How Narcissist Betrays YOU to Become Himself (Compilation)

So to recap, the narcissist first discards you in his mind, but this creates dissonance. It's a narcissistic injury. It implies that his judgment was less than perfect, and it creates abandonment anxiety.

To resolve this, he devalues you. The minute he devalues you, he has no abandonment anxiety, because why would anyone mourn or grieve over a devalued object? And he has no narcissistic injury, because it proves that he has never been wrong. And he is never wrong, of course. He is ready to move on. He is ready to translate the mental discard to discard in real life.

The minute he is ready to do this, a series of processes begin.

When the narcissist devalues the external object as a way to overcome the narcissistic injury, restore grandiosity, and ameliorate abandonment anxiety, the minute he does this, on the way to separating from you, which is the overriding goal, you remember, but the minute he does this, there is an abyss, there is a gap, which opens between you as a devalued object and the snapshot of you, which is still idealized.

The introject of you, the avatar of you, the internal representation of you, this internal object is still idealized.

But you, out there, you have been devalued, so there is a discrepancy. There is divergence between the snapshot and you as an external object.

And this creates anxiety, because the narcissist feels that something is wrong, something has gone awry.

How can it be that you are so devalued and your snapshot is so idealized?

He needs to resolve this.

And the way he resolves this is the way every two-year-old resolves similar conflicts with his mother.

He splits you.

Splitting defense is a primitive, infantile way of coping with the nuances of life. Life is gray, it's never black and white.

There's good and bad in every person. It's impossible to categorize people totally or place them in drawers in a clean manner. Taxonomy and classification often fail.

So the child copes with this need for subtlety and need for nuance by splitting.

Mother is all good, I'm all bad. Or mother is all bad, I'm all good, or whatever.

So this is called decotomous thinking.

The child breaks the world into two or more parts, usually two.

One of them is all good, the other is all bad.

And now that the narcissist needs to discard you, he needs to make peace between, to reconcile your devalued external object, his devalued external object, you and his idealized internal object, your inner representation.

So there's a discrepancy, you have been devalued, the internal object is idealized and he splits.

He now says that the introject is all bad. He devalues the introject.

The minute he devalues the introject, the minute he kind of mutilates the snapshot, the minute he attributes to the snapshot, everything that's bad, everything that's evil, everything that's imperfect, the minute he does this, he himself becomes grandiosely all good.

I want you to understand this.

The narcissist devalues you as an external object, but your internal representation in his mind is still all good, still idealized.

So what the narcissist does, he changes the equation, he renders the snapshot, the introject, your representation in his mind, he renders it all bad, thereby making himself all good.

You remember that splitting, the defense mechanism, the primitive infantile defense known as splitting has to do with all good, all bad, all black, all white, all right, all wrong, with me or against me. This is splitting.

So the narcissist converts you into a blackened enemy without any redeeming feature externally as well as internally.

But the minute he had reduced your snapshot into a devalued state, all bad, the narcissist becomes grandiosely all good.

And now he is ready to discard you.

He is virtuous. He is all good. He is perfect. He is again godlike. He is grandiose.

And you are the opposite of all this. You're all bad. You're all defective and deformed. You're all dysfunctional. You're all stupid and ugly.

And I don't know what.

So he's ready to discard you.

And there's an actual discard.

But when the narcissist actually discard you, when it happens in reality, this painful process of suddenly becoming nobody to the narcissist, an insignificant other.

When the discard in real life happens, again, the narcissist is confronted with a dilemma, with a conundrum, because you are gone. You exit his life.

What to do with a snapshot? You're gone. You're no longer in his life physically. You don't share the same space. You don't go happy. You have nothing in common.

Let's assume we have no children. He never sees you again.

But your snapshot, your introject remains in his mind.

And this is especially true if he's forced to continue to have contact with you in the future, because, for example, you have a common business or common children.

Every time he sees you or every time he thinks of you, if he doesn't see you, there's a clash.

Because he's reminded that there is a corrupted, decadent, bad, imperfect, sick introject in his mind. Your introject.

Remember, he has devalued your introject in order to be able to discard you.

He first devalued you in reality, and then he devalued the introject, and then he was ready to discard.

But having discarded you, he was left with an introject.

And there is a process of co-devaluation.

You remember co-idylization?

If I have a good, perfect introject in my mind, then I'm good and perfect.

But what if I have a bad, worthless, worthless, imperfect, evil introject in my mind?

Then I'm the same.

Evil, imperfect, etc.

This is co-devaluation.

It's utterly intolerable.

So what the narcissist tries to do when he discards you, he tries to hand over the introject to you, because now the introject is defaced, is mutilated, is a reminder, a constant reminder of bad things, imperfect things, evil things, dangerous things.

Narcissist doesn't want this inside his mind. He wants to get rid of it. He wants to hand it over to you. And he wants to convince you, he tries to coerce you and convince you to agree with his devaluation of you. He wants you to say to him, "Yes, I'm all bad. Yes, I'm imperfect. Yes, I provoked you. Yes, I made mistakes all the time. Yes, I ruined everything. Yes, it's my fault, etc."

When you do this, he can hand the devalued introject to you so that you can own the devalued introject. It's like he gets rid of you externally and internally only if you agree with his assessment of you as a bad and worthy object.

But of course, very few people do.

So the narcissist remains stuck with the introject that is now a source of extreme dissonance and discomfort because he devalues the narcissist from inside.

If I own as a narcissist, if a narcissist owns an internal object which is less than perfect, which is dysfunctional, which is malevolent, then the narcissist is this internal object.

After all, it's an internal object. It's part of who the narcissist is.

When the narcissist fails to hand over the introject to you, this has serious psychological consequences. It's kind of internal mortification.

But sometimes, even when the partner accepts her newfound role as the evil, deformed, malevolent, stupid, mentally ill person, even when the partner concurs with the devaluation, even then the narcissist fails to hand over the introject. The narcissist always fails to hand over the devalued introject to the discarded partner.

Always. There's no exception.

Either because the partner would not comply and would not collude in devaluing herself or because of what is called introject constancy.

The narcissist has no relationships with real people. He has no relationships with objects out there. So he has no object constancy because he doesn't interact and relate to objects.

Instead, he interacts and relates with internal objects, not objects out there, objects in here. These objects are called introjects.

So he has introject constancy. He derives a sense of safety and comfort and he's able to function because he has very good relationships with objects inside his mind, introject constancy.

So when he tries to get rid of one of these objects, when he tries to hand over an introject to someone, he experiences severe, abundant anxiety. It's like his real relationship is with the introject. He's emotionally invested. He's cathected in the introject, not in you.

So when he discards you and he wants to hand over the introject to put his hand inside his brain and to pluck the introject and give it to you, this creates enormous anxiety because it's like being abandoned by the introject.

And so he can't cope with this.

The process of getting rid of your devalued introject in his mind never works for the reasons that I've just mentioned.

Either you don't collaborate with your new devalued image or the narcissist experiences overwhelming, overwhelming, abundant anxiety when he tries to hand over the introject to you because he is bonded with the introject. He's attached to an introject.

You could say that he loves in his own way the introject.

How can you hand over someone you love?

So he fails.

He fails.

The devalued, the split, the all bad introject remains stuck in his mind as an internal object and he can't get rid of it.

And this creates enormous anxiety.

The clinical term for this is bad object internalization introjection.

That's what happens to him.

In his desperate attempt to separate from you as a maternal figure, he needed to discard you mentally, then devalue you externally, then discard you externally, then devalue your introject and then get rid of the introject.

And this is where he fails.

All the other phases are successful, but he fails in getting rid of the introject and it remains like an ulcer, like a wound inside his mind tormenting and torturing him by reminding him that there is a part of him, this introject, which is not perfect, which is not God-like, a part of him, which is a failure, part of him, which is bad and unworthy and perhaps evil.

He is tormented by the fact that one of his internal objects is a cause and an engine of narcissistic injury, constant narcissistic injury.

It's like having a child who is disabled or intellectually challenged.

Narcissists can't cope with this because it's a constant reminder of failure and of the fact that they are not God-like and not perfect.

So there's this introject inside his mind. The introject, which has been devalued, keeps telling the narcissist, you see, there's a part of you that is devalued, a part of you that is not God-like and not perfect.

This creates anxiety.

What to do about it?

Hovering.

The only way to reintegrate this corrupted and devalued internal object with an external object, the only way to reduce anxiety is by re-idealizing you as an external object and then the narcissist can re-idealize the internal object.

So when the narcissist gets rid of you, there's a discard. He gets stuck with your representation in his mind. He has devalued you and he has devalued this representation. He has devalued your introject, your avatar in his mind.

But this causes him a lot of discomfort and anxiety because it means that he is less than perfect by virtue of owning such an object, by virtue of being this object, being a part of him.

So he needs to re-idealize you and this allows him to re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety, ameliorate, mitigate the anxiety.

Now everyone, every single internal object in his mind is perfect because every single object in his mind is perfect. He is perfect.

But he can't accomplish this unless you are perfect too.

So he needs to reverse the process of devaluation, the process that has failed. The process of devaluation has failed because he couldn't get rid of the devalued introject.

So he needs to reverse this and re-idealize you.

But then if he re-idealizes you, he has a separator from you. The separation has failed and this is exactly what happens.

The narcissist never succeeds to separate from you.

And even if you never see him again, he's going to re-enact, replay the same dynamic with his new intimate partner and his next intimate partner.

And intimate partner number 40, this is called repetition compulsion.

The narcissist wish to separate conflicts irredeemably and irretractably and conflicts in a way that cannot be resolved with his grandiosity.

In order to separate from the maternal figure, which is you, the mother that is his intimate partner, he needs to devalue her.

But if he devalues her, he devalues himself via the introject, via the devalued introject, co-idealization, co-devaluation.

And so this conflicts with his grandiosity. He cannot separate from you because this constitutes narcissistic injury.

Separating from you leaves him stuck with a part of him, a representation of you, which is corrupt, which is dysfunctional, which is less than perfect.

So he has to choose. He can devalue you and discard you by devaluing your internal, your introject in his mind, but that would leave him less than God-like, less than perfect, because then he would have an introject which is less than God-like and less than perfect in his mind as part of him.

So he has to give up on his grandiosity if he wants to separate.

And if he insists on maintaining his grandiosity, he needs everything and everyone around him to be ideal, including you.

Devaluation is a departure from narcissism. It's the narcissist's attempt to become normal, to grow up, to become an adult.

And the narcissist much prefers to idealize you because by idealizing you, he's idealizing himself.

He's forced to devalue you. He doesn't want to do it, but he's forced to devalue you because he desperately is attempting to become, to separate, to individuate, to self-actualize.

The only way for him to do that is to get rid of his grandiosity, to get rid of his narcissism, to separate from the source of all this pathology.

His mother and now you as a stand-in for his mother, as a substitute for his mother.

Ironically, devaluation is perhaps a healthy act, an act of mental health of the narcissist because he's devaluing a figure which has damaged him.

He's devaluing his mother, who was really a monster in many ways. So it's a healthy thing to do.

But then he clashes with his grandiosity, clashes with his pathology, and his pathology is much stronger than any feeble attempts at mental health.

And he takes over and he's forced to re-idealize everyone and everything around him and inside him, you included.

He tries to over you and if he doesn't over you, he goes on to the next intimate partner and he does exactly the same.

The only exception to all this is mortification, narcissistic mortification.

All this is impossible if the narcissist has been mortified.

The minute the narcissist is mortified, he departs from his previous version because his false self is destroyed in the process of mortification.

He's disabled and deactivated at the very least, usually destroyed. His defenses crumble. He goes through extreme life-threatening decompensation.

So it's like he had died. He had died and now he reinvents himself. He's reincarnated. He's reborn.

And this allows him to self-idealize.

So initially after mortification, the narcissist feels dead and by the way, he has suicidal ideation and so on.

So he goes through a period of reconstruction, but he reconstructs himself as someone else.

In effect, he creates a new false self.

And so all the previous memories are erased and there's no need to idealize or re-idealize you because you're gone. You're gone with his entire history, entire identity, entire memory. He's a new person.

And so after a mortification, there's never over it. Mortification leads to self-supply and self-idealization. There's a restoration of minimum grandiosity and then the narcissist re-embarks on the path of pathological classical narcissists.

Okay, I hope I made it much more clear. I'm going to recap everything very, very fast.

The shared fantasy is the space within which narcissists interact with intimate partners.

It starts with co-idealization.

The narcissist idealizes you and by doing so, he's idealizing himself.

It also allows him to get you addicted to him because you see your idealized image through his gaze and that is very addictive.

The next stage is dual mothership.

The narcissist becomes your mother, gives you unconditional love and acceptance and idealizes you and you become his mother.

But you become his mother in order to allow him to separate from you.

He has unfinished business with his mother of origin and he wants you to play a role so that he can finish the business with you this time.

He needs to separate from you.

But the very need to separate from you causes narcissistic injury because it means that he misjudged you. It means that he is not all-knowing as a God should be.

So what he does, he devalues you, the external object.

By devaluing you, he restores his grandiosity, he erases the narcissistic injury and he reduces his abandonment anxiety.

At that point, he splits. He has devalued you but there is an introject of you, a representation of you in his mind which is still idealized.

So what he does, he splits you.

He makes the introject your inner representation in his mind. He makes it all bad and so he becomes all good and now he is ready to discard you in real life.

He has you as a devalued object, he has your introject as a devalued object, he is ready to get rid of you.

But he wants to get rid of your introject also.

He is trying to hand it over to you. He wants you to own this devalued corrupted internal representation of you, your introject.

And he wants you to acknowledge that you are bad, that you are imperfect, that you destroyed everything, that you are to blame, that you should be guilty and ashamed of it.

If you don't collude with this game, he has a problem because he is stuck with your introject that has now been devalued.

This creates a process known as co-devaluation which is the opposite of co-idealization.

When the internal object is all good and idealized, the narcissist is all good and idealized.

When your internal object in his mind is corrupted and all bad and unworthy, the narcissist is corrupted and all bad and unworthy. It's co-devaluation.

But he cannot get rid of this introject in any other way.

If you refuse to own it and collaborate, he cannot get rid of it in any other way because he has introject constancy. He is emotionally invested in introjects, not in people.

So he's invested in your introject. He's invested in your avatar, emotionally.

And when he tries to get rid of it unilaterally, without your collaboration, he feels anxiety because this generates introject inconstancy.

So he is stuck with devalued, split, all bad introject as an internal and this creates enormous anxiety.

To resolve this anxiety, the narcissist approaches you, hoovering, and tries to re-idealize.

Having re-idealized you, he can then re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety.

The only exception to all this is mortification.

Thank you for listening.

And I hope I've been clear this time. I tried to put all my balls in one basket, take your mind off the gutter, and I hope I've succeeded.

Ever since I released the video "One Narcissist Relationship Cycle", people have been misidentifying narcissists with cockholes.

Both the narcissist and the cockhole push their intimate partners to be with others.

Not all narcissists, but many narcissists do.

But these narcissists are not cockholes.

The reason for what the narcissist does is not the same as the cockhole's motivation.

The cockhole is motivated by pain. He is an emotional masochist.

The narcissist's reason is that he wants to experience betrayal.

The narcissist, in other words, has a betrayal fantasy.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm a professor of psychology in CIAPS Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies, the Outreach arm or program of the SI consortium of universities.

Let me button my upper button, right? I don't want to titillate you.

Okay, Shoshanim, let's delve right in.

Narcissistic supply, even sex, are anxiolytic. In other words, they serve to reduce anxiety.

The reason the narcissist pursues narcissistic supply and the reason the somatic narcissist engages in sex is because it makes them feel good. And it makes them feel good because these reduce anxiety. They mitigate it.

But there's another thing that makes the narcissist feel vindicated, elated, somehow relieved. And that thing is betrayal.

Narcissists have been betrayed in early childhood. The narcissist has been betrayed by his mother in early childhood.

He seeks to recreate this betrayal throughout life. He chooses fake friends who bed-mouth him, steal from him, poach his mates and betray him. He behaves obnoxiously and abusively to make people hate him and then hurt him. And he pushes his intimate partners to betray him in a variety of ways, including by cheating on him.

So, it's all about the pursuit of betrayal. It's all about fulfilling some fantasy of betrayal.

What is this fantasy? Why does the narcissist need to be betrayed? What is the role of betrayal in the narcissist's psychological economy? What processes does betrayal bring on and about? And where does it all culminate? What is the aftermath?

This is the topic of today's video.

Remember just a refresher.

Narcissists convert their intimate partners to substitute mothers in order to accomplish separation individuation.

The narcissist's original mother did not allow him to separate from her and did not let him become an individual. This is an unfinished business. It's an unfinished agenda.

The narcissist has to go through this phase in order to become an adult and then an individual.

And the narcissist goes through life engaging in what Freud called a repetition compulsion. He keeps choosing intimate partners within a shared fantasy. He then converts these intimate partners into mother figuresand he then tries to separate from his intimate partners by devaluing the intimate partner and then discarding her. This is a replay, a reenactment of the separation and divisuation that he had never had with his original mother.

One way to make separation and divisuation happen is by insistently and persistently pushing the partner to betray the narcissist.

For example, by being with another person.

I'm going to use from this moment on, I'm going to use the male gender pronoun, but it's utterly interchangeable, utterly interchangeable with a female pronoun.

There are 50% of narcissists, diagnosed narcissists today are women.

So as I said, one way to bring about separation and divisuation is by pushing your partner to betray you somehow.

And I'm going to use the example of cheating because cheating is the ultimate betrayal. Cheating is a total rejection of the narcissist as a man, as a lover, as a person, and as an intimate partner.

There is no greater rejection than cheating by the person you trusted and loved.

So when the narcissist pushes his partner to betray him, this way, the separation from the partner is coupled with debilitating pain.

Why would the narcissist choose an option that involves agony, excruciating, writhing, pain? Why would he do this? Why doesn't he simply, I don't know, devalue the partner and then discard her? Or why does he simply, doesn't he simply break up and move on? Why does he have to go through this drama of betrayal and in the example that I'm using, being cheated on, sometimes ostentatiously, egregiously, and life-threateningly, painfully? Why would he choose this?

Because he wants the separation. He wants the separation to be coupled with pain.

Because if the separation is painful, it's irreversible and it's final.

The narcissist always warns and grieves the mother fantasy, not the actual departed intimate partner. The narcissist couldn't care less about his intimate partner. She's interchangeable. She's fungible. She's an extension of himself. She's a mere internal object, a snapshot.

It's not about the intimate partner. It's about the loss of the fantasy.

The narcissist separates not with his real life spouse or not from his real life girlfriend. The narcissist separates from the fantastic, imaginary maternal figure that she had become in his mind through the process of snapshotting or in projection.

So, in order to efficaciously separate from the partner, the narcissist needs to make it so harrowingly painful that he would never, ever go back.

The process is rendered irreversible by the agony involved in it.

The narcissist, therefore, is not a masochistic cackle. The narcissist does not get sexually aroused by the cheating, as a cackle would do.

On the contrary, the narcissist's subsequent suffering causes him extreme depression and a marked decrease or disappearance of the libido of the sex drive.

Narcissist become asexual in the wake of such betrayal and cheating.

This is the exact opposite of catchedry.

Back to the topic.

Normal people react to mate poaching with mate guarding or sexual gatekeeping.

In other words, if someone is trying to take away your spouse or your boyfriend or your girlfriend, you're likely to react very aggressively by fending off the intruder, isolating your intimate partner from the wannabe mate and generally restricting her movements, maybe even spying on her.

These are typical behaviors, but not with the narcissist.

The narcissist reacts to mate poaching.

The narcissist reacts to attempts to poach his mate, to steal away his mate.

With the exact opposite, he reacts with mate sharing.

He actually engages in projective identification. He pushes his intimate partner towards the poacher.

When another man shows interest in the narcissist's spouse or the narcissist's girlfriend, the narcissist is not likely to react by guarding his intimate partner, isolating her, sequestering her, or demanding that she cuts all contact with the poacher.

On the contrary, he is likely to offer his spouse or girlfriend to the newcomer, to the male who is interested in her. And he is likely to do this in a very aggressive way. He's likely to actually orchestrate the whole event, the cheating. He's likely to push his intimate partner by abusing her or by extolling the virtues of the new man, idealizing him to her so that he renders the new man irresistible.

This is mate sharing with the man she would cheat with.

Often the narcissist actually chooses this man himself. He chooses the cheating partner of his spouse or girlfriend.

It's all part of a play, a theater play, a production kind of movie. And it's all about the narcissist's betrayal fantasy.

He needs to be betrayed because having been betrayed, he experiences such pain that facilitates the separation and not only facilitates the separation, but makes it irreversible.

Having idealized his partner, the narcissist's self-idealization, grandiosity, depends on his ownership of her. This is known as co-idealization.

When the narcissist idealizes his partner, he's also idealizing himself by owning the partner. It's like he's saying, "I own this perfect object. That means that I'm perfect."

So relinquishing his partner to another man, handing his partner, his mate, his spouse, his girlfriend, handing her to another man undermines the narcissist's sense of self-worth.

Actually results in self-devaluation so extreme that the narcissist's internal bad object takes over and the dual messages of the bad object are amplified.

You're not lovable. You don't deserve happiness because you're not good enough.

I'm going to repeat this because everything I'm describing here is totally counterintuitive and outside the experience of the vast majority of humanity.

The narcissist converts his intimate partner to a mother figure.

Then he needs to separate from her.

The best way to separate from her irreversibly is to force her to betray him.

And the most exquisite form of betrayal is cheating.

So the narcissist pushes his partner to cheat on him. He introduces her to eligible men. He praises them and idealizes them and idolizes them so that they become irresistible. He makes sure that she meets them continuously.

Finally, if all else fails, he actually demands that she sleeps with the other guy or have a romance with the other guy. He needs her to betray him. He needs her to betray him.

And the narcissist's partner feels this. She keeps saying, "It's as if you would be angry at me if I don't do it." And indeed, the narcissist would be because his overriding need is to separate from her. And he can't separate from her unless she does something really, really bad, unless she misbehave egregiously, unless her misconduct cannot be overlooked. He needs her to be evil. He needs her to really, really misbehave so that he can just say goodbye in good conscience and attain the high moral ground and feel like a victim.

These are the conditions for separation.

And even though handing over his partner to another man is possibly the most excruciatingly painful experience imaginable, it is far better. It is far more tolerable. It is far more bearable than not being able to separate from your intimate partner.

The narcissist needs to separate from the intimate partner because if he doesn't, there is going to be a replay, a reenactment with a terrifying dynamics with the original mother, which involve life-threatening shame and other negative effects.

The narcissist is compelled to separate from his partner and he beseeches her. He asks her to help him to do that by misbehaving, by betraying him on some occasions with another man.

I'm using the example of cheating, but it could be any form of betrayal.

Remember that once the betrayal is accomplished, the bad object inside the narcissist takes over the bad object, the voices of the dead mother and other sadistic, harsh, disparaging, inner critic voices.

So these voices tell the narcissist, these introjects create, generate automatic negative thoughts.

And the two dominant ones are, you see, she cheated on you. She betrayed you. She chose another man over you.

You are not good enough. You are not lovable and you don't deserve happiness and you will never have happiness because no one will ever love you.

Even this intimate partner, as you see, the minute she met another man, she just walked away.

The bad object inside the narcissist now essentially takes over as a narcissist is in a process of extreme, extreme life-threatening self-devaluation.

At the same time, the narcissist is also very envious of the other men with whom the spouse or the girlfriend who cheated.

The other man now possesses the good idealized object. The other man now is the owner of the narcissist intimate partner.

Her introject, the internal object that represents the partner inside the narcissist's mind is still idealized.

So now the other man is in charge of the idealized snapshot of the idealized internal object in the narcissist's mind.

It's as if the other man had reached into the narcissist's mind and absconded with the good object inside it, which represents the intimate partner.

And this feels like self-harm or self-mutilation. It feels like the narcissist feels like a self-destructive fool for having handed over, for having handed over this intimate partner over to a man.

And he envies this man for possessing her. And he says to himself, "I used to possess this intimate partner. I used to be in charge and I used to be the owner of the idealized object.

This other man used to envy me. This other man wanted to possess her. This other man desired her.

And now this other man had replaced me in her heart and mind."

And this is a horrible feeling.

The narcissist has usually a referential ideation, which in this case is probably true.

And he believes that the other man is bed-mouthing him as a predator or a monster. He believes that the other man has taken over the heart and mind of his intimate partner by casting him as an abuser.

In other words, the narcissist realizes that he is trapped in the Carpmann drama triangle. He is the abuser. His intimate partner is the victim.

And the third man, the third party, the man who she is cheating with, is actually a rescuer or a saviour. He has attained the role of a predator and a monster.

And this was all he is doing. He made it all happen. He orchestrated the whole thing. He pushed the parties towards each other. He didn't mind how many times they protested against it. He insisted, even became indignant, if they wouldn't obey him.

He feels, the narcissist feels that his repetition, compassion renders him defenseless, disrespected by everyone involved, weak, even pathetic. And he consoles himself by clinging to the fact that he had made all this happen. He was in charge and everyone involved was merely a puppet. He was the puppet master. And they were just puppets enacting the drama of his betrayal.

That is not far from the truth. It usually is true.

And yet it's not enough to reduce or to ameliorate the narcissist's seething envy of the other men with whom his intimate partner is cheating.

It's not enough to reduce the sense of utter helplessness in the face of such powerful inner compulsions. It's not enough to allay the overwhelming sense of loss and the huge sadness that sweeps over the narcissist in waves in the aftermath.

The narcissist hates to do this. He doesn't want to do this.

These are the worst moments in his life in the wake of betrayal by an intimate partner.

He would rather avoid all this, but he has no option. He has no choice.

This is a compulsion, a repetition compulsion.

And like every other compulsion, there's no way out. There's no way to counter it. There's no way to negate it.

He needs to separate from the maternal figure that his intimate partner had become. He needs to let go of her and he needs her to let go of him. And this needs to be done in such a clear cut and ostentatious manner so that there's no doubt of the separation and it cannot be reversed.

The narcissist perceives the men that the partner is cheating with as superior to him in some ways.

Why does he do that?

Narcissists don't like to feel inferior. Narcissists like to feel superior.

Why in this particular case, in the betrayal drama, in the betrayal fantasy, why does the narcissist want to feel inferior to the men his spouse or girlfriend had chosen over him?

The men that he pushed her to choose.

Again, there is an artificial resemblance to the cathexis.

The cathexis is a masochist and he does often feel inferior to the bull, the bull is the third party, the other man who is having sex with his wife.

But the resemblance ends here.

The reason the cathexis wants to feel inferior is because he wants to experience pain because pain arouses him sexually.

That's not the case with the narcissist.

Absolutely not the case.

The reason the narcissist wants to feel inferior to the man his wife is having a romance or sex with is because this way he can be a child again.

Remember, separation and individuation is an early childhood process. It takes place between the ages of 18 and 24 months.

In order for the narcissist to separate effectively, to really separate and to have a chance at becoming an individual, the narcissist needs to go back in time and become a child again.

He needs to regress and infantilize himself because only children separate and individually.

And so he needs to feel that his spouse or his girlfriend is the adult, she is the mother.

The other man who is now having an affair with her or fleeing or casual sex or whatever, that other man is an adult too.

There are two adults doing this. Two adults are betraying him.

But he is not an adult. He is a child. He is a child.

Mother is cheating with him, cheating on him with a real man.

I repeat, mother, his intimate partner, is cheating on him with a real man.

He is not a real man because he is a child, because he can separate from mother only as a child.

He cannot be a grown up in this game. He needs to infantilize and of course, children by definition are inferior to adults.

By rendering the third, the other man an adult, by considering the other man to be a grown up, the narcissist is actually saying, you're a grown up, you're an adult, I'm not, I'm a child, I'm much inferior to you. And my intimate partner is my mother.

So in this drama, in this triangular drama, usually triangular drama, the narcissist uses his intimate partner and her lover as props. They are the adults compared to which or compared to whom he is a child.

And now, as a child, the preconditions for separation are fulfilled. There's a devalued mother, there's a painful breakup in a reenacted childhood, and there is an adult figure resembling very much a father figure who is taking away mother from the child, a reenactment of the Oedipus complex.

Of course, all the drama, all the betrayal drama and the betrayal fantasy involves splitting as a precondition for individuation.

The child in this story is all good. The child is a victim. Mother and her lover, mother and the other man, they're all bad.

Now that the child is all good and mother and her lover are all bad, the child can safely separate from mother. Actually it feels safe to separate. It has an incentive to separate because mother is threatening, ominous, she's a bad person, bad object, bad external object.

So now the narcissist has an incentive to separate, having devalued her, having rendered her a bad external object.

So let me summarize this part for you.

It's really this, this is a mind bender.

The narcissist wants to separate from his mother, from the maternal figure, from the intimate partner.

To separate from a maternal figure, he needs to be a child again. To be a child again, he needs to regard the mother figure, the intimate partner, as an adult and he needs to regard the other man with whom she's cheating or having an affair as another adult.

There are two adults there and they are betraying him together. Together they're betraying him and now that they betrayed him, he is in huge pain. He is in pain because these two adults are evil, they're victimizing him, they hate him, they don't love him. The bad object inside the narcissist keeps telling him you're not lovable, you don't deserve happiness, you're not good enough. You see, she has chosen someone else over you.

So at that point the narcissist is ready to separate.

He says to himself, anyhow I'm not lovable, no one can love me, she hates me, her lover hates me, her lover is superior to me because I'm a child and he's an adult, of course, she would go for a real man, not for a child. So she would never come back to me.

I am ready to separate because I'm all good in this story.

Even though I orchestrated everything, even though I made it happen, even though I pushed them towards each other, they didn't have to do what they're doing. They could have abstained, they could have refrained from doing this, that they are doing this, proves how much they hate me, that they ended up complying with my wishes and demands, just goes to show how disrespected I am and how hateful I am.

And so now he's ready to separate and in the process he involves the ancient primitive defense mechanism of splitting. I'm all good, I'm a victim, I'm a child, a molested childand this evil woman who is my mother or maternal feeder, she is a lover who is as evil as she is, they both betrayed meand I was willing to say goodbye.

So this is engineers, the whole situation of betrayal. He's fully in control of it. He selects mates for his wife, he selects mates as his wife or as his girlfriend, he selects mates that are more likely to collaborate in realizing the betrayal fantasy. He selects mates who would betray him, he selects mates who would cheat on him, promiscuous mates, unboundaried mates, mentally ill mates, he selects spouses and girlfriends who are likely to go along with the betrayal drama. Such women are anyhow prone to fantasyand they collude with the narcissist to the point of complying with his wishes, even when his demands of them are egodystonic, even when what he is asking of them to do is perceived by them as wrong, they are unhappy with it, they don't want to do it.

He kind of broadcasts to them, you should cheat on me and they say I don't want to cheat on you, I don't want to cause you pain, I never did this before, I don't want to do thisor I did this before, I don't want to do it again but he keeps pushing relentlessly, he keeps brainwashing them, he keeps entraining them, he keeps grinding them to the point that they say okay, in order to remain in the fantasy we are going to do this.

In their mindsif they do this, if they cheat on himfor example, it would make them closer to him, if they cheat on himit's an act of intimacy, if they cheat on him he is going to reclaim them and he is going to love them even more because they have complied with his wishesbut of coursethey don't realize the narcissist wants them to cheat in order to get rid of them, the narcissist wants his intimate partner to cheat on him or to betray him in some other way so that he can separate from her finally and irreversibly.

This abuses his intimate partner, prompts him, he prompts her to betray him, he sets the stage even to the point of choosing the other men, introducing him to her and making sure they spend a lot of time togetherand then acting as a kind of cupid, promoting that other man, idealizing him and idolizing him, telling his intimate partner he is your perfect, he is your perfect match, don't ever let him go, don't let go of this opportunity.

It is important to note that the fantasy of the narcissist is that of having fallen victim to an evil partner which is reminiscent of his real dead mother, deadI meanpsychologicallynot physically. The dead mother is narcissistic, selfish, absent, instrumentalizing, identifying, bad mother.

Sohe is the fantasy, the betrayal fantasyis that I'm going to be a victim of a partner, an intimate partner who is essentially a mother substitutebut she would be as evil as betraying and as hurtful, she would cause me as much pain as my original mother.

The fantasy is mostly counterfactual, it's delusional, it's persecutory, in realityit is the narcissist who literally coerces, forces his partner to cheat on him in a variety of ways. I don't know of any, there are very few partners who could resist this unless they walk away.

So it is the narcissist who sets everything in motion, he is the deus and he is the machino, he is the puppet master, everyone is manipulated into acting the roles of the parts, inestimably of betrayal and yet in his mindhe is a victim, in his mindhe is being persecuted, in his mindhe did nothing to deserve this, in his mindit was all a test that they had failed, a loyalty test that his intimate partner had failed and his friendfor examplehad failed.

In his mindit's kind of make- belief, not real, a simulation.

And when things actually do happen and he is betrayed or cheated on, he is reduced to smithereens, he falls apart, he literally falls apart, he disintegrates.

The fantasy that he has of himself as a victim, victim of an evil partner and her even more evil lover, this fantasy is not trueof course, so he has to defend it fiercely against reality, against the facts, he needs to believe that he had been betrayed, he needs to believe that he is a victim because an efficacious separation, individuation depends on this belief, depends on this fantasy that the maternal figure, the intimate partneris bad and that the other party is equally bad, he needs to sustain this fantasy in order to say goodbye and never look back.

His original mother had left in his mind a legacy, a trace, a sadistic, tormenting introject, a voice that his enemy, his hostile voice, a voice that wants to destroy him, a voice that pushes him to incredible acts of self-harm and self-mutilation, to self-punitive actions that defy beliefand now what he does, he superimposes the bad object, he superimposes the sadistic original mother introject on the introject of his intimate partner.

So once the intimate partner had cheated on him or betrayed him in some way, the road is open and he can merge the introjects, he can merge the original mother introject which is hateful, keeps telling him that he is not lovable, he merges it with the intimate partner introject.

As an aside, this attempt is doomed to failure because it has some inherent contradictions.

I recommend, I advise you to watch the video I've made about Hôver.

Why does the narcissist Hoover?

But back to our topic, the narcissist distorts reality, he refrains reality, he deceives himself into accepting a version of the events which is largely untrue, but a version of the events which is excruciatingly agonizing and therefore conducive to separation individuation.

He adopts a fable of rejection, humiliation and victimization.

But it's not true, it's a confabulation.

This confabulation is intended to buttress and magnify the twin messages of the bad object.

You are no good and therefore deserve no happiness and you are not lovable.

So in the aftermath of the betrayal and the cheating, the narcissist feels so down, so depressed because his bad object is tormenting him.

The bad object is infused with new power because remember the bad object is the original mother introject.

It hates the narcissist, it's sadistic.

And now that it had merged, now that it had been merged with the introject of the cheating or betraying intimate partner, it is much more powerful.

It is much stronger, it overpowers and overwhelms the narcissist.

Indeed, it becomes dysregulated, very similar to borderline.

At that point, the only solution or resolution is to start all over again with a new partner in order to internalize a good idealized object which will be able to somehow balance the bad object, the rampant bad object.

To summarize, the narcissist converts his intimate partner to a maternal figure.

He needs to separate from her because he has unfinished business with his original mother or his original mother did not allow him to separate individually. He needs to do it with his intimate partner. He pushes his intimate partner to betray him, for example, to cheat on him with another man. He coerces her to do it even if she doesn't want to. And he does this because betrayal and cheating cement the power of the separation.

Having been betrayed, having been cheated on, the separation becomes strong, irreversible and final.

Regrettably, this doesn't happen for reasons that I mentioned in the video on hoovering.

But one more important reason is that he has now, in the aftermath, in the wake of the betrayal, in the wake of the cheating, he has to merge the original mother, introject, the hateful, sadistic introject, the voice in his mind, her voice in his mind with the introject of the betraying and cheating intimate partner.

This creates a much stronger bad object inside his mind.

And then he's driven to the point of suicidality. He becomes suicidal. He becomes borderline, dysregulated, can't sleep at night, can't eat. He doesn't take care of his health. He neglects himself, he's super depressed, and he contemplates suicide repeatedly.

To emerge from this state, the only solution is to affect another fantasy, to emotionally invest in another fantasy.

Remember, the narcissist is never emotionally invested in any real life person. The narcissist is incapable of perceiving external objects as external. He creates immediately an internal object that represents the external object, and he continues his interactions exclusively with the internal object, with the snapshot.

So he needs now to find someone, another person, another spouse, another life partner, another intimate partner, another girlfriend, needs to find someone which he can then convert into an internal object.

He imbues her with maternal properties. She's idealized, she's a good mother in his mind, and she's fighting off the bad mother.

For a while, peace is restored and tranquility. The narcissist is happy. He loves-bonds. Love-bonds is a newly found mother.

But then the cycle kick-starts again, and he has to separate from this maternal figure as well.

And it all re-convinces.

I recalled certain phrases and sentences that my intimate partners told me, my girlfriends, my wives, they told me, because I subjected all of them to this cycle successfully.

The overwhelming vast majority of them ended up being with other men.

Sometimes as fast as four days or six days.

I'm good at what I do.

They succumbed to the betrayal fantasy. They faded into it, and they played their own to perfection.

But in the process, and definitely in the aftermath, when they woke up from this simulation, from this dream state, and they realized what they had done, many of them became very egodystonic.

And those who did not become egodystonic realized that they had been played and manipulated into the role.

So they spoke to me.

As an example, one of them told me, "I thought you were getting rid of me. I thought you wanted me to sleep with another man." Another one told me, "I thought you hate me, and you would be angry if I do not go to the other man. You love pain and you will do anything to be in pain. You push your woman to cheat in order to be able to say that mommy again betrayed poor baby.

Another one told me, "We agreed and you insisted that I try to have a baby with another man.

You love pain. You push your woman to cheat, and then you're in pain.

And Richard Grannon, my fake friend, told me, "Everyone is your puppet because you want to prove to yourself that every woman will betray you and he's a whore like your mother.

So people around the narcissists do notice what he's doing.

They interpret most of his actions properly, but they help us to resist.

Resistance is futile.

Why?

Because they themselves are addicted to fantasy. They have powerful fantasy defenses.

What they fit into the Narcissist fantasy, they become intoxicated with it, and they kind of derealize and depersonalize. They become dissociative. They act the part on autopilot. It's like they are in a dream state or some nightmarish landscape.

Even if they believe themselves to be embedded in reality, they are not.

The only thing they are grounded in is the Narcissist betrayal fantasy, unfolding inexorably as they play their parts zombie-like.

This is a post-script with wine, of course.

So I forgot to mention in the original video that the Narcissist self-harming, the Narcissist self-destructiveness, self-mutilation, they are all forms of emotional disinvestment or de-cafexes in clinical terms.

The Narcissist, in order to separate, needs first to separate emotionally.

But what did you say?

Narcissists have no emotions.

Yes, it's not emotions in layman's terms.

The Narcissists are emotionally invested, they are affected in the fantasy.

In order to separate, they need to de-cafect the fantasy. They need to withdraw the emotional investment in the fantasy.

This is a process of emotional disinvestment, by harming himself, by causing himself pain, by buttressing and reaffirming the signals and voices of the bad object, the Narcissist is able to detach emotionally from the fantasy and to embark on separation.

Now to much, much more important things.

It's red wine, not what you're thinking.

Many of you were taken by the idea of the Narcissist betrayal fantasy.

Watch the video I posted a few days ago.

But the video I've just mentioned described merely the psychodynamics behind the betrayal fantasy, what goes on in the Narcissist's mind when he re-enacts and plays out the betrayal fantasy in his relationships.

And before we proceed, because today's video we're going to discuss how the betrayal fantasy is actually implemented in reality, the brass tacks, all the moves and the counter moves when the Narcissist tries to impose the betrayal fantasy on his nearest and dearest.

And a proper betrayal fantasy.

My former fake friend, that's the F word, used to look me in the eye, smile smugly and say "I'm plagiarizing you again".

I didn't mind being plagiarized as long as I was by his side, compensating somehow for his rather limited intelligence.

But now poor thing is all alone.

Dude, get it right at least.

Majorize me by all means.

I get it right.

I know I understand your limitations, but try harder.

Consult someone regarding the ten dollar words.

I mean transcend your limitations with the help of others.

Poor you.

OK Shoshanim.

Today's video, as I said, is about the betrayal fantasy.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of "Belignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited". I'm also a professor of psychology in SIAS-CIAPS Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies, an outreach program of the CIAPS consortium of university.

Some of you asked me what if I had another position or previous position as a professor.

Yes, I was professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Rostov-Onda, a Russian Federation. Not a very popular destination lately.

Let's delve right into another unpopular destination, the narcissist mind.

The previous video was about the etiology of the betrayal fantasy, the rootsand the internal processes that accompany the betrayal fantasy as it unfolds.

What about the mechanics of the betrayal fantasy? How does it operate?

First of all, it's crucial to understand that the narcissist breaks up with his intimate patterns.

I'm going to use, sorry, before I proceed, I'm going to use he. I'm going to use the male gender pronoun.

But of course, it's utterly interchangeable with a female gender pronoun. About 50% of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder nowadays are women.

OK. This disclaimer out of the way. Let us forge ahead.

The narcissist breaks up with women and he does this by pushing them to cheat with other men.

Why would he do that?

To avoid future stalking. The narcissist is terrified of intimacy. He abhors demands on his time, resources, exclusivity, behavior. He doesn't want people in his life.

The narcissist is a solipsist, is a loner, is a lone wolf. And the reason for that is that the narcissist cannot comprehend external objects. The narcissist interacts only exclusively with objects inside his mind, also known as internal objects with introjects, voices in his mind.

In this sense, the narcissist is very close to psychosis, as I've been saying for years in the footsteps of Otto Kernberg.

So narcissist is a loner.

And then suddenly there's another person there, an intimate partner. This intimate partner becomes a nuisance, an annoyance taking over the narcissist's life.

Gradually and incrementally, the narcissist resents this. He wants his intimate partner out and away, one way or another.

In short, he wants to get rid of the woman in his life. So he pushes her to cheat with another man because once she cheats with another man, she would feel guilty. She would have no claim on him. She could make no demands and she would vanish. This would prevent future stalking.

Some of the women the narcissist breaks up with when cheating is not involved do become stalkers or just bitter, resentful and hateful.

The narcissist's lesson is if I just break up with a woman normally, as other people do, I'm going to be haunted and hunted for the rest of my life.

Now don't misunderstand. The cheating causes the narcissist excruciating pain for a few weeks, but it is far preferable to stalking and to charges of unfulfilled promises.

Now before we proceed, I'm using the example of cheating, but this applies to any type of betrayal, any type of knife in the back, any type of backstabbing, any type of bed mouthing, any type of breakdown of trust.

I selected cheating because it is the most extreme form of betrayal. It's a total rejection of the cheated on.

And because in the previous video, I've used the example of cheating, but as I say, it applies to all types of betrayal.

And at the end of this video, I will briefly review other types of relationships, not intimate relationships, but other types, for example, workplace collaborations, friendships, and so on and so forth.

At this stage, let us take with cheating as an example of the principle of betrayal as a reification of betrayal.

So the narcissist wants to get rid of an over demanding, over present intimate partner.

He's afraid of being confronted with demands, pain, the partner's pain, fighting, stalking. He doesn't want any of this.

So he pushes the partner to cheat so that she feels guilty, so that she vanishes on her own accord.

This causes the narcissist pain.

In a minute, I will explain which kind of pain. It's not the kind of pain that you imagine because narcissists are the kind of people that you imagine. They're not healthy. They're not neurotypical. They're not normal.

So even their pain is highly idiosyncratic, highly unusual. We'll come to it in a minute.

But let us dispel two misconceptions.

The narcissist is not a masochist. He doesn't seek pain for pain's sake. He doesn't like pain. He hates to experience cheating. He's devastated and he detests having to go through this cycle again and again.

So when the narcissist pushes women, dates, girlfriends, intimate partners to be with other men, when he often orchestrates the cheating, he orchestrates the betrayal, the extramarital affairs, the extra-diadic affairs, he very often puts his intimate partner in touch with the cheating partner.

When he does all this, it is not because he seeks pain. It's not because he's a masochist.

I will read at the end of this video. I'm going to read a few segments, a few sections from the book by Theodore Millon about the similarities and dissimilarities between narcissism and masochism.

In this particular case, it's not about masochism because the narcissist truly experiences agony and he hates it. It's also not cuckoldry.

The narcissist is not sexually aroused by the fact that his intimate partner is with another man. On the contrary, it depresses him and reduces his libido to zero. It has the opposite effect to sexual arousal.

Narcissists are not masochists. They don't seek pain. They are not cuckolds. They're not aroused by extramarital or extra-diadic affairs with all kinds of bulls. They just use cheating to get rid of the intimate partner. They merely wish to get rid of the intimate partner altogether or at the very least to minimize her footprint in the narcissist's life.

Unconsciously though, there is another layer.

The narcissist catastrophizes. He believes that the world is hostile. Bad things are going to happen. People are not trustworthy. Everyone is out to get him. There's a lot of paranoia involved in narcissism, persecutory delusions.

Indeed, I'm trying to recast paranoia as a variant of narcissism because the paranoid believes that he is the dissenter of some conspiracy, center of attention, however malign.

So unconsciously with the narcissist, this strategy of I'm going to push my partner to cheat on me so that I can get rid of her so that she feels guilty so that she doesn't bother me again.

This strategy is intended to control. Control what? Control who? To control the inevitable, inevitableabandonment, rejection, cheating, betrayal and humiliation.

The narcissist believes that these things are inevitable. That his intimate partner is going to anyhow cheat on him, anyhow betray him, anyhow humiliating. It's going to happen ineluctably.

Better to be on top. Better to surf the wave. Better to control the outcomes by orchestrating the antecedents. Better to engineer the cheating. So that you can tell yourself as a narcissist, it was all my doing. I'm a puppet master. I'm in control. I'm omnipotent. I'momnipotent. I'm God like. I play with people's destinies and minds.

And so this satisfies grandiosity, the grandiosity, cognitive distortion. It satisfies the narcissist's inherent and all pervasive belief that he is the center of the world. He revolves around him and he is pivotal. He's a pivot. He's the axis around which everyone's lives and minds and wishes and dreams and everything. It's around him. So is around him. So even cheating should be actually an extension of him. Even cheating should be his doing and no one else's.

So this is the first unconscious motivation.

There is a second unconscious motivation.

The narcissist feels the need to sadistically punish his partners. He has to satisfy this need.

And he wants to sadistically punish his partners because he perceives them as frustrating objects. He perceives them as sadistically punishing him.

Projection. He believes that his intimate partners everlasting presence, her demands, her inquiries, her complaints, her wishes, her hopes, these are forms of encroachment. It's a form of imprisonment and shacklement, incarceration, suffocation and smothering that the narcissist resents.

He wants to punish his partner for inflicting all these on him. He wants to punish her sadistically, cruelly. He does this by withdrawing from the relationship, absenting himself emotionally and sometimes physically.

And when these don't work, when the intimate partner doesn't get the message, doesn't understand the signal, stay away from me, leave me alone, let me be, let me have my life, I need my space, I need my time, infinite space, an infinite time, you're just here to serve me when and if I need, etc.

When she doesn't get this message, he coerces her, he pushes her, he cajoles her, he forces her to self-trash, sexually self-trash with another man by cheating on him or axiologically self-trash, in other words, betray her own values.

Often the two go together.

The intimate partners of a narcissist don't want to cheat on him. It goes against their values, their beliefs. It's not ingrained in them, inculcated in them, it's not who they are, but the narcissist forces them to transform themselves and to betray their values and to act in a way which is atypical, unusual.

Very often the intimate partners of narcissists, having cheated on a narcissist, are absolutely shocked, egodystonic, devastated, sad, heartbroken that they have done it.

And so the narcissist has this need to also punish his partner by forcing her to become someone else, by kind of taking over her mind and playing with it. It's a mind game and a power play.

"Okay," you ask.

The narcissist needs to get rid of his intimate partner and his way of doing this is pushing her to another man and then he has the upper hand, he's the moral victim and he can tell her to go. And she has no claim on him because she misbehaved. Her misconduct rules out any further negotiation.

Great.

But doesn't he care? Doesn't the narcissist care that his wife, that his girlfriend, that his date is with another man?

And the shocking answer is no.

He actually doesn't care.

The narcissist couldn't care less that the woman in his life is with another man, regardless of what it is they're doing, sex included.

The narcissist feels relieved, released, free that she's gone.

The narcissist suddenly feels unshackled.

She will not be making any further demands on me. She will not stop me. I'm a free man.

So no, the narcissist doesn't care what the woman in his life does with other men at all. And I mean at all, not even minimally.

On the contrary, he has positive affectivity. He reacts positively.

But then you say, wait a minute, didn't you say a few sentences ago when we were all much younger that the narcissist experiences pain, excruciating pain when this happens?

Yes, I did.

But it's not the kind of pain you think it should be. It's another kind of pain and I'm coming to it in a second.

The narcissist doesn't care, doesn't react emotionally in any way, shape or form. Definitely not negative to the fact that the woman in his life is with another man.

He's actually angry.

If an intimate partner resists his prodding, his pushing, his interpolation, describes a situation where people adopt others' expectations as their own. They internalize other people's expectations, that's interpolation.

When the intimate partner of the narcissist refuses to be played with, refuses to succumb, refuses to give in, refuses to collaborate and collude in the narcissist's crude maneuver to push her to cheat on him or to betray him in some other way, the narcissist becomes angry.

He is actually angry at intimate partners who resist the manipulation and survive in the relationship. When he pushes a woman in his life, his girlfriend, his date, his wife, to go out to a specific man and have sex with him and she doesn't, it makes him furious, makes him angry because these intimate partners are perceived as clingy, needy, threatening.

What's the threat?

The ultimate cheating, the ultimate betrayal because remember the narcissist believes that sooner or later the other shoe will drop. So sooner or later the intimate partner will cheat on him.

So why not now?

It's as if the intimate partner says, "I'm going to cheat on you in my own good time. I'm not going to obey your script. I'm going to choose who to cheat with and when to cheat.

And the narcissist is furious. He says, "Yo, intimate partner, if you want to cheat on me, why don't you do it right now with this guy that I've selected for you and I've put you in touch with? Why don't you obey my script? Why don't you have to do it independently and then cause me horrible pain? I know you're going to do it in any case. I know I'm going to do it in any case, so why not do it now? Why shock me and surprise me and traumatize me in the future when you could do it right now and release me and make me feel good so he becomes angry?"

Okay, I did say several times in this video that the implementation of this strategy, the only way to get rid of my intimate partner is to force her to cheat on me. Get rid of her for good. Get rid of her for real. Get rid of her with no trace.

The only way to accomplish this, to accomplish this, is to push her to cheat.

But I did say that this strategy causes excruciating pain. How come? What kind of pain?

The pain that a narcissist experiences is not romantic jealousy. It is not possessiveness. He couldn't care less what his intimate partner is doing with other men. None whatsoever.

The pain that a narcissist experiences is narcissistic injury. And if the betrayal or the cheating is public, then it's narcissistic mortification.

That's the pain.

Injury or mortification.

The pain, in other words, that the narcissist experiences when his wife cheats on himor his girlfriend cheats on him or his date cheats on him.

The pain the narcissist experiences has nothing to do with her. It has nothing to do with the other guy.

The pain that a narcissist experiences has to do with himself, of course.

He has been narcissistically injured. He has been narcissistically mortified.

One, what causes this injury or this mortification?

It is about and solely about, only about, being disrespected and humiliated by other men.

Other men, when they see the narcissist pushing his partner, when they see the narcissist pushing his women to cheat with other men, they think of him as a doormat, a cuckold, or a coward who is unable to restrain his women folk or unable to protect his women.

In other words, the narcissist's strategy to get rid of his intimate partner generates derision and mockery among his peers.

But people can't wrap their heads. They can't grasp this strategy. It is so alien, so counterintuitive, so crazy-making that they can't believe it's true.

They say, "Oh, nonsense. It's a cognitive dissonance."

His girlfriend cheated on him, so he invented the story that he made it happen, that he pushed her to cheat, that people don't believe this.

They say, "Oh, he's just trying to show that he was in control. He was actually deeply hurt, and he wanted her to not do it. So he was testing her. Maybe he was just testing her.

It's none of the above. It's not a test. It doesn't involve romantic jealousy or possessiveness. It does not hurt the narcissist. There's no pain, this kind of pain. It's none of the above. It's a maneuver. It's a tactic. It's a strategy of ridding oneself of undesired and undesirable intimate partners. End of story. It's absolutely cold-blooded.

But again, the peers of the narcissist misinterpret his behavior, and this misinterpretation causes him narcissistic injury and narcissistic mortification.

He feels humiliated by the misunderstanding of his motivation.

At the same time, when he pushes his intimate partner to cheat, and she does ultimately, this is automatically perceived by the narcissist as rejection and humiliation, as a kind of criticism, as if he were inadequate, mentally ill, incapacitated, not good enough.

In other words, unworthy.

In other words, as if he is less than perfect.

So this is the irony of the situation.

The narcissist pushes his intimate partner to cheat on him in order to get rid of him.

He pushes really hard. He pushes really hard. It's like hard work.

Then it happens, of course, because if you push anything hard enough, it happens. Then it happens.

And then once it happens, the good news is the silver lining, he does succeed to get rid of the intimate partner.

But the cloud is societal reaction, the action of everyone around him.

His peers, his peers, his colleagues, his family, everyone thinks that he's a doormat, a cuckold, a coward, etc., not protective enough, etc.

So this hurts.

This is narcissistic injury or mortification.

Similarly, unconsciously, he perceives the act of cheating as a kind of rejection and humiliation, an indication that he is less than perfect.

Never mind that he engineered everything. Never mind that he controlled everything. Never mind that he puppeteered everyone involved, or at least he tells himself this. Never mind all that.

There's still this element of she went ahead with it. She actually went ahead with it.

That means that I wasn't good enough. That's the bad object speaking.

And if you revert, if you go back to the previous video I posted about the betrayal fantasy, I talk a lot about the bad object.

Because what happens is, when the narcissist is exposed to this point of view, you're a coward, you're a cuckold, you're a doormat, you're not protective, you're not a man, you're inadequate, you're not good enough, you're unworthy of love, you're not lovable. When he's exposed to these messages from the environment, even though these messages are a misinterpretation of what had happened, these messages are wrong.

People don't realize that the narcissist had acted in his own best self-interest. People don't understand because they can't grasp the narcissistic world. It's so not human, it's so alien.

But then, because the narcissist is crucially dependent on input and feedback from the outside, because he's subject to internal regulation of his sense of self-worth, for example, because he builds his identity on the fly from narcissistic supply and beatific attention, because he's a kaleidoscope of other people's gazes, because of all this, he willy-nilly, unwillingly internalizes their fallacious, wrong point of view and comes to regard himself as inefficacious, helpless, unlovable, obsequious, unworthy, ugly, craven, doormat, coward, etc.

Actually, in his own mind, he had been cuckolded. He knows it's not true, because he knows that he has done everything intentionally with a plan in mind. He knows that all the steps that led to the cheating were his own doing, 100%. So he knows that he's the mastermind. He knows that he's a puppet master, and yet, because the narcissist always internalizes other people's gaze, other people's point of view, he is forced, he has no defenses, against the alternative, fallacious, wrong view of what he had done, and he internalizes it.

And then it feeds into his harsh inner critic. It kind of fuels his sadistic superego, or bad object, it projects. It amplifies the shame that underlies narcissism, because narcissism is the outcome of shame.

You should read work by Masterson and Lydia Wielowska and so on. It's intimately connected to shame.

So narcissism is a reaction to shame, a defense against shame.

And the whole process of forcing his intimate partner to cheat, and then being exposed to ridicule, mockery, and derision, and pity, and contempt, this whole process, having internalized this input, feeds the narcissist's shame.

The furnace in which the narcissist burns eternally, his own inner hell and inferno.

The shame then erupts out of control, like so much magma or lava out of volcano. The shame consumes the narcissist to life-threatening proportions.

The narcissist could easily become suicidal.

So it is so bizarre, because the narcissist, to recap, to recap, see how strange, how mind-bending this is.

The narcissist wants to get rid of his intimate partner, he pushes her to cheat. It's all he's doing, it's all his plan, it's utterly in control. He pushes her to cheat.

Then she cheats.

Then other people mock the narcissist.

Then instead of saying to himself, they don't know what they're talking about. This is not true. I know what happened. I made it happen.

Instead of doing this, he internalizes the point of view of other people, their gaze, their ridicule and mockery and derision, internalizes it.

He internalizes all these, because he is used to feeding off the feedback and input of other people. He is used to reconstitute himself on the fly based on other people's input and feedback. He can't help it. It's a reflex. It's out of control.

So he internalizes this point of view, and then he's flooded with shame and becomes suicidal.

Okay, you see.

Great.

Thank you, Vaknin.

Now we understand much more, that we understand much less.

Why?

Why not change the strategy? Why continue with this potentially life-threatening game, mind-playing and power play? I mean, why?

Mind game and power play? Why? Why not learn from experience and never ever do it again?

And the answer is the shared fantasy.

The narcissist's only meaningful relationships are within a shared fantastic space.

It's known as a shared fantasy. It was first described in 1989.

The shared fantasy of the narcissist is highly addictive. I've described it in previous videos, including interviews with the aforementioned fake friend.

The shared fantasy is highly addictive. The partner gets addicted to the shared fantasy.

And when the partner is cut off, this generates stalking behaviors. Stalking behaviors.

The intimate partner cannot let go of the shared fantasy and of the narcissist. And if the intimate partner is pushed away violently and aggressively, being blocked, or I don't know what, threatened, the intimate, the erstwhile intimate partner becomes hateful.

This virulent hatred, in spurned women anyhow.

But refugees of the shared fantasy, intimate partners who have been cast out of the shared fantasy, out of paradise, out of the Garden of Eden, they resent, hate, detest the narcissist. They want him dead.

So the shared fantasy is highly addictive. It generates stalking behaviors and virulent hatred and the wish to destroy the frustrating object.

The narcissist, these women mobilize and attempt literally to ruin the narcissist, get him, you know, punish him somehow.

But once these women cheat at the narcissist's behest, if he succeeds to force them to cheat, they are a disadvantage.

Whenever they even contemplate approaching the narcissist, he can point to the cheating. He can emotionally blackmail them. He can silence their vocal complaints. He can get rid of them for good. He can say, it's all your fault. You cheated. You shouldn't have. Why did you do that?

Now it's all over. Now it's a point of no return. Now I owe you nothing. And the intimate, the former intimate partner accepts it because cheating is wrong. Nevermind the circumstances. Cheating is always wrong. End of story. Period.

And another end of story. There's no justification for cheating. None whatsoever.

So once you have cheated, once you've cheated, you're morally compromised. You're not in the position to make demands. You're not in the position to require the fulfillment of promises, however broken they may be. You are not, you cannot complain.

So the cheating puts a Chinese wall, a firewall between the narcissist and his former partners, protects him. It's a defense.

So this is not about masochism. It is just the effective dissolution of the shared fantasy.

To effectively dissolve the shared fantasy, you need to force your intimate partner to cheat.

And this requires the endurance of a narcissistic injury or narcissistic mortification because everyone perceives you as a cuckold.

The effective dissolution of the shared fantasy requires narcissistic injury or mortification by posing as a cuckolded partner in full view of everyone.

That's the cost of dissolving the shared fantasy permanently and irreversibly.

It's like the narcissist is faced with two unpalatable choices.

Break up with your intimate partner the way normal people do.

You can do that, but because the partner has been enmeshed in a shared fantasy, she's not likely to take to it kindly. She's likely to become a stalker, a hater and an underminer of the narcissist's life for years to come.

So that's one option.

Not very appetizing, we must admit.

The other option, push her to cheat, force her to cheat, engineer the situations which will be irresistible to her. She will fall into temptation.

And then once she has succumbed, once she has cheated, you can dissolve the shared fantasy with impunity and safety because she will have no claim on you or on the discarded fantasy and dream. She has wronged you as a narcissist.

And so the narcissist can say to himself, "She misbehaved. It's all her fault." And she says to herself, "I misbehaved. It's all my fault. They're on the same page. Way to go."

It's not about masochism. It's not about narcissism.

It's simply the only way open to the narcissist to dissolve a shared fantasy.

In the long run, this posture benefits the narcissist because he retains the high moral ground.

He can pose as a victim. Even as he devalues and discards his partners callously and cruelly, he can still point to the cheating incident and say, "Yeah, I may have been cruel. Yeah, I may have been ruthless. Yeah, I may have been callous. Yeah, I may have been abusive."

But she had it coming. She deserved it. She cheated on me.

And you know what? 90% of people will nod their heads in assent. They will agree. Cheaters deserve the worst.

So the short-term cost of narcissistic injury and even life-threatening narcissistic mortification, the short-term cost is way outweighed by the long-term benefits of a victimhood narrative.

Now I promised you that I will apply it to other areas of life of the narcissist.

I chose an example of cheating, the example of cheating, as a form of betrayal.

But everything I've just said applies to other forms of betrayal.

The narcissist uses a variant of this strategy in all intimate settings, for example, in friendships. Or interpersonal relations, for example, with colleagues or collaborators.

Once the narcissist deems someone undesirable, for example, the narcissist thinks that he has been mistreated somehow. Or the narcissist thinks that the usefulness of someone is over, has become a burden. Once the narcissist decides that someone is undesirable, the narcissist entraps them.

He creates a trap. He introduces irresistible temptation.

In Hebrew we say, "You shall not put an obstacle ahead of a blind man."

B'fnei iver lotasim michol.

So this is what the narcissist does. He spots the vulnerability of the person he wants to get rid of and then he interposes, he presents an irresistible temptation. He entraps the person.

And so then the person fails, having succumbed to the temptation, and the narcissist can say, "You know, you see what is done? You see what is done? No way. I'm in the right. I'm on the high moral ground. I was the victim."

So the narcissist applies this strategy in all his relationships. He engineers situations which set people up for failure, people he wants to get rid of, he sets them up for failure, and then they fail inevitably because he knows exactly which buttons to push. They fail inevitably.

And the guilt, the history, he causes people to betray him ostentatiously in full view so that they have no refuge or sanctuary.

They cannot even explain themselves. They simply acted wrongly.

What can they say?

"I didn't have free will. I was hypnotized. I was in a trance.

The narcissist is a puppet master and I'm his puppet."

The misbehavior is spectacular. It's conspicuous. It's ostentatious.

There's nothing that can be said in the defense of such misconduct.

So the narcissist engineers situations to get rid of people by pushing them to behave in immoral ways against the rules of society, against the morals of society.

He pushes them to become antisocial. He pushes them to ignore codes like you should not poach the mate of your friend. He pushes them to steal. He pushes them to do things which are egodystonic, cause them a lot of distress afterwards, a lot of shame and a lot of guilt, cause them to doubt themselves.

And then he can point at their behavior. That's the reason I broke up with her. She cheated on me. That's the reason I broke up with him. He poached my girlfriend.

Yeah, but who made it happen and for which purpose?

The narcissist accomplishes all this by playing on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of people he wants to get rid of.

And then he gets mortified or narcissistically injured. He becomes morally indignant and righteous because he feels that he had been compelled to get rid of.

There's always a good reason to get rid of him. But he feels that he had been compelled. It wasn't his choice.

And the narcissistic injury and the pain of mortification and the life-threatening suicidality, they're all an inevitable cost of doing business. It's the only way the narcissist can get rid of people in his life because he unmeasures everyone in a shared fantasy, even in business, even in friendships, even in marriages, even with girlfriends, even on dates.

The narcissist creates impromptu shared fantasy light.

And so the only way to exit the shared fantasy is if the other guy or the other girl misbehave.

If they do something so horrible that they have no claim on the narcissist anymore, they can't ask to return to the shared fantasy. The gates of Eden have closed and there is an angel with the turning sword of fire, the fire of entrapment, the fire of entraining, the fire of brainwashing.

People often describe these experiences as having lost their minds, as having been zombified, as having been in a state of trance, as having dissociated massively.

Because the narcissist enters their minds and makes them do things which defy their own beliefs about themselves.

Thank you for listening. I hope I haven't untrained you too much.