Good, almost new year.
Like everyone else, I've had my share of backstabbing fake friends.
Actually, I just got rid of one, the worst of the lot.
But Joanne Lachcar, the late lamented Joanne Lachcar, was a true friend to me. We worked together, we collaborated, and she was one of the mothers of the field. She was the first to describe the dynamics between borderlines and narcissists in her famous book, The Borderline Masticistic Couple.
Today's video is a compilation of two videos I've posted earlier.
One is titled, "How does the narcissist see you?" And the other one is titled, very originally, "How does the borderline see you?"
So when you put the two together, you get a complete picture of the dynamics in the relationship between borderlines and narcissists. Narcissists tend to be very attracted to borderlines, and borderlines tend to be very attracted to narcissists for reasons that I've explained in 71 videos, all of them available in my Borderline Personality Disorder Revisited playlist on this channel. Playlist, go to the channel, find playlist, and find the borderline playlist. I explained there why borderlines and narcissists typically end up together, hurting each other in the process and then embedding themselves in a shared fantasy. So without further ado, let's go straight to the two videos combined together that give you a total picture of the narcissistic borderline couple.
Here is a toast to Joanne Lachkarn, a true friend who passed away a few weeks ago. May she rest in peace. Her work will live forever.
Thank you. Okay, baby seal and multiple shvanpanim. My name is Sam Baknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited NES. I am a professor of psychology in CEAP's Center for International Advance and Professional Studies, the Outreach Program of this year's Consortium of Universities. A few weeks ago, I made a video about how the narcissist sees you. Today I'm going to tell you how the borderline sees you, her intimate partner. It's going to be a tough ride, very triggering. And you make frequent stops, drink water, think positive thoughts. The borderline is a harrowing experience. Living with a borderline, let alone loving a borderline, is a suicidal mission, but it's intense. It's colorful. It makes you feel alive like nothing else. You had been warned, baby seals, shvanpanim, shvanpanim and shovarim. Look it up. Okay, so there's a borderline in your life and you are her intimate partner. Yes, yes, yes. Before I get an avalanche of some demonious self-righteous comments, 50% of all borderline personality disorder diagnoses are handed out to men. I propose a new diagnosis, covert borderline, which better suits men.
Because while the emphasis with borderline women is about emotionality and sexuality, the emphasizing borderline men is more about grandiose power and similar things.
Borderline men resemble much more narcissists than borderline women. That's why I'm proposing to break the two apart and to have an emotional dysregulation disorder assigned to women with secondary psychopathy as a self-state and covert borderline, which is a combination of borderline and narcissism assigned to men.
Okay, so every gender pronoun here is interchangeable. I'm going to use she. I'm going to use a female figure, female protagonist in this narrative because hitherto, which is a fancy word for until now, most BPD diagnosis were handed out to women. Women were diagnosed mostly with BPD.
Okay, enough with this gender nonsense. Let's get to the point.
How does a borderline see you? Her intimate partner.
And so as you well know by now, there are two stages in borderline and these two stages in the borderline's behavior correspond to her two anxieties, abandonment anxiety, the clinical term is separation insecurity and engulfment anxiety.
The borderline's point of view is the outcome of her internal dynamics, especially the compulsive need to approach you and then avoid you. I hate you. Don't let me go. I love you. I want you dead. I detest you. Don't ever leave me.
These conflicting messages, these mixed signals render the life of the intimate partner of the borderline a mayhem. Totally chaotic. Utterly unpredictable. A rollercoaster of emotions, reactions and pain. Pain permeates every interaction with the borderline. Pain coupled with exhilaration, coupled with pain, coupled with exhilaration. The ups and downs of the borderline infect the partner. They are contagious.
In the approach phase, this is how the borderline sees you. You're my world. You're my life.
And she means it. She means outside of you, apart from you, there's nothing. There's no one.
She kind of minimizes herself and projects herself onto you and into you. She renders herself the equivalent of an introject. She wants you to subsume her. She wants you to consume her.
This is not exactly merger and fusion, which are common in codependency. This is much more than that.
This is identification and introjection. It's an infantile process.
The borderline is intensely childlike, which provokes in you paternal or parental reactions. The borderline parentifies you. You're my world. You're my life.
Because I don't know any better. Because I don't have any other access. Because you are the vector through which I exist. I resend my ego to use my antiquated fringe.
The borderline sees you as a savior. She foists on you the role of a rescuer. You will save me from myself, she says. I'm horrible. I'm intolerable. I'm poisoned. I ruined everything. For myself and for others.
And you are going to change all this. You're going to save me from myself. You're going to save me from others. And you're going to save others from me. You're going to be the buffer, the firewall between me and my pernicious, radioactive impact on the world around me. Everything the borderline tells you, everything is meaningless without you.
Your existence as my intimate partner imbues the world. Events, other people, interactions with sense. You my intimate partner, you make sense of reality for me. You are my reality testing.
The borderline is likely to often ask you, do you think the same? Is it true?
Because you are the yardstick of her universe. You are her reality. You are a stable rock, guaranteed presence, permanence, constancy, determinacy. When you are there in her life, the borderline feels utterly oceanic, safe. You are, in other words, a secure base.
Again, these are infantile childhood dynamics.
But you have other roles in the borderline's life during the approach phase. Don't ever mix your drinks. You stabilize the borderline's moods.
She has ups and downs. It's known as moodlability. She is depressive and she's a bit manic, which is a reason why many diagnosticians confuse and conflate borderline personality disorder with bipolar disorder.
Wrong, of course. The first is a personality disorder. The second, the latter, is a mood disorder.
But people with borderline personality disorder cycle all the time. This rapid cycling of moods affects cognitions, decisions, choices, values, behaviors, reactions. These render the borderline identity-less. This is called identity disturbance. It's as if she has no core, no kernel, no stable atom inside her, which kind of oscillates and determines her time.
The borderline is a river in flux, an ephemeral cloud. It is the role of an intimate partner, you, to stabilize, says the borderline, to stabilize my moods.
You should regulate your emotions because with you I feel safe and with you I feel whole. I feel completed without you. I'm partial. Without you I am almost dead. Lots of me decay and decompose and fall apart and disintegrate without you.
You are the "elain vital", you are the animating force within me, says the borderline.
When you are with me, committed to me, monopolized by me, 100% mine, possessed by me, owned by me, inside me in every way, sexual and otherwise, you are me.
But you are a better me, you are stronger me, you are more stable me, and so I can merge with you, thus improving my functionality, allowing me to cope, to survive, to somehow go through life.
Because I don't like life, I hate life and I hate who I am in life.
I need you to live another life for me, vicariously, by proxy, and I will give my life for you. I will sacrifice myself, self-sacrificial.
It's the same with the Master's, by the way. He sacrifices his true self for a false self.
The borderline also is a false self, but her false self merges with the intimate partner, process known as external regulation.
So gradually, you are sucked into the vortex of the borderline.
You begin to feel responsible for her moods, her emotions, even her cognitions.
She pretends to be dependent on you, all the timefostering dependency in you.
You are becoming co-dependent on the borderline because she can't live without you. She can't survive without you.
You feel responsible. She is very childlike. She is very vulnerable. She cries, her beautiful eyes tear up anytime you threaten to leave or to go, and you just can't take it. She pushes all your buttons. She leverages your softness and your empathy. All you need to be needed, all your grandiosity.
The borderline is adept at finding all the chinks in your armor, and then invading you and penetrating you like no other.
The borderline says, "I'm bad. I'm evil. I'm unworthy. I'm poisonous. I'm a bad object.
But with you, my internet partner, I feel good. I feel worthy because you accept me as I am, because you love me as I am, because you see me like no other, and because you enable and empower every part of me, every hue and every frequency in my spectrum.
I become more through you. I self-actualize through your agency.
Borderline borrows your agency in order to become more self-effecious, but in the processshe renders you less agentic.
And this is merely the approach side.
Now we are heading into the real tumult, the avoidance.
You can't win with the borderline. You love her. You intimate with her. You lose her. You're cold and detached and neutral and therapeutic and aloof. You lose her. You try to help her too much. Give her advice. Direct her. You lose her. You ignore her. You let her live her own life. You lose her.
It's a lose-lose proposition or a lose-win proposition in some cases, but usually a lose-lose proposition.
There's no winning strategy with a borderline.
And some people are addicted to the right, to the drama, to the rollercoaster. They don't care about the borderline. They want to experience the borderline's dysregulation vicariously. They love the ups and downs. They adore waking up in the morning, not knowing what the day will bring.
Borderline guarantees this serendipity, this unpredictability, this inconstancy, impermanence and indeterminacy.
Borderline is a bag full of surprises, a never-ending adventure, a risk, a novelty, a danger lurking in your own bed.
How is this resistible?
It's not.
It's not even for healthy people.
So approach is always followed by avoidance regardless of your behavior, behavioral choices, and regardless of your strategies with the borderline.
Approach and avoidance, repetition, compulsion in the borderline is, as the name implies, a compulsion.
It's out of the borderline's control and it is not mitigated or affected by any external factors or parameters.
Some stage the borderline says, "I'm overwhelmed by pain. You are hurting me, owing to your rejection and abandonment."
And yet the borderline tends to interpret almost everything as a rejection. Almost any behavior is a form of abandonment. You are too long on the phone with a business associate. You're abandoning and rejecting.
Go on a business trip. You're abandoning and rejecting.
You have your own set of friends. You're abandoning and rejecting.
You cast a glance at a beautiful woman in a restaurant. You're abandoning and rejecting.
You refuse to countenance and accept the borderline's egregious misconduct and bad behavior. You're abandoning and rejecting.
You disagree with the borderline more than once. You're abandoning and rejecting.
Everything is abandonment and rejection in the borderline's eyes and she often projects abandonment and rejection onto you. It is she who wants to abandon and reject you and she projects it onto you.
She anticipates abandonment and rejection. After all, she is a bad object. She is unworthy. She's corrupt. She's unlovable. She's inadequate.
Why would you not abandon and reject her?
It's inevitable, ineluctable that you should.
So she prepares herself. She preemptively cheats on you. She prophylactically abandons you first before you abandon her.
You're not protective, she tells you.
You don't love me, really. Your love is not true. You don't care about me. You found someone else to take my place. You're disloyal. You're looking for alternatives.
And no amount of proofs to the contrary, no amount of evidentiary presentation would help you.
She's made up her mind. Don't confuse her with the facts.
Most borderline women are also misandrist. They hate men because they've been exposed to the vagaries of abuse and bad relationships. They're post-traumatic. So they're likely to punish you for being men. They're likely, for example, to cheat on you in order to cause you pain or to triangulate, to accomplish the same, to get a rise out of you by sexually self-trashing.
With other men, the borderline accomplishes multiple goals simultaneously. She affirms and confirms the bad object in her, thus justifying her anticipation of rejection and abandonment. She also proved to herself that all men are immoral beasts. The all men take advantage of how broken, damaged women such as herself that upholds her misandrist, man-hating view. Cheating is only one type of reckless behavior from insecurity, one type of reckless behavior.
The borderline can become violent, aggressive in other ways, shopaholic, workaholic, pathological gambler, and there are numerous ways to self-destruct.
But whenever the borderline anticipates abandonment and rejection, she decompensates. All her defenses collapse.
In the dead point, she's ready to move on to a stage called acting out.
But not before she switches into another self-state, a secondary psychopathy self-state.
She becomes merciless, disempathic, hateful, revengeful. She needs to prove to herself that she is still irresistible and she would do it with another man. She needs to prove to herself that she is omnipotent. Her grandiosity equals easily the narcissist. So she would, I don't know, overspend, deplete the family's savings. In retail therapy, spray shopping, reckless behaviors are very common in borderline.
In the acting out phase, be it with men, be it with money, be it with violence, be it with behaviors such as drunk driving, etc., etc.
At some point, the borderline decides upon the following sequence.
You're a man.
She's a bad objectbecause you're a man and therefore impervious to the needs, emotions, and love of a woman.
Because you're a man, you're evil, you're a beast, you're immoral.
Because she's a bad object, you're going to abandon her, you're going to reject her.
She needs to strike first.
So she would decompensate, she would switch to a psychopathic state, and she would act out.
And while she does this, she experiences triple dissociation, three types of dissociation, amnesia, depersonalization, and derealization, and the borderline experiences, typically two or all three during a period of acting out.
Amnesia, she deletes the memories.
Simply she has no access to them.
She has very blurred memories, even when she's not drunk. Autopilot, depersonalization, she feels that she is not inside her body, that it's just she is just going through the motions, that her body is some kind of independent entity, taking on a life of its own. Depersonalization, it's not me, I'm not there, this is not happening to me, I'm not doing this. Derealization, the whole thing feels like a movie. It's not real. It's dreamlike or nightmarish.
These are three mechanisms of dissociation that operate in a borderline that had been hurt, that had been rejected, that had been abandoned, that had been humiliated.
This is her reaction.
She acts out dissociatively. She says to herself, "I need to do something, I have to do something. I need to do anything. I need to hurt him, my intimate partner."
And thenhaving hurt him, the power matrix restored, because it's a power play of course, having hurt him and the power matrix, power balance restored, I can regain his love. I'm going to cheat on him and still regain his love. I'm going to destroy his finances and he would still love me. I need to test him to the limits, I need to push beyond the most extremenether regions of my world and then act in ways which are so egregious, so ostentatious, so horrible, so beyond the pale, that if he still loves me after all this, it means that he really loves me. It's a test of loyalty which many intimate partners or friends often fail. It's a test of loyalty and a test of the veracity of the intimate partner's lovebecause a borderline never trusts the intimate partner to truly love her.
How can anyone love her? She's horrible.
So she acts horrible. She becomes the bad object, orish, or whatever.
And then she returns to the intimate partner begging for forgiveness, riven with guilt and shame and discomfort and egodystonic, begging on her knees to be forgiven and accepted back to the fold.
And if the intimate partner says yes, for a while she rests assured that she's loved. She feels accepted.
The avoidance phase, in the avoidance phase, the borderline openly says, "You want me dead. You want to shackle me. You want to shame me to your world or to your bed. You want me to be only yours. You want to disappear into you."
She says to the partner, "You've changed. You blame-shift. I'm the victim, not you. You guilt-tricked me. I've done nothing wrong. You have rejected me. You have abandoned me."
And so I was just retaliating. And I didn't even know what I was doing because I was dissociating. It wasn't me. I don't feel it was me.
There's some reckoning with his self-state theory.
So I think it was a self-state. It wasn't me.
She says to the intimate partner, "You're not even self-aware. You're very self-destructive. You're going to destroy our relationship. You don't like what I've done. You can forgive me. You know I can't help it. You know it's stronger than me. You know it's not me."
I wasn't there when I shagged this guy, when I slept with him. I wasn't there. It was just my body. Anyhow meaningless because I love you and only you. You're judgmental. You're over-critical.
And you want to drag me with you. You just after my leg looks, you just want to have sex. You don't really love me. And paranoid ideation sets in in the avoidance phase.
The borderline becomes paranoid.
She develops persecutory delusions, a persecutory object which used to be you. The idealized object of the intimate partner, the idealized introject, the internal objectis replaced by a persecutory one. The intimate partner becomes the enemy.
I love you. Don't leave me. I hate you. Stay with me. I want to kill you. I hope you live forever.
A persecatory object in the borderline is likely to tell you, "You're lying to me. You constantly deceive me. You constantly cheat on me. You're out to get me. You entrap me. You never mean what you say. You gaslight me. You hate me while I love you unconditionally and self-sacrificially. You don't know how to love you. You're humiliating me and shaming me all the time. You're malicious. You know how guilty I feel. You know how shameful I feel for what I've done. And yet you harp on it. And you keep bringing me back to these memories which I want to erase, which I just want to forget. And yes, of course it will happen again.
But it's just the way I am. It's a take-it-or-live-it proposition.
If you truly love me, you will accept me.
And now that you have survived the ordeal, the test that I've imposed on you, now I know that you truly love me. And now I can approach you again.
Again, you become my world. You are my life. You will save me from myself and from others.
Everything is meaningless without you.
You're a stable rock. You stabilize my moods. You regulate my emotionswith you. I feel safe and whole, completed. I will give my life for you. I'm bad and evil, but with you I feel good and worthy because you've just proven that you accept and love me as I am.
It may come as a shock to you, but the narcissist doesn't see you the way you see yourself. The narcissist doesn't see himself the way you see him.
And frankly, it's doubtful whether the narcissist sees anyone at all.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the smiling blue professor of psychology and the author of the inestimable Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism, Revisited, The Bible of the field and the book that coined the phrase "narcissistic abuse".
Today we're going to discuss the narcissist's point of view.
How he perceives you and the relationship.
Are you truly a significant other or maybe just an insignificant other? Are you an intimate partner? Is there intimacy and is there a partnership in the relationship with the narcissist?
But most importantly, what does he think about you secretly in the inner recesses of his undisclosed mind, the occult areas of his demented soul?
I know you like this. You like to think that narcissists are possessed by demons. They're not possessed by demons. They are demons. I'm kidding. I'm just kidding.
Narcissists are flawed human beings with lacking equipment. Nothing more, nothing less. Terrified, traumatized kids who throw temper tantrums and can perceive other people as separate from them.
And so let's delve straight in.
When the narcissist sees you for the first time, he takes a snapshot of you, he internalizes a snapshot and he continuously interacts with the snapshot.
Blah blah blah blah. You know this from previous videos.
He also photoshops the snapshot, a process known as idealization.
By idealizing you, he can idealize himself.
If you are perfect and he is in possession of a perfect object, you, then he is perfect. Or maybe even uber perfect, more perfect than even you.
But then gradually life intervenes.
Reality intrudes. You begin to deviate and diverge from the idealized snapshot, which pisses the narcissist off.
And then he begins to change the way he sees you, the external object.
Mind you, the internal object, the introject, your representation in the narcissist's mind, the snapshot, the avatar, that doesn't change until very late in the relationship.
But the way he perceives you begins to change.
He cannot really accept you as separate from him. You are an extension. You're an organ.
But it's like someone with a chronic illness who is very angry at his heart or his liver or his lungs because they give him trouble.
So when you get chronically ill with your kidneys, for example, you may develop a hatelove relationship with your kidneys. You may resent your kidneys for giving you a tough time. Same thing.
That's not how the narcissist sees you. Another arm, another leg, for extremely lucky, another heart.
The narcissist, first of all, is likely to convince himself that he had judged you correctly when you have met.
He needs to preserve his grandiosity. The narcissist never makes mistakes. The narcissist is never wrong. The narcissist is infallible. It's inconceivable that he has misjudged you, for example.
So he tells himself, "I judged her correctly and appropriately when I met her. My perception of her was right. My judgment of people is intact. Nothing's wrong with me. She has changed. She has changed.
Why has she changed?
Well, I don't knowthe influence of bad friends. Her family is poisoning her against me. Circumstances, she is mentally ill or she is physically ill. The medication she's taking, exposure to left-wing radical ideas in college, what have you.
Whatever the reason may be, the narcissist convinces himself that you are being transformed, that you are in the process of metamorphosizing into another person.
And so the gap between the snapshot and you, in reality, the gap between your introject, the internal object that stands in for you in the narcissist's mind and you, this gap grows not only because of what you are doing.
This abyss opens up also because of the internal narrative of the narcissist. And this narrative is about how you are changing for the worse.
Narcissists are paranoid. They have persecutory delusions. They regard the world as a hostile place, how to get them.
Ask Donald Trump.
The second process that happens with the narcissist, his point of view, is that you constantly blame shift.
He thinks you're guilty. He thinks you've done something wrong. He thinks he is immaculate and innocuous and innocent.
You keep blaming him for things. You keep assigning to him responsibility and guilt and accountability.
And he resents this. He thinks you're manipulating him. He thinks you're playing with his mind. He thinks that's a power play and a mind game that you have embarked on.
He is bewildered. He's disoriented. You are his mother. You're a mother figure. Why are you doing this to him?
And so whenever you disagree with the narcissist or criticize something or suggest something or prepare or suggest, give advice, the narcissist or even offer help, the narcissist perceives this as shifting the blame, counterfactually.
The facts are in the narcissist's mind that he is blameless, that he is guiltless, that he doesn't deserve a newness and that what you're doing borders on malice.
And you, everything the narcissist thinks about you, everything he says about you may be true. Even narcissist get it right from time to time.
And because it may be true, even in principle, it provokes in you profound self-doubt.
You begin to ask yourself, maybe he's right. Maybe he has a point. Maybe I'm the narcissist. Maybe I'm misbehaving. Maybe I'm too onerous, ordinary, tough, harsh, strict. Maybe I should change my ways.
This is how the narcissist molds you, makes you malleable and mutable.
The narcissist presents himself at all times as a victim, a victim of his superiors, a victim of the state, a victim of circumstances. He was born in the wrong period in history.
And you of course, swept in this tsunami wave of self-imputed victimhood.
Today it's known as TIV. It's a new personality construct.
And so the narcissist cast himself as a victim.
And he does this because it affords him the high moral ground and it's a tool of manipulation.
It's also an integral part of his confabulation.
He rewrites his history. He recomposes his narrative in a way that casts him in a good light and all others in a bad light.
He's the angel, all the others are demons. He has always been right. They have always been wrong. He deserved much more. They got it.
He has been discriminated against, underappreciated and generally mistreated. That's the victim stance.
And he sees you as a victimizer. He sees you as an abuser, which makes communication with the narcissist very difficult because you don't have common ground and you don't have a common language. Even your most innocuous acts, even things you do which are unrelated to the narcissist, are going to be fitted into the victimhood narrative.
The narcissist is going to hyper-vigilantly monitor you, supervise you, spy on you, follow you around in order to gather incriminating evidence. Everything you say and everything you do can and will be used against you in the narcissist court.
You have been warned, Minnie.
And so this is the "I am the victim" thing and you are my abuser.
And he also thinks that you guilt-trip him. He thinks that you are an emotional blackmailer, that you actually sacrifice in order to leverage your sacrifice to make him behave in specific ways. He thinks that you love him because you want something from him.
It's not real love. It's conditional love. It's manipulative love, if it is love at all.
He thinks you make him feel guilty because by making him feel guilty you can modify his behaviors and you're goal-oriented.
In his eyes you're very, very close to a psychopath. And that is regardless of howempathic you are, how caring, how compassionate and how loving.
Don't think you can, by caring for the narcissist and by sharing with the narcissist, you can somehow change his mindset or state of mind.
You can't.
Because it's not about you.
It's about an internal world populated with avatars, a paracosm, an alternative reality where the narcissist writes scripts for movies.
He's a movie director, an actor and you're just an actress or a prop on his theatre play stage.
So it's not about you.
Still, the narcissist perceives himself as a victim who is being emotionally manipulated and the black male via guilt tripping.
He accuses you when you disagree with this assessment of you. He accuses you of lacking self-awareness. You have no introspection, he does.
You can't see yourself really. You don't look at yourself in the mirror. You are totally unaware of yourself. You have no self-awareness. You really need to get to grips with who you are. You really need to accept how flawed and wrong and sometimes malevolent you are.
He is trying to convince you that there's in you a grain of evil. Minnie, all those of you who miss her, here she is, always by my side and on my lips.
So he tells you you're not self-aware.
He also accuses you of being self-destructive, of being hateful. You want to drag me down with you, he tells you. Your habits are self-defeating. I'm not going to succumb to this. I'm soaring into the stratosphere. I'm bigger than this. I'm cosmically significant. I am divine. I'm god-like. You're not going to drag me to the level of a common human.
In extreme cases, the narcissist may deny you sex and become celibate because by denying you sex, he transcends the foibles and the weaknesses of the human species. He becomes uber-mensch. He becomes a superman.
So it's important for him to sustain his grandiosity by casting you not only as an abuser but as a toxic influence, someone who creates an ambience, an environment that reduces the narcissist to the lowest common denominator.
The narcissist is not human, he is the next stage in evolution.
And you're trying to transform him or transmute him or transubstantiate him back into human. You're trying to devolve him, not evolve him.
And he is not going to let you. He's not going to let you contaminate him and infect him with your low-grade humanity.
The fact that you can't appreciate the narcissist's amazing exceptionalism, the fact that you underestimate his rarity, his sui generis, the fact that you can't absorb or worship him as the god that he is, that just proves that you are disloyal. You're disloyal.
There is this cult, there's this narrative that you belong to and you're betraying it. There's a sense of betrayal, a bit traumatic.
The narcissist has been betrayed as a child by his mother and here comes a replay, a reenactment of his early childhood betrayal.
Actually he pushes you to betray him. And then when you look for alternatives, he blames you for it. You're out to get me, he tells you. You're just after my money. You lie to me. You deceive me and you cheat on me with others. You entrapped me. I could have been much further in my career, in my life. I would have been much more accomplished, but because of you, I'm stuck here. Because of you, I can't self-actualize and realize my potential. You're a bad influence of me. You're a trap.
You know, in medieval times, they had this vagina dentata, vagina with teeth. Women were considered to be predators, actually, throughout the majority of human history. Not men. Women were considered predators.
And Venus trapped. Venus trapped.
So he has this misogyny, he has this deeply embedded hatred of women.
And by the way, everything I'm saying, just flip the genders, flip the gender pronounsand it still works.
So if it's a woman, a female narcissist, a woman narcissist, she hates men. She's a misandrist.
So the choice of gender pronouns in this presentation is arbitrary. You can easily flip between the genders. It's equally accurate with men and women because there are no men and women left today. Women are just men with vaginas.
So he accuses you of trapping him. He accuses you of an elaborate scheme to shackle him, imprison him, prevent him from realizing his huge potential and from self-actualizing.
It's like Samson and Delilah, you cut his locks, hair locks. You never mean what you say, he tells you. You are very devious. You double speak. It's difficult to tell the truth. I can't really make up what it is that you're after. I don't understand your direction and goals. You are not mysterious. You are more like devious. You are more like cunning. You are more like scheming.
Again, this view of you is a psychopath or a psychopath in the making.
He blames you for gaslighting you. He tells you, you are distorting reality and you are impacting my ability to judge reality properly. You create a hallucinatory, nightmarish world where I'm totally disoriented, dislocated, derealized, depersonalized and amnesiac. It's your effect or your impact on me that makes me lose my reality testing.
When I'm with you, I feel totally flat, totally empty, sometimes as if I'm dead or unreal. And so I need to get away from you because you create this alternative reality for me and you force me into it. And I know it's a lie. I know it's not true. I know the world is not like this. I know I am not like this. Everything you're telling me about yourself is intended to deconstruct me and reconstruct me in your image.
He's projecting, of course. This is projection. That's precisely what he's doing to you.
And he says to you, you hate me while I love you self-sacrificially.
I do everything for you. I did everything for you. I changed my life for you. You were the center of my world. You were my world. And look how you're treating me now. Why do you hate me having loved you so?
So in his mind, he's casting you as a persecutory object. You're becoming, gradually, the enemynumber one, two, and three.
He needs you to become the enemy because he needs to discard you, because he needs to separate from his original mother via you, the substitute mother.
I've explained this in previous videos. Watch my interview with Richard Grannon about the fantasy lives of narcissists and borderlines.
So he is caught in this convoluted dynamics where on the one hand, you're the mother figure. And on the other hand, he needs to hate you and discard you in order to separate from the mother figure and finally become an adult individual.
On the one hand, it's very promising and very alluring. And so devaluing and discarding you is an irresistible proposition.
On the other hand, it's very terrifying to abandon mother or to be abandoned by her.
He needs a secure base, a sense of safety.
So he keeps coming back and forth.
And that is the narcissist approach, avoidance, hot and cold, intermittent reinforcement.
The way he accuses you of humiliating, shaming him, especially in front of peers, mortifying him, he begins to truly hate you. He begins to truly hate you and plot revenge in many cases.
That is at the stage where you should bail out because he's no longer with us. He has lost touch with reality. He's immersed in his internal murky dynamics.
There's nothing further you can do for him. He's gone. He's gone far away where you could never reach.
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