 Okay, okay. So hello everyone and hello professor because we have a guest today and it's a professor some back in the the outer of the Malignan self love. Narcissist, very visited. Hello, some. Hello. Yeah, some is shorter than professor. It's a. Yes, today I would love to speak with you about love about what is love actually mean especially what does it mean when a person with NPD and will with BPD is saying I love you what exactly does it mean. Yes, well, the answer is a bit long because like everything else with the narcissist is complicated is unlike other people. That's why they are narcissists and they are not other people. The narcissist is not capable of loving others is not capable of loving. Not only romantically, but he's not capable of loving friends or loving his children or loving generally loving humanity or easing capable of the emotion of love. Now in psychology we do not make a distinction between loving your husband and loving your dog. This is love. It's the same emotion. It is manifested differently and has different behavioral aspects of course, hopefully you don't behave with your husband the same way you behave with your dog. But the emotion behind this is absolutely the same and the narcissist is incapable of it for 10 reasons. So it's going to be a bit of a long answer. I apologize in advance. First of all, the narcissist is not capable of recognizing the externality and separateness of other people. In other words, the narcissist is not capable of perceiving other people as external to him and as separate from him. Now when I say him and her, half of all narcissists are women. So everything I'm using the male gender pronouns, but it applies to women as well, women narcissists as well. So there's no capacity to recognize that other people are out there and that they are separate from the narcissist. The narcissist treats other people as internal objects as extensions. So any kind of emotion, any kind of catexis that the narcissist has with regards to other people is actually self directed. So even when the narcissist is sexually attracted to someone, he is actually attracted to himself. This is known as auto erotism. Even when the narcissist thinks that he is in love with someone, he is actually in love with the internal object that represents this someone in his mind. So he is in love with himself in effect. Narcissists in short are incapable of othering regarding people as others. The second problem is that narcissists are over cognitive. They have cognitive style, not emotional style. They possess everything through cognition. They do have empathy, for example, but it is called empathy, cognitive and reflexive, not emotional. They do have negative emotions, but the negative emotions are possessed cognitively. Everything is cognition. Now the narcissist, narcissism is a fantasy defense. In other words, the narcissist lives in fantasy, not in reality, is divorced from reality. And fantasy involves cognitive distortion. Fantasy involves falsifying reality. So the narcissist puts emphasis on cognition and is incapable consequently of positive emotions. Narcissists are also very afraid of positive emotions because positive emotions are automatically linked to negative emotions. If you are capable of experiencing positive emotions, then of course you will also experience negative emotions. And the narcissist's negative emotions are life-threatening. For example, shame. The narcissist's shame is life-threatening. So narcissists say, okay, I will not experience positive emotions in order to not experience my shame or my guilt or whatever. Next thing is what is known as bed objects. Inside the narcissist, there is a group, a constellation of voices. They are known as introjects. These voices keep telling the narcissist, keep informing the narcissist. You are unworthy. You are bad. You are stupid. You are ugly. You are a failure. You will never amount to anything. You keep making mistakes, etc., etc. And the bed objects actually tells the narcissist, you are not lovable. You cannot be loved. No one will ever love you. You are so bad, so corrupt, so hopeless that no one will ever love you. So the narcissist needs to validate the bed object because the bed object is usually, not always, but usually the voice of mother and father. The voices of mother and father. So the narcissist is still a child and the child cannot say mother is wrong, father is wrong. The narcissist should validate the bed object. The way to validate the bed object is by acting unlovable. When you try to love the narcissist, he pushes you away. He abuses you. He abuses you. He makes you not love him. He wants to prove to himself and to you that he is truly unlovable because mother said so. Father said so. They said I'm unlovable and they're never wrong. So I'm going to prove to you that I'm unlovable. I'm going to abuse you until you abandon me or give up on me or abuse me back. Reactive abuse, you know. This is known as projective identification when the narcissist forces his partner to not love him. The next thing is that narcissists feel superior. They are vaughty. They are conceited. They believe that they are supreme and so on. And everyone is capable of loving. Even pets, even animals love. Love means that you're like everyone else. Like everybody else because everybody loves. If you love, you're like everybody else. You're common. And this is unacceptable to the narcissist. He perceives love as a weakness. He perceives love as the great equalizer. It makes him equal to other people. And he's not equal. He's godlike. So he regards love as a kind of power play. I'm going to prove to you that I don't love you. I'm going to prove to you that I don't need you. I'm going to prove to you that I'm superior to you by not loving you. I'm going to prove to you that you have no power over me. You cannot make me love you because I'm not weak. I'm godlike and I'm not like everybody else. You think you have power over me. You can make me love you. I'm going to show you that you don't have power over me because I'm unique. I'm special. So there's a lot of contempt. When the narcissist comes across a potential love interest, this generates in him a reaction of contempt and rage, anger, because he feels threatened by love. Love threatens to expose the fact that he is like everybody else, that he's vulnerable, and that he is in need of love. And he hates this. He hates to realize this. Next thing is that narcissists uses relationships to replay, to reenact early childhood experiences, early childhood conflicts, especially an attempt to separate from the mother and to become an individual known as separation individuation. So the narcissist converts you, whether you're male or female, doesn't matter. The narcissist converts you into a mother figure, a maternal figure. And then here the narcissist has had a very bad conflicted relationship with his original mother, with a biological mother. So he reenacts it. He replays it inside the relationship. He says, you are my new mother, and I'm going to do to you what I did to my original mother. I'm going to hate you the same way I hate my mother. I'm going to be angry at you the same way I'm angry at my mother. And I'm going to separate from you, as I should have separated from my biological mother and failed. But with you, I'm going to succeed. I'm going to devalue you, and I'm going to discard you. This is automatic. It's known as a repetition compulsion. It's not something that the narcissist can control. It's totally automatic. Another element in this is that if you are the mother, then having sex with you is incest. It's incestuous. So the minute the narcissist converts you into a maternal figure within a shared fantasy, which he does with everyone, the minute he does this, he cannot have sex with you anymore. It's incestuous. And he cannot love you also. It's also not OK. It's a taboo. He's breaking a taboo, which is very strong. Narcissists associate love with pain, rejection, and abandonment because this has been the first experience of love that they've had as children. As children, the narcissist is abused. It may be physically, maybe sexually, maybe emotionally, maybe verbally, maybe psychologically. Maybe the narcissist is instrumentalized, used as a tool to realize the mother's unfulfilled wishes or the father's hopes and expectations. Maybe the child is parentified, is forced to act as a parent to his own parents. Whatever the case may be, it's a bad experience. It's a horrible experience. So the narcissist learned as a child that love leads to pain, rejection, and abandonment. Love is not safe. There's no secure base. Love is not safe. Love involves a loss of control. Love involves a threat. Love involves an external locus of control. So love is angiogenic, creates anxiety. In the narcissist, love creates anxiety. It's not a pleasant experience at all. It's a terrifying experience. The narcissist's love, and this is the last point, the narcissist's love is transactional. The narcissist has learned as a child that in order to be loved, he has to perform. He has to do something. He has to deliver something. If he fails somehow, he is not loved. He's not loved any longer. So this conditional love is the only form of love that the narcissist knows. So the narcissist thinks that if you love him, you want something from him. He thinks that love is manipulative. You're using love to manipulate him and to conclude some kind of transaction in which you're going to have some benefits. And then he becomes very worried. He becomes anxious because what would happen if he fails to deliver? If he does not succeed to perform, you will leave him. You will leave him for sure because it's a business deal. So this also increases the anxiety. As you can see, as far as the narcissist is concerned, love sucks. It's a really, really bad experience on multiple levels. Some of them unconscious. Some of them conscious. The only outcome of love is enormous anticipatory anxiety. Something bad is going to happen to me. As a narcissist, if I love, something bad is going to happen to me. Something bad is already happening to me inside because of my unconscious processes and so on. My grandiosity is challenged, but something bad is going to happen to me outside because I'm unlovable. And if people say they love me, they want something from me the same way my parents did. And I'm bound to fail. The narcissist catastrophizes. I'm bound to fail and it will all end in tears, blood and tears. That's how narcissists see love. So why would they love? Thank you so much for this deep analysis. And above all that, I would like to ask, so why sometimes they insist that they can love? That they... Yes, I love you. Yeah, I can feel it. Why they insist? What is that they are misinterpret with this sentence? First of all, exactly as you said, they mislabel. This is a mislabel. What they feel, what they're feeling is not love. They're not capable of love, period. They're not capable of what we call catexes, emotional investment in a love object. By the way, any object, any love object, even inanimate objects, they are not capable of loving anything because they have what Freud called at the time narcissistic libido. Their love, all their emotions are self-directed. When the narcissist was growing up, the only safe space was himself, the false self. Mother was not safe, father was not safe, the family was not safe, siblings were not safe. No one helped the child. He could only rely on this god-like invention, the false self. So what narcissists call love is what clinicians call the shared fantasy. It's a fantasy defense. Within this fantasy, the narcissist convinces himself that he is in love. He has to label. He feels, he's feeling some things and he has to label them. So he labels them love. Some narcissists are also manipulative, especially antisocial, malignant or psychopathic narcissists. They're manipulative. So they will tell you that they love you to keep you around. In order to create in you attachment and bonding in order to get you addicted to them, in order to obtain some benefits like sex or money or whatever, they will tell you that they love you to obtain a goal because they're goal oriented and that's a manipulative strategy and it's potentially a crime. This is known as the lover-boy method. Andrew Tate right now is, you know, in prison for this. Not in prison, but in front of a trial. So, but the vast majority of narcissists really believe that they love me. It's just the fantasy. The fantasy is so overpowering, so wonderful. It's such a Disneyland. It's a theme park. They can't let it go within the fantasy. They feel validated. They feel they feel that the grandiosity is true. It's not false. They feel that they are wonderful and unique. They idealize their partner in order to idealize themselves. So both of them become ideal in sort of a cloud or a bubble and so on. And what they feel is the gratification of constant narcissistic supply. And it is such a high, it's like a drug. It's such a high that they can't tell the partner, you're a wonderful source of narcissistic supply. You are gratifying me. Thank you very much. They say I love you. It's total mislabel. And you should not fall for it. You should not fall for it if the person is a narcissist. That's nonsense. He is incapable of loving. Thank you so much for that. And I do agree you shouldn't go for it because my another question is why loving a person with NPD hurts so much? Because I know that it hurt because I was in this kind of relationship. It's not only from the knowledge from books but from also personal experience. But why it hurts so much like nothing else on this earth? Why? Because it's the only kind of relationship where you have multiple forms of grief when the relationship breaks. You have multiple forms of grief and within the relationships you are constantly in a state of mourning, of grief. Because the relationship involves death, not life. When you are in a relationship with a narcissist as I said it's a fantasy but this fantasy is shared. We don't call it fantasy. We call it shared fantasy. You collaborate with the narcissist and you collaborate with the narcissist because he idealizes you and it feels wonderful to be idealized. It's very gratifying. It's your own source of narcissistic supply. You see yourself through the narcissist's eyes and you fall in love with the image of you that the narcissist projects to you. You don't love the narcissist. You love the way the narcissist loves you. This is the opening stage and it feels wonderful and it feels perfect and it feels ideal and it feels like nothing you've had before. And then abruptly and suddenly it becomes a nightmare. This is known as intermittent reinforcement. Positive, negative, hot, cold, loving, hating and you are totally disoriented and you are terrified to lose the fantasy and to lose your place in the fantasy. Gradually you assume the maternal role because that's the narcissist's condition for the shared fantasy. So you do become a mother and because you become a mother you develop maternal feelings for the narcissist. He becomes like your child. And so when the relationship goes bad when the narcissist begins to devalue you when definitely when the narcissist discards you or when you leave the relationship when you abandon the narcissist and go away you are grieving multiple things. First of all you are grieving your idealized image. You're no longer idealized. Now you're just again a normal person, common person. That hurts. The way the narcissist shifts from loving you loving you, from idealizing you to hating you is horrible. Of course many, many people have auto-plastic defenses. That means they blame themselves. They ask, what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? You know, they feel guilty. They feel ashamed and so on. So you mourn yourself and you grieve yourself in the relationship. You grieve the relationship because the fantasy is difficult to let go of. The fantasy involves a vision of the future. A vision of the future where you're going to be together and have children or big common business or whatever. So there's a vision of the future which you have to let go of. This vision of the future gave your life many in direction and purpose. You felt elated and you felt wonderful that you know you have a common goal and you're working towards that goal and suddenly it's gone. So you're mourning the fantasy. You're mourning the child. You're a mother who has lost her child. And you're mourning your partner, of course. And you're mourning not your partner so much as the fact that you idealized him. You're mourning the imaginary partner that you had within the fantasy. Because of all these multiple forms of grief which are simultaneous you're mourning the child which are simultaneous grieving yourself, grieving the child, grieving the fantasy, grieving the partner, grieving the imaginary partner. Because of all these multiple forms of grief you're in a very, very bad shape. You're unable to regulate yourself. You cannot give yourself answers. You feel stupid. You feel wronged. You feel a victim. And at the same time you feel that you must have done something wrong. You were the perpetrator. Maybe you were the abuser. You begin to doubt yourself. Maybe I'm the narcissist. It's a place of total disorientation and dysregulation. And in this sense clinically people after in the wake of relationships with narcissists clinically they're indistinguishable from borderline personality disorder. So complex complex trauma or complex PTSD which is very, very a very common response to relationships with narcissists is clinically the same as borderline personality disorder. You're reacting exactly the same. You are an emotionally dysregulator. You are self-harming and self-destructive. You encounter huge emotions, very powerful emotions. You're overwhelmed by shame and guilt. You become aggressive and disempathic. You lose empathy. You feel like a victim and then you feel like an abuser. These are all you have mood swings, you have mood liability. These are all classical signs of borderline personality disorder. And so it's a bad place to be. I do agree after relationship that I've had in the past many years ago you feel also unworthy. I felt unworthy also. I've had a second thought that definitely is something wrong with me. And it was of course, but in a different way that I even asked my therapist, tell me if I do have maybe BPD because I'm my behavior it's like that. And then my therapist said, no you don't have a BPD. You have CPTSD and PTSD. And then I saw that when I regulate myself regularly in a therapy then I observed that, okay I understand now what was going on and I have to just go through this process. But yes, it's it's really difficult and painful. That's why I have also one question. What would be one advice you could give to people or to someone who is thinking about this kind of relationship to what they can do to stop this and what they can do for themselves to not even start this kind of relationship with NPD. What they can do, how they can help themselves before it will start because after and even during it will be really painful. Well, there are many signs but before I go there you mentioned something very important in order for the narcissist to devalue you and to discard you victims must understand that the narcissist is having a relationship with himself not with you. You don't exist, you're not an external object you're an internal object in the narcissist's mind he's having a relationship with himself. Now don't forget that at the core of narcissism there's a bad object. So the narcissist is having a relationship with a bad object. When the narcissist is in a shared fantasy with you he's actually in a shared fantasy with a bad object because the narcissist is terrified of the bad object. What the narcissist does he idealizes the bad object he falsifies it. He says it's not a bad object it's an all good object. But the minute the narcissist converts the bad object into an all good object that means that the narcissist becomes a bad object. This is known as splitting. If the bad object is all good what remains of the narcissist is all bad. So the narcissist cannot escape the bad object whatever the narcissist does he remains stuck with the bad object and there's one solution what the narcissist does is he merges the bad object with your object. In his mind the narcissist has an internal object that represents you. So he takes this internal object and he merges it with the bad object. Now you are the bad object and then this gives him legitimacy to discard you and to devalue you become what is known as a secretary object you become an enemy so he then devalues and discards you. But he needs to devalue and discard you. It is an integral part of the shared fantasy. There is nothing you can do about online many self-styled experts as usual give wrong advice and nonsensical information. For example they say that the narcissist devalues you because you criticize him or you disagree with him that is nonsense even if you never criticize the narcissist even if you are 100% submissive even if you are the best conceivable even if you give narcissistic supply endlessly even if you never confront the narcissist he is going to devalue and discard you because it is not about you it is about his relationship with his original mother it is about his relationship with the bad object inside him he just uses you for therapy the relationship, the shared fantasy is therapeutic is a kind of therapy what do we do at the end of therapy we discard the therapist when therapy is finished we say goodbye to the therapist we don't remain in a relationship with the therapist until we die we come to the therapist, we get therapy we say goodbye we don't devalue the therapist but we discard the therapist that is what the narcissist does he uses you for therapy internal therapy we discard you but in order to discard you because he has idealized you he needs to change that he needs to devalue you so it's not your fault you could do nothing about don't listen to self-styled experts that somehow blame you they say you were too critical you criticising, you disagree that's why he devalued you no, you are not responsible zero, you had nothing to do with it you just happen to be there well it's very easy to tell that someone is a narcissist within the first 5 minutes again don't listen disbelieve self-styled experts that tell you that the narcissist is a great actor and it's not possible to realise that he's a narcissist takes weeks and days and not true narcissists cannot hide the fact that they are narcissists any more than a dog can hide the fact that he's a dog it's just that you are lying to yourself you are denying you witness the red the red alerts, the warning signs and we ignore them you deny them because you are lonely or because maybe you grew up in a family that made you the typical victim for a narcissist made you sensitize to narcissism or maybe you gravitate you are attracted to narcissists whatever the case may be you are lying to yourself the narcissist from the first minute is controlling he treats other people badly it could be a waitress, it could be a cab driver it could be anyone he treats other people, not you he idealizes you he treats you like a queen but he treats badly everyone around you and he tells you where on the first date he decides which restaurant to go to what you eat he chooses your food for you he's controlling also in the sense that you go to the bathroom and you return and he asks you what did you do, where did you go why did it take so long so you see the micro management the control freakering he is either not interested in what you have to say to yourself all the time or he keeps totally silent and he listens to you but in a way like the police would listen to you he's interrogating he's compiling a file on you also he's bound to say things that are very uncomfortable for example if he sees that you have some vulnerability some weakness here some anxiety he will push it he's a bit sadistic he will push it he will make you feel uncomfortable he will make you feel self aware self conscious this happens in the first five minutes invariably always but people deny this because they want to be idealized they want to be in a fantasy and so on and so forth narcissists offers who wants to be in reality Covid pandemics, wars breakdown between genders crime reality really sucks terrorism you name it so here comes the narcissists and says leave it to me come into my fantasy and you no longer need to worry or to think or to make decisions you can become a child if inside my fantasy you can become a child again and I will act as your parent you know on condition that you act as my parent when I need to so it's what I call dual mothership it's an exchange of parenting roles but don't believe and don't buy into the story that you have been deceived narcissists are very clear about who they are even covert narcissists are clear for example they are very passive aggressive they are malicious they gossip they say bad things about other people they bad mouth people and they do it within minutes within minutes they would make sadistic jokes about the waiter or the cab driver you know you see that they are bad people simply bad people you see this but you reframe everything the covert narcissist has a passive aggressive sadistic sense of humor so you say to yourself all is very funny the narcissist mistreats other people mistreats them humiliates them in front of you and you say to yourself all is a very strong person you reframe everything positively because you want to believe it you want to believe in the fantasy and you've been alone for too long and you feel lonely and you feel the need to be with someone and maybe you feel that you have failed in life or whatever and the narcissist promises you to be a second childhood second chance to succeed thank you for that and for like I said deep analysis and it's really I think to remind us what is important and what it's more healthy for us and one good friend of mine told me that assertiveness and boundaries are really important and I think they are thank you so much for our conversation and for your time as always and yeah and take care thank you see you next time bye bye