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Long title, yes. My awakening has been a slow coming. It's somewhat late in life but I don't want to spend the rest in misery. I am 44 years old. I live in Absurdistan, formerly known as Sweden. My dream was to become a musician. How clever. Nobody pays for those anymore. I compensated my dysfunction by practicing my instrument insane number of hours. Didn't work. "Never give up on your dreams". Only a fool keeps pursuing dreams that are disguised nightmares. I want to give something back. I've learned so much but my truth is insanity here. I have nothing to show for the effort I have put in. I want to move away from here. My therapists have told me that it's a escape mechanism, that I don't want to face my fears. It's funny because when I have told them about what I have faced they end the therapy (because of transferrence?). Yay public healtcare! It seems that what is needed for this country is viewed as so offensive that it is completely impossible to convey. Being a middle aged supposedly privileged white male but lacking the evidence for that priviledge, i e the fancy car, the fancy apartment in the fancy community etc, it seems a futile endeavour. My "career" has been interrupted several times due to depression. Like I told a friend recently; "The only thing I know is to get a job." Working with low intelligence, leftist feminists that get drunk on the weekend. Yeah that dream I had kind of screwed up my chances of increasing my income. 40 to 80 is a long time.

Hello all. My first post here, but I can't think of another community on or offline that hasn't drunk the 'family koolaid'. TL;DR: The issue at hand, and I think many of us might have a similar situation, is that my fiancée has an expectation/ desire that my family of origin has a place in our lives together. I think they are really bad people, so damaged that they have no clue how toxic they are. Ironically she wants nothing to do with her abusive mother. I occasionally try to connect with them mostly out of a sense of misplaced duty but I leave every visit angered and saddened. I think I have to explain my feelings towards them by giving some background. As a warning, some of the things I discuss here may provoke either rage, sickness or incredulity so again I warn you and also swear that this is the real truth of my life. My mother grew up as R-selected as you can get: zero male figures in her life, with angry, abusive and neglectful females as her 'caretakers'. This was post-war Germany where sadly stories like this are common. When my mother was 9 her mother died horribly. My mother grew up admiring the USSR and communist ideals, naturally, seeing them as the opposite of the much maligned NSDAP. My mother is extremely foolish as later as an adult some man asked her to have his child and she obliged him even though they weren't married, just assuming he would stay. Naturally he left her shortly after. He died not long after in what is likely a drunk driving accident, leaving my mother with my brother. Four years later she met my father, and older American army officer, himself from an extremely rough background involving whatever abuse and privation you can imagine including frequent familial sexual abuse. He himself I would say now had traits of both autism and sociopathy. I imagine my mother would naturally be attracted to her perfect R-selected match or perhaps to her limited judgement he represented an image of respectability, strength and charm. I don't want to be unfairly hard on them as they essentially experienced hellish lives, but all I mean by that is that I will not exaggerate. I believe cross-cultural matches are dangerous because the language barrier/ culture barrier sort of fogs peoples evaluations of one another relative to their native social context. During my childhood my mother, inspired by feminists in her liberal arts program, decided to divorce my father and excise him from my life. Perhaps it was the propaganda, perhaps it was my father's constant philandering. Regardless of the details, which to this day I can not fully know, I received the wrath of my mother for years as she attempted to indoctrinate me and my brother to believe that everything male was evil, females are 100% good, communism is the ideal society, the sexes are not only psychologically identical but somehow even physically identical (???) as were the races. I was praised as being 'so smart' when I would parrot all this nonsense back to her. The most terrible thing she tried to teach me was that sexual promiscuity was a good thing and a man had no right to expect fidelity from his female partner. Or actually many the most terrible thing was that modern art was supposedly better than classical art -- she literally yelled at me every time I tried to draw a doodle that was remotely identifiable as a real-world object. For fun she liked to invite a series of men of the years to share her bed at the house my father bought for her. She also had zero physical boundaries, often going nude in passing or just barging in when I was using the restroom or shower. I remember just shivering with a feeling of violation as she would demand to inspect my penis' foreskin for phimosis which I know now is a nonsense condition that either resolves itself naturally or may be overcome with simple stretching. No need to slice of 1/3 of my penis which thankfully didn't happen. I had zero trust in her. Compounding this were my own psychological and developmental problems. I couldn't tie my shoes until I was 9, I couldn't really read until I began puberty. I had a violent temper that I would unleash against my pears, hurling invective at them just like my mother would constantly lambast anything American or male related or even anything she imagined was somehow American rather than ubiquitous. I was a small boy for the longest time, skeletally thin or fat and pre-hypertensive due to having little to eat or only junk food to eat (for no good reason as my father dutifully paid child support which my mother used for her own purposes). My mother knew what she was doing and would lie to doctors about the health of my diet. I was always weak and cranky, often nearly passing out upon standing. Ironically my mother was always screaming about how fat Americans were and how fat and calories were so evil. My brother during this time would stuff his face to my mother's criticism while she alternately praised me for how little I took. As I entered puberty, I became aware of my situation. My mental and physical development exploded and I began to assert control over my own wellbeing. I fully recognized that I had grown up deprived of food, sleep, attention, healthy social interaction, community and male role models except for the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Segal, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme. In a very real and also very sad way, these movie men were my surrogate fathers, serving as my most powerful role models, if not perfect, of what a man can and should do in the world to my adolescent mind. I continued to starve until I was too big to be yelled at for fixing myself a sandwich by my apparently psychotic or extremely cheap mother. I became popular at school as I took the pose of both teacher's pet but also class-clown. During this time my mother acquired another husband, who actually lived with us and off my father's child support payments for a good number of years. This man was a broken shell, a product of a sadistic father and a psychopathic mother. Naturally he was a very malleable doormat for my mother. He was phlegmatic, to a point, but possessed an explosive temper when pushed to his limit, which these days is next to nothing to set him off. Everyone was always screaming: my brother was constantly angry and yelling and slamming doors, my mother with her blood-curdling scream, my step-father a porcupine and me trying my hardest to stay out of the way of these angry, illogical freaks. As bad as this was, this was the least miserable time during my childhood/ young adolescence. As a child otherwise unremarkable or below-average I had been able to speak with adult level sophistication since an unusually early age. Later it really became apparent that I was a 'late bloomer' and my scholastic achievements began to pile up, and naturally my brother, who was always terrible academically, began to hate me. My mother spoke about my achievements to all her friends like she had single damn thing to do with any of it. Seeing myself through my peer's eyes I began over the years to correct my own faults: temper, immaturity, rudeness, fear and to this day I struggle with these behaviors. Having my fiancée with me is a great help in this matter as she is very sensitive and loving -- being with her reminds me of how people are naturally quiet in a library, and our good communication allows me to know when I am unconsciously or even consciously less than fair. I love her so much it brings tears of joy to my eyes. Perhaps it is unhealthy because she is essentially the only psychologically healthy person I know better than an acquaintance, however she has always acted with love towards me and I to her. Besides just her feedback and my self-analysis I make sure to get the correct amount of sleep, avoid blood sugar fluctuations and get plenty of vitamin D and exercise. This continued through my young adulthood. I became extremely intelligent -- so intelligent I wish every day I were an idiot. Workplaces love me -- my peers view me as some kind of sage but I can't connect with them and form real friendships. I built up degrees and honors and pursued my career deliberately in anything as different from art or humanities as I could determine, not because I hate these things but because I hate the people who occupy these fields. My mother took credit and my brother hated me. My mother used my stepfather's eventual relative fortune to buy a series of dilapidated shacks. My brother instead circled the drain of life with expectations completely mismatched to the actions he took. Mostly he partied, drank, slept around and blamed everyone else under the sun why he almost failed out of high school and a third tier state college. He lives at home to this day with my mother's 10 cats, in a pose of codependence, after having lost he job he got through nepotism and that he failed out of through sheer incompetence. My brother especially makes visiting hell because he eagerly consumes pop culture. Every time I challenge him when he brings up a mainstream media anti-Trump or anti-Right smear with widely documented facts, facts my brother doesn't contest mind you, he becomes enraged almost to the point of striking me, accusing ME of starting an unwanted debate and trying make HIM a loser by merely challenging anything he says. His way of conciliation is to demand that I agree that everyone is an idiot, and that I shouldn't try to maintain any beliefs because nobody will ever accept them and that all world views are compatible despite the presence a little thing called state power. What he really means is that I shouldn't directly or indirectly reveal to him how little thought he puts behind things and he doesn't care about right, wrong or even basic societal order. He is also a true-blue leftist. He also criticized me for 'pulling away from the family' -- no shit. Why would I want to spend a second more with three broken gas-lighters so aggressively unintelligent, catastrophically dysfunctional and morally debased that they resist even things like the Non Aggression Principle or the idea that Straw Men are not arguments? I shouldn't be surprised they do given our history. After this rant, the issue is that my fiancée wants my 'family' to participate in our future children's lives. She doesn't blame people for their behavior no matter how long after the initial trauma they maintain the effects. This is probably why she tolerated me during our early days when I was still bad at expressing my feelings productively and took measures to further mature. So basically she is a poor judge of character, luckily and also unluckily for me. But in my family I can't think of people more diametrically opposed to my most cherished values than those people or more toxic to a child that wants to grow up with: objectivity, virtue, a pursuit of belief or non-belief in religion unassailed by ideologues, personal interests, health, safety, joy, comfort, secure love, protection, education and example. What can I do as neither of our families are sane? Can we be just an Island and still be healthy? Especially as a right-wing pro-religion yet paradoxically a classically atheist there are hardly any people like me in our very liberal city. Oddly my fiancée is a recovering leftist from a leftist family but she absolutely loves Ancap ideas when I support them with objective universal arguments and historic evidence that the opposite is demonstrably bad.

The monsters inside us and how they get there. Why do targets stay with narcissistic abusers? Why do people stay in contact with abusive family members?

https://www.youtube.com/c/sachaslone

Channel Topic: Navigating toxic relationships Format: Monologues pinpointing manipulative behavior through personal stories, using terms associated with disordered personality. The subject matter is very very serious, but he manages to make light of it all and he is one of a kind. Needless to say, I don't agree with him in everything; he's not entirely philosophically consistent but his ideas and flow of presentation are brilliant and have helped me tremendously. In an incredibly head-tripped stressful time for me his videos helped me to navigate toxic relationships and isolate horrendously toxic behaviors in manipulative relationships. He's helped me as I learn to identify and treat those behaviors as seriously dysfunctional. These are my three favorite videos from his channel, I hope you find the information and his personal insights to be of help or use to you. P.s.: His voice will grow on you! P.p.s.: thank you Sacha Sloan on FDR and YouTube for recommending his channel to me!

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer One paragraph that stood out: "As we navigate through the world, we are changed by a variety of experiences. Of special note are experiences of three types: (1) we observe what is happening around us (other people behaving, sounds of music, instructions directed at us, words on pages, images on screens); (2) we are exposed to the pairing of unimportant stimuli (such as sirens) with important stimuli (such as the appearance of police cars); (3) we are punished or rewarded for behaving in certain ways. We become more effective in our lives if we change in ways that are consistent with these experiences – if we can now recite a poem or sing a song, if we are able to follow the instructions we are given, if we respond to the unimportant stimuli more like we do to the important stimuli, if we refrain from behaving in ways that were punished, if we behave more frequently in ways that were rewarded" The only thing I would counter is, given the standard of most childhoods, the way to become more effective is to behave more frequently in the ways that were punished in our formative years, and less in the ways that were rewarded.

Hello everyone. Thank you in advance for reading my post There are a lot of topics that I would like to talk about in this thread and a lot of things I would like to say, but first I would like to start with a brief overview of my recent history just so you can get an idea where I am coming from. This will probably end up being a long post so sit back and relax. So where to begin? Probably my sophomore year of high school. That is when things started to go downhill with me being completely oblivious to it. In 2012 during my sophomore year I started taking guitar lessons with a new teacher. I had already been playing guitar for five years at that point and I only stopped taking lessons with my old teacher because he moved to a different state. This new guy I started with was a great teacher and I learned alot about music from him. Eventually he suggested that I might want to become a guitar teacher myself. At that time, I still had no idea what I wanted to do in life, so this suggestion interested me. Eventually he completely sold me on the idea and I decided that after high school, I would start a career in music starting with guitar teaching. I said to myself, I have always been a music person so what else am I going to do right? I should also mention that around this time, my teacher was starting his own business; a music school of his own teaching college level stuff. I was apart of the first classes he gave at this new school. Fast forward to 2014 I had graduated high school and had also graduated from the first year of my teachers music school. I had my high school diploma and a "Degree of Achievement" (a certificate) from my guitar teachers school. My teacher started telling me things like how great my career was going to be and how great being a teacher was. So my career was starting or so I thought. In truth, I really had no idea what I was doing or what was going on, I was just doing what my teacher told me and following his lead ( I will elaborate on this more below). So this is the point (late 2014) when my teacher started to dangle carrots in front of me. He offered me a position at his new school and was constantly telling me that he was going to get me lots of students and that his business was going to grow really big "soon". Unfortunately, I believed him. It was also at this point that I started to doubt the quality of his character. I had known for a long time that he strongly believed in god and that he pushed his faith on others and also that he subscribed to a great deal of mysticism. Then I found out that he was a strong supporter of stateism and basically just sat in front of the T. V. all day watching fox news. He was a sheep. I didnt think that they actually existed until I met one of them. At one point he even told me "You shouldn't go around believing that there is no god". He knew beforehand that I was an atheist. Why did I put up with this? I will elaborate below. Then the final nail in the coffin was laid. He told me that he hit his kids. Then i knew I didnt want this man in my life anymore. He said insane things like "Yeah I hit my daughter because she ran out into the street, and because of that punishment, shes not going to run out into the street anymore. I'm saving her life by hitting her." You cant make this stuff up. So fast forward to summer 2015. All this time I had been waiting for his promises for basically a year. It was time I finally confronted him on this. So I called him up one day and talked to him about it. After a few minutes he completely blew up at me. He proceeded to yell at me and say some of the most retarded shit I've ever heard. After a few minutes of this I knew that this would be the end of our relationship. I was done. I told him to not hit his kids, and then I hung up the phone. He sent me a text telling me to never get near him or his family again. So that was it. The three years of my life that I spent relying on him ended up being wasted years. Who knows what I could have done in that time if I had never met that bastard. I spend so much of my time being jealous of people my age who have been smarter with their lives and are successful. Now I will tell you what my teacher really is. He is a rank Narcissist. (Note: the following is simply my own perception of narcissism as I have seen it and experienced it) Narcissists try to create their own little world centered around themselves. In this world they are perfect and never wrong. Then they try to seduce other people to become a part of this world. His wife and many of his friends were apart of this own world of his. And of course he had seduced me into his world as well. Eventually I realized this and escaped from his little world and I accepted the true reality of what he really was. In my final phone call with him I shattered this world of his. Why? Because I told him that he could not keep his promises which, of course suggests he in not perfect. What do you get when you shatter a narcissist's image of themselves? You get rage. That is why he blew up on me. That is also why I put up with his bullshit for so long because i knew that if i challenged him, he would blow up at me and I was afraid of this. But why did I rely on him for so long? When I was growing up, and even through my teens, my mother basically did everything for me. She never taught me how to do anything and I was totally reliant on her. This conditioned me to not want to do things myself and not put forth any effort because everything in life had been done for me. This is why when my teacher told me things like "I'm going to start you on this career, im going to get you this job" I totally attached myself to him because thats what I was used to. He was offering to do things for me. It also didnt help that my father was also a narcissist And now we get down to what I really want to talk about: How this conditioning has effected my ability as a productive human and how It effects my future. I come from a family that you could say is very modest. They don't have great aspirations, they don't want to do great things in the world, they just want to live life and have dysfunctional relationships with the rest of their family. That is what makes me the elephant in the room because I actually have great aspirations. I want to write music, to have my own band, to play in front of tons of people. For this reason (and for a GREAT many other reasons including loads of abuse, feel free to ask me if you want) I knew that I wanted to De-foo from my family long ago. I didnt want to be apart of their petty squabbles and fake respect and love for each other. I'm not going to pretend that someone who abused me greatly and is unrepentant about it is my friend or loves me. When I finally accepted the reality of my family my relationship with them died. To quote Atlas Shrugged: "Where do you come from?" "Buffalo." "Got any family?" She hesitated. "I guess so. In Buffalo." "What do you mean, you guess so?" "I walked out on them." "Why?" " I thought that if I ever was to amount to anything, I had to get away from them, clean away." "Why? What happened?" "Nothing happened. And nothing was ever going to happen. That's what I couldn't stand." This passage describes my family and how I feel about them pretty well. (Note: My family isn't completely dependent on welfare or anything like that. They have their own careers and provide for themselves, its just that any mention of having big dreams or having an impact on the world are completely shot down by them. They don't encourage that kind of thing at all. This is part of the reason I want to get away from them.) Now, you may now be imagining that I am some person who comes from an abusive and un-philosophical family but is also a person who has great aspirations and rises above his past to become a great and creative producer But there's the problem. That is not me. I am not that man. Sure I do have big aspirations, but I feel like I completely lack the will and the driving force to follow those aspirations. Whenever I say I'm going to do something, there is a part of me that never takes myself seriously. I have a voice that tells me "Your not really going to do that." "Theres no way you can do that are you kidding?" Its like im stuck in some gross muddy muck and whenever I think I want to do something, it is too hard to escape from it so I don't. It feels like I am being torn apart. On one side I am unlike my family because I actually want to do things but on the other side I am like them because I don't have the will to do them. It still feels like I am apart of them somehow and I don't want to be. But I do think that the biggest cause of not feeling that I can do things is the conditioning I received from my parents who did everything for me and who also never encouraged me in anything. That is what was deadly Now, how has my past affected my general ability to do things as a human being? Well, I think it has had a huge negative effect. Like I've mentioned above, I was raised to not have to do anything for myself and I come from a family that doesn't encourage ambition. Does someone with this kind of history seem like they would work very hard? Most of the time when I've been working it seems like everyone is doing things faster, smoother, and simply better than me. I always try my hardest but I am sometimes in awe about how slow I do things. This has led to me having an image of myself that basically says that I am totally incompetent. I always try to tell myself that I am not, but it is very hard to do so when I see people doing things faster and better than me all the time. I realize that I am good at some things an worse at others and that I can improve at things with practice, but still whenever I try to do things at work, I have that same feeling of being stuck in a swamp and not having the will to do things. I wish I didnt have that feeling. That is one of the main things I am working on right now. All I want to do is to live by my own effort. That is something that I am not doing right now and I think that is the main source of my depression (among other things). I'm going through kind of an identity crisis right now. I'm basically trying to figure out weather or not I can be an achiever that pursues my dreams or someone that is too effected by his past to ever achieve them. As far as what I am doing right now I do have some kind of tentative plan. I know for sure that I am going to go to a career counselor to try and get a grasp on what I could be good at and what I enjoy. Depending on what I hear from the counselor I will decide what to do next, however I also think that I want to go back to school to a technical 2 year college so I can get a degree that is actually worth something so I can get a good job so i can finally get away from my god damn parents forever. My dilemma is this. I want to have a job I enjoy but I also want to get away from my parents as soon as humanly possible. Because of this, I would be extremely tempted to take the first living wage paying job that I am offered even if it is something that I may not enjoy. On the other hand I could wait and find a job that I know I would like but then I might be stuck living with my mother longer while I try to find it. Living with my mother is absolute anguish. I've been living here so long now and ALL I want to do at this point is to GET AWAY. Also, for those who are wondering, I am seeing a great therapist right now and I have been for one and a half years. It has been so immensely helpful to me. As far as my dreams go (writing music, having my own band) they are something I still want to peruse. I need to focus on one thing at a time and becoming financially independent is my main focus right now. Once I do that, and once I start to heal and the depression goes away, I feel like then I could focus on what I really want to do which is writing music and releasing it. Doing that right now while I am in this horrible situation seems pretty much impossible to me. I feel like I also need to get out of the swamp that I'm in now and learn how to actually have courage and have the will to do the things that I want. I don't know how I'm going to do this but that is why I made this post. I would love to hear you guys' thoughts on everything I have said. I want to overcome these issues that I have. I know that there's some very emotionally and intelligently smart people here on FDR and I think that some of you guys could really shed some light on what is going on. I deeply appreciate all the help I can get. Thank you. P.S. The name of my former narcissist guitar teacher is David Poole. If you live in the Atlanta area and are involved in any part of the music scene, stay the hell away from this man.

PRO TIP: Covert passive aggressive manipulators love to start conversations with: "I'm concerned about you." "I care about you." "I'm worried about you." This type of passive aggressive communication is a strategy used by covert manipulators as a way to level up their dominance, to intimidate the target, to leave the target feeling self-doubt, and to put the target on the defensive. Manipulators want to control the target's emotions and actions. In my opinion, a better way to start a conversation is with curiosity. For example, "How are you? I am very curious to know more about what has happened. A healthy person, who is in ally, will never start a conversation putting you on the defensive. A true friend who respects you, will want to hear about what has happened, from you, before they solidify their thoughts and feelings. The appropriate time for a friend to declare 'I'm worried about you' is after you have told them the story! <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/USO6gq5hHJ4"frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Every once in a while, targets who have gone no contact with their family of origin will start daydreaming and remembering the “happy good times” with the narcissist in their family. Well, I’m here to remind you that those were not fun, happy times. Those were disgusting, humiliating times. Those were very sad times. Self-Knowledge Daily — Doing the daily work of knowing who we are, and creating the conversation we want to see in the world. Search the growing archive of articles and videos by topic on our website. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook http://selfknowledgedaily.weebly.com/about.html

Originally posted on Medium! Enjoy! As long as we stay around corrupt, abusive, and nasty people who overtly attack us, implicitly humiliate us through clever language tricks, or invalidate us subliminally through a sudden but brief look of contempt that immediately follows earnest proclamations that attempt to convince us they “understand where we’re coming from”, our entire emotional apparatus will remain compromised. So long as we remain in the presence of toxic people, our emotions will remain toxic through overstimulation; guilt becomes toxic shame, humiliation becomes chronic irritation, fear becomes hypervigilance and paranoia, while anger festers into murderous rage. Let’s have a more detailed look at anger as an example. Emotions are just another kind of information; information in the form of energy and the information that is being communicated through anger is that, not only has there been a violation or a transgression against you, but also that something needs to change, hence the energy which is designed to propel you into action. For instance, if you feel angry after being insulted by a bully, your anger is saying “get away from this person” or “remove yourself from the interaction”. But what happens when we cannot remove ourselves from the interaction? What happens if we are children, have no control over our environment and can’t escape because the bullies in our lives are our parents? Or, what happens even when we can control our environment and leave, but for whatever reason mistakenly believe that we can’t? Well, it is likely then that the anger will turn into rage. The difference between anger and rage is that while anger carries the message, “take control of your behavior and change things by leaving the dysfunctional environment”, rage says, “since we can’t remove ourselves from the environment let’s change things by controlling the other person” or, more simply put, by fighting back. This is why rage is often coupled with violent impulses to inflict physical or psychological damage on the other person. Again, it is designed to propel us into taking action that will change something. But what if we can neither fight nor flee from an abuser, as is almost always the case for children? What happens when we can’t run or when any attempt to fight results in greater harm for us? What happens when feeling these emotions become dangerous for us? The answer is that we end up feeling nothing. We become depressed. We enter the ‘freeze’ response similar to what we would enter into in the presence of a grizzly bear, a beast that we can neither fight nor run from; we play dead. Now, to be clear, it is terribly tragic for a child to ever have to enter into this response as a result of being raised by hostile parents, but at the same time it is totally healthy and necessary for preventing the child from further harm. It is unnecessary when this occurs for an adult who does indeed have the choice to get abusive people out of his life. Once we escape the corrupt and commit ourselves to healing, we slowly but surely can heal our emotional apparatus. And once we are safe to feel again, we gain access to our emotions like anger and grow confidence in our ability to process reality and self trust that our emotions accurately reflect reality. Eventually, people’s sneaky and crazy making attempts to undermine us and blame us for our feelings becomes extremely obvious and pathetic. We become our own proof.

On medium this, to my great surprise, has become my most successful article yet, being my most viewed (767) piece with the largest read ratio(595 reads) of 78%. I shared this article in only two narcissistic abuse facebook groups before I went to bed around midnight and only 6 hours later both posts have gathered over 20 likes and much praise. And the thing is, this is one of the simplest things I've written. A piece which my inner critic usually opposes by telling me the next piece has to be a dazzling display of my analytical capacities being pushed to the max, with research and sweeping rhetoric. The lesson? Empiricism is the way to go. You just don't know if that thought you're having is boring or not until you share things. The “Narcissistic Dull” Much has been written about narcissists, in great length and in great detail. Such work has even spawned the invention of new terms and lingo to better describe characteristics that are typically displayed by narcissists as well as to establish a clear distinction between a behavior when its exhibited by a narcissist versus someone like you or me. For example, there’s rage and then there’s “Narcissistic Rage.” Anybody who’s encountered such fury will know that there’s a clear difference between the two. For example, I rage sometimes, like when I yell at electronics that aren’t working the way I want them to. However, it’s totally a guilty indulgence for me and something that if you happened to witness on accident, I’d feel pretty embarrassed about it and would be keen on persuading you that it’s not something I do a lot or think is ideal. When a Narcissist rages she feels no such shame. She does not consider the boundaries of others nor how her screaming tirades impacts those around her and if she does, she feels self righteous and that the abuse is justified. Even if she’s aware of how immature and mean her behavior is, she does not care. If anything, she feeds off the thrill of power and feeling of omnipotence she gets from provoking fear in others. However, there is one such characteristic that I’ve encountered repeatedly in narcissists I’ve interacted with that I don’t think I’ve ever read about, which is that they are so often incredibly, painfully boring. I’d like to introduce my own term by calling it the “Narcissistic Dull”. Think about what makes a conversation enjoyable. For me, it is when the other person brings curiosity into the interaction, is truly interested in what I have to say, listens and asks questions. This is what helps to keep me engaged. But, despite the narcissist’s wit and charm, that flashy novelty wears off during conversation because they never ask you anything, don’t listen, they never are interested in you and they just go on and on and on about themselves. And because they (wrongly) think that they are interesting, they won’t neglect to mention the tiniest details. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to listen to my mom say while we’re at Subway, “You see, I’ve never really liked bread. If I eat it, I like it burnt.” Sure, anyone can be dull, but if what I’m saying is a little boring to a friend, we can express ourselves and find a way to make the conversation fun again. When the narcissist is dull, she is extremely dull, doesn’t notice how bored you are or does notice, in which case she doesn’t care about your experience in the conversation and if so so happen to make your experience known, she will not take kindly to receiving any kind of feedback that isn’t what she wants to hear.

When I was younger, I was very shy and didn't have many friends, nor did I talk much. People always said I was really quiet. As I've gotten older and more confident I have apparently gone in the opposite direction. A few years ago, before I actively started pursuing self-knowledge, people sometimes said I talked too much. I've noticed that I happen to talk about myself or things in my life a lot as well. I'm in a weird place where I know what I'm doing, but I have difficulty not doing it. I know the key to having a good conversation with people is empathy and active listening, but I find myself just anticipating when the other person finishes so I can give my two cents on the matter, no matter how trivial. Is there any way to fix this? I've tried going "silent" a few times and only responding to people, but I always end up back to jabbering away at some point. I really don't want to be either silent, nor hog conversations or turn it to myself. It's weird because it only affects my personal life really. When I'm in a professional setting I don't seem to talk about myself too much unless asked. I thought perhaps a solution is to view my personal life as a business setting, but then I don't feel authentic. One of the first books on self-knowledge I read was "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and it has only helped me become self-aware of how much I do talk about myself. I've used a lot of the advice in the book, but it seems to only help professionally and not personally. As a result I still have few friends that I'd consider close. Does anyone have any past experience with this or advice on what I can do? I know I need to ask questions and be genuinely interested in others, but that impulsive itch to talk always creeps up and it's hard to stamp out when it does. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Cruelty is a topic which has fascinated me for years. I still remember very vividly my feelings of utter bewilderment that I experienced towards some of my earliest encounters with such acts. Whether it was a more personal example such as verbal aggression coming from a school yard bully or something more distant that I had read about or seen in a history book, I've never been able to wrap my head around what could enable people to be mean; let alone enjoy it. One example of me attempting to solve this enigma that comes to mind was when I was around the age of 15 or so. While an old friend and I were watching a an anime film, one of the antagonists ejected one of those oh so derisive maniacal laughs that we've grown so accustomed to from villains. After which, I couldn't help asking, "Why do villains always laugh when they hurt people?" Apparently being annoyed with my question, my friend replied quickly and irritably, as if the answer were obvious, "I don't know, maybe for the same reason YOU laugh at things YOU think are funny". As a result, I didn't make any attempts to take the query any further and so, I was back to square one. Of course, l understood that laughter is a reaction that occurs as a result of finding something funny. But, that wasn't a satisfying answer. I wanted to know why they find it funny. What is it that makes some people able to find humor and enjoy the suffering in others, while others are repulsed? Since then, despite many attempts to arrive at some form of closure regarding this topic, I've remained at a loss for a satisfactory explanation as to how exactly some people are capable of treating other people as objects. Even since my discovery of the concept of empathy and how a lack thereof allows others to inflict suffering, the more I thought about things, the more confused I became. For example, if empathy is merely the ability to "understand what another person is thinking and feeling" so to speak, and if a lack of this ability is what allows for others to be cruel, how is it that the sociopath seems incredibly adept at understanding the preferences of his target, uses his knowledge about the target's desires in order to better exploit him, and on top of that is totally aware that he is inflicting harm, yet doesn't care. Also, how is it that others I've encountered apparently lack empathy in certain situations, meaning they are completely oblivious to what others are thinking and feeling, but are at worst just a bit of a nuisance because they don't understand social cues. One minor example that occurs to mind is of someone who, as I was trying create distance between us so I could eat, he followed me and went on and on about the disgusting pictures of flesh wounds he was looking looking at on the internet the night before. It didn't occur to him that I might not want to be grossed out while I was eating. However, this same gentleman doesn't strike me as someone who is cruel. Had I pointed out to him that I would prefer solitude or that he was making me upset, my gut tells me that he would have felt bad and apologized. This suggests that empathy is a spectrum, with some on the high end and some on the low end. Also, empathy is something that can be permanently lost in some, such as the case of the psychopath, while being in a state of non empathy for others is a merely transient state, which I am not immune to entering into. I am capable and have committed acts of cruelty too, so I'm not putting myself on a pedestal of superiority. Because mere speculation isn't satisfying to me, in order to figure out precisely where I land on the empathy spectrum, I took the "Empathy Quotient Test", which consists of 60 questions. I scored a 66 out of 80, which means I have a high ability for understanding how other people feel and responding appropriately . This is actually remarkably close what I would have rated myself if I were to have just guessed, which again demonstrates self empathy/awareness. It also indicates growth since the last time I attempted to answer this question speculatively, I would have said it was quite low. That may all be well and good, but what exactly is empathy? After years of searching for an answer, I finally found a satisfactory explanation in Simon Baron Cohen's amazing book called, "The Science of Evil: On Empathy and The Origins of Cruelty". For anyone else who is interested in the topic, this is an essential must read. My own understanding of empathy not only became vastly enriched by this book, but so did my own empathy for the non empathetic. Empathy is not an all or nothing ability, but is a complex process to that involves not just the cognitive awareness of what others are thinking or feeling, but also involves an affective aspect that allows for responding with the appropriate emotions to another person's subjectivity. Both aspects of empathy are only possible only if a full circuitry of multiple brain regions are working simultaneously. And depending on which parts work or don't work, for whatever reason, is what distinguishes whether someone is either a psychopath who is aware of other's feelings and doesn't care or who is autistic who genuinely has trouble identifying the feelings of others as well as themselves. But, nothing more I could say could really do the book justice. Do yourself a favor and check it out. Take care.

My newest video; an example of a narcissistic father and a narcissistic person in general: http://vimeo.com/selfarcheology/father

This could cover an entire show but I'll try to summarize the best I can... I come from a broken family with 4 siblings. I'm the second to youngest. My two older (bro and sis) are dependent on drugs and have 3 children of their own. My mom, who is now single from her second divorce and lives alone, is the main reason I struggle with my decision and why I believe I am writing.It wasn't until I had my first son (now 5) that I noticed a dark/negative side of my mom. Long story short, I suddenly realized that my mom was class A manipulator and perhaps the sole reason for the perpetuating turmoil in my entire family. Once my perspective changed from child to parent, I started seeing things differently and began to question my mother's judgment as a parent, then as a person, and the epiphany hit me. She had been maniputaling my ideas/thoughts/judgments of others for my entire life. Then I read this book from Jay Carter – Nasty People: How to Stop Being Hurt by Them Without Becoming One of ThemThis book was an eye opener for me and helped me realize just how much I had been affected by manipulative people around me. It also forced me to address each relationship I had with my sibblings and mother on an individual basis, instead of just going along with everything just because we were a family.Listening to Stefan's podcasts really opened my eyes too. Thank you, Stefan! They helped me to simplfy the idea of just how easy and how free we really are to make our own decisions and do what is most healthy for ourselves (in my case, my children). Stefan taught me/us that parents can be fired! There is no law or agreement that strictly forbids you from "firing" your parents. Pretty empowering!Without going into all the family drama, all I can say is that nearly 4 years ago, I made the decsision to "opt out" from my family, entirely. I didn't want to choose who was acceptable for my children and who was not. Instead, I just opted out from all of them.My life and my health has improved tremendously since I made this decision. But the question now lies ahead: What do I tell me kids? I don't want to talk bad about my family. I don't want to manipulate my kids by feeding them my opinions. But they are going to ask me the who, what, why, how come? Its something for me to be thinking about.My oldest son is 5 now. He has a close relationship with his grandma/grandpa on my wife's side. He hasn't asked yet about my parents. And I haven't thought about it much (probably because thinking about my family causes me grief)....and I can't think of a better group to ask for advice. In other words, I would much rather be giving someone else this advice For those wondering why I haven't mentioned my father. I have two - both were abusive - zero relationship with either. My mom left my real father when my oldest Bro was 10, sister 5, me 1. The step father came into the picture when I was 4. He was verbally and physically abusive and raised me until I was 17 when I moved out. I'm 35 now so good riddance there.

A quick new video on how and why do people become narcissistic.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/11/14/the-most-narcissistic-u-s-presidents/