Here's another comment for the ages.
Seriously, I mean it. It goes.
After watching many of your videos, I can't understand one thing.
How can a narcissist imitate so perfectly the mother's gaze and unconditional love, if the narcissist has never experienced it himself.
How does the narcissist know so precisely what the loving eyes of a mother look like in order to imitate them to such a degree that no one else can do?
Thank you.
Well, there are many assumptions in these questions, which are simply wrong. But the crux of it is correct.
The narcissists cannot imitate unconditional love or the mother's gaze because he doesn't know how. And he doesn't know how because he doesn't have first-hand experience of these things.
That is not to say that narcissists are incapable of imitation, actually I have a whole video dedicated to the mimicry of the narcissists.
For example, narcissists are able to imitate empathy, very convincingly, compassion, they're great actors in some respects.
But let's go back to the question.
The narcissist idealizes the partner. That much is true.
The narcissist attributes to the partner, qualities, traits, behaviors, cognitions, effects, dimensions of personality, which, in truth, she does not possess, is very far from.
That's the idealized image of the partner.
And then he allows the partner to see herself, to see the idealized version of herself through his gaze. I call it the hall of mirror effect or effects.
The narcissist, intimate partner, best friend, whatever. The person the narcissist has idealized is granted access to the idealization, to this image of perfection that the narcissist creates.
And this access is addictive, it's intoxicating.
The partner, in the example of a romantic relationship or an intimate relationship, in a shared fantasy, the partner is first love-bombed, idealized.
The narcissist creates a narrative version of the partner, which is perfect, amazing, unprecedented, fascinating, drop-dead gorgeous, super hyper-intelligent, and so on so forth.
And then he allows the partner to see herself through his eyes as such.
But this creates a kind of splitting, kind of dichotomy, because the partner sees herself through the narcissist's gaze or through the narcissist's eyes from outside herself.
In other words, it's as if there's the real partner, what is known as the external object, and then there is the internal object which is idealized, which represents the partner in the narcissist's mind, and to which the external object, the partner, is granted access via the narcissist gaze and eyes.
Now we have a name for this in psychology, clinical psychology, and it's known as depersonalization.
Depersonalization is when you observe yourself from outside your body, when you see yourself in a situation with people, and you feel that you're not there. You feel that you're just watching the events unfold. You're just an observer. Not always an uninterested observer, but always an observer.
So what the narcissist does to you in the idealization, love bombing phase, he causes you to distance yourself from yourself. He estranges you from yourself. He removes you from yourself.
He creates two versions of you. It's like he induces in you multiple personality disorder or more precisely dissociation. It's a dissociative effect.
And then there's you, the old you, the you are used to, the you you grew up with, the you have become, and there's the new you, the idealized, amazing, glowing version in the narcissist's mind, to which the old you is granted access.
So the old you witnesses the new you. The old you interacts with the new you. The old you identifies with the new you.
And finally, this is cemented. There are two versions of you now. You are totally dissociated and depersonalized.
And this, of course, leads to cognitive distortions. You misinterpret the experience as unconditional love emanating from an external source from the narcissists.
It's not the case. When you observe yourself through the narcissist's gaze, when you view yourself, when you view yourself when you hold yourself through the narcissist's eyes when you behold yourself through the narcissist's process of idealization you feel as if someone from the outside loves you. Someone from the outside is idealized.
You feel as if that ideal version of you is you and not you at the same time.
You are capable of loving or falling in love or getting infatuated with this idealized version. It's intoxicating and addictive, as I said. You want more of it all the time. You're floating on air.
But at the same time, you have a feeling that it's coming from outside. This unconditional love, this acceptance, this idealization, they're all coming from the outside, they emanate from an external source.
And then you ask yourself, who could this external source be? Surely it's not me. I'm here. It must be the narcissist.
In other words, it is you who loves yourself unconditionally. It is you who is providing the mother's gaze. You are mothering yourself.
You're the one who is mothering yourself. You're the one who is mothering yourself. You're the one who's mothering yourself.
It's not the narcissist. He doesn't do anything. He just grants you access to a simulation where you are a much better version of yourself.
And so now you are capable of loving yourself unconditionally because you're perfect being.
And you do, you love yourself unconditionally as a mother would do.
And so you become your own mother. You remother yourself, you re-parent yourself, you love yourself, you imbue yourself with a sense of perfection, and you endow or bestow upon yourself, a kind of love that is not conditioned on performance or on traits because you do not need to perform and your traits are perfect.
And so it's a very intricate and intriguing process the narcissist makes you fall in love with yourself the narcissist causes you to get infatuated with yourself.
But you perceive this, you experience this love and you experience this infatuation as coming from the outside.
And when you ask yourself, where is it coming from? The only possible question answer is it's coming from the narcissist. So you misattribute it to the narcissist.
The truth is you are mothering your, you're mothering the perfect version of yourself. You're mothering the ideal version of yourself through the narcissist gaze, through the narcissist's eyes.
He grants you access, but you attribute the mothering and the unconditional love to the narcissist. It's what is known as attribution error.
You misattribute it. It is not love it is not unconditional love it is self love it is not a mother's gaze it is self-mothering you're doing everything 100% of it you're the one who's falling in love with yourself. You're the one who's loving yourself unconditionally. You're the one who is mothering herself. It's you, you and you.
And yet, in desperate attempt to make sense of it all, you say it must be the narcissist.
Self-infatuation is mistaken for the narcissist love.
Because the dissociative depersonalization is intolerable, unbearable, and very, very threatening.
So you would tend to deny it. You would tend to say, there are not two versions of me so true that there are two versions of me there's me and there's the way the narcissist loves me now
this is an example of what I hold in an earlier video this week contagious snapshoting or infectious introjection the narcissist induces in his victims or her victims a conflation a confusion of external and internal
your unconditional love your experiencing the mothers gaze your experiencing, they're coming from you, they're internal, but you confuse them with external, you believe, you misperceive them as external.
You're saying these are not internal, this unconditional love is not self-love, self-infatuation, self-limerance, no way, it's coming from the outside. Where is it coming from?
From the narcissist.
And this maternal gaze, maternal gaze that holds me and cossets me and tempers me and loves me unconditionally and so on, this maternal gaze that holds me and cossets me and tempers me and loves me unconditionally and so this maternal gaze is not my own gaze I'm not mothering myself this is coming from the outside you're confusing internal with external and the only other person out there the only external human being out there is the narcissists, so you attribute everything to him or to her, a misattribution.
The victim reacts to the narcissistic's internal dynamics as if they were external and at the same time she reacts to her own internal dynamics as if they were external she confuses internal with external when the narcissist interacts with his internal objects she thinks he's interacted with her.
When the narcissist is undergoing an internal process, she thinks it's an external process directed at her.
And I have another video dedicated to it this week. In the description, you'll find the links
So there's a confusion between internal and external everything internal is experienced as external exactly like the narcissist the victim simply mistakes internal processes internal dynamics internal objects with external ones.
The way you would mistake a reflection in the mirror for a real person, for example, in a carnival.
And so this contagious snapshot angle, infectious introduction is in turn a private case of a much bigger class of phenomena.
The narcissist exports his internal dynamics and imposes them on his relationships.
The narcissists limitations, experiences, quirks, pathologies, they're all kind of exported, layered on the relationship and become the veneer of the facade of the relationship.
For example, the narcissist has never experienced separation as a child, so he does not allow his partner to separate there's no separation in the narcissist relationship he merges symbiotically with his partner he takes over his partner he renders her an internal object she no longer is allowed to have an external existence, let alone agency, independence, autonomy.
So here's an example of a narcissist's clinical feature, the lack of separation, that then becomes typical of the relationships that the not the interpersonal relationships of the narcissists and similarly everything in the relationship has to do with the internal dynamics of the narcissists, writ large, exported.
And this is known of course as hyper-reflexivity.
Someone wrote to me, I guess if the external object's impact is dissonant and threatening, and this threat is perceived as internal, that's very scary and hence the need to get rid of it.
No, exactly the opposite. You got it backwards.
There is a compulsion to get rid of the external and internal object.
Within the shared fantasy, there's a compulsion to get rid of the external object and also of the internal object that represents the external object.
This discard is a symbolic separation individuation.
The narcissists reenacts early childhood conflicts. He was unable to separate from his original mother and to individuate.
So now he's trying to separate from his substitute mother, the intimate partner, and become an individual.
And so what comes first is the dire and urgent need, the manic need, if you wish, to get rid of the partner.
It's compulsive. Narcissus is compelled to do it, willy-neilly.
And in order to make sense of it, the narcissist begins to cast the internal object, which he misperceives as external. He casts it as dissonant and threatening.
So it's not that the object is dissonant and threatening and then the analysis says, wow, I have to get rid of it.
Exactly the opposite.
The narcissist says, I have to get rid of the external object and the internal object that represents it.
But why am I doing this?
Probably because it's dissonant and threatening.
So you see, this paradigm of internal versus external, or the confusion or conflation of internal and external, has huge explanatory power in pathological narcissism, and especially in the interpersonal deficiencies and dysfunctional relationships of narcissists.
Pathological narcissism is a what used to be called the case of arrested development the child failed to develop a self.
Consequently, there are no functional boundaries. When you don't have a self, you don't know where you end and the world begins.
And so the narcissist segues, kind of dissolves into his or her environment and annexes it, appropriates it.
Then he's totally confused, what's internal, what's external, it's all one and the same.
And then he forces his partner to think the same way, to perceive the world the same way, and she gets confused between internal and external.
And this leads to all the complications that I've just described in this video.
Whatever happens inside the narcissist is misperceived by the partner as if it is happening externally.
And so inevitably, when the narcissist grants the partner access to the beloved, idealized, perfect object, she falls in love with it, but her internal dynamic is misattributed.
She says it's not internal, it's external, it's coming from the narcissist.
She sees her idealized object, the idealized object that represents her. She sees it as a motherhood. She develops maternal feelings towards this idealized object because babies are idealized objects, you know?
So the maternal instinct or maternal feelings are triggered. She becomes a mother. She mothers herself. She mothers this idealized object.
But because the narcissist had taught her to confuse internal and external, she says, this is not coming from inside me. This is not internal. This is not internal. This is coming from the outside. So it must be coming from the narcissist. He loves me unconditionally.
The narcissist confuses his internal dynamics with external, internal objects with external.
The victim becomes exactly like the narcissist. She confuses her internal dynamics with external dynamics and her internal objects with external objects.
And together, immured and immersed and embedded in a shared fantasy, both partners, the intimate partner and the narcissist, begin to lose touch with reality completely, not only because fantasy is the antithesis of reality, the opposite of reality, but even more importantly, because they get confused as to who they are in contradistinction to the rest of the world.
They don't feel that they are separate external entities with clear contours, demarcated boundaries. They don't feel this way. They feel as if they are dissolving or as if they are, you know, floating.
There's a famous painting by Salvador Dali, Galatea, where she dissolves into molecules. That's the feeling.
And whereas most victims enter the relationship with the narcissists relatively healthy, at least as far as these faculties, the ability to tell external from internal, under the influence of the narcissists and training other manipulative mechanisms and techniques, they gradually begin to resemble the narcissists more and more.
And they too lose touch with reality and begin to conflate and confuse what happens to them internally with what allegedly is happening externally.
That's why they attribute many internal dynamics to the narcissists in their lives.