Over the past year, I have been synthesizing, integrating Sanders' idea of a shared fantasy with my principal of dual mothership to yield a coherent framework for understanding the narcissist's interpersonal and intimate relationships. Now, it's a conceptual framework. It's extremely difficult to grasp at first exposure. I understand that.
And so, I'm making this video where I'm about to put together everything you've heard on my channel with regards to these issues. So, this is the only video you should actually watch if you want to get the full picture, the integrated picture. I hope it will be of help to some of you.
But before we go there, a few service announcements. I'm going to be in Bucharest next week. If you are in Romania or in Bucharest or in Europe and you wish to have a one-on-one personal counseling session with me, please write to me urgently at samvaknin at gmail.com. Again, personal one-on-one counseling sessions in Bucharest. Write to me. I'm traveling next week.
Second thing, everything you're about to hear in this video is an integral part of the free Seven Days Seminar in Tumno Sevevin in Romania. September 19th to the 25th, there's a free Seven Days Seminar with me in Romania. Write to me. Again, write to me at samvaknin at gmail.com. In order to secure your seat, the capacity is 300 and there are already 276 people registered, confirmed with bookings in hotels. So, there are no seats left. If you want to attend my Seven Days Free Seminar, please write to me urgently on my email, sanvaknin at gmail.com.
The seminar will also include a general introduction to cluster B personality disorders with the bleeding edge, cutting edge, latest research in the field. Richard Grannon is coming out with a course based partly on my dual mothership and shared fantasy concepts.
So you may wish to be hypervigilant and await his new course materials. And Richard and I will be recording a few additional dialogues in Bucharest this coming week. And the dialogues will deal with treatment modalities, possible treatment modalities based on my new concepts.
One last thing. I know you tend to sign off after 8 minutes or 10 minutes because, you know, 8 minutes is too much. Attention spans have decreased over the last few decades.
People can barely read more than one sentence and listen to more than one soundbite. But in this particular video, which you're about to watch, if you don't listen to the very, very end, you're going to miss up on some very exciting things which could shed light on many of the mysteries and enigmas and conundrums in your past relationships and can prevent you from pitfalls and problems in your future relationships. This single time, make an exception. Listen to the end.
Okay. As I said, my conceptual framework aims to explain the inexplicable, the bizarre, erratic, inhuman, robotic in a way, behaviors of the narcissist with his nearest and dearest, with his supposedly loved ones, with his intimate partners, with his significant or insignificant others.
Why does he behave this way? How can you explain the somersaults and all these turning on a dime? How could you explain the narcissist fluctuating from one pole to another, from idealization to devaluation? How do you account for all these? Why does he hoover you, having gotten rid of you?
So I constructed this conceptual framework which provides 100% answers to all these questions. For the first time, may I add?
And the whole framework is constructed on the concept of shared fantasy, first proposed by Sanders in 1989.
Shared fantasy is a space. It's a space where the narcissist can re-experience his childhood trauma safely.
So it's a fantastic space. It's divorced from reality because reality hurts. Reality is unpredictable. Reality is dangerous. And above all, you cannot control reality.
So the narcissist constructs this paracosm, this theme park, this Disneyland, and invites you in. This is the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy is a very complex, unfolding psychodynamic process. And it has multiple stages.
And it is this fact that there are so many phases and that these phases are mutually exclusive. They contradict each other. It is this fact that throws you off the scent, that discombobulates you, that confuses you. You're disoriented. You feel as if you are trapped in a nightmare or a dreamscape. You can't make sense and meaning out of what's happening to you.
But in the narcissist mind, it all makes perfect sense.
And I'm inviting you today to go with me, to wander with me the corridors of the narcissist mind as he inhabits or possesses the shared fantasy, as he haunts the shared fantasy because the narcissist mind is a haunted house.
What are the stages of the shared fantasy?
Stage number one, co-idealization. By love bombing you, by idealizing you, by telling you that you're perfect, that you're brilliant, that you're drop dead gorgeous, that you're super intelligent, that he has never had such an experience before you.
This process of idealizing you, rendering you a perfect being has multiple reasons, multiple motivations.
The first one is to get you addicted to your own idealized image via the narcissist gaze. This is called the Hall of Mirrors effect. A narcissist invites you to a Hall of Mirrors where you see yourself multiplied in an idealized form.
And that's very addictive. You can't let this go.
But this is only one reason for idealizing you.
The second reason to idealize you is what I call co-idealization.
By idealizing you, the narcissist is actually idealizing himself. By photoshopping your introject the snapshot that the narcissist has taken of you, the narcissist actually claims to own you because you're an internal object.
Remember, when the narcissist first sees you as a potential intimate partner, he takes a snapshot of you, exactly like a photograph. And then he photoshops it. He idealizes it.
And this snapshot is called the introject.
The narcissist then internalizes the introject. It's in his mind and he owns it. It becomes an extension of him. He merges with it. He fuses with it. The introject becomes an integral part of the narcissist's brain. And so the narcissist owns a totally good object, a totally perfect object, your snapshot, your avatar.
Now your avatar or snapshot have nothing to do with you and increasingly less and less to do with you actually. But in the narcissist's mind, the only reality is your snapshot. The only real thing is your avatar with which he interacts never with you, always with your representation in his mind.
The narcissist has a dialogue with the object in his mind, the internal object that stands in for you. You're no longer relevant. How you appear in the narcissist's mind, your apparition is relevant. And because this apparition, this representation, this icon, this avatar is all good and perfect and brilliant and amazing, and the narcissist owns it, it makes him equally good and brilliant and perfect and amazing. By owning it, the narcissist imbues himself with the attributes of the object.
You know, in ancient pagan primitive societies, they used to eat prisoners of war because they believed that by eating prisoners of war, they will have digested their courage. They will have acquired the traits, the good positive traits and qualities of the enemy.
It's the same with the narcissist. He consumes you, he digests you, he attributes you to you perfection and brilliance and beauty, which are beyond human. And by digesting you, he acquires these properties himself.
And this is the first phase in the shared fantasy co-idealization.
The second phase is dual mothership.
In the dual mothership phase, the narcissist gradually converts you into a maternal figure. A stand in for his original mother. His original mother might be dead, might be alive. It's besides the point, it's irrelevant. It's not about the real flesh and blood mother. It's about his mother, his birth mother, as she appears in his mind. In other words, the introject of his mother in his mind.
What he's trying to do, he's trying to convert you into a competing introject, a competing or substitutive maternal introject to displace his original mother.
He forces you to become his mother. He tests you with narcissistic abuse. Are you going to love him and accept him? Nevermind what he does to you. Are you going to offer him unconditional love? Are you going to idealize him the way mothers idealize their children?
It's a recreation of childhood with you in the mother role. At the same time, the narcissist offers you mothership. He becomes your mother. He becomes your parental figure. He offers you unconditional love. He idealizes you. He is there for you. He's all over you, actually.
This is very addictive. It's very difficult to let go of this because it's a second chance at having a proper childhood with a good enough mother. It's the first time you can love yourself through the narcissist maternal gaze. Before you ask anything, yes, it's only mothers.
Fathers are not relevant at this stage of development. Fathers are very relevant much later in the processes of socialization and enculturation or acculturation.
When children acquire societal mores and edicts, scripts, how to behave in society, sexual scripts, cultural tropes, this comes from the father. But the mother determines whether you become an individual at all. And so we are talking only about mothers. Even with women, it's only about mothers.
The narcissist offers you a second chance to love yourself through a maternal gaze. And this is the dual mothership concept. You mother the narcissist, and the narcissist mothers you.
But why would the narcissist want you to be his mother?
His original experience with his mother has been abject and obnoxious and horrible. Why would he like to go through it again?
Because he never got a chance to separate from his original mother. His original mother was what Andrei Green called a dead mother. Dead, not in the physical sense, dead in the emotional sense, an absent, selfish, narcissistic, demanding, smothering, abusive, instrumentalizing, parentifying mother. A bad mother, a not good enough mother in the language of Donald Winnicott.
So this kind of mother doesn't allow the child to separate from her. She annexes the child. She treats the child as an integral part of her. She merges and fuses with the child and leverages the child as an extension.
And so the child never gets a chance to separate. And because he cannot separate, the narcissist never gets a chance to individuate, to become an individual.
He has no ego, actually. That's the irony. Narcissists have no ego. They are selfless. So he cannot develop. He cannot become an adult. He is stuck in a perpetual loop known as repetition compulsion or diathesis in Adlerian terms.
He is stuck in a perpetual loop with his mother of origin, trying desperately to separate from her in his mind and failing consistently. And here you come along and you become his new mother. And with you, he has a chance. With you, he stands a chance to separate. Finally, he can complete the incomplete process of his childhood. He can settle the accounts. He can move into the world a bit grandiosely, take on reality and perhaps grow up, realize his potential, self-actualize, become an adult. You're his lost hope. And he needs to separate from you the way he didn't do with his mother of origin. He needs to reenact the separation.
But how can he separate from you?
He needs to discard you. The only way to separate from you is to get rid of you. So he does this in his mind.
This is the third phase.
Remember this first phase is idealization, love bombing.
The second phase is dual mothership.
The third phase is mental discard.
The narcissist begins a separation from you in his mind. He first discards you in his mind.
But the minute he starts to discard you in his mind, this has two adverse effects. It creates two problems, two very difficult psychological processes.
The first one, abandonment, anxiety, separation, insecurity. The narcissist is afraid to lose you.
And the second one is narcissistic injury. Because if the narcissist is compelled to discard you, if he feels the need to get rid of you, it means that his judgment of you was wrong. It means you were not ideal. It means he misjudged you. It means that he's not omniscient. He's not all-knowing. He's not God-like.
And there's a serious narcissistic injury. The very fact that he is compelled, forced to separate from you, owing to his internal processes, to his incomplete business with his mother, the fact that he needs to get rid of you, to exit the shared fantasy, to leave you behind, this fact implies that he has made an error of judgment with you, that he was less than perfect, that he is fallible and that he can commit and did commit a mistake. That's a major narcissistic injury.
How to overcome this narcissistic injury? Narcissistic injury is very painful. It's intolerable. How to overcome the abandonment, anxiety, which also threatens the narcissist's precarious internal balance?
The answer, devaluation.
The narcissist needs to devalue you.
But he needs to devalue you as an external object. The minute he devalues you as an external object, he restores his sense of grandiosity. He wipes clean the narcissistic injury and he has no more abandonment anxiety.
What does it mean to devalue you as an external object?
It means to look at you in a new way. It means to say, for example, she has changed. I wasn't wrong about her. I'm never wrong, but she has changed. Or she is manipulative, malevolent and deceitful. She hid information from me. That's why I misjudged her. Or she is no good. I have evolved. I have grown up. I have developed and she was left behind. We have diverged, etc., etc. These are all forms of devaluing the external object.
Now, the minute the external object is devalued, it's worthless. The minute the external object is no longer idealized, no longer good, this allows the narcissist to restore his grandiosity. There's no narcissistic injury. He wasn't wrong after all. You had deceived him or you have changed or he has changed. He wasn't wrong after all.
There's no narcissistic injury, grandiosity restored, and there's no abandonment, anxiety. Why have abandonment anxiety with a devalued object?
It's a good thing to lose a devalued object. This creates an ego congruent sense of discard, of a hitherto idealized object. In other words, now the narcissist feels comfortable, egosyntonic, comfortable with his decision, internal decision, mental decision, to discard you.
Now he is able to move on to the last phase or the last phases of the shared fantasy.
So to recap, the narcissist first discards you in his mind, but this creates dissonance. It's a narcissistic injury. It implies that his judgment was less than perfect and it creates abandonment anxiety.
To resolve this, he devalues you.
The minute he devalues you, he has no abandonment anxiety because why would anyone mourn or grieve over a devalued object? And he has no narcissistic injury because it proves that he has never been wrong. And he is never wrong, of course. He's ready to move on. He's ready to translate the mental discard to discard in real life.
The minute he's ready to do this, series of processes begin.
When the narcissist devalues the external object as a way to overcome the narcissistic injury, restore grandiosity, and ameliorate abandonment anxiety, the minute he does this, on the way to separating from you, which is the overriding goal you remember, but the minute he does this, there is an abyss. There is a gap which opens between you as a devalued object and the snapshot of you, which is still idealized. The introjective of you, the avatar of you, the internal representation of you, this internal object, is still idealized.
But you, out there, you have been devalued. So there is a discrepancy. There is divergence between the snapshot and you as an external object.
And this creates anxiety because the narcissist feels that something is wrong, something has gone awry.
How can it be that you are so devalued and your snapshot is so idealized?
He needs to resolve this. And the way he resolves this is the way every two-year-old resolves similar conflicts with his mother.
He splits you. Splitting defense is a primitive, infantile way of coping with the nuances of life. Life is gray. It's never black and white. There's good and bad in every person. It's impossible to categorize people totally or place them in drawers in a clean manner. Taxonomy and classification often fail.
So the child copes with this need for subtlety and need for nuance by splitting. Mother is all good. I'm all bad. Mother is all bad. I'm all good or whatever. So this is called dichotomous thinking. The child breaks the world into two or more parts, usually two. One of them is all good. The other is all bad.
And now that the narcissist needs to discard you, he needs to make peace, to reconcile your devalued external object, his devalued external object, you and his idealized internal object, your inner representation.
So there's a discrepancy. You have been devalued. The internal object is idealized and he splits. He now says that the introject is all bad.
He devalues the introject. The minute he devalues the introject, the minute he kind of mutilates the snapshot, the minute he attributes to the snapshot, everything that's bad, everything that's evil, everything that's imperfect, the minute he does this, he himself becomes grandiosely all good.
I want you to understand this.
The narcissist devalues you as an external object, but your internal representation in his mind is still all good, still idealized.
So what the narcissist does, he changes the equation. He renders the snapshot, the introject, your representation in his mind, he renders it all bad, thereby making himself all good.
You remember that splitting, the defense mechanism, the primitive infantile defense known as splitting has to do with all good, all bad, all black, all white, all right, all wrong, with me or against me. This is splitting.
So the narcissist converts you into a blackened enemy without any redeeming feature, externally as well as internally.
But the minute he had reduced your snapshot into a devalued state, all bad, the narcissist becomes grandiosely all good and now he is ready to discard you. He is virtuous, he is all good, he is perfect, he is again godlike, he is grandiose and you are the opposite of all this.
You're all bad, you're all defective and deformed, you're all dysfunctional, you're all stupid and ugly and I don't know what.
So he's ready to discard you and there's an actual discard.
But when the narcissist actually discard you, when it happens in reality, this painful process of suddenly becoming nobody to the narcissist, an insignificant other, when the discard in real life happens, again the narcissist is confronted with a dilemma, with a conundrum because you are gone, you exit his life.
What to do with a snapshot? You're gone, you're no longer in his life physically. You don't share the same space, you don't go have it, you have nothing in common. Let's assume we have no children, he never sees you again.
But your snapshot, your introject remains in his mind and this is especially true if he's forced to continue to have contact with you in the future. Because for example, you have a common business or common children. Every time he sees you or every time he thinks of you, if he doesn't see you, there's a clash because he's reminded that there is a corrupted, decadent, bad, imperfect, sick introject in his mind, your introject.
You remember he had devalued, he has devalued your introject in order to be able to discard you. He first devalued you in reality and then he devalued the introject and then he was ready to discard.
But having discarded you, he was left with an introject. And there is a process of co-devaluation.
You remember co-idealization? If I have a good, perfect introject in my mind, then I'm good and perfect.
But what if I have a bad, worthless, imperfect, evil introject in my mind? Then I'm the same. Evil, imperfect, etc.
This is co-devaluation. It's utterly intolerable.
So what the narcissist tries to do, when he discards you, he tries to hand over the introject to you because now the introject is defaced, is mutilated, is a reminder, constant reminder of bad things, imperfect things, evil things, dangerous things.
The narcissist doesn't want this inside his mind. He wants to get rid of it. He wants to hand it over to you and he wants to convince you, he tries to coerce you and convince you to agree with his devaluation of you.
He wants you to say to him, yes, I'm all bad. Yes, I'm imperfect. Yes, I provoked you. Yes, I made mistakes all the time. Yes, I ruined everything. Yes, it's my fault, etc.
When you do this, he can hand the devalued introject to you so that you can own the devalued introject. It's like he gets rid of you externally and internally only if you agree with his assessment of you as a bad and worthy object.
But of course, very few people do. So the narcissist remains stuck with the introject that is now a source of extreme dissonance and discomfort because he devalues the narcissist from inside.
If a narcissist owns an internal object which is less than perfect, which is dysfunctional, which is malevolent, then the narcissist is this internal object. After all, it's an internal object. It's part of who the narcissist is.
When the narcissist fails to hand over the introject to you, this has serious psychological consequences. It's a kind of internal mortification.
But sometimes, even when the partner accepts her newfound role as the evil, deformed, malevolent, stupid, mentally ill person, even when the partner concurs with the devaluation, even then the narcissist fails to hand over the introject.
The narcissist always fails to hand over the devalued introject to the discarded partner.
Always. There's no exception.
Either because the partner would not comply and would not collude in devaluing herself or because of what is called introject constancy. The narcissist has no relationships with real people. He has no relationships with objects out there. So he has no object constancy because it doesn't interact and relate to objects.
Instead, he interacts and relates with internal objects, not objects out there, objects in here. These objects are called introjects. So he has introject constancy. He derives a sense of safety and comfort and he's able to function because he has very good relationships with objects inside his mind, introject constancy.
So when he tries to get rid of one of these objects, when he tries to hand over an introject to someone, he experiences severe abandonment anxiety. It's like his real relationship is with the introject. He's emotionally invested, he's cathected in the introject, not in you.
So when he discards you and he wants to hand over the introject, to put his hand inside his brain, to pluck the introject and give it to you. This creates enormous anxiety because it's like being abandoned by the introject.
And so he can't cope with this. The process of getting rid of your devalued introject in his mind never works for the reasons that I've just mentioned. Either you don't collaborate with your new devalued image or the narcissist experiences overwhelming, overwhelming, abundant anxiety when he tries to hand over the introject to you because he is bonded with the introject, he's attached to the introject. You could say that he loves in his own way the introject.
How can you hand over someone you love? So he fails. He fails. The devalued, the split, the old bad introject remains stuck in his mind as an internal object and he can't get rid of it.
And this creates enormous anxiety. The clinical term for this is bad object internalization introjection. That's what happens to him.
He, in his desperate attempt to separate from you as a maternal figure, he needed to discard you mentally, then devalue you externally, then discard you externally, then devalue your introject and then get rid of the introject.
And this is where he fails. All the other phases are successful, but he fails in getting rid of the introject and it remains like an ulcer, like a wound inside his mind tormenting and torturing him by reminding him that there is a part of him, this introject, which is not perfect, which is not God-like, a part of him, which is a failure, part of him, which is bad and unworthy and perhaps evil. He is tormented by the fact that one of his internal objects is a cause and an engine of narcissistic injury. It's like having a child who is disabled or intellectually challenged. Narcissists can't cope with this because it's a constant reminder of failure and of the fact that they are not God-like and not perfect.
So there's this introject inside his mind and the introject, which has been devalued, keeps telling the narcissist, you see, there's a part of you that is devalued, a part of you that is not God-like and not perfect. This creates anxiety.
What to do about it?
Hovering.
The only way to reintegrate this corrupted and devalued internal object with an external object. The only way to reduce anxiety is by re-idealizing you as an external object and then the narcissist can re-idealize the internal object.
So when the narcissist gets rid of you, there's a discard. He gets stuck with your representation in his mind. He has devalued you and he has devalued this representation. He has devalued your introject, your avatar in his mind.
But this causes him a lot of discomfort and anxiety because it means that he is less than perfect by virtue of owning such an object, by virtue of being this object being a part of him.
So he needs to re-idealize you and this allows him to re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety, ameliorate, mitigate anxiety.
Now that the internal object is re-idealized, the discomfort is gone. There's no discrepancy between his inflated, grandiose self-image is perfect and God-like and the reality of his internal space. Now everyone, every single internal object in his mind is perfect because every single object in his mind is perfect.
He is perfect, but he can't accomplish this unless you are perfect too.
So he needs to reverse the process of devaluation, a process that has failed. The process of devaluation has failed because he couldn't get rid of the devalued introject. So he needs to reverse this and re-idealize you.
But then if he re-idealizes you, he hasn't separated from you. The separation has failed and this is exactly what happens.
The narcissist never succeeds to separate from you. And even if you never see him again, he's going to re-enact, replay the same dynamic with his new intimate partner and his next intimate partner and intimate partner number forty. This is called repetition compulsion.
The narcissist wish to separate conflicts irredeemably and irretractably and conflicts in a way that cannot be resolved with his grandiosity.
In order to separate from the maternal figure, which is you, the mother that is his intimate partner, he needs to devalue her. But if he devalues her, he devalues himself via the introject, via the devalued introject, co-idealization, co-devaluation.
And so this conflicts with his grandiosity. He cannot separate from you because this constitutes narcissistic injury. Separating from you leaves him stuck with a part of him, a representation of you, which is corrupt, which is dysfunctional, which is less than perfect.
So he has to choose. He can devalue you and discard you by devaluing your internal, your introject in his mind, but that would leave him less than God-like, less than perfect, because then he would have an introject which is less than God-like and less than perfect in his mind as part of him.
So he has to give up on his grandiosity if he wants to separate. And if he insists on maintaining his grandiosity, he needs everything and everyone around him to be ideal, including you. Devaluation is a departure from narcissism.
It's the narcissist's attempt to become normal, to grow up, to become an adult. The narcissist much prefers to idealize you because by idealizing you, he's idealizing himself. He is forced to devalue you. He doesn't want to do it, but he's forced to devalue because he desperately is attempting to become, to separate, to individuate, to self-actualize.
The only way for him to do that is to get rid of his grandiosity, to get rid of his narcissism, to separate from the source of all this pathology. His mother, and now you, as a stand-in for his mother, as a substitute for his mother.
Ironically, devaluation is perhaps a healthy act, an act of mental health of the narcissist because he's devaluing a figure which has damaged him. He's devaluing his mother who was really a monster in many ways.
So, it's a healthy thing to do, but then he clashes with his grandiosity. He clashes with his pathology, and his pathology is much stronger than any feeble attempts at mental health, and he takes over, and he's forced to re-idealize everyone and everything around him and inside him, you included.
He tries to hoover you, and if he doesn't hoover you, he goes on to the next intimate partner and he does exactly the same.
The only exception to all this is mortification, narcissistic mortification. All this is impossible if the narcissist has been mortified. The minute the narcissist is mortified, he departs from his previous version because his false self is destroyed in the process of mortification. Disabled and deactivated at the very least, usually destroyed. His defenses crumble. He goes through extreme life-threatening decompensation.
So, it's like he had died. He had died, and now he reinvents himself. He is reincarnated. He is reborn, and this allows him to self-idealize. So, initially after mortification, the narcissist feels dead, and by the way, he has suicidal ideation and so on. So, he goes through a period of reconstruction, but he reconstructs himself with someone else.
In effect, he creates a new false self, and so all the previous memories are erased, and there's no need to idealize or re-idealize you because you're gone. You're gone with his entire history, entire identity, entire memory. He's a new person, and so after mortification, there's never hoovering. Mortification leads to self-supply and self-idealization.
There's a restoration of minimum grandiosity, and then the narcissist re-embarks on the path of pathological classical narcissists.
Okay, I hope I made it much more clear. I'm going to recap everything very, very fast.
The shared fantasy is the space within which narcissists interact with intimate partners.
It starts with co-idealization. The narcissist idealizes you, and by doing so, he's idealizing himself. It also allows him to get you addicted to him because you see your idealized image through his gaze, and that is very addictive.
The next stage is dual mothership. The narcissist becomes your mother, gives you unconditional love and acceptance, and idealizes you, and you become his mother.
But you become his mother in order to allow him to separate from you. He has unfinished business with his mother of origin, and he wants you to play a role so that he can finish the business with you this time.
He needs to separate from you, but the very need to separate from you causes narcissistic injury because it means that he misjudged you. It means that he is not all-knowing as a god should be.
So what he does, he devalues you, the external object. By devaluing you, he restores his grandiosity. He erases the narcissistic injury, and he reduces his abandonment anxiety.
At that point, he splits. He has devalued you, but there is an introject of you, a representation of you in his mind, which is still idealized. So what he does, he splits you.
He makes the introject your inner representation in his mind. He makes it all bad, and so he becomes all good, and now he is ready to discard you in real life. He has you as a devalued object, he has your introject as a devalued object.
He is ready to get rid of you, but he wants to get rid of your introject also. He is trying to hand it over to you. He wants you to own this devalued, corrupted internal representation of you, your introject, and he wants you to acknowledge that you are bad, that you are imperfect, that you destroyed everything, that you are to blame, that you should be guilty and ashamed.
If you don't collude with this game, he has a problem because he's stuck with your introject that has now been devalued.
This creates a process known as co-devaluation, which is the opposite of co-idealization. When the internal object is all good and idealized, the narcissist is all good and idealized.
When your internal object in his mind is corrupted and all bad and unworthy, the narcissist is corrupted and all bad and unworthy. It's co-devaluation, but he cannot get rid of this introject in any other way.
If you refuse to own it and collaborate, he cannot get rid of it in any other way because he has introject constancy. He is emotionally invested in introjects, not in people.
So he's invested in your introject, he's invested in your avatar emotionally, and when he tries to get rid of it unilaterally without your collaboration, he feels anxiety because this generates introject inconstancy.
So he's stuck with devalued, split or bad introject as an internal object, and this creates enormous anxiety.
To resolve this anxiety, the narcissist approaches you, hovering, and tries to re-idealize.
Having re-idealized you, he can then re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety.
The only exception to all this is mortification.
Thank you for listening, and I hope I've been clear this time. I tried to put all my balls in one basket, take your mind off the gutter, and I hope I've succeeded.