Here's to love. You ask any narcissist and they will tell you that they are capable of loving the way no one else can. Their love is the deepest, most profound, most authentic and authentic, most true, most engulfing and encompassing and reassuring and caring the way the narcissist loves is the ultimate and the only way to love.
Everyone should come to the narcissist to learn how to love.
The narcissist's love is "echt" and all other types of love are "erzats" for the German speakers among you.
So today we are going to discuss the question, how does the narcissist experience his love?
Why does he convince himself that he is loving, caring?
In which way leads him to label the internal processes and emotions that drift inside him and sometimes overwhelm him? Which way leads him to mislabel them as love?
Remember the following, once and for all.
Narcissists are incapable of love. Narcissists have no access to any positive emotion because early on in childhood they have learned to associate love and intimacy and caring and acceptance and all these very positive behaviors and traits, "sakor" and they've learned to associate all these with hurt, with pain, with exploitation, with instrumentalization, with parentification.
They've learned that love and intimacy end in inevitable heartbreak and therefore it's better to stay away.
So the narcissist needs to engage in extreme self-deception, sleight of hand, presited digitization in order to convince himself that what he is feeling at any given moment is actually love. Anything that starts with "el", the "el" word, is anathema, a threat to the narcissist.
And yet all narcissists claim that they are the greatest lovers ever, emotionally and needless to say, sexually as well.
Today we're going to analyze the roots of this self-deception and what is it that the narcissist is going through, what does he experience to render him so convinced that he is in love?
You all know by now that what the narcissist calls love is actually the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy involves an initial stage known as love bombing, regrettably it includes the word "love" which is very misleading, it's more akin to brainwashing, it involves a mechanism known as entraining, so it has nothing to do with love.
Love bombing has nothing to do with love and a lot to do with bombing.
Ask any "gazan".
So the shared fantasy involves an initial stage of love bombing in which the narcissist internalizes the potential intimate partner, introjects her and then idealizes her.
And please don't get on my case in the comments section. When I say "he", it applies to "she", when I say "she", it applies to "he".
Gender pronouns are interchangeable because half of all diagnosed narcissists nowadays are women, regrettably. They caught up with men.
So shared fantasy, love bombing, idealization, you're all acquainted with this.
But I think what many of you don't realize is that the shared fantasy and most specifically the idealization phase, these are defenses.
The narcissist is terrified of the other sex in case he is a heterosexual, he's terrified of intimacy, he dreads intimacy, he has learned to associate intimacy with excruciating pain, heartbreak, devastation and possibly mortification. So he's terrified, he's in a state of terror.
The shared fantasy triggers in the narcissist early childhood traumas because he tends to convert his intimate partner into a maternal mother figure. Everything that has gone awry, everything has gone bad between him and his biological mother of origin, his real mother, is reenacted and replayed within the shared fantasy. The narcissist is prone to hurt aversion, he is averse to hurt because he doesn't have very good defenses when it comes to pain.
Narcissists are actually overt and covert, are actually quite fragile and that's why the compensatory mechanism of pathological narcissism is so rigid and uncompromising because it's actually very vulnerable and very fragile.
So narcissists are afraid of pain, they dread intimacy and love and so when they spot a potential intimate partner, they defend against this eventuality, against this potentiality of pain by imposing on the situation a fantasy, by rendering the partner unreal, idealizing her.
So if the partner is unreal and if the whole situation is a fantasy, the narcissist cannot get hurt, he cannot experience pain, he cannot be devastated or heartbroken because it's all a fantasy controlled by the narcissist and because the partner is no longer there.
The external object which is the partner has been relegated to the outer darkness and the narcissist continues to interact with a pliable, malleable, controllable internal object.
All this is a very complex defense and it has another layer or another explanation if you wish.
Once the narcissist has idealized his partner, he convinces himself that the partner will never hurt him, the partner will never harm him, the partner will never cause him pain, inflict pain on him, the partner will never betray him.
Why?
Because she is perfect, she is ideal.
An ideal partner doesn't do such things.
An ideal partner in other words is safe.
So one of the functions of idealization is to render the partner safe, to defend the partner, to take away her bite and her sting, to de-weaponize her, to decommission her.
By idealizing her and then interacting only with the idealized internal object, the narcissist actually feels safe because now she is ideal and ideal mothers don't do this to their children.
She will not hurt me, the narcissist says.
Additionally, the process of idealization involves co-idealization.
The narcissist owns an ideal, perfect object, the intimate partner, that renders the narcissist perfect and ideal.
Only ideal and perfect people possess ideal and perfect people.
So in the famous sentence, hurt people, hurt people, perfect people possess perfect people.
So by idealizing his intimate partner, the narcissist himself becomes perfect and ideal.
And so by being perfect and ideal, the narcissist becomes divine, above reproach, above criticism, invulnerable, impermeable, impregnable, invincible.
So the process of idealization is a defense on multiple levels.
On the one hand, the shared fantasy, it's a fantasy, nothing bad can happen to me, it's a dream, I can wake up.
Second thing, my partner is ideal, so she's not going to hurt me.
Thirdly, I'm ideal because I have an ideal partner, so I can never be hurt in principle. I am untouchable, unhurtable, invulnerable because I'm ideal. I'm ideal.
And all the childhood traumas that are going to be replayed and reenacted in the shared fantasy, I can cope with them. They're not going to touch me. I'm one step removed.
So in effect, the shared fantasy, and especially the idealization phase in the shared fantasy, is not only defensive, it's also dissociative. It's as if the narcissist depersonalizes and derealizes.
By creating a shared fantasy, the narcissist becomes an observer of the shared fantasy, thereby depersonalizing. He is not present in the shared fantasy in person. He also derealizes the situation, the relationship. He renders it fantastic, imaginary, a paracosm, a virtual reality.
That way, the narcissist feels that he has recreated a secure base, a maternal figure, a mother who is also a secure base because she cannot hurt him.
There are so many defenses embedded in the shared fantasy against pain and against hurt that the narcissist finally feels safe, secure, stable, able to interact.
Interact with the internal objects in his mind, but even so, now he can reenact and replay the conflicts with his mother on the way to separation and debilitation without any dread and any fear. He recreates a secure base and then he feels that it's okay to engage in symbiosis, to become one with the intimate partner the way he used to be with his mother, but with the aim of this time breaking up, separating and individuating.
Back to the womb, but only in order to be reborn. Back to mummy in order to reject her, separate from her, become an individual.
But the mummy in this case, the mummy, I mean, with an "O" the mother, in this case, the intimate partner rendered a maternal figure is this time truly a secure base.
The narcissist is in control of the whole situation. The shared fantasy is the narcissist. The internal object is owned by the narcissist. The internal object is idealized and perfect. It's harmless.
The narcissist is ideal and perfect. Can't be harmed.
Now let the games begin.
The theater production is on.
Now the shared fantasy, you could ask, "So, okay, what's the difference between a shared fantasy and infatuation or limerence?"
In all this situation, there are some cognitive distortions. We tend to minimize the bad aspects, the shortcomings, the negative dimensions of our intimate partner and emphasize her positive traits, behaviors, looks, and so on.
This happens in the initial stages of liberation and infatuation when you fall in love.
When you fall in love, you don't see your partner as she is. You see your partner as you wish she was.
So there is a lot of cognitive distortion in falling in love.
What's the difference between a shared fantasy and infatuation or limerence?
Well, huge differences, enormous differences.
And anyone who says the shared fantasy is common, a common feature of all romantic and intimate relationships, number one, has zero knowledge in psychology and number two has never really experienced romantic intimate relationships.
He has always engaged in shared fantasies.
In short, anyone who says that a shared fantasy is a feature of all romantic intimate relationships is a narcissist, a covert narcissist maybe, but definitely a narcissist.
Now let me help out here.
And let me delineate and enumerate the myriad differences, profound fundamental differences between a shared fantasy and the type of blindness that is inherent in initial phases of infatuation and limerence and are not denying that there is such blindness.
Now, point number one.
The shared fantasy is asymmetrical. It is anomic or antisocial on the part of the narcissist and rigid, rigidly regulated the part of the partner.
What I'm trying to say is this.
The narcissist feels at liberty to behave in the shared fantasy without any rules, regulations, norms, that's why we call it anomie, without norms, not normative.
The narcissist does not succumb to any agreements, does not honor any contracts. He is a law unto himself.
And in this sense, in a shared fantasy, narcissists are a bit psychopathic. They're antisocial and they display anomie. They improvise on the fly. They create new rules all the time to suit themselves and to cater to their needs and to convenience them.
The partner, however, has to rigidly adhere and conform to the narcissist edicts, decrees, promulgations and rules. So the partner is put in a straight jacket. She must honor the code imposed by the narcissist and consistently revised. And if she doesn't, she's penalized heavily.
While the narcissist is at liberty to behave any which way he wants, he's totally free to do as he wishes.
So the structure of the shared fantasy doesn't resemble at all any type of normal healthy relationship, let alone a loving relationship.
The narcissist from the get go, from the first second, is the boss, is in charge, is the law, dictates, determines, punishes, rewards, intermittent reinforcement, bullying, they're all built into the law bombing and the idealization phases.
These phases are defensive as far as the narcissist is concerned, but they're coercive as far as the partner is concerned.
The narcissist feels that he's a king, a king like in the early Middle Ages, unbridled and unencumbered by any outside authority with the exception maybe of God.
So it's a kingdom.
The shared fantasy is a kingdom.
That's why it is very reminiscent of a fairy tale.
That is not my insight. That is Bruno Bettelheim's insight.
The shared fantasy of the narcissist is reminiscent of a fairy tale because he is a king.
And his intimate partner, in the best case, may be a princess.
But it's all structured the way a fairy tale is structured.
And a fairy tale is structured very like a dream.
It's a dreamscape. It's surrealistic.
That's why people, including self-styled experts, mistake this behavior for gaslighting.
It's not that the narcissist deliberately and premeditatedly falsifies reality in order to manipulate the intimate partner towards some goal.
That is gaslighting. That is what psychopaths do.
No, the narcissist truly believes in the veracity, in the applicability, in the truthfulness and authenticity of the shared fantasy.
As far as he's concerned, it's real. And it's a kingdom.
When he's in the shared fantasy, he feels God-like, king-like. Everything is possible.
This landscape of infinite possibility, all potentials are there.
The narcissist feels he can self-actualize in every which way he chooses. He is protean, he's shape-shifting within the shared fantasy, not because he's malevolent or manipulative. He's shape-shifting within the shared fantasy because it's huge fun.
He feels finally freed, relieved. It's a little like a child playing in a sandbox.
And he perceives his intimate partner as a plaything or a playmate.
And I have a video dedicated to this.
So shared fantasy is not infatuation and limerence. It's what unidirectional. It's the narcissist's emanation, the ectoplasm of the narcissist.
The intimate partner is just a guest, a visitor, a tourist in this delusional kingdom of the narcissist.
And because he is just a guest, a figment, a relic, and the mentor, she's utterly interchangeable. Unreplaceable.
Which is not the case when you are infatuated with someone.
When you're infatuated with someone, we have limerence, you're focused on a highly specific individual. And you can't just switch on a dime to another individual.
That is not the case with the narcissist.
Once the narcissist has devalued and discarded you, he could switch to another target with the same fervor, with the same intensity, with the same involvement and investment and commitment and protestations of love and you name it, he could switch within the hour, literally.
And I'm kidding, you know.
This is the first difference.
I mentioned intensity.
Shared fantasy's intensity is far higher, far greater than anything in infatuation and ignorance.
And that is because the shared fantasy is a form of controlled dysregulation.
The narcissist, remember that narcissism is a form of failed borderline. Pathological narcissism is a failed borderline personality organization.
Whereas the borderline emotionally dysregulates, the narcissist has learned to repress and suppress his emotions to the point that he has no positive emotions.
And definitely he cannot be overwhelmed by these emotions.
But the shared fantasy provides him with an opportunity to experience proxy emotions, echoes, echoes, imitations of emotions, mimicked emotions, and to feel dysregulated in a controlled environment.
It's like he says, it's safe.
The shared fantasy is safe.
My partner is safe. Everything there is a secure base.
And within this secure base, let me explore this arcane topic of emotions. Let me dysregulate a bit.
Nothing will happen. It's okay. I can always turn it off. I can always exit the shared fantasy.
And this is of course, what junkies tell themselves about their drug of choice.
Ask any grandiose coke addict and they will tell you that they are fully in control of their habit.
The shared fantasy in other words, is an addiction.
Whereas infatuation and limerence are not addictive. They're intense. They're overpowering. They can even overwhelm you, dysregulate you, but they're not addictive.
The shared fantasy is addictive.
Pay attention.
In infatuation and limerence, your focus is your partner. In the shared fantasy, the addiction is not to the partner. It's to the shared fantasy.
The narcissist is addicted to this space like an opium den. You know, this 19th century opium den is addicted to this space where he can enter and perhaps be himself. A space where he can enter and whatever he likes, including experience what he believes erroneously to be emotions and dysregulation.
So this is a space that is a simulation or imitation of mortification, actually. In real narcissistic mortification, the narcissist experiences real emotions.
Consequently, he falls apart. He dysregulates completely and he becomes a borderline.
Emotions is in the wake of mortification become borderlines and experience emotions. That's the reason they disintegrate and that's the reason they become highly suicidal.
But within the shared fantasy, the experience is not that of real emotions. The experience is that of imitations, fakes.
Still the perception of safety of the space, space as a secure base allows the narcissist to travel a bit into himself and it's an addictive.
Of course, the narcissist is auto-erotic and the narcissist is affected emotionally invested in himself.
So the shared fantasy allows the narcissist to fall in love with himself by exploring himself within the shared fantasy, which is a secure base, a safe space by exploring himself.
The narcissist develops infatuation.
Yes, but with himself.
The two parties in the shared fantasy fall in love with themselves.
The narcissist intimate partner in the shared fantasy falls in love with her idealized image seen through the narcissist gaze.
The narcissist falls in love with his newly discovered terrain, his newly discovered self.
They're both solipsistic and autistic. They're in love with themselves.
The addictive component in the shared fantasy sets it apart from normal processes, which involve cognitive distortions, emotional dysregulation, but still they do not involve addiction.
The addiction is expressed in the shared fantasy in the form of immersion.
The shared fantasy is immersive.
When the narcissist embarks on a shared fantasy, when he commences with the process, everything else in his life dissipates and dissolves. Everything disappears and vanishes. He is focused 110% of the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy consumes and subsumes all the other areas and fields of the narcissist's life when it is in action and in force. It becomes the narcissist's life and the narcissist is immersed in the shared fantasy as a substitute life.
This, of course, doesn't happen in infatuation and liberence.
Next, in the shared fantasy, there is resonance. There is instant recognition. That's why people talk about twin flames and soulmates and other such nonsense. There is an immediate resonance that leads to a kind of self-recognition.
Remember that the intimate partner falls in love with her idealized image through the narcissist's gaze. She sees herself in the narcissist. She's likely to say, "No one has ever understood me so well. No one has ever seen me. No one has ever comprehended me.
No one, you know, because she feels fully grasped, fully glommed."
This is because both the narcissist and his typical intimate partner comefrom the same, from an identical early childhood background involving abuse and trauma, instrumentalizing and parentifying, idolizing, pedestalizing.
Whatever the case may be, they come from the same background. They have the same language. They can truly communicate on the most profound level, almost telepathically. They don't need to talk sometimes. Body language does the trick.
So this is a normal resonance.
This instant recognition of oneself in the other, they bond, they create a bond in an attachment which is also known as trauma bonding, in my viewmistakenly.
And this doesn't exist in infatuation and in limerence.
Reality testing in infatuation and in limerence is pretty much preserved according to studies.
You fall in love not with a figment of your imagination within a fantastic space, not with a character from a movie, but in the shared fantasy, these are twin processes of self-infatuation, autoerotism, and attraction to oneself via the agency of the partner, resonance.
Now the shared fantasy is, of course, a cognitive distortion writ large because it involves the misapprehension or misperception of oneself as ideal.
The narcissist regresses the intimate partner and the intimate partner regresses the narcissist and they become children and they see each other as children.
So the narcissist is his intimate partner's child and the intimate partner is the narcissist's child. He is her daddy, she is his mommy, but it's not really daddy, it's actually a mother figure.
So there is an issue here that grandiosity takes over because the image, the mutual image is ideal.
This process of idealization culminates in grandiosity.
When the intimate partner falls in love with her idealized image through the narcissist's eyes, she also, of course, is idealizing herself, which is the hallmark and the cornerstone of grandiosity.
There's a feeling, for example, of invincibility, a feeling that it's us against the world. We are winners, no one can break us apart.
Together, we are the strongest. We complement each other and we enhance and amplify, magnify and empower each other. This is mutual resonance of two self-infatuations.
This leads to a perception of wholeness.
In the shared fantasy, the partners feel that they are completing each other, that they are incomplete and imperfect without each other. So there is this wholeness, this oceanic feeling of becoming one.
It's not codependent merger and fusion. It's a different phenomenon. It's an interesting topic for a video, but it's really becoming one emotionally as well as rationally or intellectually.
The codependent mergers and fuses with the intimate partner in an instrumental way. It's a control technique. It's control from the bottom. It's a way to avoid abandonment. It's a way to manipulate the partner to perform certain tasks or accomplish certain goals. It's very instrumentalized.
In the shared fantasy, the wholeness, the feeling of completeness, has nothing to do with goals. It's not weaponized or instrumentalized. It just emerges from this symbiosis between mother and child, from going back to the womb. It's like being unborn. You know, you're unborn, you get a second chance.
It's absolutely intoxicating. It's intoxicating to get a true second chance.
Here you are. All your mishaps, all your mistakes, all your failures, all your defeats are erased with a magic wand.
Because you are regressed and regressed and regressed into the womb. You're unborn. Your life starts anew, afresh, from zero, from scratch.
Because now you're in the womb, you can be born again.
Christians, you can be born again.
The narcissist, and remember that in my view, narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a kind of private religion.
The narcissist allows you to be born again.
He does this by idealizing you, divorcing you from reality and from your own memory.
Kind of wiping the slate clean, regressing you to his womb and letting you be reborn as if he were Zeus, be reborn from himself.
This feeling of wholeness, this oceanic feeling of nirvana is irresistible, absolutely inebriating and addictive.
And so the shared fantasy, as distinct from infatuation or limerence, is inexorable.
People call it trauma bonding.
People say, you know, it's inexorable because of its own dynamics, not because of the people involved.
The bonding of the attachment within the shared fantasy is on multiple levels, on an eternal level, on an intimate popular level, sexual level, and so on.
But the inexorability of the shared fantasy is independent of the parties.
It's as if the shared fantasy acquires a life of its own.
And the parties are helpless to stop it.
Never mind how hard they want to stop it. Never mind how committed they are to reversing the process or eliminating it.
They simply can't. They fail.
And of course, the shared fantasy's ultimate goal is dissolution and disintegration of the shared fantasy.
So shared fantasy is a self-destructive process, a process that eliminates itself, that unwinds autonomously and automatically.
The aim of the shared fantasy is separation and individuation.
So shared fantasy always leads to devaluation and discard regardless of the partners' behaviors, choices, decisions, traits, or anything else to do with the partners, regardless even of any environment or environmental intervention or cues, regardless of any information.
The shared fantasy is a totally catalyzed chemical reaction that cannot be stopped or reversed in any way, shape, or form until it reaches its natural conclusion in separation and individuation.
The shared fantasy therefore, being inexorable, never reaches a plateau, never stabilizes.
It only transcends.
So shared fantasy is very transcendental because it always transcends.
There's always the next level.
It's a little like some video games or Scientology. There's always the next level.
And the partners are basically kind of observers. They are subject to forces internal and external that are stronger than them.
They're pretty helpless and hapless and tossed about like so many toys or playthings by the gay force of the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy is an escalating process. It never stops or stabilizes.
And of course, throughout this, there's impaired reality testing because it's a fantasy.
It's a divorce from reality. It's a power concern.
So this impaired reality testing leads to attribution errors.
Attribution errors is a fancy way of saying misunderstandings.
Intentions, motivations, expressions, speech acts, bodily cues, body language expressions, micro expressions. Everything is misattributed. It's actually misattributed because the misattribution is a critical fuel, the engine of the shared fantasy.
Shared fantasy thrives on conflict and drama and these mistakes. The friction that is created by these constant misreadings of each other. This friction drives a shared fantasy forward.
Let me explain to you why.
You remember the resonance. You remember that the two parties believed that they found each other, soulmates, twin flames, they found a reflection of themselves in the other. Each of the two parties believe that they are mirrors of each other. They are perfect replicas or clones of each other.
Now, consequently, if they remain inured, if they remain stuck in this perception of resonance, perfect resonance, completing each other, wholeness, nirvana, the whole thing will stagnate. The shared fantasy would stabilize.
So the shared fantasy has built-in mechanisms to create conflict. It's a conflict adversarial system and this conflict drives the shared fantasy from stage one to stage two to stage three and to the inevitable devaluation and discard.
Of course, during this entire process, because the parties are regressed, the parties are essentially infantile.
This mutual infantile regression, remember the narcissists sees the intimate partner as his mother and that means that he's a child. She sees him as her mother and that means she's a child.
So they constantly regress each other.
By behaving as mothers do, they regress each other.
And because they become infants, they revert or resort to infantile defense mechanisms such as splitting, all good, all bad.
The world is all bad. We are all good. You're all bad. I'm all good. I'm all bad. You're all good.
From the world to black and white thinking, decontinous thinking.
So splitting, projection, projection not only of negative traits, qualities and so on, weaknesses and so on, things you're ashamed of, projecting good things, projecting good qualities, projecting fantasies, wishes, projecting everything on the partner.
I wish she were intelligent and then projecting this on the partner and saying she is intelligent. I wish she were better looking and then projecting this on the partner and saying she's drunk, dead gorgeous.
So projection, projection in the shared fantasy is a bit abnormal because normally projection is of unwanted parts.
When you project, you project the things in you, the parts in you that you reject.
You're ashamed of something. You're afraid of something. You hate some things in yourself.
So you project them on other people.
But in the shared fantasy, a lot of the projection is of positive qualities and traits and so on, because this is the precondition for idealization.
Idealization involves projection because there's a need for co-idealization.
If as a narcissist in a shared fantasy, the narcissist projects good qualities, dreams, wishes, fantasies onto the partner so that he then can idealize himself.
Co-idealization is founded on projection. One could even argue it's a form of projection.
Of course, I said that the shared fantasy is a process of transcendence, but transcendence gives the wrong impression of going up.
Actually the shared fantasy deteriorates all the time, degenerates all the time, goes down.
So maybe it's not transcendence, it's descendants or whatever, but it's never stable. It's never stagnant. It's never actually safe and secure.
It's the most extremely imaginable insecure space because the relationship constantly deteriorates and leads to a lot of friction and fighting and aggression and verbal abuse and other types of abuse and so on, physicals and so on.
This creates a lot of anxiety in the borderline.
If the partner is a borderline, for example, there's an anxiety of abandonment and anxiety of engulfment.
But even when the two parties are narcissist and healthy person, there is anxiety of loss, also known as romantic jealousy. There is anxiety of rejection. There is anxiety of the impending and looming doom of the shared fantasy.
The end of the shared fantasy, the ending of the shared fantasy is pretty clear. It's clear to all parties that it's going nowhere, that it's in bad shape.
This creates a lot of anxiety and catastrophizing.
And these black spirits, these black winds swirl inside the shared fantasy.
Anxiety is enhanced all the time by the misbehavior of the partners.
Anxiety ensues because of the evident disintegration of the shared fantasy and its ultimate dysfunction in the discard phase.
So there's a lot of fear and terror and anxiety there.
And the partners attempt to reduce the anxiety, to ameliorate and mitigate it in a variety of ways.
For example, sexually, but not only sexually. For example, the narcissist's betrayal fantasy is a way to ameliorate anxiety.
The narcissist catastrophizes, anticipates loss and rejection, anticipates the partners cheating in fidelity and then encourages her to do it, thereby gaining illusory control over the situation. I made her do it. So it was my doing, so I'm still the boss, so I'm still in control, so I'm still God.
An example.
There are many ways to cope with the emerging overwhelming and disregulating anxieties within a shared fantasy.
And the irony is that the partners form the shared fantasy as an anxiolytic mechanism.
Remember that the shared fantasy is a defense against pain, against hurt, against devastation and against heartbreak, and then the parties find themselves trapped in the most heartbreaking space imaginable.
Where the attachment and the bonding are incredible on the one hand, and the ambivalence and the rage and the aggression and the hatred are equally strong.
Down between these two poles of becoming one and eliminating one, you end up with situations like for example Chris Watts.
There's a lot of negative affectivity in the shared fantasy.
Shared fantasy legitimizes emotions.
Remember the shared fantasy is the narcissist playground. It's where he dares to experiment and to explore himself and another person.
He feels, erroneously, that it is a secure base, but this also gives rise to a lot of negative affectivity.
The reason the narcissist denies his positive emotions, refuses to access them or to experience them, is that they bring on pain.
The narcissist's emotions in early childhood brought pain and hurt and devastation and heartbreak.
So he learned not to emote, not to have emotions, positive ones.
And here he is in the shared fantasy, in the space, where he can emote.
So when he tries to emote, all he gets is negative affectivity. All his extreme negative affects become even more extreme and escalate to the point of loss of control, coercion, abusive behaviors and worse.
So negative affectivity is unleashed like the genie from a bottle by the permissiveness and the ostensible freedom and the alleged control of the shared fantasy.
The narcissist says, "I'm in control of the shared fantasy. It's space. It's safe. It's a safe space. I don't need to worry. I can now experience emotions."
And then he finds out that he's drowning in negative emotions that are taking over like some kind of demon possession, if you wish, and render him utterly insane.
The negative affectivity neutralizes his ability to control anxiety, his anxiolytic control.
And the shared fantasy, which started off as a form of anxiolytic control, as a defense against hurt and pain and dysregulation, the shared fantasy then becomes a reification, an embodiment of everything the narcissist has been trying to avoid.
And of course, this is exactly how this shared fantasy is structured.
The shared fantasy renders the narcissist's life intolerable, unbearable and unacceptable within the shared fantasy.
So the narcissist runs out of the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy becomes this black hole, destructive neutron star. I don't know what metaphor I can use.
So it starts off as a promise. The shared fantasy starts off as a promise.
Here I am. I found a new mother. She's a secure base. I can now finally experience emotions. I can be a child again. I can start from fresh, anew, from scratch.
And then the shared fantasy deteriorates. It becomes a horror show where both partners are at each other's throats trying to annihilate and destroy each other.
And at the same time, deeply, deeply committed, deeply bonded and deeply attached to each other.
And it's excruciatingly painful and it drives the narcissist out of the shared fantasy, which is the aim of the shared fantasy, to expel the narcissist into a separation/individuation phase.
The narcissist could never separate and individuate from a maternal figure if the shared fantasy was cozy and fuzzy and wonderful and warm and ambience that you never want to leave.
The shared fantasy needs to become intolerable for the narcissist to embark on separation, individuation, via devaluation and discard.
In this sense, the shared fantasy encourages aggression via frustration.
The shared fantasy generates coercive, abusive behaviors and other forms of aggression which are more sublimated, more socially acceptable.
And the whole setup of the shared fantasy is intended to drive the narcissist away from the intimate partner to experience separation, however painful it may be, and then individuation.
Alas, it never works.
And if you want to know why it never works, you need to watch the videos in my shared fantasy playlist.
The narcissist is doomed, like Sisyphus at the time, to repeat the cycle again and again and again until the day he dies.