1.

 

Why would the likes of Weinstein and Cosby - rich, famous, and powerful - sexually harass babes? Because they cannot get consensual sex. "Gimme a break!" - you collectively exclaim - "These folks must be besieged by willing partners!" You don't know how wrong y'all are.

I have been rich and a mini celebrity on and off all my life. It was easier to get laid in the periods in between, when I had been poor and a nobody. Goldiggers aside, women felt intimidated and even repelled by my public exposure and intellectual prowess. Many of them grew envious of me or embarked on all manner of power plays and mind games, aiming to demonstrate their superiority, invincibility, and irresistibility by winning these one-sided delusional competitions.

When I am in the limelight, I am reduced to a one-dimensional cartoon figure, a mere function, a symbol, or a caricature. "You are my guru, my teacher, my savior, a genius. I love your mind, your brain. I can listen to you for hours, I have dreamt of having the opportunity to talk to you, I have had a crush on you since the first time I heard you speak, you are a legend." But, really, I am objectified and dehumanized by these acolytes. If I dare to confess any emotion or mood (for example: that I am depressed), if I express a wish, chat someone up and flirt, if I appear human in any way, shape, or form - my erstwhile fans reject my humanity aggressively: they feel "betrayed". Henceforth they devalue me for having debased my ostensible sublimity with the filth of carnal desire & lucre and for having disgracefully revealed my vulnerabilities & weaknesses. They resent me and are furious that I robbed them of their superman and substituted for it a mere mortal. They cannot forgive me the disillusionment and disenchantment. The Wizard of Oz is, after all, more of a villain for his frailty than for his misdeeds.

2.

I have been filthy rich and dirt poor several times in my life. Let me tell you: being rich beats being poor hands down. But to have a lot of money is not an unadulterated alloy. It has its many negative aspects and drawbacks.

Money is like blood in the water: you attract sharks and predators, not least of which are golddiggers - spouses or intimate partners who are bound to cheat on you in every bed of every hotel in between bouts of burning your hard earned cash on compulsive shopping.

It is not easy to fend off the tax authorities, law enforcement, myriad regulatory agencies, service providers, business associates, lawyers, investment advisors, medical doctors, psychotherapists, masseurs, loyal and trusted employees, accountants, and assorted gurus who conspire to abscond with your money often in cahoots with your nearest, dearest, friends, and family.

Sharks are well-designed and insatiable predators. Sometimes you don't even realize that the shark is a shark until it is way too late. They bite you and bleed you for your dough and then dump you when you have run out of it. Poor people do not face these problems at least.

In many parts of the world it is dangerous to be rich owing to kidnappings for ransom. The rich live in gated compounds with security and stroll along restricted paths with burly bodyguards, like in a maximum security prison. Their children are inmates.

And when the people rebel, the rich suffer first (like after the French and October revolutions). When regimes change or you fall out of political favor with the powers that be, you lose everything, your freedom included.

The rich are much more at risk than the poor. To be rich is not to be safer - it is to be more vulnerable because you have a lot more to lose. I had been much more anxious and worried when I was rich than when I was poor. Money has good sides - but also many bad aspects. In life, it is always advisable to maintain a balanced view of everything - especially of money.

3.

Women should be all over me. I am borderline handsome, very entertaining & lively in company, & kinkily creative in the sack, I am told. More often than not, I have money & am well-known.

Yet, all women avoid me like the plague. Many react to my advances with apoplectic hysteria & palpable terror. Others with gleeful derision. If I hit on a woman, she invariably hits back where it hurts.

Women - whether they have met me or not - find me creepy, freakish, & repulsive, often merely based on my reputation as a predatory Asexual (read: deviant) Evil Genius. There is also my murky bio replete with a spell in prison & other unsavory, shadowy titbits.

Women who do meet me in person find my mind & intellect irresistible. They get hooked. But all of them without exception - my girlfriends & wives included! - are unnerved by the fact that I treat them as genderless objects, functional servants, thus defeminizing them. "You are not a man, not fully human, more like a an emotionless robot, a weirdo child. You are demanding, selfish, & exploitative. You do not make me feel like a woman", they all exclaim with exasperation before they proceed to cheat on me or break up. I am a childless misogynist & loner misanthrope.

This extreme unease is justified. I treat all women as either an interchangeable captive audience to my rambling monologues (when in my cerebral mode); multi-orificed sex dolls to masturbate on, in, & with (when in a somatic phase); or fodder for my Cold Empathy (my uncanny ability to read people & leverage these insights sadistically to discomfort & depress them thoroughly). Women also feel inferior & inadequate faced with my 190 IQ. They are afraid to be judged & found wanting, to disappoint, to look & sound stupid. The more manipulative among them resent the fact that they have no sexual or other power over me: I checkmate them in their own game every single time.

No wonder that ALL WOMEN find the prospect of being with me or even just fucking me about as attractive as a visit to a deranged dentist.

A woman wrote this to me in response to my post today: "You say that you are a handsome genius. Hannibal Lecter was a handsome genius, rich and famous, dapper and connoisseur. But he was Hannibal Lecter! If he gets in touch with me, never mind how irresistible I find him, I will quake in my boots!

I was shocked: "Are you seriously comparing me to Hannibal Lecter, the sexually sadistic serial killer???"

She answered: "No, you are far more dangerous! He was a classic body slashing psychopath. You slash our minds! Much worse!" She added: "But he is more intelligent than you." How come? "He never publicized the fact that he is a lethal psychopath. You made documentaries about your sickness."

She continued: "What did you expect? YOU taught us that narcissists are monsters and to stay away from them and to go No Contact! You gave us the language to articulate our fears and disgust. Now you are saying: Game over? Let's start afresh? I have been lying or exaggerating all the time? I am not asexual, I love sex and women? This somersault only makes women fear you and distrust you even more as a deceitful inconsistent manipulator and con artist!

At least have the spine to stay on message and not to whine when you pay the price for decades of telling us how horrible you are as the world's number one psychopathic narcissistic monster. We believe you and this is why we are all avoiding you."

4.

I feel like the Sun.

Throughout my life, I gave out the light of knowledge and the warmth of true support and friendship to everyone who came into my orbit. Like the Sun.

But no one will come near me because they are terrified of getting burned, consumed in the twin flames of my formidable intellect and disordered personality.
I am too intense, like a force of nature.

Women react the worst: having entered my circle, they soon disintegrate, decompensate, act out, cheat - they do anything and everything, even out of character, to flee my irresistible, dark, identity-wracking, soul-rending, and stifling gravitational pull.

Looking at the Sun directly blinds. So, no one really sees me, except through my works. No one even offers a surreptitious gaze.

People - especially women, including all the women in my life - avert their eyes, withdraw into secluded private havens to avoid me altogether: no sex, no intimacy, often resorting to other men.

I am lonelier than the Sun: it has the planets for companionship.

5.

Sometimes the only way open to me to realize how I feel about a woman is to lose her.

I have no access to my emotions, so if I wonder how deeply I have grown fond of someone very dear to me, I push her away aggressively, usually towards other men.

Then, once she had succumbed to my relentless and cruel rejection and cheated on me, if I endure the kind of pain that one associates with drowning, or with an amputated soul, I know that I love her.

It is a lot like self-mutilation or self-harm: I cut away my heart and watch the spurting blood as an augur and omen which informs me of my state of mind, my bond with her.

The vicious irony is of course that after my erstwhile woman had opted for another man, I can no longer be with her owing to my abandonment anxiety.

So, the only method available to me to tell whether I love a woman also ascertains that we can never be together if I do love her.

6.

Why do I keep failing in business? Because I hate to do business. I find doing business mind-numbing.

Why do I keep pushing my women to be with other men? Because I want to get rid of them for various reasons.

But why not simply abstain from doing business and breakup with these women? Why do I embark on these convoluted pathways towards my ultimate goals?

Because all my decisions are irrational. I am heavily affected by my mental illness (a toxic brew of personality and mood disorders). I keep doing business owing to my generalized anxiety. I remain in dysfunctional relationship because I become dependent on my intimate partners, replete with abandonment anxiety.

The rational and intellectual part of my mind is alarmed by my self-destructive decisions and choices. But the only way it can intervene is by undermining the self-defeating course of action, by sabotaging my self-sabotage.

Ironically, what many people perceive as self-inflicted failure is actually a dose of healthy trajectory correction.

7.

I invest my time and attention in men only if I can make money off them or as long as they provide me with narcissistic supply: adulating attention. I am not interested in anything else men have to offer, like friendship. I am goal-oriented and value my time as a sacred and scarce resource.

 

I listen to women sympathetically and give them advice, act warm and empathic, engender intimacy, make them laugh and tell them fascinating stories in order to get them addicted to my presence and then use them as sex toys, fawning and admiring audience, and providers of domestic services. I have no interest in anything else women have to offer beyond access to their bodies and their subservience.

 

When I reach the conclusion that the usefulness of the other person is over or when my counterparty makes demands for reciprocity, I cut off all contact or absent myself in other ways, often aggressively.

 

So, if I lose sexual interest in a woman, or if she is no longer sexually available, I instantly become detached and distant, bored and perfunctory, more like an impatient and abrasive roommate than a tender lover. I push her aggressively towards other men.

 

If she becomes rebellious and defiant, demanding the fulfillment of her needs, or is herself narcissistic and competes with me, I ignore her altogether, signalling that I couldn't care less what she is doing and with whom as long as she leaves me be. She has outrun her usefulness and is past her expiry date, having become a drain on my resources.

 

I am gutted when my woman resorts to other men because her cheating triggers old traumas and constitutes a narcissistic injury. But I also feel relieved of the ballast of a non-functioning woman and free to pursue the next one to cater to my needs.

 

Similarly, if men try to transcend the transactional boundaries of our dealings, I vanish, undermine the joint work, or humiliate them brutally.

 

At the core of all this is that I find people inordinately boring and contemptible to boot. There is little of value in interacting with others and the price paid for such exchanges is always disproportionate.

8.

I have been accused repeatedly of brainwashing people - especially women - and making them act in ways that were alien to them and unprecedented. Some of them blame me for deploying my vast knowledge of psychology to manipulate them sinisterly.

My carefully selected words seem to hypnotize people (again, women in particular), create in their minds overwhelming visuals, and regress them to an infantile and often self-destructive state.

I don't buy this.

My take on it is that people use my verbiage to legitimize urges and courses of action that they have already given into long before they interacted with my toxic emanations.

Words do have power, of course. They instantly alter the brain's biochemistry and leverage its neuroplasticity. This is why talk therapy works, by and large. This is how I constructed my Cold Therapy.

But like other excuses for antisocial or immoral behavior - alcohol or hypnosis, for example - words can never coerce you into acting against your true nature, values, preferences, priorities, earnest wishes, choices, decisions, or plans. They just roll out the Real You.

My words just help people put a name to their repressed and otherwise inaccessible emotions, label their inner stirrings, act on their inhibited desires, and become who they veritably are all along.

9.

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.

10.

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.

11.

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.

12.

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.

(continued below)

This article appears in my book "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"

Click HERE to buy the print edition from Amazon (click HERE to buy a copy dedicated by the author)

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13.

 

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.

 

14.

 

I never treat women as princesses. Not even when I want them as prostitutes, or as a fawning audience, or as providers of homemaking services (which are the only three ways I ever want them). I treat women and communicate with them exactly as I treat men and communicate with them: transactional, brainy, efficient, goal-oriented, precise with words, intolerant of stupidity or errors, and not willing to make any concessions or behave in any special way just because they are women.

I can be emotional but even then it comes out somehow as though I am a detached, distant, and amused observer.

This is what women mean when they keep insisting that I am "not a man", or that I do not exude a "man vibe". I relate to them as I do to MEN

In my presence, women feel defeminized, desexualized, and, therefore, dehumanized and objectified (as sex toys or as passive adulators)

When a woman shows interest in a man or reciprocates his advances, the typical man is transformed.

He reacts by eagerly flirting with the woman like she was the most amazing, fascinating, irresistible, miraculous, and desired creature that ever entered his life.

The presence of a woman makes him a man.

The presence of a woman means nothing whatsoever to me if she fails to provide me with sex, admiration, or homemaking services. She is then rendered instantly useless and a waste of my resources. I could not be bothered with her. She becomes a drag and a nuisance, subject to frustration and aggressive abuse intended to get rid of her.

 

15.

 

I create only when I am in excruciating pain, ubiquitous strife, and a state of hypervigilant conflict over real or imagined slights and abuse.

I equate creating with living: innovation is life itself. When I don't create, I feel inert, dead.

So, I make sure to engineer situations which cause me intolerable agony (shoehorn my women into cheating on me, for example). I provoke backlash, contumaciously challenge authority, skirt the Law, bait fate, assume risks, invite maltreatment and universal loathing.

And then I sit down to distil my blood, sweat, and copious tears, the headstone memories of itinerant men and women, the echoes of loves and hatreds and fights, objects that are alive with reminisced hurt. I plunge straight into this abyss and like a pearl diver emerge with one gem after another: the very molecules I am made of as I exsanguinate.

Then, one day, a mere pale emanation, I will be no more. At peace at last. Nothing left to say or write or do. The silence of one lamb.

 

16.

 

What a cruel irony it is that I have developed Cold Therapy - the first ever effective treatment (cure, really) for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) - too late to benefit from it myself.

I am 59 years old, my health is failing. My mental illness had consumed my life - is still devouring it - as surely as the bush fires ravage homes in Australia, leaving only the ashes of Me behind.

WARNING

I will block anyone who gives me the feel good New Age crap about how it is never too late in life. Life has an expiry date beyond which it is all blood and tears and stools and wallowing in your own stench of decomposing physical and mental decrepitude. So back off with your American anodyne platitudes about how every age has its charms. Old age sucks 100%. We lie to ourselves about it in order to survive somehow in the face of our own vanishing dismemberment.

NPD is the slowest invisible cancer - but of the soul and mind. It is spiritual AIDS with nothing to abet it. It is all-pervasive, relentless, and merciless. It starts at age 3. It causes people around the narcissist to hurt and torment him purposefully and profusely as a way of getting back at him for his egregious abuse. It is Inferno and I have been its Dante since 1995. No Beatrice can help me, no god, no healer. I have been doomed by my own progenitor to a life of itinerant, profound, debilitating hurt, unlovable, shunned like a leper, feared and loathed and mocked in equal measures.

It is with impotent rage that I bequeath Cold Therapy to a world I care nothing for or about. Rage at the injustice of healing and aiding millions with my pioneering work since 1995 - except the only person who most deserved my love and my devotion and my succor: Sam.

 

17.

 

This is also a part of my grandiosity:

My presence (my mind, my sex) is such a blessing and a gift that women should PAY with everything they have - just to have me around. They should expect nothing else from me but the little I am willing to bestow.

They should be eternally grateful for the opportunity to have met me at all - let alone shared my life and my bed. I am a god - and, like every divinity, I expect human sacrifice. They should welcome even my abuse as a token of my attention.

Other men work hard to earn sex, love, and female companionship. They maintain whatever relationships they have in various ways (providing attention, affording succor, gifts, having a good time together, pursuing common interests, drinks, travel, and lovemaking). Even a one night stand requires some investment of time and attentiveness.

I passively await women to be all over me as my effortless birthright. I grant them my time only as an adulated guru.
Women absolutely hate, loathe, and detest me for it: that I do not consider them worthy of any efforts or investment on my part. Their narcissistic injuries, rage, and humiliation are too much to bear.

So, they get back at me the only way they can: by teaming up with other men and by cheating on me ostentatiously. And, giving the slightest opportunity, by abusing and hurting me in the most shocking, cruel, and sadistic ways imaginable. Hell hath no fury like a woman who is taken for granted, as a chattel.

 

18.

 

Richard Grannon once told me: "There is nothing you want more than intimacy (with a woman), but it is your kryptonite (the substance from his home planet that, upon contact, renders Superman weak and vulnerable)

The Kryptonite Model of Narcissism explains the pathology in terms of multiple push-pull, approach-avoidance repetition compulsions.

Consider my case (of course): I crave intimacy, but whenever a woman offers it, I reject & abuse her egregiously and so undermine any possibility for an intimate (as distinct from merely functional) long-term relationship. I push my women hard & repeatedly to find other men and cheat on me

I adore sex, just love everything about it. But, inexplicably, I go for periods of 5-15 years (!!!) of utter, unmitigated celibacy, not even flirting.

I value stability, certainty, & safety above all else, but my life hitherto - all 59 years - had been disorientingly chaotic & life-threateningly dangerous every step of the convoluted way. Last time I have held a job was in 1984.

I want to belong somewhere, to rest my truly wearied body. Yet, I haven't met or seen my mother, father, siblings (bar the youngest), any other member of my extended family, & any of my erstwhile friends & business partners in Israel since 1996, the last time I have been to my "homeland". I am an award-winning published author in Hebrew & yet haven't used this language for 23 years, until 2019

I have no roots, no affiliations, allegiances, or attachments to anyone or anywhere or anything

I demand to be respected for my work in economics, psychology, & physics. Yet, I refuse to grow up & face adult chores & responsibilities: I have no driving licence and no children. I have been a multimillionaire several times but insisted to live in rented premises (usually in an annex to my office). I bought my first home (apartment) only 10 years ago.

I pioneered the modern study of narcissism in 1995. Yet, I do not understand what makes me tick. I just know that I have manage to deplete & exasperate even myself. Every single dimension of my personality & existence is unadulterated Kryptonite.

 

19.

 

I am the one who taught the world in 1995 that narcissism is untreatable, that no amount of insight can help the narcissist, that narcissists cannot love, attach, or bond in any normal sense of these words, and that the only truly effective coping strategy when you have found yourself marooned with a narcissist is no contact. I invented the very language used today to communicate on this topic, including "narcissistic abuse" and "no contact"

But I am very lonely in my solipsistic, delusional, and sad universe. I crave to be loved and to experience intimacy in all its forms.

So, I harnessed my formidable intellect - all 190 IQ points of it - to write my user's manual. I had hoped to find salvation in self-awareness. I should have trusted my own warning (dated 1997) that this would be a futile effort https://samvak.tripod.com/2.html

I then embarked on a Herculean attempt to invent a new treatment modality for narcissistic disorders of the self, Cold Therapy. I succeeded, but way too late for me: the first practitioners of this technique will be certified only this year. I am 59 years old and my health is failing.

And, in the meantime, I kept traumatizing one woman after another as they had maintained the futile endeavour to transform and heal me with their love, dedication, and commitment. Many women made numerous personal sacrifices just to be with me. I objectified, exploited, and then abused them.

The closer they got to the howling void that is me, the more they panicked: the horror was so great that many of them ended up cheating on me egregiously and ostentatiously just to break the shared nightmarish surrealistic psychotic state of our togetherness, the addictive spell that I have cast on them. Only one of them kept in touch after this harrowing experience. All the others vanished from my life without a trace, like hostages fleeing a death cult.

 

20.

 

My relationship algorithm is very simple

1. I acquire and addict the woman to my presence by offering her my scintillating mind, a fount of knowledge, and inventive kinky sex.

2. I alternate between displays of empathy, succor, and loyalty and savage, soul-devastating abuse (intermittent reinforcement)

3. If the woman becomes adulating, submissive, and obedient, I continue to abuse her with impunity - but also make her my most intimate life partner and trusted confidante

3. If the woman becomes defiant, abusive, demanding, and devaluing, I amplify and vary the modes of abuse to include all forms of rejection and indifference.

4. A defiant, immature, narcissistic, or psychopathic woman would tend to triangulate at this stage: she would misbehave with other men or threaten to do so or choose another man to fulfill some of her needs, emotional and/or physical.

Upon the first hint of triangulation, I push the woman aggressively and relentlessly to develop a full-fledged relationship with the other guy, for one night or for one year, up to her.

5. Her betrayal of me and cheating on me thus accomplished invariably, I abandon the woman and move on to seek an alternative.

 

21.

I seem to attract two types of women: those with the psychological makeup of a psychopathic narcissistic man or women who adhere to and uphold traditional gender roles.

The first kind are ambivalent about me (love-hate), compete with my accomplishments and mini-celebrity, and visit upon me the sins of all their previous abusers combined. They are envious, aggressive, resentful, defiant, and contemptuous. They act impulsively and conspicuously to shock, shame, and humiliate me. Often they disrespect me in public and badmouth me behind my back. Afraid of my retribution and vindictive vengeance, they are paranoid, manipulative, and deceitful. The relationship, such as it is, deteriorates into a zero-sum power play.

The second sort admire my intellect and seek to gratify me in every traditional feminine way by rendering their services and catering to my needs and wishes. My targeted abuse and hurtful rejection are patiently tolerated and smoothed over.

Both these types of women ultimately end up abandoning me or cheating on me with other, kinder, more attentive and desirous men. Drama is inevitable. Either way I end up on my own, time and again.

 

22.

 

All the women in my life ended up with other men: they cheated on me, got involved in affairs, or abandoned me altogether. Many of the other men they opted for were far inferior to me in every way: uglier, older, poorer, losers, disabled, mentally ill, criminals, or far less intelligent than me. Most of them abused my women verbally, psychologically, and even physically way worse than I have ever done. A few of them withheld sex or, conversely, sexually assaulted my straying women.

And yet my women manifestly preferred these men to me and maintained long-term relationships with them.

It always puzzled me: Why trade down? And why settle for another, much more egregious abuser? What in ME made the relationships I had offered to my women so intolerable that they had fled screaming to the hills and flung themselves into the hirsute arms of the first man they came across, ANY other man, never mind how dysfunctional, repulsive, and dangerous he was?

The answer to the conundrum was that I made sure to deny my women adamantly and recurrently the things that truly mattered to them. If they sought commitment and children, I gave them only sex and attention. If they thrived on sex and attention, I withheld both, but acted as a good, long-term provider. If what they wished for was certainty and stability, I peregrinated and approach-avoided. If they needed personal space, I intruded. If they craved common memories and companionship, I absented myself. Being a virulent misogynist at heart, I sadistically taunted and punished my women by becoming their dream and then by remaining a mere fantasy, tantalisingly and forever out of reach. So, furious and heartbroken, sad and mad, they dumped me emotionally, sexually and, in all 26 cases but one, also physically.

The other men that usurped my place and absconded with my women have adopted the opposite strategy: they gave my women what they desired most, be it attention, or sex, or succor, or commitment. Having been granted their most fervent wishes, my erstwhile women turned a blind eye to the less savory aspects of the men they selected. They shouldered on.

 

23.

 

I have become a global hate figure because I remind people how stupid they are: statistically, the overwhelming vast majority of the readers of this post would be inordinately gullible and unintelligent. I also insist to take away people's delusional fairy tales and pet conspiracy theories (starting with all religions through homeopathy and Reiki to New Age trash and meaningless labels such as empaths)

Women especially find my intelligence intimidating. Even before I outed as a psychopathic narcissist, women have been avoiding me, terrified of being exposed as possessed of less than stellar intellect. After all, how does one succeed to not bore to tears someone with 190 IQ and encyclopedic knowledge? How do you keep him interested? Dating me was perceived as a combination job interview and competitive sport: at best exhausting and at worst devastatingly humiliating.

Contrary to the proliferation of self-enriching predatory life coaches and personal trainers and therapists and gurus - I take away false hope, not give it.

There is no giant inside each one of you: most of you are lucky to earn the title midgets. And there are very few things you can do well: you are likelier to fail in most of your attempted endeavors. And life is utterly random and meaningless. And, breaking news, like the tooth fairy, god is a hairy fairy tale for the feeble-minded. The last thing the CIA cares about are your tinfoil heads. The majority of humanity - including your children and their children - die unlamented and soon forgotten. Facts. Face them and move on with your lives, such as they are. And don't forget to despise and hate me for opening your eyes and for telling you the unvarnished truth.

 

24.

 

I can accept and tolerate - and have countenanced in dozens of intimate and work relationships - cheating, betrayal, and abuse when they do and did not involve attempts to deceive me, cover up misbehavior, or misrepresent facts and events.

When you lie to me, you are challenging my grandiosity: in my mind, I am omniscient (all-knowing). To prevaricate implies that you think that I am stupid and gullible enough to believe your nonsense: your feeble and futile confabulations constitute a narcissistic injury. I am driven into rage and vindictiveness by such manifest dishonesty. I immediately absent myself from the relationship, one way or another.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that I am delusional and my reality testing is shot: I know how easy it is to pull the wool over my eyes. I am so focused on securing narcissistic supply that I screen out even the most blatant reminders of the traitorous misconduct of significant others. It sometimes takes me months to realize what had happened: that I had been conned, stabbed in the back repeatedly, or subjected to egregious ostentatious infidelity which I actually witnessed! Triangulation is hopeless in my case because I never notice it!

Less typically, I never lie. This has nothing to do with my non-existent morality and everything to do with my grandiosity.

Lying requires a sustained effort: first to come up with a plausible false narrative (external consistency) and then to recall it and retell it (internal consistency). I am so vastly superior to everybody else that I deem no one worthy of such exertions. I also enjoy sadistically inflicting pain on others with my brutal honesty. It is a great and wounding fun to be always truthful - and a lot less taxing than lying.

(continued velow)

 

This article appears in my book "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"

Click HERE to buy the print edition from Amazon (click HERE to buy a copy dedicated by the author)

Click HERE to buy electronic books (e-books) and video lectures (DVDs) about narcissists, psychopaths, and abuse in relationships

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook (my personal page or the book’s), YouTube

 

 

25.

 

As I was growing up, my mother had informed me - in sadistic words & life-threatening deeds - that I am unlovable, no one will ever love me.

It took me the rest of a long life to realize that she was wrong: I am inordinately lovable.

People feel affectionate towards me instantly & women get infatuated & care about me profoundly even at a distance, let alone face to face. They are bewitched by my mind & by my ability to understand their essence the way no one had ever done before.

When I - rarely - put my mind to it, I am superintelligent, irresistibly charming, hypersexed, insightful, & stimulating to be with. I have had the most incredible life. Some women also bond with the delightful, curious but deeply wounded child inside me.

Yet, not one person perseveres, no one sticks around: men won't collaborate with me after a while. Women are the worst: my life has been one extended & egregious torture by furious, frustrated, envious, & heartbroken females.

At first, they try their hardest to share a life with me. But invariably, all my intimate partners end up cheating on me openly (in my presence or they make sure to share the tiniest details afterwards) - or dumping me unceremoniously in favor of another man. There hadn't been a single exception in 26 serious relationships!

So, my mother must have had a typo: I am lovable, but not livable.

I treat people as functions, props, or objects. I extract from them the 3 Ss: sex, supply, services. I expect them to leave me in unhindered peace when they are not engaged in the performance of their duties. If they attempt to make demands on my time, attention, or resources, I become cruelly abusive, lash out & all but demolish them almost demonically. I am otherwise utterly self-sufficient, engaged in an addictive intercourse with by far the most intelligent and exciting person I know: me.

Other people I perceive as ineluctable nuisances, maintenance chores, background white noise. They are there to entertain me, serve me, and cater to my needs. And like The Help downstairs or a utility service provider, their presence should never be felt as they unobtrusively glide, ghostlike, in and  out of my life.

 

26.

 

Women are terrified of me. Literally. Even women who know me well and whose lives I have transformed for the better. Not long ago, a student I had agreed to meet appeared hours late, accompanied by her best girlfriend and ... a police detective for protection. I am kidding you not.

When I ask women why they are so mortified, they answer: "You are a psychopath and a narcissist, you are dangerous". How dangerous and in which ways remains vague, even to them. There is just a general feeling of acute menace in the air, entirely engendered by their fervid and ill-informed imagination.

But the very same women freely pick up complete strangers in bars, get drunk or high senseless, and end up alone in hotel rooms and apartments with these men. They trust them fully.

Many of these casual dates are seasoned predators. They could well be psychopaths and narcissists. Why are women NOT afraid of these unknown men - but paralyzingly scared of me?

Moreover, many women recoil in undisguised horror at my presence and then date, bed, and have intimate committed relationships with men they KNOW are abusers, criminals, junkies, or alcoholics. These men are not strangers to these women! They have a reputation for being violent, reckless, and antisocial that these women are fully cognizant of. Yet, they still invariably prefer these men to me.

I have been a student of irrational behavior for decades now. But this puzzle stumps me. These women are not choosing better men than I am. On the contrary: they are opting for far more abusive or dangerous men and usually also far inferior in most ways. And yet, they avoid me like the plague. Go figure.

 

27.

 

I am always 1000% upfront with my women: I provide them with a roadmap as to what they could and should expect. Few men, if any, are as explicit, as honest, and as self-disclosing as me at the beginning of a relationship.

But women REFUSE to believe me. They refuse to believe that such a heartless, robotic, emotionless being can have a human form AND they grandiosely expect to be the sole and first exception or to "fix" me.

In all critical aspects, I am not human, more like an artificial intelligence.

The problem I have is that I am trying to mate with another species, not my own: humans.

Women are terrorized and horrified by me not only because I am a psychopath. Many women can live with that.

No. They run away screaming to the waiting arms of the first man available because they find out that I am a reptile or a computer simulation or a robot with a brain who is about 10 times more potent than an average one (fact: I have 190 IQ). It is like being trapped in a futuristic sci-fi yarn with an alien life form, albeit carbon-based.

PS

Just to set the record straight: my work on narcissism actually has little to do with introspection.

I have a database of 1736 DIAGNOSED narcissists who responded to a 687 questions long questionnaire. It is by far the biggest in the world.

Long gone are the days that my work emanated from self-observation.

BUT

Women MISCONSTRUE my work as autobiographical. They wrongly apply to me everything they hear and read about narcissism, 99% of which is copied from my original work in 1995-9.

 

28.

 

When I post well researched video commentary on my YouTube channel, get numerous comments about my hair, my shirt, the nature of the drinks in my transparent glass.

This is a manifestation of Parkinson's law of triviality: people dedicate more time and heated energy to things they know well from personal experience than to deep and demanding topics that necessitate learning and critical thinking.

Everyone knows a lot about hair and shirts and water - but how many understand the intricacies of viral propagation?

This is a very disturbing truth. It means that most folks can be easily manipulated by juxtaposing a marginal but familiar topic with a crucial, life-altering one.

Most interlocutors or voters or decision-makers will pay attention and dedicate resources to the former - but largely gloss over the latter.

 

29.

 

Like every narcissist, my only goal is narcissistic supply. But as a hybrid antisocial narcissist and sadist, my exclusive form of supply is sadistic: it is to embarrass, humiliate, degrade, and undermine people (especially women). My sadism is grandiose: that I possess the power to so badly damage my devastated interlocutors and intimate partners proves me omnipotent and it elates me, like a rush or a high. It is the confluence of fantastic personal inflation buttressed by the visible impacts of my unmitigated, relentless, and callous cruelty.

I obtain sadistic supply with my aggressive ostentatious and public defiance of everything my targets or victims hold sacred, their conventions, plans, and hopes.

I first collude with their fantasies and dreams, pretending to be the perfect accomplice and mate. But then I destroy everything we have built together with cold indifference and glee, methodically, as though exclaiming: "You can never take me for granted for I am a force of Nature and I will punish and ruin you for daring to humanize me, for being so blind that you fail to grasp my divine superiority in every way. I do not need you or anything you have to offer and I will prove it by discarding you offhandedly, like so much retarded trash." I harp on people's insecurities, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses mercilessly and push them to the limits of decompensation, disintegration and acting out.

All other forms of narcissistic supply and psychopathic goals (admiration, recognition, sex, money, power) are secondary and subordinate to my sadistic needs. I often sacrifice them in order to obtain the gratification of watching my prey unravel as I inflict pain and suffering on them, frustrate them, and counter their happiness and joy - often in public.

An example: I will give up having sex with a woman if I can instead frustrate, reject, humiliate, and hurt her with my reluctance or refusal to respond to her signals, cues, and advances. Her pain is a far greater aphrodisiac and supply than anything sex with her can yield.

Similarly, I will forgo or sabotage great opportunities and rewards just so as to hurt and frustrate the hopes and expectations of others.

 

30.

 

I don't know how to be a man. I switch between being hero (I am a macho, all women be damned) and zero (resistance is futile: any passing male is more man than I am and is going to bag and bed my woman).

Men just walk to my women - lovers, girlfriends, wives - and pick them up in my presence. This is because, when we are in public, I show zero interest in the woman with me and give no hint of intimacy of any kind with her. I ignore the woman completely, or, if I pay any attention to her at all, it is briefly, just to mock and berate her painfully (which arouses the other men's savior protective "damsel or princess in distress" instincts)

I am immersed in interacting with the male company, trying to impress them. I usually meet in groups, so the role of the woman by my side is very unclear (Hanger-on? Admirer? Student? Guest? Estranged wife? An ex? Lovers quarrelled?) I never protest when a man flirts with my woman or picks her up. I give the impression that I couldn't care less, that I am not bothered at all, that I have better, more important, things to do then to get involved.

I never stand up for my woman or protect her even when I know that she is very drunk and that the man she had picked up to spend the night with or to have an affair with is a piece of lowlife scum alcoholic criminalized junkie loser. I let her go and get hurt.

My women behave like virtual singles: aggressively pick up men, flirt with them, spend long stretches of time with them, days and sometimes whole nights, go to bars and night clubs alone and pick up men there. They have emotional affairs or cheat repeatedly.

My women become so desperate that they signal to men, give them their phone numbers, and flirt with them even when they are having an evening out with me in a restaurant! They have no real bond with me and are starved for sex and intimacy, to be wanted and cherished. They feel used and abused by me. They want out by any means: cheating and ostentatious infidelity is their exit strategy.

When asked directly, my women let the other men know that I don't care or mind any misbehavior and that I have no interest in them, their whereabouts, who they are spending time with, when and it they will return, and how they choose to act ("he is busy with his computer", "he rejects and abuses me", "he is very sick, has mother issues" "he told me I can fuck others").

 

31.

 

I am a global hate figure and have grown accustomed over the past three decades to reams of vitriolic hate mail. But the pandemic amplified this murky wave into an effluent tsunami. The irony is: in most of these diatribes, people call me a "narcissist" and enumerate my misbehaviors in exacting detail - all first described in and borrowed from my work in 1995.

The overwhelming majority of these haters don't even know who I am or realize that they can throw these epithets in my face only due to my pioneering work almost 30 years ago. Every single speaker on narcissism is rehashing my texts, handed down the generations of self-styled experts, gurus, political analysts, life coaches, "empaths", and professional victims.

I gave my detractors every single weapon that they are now deploying against me! I and my unwitting disciples have fostered in tens of millions of people around the world awareness of what was happening in their relationships and lives, a name for it, and a language to describe and communicate it.

Among numerous other terms, I coined the very phrase "narcissistic abuse" in 1997. Yet I was never invited to speak in "Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day". Another recently self-confessed narcissist gone public was welcomed by the organizers as a speaker. Enough said.

 

32.

 

After 15 years of self-imposed monastic seclusion, I re-emerged in 2016. To my unmitigated horror and disorientation, I found out that the world I had left behind is gone for good and the new normal is as alien to me as the surface of Pluto.

I withdrew into my shell in the 1990s, a time of unbridled optimism in the West. Now, a mere two decades later, everything is topsy-turvy:

Sex is meaningless and casual, promiscuity is an accomplishment, virginity a repellent liability, adultery is universal and fun;

Divorce and reciprocal abuse are the norms in all manner of so called "relationships", intimacy is threatening, courting is harassment;

Expertise is suspect, mocked, and rejected;

Charitable acts are vile conspiracies, technology is slavery, erudition is derided, truthism and malignant grandiose egalitarianism abound;

Entitlement pervades; career criminals are martyrs, law enforcement monsters, con artists and actors rule and rock;

Social interactions and sexuality are vanishing, loneliness is in vogue;

The occult, the paranoid, and the irrational are considered superior to science and rationality, books and learning are niche pursuits;

Birthrates tumbled under the replacement rate, marriage and parenthood are widely shunned and frowned upon;

Only the virtual is real, censorship is praised, rabid and escalated self-promotion touted;

Plutodemocracies and authoritarian psychopaths govern, poverty, hardship, and sickness the norm worldwide.

And this was before Nature declared war on us.

I count my blessings: I don't have much longer to live. This is one planet I would be delighted to check out of. It is not mine and I have no idea how I ended up here. I want to go home.

 

33.

 

Every relationship represents a fine tuned balance between prize and price. The longevity and health of the connection crucially depend on and derive from this equilibrium.

In my case, the prize - what I can and am willing to offer and to share, my intellect - is often inaccessible: most of the time, no one has any idea what I am on about. The difference in terms of IQ between me and an average person is substantially greater than the gap between a human and a chimpanzee, a pig, or a dolphin. So the pearls I cast are to the herd of swine like so many shards of useless glass.

Even when (rarely) I do succeed to penetrate, however incrementally and partially, people - especially women - find that it is not worth the price they have to pay to keep me company. I am too difficult, entitled, hypervigilant, and high maintenance.

Most folks settle for much less of a prize if the price is right. They look to connect with others who are either authentic or human, or, the bonanza, both.

To be human is to be flawed in some way, NOT perfect or superior! A imperfect counterparty - interlocutor, sex partner, lover, spouse, or partner - engenders feelings of comfort, safety, ease, and is endearing. Someone who is genuine but immoral or fake is still fully human: their inauthenticity proves how insecure and vulnerable they are - how REAL.

I am fraudulent through and through: a mere confabulation. I am wholly invented, an utterly fictitious character with a feigned facade simulating a Self where there, in truth, I am nothing but wisps of smoke swirling in an interminable hall of mirrors. I have camouflaged myself so efficaciously that I have lost myself.

Additionally, I am irredeemably and unmitigatedly inhuman: a sadist in bed and out, zero emotions, possessed of a reptile's cold empathy. I victimise and humiliate as others breathe and more often than not I find the experience of demeaning, despoiling, and debasing others far more exhilarating than sex.

All the endowments I have are at the service of this single-minded pursuit. No wonder no one would come within a mile from me. I am more alone than the most devout monk in the most desolate wasteland: in the desert of me.

 

34.

 

I never let anyone - man or woman - love me or befriend me because it negates my grandiosity which I cherish and value about everything - and everyone - else.

Intimacy implies the ability to truly know me. But, like god (that other, more successful piece of fiction), I am unknowable. I make sure of that. To presume that any inferior being out there can have access to my splendiferous mind is to slight me.

Similarly, there is no love or friendship that is not equipotent: in intimate relationships, there is a symmetry of powers, rights, and wants between paramours, partners, and buddies. But I am no one's equal: I am so vastly superior intellectually that I am out of the grasp of ordinary dimwits (=everyone else, the remainder of the teeming masses of humanity, the great unwashed). Plus, I don't need anyone: I use everyone but only as interchangeable commodities, indistinguishable and inert. To claim otherwise is presumptuous and grandiose, almost sacrilegious.

I am, of course, open to relationships with women for sex, supply, and services (3 Ss) and with men for the latter two functions. Serviced and adulated is half my happiness. The other half is sadistically humiliating and hurting folks in all manner, both in private and - the delicacy - in public. What is there to not like?

 

35.

 

Despite the fact that I won Israel's most prestigious prize for maiden literature in 1997, my biographical entry was removed from the online encyclopedia of Israeli authors. The reason? I am a psychopathic narcissist.

 

I am in good company, together with Columbus, Washington, Churchill, Heidegger, Wagner - history is being falsified on a scale never seen before. "Gone with the Wind" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" are blacklisted. Monuments are being pulled down, names deleted and effaced, politically incorrect textbooks shredded. If you dare to resist, you are mobbed and gangstalked, your reputation smeared. Many lose their jobs or even freedoms.

 

Today's heroes and idols are lowlife scum: career criminals and con artists, covert narcissists and psychopaths, and ruthless politicians. New Speak is everywhere and walking on linguistic eggshells de rigeur.

 

In Stalinist Russia, successive editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia sported doctored and retouched photos, eliminating those who fell out of favor. I never thought I would see the day that this became the praxis in the West.

 

36.

 

I am a stalker, sometimes erotomanic, often a sadistic bully. I cling to the women in my life and invade their existence in every way, like a cancerous metastasis. I act clinging, needy, demanding, infantile, verbally abusive, entitled, and highly dependent.

Everyone who ever came in contact with me has shunned me or fled, sooner (within days), or later (within years if they had enjoyed my money while having lovers on the side, or if they pilfered my ideas and prospered all the while).

Men don't mind or even relish being seen as assertive and decisive, so, when they were done with my utility, they had just vanished or told me off in no uncertain terms.

Women prefer to be thought of as sluts rather than as heartless traitorous bitches and so they cheated on me ostentatiously in order to get rid of me. They picked up men in my presence or contacted me after the act to inform me of the minutest details of their betrayals.

Many of these women went to even much greater and more egregious extremes that defy belief. Their need to put distance between us drove them to the realms of insanity, decompensation, dissociation, somatization, and rabid acting out.

Of course, I am childless. Women panic at the mere thought: what female in her right mind would interbreed with a mutant?

YouTube numbers tell the whole story: my content is of the highest quality. Yet, people avoid me like a virus of the mind which can cause a systemic infection. Even if they recover from being exposed to me, there is bound to be traumatic multiple organ long-term damage.

It took me 60 years and 43 books authored to come to terms with what everyone in my childhood had told me, from my mother to my kindergarten teacher: I am very mentally ill, a pathogen, and profoundly unlovable.

Innumerable men and especially women, confronted with my hideous deformities, confirmed to me that I am a Quasimodo of the soul. I can't even ring the bells anymore: there is no one left to listen.

(continued below)

This article appears in my book "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"

Click HERE to buy the print edition from Amazon (click HERE to buy a copy dedicated by the author)

Click HERE to buy electronic books (e-books) and video lectures (DVDs) about narcissists, psychopaths, and abuse in relationships

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook (my personal page or the book’s), YouTube

 

 

37.

 

My grandiose and psychotic mother felt deeply that we, her children, absconded with her life, so she eradicated our lives in vengeful return. But she was "sentenced" to reach a ripe old age and witness our wasted, decrepit, aimless, mentally disabled existences, the bitter, poisonous fruits of her rejection and vicious, life-threatening abuse.

 

My stunted, arrested personal growth has yielded a genius-child in the egregiously unfit and neglected carcass of a deceitful adult. I have wasted all my many years looking for another mother to love me unconditionally and accept me as I am, including my warped sexuality and delusional grandiosity. I tested every woman in my life by subjecting her to mind shrivelling sadistic psychological abuse and to my sexual proclivities: is she the one? Will she survive the horror of ME?

 

They all flunked my test, cheated on me ostentatiously with other men to force me to let them go. They all finally dumped me and abandoned me in ways so cruel to render their actions unheard of, even psychopathic.

 

After each such mortifying, gut wrenching trauma, evidently unlovable as forewarned by my parents, I withdrew from life completely, avoiding all human contact, the hapless and passive recipient of tidal waves of hatred online and off it.

 

For interminably long stretches of time - many years or even decades at each go - I just sat there, gazing forlornly, witnessing my women drifting away into their parallel lives with other men, suffering the tsunami of ill wishers and haters, awaiting, without much hope, my resurrection at the hand of my next mother, my new adopted family. Anticipating the next round of excruciating agony meted out by my loved one.

 

38.

 

I hate my mental illness with vehement vengeance. I am impotently enraged and profoundly sad at the way it had impacted my life. My narcissism reduced to rubble everything and everyone that could have been beautiful in my life. It forced men and women to hurt me really cruelly in self-defense.

But the overwhelming majority of narcissists are not like that at all.

Narcissists are proud of their narcissism and emotionally invested in it. They believe that it renders them more self-efficacious and creative.

 

39.

 

I have been asking myself two questions for a long time now:

1. Many gurus, YouTube celebrities, and public intellectuals are considerably more rude, abrasive, impatient, and even bullying than I am.

Why do people tolerate their misconduct and continue to shower them with love and adulation - and, at the very same time, react abusively, hatefully and aggressively to almost anything I say? And I mean ANYTHING!

Because people perceive me as inferior to them.

It is easy to accept even egregious maltreatment from someone you deem superior to you, or even from an average guy, very much like you: "He is a genius, a teacher, a leader and it explains and justifies his outbursts" or "he is a good guy who is just having a bad day", or "he means well, he simply has a temper on him".

But people bristle at haughty, condescending, and wounding behavior by their evident inferiors. They retaliate in kind or escalate, assured that they will prevail and triumph over a lowlife wannabe or a defective, mentally-ill psychopathic narcissist, like the repellent Sam Vaknin.

2. Why do women invariably reject me outright and immediately prefer other men to me, even when these men are way poorer, less educated, losers, abusive, junkies, older, infirm, and even uglier?

Same answer: any man - repeat: any man whatsoever!!! - is infinitely preferable and vastly superior to a psychopathic narcissist like me.

It took me a long while to accept that people - women and men alike - disrespect me overtly and ostentatiously because they actually regard me as pitiable and lame, a buffoonish pompous fool, broken and dysfunctional, unlovable, hideous, insufferable and revolting, hopeless and to be shunned.

People cut me no slack and give me no break because I am the one who have been telling humanity for 25 years that I am a monstrosity, a psychopathic narcissist and that my ilk are traumatizing inhuman mutants, good for nothing, and best avoided.

At least folks take my word for this. People are reacting to WHO I am (psychopathic narcissist) - not to WHAT I am saying as I myself had taught them to do when they are confronted with someone like me.

 

40.

 

Failing and being hated feel real to me, somehow more reliable, and way longer-lasting. Both have a calming, anxiety-reducing effect. I know where I stand, who is who, and what's next.

In contradistinction, love and success are fickle and ephemeral and when they are ineluctably gone, it is painful.

Often, love is feigned by golddiggers and worse, or conflated with erotomania and dependence. Success calls for antisocial cutting of corners and for compromising and bargaining away one's integrity and principles, trampling even on loved ones in the inexorable process.

Attempts to be loved and to accomplish require great investment and grandiose faking for passing, soon to be forgotten returns. The prize is often unworthy of the price.

Consequently, as far as I am concerned, love and success feel inferior to and less safe than any other alternative, worse even than being socially shunned and derided or than becoming a total loser. I undermine both these seductive lures on sight.

Better be an authentic loser, but true to myself, than a faux winner: who is doing the winning anyhow, if one is not oneself - but a fraud?

"For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?" Matthew 16:26

 

41.

 

In my dreams I bid adieu to people I will never see again.

And they are more real to me than they have ever been.

Old men are made of memories, I now discover.

The flesh is worn, defeated, the spirit mellow. All that remain are sepia snippets and pervasive waste.

What could have been way overwhelms what is.

Existence dwindles, ethereal, ephemeral, and foregone, bleeds seamlessly into embracing nothingness.

Not rage. Just grace. A truce with life, a welcome pact with death, the inner peace of absence looming.

It is of beauty, this surrender - or maybe 'tis the victory of spirit.

 

42.

 

For almost three decades I self-isolated in cell-like rooms, shunning all forms of human contact, including sex. I did not socialize or befriend anyone. I spent 100% of my time reading, writing, shooting videos for my YouTube channel, collecting ebooks, print books, and films. I let the women who loved me be intimate in every way with other men. I didn't care. I had rejected life as thoroughly as any suicide. I was all but gone and foregone.

Then, following a nearly lethal depression, I returned to life full force. I attempted to compress into a few years everything I had missed during my self-imposed wasteland hibernation.

My resounding failures in every sphere in this last endeavor to rejoin the human race served as excruciating reminders of why I had chosen to go monastic in the first place: I am spectacularly unfit to be with people, men and women. I lack the most rudimentary skillset and my mental illness aggravated and egregious had by now become an insurmountable obstacle.

Additionally, I had dedicated the long years of my seclusion to fostering and propagating in full public view the reputation of a freakish and creepy psychopathic mutant, making sure few would dare or want to come near a self-confessed monster like me. It was a labor of self-hatred well done: possibly the sole accomplishment in my vacated existence.

The pandemic sealed this last effort to resurrect and I am back where I started: a dilapidated monk in a confined space with a severely constricted life.

My vicissitudes remind me of two films: "Charly" and "Awakenings". In both masterpieces, the protagonist's capacity to engage with life and love is curtailed irreparably by a medical condition. In both, he is awakened by a miracle cure and exuberantly experiences the beauty of the world. He loves, he laughs, and then, tragically ... the effects of the drug wane and he is back to his erstwhile somnolent zombie state.

 

43.

 

How am I whiling away my pandemic?

Accepting reality and who I am.

Getting rid of long held delusions about others, but especially about myself.

Realizing my limitations.

Healthy process, but it provokes mourning: I grieve for who I thought I was and for a life so pervadingly confabulated that it was never lived.

 

44.

 

I never protect or value what's mine - from my women to my intellectual property - so others openly take everything and everyone away from me. I often give my ideas and goods for free and push my women to cheat on me with other men.

Men pick up on my distress signals and despise me for my spinelessness. They openly flirt with my dates, lovers, and spouses in my presence and whisk them off into nights of good time and carnal pleasure, ignoring me completely. I never dare to protest these fathomless humiliations. I just await the return of my despoiled, drunk partners.

This also engenders disrespect: whether I am perceived as cowardly, or as defeated, or as a slacker flake, I merit and elicit only derision, revulsion, and contempt from others: men, women, intimate and business partners, colleagues, clients.

Coupled with their envy of my gifts and revolt at my obnoxious and pompous personality, it leads to virulent displays of public humiliation/shaming and passive-aggressive or punitive acts against me.

Such disrespect is communicable and contagious and the contagion is exacerbated by my own behaviors: I either feign indifference or reactance ("do your worst, see if I care" defiance).

My apathy is not perceived as a sign of strength, but on the contrary: it is the hallmark of a doormat's cowardice, weakness, and absence of enforceable boundaries. I open myself to contempt, abuse, and gleeful mockery.

Alternatively, people interpret my behaviors as passive-aggression.

My visible, public, and ostentatious disrespect for my intimate partners is coupled with overt disinterest in them and observers grasp it as a profound lack of self-dignity, strength, and self-respect (as abdicating, not caring for, and not protecting my "property").

Similarly, my reactance is not perceived as credible: I am about as intimidating and deterring as a weakling spoiled brat - and even more repulsive and antagonizing. People experience an irresistible impulse to slap me down to size.

My attempts to "man up", deter, and intimidate provoke the offending party to escalate into egregious territory and react with undisguised disdain whenever I try to set boundaries or enforce them.

 

45.

 

I am never a man to my woman and this does not let her be a woman to me. In my Guru Father role, she is merely an audience; when I am a Genius Child, she is a mother on probation. Self-emasculation lead to defeminization, castration, aversion, sexlessness, and extramarital affairs.

 

I accept that, in order to persevere and survive within my increasingly more sexless shared fantasy (in which I am intermittently a child or a father, but never an adult man), my woman has to meet her sexual and emotional needs with (other) men.

 

Q: Why do you accept the asymmetry: she is cheating with others while you are at home waiting for her like a cuck or a soy boy?

 

Cucks derive sexual pleasure and are aroused when their partners have sex with others. I don’t. I am totally indifferent, not even romantically jealous. Just oblivious. It is as relevant to me as the war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

 

I accept that I am not allowed to do the same. I acquiesce in this asymmetry for various reasons:

 

A. She is an adult and I am not - she needs mature, conventional, reciprocated, and reglar sex and intimacy, I don't. So, I have to compromise and sacrifice in order to secure her presence and commitment to the relationship;

 

B. I can have sex only within a shared fantasy (a new relationship) while she can compartmentalize and not abandon me;

 

C. Any new shared fantasy will end the same way, so why bother? As long as I am getting supply and services (however meager), better stay put and forget about sex. I move on to a new shared fantasy only when 2 of the 3 Ss are missing at which point the woman had come to replicate my bad, dead mother and failed in her role as a good enough mother;

 

D. Only mentally ill, broken, damaged and traumatized women will succumb to my psychosexuality and enter the shared fantasy and this poses serious risks (exposure, blackmail, suicide, criminal liability). Scouting for a new shared fantasy is an absolute desperate last resort;

 

E. I successfully sublimate my autoerotic sadistic kinky sex drive: I really prefer learning and entertainment to sex and am far more gratified by these solitary activities. My biological drive is entirely satisfied with porn. My psychosexual kink and sadism require a compliant live body, but the prize is not worth the price: I suppress my urges, exactly the same way practitioners of other paraphilias (like pedophilia) do. Plus, rejecting women, frustrating, and humiliating them when I cannot have them for my sadistic pleasures feels as good as sex.

 

In shared fantasy not protective, but possessive; when there is a risk of abandonment, I am both both; in the bargaining phase, I am neither.

 

I feel humiliated that I can never have a woman that is only mine, can’t keep or satisfy my women, that other men, far inferior to me intellectually, often predator scum, pick them up in my presence, capture their hearts, minds, or bodies if even for a night. Like a cripple or an unemployed who cannot provide for his family: an inadequate invalid.

 

Women are angry at me that I push them back into the cesspool that is the dating scene and to drunkenness, to be molested by scum who regard them as sluts because they are married or in a relationship.

 

Women go to any length to cheat on me (even with strangers, their repellent abusers, petty criminals, pedophiles, alcoholics) for 4 reasons:

 

1. Meet their emotional and sexual needs for sex, intimacy, succor, attention, passion, desire, flirting, seduction/chase, etc. with a man;

 

2. Regain or buttress their self-esteem, self-confidence, and sense of femininity and desirability;

 

3. Reconstitute a proper reality testing (counterbalance my gaslighting and the inexorable pull of the shared fantasy) as well as a sense of normalcy (which is a relief, like waking up from a persistent nightmare);

 

When stalked in the shared fantasy and in the bargaining phase (having been ignored and pushed away forcefully), to ...

 

4. Force me to breakup with them, get rid of me by behaving so egregiously so as to mortify me.

 

I seek inferior or much younger women because: 1. They will accept kinky sex more readily 2. They will mother me because they have nothing else to do 3. I can play the Father role with them more convincingly and for longer.

 

46.

 

My natural state is schizoid: when I am successful, I feel empowered, self-sufficient, and sadistic ("fuck off factor") and when I fail, I withdraw in order to avoid narcissistic injuries and mortifications.

 

Avoidance and withdrawal from others is also a punitive measure: I deny them access to my mind and body because they had failed to appreciate me properly or had transgressed against me in some way. Among the mementoes of long dead relationships and the wreckage of broken dreams, I self-soothe, binging on my own fantasies.

 

I have always been solitary, introverted, and have generated a constant stream of intellectual arousal and self-stimulation (probably out of necessity), alone with my books, in the library, or in my study.

 

Nothing terrifies me more than becoming the center of a cult. As many of you can attest, I brutally, resolutely, and rudely reject any attempt to become my fan or follower. I barely tolerate even comments on my video. A cult would be a veritable nightmare.

 

47.

 

In 1995, I coined the phrase “narcissistic abuse”.

In 1997, my wife, Lidija Rangelovska (@reframingtheself) gave me a website on Geocities as a birthday gift. I uploaded my book and made it free.

In 1998, I established the first ever narcissistic abuse support group for narcissistic abuse victims on the now shuttered platform Listbot.

When Listbot closed its virtual gates, I migrated the group to Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, and MSN Groups. I also created 4 topics on Suite101.

By 2004, mine was the only website on narcissism and I owned and moderated all 6 forums available online, with well over 250,000 members in total.

Yahoo Groups is closing now. I am the last person active from that first generation. We struggled hard to get the message across, to educate, to help. We did not even have a proper language to communicate with: I had to come up with most of the words and phrases in use today and borrow from other branches of psychology.

This is the end of an era. I am proud of what we, the pioneers of this field , have accomplished. As we bow out, one by one, we leave this world a better place than we had found it.

 

48.

 

No one respects me even minimally. I am held in universal contempt & derision & people repeatedly ignore my boundaries & violate my rights disdainfully & with impunity. They humiliate me deliberately, mock & ridicule me, & help themselves to everything that's mine: my intimate partners & my innovations, especially.

 

All my women had cheated on me or betrayed me. The men who took them from me were frequently my "friends" or colleagues: they adopted my women’s disrespect towards me as their own & misinterpreted my equanimity as submissiveness. Hundreds of coaches, self-styled "experts", & scholars pilfer my work habitually, steal my ideas, & plagiarize me openly & unabashedly. All these acts reify extreme disrespect.

 

I am disrespected so profoundly by everyone, near & far, for 3 reasons:

 

1. I disrespect people, humiliate & abuse them gleefully, sadistically, automatically, publicly, & relentlessly. They hit back at their tormentor where it hurts: by denying me recognition, depriving me of sources of narcissistic supply, flaunting their misbehavior & my impotence to stop them, punish them, or do anything about it.

 

2. The Salieri Effect: people envy me for my undeniable gifts & prodigious output. It is unjust that someone as hideous as me is so endowed while they wallow in sterile mediocrity! By stealing my work, they are restoring justice, not usurping it.

 

They feel self-righteous when they save & salve my broken, hurting women; justified when they abscond with my intellectual property: the proceeds of crime are forfeited to the victims.

 

I should own nothing, should die alone, should not enjoy the fruits of my labor because my very existence constitutes an affront & a crime against humanity.

 

They are self-styled crusaders in a morality play, a Manichean battle against Evil. This grandiose campaign to right the wrong that is me also renders them fearless & immune to any of my objections & penalties.

 

3. I disrespect myself. Why else would I need a False Self & my grandiose fantasies? Without them I deem myself inferior, an impostor, corrupt, & an inefficacious failure. Moreover, I made a public spectacle of my own deformities & disabilities, a wicked doormat, rendering myself wide open to abuse.

(continued below)

This article appears in my book "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"

Click HERE to buy the print edition from Amazon (click HERE to buy a copy dedicated by the author)

Click HERE to buy electronic books (e-books) and video lectures (DVDs) about narcissists, psychopaths, and abuse in relationships

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook (my personal page or the book’s), YouTube

 

 

49.

 

Why don't I change?

 

1. Defiance, reactance, rebelliousness, non-conformity ("no one will tell me what to do"); 2. Grandiosity ("my way or the highway", fuck off factor); 3. Too late to change, my life is over ("at his age, 60, it is a problem"); 4. I like who I am (ego syntony): carefree, playful, noncommittal, adventurous, childlike, true to myself, proud; 5. I feel liberated, unshackled, with an infinite horizon of unlimited options, possibilities, opportunities and potentials, unbridled; 6. I preempt anticipated failures and thus regain ostensible control (I don't have a following or clients because I reject everyone and am a unflinching truthteller, women cheat on me and abandon me because I abuse them first); 7. Indolent, bored, slacker: I hoard and mummify - devices, books, videos, women - but can't be bothered to make use of or maintain them (so, my objects rot and my women flee).

 

50.

 

When the significant women in my life get intimate with me and witness my range of debilitating mental illnesses and my infantilism, they become averse and cut off all sex with me.

 

At that point, to forestall abandonment, I let them find other intimate partners even as we remain involved in a committed relationship. With the risk of a breakup always in the air, it is excruciatingly agonizing to witness their dalliances with other men, but I have no other sensible choice.

 

My only expectation is to not be abandoned even as my partner strays with multiple men and even when her involvement with other men is emotional and deep.

 

While my partner is free to have affairs and sex with other men, I remain celibate because I can have my kind of sex only within an intimate shared fantasy. 

 

Forming a new shared fantasy with another woman would precipitate my worst fear (abandonment by my current intimate partner) and would lead ineluctably to precisely the same situation with the next partner, it would result in identical inexorable outcomes: a sexless relationship with her and institutionalized cheating by my new mate. She, too, will cut off the sex, totally repelled by me, and she, too, will end up being with other men.

 

In the past 36 years, I have tried it 26 times with women from 13 countries on 4 continents, ranging in age from 20 to 50, their backgrounds disparate. All ended up behaving exactly the same way. I drove them away and they remained marooned in the relationship for my money and because they pitied me, all the while resorting to other men for intimacy, fun, succor, and sex: adult functions way out of my repertory. 

 

So, why bother to insanely start all over time and again? It is far more rational to preserve the current shared fantasy by giving up on my partner's sexual exclusivity and by letting her meet all her needs with men outside the dyad - even as I remain celibate through and through.

 

My only hope is that she will not abandon me altogether: a crippled child in need of a surrogate mother. But, of course, ultimately, they all do.

 

51.

 

People - even "friends" and collaborators of mine - hold me in profound contempt as an unboundaried, cowardly, weak, and grandiloquent bully. They disrespect and humiliate me in the most egregious ways, ostentatiously and gleefully, conspicuously and publicly breaching every conceivable code of conduct and etiquette.

With me, people allow themselves liberties that they would never dream or dare adopt with the lowliest of others: openly dating my partners (who are equally contemptuous), both parties then bragging to me in detail about their sexual exploits and emotional affairs; absconding with my property; and stealing my ideas - to mention but a few examples of such violations.

On the rare occasions that I do set boundaries, everyone mock me. Then, when I enforce my boundaries and act as I had said that I would if they are breached, people feel somehow deceived, angered, and disappointed: perennial doormats are not supposed to do that!

 

52.

 

Narcissist's Credo

No one can enslave me, tie me down, or tell me what to do, my way is the only way: seize the day, keep moving, reinvent yourself often (contumacious defiance)

No one has anything I cannot survive without, so no one has power over me or deserves anything from me, I owe nothing to anyone (unbridled freedom)

I abuse and reject anyone who presumes to be superior to me intellectually or to possess something s/he thinks that I need or desire (sex, love, money, power)

I never change, commit, invest, or make an effort because no one and nothing merit such a sacrifice

No one has the right to reciprocate my mistreatment because I am inherently superior and therefore entitled.

 

53.

 

I prefer ...

Novelty and diversity over depth and focus

Adventurous fun and play over committed work and investment

Big picture over details

Short-term with exit strategy over long-term annuity

Improvising over learning

Impressing and inspiring awe over communicating or educating

Solitary pursuits over any company

Hoarding over consuming

Hurting others over pleasing myself

Minimum necessary over maximum attainable

Unconstrained freedom and self-determination over any obligation or ambition

Inducing fear and hatred over engendering love and attraction

Celibacy over conventional, adult, emotion-laden, reciprocated sex

Fantasy over reality

Being superior and alone over being average and getting laid

Being my obnoxious self over pleasing people empathically

Commoditized, anonymized, crowd interactions over personal exchanges and relationships

 

54.

 

To NOT act as a man, as an adult, or prosocially - these are choices.

I am perfectly capable of NOT making these choices.

My misbehavior is not who I AM - but who I CHOOSE TO BE to satisfy my contemptuous sadism and to maintain my unbridled, defiant freedom.

Examples:

At the beginning of every relationship, I emulate a man both emotionally and sexually. My imitation of a man is so skillful and accomplished that I had never been turned down by any woman I had targetted.

Similarly, in business, I am very "worldly".

I know how to charm and enthrall, make friends and maintain long-term loyalties. I have done it all before, many times. I can fake empathy and care very convincingly.

I can refrain from any abusive or sadistic behaviors for long stretches of time when I am afraid of retribution (in the army or in prison) or when I am in pursuit of a goal (like a source of income).

I can invest and commit in both business and intimate relationships.

But none of these prizes is worth the price.

Choices entail costs and tradeoffs which I invariably end up paying. Yet, here, the twin prizes of contemptuous self-sufficiency and godlike liberties are definitely worth any sacrifice.

 

55.

 

Sam Vaknin's Genius Bloopers and Show-stoppers Co-startling  Minnie the Mug

 

"You were always somewhere else, she couldn't understand you, she didn't know what you wanted from her ... she used to cry ... you made her very unhappy ... didn't you know that?" ("Waiting for the Barbarians").

People - men and women alike - are a burden and a drain on my energy. In crisis (such as this pandemic), I prefer to be left entirely to my own devices. I ration my resources to maximize ROI and anticipated ROI. Where I see no future benefits or goals accomplished with certainty within a minimal timeframe, I go no contact. Women should provide any 2 of the 3 Ss (sex, sadistic and narcissistic supply, services), men 2 of 2 Ss - any fewer leads to effective withdrawal (or, where inescapable, minimal transactional communication) or, the minute it is feasible, actual no contact.

I am the one doing ALL the rejection, humiliation, abuse, refusal to commit, and abandonment. But I feel out of control: these acts are compulsive. I am furious at and resent myself for being so weak and for succumbing to my mental illness. So, I reframe with self-destructive and self-defeating counterfactual negative automatic thoughts so as to punish myself ("they abandoned me because I am unlovable").

My core failure is my delusional grandiose entitlement: like many others, I refuse to adopt any active roles because they involve commitment, investment, and familiarity or intimacy, however minimal. I do adopt passive roles as a recipient. I frame this choice as a failure because I fail to maintain the loyalty and presence of my 3Ss providers (as all successful passive rolers do). My failure lies in my unwillingness to invest even in the bare maintenance of my sources and suppliers: my grandiose entitlement is so outlandishly delusional (unrealistic, fantastic) that I fail even as a totally passive consumer (eg, as a con artist).

 

During the pandemic, I want commoditized, one time, anonymous narcissistic supply without (1) familiarity and/or (2) demands on any my resources. Familiarity implies equality or contempt (rather than fear of ultimate anticipated rejection) and to demand my attention without commensurate return (sex or services) is an insolent imposition. In both cases, I reject the supplier (having already garnered the narcissistic supply) and by doing so I extract sadistic supply (by humiliating her/him) to add to the already harvested narcissistic supply. I encourage familiarity and am responsive only when ROI in the form of the 3 Ss is guaranteed.

I do not have the stamina and the emotional skill set required for any type of human intercourse. Nothing and no one has meaning for me, except as a diversion. I aspire to nothing and want nothing and no one. I prefer to masturbate not only sexually (autoerotic) but also psychologically/intellectually (autolibidinal).

"If we want nothing, then nothing stands in our way. This may lead to a life of monastic enlightenment -- or habitual evasion" (Corbett, "Art of Character"). Sterile pseudointellectual pursuits replace real life action.

 

56.

 

Narcissists are bumbling fools and buffoons. Even when they are highly intelligent, they are often incredibly dumb. They may be erudite, but they are never wise.

 

People respect me for my intelligence and assume that I possess corresponding traits of wisdom and maturity.

But, when they get to know me up close, they lose all respect for me.

When people - men and women - first make contact with me, they are even awed. But, all of them invariably end up regarding me as a pathetic and indolent doormat loser, a mentally ill and obnoxious, yet grandiose cripple. They feel deceived and are driven to hurt me, put me in my rightful place, and mock me. At best, they pity me and shun me.

I am pervasively disrespected because I thoroughly disrespect myself: I reject my life and everything and everyone in it as meaningless, I engage in self-defeating and irrational misconduct, I do as I please (my way or the highway), pay no heed to consequences, lack any ambition or motivation, just drift along randomly, giving up on assets, accomplishment, communities, places, language itself, and people without any regret or second thought. I never attach or bond to anyone, anything, any place, any vocation or pursuit. I am ephemeral.

I invest in nothing, never plan, and commit to nothing and to no one. I drift and am an itinerant slacker. The minimal work that I do - even my hobbies! - is shoddy, cluttered, and haphazard, everything looks ramshackle and improvised. I am absent and abusive in all my relationships, busy mostly in fending off encroaching intimacy.

Like Cleckley's patients, mine is a mere mask of sanity, and like them, I don't even bother to keep it on, so naturally no one fears my retribution or respects my boundaries. They trespass on me with impunity and glee, egregiously and ostentatiously.

I am self-destructive and often implore people - offline and online - to humiliate and to hate me (even to the extent of initiating self-directed smear campaigns or anonymously or via sock puppets!!!)

 

57.

 

Who is he?

The narcissist is an absence
A howling wind
In the vacant corridors
Of his tortured mind.
He is the echoing cry
Of a wounded sepia child
Faded into
A bleeding emptiness.
A void.
Mirror upon mirror
Reflects the nothingness
Where a person should have been.
Into his carnival attraction
You are solicited to fill
The bottomless pit
Of him.
Around, a million times you
Beckon and seduce
To join his vanishing act
And to not be.

 

58.

 

Narcissist's (universal) Transaction Rules

As long as you regularly provide me with at least 2 out of 3 Ss (Sex, sadistic or narcissistic Supply, Services/money/power), I am your unboundaried doormat and you can walk all over me and otherwise misbehave as you please.

Give me only 1 of the 3 Ss or none and I will sadistically abuse you, test you to the breaking point, and punish you for failing.

Threaten to abandon me or attempt it and I will either hoover you or, failing that, stalk you.

Try to bargain with me, change or fix me, set rules and boundaries, or insist on long-term commitment or investment and I am gone as soon as I can find someone to take your place.

 

59.

 

Just when I think that I have seen it all, I come across ignorant nonsense by self-styled “experts” and “coaches”: statements so stupendously stupid that they literally take my breath away. Consider this early morning’s crop of two inanities (minutes from waking up):

 

1. The narcissist keeps his triangulation a secret, self-importantly says a leading “narcissistic abuse coach”.

 

Triangulation is when the narcissist or borderline attempts to get a rise out of you, render you jealous, modify your behavior, or manipulate you by introducing a third party into your relationship.

 

For triangulation to work, its target needs to witness it! The act of triangulation is always conducted ostentatiously and overtly, in full view, in the open! Secrecy would defeat the purpose!

 

2. Breathtakingly ill-informed “info” by yet another self-discovered “expert”: the narcissist has a boundless ego.

 

Ego is the part of the personality that controls impulses, maintains reality testing, regulates one’s sense of self-worth, and mediates between other constructs of the personality. The narcissist has an atrophied ego or even no ego. Narcissism is a disorder of the (constellated) self. Narcissist are children, stuck at an early developmental stage.

 

This is why narcissists resort to other people and compulsively seek narcissistic supply: they outsource these ego functions!

 

So, why do people flock to these shoddy and sometimes shady characters who lack any credentials in the field (such as papers published in academic journals or studies conducted)?

 

People told me openly: we don’t care how knowledgeable or ignorant these “experts” and “coaches” are. We are not looking for a university-level education: we need HELP. When you drown, you are not interested in the chemical properties of water or in the resume of the lifesaver.

 

We are in search of someone to hold our hand (validation and succor), tell us how to cope (solutions), and give us hope. We don’t even care if these “coaches” and “experts” are actually narcissists and psychopaths as long as they deliver these goods.

 

No one is listening to Sam Vaknin, these victims and survivors told me, because you shame and blame victims, provide no solutions, and your message is bleak, nihilistic, and hopeless.

 

60.

 

I become possessive and try to reclaim my cheating partner only when I anticipate abandonment. Otherwise, I am indifferent to her cheating, however indiscreet and ostentatious, and content to be left alone and unencumbered by her demands and expectations, catered to by other men.

I never discard my partner when her only transgression is serial cheating: she is extremely unlikely to forgo my brilliant mind, its insights, and the money it produces just for sex or even for a longer-term lover (fewer than 3% of women do).

Moreover: I do not compete with other men for my women when it comes to sex and love (functions I consider vastly inferior to the intellect and of which anyhow I am incapable owing to my infantile emotional age).

I, therefore, do not experience narcissistic injury or romantic jealousy or even unease when my partner chooses a man to love and to sleep with – no more than I would experience injury if she were to invite a plumber or an electrician or go to a hairdresser or a masseur to take care of her needs. As a service provider, she can do as she pleases in her time off.

I feel injured only when she prefers another man’s intellect, knowledge, expertise, and experience to mine in my core competencies (medicine, finance, geopolitics, psychology, etc.)

I emotionally or physically discard my partner only when she challenges or undermines my grandiosity as genius, guru, and father figure either via bargaining (which implies that I am not perfect) or when she replaces me with – and betrays me to - another guru/genius/father figure/trusted friend/savior (which implies that I am not omniscient and unique).

I pre-empt the inevitable abandonment: a partner who had rejected my only offerings and contributions to the couple – my mind, its insights, and my moneymaking brainchildren – and who had found a satisfactory substitute for them is on her way out anyhow.

I realize that my woman is suddenly devaluing my mind only because she is heartbroken and enraged at my indifference which she perceives as rejection and neglect. The relationship is doomed in any case.

This article appears in my book "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"

Click HERE to buy the print edition from Amazon (click HERE to buy a copy dedicated by the author)

Click HERE to buy electronic books (e-books) and video lectures (DVDs) about narcissists, psychopaths, and abuse in relationships

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook (my personal page or the book’s), YouTube

 

 

61.

 

Men born in the height of the Victorian era, in 1870, were my age (59) in 1929. They felt utterly disoriented and dislocated as norms, values, behaviors, and mores shifted kaleidoscopically and dramatically. The world they found themselves in was alien to them: anomic, violent, promiscuous, dissolute, narcissistic and psychopathic. New technologies and the growing involvement of the nanny state in private affairs rendered obsolete millennia-old institutions such as family, community, and even friendship.

Bewildered and dazed, they watched with growing horror as the world descended into collective madness. I sympathize with them: I feel exactly the same. I know where all this is going to end. I was among the first clarion calls, a self-sacrificial canary in the darkening shafts of this existential mine. But I am helpless to effect any change in the suicidal course of events. I am reduced to a mere spectator in this society of spectacle and theatre of the absurd.

 

62.

 

We all cope the best we can
with what little we are given.

Happiness is this doomed struggle that we call "life".

The world always overwhelms us.

Yet, in such defeat lies our humanity,

not in the swagger of illusory triumph.

 

Here is a surefire recipe for a failed life: PIN.

Procrastinate until it is too little, too late;

Ignore until things get too egregious and unfixable;

Neglect until you are rendered non-competitive and irrelevant.

 

63.

 

There is only one book whose content I cannot recall despite having had to wade through it a dozen times or so. In contrast: I remember in minute detail, often verbatim, the verbiage of thousands of tomes. How come?

“Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” is not really autobiographical. It is based on decades of research, reams of scholarly literature, and structured interviews with 1800+ people diagnosed with NPD and what was left of their “neatest” and “dearest”.

Yet, it resonates potently with me. I’d rather not be reminded so starkly and unequivocally of my shattering disability, ubiquitous inadequacies, and failed, wasted, tragic life.

Truly assimilating my book would bring about life-threatening mortification. So, I dissociate every single word in it fearfully.

This repression of my own words and insights sometimes yields comic outcomes. People send me a quote and I hasten to disparage the author: “who is the wannabe genius who fathered this nonsense?”, I retort. “You did”, the answer comes back, “in your book, page so and so!”

 

64.

 

I have just learned that Rafi Eitan, one of the most important figures in my early life has passed away last year. In the murky world of intelligence agencies, he was my guide and guardian angel and saved my bacon more than once - and my sister’s, later an important figure in Israel’s defense establishment in her own right.

Growing old is about losses: of body functions, of a mind obscured, of dreams unfulfilled, of opportunities missed.

But, above all, aging detaches you ever so incrementally from your context: values change, buildings get torn down, your peers and elders die.

Before you know it, you are all by yourself on an alien planet, surrounded by lifeforms whose behaviors, motivations, and language you cannot decipher. Horror.

 

65.

 

Download the first chapter here: https://samvak.tripod.com/goldfish.doc

 

In her algae-ridden aquarium, my goldfish, Fredericka “Freddush” invariably appeared to be happy. She never complained, except when cold or hungry. She circled in the water, fins erect, mouth agape, the better to catch food morsels.

I don’t really know if she was happy or not, of course. I don’t even know if she was capable of happiness or, if she was, whether her brand of happiness resembled mine, a human’s. I can’t fully empathize with her without anthropomorphizing her, projecting onto her my inner world. I can’t put myself in her shoes, even had she had any.

Still, there is a lot to learn from Freddush when it comes to being content with life and its offerings.

But was my goldfish’s life meaningful?

 

65.

 

Both Picasso and Einstein would have been considered abusers nowadays. With such a reputation, women would have shunned them, regardless of their genius or celebrity status. See Harvey Weinstein.

It wasn't always like that. In my youth, geniuses were allowed to mistreat other people, including and especially their intimate partners and nearest and dearest. The genius's infidelity, outbursts, moodiness, and absences were the price one paid for the once in a lifetime privilege of sharing a life with a luminary. It was both expected and accepted.

Today, physical appearance and a kind personality (real or feigned) are the two parameters that determine attraction. A towering intellect, an overabundance of talents, skills, and expertise are major turn offs and their bearers are derided, hated, suspected, and shunned. In these uncertain times, there is safety in mediocrity, similarity, and predictability. The irrational is comforting, the stupid congregate, the losers afford each other succor. Alpha winners are hunted, penalized, or avoided altogether, by both genders.