bitter, disappointed anger and its numerous transformations. Finally, it is alchemically transmuted into hatred.

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Intimacy and sex are inseparable, even in a casual, one night stand. The greater the emotional intimacy, the more expressive and meaningful the sexual intimacy.

But there are people for whom sex and intimacy are mutually exclusive: when they are bonded and attached to a partner, they cannot make love to her and they fuck only relative strangers within shallow, fleeting relationships.

These dysfunctional and hurtful folks perceive intimacy as a threat and sex as a dirty act within a power play of dominance and submission. To fuck a loved one is to demean her and treat her a slut. To make love to an intimate partner is to hand over power and to be inevitably wounded and hurt when dumped or abandoned. So, they abstain and cheat.

Ultimately, these emotional cripples end up in dead marriages or as loners and are reduced to bar crawling to find equally inebriated sexual partners. As age takes its toll, they totally withdraw, incapable of even the most rudimentary tasks of psychosexual companionship.

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In some couples, where one member is a failure and a loser, the other member fails to thrive and engages in self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors in order to not humiliate the less accomplished intimate partner by being too successful.

Similarly, when one of the members of the dyad is challenged or threatened by intimacy or sexuality, the other member often opts to suppress her femininity (or his masculinity) in order to avoid conflicts and hurt.

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Peter the Great oriented a reluctant Russia towards the West: its technologies and work ethic, if not its values. Two centuries later, Russian aristocracy was French, its military and commerce German, its monarchy half British, its culture and literature at the core of mainstream Europe. Putin is aiming to reverse all this by firewalling Russia, weaning it off its dependence on the West, and reorienting it towards Asia (from China to the Middle East). It is a gargantuan reversal.

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Narcissists prefer to be right than to be happy. It is a self-defeating, even self-destructive propensity. The narcissist pushes people to prove his judgment and prognostications infallible even at a life-threatening traumatic cost to himself

For example: the narcissist may predict a dire, painful future and then preemptively make it happen in order to avoid dissonance, a challenge to his grandiosity (omniscience), and the excruciating shame for having been wrong and having misread the tea leaves

The narcissist prevaricates, deceives, confabulates, and gaslights in order to preserve ego syntony by always being right. He undermines intimate relationships, his own accomplishments, and values and priorities to preserve his fantastic, godlike grandiosity.

When confronted with incontrovertible evidence that he is wrong, the narcissist reacts by retreating to delusions and thus denying reality. He decompensates, acts out, and rages or becomes passive-aggressive.

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Beta male losers get laid more often than "alpha" male winners because women frequently select them for casual sex. "Nice guys" are "safe": they do not threaten the woman with any prospect of long-term attachment or relationship, they make few demands, and are pliable and compliant one night sexual and dating partners: someone to have drinks with, chat, and socialize with, fuck for a while, and then discard without giving this disposable man a second thought.

Women are far more likely to have sex on a first date with a beta male than with the socially superior and more accomplished variant.

As women adopt hitherto exclusively male sexual behaviors, mores, and traits, they become more promiscuous. Recent studies have revealed that women have almost as many one night stands as men, for example. Cheating among women in committed relationships also surged dramatically.

Research shows that women younger than 40 prefer men with 120 IQ points or fewer to men with 140 IQ points or more. They also find "overconfidence" in men extremely offputting. Nuff said.

This is a major upheaval in gender roles and inter-gender power politics. Only 40 years ago, women still overwhelmingly opted for winners and "jerks", in line with a trend as old and established as humanity itself

Numerous recent studies demonstrate this tectonic shift. As women become way more narcissistic and empowered in multiple ways, they prefer weaker, feminized males both as sexual partners and in romantic dyads.

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To preserve a language as a LIVING LANGUAGE, the following conditions must be met:

1. An academy of language to set standards and preserve linguistic knowledge

2. A corpus of words codified in works of reference such as dictionaries and thesauri

3. A population which speaks the language and shares the same cultural and historical space

4. Literature and media which make use of the language as a primary resource

5. Constant innovation and neologization (creation of new words) in slang and in various disciplines like technology.

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All of us - angels and demons alike - are trapped in the marble that is our lives.

We are but the accretions of hurt, the ossuaries of memories, the fossilized remains of previous identities, the skin regards of dear ones, the flaking sperm and dessicated lubricants of lovemaking, penumbral tastes and smells, raging against the dying of the light.

How fragile we are and how fleeting, ethereal.

We cling to each other for panicky comfort and we recoil, averting gaze, breaching the anguished oath of blood and tears that binds us.

A spark of god, his image, the greatness of surviving our mortality and passing with a smile, we swirling specks of dust illuminated, exclaim defiantly: been here, done that, we bid farewell on our terms. Adieu.

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Swap to the left for another vid.

Just a typical day at the office.

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Some philosophers say that our life is meaningless because it has a prescribed end. This is a strange assertion: is a movie rendered meaningless because of its finiteness? Some things acquire a meaning precisely because they are finite: consider academic studies, for instance. It would seem that meaningfulness does not depend upon matters temporary.

We all share the belief that we derive meaning from external sources. Something bigger than us – and outside us – bestows meaning upon our lives: God, the State, a social institution, an historical cause.

Yet, this belief is misplaced and mistaken. If such an external source of meaning were to depend upon us for its definition (hence, for its meaning) – how could we derive meaning from it? A cyclical argument ensues. We can never derive meaning from that whose very meaning (or definition) is dependent on us. The defined cannot define the definer. To use the defined as part of its own definition (by the vice of its inclusion in the definer) is the very definition of a tautology, the gravest of logical fallacies.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/external.html

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Earth is a complex, orderly, and open system. If it were an intelligent being, we would have been compelled to say that it had "chosen" to preserve and locally increase form (structure), order and complexity. This would explain why evolution did not stop at the protozoa level. After all, these mono-cellular organisms were (and still are, hundreds of millions of years later) superbly adapted to their environment. It was Bergson who posed the question: why did nature prefer the risk of unstable complexity over predictable and reliable and durable simplicity?

The answer seems to be that Nature has a predilection (not confined to the biological realm) to increase complexity and order and that this principle takes precedence over "utilitarian" calculations of stability. The battle between the entropic arrow and the negentropic one is more important than any other (in-built) "consideration". Time and the Third Law of Thermodynamics are pitted against Life (as an integral and ubiquitous part of the Universe) and Order (a systemic, extensive parameter) against Disorder.

In this context, natural selection is no more "blind" or "random" than its subjects. It is discriminating, encourages structure, complexity and order and rewards cooperation. The contrast that Bergson stipulated between Natural Selection and Élan Vitale is misplaced: Natural Selection IS the vital power itself.

Modern Physics is converging with metaphysics (possibly with the philosophical side of Religion as well) and the convergence is precisely where concepts of order and disorder emerge. String theories, for instance, come in numerous versions which describe many possible different worlds (though, admittedly, they may all be facets of the same Being: distant echoes of the new versions of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics)

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/anthropy.html

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When a man is cheated on by one woman, he feels cheated on by all women.

A cheating woman is unlike a cheating man: the woman invites her sex partner in, welcomes him warmly, serves him her unique drink, and guards his liquid manhood in herself. She is a host, he is a guest

Even in casual sex, the woman gives her essence, from inside. Even a one night stand implies intimacy, closeness, naked vulnerability, and total trust between the woman and her lover. It is a devastating blow to the cheated man from which he never fully recovers.

I have been cheated on repeatedly, defiantly, and sometimes maliciously and cruelly by many women. Here is the story of one such affair:

On the phone, hushed voices, in our bedroom, late afternoon, Noa declines an offer to meet with her lover. I stand in the corridor, book in hand, listening intently, refusing to believe.

Her side of the conversation consists of a half-hearted demurral balanced by a lot of hopeful incredulity. How do you know the key will be under the rug - she questions her interlocutor - and how can you be sure they won't be at home?

This is how this phone conversation proceeds and Noa can see a penumbral Sam projected by the hallway lighting and then she can see me entering the room and looking at her, dumbfounded. She casts a glance my way and ignores me, continues the exchange as though nothing entered her field of vision.

I tell her: "Disconnect, Noa, now!". She goes on talking and my voice turns harsher and echoes through this vacuous room. I approach and extend an infuriated hand towards the phone's cradle. Now Noa apologizes hastily and hangs up.

Ricocheting verbal shrapnel, sentences unuttered, tension. We look away, she at the phone, I at my tiptoed feet. Noa suddenly grins but it is sheer embarrassment. We can't believe that this is happening to us, to our togetherness.

Story continues here: http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/harmony-en.html

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There are three types of adult children:

The Intellectually Disabled Adult Child

Is very curious but has severe learning disabilities and attention deficits. Is very naive and trusts people because he or she misreads social and sexual cues and body language. Has concrete thinking. Is often also autistic. Good hearted but self-centred and lacks full-fledged empathy, so can be inadvertently cruel, inattentive, and insensitive.

The Delightful Adult Child

Is superintelligent, very curious, unconventional ("fresh") thinker, kind hearted, self-centered, and goal-oriented: all are qualities typical of a child.

The Narcissistic Adult Child or Peter Pan

Refuses to fulfill adult roles and chores. Is parasitic and dysempathic. Has dysregulated moods and affects. Egotistical, entitled, spoiled, and petulant.

More about the Narcissistic Adult Child here: https://samvak.tripod.com/narcissistinfantile.html

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She sees me off and welcomes me back on my trips, at the airport in Vienna.

She is at once a homemaker (her freckles and the coffee) and souciant, even risqué and inviting (her hair and smile). I know that one day she will be gone and am already nostalgic for our days and nights together.

I grieve for what could have been had she just mustered the courage and determination to step off her billboard - or had she invited me to join her there.

I would have. Joined her there

I would have given up the world for her grin and freckles and the wafting aromas of her coffee and of herself.

Could I have fallen in love with an advertisement? Could I be infatuated with an Althusserian interpellation? Is this not the ultimate, most delectable form of escapist fantasy? Is it even healthy?

Who cares! I mean: just look at her, gaze into her eyes, count the dimples in her cheeks, and swathe yourself in her auburn cascade ... She is irresistible because she is ethereal. And transient. And wholly mine.

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Do Narcissists Have Emotions?

The narcissist’s positive emotions come bundled with overpowering negative emotions, notably anger and envy. Rather than experience these, narcissists prefer to imitate emotions and affect.

Still, when deprived of narcissistic supply or when narcissistically injured, the narcissist does exhibit a limited range of reactive and highly destructive emotions.

Read about the narcissist's barren and inaccessible emotional landscape here: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq33.html

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A valiant effort by @energyandstructure to improve on mother Nature (and on my mother)

Swipe to the left to see the original (taken 6 years ago), the changed look, and more recent photos.

Rhys and Maurits provided me with this list of amendments to the first draft (which took 58 years to compose)

Changes made to face

Lowered central forelock of hairline
Advanced temple points of hairline
Removed glabellar lines
Lowered, straightened and thickened eyebrows
Removed under-eye bags
Elevated lower lid margin
Elevated lateral canthus
Decreased ear protrusion
Shrank nose
Softened nasolabial folds
Softened marionette lines
Lengthened chin vertically
Increased gonial angle
Widened neck
Removed lip crack
Slightly increased size of lips
Improved skin tone

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Advice from an old man to a young person:

Maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think you do.

You have changed a lot, so maybe it is time to experiment and to discover yourself in a variety of settings and activities.

Maybe it is not good to have so many rigid rules: "I never do this" or "I always do that". It is better to go with the flow and redefine your boundaries from time to time.

Sometimes it is good to lose control, get lost, and not plan too much. Just to act and see what happens.

Some actions give you energy, others consume it. Find out which and which and create a balance between the two so that you never feel depleted.

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Reliant as he is on outside judgement, the narcissist feels miserably inferior and dependent. He rebels against this degrading state of things by escaping into a world of make-belief, daydreaming, pretensions and delusions of grandeur. The narcissist knows little about himself and finds what he knows to be unacceptable.

Our experience of what it is like to be human – our very humanness – depends largely on our self-knowledge and on our experience of our selves. In other words: only through being himself and through experiencing his self – can a human being fully appreciate the humanness of others.

The narcissist has precious little experience of his self. Instead, he lives in an invented world, of his own design, where he is a fictitious figure in a grandiose script. He, therefore, possesses no tools to enable him to cope with other human beings, share their emotions, put himself in their place (empathise) and, of course, love them – the most demanding task of inter-relating.

The narcissist just does not know what it means to be human. He is a predator, rapaciously preying on others for the satisfaction of his narcissistic cravings and appetites for admiration, adoration, applause, affirmation and attention. Humans are Narcissistic Supply Sources and are (over- or de-) valued according to their contributions to this end.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq23.html

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Some people can have sex only when they are drunk.

There is a qualitative difference between drunk sex and sober sex.

Drunk sex is wild, forbidden, everything is allowed, everything can and does happen, exciting, arousing, out of control. It is surrealistic (dreamlike), a fantasy come true, freedom reified.

Alcohol disinhibits (removes behavioral inhibitions), renders sexual partners much more attractive than they are, suppresses empathy and long-term memory formation, and distorts cognition and judgment.

But perhaps as importantly, alcohol legitimizes immoral and socially unacceptable misconduct which often ends up hurting significant others: "It is not my fault that I misbehaved, I did not mean to or want to, it was the drink that made me do it!" The sexual alcoholic may be addicted not only to the alcohol - but also to drunk sex and that is why he or she inextricably links sexual arousal to alcohol.

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I have learned three solid facts - life-saving lessons - in 25 years of work in the burgeoning field of psychology:

1. Action not only implies and indicates intention - but proves its existence. Actions are always choices and are the only data accessible to us. States of mind are self-reported and unreliable to the point of being useless. Psychodynamics are inferred. But actions are indisputable and the golden standard: they teach us what people actually meant and planned to do, alone or with others.

Even when under the influence of massive amounts of alcohol or other substances, executive functions and decision-making processes are intact. People make conscious choices when they are inebriated very much as they do when they are sober.

Moreover: inaction is a form of action. It involves choice and resolve. Procrastination simply means that the person elects to not act. It demonstrates reluctance, aversion, or fear. It is a protracted act.

2. The second lesson I have learned is: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck - better treat it as a duck. Who cares if it really is a duck?" If someone habitually abuses you, withholds, hurts you, or is being cruel to you - better assume that he hates your guts. Whether he actually does loathe you or does not is immaterial: put distance between the two of you.

3. Finally: a bad weather only friend is a bad friend. Someone who craves to learn every last detail solely about your defeats and failures, depression and life's ineluctable catastrophes is turned on by your misery. Such a "buddy" is equally likely to envy your successes and try to stymie your growth, pull you down, and tear you apart.

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I have 190 IQ and I make sure that my interlocutors are well appraised of this daunting fact

They instantly feel inferior and react in one of two ways: aggression ("I am going to hurt you") and paranoia ("you are going to hurt me"). Men and women alike try to buttress their shattered self-esteem by derisively asserting that they are my intellectual equals or betters. When this counterfactual strategy ineluctably fails, they resort to causing me harm vindictively: by cheating on me ostentatiously (the women), cockteasing (women) or rejecting me tauntingly (both sexes), badmouthing me, humiliating me publicly, denying my contributions or plagiarizing my ideas, by ignoring me, acting with passive-aggression, or openly undermining my work and subverting my wellbeing

Hurting me restores some semblance of balance to our interaction and makes my hapless counterparties feel less helpless, shambolic, and hopeless in the face of my cerebral supremacy.

Others become fearful or even paranoid. They assume that I will naturally gravitate towards leveraging my innate advantage to manipulate them, compromise their best interests and welfare, absentmindedly and indifferently traumatize them, or just sadistically harm them for the fun of it, the way we toy with pets.

This makes it impossible for me to have any kind of non-transactional relationship with people.

So, why don't I give up my oneupmanship? Because I value my time. Human intercourse in all its forms is wasteful because most people are inordinately stupid and scatterbrained, especially in this day and age of attention deficits and soundbites, rampant irrationality, blanket nescience, virulent narcissism, and malignant egalitarianism

I don't have time for most people because I am busy extracting the maximum out of my life: learning more, writing, cerebrating, and pondering the countless mysteries that surround us. In comparison, the overwhelming majority of people fade into mind numbingly boring insignificance as they plough through their entomological eat2shit existences and drone on with gossip and small talk.

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We reject and resent those who challenge our self-perception and self-image. It takes decades of emotional investment and the processing of vast swathes of memories to form a coherent experience of oneself.

Even if we regard ourselves in largely negative terms, we refuse to countenance an alternative, more positive point of view. We fiercely defend our hard-earned storyline about who we are against countervailing information and its purveyors, even the well-meaning ones.

Consequently, if we believe that we are mentally ill, broken, hopeless damaged goods, we will seek to hurt, remove from our lives, push away, or even annihilate anyone who loves us, accepts us, forgives us, makes us feel safe and at home, and trusts in us. When we fail to make these nearest and dearest conform to our doomsday scenarios about our irredeemably corrupt identity - we hurt them horribly and punish them cruelly and this way uphold our sense of our core as evil and incorrigible.

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Love never travels alone. Its constant companions are fear, resentment, and hate.

Love demands the partial surrender of personal autonomy, limitations on freedoms and on the repertory of one's choices, and constant compromising. These provoke both resentment and fear of handing so much power to another person.

Pain aversion and abandonment and separation anxieties as well as object impermanence (inconstancy) and fear of intimacy (dysfunctional attachment styles) all play crucial roles in amplifying the dread of becoming dependent on someone else for critical psychological functions, the regulation of emotions, moods, and affect, and the maintenance of one's overall wellbeing.

If the partner is narcissistic or psychopathic, lacks empathy and acts with callous and selfish disregard, these mixed feelings coalesce over time into hatred.

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Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD) combines traits of both Narcissistic and Antisocial (psychopathic) personality disorders. It, therefore, stands to reason that these three cluster B ("dramatic") stalwarts share the same etiology and psychodynamics.

Many histrionics ("attention whores") use the opposite sex - their attention, infatuation, and arousal - to regulate their emotions, moods, affect, and sense of self-worth (self-esteem and self-confidence). Potential mates are their "histrionic supply". Similarly, when roundly and resolutely rejected, collapsed histrionics react with "histrionic rage". They resort to in your face defiance, often by triangulating with a third person in order to provoke jealousy or grievously hurt the frustrating and rejecting object.

The histrionic's aggression is focused on restoring his or her grandiosity via a new and ostentatious sexual conquest. But it can and does wear many other, mostly passive-aggressive or reckless forms or behaviors: compulsive shopping ("shopaholism"), gambling, lying, sabotaging, procrastinating, substance abuse, verbal abuse, brutal honesty, offensive humor and mockery, and so on.

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I verbally abuse people in order to regulate my labile sense of self-worth and to feel empowered. Men and women, intimate partners and business associates, the mighty and the fallen - I am an equal opportunity abuser.

Abusing someone who loves me or needs me - in any type of relationship - renders the unfortunate recipients of my wrath helpless and desperate. It elevates me to a position of omnipotence and superiority over them by granting me the sole key to their relief and happiness. Their suffering is proof positive of my leverage over them, of my might, and of their addiction to my presence and to my gifts.

I push my nearest, dearest, and collaborators to the limits of endurance in order to test their allegiance and fealty. Their loyalty to me in the face of the adversity I wreak sustains my grandiose view of myself as unique and worthy of every sacrifice. Their agony helps to keep my fragile self-esteem from crashing.

Like the most malevolent dictators, I believe that fear and crass self-interest trump more noble emotions any day and motivate people efficaciously.

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We abuse and hurt the people we love most because we feel safe to do so. We misbehave and break all the rules, we even cheat on and betray our most significant others because we know that they will take us back, no matter what, that they will accept us and love us unconditionally.

Home is that place you return to after you have screwed up really badly. It is that refuge and shelter where you can crash when no one else will have you. It is that oasis of idiosyncratic familiarity, the calm that comes with the knowledge that you had arrived at the end of the line and found it hospitable.

You can rely on people who truly love you to pick up the pieces and put back together your Humpty-Dumpty. Indeed, this willingness to tolerate yet another escapade or worse is the hallmark and ultimate test of love.

So, you let your hair and guard down, you violate every edict and principle in the book, you torture the people who mean most to you. Because you know you safely can.

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When confronted with their egregious and hurtful misconduct ("how could you?"), narcissists and psychopaths (and many trauma victims) react by citing RULES, never emotions. They experience guilt or shame only because they have breached their normative framework and thus undermined their laboriously cultivated, often grandiose, self-image (as a "good person" in self-control, rational, and so on).

A psychopath or narcissist (or post-traumatic victim) is likely to say:

It was WRONG, what I did (followed with elaborate excuses and hairsplitting as to the exceptional circumstances of that particular wrongdoing) – not horrible, but wrong;

In my society/culture/country these are the RULES and NORMS of behavior (so my misbehavior is OK where I come from);

I have PRINCIPLES (I follow my own rules and feel bad only when I break my personal edicts). Of course, the "principles" contain so many loopholes and exceptions that they legitimize disinhibited and impulsive conduct, however hurtful to others;

I never did this before (implying that the misconduct was the outcome of special circumstances, not of personality or character flaws).

Narcissists and psychopaths as well as sufferers of PTSD and CPTSD have an external locus of control and attendant alloplastic defenses: they explain their actions by referring to outside - often ill-intentioned or unfortunate - influences, events, and circumstances. They are also deprived of an inner compass as to right and wrong because they lack emotional empathy.

In a desperate attempt to orient themselves in an alien world, replete with empathy and emotions, they resort to a highly structured, formalized, and ritualized hermeneutic framework with rigid organizing principles - and then they ignore it and do as they please ("I just needed to do that").

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