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Sam Vaknin and other youtube personalities surrounding NPD are people who make a lot of money convincing you they uniquely understand this pervasive threat and can help you protect yourself from it. They don’t have incentives to present accurate, holistic information, they have incentives to get video views. He has some interesting ideas, but the overall presentation is skewed by the medium it is presented in and is basically just his opinion.

All the expertise on the really deep psychological stuff is like that to an extent, and I think the best way to understand any of it better is to compare a few different perspectives from academics, practicing therapists, and people who worked on healing themselves. I recommend learning about Object Relations Theory and Attachment theory from an academic perspective, Pete Walker’s CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, and Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy from a personal/clinical perspective.