Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)
Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)
Grannon and Vaknin ask themselves: whatever happened to women?
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The narcissist takes over your mind. Learn how in this Grannon-Vaknin convo.
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Honored to serve as a member of the Advisory
Scientific Board of Neurotalk for the THIRD year in a row (swipe left). 12th
Annual World Congress of Neurotalk 2022, June 15-17 2022, Singapore.
Presentation in the World Psychiatrists and Psychologists Conference, November 15, 2021, titled "Malignant Fantasy Defense and Its Outcomes". Certificate of Recognition.
Presentation in the series on malignant fantasy defenses, 7th International Conference on Psychiatry and Psychological Disorders, November 23, 2021.
Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychopathology and Psychiatric Diagnosis (IJPPD).
My lectures and presentations are also made available on my
YouTube channel. Watch the latest ones here.
Speaker in other international conferences on
psychology, psychiatry, mental health, and neuroscience
Member of the editorial boards of other academic publications
on psychology, psychiatry, mental health, and neuroscience.
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html
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Narcissists are 2 year old infants who are trapped in a post-traumatic condition characterized by a perpetual prolonged complicated grief coupled with depression.
Already in 1942 Hervey Cleckley hypothesized that narcissists and psychopaths
may be actually emotionally hypersensitive and inordinately intelligent. Their disorders are defensive attempts to wall off emotions
that were so profound that they threatened to overwhelm and dysregulate them.
Theirs is a post-traumatic state that can best be described as complicated
grief or prolonged grief reaction.
A later scholar, J. S. Grothstein suggested in
1984 that Borderline Personality Disorder was the outcome of a failed effort by
the child to deploy pathological narcissism to avert and forestall ominous
emotional reactions to extreme abuse.
All my life I accepted that my intimate partners
could survive being in a abusive, traumatic, and self-sacrificial relationship
with me only by liaising with other men for some much needed restorative
respites. I had to share all the women in my life with other guys throughout my
relationships - or else remain lonely and die alone.
But another reason for this dysfunctional
arrangement may have been the fact that I am too intense and self-destructive,
burning like a candle at both ends. My partners needed to get away from me to
avoid witnessing my agonizing meltdowns. It was too painful for them to stick
around precisely because they did love me.
Interview
in MEL Magazine:
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/sam-vaknin-youtube
MEL MAGAZINE: THEY SAY NARCISSISM IS UNTREATABLE. THIS NARCISSIST IS GIVING IT A TRY ANYWAY
Ian Lecklitner
Ian Lecklitner is a staff writer at MEL Magazine.
He mostly writes about everyone's favorite things: Sex, drugs and food.
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I always prided myself on shunning the double standard when it comes to men and women. I apply the same rigorous
criteria to the sexual choices and acts of both genders.
But what I have conveniently overlooked are my
emotional reactions.
Take sexual self-trashing, for example. I consider
it a form of egregious self-harming in both males and females. I am revolted
and horrified and saddened in both cases.
But I tend to exert harsh moral judgment only on
women. Men are exempt, somehow.
I feel that women who self-trash are not only
mentally disordered and unboundaried (like their male counterparts) - they are
also immoral and condemnable sluts. The woman invites the man in, she is the
failed guardian of virtue.
So much for my impartiality.
Still, while I am wrong to judge sexual
self-trashing, I am justified in warning against its well documented long-term
adverse mental health outcomes for BOTH GENDERS.
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Homo
sapiens is the only organism that sacrifices its life
in order to defend fictitious narrative spaces.
Mankind creates artificial symbolic sets and then
inhabits them. The semiotics of such realms is what humans call
"meaning".
When these kingdoms of the mind are exposed to
ruinous external shocks (like pandemics or wars), all meaning is lost. Anomie
sets in and leads to suicide, mental or physical.
As a species, we confuse complexity with much
desired meaningfulness. So, we tend to create systems which are convoluted and
thereby intrinsically unstable.
As individuals we tend to inauthenticity by
assuming complex social external roles that are incommensurate with our
internal, genuine voices. This also leads to instability and dysfunction.
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Narcissism in young people is healthy. It is the foundation of self-esteem and self-confidence and allows for a stable and well regulated sense of self-worth. But can it go too far?
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Titivated myself! Preparing to participate on
Monday in the first documentary ever by Paula Lekuona about my philosophical system of
Nothingness and, later in the week, two days of shooting with Mark Vicente for
his docu on narcissistic abuse.
I coined the phrase “narcissistic abuse” in 1995
and I am so proud to witness it go global and mainstream!
Find additional documentaries on me and with me
here: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html
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There are four tiers of values with differing validity and strength. We tend to conflate
them and this confusion often results in almighty adversity.
The weakest norms are culture-bound and usually in
flux: they vary across different societies and periods in history. Condemning
promiscuity and exhibitionism is an example.
Some values are situational. Thou shalt not kill
is suspended in battle, euthanasia, self-defense, and in a host of other
circumstances.
The strongest values are universal and immutable.
It is hard to think of any justification for incest, pedophilia, or bedding
your best friend's wife.
Evidence-based values and norms are arguably even
more potent.
We know that sexual-self trashing has severe
long-term consequences on mental health and intimate relationships. So does
alcoholism.
So, castigating these practices is justified if we
accept that self-destructiveness is a bad kind of choice (which, of course, is,
in itself, open to debate).
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Put together Western men in a female-free zone and they sound like the worst
patriarchal, chauvinistic, even misogynistic tribe.
But, as distinct from their third world
counterparts, they lie to women about how they truly feel.
Decades of politically correct indoctrination,
social activism, victimhood movements, wokeism, and militant feminism
conditioned Western males to feign equanimity in the face of rampant female
promiscuity and exhibitionism.
In public and when among women, Western men seem
unfazed by feminine acts that not long ago would have passed for dissolute
egregious prostitution.
But when huddled defensively together, away from
any prying woman, these very ostentatiously progressive-liberal men call a slut
a slut and volubly hold these women in unmitigated and utter contempt.
This doublespeak is the new double standard.
"Modern" men are delighted to avail
themselves of loose and wasted women and then dump them unceremoniously as so
much trash.
But the same men would not dream of having a
relationship with women of ill repute: a gangbanger, a habitual drunk one night
stander, or a live cam self-pornographer. And they disseminate the names of
these women as easy lays wherever they go.
Plus ca change.
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The Madonna-Whore complex is old news: some men divide women into respectable but
sexless and disreputable but hot. The first kind are marriage material - the
others are good for casual sex at most, pump and dump trash.
One mediating mechanism involved in this schism is
abandonment or separation anxiety.
Such men, when they have sex, immediately place
their sexual partners in the “whore” category: loose, unboundaried, no
self-respect or dignity. Sex is dirty, degrading, and despoils the woman.
But “whorish”, promiscuous sluts cheat and abandon
with abandon. To mitigate the anxiety engendered by such ineluctable outcomes,
these men recast their long-term sexual partners as Madonnas, incorporeal
saints, devoid of sexuality and lust. Now said men feel safe.
But, of course, to have sex with a saintly mother
figure is both sacrilegious and incestuous, so all sex in the couple ceases.
The woman becomes an asexual artifact.
This state of protracted sexlessness drives these
hapless women to cheat and to abandon - the very traumatizing outcomes sought
to be skirted in the first place!
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Women who consent to no strings attached
instant drunk sex with men they had just met make it very difficult for their
boundaried, self-regulated, self-respecting sisters who are possessed of at
least a smidgen of self-esteem and wish to pace the dating process organically.
Having grown accustomed to sex on demand, men are becoming more and
more predatory and unwilling to commit or to invest beyond a
single night's romp.
When denied sex, even on a first date, most men
become aggressive, demanding, coercive, verbally abusive, and worse. A whopping
one quarter of first dates now end in rape.
Similarly, studies show that women are giving up
on men in droves. They expect no intimacy or relationship. When horny, they
resort to dating apps or the nearest dive, pick up a stranger, and go through
the motions. Hookup sex is so bad that only 10% of women and one third of men
actually orgasm.
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The first documentary ever about my philosophical system of
Nothingness with Paula Lekuona and Sarah (in the office of
my good friend @zoran.vitanov).
Join my Nothingness YouTube channel.
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When you break up with the
narcissist, you literally fall apart. To end your
grieving is to acknowledge and accept the loss of an object - but that object
is YOU. You cannot get over your bereavement because you are mourning yourself.
At first, during the lovebombing and grooming
phase, the narcissist offers you unconditional love, as a mother would. Then he
idealizes you and causes you to become infatuated with your own idealized
image. He invites you into a simulation, a paracosm, a shared fantasy where you
merge/fuse into a single selfobject. Then he withdraws all these. He cancels
YOU.
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Therapists have an impossible task.
They help their clients to gain insight (=face the
truth).
But these clients need therapy in the first place
because they deny the truth and HATE it.
It is dangerous for both therapist and client when
the therapist assumes the roles of savior, rescuer, or even educator or parent
(countertransference).
More here: https://samvak.tripod.com/abusefamily24.html
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Sometimes self-destruction is beneficial. When the structure is decrepit, you need to erase it to the ground in order to rebuild.
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Healthy people regulate their affect (emotions) and moods
internally. It is as if they had a gyroscope that keeps them rotating around a
center of personal gravity, a homeostatic equilibrium.
Mental health disorders such as cluster B and
dependent personality disorders involve three types of external regulation:
1. Somatic
Using the body - especially unboundaried and
indiscriminate sex - to restore and maintain self-esteem;
2. Cerebral
Using the mind to obtain narcissistic supply in
order to stabilize a volatile or fluctuating sense of self-worth; and
3. Outsourced or vicarious
When intimate partners or other significant
figures (such as role models or celebrities) are leveraged to provide ego functions
such as reality testing, impulse control, emotional regulation, judgment,
object relations, cognitive processes, defense mechanisms, and synthetic
function.
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Older narcissists tend to develop "mate selection anxiety".
Decades of mortifying failed relationships with
deceitful, lying, sexually self-trashing, serially cheating, labile, and
dysregulated intimate partners coerce the narcissist into the injurious
realization that the kind of women he is likely to fall in "love" with
are positively lethal to him.
Thus, many narcissists end up facing three
unappetizing alternatives: infatuation with a ruinous partner; a dreary,
sexless life with a safe partner; or profound, existential solitude.
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Climate
anxiety is a new mental health phenomenon: a
debilitating dread, especially among the young, of an oncoming climate change
apocalypse.
Oddly, the very same youth seem to be utterly
unperturbed by another already unfolding global calamity of a magnitude which
easily rivals the climate catastrophe: the inter-gender estrangement.
Young men and women are utterly at ease with
avoiding each other (except for a few bouts of lousy sex in sporadic drunk
hookups).
These very anxious youngsters prize solitary
activities and espouse atomizing self-sufficiency and "empowerment":
sexually objectifying oneself and others.
All forms of relationships - dating, sex,
marriage, long-term liaisons - are down by high double digit figures.
Yet, the young don't care. They are narcissistic
and solipsistic. They need fresh air and clean water to survive and play their
interminable video games - but they no longer need each other.
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Will be visiting Warsaw next month. If you care to organize a lecture, interview, or an event with me there, DM or write to samvaknin@gmail.com
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First day with the renowned documentary
filmmaker, Marc
Vicente and his producer, Scott Altomare.
11 hours of shooting (and another 11 hours
tomorrow) for a film about narcissistic abuse.
Second day with the renowned documentary filmmaker, Marc Vicente and
his producer, Scott Altomare.
11 hours of shooting (and a third day next year)
for a film about narcissistic abuse.
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Trauma
bonding is widely misunderstood as a form of extreme
attachment fostered by traumatizing intermittent reinforcement.
But it is way more than that - which is why it is
nearly impossible to disentangle and reverse.
Trauma bonding involved retraumatization. The
abuser triggers and reactivates unresolved conflicts in early childhood
(“archaic wounds”).
He engenders a multilayered and multidimensional
resonance of unrequited pain and angst, both old and new.
By doing so, the abuser assumes a maternal role
within a shared fantasy: at first, during the lovebombing and grooming phases,
he promises unconditional love (via idealization).
But then he becomes a dead mother who is selfish,
immature, withholding, insecure, and aggressively rejecting.
Who can give up on her real life mother or her
reactivated, simulated mother introject? It is like getting a second chance at
righting all the wrongs of childhood.
No one can give up on that. So, bonding sets in.
In this sense, trauma bonding, exactly like
narcissism, is a fantasy defense gone awry.
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Don’t ask yourself: “Are my actions right or
wrong?” People disagree on what is right and what is
not.
Ask yourself: “Am I harming and hurting others
with my choices and behaviors?” If you are - cease and desist.
Ask yourself:”Am I harming or hurting myself with
my choices and behaviors?” If you are - cease and desist.
Do your research, do not assume that you know what
is best for you because you often don’t and you may well be self-defeating and
self-destructive.
Respect yourself.
Protect yourself.
Love yourself.
You are all you’ve got.
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Body autonomy is a pivotal
value. Your body belongs to you and to no one else but you: not to your spouse,
not to society, not even to your country.
You can do with your body as you please and as you
see fit.
The only exception is: do no harm. Do not hurt
other people in any way. If you do, you should be restrained and punished.
What about choosing to hurt yourself? Is that an
inseparable part of body autonomy?
No, it is not. When you harm and hurt and mutilate
yourself in any way, you end up imposing psychological and economic costs on
society at large and on others like your loved ones.
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It is impossible to suffer from a mental health
illness - even only anxiety or depression - and have a healthy sexuality.
Our psychosexuality is both a determinant and a
derivative of our personality. If the personality is pathologized in any way,
if moods and affects or cognitions are skewed - sexual choices, preferences,
and acts are bound to be adversely affected and become reckless and
self-destructive.
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Debunking
some narcissism myths:
1. Unambiguous physical or sexual abuse rarely
results in adult (secondary) narcissism. To be afflicted with NPD (Narcissistic
Personality Disorder), one needs to be pedestalized, idolized,
pampered, instrumentalized, or parentified as a child and then abruptly and
cruelly discarded. The adult narcissist spends a lifetime trying to recapture
those lost moments of parental idealization.
2. Narcissists do have emotions, but they have
access to and experience only negative affectivity: rage, envy, hatred and the
like.
3. Narcissists have a truncated form of empathy
("cold empathy") which allows them to spot and leverage the vulnerabilities
of their targets.
4. Narcissists dread abandonment ("separation
anxiety") and are often dysphoric ("depressed"), especially when
they fail to secure narcissistic supply.
5. Grandiosity is about being unique, not about
being the best or the greatest or the most. So, the narcissist can brag about
being the perfect loser, failure, or victim. This is especially true of covert
narcissists.
6. Some narcissists are prosocial and communal: morally
upright, altruistic, and charitable. They are ostentatious and grandiose about
it all, though.
7. Psychopaths lie. Narcissists mostly
confabulate: concoct self-aggrandizing narratives to bridge dissociative
(memory gaps) with plausible scenarios.
8. Narcissists cheat less often than psychopaths
because they are prone to abandonment anxiety and are terrified of losing their
partners. They are less faithful during the bargaining and devaluation phases
of the shared fantasy.
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Four cases of a fantasy defense gone awry: trauma bonding, identity disturbance, fantastic grandiosity, shared fantasy in narcissistic and borderline disturbances of personality.
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Almost half the adult population in the USA are
singles who have never been in a long-term committed relationship,
including cohabitation.
Other parts of the world are getting there.
Contemporary singles are likely to end their lives this way.
Atomization, malignant individualism, and
technological self-sufficiency conspire to render us irremediably lonely.
The solitude of singles adversely affects their
income and health, both mental and physical.
These shocking data reflect terminal deficiencies
in the skillset required in order to maintain intimacy and relationships.
Decades of casual sex and placing career above
love hardwired our neuroplastic brain to shun both.
But what are these missing skills? The ability to
compromise, set boundaries, be vulnerable, tolerate frustration, give space,
trust, and cooperate.
In short: everything that the narcissists and
psychopaths we are all becoming are bad at.
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We misattribute the most likely motivations to
our actions and to other people’s choices and behaviors (an element of attribution error or bias). Often, the picture is much more complex and involves
layers upon layers of occult reasons and causes. Three examples:
1. Toxic relationships
Sometimes people remain trapped for decades in
toxic relationships not because they pity or love the partner but because they
seek to continue to punish their mates for past transgressions, real,
perceived, or imagined.
2. Sunk costs
People make new decisions or persevere with old
ones because they had already invested resources, however minimally, in a
course of action. Any investment yields commitment, regardless of outcomes.
3. Celibacy
Some narcissists opt for lifelong celibacy because
they are incapable of either sustaining a sexually active long-term
relationship or of having casual sex (which undermines their sense of
uniqueness).
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When someone with a Borderline Personality
Disorder (BPD) acts out and cheats on her partner (secondary psychopathy
self-state), she feels guilty and ashamed in the aftermath.
But she also dreads her mate’s reaction. So, to
ease her conscience, she voluntarily confesses but she also lies about what had actually happened.
Typically, she minimizes the transgression: “We just
danced, or hugged, or kissed, talked, or drank, or had coffee together for old
times’ sake”.
Or she transposes the event to another place or
time, usually conflating it with more innocuous but similar occurrences.
She feels justified to lie because she casts it in
terms of self-defense against abusive reactions to her misconduct.
Gradually, she starts to believe some of her own
prevarications and protests vehemently against any attempt to refute them.
She feels exonerated and vindicated, empowered,
morally upright, and entitled to repeat her misbehavior and to lie about it,
cornered as she is in a dead relationship by her abusive and rejecting partner
(alloplastic defenses coupled with an external locus of control).
And since Borderlines read rejection and
abandonment into every act of their mate or spouse, recurrent misdeeds and then
lying is baked into any relationship with them.
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A friends with benefits (FwB) arrangement is vastly preferable to casual sex as far
as mental health outcomes are concerned.
But it is a pernicious phenomenon all the same
because it provides the illusion of an intimate relationship where there is
none.
Studies show that people who engage in FwB are
less likely to find a true intimate partner or maintain a full fledged love
relationship. They are more likely to engage in promiscuous and reckless sex.
FwB liaisons often last for months or years
and inhibit dating or courting. Ultimately, they may have a retarding effect on
acquiring and deploying intimacy and relationship skills. They also foster and
encourage superficiality and emotional unavailability and render sex a mere
release or self-soothing function.
On the rare occasion that one of the parties
wishes to convert the FwB situation into a romantic affair, s/he is often
rebuffed and rejected.
This might take a devastating emotional toll,
especially if the spurned party suffers from a mental health problem, such as
Borderline Personality Disorder.
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There is no worse combo than comorbid antisocial,
narcissistic, and borderline personality disorders, diagnosed in about 10% of cluster B patients.
Scholars are beginning to reconceive of both
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and overt narcissism as forms of
secondary and primary psychopathy, respectively.
This trifecta renders the afflicted impulsive risk
takers, hostile, aggressive, egocentric, mistrustful, possessed of compromised
empathy, and grandiose.
Each of the disorders is mutually compensatory and
covers up for deficiencies in the other comorbid mental illnesses.
The disorders, in the form of self-states
(subpersonalities or pseudoidentities) “take over” the patient’s total
functioning in reaction to stressors and environmental challenges.
These transitions lead to an even greater identity
disturbance.
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Psychopaths
lie. Narcissists mostly confabulate: concoct
self-aggrandizing narratives to bridge dissociative (memory gaps) with
plausible scenarios.
Antisocial Personality Disorder Alternative Model
(p. 764)
"Deceitfulness (an aspect of Antagonism):
Dishonesty and fraudulence; misrepresentation of self; embellishment or
fabrication when relating events."
Narcissists dissociate (erase memories) a lot (are
amnesiac) because their contact with the world and with others is via a
fictitious construct: the False Self.
In an attempt to compensate for the yawning gaps
in memory, narcissists and psychopaths confabulate: they invent plausible
"plug ins" and scenarios of how things might, could, or should have
plausibly occurred. To outsiders, these fictional stopgaps appear as lies. But
the narcissist fervently believes in their reality: he may not actually
remember what had happened - but surely it could not have happened any other
way!
These tenuous concocted fillers are subject to
frequent revision as the narcissist's inner world and external circumstances
evolve. This is why narcissists often contradict themselves. Tomorrow's
confabulation often negates yesterday's. The narcissist does not remember their
previous tales because they are not invested with the emotions and cognitions
that are integral parts of real memories.
People with severe dissociation (memory lapses and
"lost time") are often misunderstood and perceived as liars.
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Love is the opposite of self-sacrifice.
Love is the antonym of dependency.
Love and self-destructiveness are mutually
exclusive.
If your loved one demands or expects any of the
above - UNlove them in a hurry.
Loving another person is first and foremost an act
of self-love.
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As distinct from Borderlines, narcissists and
psychopaths maintain rigid boundaries founded on hypervigilance and paranoid
ideation, respectively.
But, as they grow older, many of them are forced
into astonishing compromises, terrified as they become of remaining alone, bereft of
companionship and succor when they need it the most. They are too depleted to
start all over time and again.
I have let all the women in my life be with other
men, recognizing the enormous toll and self-sacrifice it takes to be my partner
and still heartbroken at their consensual betrayals.
Even so, having cheated on me repeatedly, they had
all abandoned me.
I have allowed the men in my life - friends and
business associates - build entire prospering careers on ideas they had stolen
from me.
Even so, none of them is still around. My
promiscuity, trying to bribe them into staying, had been in vain.
Being mentally ill carries an inordinate price tag
of self-denial and self-grieving. The enormous compromises required in order to
attain the mere rudiments of a connection with others only aggravate the
underlying conditions.
Even so, at the end of a life unlived, there is no
one around to bid farewell to the mentally afflicted. They die alone and long
forgotten.
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Some high
functioning patients compartmentalize their mental
illness: an accomplished professional by day prostitutes herself intoxicated by
night; a beloved medical doctor turns pedophile after working hours; a
respected politician burgles homes by moonlight.
Their mental illness functions like a pressure
valve, a dysregulated and unboundaried release of anxiety, depression,
antisocial impulses and other derangements.
Forgive these people, don’t rage or mourn what
could have been. Don’t let their accomplishments and standing in society
mislead you: there is nobody home, they know not what they are doing, they are
spiralling out of control, threatening to take you with them.
Do not try to make sense of the choices and
actions of such poor miscreants and misfits - for there is none. Just move on
with your life and forget them.
Remember: you are under no obligation to sacrifice
yourself and to love the mentally ill. Your remote sympathy and pity are
sufficient offerings.
Safeguard your life and sanity, stay away, and
remove such people from your life posthaste, regardless of how agonizing such a
breakup may be to you. No contact.
Do not be a rescuer or savior or fixer - lest you
end up being in need of rescuing, saving, and fixing.
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Love is not the same as infatuation or
limerence. Love
thrives on trust and respect.
If you love someone but cannot trust and respect
them - walk away. The longer you stay, the more profound the heartbreak.
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The sadistic narcissist’s
psychosexuality is centred on power: humiliating, subjugating,
and dominating his partner as a stand in for all women.
Having accomplished this, he loses all interest in
reciprocal sex and settles into a relationship of degrading abuse and, at
times, celibacy. He rarely cheats on his prey.
But when his mate becomes independent or defiant,
when she rebels against her role and his antics, he suddenly evinces a
hypersexual drive as he hunts for his next victim.
Infidelity and rejection conspire to push his
disobedient erstwhile partner away and make room for the next target.
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Women
are defining themselves in what used to be exclusive
masculine terms and are rejecting all feminine aspects and descriptors.
This “stalled revolution”, as it is called in the
scholarly literature, is exploding among the younger generations where gender
roles have been effectively abolished, leading to an androgynous unigender
state.
One more piece of evidence from a series of
studies by researchers at the University of Minessota: men are now seeking love
and a long-term connection prior to having sex (even a one night stand) - women
are the ones who reject them and walk away.
From Time magazine, February 14, 2019:
“… (S)tudies have shown that men usually say I
love you in a relationship before women do, and prefer to hear it before they
have sex. Women are more circumspect, preferring to hear it said after the
couple first has sex”.
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Weak
people terrify me. Weakness of character is
indistinguishable from evil. The weak are suggestible, malleable, mutable and,
therefore highly unstable, unreliable, and untrustworthy.
People pleasing and an
inability to say “no” even to the most degrading offers and demands lead the weak
to reckless, disgraceful, and antisocial acts. They are enablers in the worst
sense of the word: aid and abet the self-destructiveness of others.
Gradually, to survive their wracking guilt, shame,
and self-loathing, they evolve into narcissists and psychopaths. They mistake
defiance for boundaried assertiveness.
They betray their loved ones and breach their own
fragile and permeable boundaries time and again just in order to fit in and be
“liked” or to counter loneliness and boredom.
Many weak folks are mentally ill. They suffer from
Borderline or Dependent personality disorder, for example. But others have been
conditioned by needy and selfish parents to become subservient and self-denying.
Rescuer/savior/fixer types are attracted to weak
mates. They crave the omnipotence that comes with the territory, but also the
drama: ups and downs, pain, sweet reconciliations after tumultuous fights,
intermittent reinforcement, and trauma bonding.
Some intimate partners of the weak mistake the
people pleaser for the empathic, kind, loving, and altruistic sort. They are in
for a rude awakening as s/he pivots and cheats or lies or betrays just in order
to gain the approval and continued presence of others.
Many weak people also provoke abuse, stray
compulsively, prevaricate habitually, abuse substances, engage in extreme
sexual self-trashing, and act recklessly - all forms of self-harming.
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Two
myths pervade the last 60 years: that we all have a
right and a need for recreational sex and that women are gatekeepers who refuse
to procreate with unsuitable men (another Jordan Peterson malarkey).
Well into the end of the 19th century and in most
of Nature, sex was and is about making offspring. It is limited to a mating
season or estrus (the Talmud actually uses the word “season” to describe the
female sex drive).
Recreational sex is a new invention. The right to
have sex is an incel concoction: the majority of animals and humans get laid
rarely or not at all.
Moreover, a plethora of studies reveal the toll in
mental and physical health that casual sex has on its participants. It also
adversely impacts the capacity for intimacy and the ability to form long-term
relationships. Hookups are seriously damaging (see my video on the topic where
I review the literature).
Finally, women actually have a tendency to select
inappropriate mates for breeding: criminals, the uneducated, and the poor
account for the majority of children born worldwide. The elites are often
childless or have one child per household.
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Patriarchy: without consultation or voice,
taxation without representation, subjugation, occasional horrific abuse,
stunted growth, no self-actualization, sexual assault impunity (MeToo).
Women woke up and realized that most relationships
with men are abusive.
Women adopted the abuser’s POV, male stereotypes.
Men are betraying women, coerce them into casual
sex and then abandon them.
Everyone more narcissistic and psychopathic, men
and women: tide that lifts all boats. But women regard their newfound
narcissism as empowering ideology which legitimizes and contextualizes all
misdeeds.
Men have to adapt to a Female Age, but so do women.
Equality is not identity: homogeneity (unigender,
only fluid sex) leads to entropy and death (no relationships, we need children,
no intimacy skills)
Counterfactual claims and myths in an age of
truthism: no one is happy
Invulnerability signalling: autonomous, agentic,
goal-oriented, unemotional, uninvolved, self-sufficient
Gender vertigo
Abolished gender roles, sexual scripts
Confusion as to appropriate behavior (codes of
conduct)
Stalled revolution
Masculine unigender
Women as breadwinners, surpass men
PC media revel in uniformity (“pregnant people”)
Women are defining themselves in what used to be
exclusive masculine terms and are rejecting all feminine aspects and
descriptors.
Fluidity
Biological sex and socio-cultural gender
Defiance
Attitudinal shift from agency and self-efficacy to
aggressive assertiveness replaced benign constructive discourse and
inter-gender dialog
Refugees of abusive relationships and divorces:
animosity, bitterness, hypervigilance, hatred, withdrawal, insecure avoidant
attachment
Enshrined double standard
Women conform to male stereotypes of sexually
emancipated “sluts”.
Claims of empowerment belied by introjection of
male chauvinistic double standard, rampant discontent, and substance abuse.
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Nothing
terrifies the Borderline more than abandonment and rejection, real, anticipated, or imagined.
In the wake of repeated such harrowing
experiences, Borderlines react in two ways, often alternating between them:
1. They avoid all contact with potential intimate
partners, constrict their lives to work only, and become schizoid; or
2. They sexually self-trash in casual random sex,
exclusively with strangers. This way, they never experience heartbreak, they mitigate
the pain of having been rejected, restore their wounded grandiosity with their
“conquests” (“validation” or “self-esteem”), and self-soothe.
Borderlines self-medicate with anxiolytic
predatory men who often victimize and mistreat them egregiously, even in one
night stands.
As a defense against the mortification, shame, and
guilt involved in acting out and in being maltreated contemptuously,
Borderlines immediately impose a romantic or defiant fantasy on the stranger
they are with and the unfolding unsavory proceedings.
Borderlines react with derision and hostility to
any attempt to undo the fantasy. They cast well-meaning and caring therapists,
friends, intimate partners and family members as persecutory objects, almost
enemies.
Unfortunately, Borderlines tend to pick
narcissists as mates. Narcissists dread true
intimacy and regard it as a threat, a permanent
challenge to their grandiosity. Borderlines equally undermine intimacy for fear
of being engulfed or enmeshed.
The two parties abuse each other as they attempt
to cause their partners to decompensate and act out (misbehave), affording them
an excuse to break up. This process of restoring one’s comfort zone by
modifying the partner’s behaviors is known as projective identification.
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High-functioning
Borderlines succeed to regulate their emotions and moods
for certain periods of time, giving the impression that they are actually
grandiose covert narcissists (Borderlines are as grandiose as narcissists and
psychopaths).
Here is how to tell the difference:
Covert (fragile, shy, vulnerable) narcissists never experience suicidal ideation or attempt suicide. They
externalize aggression and are typically negativistic (passive-aggressive);
Covert narcissists do not experience separation
insecurity (abandonment anxiety) and they maintain object constancy;
Covert narcissists are not clinging or needy;
Covert narcissists are self-efficacious, most
borderlines are self-defeating;
Borderlines are self-critical. Akin to neurotics, they
have autoplastic defenses and dichotomous thinking (splitting). Covert
narcissists have alloplastic defenses;
Borderlines are highly emotive and dysregulated.
They are overwhelmed by their emotions. Covert narcissists display only
negative affectivity and often have reduced affect display.
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Addicts think that their addictions are defined by the frequency of
their dysfunctional behaviors.
They say: “I can’t be an alcoholic! I haven’t
touched a drink in a year!” or “How can you say that I am a sex addict? My
libido (drive) is so low that I hadn’t dated anyone for months now!”
But addiction has nothing to do with how often one
misbehaves or becomes self-destructive.
Addiction is about the obsessive-compulsive nature
of the actions of the addict when he does act out his addiction: the craving,
impulsivity, recklessness, and the resulting ego dystony (shame, guilt,
discomfort, embarrassment).
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According to the Karpman drama triangle, fixer, savior, rescuer,
messiah types get very frustrated when they fail to “fix”,
“rescue”, or save their quarry or when their ostensibly well meaning offers to
help are rejected.
Frustration easily turns into aggression directed
at the very person they had claimed eternal love for and devotion to. They seek
to destroy the source of the narcissistic injury.
These behavioral shifts strongly indicate that
fixers, saviors, and rescuers are covert narcissists.
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Even people with run of the mill mental health
disorders such as depression and anxiety fall victim to sexual assaults
and sexual abuse by predators much more
often that healthier folk.
The incidence of such mishaps skyrockets when it
comes to patients with personality, mood, and psychotic disorders.
They tend to abuse substances and be collared into
extreme and reckless sexual situations with opportunistic individuals and
groups of abusers.
Mentally ill victims typically react to the shame
induced by such helplessness in one of two ways:
1. They reframe the events as agentic and
autonomous: “I wanted the sex, I initiated it, I could have stopped it at any
minute, despite my intoxicated state, I was in full control of the
proceedings”; or
2. They adopt the victim stance: “I was drunk,
young, drugged, scared, trapped. There was nothing I could do about it, so I
just gave in and put out. The people who did this to me were lowlife scum. I
did nothing to either deserve this or bring it about.”
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Narcissists are so alien. How can we ever hope to understand the madness?
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Adolescent Narcissism: Personal Fable, Imaginary Audience, Depressive Realism, Defensive Pessimism, Hostile Attribution Bias or Intent.
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We
are beings made of dreams and of memories. They
are all we have. They are all we are.
And when we are gone, they are all we leave behind.
So, we should generate as many of both as we can
before it is too late and we are over.
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As old men typically do, I have been observing the younger generations with growing horror, alarm, and disaffection.
Some of my negativity is amply substantiated by
multiple studies. The rest is anecdotal based on my daily contact with hundreds
of youth in 40 different countries.
I noticed, for example, the profound lack of
curiosity about others and about the world.
Navel gazing combines with “cool” superficiality
to yield shallow surface communication which amounts to staccatoed
meaninglessness.
Ask any personal or deep question of the young and
they cast you as either derisive or offensive (“digging”).
Conversations - even between ostensibly intimate
partners - are extinct, having been totally replaced by video games, brainless
social media posts, and other dumbing pursuits.
It is a binary state, devoid of nuances and subtleties: I feel bad (“awkward”) – I feel good.
This profound breakdown in interactions results in
an incapacity to maintain intimacy or relationships.
Everything - from sex to learning - is casual and
random. The young invest the bare minimum in their rote learning in order to eke
out a living in our dystopian world. Having acquired a degree or a skill, they
suspend all thinking and involvement and turn into glazed-eye zombies.
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Modern psychology has discarded the cumulative wisdom of 100 years in its
misguided attempt to become a natural science, like physics.
Part 1 of Interview with Sandy Ghazal Ansari, New
Center for Psychoanalysis, LA. Ansari is a lay psychoanalyst practicing under
Educational Therapy where she works with children on the Autism Spectrum, with
gifted children, and with adults on their academic stressors.
Listen to this IF YOU DARE! A shocking NEW VIEW of Narcissists and
Narcissism.
Part 2 of Interview with Sandy Ghazal Ansari.
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When the narcissist says "I miss you", he means:
I miss what you had been giving me (sex, services,
narcissistic supply, money, connections);
I miss the way you saw me (genius, handsome,
awesome, amazing, fascinating, unique);
I miss the situation we had both found ourselves
in: an empowering fabulous fantasy of immaculate love, perfection, and
cinematic attainments.
He never misses YOU. He misses what he thought he
had with you.
He misses his magical former self, not you.
Narcissists never have relationships - only
situationships.
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The narcissist needs to "pop the cherry"
of “his” woman: convert her from boundaried, agentic, and
regulated (however minimally) to psychosexually submissive, masochistic, and
self-trashing.
He believes that this primacy renders him unique
and in control as she becomes addicted to him and to his kinky sex.
If a woman is already utterly self-trashing, the
narcissist feels like a statistic, negated, narcissistically injured, even
mortified.
Hence the aversion most narcissists have to casual
sex with drunk “loose” women.
In a long-term relationship with such an
unboundaried woman, the narcissist feels unsafe because he cannot perceive
himself as either special or as her master who had moulded her and made her
what she is (Pygmalion’s Galatea).
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In this day and age of malignant tolerance and
moral relativism so many questions have been classed taboo that
public academic discourse has ground to a screeching halt.
Consider for example the research-based FACTS that
the overwhelming vast majority of sex workers, promiscuous sexual
self-trashers, and serial cheaters suffer from a constellation of mental health
issues (such as mood and anxiety disorders) and possess highly specific
antisocial personality types (“dark triad” and “dark tetrad”).
The sexuality of all three is usually nonautonomus
(people pleasing, "never say no") which leads to frequent
revictimization.
All three kinds are dysregulated and unboundaried
and abuse substances (mainly alcohol).
They tend to act out in reaction to perceived or
real abandonment or rejection - or defiantly, in your face, and recklessly.
They all perceive sex as transactional in some
way, a give and take involving shallow affectivity (emotions). Even when the
sex is meaningful - the partner is interchangeable and meaningless, a mildly
interesting or convenient prop, usually embedded in a transient fantasy.
All three types are unable to maintain long-term
dyads and are prone to egregious dissolute cheating, replete with blaming the
partner for their misconduct.
They lack intimacy and relationship skills, have
insecure attachment styles, and are approach-avoidant (repetition compulsion).
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The issue of abortion is emotionally loaded and this often makes for poor, not
thoroughly thought out arguments. The questions: "Is abortion
immoral" and "Is abortion a murder" are often confused. The
pregnancy (and the resulting fetus) are discussed in terms normally reserved to
natural catastrophes (force majeure). At times, the embryo is compared to
cancer, a thief, or an invader: after all, they are both growths, clusters of
cells. The difference, of course, is that no one contracts cancer willingly
(except, to some extent, smokers -–but, then they gamble, not contract).
When a woman engages in voluntary sex, does not
use contraceptives and gets pregnant – one can say that she had signed a
contract with her fetus. A contract entails the demonstrated existence of a
reasonably (and reasonable) free will. If the fulfillment of the obligations in
a contract between individuals could be life-threatening – it is fair and safe
to assume that no rational free will was involved. No reasonable person would
sign or enter such a contract with another person (though most people would
sign such contracts with society).
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Loving
the narcissist is a very agonizing experience. Why?
Lack of empathy
Indifference after lovebombing: death of a dream
and the shared fantasy
Withdrawal and avoidance
Scouting for alternatives and discard
Sexlessness
Paranoia
Possessiveness
Narcissistic rage
Depression
“Love” conditioned on performance
Intermittent reinforcement
Devaluation
Memory lapses and confabulations
Impaired reality testing (grandiosity as cognitive
distortion)
Miscommunication
Intransigence