Have you ever wondered how to actually heal from narcissistic abuse?
Or wondered if it's even possible?
It absolutely is, and by the end of this video, you will have real steps on how to do just
that.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Zung, top 1% attorney, and the best-selling author of the books Negotiate
Like YOU M.A.T.T.E.R. and Breaking Free: A Step-by-Step Divorce Guide.
I've helped thousands of people go from lives of drama trauma and chaos to step into lives
of freedom, possibility, and purpose, and I do the same thing for you right here in
these videos and on this channel.
So, make sure that you've subscribed, you've hit that notification bell, and that way you
will get notified every time I upload brand new videos and new content, which I do pretty
frequently.
So, today you're in for a treat.
This is Part 1 of my conversation with Dr. Judy Rosenberg, who has pioneered the absolutely
incredible Mind Map which actually gives you real steps on how to go from where you are
now, and feeling just awful, and traumatized, and beat up, and used and abused, to getting
to that life, to actually feeling healed, and actually creating a brand new life for
yourself.
This is Part 1 of my interview with Dr. Judy Rosenberg.
So, without further ado, let's dive in to Part 1.
Hi, Judy Rosenberg.
I have Dr. Judy Rosenberg here.
Welcome to my show: Negotiate Your Best Life.
I'm so excited to have you here with me today.
Thank you.
You are so accomplished, and you do all kinds of things in the field of psychology, but
specifically on how to heal quickly from the trauma and the PTSD that people have felt
from dealing with narcissists, or having a narcissist in their life, or in a relationship
with narcissists for even years at a time.
You've come up with some incredible tools for people to heal from that.
So, I want to get into all of that.
But first, Judy, tell us more about you, more about your background, how you got where you
are.
Sure.
So, just a little bit about my cultural background: I was born in Budapest, Hungary.
I'm a survivor of Holocaust parents.
Wow!
Amazing.
Yeah, and my mission since I was a little girl was to heal the world.
I just thought that if I personally don't heal the world, the world is going to blow
up.
So, can you imagine the responsibility?
Oh, my god!
"Got to do something.
If I don't do something, everybody's going to blow up."
Oh, my god!
So, I think it started somewhere in there, at a very early age.
And then I, like yourself, have children.
I have two grown sons and a beautiful grandson.
A beautiful family.
I think my first experience with narcissism was that I didn't even know it was narcissism.
I thought it was normal the way my family talked to each other, the basically...
Here, I'll give you my definition of narcissism.
In a nutshell, it's a system gone wrong, where the parents put their feelings before the
child.
I just thought that was normal.
Up to a point, but then I started questioning it.
"There's something wrong here."
And so, having had a lot of experience with narcissists, both within my family, and in
the friendship circle, and in various relationships, I soon learned that there was a pattern going
on there.
Then I got very interested in where that pattern came from and what the blueprint was behind
it.
I was always a kind of a causal thinker.
I was more interested in why is this the way it is?
Why are people constantly choosing the same dynamics?
Why are they constantly being tripped up by certain insults and certain treatment?
So, this was an evolution.
Back in 2002, I was taking a Kabbalah course, and studied-
Oh, that's so funny!
I took Kabbalah as well.
You did?
Wow, [crosstalk 00:04:32] I did, I studied Kabbalah for a couple of
years actually in 2005 to 2007.
Somewhere around in there.
Okay.
Well, interestingly enough, I started doodling a little solution to healing global disconnect,
and it was following the creation model: creation, destruction, reintegration.
And so, it became my Mind Map, and it was meant to heal global disconnect.
Never did I think that it would be my psychological model.
I had a plan to launch this global project called Join the Human Race: Healing Global
Disconnect, and it didn't quite turn out that way because I didn't have the budget to launch
a global project.
I didn't know how to do it.
And so, I thought, "Okay, it's an interesting model.
I think I'll try it on my patients on the micro level."
That's where the Mind Map...
That's how the Mind Map was born.
The specialty of narcissism evolved because I didn't really know that so many people were
injured in this way until I started getting call, after call, after call, and then the
popularity about narcissism, covert narcissism, overt narcissism, grew.
By then people were saying, "I'm a mess.
I don't know what happened, but I feel completely diminished.
What can I do to heal?"
[crosstalk 00:06:10] Yeah, I mean, narcissists literally suck the
life out of you.
I mean, they literally are like leeches.
Yes.
I call it the vampiring effect.
Yeah.
I didn't even realize that until I was dealing with narcissists of my own.
But I literally...
One in particular that I had to deal with I felt like was literally draining the life
out of me.
And I said, "It's like a leech."
I didn't even have the vocabulary to go, "Oh, it's an energy vampire," or it's this, or
it's that.
I hadn't studied anything about narcissism yet.
I just knew that that's how I felt.
Well, over time I developed a vocabulary, and the vocabulary includes words like "psychovirus"
and "the vampiring effect" and "the double-dungeon of darkness", where you cannot turn to your
mother, you cannot turn to your father, so basically you're checkmated in your emotions.
And so, you start degenerating because you don't have the inner strength, you don't have
the core sense of self.
As you were talking about earlier, you were talking about how this empty shell needs to
be fed all the time.
The parents are supposed to do that in the first phase of life, and if that's not done,
there's this hollowness and emptiness and...
I just lost you there.
Hello, hello, hello?
... nobody to turn to, so they just [crosstalk 00:08:02]
Hold on one second, because...
Okay.
Judy?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear.
Yeah, yeah.
I froze for a moment.
Yeah, you froze, and so I didn't hear anything after "hollowness or emptiness".
So, if you could just go back.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, let me just go back and start recording again.
Okay.
Go ahead.
So, there's this hollowness and emptiness.
Yes, I call it a double-dungeon of darkness because how we form our core sense of self,
we blueprint off of our parents.
They're supposed to give us eye contact, skin contact, attunement, mirroring, breastfeeding,
et cetera.
If we don't get those elements, I call it psychological nutrients, if we don't get those
psychological nutrients, then we're not really building that core sense of self.
If we don't have anybody to turn to, then we will start borrowing energy, that vampiring
that takes place, and we borrow people's energy because we don't want to... the person doesn't
want to collapse inside.
That's where the other person will feel sucked dry.
That is such a beautiful way of describing it because they just have this little inner
fragile ego that they need to... that they just feel like they need to constantly feed
externally with this narcissistic supply.
And that's how they do it, by pulling it from other people.
But it's this black hole.
It can never be filled.
That's correct.
Right.
They can never heal.
They can't be rehabilitated.
They can't...
What I'm finding is that most people will fire their therapist because they don't want
to go there.
They don't want to go into the hole in the soul.
They've survived that way.
It's a very, very difficult journey because you have to awaken or develop empathy.
Without empathy, you can't truly connect to another human being.
And so, when empathy has been burned out of your system, or never even taught as a model,
then you're operating on a whole new level.
Then it's power and control, so you don't have faith in human connection.
If you don't have faith in human connection, let's buy some pretty objects.
Let's play with people.
Let's use this person or that person to muster up a sense of self.
It's a really, really ugly game, and it ends up breaking down into chaos, defenses, and
then the final breakdown, because systems that are not sustainable, as you know, they
collapse.
Yeah, and that's the discard phase.
That's the discard phase, correct.
Yeah, and during the discard phase, you still see them coming back, and love bombing, and
all that sort of thing because the love bomb is really a methodology of control that they
use.
Yeah, because they just want to put you in formaldehyde.
They want you up on the shelf, and then they want Betty, or Larry, or Henry, or whoever
all up there waiting for them to reconnect because, as you mentioned, the other side
of the coin is that they often pair with empaths.
They often pair with people who have been injured at a causal level, and they too have
not received the emotional supplies from their parents, and they have abandonment issues.
So, when you pull at their abandonment issues, they are very, very ready to hang on again
or reconnect with the toxic tie because love in any form, in this particular dynamic, is
better than no love at all.
So, they will play on that, and it is really, really disastrous for the person who's involved
with the narcissist because it's a never-ending game until somebody intercepts the game and
pulls the plug on the lies and systems gone wrong that make up for this entire dance.
Absolutely.
So, you have developed this incredible Mind Map that you created for healing, and I wanted
to go through it because I think it's really genius what you've put together.
Thank you.
If people use it in working with you or somebody from your team, you actually say that they
can see results within 12 weeks.
The Mind Map is designed to take place in 10 sessions.
Oh, 10 sessions.
I thought it was 12.
10 sessions, and then there's usually a little bit of followup, so you're not wrong with
the 12 weeks.
Sometimes I like to spread it out so that they re-contact me a couple weeks after the
10 weeks, or maybe three or a few weeks later.
So, in essence, the Mind Map is a from-through-to model: from the past, and the encodings of
the past, through dismantling the here and now and the effects on the psyche, to healing,
reconnecting, and paradigm shifting out of the mess.
That's the game plan.
It takes place in 10 sessions.
Unlike traditional therapy, the sessions are very, very... they're very specific.
Session number one, no mystery, we're going to talk about childhood wounds and how the
individual was wounded by the blueprint.
Mom, dad, I call it the cause.
Mom and dad are the cause.
Now, I want to distinguish cause from fault, because this is multi-generational.
It's important to know that the parents also psychologically inherited their bad blueprint
and passed it along to the people...
To us, everybody, multi-generationally, because nobody comes out of childhood wound-free.
It's just impossible.
And so, we've got to locate it at that level.
The five childhood wounds are physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, neglect, and control
smothering.
These wounds affect people in different ways.
By going back into that area and discovering whodunit, what happened at what age, people
then have an idea of why they're feeling what they're feeling.
Then we have to go back into the amygdala, which is the reaction to the wounds, because
all of this material is unconscious, and that's why cognitive behavioral therapy is not enough
because it merely addresses the cognitions, which are the conscious messages that we store
in panel three, which are the encodings.
But what is often missed is the preverbal, the unconscious material, which is what the
baby is absorbing, and the subtle messages that they're incorporating into the fiber
of their being.
So, if a mother neglects the child, or the child is not mirrored or attuned to, the child
may go inward because it doesn't have the ability to call themselves out, because that's
the parents' job.
Imagine the messages going on here.
Not cognitive, but definitely received: "I'm not lovable.
I'm not wanted.
I'm not important.
I don't matter.
I'm not effectual.
There's this hopelessness.
I'm uncomfortable."
The amygdala is reacting because there are no words here, so the baby's crying.
The baby is having stomachaches and muscle tension.
Then eventually learned helplessness.
Martin Seligman: "Learned helplessness."
The baby realizes that he or she has no agency in the world.
So, now I'm on panel three.
Now the encoding is, "I'm powerless.
I have no meaning in life.
I'm not lovable.
I'm not good enough.
I don't matter."
These are the lies that we have to identify because what happens in childhood is the baby
will identify with how the parents see them, because we see ourselves in the eyes of our
mothers and fathers.
That's how we self-define.
If we don't have a very good mirror that we're staring at, we're in trouble.
Thanks for watching this Part 1 of my interview with Dr. Judy Rosenberg.
If you're getting ready to negotiate with a narcissist, you're definitely going to want
to grab my free Crush My Negotiation prep worksheet.
You can grab it at the link below, or just go to winmynegotiation.com, and it will be
all yours.
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Part 2 of this incredible conversation with Dr. Judy Rosenberg.
I'm so glad that you were here and that you stopped by my channel.
Remember that today's a great day to start negotiating your best life.
I'll see you in the next video.