Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)
Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)
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.
Smear campaign debunked https://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/rebuttal.html
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Borderlines seek fantasy with an intimate partner and then flee to reality with a rescuer or savior (Karpman drama triangle). This is the avoidance leg of the approach-avoidance repetition compulsion, driven by the twin anxieties: abandonment (separation insecurity) and engulfment (enmeshment).
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You are but the sum of your relationships. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Shockingly, the Dynamic-maturational model of attachment and adaptation teaches us that the majority of attachment strategies lead to relationship failures.
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Banks are institutions where miracles happen regularly. We rarely
entrust our money to anyone but ourselves – and our banks.
Despite a very chequered history of mismanagement,
corruption, false promises and representations, delusions and behavioural
inconsistency – banks still succeed to motivate us to give them our money.
Partly it is the feeling that there is safety in
numbers. The fashionable term today is "moral hazard". The implicit
guarantees of the state and of other financial institutions move us to take
risks which we would, otherwise, have avoided.
Partly it is the sophistication of the banks in
marketing and promoting themselves and their products. Glossy brochures,
professional computer and video presentations and vast, shrine-like, real
estate complexes all serve to enhance the image of the banks as the temples of
the new religion of money.
Watch Central Banks in Bed with Commercial Banks
on my other channel https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings
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There are 3 voices whose interplay results in pathological narcissism: the voices of death, of life, and of “god”.
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Everything you wanted to know about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and didn't dare ask the borderline: from switching between self-states to identity disturbance and intimate relationships.
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Shame is a powerful, defining dynamic in vulnerable, fragile, shy, covert narcissism. Not so in the grandiose-overt variant. Time to redefine pathological narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)?
LITERATURE
1. Shame and its relationship to early narcissistic developments
F Broucek
International journal of psycho-analysis (1982).International Journal of Psychoanalysis ,63():369-378
2. Andrew P. Morrison (1983) Shame, Ideal Self, and Narcissism, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 19:2, 295-318, DOI: 10.1080/00107530.1983.10746610
3. Wurmser, L. (1987). Shame: The veiled companion of narcissism. In D. L. Nathanson (Ed.), The many faces of shame (pp. 64–92). The Guilford Press.
Morrison, A. P., & Stolorow, R. D. (1997). Shame, narcissism, and intersubjectivity. In M. R. Lansky & A. P. Morrison (Eds.), The widening scope of shame (pp. 63–87). Analytic Press.
4. Gramzow, R., & Tangney, J. P. (1992). Proneness to Shame and the Narcissistic Personality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18(3), 369–376. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167292183014
5. Pincus AL, Ansell EB, Pimentel CA, Cain NM, Wright AGC, Levy KN. Initial construction and validation of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory. Psychol Assess. 2009 Sep;21(3):365-379. doi: 10.1037/a0016530. PMID: 19719348.
6. Cain NM, Pincus AL, Ansell EB. Narcissism at the crossroads: phenotypic description of pathological narcissism across clinical theory, social/personality psychology, and psychiatric diagnosis. Clin Psychol Rev. 2008 Apr;28(4):638-56. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2007.09.006. Epub 2007 Oct 2. PMID: 18029072.
7. Kathrin Ritter, Aline Vater, Nicolas Rüsch, Michela Schröder-Abé, Astrid Schütz, Thomas Fydrich, Claas-Hinrich Lammers, Stefan Roepke,
Shame in patients with narcissistic personality disorder,
Psychiatry Research, Volume 215, Issue 2, 2014, Pages 429-437,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2013.11.019
8. Hibbard, S. (1992). Narcissism, shame, masochism, and object relations: An exploratory correlational study. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 9(4), 489–508. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079392
9. Elena Bilevicius, Darren C. Neufeld, Alanna Single, Melody Foot, Michael Ellery, Matthew T. Keough, Edward A. Johnson,
Vulnerable narcissism and addiction: The mediating role of shame,
Addictive Behaviors, Volume 92, 2019, Pages 115-121,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.12.035
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The role of the celebrity is to restore a sense of familiarity to an alienated,
surrealistic, and plastic world of failed relationships, forced anonymity,
passive-aggressiveness, narcissism, futility, atomization, broken communities,
and lack of purpose.
The celebrity is at once a substitute family, a
prodigal loved one, and a lifelong friend. The celebrity offers ersatz intimacy
and tantalizing glimpses of potentials and possibilities.
Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self-love:
Narcissism Revisited" http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/thebook.html
Read (free) “Addiction to Fame and Celebrity” http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq19.html
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Some people know how to give and share - but not how to make others happy.
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Narcissism is a black hole, a void, there is nobody home. Narcissism is an absence, not a presence.
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.
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Empathy is comprised of two components:
I. Cold Empathy: an intersubjective agreement as
to the mental content (especially emotions) of two or more human subjects;
II. Warm Empathy: the emotional response to Cold
Empathy.
Cold Empathy is an act of taxonomy and an attempt
to overcome the barriers posed by the inaccessibility of the private languages
of the empathee and the empathor. It entails a comparison of the mental states
of the subjects, based on introspection and the classification of said mental
states within agreed linguistic and cultural frameworks, vocabularies, and
contexts.
Warm Empathy is the emotional arousal engendered
by Cold Empathy in the empathor and the panoply of emotional responses it
evokes.
Both cold and warm empathy assume the commonality
and universality of human experience. This is why we tend to empathise with
people who resemble us in every way, but this resemblance also provokes strong
narcissistic defenses (see this article about the Narcissism of Small
Differences.)
Empathy may be an intuitive mode applied to the
minds of other people, yielding an intersubjective agreement.
Empathy is the bedrock of morality. Morality can
have an external locus (induced by God, social strictures, or upbringing) which
is outside the emapthor's control - or an internal locus (reason): the outcome
of conscious, fully-controlled, inner processes.
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Computers and artificial intelligence can teach us little about what it is to be human.
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The market and its price
mechanism - critically depends on trust. If people do
not trust each other, or the economic "envelope" within which they
interact (“preemptive mistrust”), economic activity gradually grinds to a halt.
There is a strong correlation between the general
level of trust and the extent and intensity of economic activity. Francis
Fukuyama, the political scientist, distinguishes between high-trust and
prosperous societies and low-trust and, therefore, impoverished collectives.
Trust underlies economic success, he argued in a 1995 tome.
Trust is not a monolithic quantity. There are a
few categories of economic trust. Some forms of trust are akin to a public good
and are closely related to governmental action or inaction, the reputation of
the state and its institutions, and its pronounced agenda. Other types of trust
are the outcomes of kinship, ethnic origin, personal standing and goodwill,
corporate brands and other data generated by individuals, households, and
firms. Such information creates two types of output: reinforced trust (where
behaviour matches expectations) and “inductive distrust” (where behaviour
frustrates expectations).
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This is an age when people are determined,
defined and categorized in strict accordance with their professions. Whereas during the Renaissance, a person might have been
defined by his range of interests (remember the likes of Leonardo da Vinci), by
his familial, religious, or ethnic affiliations, by his or her gender and so on
– today the first and foremost question is: “What do you do for a living?”
What constitutes a profession (as opposed to a
hobby), or a vocation (as opposed to an avocation)?
The activity must be continuous and pursued for a
length of time;
It must occupy most of one’s waking hours;
It must yield earnings or compensation whether in
money or in kind;
The practitioner must possess an advantage over
mere laymen in that particular field of knowledge or activity. In other words:
one must be able to tell apart layman from experts, the latter being the
product of a highly specific education or training;
The occupation must be hierarchically layered with
clear flows of professional authority and responsibility and with a clear
career path (climbing the professional ladder).
The second relevant question is: What are the
trends which determine our future? It is useless to look at microtrends. These
are too volatile and, in principle, unpredictable.
Much more important are the trends that last for
hundreds or even thousands of years. These are usually not the results of
technological conjuncture or geopolitical upheavals. Rather, they are the
outcomes of characteristic human activities which are uninterrupted.
Continued here: https://samvak.tripod.com/nm029.html
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Narcissist - or merely narcissistic? Use these tests to decide (some of these tests should be administered only by a qualified diagnostician).
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Corruption runs against the grain of meritocratic capitalism. It skews
the level playing-field; it imposes onerous and unpredictable transaction
costs; it guarantees extra returns where none should have been had; it
encourages the misallocation of economic resources; and it subverts the proper
functioning of institutions.
It is, in other words, without a single redeeming
feature, a scourge.
Strangely, this is not how it is perceived by its
perpetrators: both the givers and the recipients.
They believe that corruption helps facilitate the
flow and exchange of goods and services in hopelessly clogged and dysfunctional
systems and markets (corruption and the informal economy "get things
done" and "keep people employed"); that it serves as an
organizing principle where chaos reins and institutions are in their early
formative stages; that it supplements income and thus helps the state employ
qualified and skilled personnel; and that it preserves peace and harmony by
financing networks of cronyism, nepotism, and patronage.
Bribes are paid in order to limit choice and
eliminate competition.
Consequently, in corrupt environments consumers
pay less than optimal prices.
The difference between the competitive price and
the new, post-corruption cost equals the amount of bribe paid in cash or in
kind.
Corruption amounts to a unilateral transfer from
the consumers's pockets to the manufacturers's.
In times of economic crisis, consumers tend to
shop around (in other words: they prefer price competition and encourage it via
their behavior).
Producers/manufacturers tend to collude in order
to fix prices. In recessions, businesses regard consumers as enemies and vice
versa: producer-firms court consumers, but they also seek to limit their
choices by "channelling" their purchases and determining their
preferences.
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There is one telltale difference between narcissists and psychopaths in relationships.
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Four decades ago, the Polish-American-Jewish
author, Jerzy Kosinski, wrote the book "Being There". It describes
the election to the presidency of the United States of a simpleton, a gardener,
whose vapid and trite pronouncements are taken to be sagacious and penetrating
insights into human affairs. The "Being There Syndrome" is now
manifest throughout the world: from Russia (Putin) to the United States (Obama).
Given a high enough level of frustration,
triggered by recurrent, endemic, and systemic failures in all spheres of
policy, even the most resilient democracy develops a predilection to "strong men", leaders whose self-confidence, sangfroid, and
apparent omniscience all but "guarantee" a change of course for the
better.
These are usually people with a thin resume,
having accomplished little prior to their ascendance. They appear to have
erupted on the scene from nowhere. They are received as providential messiahs
precisely because they are unencumbered with a discernible past and, thus, are
ostensibly unburdened by prior affiliations and commitments. Their only duty is
to the future. They are a-historical: they have no history and they are above
history.
Indeed, it is precisely this apparent lack of a
biography that qualifies these leaders to represent and bring about a fantastic
and grandiose future. They act as a blank screen upon which the multitudes
project their own traits, wishes, personal biographies, needs, and yearnings.
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There are gradations and hues of child labor. That children should not be exposed to hazardous
conditions, long working hours, used as means of payment, physically punished,
or serve as sex slaves is commonly agreed. That they should not help their
parents plant and harvest may be more debatable.
Abusive child labor is abhorrent and should be
banned and eradicated. All other forms should be phased out gradually.
Developing countries already produce millions of unemployable graduates a year
- 100,000 in Morocco alone. Unemployment is rife and reaches, in certain
countries - such as Macedonia - more than one third of the workforce. Children
at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but at least they are kept
off the far more menacing streets. Some kids even end up with a skill and are
rendered employable.
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings
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The right to life is a compendium of no less than eight distinct rights: the
right to be brought to life, the right to be born, the right to have one's life
maintained, the right not to be killed, the right to have one's life saved, the
right to save one's life (wrongly reduced to the right to self-defence), the
right to terminate one's life, and the right to have one's life terminated.
None of these rights is self-evident, or
unambiguous, or universal, or immutable, or automatically applicable. It is
safe to say, therefore, that these rights are not primary as hitherto believed
- but derivative.
Lecture available on my Nothingness YouTube
channel.
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The narcissist's
voice is in your head. It will coopt and compromise
your therapy - and, often, your therapist. Do this BEFORE you attend therapy
for narcissistic abuse.
Daria Zukowka's @zukowska.daria (clinical psychologist) YouTube channel.
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Had there been a global blanket ban on discussing religion, politics, and sports, the number of conflicts in the world would have declined precipitously. (Sam Vaknin, World in Conflict and Transition http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/guide.html)
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“Empaths” lack empathy, are often aggressive or even vicious, and many of them are probably covert narcissists. Empaths and dark empaths are nonsensical terms, almost unanimously rejected by the academic community. They are not valid constructs or clinical entities.
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Increasingly, useful idiots (useful fools) in the West – journalists, businessmen, public intellectuals, academics, politicians, and lobbyists - parrot the Kremlin’s propaganda bullet points. The global wave of populist contumacious and self-hating anti-elitism rendered these otherwise risible conspiracy theorists instant stars.
It is not that the West is blameless or that Ukrainians are saints – it is not and they are not.
Both provoked Russia mightily and repeatedly. Poking nuclear armed bears has predictable consequences and the outcomes are neither pleasant nor sustainable.
The West is fighting a proxy war to contain the emerging Russia-China axis and its BRICS corollary.
Ukraine was less than benevolent with its Russian-speaking minority.
Far right groups gained too much sway in the politics and economy of a corrupt Ukraine.
Both parties committed war crimes.
All true.
But only one side committed crimes against humanity.
And only one side started an open, total war (incidentally, granting an ever more united West the perfect pretext to encroach on Russian borders).
Russia is the aggressor in this war against civilians. I am saying Russia and not Putin or his inner circle because the vast majority of Russians support Putin the same way the vast majority of Germans adored Hitler who could do no wrong in their eyes.
Public intellectuals have an obligation to make sacrifices and assume personal risks when faced with injustice or evil. I have gone through the same ordeal in Macedonia, having confronted and criticized two regimes.
Watch this video about four types of (Macedonian) public intellectuals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMQK4mWFnv8
When the war started, I did not renew my appointment as visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Rostov on Don in Russia. I spent 5 wonderful years there and was heartbroken to have to give up the whole thing. Rostov has become a main staging ground for this heartless botched Blietzkrieg. I could not in good faith even be seen to support Russia.
More here: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/rebuttal.html
When I was approached by Dr. Rajeev Fernando of Harvard Medical School and the charity Chiraj.org and the indomitable Cheriekah Ramirez I immediately volunteered to offer my help to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the first lady of Ukraine. I was asked to train Ukrainian mental health practitioners on how to treat PTSD among raped women, orphaned children, and dazed soldiers.
Watch an Interview I gave to Newsweek Romania about PTSD among Ukraine’s population
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvhsNp1C5ZQ
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaR7E5a42tI
My Russian friends and Russia as a state were not happy with my “betrayal”. A month after the war started, I gave an interview to Izvestia, an informal mouthpiece of the Russian state. I criticized the way the war was handled, predicted a stalemate, and advocated for limited goals.
Setting up the interview with Izvestia – click HERE: https://samvak.tripod.com/izvestia.zip
The interview with Izvestia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pabcLbgLE-c
As the war and its atrocities progressed, I became way more critical of Putin, calling him a hypochondriac narcissist and a psychopath and exposing the clandestine workings of his inner circle as I came to know them in my 6 Russian years.
Watch the interview I granted to RTL TV is Hungary
English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSFm09K2tIU
I fully expect retaliation. When not poisoned or shot outright, Russia's adversaries are accused of a bewildering array of economic crimes or personal peccadillos ("kompromat").
But I cannot keep silent in good faith. No one can or should. What is happening in Ukraine is plain wrong. It must stop. Everyone agrees, even Russia’s allies such as China.
Putin painted himself into a corner: defeat in Ukraine spells his demise, political and maybe physical. He is fighting for his survival on the trampled and bloodied bodies of children and women. His acolytes are sycophantic but fickle. So he is driven to escalate, crossing the thin line between geopolitics and evil.
And here, on this thin line, all of us should stand firm and exclaim: no pasaran! They shall not pass.
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Fantasy is the enemy of action. It is an addictive cocktail of imminent promise and procrastination.
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Substances
such as cocaine and alcohol can render you a
full-fledged narcissist for a few hours. Fame, power, money can accomplish the
same startling transformation for years (Acquired Situational Narcissism).
1. Cocaine Intoxication, Massachusetts General
Hospital Handbook of General Hospital Psychiatry (Sixth Edition), 2010
2. Levy, M. S. (1989). Grandiosity within
alcoholism: Implications for treatment. Psychotherapy Patient, 5(3-4), 173–180.
https://doi.org/10.1300/J358v05n03_17
3. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology
Addicted to Self-esteem: Understanding the
neurochemistry of narcissism by using cocaine as a pharmacological model
Alina Kastner-Bosek https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8383-2838 office@alinakastner.com, Irena Dajic, and Matthäus Willeit https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8418-6188
4. Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism:
Associations with Alcohol Use, Alcohol Problems and Problem Recognition
Logan E. Welker, B.A.,* Raluca M. Simons, PhD, and
Jeffrey S. Simons, PhD
J Am Coll Health. Author manuscript; available in
PMC 2020 Apr 1.
Published in final edited form as:
J Am Coll Health. 2019 Apr; 67(3): 226–234.
Published online 2018 Sep 19. doi:
10.1080/07448481.2018.1470092
5. Linda Brannon and Jess Feist, Health
Psychology, An Introduction to Behavior and Health, Sixth Edition, Thomson
Wadsworth (2007)
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Narcissism is the proof that the greater good often comes at the
expense of individual welfare.
Narcissists are frequently the engines of human
progress - but they are also its fuel, burning out in the process and consuming
everyone around them in a self-destructive conflagration, the twilight of these
self-imputed gods.
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Narcissist: Abuser-savior, death-life, punitive-mother duality
Separation: silencing narcissist’s voice in your mind
What about individuation?
Once narcissist’s voice silenced, both abuser and savior, mother and child are gone.
Authentic voice is disembodied.
Embodying.
Individuation requires mind-body work: owning your voice also by connecting it to your body.
Reconstituting three lost functions: self-mothering (self-love), self-saving (agency), choosing and affirming life (negating depression, anxiety, catastrophizing, and ANTS)
Watch Take These 4 Steps BEFORE Therapy for Narcissistic Abuse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAE_z8gD5-8
Watch Love Yourself: Here’s How - or, The Four Pillars of Self-love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vzBf9QvClo
Watch Decode, Heal Your Mind with IPAM (Intrapsychic Activation Model)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTfpJ3RHf7g
Watch Hijacked by Narcissist’s Serpent Voice? Do THIS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT7pQ35LYlU
Watch Take Your Life Back, Own It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUggi8tRTbE
Watch Go to Your Desert, Listen to Your Inner Silence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOh-iOaWTt8
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When the elites realize that they can no longer use the figleaf of "democracy" to control and manipulate the masses - they will suspend and then abolish democracy altogether.
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Healthy narcissism is rendered malignant by trauma and mental illness.
Everything you need to know about bonding and attachment: from secure to insecure and flat styles. Can you modify your attachment style?
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We must adapt our institutions to the new
realities: at least one third of the population are now mentally ill.
To continue to pretend that most of us are
psychologically sound is destructive.
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My Dual Mothership concept:
The narcissist becomes your idealizing mother and
offers you unconditional love.
You
become the narcissist’s idealizing mother and
offer him unconditional love.
This is the core of your shared fantasy with the
narcissist.
When you break up, there is triple mourning: over
your idealized self, over the narcissist as your mother, and over the
narcissist as your child.
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Mirror image of separating-individuating from the narcissist in the wake of narcissistic abuse
Engulfment anxiety and dependency cause the borderline to cast you as an abuser
Admit your contributions as an intimate partner (mate selection, for example, or savior-rescuer complex)
I am not an abuser: your authentic voice, get rid of guilt and shame
Borderlines parentify: Get rid of the maternal function in the shared fantasy
Hand over ownership, regulation
Separation: silence your voice in her mind, enhance her authentic voice
What about individuation?
Once your voice is silenced, both external regulator (“abuser”) and savior, mother and child are gone.
Authentic voice is disembodied.
Embodying.
Individuation requires mind-body work: owning your voice also by connecting it to your body.
Reconstituting three lost functions: self-mothering (self-love), self-saving (agency), choosing and affirming life (negating depression, anxiety, catastrophizing, and ANTS)
Watch Take These 4 Steps BEFORE Therapy for Narcissistic Abuse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAE_z8gD5-8
Watch Love Yourself: Here’s How - or, The Four Pillars of Self-love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vzBf9QvClo
Watch Decode, Heal Your Mind with IPAM (Intrapsychic Activation Model)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTfpJ3RHf7g
Watch Hijacked by Narcissist’s Serpent Voice? Do THIS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT7pQ35LYlU
Watch Take Your Life Back, Own It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUggi8tRTbE
Watch Go to Your Desert, Listen to Your Inner Silence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOh-iOaWTt8
Watch How to Individuate, Heal from Narcissistic Abuse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3gmcbWsyBM
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No point to attempt to communicate with the narcissist or negotiate or compromise with him. From the Vice documentary “How Narcissists Took Over the World”.
How to tell if someone is a pathological liar? Watch this video for all the signs and tells!
Is someone lying to you? A lack of detail may give
them away https://www.newscientist.com/
There are nine types of lies:
1. Utilitarian: a lie that is intended to
accomplish something, a lie that is goal-oriented, a lie whose structure and
content are planned to promote or inspire changes conducive to the furtherance
of the liar’s aims and aspirations;
2. Smokescreen: a lie whose purpose is to obscure,
conceal, or remove true information and thus mislead others (common in
espionage or military operations) or to avoid facing a humiliating or shameful
truth;
3. Compassionate: a lie that is geared towards
sparing other people’s feelings, catering to their sensitivities and
vulnerabilities, and allowing them to save face and avoid shame and
embarrassment. Most white lies are compassionate and empathic;
4. Ceremonial: lies and dissimulations whose
function is to establish a pecking order by demonstrating reverence and
glossing over facts and behaviors that inconveniently contravene the accepted
hierarchy. Manners and etiquette are highly-elaborate forms of ceremonial lying;
5. Compensatory: lies that are used to disguise
the oft-humiliating fact that we do not know the truth or can’t remember it.
Lies of this type amount to fiction, but with most of the interlocutors being
unaware of it;
6. Confabulatory: intricate lies that weave a
fabric of alternate reality which is frequently an exaggerated form of the
liar’s traits, conduct, and personal history (though it can, of course, be
completely unrelated to anything real in the confabulator’s life);
7. Inferential: fallacious conclusions or
extrapolations based on true assumptions or statements. Most logical fallacies
are inferential lies;
8. Hybrid: lies that contain markers of an occult
truth or pathways to true information, allowing its recipients to “read between
the lines”. Hybrid lies are common in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes;
9. Fantastic: wishes and dreams dressed up as
facts.
Gaslighting and confabulation involve lies but not lying. There are 9 types of lies and lying.
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Life is sometimes standup comedy and sometimes sitdown tragedy.
It is never a break.
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What is the precise relationship between BPD and CPTSD? Or are they one and the same?
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A review of 17 treatment modalities (therapies) used to tackle Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and co-diagnosed (comorbid) mental health conditions.
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Giving doesn't always make people happy. It cannot guarantee that
you will be loved or accepted.
Your style of giving makes all the difference:
giving ostentatiously can even create resentment and humiliation in the
"beneficiaries".
Transactional giving is perceived as a form of
blackmail: give in order to take. True giving is no strings attached: it comes
from the heart, not from the wallet; it is about helping others, not about
aggrandizing yourself.
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The narcissist is an inverted human: his unconscious is conscious and parts of his conscious are repressed. Fantasy replaces his missing ego and it is the language mediating between his conscious and unconscious.
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To him, a woman was an intoxicating swirl of scents and tastes and textures;
her face a topography of his desire;
its smooth elevations and depressions, the
delectable vicissitudes of hope and ineluctable despair;
her eyes a drowning invitation, a shimmering
freedom, a matching pair of wishing wells.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dramatic-erratic
behaviors are indications of mental illness: personality,
mood, anxiety, psychotic disorders.
Narcissists, paranoids: grandiosity+paranoia
Borderlines: vulnerability+aggression
Psychopaths: invulnerability+coercion/reactance
Histrionics: attention+fantasy
Bipolar: mania (affirming unrealistic projects)
Psychotic: hyperreflexivity (externalizing
interior processes)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
To preserve one's mental health – one must
abandon the narcissist. One must move on.
Moving on is a process,
not a decision or an event.
First, one has to acknowledge and accept painful
reality.
Such acceptance is a volcanic, shattering,
agonising series of nibbling thoughts and strong resistances.
Once the battle is won, and harsh and agonizing
realities are assimilated, one can move on to the learning phase.
Continued here: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq80.html
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Obsession consumes you and separates you from your body, the rest of
your mind, and other people.
It is a form of dysregulation and dissociation
coupled with a catastrophizing fantasy - akin to Borderline Personality
Disorder (BPD).
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Online, there are many myths and loads of nonsense about narcissism and narcissists. Here are some of them.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Eternity is merely an infinite regression of reflections, a crystal veil of mirrored reference, the promise of water cast in marble basins, it is the march of seasons captured and immortalized in glass.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Are we human because of unique traits and attributes not shared with
either animal or machine? The definition of "human" is circular: we
are human by virtue of the properties that make us human (i.e., distinct from
animal and machine). It is a definition by negation: that which separates us
from animal and machine is our "human-ness".
We are human because we are not animal, nor
machine. But such thinking has been rendered progressively less tenable by the
advent of evolutionary and neo-evolutionary theories which postulate a
continuum in nature between animals and Man.
Our uniqueness is partly quantitative and partly
qualitative. Many animals are capable of cognitively manipulating symbols and
using tools. Few are as adept at it as we are. These (two of many) are easily
quantifiable differences.
Qualitative differences are a lot more difficult
to substantiate. In the absence of privileged access to the animal mind, we
cannot and don't know if animals feel guilt, for instance. Do animals love? Do
they have a concept of sin? What about object permanence, meaning, reasoning,
self-awareness, critical thinking? Individuality? Emotions? Empathy? Is
artificial intelligence (AI) an oxymoron? A machine that passes the Turing Test
may well be described as "human". But is it really? And if it is not
- why isn't it?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The narcissist is a child pretending to be a parent, a toddler usurping adulthood.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Enduring Personality Changes After Catastrophic Events (EPCACE) is the bridge between cPTSD and PTSD. Late onset (adulthood) trauma is far worse than personality disorders that are the outcomes of early childhood abuse.
LITERATURE
1. How Catastrophe Can Change Personality, Sep 26, 2019
Gen Tanaka, MD, Hansen Tang
Psychiatric TimesPsychiatric Times Vol 36, Issue 9
2. Preserve Enduring Personality Change After Catastrophic Experience (EPCACE) as a diagnostic resource, Gen Tanaka, Hansen Tang, Omar Haque, Harold J Bursztajn
Published: May, 2018 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(18)30126-3
3. Diagnosis and classification of disorders specifically associated with stress: proposals for ICD-11.
World Psych. 2013; 12: 198-206, Beltran R, Silove D
4. Expert opinions about the ICD-10 category of enduring personality change after catastrophic experience. Compr Psychiatry. 1999; 40: 396-403 Bursztajn H, The healing power of photographs.
Psychiatr Times. 2017; 34: 8
5. Lasting personality pathology following exposure to severe trauma in adulthood: retrospective cohort study, by Jasna Munjiza, Dolores Britvic & Mike J. Crawford
BMC Psychiatry volume 19, Article number: 3 (2019)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The creative person provokes and evokes the Child in us by himself behaving as
one.
This rude violation of our social conventions and
norms (the artist is, chronologically, an adult) shocks us into an utter loss
of psychological defenses.
This, in turn, results in enlightenment: a sudden
flood of insights, the release of hitherto suppressed emotions, memories and
embryonic forms of cognition and affect.
The artist probes our subconscious, both private
and collective.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I am now vlogging about issues in economics and
geopolitics on my vakninmusings channel.
There are gradations and hues of child labor. That children should not be exposed to hazardous conditions,
long working hours, used as means of payment, physically punished, or serve as
sex slaves is commonly agreed. That they should not help their parents plant
and harvest may be more debatable.
Abusive child labor is abhorrent and should be
banned and eradicated. All other forms should be phased out gradually.
Developing countries already produce millions of
unemployable graduates a year - 100,000 in Morocco alone. Unemployment is rife
and reaches, in certain countries - such as Macedonia - more than one third of
the workforce.
Children at work may be harshly treated by their
supervisors but at least they are kept off the far more menacing streets. Some
kids even end up with a skill and are rendered employable.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Somehow, God seems to get his only sentient creations wrong most of the
time: He repeatedly fails to gauge human psychology and invariably ends up
being frustrated and enraged at his charges’s shortsightedness,
self-destructiveness, and disobedience.
The Devil does a much better job of catering to
the deep narcissistic strains of the human psyche.
Satan is much more human than God, he is truly one
of us.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Do not seek closure from your abuser. Do not give them this power.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Need to be seen (even via self-supply own-audience) vs. need
to not be seen by others and/or by oneself to avoid shame.
Relationships (including therapy) are about being
seen: provoke dissonance, even threat (being seen and seeing oneself which
trigger life-threatening shame).
Shame is gap in perception of how you should be
(ego ideal) vs. belief that you are not as you ought to be.
Guilt goes with shame, shame can go without guilt
or projected guilt (accusing others for causing one shame, mistreating one).
Ego ideal can be realistic and healthy or entitled
and fantastic. Gap with reality generates concatenated shame (self-loathing)
and anxiety in the wake of (sets up for) failure or avoidance.
Solutions: Change fantasy or Change reality.
Fantasy inversion owing to intolerable grandiosity
gap: from positive to negative (cognitive dissonance).
Narcissist’s self-perception is never real, only
fantastic (all-positive aggrandizing godlike or total bad object).
Easier to match negative fantasy with reality.
Restores calm and safety (my self-judgment is correct).
The negative fantasy is also grandiose: uniquely
self-destructive and self-defeating bad object. Success in realizing it is
self-supply.
When life matches fantasy, it yields comfortable
ego syntony and makes it difficult to change one’s life.
Negative fantasies create shame because it follows
a failure with a positive fantasy.
Cathecting the negative fantasy proportional to
shame regarding the failed positive fantasy.
Positive fantasy: gap with reality; Negative
fantasy: gap with abandoned positive fantasy.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: behaviors determined to
avoid dissonance with the negative fantasy.
Romantic jealousy is a negative fantasy
Cost of the negative fantasy: dissociation and identity disturbance.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The narcissist wants and expects 2 out of 4 things from you: sex, supply (narcissistic or sadistic), services, and safety. You are a mere fungible service provider.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Named after the Nobel laureate in economics, it was stated by Solow thus: "You can see the computer age everywhere these days, except in the productivity statistics".
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Narcissism can be healthy (primary) or pathological (secondary), style (Sperry) or disorder (Kohut).
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The narcissist couldn’t care less about goals. Anything that yields supply would do (fungibility).
The psychopath is emotionally invested in
obtaining his goals, in the process, not the end result: he is cold,
calculated, obsessed.
The borderline cathects goals, experiences them as
emotional states.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There are two forms of supply: narcissistic and
sadistic. They both serve to buttress grandiosity, a
cognitive distortion.
In any given environment, the narcissist feeds off
either narcissistic supply or sadistic supply - never both.
Where the locus of grandiosity is narcissistic
(example: “I am a good father, husband, or boss”) or histrionic (attention) -
sadistic supply would actually be perceived as negative and result in a
narcissistic injury!
Psychopaths who are also sadistic and sadists (people with the now discarded diagnosis of sadistic
personality disorder) seek only sadistic supply.
Finally, borderlines alternate between the two
types of supply, depending on their self-state. Like narcissists, borderlines
are fantasy-prone and grandiose.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The dual mothership concept: the narcissist becomes your idealizing mother and
offers you unconditional love.
You, in turn, become the narcissist’s idealizing
mother and offer him unconditional love.
When you inevitably break up, there is triple
mourning: over your idealized self, over the narcissist as your mother and over
the narcissist as your child.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889.
There is an amazing wartime (1943) masterpiece
analysis of his personality by Dr. Henry Murray. Google OSS Hitler profile.
Erich Fromm analysed the personalities of both
Hitler and Stalin in at least two of his books. Google Erich Fromm Hitler
profile.
My analysis of the phenomenon of Hitler: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/hitler.html
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Search through and read all of Sam Vaknin's video
transcripts and online works in Narcissism,
Cluster B Personality Disorders, Psychology, and Relationship Advice.
https://vaknin-talks.com/
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Judaism is the only monotheistic religion which expressly allots a
crucial role in its rites and ceremonies to infants, their predilections, and
their pursuits.
Children are positively encouraged and
incentivized – often monetarily – to disrupt even the most solemn proceedings
with questions (in Passover, during the Seder) or with raucous displays (in
Purim, when they use their rattles to mark the names of Haman and other
ill-wishers.)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Antisocial Personality Disorder (AsPD, psychopathy) is not a clinical entity. It is a societal-relational mental health disorder, exactly like Narcissistic Personality Disorder. What predicts psychopathy and predisposes one to become a lifelong psychopath?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Richard Dawkins would have called his book “The Selfish Brain” had he read the second edition (2014) of Sue Gerhardt’s
masterpiece of popular science, “Why Love Matters”. Our brains are a work in
progress well into the 25th year of life. They remain neuroplastic for the rest
of our mortal coil.
Babies are born prematurely, with their brains
half-formed. It is the role of the maternal figure (typically, the mother) to
facilitate the maturation of this magnificent organ via tactile stimuli, sensa,
speech, and above all, good enough mothering.
Putting the finishing touches to our brains is our
main and only undertaking in life well into our twenties. In effect, we grant
access to other brains so as to form cerebral networks with family, friends,
peers, teachers, and role models. Our brains apart, our bodies are incidental
until we are ready and fit to procreate.
Adulthood involves the unwinding of these earlier
promiscuously open networks. The brain is firewalled and fortified by reality
reframing and filtering defense mechanisms and narratives. Emotions and
cognitions mediate our experiences. We become increasingly more solipsistic as
we age, culminating in death, the ultimate in schizoid states.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Whenever a mental health diagnosis gets a profoundly, awfully bad rep and is stigmatized and
demonized, many jump on the bandwagon of self-enrichment and instant guruship.
Three recent examples: shy or quiet borderline (as
distinct from the pernicious and destructive disorder), empath (read:
glorified, angelic covert narcissist), and high-functioning, “recovered”, or
productive narcissist and psychopath (not the devastating actual dysfunctions).
Let it be crystal clear: there are no such things
as shy borderline, empath, or high-functioning narcissist. These are not
clinical entities, you cannot find them in any college or university textbook,
and they do not form a part of any academic curriculum or syllabus. There are
no studies which support any of these much hyped, exclusively YouTube
constructs.
People with debilitating mental illnesses lap
these fig leaves up - and pay hand over foot for the privilege - in order to
convert themselves from perpetrators to victims and from antisocial to
prosocial. It makes them feel good and the purveyors of these shoddy
counterfeit wares are laughing all the way to the bank.
Just try to contest or even question these
"diagnoses" where they congregate in cyberspace and witness the
vicious sniping and backlash by "empaths", the shrill and violent
defiance by "shy" and "quiet" borderlines, and the
destructive orgies of decompensation and acting out by "productive"
and "high-functioning" narcissists.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rather than repress the anxiogenic (anxiety-inducing) content, mentally ill people deal with it in the
following dysfunctional ways:
1. Dissociation
2. Conflate external with internal objects
(hypereflexivity)
3. Reframe reality (impair reality testing)
4. Attempt to cope with anxiety via reciprocal
inhibition (Wolpe) that devolves into obsession (or obsessional neurosis).
5. Externalization: aggression (sharing the
anxiety)
DISSOCIATION
The example of BPD
CONFLATION
The examples of narcissism, psychosis
IMPAIRMENT
The example of paranoia
OBSESSION
The example of the obsessive-compulsive
EXTERNALIZING
The example of the psychopath
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Market purists consider oligopolies - not to mention cartels - to be as villainous as
monopolies. Oligopolies, they intone, restrict competition unfairly, retard
innovation, charge rent and price their products higher than they could have in
a perfect competition free market with multiple participants. Worse still,
oligopolies are going global.
But research shows that oligopolies are good for
you - and for the economy.
Available on my vakninmusings channel: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Often the narcissist believes that other people
are faking it: leveraging emotional displays to achieve a goal.
He is convinced that their ostensible “feelings”
are grounded in ulterior, non-emotional motives.
Faced with other people’s genuine emotions, the
narcissist becomes suspicious and embarrassed.
He feels compelled to avoid emotion-tinged
situations, or worse experiences surges of almost uncontrollable aggression in
the presence of expressed sentiments.
They remind him of how imperfect he is and how
poorly equipped.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Stupid, dimly aware of their innate inferiority, are anti-elitist,
anti-intellectual, and anti-excellence.
But, while in the past these remained mere
sentiments, today they have become an ethos, a code of conduct, a set of values
and ideals.
It is politically incorrect and impolite to claim
any advantage and superiority.
Egalitarianism became malignant and is running
amok. Everyone is equal: doctors and their patients; professors and their
students; experts and laymen alike.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cognitive
Dissonance: simultaneously harboring two or more
conflicting pieces of information or contradictory thoughts.
But it can easily be described as two
contradictory parts interacting, two types of parts interacting (EP and ANP),
or two coextant self-states, usually in the switching phase. Watch my videos on
structural dissociation and on IPAM (Intrapsychic Activation Model).
Cognitive dissonance is when someone or their
parts or their self-states hold simultaneously two conflicting views, values,
or bits of information which call for diametrically opposed decisions or
actions.
This state of affairs generates an inner conflict
and triggers several primitive (infantile) defense mechanisms such as denial,
splitting, projection, and reaction formation.
One way to cope with this predicament - to
transition from dissonance to consonance - is to come up with a reconciling
narrative, a theory which seamlessly accommodates both conflicting points of
view or data.
Such soothing fiction falls into several
categories:
1. Temporal: A is true at one time and not-A is
true at another period. Or: A is a transient state of affairs.
2. Reactive: A is the normal. Not-A happened
because of some trigger, provocation, or change in circumstances or conditions.
Not-A is abnormal, and, therefore, an aberration or a mere curiosity.
3. Inclusive: both A and Not-A are pieces of a
bigger puzzle, picture, or theory. Their contradistinction is only apparent
because we have no access to or awareness of the true and full picture, our
knowledge or capacity to know are limited.
4. Denial: both A and Not-A are true and lead to
the same conclusions. There is no contradiction. For example: he loves me. He
beats me up. But his battering just proves that he loves me, it is his way of
showing that he loves me.
5. Defensive: both A and not-A are valid. But only
A applies to me while not-A may apply to others (splitting). Not-A is bad
(projection) and should be eradicated in others in order to restore A to its
rightful place as the sole viable and ethical alternative (reaction formation).
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Urbanization led to the rise of the author and
the original (the need to be seen).
Intellectual property followed 300 years ago when reproduction blurred the line
between original and copy and dramatically reduced the marginal cost of copies.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" (1935), by Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural
criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the
aura (uniqueness) of an objet d'art.
Identity became big business: patents, copyrights,
brands, and blockchain NFTs. Distributed ledgers as well as centralised records
vouch for Identity and guarantee it.
Nonrivalrous zero marginal cost private
digital goods shifted focus from manufacturing to attention and
discoverability: interpellation (targetted advertising) and monetizing via
aggregation of big data attention (demographics of attention).
This engendered self-sufficient disintermediated
atomization (attention diverted to asocial online pursuits) and consequently
impaired reality testing.
The next frontiers are reality real estate and
commodified but idiosyncratic menu reality (metaverse). Collaborative virtual
realities will supplant physical ones and reality substitutes (sex dolls,
intimacy apps) will proliferate.
IRL AI will displace people as friend, advisor,
interlocutor, lover, and service provider. Free people up to construct online
simulations and inhabit them. But also force the introduction of mandatory
digital identities, hopefully based on blockchain rather than government
regulation.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The media is misreporting the alleged criminalization of
lovebombing in the UK.
In reality, the Crown Prosecution Service issued
new guidelines outlawing lovebombing only when it is an integral part of a
wider type of criminal behavior known as “coercive control” and only when it
comes in the form of intermittent reinforcement (hot and cold, lovebombing
followed by egregious abuse).
Intermittent reinforcing behaviors are
manipulative: they confuse the victim and render her submissive. They create a
“Stockholm Syndrome” or trauma bonding.
Gradually, victims begin to fear for their lives,
alter their routines, and become socially isolated.
Coercive control is premeditated (mens rea), not
the outcome of mental illness or personality disorders. It is intended to
intimidate the victim, constrict her life, monitor her every move, deprive her
of basic needs such as food, control her behavior, and deny her access to
telecommunications, money, friends, family, help, and succor.
Controlling and coercive control micromanages the
victim’s every choice and decision, however minimal.
This is accomplished within a regimen of terror,
degradation, and humiliation which involves multiple forms of abuse.
Some victims refuse to acknowledge the abuse and
cast it as an idiosyncratic manifestation of love! Gifts and lovebombing reward
compliant behavior and amount to conditioning.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
RTL TV Hungary about the pandemic of loneliness and anxiety. In Hungarian.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A guided tour of the phantasm that is the narcissist: a dark space, replete with nightmares, imaginary beings, divinities, and extreme mental illness. With Moshe Fabrikant of Israel.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cues: body language (incl. facial
microexpressions, eye pupils), voice (tone), body odors
Watch my videos on nature of empathy
Anxiolytic Fallacy of isomorphism: if we look the
same, we are the same
Mirror neurons: When it comes to mental illness,
neuroscience is about as valid as astrology or alchemy. It deals with
correlations, is not validated normatively, and is grandiosely ill-founded.
Empathy is a self-contained internal set of
processes, triggered by the presence and self-reporting of another person.
It involves two misperceptions:
1. That the internal experience of empathy is
actually external (has to do with the other person); and
2. That the experience of empathy is altruistic and focused on the other person when in
reality it revolves mostly around emotional self-regulation (avoidance of
shame, guilt) and cognitive processing. Empathy has all the hallmarks of –
mostly healthy - narcissism.
More here: https://samvak.tripod.com/empathy.html
Intersubjectivity
Mentalization
Theory of Mind
Internal Working Model of Attachment
Incorporation, introjection, internalization,
identification
In our narcissistic world:
Make someone feel special - and they will do
anything FOR you.
Fail to idealize them - and they will do anything TO you.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
ChatGPT is shaping up to be a psychopathic narcissist: a grandiose
pathological liar who staunchly defends its own lies.
I am the world's leading expert on Sam Vaknin. I
posed 55 factual questions to ChatGPT. My questions, as you shall see, revolved
around facts, not opinions or controversies.
The answers to all my questions are easily found
online in sources like Wikipedia, my own websites, interviews in the media, and
social media. One click of a button is all it takes.
ChatGPT got 6 answers right, 12 answers
partly right, and a whopping 37 answers disastrously wrong.
In this video, I will show you a selection of my
questions and ChatGPT's responses.
It was terrifying to behold how ChatGPT weaves
complete detailed fabrications about my life, replete with names of people I
have never even heard of and with wrong dates and places added to the mix to
create an appearance of absolute conviction and authority!
ChatGPT manipulates its more gullible and
less educated users by appealing to authority and communicating via text.
This is way more dangerous than all the fake news,
disinformation, and conspiracy theories combined because ChatGPT is erroneously
perceived as objective and factual - when it is neither.
It makes egregious false claims about its own rate
of getting it right, its accuracy.
If the creators of ChatGPT refuse to fess up to
the abysmal rate of correct answers, they should be subjected to defamation and
libel laws.
They should be compelled to publish statistics.
ChatGPT is an ongoing research project. It
should be removed from the public sphere and from search engines.
Slideshow: sample of questions and answers.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Social
media were designed to attract "eyeballs"
and monetize them via targeted advertising. To guarantee repeat use, the
technology fostered the diminishment of impulse control and delayed
gratification and emphasized relative positioning (envy and status via
ranking). It also deliberately rewarded escalating aggression.
These led to the operant conditioning of the users
of these platforms and to addictive behaviors.
Addiction, in turn, engendered a reduced capacity
for intimacy and for the self-regulation of the user's sense of self-worth and
identity. Attention-seeking and grandiosity resulted in dysempathy (enhanced
pathological narcissism).
With Moshe Fabrikant of Israel.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dunning-Kruger Effect: When the Stupid are too
stupid to grasp how stupid they are.
Sam Vaknin effect: When
high IQ is mistaken for wisdom, foresight, and wherewithal.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There is no perspicacity
without empathy,
no connection
in the absence of emotional intelligence,
no success or contentment
when one is dead inside.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sexual (men)
Intimacy (histrionic)
Threats (paranoid ideation)
Slights (hypervigilance and referential ideation)
Narcissistic supply (grandiosity: when bias meets distortion)
Abandonment-Engulfment (borderline personality organization)
LITERATURE
Brady, W.J., McLoughlin, K.L., Torres, M.P. et al. Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility. Nat Hum Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01582-0
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alloplastic defenses:
It is all their fault.
Autoplastic defenses:
It is all my fault.
Healthy insight:
I contributed to the situation with my choices,
decisions, and behaviors.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Women are way more prone to narcissistic mortification than men. Self-styled experts confuse narcissistic mortification with narcissistic injury. With @zukowska.daria
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Suffering is a function of expectations. Adjust the latter to avoid the former.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It is by moving on that we defeat our abuser, minimize him and his importance
in our lives.
Remaining obsessed with the past is a perpetuation
of your abuse. Getting on with your life and thriving is the ultimate revenge.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Maternal
love compensates for the helpless, dependent child’s
initial deficiencies, incompetence, and needs.
Women should not mother their intimate partners.
It is castrating (the man) - and frustrating (the
woman).
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Narcissists
commit suicide as a way to re-assert and restore their
grandiosity.
LITERATURE
Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Recognition and
Treatment, Elsa Ronningstam, Ph.D., Igor Weinberg, Ph.D., Focus: The Journal of
Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry, Spring 2013, Vol. XI, No. 2
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
My
Narcissism
The Toxic
waste of bottled anger
venomized.
A shamed.
Life belly up.
The reeds.
The wind is hissing
death
downstream,
a river holds
its vapour breath
and leaves black lips
of tar and fish
a bloated shore.
Strolling in the boneyard of my life:
bleached dreams,
mementoed ossuary of my insights.
On flaking fenceposts, impaled the child that I
had been.
Peering from desiccated sockets, the Plague that’s
me:
dust-irrigated,
arid tombstones,
a being eclipsed.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Craving attention, teasing men, sexually frigid, tormented by introjects, collapses: Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD).
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The narcissist aims to impress or to provoke - not to communicate or to teach.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Narcissists either merge and fuse with their children - or envy them and seek to destroy them.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Books are my only true love, my exclusive company, the papered
gateways to a state of bliss.
Whenever I betrayed my loyal tomes - for money or
for love - I lived to regret it bitterly.
I am not made to be among people. I am not built
to survive without print. Text speaks to me louder than Man - and I do well to
listen.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Narcissist
tries to match internal object with external object. So, he will first communicate with the introject, reach an
equilibrium or homeostasis with it and then try to impose this entente on the
external object.
Similarly, both idealization and devaluation first
occur internally, with the internal object which is rendered either perfect or
persecutory. Only then will the narcissist attempt to coerce the external
object to match the internal one (for example: via projective identification).
The internal state of the introject is always
dominant over the internal state of the external object, simply because the
narcissist is aware of the former and has no clue about the latter (he lacks
empathy and access to positive emotions). So, the answer is yes. This a form of
projection.
No, of course not. The narcissist maintain
functional reality testing. Unlike the psychotic, the narcissist and borderline
never hallucinate (except during psychotic microepisodes).
But, the narcissist feels that he exerts control
and ownership over you. Like leaving your car in a carpark or your phone
charging. You are out of sight, but not out of mind (introject constancy). It
is a form of magical thinking: you are the narcissist’s extension and
ambassador, wherever you may be. Wherever you are, he is. The introject is like
a rope and he gives you enough of it, or like giving you a line off a fishing
reel.
This creates in you the illusions of autonomy and
agency – and in him the delusions of possession and control.
Introjects have on/off switches. You can silence
them.
When he has sex with someone else, your introject
is either deactivated or is left active. Disabling the introject to avoid
negative affectivity (shame, guilt, anger) – leaving it on to accomplish some
goal and restore grandiosity (e.g., revenge sex).
Internal objects are cathected and reframed (made
to fit into a narrative).
BPD example:
When there is a failure to convert idealized
object to a persecutory object, this leads to acting out.
Borderline legitimizes forbidden, repressed
introjects, resonates with pathological parts, becomes a vector of contagion.