I hope you are hungry for narcissism, tick bits, because I'm gonna provide you now with a buffet or a smorgasbord of narcissism issues.
This is an accumulation of questions that have been asked and these questions don't justify or warrant a whole entire video.
So what I'm going to do, I'm going to answer these questions, it's a kind of Q&A session.
Okay, Shoshanim, got it?
Okay, let's delve right in.
Someone asked me about the dual mothership principle and the narcissist sexuality.
How is the narcissist sex drive influenced by the fact that the narcissist regards his intimate partner as a maternal figure?
Well, as usual with narcissists, into diametrically opposed ways, the dual mothership principle can drive the narcissist to become hyper sexualized, extremely sexual or can drive the narcissist to abstain from sex, to refrain from having sexual relations with his intimate partner, to withhold and to avoid sex to become the equivalent of asexual.
Why is that?
To remind you, what is the dual mothership principle?
When the narcissist comes across in a potential intimate partner, the narcissist converts her in his mind into a maternal figure.
This applies of course to female narcissists as well.
Both male and female narcissists convert intimate partners into maternal figures.
So from that moment on, the narcissist is in a relationship with a mother figure.
The narcissist relates to the intimate partner as he would to a mother.
He expects unconditional love, caring, support, compassion, affection, etc, saucers and the narcissist tests the allegiance, the fealty, the loyalty of the intimate partner and whether she's a good enough mother.
In other words, would she love him no matter how badly and egregiously he behaves.
This is the dynamic in dual mothership.
Of course, the narcissist constructs the shared fantasy around a maternal figure in order to reenact separation, individuation, the process that had failed with his biological mother so that he can separate from the new mother that he had found and then become an individual.
Now all this has massive effects on the sexual relations between the narcissist and his intimate partner.
Most narcissists would be driven to celibacy, asexuality, sex withholding, because to have sex with your mother, that's incest.
The more the narcissist regards his intimate partner as his mother, the further along the shared fantasy he proceeds, the more she becomes this maternal figure, all containing, all holding, all engulfing, all loving, the more difficulties for the narcissist to conjure up sexual passion and desire and arousal because that's mummy out there. That's a mother and you don't have sex with your mother. That's the majority of narcissists.
A tiny minority of narcissists would find this, the fact that the intimate partner is a mother figure would find it sexually arousing.
These are narcissists who are into incest fantasies, incest aroused, or the thought of incest arouses them sexually.
So here we have two outcomes depending on which narcissist you ended up with in the lottery of life.
If the narcissist's incest inclined is sexually aroused by the thought or the imagining of incest, the imagery of incest, this kind of narcissist would become hypersexual in the shared fantasy with the new maternal figure, you.
The vast majority of narcissists, however, would reject you as a sexual object, would desexualize you, defeminize you, or demasculinize you, constrate you in a way so as to avoid sex with a parental figure which is incestuous and taboo.
Okay, that's the first question.
Second question had to do with emotional cheating versus physical or sexual infidelity. Which one is worse?
It's a question of value judgment, of course, and I will leave it myself to the narcissist.
It depends on the type of narcissist.
But generally speaking, a narcissist would react much worse to emotional cheating than to physical cheating.
The cerebral narcissist is not sexually invested, does not sexually affect his intimate partner because she's a mother figure. So he would not perceive her as a sex object. He would denude her, deny her her sexuality.
And this kind of narcissist wouldn't care if his intimate partner were to have sex with someone else.
This is a cerebral narcissist.
The somatic narcissist may even encourage infidelity as a kind of insurance policy. You are cheating. I am entitled to cheat as well. The partner's cheating would legitimize the somatic narcissist cheating in fidelity all around culminating usually in an open relationship or the lifestyle swinging.
So sexual infidelity in relationships with narcissists is usually a non-event. It can cause the narcissist, narcissistic injury. It can enrage him for a while. He can feel humiliated and shamed, especially if it's done in public and ostentatiously, if the cheating becomes well known or in your face and he has to witness it somehow.
But the sexual aspect is not the dominant one because as far as the narcissist is concerned, his intimate partner is not a sexual target. He either objectifies her sexually, he uses her body to masturbate with, and then she's meaningless as a human being. She's meaningless as a person. She's just a dildo or whatever.
Or he avoids her. He ignores her sexually altogether.
And in both cases, it doesn't matter much if she were to have sex with someone else.
Emotional cheating is not the same.
Narcissists react very badly to emotional cheating not initiated by them.
You remember the betrayal fantasy of the narcissist?
Narcissists encourage their intimate partners in certain situations.
For example, when the intimate partner triangulates, they encourage the intimate partner to have sex or even full-fledged relationships with other people. And again, especially if the partner indicates an interest in someone else or triangulates with someone else. It's a kind of see if I care attitude, can do whatever you want because I don't care about you. You don't matter to me. I'm indifferent.
It's a message of invulnerability and superiority and self-sufficiency and a grandiose message.
But the betrayal fantasy restores the narcissist's sense of control.
The narcissist anticipates the partner's infidelity and then he takes over the situation. He encourages it and encourages her to engage in infidelity and then he can tell himself, I made her do it. I control the whole thing. It was my doing. I made it happen.
This is within the betrayal fantasy. These are highly specific situations involving triangulation, involving expression of interest in another partner, involving the final phase of the shared fantasy when the narcissist needs to devalue his partner.
The betrayal fantasy, encouraging the partner to cheat. This is a limited instrument, a limited strategy.
Throughout the majority of the life of the shared fantasy, the narcissist would take it very badly if his partner were to cheat on him emotionally, if she were to fall in love with someone else, if she were to have intimacy with someone else.
The reason is of course, separation insecurity, abandonment, anxiety.
The narcissist is provoked and then becomes emotionally dysregulated. Clinically, he is reduced to a borderline state in many ways.
So this is the answer to the question.
Emotional cheating matters much more to the narcissist than sexual cheating.
Now someone asked me about reality therapy.
There is a video that I released recently about the reality principle and the ego, the function of the ego in reality testing.
Someone asked me, what about reality therapy?
Reality therapy is an approach in psychotherapy. It was developed by William Glasser in the 1960s. It is a very interesting approach because it focuses on what Glasser called the three R's, realism, responsibility, and right and wrong.
So Glasser suggested to not focus on symptoms, symptomatology, on mental illness, on labeling, on diagnosing. He suggested to focus instead on the here and now and on reality.
It was a precursor of mindfulness coupled with enhanced reality testing.
Reality therapy maintains that individuals, people suffer from a socially universal human condition.
There is no such thing in reality therapy. There is no such thing as mental illness. That is just the human condition.
The human condition is universal and we react to it to varying degrees of adaptation.
The unsuccessful attainment of basic needs causes disruptions. The person moves away from the norm, behaves in a non-normative way.
The more the person fails to attain life goals and definitely basic needs, basic needs including love and so on.
So reality therapy monitors behavioral responses to a generalized universal human condition that requires the individual to adapt behaviorally in order to extract efficaciously beneficial outcomes from the environment.
So, reality therapy ignores the client's past.
It is a problem solving therapy.
A series of procedures that focus on the actions of the client and the ability to imagine and then choose and then create a future which would be self-efficacious, agentic, independent, beneficial and desired by the client.
Clients seek to discover in reality therapy.
What do they really want?
Reality therapy helps you to zero in on your true passions and wishes and dreams.
What are the dreams and passions and wishes imposed on you by society, by your mother, by your father, by your family, by your friends and by generalized expectations and scripts such as sexual scripts?
What is it that you really want?
And then once you have zeroed in on it, once you have a list of your real desires and passions, the therapy shows you how to choose behaviors that are likely to lead you to accomplish and to actualize and realize and materialize these goals.
According to Glaser, the social component of psychological disorders is overlooked.
We rush to label the population as mentally ill, ignoring the fact that people are embedded in society or social structures and frameworks, that people are relational, that interpersonal interactions are what defines us.
And so Glaser attempted to shift the emphasis from the death psychology, the psychology of the inside, the psychology of our internal world to society and the way we function in it.
Social problems, he said, cause distress.
It's not a labeled sickness. It's simply the inability to satisfy one's psychological or other needs.
Reality therapy separates the client from the behavior, allows the client to choose behaviors from a repertory the same way you choose, I don't know, a movie to watch in accordance with goals that direct these choices of behavior.
That's a general introduction to reality therapy.
Some of you have asked me to talk about narcissism in adopted children and foster care, and I will dedicate a whole video to this.
This deserves a whole video.
And the last thing I want to discuss in this Smogasbord buffet video is interjects and our relationships with interjects.
You see, interjects are perceived even in healthy people as separate from us when we have an ego congruent relationship with them.
Wow, that's a mouthful. Let me try to explain.
There are two types of voices. There are voices inside our heads that we somehow came to believe represent us. So we assimilate these voices. We digest them. We subsume them.
And these voices become part and parcel of our identity, of who we are.
We come to believe, counterfactually, by the way, in most cases, we come to believe that these voices actually are internal voices. They represent us. It's a kind of dialogue between us and ourselves.
So these internal voices are fully assimilated, and we can't tell the difference between these internalized voices and our authentic voice, who we really are, the only voice that is we.
So this is one group of interjects.
These interjects are egointerjects.
These interjects are egosyntonic.
In other words, these interjects do not cause enough anxiety and distress.
They are in perfect harmony, symphony and synchronicity with a multiplicity of other voices and put together in a cluster or series of clusters.
They form our identity.
So when we listen to such a voice, to such an interject inside our head, we can't tell the difference. We can't say, "This voice is not me. This voice is talking to me, but it's not me." You can't do that.
The first group of interjects, when you hear the voice in your head, you say, "That's me. That's me talking to myself."
Then there's another group of interjects. And this other group of interjects is ego congruent.
I'm sorry. This kind of interjects are ego-dystonic.
They cause distress, discomfort.
You feel ill at ease, an uncanny reaction. You experience distress. You doubt yourself. You argue with yourself. You reject some of the messages of these interjects. You feel humiliated or ashamed, guilty, and so on.
Our conscience, the conscience, is a cluster of such interjects. Our conscience makes us feel uncomfortable, makes us feel guilty, makes us feel anxious.
So that's an example of a cluster of ego-incongruent interjects.
There are other interjects within this second group that really, really drive us to the point of insanity, that are really threatening, really self-defeating, really self-destructive. There are even interjects that take over, metastasize, and consume all the other interjects.
One perfect example is the false self, which is an extension of a fantasy defense within a virtual reality known as a paracosm. The false self takes over the individual who had created the false self.
The second type of interjects would usually generate pathologies. These interjects are pathogenic.
We relate to these interjects as though they were separate from us. We are estranged from these interjects. We are alienated.
So we don't identify with these interjects. We have internalized them. We have interjected them. We have incorporated them to some extent, but we don't identify with them.
We know that these voices are not us. They're somehow imported or implanted or entrained in our minds.
So we tend to aggrandize or devalue these interjects.
We have a narcissistic defense. When we are confronted with these interjects inside our minds, we react as narcissists do.
We idealize these interjects by aggrandizing them or we devalue them.
So either we attribute to these interjects depth, authority, profundity, wisdom, like the royal we, or we devalue these interjects.
We say these interjects are wrong, they're bad, they are enemies. Should not listen to these interjects.
You feel threatened.
We very often name interjects, especially in the second group.
Naming psychological parts and constructs is very common.
So how could you tell if the interject that you are naming belongs to the first group or the second group?
The first group is egosyntonic.
The first group of interjects you feel it is part and parcel of who you are, of your identity, of your essence, of your quiddity. These interjects are you.
So you don't use the definite article. You don't preface these interjects with the.
So the second type of interjects, which remember are held to be either somehow superior or somehow inferior.
The second type of interjects are usually because they are perceived as kind of external, they are internal, but they're still one step removed. They're distant. They talk to you. They don't talk from within you. They don't talk the way you talk to yourself, but they talk to you as if they were external entities, although actually they're internal.
And so this kind of interjects are usually capitalized and preceded by the definite article.
You say, for example, the false self. You don't say false self, you say the false self.
So when these second type of interjects are aggrandized and idealized, as I said, they're perceived to be knowledgeable, deeper, more ancient, possessed of authority, sagacity, and so on and so forth, you would tend to listen to them and you would form a parental relationship with these interjects.
They would serve as kind of role models, teachers, gurus, internal coaches, if you wish.
When you devalue these interjects because they become life threatening or self-defeating or self-destructive, they devalue them as a form of defense.
When you devalue them, they become exactly the opposite.
Instead of parental figures, they become persecutory objects, enemies.
And in the shared fantasy, the intimate partner transitions from the intimate partner is perceived as a member of the second type of interjects, the alienated or the estranged interjects.
So the intimate partner transitions from an idealized interject to a persecatory object or persecatory interject.
So the intimate partner, the narcissist forms an interject or internal object representing the intimate partner.
This is snapshotting and then he idealizes the snapshot but retains the position of this internal object which represents the intimate partner in the second group of interjects, the distant interjects, the alienated interject, the externalized interjects, if you wish.
But gradually, and I've described the reasons in my videos on the shared fantasy, gradually there's a need to convert the interject into a persecatory object and then separate from the partner and individual.
Sometimes we externalize an interject. It's a form of narcissistic defense. It's a form of narcissistic defense that borders on psychosis.
Remember that both the psychotic and the narcissist have extreme difficulty to tell apart external from internal objects. They make mistakes. The psychotic mistakes, his internal objects as external objects and the narcissist mistakes her external objects as her internal objects.
As a confusion, a blurred line between internal and external objects.
When the narcissist is subjected to extreme stress, decompensates and begins to have psychotic micro-episodes, begins to transition to psychosis the way Canver has suggested many decades ago.
When this happens, the narcissist begins to perceive the interjects, the alienated interjects, the group two interjects. He begins to perceive them as emanating from outside reality, from the outside. He begins to externalize the interjects.
And this is the only case where the narcissist is able to interact with external objects because they used to be internal and they are still internal.
The narcissist is not the only one to do this.
So a large extent when we, even healthy people, even normal people are put under extreme stress and anxiety, sometimes they tend to externalize objects.
So for example, they would talk to themselves or they would talk to mommy, to mother. They would talk aloud to a non-existent, non-present mother.
It's a form of externalizing the interject.
Okay, Shoshanim, I hope you had a lot of fun in this wild ride in the netherworlds of narcissism. And stay tuned for my next offerings as time goes by.
You thought you got rid of me? Not so fast. Halloween is coming.
I forgot one item. I did mention it. I did dwell on it at length in another video, but I would still like to add it here and that is music. Music triggers the narcissist, but it's a kind of primitive triggering, very basic triggering because it harks back to the pre-verbal stage of early childhood.
Simply put, music reminds the narcissist of the entraining that he had experienced as a child, early childhood entraining.
Now to remind you, entraining is a form of verbal abuse, verbal abuse that conditions the brain, brain washes, synchronizes brainwaves with the abuser's brainwaves. This is called entraining.
Infernal abuse is indistinguishable from music in its impact on the brain. It creates entraining exactly as music does.
So when the narcissist listens to music, he is catapulted back into the period where he had been exposed to entraining as a small child.
And of course, these triggers in him, extreme reactions, many narcissists react emotionally to music. They dysregulate actually when they listen to music. It is as if music dismantles the narcissist defenses, even deactivates his false self and he is thrown back to a borderline phase.
One of the phases on the way to becoming a narcissist and he becomes emotionally dysregulated and also extremely self-destructive.
That is the power that music has on many, not all, but on many narcissists because it is intimately linked with another form of exposure to sound, verbal abuse and training.