Rob: Your story about your experience in a cult is fascinating and important to discuss, but I just want to get some more basics together first.
DS: Sure just jump in anytime, stop me whenever.
Rob: When you talk about subjectivity and intersubjectivity, you're talking about a person being able to express who they are in a free and unchallenged, not unchallenged but in a healthy way. That's basically what it is, right?
DS: It's a negotiable relationship as opposed to a non-negotiable relationship. That's another way to look at it.
Rob: And when somebody is in a relationship, whether it's a parent or a partner or an employer where the one person is a traumatic narcissist, that traumatic narcissist basically controls the other person and totally squelches any attempts to express an idea or feelings or needs. And if the person does, you've written, and you describe it in your book how the traumatizing narcissist actually inflicts guilt and shame on the person as though just having normal healthy needs is totally selfish and inappropriate.
DS: Yes, exactly. Exactly. There's a, the narcissist. One way of thinking about narcissism is to think of it in terms of the need to maintain a constant intense sense of superiority over everyone and everything. A sense of total superiority. And in order for, and you know to feel as though you are superior to all others is delusional. It's actually psychotic. It's not reality. Nobody is perfect and nobody is superior to everyone else. But the narcissist literally is obsessed with maintaining a sense of their own perfection. And in order to do that, since that's already a delusional aspiration, they have to prove that everybody else is inferior. And in order to prove that everyone, but they also need everybody to prove to them that they are superior. So in order to get everybody to feel that they're inferior, let's say I'm the traumatizing narcissist, I need everyone to feel inferior to me, but I also need them to verify that I'm superior. So what do I need to do, I need to get them to recognize me as potentially lifting them up out of their inferiority and granting them superiority because I confer it on them. Does that make sense?
Rob: So it's not just that they have to make people feel inferior, but they have to get people to express and proclaim that this traumatizing narcissist is wonderful, and helping them to become better people.
DS: Yes. Absolutely.
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