 My name is Sambhakin and I'm the author of Malignelse Flavre, Narcissism Revism. Like borderlines, narcissists have something called abandonment anxiety. They are terrified by the thought of being abandoned. They are like children who are afraid that their parents, when they are out of the room, will never come back again. They lack object constancy. In other words, narcissists believe that when people are out of sight, they are also out of mind. They do not believe in permanence, in reliable, long-term relationships, in bonding, in attachment. And they don't believe in these things because they have never experienced them, either as children or as adults. Okay, so then narcissists have abandonment anxiety. Then why do they abuse? They are nearest and dearest. They are so-called loved ones. After all, if you abuse somebody, the chances of being abandoned by that person are much higher. If you abuse your wife, she's likely to walk away. If you maltreat your girlfriend, she's likely to find another boyfriend. Why abuse? Abuse ostensibly and intuitively should increase the chances of abandonment and therefore increase the narcissists' abandonment anxiety. Yet all narcissists, without a single exception, abuse. Granted, they abuse in different ways. Some of them abuse verbally, some of them use brutal sets of humor or brutal honesty. There are a million ways to abuse in multifarious forms of aggression. But whatever the narcissist and whoever the narcissist, narcissists always abuse. And especially those they are supposed to be intimate with. Well, here's a counter-intuitive paradox. Abuse serves to decrease the narcissist's abandonment anxiety. It reduces the anxiety, it ameliorates it, it alleviates it. How come? Well, first of all, when you abuse someone, when you devalue someone, you feel superior to them. They, at the receiving end, the recipients of abuse are inferior to you, the abuser. Abusers are in position of authority. They dole out abuse. So devaluation leads to a sense of superiority. And superiority restores the narcissist's sense of grandiosity. Restores the grandiose fantasy, the narrative that underlies the narcissist's inflated sense of self. But why would the narcissist need to restore his grandiosity? Where did it go? Why, who ruined it? The abandonment anxiety. The narcissist has abandonment anxiety. And superior beings, perfect beings, God-like beings, should not feel anxiety. The very fact that the narcissist feels anxiety undermines his sense of grandiosity and his sense of perfection and superiority and God-like qualities. So it goes like that. The narcissist feels abandonment anxiety. This challenges his sense of perfection and superiority. He then devalues his spouse or girlfriend or intimate partner or significant other. By abusing and devaluing her, he feels against superior. By feeling superior, he restores his grandiosity. And by restoring his grandiosity, he eliminates or, at the very least, reduces his anxiety. Or in number one. But abuse has other functions. For example, preemption. The narcissist assumes that he will always be abandoned. Loss is guaranteed. Things will go badly. Relationships will break up and terminate. The narcissist assumes that he will be abandoned. Hence, his abandonment anxiety. So if he is anyhow going to be abandoned, he might as well control the process. He might as well bring about his own abandonment. He might as well precipitate the abandonment, cause it, lead to it, generate it, foster it. If he does, then he is in control. If he were to be abandoned because of his own doing, if the abandonment was of his own making, then he, in his eyes, had initiated his abandonment. He is in control. He is not abandoned. He is simply fulfilling a goal or a target. So preemption, restoring a sense of control over circumstances and over other people. Inducing abandonment as a way of lying to yourself and saying, well actually, I have not been abandoned. I sought it. I wanted it. This is called cognitive dissonance. The third function of abusing others is uncovering the truth. The narcissist assumes that people are faking it. That they are not as good as they were. That there are hidden agendas at play. That his wife or his girlfriend or his intimate partner or his significant other are just pretending to love him. Claiming to be loyal, claiming to be supportive, but when push comes to shove, their true face will be revealed. The mask will fall and they will be uncovered as who they are. It is loyal, cheating, unfaithful, unreliable, unpredictable. So how do you prove this? How do you prove this working hypothesis? By abusing people. When the narcissist abuses the significant other, he is testing her. He pushes her to the corner and he wants to see how will she react. Will she, for example, abandon him? Will she cheat on him with another man? Will she walk away? Will she attack? Will she counterattack? He ferrets out information about her. Abuses a kind of probing. It's a kind of test or testing process. It's as though the narcissist had put his significant other in a lab and then he is conducting all kinds of tests, laboratory tests. Abuse is a controlled experiment at revealing the truth about your intimate partner. Is she as steadfast as she claims? Is she as loyal? Will she still be there even if I'm a jerk, even if I'm abusing her, maltreating her, humiliating her, insulting her privately and in public? How far can I go? To what extent can I annihilate her? To what extent can I extinguish her as an autonomous entity and still she will be around? So it's a test. And finally, of course, abuse is a form of behaviour modification. Abuse is a signal. It's a communication loop. By abusing someone, you're telling them that you're unhappy with their behaviour. And you are signaling to them, sometimes violently and always aggressively, that they should alter their behaviour if they want to not be abused. The thing is that abuse works. Abuse actually works most of the time. Most spouses, intimate partners and significant partners would alter and modify their behaviour in order to minimise abuse. So abuse is an efficacious, efficient method for modifying your partner's behaviour. And because it works, it is so commonplace among narcissists and psychopaths. Okay, so how do you deal with it? What are the coping styles which have proven to be efficient with protracted, unlimited abuse? Abuse is a feature of the relationship. It's a fixture. It's an attribute of the relationship. Well, there are five essentially coping styles. The first one is submissiveness, by being submissive, by accepting and adhering to every rule, every capricious move, every arbitrary decision, every criticism, by avoiding disagreement, by being conflict adverse. You can minimise, or reduce at least, the incidence, the frequency, and the prevalence of abuse in the relationship. Submissiveness. The second coping style is exactly the opposite. It's conflicting. It is the counter-dependent coping style. It is a refusal to accept the abuse, refusal to accept authority, challenging the abuser, arguing, disagreeing, criticising, provoking fights, raising him. That also works to some extent in reducing the abuse. Ultimately, the abuser would institute a policy of no contact and would go away, would become absent, either physically or emotionally, and definitely conversational. If the partner, the intimate partner, causes the abuser pain every time he abuses, makes the abuser pay a price for his misconduct, the abuser, very much like a dog in Pablo's experiments, would learn not to abuse. But that is, of course, a conflictive stance, which means that nothing much is left of the relation, except constant conflict, constant warfare, constant fighting. And then we have mirroring. Mirroring is a third coping style. Mirroring doesn't mean that you do exactly what the abuser does. He shouts, he shouts, he says a word, you repeat it, and so on. That's not mirroring. Mirroring simply means that you hurl back, you throw back at the abuser, his verbiage, his sentences, the words he chooses, and so on and so forth. And you throw them back at him, rearranged in a way to provoke a certain dynamic. So, for example, if the abuser says, I would like to go and do something, and you don't want to go and do something. If you say, no, I don't want to go out, you know, if you want to go by yourself or something, you're likely to be abused, criticized. If you ever do anything with me, you are no longer interested in me, you don't want to be with me, I knew I could not trust you, this relationship is going to hurt, you are ruining it for both of us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The well-known refrain. One possibility is mirroring, reflecting these sentences back at the abuser, but in a way which would create in the abuser a dynamic, for example, would create in him abandonment anxiety. So by saying, well, you may well be right, you know, the relationship is really going to hell, and we seem to disagree on many, many things, and so on, and that's precisely why I want to go out. It is actually, you're repeating this verbiage, but by repeating it in a certain order, you're provoking abandonment anxiety. As you're provoking the abuser in negative emotions, such as anxiety or fear or depression and so on and so forth, gradually the abuse or the incidence of abuse will decline. Mirroring is a very complex coping style because you need to fully understand the abuser's psychology and you need to know how to rearrange his abuse and then reflect the abuse to him in highly precise ways. It's precision art. If you do that, if you're adept at mirroring, you can achieve surprising results, including an up to the point of the abuse disappearing completely. And then there is collusion. Collusion is actually to amplify the abuse up to the point of caricature. So if the abuser says, you know, you're so stupid, you don't think about what you're saying, you're always wrong and so on and so forth, in a collusion or collusion coping style, you would say, you know what? You're right. I'm really very, very stupid. You are so intelligent, you're so decisive, you're so strong. You're always so right, etc. You exaggerate. We're overemphasized, his words, to the point of rendering them humorous and caricaturistic to the point of rendering the abuser a cartoon figure. And this would usually unsettle the abuser, drive him back, he would be able then to look to see himself. You would be reflecting him and he would be able to see himself and this usually would have positive feedback on his behavior, that you would be creating a feedback loop which would reduce his abusive behaviors. The last coping style, which is not exactly one of my favorites and should be advised against, except perhaps as the last resort, is displacement, directing the negative energy of abuse from yourself at someone else. So if your abuser begins to attack you, criticize you, disagree with you vehemently and aggressively, humiliate you, chastise you, etc., etc., you can then direct this negative energy, this rage, this, you know, discomfort. You can direct all these negative emotions at someone else that you can both denigrate and demean and criticize and so on. Someone you agree on, another scapegoat or another victim. So, but this is both an immoral choice and could backfire in the sense that you would gradually become an extension of the abuser and an abuser yourself. So displacement is a kind of shared psychosis, a situation where you and the abuser form a diet, form a kind of a cult of abusing other people. It's not recommended, of course, but it's also a coping style I hate to mention and it does happen more frequently than you know when an abused spouse teams up with her abuser to abuse third party, abused by crossing.