So, now that we see, what does it mean globally?
Let's narrow it down a little bit.
What does a narcissistic person exist in a family?
I think in interpersonal relationships, family is one type of interpersonal relationship.
There are essentially two problems.
One is the zero-sum game and the other is the contagion effect.
So, zero-sum game simply means that the narcissist doesn't engage in intimacy or in building something, building a family.
The narcissist engages from the first date. The narcissist engages in a power play.
It's all about power. Who has the power? Who is right? Who is wrong? Who will dictate? Who will lead? Who will follow?
So, it's all about power. It's a constant contest and competition for power.
Of course, you can't build anything long-term or healthy on such a foundation because you need, of course, a power matrix in a relationship, but you also need collaboration. You need intimacy. You need common values.
Many other things. Power is not enough.
But for a narcissist, everything else, if it does exist and it rarely exists, but if it does exist, everything else is at the service of accumulating and exercising power.
So, for example, a narcissist could encourage intimacy, but he would encourage intimacy to have power over his partner. So, he would use the intimacy to blackmail his partner to give him services or concessions.
Or he could, for example, encourage collaboration, but he would encourage a collaboration so that he reaps the fruit of the collaboration, so that he benefits, so that he profits, not equally.
So, whatever happens, the narcissist will leverage whatever happens and whatever attributes of the relationship for his own gain and for control.
So, it's a power play.
That's the first insurmountable problem in the relationship.
The second problem is contagion.
The longer you live with a narcissist, the longer you collaborate with a narcissist, the longer you love the narcissist, the more narcissistic you become.
Extremely simple. It's an infectious disease. It's a pathogen.
It's not possible to spend time with a narcissist and psychopath, narcissistic, no psychopathic.
You find yourself doing the most amazing things that you would have never believed you could do. I don't know, lie, cheat. And you don't recognize yourself anymore. You have lost your identity. You don't know who you are anymore.
It's extremely disorienting, extremely. It's like you have acquired the narcissist identity somehow. It's body snatching. It's like a body snatching process.
And you feel that while before you had met a narcissist, you had very clear, strict boundaries. When you have lived with a narcissist for a while, you begin to dissolve. Your boundaries begin to be very fuzzy and you begin to dissolve, like diluting something in the liquid, like you're diluted, like ink in a liquid.
You feel like this ink drop in a liquid. You feel that you are, you know.
And so the contagion effect is a major problem because it not only alters your behavior and your reactance, the way you react, but it alters your identity, who you are, or at the very least, your self-perceptionor perception of your identity.
It's disorienting and dislocating to the point of depersonalization, derealization, and dissociation.
When we no longer know who we areand we feel our identity is threatened, we do three things.
We depersonalize. We suddenly feel that we are not we. We suddenly feel that we are disconnected from ourselves. We derealize. We feel that our reality is a kind of nightmare. It's not real. We feel like we are in some horror movie, you know.
And that is where gaslighting comes into play.
Because gaslighting is extremely effectiveprecisely because the victim already has already a feeling that reality is not real, that it's a horror movie. That's why gaslighting lighting works, because the victim is already disoriented.
And the third reaction, which is by far the most common, is dissociation, forgetting things, lapses in memory, deleting traumas, deleting sins, suppressing, and so on.
So the contagion effect also has an effect on memory, continuity, identity. It's a major effect.
It's not like, okay, if I live with the narcissist, I start to lie, which is bad enough.
That's not the issue. This is a small issue.
If I live with the narcissist, I start to not be. That's much more serious problem.