Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams (archive only)

Narcissism with Vaknin on Instagram (active account)

 

Entitlement and a sense of victimhood inexorably lead to aggression (even violence) and to the exclusion of others. Nazism was a victimhood movement.

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To be seen is a prerequisite for mental health. If you are not seen, you are bound to develop mental illness. If you are addicted to being noticed, you have already developed a mental health pathology.

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The meaning of the word “narcissism” has been devalued, misconstrued, manipulated, and mutilated. Misinformation is the norm.

Interview with Trisha Goddard of TalkTV. Btw, I granted the interview from Macedonia, not from Israel. The full interview is available on my YouTube channel (search for “TalkTV”).

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Paranoid ideation has two components:

1. Self-punitive (“I am a bad person, I did something wrong, I deserve to be punished”); and

2. ⁠Grandiosity (“I am so important that I have become the potential or actual victim of malign intentions and malevolent conspiracies”).

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Deprogram the Narcissist in Your Mind.

Translation courtesy of @maria_larios78

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Narcissists are infuriated when they are finally made to pay for their misbehavior, crimes, and abuse.

They deny everything, reframe their choices and actions (“I had no choice”, “they made me do it”), and claim victimhood. They are never to blame, always to be pitied.

They lash out at their “tormentors” and compound their troubles by externalising aggression and acting out.

 

Nothing more pathetic and revolting than a covert narcissist claiming the high moral ground or an overt narcissist claiming victimhood.

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Capitalism is founded on the outlandish maxim that altruism is the sum total of selfish acts.

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Psychopaths are enamored with having power over you, so they actually SEE you. As far as the narcissist is concerned, you exist only as an internal object in his mind.

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@mirna_liz37 ‘s haunting, eery, and heart-rending visualization of the void at the core of the narcissist, the child trapped in there, and the futility of attempting contact across this deep space.

 

Another heartbreaking and haunting chapter in the Baguette’s Life series by @mirna_liz37 . This time, she explores the introjects. With a palette of tenebrous, creeping despair and rending pity, she succeeds to capture the terror of nonbeing, the ghostly nuances and subtleties of the futility of an emptiness that seeks to become and interact with penumbral others - to no avail.

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Sunshine disinfects abuse. Throw open the blinds.

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How to figure out if someone is a real victim or a narcissist faking victimhood?

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I experience people as dim apparitions, inert characters in a boring novel or a tedious, overlong film – lifeless, except when they provide me with narcissistic or sadistic supply at which point they spring to life (like so many nutcrackers or gingerbread men) and become radiant, kinetic, idealized beings.

 

People pass through my perimeter, devoid of all significance, their limbs askew, their mouths gaping. They invariably exit stage left, never to be brought to mind.

 

Stuttering, then freezing frames in obsolete films or in burning celluloid photographs.

 

They cease to exist when they cease to give and I expect to be treated as transactionally.

 

Nostalgia for the period, for memories of abundant, high quality supply – never for people. I don’t miss anyone ever: they are mere sepia memories trapped in the amber of my mind.

 

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

 

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

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Definitions of terms used in this lecture at @35:56

 

Entraining, Hypnotist’s introject (hence posthypnotic suggestion).

 

Hypnosis as a shared fantasy with role-playing:

 

Outsourcing reality testing. Fitting into narrative (scripting) and affirming the delusions as realistic, acceding to goals. Suspension of disbelief/judgment of right and wrong (narcissist's introject). External regulation of moods and emotions, sense of self-worth, self-perception and self-image. Confusion of external and internal. Assigned role playing.

 

Symbiotic-infantile merger/fusion with secure base parental figure.

 

Self-states.

 

LITERATURE

 

Cleveland JM, Korman BM, Gold SN. Are hypnosis and dissociation related? New evidence for a connection. Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2015;63(2):198-214. doi: 10.1080/00207144.2015.1002691. PMID: 25719522.

 

Hypnotic suggestibility in dissociative and related disorders: A meta-analysis, Lillian Wieder, Richard J. Brown, Trevor Thompson, Devin B. Terhune, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 139, August 2022, 104751

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Narcissists are infuriated when they are finally made to pay for their misbehavior, crimes, and abuse. They deny everything, reframe their choices and actions (“I had no choice”, “they made me do it”), and claim victimhood (“I am being punished for acting morally, for being boundaried, for exposing them”).

They are never to blame, always to be pitied. They lash out at their “tormentors” and compound their troubles by externalising aggression and acting out.

Narcissists get away with it all the time: superficial charm, plausible deniability, exculpating narratives, inundation with details, nitpicking and hairsplitting, mutilated language, flying monkeys, delay tactics, intimidating aura, outlandish charges and counterclaims, crazymaking and acting out.

Impunity and immunity are parts of grandiosity. So, being exposed and penalized constitute narcissistic injury or mortification.

External vs. internal solution.

Nothing more pathetic and revolting than a covert narcissist claiming the high moral ground or an overt narcissist claiming victimhood.

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Borderline, narcissism and codependency involve a fantasy defense. The codependent has a dual role as both parent and child, reflecting her punitive inner parent and inner child.

The codependent’s inner parent feels betrayed when the codependent falls in love. It pushes the codependent to punish her partner as a loyalty test, to placate the implacable inner parent. Riven by guilt and shame, the codependent then punishes herself as well. This is a borderline dynamic.

Codependents and their intimate partners engage in co-regulation (via symbiotic merger/fusion).

The codependent suffers from object inconstancy, separation insecurity aka abandonment anxiety, and catastrophizing. She seeks to attach to a secure base via people-pleasing, control from the bottom and emotional blackmail (an external object), and aggression directed at an internal object.

The codependent outsources her ego functions, such as reality testing.

The codependent feels alive only when in a relationship, she maintains a vicarious life. In solitude, she finds her constricted life intolerable. She loves herself by proxy, through the gaze and agency of her intimate partner.

 

Daria Zukowska's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_hm5r5Osb818eIB5t7j-g

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Freud (starts 24:10) was the intellectual father of substance abuse and drug addiction. Holmes was their literary progenitor.

 

LITERATURE

 

WATCH Transient Narcissism Induced by Substances, Circumstances: Cocaine, Alcohol (Conf. Presentation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjx_w-qRauc

 

Freud, S. (1984). Über Coca. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 1(3): 206–217. (Originally published in 1884.)

 

Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton.

Lebzeltern G. S. Freud und das Kokain [Sigmund Freud and cocaine]. Wien Klin Wochenschr. 1983 Nov 11;95(21):765-9. German. PMID: 6369804.

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The False Self usurps the very being of the narcissist.

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Narcissists are children, so treat them as such!

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Introjects are amalgams of representation of external object, affects, memories, and cognitions combined with a representation of the self.

Creating internal objects is a primitive way to reduce anxiety (anxiolytic). The narcissist creates anxiety and triggers introjection in his victims.

Early childhood introjects are confused with the authentic self. Later life introjects are not.

Most introjects are aggressive and sadistic. Narcissist’s introject is no exception.

Introjects are not the small people in the TV (photoshopping).

The voices are not merely recordings of the originals replayed.

Introjects are created instantly (snapshotting) and are not a function of the length of exposure to the originals but of their significance and function (e.g. infant-mother, narcissist-others).

We are born with capacity to introject but with no introjects.

Empathy is a form of introjection-identification. But, it is instinctual and, therefore, a threat to the ego and split it off.

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In the process of Snapshotting (introjection), the narcissist converts you into an internal object and proceeds to interact with it in his/her mind. This helps the narcissist allay his/her abandonment anxiety (separation insecurity). Introject constancy compensates for object inconstancy (compensatory introject inconstancy).

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Borderline Personality Disorder

 

Identity disturbance (unstable identity, fragile sense of self)

Emptiness, false self, fantasy defense

External regulation

Impaired reality testing (e.g., paranoia, overestimation of intimacy like in HPD), psychotic microepisodes

Self-harm, suicidal ideation, self-destructive cognitions and actions: self-punitive, silence internal turmoil, call for help, feeling alive (dead inside)

Recklessness, impulsivity, secondary psychopathy

Emotional volatility, affective lability, emotional dysregulation (DBT): anger, reactive mood shifts and changes

Intense interpersonal relationships involve idealization-devaluation (relational disorder)

Twin anxieties: abandonment/rejection-engulfment/intimacy, approach-avoidance repetition compulsion

 

The role of psychological defense mechanisms in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

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The three worst ideas ever:

Everyone should have …

The right to free speech;

The right to a vote;

The right to own and use mass communication technologies.

Rights - like respect and trust - have to be earned.

The illiterate, the dumb, the insane, the criminal, and the penniless (who have nothing to lose and no skin in the game) should have none of the above three rights.

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Narcissist’s inner child is not his/her true self: it is a compendium of needs, especially the need to find a substitute mother and the need to separate and individuate.

IDEALIZATION in shared fantasy
She is ... GOOD MOTHER (breast)

Perfect, ideal, all good
Secure base: safe, trustworthy, reliable, resilient, responsive
Loves unconditionally: forgiving, accepting, authentic, rewarding
Power couple

DEVALUATION in shared fantasy
She is ... BAD MOMMY (breast)

Imperfect, all bad, persecutory
Unsafe, untrustworthy, unreliable, fragile/weak/vulnerable
Manipulative, transactional, fake, denying, rejecting, frustrating
Traitor, envious, passive-aggressive

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When you grow old
Your fingerprints
Start fading.
The lines and whorls
That make up
Your identity
Break down
Disjointed.
You are rendered
Hard to tell,
To capture.
Safer to commit crimes
With gloves off.
Or just to touch
Someone
Post mortem
With your blurring
Fingertips.

Poetry of Healing and Abuse by Sam Vaknin http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/contents.html

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The availability of multiple options (choice) creates anxiety and people hate it.

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Intermittent reinforcement creates trauma bonding, a form of self-harm.

Meme courtesy of @mirna_liz37 creator of Baguette’s Life.

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People seek self-improvement for a goal: more money, sex, power, friends or a happier, more resilient relationship or children. This is a wrong, self-defeating orientation.

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This article was published 25 years ago, long before the vast majority of people have even heard of narcissism and 5 years after I started my pioneering online educational work on Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

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Every generation has its pathologies and the leaders that resonate with them. We have transitioned from the Age of Psychosis (religion) to the Age of Fantasy (narcissism). Now, we are on our way to the Age of Delusion.

I misspoke in 2:30. It should be HYPERREFLEXIVITY. Too many simultaneous thoughts! Apologies.

Adriana Ferreiro https://adrianaferreiro.com/

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I don’t care what happens after I die. I will not be present in my own death. It is my life that I am concerned with: the pleasure it affords and the risks it poses.

I deserve and demand credit for my work as long as I am alive because I expect to be respected and because plagiarism is theft.

But post-mortem legacy is for suckers. It is a narrative intended to facilitate social control.

Why would I care about what people have to say about me after I have died and have become worm menu? It is the height of nonsensical irrationality!

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Video presentation on 3rd International Conference on Neuroscience and Mental Health, Dubai, May 15-16, 2025

 

Black hole in autistic children first suggest by Frances Tustin in 1972.

 

Metaphors of narcissisms and borderline personalities: rot, vampire, virus, cancer, black hole, quantum objects (uncertainty and information)

 

Bad memories are the tuition fee we pay in order to learn from our mistakes and grow. Narcissists and borderlines are dissociative: they have vast memory gaps and are, therefore, incapable of growth and learning.

Quick scramblers

 

LITERATURE

 

WATCH Why the Emptiness in Borderlines, Narcissists? (Introjection Failure and Compulsive Introjection) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuLf1gvOLq8

 

WATCH Haunted Minds of Narcissist, Borderline: Schizoid Empty Core https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHfYPEf_8ZM

 

WATCH No Identity Without Memory (Lecture for Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1TudmLThyA

 

Black holes scramble information – but may not be the best at it, New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2429489-black-holes-scramble-information-but-may-not-be-the-best-at-it/

 

The ‘black hole’: a significant element in autism, Frances Tustin, (1988).Free Associations,1L(11):35-50

 

Eshel O. 'Black holes', deadness and existing analytically. Int J Psychoanal. 1998 Dec;79 ( Pt 6):1115-30. PMID: 10036623.

 

Clark, G. "A black hole in psyche." Harvest 29 (1983): 67-80.

 

The “Black Hole” as the Basic Psychotic Experience: Some Newer Psychoanalytic and Neuroscience Perspectives on Psychosis, James S. Grotstein, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis Vol. 18, No. 1, March 1990

https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.1.1990.18.1.29

 

'Black holes': escaping the void, Sharn Waldron 1 J Anal Psychol, . 2013 Feb;58(1):99-117.  doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5922.2013.02019.x.

 

Pecotic, B. (2002). The “black hole” in the inner universe. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 28(1), 41–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00754170110116736

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Introjects are amalgams of representations of external object, affects, memories, and cognitions combined with a representation of the self.

Creating internal objects is a primitive way to reduce anxiety (anxiolytic). The narcissist creates anxiety and triggers introjection in his victims.

Early childhood introjects are confused with the authentic self. Later life introjects are not.

Most introjects are aggressive and sadistic. Narcissist’s introject is no exception.

Introjects are not the small people in the TV (photoshopping).

The voices are not merely recordings of the originals replayed.

Introjects are created instantly (snapshotting) and are not a function of the length of exposure to the originals but of their significance and function (e.g. infant-mother, narcissist-others).

We are born with capacity to introject but with no introjects.

Empathy is a form of introjection-identification. But, it is instinctual and, therefore, a threat to the ego and split it off.

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The 2024 presidential elections in the USA are going to be the last free and fair ones. Even if Trump were to lose the popular vote (the way he did to Hillary Clinton), his armed militias will take to the streets and to the Congress and this time, the insurrectionists will make sure they successfully “obstruct official proceedings”. Blood will be spilled.

Never mind who wins the elections, Trump would end up in the White House. There is no force left that can or dares oppose him.

About half the electorate – the Republicans - do not regard such an outcome with dread. They perceive democracy as a ruse of the progressive-liberal coastal elites and the Democratic Party as a bunch of authoritarian, godless traitors.

The gulf between the two camps is unbridgeable as they fiercely and violently differ on all issues, from family values to immigration and from the role of the Federal Government to America’s place in a globalizing world.

A one-party alternative – with the Democrats gone and their leaders incarcerated - seems very appealing now. Hence the ubiquitous popularity of the likes of Orban, Netanyahu, and Putin, role models among the rank and file as well as the leadership of the GOP.

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I experience people as dim apparitions, inert characters in a boring novel or a tedious, overlong film – lifeless, except when they provide me with narcissistic or sadistic supply at which point they spring to life (like so many nutcrackers or gingerbread men) and become radiant, kinetic, idealized beings.

People pass through my perimeter, devoid of all significance, their limbs askew, their mouths gaping. They invariably exit stage left, never to be brought to mind.

Stuttering, then freezing frames in obsolete films or in burning celluloid photographs.

They cease to exist when they cease to give and I expect to be treated as transactionally.

Nostalgia for the period, for memories of abundant, high quality supply – never for people. I don’t miss anyone ever: they are mere sepia memories trapped in the amber of my mind.

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

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When you possess rights, they impose obligations on others - as well as on you!

If you insist on having rights that translate only to other people’s duties - this is narcissistic entitlement.

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The state, the tidal wave of narcissism, and duplicitous and craven public intellectuals all but dispensed with private empathy. Case study of Macedonia. Empathy is big business and cowardly, unscrupulous public "intellectuals" are cashing in on it.

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In conditions of extreme stress, psychotic microepisodes cause hallucinations.

Co-idealization and co-devaluation lead to regression (sensory misattribution in infancy).

Synesthesia across the divide between external and internal (external stimuli trigger internal ones).

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A @shadowdeangelis 90 second capsule that sums up perfectly the most foundational insight in pathological narcissism: the narcissist is not wearing a mask - the narcissist IS the mask and nothing but the mask.

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The USA is declining and decomposing and the Republican party have zoomed in on the sole agents and catalysts of these alarming processes: the Democrats and their democracy. The GOP also brandish a prescription for healing: the 2nd American Revolution.

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The quack and charlatan of today are the professors of tomorrow.

Dr. Bell, a professor of medicine in Edinburgh, taught Arthur Conan Doyle and served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. The movie is “The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes (Murder Rooms)”.

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Baguette’s accurate views on narcissism never cease to amaze me! Courtesy of @mirna_liz37

Meet Pirouette, Baguette’s borderline approach-avoidant girlfriend. From the “Baguette’s Life” series by @mirna_liz37

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Dementia

Simultaneous impairment of various mental faculties, especially the intellect, memory, judgment, abstract thinking, and impulse control due to brain damage, usually as an outcome of organic illness. Dementia ultimately leads to the transformation of the patient’s whole personality. Dementia does not involve clouding and can have acute or slow (insidious) onset. Some dementia states are reversible.

 

Denial

Defense mechanism. Ignoring unpleasant or painful facts, filtering out data and content that contravene one’s self-image, prejudices, and preconceived notions of others and of the world.

 

Dependent Personality Disorder

DPD; A compulsive, pervasive, and excessive craving to be attended to and taken care of that leads to clinging, stifling, and humiliating or submissive behaviors. Codependents are paralyzed by their anxiety of being abandoned.

They are indecisive and demand constant and repeated reassurances and advice from a myriad sources, thereby “transferring” responsibility for their decisions to others. Codependents rarely initiate, though they often harbor repressed ambition, energy, and imagination. They lack self-confidence and distrust their own abilities and judgment.

This reliance on others leads to self-negating behavior. The codependent never disagrees with meaningful others or criticizes them, lest s/he loses the support and emotional nurturance they do or could provide.

The codependent molds himself/herself and bends over backward to cater to the needs of his nearest and dearest and satisfy their every whim, wish, expectation, and demand.

Nothing is too unpleasant or unacceptable if it serves to secure the uninterrupted presence of the codependent’s family and friends and the emotional sustenance s/he can extract (or extort) from them.

The codependent feels helpless, threatened, ill-at-ease, child-like, and not fully-alive when alone. This acute discomfort drives the codependent to hop from one relationship to another.

The sources of nurturance are interchangeable. To the codependent, being with someone, with anyone, no matter whom - is always preferable to being alone.

 

Depersonalization

Feeling that one’s body has changed shape or that specific organs have become elastic and are not under one’s control. Usually coupled with “out of body” experiences. Common in a variety of mental health and physiological disorders: depression, anxiety, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and hypnagogic states. Often observed in adolescents and in Borderline Personality Disorder.

 

Derailment

A loosening of associations.
A pattern of speech in which unrelated or loosely-related ideas are expressed hurriedly and forcefully, with frequent topical shifts and with no apparent internal logic or reason.

 

Derealization

A dissociative disorder or defense. Feeling that one’s immediate environment is unreal, dream-like, or somehow altered.

 

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3 Types of Malignant Narcissist

LITERATURE

WATCH Malignant Covert Narcissist Becomes Primary Psychopath to Compensate for Collapse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlaDDwzJG-E

Otto F. Kernberg (2020) Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89:1, 1-24, January 2020

DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2020.1685342 ( https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2020.1685342 )

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The three epochs in the history of the modern pseudo-science of psychology: 1. The lab study of the dead brain in its correlation with live behaviors; 2. Theorizing about the mind: its structure and functioning; 3. The study of observable phenomena in populations or cohorts, using statistics.

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Jung's collective unconscious, Zizek and Lacan, Narcissism Reconceived, Jews and victimhood, Gaza and Israel, Antisemitism.

 

Matthew Biberman, Director of the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, Professor of English, University of Louisville

 

https://louisville.edu/english/people/current-faculty-new/s-matthew-biberman

 

The LCLC PODCAST: https://soundcloud.com/lclcoralhistory

 

https://www.thelouisvilleconference.com/

 

Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture

 

https://louisville.edu/artsandsciences/conferences/lclc

 

and the call for papers is there.

 

YouTube

 

https://www.youtube.com/@universityoflouisvilleengl5660/playlists

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There is no memory without emotions, no identify without memories, and no attachment without an identity.

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I am one hot narcissist! 40 celsius here (105 Fahrenheit). A globe in heat. Scroll left.

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Listen to my BBC World Service/PBS/NPR Interview (starts 14:21):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172zb8ynfjzwxy

Active links available here:

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

Type the links into the address bar of your browser.

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The Wunderkind narcissist refuses to grow up and become a full-fledged adult. Why is that?

Meme courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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Would-be assassins of political figures engage in dichotomous thinking (splitting): evil vs. good. The politician is all evil, the assassin is on the side of good. It is a morality play.

The assassin's thinking is apocalyptic (catastrophizing): the world as we know it will come to its end should the wicked politician have his/her way. There is a sense of urgency, helplessness, anxiety, even panic.

The assassin's cognitive processes are distorted and his reality testing is impaired. He is grandiose ("Only I have the power and courage it takes to change the world and the course of history").

Should the politician survive the assassination attempt, many of his followers and disciples are likely to regard it as a sign of divine protection and anointment.

When the assassination attempt succeeds, ensuing hagiography renders the politician an immaculate saint and a sacrificial lamb for the cause.

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Stockholm Syndrome in international affairs:

Rather than feel helpless in the face of terrorist organizations and rogue states, humiliated by our own impotence …

We ostentatiously befriend the offenders (“If I am on their side, they won’t harm me”).

We publicly justify and support the criminal bullies and the terrorists and we condemn the “police” (countries and law enforcement agencies which are out to destroy them).

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Love is a process - not an event.

Love is about fertile separateness - not about sterile merger or fusion.

Love is about maturity and personal growth - not about regressive infantilization (“baby”).

Love is the triumph of experience over hope, of wisdom over fantasy.

 

So, what is love - and what isn’t?

Video courtesy @vilina_osho_therapist

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It is legitimate to argue over beliefs and values - but it is aggressive, bigoted, and illegitimate to reject someone’s identity.

Ideologies like Zionism and Communism are identities.

Religions like Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are identities.

Ethnic and racial attributes - like being Black or Macedonian - are identities.

Sexual orientations - like being gay or trans - as well as gender roles (man, woman) are identities.

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As Freud would put it in 1933, “Even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well and in acting as a mother to him.”

In the same juvenile vein, Freud morosely reminded his fiancée that their ideal happiness couldn’t last for long, because “dangerous rivals soon appear: household and nursery.”

She was told from the outset that she would be expected to serve his needs, manage his domestic existence, and honor his decisions in all other matters. The dollhouse diminutives with which he addressed her only reinforced the message that his darling girl was to live only for him, exercising no individual will.

As Ernest Jones observed with unusual bravery, Freud was insisting on nothing less than “complete identification with himself, his opinions, his feelings and his intentions. She was not really his unless he could perceive his ‘stamp’ on her.”32 And again, the relationship “must be quite perfect; the slightest blur was not to be tolerated. At times it seemed as if his goal was fusion rather than union.”

LITERATURE

Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews

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There are many reasons to pity the narcissist. But do yourself a favor and pity yourself more: go no contact!

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Gaslighters know the difference between actual reality and the fake version that they are imposing on the victim. Gaslighting is intentional and manipulative.

Narcissists are delusional: they cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. They firmly believe their own, counterfactual version of reality (“impaired reality testing”) and invite or coerce you to join them in their la-la land.

Psychopaths gaslight. Narcissists do not.

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None of us can survive harsh realities without self-deception and fantasy. Society turns a blind eye to this necessity. You have no “giant within”. All you have is magical thinking, an infantile pathology. Your mind affects your body, but it has little direct impact on reality. Wishing or thinking very hard or focusing on something external doesn’t make it so: it is a form of magical thinking, an infantile pathology.

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When the Narcissist compliments you or uses emotionally-charged language or becomes sentimental, it does not mean that he is attracted or attached to you or that he cares about you.

It means merely that you are useful to him/her in some way(s).

He is “maintaining” you in working order, as he would an appliance or a device.

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We become into our inner silence amid the cacophony of introjects.

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“Dead” mothers - mothers, not fathers! - create narcissistic offspring.

A “mother” is anyone - male or female - who fulfills the maternal functions between the ages of 0-4 years (formative period).

Art courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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Your mind affects your body, but it has little direct impact on reality. Wishing or thinking very hard or focusing on something external doesn’t make it so: it is a form of magical thinking, an infantile pathology.

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Shame is self-directed, self-negating anger at one’s helplessness in the face of overwhelming external circumstances or uncontrollable internal impulses.

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Don’t seek popularity. Seek authenticity. Seek truthfulness. BE YOU!

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Sadist?
Avoid people altogether.
Borderline?
Remain single and celibate.
Pedophile?
Stay away from children.
Narcissist?
Nothing you can do.

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FACT: Average IQ has deteriorated dramatically in the past 40 years. Idiocracy.

7 randomly selected proofs: People insist that …

1. Empaths exist
2. Trump loves America
3. Elon Musk is a genius
4. Wanting something real hard makes it happen
5. Children are bundles of joy
6. Women sleep only with alpha males and procreate exclusively with simps
7. All narcissists are demons with a pungent smell and black eyes.

Nuff said.

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We often confuse obsession with attention.

Obsession is about YOU: You are being overwhelmed by vivid and intrusive dreams, wishes, fantasies, or desires.

The subject of the obsession always comes second, although it is constantly in the background.

Attention is when your focus is on the OTHER, on what they are communicating to you - not on you.

When you are obsessed, you are unable to maintain attention in communication because you are too focused on and immersed in your obsession.

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Clinicians often commit mistakes in treating trauma that are based on antiquated, debunked “knowledge”.

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Narcissistic abuse, first described by Sam Vaknin in the 1990s, is the worst form of maltreatment known. It has calamitous and often irreversible consequences for its victims. Bail out - never try to save the narcissist!

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@shadowdeangelis discusses the narcissist’s mind virus and how to get rid of it. Succinct and incisive, as usual.

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Choose Reality, However Tough, Over Narcissist’s Fantasy, However Alluring. With @micheleparadiseofficial

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Children are born with the entire array of dissociative tools. Subject to abuse, trauma, and ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), they are capable of having flashbacks (re-vividness).

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That you have survived a narcissist does not make you an expert on narcissism.

It makes you an expert on the narcissist that you have survived - if s/he indeed is a narcissist to start with (diagnosed).

Anecdotes are not science. Only experts can debate with experts.

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Another view regarding the street riots in the UK: listen to grievances, do not stigmatize, not everyone there is a violent opportunist. With Trisha Goddard of TalkTV.

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Fraudulent+Delusional+Sadistic=Malignant Narcissist.

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What is a good enough mother’s main role? The good enough mother is far removed from the Disney and Hallmark caricatures.

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Trisha Goddard on Chronic Illness and the Need to See and Hear People (Good Morning, Britain).

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Information does not amount to knowledge.

Curiosity and education are not one and the same.

Anecdotes do not a science make.

Experience is not a synonym for expertise.

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Academics not immune to the temptations of instant celebrity guaranteed by churning out a study about narcissism.

 

Difference between real study (randomized trial), population study, and meta analysis.

 

Meta analyses “have the potential to mislead seriously, particularly if specific study designs, within-study biases, variation across studies, and reporting biases are not carefully considered.” (Cochrane Training)

 

Problems with this and most other studies and meta analyses about narcissism:

 

They are not randomized trial

 

Many use proprietary tests and questionnaires that are not validated

 

Children and adolescents included

 

Dearth of people diagnosed with NPD and no comorbidities. Most subjects are narcissistic style and dark triad.

 

Subjects only from the industrialized countries, white, male, often college students

 

Arbitrary, idiosyncratic classifications

 

Nine clinical features and trait domains of narcissism:

 

Lack of empathy

 

Fear of intimacy (insecure attachment style)

 

Disturbed or diffuse identity

 

Attention seeking behaviors

 

Grandiosity (cognitive distortion)

 

Anankastia

 

Negative affectivity, including fragility (bad object)

 

Dissociality (antisocial behaviors)

 

Antagonism

 

Only the last 2 traits mellow with age, not owing to learning from experience (the narcissist is incapable of that), but probably for biological reasons. The same mellowing is observed in psychopaths and borderlines.

 

LITERATURE

 

Orth, U., Krauss, S., & Back, M. D. (2024). Development of narcissism across the life span: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal studies.Psychological Bulletin, 150(6), 643–665. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000436

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Psychopaths gaslight - narcissists confabulate. @shadowdeangelis

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The narcissist in a sentence: Big Shit – No Chief.

 

One day there was an Indian chief who was constipated. He sent one of his warriors to the witch doctor to get some medicine. The warrior goes to the doctor and says “Big Chief, no shit”. The doctor gave him one pill and told him “The chief should be fine tomorrow”

The warrior went back to the chief and gave him the pill. The next morning the warrior was sent back to the witch doctor and says “big chief, no shit”. The doctor gives him five pills and tells him to give them to the chief.

The next day the warrior appears at the witch doctor’s house yet again saying “big chief, no shit”. The doctor gets annoyed and so gives the warrior the whole bottle of pills to give to the chief.

The next day the warrior goes back to the witch doctor

“Big shit!! No chief”.

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Narcissists crave the state of a shared fantasy. Why is that?

Courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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Just released a revised version of my book “The World of the Narcissist” with my latest research and insights into Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and pathological narcissism.

Image courtesy Tammy Lynn.

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Remember this: tunnels always end in light.

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Narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy fosters personal growth and development. Abusive relationships are in some ways therapeutic.

 

The narcissist regresses you in order to garner control over you and manipulate you to fulfil your role in his/her shared fantasy.

 

Regression and infantilization.

 

Regression in the service of the ego: primary process and prelogical thinking.

 

Wish fulfillment and magical thinking.

 

Thought–action fusion (TAF).

 

Benign vs. Malignant Regression, Basic Fault (Balint).

 

The Freuds (Sigmund and Anna), Peter Blos.

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Humoral theory, libidinal types (Freud), Jungian typology (attitudinal types, functional types). Type A, B, D, and T personality.

 

WATCH Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): Fortune Cookie or Reliable Test? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNTGnIgdBI

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You need three types of courage in your life but you should know what behavior constitutes courage and which is only mislabeled as such.

 

Courage is about not being afraid to be afraid.

 

Resilience is about not being afraid to be vulnerable.

 

Strength is about not being afraid to seek help.

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Deutschlandfunk.de: When narcissists make everyday work hell. There are strategies to deal with it. Listen or download (5+ minutes, in German).

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Even when they are self-aware and claim to be eager for personal transformation, narcissists, psychopaths, and narcissistic borderlines are incapable of change and of learning owing to their entitlement and grandiosity: they perceive themselves as perfect and as entitled to their misbehavior and faults.

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Does the narcissist have a conscience? Swipe left to find the answer. Images courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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All narcissists have a dominant type (somatic, cerebral, covert, overt) and a recessive type. They cycle between the various types in the wake of a state of collapse.

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WATCH Self-styled Narcissism "Experts", Psychology Credentials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVumcfziD4Q

 

WATCH 5 Signs of Weaponized Boundaries (+Spectrum Myth) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePGb8f2X7uQ

 

Video presentation in European Congress on Addiction and Psychiatry, Lisbon, April 2025

 

Information does not amount to knowledge. Curiosity and education are not one and the same. Anecdotes do not a science make. Experience is not a synonym for expertise.

 

That you have survived a narcissist does not make you an expert on narcissism. It makes you an expert on the narcissist that you have survived - if s/he indeed is a narcissist to start with (diagnosed). Anecdotes are not science. Only experts can debate with experts.

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The other day I listened to Jordan Peterson expostulating on why the Jews are so powerful: because they are more intelligent than the gentiles. Wrong data aside, it was antisemitism at its most virulent.

Even positive stereotypes of Jews are forms of antisemitism.

Any sentence that generalizes and starts with “they are” is racist.

No two individuals are alike. We are not commodities.

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Millennials and Gen-Zers refuse to grow up and assume the mantle of adulthood. Why is that?

The youth of today are opting out of the political and social game and the public square. They are not participating in the life of collective, not even as rebels. They merely seek to sabotage the established order via avoidance, virtue signaling and self-aggrandizing morality plays, withdrawal, and passive-aggressive resistance. They constitute a new phenomenon: the avoidant revolutionary.

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Woke splitting:

People of color, natives, and women are always right, good, and victims;

White people and men are always wrong, evil, and abusers.

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Childhood sexual abuse often results in BPD, DID (mainly OSDD) in adulthood.

 

Victims of sexual abuse in childhood dread and sexualize intimacy and being loved because they misidentify and conflate those with pain and boundary wrecking abuse.

 

Sex becomes an anxiety reaction or stress response.

 

The strategies used by these children, starting in adolescence involve: self-objectification, absenting oneself from sex and intimacy via dissociation (most notably derealization, depersonalization, and amnesia), and self-punitive choices intended to restore the good object (by penalizing and subduing the bad one).

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Ostentatious, active ingratitude is betrayal.

Good people shame us, remind us of who we are and we react aggressively with negative affects (narcissistic injury, helplessness).

Suspect manipulative motivations, social skills, and mental health of do-gooders.

Resolve cognitive dissonance by blaming them for the dissonance.

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People regard mental illness as an ASSET in a dystopian, surrealistic reality:

No one wants to mess with a crazy person

Mental illness afford access to information and insights denied mentally healthy and socially conformant people, including the ability to know what’s right and predict the future

The mentally ill can behave in ways denied to others: disinhibited, inconsistent, menacing, impulsive, or inexplicable.

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Full video on my YouTube channel. You should work on your ego ideal (the way you think you should be or ought to be). Not everyone is built to socialize. Not everyone is built to have relationships. Not everyone is built to conform.

You have an image of how and what you should be (“ideal ego”). Your ideal ego sets you up for failure because it imposes on you expectations and standards that you find difficult to meet.

Rather than try to change who you are - modify your ego ideal. Rather than attempt to motivate or incentivize or coerce others to conform to your unrealistic ego ideal - change your ego ideal.

If you can’t be humble about your shortcomings, at least be realistic as to your limitations: you cannot control others, life, circumstances, the environment, or the future. To believe otherwise is the intoxicating manic phase of grandiosity.

Focus on your strong suits. Socializing and relationships are not your strong suits. When you emphasize your relative shortcomings rather than your relative advantages - it ends in failure and paranoid ideation.

When you keep placing yourself in impossible situations with the wrong people this leads to hypervigilance and to paranoid ideation.

Regarding boredom: it is usually a sign that you are not challenging yourself enough - or that you have no long-term vision/plan - or that you are insecure (don’t trust yourself to be able to accomplish your goals).

Culture No Excuse for Abuse

One’s culture is no excuse for abuse. Anyone abuses you - even a first degree relative - you cut them off. No contact. Anyone manipulates or coerces you into doing something - you UNdo it. No two ways about it. I have never used my culture as an alibi, as an excuse to not do the right thing.

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Never ask: “What have I got to lose?” Always ask: “What can I gain by choosing to behave this way?”

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What doesn’t make you stronger sometimes kills you.

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Every dead end (cul de sac) is an opportunity to explore a bypass.

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Psychology is a pseudoscience faking it as a branch of medicine under the guise of psychiatry. What went wrong along the path of this essentially literary discipline?

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Being normal and being mentally healthy are not the same thing.

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The new academic year is upon us. I have been serving as a professor of clinical psychology and of finance and business management in CIAPS (among other higher ed institutions in several countries) since 2012. This year, I will be posting some of my lectures in CIAPS on my YouTube channel.

CIAPS (Commonwealth Institute of Advanced Professional Studies) is based in Cambridge, UK; Birmingham, UK; Ontario, Canada; and Lagos, Nigeria.

On my channel you can also find my lectures in Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia where I served as Visiting Professor of Psychology for 5 years (2017-22). Many additional lectures in SFU are available via http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html

This year, I have seminars and lectures scheduled in several countries. They are for clinicians only, but I will be posting the video recordings on my YouTube channel.

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Liking people (empathy) is about giving.

Liking to be with people (gregariousness) is about taking.

Not one and the same!

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I never was a child: I was a Winderkind, the answer to my mother’s or father’s prayers and intellectual frustration.

I wrote in “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” in 1997:

“Forcing a child into of adult pursuits is one of the subtlest varieties of soul murder. Very often we find that the narcissist was deprived of his childhood. He may have been a Wunderkind, the answer to his mother’s or father’s prayers and the salve to her frustrations. A human computing machine, a walking-talking encyclopaedia, a curiosity, a circus freak – he may have been observed by developmental psychologists, interviewed by the media, endured the envy of his peers and their pushy mothers.

Consequently, such narcissists constantly clash with figures of authority because they feel entitled to special treatment, immune to prosecution, with a mission in life, destined for greatness, and, therefore, inherently superior.

The Wunderkind narcissist refuses to grow up. In his mind, his tender age formed an integral part of the precocious miracle that he once was. One looks much less phenomenal and one’s exploits and achievements are much less awe-inspiring at the age of 40 – than at the age of 4. Better stay young forever and thus secure one’s Narcissistic Supply.

So, the narcissist refuses to grow up. He never takes out a driver’s licence. He does not have children. He rarely has sex. He never settle-down in one place. He rejects intimacy. In short, he refrains from adulthood and adult chores. He has no adult skills. He assumes no adult responsibilities. He expects indulgence from others. He is petulant and haughtily spoiled. He is capricious, infantile and emotionally labile and immature. The narcissist is frequently a 40 or 60 years-old brat.”

Image courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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One internal voice is authentic, yours - the others are introjects: disembodied voices of parents, influential peers, role models, teachers, etc.

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Narcissistic parents often cultivate their children as sources of narcissistic supply, with the golden child being idolized and the scapegoat child being neglected and even abused.

This discriminatory behavior is due to the narcissistic parent’s projected splitting, which involves the inability to integrate contradictory qualities of the same object into a coherent picture.

The narcissistic parent splits their personality into good and bad traits and projects the good aspects onto the golden child while projecting the bad aspects onto the scapegoat child.

This pattern of behavior becomes lifelong and can lead to emotional incest and even outright incest.

Video courtesy @shadowdeangelis

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Found footage of someone who looks a lot like Sam Vaknin (only more intelligent). Don’t try this at home! If you come across this madman, barricade yourself and call the authorities, including a psychiatrist. This “man” is unarmed and sectioned! Pity about the t-shirts, though!

Compilation courtesy Dorcas.

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Narcissists are human, at least biologically speaking. But are they human in any other way?

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If you are bored and dissatisfied in your relationship because you miss the drama and having a trophy spouse as a status symbol then you must be confused: people are not luxury cars and relationships are not accidents. The alternative to drama (which is a fantasy) is reality.

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@vakninsamnarcissist is my archival account on Instagram with hundreds of texts and images about narcissism, narcissists, narcissistic abuse, and dozens of other topics. You are welcome to visit it!

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How could you tell if you are faced with a narcissist? Interview with @theoriesofeverythingpod

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The popular misconception is that narcissists love themselves. In reality, they love the impression they make, their reflections. He whose love is directed solely at impressions and reflections is incapable of loving people, himself included.

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When you offer your partner true love - you are offering them everything.

When you offer your partner everything but not your love - you are offering them very little indeed.

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Better one literate cat than ten ignorant humans! Meow to that!

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Pathological narcissism is a cult, a private religion with one deity and one worshipper. It is missionary: it tries to convert you to the narcissist’s private ideology and point of view. How to survive it?

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Controlling one’s impulses, acting boundaried, and delaying gratification are not the same things as faking it or pretending.

Such behaviors evince respect or even empathy for others - feigning and faking are disdainful, manipulative, and contemptuous.

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Two wrongs never make a right. True. But two rights often make a wrong.

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These automatic thoughts are at the core of people pleasing and parentifying children:

1. My happiness is always at someone else’s expense (zero sum game);

2. I have to earn my happiness, I don’t deserve it;

3. I have to somehow bribe people to stay with me, collaborate with me, help me, or tolerate me because I am a bad object (unworthy, unlovable, crazy, inadequate, dissolute, hopeless, and so on).

4. I need to compromise on my boundaries and rights owing to all the above.

People-pleasing involves grandiosity and catastrophizing:

1. “They are going be devastated and harmed if I say ‘no’. I am that important to their lives and well-being” (grandiosity); and

2. ⁠”If I say ‘no’, there will be disastrous consequences to me, especially emotionally, but maybe also in other ways (I will be making enemies)”. This is catastrophising.

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Boundaries are usually healthy. But they can be weaponized aggressively. Here are the 5 signs of a person who uses "boundaries" to breach and violate yours:

 

WATCH Boundaries vs. Borders: FIREWALL YOUR Relationships, Yourself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSnTWlns9W0

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Gratuitously offensive (weaponizes boundaries)

 

Arbitrary and shifting (identity diffusion)

 

Aggressive and sadistically punitive, Passive-aggressive, covert, fragile, hypervigilant or paranoid

 

Grandiose (fantastic boundaries)

 

Noncommunicative (coercive telepathy)

 

Domain traits are on spectrum, NPD is not. So, numbers of narcissists much lower, no gender specificity.

 

Subclinical vs. clinical, disorder vs. style (e.g., malignant narcissist vs. dark tetrad).

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Every experience in life and every encounter with others changes us. We are never the same person again.

Narcissistic abuse is no exception.

But you can fully recover and heal from it, albeit a changed, wiser person.

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Never ask: “What have I got to lose?” Always ask: “What can I gain by choosing to behave this way?”

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From the publisher @reframingtheself : “In April 1997, we uploaded to the Web a free Internet edition of Sam’s book ‘Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited’, written in 1995. It is still available here: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com.

It generated an outpouring of anguish and relief from both narcissists and victims of abuse, who now could put a label to their misery and suffering.

Thus, we followed up with the first print edition of the book in 1999.bAt the time, with the exception of a handful of scholars, no one had even heard of pathological narcissism.

Sam had to come up with a whole new vocabulary to describe the pernicious disorder and its insidious effects.

He coined phrases such as Somatic and Cerebral Narcissist, narcissistic abuse, No Contact, devalued and discarded, cold empathy, and dozens of others.

Sometimes, he had to imbue moribund phrases from the 1930s and 1970s with new meaning: Narcissistic Supply and False Self are two examples of many.

30 years later, narcissism is a cultural meme, a buzzword, and a leading topic of study in academe. Yet, it is precisely this popularity that threatens to obscure the true nature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

This tenth, definitive, revised printing aims to remind everyone not to bandy narcissism about as a mere invective. It provides a coherent and rigorous framework for the discussion of pathological narcissism in all its manifestations, individual and social.”

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(Swipe left) A day in the life of an aging scholar: 1. The elephant in the bookstore 2. Don’t look a gift rabbit in the eyes (thank you, Chiara Rudi!) 3. How a Jew started all this shit (narcissism). Photos courtesy of @reframingtheself

 

A day in the life of: swipe left. Typically crazy day yesterday: buying books by the cart in Akademska Kniga (an amazing bookstore!), discovering my inner biker, and getting introduced to a literate cat who knows more about narcissism than all the self-styled “experts” online combined (hint: the book by its side 😉). In between: an interview in Telma TV. Phew!

Photography: @reframingtheself

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Two laws of giving:

1. Overgiving is underappreciated.

2. When the top dog gives, s/he is being generous; when the underdog gives, s/he is being manipulative.

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The borderline requires object constancy, pushes all her partners to develop introject constancy: she is too painful as an external object. Interacting with a BPD external object requires high-effort coping.

 

To ensure object constancy, the borderline needs to freeze the partner, avoid any change and dynamic, thus provoking in the partner engulfment anxiety and avoidant behaviors.

 

The partner then reacts with narcissistic defenses and evolved introject anxiety.

 

To ensure introject constancy, the partner needs to avoid the external object, provoking in the borderline abandonment anxiety and her approach.

 

The partner responds by trying to secure the borderline’s object constancy (approach).

 

This leads to approach-avoidance repetition compulsion.

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Baguette discloses a traumatic event from his childhood and the consequences of parenting by a broken mother. But there is a message of hope to the victims. Be sure to watch the highlight with the previous videos and photos in this series which are both heartbreaking and uplifting! Video courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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Narcissists devalue people they envy. If this doesn’t work, they attempt to destroy them.

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The narcissist perceives your speech as hostile and persecutory. Why is that? Your recovery, regaining personal autonomy, independence and agency, are perceived by the narcissist as a threat.

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Women are way more prone to narcissistic mortification than men. Self-styled experts confuse narcissistic mortification with narcissistic injury.

 

Narcissistic mortification

 

Narcissistic mortification, is a sudden sense of defeat and loss of control over internal or external objects or realities, caused by an aggressing person or a compulsive trait or behavior. The entire personality is overwhelmed by impotent ineluctability and a lack of alternatives.

 

But, the only true solution to a mortification is the regaining of control and, even then, it is only partial as control had clearly been lost at some point and this cataclysm can never be forgotten, forgiven, or effectively dealt with.

 

The need to reframe narcissistic mortification is because – as an extreme and intolerably painful form of shame-induced traumatic depressive anxiety – it threatens the integrity of the self, following a sudden awareness of one’s limitations and defects (Lansky, 2000 and Libbey, 2006).

 

When they are faced with their own hopeless “unlovability, badness, and worthlessness”, mortified people experience shock, exposure, and intense humiliation, often converted to somatic symptoms. It feels like annihilation and disintegration.

 

With @zukowska.daria

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Friday, 9 PM, on Vistel, Slobodan Tomik talk to Sam Vaknin about the world today and tomorrow.

 

Swipe left. Full episode on my vakninsmusings YouTube channel. Rerun at 10 PM tonight on Vistel TV.

 

Regional wars erupt only when some of the parties involved perceive a power asymmetry that would allow them to eliminate a foe or alter the geopolitical order.

 

This is why regional war in the Middle East is out of the question: both Iran and Israel are depleted economically, torn apart internally, and vulnerable to annihilating attacks.

 

Moreover: there is a coalition of moderate Sunni Arab states and Western powers pitted against Iran.

 

Similarly, the war between Russia and Ukraine will never spread or get out of hand. Even if Russia were to conquer the entire territory of its neighbor - NATO, a defensive alliance will not countenance going to war over it.

 

But there is a growing trend that is truly terrifying: the legitimization of the use of nuclear weapons even in conventional wars. Russia, North Korea, Israel, and China are all engaged in the ostentatious contemplation of the hitherto unthinkable.

 

Russia has just revised its policy to allow for the incorporation of its nuclear arsenal in all types of warfare. Israel considers the current conflict it is embroiled in an existential threat. North Korea is alarmed by the growing military collusion between the USA and South Korea and is flaunting its nuclear arsenal. China has just lobbed an ICBM to signal its readiness to confront the West over Taiwan.

 

The utilization of tactical nuclear weapons in regional or local wars is in itself only a minor threat to world peace. But having crossed this threshold, having flung open Pandora’s box, strategic nuclear weapons are liable to follow.

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The most difficult message you will ever hear as a victim of narcissistic abuse (which I was the first to describe more than 30 years ago). Don’t shoot the messenger - ponder the message. It’s a warning. Listen to the very end. Every word counts.

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Chaired the sessions of the Addiction World Conference earlier this month. Watch the videos in the Addiction playlist on my YouTube channel, including my recent lecture in Mexico City.

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Love is one of those elusive words that defies a lexical definition.

In the wake of narcissistic abuse, look for a trauma specialist, not for a therapist who deals with relationships.

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We often confuse obsession with attention.

Obsession is about YOU:

You are being overwhelmed by involuntary imaginative and intrusive dreams, wishes, fantasies, or desires.

The subject of the obsession always comes second, although it is constantly in the background.

Attention is when your voluntary focus is on the OTHER, on what they are communicating to you - not on you or on your interactions with them.

When you are obsessed, you are unable to maintain attention in communication because you are too focused on and immersed in your obsession.

Attention filters out irrelevant and useless information (noise). Obsession floods the individual with noise and then puppeteers its victim via compulsion.

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Narcissistic rage is intended to restore the narcissist’s grandiosity. It is a reaction to shame, fragility, vulnerability, and humiliation. It signals superiority, defiance, and invulnerabiity. It is psychopathic.

The borderline’s acting out is about regaining control over her life and over the abandoning or rejecting person (behavior modification and manipulation). It is more panic than rage. It signals neediness and is codependent.

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Lecture on cluster B personality disorders to clinicians in Acibadem Sistina Hospital in Skopje.

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In the wake of harrowing narcissistic abuse: surrealistic-impressionistic take. Courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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My first class as Visiting Professor of Psychology and Visiting Professor of Economics in South East European University in North Macedonia. The topic: Lifespan Development Psychology. I am a long time Professor of Clinical Psychology and a Professor of Business Management in CIAPS (Cambridge and Birmingham, UK; Ontario, Canada; and Lagos, Nigeria).

 

(Swipe left). My first lecture as Visiting Professor of Psychology in SEEU is available on my YouTube channel. CIAPS (where I serve as Professor of Clinical Psychology and Professor of Business Management) has announced my appointment in SEEU as well.

The lecture posted on my YouTube channel is an introduction to lifespan development psychology, a fascinating, integrative, new field.

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Both borderlines and narcissists have a psychopathic protector self-state.

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My responses in English. Iran, Israel, Hizbullah, Hamas, Shia, Sunnis in the Middle East - what’s next? Full interview tomorrow on Telma TV. The full interview in my vakninmusings YouTube channel.

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A day in the life of: swipe left. Typically crazy day yesterday: buying books by the cart in Akademska Kniga (an amazing bookstore!), discovering my inner biker, and getting introduced to a literate cat who knows more about narcissism than all the self-styled “experts” online combined (hint: the book by its side 😉). In between: an interview in Telma TV. Phew!

Photography: @reframingtheself

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(Swipe left). My first lecture as Visiting Professor of Psychology in SEEU is available on my YouTube channel. CIAPS (where I serve as Professor of Clinical Psychology and Professor of Business Management) has announced my appointment in SEEU as well.

The lecture posted on my YouTube channel is an introduction to lifespan development psychology, a fascinating, integrative, new field.

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Blacks are a minority in the USA. So are the Jews, LGBTQ, and other groups.

But in today’s ochlocratic reign of the dumb (idiocracy), the most despised, hated, and assailed minority are intelligent people: academics, intellectuals, experts, and professionals.

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Traumatic events shatter our views of people as essentially good and of the world as just, orderly, and structured. TalkTV with Trisha Goddard.

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Self-aware, “repentant”, “recovering” narcissists are still full-fledged narcissists: manipulative and immersed in fantasy.

Image courtesy of @_kalleidoscope

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In some mental health disorders and illnesses, there is no stable core identity. Instead, various identities (self-states) compete for control (identity diffusion or disturbance).

From a course I teach in South East European University (SEEU).

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The Bible has been warning us about narcissists almost 2000 years before the DSM and the ICD. Excerpt from my lecture in Sistina Hospital.

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We seek a second opinion on rare medical occasions - not 100 opinions!

Victims find comfort in this repetition. It is like liturgy in religion. Prayer to counter the religious-like injunctions of narcissism.

Make sense of the world (hermeneutic).

Structure and order in randomness (conspiracism): morality play and splitting.

Self-soothing.

Compulsion: Looking for a precise fit because of impaired reality testing owing to entraining or gaslighting.

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Correction: semantic - not episodic - memory. The narcissist has a complicated relationship with his fantasy - never with you. From my lecture in Sistina Hospital.

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Don’t bother to educate the narcissist, enlighten him (or her), or even threaten. It is a waste of your time and mental energy. Narcissists are the walking dead. They can never see the light. They never learn or evolve.

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To sustain and buttress their sense of godlike superiority, narcissists surround themselves with manifestly inferior hangers-on: less endowed, less intelligent, less accomplished, or less handsome than they are.

Narcissists idealize themselves and their role models du jour - and hold all others in profound and virulent contempt.

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The meeting between the narcissist and his victim is a meeting of 2 hungers. With Azam Ali (azamaliofficial on Instagram).

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How come narcissists and borderlines are a perfect match when they are so different?

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Parental overprotectiveness is a form of abuse because it denies the child the ability to separate from the parents, experience reality with all its pains and losses, model peers, and form boundaries.

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Don’t overthink rejection and betrayal.

It is rarely about YOU, more often about who THEY are.

Keep doing your thing.

You are the only one that matters to you, your only meaningful audience.

Adopt your internal compass and follow it.

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What bothers me is that hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Jews condemn in no uncertain terms the occupation of the West Bank and the atrocities in Gaza.

I have yet to come across one Palestinian who unequivocally disowns the massacres of October 7 perpetrated by the psychopathic scum Sinwar and the barbaric Hamas.

Keeping mum in the face of crimes - Palestinian or Israeli - renders one an accomplice to these crimes.

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Ohrid. Kasarna Hub.

October 26. 6 PM.

Sam Vaknin

“Narcissistic Abuse: Into the Dark Side and Back”.

Be there. Free entry.

 

Lecture to clinicians and community activists.

 

Scenes from my stay in the scenic Heritage Site city of Ohrid. Empathizing with the birds in the lake. Granting an interview to TalkTV. Strolling. Recording hours of new lectures for my poor students. Started this trip with a lecture to clinicians and community organizers about narcissism, what else. Photos courtesy of @reframingtheself

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Why do celebrities die young?

 

Isolation (unique experiences, crowds)

Objectification (moneymaking machinery)

Acquired situational narcissism (Milman)

Persona (mask), fan expectations become straitjacket: deviation is punished

Conflict between creativity and crushing routine

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There are two forms of egregious idiocy:

1. To question nothing; and

2. To question everything.

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It is very likely that your anxiety disorder is producing effects in both your body and your mind.

The minute you accept this fact, the anxiety will disappear!

Most of the time, we are actually anxious of being anxious (anticipatory anxiety)!

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It is very likely that pathological narcissism is partly hereditary (genetic) and involves brain abnormalities (though these could be the outcomes of narcissism, not its precursors). There is just no rigorous conclusive evidence of the above yet.

But there is a huge body of evidence that links narcissistic personalities to early childhood abuse, trauma, and adversity (pampering, idolizing, parentifying, smothering, and instrumentalizing the child are also forms of abuse).

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The narcissist has a poor grasp of reality (impaired reality testing). So, why does the borderline allow the narcissist to determine for her what’s real and what’s not?

Because the borderline misjudges the narcissist’s fantasies and cognitive distortions for reality.

S/he buys into the narcissist’s mental illness.

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While the narcissist’s false self is impregnable and defensive, intended to keep out a potentially hostile world - the borderline’s is wide open and beseeching, craves love, acceptance, and above all, a sense of safety.

The False Self in both cases is imbued with aggression, but otherwise these childhood constructs could not be more different.

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Most “self-aware” “narcissists” online are charlatans, plagiarists, and con artists. They peddle false hope to gullible victims. This revictimization is nauseating.

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Keynote speaker in 5th Global Conference on Addiction Medicine, Behavioral Health, and Psychiatry. My topic: suggestible patients in therapy.

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More than 100 tips and strategies on how to cope with narcissists and how to recover and heal from narcissistic abuse. Full video in my YouTube channel.

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Only a rank narcissist would have no qualms or scruples about becoming a dad at age 83, utterly disregarding the multiple risks to the child: genetic, psychological, and social.

As long as “he enjoys being a dad again”.

It is all about him, of course.

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Centuries ago, October 31 was called in England “All Hallows’ Eve”. People prayed to prepare the souls of the departed for the Catholic All Saints’ Day on November 1.

October 31 was also the Celtic New Years’ Eve - the “Samhain”. On that night, the spirits of the deceased were supposed to possess living bodies before departing to the afterlife.

Pumpkins were not part of Halloween celebrations until late in the 19th century. The Irish and other Europeans actually carved up turnips. Poor immigrants to the USA could not afford turnips and turned to pumpkins instead.

Candid camera footage courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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The impacts of self-hugging are identical to the effects of being hugged by someone.

Skin to skin contact via hugging is anxiolytic and a precondition for wellbeing or even survival (Harlow’s monkey experiments). Special neuroreceptors in the skin (c-tactile afferents) detect soft, pleasurable touch.

Hugging is soothing and induces solace and comfort. It reduces stress and pain (analgetic). It is beneficial to the heart and the immune system.

The gesture of hugging is a context-dependent language and a form of social signaling of connection and emotions: intimacy, trust, and communication.

Hugging releases in the body a cascade of hormones and other molecules: oxytocin (bonding, maternal secure base), endorphins (pain relief and wellbeing), serotonin (mood), and dopamine (pleasure).

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Narcissists act constantly to an audience, real or imagined. When the narcissist self-supplies, s/he has an audience of one: herself/himself.

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Inverted narcissism is a combination of a covert narcissism with co-dependence. The inverted narcissist depends exclusively on narcissists (narcissist-co-dependent).
The inverted narcissist craves to be in a relationship with a narcissist, regardless of any abuse inflicted on her.

She actively seeks relationships with narcissists and only with narcissists, no matter what her (bitter and traumatic) past experience has been. She feels empty and unhappy in relationships with non-narcissists.

Video courtesy of @mask.ov.sanity

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As opposed to the exact sciences, in the social “sciences” and in the humanities, 90% of all “innovations” are recycled, renamed, and rebranded old ideas and 80% of the “experiments” cannot be repeated with the same outcomes (replication crisis).

These “disciplines” are scams, or to be more charitable, observational literature cloaked in self-aggrandizing “mathematics”.

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You are a mere interchangeable character in the narcissist’s shared fantasy.

Meme courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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Who is like the greatest psychologist like ever? LIKE WHO?

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How do infants develop a subjective identity and a grasp of external, separate objects?

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Frightened and angry people follow frightening and angry people.

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The narcissist creates conditions that guarantee your failure or misbehavior, then blames you and shames you and guilt trips you into submission.

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What are you to the narcissist? How does he perceive you and your relationship? With @rebeccazung

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The narcissist’s aggression is antisocial (psychopathic): it is aimed as coercing other people to affirm his/her inflated, grandiose, fantastic self-concept and at imposing on them a delusional shared fantasy.

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Narcissists are autoerotic. They crucially require your enthusiastic consent in order to feel irresistible and sexy and then they proceed to make love to themselves, using your body as a masturbatory aid.

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Narcissists have no access to their positive emotions. Even when they are cognitively self-aware, they form no transformational insights, as these require an emotional correlate. Full interview with Peter Kolakowski available on my YouTube channel.

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Another week, another class in South East European University (SEEU). This time: From Freud to Fairbairn, from Psychoanalysis to Object Relations.

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Worried that you might be a narcissist? Watch this.

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The inability of narcissists to tell reality apart from fantasy (impaired reality testing) and their memory gaps (dissociation) force them to confabulate (invent plausible narratives and gaps as to what may have happened) which they then cathects and fully believe. Video courtesy of @shadowdeangelis

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Keynote speaker 6th Global Conference on Addiction Medicine, Behavioral Health, and Psychiatry. Full video on my YouTube channel.
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Gangstalking is a much mischaracterized and neglected psychosocial phenomenon. It described in the literature overwhelmingly as a delusional disorder.

It is sometimes conflated with social justice activism, victimhood and woke movement such as #MeToo when “gangs” of activists or alleged self-imputed victims target individuals cast as evil perpetrators.

Alternatively, gangstalking has been attributed to deep state structures and featured in other conspiracy theories, such as Qanon.

This expansive redefinition of gangstalking has given it a bad rep and caused academics to shy away from it.

Thus, people who claim to be gangstalked are cast as delusional, paranoid, psychotic, grandiose or narcissistic, and worse.

There has been no in-depth study of the veracity of the claims the victims of gangstalking because its very existence has been widely and invariably discredited.

However, occasionally, gangstalking is real, it does occur. I will describe ten environments, settings, and circumstances that give rise to the orchestrated activity colloquially known as gangstalking.

10 Types of Gangstalking

Personal experience: learning opportunity

Gang stalking in most cases is delusional, but, on some occasions, it is still a real phenomenon denied by the clueless academic community (targeted individual).

Dynamics resemble shared psychosis: inducer and secondary induced

Morality play

Grandiosity via elation and empowerment

Flying monkeys and unwitting collaborators: conspiracies (structured goal-orientation) or networking (loose like-minded alliances or coalitions). Free riders.

Smear campaigns (falsehoods, defamation, libel)

Cults and the Other (in-group vs. out-group)

Mentally ill

Revenge

Mobs (e.g., cancel culture) and mob or cult or hive mind

Bullying (including at school)

Religious excommunication

Social ostracism

Legal and institutional

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Narcissist’s (in)significant other to the indifferent narcissist: “I betrayed your cruel absence, not your loving presence. Had you been present in my life and loved me, unfaithfulness would have never pervaded my mind nor my body. I would have been yours exclusively.”

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Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

 

Perfectionism leads to procrastination, never getting anything done!

 

Don’t be perfect - be accomplished.

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Blondes are stereotypically perceived as ditzy, histrionic, unfaithful, and high-maintenance.

So, why (gentle)men prefer blondes?

Men do approach blondes more than any other color, it is a fact. Especially men under the age of 30.

Blondes feature prominently in all types of magazines, not only in adult ones.

Like redheads, blondes are rare (scarce) or maybe they are considered by men to be less threatening (dumb blonde).

Blondes are also perceived as “easy” (promiscuous) because they are easily manipulated. Availability is the number 1 aphrodisiac.

Blondes are perceived as needy and this enhances male self-confidence and dominance and reduces inhibitions (because of a lower risk of rejection).

Blondes are also perceived as younger and healthier (because hair darkens with age and they have the highest hair density) and, therefore, more fertile.

Estrogen and testosterone lower in blonde females only, rendering them more childlike in both physique and behavior. This triggers protective male responses and sexual selection.

Blonde genes are recessive. Both parents should be blonde for the child to blonde, thus ascertaining paternity in some cases. Consequently, blue eyed and blonde men are more attracted to blue eyed and blonde women.
Fewer men are born blonde than women.

Blonde men have no dating advantage. Proof of societal-cultural influences on short-term mate selection (but not on long-term coupling).

Blonde hair is determined by a recessive gene. This means that a blonde male can be 100% certain of his paternity if he mates with a blonde female. It does NOT mean that non-blonde cannot have a blonde child: some ancestor in the past could have been blonde.

Blonde hair is determined by a recessive gene. This means that a blonde male can be 100% certain of his paternity if he mates with a blonde female. It does NOT mean that the non-blonde cannot have a blonde child: some ancestor in the past could have been blonde.

LITERATURE in the description of the video on my YouTube channel.

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Entraining (or entrainment) and projective identification are powerful techniques for mind control and behavior modification. Narcissists and psychopaths make use of both.

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Featured Speaker in World Neuroscience and Psychiatry Conference 2025, Bangkok, March 2025. Talk on The Aggressive Narcissist.

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Terrorism is the use of fear to control and manipulate people. Narcissists and psychopaths are domestic terrorists.

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Biden, Putin, Trump, Russia, Ukraine, Israel and all the rest. Guest of Slobodan Tomik in Vistel TV. Rerun at 10 PM on Saturday.

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The dissolution of my life reflects the disintegration of the world around me, of the very fabric of civilization.

Decay and decadence are contagious and transcend the boundaries of the collective to infect the individual.

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Narcissist’s jealousy is reactive to threats to his locus of grandiosity.

Cerebral narcissist indifferent to infidelity (his service provider is allowed to have more than one client), but become jealous if his partner admires someone else’s intellect

Somatic narcissist is sexually jealous but not possessive (e.g., into group sex)

Covert narcissist insecure and fears loss, so his jealousy is possessive.

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The borderline masks devouring inner emptiness and overpowering pain in a variety of ways.

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The narcissist’s shared fantasy is an attempt to recreate the original symbiotic bond with the biological mother, this time around with a “new mother”.

 

So, it is not the same as hoovering - it is repetition compulsion.

 

Hoovering is an attempt to resolve dissonance and anxiety triggered by the residual internal persecutory object that used to represent the initially idealized and then devalued Other.

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Public toilets are divided by genitalia, not by gender.

Only people will identical genitalia should use the same public toilet, regardless of their self-imputed gender.

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Organizing Committee Member and Speaker in World Neuroscience and Psychiatry Conference 2025, Bangkok, March 2025. Talk on The Aggressive Narcissist.

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In a smear campaign, those who are ready to believe the most egregious lies about you instantly and uncritically are either dumb, or malevolent, or envious, or bribed somehow, or have always been hostile, hitherto faking friendship or neutrality. Be grateful to have exposed them and rid yourself of their presence in your life.

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You need to disable or erase the voice (introject) of the abuser in your mind before any healing can occur.

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Narcissists are love-blind. They offhandedly, absentmindedly, and contemptuously discard the greatest assets a human being could ever aspire to or have: the dedicated few who love them loyally, genuinely, dearly, profoundly, totally, and wholeheartedly.

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Countdown to the mega-seminar in Zagreb with hundreds of clinicians from all over Europe in attendance.

 

he Power of Intention Center organizes a free seminar by Professor Sam Vaknin. More details below, and you can sign up on this link: https://snaganamjere.com/sam-vaknin/

LECTURER

Sam Vaknin, PhD

Professor of Clinical Psychology and Management Studies in CIAPS (Commonwealth Institute of Advanced Professional Studies), Cambridge and Birmingham, UK; Ontario, Canada; and Lagos, Nigeria;

Visiting Professor Of Psychology and of Economics in South East European University (SEEU), North Macedonia

Former Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia (2017-22).

SEMINAR

Cost: FREE

Length: 7 hours with 4 breaks of 15 minutes each.

Title: “Cluster B Personality Disorders: Recent Advances in Diagnosis and Treatment”

Audience: organized by Intention Power Center

Venue: Hotel “Antunović”, Zagreb, 102 Zagreb Avenue, Croatia

Timing: 8th December 2024, 10.00 a.m.- 5.00 p.m.

Language: English (no translation)

Synopsis:

The field of personality disorders is at an impasse, reflected in the competing diagnostic models in the DSM 5-TR (the categorical lists of diagnostic criteria imported verbatim from the DSM-IV-TR vs. the dimensional, descriptive alternative models, relegated to the appendices).

We need to reconceive of cluster B personality disorders as post-traumatic dissociative conditions involving self-states (subpersonalities with pseudoidentities). This seems to be the most clinically rigorous way to rid ourselves of excessive comorbidities and polythetic diagnoses.

Recasting cluster B personality disorders as post-traumatic conditions which involve dissociation goes a long way towards resolving these outstanding conundrums and provides for hitherto absent efficacious treatment modalities.

 

Yesterday, I started to upload to YouTube the 5 videos of the clinicians seminar in Zagreb.

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With the flying monkey, the narcissist creates an attenuated cult-like shared fantasy.

The narcissist is the flying monkey’s role model. But the flying monkey also serves as savior-rescuer and maternal protective figure.

Narcissist devalues, discards, and punishes vicariously, by proxy, through the agency of the flying monkey, the narcissist’s long arm, an extension of his omnipotence. Flying monkeys, therefore, buttress the narcissist’s grandiosity.

The flying monkey experiences the shared fantasy the way an intimate partner does: feel chosen, unique, omnipotent, in the know, thrilled/excited/aroused, useful (needed), legitimized.

 

Anyone can serve as the narcissist’s flying monkey, including intimate partners, children, parents, friends, coworkers, neighbors, the mentally ill, activists, law enforcement, institutions, the media, and academics.

Just about anyone and everyone can be compromised, brainwashed, and recruited into the shared fantasy.

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They say that beggars can’t be choosers.

But choosers can’t be beggars as well!

Be a chooser - not a beggar!

Never beg!

Always choose wisely!

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Baguette dares the abyss of his narcissism - with dire consequences. Courtesy of @mirna_liz37

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Some people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) experience psychotic microepisodes when they are pushed to the limit with extreme stress, anxieties, tension, or threats.

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Healthy narcissism is the foundation of a stable sense of self-worth (self-esteem and self-confidence). It is also a crucial element in self-regulation. Pathological narcissism is the dysfunctional opposite of all these.

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Many of the negative outcomes of relationships with narcissists are self-inflicted.

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In the aftermath of the shared fantasy - the discard or the breakup - the narcissist reverts to form: a carnivorous succulent plant awaiting to dissolve its unwitting prey.

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We often mistake aesthetic arguments for moral or even intellectual ones because we perceive beauty as evidence of truthfulness, goodness, or functionality.

So, rather than say “I find it ugly or unattractive”, we end up exclaiming: “This is wrong or evil or dysfunctional.”

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Projective Splitting

The narcissistic parent splits her personality into good and bad traits, qualities, and dimensions. She projects his or her good aspects, the ones she finds to be acceptable (ego-syntonic) or even desirable onto the golden child who then embodies and reifies everything that’s right and proper in the parent’s personality, an extension of the parent’s grandiosity.

In contradistinction, the traits and qualities of himself or herself that the narcissistic parent finds bad, unacceptable, rejected, or shame-inducing are projected onto and attributed to the scapegoat child, the black sheep of the family, the reject and the outcast who is then rendered a constant reminder of the parent’s shortcomings, a challenge to her fantastic self-perception and, therefore, a permanent narcissistic injury.

Courtesy of @shadowdeangelis

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The semantic (skills and education) memory of narcissists is intact. They have gaps only with their episodic (autobiographical) memory. They confabulate to cover up for it.

When they do recall anything - interpersonal relationships included - it is either via dark or via rosy retrospection (nostalgic recall), idealizing , devaluing, and discarding (dissociating) the memories the way they do people.

Borderlines also go through idealization and devaluation cycles and they are highly dissociative, but their selective surviving memories are way closer to reality because they retain the affective correlates of their experiences.

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Narcissists regard themselves as victims because victimhood pays: it is grandiose, garners attention and compassion, confers rights on the victim and obligations on others, and can often be monetized.

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All previous revolutions in human history were aimed at replacing the old order with a new one. Building a better future (utopia). All were led by intellectuals.

The current revolution that is sweeping the globe is about replacing the old order with no order at all. It exalts destruction and nescience and derides construction and erudition.

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We are all passengers on the proverbial Titanic.

But rather than prepare for the looming iceberg, we fret about our position on the decks, the lunch menu, the musical selections of the orchestra, the amenities on board, and about who did or said what to whom and why.

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Narcissists have no access to positive emotions such as love. They fear intimacy (their attachment style is dismissive-avoidant). They are autoerotic (are sexually attracted only to themselves, using your body as a sex toy).

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True love is indeed deep. But it is a function of time and of common experiences.

It evolves over a protracted period, fed by numerous common experiences, both good and bad (hardships and challenges).

One should never confuse intensity (infatuation, limerence) with profundity (depth).

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Narcissists coerce you into reactive abuse because it sustains their counterfactual belief in their victimhood.

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Imagining the Other is erotic: everything incorporated in or emanating from another person can become an object of sexual arousal.

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Nostalgia.

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Some people can see the future with startling clarity.

Fewer can gauge the present accurately.

No one can know the past truthfully.

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The narcissist plays on your need to be seen. By ignoring you intermittently, he creates trauma bonding.

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Dysregulation is induced by both positive and negative affects.

Anticipatory (anxiety or catastrophising) vs. reactive (triggered) dysregulation.

Dysregulation is a-regulation (absence of regulation, unregulation), not chaos/disorganization, instability (EUPD is bad choice), or amplification. It is internal decompensation and disinhibition.

Appraisal failure (catastrophizing)

Video courtesy of @adventuresinadversitypodcast

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Fearful-avoidant (disorganized) “attachment style” is a latecomer to attachment theory.

Its authors merely copy-pasted verbatim the DSM 4 diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder.

So, this is not an attachment style at all! It is a personality disorder.

Recently, there has been a proliferation of such sham constructs: “dark empath”, “maladaptive daydreaming”, “shy or quiet borderline”, and “recovered narcissist” come to mind.

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The narcissist wears you down, obliterates your resistances and defenses, suspends your personal autonomy and agency, renders you in invisible and subservient.

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Two great quotes: one from the very disturbing film “American Psycho” and the other, the confession of a Borderline. Chilling.

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Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD):

Identity disturbance (unstable identity, fragile sense of self)

Emptiness, false self, fantasy defense.

External regulation

Impaired reality testing (e.g., paranoia, overestimation of intimacy like in HPD), psychotic microepisodes

Self-harm, suicidal ideation, self-destructive cognitions and actions: self-punitive, silence internal turmoil, call for help, feeling alive (dead inside)

Recklessness, impulsivity, secondary psychopathy

Emotional volatility, affective lability, emotional dysregulation (DBT): anger, reactive mood shifts and changes

Intense interpersonal relationships involve idealization-devaluation (relational disorder)

Twin anxieties: abandonment/rejection-engulfment/intimacy, approach-avoidance repetition compulsion

Courtesy of @sayedserena

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I hold a very dim view of religion and regard spirituality as the cop-out of the feeble-minded and the weak. Yet, this book succeeded to captivate me. Martin’s (@armandmartin7) starting point is always science and he is hyper-rational. He builds his entire edifice and message on cutting edge discoveries in an astounding array of fields. With unwavering and incisive insight, he then leads the reader to the boundary between the mind and the spirit - and beyond.

At the same time, this tome is a scathing critique of modern civilization. A clarion call. A premonition founded on observation. And a manifesto passionately advocating fundamental renewal. Frankly, these are my favorite chapters. The book easily competes with masterpieces in the field.

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Homosexuality is no longer included in the DSM as a diagnosis. But is it natural? Is it an artefact of human civilization?

In the face of fierce opposition by the Christian Orthodox Church and other conservative forces, Greece just passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage and parenting.

The use of the word “marriage” may be historically inaccurate. “Union” would have been better. But should homosexuals be allowed to serve as parents? What do we know about homosexuality, to start with?

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Friends are the people you go to when you are bad company: down, angry, sick, or otherwise in need.

Friendship is about succor, not about entertainment and having fun.

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Social media monetize your eyeballs (attention). The more lonely you are, the more money they make. Attention paid to nearest or dearest is advertising income lost to the social media platforms.

Social Media Want YOU Isolated, Angry, Envious, Scared (with Moshe Fabrikant, Israel) @moshefabrikant

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There are two debilitating counterfactual fantasies in intimate relationships:

My partner is/was all good and I am/was all bad.

My partner is/was all bad and I am/was all good.

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The borderline’s emotions - especially love - and her “intimate” relationships are not what they seem. Her or his attachment style is actually dismissive-avoidant.

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In our contemporary dystopian world …

Destruction and disruption are perceived as the only virtuous creative acts;

Anecdotes and lived experiences - however limited and provincial - are the only founts of authority whereas academic scholarship is considered suspect, clueless, and ignorant;

Institutions are deemed to be the seats of evil. Anarchic individualistic nihilism cloaked in old-fashioned values and traditions is the new norm.

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Success requires luck, serendipity, an eye for opportunities. But above all, it demands hard work.

You could be a sadistic, contemptuous, immature narcissist (Steven Jobs) or just plain dumb (Elon Musk) and still make it big because you are a hard, persistent, persevering worker.

You could be the world’s greatest genius, if you are an indolent slacker, you will end up in your mother’s basement, living off of your father’s retirement fund.

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New Year’s Abuse Survivor’s Resolutions

 

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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“Happy New Year” sounds more and more trite and delusional with every passing year.

How about “Have a Not Worse New Year”?

Much more realistic.

Or maybe: “Have a New Year a-la carte, with all your dreams and wishes on the menu!”

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Parental Intelligence (PI):

Love
Care
Protect
Socialize
Discipline
Nurture
Teach
Let go

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If you deny your problem - you will never solve it.

If you deny your illness - you will never heal.

If you deny your role and contribution - you will never move on or feel safe.

Denial is at the root of all failure.

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Both the narcissist and the borderline have a true self (and a false self). But they have no access to the true self. It is not psychodynamically active or interactive.

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Dark triad personalities are subclinical narcissists and subclinical psychopaths. In other words: they cannot be diagnosed as either narcissists or psychopaths. In the dark tetrad there is also sadism present. I proposed to add borderline to the mix in a dark pentagram personality.

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People like people who like them in return.

You are popular because you allow people to like themselves through you, to regard themselves as lovable through your gaze.

Obviously, this can be easily faked by manipulative con artists - and often is.

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Love should never be performative nor should it ever be conditioned on performance. Love is an emotion, not an exam.

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The only two things I love more than food are: books and more food. Consequently, I resemble a Jewish bowling pin. It is Christmas in the countries of Orthodox Christianity which still adhere to the old calendar. Opportunity for both comestibles and combustibles (and books, of course, always books).

Photo courtesy of @reframingtheself

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Businessmen are concerned only with survival. The worlds of business and finance are amoral.

They bend the knee and lick the boots of men in power.

They have done it with Hitler and Putin, they are behaving the same way with Trump.

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Freedom is terrifying. To be authentic is to be existentially alone.

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To think outside the box is genius.

To completely ignore the box is idiocy.

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A recap of Antisocial Personality Disorder (AsPD). Btw: sociopath is simply the old word for psychopath, nothing more or less or different. The word “psychopath” itself is hotly contested and cannot be found in the DSM(!)

Video courtesy of @sayedserena

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Victimhood pays which is why psychopaths and swindlers often pretend to be victims. But narcissists truly believe that they had been victimized.

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The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence: it is wisdom.

Often extremely intelligent people are also inordinately dumb.

Remember the IDIOT in idiot savant.

Photos courtesy of @reframingtheself and her pigeons.

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That you ended up with a narcissist (often more than once) says something about you. Try really hard to understand what so as to not fall in the same trap again.

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Women now describe themselves in what used to be stereotypically masculine terms.

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A trip down memory lane courtesy of the Wayback Machine. Snapshots of the first ever website and the first ever support group dedicated to narcissistic abuse.

In 1995, after ten years of research, I finished writing my magnum opus, “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”.

For my birthday in 1997, my wife and collaborator, Lidija Rangelovska @reframingtheself uploaded the FAQs part of the book to a Geocities website. It was the first website ever on narcissistic abuse.

Later that year, I opened and moderated the first support group for victims of narcissists. I then established another 5 groups on Suite101.

For an entire decade, I was the only voice online. It took nine years before I lost this distinction. In 2009, I also opened the first YouTube channel on narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

I pioneered the field and coined most of the language in use today. I am now largely forgotten and obscured, eclipsed by an avalanche of charlatans and self-styled “experts”. Only the Wayback Machine preserves the truth in its bowels, in the archaeology of the internet.

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Trauma bond is an extreme, unidirectional, self-harming attachment fostered by traumatizing, unpredictable intermittent reinforcement and involving a power asymmetry.

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I regard misinformation and fake news to be crimes against humanity, leveraging and taking advantage of the innate stupidity of the vast majority of people.

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When abandoned, rejected, humiliated, stressed, or attacked, the borderline becomes a secondary psychopath, a protective state. S/he decompensates and acts out. If s/he recalls her aggressive recklessness, s/he may be ashamed and remorseful. But, in many cases, s/he dissociates the events or even attributes them to another self.

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Constant state of artificial crisis, acting out. emotional dysregulation, switching, chaos, disruptive behaviors, identity diffusion/disturbance, mixed signals, inconstancy, indeterminacy, capriciousness, arbitrariness, and unpredictability: welcome to the Dramatic-erratic cluster B of personality disorders.

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Parental abuse is not limited to the classic forms (physical, sexual, psychological, verbal) and to ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). It includes all types of overprotectiveness, instrumentalization of the child, and disallowing the child to develop boundaries, to separate, and to individuate.

Image courtesy of @_kalleidoscope

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The Evolving Role of HR Managers by CIAPS

Join our exclusive 1-hour CIAPS Webinar

Date: 29th January 2025
Time: Starts at 10 am and ends at 11 am
Location: Online
Fee: Attendance by Invitation only

Contact Us

For inquiries or more information, please get in touch with us via

Email:events@ciaps.org
WhatsApp: +447424898596
Website:www.ciaps.org

Don’t miss this opportunity to redefine your role in HR and lead your organisation to success!

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Reactive abuse is abuse. No excuse for abuse - not even abuse.

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We have become too selective in choosing mates, insisting on a perfect match.

This selectivity may be intentional: a way to avoid commitment, relationships, family, and children.

In other words, it may be a mate avoidance strategy.

Watch the recent video by @armandmartin7

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Trauma is an idiosyncratic reaction to events, a subjective experience, not an objective clinical entity like, say, cancer.

Video courtesy of @mr_tees_odyssey

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If having an affair has revitalized your marriage – then your union has always been sick and dysfunctional, based on deception, mistrust, and abject dependency. A mentally healthy marriage never survives an affair.

It provoked a bit of a storm. So, here is what I meant to say:

I refer to cheating: an affair involving deception. Not to an open marriage or open relationship or polyamory or the lifestyle (swinging) or cuckoldry which do not involve deceptive practices.

Any arrangement between consenting adults which involves no coercion of any kind and no harm whatsoever to others is perfectly legitimate as a way to pursue happiness and wellbeing.

Some affairs are consensual (for example in polyamory).

When the affair involves concealment and lying, to forgive this magnitude of deception and rejection, you need to be mentally impaired somehow.

If the marriage is of two psychologically impaired people, no number of affairs can fix it. This is rank nonsense. Serious mental illness is for life and incurable (though manageable). Ignore the self-interested nonsense online about “healing”. It is a scam.

Mentally healthy people break up after a deceptive affair. If they do not - then they are mentally impaired in some manner. No two ways about it.

Their boundaries are porous or nonexistent. They are dependent (codependent). They regulate externally. They are trauma bonded. They are too anxious to face life and reality (constriction). They cannot perceive their partner as real. They are dissociative.

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The narcissist subjects you to 3 tests:

1. Are you capable of being idealized?

Minimal traits, assets, and behaviors.

2. Are you able to provide 2 of the 4 Ss?

Sex: find him irresistible, enthusiastic, consensual-submissive, prone to sexual fantasies, unboundaried-kinky, self-trashing, promiscuous.

Services (that he needs and lacks).

Supply (narcissistic or sadistic): adoring, uncritical, submissive, masochistic, self-loathing.

Safety: addictive personality, maternal bonding, loyal, inertial.

Are you vulnerable to shared fantasy?

Ideal partner:

Damaged-broken, daydreamer, abhors reality, romantic (even as a friend), grandiose, self-love deficit.

Images courtesy of @_kalleidoscope

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In terms of IQ, the difference between someone with 160 IQ and the average person is like the difference between the average person and a chimpanzee. Fact.

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The borderline mistakes intensity for intimacy. S/he uses drama to avoid her greatest fear: engulfment.

Clip courtesy of @mr_tees_odyssey

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The narcissist is a cardiovascular event:

From heartthrob to heart attack to heart failure to heartbreak.

Or a CVE: One stroke and you are out.

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Perplexity is a search engine app of all the major AI chatbots, like ChatGPT and Claude. Here is what it has to say about my work in psychology.

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Splitting, dissociation, psychosis are a few of the many defensive mechanisms and strategies that we use in order to evade and avoid a reality that we find to be unbearable, intolerable, and highly dissonant.

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Narcissists interact exclusively with internal objects (your avatar, your representation in their minds). But they need you to stick around in order to convince themselves that they are healthy, not insane or delusional or psychotic.

Clip courtesy of @mr_tees_odyssey

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Western civilization is experiencing narcissistic collapse and attempting to compensate via self-supply and fantasy.

Film Joker advocated anarchy, violence, and libertarianism to unshackle the long-suppressed and suffering individual from the oppression of social and cultural norms, mores, and institutions and the tyranny of ideologies.

Such Jokers have sprung to political prominence recently. Like Hitler before them, these charismatic demagogues collude with industry and tech who are, by nature, anti-government.

When individuals are not reined in by rules and institutions, they do not thrive: they become self-destructive and a menace to others.

Moreover: you cannot pick and choose which rules to follow and which institutions (like the family) to sustain (conservatism, traditionalism). The tidal wave sweeps all before it.

Ironically, self-styled conservatives and traditionalists are destroying social institutions and catapulting us back to the hunter-gatherer phase of civilization. In this sense, they are reactionary.

Ginger Coy’s Concerning Narcissism on YouTube and Substack.

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Where there is a lacuna unaddressed, a niche untackled, or a need unmet there is money to be had and reputations to be made.

 

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Playing by the rules is slavery, not authenticity.

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Narcissist uses drama to facilitate: attention-seeking, self-enhancement, substitute to narcissistic supply in protracted states of reduced narcissistic supply or collapse (hunting for morsels): distraction and self-supply (e.g. in paranoid drama).

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Codependents manipulate and control from the bottom via needy, clinging behaviors and utterances of childlike helplessness.

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The opposite of self-love is narcissism: a form of compensatory self-rejection.

Excerpt from an interview with Brad Carr.

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What are the differences in terms of narcissistic supply between overt and covert narcissists?

Video courtesy of @sayedserena

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When an individual or a collective are hellbent on self-destruction, there is nothing you can do but stand back and wait to pick up the pieces, if any are left.

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You are your worst enemy. You are looking for any excuse to stay in touch with the narcissist. Even fighting with the narcissist is a form of contact.

Excerpt from an interview with @maiaece

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Studies show that people high on empathy misread other people the way autistic folks do (whose empathy is actually impaired). The reason is: emotions.

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How one narcissist experiences his cognitive decline, reminiscent of dementia.

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At the dawn of humanity, body fat was a serendipitous and rare treasure. Once you have gained weight, hormonal and metabolic changes in your body make sure that you never relinquish it permanently.

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The only place lonelier than a crowd is in a bad relationship.

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Workshop by Goldberg and Associates at the University of Toronto features my work inter alia. Topic: divorce, custody, dissociative disorders, betrayal trauma, parental alienation (a real thing?).

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No contact is a defensive strategy against narcissistic contagion.

Excerpt from an interview with @maiaece

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Narcissists seek vulnerable people to serve as partners in the shared fantasy and as sources of narcissistic supply. They subject such prospects to probing tests and “interviews”.

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College students are unleashed on smug intellectuals and a bloated bureaucracy. Elon Musk’s DOGE? Nope. Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

 

Democracy can never survive because it is self-contradictory: voters are barred from deciding to abolish it. In this sense, democracy is as totalitarian as any dictatorship.

 

The USA is reverting to its roots. It was founded and governed by the billionaires of that era, rich slaveholders, in order to minimize taxation and (British) government interference. The USA was never meant to be a full-fledged democracy (remember the electoral college?)

 

Checks and balances is a counterfactual myth. If the US President decides to ignore the decisions of the Congress and the verdicts of the courts, there is nothing any of them can do about it. Impeachment is a joke, the power of the purse irrelevant. It is a tyranny in all but name.

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Cut off your toxic family! No contact is the golden rule. The always on point @shadowdeangelis

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Viculin compresses into 120 pages mountainous amounts of information and trivia about the increasingly more demented Nietzsche: his relationships such as they were, his lifestyle, rage attacks, abuse of substances, career, his period, lack of empathy, and writing style. With the tenacity of a detective, Viculin traces the itinerant and desultory Nietzsche across the stations of his cross and the savage terrains of his writing.

The emerging but inescapable conclusions are startling: Although Nietzsche had certain merits as a cultural critic - when not hyperbolic, overcome with vitriol and constrained by his habit of dichotomous thinking - and as a psychologist of the power drive, he was in many ways a trendy copycat (today we would call him an influencer). He rarely acknowledged the important influences noticeable in his works, and was a bad person, a charlatan, and the denizen of a demented fantasy.

That such a nonentity is being eulogized by today’s public intellectuals, is the topic of countless dissertations and books, and the predominant symbol of the rebellious is a tragic testimony to our ersatz age and declining civilization.

The book unfolds like a thriller and is inexorable in its argumentation. A delightful read.

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Narcissistic abuse starts off as a test: are you a truly good mother who would love her (or his) narcissist-child unconditionally, no matter how egregiously and cruelly the narcissist behaves? Will you never abandon the narcissist? Will you stick around never mind what?

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No identity without continuous memories.

Courtesy of @_kalleidoscope

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Psychologically, narcissists are toddlers. So, how come they end up running corporations and even countries? The answer is: they have good semantic and procedural (how to) memory. But eventually, they prove to be destructive to themselves and to others because of a lack of affective (emotional) empathy, no access to or understanding of positive emotions, and extreme dysregulated negative affects (rage, envy, hatred).

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If the cage is sufficiently large, it creates the illusion of freedom. When the enclosure is adequately provisioned it is misperceived as home.

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Everything that makes you “happy” comes from the outside. “Happiness” is society’s way of controlling you.

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Unlike psychopaths, narcissists don’t care about money and power except as means to an end: narcissistic supply (attention).

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Waiting for the narcissist to be empathic, compassionate, caring, loving, optimistic, grounded, friendly, attentive, and supportive and to stop being obnoxious, hateful, aggressive, contemptuous, haughty, impatient, and, generally, a pompous, and irredeemably delusional a-hole.

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Sadistic supply is a much neglected variant of narcissistic supply common in malignant narcissism (a combination of clinical narcissism, clinical psychopathy, and sadism). Sadistic supply is a form of grandiose self-enhancement and fantasy which involves the infliction of pain and hurt on others and witnessing their reactions.

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The narcissist does not have a private life, only a public face. Zero authenticity, all out persona (mask).

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The Alice books by “Lewis Carroll” are my favoritest books in the whole world. I possess a dozen editions, at the very least.

On Israeli radio, I discussed the hidden messages in “Alice in Wonderland” with Benny Hendel. The recordings (in Hebrew) are available in archive.org.

I even wrote a sequel to the books (commissioned by a UK publisher of cookbooks!). It is available here: https://samvak.tripod.com/aliceanniversary.html

This magnificent edition by the original publisher contains the color illustrations by Tenniel, text hitherto excised from the published tomes, correspondences and prefaces by Carroll and, of course, the precious, mind-bending texts.

Thank you @reframingtheself

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What awaits us all? An interview with @slobodantomik

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Narcissists need you to stick around in order to convince themselves and the world around them that they are normal and healthy (“I am having interpersonal relationships, so nothing is wrong with me!”)

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The “modesty” displayed by narcissists - especially covert, or inverted narcissists - is false (pseudo-humility). It is mostly and merely verbal. It is couched in flourishing phrases, emphasised to absurdity, repeated unnecessarily – usually to the point of causing gross inconvenience to the listener. The real aim of such behaviour and its subtext are exactly the opposite of common modesty.

It is intended to either aggrandise the narcissist or to protect his grandiosity from scrutiny and possible erosion. Such modest outbursts precede inflated, grandiosity-laden statements made by the narcissist and pertaining to fields of human knowledge and activity in which he is sorely lacking.

Devoid of systematic and methodical education, the narcissist tries to make do with pompous, or aggressive mannerisms, bombastic announcements, and the unnecessary and wrong usage of professional jargon. He attempts to dazzle his surroundings with apparent “brilliance” and to put possible critics on the defence.

Beneath all this he is shallow, ignorant, improvising, and fearful of being exposed as deceitful. The narcissist is a conjurer of verbosity, using sleight of mouth rather than sleight of hand. He is ever possessed by the fear that he is really a petty crook about to be unearthed and reviled by society.

This is a horrible feeling to endure and a taxing, onerous way to live. The narcissist has to protect himself from his own premonitions, from his internal sempiternal trial, his guilt, shame, and anxiety. One of the more efficacious defence mechanisms is false modesty.

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Narcissists are incapable of perceiving other people as separate and external. To the narcissist, other people are internal objects, figments in his mind, avatars, props and property. Excerpt from an interview with @maiaece

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Introducing drama into his life - acting as both the director and star of his/her movie - allows the narcissist to secure favorable outcomes (sense of self-efficacy) and to control and manipulate people by introducing uncertainty.

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The only way to be present in a relationship with a narcissist is to suspend yourself and vanish.

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The somatic narcissist leverages his/her body and its functions to obtain narcissistic supply. The locus of grandiosity is corporeal. The cerebral narcissist uses intellectual and creative pyrotechnics to accomplish the same: his/her seat of grandiosity is the mind.

Video courtesy of @sayedserena

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(Swipe left) Series 1 of the @_kalleidoscope reviews of my work on pathological narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

 

Series 2 of the @_kalleidoscope reviews of my work on pathological narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

 

Series 3 of the @kalleidoscope reviews of my work on pathological narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

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Nothing terrifies the abuser more than public exposure. Share with friends, family, law enforcement, mental health professionals, your lawyers, accountants, court evaluators, even the media all the details of the abuse that you had suffered.

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My heart goes out to X. I pity X. I am worried sick about X. The kid, not the corporation. He is on a certain path to severe, lifelong mental illness.

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Panic and anger are bad advisors. They give birth to the twin mindsets of paranoia and aggression and the twin outcomes of self-defeat and self-destruction.

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If you are being abused - you are not being loved. No two ways about it.

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Narcissists ALWAYS Implode, Harming Themselves and Everyone Around Them. NO EXCEPTION. NONE. Oh, and NPD is INCURABLE. Period.

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Losses are the engines that drive personal growth, renewal, and development.

 

We are all born handicapped and raise around our explorations of this scintillating cosmos the enclosures of identity and distinction, aka the self and personality.

Life is, therefore, a process of ever greater constriction, as we ossify into ourselves, from becoming to being, inexorably fossilized, trapped in the ambers of our lives, peering out of the ashen hourglasses of our dwindling sands, not comprehending, befuddled, bemused, or terrified.

We are ephemeral creatures made of dreams and stories and narratives that allow us to soar beyond the confines of our egos.

And yet, we rarely forgive ourselves for being who we are, for having cravenly eschewed and forsaken the alternatives, for having matured into error-prone cliches and subdued banalities.

We then often embark on self-punitive and gory crusades against our most miserable existence. We mete out harsh justice against ourselves: judge, jury, and executioner in one.

Yet, all this is wrong, so wrong.

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Catastrophizing and paranoid ideation are clinical features common to all cluster B personality disorders. The Borderline, for example, anticipates abandonment and rejection.

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From the video titled “The Covert Narcissist’s Insidious Speech”:

Passive-aggression: underhanded, backhanded compliments, sabotaging

Pseudo-humility and pseudo-stupidity (solicitation)

Machiavellian/manipulative: needy/clinging, catastrophizing

Controlling: surveillance, fantasy, coercion, control from the bottom

Envious: relative positioning, smearing, taking down

 

Envy and the resentment it engenders are the motivational forces behind covert narcissism.

Clip courtesy of @mr_tees_odyssey

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Planet, universe much better off should the human species be supplanted and replaced by the next stage in evolution.

The next stage in evolution could be a variation on the human species, could be a mixture of the human species with machines, so cyborgs, or could be a total replacement of the human species by another form of intelligence such as AI.

It is presumptuous to adopt God’s POV (can we control our own evolution, what would be good for the planet).

We are limited entities.

No perfect information about ourselves and the environment. Logician and mathematician Kurt Godel: we cannot create perfect logical and mathematical system. If we did, they would become inconsistent and self-defeating. It is a grandiose set of mind.

What is better? Why is it better? What makes something or some environment better?

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The narcissist wants another (fantasy) life.

S/he is never happy with the one s/he has (reality).

The narcissist is never content with who s/he is. S/he wants to be someone else.

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Everyone is forced to make a developmental choice: betray your parents - or betray yourself. This is known as “separation-individuation”.

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Never confuse control with caring. Control is not about you. Caring is.

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Narcissistic collapse is a constant, repeated failure to secure narcissistic supply. Self-styled “experts” online often confuse the collapsed narcissist with the failed narcissist (which is an early childhood stage in the development of Borderline Personality Disorder or BPD).

Video courtesy of @sayedserena

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Interview for the Frontline Club of journalists, London, UK. With the veteran cameraman and reporter Vaughan Smith.

Topics: the psychology of propaganda and cluster B personalities as engines of progress.

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In the topsy-turvy world of the narcissist your love amounts to criticism and weakness, your caring is a narcissistic injury, your advice, succor and help are humiliations, and your intimacy a threat.

Clip courtesy of @mr_tees_odyssey

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Codependents, borderlines, narcissists, and psychopaths guilt trip their partners.

Provocative and defiant behaviors trigger abuse via projective identification and allow for guilt-tripping (control from the bottom).

Egregious misconduct is negation (I don’t see you) and may trigger panic in people with ontological and separation insecurity, dissociation, and a bad internalized object.

Clip courtesy of @mr_tees_odyssey

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FULL VIDEO on my YouTube channel. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are narcissists. This channel deals with narcissists. This is not about politics: it is about mental illness in the highest ranks of society and the global order. Here is a compilation of predictions I made in March 2016 and a warning I issued in 2022.

I was the first to suggest that Donald Trump is a narcissist:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/donald_trump_and_narcissistic_personality_disorder_an_interview_with_sam_vaknin.html

Trump: Narcissist in the White House?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/the_trump_revolution.html

I have a moral and professional obligation to warn against this man.

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Narcissists and children exposed to emotional incest abuse their intimate partners for many reasons: to test their unconditional love and loyalty, to control and manipulate them, and to demonstrate to their internalized-introjected mother that they have been faithful all along.

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Living alone might be easy, it is dying alone that is terrifying.

Gene Hackman and his wife.

An actor with his last audience gone, betrayed by his own mind, lost, disoriented.

In this forlorn week, he may have kept looking for her, the love of his life, wandering the monastic mausoleum that their home had become. Bodies everywhere: his wife, his dog, his own.

A growing number of us have no partner, no children, and no friends. We inhabit intimacy deserts with little to look forward to but our own solitary demise and the dubious pleasure of our own ineluctable presence.

Maybe this is why narcissism is on the rise: the gods need no companions and surmount death. We make ourselves into deities so as to avoid the solipsistic experience that being human has become, untethered from our social spaceships as we tumble head over heels, receding, drifting away into the deep space of our demented, petrified minds.

The movies Vortex by Gaspar Noe and The Father with Anthony Hopkins.

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Certificates of attendance and excellence at the World Neuroscience and Psychiatry Conference, March 2025. My presentation: “The Aggressive Narcissist”.

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Alcoholism serves several psychological purposes effectively.

This is why alcoholism is so intractable (difficult to get rid of or treat) and why recidivism is as high as 60% within the first year after rehab.

1. Palliative

Helps the alcoholic to cope with dissonance, frustration, anxiety, anger, stress, sadness, panic, and other negative emotions or mood disorders

2. Restorative

Helps the alcoholic to restore his or her self-confidence and self-esteem, also as a man or a woman (especially when coupled with a body image issue)

3. Disinhibitory

By lowering inhibitions, alcohol legitimizes narcissistic traits and behaviors like: lack of empathy, extreme selfishness, a sense of entitlement.

Allows the alcoholic to express his or her repressed promiscuity and aggression: traits that s/he find ego-dystonic (traits that s/he dislikes). Alcohol renders the alcoholic much more sociable, grandiose, and sociopathic (becomes volubly defiant, hates authority figures, engages in reckless behaviors like unprotected sex with a stranger, or compulsive shopping or gambling)

4. Instrumental

Allows the alcoholic to accomplish goals (is goal-oriented) that s/he would never even try when sober.

The drunk person during an alcohol-induced blackout is FULLY AWARE of WHAT s/he is doing, WHO s/he is doing it with, whether what s/he is doing is WRONG, and if she is HURTING loved ones with her or his promiscuity, immoral, or antisocial or even criminal acts. During the entire episode, s/he makes multiple choices and decisions based on rational analyses and emotional states. S/he is 100% in control and should be held accountable for the misbehavior.

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There are many forms of traumatic abuse in childhood that not only go unrecognized but are even condoned by society.

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When women type the word MEN, the most common typo is probably MEH.

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In the wake of trauma, we default to acquired coping strategies (eg, substance abuse or avoidance).

In therapy, the patient learns new behaviors and practicing them until they become the default.

Narcissists are incapable of learning, resistant to it.

Learning is a social process (social cognitive learning, Bandura)

This inability to learn and evolve precludes adaptation and results in the adoption of dysfunctional solutions and strategies (maladaptations), grounded in solipsistic fantasy (grandiose self-enhancement) and cognitive distortions.

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Having secured your presence in his shared fantasy as a substitute maternal figure, the narcissist needs to test you: are you truly a good mother? Will you stick around and love him/her unconditionally, despite all the egregious abuse?

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Loyalty is a commitment to place the interest of another above one’s self-interest. It is mildly self-sacrificial.

Loyalty is a crucial element in the most significant intimate relationships, such as marriage or friendship or group affiliation. Loyalty, therefore, requires intimacy.

Loyalty is both a state of mind and a behavioral pattern. It is not entirely there until it has been tested.

Loyalty to values and collectives is identical to loyalty to individuals - only multiplied.

Fidelity is an ambiguous word. It has many meanings. Broadly, it means truthfulness, authenticity. Faithful, authentic, genuine, truthful, or even trustworthy.

Loyalty can drive you to lie in order to protect the person you are loyal to, for example.

Loyalty is an either/or proposition. No compromise.

As long as such loyalty yields an uninterrupted flow of high-quality narcissistic supply, yes. It is a form of explicitly transactional loyalty.

A narcissist would sacrifice his life only if he has no other choice and then only if it guarantees posthumous narcissistic supply.

Any relationship that calls for major sacrifices of essential aspects of wellbeing, identity, or existence is unhealthy.

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Narcissists have no ego and outsource ego functions. This dependency on others is why all narcissists are hypervigilant and fragile, even the overt ones. By @shadowdeangelis

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It is reasonable to assume (though rigorous evidence is lacking) that one is born with a genetic predisposition to develop pathological narcissism: not all siblings - even twins - exposed to the same dysfunctional home environment end up being afflicted.

But it is indisputable and rigorously documented that all narcissist have a history of abuse, trauma, “dead” mother, objectifying, overprotectiveness, idolizing, parentifying, instrumentalizing, or breach of nascent boundaries in early childhood (problems with separation-individuation).

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My YouTube channel is academic and scholarly. Not the fluff that all other narcissism channels are made of. Yet, it garnered 400,000 subscribers and 85,000,000 views.

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People nowadays call every crisis and difficulty a trauma. Crises induce personal growth and maturation. Traumas induce regression and other dysfunctions.

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Poor family members bamboozle rich relatives using the classical techniques of the narcissist’s shared fantasy.

If you are that rich relative, listen to this video and position yourself: at which point in the shared fantasy are you?

Poor envy the rich, resent them, wish to emulate them, and scheme to abscond with their money.

Poor relatives are like covert narcissists and are Machiavellian. They frequently target members of the family who are either vulnerable, with addictive personality, codependent, people-pleasing, or grandiose.

Insinuation

Baiting (narcissistic supply, “love”, constant, intrusive attention)

Escalating requests for money or use of property: testing how far they can go without exposing their hand and incurring a backlash. Initially, money for essentials like food, medical treatment, and shelter and then demands to cover all expenses: clothing, toys, car, travel, entertainment, investments in business and real estate, taxes, etc.

Attempting to coopt the spouse and children of the rich relative using the same methods

Controlling the rich individual by isolating them and turning them against their own nearest if not always dearest

Takeover of the money and assets of the rich relative in life or after death.

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The covert borderline combines the positive adaptations of both NPD and BPD.

BPD and NPD are prone to switching owing to splitting and self-splitting defenses (previous self-state all bad while new self-state all good), lack of core identity (identity disturbance), and no constellated or integrated self/ego (emptiness or empty schizoid core). They are in constant flux.

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Narcissistic abuse is about negating the victim. It is traumatic.

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The inner landscape of the covert - always collapsed - narcissist is a hellscape.

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People incapable of happiness and intimacy reject life because life is a hurtful reminder of what could have been and will never transpire.

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The narcissist’s and borderline’s interpersonal relationships look the same. They are not.

Full talk with @maiaece on my YouTube channel.

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You could easily fake religious devotion. It is not a filter of any kind.

I guess the test is if the person is OSTENTATIOUS about his religious practice: if he brags about it, shows it off demonstrably, attracts attention to it, and demands praise for it.

Legal system as repetition compulsion

Reenactment of earlier life conflicts with the hope of a different resolution.

All injuries and traumas at any time in life challenge our sense of power, agency, fairness, and justice.
 
How AI Manipulates You Via Flattery

There is ample anecdotal evidence that AI tailors responses to queries in order to provide narcissistic supply and buttress cognitive distortions such as grandiosity.

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The narcissist cycles between rabid promiscuity in the somatic phase and ascetic, even sadistic celibacy in the cerebral stage.

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Two ways to obtain narcissistic supply give rise to two types of narcissism: somatic and cerebral. Talk with @maiaece

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The idea of “consciousness” is a meaningless tautology. No wonder no one has the slightest idea what consciousness is. Talk with @maiaece

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FREE 3-days seminar with Prof. Sam Vaknin May 22-25 in Skopje, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

The subject: “Evidence-based Scientific Healing and Recovery from Narcissistic Abuse: The Complete Plan (Clinical and Self-help Practices)”.

The seminar is meant both for clinicians (therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists) and for laymen. It is open to the public. You are all welcome.

The seminar will open with the launch of the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation (https://vrfoundation.net/)

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The sunk cost fallacy is one of the reasons that victims of narcissistic abuse find it difficult to walk away from the shared fantasy. Interview with @maiaece

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In life we can choose one of two paths: to be right and on the side of justice or to be wise and move on with our lives.

Wisdom requires compromise and compromise requires sacrifices which are often unfair and unjust – but always wise.

Grudges, rumination, and personal rivalries are self-defeating.

Letting go and moving on require a conscious acceptance that life is not fair and not just, that it reflects asymmetries of power and endowments, that the playing field is anything but level, and that cunning, scheming, callousness, and ruthlessness are often rewarded.

The wise man and woman pick their battles. They never feel disrespected or undignified when they are grounded in the realities of survival, when they have to give in and give up.

When your sense of self-worth is tied up in always being right, prevailing, winning, being treated justly and fairly – you are a narcissist with a sense of entitlement or maybe you are trying to reduce and assuage your existential angst and anxieties. Either way, it is unhealthy.

The world and people in it owe you nothing, not even justice and fairness.

Life is too short, our resources too scarce, most issues cannot be resolved, most wounds cannot be healed, most people are less than morally upstanding. Take it or leave it. Get over it. Invest in life, not in abstract notions and principles.

Be wise. Choose Life.

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Experts are perceived as superior, living reminders of others’s inferiority. There is implied patronizing, condescension, and contempt (hypervigilance).

Science and intellectuals challenge received wisdom, conspiracy theories, nonsensical hypotheses, and self-imputed expertise. They habitually inflict narcissistic injuries and mortifications on people. They destroy delusional belief systems such as religion, expose how dumb people are.

People rebel against the oppression of resource-intensive research and incontrovertible evidence.

Easier to be self-styled expert on astrology, conspiracy theories, or narcissistic abuse than an astrophysicist, a historian, or a psychiatrist. Shortcuts to celebrity and money.

The media are as ignorant as its consumers. No help there.

Combination grandiosity, envy, indolence, mass stupidity, and entitlement in an attention economy and post-truth society.

Opinions are facts. Access to raw information and misinformation is as good as actual knowledge and authoritative expertise.

Malignant egalitarianism as an outcome of Dunning-Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. It was first described by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.

Degeneration and devolution: a revolution of ignorance and incompetence, decay and decadence, anti-intellectualism and hatred of science and academe.

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Anger and rage in narcissism are endogenous (generated from the inside) and disproportional. They are intended not only to modify other people’s behaviors but to guilt trip and shame (Machiavellian).

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The only way to melt the narcissist’s heart is to extinguish yourself.

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Both overprotective and neglectful parents are with us for life.

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Narcissists do not gaslight intentionally: they cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy and they believe their own confabulations and promises. But the victims experience the shared fantasy and the abuse of language by the narcissist as gaslighting par excellence.

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When narcissistic supply runs low, the narcissist self-supplies. But self-supply has inherent limitations which invariably lead to narcissistic collapse. Interview with @maiaece

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The narcissist is a train wreck waiting to happen (swipe left)..

Crime scene photographs courtesy of @reframingtheself

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(Swipe left) The differences between the dissociation of the borderline and that of the narcissist. Clips courtesy of @_kalleidoscope

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Even robots experience narcissistic abuse! (Carcy, the French fashion magazine, issue 12).

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The narcissist confuses you into the shared fantasy, rendering you disoriented and unsure about who you are and what is real anymore.

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The malignant (psychopathic) narcissist is antisocial (primary psychopathy) and sadistic. It is by far the most dangerous mental illness of all, even more threatening than the primary psychopath.

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Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is NOT a Bipolar Disorder (which is a MOOD disorder). Anyone who says otherwise is an ignorant charlatan. Interview with @maiaece

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Medclave’s 7th Mental Health Congress, April 2025. My presentation: “Sociopath? No Such Thing!” Available on my YouTube channel.

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The full talk with @sundycarter_ is available on my YouTube channel. Here we discuss the entrapment nature of the narcissist’s shared fantasy.

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Competitive, ostentatious victimhood is profitable in more than one way.

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Self-styled “experts” often confuse the narcissistic style with the narcissistic (personality) disorder (NPD) - and both of these with psychopathy (the extreme form of Antisocial Personality Disorder or AsPD). Also watch my video on YouTube titled: “Sociopath? No Such Thing!”

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Social media are designed to bring out and leverage the worst in their users, all negative affects such as anger and malicious envy. It is a toxic environment.

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The narcissist’s ideal partner is an embalmed ancient Egyptian mummy: never talk backs, never deviates from the snapshot (her introjected representation in the narcissist’s mind, an internal object), inanimate, non-threatening, never abandoning.

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Power drunk yet anxious and insecure? It is known as “impostor syndrome”. It also characterizes some types of psychopaths.

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Everyone has healthy narcissism. Very few are possessed of the pathology: the cancerous mutation.

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Robert Greene (@robertgreeneofficial) mentions me and my work in an interview with Codie Sanchez (@codiesanchez).

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Religion is a sublimated (socially acceptable) form of delusional disorder whose contents include a supreme being or power which dictates a code of conduct and sanctions transgressors. Religion is the institutional manifestation of this mental illness, hijacked by psychopaths and narcissists for purposes of attaining power and riches.

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Happy birthday to me from my wife, partner, best friend, and greatest gift, Lidija @reframingtheself

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Counterfactual reasoning (what might have been) leads to unhappiness, is a form of fantasy.

The deceptive appearance of choice: you could not have acted differently.

The illusion of control: you cannot predict or guarantee outcomes.

The cognitive distortion of grandiose omniscience: you can’t tell if an event is bad or good for you.

The trap of reason: it is inferior to intuition when judging people.

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How victims of narcissists react when they realise that the narcissist is not relevant anymore. Clip courtesy of @mirnacchagas

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Why can’t the narcissist direct his cold empathy at himself (introspect)? Everything through a glass darkly, through a fog, mist.

Discrepancy between cold empathy and profound fantasy, dissociation, confabulation, and denial (lack of self-awareness).

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The narcissist uses entrainment to brainwash you into his/her cult. With Brad Carr.

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Pathological narcissism is a defense against the shame of being less than perfect and against the terror of experiencing this shame.

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Narcissists hate other people’s happiness because they haven’t caused it, they can’t control it, and reminds them how elusive it is, how they can never experience it.

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Few people know that my work in mathematical logic has been used 30 years ago to define computer architecture as it is today. As is my habit, I provided all my intellectual property gratis, free of charge. More here: https://samvak.tripod.com/define.html

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Eytan Suchard’s (@eytansuchard) elaboration of my 1984 Chronon Field Theory has transformed it into a full-fledged Theory of Everything (TOE). It is far superior to other alternatives, such as the pseudo-mystical string theories. It has the potential to revolutionize physics. More info and links to academic articles and papers here: https://samvak.tripod.com/time.html

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Trauma bonding is at once a form of self-harm but also a desperate search for hope and meaning.

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Attempting to communicate with narcissists is an inordinate waste of your time - and theirs.

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Pathological narcissism is a nauseating repetition compulsion known as the shared fantasy: spot-audition, lovebomb-idealize (psychopaths groom), devalue internal object, devalue external object, discard, replace, and, often, hoover.

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Clip from a Vice documentary titled “How Narcissists Took Over the World”.

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The narcissist lures you into the shared fantasy by triggering your maternal instincts. Interview with @rebeccazung

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The word “evil” has no place in clinical psychology. We are not dealing with a morality play. Demonizing narcissists and borderlines is a form of splitting defense which in itself is a clinical feature of … pathological narcissism and a borderline personality organization. In other words: when you are castigating narcissists and borderlines, you are probably projecting. Interview with Christopher Bronson, MD

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HIDDEN PHASES of CYCLE OF SHARED FANTASY

Spotting
Auditioning
Lovebombing
Idealization as unconditionally loving maternal figure (psychopaths groom)
Testing with narcissistic abuse
Devaluing internal object
Devaluing external object
Discard
Replace
Hoovering (owing to dissonance-anxiety)

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There are many reasons why narcissists and borderlines are attracted to each other. Here are a few of them. Search the BPD playlist on my YouTube channel for more.

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It is very likely that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) has a hereditary or genetic component and that it involves brain abnormalities. But there are no serious, rigorous studies which support any of this. Only charlatans claim otherwise. Moreover: we examine only adult brains, so we have no way of telling which caused what. Did the abnormal brain cause narcissism or did a lifelong of narcissism deform the brain? Interview with @rebeccazung

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Reckless stupidity is often misjudged as courage. But courage is about overcoming fear, not about overlooking consequences.

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FACTS. Don’t listen to self-styled “experts” online and their self-conjured nonsense. An academic degree does not equal expertise on any one, specific topic. These are charlatans and con artists. Only 1.7% of the general population are diagnosed or diagnosable with NPD (prevalence), half of them are women. Source: DSM 5-TR (2022).

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In spotting phase, narcissist stares, glares, scans, and analyzes. Shy away. Avoid eye contact. Walk away. Surround yourself with others.

After initial contact, in the auditioning phase, the narcissist subjects you to 3 tests:

1. Are you capable of being idealized? Minimal traits, assets, and behaviors.

2. Are you able to provide 2 of the 4 Ss? Sex: find him irresistible, enthusiastic, consensual-submissive, prone to sexual fantasies, unboundaried-kinky, self-trashing, promiscuous. Services (that he needs and lacks). Supply (narcissistic or sadistic): adoring, uncritical, submissive, masochistic, self-loathing. Safety: addictive personality, maternal bonding, loyal, inertial.

3. Are you vulnerable to shared fantasy? Damaged-broken, daydreamer, abhors reality, romantic (even as a friend), grandiose, self-love deficit.

Interview with @novas_narcissistabuse_recovery

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Envy, fear, and hate are the most common human affects. Which is why social media have designed their platforms around envy, fear, and hatred.

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There is the kind of pathological narcissism that is diagnosed and frowned upon and socially-condoned narcissism which is a sure way to get the top of your profession, to attain, to accomplish. Like crime, narcissism pays. It is fast becoming a positive adaptation. Documentary from Vice, 2016.

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Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant far worse than Trump could ever be. He suspended habeas corpus, detained journalists, and may have planned to arrest the Chief Justice of the day (among numerous other crimes). He was also an inveterate racist.

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Do narcissists have a “type”? Do they show preference for specific kinds of victims? With @novas_narcissistabuse_recovery

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(Swipe left) Loving books has always been infinitely easier for me than liking people. Books are, by and large, intelligent and can teach me something. They are always there when I need them, literally holding my hand. I love their scent and texture. If it sounds erotic, it is. I would give up on any other experience - any! - for the sake of a book. My wife and partner @reframingtheself knows how to make me happy: yesterday, at the Skopje book fair, she bought me the complete Harry Potter as a birthday present.

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(Swipe left) Series 3 of the @_maiamarcia reviews of my work on pathological narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

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Leadership often requires giving up on personal autonomy. It is having LESS power over one’s life even as one gains MORE power over other people.

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The amazing experience of children in Kibbutzim in Israel: they were raised centrally by nannies and rarely saw their parents. Yet, they grew up to be the most mentally healthy and accomplished cohort (population)! Interview with @psic.renzosantamaria

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“Dr. Phil” argues with a “psychic medium” about Sam Vaknin.

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When you break up with the narcissist and your relationship, such as it was, is over, the narcissist mourns the loss of the shared fantasy. He does not grieve your absence. His bereavement propels him to hastily form the next shared fantasy.

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Role of PNS (pathological narcissistic space) in spotting

In spotting phase, narcissist stares, glares, scans, and analyzes. Shy away. Avoid eye contact. Walk away. Surround yourself with others.

After initial contact, in the auditioning phase, the narcissist subjects you to 3 tests:

1. Are you capable of being idealized? Minimal traits, assets, and behaviors.

2. Are you able to provide 2 of the 4 Ss? Sex: find him irresistible, enthusiastic, consensual-submissive, prone to sexual fantasies, unboundaried-kinky, self-trashing, promiscuous. Services (that he needs and lacks). Supply (narcissistic or sadistic): adoring, uncritical, submissive, masochistic, self-loathing. Safety: addictive personality, maternal bonding, loyal, inertial.

3. Are you vulnerable to shared fantasy? Damaged-broken, daydreamer, abhors reality, romantic (even as a friend), grandiose, self-love deficit.

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Are narcissists less likely to attend therapy? Overt narcissists are (unless forced to). But covert narcissists are MORE likely than the average person to seek treatment. (Pincus et al., 2009)

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As distinct from a psychopath, a narcissist who would see a woman crying might suspect that she is faking it and hold her in contempt for being weak. But it will not prevent him from attempting to convert her into a source of narcissistic supply and a participant in his shared fantasy, a provider of 2 of the 4 Ss: sex, supply (narcissistic or sadistic), services, or safety. Fragment from an interview with @novas_narcissistabuse_recovery

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Two immutable lessons in life:

1. Everything - good or bad - comes to an end;

2. Every thing and every one requires ceaseless, untiring maintenance.

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In the wake of narcissistic abuse, focus on rebuilding, not on healing or even on recovery. With @zukowska.daria

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Narcissism is on the rise - both the disorder (NPD) and the style. In 1997, I coined the phrase “narcissism epidemic”. I should have called it “pandemic”. Interview with @rebeccazung

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Narcissists view and reframe their abuse not as abuse, but as:

Benevolent altruism (tough love): prosocial reframing

Necessary corrective measures (to avoid adverse outcomes or for the greater good)

As a reactive survival strategy, a defense against abuse and exploitation (victim stance)

As justified punishment or retribution

As common behavior and a sign of honesty and forthrightness (no hypocrisy)

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NPD (narcissistic Personality Disorder) is mostly comorbid with AsPD (Antisocial) and HPD (Histrionic), not with BPD (Borderline). Fewer than 25% of people with AsPD also have NPD.

Source: studies cited in Handbook on Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

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Narcissists and borderlines cater to each other’s pathologies. As my late lamented friend Joan Lachkar put it: their archaic wounds or v-spots - vulnerabilities - resonate.

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Narcissists verbally abuse their victims as a form of entrainment (extreme brainwashing).

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Self-sufficiency is a delusion. We are all dependent on other lifeforms. What are you without your gut microbiome? The narcissists pretends to be self-sufficient even as he leverages dependency - both his and yours.

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All narcissists have overt and covert (vulnerable) dimensions of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). In the wake of collapse or mortification, the narcissist switches type (no type-constancy). Similarly, all narcissists oscillate between somatic and cerebral presentations. It is wrong to use the word “grandiose” to describe the overt narcissist: covert narcissists are even more grandiose than overt ones. Interview with @maiaece

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(Swipe left) Introductory lecture in the seminar in Skopje: the psychopathology of the narcissist. Tomorrow: the shared fantasy, grief. To organize a free seminar in your city, get in touch with me.

 

(Swipe left) The 4-days in Skopje seminar is over. Presented by the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation and sponsored by SEEU and CIAPS (Cambridge, UK), it was an overwhelming experience in the good sense. People from all over the world brought together by a common pain, the wish to learn and - in the case of clinicians - help alleviate the suffering inflicted by narcissistic abuse. To organize a free seminar in your city, get in touch with me.

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Somatic and cerebral narcissists complement each other and can form stable dyads. Interview with @psic.renzosantamaria

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When you are the one who discards the narcissist, s/he reframes this humiliating experience in two ways: an internal solution and an external one.

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Why idealization is a form of abuse.

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Narcissistic abuse negates and vitiates you. @zukowska.daria - a clinical psychologist, friend, and long-term collaborator - has this advice for you.

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Video presentation in 7th World Mental Health Congress Webinar, April 2025

Sociopath, sociopathic personality, sociopathy

n. a former name for an individual with an antisocial personality disorder.

(APA Dictionary)

dyssocial (sociopathic) behavior

Psychopathy

Theodore Millon’s subtypes of ASPD.

DSM 5-TR Alternative Model of Antisocial Personality Disorder

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I will travel anywhere in Europe or the Middle East at my sole expense to provide FREE lectures and seminars. The organizers have to provide a space for the lectures or seminar and pay a professional cameraman to video-record the entire event.

Seminars and lectures in other parts of the world are equally free (no speaker’s fees), but the organizers also have to cover my travel and accommodation expenses.

Contact me if you are interested to organize a seminar or 2 lectures in your city (DM or )

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Borderline abuse is not the same as narcissistic abuse.

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Both a developing embryo and a narcissist are parasites. But one becomes more human by the day while the other less human by the hour.

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Some scientists and scholars invent and pioneer whole new languages (e.g, Newton), others merely use existing language to make sense of raw experimental data and arrange it in new models and theories (e.g., Maxwell, Einstein).

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Sanity is about choosing reality, it is about embracing losses as an engine of personal growth, it is about grief. Interview with @micheleparadiseofficial

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Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) should never be a criminal insanity defense because: 1. Narcissists can tell right from wrong; 2. Can modify their behaviors to suit the circumstances (control their impulses); and 3. Are fully aware of their actions and the consequences of their actions (though not of their motivations). They simply don’t care enough to change.

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Non-consensual acts do not create obligations or rights. Children owe their parents nothing. Being brought into the world does not involve prior consent by the newborn.

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Multiple studies show that people detect narcissists with a high degree of accuracy within 3-30 seconds of any kind of exposure (even by watching a video or looking at a photo!) But when emotions and expectations are involved, this detection rate collapses owing to cognitive dissonance. Full video on my YouTube channel.

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The narcissist feels threatened by you and envies you. S/he appropriates your life as his/hers, rendering you an inert internal object.

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When the narcissist’s partner is distracted, sick, weak, or otherwise indisposed, he is angry at her the way a child rages at a dysfunctional mother.

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A great summary of my work on contemporary civilization courtesy of the Darpana podcast on YouTube.

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Dissociation is common in both Borderline and Narcissistic personality disorders, albeit for different reasons. You have a role to play in this.

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No loneliness is more profound than the solitude wrought by betrayal.

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(Swipe left) Series 4 of the @_maiamarcia reviews of my work on pathological narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

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The narcissist breaks your heart by remaining a mere potential, an ever-receding mirage of an unfulfilled promise of blissful love.

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Full video on my YouTube channel.

Street life
Assuming new identity
Insinuation
Gossip
Busybody
Miss Marple
Looking for a family
Takeover
Merger/Fusion
Adopted family

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Introduction to guest class at the School of Advanced Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. What is the causal relationship between immigration and crime?

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There is a dangerous and disturbing trend in academe to glorify and glamorize narcissism and psychopathy as high-functioning, socially beneficial positive adaptations. Interview with @natvnetwork. Excerpt from a recent interview with @natvnetwork

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I couldn’t have hoped for a better audience: 100 people from a dozen countries, all hellbent on learning, probing, challenging, and critical thinking. Healing is about assuming responsibility for your life and going where the evidence leads you.

Free seminar in Skopje, May 22-25, 2025. Organized by the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation, CIAPS (Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies) in Cambridge UK (where I am a professor of psychology and a professor of business management). Premises courtesy South East European University (where I am a visiting professor). Cameras: Marjan Ognenovski and Elvis. Sound: Mr. Kamchev. Logistics: @reframingtheself Lidija Rangelovska.

The subject: “Evidence-based Scientific Healing and Recovery from Narcissistic Abuse: The Complete Plan (Clinical and Self-help Practices)”.

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A privilege to be in the narcissist’s presence and share time and space with him

Entitled to concessionary special treatment, you must adapt to him, he must never adapt to you (control, omnipotence, hierarchy, sadistic bullying)

Defiant take it or leave it omnipotence

Narcissist’s Apology Structure (pseudo-apology, excuses, blame-shifting and guilt-tripping)

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Adversity can lead to growth. A good life can lead to complacency. You are not omniscient. You cannot predict the future.

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“Love” addiction and sex are not love. Lust, infatuation, and limerence are not love.

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Internalized bad object (formerly known as primitive superego).

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(Swipe left) 2nd International Congress on Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, London, June 2025. My keynote presentation: “The Ingredients of Paranoid Ideation”.

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Narcissistic and borderline mothers have a profound, lifelong impact on their children. Courtesy Serena Sayed (@sayed_serena_temp).

WATCH How “Dead” Mother Creates “Dead” Child (Zagreb Clinicians Seminar, Part 3 of 5)

WATCH “Dead” Mothers and Their Offspring: Narcissistic, Borderline, Psychotic

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The malignant narcissist is a combustible mix of clinical narcissism, clinical psychopathy, and sadism. The malignant narcissist is a narcissist, not a psychopath.

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In a world awash with loneliness, intimacy is a valued currency. If you can give intimacy or even fake it convincingly, you can secure all your heart’s desires.

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Sam Vaknin seated as Sigmund Freud’s regular table in Cafe Landtmann in Vienna, desperate for inspiration! If only Sigi had a YouTube channel!

My inimitable and otherworldly generous tour guides: Nicoleta Kay https://www.facebook.com/nicoletakay23/ @viennalocalguide and the historian Dr. Alexander Stollhof.

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Abusive behavior caters to important psychological needs of the abuser. Interview with Stephanie Carinia, Trauma Expert.

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Decompensation in pathological narcissism devolves into a borderline-like state: affective dysregulation, acting out, even suicidal ideation. Kernberg suggested that narcissism is a defense against a borderline personality organization.

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(Swipe left) Participating in the 10th documentary film about my work with Peter Kolakowski of German television (@rundfunkreporter). Camera: Marjan Ognenovski. Photos courtesy of @reframingtheself

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Unlike narcissists, psychopaths are self-sufficient. They do not need other people or care about them.

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Swipe left) Second day of a German TV documentary about my work (the 10th such film!) with @rundfunkreporter @zoran.vitanov @reframingtheself @vakninrangelovskafoundation. Trailer for the forthcoming German TV documentary film about my work (by Peter Kolakowski @rundfunkreporter). With contributions by the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation (https://vrfoundation.net) @vakninrangelovskafoundation

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The victims of the narcissist experience the shared fantasy as a form of gaslighting and as future faking.

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Tonight, Sam Vaknin and Sarah Westall on Dr. Drew LIVE:

https://drdrew.com/2025/necessary-narcissism-decoding-our-world-leaders-w-professor-sam-vaknin-sarah-westall-ask-dr-drew/ @drdrewpinsky

 

Narcissism is a universal trait. Traits are hereditary. Healthy narcissism is the cornerstone of self-esteem and an internally well-regulated sense of self-worth. Narcissistic style is subclinical. Pathological narcissism (Narcissistic Personality Disorder or NPD) involves severe mental health issues. With @drdrewpinsky

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The “no contact” set of strategies (a phrase I coined) that I pioneered in the 1990s were initially highly controversial. The consensus at the time was that couples need to try and try again to reconcile and make it work.

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No excuse for abuse: not even abuse.

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Existence (or existential) signaling is the escalating attempts to stand out, attract attention, and be seen. Social media are examples of existence signaling platforms. Virtue signaling caters to multiple needs.

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You get no credit for investing in a narcissist, for committing yourself, for your sacrifices. Every day, you start from scratch, with zero balance in the ledger of your pseudo-relationship.

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A review of my book “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”, now in its tenth edition. It was first published online in 1997 (in print in 1999 “) and pioneered the field of narcissistic abuse.

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Job description: mother to a childlike narcissist, an enfant terrible. With @novas_narcissistabuse_recovery

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Even when the abuse is evident, people stay in the traumatizing relationship. Why? Interview with Peter Kolakowski @rundfunkreporter

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I will travel anywhere in Europe or the Middle East at my sole expense to provide FREE lectures and seminars. The organizers have to provide a space for the lectures or a seminar and pay a professional cameraman to video-record the entire event.

Seminars and lectures in other parts of the world are equally free (no speaker’s fees), but the organizers also have to cover my travel and accommodation expenses.

Contact me if you are interested to organize a seminar or 2 lectures in your city (DM or )

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Watch to the end of the video! Here are the hard, harsh truths about the USA. My retort to vitriolic attacks by viewers of my talk with Ginger Coy:  USA’s Last July 4.

I was the first to suggest that Trump may be a narcissist and have been warning repeatedly against his ascendancy.

The founding fathers were oligarch slaveholders, dead set against democracy. Their checks and balances were geared towards preserving the competing elites and regulating the power of the few.

The USA has always been a fascistic country with Lincoln as a prototypical tyrant: permanent revolution, utopian nihilism, reactionary values, elite-led populism, and collective individualism.

Things started to change after World War I and the renewed exposure to Europe, culminating in the 1940s-1950s.

FDR in the 1930s and intellectuals in the 1960s have imported into America and superimposed on its denizens a European ethos, alien to them – from Keynes to post-Marxists.

We are witnessing the backlash and the re-assertion of the real USA: religious, anti-liberal, aggressive, dysempathic, populist, and Darwinian.

Ginger Coy’s Concerning Narcissism on Substack

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Nothing bonds and binds people more than having been contemptuously rejected by the same person, class, or group.

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Narcissist holds you in contempt even as he regards you as a threat!!!

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Only malignant narcissists are sadists. Talk with @psic.renzosantamaria

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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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Psychology has all the hallmarks of a pseudoscience. Neuroscience is at its unpromising infancy. Yet, the practitioners of both these disciplines strut onstage like the groundbreaking geniuses that they are not. With The Digital Mind Meld Project.

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Why do we feel that the narcissist is a rock, exuding self-confidence and possessed of a transformative vision (=the shared fantasy)? In reality, narcissists are fragile, brittle, and vulnerable. Yes, ALL narcissists.

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We are in the throes of a culture war (Kulturkampf) about values and beliefs. With Ginger Coy.

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Suffering is the inevitable path to healing and there is no greater agony than having to let go of a life imagined. Choosing the unknown is terrifying.

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Repetition compulsion in pathological narcissism is made possible only by destroying self and others repeatedly and then starting from scratch and doing it all over again in an identical manner. With @softandsavagepodcast

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Do not aim for the stars. Let them aim for you.

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Narcissists have an impaired reality testing: they cannot tell the differences between internal and external, fact from fantasy.

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The borderline is grandiose, exactly like the narcissist and psychopath. Interview with @maiaece

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Narcissistic abuse is total. It is aimed at de-animating the targets, rendering them conformant to the internal objects that represent them in the narcissist’s mind and to the all-subsuming shared fantasy. @shadowdeangelis

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Narcissists are consummate storytellers. But they believe their own fantasies, narratives, and confabulations. Their self-conviction pulls you in and persuades you of the veracity of their theatre.

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Out today: Kathleen Saxton’s latest article for Stylist Magazine...on the misconception that narcissists are mostly male. Think again my friends!

IMHO (and clinical experience) the deadlier of the species is the "covert narc" - the polite, introverted, smooth and performative ones, who deliver so beautifully in public to those they seek to impress, yet systematically distort, punish and abuse out of sight at home. A good number of those...are female.

Societal norms and contexts play their role (as I cover in my forthcoming book My Parent the Peacock) but we are getting smarter and new research is underway. The more we educate ourselves on the covert narcissists hidden the plain sight the better.

Take a read on: https://lnkd.in/edRmZ_xM

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Insight is the key engine of learning and behavior modification. But, in the absence of an emotional correlate (reaction), intellectual insight alone does not translate into a dynamic of change.

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The interpersonal dynamic between the borderline and the narcissist is complicated. Courtesy of @sayed_serena_temp

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(Swipe left) “Empaths” are grandiose and entitled individuals who engage in competitive victimhood and constant self—enhancement (self-inflation or self-aggrandisement). Sounds familiar? Yes, narcissists do that.

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Alloplastic defenses are at the core of the narcissist’s interpersonal relationships. They involve abrupt transitions of attribution (from dispositional to situational) coupled with the activation of primitive psychological defense mechanisms, such as splitting and projection. All these are intended to protect and preserve the narcissist’s fragile yet fantastically inflated self-concept.

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In the vast majority of cases, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) remits spontaneously between the ages of 35-45 (source: ICD-11 and numerous studies). So, if your mother is getting worse with age, she is probably a narcissist or a psychopath. From an interview with @maureen_callahan_writer

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Free speech is the right to not be penalized for the public expression of bias, superstition, paranoia, and differences in opinion, orientation, priorities and vision.

Dissociation in borderline personalities is very different to dissociation in pathological narcissism.

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Narcissists have no access to positive emotions (such as love), only to negative ones, such as envy, anger (rage), hatred, or fear (negative affectivity). Both their attitudes and motivations are shaped and determined by negative affects.

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A bad cluster B joke.

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Religion is a mass psychogenic illness and an extreme form of delusional disorder. But does it confer mental health benefits?

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Evil happens when self-hating, self-destructive people do unto others as they would have done unto themselves.

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Talked today to @_maiamarcia, author of the forthcoming book, “Snapshotting Sam Vaknin”: a commentary on my work in the field of cluster B personality disorders. Marcia Maia is a Brazilian clinical psychologist, biologist, and immunologist. Excerpt from a 3 hours talk with Marcia de Lorena Serra Maia, @_maiamarcia clinical psychologist and author of forthcoming book, “Snapshotting Sam Vaknin”. @_maiamarcia, author of the forthcoming book, “Snapshotting Sam Vaknin”: a commentary on my work in the field of cluster B personality disorders. Marcia Maia is a Brazilian clinical psychologist, biologist, and immunologist. Full video on my YT channel. There are three tests to determine whether a mental health intervention is required. With @_maiamarcia author of “Snapshotting Sam Vaknin”.

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In a desperate attempt to make sense of what has happened to them, victims self-aggrandize: they claim to have been “chosen” because they are “special”. Nonsense.

EXCERPT “Science-based Healing and Recovery from Narcissistic Abuse” seminar in Skopje, May 2025 (opening evening, most people haven’t joined yet).

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Triangulation is a relationship management technique.

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WATCH Narcissist: Irresistible, Pathological Charmer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8Mi3fJdTMw

WATCH People-pleasers and Pathological Charmers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlJjxQCzL9A

Superficial charm and glibness in both the psychopath and the prosocial narcissist.

But, as opposed to the psychopath, the narcissist triggers uncanny valley reaction and is an ostentatious do-gooder: performatively moral, helpful, and altruistic.

Pathological charmers react with rage and aggression when their intended targets prove to be impervious and resistant to their lure. This kind of narcissistic injury — being spurned and rebuffed — makes them feel threatened, rejected, and denuded. 

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Lidija Rangelovska suggests that when you repress and ignore your gifts and endowments in order to punish or to please the abuser, it is self-destructive. You are denying yourself: your looks, joy (joie de vivre), talents, creativity, empathy, compassion, sociability, sexuality.

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With @reframingtheself and @maiaece at the legendary carnivore haunt, Toto. The spirits are swilling but the flesh is tasty. And fascinating debate about the merits and demerits of democracy and how it inexorably leads to authoritarian demagogues. Also: conference about Consciousness in Skopje.

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Universal suffrage is the larva; charismatic authoritarians are the inexorable chrysalis; conflict, devastation, and war are the ineluctable monstrous moth.

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Never let the unattainable and unavailable obstruct the possible and the doable.

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(Swipe left) Iconoclastic lecture at the newly opened Political Academy in Struga. Topics: The young in politics and social media in politics 101.

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How can you tell if you are a borderline (someone with a Borderline Personality Disorder, BPD diagnosis). Interview at @thenerveshow

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Hoovering is a complex behavior. It is an attempt to resolve the dissonant residues of the shared fantasy. Courtesy of @sayed_serena_temp

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ABRAVIN – Brazilian Association for Supporting Victims of Narcissism (@abravin_ ) is an organization dedicated to welcoming, guiding and strengthening people who have experienced relationships marked by manipulation, emotional control and psychological abuse.

Our purpose is to give a voice to those who have been silenced for too long. We do this through emotional support, qualified information, protective actions and safe listening spaces, always respecting each person’s time and story.

We know that having a relationship with a person with narcissistic personality disorder or even leaving a narcissistic relationship, whether romantic, family or professional, requires much more than courage, it requires a lot of clarity.
That’s why we created this book.

This book is a dictionary-style guide, written in simple language, designed to help you identify, understand and put words to common expressions of abusive communication, which are often normalized, subtle or disguised as affection.

The dictionary is available in English and in Portuguese.

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Multiple studies show that even minor exposure to the presence of narcissist - 3 to 30 seconds - causes discomfort (“uncanny valley reaction”). This is true even you watch a video involving a narcissist, a photo or with minimal access to an email message authored by a narcissist.

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(Swipe left) “Malignant Self-love” (my groundbreaking book) is featured in the bestselling “How to Murder Your Life” by Cat Marnell.

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Gaslighting requires premeditation, a power asymmetry between perpetrator and victim, and the ability to tell apart reality from fantasy (which the narcissist lacks). Psychopaths gaslight. Interview with @psic.renzosantamaria

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Survival requires an intact reality testing. Preferring fantasy to reality undermines efficacy and might result in extinction. With Ginger Coy (see her Concerning Narcissism on Substack).

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The narcissist’s leverages your loneliness as a predatory attack vector. Interview at @natvnetwork

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Watch the interview with @maiaece on both our channels (Turkish subtitles on hers). On my channel, there is a whole playlist dedicated to our talks.

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Why are narcissists so infuriatingly and stupidly obstinate? FULL VIDEO on my YouTube channel.

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Make Nostalgia Great Again: It is Not What It Used to Be.

Nostalgia binds victims to abusers. Wistful longing, sentimental yearning for the past. A form of attenuated mourning or grief. Nostalgic people are emotionally intense and other directed.

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The narcissist is an absence masquerading as a presence, a void, a black hole. Interview with Dr. Yana Greenberg.

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When secondary mental health issues are resolved, the primary ones are revealed and take over. With @thenerveshow

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Identifying your type of shadow is crucial to maintaining mental health. Watch the video titled Identify Your Shadow: 14 Shadow Types on my YouTube channel. Courtesy of @practice_nothingness

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Sharing (“altruism”) is the natural state, selfishness is abnormal.

Selfishness involves the inability to perceive the externality and separateness of object (the absence of representation of sharing partners, internal objects, or selfobjects or when the selfobject is the alienated, depersonalized immature or unintegrated self).

Healthy, normal people have moments of solipsism but it is the permanent state of the narcissist and the psychopath.

I suggested that the only way to conclude that pathological narcissism has been mitigated or ameliorated is by observing the narcissist in social settings. If the individual no longer meets the criteria for a diagnosis of NPD (which is diagnostically defined in relation to other people), it is safe to assume that the underlying pathology is gone.

BUT

ONLY if we observe the narcissist over an extended period of time (many years). It has to be longitudinal. Otherwise, such a conclusion would be speculative at best and wishful thinking or self-serving at worst.

We also have to always take into account lifespan impacts: certain antisocial/dissocial and abrasive behaviors naturally abate and remit with age.

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Vaknin Transcripts: Full transcripts of Sam Vaknin’s videos https://vaknintranscripts.com/

Vaknin Summaries: Full summaries of Sam Vaknin’s videos https://vakninsummaries.com/

SHORTS and CLIPS Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel (copy paste the entire address): https://www.youtube.com/@VakninNarcissismSummaries

 

This channel is not affiliated with Sam Vaknin personally. It features summaries, shorts, and excerpts from Sam Vaknin’s videos focusing on cluster B personality disorders, narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and other personality disorders. We will explore narcissistic abuse, toxic relationships, and the psychological impact on partners, family, children, partners, co-workers and everyday people surrounding us.

 

Our content goes beyond psychology, delving into human behavior, philosophy, ethics, and the influence of the internet, social media and technology — including artificial intelligence (AI) — on modern society, offering a deeper understanding of how these forces shape our world.

 

Whether you’re seeking help with narcissists, psychopaths, or patterns of manipulation, or you’re curious about broader cultural trends, this channel provides clear explanations, thought-provoking ideas, and accessible knowledge.

 

SHORTS and CLIPS Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel (copy paste the entire address): https://www.youtube.com/@VakninNarcissismSummaries

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Excerpt from the seminar in Skopje in May this year: 10 ways the narcissist messes up your mind and alters your perception of reality. This is part 1 of the opening lecture. Most participants joined the seminar only the next day.

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Courtesy of the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

Sleep disorders and somatic symptoms

Somatization, somatization disorder

Somatic symptom disorder (formerly: somatoform disorder)

Conversion disorder

Motor conversion symptoms

Sensory conversion symptoms

Functional neurological symptom disorder (FNsD)

Dissociative neurological symptom disorder (DNSD)

Bodily distress disorder

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Pathological narcissism is a fluid condition, with overt and covert phases in every narcissist’s life. There are various subspecies of pathological narcissism. Every narcissists cycles through all of them. Full interview for @thenerveshow available on my YouTube channel.

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All you need to know about pathological narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) in under 6 minutes. Courtesy of the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Fluidity: gender, sex, scripts, roles, age + Puerility = Ahistoricity

Narcissism is ahistorical: dissociation (no memory), self-creation, reinvention, defiance, uniqueness

Borderline has identity disturbance

identity diffusion

identity versus identity confusion

identity status model

identity crisis

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Two methods to quell the narcissist’s disproportionate, explosive rage:

SUBMISSION

You can calm them down by displays of submission and flattery in a highly specific sequence: enlightenment/awakening, concession, amends.

Narcissists hold submissive, dumb, and weak people in contempt which only compounds their rage. So, make it about him, not about you.

Don’t be too obvious: the narcissist will experience this as manipulation and it will trigger aggression.

MIRRORING

Rage back, threaten abandonment (but not exposure or other real life penalties)

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When you are helpless in reality, often the only solution is to delude yourself that you are superior in a fantasy.

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The narcissist baits you with a display of childlike vulnerability and innocence. But this is a child of the corn: it is hellbent on your destruction. Abandoning this apparition is a survival strategy. Clip courtesy the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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This clip courtesy Vaknin Narcissism Summaries. Survivor guilt for having abandoned the narcissist (=your child), survived

Not only guilt but a sense failure and betrayal

Children are cruel, egotistical, dysempathic. Weaponised in an adult body, they can become ominously life-threatening.

We hurt people mostly when we interpret the situation or the relationship as a battle for survival. Life is sometimes reduced to a zero sum game. With the narcissist, it has never been a win-win, a give-and-take.

But narcissist is a nonentity, incapable of being hurt - only enraged by the violation of the fantasy, by its betrayal.

You have abandoned not a human being, a lover, a child, a mother figure, or a partner. You walked away from a narrative, a movie, a cult with you as human sacrifice.
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A book by @unboxingnarcissisticabuse published with the help of the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation. If you are a survivor, this book is for you. If you are a clinician, it will change the way you see collapse and recovery. If you are lost in the mirrored gaze of narcissistic abuse, know this: There is a way out – and a way back.

​​​​​​​For 40 years, the literature has been asking “Who is the narcissist?”. MPIT asks, at last: “What happens to the one who survives them?” Narcissism theory is incomplete without its shadow: the collapse of the victim. MPIT completes the picture. From collapse to integration: the first psychodynamic map of the survivor’s journey. What survivors have long known in their bodies and bones is now being mapped with clinical precision.

This book is not about co-dependency, self-help platitudes, or pop-psychology soundbites. It is a comprehensive framework that shows why collapse happens, how the psyche inverts, and how recovery is not only possible – but inevitable when the path is lit.

Mortification is the only way to get rid of the narcissist for good and avoid hovering and stalking.

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Forthcoming documentary about my work by Peter Kolakowski @rundfunkreporter

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Words of wisdom about the impossibility of closure with narcissists (by @shadowdeangelis )

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A monopoly in economics is a bad, wasteful thing. A monopoly in politics (dictatorship) is considered vile. Why is a monopoly in religion (monotheism) any different?

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Do not deny or resist a major transformation. Do not panic or rebel. There lie defeat or extinction. Adapt. It is the only way to survive.

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I am in Vienna, in my regular suite at the historical (1764) Koenig von Ungarn hotel @hotel_kvu , adjacent to Mozart’s House (Mozarthaus) and meters away from the cathedral.

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Self-portrait and my message to humanity (😂) Photos courtesy of @reframingtheself

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Empathy is about the empathizer, not the empathee.

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The narcissist merges with you and then rejects you because who wants to be with the narcissist that you have become?

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Will Peischel, “fact checker”
Owen Long, “journalist”
New York Magazine

I regret that - following an ostentatious display of “fact checking” - you still ended up publishing egregious errors and falsehoods about my work.

This kind of shoddy, biased, unconscientious “reporting” explains why an overwhelming majority of Americans profoundly distrust the mainstream media.

In future interviews and videos I will be sure to give your article as an example of what has gone wrong with journalism in your country.

Sam Vaknin

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To become intimate with your fans and followers (yikes!), you must render yourself vulnerable.

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Reflexive empathy already allows us to mentalize and create theories of mind. Later on, we generate Internal Working Models (IWMs) and form an attachment style. Clip from the Skopje Seminar, May 2025.

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Yes, it is easy to manipulate narcissists (they are gullible) and even psychopaths (who lust after power). Courtesy of @jackgets1

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In an age of excruciating loneliness, even self-“diagnosing” mental illness affords one an opportunity to socialize and to belong to a community. Anything goes.

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Gaslighting is widely misunderstood. @unboxingnarcissisticabuse disambiguates this insidious, pernicious, and nefarious manipulation and control behavioral strategy.

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Parentification and adultification do not stop in childhood. The parentified child internalizes the parents as childlike objects and the parentified, adultified child creates a parentlike self-concept to perpetuate the Parentification. Clip courtesy of the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion and a clinical feature of multiple mental health issues. We find grandiosity in Borderline, paranoid, and Antisocial personality disorders, bipolar disorders (manic phase), psychotic disorders, autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, and many others. Many shorts in the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Don’t ever take narcissistic abuse personally. After all, you don’t exist, except in the narcissist’s mind. J. S. Wolfe interviews @vakninsamnarcissist and @reframingtheself

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Abuse has physiological, neurobiological, and psychological impacts (the way we experience it all). Clip courtesy the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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There are psychological and psychodynamic differences between narcissists and psychopaths. Inevitably, the various ways they manipulate their victims differ considerably.

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Why narcissists love borderlines and why borderlines hate them back. Full video on my YouTube channel. Clip courtesy of Vaknin Narcissism Videos YouTube channel.

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I am in Paris from now throughout October.

 

The narcissist sometimes discards toxic people, is victimized by predators, experiences pain, fear, and shame, and is gaslit by his own fantasy.

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Coaches online have one consistent message: disown yourself as you are now, become different. It is an unhealthy creed of self-rejection. Clip courtesy of @practice_nothingness

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Only 2% of the population have NPD. But even if each narcissist impacts only another 10 people - we are talking about 20% of the global population. Remember: many of them affect thousands or even millions!

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Narcissism is simply a desperate attempt to avoid the experience of a debilitating, life-threatening shame. Clip courtesy of Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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The increasing complexity of AI is already out of our control. With @maiaece

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Only a fraction of victims bolt and flee. The vast majority stay immured in the shared fantasy as it gratifies their deep psychological needs, including the love of aggrandized, idealized versions of themselves.

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MPIT is a revolutionary recasting of narcissistic abuse from the victim’s point of view. The author @unboxingnarcissisticabuse incorporated my work in his broader and unprecedentedly insightful canvas and book. Clip courtesy of the ingenious @jackgets1. The book was published with the support of the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation.

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Both you and I have been preparing for this moment since we were born: your life is just beginning, mine is at its end. We are equally good to go.

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You will know the path when it chooses you.

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https://www.narcgpt.ai NEW! An AI chatbot for victims of narcissistic abuse, based entirely on my work. I have no involvement or commercial interest in this venture but I welcome the use of scholarly literature as the foundation for helping people in need.

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While I believe that being alone is the default state, we become - acquire an identity - through other people’s gaze. Clip courtesy of Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Watch the covert borderline playlist on my channel and compare it to the BPD playlist. Clip courtesy the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Don’t listen to money grabbing self-styled “experts”. The fact is: you are very unlikely to have had a relationship with a narcissist or a psychopath. And, no: they are not underdiagnosed (the prevalence of these disorders is well-established, actually, with overt narcissists MORE likely to attend therapy than the general population. Interview in the URL podcast.

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Communal, prosocial narcissism is premised on ostentatious self-sacrificial victimhood. Interview with @thenerveshow

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Full video on the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel. Eight strategies to confront narcissistic abuse. Lecture to clinicians in Budapest. The complete event is available on my YouTube channel.

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Unigender: two types of men with two differing sets of genitalia. Boring. Detrimental to the survival of the species.

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The full video will be posted today on my YouTube channel. Spousal correlation - now substantiated beyond any shred of a doubt - is the fact that members of a long-term couple or a dyad develop the same psychiatric disorders including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia (!) and bipolar disorder.

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Litigiousness may be a form of narcissistic repetition compulsion.

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The role of transformative insight in therapy.

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Are YOU the narcissist’s “mother” or his “anti-mother”?

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The inverted narcissist is a type of covert narcissist who obtains his/her narcissistic supply vicariously, by proxy, through the adulation and attention afforded her overt narcissist partner. Interview with @psic.renzosantamaria

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Narcissistic abuse has insidious, slow-burning phases (boiling frog testing) and abrupt phases (maternal figure devaluation).

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There are three types of pathological mindsets of victims of abuse:

1. “Professional” victims whose victimhood is an integral and crucial part of their identity and sense of self-worth. Abuse is their comfort zone and they provoke, elicit, and solicit it. Their self-imputed superiority, both moral and personal, helps them to regulate their sense of self-worth.

2. Defiant: these victims are engaged in a sempiternal power play with their abusers and react with abuse of their own to any maltreatment. The spiral of mutual torment is hard to break because drama antics and trauma bonding intermingle. The victim’s conduct gradually becomes increasingly more psychopathic or narcissistic.

3. Submissive: the majority of victims feel bad in the abusive environment and seek to extricate themselves emotionally or physically. But a minority of victims succumb to their fate and accept it unquestioningly, as a force majeure. They reframe the abuse and engage in “malignant optimism”. “It is not all bad”, they exclaim: “It is not what it seems.”

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It is not the economy. It is not only about immigration. It is a culture war. With Ginger Coy.

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The narcissist insists: “The only way to survive in my marriage is by satisfying my unmet needs outside it. My infidelity is virtuous, my adultery self-sacrificial, a selfless act of love.”

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Wikipedia is a narcissistic cult, a cabal of 500 active self-styled ignorant narcissists, mostly teenagers who brag publicly about their ignorance and bias. Shocking admission by a top Wikipedian is representative of the ethos. Slp1: “I tend to edit articles that take my fancy and have no connection to my professional and academic background.” Wikipedia "editor" slp1 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Slp1 ). And she is PROUD of it!

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Grandparents are therapists. They are licensed by life itself and educated in the academy of hard knocks. They have seen it all and how everything turns out. Theirs is the therapy of wisdom. With Chris Senise @chrissenisepodcast .

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This video is dubbed in GERMAN. Do social media trigger narcissism or were they driven by it? Interview with Peter Kolakowski, Südwestrundfunk SWR.de. @rundfunkreporter
The Impulse show: https://www.swr.de/swrkultur/wissen/wissen-aktuell-impuls-2025-10-14-100.html

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Preview courtesy the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel. There are three types of attention: 1. Synoptic: making connections between events and facts so as to create an emergent logical and explanatory narrative (connecting the dots); 2. Targeted: maintaining a laser focus on a few data to the exclusion of all else; 3. Inclusive: paying equal attention to people, happenings, and information without committing to a single theory or filter (no confirmation bias). The narcissist is an obsessive-compulsive junkie: he is addicted to narcissistic supply and seeks it out relentlessly. He, therefore, manifests the second type of attention-giving. Only when he can leverage the other two variants to secure supply, does he express them, too.

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Are your narrative and inner dialogue even logical? Clip courtesy of @practice_nothingness

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The narcissist deploys a variety of stratagems and mechanisms to invade your mind and stage a hostile takeover.

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What is the connection between the narcissist’s alloplastic defenses, paranoid ideation or hypervigilance, external locus of control, and internalized bad object? Clip courtesy of the Vaknin Narcissism Summaries playlist.

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Anti-depressants as a class of medications are under intense scrutiny. There is no question that they are being over-prescribed. Clip courtesy of @heavolution

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When you are disbelieved, invalidated, ignored, or even mocked and blamed you suffer epistemic injury. Clip courtesy Visceral Gravitas YouTube channel.

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Narcissists cast themselves as victims, claiming the high moral ground and casting their “abusers” as ethically inferior and contemptible. Clip courtesy the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Fascism offers love and empathy to members of the in-group, hate of and rage against members of the out-group. With Ginger Coy.

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Impatience renders even the smartest person unwise.

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The internalized mother archetype in healthy people underpins self-nurturing and self-compassion. The narcissist failed to internalize an abusive mother and search for substitute mothers all his/her life.

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Narcissistic and Borderline personality disorders (NPD, BPD) constitute severe mental illness. In the footsteps of giants like Otto Kernberg, I consider them to be forms of pseudopsychosis. Clip courtesy of @jackgets1

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Pathological narcissism is a compensatory defense against negative affects such as shame, anger, and grief. Clip courtesy of the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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3 distance lectures (via Zoom) in the University of Applied Sciences in Elbląg, Poland. Sponsored by the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation (@vakninrangelovskafoundation)

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Being a covert narcissist is a horrible existence. Clip courtesy of Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Science is a method for querying the universe, reality. It helps us formulate the right questions. But it never gets to the truth: the answers provided by science are always transient and false. Interview in The Nerve with Maureen Callahan.

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Love addicts are intoxicated by infatuation and limerence, not by love. Clip courtesy of Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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There is one experience god can never have: death. This renders him imperfect. He created us to heal and perfect himself through our deaths.

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Mark Beare, the originator of the MPIT theory of narcissistic abuse 

@mirroredpsychicinversiontheory comments on my work.

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When emotionally dead mothers have children. Clip courtesy of @sayed_serena_temp

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According to recent studies, the main source of info for AI chatbots is not encyclopedias or books, not even Wikipedia. It is Reddit plus X (Twitter). ‘Nuff said. Studies show that when people use AI chatbots, they are not looking for facts or the truth. They are so lonely that they just want to talk to someone.

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Prof. Sam Vaknin pioneered the study of narcissistic abuse in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.

“(The first self-aware narcissist) would be Sam Vaknin, a North Macedonia–based psychology professor and a diagnosed narcissist who has 419,000 subscribers on YouTube. He “came out,” so to speak, in the mid-’80s and ever since has been explaining NPD to the world via his books, recorded lectures, and confessional videos in which he investigates the intricacies of narcissism.”

(Long, Owen. “They’re Narcissists and They’re Proud” New York Magazine, vol. 58, no. 19, 8 Sept. 2025)

 

“(A) personal mission by self-confessed narcissist and author Sam Vaknin to raise the profile of the condition, through a book and continued high profile on the internet.

Sam who? Sam Vaknin is one of the most influential voices in modern perceptions of narcissism. This is partly because of his book, Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited. But mainly it is because of his amazingly intense presence on the internet – in discussion forums, information pages, agony columns. He is not a psychoanalyst or a psychologist or a psychotherapist. In fact he’s a philosopher. But he’s also a self-confessed narcissist, and has become a self-appointed spokesman on narcissism issues for America – and, via the internet, the world.

Vaknin’s … considerable industry on the subject has had a major effect on making narcissism an issue to be taken seriously by the general public – and not just by psychoanalysts and mental-health professionals.
Vaknin has also come up with some additions to theories on narcissism and how it manifests itself.

Whether you go with everything Vaknin says or not, there’s no doubt he’s one of the most outspoken, industrious, fascinating narcissists around.

Crompton, Simon (2007). All About Me: Loving a Narcissist. Routledge, London, United Kingdom

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Confabulation is an attempt to bridge over dissociative memory gaps. It is not the same as gaslighting, though victims definitely experience it as such. Mark Beare, the originator of the MPIT theory of narcissistic abuse throws some light on the matter. Courtesy of @mirroredpsychicinversiontheory Narcissists confabulate in order to bridge memory gaps and maintain a sense of personal continuity (pseudo-Self).

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The messages we receive in our contemporary civilization encourage grandiosity and entitlement. Interview on @natvnetwork

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Intermittent reinforcement is the cause of trauma bonding. Clip courtesy of @shadowdeangelis

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The narcissist’s inability to perceive you and relate to you as an external object has dangerous implications. Clip courtesy of the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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You love to see yourself idealized through the narcissist’s gaze. It is addictive, intoxicating, irresistible. Subscribe to the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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As long as I am virulently hated by both narcissists and their victims, I know I am a truthteller on the right path.

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If you are dissatisfied with your relationship, trust that your partner is equally unhappy. To Insist on prolonging such an agony is abusive.

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3 distance lectures (via Zoom) in the University of Applied Sciences in Elbląg, Poland. Sponsored by the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation (@vakninrangelovskafoundation)

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There are nine clinical features of pathological narcissism. They are not the same as the nine diagnostic criteria in the DSM. Subscribe to the Narcissism Summaries and Narcissism Clips YouTube channels.

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Narcissistic and Borderline personality disorders may be as severe or worse than psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. More clips in the Narcissism Summaries and Narcissism Clips YouTube channels.

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Your love challenges the narcissist’s grandiose sense of omnipotence and self-sufficiency.

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Talk regarding global affairs with Jean Stanoevski and Slobodan Tomik. Tonight at 21:15 on Vistel TV (vtv.mk). My responses in English.

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Most abusers are mentally well and hale.

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Switching in pathological narcissism and in borderline personality organization. Clip courtesy of @sayed_serena_temp

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Thank you for thanking me. Glad to have been of help. Video courtesy the Manuka Blabla YouTube channel.

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Sima Vaknin-Gil is the younger sister of Sam Vaknin. Brig. Gen. (Res.) Sima Vaknin Gil is a former intelligence officer in the Israeli air force, served as the Chief Censor of the State of Israel and is a former Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy. Sima is an Expert in intelligence work, data and research-based action and campaigns, the de-legitimization campaign against Israel, the BDS movement, and antisemitism.

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Victims of narcissistic abuse are looking for every excuse to stay in touch with the narcissist: litigation, joint custody, a common business, his loving family, you name it.

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Are narcissists more prone to cheating and other antisocial behaviors? Skopje Seminar, May 2025.

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Pathological narcissism in a nutshell. Narcissism is a cluster of hereditary traits. Pathological narcissism and NPD are mutations: they occur when wrong parenting and a dysfunctional family in early childhood render these traits malignant and rigid. Nature and nurture collude.

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The grandiosity gap between the narcissist’s inflated, fantastic self-concept and reality runs deeper than we think, says Mark Beare, originator of the MPIT theory of narcissistic abuse (@mirroredpsychicinversiontheory )

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Pathological narcissism is hard to maintain in the face of reality: it is a brittle, fragile self-concept and a precariously balanced house of cards. When it crumbles, the narcissist transitions from an overt state to a covert one.

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Narcissists ignore boundaries because they are control freaks and they are control freaks because they dread abandonment (separation insecurity aka abandonment anxiety).

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Wisdom is about letting go while justice is about NOT letting go.

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Snapshot of humanity, 2025: the world is ruled by fools and knaves. The mentally ill create techno-fantasies for the irrevocably dumb. Narcissism regulates all relationships. The planet, rendered uninhabitable, is made ready for the next dominant species (AI?).

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Under stress, rejection, tension, anxiety, and abandonment, someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) may react with a brief psychosis (psychotic microepisodes).

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The covert borderline is not a comorbidity. It is a cohesive hybrid of BPD and NPD. Clip courtesy of @jackgets1

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Parents have a privileged position in your life and so possess the power to inflict damage like no one else. Clip courtesy the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Watch the full video titled “A Warning to Neuroscientists” on my YouTube channel. The statistical power of neuroscience studies is low, comparable to economics. Neuroscience good with processes, traits, functions (memory, cognition, language processing, emotions): building blocks, not complex constructs such as personality disorders.

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University presentation regarding Borderline Personality Disorder by @henort_101

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Full video on my YouTube channel titled: New Study: NPD Cured? NOT!

Weinberg, Igor PhD; Ronningstam, Elsa PhD; Ravichandran, Caitlin PhD; Gunderson, John G. MD. Can Patients With Narcissistic Personality Disorder Change? A Case Series. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 212(7):p 392-397, July 2024. | DOI: 10.1097/NMD.0000000000001777

Ronningstam, Gunderson leading scholars on narcissism. But the study is dramatically and irredeemably flawed. It flatters and fawns on both these eminent scholars and, evidently, they are far from immune to it.

8 patients: impossible to establish statistical significance.

Shockingly: the clinicians working with these patients were the ones who selected and evaluated them! Of course they would say that the treatments have been an astounding success, reflecting well on their own miraculous professionalism. The authors admit that the clinicians selected ONLY patients who have improved, never the patients who haven’t (sampling bias). This means that the results cannot be generalized to the general NPD population.

The researchers supposedly came up with their own diagnoses which mysteriously tallied closely with this catastrophically skewed non-representative sample. Of course, the researchers are even more biased than the clinicians in this case!

“Comorbidities were common (average 2.5/patient). In terms of comorbid disorders, five had mood disorder, including bipolar II disorder (n = 1), substance use disorders (n = 3), eating disorder (n = 3), and OCD (n = 1). In addition, four had trait or diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and one had antisocial features.”

Diagnostic Interview for Narcissism (DIN) and the Diagnostic Statistic Manual for Psychiatric Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) Personality Disorder Section II categorical criteria outdated.

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Many words - Christianity and Meritocracy among them - started off as derogatory slights and ended up as honorable ideals. Remember this when next you are hounded and vilified.

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Narcissism is a traits or combination of traits. All traits are hereditary. Everyone has healthy narcissism. But pathological narcissism is a the outcome of childhood trauma, abuse, and adversity (in dozens of ways). Literature in the description of the video titled “NPD Genetic, Hereditary?” on my YouTube channel.

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People are not the same in professional settings (mask, persona) and personal ones. The latter involve triggers and fewer boundaries and constraints. Beware of pathological hope/malignant optimism. Some people and relationships cannot be fixed.

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Full interview on my YouTube channel. The words supernatural and paranormal are oxymorons used by morons. With Maureen Callahan in @thenerveshow

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The tendency to victimhood is linked to anxious attachment. Clip courtesy @practice_nothingness

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To convert you into an internal object (snapshot or introject you), the narcissist must first “kill” you in his mind as an external object. With @5d_theory and Maia Marcia.

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Succor and advice for victims of narcissistic abuse with the new AI chatbot on https://narcgpt.ai

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Identifying with the aggressor and finding abusers irresistible occur because you have learned to anticipate hurt and pain in love and intimacy. You misidentify them as one and the same.

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Herd mentality explained.

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Victims who persist and persevere in a narcissistically abusive relationship share a common psychological profile. Clip courtesy the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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The past has limited utility in a fast changing world. Best is to be grounded in the present. Clip courtesy of @henort_101

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Journal of Psychology and Psychiatry Editorial Awards.

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No contact is the only real defense against narcissistic abuse. In the video: the therapist Blake Anderson @blakeandersontherapy

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Friendship means the ability to say “no”, decline requests, and set boundaries without fear of repercussions.

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When you make a choice, you exclude all other alternatives and render them unavailable to you. That moment, you give up on your freedom. With @maiaece

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Narcissists experience collapse. Borderlines experience decompensation. Clip courtesy of @sayed_serena_temp

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Mark Beare explains his groundbreaking MPIT theory of narcissistic abuse. His book “Narcissistic Redeemer” was published this year by the Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation. @mirroredpsychicinversiontheory

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The no contact strategy which I proposed in the 1980s should be applied only to abusive family members. Shunning non-abusive members of your family is voluntary estrangement. Interview with Maureen Callahan at @thenerveshow

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Where is the world heading to? On Glasot na Narodot with Jean Staneovski and Slobodan Tomik (my responses in English).

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“Empaths” are covert narcissists, out-narcissisized by overt ones, pure and simple. Courtesy of @jackgetz.1

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Pathological hope (malignant optimism) explained by @shadowdeangelis

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What is avoidant personality disorder? Courtesy of @sayed_serena_temp

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Making friends, finally. Photo courtesy of @reframingtheself

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The differential diagnoses in the DSM are counterfactual and result in comorbidity and polythetic variability. The ICD-11 got it right. Full lecture to the University of Applied Sciences in Poland on my YouTube channel.

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The XXVI EUROTAS Congress, held in Greece on the island of Spetses, is not just another event — it is an invitation to deeper self-confrontation. This October, 21–25/10/26, in Spetses, Sam Vaknin joins as keynote speaker and opens a bold dialogue about the human psyche — beyond illusions and certainties. For those who dare to move beyond the familiar — this is where they belong.

For more information: https://www.humanology.gr spetses2026conference@gmail.com

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The inventors of modern technologies are all severely mentally ill. Their audience are the hopelessly brain dead.

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The narcissist re-enacts early childhood failures with you, his/her substitute mother. S/he needs to separate from you and thus become an individual. More in the Skopje Seminar playlist on my YouTube channel.

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Empathy is a social convention, not a meaningful reality. It is a counterfactual confabulation.

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Narcissistic mortification drives the narcissist to decompensation, emotion dysregulation, suicidal ideation, and pseudo-psychosis. In short: the narcissist becomes a borderline.

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Science is a process of interrogating reality and falsifying the answers time and again. It is not about facts or truth. It is asymptotic, not settled. With Maureen Callahan @thenerveshow

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As opposed to borderlines, narcissists possess introject constancy (the persistence of cathected introjects long after the external objects they represent are decathected). Mark Thomas Beare, the originator of MPIT, the next big thing in the field of narcissistic abuse studies breaks down this particular dynamic within the shared fantasy. Courtesy of @mirroredpsychicinversiontheory

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For the first time ever, I went Live on the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel on January 5 at 2 PM ET (New York time). The first 2 hours were open to all. I responded to questions from the public. On the third hour, I provided personalized advice to members of the Narcissism Summaries channel. Write to them for details: https://m.youtube.com/@narcissismsummaries Photos courtesy of @reframingtheself

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If you always validate, vindicate, and justify your child, you may be creating a narcissist. With @chrissenisepodcast

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Live every day as if it were both your first on this earth - and your last.

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Malignant optimism (or pathological hope as @shadowdeangelis calls it) often keeps the victim within the abusive shared fantasy of the narcissist. It is a type of rescuer/savior complex.

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Fascism is not a coherent ideology. It has something for everyone. It is the ultimate big tent. This renders it more resilient than liberal democracy. With Ginger Coy.

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The inverted narcissist is a codependent who teams up with an overt narcissist in order to secure an uninterrupted regular flow of vicarious narcissistic supply. With clinical psychologist @zukowska.daria Clip courtesy the Narcissism Summaries YouTube channel.

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Victimhood is a narcissistic splitting defense. @with @natvnetwork

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Abuse provides external regulation where self-regulation fails (for example in victims with Borderline or Dependent personality disorders). With Stephanie Carinia @psychologiststephanie

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Swipe left to visualize concepts in my work. Images courtesy clinical psychologist and biologist Maia Marcia, co-author with @5d_theory of the book “Snapshotting”.

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Passive-aggression is a form of sadism that is common among covert narcissists (the covert phases in the narcissist’s life).

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Wrong questions: WTF is happening and WHY? Right question: why should I CARE?

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In the wake of narcissistic abuse, the grief is multi-faceted. It can be all-consuming and dangerous to your mental health. Clip from the Skopje Seminar May 2025.

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Give yourself the gift of your own existence as the organizing principle of your life.

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Switching is common is several personality and dissociative disorders. Clip courtesy of @sayed_serena_temp

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The only thing narcissists crave addictively is attention. They make money, accumulate power, date, or virtue signal as activists for one purpose only: to secure narcissistic supply.

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Stamina + Endurance + Persistence=Resilience.

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O narcisista que parece santo, mas não é!!! Sam Vaknin, especialista em narcisismo, descreve o “narcisista comunal” como um subtipo específico de narcisista, que busca suprir suas necessidades egoístas por meio de comportamentos aparentemente altruístas, empáticos e morais. Ronaldo Perrotta

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Healthy relationships involve a realistic view of the partner, neither idealization, nor devaluation. Even limerence and infatuation revolve around loving the partner as s/he is, not as s/he could or should have been.

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Devaluation and discard have nothing to do with you. They inexorable phases in the narcissist’s shared fantasy. They are hard to accomplish and cause cognitive dissonance which the narcissist finds difficult to resolve. More content in the Skopje Seminar playlist on my YouTube channel.

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I uploaded this video (and many others) in 2016. No one would listen. Now, it is too late. The USA is undergoing a state capture by a cabal of narcissists and psychopaths.

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Cult members don’t have any values or beliefs: the leader’s ever-shifting, contradictory whims are law. With one exception: hatred, envy and rage directed at members of the out-groups. This is the red line that no cult leader can safely cross.

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The mother’s main role is to introduce and induct the child to reality. In other words: to frustrate the child the way the world would time and again do throughout the child’s lifespan. Clip courtesy of @quartdunsiecle

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Many abusive behaviors are intended to test your commitment to the toxic relationship, various dimensions of your personality, and your reactive conduct. This amounts to constant stress testing.

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Your relationship with yourself is the most important. Submission is self-betrayal.

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Saturday, February 28, I will be giving a lecture at a 4-hour online event, organized by the renowned therapist and author Kathleen Saxton @clinicwithk

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Silent treatment is to no contact what murder is to self-defense.

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Answer these 23 questions to determine if you are recovered or healed in the wake of narcissistic abuse.

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Psychopathic abuse might result in PTSD. Narcissistic abuse usually yields CPTSD (complex trauma) in its victims.

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Autistic vs. dereistic thinking in pathological narcissism and in autism.

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Covert narcissism is a state of collapse: the recurrent failure to obtain narcissistic supply. All narcissists go through overt and covert phases, thorough every narcissist has a dominant state and a recessive (reactive state).

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The self-help industry and many therapists and clinicians who should know better make promises they cannot keep and demands you could never meet. There is a word for this type of misconduct.

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Any sentence that includes the word “but” - explicitly or implied - is not an apology.

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Why is this the most horrible period in human history?

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The body language of abusers is telling. Learn to read it!

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Scandal tolerance: When antisocial or even criminal behaviors become the norm and not trigger adverse outcomes. Aka scandal fatigue.

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No one can really access another person’s mind or verify that person’s self-reporting.

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Society expects you to lose your authenticity and become someone recognizable, acquire some identity that conforms to societal expectations and mores.

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Are we social animals or have we been forced into socializing by the need to survive in demanding environments? Now that we have become self-sufficient, we are finally choosing to be alone, our factory setting all along.

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The coming revolt of the masses. With Slobodan Tomik and Jeak Staoevski in Glasot na Narodot.

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Pathological narcissism involves roleplaying: the narcissist plays different roles in different settings and these roles are dictated by the structure and content of the shared fantasy.

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The - sometimes absent - gaze of a “dead mother” can kill the vitality and essence of the child. It is a form of crucifixion without a resurrection down the road. With psychologist and biologist Maia Marcia, author of the book “Snapshotting”.

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Smear campaigns involve pathetic usually mentally ill or control freak losers.

Psychopathic cult leader masquerading as a benevolent guru: self-righteous moralizing to disguise the projection. The inducer. Unable to maintain long-term relationships, especially with intimate partners. Substance user.

Faded bloated past their prime histrionic, failed wannabe impostor, pretending to be an investigative journalist, expert, or researcher to lend an air of faux professionalism and objectivity to her or his pursuit of narcissistic supply and celebrity. Sublimates her paranoia as a form of ostentatious faux courage. The exploiter. Could be more than one.

Eternal cult member with a cult mind to blindly follow orders down the cult leader’s rabbit hole in return for a sense of belonging to an extended family, friendship, intimacy, and being accepted warts, shortcomings, repulsiveness, and all. The slave. Could be more than one.

The shapeshifting triumvirate recruits people with grievances, real or imagined, to do their bidding and act as cannon fodder or flying monkeys.

Proselytizers vs. Disseminators: canonical text, exegesis and deconstruction, embellishments.

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Psychopaths regard life and its constraints, expectations, and demands as enslavement. The more successful they are, the more shackled and stifled they feel.

The only way to feel completely free, to experience liberty to its maximum is via defiance, contumaciouness, and criminality - with zero consequences. Such antisociality empowers and liberates, is restorative and anxiolytic.

Enactivism is a theory of cognition proposing that minds are not just in the brain but emerge through the dynamic, embodied interaction between an organism and its environment. It argues that organisms “enact” or bring forth their own world, making cognition a form of sense-making rather than just processing information.

Autistic and dereistic thinking are the only exceptions to enactivism. Ways of relating to reality, experience, logic, and to other people. Fantasy-infused thoughts (dereism) or narcissistic and egocentric self-absorption (autistic). These patients’s illogical and idiosyncratic cognitions derive from an overarching and all-pervasive daydreaming or fantasy life.

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We react to narcissists and psychopaths the way we will on day react to humanoid robots. Talking to Maia Marcia, biologist and clinical psychologist, author of “Snapshotting”.

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The rise of the narcissistic-charismatic politician is linked to massive sociocultural movements and trends in the past six centuries.

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When you elevate people from fringe losers to mainstream winners, they forgive you anything, turn a blind eye to everything, and are unthinkingly and self-sacrificially loyal.

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As a professor of business studies and finance in the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, UK, I have toiled all of last year on creating and teaching this syllabus on advanced taxation. In the past month alone, 2 governments invited me to use it to train their employees: one of the biggest countries in the world - and one of the smallest. A dozen other countries on 3 continents are expressing interest. I will be traveling nonstop the next 2 years.

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All narcissists are both grandiose and vulnerable, sometimes overt and then covert (no type constancy).

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People often confuse empathy and conscience. They are not the same thing.

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The covert narcissist’s sexuality and experience of “love” was described by Akhtar and Cooper in 1989.

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As women assume a more masculine self-concept (according to studies), their share in NPD and AsPD (including psychopathy) is growing exponentially while their share of BPD diagnosis is declining.

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Additional videos on smear campaigns on my YouTube channel. Who are you and your motivation may undermine your credibility as well as incur civil and criminal liabilities. Narrative: congruent and non-congruent revelations. Narcissist: impression management vs. Reputation management.

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Both borderlines and narcissists suffer from separation insecurity (abandonment anxiety). But the etiology (the why) and the dynamics (the how and what they do about it) are different. Talking to @maiaece

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Don’t give the narcissist a reason to go after you in court or you will never get rid of them. A narcissist would sue you time and again, relentlessly, and will use litigation to both alleviate existential boredom and emptiness and regulate his or her omnipotent self-concept.

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The sexual fantasies of narcissists and psychopaths explored in the latest edition of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”. The text was originally published online in 1997, decades before Epstein and the current narcissism craze.

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Stupid people are way more successful, rich, and powerful than intelligent ones because they are unable to weight risks and consequences properly and because they rarely doubt their decisions (Dunning-Kruger effect).

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The tide of narcissism has transformed the fabric of interpersonal relationships.

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If you are unlikeable and unlovable, universally loathed and hated, even your most positive and selfless actions will be condemned and criticized. If you are loveable and charming, even your crimes will be commended, forgiven, or overlooked.

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Narcissists couldn’t care less what people think about them - as long as people are thinking about them.

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“Self-aware”, “reformed”, “nice” narcissists online are like Nazi SS guards running support groups for survivors of the Holocaust.

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In the overt phases, narcissists are unlikely to attend therapy. In the wake of mortification, collapse, and when they have hit rock bottom, they are more likely than the general population to attend therapy. With @psic.renzosantamaria

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You are the glue that holds the narcissist together. Narcissists can self-supply but they cannot generate their own identity, they are disjointed and discontinuous without your narrative.

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Happy 8th of March to my wife, Lidija Rangelovska @reframingtheself without whom none of this would have been possible. She is the one who pioneered the field of narcissistic abuse in the 1990s when no one online has heard of narcissism. No one. She salvaged the manuscript of my groundbreaking book, “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”, literally from the trash bin and then gifted me the first website ever on narcissism and narcissistic abuse.

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“Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”. The book that started it all in 1995-7. The first ever dissection of narcissistic abuse. It contained a newly coined language that is in wide use today. Initially, in 1997, Lidija @reframingtheself and I made the text available online. I also established the first 6 support group for victims of narcissistic abuse. Clip courtesy of @rebooting.humanity

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1: Can’t you see that s/he is FAKING?

2: Of course I can! I am not naive! At least s/he cares enough about me to fake!

You can’t be bothered to even do that!

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Nothingness is not about defeat, surrender, or indolence. It is about healthy boundaries. Learn more about Nothingness by watching the videos in the Nothingness playlist on my YouTube channel or by subscribing to my Nothingness YouTube channel and watching the Philosophy playlist there.

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What do psychopaths call a success?

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The mind is an experience. You can’t cease to experience it until a few seconds after brain death. Talking to @maiaece

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Exactly like environmental toxicity, toxic people affect us in myriad ways.

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No contact is self-defense. Silent treatment is an assault.

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In a jungle, complaining about the predators, analysing their ways, trying to make sense of the hunt, and castigating their immorality will only get you devoured. To survive, you need to fight back or flee.

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Smear Campaigns Which Involve MULTIPLE, COACHED Parties are INDICTABLE, EXTRADITABLE, Transnational CRIMINAL CONSPIRACIES or COLLUSIONS to Harass, Stalk, or Pervert the Course of Justice. The Perpetrators Have NOWHERE TO HIDE.

Harassment and Stalking are Criminal Offenses in All Jurisdictions. Defamation is a Criminal Offense in Some Jurisdictions and Gives Rise to Civil Liabilities in All Jurisdictions.

The Perpetrators of Smear Campaigns Often Accuse You of Criminal Acts or Misconduct That They Themselves have Committed. TURN THE TABLES ON THEM: Expose Their Misdeeds.

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I was accepted as speaker in the Psychiatry Congress 2026 chaired by the legendary Elsa Ronningstam.

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People can and often do forgive abuse. People can and often do overlook evil. But no one forgives the humiliation of having been held in contempt. No one. Ever.

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Full video on my channel (search for the keyword “suicide”. A new, promising approach to suicide prevention is founded on evidence, not on self-reporting. I posted this video a few years ago. Since then, there is even greater reason for optimism.

LITERATURE

Galynker, I., Bloch-Elkouby, S. and Cohen, L.J. (2024), Suicide crisis syndrome: a specific diagnosis to aid suicide prevention. World Psychiatry, 23: 362-363. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.21229

Briggs, Jessica, ‘The Comprehensive Narrative-Crisis Model of Suicide’, The Suicidal Crisis: Clinical Guide to the Assessment of Imminent Suicide Risk (New York, 2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Nov. 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780190260859.003.0003, accessed 29 Nov. 2024.
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FULL VIDEO on https://www.youtube.com/samvaknin

Narcissists are dumb and smug enough to provide you with evidence: email messages, videos, comments on social media, audio recordings.

No substitute for legal advice from a qualified attorney. Reddit and AI are no substitute (as I found out).

How to fight criminal conspiracy to harass, defame, stalk, breach privacy:

Save all documents, recordings, social media posts or comments as evidence for coordinated coaching of witnesses or complainants, perverting the course of justice, tampering with evidence, and criminal conspiracy.

In some jurisdictions - such as Switzerland - recording a conversation with you without your consent is a crime (felony). Publishing or sharing such an illicitly obtained recording is an even bigger, separate, crime. Sometimes, such a recording is used in blackmail or extortion - a third and very serious felony. Some criminals are dumb enough to blackmail you in writing, in a WhatsApp chat!

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Vulnerable people are attracted to narcissists and target the narcissist. Watch the video to learn why.

The narcissist couldn’t care less WHO you are. Narcissists have no “type”. Narcissists audition potential partners. The narcissist subjects you to 3 tests:

1. Are you capable of being idealized?

Minimal traits, assets, and behaviors. Can you help the narcissists self-enhance (be his/her trophy).

2. Are you able to provide 2 of the 4 Ss?

Sex: find him irresistible, enthusiastic, consensual-submissive, prone to sexual fantasies, unboundaried-kinky, self-trashing, promiscuous.

Services (that he needs and lacks).

Supply (narcissistic or sadistic): adoring, uncritical, submissive, masochistic, self-loathing.

Safety: addictive personality, maternal bonding, loyal, inertial.

3. Are you amenable to shared fantasy?

Period. Nothing else matters.

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Purchase our book bundles and get a free consultation with Sam Vaknin, Lidija Rangelovska, or both! For more details, go to: https://www.narcissuspublications.net

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Devaluation and discard are inexorable phases in the shared fantasy. They are driven by internal dynamics, not by external events. Clip from the free seminar in Skopje, May 2025.

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The crisis in the Middle East and global geopolitics. Talk in Glasot na Narodot with Slobodan Tomik and Jean Stanoevski. My responses in English.

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Immediately involve the police and lawyer up! If you are the target of a transnational criminal conspiracy involving more than one person, extortion, harassment, defamation, privacy crimes, and perversion of justice are just a few of the crimes these people have committed and are still committing.

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The Serbian language hardcover edition of “The World of the Narcissist” (the English title) is finally available for sale on Amazon.

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Past behavior is the best predictor of future (mis)conduct. Make sure you know everything about your future partner’s past.

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Just selected as a member of the scientific advisory and organizing committees of Global Mental Health Systems Congress 2026.

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Linda @escapingmyfairytale describes her awakening and self-reconciliation in her highly personal YouTube videos, informed by my work and the work of others.

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Self-hate is the most intense form of hatred there is. That is why it gets projected onto others.

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In London, UK, with Ruth Jacobs. The False Self is a defensive structure. Defense against what?

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Appraisal of my work by @mirroredpsychicinversiontheory Mark Thomas Beare’s work is a revolutionary new way of looking not only at narcissistic abuse but also at human psychology in general. He will be co-opening the free seminar in Ohrid in May 21-24 with a guest lecture. Mark Thomas Beare will be presenting his grounding work on narcissistic abuse on the opening day of the free seminar in Ohrid (May 21-24).

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Narcissists are notorious for spying on you.

What many people do not realize is that such activities are actually crimes, even felonies.

In some jurisdictions (for example: Switzerland), audio or video recording a conversation with you without your knowledge and consent is criminal.

In the example of Switzerland, such an act is punishable by up to one year in prison.

Moreover: it is another crime – a much more serious one – to share with others or to publish such an illicitly recorded conversation or any part thereof.

Third parties could include friends, family, co-workers, employers, parishioners, members of the community, the media, website owners, authors, book publishers, journalists, podcasters, documentary filmmakers, and others.

If these third parties in turn republish the information to a new audience, they are complicit in the aforementioned crimes. They become accomplices.

Again, to take Switzerland this is a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison. Switzerland takes privacy laws very seriously, they are very big on privacy. This offense is both indictable and extraditable.

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Rebecca Zung’s amazing litigation and conflict management tool, SLAYAI, at SlayPro.ai It distills decades of courtroom experience and an unparalleled expertise in managing smear campaigns, false accusations, criminal conspiracies, and other high-conflict situations. @rebeccazung

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Third-rate opportunistic coaches, wannabe failed podcasters, fishy, iffy documentary filmmakers, and a rabble of way worse characters have converged on the “narcissists are evil monsters” trend. They milk the gullible and hateful and the truly hurting, gleefully laughing all the way to the bank.

A few irresponsible and rabid academics and clinicians, usually charlatans and self-enriching con-artists are the worst offenders against the basic moral tenets of their profession: do no harm, spread no evil and hatred, attempt to heal and help.

Real victims are in pain. They seek an explanation for what has just transpired. They cling to any semblance of empathy and succor, however fake. They are angry and sad. And they are cynically, heartbreakingly taken advantage on by predators masquerading as coaches and “experts”.

The demonization and castigation of narcissists have reached a breaking point of no return, to mix my metaphors. If not arrested now, it will end badly. Someone will die. It is getting really wild and terrifying out there.

Narcissists are mentally ill. They are delusional and trapped in fantasy. They are immature and, like all of us, are doing their best to cope. I am not aware of any other diagnosis or group of psychologically impaired people who are being so egregiously hated and damned.

That is not to say that narcissists do not harm people. They do. Society and individuals need to learn to recognize the signs, avoid narcissists, and stay safe. Where right to do so and applicable, we need to punish narcissists for their misdeeds the way we punish all transgressors, narcissists or not.

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In a personality cult, the only core value is: the leader is always right. Nothing else matters or is upheld or fought for.

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Monkeybranching starts in the devaluation phase

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Is it possible to maintain multiple shared fantasies simultaneously?

It is, but not of precisely the same nature (for example: romantic and sexual and friendship and admiration of a role model).

Meta-fantasy (form of meta-cognition): fantasizing about an alternative, substitute fantasy

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The paranoid is a collapsed narcissist past her prime in every way. Her paranoia is a form of last ditch attention-seeking grandiosity. The paranoid is a persecutory drama queen. The grandiose paranoid casts herself as a moral crusader (“I confront killers”) who is assuming risks (“I am the next target”) for the greater good. She is a prosocial narcissist. In her pathetic pursuit of attention and adulation, the narcissistic paranoid will not hesitate to engage in underhanded behaviors, break promises, breach contract, and violate multiple laws. Collapsed prosocial paranoid narcissists often become rabidly antisocial.

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Using entrainment and regression, then narcissist installs an introject (internal object with a voice that represents him) in your mind.

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@rebooting.humanity is a meticulous and intelligent reader of my book “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”. I wrote it for people like him.

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New technique for insomnia: cognitive shuffling. Works for me, especially when I travel.

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Narcissists can and do modify their behaviors. The core psychopathology remains, but narcissists are fully aware of their actions and their consequences (though rarely of the underlying psychodynamics and motivations). With Rebecca Zung @rebeccazung

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Self-destructiveness, self-defeating, self-handicapping, and self-harm are often erroneously conflated with masochism.

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Love is a vulnerability, a weakness. Hate empowers. Maybe this is why - in an uncertain, dangerous world - people prefer to hate.

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Women with cluster B personality disorders lie and confabulate inordinately frequently - not because they are female but because of the nature of their psychopathologies.

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Very active international conferences season. Even more to come. Conferences are where you compare notes with other scholars and learn about the latest advances in the field.

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Faced with others’s glaring mistakes, sometimes I like to just stand back and watch a train wreck gathering full steam and coming to a head. Their head(s). LOL Photos courtesy of @reframingtheself

My work on narcissistic abuse (I coined the phrase) preceded by decades (started in 1984) the plagiarism of the charlatans and con-artists that pass for “experts” nowadays. These swindlers destroyed the legitimacy of the field and harmed millions of people in the process. Listen to what @mirroredpsychicinversiontheory found in his research.

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In times of uncertainty, anxiety, and terror - self-affirming fantasy is the only refuge and truthtellers are cast as demonic foes.

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Full video on my YouTube channel. Heal the Community, Not the Individual (keynote address to the Global Mental Health Systems Congress 2026)

Session: “Mental Health as a System-Level Phenomenon: From Individual Pathology to Population Dynamics”

Mental health issues are the hidden pandemic of our time. They are still being treated on the individual level, not on the population level (epidemiologically).

→ How mental health manifests at a population level rather than only at the individual level

Individual or relational (Object Relations, Lacan)

Socialization: modeling, roles, narratives, scripts, norms, mores, conventions, inhibitions, rewards and sanctions

→ The role of societal structures, culture, and environment in shaping psychological outcomes

Family

Culture-bound syndromes

Demarcating normal from abnormal (e.g. religion)

Weaponizing mental illness as social control tool

The role of genius (Eysenck)

→ Where current systems fall short in addressing large-scale mental health challenges

Crisis of Medicalization (recent incarnation: neuroscience, psychopharmacology)

The professionalization of care the sidelining of the village

Mental health as a luxury and mental illness as malingering (or stigma), a character flaw, fully at the behest of the individual

Current psychology is asocial, atomized, abstract, statistical, a pseudo-science. We need to rediscover the literary roots of psychology, create healing texts

→ What shifts are needed to move from individual treatment models to system-aware approaches

We need to heal whole communities, not individuals.

Mental illness is a contagion, we need a germ-like theory of psychology

We need to engender a new holistic communal psychology, de-emphasize the Self, re-emphasize the Other

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Uncanny. @rebooting.humanity compares excerpts from “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” by Sam Vaknin (first published in 1997) to Trump’s speeches.

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Full video on my YouTube channel. 9 out of 10 survivors of attempted suicide regret the attempt and never try again.

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Idearism (the plagiarism of ideas and intellectual property) is an existential threat to the future of humanity.

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Switching and splitting in BPD, NPD, and other mental health conditions.

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When narcissists are subjected to narcissistic mortification they emotionally dysregulate, develop suicidal ideation, and become indistinguishable from people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). With the psychologist Renzo Santamaria.

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Both psychotic disorders and narcissistic pathologies involve self-talk and private speech (language). Internal objects and confused and conflated with external ones. Hyperreflexivity sets in.

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The pathological narcissistic space (PNS) is the narcissist’s hunting grounds. It is a physical or virtual space (a haunt) like college, a pub, church, a political party, club, dating app, or the family home where the narcissist is guaranteed to harvest narcissistic supply (basically, any form of sustained attention that buttresses the self-concept) from his or her sources (fans, admirers, sycophants, acolytes, even detractors). With Brad Carr.

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Under protracted extreme stress and anxiety, narcissists go through a borderline phase and end up becoming primary (factor 1) psychopaths. Under similar circumstances go through a narcissistic phase and end up briefly becoming secondary (factor 2) psychopaths.

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An overview of the history of the concept of narcissistic abuse by Mark Thomas Beare (@mirroredpsychicinversiontheory), the originator of the MPIT and ASR framework and theories.

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Sam Vaknin’s pioneering and groundbreaking book, “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” was published online in 1997 and in printing 1999. It is now in its 19th edition. Trump was elected President in 2016. Clips courtesy of @rebooting.humanity

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There are types of signaling which are indicative of an underlying mental health pathology.

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Several societal and cultural trends have conspired to render intimate relationships a thing of the past.

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AI rendition. Maybe it is time to establish such a magazine to study my work LOL Courtesy of Kathi Stringer who brought this to my attention.

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Is the narcissist terrified of being EXPOSED? IT DEPENDS! If the exposure aligns with the narcissist’s “brand” and self-concept - s/he WELCOMES IT as a form of added ATTENTION (narcissistic supply). If the exposure negates and undermines the narcissist’s carefully cultivated image and fantasies, s/he feels threatened.

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Co-idealization means that you were in love with an ideal, an image, an act, a set of impressions - not with the narcissist. Of course, similarly, the narcissist never loved the real you. Clip from the Skopje Seminar, May 2025. Next free seminar: Ohrid, May 21-24, 2026.

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