Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)
Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)
To protest: “I love women: they are so childlike!
They are so in need of protection and patience! They have a special language
all their own and their world is so limited!”
Is the worst form
of toxic
misogyny.
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Ryan Connor and Sam Vaknin contemplate narcissism, porn,
relationships, sex, and everything in between.
Watch full interview on Eyes Wide Open podcast,
episode 33.
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To gain love, to be rendered lovable, the
narcissist feels compelled to perform.
Hence the performative shared fantasy.
Grandiosity gap creates frustration-aggression
which is the aim of the shared fantasy as it leads to separation-individuation.
Narcissists: arrested stunted development,
age-inappropriateness
Compensatory strategies: antisocial-defiant vs.
conforming pseudo-normalcy
Childhood: mimicry, identity formation,
separation-individuation (both strategies combined in secure base)
Adolescence: peers, role models, overt
rebellion=conformity
Adulthood: life plan, goal attainment, shared
fantasy (in lieu of object relations)
Middle age: diffuse mortification, rebellion,
anxiety/panic, regression (“midlife crisis”), shared fantasy, impaired mate
selection
Senescence (old age): consequences (social
isolation, ostracism, incarceration, indigence)
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Walking
on eggshells starts in childhood.
Video courtesy of @antoniawhyte8666
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Defense
Mechanism
A psychological process that protects or isolates
a person from the effects of anxiety, internal and external stressors, and
perceived or real dangers, usually by reducing, altering, or blocking his or
her awareness of them. Defense mechanisms mediate the individual’s reactions to
emotional and physical hurt, inner conflicts, and stressors of all kinds. Most
defense mechanisms are adaptive when first formed but later become maladaptive
(e.g., splitting, acting out, projective identification, projection, intellectualization).
Others - such as suppression or denial - can be adaptive in certain
circumstances and if they are flexibly applied, are not severe, and are safely
reversible. Defense mechanisms are measured and evaluated using the Defensive
Functioning Scale.
Delirium
Delirium is a syndrome which involves
clouding, confusion, restlessness, psychomotor disorders (retardation or, on
the opposite pole, agitation), and mood and affective disturbances (lability).
Delirium is not a constant state. It waxes and wanes and its onset is sudden,
usually the result of some organic affliction of the brain.
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Does Khamenei have a point? Has Israel been defeated in
Gaza, or at least stymied there? Has the much vaunted
offensive boggled down?
Published on November 21 on my vakninmusings
YouTube channel. I misspoke: 2-3% should have been 20-30%.
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Devaluation is an unimaginably traumatizing experience.
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Collapsed narcissists (who fail to secure narcissistic supply) withdraw from life and become schizoid, immured in a shared fantasy with their internal objects (self-supply and sellf-audiencing). This could lead to self-mortification and self-stalking.
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Nicolas and I discuss narcissism, other cluster B disorders, the state of psychology, and the impacts of technology and popular culture and politics on the younger generations.
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When they accrue and accumulate:
The pedestrian, familiar, and habitual become
abusive, horrific, and abhorrent; and
The glacial, surreptitious, and imperceptible are
rendered discernible, overwhelming, and impossible to ignore.
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@shadowdeangelis elucidates the narcissist’s cycle of idealization-devaluation in under 90 seconds (!)
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The codependent believes that her neediness and helplessness guarantee her partner’s presence in her life and interest in her wellbeing.
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In the schizoid phase when the narcissist self-supplies, he can self-mortify (his introjects become the audience, the public). He stalks his introjects (obsession, rumination). Clinically, this involves a delusional disorder and a psychotic disorder. Self-stalking: an attempt to maintain introject and object constancy.
WATCH No Narcissistic Supply? Self-supply or Forced Supply https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjYH5d-bB2I
WATCH Narcissist’s Self-supply Techniques https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_xGUbMFRMw
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As with every protracted conflict, both the Israelis and the Palestinians spew out counterfactual propaganda regarding the events that led to the crisis of Palestinian refugees (more precisely: internally displaced people) in 1947-9.
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Some victims - real and self-styled - abuse their victimhood and act as narcissists do. Narcissists - especially covert ones - often self-aggrandise as “victims” and as “empaths”. With @micheleparadiseofficial
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Empowered by technology, contemporary Humanity is comprised of 99% profoundly dumb people who compensate
for their abysmal intellectual inferiority and nescience with pathetic and
risible grandiosity and with insufferable victimhood entitlement.
The remaining 1% are truly gifted and endowed
individuals whose veritable superiority renders them contemptuous and haughty.
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Painful message and hopeful message to victims of narcissistic abuse.
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A man or woman can fit into a whale’s heart.
And sometimes a whale can fit into the right human
heart.
But some people are heartless and no heart, no
matter how big, can accommodate them.
These people are known as narcissists and psychopaths.
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Narcissist
cannot love - but he also does not let himself be loved. His
bad object feels threatened and resists it.
Love always ends in heartbreak, pain, hurt and
abandonment.
Paranoid ideation and projection: love offered is
not real (a fantasy) or it is fake and manipulative. It needs to be tested and
probed all the time.
Love is for commoners, not for the exceptionally
superior.
Love is dependency and neediness: dependency is
risk and neediness is mortifying. It challenges the narcissist’s
self-sufficiency (I don’t need you, see if I care).
Love is vulnerability and therefore dangerous and
weak. It demands micromanaged and coercive control to avoid a devastating loss.
Love requires adult skills and sets the narcissist
- the perennial abused child - up for failure.
Love requires emotional maturity, a secure
attachment style, and a grounded center. The narcissist is an addict with none
of the above: his only relationship is with his drug, the fantasy sustained by
a constant influx of narcissistic supply.
Love requires the recognition of the Other.
Narcissists are incapable of othering and feel threatened by the partner’s
personal autonomy and agency, an external object gone amok and which threatens
the inertly perfect universe of their internal objects.
Narcissists blindly devour and consume. They are
mimicking parasites suspended in a sempiternal symbiotic fantasy, frenzily
feeding off their successive hosts.
They push away and resist any attempt to love
them. Their approach is acquisitive, their avoidance preordained by their need
to reenact the unresolved conflict with a dead mother. They are automata,
programmed with their own shame-driven compulsion, dummies to a self-conjured
ventriloquist, the False Self. A seeking homing in algorithm gone awry.
Video presentation at the Addiction World Conference, San Francisco, September 2024
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The twin flame is the empath’s
solution to his/her state of sempiternal victimization.
Both are delusional forms of covert - even psychopathic - narcissism.
Video courtesy of @mirna_liz37
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People incapable of happiness and intimacy reject life, that hurtful reminder of what could have been and will never transpire.
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@shadowdeangelis offers the most important advice to victims of narcissistic abuse. 90 seconds of healing.
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Sacrificial
entitlement is a form of self-supply, combines grandiosity
and victimhood, exactly like morality, charity.
Privilege to be privy, witness to his life,
adventures, and accomplishments.
A transformative experience for better
(narcissist’s POV) or for worse (your POV).
Your abandonment of him constitutes ingratitude,
part of your inexorable devaluation.
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Available on https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings
Masculinity: valor, heroism, courage (overcoming fear),
selflessness, altruism, self-sacrifice for the greater good, protectiveness.
Negative identity formation: dehumanizing,
objectifying, and demonizing the enemy, morality play (good vs, evil).
Role playing in an adversarial rule-based game (as
revealed when veterans on both sides meet after the war is over).
Winning validates (divine blessing and being
chosen, Got mit uns).
Cultural-social activity that facilitates
intimacy, bonding and cooperation, innovation, and emergent, cathartic new
order.
Tension between individual and collective (special
ops as middle ground)
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How common is pathological narcissism (narcissistic style) vs. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)?
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Your love is wasted on the narcissist because s/he regards himself/herself as unlovable (bad object). S/he interprets your love as manipulative faking.
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Speculating about WHY people do what they do is useless. It is far more productive to observe their actions. With Jim Moira, New Zealand.
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Adaptation applies to populations, not to individuals (thus sociobiology and behavioral ecology are more scientific). It is totally automatic. It cannot take into account cognitions, emotions, beliefs, values, and mental health disorders (such as psychosis).
Each psychological process and behavior involve thousands of co-expressed genes.
Focus on reproduction and reproductive success is utterly delusional and counterfactual. Example: rape is a misogynistic power trip, not about reproduction or even sex.
Ignores the role of intangibles such as meaning, truth, security, or happiness.
Domain (task) specific (modules) or domain general?
Computational models are behaviorist (input-processing-output). Dual Inheritance Theory DIT (Baldwin effect): genes+culture.
Determinism: stone age determined who we are (ignoring neuroplasticity).
We know very little about the environment in the past.
The conundrum of altruism: inclusive fitness applies only to relatives and reciprocity theories are counterfactual.
Exaptations, spandrels (byproducts), random variability are not adaptations but probably contribute more to survival.
Adaptations are complex, species universal, adaptively functional. Obligate (environment-invariant) or facultative. Most psychological adaptations are facultative.
Cultural universals are few and often confused with skills acquisition or conditioning (eg, via socialization and acculturation, social learning and modeling). Promiscuity as an example.
Environment of evolutionary adaptedness (recurrent selection pressures and boundary conditions) is retrodictive, teleological, and tautological.
Concept of mismatch (between erstwhile adaptations and changing environments).
Mismatch implies any number of possible original environments and explanations for the development of a trait.
Even hunter-gatherers lived in settlements, with rudimentary agriculture, and art.
Supernormal stimulus: impulse control.
Evo-devo (Evolutionary-Developmental Psychology): confusing biology with psychology (smiling, crying, facial expressions). This is an example of the pan-adaptationist fallacy.
Function to form (problem to solution): uncertain paternity led to male romantic jealousy (but exists also in childless couples, reaction to catastrophized loss and the intimacy part of the sex).
Form to function (reverse engineering solution to problem): morning sickness to avoid ingestion of toxins (nonsense: it is bad even when not pregnant, it stop in the second trimester, is biological).
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There are 2 ways to keep the
narcissist tethered to you and addicted to the shared
fantasy:
1. Tell him how great and unique he is; or
2. Tell him how needed and indispensable he is.
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Wars are fueled by victimhood and narcissism (talk on the Eyes Wide Open podcast with Conor Ryan).
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When you are independent of him, the narcissist
fears you and when you are dependent on him, he holds you in contempt.
The narcissist dreads your personal autonomy and
agency and disdains your dependency and emotionality.
There is no winning strategy with
the narcissist.
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Why do narcissistic mothers damage and break their daughters to that extent?
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Triangulation revolves around managing and controlling a relationship
dynamic by introducing a third party into the mix, emotionally or sexually.
Triangulating partners choose any third party who
is perceived - in reality or fantasy - as available.
When no specific third party is available to
triangulate with, they makes general triangulation statements such as:
“I always cheat; I can never be loyal; I can’t
resist my sex drive; cheating is meaningless; I don’t give a damn about my
partner; I don’t even remember him when I have sex with others; I always do as
I please at the moment” and so on.
Triangulation is used to get a rise out of the
partner and thus restore the relationship; punish for some transgression, real,
anticipated, or imagined; sustain a fantasy; or dissolve the relationship.
Pushing your partner to cheat is also a form of triangulation.
The word gaslighting was invented in the 1960s,
but I was the first scholar to use it in terms of narcissistic abuse (a phrase
that I coined to describe the narcissist’s annihilating abuse).
Video courtesy of @shadowdeangelis
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The narcissist never envies WHO you are - only what you possess or accomplish.
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Premarital cohabitation is correlated with higher rates of divorce.
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The narcissistic parent regards his or her child as a multi-faceted Source of Narcissistic Supply. The child is considered and treated as an extension of the narcissist. It is through the child that the narcissist seeks to settle “open scores” with the world. The child is supposed to realise the unfulfilled dreams, wishes, and fantasies of the narcissistic parent.
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Some abused and traumatized children become narcissists. With psychotherapist Michele Paradise @micheleparadiseofficial
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First, we took the magic out of the Universe and its Reality.
Then we demystified the human mind.
Now we are removing the wonder from the
captivating dance of sex and intimacy.
The Great Disenchantment is upon us.
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Psychotherapy
and sex used to be private, intimate activities.
Now both are ostentatious online spectacles.
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We are pathologizing, medicalizing, and criminalizing every human behavior, handing over power over individuals to institutions. It is social control gone haywire.
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Nowadays, honesty is considered to be deplorable aggression and truth-telling an attempt to victimize. Confirmation bias and victimhood rule. Charlatans and con artists are having a field day.
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Narcissist’s
Fallacy: If everyone is unique, no one is unique. Only
way to be unique is to not be unique like everybody else.
So, the narcissist must deny the uniqueness of
others by emphasizing commonalities and, at the same time, deny the denominator
common to him and others.
This is a slippery slope. It can end up denying
the narcissist’s own uniqueness. This is why he idealizes or devalues a subset
of internal objects (vicarious uniqueness, by proxy).
Temporal splitting: uniqueness in
idealization-devaluation.
Narcissist’s problem: Everyone is unique specimen
due to unidirectionality of time arrow and indeterminacy in QM, everyone is
non-repeatable and non-replicable (which is why psychology is pseudoscience).
Moreover: everyone is non-repeatable and
non-replicable from one nanosecond to the next. The concepts of self and core
identity are counterfactual.
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Fade away The Dead
You are forgiven
We
Have the business of Life
to run
Without
Your penumbral interference
and your skeletal remains
in our overflowing closets
So
render yourselves
the memories
that you have always been
and slink away in silence
into your kingdom
Await us
We are on our way
We won’t be late to join you, rest assured
in peace
for we will be there soon
with you
a dim remembrance.
Portrait courtesy of Jean Stanoevski.
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The shared fantasy is the narcissist’s second childhood.
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Inter-gender relations have rarely been worse. This is the sad outcome of several accelerated social trends:
1. Invulnerability signalling
Both genders signal to each other that they are autonomous, goal oriented, unemotional, uninvolved, and totally self-sufficient.
2. Gender vertigo
The abolition of gender roles and sexual scripts engendered ubiquitous confusion with regards to appropriate behaviors and codes of conduct. Each relationship and institution has to be negotiated from scratch in every instance and this results in destructive and depleting friction and eventual atomization.
3. Stalled revolution
Both men and women now regard themselves in erstwhile masculine terms ("unigender"). Both have become breadwinners. Women have surpassed men in many realms.
Politically correct and woke groups and media revel in this uniformity. One inane example: mainstream media have recently resorted to the moronic phrase "pregnant people".
4. Fluidity
Both biological sex and socio-culturally determined genders are now up for grabs and subject to alteration.
5. Defiant agency
Agency and self-efficacy are gradually being infused with aggression and transmogrified into in your face assertiveness and reckless defiance. This attitudinal change has permeated the inter-gender dialog and displaced more benign discourses.
6. Enshrined double standard
Women conform to male stereotypes of sexually emancipated females ("sluts"). Their claims of empowerment are belied by their introjection of the male chauvinistic double standard and by rampant sexual self-trashing and self-harming behaviors. This duality - self-denial and self-deception - is driving the genders apart. Men and women are giving up on each other in droves and for good.
LITERATURE
John L. Oliffe, Mary T. Kelly, Nina Gao, Jennifer Mootz, Zac E. Seidler, Simon M. Rice, Neo-traditionalist, egalitarian and progressive masculinities in men's heterosexual intimate partner relationships, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 333, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116143
For Valentine’s Day, 5 facts about single Americans
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The narcissist’s life in under 30 seconds: from life of the party to schizoid recluse.
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Don’t become a clone of your abuser.
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Frustration is perceived as narcissistic injury or even mortification.
It breeds intolerable anxiety and stress which result in decompensation,
emotional dysregulation (BPD self-state), and acting out (secondary
psychopathic self-state).
Low frustration threshold and tolerance lead to
desperate attempts to eliminate the source via externalized and reckless
aggression culminating in violence (coercive snapshotting).
Narcissist perceives frustration as emanating from
the inside. His aggression is actually an attempt to reduce dissonance and
anxiety.
Walking away won’t do the trick because
narcissists interact exclusively with internal objects, dehumanizing and
objectifying others.
The BPD self-state is impulsive and destructive
(temper tantrum). The psychopathic one is cold, premeditated, ruthless,
callous, relentless, inhumanly dysempathic. But both of them are
fantasy-oriented and involve an impaired reality testing.
Psychopathic state preceded by a covert state:
ponderous, brooding, spiteful, passive-aggressive, bitter, determined, evasive,
overly polite (pseudo-civility), affected, ostentatiously obedient or caring.
Keeps imagining the act.
Borderline state either sudden (eruptive with calm
before the storm) or escalatory.
Alloplastic defenses justify the aggression. An
external locus of control (you made me do it) aggravates the antisocial
behaviors.
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Nothing worse than being trapped in the workplace with a narcissist. Eyes Wide Open Podcast with Conor Ryan.
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WATCH CPTSD or Personality Disorder? (Compilation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0-JD78_Wjo
WATCH Narcissist: When Reality is Just a Dream (Ego's Reality Testing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R77ofZW99LE
“SHY” or “QUIET” BPD vs. CLASSICAL BPD
I reject the “diagnosis” of shy borderline. All borderlines are sometimes shy and introverted ("act in") and sometimes act out aggressively.
Someone who is “shy” ALL the time is not a borderline. She is either a covert narcissist or has CPTSD.
Impaired reality testing is not the same as no reality testing. Fantasy is not a hallucination: fantasy borrows elements from reality and builds around them.
The narcissist, borderline, paranoid, schizotypal cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy because they share components, have a lot in common.
NPD fantasy is infantile (phantasy). In the absence of a fully constellated and integrated self and ego, the fantasy is limited to self-regulation via cognitive distortion and to the resolution of early childhood conflicts (separation-individuation). All the rest is intact.
BPD fantasy involves external regulation and outsources ego functions.
When fantasy fails in NPD the outcome is shame dysregulation and mortification, when it fails in BPD the outcomes are dysregulation and lability.
In NPD shared fantasy, the partner is unreal (internal object). In BPD shared fantasy the partner is hyperreal. Borderlines perceive themselves and their lives as Unreal (dissociation). This is why borderlines cling, hoover ferociously, won’t let go. They leverage every opportunity and contact to reconstitute the shared fantasy. Example: We all seek closure. But borderlines abuse this quest in order to hook you yet again.
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Money, career, fame, affairs, siring children -
are all intended to fend off inevitable aging and death.
But busy as we are in anticipating the future and
outwitting it, we neglect the present, our nearest and dearest, others, and
life itself.
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Was Jesus born 2023 or 2024 years ago? Was he born in year zero?
The first year AD was 1 - so, Jesus could not have
been born in year zero. The very concept of zero was invented much later.
Numerous historical minutia in the gospels
indicate that Jesus must have been born before 4 BC. For example, He is said to
have been born during the reign of King Herod, who died in 4 BC.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Santa Sam
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Psychopath: compartmentalization of positive emotions.
Ingroup and outgroup.
Machiavellianism: Power play: catching emotions is defeat by a manipulative abuser (the victim!)
Honesty only when ready to move on or when attempting to destroy victim
Decoy behaviors
Comorbidities: NPD+BPD, Malignant narcissism explained via compartmentalization/isolation.
Compartmentalization and isolation are the mechanisms that enable dissociation, splitting, concentration/attention/focus, cognitive dissonance, comorbidities, and self-states (see IPAM).
Coping with death
Addictions like workaholism
It is more like role play but one role being surrealistic and another grounded in reality, one internal and one external (responsive to internal vs. external environment, respectively).
LITERATURE: APA DICTIONARY
compartmentalization
n. a defense mechanism in which thoughts and feelings that seem to conflict or to be incompatible are isolated from each other in separate and apparently impermeable psychic compartments. In the classical psychoanalytic tradition, compartmentalization emerges in response to fragmentation of the ego, which ideally should be able to tolerate ambiguity and ambivalence. See also isolation. —compartmentalize vb.
Isolation
in psychoanalytic theory, a defense mechanism that relies on keeping unwelcome thoughts and feelings from forming associative links with other thoughts and feelings, with the result that the unwelcome thought is rarely activated. See also compartmentalization.
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Jesus’
mother, Mary, was a virgin before she gave birth to him - and
remained a virgin in perpetuity. This is the official (Catholic) doctrine.
But Jesus had brothers and sisters - plenty of
siblings.
St. Paul wrote (Galatians 1:18-19):
‘Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to
see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But of the other apostles saw I
none save James the Lord’s brother.”
This very same James is also the son of one,
Alpheus! All the brothers of Jesus are the sons of this Alpheus whose wife’s
name was ... Mary!
Matthew 1:25:
“And he [Joseph] knew her [Mary] not until she had
brought forth her first-born son...”
First-born meaning there were others who followed
(second-born, third-born, etc.)
Matthew 13:55-56:
“Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his
mother called Mary? And his brethren, James and Joses and Simon and Judas? And
his sisters, are they not all with us?”
Mark 6:3 (referring to Jesus):
“Is this not the carpenter, the brother of James,
and Joses, and of Judas, and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?”
According to both Matthew and Mark, three women
stood by the cross at the crucifixion: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James
and of Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children (Salome). Salome was Virgin
Mary’s sister and, therefore, Jesus’ maternal aunt.
John (an eyewitness to the events) identifies Mary
as Jesus’ mother - but distinguishes her from Mary, wife of Alpheus and two
other women (for a total of four women rather than three):
John 19:25:
“Now there stood by the cross of Jesus (1) his
mother, and (2) his mother’s sister, (3) Mary the wife of Cleophas [Alpheus],
and (4) Mary Magdalene.”
Mary, wife of Alpheus, could not have been the
sister of the Virgin Mary, as the Church would have us believe. In Jewish
families, two sisters cannot share the same name.
John implies that Mary, mother of Jesus was not
the wife of Alpheus, father of James and Joses, and Judas, and Simon, who are
identified as the brothers of Jesus by all the other gospels!
Reporting from the Marriott hotel
Go Spell Vaknin
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When your expectations are impossibly unrealistic, all accomplishments, however momentous, feel like failures.
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Unlike psychopaths and borderlines, covert narcissists are capable of controlling their impulses and of delaying gratification. This renders them a lot more dangerous.
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The codependent controls others through self/sacrificial submissiveness and is empowered via clingy neediness.
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WATCH Narcissistic Post-enlightenment World (with Ginger Coy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vky0h1MdPto
WATCH Trump Warning: My Moral and Professional Obligation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMdD3cbWQFQ
Read column in Brussels Morning here: https://brusselsmorning.com/is-trump-a-proto-fascist/36495/
Recent (2023) statements by the front runner in the Republican primaries for Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, were eerily reminiscent of pronouncements by Adolf Hitler. Trump compared his rivals and adversaries to vermin to be destroyed, promised to establish concentration camps, and blamed immigrants for poisoning the blood of the USA.
But does this foaming at the mouth amount to fascism?
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If you want to really hurt someone who loves you dearly - hurt yourself.
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The narcissist fails to complete all 8 phases of the lifespan. Erik Erikson proposed that ego identity is gradually achieved by facing goals and challenges during eight stages of development across the lifespan. The stages are (a) infancy: basic trust versus mistrust; (b) toddler: autonomy versus shame and doubt; (c) preschool age: initiative versus guilt; (d) school age: industry versus inferiority; (e) adolescence: identity versus identity confusion; (f) young adulthood: intimacy versus isolation; (g) middle age: generativity versus stagnation; and (h) older adulthood: integrity versus despair. (APA Dictionary)
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Interview on Voice of the People with the veteran journalist Slobodan Tomik. We discussed the endgame in Ukraine and in Gaza. Macedonian only on Vistel (Vistinska Televizija).
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There are two types of narcissistic
shared fantasy:
1. Fairy tale (where the partner is a princess or
damsel in distress); and
2. Faux normalcy (where both the narcissist and
his partner pretend to be having a perfectly normal relationship).
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Find these reveries and many other memes on my Instagram.
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Millennials, Gen Z
and Alphas consider sex to be a language, not an identity: fluid,
malleable, and expressive.
About 20% of them self-identify as queer. Many sleep with both
sexes and maintain open relationships.
Situationships and friends with benefits are the most common
dyadic formats as almost one half of people under age 35 continue to live with
their parents and regard having to work as an unnecessary evil (according to
all studies).
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@shadowdeangelis on devaluation as a built-in feature of the shared fantasy of the narcissist. Nothing you can do to prevent it.
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To calibrate the Julian
calendar with the Gregorian one and to move the Spring
Equinox back to March 21, 10 days were dropped from the civil calendar in
October 1582. Thursday, October 4 was followed by Friday, October 15. People
rioted in the streets throughout Europe, convinced that they have been robbed
of 10 days.
But this was merely a convenient fiction. The
Spring Equinox in the Gregorian calendar was, indeed, celebrated on March 21 in
perpetuity. But, according to the Julian calendar, in the 17th century it
arrived on March 11th, in the 18th century on March 10th, in the 19th century
on March 9th, and in the 20th century on March 8th - 13 days earlier that even
the erroneous date adopted by the Nicea Council.
The Gregorian calendar was controversial in
Protestant countries. Britain and its colonies adopted it only in 1752. They
had to drop 11 days from the civil calendar and move the official new year from
March 25 to January 1. For centuries, dates followed by OS (“Old Style”) were
according to the Julian calendar and dates followed by NS (“New Style”)
according to the Gregorian one. Sweden adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1753,
Japan in 1873, Egypt in 1875, Eastern Europe between 1912 to 1919 and Turkey in
1927. In Russia it was decreed by the (bourgeois) revolutionaries that thirteen
days would be omitted from the calendar, the day following January 31, 1918
becoming February 14, 1918.
It was Pope Pius X who, in 1910, changed the
beginning of the ecclesiastical year from Christmas Day to January 1, effective
from 1911 onwards.
All that time, the Christian Orthodox continued to
observe the Julian calendar. In 1923, a Conference of Orthodox Churches in
Constantinople reduced the number of leap years every 900 years and attained a
discrepancy between the calendar and the natural solar year of merely 2.2
seconds per year.
According to this calendar, the Spring Equinox
will regress by one day every 40,000 years.
They, too, had to drop 13 days to bring the Spring
Equinox back to March 21st. Hence the gap between December 25 (Gregorian
calendar) and January 7 (revised Julian-Orthodox calendar).
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Narcissist’s excuses for cheating, betrayal, and infidelity are disingenuous and laughable.
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Schizoid
lifestyle as rational, ego-syntonic (happy) choice
Schizoid personality mistaken for narcissism.
Schizoid not problem of object relations but of
cathexis (object libido)
Paranoid ideation, dysphoria, anxiety, and
catastrophizing as engines of schizoid behavior.
Inscrutability and irrationality threaten order
and structure.
Treasure chest or pandora’s box.
Triggers grandiosity by challenging it:
Misunderstood: If only understood, will be mine
Blank screen (projection)
Blank slate (molding, formation).
Adventure, narrative, movie, thrills, technicolor.
Detachment: misconstrued as helplessness and
childishness.
No threat of intimacy, lots of personal space.
Self-sufficiency misinterpreted as strength or
fearlessness.
Asexuality is a challenge.
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Cancel culture, virtue signalling, competitive victimhood are narcissistic. Dark personalities have taken over the public sphere.
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You never wanted to make me happy. You just wanted me to be yours.
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Secret of Narcissist’s Romantic attraction:
Narcissist’s cold empathy and entraining.
Escape from reality into a shared fantasy
Second childhood (dual mothership)
Self-infatuation with an idealized version of you,
seen through the narcissist’s gaze
Modeling and typing in formative years and
adolescence: abuse as comfort zone, attraction to abusers
Bad object validation
External regulation: anxiolytic surrender of
control
Self-punitive relationship: self-harming,
self-trashing, self-defeat, and self-destruction by narcissist
Projective identification
Ask yourself: why was I inexorably attracted to the narcissist’s shared fantasy? What in it appealed to me irresistibly?
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Religion (body as a shrine), cannibalism, religious prostitution, sex work (conform to stereotypes like big boobs), human sacrifice.
In narcissism, the body is either idealized or devalued, but considered in both cases a persecutory object (aging, disease, disability and death) that needs to be placated (sacrifices) or maintained/renovated.
This ambivalence and existential angst (dread) are anxiogenic (hypochondriasis). They lead to OCD (e.g., injurious, ritualistic exercise regime) and a dissociated body (estrangement).
Seat of trauma (body keeps score) and of healing.
Somatization, somatoform disorders, and conversion.
Solution: objectified but fluid body (e.g, makeup, plastic surgery).
Objectifying body as bait and a strategy to elicit narcissistic supply.
The somatic leverages his body to obtain narcissistic supply via:
Flagellation or mortification (Christian saints, Diogenes, Gandhi, endurance sports).
Autoerotic gratification (confirmatory sex).
Nudity and sex: sexual narcissists is wrong, it is somatic. Narcissism is somatized not only via sex.
Signaling: palimpsest of hidden and over texts.
Tattoes: externalizing one’s essence and recording one’s personal history, milestones, mnemonics.
Tattoos signal rank, in-group affiliation (gangs).
Bodybuilding (compensatory, rewriting body by rewiring musculature emphases).
Martial arts (philosophy and worldview).
Sports (extreme).
Sartorial attire: Normcore vs. ostentatious clothing.
Othering: recognizing and accepting the externality and separateness of other people.
Child others himself via mother's gaze: first body (Freud's psychosexual stages), then mind (early form of neutral splitting).
Then child others mother and transitions to object relations (from autoerotic narcissistic libido to other-directed object libido).
Narcissism is a failure of othering, so the child remains stuck in the othered body (somatic-solipsistic) phase or othered mind (cerebral-solipsistic) phase.
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It is impossible to be happy in a world or in a relationship steeped in misery. Start by changing your environment.
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In this unigender era, is being a gay man less manly than being a heterosexual
one? Is a woman who is the outcome of a sex change operation less feminine than
her natural-born sisters? In which sense is a “virile” lesbian less of a man
than an effeminate heterosexual or homosexual man? And how should we classify
and treat bisexuals and asexuals?
What about modern she-breadwinners? All those
feminist women in traditional male positions who are as sexually aggressive as
men and prone to the same varieties of misconduct (e.g., cheating on their
spouses)? Are they less womanly? And are their stay-at-home-dad partners not
men enough? How are sex preferences related to gender differentiation? And if
one’s sex and genitalia can be chosen and altered at will – why not one’s
gender, regardless of one’s natural equipment? Can we decouple gender roles from
sexual functions and endowments?
Aren’t the feminist-liberal-emancipated woman and
her responsive, transformed male partner as moulded by specific social norms
and narratives as their more traditional and conservative counterparts? And
when men adapted to the demands of the “new”, post-modernist woman – were they
not then rebuffed by that very same female as emasculated and unmanly? What is
the source of this gender chaos? Why do people act “modern” while, at heart,
they still hark back to erstwhile mores and ethos?
We assume erroneously that some roles are
instinctual because, in nature, other species do it, too: parenting and mating
come to mind. The discipline of sociobiology encourages us to counterfactually
learn from animals about our social functioning.
But humans and their societies are so much more
complex that there is little we can evince from lobsters, chimpanzees, or
gorillas.
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@shadowdeangelis on anger vs. rage. More here: https://samvak.tripod.com/mask.html and here: https://samvak.tripod.com/journal86.html
Narcissistic rage has two
forms:
I. Explosive – The narcissist flares up, attacks everyone
in his immediate vicinity, causes damage to objects or people, and is verbally
and psychologically abusive.
II. Pernicious or Passive-Aggressive (P/A) – The
narcissist sulks, gives the silent treatment, and is plotting how to punish the
transgressor and put her in her proper place. These narcissists are vindictive
and often become stalkers. They harass and haunt the objects of their
frustration. They sabotage and damage the work and possessions of people whom
they regard to be the sources of their mounting wrath.
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WATCH War as Narcissistic Fantasy (with Trisha Goddard on TALKTV) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NC7l19fXXg
On the one hand, there is the pornography of extreme, gory battle. War is thus perceived as the ultimate reality TV, a video game come alive, or a horror film incarnate. There is vicarious gratification in witnessing all this safely, from the comfort of one’s living room, having been spared the atrocities. A smug sensation of accomplishment, of having gotten away with it.
Distant wars also legitimize aggressive and entitled virtue signaling and competitive morality, a noxious self-aggrandizing and ostentatious form of self-imputed altruism.
There are, of course, those who empathize with the dying and the wounded and the suffering and do their best to help without seeking the attendant accolades of the professional do-gooder.
The narcissist feels superior to you in every way - so, why would s/he envy you? S/he envies what you possess: your youth, your looks, your clothes, your home, your job, your friends, your family, your reputation, your accomplishments, your car or smartphone - and the list goes on.
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Kohlberg’s
stages of moral development summary 1:08:40
Narcissists and psychopaths completely fail to
develop moral reasoning. Victims shock: transactional, moral, empathy-based
(verisimilitude) complaints.
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How people mistreat you is largely up to you. If you are being constantly disrespected, abused, and obstructed - here is how to change the situation.
Dignity is never about winning. It is about fighting for what you believe in.
Information asymmetry: you know about yourself
much more than anyone will ever know about you.
So, people pick up cues from you (social learning
theory and modeling) and follow them blindly, uncritically: if you disrespect yourself – they disrespect you, if you hate yourself – they hate you,
if you self-defeat – they sabotage you, if you seek pain – they give it to you,
if you are self-destructive – they gleefully ruin you.
If you consider yourself unattractive or unworthy
or unlovable – so would everybody else. After all, you must know something that
they don’t.
If you broadcast guilt, you are guilty. If you
wallow in shame and self-pity, people will give you good reasons to do so.
If you consider yourself a failure and a loser who
can’t get a single thing right – you will only and always succeed at failing.
People will set you up for it.
You can convince people of the most outlandish and
counterfactual claims about yourself – for better and for worse - if you
yourself believe in them and passionately insist on their veracity.
But don’t get people to like you by pleasing them
or by altering yourself so as to reduce their discomfort.
The only way to turn your life around is to treat
yourself the way you want others to treat you, the golden rule. Don’t worry:
people will pick up on your new transmissions and follow your lead. Ultimately,
people seek to please and to conform.
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Lessons about the North-South divide:
Education is only one path to social mobility. In
other societies, reputation and social networking matter much more.
The West has institutionalized corruption (aka
lobbying) and now preaches to the developing world about nepotism, cronyism,
and venality.
Technology should never be the end - only the
means to an end.
The indigenous population knows the best solutions
to its problems. We need to listen rather than preach, hector, and dictate.
Sam Vaknin, former economic advisor to governments.
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Ode
to the Borderline
By: Sam Vaknin
Self-immolated, I rise
from in your ashes,
Sun.
Nailed to your cross,
arms flung.
Your honey and vinegar
on lips enparched.
The thorns that pierce
our togetherness.
I am speared
your flames,
but resurrect to you
inexorably.
An unrequited dew,
an ephemeral yearning
for your injured flesh.
I flap my wingspan
as I sore.
Rebirth foregone.
Poetry of Healing and Abuse: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/contents.html
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Promiscuity is not just a lifestyle choice. Studies link it to dark triad personalities. The number of sex partners is also highly correlated with rates of divorce or breakups and with serial infidelity. Promiscuity is an addiction with a poor prognosis over the lifespan.
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Loss
is a feature of narcissism, but also an
organizing-explanatory principle. Narcissism is about avoiding, inducing (bad
object or victimhood), managing loss (reframing it).
Prolonged grief over what s/he could have been and
what s/he has never experienced: love, sex, friendship, loyalty and over what
s/he has always had to endure: infidelity, betrayal, and loss.
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High IQ does not translate into success in the absence of perseverance, agreeableness, industriousness, stability (self-regulation), humility, a capacity for team work (minimal empathy and respect for others), mental health, a social support network, and luck. Many geniuses are homeless or incarcerated and all but forgotten.
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Narcissists and psychopaths process knowledge differently to healthy people. They also “love” differently.
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Insight and intuition are dissimilar ways of gaining knowledge. Child developmental model: internalization (reproduce external relationships as intrapsychic processes), introjection (internal object), identification (alleviate loss, reduce conflict anxiety), incorporation (foreign object assimilated). Causal chain disorders: lack insight, rich on intuition.
WATCH Narcissist? Trust Your Gut Feeling: 4 Rules to Avoid Bad Relationships (Intuition Explained) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFEb48Y-JZE
WATCH Hypervigilance and Intuition as Forms of Anxiety https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFum2fmhJA4
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Only two ways to attain happiness: to have it all - or to have nothing whatsoever.
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Paranoia is way of staying in touch internally, inside your
self-deceiving mind, with someone who is no longer in your life.
“S/he is conspiring against me and stalking me because
s/he is still in love with me and I still matter to him/her. One day we will be
back together - or one day I will avenge myself”.
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Retroactive jealousy is the outcome of the narcissist's inability to control or own your past. This interferes with his ability to idealize and infantilize you and, therefore, threatens the formation and longevity of the shared fantasy.
Idealization is unlike a scientific theory: inconsistent, not falsifiable and therefore always dissonant (gorgeous but virgin).
Narcissist infantilizes partner to allow for dual mothership and so devalues and demonizes past lovers who abused and took advantage of the partner.
Past versions of yourself interfere with idealization (your life starts and ends with the narcissist in an eternal, fantastic present).
Past lovers and past versions of partner cannot be snapshotted (controlled, possessed) - creates insecurity, abandonment anxiety.
Proof: past lovers but not current lovers provoke jealousy (open relationships, group sex, betrayal fantasies). Current lovers are snapshotted and integrated into the shared fantasy (instrumentalized).
The narcissist inhabits an eternal present.
To the narcissist – and more so, to the psychopath – the future is either of two: a hazy, abstract, merely hypothesized concept, or an anticipated certainty, the preordained outcome of his magical thinking (he believes that he determines future events merely by thinking about them.) These two misperceptions of time – diffuse time and teleological time-inversion - are cognitive deficits and are owing to a confluence of several narcissistic traits.
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Climate
change is not only a crisis - it is an opportunity: it
amounts to a redistribution and reallocation of economic resources.
Global warming will give rise to new industries
and activities, new ocean traffic lanes, new flora and fauna, new venues for
tourism, and new holidays.
Rather than futilely attempting to reverse the
irreversible - we need to adapt to climate change. It is here to stay - and so
are we.
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Female misogyny is outcome of:
1. Masculinization of women (competitiveness, ambition), unigender. Same as male. Gender is no longer a determinant in mental health. We live in a unigender world. Back to hunter-gatherer societies where women hunted with men.
2. Rise in female narcissism and psychopathy: choice of “alpha” male role models (girl boss, future is female, raunch culture).
3. Scarcity of eligible male partners (gender asymmetry owing to disparities in education, earnings, and elevated standards). Many men perceived as effeminate losers.
4. Schizoid atomization, self-sufficiency, negative identity.
5. Intolerance of variance and nonconformity, hierarchy.
6. Identity politics, competitive and performative victimhood.
MeToo is opposite of solidarity: 1. Patronizing-condescending 2. Infested with dark personalities 3. Negative identity (misandry) 4. Coercive.
Three types of masculinities
1. Neo-Traditionalist: The Guardian of Tradition
2. Egalitarian: Partners in Balance
3. Progressive: Pioneers of Gender Equity
LITERATURE
John L. Oliffe, Mary T. Kelly, Nina Gao, Jennifer Mootz, Zac E. Seidler, Simon M. Rice, Neo-traditionalist, egalitarian and progressive masculinities in men's heterosexual intimate partner relationships, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 333, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116143
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Hiding from people or threats won’t make them go away.
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Mortification leads to decompensation (deactivation of defenses, including the false self), contact with shame, emotional dysregulation, and acting out (like in BPD).
Shame requires object libido. Narcissist entrains himself to reboot narcissistic libido. Therapeutic hint for BPD.
Abandonment or engulfment provoke borderline mortification: anxiety and emotional dysregulation, decompensation, and acting out. These trigger narcissistic defenses (NPD, secondary psychopathy, covert borderline).
Acting out results in shame and guilt which involve object libido. Therapeutic hint for NPD.
No Narcissistic Supply without Self-supply.
Narcissist’s grandiose fantasy renders input from others narcissistic supply.
When narcissist is mortified, depressed, or otherwise fails to believe his own fantasy, no feedback from others will be perceived as catalyzing supply, only as fake or low-grade supply.
WATCH Narcissistic Mortification: From Shame to Healing via Trauma, Fear, and Guilt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziIrvAm6rJw
Narcissistic Mortification, Shame, and Fear https://www.pulsus.com/scholarly-articles/study-on-narcissistic-mortification-shame-and-fear.pdf
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Your good luck and misfortune alike are mostly the sum total of your choices. Ultimately, there is only one thing you cannot control: the ineluctable fact of death.
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High IQ does not translate into success in the absence of perseverance, agreeableness, industriousness, stability (self-regulation), humility, a capacity for teamwork (minimal empathy and respect for others), mental health, a social support network, and luck. Many geniuses are homeless or incarcerated and all but forgotten.
Reality testing: reality perceived differently (autism). Coupled with recklessness, fearless godlike immunity, it leads to exploratory behavior.
Originality, novelty, difference: synoptic connectivity appears schizotypal or even psychotic (Schizotypy) (psychoticism and creativity). It is often disorganized initially (inspiration, intuition, dreams).
Attention multitasking generates unexpected insights and synergies.
Impatience, grandiosity or contempt and condescension: block out noise, ignore criticism.
Lability and dysregulation as sources of inspiration.
Proclivity for change, thrills, risk result in innovation.
Inordinate hardships in life, resilience tested.
LITERATURE
Reddy IR, Ukrani J, Indla V, Ukrani V. Creativity and psychopathology: Two sides of the same coin? Indian J Psychiatry. 2018 Apr-Jun;60(2):168-174. doi: 10.4103/psychiatry.IndianJPsychiatry_129_18. PMID: 30166672; PMCID: PMC6102953.
Barrie, W., Yang, Y., Irving-Pease, E.K. et al. Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastoralist populations. Nature 625, 321–328 (2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06618-z.pdf
Tufts University. "Biologists Link Huntington's Disease To Health Benefits In Young." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 26 September 2007. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070925130029.htm
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“Intermittent mothers” - sometimes good enough and sometimes “dead” - foster narcissism and engender codependency in their children.
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What greater punishment for the narcissist than being recognized and venerated only posthumously?
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New light on pathological narcissism and narcissistic abuse.
Claire Auden's Podcast http://podfollow.com/the-narc-behind-the-educator-series
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Contempt is not the precursor to sadism - it is just an excuse to hurt people. It legitimizes sadism by devaluing its victims.
Jose Espinosa and I explore narcissism and narcissistic abuse based on studied and clinical knowledge (no self-styled "experts" allowed!)
Self-Talk on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/SELFTalkNarcisismo
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Therapy can help the narcissist modify his or her abrasive and antisocial behaviors in the short-term. But no treatment modality can yield lasting change, let alone heal or cure narcissism. Only self-enriching charlatans and con artists say otherwise.
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Suicide is a form of acting in coupled with acting out (like a temper tantrum), internalized and externalized aggression. It is preceded by switching to another self-state (secondary psychopathy in borderlines and borderline organization in narcissism).
BPD and NPD are prone to switching owing to splitting and self-splitting defenses (previous self-state all bad while new self-state all bad), lack of core identity (identity disturbance), and no constellated or integrated self/ego (emptiness or empty schizoid core). They are in constant flux.
When confronted with promise or threat, real, imaginary, anticipated, or recalled.
Responsive to real or anticipated environmental cues (e.g. stress, anxieties, substance abuse, holidays, important events, life crises or traumas, new people, crowds, mortification, medication, even sensa – see Proust).
Preceded by emotional dysregulation (emotional switching – Houben).
Switching: consensual, forced, triggered.
Signs of switching (prodromal phase):
Rigid body posture or pseudo-fainting
Calm before the storm: atypical kindness, reasonableness, submissiveness, conflict aversion
Changes in body self-image
Dramatic change in identity (behaviors, preferences, values, beliefs, emotionality, cognitive style)
Talkativity (hyper-verbalizing), hyperreflexivity (pseudo-psychosis) and hyperactivity followed by a period of subdued, slow motion, hesitant reactivity
Impulsivity
Dissociation
LITERATURE
Houben M, Bohus M, Santangelo PS, Ebner-Priemer U, Trull TJ, Kuppens P. The specificity of emotional switching in borderline personality disorder in comparison to other clinical groups. Personal Disord. 2016 Apr;7(2):198-204. doi: 10.1037/per0000172. Epub 2016 Feb 15. PMID: 26882282; PMCID: PMC4816671.
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If you try to buy other people’s love - all you earn is their contempt. Neediness is like blood in the water - it turns everyone in your life into a predator.
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Terror
organizations can be eradicated only when they do not enjoy
popular support and when they engage mostly in self-enrichment via crime
(examples: al-Qaida, ISIS, narco-terrorists in south America).
In all other cases, faced with resolute attrition
by state actors, terror groups convert into political parties (see Viet Cong,
Taliban, Hezbollah, IRA, ETA, Sandinistas, etc.)
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I am not a conspiracy theorist because whenever I could account for events either by human stupidity and neglect or by human scheming and malice - I knew that the former explanation is infinitely more likely.
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LITERATURE
Grant JE, Chamberlain SR. Impaired cognitive
flexibility across psychiatric disorders. CNS Spectr. 2023 Dec;28(6):688-692.
doi: 10.1017/S1092852923002237. Epub 2023 Apr 28. PMID: 37114560.
Jeung-Maarse H, Schmitgen MM, Schmitt R, Bertsch
K, Herpertz SC.
Oxytocin effects on amygdala reactivity to angry faces
in males and females with antisocial personality disorder.
Neuropsychopharmacology. 2023 May;48(6):946-953. doi:
10.1038/s41386-023-01549-9. Epub 2023 Mar 20. PMID: 36941365; PMCID:
PMC10156793.
d’Huart D, Seker S, Bürgin D, Birkhölzer M,
Boonmann C, Schmid M, Schmeck K. The stability of personality disorders and
personality disorder criteria: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clin
Psychol Rev. 2023 Jun;102:102284. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2023.102284. Epub 2023 Apr
23. PMID: 37116251.
Bernstein DP, Keulen-de Vos M, Clercx M, de Vogel
V, Kersten GCM, Lancel M, Jonkers PP, Bogaerts S, Slaats M, Broers NJ, Deenen
TAM, Arntz A. Schema therapy for violent PD offenders: a randomized clinical trial. Psychol Med. 2023
Jan;53(1):88-102. doi: 10.1017/S0033291721001161. Epub 2021 Jun 15. PMID:
34127158; PMCID: PMC9874993.
De Wit-De Visser B, Rijckmans M, Vermunt JK, van
Dam A. Pathways to antisocial behavior: a framework to improve diagnostics and
tailor therapeutic interventions. Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 9;14:993090. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2023.993090. PMID: 36844347; PMCID: PMC9947159.
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To the narcissist, you are perfect during the idealization phase and no-good during the devaluation stage. You are never anything nuanced, in between. This is called splitting or dichotomous thinking, an infantile, primitive psychological defense mechanism.
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Loneliness is the worst advisor. It blinds you. It pushes you to make detrimental decisions and deleterious choices. Accept your aloneness and singlehood and become your own best friend!
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Plundering is the most basic of human behaviors.
If you fail to guard your mate, your best friend
will poach her (or him).
If you neglect to protect your possessions, your
nearest and dearest will abscond with them.
If you don’t extract a cost from plagiarists and
idearists, they will pillage your work and make it theirs.
Indolence and cowardice signal indifference and
invite the immoral and the delinquent into your life and home.