 Okay, we are now going to discuss the noxious interpersonal relationships. In other words, the other thing. I mentioned before, hopefully some of you remember, if you're not dissociating throughout this lecture, which I've been explaining, that the noxious uses the same methodology, the same structures, the same dynamics, and the same techniques in all relationships. Whenever external objects are involved that are internalized. So, to be anything from colleague to intimate partner and so on. And the shocking thing for all of you, perhaps, is that the noxious does not see a difference between an intimate partner and a colleague. A boss and a child. None. Therefore, the noxious does not choose you as his intimate partner. There's no choice in both here. You're all dispensable, interchangeable, commoditized. Like so many grains of rice. The noxious doesn't care if you are empathic. Because he doesn't do empathy. He doesn't care if you're kind and nice. You don't care about any of these things that you see online. When victims self-aggrandize. The noxious chose me because I'm amazingly empathetic. I'm super empathic and empathic. Supernova. These are all nonsense. The noxious is interested in four things. They are known, I call them the four S's. Four S's are sex. Of course, services, safety, and supply. The two types of supply, narcissistic supply and sadistic supply. Minority of narcissists are sadists. So they derive pleasure from inflicting pain. And this is a form of supply, narcissistic supply. These are the four S's. If you provide two of the four S's, any two, you qualify. So if you provide sex and services, it goes, you've got the job. If you provide services and safety, you've got the job, etc. So it's also not true that the narcissists insist on the totality of the package. All the four. Narcissists, therefore, is in this sense anti-social. He is goal-oriented, exactly like the psychopath. In intimate relationships, in all relationships, in intimate relationships, the narcissists is goal-oriented. What can you do for him? What can you give him? Who you are is utterly irrelevant. That's why narcissists never envy you. It's not true. They don't envy you, because they are superior to you, of course. God doesn't envy humans, for example. So you must get rid of a lot of these nonsense. You are a production unit equivalent of a refrigerator, or a television set, or a laptop. You are a production unit. Of course, most narcissists don't have sex with their laptops. It's very dangerous with electricity, but still, you understand what I'm saying. These are functional units. Okay. Now, the deal that the narcissist offers you is a bad deal. Who wants to be a service provider? Essentially, he's offering you to be a service provider. Who wants to do this? No one wants to do this. And again, everything he does, everything the narcissist does, is not intentional, is not premeditated, and very often is not conscious. Narcissists are not psychopaths. Psychopaths are premeditated. Psychopaths are intentional. Psychopaths have plans and goals. Not narcissists. Narcissists do everything automatically. I would compare narcissists, for example, to a virus. A virus has a purpose, it's a goal. This is known as teleology. Yes, it's a teleological assumption. So a virus has a goal, obviously, to penetrate a cell, to replicate in the cell, et cetera, et cetera. By the way, a virus doesn't have any goal to kill the cell. But to replicate. But we wouldn't say that a virus is doing this on purpose. It is intentional. So we should not confuse intentionality with purposefulness. The narcissist is purposeful, of course, because he needs to secure favorable outcomes. He needs to be self-efficacious. But it is not intentional like the psychopath. Everything he does is almost automated, almost automatic. What he does is called the shared fantasy. It's a way to lure you, to attract you, into a honey trap. And then to prevent you from exiting. And this is done in a diabolically sophisticated manner. But many processes in nature, which are not self-aware processes, not conscious processes, are diabolically efficient. Many. I mentioned viruses, but not only. So you can say analysis is with not the viruses, not the tiger, because he knows right from wrong. Yes, but when he implements the plan of attracting you, captivating you, capturing you, converting you into a hostage, sucking your lifeblood and so on, he doesn't do this in terms of right and wrong. He does it more like nutrition. He has to eat. It's a predator, in other words. Simply a predator. So stop thinking about narcissism in terms of a morality play. Good versus evil. You know, angels versus demons. This is medieval. There's no place for this in psychology. Clinical psychology. There was a guy called Scott Peck. Totally insane. And Scott Peck, and I mean, he was totally crazy. And Scott Peck wrote a book where he said that the modern expression and modern ratification of evil is narcissism. Okay, that's nice, but it's not psychology. Here's what the narcissist does. But before we go there, as usual, I have to say something. I have to introduce it to the concept that I developed that I called the Hall of Mirrors. The Hall of Mirrors. Victims of narcissists think that they fall in love with the narcissist. They don't. Because you can't fall in love with an absence, with a void, with a black hole. There's no ability to affect, to emotionally invest in that which is not there. In a nothingness. Observe. So what are you falling in love with? With yourselves. You're falling in love with yourselves. You're falling in love with the way the narcissist sees you. With the way the narcissist claims to love you. You're falling in love with the interaction between you and the narcissist that renders you ideal and perfect. So I call it the Hall of Mirrors. The narcissist lures you into the carnival. The narcissistic carnival. And there's a Hall of Mirrors. And you enter the Hall of Mirrors and you see a thousand reflections of yourself. But they're not real. They're idealized reflections. In these reflections, you're perfection. You're amazing. You're drop dead gorgeous. You are super intelligent. You're unprecedented. The narcissist tells you nothing like that has ever happened to me before. You're the love of my life. What I experienced with you I've never experienced with anyone else. And so he renders you ideal. And we all have a self-love deficit. Including in modern society. A self-love deficit. And here the narcissist allows you to experience for the first time, maybe for many, for many people it's for the first time, allows you to experience self-love. Because now you can fall in love with yourself. Why? Because you're perfect. You're perfect. We learn, many of us, even healthy people, we learn what is called performative love. Love that is dependent on performance. Conditional love. And we'll love you if you're a good girl. We'll love you if you're a good boy. Mother tells you. Father tells you. You learn that love is a means of exchange. You provide performance and you get love. The performance can be defined differently in different families. Of course. But it's always a trade. It's always transactional. And the narcissist comes and offers you the opportunity to revisit your childhood to experience unconditional love. Why unconditional? Because you're already perfect. You don't have to perform. As you are, you're perfect. We need to perform when we are not perfect. We need to perform when we are imperfect so that we become perfect. The need to perform means something is missing. We need to do something. There is a demand, a parental demand to perform the hidden message, the account messages. You are not as good as you are. As you are, you're inadequate. You're insufficient. You need to improve on yourself. You need to change. You need to not be you. You need to not be you. I want you to be a good boy. Message, you're not a good boy. So you need to not be you. This is self-denial and self-negation. It's extremely common in parenting all over the world even in total healthy and functional normal family. Here comes a narcissist that says you need to do nothing. By virtue of your existence you're perfect. You're a deal. So this is the world of mirrors. You fall in love with yourself, with your reflection through the narcissist's gaze, through the narcissist's eyes. You're beginning to see something very interesting. The narcissist replicates with you the deficiencies in his own upbringing, in his own child. The narcissist did not enjoy a mother's gaze. So he provides you with a mother's gaze. The narcissist was not able to separate from mother. So he would attempt to separate from you, as you will see. It is as if the narcissist recreates his child with you and helps you to recreate your child with him. It's a principle called dual mother's gaze. I will come to it in a minute. So this is the world of mirrors. And I have to go back a bit to the process of early childhood. To understand the shared fantasy which I will discuss in a minute. You need to understand the dynamics in child. So what happens in child? A baby is born. Now raising babies sucks. It's a horrible thing. Babies are horrible. Absolutely horrible. I'm not going to details. Say it again. Mothers are so happy. I will not say it again. I know I raised my brothers and sisters from scratch. It was the biggest trauma of my life. So it's really really difficult. One third of mothers develop depression. Postnatal depression. Today we know the real figures. These figures were hidden many, many decades. But now we know. About one third develop postnatal depression and anxiety disorders. One third. And most mothers if not all mothers idealize the baby. That's the initial phase. They are not. Later they continue with the idealization. Remember they give the baby a realistic picture. But initially to raise the baby to adapt to the new situation which puts enormous stress and strain on the relationships on the career the price is huge. To adapt to this the mother idealizes the baby. It's a process of idealization. This idealization continues usually until 18 months. Because the mother idealizes the baby. The baby has developed grandiosity. The baby experiences the wall of mirror effect. The baby sees itself through the mother's gaze and through the mother's gaze the baby is perfect. So the baby develops grandiosity. It is this grandiosity that allows the baby to separate from mother and to explore the world. Because think about it you're two years old and you tell mother I'm independent and I'm free. And I'm going to explore the world. You need to be seriously grandiose to do this. And this grandiosity derives from the idealization of the mother. So the mother becomes what is known as a secure base. The baby is not afraid to lose mother if he says goodbye to her and begins to discover other people in a process known as object relations. Such children when the mother allows them to separate develop secure attachment style. When the mother does not allow separation there's insecure attachment style. Now the concept of shared fantasy again to my huge regret was invented by me was invented by Sander S-A-N-D-E-R in 1989 Sander came up with this concept of shared fantasy and applied it to healthy normal relationships. Sander applied it to narcissistic abuse and abusive relationships. So this adaptation is mine but the concept it is. And it involves fantasy shared fantasy. What is a fantasy? In psychoanalytic theory a fantasy is a defense. It's a defense mechanism. Why? What does it defend against? Reality of course. Fantasy defends against reality. In a way it's good because fantasy allows you for example to daydream to plan to imagine things. Fantasy is a good thing. But if fantasy takes over if it metastasizes if it becomes a total alternative to reality which is much more appealing than reality then of course it's pathological and the shared fantasy is a pathological fantasy. The thing in about fantasy is that it's addictive. It has elements of addiction and so you could have a fantasy about a person and this is known as person centered fantasy exactly the equivalent of person centered addiction. Or you could have a process a fantasy about a process so this is known as a process focused fantasy comparable to process addiction. But it's addictive. Why is it addictive? Because again reality sucks. Reality sucks. You're not living in fantasy then you're living in fantasy because you're only living in fantasy of course. Every time you open the television you're in fantasy. Actually watching a movie believe it or not involves extreme dissociation. Do you know why you jump in a horror movie? Because you're inside the horror movie. You're dissociating and fantasy in today's world was not the case 100 years ago but today's world fantasy definitely has replaced reality in many ways. So we have a general situation of pathological fantasy. The shared fantasy between the narcissist and his intimate partner I'm taking this as an example. The shared fantasy between the narcissist and the intimate partner is first of all shared. Because the victims of narcissistic abuse the survivors of such relationships and so on they want to exonerate themselves. They want to say I am not guilty I didn't do anything wrong. I was the passive recipient of evil intentions and evil actions. It's not my fault I did not contribute anything to my predicament and that's of course counterfactual. It's actually a fantasy. It's a fantasy defense. The shared fantasy is a full-fledged, full-skate collaboration between the narcissist's intimate partner and the narcissist each for their own reasons each for their own reasons and each couple, each diet requires a different as a highly specific and idiosyncratic analysis so we cannot generalize. But the rule is that the partner collaborates with the narcissist colludes with the narcissist and acquires with the narcissist to create a common fantasy. What is this reminiscent of? A cult. It's the equivalent of a cult. This fantasy is inward looking. It excludes the world and it has its own narratives which are counterfactual that defy the facts and narratives which are very often paranoid and narratives that are used in majority of cases and the partner of the narcissist fully collaborates with all this. For example she encourages the narcissist to be grandiose. She enhances the narcissist's grandiosity. She colludes with the narcissist in excluding all others or criticizing all others or demeaning and debasing all others. She conspires with the narcissist to adopt unrealistic goals about I don't know marriage or children or financial plans or business plans or whatever. So there's a lot of collaboration and collusion. And when victims would tell you I have been deceived the narcissist is a great actor. I didn't know what was happening when I discovered I exited the whatever it was. That's unfortunately untrue. Actually we have studies that show that when you're in the presence of a narcissist within minutes you develop something known as uncanny value reaction. It's a sense of discomfort and either it is as if the person you're with who happens to be the narcissist is not fully human. Something wrong, something off key together wrongly wrong manufacturing. Now the uncanny value reaction was first described of course by a Japanese in 1970 Masahiro Mori, a roboticist Masahiro Mori said as robots will become more and more human we're going to begin to feel more and more discomfort more and more if it is. If a robot resembles humans the worst we will feel in the presence of the robot and this is the uncanny value reaction and everyone has it in the presence of a narcissist. So why why do many people claim to have been deceived because they suppress it they deny it. They don't want to recognize it. For example if you're very very very lonely then you would tell yourself what kinds of stories about the narcissist. They say it's nothing. It's misbehaving here but otherwise as a great guy you will convince yourself you create marities to push yourself into the fantasy. So it's a collusion, it's a collaboration not let anyone tell you otherwise. And it has seven stages. Stage one co-idealization co-idealization is when the narcissist idealizes you he tells you that you're perfect, you're amazing etc etc what I mentioned before and this idealizes him because for example if I own a Ferrari it says something about me if my partner is perfect drop dead gorgeous, amazingly intelligent it says something about me that she is my partner right? It idealizes me. So that's a process of co-idealization the partner enters this phase because she loves to be idealized it's a bit narcissistic don't tell anyone so the feeling of being idealized the feeling of being perceived as perfect is intoxicating it's addictive and anyone who has exited a relationship with the narcissist would tell you this she misses this she misses the focused attention the love bombing the amazing concentration on herself, on her needs on her history, on everything it's like she's the center of the world she's the most amazing creature to have ever been created except something so it's addictive it's intoxicating and it allows the narcissist to idealize himself because it's usually the narcissist it's all about himself never lose sight of this it's all about himself even an ideal object that makes me ideal so this is co-idealization the second stage is the dual mothership the dual mothership is a covert contract it's a contract but unknown to you and the contract says you're going to be my mother and I'm going to be your mother not father everyone asks me online it cannot be father the psychological role of a father is very different to the psychological role of a mother a father has to do with acquiring skills, socialization later in life the father comes into play around age 3 that's why many single parent families with single mothers raise healthy children without a father the unpleasant truth for us males is that we are not needed until age 3 so there there's new dual mothership this narcissist tells you sort of communicates to you subliminally it's not open he says I'm going to love you unconditionally I'm going to idealize you I'm going to let you experience maternal love as you should have experienced it and did not experience it with me you will experience it I will love you like you've never been loved before and all I want you is to be my mother I want you to love me the same way I want you to love me unconditionally I want you to accept all my behaviors I want so he tests you he tests you with narcissistic abuse he pushes the interval he behaves egregiously he misconducts he abuses you he maltreats you he attacks you he criticizes you all the time when you continue to love me will you love me despite my misbehavior it's a mother who tests and this is the there is dual messaging you're perfect you're ideal, you're got like you're amazing but I'm going to abuse you I'm going to attack you I'm going to criticize you so this creates dissonance at this stage of the dual mothership the victim begins to experience dissonance and the narcissist tests the victim but that's a self-limiting test at some point the narcissist says she passed all the tests she can be my mother at some point in the relationship there are two mothers the narcissist is your mother and you are his mother and you both love each other unconditionally and you both accept each other without any reservations without any limitations without any boundaries and so on so forth in other words you recreate what mother called this symbiotic stage you become one with two heads and this is stage number two the dual mothership the next stage the narcissist converts you into a mother in order to reenact or recreate the early childhood with his dead mother so he's trying to find a substitute mother a good mother but wait a minute do you remember what a good mother does pushes the child away for the narcissist to conceive of you as a good mother he needs to separate from you if he doesn't separate from you you're just another bad mother you're exactly like his mother his mother didn't separate from him, didn't allow him to separate he needs you to allow him to separate in order to prove that you're a good mother and that's said irony of the shared fantasy because the devaluation and the discard phases the phases of breakup are baked into the shared fantasy they are the reason for the shared fantasy the narcissist embarks on romantic relationships in order to divorce you in order to break up that's the goal of the shared fantasy and we can sort of understand this could I have behaved differently did I do anything wrong or maybe he is evil he is malicious he didn't see my value he didn't understand that I'm perfect for him if my love could have transformed him all kinds of nonsense the narcissist shows you to become his next mother and he needs a good mother because his previous mother was a bad mother and he needs a good mother he breaks up with her child that's the definition of a good mother and so he needs to break up with her and this starts by something which I call the mental discard he begins to transform before we go there when the narcissist meets you and decides that you could be his intimate partner you remember what he does he creates an internal object he snapshots you he introduces you he creates a representation in his mind that stands in for you that is you he continues to interact with this internal object never with you that's another common mistake of it he snapshots you introduces you and all his future interactions are with the internal object never with you he is incapable of perceiving externally he continues to interact with this snapshot with the internal object and now comes the phase where he has decided that you love him unconditionally as a mother should that you are a good mother and therefore you are a secure base it is safe to separate from you safe to separate from you all this process takes place inside his mind not with you so you are not aware of all this because there is no external interaction it is all happening inside and so he says ok she is a good mother time to separate and he begins to change to transform the internal object that represents you he doesn't transform you you don't exist he transforms the internal object he transitions the internal object from idealized to persecutory he makes you in short an enemy an enemy this is the third phase this is the third phase the mental phase so in preparation for the separation he converts you from ideal perfect etc he converts you to an enemy so now you are an enemy in his mind but not yet in reality because he doesn't interact with external objects and you begin to feel strange because of this mixed message it all takes place in his mind but then there is a problem he idealized he has idealized now he is converting you into an enemy what does it mean he has been wronged about you he has been wronged if you are an enemy then you should not have been idealized in the first place there is a mistake here and one thing narcissists never do especially me is admit to a mistake they are never wrong what we call infallible they are like the pope, only worse they are infallible so the narcissists cannot admit that he has made a mistake in having idealized you so this creates internal narcissistic injury the narcissists is wounded by his own machinations he cannot reconcile he doesn't want to explain how did he make this this mistake and so in order to explain this to himself and to restore his grandiosity because the narcissistic injury is a challenge to the grandiosity but grandiosity for you to understand is a cognitive distortion it's a misperception of reality it's an impairment in reality testing so am I going too fast a little too fast so you understand that when he converts you from ideal to the secretary it presents a problem so to solve this to restore his grandiosity he has to devalue you he has to he has to convince himself that you have been like that you have been when he idealized you you have been like that but something happened for example you are under the influence of bad friends or something biological happened to you some disease you are having some brain disease or something or your mother died and it affected you in ways that changed your cycle you are not the same the person idealized is not the person that is now a secretary she has changed he does not change he stands still because he doesn't need to move but you have changed so he needs to devalue you and that is the explanation for devaluation devaluation is an attempt to match the external object with a new a secretary internal object so that he can explain to himself that he did not get it wrong he did not commit a mistake but you are not the same person you are mentally ill now physically ill both he will find in your history or autobiography or personal circumstances he will find some explanation since you started to be friends with yaks you are not the same person she has bad influence you are now interested in music you are interested in history like me so you have changed he was constant he was loyal he was always there for you so he devalues to restore grandiose secretary object now matches the external object whenever there is a discrepancy between the external object and the internal object this creates dissonance even though the narcissist cannot perceive the separateness and externality of the external object still the narcissist cannot deny reality infinitely so if for example he developed the belief or he idealized you that you are the most loyal partner imaginable that you can trust you fully and you are super reliable and then the next thing he knows you are having an affair with your boss you can deny reality after all not fully psychotic it's not a question of total divorce so the limit if you cross this limit it creates dissonance the divergence and deviance between the idealized object and you if it becomes too big it creates dissonance similarly if the divergence between you and the secretary object is too big dissonance for example if the secretary object is that you are cheating on him and yet he never succeeds to prove it or if the secretary object is I don't know you are not taking care of him and yet you are taking care of him and then for them this creates dissonance and he will try to push you to not take care of it to cheat on him this is known as projective identification it will push you in ways to behave in ways that affirm that support the devalued secretary object so many masses push their partners to cheat this is known as the betrayal fantasies because this confirms then it matches the external object matches the internal object and there is no dissonance this is the next stage and then at this stage the narcissistic is ready you are you are loving unconditionally like a mother does you idealize him co-idealize him like a mother does you are a good mother you survive these narcissistic views with flying colors and then he prepared to separate from you he converted you into the secretary object so there is good reason to separate why are you not taking care of him there is a good reason to separate so now he is ready to separate from him and the separation is known as discord so a word that I coined discord discord all of us break it put your hands up put your hands up put your hands up put your hands up put your hands up this is the fourth stage this is the fifth fourth there is no variation and now the narcissists is ready the narcissists is ready not allow him to separate. But he's a good mother. He protects himself. He cannot separate from you as a mother. He's not a child. You're not a child, I mean. So he needs to devalue you. That's his way to separate from you. And now he can separate from you. And if he's safe to separate from you, because you're a secure base, if he's safe, if he's justified, if he's okay to discard you, it's okay to separate from you. And so he separates from you. It could be physical, but doesn't have to be physical. It could be emotional, for example. Emotional absence. It could be staying with you and having affairs. It could be sabotaging your coexistence, your life together, the variety of ways. It doesn't have to be physical separation. That's another common mistake. It's simply absentee himself, removing himself from the scene, and destroying the intimacy. There's a campaign to destroy the intimacy, in numerous ways. And this is the discarding. This is a symbolic reenactment of the separation that should have happened with the original mother and never had. And here he separates. But this is a psychological cost. Everything is a psychological cost. This is a psychological cost. The minute he discards the partner, means he separates from the partner, he has several psychological reactions. The first one is known as separation insecurity. This is the clinical term, and the colloquial term online is abandonment anxiety. Abandonment anxiety is not a clinical term. So he experiences abandonment anxiety because, remember, he's getting rid of mother. Mother, mother and mother, explain that the child who separates from mother experiences abandonment anxiety and then runs back to mother in a process called rapprochement. So this is absolutely the correct way to separate individually. You separate, you experience abandonment anxiety, and you run back to mother. You run back to mother to test whether mother still loves you, despite the fact that you have discounted her. Does she still love you? And this is a process known as hoovering. So hoovering is the adult version, adult narcissistic version of rapprochement. Testing whether he's still loved, still has a place in your heart. Despite the fact they made your life hell, converted you into an enemy, and shot your dog. At that point, there's a problem. So the shared fantasy is very intricate. It's a very intricate mechanism. But I hope that you see how it fits well with so many phenomena in relationships with narcissists. So as far as I know, and not because I invented it, I did not. Sunder invented. As far as I know, this is the best explanation to all the phenomena that we are aware of in relationships with narcissists. There are other explanations, but they don't explain everything. They explain 0.1, 0.7, 0.6, but nothing explains everything. Only this. So it's pretty safe to assume that this is what's happening. Also, any partner of narcissists would tell you that she had to act as a model at some point. There were maternal functions somehow involved. Maybe not all the time, but there were maternal expectations at some point. So when the discount is completed, there's abandonment anxiety, which leads to hovering. Hovering is an attempt to restarnish the shared fantasy. But there's another phenomena. Remember that the narcissist converted the internal object that represents you from ideal to the secretary, to enemy. When he gets rid of you, he remains stuck with the object, with the internal object. You're gone, but the internal object is there. By the way, same thing happens to you as victim of narcissists. The narcissist is gone, his introject is in your head. And in order to heal from narcissistic abuse, you need to get rid of the introject, and you need to go through separation, individuation. Because remember the dual mothership. What is a dual mothership? The narcissist tells you, I will be your mother. But for the narcissist to be your mother, you need to become a child. The narcissist regresses you, infantilizes you. So you go back to being a baby. And he goes, he is a baby, and you are a baby. These are two babies pretending to be mothers, each other's mothers. So when the narcissist exits your life, thankfully, you remain stuck as an infant. And you actually need to go through separation, individuation, as an infant does. So the only way to heal from narcissistic abuse is to get rid of the introject, there are ways to do this, and to separate, individuate from the maternal figure of the narcissist. And only then you can proceed to restoring your adult identity. So same happens to the narcissist. You are stuck in his head. There's an introject of you in his head. And it's a bad one. It's an evil one. It's an enemy one. You're his enemy. And of course, I don't need to tell you that when you have such an internal object, it's very threatening. It creates, in other words, anxiety. It's antiogenic. This kind of internal object in your head creates anxiety and anxiety leads to paranoid ideation. That's the sequence. So when you have gone physically from the narcissist's life, he remains stuck with a vision of you as his enemy. And this vision generates anxiety and dissonance. And later, paranoid ideation begins to suspect you of conspiring against him, doing bad things, and so on and so forth. Even when you're really outside, out of his life, when you're not in contact, not contact strategy, which I designed in the 90s. Even then, you're still there as an internal, a threatening internal object, threatening and frustrating internal object. This you cannot get rid of. And he's stuck with this. So what can he do about this? He has only one option. He needs to, he has two options actually. He needs to re-idealize you. He needs to convert that the secondary object back to an idealized, non-threatening, material object. He needs to do this. And this is done in the process of hovering. The process of hovering, attempting to re-establish the shared fantasy, the narcissist re-idealizes you. So a month before the hovering, he told you that you're a bitch, you're a thief, you're disloyal, and you deserve to die under an 18-wheeled truck. Usually it's an 18-wheeled truck. He tells you this a month before. And a month later, you're again the most amazing, perfect, super beautiful. And so he re-idealizes you. He changes the internal object back from the secretary to ideal, but then he must have you in his life. Remember, all the principle is the external object must conform to the internal object, not because the narcissist interacts with the external object, but because there's a limit to how much reality he can deny. So if he re-idealizes you, you need to be in his life again in a maternal capacity. Shared fantasy has to be re-established. And this is the seventh stage. Now, another option is when the narcissist, of course, finds a replacement, a substitute. But then something very interesting would happen. The substitute would be snapshot, introjected, and there would be an ideal object, which represents her, ideal internal object, which represents her. And there would be your, the secretary object, which survives in his mind. So we would have in his mind an ideal object, and not the secretary object, and if he doesn't resolve the situation, there will be more disloyal, so conflict, internal conflict between these two objects. So what he does, and very, very few victims in the departments are aware of this, what he does, he merges the objects. So he idealizes the new mother in your form. He would tend to idealize her as you. And this is a very interesting process. He's kind of merging all the internal objects so as to avoid the secretary disloyal. So a narcissist would select one intimate partner, de-idealize or devalue her, get rid of her, and would move on to another. And then he would idealize that new source, that new intimate partner. But he would talk about her in terms that actually describe you. He would idealize you, her, as if she were you. And there would be a huge discrepancy between the new idealization and the real object. So for example, if you are truly beautiful, okay, you're truly beautiful, and you idealize, you said you're amazingly gorgeous, and I know what. And then his next catch is how to be gentle, less than, less than a rocker. Now and sadly, less than good looking. He would still idealize her as drop dead gorgeous. He would carry over your idealization to her in order to avoid disloyal. And this becomes more and more divorce from reality as the narcissist goes through repeated shared fantasies until finally he is totally divorced from reality. And then this kind of narcissist can fall prey to a psycho one or to a gold digger. He's so divorced that the interaction is totally in his mind and he doesn't pay attention that he's being combed and you know he really comes across an enemy or a truly evil person who takes advantage of the narcissist. This because the divorce between reality and fantasy grows all the time. The more intimate partners the narcissist discards, the harder he has to work to merge these internal objects to avoid conflict and dissonance. And the further away from reality the idealization is until finally it has nothing to do with reality. And then the narcissist is entirely inside his mind and he's helpless. He's truly helpless then as a child. He's helpless. And then he's easy prey. He becomes, he transforms from predator to prey. And then all kinds of evil people take advantage of the narcissist. Psychopaths, gold diggers, I mean you know, and this is because he's defenseless. Reality testing is completely destroyed over many, many cycles. That's in the nature of the Schott family. Okay, now we divide this group to masochists who want to ask questions and say this who would like to leave the world and this way inflict the novice payment. Goodbye, say this. A brave soul. I'm going to convert her into a secretary of duty. So vodka, but you know, you get, you drink what you get. Yes. How can a view help you in life? Any questions? You showed them. You can ask a question. Of course you can ask a question. I paid you to ask a question. Okay, so I want to ask a question about grief after a relationship. If it was such an abusive relationship, then what would you say that people or abused one is grieving about? That's precisely what I said. You are not in love with you. You are not in a relationship with you. You are in a relationship with yourself. What you are grieving is yourself. You are grieving the lost self-love, lost capacity to self-love. You are grieving, of course, the shared fantasy. You are grieving the child. Like a mother who lost her child. You are grieving a mother. You lost a mother. So grief after narcissistic abuse is not typical grief. It's what we call prolonged grief disorder. It's not typical grief, but it's four layers of grief, like a wedding cake. Four layers of grief. And each one of them is very powerful. Is there anything more powerful than losing your child? And narcissism gradually becomes more and more your child. And when you lose this child, it's horrible. And then you also lost a mother, because initially he truly acted as a mother. And you lose a shared fantasy, which was a refuge, an escape from reality, if you made reality. And you lost yourself. You finally fell in love with yourself, learned to love yourself. And then it was taken away from you. Because you can love yourself only through the narcissist's gaze and all of mirrors. It's not that the narcissist teaches you how to love yourself independently or the very contrary. It makes you addicted to his gaze. So that whenever you want to fix, when you want to inject intoxication of, I'm perfect, I'm amazing, I'm ideal, I'm gorgeous. You go to him, he will tell you. He'll tell you what you want to hear about yourself. And that's really addictive. It's intoxicating. It's a wonderful feeling. Love bombing is a wonderful feeling, which is why everyone falls for it. It's known as love bombing. He gets the love, you get the bonds. It's known as love bombing. So that's the reason. There's a multiple forms of grief superimposed on each other. And each one of them is possibly the worst kind of grief imaginable. So all four are devastating. Yes. Yes. All the dynamics of narcissism, as I said at the very beginning, all the dynamics of narcissism are built on splitting and another mechanism called projection. Yes, yes. You're right. It's the form of splitting. So, but all, all interactions of narcissism, all the dynamics of narcissism are based on splitting and projection. So for example, it involves not only splitting, but also projection. Because the narcissist makes you all bad. And by implication, he makes himself all good. But he makes you all bad because he's all bad. He projects onto you the parts of him that he rejects, the parts of him that he's ashamed of. So it is the narcissist who wants to be aggressive with you. He wants to discard you. He wants to get rid of you. It is he who is planning to do something back to you, but he cannot admit it. So he projects it onto you. He says, you are the one who is planning to do something back to me. You're evil. When actually he is the one who is planning to. So this projection is splitting in both. And yes, it splits you, of course. You're all good and then you're all bad. I was in that kind of relationship, like from the book, all stages. And it was short. Thanks, because I ran away, but I agree for two, three years. But it was almost clear to me what is happening, but I was in desperate feelings and situation before I met him for three, four years. It was my business relationship between people. I was really desperate of I wanted like to run away from that situation and to run away from my body. It was so strong, wish to run away from that situation. So I run away straight to his arms and all happened, all this addictive idea, everything, everything what you mentioned. So I was questioning myself how this happened to me. But now when you said this loneliness and this before this situation before I met him was really hard for me for years. The shared fantasy is a promise that you no longer need to be in reality in order to obtain outcomes. So you can be self efficacious, even when you're not in reality. And it's a promise that all options and alternatives and possibilities will materialize. So like endless promise, whatever you wish, whatever you dream of, whatever you it will happen. There's a guarantee by the narcissist that it will happen. Massage, because he feels Godlike, projects to you somehow convinces you that he has the capacity to make anything happen. And everything happened. It's like land of infinite possibilities. You enter a land of infinite possibilities that is not grounded in reality. You don't have to pay the cost, only the benefits. And it's very, very captivating, because who wants to be in reality and who doesn't want to be with someone who can instantly realize all your wishes and dreams. This helps for shared fantasy. It helps a lot. I really wanted to run away. And it happened that I ran away from Croatia to another country. So this shared fantasy, my part, was very strong that I really wanted to run away into this, of course, fantasy and the rest of the story. I think people who find themselves in the shared fantasy of the narcissist, I think that's speculation because there's no more stuff. But I think they really hate their reality. They really hate their reality. Even if they don't admit it, but actually they hate their reality. And they sabotage. This is a form of self-harm. Trauma bonding, shared fantasy, these are forms of self-harm. So they self-harm because they want to remove themselves from reality. It's like a small child that says, mommy, I'm sick, I don't want to go to school. So they self-harm. And another thing, they don't believe their capacity to realize their wishes and dreams and fantasies and so on. They don't believe, they don't believe themselves. They don't trust themselves. They don't, they believe that if they want anything done, it has to be through someone else. It doesn't have to be narcissists. But they always think that the solution will come from the outside somehow. And this is called external locus of control. These are people with external locus of control. They always believe that if they are faced with that, for example, if they have a dream to do something, they need someone to push them. If someone doesn't push them, they are starting. They are stagnant. And so in life, they learn to disbelieve themselves, distrust themselves and not their good friends. They're not their own good friends. They don't have their own back. They don't self-accept. They self-reject. And it can deteriorate into self-loathing, self-harming, self-trushing, substance abuse, can deteriorate if it's not so. And the narcissist comes and tells you, you are so perfect that you deserve all your dreams and wishes to come to an end. I have the power to do this. Of course, what I'm talking about is a religion. It's a religion, of course. Narcissism is a private religion. It's when the child is small and helpless and subject to abuse, to trauma, the child makes a choice. He invents a God that is the false self. It's a deity. It's a divinity. Because the false self is all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect. It's a God. So the child invents a God. And then like every primitive God, these gods want human sacrifice. You know, like the Monarch in the Bible, this God wants human sacrifice. So the child sacrifices the only human the child has, himself. The child sacrifices himself to this new God. He sacrifices what is known as the true self. He sacrifices himself to this new God. And then it becomes a religion. There is a God. There is a worshipper. There's been human sacrifice that binds them. Now there's a contract. God must now fulfill the narcissist's wishes and so on, because the narcissist gave him everything he had. Even in the Bible, when you make sacrifice, not human, it's like a contract with God, to appease God, to convince God. There's a lot of negotiations with God in the Bible. Moses negotiates with God, the fighting with God, Jacob broke God's family. There's a lot of kind of atopomorphism. Narcissism is a private primitive religion invented by a child. That is what narcissism is. And because it's a private religion, and because it's a primitive religion, and because this religion was invented by a child, the narcissist is missionary, is trying to convert everyone into this religion. And so how to convert you to this religion? He makes promises. Is it different to classical religion? Of course not. God makes you promises. If you believe in him, if you make the commandments, if you engage in some rituals and ceremonies, and so on and so forth, there are some promises. There's a contract here. Religion is a shared fantasy, absolutely shared fantasy. And it's no wonder that God, all gods, are described in narcissistic terms. They're narcissists. Yahweh is a narcissist. Allah is a narcissist. They're all narcissists. I'm sorry to say. The prophets are psychotic, but the gods are not. It's a shared fantasy. So, and the narcissist is a private religion. Now, narcissism is threatening to become the biggest global religion. Why? Because unlike other religions, actually unlike most religions, it's distributed. It's a distributed religion. It's like network religion, the internet religion, because you have one god and one worshiper, one god and one worshiper, one god and one worshiper, one god and 10 worshippers, or one god and 10 million worshippers. But it's always separate. These are called nodes. These are network nodes. But the religion is common. The belief in the false self and the shared fantasy, the rituals and ceremonies of this religion are the same. So, it's a distributed religion. There's only one other religion like this, Islam. Islam does not have a central authority. No central authority in Islam, unlike the Vatican and Catholicism. Islam is a distributed religion. That's a source of its power. That's why it's the biggest growing religion nowadays. Narcissism is growing like mushrooms, and Islam is growing like mushrooms. I'll leave it up to you to make the connection. I'll probably be assassinated after I've brought it to you. Yes. What a way to go. Yes, someone. Yes. When you were talking about the nativistic flying, and you said that Narcissism is supplying himself with, when other people adore him, admire him. When they don't, then he supplies himself. When he doesn't get it from outside? Yes, yes, he does it for himself. But when they don't do it, they actually, he then can become aggressive or mad or, and then it's also supplied for him when he releases that anger. Aggression. Aggression, yes. That's not exactly supply. Depending if he terrifies people and so on, yeah, that's supply. But in the Muslim religious cases, there's some supply. That's a result of narcissistic injury. There are three types of supply. You're being supplied from other people. That's primary supply from other people. You're being supplied from someone who is close to you, like an intimate partner, who remembers the past supply. So she's like a memory bank, external hard disk, and she releases supply when you're not getting it from others. So for example, a narcissist can give a great lecture and be admired by all of you, clearly. And my wife has the role to remember this, to record this. And then in the next month, if next month I will not get supplied, then she will tell me, do you remember the lecture you gave in Zagreb? Wow, you were amazing. You were a genius. But I hate to do that. And I don't do it. Yes. That's why I divided you. So this is secondary supply. This is a form of regulating the flow of supply, not having ups and downs, but regulating it. So when the narcissist doesn't get it from outside, the intimate partner or the friend releases recorded supply, stored supply, so as to stabilize the flow of supply. And the third option is self-supply. Narcissists do self-supply very often, because anyhow they live inside their minds, internal, and so on and so forth. They have no difficulty to self-supply, they sometimes create even scenarios where internal objects inside their mind talk to each other, and this way creates supply. So for example, paranoid ideation is when you believe that you are the center of some conspiracy. So paranoid is a form of self-supply. It's a convince yourself that you are so important, so crucial, so either one, that everyone has malevolent malign intention, everything is revolving around you, there are plans to destroy you, etc. This is self-supply. Pagamal ideation is a form of self-supply, and therefore a form of narcissism. How do you get rid of the intrusive? There are treatment modalities with expertise focus on this. So for example, transactional analysis is a focus of this. CBT is not so good news, because CBT deals with the voices of the intrusive. It deals with the messages, the automatic negative thoughts. So CBT gets rid of sometimes the voices, but the intrusive is there, so it's not very important. But transactional analysis, chemotherapy, SCH, Schema Therapy is very useful this, to some extent Gestalt. So there are therapies with focus on intrusives. Of course psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis you start when you're four years old, and when you're 82 and the treatment is over, you're over. And you end up in a funeral, and then your tooth stone is written, ear, lice, a cured patient. She's probably. We're in the middle of it. But there was problems, it was good. Absolutely. Psychoanalysis is actually a truly powerful methodology, but it's the techniques are very lacking, but I want to go into this, and it's a great pity, because when it comes to intrusives, for example, by far the most powerful system that we have. And of course, all the language comes from object relations schools, which are extensions of psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic. But psychoanalysis itself, as a technique, is more like intellectual pursuit. Intellectual gain is not really built to produce healing or curing outcomes, not in any meaningful sense. Inside this, that you can get to know yourself much better is for sure. You can get to know yourself much better. But that's not the problem. I know myself perfectly, and I'm a major contributor to the theory of narcissism. So awareness and knowledge, cognition is not the same as insight. Insight is transformative. And for insight to be transformative, you need cognition and emotional correlate. The cognition needs to produce an emotional effect, which will induce change. And this is missing in narcissism. So if I went to psychoanalysts, we would make great progress. We'll talk about my mother and my father, and I will really learn about myself. I'm not underestimating psychoanalysis, but it will be more. There will be no zero outcomes, zero outcomes. Hey, I've got a few questions. There are several treatment qualities with focus on inner voices, introjades and so on. Some of them existentialist therapies, they focus on finding the authentic self, the authentic voice, and then all the others fall away. You have lobotherapy, which is a therapy developed by Victor Frandon, Holocaust survivor. And lobotherapy helps you find meaning. And the meaning, but the meaning is linked actually to voices. It's a voice of meaning. So these are all introject oriented therapies. CBT is very, very useful, but I compare CBT to junk food. It's fast, it's fast, it's effective, super effective, but it doesn't deal with root problems. It just changes your programming. So you think differently. And you act differently. It's very efficient. Not so I'm not underestimating. Of course there's DBT, the electrical behavior therapy. DBT was developed by a patient, a psychotic patient, when she was in a mental asylum. Another example of a non-psychologist at the time. Later, she made a degree in psychology. But when she developed DBT, she was not a psychotic, she was a patient in her 20s. She had, she was misdiagnosed as a psychotic and as bipolar. And later she understood and others understood that she had borderline personality disorder. So she in their asylum, she started to develop DBT. And it is extremely, extremely efficient treatment model. 50% of patients with BBT diagnosis lose the diagnosis after one year in DBT, which compared to other modalities is amazing. By the way, borderline personality disorder has very good prognosis. 81% of people with borderline with BBT diagnosis lose the diagnosis after age 45. 81%. Which leads us to believe that it is a biological problem. This leads us to believe that it's a biological problem, not a psychological problem. Something in the brain happens, biology changes, hormones, hormones, I don't know what, and the disease disappears. Psychopathy is also definitely a biological problem. Definitely. And there is this hybridity in the manuals and the ICD, the international classification of diseases, DSM. There is this hybridity. They are these, sorry, they are mental illnesses which used to be included in these books and are still there. Although by now we know for sure that these are not mental illnesses. These are medical conditions. For example schizophrenia, but it's still there. And similarly, borderline and anti-social, not anti-social, but psychopathy. Most clearly a biological problem. For example, if you have a first degree relative with borderline personality disorder, your chances to have borderline personality disorder are 500% higher. It's a strong indication of heredity. Of course, psychopath brains are totally different to normal brain. Totally, in every possible way, white, meta, glia, you name it. And physiological reactions of psychopaths are different. For example, perspiration and heart rate do not increase when the psychopath is experiencing fear or when he's lying and so on. So clearly it's a different animal. But because of economic reasons, I think, money only, these were not removed from the DSM. They should not be there. These are biological medical issues. Not very different to, I don't know, dementia. And dementia is there. Why is dementia there? What dementia has to do with mental illness? And for that matter, what psychopathy has to do with mental illness? And there's a lot of gender bias. A lot of gender bias. For example, to this very day, it's wrongly written that majority of narcissists in the DSM for textual vision, it's wrongly written that majority of narcissists are men, majority of all the kinds of women, majority, overwhelming majority of histrionic women, when that's not the reality. 50% of all people diagnosed with NPD are women. 50% of all people diagnosed with BPD are men. And among, in the histrionic group, actually, there's a small majority of men. So there's a lot of gender bias. There's almost been no major, no major figures in psychiatry, female, no major female figures in psychiatry, not psychology, psychiatry. So it's a work in progress. And there is a lot of pressure to include, to increasingly pathologize and medicalize behavior. So today you have mental illnesses, mental disorders that are connected to caffeine, caffeine consumption, internet usage. I don't know why. I'll give you one parameter. When I studied medicine, the textbook of internal medicine, like Harrison's internal medicine, the textbook at the time was about, if I remember correctly, 700 something pages. That was when the last dinosaurs died. So it was 700 something pages. Today, Harrison, which is the 22nd edition of Harrison's internal medicine, is about 1,300 pages. We'll learn a lot more. The first edition of the DSM in 1952 was 100 pages. The current edition, 1952, 70 years ago, the current edition is 1,200 pages. It's like what? We became 12 times more crazy. What is this? What is this? It's not, you know, Occan's razor, proliferation of entities. It's wrong. Something's wrong. Not certainly something's wrong. In this field of diagnostics, taxonomy, astrology, something is wrong in psychology, especially. And people notice this. So they lose trust in the profession. They lose trust in these professions, don't they? They notice this a lot of months ago, a lot of commercial interests, which are not good. Contamination, no more contamination in the field. The DSM, for example, the committee of the DSM-5, they wanted to rewrite the diagnostic criteria of personality disorders, especially borderline narcissists and the social, and a few others. They wanted to rewrite them to reflect current knowledge and they were not allowed by the insurance companies. So what they did, if you go to the DSM tax revision of the links, what did they do? You have like narcissistic personality disorder, diagnostic criteria, one, two, three, four, five, nine. Copy-pasted from a text which is 25 years old, DSM-4. Copy-pasted. Nothing changed. We didn't learn anything in 25 years. But at the end, page 767 in the fifth edition, at the end you have alternative model of narcissistic personality disorder, where the truth is written, the state of the art, the latest knowledge, like their hideout, it's in the appendixes, not to be seen, you know, because they're free. I'm simply terrified that they will lose the funding, the grants there. The ICD is much better. The ICD is absolutely cutting edge. Even I would say too cutting edge. ICD is revolutionary. The latest edition, the 11th edition. It's stunning. Absolutely stunning. I love where it's moved, the diagnostic one. And the ICD is used in most of the world. Don't forget that DSM is used in America, Canada, to some extent United Kingdom, together with the ICD, not alone, in some parts of Australia, some states in Australia, that's it. Rest of the world, more than 80% of humanity. They don't use this. They use ICD or variants of ICD, like the CCPD is variants of ICD. It's a world health organization. The ICD is world health organization, so it's a global legacy. And it's really good. If you want to learn about cluster B, the non-colleague cluster B, if you want to learn about personality disorders, go to ICD. Even older DSM. DSM is 20, 30 years old. A lot of wrong information. It's a disaster, a disaster zone. Except the alternative variants, which are very good. But the text itself is horrible. The ICD is, I would say, the knowledge is about five years old, which is great in terms of diagnostic management. Excellent. And let me show you. You want to shoot him, you don't want to shoot him. Shall we do a house? No, turn, turn to me. The prison's in Croatia, but we'll look at it. It's hopeless. A lot of weakness. Thank you. Okay, so. Oh, sorry, there's one more question. Oh. In the beginning, you mentioned the abstinence from doing some crunches. And you also mentioned the two schools, the two schools considering what the country is. But later, you mentioned about projecting the tendency of ours to find something more about ourselves. Defense mechanisms in classic theory are part of the ego. They are connected to the ego. And the ego and the tri-lateral model of Freud and so on, later on, the ego is partly conscious and partly unconscious. It's not true that the ego is conscious or conscious. Partly conscious, similarly the super ego is part of the ego. And even in later work, the id became part of the ego. So it's one thing. And it's partly a conscious or conscious. However, in other Freud's work, Freud is the authority, defense mechanism, much more than the father. So in other Freud's work, defense mechanism became automatic, but not unconscious, not associated with the unconscious. They are like automatic reactions. It's not entirely clear where this automatism comes from. But for example, your smartphone is automatic. And as far as I chip doesn't have an unconscious. The whole construct of unconscious is very, very debatable. And there have been very many serious thinkers in psychology that dispute the need for the explanatory power of the unconscious. But if we adopt the classic definition of the unconscious and the etiology of the way it was created, then there is no pathway that I can see where the consciousness would have an unconscious. There's no internalization of external voices. There's no, I mean, there's no pathway that I can see. Even the use of language in consciousness is very compromise, not overt language, but internal. It's very compromise. So as you know, there are schools in society, not minor schools, but major schools, which completely dispute the concept of the unconscious. For example, behaviorism is a major school, social learning theory. There's no place for the unconscious. So taking with a grain of salt, the unconscious is a 19th century concept which started with Ms. Mayer, if you notice, and Breuer developed it and then Freud started on it. And even at the time it was highly disputed because at the time it was sexualized. Consciousness was perceived as essentially sex related, sexual drives, repression, and so on and so forth. And while everyone continued to talk about the unconscious, for example in object relations theories and so on, if you're looking to object relations theories, fair burns theories, gun trip, if you look into them, there's no unconscious. Fairburn, for example, says that you're born with an ego. You're born with an ego. There's no unconscious. You're born with it. And then life causes the ego to divide in three parts. The libidinal ego, the anti-libidinal ego, is the central ego. So there's no trace of the unconscious in Fairburn's work. Even though he uses the term ego, which theoretically is part of the unconscious, he doesn't use the construct of unconscious for anything, anything theoretical. And Fairburn is not a minor figure, not a minor figure. Similarly, someone like Winnicott also. We didn't mention it. I mean, of course they all mentioned the unconscious. There's no role for the unconscious there. He talked about the false self, the true self, and so on and so forth. There's no role for the unconscious. I think the unconscious lost its role more or less in most of the world in the 30s and in France in the 60s. France is always 30, 40 years behind. So Lacan was the last guy that kind of contributed to the theory of the unconscious and that was the end of it. But be that as it may, if you wish to use this language element, I think unconscious is a language element. I don't think it was any validity. If you wish to use this, then it doesn't apply to narcissism. That's all I'm saying. Before everybody leaves, I just want to say a few words. I would like to thank Professor Sam Watney for this interesting lecture. And I would like to thank you for helping me all these months before we met because I was listening to your lectures online. It's a great source of knowledge in the YouTube channel. And I'm happy that I contacted Professor and he was very kind to answer. So he said that he's coming to Croatia. And then we arranged the lecture. And I was a great help because it was in such a short notice that she managed to gather you all here and find a place for the lecture. So thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you.