Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)

Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)

Why do victims and survivors keep partnering with narcissists and psychopaths, despite all the horrors they have endured?

Freud called it Repetition Compulsion: people keep re-enacting unresolved conflicts in the hope of resolving them next time around and with a different party.

Joan Lachkar suggested, for example, that Borderlines and Narcissists team up in order to salve "archaic wounds", which she later dubbed "V spots"

Both experiential and cognitive data coalesce into rigid schemas, mental representations of relationships, starting with early childhood and primary objects (mother, typically). It seems that we are doomed to revisiting our mistakes. We even behave in ways which guarantee the same deleterious or detrimental outcomes.

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Facebook unpublished my page on Donald Trump (set up years ago) after I suggested in an interview that he might be a narcissist. Whether you agree with my assessment of Trump or not - this an egregious suppression of free political speech reminiscent of the darkest epochs in human history.

First, YouTube deleted my highly academic videos on the pandemic. Then it deleted a video which did not mention the pandemic at all, but did criticize YouTube - in the most civilized manner! - for its content policy.

As I had been warning: what started off as censorship of COVID-19 related information has now devolved into ugly, open, dangerous and full-fledged political censorship, resembling the oppression found in the worst regimes on Earth and in history.

The USA had just slipped way down the slipperiest of slopes and climbing back might be impossible. Free speech and free media are now not only chilled but banned altogether and in all spheres of life, not only the pandemic.

American democracy has never been as strong as it was made out to be. Both YouTube and Facebook are monopolies: most people today get all their information from these two online platforms. They should be immediately regulated under anti-trust laws. But show me the politician or public intellectual or regulator or media personality who would dare confront these behemoths.

I reuploaded the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

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This just in.

Wonderful news!

Six weeks ago, in one my early videos on the pandemic, I reviewed several dozens antivirals and zeroed in on Remdesivir.

I predicted in that video that Remdesivir will prove to be the cure for COVID-19 owing to the way it interferes with the replication of the virus's RNA.

I am so happy it panned out!

I wrote here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_S2R9vD5HP/?igshid=e3djykhl3byg

“We will begin to use Remdesivir (a medication that I recommended in my vid weeks ago). It will cure COVID-19, so restrictions will be again lifted. Vaccines will fail clinical trials repeatedly and will come on stream only in 2022.”

The videos are now available here:

https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

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In the transactional West, service providers are expected to act with impersonal and non-intrusive courtesy as well as swift efficiency. Any attempt to exceed this remit may land them in court for stalking, sexual or other harassment, or breach of ethics. In the East, a supererogatory personal touch, some implied intimacy, concessionary flexibility, and an ostentatious display of emotions are indispensable to one's professional reputation.

Cultural differences between East and West are surprisingly trenchant and profound, considering the homogenizing effects of mass and social media. They are not limited to business or social intercourse: they permeate even the most intimate realms of conduct.

Consider ubiquitous female promiscuity.

In the West it is driven by petulant immaturity, grandiose entitlement, and the joys of newly discovered emancipation and empowerment.

In the East, women openly hunt for men and are predatory. Promiscuity there is coupled with aggressive manipulation and deception.

Or the concomitant phenomenon of misogyny.

The Western misogynist avoids women altogether or limits his interaction with them to rare casual sex. He hangs out with other misogynists. The Eastern misogynist pays women to be his concubines, sex slaves, and punching bags. He scouts for women eagerly and persistently.

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People are emotionally or sexually unfaithful to their partner for dozens of unrelated reasons. Often an affair is merely an attempt at self-exploration. But in some cases, cheating - whether a love liaison or a one night stand - is the only way to transition out of an addictive relationship founded on trauma bonding or even mere pity. Even if the partner is not aware of the transgression, the offending party is and it is often enough to bring about the separation.

Intimacy with a third party is empowering: it restores the cheater's self-esteem and confidence, makes him or her feel desirable, less tolerant of the absence, rejection, and maltreatment meted out by the spouse or mate. Having alternatives does wonders to one's sense of personal autonomy and self-efficacious agency.

Being loved by an outsider - even if only briefly and physically - proves to the straying party that s/he deserves better. It is also, of course, a way to sever the emotional bonding conferred by exclusivity, to disinvest in and divest from the failed dyad (decathect)

Sometimes, desperate to eject, cheaters self-trash recklessly with highly inappropriate partners and in insalubrious circumstances in order to render themselves "damaged goods" and make it easier for their partners to give up on them.

With narcissistic, borderline, and psychopathic cheaters, the act buttresses injured grandiosity: the hidden and forbidden makes them feel special and superior as well as righteously vengeful and omnipotent.

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A shocking - though not entirely unexpected - PBS survey:

If all lockdowns and restrictions were lifted tomorrow ... 85% will not return to school

65% will not return to work

91% will not join groups of people or attend events, like sports

80% will not go to restaurants

Only 17% of Brits will visit schools, pubs, and restaurants (poll by the UK paper Observer).

Schizoids are often described, even by their nearest and dearest, in terms of automata ("robots"). They are uninterested in social relationships or interactions and have a very limited emotional repertoire. It is not that they do not have emotions, but they express them poorly and intermittently. They appear cold and stunted, flat, and "zombie"-like.

Consequently, these people are loners and introverted. They confide only in first-degree relatives, but maintain no close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. Naturally, they gravitate into solitary activities and find solace and safety in being constantly alone. Their sexual experiences are sporadic and limited and, finally, they cease altogether.

Schizoids are anhedonic - find nothing pleasurable and attractive - but not necessarily dysphoric (sad or depressed). Some schizoid are asexual and resemble the cerebral narcissist. They pretend to be indifferent to praise, criticism, disagreement, and corrective advice (though, deep inside, they are not). They are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable, and narrowly restricted routines.

More here: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq67.html

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A leader is a shorthand version of the world in which he operates, a map of his times, the harmony (if not the melody) upon which those led by him can improvise. They must see in him all the principle elements of their mental life: grievances, agreements, disagreements, anger, deceit, conceit, myths and facts, interpretation, compatibility, guilt, paranoia, illusions and delusions – all wrapped (or warped) into one neat parcel.

It should not be taken to mean that the leader must be an average person – but he must discernibly contain the average person or faithfully reflect him. His voice must echo the multitude of sounds that formed the popular wave which swept him to power. This ability of his, to be and not to be, to vacate himself, to become the conduit of other people's experiences and existence, in short: to be a gifted actor – is the first element in the leadership signal. It is oriented to the past and to the present.

But it is a second element that makes the leader distinct. Again, it is resonance. The leader must be perceived to resonate in perfect harmony with a vision of the future, agreeable to the people who elected him. "Agreeable" – read: compatible with the fulfillment of the aforementioned needs in a manner, which renders life acceptable. Each group of people has its own requirements, explicit and implicit, openly expressed and latent.

More about leaders and leadership qualities here: https://samvak.tripod.com/leader.html

Obama https://samvak.tripod.com/obama.html   (July 2008)

Trump https://samvak.tripod.com/faq19.html#trump   (March 2016)

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Mary Mallon was a "healthy carrier" of an infectious disease, the first ever reported and observed in the New World. She was a super spreader. But, since then, and throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, more than 100 people were added annually to the rolls of "healthy carriers" of typhoid in New-York alone.

Moreover, though she infected 47 people with typhoid fever (11 of which were members of one family and their hired help) - only 3 of her inadvertent victims died. Tony Labella, another carrier, caused the death of 5 people (of 122 he had infected). But the nickname of this New York City, fiery Irish immigrant cook - Typhoid Mary - was widely dreaded in the early 1900s. Immune to the disease herself, she was the perfect carrier through her contaminated food.

Private investigators hired in 1906 to find the source of the epidemic failed. George Soper, a civil engineer, traced it back to 37-years old Mallon. When he confronted her with his suspicions and asked for samples of her blood and stool, she advanced on him with a carving knife. She similarly lunged with a "long kitchen knife" at policemen who accompanied visiting health officials. Having been found hiding in an areaway closet, under the staircase outside, on a neighbour's property, she was ultimately subdued.

Attempts to cure her with Hexamethylenamin, laxatives, Urotropin, and brewer's yeast failed. She was quarantined in 1907 for a period of three years by health officials. She was released in February 1910 when she pledged not to prepare food for others again, to observe some rules of hygiene, to provide periodic fecal samples, and to notify the health department on changes of her address.

She sued the Board of Health of the City of New York in 1909. Weekly stool samples she sent to a private lab came consistently clean - while the same stool, analyzed by the department's own labs, turned out to be mostly infected with typhoid bacilli.

She protested her innocence with these words:

“This contention that I am a perpetual menace in the spread of typhoid germs is not true. My own doctors say I have no typhoid germs. I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime and I am treated like an outcast - a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. It seems incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.”

She lost the case though, in some respects, she was treated unfairly. Alphonse Cotils, another typhoid carrier, a restaurant and bakery owner who repeatedly violated his pledge not to prepare food for his clientele, got away with a mere reprimand.

In 1911, inoculation for typhoid became publicly available - but few bothered as the disease had only a 10% fatality rate.

Mallon reneged on her promises to the Health Board and in 1915 - using the pseudonym Ms. Brown - infected mothers and their newborns with typhoid at the Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan where she worked as a cook. Twenty five people caught the fever and two of them died.

She spent the next 23 years - until her death in 1938 - with her dog in quarantine at Riverside Hospital in North Brother Island. She became a nurse, hospital help, and a kind of lab technician. After a massive stroke she suffered in 1932, she was transferred to the children's ward.

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My Bar Mitzvah at age 13: new video on my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin)

In the description of the video, you will find active links to the following:

Press clippings from Sam Vaknin's early years in Israel (HEBREW and photos)

Online Photo Exhibition

Diary of a Narcissist

https://samvak.tripod.com/journal1.html

Press Room and Media Kit with links to interviews and documentary films about Sam Vaknin and his work in psychology

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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Women weigh the looks of a potential partner for casual sex &then, to a lesser extent, his personality & mind.

On a date (or a relationship) - even a single outing - personality is king: is he attentive, nice, kind, empathic, supportive, and attracted? Looks come second and the mind matters but only up to a point: average intelligence is less intimidating than genius and a sense of humor has to be accessible in order to register at all.

The personalities of narcissists - both cerebral and somatic - are exceedingly obnoxious and repulsive. Laughable pomposity combines with outlandish grandiosity and sadistic misogyny with objectifying chauvinism.

All types of narcissists are, therefore, forced to labor inordinately hard to get any woman to just glance their way, let alone date them or sleep with them.

Only damaged, broken, promiscuous, & mentally ill women deign to consider the narcissist as a mate or a date. And even these bottom of the barrel specimen invariably recoil and jump ship after a short while.

The cerebral - of less than average good looks to start with - spends months upon months targeting potential sexual partners in pyrotechnic displays of superior intellectual fireworks which usually backfire: most women find such ostentatious efforts to impress them into submission manipulative and creepy.

The somatic dedicates the same amount of time, albeit behind the scenes, honing his body into an irresistible proposition. Women go to bed with the somatic only to then discard him as so much wet Kleenex, disposable & forgettable.

So, while the somatic scores much more often than the cerebral, his return on investment is also derisory.

Still, at least the somatic has some sex life. The cerebral is doomed to long celibate stretches - years or decades! - without regular female company & sex. Even his "intimate" partners cheat on him serially & overtly with other men. He ends up being a pitiable meal ticket in a sexless liaison, a sugar daddy, or the infrequent client of cheap sex workers as he gets older.

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People tend to mate or copulate with partners who are more or less equal to them in every way - or physically superior. Members of the manosphere misuse the term "hypergamy" to refer to the latter preference.

Less known is the fact that, with the exception of a precious few self-styled "sapiosexuals", the vast majority of people assiduously avoid potential mates with an IQ considerably higher than theirs. They are positively turned off and intimidated by such a discrepancy.

These preferences have to do with psychological defenses aimed at preventing narcissistic injuries (humiliation arising from conspicuous inferiority) and preserving the integrity and functioning of the ego or the self. Envy and competition are also involved in such avoidance.

Finally: people feel elevated and elated when they have a relationship, however cursory, with physically superior partners. They attribute the mate selection to their own attractive personality or style.

But everyone feel exploited, hypervigilant, anxious, paranoid, and vaguely menaced when they team up with their intellectual superiors. People wonder why they were chosen: what is in it for the more intelligent counterpart. They become suspicious of ulterior motives and a hidden agenda. They anticipate abandonment and loss sooner ir later, when their inferior faculties are exposed.

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I can no longer log into my old Instagram account @vakninsamnarcissist

I am a member of the Organizing Committee of the 33rd International Conference on Psychiatry and Mental Health Webinar in June 2020

https://psychiatry.neuroconferences.com/organizing-committee.php

Additional international conferences on mental health, neurology, brain studies, psychology, and psychiatry

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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Imagine the following two scenarios:

1. Your wife returns home at 5 AM and tells you that she ran across her colleague in an afterwork bar. They spent the entire night talking and reminiscing, but nothing inappropriate and sexual happened. It was such heartwarming fun that they decided to meet again from time to time: she even intends to bring him home and introduce him to you.

2. The octogenarian widowed neighbor from upstairs dropped by while you were away. He was so lonely, depressed, and heartbroken that your wife let him fondle her breasts and touch her genitalia in order to lift his spirits (if nothing else besides)

Strangely, the first scenario is likely to render you far more jealous than the second one. It is because romantic jealousy is not about sex at all. It is about intimacy and it is a form of extreme anxiety about anticipated loss, rejection, and abandonment. The risk of losing your wife to the animated corpse from the floor above is zilch - but her colleague can definitely make a move on her and the way she had already reacted to his company indicates that he stands a chance of breaking up your marriage.

People also often confuse humiliation (narcissistic mortification) with romantic jealousy. Being cheated on undermines one's sense of safety and creates disorientation, confusion, and minacious insecurity. Infantile regression triggers infantile defenses, extreme neediness, entitlement, petulance, and a passive-aggressive wish to destroy the frustrating and hurtful object. But all these have nothing to do with romantic jealousy. In other words: it is possible to be devastated but your wife's cheating and still not feel romantically jealous or possessive at all.

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Alcoholics in rehab avoid all alcoholic drinks, never mind how small. Some men - with mental issues or sexual proclivities - keep selecting promiscuous, dissolute, unboundaried, dysregulated, labile, unfaithful, good-digging, and deceptive women as mates.

These men are so terrified of their own self-destructive choices that they end up shunning women altogether, in long periods of self-enforced celibacy and emotional and sexual abstinence which can sometimes last decades.

The women that turn you on are bad for your health - goes the flashing mental alert - They could be life threatening or at the very least adversely affect your health, go after your wealth, and compromise your wellbeing. Stay away from women altogether because you tend to choose disastrously wrong women consistently. You are not well.

So, exactly like the alcoholic who avoids any type of drink, at any time, anywhere and under any circumstances in order to remain both sober and alive - these men eschew any interaction with any woman whatsoever. Better safe than sorry, or traumatized to the core, or dead.

My latest video (https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin) is titled: Why Narcissists Love Borderline Women and Why They Hate Them Back.

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Self-love is a healthy self-regard and the pursuit of one's happiness and favorable outcomes. It rests on four pillars:

1. Self-awareness: an intimate, detailed and compassionate knowledge of oneself, a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, others's roles, and threats

2. Self-acceptance: the unconditional embrace of one's core identity, personality, character, temperament, relationships, experiences, and life circumstances.

3. Self-trust: the conviction that one has one's best interests in mind, is watching one's back, and has agency and autonomy: one is not controlled by or dependent upon others in a compromising fashion

4. Self-efficacy: the belief, gleaned from and honed by experience, that one is capable of setting rational, realistic, and beneficial goals and possesses the wherewithal to realize outcomes commensurate with one's aims.

Self love is the only reliable compass in life. Experience usually comes too late, when its lessons can no longer be implemented because of old age, lost opportunities, and changed circumstances. It is also pretty useless: no two people or situations are the same. But self-love is a rock: a stable, reliable, immovable, and immutable guide and the truest of loyal friends whose only concern in your welfare and contentment.

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The narcissist's problem is that he cannot value the small things in life, the very same things that make up 99% of it.

Even as a bon vivant, he does not really appreciate food, or fashion, or wine, or cars, or women, except as status symbols and signals of his relative positioning, buttresses of his grandiosity.

The narcissist is a demented metaphysicist: concerned with what people say than with how they live their lives; with size rather than with type; with appearances and language rather than with substance.

The aroma of his morning coffee, the birdsong outside his window, the pearly laughter of his only child, the way the clouds give way to sun and water shimmers to inaudible music - all these elude his impoverished existence. He knows no other state but misery and therefore is deluded into considering it to be unadulterated happiness.

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Alcohol never causes you to do something you did not want to do. But it can lead you to do something you wish you hadn't done. In other words: it disinhibits, removes inhibitions.

When sober, you want to take some actions but hold back for various reasons, most of which have to do with "what will people say" or "someone will get hurt if I do this" (empathy). Alcohol lowers these barriers as well as diminishes impulse control. You simply don't care anymore: you are hellbent on realizing the urges you had formed while sober.

If you end up having a one night stand with someone, it is because you wanted to have sex that night (though not necessarily with that partner). And if you beat someone up, you had been meaning to do it before the booze got to you.

Alcohol also creates or enhances cognitive distortions (beer goggles, for example), but its main effect is the aforementioned disinhibition.

A drunken man's words are a sober man's thoughts, goes the old adage. It is not that the drunkard is nearer his true nature when inebriated. After all, social mores and compassion are also a part of his (sober) character.

But when in his cups, he regresses to an infantile stage, replete with object inconstancy (he forgets about his loved ones), splitting (black and white thinking), and grandiosity (alcohol myopia): his actions will have no adverse consequences to himself, he figures

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We often confuse discomfort with shame and guilt.

Imagine the following, all too common scenario: you go to a bar with someone you have just met, have a good time, get wasted, stoned, high, or pissed, and end up having unprotected sex with him or her. The next morning, your most fervent wish is to never see them again.

Is it because you are ashamed of what you had done? Ashamed of him? Of her? Not so. You are discomforted by your disinhibited misconduct and your impromptu paramour is both a witness and a reminder to your ego dystonic unboundaried dissolution and lack of impulse and self control. By trashing yourself, you had acted self destructively, perhaps.

You can also end up being ashamed, of course. But then it would mean that you care about what your nocturnal partner thinks. It implies the existence of a nascent attachment and more than a modicum of intimacy. Most likely you are going to see this man again: maybe you are colleagues or move in the same social circles.

Guilt is context-dependent: when a moral agent exerts control over certain aspects of the world and acts in a manner incommensurate with prevailing morals, or refrains from acting in a manner commensurate with them.

Shame, in this case, is an outcome of the ACTUAL occurrence of AVOIDABLE outcomes: events which impute guilt to a Moral Agent who acted wrongly or refrained from acting.

Guilt Feelings comprise Fear and Anxiety. Fear is related to the external, objective, observable consequences of actions or inaction by the Moral Agent. Anxiety has to do with INNER consequences. It is ego-dystonic and threatens the identity of the Moral Agent because being Moral is an important part of it. The internalisation of guilt feelings leads to a shame reaction. Thus, shame has to do with guilty feelings, not with GUILT, per se.

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You are much closer to happiness than most people I know - if only you accept yourself for who you are and never expect anything from anyone else, yourself included.

Structure your life to fit who you are - not who you wish your were.

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There is an almighty confusion, even among mental health practitioners and in diagnostic bibles, such as ICD-10, between the dom in BDSM (with hyperdominant sexuality) and the sexual sadist.

The dom (top) seeks to please his submissive (bottom) partner by subjecting her to pain, humiliation, and degradation. His arousal crucially depends on the power he exercises over her and on her overt excitation at the wielding of his dominance. The sadist is turned on only by the evident suffering and repulsion of his counterparty during the intercourse.

BDSM is consensual and, often, compassionate and considerate. Sadism in bed is exercised either without consent or with coerced consent which is extorted reluctantly and, usually, under explicit or implicit threat of abandonment.

The sadist dehumanizes his partner and reduces her to body parts. To him, she is not a human being, let alone a woman or even a sexual entity. He is out to spoil, dismantle, and corrupt her, as children do with toys. His main desire it to witness her unbelieving horror at what is being done to her, at her psychological or physical mutilation, and at the cheer and gratification on her tormentor's face as he proceeds with his gruesome business. Her nauseating disgust, extreme discomfort, and palpable hurt, debasement, and agony are his aphrodisiacs. Conventional vanilla sex actually turns him off.

High-end, luxury brands have to adapt and get embedded in a mix of products and services in this post-apocalyptic world.

Immediately after the lockdown restrictions are lifted, people with means will spoil themselves and compensate by purchasing expensive brands and services. But this will be a passing and brief phase.

The economic crisis which is already upon us and the attendant uncertainty are historically unprecedented. They will force people to either cut back on non-essential consumption and search for cheaper substitutes. Past experience teaches us that everyone tend to economize, except the super rich who splurge with carpe diem abandon.

Businesses of all sorts will have to adapt by offering services either digitally or at the client's homes ("takeaway"), emphasizing medical safety and de-emphasizing luxury brands and exorbitantly priced services in favor of less high-end alternatives.

The key demand will be for EDUCATION, especially delivered online or digitally, but also in small classes or one on one.

Businesses should make available a MIX of high-end brands, VIP services, mid-range brands, and generic but good products and services. Service quality and special, tailored offerings will be far more important than brands.

Even in the devastated business landscape of tomorrow, clients will always value a personal touch, a good word, a luxury or homely ambience, specialty services, sales and discounts, comfort and ease of service, and home delivery.

There is a tsunami of mental health disorders heading our way. It is projected to affect at least half the population, in all age groups.

But there are two additional waves inexorably coursing to our already dilapidated shores: irrationality and grandiosity.

In an attempt to make sense of a capricious and life-threatening universe, people resort to inane conspiracy theories, to fairytale or fire and brimstone religions, or to the demented or ignorant teachings of con artist self-styled "philosophers", "public intellectuals" and "life coaches", half educated gurus, psychopathic leaders, and other savory characters.

At the same time, grandiosity had become the norm. Hypervigilance thrives and even the most innocuous comments and actions are interpreted as humiliating insults and sadistic criticism. Aggression is cresting as is a rigid resistance to learning. The pandemic rendered everyone self-sufficient and, by extension, godlike. Apotheosis follows atomized epiphany.

These are not passing fads but structural transformations: the shape of things to come. In a way, I am glad I am 59 years old and not 40 years younger. I wouldn't want to stick around much longer in the inferno that will follow this meltdown of civilization.

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100.000 subscribers on my main YouTube channel (another 30,000 on my other channels). 23,000,000 views on this channel (another 5,500,000 on the others)

A total of almost 800 videos, mostly on psychology, but also covering topics in finance, geopolitics, philosophy and, lately, medicine.

Main YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

World in Conflict and Transition https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

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This pandemic taught us humility. The way to survive and overcome it is to find purpose in life that is bigger than ourselves and to return to the village: communal therapy.

https://www.thetalks.com/webinar/impact_psychology_health

A video of the full webinar is available here: https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

The Talks Mental Health Webinar: Resilience and Hope - Coping with the Impact of COVID-19 on Mental Health and How to Overcome It

May 16, 2020, 10:00 AM CST

Watch my videos on COVID-19 here: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

Additional international conferences on mental health, neurology, brain studies, psychology, and psychiatry

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

Buy most of my books in Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/60F8EC8A-5812-4007-9F2C-DFA02EA713B3

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The grooming or love bombing of a sexual sadist differs to that of the narcissist or psychopath. It is intended to achieve 6 goals: 1. Establish mastery, a power hierarchy, and an external locus of control 2. Mold the woman into a mindless and obedient whore 3. Overcome the woman's natural revulsion and anxiety by habituating her and coopting or hijacking her fantasy life 4. Expose the woman to brainwashing messaging and signaling 5. Push the woman to dismantle her boundaries, abrogate her values and morals, and violate her own rules of conduct 6. Push the woman to dismantle her boundaries, abrogate her values and morals, and violate her own rules of conduct.

Put together, these create a shared psychotic space within which the shared fantasy thrives on false promises and make believe role play. Whenever the woman tries to exit this common territory, she is punished with sadistic sex, egregious abuse, withholding, or rejection.

Finally, the only way open to her is to resort to another man with whom she can create an alternative sanctuary, however fantastic and brief. She cheats and the shared fantasy is irrevocably undermined as mortification sets in and the woman is now perceived as a threat to be shunned at all costs.

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The sexual sadist fantasizes not about sex but about humiliating, trashing, and degrading the woman. Conventional sex leads him ultimately to boredom and ED.

Only women of types (1) and (2) would acquiesce and cater to sadistic needs:

1. Women who are submissive and already deeply in love or irresistibly infatuated with the man. These women require grooming to be brought to this stage.

2. Promiscuous masochists in sex clubs and private networks. It takes a lot of effort to find them and there are huge risks involved, medical and personal.

3. Women in casual sex would never agree to realise the sadist's sexual fantasies. They also demand equipotence (negotiated power symmetry). So, sadists avoid one night stands as they are likely to be unfulfilling and merely provoke performance anxiety. They also invariably end up in a narcissistic injury (rejection or humiliation). Sexual sadists with a weak sex drive, opt for massive sublimation (converting the sexual energy into non-sexual, socially acceptable activities) and only intermittently go for alternative (1). The problem is that (1) requires an intimate committed relationship which most sadists are not willing to embark on. They are looking merely for an admirer, playmate, and lover (shared fantasy), a toy to dismantle - not for a wife or to become a father. Many sadists deceive their women and make false promises to the contrary in order to secure the 3 Ss (sex, supply, and services). At times, they go as far as marrying a woman so as to secure her cooperation.

So, even when the sadist does find (1), the women - angry and disappointed - end up cheating on him. This leads to harrowing mortification time and again. The prize (shared fantasy) ain't worth the price (grooming+mortification). This is why most sadists go through inordinately long stretches of celibacy.

People with atypical sexuality often give up on sex altogether in order to not hurt the innocent (lonely, fragile, broken women; children) and/or because finding a partner requires excessive investment of resources and/or because the sex is likely to result in psychologically or physically dangerous and bad outcomes to themselves and/or to others.

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Women reify the reality principle. As a puer aeternus (eternal adolescent, Peter Pan), the narcissist's main concern and occupation is the avoidance of minacious reality. Hence the repeated, studious, abusive, and ostentatious ("stay away from me") shunning of women.

The narcissist adheres to and reifies the pleasure principle: he is his own libidinal object (sexually and emotionally) and, immature that he is, he likes to play with toys (money, books, collectibles, electronic devices, cars, female bodies)

The narcissist feels safe and calm when he is all by himself because reality then makes no demands on him: via its agents: when solitary, he is self-sufficient and in full control.

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Like every narcissist, my only goal is narcissistic supply. But as a hybrid antisocial narcissist and sadist, my exclusive form of supply is sadistic: it is to embarrass, humiliate, degrade, and undermine people (especially women). My sadism is grandiose: that I possess the power to so badly damage my devastated interlocutors and intimate partners proves me omnipotent and it elates me, like a rush or a high. It is the confluence of fantastic personal inflation buttressed by the visible impacts of my unmitigated, relentless, and callous cruelty.

I obtain sadistic supply with my aggressive ostentatious and public defiance of everything my targets or victims hold sacred, their conventions, plans, and hopes.

I first collude with their fantasies and dreams, pretending to be the perfect accomplice and mate. But then I destroy everything we have built together with cold indifference and glee, methodically, as though exclaiming: "You can never take me for granted for I am a force of Nature and I will punish and ruin you for daring to humanize me, for being so blind that you fail to grasp my divine superiority in every way. I do not need you or anything you have to offer and I will prove it by discarding you offhandedly, like so much retarded trash." I harp on people's insecurities, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses mercilessly and push them to the limits of decompensation, disintegration and acting out.

All other forms of narcissistic supply and psychopathic goals (admiration, recognition, sex, money, power) are secondary and subordinate to my sadistic needs. I often sacrifice them in order to obtain the gratification of watching my prey unravel as I inflict pain and suffering on them, frustrate them, and counter their happiness and joy - often in public.

An example: I will give up having sex with a woman if I can instead frustrate, reject, humiliate, and hurt her with my reluctance or refusal to respond to her signals, cues, and advances. Her pain is a far greater aphrodisiac and supply than anything sex with her can yield.

Similarly, I will forgo or sabotage great opportunities and rewards just so as to hurt and frustrate the hopes and expectations of others.

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The artist communicates his inner world to an audience and tries to translate the private language of his mind to a universal dialect.

The narcissist is an artist, therefore. But he is ill-equipped to create art because he lacks the basic components of being human and has no access to the meta dictionary that connects all people (empathy). This is why the narcissist renders himself - his personality and his life - his only work of art.

Narcissism has been compared to demonic possession. Is there any truth to it? And how about psychopaths and borderlines? Is the False Self not an alien spirit? Are narcissists not evil and diabolical?

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The cluster B personality disorders (narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial-psychopathy) may be mere kaleidoscopic facets of an underlying dissociative process, amounting, in extreme cases, to full-fledged DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder)

In other words: these personality types are self-states, "alters" of each other.

Having endured narcissistic injury or mortification, a trauma, or severe anxiety and stress, these patients decompensate and act out along predictable pathways: the borderline becomes a vicious secondary psychopath, the primary psychopath morphs into a rabid grandiose narcissist and the quavering narcissist shape-shifts into a codependent clinging borderline. These phase transitions are startling to behold and throw off even the most experienced clinician.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that cluster B disordered personalities find it near impossible to access, process, or regulate both emotions and cognitions. These gaping deficits interfere with the meanings that they attribute to the events in their lives and to people around them. The psychopath sees no meaning whatsoever in anything or anyone. The borderline regards herself as meaningless and everyone and everything else as mission critical to her personal autonomy and self-efficacious agency. The narcissist regards only himself as totally meaningful, draining all the rest of any significance.

When under radical pressure, these actors attempt to reframe the situation in a less injurious manner by reallocating and relocating the foci of meaning, thus seamlessly and smoothly transitioning between these extended and extensive role plays that we call "personality disorders"

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I wrote about palindromic speech in my other, lamented Instagram account (@vakninsamnarcissist)

Two other obstructive speech patterns are: the hypothetical and counterfactual.

The narcissist, borderline, and psychopath use hypothetical speech to "test the waters", to see how their interlocutors would react to information. Sentences which start with "maybe" or "possibly" or "it could be that" or "I think that" or "I thought so, but wasn't sure" - are all forms of such exploratory excursions.

Maybe X typically means: X had actually happened or is the truth. How do you feel about it?

Counterfactual speech is a lie or misinformation disguised as either a rhetorical question or as a statement of settled and universally accepted fact. "Maybe she flirted with me at the restaurant, but she didn't come to my room later that evening, now, did she?" When, of course, she did visit his room that night.

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It is amazing to observe how women sense a real man even if he looks like a much rehashed roadkill or yesterday’s unsorted trash.

If a man loves and adores women and finds their company and sex irresistible - he can do anything he wants with them and to them.

Women find the idea of being irresistible - irresistible!

That’s why some women enjoy being touched even inappropriately: it proves to them that they are irresistible.

And that is also why many women have RAPE fantasies: because in such phantasmagorias, the male perpetrator finds them irresistible, cannot stop himself.

But this is true solely on one crucial condition:

That the man finds the woman irresistible in all her dimensions: looks, personality, her company, sense of humor, intelligence, personal history - as well as sexuality.

If the man finds the woman irresistible ONLY as a SEX OBJECT, to be used to grope, poke, and masturbate with - it is a major turn off for the woman and she finds such a man revolting and to be avoided. His actions are then perceived as sexual harassment and worse.

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I don't know how to be a man. I switch between being hero (I am a macho, all women be damned) and zero (resistance is futile: any passing male is more man than I am and is going to bag and bed my woman).

Men just walk to my women - lovers, girlfriends, wives - and pick them up in my presence. This is because, when we are in public, I show zero interest in the woman with me and give no hint of intimacy of any kind with her. I ignore the woman completely, or, if I pay any attention to her at all, it is briefly, just to mock and berate her painfully (which arouses the other men's savior protective "damsel or princess in distress" instincts)

I am immersed in interacting with the male company, trying to impress them. I usually meet in groups, so the role of the woman by my side is very unclear (Hanger-on? Admirer? Student? Guest? Estranged wife? An ex? Lovers quarrelled?) I never protest when a man flirts with my woman or picks her up. I give the impression that I couldn't care less, that I am not bothered at all, that I have better, more important, things to do then to get involved.

I never stand up for my woman or protect her even when I know that she is very drunk and that the man she had picked up to spend the night with or to have an affair with is a piece of lowlife scum alcoholic criminalized junkie loser. I let her go and get hurt.

My women behave like virtual singles: aggressively pick up men, flirt with them, spend long stretches of time with them, days and sometimes whole nights, go to bars and night clubs alone and pick up men there. They have emotional affairs or cheat repeatedly.

My women become so desperate that they signal to men, give them their phone numbers, and flirt with them even when they are having an evening out with me in a restaurant! They have no real bond with me and are starved for sex and intimacy, to be wanted and cherished. They feel used and abused by me. They want out by any means: cheating and ostentatious infidelity is their exit strategy.

When asked directly, my women let the other men know that I don't care or mind any misbehavior and that I have no interest in them, their whereabouts, who they are spending time with, when and it they will return, and how they choose to act ("he is busy with his computer", "he rejects and abuses me", "he is very sick, has mother issues" "he told me I can fuck others").

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Love bombing has four functions:

1. To signal the intensity and persistence of the interlocutor's or correspondent's ostensible emotions and to chart and document the growing, all-pervasive attachment

2. Virtue signaling: to convey the purity and authenticity as well as the good intentions of the love bomber

3. Gaslighting: to engender, foster, and impose on the target an immersive virtual reality bubble within which a cult-like shared fantasy or shared psychosis is established and takes hold.

4. To induce the target to enter the hall of mirrors where she is idealized and becomes infatuated with her rendition, an addictive experience which results in operant conditioning. It grants the love bomber with the power to withhold access to his contraption as a way to modify the target's behaviors (intermittent reinforcement)

Study the differences between grooming and love bombing in one of my previous posts here.

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What determines whether the narcissist experiences narcissistic mortification or mere searing romantic jealousy when his partner misbehaves with other men?

Reminder: mortification occurs when the rejection is total, abrupt, ostentatious, and when the narcissist needs his partner the most. It is a stark reminder of his power for self-delusion and gullibility. Romantic jealousy is a normal reaction to the anticipated loss of the partner.

The narcissist divides all women into homemakers, promiscuous, and promiscuous-glamorous.

When cheated on or abandoned, he experiences mortification only with homemakers. He then transforms external mortification into an internal one: they are not like that or to blame for their misconduct, it is my fault, my abuse and withholding pushed them to the limit. He overlooks any facts to the contrary, including the partner's past promiscuity and a pattern of betrayal and sexual and emotional licentiousness.

With promiscuous-glamorous (beautiful, entrepreneurial, autonomous), the narcissist experiences both retroactive and reactive romantic jealousy. "Owning" this kind of partner - who could have chosen any man - upholds the narcissist's grandiosity (uniqueness, irresistibility) and sense of virility. Losing her challenges both.

With promiscuous only partners, the narcissist feels nothing and experiences no reaction: cheating is both expected and accepted as way out of the fun and fuck shallow relationship he has with this kind of partners.

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The worst, most egregious, hurtful and dangerous type of narcissist - really, of any person - is also antisocial (psychopathic) and sadistic. He is the sad and corrupted outcome of intermittent reinforcement in early childhood which resulted in a shattering and never resolved narcissistic mortification.

Such narcissists, as children, were first idolized, placed on a pedestal, pampered, and cosseted, admired, exhibited, they could do no wrong, they were perfection reified. Then, abruptly, they were cast aside, shunned, discarded, mocked, nightmarishly abused in every which manner, sadistically criticized, and ostentatiously hated.

These narcissists will stop at nothing to recapture this garden of Eden ideal state. In women, they look for an idealizing mother - or, failing that, they try to "fix" the intimate partner coercively. They generate a shared fantasy space into which they shoehorn all others, from business partners and colleagues to romantic partners and neighbors. Any attempt to exit the space or challenge it leads to extreme aggression and a replay of the original narcissistic mortification.

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Treatment modalities (psychotherapies) belong to either of two camps: the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) no-nonsense correctional officers (example: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies or CBT) and the WYDSIWYG conspiracy theorists (what you don't see - depth psychology, the unconscious, complexes, the shadow - is what you get). The first school assumes that overt behaviors and speech faithfully reflect the patient's inner landscape.

The second group is convinced that manifest conduct and words are there to compensate for or misrepresent underlying psychodynamic processes as well as whole continents of repressed, festering material. There is always a "conspiracy", a collusion between various psychological constructs to hide the true self. In this sense, everyone has a false self to some degree (Jung, Goffman, Winnicott)

The very word "personality" presupposes the existence of a mask ("persona") intended to conceal various fears (abandonment, rejection, ostracism, failure); camouflage thwarted needs, urges, drives, desires, and emotional expression; avoid true intimacy for fear of being shunned, sadistically criticized, or hurtfully ridiculed; and defend - via defense mechanisms - against the incursion and encroachment of ego-dystonic, uncomfortable, disorienting, and painful reality.

CBT and modern theories of personality are far less paranoid. They are founded on a working hypothesis that the external is fully aligned with the internal and reflects it. Treat the patient's negative automatic thoughts and self-defeating cognitions, attitudes, defective and dysfunctional thought processes - and you will have altered his mind irrevocably towards a more functional and, therefore, happier life.

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I am a global hate figure and have grown accustomed over the past three decades to reams of vitriolic hate mail. But the pandemic amplified this murky wave into an effluent tsunami. The irony is: in most of these diatribes, people call me a "narcissist" and enumerate my misbehaviors in exacting detail - all first described in and borrowed from my work in 1995.

The overwhelming majority of these haters don't even know who I am or realize that they can throw these epithets in my face only due to my pioneering work almost 30 years ago. Every single speaker on narcissism is rehashing my texts, handed down the generations of self-styled experts, gurus, political analysts, life coaches, "empaths", and professional victims.

I gave my detractors every single weapon that they are now deploying against me! I and my unwitting disciples have fostered in tens of millions of people around the world awareness of what was happening in their relationships and lives, a name for it, and a language to describe and communicate it.

Among numerous other terms, I coined the very phrase "narcissistic abuse" in 1997. Yet I was never invited to speak in "Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day". Another recently self-confessed narcissist gone public was welcomed by the organizers as a speaker. Enough said.

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Some people are considered "lucky": they end up with most things we deem desirable: family, friends, comfortable existence, a creative legacy, pride of profession, a respectable place in their community.

Such happy-go-luckies may even be unhappy for stretches of time, or encounter serious drawbacks as individuals or in their circumstances - but they end up having a well-rounded accomplished lives.

These are the conditions for such attainment:
1. Be sufficiently intelligent

2. Have a stable core of friends, family, and collaborators

3. Formal higher or vocational education

4. Marketable and transferable skills

5. Modesty and easygoing personality

6. Friendly gregariousness with a real interest in others

7. Both industriousness and thoroughness (attention to detail)

8. Chosen (not reluctant or mandatory) commitment, however outlandish

9. Absent the above, acting (thespian) talent and the will to use it to manipulate people by faking empathy, emotions, and commonalities.

Most narcissists and psychopaths are pro-social and leverage their pathology to engender a cult-like following. They profit and benefit from their human environment.

Yet, a tiny minority of narcissists cannot be bothered: their grandiosity is so extreme, they consider themselves so vastly superior, they hold everyone in such profound disdain and contempt, that any interaction with others, however insignificant, causes them narcissistic injury. It renders them sadistic.

In today's world luck and location help but are not crucial as they used to be before modern technologies transformed the conditions for success.

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The narcissist's behaviors are indistinguishable from the conduct of neurotypical, normal, common, average, mentally healthy, and even well-adjusted folks.

It is the operating system, the house of horrors in the background of it all, the absent ghost in the machine that render the narcissist creepy, eerie, unsettling, or even frightening.

The narcissist gives off the vibe of a demented automaton, an ominous false note, like a badly assembled soulless simulated human, a Frankenstein golem.

People who are exposed to this myasmic emanation, often flee for their sanity to the arms of the first person willing to accept them, paying an emotional or sexual price, whatever it takes to get away from the dread.

But some unfortunates succumb, digested by the carnivorous flower they share their dwindling lives with.

The lack of empathy, inability to grasp others as autonomous, separate entities, the solipsistic self-centredness, and impaired reality testing that underlie the narcissist's hall of mirrors and abode of reflected apparitions amount to the death cult of absence that is his quiddity.

Like a humungous black hole, the narcissist sucks and assimilates whoever gets too close to his event horizon and surrenders independent navigation. And then the light is gone.

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As lockdown restrictions are lifted, people in fatalistic societies will behave very differently to the inhabitants of narcissistic cultures.

Fatalism implies an external locus of control: whether one lives or dies depends little on one's decisions or actions. God, fate, destiny, blind luck, misfortune, and malevolent others all conspire to render the verdict of the ultimate survive-or-perish outcome.

The denizens of these spaces are likely to act recklessly and adopt a "devil may care", carpe diem attitude to the risks that the pandemic and virus pose.

In grandiose-narcissistic environments, the locus of control is internal. Their populace believe delusionally and counterfactually that they can avoid illness and death by following rigid protocols of risk aversive behaviors.

They are likely to be far more obedient and compliant and, sheeplike, as they cower in their homes, terrified lest mortality and disease impinge upon their immeasurably precious bodies and cosmically significant lives.

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The narcissist's misogyny (hatred of and contempt for women) borders on gynophobia (fear of all things female). This is because the very presence of a woman in his life, however transient or brief - constitutes a permanent narcissistic injury.

Women usually recreate in the narcissist the original, unresolved and traumatic conflict with his mother. They trigger and unleash massive self-punitive and self-destructive forces.

The very emotional or sexual need for a woman humiliates the narcissist as it renders him inferior in his own eyes: as common as the next man who desires the company and the body of a female.

The narcissist envies women for their emotional literacy and for the power they possess to inflict pain by criticizing or abandoning him or by seeing right through his fantasies, undermining his belabored grandiosity.

Women judge the narcissist from a superior perch, able to vet, accept, or reject and replace him with another man who is not an affective or sexual invalid. The narcissist - a poor and derisive simulation of his gender - is envious of such full-fledged specimen of functioning virility.

This Damocles sword of impending infidelity or worse challenges his deepset conviction of omnipotence. The narcissist rebels and seeks to frustrate and hurt women just for who they are and for what they invoke in him, for upsetting his delusional apple cart.

Women's potential lack of exclusivity provokes in the narcissist unbearable abandonment anxiety and anticipation of harrowing, mortifying loss. To guarantee the presence and conditional love of "his" women, the narcissist must perform at top form which renders him anxious and enraged.

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If a woman goes mountaineering with a man and borrows his tough muscles to help her through a rough pass - she is an athlete.

If a woman crams for an exam together with a man, tapping his brain for his knowledge - she is a scholar.

When a woman picks up a stranger in a bar and makes use of his penis to reach orgasm - she is a slut.

When a man sells access to his brain for 300 euros an hour (yes, this is my going rate) - he is a consultant or a counsellor.

But when a woman charges 300 euros to access her vagina - she is a cheap whore.

And guess just WHO wrote all these rules!

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Some people with cluster B disorders (mainly narcissists, borderlines, and psychopaths) advertise how irrevocably bad, gratuitously mean, invariably nasty and generally evil and to be avoided they are. Yet, precisely these types may crave emotions and intimacy. What gives?

They are faking it, switching on and off their vile, callous obnoxiousness on demand.

They act this on four occasions:

1. When they feel threatened and, gorilla-like, they pound their chest to advertise their invincibility.

2. When they want to realize some goal which requires the intimidation or subjugation of a prey, a competitor, or an adversary.

3. To avoid the dual threats of love and intimacy by rejecting and alienating the potential mate. Dysregulated emotions can and often do overwhelm these characters and result in decompensation, mortification, self-destructive acting out, and severe mood lability.

4. As a test of unconditional love and acceptance with a potential relationship partner (including in non-romantic settings, like business): will you embrace me as I am, hideous warts, heinous misbehavior, egregious wanton destructiveness and all?

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Travel bubbles or corridors are arrangements between countries to allow access to their citizens across otherwise sealed international borders. Similarly, quaranteams are social bubbles: a limited group of people who meet regularly and exclude all others as health risks.

This pandemic forces us to retreat into isolation, atomization, self-sufficiency, and narcissistic or depressive solipsism. Especially so in the "countries of the plague", the epicenters of this viral agent of change.

This regression (or progress) is bound to result in two revolutionary paradigmatic shifts:

1. The normalization of mental health pathologies: everyone is going to be clinically depressed or anxious or something or other.

2. Common goods which rely on cooperation and social conventions will lose their value. The Commons will fragments and many social institutions will be rendered obsolete. Examples: money, the family, public goods such as education, and the nation-state. As the banking system collapses, we me devolve to a barter economy with agricultural land as the most prized possession.

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2 parts video today about the inter-generational conflict the pandemic wrought between boomers and millennials.

Washington Post:

The average millennial (1981-96) has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history.

Millennials will bear these economic scars the rest of their lives, in the form of lower earnings, lower wealth and delayed milestones, such as homeownership.

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Some victims emulate the misconduct of their abusers: they guilt trip, aggress, confabulate, manipulate, act entitled and grandiose, show a marked decline in empathy.

Consider the lates riots. Black Lives do Matter, no one is disputing that. There is systemic discrimination and institutional animus towards black. Racism is rampant. Slavery was a horrendous, near-genocidal process that lasted for centuries and decimated blacks on four continents.

The whites feel justified collective guilt for all these atrocities.

But, blacks guilt trip the whites: manipulate them by leveraging their guilt to obtain desired economic and political outcomes.

There is no question that individual whites egregiously misbehave and should be punished for their heinous crimes.

But by rioting destructively and indiscriminately blacks are punishing all whites as a collective - exactly what the whites did to them!

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Sex can be a way to avoid intimacy rather than experience or enhance it. By reducing the partners to fetishized body parts or objectifying them into animated dildos and dolls, the act becomes impersonal and auto-erotic rather than intimate. The partner remains largely anonymous and is then discarded perfunctorily and is easily forgotten.

Such casual one night stands usually occur a short time into a random meeting with a stranger in a bar or a party. Few meaningful words are exchanged: bodies speak and seductive flirtation usurps real conversation and getting to know each other. Even just hanging out, having fun is perceived as a wasteful prologue best truncated. People think with their crotches and reduce the other to his or her genitalia and erogenous zones.

This urgency and one track mindedness are what distinguish true casual sex from a first and even only consummated date.

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In the sadistic narcissist, both grandiosity and entitlement are at the service of the pleasurable urge to humiliate and torment other people.

Haughtily holding people in contempt for their ostensible inferiority makes it easier to dehumanize and objectify them. Feeling entitled to instant gratification and special dispensation legitimizes even the most egregious misconduct.

His sadistic impulses go hand in hand with the narcissist's unforgiving ideal inner critic and with the masochism of ineluctably frustrated unrealistic expectations and tortuous perfectionism.

In time, as people retaliate, sadistic narcissists become avoidant and schizoid. They reach out to others only to extract narcissistic supply or, if they are also antisocial (psychopathic) and, therefore, goal-focused, they seek to secure money, sex, or power.

But regardless what else motivates the sadistic narcissist, inflicting pain to him is the supreme drive. It is what socializing and sex are to healthier folks: a source of succor and an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence. To hurt, abuse, mortify, and sexually despoil are an irresistible twofer: elixir and aphrodisiac.

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Severely traumatized victims of abuse (with PTSD and CPTSD) often become avoidant. But they also display psychopathic and narcissistic traits and behaviors. These are reactive and transient: they vanish without a trace once the victims are nurtured back to health in a holding and loving environment and go full-fledged no contact with their abuser

The psychopathic and narcissistic overlays (these acquired responsive learned traits and behaviors) do not amount to personality styles and disorders. They just serve to counter the abuse or contain it and restore eroded self-efficacy and a sense of agency in the traumatic space. In this sense, they are actually healthy and indicative of resilience.

The victim becomes self-centred, dysempathic, defiant, goal-oriented, reckless, lying, or aggressive just in order to survive in the pathological environment and the multifarious assaults on her identity and individuality.

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Do stereotypes usefully represent real knowledge or merely reflect counter-productive prejudice? We know that a disproportionate number of criminals in the USA are black and that the vast majority of anti-Western terrorists are Muslim. In light of these facts, racial profiling (a sub-species of stereotyping) appears to be a rational and ethically justified act of self-defense. But is this a “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy? In other words: does racial profiling cause the very ills it is intended to counter? Hardly likely.

Stereotypes invariably refer in a generalized manner to - often arbitrary - groups of people, usually minorities. Stereotypes need not necessarily be derogatory or cautionary, though most of them are. The "noble savage" and the "wild savage" are both stereotypes.

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In the penultimate scene of the heartrending film, "The Song of Names", a wife confesses to her husband after decades of deception, that she had slept with his best friend. He smiles at her benevolently, holds her hand lovingly, and they revert to the conjugal bed as though nothing much had transpired between them.

The message? Adultery and sex are no big deal, a mere body function, like grabbing a bite or a few drinks with someone else, no cause for hurt or pain, zero risk of loss, jealousy or injury, all in a day's - or a night's - work.

Even more shocking is that the woman is presented as an eminently positive, caring, and empathic character. Her cheating is the fault of the cad, her seducer, a quintessentially bad guy. She bears no responsibility or blame and shows no hint of guilt or remorse for her act of intimacy and sex with her spouse's closest soulmate, for years of lying to her husband, and for manipulating his relationship with her paramour (who has gone missing)

I found this histrionic almost psychopathic woman to be the truly morally reprehensible character in this yarn. Yet, evidently, no one else involved in the making of the film shared this view of her.

And, this insouciance, this indifference to perfidious immorality and profound betrayal is what makes this film a horror flick.

This is the new normal, the utter lack of inhibiting values, according to this movie: cheating on your significant other with his childhood friend, hiding it from him, manipulating his thoughts self-interestedly, then a matter of fact confession, a smile, hands held in sympathy, love unperturbed and off to bed we go. Extramarital sex as a form of forgettable, meaningless, emotional entertaining exercise. None of your spouse's business.

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In the first encounters, the narcissist assumes the role of the strict, ostensibly benevolent, but sadistic parent ("tough love") - or the hurt, petulant, entitled, self-centred, and sadistic child. As a parent, he is having sadistic incest. As a child, he is having masochistic incest. The inevitable cheating by the partner punishes the parent and mortifies the child, fostering personal development and growth as well as a creative spurt.

In the narcissist’s relationships OF ALL KINDS (romantic, business, "friendships"), there are five phases: grooming, shared fantasy, interstitial I (two options: exit or persist), mortification or anti-fantasy, and interstitial II.

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A US patent of the first technological application of the Chronon Field Theory: an Alcubierre warp drive engine, exactly like in the sci-fi books and movies.

Eytan H. Suchard revolutionized my initial contribution in my doctoral dissertation in 1983-4 (titled "Time Asymmetry Revisited" and available through the Library of Congress)

Much more about chronons and the field theory here: https://samvak.tripod.com/time.html

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When caught cheating, two stock phrases many adulterers use are: "s/he meant nothing to me, it was meaningless sex" and "I will never see him or her again." Both feeble - and infuriating - attempts at amelioration backfire.

Here is what you should say to the cheater just before you dump him - the only reasonable and justified course of action:

If the sex meant nothing to you - then your partner's feelings must have meant less than nothing. Why risk hurting the person that you purport to love and care about just to do something that means nothing to you with someone who means nothing to you?

As to "I will never see him or her again" - of course you won't! You got everything you wanted from your one night accomplice, mission accomplished, why see him or her again in any case? The other party is usually equally eager to avoid all further contract. So, there is no big sacrifice involved in making such a solemn pledge. It is simply a statement of fact.

The only rational thing to do is quit the relationship instantly. "Once a cheater, always a cheater" is supported by reams of studies and mountains of research as is the lesser known truth: "Once cheated on, always cheated on" and "if they cheat with you, they will cheat on you". Bail out. Break up. Preserve your sanity. No habitual cheater is worth your self-deception - and every cheater cheats again, given the opportunity.

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Lockdowns are here to stay as a new tool in the arsenal of increasingly more authoritarian regimes the world over. In January, when China incarcerated 11 million people in Wuhan to stop the spread of the novel virus, media in the West smugly proclaimed that such misconduct can never be replicated in the West, where an active and vociferous public opinion will put an instant stop to it and defy the measure. Well, they overestimated the public's extent of disobedience. Same happened after 9-11, when most civil and human rights were curtailed without a peep from the sheepled public.

Nothing is more permanent than the transient and the temporary. The power grabs by the political class are irreversible - including their newly acquired ability to imprison their populations for indefinite periods of time. Rest assured they will make use of it, time and again. They already are abusing them against demonstrators in the racial equality and climate justice movements.

The plutocrats of the West made massive amounts of lucre during this pandemic: Jeff Bezos got 40 billion dollars richer and Gates added 12 billion to his fortune. So did Adelson, Buffet, Musk and every other billionaire on the Forbes list. Why slaughter the goose and forgo its golden eggs? These true masters of the universe - who control all media, traditional and social as well as every politico alive - will make sure that the pandemic lasts forever: it is good for business.

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Here is how to instantly tell a narcissist apart from a psychopath:

The narcissist maintains one island of stability in his life while all the other dimensions of his existence are a chaotic maelstrom. He remains married to the same woman for decades even as he dizzyingly switches between careers and workplaces. Or he climbs the corporate ladder with the same enterprise for 35 years, having divorced and remarried five different spouses.

The psychopath has no such peaceable oasis: every single aspect of his life is mayhem and pandemonium. His personal life is disordered beyond any timelines, as is his kaleidoscopic range of vocations, his myriad on and off "friendships", his antisocial or defiant pursuits, his numerous domiciles, and so on.

More here: https://samvak.tripod.com/faq32.html

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Why do victims of narcissistic abuse insist that the narcissist is possessed of such thespian talents that he succeeded to deceive them into thinking that he is nothing of the sort? Because it absolves them from personal responsibility: "Not my fault! He misled me! He made me fall in love with him before I had realized what I was getting myself into!" and other such self-deceiving, alloplastic, and, dare I say, narcissistic excuses.

The truth is that it takes a massive amount of denial to ignore the red flags and warning signs that the narcissist gives out in plenitude within the first ten minutes of meeting him for the first time. There is even a name for the primordial frisson reaction that these predators provoke in their tremulous prey: "uncanny valley"

Actually, victims are attracted precisely to these signals irresistibly and inexorably. But they want plausible deniability and someone else to blame when it ineluctably ends with horrific, life shattering abuse. It seems that narcissism is contagious from the first moment of exposure: "It is not my fault, he made me do it" is a classic narcissistic refrain, after all.

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I published this op-ed in 2001:

Incrementally, but noticeably, the West is shedding its democracy. Hard-won civil liberties are willingly sacrificed for the sake of illusory added security. Institutions are stacked with political, partisan appointees who do their puppetmaster's bidding. Laws are openly broken and the Constitution flaunted with breathtaking callousness and an ease that would have been considered unthinkable on September 10, 2001.

I wouldn't be surprised if elections are suspended due to a perpetual "state of emergency". Largely ignorant of history and thus devoid of any meaningful or helpful perspective, people shrug off this doomsday scenario. They forget that Rome - a four hundred years old republic with venerable institutions like the Roman Senate - gave in to tyranny in the space of four years. The same goes for ancient Athens, the first truly participatory democracy on earth, transformed by wars into a hideous dictatorship.

The West's is a malignantly narcissistic culture. Its denizens believe counterfactually that it is the richest, most virtuous, freest, civilization on earth. Reasonably, they are convinced that everyone is destructively envious of them. This renders them paranoid and violent.

Led by the USA

An early and observant traveller to the USA, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted this siege mentality and warned that the United States is walking a thin line between freedom and authoritarianism.

It is this ingrained belief that the world is hostile and harsh that will likely undo the American experiment. Psychology teaches us about projective identification: a defense mechanism that forces people around you to behave the way you are accustomed and expect them to. Treating everyone as a potential enemy usually turns them into ones.

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If your intimate partner or spouse is uttering ANY of these sentences, s/he is about to cheat on you and s/he knows that it is almost certainly going to happen:

No need for abandonment anxiety

These are just your insecurities

You are being insanely jealous/paranoid

I am just going for a drink with him/her

You should trust me/don't you trust me?

He is like a brother (she is family) to me

We are going to just discuss work

Actually, I don't find him/her attractive/interesting

I didn't know he/she is going to be there

I will be back before you know it

I just need some personal space and time

S/he wants to discuss something highly personal with me, so it is better if we are alone

I will never cheat on you

Feel free to add your own "pearls" of protestations of innocence and faux or guilt-driven displays of goodwill.

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It is ironic that a hardened, junkie violent career criminal became the mascot of a global human rights movement but of course "I can't breathe" and police brutality are hallmarks of the pandemic as well: the virus affects breathing, sometimes fatally - and law enforcement all over the world are at the obsequious and unquestioning service of increasingly more authoritarian regimes and money-backed politicians. They place their collective knee on the public's neck enforcing lockdowns and other measures.

So, protesters around the world, even if they are unaware of it, are not demanding only racial equality and an end to police militarized and paranoid knee-jerk violence. They are insistent on freedoms: to breathe, to speak out, to associate, and to move around. No one can breathe nowadays, regardless of his or her skin color.

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The narcissist’s grandiosity crucially depends on co-idealization: he idealizes his partner so that he can feel idealized. If his partner is the most drop-dead gorgeous super-genius, what does it say about him that she is his and no one else’s?

Co-idealization occurs simultaneously in two spaces, one real and one imaginary. The narcissist’s pathological narcissistic space is his stomping ground: his home, church, neighborhood pub, volunteer organization, or workplace. In short: the location in which his sources of supply habitually congregate and interact to provide him with adulation and affirmation. Concurrent with this physical site, the narcissist maintains a shared fantasy space within which he idealizes both himself and his intimate mate.

When the narcissist is forced to return to reality, when he is brutally awakened and decompensates (his defenses crumble), he usually does so by having been narcissistically injured or even mortified. He then devalues the fount of hurt and frustration. He uses the infantile splitting defense mechanism to render his partner the polar opposite of her erstwhile idealized version.

But, exactly as idealizing the partner resulted in self-idealization, devaluing her results in self-devaluation (“how could I have been so stupid and blind and gullible and wrong and fallible to not see how inferior she is”). To avoid this excruciating outcome, the narcissist engenders an external mortification (“she is an evil, dumb, psychopathic bitch and I must punish her”) and immediately embarks on a new round of co-idealization with the next available and willing victim

Watch video

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Lucky the virus is not targeting stupid people. Not many of us would have survived.

This is a promising member of the new class of intellectuals in the post pandemic world. He will end up as a guru or a life coach for sure. If Tony Robbins and Sadhguru did - so can he.

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In a professional, corporate, or business setting, there is a paucity of personal information regarding:

1. The backgrounds of everyone present or involved;

2. Their common or past history;

3. Mental health issues, traits, or behaviors (a fragile self-esteem, promiscuity, borderline, psychopathic, histrionic, or narcissistic);

4. How competitive or vindictive they are;

5. Emotions or attachments (overt and undeclared); and

6. The exact nature of the relationships between everyone present.

If you pick up or hit on someone you have just met in a project, at work, in a business setting, a colleague, or a collaborator, you may end up being unwittingly used as an instrument to settle accounts or some other private destructive agenda.

This is why dating and sex are best attempted only outside the workplace or the collaborative project.

Even an innocent assignation between colleagues, service providers, guests, or collaborators - let alone ending up having casual sex - can lead to major disruptive tensions.

Mixing sex with work is frowned upon in most business environments and those who flout this separation or defy it (often in conjunction with substance abuse) acquire a bad reputation and are shunned.

Thinking with your crotch is a veritably bad idea, but never more so than as an employee, service provider, or contractor while employed.

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Prophets and prognosticators of social, political, and economic trends are often shunned, outcast, mocked, or outright punished. Even when their predictions come true during their own lifetime, they are rarely acknowledged or compensated for the abuse and mistreatment meted out to them throughout their "years in the desert". In stark contradistinction, the originators of scientific theories attain fame and a slew of pecuniary rewards once their theories prevail.

This disparity is because people are invested - both emotionally and materially - in prevailing social, economic, and political trends, fashions, and assets. The Establishment rely for their survival on inertia, and on the blindness, ignorance, and acquiescence of the masses. True prophets and successful prognosticators tend to "rock the boat" and undermine this edifice of wealth and privilege. They constitute a present and immediate danger. Social ostracism is the most effective weapon against them. Persecution may follow if it proves insufficient.

But, there are deeper reasons for the resentment and consequent maltreatment of true prophets and successful prognosticators.

First, by straying outside the "official line" and by predicting (and thus promoting) change, they prove themselves unable to conform to extant social mores, edicts, values, and etiquette. This overt non-conformism renders them solitary, idiosyncratic, and eccentric. They are not - and cannot be - team-players.

Continued here: https://samvak.tripod.com/future.html

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Lasch observed that America has become a culture of excuses (for self and the "disadvantaged"), of protected judicial turf conquered through litigation (a.k.a. "rights"), of neglect of responsibilities. Free speech is restricted by fear of offending potential audiences. We confuse respect (which must be earned) with toleration and appreciation, discriminating judgement with indiscriminate acceptance, and turning the blind eye. Fair and well. Political correctness has indeed degenerated into moral incorrectness and plain numbness.

But why is the proper exercise of democracy dependent upon the devaluation of money and markets? Why is luxury "morally repugnant" and how can this be PROVEN rigorously, formal logically? Lasch does not opine - he informs. What he says has immediate truth-value, is non-debatable, and intolerant.

Consider this passage, which came out of the pen of an intellectual tyrant: "...the difficulty of limiting the influence of wealth suggests that wealth itself needs to be limited... a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation... a moral condemnation of great wealth... backed up with effective political action... at least a rough approximation of economic equality... in the old days (Americans agreed that people should not have) far in excess of their needs"

Continued here: https://samvak.tripod.com/lasch.html

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Laws have to earn observance and obeisance. To do so, they have to meet a series of rigorous criteria: they have to be unambiguous, fair, just, pragmatic, and equitable; they have to be applied uniformly and universally to one and all, regardless of sex, age, class, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, skin color, or opinion; they must not entrench the interests of one group or structure over others; they must not be leveraged to yield benefits to some at the expense of others; and, finally, they must accord with universal moral and ethical tenets.

Most dictatorships and tyrannies are "legal", in the strict sense of the word. The spirit of the Law and how it is implemented in reality are far more important that its letter. There are moral and, under international law, legal obligations to oppose and resist certain laws and to frustrate their execution.

Continued: https://samvak.tripod.com/crime.html

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The young are avoiding each other in every possible way.

Spectatoring: worrying about how you look and sound while having sex.

It is the outcome of consumption of porn and growing shame and inhibition related to nudity and body dysmorphia.

Instead: sexting which can be staged and photoshopped is the rage as well as dating apps as entertainment and diversion from real face to face encounters.

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Public hospitals are in dire financial straits. Even in the USA, one third of their patients do not pay for medical services (compared to less than 5 percent in private hospitals). Medicaid barely - and belatedly - covers another third. Yet, the public hospital is legally bound to treat one and all.

In other countries, national medical insurance schemes, the equivalents of Medicare/Medicaid in the USA, (e.g., the NHS in Britain), or mixed public-private ones (e.g., Kupat Kholim or Maccabbee in Israel) provide fairly extensive coverage. Community medical insurance plans are on the rise in both the USA and Europe. Corporate plans cover the rest.

Still, uniquely in the USA, many potential patients remain exposed. More than 40 million Americans have no medical insurance of any kind. A million new disenfranchised join their ranks annually. This despite sporadic - and oft-unsuccessful - initiatives, on the state level, to extend insurance - in lieu of charity care - to the uninsured.

This kind of deprived patient often consumes less profitable or loss leading services such as trauma care, drug-related treatments, HIV therapies and obstetrical procedures. These are lengthy and costly. Private healthcare providers corner the more lucrative end of the market: hi tech and specialty services (e.g., cardiac surgery, cosmetic surgery, diagnostic imagery)

Continued here: https://samvak.tripod.com/nm014.html

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Psychopaths abuse empathic mirroring to insinuate themselves into their victims's lives as a long lost soulmate and veritable Doppelgänger.

When he targets you, the psychopath laughs at your jokes, imitates your speech patterns, replicates your body language, resonates with your values and believes, compliments your behaviors, upholds your choices and decisions, tells you only and exactly what you want to hear, caters to your self-image, buttresses your self-perception, takes cares of your needs, flatters and idealizes you.

In short: the psychopath usurps your identity and becomes you. Psychopathic grooming is a form of identity theft and is, therefore, highly addictive: it feels like self-infatuation, irresistibly and inexorably falling in love with that most perfect being: with you.

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Games are an integral part of even the most serious rites of life. We are the ludic species. Courtship and foreplay precede sex. Pomp and ceremony precede war or celebration. A whole host of minutely orchestrated maneuvers anticipate a business negotiation.

People who cannot play games (for example: the mentally ill) and those who refuse to succumb to societal mores, protocols, and expectations (for example: misogynists, misanthropes, the contumacious, counterdependent, and defiant) lose out: they are shunned, ostracized, and excommunicated. Women abhor their transactional directness, men fear their goal-orientation. Everyone relegates them to the weirdo bin or locks them up in institutions such as prisons and mental asylums.

Ironically, total institutions such as these (and also hospitals, the army, rehab centers, and other regimented environments) are founded on exquisite and rigid gameplaying. Deviating from the rules can cost an inmate his life or the rest of his freedom. One could even say that the main role of these lockouts is to socialize by inculcating gaming skills in incorrigibles.

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Among other things, economists study the lifelong decisions of individuals to spend money they earn, invest it, or save it (delay the gratification of consumption). The theoretical rational agent spreads his income over the horizon of his life expectancy, making use of the productive years to both consume wisely and create a nest egg for him and for his dependants.

In reality, people are all over the place, expending their scarce resources irrationally, not saving as much as they should (borrowing is a form of negative savings), and not mindful of the growing structural instability of the modern workplace and the not so new normal.

One reason for these inexplicable choices is a cognitive dissonance between the certainty of our demise and our planning for a future of immortality. All of us, young and old alike - even the retired and the terminally ill - act as though we are going to live forever even as we realize and accept that death await us all. We deny our mortality and ephemeral transience. We make children to extend our useful economic lives and to provide us with a delusion of continuance beyond the grave.

More: https://samvak.tripod.com/mortal.html

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The abuse of substances such as alcohol and drugs provides the addict with much more than a fuzzy feeling or a high. This is why it is nearly impossible to eradicate or to reverse and recidivism rates are stratospheric.

Their daily consumption is ritualized and involves special implements. The day is structured around securing them and imbibing, injecting, smoking, or sniffing them at regular intervals. In this sense, they are much like an institutionalized religion: an exoskeleton that prevents the addict from disintegrating.

Drugs and alcohol provide goals and therefore render life itself comprehensible: obtain the cash or bitcoins to purchase the illicit goods, set up the utensils, interrupt the day to drink or get stoned, repeat the cycle.

The interactions with these substances amount to an organizing and hermeneutic principle: they introduce order into existence and imbue it with meaning and direction.

Finally, alcoholics and drug addicts congregate: getting intoxicated, wasted, or high is a social activity.

Consider alcohol (social drinking) and sex:

Alcohol encourages its habitués to socialize: it makes them more outgoing and self-confident. But, it does not alter choices. Rather, it affects goal-seeking behaviors by increasing confidence (grandiosity), eliminating empathy, and elevating short-term gratification of impulses, urges, and desires over the consideration of long-term consequences. It also enhances the perception of attractiveness of potential mates. So, it often results in reckless casual sex.

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Swipe left for the number of views of my entry on Wikipedia. More than 100,000,000 people have discovered narcissism for the first time on my Geocities, Tripod, and HealthyPlace websites since 1995. My website - a birthday gift from my wife, Lidija @reframingtheself - was the first and only one to deal with narcissism for years.

I had established and ran the first 5 online support groups for victims and survivors between 1995-2004. There was no one else online - just me. A Herculean task of educating and teaching and helping people. My first support group grew to 250,000 members in less than 2 years when the Internet was in its infancy.

I had to invent a new language, now in wide use all over the world: "narcissistic abuse", hoovering, flying monkeys, cerebral, somatic, inverted narcissists - I coined all these phrases and dozens more. I also borrowed terms like "narcissistic supply", gaslighting, and CPTSD and applied them to the study of narcissism, narcissists, and abusive relationships. My book, "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited", now in its 10th edition, was first published in 1999.

I made all my work freely available from day one: 43 books, 2000 articles, 600 videos. At no charge. No strings attached. Unlike all the other speakers on narcissism.

I gave tens of millions of victims and survivors their lives back - and a voice. Everyone who discusses narcissism nowadays is building on my work, whether they are aware of it or not. How I ended up being a universal hate figure is a mystery.

Every day I get an average of 30 messages wishing me dead in the pandemic from women who admit that I had saved their sanity and future. YouTube is flooded with comments about my appearance, my voice, my personality and how it is a pity that I have a presence online. Haters shuttered my first Instagram channel, had Facebook remove my pages, and deleted 43 of my videos. The virulent tsunami of hatred I have been confronting for 25 years boggles the mind.

This is the thank you I get daily for 25 years of a dedicated, charitable mission.

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Some victims of abuse are like disabled people: they tend to leverage their suffering to evade responsibility for their lives and to emotionally blackmail and manipulate others.

Regrettably, self-efficacious strategies tend to ossify and perpetuate themselves: these victims or invalids tend to transform their plight into a profession or an identity or both.

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Meaninglessness is the real pandemic of modern life: sex, relationships, work, country and most everything else have been rendered insignificant. But some people have transformed arbitrary opportunism, random couplings, and carpe diem into a work of art, an avocation, and a vocation.

People who do meaningless and emotionless are possessed of a labile (dysregulated) sense of self-worth coupled with one of two: 1. Low self-efficacy (for example, as an outcome of a less than mediocre intelligence) OR 2. Disrupted childhood in a dysfunctional family.

They trash themselves recklessly either because they feel nothing and are committed and attached to no one - or because they feel too much and are overwhelmed. Sometimes, they misbehave they misbehave in a desperate lurch, an attempt to transition from the first state to the second.

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Keynote speaker in the 37th International Conference on Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine tomorrow, starting at 09:50 AM.

The topic of my talk:

Psychology of Habit-forming in a Time of Pandemic

Additional details here (search for keywords psychosomatic medicine): http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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Cheating with no intent to exit the shared fantasy - even with the same man repeatedly - does not provoke romantic jealousy in the narcissist.

Actually, cheating with the same man preserves the idealized version of the woman, while casual, sluttish sex challenges or destroys it.

So, the narcissist prefers the former: if she has a stable, long-term, intimate lover or if she has sex with someone she has known for a long time – but only someone who does not threaten the shared fantasy with him.

The shared fantasy demands presence and availability. If the narcissist is busy (not available) or absent, the woman is free to do as she wishes (object inconstancy). But if he is available and present, she should be all his, exclusively. If she then spends time with other men, he perceives it as a rejection of the shared fantasy and it provokes abandonment anxiety and romantic jealousy.

Cheating which challenges or destroys her idealized version (drunk one night stand) and is intended to facilitate an exit from the shared fantasy (prefers to spend time with other men) provokes extreme romantic jealousy focused on both the sex and the intimacy with the other man (=the substitute shared fantasy). Cheating that is intended to mortify leads to a breakup without romantic jealousy.

The narcissist doesn’t have sex (except sadistic despoiling) or real intimacy with his woman, so he does not mind if she has both with other men. He has a shared fantasy with an idealized version of his woman, so he feels excruciating hurt and intense romantic jealousy ONLY when the woman replaces the shared fantasy she has with him with a shared fantasy (=intimacy) with another man and, in the process, as she exits the shared fantasy she had with him, destroys the idealized version that I am interacting with.

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The covert borderline is a new subtype of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) more common among men. It is different to the classic and to the shy or quiet subtypes. Both the Covert and the Classic act out while the shy or quiet acts in. The covert borderline borrows features from the classic narcissist and from the primary psychopath. The classic variant is grandiose and reacts as a secondary psychopath would to stress and ego dystony.

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In his new book, "Exercise of Power", former Secretary of Defense of the USA and the youngest chief of the CIA ever, Robert Gates laments the decline in American power worldwide. He attributes this process to America's over-reliance on projected and deterrent military might at the expense of all other soft power options: diplomacy, culture, international development and humanitarian aid, and other options. Many of these alternatives were literally dismantled even as military budgets ballooned inexorably and explosively.

But Gates fails to realize that this is merely one aspect of the brutalization of American policies, institutions, and discourse. Internally, there has been a marked and revolutionary shift to heavily militarized policing at the expense of social, educational, welfare, and mental health services. Now, at the behest of ever more belligerent and confrontational authorities, the army itself is getting directly involved in domestic politics.

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After 15 years of self-imposed monastic seclusion, I re-emerged in 2016. To my unmitigated horror and disorientation, I found out that the world I had left behind is gone for good and the new normal is as alien to me as the surface of Pluto.

I withdrew into my shell in the 1990s, a time of unbridled optimism in the West. Now, a mere two decades later, everything is topsy-turvy:

Sex is meaningless and casual, promiscuity is an accomplishment, virginity a repellent liability, adultery is universal and fun;

Divorce and reciprocal abuse are the norms in all manner of so called "relationships", intimacy is threatening, courting is harassment;

Expertise is suspect, mocked, and rejected;

Charitable acts are vile conspiracies, technology is slavery, erudition is derided, truthism and malignant grandiose egalitarianism abound;

Entitlement pervades; career criminals are martyrs, law enforcement monsters, con artists and actors rule and rock;

Social interactions and sexuality are vanishing, loneliness is in vogue;

The occult, the paranoid, and the irrational are considered superior to science and rationality, books and learning are niche pursuits;

Birthrates tumbled under the replacement rate, marriage and parenthood are widely shunned and frowned upon;

Only the virtual is real, censorship is praised, rabid and escalated self-promotion touted;

Plutodemocracies and authoritarian psychopaths govern, poverty, hardship, and sickness the norm worldwide.

And this was before Nature declared war on us.

I count my blessings: I don't have much longer to live. This is one planet I would be delighted to check out of. It is not mine and I have no idea how I ended up here. I want to go home.

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September 16, 2012

I hate this brave, new world where:

Illiteracy is 140 characters long and has a face-book;

Everyone has a thousand virtual "friends", but virtually no real friend;

Every child has a mother and multiple fathers, but no parents;

Knowledge is a matter of opinion and opinions a matter of fads;

Our idols sport muscles and vocal cords, but little else besides;

The right to vote is universal, but the will to vote is not;

Everyone has a right to free speech, but little of value to say;

Extramarital sex is considered recreation and monogamy a throwback;

The only ideology is self-gratification and collectives are mere dim memories;

The only certainty is uncertainty and the only permanent fixture is change (for change's sake); Obsolescence is the driver of innovation, but science, art, and literature are obsolete;

As men and women lose their traditional roles, confusion and inter-gender enmity reign. In a unisex world, homosexuality, or sexual abstinence are rational choices.

As malignant, narcissistic individualism is on the rise, the species is dying out. In many countries - including major ones such as Japan, Russia, and Germany - the population is declining precipitously.

More than one third of the youth of these places opt for celibacy and singlehood. Sperm counts have plummeted by a whopping 70%. We are in the throes of vanishing.

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Here is a syllogism for you: (1) All sex is physically intimate; (2) Some sex is emotionless and meaningless; hence (3) All emotionless and meaningless sex is intimate, at least corporeally. In other words: intimacy is not connected necessarily to emotions and meaning. The context is crucial.

Intimacy is the removal of psychological defenses and physical barriers in order to grant access to one's body or mind. If so, an appointment with your gynecologist or psychotherapist is intimate; but rarely involves reciprocated emotions or is a part of a meaningful relationship. Still: exposing your genitalia to be probed and sharing your innermost secrets and thoughts are, no doubt, intimate acts.

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I am a keynote speaker together with the Medical Director of the NHS and others in the 33rd International Conference on Psychiatry and Mental Health in Dubai on June 25. I will participate via a video link.

I am also a member of the organizing committee (OCM). I am a member of the Organizing Committees of more than 90 additional mental health, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience conferences - more here:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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Just finished watching the culturally sensitive and fascinating series "Unorthodox". In the last episode, a young (19), married, penniless, homeless - and pregnant - Jewish orthodox woman has a one night stand after a tour of a local bar in a foreign city (Berlin). She sleeps with a relative stranger who had been sporadically nice and helpful to her in the preceding two days. Neither of them considers her behavior a problem. No one sees anything wrong in a man taking advantage of a broken, disoriented woman. Yes, taking advantage because she is not in the right frame of mind to make even minor decisions. An interracial, multicultural, politically correct gay couple even find the whole thing hilarious and promise to keep her secret.

As long as such social, interpersonal, and sexual mores are endorsed by the mass media, our species is doomed: the monogamous, sexually exclusive couple still is the indispensable basic organizational and functional unit without which everything will grind - is grinding! - to a halt.

This is not to say that couples cannot agree and negotiate other - non-monogamous, non-exclusive, consensual - types of arrangements (such as open relationships or polyamory). But what she did was cheating, pure and simple. And, yes, I prefer "cheating" to the more sanitized and neutral versions such as "adultery", "extramarital affair" or "extradyadic sex". Where the parties do not agree to introduce other people into the couple, emotionally or sexually, and one of them does so secretly and surreptitiously, it is deceit, pure and simple. And no amount of touchy-feely "look how wonderfully tolerant we are" of rainbow-colored makeup can disguise the hideousness of the act. There is nothing aesthetic or commendable about it: it is ugly and bestial.

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There are two aspects that set this pandemic apart from all previous iterations:

1. All our institutions - from the family to the state - are defunct or, at best, dysfunctional, so the social safety net is frayed beyond repair.

2. This pandemic occurs in a generational interstitial: generation Z (zoomers) are entering the workforce (or what is left of it) and graduating, buried under an avalanche of student debt. The Boomers are retiring in droves, more wealthy and smug than ever.

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Video Presentation to the 37th International Conference on Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine, June 2020

We form memories in familiar settings and based on habits: daisy chain of memories which incorporate schema.

When we are deprived of the familiar – places, people – we compensate by dissociating (like living inside a movie), we freeze, or we try to form new familiarity.

New familiarity constricts the world: lockdown restrictions PLUS takes time to construct new habits and the initial space and number of objects incorporated in it is limited.

Drop in self-efficacy, dissociation (including depersonalization, derealization, and amnesia), disjointedness (discontinuity), confabulation and identity diffusion = psychotic disorder, confusion between internal and external objects and hyperreflxion (hyperreflexivity).

Discontinuity, hyperreflexivity, dissociation are at the core of NPD and BPD. This is why I suggest that NPD is an attenuated form of DID bordering on psychosis (BPD is failed NPD, so FARTHER from psychosis, not NEARER).

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From time to time, the Doormat Narcissist tries to fight back by conning people out of money (asserting himself by taking instead of giving). Or, he insists on sexual exclusivity at the commencement of every intimate relationship.

But even there he fails time and again: people see right through him and walk away and women cheat on him repeatedly, their needs unmet and in the hope that he will set them free and let them go once they have made him aware of their ostentatious transgressions.

Conning people is setting boundaries for and asserting NOT himself - but the fictitious character that he creates for the con. So, it defeats the purpose: again, he ends giving up everything of himself freely to ANOTHER man, albeit one that he conjures up.

Similarly, he makes women fall in love with a false apparition, an emanation, a thespian project, a role play - never with the real him. The grooming phase over, upon entering the shared fantasy, all his women discover to their dismay that he had conned them into a relationship with a complete, abusive, and mentally disabled stranger (him). Of course, their most fervent wish is to up and walk away, by any and all means necessary, including by having casual sex with strangers.

Again, by luring women into his lair, he is giving himself abundantly to ANOTHER man - albeit to a fictitious character, The Irresistible Genius. He is doing his dirty work for this fictional protagonist and satisfying his grandiose and sadistic needs: to uphold and prove his irresistibility and then to taunt, frustrate, humiliate, and despoil the women thus captivated. Those are the needs of the fictional character, not of the Doormat Narcissist and he dedicates all his resources to catering to them on the Superhero’s behalf.

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The psychopath wears the mask of sanity effectively – why can’t the narcissist? Because the narcissist is already wearing a mask (False Self, Wunderkind). Because the narcissist IS a mask.

Typologies and classifications of narcissists: Million, Westen, Kelly, Vaknin. Classic (Overt), Covert (Shy, Vulnerable, Fragile), Compensatory, Inverted (Narcissist Codependent), Somatic, Cerebral, and other subtypes.

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Our sex partners are either people who we care nothing about, emotionally insignificant and disposable - or those who mean the world to us.

But sex is mostly a physiological function: hormones rage, body systems realign. So, as far as the brain is concerned, banging a stranger is no different to copulating with your loved one. Making love to your sweetheart is not necessarily deeper, or better, or special. This is why we react to pornography so potently.

This fact creates two problems:

1. Casual sex is much more profound than we think. We force ourselves to deny and numb our reactions to it and this creates dissonances even in the most experienced cads and swingers. Conversely, we reframe sex with loved ones and confabulate to render it much more than it is.

In short: the hookup culture of rampant one night stands has pathologized behaviors, cognitions, and emotions and this adversely affects our ability to integrate physical intimacy into dyadic romantic relationships.

2. We all prefer passionate "bad guys" and "bad gals" for casual sex. But everyone is "bad", given the right partner and circumstances. As technology explodes the number of potential accessible partners, it is becoming increasingly more onerous to maintain "role constancy". Hence the supernova in adultery and cheating behaviors. We oscillate between our scripts as "good" (transactional) and "bad" (promiscuous) which fosters additional dissonance and anxiety.

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Few - if any - men are willing to commit nowadays. What for? Sex is just around the corner, with minimal or no investment of any kind.

So, contemporary women in the reproductive age who want children are so desperate that they settle on any man willing to serve as a long-term mate.

They go even for abusers, ostentatious cheaters, alcoholics, junkies, criminals, the obviously mentally ill, and good for nothing losers and delusional wannabes as long as they are willing to tie any knot, however tenuous and no matter how reluctantly.

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At the commencement of the relationship, the Narcissist is a dream-come-true. He is often intelligent, witty, charming, good looking, an achiever, empathetic, in need of love, loving, caring, attentive and much more. He is, in other words, ideal. At first, the narcissist is too good to be true. Then, he is too true to be good.

It is difficult to let go of this idealized figure. Relationships with narcissists inevitably and invariably end with the dawn of a double realisation. The first is that one has been (ab)used by the narcissist and the second is that one was regarded by the narcissist as a disposable, dispensable and interchangeable instrument (object).

The assimilation of this new gained knowledge is an excruciating process, often unsuccessfully completed. People get fixated at different stages. They fail to come to terms with their rejection as human beings – the most total form of rejection there is.

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The Narcissism Reader: Clinical. Behavioral. Spiritual

by Peter Fritz Walter (Author), Sam Vaknin (Author)

Kindle (Amazon USA)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BZYPJYL

Kindle (Amazon UK)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08BZYPJYL

Paperback

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BWGWLDR

An explorative journey co-authored by Sam Vaknin and Peter Fritz Walter.

Sam Vaknin’s contributions show that over the past century, pathological narcissism has been construed as a psychological defense, introversion gone awry, a regression, or a personality disorder. It is probably all the above—and much more besides.

His contributions to the reader deal with two neglected aspects of this multifarious phenomenon of mental illness: narcissistic mortification (when the narcissist is forced to face himself as others see him or her) and the psychodynamic role of psychological and sexual sadism in these disturbances of the self.

Peter Fritz Walter’s essays show new holistic ways of coping with sadism, and particularly sexual sadism, acted out either toward adults or toward children.

The approach taken is non-judgmental and functional, and emphasizes a bioenergetic point of departure.Information is provided about the true reasons for violent emotional and sexual afflictions and resulting misconduct, and viable alternatives to chaotic sexual behavior and suggestions for behavior adjustment are offered, not through putting up self-punishment and guilt, but in the contrary through understanding the energy-nature and inherent intelligence in our emotions.

The primal narcissistic wounding if often the result of parent-child codependence and emotional abuse, as well as a stringent lack of autonomy early in life. From a policy perspective, the way to go is quite exactly the contrary of what is practiced now by our lawmakers and social policy makers; it’s the way toward solving the blockage by dissolving the energy obstruction that led to the blockage. This energy obstruction is related to distortions of perception, and a lack of emotional awareness.

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Every relationship represents a fine tuned balance between prize and price. The longevity and health of the connection crucially depend on and derive from this equilibrium.

In my case, the prize - what I can and am willing to offer and to share, my intellect - is often inaccessible: most of the time, no one has any idea what I am on about. The difference in terms of IQ between me and an average person is substantially greater than the gap between a human and a chimpanzee, a pig, or a dolphin. So the pearls I cast are to the herd of swine like so many shards of useless glass.

Even when (rarely) I do succeed to penetrate, however incrementally and partially, people - especially women - find that it is not worth the price they have to pay to keep me company. I am too difficult, entitled, hypervigilant, and high maintenance.

Most folks settle for much less of a prize if the price is right. They look to connect with others who are either authentic or human, or, the bonanza, both.

To be human is to be flawed in some way, NOT perfect or superior! A imperfect counterparty - interlocutor, sex partner, lover, spouse, or partner - engenders feelings of comfort, safety, ease, and is endearing. Someone who is genuine but immoral or fake is still fully human: their inauthenticity proves how insecure and vulnerable they are - how REAL.

I am fraudulent through and through: a mere confabulation. I am wholly invented, an utterly fictitious character with a feigned facade simulating a Self where there, in truth, I am nothing but wisps of smoke swirling in an interminable hall of mirrors. I have camouflaged myself so efficaciously that I have lost myself.

Additionally, I am irredeemably and unmitigatedly inhuman: a sadist in bed and out, zero emotions, possessed of a reptile's cold empathy. I victimise and humiliate as others breathe and more often than not I find the experience of demeaning, despoiling, and debasing others far more exhilarating than sex.

All the endowments I have are at the service of this single-minded pursuit. No wonder no one would come within a mile from me. I am more alone than the most devout monk in the most desolate wasteland: in the desert of me.

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Normal people get things wrong, bungle things up, act immorally under the influence or even when sober, exploit and abuse, and can be unpleasant. But we tend to forgive them because we can see ourselves in them: their foibles and missteps are ours, they evoke empathy or pity or mirth. We are all in this together, they broadcast as they misbehave and then repent and experience shame, guilt, and remorse as they attempt to make up for it and somehow compensate and repair. They love others, enjoy their company, find them fascinating or desirable or funny and have a good time by socializing. They accomplish via collaborating, get laid via courting, are rendered happy with family and friends.

Not so the goal-focused narcissist or psychopath. They regard other people as mere instruments of gratification, objects to be milked, beasts of burden, or prey (as victims). People have something the narcissist and psychopath need (narcissistic supply) or want (money, sex, power, access, possessions), so they just take it, regardless of the consequences. They never mess up - they destroy. Their callous misconduct is profit-motivated in the relentless pursuit of self-interest. They are gregarious only when they are hunting. They hold everyone else in profound and abiding contempt and apologize only when forced to or threatened. They may act depraved, but even that it contrived, mechanical, somehow inhuman.

We recoil, feeling vaguely uncomfortable or threatened. But when we are self-destructive we seek them out - and they never fail to grant us this last wish to harm ourselves, to self-mutilate by spending time with them and by catering to their all-devouring needs.

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I never let anyone - man or woman - love me or befriend me because it negates my grandiosity which I cherish and value about everything - and everyone - else.

Intimacy implies the ability to truly know me. But, like god (that other, more successful piece of fiction), I am unknowable. I make sure of that. To presume that any inferior being out there can have access to my splendiferous mind is to slight me.

Similarly, there is no love or friendship that is not equipotent: in intimate relationships, there is a symmetry of powers, rights, and wants between paramours, partners, and buddies. But I am no one's equal: I am so vastly superior intellectually that I am out of the grasp of ordinary dimwits (=everyone else, the remainder of the teeming masses of humanity, the great unwashed). Plus, I don't need anyone: I use everyone but only as interchangeable commodities, indistinguishable and inert. To claim otherwise is presumptuous and grandiose, almost sacrilegious.

I am, of course, open to relationships with women for sex, supply, and services (3 Ss) and with men for the latter two functions. Serviced and adulated is half my happiness. The other half is sadistically humiliating and hurting folks in all manner, both in private and - the delicacy - in public. What is there to not like?

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I am working on reconceiving of BPD and NPD as post-traumatic disorders, as REACTIONS to CPTSD which involve dysfunctional attachment, dissociative self-states, arrested development (infantilism), cognitive deficits, emotional and affective dysregulation.

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Stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Trees and termites: Organic vs. Synthetic institutions

Last organic change in agricultural revolution and urbanization 5000 years ago: family, hierarchy, regime, society (socializing), motherhood, childhood, rules, future, cyclicality, recreational sex (cohabitation), division of labor, property

Now second organic revolution from nation-state capitalism or communism (means of production) back to hunter-gatherers via neo-feudal anomie: separation of sexes, procreative sex, single mothers, hunters and trickle down sharing, gatherers and equitable (network) sharing, self-sufficiency (communal individualism)

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Alcohol’s effects include:

1. Reduces empathy

2. Disinhibition: act on pre-existing wishes

3. Beer goggles (affects the perception of symmetry)

4. Disguise hesitancy

5. Alloplastic defense (drink's fault)

6. Long-term memory

7. Stereotypical grandiosity (alcohol myopia)

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Speaker in the Depression and Psychiatry webinar on July 13.

My topic: Sadism in Sadistic and Narcissistic Personality Disorders.

I am a member of the Organizing Committees of more than 100 international conferences on mental health, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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There are three types of manipulative speech:

Victim

Entitled, demanding, dependent, transparent, whining (grievances and grudges)

Child

Entitled, demanding, dependent, transparent, manipulative, naive-immature (fantastic)

Psychopathic

Entitled, envious, competitive, malicious, opaque (coded: dense and multilayered)
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Micro-relationships are the emotional equivalents of sexual one night stands. They are short-lived (sometimes over in hours), but every bit as intense, passionate, and intimate as longer affairs.

These are not hot dates or sultry flings or desirous sexual encounters. They are full-fledged infatuations, replete with throbbing hearts, sweaty palms, and racing thoughts. They are as obsessive as the "real" thing.

Such confluences invariably culminate in one or a few rounds of torrid sex and then the parties dispose of each other one way (ghost) or another (move on to the next partner ostentatiously and hurtfully)

Out of sight, out of mind, dissociation colludes with object inconstancy to wipe out or dim the fond memories and make room for the next bout of romantic binging. Some youngsters go through 20 or 30 such liaisons a year.

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Embrace Nothingness: an antidote to narcissism

Hard data from all over the world show the following, consistently and over millennia:

1. Accept that you are special only to yourself, unique only as a statistic, indistinguishable socially from billions of others;

2. Accept that you are here today, gone tomorrow, ephemeral, utterly forgettable and that your life is random, arbitrary, nasty, brutish, short, and meaningless. You are nothing but an eat2shit machine. Chances are that you will die childless (if you are man) or hated by your offspring.

3. Surrender: resistance is futile, change is an illusion. There is nothing you can do about your essential nothingness, your social station, your future, or people you care about. Not every problem has a solution and very few problems are real.

4. If you insist on protesting, do it by withdrawing and disengaging: in passivity there is safety. The systems set up by the elites want you to fight and to keep losing, it fosters mental illness and submissiveness in you that they can leverage to their benefit.

4. You cannot better or meaningfully alter yourself: you are who you are fundamentally, in most cases, an unendowed zero and loser and this is the way you will remain to the day you die, alone and impoverished.

5. If you were born to poor and uneducated parents, you and your children and their children will end up even poorer and with irrelevant education.

6. The only two ways to make headway in life is to be born to the right parents or to marry the right spouse, social mobility is a myth. Emerging from the right hole or penetrating it is the only way to improve your lot.

7. Anyone who tells you that he has a solution, a cure, a system, a therapy, a cause, a framework, a religion, god, love, empathy, or rules for life is a con artist, probably a psychopathic narcissist, out for your money and adulation. Adhering to a delusion, confabulation, fairy tale, fantasy, or outright lie is replacing a manageable problem with an even bigger one.

Not everything that is true works and not everything that works is true, but you should always prefer what's true to what works. Hope brings forth expectations which invariably result in frustration which causes depression and other forms of mental illness: hope is a counterfactual poison. Your compulsive need to believe in something or in someone  – a god or a guru – leads to either subservience or dysfunction, usually to both.

8. Your children will grow up hating you, depressed, anxious, miserable, mentally ill, or diseased. Their lives will resemble yours in their aimlessness and emptiness.

9. Focus on experiencing your life, do not over-think or over-analyze, you are probably too stupid to do either: eat, drink, make love, have fun, watch the sun rise and set and the flowers bloom, be happy.

10. Live and let live: do not moralize, motivate, hector, punish, argue, debate, convince, position yourself, compare, repair, reach out, converse, expect, hope, demand, or befriend. Just be and let others be. They have the same right to their insignificant existence as you do to yours.

The video is available on this channel:

World in Conflict and Transition

https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

Therapists, marriage counselors, mediators, court-appointed guardians, police officers, and judges are human. Some of them are social reactionaries, others are narcissists, and a few are themselves spouse abusers. Many things work against the victim facing the justice system and the psychological profession.

Start with denial. Abuse is such a horrid phenomenon that society and its delegates often choose to ignore it or to convert it into a more benign manifestation, typically by pathologizing the situation or the victim – rather than the perpetrator.

A man's home is still his castle and the authorities are loath to intrude.

Most abusers are men and most victims are women. Even the most advanced communities in the world are largely patriarchal. Misogynistic gender stereotypes, superstitions, and prejudices are strong.

Therapists are not immune to these ubiquitous and age-old influences and biases.

They are amenable to the considerable charm, persuasiveness, and manipulativeness of the abuser and to his impressive thespian skills. The abuser offers a plausible rendition of the events and interprets them to his favor. The therapist rarely has a chance to witness an abusive exchange first hand and at close quarters. In contrast, the abused are often on the verge of a nervous breakdown: harassed, unkempt, irritable, impatient, abrasive, and hysterical.

Confronted with this contrast between a polished, self-controlled, and suave abuser and his harried casualties – it is easy to reach the conclusion that the real victim is the abuser, or that both parties abuse each other equally. The prey's acts of self-defense, assertiveness, or insistence on her rights are interpreted as aggression, lability, or a mental health problem.

The profession's propensity to pathologize extends to the wrongdoers as well. Alas, few therapists are equipped to do proper clinical work, including diagnosis.

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Driven by a tsunami of narcissism, we are regressing to a dystopian future, shedding millennia of civilization in the process.

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Narcissists, covert narcissists (aka "empaths"), and psychopaths hijacked the narcissistic abuse community online. From self-styled coaches to wannabe "experts" to outright con artists, it is a lucrative, grandiose, and entitled swamp to rival Washington's.

I coined the phrase "narcissistic abuse" - and much of the rest of the language besides - in 1995.

Until 2004, I ran the first (and, for a while, only) website on Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the only 5 support groups available. I regret that I did. I wanted to give victims an outlet and a vocabulary to describe their experiences. Instead, I opened the floodgates to scammers and worse.

Links to the podcast Depression Expression by Scott Ste Marie:

iTunes: https://apple.co/2EQahtI

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2IdKz3m

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Keynote speaker in the World Congress on Psychiatry and Psychology on August 17, 2020.

My presentation: COVID-19: Mass and Individual Psychology and Psychopathology

Certificate of Recognition

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Award certificate for my presentation in the Depression and Psychiatry webinar on the long-term neurological effects of COVID-19 and the formation of clinical personality disorders in patients affected by the SARS Cov-2 virus.

A few years ago, I analyzed one great pandemic and predicted and welcomed the next one in this paper published on Academia.edu.

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Despite the fact that I won Israel's most prestigious prize for maiden literature in 1997, my biographical entry was removed from the online encyclopedia of Israeli authors. The reason? I am a psychopathic narcissist.

I am in good company, together with Columbus, Washington, Churchill, Heidegger, Wagner - history is being falsified on a scale never seen before. "Gone with the Wind" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" are blacklisted. Monuments are being pulled down, names deleted and effaced, politically incorrect textbooks shredded. If you dare to resist, you are mobbed and gangstalked, your reputation smeared. Many lose their jobs or even freedoms.

Today's heroes and idols are lowlife scum: career criminals and con artists, covert narcissists and psychopaths, and ruthless politicians. New Speak is everywhere and walking on linguistic eggshells de rigeur.

In Stalinist Russia, successive editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia sported doctored and retouched photos, eliminating those who fell out of favor. I never thought I would see the day that this became the praxis in the West.

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The body is an aging map of bulging scars and a topography of tactile memories.

Different intimate partners dwelled on different patches, caressed and toyed with extremities, appendages, and crevices. By touching these spots in one's body, their presence is evoked, hauntingly luminous and loving.

Ancient wounds, long crusted over, reify adventures not forgotten and battles never won. An entire biography encased in delicate skin, a piece of history trapped, the ephemeral fossils of the corporeal.

We carry our bodies like a burden, a vade mecum, a cry. And one day we shed them and we and everyone encoded in their cells is no more.

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This pandemic spells the end of the USA as a superpower and the demise of its self-imputed exceptionalism. Like the British Empire before it, its decline will take time - but it is ineluctable and irreversible.

The United States is more states than united: a Potemkin "nation", fake and incompetent to the core, divided by the very dream that propelled it into being, torn by interest groups and aggressive professional and extortionate victims along multiple fault lines and vulnerable antisocial underbellies. Americans produce only commodities and manipulate symbols, much like the natives in the colonies of yesteryear. All the other economic sectors of this third world entity are shot.

I foresaw its demise in two pieces, published immediately in the wake of 9-11 in September and October 2001:

https://samvak.tripod.com/pp112.html

https://samvak.tripod.com/civilwar.html

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Speaker in the Webinar on Healthcare, Health Economics, and Policy, tomorrow in Osaka, Japan.

My presentation is very timely: Social Values and the Health System.

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There are as many health systems and models as there are countries. This is because healthcare is a public good and, thus, reflects the social and cultural values of the societies that design and adopt them.

Video presentation in Webinar on Health Care, Health Economics and Policy

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Why are we Fascinated by Evil and Evildoers?

The common explanation is that one is fascinated with evil and evildoers because, through them, one vicariously expresses the repressed, dark, and evil parts of one's own personality. Evildoers, according to this theory, represent the "shadow" nether lands of our selves and, thus, they constitute our antisocial alter egos. Being drawn to wickedness is an act of rebellion against social strictures and the crippling bondage that is modern life. It is a mock synthesis of our Dr. Jekyll with our Mr. Hyde. It is a cathartic exorcism of our inner demons.

Yet, even a cursory examination of this account reveals its flaws.
Far from being taken as a familiar, though suppressed, element of our psyche, evil is mysterious. Though preponderant, villains are often labeled "monsters" - abnormal, even supernatural aberrations. It took Hanna Arendt two thickset tomes to remind us that evil is banal and bureaucratic, not fiendish and omnipotent.

In our minds, evil and magic are intertwined. Sinners seem to be in contact with some alternative reality where the laws of Man are suspended. Sadism, however deplorable, is also admirable because it is the reserve of Nietzsche's Supermen, an indicator of personal strength and resilience. A heart of stone lasts longer than its carnal counterpart.

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World Conference of Psychiatrists and Psychologists (webinar) in Toronto, Canada.

Topic of my presentation: Unifying Cluster B Personality Disorders.

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I am a stalker, sometimes erotomanic, often a sadistic bully. I cling to the women in my life and invade their existence in every way, like a cancerous metastasis. I act clinging, needy, demanding, infantile, verbally abusive, entitled, and highly dependent.

Everyone who ever came in contact with me has shunned me or fled, sooner (within days), or later (within years if they had enjoyed my money while having lovers on the side, or if they pilfered my ideas and prospered all the while).

Men don't mind or even relish being seen as assertive and decisive, so, when they were done with my utility, they had just vanished or told me off in no uncertain terms.

Women prefer to be thought of as sluts rather than as heartless traitorous bitches and so they cheated on me ostentatiously in order to get rid of me. They picked up men in my presence or contacted  me after the act to inform me of the minutest details of their betrayals.

Many of these women went to even much greater and more egregious extremes that defy belief. Their need to put distance between us drove them to the realms of insanity, decompensation, dissociation, somatization, and rabid acting out.

Of course, I am childless. Women panic at the mere thought: what female in her right mind would interbreed with a mutant?

YouTube numbers tell the whole story: my content is of the highest quality. Yet, people avoid me like a virus of the mind which can cause a systemic infection. Even if they recover from being exposed to me, there is bound to be traumatic multiple organ long-term damage.

It took me 60 years and 43 books authored to come to terms with what everyone in my childhood had told me, from my mother to my kindergarten teacher: I am very mentally ill, a pathogen, and profoundly unlovable.

Innumerable men and especially women, confronted with my hideous deformities, confirmed to me that I am a Quasimodo of the soul. I can't even ring the bells anymore: there is no one left to listen.

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Old Testament God is a malignant narcissist: entitled, vindictive, dysempathic, defiant, malevolent, grandiose (demands to be worshipped)

God the Father absent in New Testament but his Son is all the above and, like most other self-styled prophets of religion, psychotic. See vid.

Evil is an attribute of God. Satan is God the same way Jekyll and Hide are facets of the same person: multiple personality, self-state. Gnostic duality demiurge.

If god is everywhere and includes everything then Evil must also be a part of Him.

The scriptures are chronicles of God's struggles with own imperfections and character flaws - with the Evil side - via agency of flawed Creation.

Humans are products of god's dissociation, carriers of his broken memories, repositories of his dissociative states.

Their task is to help God heal by reintegrating with him, by bringing him back to full awareness and enlightenment, by embracing their own nothingness as a part of Him (kabbalah).

Available here: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

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Women are irresistibly attracted to mysterious, enigmatic men. But not all mysteries are created equal.

Actually, women are repelled, frightened, and get irritated by a man who withholds biographical and pecuniary information or sports a murky, occult, and confabulated life story. They regard such deliberate obfuscation as manipulative or sinister.

But women are inexorably drawn to a man whose essence is inaccessible and obscure, his identity uncertain, and what makes him tick unclear. Ostentatious self-sufficiency and dignified reticence render a man this rare combination: a challenge to be overcome and the promise of adventure as the woman explores and uncovers the terra incognito of his inner landscape.

Men who are too transparent and forthcoming regarding their psychology, men who bare their souls and carry their emotions on their sleeve - are boring and dull and assiduously avoided immature weirdoes.

“Who is he really” attracts hordes of obsessed women. “Why won’t he say what he does for a living” pushes them away equally forcefully.

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New Year resolutions are notoriously fragile and ephemeral. But victims of abuse cannot afford this cavalier attitude: their mental - and too often physical - health depends on strictly observing the following promises to themselves:

1. I will treat myself with dignity and demand respect from others. I will not allow anyone to disrespect me.

2. I will set clear boundaries and make known to others what I regard as permissible and acceptable behavior and what is out of bounds.

3. I will not tolerate abuse and aggression in any form or guise. I will seek to terminate such misconduct instantly and unequivocally.

4. I will be assertive and unambiguous about my needs, wishes, and expectations from others. I will not be arrogant - but I will be confident. I will not be selfish and narcissistic - but I will love and care for myself.

5. I will get to know myself better.

6. I will treat others as I want them to treat me. I will try to lead by way of self-example.

7. If I am habitually disrespected, abused, or if my boundaries are ignored and breached I will terminate the relationship with the abuser forthwith. Zero tolerance and no second chance will be my maxims of self-preservation.

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Predicting the apocalypse in 2016

Available here: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

My responses IN ENGLISH. The days of Western civilization are numbered. Sam Vaknin talks to Milan Adzievski for TV Sonce.

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Certificate of Recognition for my presentation about how social values affect the design and functioning of healthcare systems.

The presentation, made as a keynote speaker in the webinar on Healthcare, Health Economics, and Policy is also available on my other YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings

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Amazing Polly refers in her new video to my article about the body in illness as a torture chamber.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeVf8Bq1knk

Relevant videos on my channel:

https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

YOU and YOUR BODY after Domestic Violence, Rape, Battering: Perpetrator and Society Collude

COVID-19: Will We Become Psychotic Narcissists? (37 Int. Conf. Psychiatry & Psychosomatic Medicine)

COVID-19 Clones Borderlines, Psychopaths: Real Zombie Apocalypse (Depression and Psychiatry Webinar)

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Borderlines and narcissists mislabel their emotions.

Emotions start with cognitions (thoughts), information gleaned from the body, plus data from the environment (contextual intake).

When there are fundamental, ubiquitous cognitive deficits and biases, emotions get misidentified (impaired internal reality testing).

We know this is true from multiple experiments and from the fact that techniques such as reappraisal and exposure (approaching the avoided emotions) work. In reappraisal we change the emotion by altering the underlying cognitions.

Borderlines suffer from emotional dysregulation and, like narcissists, they often exhibit inappropriate affect (understandable when emotions get misconstrued).

Empathy deficits: cold empathy (narcissists, psychopaths) or functional empathy (borderline, codependent, and histrionic) when full-fledged emotional empathy is turned off by negative emotionality, splitting, object inconstancy.

Studies show that increased empathy and age-related increase in empathy DECREASE recognition of emotions in others (Israelshvili, Agneta Fischer, Nannis).

Cognitive emoting: analysis, comparison to others.

Cluster B patients cope with these deficits in emotional cognizance by: 1. Repressing or avoiding the emotions (narcissist, primary psychopath); 2. Misjudging the intensity or semiotics of the emotions (misreading cues, signals, and information) (histrionics); or 3. Dissociating the emotions (borderline, secondary psychopath).

Coping strategies involve self-soothing (including self-defeating, self-destructive, self-trashing, and reckless behaviors) and approach-avoidance and other repetition compulsions (with the gradual formation of a persecutory introjected object)

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In 1995, I coined the phrase "narcissistic abuse". In 1997, I was the first to suggest that narcissistic abuse leads to CPTSD: Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD).

My original article is still here (originally published on Geocities and Suite101): https://samvak.tripod.com/abusefamily22.html

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The narcissist switches between overt and covert self-states and back via collapse and mortification. To resolve dissonances – cognitive and emotional – he experiences and exhibits indifference to hurt and abrogates his boundaries.

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Believers in conspiracy theories are delusional and suffer from twin pathologies: magical thinking and conspiracism (a psychological trait).

Magical thinking: I think=I do/I prevent=It is (Illusory Beliefs Inventory – IBI).

Confusion of internal and external (external objects, events, and processes affected by cognitions, emotions, and moods).

Defective theory of mind (Piaget’s egocentricity in preoperational phase of development) and Theory of World (causation)

Form of infantile grandiosity coupled with autoplastic defenses common in neurosis. Comorbid with OCD (regain control) but not with worry or anxiety (which are more closely correlated with intolerance of uncertainty and perfectionism).

Examples of Magical Thinking:

Narcissist: action at a distance, omnipresence

Borderline: object inconstancy, dissociation (undo, rewind), disinhibited lack of impulse control

Psychopath: omnipotence, control (via intimidation and disinhibited lack of impulse control)

Conspiracism

Additional Reading: Piaget, Bettelheim, Rozin, Nemeroff, Eugene Subbotsky

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Organizing  Committee Member for the Stress 2020 Conference Webinar: International Summit on Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Management, August 2020.

First Keynote Speaker in the Stress 2020 Conference Webinar: International Summit on Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Management, August 2020.

Certificate of Recognition for my oral presentation as a First Keynote Speaker in the Stress 2020 Conference Webinar: International Summit on Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Management, August 2020.

The title of oral presentation was: Triggering Cascade, Trauma Imprinting, and Total Reactance" is now available on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

Additional mental health, psychiatry, and neuroscience conferences I am participating in:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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All mental health issues arise from confusing external and internal objects (examples: that psychosis, narcissism).

I suggest that there is a single clinical entity Personality Disorder with overlays (narcissistic, antisocial, borderline, histrionic).

Each overlay has 3 states: overt, collapsed, covert.

Transition between the states and the overlays is a reaction to gaps (reality intrusion or failure) and narcissistic mortification.

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Structural Dissociation – part of Cold Therapy together with other approaches to trauma and retraumatization.

Dissociation: integrative deficit, not defense (child has few active defenses), symptoms (psychoform and somatoform). Integration and adaptive behavior depend on synthesis (association of all components of experiences and functions into meaningful coherent mental structures both episodically and across time) and realization (analysis and assimilation via personification and presentification – bring past and future to bear on present, mindfulness and reflexivity).

Depersonalization is failure in personification (semantic not episodic memory, see my vid). Trauma reduces integrative capacity. In premorbid personalities with low integrative capacity, may lead to dissociation.

Action systems (inborn, self-organizing, self-stabilizing, and homeostatic emotional operating systems): 1. Guides daily living and survival of the species 2. Physical defense under threat (4 Fs) 1+2 = social defense against abandonment and rejection (haywire in BPD) and interoreceptive defense against mental content (=defense mechanisms, primitive like splitting or sophisticated like passive-aggression).

Charles Samuel Myers 1940 in acutely traumatized war veterans: AS1 linked to ANP (apparently normal parts) AS2 linked to EP (emotional parts of the personality). Myers called them “personalities”, but today we call them “parts”.

EP contains vivid trauma recall (FLASHBACKS) and vehement negative emotionality (fear, horror, helplessness, anger, guilt, shame – or listless, non-responsive, submissive – or derealized and depersonalized). They are linked to body dysmorphia and separate sense of self.

ANP represses traumatic memories and avoids triggers via amnesia, sensory anesthesia, restricted emotions, numbness, depersonalization.

ANP conditioned to fear EP and reacts to intrusion by altering or lowering consciousness, substance abuse, addictions, compulsions, self-mutilation (to silence inner voice of EP), phobias or mental action, of dissociative parts, attachment and intimacy, attachment loss, normal life and change, evaluative conditioning (associating neutral stimuli with negative or positive outcomes and feelings owing to prior association with negative or positive stimuli), diversion, estrangement.

Individual can have one of each (Primary SD), one ANP and two or more EP (Secondary), or multiple ANP and EP (Tertiary).

Both ANP and EP have rudimentary sense of self (“I”) and exclusive access to some memories (=identity, see my lecture to Rostov students).

Dissociative parts vary in degree of intrusion and avoidance of trauma-related cues, affect regulation, psychological defenses, capacity for insight, response to stimuli, body movements, behaviors, cognitive schemas, attention, attachment styles, sense of self, self-destructiveness, promiscuity, suicidality, flexibility and adaptability in daily life, structural division, autonomy, number, subjective experience, overt manifestations, dissociative symptoms (negative like amnesia, numbness, impaired thinking, loss of skills, needs, wishes, fantasies, loss of motor functions or skills, loss of sensation; or positive when mental content or functions of one part introduce on another part’s – psychotic/schizophrenioa like voices, nonvolitional behaviors, tics, pains; psychoform or somatoform=conversion symptoms).

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Lately, a wave of entitlement is sweeping across the globe: minorities, real and self-styled, are demanding rights and actions consistent with those rights. Entitlement is a diagnostic criterion for Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the DSM.

The problem is that someone's rights are another person's obligations: rights instantly give rise to commensurate duties of others.

Everyone is entitled to negative rights: to NOT be killed, incarcerated for no reason, muzzled, robbed, or maimed, for example.

But no one is entitled to positive rights. No one has the right to housing, food, sex, education, access ramps, moneymaking, healthcare, honest dealings, good governance, retirement benefits, decent habitation, clean air, decent burial, objective news, or anything else whatsoever.

Positive rights are coercive because they appropriate one person's resources - time, money, health - to cater to another person's need. Even in principle, there could never be a rigorous justification to such expropriation and redistribution.

Skin color, year of birth, disability, type of genitalia are all irrelevant in the proper calculus of rights. Only two factors are relevant: one's humanity (the fount of negative rights) and the utilitarian greater good.

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When men refuse to grow up, they remain spoiled brats.

When women refuse to grow up, they become psychopathic men.

There is nothing that a spoiled brat hates and fears more than a psychopath.

There is nothing that a psychopath detests more than a spoiled brat.

Both genders are refusing to grow up at record rates.

Do the math. Draw your own conclusions.

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First Keynote Speaker in the Virtual Global Summit on COVID-19.

My topic: COVID-19: Wakeup Call or PTSD?

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Certificate of Recognition for my presentation in the 37th Conference on Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine organized by the academic publications Clinical and Experimental Psychology, Journal of Neuropsychiatry, and Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy.

Certificate of Recognition for my membership in the Organizing Committee.

The topic of my presentation was: Habit-forming in the Time of Pandemic" and you can listen to it on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

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The pandemic of COVID-19 hit everyone simultaneously as a universal, inescapable external shock. Several elements in the progression of the pandemic rendered it traumatic:

1. The exponential inexorable contagion which fosters a feeling of impending doom (extreme stressor);

2. The extreme uncertainty regarding every facet of the disease – from the pathogen to the nature of the illness through to the long-term social and interpersonal effects of the desperate and ever-escalating attempts to rein it in. This led to rising rates of anxiety, depressive helplessness, hopelessness, and disorientation;

3. A lack of clear horizon and timeline which engender a sense of alarming insecurity;

4. Mortal fear of disability and death;

5. The transformation of the familiar – including one’s body, nearest and dearest, habits, and familiar landmarks – into alien, minacious, estranged entities to be avoided on pain of life, as a condition for survival;

6. The breakdown or incapacitation of all support networks, human and nonhuman (technologies).

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major traumatic event. Will it result in mass PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder)? Or will we dissociate the events and return to normal the minute an efficacious vaccine or a cure are found?

In countries which succeeded to control the outbreak, indications are that people are not experiencing PTSD – but rather develop traumatic dissociation, which gives rise to anxiety and depression.

The pandemic is bringing out the best and the worst in people and tipping many over the edge to mental illness. This new paranoid conspiracy YouTube channel is a case in point.

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Love Bombing and Grooming in Cluster B Personality Disorders

Sam Vaknin

Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia and Professor of Finance and Psychology in CIAPS, Nigeria

Dr. Sam Vaknin, Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia and Professor of Finance and Psychology in CIAPS, Nigeria.

Keywords: Love Bombing; Psychotic Space

Abstract

Put together, these techniques create a shared psychotic space within which the shared fantasy thrives on false promises and make believe role play. Whenever the woman tries to exit this common territory, she is punished with sadistic sex, egregious abuse, withholding, or rejection. Finally, the only way open to her is to resort to another man with whom she can create an alternative sanctuary, however fantastic and brief. She cheats and the shared fantasy is irrevocably undermined as mortification sets in and the woman is now perceived as a threat to be shunned at all costs.

View Full Text

https://www.cientperiodique.com/journal/fulltext/CPQNP/3/3/61

Download PDF

https://www.cientperiodique.com/article/CPQNP-3-3-53.pdf

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My grandiose and psychotic mother felt deeply that we, her children, absconded with her life, so she eradicated our lives in vengeful return. But she was "sentenced" to reach a ripe old age and witness our wasted, decrepit, aimless, mentally disabled existences, the bitter, poisonous fruits of her rejection and vicious, life-threatening abuse.

My stunted, arrested personal growth has yielded a genius-child in the egregiously unfit and neglected carcass of a deceitful adult. I have wasted all my many years looking for another mother to love me unconditionally and accept me as I am, including my warped sexuality and delusional grandiosity. I tested every woman in my life by subjecting her to mind shrivelling sadistic psychological abuse and to my sexual proclivities: is she the one? Will she survive the horror of ME?

They all flunked my test, cheated on me ostentatiously with other men to force me to let them go. They all finally dumped me and abandoned me in ways so cruel to render their actions unheard of, even psychopathic.

After each such mortifying, gut wrenching trauma, evidently unlovable as forewarned by my parents, I withdrew from life completely, avoiding all human contact, the hapless and passive recipient of tidal waves of hatred online and off it.

For interminably long stretches of time - many years or even decades at each go - I just sat there, gazing forlornly, witnessing my women drifting away into their parallel lives with other men, suffering the tsunami of ill wishers and haters, awaiting, without much hope, my resurrection at the hand of my next mother, my new adopted family. Anticipating the next round of excruciating agony meted out by my loved one.

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The narcissist hates you because you make him feel like himself – and human.

Narcissism is breakdown in communication, both internal, among the constructs (internal objects) owing to dissociation, estrangement and external, with other people (external objects).

Lack of empathy, no access to emotions, primitive defenses, and cognitive deficits and biases (grandiosity, Dunning-Kruger, confirmation) render the narcissist only partly human: the experience of being human is alien to him.

When in an active shared fantasy with an adulating woman (intimate partner who provides 2 of 3 Ss), I experience maximal grandiosity backed by unconstrained magical thinking: I feel invincible, omnipotent, capable of anything and everything, miraculously perfect and accomplished.

This perfect grandiose state is a regression to an infantile state under the auspices of a safe base good enough (not dead - Andre Green, depressive, emotionally unavailable) mother. It allows me to separate and individuate and to experience totally a constellated, functioning self (albeit a false one) or, in Jungian paralance, successful introversion..

The intimate partner can provide a full experience of the False Self (in the active shared fantasy) and a direct experience of the true self (via mortification). This is not real object relations because the libidinal investment is still in the self (and reflected in the sex: self-soothing masturbatory auto-eroticism coupled with sadism aimed at destroying the intruding object omnipotently).

The narcissist gives up on meaningful communication: he convinces himself that he is too intelligent and idiosyncratic. In an active shared fantasy, the intimate partner facilitates communication with the False Self, the only interlocutor acceptable to the narcissist. She also obliquely provides access to emotional and other modes of non-goal oriented communication thereby encouraging non-sublimatory libidinal investment and cathexis.

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For about 20% of COVID-19 patients, the disease comes and goes in waves for a period of up to 8 weeks.

Many of these "long haulers" experiences long-term aftereffects which last for months and maybe longer:

Difficulty breathing

Fatigue

Mental confusion

Blood clots

Digestive problems

Long term scarring of the lungs (fibrosis)

Cardiac damage

Headaches

Muscle aches

We do not treat mild COVID-19 cases because the side effects of the medicines we have are worse than the disease and because many of these medications suppress the immune system.

In mild cases, we want the body's immune system to attack the virus successfully, including by raising the body's temperature up to a fever of 39 degress Celsius.

In moderate and severe cases, we treat patients in a hospital with oxygen, a ventilator (in rare cases), and a variety of medications.

Still, many of the medicines used in treatment protocols in most developing countries are not used in the West because they are both ineffective and have serious - sometimes life-threatening - side effects.

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Men are prone to sexual overperception: they misinterpret many female gestures and behaviors as invitations to copulate then and there.

To be mere friends with a woman is perceived by many men as a narcissistic injury. When a woman rejects a man sexually or romantically and friendzones him, it implies that she has judged him to be of inferior quality, defective, inadequate, lacking, and has rejected him as as a potential lover, partner, spouse, and father.

Such injury can morph into narcissistic mortification if the woman offering friendship (friendzoning) used to be, at one time, the man's date, spouse, or intimate partner and had dumped him in favor of another man with whom she has had sex (at times while cheating) or with whom she had later created a family.

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"Empath", "super-empath" - and, now, "(super)nova empath" - are self-aggrandizing labels used by covert narcissists online as they perpetuate and leverage their newfound eternal pro victim status to garner attention (and, sometimes, profit).

To prove my point conclusively, join the cesspits that pass for empath support forums and innocently dare to suggest that someone there is not an empath. Or that she may have had a role to play in the relationship (starting with her flawed mate selection).

You will instantly become the recipient of every form of abuse and malevolence known to man (or woman), far more egregious than anything you have ever endured from your narcissist. Nothing worse than the narcissistic rage or passive-aggression of covert narcissists (er, sorry, empaths).

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Narcissists are looking for partners to provide 3 SSs: Supply, Sex, Services.

Narcissists couldn’t care less if you have a high level of empathy, a low, or none.

Empathy is a narcissistic injury: advice, help, support, sharing, expressing an interest (induces paranoia), and intimacy.

Life is a process of becoming via insight. Insight creates empathy.

Empathy is the foundation of learning because it allows for comparison.

All three are impossible without access to emotions. If you have access only to negative emotions you obtain cold empathy aimed at subsuming others, making them like you, avoiding growth and learning. Where emotions are inaccessible, narcissists attempt to grasp others and themselves analytically. But such knowledge is like cramming for an exam: it is not assimilated or integrated. It dooms to compulsive repetition like some demented being or badly programmed machine in a loop. The same lessons are rediscovered with every mortification (to learn the narcissist must first decompensate, deactivate all his defenses).

Access to positive emotions guarantees full fledged empathy via insight and learning and generates growth.

Narcissist rejects help, advice because he knows that he is incorrigible. He discourages intimacy because of his abandonment anxiety ("if they see my true face").

The narcissist reacts with aggression to any presumption of intimacy and rejects cruelly love and caring when offered to him (via sadistic frustration, withholding, rejection, and avoidance as well as active abuse). Such presumption of love implies equality, commonness, and knowability, challenges to his grandiosity.

Displays of emotions are fake, embarrassing.

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I hate my mental illness with vehement vengeance. I am impotently enraged and profoundly sad at the way it had impacted my life. My narcissism reduced to rubble everything and everyone that could have been beautiful in my life. It forced men and women to hurt me really cruelly in self-defense.

But the overwhelming majority of narcissists are not like that at all.

Narcissists are proud of their narcissism and emotionally invested in it. They believe that it renders them more self-efficacious and creative.

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In the 14th century, during the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) pandemic, the young socially distanced themselves in bubbles and avoided the infested cities, retreating to country estates and entertaining themselves with erotic but erudite and multi-layered stories. “The Decameron” is a record of one such retreat in Italy.

The youth of today throw COVID parties, crowd into bars and pubs, flock to the most affected regions, and refuse to implement any prophylactic measure of personal hygiene.

Selfish, entitled, willingly ignorant, proudly defiant, and impulsive these revolting end products of human evolution conform to the clinical definition of a psychopath.

Personal responsibility, learning, purposefulness, and social solidarity are for bookworms, losers, nerds, geeks, and weasels. Carpe diem and tomorrow be damned. Conspiracy theories and ostentatious, politically correct “activism” (grandstanding virtue signalling) represent the apex of the feeble-minded slacker mentality of these lost, decadent, and spineless generations, born since the 1990s.

Humanity is indeed doomed. But not by the virus.

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I have been asking myself two questions for a long time now:

1. Many gurus, YouTube celebrities, and public intellectuals are considerably more rude, abrasive, impatient, and even bullying than I am.

Why do people tolerate their misconduct and continue to shower them with love and adulation - and, at the very same time, react abusively, hatefully and aggressively to almost anything I say? And I mean ANYTHING!

Because people perceive me as inferior to them.

It is easy to accept even egregious maltreatment from someone you deem superior to you, or even from an average guy, very much like you: "He is a genius, a teacher, a leader and it explains and justifies his outbursts" or "he is a good guy who is just having a bad day", or "he means well, he simply has a temper on him".

But people bristle at haughty, condescending, and wounding behavior by their evident inferiors. They retaliate in kind or escalate, assured that they will prevail and triumph over a lowlife wannabe or a defective, mentally-ill psychopathic narcissist, like the repellent Sam Vaknin.

2. Why do women invariably reject me outright and immediately prefer other men to me, even when these men are way poorer, less educated, losers, abusive, junkies, older, infirm, and even uglier?

Same answer: any man - repeat: any man whatsoever!!! - is infinitely preferable and vastly superior to a psychopathic narcissist like me.

It took me a long while to accept that people - women and men alike - disrespect me overtly and ostentatiously because they actually regard me as pitiable and lame, a buffoonish pompous fool, broken and dysfunctional, unlovable, hideous, insufferable and revolting, hopeless and to be shunned.

People cut me no slack and give me no break because I am the one who have been telling humanity for 25 years that I am a monstrosity, a psychopathic narcissist and that my ilk are traumatizing inhuman mutants, good for nothing, and best avoided.

At least folks take my word for this. People are reacting to WHO I am (psychopathic narcissist) - not to WHAT I am saying as I myself had taught them to do when they are confronted with someone like me.

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Both individualistic societies (such as the USA, Israel, and the UK) and fatalistic ones (such as Russia, Brazil, or India) fare poorly when it comes to social solidarity, impulse control, concerted action, consensus building, and planning for the future. "Carpe diem" and "que sera, sera" rule these collectives, respectively.

These types of cultures are ill-equipped to mobilize resources and to structurally, efficaciously, and enduringly deal with external shocks (pandemic, war, or economic collapse, for instance). When compared to collectivist nations such as China, Japan, South Korea, or Vietnam, their responses, such as they are, are sluggish, labile, and chaotic.

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WA Real Interview

Narcissism is not merely a mental health disorder. It is an organizing principle of our postmodern existence. It lets us make sense of our new complex realities. Narcissism is also a new, unprecedented, networked religion with every narcissist as both god and worshipper. Cyberspace is our equivalent of Heaven in the Medieval Times.

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Some studies in places as diverse as South Korea, Germany, and Italy seem to demonstrate that transmission of COVID-19 among family members in close quarters is considerably lower than might have been expected. The transmissibility of the virus (its contagiousness) is very high.

One possible explanation is the FACT that we mate with people - even in a one night stand!!! - whose immune system is SIMILAR to ours.

Some scholars say that we are attracted to people with the same genetic makeup and smell (pheromones) of our parents. Dr Martha McClintock of the University of Chicago studied feminine attraction to sweaty T-shirts formerly worn by males. The closer the smell resembled her father's, the more attracted and aroused the woman became. Falling in love is, therefore, an exercise in proxy incest and a vindication of Freud's much-maligned Oedipus and Electra complexes.

I must mention, though, that McClintock’s work contradicts other, less conclusive and far more controversial findings regarding the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) or the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA). Studies demonstrated either fewer HLA matches than were expected (Ober et al.) – or no such effect (Chaix, Cao, and Donnelly, 2008). Wedekind conducted body odor studies, again with sweaty t-shirts, that demonstrated a female preference for MHC-dissimilarity, especially during ovulation, but only in women who did not use oral contraceptives. Men also preferred MHC-disassortative mate choices.

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Some cultures and religions regard the body as the temporary abode of the mind, a necessary evil, an encumbrance, or even an illusion. They invest in its maintenance minimally and use the body mainly to modulate and regulate states of mind.

Other cultures and religions are somatic: they cherish and worship the body as a shrine, God’s handiwork, to be nurtured and cultivated. Adherents invest inordinate amounts of time to master and modify their looks, get rid of or control illness, enhance and buttress health, tailor wholesome nutrition, exercise, and leverage corporeal assets to obtain goals, such as sex or money.

Normally, the way the pandemic is viewed reflect these differences. In the former societies, there is no panic, only a calm acceptance of the vagaries of the fragile containers we call “bodies”. In the latter collectives, there is a frenetic - hysterical panic - search for vaccines, cures, and risk-mitigation measures.

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First Keynote Speaker in the Psychology, Psychiatry, and Public Health Webinar, August 2020.

Additional mental health, psychiatry, and neuroscience conferences I am participating in:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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4 Paths of Trauma Release and Reactance (Presentation in International Summit on Depression, Anxiety and Stress Management)

Fear of abandonment and rejection (BPD)

Narcissistic injury and mortification (NPD)

Frustration (AsPD, HPD)

Cause reactance.

There are four forms of release:

Cognitive release: Catastrophizing or flashbacks (re-experiencing)

Intervention: controlled catastrophizing via imagery

Emotional release: "Triggering cascade" is when a seemingly minor trigger results in vastly disproportional trauma.

Intervention: chair-based (chairwork dialogs), mindfulness, reframing (CBT), DBT, Gestalt, Scema

Behavioral release: Total reactance characterizes Psychopaths, Borderlines, trauma victims (PTSD and CPTSD), and people with mood disorders and impulse control issues. They escalate every conflict, however minor or imaginary, to the level of nuclear, apocalyptic, all-annihilating warfare and make disproportionate use of every weapon in their arsenal simultaneously.

Defiance, posturing, hostility, aggression, recklessness, and abuse are part and parcel of these recurrent pitched battles with one and sundry: all bridges are burnt and relationships are shattered hurtfully and irrevocably.

Intervention: alliancing, self-efficacy agencing, reinforcement, DBT

Somatic release: conversion symptoms, somatisation

Intervention: dream work, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapies

Narcissists and psychopaths are dreamwreckers: they are particularly adept at provoking triggering cascades by aggressively and contemptuously frustrating both individual and social expectations, cherished and life-sustaining hopes, deeply held beliefs, and ingrained fantasies and values.

Their lack of empathy, innate, goal focused cruelty and ruthlessness, absent impulse control, and mind boggling recklessness create a whiplash of shock and disorientation coupled with agony and a pervasive feeling of being existentially negated. Intolerable angst is the inevitable outcome.

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Insecure attachment styles, attachment disorders and dysfunction are prevalent in cluster B personalities (narcissists, psychopaths, borderlines, histrionics).

In early childhood, they all loved a dead mother, but they do not dare to think about it or verbalize it (the unthought known). Instead they resort to emotional thinking.

They cathect (emotionally invest in) death and aggression (destrudo, not libido), including in inanimate material goods.

Owing to hurt-aversion, they place a premium on self-sufficiency,
independence, personal autonomy, and unbridled, antisocial self-efficacy. They frequently self-parentify and are auto-erotic.

They can love only a dead mother, so they try to turn you into one. Killing the mother figure in order to be able to love her (snapshotting, merger/fusion, extension).

They have dead inert non-interacting mute introjects which makes it difficult for them to distinguish internal from external objects.

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User, Taker, Exploiter = Predator

Narcissists and psychopaths do not form committed relationships that are (1) long-term or (2) based on any emotion.

Rather, they collaborate ad hoc, extract benefits, secure favorable outcomes, and instantly discard the sources when they are (1) no longer of use or (2) have turned maliciously hostile.

When narcissists and psychopaths are forced to return to the scene of a systemic failure (in business and in a relationship), they numb myself emotionally as they experience depression.

The only complete solution is to relocate, initiate new business, and start a new relationship with a new woman (establish a new Pathological Narcissistic Space).

A partial and inefficacious solution is to buttress their grandiosity by keeping very busy or by getting involved in a new venture with a new position.

Women: Are they mothers - or whores?

Narcissists and psychopaths abuse women - including sexually - as an ongoing test: Will they continue to be useful? Will they act with malice? What is their breaking point? (In other words: are they mothers - or whores?)

Narcissists and psychopaths are interested only in two types of interactions: (1) Adulation and (2) Stress testing limits and boundaries via abuse and sadistic sex acts (despoiling).

Narcissists and psychopaths are not interested in intimacy, friendship, companionship, or reciprocated adult sex.

Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap

The narcissists and psychopaths’s show is going on throughout their lives. The ensembles of actors change, but the play remains the same: the shared fantasy. The actors are interchangeable, commoditized.

Narcissists and psychopaths crave the state of shared fantasy because it is an exit strategy from their lives and allows me to not be themselves.

The shared fantasy is an organizing principle and imbues the narcissists and psychopaths’s existence with cinematic color, meaning, direction, thrills, and goals.

But, being a fantasy, this dream state is vicarious and, comfortingly has no real-life consequences.
When in a shared fantasy, the narcissists and psychopaths are "normal" and hopeful: they possess (faux, grandiose and erotomanic) "emotions", make (unrealistic and delusional) "plans", and are (manically) upbeat and energized. It is a self-induced, largely controlled, manic state, akin to Bipolar Disorder.

Shared fantasies come in three forms:

With a man

With a woman

Creative work

Shared fantasies are the only way out of the sometimes life-threatening clinical depression which invariably follows failures, injuries, and mortifications.

Narcissists and psychopaths are actually not into sex (but into sadistic despoiling) and are not interested in money (but in economic security or power). Thus, their measure of self-actualization is the extent of time spent within the shared fantasies.

The narcissists and psychopaths’s lives are comprised of cycles of long shared fantasies, followed by short major depressive episodes.

During these long depressions, they hoard, collect, author texts, overeat, watch films, withdraw socially and romantically, avoid sex, shower frequently.

Only one type of shared fantasy is sufficient to sustain the narcissists and psychopaths’s wellbeing. When another person provides all three shared fantasy types combined it fosters unbroken attachment.

MEN

"Useful": able and willing to provide supply, services, and (far less important and dispensable) money, whether actually, or potentially (subject to circumstances, like the pandemic or business constraints).

Narcissists and psychopaths maintain FULL CONTACT (within a shared fantasy) with a man only when and only for as long as he actually provides all 3 (supply, money, services).

Narcissists and psychopaths maintain LIMITED CONTACT (during interstitial I) with a man only when he remains useful (actually or potentially, based on her track record) and even if he is hostile (providing he is not malicious).

Narcissists and psychopaths go NO CONTACT if the man is no longer of use, regardless of how he feels about them and about the relationship.

Narcissists and psychopaths go NO CONTACT if the man is malicious (even when he is useful, actually or potentially, based on her track record).

When in the limited and no contact strategies, Narcissists and psychopaths lose all interest in the man, they are not protective or possessive, not attentive or supportive, couldn't care less about him, his fate, family, crises he may face.

In limited contact, Narcissists and psychopaths limit the interaction to extracting supply or to receiving services or money.

Men exit the shared fantasy disillusioned, sad, and enraged, having realized that the narcissists or psychopaths is a phantast, commitmentphobe, liar, loser, failure, misanthrope, misogynist, and sadistic abuser.

They give up on the narcissist and psychopath and resort to other men to do business with or befriend.

WOMEN

"Useful": able and willing to provide supply, services, and (far less important and dispensable) submissive sex, whether actually, or potentially (subject to circumstances, like the pandemic or family constraints).

Narcissists and psychopaths maintain FULL CONTACT (within a shared fantasy) with a woman only when and only for as long as she actually provides all 3 Ss (supply, sex, services).

Narcissists and psychopaths maintain LIMITED CONTACT (during interstitial I) with a woman only when she remains useful (actually or potentially, based on her track record) and even if she is hostile (providing she is not malicious).

Narcissists and psychopaths go NO CONTACT if the woman is no longer of use, regardless of how she feels about them and about the relationship.

Narcissists and psychopaths go NO CONTACT if the woman is malicious (even when she is useful, actually or potentially, based on her track record).

When in the limited and no contact strategies, narcissists and psychopaths lose all interest in the woman, are not protective or possessive, am not attentive or supportive, couldn't care less about.
In limited contact, Narcissists and psychopaths limit the interaction to extracting supply.

Women exit the shared fantasy disillusioned, sad, and enraged, having realized that the narcissists or psychopaths is a phantast, commitmentphobe, liar, loser, failure, misanthrope, misogynist, and sadistic abuser.

They give up on narcissists and psychopaths and resort to other men, for a night or for life to satisfy their unmet needs, but also as a way to triangulate, hurt, and punish narcissists and psychopaths.

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Failing and being hated feel real to me, somehow more reliable, and way longer-lasting. Both have a calming, anxiety-reducing effect. I know where I stand, who is who, and what's next.

In contradistinction, love and success are fickle and ephemeral and when they are ineluctably gone, it is painful.

Often, love is feigned by golddiggers and worse, or conflated with erotomania and dependence. Success calls for antisocial cutting of corners and for compromising and bargaining away one's integrity and principles, trampling even on loved ones in the inexorable process.

Attempts to be loved and to accomplish require great investment and grandiose faking for passing, soon to be forgotten returns. The prize is often unworthy of the price.

Consequently, as far as I am concerned, love and success feel inferior to and less safe than any other alternative, worse even than being socially shunned and derided or than becoming a total loser. I undermine both these seductive lures on sight.

Better be an authentic loser, but true to myself, than a faux winner: who is doing the winning anyhow, if one is not oneself - but a fraud?

"For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?" Matthew 16:26

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In my dreams I bid adieu to people I will never see again.

And they are more real to me than they have ever been.

Old men are made of memories, I now discover.

The flesh is worn, defeated, the spirit mellow. All that remain are sepia snippets and pervasive waste.

What could have been way overwhelms what is.

Existence dwindles, ethereal, ephemeral, and foregone, bleeds seamlessly into embracing nothingness.

Not rage. Just grace. A truce with life, a welcome pact with death, the inner peace of absence looming.

It is of beauty, this surrender - or maybe 'tis the victory of spirit.

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The global branding firm Forsman & Bodenfors have published an analysis of 8 cultural shifts occasioned or accelerated by the pandemic.

1. Frugality vs. consumption: people expect durability, longer shelf life but still wish to consume in order to regulate their moods and fill in the emptiness.

2. Meaningfulness: people are looking for diversions, ways to fill in their idle leisure time.

3. Tech matters: tech that helps people to connect is most valued.

4. Business practices spotlight: corporate social responsibility and activism matter.

5. Agenda: altruistic, community-oriented, prosocial, and charitable businesses will come on top.

6. Community: communal ties are strengthening and so does social solidarity.

7. Relationships: re-examining and reframing interpersonal relationships such as friendships and marriages.

8. Self-care: social distancing can spur self-growth (or self-neglect - SV).

Narcissistic mortification

Narcissistic mortification is “intense fear associated with narcissistic injury and humiliation ... the shocking reaction when individuals face the discrepancy between an endorsed or ideal view of the self and a drastically contrasting realization” (Freud in Ronningstam, 2013).

Rothstein (ibid.): “... fear of falling short of ideals with the loss of perfection and accompanying humiliation”. This fear extends to intimacy in interpersonal relationships (Fiscalini), unrealized or forbidden wishes and related defenses (Horowitz), and, as Kohut put it: “fear associated with rejection, isolation, and loss of contact with reality, and loss of admiration, equilibrium, and important objects.”

The entire personality is overwhelmed by impotent ineluctability and a lack of alternatives (inability to force objects to conform or to rely on their goodwill). Mortification reflects the activity of infantile strategies of coping with frustration or repression (such as grandiosity) and attendant psychological defense mechanisms (eg, splitting, denial, magical thinking).

The pandemic of COVID-19 hit everyone simultaneously as a universal, inescapable external shock. We are going through the five stages of the Kubler-Ross cycle of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

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Recently, it is increasingly suggested that pathological narcissism is the outcome of heredity (genes) or an epigenetically determined expression of genes, including in brain abnormalities. Diathesis-Stress Models and Differential Susceptibility Hypotheses are used to attempt to account for NPD.

What causes us to question the consensus regarding narcissism since 1915?

Pathological narcissism is a life-long pattern of traits and behaviours which signify infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one's gratification, dominance and ambition.

As distinct from healthy narcissism which we all possess, pathological narcissism is maladaptive, rigid, persisting, and causes significant distress, and functional impairment.

Pathological narcissism was first described in detail by Freud in his essay "On Narcissism" (1915). Other major contributors to the study of narcissism are: Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Franz Kohut, Otto Kernberg, Theodore Millon, Elsa Roningstam, Gunderson, and Robert Hare.

Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial - the perpetrators could be parents, teachers, other adults, or peers. Pampering, smothering, spoiling, and "engulfing" the child are also forms of abuse.

To identify the role of heredity, researchers have resorted to a few tactics: they studied the occurrence of similar psychopathologies in identical twins separated at birth, in twins and siblings who grew up in the same environment, and in relatives of patients (usually across a few generations of an extended family).

Tellingly, twins - both those raised apart and together - show the same correlation of personality traits, 0.5 (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, and Tellegan, 1990). Even attitudes, values, and interests have been shown to be highly affected by genetic factors (Waller, Kojetin, Bouchard, Lykken, et al., 1990).

A review of the literature demonstrates that the genetic component in certain personality disorders (mainly the Antisocial and Schizotypal) is strong (Thapar and McGuffin, 1993). Nigg and Goldsmith found a connection in 1993 between the Schizoid and Paranoid personality disorders and schizophrenia.

The three authors of the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology (Livesley, Jackson, and Schroeder) joined forces with Jang in 1993 to study whether 18 of the personality dimensions were heritable. They found that 40 to 60% of the recurrence of certain personality traits across generations can be explained by heredity: anxiousness, callousness, cognitive distortion, compulsivity, identity problems, oppositionality, rejection, restricted expression, social avoidance, stimulus seeking, and suspiciousness. Each and every one of these qualities is associated with a personality disorder. In a roundabout way, therefore, this study supports the hypothesis that personality disorders are hereditary.

This would go a long way towards explaining why in the same family, with the same set of parents and an identical emotional environment, some siblings grow to have personality disorders, while others are perfectly "normal". Surely, this indicates a genetic predisposition of some people to developing personality disorders.

Still, this oft-touted distinction between nature and nurture may be merely a question of semantics.

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In the best tradition of Russian history, opposition voice, Alexey Navalny, had been poisoned and is in a coma.

The term "vegetative state" (cortical death) was coined in 1972 by the Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and the American neurologist Fred Plum. It refers to the incapacitation of the cerebral cortex either as a result of severe head injury or trauma or as the outcome of an acute or degenerative illness or as a consequence of substance abuse.

Following a 1-2 week phase of coma (profound sleep-like unconsciousness, usually with artificially-sustained respiration), these patients wake up but they remain unaware of themselves and their surroundings. They don't respond or interact with the environment. Their reflexes are still intact, though, so their eyes roam the scene, their limbs move jerkily, and sometimes they are even capable of swallowing and chewing food (or gagging on it). They do react to painful stimuli by withdrawing, groaning, and grimacing - but all other neurological and biochemical hallmarks of pain are missing. Patients in PVS yawn, smile, weep, and laugh - but not in response to external stimuli. They breathe normally and unaided.

There is no way to diagnose PVS, even with the aid of Electroencephalography (EEG), computer tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Actually, the EEG of 25% of all PVS cases is absolutely normal! Cerebral blood flow is evident in the brains of some PVS patients. A typical MRI of a PVS patient shows widespread lesions and wasting of brain tissue - but this is common in other diseases (such as dementia) which do not render the patient unconscious! Moreover, the cerebral cortex continues to function, though at a very depressed level, akin to that of barbiturate anesthesia.

"The vegetative state can be diagnosed according to the following criteria; (1) no evidence of awareness of self or environment and an inability to interact with others; (2) no evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful, or voluntary behavioural responses to visual, auditory, tactile, or noxious stimuli; (3) no evidence of language comprehension or expression; (4) intermittent wakefulness manifested by the presence of sleep-wake cycles; (5) sufficiently preserved hypothalamic and brain-stem autonomic function to permit survival with medical and nursing care; (6) bowel and bladder incontinence; and (7) variably preserved cranial-nerve reflexes (pupillary, oculophalic, corneal, vestibulo-ocular, and gag) and spinal reflexes..... A wakeful unconscious state that lasts longer than a few weeks is referred to as a persistent vegetative state."

(Multi-Society Task Force on PVS, Medical Aspects of the Persistent Vegetative State, New England Journal of Medicine, 330, 22, 1572-1579 (1994)

"The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) is a neurological scale with a score between 3 (indicating deep unconsciousness) and either 14 (original scale) or 15 (modified or revised scale)." (Wikipedia)

If the patient does not recover from PVS within 1 month, the prognosis is bad. Patients in PVS survive for years (up to 40 years, though many die in the first 4 years of their condition) as long as they are fed and hydrated. But they very rarely regain consciousness (or the ability to communicate it to others, if they are in a "locked-in" state or syndrome). Even those who do recover within days from this condition remain severely disabled and dependent, both physically and intellectually.

In 2006, a woman in a vegetative state was able to imagine things on request (judging by her brain scans): she had “covert consciousness” (intermittent awareness without regaining any motor functions). A ten years investigation that followed demonstrated that many patients are in this state (locked in syndrome).

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Only the narcissist's delusions (shared fantasies) constitute mental illness because they impair reality testing and are self-defeating. They involve severe cognitive and emotional deficits and result in egregious misconduct (like stalking) with dire consequences, psychological (mortification) or physical (prison, divorce, banktrupcy).

The delusions are attempts to resolve the jarring dissonance between the narcissist's defiantly grandiose essence and his socialization by withdrawing into an imaginary space where he conforms to others' expectations even as he pursues his agenda of self-gratification. To reconcile the irreconcilable.

The "my way or the highway" attitude, Peter Pan "syndrome", absence of ambition, self-indulgence, slacker indolence, ludic preferences, commitmentphobia, lack of perseverance, boredom, dramatic seeking of novelty, misanthropy, and misogyny are either culture-bound value judgments (not clinical entities at all) - or actually adaptive coping strategies that optimize favorable outcomes under the constraints of the narcissist's immutable core identity.

Dysfunctionality arises only when self-efficacy is compromised and goals are forfeited. If agency is preserved and one's life and lifestyle fully reflect one's preferences and aims, all is well, no matter how many disagree, criticize, mock, or get hurt in the process.

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Certificate of Membership in the Editorial Board of Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Neurodisorders.

I am Editor in Chief or Member of the Editorial Boards of well over 60 academic journals in my fields, all listed here:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

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I am a child tyrant emperor: infantile, petulant, moody, divine, and delusional.

I am a Wunderkind: a boastful genius.

I want just to play. Nothing else. To have fun. That's all (shared fantasy). I renounce reality and truth.

My game is: you are my vastly inferior slaves and disciples.

You must accept me as I am. You are expected to fully forgive and love me unconditionally, regardless of my conduct or misconduct, even when I inevitably hurt you badly time and again.

I am immutable, opinionated, obstinate, grandiose, labile, dysregulated, and depressive. You should not try to change or fix me or to bargain with me: you are not my equals.

You can play only with me, unless I let you play with others (when you are no longer my playmates, just my servants).

I am entitled to take anything I want from you. I can do to you and with you anything I wish. You have no right to protest, decline, or resist my demands. You are my property, my chattel to dispose of and do with as I please.

You must obey my wishes unthinkingly and promptly, never disagree with me, and even please me with your agony.

You have no right to expect or demand anything from me. If I give you anything, it is because I choose to. I give only what I decide to give, usually only as little of my time, attention, knowledge, and money as absolutely necessary to keep you hooked and around as my playmates.

Only I decide which game we play, based on how capriciously bored or thrilled I am at any given period.

If you are not fit to play my game, I lose all interest in you.

If you refuse to play my game exactly how and when I want it, or if you make any demands whatsoever, I walk away and look for a new playmate.

Simple, really. And it works! I have had no reason to regret any of it over the decades of my life. Compared to the overwhelming vast majority of humanity, I am in a good place and have spent the time allotted to me on this Earth precisely as I had wanted to: my way.

Minnie called me "an ugly mug" and I retaliated, labeling her a "java queen". Tune in for the next episode.

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Network methodology and concepts are recently being applied to mental health disorders (psychopathology): symptoms are treated as nodes, causally interconnected via biological, psychological, and societal mechanisms.

Symptoms can become self-sustaining and self-reinforcing as they get integrated in robust feedback loops. The entire network than becomes chaotic (disordered). Stable states of networked symptoms amount to discreet mental health diagnoses (Borsboom, D.(2017) A Network Theory of Mental Disorders, World Psychiatry, 16(1): 5–13, https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20375).

This reconception of mental illness as a network of directly and dynamically interacting symptoms is a reversal of the medicalized, static common cause and latent variable model where symptoms are brought on by a single mental health syndrome or disorder (Bringmann, L. F., & Eronen, M. I. (2018). Don't blame the model: Reconsidering the network approach to psychopathology. Psychological Review, 125 (4), 606-615. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000108).

In these nascent models, the emphasis is on internal psychodynamic etiology. They neglect social and interpersonal interactions as major drivers of mental dysfunction. Indeed, incorporating other people in such diagrammatics will serve the flesh out the network, materialize it, put on a human face on it, and connect the internal to the external, as is the case in real life. Interactions with significant or strangers, intimate partners of colleagues, family and friends are as symptom-inducing as any neurotransmitter. Indeed, they are often the direct cause for such secretions and for most crucial and relevant network affects and cascades in the first place.

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Satisficing is when you prefer the just acceptable and minimally satisfactory to the optimal or maximal possible outcomes. The principle, discovered by the Nobel prize winning economist and management theorist, Herbert Simon, helps guide decision-making and is a cognitive heuristic (rule of thumb) within bounded rationality.

Psychologically, satisficers have a low self-esteem. This leads them to believe that they can do no better. They have a perceived lack of options (underchoice, choice underload, to paraphrase Alvin Toffler) and an external locus of control (limited agency and personal autonomy: "my life is determined from the outside and by others who are often envious of me and even malicious").

Ironically, satisficers feel entitled to accomplishments and beneficial outcomes that are incommensurate with their indolence (Path of Least Resistance). They are not self-efficacious and they lack ambition, but disguise it with pseudohumility, sanctimony, and virtue signalling.

Satisficers perceive social reality and their internal psychodynamics as largely random, arbitrary, and meaningless (Cleckley's "rejection of life" or Peterson's anti-humanity). Consequently they lack commitment (commitmentphobes), or cathexis (emotional investment).

They never plan for the future and such little planning as they do is goal-oriented (short-termism). They maintain inordinately low standards and values which are expediently reversed, compromised or abandoned altogether. Identity diffusion or disturbance is common.

Satisficers are subject to magical thinking (I think therefore it is), magical immunity (my actions or inaction have no real-life consequences) as part of a larger suite of essentially psychopathic traits: impulsivity, defiance, recklessness, and novelty, thrill, or risk seeking (adrenaline junkie).

Mental illness such as depression, anxiety, mood, and personality disorders are common among satisficers. But, strangely, slackers and satisficers are also more content than other personality types with the outcomes of the decisions they have made.

Is satisficing a narcissistic, borderline, or psychopathic behavior? Watch on YouTube

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A response to a young religious narcissistic person:

1. Seeking god's approval is a form of securing narcissistic supply - from god himself.

2. You have religious impulses. Your False Self is another deity and you have been worshipping at its altar and making human sacrifices to it (in the form of your true self) throughout your life.

3. You emote through your intellect. You feel only via thinking (cognition). You need to learn suspend your analytical skills and to distrust your intelligence once in a while. Your heart is constantly communicating - you need to learn to shut up your mind occasionally and listen to it, too.

Being too intelligent is often a curse. Like cancer, such intellectual capacity overwhelms and suppresses other forms of relating to life such as emotions or drives (even the sex drive). Intelligent people are also much more risk averse, so they constrict their lives and exclude the vast majority of experiences. They are invariably considered untrustworthy incomprehensible freaks, best shunned and derided, so gradually, they learn to self-isolate and avoid the ineluctable hurt that comes with any attempt to interact with others.

To enjoy a full human existence, one needs to have a balanced psychological ecosystem with average, common faculties. Being outstanding in any dimension of the human psyche typically carries a self-destructive price tag. Nature and human society do not tolerate outliers: they annihilate, confine, and extinguish them.

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Navalny had not been poisoned. He simply drank tea with aflatoxin. It was an accident. For a change, the Kremlin is telling the truth. For another change, Russian doctors did save someone’s life.

The main clinical finding in Germany was cholinesterase inhibition. This could be the outcome of consuming certain medications, skin or gastrointestinal exposure to a nerve agent (sarin, VX, Novichok), or ingesting food contaminated with the most potent toxic substance on Earth: aflatoxin.

One thing is 100% certain: it is not a nerve agent.

Nerve agents immediately lead to severe vomiting, extreme breathing difficulties, uncontrollable convulsions, and loss of consciousness. All these symptoms are manifested latest within minutes from contact or inhalation.

Never agents also invariably affect people who get in close proximity with the victim. In the attempt on Skripal’s life in the UK, the policeman who found Skripal and his daughter (slumped, unconscious on a park bench) died later. A policewoman who was in contact with him almost died. One member of a couple who found the discarded containers of the nerve agent had died as well.

Aflatoxin grows on food like corn or ... tea! Stored improperly, all types of tea - green, black - develop powerful mycotoxins:

https://www.google.com/search?q=aflatoxin+tea

It takes about an hour from ingestion for symptoms to develop and then there are huge pains, spasms, sweating, urge to defecate and vomit. In the blood work of people poisoned with aflatoxin we find one major clinical imbalance. Yes, you guessed it: cholinesterase inhibition.

Why would Putin poison Navalny? In all likelihood, Russia is planning to do a Crimea on Belarus. Did he want him out of the way? Then why not shoot him like they did to Politkovskaya and Nemtsov? Why take the risk that he will survive? And why assassinate him far from the center, where Moscow’s control is more tenuous and less certain?

My alter ego, Sherlock Holmes, used to say: “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

Aflatoxin’s inhibitory effects on cholinesterases, including acetylcholinesterase

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590113/

https://europepmc.org/article/med/19109006

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Holy Molly!

Now I have 666 followers!

Somehow, God seems to get his only sentient creations - human beings - wrong most of the time: He repeatedly fails to gauge our 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. This abyss between good intentions and abysmal performance rendered God a rather incompetent overseer of human affairs. Gradually but inexorably, his influence and reputation waned and Man took over – only to fail equally spectacularly.

The demise of the great secular religions - Communism, Fascism, Nazism - led to the resurgence of the classical religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism), a phenomenon now dubbed "fundamentalism". These ancient thought-systems are all-encompassing, ideological, exclusive, and missionary.

They face the last remaining secular organizing principle - democratic liberalism. Yet, as opposed to the now-defunct non-religious alternatives, liberalism is hard to defeat for the following reasons:

I. It is cyclical and, therefore, sempiternal.

II. Recurrent failure is an integral and welcome phase in its development. Such breakdowns are believed to purge capitalism of its excesses. Additionally, innovation breeds "disruptive technologies" and "creative destruction".

III. Liberalism is not goal-orientated (unless one regards the platitudes about increasing wealth and welfare as "goals").

IV. It is pluralistic and, thus, tolerant and inclusive of other religions and ideologies (as long as they observe the rules of the game).

V. Democratic liberalism is adaptative, assimilative, and flexible. It is a "moving target". It is hard to destroy because it is a chameleon.

The renewed clash between religion and liberalism is likely to result in the emergence of a hybrid: liberal, democratic confessions with clear capitalistic hallmarks.

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For almost three decades I self-isolated in cell-like rooms, shunning all forms of human contact, including sex. I did not socialize or befriend anyone. I spent 100% of my time reading, writing, shooting videos for my YouTube channel, collecting ebooks, print books, and films. I let the women who loved me be intimate in every way with other men. I didn't care. I had rejected life as thoroughly as any suicide. I was all but gone and foregone.

Then, following a nearly lethal depression, I returned to life full force. I attempted to compress into a few years everything I had missed during my self-imposed wasteland hibernation.

My resounding failures in every sphere in this last endeavor to rejoin the human race served as excruciating reminders of why I had chosen to go monastic in the first place: I am spectacularly unfit to be with people, men and women. I lack the most rudimentary skillset and my mental illness aggravated and egregious had by now become an insurmountable obstacle.

Additionally, I had dedicated the long years of my seclusion to fostering and propagating in full public view the reputation of a freakish and creepy psychopathic mutant, making sure few would dare or want to come near a self-confessed monster like me. It was a labor of self-hatred well done: possibly the sole accomplishment in my vacated existence.

The pandemic sealed this last effort to resurrect and I am back where I started: a dilapidated monk in a confined space with a severely constricted life.

My vicissitudes remind me of two films: "Charly" and "Awakenings". In both masterpieces, the protagonist's capacity to engage with life and love is curtailed irreparably by a medical condition. In both, he is awakened by a miracle cure and exuberantly experiences the beauty of the world. He loves, he laughs, and then, tragically ... the effects of the drug wane and he is back to his erstwhile somnolent zombie state.

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Women fantasize about bad guys: muscular, tattooed, drop dead gorgeous. They swipe them on Tinder and read about their steamy exploits in chick lit.

But studies - including the largest ever made - have demonstrated conclusively than in real life a woman chooses a man based mainly on three factors:

1. Is he nice to her (he can be a jerk with others, but never with her);

2. Does he find her irresistibly attractive (is he into her and finds her fascinating); and

3. Is he serious about the relationship and willing to commit: provide consistent succor and fun for a brief while - or much more for a lifetime: a home, children, future, hope, common plans, companionship, and steadfast support.

These criteria apply to any type of interaction: from casual sex or a one night stand to marriage.

Courtship, therefore, can be reconceived as an extended form of virtue signalling. But women are attuned to subtle nuances: is he truly into ME - or actually into what he can get out of me? Are his commitment, attentiveness, and kindness genuine and tested - or fleeting, shallow, and forced? Women probe men continuously.

So, to dispel three myths (MGTOWs and red-pillers, pay attention):

1. The man’s looks, earning power, accomplishments, status, and toys don’t matter much in mate selection, even for a quickie in a hotel room or an apartment. Actually, nothing else matters except the three aforementioned factors; and

2. A woman always knows when you are faking it, but she gauges the effort that you are putting into your act. Even a sham performance involves investment and commitment and signals unequivocally your overwhelming interest in her. Put on a good enough production and she will go for you.

3. Women fear rejection way more than men. They break apart when they are ignored or rebuffed. Men are far more resilient and take it in stride. This is why women administer all these tests and apply these criteria rigorously: they cannot afford to be abandoned, discarded, and dumped too often.

For more, read the jaw-dropping book “A Billion Wicked Thoughts”.

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Double rejection, double trauma model:

1st rejection BIRTH

Mother rejects and ejects child

1st trauma POV SHIFT

2nd rejection SEPARATION-INDIVIDUATION

Child rejects mother

2nd trauma SELFHOOD

During 1st phase external and internal objects are unitary

Frustration (bad breast) leads to withdrawal: narcissistic investment in introversion (Jung)

Constellated Self

Non-unitary universe with privileged object and all other objects: a schism

(Kierkegaard, Buber’s encounter I-thou: eternal thou is God PSYCHOTIC hence religion, including secular; and experience I-it, objectifying others NARCISSISTIC, hence materialism)

Selfhood is traumatic, loss of control, alienation from the world, estrangement from oneself, persecutory object

Eros and Thanatos:

Libidinal and destrudo investment, cathexis

Reflects:

Two types of mother: fully dead (Green) and partly dead (Winnicott: good enough=safe base+dead)

The dead only rejects (death only)

The good enough also accepts (death and life)

Dead parents traumatize their children and create narcissists, codependents, and even borderlines, and psychopaths who fail to distinguish internal from external objects.

We apply these schemas to objects (both self and others) and to collectives:

Dead objects (inertial, materialistic) generate confusion, disordered, disorganized personalities

Good enough objects result in mentally sound personalities

The key difference: relationship between external and internal objects.

Still, even if objects are good enough, we cannot tell the distinction between external and internal objects

Meaning=safety

What renders reality intolerable? Fuzziness of boundaries between external and internal.

Three successive phases, attempting to create meaningful narrative via organizing and hermeneutic principles:

Psychotic hyperreflexivity (Borderline, Codependency)

expansive identity diffusion (we are the world)
+dissipated self (diminished self-affection or self-presence)
+conflation of internal and external

Narcissistic grandiosity (Existentialists, Descartes, Frankl)

deflationary identity diffusion (l’etat ce moi)
+inflated (false) self
+conflation of internal and external

Nothingness

suspended identity
+calibrated self
+boundaries (this is where I cease to be and the world/you begin)

Human history unfolds like individual psychohistory:

Evolutionary embryology and vestigial structures

Collective unconscious and archetypes

Psychotic phase (religions both divine and secular)

Narcissistic phase (the Self usurps God: Descartes's cogito observer usurped God's role and this culminated in fusing Creator with observer in QM Copenhagen interpretation)

Nothingness

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The narcissist needs to hand over to you his own suffering and this way regain his inner peace and sense of control. Your pain is his healing, your crucifixion - his resurrection.

Narcissism is a delusional disorder but with 2 peculiarities:

1. The delusions are self-centred. Even idealization is co-idealization.

2. The narcissist is self-aware but attributes the discrepancies that inevitably and invariably arise not to impaired reality testing but to the inferiority, malice, envy, etc. of others. He uses devaluation to bridge the gap between perception and reality (the grandiosity gap).

Narcissist is emotionless and is uninterested in people. He is a spectacle: good for an hour or two, but dull and excruciatingly boring with his interminable monologues. He is a one trick pony. He is internally dead (destrudo, Thanatos).

Yet, the narcissist is convinced that he is awe-inspiring and fascinating.

Narcissist is hateful, aggressive, and destructive to both self and others, even significant others. But realizing these qualities lead to ego-dystony. So the narcissist project them. But he is dimly aware of his projection, so he uses projective identification to coerce people to act hateful, aggressively, and destructively.

Narcissism feels special. But he is cast in a mold, cloned stereotype or archetype (Jung’s divine child). So, he needs counterfactual narcissistic supply to buttress his sense of uniqueness. Healthy people have a sense of self-worth and idiosyncrasy. The narcissist has a sense of superior idiosyncrasy.

Is the narcissist ambitious?

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Pinocchio and Geppetto: the fantasy to not be puppet is a death wish, to not be himself (because has no self). Without the puppetmaster, when he is gone, there is no puppet, only death.

Object constancy is existential and essential, but in cluster personality disorders and in codependency, the problem is an external locus of existence, not merely of control. There is an outsourcing sense of being, not only self-worth.

Pinocchio teaches us that the only way to become human is via fantasy (lying).

Survival is predicated on becoming the puppetmaster by becoming NPD/BPD:

1. Emulating the abuser

2. Becoming (merger or fusion) the abuser

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Keynote Video presentation to Psychiatry Meet 2020's World Psychiatrists and Psychologists Conference Webinar, August 28, 2020

The Conspiracy of Symptoms: Mental Illness as a Network – Metaphor or Reality?

Network methodology and concepts are recently being applied to mental health disorders (psychopathology): symptoms are treated as nodes, causally interconnected via biological, psychological, and societal mechanisms.

Symptoms can become self-sustaining and self-reinforcing as they get integrated in robust feedback loops. The entire network than becomes chaotic (disordered). Stable states of networked symptoms amount to discreet mental health diagnoses (Borsboom, D.(2017) A Network Theory of Mental Disorders, World Psychiatry, 16(1): 5–13, https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20375).

This reconception of mental illness as a network of directly and dynamically interacting symptoms is a reversal of the medicalized, static common cause and latent variable model where symptoms are brought on by a single mental health syndrome or disorder (Bringmann, L. F., & Eronen, M. I. (2018). Don't blame the model: Reconsidering the network approach to psychopathology. Psychological Review, 125 (4), 606-615. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000108).

In these nascent models, the emphasis is on internal psychodynamic etiology. They neglect social and interpersonal interactions as major drivers of mental dysfunction. Indeed, incorporating other people in such diagrammatics will serve the flesh out the network, materialize it, put on a human face on it, and connect the internal to the external, as is the case in real life. Interactions with significant or strangers, intimate partners of colleagues, family and friends are as symptom-inducing as any neurotransmitter. Indeed, they are often the direct cause for such secretions and for most crucial and relevant network affects and cascades in the first place.

As usual, evolution borrowed the best of all possible worlds, models, structural engineering approaches, and action principles.

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The spectacular Russian film, "Coma", poses a fascinating dilemma. A mad medical scientist induces a vegetative state in subjects, thereby transporting them into a shared self-generated fantasy universe where they are happy (when they are not being chased by black entities engendered by the intrusion of technologies on their habitat).

As the Evil Genius points out: if you experience contentment, does it matter if it is real? And what is reality anyhow? If our minds accept a delusion, hallucination, fantasy, or illusion as authentic and objective - does it not make it so (especially if it is shared by many)? Is it better to be a miserable, lonely, downtrodden failure in reality than a successful creative architect in a dreamworld? If we can avoid life's abundant losses and despondence, don't we have a moral obligation to do so by any and all means possible?

Moreover: do we possess the right to impose happiness on people unbeknownst to them or against their will? Is firewalling them from reality by disabling their brains one step too far? Do we need their consent to remove them from harm's way and afford them the succor and joy that they deserve? If the only outlet to one's creativity is out of this world, should one not opt out of one kind of existence and transition to another?

And in which sense is a life confined to the mind and its internal objects less real than being embedded in a physical environment? Is the good doctor good - or is he a deranged and malevolent villain?

The film leaves these questions unanswered, as it should. As we migrate deeper into cyberspace - the postmodern equivalent of medieval Heaven - these conundrums will become ubiquitous and the lines of demarcation between virtual and actual more fuzzy. Witness the fact that several TV personalities now occupy elected high offices, having played the very same roles on the small screen. History as reality TV is already here.

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There are two types of ideas: synoptic and prescriptive.

Synoptic ideas shed light on the interconnectedness of apparently disparate phenomena or concepts. These insights are titillating, fascinating, or even mind-boggling. But, with the exception of a few specialists and eggheads, they are usually of fleeting interest, akin to intellectual fireworks and pyrotechnics, a form of entertainment that fizzles out and is rendered tedious by repetition.

Synoptic ideas are deep and intertwined, so people tend to tune out and wander off (or fall asleep) in mid-sentence. Interdisciplinarity requires discipline and rigor that few have, not even the majority of scholars (witness the crowd dynamics in academic conferences).

In contradistinction, prescriptive ideas focus on proposed solutions based on cumulative data and experience or on theories and rules of derivation. They are highly relevant to their consumers because they aim to better their lives and resolve their problems. Religion, science, technology, and most of philosophy are prescriptive.

A public intellectual whose output is strictly synoptic won't remain public for very long: he will fall out of favor and be ignored and overlooked. Prescriptive thought leaders and change agents thrive and prosper the more anomic, disrupted, dysfunctional, and pathologized society is. The more lost, disoriented, anxious, and depressed people are, the more they seek prescription to extricate them from their predicament.

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The narcissist invites you to share his fantasy.

Can we really tell the difference between reality, fantasy, delusion, simulation and virtual reality?

I analyze four films, including “The Truman Show”, “The Matrix”, “Coma”, and “Best Offer” to attempt an answer.

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Keynote Presentation to the 3rd Intl. Conference on Addiction and Psychiatry, September 2020

Big part of the text here: https://samvak.tripod.com/sense.html

The proto-psychologists James and Lange have (separately) proposed that emotions are the experiencing of physical responses to external stimuli.

They are mental representations of totally corporeal reactions. Sadness is what we call the feeling of crying. This was phenomenological materialism at its worst.

To have full-blown emotions (not merely detached observations), one needed to experience palpable bodily symptoms.

The James-Lange Theory apparently did not believe that a quadriplegic can have emotions, since he definitely experiences no bodily sensations.

Sensationalism, another form of fanatic empiricism, stated that all our knowledge derived from sensations or sense data. There is no clear answer to the question how do these sensa (=sense data) get coupled with interpretations or judgements. Kant postulated the existence of a "manifold of sense" – the data supplied to the mind through sensation.

In the "Critique of Pure Reason" he claimed that these data were presented to the mind in accordance with its already preconceived forms (sensibilities, like space and time). But to experience means to unify these data, to cohere them somehow. Even Kant admitted that this is brought about by the synthetic activity of "imagination", as guided by "understanding". Not only was this a deviation from materialism (what material is "imagination" made of?) – it was also not very instructive.

The problem was partly a problem of communication. Emotions are qualia, qualities as they appear to our consciousness. In many respects they are like sense data (which brought about the aforementioned confusion).

But, as opposed to sensa, which are particular, qualia are universal. They are subjective qualities of our conscious experience.

It is impossible to ascertain or to analyze the subjective components of phenomena in physical, objective terms, communicable and understandable by all rational individuals, independent of their sensory equipment.

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Four Rules to Avoid Bad Relationships:

1. If it feels wrong - it is wrong.

2. S/he is trying too hard? It involves too much conspicuous and ostentatious effort? It is fake.

3. Too good to be true? It is not true.

4. Verify everything: 90% of the time, people lie and 90% of the time we believe every word they say (90:90 rule or base rate fallacy).

You feel ill at ease because you are flooded with info that generates cognitive dissonance (he says one thing and behaves another) and emotional dissonance (I am so into him, I will ignore). This leads to confirmation bias.

But all the info is there (misogynist vs. narcissist vs. sadist), available to your intuition.

Philosophers have a lot to tell you about your gut feeling and whether, when, and how you should trust it.

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Why do we need routine?

Because rituals structure life.

Structure is meaning.

A structured life provides certainty, predictability, reality testing, boundaries, direction, flow, and goals (exactly like a physical structure does).

You can structure your life to be good or to attain evil. This free will choice is only up to you and the consequences are yours to bear.

Bear that in mind.

Ariely’s studies on dishonesty https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-truth-about-lying

Neuroscience of unthinking trust https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-to-keep-conspiracy-theories-from-ruining-your-thanksgiving

Everyone lies all the time https://theconversation.com/truth-is-everyone-lies-all-the-time-6749

We trust everyone all the time https://hbr.org/2009/06/rethinking-trust

Ariely’s new book about lying https://www.amazon.com/Honest-Truth-About-Dishonesty-Everyone-Especially/dp/0062183613

Everyone cheats all the time https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304840904577422090013997320

TED Talks on lying https://www.ted.com/playlists/222/5_talks_on_the_truth_about_lyi

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The wise know when to stop suspecting and start trusting. There is a thin line separating the paranoid from the moron.

To suspect all the time is counterproductive. It inhibits and retards. It consumes scarce resources. It prevents collaboration and progress. It constricts one's life and limits it. And it impairs one's reality test. Constant vigilance is a long name for the anxiety and fears induced by stupidity and ignorance.

Paranoia is a form of grandiosity: "I am important enough to be the target of conspiracies and the epicenter of critical events." It is an element of narcissism.

At some point, you have to say: "Enough is enough. I am willing to lay a bet on this person, invest in this business, go on this trip". In hindsight it may prove to have been a wrong decision. But any decision is better than lifelong paralysis.

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If all your relationships end up the same catastrophic way, you most likely need to work on three issues:

1. Anticipated hurt (your certainty that everyone is going to hurt you sooner or later);

2. Interpreting every behavior as hurtful (hypersensitivity, hypervigilance, paranoid or persecutory ideation, “no skin”); and

3. Preemptive aggression (I am going to hurt or dump them before they hurt or dump me).

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The People-pleasers

People-pleasers dread conflicts and wish to avoid them (they are conflict-averse) - hence their need to believe that they are universally liked. Always pleasant, well-mannered, and civil, the conflict-averse people-pleaser is also evasive and vague, hard to pin down, sometimes obsequious and, generally, a spineless “non-entity”. These qualities are self-defeating as they tend to antagonize people rather than please them.

But conflict-aversion is only one of several psychodynamic backgrounds for the behavior known as “people-pleasing”:

1. Some people-pleasers cater to the needs and demands of others as a form of penance, or self-sacrifice;

2. Many people-pleasers are codependents and strive to gratify their nearest and dearest in order to allay their own abandonment anxiety and the ensuing intense – and, at times, life-threatening - dysphoria (“if I am nice to him, he won’t break up with me”, “if I cater to her needs, she won’t leave me”);

3. A few people-pleasers are narcissistic: pleasing people enhances their sense of omnipotence (grandiosity). They seek to control and disempower their “charges” (“she so depends on and looks up to me”). Even their pity is a form of self-aggrandizement (“only I can make her life so much better, she needs me, without me her life would be hell.”). They are misanthropic altruists and compulsive givers.

All people-pleasers use these 5common coping strategies:

1. Dishonesty (to avoid conflicts and unpleasant situations);

2. Manipulation (to ensure desired outcomes);

3. Fostering dependence: codependent ostentatious helplessness and manifest weaknesses to elicit behaviours and solicit benefits that they angle for, while narcissistic people-pleasers aim to habituate their targets by bribing them with gifts, monopolizing their time, and isolating them socially;

4. Infantilization: displaying childish behaviours to gratify the emotional needs of over-protective, possessive, paranoid, narcissistic, and codependent individuals in the people-pleaser’s milieu;

5. Self-punishment, self-defeat, and self-sacrifice.

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Acceptance Speech as Co-Editor in Chief. See my membership in the Editorial Boards of 70+ academic journals and of the Academia.edu Editor Program:

https://samvak.tripod.com/mediakit.html

Body Integrity Dysphoria (aka BIID: Body Integrity Identity Disorder) appears only in the ICD 11. It is the overwhelming desire to be rendered disabled (usually by amputating a limb) or the extreme discomfiture with being able-bodied. Confusingly, it has several diametrically opposed clinical manifestations, the most prevalent being apotemnophilia (the wish to be amputated) and acrotomophilia (being sexually aroused exclusively with a disabled partner, usually an amputee). Acrotomphiles enjoy dominating the amputee partner during sex and are stimulated by the need to position her and take care of her needs.

BID should not be confused with somatoparaphrenia (“transabled”: denying ownership of a limb – usually the left arm - or of an entire half of the body, typically the left one, in the face of evidence to the contrary) or with asomatognosia (loss of recognition of one’s limbs and mistaking them for other people’s, reversed upon confronting proof of body integralness).

In general, single leg amputations with a stump are preferred to any other intervention, to bilateral disability, or to deafness and blindness. Otherwise “(d)evotees adhere to standard conceptions of attractiveness in all other matters outside of amputations”(Solvang, 2007).

BID patients present with a mismatch between the mental map of the body and its actual layout (possibly an error in proprioception or kinaesthesia mediated via damage to specific proprioceptors, mechanosensory neurones, or owing to problems with the vestibular system). Sufferers of BID seek to remedy this incongruence by removing the redundant, colonizing, or alien parts thus restoring a sexually exciting (autoerotic), aesthetic, perceived wholeness via self-mutilation (the same way cancer patients resent their tumors and seek to excise them or, maybe, the same as pregnant women who feel whole only when the baby is expelled from their bodies in childbirth). The anger felt towards the superfluous body part gives rise to sexual excitation (sex involves sublimated aggression in multiple ways).

BID may be reconceived as a body dysmorphia. BID patients resort to role play (for example: the use of prostheses or casts) and, in extremely rare cases, self-harm. The preference for the surgical removal of left-sided organs indicates damage to the right parietal lobe. The line of desired amputation remains stable over the life span and skin conductance is markedly different above and below it.

We can only speculate as to the psychology of BID. Modifying our bodies in order to attract mates and to keep them and also to conform to social mores regarding body image is common practice: makeup, diets, and plastic and cosmetic surgeries are all examples. So, the aforementioned restoration of a sense of corporeal completeness may be one important reason.

Controlling a disabled and dependent partner in order to fend off debilitating abandonment anxiety (akin to the psychodynamic of Borderline and Dependent Personality Disorders) may be another. Such etiology may indicate the existence of underlying narcissism: narcissists psychologically objectify their partners, reduce them to body parts or fetishes, and seek to disable them mentally and also by rendering them physically ill.

Pedophilia may be a form of acrotomophilia: children are not yet fully formed and are socially and functionally “disabled”. There is also the issue of infantilization (the wish to be taken care of and to avoid having to grow up to be an adult). In Acrotomophilia, the reverse dynamic applies: parentifying. The acrotomphiliac is grandiose (“I can see beyond the body into the soul”) and acts as a benevolent and caring parent to his disabled or deformed intimate partner, perhaps in an attempt to re-enact and resolve early childhood conflicts with caregivers with a hoped-for different outcome.

Finally, the ability and courage to modify the body is an autoerotic “private ritual of self-ownership and freedom of choice”, a reassertion of self-control also witnessed in eating disorders.

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Narcissists sexualize intimacy (sexual overperception)

Example of family with mixed sexual signals:

Mother's family - men and women – are all asexual, father's side are all promiscuous.

Or …

Father's attitude to sex as dirty and all women as whores. Mother was subtly incestuous.

Example of ambient, emotional incest: she reacts to the child’s compliments or insults regarding her appearance as a lover would.

The narcissist can be with a woman in one of two ways:

1. As an asexual child with his mother (long-term life partner); or

2. As a promiscuous but stern father with a disposable slut to be sexually despoiled and verbally abused (disciplined).

When the narcissist loves a woman as he had loved his mother, as a long-term intimate partner (he always loves women as a child loves his mother), he renders myself asexual, so as to avoid incest.

When he desire a throwaway woman, like his promiscuous father did, he transforms myself into her stern disciplinarian father: he hates and fears the woman, he sadistically despoils, torments, taunts, frustrates, and abuses her in every way, and he pushes her away, often towards other men (partly to reaffirm his view of women and for the other shoe to drop).

The narcissist fantasizes not about sex but about humiliating, trashing, despoiling, and degrading the woman, alone or with others (in group sex). He is a sexual sadist.

Given the opportunity and consent, the narcissist sexually assaults. Conventional sex leads his ultimately to boredom and ED (erectile dysfunction). He uses even group sex merely to despoil and humiliate the female.

The narcissist is to women what a pedophile is to children: sadistic monster.

DIVERGENT EXPECTATIONS

Women cannot reconcile true intimacy and love with the narcissist’s objectifying, despoiling, and sadistic sex. The former preclude for them the latter.

STAGE I: INDULGING HIM SEXUALLY

At first - when the attachment and bonding between us are minimal - women indulge the narcissist sexually.

This amplifies and solidifies his own attachment to and bonding with the woman.

STAGE II: CUTTING OFF HIS KIND OF SEX

The women then get attached and bonded and they demand to revert to conventional intimate sex. They refuse to continue to have the narcissist’s kind of sex.

STAGE III: SEXLESSNESS

At this point, the narcissist develops sex aversion or even ED and the relationship is rendered increasingly sexless and disintimate.

The narcissist’s attachment and bonding weaken: he begins to regard the relationship as a chore and the woman as a nuisance because he is not getting his sexual needs and desires met.

STAGE IV: CHEATING or BREAKUP

The narcissist is still attached and bonded and refuses to let go of the woman or set her free, despite her desperate attempts to break up (erotomanic stalking).

Women either stay with him (for material reasons), render services, but are free to cheat on him serially and indiscreetly; or women triangulate ostentatiously in order to terminate his stalking.

He is forced to choose between loveless sex and sexless love and in both cases endure mortifying betrayal.

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In 1983, I was an up and coming young Vice-President in a closely-held and secretive Jewish family multi-billion USD group of companies. I was transferred to New-York and given a corner office on a high floor in one of the Twin Towers. I hated the glass-encased building: it was ugly, massive, impersonal, badly maintained, and it swayed with the winds. I asked to be reassigned to our Park Avenue outfit and my wish was granted.

Fast forward 18 years. On September 11, 2001 I entertained a couple of house guests, senior journalists from Scandinavia. I remember watching in horror and disbelief the unfolding drama, as the United States was being subjected to multiple deadly attacks on-screen. I turned to the international affairs editor of a major Danish paper and told her "This could not have been done by al-Qaida." I am an Israeli and, as such, I have a fair "sixth sense" as to the capabilities of terrorists and their potential reach.

Enter David Ray Griffin. I was introduced to him by a mutual acquaintance. He is emeritus professor of philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. He has published over 30 books, including eight about 9/11, the best known of which is “The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé.”

On the face of it, his credentials with regards to intelligence analysis are hardly relevant, let alone impressive. But, to underestimate him would be a grave error. Being a philosopher, he is highly trained and utterly qualified to assess the credibility of data; the validity and consistency of theories (including conspiracy theories); and the rationality and logic of hypotheses. These qualifications made him arguably the most visible and senior member of what came to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.

In our exchange, he proved to be tolerant of dissenting views, open to debate, and invariably possessed of rigorous thinking.

Read the interview here: https://samvak.tripod.com/911.html

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The False Self, first described by Donald Winnicott, is not a new insight. Neither is narcissism. They both have been described and referred to in myths, religious writings, and literature.

More about the functions of the False Self and why it is so beloved by the narcissist:

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq48.html

VIDEO Embrace Nothingness: Help God to Heal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0J3jTJ4s7k

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A true friend serves as a wise mirror:

Reflects the truth without bias, without self-interest, and without an agenda

Provides impartial compassionate advice and succor, especially when asked for it.

Respects and accepts whatever decisions are taken: it is his or her friend’s life, after all.

If a true friend cannot respect and accept these decisions, s/he can no longer be a friend and must step back gracefully without adding to her/his friend’s distress.

Additional friendship advice here: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq20.html

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Narcissists - both male and female - are gender-neutral (neuter) and goal-oriented. They much prefer to impress and inspire awe than to communicate with their dates, have a good time, or even flirt. When they seduce, it is also an order to impress and inspire awe, it is a performance. Everyone – men and women – are indistinguishable: an impersonal audience.

Sadistic narcissists seek a special type of narcissistic supply: sadistic supply. So they prefer by far to frustrate, tease, and humiliate rather than to love, have a good time, or even have sex. If the narcissist is heterosexual, he (or she) will target the opposite sex but this is owing to his (or her) virulent, visceral, and unrelenting misogyny (or misandry).

In this sense, all narcissists are essentially castrated and asexual because they are still prepubescent kids: their sexual energy is totally sublimated and directed at obtaining supply.

The cerebral narcissist can go through stretches of celibacy that last for decades. The somatic narcissist and histrionic female are utterly auto-erotic: they merely masturbate with the bodies of their sexual partners, attempting to impress them with their performance, voluptuousness, and irresistibility.

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Why the more you love him, the more he hates you:

Glasser's "core complex"
Rosen's and Bateman's "thick-skinned and thin-skinned narcissists"
Motz's "toxic coupling"
Steiner's "sadomasochistic relating"
Welldon's "malignant bonding"
Lachkar's "v-spot"
Hyatt-Williams's "psychic toxicity"
Yakeley's pathological attachment styles
Fonagy's and Target's reflection and mentalization deficits

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