Narcissism Narrative Therapy ( Fix Your Narrative, Heal Yourself)
Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy that helps patients identify values and skills associated with them, and provides them with knowledge or ability to experience these values and exercise these skills in order to confront problems. The therapist encourages self-authorship and co-authoring a new narrative about themselves. Narrative therapy is closely associated with other therapies, such as collaborative therapy and person-centered therapy. The therapist and the client are perceived as having valuable information relevant to the process and they create together the content of the therapeutic conversation by imbuing it and suffusing it with this valuable information.
How to Resolve (T)horny Dilemmas
In this video, Professor Sam Vaknin explains how to resolve dilemmas. He defines a dilemma as a cognitive dissonance involving two courses of action that are mutually exclusive and contradictory. He provides an example of a typical relationship dilemma and shows a simple method to resolve it. The method involves breaking down the dilemma into its problem, need, and assumption components and analyzing each horn of the dilemma. Finally, he suggests changing assumptions if both needs have equal power.
20 Reasons to NOT Have Kids
In this video, Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the reasons why people are choosing not to have children. He cites studies that show having children can negatively impact physical and mental health, relationships, social life, earning power, and the environment. He also highlights the high cost of raising children, including education expenses, and the fact that many young adults are living with their parents well into their 20s and 30s. Overall, Vaknin argues that there are few good reasons to have children and suggests that counseling or medication may be necessary for those who still want to have them.
Savior/Rescuer as Entitled Narcissist (Excerpt)
Narcissistic saviors, healers, fixers, and rescuers are often predators who hide behind a facade of empathy, compassion, and altruism. They are grandiose, covert, and often move around in couples with someone who is honest and straightforward. They prey on vulnerable, heartbroken, sad, crying women and label someone as an abuser to pose as a savior or rescuer. They are fake friends who engage in perfidy, betrayal, and backstabbing. They are dangerous, sadistic predators who are much more dangerous than overt, open abusers.
What Love Is NOT!
Love is an elusive and highly individual experience that cannot be defined. However, it is possible to identify what love is not. Loving someone is not the same as loving the way they love you, loving to be in love, merging with your partner, being dependent on them, or using them to self-soothe. Love is grounded in reality and involves seeing your partner as a separate entity with all their gifts and potentials. It is a give and take with boundaries, compromises, and negotiations towards common goals and values.
New Year on Planet Mental Illness
Mental illness is a state of disconnect, a state of discontinuity and disjointedness. There’s no gyroscope, no core identity, no guiding light, no northern star, no caressing hand, no embrace and no hugs and no warmth and no acceptance and no love. Mental illness is a cancer of the soul. It’s all-consuming. It’s all devouring. It’s merciless. And its advance is unhindered by any external intervention.
How Narcissist Abuses Your Love, Rejects It ( Borderlines, Codependents, People Pleasers, Too)
Bad object internalization is common to narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, codependency, people pleasers, and parentified children. The bad object is a cluster of introjects, internal representations of significant others, that coalesce and if the messages are negative, it can lead to a child internalizing a bad object whose main message is “you’re not lovable.” These children learn to associate love with rejection, pain, hurt, humiliation, public shaming, shame, guilt, and negative affectivity. Later in life, these adults become slaves to the bad object, and the bad object becomes the Northern Star, the Lord Star, the guiding light.
Best New Year Resolution: Fake Friend Out!
Fake friends are not your friends, they are your enemies. They enable your dark side, your self-destructiveness, your self-harm. They are envious of you and are always parasitic. Fake friends are covert, have no moral compass, and are feral, savage, antisocial, psychopathic, and narcissistic. The best thing you can do for yourself this coming New Year is to rid yourself of their presence.
How Codependent Sees YOU (Intimate Partner)
In this video, Professor Sam Vaknin discusses how codependents see their intimate partners. Codependents are clingy and needy, and they insist on repeating sentences that border on brainwashing or indoctrination. They leverage learned helplessness into an art form and use emotional blackmail to get what they want. There are five categories of codependency stemming from the respective etiologies, including co-dependency that aims to fend off anxieties related to abandonment, co-dependency geared to cope with the co-dependence fear of losing control, vicarious co-dependency, borderline co-dependency or borderline narcissism, and counter-dependency.
Borderline-Narcissist Dance: How They See Each Other
The speaker discusses the dynamics of relationships between borderlines and narcissists, and the impact of these dynamics on the individuals involved. The speaker also delves into the narcissist’s point of view and perception of the other person in the relationship. The text covers various aspects of the narcissist’s mindset, including idealization, blame-shifting, victimization, and the perception of the other person as a persecutory object. The speaker also touches on the narcissist’s internal struggles and the impact on the relationship.