Abuser In Your Mind Self Stalking

So next time you see someone come up with a new word, a new phrase, a new concept, a new idea, a new breakthrough, you know what?

Nine out of ten times, it's stolen from my YouTube videos. I'm kidding you're not. Make a small study. Compare their videos to my videos. See where it all came from.

Okay.

Rammed finished.

Now, one last thing. Someone asked me about a dead father. There's Green's concept of a dead mother.

You see, I attribute, I give attribution, I give credit where it's due.

The concept of dead mother is not mine. It's Green's and Ray Green's.

So someone asked me about a dead father and mentioned Kafka's father. Kafka's father was rejecting and sadistic and influenced Kafka's life dramatically.

One could say that he shaped Kafka and molded him into what he had become, including his literary talent and the nature of his content, his literary output. So was he a dead father? Yes, he was a dead father, but dead fathers affect children different to dead mothers. Dead fathers affect later stages of personal development. Dead mothers affect the formative years. Formative years usually culminate in the terrible tools, culminated age two or three, and then continue somehow until age six.

But the really important period is zero to two. And in this period, the mother is mother predominates. The father is largely an irrelevant figure, literally. The mother shapes the psychology of the child from now to eternity.

The father comes into the picture much later when the child, first of all, is able to recognize the difference between himself and the external environment. And when the child is able to construct a theory of the world where father fits in, the child has a symbiotic relationship with his mother. It's a single organism, a single unit.

It's extreme co-dependence.

And so the child doesn't pay attention, is not aware of the existence of other people, or at the very least of their roles, of their function, of their importance.

The father is someone who comes and goes also. Father is busy at work.

So until age two, the father is a non-entity in the child's emerging, shaping psychology.

Starting at age two, the father begins to fulfill a very important role. The father affects personal development, including socialization.

The father is a very important socialization agent. One could say more important than the mother.

So it is the father who introduces the child to society, provides the child with social skills, teaches the child how to read social cues, introduces the child to code of conduct, to what's right, what's wrong, what is acceptable and what is forbidden, what society countenances and what society rejects, and the various sanctions and the price and the cost to benefit ratios of various choices.

So the father is the main agent of socialization.

And then, of course, gender differentiation. If he's a son, he emulates the father as a gender role model.

The father is the first man he sees intimately, first man he can follow, monitor. So he absorbs the father's male attributes, thereby shaping himself into a man, into a man, sorry, he's a male, biologically he's a male, but into a man.

So the man attributes of the father, the masculine attributes, the role play, the role, the gender role model, the father constitutes, render his son a man, or his daughter a woman.

The daughter defines herself by contradistinction to the father. She emulates, imitates, identifies, internalizes the mother, as we will see in a minute.

But she also tells herself, this is mommy and this is not daddy. Daddy is different.

And not only biologically or anatomically, daddy is different in behavior, in reactivity, in everything.

So as far as sons and as far as daughters, the father fulfills a very important gender role differentiation. He has contributions to gender role differentiation.

And then there is identity formation, which includes psychosexuality.

So the father is the one who provides crucial and critical elements of one's identity.

I mentioned gender, but also psychosexuality.

But not only. I said that the father is a socialization agent. And a huge part of our identity has to do with social interactions, shapes and interpersonal effects. So the father contributes to this as well.

So yes, father is important, but not important when it comes to the formation of narcissism.

Formation of narcissism is usually attributed to the formative years. That the mother is a much, much bigger contribution.

You know, in India, there is the coming to the topic finally, you know, in India, there's a habit called Sati. Sati is when a widow, a woman, a widow, should self-immolate, should climb upon the funeral pyre of her deceased husband, of her late husband, and burn with him, self-immolate.

So in the past, until the 19th century, numerous women in India, when they were widowed at whatever age, the husband was burned, finally, on a funeral pyre. And they climbed the funeral pyre and burned with him to join him, presumably in the afterlife. And more importantly, to demonstrate conclusively, one might say, their loyalty and faithfulness to him.

Now, this is the expectation of a narcissist. The narcissist is shocked and infuriated when you move on. When you move on, when you have a life and especially when you had found another man, he can't take it. He wants you to self-immolate on his funeral pyre. He wants to drag you with him into the Valhalla, into the hell, into his hell.

Because the narcissist lives in purgatory. He lives in hell. He inhabits hell. He is hell's own creature, not in the religious sense, in a metaphorical sense. Hell is inside him.

Eugene O'Neill said that hell is other people. No, not for the narcissist, because the narcissist is unable to perceive other people. As far as the narcissist is concerned, hell is himself. This is why he denies himself. This is why he cuts off himself. He can't stand himself. It's too much of a torture.

But he wants you to descend with him to hell. He wants you to burn on his funeral pyre. Because he's mourning himself and grieving himself from age two or four or six. He had died at age two or four or six. He had sacrificed the true self to the monarch, to the idol of the fourth self. He's dead. It's a walking dead. The narcissist is the walking dead. He's a zombie. Are you getting this?

And he wants to zombify you. He wants you dead as well. He wants to mummify you.

The famous movie by Hitchcock, Psycho, where the son mummifies the mother and continues to interact with her in a shared fantasy. That's a narcissist.

So when you finally get rid of the narcissist, when he's out of your life, when you had broken up with him, when you had divorced him, you congratulate yourself. You say, wonderful, I got rid of this thing. I got rid of this external cancer, metastatic cancer that was invading every corner and nook and cranny of my life, suffocating me and stifling me and reducing me to insanity and worse.

Now it's gone. He's gone. It's over. It's not all. It's just starting actually.

This is what happens immediately after you got rid of your narcissist.

And if you are lucky and he doesn't stalk you because some narcissists actually continue to stalk you because they regard the shared fantasy as intact. They refuse to break up. They won't take no for an answer. The shared fantasy is valid and they're in it and you're in it.

So they stalk you.

He wrote a manic stalking, it's called, but that's a minority. The vast majority just walk away. They'll try to hoover you from time to time. Not all of them, some of them, but all in all, they walk away. They find a replacement. They discard you. They replace you.

You're a grain of rice and every grain of rice looks like every grain of rice.

And if this bus has departed, the next one is in 15 minutes.

So the narcissist is out of your life, on majority of cases, but not out of your mind.

You continue the narcissist's work, his abuse, his rejection, his humiliation, his sadism, his stalking. You continue his work. You are an earnest and loyal disciple of his religion. Remember, narcissism is a private religion. He had converted you. You are now a convert to his religion. He had inhabited your mind. He's in there, he's in there talking to you, making you do things, forcing himself on your faults and cognitions. We call this intrusive thoughts and provoking in you, dysregulated emotions.

So the self-stalking continues via something we call persecutory object and another mechanism called introjects.

Let me dwell a bit about these two mechanisms.

The persecretary object is a paranoid, a figment of paranoid ideation, which coalesces around an internal object.

So there's this internal object and you begin to be afraid of it. You begin to anticipate pain and hurt and harm from this internal object.

We usually anticipate pain and hurt and harm and damage and worse from external objects.

But in your case, you shift these fears, these phobias, these anxieties, you shift them inside you. We call this process internalization. You internalize this negative emotionality and then you attribute it to a single well-defined, demarcated object.

And when you imbue this object with all your fears, all your dread, all your horror, all your pain, your hurt, anticipation of harm, rejection, humiliation, abandonment, even internal, when you imbue the object with all this, it becomes a persecretary object.

And then it's able to persecute you from the inside. It continues to persecute you from the inside, continues to inflict the damage, the harm, the hurt, the pain, the agony, the doubt, the fears from the inside. It becomes a perpetual source of abuse in effect.

So now you have an internalized object, which continues the work of abuse that your narcissistic ex had started.

The second mechanism is no less, no less nefarious.

And that's a mechanism of internalized voices. They're known as introjects. Introjects are a complex topic. I'll deal with it in a few minutes.

But to simplify matters, when you internalize someone's voice, judgment, way of thinking, attitudes, even behaviors, vocalizations, when you internalize important aspects of another person and they become embedded in your mind, and then they become you, they become a part of who you are.

Is critical determinants of your identity. Then we call this process interjection.

And the results are introjects.

So the problem is that victims of complex trauma, victims of narcissistic abuse, for example, misidentify introjects, which are internal objects, misidentify introjects as external.

These voices speak from the inside. They tell you that you're bad, unworthy, slut, failure, loser, you know, they tell you bad things about yourself. They regulate your self esteem by decreasing it to the point of vanishing. They undermine your self confidence. They render your sense of self worth, labile and fluctuating. You can't regulate it anymore. They create, in other words, liability and dysregulation.

But these introjects in a healthy person, person who had not been subjected to prolonged trauma, and therefore doesn't have a post traumatic condition. In such a person, the person knows that these are internal voices. He knows that in the case of a trauma victim, and also in the case of borderline, there is a misidentification. Very often, these voices are perceived as external.

It's not that you think your abuser is there as a hologram, or is there physically. It's not that it's that you perceive these voices as not part of you as coming from some other source.

Even when they come from inside your mind and inside your brain, it's like someone else is talking to you.

This happens a lot when you have a sadistic parent, sadistic narcissistic, withholding, dead parent. The voice of this parent is embedded in you like a shrapnel, like a shrapnel from the explosion of a shell, you know, it's embedded in you, it had wounded you.

But you still perceive these voices external.

Even when the parent is long dead, you're still arguing with the parent, you're still having dialogues with the parent, you still justify, try to justify yourself, or make excuses, or hide things, hide things from the introjection, you know, conceal, lie, deceive.

And you're treating the voice of the dead parent and the voice of your narcissistic abuser.

These voices you're treating them as not really you, like foreign objects lodged in your mind, like a projectile.

You know, there's the famous movie, I think, 1903, The Voyage to the Moon by Millet, the French filmmaker, and you see the rocket embedded in the moon, like a rocket hit the moon and penetrated it.

It's the same with the introjects.

While in a healthy person, the introjects is fully contained within the moon.

In your case, the introject is like a rocket that had penetrated the artificial surface of the moon, but still stands out clearly distinguishable from the moon from the surface.

So there is a strong perception of alienation and estrangement, like they're the voices.

And these abusive, humiliating, shaming, guilt-tripping voices, they're not really you. You don't feel they're part of you, you feel you even resent them, you even hate them. You try to get rid of them, but they intrude, they're intrusive.

And so technically psychosis, this is psychotic state. It's not a very advanced psychotic state, but it already reflects, already includes some important elements of psychosis like hyper reflection.

And you need to reframe this. You need to tell yourself these voices, these introjects, the voice of my abuser, the voice of my mother, the voice of my hateful father or whatever. These are my voices. These are my voices. I took the words from them maybe, I borrowed their way of thinking and so, but I appropriated it.

It has now become me.

Now, these voices are the voices of absence.

The problem we have in, for example, therapy, when we try to help the patient get rid of these voices or regain a modicum of control, is that these voices do not represent an existence, do not represent an entity.

Yes. If your neighbor tells you something bad, you know, it's your neighbor's voice, you know, whatever he had said is, these are his words.

And so you can conflict with your neighbor, you can confront your neighbor, constrain your neighbor, place firm boundaries and not allow your neighbor to cross them on pain or punishment.

But what do you do when the voices in your head are the voices of long absent people? And not only are the voices of long absent people, they are the voices of long absent people who themselves were absence because narcissists, the narcissist does not exist.

As I keep repeating, it's very important to understand this.

The narcissist is a wall of mirrors. It's a concoction. It's a confabulation. It's a piece of fiction. It's a movie.

So there's a double layer of absence.

The voice of the intelligent belongs to an absent person. And that person in and of itself was absence, emptiness, void. There was a void talking to you. And you were and then the void was gone and you internalized the voice of the void, the voice of deep space, the voice of emptiness and nothingness is now inside you, talking to you in the absence of the source, which never existed to start with.

This double absence, this dual layer of absence makes it unusually difficult to get rid of the introjections. We have techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy, which are very, very effective with negative automatic thoughts, but not with these voices, not with these introductions.

The experience of narcissistic abuse, as I had said in my previous video, the experience of narcissistic abuse is unlike the experience of any other kind of abuse, because in all other kinds of abuse, you're being abused by someone.

In narcissistic abuse, you're being abused by the emptiness, by Tohu Va'boo, by the abuse, by chaos itself. You're being abused by nothingness. And there's no way you can counter it.

How do you counter emptiness?

Your hand reaches in and gets nowhere. It's a whole of mirrors replicated and replicated. These are millions of reflections, billions, trillions, endless reflections to the end of time and to the beginning of the universe, to the big bang itself. There's nothing there.

So this is the voice of absence.

And what's even worse, the introjects make use of something called counterfactuals. Counterfactuals is when we ask ourselves, what if I had done things differently? What if I hadn't misbehaved? What if I loved him more? What if I tried more?

So these are counterfactuals. And these counterfactuals, which are spewed out by the vitriolic diatribes of these introjects inside your head. So these are voices of absence and void inside your head that spew out counterfactuals.

What if tormenting you with alternative scenarios of a reality that had never been there to start with? And these voices collude and collaborate with your inner critic. If you're lucky and you have a balanced, reasonable, rational, just inner critic, they amplify it to the point that it's no longer any of these things.

It becomes sadistic. It becomes your enemy. It hates you. It wants to destroy you. It becomes nihilistic at your expense. It wants to punish you. It wants to defeat you. Aided and abetted and egged on and pushed to extremes by these introjects, they convert your inner critic, also known as superego, into a sadistic.

So these voices have serious, massive effects on the nature of contracts, constructs, psychological constructs that had preceded them. They affect different parts of your personality. They transform them.

It's like infection. They change the tissue.

So everyone has an ego, superego and so on.

The introjects come in, your abuser invades your mind, you know, invades your mind, body snatches you, mind snatches you and implants seeds known as introjects in your mind. And these seeds will grow and will proliferate and will take over your mind. And as they do it, they also change and convert and shapeshift previous psychological constructs and elements in your mind that used to be healthy. And it's a disease process. It's cancer. It metastasizes and it renders even healthy tissues in your psychology, increasingly more sick, dysregulated, pathologized, problematic.

This is if you were healthy to start with.

But many of the victims of narcissistic abuse start off with a sadistic superego. They were wrongly parented by a dead mother or later a dead father. They were as children told that they are unworthy and bad. They received conditional love, which was heavily dependent on performance and complying with certain expectations. They were instrumentalized or they were parentified. The parent was immature and narcissistic.

And at any rate, they have developed this perception that they are inferior, not worthless, worthless.

And so they have a sadistic superego. And these sadistic superego keep broadcasting. You are nothing. You're zero. You're failure. You're loser. You're a defeat. You will never amount to anything. You're bad. You're unworthy. You're a slut. You're whore.

I mean, these messages keep coming even before the introjects. And now the introjects join hands with a sadistic superego. And it becomes an onslaught that literally can push you to insanity.

Guilt, shame, self-loathing, self-destructive urges and impulses, self-trashing, reckless behaviors. They wish to die, suicidal ideation.

Introjects are very dangerous. When they're embedded, when they find themselves in an environment that is welcoming, hospitable and conducive to their message, because then the message can flourish, proliferate, climb on the walls like so much ivy. And there's no way to eradicate it without eradicating the entire personality, which is, of course, not feasible. That's why therapy fails very, very often in these cases.

The abuser lodges himself in your mind, insinuates himself into your mind in so many ways, intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold, love-hate, anticipated rejection, triangulation, unpredictable behavior, fostering dependence. There's so many ways.

And then when he's in, when he had penetrated your defenses, when he found the chinks in your armor, when he leveraged your vulnerabilities and fragility and brittleness, and when he's deep inside your mind, as he is deep inside your body, he says, he releases the load, he releases his charge, the improvised explosive device, the rocket, the cruise missile, and he stays there forever. He is part of your tissue now. He is so many neurons in a population in a specific pathway that's going to specific places and affecting specific areas of your brain, the hippocampus, the amygdala, other parts.

We can show you how this is happening in functional magnetic resonance imaging. Every time you think of him, your brain erupts like so many fireworks in a bad way. Your emotions become dysregulated, your amygdala is hyperactive, your hippocampal functions are suppressed. Every time you remember something he told you, which was disparaging, humiliating, undermined you, undercut you, criticized you, stabbed you in the back, backbiting, all these techniques, gaslighted you, lied to you, cheated on you, betrayed you every time you recall any of this. And every time you replay the recordings of his voice, including the sound of his voice, the specific sound of his voice, your brain is on fire. It's about to melt.

You can see this physically.

And now you have two choices. You can collaborate with these introjects, agree with them, let them do their work, drive you to insanity, madness, suicide, or you can fight them, the fight for your life. It's a fight for your survival.

You can self-stalk, continue his work, abuse yourself, stalk yourself, don't give yourself a recipe, a break, think bad things about yourself, feel guilty, ashamed, what-ifs, counterfactuals, can play the game, absolutely. And be his agent, you're transforming yourself into his long arm, into an extension of himself, as he always thought, he always considered you to be an extension.

By colluding with the introjects, by conspiring with the introjects, you had become his extension. Or you can fight back. You can fight back.

And yes, this has to be done in therapy before you ask, how do I fight back? You can't do everything by yourself. That's narcissistic, grandiose thinking. It's very common among victims. I cured myself, I healed myself, I healed myself. These are, this is the narcissist in you speaking.

You can't help yourself, you need help.

The success of hoovering, the reason he hovers you successfully so often is because you want to silence these introjects. You want them gone, you want them dormant.

And so you think if I team up with him again, if I restore what we used to have, these voices will go away. I will feel good. I will feel elated. I will feel high. I will feel exuberant. It will be wonderful. The voices will go away. I will become egosyntonic.

Now I'm ego-distonic. I feel discomfited. I feel threatened. I feel bad.

But if I team up with him again, everything will be okay. That's hoovering for you.

Narcissist goes through a similar process in external modification. The external modification essentially is a process of introjection.

They introject the person who caused them the modification. So if you cause the narcissist some kind of modification, if you cheat on him, ostentatiously betray him, criticise him in a way that works, hitting a wrong nerve or a soft spot, he's going to be mortified.

And because he has a snapshotting attitude, he snapshots you. He relates to the internal representation of you. He never relates to you as an external object, but as an internal object.

So that moment when you had mortified him, your internal representation, this internal object becomes a persecatory object. Mortification, external modification is actually a process of converting a hither-to-benign loving, benevolent, caring, empathic object, idealized object, into a persecatory, malevolent, malicious object.

This process of converting a good object to a bad object via splitting, this is external modification, actually.

Now you understand. And now you also understand that the narcissist causes you modification.

You had idealized the narcissist. You had created an internal object of the narcissist, which was essentially benign, benevolent, loving, caring, supportive, empathic, attentive, and so on and so forth.

The love grooming, the love bombing and grooming phase, they're intended to inculcate in you, to create in you, or to help you create this internal representation of the narcissist, which has idealized and highly unrealistic.

The narcissist is good for you.

But when there is a breakup or divorce, I mean, this internal object is now converted into a persecatory object, an enemy within. And this enemy within, this fifth column, this Trojan horse, collaborates with all the elements inside you that hate you. Your sadistic superego.

The voice of your neglectful dead mother, the voice of your incestuous, horrible father, I don't know, peers, your boss. I mean, everything bad, this repository of bad, evil, affluent, self-deprecating, self-destructive, self-defeating, self-hating, self-loathing inside you, it collaborates. All these elements collaborate with the narcissist, narcissist interjects.

And the narcissist interjects are embedded in the internal representation of the narcissist in your mind, which choose to be all good and now is all bad.

The persecutory object collaborates, includes the interjects, the disparaging, humiliating, berating, demeaning, degrading interjects.

The persecutory object interjects inside, like the virus, like the coronavirus, swims in your mind, looking for collaborators, cooperation. Who's going to work with me, guys? I'm here. I'm inside. I've penetrated and invaded and I'm about to destroy her. Who would like to join me?

Yeah, I'm here. I'm her mother. I hate her. Yeah, I'm here. I'm her superego, her sadistic superego. I want to join in. And a war is waged. Interjection is a defense mechanism against neglect, abuse, trauma, and abandonment, mainly in early childhood. It involves processes of identification with the abuser and then incorporating the abuser and then internalizing the abuser into ways as in an idealized form, which is the love bombing and grooming phase, or as a persecutory object, which happens later.

A few comments about interjection.

Freud said that interjection is a part of the ecosystem. It's what he called the relational mechanism of the ecosystem. It says that what happens is that when the child grows, he tries to look at the world from the outside. He tries to adopt an external point of view. There's an internal point of view, which gradually becomes, according to Jung, the constellated self.

But there's also an external point of view. The child tries to put itself outside itself, like out of body experience, and look at itself and look at other people. And so there are inputs from this externalized point of view. And the child takes these inputs and incorporates these inputs in his emerging self-identification, his emerging identity.

And so the child from that moment has a notion and experiences internality, but also externality. This all is done by representational images, images of the parents. We mentioned the internal.

And so these images gradually fuse with the personality. When you have weak ego boundaries, you're using interjection as a defense mechanism.

Winnicott said that in interjection and projection, they allow you to hand over omnipotence. They allow you to experience weakness without ego destiny, to accept weakness and to say, okay, I'm weak now. I'm dependent now. I need someone else. Here is this someone else. I'm going to interject him. I'm going to swallow him. I'm going to put him in my mind so that the power of that someone, the potency will now be with me forever. Here I am weak. Here I'm dependent. Here I'm needy. And this external source, he's strong. He's powerful. He's supportive. I'm going to swallow him whole. I'm going to digest him. I'm going to assimilate him to use a gestalt. I'm going to assimilate him. And from now on, he will be with me forever.

Freud said that the ego and the superego were constructed by interjecting external entities and behaviors. And he said that the superego is total interjection. He said that parental figures, authority figures, you adopt their attitudes, you adopt things they tell you, you put all this together, it becomes conscious or superego.

And he said in the process of interjection, the interjection is not like a replica. It's all facsimile, totally authentic, totally genuine, but it changes a bit what you absorb. You adopt what you absorb to who you are.

There was a psychoanalyst, Maria Torek, and she wrote an essay, The Illness of Morning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse. And she said that Freud and Melanie Klein confused interjection within cooperation. She preferred Shando Ferranci's attitude approach to interjection. She said that failed morning when we grieve, you know, each phase in one of my previous videos, I explained that each phase is traumatic and we grieve. When we grow up, we have to let go of previous phases, previous people, and we grieve this process in this process.

And she says that failed morning, in failed morning, the impotence of the process of interjection, gradual, slow, laborious, mediated, effective, means that incorporation is the only choice because it is phantasmatic and mediated, instantaneous, magical, sometimes hallucinatory. She called it the creeped effects of incorporation.

I want to make one last comment. Masks are social constructs in healthy people. Masks are automatically deployed by the individual to cope with external objects with others.

When the personality is disorganized, internal objects, inner representations of others, are often misperceived as external objects. And the very same masks are used to interact with internal objects as you do with external objects.

We see this very often in borderline personality, in narcissistic personality disorder, in dissociative identity disorder.

In healthy people, they put on a mask, it's called persona. This mask is called persona. Jung Goffman wrote about it.

So they put on a mask when they interact with other people. But people who don't have a clear boundary between internal and external, they put on a mask also when they interact with internal objects.

And the mask has two protective purposes.

One, to defend against or mitigate threatening internal objects and negative introjects.

When you put on a mask, it's like your invisibility cloak. The negative introjects, the sadistic superego, the elements inside you that hate you and want you dead and want you gone and want to destroy because you wear a mask, they will not see you. Or they will mistake your identity. They will go looking for you somewhere else.

It's like invisibility.

And the second reason you wear a mask when you interact with internal objects is to reconcile a bad introject with a good internal object that corresponds to it.

So you have sometimes a good internal object, but this good internal object says bad things. For example, mommy. When you're very young as a child, mommy is a good internal object, but sometimes she frustrates you, she withholds, she's absent, she says bad things to you.

So when you try to reconcile these two, you modify either one of two. And you do this by wearing the mask.

Introjects are immutable, and their content is fixated. In contrast, internal objects can and do evolve over the lifespan.

This creates additional discrepancies that the masks have to tackle, so as to quell the ineluctable dissonance that such disparities foster.

Once the narcissist, for example, has formed an internal object based on an external object, he proceeds to interact only with the internal representation that is snapshotting. He divorces it from the external source. Yet he fully believes that he's actually interacting with the external object.

And since the narcissist completely conflates the mix and mixes external objects and internal ones, his masks are permanently out there, permanently externalized. He doesn't know, he's interacting with an object, but he's not sure if it's external or internal.

So he always has a mask.

The role of the mask is to validate the narcissist's misperceptions by providing him with repeated proof and input that internal objects are actually external objects.

The narcissist says to himself, if I'm wearing a mask, this must be an external object because people wear masks only with external objects.

Ah, wait a minute. It's an external object. I was right. I was right. It's not internal. It's external.

This snapshot, this inner representation, this internal objects, it's actually external. I'm okay. I'm normal.

They accomplish this by eliciting narcissistic supply. It supplies confirmation that the narcissist is of sound mind and not deluded and not fantasizing, that the false self is not false, that grandiosity reflects a good reality testing, and that internal objects are actually external.

And when they praise him, when they give him supply, they're doing it from the outside. It's a narcissist's attempt to overcome.

So this is the role of masks.

Okay, get to work. Get to work before the introjects devarium.