Okay, as you can see, it is springtime, house cleaning.
I'm going to post a video today which pales back to February 2020. The original video has been removed, so I'm re-uploading my part of the content.
Improved, I should hope.
It reminds me of the old Jewish joke.
The first edition of William Shakespeare's Place has been published in Yiddish. And the cover page said, "William Shakespeare, Place, translated and improved." So, I'm not William Shakespeare yet, but I'm on my way.
I'm absolutely on my way.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of the seminal Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism, Revisited, and I'm a former and current Professor of Psychology and Finance.
So, this is what I said in February 2020.
The first part would be a clinical overview of separation.
How do you end up with a narcissist after a while?
Well, first of all, you have no super ego. It's been hijacked. It's been replaced actually with a new superior, inner critic, a new conscience.
And that part is a narcissist. Your ego is compromised, so your access to reality is no longer what it used to be. Your internal reality and your external reality are both partly inaccessible and partly distorted.
And this is what the narcissist does to you, what exposure to a narcissist does to you in intimate relationships.
Your sense of self-worth is fluctuating. It becomes volatile.
You are entrained, so your brain is essentially controlled. You are no longer in many ways. You are no longer. You are no more.
And that's not even a metaphor. That's extremely close to reality. You have switched from presence and existence to absence.
But how can you heal? There's no healing possible under such conditions.
People separate from the narcissist physically, and they think they've done 50% of the job, when actually they have done less than 10%.
You need to reinvent yourself. You need to re-emerge as a separate entity before you can heal.
Think of yourself as larva in a cocoon about to become, again, the butterfly you used to be.
There's a lot of work. People invest a lot of work in technicalities. They go no contact, which is a set of 27 strategies that I devised in 1995. They go no contact. And they think the job is done. They think that's it. They invest a lot of work in things which are important.
So some of them do shadow work. Some of them do inner child work, and so on and so forth.
No one is against it. I'm not against it. They use techniques like empty chair.
And all this is very, very useful, of course. But they don't realize. They have been hijacked. They are no longer themselves.
Victims of narcissists, intimate partners of narcissists, are no longer themselves.
Who is doing all these things? Who is engaging in therapy? That's the issue. Who is doing all these things? Who is undertaking all these actions?
And the answer is the narcissist inside you is doing all these things.
He is in control. He is navigating you. You are puppets.
If you separate from the narcissist physically, but you hadn't separated from the narcissist psychologically, everything you're doing, all the exercises you're doing, including shadow work, everything you're doing you don't do. It's not you. It's not you.
It's the narcissist inside you. He is doing the exercises. He is doing the so-called healing, the fake, the faking, the for healing.
The narcissist is in your mind and to some extent the narcissist had become your mind.
It is not inside your mind only. Narcissist is your mind.
So if you don't have a mind of your own and your mind had been substituted for, replaced, hijacked, then someone else is doing all these things. It feels as if it's you, but it's not really you.
And this is, of course, a very good description of the process of internalization, internalization, and introjection, collectively known as identification.
There are voices inside our head which we mistake for our own voice. We think that when we talk to these internal objects and they tell us things, we think these internal objects are us, but they're not. They're not.
And so everything you do, as long as the narcissist is resident evil inside your mind, everything you do will have zero impact on you, zero effect.
It's a bit creepy to think that you've been taken over. I know, but you must accept it.
You must accept this reality. There's been a hostile takeover.
You need to, first of all, before you do anything, you need to not become the narcissist, to unbecome. You need to stop being the narcissist.
And I think this is a terrifying thing. This is what people don't grasp that they start to work, they invest, and these techniques, and they do all thisand they think it's beneficialand so on.
But regrettably, it's not you who is doing all these things, right? It's someone else. It's someone else. It's your worst enemy.
You have to resort to Victorian Gothic, I don't know. To grasp what's going on, you have to read horror novels dating back to the 19th century.
Body-snatching, vampires, that's more or less what's going on.
Everything I'm saying sounds like hyperbole, as if I'm exaggerating, but if anything, believe me, I'm underestimating the situation.
The narcissist truly and really takes over critical parts of your mind, and he does not release them when he's gone physically. He takes these parts with him. You have outsourced yourself, your internal processes, to your narcissist, especially if you are borderline.
The narcissist absconds with these parts of you, and that's why you feel amputated. You feel partial. You feel broken and denudedbecause the narcissist had become integrated into who you are, and then when he goes away, when he breaks up with you, his physically absent part of you has gone with him.
These parts, he absconds with them, he is in your mind. He's there.
The narcissist is a predator, but on the other hand, the whole situation is pitiable.
The narcissist is worthy of pity, if you wish.
All he's trying to do is to recreate a new mummy, a new mother. It's a toddler, it's a two-year-old toddler.
Then he wants to recreate this mother in your shape. There's a hole in the shape of a mother in the narcissist being.
This is his emptiness, this is his void, this is where he should have been, and he is not.
And so he wants to fill in this hole. He wants you to come in into him.
It's like lock and key, and you are his key, and he wants to recreate you, he wants to mold you and tame you and housebreak you and shape you into a new mother.
And then he wants to separate from you and become an individual, finally. He wants to rerun or reenact the early childhood conflict with his original mother, but this time with much favorable outcomes.
It's madness, and technically or clinically, the narcissist is a madman. He's doing the same thing, hoping for different outcomes, different results each time.
And you pay the price, you're paying for this.
The devaluation, the betrayal, the discard, they're baked into this process.
The narcissist has to fuse with you so that they can separate from you and become an individual. It's all preordained. There's nothing you can do about it. It's all about the discard.
That's the end, the end all and be all.
It's not that the narcissist is trying to hurt you, it's just that he has to separate from you in order to experience individuation. There's no other way.
It's a repetition compulsion. He is robotic. He is controlled by the inexorable processes of abuse that he has experienced in childhood.
And so the narcissist needs you. He needs the intimate partner to be his mother for a while, because he believes it's the only way to heal. He begs you to allow him to heal.
The only way that he can heal is to let him discard you.
This is the ultimate sacrifice that the narcissist is demanding from you.
Please be there for me so that I can hurt you. Accept the pain. Accept the discard. Accept the hurt if you love me, because that's the only way for me to become whole and separate from you and a real person. The only way for me to heal is this.
I need to distinguish myself from my mother, original and stand in, which is you. I need you to let me go. I need you to allow me to separate from you and to become an individual now.
The narcissist can become an individual only negatively in contrast to someone by breaking up with someone, by separating from someone, by pushing someone away.
The narcissist has no positive identity. It's all a negation. It's all an absence. It's all a void. It's all about not being, trying to become.
And so all the narcissist experiences in early childhood were negative.
The only way he knows how to become an individual is by pushing people away.
And this is where there is a very strong correlation actually between narcissism and various attachment styles.
Most narcissists have an anxious attachment style, avoidant, anxious and so on. It's a fact.
Research has demonstrated that these attachment styles are very prevalent among psychopaths, narcissists, to some extent borderlinesbecause their sense of identity critically depends on rejecting other people. The only identity patients with cluster B disorder, personality disorders have, the only identity is a negative identity.
They feel that they exist only when they are not someone else, only in, in they are contrarian. They exist only when others are not.
They need to officiate you and annihilate you so that they can become.
So they need to separate and individuate from the intimate partner. And allowing them to do so is a sign of love. It's a test.
The narcissist says, prove your love to me. He goes to the intimate partner and he begs her, if you love me, let me merge and fuse with you in a shared fantasy. And then let me break away from you. Let me, let me take your heart with me. That's proof that you love me. It's a kind of an Aztec, Aztec ancient ritual transformed into or imbued with psychology. It never works, of course.
That's the said irony. It never works because the narcissist lacks the basic skills to separate an individual.
The narcissist doesn't have what we would call an ego. The narcissist doesn't have internal structures. There's only emptiness howling winds in a hole of mirrors. The narcissist is an absence aspiring to become a presence. The absence is trying to become a presence.
And the only way for the narcissist to do this is to render you an absence. It's like, come hither, share my absence, become an emptiness with me. Enter my void, never to emerge. It's like a black hole. It's an emptiness that tries to transfer itself to you.
It's the strange superstition or prejudice or belief that if I'm empty inside and if I were to succeed and hand over this emptiness to you, then I will have been fulfilled. Then I will have become.
I need you to embrace my emptiness and to become one with it, to take it away from me, and to allow me this way to become a presence and to acquire a dimension of existence.
I'm empty.
I feel that I don't exist.
This is the overwhelming sensation of the narcissist, that it doesn't exist.
That's why he goes around asking for narcissistic supply.
"Tell me that I exist," he says.
"Tell me that I'm a genius. Tell me that I'm handsome. Tell me that I'm this, that I'm that, because I can't vouch for myself. I need your testimony. I need your input. I need to create and recreate myself on the fly all the time.
So I'm empty inside and then I meet you, my intimate partner, and you are full inside. There is you. You are a presence. I can sense your existence.
And it's a critical moment.
There's a lot of envy.
"I envy your intimate partner. I envy the intimate partner."
And he communicates to his intimate partner.
"If you love me, that's the ultimate test." "I'm going to hand over my emptiness to you. I'm going to hand over the death inside me. I'm going to establish with you a death cult. You're going to worship my death and become one with itto allow me to live and to resurrect.
And this is the fanatic part in the narcissist.
That's the struggle.
I'm dead inside and I'm going to make you, my intimate partner, dead inside.
In return, you're going to make me come alive.
It's a swap. It's a swap.
You, my intimate partner, take my death from me and give me your life. Give me your life because I'm a wooden boy. I'm a Pinocchio. Render me existent. Make me a real boy. I'm wooden now. Make me flesh and blood.
I need you to become wooden so that I can emerge from my cocoon and become my butterfly.
And you could ask, why is this exchange necessary? Why can't love do this?
Through love. Why can't the narcissist become through love, through your love as an intimate partner?
Why does the narcissist need to hollow you out, to hollow out his partners in order to render them empty and dead?
It's because the narcissist cannot experience love. He has no access to his positive affectivity. He cannot identify love. He doesn't have the basic skills to grasp love, to digest love, to experience love, so love is meaningless to him.
But in emptiness, he's an expert. He knows everything there is to know about the void and about the black hole that is, the singularity. He knows nothing about love.
You hand him love. You give him love.
He doesn't understand it. It's a foreign language. He's like an alien from another planet, having landed on Earth, exposed to English.
So there's always a pushing away. There's always a kind of counter dependency whenever there's vulnerability.
And this is why Cluster B personality disordered people. They're called dramatic because there's always drama. There's always conflict. There's always a kind of show going on. It's like a theater production or a movie. Tangentially, this has to do with the rigidity of the internal rigidity of the narcissist.
The identity itself is diffused, but they're like these rigid rules that try to compensate for the lack of a core identity. It's like an internal dictatorship.
So the narcissist is trying to balance this rigidity with kerosene and drama. The narcissist is trying to, he's an arsonist. He's a pyromaniac. He's trying to light fires in order to bask in the glow and heat externally, because inside him, there are only ashes. It's a planet of ashes.
That's another fascinating topic because it's a great definition of mental illness, by the way.
There's a balance between rigidity and drama and chaos. It's also relevant when we come to discuss these metaphors.
The narcissist needs you to become him. He needs you to become him.
It's as simple as that. He needs to become you.
This is a swapping of identities.
When he becomes you and when you become the narcissist, the narcissist then doesn't want to be with the narcissist.
I want you to understand the irony of all this.
Initially, the narcissist comes to you and says, "Can you become me, please, and allow me to become you?" And then you say, "Okay, Mr. Narcissist, I love you. I'm going to pass the test. I'm going to become you. I'm going to embrace and adopt and assimilate your emptiness and death, and you can have my life, my vivaciousness, my illamvital. I'm all yours."
But then you become the narcissist.
Having embarked on this Faustian deal, you become the narcissist, and the narcissist doesn't want to be with another narcissist.
So he discounts you, he devalues you, and he discards you.
He begins to regard you as damaged, as broken, as absent, as non-existent.
When people from the outside watch all these observers, it's strange. It's inimical. It's a bizarre transaction.
They can't interpret it. They don't understand it.
What they see, the narcissist gets close to you, and then suddenly devalues you, and then abruptly discards you.
And they say to them, "What the heck is happening here? Why is he doing this?"
And this, what I've just said, makes sense of the whole process.
He needs to become one with you so that he can separate from you, so that he can begin finally to feel that he is an individual, that he exists.
And so this process is idealization, devaluation, and discard.
And there's nothing you can do about it, because he had chosen you, he had chosen you to be devalued and discard.
For this specific purpose, he had chosen you to become one with him in order to discard you.
And that's why I coined the word "Hoover."
"Hoovering" depends crucially on how powerful the initial merger and fusion phase has been.
The more powerful this phase of becoming one has been, the more hope there is for separation.
And again, it's an irony.
The narcissist needs to merge and fuse with you powerfully, extensively, intensively, in order to have an earth-shattering separation, kind of individuation or guzzling.
If the merger and the fusion with you is loose, it's a bit indifferent, it doesn't yield real separation.
You need to be a mother figure, and emotions with mother, they're intense, they're all pervasive, they're strong.
So, to experience a real, powerful, cataclysmic, tectonic separation, you need to totally merge and fuse with the narcissist.
To the exclusion of everything and everyone else, you need to become a single-cell organism.
Just you and him, an atom, indivisible.
So, this is what the victims can't digest. This is why they lose the ability to trust again, because the victim says to herself, "We have been so close, we've been so intimate, it's been so great, it's been wonderful, it's been an amazing relationship. I mean, all was going so well. We were the best team ever. We were like twins, flames, whatever you want, soulmates."
What's what had happened? What happened here?
The intensity of the merger and the fusion, the intensity of becoming one, defies the cruelty and sadism of the ultimate devaluation and discard.
It's like the narcissist has two personalities. One personality loved you, cherished you, worshipped you, was intimate with you, couldn't live without you. And then there's this other personality, which hates you, is cruelyou, demeans you. And you can't put the two together precisely because it's not the same person.
Following the separation, the narcissist individuates, he becomes another person. The more the narcissist is merged with you, the more he is fused with you, the more intense the separation.
As far as he's concerned, the greater his chances to individuate. You're just a tool, you're an instrument, you're a kind of medicine, he self-medicates with intimate partners.
The narcissist is trying just to become, he's trying desperately to become, he wants to be a human being, that's all. It's like Michelangelo said, that when he sees a slab of marble, he already sees the sculpture captured inside it.
The narcissist wants to break this slab, to disgorge his chains and to become free. The narcissist is this slab of marble, there's a human being trapped inside. This human being is desperately trying to emerge from the marble and will stop at nothing in order to accomplish this, including sacrificing you.
And so, no one can become a true victim.
Many people can wander into the narcissist's ambit, can become a part of his world, get married with the narcissist of children and then break up. And it would be like any other breakup.
But some people are really impacted and keep being victimized and re-victimized. The rate of recidivism among victims of narcissistic abuse is humongous. I think 80, 90 percent of them keep kind of cycling between narcissistic partners.
So, the majority of people who would transition through a relationship with the narcissist would emerge somewhat unscathed or capable of reparation and recovery.
But there is a group of victims. And these victims suffer lifelong scars and trauma. And the reason this is happening to them is because they have a repetition compulsion as well.
The narcissist's repetition compulsion is to separate and individually. There's a group of intimate partners of narcissists who need to go through this pain, this cycle of pain, time and again. They keep getting victimized with additional partners, narcissists.
So, the victims of narcissistic abuse at some point become clinically indistinguishable from narcissists. The psychology is actually identical to the narcissist. The etiology is the same. Both narcissists and victims of narcissistic abuse have grown up in dysfunctional, abusive households. Both of them were not allowed to separate and individually.
Of course, one of them chose the solution of becoming the abuser. The other one chose the solution of appeasing the abuser, becoming the victim.
Yet, catering to the abuser's needs is actually colluding with the abuser. It's becoming one with the abuser. The solutions were different in childhood, but the personal history, the autobiographical memory is the same.
That's why narcissists and their victims resonate so much because they hail from, they come from the very same environment. They recognize each other instantly.
The etiology, the psychodynamic, everything is identical. The solutions are different.
And so, both co-dependence and narcissists have been saying it for well over 15 years. I think that co-dependency is a form of narcissism. It is a non-agenic and passive form, but it has all the hallmarks of narcissism.
Co-dependence to some extent are grandiose in the sense that they believe they can manipulate the narcissist. Control from the bottom, emotional blackmail, extreme neediness and clinging, in a way co-dependence have a false self as well. It's co-dependence and narcissists are just two children who are flip sides of the same coin.
Emotional dysregulation is common in borderline, as is a need for supply and the existence of a false self, but co-dependence are even closer to narcissists. In both these cases, co-dependence and borderline, there's a relegation of eco-functions to the outside.
There are nuances regarding the type of narcissistic supply, but both co-dependence and borderlines regulate externally. The narcissist becomes the gatekeeper and the gateway to reality and to inner peace.
And so co-dependence, borderlines and narcissists, they grow in households that are identical. They're clones of each other. They go through the same psychological processes as teenagers.
And at some point they choose different solutions.
Judith Herman keeps pointing out that it's all interchangeable. Co-dependence often become narcissists and they're very narcissistic sometimes. Narcissists have very prolonged periods of co-dependency and it's not only the same. As I said, it's flip sides of the same coin, but both all these disorders involve complex trauma. There is commonality.
So this is the background, but we need now to discuss practicalities.
The practicalities depend on accepting that you as a victim had contributed to your predicament as much as your abuser has done.
It's important to understand that it's not only the narcissist who is to blame. It's not only the narcissist who wants to leverage the intimate partner and to use her to experience a symbiotic relationship like with mommy and then separate and individuate. It's not only the narcissist who wants to use his intimate partner to recreate and reenact early childhood conflicts and dynamics. That is true. All this is true, but it's only one side of the equation.
The other side of the equation is the codependent or the borderline intimate partner because they're doing exactly the same. The codependent and the borderline want to merge and fuse with the narcissist in order to experience a kind of separation and individuation which would leave them actually in the position of serving the narcissist.
So the narcissist separates and individuates by rejecting, devaluing and discarding his intimate partners. The borderline and the codependent separate and individuate by appropriating the narcissist as a determinant dimension of identity.
Codependence perception, codependence experience of separation and individuation is not so different to the narcissist.
The narcissist has failed in separating, individuating early on in childhood. The narcissist has remained a figment of the mother, an extension of the mother, but the codependent is no different. It's exactly the same. Both of them are hoping that in the relationship they will somehow be able to become individuals with the other person's agency. Both of them use the other person as a tool or an instrument. So both of them essentially have the same agenda of acquiring agency, growing up, individuating, becoming adults, and this leads of course to parentification, the dual mothership concept. That's why I call it dual mothership.
They both fight to become, to acquire a mother and so the narcissist wants to acquire a mother and the codependent wants to acquire a mother. So that's the borderline. They both want mothers. It's the only way to separate and individuate is to have a mother.
Is there any other way?
It doesn't seem so because they both are engaged in a repetition compulsion with multiple partners coercing them into maternal roles.
The narcissist discounts the mother, devalues the mother and that way he gets rid or tries to get rid of an internalized bad object.
The narcissist comes to believe of himself that he's essentially bad unworthy.
So narcissism is a kind of competitive compensatory mechanism.
So then the narcissist can separate and individuate only in a bad way, only in an evil way because the narcissist perceives himself as bad and unworthy. He acts in ways which are bad and unworthy and so he discards and he devalues and he humiliates and he abuses and he suffocates because he's bad. He believes himself to be bad. He cannot separate and individuate in a good way because he's not good. He's evil. He's been told this since age 18 months. He's been told that he's unworthy, evil, corrupt and so on. And so that's the way he acts. He needs to validate these internal voices because they're the voices of mother and other very important significant others. These voices cannot be wrong. So he molds his behavior to validate these voices, to support them, to prove them right.
Codependents do the same actually. They try to separate, individuate from the narcissist by simply subsuming him by kind of taking over him in a way.
There are two ways to separate, individuate. One is to push a partner away and then you're left alone by definition and if you're alone you must have separated. So loneliness and aloneness, it's a form of separation, forms of separation. So the narcissist pushes his partner, devalues her and discovers his separateness the minute she's out the door. So that's one way.
The other way is to kill the partner, right? If you kill the partner, you're again alone, killed metaphorically. You're again alone. One way to kill the partner is to subsume him, to make him disappear into yourself, to become one with him and then you're again alone. You dissolve your partner, the partner in your acid if you wish. And so the partner disappears and reappears inside you, re-emerges inside you and this is the codependent and borderline solution.
The narcissist has a similar vestige of this solution. He creates an internal object which represents the external partner and then he ignores the external partner and interacts only with the internal object, a process that I call snapshotting. It's the codependent part of the narcissist that's doing this, subsuming the partner and converting the partner into some kind of symbol or obstruction.
So if we put these two mechanisms together, the narcissist pushes away his partner in order to separate. The codependent swallows her partner, digests the partner in order to separate. If we put two of them together, we could say that the narcissist goes from being codependent to being a narcissist and the codependent goes from being a narcissist to being codependent.
So they start in reverse positions. When the narcissist embarks on the love bombing stage of the shirt fantasy, the narcissist is highly codependent on his intimate partner and the intimate partner is in position of the narcissist. She can reject the narcissist, she has this power, but then gradually the switch roles. The codependent who starts off as a narcissist assumes the classical codependent role and the narcissist who starts off as a codependent once the shared fantasy is established firmly, reverts to being a narcissist, devalues and discounts his intimate partners.
When you subsume someone, when you assimilate someone, you're actually killing them, killing them to separate from you. And so when someone becomes a part of you, they don't exist anymore.
And as I said, the narcissist starts off this way in a shared fantasy, it creates a snapshot of you. And then he internalizes this snapshot. That's a codependent solution, not an narcissistic one.
The codependent does the opposite. Initially, she keeps her distance, she's suspicious, she is. And so in a way, she's devaluing. In a way, she pushes the narcissist away.
And so only gradually the shared fantasy takes over as if it were some third party entity with a life of its own. The shared fantasy brings the parties together and allows them to reacquire their original roles.
The narcissist solution is no one is like me. I'm superior. I'm God. God soaway with you, pushes people away.
Narcissists don't merge for long.
And the opposite solution is I am you. I am you. Let's merge.
And by doing so, you can disappear into me.
So this is the general picture. The boundaries that the codependent places at the beginning of the shared fantasy renders her narcissistic in effect. The narcissist's lack of boundaries, the initiation of the shared fantasy, wish to somehow internalize the partner. That's a codependent solution.
And this is very important to understand when we move now into practicalities, advice, tips. It's important because you as a victim, as a survivor, you had a major contribution to what had happened to you.
So let's start. Let's start by describing the typical profile of a victim of narcissistic abuse.
Codependents and borderlines are highly manipulative, highly emotionally disregulated.
And so if you can't accept this, then you're be stuck in victimhood stance for the rest of your life. If you want to cast the narcissist as a pure demonic predator and yourself as an angel, that's a grandiose defense. It renders you a narcissist.
You need to accept that within the shared fantasy, you had contributed something. You were involved in it. You were a pillar of the shared fantasy.
If you want to change, if you want to heal, if you want to move on, and if you want to avoid repetition, compulsion in the future, you need to know thyself. You need to accept that you are dysfunctional. The choices you make, made selection, everything resonates with your pathology.
People jump straight into the endgame.
Techniques, what do I do? It's all fine and dandy, but you need to become again. You need to extricate, purge the narcissist from your mind.
So if you go straight to the end, if you implement techniques or whatever, straight away, it's not you. As I said at the beginning, it's still the narcissist inside your mind who is controlling you, navigating you, puppet mastering you.
Look at the mirror, and you will see the narcissist face there, not yours. Look, if you're really looking, if you don't flinch, if you don't self- deceive, it's nightmarish because you will have realized how imbued you are with the narcissist. You will have seen the narcissist face in the mirror.
This is what entraining does. It's frightening.
Human minds synchronize.
We have the famous experiment with narcissists, with nurses, I'm sorry, where their periods, menstruation had synchronized within a month. All of them started to have a period the same time. We're synchronizing beings. We synchronize everything, biological processes, meta- processes.
When you watch a massive rally, political rally, for example, these are not 100,000 individuals. It's a single individual with 100,000 heads, crowd dynamics, mob dynamics have been described for well over 100 years. We know that when you immerse yourself in a mob, in a group, in a collective, your idiosyncratic individual identity disappears to a large extent. It's the same with the narcissist.
Narcissist creates a cult. Narcissist colonizes you.
So you need to separate and deviate from the narcissist before you do anything else.
You need first of all to accept that the greatest hurdle and obstacle is that you are not anymore. That's only the narcissist where you used to be.
You see, the reason the narcissist is so successful in colonizing you is that everyone has narcissism. Everyone has healthy narcissism.
To take on the world, there's a spurt of grandiosity, an explosion of grandiosity as a child. When the child abandons mummy and goes out to the street to explore the world, the child is very grandiose.
And this is what happens to the victim when they break up with the narcissist. They become grandiose.
The narcissist regresses you to infancy because of the dual mothership. The narcissist becomes your mother and you become a child, an infant, a toddler once again. It's an oceanic, wonderful feeling.
But when you want to extricate from the narcissist, extirpate the narcissist from your mind, you find yourself without the necessary skills and capacities because you're a baby. You're a baby again.
So you become grandiose to compensate for this exactly the same way a two-year-old baby takes on the world grandiosely. You feel empowered, you feel emancipated.
And so when I come to victims and I tell them, "Listen, I know it feels good. I know you're relieved and you feel strong now because you pushed away the narcissist or because he has left you physically, but that's all an illusion. It's all a mistake. You've done nothing. You've accomplished nothing.
Yet the victims become very angry. They vehemently reject this. They say it's not true. I'm strong. I'm in control. I dumped the narcissist or he's no longer in my life. I broke up with him.
Now I'm in charge. I know myself. You're wrong. I'm not wrong. I'm right. You think you're strong because that's what the narcissist inside your head wants you to believe.
The narcissist is there pulling your strings, manipulating you into the erroneous conviction that you have made it, that you're safe.
One of the common most common refrains of survivors and victims of narcissistic abuse is I know myself much better now. I know so much more.
But these are grandiose defenses. This is proof positive that what I'm saying is true because there would have been no need for grandiose defenses had you been truly healed. If you were defending grandiosely, you must be defending against something, right? What is it that you're defending against when you're being grandiose?
You're defending against the knowledge, the unconscious knowledge, that you have been compromised, that you're invaded, that you're infected, exactly like a vampire. You're like a computer. You've been imbued and infected with malware. There are viruses, computer viruses, working inside your mind, having taken over your root system.
You think that you're running your own operating system, but you're not.
The first thing the victim needs to do is to acquire humility, to be humble, to accept that there's a long way to go, that breaking up with the narcissist physically and even emotionally is an important first step, but only a first step. It's something like 10%.
There is resistance, of course, to this. You resist this knowledge, this terrifying realization. There's a refusal to acknowledge reality.
So when you tell the victim, listen, you're still very weak, you're still under the narcissist's control. His voice, the narcissist's voice inside your head still determines 99% of your existence, your decisions, your thought, your choices, your emotions, everything.
Narcissist is in charge, he's stronger than you.
The victims won't accept this because he challenges the newfound sense of empowerment and freedom.
But this delusional, it's illusory.
First step is humility, the ability to accept, acceptance.
The second step is to begin to separate the narcissist's voice from what remains of your voice.
As the voices, your voice or your voices, your authentic self, these voices have been suppressed and silenced for a long period of time. The exposure to the narcissist quietens you, silences you. It's difficult to recover your authentic voices, but you need to begin to make this distinction.
Luckily, there's an easy way to realize which is your voice and which is not.
You have interjected the narcissist. Your mind is silent because the narcissist superimposes on your, interjects his own internal monologue. In other words, the narcissist wants you to say what he wants you to say. If you want to have an opinion, I'll give it to you.
So this kind of thing, this, you're introducing, you've introduced the nastiness of the narcissist, interjects into your mind.
The narcissist's introject, his voice inside your head, never stops talking. It's vociferous, it's decisive, it's judgmental, it's opinionated, it's analytical, it's critical, and it's hateful. It hates you, it berates you and demeans you and humiliates you and attacks you from the inside. It's a harsh inner critic.
All the functions that used to belong to your inner critic are now compromised. And this is not your inner critic. It's simply not you.
There's almost no exception. You need to accept that you're a puppet, you've become a puppet. You need to accept that you have no agency, no self-efficacy, no autonomy, no independence anymore. You have been invaded and colonized. You've been taken over.
You need to accept this because everything in you screams the opposite. I just got rid of the narcissist, you know? I showed him. I'm strong.
But who is this? Who is saying all this? Who is saying all this?
I dumped my narcissistic abuser. I showed him who is the boss. Who is saying all this? I have a surprise for you.
It's not you. It's the narcissist's voice that is speaking.
The narcissist refrains you. You have to accept that you've been hijacked. You have the humility to realize that you are not a genteck, you have zero agency.
And that's the first phase.
And you need to identify the narcissist's voice. And the safe assumption is that your inner critic is the narcissist.
It's not you.
Okay. Is there a shortcut? Is there a way to rewrite the script?
You remember that previously I compared the whole thing into a theater production.
You have interjected the narcissist's mind. And this interject silence your own voices.
So there's only one voice left. And this voice criticizes you. And you believe this voice.
You give it credence. You need to reverse. You need to reverse the situation. You need to silence the narcissist's interjects. When you silence the narcissist's interjects, your own internal authentic voices will compensate and they will speak up.
Your voice cannot speak right now because it's been disabled and drowned by the narcissist's constant chatter.
You need to impose your voice on the narcissist's voice. You need to reintroduce your monologue, internal monologue. It's the same way the narcissist did to you in his mind.
In other words, it's like martial arts. You need to use the narcissist's momentum, your opponent's momentum against them.
The narcissist silenced your interjects. The narcissist introduced his interject into your mind, his voice.
Do you know, can you identify this voice?
Yes, because it's dominant.
Yes, because it hates you.
Yes, because it sounds more like an enemy than a friend.
So now you need to reverse this. You need to silence this interject and render the other silenced interjects dominant.
Use exactly the same techniques. Superimpose your monologue on the narcissist's interject.
Initially, it's going to be difficult because your other interjects are very weakened.
Your real voice, your authentic voice, has been silent for long and is very enfeebled.
The narcissist's voice on the other hand is talkative and critical and and uses the silences, abuses the silences.
But you need to silence it. And you need to reactivate your voice and superimpose some kind of text or dialogue on it.
It's a difficult process, but you can do it because you can identify the two sets of voices.
One set of voices is silent, owing to the narcissist's intrusion. The narcissist silenced it. One of them is silent. One group of interjects is silent. They don't talk.
The other group talks all the time. And it's this second voice that talks all the time that is against you. That is your secret enemy, your Trojan horse, your fifth column.
This second group of voices tells you that you are no good, you are zero, you're bad, you're stupid, you're unworthy. That's your new, compromised inner critic. That's a narcissist's voice and you need to silence it.
The narcissist is in control initially in your puppet. And the narcissist uses this puppet essence to do to you narcissistic things, to torture you and torment you from the inside.
And you know, the initial reaction is, "Wait a minute, what are you talking about? He's gone. He lives in another country. How can he make me into himself? How can he penetrate my mind? How can he take over? How can he, for example, change my behavior, render me confrontational, uncivil, humiliating, rude? How can he make me act as a narcissist if he's no longer in my life?"
Well, the answer is he is in your life. He is in your head where it matters most. He keeps pulling these strings. He keeps doing his thing. It's his thing.
Being a narcissist is the narcissist's thing, not yours. That's what narcissists do. You're a mere puppet. It's so difficult for you to accept.
It's a narcissist who is saying everything. It's a narcissist who is speaking through your mouth. It's absolutely like a horror movie. It's like there's an entity inside you that is taken over you. The narcissist is saying these things, moving your arms and your legs. You're not even aware. You're not aware that you had become, I don't know, exceedingly grandiose. You're not aware of some actions and choices you make. You're like disembodied. You're not aware that your empathy is declining.
The first step is you mean it. Humbleness. Eat humble pie. Accept.
The second step is identifying the active voice and the passive voice. Never mind the content. If it's active, if it's an active voice, it's the narcissist. Don't be super analytical. If there's a voice that talks to you all the time, that's the narcissist in your head, in your abode. The flag is flying. He's in residence. If a voice is active, if it announces things, if there's a voicethat's constantly there in the background, and especially if it torments you and taunts you and challenges you and criticizes you, that's the narcissist in your head. That's the narcissist in your head.
And if there's a voice that's passing or silent, that's you. That's actually you. You need to reverse this. You need to silence the active voice now.
Simply tell the active voice, "Shut up. Just shut up. I'm not listening to you. I know you're not real. I know you're not me. I know you don't love me. I know you hate me. I know you want me dead. Metaphorically at least, I'm not going to let you. I'm not going to let you destroy me from the inside.
Silence the active voice.
And sometimes this active voice is very seductive, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, like some darkening cloud that promises rain and revival. It's a very seductive voice. It's very tempting. And you will be seduced into not silencing it, because sometimes this voice complements you or aggrandizes you or gives you advice that appears to be good or acts friendly. And you will be sorely, sorely tempted to not silence it.
But that's the serpent. I'm using religious metaphors. That's the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It's a serpent before he gives you a fruit. So silence this active voice. How do you silence an active voice? I will describe in a minute.
But the silent voice, the voice that is passive, the voice that's just there, the background voice that says nothing ever, that's who you used to be. That's what's left of you. That's who you used to be before the narcissists had invaded you, before it took over.
So you need to reactivate this voice. The minute you silence the active voice, you will suddenly hear the whispering of the passive voice, saturating, as if there's something in there that you can't be quite sure. You need to amplify this. You need to encourage the passive voice to revive, magnify it somehow.
And that's an excellent way to describe separation and individuation. You need to separate from the narcissist and become you again. You need to encourage you to revive someone who used to be you.
One of the ways to do this is to simply take monologues from your past. Things you used to tell yourself, content of voices that used to roam your head, memories of things, memories of cognitions, emotions. Just take things appropriate or even not appropriate, but that preceded the period you've had with the narcissist. And then just take these things and superimpose them on the passive voice, attribute them to the passive voice. Even if it feels alien at first, even if it feels awkward and wrong and inappropriate for the circumstances, just do it. Keep doing it because you need the passive voice to say something, anything to drown out the active narcissist voice.
So you have, it's like a muscle that atrophied. You have to exercise the muscle. You remember that before you had met the narcissist, you used to tell yourself, I don't know, I like ginger tea. Take this idiotic sentence, I like ginger tea and superimpose it on the passive voice. Let the passive voice say something, anything. I love ginger tea a lot. Even though there's no ginger tea and no occasion to drink ginger tea, let it speak. Let it exercise the atrophied muscles.
You know, you have thousands of such memories, such snippets of conversation, such voices, such dialogues with yourself. Dostoyersky. I used to love Dostoyersky. I remember a trip to Italy. Collect these cognitions, connect them with emotions, make inventories of memories, write them down if you have to. Join a link, you know, take all this and reactivate the passive voice.
You have been entrained, you've been entrained and throughout this process of reactivating the passive voice, the active voice will try to take overthe narcissist voice. He will try to silence you again.
Don't let it. Don't let it. But how to silence the active voice? Simply don't listen to it. The active voice will always be actionable. In other words, the active voice is a narcissist.
He wants you to do something. 99% of the time the active voice will say one of two things. It will evaluate you negatively, one way or another. That's the inner critic function. Always, it will ask you to do something or behave in a certain way.
So when you hear a voice telling you to behave in a certain way, or disparaging you, humiliating you, it's easy. That's the active voice. Ignore it. That's the narcissist voice. Don't do it. Don't do what he asked you to do.
Gradually, out of success, inefficacious, this voice will weaken. Its impact will disappear.
As the passive voice, which used to be you, is strengthened, the active voice will weaken.
Ultimately, if all goes well, it may take a while, but if all goes well, you will have only one voice. Your voice, resuscitated, strengthened, empowered, and without which clinically, separation and individuation is impossible.
In a nutshell, and it requires a lot more details and so on, but in a nutshell, it's a lot of work.
I recommend that you write all the time.
Write exercises, write voices, the content of voices. It helps you to identify things.
Record yourself. Somehow document the process so that you have constant feedback from yourself.
There's a wily enemy inside your head. It's cunning. It knows you better than you know yourself. It shapeshifts. It's like, you know, witchcraft. 17th century witch trial, witch hunt. So, it's demonic in a way. It is unrecognizable sometimes. It masquerades as you or as people you love. It's not so easy. You need to pin it down. It's very evasive.
And so, it's likely this active narcissist voice, this introject implanted in your head, taken over you, it's likely to advocate the same behaviors and the same actions that maybe your passive voice would. And it's likely even to criticize you the same way your conscience would. It shapeshifts and it wears disguises. It pretends to be others.
Find the vulnerability. Find the voice that touches upon your vulnerability in a compassionate, in caring way, an empathic way. That's you. That's you.
If a voice keeps telling you something like, you're not very clever, you're not very clever, you're not good at something and so on and so forth, that's not your vulnerability. You never thought of yourself as clever, but don't trust yourself. If a voice keeps attacking a self-perception or a self-image that does matter to you, that's the narcissist voice.
So, if there's a voice that keeps bringing you down to earth, voice that restores your reality testing, a voice that provides you with boundaries, makes you aware of your limitations and strengths, that's your friend, that's your passive voice, that's you.
If there's another voice which attacks you where it hurts, challenges your self-image and self-perception, which matters to you, that voice hates you. So, don't trust yourself at this stage because you're compromised, you're infected.
Just listen. Just listen. Listen to the voices.
Focus on identify. Focus on identify. Notice the language. Notice the intent.
There are voices which will push you to healing and recovery, loving voices. There are voices which will push you to doom, self-destruction, self-defeat and self-trashing.
This is the narcissist voice.
Narcissist needs you, gone. It's part of his separation and individuation and destroying you is one way of ensuring that you're gone.
And don't forget, the narcissist corrupts everything.
The narcissist's voice inside your head feeds off anything you learn, anything you say.
The techniques, the exercises, they are immediately hijacked. The therapy, the therapy you're going through is compromised by the narcissist in your head. You're feeding the narcissist.
If you hadn't separated and individuated before you started any self-work, any therapy, the narcissist inside your head, disintrojects, will regard the therapy as added weaponry.
Narcissist inside your head is going to use your therapy against you.
Any new knowledge, any self-awareness will, can and will be used against you by the narcissist in your head.
He went to the therapist, to therapy, and the therapist told you something. You have better boundaries.
Next thing you know, the narcissist takes over, renders you aggressive and conflictive with your boundaries or uses the therapy to sow self-doubt, self-hatred.
If you do inner child work, the narcissist infantilizes you. You will use the inner child, the narcissist will use, the narcissist's voice in your head will abuse the inner child work, will leverage the inner child techniques to regress you to infancy, to render you helpless and hopeless.
This is why before you do anything, you need to identify the narcissist inside your mind and get rid of him for good.
Because it's like food. Anything you bring into your mind, the narcissist who is still there is going to feed on and grow stronger.
Everything you learn, everything you learn, can and will be used against you by this internal voice if you don't first silence it for good.
Again, it's not such a difficult thing. There's always one very exclusive active voice. It monopolizes. It doesn't allow other voices to express. There's no other, there's only one.
It's, and there's only one cluster of passive voices. The passive voices are who you used to be.
So be, become, you're hibernating. The passive voice is a hibernated voice and the active voice puts the passive voice into hibernation. The active voice is not you, even if it sounds like you, even if you love this voice because it's supposedly your best friend, even if it looks after your interestso you believe or you will let to believe, even if it empowers you, emancipates you, you feel stronger. I don't know why. It's not you. It's not your, your voice.
It's the narcissist masquerading as you, wildly shapeshifting, cunning, conspiring to put you down and to pull you down.
Narcissist Kamuflaas himself is going to use anything and everything you're providing with. You learn something. He uses it. You read something. He uses it. Techniques you acquire is going to use leverage against you. It's going to sound very, very collegial, very supportive, very loving and compassionate in the process, very empathic. He's faking. He's feigning.
So when you get rid of the narcissist's inner voice, often you would feel that you are losing an excellent good friend, that there's an emotional price to pay for this processbecause as you transition from the active voice to the passive voice, you will feel very, very alone.
And yeah, the narcissist isolates people. He's isolated you from your support network, from your social network, from family, from friends. The narcissist keeps you dependent on him externallywhen he's present in your life, flesh and blood. And later when he had abandoned you, you're still dependent on him internally on his introject in your mind, this foreign body.
And so the narcissist isolates you, cuts you off and owns you. The narcissist becomes your world, your exclusive reality.
Getting rid of the narcissist means getting rid of the world.
There's a huge sense of existential loneliness in the transition from the active to the passive voice.
Even I would say menace. That's why I think it needs to be done in therapy with the licensed therapist, which I'm not. But it needs to be done as a precondition for any other treatment modality.
You have these insights, this understanding that internal voices can compromise you and take over you. That's not my insight. You have this in Gestalt therapy. They have tapes. They call it tapes. You have it in transactional analysis therapy. You have it in family system therapy.
So identifying these introjects, these voices, in their roles, psychodynamic roles, is frequently done in all these therapies.
In internal family system, for example, there are three types of voices. These voices interact all the time. Some of them are dysfunctional, very dangerous. Parts therapy, it's also known as parts therapy. It's an extensional internal family system.
Similarly, in transactional analysis, there are all kinds of internal voices which are essentially functions. In Gestalt, they have tapes and so on. So none of it is new. None of the things that I've said is new.
Or even experimental.
But the humility that I mentioned before, the need to admit that there are voices inside you which are detrimental to you, deleterious, and that you should get rid of these voices. You should get rid of him. You should submit.
It's about becoming submissive in order to become empowered. And I know it defies, it's counterintuitive. It defies logic and intuition.
But sometimes the only way to really become strong again is to agree for a while to be weak.
You have ends, automatic negative thoughts. These are voices. These are also voices. I'm ugly. I don't know. I'm stupid. I'm unworthy. I always fail. I shouldn't even try.
These voices masquerade. They pretend to be your friends. They pretend to be your friends. They're telling you, you know, it's for your own good. This is tough love. You need to hear this.
And it's very misleading because you say to yourself, wow, I have a good internal friend.
He's advising me to not try. He's making me aware of my limitations and boundaries.
It must be a good friend, but it's not a friend. It's an enemy. The narcissist is your enemy.
Never mistake the narcissist for a friend. He needs to separate from you. He needs to become by betraying you. The only way he can become is by sacrificing you, devaluing and discarding you.
Submission is a primary tenet in the Abrahamic religions and not only in Abrahamic religions, Islam, Christianity. In these religions, there is a realization that Satan can mislead you with his disguises, with his slick tongue and smooth alleged friendship.
Garden of Eden, for example, if you look at the text, the serpent. The serpent in many traditions considered an embodiment of the devil. It's a devil, actually.
Let's look at what the serpent actually says in Genesis. What does it actually say? That the words of the serpent sound wonderful, sound friendly, almost self-help. The serpent could have been a very successful self-help author.
New wave, you know, very empathic and loving and caring and compassionate and so on and so on.
The serpent tells Eve in Genesis, "You need to learn new things, knowledge. Knowledge is power. You need to educate yourself. You need to improve yourself. You need to expand your horizons."
This is what every self-help author and modern educator is telling, is saying today to children and adults.
So by these standards, all modern educators and self-help authors are demonic, devilish serpents.
Seriously, that's all he said. I encourage you and urge you to open up your dusty Bible, go to Genesis, and just read what the serpent had to say.
It all sounds very lovely, amicable.
The only thing which is a bit jarring, a bit out of sync, exposing the serpent's narcissistic nature is when he says, "You're going to be like God. You're going to be like God."
There's a grandiose element there. But if you take that bit away, the rest is classic mission statement of educators and therapists, frankly.
You know, we can make you a better person. We can help you grow up. We can expand your horizons. We're going to teach you.
That's all the serpent said.
So if you were to listen to the voice of the serpent, you would have said, "Wow, this serpent is a great friend. He wants me to learn. He wants me to evolve. He wants me to improve. He wants me to educate myself. He wants me."
But the serpent was not a friend, of course. The serpent was the arch enemy of humanity and is to this very day.
Look at the outcomes of the serpent's advice. We've been expelled from the Garden of Eden.
You need to isolate and identify the serpent in your head. You need to distinguish the serpent's voice from God's voice.
What is God's voice?
In the vast majority of scriptures, God's voice is silence.
When Elijah the prophet was taken from us, you know, he had this discourse or dialogue with God. He said, "He's looking for God." And he asked God, "Are you in the rock? Are you in the ocean? Are you in the fire?"
And so God finally made it clear to him that he is in the silence. God is silent. That is you. God is you. The silent passive voices in you are you and are godly.
The active, constantly blabbering voice inside you. That's the serpent. That's the narcissist. Your authentic voice, to use John Paul Sartre, your authenticity, your authentic voice, is usually silent. The voice that talks all the time and makes suggestions and masquerades and improves upon you and tells you to not be you. That's alien. This is alien. That's not you.
It could be society. Socialization introduces such voices into your mind.
Society has voices like this, which tell you to do this or not to do this. Tell you to work hard, to make money, to have a beautiful house, family, consume goods. Altruism called this process of these voices interpolating voices, interpolation.
So these voices interpolate you. But they're not you. Any voice that speaks regularly is not you.
And if you had been exposed to the narcissist, the first thing he does is eliminate all the other voices, monopolize the acoustic space inside your mind.
And then the only voice that speaks inside you after you have met the narcissist is the narcissist.
Even when you have left the narcissist physically, he's still there. He's still there ricocheting and echoing inside your skull.
That's the narcissist.
And you must get rid of this voice. It's the serpent.
You must listen to the voice of God. The voice of God is silent.
Given the right incentives, God also speaks to you.
You know, I'm not a religious person, let it be clear. I'm using this metaphorically.
But God is silent most of the time.
But when push comes to shove, and when you do need his advice, he sends you clear messages. He speaks to you. Listen to that voice. It's you. Do not listen to the other voice. That's the narcissist. The voice that never speaks, never ceases to speak. The voice that pretends to be a friend, the fake friend, the snake in the grass. That's the serpent.
That's not you. That's the narcissist. That's a crucial insight.
Every single thing you do, and I mean, everything you do, I don't know, you drink tea rather than coffee, every single thing you do until you have eradicated the active voice of the narcissist. That's not you.
It's shocking. It's terrifying. It's like alien abduction. It's a whole horror movie. It appears to be, it appears to be real, but you know, it's the truth. I'm telling you the truth.
As long as the narcissist is active inside your head, you are not, you don't exist. You're just masterminded and moved around. A robot.
Every single decision you make, every single decision you make, every single choice, every word you utter, every movement you make, it's the narcissist, active in your head.
Active in your head. It's not you.
There was a voice, a voice telling you what to do.
Isolate the narcissist's voice because you need time to recover and heal and process things.
As long as you're not you, as long as you are the serpent, it's hopeless.
There are these two voices. It's extremely simple. Two voices.
Identify the one talking, silence it. Identify the one silent, make it talk, impose on it your memories, your thoughts from the past.
Just borrow things from the past and impose them on the silent voice.
Regardless how relevant they sound, make it come alive again. Hopefully at some point the active voice will no longer be active.
And at that point you will have become again. You will have separated and individuated from the narcissist and you can proceed. You will have grown up, transitioned from infant, unseparated, non-individuated infant to an adult with clear boundaries and object relations.
Anything you do before you have extirpated and eliminated this voice, anything you do, can and will be used against you by the narcissist's voice in your head.
That's enormous danger in premature therapy.
The first negative, intrusive parental and maternal investment is in your mind.
If your parents were functional, more or less, they are a defense against the narcissist's voice. They are a firewall, a fortress.
But if you've grown up in a dysfunctional family, you need to ignore these voices as well because they're going to collude and collaborate with the narcissist's voice against you.
It's a war. You need to realize that your mind had become a battle zone and you can't afford to remain neutral.
You need to take sides with yourself against your adversaries, detractors and enemies led by the narcissist's voice.