I mean, we, it, it was just part of our-

Yeah.

This is loss of identity again and wanting to be accepted.

So we talk about, it's Donald Winnicott's theory, who's the most amazing, you know, he was the most amazing, uh, psychiatrist and psychotherapist.

If we're born a true self, so we come into the world as a tiny baby, and nothing's happened to us, and whatever spirit pilot light we have is our, ours to own.

But very quickly, we realize that we need to, you know, we're keeping the peace with mom, we're worrying about what's gonna kick off, et cetera.

We start adapting, so we have an adapted self that we, we know we're in it a lot of the time if we've got difficult parents.

I think that's exactly what she did.

Mm

... that we can do, and really getting back in touch with what might that be, because that's so important.

What runs a- underneath all of this, of course, is this silence.

I call it the silence of the sly.

When no one else is talking about it, you know, we're led to believe that maybe there is something wrong with me.

But so often many people are thinking the same thing, and we talk about it, if you think about standard bystander effect, which is let's say there's been an accident, I don't know, at a train station, and you're the only other person and someone's fallen onto the track.

Because it's just you, you know that I have to call the ambulance, the police, and try and help them.

Mm

So for anyone who is watching and may recognise parts of themselves, um i don't know what would be most useful to share so from from you what would you like to share for those people what can they do with these this curiosity that may be coming up parts of themselves that are recognizing elements of this conversation

so the first thing i'd say is i think there are lots of unqualified helpful people out there please be careful i'm a big advocate of ukcp bacp someone that is actually qualified But when I wrote the book, I discovered that when you can search for a therapist, you can obviously search for all sorts of specialisms.

But you couldn't search for someone that understood narcissism.

So I wrote to both of the bodies and I asked them to include it as a specialism for therapists that had a qualification or training in it.

And they have done it.

So they did it the back end of last year.

So you can look for a therapist that has got a specialism in this space.

think I might have an inner

Right.

Narcissists will want to feel good in whatever form that matters to them, and you are an object to them.

You're not a person.

There's no relationship between them.

They might performatively act as though you're in a relationship or a friendship or a-- But actually, you're just an object for them to get what they need, and what they need is narcissistic supply, which is either adoration or sympathy or something where you're gonna be drawn towards them.So we've got the narcissistic criteria, but lots of narcissists will never go anywhere near a psychiatrist, so we'll never really know, which can be difficult when you haven't got someone that's been diagnosed.

But for me, it's about how do you start to feel when you are in their company?

Oh, that would be great

... and work on that.

So another technique that we would use once we've

looked at this inner child part is how do we help this part begin to start to tell their truth? So we talked about adapted self, false self.

Yeah.

So often when people come and they're beginning to come to terms with what's happened about a narcissistic parent.

They're beginning to touch in on what really happened to them and what it was really like for them and how they might really feel about this parent.

But they find it very difficult to even imagine that they would ever tell that parent how they really felt.

And sometimes in our healing, part of the journey is to begin to find the words to express what we really felt, even if we don't think an apology would ever come, which it's unlikely it ever would.

Which is what's so interesting.