 I'm having a Donald moment, don't ask, it's my turn to eat humble pie, humble pie because I have mispronounced two words, two complete words in the last 230 videos I've made. I first of all am grateful to all of you who had written copiously to inform me that I had mispronounced these words. I stand corrected. Fish have gills, not gills. If they are somatic narcissistic fish, they may have a few gills lying around, but all of them have gills, and so do we as embryos. Second thing, a thin slice in modern accepted pronunciation is sliver, not sliver as I had mispronounced it. So you see, I'm a modest person. I acknowledge my mistakes. Today we are going to discuss, by the way, had I been modest, had I been truly modest, I would have been perfect. So today we are going to discuss two issues which I trust you may find of interest. The first one is the shared fantasy of this somatic narcissist, and the second one is how do narcissists brainwash codependence. It's a highly attuned and specific process known clinically as entraining, and search as I might and as I've tried all over the internet. I couldn't find a single video that described the process of entraining between a narcissist and a codependent, so this is going to be probably a first. Now before we get to the somatic narcissist shared fantasy, many people have difficulties getting to grasps with the concept of shared fantasy. Shared fantasy is simply another name for co-idealization. Co-idealization is a process whereby the narcissist idealize a potential source of supply and later an intimate partner so as to make it possible for himself to idealize himself. So he idealizes his partner. His partner is perfect, she's brilliant, she's the most beautiful woman on earth, she's an amazing cook, she's great in bed, she's this, she's that, and that makes him special because if his partner is special and unique and unprecedented and without peer, peerless, etc. etc. then the narcissist is equally unique and special and peerless. It's a process of co-idealization and idealizing the partner helps the narcissist to idealize himself. Now many, many women who end up with narcissists equally tend to idealize their partners, either they are narcissistic or they are borderline, borderlines also have a false self, or there are certain types of co-dependence. This this subspecies of co-dependent needs to idealize her partner in order to derive from the partner what she needs. Or there's a general need to idealize the male partner. It's socially and culturally mandated to say you know my man is the best, my husband is the best, and you you come across these flinging matches between women comparing their men to each other. Either they devalue their men collectively or they tend to idealize their men collectively. So at any rate co-idealization means that the woman needs to idealize the man in order to be with him and the narcissistic man needs to idealize his woman in order to be with her. Now I'm saying man and woman because I'm always as always I'm taking an idealized heterosexual couple but this equally applies to homosexual couples, lesbian couples, transgender couples. The dynamic inside the couple is pretty identical between the intimate partners on condition that one of them is a narcissist. So the narcissist idealizes his partner and his partner idealizes him back. The reason the only reason for transitioning from the shared fantasy to other phases like the bargaining phase, the main reason is when there's a failure of co-idealization. When one of the parties fails to idealize the other either because reality is too overwhelming and does not allow for confirmation bias, reality is too much. I mean you can idealize that to a point. You can even be delusional, you can even self-deceive but there's a limit even to this. If reality is too much presents too many challenges and countervailing information and data it's difficult to idealize. So this is one reason and the second reason is that the partner pushes to de-idealize, to devalue. We'll discuss that at some other time but when there's a failure of co-idealization the shared fantasy unravels in ways that I've described in previous videos. One of the reasons that I failed to mention in previous videos, one of the reasons that women end up betraying or cheating the narcissist is because they need to reassure themselves that they are normal. You see the narcissist drives his intimate partner to an ultimate level of insecurity. The narcissist partner feels that she doesn't know herself anymore, that she is a strange, that she is alien. She looks at herself and she says is he right about me? Am I that bad? Am I that defective? Am I that deformed? Am I that evil? Am I that vicious and malicious? Am I, am I, am I? The narcissist creates via a process of ambient abuse and gas lighting in some cases, if he's psychopathic, gas lighting. The narcissist creates a sphere, an environment of extreme uncertainty and this uncertainty pervades even self-knowledge. So the intimate partner is not sure anymore who she is. Her very identity is challenged and fractured and disintegrates. She has no parameters, clear objective parameters as to how she should behave, how her acts, in which ways her actions impact the world, what should be the consequences of her behavior or misbehavior. She is totally lost. The narcissist creates a cloud of insecurity within which she meanders. There's no path. And so because she is so lost, she sometimes needs to resort to a normal man, a non-narcissistic man, in order to ascertain, in order to make sure that she is normal, that she is okay, that she is the stable, mature party, that it is the narcissist who is distorting reality, who is deflecting information via a self-serving, self-interested lens, that it is the narcissist who has no access to his emotions and has no empathy and therefore totally fails to grasp and understand what it is to be human. She needs to reassert herself as a normal person with a coherent and cohesive identity. And sometimes the only way to do that is to resort to another man, another normal man, a man with a proper reality testing, a man who can befriend her, who can enjoy her intimacy, who can regard her as interesting or even fascinating, who can provide sacor and support, who can display emotion, who finds her sexually alluring, and ultimately a man who can have and wishes to have conventional sex with her, the kind of mature adult sex that communicates intimacy and emotions. She misses all that within the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is a kind of ectoplasm. It's a kind of emanation from the narcissist's mind. It's a miasmic, twilight zone projection. It's the narcissist's mind writ large and she's trapped in the shared fantasy as one is trapped in a nightmare and can't wake up. Or if you watch a really, really good horror movie and then you start a jump at every turn, this is the shared fantasy. It's not overall a pleasant experience because the intimate partner in the shared fantasy tends to lose herself. She is rendered selfless, not in the classic sense, not the opposite of selfish, but selfless, without self, without core, without identity. She feels that she is deserving and disintegrating in some murky fluid, some gory liquid. The narcissistic shared fantasy is a kind of a dark wisp, dark wisp of smoky, through a glass-darkly existence. And many, many intimate partners of narcissists need other people, need to have sex with other people, need to make love to other people, need just to talk to other people, to extricate themselves from this twilight zone gaslighting and from this entraining, which we'll discuss a bit later. When I say women cheat on the narcissist or betray the narcissist, they have to resort to other men. Even if these men are objectively inferior to the narcissist, even if these men are repulsive, they are still better than the narcissist. They are still superior to the narcissist in critical ways, because they provide a reality test they restore. They restore in the intimate partner the feeling that she knows herself and knows the world. They resuscitate the erstwhile theory of mind and theory of world demolished by the narcissist. The somatic narcissist shared fantasy has all the elements of the cerebral narcissist shared fantasy. After all, both the somatic and the cerebral are narcissists. Don't forget this critical fact. They are both narcissists. They both share 90% of the apparatus of narcissism. They come to narcissism for the same reason. They gravitate towards the narcissistic solution. They deploy narcissistic defenses for the same reasons. They have the same etiology, same causative chain of events led to the adoption of a narcissistic false self in childhood. They had been abused. They had been traumatized. They had been spoiled. They had been smothered. They had been instrumentalized and parentified. The only difference between the cerebral and the somatic is that the cerebral is highly endowed intellectually, is highly intelligent. So he uses his intelligence to obtain supply. The somatic is not the brightest star in the galaxy, but he is still a star. He is still a star as far as his body is handsome. He has good looks. He is muscular. And if he is not, he works on it. His body builds this and that. He is athletic. And he loves women. He doesn't love women, actually. He loves access to women's bodies. He desires women. He is passionate about women because they are in possession of their bodies and he needs their bodies to masturbate with. Or he needs their bodies to soil and despoil if he is a somatic, somatic narcissist. At any rate, he needs their bodies. So he is very much into women. His eyes light up when he sees a woman. The cerebral is very much not into women. The cerebral regards women as enemies, as a ratification and embodiment of the maternal principle. And the maternal principle is the principle of pain, of frustration, of engulfment and enmeshment. So the cerebral rejects women as a solution, as a narcissistic source of supply in the physical sense. He rejects sex. He rejects their sexuality and psychosexuality. The somatic, because he has no choice, not because it's his preference, but he has no alternative. He is not bright. He is not brilliant. He doesn't have 190 IQ. And he looks good. So he uses his body. That's the only difference between them. They both extract narcissistic supply and they're both obsessed with narcissistic supply. They're addicts. They're compulsive about it. Now the somatic shared fantasy, obviously, will revolve around his body. Similar to the cerebral, he looks for three functions in an intimate part. Admirer, playmate and mother. Admirer, he wants someone who will admire his body functionality. His body functionality, his athletic prowess, his sexual coquests, his irresistibility, his attractiveness, his capacity to flirt and to seduce, etc., etc., anything and everything connected to the body. Admiration should be overt, should be expressed, should be repeated. So the somatic is the kind of man who would seize the sexual activity and inquire whether he is the best lover you ever had and how many times you have climaxed. A somatic is the type of man who would tell you that he is handsome and tall and imposing and amazing and how women cannot resist him when he enters a bar. A somatic is the kind of person who would bodybuild and develop visible muscles and then draw your attention to them. The somatic doesn't realize that many women are turned off by this because it indicates a high level of self-centeredness, egotism. The somatic is obviously like every narcissist. He is the center of his existence and of his being. You can never replace his self. His self is the libidinal object. He is in love essentially with himself. He is infatuated with himself. All libidinal catexes, all the investment of the life force is in himself. He is his own best, foremost, number one sexual object and in this sense a somatic is autoerotic. He needs women's bodies. He needs the bodies of his intimate partners but he needs these bodies to masturbate with, to masturbate on, to despoil and to soil. A little, it's like a child, a small child who needs toys but he needs toys in order to dismantle them and break them apart and toss them against the wall. It gives him enormous pleasure. So this is the admirer function and then there's a playmate function. The playmate function in the somatic shared fantasy is limited to sex usually and not only sex but again usually kinky sex. The sex with the somatic is either of two. Either it is pyrotechnic, the somatic places emphasis, puts emphasis on performance. On ability, on endurance, on perseverance, on outcomes like how many orgasms did you have. So either the sex is a form of performance art or the sex is kinky and this is especially true with sadistic somatic noses and the sex is used to humiliate the woman, to degrade her and to render her submissive. These are the two forms of sex with the somatic. Now the most somatics usually have very mechanical and brief sex, very unsatisfying. If they pay attention to the partner, they pay attention to the partner not because they want to please her, not because they are concerned with her welfare and well-being and with her pleasure but they are concerned with the outcomes. So if they please the partner, the partner will praise them, the partner will tell them that they are the greatest lovers ever and this is what they are after. If they make the partner climax, if they give the partner multiple orgasms, this is another notch in their infinite belts. So playmate, admirer, playmate and now we come to a very crucial function, the mother. Now in the case of the cerebral narcissist, the mother function is very clear. It's a sexless function, you need to be sexless and you need to mother the narcissist the way a good enough mother would. You need to love him unconditionally, you need to accept him, all his quirks, his abuse, his misbehavior. He actually abuses you on purpose to ascertain, to make sure that you are good mother, good enough mother material, that you're not a dead mother, a bad mother. He uses narcissistic abuse type one to make sure that you're a safe base or to render you a safe base. That's the cerebral. So the cerebral is not interested in you as a woman in the final stage. He's much more interested in you as the good enough mother he had never had. And he tests you, he's trying his best to convert you into a dead and bad mother, a dysfunctional mother, a selfish mother, a narcissistic mother, a mother who would again cause him pain, again hurt him, again betray him and again cheat on him. It is a test. If you succeed in this test, you are his mother forever. And he's very stable and very faithful. If you fail in this test, if you lose interest in him, if you do betray him, if you do cheat on him, if you abuse him in turn, if you cause him pain, if you hurt him, if you don't accept him and love him unconditionally, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, in this case, you are merely a replica of his original mother and the repetition compulsion is complete. There's approach and avoidance, constant approach and avoidance intended to test you and intended to render you a good enough mother. The somatic is a different story. And that perhaps is the greatest difference between the somatic's shared fantasy and the cerebral's shared fantasy. There's nothing much differentiating the two. And by the way, many somatics are convinced that they're geniuses. There's nothing more pathetic than this. These are hulks and hulks with muscles and nothing much more than that. They have brawn but not brain. And yet they are convinced that they are, they could have taught Einstein physics and of course Stephen Hawking. So these self-styled, self-imputed genius somatics are very sorry sight indeed. But the element of the admirer and the element of the playmate in the cerebral shared fantasy and the somatic shared fantasy are pretty similar. The only difference is that the admirer and the playmate with the cerebral narcissist should compliment his brain, his intelligence, his intellect, should build upon his accomplishments real or imaginary in the field or in the intellectual field. And with the somatic, she should emphasize his body, his irresistibility and submit to his sexual preferences and orientation, which sometimes is sadistic. When we come to the mother, to the mother role of the intimate partner, there's a big difference between the two. As I said, the cerebral wants you to be a sexless, good enough mother. The somatic is turned on by insist. The cerebral is turned off by insist. The mother is a proscribed persecutory object. She is forbidden. And she is forbidden because she is inaccessible. She is a dead mother. She is emotionally unavailable. She is selfish. She is narcissistic. She is depressive. She is sick mentally or physically or both. So the cerebral puts the mother on a pedestal, removes her, so to speak, from his life because she causes him endless pain and frustration. He converts her into a symbol, an emblem, an emblem, a virgin Mary. And like a virgin, she is untouchable. She, the cerebral cannot countenance having sex with his mother because that would be soiling mother, contaminating mother, dispoiling mother. And Freud was the first to notice this dichotomy, this dichotomous thinking, a form of splitting, the Madonna-Hore complex. The mother is the Madonna. All other women are whores. That is typical only, only with the cerebral. That's where Freud was mistaken. With the somatic, the idea of insist actually turns him on, exactly opposite to the cerebral. Where the cerebral would be turned off when the intimate partner becomes mother. When he parentifies the intimate partner, when he renders her a mother, good enough or bad, doesn't matter, his, his sexuality is turned off and he can no longer have sex with the mother. He becomes sexless. With the somatic, when the intimate partner is rendered a mother figure, when she is parentified, the somatic is turned on. Ironically, when this last stage of the shared fantasy, when you had assumed willingly or unwillingly the role of a mother, is when the somatic is likely to be all over you. He finds the idea of insist, a turn on. He is aroused by the, by incestuous thinking. Actually, he usually verbalizes incestuous phrases and, and there's roleplay. Many somatics engage in roleplay where they ask you to play the mother so that they can get aroused sexually. So there's a lot, a lot of incest, incest roleplay with somatics, because it turns them on. These are the elements of the shared fantasy of the somatic. The other stages in the shared fantasy are identical to the cerebral. The somatic pushes you away, approach, avoidance, he tests you by cheating on you. The somatic's way of testing you is not verbal abuse, it's cheating on you. That's his way of testing. Will you accept him unconditionally? Will you forgive him? Will you love him? Despite his misconduct and misbehavior, despite his betrayal and cheating which are recurrent, he's a serial cheater. So this is his way of testing you and all the rest is absolutely identical. He pushes you away. If you fail the test, you move on, or you move on to bargaining. You try to, to agree with him, to, to ask him to modify his behavior, for example, not to cheat anymore, et cetera, et cetera. In the bargaining phase, he pushes you away seriously. He pushes you to cheat actually. Or he would initiate group sex of three sons in this stage, in the bargaining stage. Or when you show signs of exiting the shared fantasy, many somatics initiate group sex in three sons and so on, because they want to denigrate you. They want to, to make you a slot. They want to show you, they want to demean you and debase you and degrade you by giving you to other men. They trash you. They force you also to self-trash by participating in three sons and group sex and so on. So in the last stage of the shared fantasy, when you're showing signs that you had failed the test, that you are not willing to accept the narcissist, the somatic narcissist, cheating and betrayal and you're about to leave. You're about to abandon him. Or if you gravitate and move on to the next phase, which is the bargaining phase, and you're trying to negotiate with the somatic narcissist and modification in his behavior, you're trying to discipline him, you're trying to tame him, to domesticate him. In both cases, he would try to push you to become slottish and horish. He would try to degrade you and demean you and trash you using other men, introducing other men into the picture, usually in group sex settings. And then he will of course discard you. And when he discards you, he will tell you that the reason is that you had proven yourself to be to be a whore or a slut. So this is the somatic shared fantasy. I later on, during this pandemic, I seem to be going on forever. I will have a special video dedicated only to the somatic shared fantasy, but I wanted to give you the rudiments.