 Over the past year, I have been synthesizing, integrating Sander's idea of a shared fantasy with my principle of dual mothership to yield a coherent framework for understanding the narcissist's interpersonal and intimate relationships. Now it's a conceptual framework, it's extremely difficult to grasp at first exposure, I understand that, and so I'm making this video where I'm about to put together everything you've heard on my channel with regards to these issues. So this is the only video you should actually watch if you want to get the full picture, the integrated picture. I hope it will be of help concepts. One last thing. I know you tend to sign off after eight minutes or ten minutes because, you know, eight minutes is too much. Attention spans have decreased over the last few decades, people can barely read more than one sentence and listen to more than one sound bite. But in this particular video, which you're about to watch, if you don't listen to the very, very, very end, you're going to miss up on some very exciting things which could shed light on many of the mysteries and enigmas and conundrums in your past relationships and can prevent you from pitfalls and problems in your future relationships. This single time, make an exception, listen to the end. Okay, as I said, my conceptual framework, it aims to explain the inexplicable, the bizarre, erratic, inhuman, robotic, in a way, behaviors of the narcissist with his nearest and dearest, with his supposedly loved ones, with his intimate partners, with his significant or insignificant others. Why does he behave this way? How can you explain the somersaults and all this turning on a dime? How could you explain the narcissist fluctuating from one pole to another, from idealization to devaluation? How do you account for all this? Why does he hoover you, having gotten rid of you? So I constructed this conceptual framework which provides 100% answers to all these questions. For the first time, Mayor Ed. And the whole framework is constructed on the concept of shared fantasy, first proposed by Sander in 1989. Shared fantasy is a space. It's a space where the narcissist can re-experience his childhood trauma safely. So it's a fantastic space. It's divorced from reality because reality hurts, reality is unpredictable, reality is dangerous and above all, you cannot control reality. So the narcissist constructs this paracosm, this theme park, this Disneyland and invites you in. This is the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is a very complex, unfolding psychodynamic process and it has multiple stages and it is this fact that there are so many phases and that these phases are mutually exclusive that contradict each other. It is this fact that throws you off the scent that discombobulates you, that confuses you, you're disoriented, you feel as if you are trapped in a nightmare or a dream escape, you don't, you can't make sense and meaning out of what's happening to you. But in the narcissist's mind, it all makes perfect sense. And I'm inviting you today to go with me, to wander with me, the corridors of the narcissist's mind as he inhabits or possesses the shared fantasy as he wants the shared fantasy because the narcissist's mind is a haunted house. What are the stages of the shared fantasy? Stage number one, co-idealization, by love bombing you, by idealizing you, by telling you that you're perfect, that you're brilliant, that you're drop dead gorgeous, that you're super intelligent, that he has never had such an experience before you. This process of idealizing you, rendering you a perfect being has multiple reasons. Multiple motivations, the first one is to get you addicted to your own idealized image via the narcissist's gaze. This is called the Hall of Mirrors effect, the narcissist invites you to a Hall of Mirrors when you see yourself multiplied in an idealized form and that's very addictive. You can't let this go, but this is only one reason for idealizing you. The second reason to idealize you is what I call co-idealization. By idealizing you, the narcissist is actually idealizing himself. By photoshopping your introject, the snapshot that the narcissist has taken of you, the narcissist actually claims to own you because you're an internal object. Remember, when the narcissist first sees you as a potential intimate partner, he takes a snapshot of you, exactly like a photograph, and then he photoshopps it, he idealizes it, and this snapshot is called the introject. The narcissist then internalizes the introject, it's in his mind and he owns it. He becomes an extension of him, he merges with it, he fuses with it. The introject becomes an integral part of the narcissist's brain, and so the narcissist owns a totally good object, a totally perfect object, your snapshot, your avatar. Now, your avatar or snapshot has nothing to do with you and increasingly less and less to do with you, actually, but in the narcissist's mind, the only reality is your snapshot. The only real thing is your avatar with which he interacts never with you, always with your representation in his mind. The narcissist has a dialogue with the object in his mind, the internal object that stands in for you, you're no longer relevant. How you appear in the narcissist's mind, your apparition is relevant, and because this apparition, this representation, this icon, this avatar is all good and perfect and brilliant and amazing, and the narcissist owns it, it makes him equally good and brilliant and perfect and amazing. By owning it, the narcissist imbues himself with the attributes of the object. You know, in ancient pagan primitive societies, they used to eat prisoners of war because they believed that by eating prisoners of war, they will have digested their courage. They will have acquired the good, positive traits and qualities of the enemy. It's the same with the narcissist. He consumes you, he digests you. He attributes to you perfection and brilliance and beauty, which are beyond human, and by digesting you, he acquires these properties himself. And this is the first phase in the shared fantasy, core idealization. The second phase is dual mothership. In the dual mothership phase, the narcissist gradually converts you into a maternal figure, a mother stand in for his original mother. His original mother might be dead, might be alive, it's besides the point, it's irrelevant. It's not about the real flesh and blood mother. It's about his mother, his birth mother as she appears in his mind. In other words, the introject of his mother in his mind. What he's trying to do, he's trying to convert you into a competing introject. A competing or substitutive maternal introject to displace his original mother. He forces you to become his mother. He tests you with narcissistic abuse. Are you going to love him and accept him? Never mind what he does to you. Are you going to offer him unconditional love? Are you going to idealize him the way mothers idealize their children? It's a recreation of childhood with you in the mother role. At the same time, the narcissist offers you mothership. He becomes your mother. He becomes your parental figure. He offers you unconditional love. He idealizes you. He is there for you. He is all over you, actually. This is very addictive. It's very difficult to let go of this because it's a second chance at having a proper childhood with a good enough mother. It's the first time you can love yourself through the narcissist's maternal gaze. And before you ask anything, yes, it's only mothers. Fathers are not relevant at this stage of development. Fathers are very relevant much later in the processes of socialization and enculturation or acculturation. When children acquire societal mores and edicts, scripts, how to behave in society, sexual scripts, cultural tropes, this comes from the father. But the mother determines whether you become an individual at all. And so we are talking only about mothers. Even with women, it's only about mothers. So the narcissist offers you a second chance to love yourself through a maternal gaze. And this is the dual mothership concept. You mother the narcissist and the narcissist mothers you. And so, but why would the narcissist want you to be his mother? His original experience with his mother has been object and obnoxious and horrible. Why would he like to go through it again? Because he never got a chance to separate from his original mother. His original mother was what Andre Green called a dead mother. Dead not in the physical sense, dead in the emotional sense. An absent, selfish, narcissistic, demanding, smothering, abusive, instrumentalizing, parentifying mother. A bad mother and not good enough mother in the language of Donald Winnicott. So this kind of mother doesn't allow the child to separate from her. She annexes the child. She treats the child as an integral part of her. She merges and fuses with the child and leverages the child as an extension. And so the child never gets a chance to separate. And because he cannot separate, the narcissist never gets a chance to individuate, to become an individual. He has no ego actually. That's the irony, narcissists have no ego, they are selfless. So he cannot develop. He cannot become an adult. He is stuck in a perpetual loop known as repetition, compulsion or diathesis in Adlerium terms. He is stuck in a perpetual loop with his mother of origin trying desperately to separate from her in his mind and failing consistently. And here you come along and you become his new mother and with you, he has a chance. With you, he stands a chance to separate. Finally he can complete the incomplete process of his childhood, he can settle the accounts, he can move into the world a bit grandiosly, take on reality and perhaps grow up, realize his potential, self-actualize, become an adult, your his last hope. Then he needs to separate from you the way he didn't do with his mother of origin. He needs to reenact the separation. But how can he separate from you? He needs to discard you. The only way to separate from you is to get rid of you. So he does this in his mind. This is the third phase. The first phase is idealization, love bombing. The second phase is dual mothership. The third phase is mental discard. The narcissist begins the separation from you in his mind. He first discards you in his mind. But the minute he starts to discard you in his mind, this has two adverse effects. It creates two problems, two very difficult psychological processes. The first one, abandonment anxiety, separation insecurity. The narcissist is afraid to lose you. And the second one is narcissistic injury. Because if the narcissist is compelled to discard you, if he feels the need to get rid of you, it means that his judgment of you was wrong. It means you were not ideal. It means he misjudged you. It means that he's not omniscient, he's not all-knowing, he's not good-like. And this is serious narcissistic injury. The very fact that he is compelled, forced to separate from you, owing to his internal processes, to his incomplete business with his mother, the fact that he needs to get rid of you, to exit the shared fantasy, to leave you behind, this fact implies that he has made an error of judgment with you, that he was less than perfect, that he is fallible and that he can commit and did commit a mistake. That's a major narcissistic injury. How to overcome this narcissistic injury? Narcissistic injury is very painful. It's intolerable. How to overcome the abandonment anxiety, which also threatens the narcissist's precarious internal balance? The answer, devaluation. The narcissist needs to devalue you, but he needs to devalue you as an external object. The minute he devalues you as an external object, he restores his sense of grandiosity. He wipes clean the narcissistic injury and he has no more abandonment anxiety. What does it mean to devalue you as an external object? It means to look at you in a new way. It means to say, for example, she has changed. I wasn't wrong about her, I'm never wrong, but she has changed. Or she is manipulative, malevolent and deceitful. She hid information from me. That's why I misjudged her. Or she's no good. I have evolved, I have grown up, I have developed and she was left behind. We have diverged, et cetera, et cetera. These are all forms of devaluing the external object. Now, the minute the external object is devalued is worthless. The minute the external object is no longer idealized, no longer good, this allows the narcissist to restore his grandiosity. There's no narcissistic injury. He wasn't wrong after all. You had deceived him or you have changed or he has changed. So he wasn't wrong after all. So there's no narcissistic injury, grandiosity restored, and there's no abandonment anxiety because why have abandonment anxiety with a devalued object? I mean, it's a good thing to lose a devalued object. So this creates an ego-concurrent sense of discard of an either-to-idealized object. In other words, now the narcissist feels comfortable, egocintonic, comfortable with his decision, internal decision, mental decision to discard you. Now he is able to move on to the last phase or the last phases of the shit fantasy. So to recap, the narcissist first discards you in his mind, but this creates dissonance. It's a narcissistic injury. It implies that his judgment was less than perfect, and it creates abandonment anxiety. To resolve this, he devalues you. The minute he devalues you, he has no abandonment anxiety because why would anyone mourn or grieve over a devalued object? And he has no narcissistic injury because it proves that he has never been wrong. And he's never wrong, of course. He's ready to move on. He's ready to translate the mental discard to discard in real life. The minute he is ready to do this, series of processes begin. When the narcissist devalues the external object as a way to overcome the narcissistic injury, restore grandiosity and ameliorate abandonment anxiety, the minute he does this on the way to separating from you, which is the overriding goal, you remember. But the minute he does this, there is an abyss, there is a gap, which opens between you as a devalued object and the snapshot of you, which is still idealized. The introject of you, the avatar of you, the internal representation of you, this internal object, is still idealized, but you, out there, you have been devalued, so there is a discrepancy, there is divergence between the snapshot and you as an external object. And this creates anxiety because the narcissist feels that something's wrong, something has gone awry. How can it be that you are so devalued and your snapshot is so idealized? He needs to resolve this. And the way he resolves this is the way every two-year-old resolves similar conflicts with his mother, he splits you. Splitting defense is a primitive, infantile way of coping with the nuances of life. Life is gray, it's never black and white, there's good and bad in every person. It's impossible to categorize people totally or place them in drawers in a clean manner. Taxonomy and classification often fail. So the child copes with this need for subtlety and need for nuance by splitting. Mother is all good, I'm all bad, or mother is all bad, I'm all good, or whatever. So he, this is called dichotomous thinking. The child breaks the world into two or more parts, usually two. One of them is all good, the other is all bad. And now that the narcissist needs to discard you, he needs to make peace between, to reconcile your devalued external object, his devalued external object, you and his idealized internal object, your inner representation. So there's a discrepancy, you have been devalued, the internal object is idealized and he splits. He now says that the introject is all bad, he devalues the introject. The minute he devalues the introject, the minute he kind of mutilates the snapshot, the minute he attributes to the snapshot, everything that's bad, everything that's evil, everything that's imperfect, the minute he does this, he himself becomes grandiosly all good. I want you to understand this. The narcissist devalues you as an external object, but your internal representation in his mind is still all good, still idealized. So what the narcissist does, he changes the equation. He renders the snapshot, the introject, your representation in his mind, he renders it all bad, thereby making himself all good. You remember that splitting, the defense mechanism, the primitive infantile defense known as splitting, has to do with all good, all bad, all black, all white, all right, all wrong, with me or against me, this is splitting. So the narcissist converts you into a blackened enemy without any redeeming feature, externally as well as internally, but the minute he had reduced your snapshot into a devalued state, all bad, the narcissist becomes grandiosly all good and now he is ready to discard you. He is virtuous, he is all good, he is perfect. He is again godlike, he is grandios and you are the opposite of all this, you're all bad, you're all defective and deformed, you're all dysfunctional, you're all stupid and ugly and I don't know why, so he's ready to discard you and there's an actual discard. But when the narcissist is actually discarding, when it happens in reality, this painful process of suddenly becoming nobody to the narcissist, an insignificant other. When the discard in real life happens, again the narcissist is confronted with a dilemma, with a conundrum, because you are gone, you exit his life, what to do with a snapshot? You're gone, you're no longer in his life physically, you don't share the same space, you don't go happy, you have nothing in common, let's assume you have no children, he never sees you again. But your snapshot, your introject remains in his mind and this is especially true if he's forced to continue to have contact with you in the future, because for example you have a common business or common children. Every time he sees you or every time he thinks of you, if he doesn't see you, there's a clash, because he's reminded that there is a corrupted, decadent, bad, imperfect, sick introject in his mind, your introject, you remember, he had devalued, he has devalued your introject in order to be able to discard you, he first devalued you in reality and then he devalued the introject and then he was ready to discard. But having discarded you, he was left with the introject and there is a process of co-devaluation, you remember co-idealization, if I have a good, perfect introject in my mind then I'm good and perfect, but what if I have a bad, worthless, worthless, imperfect, evil introject in my mind, then I'm the same, evil, imperfect, etc., this is co-devaluation, it's utterly intolerable. So what the narcissist tries to do when he discards you, he tries to hand over the introject to you, because now the introject is defaced, is mutilated, is a reminder, a constant reminder of bad things, imperfect things, evil things, dangerous things, the narcissist doesn't want this inside his mind. He wants to get rid of it, he wants to hand it over to you and he wants to convince you, he tries to coerce you and convince you to agree with his devaluation of you. He wants you to say to him, yes I'm all bad, yes I'm imperfect, yes I provoked you, yes I made mistakes all the time, yes I ruined everything, yes it's my fault, etc., etc. When you do this he can hand the devalued introject to you so that you can own the devalued introject. It's like he gets rid of you externally and internally only if you agree with his assessment of you as a bad and worthy object, but of course very few people do, so the narcissist remains stuck with the introject that is now a source of extreme dissonance and discomfort because it devalues the narcissist from inside. If I own as a narcissist, if a narcissist owns an internal object which is less than perfect, which is dysfunctional, which is malevolent than the narcissist, is this internal object. After all it's an internal object, it's part of who the narcissist is. When the narcissist fails to hand over the introject to you, this has serious psychological consequences, it's kind of internal modification, but sometimes even when the partner accepts her newfound role as the evil, deformed, malevolent, stupid, mentally ill person, even when the partner concurs with the devaluation, even then the narcissist fails to hand over the introject. The narcissist always fails to hand over the devalued introject to the discarded partner. There's no exception, either because the partner would not comply and would not collude in devaluing herself or because of what is called introject constancy. The narcissist has no relationships with real people. He has no relationships with objects out there, so he has no object constancy because it doesn't interact and relate to objects. Instead, he interacts and relates with internal objects, not objects out there, objects in here. These objects are called introjects, so he has introject constancy. He derives a sense of safety and comfort and is able to function because he has very good relationships with objects inside his mind, introject constancy. So when he tries to get rid of one of these objects, when he tries to hand over an introject to someone, he experiences severe abandonment anxiety. It's like his real relationship is with the introject. He is emotionally invested, he's affected in the introject, not in you. So when he discards you and he wants to hand over the introject to put his hand inside his brain and to pluck the introject and give it to you, this creates an enormous anxiety because it's like being abandoned by the introject, and so he can't cope with this. The process of getting rid of your devalued introject in his mind never works for the reasons that I've just mentioned. Whether you don't collaborate with your new devalued image or the narcissist experience overwhelming abandonment anxiety when he tries to hand over the introject to you because he is bonded with the introject, he's attached to the introject. You could say that he loves in his own way the introject. How can you hand over someone you love? So he fails. The devalued, the split, the old bad introject remains stuck in his mind as an internal object and he can't get rid of it and this creates an enormous anxiety. The clinical term for this is bad object internalization introjection. That's what happens to him. He in his desperate attempt to separate from you as a maternal figure, he needed to discard you mentally, then devalue you externally, then discard you externally, then devalue your introject and then get rid of the introject and this is where he fails. All the other phases are successful but he fails in getting rid of the introject and it remains like an ulcer, like a wound inside his mind tormenting and torturing him by reminding him that there is a part of him, this introject, which is not perfect, which is not godlike, a part of him which is a failure, part of him which is bad and unworthy and perhaps evil. He is tormented by the fact that one of his internal objects is a cause and an engine of narcissistic injury, constant narcissistic injury. It's like having a child who is disabled or intellectually challenged. Narcissists can't cope with this because it's a constant reminder of failure and of the fact that they are not godlike and not perfect. So there's this introject inside his mind and the introject which has been devalued keeps telling the narcissist, you see there's a part of you that is devalued, a part of you that is not godlike and not perfect. This creates anxiety. What to do about it? Hovering. The only way to reintegrate this corrupted and devalued internal object with an external object. The only way to reduce anxiety is by re-idealizing you as an external object and then the narcissist can re-idealize the internal object. So when the narcissist gets rid of you there's a discard. He gets stuck with your representation in his mind. He has devalued you and he has devalued this representation. He has devalued your introject, your avatar in his mind. But this causes him a lot of discomfort and anxiety because it means that he is less than perfect by virtue of owning such an object, by virtue of being this object, being a part of him. So he needs to re-idealize you and this allows him to re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety, ameliorate, mitigate the anxiety. Now that the internal object is re-idealized the discomfort is gone. There's no discrepancy between his inflated grandiose self-image is perfect and godlike and the reality of his internal space. Now everyone, every single internal object in his mind is perfect because every single object in his mind is perfect, he is perfect. But he can't accomplish this unless you are perfect too. So he needs to reverse the process of devaluation, process that has failed. The process of devaluation has failed because he couldn't get rid of the devalued introject. So he needs to reverse this and re-idealize you. But then if he re-idealizes you he hasn't separated from you. The separation has failed and this is exactly what happens. The narcissist never succeeds to separate from you. And even if you never see him again, he's going to re-enact, replay the same dynamic with his new intimate partner and his next intimate partner. And intimate partner number 40, this is called repetition compulsion. The narcissist wish to separate conflicts irredimably and irretractably and conflicts in a way that cannot be resolved with this grandiosity. In order to separate from the maternal figure which is you, the maternal, the mother that is his intimate partner, he needs to devalue her. But if he devalues her, he devalues himself via the introject, via the devalued introject, co-idealization, co-devaluation. And so this conflicts with this grandiosity. He cannot separate from you because this constitutes narcissistic injury. Separating from you leaves him stuck with a part of him, a representation of you, which is corrupt, which is dysfunctional, which is less than perfect. So he has to choose. He can devalue you and discard you by devaluing your internal, your introject in his mind, but that would leave him less than God-like, less than perfect, because then he would have an introject which is less than God-like and less than perfect in his mind as part of him. So he has to give up on his grandiosity if he wants to separate. And if he insists on maintaining his grandiosity, he needs everything and everyone around him to be ideal, including you. Devaluation is a departure from narcissism. The narcissists attempt to become normal, to grow up, to become an adult. The narcissists much prefers to idealize you, because by idealizing you, he's idealizing himself. He is forced to devalue. He doesn't want to do it, but he's forced to devalue because he desperately is attempting to become, to separate, to individuate, to self-actualize. The only way for him to do that is to get rid of his grandiosity, to get rid of his narcissism, to separate from the source of all this pathology. His mother and now you as a stand-in for his mother, as a substitute for his mother. Ironically, devaluation is perhaps a healthy act, an act of mental health of the narcissists, because he's devaluing a figure which has a figure which has damaged him, he's devaluing his mother, who was really a monster in many ways. So it's a healthy thing to do. But then, then he clashes with his grandiosity, he clashes with his pathology, and his pathology is much stronger than any feeble attempts at mental health. And he takes over and he's forced to re-idealize everyone and everything around him and inside him, you included, tries to hover you. And if he doesn't hover you, he goes on to the next intimate partner and he does exactly the same. The only exception to all this is mortification, narcissistic mortification. All this is impossible if the narcissist has been mortified. The minute the narcissist is mortified, he departs from his previous version, because his false self is destroyed in the process of mortification. Disabled and deactivated at the very least, usually destroyed, his defenses crumble, it goes through extreme life-threatening decompensation. So it's like he had died. He had died and now he reinvents himself, he is reincarnated, he is reborn. And this allows him to self-idealize. Initially after mortification, the narcissist feels dead, and by the way, he has suicidal ideation and so on. So he goes through a period of reconstruction, but he reconstructs himself as someone else. In fact, he creates a new false self. And so all the previous memories are erased and there's no need to idealize or re-idealize you, because your gun, your gun with his entire history, entire identity, entire memory is a new person. And so after mortification, there's never-hoovering. Mortification leads to self-supply and self-idealization. There's a restoration of minimum grandiosity and then the narcissist re-embarks on the path of pathological classical narcissists. Okay, I hope I made it much more clear. I'm going to recap everything very, very fast. The shirt fantasy is the space within which narcissists interact with intimate partners. It starts with co-idealization. The narcissist idealizes you and by doing so is idealizing himself. It also allows him to get you addicted to him, because you see your idealized image through his gaze and that is very addictive. The next stage is dual mothership. The narcissist becomes your mother, gives you unconditional love and acceptance and idealizes you and you become his mother. But you become his mother in order to allow him to separate from you. He has unfinished business with his mother of origin and he wants you to play a role so that he can finish the business with you this time. He needs to separate from you, but the very need to separate from you causes narcissistic injury because it means that he misjudged you. It means that he is not all-knowing as a God should be. So what he does, he devalues you, the external object. By devaluing you, he restores his grandiosity. He erases the narcissistic injury and he reduces his abundant anxiety. At that point, he splits. He has devalued you, but there is an interjective view, a representation of you in his mind which is still idealized. So what he does, he splits you. He makes the introject, your inner representation in his mind, he makes it all bad and so he becomes all good and now he is ready to discard you in real life. He has you as a devalued object, he has your introject as a devalued object, he's ready to get rid of you, but he wants to get rid of your introject also. He's trying to hand it over to you. He wants you to own this devalued, corrupted, internal representation of you, your introject, and he wants you to acknowledge that you are bad, that you are imperfect, that you destroyed everything, that you are to blame, that you should be guilty and ashamed, etc. If you don't collude with this game, he has a problem because he's stuck with your introject that has now been devalued. This creates a process known as co-devaluation, which is the opposite of co-idealization. When the internal object is all good and idealized, the narcissist is all good and idealized. When your internal object in his mind is corrupted and all bad and unworthy, the narcissist is corrupted and unworthy. It's co-devaluation, but he cannot get rid of this introject in any other way. If you refuse to own it and collaborate, he cannot get rid of it in any other way because he has introject constancy. He is emotionally invested in introjects, not in people. So he's invested in your introject, he's invested in your avatar emotionally and when he tries to get rid of it unilaterally without your collaboration, he feels anxiety because this generates introject in constancy. So he is stuck with devalued, split or bad introject as an internal object and this creates enormous anxiety. To resolve this anxiety, the narcissist approaches you, hoovering and tries to re-idealize. Having re-idealized you, he can then re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety. The only exception to all this is modification. Thank you for listening and I hope I've been clear this time. I tried to put all my balls in one basket, take your mind off the gutter and I hope I've succeeded. Ever since I released the video One Narcissist Relationship Cycle, people have been misidentifying narcissists with cockles. Both the narcissist and the cockle push their intimate partners to be with others. Not all narcissists but many narcissists do but these narcissists are not cockles. The reason for what the narcissist does is not the same as the cockles motivation. The cockle is motivated by pain. He is an emotional masochist. The narcissist's reason is that he wants to experience betrayal. The narcissist in other words has a betrayal fantasy. My name is Sam Vakny. I'm the author of Malignan Saint-Flaude, Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of psychology in SIEMPS, Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies, the Outreach Arm or Program of the SIEMPS Constitution of Universities. Let me button my upper button, right? I don't want to titillate you. Okay Shoshanim, let's delve right in. Narcissistic supply, even sex, are anxiolytic. In other words, they serve to reduce anxiety. The reason the narcissist pursues narcissistic supply and the reason the somatic narcissist engages in sex is because it makes them feel good and it makes them feel good because these reduce anxiety, they mitigate it. But there's another thing that makes the narcissist feel vindicated, elated, somehow relieved and that thing is betrayal. Narcissists have been betrayed in early childhood. The narcissist has been betrayed by his mother in early childhood. He seeks to recreate this betrayal throughout life. He chooses fake friends who bedmouth him, steal from him, poach his mates and betray him. He behaves obnoxiously and abusively to make people hate him and then hurt him and he pushes his intimate partners to betray him in a variety of ways, including by cheating on him. So it's all about the pursuit of betrayal. It's all about fulfilling some fantasy of betrayal. What is this fantasy? Why does the narcissist need to be betrayed? What is the role of betrayal in the narcissist's psychological economy? What processes does betrayal bring on and about and where does it all culminate? What is the aftermath? This is the topic of today's video. Remember just a refresher. Narcissists convert their intimate partners to substitute mothers in order to accomplish separation individuation. The narcissist's original mother did not allow him to separate from her and did not let him become an individual. This is an unfinished business. It's an unfinished agenda. The narcissist has to go through this phase in order to become an adult and then an individual. The narcissist goes through life engaging in what Freud called a repetition compulsion. He keeps choosing intimate partners within a shared fantasy. He then converts these intimate partners into mother figures and he then tries to separate from his intimate partners by devaluing the intimate partner and then discarding her. This is a replay, a reenactment of the separation individuation that he had never had with his original mother. One way to make separation individuation happen is by insistently and persistently pushing the partner to betray the narcissist. For example, by being with another person. I'm going to use from this moment on, I'm going to use the male gender pronoun, but it's utterly interchangeable, utterly interchangeable with the female pronoun. There are 50% of narcissists diagnosed narcissists today are women. As I said, one way to bring about separation individuation is by pushing your partner to betray you somehow. I'm going to use the example of cheating because cheating is the ultimate betrayal. Cheating is a total rejection of the narcissist as a man, as a lover, as a person and as an intimate partner. There is no greater rejection than cheating by the person you trusted and loved. So when the narcissist pushes his partner to betray him, this way the separation from the partner is coupled with debilitating pain. Why would the narcissist choose an option that involves agony, excruciating, writhing pain? Why would he do this? Why doesn't he simply, I don't know, devalue the partner and then discard her? Or why does he simply, doesn't he simply break up and move on? Why does he have to go through this drama of betrayal and, in the example that I'm using, being cheated on, sometimes ostentatiously, egregiously, and life-threateningly painfully? Why would he choose this? Because he wants the separation. He wants the separation to be coupled with pain. Because if the separation is painful, it's irreversible and it's final. The narcissist always mourns and grieves the mother fantasy, not the actual departed intimate partner. The narcissist couldn't care less about his intimate partner. She's interchangeable, she's fungible, she's an extension of himself, she's a mere internal object, a snapshot. It's not about the intimate partner, it's about the loss of the fantasy. The narcissist separates not with his real life spouse or not from his real life girlfriend. The narcissist separates from the fantastic, imaginary, maternal figure that she had become in his mind through the process of snapshotting or introjection. So, in order to efficaciously separate from the partner, the narcissist needs to make it so harrowingly painful that he would never ever go back. The process is rendered irreversible by the agony involved in it. The narcissist, therefore, is not a masochistic cuckold. The narcissist does not get sexually aroused by the cheating, as a cuckold would do. On the contrary, the narcissist's subsequent suffering causes him extreme depression and a marked decrease or disappearance of the libido of the sex drive. Now, this has become asexual in the wake of such betrayal and cheating. This is the exact opposite of cuckoldry. Cuckolds are sexually aroused by the betrayal and by the cheating. Their libido increases, not decreases, and they're not depressed, they're just in pain. Back to the topic. Normal people react to mate poaching with mate guarding or sexual gatekeeping. In other words, if someone is trying to take away your spouse or your boyfriend or your girlfriend, you are likely to react very aggressively by fending off the intruder, isolating your intimate partner from the wannabe mate and generally restricting her movements, maybe even spying on her. These are typical behaviors, but not with the narcissist. The narcissist reacts to mate poaching. The narcissist reacts to attempts to poach his mate, to steal away his mate. With the exact opposite, he reacts with mate sharing. He actually engages in projective identification. He pushes his intimate partner towards the poacher. When another man shows interest in the narcissist's spouse or the narcissist's girlfriend, the narcissist is not likely to react by guarding his intimate partner, isolating her, sequestering her, or demanding that she cuts all contact with the poacher. On the contrary, he is likely to offer his spouse or girlfriend to the newcomer, to the male who is interested in her, and he is likely to do this in a very aggressive way. He is likely to actually orchestrate the whole event, the cheating. He is likely to push his intimate partner by abusing her or by extolling the virtues of the new man, idealizing him to her so that he renders the new man irresistible. This is mate sharing with the man she would cheat with. Often the narcissist actually chooses this man himself. He chooses the cheating partner of his spouse or girlfriend. It's all part of a play, a theater play, a production kind of movie, and it's all about the narcissist's betrayal fantasy. He needs to be betrayed because having been betrayed, he experiences such pain that facilitates the separation, and not only facilitates the separation, but makes it irreversible. Having idealized his partner, the narcissist's self-idealization, grandiosity, depends on his ownership of her. This is known as co-idealization. When the narcissist idealizes his partner, he's also idealizing himself by owning the partner. It's like he's saying, I own this perfect object, that means that I'm perfect. So relinquishing his partner to another man, handing his partner, his mate, his spouse, his girlfriend, handing her to another man, undermines the narcissist's sense of self-worth, actually results in self-devaluation so extreme that the narcissist's internal bed object takes over, and the dual messages of the bed object are amplified. You're not lovable, you don't deserve happiness because you're not good enough. I'm going to repeat this because everything I'm describing here is totally counter-intuitive and outside the experience of the vast majority of humanity. The narcissist converts his intimate partner to a mother figure, then he needs to separate from her. The best way to separate from her irreversibly is to force her to betray him, and the most exquisite form of betrayal is cheating. So the narcissist pushes his partner to cheat on him. He introduces her to eligible men, he praises them and idealizes them and idolizes them so that they become irresistible. He makes sure that she meets them continuously. Finally, if all else fails, he actually demands that she sleeps with the other guy or have a romance with the other guy. He needs her to betray him, he needs her to betray him, and the narcissist's partner feels this. She keeps saying it's as if you would be angry at me if I don't do it, and indeed the narcissist would be because his overriding need is to separate from her and he can't separate from her unless she does something really really bad, unless she misbehaves egregiously, unless her misconduct cannot be overlooked. He needs her to be evil, he needs her to really really misbehave so that he can just say goodbye in good conscience and attain the high moral ground and feel like a victim, and these are the conditions for separation. And even though handing over his partner to another man is possibly the most excruciatingly painful experience imaginable, it is far better, it is far more tolerable, it is far more bearable than not being able to separate from your intimate partner. The narcissist needs to separate from the intimate partner because if he doesn't, there is going to be a replay, a reenactment with the terrifying dynamics with the original mother which involve life-threatening shame and other negative effects. The narcissist is compelled to separate from his partner and he beseeches her, he asks her to help him to do that by misbehaving, by betraying him on some occasions with another man. I'm using the example of cheating, but it could be any form of betrayal. Remember that once the betrayal is accomplished, the bad object inside the narcissist takes over the bad object, the voices of the dead mother and other sadistic, harsh, disparaging, inner critic voices, so these voices tell the narcissist these introjects create, generate automatic negative thoughts and the two dominant ones are, you see, she cheated on you, she betrayed you, she chose another man over you, you're not good enough, you are not lovable and you don't deserve happiness and you will never have happiness because no one will ever love you. Even this intimate partner, as you see, the minute she met another man, she just walked away. The bad object inside the narcissist now essentially takes over and the narcissist is in a process of extreme, extreme life-threatening self-devaluation. At the same time, the narcissist is also very envious of the other man with whom the spouse or the girlfriend had cheated. The other man now possesses the good idealized object. The other man now is the owner of the narcissist's intimate partner. Her introject, the internal object that represents the partner inside the narcissist's mind is still idealized, so now the other man is in charge of the idealized snapshot of the idealized internal object in the narcissist's mind. It's as if the other man had reached into the narcissist's mind and absconded with the good object inside it which represents the intimate partner and this feels like self-harm or self-mutilation. It feels like the narcissist feels like a self-destructive fool for having handed over this intimate partner over to a man and he envies this man for possessing her and he says to himself, I used to possess this intimate partner, I used to be in charge and I used to be the owner of the idealized object. This other man used to envy me. This other man wanted to possess her. This other man desired her and now this other man had replaced me in her heart and mind and this is a horrible feeling. The narcissist has usually a referential ideation which in this case are probably true and he believes that the other man is bad-mouthing him as a predator or a monster. He believes that the other man has taken over the heart and mind of his intimate partner by casting him as an abuser. In other words, the narcissist realizes that he is trapped in the Cartman drama triangle. He is the abuser, his intimate partner is the victim and the third man, the third party, the man who she's cheating with is actually a rescuer or a savior. He has attained the role of a predator and a monster and this was all he's doing. He made it all happen. He orchestrated the whole thing. He pushed the parties towards each other. Never mind how many times they protested against it. He insisted, even became indignant if they wouldn't obey him. He feels the narcissist feels that his repetition compulsion renders him defenseless, disrespected by everyone involved, weak, even pathetic and he consoles himself by clinging to the fact that he had made all this happen. He was in charge and everyone involved was merely a puppet. He was the puppet master and they were just puppets and acting the drama of his betrayal. That is not far from the truth. It usually is true and yet it's not enough to reduce or to ameliorate the narcissist's seething envy of the other man with whom his intimate partner is cheating. It's not enough to reduce the sense of utter helplessness in the face of such powerful inner compulsions. It's not enough to allay the overwhelming sense of loss and the huge sadness that sweeps over the narcissist in waves in the aftermath. The narcissist hates to do this. He doesn't want to do this. These are the worst moments in his life in the wake of betrayal by an intimate partner. He would rather avoid all this but he has no option. He has no choice. This is a compulsion, a repetition compulsion and like every other compulsion, there's no way out. There's no way to counter it. There's no way to negate it. He needs, he needs to separate from the maternal figure that his intimate partner had become. He needs to let go of her and he needs her to let go of him and this needs to be done in such a clear cut and ostentatious manner so that there's no doubt of the separation and it cannot be reversed. The narcissist perceives the men that the partner is cheating with as superior to him in some ways. Why does he do that? Narcissists don't like to feel inferior. Narcissists like to feel superior. Why in this particular case in the betrayal drama, in the betrayal fantasy, why does the narcissist want to feel inferior to the men his spouse or girlfriend had chosen over him? The men that he pushed her to choose. Again, there is an artificial resemblance to the cuckold. The cuckold is a masochist and he does often feel inferior to the bull. The bull is the third party, the other man who is having sex with his wife. But the resemblance ends here. The reason the cuckold wants to feel inferior is because he wants to experience pain because pain arouses him sexually. That's not the case with the narcissist. Absolutely not the case. The reason the narcissist wants to feel inferior to the men his wife is having a romance or sex with is because this way he can be a child again. Remember, separation individuation is an early childhood process. It takes place between the ages of 18 and 24 months. In order for the narcissist to separate effectively, to really separate and to have a chance at becoming an individual, the narcissist needs to go back in time and become a child again. He needs to regress and infantilize himself because only children separate an individuate. And so he needs to feel that his spouse or his girlfriend is the adult. She is the mother. The other man who is now having an affair with her or a fling or casual sex or whatever, that other man is an adult too. There are two adults doing this. Two adults are betraying him, but he is not an adult. He is a child. Mother is cheating with him, cheating on him with a real man. I repeat, mother, his intimate partner, is cheating on him with a real man. He is not a real man because he's a child because he can separate from mother only as a child. He cannot be a grown up in this game. He needs to infantilize and of course, children by definition are inferior to adults by rendering the other men an adult by considering the other men to be a grown up. The narcissist is actually saying, you're a grown up. You're an adult. I'm not. I'm a child. I'm much inferior to you. And my intimate partner is my mother. So in this drama, in this triangular drama, usually triangular drama, the narcissist uses his intimate partner and her lover as props. They are the adults compared to which or compared to whom he is a child. And now as a child, the preconditions for separation are fulfilled. There's a devalued mother. There's a painful breakup in a reenacted childhood. And there is an adult figure resembling very much a father figure who is taking away mother from the child, a reenactment of the Urgipal Edipus complex. Of course, all the drama, all the betrayal drama and the betrayal fantasy involves splitting as a precondition for individuation. The child in this story is all good. The child is a victim. Mother and her lover, mother and the other men, they're all bad. Now that the child is all good and mother and her lover are all bad, the child can safely separate from mother. Actually, it feels safe to separate. It has an incentive to separate because mother is threatening ominous. She's a bad person, bad object, a bad external object. So now the narcissist has an incentive to separate. Having devalued her, having rendered her a bad external object, the narcissist tells himself it's the right time and it's the right thing to do to say goodbye because these people are evil, they're dangerous, they don't love me the way a child would think. So let me summarize this part for you. It's really this, this is a mind bender. The narcissist wants to separate from his mother, from the maternal figure, from the intimate partner. To separate from a maternal figure he needs to be a child again. To be a child again he needs to regard the mother figure, the intimate partner, as an adult. And he needs to regard the other men with whom she is cheating or having an affair as another adult. There are two adults there and they are betraying him together. Together they are betraying him. And now that they betrayed him, he is in huge pain. He is in pain because these two adults are evil. They're victimizing him. They hate him, they don't love him. The bad object inside the narcissist keeps telling him you're not lovable, you don't deserve happiness, you're not good enough, you see she has chosen someone else over you. So at that point the narcissist is ready to separate. He says to himself, anyhow I'm not lovable, no one can love me, she hates me, her lover hates me, her lover is superior to me because I'm a child and he's an adult of course, she would go for a real man, not for a child. So she would never come back to me. I am ready to separate because I'm all good in this story. Even though I orchestrated everything, even though I made it happen, even though I pushed them towards each other, they didn't have to do what they're doing. They could have abstained, they could have refrained from doing this, that they are doing this proves how much they hate me. That they ended up complying with my wishes and demands just goes to show how disrespected I am and how hateful I am. And so now he's ready to separate, and in the process he involves the ancient primitive defense mechanism of splitting. I'm all good, I'm a victim, I'm a child, a molested child and this evil woman who is my mother or maternal figure, she is a lover who is as evil as she is, they both betrayed me and always willing to say goodbye. Narcissus engineers the whole situation of betrayal, he's fully in control of it, he selects mates for his wife, he selects mates as his wife or as his girlfriend, he selects mates that are more likely to collaborate in realizing the betrayal fantasy. He selects mates who would betray him, he selects mates who would cheat on him, promiscuous mates, unboundary mates, mentally ill mates, he selects spouses and girlfriends who are likely to go along with the betrayal drama, such women are anyhow prone to fantasy and they collude with the Narcissus to the point of complying with his wishes, even when his demands of them are egodistonic, even when what he is asking of them to do is perceived by them as wrong, they are unhappy with it, they don't want to do it, he kind of broadcasts to them you should cheat on me and they say I don't want to cheat on you, I don't want to cause you pain, I never did this before, I don't want to do this or I did this before and I don't want to do it again but he keeps pushing relentlessly, he keeps brainwashing them, he keeps entraining them, he keeps grinding them to the point that they say okay in order to remain in the fantasy we're going to do this, in their minds if they do this if they cheat on him for example it would make them closer to him, if they cheat on him it's an act of intimacy, if they cheat on him he's going to reclaim them and he's going to love them even more because they have complied with his wishes but of course they don't realize the narcissist wants them to cheat in order to get rid of them, the narcissist wants his intimate partner to cheat on him or to betray him in some other way so that he can separate from her finally and irreversibly. Narcissus abuses his intimate partner, prompts them, prompts her to betray him, he sets the stage even to the point of choosing the other man, introducing him to her and making sure they spend a lot of time together and then acting as a kind of cupid, promoting that other man, idealizing him and idolizing him, telling his intimate partner he's your perfect, he's your perfect match, don't ever let him go, don't let go of this opportunity. It is important to note that the fantasy of the narcissist is that of having fallen victim to an evil partner which is reminiscent of his real dead mother, dead I mean psychologically, not physically. The dead mother is narcissistic, selfish, absent, instrumentalizing, parentifying, dead mother so he's the fantasy, the betrayal fantasy is that I'm going to be a victim of a partner, an intimate partner who is essentially a mother substitute but she would be as evil as betraying and as hurtful, she would cause me as much pain as my original mother. The fantasy is mostly counterfactual, it's delusional, it's persecutory, in reality it is the narcissist who literally coerces, forces his partner to cheat on him in a variety of ways. I don't know of any, there are very few partners who could resist this unless they walk away. So it is the narcissist who sets everything in motion, he is the deus and he is the makina, he is the puppet master, everyone is manipulated into acting the roles and the parts in a theater play of betrayal and yet in his mind he is a victim, in his mind he's being persecuted, in his mind he did nothing to to deserve this, in his mind it was all a test that they had failed, a loyalty test that his intimate partner had failed and his friend for example had failed. In his mind it's kind of make-belief, not real, assimilation and when things actually do happen and he is betrayed or cheated on, he is reduced to smithereens, he falls apart, he literally falls apart, he disintegrates. The fantasy that he has of himself as a victim, a victim of an evil partner and her even more evil lover, this fantasy is not true of course, so he has to defend it fiercely against reality, against the facts, he needs to believe that he had been betrayed, he needs to believe that he is a victim because an efficacious separation individuation depends on this belief, depends on this fantasy that the maternal figure, the intimate partner is bad and that the other party is equally bad. He needs to sustain this fantasy in order to say goodbye and never look back, his original mother had left in his mind a legacy, a trace, a sadistic tormenting introject, a voice that his enemy, his hostile voice, voice that wants to destroy him, a voice that pushes him to incredible acts of self-harm and self-mutilation to self-punitive actions that defy belief and now what he does, he superimposes the bad object, he superimposes the sadistic original mother introject on the introject of his intimate partner, so once the intimate partner had cheated on him or betrayed him in some way, the road is open and he can merge the introjects, he can merge the original mother introject which is hateful, keeps telling him that he is not lovable, emerges it with the intimate partner introject. As an aside, this attempt is doomed to failure because it has some inherent contradictions, I recommend, I advise you to watch the video I've made about hoovering, why does the narcissist hoover? But back to our topic, the narcissist distorts reality, he reframes reality, he deceives himself into accepting a version of the events which is largely untrue, but a version of the events which is excruciatingly agonizing and therefore conducive to separation, individuation, he adopts a fable of rejection, humiliation and victimization, but it's not true, it's a confabulation, this confabulation is intended to buttress and magnify the twin messages of the bad object, you are not good and therefore deserve no happiness and you are not lovable. So in the aftermath of the betrayal and the cheating, the narcissist feels so down, so depressed because his bad object is tormenting him, the bad object is infused with new power because remember the bad object is the original mother introject, it hates the narcissist, sadistic, and now that it had merged, now that it had been merged with the introject of the cheating or betraying intimate partner, it is much more powerful, it is much stronger, it overpowers and overwhelms the narcissist, indeed he becomes dysregulated, very similar to borderline, at that point the only solution or resolution is to start all over again with a new partner in order to internalize a good idealized object which will be able to somehow balance the bad object, the rampant bad object. To summarize, the narcissist converts his intimate partner to a maternal figure, he needs to separate from him because he has unfinished business with his original mother, or his original mother did not allow him to separate individually, he needs to do it with his intimate partner, he pushes his intimate partner to betray him, for example, to cheat on him with another man, he coerces her to do it even if she doesn't want to, and he does this because betrayal and cheating cement the power of the separation, having been betrayed, having been cheated on, the separation becomes strong, irreversible and final, the narcissist believes that now he can move on and individuate, regrettably this doesn't happen for reasons that I mentioned in the video on Hooverie, but one more important reason is that he has now in the aftermath, in the wake of the betrayal, in the wake of the cheating, he has to merge the original mother interject, the hateful sadistic interject, the voice in his mind, her voice in his mind, with the interject of the betraying and cheating intimate partner, this creates a much stronger bad object inside his mind, and then he's driven to the point of suicidality, he becomes suicidal, he becomes borderline, dysregulated, he can't sleep at night, can't eat, he doesn't take care of his health, he neglects himself, he's super depressed, and he contemplates suicide repeatedly. To emerge from this state, the only solution is to affect another fantasy, to emotionally invest in another fantasy, remember the narcissist is never emotionally invested in any real life person, the narcissist is incapable of perceiving external objects as external, he creates immediately an internal object that represents the external object, and he continues his interactions exclusively with the internal object, with the snapshot, so he needs now to find someone, another person, another spouse, another life partner, another intimate partner, another girlfriend, he needs to find someone, which he can then convert into an internal object, imbue her with maternal properties, she's idealized, she's a good mother in his mind, and she's fighting off the bad mother, for a while, peace is restored, restored in tranquility, losses it is happy, he love bonds, love bonds, his newly found mother, but then the cycle kick starts again, and he has to separate from this maternal figure as well, and it all recommences, I recalled certain phrases and sentences that my intimate partners told me, my girlfriends, my wives, they told me, because I subjected all of them to this cycle successfully, the overwhelming vast majority of them ended up being with other men, sometimes as fast as four days, or six days, I'm good at what I do, they succumbed to the betrayal fantasy, they fit it into it, and they played their own to perfection, but in the process, and definitely in the aftermath, when they woke up from this simulation, from this dream state, and they realized what they had done, many of them became very ego-dystonic, even those who did not become ego-dystonic realized that they had been played and manipulated into the world, so they spoke to me, as an example one of them told me, I thought you were getting rid of me, I thought you wanted me to sleep with another man, another one told me, I thought you hate me, and you would be angry if I do not go to the other bed, you love pain and you will do anything to be in pain, you push your woman to cheat, to in order to be able to say that mommy again betrayed four baby, another one told me, we agreed and you insisted that I try to have a baby with another man, you love pain, you push your women to cheat, and then you're in pain, and Richard Grannon, my fake friend, told me, everyone is your puppet, because you want to prove to yourself that every woman will betray you, and he's a whore, like your mother, so people around the narcissist do notice what he's doing, they interpret most of his actions properly, but they're helpless to resist, resistance is futile, why? Because they themselves are addicted to fantasy, they have powerful fantasy defenses, when they fit into the narcissist's fantasy, they become intoxicated with it, and they kind of derealize and depersonalize, they become dissociative, they act the part on autopilot, it's like they are in a dream state or some nightmare-ish landscape, even if they believe themselves to be embedded in reality, they are not, the only thing they are grounded in is the narcissist's betrayal fantasy, unfolding inexorably as they play their parts zombie-like, this is a post script with wine, of course, so I forgot to mention in the original video that the narcissist's self-harming, the narcissist's self-destructiveness, self-mutilation, they're all forms of emotional disinvestment or decafaxis in clinical terms, the narcissist in order to separate needs first to separate emotionally, but all that you say, narcissists have no emotions, yes, it's not emotions in the layman's terms, the narcissists are emotionally invested, they are affected in the fantasy, in order to separate they need to de-cathect the fantasy, they need to withdraw the emotional investment in the fantasy, this is a process of emotional disinvestment, by harming himself, by causing himself pain, by buttressing and reaffirming the signals and voices of the bed object, the narcissist is able to detach emotionally from the fantasy and to embark on separation, I recommend that you watch a video titled Narcissist Emotional Involvement Preventive Measures, E-I-P-M's, on this channel, that's it, that's all I have to say, now to much much more important things, it's red wine, not what you're thinking, many of you were taken by the idea of the narcissist's betrayal fantasy, watch the video I posted a few days ago, but the video I've just mentioned described merely the psychodynamics behind the betrayal fantasy, what goes on in the narcissist's mind when he reenacts and plays out the betrayal fantasy in his relationships, and before we proceed, because today's video we're going to discuss how the betrayal fantasy is actually implemented in reality, the brass tux, tux, all the moves and the counter moves when the narcissist tries to impose the betrayal fantasy on his nearest and dearest, and apropos betrayal fantasy, my former fake friend, that's the F word, used to look me in the eye, smiles smugly and say, I'm plagiarizing you again, I didn't mind being plagiarized as long as I was by his side, compensating somehow for his rather limited intelligence, but now poor thing, he's all alone, dude, get it right at least, plagiarize me by all means, by get it right, I know I understand your limitations, but try harder, consult someone regarding the $10 words, I mean, transcend your limitations with the help of others, poor you. Okay Shoshaneem, today's video, as I said, is about the betrayal fantasy, my name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm also a professor of psychology in CIAPS, Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies, an outreach program of the CIAS Consortium of University, some of you asked me what, if I had another position or previous position as a professor, yes, I was professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation, not a very popular destination lately, let's delve right in, into another unpopular destination, the narcissist's mind. The previous video was about the etiology of the betrayal fantasy, the roots, and the internal processes that accompany the betrayal fantasy as it unfolds. What about the mechanics of the betrayal fantasy? How does it operate? First of all, it's crucial to understand that the narcissist breaks up with his intimate partners. I'm going to use, sorry, before I proceed, I'm going to use he, I'm going to use the male gender pronoun, but of course it's utterly interchangeable with a female gender pronoun, about 50% of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder nowadays are women. Okay, this disclaimer out of the way, let us forge ahead. The narcissist breaks up with women and he does this by pushing them to cheat with other men. Why would he do that? To avoid future stalking. The narcissist is terrified of intimacy. He abhors demands on his time, resources, exclusivity, behavior. He doesn't want people in his life. The narcissist is a solipsist, is a loner, is a lone wolf, and the reason for that is that the narcissist cannot comprehend external objects. The narcissist interacts only exclusively with objects inside his mind, also known as internal objects, with introjects, voices in his mind. In this sense, the narcissist is very close to psychosis, as I've been saying for years, in the footsteps of Otto Kahnberg. So narcissists are loners, and then suddenly there's another person there, an intimate partner. This intimate partner becomes a nuisance, an annoyance taking over the narcissist's life. Gradually and incrementally, the narcissist resents this. He wants his intimate partner out and away, one way or another. In short, he wants to get rid of the woman in his life. So he pushes her to cheat with another man, because once she cheats with another man, she would feel guilty, she would have no claim on him, she could make no demands, and she would vanish. This would prevent future stalking. Some of the women the narcissist breaks up with when cheating is not involved do become stalkers, or just bitter, resentful, and hateful. The narcissist lesson is, if I just break up with a woman normally, as other people do, I'm going to be haunted for the rest of my life. Now, don't misunderstand, the cheating causes the narcissist excruciating pain for a few weeks, but it is far preferable to stalking and to charges of unfulfilled promises. Now, before we proceed, I'm using the example of cheating, but this applies to any type of betrayal, any type of knife in the back, any type of backstabbing, any type of bed mouthing, any type of breakdown of trust. I selected cheating because it is the most extreme form of betrayal. It's a total rejection of the cheated on. And because in the previous video, I've used the example of cheating, but as I say, it applies to all types of betrayal. And at the end of this video, I will briefly review other types of relationships, not intimate relationships, but other types, for example, workplace, collaborations, friendships, and so on and so forth. At this stage, let us stay with cheating as an example of the principle of betrayal, as a reification of betrayal. So, the narcissist wants to get rid of an over-demanding, over-present intimate partner. He's afraid of being confronted with demands, pain, the partner's pain, fighting, stalking. He doesn't want any of this. So, he pushes the partner to cheat so that she feels guilty, so that she vanishes on her own accord. This causes the narcissist's pain. In a minute, I will explain which kind of pain. It's not the kind of pain that you imagine, because narcissists are not the kind of people that you imagine. They're not healthy. They're not neurotypical. They're not normal. So, even their pain is highly idiosyncratic, highly unusual. We'll come to it in a minute. But let us dispel two misconceptions. The narcissist is not a masochist. He doesn't seek pain for pain's sake. He doesn't like pain. He hates to experience cheating. He's devastated. And he detests having to go through this cycle again and again. So, when the narcissist pushes women, dates, girlfriends, intimate partners to be with other men, when he often orchestrates the cheating, he orchestrates the betrayal, the extra marital affairs, the extra dyadic affairs. He very often puts his intimate partner in touch with a cheating partner. When he does all this, it is not because he seeks pain. It's not because he's a masochist. I'll read, at the end of this video, I'm going to read a few segments, a few sections from a book by Theodor Millen about the similarities and dissimilarities between narcissism and masochism. In this particular case, it's not about masochism, because the narcissist truly experiences agony and he hates it. It's also not carcaldry. The narcissist is not sexually aroused by the fact that his intimate partner is with another man on the contrary. It depresses him and reduces his libido to zero. It has the opposite effect to sexual arousal. So, narcissists are not masochists. They don't seek pain. They're not carcalls. They're not aroused by extra marital or extra dyadic affairs with all kinds of bulls. They just use cheating to get rid of the intimate partner. They merely wish to get rid of the intimate partner altogether, or at the very least, to minimize her footprint in the narcissist's life. Unconsciously though, there is another layer. The narcissist catastrophizes. He believes that the world is hostile. Bad things are going to happen. People are not trustworthy. Everyone is out to get him. There's a lot of paranoia involved in narcissism. Her secretary delusions. Indeed, I'm trying to recast paranoia as a variant of narcissism, because the paranoid believes that he is the dissenter of some conspiracy center of attention, however maligned. So unconsciously with the narcissist, this strategy of, I'm going to push my partner to cheat on me so that I can get rid of her, so that she feels guilty, so that she doesn't bother me again. This strategy is intended to control. To control what? To control who? To control the inevitable inevitable abandonment, rejection, cheating, betrayal, and humiliation. Because the narcissist believes that these things are inevitable, that his intimate partner is going to anyhow cheat on him, anyhow betray him, anyhow humiliating. It's going to happen ineluctably. Better to be on top. Better to serve the wave. Better to control the outcomes by orchestrating the antecedents. Better to engineer the cheating so that you can tell yourself as a narcissist, it was all my doing. I'm a puppet master. I'm in control. I'm omnipotent. I'm godlike. I play with people's destinies and minds and so this satisfies grandiosity, the grandiosity cognitive distortion. It satisfies the narcissist's inherent and all pervasive belief that he is the center of the world. Everything revolves around him and he is pivotal. He's a pivot. He's the axis around which everyone's lives and minds and wishes and hopes and dreams and everything. It's around him. It's always around him. So even cheating should be actually an extension of him. Even cheating should be his doing and no one else's. So this is the first unconscious motivation. There is a second unconscious motivation. The narcissist feels the need to sadistically punish his partners. He needs, he has to satisfy this need and he wants to sadistically punish his partners because he perceives them as frustrating objects. He perceives them as sadistically punishing him. Projection. He believes that his intimate partners everlasting presence, her demands, her inquiries, her complaints, her wishes, her hopes, these are forms of encroachment. It's a form of imprisonment and shacklement, incarceration, suffocation and smothering that the narcissist resents. And he wants to punish his partner for inflicting all these on him. And he wants to punish her sadistically, cruelly. He does this by withdrawing from the relationship, absenting himself emotionally and sometimes physically. And when these don't work, when the intimate partner doesn't get the message, doesn't understand the signal, stay away from me, leave me alone, let me be, let me have my life, I need my space, I need my time, infinite space, an infinite time, you're just here to serve me when and if I need, etc. When she doesn't get this message, he coerces her, he pushes her, he cajoles her, he forces her to self-trash, sexually self-trash with another man by cheating on him or axiologically self-trash. In other words, betray, betray her own values. Often the two go together. The intimate partners of the narcissist don't want to cheat on him. It goes against their values, their beliefs. It's not ingrained in them, inculcated in them, it's not who they are, but the narcissist forces them to transform themselves and to betray their values and to act in a way which is atypical, unusual. Very often the intimate partners of narcissists, having cheated on the narcissist, are absolutely shocked, ego-dystonic, devastated, sad, heartbroken that they have done it. And so the narcissist has this need to also punish his partner by forcing her to become someone else by kind of taking over her mind and playing with it. It's a mind game and a power play. Okay, you ask, the narcissist needs to get rid of his intimate partner and his way of doing this is pushing her to another man and then he has the upper hand, he is the moral victim and he can tell her to go and she has no claim on him because she misbehaved. Her misconduct rules out any further negotiation. Great, but doesn't he care? Doesn't the narcissist care that his wife, that his girlfriend, that his date is with another man? And the shocking answer is no, he actually doesn't care. The narcissist couldn't care less that the woman in his life is with another man, regardless of what it is they're doing, sex included. The narcissist feels relieved, released, free, the cheese gun. The narcissist suddenly feels unshackled. She will not be making any further demands on me. She will not stop me. I'm a free man. So no, the narcissist doesn't care what the woman in his life does with other men at all. And I mean at all, not even minimally. On the contrary, he has positive affectivity. He reacts positively. But then you say, wait a minute, didn't you say a few sentences ago, when we were all much younger, that the narcissist experiences pain, excruciating pain when this happens? Yes, I did. But it's not the kind of pain you think it should be. It's another kind of pain and I'm coming to it in a second. The narcissist doesn't care, doesn't react emotionally in any way, shape or form. Definitely not negative to the fact that the woman in his life is with another man. He's actually angry. If an intimate partner resists his prodding, his pushing, his interpolation. Interpolation describes a situation where people adopt others' expectations as their own. They internalize other people's expectations. That's interpolation. When the intimate partner of the narcissist refuses to be played with, refuses to succumb, refuses to give in, refuses to collaborate and collude in the narcissist, crude maneuver to push her to cheat on him, or to betray him in some other way, the narcissist becomes angry. He's actually angry at intimate partners who resist the manipulation and survive in the relationship. When he pushes a woman in his life, his girlfriend, his date, his wife to go out to a specific man and have sex with him and she doesn't, it makes him furious, makes him angry because these intimate partners are perceived as clingy, needy, threatening. What's the threat? The ultimate cheating. The ultimate betrayal because remember, the narcissist believes that sooner or later the other shoe will drop. Sooner or later the intimate partner will cheat on him. So why not now? It's as if the intimate partner says, I'm going to cheat on you in my own good time. I'm not going to obey your script. I'm going to choose who to cheat with and when to cheat. And the narcissist is furious. He says, yo intimate partner, if you want to cheat on me, why don't you do it right now with this guy that I've selected for you and I've put you in touch with? Why don't you obey my script? Why do you have to do it independently and then cause me horrible pain? I know you're going to do it in any case. I know you're going to do it in any case. So why not do it now? Why shock me and surprise me and traumatize me in the future when you could do it right now and release me and make me feel good. So he becomes angry. Okay. I did say several times in this video that the implementation of this strategy, the only way to get rid of my intimate partner is to force her to cheat on me, get rid of her for good, get rid of her for real, get rid of her with no trace. The only way to accomplish this, to accomplish this is to push her to cheat. But I did say that this strategy causes excruciating pain. How come? What kind of pain? The pain that the narcissist experiences is not romantic jealousy. It is not possessiveness. He couldn't care less what his intimate partner is doing with other men. None whatsoever. The pain that the narcissist experiences is narcissistic injury. And if the betrayal or the cheating is public, then it's narcissistic modification. That's the pain. Injury or mortification. The pain, in other words, that the narcissist experiences when his wife cheats on him or his girlfriend cheats on him or his date cheats on him. The pain the narcissist experiences has nothing to do with her, has nothing to do with the other guy. The pain that the narcissist experiences has to do with himself, of course. He has been narcissistically injured. He has been narcissistically mortified. One, what causes this injury or this mortification? It is about and solely about, only about, being disrespected and humiliated by other men. Other men, when they see the narcissist pushing his partner, when they see the narcissist pushing his women to cheat with other men, they think of him as a doormat, a cuckold or a coward who is unable to restrain his women folk or unable to protect his women. In other words, the narcissist's strategy to get rid of his intimate partner generates derision and mockery among his peers. Observers of his behavior misinterpret the dynamic. They think he's a masochist. They think he is submissive. They think he's a cuckold. They think he's a coward. He is none of the above. He's actually cold-blooded and calculated. Engineering the whole situation from A to Z to obtain a very selfish goal is being self-efficacious, the exact opposite of a doormat or a cuckold or a coward. But people can't wrap their heads. They can't grasp this strategy. It is so alien, so counter-intuitive, so crazy-making that they can't believe it's true. They say, oh nonsense, he's just, you know, it's a cognitive dissonance. His girlfriend cheated on him so he invented the story that he made it happen, that he pushed her to cheat, that he, you know, people don't believe this. They say, oh, he's just trying to show that he was in control. He was actually deeply hurt and he wanted her to not do it. So he was testing her. Maybe he was just testing her. It's none of the above. It's not a test. It's not, it doesn't involve romantic jealousy or possessiveness. It does not hurt the narcissist. There's no pain, this kind of pain. It's none of the above. It's a maneuver. It's a tactic. It's a strategy of ridding oneself of undesired and undesirable intimate partners. End of story. It's absolutely cold-blooded. But again, the peers of the narcissist misinterpret his behavior and this misinterpretation causes him narcissistic injury and narcissistic modification. He feels humiliated by the misunderstanding of his motivation. At the same time, when he pushes his intimate partner to cheat and she does ultimately, this is automatically perceived by the narcissist as rejection and humiliation. It's a kind of criticism as if he were inadequate, mentally ill, incapacitated, not good enough. In other words, unworthy. In other words, as if he is less than perfect. So this is the irony of the situation. The narcissist pushes his intimate partner to cheat on him in order to get rid of her. He pushes really hard. He pushes really hard. It's like hard work. Then it happens, of course, because if you push anything hard enough, it happens. Then it happens. And then once it happens, the good news is, the civil lining, he does succeed to get rid of the intimate partner. But the cloud is societal reaction, action of everyone around him. The peers, his peers, his colleagues, his family, everyone thinks that he's a dormant, a cuckold, a coward, etc. Not protective enough, etc. So this hurts. This is narcissistic injury or modification. Similarly, unconsciously, he perceives the act of cheating as a kind of rejection and humiliation, an indication that he is less than perfect. Never mind that he engineered everything. Never mind that he controlled everything. Never mind that he puppeteered everyone involved or at least he tells himself this. Never mind all that. There's still this element of she went ahead with it. She actually went ahead with it. That means that I wasn't good enough. That's the bad object speaking. And if you revert, if you go back to the previous video I posted about the betrayal fantasy, I talk a lot about the bad object. Because what happens is, when the narcissist is exposed to this point of view, you're a coward, you're a cuckold, you're a dormant, you're not protective, you're not a man, you're not you're inadequate, you're not good enough, you're unworthy of love, you're not lovable. When he's exposed to these messages from the environment, even though these messages are a misinterpretation of what had happened, these messages are wrong. People don't realize that the narcissist had acted in his own best self-interest. People don't understand because they can't grasp the narcissistic world. It's so not human, it's so alien. But then, because the narcissist is crucially dependent on input and feedback from the outside, because he is subject to internal regulation of his sense of self-worth, for example, because he builds his identity on the fly from narcissistic supply and beats of attention, because he's a kaleidoscope of other people's gazes. Because of all this, he willy-nilly, unwillingly internalizes their fallacious, wrong point of view and comes to regard himself as inefficacious, helpless, unlovable, obsequious, unworthy, ugly, craven, dormant, coward, etc., etc. Actually, in his own mind, he had been cuckolded. He knows it's not true, because he knows that he has done everything intentionally with a plan in mind. He knows that all the steps that led to the cheating were his own doing 100%. So, he knows that he's the mastermind. He knows that he's a puppet master. And yet, because the narcissist always internalizes other people's gaze, other people's point of view, he is forced, he has no defenses against the alternative fallacious, wrong view of what he had done, and he internalizes it. And then it feeds into his harsh inner critic. It kind of fuels his sadistic super ego or bad object interjects. It amplifies the shame that underlies narcissism, because narcissism is the outcome of shame. You should read work by Masterson and Lydia Rogelowska, and so it's intimately connected to shame. So, narcissism is a shame, a reaction to shame, a defense against shame. And the whole process of forcing his intimate partner to cheat and then being exposed to ridicule, mockery and derision and pity and contempt. This whole process, having internalized this input, feeds the narcissist's shame, the furnace in which the narcissist burns eternally, his own inner hell and inferno. The shame then erupts out of control, like so much magma or lava out of volcano. The shame consumes the narcissist to life-threatening proportions. The narcissist could easily become suicidal. So, it is so bizarre, because the narcissist, to recap, see how strange about, how mind-bending this is. The narcissist wants to get rid of his intimate partner. He pushes her to cheat. It's all he's doing. It's all his plan. It's his utterly in control. He pushes her to cheat. Then she cheats. Then other people mock the narcissist. Then, instead of saying to himself, they don't know what they're talking about. This is not true. I know what happened. I made it happen. Instead of doing this, he internalizes the point of view of other people, their gaze, their ridicule and mockery and derision internalizes it. He internalizes all these because he is used to feeding off the feedback and input of other people. He is used to reconstitute himself on the fly based on other people's input and feedback. It can't help it. It's a reflex. It's out of control. So, he internalizes this point of view and then is floated with shame and becomes suicidal. Okay, you say. Great. Thank you, Vaknin. Now, we understand much more that we understand much less. Why? Why not change the strategy? Why continue with this potentially life-threatening game? Mind play and power play. I mean, why? Mind game and power play. Why? Why not learn from experience and never ever do it again? And the answer is the shared fantasy. The narcissist's only meaningful relationships are within a shared fantastic space. It's known as a shared fantasy. It was first described in 1989. The shared fantasy of the narcissist is highly addictive. I've described it in previous videos, including interviews with the aforementioned fake friend. So, the shared fantasy is highly addictive. The partner gets addicted to the shared fantasy. And when the partner is cut off, this generates stalking behaviors. Stalking behaviors. The intimate partner cannot let go of the shared fantasy and of the narcissist. And if the intimate partner is pushed away violently and aggressively being blocked or, I don't know what, threatened, the intimate, the erstwhile intimate partner becomes hateful. This virulent hatred, inspired women anyhow. But refugees of the shared fantasy, intimate partners who have been cast out of the shared fantasy, out of paradise, out of the Garden of Eden, they resent, hate, detest the narcissist. They want him dead. So the shared fantasy is highly addictive. It generates stalking behaviors and virulent hatred and the wish to destroy the frustrating object. The narcissist, these women mobilize and attempt literally to ruin the narcissist, get him, you know, punish him somehow. But once these women cheat at the narcissist behest, if he succeeds to force them to cheat, they are disadvantaged. Whenever they even contemplate approaching the narcissist, he can point to the cheating. He can emotionally blackmail them. He can silence their vocal complaints. He can get driven for good. He can say, it's all your fault. You cheated. You shouldn't have. Why did you do that? Now it's all over. Now it's a point of no return. Now I owe you nothing. And the intimate, the former intimate partner accepts it because cheating is wrong. Never mind the circumstances. Cheating is always wrong. End of story. Period. Another period. And another end of story. There's no justification for cheating. None whatsoever. So once you have cheated, once you have cheated, you're morally compromised. You're not in the position to make demands. You're not in the position to require the fulfillment of promises, however broken they may be. You cannot complain. So the cheating puts a Chinese wall, a firewall between the narcissist and his former partners, protects him. It's a defense. So this is not about masochism. It is just the effective dissolution of the shared fantasy. To effectively dissolve the shared fantasy, you need to force your intimate partner to cheat. And this requires the endurance of a narcissistic injury or narcissistic modification because everyone perceives you as a cuckold. The effective dissolution of the shared fantasy requires narcissistic injury or modification by posing as a cuckolded partner in full view of everyone. That's the cost of dissolving the shared fantasy permanently and irreversibly. It's like the narcissist is faced with two unpalatable choices. Break up with your intimate partner the way normal people do. You can do that, but because the partner has been enmeshed in a shared fantasy, she's not likely to take to it kindly. She's likely to become a stalker, a hater, and an underminer of the narcissist's life for years to come. So that's one option. Not very appetizing, you must admit. The other option, push her to cheat, force her to cheat, engineer the situations which will be irresistible to her. She will fall into temptation. And then, once she has succumbed, once she has cheated, you can dissolve the shared fantasy with impunity and safety because she will have no claim on you or on the discarded fantasy and dream. She has wronged you as a narcissist. And so the narcissist can say to himself, she misbehaved. It's all her fault. And she says to herself, I misbehaved. It's all my fault. They're on the same page. Way to go. It's not about masochism. It's not. It's not about cuckoldry. It's not. It's simply the only way open to the narcissist to dissolve a shared fantasy. In the long run, this posture benefits the narcissist because he retains the high moral ground. He can pose as a victim. Even as he devalues and discards his partners callously and cruelly, he can still point to the cheating incident and say, yeah, I may have been cruel. Yeah, I may have been ruthless. Yeah, I may have been callous. Yeah, I may have been abusive. But she had it coming. She deserved it. She cheated on me. And you know what? Ninety percent of people will nod their heads in ascent. They will agree. Cheaters deserve the worst. So the short-term cost, the short-term cost of narcissistic injury and even life-threatening narcissistic modification, the short-term cost is way outweighed by the long-term benefits of a victimhood narrative. Now, I promised you that I will apply it to other areas of life of the narcissist. I chose an example of cheating. The example of cheating is a form of betrayal. But everything I've just said applies to other forms of betrayal. The narcissist uses a variant of this strategy in all intimate settings, for example, in friendships. In all interpersonal relations, for example, with colleagues or collaborators, once the narcissist dims someone undesirable, for example, the narcissist thinks that he has been mistreated somehow, or the narcissist thinks that the usefulness of someone is over, is become a burden. Once the narcissist decides that someone is undesirable, the narcissist entraps them. He creates a trap. He introduces irresistible temptation. In Hebrew, we say, you should not put an obstacle ahead of a blind man. Bifnei ver lotasim mikshol. So this is what the narcissist does. He sports the vulnerability of the person he wants to get rid of, and then he interposes, he presents an irresistible temptation. He entraps the person. And so then the person fails, having succumbed to the temptation, and the narcissist can say, you know, you see what he has done? You see what he has done? No way. I have, I'm in the right. I'm on the high moral ground. I was the victim. So the narcissist applies this strategy in all his relationships. He engineers situations which set people up for failure. People he wants to get rid of, he sets them up for failure. And then they fail inevitably, because he knows exactly which buttons to push. They fail inevitably. And the gun, the history. He causes people to betray him ostentatiously in full view so that they have no refuge or sanctuary. They cannot even explain themselves. They simply acted wrongly. What can they say? I didn't have free will. I was hypnotized. I was in a trance. The narcissist is a puppet master, and I'm his puppet. The misbehavior is spectacular. It's conspicuous. It's ostentatious. There's nothing that, there's nothing that can be said in the defense of such miscontact. And so the narcissist engineers situations to get rid of people by pushing them to behave in immoral ways against the rules of society, against the mores of society. He pushes them to become anti-social. He pushes them to ignore codes like you should not poach the mate of your friend. He pushes them to steal. He pushes them to do things which are ego-dystonic, cause them a lot of distress afterwards, a lot of shame and a lot of guilt, cause them to doubt themselves. And then he can point at their behavior. That's the reason I broke up with her. She cheated on me. That's the reason I broke up with him. He poached my girlfriend. Yeah, but who made it happen? And for which purpose? The narcissist accomplishes all this by playing on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of people he wants to get rid of. And then he gets modified or narcissistically injured. He becomes morally indignant and righteous because he feels that he had been compelled to get rid of them. There's always a good reason why to get rid of them. But he feels that he had been compelled. It wasn't his choice. And the narcissistic injury and the pain of the modification and the life-threatening suicidality, they're all an inevitable cost of doing business. It's the only way the narcissist can get rid of people in his life because he enmeshes everyone in a shared fantasy, even in business, even in friendships, even in marriages, even with girlfriends, even on dates, the narcissist creates impromptu shared fantasy life. And so the only way to exit the shared fantasy is if the other guy or the other girl misbehaves, if they do something so horrible that they have no claim on the narcissist anymore, they can't ask to return to the shared fantasy. The gates of Eden have closed and there is an angel with a turning sword of fire, the fire of entrapment, the fire of entraining, the fire of brainwashing. People often describe this experience as having lost their minds, as having been zombified, as having been in a state of trance, as having dissociated massively. The narcissist enters their minds and makes them do things which defy their own beliefs about themselves. Thank you for listening. I hope I haven't entrained you too much.