Borderline Codependent: Clinging Child, Punitive Parent
Codependency in parents can lead to children who only receive conditional love based on their performance. This can result in a child who is objectified and treated as an extension of the parent. The child learns that to obtain affection, they must perform, leading to a lack of self-love. This can result in a psychopath, passive-aggressive personality disorder, masochistic adult, or an adult with depressive disorders. Codependents often experience extreme abandonment anxiety and swing between self-effacing and explosive behaviors due to divided loyalties between their partner and internalized parent.
Incest: Narcissism or Society? (International Conference Adolescent Medicine & Child Psychology)
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the taboo of incest and its historical and cultural context. He argues that incest is not a clear-cut matter and that many types of relationships defined as incestuous are between genetically unrelated parties. Vaknin suggests that the incest taboo was and is aimed at preserving the family unit and its proper functioning, regulating the intergenerational distribution and handling of accumulated family wealth, and preventing the degeneration of the genetic stock of the clan or tribe through intra-family breeding. He concludes that incest is a culture-bound restriction, prohibition, and taboo, and that a world without incest is considerable, and a world with incest is considerable.
Cold Therapy: Treat Narcissism and Depression (30th World Psychiatrists and Psychologists Meet)
Cold Therapy is a new treatment modality for narcissistic personality disorder developed by Professor Sam Vaknin. It treats pathological narcissism as a post-traumatic condition and uses techniques borrowed from child psychology and trauma therapy. Cold Therapy aims to re-traumatize the patient in a controlled environment, allowing them to emerge as a healthier adult with firm boundaries and a stable sense of self-worth. The treatment consists of 25 proprietary techniques, including erasure, hypervigilant referencing, grandiosity reframing, and happiness mapping.
Narcissist, His Body, Other Bodies (35th Psychosomatic Medicine Conference 2018 Video Presentation)
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the relationship between narcissists and their bodies, focusing on somatic narcissists who derive attention using their body and sexuality. Somatic narcissists often misjudge their bodies and dedicate significant time and effort to reshaping and improving them. The cerebral narcissist, on the other hand, devalues their body and focuses on their intellect. Vaknin also explores how narcissists react to their own illnesses and accidents, as well as the illnesses and disabilities of their children.
Abuser-Victim Bond: Emotional Processing and Object Inconstancy
Victims of narcissistic abuse keep falling for it because they are the spitting image of their abusers in terms of psychodynamic processes. Victims and abusers have unusual ways of processing information, and they share impaired object constancy. Victims and abusers bond via their resonating pathologies, and this bonding is an addiction. Abusers and victims fulfill each other’s voids, and traumatic bonding is extremely difficult to break.
Narcissism Evolving: 3 Disturbing Trends
Women have become as narcissistic as men, if not more so, as gender roles shift and women try to emulate men. Narcissists are becoming more dangerous, leveraging their cold empathy more sinisterly and becoming more malignantly grandiose and even criminalized. People, even narcissists, no longer have role models and everyone claims superiority, leading to pathological envy and a society where no one can be better than anyone else. This narcissism is going to kill and destroy us as a species.
“Sexual Perversion”? No Such Thing in Psychology
There is no such thing as sexual perversion, as long as the sexual behavior is consensual between consenting adults and does not harm anyone, including oneself. Psychologists and psychiatrists consider such behavior to be healthy and normal. Even pedophilia and coprophagia are not considered perversions, but rather paraphilias, which are unusual sex practices. Perversion is a societal and cultural value judgment that is dependent on the period.
Fear of Intimacy, Cheating, and Preemptive Abandonment
People who fear intimacy will choose partners who are also afraid of intimacy, and they will both make sure there is no intimacy in the relationship. Abusive relationships are mutually exclusive to intimacy, and people with fear of intimacy choose abusers as their partners because being abused is their comfort zone. Narcissists are terrified of losing their source of secondary narcissistic supply, usually their spouse or intimate partner, and they push their intimate partner away to allay their anxiety over the impending and ineluctable loss of the relationship.
Narcissism as Addiction (ICABS 2019: International Conference on Addiction and Behavioral Science)
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the idea of recasting narcissistic disorders of the self as addictions. He explains that pathological narcissism is a form of addiction to narcissistic supply, which is the narcissist’s drug of choice. The pursuit of narcissistic supply is frenetic and compulsive, and when it is missing, the narcissist resorts to abnormal narcissistic supply by behaving recklessly, succumbing to substance abuse, or living dangerously. Narcissists faced with a chronic state of deficient narcissistic supply become criminals, race drivers, gamblers, soldiers, policemen, investigative journalists, or develop phobias, fear, and anxiety.
The Four Mantras of Victims of Abuse
Victims of abusive relationships often stay in them due to negative automatic thoughts that they have adopted from their abuser. These thoughts include “I am lucky to be with my abuser,” “life doesn’t get much better than this,” “my partner is not worse than others,” and “life is a serious business.” These thoughts are more common in non-Western societies, where the pursuit of happiness is considered selfish and risky, and the family is centered around procreation and property. Women in these societies often tolerate abuse and domestic violence and act meek and subservient to accommodate their bullying husbands.