Can Narcissist's Demons Be Exorcised? (Compilation)

Okay, ladies, it's safe to exit the lockdown. First of all, I've had a professional haircut and I look much less threatening. I hope. Second thing, I've reconciled with Minnie Mouse. Two videos ago, some of you might recall that I had cheated on her with another mug. But we are back together and she's giving me her wonderful coffee yet again. In between we had a we had a few fights normally and she said that I'm demonic which led me to the topic of today's video demon possession and narcissism. Anyone who has trolled YouTube for videos by self-styled experts, experts, life coaches, and other luminaries has come across the inevitable comparison between narcissists and psychopaths and demons and vampires and other supernatural creatures. While I'm deeply flattered by the company, I would like to differ a bit and to propose, as usual, a historical and linguistic context with some very surprising outcomes. So stay tuned. This is not your typical debunking video. Um, the ones I do with conspiracy theories, alien reptilians, 5G, and similar. This one has to do with a smooth transition between demonology and its um twin psychiatry. And so let us start by first perhaps agreeing on a common language. Quarks. Quarks. Q U A R Ks. These are supposed to be the building blocks of matter in the universe. Yet no one no one has seen them. No one has captured the quark and in all probability they don't really exist in the classical sense. Same with God. No one has captured God. No one has spoken to God outside a mental asylum. Same with demons. Same with ego, super ego and ID, Freud's famous inventions. Last time I checked, none of my colleague professors of psychology, psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists has ever interacted with an ego, sat down with an ego for coffee or discuss matters with a super ego. All these quirks, God, demons, ego, super ego, unconscious, all these are not real entities. They are not ontological entities. They are not objects. Like for example, your television set or your money, what's left of it. All these are language elements. They are words. Words that we use metaphorically usually to capture the essence of something, the essence of an object, the essence of a process, the essence of an observation. These words are useful because they really give us an instantaneous way to communicate to others what it is that that we had been seeing or observing. So in the middle ages there were no psychiatrists. Good for them. Instead they had priests. There was no Ziggman Freud. There was his substitute at the time, his replacement, the temp god. So in the middle ages they were aware of mental illness. Of course they had hysterical people, they had psychotic people, quite a few of them actually. And when they tried to discuss and describe these phenomena to communicate them to others, they invented entities. They invented entities. And the class of these entities were known as demons. Demons were a satanic manifestation. the servants of Satan in some religions or a satanic class of angels in other religions and demons were language elements exactly as today we would talk about ego super ego ID unconscious conscious these are also language elements and so it's very important to to understand that all we have done in the past 600 700 is we had transitioned from one type of vocabulary, one type of dictionary to another type of vocabulary. We have changed the words we use, our language elements. But have we changed the essence? Can we easily compare a demon to the ego? Is a demon another word for ego? A demonic person another word for an egotistical person? Don't forget that in the Middle Ages there was something called morality play. Morality play was a theater play, also called an interlude. It was a type of allegory. There was a guy, the protagonist, and he was walking around on the stage and he met all kinds of raifications, personifications of various moral attributes. There was a character that represented God. Another one, death, every man, good deeds, angel, knowledge, beauty, discretion, strength, wealth, worldly possessions, this that. So there were all kinds of people, actors walking on stage and each one of them raified or symbolized a kind of trait or behavior or class of objects or characteristics. And so this was the morality play. And every man was interacting with these and they were discussing wealth, worldly worldly possessions, the imminence of death, God's power, importance of holding values and through the morality play the morality and ethics of the age were communicated to the observers. There were other characters, pity, perseverance, imagination, contemplation, free will, etc., etc. And all of them blatantly I mean openly represented moral ideals. Uh some of these characters were good, some of them were evil, some of them were in between. Some of them were classical characters like Mary or the child Christ or angels and and so on or God. And some of them were demons. And demons were considered to be alien spirits entities. And the characteristic of demons as opposed to the others was that demons controlled people's actions. In the book witches and neighbors written by Briggs he says possession might be defined as a direct action of the devil operating on an individual whose own sins had exposed him to this terrible fate. In other words, the individual, the possessed individual was to blame for his own possession. He was guilty. He became possessed because he sort of opened the gates to the the dark side, to the dark entity, to darkness. He opened the gates to evil, to satanic emanations. And he did this by sinning, by doing something wrong. He was the victim of his own past transgressions, of his own remorse and regret. Now that's very interesting because that's exactly contrary to narcissism. In narcissism there's no remorse, there's no regret and there's no perception of sins. The narcissist commits sins but is not aware of these sins. Nor is this scene instrumental or functional. It's more kind of a byproduct, side effect, off-handed, a result of goal orientation. Narcissist seeks narcissistic supply and in the process will stop at nothing. He is ruthless, relentless, and callous. Same with the psychopath. But we'll come to that a bit later. The demon once he enters the person he seizes the entire personality. It's a diabolical being that actually becomes the person even physically. And in this sense demonic possession is the earthw the predecessor of what today we would call in science fiction body snatching. It's like an al alien entity that becomes the person. Narcissism is the same. It's an alien being in effect. It's a fictitious being, the false self who takes over the narcissist, possesses the narcissist, if you wish, becomes the narcissist. There's nothing there except the false self. The narcissist does not exist. There's nobody home. It's a hall of mirrors. As I keep telling all of you, it's a kaleidoscope. So, the narcissist is an apparition. We'll talk about it a bit later in this in this video. is an apparition possessed or controlled by a piece of fiction. The difference between the narcissist and classical demon position possession as it had been perceived in the med medieval ages middle ages is that the false self is invented by the narcissist. It's a concoction. It's a piece of fiction authored by the narcissist. It's exactly like uh someone would write a book and the book would take over or someone would make a sculpture the sculpture will take over or someone would paint uh would paint the painting and the painting will take over the life of the painter which is the famous case of Dorian Gray in the novel. And so in the in encyclopedia of witch uh witches and witchcraft there is such a thing believe it or not they say there are two ways to become possessed by the devil. Either the devil passes directly into a person or someone usually said to be a witch or a wizard working with a devil sends a demon into the victim through bewitchment. The Jesuit professor Dr. Malaki Martin in hostage to the devil outlines the stages of possession. First, there's the actual entry point when the evil spirit first enters the victim. Then, there's a stage of erroneous judgment by the possessed in vital matters, perhaps including the making of unethical choices. Until now, it sounds like classical narcissism. Then there's the voluntary yielding of control by the possessed person to the invading spirit even though he knows the spirit is alien to his personality. It's a good good metaphor of the false self. And finally, there's perfect possession. And indeed, narcissism, as the diagnostic and statistical manual says, is all pervasive. It's ubiquitous. Until now, the metaphor of demon possession really has very close similarities, strong similarities to narcissism. Narcissism had narcissism been typified, characterized, described and diagnosed in Middle Ages, probably these people would have been described as demon-possessed. But some important characteristics are missing. Some are missing and some are not. For example, in in um texts written about demon possession in the middle ages, one of the distinguishing features of possessed people is that they are missing memories. They have missing time. And this is what today we call dissociation. Dissociation is an integral and crucial part of many cluster B personality disorders, notably borderline personality disorder where dissociation is a diagnostic criterion and narcissistic personality disorder where the narcissist tries to compensate for his lapses of memory by lying and confabulating. So dissociation is common to both the demonp possessed person and the narcissist and the borderline. Then there is perceptual distortions. The perceptual distortions described in possession literature, medieval possession literature up to the 18th century. I would say these perceptual distortions are what what today we would call hallucinations, delusions, illusions. But some of them, a small part is what today would be would be titled cognitive deficits. It's a an impaired or defective reality testing. It's when the possessed person does not perceive reality properly, misinterprets cues from the physical environment, from the social environment and from other people. For example, sexual hyperpion. He would tend to interpret behaviors of other people as hypersexualized and he would tend to act on these cues inappropriately. For example, he would rape a woman. So perceptual distortions, these are also common to narcissism, pathological narcissism and demonp possessed people. There's a loss of sense of control in demonp possessed people. They feel that they are controlled by a demon. They feel they are alienated. They are what we call clinically they are estranged. They feel that whatever they are doing, it's not entirely they who are doing. So a a a borderline um a borderline a woman diagnosed with borderline personality disorder very often would say I felt like I had been on autopilot. I felt that it wasn't me. Depersonalization I felt that what whatever was happening was not real. Derealization or I forgot what had happened. Dissociative amnesia. This this sense of loss of control is very central to demon possession and to narcissism borderline and to some extent psychopathy as well. Many psychopaths describe the moment the moment that their impulses took over and they couldn't control the impulses. Actually classical texts uh on psychopathy by Kartman, by Cleley, by others, classical texts mention repeatedly that psychopaths are out of control. that this is the main feature that the most transient whim, the most transitory thought, cognition, the most fleeting emotion um kind of prompts the psychopath to act and to act impulsively and to act without due consideration to possible consequences including very adverse consequences. And so by now we have missing memories, dissociation, perceptual distortions, impaired reality testing and loss of sense of control, which is lack of impulse control or a an external locus of control. The narcissist and the borderline feel that they controlled from the outside. They're the victims of other people, of circumstances, of envious um bosses, of uh the government, of in extreme cases. This sense of loss of control coupled with another psychological trait known as conspiracism. This leads to to conspiracy theories. So people who believe in conspiracy theories have this sense of external locus of control very mobid very malignant coupled with conspiracies and indeed a lot of the demon possession literature reads like modern conspiracy theories. The next feature is hyper suggestability. The person who is possessed by the demon claims that the demon makes him do things but makes him do things not necessarily by brute and crash force, not via violence and aggression. Very often the demon is very seductive, very flirtatious, very convincing, very rational even. And so the person the victim of demon possession the possessed person is hyper suggestible is is reacting as though he were in a hypnotic state. And this is very this is one of the diagnostic criteria actually of histrionic personality disorder which today is being reconceived as combination narcissism and secondary psychopathy. Hypers suggestability. And indeed, the narcissist is equally hyper suggestible cuz the narcissist is grandiose. He believes he knows everything. He believes he's all powerful. He's also very gullible. It's very easy to cheat narcissist, to deceive a narcissist. Con artists have a field day with narcissists because they are buffoons. They're idiots. They're bumbling fools. And narcissists are like that because they they don't believe that anyone can be smarter than they are. They don't believe anyone can pull the wall of wood over their eyes. They don't believe anyone can make them do things because they are all powerful. They're godlike. So it's very easy to cheat and con them. Then there's a series of of features of demon possession which have no equivalent. They're important features and they have no equivalent in any claust personality disorder. So while I would say the hyper structure of demon possession shares some common denominators with narcissism, psychopathy, borderline, let's call it the cluster B kaleidoscope. The rest of the features and they're very important behavioral features, they don't have anything to do with cluster B. And I think the reason for this mixup, the reason for this cocktail is that demon position has been misapplied very frequently in the past to mental illness. People who have been mentally ill were described as demonp possessed. The Catholic Church was so so alarmed by this tendency to misidentify mental illness as satanic manifestations. The Catholic Church was so alarmed that he it had created a whole bureaucracy of exosis and a whole library of texts which deal with exorcism. And the first few stage the first the the bulk of the first stages is to make sure that what is being described as demon possession actually has anything to do with the supernatural realm. So the Catholic Church says most of the reports about demon possession actually have nothing to do with demons or with possession. They are reports of mental illness. And so Catholic Church very often sends a psychiatrist to interview people who claim to be demonp possessed or their relatives who report them in. the psychiatrist comes and conducts an interview, a structured interview and administers tests in order to rule out mental illness before a license exist from the church comes on the scene. And so I think demon possession, classical demon possession confuses and conflates classical psychosis, psychotic disorder with other manifestations which have little to do with psychiatry or psychotic disorders. for example, maybe cultural influences, societal influences, suggest suggestions by religious texts, um some context within which demons are accepted as reality. And we'll come to all this a bit later. So, here's a series of manifestations of demon possession which have no trace in any other form of mental illness. Contortions, paranormal capabilities, superhuman strength, knowledge of previously unknown languages, knowledge of future events, unnatural body movements, you know, angles, the head turns 180°, glossia, speaking in tongues, insults, evil spirits sometimes can even mimic the clergy and speak of Christ, blasphemies, Appearance of wounds that vanish as quickly as they appear. They are not stigmata. Stigmata stigmata remains for a few remain for a few days. Wounds that appear and disappear within minutes. Thinking oneself as possessed. So the possessed usually would describe themselves as possessed. Leading a wicked life, living outside the rules of society. Yes, these are sides of demon possession. Being persistently ill, falling into heavy sleep and vomiting. uh the appearance of strange objects out of nowhere. The claim that one had made a pact with the devil, being troubled by spirits, being tired of living, being uncomfortable, being ugly, believe it or not, being violent, making sound sounds and movements which are bestial like animals. And in the Roman ritual, the ritual that deals with demons, their containment, their castigation, their exorcism, and Roman ritual coalesed in the middle ages. And so they describe several um synenon manifestations. In other words, these things must exist for demon possession to be diagnosed, so to speak. A manifestation of superhuman strength. Speaking in tongues or languages the victim cannot have known. Revelation of knowledge distant or hidden or cult that the victim cannot know. Blasphemous rage, obscene hand gestures using profanity and an aversion to holy symbols, relics, places or water. And position isn't is is bad in Christianity or more precisely in Catholicism. But in a variety of other religions and beliefs and sects and so on, possession is a way to interact and communicate with the supernatural, with the paranormal. And it's not always bad. And sometimes even human beings should help spirits and ghosts and demons um to obtain some goals. So for example in Judaism there is a concept called debuk. Debbuk is a soul which inhabits a victim. But why does it inhabit a victim? A human living victim? Because it has a task to perform on earth or because it has to atone for some sin. So the human inhabited victim is not a victim actually. It's a cry for help and he's supposed to help this spirit um obtain closure and inner peace, make peace with its creator and transition up or down or wherever it's supposed to go. Um, when there is a situation of possession where Satan or some demons take full possession of a body without the consent of the victim, it's usually because this person did something that caused this to happen, opened the gates, as I said, made it possible for for a satanic emanation or influence to enter. Um obsession is also usually involved. It includes sudden attacks of irrational intrusive thoughts. Um usually involving some kind of suicidal ideiation and infiltrating into unconscious and preconcious um visuals like for example dreams. And then there's something called oppression. In oppression there's no loss of consciousness. There's no involuntary action but there is an inner torment. Inner torment which reflects which is reactive reflects a series of misfortunes uh in business uh family nearest health something and his minions the demons they cause external physical pain and they can there's they can infest houses or animals. So they can have an outside manifestation and they can subject a person. There comes a point where some people are so weak, so broken, so damaged, so frightened that they voluntarily submit to Satan or to a demon. And in charismatic or evangelical Christianity, for example, they also believe in demons and they conduct exorcism by groups that are called deliverance ministers or deliverance ministries. And but they believe the evangelicals believe that possession is is coupled with with ineluctible bad human behavior. And so they regard addiction to pornography for example or alcoholism as a form of demon possession. Uh to this very day they consider homosexuality to be a form of demon possession. and even physical manifestations. For example, if you are constantly tired, then you have chronic fatigue syndrome, they would consider it as as demon possession. And so evangelical Protestant creeds and Protestant sects, charismatic, evangelical Christianities and so they begin to make the the transition, the seamless transition between demonology and psychiatry. They they are trying to kind of create a realm, create a territory where both converge, both coales, both are conflated and actually mental health manifestations, certain dysfunctional behaviors, especially if they affect other people in the community. um bad unworthy behaviors, unethical behaviors, criminal antisocial behaviors, impulsive behaviors, defiant behaviors. All these which are typically attributed to psychopathy or narcissism or borderline in these Christianities would also indicate the existence of an agent a supernatural paranormal agent which in induces the person to behave this way but induces him because the person is willing. It's kind of an unholy alliance, an unholy matrimony, um a desecrated matrimony between the person, the perpetrator and the demon. It's like the demon finds a willing ally, an accomplice, a contributor, a collaborator in the unworthy individual. Some individuals therefore are much more open to demon possession according to these Christian creeds because they are already corrupted in and of themselves. In other words, conditions such as narcissistic personality disorder, dissocity disorder, borderline, they would be considered as predispositions. They predispose the individual to be possessed by demons. They are kind of proclivities. They are bad inclinations uh which open the individual wide open to satanic malevolent diabolical influences. In Islam there is quite a taxonomy of of demons. There's gins, shatin, aid and and other types. Ruling over all of them is el the leader of evil spirits. And but Islam is much closer to charismatic and evangelical Christianity than it is to, for example, Catholicism because in Islam, an evil spirit cannot tempt and seduce humans into sin. Unless these humans are already addicted totally to what Islam would call lower desires. These people are addicted to alcohol consumption, alcoholics. They're addicted to sex. They're sex addicts. They are unethical in their in their conduct or misconduct and so on. So Islam agrees with evangelical Christianity that first the first condition, the first step into demonic territory is via unethical conduct. And very often this kind of impulsive, defiant, unethical, antisocial conduct reflects a mental health condition is typical of a mental health condition such as narcissism or psychopathy. So this is the sequence. This is the chain. You're mentally ill. You misbehave. You're possessed by demons. Islam also has exactly like Judaism. Pretty benign spirits, genes. For example, a gene can try to possess an individual because the gene fell in love with the individual or because the gene takes revenge for for someone who hurt him or or or for similar reasons. So, it's much more it's much more humanlike transaction and the gene is very humanike. By the way, there's no trace of gins in the Quran or or even the hadith. Gins are kind of folk folk religion or folk folk entity and and gins are not evil. Some of them are but the vast majority are not and um therefore possession by gin is is not at all like possession by de devils or de demons and this is contrasted to the shatin. The shayatin are always evil. the hadiths, the interpretative texts of the of the Quran which were passed verbally from one generation of scholars to another. So the hadith suggests that demons devils are distinguished from gins in many ways and one of the most critical ways is what they call waswas. Waswas waswas are whispers, voice, internal voice like very similar to introjects in psychology. In psychology, voices of important uh people known as objects for some reason in psychology. So voices of primary objects like mother and father, voices of role models, adult role models when the child grows is growing up, teachers or even influential peers. These voices are internalized. Internalized they continue to operate within the human mind and they are known as introjects. And in in Islam, the Shayatin, the evil spirits, they they are introjected. They are internalized within the human body, within the heart usually because the belief at that time was a the seat of wisdom and thinking and and so on. Emotions definitely was the heart. No one considered the brain of any importance. So the devils, these devils would inhabit the heart. They would establish residence near the heart and they would talk from there. They would whisper devilish whisperings very similar to introjects. And this was this is actually the core possession in Islam. And in this sense, Islam is much closer to our modern perception of psychiatry. Modern perception in psychiatry. So in psychiatry today we believe that the self is constellated in big part from these voices. We believe that in the process of socialization and acculturation separation and individuation all these processes of personal growth and maturation starting in very very early childhood. These voices are very very critical. If they are sadistic, if they are unforgiving, if that then we have an inner critic which which kind of reduces us to to mental illness. If they're benign and benevolent and loving, unconditionally loving and accepting, we grow up to be healthy individuals. And these voices are integrated into our self-concept and into various self states in cluster B personality disorders. In Islam is very similar. These voices can be malevolent. The they they can contain malice and when they do they drive the person to behave in ways which are counterproductive, self-destructive, dysfunctional, very similar to mental illness in the modern conception in psychiatry. In uh Buddhism, demons are confined to hell where they are actually suffering. But when they descend to earth, when when they are encountered, I'm sorry, when they encountered on earth, they're not real in Buddhism. They are a delusion. And so they're called maras. And they their main role is temptation. And you're supposed to overcome them. And they are numerous forms of mara. There are four classes of mara. And they embody emotions which are not processed like greed and hate and delusion, defilement, unh wholesome states. They embody death itself. They embody um they they they serve as kind of simile or metaphor for existence. So existence and death they're considered low lowlevel states and they are somehow allied with these demons who are actually delusional. So existence and death are delusional. And the sensuous realm, the realm of touch and and senses and smell and and they they are also associated with with with demons. Because to be truly liberated and to experience the cycle of rebirth, you need to go through a process of enlightenment which is a release from the physical world and from its sensor from its sensory manifestations. And so the physical world and sensa are demonic in effect. They are desire and temptation. It's another very interesting very interesting uh view and there is even a process in Buddhism where you appease the demon and then he go he says bye-bye and he goes away un unless of course he's still in lockdown we have to check but demons who who are appeased they depart and they go to a different realm where they cannot touch you anymore. Um I don't know how many of you know but in the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 5 2013 the latest edition there is a category for people who believe in demonic possession it's called possessive trance disorder and the the literature literature in psychiatry there were many studies of demonic position in psychiatry because the affinity between demonic possession and certain types of mental health illness or disorders, diseases, the affinity is very clear, very evident, explicit. So for example, we know that that um possession uh symptoms of certain disorders were ascribed to possession. hysteria to rat to rat syndrome epilepsy um schizophrenia conversion disorder and of course dissociative identity disorder in the DSM5 the text that deals with dissociative identity disorders say it says openly I'm quoting from the DSM possession form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as If a spirit supernatural being or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner. So even demon possession, spirit, supernatural beings make an appearance in a classical the Bible of the profession in the DSM5, not as real entities, but as ways to describe certain manifestations of a disorder, dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Why am I mentioning this? I'm mentioning this because I've spent the last 25 years trying to convince colleagues and layman that narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder are post-traumatic conditions that are essentially variants of dissociative identity disorder. And we try to convince people that narcissists and border lines suffer from limited versions, private cases of multiple personality disorder. And so the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 5, it says that the personality states of dissociative identity disorder or self states in borderline, they may be interpreted as possession. In some cultures, spirit possession. Spirit possession in many cultures very often associated with traumatic experiences. We have numerous stories where someone goes through a traumatic experience and then um he is overtaken by a spirit or by a demon or by an alien entity and and so on so forth. Possession experiences very often in in literature in the Middle Ages and again up to the 18th century. Possession experiences are associated with stress, distress, trauma, um painful experiences, hurt, injury, narcissistic injury, narcissistic modification and so on. And there is there is a question here um because in these cultures most dominantly in Asia and Africa people would automatically say ah he's possessed by the demon and then you know nothing to do about it except perhaps some witch doctor or some exorcist from the Vatican or something but they wouldn't bother they wouldn't bother to rule out mental illness by referring the person to a psychiatrist. In some countries in Africa, there's one psychiatrist for the entire population. And in other countries, supposedly western and advanced such as Spain, Italy, United States, there are more people who believe in spirit possession and demon possession, believe it or not, than in the miracles and WS of psychiatry itself. So more people would tend first of all to go to a clergyman to a priest to the church to their community and the psychiatrist or psychological therapist would be a third or fourth or fifth choice and that is bad. That is bad because in many of these cases we actually dealing with psychotic disorders. Even in the case of narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder definitely in some cases of psychopathy, we deal with people who already have psychotic micro episodes. People whose dissociation is so extreme that the personality is totally fragmented. In narcissism, there are two personalities, the false self and the true dilapidated true true self. So the false self and the true self. The same in borderline personality disorder. There's a false self and true self. In psychopathy, the transitions are so abrupt and so impulsive that many people uh compare it to switching. In multiple personality disorder, there's something there. There's some common core of dissociation, some common core of self states which are distinguishable from each other, which resemble very much demon possession. If people are not educated, they don't they wouldn't know. They wouldn't know and and they wouldn't go they wouldn't revert or resort to mental health practitioners who can help because we do have help very effective help for psychosis and alleged demon possessions when we analyze reports of demon possession the vast majority of of which are rejected by the Catholic Church by the way as have nothing these reports have nothing to do with demons. oppositions. So when we study these reports, we discover that actually we are dealing with post-traumatic states or or psychosis. And in specific cultures, we have numerous conditions that mimic demon possession. And some of them are even in the diagnostic and statistical manuals of these countries. For example, in China, the Chinese diagnostic Chinese classification of diseases um contains quite a few of these conditions. I'll mention only two. Amok. Amok is a male specific culturebound syndrome. It's an alternating pattern of dissociation, brooding, intrusive thoughts and violence directed at objects and people. It's provoked by real or imagined criticism or slight. So there's a lot of hypervigilance there and it is accompanied by the secondary ideation, amnesia, automatism and extreme fatigue. Sometimes AMO co- occurs with psychotic with a psychotic episode. This is very reminiscent of narcissistic injury or narcissistic motification followed by narcissistic rage in a process of hypervigilance or paranoid ideation. Anoch is common in Malaysia where it was discovered, in Laos, in the Philippines, in Polynisia where it's called caf or cathode, in papu nuini, in Puerto Rico where it's called ma mald pellea and among the navo native Americans where it's called the I hope I pronouncing remotely correct. Another condition is the shiny. Shinyong is another culturebound syndrome typical to a specific culture and it's in Korea where I worked for a few years. Shinyong is very common there. It's an illness that progresses from general unease, anxiety, somatic complaints like weakness, dizziness, fear, parorexia, parexia means eating disorders, insomnia and gastrointestinal problems. So it starts like this and then it progresses to dissociation. And when dissociation sets in, these people report possession by ancestral spirits. So 25 years ago, I suggested a methodological framework. I compared the narcissist to a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. I'm going to quote quote myself, of course. So I'm going to quote myself an article I had written in 1997. A debate is starting to steer. That was 1997. Today is much more much more evolved. A debate is starting to steer. Is the false self an alter? In other words, is the false self is the true self of a narcissist the equivalent of a host personality in dissociative identity disorder? and is the false self. One of the frag fragmented personalities also known as altars. Actually today my view is is the obverse is exactly the opposite. I think the false self is the host personality and the true self is one of the altars. I'm continuing to quote quote site from the article 1997. My personal opinion is that the false self is a mental construct not a self in the full sense. It is the locus of the fantasies of grandiosity, the feelings of entitlement, omnipotence, magical thinking, omniscience, and magical immunity of the narcissist. It lacks so many elements that it can hardly be called a self. Yungians would say that it's not a constellated self. Moreover, I continue in the article, the false self has no cut off date. Dissociative identity disorder alters alternative personalities. These personalities have a date of inception when they started. They are reactions to a specific trauma, a moment of abuse. The false self is a process, not an entity. It is a reactive pattern and a reactive formation. All taken into account, the choice of words had been poor. The false self is not a self nor is it false. It is very real to the narcissist, more real to the narcissist than his own true self. A better choice would have been abuse his reactive self or something like this. I'm continuing in the article 1997. This is the core of my work. I'm saying that narcissists have vanished and have been replaced by a false self. Again, it's a bad term, not my fault. Right to Winnote or Karnburg. There is no true self in the narcissist. It's gone. The narcissist is a hall of mirrors. But the whole of mirrors itself is an optical illusion created by the mirrors. It's a little like Asher paintings. Malignant personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder is more common than believed today. By the way, this was written in 1997 when everyone thought it's very rare. But I already felt after 2 years of work in the field that it's very common and today we know that about 3% of people have dissociative dissociative diss severe dissociation. Many of them have dissociative identity disorder. Anyhow, so the article said I can I'm saying in the article uh multiple personality disorder dissociative identity disorder is more common than believed. The emotions are the ones to get segregated. The notion of unique, separate, multiple whole personalities is primitive and untrue. Dissociative identity disorder is a continuum. The inner language breaks down into a polyglot chaos. Emotions cannot communicate with each other for fear of the pain that it will evoke and its fatal results. So these emotions are kept apart by various mechanisms. A host or birth personality, a facilitator, a moderator and so on. And here we come to the cr crux of the matter. All personality disorders except narcissistic personality disorder suffer from a modiccom of dissociative identity disorder or incorporated somehow. Only the narcissist does not. This is because the narcissistic solution is to emotionally disappear so thoroughly that not one personality or emotion are left. Hence the tremendous insatiable need of the narcissist for external approval. The narcissist exists only as a reflection, a hive mind. Since the narcissist is forbidden from loving his true self, he chooses to have no self at all. It is not only dissociation. It is a vanishing act. Let me explain this because there's been an evolution in my thinking since 1997. Shockingly, I would disagree with what I had written here. I would today say that both the true self and the false self exist and that in this sense the narcissist is dissociative to the point that he has dissociative identity disorder. But it is true that all the functioning has been relegated to the false self. I'm continuing in the article. I continued in the article. This is why I regard pathological narcissism as the source of all personality disorders. The total pure solution is narcissistic personality disorder. Self-extinguishing, self- apology, totally fake. And then there are variations on the self-hate and perpetuated self- abuse themes. There's histrionic personality disorder, narcissism with sex or body as source of supply, narcissistic supply. There's borderline personality disorder, emotional ability, movement between poles of life wish and death wish and so on. So why are narcissist not prone to suicide? Simply they had died a long time ago. They are the true zombies of the world. If if you read vampire and zombie legends, you will see how narcissistic these creatures are. end of my quote of the quote from my article in 1997. You already see here the seeds of comparing narcissism to supernatural entities such as vampires, zombies or well demons are not mentioned here, but they might as well have been mentioned here. And this is because narcissist the narcissist vanishes as a human being in any meaningful way. It must be stated categorically. If you don't have empathy and you don't have access to your emotions or maybe have if you have only negative emotions in no way that I'm aware of can you be defined as human. You are not human. A person without empathy without emotions is not human in any sense of the word. It's a good simulation of a human. It is it it has resonance tables that enable him to imitate a human. So it's a good mimic it's mimicry. It's mimesis. It's mimemetic. It's a good artificial intelligence creation. It's an alien that takes over. It's any metaphor that you wish. It's a demon. It's but it's not human. Narcissists and psychopaths are not human because they lack these two ultra critical features of humanity. And so this is perhaps why people feel intuitively and counterfactually that narcissists are demonic, that psychopaths are satanic. They're trying desperately. People are trying desperately to explain to themselves. How is it possible to have a human form? How is it possible to mimic perfectly empathy, emotions? How is it possible to give all the right responses to have to possess ostensibly all the right values? How is it possible to analyze accurately situations, real life situations, and give excellent advice? How is possible to do all this if you lack the most critical modules of being human? And so they say, well, this is supernatural. There's something supernatural going on here. This is satanic. That's an imitation. It's it's a facade intended to deceive us and mislead us and tempt us and seduce us. It's the phenomenon of narcissism and psychopathy is so harrowing and so out of of our human daily human experience that we have to resort to archetypes, Yungian archetypes to religious motives and symbols to a proliferation of supernatural entities in a desperate attempt to grasp somehow what is supposedly the essence of this thing that is sitting opposite does smiling, talking, crying, crying, pretending. Is it real? Can a simulation be that convincing? Is something wrong with us? Something wrong with us? Are we perhaps defective? Is something wrong with our empathy? Maybe. I mean, it's so unsettling. And the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori called it the uncanny valley. He said that when robots become totally humanoid android when when they become totally humanlike we're going to feel very uncomfortable around them because we would still feel something off key off note but we won't be able to put a finger on it. It's the same with the narcissist and psychopaths. They're like the super highly sophisticated robots of the future. They they come from the future. They were sent to us in the future. I don't know how to So they're like from the year 2500. They are they are um creatures from Kzvile's singularity. They resemble humans so convincingly, so amazingly well. And yet we know that they are not. We feel I mean healthy people feel normal people neurotypicals they they feel something is missing something is off key something is there's a wrong note there somewhere a false note it's a zas it's a it's an imitation it's uh this brand is is counterfeit but when you when push comes to sharpen you can you explain why they can't no one It's just a feeling, an intuition. So, we regress. We regress to the Middle Ages. We were looking for other types of language to help us because we we experience the world via language. Language creates consciousness. And so, to to create an awareness and consciousness, an interpretation of these creatures, narcissists and psychopaths, we need another different language. The language we have is insufficient. It breaks down. It collapses. And this is how we experience narcissists. But how does a narcissist experience his own life? Narcissist experiences life as a prolonged, incomprehensible, unpredictable, frequently terrifying, deeply saddening nightmare. This is a result of the functional dichotomy fostered by the Narcissist himself, by the way, between his false self and his true self. The true self, the fossilized ashes of the original immature personality. The true self is the one that does the experiencing in normal people. The false self is nothing but a concoction, a figment of the narcissist disorder, a reflection in the narcissist's hall of mirrors, a glint in his eyes. The false self is incapable of feeling, emoting, experiencing. Yet it is fully the master of the psychonamic processes which rage within the narcissist psyche. Narcissis is a volcano. This inner battle between true and false. You see it's a morality play. True and false, good and bad, good and evil, God and Satan. It's binary. It's domous. The narcissist uses uses splitting defense mechanisms to see the world and to idealize and devalue people in rapid succession. But he himself is split. He is splitting raified. This inner battle is so fierce that the true self experiences experiences it as a diffuse though imminent and eminently ominous threat. There's also identity diffusion. Uh typical also of border lines mini mini break. How would you feel if you had this ongoing warfare, conflict, dissonance inside you? You would feel anxiety. The narcissist feels anxiety. He finds himself constantly ready for the next blow, next loss, next calamity. He does things. He acts and he knows he he knows not why he's doing these things. Wherefor he says things, he behaves in certain ways which he knows endanger him, put him in line for punishment. Psychopaths describe their inner experience the same way. Narcissist hurts people around him, breaks the law, violates accepted morality. I don't know what he knows that he is in the wrong and sometimes he feels ill at ease on the rare moments that he does feel. As opposed to psychopaths, some narcissists are capable of remorse, regret, shame and guilt. Although it has more to do with being found out, losing face psychopath is utterly incapable of any. The narcissist sometimes wants to stop, but he doesn't know how. Gradually, he is estranged from himself. He's possessed in a way by some kind of demon. He feels like a puppet on invisible mental strings. The narcissist resents this feeling of course. He wants to rebel. He is repelled by this part in him with which he is not acquainted. So in his efforts to exercise this devil from his soul, the narcissist dissociates, cuts off, splits, vanishes, gone. We you've all seen this vacant look, vacant look in his eye. The eyes are the windows to the soul. You've all seen the ve vacated soul where a soul should have been. There's only deep space. You see it through the eyes. An eerie sensation sets in and pervades the psyche of the narcissist. In such moments at times of crisis, of danger, of depression, of failure, of narcissistic injury, not to mention narcissistic mortification, which is the ultimate, the narcissist feels that he's watching himself from outside. This is called depersonalization. This is not an out of body experience. Don't cast it in any supernatural terms. It's not an astral astral body or whatever. Narcissist doesn't really exit his body. It is just that he assumes involuntarily the position of a spectator, a polite observer mildly interested in the whereabouts of one Mr. narcissist and it's the feeling is very much like watching a movie. The illusion is not complete. You know it's a movie. It's not precise also. But you know watching a movie involves dissociation. You dissociate the rest of the world when you watch a movie. And this detachment continues for as long as the narcissist's egoistonic behavior persists. For as long as the crisis goes on and he feels uncomfortable. For as long as the narcissist cannot face who he is, what he's doing, the consequences of his actions. In that moment, he dissociates, cuts off, detaches, and and and then he is an actor in a movie, the movie of his life. Since this is the case most of the time, the narcissist gets used to seeing himself in the role of the protagonist, usually the hero of a motion picture or of a novel. It also sits well with his grandiosity, of course, with his fantasies. And sometimes a narcissist talks about himself in the third person singular. So, so Donald Trump calls himself Trump. Sometimes he calls his other narcissistic self by a different name. That's also common. The narcissist described his life, its events, its ups and downs, vicissitudes, pains, elation, disappointments. He describes all these an ensemble of of things that constellate into a coherent cohesive life in normal healthy people. He describes all these in the most remote, professional and cultly analytical voice as though he were describing with a modicum of involvement the life of some exotic insect. And if you read Kafka's metamorphosis where the protagonist wakes up one morning and finds out that he had turned into a cockroach. Mind you, there are echoes of this because the the guy wakes up and to his horror, he's a cockroach, but he doesn't freak out. He starts to analyze his cockroachess, you know. So now what the Narcissist does, Narcissist watches himself, derealizes, depersonalizes and dissociates of course watches himself from outside and then as though he were some scientist observing a very exotic form of life. He starts to sort of analyze, synthesize, offer synoptic views, make projections as though it's none of his business, as though he were talking about someone else. and that someone else is the false self. The metaphor of life as a movie, gaining control by writing a scenario, by inventing a narrative, is therefore not a modern invention. Caveman narcissists have probably done the same. Neanderthal narcissists. Some narcissist are still Neanderthal, but this is only the external superficial facet of the disorder. Don't forget this. The crux of the problem is that the narcissist really feels this way. He's not only showing off. Look how sua I am. Look how detached. Look how coldheaded. It's the way he feels. He actually experiences his life as as though it had it belongs to someone else. His body is dead weight or as an instrument in the service of some entity. He his actions, his deeds is amoral. Not immoral. Not immoral, but amoral. He cannot be judged for something he didn't do, can he? It's not him. It's not he. So that's why narcissist are very shocked when they are arrested or punished. They didn't. Narcissist doesn't feel that he had done this. Someone else did. The false self. Arrest the false self. What do you want from me? As time passes, the narcissist accumulates a mountain of mishaps, conflicts unresolved, pains well hidden, abrupt separations, bitter disappointments, losses, losses, losses, losses. He's subjected to a constant barrage of social criticism and condemnation. He rejects life. He destroys life. He he squanders every opportunity. He's ashamed. He's fearful. He knows that something is wrong. But there is no correlation between his cognition and his emotions. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to do. He cannot form what we call in psychology sheas. Cannot form a scheme. He cannot unite some emotion with some cognition with some value with some belief. The some theory of others, theory of mind, theory of the world. It's it's all over the place. It's like some improvised explosive device keeps detonating and doesn't allow him to integrate. So he just wants out of it. He's exhausted. He's depleted. He prefers to run away and hide as he did when he when he when he was a child. Only this time he hides behind another another self, the false self. People what people do they reflect to the narcissist this mask that he had created until even the narcissist comes to believe that it exists. He comes to acknowledge its dominance. He forgets the truth. He knows no better because so many people had told him had confirmed and affirmed and reflected the false self that he says well maybe you know maybe the false self exists and I don't. The narcissist is only dimly aware of the decisive battle which rages inside him. The dissolence, the unresolved dissonance, or as Freud used to call it, the unresolved conflict and the archaic wound or as John Lkar calls it, the vispot, vulnerability spot. Narcis feels threatened, very sad, very suicidal. But there seems to be no outside cause of all this makes it even more mysteriously menacing. You see where I'm leading with this? This leads to demon possession. Because if you are religiously inclined, if you're superstitious, if you're conspiracy theorist, you have a conspiracy conspiracism um personality trait, if you are paranoid and have per secondary delusions and paranoid ideation, if you have all this, it's one short step from this to the supernatural and paranormal. This and this is especially true by the way if you live in certain cultures and societies where which legitimize legitimize uh talk of demon possession wizardry magic and so on. uh these society in these societies and cultures if you say I've been possessed by a demon or I've been cursed I've been cursed by my enemy uh my enemy put a hex on me put a spell on me in some cultures and societies they would mock you or worse administer some very powerful antisycchotic medication in other cultures and societies they would refer you to the local do witch doctor the local spellcaster local fortune teller and soothsayer to take off the spell or to cast out the demons depends on. So culture and society are very important in what kind of language is legitimized, what metaphors can be used to describe inner states. This dissolence, these negative emotions, these nagging anxieties, they transform the narcissist's motion picture solution into a permanent one. It becomes a feature of the narcissist's life. Whenever he is confronted by an emotional threat or by an existential threat, the narcissist retreats into this haven, this mode of coping, he enter, he re-enters the movie. He becomes a two-dimensional character and no one can hurt a cell character. You know, you are impregnable, immune. The narcissist relegates responsibility and submissively assumes a passive role. He who is not responsible cannot be punished. runs the subst subtext of this capitulation. The narcissist is thus conditioned to annihilate himself both in order to avoid emotional pain and in order to bask in the glow of his impossibly grandio fantasies. And the narcissist does all this with fantastic zeal, fanatic zeal, with efficacy. Prospectively he assigns his very life to the false self. decisions to be made, judgments to be passed, agreements to be reached. Not my business. Let the false self take care of it. False self is like a kind of combination uh super efficacious butler and uh tyrannical master. Retroactively, the narcissist reinterprets his past life in a manner consistent with the current needs of the false. It is no wonder that there is no connection between what the narcissist did feel in a given period of his life or in relation to a specific event and the way that he sees or describes or remembers these late later on. The narcissist may describe certain occurrences or phases in his life as tedious, painful, sad, burdening. Even though in reality what had happened is that he he had experienced these periods, these occurrences, these phases, these events entirely differently. At the time he was very happy. The same retroactive coloring occurs with regards to people. The narcissist completely distorts the way he had regarded certain people, the way he had felt about these people. His inclination is directly and fully derived from the requirements of his false self during the process of recasting and rewriting and reframing and inventing new narratives. In other words, a person can be all good, wonderful, perfect, brilliant, beautiful, amazing, gorgeous, and the day after the exact opposite of all these things. Idiot, ugly, this that. Why? Because the false self had rewritten the script overnight. And you need you need to change your view of that person. So the these are the transitions between idealization and and devaluation. In some the narcissist does not occupy his own soul nor does he inhabit his own body. There's no continuity there. It's discontinuity in body raified. Narcissist is a servant of an apparition of a reflection of an ego function to please and appease his master the false self. The narcissist sacrifices to the false self his true self his own life. It's human sacrifice. From that moment onward, the narcissist lives vicariously through the good offices or the bad offices of the false self. And throughout all this mess, the narcissist's personal biography. Throughout all this mess, the narcissist feels detached, alienated, estranged from his self, even from his false self. He constantly harbors the sensation that he is watching a movie with a plot of which he has but little control and to which he is not privy. It is with certain interests even be amusement or I don't know fascination that he watches this film still he watch he is watching only that he's just watching he's a mere passive observer the narcissist also engages in permanent or willian alterations to the emotional content rewriting you know history the content which accompanies accompanies certain events and people in his life he constantly rewrites it He has like 200 versions of of the same same event, same love affair, same marriage. He rewrites his emotional history according to instructions emanating from the false self. Thus, not only does the narcissist relinquish control of his future life, the movie, he gradually loses ground to the false self in the battle to preserve the integrity and genuinize genuiness of his past experiences. The false self gobbles up not only the narcissist but even his memory. And because there's no identity without memory, the narcissist loses his identity. Uh identity dispersion or diffusion or erosion eroded. He's eroded by these two processes and the narcissist gradually disappears and is replaced by his by his disorder to the fullest extent. And of course all this can happen also um as a result of medical conditions. For example, many of these phenomena occur when there's traumatic brain injury. And this is why in some cultures and societies in some periods of uh in history people with brain injury traumatic brain injury or brain problems in the brain problems with brain biochemistry. There were schizophren paranoids brain problems. These people were described as demon-possessed or alternatively as prophets with privileged access to supernatural divine voices. Much closer to our period, Phineas Gage was a 25-year-old construction foreman. He lived in Vermont in the 1860s. While working on a railroad bed, he packed powdered explosives into a hole in the ground using camping iron. The powder heated and blew up in his face. The tamping iron that he had been using rebounded and pierced the top of his skull, ravaging the frontal loes. Uh 8 years later, his doctor, a guy aptly named Harlon, reported the changes to Phineas Gage's personality following the accident. The doc, the good doctor says, "Fineas Gage became fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his customs, manifesting but little deference to his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice, when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinently obstinate, yet capriccious and vacasillating, devising many plans for for future coop devising many plans for future operation. which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for other plans appearing more physible. His mind was radically changed so that his friends and acquaintances said he was no longer Gage. In other words, the brain injury turned Phineas Gage into a psychopathic narcissist. Rewind and listen again. It's a psychopathic narcissist. Similarly startling transformation has been have been recorded among soldiers with penetrating head injuries suffered in World War I. Same exactly they became narcissist psychopaths. Orbital medial wounds made people pseudo psychopathic. I'm quoting from the literature grandio euphoric disinhibited purile. When the dorsal lateral convexities were damaged, the the soldiers affected became lethargic and apathetic and so they were called pseudo depressed. A a doctor by the name of Kishwint noted that many had both syndromes. They were both psychopathic and depressed. I don't want to go into this but there is a very strong affinity between narcissism and depression to the point that at some stage scholars and others myself included suggested that narcissism might be a depressive disorder. Back to the issue in a study titled gray meta abnormalities in patients with narcissistic personality disorder published in June 2013 in the journal of psychiatric research. The authors conclude relative to the control group, narcissistic personality disorder patients had smaller um gross matter volume in the left anterior insula. Independent of group gross matter gray matter volume, I'm sorry, in the left anterior insula was positively related to self-reported emotional empathy. Complimentary wholeb brain analysis yielded smaller gray matter volume in front of paralyic brain regions comprising the rostral and medium singulate cortex as well as the dorsalateral and medial parts of the preffrontal cortex. Wow, it's quite a mouthful. Here we provide the first empirical evidence for structural abnormalities in front paralytic brain regions of patients with narcissistic personality disorder. The results are discussed in the context of narcissistic personality disorders patients restricted ability for emotional empathy. The diagnostic and statistical manual is clear. The brain injured may acquire traits and behaviors typical of certain personality disorders, but head trauma never results in a full-fledged personality disorder. And so it says in the DSM in the general diagnostic criteria for personality disorder if the enduring pattern is not due not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance for example given a drug of abuse a medication or a general medical condition such as head trauma in my book malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited yes I'm the author I had written it is It is conceivable though that a third unrelated problem causes chemical imbalances in the brain. Metabolic diseases such as diabetes, pathological narcissism, and other mental health syndromes. There may be a common cause, a hidden common denominate, perhaps, I don't know, a group or array of genes. Certain medical conditions can activate the narcissistic defense mechanism. Chronic ailments are likely to lead to the emergence of narcissistic traits or narcissistic personality style. Traumas such as brain injuries have been known to induce states of mind akin to full-blown personality disorders. Such narcissism though is reversible tends to be amilarated or disappear altogether when the underlying medical problem does. Other disorders like bipolar disorder, mania depression in the past. They are characterized by mood swings that are not brought about by external events. Endogenous mood swings, not exogenous. But the narcissist mood swings are strictly the results of external events as he perceives in interperson of course. But phenomena which are often associated with narcissistic personality disorder such as depression or obsessive compulsive disorder. These phenomena are treated with medication. Some indications are that SSRIs such as fluoxitine known as Prozac might have adverse effects if the primary disorder is narcissistic personality disorder. The sometimes lead to to this rotten syndrome which includes agit agitation and exacerbates the rage attacks typical of the narcissist. The use of SSRI is associated at times with delirium and the emergence of a manny face and even with psychotic micro episodes. This is not the case with the heteroscyclic MAO and mood stabilizers such as lithium. Blockers and inhibitors are regularly applied without discernible adverse side effects. As far as NPD is concerned, not enough is known about the biochemistry of NPD. There seems to be some vague link to serotonin, but no one knows for sure. There isn't a reliable non-intrusive method to measure brain and central nervous system serotonin levels anyhow. So it is mostly guesswork at this stage. And so we have gone a long way in this video. We started with demon possession. Then we I tried to show the the equivalent in mental illness and how certain mental illness can be easily perceived as controlled from the outside which would be conducive to the perception of demon position possession in some cultures um uh societies and periods. And now I want to finish by by discussing time. Time is a quality of the physical world or at least of the way we perceive the physical world. And many narcissists do not feel a part of reality. They feel unreal. They feel like as though they are fake faximiles of tangible normal people. And this dents their perception of time and causality. That the narcissist possesses a prominent false self as well as a suppressed and dilapidated true self is common knowledge. Yet how intertwined and inseparable are these two? Do they interact at all? How do they influence each other? What behaviors can be attributed squarely to one or to the other of these two protagonist? Moreover, does the false self assume traits and attributes of the true self in order to deceive the narcissist himself or others? Many researchers and scholars and therapists try to grapple with the void, the emptiness at the core of the narcissist and the borderline. The common view is that the remnants of the true self are so oified, shredded, atrophied, cowed into submission and repressed that for all practical purposes the these remnants of the true self are functionless and useless. In treating the narcissist, the therapist often tries to invent a healthy self rather than build upon the distorted wreckage strewn across the narcissist psyche. So one way of looking at it is that what used to be called demon was parental influence in early childhood. This demon sort of demon-l like thing influence entered the narcissist fractured the narcissist fragmented the narcissist false self was created which is of demonic character in many ways. It's an alien kind of spirit or ghost whatever you want to call it. And then the therapist role is to get rid of all these all this debris, all this floatsome and jetum and reconstruct from scratch another entity, another functional constellated self. But would that not be also an artificial creation, a keen I don't know, to some computer program, some robot, or in medieval terms, some demon. One of the rare glimpses of true self that the unfortunates who interact with narcissists keep reporting. Many victims of narcissis keep saying he has a he has a inner child. I he has a true self. When he's in crisis or when he's sad or when he's broken I can see through him can see someone is there. If the pathological narcissistic element is but one of many other disorders the true self may well have survived. In other words, if there's pronounced coorbidity, for example, if narcissism goes hand in hand with borderline in a specific individual, the borderline side may have preserved some empathy, some access to emotions, however disregulated, and in this sense has infused the true self with some life, with some energy. Gradations and shades of narcissism occupy the narcissistic spectrum. Narcissistic traits overlay are often co-diagnosed with other disorders. Coorobidity. Some people have a narcissistic personality but not narcissistic personality disorder. This distinction is very important. A person may well appear to be a narcissist but is not in the strict psychiatric sense of the word. In a full-fledged narcissist, the false self imitates the true self. And to do this artfully and successfully, the false self deploys two mechanisms. The first one is reinterpretation. It causes the narcissist to reinterpret certain emotions and reactions in a flattering true self-compatible light. A narcissist may for instance interpret fear as compassion. If I hurt someone, I fear, for example, an authority figure. I may feel bad afterwards. I may interpret my discomfort as empathy and compassion. To be afraid is humiliate, but to be compassionate is commendable and earns me social acceptance and understanding. Freud described similar processes and he called them sublimatory processes, sublimatory channels or sublimation. And the second mechanism the false self uses to appear to be the true self is emulation. The narcissist is possessed of an uncanny ability to psychologically penetrate other people called empathy. Often this gift is abused and put at the service of the narcissist control freakery and sadism. The narcissist uses called empathy liberally to annihilate the natural defenses of his victims by faking unprecedented almost inhuman insight and empathy. And this capacity is coupled with the narcissist's ability to frighteningly imitate emotions and their attendant behaviors. The narcissist possesses resonance tables, correlates, correlations. He keeps records of every action, every reaction, every atterance, every consequence, every datim provided by others regarding their state of mind, state of mind and their emotional makeup. He sort of collects, he hoards observations. Uh she was sad, she was crying. So if people are sad, they're crying. So if I want to fake sadness, if I want to imitate sadness, I have to cry. From these, he then constructs a set of formulas which often result in impeccably and eerily accurate renditions of emotional behavior. And this could be enormously deceiving. Another source of belief that the narcissist is demonpossessed because in medieval lore well into the 18th century, one of the distinguishing hallmarks and features of demons was their ability to imitate humans so deceptively and so perfectly that no one could tell the difference except highly trained people of the church, experts from the church. We have no church anymore. We have no religion anymore. God is gone and left us to our own devices. We at the mercy of narcissists and psychopaths and they are at the mercy of their own creations. The false self and the false self is merciless, ruthless and relentless. God save us all. And now goodbye from me. During the devaluation phase of the shared fantasy, it is very common for both parties to experience hallucinations, sensory misperceptions, misapprehensions, and misattributions. Now these hallucinations are the outcome of what we call psychotic micro episodes. The evaluation phase is exceedingly stressful. It triggers anxiety. It triggers a re-evaluation of one's sense of selfworth and self-esteem. Um reality testing is put under torsion and pressure and very often crumbles. So both parties de develop impaired reality testing. The whole situation is nightmarish, surrealistic and hallucinations are one way of trying to make sense of what it is that is happening. My name is Sambakin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited. I'm a professor of clinical psychology. Now, you know the famous alleged phenomenon of black eyes, that's a hallucination. Or his face changed and became demonic. That's a hallucination. Or my abuser or my intimate partner even smelled different. That's a hallucination. Hallucinations are force sensory perceptions that have a compelling sense of reality despite the absence of any external stimulus. Hallucinations affect all the senses but auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations and allactory smell related hallucinations are the most common. Now, hallucinations as I said are typically a symptom of a psychotic disorder or a psychotic break or a psychotic micro episode. In schizophrenia, patients with schizophrenia have a lot of hallucinations. But hallucination can also result from other factors, substance abuse, neurological abnormalities, sickness, and as I said, extreme stress, rejection, shame, humiliation, anxiety, deterioration in the sense of selfworth and self-esteem, lack of safety, a sense of impending doom, threat, and menace. The whole situation is outlandish, alien, nightmarish and surrealistic. Under these conditions, some people with a weaker constitution, shall we say, develop psychosis but very brief psychosis, psychotic micro episode. And during these micro episodes, which could last anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. During these micro episodes, they mispersceive the the partner. The narcissist mispersceives mispersceives the partner in his shared fantasy and the partner in the shared fantasy mispersceives the narcissist. It is important to distinguish hallucinations from illusions and both from delusions. Illusions are misrepresentations of real sensory stimuli. Delusions are beliefs. Beliefs in the face of contrary contrary evidence. Hallucinations have nothing to do with reality. So when the intimate partner of the narcissist or the friend of the narcissist or anyone involved with the narcissist in the shared fantasy has to undergo the excruciating hurtful anguish uh ridden process of devaluation when the intimate partner is converted into a persary object becomes an enemy devalued when there's a transition from ideal realization to devaluation. This sometimes this stress, this tension, this conflict are too much and then the partner the is perceived as the source of the aggression, the source of the frustration. The narcissist, intimate partner perceives the narcissist as frustrating, justly perceives the narcissist as frustrating, as aggressive. And so in her mind she converts the narcissist into a demonic entity into a devilish emanation. Um he even smells different. His eyes turned black, his face contorted and became demonic. But why does this happen? Why do partners in the shared fantasy react this way to the narcissist inexurable cycle of idealization devaluation? Remember that the narcissist idealizes and devalues because he is reenacting early childhood conflicts with his biological mother of origin. Has nothing to do with you. This is a process that is utterly automatic, compulsive, emanates from the inside, immune to external stimuli and cues. Even your presence is not recognized. You're merely an internal object. Freud called it repetition compulsion. Anyhow, why does this happen? Why do partners react with microcsychosis or pseudocysis to these stresses and so on? because they are no longer adults. Within the shared fantasy, the intimate partner is actually a child. The intimate partner is regressed to infancy. Now, why is that? Because of the idealization and devaluation. In the shared fantasy, both partners idealize each other and then both partners devalue each other. But in order to idealize the partner, one needs to accept the partner in a parental role. The partner becomes a substitute or surrogate parent, usually a mother. That's my principle of dual motherhood. Both partners become mothers to each other and both partners become children to each other, each other's children. So co-idalization and code devaluation by the way which is also an infantile process they regress both sides of the equation. They regress the narcissist and they regress the intimate partner and they become infants babes in the wood their children. Now why is that important? Because in early childhood in infancy the child misattributes sensor the child misattributes sensory inputs. The child sees of course child hears the child smells but the child is not aware of the full panopoly of manifestations of the external world. The child is aware dimly of the existence of mother a bit later the existence of father and and its own existence. And so when the child is bombarded by sensory stimuli information from the environment in the form of auditory input, visual input or factory input. The child doesn't know where this is coming from. He doesn't know to what or to whom to attribute this sensor this sensory information this sensory input. He doesn't know what to do with it. He says who is this coming from? Is it coming from mother? Is it coming from myself? Is it coming from uh our combination, our symbiosis, our merger and fusion? The child is very confused initially. This is typical of the first few months of life, 6 months, maybe up to 12 months. The child is very very confused with regards to sensor input from the environment mediated via the senses. And so the child misattributes the sensor. In many respects, the child in the first few months of life is psychotic. is the child is unable to tell the difference between internal and external out there and in here and outside and inside. And so the child often mistakes sensory information, information mediated via the senses, often mistakes these bits and pieces of information and considers them coming from the inside. Considers them internal or sometimes the child considers these external correctly but misattributes them. He thinks the noise is coming from mother. the smell is mother's smell when actually it's not. So sensory misattribution in infancy and because the participants in the shared fantasy are regressed to infancy it is very difficult for them to manage sensory information, sensory data, sensory stimuli, sensory cues. Very difficult for them to manage these. very difficult for them to attribute these appropriately to the correct sources and consequently the outcome is illusions and hallucinations when sensory inputs are mispersceived when they come from the outside and internal psychological processes are mispersceived as sensory inputs in a way what happens here is that the introject the introjects the internal voices and the internal processes are mispersceived and mistaken for external sensory inputs. the infantilized partner in the shared fantasy. And of course, the narcissist who is constantly infantilized, but definitely the infantilized partner in the shared fantasy mistakes the voices of introjects, visual cues, internal visual cues, memories for example, mistakes them for external for input information and data coming from the outside. And so this creates the ground for hallucinations. When the intimate partner says my abuser even smells different, what she is saying actually is the intraject of my abuser is undergoing a transformation. A transformation that is frightening and incomprehensible to me. When she says his eyes turned black and his face contorted and became demonic, what she's saying actually is I perceive now the introject of my abuser. I perceive the internal object that represents my abuser as per secondary, as evil, as demonic, as an enemy. And so this induces via the process of sensory misattribution. This induces to believe the belief that these internal convictions, these internal processes, these internal voices are not internal. They are actually external and they're happening in reality. It's a form of introject projection if you wish. The introject is projected outward and attributed or misattributed to the narcissist or to the intimate partner. So this is the groundwork. This lays the groundwork for hallucinations. There's another process involved and it is sin sinusesthesia. Sesthesia um or synthesia um is an interesting condition. It's a condition in which stimulation of one sense generates a sim simultaneous sensation in another sense. These are conccommittent sensations and they are automatic. They're not intentional. They're not controllable. They're not conscious and they're they're highly efficient. They're vivid and they're consistent over time. So originally susthesas senesthesias depending on the country were believed to be asymmetric but birectional kind of associations which are not symmetric but two-way associations. Either sensation could induce the other and and so on so forth. Now there are more than 50 different types of sesthesia. Most common are what is known as graphim color sinthesia in which someone sees colors when viewing letters. So when someone is is presented with numbers on a page they see colors. When someone is exposed to words known clinically as graffines they see colors words on a printed page. There's also time space anesthesia when the person experiences the duration of time, months, days, hours, other units of time as occupying specific spatial locations, locations in space. So for example, January 30th is 30° to the left of January 29th. Other types include mirror touch sesthesia. A person is watching another individual being touched and that person feels a tactile sensation in their own body as if they are being touched. There's lexical gustatory synthesia or word gustatory sesthesia, word taste synthesia in which individuals experience flavors. They experience tastes when they hear certain words. about 5% of people have some form of this neurological blending or misattribution or misconnection or misjunction of the senses. Now there are various explanations offered for the phenomenon. Um there's a theory called the cross activation theory and it proposes that sinostthesia stems from increased connectivity between neighboring sensory cortical areas as a result of incomplete developmental pruning of sinapses. There is a disinhibited feedback theory that proposes that sinusesthesia rises arises when the feedback that develops post-natally after birth from higher cortical areas onto lower sensory cortical areas is too weak to inhibit effects from connections between these sensory areas and so on and so forth. There are various forms of senesthesia. As I said, there's chromatic audition. Chromatic audition is a type of senesthesia where color sensations are experienced where sounds are heard. This is also known as phop phonopsia. There's chromosesthesia. Chromosesthesia is a type of sesthesia where in which perception of non-visual stimuli I don't know sounds, tastes, uh smells odors. This sensation is accompanied by color sensations. Now, strictly speaking, chromosia is not a conscious juxtaposition of two different sense perceptions. The two perceptions coincide as responses to the same stimulus. So, a musical note may be consistently experienced as blue and this is known as pseudo chrom chrommo chromoses. Now phonism is a form of senesthesia in which a sensation of hearing is affected through another sense by something that is seen, smelled, tasted or felt. So as you as you see there are numerous forms of synthesia. I think sesthesia is involved in the devaluation phase of the shared fantasy. I think there are two processes at play. The partner in the shared fantasy who is being devalued is an infant. She has been regressed into infancy by the abuser or by the narcissist. As an infant, she's unable to tell apart the sources of sensory inputs. She gets very confused. She misattributes information from the environment, data, stimuli. She misattributes them. And this leads to illusions and uh to illusions in in the case of in the devaluation phase. Similarly, because the partner is infantilized, because the partner is regressed, she um projects her internal processes, her introjects, the voices in her mind, images, memories. She projects them outwards. She confuses internal with external. She believes the things that are happening in her mind are actually happening outside which is a great definition of a hallucination. This process is known as hyperrelexivity in psychosis. All in all, the partner undergoes a psychotic micro episode. a very brief period of psychosis in reaction to extreme stress, tension, humiliation, anxiety, shaming, rejection and abandonment. Now the second process is synthesia. I think what happens is the partner um conflates sensory inputs. The partner synthesizes data, stimuli, and information from the outside in a way that triggers other stimuli and cues and and data inside. So there is it's not classical synthesia in the sense that it's not a color that provokes uh sound or a sound that provokes a color or whatever. It's synthesia across the divide between internal and external. When the intimate partner within the shared fantasy, when the friend within the shared fantasy, when a when a participant in the shared fantasy is exposed to adverse, hurtful, humiliating, um, dangerous, threatening input and stimuli from the outside, mediated usually via the obnoxious personality of the abuser or the narcissist. When the the partner in the shared fantasy comes across these adverse stimuli, they usually connect these external stimuli to internal stimuli. And so this gives rise to sensations, sensory input, sensor that are actually not ex external but internal. So if the abuser if the abuser provides an external stimulus that is perceived as um threatening as as difficult as hurtful external stimulus that is best avoided. This triggers in the intimate partner another stimulus internal stimulus. It's a form of defense actually. It's converting the external stimulus which is unbearable and intolerable into an internal stimulus that is controllable. So the abuser's voice would trigger internally an alactory change, a change in the perception of smell. As the abuser verbally abuses you, you may suddenly believe or convince yourself that his smell has changed. As the abuser challenges you, threatens you, humiliates you, shames you, etc., This external input, this sensory input would be converted internally into an image, a v a visual stimulus and you would convince yourself, you would hallucinate that his eyes are becoming black or that his face is becoming demonic. This is synthesia but across external internal the external internal divide. So we have regression, regression and senesthesia. When you put the two together, we have psychosis albeit limited in time and hallucination as to sensory inputs as to sensor misinterpretation of senses. wrong visual or factory, auditory and in very rare cases tactile misinterpretations and misattributions of what's happening. And this enhances and increases the sur realistic dreamlike not to say nightmarish quality of the devaluation and discard phase of the shared fantasy. I'm not quite sure why. Probably in my capacity as the devil. People keep asking me, "What do I think about exorcism?" Well, here is what I think about exorcism. I think it's a successful form of psychotherapy intended to treat people who should be diagnosed with psychotic disorders and instead are diagnosed with demon possession. I think exorcism is beneficial. I think exorcism is successful. I think it's just another form of psychotherapy, a treatment modality. So does does that mean that I think or believe that demons exist? Of course not. Demons no more exist than for example the ego. No one has captured an ego. No one has spoken to an ego. Present company accepted. No one has ever measured an ego or you know ego is a metaphor. Ego is a language element. So is the super ego. So is the id. So is the shadow. So is the unconscious. These are not real things. They are metaphors. They are simileies. They are their allegorories. They are language elements. They're narratives. And the same applies to the religious narrative which involves angels and genes and demons and gods. These are just different languages. But both languages, clinical psychology and religion, describe the same dynamics, internal psychological processes, psychonamics. They describe the very same occurrences and turbulences within the human soul or psyche or mind or consciousness or unconscious. All of these, of course, are just literary um devices and artifacts. They're not real. And so things are happening inside us. We are sometimes aware of these things and sometimes we're not aware of these things. These are processes that are sometimes inexurable and sometimes stoppable, sometimes out of control and sometimes the outcome of external circumstances, environments, predicaments. vicissitudes, exigencies and so on. But things are happening inside. There's no debate. There's no argument about this because everyone experiences this internal reality. And so religious you religions use one vocabulary. God, angels, demons, exist and so on. Psycho clinical psychology uses another vocabulary. And the two vocabularies can different can definitely be mapped onto each other. We could construct a dictionary. For example, demon possession would be translated from religion to clinical psychology as psychotic disorder. Okay? It's a language. These are languages. Move on. Nothing to see here. Nothing to write home about. But why do I perceive exorcism as a successful treatment modality as a form of psychotherapy that's been exercised for thousands of years perfected and now is very uh efficacious in treating the more extreme forms of psychosis and some types of major depressions and so on. Why? This is the topic of today's video and a propo exorcism and demons between May 22nd and May 25th in Scopia, the beautiful capital of the Republic of North Macedonia. I, Sam Baknim, am going to give a free seminar. Is the free seminar free? You bet. No payment, no entrance fee, nothing. just come grab a seat and listen, observe the show. And so, three days, three and a half days actually with me in Scopia free of charge seminar on evidence-based healing and recovery from narcissistic abuse. If you want to learn more, go to the description and write to me. I'll reserve a seat for you and send you additional information. back to the demons of this earth and exorcism to the dark side, the shadow, the part of you that would have been considered in ancient morality and ethics and religion evil. We all tend, we all have an evil side. We all have a dark side. We all have a shadow side if you wish to use Jung's words this set of complexes. And some of us um repress this side. Some of us shunt it out of awareness and out of consciousness. Bottle it up, contain it, and then ignore it. Pretend that it's not there. And some of us cope with it head on. Try to confront it. Try to reframe it. Try to somehow get rid of it. Be be the case as it may. All of us have this side. All of us represent a living talking morality play where our good side is fighting it out with our evil side. We human beings are the raification, the personification of a battle between light and darkness, between good and evil. This is not the language of clinical psychology. Of course, this is the language of moral studies, the language of religion, but still it doesn't render it less applicable and less valid. This battle definitely is taking place day in and day out in each and every one of us. And sometimes the forces of darkness, psychotic disorders, use any language which makes you feel comfortable, demons, I don't care. Sometimes these elements in us take over. Sometimes, especially when the personality is rigid, incapable of adaptation, there is a break or a schism or a fracture, a fragmentation, which allows these forces to emerge through the cracks, if you wish, through this, through the chasms. It's like fault lines in an earthquake. They emerge the same way lava emerges from a volcano. Then they take take over. The more rigid the personality, the more mentally ill the person. Mental illness is another word, another phrase to describe rigidity. And this rigidity doesn't allow the individual to cope with internal dynamics in an adaptive way to transform himself or herself to somehow mitigate phenomena such as anxiety and depression and phobias and terrors and and so on fantasy. So when the personality is rigid, inflexible, it is unable to respond to changing internal circumstances. And this can give rise to a hostile takeover of the person by forces which should have been balanced by other forces within a kaleidoscopic everchanging arrangement. uh meeting of the minds of the meeting of self states. This phenomena therefore of what used to be called demon possession, what we call today psychotic illnesses, depressive illnesses, they occur in people who are predisposed to mental illness and mental health disorders. People whose personality is rigid and again personality is just a language element. There's no such thing. It's not real. It's not more real than demons. It's just the way we organize reality, the way we make sense of it. It's a hermeneutic principle, personality, and it is an organizing principle. And it is a language artifact, a language element. And so when there is this rigidity and inability to respond in real time to an incipient imminent attack by the dark side, then you're taken over. You are consumed. You're subsumed by your shadow, by your demons, by whatever you want to call it. And it is then that the real battle starts between what used to be called good and evil. We could say today between restorative forces, forces that restore and forces that deplete, self-destructiveness and self-defeat and the wish to exist and to live in happiness and contentment. This battle is ongoing, but sometimes one of the sides takes over and it's usually the dark side. It is at this at this point that exorcism comes into the picture. In exorcism, there is an interesting inversion of our western modern perception of psychotherapy. Because in exorcism, the therapist is active. The patient is passive. In modern western treatment modalities and psychotherapies, it is the therapist who is passive and the patient is active. Where whereas in exorcism, it's the other way around. And when the patient is passive, inert immobilized, deactivated, disabled, a mere observer, it is at that point that the patient becomes useless. This passivity, newly acquired passivity within the performance known as exorcism, renders the patient useless to his or her demons, his or her dark side, his or her shadow. And because the patient is no longer useful, no longer helpful, no longer able to collude and collaborate with his or her demons, they just go away looking for more cooperative and useful host. It is a utilitarian equation. By altering the patient, by modifying the patient, by rendering the patient a kind of inert passive object, the demons don't find the patient of any interest any longer and they depart. Again, to remind you, there are no such things as demons. These are language elements. The idea is that the hyper kinetic state of the patient, the patient's if you wish ADHD, metaphorical ADHD, the patient's inability to settle down, to reach an internal consensus to somehow calm down the patient's um exaggerated, hyperbolic, erratic, stochastic internal psychonamics. The idea is that these give rise to illnesses and disorders and disturbances of the mind. And that if we were to reduce this hypercinis, if we were to render the patient less kinetic, more inert this would have a calming, beneficial, benevolent effect or impact on the mental illness and the mental disorder. This is of course the idea and the ideology behind bey behind antiscychotics. Antiscychotic medications do exactly this. But exorcism has a uh a philosophy that goes beyond passivity and activity. The therapist in exorcism is a performer. Exorcism is performative. It's a theater play that involves a script and a narrative. The script and the narrative afford the patient with meaning and hope. And it is the therapist's role, the exorcist role, I'm sorry, in the therapy known as exorcism. It is the exorcist role to introduce the patient to this hope and meaning by performing the hope and meaning on stage by giving the hope and meaning. um a kind of embodiment or personification in flesh and blood by an act of transsubstantiation where hope and meaning or ab which are abstract concepts suddenly become part and parcel of the exoris personality, exoris and exorcist connection to the beyond to God to angels to you name it. to the to religious sacred texts. So the therapist performs in a scripted theater production which involves an an overarching narrative an all-consuming narrative of I will guide you through the valley of the dead through this veil of tears. I will guide you my patient towards hope and meaning. Hope and meaning that I personify that I raify that I embody by virtue of my connection to the grander narrative of God. And so exorcism is performative. In western psychotherapy it is the patient who is performative. The patient is involved in a guided reenactment of for example early childhood conflicts or distressing situations. Psychotherapy in the west is when the patient visits a clinician. A therapist, a psychologist, social worker visits a clinician and the clinician guides the patient to obtain insights about past situations by reenacting them using highly specific, concrete and unique scripts and narratives which are limited limited to the psychotherrapeutic environment and alliance and never emerge, never exit. this framework. So whereas exorcism by implication and by extension is linked to cosmogy to the totality of the universe. It's a holistic approach. Psychotherapy in the west is a reductionist approach. This is the problem. let's reenact it in highly specific ritualized ways and then uh we will get to the bottom of this and we will resolve the issue and create a new narrative hopefully. So you see that exorcism is the mirror image of western psychotherapy and the patient is no exception. In exorcism the therapist is active, the patient is passive. In western psychotherapy, the therapist is passive, the patient is active. In exorcism, it's a performance linked to a much greater narrative, a total narrative actually, a theory of everything. Whereas in psychotherapy, there's an emphasis on the immediacy of the patient, his needs, his problems, his present, and the presence of the therapist as a catalyst, a facilitator. It's very it's a very limited approach. We need to reconceive of western psychotherapy because it is not successful. Western psychotherapy is sometimes helpful with healthy people. People who do not need psychotherapy but they need a good friend or a good spouse or a good mother or someone neighbor. These people because of today's automization and lon pandemic of loneliness these people resort to psychotherapist needlessly. So psychotherapy is very efficacious and effectual and effective with these people because anyhow they are ready for change. Anyhow they're ready for healing, recovery and moving on. However, modern treatment modalities in the west are abysmal failures when it come to mental illness and mental health disorders to the point that there are many people who doubt that there is such a thing as mental illness because of the constant failure of the alleged treatments. And so we need to revamp and reconceive and reform western psychotherapy along the lines of exorcism. We need to allow the therapist to play an active role today. If you as a psychotherapist give advice to your client, you may lose your license. It is bad practice. You should never give advice. You should never guide. You should never direct the patient. You should never make choices for the patient. You should never control the patient. This is all wrong. We should convert the modern therapist into an exorcist. In the sense that we should allow the modern therapist to impose values and beliefs on the therapy to serve as a teacher, a friend, an advisor, a guide, a leader and when necessary take control over the situation and the patient if the patient is selfharming or in danger. So we need to convert modern western therapists into exosis. We have a lot a lot to learn from that discipline and rather than mock it and ridicule it and call it superstitious and stupid and so on the typical vanity and rotiness and arrogance of modern science and its practitioners. Rather than do this, we would do well to analyze exorcism sessions, the dynamics that develop and the interactions that develop between the exorcist and the patient and why exorcism is a lot more successful than any treatment modality almost any treatment modality with the exception maybe of behavioral therapies CBT, DBT and so on. And indeed in CBT and DBT the therapist assumes an active role actually in human therap in human psychotherapy. So and this is how I see exorcism. I am not I'm not averse to regarding it as a legitimate treatment modality should other treatment modalities fail. I much prefer exorcism to drugs. psychotropics, antiscychotics, anti-depressants. I much prefer exorcism to drugs. The impacts at least on the body are much more benevolent than benign. And so we should legitimize exorcism as a branch of clinical psychology and study it in depth. There is a lot to learn from it. If the narcissist is demonic and evil, guess who gets to be an angel and the raification of goodness? The victim, of course. The victim of narcissistic abuse, the victim of the narcissist. The victim is impeccable, immaculate, super empathic, angelic, flawless, blemishless. Victim is never responsible, never contributes to his or her own predicament. She is 100% white and the narcissist is 100% black. Now, ironically, this kind of thinking known as dichotamous thinking is a foundational pathological aspect of narcissism. Narcissists think this way. Dichotous thinking is founded on a primitive regressive infantile defense mechanism known as splitting. Black versus white, good versus evil, perfect versus imperfect. Hot versus cold, splitting. Many, many victims split. They render the narcissist irredeemable and themselves the utmost form of perfection. Not perfection in the sense that they possess all the skills and talents in the known universe. That's not this kind of perfection, but moral perfection. They should not be held accountable for anything. They're not responsible for anything. They're blame They're not blamew worthy. They are They had nothing to do with it. It was a force of nature. A force of nature brought brought on by Lucifer and his hordes. Narcissists are fallen angels or demonic spiritual entities or the embodiment of possession. This spiritual war, casting the relationship with the narcissist in terms of spiritual war, why do that? What does it accomplish except delusionality, hallucinations, and a pseudocychotic state? It pushes the victims into the realms of insanity. Why would victims render themselves insane in order to make sense of what had happened to them with a narcissist? Because narcissistic abuse is highly traumatizing and because many people are weak infilled by the relationship with the narcissist or feminded to start with. Many people are broken and damaged when they've met the narcissist. They were already vulnerable and fragile. The damage inflicted on them, the devastation has been such that they chose to retreat from reality and to ensconce themselves in a fantasy, in delusions, even in hallucinations. But there are additional motivations. When you cast your relationship with a narcissist as a spiritual war, it makes you important. your your life, your existence matters. This is self-importance as a warrior in some kind of cosmic battle. You're on the forces of good against evil. So you aggrandise yourself. The concept of spiritual war with the Nazis is a self aggrandizing concept. It renders your life meaningful because participating in a cosmic battle against the forces of evil has been at the core of many many religions. Christianity not accepted. So this has religious overtones and you are a kind of disciple or emissary and definitely a fighter. You're fighting uh for the victory, the ultimate triumph of good over evil. That's point number one. Self agrandisement, grandiosity, a cognitive distortion, divorcing reality in order to feel good about yourself, to feel somehow elevated. You've lost control in your relationship with the narcissist. You were helpless. You were impotent. You've lost control over your life, your decisions, your choices, your friends, your abilities, your social network. Everything was taken over by the narcissist. And finally, the narcissist has absconded with your very mind through the process of entraining. Having lost everything, you want to reassert control. You want to regain mastery over your life. And one way of doing this is pretending or lying to yourself or deceiving yourself into believing that you are participating in some very important cosmic event and that it is your choice to participate in it and that you're in control of your life. that you have taken mastery and now you're counterattacking. It's always good to counterattack. It feels good. Feels good because you're no longer helpless. You're no longer subject to the whims and predelections and proclivities of other people. You're in charge at least of your own destiny. Reasserting control is the second motivation. The third motivation, shunning responsibility. If you cast your relationship with the narcissist as a spiritual war and the narcissist is the prince of darkness or at the very least Darth Vader, what could you have done? You couldn't have done anything about it. This was and there was an asymmetry of power. So, you're not responsible. You have contributed nothing to this. It's not your fault. You're not to blame. You're not guilty. You shouldn't feel ashamed. Casting your relationship with the narcissist as a spiritual war exempts you and exonerates you. That's a great feeling because until you have cast it as a spiritual war, you had knowing doubts. You questioned yourself. You felt stupid. You felt, you know, you were doubtful about your role in all this. And rightly so. So spiritual war is a copout. Oh, it wasn't a relationship with another human being, however flawed. It was a relationship with a demon. And after all, what could we near mortals and human beings can do against the forces of darkness? Next is the feeling that you were chosen by the narcissist. Why were you chosen by the narcissist? Exactly. Because your very being in existence, who you are, your identity, raify goodness. You are good. You are an extension of the very concept of good. So the narcissist has chosen you because he spotted your essential goodness. Because you're perfectly benign, caring, loving, super empathic. Not normally empathic, but hypermpathic. Super empathic. In short, you're an empath and immaculate. You're immaculate. You're flawless. You're blemishless in this sense. Flawless and blemishless in the sense that your essential goodness and your overpowering empathy are perfect. And so you are the raification of the principle of good and the narcissist is the raification of the principle of evil. And your clash was inevitable. There was some inexorability. It was inexorable. There was some inexorability. There was some momentum that could not have been stopped or interfered with. You were the subject of a train wreck. the victim of processes much larger than you, even much larger than the narcissist, the cosmic war between good and evil, between God and Satan, whatever metaphors you want to use. So, you were chosen. It wasn't accidental or incidental. You were chosen because of your essential goodness. That elevates you. Of course, it's another form of self agrandisement. I'm all good. This is proof positive that I'm all good, that I'm perfectly good. So being chosen is a form of grandiosity or believing that you have been chosen is a form of grandiosity. Of course, the narcissist didn't choose you because you're empathic or caring or loving or benign or compassionate or whatever. Assuming that you are, that's also debatable. But even if you are, the narcissist haven't chosen hasn't chosen you for this. Narcissist wouldn't care less about you. Narcissist didn't even notice your external separate existence. Narcissist wouldn't know empathy or love if it if if they fell on his head. Narcissist don't do empathy. They don't do love. They don't do positive feelings. They wouldn't have they don't they don't understand this language. So they didn't choose you because of these things. They chose you because you supplied sex or services. or safety. You agreed to act in the maternal role or you provided supply, narcissistic supply, sadistic supply, whatever things the narcissist chose you because what you could give him, because of what you did give him. And the moment you stopped giving in his mind at least, it was over. Finally, a spiritual war implies that you are as pure as a baby. And this is not a metaphor or a simile. There is regressive infantilization. The narcissist is a big evil daddy, a kind of inverted parental figure. And you are as pure as a driven snow, unadulterated as a child, as an infant. a lot of regression, a lot of infant self infantilization. Here's the truth about your relationship with the narcissist. You made stupid choices that were possibilities. You made stupid choices because you're inherently innately stupid. You're simply dumb. Or you made stupid choice choices because you were at a moment in your life where you were distracted. You were damaged. You were broken. You were hurt. You were vulnerable. you're fragile, whatever, but you made stupid choices. These choices were your choices and you're fully accountable and responsible for them. You were vulnerable. That much is true. You've been taken advantage of very likely. So what? This is life. This is life. This is the guiding principle of life. It's known as evolution. It is your role to protect yourself. Of course, abuse is not justified. Of course, abuse should be penalized socially, criminally, and so on so forth. That goes without saying. But on the other hand, you shouldn't exempt yourself from responsibility. You shouldn't you shouldn't exonerate yourself in your internal court. You've made stupid choices. You let down your guard. You absconded with your boundaries. You displayed your vulnerability. You invited abuse and so on. Learn a lesson from this. Don't ever do it again. To the narcissist, you were a service provider. End of story. Not a partner, not an intimate partner. Narcissist don't do intimacy. Not you meant nothing to the narcissist except as a service provider. As long as you kept providing two of the four S's, sex, supply, services, safety. As long as you provided two of these four, you were on. The job was yours. The minute you stop providing these or the minute the narcissist has devalued you because of his own internal dynamics, it was over. You meant nothing to the narcissist because you have never existed externally. As far as a narcissist is concerned, you were also utterly interchangeable. There was nothing about you that was unique, irreplaceable, super special, amazing. Nazis don't see people this way. They asked themselves, narcissists ask themselves, "What's in it for me? What's in it for me?" And the things that you could supply the narcissist that you the things that you did supply the narcissist with are replaceable. are interchangeable. There are many competitors out there and the narcissist is not averse to placing himself up for auction. So don't kid yourself. Don't agize yourself. You are not chosen. You are not special even. You are nothing to the narcissist as meaningful as his internet service provider for example. And as he would not have hesitated to switch internet service providers with a deterioration in service, so he did not hesitate in dumping you and exchanging you for someone else. You have to learn this hurtful and difficult lessons. If you want to move on and never repeat the same mistakes again, casting yourself as the eternal victim and describing the relationship as a spiritual warfare, these are copouts. These are copouts and would they would lead you nowhere. They would mislead you. They would guarantee that you will fall victim again to exactly the same type of person, the same circumstances. Don't make this mistake for your own sake. Good morning, good evening, wherever you may be. Today I would like to read a statement to you. I'll be reading to state the statement in order to not get anything wrong. And for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of malignant self-love, narcissism revisited, the first book ever written on narcissistic abuse. I coined most of the language in use today, including the phrase narcissistic abuse in the 1980s and 1990s. And today I'm a professor of psychology in multiple universities, most notably the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. I want to read this statement to you because I think things are getting out of control. I think we are on a downward spiral that is dangerous to everyone involved. And I think there are ruthless, callous, unscrupulous people out there who are taking advantage of this dynamic, amplifying it for personal gain. And here goes. This is my statement. Third rate opportunistic coaches, wannabe failed podcasters, fishy iffy documentary filmmakers, and a rabble of way worse characters have converged on the narcissist are evil monsters trend. These people milk the gullible and the hateful. And worst of all, they milk 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 our profession. Do no harm, spread no evil and hatred, attempt only to heal and help. What about real victims? They're in pain. They seek an explanation for what has just transpired. They cling to any semblance of empathy and suck, however fake and manipulative. victims are angry, understandably sad, they're in grief, and they're cynically, heartbreakingly taken advantage of by predators, masquerading as coaches and experts, self-styled experts. The demonization and castigation of narcissists has reached a breaking point of no return to mix my metaphors. If it is not arrested now, if it is not stopped this very minute, it will end badly. Someone will die. It is getting really wild and terrifying out there. It's frightening. It's a nightmare. Narcissists are mentally ill. Narcissists are delusional. They're trapped in fantasy of their own making. Narcissists are immature. And like all of us, they are flailing. They're doing their best to cope. I'm not aware of any other diagnosis or any other group of psychologically impaired people who are being so viciously and egregiously hated and damned. That is not to say that narcissists do not harm people. Reminder, I'm the father of the phrase and the movement of narcissistic abuse. My credentials are immaculate when it comes to this. I know that narcissists harm people. I'm the one who told the world about it. Narcissists do harm people, do hurt people, do cause people pain, do misbehave horribly. Society and individuals in society need to learn to recognize narcissists, the signs, the behaviors, to avoid and shun narcissists, and to stay safe. Where it is right to do so, where it is applicable, we need to punish narcissists for their misdeeds the way we punish all transgressors, narcissists or not. Studies show that pathological narcissism in its milder forms can be a force for good, an energy to be harnessed. Narcissists have created most of the world we live in today. The literature, the arts, the culture, the technologies we use, and the religions we adhere to, they are all the creation of narcissists. Ours is an era of radicalization, polarization, and malignant intolerance of the other. We extol and elevate ritualized aggression. We glamorize and glorify individual and collective cruelty and violence. We feel purified, cleansed, elevated, morally upright, unadulterated when someone is assassinated, when someone is canled. And when it comes to narcissists, we're on the way there. The amount of patrred hatred and rabid exhaltations online and offline frankly are such that sooner or later people are going to take matters into their own hands and it's going to end in bloodshed. And it is the classic defense mechanism of splitting rate at large. I am all good. The narcissist is all bad. I am an I am the angelic, helpless victim. The narcissist is the irredeemable, incourageable demon. Victimhood is also a perfect way to account for one's bad choices and wrongdoing. People blame me for having started it all in the 1980s and 1990s, for having been the first to demonize narcissists. May Kulpa, that is true. I let my self-destructive self-loathing and self-hatred affect my better judgment and my academic integrity integrity. I spread hate against narcissists. I demonize narcissists. I am the originator of the disparaging discourse and language that is in use today. But it is never too late to admit guilt. It is never too late to repent. Consider this my confession and my reconciliation with myself if no one else. Better late than never. Back off before it's too late. Defend yourself and protect yourself against narcissists, the deletterious effects of their actions and traits and fantasies and delusions. Make sure you're safe. Make sure you're well and hail and healthy. Make sure that your life goes on uninterrupted. These are legitimate forms of self-defense. But what is not legitimate is demonizing the other and calling for the other's extermination. We have been through this in the 1930s and 1940s. Are you all looking for a narcissist holocaust?