Okay, Joes and Joettes, Bidens and Bidettes, I have a message for you. I have a message for you, and it's an important one.
If you have a narcissist in your life, stand back. If you are on my YouTube channel, stand by. And if you have any kind of hair left, dye it orange. Orange is the new black. Orange is the future.
Now, many of you have complained that there was a sound of drilling, very strong drilling sound in yesterday's video. It bothered you. You don't like to hear sounds of drilling, but it was not drilling. It was my neighbors having sex, and you thought you had it good.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology and a professor of finance in several universities around this shrinking globe.
And today, I'm going to bring you another palette of frivolities and foibles from the world of the narcissist.
Before we go there, as usual, I'm going to answer some of your questions.
So the first one, what do I anticipate after the pandemic in terms of mental health? I'll make it very brief because I've dealt with it in other videos. Hint, hint.
I anticipate three waves.
I think the first wave would be a wave of mood and anxiety disorders. I think the second wave would be a wave of personality disorders, especially cluster B personality disorders.
There will be the pandemic and the measures adopted as a result of the pandemic or in order to forestall the pandemic. All these put together create enormous stress and enormous anxiety and trigger narcissistic and even psychopathic defenses. They are known as reactants.
So that will be the second phase, the second wave. And the third wave, I think people who are prone to psychosis are going to develop psychotic disorders. So, for example, borderlines are very likely to develop psychotic disorders, even some narcissists, especially some subtypes of covert narcissists, but many other people, people with underlying schizophrenic form disorders and so on. I think these people are going to ultimately develop psychotic disorders in the wake of this pandemic.
Next question. What do I think about the smear campaign? There is the possibility that we can reframe the narcissist smear campaign. We can think of it in classical terms.
Smear campaign is a manifestation and an expression of the narcissist's underlying fundamental evil. The narcissist is bad. Narcissist is wicked. Narcissist is satanic.
I mean, just look at me. And because of that, he engages in untoward practices such as smear campaigns.
But we can think about it differently.
Perhaps a narcissist is engaging in a smear campaign because it's trying to shift from internal modification to external modification.
In other words, a narcissist who feels bad about himself, who is egodystonic, and we discussed that in the previous video, such a narcissist would feel very uncomfortable because he's not used to feeling responsible. He's not used to guilt and shame, regret and remorse. These are novel experiences and not welcome ones.
So such a narcissist forcibly tries to shift from internal modification. I'm bad. I'm guilty. I have misbehaved to an external modification. They're bad. They're guilty. They should be ashamed of themselves. They engage in misconduct. They mistreated me. They abused me.
So to move from internal to external modification. One of the tools possibly is the smear campaign.
The smear campaign creates an echo chamber. You know, the narcissist goes to his friends. He said, wow, my wife is horrible. They say, yeah, she is horrible. You're right. You know, so he gets, he gets kind of validation. He validates his dim view, his denigrating view of the other.
And it makes it easier for him to transition from an internal modification. It's all my fault. I misbehaved to an external mortification. It's all their fault. They misbehave. The smear campaign gains the narcissist and garners and genders reactions that support the narcissist's new mortification, external mortification, support the narcissist's view that he's surrounded by monsters, that he's a victim.
The smear campaign reasserts and buttresses the narcissist's view of himself as a victim.
Now this doesn't happen in the bargaining phase because in the bargaining phase, as I've said in the previous video, in the bargaining phase, the narcissist accepts that he had created the dismal circumstances in which he had found himself.
He understands that he is responsible. He put things in motion. He pushed everyone away from him. He caused his wife to cheat on him. He, I mean, he realizes that he is the, the premium moment, the prima causa, the first cause of everything that had happened.
And in a way it comforts him in the bargaining phase because he wants to feel in control. He wants to feel that whatever is being done to him is done to him because he had initiated it. He had kind of, he used everyone as a pawn, as a device, as a machine. He put things in motion.
So in the bargaining phase, the narcissist is very unlikely to transition from internal mortification to external mortification because internal mortification provides him with secure renders him in control.
But during the shared fantasy, it's a different story.
During the shared fantasy, the narcissist is very likely to engage in a smear campaign, is very likely to bad mouth his intimate partner, his business partner, whoever participated in the shared fantasy. Anyone who exits the shared fantasy is likely to be subjected to such a treatment, to such a procedure, to a smear campaign or to bed mouthing because the narcissist in the shared fantasy needs to shift the blame. He needs to transition from internal mortification to external mortification because he loves the shared fantasy. He wants to stay in it. He wants to sustain and maintain it. He doesn't want anyone to leave, to exit, to abandon the shared fantasy or him.
In the bargaining phase, the narcissist is instrumental. He's goal oriented. He wants to push people away. He wants to get rid of his girlfriend, his intimate partner, his spouse. He wants to dismantle a business he has with someone or to seize some kind of collaboration. He's very goal oriented. And whatever he does, his abuse, his mistreatment, his maltreatment, humiliating other people, sadistically taunting them, teasing everything, all these behaviors intended to push people away.
And when he succeeds to push people away, he feels that he had accomplished his goal. If he's in control, that's in the bargaining phase, not so in the shared fantasy, the shared fantasy. When people abandon the narcissist, he feels really, really bad and rejected.
The thing is that everyone wants from the narcissist, something that he's unable to give.
Consider, for example, in a heterosexual couple, I keep emphasizing, you know, I talk about men when actually it applies equally to women. And I talk about heterosexual men, when it applies perfectly well to homosexual men and to lesbians, homosexual women.
So heterosexual men, heterosexual narcissists.
Consider women, for example, a woman wants a man. She wants a man as a life park. She doesn't want a child. Never mind how delightful the child. She doesn't want a child. She's not looking for a child. She doesn't want to be a mother to her own spouse, her own intimate partner. She wants intimacy. She wants adult intimacy. And it's impossible to accomplish with a child.
Similarly, she doesn't want a stern, disciplinarian, strict and harsh father. And these are the only two roles that the narcissist can play.
He can be a delightful child, you know, very cute and, you know, sprightly, or he can be a stern, harsh, sadistic father, the kind of projection and reification of the inner critic.
But both a child and a father preclude certain behaviors and, of course, certain activities. It's very difficult to have sex with your own child. It's very difficult to have sex with your own father.
Assuming these roles within the dyad, gradually precludes sex, creates what we call sex aversion.
To a woman, the narcissist is a child or a father. To a man, the narcissist is a loser or a failure. To his stakeholders, to his clients, to his suppliers, to his partners, is also a failure because he cannot provide a full-fledged all-rounded role application. He cannot play social roles effectively.
And so, consequently, people put boundaries with the narcissist and there are several types of boundaries.
There's a classic boundary. The classic boundary is a rule of conduct. It's informing other people what is acceptable to you and what is not acceptable to you. And if they misbehave, if they violate the boundary, informing other people what the cost will be, what are the sanctions, what is the price of breaking and breaching the boundary, what are the rewards if the boundary is observed.
There are other types of boundaries. For example, there are defensive boundaries. Defensive boundaries are boundaries that are intended to keep things out away. So, for example, confirmation bias is a defensive boundary against information. Confirmation bias means that you reject, ignore, repress and suppress any information, any information or data that challenge your self-image or self-perception. That's a boundary. Aggression is a boundary, in effect. Aggressive behaviors are boundaries. They set a clear perimeter that demarcate. There's a border there, guarded, protected and shielded by your aggression. Reactance, defiance, these are boundaries and so on.
So, there are many boundaries. People use boundaries against the narcissist. Luckily for the narcissist, he is able to recover speedily even after mortification because he's not really rejected. He's not really rejected because he never fulfills any roles. He fulfills a single role. We'll talk about it in a minute because I'm going to discuss today the cerebral narcissist in the shared fantasy.
So, a narcissist, somatic, cerebral, doesn't matter. Usually fulfills a single role. He could be a guru. He could be a stud. He could be a child. He could be a father. But he never fulfills a gamut or panoply or smogasbord of roles altogether.
A healthy person, a typically healthy person, neurotypical, usually fulfills multiple roles simultaneously. So, he can be a friend, a father, a husband and a lover. The narcissist can't. He is a single trick pony, single trick horse. So, he can never be a true intimate partner. He can fulfill a certain function and that's it.
So, when the woman is rejecting the narcissist, for example, in a romantic shared fantasy, the woman exists in a variety of ways. We discussed it. She can cheat on him. She can betray him. She can just walk away. When the woman rejects the narcissist, she's not rejecting his presence because he's never present. He's never present except along a very specific dimension with a very specific role, very specific function, a sliver. So, he's never truly fully present. So, when she rejects him, she's not rejecting his presence. She's rejecting his absence.
When a woman cheats on the narcissist, she is not cheating on his presence. She's cheating on his absence. She's not cheating on his intimacy. She's cheating on his lack of intimacy. She rejects the narcissist's single function because she's looking for someone who can provide multiple functions.
Of course, the narcissists are not, I mean, vast majority of them are not idiots. They realize and accept and prepare themselves to anticipate the constant losses. They mourn their inability to hold on to people. They can't understand fully how do they provoke people all the time to hurt them?
People do their worst to hurt the narcissist. The narcissist is kind of flabbergasted because he refrains and recasts himself. He writes narratives in which he's a saint or perfect or very, very generous and altruistic. And he can't understand when people hurt him, his spouse, his business partner, his colleagues, his neighbors.
When people go to extremes to cause the narcissist pain and discomfort, the narcissist is discombobulated. He says, what the hell? What have I done to these people?
And he attributes this to his uniqueness. He says, because they can't understand me, I cannot be understood. I cannot be known because I'm so superior. I'm outside the remit and the periphery of these people's experiences, daily experiences.
These people, I'm inaccessible to them. People can't get me, can't dig me, can't understand me, can't know me because I'm a little like God, you know, you can't know the mind of God. I'm Godlike a bit.
My false self is definitely Godlike.
And so people can't understand me because they cannot understand me. They feel envious or they feel intimidated and frightened or they feel inadequate. I cause the narcissist tells himself, he says to himself, my mere superiority, my mere hyper intelligence, my mere enormous intellect, my mere handsome looks, my mere advantages, they cause people such discomfort, such humiliation, such injury that people want to pay back. They want to revenge and avenge themselves. They want to punish me, but they're punishing me not because of something I've done, but because of who I am, because of my identity, which is so far removed from their daily life, that they try to destroy me. They want to destroy me because I keep frustrating them with my displays of omnipotence or omniscience. My grandiosity is justified. It's not a confabulation. It's not a fable. It's not a story. It's not a narrative. It's true. I am superior.
And this is because I'm unique.
They hate me. I cannot be loved by mere mortals because I'm immortal.
My abuse in this way, with this story, the abuse that the narcissist experiences, and he does experience abuse, everyone around the narcissist abuses him. It's reactive, of course. The narcissist is first to abuse, but then they abuse him back.
And he explains this abuse in this way.
And so it becomes egosyntonic. He can live with it.
Now, people ask me about supply, secondary, primary. They're very confused.
Primary supply is anything that causes the narcissist supply. So it's attention, adulation, narration. It's a flashy car. It's a new job, you know, president of the United States. It's something that causes him. It's an instrument to obtain attention. So if you get a new job, and it's a superior job, I mean, you get attention and also have power, access to sex, to money, money, gunner's attention, etc. So anything that can lead to attention is primary supply.
Secondary narcissistic supply is not the same.
Now, you as the narcissist, insignificant other, his intimate partner, you cannot provide him with primary supply, only with secondary supply.
Secondary supply has several functions.
You are his fan. You regulate his narcissistic supply. You keep it stable. You flatten the curve. You flatten the curve of the narcissistic supply in two ways.
You're always there. You're permanent. You're regular. You're predictable. You know, you don't challenge him. You don't abandon him. You don't, so you are a stabilizing influence.
And on the other hand, you memorize, you remember, you recall, you're like an external hard disk or external memory. You recall the narcissist moments of glory and glamour and victory and triumph. And you rebroadcast, you reruns, it's like reruns of series, you know, you rebroadcast this to the narcissist when he's low, when the narcissist fails to obtain supply, supply is deficient. He's mocked, he's ridiculed, he's abandoned, he's shunned.
I don't know what you tell him. Do you remember how wonderful your lecture was? Do you remember meeting the president of Russia? Do you, I mean, and then the narcissist perks up.
It's like water to a plant, a shriveling plant, and that is secondary supply.
But you provide the narcissist with secondary supply. You regulate the flow of narcissistic supply with your input and with your presence, but you also provide him with primary sadistic supply.
You are the narcissist's favorite target to gratify his sadistic impulses, if he has them.
It's very important to understand that only a small minority of narcissists, I'll say this, and only a small minority of them need sadistic supply.
That's a big glass of wine. Vaknin, you wino, get on with the lecture. Sorry, sorry, Ocha. Here we go.
So you provide primary supply in the sense that you are the favorite target. If he wants to humiliate, humiliate someone. If he wants sadistic sex, if he wants to taunt and torture and torment and tease, if he wants to put someone down in order to feel superior, etc., you will be the natural default choice.
And he needs access to your body and he needs access to your body because he wants to masturbate with your body. He masturbates with your body.
It's very important to understand. No narcissist has sex, not cerebral, not somatic, not covert, not inverted. There's no type of narcissist who makes love because they're incapable of love. And there's no type of narcissist who has sex.
All narcissists die virgins because what they do with your body is they masturbate with it.
You're an object, you're an animated sex doll, or if the narcissist is a woman, you're an animated dildo, animated vibrator. That's all you are.
And the second reason they want access to your body is that they despoil your body. They soil your body. They humiliate you via your body.
The body is a visible emblem of sadistic humiliation. They do certain things to your body that reify, exemplify and manifest pain, hurt, humiliation, inferiority, submission, but in a bad way.
Not like in BDSM where it's consensual and great fun, but in a rape-like thing. It's very close to rape, actually.
So you're a housekeeper and a butler and a partner and a personal assistant. These are the services you're supposed to provide. You're also a mother. You're also a masturbatory aid, sex doll. You're the target of sadistic supply. And you're supposed to tell the narcissist how great he is, how wonderful he is, how victorious he is every time he's down.
That's regulation of supply. And you're supposed to always be there when he needs you. I mean, on call, you're like on standby.
So not a very appetizing job description, mind you.
And so people have been asking me, but he used to have sex with me, but now he doesn't have sex with me, but he never had sex with me. And people are totally confused about the cerebral narcissist.
Let's start by saying that the somatic narcissist, compared to the cerebral narcissist, is totally normal because the somatic narcissist loves everything you love.
Now somatic narcissist loves access to human bodies, what you call sex. For him, it's masturbation, but it doesn't matter. He likes this. He desires you. He finds you irresistible because he needs your bodies. He's a body snatcher, the somatic narcissist, but at least he wants your body. He usually likes to have a good time. He's a social drinker. He's gregarious. So the somatic narcissist is much more human than the cerebral narcissist. Much more human. He's vampiric. He's exploitative. He's autoerotic, a bit of a latent homosexual. I mean, he has his quirks. He has his quirks and his glitches and his bugs. So true, but he's much more human than the cerebral narcissist.
And so the cerebral narcissist is really seriously alien. There is very, very little in common. And I'm saying it as a professor of psychology with full responsibility. I don't want to say authority, but I'm judiciously using these words.
The cerebral narcissist has so little in common with normal, healthy human beings that I hesitate to call him human. It's an organism. It's carbon based and it has all the wetware and software. It has a brain. It has a liver. It has, I mean, it's okay in the anatomical sense. It's human, but not much, not much more than that.
The cerebral narcissist is a one trick, insufferably haughty, delusional, and entitled pony force. He is not God's gift to the world. God is his gift to the world. You get it?
The cerebral offers a front row seat to the pyrotechnics of his Fortean intellect.
So this is his gift. He says to you, listen, you get close to me. And you become my intimate partner, for example, become my business partner. You become my audience in a lecture. I'm going to give you the show of your life and just sit back, relax and consume me because I'm at the ultimate drug. My intelligence, my brain, my mind, they are the ultimate drug. They are mind altering. They're like virtual reality. They're like augmented reality. They're in the matrix, enter the matrix.
So, and you have a front row. If you're my spouse, if you're my, I mean, I give you a front row and it's pyrotechnical. It's like fireworks, you know, but that's it. That's all he gives you or anyone else ever.
The cerebral narcissist gives nothing else besides not sex, not commitment, not investment, warmth, family, home, children, empathy, attentiveness, attention, secure, support, friendship, intimacy, socializing, good time, leisure activities, positive emotions, love, forget about it. None of these things are forthcoming from the cerebral narcissist. If you're trying to extract it from the cerebral narcissist, he's going to resent you and he's going to abuse you. And also you're foolish. It's a foolish errand to try to extricate or motivate the cerebral narcissist to any of these behaviors and traits. He doesn't have it in him. His mind has been molded at such an early stage of his life, molded and deformed to an extent that is utterly irreversible and irrevocable.
It reminds me that there were nomads, vagabonds in Europe. They were called Co-pacosis. Copacicosis, they used to steal children, babies. They used to steal babies and they used to put them in bottles and the baby grew in the shape of the bottle. As the baby grew up, you know, became older, the bottle broke the bones of the baby and then they would break the bottle and they would have a baby bottle or a bottle baby. Baby in the shape of the bottle.
This is the cerebral narcissist. He's invariably abusive and contemptuous of everyone and sometimes statistically so, precisely because he thinks the only thing that matters are intelligence, intellect, analytical capacity. He honestly and firmly believes that it is an extreme privilege for you just to witness and admire his intelligence in action. He's mortified, utterly mortified and that's narcissistic mortification, just far more common among cerebrals. He's mortified when you, his intimate partner, cheat on him. Cheat on him with other men who are considerably less endowed than him intellectually. Like he is the apex, he is the epitome, he's the top.
How could you have settled for someone, the man you were cheated with, who is less than him, less intelligent than him, less sharp, less analytical, less prescient, less omniscient? How could you go for someone who is so vastly, manifestly inferior to him intellectually?
He's shocked, he can't digest it, he can't understand it because in his world the absolute only thing that matters is the intellect, intelligence, analysis.
So when people shun the cerebral narcissist, when they label him a failure and a loser, he doesn't know how to cope with this. He's a self-imputonomous. How can they think this? So they're idiots.
If they had reached these conclusions, they are so profoundly stupid. This just proves it.
These conclusions serve to prove that they are retarded because no one in his right mind would have missed the signals of his genius.
And when he fails to get the job that he was angling for after a job interview, I mean he's besides himself. Jesus, how am I going to survive in this world?
Everyone is so stupid, so backward, so primitive. I mean people have zero analytical skills, I can't survive here. I wish I were born on another planet, he says. I'm a Vulcan, a Vulcanian, a Star Trek.
The cerebral narcissist cannot grasp that for intelligence to be meaningful to other people, the intelligence must be embedded in emotions, in empathy. The intellect must come replete with social skills and with a capacity for teamwork.
Intelligence alone, all by itself, solipsistic intelligence. An intellect that doesn't come with the ability to exercise it with other people.
They are utterly meaningless. They might as well not exist. They are the equivalent of a, I don't know, smartphone.
He doesn't get it. He simply can't get it. He feels so entitled.
He says, people have to accommodate me, they have to modify their behaviors because what I'm bringing to the table is unprecedented, it's divine, it's unique.
And people have to recognize this and they have to change. They have to change. The world has to change. The workplace has to change. My wife has to change. Everyone has to change and modify and transmogrify and transform if they want to benefit, if they want to reap the fruits of the amazing gift that I've been given.
Moreover, as far as his spouse or partner are concerned, there is this issue of intelligence and intellect and so on. To make any lasting sense, to make any meaningful impression, the cerebral narcissist's cognitive analytical prowess must be somehow transferable. He must somehow pass it on.
So one way to pass it on is to communicate, but the cerebral narcissist is intentionally non-communicative. He is on purpose, he uses language that is inaccessible to most people, incomprehensible even. He uses jargon or lingo. He would make it very, very difficult for people to understand him because he believes that obscurity, arcane language proves that he is superior, proves that he has access to knowledge and information that other people don't put him above the madding crowd.
And so that's one way. One way for an intelligence or an intellect to be meaningful is that it's communicated.
But there's another way to communicate it. By procreating, by having children, you must pass off your intellect and intelligence, this genetic endowment to your offspring or else your gift ends up being a one-off ephemeral and increasingly more tedious thing to behold, kind of a blip or a glitch that keeps repeating itself like a pulsar or a quasar in the universe.
A pulsar, these are rotating stars that send pulses. The pulses ultimately become, you know, at the beginning it's very exciting and so on, but you know after six years of passing, you get a bit tired.
If you are hyper intelligent, super intelligent and you communicate your intelligence, it has impact. It affects people. It alters lives for the better.
You know what? Forget lives. It changes the world one way or another.
But if you refuse to communicate and refuse to have children, so that you can't pass it, you don't pass it verbally and you don't pass it genetically, I mean then you're a freak. You're a freak show. You're a circus. A circus act.
And how many times can you see the same circus act? You get boring. You become boring. You become tedious and most cerebral narcissists with their endless soliloquies and monologues, they become very boring and very tedious, trust me. Sometimes I bore even myself and I'm my biggest fan by far and still I bore myself to death.
I need a drink.
Vaknin, do you know why I know?
Get on with the lecture.
Yes, sir.
So the childless, ribbon narcissist is a hoarder. He hoards his gift. He's so jealous, so envious that he refuses to share his gift even by his own progeny.
He does one and when they do have children, they're jealous of them. They're envious. Very sadly, they're very destructive this way.
They compete with their own children. Even when the children are very young, the competition rears its ugly head.
Okay. I have received many comments that had indicated that the structure that I described in my previous video was not entirely clear. Surprise, surprise there. Let me try to elucidate and this time in a skeletal way, like a skeleton, without my usual pompous verbose flourishes.
Here I did it again.
So to start with, the narcissist approaches you and then avoids you.
If you want to understand the governing principle of your alleged ostensible relationship with a narcissist, its approach, avoidance, repetition, compulsion.
Narcissist is afraid of you. Whoever you are, romantic partner, business partner, doesn't matter, neighbor, colleague, narcissist is afraid of you because people have the capacity to cause the narcissist injury and mortification and these hurt and even threaten life.
So narcissist regards everyone as a potential menace. So he approaches and when he feels that things become too cozy, too intimate, too fuzzy, too warm, too empathic, he withdraws approach, avoidance, approach, avoidance and endless, perpetual mobility machine like a piston in a train in a locomotive.
So it all starts with the grooming and love body and the grooming and love by me face includes false promises, lies, confabulations.
Why?
Because if a narcissist were to show his true face, let alone his true intentions, no one would come near him. So he has to lie, he has to pretend, he has to act, he develops instant thespian skills.
Next, the first phase is grooming and love body.
Second phase, shared fantasy. He had captured you, he had acquired you, he is all over you. He had become your obsession. You become compulsive, you become possessive, you want him because he's the best thing since sliced bread, better than sliced bread.
So you can't live without himself. Here, he can mold you, he can shape you into an actor in the theater production. That is his shared fantasy.
Now don't confuse theater with life. Don't do this. That's theater.
Narcissist has no life. Only consecutive movies, consecutive theater productions. It's a shared fantasy.
And when he went like a spider, he had captured you in the wave and he feels your tremors and your movements, you know, communicated via the web. He can feel you. He has called empathy. He scans you all the time and so on. When he feels confident that he is the new proprietor, that you had become his objectified property, he starts to abuse you. He starts to abuse you for two reasons.
One, he wants to test whether you can become his mother or father.
Again, if the narcissist is a woman, just change the gender pronouns. So he wants to, in the case of a heterosexual narcissistic man, he wants to test, he abuses you.
Narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy is intended to secure two goals.
One, to test whether you can become a true mother. A true mother means that you will love him unconditionally, that you will accept enemy's behavior and enemy's conduct, including abuse. So he abuses you. He pushes the envelope. He wants to see how far he can go. He wants to see when you will show signs of abandonment, of giving up, of being desperate, of looking for someone else. And he wants to know your boundaries, in other words, he's testing the boundaries.
So this is the first goal.
The second goal, he is reenacting, that is unconscious and compulsive. He's reenacting his early childhood conflicts with his mother. All the aggression is displaced from his mother to you. You become his mother.
And if the mother was a dead mother, emotionally unavailable, depressive, narcissistic, and so on, he would push you to play this part through a process called projective identification.
Now, if you play this part, he's justified in dumping you. He's justified in discarding you.
If you don't play this part, and if you accept him and love him unconditionally, he's yours forever. He will be addicted to you forever.
But extremely few women survive this. It's an ordeal by fire, ordeal by fire. It's the closest thing to a terrainan, terrestrial hell, the closest, because he's abusing you and sending you at the same time mixed signals.
The first signal is, please, I want you to be my good enough mother. I want you to love me unconditionally. I want you to accept my naughty side, my misconduct, my misbehavior, my faults, my foibles, my frivolities, I want you to truly love me like a child, a pure child with message number one.
At the same time, he's sending the diametrically opposed message. I want you to be a bad mother, a vicious mother, a wicked mother, the wicked mother of the North. I want you to abuse me and torture me and cheat on me and ruin me. And because I want you to be my mother, my original mother, the mother who had shaped me, I miss her. I want her.
And I want to continue to engage in the game that we used to have where, you know, she was abusing me. I was abusing her.
This power play, he tries to create the power play via mind games. These messages can be reconciled. It's a lose-lose situation. There's no winning here.
Only a super centered, extremely resilient, hyper intelligent, mega genius woman can somehow find the middle ground by sending her own contrary mixed signals by modulating the narcissist's mixed signals.
I'll dedicate a whole video to this some other time. So subjected to the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy, most women react in one of two ways.
I would say 99% of women react in one of two ways.
There are those women who withdraw. They are pushed away. They actually effectively, emotionally exit the shared fantasy. Some of them, not all of them, some of them cheat and they cheat discreetly because they don't want to hurt the narcissist. They still regard the narcissist as a wounded child. They understand the narcissist in some way.
They are, and so they don't want, you know, they don't want to cause unnecessary pain, but they want to gratify their unmet needs. They have needs. And so they want to meet these needs. If they cheat, they cheat discreetly. If they betray, they betray incrementally and mildly, and they withdraw only usually emotionally.
When the narcissist spots this, remember, he has this scanner, he has this radar called empathy. He gets you before you get yourself. He can anticipate every move you make. You can never fool the narcissist. Don't fool yourself that you had ever fooled the narcissist. He's extremely unlikely to show you that he knows, that he understands, that he anticipates you, that he has every detail about everything you have done with anyone. He will never show you this because it's a vulnerability. It proves his weakness. Spying on you is a weakness, etc.
So, but he knows everything. You take it as a working hypothesis. Your narcissistic partner knows absolutely everything you've ever done with anyone and your innermost thoughts and so on.
Cold empathy is the most powerful tool I know to penetrate other people's minds. Most powerful. So he gets you.
He realizes he picks up the tremors like a seismograph. He knows the earthquake is coming.
And so he begins to stalk you. If you choose this solution, emotional absenteeism, having it on the side, double timing, you know, he begins to stalk you, a rotomaniac stalking.
And in a way it's becoming even, even a more pronounced case of approach avoidance. You know, he approaches you with the stalking and then he avoids you with the abuse. Becomes really bad.
Other women, you remember there are two solutions to the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy.
Other women choose to bargain. They bargain with the narcissists. They pose demands. They remind him of his promises. They ask for his commitment. They suggest some arrangement. They try to spice up the sex life. They insist on going to couple therapy, marital counseling, etc.
They try somehow to bargain their way into a better, improved relationship. And this provokes the second type of narcissistic abuse.
And the soul, the only goal of this second type of narcissistic abuse is to jettison the partner, to get rid of the partner once and for all.
So while in the first case of narcissistic abuse and stalking, they avoid and they avoid in your approach. In this case, sorry, in the first case, you avoid in their approach.
Yes. In the first case, the first solution you chose to withdraw. You chose to cheat discreetly. You choose to emotionally absent yourself from the relationship.
So you're the one who is avoiding. You're the one who is developing avoidant strategies and behaviors.
And then they approach stalking. So in the first case, you avoid their approach.
In the second case, you approach. You approach. You're trying to bargain. You're trying to restore the relationship. You're trying to make things better. You approach.
And now it's their turn to avoid. They push you away.
So the stalking, which is solution number one, I mean, behavior number one, solution number one provokes talking or the type two abuse type two narcissistic abuse is the sort of abuse that happens in the bargaining phase.
Whether you're stopped or whether you're abused, majority of women end up abandoning the narcissist.
Now, some of them abandoned functionally by cheating or in on the narcissist and betraying the narcissist ostentatiously or by engaging in a smear company or by taking revenge or by just abandoning overtly and conspicuously.
So these are the dramatic personalities among you. If you yourself have mental health issue, like if you're borderline or codependent, you're likely to engage in a dramatic exit, exit lift.
But the majority of intimate partners of the narcissists, they just walk away. Simply they pack their things and walk away. Heartbroken, they give up and they just walk away.
So then the narcissist starts to reframe his internal notification that the hidden, the hidden implicit knowledge that he had made all this happen, that he is the one who had destroyed the relationship.
So he's beginning to convert it to external modification. He's beginning to say what it was her fault. She misbehaved. She abused me. She cheated on me. She abandoned me.
So this is from internal to external. And then it doesn't work very well. And there's a pendulum movement from internal to external, from external to internal. And the reason for this vacillation is that the shared fantasy is egosyntonic.
The narcissist feels good in the shared fantasy. And when you exit the shared fantasy, he feels wrong. He feels that you had misbehaved. He feels that you had abused him. He feels like a victim.
While the bargaining phase is egosyntonic, the narcissist doesn't feel comfortable with the bargaining phase. He hates it. He wants out.
And so he feels that he's in control when he pushes you away. When he not statistically abused you in the bargaining phase, he knows what he's doing. And he knows that in a way it's wrong to abuse people.
So he has internal modification.
The thing with the minx, all I could get from her was coffee. She didn't give me this buzz of intoxication and passion and desire. You know what I mean? I've been with her for too long.
Okay, kiddos and kiddos. The same, the same cycle with the very same steps, with the very same dynamics applied in all the narcissist's relationships, romantic relationships, one-night stands, business in the workplace, in church with neighbors.
Take this model with all its steps, all its dynamics, all its behaviors and misbehaviors, avoidance, approach, all this. And you will see that it applies to the way the narcissist performs his job in the workplace, to his relationships with his colleagues and with his boss, of course, to a prolonged interaction with a specific neighbor, you know, enmity between neighbors, to the way he functions in church and to his relationship with the children.
This is the universal schema, the universal framework, the template of all the narcissist's relationships.
Okay, that's been a heavy video, so I'll finish with two tidbits, just to gratify you and edify you.
We are all under curfew and we are all in quarantine, or many of us are in quarantine, some of us are under curfew and so on and so forth.
Now, lockdown is a relatively new word, and so it doesn't have a very illustrious history.
The history, the roots of words, it's a discipline called etymology. Etymology is a study of the roots of words.
But curfew and quarantine are old words, they're like hundreds of years old, and they have a very long and varied and colorful history, very similar to some narcissists.
CAREFUE is a contraction, portmanteau contraction, of the original French. In French, it was called couvre-feu, which means cover the fire.
You see, in the Middle Ages, in Europe, there was a bell, and the bell was rang. They were ringing the bell at a certain hour in the evening, usually it was about eight o'clock, depending on the location, depending on the sun and so on. Usually it was eight.
And when the bell was rang, everyone had to put up fires, domestic fires, outside fires. All fires had to be extinguished.
And the reason was that if it didn't extinguish the fires, they tended to spread.
So very small domestic fires sometimes destroyed a whole city, like the Great Fire of London, which started in a bakery in a tiny, and of course in Chicago.
So domestic fires were very, very dangerous. They burned down whole towns, whole cities, whole villages.
So when the bell was run, couvre-feu covered the fire.
Couvre-feu, this is, they borrowed the term to refer to a restriction on anything, not only on fire, on citizens movements, but after dark.
So until very, very recently, they were ringing the church bells when there was curfew.
Until very recently, no one, no, actually, I, no one really knew why.
They just knew there's a curfew and we have to ring the bells, but no one remembered why.
What was, what was the original purpose?
I refer you to the poem, Grace Elegy, written in a country churchyard, in a country churchyard.
And it says the sentence there, the curfew towards the knell of parting day.
It's an echo of this thing.
Now quarantine, quarantine has to do with narcissism, believe it or not.
Originally the word quarantine meant a period of 40 days in which a widow had the right to remain in her dead husband's house.
We find the first mention of this type of quarantine in the early 16th century.
And so quarantine had to do with the relationships between men and women.
When the narcissist dies, his widow can remain in his house for 40 days.
Another use of quarantine, it was pronounced Calentine.
Another use was the desert in which Christ fasted for 40 days.
So the desert itself was called Calentine. It was borrowed from the Latin word quadraginta, 40.
Okay.
The quarantine, the way we use it today is an earlier word.
It's actually started, I read online, things which are completely wrong.
They attribute the word to Italy. Didn't start in Italy. It started in Croatia in a city known today as Dubuovnik, an amazing place, by the way.
It's like medieval life come alive. It's a port, it's a fort and a port put together. It's a stunning place.
Once the pandemic is over, promise yourselves to go and see Dubuovnik. You've never seen something like this. It's on the sea. It's like someone took a ferry castle, put it on the sea.
Anyhow, it wasn't called Dubuovnik at the time. It was called Gagusa and they passed a law and the original law was not 40 days. It was actually 30 days and it was not called Calentine. It was called Trentine, no.
And it was like every ship arriving from any part of the world where there was a disease of some kind, that ship had to be isolated. The sailors had to be isolated and the goods, by the way, had to be isolated for 30 days.
So no one from Gagusa, Dubuovnik of today, was allowed to visit the ships during the Trentino. And if someone broke the law, they joined the ship crew. I mean they had to remain on the ship for the mandatory 30 days.
And so for close to 100 years, 80 years, 100 years, many, many cities in Europe, port cities with harbors, they adopted this Trentino. So Marseille had the Trentino, Pisa had Trentino, and many, many other cities.
So something happened after 80 years. No one is quite sure what. Something happened after 80 years. And they extended the period from 30 days to 40 days. And they renamed the Trentino and called it Calentino, which is the root of the word Calentine that we use today.
A little entertainment after a very heavy and difficult video.
So I need a drink. Vaknin, why not? Let the people go. Let my people go. Okay, okay, got it. Okay, this was it for today.
We discussed cerebral narcissist. There will be a video, I'm threatening you, there will be a video dedicated to the somatic narcissist. Now that will be real fun.
As what goes on the mind of somatic narcissist. And the way he deceives you is, it's amazing. He's a con artist, while the cerebral is an alien, a form of artificial intelligence. The somatic is simply a con artist, but a delightful con artist, you know, many women say maybe somatic, maybe he's a narcissist, but it was worth it. So we'll talk about it. I promise.