This is a recap of an interview that I gave in October 2021. The interview is no longer available on my channel.
Don't ask.
So when we were all a lot younger, here is what I had to say.
Shared fantasy is a form of Paracosm. Paracosm is a kind of an alternative reality, an alternative universe.
So shared fantasy is an alternative universe constructed by the narcissist who then invites the potential intimate partner or source of supply to enter this universe and to adhere to its percepts, to its tenets, to its underlying foundational principles.
But this is only the first step.
The narcissist is the exact equivalent of a parasite, a kind of human tapeworm. He infiltrates your mind. He takes over and he makes you believe things that are not there. He makes you experience emotions that are not yours. He makes you obey voices that are his.
We're going to discuss the intricate mechanisms that the narcissist uses in order to accomplish this goal of hijacking your mind, your brain, your mental health, your ability to resist, your functions.
You outsource yourself to the narcissist, even if you're completely healthy and definitely if you're a borderline.
And then the narcissist becomes you.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Surf Lab, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm a former visiting professor of psychology. When I say that you adhere to the shared fantasy, it means to accept the paracosm of the shared fantasy as real.
And when I say adhere, it also means to subject one's cognitions and emotions to the exigencies and parameters of the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy is a mind warping, mind altering experience. It's not just a Disneyland. It's like as if you were buying a ticket to Disneyland and then you could never exit because Disneyland would have become the world and you would have had to accept the reality of Mickey Mouse and the fact that there's a castle on the hill and so on and so forth.
So you have to reside in the shared fantasy from the moment you're invited in.
Shared fantasies are the way narcissists create dependency in the intimate partner because what they do is idealize the intimate partner and then they allow the intimate partner to form emotional attachment with the idealized image.
So it's a form of self-love.
When the intimate partner falls in love with the narcissist, he doesn't fall in love with the narcissist. The narcissist is unknowable. It's an unknown quantity. You can't fall in love with the unknown.
So what are you falling in love with?
The intimate partner doesn't fall in love with the narcissist. It falls in love with his or her idealized image that the narcissist granted you access to.
Narcissist idealizes you, then lets you be in touch with your idealization and this proves to be irresistible. You fall in love with yourself and you fall in love with your idealizer for having given you this experience. You become grateful.
This is the shared fantasy.
Shared fantasy has two effects which are not often discussed.
One is what is called mass psychogenic illness. These are clinical terms. Mass psychogenic illness is the correct term for shared psychosis or folie a deux. It is the suspension of disbelief, the suspension of judgment, the ability to adopt a we versus they mentality. It's us against the world.
There is an adherence to rules of the game within the shared fantasy that are often unrealistic. There's a suspension of reality or a reality impairment. Reality testing itself is affected.
And all this mess is known as mass psychogenic illness.
Mass because it affects the narcissist and you.
This is one effect of the shared fantasy.
The second thing that happens in the shared fantasy and it happens exclusively to the victim is a prolonged grief disorder.
That's a new disorder that's been identified about four years ago. About 10% of people when they emerge from an injurious hurtful relationship, they are unable to recover. No matter what, they are simply unable to recover and recuperate. They grieve, they mourn forever.
And this is known as prolonged grief disorder.
The vast majority of victims of narcissist experience prolonged grief disorder.
It's a very interesting phenomenon in itself.
But the question is, why does the shared fantasy have this power over you? Why does a shared fantasy generate mass psychosis and prolonged grief?
What in the shared fantasy does this to you?
I mean, let's go back to Disneyland.
When you go to Disneyland, when you exit, you don't have a prolonged grief disorder, unless of course you're a Jew.
The price of the ticket does this to you. You grieve.
I'm sorry, it's my anti-semitic jokes.
So the shared fantasy is a kind of Disneyland.
What in it causes these shattering, life altering, mind bending effects? What's the distinction in other words? What's the difference between a shared fantasy and a Disneyland fantasy?
The reason of course is that a shared fantasy is actually a trance-like pseudo hypnotic state.
Yes, you heard me correctly. You are induced into a trance-like hypnotic state.
Very similar to the effects of drinking wine.
The shared fantasy involves a primary stage called grooming or love bombing, which induces in the victim essentially a trance state or a pseudo hypnotic state clinically known as a dissociative state.
In a dissociative state, there are several elements.
There is a shared fantasy, which is essentially a dissociative state, trance state, pseudo hypnotic state, and there's a lot of forgetting involved. It involves depersonalization.
The victim often feels that it's not she who is involved, but kind of someone else or that she has let go of herself. She feels estranged from herself. She feels alien, unknown, unfamiliar to herself. She's kind of observing herself from the outside, and this is known as depersonalization.
And there's also derealization.
Colloquially this is known as gaslighting. Derealization is when you misinterpret reality or you believe that you are misinterpreting reality, or you believe that reality is not real.
And what is real is not reality, etc., etc.
The lines between reality and misconceptions of reality, these lines blur, and you're no longer sure what is real and what is not.
There's a problem with gauging reality and judging reality, and so on and so forth. Gaslighting does this to you, so it's a form of derealization.
And it induces derealization. And finally, in the shared fantasy, of course, there's fantasy.
It's a defense mechanism. The paracosm fantasy is the opposite of reality.
And the main aim of fantasy is to prevent you from acting in reality, on reality, and within reality.
Now, people confuse fantasy with dreaming.
When you dream, when you have a daydream, or when you dream about becoming, for example, becoming me, it's not the same as fantasy. When you dream, it's a practical thing.
Dreaming involves planning.
A dream is the first step in planning. It usually results with some interface with reality.
It could be a failed interface. Your dream can fail or can break, but there's always an interface with reality via the stage of planning.
Fantasy is the exact opposite. The main aim of fantasy is to inhibit action, to prevent you from interfacing with reality, to keep you captive in a dreamlike state, to not allow you to plan because you are denuded, deprived of agency and autonomy.
That's fantasy, not a dream.
See the paracosm, this is a form of dissociation. It's like a bed dream. You're unable to act, incapable of moving because of the fantasy. You're not sure that you are yourself because of depersonalization. You're not sure that what you're witnessing is real, derealization, and you keep forgetting things.
So put all of these together, and you're in a dissociative state.
And at this point, when you are most vulnerable, when your ability to interact with reality has been disabled to its maximum, at this point exactly, the abuser strikes.
He starts a process called entraining.
I was the first to apply the concept of entraining to abuse in October 2020. Now as early as 2006, scholars have noted the similarity between verbal abuse and for example music. They realized that a repetition of words, a repetition of phrases, induce hypnotic or hypnosis-like states in the mind.
This has been described in books and articles.
But no one knew how this is being done until the discovery of entraining.
Entraining is a concept borrowed from neuroscience. It's when external input, such as music, has an effect on brainwaves so as to create, so as to cohere and synchronize the brainwaves of several participants in a specific way or form.
The science of entraining in neuroscience had demonstrated in multiple ways that we can use external input to affect the brains of multiple people, to produce coherent cohesive structures, cohesive multi-unit activities, cohesive brainwaves which are identical in multiple people.
So if a group of people is listening to the same music, their brainwaves will become the same.
This could easily be described as brainwashing.
The abuser uses entraining to brainwash you.
But what is really entraining?
It involves an external stimulus.
Stimulus can be music, but it could be verbal abuse.
If you listen to the abuser when he verbally abuses you, it is exactly like music.
First of all, the abuser repeats many sentences again and again and again. There's a lot of repetition going on. It's like a refrain in a song. It's like he's singing the abuse, and there's a refrain, and the refrain is this sentence that keeps recurring.
The second thing is the abuse is never typical speech. It's not a speech act. It's not like two people talking. The abuse is structured. It is a kind of mathematical regularity. It has repeated phrases. It resembles music very much. And I call it the music of abuse.
Exactly like music abuse, and trains the brain.
Abuse mental abuse, verbal abuse, and train the mind.
The abuser creates in your brain, in your hardware or wetware, specific wave patterns.
Now, he doesn't know what he's doing. Most abusers are not neuroscientists, but all abusers are predators.
So in training comes to them naturally. These brain patterns in your mind render you a resonance of the abuser, an extension of the abuser.
Your brain synchronizes with his brain. Your brain becomes one with his mind, with him.
The waves in your brain reflect totally the waves in his brain.
He had penetrated your brain. He has taken over and generated waves identical to his brain waves.
And from that moment, you're enmeshed.
And training leads to enmeshment or merger or fusion in a relationship.
So this is the second phase, entraining, fantasy dissociation, entraining, enmeshment.
The minute you're enmeshed, you're no longer, you no longer exist as an independent entity in any meaningful sense of the word.
It's a little like hypnotic suggestion.
In hypnosis, as in abuse, suggestible people are the core constituency.
So why do we have an hypnosis?
What is the story of post-hypnotic suggestions, words?
You wake up from the hypnosis and I say Brussels and you kill your neighbor, which anyway you wanted to kill.
So it's the same with entraining and abuse.
The abuser maintains a post-hypnotic control over you.
He hasn't trained your brain. He hasn't gendered these brain waves.
And from that moment, anytime he repeats the abusive text, the catechism of abuse, anytime he does that, he generates in your mind exactly these brain waves. He replicates them. And he has a kind of post-hypnotic control over you.
And this is entrainment.
These are scientific facts, by the way. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's not a wild speculation. This has been done with music.
And I see no difference between music and speech, especially structured, repetitive speech such as verbal abuse.
So then at that point, when you have become a slave, it becomes a slave or in computer terms when you've become a client of the abuser, you are at the abuser's disposal.
At this stage, the abuser seeks to transfer self-regulatory functions from you to himself.
Let us recap.
This is not easy material. It starts with grooming or love bombing.
The grooming is intended to induce a dissociative state, a state which involves amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, a fantasy defense, and so on. This is called a shared fantasy. It's a little like hypnosis and a lot like trance.
When this happens, the abuser starts to entrain you.
He creates in your mind brain waves which are identical to his brain waves. Your brain waves are totally synchronized with his brain waves. It's as if he had exported his brain waves into your brain, suppressing your own brain waves.
From that moment, your one mind melded a hive mind. You become one.
By the way, this has been documented in rock bands. There were studies of the brain activities of players in rock bands. All their brains generated identical waves when they started to play together. It is as if they had become one mind. So you become one mind with the abuser as if you were a rock band.
But why?
What for?
Why is this needed?
Wine break. This is tough material.
You remember that I said when we were all much younger that the abuser wants you to transfer your self-regulatory functions to him.
To do that, he needs to disable your autonomous brain waves. He needs to implant in you like the Manchurian candidate who needs to implant in you his brain waves.
So now your brain is a mere reflection. It's been hijacked. It's been colonized by a parasite. It's an imitation, a replica, a copy of the abuser's mind, his brain.
So now the abuser takes away from you your regulatory functions. Normally, if you're a more or less healthy person, you regulate by yourself. This is called self-regulation. You regulate your emotions, your moods. There are many regulatory functions taking place every second of the day.
And what the abuser does, he takes these regulatory functions away from you. He renders you defenseless. You don't have your own wave patterns to protect you against his intrusion. It's like your firewall has been disabled by malware. It's like the abuser had installed a virus or a short trojan in your mind, a root kit.
So now he uses it to transfer regulatory functions from you to himself. And he starts to regulate your emotions and your moods and later on your cognitions. It takes control. It's like a hostile takeover. Anyone who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you this, that the abuser controls their moods. The abuser makes them happy, makes them unhappy, makes them depressed, makes them whatever. It all comes from the abuser. It's external.
And this is why we bond with abusers. This is trauma bonding.
The abuser does this, accomplishes this using a series of techniques.
The first technique is intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold, I love you, I hate you and so on and so forth.
The second is approach avoidance, I want to be with you. I don't want to be with you.
Trauma bonding, which we have discussed, I've discussed in other videos.
Abuse verbal abuse and so on.
So using these techniques, the end result is that you are an empty shell or your internal regulation has been outsourced to the abuser, has been externalized.
And so you stand there like a zombie or like a robot in a bed, big movie or a movie, sci-fi movie and you are waiting for the abuser to activate the various various modules of your mind.
It's like your mind is dormant, inactive, disabled until the narcissist or the abuser throws on a switch.
The abuser decides how you're going to feel. The abuser decides what your mood is going to be. The abuser decides even what you're going to think and when.
You have handed control totally to your abuser via the process of shared fantasy, dissociative shared fantasy and entraining.
And these twin processes, the shared fantasy and the entraining had rendered you a tool, a machine, a device used by the abuser.
The entrainment, entraining you means reorganizing your mind.
And this leads to something that I call emotional artifacts.
I'll come to it in a minute.
When the abuser entrains you, what he does, he accesses your mind and he activates certain brain patterns. He deactivates other brain waves.
So he's reorganizing your mind in a way.
The minute he does this, he generates emotions and cognitions. Normally meddling with the brain, playing around with your mind is bound to produce emotional reactions and cognitions, thoughts.
And these are the abuses doing.
No one can stop this. As long as you're alive, you're going to emote, you're going to think.
Many people, many scholars think that emotions are a subspecies of cognitions.
But at any rate, you're going to have emotions, you're going to have cognitions. This is unstoppable.
Not even the abuser can turn this off.
But what the abuser does, having taken over your mind, he had rendered your emotions and your cognitions not yours, but his.
So we call these non-autonomous cognitions in non-autonomous emotions. I call them artifacts.
You continue to generate emotions and cognitions. You continue to experience them as authentic as if they were yours, but they're actually not yours. They're induced in you by the abuser.
So again, it's not intentional. It's just what predators do. It's like a shark. The shark doesn't analyze your blood before it pounces on you.
Sharks, that's what they do. Predators, that's what they do. Abusers, that's what they do. They take over your mind and they generate artifacts, emotions and cognitions that you mistake for yours when they're not yours.
From that moment, any cognition and emotion you have is actually a reflection of cognitions and emotions of the abuser.
Because the abuser has taken over your mind and all the brain patterns and brainwaves and so on and so forth in your mind are not yours at all.
Obviously you subjectively experience all these as if they were yours, but they're not.
So if you are prone to something, it will be enhanced by the abuser.
But very often you will find yourself amazed at who you have become. You will feel estranged and alien as if it were not you anymore. Your brain will have become a clone of the abuser's brain.
Now everything I'm telling you is well documented in neuroscience. They studied the effect of music, as I mentioned, and they demonstrated that a single mind can take over a group of minds via music.
They demonstrated that if you listen to a waltz, your brain will react with the same frequency as the waltz and actually will become a giant waltz machine or waltzing machine, a very strange imagery.
The brainwaves will be canceled and the only brainwave remaining, the spike, it's called the spike, will be equal to the frequency of the waltz.
That's why our bodies move when we listen to music because we have no other waves, only this wave.
And this wave becomes dominant and it moves the body.
In the study of entrainment or entraining via music, there are conclusions, conclusive findings that show, one, that one mind can take over other minds via music and two, that music can eliminate all autonomous brainwaves and induce a non-autonomous series of brainwaves from the outside.
Music, simple music, a waltz, not verbal abuse.
Verbal abuse is much more potent because it harps on your vulnerabilities, it reactivates your traumas much stronger than music in many ways.
There are other findings, very frightening findings.
So I think that abuse is worse than music because of the exposure to abuse, exposure surface is much bigger.
How many times do you listen to the same song but the exposure to abuse is much more extensive.
The surface of the exposure, it's repetitive, abuse creates pathways in the brain, physical pathways, neurological pathways, neural pathways.
And this is how psychotherapy works as well.
Talk therapy has the same effect on the brain.
The brain is neuroplastic. It's much more neuroplastic than we had known. It's very reactive to sound, especially structured sound, especially structured sound, which are meaningful.
And so again, I have a video dated October 2020 about in training, some of the neuroscientific findings regarding in training.
You're invited to watch this video. It's only 15 minutes. I don't know why. And it describes these terrifying findings.
We are far less independent than we like to think. We are far more influenced by outside stimuli than we have ever imagined.
It's absolutely shocking.
So the reason I doubt in my mind that the abuser has a massive impact via in training on the victim's mind to the point of taking over it.
But the activity of the mind continues regardless.
So you continue to generate emotions and you continue to believe that they're yours. Only they're not yours anymore.
Cognitions, thoughts, ideas, which you then appropriate and feel that you own.
But this is a delusion, an illusion.
The waves of the abuser, the brain waves are reflected in your brain.
Your brain had become a clone.
You will interpret everything as yours and to avoid anxiety, to avoid dissonance, you will stick to it.
Even though the truth is none of it is you anymore.
The abuser is anxious.
Most abusers suffer from anxiety, including psychopathic abusers.
If the abuser is anxious, you will become anxious.
If he's narcissistic, you will become narcissistic. You will begin to mirror the abuse. You will become the abuser.
It's a process of becoming enmeshment.
The big studies about folie à deux in two, shared psychotic disorder. We know that people become clones of each other. There is even a study, a famous study on the physiological level.
When women who had been put in the same building, they were nursing students, their menstruation, their period synchronized, they all had period on the same day. We are synchronization animals. We are synchronized beings.
We sink into each other. We sink with each other. We become one in social groups and we always become one. We always become a hive. We always create colonies. We hold ourselves to be an infinitely more advanced life form than ants or bees.
But the truth is we are not, not on the biological level at least.
There is a colony element, a hive element that we tend to deny and ignore because we live in an individualistic age.
The individual is God, the individual is the idol.
So we never admit that we are actually nothing but cogs in the social machine.
As the object relations scholars in Britain in the 1960s, this is nonsense, have written, this is nonsense.
What we call individual, what we call self is actually relational. It's the outcome of interactions with numerous other people. It's a Venn diagram.
These two circles, yeah, we are the common area.
So it's ridiculous to claim that we are not reacting to outside influences and so on and so forth. It can happen.
The emotions that you experience are yours but they're actually not yours.
If you're exposed to an abuser, the emotions you're experiencing are the abusers. These are artifacts.
Once a shared fantasy is over, you are still faced with a problem because the shared fantasy is a dissociative state.
You simply don't remember. You did not generate working memory or long-term memory. Memory is the foundation of identity and identity is your bulwark. It's your defense against artifacts, against intrusion from the outside. Identity is protected by boundaries. Identity is where I end and you begin.
If you don't have an identity, you're wide open to attack. If you don't have memory, you don't have an identity and this is the first thing, then the abuser disables your memory.
So the disruption to memory in the dissociative state creates what we call identity disturbance and then you're not able to resist intrusion by the abuser.
But even when the abuser is gone, you still cannot reconstruct this period adequately. There's no ability to do it because you don't have memory. There's no memory.
So would that dissociative state increase during periods of abuse?
Are we more likely to forget abuse? You're likely to forget anything the abuser would like you to forget.
Sometimes the abuser wants you to not forget the abuse. He wants to teach you a lesson kind of condition. Sometimes he wants you to forget the abuse because he's in a lot bombing stage or a grooming state.
The abuser decides, not you.
So it is the abuser who is a decision maker. The abuser's control is total.
There have been studies about in training where we were able to reconstruct a musical piece from the EEG wave patterns of the brain.
One of our researchers constructed a Mozart piece just by being given the EEG, the printed EEG.
So now what is a musical piece?
A musical piece has many voids, has many empty spaces. So musical pieces are kind of simulation of memory and dissociation.
Now think, now consider the abuser's music.
The abuser's music has empty moments with no sound, silent treatment for example, and moments with sound, but verbal abuse.
But the abuser decides whether this particular bit of music, the music of his abuse is Mozart or Bach, Bach or Deep Purple. It is the abuser's sole decision and choice.
So the abuser directs your dissociation. The dissociation is directional. It is as if he is producing a movie of some kind.
The typical reaction is very complex.
And what happens after the shared fantasy is over is even more complex.
You know I have been thinking, I do it from time to time.
It's interesting that abuse has a musical element.
You remember the myth of Narcissus?
Narcissus' partner was Ecowas Erato.
Erato simply echoed whatever he said.
So there was Narcissus and there was Erato who echoed everything he said.
And that's a perfect metaphor for brain entrainment don't you think?
I think the repetition element is critical in both music and in verbal abuse.
And I think abuse is a form of music.
So you can be made to feel love and obsession that you don't genuinely feel.
It's an artifact. It's a kind of projection.
You experience this as yours of course.
It's inconceivable to you that you might have been hijacked or snatched. It's inconceivable to you.
You still maintain the core of I am.
So you would take ownership of these intrusive thoughts and emotions.
Think of it as a virus.
When the virus enters the body it penetrates a healthy cell.
Now the healthy cell doesn't say, excuse me, you're a virus, get out of here. We don't tolerate immigration.
No.
The healthy cell accepts the virus and begins to copy the virus, replicate it.
The healthy cell replicates the virus.
It becomes a machine for copying the virus because the healthy cell doesn't make a distinction between itself and the virus.
The healthy cell says, if you are here then you must be me. You must be me because you're made of DNA. You're made of RNA. So you must be me.
There's no other explanation. I mean, you're here.
Surely it's me.
So I'm going to copy you.
Many people, many victims describe to you this sense of inner battle, a civil war, as if they're fighting themselves somehow. They feel torn. They feel ego incongruent. They feel like they're falling apart. They feel as if there is a schism, a break. They don't understand why, but actually they are at war with an invader.
The fighting of an invasion, they're battling a pathogen coming from the inside, implanted in them by the abuser.
Again with the example of the virus, the cell sees a package of DNA or RNA coming its way and it's a virus.
And so the cell says, wait a minute. RNA is what I typically do. Like emotions is what I typically do. So the cell says, okay, RNA is what I typically do. So I'm going to do it.
I'm going to begin to copy the RNA.
But this particular RNA is the virus. So it's a mistake. The cell is making a mistake.
And when you say these are my emotions, you're making the same mistake. You say emotions is what I typically do.
So if I feel emotions, they must be mine and I'm going to own these emotions. I'm going to adopt them. I'm going to act accordingly.
Even when the abuser is gone, the self-deception continues because you don't have memory. You don't have the glue that holds your identity together. It's gone for that period of abuse.
So you don't have any firewall. You don't have a way to fight back these emotions, to tag them as alien, not you.
They linger. They linger because you don't have memories of being you. They have been eradicated, wiped off the blackboard.
During this period, you don't have memory. During the spirit of your relationship, the shared fantasy, your relationship with the abuser, you don't recall being you. You have memories of being the abuser, but not memories of being you.
Even when you think that you have memories of being you, these are actually memories of being the abuser.
It's pretty shocking, but we are beginning in clinical psychology, we are beginning to accept this.
It's like cult programming in a way.
So there's prolonged grief, a disorder, because you mourn two things.
You mourn the self-love that you had experienced because the narcissist allowed you to experience self- dependency, allowed you to experience true self-love of an idealized you.
You fell in love with this idealized image that the narcissist has created of you.
You fell in love with yourself through his gaze and it proved to be irresistible and addictive.
So you mourn this, but even more importantly, you mourn the missed time.
You mourn the lost time.
There's a period, there's a hiatus, there's a lacuna, there's a vacuum where you should have been and you are not.
It is a years long vacuum in long-term relationships with abusers.
But in this period, in your time with the abuser, in your involvement in the shared fantasy, during your involvement in shared fantasy, you did not really exist in any meaningful sense of the word.
The abuser has taken over. He has supplanted you, substituted for you.
You became a clone. You did not really exist. You lack functional memory because there's nothing to remember of your own.
You felt very often that you behave in ways which are alien to you.
And this process is called estrangement. You felt derealized very often.
You were not sure what is reality, what's true, what's not, what's going on.
What in the fantastic space can be relied on. This time is lost, totally lost.
When you come to and when you recover, it's like you've been in a coma, a vegetative state.
Imagine you've been in a coma for 10 years and you wake up.
You will surely mourn these 10 lost years.
But in coma at least, no one takes over your mind and here the abuser does.
I have several videos on how to distinguish, introjects, internal voices, how to do the work of telling which voices are genuinely authentically yours and which are important or fake or false and which emotions are yours and which are artifacts.
And I have other videos about how you need to separate and other videos about how you need to individuate.
Search the channel. Don't be lazy.
The second issue is memory recovery.
To recover your memory is crucial to healing. That's why we have so many scholars working on false memories, abuse memory.
Memory is crucial.
One of the main reasons therapists are trying to kind of recover or retrieve childhood sexual abuse memories is that the main problem with abuse is the ruination of memory, the undermining of it.
Trauma is about memory. Trauma is dissociative by definition.
Even complex trauma is dissociative by definition.
Indeed one of the main criteria of borderline personality disorder is dissociation.
In the DSM, Judy Herman, the mother of complex trauma, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, Judy Herman wants borderline personality disorder to be abolished completely as a diagnosis. She says, "What is this nonsense? It's all complex trauma with emotional dysregulation." And she's right.
I fully agree with her.
And to remind you, this is a recap of an interview given in October 2021.
All these conditions, narcissism, borderline, they're all forms of complex trauma. They all involve massive disruptions to continuity and congruence of memory.
This is what the abuser is doing to you.
And so you can't recover because you cannot retrieve your memories. After you have retrieved your memories, you can then form connective tissue.
You can form yourself in a way or reform yourself. You need to remember.
And ironically, hypnosis is one of the ways.
Having formed or reformed yourself, you can get acquainted with yourself. Then you're able to tell which voices are real and which are not.
But you have to do this work. You have to remember. You have to separate. You have to individuate.
Without any of these three elements, in the absence of any of these three elements, forget about it.
You can never heal.
You need to reconstitute yourself.
Memory, separation, individuation.
So the job is distinguishing between what are your authentic real you introjects and his or her introjects.
The abusers.
And then coming back to yourself and trying to recover your memories.
The memories during the period of abuse where you were not present. The memories that you must somehow rebuild.
We do this with sexual abuse in dissociative identity disorder. This is done regularly.
And we need to extend this kind of work to all types of abuse because they all involve massive dissociation.
Now there was no understanding of training and there was a minimization of the role of dissociation in trauma, post-traumatic conditions, in trauma and stress responses and in abusive relationships.
I mean, a scholar, a practitioner was saying sexual abuse.
Well, we understand that. We dig sexual abuse. It's an invasion of the body. It's bad. Let's deal with it.
Physical abuse, of course.
Violation of physical boundaries of the body. We can deal with that.
But how can we deal with verbal abuse?
I mean, what on earth is this?
It's an invasion of the mind. It's mind rape.
It's in training.
We are beginning to see glimmers of hope with a new enhanced understanding of, for example, coercive control and love bombing as a form of abuse.
And training is a new concept. And it takes time. It takes time. It didn't exist until recently.
It shows us that words, sounds, music, they can synchronize brainwaves to the point that original, autonomous, independent brainwaves are all but eliminated, repressed at least, suppressed.
It's really disturbing. It's a really sick idea, but it encompasses everything.
All the confusion, all the bewilderment abuse victims experience.
You become unknown to yourself, an alien, a stranger through this process.
And just people walk away from narcissistic abuse and they say, "Oh my God. My abuser was so wonderful. I was so in love. His sex was so great. I'm obsessed with him.
You know, some victims go through this phase of prolonged grief and they idealize the abuser and they idealize the time with the abuser.
But these feelings are not yours. They're implants. They're artifacts.
Whenever you idealize the abuser and the period of abuse, this is not you, ever, by the way, no one is this self-hating and self-loathing. And self-hating and self-loathing are artifacts.
They are voices of other people inside your head, which drive you to self-defeat and self-destruction.
The bad object.
Everything was implanted in your mind in a shared fantasy. A shared fantasy could be with your parents, could be with a lover, could be even in the workplace.
So this is common knowledge in traditional forms of abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse.
But we still have to realize that all abuse, all forms of abuse share the same template, apply the same techniques and obtain the same outcomes.
The same concepts should be used to deal with psychological abuse as with sexual abuse.
It's all we need to do.
The idea of entraining is the mechanism, how it's done.
Because until now, no one understood how it's done.
Why the dissociation? Why memory gaps? Why the estrangement?
The feeling that you are not you?
But now we understand and training explains all this.
The victim would tell you, "I don't know what came over me. It wasn't me. I don't know why I did this. It didn't even feel like me. I would have never done this. No way.
So think of the abuser as a parasite. A parasite who invaded your mind and then colonized it and then subverted it and transformed it into a factory to reproduce its own abuse.
That's what parasites do, by the way.
For example, in mice, they change the behavior of mice completely. They make mice way less terrified of cats. Host behavior and mental health are affected by parasites.
Human beings invaded by parasites become violent or promiscuous. Parasites have this capacity to alter the mind.
So that's what the abuser does.
It's a parasite. He invades your mind, he colonizes it, transforms it and uses it using words.
Instead of tapeworms, he uses words.
What does the abuser want to produce in this factory?
You know, the virus simile, it's like a virus. The virus uses a cell to produce additional viruses.
What does the abuser want to produce?
He wants to produce cognitions. He wants to produce emotions. Emotions which are conducive to the sustenance or sustainability of the shared fantasy.
Abuser is focused on maintaining the shared fantasy, enhancing its potency, applicability.
Because it is within the shared fantasy that the abuser controls your regulatory functions, the minute you recover your memories, the minute you distinguish the fake, inauthentic introgates, the emotional artifacts from the authentic ones, the shared fantasy crumbles.
It cannot continue. The shared fantasy relies critically on dissociation, the suspension of a state of self, not constellated self.
So self is a defense against such intrusions. It has boundaries. It's a defense against the world. It's where you, the boundaries where you end and the world begins.
When the self is under attack when it is suspended or disabled, when it's porous and so on, you have borderline, you have psychosis.
The psychotic person confuses internal objects with external objects because he has no constellated functional self.
The same with the narcissist. He confuses external objects with internal objects because he has no ego.
That's the irony. The narcissist is selfless, especially me. I am selfless.
Okay, okay. Let's not in training. I'm just kidding.
The minute you have a self, which must be constructed on a foundation of continuous memory, you are not defenseless and helpless anymore.
The minute you have a self, the dissociation is gone. The shared fantasy is doomed. It cannot be sustained.
Another direction is to regard trauma as a language, a language element.
Actually, we use trauma to make sense of the world and to organize it.
This is why so many people are wedded, religiously wedded to their trauma.
They refuse to let go of the trauma.
Never mind what you do.
That also explains trauma bonding.
They're invested emotionally in the trauma. They love the trauma. They sleep with the trauma and wake up with the trauma because the trauma is their language.
They explain the world to themselves through the trauma. They organize the universe and imbue it with meaning via the trauma.
Take away the trauma and you render the world instantly meaningless and terrifying, frightening, hostile, inexplicable to them.
The trauma is a language.
So there is dissociation, right?
When we react to trauma, we dissociation.
We begin to distinguish between total dissociation and what we call permeable dissociative partitions, partial dissociation.
So for example, sub-states that trade some information but not all the information. There will be a common repository of information shared by all the sub-states, but there will be proprietary information specific to the sub-states alone.
An example is OSDD, a form of dissociative identity disorder.
So coming back to trauma, the dissociation helps actually to perpetuate the trauma, to maintain it buried in the unconscious, admittedly, but never eradicated, always there.
That's why dissociation is bad for you. It's protective. It's positively adaptive, but it needs to be rid of.
You need to develop memory if you want to reverse or eliminate the trauma and become you again. Heal.
Healing is about becoming you.
The best definition of healing I know is becoming you again, not becoming great again. That's narcissistic, becoming you again.
So it explains many things.
So different sub-states are dissociatively permeable. They share common information.
And there are different levels of permeability between different states because of particular protection and self-image, perceptual filters.
Don't forget that the concept of self came into being when the atomic theory was at its height.
So like the atom, the indivisible particle, there was a self.
Self is the atom of the person, it's the indivisible particle of every human being.
And every generation is influenced by the mores and the myths and the narratives of that period.
Psyche, the soul, used to be compared to a typewriter, believe it or not. There was a high tech of the time. Now it's compared to a computer. And in the future, it will be compared to artificial intelligence because that's what we have. What else can we compare it to? Computers, artificial intelligence.
We shouldn't take these comparisons too seriously. Computers are fluid. They recombine all the time.
And that's the great hope for victims of trauma in the shared fantasy.
Even memory is very, very protean. It's created on the fly. Every time you try to remember something, you reconstruct the memory from zero, from scratch. You take something from there, something from here, and you put some emotions and you put all of them together and you reconstruct the memory that you convince yourself is true. It's a form of confabulation. All memories are fiction.
Right.
You heard me right. All memories are fiction.
Well over 90% of memories have never happened, never happened the way you think they've happened. They had happened. Close to 50% never happened at all. All memories are fiction.
And I refer you to work by Elizabeth Loftus, but that's very early work.
There are current works, recent works that support this.
So if memory is a fiction, not totally of course, not entirely, but if a big part of it is fiction, or in other words, if you control memory, if you can assemble memory at will on the one hand, and on the other hand, you can fight off dissociation so as to release the trauma in a way to re-experience it and purge it, purge it from the system, cleanse your system.
Well, that's good news. That's good news.
And following this interview, which is no longer available on my channel, I created videos about each and every one of these stages, regaining your authentic introjects, authentic voices, and thereby your memory separating and individuating.
Don't become a William. Don't adopt new speak. Don't say fiction is the truth. Learn to stick to authenticity and reality. These are your only defenses against disintegration and madness.