I know you miss me. It's easy. Just say it. Come out and say it. Vaknin, we miss you. My name, my name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the only author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited. I am also your favorite professor in any subject whatsoever. This happens to be psychology. Today we are going to discuss two tangential subjects. One is modification and how modification contributes to the regulation of moods in the narcissist and to the transition from one type of narcissist to another.
I have dealt with these topics at length in previous videos, but today I would like to clarify it a bit.
The second topic on today's relatively short video is hoovering, a contribution to the dynamic of hoovering.
I coined the word hoovering together with many other words like ghosting, flying monkeys, somatic narcissists, the rebel narcissists, and so on and so forth. I coined it to describe a process whereby the narcissist tries to revive the shared fantasy, but to revive a specific shared fantasy by re-acquiring, by teaming up again with the process of re-idealization, a re-idealized erstwhile previous intimate partner.
Hoovering never happens if the intimate partner multiplies the narcissist, but anything short of modification and you are up for hoovering.
Today I would like to make a minor contribution to this topic as well.
But before we go there, I would like to add to your reading list the assignment for this semester. These are books that you have to read, as you know, you have to submit reports and so on. And I'm about to add a book which I would place at the top of the list.
So this is really a sine qua non. This is something you have to do. It's an amazing book and even giants like Theodore Millon rely on this book extensively as an authoritative source. And it is.
It's very short. It's in terms of textbooks. It's less than 300 pages long, but it's a bombshell. It includes everything known about personality disorders. I strongly recommend it to any student, especially since you are post-graduates.
This is a way to keep up to speed. Keep up, keep yourself updated.
So Len Sperry, S-P-E-R-R-Y is the author. The book is the handbook of diagnosis and treatment of diagnostic and statistical manual five personality disorders, assessment, case conceptualization and treatment. This is the third edition published in 2016. One of the major advantages of this book is that it keeps making a distinction between a personality style and a personality disorder. Many people have the same personality style as someone with a personality disorder. For example, many people are grandiose. They're narcissistic. They're entitled. They lack empathy, etc, etc. Yet they don't measure up to the level of a diagnosis. They have a personality style. He has these amazing tables comparing the style to the disorder. Millan had adopted this contraption and had incorporated it in his seminal book, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, which I keep quoting from in my videos. So Len Sperry, handbook of diagnosis and treatment of DSM-5 personality disorders. A must.
Let us now go to the topics of the video, starting with the with modification.
To remind you, narcissistic modification is an extreme form of decompensation. Let's regress a bit.
Each and every human being, each and every human being, healthy and unhealthy, has something called narcissistic defense mechanisms. Narcissistic defense mechanisms are strategies, ways of reframing and reinterpreting reality so that it doesn't inflict grave damage on one's soul or psyche.
Sometimes reality is too harsh, injuring, injurious, wounding, painful, hurtful and cannot be countenance, cannot be accepted as it is.
Psychological defense mechanisms kick in and they essentially falsify reality. They falsify reality by beautifying it, by changing it, by recasting it, by looking at it from another angle, by pretending, by denying, by repressing, by splitting reality to all good and all bad and identifying with the good.
There are numerous ways of rewriting history and absenting yourself from unmitigated friction with reality so as to ameliorate anxiety, regulate your internal environment, including your moods and your emotions and allow you to survive simply.
So defense mechanisms are crucial for survival. In the absence of defense mechanisms, people disintegrate, they fall apart, they become psychotic. Borderlines, for example, have extremely primitive defense mechanisms so they don't cope very well with reality. It's like they have no skin and they are in direct touch with reality, not mediated through elaborate defense mechanisms.
Similarly, narcissists resort usually to primitive defenses such as splitting or grandiosity and narcissists similarly are constantly injured and wounded by reality, narcissistic injury. And so narcissistic mortification is when all the psychological defense mechanisms at the disposal of the narcissist crumble. All of them are disabled, all of them are inactivated at the same moment and when I say moment I mean moment.
One could argue that normal people, healthy people, also can undergo narcissistic mortification because in each and every one of us there's healthy narcissism.
Here I disagree vehemently with Otto Kahnberg. Otto Kahnberg claimed there's no such thing as healthy narcissism. I completely beg to disagree and on my corner are 99% of the scholars of narcissism. We all believe that there is healthy narcissism.
Well, since there is healthy narcissism and healthy narcissism underlies one's sense of self-esteem, regulates one's sense of self-worth, gives one self-confidence. Since there is healthy narcissism, we should have a narcissistic mortification also in the case of healthy people.
But healthy people have numerous defense mechanisms, primitive, less primitive, highly evolved, socially embedded and contextualized defense mechanisms. So healthy people emerge from mortification almost instantly by drawing on ego resources and outside resources which the narcissist doesn't have because it doesn't have a functioning ego.
Narcissism has only primitive defense mechanisms, primitive, childlike, infantile and these are his only protections against a hostile, harsh jungle out there. And when these defenses fall apart, he falls apart.
And this process of falling apart is called decompensation. Defense mechanisms compensate for the unsavory, unpalatable, unacceptable aspects of reality. And when they disappear, when they are no longer available to the narcissist, there is a process of decompensation, inability to compensate.
Reality invades like a tsunami, like a tidal wave, invades the narcissist's emptiness in effect, fills him up with tremendous pain and hurt, unleashes his buried, repressed and denied negative emotionality from his early childhood. And he becomes effectively a borderline.
His emotions are dysregulated, his moods become labile, he becomes to all intents and purposes psychodynamically a borderline.
Mortification pushes the narcissist to become a borderline.
It is a result, what is more, mortification happens when the narcissist is exposed to a deeply traumatizing, deeply challenging, deeply humiliating event.
And so the narcissist copes with mortification and with such events in one of two ways.
He can render the mortification external, he can convert it to external mortification. What does it mean? External mortification is when the narcissist casts himself, presents himself, believes that he is a helpless victim. He adopts the victim's stance.
He pretends, he doesn't pretend he believes, he's fully convinced that he had been victimized by malicious, envious, envious or mentally ill people.
And so he transfers, he transfers the shame and the humiliation and the guilt sometimes and the responsibility and the locus of control to evil outsiders. And this preserves his self-image as a good person, a morally upright person who did nothing, who had done nothing wrong, who did not deserve such treatment.
But if your fate and life and mental health and well-being and welfare and ability to function, if they are controlled, if all these are controlled from the outside, it's very frightening. It's threatening and it pushes you to depression.
When the narcissist chooses to externalize the mortification, he becomes clinically depressed. We are beginning to see glimmers of what I'm about to tell you. Mortification seems to regulate moods and affects. It is a regulator.
Now, borderlines and to a large extent narcissists, but not only histrionics, schizoids, paranoid, they have a problem with emotional dysregulation. Mortification forces them to make a choice in terms of moodlability, for example, it forces them to choose depression. It's like what we call in quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function. There are many possibilities, happiness, depression, this, that, and the mortification pushes them to make a final choice and to adopt depression, the depressive stance.
And so, by the way, in psychoanalytic terms, this is a regressive phase. It's regressing to the paranoid schizoid phase of Melanie Klein, but we'll leave it aside for a minute.
Function number one of mortification, reducing moodlability by settling on a specific mood, by a collapse of the wave function of moods in quantum mechanic terms. This is function number one, but there is also emotional dysregulation, enhanced emotional dysregulation after mortification. The narcissist is awash with negative emotionality. Had he been a borderline, he would have been pushed to suicide. Indeed, many, many think that narcissistic mortification is life-threatening. I wouldn't go that far, but some scholars do, especially in the 1950s.
So one option is to choose external mortification. Then there's a second option, to choose internal mortification. Internal mortification is when the narcissist says, it's my fault. I made it happen. My, for example, my abuse pushed her to misbehave this way. My lack of agreeableness, my disagreeableness forced people to humiliate me. So he accepts his contributions to the mortifying event. And he also accepts his ensuing responsibility. If he actually engineered the event, if he led inexorably to the event, if he pushed everyone present to humiliate him, to torture him, to mock him, to impinge on his interests, whatever. If he pushed people to misbehave, then he's responsible for it. It's an acceptance of responsibility and contribution.
And of course, by reframing the event this way, the narcissist restores his sense of mastery, his sense of control over the situation. I made it happen. His sense of control of others. I pushed them. They were my pawns. They didn't, it's like Jesus says in the New Testament, forgive them father, for they know not what they are doing. So they didn't know what they were doing. I pushed them.
And this position is very comforting. The narcissist says, well, I'm in control of such situations. I can prevent them from happening. But this pushes him to be hypervigilant, to be paranoid, to develop referential ideation, to develop persecutory delusions. Because if he's in control, and if he can push people, and so on and so forth, he needs to be on his toes to prevent this from happening again. He needs to be on his toes in both cases. If people are evil and malicious, he needs to be on his toes. He needs to be on his guard. People are going to get him. They're about to hurt him. They're about to torture him and torment him and taunt him and humiliate him and mock him. And worse, he needs to be careful.
So this creates hypervigilance, paranoid ideation, secretary delusions, referential ideation, etc.
But there is the same response when there is internal mortification. Because in internal mortification, it is the narcissist who makes it happen. So he sort of brings it upon himself.
And in this case, the hypervigilance is self-directed. The paranoid and referential ideation is self-directed. The secretary delusions are self-delusions.
So we have two solutions. External modification without word-directed paranoia. And internal modification with inward directed paranoia. One could call it hypervigilance and auto-vigilance, if you wish.
That's a very interesting statement. Because we have disorders with auto-plastic defenses. These disorders used to be called neurosis. It seems that we no longer use this term more or less.
But neurosis at the time, there were disorders of auto-vigilance when the patient took responsibility for everything bad and wrong that had happened in her life. And consequently was very afraid of herself as her worst enemy. I've seen the enemy in his eye.
And so it seems that mortification, first of all, regulates mood. It pushes the narcissist towards depression if he chooses internal mortification. And pushes the narcissist towards neurosis if he chooses internal mortification.
And in both cases, the mediating vector, the mediating resource, is paranoia. So mortification engenders paranoia, provokes paranoia.
But then the only question left, is the paranoia directed outward, in which case there's depression, or is it directed inward, in which case there's neurosis.
Now it sounds to you like duh, like so what. But it's a big deal. Trust me. I'll tell you in a minute why, after I get some liquid courage.
Is there anything better than red wine? Yes, more red wine.
Okay, why is it a big deal?
It's a big deal. Because in the past, all the greatest minds of psychology made a distinction between psychosis and neurosis. There were the neurosis, multiple, and with the psychosis, multiple.
And it seems that mortification can create a bridge between neurosis and psychosis. It can create a bridge between internal objects, interpreted as external objects, in external mortification, and external objects, interpreted as internal objects, in case of internal mortification.
Remember, when external objects are interpreted as internal, that's narcissism. When internal objects are interpreted as external, that's psychosis.
And mortification allows you both, depending which type you choose. It's like there's a menu.
When you're mortified as a narcissist, you have a menu. Or the maƮtre d' comes to the table and says, monsieur, you can choose one of two. Today we have a plat de jure. Today we have an offer, external mortification. And we give you the option of depression. And the other dish is internal mortification. We give you the option of neurosis.
In the first case, essentially, you react, you have narcissistic defenses. Narcissistic, ancient, primitive structures are activated. Mortonic line would have appreciated this.
And in the second case, neurotic structures are activated. And in both cases, in both cases, there's a god-awful, almighty confusion between internal objects and external objects.
It seems that the mechanism that causes us to confuse internal and external objects is not actually trauma, but is the reaction to events which is mortification.
We may have to reconsider whether narcissism, borderline, etc., are post-traumatic events or post-mortification events.
And you can say, what's the difference?
Trauma creates mortification. Not really.
First of all, most traumas don't create mortification. But trauma is exclusively, usually, exclusively the outcome, the outcome of reaction to events that is not mediated via an interpretative framework. In other words, trauma is direct.
You experience something, and there's trauma. There is no middle stage where you analyze, think about it, reframe it, put it in context. You don't have time to activate any defense mechanism. There's an event in immediate trauma. It's so direct.
I mean, the traumatic response is so immediate that there is good reason to suggest that trauma is simply a dysfunction of reality testing. Not actually a real wound or real injury, but simply misapprehending reality and misapprehending reality in a way that is very threatening, of course.
So you could say that trauma is a subspecies of paranoia. Paranoia is the triggered immediately, without mediation.
So trauma is when you confront a potentially mortifying event and you immediately react by developing a full-fledged panoply of cognitions and emotions which are integrated cohesively into a narrative, which we later call trauma. That's trauma.
But if you're not the same, you can have a mortification five days later, five months later, even years later. A mortification first undergoes a phase of cognitive analysis. The emotions are not on the surface. There's no access to most of these emotions because they're very threatening.
There is, in other words, trauma first happens, then is dissociated.
So the sequence in trauma is event, trauma, dissociation. The sequence in mortification is event, dissociation, mortification.
It's a very, very important distinction, very crucial distinction, because in the case of trauma, it is already cognitively and emotionally processed reaction to the event. It's a choice, in other words.
In the case of mortification, I'm sorry. In the case of mortification, it's cognitively and emotionally processed reaction to the event.
So mortification is a choice.
Trauma is not a choice. Trauma is very similar to what Freud called ab reaction.
Trauma is totally, a totally automated process. It's not a choice. It's, I would say, a constitutional propensity, constitutional defect. I don't know what else, what other words to use.
It's like the person is trauma ready. It's like high definition ready television is trauma ready.
And this is his mode of reacting to reality. This is the language he uses to process reality and to try to act within reality, self efficaciously.
Mortification is not like trauma, because mortification requires a phase of analyzing what had happened and then allowing yourself to experience the reactive emotions, the emotions in reaction to what had happened. This processing involved and only then you can feel mortified.
But this processing is unconscious, is dissociated.
Summary trauma is event and then trauma. So trauma is totally automatic reaction to event.
If you have the tendency to process reality via trauma, so reality, trauma, forgetting about it, dissociation, opposite reality, dissociating the reality, forgetting about it, background, unconscious processing, cognitive and emotional, and then mortification, very crucial observation.
And then according to the choice you make, because you process everything cognitively and emotionally, then you make a choice.
Do I prefer an external trauma or do I prefer an external mortification? Or do I prefer internal mortification?
If it was external mortification, you end up depressed, depression. You regulate your mood. You prefer to regulate your mood than to regulate your cognition or your emotion. You think your mood is the main threat.
So you choose external mortification and you end up choosing, making a choice of depression. You regulate your mood badly. It's a bad choice, but it's better than up and down.
The other option is internal mortification, where you actually regulate your emotions and your cognitions in ways which are neurotic.
Autoplastic, for example, you blame yourself.
We said in earlier videos that collapse and mortification regulate moods, but they also regulate something much more important, switching between self-states.
Now what is called diagnosis in the diagnostic and statistical manual, what is called personality disorders, that's very antiquated notion. This notion is like at least 50 years old, if not 60. We don't think about these things this way anymore.
It's very good for insurance purposes. It's very good for pharmaceutical companies and medical doctors and hospitals, but scholars in the field, we don't think about it this way. We think in terms of post traumatic conditions, dissociation, self-states. We don't think in terms of personality disorder.
This is very old thinking. So personality disorders are self-states and because they're self-states and because disordered people have many self-states, you can easily switch from one so-called diagnosis to another so-called diagnosis. You can easily switch from one personality disorder to another personality disorder. You can switch from one self-state to another self-state. For example, borderlines under stress, anticipating rejection and humiliation and abandonment, borderline switch from one self-state, the borderline self-state, to another self-state, the secondary psychopath self-state. That's an example.
Similarly, we switch from the narcissistic grandiose self-state to the paranoid self-state. We all switch, I mean mentally ill people, mentally disordered people, switch between self-states.
What is the trigger? What decides if there is switching or not?
Mortification and collapse. Mortification and collapse, they are the triggers and the bridges. They cause the covert narcissist to become overt, the overt to become covert, the somatic to become cerebral, the cerebral to become somatic, the inverter to become overt, the borderline to become psychopath, the psychopath to become narcissist, the narcissist to become borderline.
All these things happen daily all the time to all people with so-called personality disorder. Any therapist will confirm this and any spouse, any intimate partner of someone with personality disorder will confirm this.
Narcissists often are obsessive compulsive. Obsessive compulsive are grandiose. Grandiose people are paranoid. Everyone will tell you that making these artificial distinctions between personality disorder is nothing short of counterfactual. It's psychology's fantasy. It's not true. It's simply not true.
And in the ICD-11, they are thinking of UNIF putting everything under one, one diagnosis, personality disorder, which is something I've been advocating since 1995.
But what I've added in the last four years is the mechanical psychodynamic explanation why people shift between these so-called diagnosis because they are mortified. And when they are mortified, they are faced with a choice.
They have to process the events. They analyze them cognitively. They experience them emotionally. And all of this happens in their conscious.
And then they make a choice. It could be a mood-induce choice. I choose depression or it could be a neurotic choice, choice of neurosis. I accept responsibility and so on.
But in both cases, they transition to another diagnosis, another type. The covert goes through mortification.
And if he becomes, for example, neurotic, if he chooses neurosis, he becomes instantly overt.
Because what is neurosis is to say, I was in control. I did everything. It all happened because of me.
That's a grandiose statement. Covert narcissists who make grandiose statements openly, they are not covert anymore. They're open. They're overt.
So through such as through such processing of the mortification, the covert becomes overt.
And that's only one example.
Similarly, the borderline. If the borderline chooses internal mortification, for example, she anticipates abandonment and she's been humiliated or she's been rejected, openly rejected by someone.
Borderlines cannot digest and cannot assimilate rejection, abandonment and humiliation. So when this happens to them, they're mortified.
The minute they're mortified, they begin to process the mortification. The processing time in borderline is very, very brief. It's days, hours, sometimes minutes.
And so they process the mortification cognitively. They process the mortification emotionally. It all happens in the background, in the unconscious.
The borderline just feels ill at ease. Uncomfortable because egotistone is growing.
As the processing continues, egotistone is growing. And so at some point, the mortification becomes conscious.
Yes, the processing is finished and you become conscious. And then the borderline is to make a choice.
Do I want to be depressed? Or do I want to be neurotic? If she chooses neurosis, she transitions to secondary psychopath.
Because what is neurosis? What is the internal mortification solution?
It's to say, I'm in control. I am the master. I'm going to decide how things are going to happen. That's defiance. That's lack of impulse control. That's recklessness. These are all features of the psychopath.
So she becomes psychopathic because she had what happens if she chooses the external mortification and she becomes depressed?
Well, we have a combination of borderline with depressive aspects. And of course, what is a borderline with depressive aspects? It's a covert narcissist. It's a covert narcissist because her grandiosity is preserved.
But her depression pushes her into a schizoid position, into the background, away from people.
And if you put all this together, you get a covert, but not any covert, covert narcissist.
Similarly, I can show you how applying these simple principles gives you any diagnosis, any diagnosis within the personality disorders space, schizoid, I mean, paranoid, you name it.
Here's a game for you. Sit at home, write down these principles.
Principle, mortification, unconscious processing, and then you can choose depression or neurosis.
In depression, you're not in control. In depression, you're controlled from the outside. In neurosis, you control.
Okay, simple principles, take them, use them, use them, apply them to personality disorders and see the amazing results.
You easily transition from narcissist to schizoid, from schizoid to borderline, from borderline to paranoid. Immediately you see they are all facets of one single clinical entity. It's so obvious.
Okay. I want to say a word or two about hoovering and I will let you go having hoovered you into this video. When you dump the narcissist, when you abandon, when you break up with the narcissist, and even when the narcissist discards you, even when he discards you, discarding you, when the narcissist discards you, that's internal mortification. The narcissist has failed. Otherwise, why would he have to discard you?
For example, if he discards you and he devalues you, he has to admit that he had made a mistake when he had idealized you.
If I say to myself, she's stupid and ugly, I have to get rid of her. I also instantly have to ask myself, then how come did you consider her beautiful and intelligent only two years ago? Were you wrong then or are you wrong now? Are you capable of being wrong?
The discard phase is a challenge to grandiosity because to devalue your intimate partner and then to discard her, you must admit that you had made a mistake when you had idealized her.
So there's a mortification there and exactly this mortification pushes the narcissist to hoover because even the discard and of course when you break up with the narcissist or you dump people, you cheat on him, all these events are mortifying events and it's a challenge to the narcissist's grandiosity.
He needs to resolve the mortification and he resolves the mortification by converting it into either external or internal.
In a minute, we're connected to hoovering.
The narcissist, when he discards you, devalues and discards you or when you devalue and discard the narcissist, because you remember this process of idealization is mutual. The narcissist idealizes you, you idealize the narcissist. It's co-idealization, co-idealization.
Devaluation is the same, co-devaluation. You devalue the narcissist, the narcissist devalues you, whichever the case may be. It's mortifying.
If you are the one who had dumped the narcissist, it's definitely mortifying. If he is the one who had discarded you, he has to admit that he had made a mistake when he had idealized you. That's mortifying. It's a challenge to grandiosity.
So he can then choose. Once mortification sets in, he must choose between external and internal.
He can say, well, good riddance, she's a slut, she's stupid, she's ugly, she's fat, she's old, she's whatever. So external mortification involves overt devaluation. Blaming the other, she's evil, she's malicious, she conspired against me, she stabbed me in the back, she betrayed me.
External mortification is transferring the locus of control to you.
But this creates thelocus of control to you. You are in control. You had implemented your evil scheme, and he was your raw material. The narcissist was a victim. Being a victim and being a god, doesn't sit well together. God is not a victim. God's son was a victim, but God is not a victim.
So it's a problem for the narcissist to maintain both simultaneously. It creates what we call cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, the narcissist believes himself to be God. And on the other hand, here is the victim of a woman he had just devalued.
So he is not only a victim, he's a victim of an inferior person.
Motifying.
If he chooses internal mortification, it's even worse because he says, you know, I pushed her away. I made her cheat on me. I abused her. I mistreated her. I rejected her and humiliated her and abandoned her long before she did. I'm still in control. I made this happen.
Okay. If you're still in control and you made this happen, you made what happen? You made what happen? You destroyed your relationship. You proved yourself an idiot for having idealized the wrong person. What did you make happen?
So in both cases, there's a challenge of grandiosity and the only way to restore the grandiosity is to hover you.
Hovering is about restoring grandiosity. End of story. There's no other motive to hovering. People keep asking me, why does he hover me? He has, you know, another source of supply. He's married. He's hoovering you. Not because not only when he doesn't have other sources of supply, that's functional hoovering. And that's not okay. He's hoovering you, not usually. He's trying to hoover you mainly to restore his grandiosity.
Very, very few occasions, it has to do with practical, functional, utilitarian thinking like I don't have a source of supply.
I'll go back to Amanda, or I don't have a shared fantasy. Let's try to reestablish a shared fantasy and I will re-idealize Amanda so that she can fit into the new shared fantasy.
It's hard work to hoover, to re-idealize. It's counterfactual. You have to fight yourself. You have to, and again, you have to admit that you're wrong because you had devalued Amanda only two weeks ago. Why are you hoovering her now? I mean, two weeks ago, she was an idiot. Stupid, ugly. What happened in these two weeks? I mean, it's the fastest diet on earth. So there's a lot of it. There are many internal contradictions in hoovering. It's a very fraught and problematic process for the narcissists.
So he hovers you to restore his grandiosity. And the aim, even sometimes unconscious aim, is to hoover you.
And then when he succeeds, to immediately dump you, vindictively. A lot of hoovering is concerned with revenge, with punishment.
Hoovering is intended to reaffirm the narcissist's grandiosity. I'm irresistible. I'm amazing. I'm the one and only. I'm unique. She can't find a substitute for me. So this is reaffirmation of grandiosity, rebuilding it.
The second reason is to punish you for your transgression, transgressions for not fitting into the shared fantasy, for not fulfilling your maternal role, for failing as a mother, for not being his admirer and fan, unthinking admirer and fan, for not catering to his sexual kinkiness and sadism, for letting him down and disappointing him by not agreeing to participate in his adventures as a playmate.
There are numerous reasons why you had let, why you had kind of let him down. And these are transgressions, especially if you cheated on him or stole his money or something. If you really did something, not okay if you had misbehaved.
So he needs to punish you for the transgressions.
Motive number one, restore grandiosity. Motive number two, punish her. It's a penal, punitive measure.
And reason number three is to teach you to behave yourself in the future, to condition you.
Hoovering is a form of operant conditioning. It's a form of intermittent reinforcement.
I discard you, I hoover you. I discard you, I hoover you. Hot and cold, warm and frizzy, loving, hating. It's intermittent reinforcement and it creates trauma bonding.
Hoovering is a long term, non-contemporous, non-contemminous. That means it's a long term form of intermittent reinforcement, where the reinforcement the opposite reinforcement comes a bit later, is divorced in time.
Because most intermittent reinforcement is immediate.
I hate you now, I love you in two hours. This is, I hate you now, I love you in two years. So it's very, very long, intermittent reinforcement, but it is and it creates trauma bonding.
It teaches you to behave yourself in the future. It's exactly like housebreaking a pet. You housebreak your dog, you housebreak your cat, don't pee on the carpet and don't pee on Sam, etc.
So he's domesticating you, he's conditioning you and molding you Pygmalion Galatea style to be his perfect snapshot. He is reverting you to the snapshot so that you can fulfill your role in a shared fantasy.
These are the functions of Hoovering and it's intimately connected to the mortification that he had experienced when his grandiosity had been challenged in the disintegration of the shared fantasy.
When in the face that the shared fantasy disintegrates, whichever solution he chooses, internal mortification or external mortification, his grandiosity is severely tested.
If he chooses external mortification, you control the situation. You had the upper hand, you in your evil mind, wicked schemes and so on, you destroyed him.
He had been the victim, but that means that he's helpless, he's not omnipotent, he's not godlike. That's mortification.
If he chooses internal mortification, he stupidly destroyed the shared fantasy. He misjudged you when he had idealized you. It reflects badly on him. It also leads to mortification and mortification forces him to compensate by Hoovering.
Hoovering is a compensatory grandiosity reconstruction measure which at the same time molds you, changes you, conditions you and transforms you to become such a partner in a future shared fantasy who will not force the shared fantasy again into bankruptcy.
Be the right partner, the hoover, noise, admirer, sex slave, mother. Got it, kiddos?
Okay, until next time.