If the narcissist takes away the whole of mirrors, you will not see yourself anymore, and you will not be able to love yourself anymore.
So you need the whole of mirrors. You become addicted to the whole of mirrors. Every morning you enter the whole of mirrors, you see yourself here, and here, and here, and you fall in love again, every morning.
And he has the power to shut off the whole of mirrors, to take it away. He has total power over you.
This is why loving a narcissist is an utterly immersive and addictive process. It's like some kind of virtual reality, but very high-level virtual reality, what we call immersive virtual reality, where we feel that we're inside the world, inside that virtual world.
But none of it would have worked if the victim had self-love to start with. If the victim loved herself to start with, she wouldn't, she wouldn't need the mirrors. The mirrors would not work. She would immediately identify that it's self-love and not real love, and she would walk away.
Therefore, the victims of narcissists, when I say victims, I mean someone who fell in love, cannot fall out of love, is addicted, stalking, obsessed, this kind of victims.
And the victims who have malignant optimism, the belief that if they only love the narcissist, if they only invest, if they only cure the narcissist, if they only convince him to go to therapy, if they only love him unconditionally, everything would be okay. They would fix the fixers, the ones who fix the narcissist, the total nonsensical delusion.
But these type of victims, they never had self-love to start with.
Narcissists, a relationship with a narcissist is their first experience at self-love, which is utterly addictive. At a late age, it's very addictive.
So, because they don't have this experience of self-love, they have an emptiness, exactly like the narcissist is the emptiness, but they have an emptiness. They have a hole. It is through this hole that the narcissist enters. That's the penetration point.
And it's not one. It's a metaphorical mental hole. Through this mental hole, the narcissist penetrates, intrudes, invades, and colonizes. Colonizes is a parasite. Narcissist is a parasite, like in palisitology, like in medicine. It's a parasite invades the body and colonizes it.
But there must be a hole. A woman without the hole is not amenable to the narcissist. His child is magic, but not work. She must have a hole. She must have a lack of self-love, lack of self-awareness, and she must allow the narcissist to be the agent of her own self-discovery.
In this, ironically, a relationship with a narcissist is a form of therapy, or even a psychotherapy. It's a form of therapy because it is through the narcissist, she becomes much more self-aware and develops self-love, experiences self-love.
The only problem is, the only problem is that she cannot continue with these very positive developments except through the agency of the narcissist. In other words, he becomes her pusher, her supplier. Without him, she cannot obtain the drug of self-love or continue her self-awareness.
That's the only problem. Otherwise, I would have said that ironically, having a relationship with the narcissist is actually a positive thing. This forces you to become self-aware, forces you to love yourself, and forces you to protect yourself, to defend yourself, finally to stand up for yourself just in order to survive.
So normally, it's actually a positive therapeutic experience, but it creates addiction on the narcissist.
And the narcissist, being a parasite, colonizes your brain, your mind, and then it's very difficult to get rid of it.
These are the negative aspects.
So the narcissist, a narcissist is a bad therapist. It's a therapist who abuses the patient, kind of.
By the way, many narcissists openly would say, I'm going to heal you. I'm going to cure you. I'm like your doctor here. I'm like your guru. I'm your guru. Listen to me. I'm going to teach you. I will lead you.
They play the part of the teacher, the guru, the therapist, in order to penetrate.
So, this is more of a lesson.
You usually mention in your videos that it's a dance macabre. How can we get out of this game and break this cycle?
My very good friend Joanna Scarr, who was the first psychologist to notice the resonance of pathologies between victim and narcissist, in 1983, she wrote the book, The Narcissistic Borderline Couple, which was the first book ever on pathological resonance. And she said that narcissists and their intimate partners or victims, their emptinesses resonate, their pathologies resonate.
They said that the rest, she said the rest of the dimension of personality don't interact. Just the pathologies, just the pain, just the trauma, just the hurt, just the void, just the emptinesses.
And the second edition of the book, it's a brilliant groundbreaking book. So, she was the first one to notice. It's a huge problem. It's a very big problem.
The rate of recidivism, in other words, the rate of going back to another narcissistic partner is extremely high among victims. Victims who've been traumatized beyond words, lost all their money, ended up in jail, drug addiction, ruined lives, lost their children, and so on, again go to a narcissistic partner.
Unstoppable. In this sense, the rate of recidivism among victims of narcissistic abuse from my anecdotal research, but it's not small.
My database is huge. The rate of recidivism I can compare only to alcoholism, even worse than drugs. As in drugs, we have about 60%. Alcohol, we have about 80% in the first year. So, alcohol is the worst.
To get rid of alcoholism is the worst addiction. It's much easier, for example, to get rid of heroin and alcohol. And above alcohol are these toxic relationships.
The victims of narcissists keep choosing narcissists because the experience of loving a narcissist, in other words, loving yourself, is incomparable. Nothing comes close to it.
The world looks dead, blank and white, and hopeless, and dreamless without it. Getting to love yourself erotically, sexually, and romantically, because it's not a typical self-love. It's not a healthy self-love. It's a healthy self-love, where you have a core, you know yourself, and you parentify yourself. You act as your own parent. Yes, you give unconditional love, support, advice, guidance to yourself. That's a healthy self-love. The self-love that I'm talking about with narcissists is very sick. It's much closer, I would say, to incest. It's making love to yourself, also sexually, also erotically.
So, it's an indescribable experience of being in love with yourself, not only in the healthy sense, but also in the totally sexualized, eroticized, fetishized sense. In other words, you become your own fetish. It's a form of fetishism. It is an experience, the likes of which I am not aware of in any other human interaction. It's absolutely mind-boggling, a mind-blowing experience. And once you have gone through it, once you've gone through it, it's very difficult to go back to the normal world. Very difficult.
Normal world feels dead, simply. Narcissism somehow makes you feel alive. It's what is sick, or what is eroticism. It's a force of life, of course. It's a force of procreation. It's a force of making new life. You feel very alive when, through the narcissists, you love yourself in every possible way.
So, it's a wow experience. Where else can you find it?
And so, you try. You try very hard. You date normal guys. They are there. So, support me.