Love bombing is the first phase in what is known as the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy was first described by Sander. Sander was a psychoanalyst. In 1989 he proposed the structure of the shared fantasy.
And the shared fantasy involves many phases, but what is important about the shared fantasy is that it is compulsive. It's inexorable. It is not reactive.
In other words, it cannot be influenced by the intimate partner, for example. It has a life of its own.
The dynamic unfolds, and there's no way for you to alter it, to interfere with it, or to redirect it in any way, shape or form. It's a totally autonomous process.
It starts with what is colloquially known as love bombing, and love bombing is about idealization or actually more precisely co-idealization.
Idealization is when the narcissists, because narcissists engage in shared fantasies, narcissists and people diagnosed with borderline personalities.
So it starts with idealization when the narcissist actually creates an internal representation of you in his mind, known as internal objects or introject, and then imbues it with qualities or traits which are counterfactual, which are fantastic. They're fantastic, they're not real.
And then he continues to interact with this internal object rather than with you.
And because this internal object is ideal, is perfect, this internal object is anything from drop-dead gorgeous to hyper-intelligent, to godlike, to you can do no wrong, you are amazing, you're unprecedented, and so on so forth.
It allows the narcissist to idealize himself.
Now when I say himself, half of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder are women. So the gender pronoun in this case is not representative. But I'll continue to use it because that's good literature.
So the narcissist idealizes himself by idealizing you.
He believes his conviction is that he possesses you somehow. You're an artifact, you're a figment of his mind and imagination, and because you're a piece of property or a theater prop, the very fact that he owns you imbues him with perfection.
It's essentially like owning a luxury car, you know.
So this is co-idealization.
I'm actually I'm mesmerized right now by you.
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I'm mesmerized right now by you.
Thank you.
So it's actually a process of co-idealization. It's not true that the idealization flows one way.
And it also has psychological functions. Idealization fulfills some psychological functions.
First of all, the narcissist converts you into a maternal figure. And as a maternal figure, you need to be ideal and perfect, because that's the only way you could provide a narcissist with unconditional love.
Narcissists seeks this kind of love and tests you in a variety of ways, subjects you to tests, to testing.
He misbehaves. He pushes the envelope. And then he stands back, and he says, is she going to stick around? If she sticks around, that means she's a good mother. It means her love is unconditional. If she doesn't, then she's not. She's a bad mother. Then I need to get rid of her.
So this is the first phase.
Love bombing signals intensity. It signals commitment. It signals the intensification of limerence and infatuation. And it's also a form of virtue signaling.
The narcissist signals to you that he is so much into you that you have captivated him to such an extent that he has become so addicted to you that you can trust him. He is trustworthy. He is trustworthy. He's reliable. If he makes a promise, he intends to keep it, because he's terrified of losing you. He developed separation insecurity or abandonment anxiety. He's afraid to lose you.
So there's a lot of signaling going on.
Would you say that just so I can clarify for my patients, that you would say, because I understand you are married, you've been married for quite some time. Would you consider yourself to be codependent?
My private life is off limits. I'm here as an expert on narcissism.
No, no, I'm just asking because people ask me, they do ask all the time, would you say that their partner would be codependent? And I say, I think to an extent that would be considered codependency to an extent.
And so I don't want to ask you specifically back on.
Co-dependence and people with borderline personality disorder, and even people with mood disorders and anxiety disorders, are more likely to be attracted to narcissists.
However, the reverse is not true.
Narcissists are indiscriminate in their choice of partners. It is not true that narcissists have a kind of type, that they attract to a specific type.
Narcissists are attracted to anyone who can provide them with four basic elements. I call them the four S's. Sex, supply, sadistic or narcissistic, safety, being there, being present, and services.
Now, any two of the four would do. If you satisfy two of the four, then you're in. Your job is yours. You pass the test.
So narcissists are a lot more focused on self-enhancement and what they tend to gain out of the relationship. They are much less interested in the identity or the traits and qualities of the prospective service provider.
The same way, you are not really interested to know a hell of a lot more about your internet service provider. You know, you just want to know that the internet is there, it's working, and that's it.
And consequently, the narcissist's intimate partners or friends are interchangeable. They're utterly dispensable and they are commoditized or commodified like so many grains of rice.
So victims of narcissistic abuse in a desperate attempt to make sense of what has happened to them tend to self-aggrandize to some extent. They say, well, I've been chosen because I'm super nice, amazingly kind. I'm an empath or whatever other nonsense is permeates the online environment.
But the truth is that narcissists choose service providers. I call people in the narcissist's life insignificant others.
And so we are back to love bombing and it is part of the shared fantasy.
And at that point, what the narcissist does, he baits you. He lures you in. And he does it in two ways, basically. There are two strategies.
One, he exposes you to a simulation of an inner child. He provides you with a theater production of a child that is hurting, that is traumatized, that is in pain, that is in need, and that requires protection. It triggers in you, the protective reflexes and maternal instincts. Whether you're a man or a woman, woman, doesn't matter.
So this is one lure, one bait.
And the second thing the narcissist does, he grants you access to your idealized image. Through his gaze, through his gaze.
So you become addicted to the way he sees you. You see yourself through the narcissist's eyes in the idealization phase, and it's irresistible. You want more of it. It's definitely an addiction.
And then this is the idealization phase, the love bombing.
I want, though, to make a few two qualifications, which are absent, absent in the literature, and even more so absent online.
It is not true that every narcissist starts with love bombing. Some narcissists start with what I call hate bombing.
In other words, which is where they ignore you, correct?
Where they ignore you, attack you viciously, verbally abuse you from the get-go.
Right.
So it's more of where you want and they ignore.
It's a display of dominance.
Okay.
It's an animalistic display of dominance. It's a shock and awe strategy. And taking over it's a hostile takeover.
So some narcissists don't love bomb you. They hate bomb you. They destabilize you. They disorient you and they disregulate you, so that you become dependent on them. And that is what is known as trauma bonding.
And this is a strategy that is typical, for example, of malignant narcissists.
Malignant narcissists are people who have narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism simultaneously.
That's the dark triad.
Well, not dark triad, no. Dark triad is subclinical. So in dark triad, the narcissism and psychopathy are subclinical. They cannot actually be diagnosed.
We are talking about malignant narcissists, this is a construct first suggested by Otto Kernberg. Malignant narcissists are clinical narcissists, clinical psychopaths, and clinical sadists.
So a delightful concoction.
These people tend to emphasize dominance rather than, for example, addiction.
So the first strategy is to get you addicted, and the second strategy is to render you submissive, out of terror, to terrorize you, basically.
Another comment I'd like to make is that sex plays a part.
The narcissist adopts one of two strategies again, depending on the type of narcissists.
A narcissist could become hypersexual during the acquisition phase, the love bombing and the idealization phase, a narcissist can become exceedingly hypersexual, and that is of course addictive.
On the other hand, a narcissist could become hyposexual, rejecting, avoidant, dismissive, and that would kind of challenge you to excite the narcissists, to arouse the narcissists.
So these are two strategies, leveraging sexuality to create a kind of bonding or a kind of addiction or kind of, that would follow into the shared fantasy.
So this is the first phase, idealization.
Right.
Then driven by his own internal complexes and internal dynamics, the narcissist is forced to devalue you.
The narcissist converts you from what is known as an idealized internal object to a persecutory internal object.
You not only lose all your charm and all your putative advantages, but you also become an enemy, an absolute enemy, a foe.
And then the narcissist devalues you and discards you.
Now this has a lot to do with a reenactment of early childhood conflicts with a maternal figure.
I'm not going to it all right now.
But honestly, it's so funny how everything always goes back is very Freudian. Like everything goes back to the mother always.
Yes.
Actually, Freud suggested the concept of repetition compulsion, but it was developed mainly in the object-relations schools. In the 50s and 60s by Melanie Klein, Guntrip, Winnicott, Ferber and others.
And they were the ones who created this model that I'm describing.
And of course, it's a metaphor. No one has ever captured an internal object or spoken to an internal object. It's a metaphor.
But it is true that narcissists, what the narcissists would do, that's quite true from my observations. I've been in this racket for 30 years. It is quite true that the narcissist would try to convert you into a mother figure. That's quite true.
He would infantilize himself. He would become dependent in some ways.
Yeah, because always wanting to have that mother figure and he was being mothered.
Yes, and he would re- but at the same time, the narcissist would play the role of a mother. So he would mother you. He would regress you. He would infantilize you and he would induce in you dependency so that he can become a paternal parental figure or a guru or whatever so these two dynamics are in operation simultaneously you are his mother he your mother, and that's what I call the dual mothership.
Yeah, and I also find it funny because there also comes into play a lot of parenting, you know, because there's punishment in there, and there's, I found that there's punishment, there's role play. There's so many things that come into play.
Yes it's in my view the reenactment of early childhood it's my view all shared fantasies are really I'm very Satir oriented. When I first started becoming a therapist, I was very into Satir, and I found, like, the family dynamic, it just, it blew me away, you know, just with narcissism in general. I was like, wow, I'm like, this is like, there's family sculpting in here, there's everything.
Yes, Virginia Satir and others, for example, internal family systems theories, for example, transactional analysis as well.
Yeah, all these kind of superimpose a family structure or a family model or family whatever scheme, family scheme on the behavior of adults.
And the narcissist is no exception in this sense.
I think we all, to some extent, in our intimate relationships, all of us are trying to somehow reenact certain dynamics.
And we are lucky if we've been allowed to graduate by our original parents to graduate into adulthood.
But many of us never do.
I know, it's so hard.
Many of us never do.
Narcissists are all emotionallytwo years two years old or three years old or at the most six maybe nine but like their children. Narcissists are children.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I'm finding this very interesting because I heard you say so many women are narcissists.
And in circles specifically, we have, I mean, from my perspective, most of our clientele are women, right?
So we have, I'm going to just estimate that we're 80% women, 20% men. And that may be high. But I'm thinking that's about accurate.
It might be a little off. But, um, I try to be very fair because I feel like, I feel that that's off. I feel like just the men don't come in as often. I feel like, you know, they just don't speak up.
In my private practice, I have a lot of men just because they're a little bit more shy.
But, you know, I know for a fact that there are a lot of women who are narcissistic, carte blanche, right?
But in our circles groups, I give a lot of credit. The men are like, no, man, I have been the victim, right, of this. And I love when they speak up on the platform. I love when they're when they're not shy, right?
And for me, you know, some of the guys come in and like, whoa, like, I was afraid of Christine at first, like, because I'm very, I'm very straightforward. And they're like, I sat in on her rooms and I listened, but I was afraid to talk for a while because, like, I'm very, very blunt.
But they're like, I've learned a lot, like, from coming there. But, you know, she's given me a lot of, a lot of, like, little nuggets. And now I'm okay to talk because, you know, coming in as one of the men, it's a little intimidating with all the women that are there.
But they do. They come and they start speaking. And it's great to hear that they're not afraid.
So I love that we have a lot more men coming forward to end talking. So I think that's great. I feel like it's very empowering for the guys.
It's reflective of larger social trends.
In general, narcissism is not only a clinical entity. It's an organizing principle of society. It's a hermeneutic principle. In other words, it imbues life and reality with some sense and some meaning.
You can explain many things using the concepts of narcissism. You can explain politics. You can explain show business. You can explain sexuality. I mean, it's applicable.
But I wanted to say that the fact that men are coming forward and that women are more and morenarcissistic and so has to do with the fact that women are becoming more masculine. There are many studies by Lisa Wade and others that demonstrate that women have adopted male stereotypes as identity, identity elements. In other words, the identity of modern women is more and more masculine. And so, yeah, the work point. Narcissism is a masculine disorder or used to be thought of as masculine disorder. So I'm not surprised.
Oh, what was it in, back in the movie, what was the movie from the 1940s? Gaslighting? Yeah. Gaslighting. Yeah, that's where it started, right?
There were two of them actually, two movies.
Yeah, and it was a, it was a male term, gaslighting.
Gaslight was a, the movie Gaslight was about a male abuser.
Yeah, that's the one where he was putting the candles out?
Yes.
Yeah, okay, yeah.
That's, he used to move the furniture, paintings, paintings from the wall, play with her jewelry and so on, and then he made her believe that she has lost touch with reality, that she's somehow demented and something wrong is happening to her.
But I think, I think narcissism is, as I said, is embedded in very large social trends and changes in society, contemporary society. This topic for another lecture, another talk.
But I find it interesting.
I used to do some topics in middle school. And I was watching the dynamic from me, even years ago, my own children were in middle school. And now the middle schoolers are, the dynamic has changed. And those children can gaslight, like nothing you've ever seen now. And I'm talking like 10, 12, 13 years old.
Well, they are trained. They are digital natives. And so their natural habitat is social media, the internet and so on, which is a gaslighting environment. On social media, for example, fake news and misinformation is preponderant. And there's no way to tell it apart from real information. There's simply no way. So a lot of gaslighting is taking place integrated into the platforms.
So... And you know, and I didn't realize, I didn't realize until this past election, how bad it was, just because I don't, I'm sad to say that I don't pay a lot of attention to that until my own college-age daughter had started sending memes. And I just didn't realize.
And I said, you know that that's just a picture of a picture. And she was like, well, what do you mean? It's true. And I said, no, it's a picture of someone just took mean? It's true. And I said, no, it's a picture of a, of someone just took a picture of a picture. And I said, you have to, you know, fact check because I don't know what I'm saying, you know.
And she was like, what do you mean? She goes, it's true, because I got it off of the, whatever. And I was like, that's where they get their information from. And I was like, my mind was blown.
The reason that narcissists and narcissism are on the ascendance is because people are much more habituated when it comes to fantasy. They're much more acclimated. They're much more accustomed to fantasy. And the main merchandise, the main offering of a narcissist is fantasy. Narciss offers you a fantasy. And if you're less grounded in reality, and if you find reality intolerable, unbearable, if you're divorced from reality by playing video games or social media, seven, eight hours a day, that's a statistic. Then you would be much more vulnerable to fantasy. And so this is the way, this is the vector. That's a vector infection of narcissists. They infect you with fantasy.
Well, it makes sense. I mean, I don't know how old you are, Sam. But I mean, I remember going into Spencer's. It was like a, it makes sense. I mean, I don't know how old you are, Sam, but I mean, I remember going into Spencer's. It was like a, it was like a gag shop in the mall when I was younger. You know, you'd walk in and it had all the fun things. You know, it had all the things that you weren't supposed to look at. You know, it had all the gag gifts. And you would go in there and you'd be like, oh, that's fun. And that's cool to look at. And you would buy it and you would hide it in your you'd be like oh that's fun and that's cool to look at and you would buy it and you would hide it in your room because you don't want your parents to see it you know it was like all the taboo things and you go in there now and it's okay to buy it's okay to go get it like you know it's just all the things that you don't have to hide anymore yeah because it's not real the reason the reason The reason all these inhibitions and all these rules and norms and mores have evaporated is because we dispense with the concept of reality.
If it's not real, you're allowed to do anything. It's not real, you know, there are no consequences. There are no consequences.
That's the belief, the intelligence.
And I think it started with the texting, right? Because it's not, you don't have to talk, you don't have to say anything. So it's not, it's not, it's, face to face, not, yeah.
You don't see, you don't see what you're doing.
We don't see your impact on other people.
So that's why aggression online is much, much more heightened than in reality, because the people at the other end of the screen are not real. They're avatars, you know. So we've all become two-dimensional. It's flat-land.
We've all become flat-lined, so to speak.
No one realizes the impact of their words on another person or...
It's because there's no other people. There are no other people. They're only avatars. They're only images on the screen.
As far as I'm concerned, there are no other people. They're only avatars. The only images on a screen. As far as I'm concerned, you're two-dimensional. You're literally two-dimensional. I mean, it's a fact. I can't see. I can walk around you. I can't smell you. I can talk to you. I mean, I can talk to you in a meaningful way.
So we have removed reality from our daily experience, and we have substituted for it with fantasy, and that is the playground of the narcissist, fantasy. We've invited narcissism into our lives by getting rid of the only protection against narcissism, which is realism of the reality principle.
Wow. You know what? Honestly, obviously I know that, but it just makes more sense when you're like, when you wrap your head around and say it. Yeah.
It's good to talk about this thing. That's online dating.
That's online dating. That's virtual chats.
It's good to talk about these things.
Online dating, that's, that's online dating, that's virtual chats, that's gaming, that's everything. That's something.
Starting with television, everything.
Wow.
Video games, television, everything is immersive now. The experiences are immersive. So we have like virtual reality and, you know, it's busy multiverse is about to.
So it's all becoming immersive and exclusionary. It, it clashes head on with reality.
So I'll give you one last example because I think we are running out of time. You, when you are on social media, you can't be with your children. Right. When you're on social media, you can't have intimacy. When you have social media, you can't have a boyfriend or girlfriend or a spouse. When you're social media, you can't have a boyfriend or girlfriend or a spouse.
When you have social media, you can't have meaningful social contacts. You have to choose either social media or intimacy. Either social media or relationships. They don't go together.
The name social media is a misnomer. It's very misleading.
It should be isolation media.
A social, anti-social, yes.
So this is the world we live in where the big corporations, big tech and so on, they don't want you to have a life.
Because if you have a life, they cannot monetize your eyeballs. They cannot make a profit of you.
They need you to live in the platforms. They don't want you to use the platforms. They want you to be the platform. And anything you do outside the platform is net loss. And they will discourage it in any way possible including fostering in you conditioning and addictions which is exactly what they're doing.
This is really really malicious.
So malicious?
It is. It is. It is very narcissistic.
Yeah.
It's malicious.
And everything I'm saying is not a conspiracy theory.
This has been attested to by psychologists and engineers who actually created the platforms. They gave testimonies in Congress, outside Congress. Some of them became whistleblowers.
This was intentional. This was intended to create addiction to foster operant conditioning and so and so forth so that you would become bonded with the platforms one way or another and will never be able to let go and will gradually constrict your life until you're left with none, none whatsoever.
Eye opening. Thank you, Sam.
So we're going to.