When we were all much younger and much more handsome, Mayor Ed, I released a video titled Abandon the Narcissist in Her Child Before It Kills You, Metaphorically Speaking, of course.
And this inevitably led to a hailstorm of misunderstandings and questions and queries and hand-wringing and tears and grief and mourning, and I will not go further into other manifestations.
Today, I will do my best to clarify all this by inviting you into the narcissist's mind.
How does the narcissist's inner child see you?
Not how you see the narcissists, not how you interact with the inner child of the narcissists, but how does the narcissist's inner child see you within the shared fantasy and in other settings through the narcissists' eyes and gaze.
Think of a captive in a prison, gazing at the world from behind the bars and trying to make sense of what it beholds.
This is the topic of today's video.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of clinical psychology.
Let's clarify two things.
Two, because I'm Jewish, and everything Jewish is divided in two, in two, and sometimes in three. It's your lucky day, it's only two.
Number one, the narcissist inner child is not the narcissist's true self.
Not. Don't make this mistake. It's very common to believe that the access you have been granted by the narcissist to his childlike features is actually the pathway into the narcissist's true essence, into his true self.
Well, there's no such thing as a true self. The narcissist has sacrificed the true self as a child and opted to become one with the false self by strangulating and essentially assassinating the true self.
There is a remnant there, a corpse. The true self is ossified, fossilized, deactivated, disabled, dead for all intents and purposes, psychodynamically inactive.
You are not able to get in touch with the true self because the true self cannot reach out to you. It has no capacity to reactivate itself, reboot, if you wish, revive and resuscitate.
You're never in touch with the true self. Don't kid yourself.
You keep telling yourselves all kinds of stories, trying to convince yourself that there is some humanity in the narcissist.
His eyes, his smile, his curiosity, his hobbies, his, I don't know what, his displays of ostentatious compassion from time to time.
Forget all this. This is a simulacrum. It's a staged show, it's a movie. You are never ever in touch with the true self because the false self is in the way. It firewalls the narcissist. It encases the narcissist, encapsulates and isolates a narcissist from any human touch or human contact.
Number one.
Number two, the inner child of the narcissist is not really a child.
I repeat this, the inner child of a narcissist is not a full-fledged child. It's not a kind of immature personality in there. It's not the small person inside the television set. There's no such thing.
The inner child of the narcissist is an amalgam, a compilation of highly specific features, dimensions and aspects of childlike, infantile, regressive behaviors and traits.
So these are broken aspects, kaleidoscopic charge of a childlike emanation or apparition.
It's not real, it's a simulation, it's an imitation, it's a kind of echoing memory of what the true self used to be.
Essentially, the narcissist inner child is a conjunction of two needs. It's a needy entity.
The first need, I must find a new mother.
And the second need, I must separate from this new mother, become an individual and grow up into being an adult.
You put these two together and you get the narcissist's inner child and there's nothing more to it. Absolutely nothing more to it.
Anything that you see outwardly, behaviorally, this is make-belief. This is manipulative, Machiavellian. Some of it is even antisocial.
It's an attempt to capture you, an attempt to lure you in, it's a bait.
The narcissist displays outwardly childlike, even infantile behaviors. He says stupid childish things in a stupid childish voice. He smiles the way a child would smile. His eyes sparkle. He even walks like a child.
And this pulls at your heartstrings. You can't resist this. The maternal instinct is common to both women and men. We are protective of babies regardless of our genitalia.
And so the narcissist triggers in us this need to save, to rescue, to protect, to engulf, to hug, to embrace, to comfort, to soothe, to be there for this simulated child.
But make no mistake about it. It's smoke and mirrors. It's light of hand. It's a magician's performance.
There's no inner child there. Just an entity, hell bent and driven and goal oriented. An entity that needs to acquire you, to capture you, to assimilate you, to consume you, and to use you as a maternal substitute, and then to get rid of you in the process of becoming.
Do you know these dolls? There are these dolls that you flip them over and they say, I love mommy, I love mommy, I love mommy. This is the narcissist's inner child. Creepy and eerie, isn't it?
Okay, and today I'm going to invite you to look at yourself through the eyes of this broken doll inside the narcissists, through the eyes of this inner child and trust you me it's a harrowing experience.
Now, the narcissist activates his inner child as a lure, as a bait, as a seduction, as a temptation in the first phase of the shared fantasy, colloquially known as love bombing.
In this stage, he attempts to convert you and transition you into a state of dependency.
Love bombing is a way to idealize you and then make you fall in love with your own idealized image through the narcissist's gaze.
So in a shared fantasy, you are first idealized, but you are idealized as a maternal figure.
And again, regardless of gender, first of all, half of all narcissists are women. So regardless of gender, you're a maternal figure. Even if the narcissist is a man and he has a male friend, the male friend is a maternal figure, okay? Fulfills maternal functions.
So in the idealization phase of the shared fantasy, again, colloquially known as love bombing, you become a maternal figure, you become a substitute, a surrogate mother.
And because you are being idealized, you are cast as a good mother.
Now in clinical terms, in object relations theory, this is known as the good breast. Pornographic, isn't it?
So, you are cast as a good mother.
What is this good mother? How does the narcissist's inner child see you when he looks at you, when he contemplates you, when he observes you, when he spies on you, when he surveys you, when he is following, when he follows you, everywhere you go? How does he see you actually in this initial stage?
He sees you as perfect, perfect, ideal. Most importantly, he sees you as all good. You can do no wrong. You're infallible.
Because you're perfect, because you're essentially godlike, you are the embodiment and very reification of goodness. You're the exact opposite of evil and wickedness and malevolence.
You're a secure base. You're safe. You're trustworthy. you're reliable, you're resilient, you're responsive.
The narcissist feeds off your strength, relies on your presence.
The narcissist creates or actually recreates the early childhood experience of a mother figure.
Initially, up to age 36 months, we regard our parents, especially mother, as godlike. Godlike, perfect, immaculate, impeccable, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and all good, devoid of any evil or bad aspect.
This is a primitive defense mechanism known as splitting.
So the narcissist's inner child splits you the way a real child would split his mother at around age 2.
So he splits you and you become this figure that imbues the narcissist with a sense of safety, security, predictability, determinacy. You soothe the narcissist with your very existence. You comfort him with your speech and your interactions. You are anxiolytic. You become a kind of medicine, external medicine. You regulate the narcissist's moods and emotions from the outside, but you also reduce the narcissist's anxiety.
Children are anxious, and the narcissistic's inner child is no exception. The narcissistic inner child has the mental or psychological or emotional age of something like two to three years old, four at the outset, four years old.
And because of that the narcissist regards the world as potentially dangerous, risky, hostile, and he needs you by his side as a maternal figure, as a mother substitute. He needs you by his side to calm him down, to bring him back to a state of functioning. This is known in psychology as a secure base.
So the narcissist, because he's a child, or because the inner child is the part of the narcissist that interacts with you, the narcissist expects you to love him unconditionally. He expects you to forgive him, never mind what he does. He expects you to accept him exactly as he is. He expects you to be authentic, not to fake, not to lie, not to pretend. He expects you to reward him.
The narcissist's inner child keeps testing you all the time. He keeps, for example, abusing you verbally and otherwise. He keeps misbehaving. He keeps throwing temper tantrums and rage attacks. And all this time, the inner child is observing you. Will she love me despite everything? Would she go away and abandon me or would she stay? Is her presence guaranteed never mind and no matter how I misbehave?
So the narcissist's narcissistic abuse in the first stage of the shared fantasy is a test, a kind of loyalty test. Will you remain faithful to the narcissist? Will you treat the narcissist as your own child? You don't abandon a child. Never mind how the child misbehaves. You never abandon a child.
Ultimately, the inner child graduates, so to speak. He comes to trust you. He comes to believe you. He comes to regard you as a forgiving figure. He comes to rely on your all-accepting embrace and warmth.
And at that stage, the narcissists transitions as an inner child. The narcissists transitions to a symbiotic phase, to merger and fusion.
The inner child of the narcissist attempts to become one with your inner child, attempts to merge with you, back to the womb, back to the womb, back to the matrix, create a single organism with two heads, a power couple if you wish.
The narcissist initiates joint projects, joint activities, joint hobbies, but not in order to share something with you, but in order to subjugate you, to absorb you, to consume you, and to become one with you, to become one with you in a way that is not the same as the codependence, distinguished from the borderlines.
The codependence and the borderline are preoccupied with control. They want to control you from the bottom. By becoming needy and clingy, they attempt to control you.
The narcissist doesn't always become needy or clingy, although these are definitely options. If the narcissist is also a co-dependent or if the narcissist is also a borderline, he is bound and very likely to become needy, to cling to you, to take over your time and resources, to convert you into a service provider.
But if the narcissist is purely a narcissist or if a narcissist is a psychopathic narcissist he would try to resonate with you. He would try to regress you into an infantile state so you would become simultaneously a mother his mother and his child at some points he would be your mother, at other points you would be his mother, at all times you would both be children, like two babes in a dark wood, in a dark forest. And so it's a kind of fairy tale existence. And this is the essence of the shared fantasy. The two of us against the world. The we against the, it's a cult. And within this cult, your inner child and the narcissist broken, partial, part object, partial inner child, become one.
He actually appropriates and annexes the aspects of your inner child that are missing in his inner child. He augments his inner child, he enhances his inner child, he renders his inner child complete and whole by absconding with aspects and elements and dimensions of your inner child. This is the vampire-like quality of narcissus, the vampirism. And so this is the idealization stage. The narcissus inner child becomes stronger and stronger, more and more whole, more and and more complete as you become weaker emaciated as you become dilapidated and depleted and weak and unhealthy narcissists thrives and flourishes.
This is evident in the relationship.
And this dynamic causes the narcissus inner child to wish to separate from you and become an individual and later on an adult, a process that I call adultification the narcissists compelled by the dynamics of the shared fantasy which are compulsive dynamics narcissus is compelled to transition from ideal idealization to devaluation he now needs now that he is strong enough, now that he has mature, now that the inner child of the narcissist has become almost full-fledged and strong and resilient, the narcissist feels safe enough to transition to the separation individuation phase. He now needs to get rid of you as a maternal figure, not to get rid of you as an intimate partner because the narcissist never sees you as an intimate partner. He needs to get rid of you as the internal object in his mind that represents the substitute mother.
He needs to get rid of his mother through you. You are just a proxy for his mother. You are just a surrogate mother. You are just a substitute mother.
So he needs to get rid of you because he is incapable of becoming an individual or growing up or maturing or becoming an adult as long as his internal mother is active. Remember that narcissism, pathological narcissism, is the outcome of failed separation individuation in early childhood.
The narcissist needs to reenact this stage, this process. The narcissist needs to reenact this stage, this process. The narcissist needs to replay old childhood conflicts in order to resolve them differently, successfully. So you are there as an actress. You play his mother. And he separates from you because he can no longer separate from his original mother it's too late he's much older so he separates from you and he attempts to become an adult individual by essentially dumping you but in order to you, he needs to devalue you. And while the idealization involves the inner child in the narcissist, the devaluation also involves the inner child. It is the inner child who devalues you. Now you become a bad mommy, a dead mother, or in clinical terms, the dead, the bed breast. You used to be the all good mother, the perfect mother, the impeccable mother, the blemishless mother, the blameless mother, and now you become the absolute exact opposite of a secretary object, an enemy, the bad mummy, the bad breast. Now you are imperfect, as far as the narcissists in a child, you look imperfect. All bad, as I said, the secretary. You're unsafe. You are untrustworthy. You're unreliable. And above all, you're fragile. You're weak. You're vulnerable. You're no longer the all powerful, infallible mother, but you have failed.
The narcissist convinces himself that you have failed in your role as a maternal figure, exactly the way his original mother has failed.
It's a replay, it's a reenactment, it's a cosplay, you know.
So now, you bear the blame for everything his mother of origin, his biological mother has done to him.
Now that he replaced the conflict with his original mother, his original mother wouldn't let him separate. She breached his boundaries. She abused him and traumatized him in a variety of ways.
And now you're going to pay the price for this.
He's going to cast you in the role of the bad mother, the dead mother, the dysfunctional mother, the selfish mother, the instrumental mother, the parentifying mother, the pedestalizing mother, the mother wouldn't let go. The mother wouldn't allow him to become.
Since he has no access to his original mother, even if she's alive, it's too late. He now has access to you and as a maternal figure you will bear the brunt and the thrust of this rejection by the inner child of the narcissist.
The narcissist inner child says, you're a bad mommy. You're a bad mommy and I don't want to be with you anymore. I don't want to see you anymore. I'm going away and I'm going to grow up and they're going to be strong and I'm not going to need you anymore, ever.
You're manipulative, says the inner child, you're transactional, you're fake, you never loved me.
He denies. He denies everything that has happened and he projects onto you his denial he says to you you are the one who is denying me you are the one who is rejecting me you are the one who is frustrating me you are the one who's never loved me you are the one, all you wanted is what I gave you. You were transactional. You were manipulative, you were a gold diger, whatever.
So this is the narcissist's way, childish way, an infantile way, of converting you from a good mother to a bad mother, thus allowing the narcissist to discard you, to get rid of you, and now that he's all alone, he is no longer a child, and he can become an adult.
At least that's a story he's telling himself.
In reality, this never works.
You are perceived by the inner child of the narcissists to have become a traitor. You've betrayed him. There's betrayal trauma involved.
The narcissists' inner child is in a constant state of grief. It's a prolonged grief disorder. Grief and shame, mourning and disgrace.
If you put them together, this is the narcissistic inner child. It's the reservoir of life-threatening shame and the grief over never having become, the grief over the lost potential, the unrealized opportunities, the inability to separate and become an individual.
There's grief, there's mourning. The narcissist mourns what he could have been and would never be and he feels ashamed for his own weakness and his own failure at separating individuating but of course he's projecting all this so you are the traitor you are envious of him you're passive aggressive aggressive, you're sabotaging. You hate him. In reality, you hate him.
And so the narcissist's inner child, because it's not a real child, because it's essentially goal-oriented, it's a device, it's a stratagem, it's an algorithm, because it's very robotic and Android-like, it's able to transition swiftly and seamlessly from one view of you to the other view of you, because it's a program, it's a code, it's a software.
And this software has two phases, two stages, it's binary.
And it is, the instructions in the program are to transition from idealization to devaluation in order to accomplish the goal of separation individuation.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
And it's all mediated via the inner child.
And this is the horrible pain of being with the narcissists, because you feel that you have been rejected and discarded by an innocent child.
You feel that you have done something wrong, that it's your fault, that you are to blame, that something went awry, that you misbehaved and you feel guilty and you feel ashamed and you torture yourself, you self-flagellate, you keep thinking, how could I behave differently? What could I have done differently?
You don't understand because your experience with a narcissist has been an experience with a child.
You bonded with the narcissist as his mother.
So now that the narcissist rejects you, hates you, is angry at you, denies you, now that he sees you as all bad, it is as if a child is doing this to you.
And a child is innocent, isn't it? A child is innocent and pure. A child never fakes, never pretends.
And so you are led to believe that it's all your fault, that you could have prevented all this from happening.
And this is the legacy of our relationship with the narcissists. This is the legacy and the outcome of narcissistic abuse.
This inner torment, this inner torment, this inner torture, this inner tumult, this inability to extricate yourself from the shared fantasy.
As you feel that maybe if I do things differently, maybe if I just say this, maybe if I could fix things.
Because it's a child and he used to love me. He used to love me. He used to look at me with his innocent eyes and trust me. He used to rely on me.
And I let him, let this child down. I disappointed this child. I got it wrong.
Of course, this is nonsense. This is counterfactual. This is not true. It's not a child. It's a machine. It's an algorithm. It's a program.
You've been interacting with a robot. And this robot is programmed to make you feel this way because this program, this robot, this so-called inner child, this broken doll is programmed to keep a hold on you for the future in case you may be needed to hover you back.
It's an exceedingly creepy scenario. It's reminiscent of the worst conceivable horror movies.
You know, these ventriloquists with their dolls, speaking, talking dolls.
But it's true this is the internal reality, this is the inner landscape and wasteland of the narcissist.
Within this wasteland there are shards and fragments of broken, assassinated children, self-animated, mysteriously, robotically, in search of completion, in search of healing, in search of recovery that would never come.
And you are nothing but the collateral damage in this civil war inside the narcissist.