NewsBreak Original

I still remember the day. I was sitting in the family van. The van was blue with galaxy detailing. It was the end of May. The year was 1980. My narcissistic father got into the driver’s seat and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I know how ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ ends,” he said.

My narcissistic father knew that the male head of a household has special privileges in the United States. We are not too far removed from a time in history when women weren’t allowed to vote or hold bank accounts. Even today, many men prohibit their wives from having access to money. This is a control mechanism.

It got to the point with my narcissistic father that I had to put on my armor just when he walked into the room. He bowed his head forward and rolled his eyes up at me. He wore a sarcastic smirk.

It’s fashionable for older generations to pick on younger generations in public and the media. They call people under thirty “lazy” and “entitled.” But the truth is that older generations have ruined the economy and the world.

It is reasonable for a child to feel afraid. The world is a confusing place filled with dangers. Everybody is physically stronger than a child. Children don’t know who to trust or where to go to feel safe.

Children of narcissistic parents spend their whole lives groomed for exploitation. Narcissistic parents care only about their wants and needs. They have no regard for the wants and needs of their children or anyone else.

Choosing a religion is one of the most personal choices an individual can make. Unfortunately, American society seems to be evolving into a place where more and more people impose their religious beliefs on others.

My narcissistic father couldn’t understand anything that didn’t happen directly to him. This made it very difficult to explain anything to him. For example, if he was fifteen minutes late to a meeting with you, he’d become offended if you got angry. “Relax,” he said. “It’s only fifteen minutes, why are you making such a big deal of it?”

Asking serial entrepreneur Jeff Cohen, "What if I have a successful and profitable company - why should I do anything differently?"

Asking serial entrepreneur Jeff Cohen what is his take on the current economy, where it's headed, and how we should prepare for it.

Colorado business owner asks serial entrepreneur Jeff Cohen to explain how some entrepreneurs fail to gain freedom from their business.

Most people tell you that you need to escape narcissists. The only advice they offer is to remove them from your life. They tell you to get as far away from narcissists as possible.

I have a lot of empathy for my narcissistic father. However, I don't want to spend any time with him. I know he’s in pain. He has been in pain my whole life. Narcissism runs in my family. It takes a courageous individual to break the cycle and insist on treating others with more kindness.

Getting asked questions such as “Why are you still single?” or “Just one?”. Getting invited by couples to lunch but not dinner, outings on weekdays but not weekends, kids’ birthday parties but not movies with grown-ups.

I have a difficult relationship with my mother that makes Mother’s Day a challenge, to say the least. How do I handle my conflicting feelings around this time of year?. Any time there is a difficult situation, especially one that involves emotions, healing and boundaries, you must be kind to yourself. Give yourself grace. During Mother’s Day, be gentle with yourself and try not to allow your emotions to beat you up. Your emotions are here for a reason, and you are meant to feel them because you need to realize something, process it and release what’s inside. Don’t ignore them. Look for ways to understand, process and release your conflicting feelings.

Growing up, my narcissistic father used to let me know he was going to be disappointed with me before I even did anything. “I don’t know why I’m asking you to do this because you’ll probably mess it up.”

For a long time now I’ve looked at my best friend’s long-standing de facto relationship and have noted the following: controlling and possessive behavior; unreasonable jealousy; put-downs; threats; manipulative actions.

The bottom dollar effect describes our tendency to feel more pain when we spend the last of our money and to derive less pleasure from what we’ve bought. The bottom dollar effect was discovered by Robin Soster, Andrew Gershoff, and William Bearden in 2014. In their first experiment, participants were asked to imagine that they had bought credits to spend on three 2-minute movies that cost 10 credits each. One (control) group was given 50 credits, meaning that the three movies did not deplete their resources, and one (experimental) group was given 30 credits, meaning that their last purchase would signal the end of their credits.

The IKEA effect describes our tendency to place excessively high value on the things that we (help to) create. This effect comes with its own apocryphal story. As the legend goes, at some point in the 1950s, US food company General Mills decided that it wanted to sell more of its Betty Crocker brand of instant cake mixes and approached Ernest Dichter — the “father of motivational research” — for help. Dichter advised the company to replace the powdered eggs in the cake mix recipe with a requirement for fresh eggs in order to give the baker more ownership of the final result. The rest is, as they say, history. (Although, in this case, it probably isn’t.)