Dr. Judy Rosenberg has pioneered the absolutely incredible “Mind Map” that provides insight into the exact ways one can heal from trauma. The trauma caused by narcissistic abuse, in particular, is no exception to the level of healing that can occur through the tools that Dr. Judy Rosenberg has come up with. Born in Budapest, Hungary to Holocaust survivors, Dr. Rosenberg’s mission since she was a little girl was to heal the world. This mission endured as she navigated through narcissistic relationships with family members, friends, and others in her community. Eventually, she began to see the various patterns in these relationships and came to believe that narcissism was caused by a “system gone wrong” This broken system being the result of parents putting their feelings above their child’s feelings.
I have had the absolute pleasure of being able to interview Dr. Judy Rosenberg and find out all about what happens when someone is abused by a narcissist, why it’s so hard to leave them, and how to heal.
What is the Mind Map?
“Interestingly enough, I started doodling a little solution to healing global disconnect. It followed the creation model: creation, destruction, reintegration. I had a plan to launch this global project called Join the Human Race: Healing Global Disconnect, it didn’t quite turn out that way because I didn’t have the budget to launch a global project or know how to do it. So, I thought, ‘Okay, it’s an interesting model’ I think I’ll try it on my patients on the micro level.”
“It became my Mind Map, and it was meant to heal global disconnect. Never did I think that it would be my psychological model. That’s how the Mind Map was born.”
“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 and unlike traditional therapy, the sessions are very specific.”
What does the first session look like?
“No mystery, we’re going to talk about childhood wounds and how the individual was wounded by the blueprint or the cause. Mom and dad are the cause.”
“I want to distinguish the cause from the fault because this is multi-generational. It’s important to know that the parents also psychologically inherited their bad blueprint and then passed it along. Nobody comes out of childhood wound-free. It’s just impossible.”
“The five childhood wounds are physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, neglect, and control smothering. These wounds affect people in different ways.”
“By discovering who wounded us, what happened, and at what age, people then have an idea of why they’re feeling what they’re feeling.”
How did you become interested in Narcissism as it relates to the Mind Map?
“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?’”
What usually happens when someone with prior trauma gets re-traumatized by a Narcissist?
“If a mother neglects the child, is not mirroring or attending to them, then the child may go inward because it doesn’t have the ability to call themselves out. That’s the parents’ job. Imagine the messages going on here. ‘I’m not lovable. I’m not wanted. I’m not important. I don’t matter. I’m uncomfortable.’ The amygdala is reacting because there are no words that are able to be used here, so the baby cries, has stomach aches and muscle tension. Eventually learned helplessness occurs where the baby realizes that he or she has no agency in the world.”
“So, 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 that 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. This sets the person up for what I call the WTF or the What the Freud.”
“Here comes a partner, let’s say, that partner reminds them of the injury of not mattering. At first, they feel that they’ve conquered the not-mattering injury because they’re being love-bombed. They think to themselves, ‘Wow, finally, somebody thinks I matter. I think I’ll pair myself with this individual.’ Pretty soon, those little crumbs of mattering become very, very intermittent. Intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful reinforcement schedule of all. Because if you receive one crumb, wow that’s really special, as opposed to lots of regular reinforcements. When an individual receives regular reinforcements, it is what I call a secure attachment. People who are injured are used to insecure attachment.”
“By conquering the person that treats them like their mom or dad did or does, they’re going back into the repetition principle and they’re trying to win the game that they didn’t win then and they will never be able to win. They get re-triggered and then they try to defend themselves. They may try to defend themselves through cutting, by watching porn, or being on the cell phone all day. There are just so many creative ways people defend themselves. Some people just simply opt out of life. At the end of that game (defending oneself), they break down. There’s that blowout. There’s that final discard or that final breakdown. They’re suicidal or they’re homicidal. This could be an explosion. It doesn’t have to necessarily be an implosion. What do we do when we can’t hold our feelings? We’re either imploding and destroying ourselves or we’re projecting and exploding onto other people.”
“One must break-down in order to break-through.”
How does one break through?
“Breakthrough is the release of psychological toxins. It’s very important that they get in touch with the cause (of their pain) and hold (the injurers) energetically responsible. We do this through a series of truth conversations. In the truth conversations, individuals express the range of emotions that they were not able to express to their primary caregivers, usually their mother or father.”
“The herder can’t be the healer. So, it’s a bad choice to call your parents and try to work this through with them. We work it out in the therapeutic environment so that they can release these toxins, reprocess everything, identify the lies as opposed to identify with the lies and start moving into the paradigm shift. The paradigm shift is where one becomes aware of their cracked lens of perception and becomes aware of the lies and the patterns that they bought into. Their boundaries are more defined.”
“It’s really a matter of dismantling something that people are very unconscious of. It’s kind of like grooming. Individuals have been groomed to think (a certain) way. They’ve been groomed to be taken advantage of. Once you shine the light on all of these aspects, it loses its power. That’s what people get to experience from the process of the mind map system. It’s their parents’ creation. It’s been a multigenerational creation and it has nothing to do with their authentic self. Once this is exposed, they can start to grow.”
What happens when an individual heals from the Mind Map therapy model?
“I see people who are able to vet those that can come into their inner circle or their medium circle. They can vet what’s healthy for them and what’s not healthy for them. They can choose appropriate growth partners, whether they be business partners, marital partners, or friendship partners. It doesn’t matter. It’s the one-plus-one is greater than two phenomena and that’s the new game of life.”
Is the cycle of attracting Narcissists broken after The Mind Map healing process?
“If a person with a narcissistic personality comes along and demeans, devalues, tries to destroy, we have dismantled the bomb (the system) so that they can press and press and press as much as they want and receive no reaction. That’s how you step away from dancing with the narcissist. You dismantle an individual’s entire system so that they can walk away because they now have internal value. They’ve created that internal feeling for themselves.”
Why do you think Narcissists are the way they are?
“When you can’t turn to your mother, you can’t turn to your father, you’re checkmated into your emotions. So, you start degenerating because you don’t have the inner strength, or the core sense of self. Parents are supposed to do that in the first phase of life, and if that’s not done, there’s this hollowness and emptiness.”
“We form our core sense of self, we blueprint off of our parents. (Our parents) are supposed to give us eye contact, skin contact, mirroring, breastfeeding, etc. If we don’t get those elements, or psychological nutrients, then we’re not building that core sense of self. If we don’t have anybody to turn to, then we will start borrowing energy. This is when the ‘vampiring’ takes place. We will borrow people’s energy because we don’t want to collapse inside. That’s when the people in our lives will start to feel sucked dry.”
Can a Narcissist recover or 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 that hole in their soul. They’ve survived that way. It’s a very, very difficult journey because they have to be willing to awaken or develop empathy. Without empathy, you can’t truly connect to another human being. So, when empathy has been burned out of your system, or was never even taught as a model, then you’re operating on a whole new level. You’re operating through power and control because you don’t have faith in human connection. If you don’t have faith in human connection, then you go through life like, ‘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 ugly game and it ends up breaking lives down into chaos, defenses, and then what will hopefully be a final breakdown. Systems that are not sustainable collapse.”
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.
Get in touch with Dr. Judy Rosenberg and utilize her resources!
Go to her website: psychologicalhealingcenter.com
Get her book: Be The Cause: Healing Human Disconnect. You can purchase it on Amazon.
Subscribe to her YT channel: Dr. Judy WTF, What the Freud.