 The narcissist always prefers the false self to you. He always chooses his false self over you. And he always, but I mean always, ends up sacrificing you to the false self. Why is that? Why this dominance of the false self? Here you are. You provide the narcissist with love, with caring, with empathy, with compassion, with a listening ear, with a shoulder to cry on, with good advice. You're the perfect mate, the amazing best friend. You cater to the narcissist's psychological needs, financial needs, career needs. You're always there for him. And yet, when push comes to shove, at the critical moment, the narcissist always dumps you, sacrifices you, annihilates you, negates you, and chooses a piece of fiction, a narrative, an imaginary, something not even friend. Why is that? This is the topic of today's video. Two brief service announcements. If you want to organize a free lecture in North Macedonia, please contact me at SamVaknin at gmail.com. SamVaknin, one word, my name at gmail.com. In second service announcement, you can search the channel, my channel, via the playlist. There's almost 30 playlists. They are arranged by themes. You go to the playlist and you get all your answers questioned, more or less. I've been saying for well over a decade that the narcissist's false self is a primitive, savage, parental deity, a mollock that demands and expects human sacrifice, not one but many, starting with the narcissist's true self in childhood, the first human sacrifice. Narcissism is therefore a private, missionary religion the narcissist attempts to convert others, you included, into his or her creed. And then once you have joined the cult, once you have become a worshipper, the narcissist sacrifices you to the insatiable, voracious shared fantasy which pivots and revolves around the false self. Now none of this is new. I've said it in multiple interviews and well over 60 videos, over the past 10 years. Here is one example, an interview I granted to Juan de Viet or de Viet in 2021, that's three years ago. Have a listen on the topic. But I guess that that friend that I've built was a childhood friend. It's a false self. It's the false self. It's God actually. That's why I compared narcissism to a private religion. I think the child discovers God, but discovers it idiosyncratically. The child is alone and discovers a God-like figure, a divinity, and creates a private religion. And exactly like in ancient primitive religions, this new God, this mollock, demands human sacrifice. And the child sacrifices himself to this God. He sacrifices his true self. What is the true self? It's human sacrifice. So the child sacrifices his true self to this new God, the false self. And from that moment on, there's a religion. The child, the false self is divinity. The child is the worshipper. And there's been an act, a binding, bonding act of human sacrifice, which sealed the covenant. Exactly like God and Abraham sealed the covenant. And from that moment on, it's a religion. And the narcissists are missionary. Exactly like in Christianity, narcissists are missionary. They're trying to convince you that they are really perfect and geniuses and great. They're trying to convert you to their religion. So they're very missionary. You see a lot of religious undertones and overtones in narcissism. That's why I believe that the future distributed religion is going to be narcissism. I think narcissism would be the religion of the future. I mean, forget Christianity, forget all this. Narcissism is a religion of the future where everyone is both a God and a worshipper and the temple. And everyone is a self-sufficient, self-contained, solipsistic God. And so it's a very religious, it's a meta, mega religious transformation the age we're in, because we are all converted into gods. We are all being transformed into gods, lesser gods, higher gods, but gods. And we're going to end up in the distributed network of gods. The prevalent metaphor of today is the network, of course. So a new religion would be a network religion. It would be a distributed religion by definition. Everyone is a node, a node in the religion. And everyone is a god in the religion. I mean, we are in a state of malignant egalitarianism. We're all equal, no one has advantage over anyone. Your truth is as good as my truth. Your facts are as good as my facts, alternative facts. So we're all in a situation where I call it malignant egalitarianism. And of course, no one will accept any position less than God in this reality. I will not let you be God. Who are you? You're equal to me. I'm equal to you. If you're God, I'm God also. That's the future. Whoa. Like how archetypal, first of all, as you describe the sacrifice of self. I just had all these connections go off in my mind as you, you know, walk through that. It's pretty somber to think that we're all ending up in a space where we're in this distributed religion of self. Why do you think that's happening? Because we lost the alternatives. We lost the alternatives. Religion. I said that the false self is a parental figure. The false self is how a child views his or her parents. The child, the very young child, the infant prior to age 36 months, the child regards the parent, especially the mother, as a secure base. But the child regards the mother as a secure base because the child idealizes the mother. And later, the child idealizes the father. The parents are Godlike. They are infallible. They never commit mistakes. They're omnipotent. They're omniscient. In short, the parents are perfect beings. When the child is rejected by the parents, especially the mother, when he's traumatized, when he's abused in a variety of ways, remember, smothering, pampering, idolizing, pedestalizing, these are forms of abuse as well. When the child's boundaries are not recognized, when the child is not allowed to become separate from the parents and be rendered an individual, when the child is not allowed to develop a nascent self and ego and so on and so forth, these are all forms of abuse, trauma, and essentially rejection. And so, the child replaces the real, rejecting, frustrating, hurtful parents with another parent, an imaginary friend who is very parental, a parental figure. The false self, exactly like mother, exactly like father, is Godlike, infallible, omnipotent, all-powerful, omniscient, all-knowing, and perfect, and brilliant. So the false self is a combination of an imaginary protective friend, a kind of Batman or Superman, and the parents the child should have had and never had. The imaginary friend is everything the child wants to be and cannot become, and everything the child is not. The child is helpless, the false self is omnipotent or powerful, the child is fallible, commits mistakes and errors. Most of these children have bad objects or idealized objects that divorce them from reality. The false self never commits mistakes, he's always right. The child is at a loss as to what makes the adults in his world tick, what motivates them, what causes them to behave in the unpredictable, capricious, arbitrary, hurtful, dangerous, risky ways that they behave. This recklessness, where is it coming from? The child is totally confounded and confused about his mother and father, about his parental figures. The false self is all-knowing, he is able, the false self is able to predict the future with absolute perfection, never gets it wrong. So the false self is an amalgam, a combination of an idealized rendition of the child, which is godlike and perfect, coupled with an idealized rendition of the parental figures, which incorporated into the false self are always perfect, while in reality they're very far from perfect. In short, the false self is a compensatory process. At the beginning of the shared fantasy, the narcissist converts you into a maternal figure and this creates a conflict. Remember that the false self is a parental figure and now you have entered the narcissist's life as an intimate partner, as a friend, never mind, and the narcissist converts you into a mother, a maternal figure. So now the narcissist has created competition between you and the false self. It's like a custody battle, you know, between mother and father, who will gain custody over the children. So there's a battle, a battle erupts once you have entered the narcissist's life, once you've been idealized by the narcissist, once you've been converted into a maternal figure in the narcissist's shared fantasy, it pits you against the false self. This is a train wreck, you are on your way to conflict with the false self. Are you the narcissist's new mother or is the false self the narcissist's old mother? This creates competition and dissonance within the narcissist. By the way, the same process happens in therapy. In typical psychotherapy, the narcissist develops transference. He attributes to the therapist, parental roles and parental attributes and traits. And so the therapist becomes a substitute father and ersatz mother and these conflicts dramatically with the innate parental figure inside the narcissist, the false self. So the false self conflicts with, rejects, attacks, undermines, challenges anyone who enters the narcissist's life and becomes by transmutation a mother or a father. The therapist becomes a father, an intimate partner becomes a mother and the false self resents and rejects both options. And this creates an internal conflict known as dissonance. One of you has to go either the false self or you. You've become a mother in direct competition and challenge to the false self. So now the false self is pushing the narcissist to get rid of you in order to ameliorate the conflict, the internal conflict and mitigate the resulting anxiety. You don't send a chance in this battle with the false self. The narcissist identifies himself or herself with the false self. As far as the narcissist is concerned, he or she is the false self. It's not that the narcissist owns or possesses a false self. The false self is not like a smartphone or car or a television set. The false self is not a possession. It's not an asset. It's not even an object or at least not a conscious object, internal object. It's not a process. The false self takes over the child and then disables the true self and becomes the child. By age six to nine years old, there's nobody there except the false self. The false self is what remains of the child after the abuse and the trauma. The false self is a detritus and the vestige of the child. It's like a ruined city in an archaeological dig, wasteland. And there's the false self and the narcissist, the adult narcissist has never known anything else except the false self. The adult narcissist identifies with the false self, interjects the false self, incorporates the false self and ultimately becomes the false self. When you enter the narcissist's life within a shared fantasy and he converts you into a substitute mother, a maternal figure, this triggers and provokes the false self because you're a mother and the false self is a mother. Which mother will have the child? Which mother will take over the narcissist? Which mother will control the situation? Which mother will manage things? There's a war between you and the false self. But the narcissist experiences this as a war between himself and you. Because the narcissist is the false self, anything the false self does, anything the false self thinks, anything the false self feels is misperceived by the narcissist as his own emotions and cognitions and actions and so on. The narcissist is the false self. If you challenge, since you challenge the false self, you're actually ending up challenging the narcissist. There's nobody else there. There is no real constellated integrated self. There's only this facade, this shimmering mirage, this piece of fiction, this narrative that is known as the false self. That's all there is. If you challenge this, you're challenging the narcissist very existence, very ability to function and very precarious balance of his personality. So he needs to let you go. The narcissist needs to sacrifice you just in order to restore his inner equilibrium, homeostasis to reduce anxiety, to allow him over to function again. And this process, this conflict between you and the false self, which ultimately leads to your discard. This process is one of the main engines of the attempted reenactment of the failed early childhood separation individuation. And it leads inexorably to your devaluation and discard. Now this last paragraph has been mouthful. Let me try to break it down for you. You remember that the main or the only goal of the shared fantasy is to allow the narcissist to re-experience his or her early childhood with the mother, with the original mother, biological mother, and then to separate from her and to become an individual. Originally in his early childhood, the narcissist failed to separate from the biological mother because she was a bad mother, the wrong mother, what is known as metaphorically a dead mother, the kind of mother who did not allow the narcissist to separate from her, to become an individual, to walk away, to start his own life, to set his own boundaries, etc., etc., either because she has been absent or because she has been overpresent, overprotective, domineering in both cases. The end result is disruption in the process of separation individuation and therefore an inability to generate a self, an ego, an inability to generate this core identity, which is boundary and maintains a continuity of the sense of self. Narcissists fail to do this because they never exit the symbiotic merger and fusion with their mothers. And now here you come and you are a mother substitute. And the narcissist says, wow, great, there's a second mother, second mother, second chance, second chance, this time I'm going to get it right, this time I'm going to separate from her, this time I'm going to become an individual of my own, an adult, boundary, healthy, and so on. It's a chance. Narcissist regards this as a chance at reinvention and healing. But at a cost, and the cost is having to get rid of you, devaluation and discard are symbolic reenactments of separation from the original mother. You're a substitute mother and the devaluation and discard are substitute separation individuation. Now all this is great and there are several internal processes within the narcissist that push inexorably towards this outcome of getting rid of you, separating from you, dumping you, discarding you. I mentioned one of these processes in an earlier video, narcissistic elation. And the other process is this, your conflict with the false self. The shared fantasy is conflictive. It induces anxiety because there are two competing mothers, you and the false self. The false self prevails always invariably in order to justify and generate separation from you. When the false self wins the war with you, the narcissist decides to get rid of you because you have created this conflict. You have created this anxiety, your presence, and so he needs to get rid of. So this drives the narcissist, this conflict drives the narcissist to reenact separation, individuation with you. In this sense, the narcissist needs to sacrifice you to the Moloch, to this savage, primitive divinity, the false self. The narcissist has sacrificed his true self to the false self as a child and now he needs to sacrifice his new mother time and again to the false self because this is the only way the narcissist can separate an individual. Both of you are caught in a shared fantasy that is ruled over by this Godlike or Godhead, which is the false self. The false self is the supreme being that kind of orchestrates your movements. The choreography of the shared fantasy is dictated by the false self. You are both puppets, marionettes. The narcissist is no more at control of his actions and decisions than you are, no more in control than you are. You're both out of control. You don't have control over what's happening. The minute you've entered the shared fantasy willingly, the minute you became intoxicated and addicted to the whole of mirrors and to the love bombing and to the idealization and so on and so forth, you're doomed. You're doomed because that very minute you've become a slave, that very minute you've become the property, not of the narcissist but of the false self. In short, the shared fantasy is a kind of morality play directed by a supreme being which is the false self. Both of you fulfill roles in this morality play, medieval morality play. Some would say Commedia dell'Alte. It's a play in any case. It's a theater production. It's a movie and there's a director and the director is a false self and you're just going through the motions and reading your lines from the script. You're both actors on a stage and the stage is a reenactment of early childhood separating from mother and becoming an individual. Of course, the false self is the seat of grandiosity. By any type of grandiosity, being a victim is also a form of grandiosity. So any type of grandiosity is invested emotionally, affected in the false self. That is the locus, the repository of grandiosity. So the play itself, the theater production, the movie is grandiose, is out of this world, is imbued with fantasy. That's why we call it shared fantasy and not for example, shared really, really bad reality because it's not reality. It's not to do with reality. It's a fantastic tale of a godlike creature which is the false self and his substitute mother and how this time the godlike creature prevails and forces the mother to grant the child separation and individuation. By merging with a child, the false self imbues the child, endows the child, bestows upon the child godlike qualities. So shared fantasy is what is known as apotheosis. The child by separating from mother and individuating becomes godlike. The child perceives the separation individuation as becoming a god, the process of becoming a divinity, a deity. It brings the child closer to the false self. It's as if the child says, false self, dear, false self, I'm going to get rid of her. I'm going to get rid of my intimate partner. I'm going to get rid of my best friend and by doing so, I will become more, I will have become more divine and by becoming more divine, I will be closer to you. I will establish proximity with you and our merger and union, our wedding will be complete. Indeed, in the Kabbalah, there's the concept of wedding with a Shechina, wedding with a kind of attribute of God. So the child, remember that the narcissist is a child. I hope you remember this. So the child who is the narcissist chooses a substitute mother, triggers, angers and provokes the false self. Then the child gets rid of mother, of the new mother, of you, gets rid of the new mother. By doing so, the child endears itself to the false self, becomes closer to the false self. It's as if the child conspires with the false self against you and by conspiring with the false self, merges and fuses with the false self and becomes divine. You endow the child, you transform the child, you transubstantiate the child into a God and this is the fantastic element in the shared fantasy. The narcissist believes unconsciously that by going through the motions within the phases of the shared fantasy, he will exit the shared fantasy as a God, as a divinity, as a deity, as an idol. He will exit the shared fantasy transformed from a defective, deformed, unworthy and love of the human being into the epitome and ratification of perfection, thereby rendering himself as a child indistinguishable from the false self. So it's indeed an apotheosis. But having discarded you, the narcissist still remains stuck with your maternal introject. In other words, remember, when the narcissist first comes across you, when the narcissist decides that you can serve as an intimate partner, source of supply, whatever the case may be, the child takes a snapshot of you. This is known as introjection and the process is known as introjection. He creates a representation of you in his mind, an avatar that stands in for you in his mind. And so this introject is maternal because you are supposed to become a substitute mother within the shared fantasy. By the way, to be clear, the shared fantasy is the only way the narcissist relates to all people. All interpersonal relationships of the narcissist are shared fantasies. The narcissist has a shared fantasy with his intimate partner, with his children, with his colleagues, with his best friends, with his sources of supply, with his neighbors, with his, you name it. So the narcissist converts everyone around him into maternal figures. And when the narcissist discards you, he remains stuck with his avatar, with his icon of you in his mind, with his, with your representation in his mind. Your gun, you've exited the narcissist's life, you've been discarded or you dumped the narcissist, whichever the case may be, you're no longer there physically, but your representation in his mind is still there. And now it is persecutory. In order to devalue you and discard you, the narcissist converted you into an enemy in his mind. You became his enemy and the enemy of the false self by implication, because the narcissist is getting closer and closer and closer to the false self, establishes ever closer union or symbiosis with the false self by rejecting you. This act of discarding you, devaluing you, separating female leads the narcissist to individuate through the false self to become an individual by becoming a god, to individuate via a god-like entity, which is the false self. But there's no way to get rid of your avatar, of your image, of your snapshot in the narcissist's mind. And to, and now you're an enemy, you're an enemy within, you're a Trojan horse, you are a fifth colon. And so he stuck with you. On the one hand, he has a parental mega-introject, that's the false self, an introject that has metastasized and took over his entire mind or soul if you wish. So there's this introject, which is a false self, it's overwhelming, it's all pervasive, it's ubiquitous, it's, and on the other hand, there's this maternal introject, which used to be you, you used to represent you and is now an enemy, a persecutory object, and this again creates dissonance between the false self and the persecutory object that you had become in the narcissist's mind. So this dissonance is never solved. The shared fantasy invariably ends in devaluation and discard, which are symbolic representations of separation, individuation in early childhood. The mother is gone physically, but not mentally, not ideationally, not psychologically. The mother is still here in the narcissist's mind, nagging, enemy, attacking, criticizing, persecutory, and there's the false self with its own demands to be the exclusive parent. Thou shalt have no other parent over me. And this creates, this perpetuates the dissonance within the narcissist. So even once the narcissist has completed the devaluation and the discard, the symbolic separation and individuation, there's no way the narcissist could resolve the dissonance and the anxiety attendant upon the dissonance, which is the outcome of the dissonance. This he can never, ever resolve till the very day he dies and probably post-mortem in the afterlife. There's no way to resolve this anxiety. There's no way to resolve this anxiety because the false self is a parental figure, a demanding, often sadistic, harsh parental figure, on the one hand. And on the other hand, everyone in the narcissist's life is automatically converted into a parental figure. So there's no end to the dissonance and the inner conflict. And even though the narcissist becomes godlike, briefly having rejected you, having discarded you, the narcissist merges fully with the false self. It's as if the narcissist says to the false self, you see, I obeyed you. I followed your commandments. I'm submissive to you. I'm you. And so for a brief moment, the narcissist experiences narcissistic elation, narcissistic elation in the sense that the narcissist experiences the oceanic feeling of merging with a parental figure. And also the narcissist experiences the parental figures divinity, the parental figures omnipotence, omniscience, perfection. But that's brief. It's brief because a moment later, your introject in the narcissist's mind again conflicts with the false self. It's still active. It's a bad mother now. You've been devalued. You've been discarded. You've been converted into a secretary object. You're an enemy, but you're still active. And so now the narcissist is stuck with a truly, truly bad menacing mother confronted by the false self, which is harsh and sadistic and demanding. And the cycle starts all over again. The narcissist attempts to find the next mother with the forlorn, desperate, hopeless hope to somehow get to the bottom of this and resolve the separation individuation cycle. Once and for all, succeed somehow with the right partner, maybe. And all this time, the narcissist goes through cycles of grandiosity, having merged with the false self, having discarded you and having merged with the false self, narcissist experiences elation and enormous burst of grandiosity. And then there is essentially the equivalent of self injury or self modification. And the narcissist needs to start all over again. This is the internal cycle of the narcissist. I hope I shed some light on some of the dynamics. I do encourage you to watch the shared fantasy playlist on this channel. It contains a lot more. Narcissism is not just about being an a-hole or haughty or arrogant or super highly, highly complex set of mechanisms, processes, emotions, cognitions, fantasies, and so on and so forth that interlock and interact interminably with an infinite number of permutations. And all this because the child has not been allowed to develop, to grow up, to confront reality, to separate, to become an individual, to become an adult. This stunting, this thwarting, this suppression, this renders the narcissist a cesspool of dysfunctions and extreme detachment, derangement one could say from reality and self-restrangement. And no matter how deep you dig, there's still more to find. And this is my latest contribution. Mind you, everything I've said in this video I've been saying for well over 10 years now, but I put it now in one place together for your edification and comfort because I care about you, Shoshanim. And if you believe that, you have learned nothing from my channel and about narcissism.