HEAL: Who Narcissist Sees in the Mirror: YOU, No REFLECTION (Skopje Seminar, Day 4, Lecture 2)

Lakan Jacqu Lakan described the process of mirroring. He suggested that children go through a stage of mirroring. He proposed that children see themselves in the mirror and that's how they acquire a sense of externality and separateness. This is me and so if this is me the rest of the world is not me. So mirroring is a crucial stage in the formation and emergence of the self. And what is what happens with the narcissist is that when the narcissist looks at the mirror, the metaphorical mirror, he doesn't see himself, he sees the world. In other words, when the narcissist looks at the mirror, the entire world is there. So the narcissist reflection is all of you, the rest of you. It's not he never sees his himself because he has no self. He sees you as floating self objects and so on so forth. And in order to avoid terror because it's terrifying to look at the mirror, imagine you look at the mirror and you don't see yourself. You know, vampires, vampires look at the mirror and they don't see themselves. It's this is considered a really terrifying experience and this is a common experience in narcissism. Narcissist looks at the mirror metaphorical mirror. Yes. Not real mirror. Unfortunately, when I look at the mirror, I do see myself. So narcissist looks at the metaphorical mirror and he does not see himself. He sees other people, the rest of the world and so on. It's a terrifying experience. And the only way out of the terror, out of the horror of not being, is to pretend that everyone and everything is you. You say what I see in the mirror is me. Yes, I see thousands of people and I see the world and I see but it's all me. So I don't need to worry. I don't need to feel bad. I do see myself in the mirror. That's when we apply Lakan's mirroring to this. But the narcissist must make sure that you will not undermine and contradict this perception. If a narcissist believes that you are him, that you have no external existence, that you have no separate existence, that when he sees you in his mind's eye and externally, he's actually looking at himself, that it's part of who he is, that is his identity. Then you have huge power over the narcissist because you can challenge this. You can undermine this. You can contradict this. And this is power. The narcissist cannot give you this power. So he needs to take it away from you. He needs to take away this power from you. And the way to take it away is to punish you. Anytime that you deviate, diverge, contradict, undermine and challenge this perception that you are just an extension of the narcissist, that you are just an internal object that you exist only in the narcissist mind and only due to the narcissist that he made you become, conjured you up like some kind of slight of hand or illusion or trick. Yeah. So if you challenge any of this and so on, the narcissist punishes you. That's why you cannot be independent. You cannot be you cannot be agentic. You cannot have agency. You cannot have personal autonomy. You cannot have your own friends. You cannot have your family. You cannot travel. You cannot have a job. You cannot have any of these things. Because if you do have a life of your own, that means you are not the narcissist. That means you are not an internal object. He needs to take away your what the French called alarm vital. He needs to take away your force of life. He needs to deanimate you. He needs to reduce you to an automaton and so on. So that he can convince himself that you exist only in his delirium that you are a delirious delusion illusion not a real thing. Because if you are a real thing then he is not a real thing. It's his reality or your reality. The two cannot be together. The two cannot be coexistent. It's a fight for life and death. It's a survival. It's about survival. That is why narcissists are so intense in forcing the shared fantasy on you, in punishing you, in controlling you, in because they are fighting for their lives. It's a survival. Fight for survival. Do not underestimate the narcissist's motivation to put you down. And this is what makes narcissistic abuse unique. This does not exist in any other form of abuse. The abuser actually in other forms of abuse, the abuser does not want you down. The abuser want wants you as a separate entity. If the abuser wants, for example, to have sex with you, then you need to be out there. If the abuser wants to take your money, you need to be out there with your money. Then the abuser needs you as an external object. Most abusers, most abusers need you as an external object. The psychopath definitely wants you as an external object. But the narcissist needs essentially to kill you. Essentially to kill you, metaphorically to kill you, mentally, psychologically, in any in any way to kill you. Because only as an inanimate object can you then ascertain can you then support the contention that you are just a figment that you are just a prop that you are just an intern internal object. External objects misbehave. Internal objects don't. External objects abandon. Internal objects don't. External objects are constant. Inconstant internal objects are constant. The narcissist is a child. So he's looking uh to recreate a maternal figure which would be there forever. Narcissists don't also don't have a concept of time. I was the first to suggest this. By the way, I wrote an essay suggesting that narcissists don't have a concept of time. And then the great Otto Karnberg published a suspiciously similar essay. I'm not saying anything. A few years later, great mind thinks alike. think alike. So, it seems that narcissists have a problem with the with a conception of time because they're children. They don't have a conception of here, now, tomorrow, this that they it's all now. It's all right now. So, they're mindful in this way. Ironically, in in some ways, they're mindful. So, it's all now. And because it's all now, you are not you cannot be allowed to have a future. So, you need to be now. You need to be here. You need to be in the present totally embedded and immersed and imured in the present. You you cannot have a a future. You can also not have a past because if you have a past, you are multi-dimensional. And the past has been out of the control of the narcissist out of the awareness of the narcissist. And if you have had a past, it means you have had an external existence. You have not always been internal. And so the narcissist needs you to always have been internal. Your internality or needs to be um what we call an extensive parameter. Your internality needs to characterize the totality of you. So all aspects of you need to be internal. This is such um devastating experience that when the narcissist is out of your life, you still you are still under the influence of this process of introjection and internalization. You still behave or feel as if you are some kind of internal object and extension. The narcissist is there next to you. Even after the narcissist has left physically, you feel his presence somehow equivalent of a ghost or an apparition or matrix of energy. The narcissist is kind of there, kind of still controlling you, kind of intrusive, kind of intervening in your psychological cognitive processes. His voice resonates in your mind. You're still consulting him. He's still giving you instructions. He's criticizing you. is always there. You need therefore as a precondition for therapy, you need to get rid of this presence, emanation, call it as you wish, this spirit. I mean, use your own terms. This demon, if you're religiously inclined, you need to get rid of this presence because if you don't, this ethereal, ephemereral narcissist, this nonbody disembodied narcissist will take over the therapy, will co-opt it, will compromise it, and then leverage it against you. Therapy could be a dangerous process as long as the narcissist is still inside your mind colonizing it and infesting it and in control of it could be a really dangerous process because therapy provides a lot of information and many tools that the internal narcissist can use against you and whatever the internal narcissist can use against you he will use against you. So you should be very careful. Now the narcissist ends up ends up playing several roles in your life and that is again before we come to the question of how to get rid of this voice and and so on. The narcissist plays several roles in your life. On the one hand he is an abuser. On the other hand he's a savior. He's a rock. He's a healer. He's a kind of guru teacher. So he has a dual role. He also represents what Freud called tanatic tanatus the the death force. He he represents death and he represents life. He represents death because he kills you metaphorically in order to internalize you. So he needs to kill you. So there is a death element. But he also represents life because after he has killed you, you live through him. The your continued existence in the narcissistically abusive relationship is via the narcissist vicariously by proxy. Anyone who has been exposed to narcissistic abuse after a while stops living autonomously. She is on life support and the life support is the narcissist. She survives through the narcissist. And so he is the he is the giver of life and he is the force of death. He is also your mother but he is also highly punitive. He claims to love you unconditionally. He idealizes you initially at least and so on but from the get-go from the first minute is punitive if you deviate if you diverge if you rebel if you contradict if you disagree if you criticize and so on is also punitive from the first minute these contradictions these contradictions loving unconditionally loving mother super punitive mother abuser and uh savior death force and life force These contradictions create the equivalent of what is known in behaviorism as intermittent reinforcement. Intermittent reinforcement is when we get confusing mixed signals from the same person. I love you. I hate you. I love you unconditionally. I'm going to punish you. I'm going to kill you. But I'm the force of life. You live through me. And so on. These are conflicting messages and they're constantly broadcast and this creates intermittent reinforcement and intermittent reinforcement leads to dependency and addiction and bonding and this is what is colloquially known as trauma bonding. So the the person who takes away your well-being, the person who takes away that's the only person who can give it back. You become dependent on the narcissist because he took something from you and only he can give it back. Only he can restore you somehow. So you endow the narcissist with a the power to restore you. It's very religious. Remember that pathological narcissism is a primitive religion. You have been sacrificed to the false self as human sacrifice. You've been sacrificed to the false self. But exactly for example like Jesus you could be resurrected through the agency of the of the false self. So the false self is God. Of course false self in in the narcissist in the narcissist cosmoggony and narcissist picture of the world. The false self is God. It's a deity. It's a divinity. So it has the power to take away your life, transform you, transubstantiation, transform you and resurrect you. These are common themes in Christianity and and other religions. Zoastranism and so on. These are highly religious experiences. And in in this sense your your uh relation relationship in some respects resembles a religious experience. Um kind of epiphany. some at times epiphany, at times sacrifice, human sacrifice, at times resurrection, at time these are extremely powerful motives in the human psyche. Uh Jung Yung called these archetypes. These are archetypes. The resurrected, the the god, these are archetypes. These are very profound, very, very deep layers of the human soul, of the human psyche that the narcissist taps into and activates. In normal daily life, you're very unlikely to experience this with anyone else. If you have a relationship with a normal healthy person, you're not likely to experience death. You're not likely to experience resurrection. You're not likely to experience human sacrifice. You're not likely to experience any of this. But if you are with a narcissist, you are likely to experience all of these multiple times. And the experience to some extent is addictive. It creates bonding. It's by the way mistakenly known as tra trauma bonding. But okay, we'll not go into it. It creates bonding and it creates uh addiction and addiction in effect because some of the experiences are highly elevating, highly euphoric. We say that these experiences are uh dopamineergic. They they they involve they involve hormones and neurotransmitters and neurom modulators such as dopamine but not only oxytocin to some extent and so on. So there's a lot of play with the hormonal system and the neurobiological system that is at play uh at work in the narcissistic relationship. So you are being conditioned. You're being molded. You're being into becoming an artifact into becoming a work of art if you wish, a narrative. You are being you are being denuded of your physical existence. You're being reduced to some kind of symbol, some kind of sign. And then the narcissist manipulates you the way a banker manipulates manipulates numbers on a computer. Narcissist manipulates you as if you were a sign or a symbol in a language that is all all his own. What we call private language. The narcissist has a private language. It's a language all his all all his own. It's not a language that he uses to communicate with people, but it's a language that he uses to communicate among the parts in himself. He is broken. Remember, he doesn't have a self. He doesn't have a unitary core. But he has like thousands, millions maybe, who knows, of selfobjects and memories. And they're all in a kaleidoscope. They're all in a mess. And and the language is holding them together. It's only the language that's holding them together. this private language that he uses to communicate and this private language includes uh cognitive distortions such as an inflated fantastic self-concept grandiosity but this language includes other elements um and I will not go into it right now because a whole seminar on its own but in this in this respect narcissism pathological narcissism yes not healthy healthy is But pathological narcissism in this respect is the equivalent of dissociative identity disorder. It's a kind of multiple personality disorder. Obviously we have at least two selves. You know we have the true the true self which is dead oified fossilized has been sacrificed to the false self in early childhood. This true self is inactive. It has no energy. And we have the false self. So we have at least two selves. But because the self objects are disconnected, disjointed and so on, in effect the narcissist has hundreds, thousands of cellves. So it's unlimited effectively. So it's like planting a big bomb and exploding it and then fragments and the shards are all over the place and that is the internal space of the narcissist. This affects you badly. This affects you very badly. You become embedded in this private language. You become the ob the object or the subject of this private language, the recipient of this private language. You're manipulated as an internal object and you're forced to interact with other internal objects within the narcissist. Your behavior is molded and shaped. You are penalized if you deviate. You're rewarded if you're not. And this leads to intermittent reinforcement and a very strong bond because you need the narcissist to to regulate you. The narcissist renders you disregulated, takes away your regulation. Your emotions become disregulated. Your moods become disregulated. Even your use of language becomes disregulated. Everything falls apart. You're not in control anymore. And you need the narcissist to regulate you externally. In essence, the narcissist makes you a borderline in many respects. Makes you a borderline. So you need the narcissist and this stays with you after the relationship is over. And you need therefore the relationship over you need to grow up as now you have been regressed. You're probably 10 to 18 months old. Definitely as far as executive functions and and otherwise you have been severely uh you know so all use of language and decision making and all all have been regressed. you're a baby and you need to to start from zero. Basically, you need to start from zero. And the problem is that as long as a narcissist has an introject in your mind, as long as a narcissist has this app installed in your mind, you're like a smartphone and there's this app. As long as he has this, he has control over you because don't forget this introject is a mother introject. It's a maternal introject. The voice of the narcissist in your mind is a maternal voice. So if you want to separate individuate, if in order to grow up, you need to separate an individuate. That is a process of growing up. If you want to do this, you need a mother because you separate from a mother and then you become an individual. You cannot separate from a father. By the way, many people ask me, can I separate from a father? No. Separation is uniquely with a maternal figure. Usually the mother, usually biological mother. Yeah. So you can separate only from a mother. So now you say, "Okay, I'm a baby." The narcissist left. He's out of the picture. I'm still a baby. I'm much less autonomous, much less independent, much more dependent. I'm addicted. I'm bonded. I'm suffering. I'm helpless. There's a sense of helplessness, learned helplessness, and so on. I'm a baby, so I need to grow up. I need to grow up. And in order to grow up, I need to separate from a mother. That's the only way we know of growing up. By the way, growing up is about separating from maternal figure. It happens in childhood. It happens in adolescence. That's the way we grow up. So, but the minute you think, the minute you're thinking to yourself, I need to grow up. I need to grow up. So, I need to separate from a mother. There is an internal mother. This internal mother takes over. It's there. The minute you think about the word mother, the minute you conceive the word mother, the internal mother is activated. This is the power of the narcissist. The narcissist would not allow you to separate individual individuate because he has become your mother. He controls the mother construct. He controls mother construct. Whenever you think of mother, you will think of him. So it's very very difficult to separate and individuate. And the first thing you need to do of course is to get rid of the introject. Only what you you need to get rid of the intraject. Only then you'll be able to separate individually from a substitute maternal mother could be for example a therapist. And this process is known as transference. So you go to therapy, there's a therapist and you begin to see the therapist as a mother. And this is legitimate. It's called transference. And then the the therapist, a good therapist, agrees to play the role of the mother without breaching boundaries, of course, and allows you to separate. But you can go to a therapist as long as you're infected with a narcissist introject. You can't do that because the minute you begin transference, the introject, the narcissist introject in your mind, which is a mother, would punish you. The introject would tell you, for example, you're betraying me. I'm your mother. Why are you going to another mother? You know, you're in therapy and you want the therapist to be your new mother, but the mother inside your head will tell you, "You're you're betraying me. You're bad. You're bad uh child." You know, you can't even have a relationship with another person because the the mother introject will will chastise you and castigate you and and and punish you for loving another person because I'm your mother. You should love me, you know. So, you're paralyzed. As long as you have the introjection, you're paralyzed completely. Therapy would be useless. Relationships, forget about it. You can't have relationships. intimacy will frighten you and and so on so forth. This is a control mechanism. It's malware. It's exactly like malware. It's like a computer virus, you know. It takes over the operating system. So, this is top priority. I hope you understand. I went deep into this for you to understand. Then we are not talking about some voice in your mind that you know disagrees with you or whatever. We are talking about full compromise of the operating system. Black screen of death. BSOD. You know, those of you who use computers, end of the story, you need antivirus. You need to cleanse the computer. You need to remove the malware. The first thing we do, the first thing you should do in order to begin the process of of cleansing the tracks and you know removing the introject is embodiment. You need to embody. You cannot trust your mind in the wake of narcissistic abuse. You cannot trust your mind. Your mind is infected. Your mind is compromised. Your mind is not your friend because your mind is under the control of the narcissist. The narcissist will take you down. The narcissist will make you doubt yourself. The narcissist will make you hate yourself and loathe yourself. The narcissist will drive you. The narcissist's voice, the introject, will drive you to abuse substances and to perhaps commit suicide. try to attempt to commit suicide. So the introject there is not your friend. Definitely not your friend. Remember uh you broke up with a narcissist. It's a narcissistic injury. It's a narcissist. Even when the narcissist discards you, he perceives it as rejection because he was forced to discard you because you have changed because you are evil. Because so narcissism doesn't say I discarded her. Yippee happy golucky I'm going to find. Narcissist says I discarded her because she left me no choice because I trusted her and she has changed because bad company influenced her because her family conspired against me because because aloplastic defenses. So narcissist is angry at you and the narcissist introject is faithful authentic. This reflects the narcissist in your mind and is angry at you too. He's not your friend. So you cannot rely on your mind initially to get rid of the introject because your mind at this stage is the introject is under the introject. So you need to use your body and so you use embodiment. Kathleen is a trauma therapist and she knows that we use body mind body therapies a lot to get rid of trauma to process trauma actually to process trauma. So you need to use the body. Um here you can go to a therapist but just to focus on body issu on the body techniques. So someone to teach you how to use your body to process trauma or to to cope with uh internal voices such as the ones I describe. So the first stage is to leverage your body. That is why at this stage for example techniques like EMDR might be very useful. Example quite a few might be useful uh because EMDR helps helps the body to process issues. However, this is not full-fledged therapy. This is not therapy. This is just to learn to use your body, to reconnect with your body, to make friends with your body, to create an alliance with your body and to use your body against your mind, against the introject. This whole process is known as embodiment. And therapists, special therapists know how to do this. So, it's called mindbody. This is not a seminar about mindbody therapies. But I'm just giving you I'm giving you pointers where to go and what to look for. Don't look for a classical psychotherapist who will process with you the relationship, discuss your that's not what you should look for. You should look for someone who is an expert on body mind therapies and connect you with your body and so on. So embodiment embodiment is the first thing. The next stage is you need to flip the script. You need to flip the script. One of the main experiences of the victim of narcissistic abuse is disempowerment. There's a sense of helplessness. And because this helplessness has been acquired, it's not something you you came you entered the relationship with. It's something you have acquired in the relationship. We call it learned helplessness. You have learned this helplessness. So you need the next stage is actually you need to regain power. You need to empower yourself. You need to lose the learned helplessness. And you do this by reversing the roles internally. We are not talking now about interacting with the narcissist. Remember at this stage you are no contact and no contact means no contact inside your mind. You reverse the roles. Learned helplessness. You have acquired learned helplessness because the narcissist took charge. He he he dictated he dictated even daily things you know what to watch, what to eat, what to do, where to go, which vacation to take and where and so forth. But he also much more importantly dictated how you should feel and which feelings are illegitimate. He dictated what should be your reactions and which reactions are off off not allowed. So he he shaped your cognitions and he shaped your emotions. Regain control over these not only not only over your daily life also over your daily life but also regain control over your internal life the way you process reality and interacted with it. You need to reverse the roles. You need to assume the role of the director. You need to you need to regain control. You need to stage a military coup. You need to dispose of the dictator. and establish democracy or whatever form of government you like, but you need to get rid of the dictator. And so to do this, you need to there are various techniques of doing this and again here you can consult a therapist or work with a therapist. So for example, one very useful um therapy which deals with this exactly is internal family system. Another type of therapy which is very useful is transactional analysis and another u therapy treatment modality which is useful is psychodrama. So you can use these three in conjunction. So you see what I'm see what I'm trying to teach you. What I'm trying to teach you is to take the therapy one step at a time to define highly specific goals to find the exact therapy for the goal to achieve the goal and to move on to another type of therapy to achieve another the next goal >> which >> internal family system IFS it's known as IFS no one says internal Internal, internal, family system. >> How did they do? Another two. >> Are you taking into account my life expectancy? >> I think you are trying to see whether I can spell. You don't trust me. Now, in German, everything sounds like I'm going to decapitate you and do something horrible to your remains. And that includes the sentence lied which sounds like I'm about to shoot you and so on. Similarly there is a treatment modality known as gestalt. Horrible gestalt. So in gestalt there is a there is a technique known as chair work. Chair work is also useful for this purpose of flipping the script and becoming the director. Not the actor actress or actor not allowing the narcissist to direct the play but becoming the director. Now in some of these techniques they will use imagery of a movie. They will tell you there's a movie. Now you are the director and the narcissist is the actor and they will create for you scripts. to create for your script or you will create a script with the therapist and you will use the script and that diminishes the narcissist. That reduces the executive capacity of the narcissist because you own and control the narcissist in the movie and if a narcissist misbehaves you can fire them and do horrible things to them and so on. You can even speak German to them which is unusual and cruel punishment forbidden by the US constitution. Okay. >> H >> schema >> no schema is not schema might be relevant a bit later. So the first stage is to flip the flip the thing. Second thing I mean second next phase the next phase is having flipped the the script now you are the director of your own life and the narcissist is a mere actor is still there. We're not pretending that you got rid of the narcissist. The voice is still there. The intro is there. He's still a maternal figure. But he's a maternal figure under your control. It's a little like life, you know, initially when you are 10 years old, mommy tells you what to do. And then when you're 40 years old, hopefully mommy doesn't tell you what to do anymore. And when she is 90 years old, you tell her what to do. Right? So there's a reversal of of roles and a reversal of power the power matrix and this is the general idea. Having accomplished this you you move on to the next phase. Now at this stage you still have an introject inside your mind but remember it's a maternal introject. So it's a mother you have a mother inside your mind and this mother is exceedingly unhappy like mothers in real life. So this mother tells you, "You're betraying me. You're abandoning me. You're abandoning me. I will die without you." A lot of emotional blackmail, control from the bottom, clinging, neediness. Narcissists are needy. I mean, we This is one thing we don't acknowledge because we demonize them. We we empower we make them powerful. We give them power over us, over you because narcissists are we we need to aggrandize them in order to be victims. I mean you can't be a victim of a of a whistle. You can't be a victim of a nobody. Yeah. You need to be a victim of someone. So we are the ones who give Narcissist power. We are the ones who aggrandise them. We are the ones who It's like the wizard of Oz, you know. Or like those of you who were children, some of you were children. I know. Those of you who were children, do you remember when you were alone at night in the dark, you created monsters in your imagination? monsters under the bed and over the bed and and so on and so forth. In my case, by the way, the monsters were afraid of me. So, in this is the example here. You you have created you've taken the narcissis and you created this monster in order to explain your submission, your fear, your dysfunction. You needed the narcissist to be big and monstrous and so on because otherwise why why did you succumb? Why were you so submissive? Why did you obey? Why did you know? So, but it's not true. It's a wizard of Oz. You remember the wizard of Oz, right? In the Wizard of Oz, it's a book and and a movie. And the Wizard of Oz, the there was this u wizard and he had this machine, huge machine, and he kind of everyone was terrified of him. And a wizard, he's a is controls the universe. He's huge. He's this, he's that. And then I think it was the lion. The lion he pulled away pulled away the curtain. And behind the curtain there was this this dwarf and he was operating the machinery. This is the wizard of Oz and this is the narcissist. Basically the narcissist introject is a mother. The more you heal, the more you recover, the more the mother becomes needy, clinging, codependent, uh emotionally blackmailing you and so on. Initially the mother is controlling, aggressive, sadistic. You know the mother is initially but the more you heal the less power the mother introject has the more she becomes codependent and the more she begins to torture you from the inside by shaming you. The narcissist main driving effect is shame. The main emotion behind pathological narcissism which gave rise to pathological narcissism is shame. So the narcissist tries to manipulate you with shame because narcissist don't know any other emotion. They have only access to negative emotions. So he will try to manipul manipulate you with guilt and shame. That's all he knows. The mother intro starts to do that. And then you need to remember something very interesting. Yes, the narcissist is your mother and he has a maternal introject inside your mind. But you are also the narcissist's mother. You're also his mother. And now stage number three, you become finally a mother. And you begin to treat the narcissist as the two-year-old that he is. Temper tantrums. Mothers know how to cope with them. Some mothers, mothers impose discipline, mothers dictate behavior, mother, mothers establish environment, mothers say no, you assume the maternal role. Because when the narcissist leaves, when you leave the narcissist or when there's a discard, when the relationship breaks up, you remain stuck in the infantile stage. You're you're mean you're you're you're a baby with a mother inside the baby's mind. But never forget that the narcissist walks away also as a baby and he also has a maternal introject yours. Use it. Use this power. Use this access. Use this vector and become the narcissist's mother in your mind. It's all in your mind. Never establish contact with a narcissist. This is all in your mind. In your mind, reestablish your maternal authority. You are the mother. This is a 2-year-old baby. He will not tell you what to do. He doesn't control you. He makes no decisions. End of story. And you will not tolerate misbehavior and misconduct and so on. You begin to act the mother. The more you act the mother, the more your healing progresses. In order to act the mother, you need again I I recommend therapy. I I hope I was not mis I'm not misunderstood. I recommend therapy but not global therapy. Like I had a horrible relationship. I need help. That I do not recommend. But what I do recommend is tailored therapy. Step one, I need this therapy. Step two, I need this therapy and so on. Step three is reestablishing the maternal authority and the maternal introject uh that takes control over the narcissistic introject. And to accomplish this you would need mostly this this system mostly IFS. Mostly you can work with transactional analysis also. These two modalities are very powerful when it comes to maternal introjects and how to change them and how to manipulate them and so on so forth. By the way, beautiful, beautiful concepts. I have a video online. I have a video online about everything by the way. The sex life of lives of uh of flies. I have a video on that. So, one of my videos is dedicated to internal family system. So, those of you who want to learn more can watch this video. IFS and transaction analysis are very powerful modalities that will allow you to reestablish yourself as a mother, an internal mother and thereby to subjugate the narcissist introject as a child. You have reached a long way by now. If you have accomplished these three functions, you're a long way towards silencing the narcissist introjection. Now, before I continue, let me check my zipper. That's okay. Before I continue, um, you will never ever get rid of the introjector. I mean, don't kid yourself. Don't delude yourself. You've been through something. You've had a harrowing, horrible experience. This experience is with you for life. There's no way you can undo the experience, dissociate it, erase it, forget it, ignore it, deny it. Not only there's no way but it's also unhealthy. Association is unhealthy. You are stuck with this experience. You've had a bad experience like this seminar for example. So you are stuck with this experience and you are stuck with the narcissist introject. It's not about erasing the narcissist intro. How can you erase something like that? It's a trauma. It's about silencing it. It's about rendering it inactive. Exactly like the narcissist's true self. The true self is there. However, it's inactive. In psychology, we distinguish between inactive and active constructs. Active construct is a construct which is imbued with energy. It has energy. This energy is known was known at the time as cexis. So active constructs parts of your personality parts of yourself which are active they're working all the time they are in operation they are affected they have energy. There are parts of your personality well not in healthy people but in a narcissist for example there's a part of the personality the true self which is decaed. It has no energy. It's there, but it might as well not be there. It has no impact on anything. It's dead. Dead in the water. You have a narcissist introject, you need to make it, you need to defect it. You need to take away its energy. Okay? Those of you who want to go much deeper because these techniques are a bit superficial. They are very effective. Don't misunderstand me. Very effective. But they're a bit like, you know, turnkey. It's a kind of it's a because internal family system is is of course a metaphor. These parts these parts don't really exist. Same with transactional analysis. But these are useful metaphors and they allow us to recover. They're very good. Highly recommended. Those of you who want to go much deeper and and work on your issues that have led to the narcissistic introjection and to a relationship with the narcissist and so on and so forth, you may wish to to consider a psychonamic therapy even psychoanalysis perished the thought. So because these these techniques and especially object relations related object relations related techniques and psychonamic psychotherapies and so on they really know what they're doing when they when it comes to intrajixs. They are the gold standard when it comes to dealing with introjects reframing introjects disabling intakes silencing them and so on so forth. So if you want to do more profound and more fundamental work, if something is wrong with you also, not only with the narcissist, then you may wish to to go to a psychonamic psychotherapist. Having having gone through all these phases, having gone through all these phases, by now what you have is an inactive deaffected inactive introject. An introject without energy is there unfortunately for life. But it's inactive. Now you may ask if this introject can be activated in the future. Yes, of course. For example, if you expose yourself to the same narcissist, the introject can be activated, will be actually activated and you will go back all the way. This is an anti-semitic towel and you will go back you will go back all the way to the very beginning. You'll go all the way to the very beginning. You'll go you'll be babyified again, infantilized again. You have to start from zero again. So the introject is there and those of you who use computers or those of you who love computers, the introject is a backdoor, a backdoor malware. It's it's a vector of attack so that narcissists can use the introject as a way to enter your mind and reactivate the introject. What I'm trying to tell you is that having endured a narcissistic relationship, you are vulnerable. From that moment on and for the rest of your life, you are vulnerable. You have a hole here. This is the introject. And every narcissist can plug into this hole and take over your mind. You're therefore well advised to avoid narcissists. Well advised because don't kid yourself and think that if you're healed and you're recovered, you have acquired immunity. There is some immunity against narcissism from now on. You can spot them. You can, you know, they have no impact on you. They cannot do anything to you because you can identify them. Don't kid yourself. On the very contrary, the exposure to the narcissist renders you more vulnerable to narcissists and therefore you need to be more vigilant than people who have not been exposed to narcissism. This is the case in medicine as well. If you have had one case of pneumonia, your lungs are much more susceptible to pneumonia. If you have had if you've had COVID once, you are much more likely to acquire COVID again. of a different variant but never mind. So there is the body when the body suffers there is u there is a tendency to reacquire the disease and it's the same with narcissist there is no way for you to become immune okay I keep mentioning therapist and all kinds of things and before but and I will get to it at the very end either your my end or your end we'll see but um before we do that I would like to um discuss your treatment goals. Having gone through these three stages, you are ready finally to attend therapy, classical therapy. You go to a therapist. You say, "I had a horrible relationship. I'm devastated. I'm this. I'm that. I want to recover. I want to get to know myself better. I want this. I want that." That now you're ready for this. Now you're ready for this. And I advise you to establish the following goals because when you go to a therapist, never go to a therapist unprepared. Always define your goals. What do you want from the therapy? Always make sure that the therapist you're going to can meet these goals, can fulfill them, and agree with the therapist in advance regarding these goals. This is known as therapeutic alliance. And if the therapist does not meet these goals, does not satisfy you, is not able to make progress with the goals, not with you, with the goals, even if you feel wonderful with this therapist because he reminds you of your uncle, go away, break up with this therapist because here you should be goal oriented and you should pursue your goals relentlessly and and you owe nothing to your therapist. Well, except if you owe money, but otherwise you owe nothing to your therapist. So, the goals are very important. And I advise you, you can have your own goals. By the way, for example, you can have a goal. I want I want to be with narcissists. I love to be with narcissists, but I want to learn how to manage them. I'm kidding you not. There are people like that. There are people like that. They're known as inverted narcissists. And they say, "I feel alive. I feel that the world is in color. and I feel dead and the world is black and white unless I am with a narcissist. I need to be with a narcissist because they're so confident. They're so full of life. They're so amazing. They're so entertaining. And looking at myself, I fully agree. But thank you. But uh and it's legitimate to have this as a goal. Legitimate. So, I want to go to a therapist because I want to learn how to manage narcissist better because I can't live without narcissist. I just can't live without them. When I'm, you know, away from a narcissist, my life is not alive. So, it's legitimate. But just be sure what it is that you want. And don't be all over the place. I want to feel better. I want to be happy. These are not goals. This is poetry, but it's not goals. So, I suggest you the following goals. It's up to you, of course. The first one, ask the therapist to help you to regain agency. You have been denuded and denied your sense of agency. The narcissist did not allow you to act in an agentic way. Didn't allow you to have agency. So, as to regain agency at the end of a relationship with the narcissist, you have an external locus of control. When you were with the narcissist, you felt that the narcissist controlled you or at least that the narcissist controlled the relationship that he was in control of something, the relationship, you both of you and so on. So you need and this this caused you to develop an external locus of control. It's as if the control comes from the outside from the narcissist. You are like uh puppets and he's the puppet master. Yeah, something like that. So the therapist needs to help you to develop an internal locus of control to regain to regain agency. Therapists know how to do this. For example, they give you tasks and they assign responsibility like you're responsible for the task. And if you don't fulfill the task well or don't fulfill it at all or whatever, they uh they make you feel responsible for it. They develop accountability. on their techniques to to accomplish this. So assume responsibility for they force you to or they ask you to assume responsibility for decisions, choices, actions and contributions. One of things one of the things that is common among victims, they develop a whole new language and the language is passive. So whereas before the relationship with the narcissist you would say I did this after the relationship with the narcissist you would say this happened to me. It's like you're passive. So a good therapist would work with you on your language because language creates consciousness. The minute the minute you say I did this you assume responsibility for your actions and choices and decisions. you empower yourself. But if you say this happened to me, then you're nothing. You're inert. You're an object. Things happen to you and so on. So this is an example how we we need to reframe language. The therapist would also teach you to use to use I sentences, not he sentences or you sentences or we sentences. So for example, it's very common when you when you talk to someone and you feel unhappy, it's very common to blame them. Say uh what you're doing is wrong and that's of course not not productive. It also reflects a narcissistic dynamic aloplastic defense. So the therapist will teach you to say to say what you're doing makes me feel bad. makes me feel bad. I sentences that's I give I'm giving you examples of of uh use of language to restore internal locus of control. So the therapist will help you to emphasize personal autonomy, independence and so on so forth. And a good therapist will teach you the difference between this and for example aggression or defiance because it's very easy to become empowered and then to become grandiose and then to become aggressive and defiant and so on and it will teach you how to tell the difference and avoid it. The second goal which I suggest to you when you go to therapy is to regain authenticity. In other words, to separate and individuate, to identify the voices inside you which are not your voices and to get rid of them, to silence them. In existentialist psychotherapy, we actually silence they they silence all the voices all. So we remain with a single voice, the authentic voice. Jean Paul Stoy, Jean Paul Satoy who not his fault was French wrote uh was one of the fathers of existentialism. And so Jean Paulo S in his famous book described a situation where he went to a restaurant and he was sitting in a restaurant and then a guy came in and the guy came in from the street and the guy was talking to his friends and so on and he was clearly authentic. He was himself. And then the guy came in and he stopped at a given location. He took off his street clothes and he put on um the robe the the uniform of the waiter. He was a waiter. He put on the uniform of a waiter. And Jean Paul said the minute he put on the uniform of the waiter he lost his authenticity. He was he became uh construct he became the derivative of social expectations. Society dictated what he would become. Much later there was a guy Louie Altuser and Louis Aluza was a neo-Marxist philosopher and Lou Aluser in coined the word interpolation. Interpolation is how society gives you your identity. Society tells you this is your identity. and you must accept it. So this is called interpolation. Consequently, Louie Aluser like Nichi ended up in a mental asylum. Okay. So interpolation this is a problem with au authenticity and the the therapist will will help you to distinguish voices and automatic sentences and injunctions which are not yours and disable them one by one including the narcissist voice. Depending which type of treatment you go to, you may end up with a single voice, the authentic voice or multiple voices which are benevolent, voices which are good for you, voices which love you. If you want the radical treatment to the very end, silence everything, be left only with your single voice and then maybe gradually and carefully activate other voices. Then you need to attend existentialist existent psychotherapy. They are the ones who they're the best at silencing introjects and identifying the authentic voice. But you need to regain your authenticity. So you need to regain you need to regain agency in personal autonomy. You need to regain authenticity. The third thing that third third goal goal number three that I think should be a goal in your therapy is to regain mindfulness to be present and you do this via the body mostly. Mindfulness in is a mindbody modality. So you need to reconnect with your body and you need to feel grounded. You need to feel centered. You need to feel present. There are multiple techniques. They're all known as mindfulness techniques that can help you with that. It's a crucial step because what the narcissist does to you, he divorces you from your body. It's a process known as estrangement. The narcissist induces in you estrangement. He divorces you from your body or even makes you makes you see your body as an enemy. So you are divorced from your body on on the one hand and the narcissist takes you away from the present because it's a shared fantasy. It's future oriented. So the narcissist always take you away from the present and catapults you throws you into the future so that he controls the present while you are daydreaming and fantasizing and and so on. He gains control of the present. So you're always when you're with the narcissist, you're always stuck in some future tense, in some to happen. It could be a bad thing. You could anticipate something bad. It could be a good thing, but it's always not now. It's always about to happen. And so you g you gain a future orientation. Whereas a narcissist owns the present. You need to regain the present. You need to come back. You simply need to come back. You're no longer with us. You're away. You need to come back all the way. And you need to be here and now. So regain mindfulness. I think uh the the fourth goal, goal number four is to regain personhood. Personhood. Now the first thing when you try to regain personhood is to get rid of your tendency to depend your dependency. We believe that um not everyone but some scholars believe that dependency and addiction require a specific type of personality. So we have the concept of addictive personality. Addictive personality is someone who is addicted today to alcohol, tomorrow to drugs, the next day to love, next day to sex, the always addicted to something. So it's an addictive personality. Uh when I was working in rehab, we told the addicts, the alcoholics, I was alcoholics rehab. We told the alcoholics, do not fall in love. Do not fall in love for one year. one year you're not allowed to have a relationship because what happens is they get rid of the alcohol. They're no longer dependent on alcohol but they become dependent or addicted to love. So they addicted to relationships. So we told them don't have relationships. Remember what I told you at the beginning of the seminar. Don't get your hopes too high. This is the only piece of clothing I'm going to remove. Tada. Thank you. What's the temperature here? Sauna. Okay. >> Sorry. >> Warmer than it was. It's because I took off my sweater. I'm hot. I'm hot. >> Uh, three. Three is okay. Three. Yeah. Do you know what this was on? Bloody hell. My grandmother was doing this. Okay, never mind. She's dead. Okay, so shun shun dependency. They when you regain victimhood, when you regain uh regain victimhood, when you regain uh personhood, the first thing is to try to identify whether you have an addictive personality. Personality that is prone to dependency and addiction. And if you do, then there are techniques to cope with addictive personalities. And this is a top priority because even if everything else works and you shut off the introject and you do the if you have a addictive personality, you leave the office of the therapist and you fall in love with the narcissist because it's an addictive um addictive connection, addictive contact. uh in regaining personhood you also undo undo the damage of the trauma trauma bonding but not only trauma bonding here Kathleen maybe can help us but there is treatment for the trauma this is part of the regain personhood goal to undo the undo the trauma and unpleasant as it sounds the therapist should deal with your grandiosity It is extremely likely that if you end up in a relationship with a narcissist, it is partly because you are grandiose partly. In most victims of narcissistic abuse, there is an element of grandiosity. And the narcissist catered to this grandiosity. You would not have reacted to the idealization had you not been somewhat grandiose. The idealization appeals to you, appeals to your grandiosity. So the therapist in this process of healing and recovery needs to tackle your grandiosity to deconstruct it. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion, but it's also an emotional need. So the therapist would would ask himself and you or herself and you uh what are the emotional needs satisfied by grandiosity? For example, do you feel insecure? Is it a question of feeling safe or or do you feel that you're inferior? Is it compensatory? So he will deal with the grandiosity or she will deal and somehow deconstruct it. It's an integral part of regaining personhood. Why? Because when you're grandiose, you are not you. When you're grandiose, you are an idealized image of you which is not you. Grandiosity is about rejecting you, rejecting who you are. and substituting with an idealized version of you which is not you. The therapist also if needed if needed will teach you some basic skills for example impulse control. Many victims of narcissistic abuse are impulsive. The therapist may borrow elements from dialectical behavior therapy which is great at controlling impulses. A therapist will teach you to be patient, open-minded, humble. In other words, the therapist will emphasize agreeableness, conscientiousness, and open-mindedness, which are elements in the big five factor model of personality. The five factor model. Yeah. So, he will he will if if you need if you need it, maybe you don't need it, but if you do need it, it's part of regaining personhood. He will teach you in short to love the real you. Not the imaginary you. Not the you that you should be. Not the you that you could be. Not the you that is idealized. Not the you that is grandiose. Not the you that is perfect. But just the real you simply. And these are the goals. I think these are the four goals. Regain agency, regain authenticity, regain mindfulness, and regain personhood. Having gotten rid of the introject or disabled the introject silenced and having gone through these four stages you're now faced with the most difficult stage of all and the last one and that is the stage of developing self love. Um we have another 10 minutes to go then I'll give you a 45m minute break um to have lunch and then you return and we continue but we still have another 10 minutes. Okay. for the >> for the personhood developing personhood basically basically every therapy does this it's not but I think mostly dialectical behavior therapy mostly dialectical behavioral therapy is a therapy for borderline personality disorder it was developed by the way by a mental patient I don't know if you know she was in a mental asylum when she started to develop it. Um, she was misdiagnosed. She was misdiagnosed with psychosis when actually she was not psychotic. She had borderline personality disorder. So she developed she was being mistreated. She was being mistreated with medication and they almost killed her. So she said uh she didn't trust her own diagnosis. So she developed a treatment modality alone in the cell. You know amazing story. She developed a treatment modality which later became DBT which is not only extremely effective with borderline personality disorder but is one of the most effective treatment modalities ever developed. She was in her 20s when she developed it. Mental patient in a mental asylum sorry Marsha McLuhan Marsha McLuhan. So it's an amazing story of human resilience and human strength. She was right. Her correct diagnosis should have been borderline personality disorder. Now borderline personality disorders border lines dissociate and when they are under extreme stress and ext extreme anxiety especially if it has to do with abandonment and rejection some border lines develop transient psychosis. It's called psychotic microep. So this psychosis can last up to four days. If the doctor is not trained, especially psychiatrists, psychiatrists really suck when it comes to mental illnesses. So if it's a psychiatrist, he would see the psychosis and he would medicate the psychosis. He would not inquire what led to the psychosis and so on. Now you know of course the difference I hope between psychologist, therapists and and psychiatrists and psychiatrists are medical doctors. Basically they are focused on pills on psychopharmarmacology and they are not good at uh treating you know for example personality disorders they should not be they should make they should not be consulted for personality disorders. Yes psychologists are more academically inclined. So you have psychologists who are experimentalists. You have psychologists who lecture and so on. And therapists are people in the field. They are clinicians. the whole group of clinicians, many social workers, the therapists as well. And these clinicians work with patients and and they the they provide the raw material for the psychologist to study and to analyze and so on. Psychiatrist thinks that they are the supreme rung of the they are the the king kongs of the jungle. But uh I don't think psychiatrists deal with psychology. I think psychiatrist deal with the brain and medications that affect the brain. It's a branch of medicine in effect. Okay. I teach neuroscience as well. So it's not that I'm against but I don't think it's psychology. Hello. Now you have reached the last stage and the last stage has to do with selflove and because self- loveve is a compounded subject and requires delving in um let's take a break now I don't want to start and then in five minutes stop and let's take a break