Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)
Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)
Nothing is more hated by the narcissist than the sentence
"I Love You".
It provokes him to uncontrollable rage. Why is that?
a. The narcissist hates women virulently and vehemently. A misogynist, he
identifies being loved with being possessed, encroached upon, shackled,
transformed, reduced, exploited, weakened, engulfed, digested and excreted. To
him love is a dangerous pursuit, fickle and labile. He believes in fear and
hate as immutable, reliable motivations, not in love. He gets married only so
as to secure the services of his “partner” as homemaker, audience, personal
assistant, and companion. He, therefore, is rarely possessive and jealous: he
doesn’t care what she does, when, and with whom, as long as his needs and
expectations are impeccably met. He avoids intimacy also because it demands
reciprocity and, thus, a waste of his scarce and precious resources on the
tedious chore of maintaining a relationship when all he wants is a
business-like, contractual arrangement.
When a woman tries to pick up a narcissist, flirt with him, or court him, he is
likely to react by subjecting her to humiliating and cool disdain (if he is a
cerebral narcissist) or by dumping her after having sex with her (somatic
narcissist). In both cases the abusive message is: you have no power over me
because I am unique, omnipotent, not your typical run-of-the-mill sap; you are
nothing to me but a pitiful parasite or an object to be violated. Your very
approach and attempt to seduce me is proof of your imbecility, blindness, or
maliciousness for how could you not have noticed that I am different and
superior?
b. Being loved means being known intimately. The narcissist likes to think that
he is so unique and deep that he can never be fathomed. The narcissist believes
that he is above mere human understanding and empathy, that he is one of a kind
(sui generis). To say to him "I love you", means to negate this
feeling, to try to drag him to the lowest common denominator, to threaten his
sense of uniqueness.
Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq74.html
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The agent-principal problem is
rife in politics. In the narrative that is the modern state, politicians are
supposed to generate higher returns to citizens by increasing the value of the
state’s assets and, therefore, of the state. In the context of politics, assets
are both of the economic and of the geopolitical varieties. Politicians who
fail to do so, goes the morality play, are booted out mercilessly.
The misconduct of politicians is one manifestation of the "Principal-Agent
Problem". It is defined thus by the Oxford Dictionary of Economics:
"The problem of how a person A can motivate person B to act for A's
benefit rather than following (his) self-interest."
The obvious answer is that A can never motivate B not to follow B's
self-interest - never mind what the incentives are. That economists pretend
otherwise - in "optimal contracting theory" - just serves to
demonstrate how divorced economics is from human psychology and, thus, from
reality.
The same goes for politics and political science, respectively.
Politicians will always rob blind the state. They will always manipulate
electorates, political parties, legislatures, and the judiciary to induce them
to collude in their shenanigans. They will always bribe constituents and
legislators to bend the rules. In other words, they will always act in their
self-interest. In their defense they can say that the damage from such actions
to each citizen is minuscule while the benefits to the politician are enormous.
In other words: such misbehaviour is the rational, self-interested, thing to
do.
But why do citizens cooperate with such political brigandage? In an important
Chicago Law Review article titled "Managerial Power and Rent Extraction in
the Design of Executive Compensation" the authors demonstrate how the
typical stock option granted to managers as part of their remuneration rewards
mediocrity rather than encourages excellence.
Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/leader.html
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The narcissist has either of three types of (non-)intimate (not) relationship with his (in)significant
other:
1. As playmates, sex buddies, or casual collaborators:
no shared fantasy, no drama, very businesslike (transactional), loads of fun
til it’s abruptly over or peters out;
2. Companionship shared fantasy: grooming as an
admirer/fan and occasional sex partner or sexless service provider (but without
lovebombing or honeymoon). A very stable and resilient bond that can last a
lifetime;
3. Romantic shared fantasy (usually with labile,
dysregulated, promiscuous, approach-avoidant women and imminent abandonment).
Involves both grooming and lovebombing (honeymoon phase), lots of sex (often
kinky or sadistic), drama, near-psychotic levels of fantasy, and a
rollercoaster of idealization and devaluation. Ends with narcissistic
mortification.
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As the inimitable Hervey Cleckley had observed in 1942, psychopaths (and
narcissists) reject life itself. Their nihilistic acts of self-destruction are
driven by a proud ideology of defiance, contumaciousness, and reactance. Their
self-defeat signals their profound contempt for others, for authority, society,
and for everything that everyone hold dear.
Narcissists and psychopaths consider themselves
superior, unique, and, therefore entitled.
They disdain mediocrity and sheeple reflexes to
obey, trust, and follow. They are contrarians: they act against all norms,
subvert all expectations, and reject all the attributes of civilized
co-existence and collaboration.
They smugly and ostentatiously trample upon the
rewards, incentives, and inducements that reality has to offer (love, family,
career, safety, reason).
When they do pursue anything that is deemed
conformant and sublimated (socially acceptable), they take great care to do it
their way: in the most extravagant, antisocial, reckless, callous, ruthless,
merciless, and shocking manner.
They consider being hated and feared a badge of
honor. They strive to be an enigma to the great unwashed teeming masses: being
widely misunderstood is the coveted pinnacle of their accomplishments.
What others consider a wasted, abandoned, sad life - they see as poking society’s
collective eye with a triumphant middle finger. They prevail by refusing to
play the game and by aggressively upturning the social tables in everyone’s
temples. The devastation of their own lives is a statement of how little they
value the lives and toils of others.
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Narcissists
react with rage, envy, and possessiveness when they are abandoned or betrayed -
but only when their locus of grandiosity is directly challenged and undermined
in the process.
The cerebral narcissist is largely asexual. His
grandiosity is vested in his spectacular intellect, not in his non-existent
maturity or virility. He is, therefore, utterly indifferent to his intimate
partner's affairs or sex hookups with other men (which, typically, he is fully
apprised of) - unless they indicate imminent abandonment.
The cerebral couldn't care less when his wife,
girlfriend, or lover is whiling night or even years with other - likely
predatory - men: he is incapable of attachment, bonding, or love. He is not
bound to his partner - but to the services that she affords him. As long as
these are guaranteed, he is content with her frequent absences.
But when his partner gravitates towards another
guru or father figure, he erupts with extreme jealousy and hurt. If he fails to
reclaim her exclusive admiration and awe, he discards her.
Like his cerebral brethren, the somatic often
maintains a sexless household with his insignificant other - but, unlike the
cerebral, he expects her to remain sexually exclusive. He perceives her
straying with other men as an implied criticism of his sexual prowess - the
very core of his grandiosity.
The somatic doesn't mind when his spouse falls in
love or is emotionally intimate with another man. Nor does he pay attention if
she admires someone as intellectually superior or as a father figure. All he
cares about is to make sure that she does not share her body and her sex with
others. Having experienced his orgasmic pyrotechnics, she should be inured to
the seductive allure of any and all other contestants.
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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!”
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Shielded from
reality by his grandiose view of himself as perfect and irresistibly desirable,
the narcissist fails to realize how embarrassed people in his orbit are with
his personality and misconduct.
If his intimate partner has daddy issues, she
would feel ashamed being seen with a old man, often self-neglected and past his
prime, if he ever had any.
If he is easy on the eyes and her peer, he tends
to lack an operable neocortex.
If he is capable of thinking, he misses the
curiosity needed to exercise this faculty.
If he is gregarious, he is obnoxious. When he is
reclusive, he is abusive.
When he is smart, he is never wise.
When he is knowledgeable, he is asexual and
incapable of any form of romance or attachment.
If he is into sex, he prefers porn and
masturbation, even with his partners’s bodies.
He ostentatiously oscillates between a jejune wimp
and a macho caricature, convincingly in neither.
His jokes fall flat or excel in their brutality,
his commentary inane or paranoid, his gestures overdone, his honesty sadistic,
his succor rife with conditional toxicity, his assertiveness defiant and
ill-times, his swagger cartoonish. A buffoon with regal airs.
People around him cringe in shocked
amazement at his antics and wish they were somewhere else, or could bury their
way into invisibility.
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Ubiquitous computing is becoming not only intrusive but also more
condescending and patronizing by the version. I call it: “nanny computing”.
Underlying nanny softwares are the twin
assumptions that people are way too stupid to be entrusted with their own
welfare and so irrational that they never get things right, having compromised
the decision-making process.
Nanny apps and programs override and overwrite the
user’s explicit choices, preferences, and commands. This is reminiscent of HAL,
the starship’s onboard computer in Odyssey 2001.
Nanny computing is only one manifestation of a
societal trend at least 150 years old, when the first welfare nanny state was
established by Bismarck.
People are infantilized and regressed to an
earlier, dependent phase of personal development. One’s agency is usurped by
authorities: religious, secular, or technological.
Social media are the latest examples of
such “it is for your own good” coercion but they were preceded by numerous
other instances, including prohibition and the criminalization of psychoactive
substances. The COVID-19 pandemic cast this pernicious paternalism into sharp
relief.
Uniformity, conformity, and predictability are
crucial to the functioning of modern mass economies. Individualism is a threat
to be constrained. Grandiose defiant narcissism is the revolt of the masses as
they recoil from the deadening embrace of those who “know best what’s good for
you, sonny!”
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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.
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The
lovebombing and grooming phase involves co-idealization: both the narcissist and his targeted
prospective partner idealize each other.
The narcissist needs to delusionally misperceive
his partner as perfection reified because her impeccability reflects on him:
”she is such a treasure - and she chose ME!”
The narcissist’s mate idealizes him because it is
through him that she experiences self-love (probably for the first time in her
life). She gets emotionally invested (cathected) in his fantastic rendition of
her. This is the “hall of mirrors” effect.
The victim aggressively rejects any attempt by
family and friends to restore her reality testing and to open her eyes as to
the true nature of the predator she had become infatuated with.
In extremis, she may even sever all communication
with anyone who dares to criticize her man or disagree with him. Hurt and
befuddled, loved ones reciprocate by shunning her.
Gradually, she forms a cultish shared psychosis
(shared fantasy) with the narcissist and excludes all others from her life,
leaving her as isolated and vulnerable as any hostage.
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The cerebral
narcissist's inner monologue, addressed and signaled to his insignificant other:
I am a Genius Child (Wunderkind).
Admire me and serve me as the Genius that I am.
Love me unconditionally as a mother loves her
Child - not as a woman loves a man. I am a child, not a man: real
as the former, fake as the latter.
Satisfy with other men your emotional needs for
adult intimacy and your physical urge to have sex. Expect and demand nothing
grown up from me, your Child.
I prefer to explore the world and its marvels on
my own, leveraging my magnificent brain. You are not invited: don't be the kind
of intrusive mother who makes a nuisance of herself. Go away until I call for
you!
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Psychoanalysis is now widely considered nothing better
than a confabulation, a baseless narrative, a snapshot of Freud's tormented
psyche and thwarted 19th century Mitteleuropa middle class prejudices.
Most of the criticism is hurled by mental health
professionals and practitioners with large axes to grind. Few, if any, theories
in psychology are supported by modern brain research. All therapies and
treatment modalities - including medicating one's patients - are still forms of
art and magic rather than scientific practices. The very existence of mental
illness is in doubt - let alone what constitutes "healing". Psychoanalysis
is in bad company all around.
Some criticism is offered by practicing scientists
- mainly experimentalists - in the life and exact (physical) sciences. Such
diatribes frequently offer a sad glimpse into the critics' own ignorance. They
have little idea what makes a theory scientific and they confuse materialism
with reductionism or instrumentalism and correlation with causation.
Few physicists, neuroscientists, biologists, and
chemists seem to have plowed through the rich literature on the psychophysical
problem. As a result of this obliviousness, they tend to proffer primitive
arguments long rendered obsolete by centuries of philosophical debates.
Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/psychoanalysis.html
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Vaccine
nationalism is shaping
up to be an exclusionary race by richer economies - notably the US, UK, and
Canada - to hoard 3-5 times the amount of doses needed to inoculate the entire
population, thereby preventing poorer nations from getting their hands on the
much needed jabs.
A possible explanation for this irrational, even
malevolent misconduct, is that no one knows how many shots would be needed to
induce long-lasting immunity. The COVID-19 vaccines may prove to be as fickle
as their flu equivalents and require an annual administration of a booster.
Better safe in a warehouse than sorry in hindsight.
A less benign and way more sinister conspiratorial
rationale is that the West is trying to get a head start in reviving its
post-pandemic economies, leaving in the dust and in a state of dependency the
likes of Russia and even China by denying them access to the way superior
biotechnology, manufacturing, and distribution infrastructure (including cold
chain) that go into the vaccines of the West.
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Even when the cerebral
narcissist is all by
himself and a woman is fully available and keen on him, he is not interested or
aroused when he is in the throes of a shared fantasy, including in a sexless or
a fractious one.
He becomes promiscuous only in between shared
fantasies.
It is not that he is loth to risk the shared
fantasy by engaging in extradyadic sex: he simply becomes contentedly asexual
when he is involved in one.
The incentive structure in the shared fantasy
disables his sex drive: masturbation to porn is part substitute to real life
sex and the disincentives are many and powerful:
1. Aversion to incest (the partner is a maternal
figure);
2. Powerful sublimation: intellectual pursuits
pleasure him way more than sex and the gratification is deeper and more
enduring as his intellectual accomplishments - real or imagined - resonate with
his grandiosity;
3. Indolent inertia: the prize of sex is not worth
the price of having to endure a woman's carping and her tedious company;
4. Difficulty of finding a partner to his
autoerotic, immature, often sadistic, kinky sex;
5. He feels safe within the shared fantasy, as
long as there is no anticipated abandonment and no challenges to his
grandiosity.
In contrast, the cerebral feels unsafe - paranoid,
even - when he ventures out. He also foresees ineluctable hurt and
mortification down the road in any new liaison and shared fantasy.
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Protracted dysphoria and anxiety reduce the urge to have sex (hyposexuality is actually one of the presenting signs of both). The cerebral narcissist’s asexuality could well be the outcome of depression and anticipatory anxiety: he fully expects to be betrayed and abandoned once his partner had found out the truth about him.
It is as self-fulfilling prophecy: the very anticipated abandonment which he so fears and his concomitant hurt-aversion lead to his emotional and sexual withdrawal (avoidance) which inevitably results in the dreaded outcome: breakup and heartbreak.
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Are memories
of trauma and abuse any
different to other memories? Are they mostly real or mostly false? Can memories
be truly repressed? How are they accessed and recalled late in life?
First part of third winter semester lecture to
South Federal University, Rostov on Don, Russian Federation, and to the
Psychology track in SIAS-CIAPS.
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Two types of recovered
false memories:
1. Denying, altering, or minimizing personal
involvement in and contribution to the abuse or the abuser's role or the abuse
itself;
2. Recalling false incidents, typology, or pattern
of abuse.
Double whammy of gaslighting and confabulation
encourages disorientation, dissociation, and formation of false memories, some
of them compensatory (confabulations).
CONFABULATION
Confabulation is a memory error defined as
the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about
oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive.
FALSE MEMORY
False memory refers to cases in which people
remember events differently from the way they happened or, in the most dramatic
case, remember events that never happened at all.
False memories can be very vivid and held with
high confidence, and it can be difficult to convince someone that the memory in
question is wrong.
Second part of third winter semester lecture to
South Federal University, Rostov on Don, Russian Federation, and to the Psychology
track in SIAS-CIAPS.
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As Eric Berne
noted in the founding text of Transactional
Analysis, human
relationships are "games people play". There are two types of people
who adamantly and proudly refuse to partake of such ludic exchanges: the
narcissist and the psychopath.
When they would not play "sex" or
"intimacy" or "family" with a woman, she resorts to other
playmates. When they decline to play "business" or
"friendship" with someone, the rejected parties revert to another
partner. These ineluctable self-inflicted losses warp, thwart, and stunt the
minds and the lives of narcissists and psychopaths. In his seminal survey of
grandiose psychopathy, "The Mask of Sanity", Hervey Cleckley branded
it a "rejection of life itself".
The only game the narcissist will participate in
is "let us all pretend that this is for real": a delusional shared
fantasy with limited longevity and guaranteed expiry. The psychopath's only
concession to human intercourse is a zero-sum "let's play my game: you
give it all and I take everything you have and then some."
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Typology
of Revenge
The need to seek revenge on wrong- and evil-doers
is as ancient as Mankind. But people attempt to address their grievances in
three ways:
1. Punitive-moralistic
The aim of this type of vengeance is to restore
justice and, with it, the victim’s view of the world as orderly, predictable,
and causal. Perpetrators should be punished; victims should be soothed and
elevated; and society should publicly acknowledge who is who and mete out
opprobrium and succour respectively.
This type of revenge tends to devolve into an
obsession (intrusive, uncontrolled thoughts) and compulsion (an irresistible
urge to behave in a way that is sometimes inconsistent with one’s values or
even true wishes, or incommensurate with one’s skills, needs, long-term
interests, capabilities, or wherewithal.) It is unhealthy and, in the
long-term, counterproductive as it taxes the victim’s time and resources;
adversely affects her other relationships; renders her dysfunctional; and,
ultimately, consumes her.
2. Narcissistic
Vindictiveness is the narcissist’s way of
restoring his self-imputed grandiosity and of recuperating from a narcissistic
injury. Having fallen prey to malfeasance or crime, the narcissist is proven to
be gullible, ignorant, and helpless. This experience is humiliating and the
circumstances of victimhood contrast sharply with the narcissist’s inflated
view of himself as omniscient, omnipotent, brilliant, shrewd, and perfect. Only
by bringing the culprit to utter ruin does the narcissist regain his sense of
self.
Ask yourself if your bruised ego is the main
reason for your indignation and spite. If it is, try to separate the elements
of your conduct that have to do with your justified grievance and those that
revolve around your unhealthy narcissism. Avoid the latter and pursue the
former.
3. Pragmatic-restorative
With this type of revenge, the victim merely
wishes to restore her fortunes and reassert her rights – in other words: to
revert the world to its erstwhile state by acting against her violator
decisively and assertively.
Continue: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq75.html
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Chemical
and biological warfare
are not an invention of the 20th century.
Solon (638-559 BC) used a strong purgative, the
herb hellebore, in the siege of Krissa. During the 6th century BC, the
Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with rye ergot. In the Peloponnesian War
(431-404 BC), the Spartans flung sulphur and pitch at the Athenians and their
allies. In the Middle Ages, besiegers used the bloated and dripping bodies of
plague victims as readymade "dirty bombs".
In 1346, during its siege of Kaffa (present day Feodosia
in Crimea), the Tartar army suffered an outbreak of the Plague. They hurled the
corpses of their infected dead over the city walls and into the city's water
wells. The resulting epidemic led to the city's surrender. It is widely
believed that people afflicted with the horrendous disease fled the place and
started the Black Death pandemic which consumed at least one third of Europe's
population within a few years. Russian troops adopted the same tactic against
Sweden in 1710.
Smallpox was another favourite. Francisco Pizarro
(1476-1541) gave South American natives clothing items deliberately
contaminated with the variola virus. During the French and Indian wars in North
America (1689-1763), blankets used by smallpox victims were given to American Indians.
General Jeffery Amherst (1717-1797) gifted Indians loyal to the French with
smallpox-contaminated bedspreads during the French and Indian War of 1754 to
1767. An epidemic broke among the Native American defenders of Fort Carillon
and they lost it to the English.
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Your abuser "agrees" (is
forced) to attend therapy. But are the sessions worth the effort? What is the success
rate of various treatment modalities in modifying the abuser's conduct, let
alone in "healing" or "curing" him? Is psychotherapy the
panacea it is often made out to be – or a nostrum, as many victims of abuse
claim? And why is it applied only after the fact – and not as a preventive
measure?
Courts regularly send offenders to be treated as a
condition for reducing their sentences. Yet, most of the programs are laughably
short (between 6 to 32 weeks) and involve group therapy – which is useless with
abusers who are also narcissists or psychopaths.
Rather than cure him, such workshops seek to
"educate" and "reform" the culprit, often by introducing
him to the victim's point of view. This is supposed to inculcate in the
offender empathy and to rid the habitual batterer of the residues of
patriarchal prejudice and control freakery. Abusers are encouraged to examine
gender roles in modern society and, by implication, ask themselves if battering
one's spouse was proof of virility.
Anger management – made famous by the eponymous
film – is a relatively late newcomer, though currently it is all the rage.
Offenders are taught to identify the hidden – and real – causes of their rage
and learn techniques to control or channel it.
But batterers are not a homogeneous lot. Sending
all of them to the same type of treatment is bound to end up in recidivism.
Neither are judges qualified to decide whether a specific abuser requires
treatment or can benefit from it. The variety is so great that it is safe to
say that – although they share the same misbehavior patterns – no two abusers
are alike.
Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/abusefamily8.html
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Compensatory
personal boundaries are
rigid, hypervigilant, aggressive (often defiant), and excessive
(disproportional). They are intended to compensate for the lack of enforced
boundaries in any one or more other areas of life.
Thus, if an individual has no boundaries in his
private life, acts as a people pleasing doormat, and is subject to all manner
of disrespectful abuse by his "nearest" and "dearest" - he
is likely to be a tyrant in the workplace, keen to spot transgressions and
slights where there are none, acting entitled and temperamental, and insisting
on perfection or unthinking obeisance to his every whim.
This implies the existence of a "law of
conservation of personal boundaries". One's very identity depends on such
fortified demarcations in at least one realm of one's being, functional
existence, and day to day operations.
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There are
three toxic threats to one’s individual freedoms and authentic being: hope,
love, and success.
Hope is a counterfactual and delusional reaction
to despair and meaninglessness. It fosters expectations that are invariably
thwarted. Its companions and successors are depression, frustration, and
aggression. Nothing is more pernicious and insidious than hope.
Love is the pathological attempt to counter
existential and profound loneliness via an idealized, largely narcissistic
narrative projected onto one’s partner. It invariably ends in heartbreak and
devastation because it is inherently contrived and because it involves numerous
practices which runs counter to the pursuit of liberty and happiness.
Success is society’s way of harnessing individual
energies and gifts at the service of the collective and its elites. It is
slavery in all but name.
The rational, sane person avoids this venomous,
identity-eradicating trio. He lives free in the fullest sense of the word: free
of the future and its intimations (hope), free of all others (love), and free
of any organizing principles (success).
Whenever this Nietzschean Superman is threatened
by hope, love, or success - he rebels and recoils and is gone, having left
everything and everyone behind as so many discarded shackles.
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Intimate relationships entail the
experiencing, triggering, and display of one's vulnerabilities. Many find this integral and critical
component of intimacy frightening or distasteful.
Being vulnerable is childlike and, therefore,
could be a wonderful feeling: excitement and relief in equal measures. To cast
aside all masks is to liberating. To finally be 100% you is exhilarating. To be
accepted as you truly are is to be loved.
The disclosure of one's "weaknesses",
fault lines, and deficiencies gives rise to anxiety only when you don't trust
the other party, when you are worried that he might disparage the newly gained
information, reject you, or, much worse, leverage your openness, wounds, and
needs to his advantage.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nothingness
in my philosophy has
roots in Buddhism and Neo-Daoism.
NEW CHANNEL Nothingness: Antidote to Narcissism
Nothingness: Antidote to Narcissism Playlist on my
main channel.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
How to Divorce a Narcissist or a
Psychopath - click on the links (they apply to all types of relationships with
narcissistic or psychopathic abusers of both genders):
http://vaksam.tripod.com/5.html
http://vaksam.tripod.com/abuse3.html
http://vaksam.tripod.com/abuse18.html
http://vaksam.tripod.com/abuse.html
http://vaksam.tripod.com/abusefamily.html
http://vaksam.tripod.com/faq1.html
Divorce is a good exit strategy out of an abusive relationship.
But the problem is that people use it as a first -
not last - resort. Whenever things get even trivially tough - they bail out
rather than try harder.
Nowadays, people give up owing to DIFFICULTIES -
not to ABUSE. They MISLABEL difficulties as “abuse” in order to justify their
lack of perseverance.
Our civilization relies on disposable and
replaceable products - and we treat each other the same way.
The modern concept of a romantic dyad based on infatuation
causes people to renounce reality in favor of fantasy and so they idealize
their partners. This inevitably leads to disillusionment and breakup.
The misguided concept of a love-based marriage
(romantic love) changed the way we select mates.
It is a modern phenomenon. Previous generations
were transactional and saw each other in a realistic light. The mass media -
cinema and romantic literature, especially - taught us to idealize our intimate
partners in any and all ways.
Many studies have shown that people in marriages
that were arranged or subject to matchmaking grew to love and respect each
other. Basing mate selection mostly on lustful sex and on attraction got
humanity into the relationship mess we have now.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
We used to have an intimate relationship
with death, with our inevitable departure from the world. Demise was as much a
part of life as birth: we did not exist before we were born and, at some point,
we will cease to exist again.
No one wanted to die prematurely - but no one made
life itself an extended exercise in evading the inevitable. We ventured gently
into the night, grateful for having had the chance and gift of spending some
time in this incomparable theme part called “reality”.
The great 17th century essayist, Michel de
Montaigne, wrote:
“Let us rid death of its strangeness, come to know
it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At
every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects ... It is
uncertain where death awaits us - let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of
death is premeditation of freedom ... He who has learned how to die has
unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection
and constraint.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
To see how far
we have deteriorated as a civilization, how atomized and alienated we had
become, how extinct solidarity
and empathy are, here
is an excerpt from Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year” (a
semi-autobiographical narrative of the bubonic plague in 17th century London):
“A near view of death would soon reconcile men of
good principles one to another and that (it) is chiefly to our easy situation
in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are
fomented, ill blood continued ... Another plague year would reconcile all these
differences, a close conversing with Death or with diseases that threaten
Death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among
us and bring us to see with differing eyes”.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Subscribe to
my new YouTube channel: Nothingness: Antidote
to Narcissism
Nothingness is not about being a nobody and doing
nothing.
It is about choosing to be human, not a lobster.
It is about putting firm boundaries between you
and the world.
It is about choosing happiness - not dominance.
It is accomplishing from within, not from without.
It is about not letting others regulate your
emotions, moods, and thinking.
It is about being an authentic YOU.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Power
Threat Meaning Framework
is a new perspective on why people sometimes experience a whole range of forms
of distress, confusion, fear, despair, and troubled or troubling behaviour. It
is an alternative to the more traditional models based on psychiatric diagnosis.
Cold Therapy and Nothingness: False Self is
organizing and explanatory principle and generator of meaning. By dismantling,
the narcissist re-experiences his traumas and must try to make sense of them
(construct a new narrative).
Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy is based on the
premise that the human person is motivated by a “will to meaning,” an inner
pull to find a meaning in life. The following list of tenets represents basic
principles of logotherapy:
1. Life has meaning under all circumstances, even
the most miserable ones.
2. Our main motivation for living is our will to
find meaning in life.
3. We have freedom to find meaning in what we do,
and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a
situation of unchangeable suffering.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Speaker at the International Webinar on “Addiction, Psychiatry & Mental Health” scheduled during March 17-19, 2021.
Invitation letter to serve as the keynote Speaker at the International Webinar on “Psychiatry and Mental Health 2021" on February 17-19, 2021.
Lecture at the Department of
Psychiatry, McGill University, Canada, January 22, 2021
I will discuss my new concepts of covert
borderline and the bridge between overt and covert cluster B states via
collapse and narcissistic mortification.
My lectures and presentations are also made
available on my YouTube channel. Watch the latest ones there.
Speaker in other international conferences on
psychology, psychiatry, mental health, and neuroscience:
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
We assume
erroneously that some roles
are instinctual because, in nature, other
species do it, too: parenting and mating come to mind. The discipline of
sociobiology encourages us to counterfactually learn from animals about our
social functioning.
But humans and their societies are so much more
complex that there is little we can evince from lobsters, chimpanzees, or
gorillas.
In nature, there is "male" and
"female", not "man" and "woman" which are learned
and acquired gender roles. There is no "mother" and
"father", even among apes - just progenitors.
To fulfill any of these demanding and multifarious
human functions, we must be exposed to good enough and working role models in
childhood and then practice tirelessly through adulthood, constantly reframing
and evolving as demands and expectations change with social mores and the
times. Evolution in the human species is no longer predominantly genetic - but
social and cultural.
So, many people simply don't know how to act as
men or as women, as mothers or as fathers. Here, faking it never makes it.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Victims of prolonged abuse often
introject (internalize) their abusers and convert them into permanent
persecutory objects. Henceforth, they trauma bond with this inner tormenting
voice even when the original bully is long out of their lives.
Victimhood becomes a cozy comfort zone and the
victims is emotionally invested (cathected) in maintaining it pristine and
operational. It becomes a determinant of the victim's identity and helps her to
regulate her emotions and ameliorate her anxiety and mood lability.
Perpetual victimhood serves four indispensable
psychological needs:
1. It restores a sense of agency and self-efficacy
and reverts the locus of control from external to internal. Many victims garner
attention and make money from their newly found "profession";
2. It makes sense of the victim's personal history
and of the world around her thereby rendering them meaningful: structure,
order, and even a sense of "karmic" justice are restored;
3. It legitimizes avoidant behaviors. The world
out there is challenging and painful: shunning it guarantees tranquility and an
inert peace of mind;
4. Victimhood allows the victim to indulge her grandiosity and
sense of moral superiority: it paints her as immaculate, angelic, empathic,
supportive, loving, caring, compassionate, and, in short, perfect,
blesmishless, and blameless. It is a morality play or a crusade and she is the
warrior angel fighting off the demonic narcissists.
Victimhood affords the victim membership in
tight-knit communities of like-minded people and a sense of belonging and being
finally understood, vindicated, and elevated. It is an intoxicating mix and
victims become aggressive if and when you try to take it away from them by
alerting them to their own imperfections and contributions to their sad state
of affairs.
With one or two laudable exceptions, unscrupulous
"coaches" and "experts" online seek to perpetuate this
state of victimhood: telling your clients what they want to hear and what they
are willing to pay for is good for business. The truth and healing have a
negative effect on their burgeoning bottom lines.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Islam, Narcissism, and Women are the future (Men are obsolete). Both history and the human
reaction to it are constant: narcissism (delusional fantasy) as a defense
against the disorientation of a rapidly shifting reality and one's own
insignificance. The solution is radical acceptance. Oh, Men are doomed: the
future is feminine.
Convo with Karoline Gil.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Two wrongs never make you right.
If you cheat on your cheating narcissist - you are
still a cheater.
If you abuse your abuser - you
are an abuser yourself.
If you behave like a psychopath - then you are one.
If you mirror evil - you become it.
Stare into the abyss and it will consume you whole.
Being a victim is not a license to join the ranks
of your tormentors.
Beware of self-righteousness and moral
superiority: they are paving stones on the path to hell.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Biographies of great men invariably
start with a physical description of their external
appearance: Napoleon's height,
Kennedy's youth, or Hitler's piercing eyes.
When I post videos, most of the comments refer to
the color of my hair, whether I am handsome or reptilian, and do I look
fatigued or rejuvenated.
The primitive circuitry of our brains is focused
on mate selection and the propagation of our selfish genes. Looks matter
because they convey inordinate amounts of instantly accessible information
about our heredity, health, and constitution.
Nor is this preference temporary or limited to
sexual, romantic, or intimate affairs.
Studies have shown that people who are physically
attractive are employed much more often and earn much more money than their
pedestrian, better qualified, competitors.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Important message: Victim - Do not Become Your Abuser!
Plus
In 1995, I coined the term “narcissistic abuse”
and gave language and voice to its victims. Listen to the original article I
had written back then.
Professional
Victims - as distinct from healthy ones - tend to blame their childhood
experiences for being eternal victims. Again, they are victims: this time, of
their parents.
We must begin to accept that a victimhood
stance is an integral part of a
narcissistic identity: grandiose, entitled, and replete with alloplastic
defenses (blaming others for your lot in life, bad choices, and failures).
Have happier, healthier, many more years to come.
Stay hale and well and sane. Don't let yourself become that which you had
feared the most.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Women often rediscover their femininity
having been rejected by a narcissistic abusive bully. Regrettably, many of them
degenerate into promiscuity
coupled with substance abuse and end
up with other predators in compromising situations which sometimes end in
sexual assault.
Women tend to internalize (introject) the abuser
and merge with him, thus adopting his judgment that they are damaged goods,
broken, crazy, and inadequate, a bad, unworthy object.
Their subsequent histrionic escapades are partly
intended to vindicate this harsh and hopeless verdict and, in a way, bond with
the abuser’s voice and keep him in their lives, albeit vicariously and
symbolically.
By emulating the abuser, these women merge and
fuse with him. They also self-trash and punish themselves for their bad
judgment and bad lot in life by objectifying and cheapening themselves.
The more egregiously they misbehave, the closer
they adhere to their abuser’s creed, the more likely they are to spiral and
lapse into reckless and self-destructive behaviour patterns.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In the film “The Nest”, Rory (Jude Law)
is a narcissist and a con artist. Everything about him is fake and everyone
sees right through him. His mother, wary of his abrupt reappearance after years
of absence, refuses to visit and finally meet her 10-years old grandson. His
business partners shun him, embarrassed by his tacky bragging and his breezy
and reckless lack of attention to detail. His wife exposes him to his
colleagues and clients and then proceeds to get drunk in a bar and probably
have a one night stand. He lives way beyond his means. “I pretend to be rich”,
he admits. His children parent him and distrust him profoundly. A taxi driver
contemptuously evicts him from his vehicle, miles away from his home, having
heard his confession: “You just told me that you are broke and a liar,” – he
expostulates – “how do I know that you will pay the fare?”
Rory never learns from his recurrent downfalls or
admits to wrongdoing, always fantasizes at others’ expense. To act decent is
still to act and he prefers his personal thespian production to anything anyone
– society, his wife, his boss, his colleague – has to tell him. He is defiant
because he firmly believes that everyone fakes and only a few get caught. Why
succumb to social mores and moral values? People who do are equally false.
Being upright and righteous is their spiel – being Rory is his.
This is why and where therapy fails with
narcissists: any modification
of behavior is perceived as forced and
pretended, as ersatz as any narcissistic tantrum and confabulation. Devoid of
empathy and with his access to positive emotions blocked, the narcissist cannot
accept any values or prescriptions or even advice from the outside. It is all a
game anyhow – might as well rig the rules in my favor, he thinks to himself,
smirking with disdain at the sheeple who can’t see through the façade of
society and its levers of control.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Answering questions posed by the members of the Facebook group "Sam Vaknin's Party Boat of Harsh Truths". Join the group now!
Allegory of Sam.
View the original and read the accompanying text
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A good
therapist is less interested in WHAT
the client says and more in WHY she chooses to express herself via the specific
narrative that she had selected (out of many which are equally possible and
plausible).
The practitioner can learn about the client's
resistances, defense mechanisms, cognitive deficits and biases, and emotional
regulation from her speech acts and their contents.
Far more telling, relevant, and important are her
choices, actions, repetitive patterns, and how she structures her life.
Often, the client belies, defies, and disagrees
with what her personal history indisputably reveals about her. But such a
defensive posture is to be expected - and ignored. This is one case when the
client is rarely right, whether female or male.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I am good at what I do and my fees
reflect this fact. When I advise my clients that, in their particular case or
with regards to a particular issue, they can secure the same outcomes by
resorting to a more affordable counsellor, they get offended and bristle at me.
Such reactions used to mystify me: why get angry
at me for being honest and transparent about options? After all, in this time
of economic hardship, I am only trying to minimize the expenditures of my
charges.
A female client explained it to me: “Both a jalope
(old, dilapidated car) and a Porsche can get you from point A to point B. But I
have worked hard and long to be able to deserve a Porsche.”
Narcissists feel entitled to special treatment by
the top honchos in every field. Only the best for them! It is a part of their
grandiosity. They feel humiliated and rejected when they have to settle for
less - even when identical favorable results are guaranteed at a much lower
cost.
As I said: narcissism is a nauseating cocktail of
stupidity and irrationality.
Find
your shadow and the shadows of people
around you – even of institutions and collectives - in one (or more!) of these
types.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Everyone has a “shadow”: a dark side (with some positive elements) in the unconscious where all things uncomfortable, repressed, denied, and ego dystonic go.
Inner dialog:
be somebody+do something of your life.
Translation: Don’t be yourself and treat your life
as raw material or a passive object.
Relative positioning (like social media): Anxiety,
depression.
Introjects: voices (example: inner critic or
superego which could be prosocial or sadistic).
Socialization and its agents (parents, role
models, peers and their pressure to conform, institutions, mass media).
Map of Happiness.
Subject inner dialog to scrutiny as you would a
scientific theory:
Attribution
Ego-syntony (not happiness!)
Fuzziness
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
To qualify as a
"psychological" (both meaningful and instrumental) plot, the
narrative, offered to the patient by the therapist, must be:
a. All-inclusive (anamnetic) – It must encompass,
integrate and incorporate all the facts known about the protagonist.
b. Coherent – It must be chronological, structured
and causal.
c. Consistent – Self-consistent (its subplots
cannot contradict one another or go against the grain of the main plot) and
consistent with the observed phenomena (both those related to the protagonist
and those pertaining to the rest of the universe).
d. Logically compatible – It must not violate the
laws of logic both internally (the plot must abide by some internally imposed
logic) and externally (the Aristotelian logic which is applicable to the
observable world).
e. Insightful (diagnostic) – It must inspire in
the client a sense of awe and astonishment which is the result of seeing
something familiar in a new light or the result of seeing a pattern emerging
out of a big body of data. The insights must constitute the inevitable
conclusion of the logic, the language, and of the unfolding of the plot.
f. Aesthetic – The plot must be both plausible and
"right", beautiful, not cumbersome, not awkward, not discontinuous,
smooth, parsimonious, simple, and so on.
g. Parsimonious – The plot must employ the minimum
numbers of assumptions and entities in order to satisfy all the above
conditions.
Continued https://samvak.tripod.com/psychoanalysis3.html
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The important elements of testability,
verifiability, refutability, falsifiability, and repeatability – are all
largely missing from psychological
theories and plots. No experiment
could be designed to test the statements within the plot, to establish their
truth-value and, thus, to convert them to theorems or hypotheses in a theory.
There are four reasons to account for this
inability to test and prove (or falsify) psychological theories:
1. Ethical – Experiments would have to be
conducted, involving the patient and others. To achieve the necessary result,
the subjects will have to be ignorant of the reasons for the experiments and
their aims. Sometimes even the very performance of an experiment will have to
remain a secret (double blind experiments). Some experiments may involve
unpleasant or even traumatic experiences. This is ethically unacceptable.
2. The Psychological Uncertainty Principle – The
initial state of a human subject in an experiment is usually fully established.
But both treatment and experimentation influence the subject and render this
knowledge irrelevant. The very processes of measurement and observation
influence the human subject and transform him or her - as do life's
circumstances and vicissitudes.
3. Uniqueness – Psychological experiments are,
therefore, bound to be unique, unrepeatable, cannot be replicated elsewhere and
at other times even when they are conducted with the SAME subjects. This is
because the subjects are never the same due to the aforementioned psychological
uncertainty principle. Repeating the experiments with other subjects adversely
affects the scientific value of the results.
4. The undergeneration of testable hypotheses –
Psychology does not generate a sufficient number of hypotheses, which can be
subjected to scientific testing. This has to do with the fabulous
(=storytelling) nature of psychology. In a way, psychology has affinity with
some private languages. It is a form of art and, as such, is self-sufficient
and self-contained. If structural, internal constraints are met – a statement
is deemed true even if it does not satisfy external scientific requirements.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Maybe.
May it be.
Be it as it may ...
A happier
new year to you all.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jordan Peterson faithfully echoes every single argument Christopher Lasch has made in the 1970s.
The Narcissistic Tide/Epidemic: It is safe to define narcissism as a shift of emphasis from substance and essence to appearance and spectacle (Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”). To do so means to render narcissism an organizing principle of the entirety of our civilization. Even fields which seem immune to the vagaries of the human psyche are subject to narcissism.
The rising tide of narcissism is compensatory: as social institutions crumble, role models are dethroned, gatekeepers are decried and derided, narratives unravel, and communities dissipate, people find themselves in the throes of disintermediated atomization within increasingly anomic societies. Existential loneliness in a senseless universe conflicts with the primordial, atavistic need to be seen. We all struggle to be noticed at any cost to ourselves and to others because the gaze of the Other affirms our very quiddity and survival.
"The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life. Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, he finds little use for dogmas of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the security of group loyalties and regards everyone as a rival for the favors conferred by a paternalistic state. His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace. Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval and acclaim, he distrusts competition because he associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. Hence he repudiates the competitive ideologies that flourished at an earlier stage of capitalist development and distrusts even their limited expression in sports and games. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire."
(Christopher Lasch - The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an age of Diminishing Expectations, 1979)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Every person has an inner text to which
s/he compares every information emanating from his/her environment in order to
determine what is missing and what had been purposefully omitted.
With the exception of Nietzsche, no other madman
has contributed so much to human sanity as has Louis
Althusser.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In 2004, I passed the Brainbench Counselling
Techniques test.
My certificate (enlarge the image) states:
“Scored higher than 99 percent of all previous
test takers.
Demonstrates understanding of most advanced
concepts within the subject area. Appears capable of mentoring others on the
most complex projects.
Strengths
Counselling Techniques
Differential Diagnosis
Weak Areas
None Noted
Sub-category Scores
Conceptual 4.0
Problem-solving 5.0
Terminology and syntax 4.0
Weighted average score 4.6"
The testers note that I took only 37 seconds to
answer each question, completing the certification exam in under 25 minutes.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
New study, “The Tendency for Interpersonal
Victimhood: The Personality Construct and its Consequences”.
All narcissists are collapsed and suffer from the
Impostor Syndrome
Problem of attribution: many internal objects used
to be external. Confusion leads to narcissism or to psychosis.
The Typology of inner objects corresponds to
Jungian archetypes:
Self as the authentic voice (in attribution)
Jung: "The shadow, the wise old man, the
child, the mother ... and her counterpart, the maiden, and lastly the anima in
man and the animus in woman".
Persecutor
Sage
Infant
Mother
Gender
Sex (vulnerability, life)
Death (Thanatos) imbues all of them
Narcissist collapsed state is outcome of such
disruption in inner dialog: sadistic perfectionist inner critic superego sets
him up for failure posing unattainable unrealistic goals.
In adversity and crisis, the narcissist becomes
psychotic (Kernberg): he misperceives this voice (persecutory object) as
external (projects it) and feels victimized.
We project inner dialog whenever we are triggered
to revividness (i.e., an external object INITIATES direct communication with
internal object). PTSD is a form of psychosis (hence flashbacks).
We introject inner dialog whenever we are traumatized
(i.e., internal INITIATES communication with an external object), which is why
trauma leads to narcissism (CPTSD/BPD).
Solution: Splitting.
Splitting leads to dissociation:
Depersonalization, derealization (where the
splitting prevents the construction of a healthy inner dialogue): we are all
bad and "killed" symbolically); OR
amnesia (we are all good and environment
"killed" symbolically).
Addictions provide such dissociated splitting in
neurotypicals.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Happiness comes naturally,
from the inside.
It is a slow, steady, and safe unfolding, not the
ephemeral pyrotechnics of fireworks.
It never depends on anything external.
It cannot be bought - or sold.
It is a state of mind, not a state of affairs.
It is self-love and self-acceptance without the
narcissism.
It flowers in the least expected moments,
brings to life the moribund, and refreshes the stale.
Happiness is Being AND Nothingness at once.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nothing is more sad and lonely than having
casual sex in order to feel less sad and lonely.
Nothing is more deceitful than brutal honesty: it
pretends to offer empathy and succor, but is mere camouflaged sadism.
Nothing is more vainglorious than false modesty
and pseudo-humility.
Nothing is more hateful than the ineluctable
expiry of love.
Nothing is more wrong than being right all the
time.
Nothing is faster than life or slower than dying.
Nothing is more attractive than the
self-sufficient, nothing more repellent than the clinging and the needy.
Nothing is more corrupt than conformity and
nothing more noble than being oneself.
Nothing is more dignified than honoring others.
Nothing is more hopeful than what we already have.
Nothing is more blind than merely observing and
nothing more deaf than merely hearing.
Nothing is more present than the past. Nothing
less certain than the future.
No gift is greater than a smile and no harm is
more deleterious than rejection.
No risk is grander and no reward more substantial
than to live life to its fullest. Only the craven and the foolish extol death
or asceticism as bravery or wisdom.
Reality is in our mind alone and what is out there
is solely what we make of it.
Go forth to this New Year and make it love you.
The way out is your only entrance.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Learn more by reading Habermas,
Fukuyama, and Foucault. All justice-seeking
movements start with grievances (injustices). They decry and seek to remedy
and reverse individual transgression (eg, the narcissistic abuse online
movement) or societal and cultural biases (implicit and explicit),
discrimination, and suppression.
The victims organize themselves around
exclusionary identity politics and intersectionality and this orientation
results in grandiosity and entitlement, in other words: in growing narcissism.
Increasingly more aggressive, these movements often become psychopathic
(defiant and contumacious) and demonize the Other.
Recent studies have revealed a "victim identity
(Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, TIV) and the fact that many activists
have psychopathic traits.
Left-leaning victimhood movements centre around
claims on the majority, on social institutions, and on history. Right-wing
movements are conspiracy-minded and avoidant, but also more violent.
Narcissists and psychopaths gravitate to such movements in order to obtain
narcissistic supply, money, power, and sex. They become the public faces and
the media darlings on these hapless victims, having hijacked their legitimate
complaints and demands.
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Abuse Victim's New Year
Resolutions
New Year resolutions are notoriously fragile and ephemeral.
But victims of abuse cannot afford this cavalier attitude: their mental - and
too often physical - health depends on strictly observing the following
promises to themselves:
1. I will treat myself with dignity and demand
respect from others. I will not allow anyone to disrespect me.
2. I will set clear boundaries and make known to
others what I regard as permissible and acceptable behavior and what is out of
bounds.
3. I will not tolerate abuse and aggression in any
form or guise. I will seek to terminate such misconduct instantly and
unequivocally.
4. I will be assertive and unambiguous about my
needs, wishes, and expectations from others. I will not be arrogant - but I
will be confident. I will not be selfish and narcissistic - but I will love and
care for myself.
5. I will get to know myself better.
6. I will treat others as I want them to treat me.
I will try to lead by way of self-example.
7. If I am habitually disrespected, abused, or if
my boundaries are ignored and breached I will terminate the relationship with
the abuser forthwith. Zero tolerance and no second chance will be my maxims of
self-preservation.
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Questions answered about
narcissists, psychopaths, abusive relationships, and ... the Universe!
"Sam Vaknin’s Party Boat of Harsh
Truths" https://www.facebook.com/groups/556746484978383
SAM VAKNIN ANSWERS ALL YOUR QUESTIONS ! ! !
SAM’S FIRST INTERVIEW OF 2021 ! ! !
Q and A with Sam Vaknin answering the questions
from Facebook Group.
Fascinating Answers and Amazing Insights ! ! !
HERE ARE IMPORTANT LINKS ! ! !
Sam Vaknin’s Book, ‘Malignant Self-Love Narcissism
Revisited’, from Amazon Books
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1983208175
(US)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1983208175
(UK)
Sam Vaknin’s Website: https://www.narcissistic-abuse.com
Sam Vaknin’s work on Physics theories:
Chronon Field, Time Atoms, and Quantized
Time: Time Asymmetry Re-Visited
https://samvak.tripod.com/time.html
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When confronted about certain social
practices, many dredge up examples from primitive societies and ancient
cultures to buttress their case: "Promiscuity was the dominant sexual
practice among the Tahitians!", they exclaim, "Our sexual exclusivity
and monogamy are throwbacks to the dark Victorian age! Why get stuck on such
fixations?"
Sociobiologists, ecologists, behaviorist
psychologists, ethologists, and environmental activists keep reminding us that
the way we act and our choices are "not natural". They legitimize as
"only natural" misconduct that is normally and rightly frowned upon:
"But chimpanzees and gorillas behave exactly the same way!", they
triumphantly proclaim, "Why not revert to Nature? Surely billions of years
of evolution can't be wrong!"
This romantic view of the noble savage and
idealization of nature are counterfactual. Savages were and are just that:
savage. Nature is nasty, brutish, and psychopathic.
We spent our entire history as a species
decisively putting behind us our primitive unlamented ancestry, natural and
societal. Mindless casual sex and cannibalism are best avoided, for example.
True, we are the custodians of Nature. But
Guardians do not emulate (or harm!) their minor charges. We are the adults in
the room. We should act as ones. We should preserve what we can, adhere to
caution, use the rest. We should not deteriorate and degenerate by mimesis: we
should make sure that we never become lobsters or primates.
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Over 10,000 connections on Linkedin, 7,000 of whom are psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In the aftermath
of every major pandemic in history – the Black Death and Spanish flu included – the world had
experienced a long period of unprecedented prosperity and irrational exuberance
as efforts to rebuild coincided with a redistribution of wealth. In some cases,
income inequality decreased (14th and 15th centuries) – in others, it skyrocketed
dramatically (1920s).
COVID-19 is bound to segue into the same magnitude
of economic rebound, but it is also likely to induce structural changes. Remote
work will overtake work in physical locations, for example. Many tech giants
have announced plans to dispense of most of their office space. This will have
a huge destabilizing impact on construction and on commercial real estate.
Automation and globalization - trends that commenced long before
COVID-19 - will be catalyzed by it.
Family formation will languish further as both
life expectancy and earning drop off a cliff. Entire industries, originally
created to cater to the outsourced needs of families – first and foremost,
education - will go into terminal inexorable decline. The only exception will
be healthcare.
The pandemic also exposed the stark divide between
the dwindling and impoverished, hollowed out middle and working classes and the
elite, centred around finance, technology, and retail. The record-breaking
ascendance of the stock exchanges reflects this schism between main street and
wall street.
The workforce of the future will be comprised of
low-income, unskilled, dead end jobs on the one hand and well paying positions
that require higher education and continued re-skilling throughout the lifespan.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The narcissist is prone to plagiarism and to
absconding with other people’s ideas and life’s work. But this instantly
creates a cognitive-axiological dissonance because, counterfactually, the
narcissist considers himself to be a “good, morally upright person”.
An intelligent narcissist resolves this dissonance
by confabulating and reframing: he convinces himself that the stolen goods were
his to start with, he came up with these ideas independently and long before
anybody else did. This alternative history makes him eligible for the fruits of
labor that is not his. This kind of narcissist convinces himself that his
manufactured lies are the only reality and envious folks are out to deprive and
disenfranchise him.
Dumb narcissists know that they are less than
stellar. This ego dystonic realization makes it impossible for them to recast
their misdeeds as merely reclaiming what’s theirs. So, they resort to
aggression and to suppressing the truth. In the process, they deploy a host of
primitive defense mechanisms, such as splitting, projection, magical thinking,
and denial. They are inexorably transformed by their own antisocial acts into
primary psychopaths.
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The collapsed somatic narcissist
is incapable of leveraging his good looks, sculpted musculature, and sexual
prowess to obtain narcissistic supply. If he is endowed with intelligence, he
switches to the cerebral mode. If not, he becomes covert.
The etiology of such failure is complex. The narcissist
may feel that he is engaging in a forbidden competition with a dominant
parental figure. Or, he may have been rewarded in childhood for intellectual
accomplishments while sex was decried as “dirty”.
In most cases, the failure is that of gender differentiation:
the collapsed somatic narcissist is a latent homosexual or of fluid
psychosexuality.
One possible outcome is celibacy or sexlessness
within a relationship. Another solution is promiscuity (usually coupled with
substance abuse). If the narcissist fails at both the somatic and the cerebral
types, he undergoes mortification and becomes covert for good. If he has strong
histrionic or borderline features, he is more likely to become a psychopath
(secondary or primary) or a covert borderline.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Interview in Kanal 77 about the shape of things to come after the pandemic
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The narcissist’s shared fantasy
occurs with any type of source of supply of any kind (primary or secondary):
friends, family, business associates, and intimate partners.
Grandiose narcissists react to animosity,
contempt, and hostility by disengaging from the offender(banning/blocking, not
responding). Only in the case of a shared fantasy, do they attempt to first
stalk the perceived transgressor or to hoover her before they relent and
disengage.
The same subspecies of narcissist react with
animosity, contempt, and hostility to any act of friendliness, mindless
adulation, offered empathy, support, succor, or advice as well as to any
attempt at intimacy, including sexual advances. They regard such overtures and
gestures as presumptuous, narcissistically injurious, and impertinent
impositions.
Their ideal narcissistic supply source is
commoditized and anonymous (faceless audience in lectures, views on videos).
Their ideal sadistic supply (victim) on the other hand, is personal and
intimate.
The collapsed somatic narcissist
is incapable of leveraging his good looks, sculpted musculature, and sexual
prowess to obtain narcissistic supply. If he is endowed with intelligence, he
switches to the cerebral mode. If not, he becomes covert.
The etiology of such failure is complex. The
narcissist may feel that he is engaging in a forbidden competition with a
dominant parental figure. Or, he may have been rewarded in childhood for
intellectual accomplishments while sex was decried as “dirty”.
In most cases, the failure is that of gender
differentiation: the collapsed somatic narcissist is a latent homosexual or of
fluid psychosexuality.
One possible outcome is celibacy or sexlessness
within a relationship. Another solution is promiscuity (usually coupled with
substance abuse). If the narcissist fails at both the somatic and the cerebral
types, he undergoes mortification and becomes covert for good. If he has strong
histrionic or borderline features, he is more likely to become a psychopath
(secondary or primary) or a covert borderline.
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The holidays season should be a
time of family get-togethers, love shared, and relatives and friends brought up
to date. Holidays are supposed to be the reification of that contradiction in
terms: mass or group intimacy.
Instead, for victims of family violence and abuse,
the holidays are recurring nightmares, replete with danger and duplicity, a
theater of the absurd with menacing overtones. This is especially true when the
offender also has Narcissistic or Antisocial Personality Disorders. It is
important to understand the mindset of such abusers.
Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/narcissisthappiness.html
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Judging vs.
Understanding (Spinoza)
Chair work:
Think about your identity and your life.
Now apply these answers to yourself, but this
time, try to play both parties:
Think of yourself as a victim
And then
Think of yourself as your abuser.
Korsakoff patients, memory, identity, and
confabulation in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Other Clinical
Tales by Oliver Sacks
Prepare your brain as a fount of meaning in Meet
Me at Infinity by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
March 2016 interview I gave to
American Thinker:
"AW: Is it your considered opinion that
Donald Trump would represent a significant danger were he to become president
of the United States of America and if so, how?
Vaknin: You just have to look at Trump's business
history to extrapolate America's future under a President Trump. Narcissists
are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction (with other
people usually paying the heft of the price). Narcissists tend to be divisive,
vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent,
judgment-impaired, and irrational. Narcissists are junkies: they are addicted
to attention ("Narcissistic Supply") and will go to any extreme to
secure it. Narcissists are liars, confabulators, and miserable failures
(although some of them, like Trump, are geniuses at disguising the fact that
they are, in fact, losers). Is this the kind of person you want in the White
House?"
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/donald_trump_and_narcissistic_personality_disorder_an_interview_with_sam_vaknin.html
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Announcing my interview on Kanal 77 tomorrow about the shape of things to come, the world after the pandemic.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
How does the narcissist cope when he can
no longer obtain supply because all his sources have dried up or because he is
unable to establish a new PNS owing to external circumstances or to internal
constraints (he is covert)?
The narcissist then resorts to self-delusion.
Unable to completely ignore contrarian opinion and data - he transmutes them.
Unable to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist partially
withdraws from reality. To soothe and salve the pain of disillusionment, he
administers to his aching soul a mixture of lies, distortions, half-truths and
outlandish interpretations of events around him. These solutions can be
classified thus:
The Delusional Narrative Solution
The Antisocial Solution
The Paranoid Schizoid Solution
The Paranoid Aggressive (Explosive) Solution
The Masochistic Avoidant Solution
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Some narcissists are not gregarious
because they have a comorbid
Schizoid Personality Disorder or because life pushed them to become
schizoid (see next video). They avoid social events and are stay-at-home
recluses. Doesn't this behaviour go against the grain of narcissism?
Howard H. Goldman (Ed.) in the "Review of
General Psychiatry" [4th Edition. London, Prentice Hall International,
1995]:
"The person with Schizoid Personality
Disorder sustains a fragile emotional equilibrium by avoiding intimate personal
contact and thereby minimising conflict that is poorly tolerated."
Schizoid narcissists are not covert narcissists:
1. Covert narcissists are shy and anxious and
convert their social dysfunction into an ideology;
2. Covert narcissists react emotionally to
negative and positive supply;
3. Narcissists engage in sex and enjoy it.
Admittedly, they use sex only in order to acquire
a potential partner for a shared fantasy. If someone is deemed to not be a
potential partner or once the partner is acquired, narcissists become asexual.
They remain sexually active within a dyad only to forestall abandonment.
If the schizoid narcissist is also a sadist, the
sex is kinky and revolves around despoiling the partner (who accepts it and
compromises her needs).
The schizoid somatic narcissist is autoerotic and
uses his sex partners for self-gratification and as a form of narcissistic
supply.
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The narcissist is indiscriminate and
promiscuous in his mate selection: anyone would do if she provides him with 2
of the 3 Ss (sex, sadistic and narcissistic supply, and services).
Codependency and trauma are not objective but
subjective: states of mind, not states of affairs.
Codependency is a pattern of reactions to the
presence of an abuse and the promise of abuse (comfort zone): intimate partner
regulates emotions, moods, and mediates dialog among introjects.
Abuser and victim are each other’s instruments.
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Narcissistic and schizoid disorders of the self are one and the same and both can lead to psychosis. We all start life as traumatized schizoids and envious narcissists, but, then, our anomic civilization does everything underhanded to keep us this way into adulthood and leverage our dysfunctions and misery for social control and profits.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Multiple studies have shown that both
men and women miss the overwhelming majority of flirting cues and
behaviors. Men flirt to score (have sex), women flirt in order to feel
connected, have fun, and reaffirm their desirability.
Styles of courting and flirting prefigure the type
and quality of the ensuing sex: direct and transactional flirting indicates
brutal and self-interested copulation.
Subtle though unambiguous flirting, especially one
based on a fantasy or fairy narrative (fabulous) is creative, imaginative,
indirect, and puts the woman at the centre as a damsel in distress, diva,
goddess, or princess. Women use two bits of data to proceed to sex: 1. Is he
nice and kind to me and 2. Does he find me irresistible. Contrary to myths
online, everything else matters very little.
Such complex flirting guarantees orgasm: women
react to clitoral stimulation, role play, fantasies, and dirty talk much more
than to thrust, Sturm und Drang. Diplomacy wins in the sack with women, not a
military campaign.
Schizoids and some types of narcissists (sadistic,
for example) find flirting and courting excruciatingly boring, wasteful, and
off-putting chores. They are auto-erotic and merely wish to use the woman’s
body to masturbate with.
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Much like the autistic person, the narcissist is oblivious to
adverse events and misbehavior occurring right under his nose.
The cerebral narcissist fails to notice even when
- in his presence! - his intimate partner flirts with another man and arranges
an assignation! Triangulation is wasted on him.
This oversight is not only because he doesn’t mind
or care (as long as he is not threatened with abandonment), but because he is
insensitive to sexual and social cues and misinterprets them unless and until
they become too conspicuous and potent to ignore.
The narcissist’s extreme imperviousness to cues is
owing to his self-absorption, boredom, barebones transactional approach to the
relationship, and to his lack of empathy.
Similarly the narcissist assiduously filters out
or reframes information counterfactually in order to fend off anxiety and to
preserve the shared fantasy with his evidently straying partner.
He acts the gullible and the naive until he is
threatened with abandonment - at which point he is abruptly transformed into an
astute and discerning (almost psychic) observer and an interpreter of events
and misconduct in his human environment.
One of the main drivers of narcissistic
mortification is the realization that such extreme lack of awareness to his
surroundings represents an existential threat. The cerebral narcissist is
forced to wonder with mounting trepidation: What else have I been missing, both
positive and negative?
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SF=Shared
Fantasy AND Science Fiction. From androids to actroids, affective computing to
the Turing Test, uncanny valley to same-race bias, mimicry to symbiosis - learn
how the narcissist dupes and lures you into his shared fantasy.
Pollyana defenses (naive, gullible,
counterfactual): base rate fallacy (everyone is telling the truth most of the
time), people are good.
Malignant optimism: exceptionalism ("he is
not that bad"), savior complex ("I am going to save, fix, and heal
him").
This is a universal delusion: we have no access to
other minds, but we develop a theory of mind via mentalization, adhere to the
intersubjectivity agreement, and pretend that empathy gets it right.
From "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism
Revisited":
"Narcissists and psychopaths use cold empathy
to fake the full-fledged kind and emotions.
The weaker variety of narcissist tries to emulate
and simulate "emotions" – or, at least their expression, the external
facet (affect). They mimic and replicate the intricate pantomime that they
learn to associate with the existence of feelings. But there are no real emotions
there, no emotional correlate.
This is empty affect, devoid of emotion. This
being so, the narcissist quickly tires of it, becomes impassive and begins to
produce inappropriate affect (e.g., he remains indifferent when grief is the
normal reaction). The narcissist subjects his feigned emotions to his
cognition. He "decides" that it is appropriate to feel so and so. His
"emotions" are invariably the result of analysis, goal setting and
planning.
He substitutes "remembering" for
"sensing". He relegates his bodily sensations, feelings and emotions
to a kind of a memory vault. The short and medium-term memory is exclusively
used to store his reactions to his (actual and potential) Narcissistic Supply
Sources.
He reacts only to such sources. The narcissist
finds it hard to remember or recreate what he ostensibly - though
ostentatiously - "felt" (even a short while back) towards a
Narcissistic Supply Source once it has ceased to be one. In his attempts to
recall his feelings, he draws a mental blank.
It is not that narcissists are incapable of expressing what we would tend to classify as "extreme emotional reactions". They mourn and grieve, rage and smile, excessively "love" and "care". But this is precisely what sets them apart: this rapid movement from one emotional extreme to another and the fact that they never occupy the emotional middle ground.
The narcissist is especially "emotional" when weaned off his drug of Narcissistic Supply. Breaking a habit is always difficult – especially one that defines (and generates) oneself. Getting rid of an addiction is doubly taxing. The narcissist misidentifies these crises with an emotional depth and his self-conviction is so immense, that he mostly succeeds to delude his environment, as well. But a narcissistic crisis (losing a Source of Narcissistic Supply, obtaining an alternative one, moving from one Narcissistic Pathological Space to another) – must never be confused with the real thing, which the narcissist never experiences: emotions.
Many narcissists have "emotional resonance tables". They use words as others use algebraic signs: with meticulousness, with caution, with the precision of the artisan. They sculpt in words the fine tuned reverberations of pain and love and fear. It is the mathematics of emotional grammar, the geometry of the syntax of passions. Devoid of all emotions, narcissists closely monitor people's reactions and adjust their verbal choices accordingly, until their vocabulary resembles that of their listeners. This is as close as narcissists get to empathy."
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All narcissists end life in a
schizoid state. In interpersonal relationships, they progress from
narcissism (lovebombing/grooming) to abuse (or to sadism) to discard
(schizoid). This is true also in their careers and in their general social
engagement and attitude to the world, as narcissistic injuries and
mortifications mount and reach an intolerable crescendo, causing extreme
withdrawal and avoidance behaviors.
As distinct from the overt-classic narcissist, the
schizoid, cerebral, sadistic, and covert types of narcissist prefer anonymized,
faceless narcissistic supply. The sadist, though, derives sadistic supply also
from one-on-one encounters.
Within the shared fantasy with an overt
narcissist, the abuse is intended to test the partner and re-enact early
childhood conflicts. But it has added functions in the case of the schizoid
narcissist (to re-establish a solitary space by pushing the partner away), the
sadist (to pleasurably inflict pain), the cerebral (to deny intimacy and
forestall sex), and the covert (to establish dominance in a power play).
All types of narcissists mourn the permanent
passing of the shared fantasy, never the loss of the counterparties involved in
it. This is how they can transition so smoothly to a new mate/friend/business
associate.
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People are irrational. They often act
without rhyme or reason, against their best interests, ignoring the
consequences of their actions or inaction, and under a bewildering array of
interacting internal and external stimuli too numerous or complex to identify
or enumerate.
Overanalyzing is counterproductive. Most people
are suggestible, aim to please and to conform, and prone to false memories. It
behooves psychology to be way more humble and focus on dispensing good and
tried advice on various life issues. It is as much a wannabe science as it is a
form of glorified literature and should know its place.
The Japanese call non-grandiose thinking: mono no
aware.
Weakness of character is indistinguishable from
evil. Weak people cowardly sacrifice moral principles and values, are often
highly suggestible, are eager to please and conform at any cost, and
unthinkingly follow the mighty and the rich wherever they may lead them.
The main preoccupation of the weak is how to
abrogate responsibilities and obligations and surrender their freedom of action
and free will to strong men and institutions.
Weakness entails corruption, compromise,
deception, and dependence as well as the ability to morph and shapeshift in
order to fit in. The weak are amorphous and fuzzy, they cannot be trusted
because they have no core or identity. They are easily swayed and end up
committing the most appalling transgressions against themselves and others,
even their nearest, dearest, and loved ones.
I perceive stupidity as intentional abandonment, a
form of aggression.
Stupidity is threat when coupled with conspiracism
or narcissism
I cannot accept reality that Mankind is divided to
dumb and dumber. This inability is in itself profound stupidity.
How the Stupid Took Over the World
FULL TEXT https://samvak.tripod.com/blog.html
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My YouTube channels:
Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Abuse in
Relationships (samvaknin)
World in Conflict and Transition (vakninmusings)
NEW CHANNEL Nothingness: Antidote to Narcissism.
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Financial Times "When
Narcissism Becomes Pathological":
"Jose Romero-Urcelay is a forensic
psychiatrist and the director of therapies at the Dangerous and Severe
Personality Disorders unit at Broadmoor, West London Mental Health Trust. He
confirms Vaknin’s theory that pathological narcissists are drawn to careers in
finance, law and politics. He also treats numerous patients with narcissistic
personality disorder. “It is crucial,” he says, “to distinguish between
narcissistic traits, which may be advantageous – such as confidence, a need to
get to the top, the need for praise – and NPD. Those with personality disorders
are exploitative, and likely to cause significant distress to others.”
Typically, this takes the form of emotional abuse.
The narcissist’s insatiable quest for attention (what Vaknin was the first to
describe as “narcissistic supply”), leads him or her to seek out a steady
source of admiration. Where that is in short supply, the narcissist prefers to
inspire fear or hatred than suffer the nightmare of being ignored. And unable
to empathise, they are indifferent to the consequences of hurting people."
Jaume Plensa’s “Behind the Walls”. It is a
new installation on campus outside of the University of Michigan Museum of Art
in Ann Arbor Michigan.
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Is Holmes a high functioning sociopath?
Actually he is a schizoid narcissist
Poirot? The same. Both cloak their sadism as moral
uprightness.
Are personality disorders merely culture bound
diagnoses?
Psychopathy as self-state, protective ego resource
in DID, BPD (secondary), NPD, HPD, PPD.
Philip Bromberg's work.
Decompensation owing to intolerable anticipated or
actual stress or trauma (CPTSD/PTSD): grandiose and fantasy defenses crumble
and lead to acting out or to suicide.
Emergence of a psychopathic protective self-state
(same in DID).
But protect from what?
NPD: injury, mortification (hypervigilance) leads
to contact with trauma traces, repressed emotions - NPD becomes BPD (Grotstein:
BPD failed narcissist).
PPD: threat (paranoid ideation, persecutory
delusions)
BPD: abandonment, rejection
HPD: rejection, injury
When the protective self overactive or is the only
self-state/resource, we get hybrids types (comorbidity) like the malignant
narcissist (Fromm, Herbert Rosenfeld, Kernberg).
Millon's Unprincipled Narcissist,
Disingenuous Histrionic, and Impulsive Borderline.
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Intimacy Retarding Paranoia
Paranoia is use by the narcissist to ward
off or reverse intimacy. The narcissist is threatened by intimacy because it
reduces him to ordinariness by exposing his weaknesses and shortcomings and by
causing him to act "normally". The narcissist also dreads the
encounter with his deep buried emotions - hurt, envy, anger, aggression -
likely to be foisted on him in an intimate relationship.
The paranoid narrative legitimizes intimacy
repelling behaviours such as keeping one's distance, secrecy, aloofness,
reclusion, aggression, intrusion on privacy, lying, desultoriness, itinerancy,
unpredictability, and idiosyncratic or eccentric reactions. Gradually, the
narcissist succeeds to alienate and wear down all his friends, colleagues,
well-wishers, and mates.
Even his closest, nearest, and dearest, his family
- feel emotionally detached and "burnt out".
The paranoid narcissist ends life as an oddball
recluse - derided, feared, and loathed in equal measures. His paranoia -
exacerbated by repeated rejections and ageing - pervades his entire life and
diminishes his creativity, adaptability, and functioning. The narcissist
personality, buffeted by paranoia, turns ossified and brittle. Finally,
atomized and useless, it succumbs and gives way to a great void. The narcissist
is consumed.
Counterintuitively, with paranoid intimate
partners, it is better to share everything and to be utterly and unmitigatingly
honest. No matter how bad and hurtful, reality always comforts them because it
is so much less egregious and menacing than their own suspicions, paranoid scenarios,
and hypervigilance. The paranoid's best friend is reality and his worst enemy
is his rampant, morbid, catastrophizing imagination.
Example:
She: I like (this man at work) a lot. I am
attracted to him.
He: She is honest and trustworthy. If something
happens with that man she will tell me. It is only human to be attracted to
other people.
Continued https://samvak.tripod.com/narcissismparanoia.html
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Narcissistic mortification is
an extreme form of decompensation when all the narcissist’s defenses
crumble as a result of a deeply traumatizing, challenging, and humiliating
event.
The narcissist copes with mortification in one of
two ways:
1. He renders it external, casting himself as the
hapless victim of malicious, envious, mentally ill people. This preserves his
self-image as good and morally upright, but leads to depression.
2. He renders it internal and accepts his
contribution to the mortifying event and his ensuing responsibility. Such
reframing restores his sense of mastery and control over the situation and
others but results in hypervigilance, paranoid and referential ideation, and persecutory
delusions.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Personality disorders are narratives that disguise and
defend against discontinuities in identity and memory --- Impostor syndrome (false self
covers for true self)---grandiosity, hypervigilance, referential ideation ---
suspiciousness --- persecutory delusions and paranoid ideation --- persecutory
object.
Persecutory object is an internal object that
represents the intimate partner or others.
If others, the intimate partner can collude in the
delusion or oppose it. If she opposes it, she becomes the persecutory object.
If the intimate partner is the persecutory object,
she can collude (accept her role and act accordingly to conform to
expectations) or oppose it by redirecting the suspicions at others, including
family members.
Mortification, when rendered external leads to
paranoia and when internal leads to depression.
Collapse and mortification, therefore, seem to regulate both affectivity (moods) and switching between self-states (“diagnoses”).
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Narcissistic mortification is an extreme form of decompensation
when all the narcissist’s defenses crumble as a result of a deeply
traumatizing, challenging, and humiliating event.
Mortification: event, dissociation, processing the
event cognitively and emotionally (unconscious), choice of external or internal
response
Trauma: event, automatic (traumatic) response,
processing the event cognitively and emotionally (unconscious), dissociation
The narcissist
copes with mortification in one of two ways:
1. He renders it external, casting himself as the
hapless victim of malicious, envious, mentally ill people. This preserves his
self-image as good and morally upright, but leads to depression.
2. He renders it internal and accepts his
contribution to the mortifying event and his ensuing responsibility. Such
reframing restores his sense of mastery and control over the situation and
others (neurotic autoplastic solution).
Both choices result in hypervigilance, paranoid
and referential ideation, and persecutory delusions.
Collapse and mortification, therefore, seem to
regulate both affectivity (moods) and switching between self-states
(“diagnoses”).
Challenge to his grandiosity: hoover you and then,
when he succeeds, IMMEDIATELY dump you vindictively.
1. Reaffirm his grandiosity ("I am
irresistible")
2. Punish you for your "transgressions"
3. Teach you to "behave yourself" in the
future (like housebreaking a pet).
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I have only contempt for the brain dead
proponents and propagators of lowbrow conspiracy theories. But I
must admit that I am bothered by several unprecedented features of this virus:
1. Coronaviruses - especially huge ones, like SARS
Cov-2 - mutate very slowly, much more slowly than their influenza cousins, for
example.
Yet, this virus had mutated thousands of times
already. Twelve of these mutations led to a substantial modifications of its
most critical weapon of intrusion and transmissibility: its spike.
These mutations occurred on three continents
simultaneously within the space of 3 months.
By comparison: the "Spanish" flu virus garnered
only one substantial mutation after 2 years, having infected 1 billion people
worldwide. Luckily, the error in replicating reduced its virulence.
Possibly, the COVID-19 virus is mutating so fast
because it had been subjected to selective pressure owing to the lockdowns - as
I had repeatedly warned it would in March and April last year.
2. The interspecies barrier is formidable and yet
this virus hops across species effortlessly: bats, pangolins, humans, cats,
tigers, mink, gorillas, dogs - all are welcome to be infected.
3. Animals very rarely infect humans (zoonosis).
With this virus, humans - the exclusive carriers - are infecting animals. There
isn't even a word to describe such a mode of transmission!
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The disintegration of the shared fantasy
exposes the narcissist and others to the harsh reality: he is mentally ill and
his family or firm are precariously balanced houses of cards.
As humanity is becoming increasingly more
grandiose and entitled, puberty
is extended well into
one’s 20s (Twenge and Campbell). Boomerang kids live with their parents and
continue their interminable “education” well into their 30s. Marriage, sex, and
childbearing are distant memories. Even computers and the Internet reflect
these trends: they nanny and discipline us (see my post about “nanny computing”).
Not only do we all refuse to grow up and assume adult chores and
responsibilities (Peter Pan Syndrome or Puer Aeternus), but we elect puerile
leaders who cater to our pathological needs. Postmodern, post-industrial
civilization is one gigantic shared fantasy and the pandemic has, therefore,
led to global mortification.
We are reacting to this mortification as all
adolescents do: we look for our missing parents. Some deny reality and try to
continue with the old normal (“hoover” the various partners – individual and
institutional - in our shattered shared fantasy). Others rebel against parental
figures and become antisocial: defiant, impulsive, callous, and reckless. But
the majority are cowed into unthinking submission, a type of conformity common
to adolescents faced with a threat or with the unsavory outcomes of their
misconduct.
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Passive-aggressive and ornery
employees, suppliers, clients, managers, consultants, or bosses are of
little value to the firm regardless of their qualifications.
Your value to the enterprise lies not merely in
your professional qualifications (training, skills, experience) or input.
Corporate structures are far more interested in
your abilities to:
Act as a part of a team and to tolerate inevitable
friction, injustice, and inefficiencies
Communicate your concerns in a non-confrontational
manner
Place the interest of the enterprise above yours
Inspire positivity in others and motivate them
Get things done without undue disruptions or
obstructionism (passive-aggression)
Avoid entitlement
Maintain a realistic view of yourself, your capacities,
value to the organization, contributions, both yours and others's (avoid
delusional grandiosity).
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Swipe left: YouTube used to recommend
each of my videos to MILLIONS of users.
Then I made the mistake of criticizing the way government
mishandled COVID, Black Lives Matter, MeToo, fake “gurus”, “coaches”, and
self-styled “experts” online, and the pernicious movement of the covert
narcissists who call themselves “empaths”.
Thuggish psychopathic Facebook reacted by simply
denying me access to my erstwhile Instagram account @vakninsamnarcissist and cutting off the dissemination of my
posts on Facebook: no one sees them anymore.
YouTube is more like a passive-aggressive
covert narcissist.
YouTube now no longer shows my videos in search
results (search for “narcissism” to see what I mean).
YouTube is now not recommending my videos anymore
except to users who have spent months watching other channels on narcissism.
As you can see, my latest video had been
recommended to fewer than 93,000 users (compared to an average of 2 million
historically).
Ironically, the number of subscribers to my
channel has shot up from 85,000 to 135,000 and my CTR (Click Through Rate) has
DOUBLED (in other words: twice as many users click on my videos on the rare
occasions that they are recommended).
These platform are monopolies. They have severely
undermined free speech and should be regulated, penalized, and broken up. Their
current egregious misconduct is a dictatorship (technocracy): the unelected and
unqualified few, armed with dumb AI softwares, are muzzling, silencing, and
throttling anyone who dares to call the truth as they see it or to not toe the
party line to maximum profits. These enterprises are evil and a menace, end of
story: they should be confronted and reformed or taken down.
Before they delete this video: share, favorite,
like, subscribe, and comment! Fight back!
https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin
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Are personality disorders real? Or are they narratives intended to cope with trauma and disguise the resulting dissociation?
Amazing and inspiring real life story of how a comatose person with a locked-in syndrome wrote a book by batting a single eyelid - and what this tells us about the state of psychology as a wannabe pseudo-science.
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Social media have become
the playground of narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists who post extreme and,
at times, illegal porn and revel in the reactions to it, thus garnering
vicarious narcissistic supply. Via such postings, they express their rabid
misogyny by objectifying women and subjecting them to humiliating subjugation
and to aggression bordering on outright violence.
Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding,
some of the content is illegal and can land even an accidental viewer in hot
waters. Relatively innocuous search terms such as “family”, “wife”, “sister”,
or “daddy” often yield sleazy and actionable photo and video results, displayed
automatically on the user’s screen and saved to his or her browser cache
without any warning or consent. Tumblr was not alone in this. Twitter, Mind,
YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, although to a lesser degree, also host porn
on a massive scale.
Porn addiction ties well with the narcissist’s
fantasy sex life. Social media enable and legitimize a host of sexual fetishes
and paraphilias, including pedophilia. Via these platforms, the narcissist
finds an eager audience and a sense of empowerment and immunity, aided and
abetted by his anonymity.
Interview granted to Misty Harris of CanWest on February 23, 2005
Q. How might technology be enabling narcissism, particularly for the Internet generation?
A. To believe that the Internet is an unprecedented phenomenon with unique social implications is, in itself, narcissistic. The Internet is only the latest in a long series of networking-related technological developments. By definition, technology is narcissistic. It seeks to render us omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent - in other words, Godlike.
The Internet allows us to replicate ourselves and our words (through vanity desktop publishing, blogs, and posting online content on Web sites), to playact our favorite roles, to communicate instantly with thousands (narrowcasting), to influence others, and, in general, to realize some of our narcissistic dreams and tendencies.
Q. Why is it a bad thing to have a high opinion of yourself?
A. It is not a bad thing if it is supported by commensurate achievements. If the gap between fantasy and reality is too big, a dysfunction that we call "pathological narcissism" sets in.
Q. What does it say about our culture that we encourage narcissistic characteristics in people? (example: Paris Hilton - we made her a star for loving herself)
A. Celebrity culture is not a new thing. It is not a culture-dependent phenomenon. Celebrities fulfil two emotional functions for their fans: they provide a mythical narrative (a story that the fan can follow and identify with) and they function as blank screens onto which the fans project their dreams, hopes, fears, plans, values, and desires (wish fulfilment).
Western culture emphasizes ambition, competitiveness, materialism, and individualism. These admittedly are narcissistic traits and give the narcissist in our society an opening advantage.
But narcissism exists in a different form in collectivist societies as well. As Theodore Millon and Roger Davis state in their seminal tome, "Personality Disorders in Modern Life":
"In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is 'God's gift to the world'. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is 'God's gift to the collective'".
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Pathological narcissism is a
narrative intended to disguise discontinuities in memory and identity
(post-traumatic dissociation). But it has another role: to glamorize
dysfunction and elevate it to the level of an ideology of superiority.
Children with impaired and incompetent
disorganized personality or with a self-defeating, ornery temperament are
shunned, ridiculed, and bullied. To compensate for these painful experiences,
they sometimes recast their freakish idiosyncracies as choices, thus restoring
an internal locus of control.
Thus, the schizoid or autist boasts grandiosely
about his self-sufficiency, emotional imperturbability, resilience, razor-sharp
focus, extreme IQ, social selectivity, and asexuality. These render him
superhuman in his eyes.
Similarly, the sadist brags about his altruism,
rationality, invulnerability, perspicacity, and imperviousness to weakness and
to pain.
Drill down to find that compensatory narcissism is
merely the fantasy aggrandizing veneer superimposed on other mental health
disorders and their harrowing lifelong costs.
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Narcissist: By cheating on me with other
men, you are rejecting me as a man! By abandoning and betraying me, you are
rejecting me as a person!
Intimate Partner: You are never there either as a
man or as person! I am cheating on your absence as a man and I am abandoning
your absence, not you!
Narcissist: But I AM my absence!
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Narcissism
is a core feature of the personality: primary narcissism in infancy is critical
to the formation of the self, healthy narcissism helps us to regulate our sense
of self-worth and guarantees self-efficacy.
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Like cancer, narcissism can become malignant and be triggered in its sick form by any trauma and in any mental illness. It acquires the features of the underlying primary core mental health issue and serves as an overlay (veneer, coat of paint). It is a misleading facade presented to the world - and to diagnosticians.
The narcissist's intimate partner
regulates the flow of primary narcissistic supply. She shores over period of
scant supply by providing secondary supply (recalling the narcissist's moments
of past glory as witnessed by her).
But secondary supply has another important
function: to foster and cement bonding and addictive attachment within the
shared fantasy.
At the core, the narcissist is trained to expect
and accept only conditional, performance-based love. He signals to his mate:
"Mom! Look how amazingly unique, fascinating, and special I am! Look what
I have accomplished! Don't you just love it - and me?"
If the partner withdraws from the dyad and shuns
the narcissist, if she withholds her secondary supply and conditional love and
affection, the narcissist feels threatened and develops extreme abandonment or
separation anxiety. This is especially true if she is having an affair with
another man who she openly admires and whose virtues she extols.
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Finally, In RUSSIAN! My narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and personality disorders videos in Russian, translated by Olga Kozhemiakina. Thank you, Olga!