Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)
Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)
Narcissist is in a state of prolonged grief and
misery seeks company.
Exposure to prolonged grief is traumatizing: transmission vector.
Endogenous vs. Exogenous dysregulation.
Driven to re-enact loss and resolve trauma with a
maternal stand-in by recreating the trauma space (ideal Mom-ideal Kid in a
shared fantasy engendered by secondary trauma).
Vicarious trauma fosters role reversal from Mom to
Kid (infantile regression);
Narcissist as Mom can now abuse the Kid and disarm
it (narcissistic abuse);
Once power and hurt asymmetries are righted,
narcissist reverts to Kid and his partner is restored to a much less
threatening Mom.
Narcissist now attempts to complete the
separation-individuation phase from his Mom partner without fear of retribution
from an enfeebled, shattered Mom.
He separates from her (discarding her or pushing
her to abandon him) thus reasserting control, even at the cost of elevated
anxiety (which he resolves by replacing).
Hoovering is outcome of unresolved conflict
(introject permanence leads to attempts at restoring object permanence).
Watch Narcissist as Grieving
Infant: It Affects YOU
Watch When Your Pain Traumatizes
Others: Vicarious (Secondary) Trauma
Watch Why Narcissist Hoovers,
Replaces YOU.
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What’s wrong with voluntary sex work? It has social utility. The sex worker can make a FORTUNE
out of activities that anyhow she engages in gratis.
I prostitute my brain. No different to
prostituting one’s vagina.
Condemning sex work is patriarchal thinking: men
prostitute themselves - their muscles and brains - all the time.
The sex worker gets to meet fascinating men, have
a regular sex life, gets invited to restaurants, bars, clubs, travel all over
the world, and often ends up snagging a rich husband (a rescuer type). And I
forgot to mention opportunities for group sex.
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Psychology is in crisis owing to the pernicious
influences of celebrity and money.
Scientists are claiming expertise when and where
they have none.
Many are "massaging" the results of
experiments (replication crisis).
Making unfounded claims based on flimsy or
non-existent evidence
Abusing their authority.
Molecular Biology fundamentalists (Sapolsky BOOK)
are grandiose and grossly misleading, I cringe.
Some of the problems: correlation not causation,
reductionism and ignorance (empathy not narcissism), contradictory results, not
enough known, environmental triggering (nurture, not nature), replicability
issues, inflated ill-founded claims.
Examples: antidepressants and DSM.
ANTIDEPRESSANTS
Is Depression Healthy? (2nd Webinar on Depression
Management, May 2021)
No link between depression and serotonin, finds
major analysis
A review of 17 previous studies finds no evidence
for a link between depression and low serotonin levels, which SSRI
antidepressants focus on – though not everyone is convinced by the findings
NEW SCIENTIST HEALTH 20 July 2022 By Sarah Wild
The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic
umbrella review of the evidence
Joanna Moncrieff, Ruth E. Cooper, Tom Stockmann,
Simone Amendola, Michael P. Hengartner & Mark A. Horowitz
(Nature) Molecular Psychiatry (2022)
DSM
Watch Future of Personality Disorders:
ICD Revolutionary, DSM Craven.
Finally, a revolution in the perception of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in the newest editions of the DSM and ICD.
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DAILY MAIL: How a narcissist REALLY sees you: Doctor of psychology (who's also narcissistic!) reveals your emotions make them feel weak, you mean 'nothing' to them and they discard you to get back at their mother.
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Stress mobilizes - anxiety paralyzes.
Dedication galvanizes - addiction euthanizes.
Envy kills - emulation fulfills.
Grieving is overcome - depression overcomes.
Striving attains - perfectionism detains.
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Psychosis
is the natural state in childhood:
hyperreflexivity and internal objects=external ones.
If the external is terrifying (abuse, trauma), the
child transitions to BPD where internal objects are external (psychoticism) and
with a False Self which starts as external (special friend) and ends as
internal.
This Self fragment or figment prevents
full-fledged psychosis (a state of no self).
If the BPD False Self is attacked and disabled by
abuse and trauma, the child attempts to transition to NPD.
NPD is mirror image of BPD:
External objects are internal (fantasy and
delusionality) and False Self which starts as internal (grandiosity) and ends
as external (true self vanishes).
This solution fails when reality intrudes and
cannot be reframed and the False Self remains internal.
The child then transitions to psychopathy where
only external objects exist and there is no false self or any self (unimpaired
reality testing).
Decompensation reverses this sequence. Therapy can
leverage decompensation to affect regression and fix the failures (second
chance).
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The exact same actions can be utterly meaningless or
overwhelmingly meaningful.
Dinner at the same venue with the same menu
choices, watching a movie, listening to music, or even having sex feel utterly
different with a loved one than with a random colleague.
But the absence of meaning is not to be confused
with emotionlessness.
Every action is imbued with emotions. There is no such
thing as an emotionless experience.
Even a one night stand with a total stranger
involves vulnerability, trust, and affection if not lust and thrill. It has
emotional antecedents and consequences.
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Response to all critics of this video: "4 Facts to Blow Your Mind: Abuse, Parenting, Stress, Marshmallows".
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Long interview in the new issue of the visually stunning Italian fashion publication, Shot Magazine @shotmagazine with @alex_amok and Erin.
The future belongs to solitary, self-sufficient
narcissists and psychopaths with no empathy or
emotions. Consumption is the substitute for life.
Interview transcript and proposed solutions here
in 2 videos of the interview on my YouTube channel.
You can watch the video recordings of our
conversation in 2 parts on my YouTube channel. The transcript is available in
the description field of each of these 2 videos:
20 Steps to Fix This Horrible Mess We Are All In (Shot Magazine)
Adapting to Dystopian New Normal (Interview with Shot Magazine)
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Victimization involves the
denial of the self-determination, identity, self-actualization, rights, and
boundaries of a person without their express consent and collaboration.
When victimhood becomes an organizing and
explanatory (hermeneutic) principle, a determinant of the victim’s identity,
and a socially binding force centred around grievances; prosocial or communal
grandiosity; entitlement; conspiracism (paranoid or persecutory delusions);
aggressive engagement or, on the other end of the spectrum, schizoid
withdrawal; dysempathy; defiance (reactance); and contumaciousness (rejection
of expertise and authority) – we have on our hands a victim identity movement.
No one is a victim. We may end up being victimized
– but it doesn’t render us victims for life, it doesn’t brand us.
The sociologist Bradley Campbell suggested that
we have transitioned from a culture centred around dignity to one based on victimhood.
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 transgressions (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.
Interview in News Intervention with Scott Douglass
Jacobsen.
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We tend to confuse the amoral with the
immoral and both these with evil.
A person can be good and do good without adhering
to any system of morality. The prosocial or communal narcissist is a case in
point.
It is also possible to renounce morality
altogether without ever acting immorally. For example: moral relativism or hard
atheism need not result in immorality.
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Signs of imminent devaluation and discard by
the narcissist:
Emotional absence, indifference, and coldness
Affected “civility”
Constant criticism and denigration
Passive-aggression
Unfavorable comparisons
Setting you up for failure and misconduct
Paranoid ideation and pathological jealousy
Sudden secret actions (financial or romantic)
Public disparagement and humiliation, also with
common children
Sex withholding or degradation
Cessation of all joint activities, especially of a
social nature
Pervasive distrust and micromanagement
Discard reenacts unresolved separation phase.
Individuation depends on devaluation (in order to
preserve grandiosity and exit the shared fantasy) and
externalization-projection (reversal of internalization-introjection). When
either of these two processes fails, hoovering results.
So, emotionally, discard precedes devaluation. The
narcissist hangs on to his partner only in order to complete the devaluation.
Devaluation resembles also the separation phase in
adolescence: reactance (defiance), contempt, distancing, negative identity
formation, approach-avoidance.
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1. Parents less happy than the
childless
2. Abuse indicates love and caring
3. Stress is good for you, meditation and mindfulness
which are used to reduce it are not always beneficial
4. Marshmallow Test is Wrong
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Discard reenacts unresolved
separation phase.
Individuation depends on devaluation (in order to
preserve grandiosity and exit the shared fantasy) and
externalization-projection (reversal of internalization-introjection). When
either of these two processes fails, hoovering results.
So, emotionally, discard precedes devaluation. The
narcissist hangs on to his partner only in order to complete the devaluation.
Devaluation resembles also the separation phase in
adolescence: reactance (defiance), contempt, distancing, negative identity
formation, approach-avoidance.
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New haircut, new aesthetics.
The language of aesthetic judgement is identical to the languages of physics, morality, and
hedonism. Aesthetic values sound strikingly like moral ones and both resemble,
structurally, the laws of nature. We say that beauty is "right"
(symmetric, etc.), that we "ought to" maximize beauty - and this
leads to the right action. Replace "beauty" with "good" in
any aesthetic statement and one gets a moral statement. Moral, natural,
aesthetic, and hedonistic statements are all mutually convertible. Moreover, an
aesthetic experience often leads to moral action.
There is a principle of aesthetic resonance at
work. Works of art and beauty evoke in us associations with nature: white
marble is strongly evocative of the naked human form, for instance. The
resonance is both qualitative and pertains to intensive aesthetic properties,
such as texture, color, “warmth”, or shape (as in the aforementioned example)
and quantitative (as when aesthetic pieces refer to and enhance each other so
as to yield an emergent whole.) This deeply-felt resonance may be at the heart
of aesthetics’ affinity with morality, especially with the “natural law”.
More here: https://samvak.tripod.com/ethics.html
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Watch this first: Narcissist First Discards
You in His Mind, Then in Reality.
Why Narcissist Hoovers, Replaces YOU.
During the devaluation and discard phases, the
narcissist's attempts to hand over to you the introject (snapshot) that
represents you in his mind, imbuing it with negativity (devaluation). It never
works owing to the narcissist's introject constancy (intended to allay his
abandonment anxiety/separation insecurity) and to his repetition compulsion.
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Narcissistic supply and perceived success (self-supply) are aphrodisiacs. When they are deficient or absent in the collapse phase,
the narcissist becomes dysphoric (watch my video titled “The Narcissist’s 3
depressions”).
Depression is closely correlated with
hyposexuality or even sexlessness (a transient subtype of asexuality). In this
sense, all narcissists have gray sexuality and are on the a-spectrum (though,
of course, not all asexuals are narcissists).
Normally, cerebral narcissists switch to somatic
in order to restart the interrupted flow of supply. But when they have body
image problems, this may take longer than normal.
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I hate the idiotic and counterfactual trope: “It is never too late”.
Of course it is too late for most, if not all
things. Anyone who knows the first thing about aging will concur. And we rarely
get second chances.
Both the mind and the body lose capabilities at an
alarming rate as we grow older: cognitive decline and sexual dysfunction are
inexorable, the immune system crumbles, self-repair is out of the window.
There is a thin line between optimism and
deception, hope and delusion, determination and grandiosity. Never cross it -
for your own good!
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What would a regime run by artists look like? Look no further
than Nazi
Germany.
Hitler was a mediocre and frustrated classical and
architectural painter. He contributed to the design of the Volkswagen beetle in
1938 and, with Speer, co-planned museums and cities of the future.
Goering was an art collector and connoisseur. He
looted art from all over Europe for his private collection and a future museum.
The leadership of the Nazi dictatorship was
obsessed with aesthetics in its rallies (Nuremberg), symbols (the swastika),
cinema (Riefenstahl), and even uniforms. Himmler commissioned the captivating
SS uniform from Hugo Boss and Goring designed the Luftwaffe’s imposing attire.
The Nazis burned books but never destroyed art -
not even “degenerate”, Jewish art which they placed in cautionary exhibitions.
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Narcissists attaches to objects (books, human bodies) and
functions (the 4 Ss: sex, supply, services, and safety); borderline attaches to
her regulated states.
Different but complementary functions of their shared fantasies: engulfing (narcissist) vs. being engulfed (borderline).
Dual mothership in operation in both types of
shared fantasy.
Approach-avoidance (borderline) vs. narcissist's
attempted separation (devaluation and discard)
Hoovering for different reasons (introject
constancy vs. object constancy).
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This is a summary of my shared fantasy-dual
mothership framework for the narcissist’s intimate interpersonal
relationships.
7 Stages of shared fantasy:
1. Co-Idealization (lovebombing, introject and
narcissist all good because he owns object)
2. Dual mothership in a shared fantasy (recreation
of childhood)
3. Need to reenact separation leads to mental
discard which results in narcissistic injury (narcissist not omniscient, his
judgment was wrong)
4. Devaluation of external object to restore
grandiosity (make ego-congruent sense of the discard of an hitherto idealized
object).
5. Devaluation of introject via splitting defense
(introject now all-bad, narcissist grandiosely all-good)
6. Real life discard: projection of introject to
you in an attempt to integrate it with external object. Projection-integration
fails owing to abandonment anxiety triggered by introject inconstancy and your
refusal to own split, all-bad introject. Devalued, split, all-bad introject
remains as internal object, in narcissist's mind. This creates anxiety (bad
object internalization-introjection)
7. The only way to reintegrate this internal
object and reduce anxiety is by re-idealizing the external object and the
corresponding introject. This is impossible if the narcissist has been
mortified. He then departs from his previous version and reinvents himself
which allows for self-idealization (grandiosity restored).
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SCIENCE, 31 Jul 2022
Dr. Sam Vaknin - the global narcissist database
From Sunday Morning, 11:36 am on 31 July 2022
Dr Sam Vaknin is the author of one of the first in
depth books about narcissism and has a large database on narcissists which is
now used globally. Not only is he an expert on the disorder, he's a clinically
diagnosed narcissist himself, so he's got some good insights to share, and to
beware of. He's now a visiting professor of psychology as well, and the author
of the book Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited. Dr Vaknin speaks to Jim.
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Hyposexuality
or Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) is a
desire disorder in the DSM: no libido, little or no sex, and DISTRESS about it.
Libido: attraction, desire, action towards self or
object.
Some asexuals are not attracted sexually to
anyone, have no desire, and many of them are sexless, they don’t even
masturbate. These asexuals have no libido.
Some asexuals masturbate. Others have periods of
sexual activity. Some are repelled by sex. Asexuality is a spectrum.
The asexual orientation is lifelong or recurrent
(intermittent).
Grey sexuality is between asexuality and
sexuality. Example: demisexuals.
Asexual+distress=hyposexual
Ridiculous to say that there are no asexual
narcissists.
All narcissists – somatic and cerebral – go through
phases of asexuality in the wake of dysphoria (watch my video Narcissist’s 3
Depressions).
It is asexuality and not hyposexuality because the
narcissist experiences no distress regarding his sexuality although he is
depressed about deficient or absent narcissistic supply.
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The narcissist invests emotional energy (cathexis)
only in internal objects (introjects), never in external objects like you. This
is because he feels safe only with internal objects: they never abandon or
reject him. The introjects and internal objects are not constellated
(integrated), so the narcissist has no ego or self. Some of the internal
objects constitute self-states.
In clinical terms: the narcissist has only introject (diffuse
narcissistic) libido, never object libido. He identifies with and
cathects only his introjects, never a love object. He can never lose a love
object.
If you challenge the narcissist's introjects or
undermine them, you are threatening to take away his libido (his life force),
thereby becoming his enemy (a persecutory internal object).
All narcissists interact with introjects
(internal objects), never with the external objects which they represent. They
all seek introject constancy.
Depending on the island of stability, some narcissists
maintain long-term constancy of the introject related to the intimate partner.
These are the “rocks” or the “special
friends” in the borderline’s world.
The Borderline senses this long-term commitment to
and investment in the introject and it is a source of object constancy to her,
assuaging her separation insecurity (abandonment anxiety). It is also a fount
of engulfment anxiety. This duality causes her to approach the narcissist and
then avoid him.
She reactivates the narcissist’s introject from
time to time in her approach-avoidance repetition compulsion.
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My new proposed diagnosis - covert borderline - combines elements of pathological narcissism with
classical borderline’s.
Consequently, the covert borderline is subject to
a greater range of anxieties than either of its constituents.
The covert borderline is capable of narcissistic
injury and mortification and experiences the borderline’s push and pull
(abandonment vs. engulfment).
The covert borderline’s narcissistic defenses
serve him well, though. They fend off these tremors. They allow him to put on a
facade of stability and imperturbability.
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Anxiety involves hyperarousal based on catastrophizing. Anxiety has many forms. Gut
feelings, intuition, and hypervigilance are forms of anxiety.
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Narcissism is a surrealistic landscape. It is so removed from daily
experience and what it is to be a human that it defies comprehension.
Convo with Trisha Goddard of TalkTV.
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All fantasies are psychological defenses against an unbearable reality.
But what renders the world so intolerable? Its threatening nature.
Undergirding all fantasies is a master delusion:
“I am fragile, at risk of losing my mind, falling apart at the seams, an ideal
victim of people or circumstances, an unworthy or bad object, doomed to fail.”
What gives rise to such a self-negating and
catastrophizing scenario of precarity?
Parental overprotectiveness or, its opposite, neglect.
Both types of caregiving misconduct yield all-pervasive mistrust of life and of
the very possibility of justice, patterned order, and stable structure.
Science and enlightenment were failed
experiments. Now we are reverting to the Middle Ages: from the reality
principle to fantasy.
Fantasy vs. Lies vs. Delusion vs. Confabulation.
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Whether a trait or behavior, mood, affect
(emotion), or cognition are pathological or positively
adaptive depends entirely on the context.
For example: to have been reactively depressed in
Auschwitz would have been a normal reaction, a form of processing trauma.
There are periods in history and civilizations
when and where narcissism and psychopathy were self-efficacious strategies: the
USA and Nazi Germany, respectively.
Similarly, repetition compulsion could be both
warranted and beneficial. Even the recurrence of bad things renders life more
predictable and endows us with a sense of safety.
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There are two types of fantasy defense: person-centred and process-centred. This taxonomy is
similar to substance-centred vs. process-centred addictions. The person at the
center of a person-centred fantasy is akin to an addictive substance at the
core of a substance-centred fantasy.
Fantasies are intended to provide safe spaces and
outlets for aggressive and self-destructive impulses involved in the civil war
between the need to be seen (grandiosity) and the internalized bad object (“I
am inadequate, an impostor, and unworthy”). Dysregulation and identity
disturbance are the outcomes of this inner strife.
When in touch with reality, these voices create
coalitions which lead to adverse outcomes. For example: spectacular, public,
and attention-grabbing self-destruction.
Fantasies which revolve around another person -
common in intimate or interpersonal relationships - inevitably dissolve into
reality and therefore mayhem.
Fantasies which are founded on a narrative or an
impersonal process - self-aggrandizing or self-destructive as they may be -
never do. They are self-contained and well regulated.
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30 minutes to takeoff in Hotel Grand Continental in Bucharest. @richard.grannon and me, the beauty and the beast. Free entry.
Joint seminar with @richard.grannon in Bucharest. Richard took my concepts and created the most amazing set of practical guidelines and process flows! I was floored!
Mega interview with Richard Grannon @richard.grannon regarding the formation and lives of borderlines and narcissists.
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Gaslighting is far more
effective when coupled with trauma because trauma is disorienting and induces
self-doubt and self-recrimination.
Of course, gaslighting itself induces trauma and
so a self-reinforcing vicious cycle ensues.
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For a while, I call him Theo (his brother’s
name) to force him to adopt the perspective of a loving outsider. It also
provokes him and riles him up and this reduces the efficacy of his defenses and
resistances. "Estrangement" is a technique I use in Cold Therapy.
Vincent van Gogh has
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD):
Itinerancy, instability (professions, locations)
Grandiosity
Self-harm
Violent outbursts
OCD (painting)
Parasitic lifestyle
Dysfunctional relationships
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This is the trailer to an interview I granted
to Newsweek. I will post the full interview next week: Ukraine: From
Invasion to PTSD (Newsweek Interview TRAILER).
This is a part of a larger interview that will be
published in a few days by Newsweek Romania.
You can find an article in Romanian about this
here: https://newsweek.ro/
The journalist who did the interview, Remus
Cernea, is a war correspondent in Ukraine.
This is the first part of a larger interview for Newsweek
Romania.
You can find it translated into Romanian here: https://newsweek.ro/international/
The second part of the interview will be published
in a few days.
The journalist who did the interview is a war
correspondent in Ukraine and you can follow his YouTube channel(mostly in
Romanian) and his Twitter account here: https://twitter.com/remus_cernea (mostly in English)
This is the trailer to an interview I granted to
Newsweek: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings
You can find an article in Romanian about this
here: https://newsweek.ro/international/
Interview regarding PTSD in Ukraine with Remus Cernea in the print edition of Newsweek. The full interview is available in 2 parts on my YouTube channel.
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There is a pragmatic - amoral - reason to never lie.
When we deceive, we cause people to interact with
our deception, not with us or with reality.
We therefore keep getting the wrong, inaccurate
information from others and we end up deceiving ourselves.
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The United States is in the throes of
full-fledged mass
psychosis. The stupid and demented have taken over. It
is a terrifying thought.
A prestigious outlet has just rejected an article
I submitted - at their prompting - as “unfit for publication”.
The reason? I refused to replace the words
“students” and “pupils” with “scholars” (!) and I vehemently rejected the
counterfactual demand to substitute “pregnant people” for “pregnant women”.
Breaking news:
Students are not scholars. A few of them become
scholars by first being students. And only women can be pregnant.
I also mentioned that the Bible contains more
raunchy sex scenes than most modern literature. That did not curry favor with
my reviewers. They asked me repeatedly to remove this paragraph - an act known
as censorship.
As far as free speech goes, the USA is on par now
with China and Russia (a country I lived in for 6 years).
Another ominous story:
A UK medium asked me to submit an article on
narcissism.
I WITHDREW it OFFICIALLY because they insisted on
altering it.
They proceeded to publish it with the alteration
(!) in which they essentially stated that we all develop pathological
narcissism in early childhood.
The editor did not want to demonize narcissism
because this would be a form of … ableism!
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Richard Grannon @richard.grannon leverages Sam Vaknin's synthesis the concepts of shared fantasy, dual mothership, entraining, self-states, and introjection to come up with the beginnings of a fix for narcissistic abuse.
Richard Grannon’s @richard.grannon amazing new course based partly on my new framework for
understanding narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and borderline personality
disorders:
https://www.richardgrannon.com/unplug-from-the-matrix-of-narcissism
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Many truths in psychology are
counterintuitive. Three examples:
1. Success forces one to engage in reality. If one
is prone to fantasy, one would engineer failures or undermine success at any
cost. Fantasy is an alluring comfort zone and success tend to intrude and
unravel it;
2. Devaluation is not the same as disenchantment
(falling out of love). It involves splitting: rendering the devalued person all
bad and persecutory, retroactively and prospectively. Disenchantment is the
opposite of splitting and the antithesis of idealization: it involves
integration of the bad and good aspects of the object (the other person);
3. Defiance (reactance) is not a form of boundary
setting. On the contrary: it is about vitiating boundaries, one’s own and others’s.
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Jordan
Peterson, the master of banalities and king of cliches,
wearing his “I am the greatest genius ever and the most humungous revolution in
human thinking has just occurred to me” says in an interview: “If you don’t
speak what is truly on your mind, you are not giving voice to your unborn self”.
WTF is this nonsense supposed to mean? 5.3 million
shares.
Sadhguru in a lecture in one of the most
prestigious medical schools in the States: “Western medicine has still a long
way to go. We in the East know, for example, that the milk from a woman’s left
breast is not the same as milk from her right breast. That is why you should
feed boys and girls from different breasts”.
3.7 million likes.
Slavoj Zizek, a truly towering intellect,
gets an average of 1600 shares on 10 randomly sampled profound Facebook posts
of his sayings. Every self-styled expert on YouTube gets way more.
Such is the decaying civilization we live in.
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Scientific
theories invite constant criticism and revision. They
yield new problems. They are proven erroneous and are replaced by new models
which offer better explanations and a more profound sense of understanding -
often by solving these new problems. From time to time, the successor theories
constitute a break with everything known and done till then. These seismic
convulsions are known as "paradigm shifts".
It is interesting to note that paradigm-shifting work
is often produced by non-specialist outsiders, gifted amateurs, and laymen
(such as Da Vinci, Steno, Mandel, Freud, and, to some extent, Einstein). As
Thomas Kuhn noted, run of the mill scientists are vested and invested in the
status quo and normally generate paradigm-sustaining theories and discoveries.
Contrary to widespread opinion - even among
scientists - science is not only about "facts". It is not merely
about quantifying, measuring, describing, classifying, and organizing
"things" (entities). It is not even concerned with finding out the
"truth". Science is about providing us with concepts, explanations,
and predictions (collectively known as "theories") and thus endowing
us with a sense of understanding of our world.
Scientific theories are allegorical or metaphoric.
They revolve around symbols and theoretical constructs, concepts and
substantive assumptions, axioms and hypotheses - most of which can never, even
in principle, be computed, observed, quantified, measured, or correlated with the
world "out there". By appealing to our imagination, scientific
theories reveal what David Deutsch calls "the fabric of reality".
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EDITORIAL
The Psychopathology of
Fetishism and Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID)
Sam Vaknin*
Corresponding Author: Sam Vaknin, Visiting
Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia and
Professor of Finance and Psychology in CIAPS (Centre for International Advanced
and Professional Studies).
Received: March 16, 2022 ; Revised: March 21, 2022
; Accepted: March 23, 2022
Citation: Vaknin S. (2022) The Psychopathology of
Fetishism and Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID). J Psychol Psychiatr Res, 1(1):
1-4.
Copyrights: ©2022 Vaknin S. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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DAILY MAIL: “I'd rather be a narcissist than one of today's pathetic, self-pitying young women: Her ego knows no bounds but at least, says JULIE BURCHILL, she's proud of what she's achieved”.
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Both narcissists and borderlines alternate between fantasy
and reality - but their fantasies are very different. The
borderline's is object (person)-centred, the narcissist's is process
(narrative)-centred. Moreover: the fantasies cater to the narcissist's and
borderline's deepest psychological needs.
Richard Grannon's @richard.grannon YouTube channel.
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Second hand smoke is respiratory rape.
Ambient noise pollution is auditory rape.
The great unwashed are olfactory rape.
Unwanted touch and invasion of private space are
tactile rape.
Not fully consensual sex is rape, pure and simple.
All forms of abuse constitute emotional rape.
And …
Stupidity is intellectual rape.
They should all be criminalized and penalized, the
perpetrators relegated to penal colonies.
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Questions I have never been asked before on narcissists, psychopaths, empaths, victimhood, fantasies, singles, and love. With the British journalist Eve Tawfik.
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The stupid have always had opinions about everything under the sun. But
they were wary of expressing them lest they be shamed, ridiculed, and shunned
by their betters. This is no longer the case: the dumb are brazen and
vociferous, drowning out, by the force of sheer numbers, all informed voices.
The ignorant and the retarded are the overwhelming
majority. They trust their pitiable life experience over science. They adhere
to magical thinking. And they are fierce in the defense of their grandiose,
inflated, fantastic self-image as undiscovered geniuses (Dunning-Kruger effect).
Technology empowers mediocre failures and losers
in their self-delusion of malignant egalitarianism.
Access to raw information is not the same as
possession of structured knowledge. But the stupid can’t tell the difference:
“I am as knowledgeable as my doctor or professor because I can google. My opinions,
therefore, count as facts.”
Stupidity is on the rise for two reasons: 1. A
reverse Flynn effect: there has been a precipitous decline in average IQ scores
in the past 4 decades; and 2. Inanity is tolerated and legitimized thereby
encouraging indolence, entitlement, and nescience (malignant tolerance).
The Stupid, the Trivial,
and the Frivolous are everywhere: among the working classes, of
course, but increasingly you can find them displacing the erstwhile elites,
spawning hordes of mindless politicians, idiot business tycoons, narcissistic
media personalities, gullible clergy, vacuous celebrities, illiterate
bestselling authors, athletes with far more brawn than brain, repetitious pop
singers, less than mediocre bureaucrats, bovine gatekeepers, and even ignorant
and semi-literate academics.
Their cacophony drowns the few voices of wisdom,
expertise, and experience and their sheer number overwhelms all systems of
governance and all mechanisms of decision-making. Rather than futilely fight
back this tsunami, the well-educated, the erudite, and the intelligent choose
to withdraw and seclude themselves in self-constructed, schizoid ivory towers,
all bridges drawn.
Imbeciles are a menace to the continued existence
not only of our civilization, but also of our species. We may end up being all
Homo, no sapiens.
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You should not deny yourself happiness just because it comes at a price. You should not fear life!
Life is about loss and suffering: the coinage with
which we purchase bliss.
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Passive-aggressives are
people pleasers who express negative affectivity (anger, sadness, resentment,
annoyance, envy) dysfunctionally (by frustrating and obstructing others).
Covert narcissists are focused on sustaining a grandiose, fantastic view of
themselves - not on their negative affects (emotions).
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Vaccination
or inoculation is the introduction of an enemy (bacterium or
virus) into our bodies in order to get us to acquire new capacities and trigger
in us new (immune) processes, thus rendering us stronger and improved.
The same idea drove cannibals to consume the
internal organs of dead and captured enemy soldiers in order to acquire their
traits and thus be rendered upgraded and superior.
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Is David Chalmers right? Are simulation and reality indistinguishable? Is our reality merely some alien's
simulation?
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The Self is an invention of late 19th century German
"scientists". It is a counterfactual construct. Self-states triggered
by environmental cues - that's reality.
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How can you tell the stupid from the
wise?
Stupid people question absolutely everything all
the time either because they are insecure (even fearful) or because they are
grandiose and know it all better.
The wise and intelligent discriminate between
information that fits into structured knowledge and requires little or no
questioning - and hypotheses which demand falsification.
Doubt is the engine of progress in all its forms:
scientific, individual, and social.
But all-pervasive doubt retards growth and results
in conspiratorial, schizotypal, paranoid, and esoteric mindsets, all of which
are the hallmarks of the truly dumb.
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Narcissism is a critical phase in healthy development. However, if it
persists into adulthood in its infantile form, it becomes a pathology and a
dysfunction.
Full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM13rJpigjM
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Are all forms of intelligence the same? Can we distinguish artificial intelligence from
the human variety?
The other convos in this Cycle here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSRuk5bdik&list=PLygJHHONRxjy9_-KnDaeDhLTuOm6RoYL_
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External
regulation by the intimate partner: of emotions and moods
(borderline), of needs (codependent), or of narcissistic supply (inverted
narcissist, a subtype of covert narcissist).
Inverted narcissism may be the outcome of arrested
narcissistic development: the formation of the False Self is disrupted and
incomplete and the inverted narcissist is forced to resort to and depend upon
the False Self of another narcissist (her partner) in order to regulate her
sense of self-worth.
The Inverted Narcissist is a co-dependent who
depends exclusively on narcissists (narcissist-co-dependent). If you are living
with a narcissist, have a relationship with one, if you are married to one, if
you are working with a narcissist, etc. – it does NOT mean that you are an
inverted narcissist.
To "qualify" as an inverted narcissist,
you must CRAVE to be in a relationship with a narcissist, regardless of any
abuse inflicted on you by him/her. You must ACTIVELY seek relationships with
narcissists and ONLY with narcissists, no matter what your (bitter and
traumatic) past experience has been. You must feel EMPTY and UNHAPPY in relationships
with ANY OTHER kind of person. Only then, and if you satisfy the other
diagnostic criteria of a Dependent Personality Disorder, can you be safely
labelled an "inverted narcissist".
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Three
separations: infantile, adolescent, social
Impediments: dead mothers, strict parents, nanny
states and institutions
Each separation leads to self-state. It could be a
healthy, functional self-state or, once impeded, a pathological one.
Autonomous self-state (grandiose vs. insecure or
fearful)
Peer self-state (defiant vs. conforming)
Social self-state (collaborative vs. avoidant)
Disrupted self-states:
Autonomous (borderline, narcissistic, paranoid,
covert)
Peer (schizoid, avoidant, codependent or people
pleaser)
Social (antisocial, asocial, ostentatiously and
self-sacrificially prosocial)
Separation-individuation (from Mahler to Severino)
Erikson: autonomy, shame, and doubt
Kohut: selfobjects and problems with the Self
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Psychopathic
(malignant or antisocial) narcissists are far less
adept at acting and pretending. They are too grandiosely contemptuous of
everyone to bother to fake empathy, compassion, and modesty (which run of the
mill narcissists often do).
Their reactance (defiance) prevents them from
fitting in, team work, or accommodating others. Even the need to secure
narcissistic supply is not compelling enough to motivate them to act
prosocially. They are never nice.
Consequently, they are far more likely to suffer
disruptions in the flow of narcissistic supply and the ensuing dysphorias
(depressions) that accompany such impediments.
Whenever the narcissist is depressed, he becomes
asexual. He loses his sex drive altogether. Depression has an antilibidinal
effect on the narcissist.
Inevitably, psychopathic narcissists end up
spending a much bigger portion of their adult life sexless than any other type
of narcissist.
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Here is one of the most narcissistic texts ever (from the “Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry):
“(To other roses) You're beautiful, but you're
empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think
my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important
than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one
I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since
she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three
butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when
she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my
rose.”
The rose (“MY rose”) is merely an inert object in
a fantasy. The Little “Prince” doesn’t give a shit about the rose. He is
attached to his INVESTMENT in the rose, to HIS memories of the rose. HIS, HIS,
HIS. It is all about HIM. The rose is made special (idealized) BECAUSE OF HIM!
A typical narcissistic shared fantasy.
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I keep telling @mikekimcomedy Mike: Intimacy is terrifying: exposing
all your vulnerabilities often ends in pain and loss. But it is the only way to
accomplish the 4 pillars of self-love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vzBf9QvClo
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Narcissism
is a critical phase in healthy development.
However, if it persists into adulthood in its infantile form, it becomes a
pathology and a dysfunction.
Full interview with @richard.grannon on my channel.
Richard Grannon's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/RICHARDGRANON
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Donald W. Winnicott, the famous paediatrician
turned psychoanalyst, suggested that abused and traumatized
children dare not hope for love. To protect themselves
against disappointment, they hate others ostentatiously and desire to be hated
in return. It is their way of testing the waters: can these people or
institutions hate the child without resorting to maltreatment and rejection?
Epictetus: Men are disturbed not by events, but by
the views which they take of them.
Albert Ellis, founder of REBT, precursors to CBT:
experience causes no specific emotional reaction, the individual’s belief
system produces the reaction.
Harry Stack Sullivan: people are products of their
environment.
Boris Cyrulnik: trauma consists of the injury and
the representation of the injury. Adult interpretations of events are the most
damaging post-traumatic experience for children. Labels can be more damaging
and damning than the experience.
Dorothy Rowe: when we are wrong, we self-blame and
feel guilt, shame, helplessness.
Georg Hegel: consciousness of self depends on
presence of the Other
Jean Paul Sartre: perception of the world,
including of others, changes when another person appears, we absorb their
concept of the Other into our own.
Jacques Lacan: the unconscious is the discourse of
the Other.
Charles Horton Cooley’s looking glass self (way we
view ourselves based on how we imagine that other people view us).
Heinz Kohut: when child’s needs are not met, a
fragmented self emerges, consisting of the narcissistic self and the grandiose
self.
Eric Berne: lifelong child, adult, parental ego
states.
Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy: sense of
reality created through perception, the ways we view our experiences, not the
events themselves.
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This is the second part of a larger interview for Newsweek
Romania.
The first part is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vWXwK7Ot3I
The journalist who did the interview is a war
correspondent in Ukraine and you can follow his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/RemusCerneaOfficial/featured (mostly in Romanian) and his Twitter account here: https://twitter.com/remus_cernea (mostly in English)
This is the trailer to an interview I granted to
Newsweek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaoPY70a0FA
You can find the translation into Romanian here:
https://newsweek.ro/international/video-psiholog-daca-nu-tratam-traumele-razboiului-exista-riscul-sa-avem-sute-de-mii-de-sinucideri
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What kind of mother would deny her son a
meaningful, fulfilling life until he is too old to have one?
What kind of mother would do her utmost to wreck
any relationship her son has ever tried to have, thus denying him happiness?
What kind of mother would distrust her offspring
with even the most basic tasks and decisions?
An awful, horrible, and now literally dead mother (apropos Andre Green’s phrase, coined in 1978).
She had a profound sense of duty and the belief
that life and other people should be totally subordinated to it.
A good therapist could have helped her with this
psychopathic psychopathology.
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Freedom of Will: Illusion or Reality? (News Intervention) https://www.newsintervention.com/freedom-of-will-illusion-or-reality/
Free will exists the same way Harry Potter and
Sherlock Holmes most definitely exist. It is real. It is a force to reckon
with. It shapes our minds and lives. It exerts a huge influence on multiple
spheres. What more do we need to know?
Free will is a useful fiction, akin to god or the
afterlife: only agents with free will can be held morally responsible.
Free will comprises
three conditions:
1. The ability to choose and act otherwise;
2. Having control over one’s choices and actions;
3. That the choice or act are rationally motivated.
The very concept of free will is founded on
convenient delusions such as time or causation. Whereas teleology is prohibited
in all sciences (we do not attribute purposeful actions to objects and animals,
for example), it mysteriously permeates philosophy and more specifically the
field of ethics.
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The narcissist is focused on
YOU - not on himself. He makes you fall in love
with YOUR idealized image through his relentless, invasive gaze.
With @richard.grannon
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The Borderline outsources to her intimate partner the regulation of her affects
(emotions) and moods - even her cognitions (thoughts) and ego functions (such
as reality testing and sense of self-worth).
This helps her to sustain the fantasy that she is
perfect (buttress her grandiose False Self): stable, regulated, happy, functional.
With @richard.grannon
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All autosexuals (Erotic Target Identity
Inversions) are autoerotic, but only a minority of
autoerotics are autosexual. Autoerotism more frequently finds expression via
activities such as same-sex partnerships (homosexuality), or incest (which is
sex with the living expression of one’s own genetic makeup). Gender dysphoria,
transvestism, autogynephilia, autopedophilia, and similar paraphilias are all
autoerotic.
REFERENCES
1. Erotic Target Identity Inversions Among Men and
Women in an Internet Sample
Ashley Brown , Edward D Barker , Qazi Rahman
J Sex Med. 2020 Jan;17(1):99-110.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2019.10.018
2. Autogynephilia: an underappreciated paraphilia
Anne A Lawrence
Adv Psychosom Med 2011;31:135-48.
doi: 10.1159/000328921
3. Erotic target location errors: an
underappreciated paraphilic dimension
Anne A Lawrence
J Sex Res, 2009 Mar-Jun;46(2-3):194-215.
doi: 10.1080/00224490902747727.
4. Clinical observations and systematic studies of
autogynephilia
R Blanchard
J Sex Marital Ther, 1991 Winter;17(4):235-51.
doi: 10.1080/00926239108404348.
5. Early history of the concept of autogynephilia
Ray Blanchard
Arch Sex Behav, 2005 Aug;34(4):439-46.
doi: 10.1007/s10508-005-4343-8.
6. Autopedophilia
Kevin J Hsu , J Michael Bailey
Psychological Science, November 29, 2016
DOI: 10.1177/0956797616677082
7. Autoerotism
The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and
Culture 1st Edition
by Edward Erwin (Editor), Routledge, 2001
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Never heard before tips on how to break up with a
toxic partner (especially a narcissist) - from the horse's
mouth!
Interview for Heartbreak to Happiness Podcast with
host Sara Davison @saradavisondivorcecoach and Guest Sam Vaknin.
If you would like support for coping with any of
the issues raised do visit www.sara davison.com for our online support groups
and coaching.
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You are invited to attend a FREE 7-days seminar on Cold Therapy between September 19-25, 2022 in Drobeta-Turnu Severin, the
fairytale city in Romania, including 2 days for Questions and Answers and
additional material.
Cold therapy has come a long way in the past 6
years and is now a treatment modality for major depression as well as Narcissistic
Personality Disorder (NPD). More about it: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq77.html
First day of 7 days of the FREE Cold Therapy seminar in Drobeta Turnu Severin, Romania lasted 4 hours rather than 2 because people had so many questions and I couldn’t resist the narcissistic supply
Sam and the Introjects: Group photo with some of
the participants of the seminar, the
loveliest, liveliest audience I have ever had.
Snippets from the Cold Therapy seminar. Courtesy @steckerl_fisch
Back
from the seminar in Romania and on to Budapest
(October 20-23) via Vienna (October 10).
Available for personal, face to face counselling
in both locations on these dates.
So what does any of this have to do with the
playful canines in Drobeta Turnu Severin?
Nothing whatsoever.
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Some victims of narcissistic
abuse don’t want your help, resent you for offering
it, the shared fantasy is their refuge, too. They dread loneliness.
BPD God fantasy: I am the perfect intimate
partner, beautiful, irresistible, fascinating.
There are six common fallacies of victims of abuse:
1. His abuse is actually a sign of love and
commitment
2. HE DEFINES WHO I AM (HE MADE ME)
3. I AM LUCKY
I am worthless, damaged goods. I am lucky to have found
even my abuser. If I leave the relationship, who else would want me and where
will I find another partner?
4. THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS
Life is harsh and it doesn't get much better than
this. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but that is
merely as an optical illusion. This is as good as it gets.
5. MY PARTNER IS NOT WORSE THAN OTHERS
Every other partner I may find will have flaws and
quirks that I will have to get used to and accommodate all over again. Better
stick with what I know. No one guarantees that my next partner will not be even
worse than this.
6. HAPPINESS? BAH!
Life is a serious business. It is not about the
selfish pursuit of elusive "happiness". It is about meeting your
obligations and getting on with it. At best one can expect companionship and
mutual support in old age. Anything more than that is self-defeating and
destructive wishful thinking.