From Grooming to Discard via Shared Fantasy: Cheat, Mortify, Exit

And to summarize, the narcissist is not interested in women at all. He just uses sex and love bombing to secure a woman. Any woman would do. They're all the same, dispensable, interchangeable.

He's not looking for women. He's looking for what women can give him.

By the way, he's not looking for any kind of relationship. He's not looking for friendship. He's a taker. He's just interested in what he can get out of people.

The providers of services, the providers of goods, the providers of anything that he sets his mind to, these providers are transparent, two-dimensional and discardable. They are dispensable.

And so he creates the shared fantasy, not because he's in love with a woman or infatuated with her or can't live without her or finds her irresistible or fell in love. He creates a shared fantasy because within the shared fantasy he is able to optimally extract the three S's, sex, supply and services.

Still, the narcissists, most narcissists are not stupid.

So he anticipates the interstitial phase. He anticipates the end of the shared fantasy. He anticipates the anti-fantasy, culminating in cheating and abandonment by the woman.

So he gives a relationship provisional and very often transitions to sexlessness. And always there's an ambient, there's an atmosphere in the relationship of it's about to fall apart. It's like on the edge, on the ledge, on the verge. It's tittering. It's a house of cards. It's uncommitted. It's uninvolved.

There's always this feeling, even if you spend 20 years with the narcissists or 40 years with the narcissists, you have this feeling every single day of the relationship or so-called relationship because you are in a relationship for him. He is in a relationship for what you can give him.

And one day maybe there are things you won't be able to provide anymore. At that moment your history.

So let's go into the cycle. I'm going to describe the cycle in very great detail.

And I urge you and advise you to position yourself in each of the sub phases so that you know what's coming.

The cycle is ineluctable.

A follows B follows C. It's never changing. It's identical in all the narcissist's relationships forever.

Narcissist may mislead you. He is very misleading. Narcissist is an inveterate liar. Not liar but confabulator. Psychopath is an inveterate liar. A psychopathic narcissist is an inveterate liar.

And their lies and deceptions are built in a way that is very difficult to detect because they always contain a kernel of truth. They are constructed around the kernel of truth.

And people want to believe other people. It's called the base rate fallacy. They want to believe other people.

And so they want to believe the narcissist and the psychopath. People are malignant optimists.

And so listen well. This is the cycle. It starts with a grooming phase.

The role of the partner at this stage is strictly as an admirer.

To attract the narcissist, to start grooming her, the woman needs to be an admirer. She needs to be eligible for a shared fantasy.

She should, for example, know who the narcissist is. She should show signs of being able and willing to provide supply, including admiration and sex.

So she should display evident and overt signs of infatuation or admiration or adulation or gratitude. So anything that builds up the narcissist's grandiosity is an indication that she's a good source and eligible for grooming.

And the grooming and love bombing are intended to achieve 10 goals.

You can identify yourself if you're a partner of a narcissist or you have ever been exposed to a narcissist, even in a workplace environment, you can immediately identify these signs.

So 10 goals. Number one, to establish mastery, a power matrix, power hierarchy and an external locus of control.

Number two, to mold the woman, the partner, into a mindless and obedient, essentially, slut or whore.

Number three, to overcome the woman's natural revulsion and anxiety by habituating her and co-opting or hijacking her fantasy life.

Number four, to expose the woman to brainwashing messaging and signaling.

Number five, to isolate the woman from her family and social networks.

And number six, to push the woman to dismantle her boundaries, abrogate her values and morals and violate her own rules of conduct.

Number seven, to signal the intensity and persistence of the interlocutors or correspondence of sensible emotions and to chart and document the growing or pervasive attachment, fake attachment, of course.

Number eight, virtue signaling, to convey the purity and authenticity, as well as the good intentions of the love bomber.

Number nine, gaslighting, to engender, foster and impose on the target an immersive virtual reality bubble within which a cult-like shared fantasy or shared psychosis is established and takes hold.

And number 10, to induce the target, to enter the hole of mirrors where she is idealized and she becomes infatuated with her own rendition with the way she looks, with the way she appears in the mirrors.

It's an addictive experience, which results in operant conditioning.

When the woman sees herself as the narcissist sees her, totally ideal, perfect, brilliant, irresistible, drop-dead gorgeous, stunning, etc., she herself gets infatuated with herself. She becomes infatuated with herself. She falls in love with herself.

And for many women, this is the first experience of self-love, and it's very addictive.

It grants the love bomber with the power to withhold access to this contraption as a way to modify the target's behavior.

And this is called intermittent reinforcement.

You don't behave. I will deny you access to my hole of mirrors where you can see yourself.

It's narcissism by proxy. It's contagious narcissism.

The woman sees herself in the hole of mirrors the same way Narcissus, the mythological youth, saw himself in the pond and fell in love with herself. She falls in love with herself.

But there's a keeper of the mirrors. And this keeper has the key, and you have to behave to be granted access to this hole of mirror.

Now, I dedicated a whole video to love bombing and grooming. And if you want more about this topic, you can watch this video.

So put together, this creates a shared psychotic space. I'm saying psychotic because it has no reality testing. It's not real. It's delusional. It's fictitious. It's like a movie.

And so within this shared psychotic space, the shared fantasy thrives on false promises and false premises.

And there's a make-believe role play of both parties. It takes two to tango. It takes two to tango. The role play is of both parties.

The difference is that the partner's role play is dictated by the narcissist. It's a kind of emergent role play, but dictated by the narcissist.

And the narcissist role play is determined by the narcissist.

The narcissist is in control of the role play.

So let's move on from the grooming phase to the shared fantasy phase.

This phase involves infatuation, continued love bombing, the honeymoon period. And the sexuality in this phase is usually sadistic, humiliation, kink, and there is sexual exclusivity.

As a condition, narcissist at this stage of shared fantasy demands sexual exclusivity.

The role of a partner in this phase is a playmate.

And so in the first encounters, the narcissist assumes the role, as I said, of a strict, ostensibly benevolent, but sadistic parent.

He provides tough love.

But then suddenly, shockingly, abruptly, unexpectedly, nightmarishly, he transitions and becomes a wounded, hurt, petulant, entitled, self-centered, and sadistic child.

A really evil, bad, spoiled brat, like Henry James' stories.

As a parent, the narcissist is having sadistic incest with his partner. As a child, he is having masochistic incest.

And so the inevitable cheating by the partner punishes the parent element and mortifies the child.

And as I said before, it pushes the narcissist to evolve, to gain insight, to develop. His arrested development is no longer arrested, and he grows a bit, and he's even creative in this period.

So for the shared fantasy to subsist and to exist, both parties must lie to themselves. The partner must lie to herself that the narcissist means what he says. That he has a very intention of carrying out his promises. That he's not maybe a narcissist or a liar. Or if he's a bad guy, or if he's a damaged guy, or even if he's a narcissist, she will be the one to fix him. It's a malignant optimism. It's the messiah, saviour complex, inverted.

Usually women are looking, some types of women, borderline, for example. They are looking for messiah, protector, saviour types.

But in a shared fantasy, it's a woman that assumes this role. It's a maternal role.

And she says, with my love, with my acceptance, with a warmth that I provide, with a home that I will build for him, I will make him feel so safe. I'll make him feel I will solve his wounds. I will heal, I will cure him, and he will be able to love me. So it's a saviour messiah complex.

And the narcissist also participates in this charade by intentionally suspending judgment. He renders himself knowingly and intentionally gullible and delusional. But he limits his gullibility and delusionality only to certain elements.

The profile of her partner, her emotions towards him, the intimacy they ostensibly have, the capacity and intent to hurt him, to abandon him, her misbehaviour with other men, her cheating. He overlooks this, and the nature and intensity of the relationship.

In all these elements, he on purpose turns a blind eye or pretends to be stupid or gullible. So he allows his partner, in this case the woman, in a romantic relationship, romantic heterosexual relation, he allows the woman to pull the world over his eyes, to deceive him, to manipulate him, to play with him.

But make no mistake, he knows what's happening. He's just allowing it. He's allowing it.

He says it's like he's saying to himself, okay, better to live in a dream, which I know is not real, than to wake up to reality. It's escapism. It's his way to escape reality. It's his way to suspend what had become intolerable and unbearable.

And as long as a shared fantasy has any spark of life left, the narcissist engages in confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is when we ignore, disregard, suppress, or even counter information that challenges our perceptions, challenges our prejudices, challenges what we think we know. So this is called confirmation bias.

We create a silo, an echo chamber with like-minded people, and we hear only what we want to hear.

So narcissist in a shared fantasy creates experiences, confirmation bias.

And the confirmation bias supports his grandiosity and the idealization of the maternal, safe-based aspects of his partner.

In other words, the narcissist convinces himself that the partner will not hurt him, will not abandon him, will not act against his best interests, will not compromise him, will not betray him.

And this is called safe-based.

Now, when the child in a stage called separation and individuation, when the child begins to notice the world, you know, he lets go of mommy, he wanders, he walks, he ventures into the world. But then he panics because he perceives this abandonment as though by leaving mommy, by letting go of mommy, he actually will never see her again.

So he runs back to mommy and hugs her legs, you know. So she is a maternal, safe-based.

She allows the child to experience and to explore the world safely because she's always there waiting for him. Whatever he does, she's not going to be angry at him, she's going to punish him for walking away, for leaving her for a few minutes. She's going to let him exercise his grandiosity in effect because children explore the world via grandiosity. The world is very risky, very dangerous, very unknown. You have to be grandiose to explore it.

So the child leverages his grandiosity to explore the world, knowing full well that mommy is behind him, waiting as stable as a pillar, as safe and as loving as anything.

And the narcissist's partner provides this maternal safe base and the narcissist idealizes her as a mother and so she becomes in his mind a safe base, someone who will not punish him and hurt him if he explores the world or when he explores the world.

By the way, including explore other women. So it's like the narcissist says, you're my mother and I trust you as a mother.

But to do this, he needs to filter out, to ignore, to suppress and to deny a lot of information. Sometimes he needs to ignore overt blatant or stentatious cheating just to maintain this illusion or delusion of a safe base.

And this filtering out and denial of countervailing information leads to suppression of evidence to the contrary, including cheating evidence. We'll come to it a bit later.

So the narcissist idealizes the partner to allow her to perform her roles within the shared fantasy and he also makes use of other defense mechanisms, infantile defense mechanisms, for example, splitting all good, all bad, black and white, dichotomous thinking. So he converts his partner into an all good object.

The rest of the world is all bad, his partner is all good, Madonna horror complex.

This affects the sex at some stage because if she's all good, she's saintly, she's a divine figure and you don't have sex with divine figures unless they look really good.

So splitting, denial I mentioned, confirmation bias I mentioned.

He also assumes the role of a rescuer or a wizard, someone who will solve all problems, provide life-transforming insights if he plays the guru, take her by the hand.

And that is the paternal side, that's his father's side.

You see, the problem with narcissists is this unbelievable admixture, this cocktail, concoction, indescribable solution of chemicals. He's a father one minute, then a child the next minute.

He wants the woman to be a mother, provide a safe base, but then he becomes her father and he tells her what to do or who she is, provides her with penetrating insight, psychologically insight about herself. He rescues her, he provides support and support, however simulated.

And immediately after that, he engages in magical thinking. And he says, if I just think about it, I'm going to help her and heal her.

So why is she bothering me? I just need to think, she doesn't need to bother me.

It's unbelievably kaleidoscopic, confusing, madly mess.

Add to this that most narcissists have something called the Wunderkind mask. I'm a genius.

So most narcissists are not open to learning, not open to improvement or change. They don't evolve. Their development had been arrested and they're stuck at a mental age, typically of four or six years old. It's like living with a four or six years old in an adult body.

And of course the grandiosity.

But even so, the narcissist functions this way only for as long as the relationship remains in the safe and unreal realms of shared fantasy, role playing, gaming, it's a video game.

And he allows this to himself and he doesn't feel threatened because it is like virtual reality. You know, by converting it into a fantasy or a delusion or a video game, the narcissist is actually saying, I can play this game safely because even if I lose, there are no repercussions. There are no outcomes in the real world. It's not real. It's a bubble.

The shared fantasy allows the narcissist to avoid true intimacy, true commitment because it's a dream. And he shirks. He avoids, abrogates his other responsibility and shows.

And by shunning intimacy, he also avoids being exposed as the fraud that he is.

Because when you're intimate with someone, intimacy is founded on true information. You can have fake intimacy. Someone can come to you and share an amazing life story with you and describe their relationship. And it's all fake. It's all false. Never happened. You would still have intimacy with that person, but it would be one sided intimacy.

He, by lying, knows that the intimacy is fake, wrong. You don't.

So that's also possible.

But the narcissist doesn't go even for this. He shuns intimacy. He avoids it completely.

Why?

Because he has this imposter syndrome, this feeling that he's a fraud, that he's a house of card, a Potemkin village. Not real. Not fully real. Kind of invention, an animated cartoon character, a video game character, is a fraud.

And he's afraid that if you get too close, he's going to be pixelated. When you get too close to him, he suddenly dissolves and disintegrates into numerous points.

So he's afraid of that. So he keeps, there's a kind of an invisible firewall surrounding the narcissist.

You keep feeling that you can't really get to him, that there's something blocking access.

And the narcissist is a poor item. He's an eternal adolescent, eternal child. And he's a dysfunctional non-man because he has disrupted gender differentiation.

Because he never grew up. He never, you know, he never exceeded the mental age of four or six, where gender is not a very clear construct. So he has problems with gender. His problem with mental age, his problem with emotions, because he has adolescent, at best, adolescent emotions. Usually not even this. He's dysfunctional. He doesn't want his partner to know this.

So he keeps his, he keeps this invisible barrier.

It's like the Stephen King story. You know, like you bump the dome. You bump against this invisible thing and you can't exit. You see the narcissist behind the veil, behind the glass darkly. You see a narcissist and you want to reach out to him because many narcissists are really, really cute. They're really lovable. And you see the child in the narcissist and you want to reach out to the child. You want to hug the child, nurture the child.

But there's this invisible shimmering surface between you and him. And it's a surface that the narcissist constructs and maintains assiduously for fear of being exposed.

The narcissist is a conviction that he's not lovable as he is, that if anyone gets to see the real him, they will abandon him instantly and with shock and revulsion. He's afraid, afraid to be truthful.

And sometimes the narcissist, the married narcissist uses his marital status as a protective shield in addition to this instinctive shield or reflexive shield.

So there's this shield that, you know, don't get near me. Don't touch me. Don't get too close. Don't invade my territory.

And then there's a second shield, a married. A married, it's a protective status. And it's an excuse to not get too committed, involved or present, even when the narcissist has a lot of fear.

The fantasy phase feels to the narcissist like a role-playing game, like a movie set. The narcissist is an actor following an unpredictable, thrilling, unfolding script. Or most narcissists, especially the anti-social ones, most narcissists are novelty-seeking. They engage in risky recklessness. And in this sense, they are very similar to psychopaths.

So the narcissist in the shirt fantasy phase is a child in a sandbox. He's playing with animate toys, you. You're an animated toy in a theme park adventure, a thrill. You're a theme park attraction. You're an attraction. Your attraction, he wants to ride you like a roller coaster.

And I'm not talking only about sex. The narcissist shuns anything remotely adult.

Many narcissists don't drive, don't have a driving license, many of them don't have children, don't pay taxes, don't own real estate or homes, don't buy gifts. These are things adults do. They want to grow up. They're Peter Pan.

Peter Pan openly says in the book, I strongly strongly advise you to reread Peter Pan by Barry.

Peter Pan, the work of fiction, ostensibly, allegedlyis actually the best description ever of the inner workings of the mind of the narcissist and what he does to women who love him. Tinker loves him and Wendy loves him. See what he does to these women.

They love him in different ways. Wendy facilitates, co-ops, and colludes in the shirt fantasy. Tinker is a nonsense down to earth fairy, supposed to be ephemeral and immaterial, but she's much more real than Wendy. She's much more real because she knows her boundaries. She knows exactly what she wants. She wants a man.

And very early on in the book, Tinker realizes that Peter Pan is anything but not a man.

And so the narcissist lies about everything all the time, especially about himself.

But he doesn't perceive these as lies. He perceives these as probable or plausible compensations for dissociative gaps.

And we call this confabulation. And he does this in order to avoid intimacy, to avoid commitment.

Of course, if it's a psychopathic narcissist, sadistic narcissist or psychopath, they lie. They knowingly, adequately, intentionally, and in a planned manner lie.

And one of the main reasons for this is to withhold intimacy and to undermine any commitment.

And this is why the shirt fantasy flourishes mainly on trips and vacations.

Daily life can never amount to a shirt fantasy fully because it is demanding. It exposes the narcissist. It inexorably leads to the interstitial phase and the anti-fantasy.

So narcissists create vacation-like, holiday-like trip or traveling-like bubbles or spaces.

So if they have a relationship, they would construct it in a way that would look much more like spending time in a holiday together, a holiday destination, vacation destination. Staycation, if you wish.

But it's critical to understand that the shirt fantasy is the partner's safe base for the narcissist.

Narcissist sees the shirt fantasy as the reification, the embodiment, the personalification of the maternal role of a safe base.

Why?

Because it's a fantasy. It feels safe because it is not real.

The shirt fantasy includes elements such as intermittent sex, fun, companionship, supply, adventure, easy money, easy gifts.

By the way, I identify gifts and money as love, being cared for. It's what mothers do. They give gifts. They give money. It's a maternal function.

But all these elements exist in a shirt fantasy, but it's still unreal. It's still a bit like dreaming these things.

Because it's unreal, it's totally safe. Because it's safe, it allows the narcissist, gives the narcissist the energy to explore the world.

The narcissist is very alive at this stage. He feels resuscitated. He feels resurrected. Like Frankenstein. It's like the electricity of shirt fantasy streams through his hitherto more abundant body. And he gets up, he wakes up.

Yeah, you can see the seams. You can see the different parts. It's almost falling apart, but it's alive. It's a golem. It walks. It talks.

The partner's shirt fantasy usually revolves around marriage, children, home, being an intimate couple, doing something together.

And so the shirt fantasy of the partner and the shirt fantasy of the narcissist are not the same. It is this discrepancy, this disagreement about the nature of the shirt fantasy that undoes it.

It's the root of its undoing.

But it's critical to understand that both parties, the narcissist and its intimate partner, both of them agree to share a fantasy.

It's not like the partner says, this is not a fantasy. This is reality. And the narcissist is not reality. It's a fantasy.

No. They both agree to create a fantasy, each for his or her own reasons. They both seek to evade reality. They both construct a space where they feel hopeful, where they feel fulfilled, and when they can look forward to the future.

It's a fantastic space. They both know it.

But the partner believes that she can introduce elements into the fantasy, like children or marriage or home or doing something together or whatever, travelling. She believes she can introduce elements to the fantasy that would not undermine the fantastic nature of the shirt space.

While the narcissist disagrees, he thinks that if you introduce to the shirt fantasy pedestrian routine, average common elements like, for example, owning a home, getting married, having children, it undermines the very fantastic nature of the space.

He believes the fantasy is everything that is non-adult. This is the core disagreement with the partner.

Both of them, the partner and the narcissist agree to create a fantasy.

But the partner says, let's create an adult fantasy. Oh, that sounds good. Let's create an adult fantasy.

And the narcissist says, no, I want my fantasy to be childlike. It's exactly like the little prince, Saint-Exupéry, and his book, Little Prince.

If you read this second book I advise you to read, read Peter Pan and Little Prince and you know everything you have to know about narcissists.

In that book, it's clear that the prince has a fantasy and the aviator, the crap, the aviator whose airplane crashed in the desert, the Sahara Desert, also has a fantasy.

But they disagree about the nature of the fantasy at the beginning, in the initial dialogue.

The narcissist mislabels his shared fantasy and calls it love. But it's not, of course, because love is founded on truth, on reality, crucial.

Real love is reality and real love is never dependence and never fantastic and never creates a merger or a union of two organisms into a single organism with two heads.

This is co-dependency, it's not love.

So, narcissist mislabels his fantasy.

And then as tensions, because of these disagreements, as tensions accumulate within the shared fantasy, the parties move inexorably, can't stop it, into interstitial phase one.

And in interstitial phase one, which is the third phase, grooming shared fantasy, interstitial phase one.

In interstitial phase one, they have two options. Option one is, and the first option is exit.

So now we're talking about interstitial phase one, option one, exit.

This phase involves cheating, an aborted attempt to dump each other, or actively persisting, or cheating to modify.

Let's talk about all these things.

The role of a partner in the interstitial phase one, in interstitial phase one, is a mother. So her role was a playmate in the shared fantasy before that admirer in the grooming. Now her role is a mother.

In this phase, interstitial phase one, women choose to either exit the shared fantasy, option one, or to persist in the shared fantasy, and to attempt to move to a committed relationship, to alter the components or the constituents of the shared fantasy, and thereby changing its character or nature.

So exit, or persist.

And this phase allows the narcissist to prepare mentally for the last phase, which is for the penultimate phase, which is anti-fantasy.

In other words, narcissist realizes that things are shakyand he begins to dick effect. He begins to disengage emotionally, withdraw his investment. He begins to grieve, and he definitely begins to seek alternatives, because whatever you say about narcissists and psychopaths, they are optimizing machines. I mean, they discard and find and replace within seconds.

So this is the interstitial phase.

Why would the partner usually seek to terminate the shared fantasy? Whenever the woman tries to exit this common territory, this psychotic space, she's punished. She's punished with sadistic sex, egregious abuse, verbal, psychological, financial, other, withholding, including withholding of sex, or rejection. She's punished.

And that makes her feel very wronged. It's unjust. Why? Why does she feel that it's not okay to be punished if she tries to exit this space?

Well, first of all, because we are all autonomous, independent agents, and if we choose to leave, we should be allowed to. But forget that for a minute. The problem is much deeper.

You see, when the narcissist meets his women, he meets them in settings that imply that he's looking for a serious long-term relationship. He dates women. He doesn't go to bars, or to parties, or dating apps. That's not how we find these women.

If you go to a bar and pick up a woman, her expectations are pretty minimal, pretty basic, and they can be fulfilled into ours. If you are in a party and you flirt with someone and you end up in bed, that's also pretty confined. Although even there, some expectations can be disappointed. The disappointment itself would be expected.

But if you flirt with someone for six months, or you date them for weeks, it's a signal. If you demand sexual exclusivity, it's a signal. If you share very intimate details of your life, seek advice. It's a signal. These are signals.

The narcissist gives all these signals and meets his women in settings and behaves in ways that clearly signal, I'm looking for a serious long-term relationship.

But then he reveals later with his behaviors in the shared fantasy that he's interested in these women merely as playmates. He withholds. He doesn't fully belong. He's not fully present. He makes these women feel transparent, non-existent.

These behavior patterns make women feel very disappointed, angry, toyed with. They feel deceived, which leads them to cheat on the narcissist as a way to terminate their relationship, restore themselves emotionally, elevate their self-esteem, and hurt the narcissist in this order, by the way. It's more about them than about the narcissist.

So this defiant act of independence ending up in bed with another man, even if it's a one-night stand, is a defiant act, a symbolic severing of the bond, the trauma bond, the relationship. And it's intended to restore the woman's autonomy and self-efficacy, restore her as an agent. She's an object. She wants to become a human being, again, an agent.

And cheating is one way, cheating, I mean, having sex with another man, is one way of doing this. It's a signal of independence.

And that's why in many of these cases, the women actually inform the narcissist of what had happened, or they pick up men when the narcissist is present, and they make sure the narcissist knows about it. So that there's no way back, or to force the narcissist to dump them, or to empower themselves to make them feel so strong and restored that they will get the nerve to walk away.

It's all about trying to sever the sick miasma that the relationship had become, because the shared fantasy is so psychotic, so detached, so unreal, that it starts as a dream, but invariably ends as a nightmare. The narcissist reifies object inconsistency. He deletes chats and emails, or is married, or is in touch with multiple women, or he triangulates.

So he is unavailable even as he claims to be available, and he plays the harps on the partner's own abandonment anxiety.

And this leads to the dissolution, disintegration of the partner, and she counter-triangulates and cheats, very often just as a way to restore herself and to get the hell out of them.

Women reject their permanent role in the shared fantasy as mere sex slaves, or sex buddies, playmates, toys, co-fantasies. Women want more from their relationship, and they want exclusivity.

In this phase, women refuse to continue to realize the narcissist's sexually sadistic fantasies. They revert and transition to conventional vanilla sex.

And when their demands and expectations are not met, women don't feel that they have to meet the demands and expectations of the partner.

My demands are not met, why should I meet your demands?

And so there's a deterioration, a deterioration in the reciprocity of the relationship, and the goodwill, I would say, the goodwill reserves, goodwill deposits dwindle.

And women sometimes deny sex or withhold sex or insist on non-satisfying conventional sex as a manipulative tactic to manipulate the narcissist, to wake him up, to get a rise out of him, for the same reason they triangulate, same reason they cheat.

Or because there is no longer a quid pro quo.

All this happens in the interstitial phase, when the woman decides to exit the relationship.

And the narcissist reacts to all these maneuvers by losing sexual interest in the woman and by experiencing sometimes occasional erectile dysfunction.

Let's talk a bit more about cheating.

Now, I can hear the chorus of voices, I never cheated on my narcissist, I don't cheat, I will never cheat, I am not saying that all women, all the intimate partners, female intimate partners or narcissists cheat.

That's not what I'm saying.

Some of them cheat, some of them don't cheat.

However, cheating is an option in the mind of all these women.

Do not believe a woman who would tell you, I never thought about cheating on you. Do not believe that.

She may, because she's inhibited, or because she's well socialized, or because she has a higher self-esteem, for whatever reason, she may opt to not cheat.

But she had considered cheating, and considered cheating with specific individuals, with candidates, just held herself back.

Cheating is the only way open to a woman to kind of escape this madness of the shared fantasy, and it fulfills several functions simultaneously.

And this is why cheating gradually becomes an irresistible choice.

Now, of course, at some point, many women would say, rather than cheat, I prefer to walk away, and other women would cheat as a way of walking away.

But it's there, psychodynamically. Cheating allows the woman to get away from the narcissistic partner, safely and protected and rescued by another man, to abandon him before he dumps her in the anti-fantasy phase, and also to get rid of a narcissist for good.

Since narcissism becomes a source of pain, anger, frustration, disappointment, emotional blackmail, a restriction of freedom, growing fear, there's also all the time this fear of retribution and stalking after the breakup or the cheating.

And women come to regard their ancestors severely disturbed, or even as evil, the secretary object.

And so there's a lot of incentive to walk away with another man.

There's kind of intuitive feeling that that other man is a sort of protection.

And there's also the thing that it's a symbolic act of defiance, independence, autonomy. It's cutting the gaudic knot.

The personality or the identity of the other man is very rarely relevant.

The other man is also simple, is also a kind of tool or instrument to exit the relationship.

And again, the cheating doesn't have to be actual. There could be emotional affairs. Or the cheating would take place in the woman's mind.

And just the fact that she had considered it would be sufficient.

So the second function of cheating, real or conceived, is for the woman to restore herself with a man, both emotionally and sexually, to demonstrate to the narcissist and to herself her attractiveness, independence of him, and her ability and willingness to experiment sexually and to do whatever else she wants with whoever she wants.

And finally, of course, is always the element of hurting and punishing the narcissist.

Remember, this is the interstitial phase exit strategy, option one.

In an active shared fantasy, the problem is that discrete cheating will not yield a transition to anti-fantasy.

So the woman needs to cheat in order to mortify the narcissist. She needs to ostentatiously cheat. She needs to humiliate him in the act of cheating. She needs him to know what had happened. She needs him to witness what had happened. To irrevocably undermine the shared fantasy as mortification sets in and is fully processed.

There are four videos on this channel which deal with narcissistic mortification. To learn more about this topic, you need to watch them.

There's been a serious misunderstanding, my fault. When I said that once a woman exits the shared fantasy, the narcissist will never try to get her back, which, of course, is not what I meant to say. Narcissist is Hoover. Hoover, previous sources of supply. Hoovering is a term that I coined. Sources of supply. They come back again and again to women who had left them and exited their life.

So that's all I was trying to say. I was trying to say that under certain conditions, if the woman lives in a specific way, then the narcissist will shun and avoid her because she is a source of danger. She's a threat.

So if a woman lives, for example, by mortifying, then the narcissist would avoid her. If a woman lives, we'll come to it a bit later.

But generally speaking, the cheating needs to mortify to obtain the goal of interstitial phase one.

The woman, as I said, is then perceived as a threat. Cheating to mortify, cheating in order to mortify, allows the woman to de-effect, to disengage from the narcissist emotionally.

At this stage, she is disillusioned and she counters her addiction, her trauma bonding, by transferring her attachment and emotions to another man.

Now, this attachment and emotions could be very short term, very shallow. They could lead to a one-night stand or casual sex or nothing flirting all night.

It's just that she violates, breaks the unspoken agreement of sexual exclusivity or emotional exclusivity. That symbolic act is in itself sufficient, like raising the flag, you know.

And so she transfers her attachment and emotions to another man, her interest, her intimacy, her openness, her trust, her gratitude to another man. And usually she does it in public or she makes sure that the narcissist gets to learn about all this.

And by doing this, she both abandons the narcissist and abrogates her maternal role.

And from that moment, the narcissist will find it very difficult to regard her as a safe-based mother because she hurt him. He did not believe that she will hurt him, but she hurt him.

And so there are two types of shared fantasy.

One is aborted shared fantasy and one is active shared fantasy.

Sometimes the narcissist tries to create a shared fantasy with a partner and it's not working out. The shared fantasy is not fully formed. It's the beginnings. There are rudiments of shared fantasy, but they don't coalesce into a shared fantasy.

When cheating occurs in an aborted shared fantasy, this leads to a successful exit. The narcissist cannot return to women who had betrayed the shared fantasy by cheating or triangulating if the fantasy had been aborted before it had matured.

That's a critical thing.

If the narcissist picks up a potential partner or potential mate, tries to create a shared fantasy with him, and fails, and then she cheats, he will never return to this woman.

And then there's cheating in active shared fantasy.

This kind of cheating is much less effective. It's recurrent, it's failed, exits. It must result in a mortification.

To be successful, the shared fantasy is active, the narcissist ends it only after having processed a mortification, after having endured several rounds of injurious cheating.

So the sequence in an active shared fantasy is cheating, injuries, reclaiming the woman, cheating, injuries, reclaiming the partner, and then the partner says enough is enough, she mortifies the narcissist.

The narcissist undergoes a mortification, processes the mortification, and then dumps the partner and breaks up with her.

Or lets the partner dump and break up.

And this is owing to the fact that these women are perceived by the narcissist as having betrayed the shared fantasy and exited without his property of their own initiative as a display of personal autonomy and dependence with other men while cheating.

This is acceptable in an active shared fantasy, but not in an aborted fantasy. And it's acceptable if there's no modification involved, if the cheating is instrumental.

If the woman cheats just because she wants to feel better or wants to have sex.

But if she cheats in order to ruin the narcissist psychologically, to mortify him, to challenge the foundations of his psychology, his grandiosity, everything, then he will avoid this woman like the plague afterwards.

The impact is owing to the way the partner had abandoned the shared fantasy.

Another way is to transition from shared fantasy to anti-fantasy without going through the interstitial phase, without giving the narcissist time to detach and de-cafet.

And this leads to traumatic narcissistic mortification.

Again, this is the kind of woman a narcissist would avoid.

There's no problem with a partner who had kept disrupting the formation and maturation of the shared fantasy.

Because this kind of partner doesn't allow the shared fantasy to flourish and to coalesce and to come into being.

So a partner who comes and goes, approaches avoidance, refuses to idealize the narcissist, refuses to adulate, refuses some types of sex, is not a good playmate. This kind of partner is disruptive and doesn't allow the shared fantasy to form and to mature.

So if this partner walks away or cheats or something like that, the narcissist doesn't react too badly. He perceives the whole thing to have been a fling or casual sex, and he will try to over this kind of woman or partner in the future.

Now, the breakup that ensues is in itself a very complex phase, psychodynamically speaking.

Let's start with sex. Sex with a woman is similarly in the service of securing the stability of the shared fantasy.

It also fulfills another role. It allows the narcissist to humiliate and degrade the woman so as to prove to himself his own irresistibility and addictive quality.

You see, if he humiliates a woman, despoils her, degrades her, and she keeps coming back for more, it proves that he is irresistible, that he is addictive, that he is suiciary, is only one of his kind, you know.

Here he is destroying her, annulling her, humiliating her, demeaning her, berating her, debasing her, and she keeps coming back for more.

What does it say about him? He's gone.

When triangulation or cheating occurs in an active shared fantasy space or phase, the narcissist persists in the fantasy because fantasy has, as you have seen, crucial, fulfills crucial psychodynamics, psychological needs.

And so it would take a lot to break an active shared fantasy.

Only when these needs are challenged directly in mortification, only then the narcissist gives up.

But as long as there are narcissistic injuries here and there, the fantasy is worth maintaining and keeping using confirmation bias.

So triangulation is not enough. Cheating is not enough. He persists in the fantasy. He embarks on a reclaimed honeymoon following every incident, every episode.

And of course, this reclaimed honeymoon doesn't last long and is followed by abuse and absence. And this forces the woman to escalate.

She flirts, doesn't work. She triangulates, doesn't work. She cheats, doesn't work. So she has to escalate. She has to severely injure and mortify the narcissist by cheating on him ostentatiously in a humiliating way to end the relationship, simply to dump him and walk away.

Now this is cheating. When I say cheating, it's a form of mortification. There are many other forms of mortification.

The betrayal of trust, the ruination or destruction of the safe base element in the relationship. It can be done in many ways. She could steal all this money.

There's a famous, there's a very good movie, The Best Offer, where an old reclusive bachelor art collector falls in love with a ravishing, stunning but mentally ill woman. Oh, she pretends to be mentally ill. She abscons with all this art collection and his money.

So there are many ways to to mortify. I'm focusing on cheating and sex because this is the most common way, actually.

But a woman partner, narcissist intimate partner, can mortify the narcissist in many other ways.

If the shared fantasy, I remind you, if the shared fantasy is aborted or does not mature, the narcissist dumps the woman immediately after her triangulation in cheating and he suffers only narcissistic injury.

But once dumped by either party, the shared fantasy is over. A relationship can continue.

But the fantasy is over. And it cannot be revived by either party, even if the will is there, even if they try, even if the woman remains and lost his life, even if she returns to him, he returns to her.

The shared fantasy is dead. Once dead, always dead. Even if he hovers this kind of woman, this woman in the future, even who for her not is a partner for a shared fantasy or if he recreates a shared fantasy with her, it will be with such reserve and so many preconditions that actually it will be more transactional.

So there's been a breakup and there's a process of grieving and moving on as the narcissist is attached not to the shared fantasy itself or to any of its details, but to the way he had felt in the shared fantasy.

This is very crucial. Narcissist is not attached to his partner. He doesn't fondly remember what they had done together. He doesn't even put emphasis on the sex. He gets attached to the way the shared fantasy had made him feel. He gets attached to his own reactions to the shared fantasy. He grieves the passing of the shared fantasy only self-referentially and autoerotically.

The woman's indispensable role in the fantasy is solely as a mere theta probe. A catalyst is an object. A presence is required, but she must remain quiet. The woman's function is only to counterfactually buttress all the elements of the narcissist's grandiosity and to affirm the reality of the fantasy, to make the narcissist feel elated, feel high.

The narcissist idealizes the woman in order to facilitate the shared fantasy. If he doesn't idealize her, it will not be a fantasy.

So he has to idealize her, or he idealizes her in order to resolve mortification. He decafects, he removes his emotional investment in order to switch off and to move on to the next shared fantasy.

So the idealization-devaluation cycle that we are also acquainted with is closely connected to the various phases of the shared fantasy, and it's brought on by these phases.

He idealizes in the grooming stage, he idealizes in the shared fantasy, and then he has to devalue. He has to devalue to break out of the shared fantasy and to establish a new one.

Some people are addicted to love, some people are addicted to risks, some people are addicted to money or to thrills. The narcissist is addicted to fantasizing. And fantasizing not only in romantic relationships, he fantasizes in business.

Narcissists are well known for consistently coming up with get-rich-quick schemes and hair-brain projects.

He likes to fantasize. Fantasy is the permanent state of mind and being of the narcissist. It's where he feels most safe, most comfortable, most calm, most happy.

The cathexis, the emotional investment, is in the shared fantasy, or actually more precisely in the way the shared fantasy is experienced, not in the woman, not in the relationship.

And this is why when the narcissist accepts the fantasy's demise, he disengages, he switches off, he de-cathex overnight, and he transitions with alacrity to the next shared fantasy.

Intimate partners of narcissists keep musing, keep complaining, keep being shocked at the speed with which the narcissist transitioned from the relationship to another one.

You know, he dumped them on Wednesday, and on Friday he has a new wife, and on Monday she's pregnant. They're shocked at this instant transition. I have witnessed a transition which took 20 minutes. A witness with my own eyes, a psychopathic borderline, narcissistic grandiose woman, who transitioned in a few minutes.

So as long as the fantasy has any life or hope left in it, the narcissist mourns its imminent passing. He tries to reverse the situation, to keep it alive.

And he's mortified when the shared fantasy expires. Make no mistake about it. He pays a very dear and deep emotional price.

But that is why the narcissist never grieves over any aspect of the woman, of the relationship.

The shared fantasy in which he is exclusively invested is a state of mind. It's not a reality. It's the way he interacted and interfaced with a fantasy that he mourns, that he misses.

The narcissist does not miss or dwell on the sex, on common activities, on memories, on plans, on his partner. They're all interchangeable, commoditized components of the shared fantasy.

He can have this with any woman, and he does. He just needs a trigger, and the trigger is in the form of a woman, but he just needs a trigger to activate an internal mental state.

What the narcissist does grieve are the outcomes of the mortification. He grieves the renewed loss of innocence and being forced to revert to reality and to confront himself in an unforgiving, unflinching, cruel and unflattering mirror.

All this, yes, all this is a totally decompensating, disintegrating effect on the narcissist. But that's more or less it.

The narcissist grieves and mourns himself.

Now, there's another variant of interstitial phase one, another option, and that is the option to persist.

This option involves frustration. The sexuality becomes conventional, the sex, and still there is a presumption of exclusivity. The narcissist partners mistake the shared fantasy phase. They think it's a passing, temporary, love bombing or infatuation stage, and it's going to be followed by the implementation of realistic plans, or at the very least, realistic fantasy, adult fantasy, fantasy that involves life, elements of life.

Like I mentioned before, home, business, doing business, creating a home, having children, making a family.

So the the narcissist intimate partners are much more grounded in adult, short responsibilities and in well-tensioned view of life.

And when they start pushing for more, the narcissist becomes indecisive and approach avoidant. As long as this discontent, this friction, this disagreement is not translated to specific demands, ultimatums, withholding, conflict, or betrayal and cheating.

The narcissist pretends and continues to act as though everyone is still on the same shared fantasy page. But it can't last for long. It can't last for long and it leads to an anti-fantasy phase.

And the anti-fantasy phase, phase four of the five, involves mortification, decoupling, sexuality is non-existent, sexlessness, celibacy, abstinence.

And in some cases, partners wish to stay together, they create open relationships.

The minute the partner tries to transition from simulation to reality, the minute the partner refuses to participate in the shared fantasy, the minute the partner tries to convert the shared fantasy into some modicum of adult reality.

The minute the partner attempts to extract unilateral benefits, material or otherwise, she moves in to live with the narcissist or meets the narcissist regularly. She demands sex, the narcissist's time, attention, sharing, which is boring.

The minute she obstructs his work, who interferes with it, the minute she grandiosely claims a share in or control of the shared fantasy or any of its elements, the minute she rejects the narcissist's sexuality, criticizes his sexual performance or proclivities, the minute she has any overt expectations, the minute she makes any demands or ultimatums of any kind, verbally abuses the narcissist, the minute she triangulates, she flirts, she misbehaves with other men, spends time with them, she's on the narcissist, betrays the narcissist in any way which modifies him.

That's a critical element, mortification. The minute she questions, disagrees, criticizes, mocks, shows disappointment, withholds any of the three essays, sex, supply and services, or any combination of the amount. All these are perceived as criticism and devaluation.

They are challenged to the narcissist's grandiosity and a proof of the partner's worthlessness.

She is, I don't know, stupid, needy, dependent, weak, dangerous. She's out to get him, she's a gold digger.

It's paranoia, paranoid ideation, provokes paranoia, the secretary ideation.

Shared fantasy dissipates, the cool-headed, unflinching, narco-path takes over.

Disenchanted, this narco-path instantly and totally gives up on the partner emotionally, he takes effects.

He discards the fantasy, the roleplay of the game. The narcissist loses all sexual interest in the woman, begins to verbally abuse her sadistically, pushing all her buttons.

In that instant, she's no longer his woman.

He doesn't care what she does with other men. He no longer reacts to other men's disrespectful advances on her or comments about her. He wakes up, so to speak. He fully refers to reality, absenting himself.

He may be there physically, but never emotionally or mentally. He becomes a kind of disinterested roommate. He also becomes egregiously, verbally abusive and devaluing if he is impinged or if he is kind of pricked or addressed.

The narcissist sometimes pushes the partner to cheat on him with others in order to either cause him self-motification or to terminate their relationship without untoward repercussions or to guilt-trip the cheating party into submission.

And this instantaneous transition from shared fantasy to transactional reality is accomplished in sometimes minutes, as I told you. Usually it takes days and weeks, but I've witnessed such a transition which took minutes.

And the narcissist does not bother after that to monitor the environment anymore for competitors. He redirects all his energies and attention and focus to other tasks. He erases the partner emotionally. There's no object consensus. He's gone. She's history. Out of mind, out of sight.

He still reads available cues perfectly, but selectively, in order to affirm that the partner is disrespectful, unfaithful, disloyal, or pervasive liar, etc., which makes it easier for him to dig effect.

And he helps him to move on to the next fantasy roleplay with the next idealized partner, even when he chooses to do so.

It also alerts the narcissist to any pitfalls or risks in the process.

So to dig effect, to withdraw emotionally, the narcissist again uses splitting, but this time reverse splitting.

At the beginning, the shared fantasy phase, grooming phase, the partner was all good. Now she's all bad.

To switch from shared fantasy to anti-fantasy, he renders the partner, he sees the partner as a cruel, sadistic, withholding, frustrating, deceitful, abusive, persecretary, maternally cheating object, not safe, dangerous, hostile, an enemy.

And he coerces the partner to conform to this role, to enact it. It's something called projective identification.

He rejects the partner, he abuses her, he withholds sex and everything else. And this pushes the partner, for example, to cheat or to retaliate.

And this, upon his view, that she's all bad. But cheating or abusing the narcissist has a role for the woman as well, for the partner. It allows her to dig effect.

And so the narcissist misconduct provokes the partner to flee and to seek a core or to retaliate or to find another safe man.

Sometimes someone who is vastly inferior to the narcissist. So he's unlikely to reject and abuse her and compound her injury.

In the case of cheating, it causes the narcissist life-threatening pain if it reaches the stage of mortification.

But following mortification is emotionally free and able to transition to the next shared fantasy.

So the two parties collude and collaborate in mortification. The woman wants to modify the narcissist, so she's set free.

And the narcissist wants her to modify, so that he's set free. They both want to be set free.

And the only ticket out is mortification. The narcissist's mortification.

mortification can be minimal if the woman assumes her share of the responsibility or blame for what had happened.

Or mortification can be major if the woman casts all the responsibility or blame on the narcissist.

And a prime reason for mortification can be, for example, if the narcissist becomes convinced that he is the bad guy. That his partner did not deserve the horrific, cruel, inhuman abuse that he meted out to them.

Now, why would a narcissist cast himself as a bad guy?

Because then he can say, I made her do it. My misbehavior, my misconduct, my abuse, my cruelty, my sadism pushed her to do what she had done. So I'm in control. I'm still the prime mover and shaker and the prime reason, prime cause.

It restores his grandiosity.

There's another variant where the narcissist feels that he had been wrong. That he's the good guy, the victim.

And their mortification is reduced or absent altogether.

The cheating, she's a bad object.

Yes, you remember splitting. Cheating makes it impossible for the narcissist to entertain counterfactual.

What if ego-distonic fantasies? Like I failed, I misbehave, let's try again.

He can say that when there's no modification. And he does.

Very often the narcissist persists in the fantasy and try again and again again.

But during this mortification, he cannot say that. He cannot re-affect the betraying, modified object, the woman.

He can have emotional sex with her or add whole collaboration in the future, but never again a shared fantasy.

Mortification taught him a lesson that she's dangerous. All women react the same to the narcissist in their lives.

They're intimidated, confused, exhausted, angry, disappointed. They then seek to hurt the narcissist, but as they walk away or cheat, many of them out of pity, sometimes try to minimize the pain they had caused by lying or by minimizing their misbehavior, reframing it.

It's a mistake. It's a mistake because if they do this, then the shared fantasy survives. The narcissist will latch on these confabulations and pre-variations in order to not be mortified.

And he will persist with the shared fantasy.

If you want to end this torture, the only way is to mortify the narcissist. You have to be cruel.

Borderlines, for example, some borderlines are secondary cyclones. And they just don't care about hurting the narcissist grievously at the moment of pursuing the fulfillment of their needs.

Regret, shame and guilt come later.

And consequently, these kind of women often mortify the narcissist by putting a cruel mirror to the hideous grandiose buffoon and obnoxious repulsive monster that he is.

These kind of women say any man, any man, is preferable to you. You are a horrible person and a deluded fool, fool of yourself, fool.

So the narcissist reacts to his own mortification.

The way people react to him with shock, horror, nausea, depression, avoidance, denial, trauma. He may even become psychosomatic, headaches, gastrointestinal symptoms, panic attacks, dyspnea, inability to breathe, shortness of breath, depression, anxiety, aggression, etc.

Mortification is crucial if you want to end a shared fantasy. There's no way around it.

Half measures, disguises, pre-variations, confabulations and pretensions will get you nowhere.

Women realize that as the end.

Many of them cheat with other men and many of them betray in other ways.

But I found out that the majority of intimate partners of narcissists end up realizing this intuitively and mortifying the narcissist, which leads to the last stage, interstitial phase two, latency.

The narcissist switches from external mortification caused by the intimate partner to auto-plastic internal mortification or vice versa from internal mortification to other plastic external mortification and usually cycles between these two mortifications.

In a brief nutshell, because there are four videos dedicated to this, the narcissist can say, it was all my fault, I made her do it, thereby regaining his sense of grandiosity as the prime cause and in control, or he can say she was evil and she did this to me, I'm going to punish her.

These are the two types of mortification.

Narcissist reconstructs the false self, reconstructs the false self with doses of grandiosity. He assumes responsibility and implied control over what had happened or he casts everyone involved as evil and seeks to punish them.

He then goes into schizoid hibernation, no sex, no social interactions, masturbation, minimal contact with this woman, the intimate partner who had mortified him and with other women.

Tolerance over misbehavior, cheating, other types of misconduct because he's no longer in his life.

And finally, the mortifying and envious woman and other evil parties are perceived by the narcissist as a threat to be shunned, also because they recover and thrive after he had punished him while the narcissist withers and suffers irreversible damage.

So it's ego dystonics. It's unpleasant for the narcissist to see how limited his power is.

So finally, narcissists have been mortified. These are evil people. Try to punish them.

I did punish them to some extent. Didn't work so well. I don't want to be faced with my failure, with this failure to punish them. I don't want to witness this. I'm out of here.

Grandiosity restored, however delusionally, partially.

The narcissist moves on to the next shared fantasy.

He becomes decisive and approach oriented. No avoidance there. Immediately after the anti-fantasy, the narcissist is vulnerable to abuse, manipulation and expectations by unscrupulous women, psychopaths, borderlines.

And many narcissists fall prey, actually. They're very, very vulnerable at this stage. They are in a state of mind, in a psychological state that is equal equivalent to the typical state of mind and psychological state of their victims.

They become victims.

Because narcissists at this stage, after the mortification and after latency, he seeks another shared fantasy indiscriminately.

He idealizes anyone. He is looking for an intimate partner to participate in a new shared fantasy urgently, compulsively, indiscriminately.

So he falls prey very often. Time for many, I think. Restorative many. He falls prey very often to psychopathic and so on.

Women, narcissists cannot survive without a shared fantasy for long.

Narcissistic supply functions depend crucially on a shared fantasy.

Narcissist is a grandiose fantasy. That's how he derives narcissistic supply.

To support a false structure, a false self, falsity, fantasy, he needs this.

Without these elements, he's not supplying. Without supplying, he falls apart.

He also needs a maternal substitute. He needs to feel loved and safe. These are mission critical for even minimal functioning of the narcissists.

The narcissist is a child. He needs a mummy. He needs a mummy.

And he needs constant praise. Then, emboldened, he can venture out into the world and fuck it up all again.