How to Regain Agency After Narcissistic Abuse (Clip: Skopje Seminar, May 2025)

At the end of a relationship with the narcissist, you have an external locus of control. When you were with a 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 and so on. They have 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 a narcissist, you would say, "I did this." After the relationship with a 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, alloplastic 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 going to give you examples of of use of language to restore internal locus of control. So the therapist will help you to emphasize personal autonomy, independence, and so on and 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 he 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 the they silence all the voices. All. So we remain with the single voice, the authentic voice. Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre, who not his fault, was French, wrote was one of the fathers of existentialism. And so, Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous book describes 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 Sartre said, "The minute he put on the uniform of the waiter, he lost his authenticity. He was he became a construct. He became the derivative of social expectations. Society dictated what he would become." Much later, there was a guy Louis Althusser. And Louis Althusser was a neo-Marxist philosopher. And Louis Althusser in a coined the the word interpellation. Interpellation is how society gives you your identity. Society tells you, "This is your identity." And you must accept it. So, this is called interpellation. Consequently, Louis Althusser, like Nietzsche, ended up in a mental asylum. Okay. So, interpellation this is a problem with 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's voice. Depending which type of treatment you you 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, you'll be left only with your single voice, and then maybe gradually and carefully activate other voices, then you need to attend existentialist existential psychotherapy. They are the ones who they're the best at silencing introjects and I identifying the authentic voice. But you need to regain your authenticity, so you need to regain you need to regain agency and in personal autonomy, you need to regain authenticity. The third thing that I 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 mind-body 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 it. 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 a narcissist, you're always stuck in some future tense, in some thing that is about 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 gain you gain a future orientation. Whereas the 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 the 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 to day to alcohol, tomorrow to drugs, the next day to love, the next day to sex, the next 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 1 year. 1 year you're not allowed to have a relationship. Because what happens is they get rid the alcohol. They're no longer dependent on alcohol, but they become dependent or addicted to love. So, they're 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. Woo! What's the temperature here? Sauna. Okay. Sorry? Warmer than it was. It's because I took off my sweater. I mean I'm hot. I'm hot. Uh three three is okay? Three? Yeah? Do you know what this was on? Bloody hell. Phew! My grandma was doing this. Okay. Never mind. She's dead. Okay. So, shan shan depend this