In the wake of a relationship with a narcissist, you keep asking yourself, does he remember me at all? Does he remember us? And how does he recall the life we've had together?
The common experiences.
How does a narcissist experience memory?
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever written on narcissistic abuse. I'm also a professor of clinical psychology.
Anyone who has been a frequent visitor to my channel, in other words, any masochist, knows that narcissists suffer from dissociation.
They have dissociative memory gaps. They do not possess a continuous memory.
And because they have these black holes strewn across the galaxy of their episodic life autobiographical experiences, they are unable to maintain a core identity.
Identity is just another word for memory, the memory of yourself, the memory of the continuous I. And in many respects, identity is just a synonym of the self, or what used to be called the ego.
So, if your memory is short, if you are unable to recall things, especially in the long term, then it will be very difficult for you to develop a cohesive, coherent narrative of who you are.
And this is a process which is pathological. It's a problem with the integration and synthesis of one's experience.
It's not only a defense. Freud and others, Jeannes, others suggested that dissociation is a defense against unacceptable content.
Yes, it is. But the outcome is a deficit in the ability to put together things in a way which would make sense of one's life and imbue it with meaning.
And you, as the narcissist's former intimate partner, former best friend, former anything, you fit right into this maelstrom, into this vertigo vortex. You fit right into this chaotic sin.
And this is the narcissist's mind. A whirl, a kaleidoscope. It's never static, or it never settles down. The dynamics have taken over. The narcissists has a dynamic instead of a mind.
And so it's very, very difficult for the narcissist to revisit any territory of his or her previous life.
We all generate memories on the fly. Memories are not like books in the library or folders in some archive. Memories are not like files in a computer. You don't access them and they remain unchanged.
There's no immutability of memory.
Memory is mutable. Memory constantly reshapes itself, reforms and disintegrates, and then reforms again.
These constant processes of reconstruction are ad hoc and they often yield memories which are incompatible with each other regarding the same event or the same point in time. And this is totally healthy. This is how all people remember.
In the narcissists, the situation is exacerbated.
The situation is egregious because the narcissist is unable to get hold of the fragments and the shards that ought to be put together in a jigsaw puzzle that would then be experienced counterfactually as memory.
Whereas healthy people create memories as they go and then store them in long-term memory in the hippocampus and then retrieve them somehow, although molested, although altered, although transformed, they are still retrieved in a recognizable form. The narcissist doesn't have any of this, any element in this system.
So the narcissist has to confabulate, the narcissist has to create ersatz, fake, wannabe, pseudo memories which he then convinces himself are real and have actually happened and occurred.
And you are no exception.
You're just a piece in the puzzle. You're just a figment of the paracosm, of the alternative reality, which are narcissists inhabits. You are just a character or a protagonist in a work of fiction which is in progress and constantly unfolding and unfurling.
You have no separate, independent, autonomous, objective existence. You never had.
Ab initio, from the very beginning, you've been converted into an internal object, and you have spent your life with a narcissist as an internal object.
Confabulations and ego congruent delusions pass for memory with the narcissist.
Whereas other people have memories, narcissists have confabulations which they then mis-experience as memories, whereas other people have narratives and beliefs about themselves, and self-awareness regarding their own strengths and weaknesses and limitations and so on, the narcissist has ego-congruent delusions, delusions which make him feel good, make him feel egosyntonic, delusions which are founded on a distortion of reality, cognitive distortions, such as grandiosity.
In this kind of scene, in this kind of landscape, your existence, your prior existence in the analysis is life, the relationship you've had, the things you've done together, you've witnessed, things you've shared, all of these evaporate, evaporate in the final stages of the shared fantasy, where you have been converted into a persecutory object, an enemy.
Let's retrace, take a step back.
When the narcissist thinks about you from time to time, and it's very rare, much more rare than you care to admit, it's painful to admit, it's painful to realize how rarely you come to the narcissist's mind, how rarely you emerge in the narcissist's consciousness.
The minute you have left the shared fantasy, willy or nilly, the minute you've been expelled from the Garden of Eden, discarded, the minute you have left the narcissist and abandoned him, at that minute you are no more.
You're erased, like a file in a computer. You're still there, you know, when you delete files in a computer, they're still there.
But there's no way to access you. The address that points in your direction is gone and you have become a latent trace, an imprint, a vacated internal object, cathected, relegated to the recycle bin, no longer active in any meaningful psychodynamic way.
And so the narcissist, when he moves on from one person to another in an intimate relationship for example, in a friendship, another workplace, another setting.
What he does, he reframes an overarching, self-enhancing narrative.
And this narrative, this new narrative, new shared fantasy, has two parts, stands on two pillars.
Part of the narrative accounts for the past, and part of the narrative accounts for the present and future fantasy.
So part of the narrative would serve to reframe the past, justify the narcissist's behaviors in the past, account for the narcissist's failures in the past, sustained the narcissist's grandiosity in the past.
That part of the narrative would be past oriented, looking backward.
And there, there you are embedded in that part of the new shared fantasy as a kind of relic, an ancient Egyptian mummy, memento in the best of cases, a placeholder, a deactivated icon or avatar.
The narcissist clicks on you, nothing opens on the screen.
So, you are part of the self-enhancing, self-justifying narrative of the narcissist regarding his or past.
You belong to the past. You are like a part of some archaeological dig or excavation. You're embedded in a layer trapped there, never to emerge.
And then the other part of the narrative, the new shared fantasy, is to do with someone else and with the future with that someone else and with the idealization of that other person.
You are of course a persecutory object, your enemy, you're defanged and deactivated and disabled and buried deep until such time as the narcissist needs to resurrect you and re-idealize you in an attempted hoover.
Why would the narcissist hoover? Because you're there. Even though you're rendered inanimate and inert, you're still there and that bothers the narcissist. That is a source of anxiety.
But coming back to the point when the narcissists do recall you when something flashes like a flash in the pan, something flashes across a narcissist's imaginary screen, how does a narcissist perceive you? How does he experience you? Is there an emotional reaction?
Narcissists regard the past and you included in two ways.
Dark retrospection and rosy retrospection.
Dark retrospection and nostalgia.
Dark retrospection and dark nostalgia.
Dark retrospection and dark nostalgia allow for the conversion of the idealized internal object, you, into a persecutory one.
So the narcissist would tend, when he does remember you, which is again extremely rare, he would tend to demonize you. He would tend to exaggerate your bad qualities, devalue you ostentatiously, publicly, vociferously, especially to the new participant in the new shared fantasy.
So you would become a receptacle of everything that has ever gone wrong. You would become an embodiment and an emblem of the narcissist's failure to consummate the shared fantasy via an act of separation in successful individuation.
It was all your fault. It was all your fault.
So this is dark retrospection, which emphasizes the negativity to the exclusion of anything positive that you may have had or that you may have been.
And then there is rosy retrospection.
Rosy retrospection supplants, replaces dark retrospection in preparation for hoovering. Rosy retrospection prepares the ground for hoovering. It is the beginning of re-idealization.
So here is a cycle. The narcissist idealizes you, he then devalues you, he then discards you one way or another, he then converts you into a persecutory object, an enemy, when he does remember you it is via dark retrospection and dark nostalgia and you become the reason for everything bad that has ever happened to the narcissist.
And then at some point, because of dynamics that I've described in the shared fantasy list, especially the videos dealing with hoovering, and then at some point the narcissist transitions from dark retrospection to rosy retrospection and normal, regular nostalgia, where he remembers only the positive things you've had together, only your positive qualities, only how you made him laugh and how you made him love and how you made him feel grand and elevated, and how you soothed him, how you comforted him, or he took care of him, etc.
This is rosy retrospection. Nothing negative is allowed to intrude on this counterfactual picture.
And that sets the ground for re-idealizing you and then hoovering you from dark retrospection to rosy retrospection.
You're never remembered as you truly are and many of the things the narcissist claims to remember have never happened. They are confabulations.
The narcissist gaslights himself.
And many of the traits and qualities that he attributes to you are completely untrue and unrealistic, even the positive ones. And of course, the negative ones.
So it's not about you. You have nothing to do with any of this.
These are internal dynamics.
And these internal dynamics use you, not you. They use your representation in the narcissist's mind.
These dynamics leverage your representation in the narcissist's mind in order to accomplish highly defined psychological and psychodynamic goals.
It's an inexorable process. It unfolds and unfurls autonomously.
Even after you die, or if you were to die, these dynamics would still happen, would still recur.
The very fact that you're alive is besides the point actually.
And so the answer to your question, does the narcissist remember me?
Rarely, yes, initially, immediately after the discard, via dark retrospection, and then much, much later, via rosy retrospection when he's about to idealize, re-idealize, and hoover you.
What does he remember?
Not you. Not you, but your internal object.
The representation that he has created of you, which has nothing to do typically with you or with reality.
He is attached to that, never to you.
And then does he remember anything of your common experiences, life together, laughs you have shared, plays you have watched, movies, anything?
Nothing. Nothing.
A narcissist is solipsistic. Exists in a bubble, a universe, a bubble universe, all by himself. You are a kind of reflection on the surface of the bubble.
And so he doesn't remember what has happened to you or to himself because he has no self.
Narcissus have almost zero episodic memory. In other words, autobiographical memory is severely impaired.
And you're part of the narcissist's autobiography. You're an episode.
And so definitely the narcissist has no recollection of you.
Narcissus often forget even the faces of their former intimate partners. Never mind how long the time they've spent with them. Never mind what kind of experiences they've gone through with the partner.
They would tend to erase all the irrelevant information about the partner which is essentially everything.
No, you're not a part of the narcissist memory because he has none.