 So, do you want to have a child with me or not? Today, we're going to discuss a very sensitive and ever-growing topic. Pregnancy and how does the narcissist react to your unborn child? We're going to start with this and then we are going to unravel this Ariadne thread Gradually and slowly into the narcissist's head is his internal inferno that he calls his mind You're going to discover through the process of pregnancy and childbirth a Lot more about the shared fantasy and the dynamics between you and the narcissist So stay tuned. It's going to be a bumpy ride But a nightmarish one, I promise you my name is Sam Vaknin And I'm the handsome author of Malignant self-love Narcissism revisited. I'm also a very cherished and admired and adulated professor of psychology in several countries around the world, which will remain unnamed O Keshoshanim It's time to get your Christmas present. Oh, oh, oh Okay, let's get serious which seems to be ever more difficult as this pandemic progresses Some narcissists devalue and discard their partners during a pregnancy or shortly after childbirth This is true Even when the narcissist had initiated the pregnancy even when when he is the one Who had wanted to have a child with you? What gives? Why do narcissists react so adversely to this process? when to start with Pregnant woman is an autonomous Agentic female she has agency. She has autonomy. She is independent and this Challenges and undermines the inert and malleable internal object that represents her in the narcissist's mind The object that I call snapshot and clinicians call Intraject so remember from previous videos those of you who had survived them The narcissist makes a snapshot of you then he photoshopped the snapshot he idealizes you and Then he continues to relate to the snapshot not to you as you diverge from the snapshot You frustrate the narcissist. He becomes aggressive. He devalues and discards you now pregnancy getting pregnant is one hell of a way of Deviating from the snapshot from diverging from it because the changes in your body and To some extent in your mind these changes are Visible to the narcissist. He cannot deny them reframe them or ignore them so He sees you changing day by day and There's nothing he can do about it your transformation is out of his hands out of his control And this transformation takes you further away from him Further away from the snapshot and Further away from the interject from this internal object that in his mind is you It's a very threatening process the narcissist reacts with Separation in security, which is the clinical term for abandonment or separation anxiety He feels that you're abandoning him somehow by transforming by becoming more agentic by harboring Independent processes in your body and in your mind You are drawing away from him. You are drifting away from under him and from his control this divergence Creates in him extreme insecurity and Anxiety is likely to tell you that he feels that you had changed. He feels unsafe He's humiliated at his own exposed dependence on you and helplessness without you And so in an attempt to rid himself of these negative effects of these negative emotions of These turbulent and tumultuous internal Havoc that your pregnancy rakes on him So in an attempt to get rid of all this because it's not pleasant. It's dissonant It's something which generates in him anxiety. So to rid himself of all these and To cope somehow with the attendant frustration He aggressively devalues you and then he dumps you Unceremoniously pregnant as you are now he may dump you Only emotionally he becomes absent called Detached or he might definitely pack up with these things and walk away with a much younger and much less pregnant version of you most narcissists would opt for absenteeism Attachment withdrawal and avoidance in line with their insecure attachment styles analysis is Typically would protest his victim would claiming to have been Neglected and ignored by you. You're not the same. He would tell you you don't pay me attention You don't care about me anymore. It's only your pregnancy. It's only this unborn child You're focused on him or her only You have forgotten me you had abandoned me in effect and no longer in your thoughts I'm no longer the main focus of your attentions and compassion and caring and affection Narcissists cannot control the processes and emotions Unfolding in your body and your mind These are way out of his remit The merger and diffusion and the symbiosis between you and the narcissist Breakdown the minute a third party enters the picture It's a form of triangulation. The narcissist experiences this as cheating on him betrayal triangulating on him with a third party Your partners the narcissists partners body and mind conspire against him in the process of pregnancy and conspire against him with another person About to be born the narcissist anticipates and Catastrophizes the childbirth. He realizes that a newborn baby is likely to consume even more of your resources more of your presence then a fetus or an embryo Narcissists cannot outdo Cannot out compete with you. You are He cannot get pregnant. He cannot give childbirth. You are creating life It's an act of creation and a creative act and he cannot He cannot outdo you in any way. He feels inferior he feels that Mysteriously and and only and weirdly you would become much more potent much more powerful than him Because you are creating life. You're good like He that too he had been good like now you are good like and this comparative inferiority constitutes a protracted narcissistic injury best avoided you become a source of frustration and he aggresses against you or he avoids you all together Narcissism is a fantasy defense gun or eye even the DSM says this There are two types of narcissistic fantasies. There's grandeur Money sex power access or adulation. This is one type of narcissistic fantasy And then there's the shared narcissistic fantasy fantasy of perfect love with a soulmate You are embedded firmly in the second type of fantasy in the shared fantasy The narcissist is far more prone to engage in the letter In a shared fantasy when he is in the throes of the former of a grandiose fantasy. In other words And when the narcissist is successful When he is able to obtain narcissistic supply when he is realizing his goals and moving forward and he feels much more confident He feel his sense of self-worth is stabilized and so he can now embark on a shared fantasy The narcissist is also far more psychopathic when he is mired in the grandiose fantasy So he is likely to objectify you much more The demise of either fantasy grandiose or the shared Leads to the ultimate unraveling of the other fantasy So when he fails in his grandiose fantasy your shared fantasy is in trouble And when he fails in the shared fantasy makes it difficult for him to obtain supply But the grandeur fantasy the grandiose fantasy is more resilient and takes longer to fall When a shared fantasy goes bunk abruptly for example when you become pregnant The narcissistic parks on frantic and indiscriminate efforts to find an alternative to you Only when he fails at the discard and replace phase is the grandiose fantasy adversely affected too So when you get pregnant The narcissist feels abandoned and neglected. He feels that his shared fantasy is breaking down. He's no longer the focus of You is no longer at the center of your attention and Administrations so his shared fantasy is challenged by your Independence autonomy agency self-efficacy and increasingly divergent behaviors As the shared fantasies is collapsing He wants to maintain at least the grandiose fantasy So he's trying to look for a replacement is trying to devalue you and then discard you and then replace you And only if he fails in that Will the rest of his life be affected the grandiose fantasy Within the shared fantasy You are not real. You're a figment. The narcissist conjures his intimate partner in the shared fantasy Exactly as a magician would conjure up a sleight of hand and then the narcissist Dematerializes you now these two processes are very important the conjuring and the dematerialization The shared fantasy is a template and a matrix It's a rigidly coded simulation Which like many other artificial intelligence applications yields unexpected results The narcissist codes for this simulation He writes the program and then he runs the program in his mental computer But because reality interferes and because the program is so complex it very often has Unexpected outcomes which the narcissist cannot cope with Pregnancy is one such outcome The shared fantasy is a matrix You are supposed to be plugged into the matrix and pretend to believe or believe or really believe that it is Reality it is a template upon all your in upon which all your interactions with the narcissists take place and they are Formed and shaped by this template, but the shared fantasy is also a network and also a hierarchy Both network and hierarchy The hierarchical rigidity of the shared fantasy is manifest in the conjuring act The narcissist coerces you To be and to behave in regimented Micromanaged and minutely specified and controlled ways the narcissist micro-controls you Whenever you deviate however minutely from the choreography from the orchestrated set of steps Algorithmic also Whenever you deviate from this algorithm The narcissist penalizes you he panics he panics at first and then he punishes you for having caused him Caused him this panic and distress. So it's very rigid and very hierarchical. It's top-down But being the simulation that it is the narcissist Dissubstantiates you forces you to renounce reality So the condition for fitting for plugging into the matrix is to not be Or at least to not be in reality to suspend your animation Pregnancy challenges this It's very clear in Pregnancy that you are creating new life upon which the narcissist can exert no control and to which he has no access That makes you renders you alive as well because only life Can give rise to life Only life can give new life to new life It is a reminder that you are alive Outside the confines and the remit and the limitations and the boundaries of the matrix It challenges the hierarchy and the template It's an act of utter rebellion in the narcissist mind its defiance reified and So caught in a dream like cobweb Both parties in the shared fantasy develop paranoid ideation and this paranoid ideation is Leveraged and amplified by the pregnancy in the cult like settings of the shirt fantasy life itself is the enemy and so Life can threaten the shirt fantasy can impinge upon it can challenge it undermine it and expose it for what it is Fantasy and so anything that ricks of life that smells of life that Reminds one of life anything reminiscent of life is a threat Narcissus hate life with a passion. They avoid life. They evade life. They escape from life into fantasy That is a very good definition of narcissism and although the narcissist as a programmer Seems to be in control Actually, anything is possible in the nightmare that evolves out of the shirt fantasy the network effects of this form of lucid dreaming They lead to a psychogenic illness and they are unforetold you can't predict these effects They can go any way. That's why the narcissist catastrophizes Any sign of independence? Because the system is so precariously balanced that it even a butterfly can produce a hurricane The slightest deviation Divergence independence sign of independence can unravel the whole shirt fantasy Everything needs to be seriously ossified fossilized dead and mummified In this form of lucid dreaming only the dream can be real and reality should be rendered a dream And so they are lucidatory crazy making and cataclysmic cataclysmic than one more of all romantic relationships with the narcissist They have to do With a fantasy and they have to do with the narcissist desperate attempts to kill you and to suppress any sign of life in you Pregnancy is therefore perceived as the mother of all challenges the ultimate Defiance the epitome of rebellion the most corrosive act within a shirt fantasy and even when the Nazis had Initiated it in order to garner supply one way or another now or in the future Even then he is totally unready totally unprepared For the unfolding of the pregnancy and for what it's going to do to his mind or what is left of his mind