Hello, everybody. Today we are going to delve deeper into the relationship cycle with a narcissist.
What makes him tick? What makes you tick? And what makes both of you tick and talk?
And so the first thing which is critical to understand is that as far as the narcissist is concerned, giving, especially material giving, equals love, and love entitles him to abuse you.
The narcissist grew up in a household where love equaled abuse. Love led to abuse. Actually, abuse was the only form of attention, and abuse was proof of being noticed, of being seen.
Abuse was caring. It's like we say, sharing is caring in a narcissistic household.
Abusing is caring. If you abuse someone, it means you care about them. If you abuse someone, it means you love them. It means that they mean something to you. It renders the relationship meaningful.
So giving equals love, equals abuse, and giving, which is a way of showing love, demonstrating love, giving entitles the narcissist, so he feels, to abuse.
But it's a two-way street. The narcissist feels that it's okay to abuse him when he is the recipient of largess.
In other words, the narcissist thinks that giving entitles to abuse both ways, when he gives you material goods, when he gives you a home, when he gives you children, when he gives you attention, when he gives you anything.
Concomitantly, he had acquired the right to abuse you.
But similarly, when you had given him anything, when you had given him attention and care and empathy, anything, love, sex, the minute you had given him something, you, in his mind, had acquired the right to abuse him.
Actually, he fully expects abuse to follow the act of giving.
Because remember, giving is love, and in his childhood, love always came with abusive conduct. Love was always traumatic.
Also remember that it abuses many forms and facets.
So we are not talking about classical physical abuse only, or sexual abuse, but we are talking about all forms of abuse, when the child is not allowed to develop his or her own boundaries, when the child is not allowed to separate from the parent or individuate, when the child is instrumentalized, parentified, all these are forms of abuse.
The narcissist grew up learning to associate indelibly and inextricably. Bad behavior, misconduct, abuse, trauma, pain, hurt with love.
And then he made, he created in his mind, the erroneous equation. To love is to abuse, and to give is to love.
So to give entitles you to abuse, and if you receive, you should automatically expect to be abused.
I said in previous videos that when women cheat on the narcissist, when they abandon the narcissist, when they replace the narcissist with others, it ends up recreating the trauma that the narcissist had with his mother, and it results in mortification.
It's not the same with men.
When men replace the narcissist, as an advisor, as a collaborator, as a business partner, when the narcissist's clients or stakeholders, suppliers, customers of both sexes, replace him, dump him, as an advisor, as a guru, as a service provider, all these cause narcissistic injury. These are all painful, painful events and painful transitions, no question about it.
The narcissist's grandiosity is challenged, his self-image is perfect, his omnipotent is ruined, devastated by such abandonment, desertion and betrayal, as he perceives it.
But when he is abandoned and betrayed and replaced and substituted for by men in very well-defined functions, this causes him pain, it causes him hurt, it causes him to rage. I mean, it makes him rage, narcissistic rage is a reaction to narcissistic injury or narcissistic wound.
But that's where more or less it ends. It's not the same when women cheat on him and abandon him.
At that point, there's mortification.
And there's mortification because it recreates early childhood conflicts, especially with a maternal figure.
So when women replace the narcissist as a man, as a lover, as a husband, it causes mortification and only women possess this power, men can't do this to the narcissist.
I'm talking about a heterosexual narcissist.
There's a deeper reason for this.
The narcissist interacts with women in two roles, as a child and as a father.
On the one hand, he's a delightful or obnoxious British child. On the other, he's a disciplinarian, harsh, stern and demanding father.
These are the only two roles he knows.
The narcissist doesn't know to be a man because his gender differentiation, the process by which we acquire gender roles, has been disrupted early on. His identity is malformed, ill-formed, not complete, and a crucial part of one's identity is one's gender.
And so the narcissist is genderless. He has no gender.
What he does instead, he imitates, he emulates other roles that he had seen. He knows how to be a child because he used to be a child and because he had observed children.
So he pleased a child. He knows how to be a father because in all probability he had a very, very harsh, demanding, strict, disciplinarian and possibly physically abusive father.
So this he knows how to do. And he does this. He knows how to be a narcissist because usually one of his parents is narcissistic or selfish or emotionally absent or depressive or what Green called the dead mother.
So he knows how to do this.
So when he approaches a woman, when he teams up with a woman, when he starts a relationship with a woman, the heterosexual narcissist immediately is cast in one of two roles, one of two functions, as her child or as her father.
So when women reject the narcissist, it recreates the dynamic, the family dynamic of a dead mother, a mother who abandons him, maternal abandonment.
When a woman rejects the narcissist, betrays the narcissist, adandons the narcissist, they are doing this as a mother would reject her child as the narcissist's mother had rejected and abandoned him.
It's a recreation. It's a reenactment. It's a déjà vu. It's re-traumatization.
And so it's a flashback in a way, an extended, extended flashback like in PTSD, in post-traumatic stress disorder.
The narcissist perceives such misbehavior. If his woman cheats on him, if she abandons him, she betrays him in any way. If she upsends herself and withdraws, he perceives all this as a mother doing it to her son.
He feels rejected as a child and would not as an adult would, but as a childhood.
And when women prefer other men to him, when his spouse or his girlfriend or whoever dumps him, abandons him, and cheats on him, in other words, prefers another man to him, he perceives it as having adopted another child to take his place.
It's like his mother had adopted another child, and this child replaces him, substitutes for him.
Now, this is a life-threatening thing. It's about survival.
Because if a baby is abandoned by mommy, if a child is ignored, is not seen, is not noticed, if no one takes care of the needs of the child, this child dies.
Children don't have their wiggle, the capacities and the skill sets to survive without adults.
So if mommy cheats on me, if mommy abandons me, if mommy betrays me, and if mommy goes with another man, especially if she does it ostentatiously so that I see it and I witness it, I can't ignore it, that's life-threatening.
That's about survival. Because it's a mother abandoning her child.
It's exactly like the narcissist's original mother.
The birth mother had abandoned him, and even then he failed. He had failed life-threatening. He had failed that his survival is at stake.
Such misconduct or such behavior by the woman reaffirms and confirms to the narcissist his essential unlovable.
The narcissist had been taught as a child to consider himself inadequate, somehow deformed and defective, unworthy, definitely unworthy of unconditional love, bad, a failing object.
The narcissist garnered love, received love as a child only when he had met certain performance criteria. That's why in his mind giving is associated with love, is associated with abuse, which is to receive his mother's love or parental love more generally.
The narcissist had to give as a child. He had to give something. He had to perform. He had to meet some criteria, good marks at school, or reciting a poem, or just being cute. He had to meet these criteria. He had to do things. He had to give things. Otherwise, he did not receive love.
And so when, as an adult, his intimate partner abandons him, cheats on him, betrays him, et cetera, et cetera, he says to himself, well, actually she's right. My mother also broadcast to me when I was a child that I'm not lovable as I am, that I'm somehow unworthy of love, inadequate.
So it amplifies this very pernicious and self-destructive message.
When women swap the narcissist for a substitute man, and especially if they do it conspicuously, overtly, openly in front of him, or when they inform the narcissist about their cheating in detail.
Yes, there's also this.
Women call the narcissist and tell him what they've done.
Well then, it becomes impossible to interpret their behavior in any other way.
The narcissist is caged into a hermeneutic space, a space of explanatory space.
And his entire childhood, and frankly, many of his adult experiences, because narcissists keep experiencing loss all the time, narcissists go through multiple breakups.
Narcissists are cheated on, betrayed, abandoned repeatedly. And for good reason, they're abusive, but still, this is their experience.
They have this explanatory space, and they reframe everything to fit this space.
And this space says, as I am, no one can love me. To be loved, I need to give.
But then if I give, I resent it. And I have the right to abuse, because this is the cost.
The cost of my giving, the cost of my love, is the right to abuse.
And vice versa, if I get anything, if someone gives me something, they have a right to abuse me.
It goes without saying.
And then if they abandon me, if they cheat on me, if they betray me, if they replace me with some substitute, that only serves to prove that I had been right. I had been right.
One, I'm not lovable.
Two, everything is transactional.
The narcissist, as I said in previous video, refrains women's rejection and cheating and betrayal as total.
It's in a way women reject his totality, his entire being, and in every possible role that he knows how to play, as a child, as a lover, as a companion, as a guru, as a husband, as a father, even as a provider.
The narcissist doesn't know how to be a man.
Narcissist can be charming, can be fascinating, can be amazing, can be captivating, can be hypnotic, can be irresistible.
But if you dig deeper, if you are true to yourself and honest, you will see that you were attracted to the narcissist, not really as a man, but within a shared fantasy.
And within this shared fantasy, within this fantastic space, the narcissist played the role of a father and later your child.
These are powerful roles. They resonate with every woman. Every woman has daddy issues and every man has mommy issues.
Freud discovered it 120 years ago.
So the narcissist resonates with your daddy issues.
And then when he has insinuated himself into your life, when he has invaded your space, when he has taken over you, when he had consumed you like a body snatcher or a mind snatcher, he then suddenly transforms and becomes a child.
And this is an even more powerful trigger.
It triggers your maternal instincts.
We'll come to it in a few minutes.
These dual roles are as potent, as powerful as the role of a man.
So even though the narcissist doesn't know how to be a man, he knows how to bond with you. He knows how to get you attached to him. He knows even how to make you addicted to his presence because he plays the double role of father and child.
And these are very critical roles.
But why does the narcissist feel that he is the rejected party if he is the one doing all the rejecting to start with?
It is the narcissist who starts, narcissist who boots up the cycle of abuse.
The first acts of condescension, mockery, derision, aggression, humiliation, degradation, defiling, sexual and otherwise.
These first acts, they are all the narcissist.
The narcissist starts this.
The narcissist introduces maltreatment, mistreatment into the relationship.
He's the one, he's the first one. He's the initiator. He's the first mover. He at first rejects you. He takes a lot of rejection and humiliation, a lot of torment and taunting and teasing and torture to push you away to the point that you betrayed the narcissist or abandon him or cheat on him.
And the narcissist is fully invested emotionally and as far as resources in pushing you away.
So if the narcissist is at the crux of all this, if the narcissist is the pivot, if he is the heart of the hurricane and the vortex, if he does the rejection and the humiliation and the abuse, why does he feel that he had been rejected? Why would you finally go away, when you finally do abandon him, when you do betray him as he sees it?
And the few of you who do cheat on him, when you do all this, why does he perceive it as misconduct? Why does he say, I don't deserve any of this? Is he insane? Is he that dissociative? Doesn't he remember that he is the one to have put you through a grinder? He is the one who has molested you, hurt you, caused you in insufferable pain, led you inexorably to the edge of insanity? Doesn't he realize all this?
Well, he does, but as usual for a narcissist, he reframes and reinterprets a lot.
The narcissist believes that there is a qualitative difference between his rejection and your rejection.
His rejection of you, when he rejects you, it's only a test. It's posturing. It's not serious. It's a bluff. It's a facade baby. I didn't mean it. Sorry, you know me. I'm like that. Temper, can't control, drank too much. Let's forget it. Let's put it behind us.
Why do you hold grudges? Why can't you forget? Why can't you forgive? Why do you ruminate?
So, as far as the narcissist is concerned, his rejection is a trifle. It's circumstantial. It's incidental. It's tangential. It's not serious. It's not profound. It's nothing to get excited and aroused about. It's nothing to get worked over. It's definitely nothing to hold in memory.
And so the narcissist is shocked that you should consider his abuse to be meaningful, to be foundational, to be irreversible, to be something that traumatized you.
It is absolutely short. He perceives his own abuse as kind of a jocular misbehavior that is out of his control.
Kind of, you know, I can't help it.
The etiology is different. The motivation is different between his abuse and your abuse.
He thinks that his rejection of you, when he humiliates you, when he insults you, when he berates you, even in public, he thinks this is tentative, intermittent. Anyhow, it's targeted. It's a specific issue. And it's perspective.
He's testing you. He's asking you via his abuse.
His abuse is a way of asking, will my needs be met by you? Will you meet my needs? Am I too crippled to invalid, to be worthy of your investment, your commitment, your unconditional love?
He's pushing you to the limit to see where is the limit. He's thinking outside the box, out of the envelope. He's taking you by the hand to regions of the earth, regions of your relationships, areas of your relationships, spaces within your relationships that you never knew existed, that are harrowing and horrifying and hugely hurtful, even traumatizing.
And he's doing all this, he does all this, he just wants to see how far can you go and not abandon him. Are you truly good enough mother material? Or are you like all of them, all the other women in his life, starting with his mother, essentially emotionally absent, dead, you will not meet his needs, you will abandon him, betray him, cheat on him, etc.
He's testing you.
So in his mind, his abuse is not the same like your abuse.
Your rejection is of different matter. It's made up of a different fabric.
Your rejection is not his rejection.
If you cheat on him, it's not the same like if he cheats on you. If you humiliate him, it's not the same.
Everything you do has a different motivation, different etiology, different causation, different reasoning and different outcomes.
What he does may look on the surface equal, same, similar to what you do, but what you do is much more meaningful, much more weighty.
Your rejection is final, is total, and your rejection is retroactive because he says the whole relationship sucks, my needs have not been met.
You, the narcissist, you're not worth wasting time on.
So while his abuse and rejection are pinpointed, pre-pointed, shall I say, testing, and not very serious, definitely not to be taken seriously, your abuse is earth-shattering, devastating, destructive, final, total, horrible, mortified.
In short, there's no equivalence or symmetry between the narcissist's rejection of you and your rejection of the narcissist.
The narcissist rejects you as the child would reject his mother.
It's a harmless, though unpleasant temper tantrum, coupled with understandable sexlessness because you are his mother.
Cerebral narcissists rarely cheat, actually. They do not replace their intimate partner with another and they also rarely harm their intimate partner.
Cerebral narcissists are much more reticent, they're schizoid, they're withdrawn. They hurt and they cause pain with their withholding and with their absence.
But even somatic narcissists, both types of narcissists, reject you as a child would reject a mother.
Now a mother wouldn't take a child's rejection seriously. She would overcome it and she would continue to love the child the same.
Nothing will change in her emotions, in her commitment to the child, in her love for the child, in her urge to satisfy the child, to meet the child's needs and to care for the child. Nothing will change because the child had rejected her. Or even abused her.
Children abuse, children reject, children cause pain, you don't dump them, you don't abandon them, you don't cheat on them, you don't replace them with other children.
The narcissist loves you as a child and you reject him as a mother.
And so your rejection is life threatening. It's harrowing, it's hurtful, it's something the narcissist cannot process.
He perceives as betrayal and his replacement with other men.
He perceives as absolutely a death sentence, a death warrant.
So while the narcissist considers his abuse to be the equivalent of shooting a revolver in the air, your abuse is detonating a nuclear device.
Your response is a nuclear option. It's totally disproportionate to the narcissist's provocations as he sees them.
You are reacting to the breakdown and the dysfunction of the idealized version of the narcissist, not to the narcissist himself. You are reacting to your broken dreams, to your frustrated fantasies, to your thwarted wishes.
And the narcissist bears the brunt of this dissonance, of this heartbreak.
And the narcissist says, why do I have to pay for your heartbreak? Why do I have to pay because you were deluded and lived in fantasy or expected too much of me? Why do I have to pay the price for your lack of reality testing, impaired perception of reality?
Nevermind that he is the one, he is the one who had created the fantastic psychotic space which you now inhabit.
He doesn't see his role in this. He doesn't see his responsibility.
And he is mortified because during the grooming and the love of being in the honeymoon phase, he colluded with you in conjuring up an idealized version of him.
And then later he came to believe in this idealized version as both of you had entered the shared fantasy.
Your abrupt, your cruel exit, abandonment forces him to wake up and contrast the idealized embraced beloved version of him and the real rejected abandoned him.
The narcissist suddenly faces the fact that the idealized version of him, the story you had both constructed as to who he is, it's fake, it's unreal, it's not true.
And the real version of him, who he really is, is not worthy of love, is worthy only of rejection, worthy only of betrayal, worthy only of cheating, only of abandoning.
So it reaffirms to him his own miserableness, the waste, the wasteland that is his life and his lack, essential lack of loveability.
And he feels deceived and he feels bitter because early on in the shared fantasy, he had exposed to you the child.
He actually used the child to lure you in. He introduced you to his inner child, introduced you to the child because he had hoped that you will fall in love with the child and this will establish object constancy, you will never abandon him.
It was intended to forestall abandonment.
He wanted you to bond with him as a mother bonds with a child. Mothers never abandon their children.
Women abandon their men, spouses abandon their wives, about abandon their husbands, but mothers never abandon children.
So he presented to you the child and he made you fall in love with the child and he made you want to protect the child and to care for the child.
And there was this guarantee against being abandoned and cheated on and betrayed.
And then it didn't work and he feels very, very hurt, very bitter, very deceived, very angry.
Why, he asked himself, she knew I were a child. Why did she choose to ignore it? Why didn't she tell me from the very beginning, sorry, you're a child and I want to be with you?
He thought, the narcissist thought that his child role, his child function was an integral, an essential part of the deal that he had struck with his intimate partner, with his counterparty.
When his intimate partner cheats on him, betrays him, abandons him, they're doing it to the child and they're breaking contract because the narcissist feels that he had a contract with his intimate partner.
Narcissist grew up in a transactional home where everything is a contract, give and take, business. And he feels he doesn't deserve it.
And plus, the child is sick, is narcissistic or mentally ill and it renders the abandonment and the betrayal of the child even more egregious, even more cruel and heartless.
I mean, how can you abandon a mentally ill child who needs you so much, who so critically depends on you for the regulation of his internal environment, who can't essentially exist without you in the fullest sense of the world?
To do this, you must be very heartless and cruel and disempathic and sadistic.
Of course, a projection, the narcissist is projecting his own traits.
During the grooming phase, actually the narcissist trots out the father.
During the grooming phase, the narcissist is much more likely to show you the father, the father aspect, the father role or the father function, the facade of the father.
He homes in, he zeros in and he picks, usually, women who have daddy issues, with their original fathers, an absent father, a bad father, an incestuous father, a molesting father, an evil father, et cetera, issues, daddy issues.
So he homes in on a woman with daddy issues. And then he presents his father, his father role, he becomes her father, he becomes supportive, sage, wise, with vast experience, a guru, with all the answers, with all the solutions, can do, I will take care of it kind of guy, leave it to me, everything will be okay.
You can rest finally, put your head on my shoulder. I have the father you have always been looking for.
So this is during the grooming, in love, Bombay phase.
He allows the target, he allows the prospective intimate partner or prospective social supply to construct her idealized version of him around the father.
So the idealized version of a narcissist in the love bombing and grooming phase is usually paternal, paternal or at the very least avuncular.
And he colludes in this process in order to transition as smoothly and as seamlessly as possible to the shared fantasy.
So he encourages the intimate partner to consider him in paternal roles and parental roles.
In other words, the narcissist parentifies himself.
This is something he knows to do well because when he was growing up in his early childhood, in a dysfunctional home, he was always forced to parentify one way or the other. He had to parent himself. And very often he had to parent one of the parents, the selfish narcissistic parent.
So he knows how to parentify. So he parentifies himself and he allows the intimate partner to construct a whole idealized fantasy around this parentified figure, a parent substitute.
But then the shared fantasy starts.
The narcissist and his intimate partner are both in the shared fantasy. And the minute it starts, a very disconcerting startling transition occurs.
The narcissist transitions from a father figure to a child figure.
It is a shocking, he reveals the child kind of.
He allows himself to be a child because he feels that he had acquired the intimate partner. He owns the intimate partner. He possesses her. She is unlikely to abandon. He has a modicum of object constancy and now feels safe enough to stop being the father and start being the child.
And it is a shocking revelation to the woman. It causes her resentment.
The woman feels that she had been deceived. I mean, she had bargained for a father and she ended up with a child. The child narcissistic abuse, what I call narcissistic abuse type one, and is coupled usually with sexlessness.
So the child begins to abuse her. That is narcissistic abuse type one.
And also the sex stops because the child cannot sleep with his mother.
These sestuous undertones and overtones sort of tamp down the sex until the point where both parties are sex averse.
But the woman interprets the narcissistic abuse and the sexlessness as a humiliating rejection, as withholding, as abandonment.
Because she cannot fully digest and accept that the man she had chosen, the man she had idealized so much as a father, is actually a kid. A child, and therefore incapable of sex, and very likely to throw temper tantrums and to be a spoiled brat. She can't reconceive of his narcissistic abuse as bratishness, as bad behavior of a kid. And she can't reconceive of the sexlessness as a child's sexlessness.
In her mind, there's still this lingering idealized father view. And so it's again a rejection by a father figure.
She's again being rejected by a father, and again with very, very strong sexual overtones. In this case, sexlessness, but very pronounced sexlessness.
And so she withdraws. She withdraws and some women also cheat. They withdraw and they cheat.
Another group of women try to bargain the child away, try to replace the child with the idealized version that had existed during the grooming and the lock bombing.
And so the women who withdraw and some of them cheat, they remain in their relationship, but they grow distant and detached and resentful. And in turn, they become abusive. They adopt actually narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors. They are in the throes of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, in the throes of complex trauma.
The women who try to bargain, they are subjected to narcissistic abuse type 2. Narcissistic abuse type 2 is adult, not child, and it's carried out by the father.
When women try to bargain in their relationship to get rid of the child, the narcissist reverts from child back to father. Back to father and he becomes an adult, but a bad kind of adult. He becomes disciplinarian, harsh, strict, tough love kind of father. And he reverts to the idealized version of himself as the woman had wanted.
The essence of the bargaining is, please stop being a child. Can you go back to being a father, an idealized father?
And the narcissist complies, he goes back to being an idealized father figure, but this is coupled with narcissistic abuse type 2 and sexlessness because fathers don't sleep with their daughters.
And this confluence is even more traumatic and hurtful.
There is no way to survive in a relationship with a narcissist within the shared fantasy without coming across the child or the father.
And both the child and the father cause enormous anguish, enormous pain, and women just want to run away. They want to avoid the pain at any cost. They would do anything to dull the pain, to dull the agony.
And so some of them act out, they cheat, they become alcoholic, they consume drugs, others just withdraw, become totally absent, physically, emotionally, drown themselves in work with the children, otherwise.
Some of them try to bargain and then they're subjected to even more horrendous abuse.
It's a no win situation.
And ironically, those women who cheat, they feel legitimized by the narcissist.
The narcissist self-assumed due and role made it easier and safer for these women to cheat on the narcissist in the first place.
I want to explain how.
The father role makes it feel safe for women to misbehave.
If you are with an intimate partner and you are her father, she would feel legitimized to have other men because first of all, you're a father. You're not entitled to expect sex, let alone sexual exclusivity from her.
And second thing, they expect unconditional acceptance from the father figure regardless of their misconduct, regardless of how egregiously they misbehave.
And when they interact with the father or with the child, it makes it difficult for them to perceive their actions as cheating or betrayal.
Because you see, one cannot cheat on a child. One cannot cheat on a father. I mean, both of them, child and father, wouldn't mind, wouldn't care.
So, there is, on the one hand, when the narcissist intimate partner finds herself trapped in the shared fantasy, with a child and with a father.
And I mean, she feels that she had lost everything that normally unites a man and a woman.
All this subterranean subliminal subtle flow of energy, if you wish, sexual energy probably between men and women.
She doesn't feel, in other words, that she's with a man. She feels what I call as a virtual single. She feels single again.
At home, she has a father. At home, she has a child.
But she doesn't have a man. She doesn't interact with this adult as a man. She doesn't get men vibes from him. He doesn't give her sex. He's not passionate. He doesn't desire her. He shows no interest in her. There's no courtship, no flirting, no seduction, nothing.
And on the other hand, there's only abuse.
Either as a father, which is a difficult, harsh, strict form of abuse and disciplining, or as a child, which is a British temper tantrum type of abuse.
So she comes home, and there's nothing there for her as a woman. There's something for her as a mother. There's something for her as a daughter, and nothing for her as a woman.
Normally, she would go and look for other men. She wants to feel. She wants to feel like a woman, you know?
All the other men can make her feel like a woman. He can't.
So they don't believe what they're doing, whether they're doing is cheating or betrayal.
So as I said before, men can cause the narcissist only extreme narcissistic injury. And men usually do it with aggression, and this aggression is externalized, or sometimes the narcissist interiorizes the aggression and becomes depressed.
So after narcissistic injury caused by men or by clients or by non-romantic, non-intimate partners, the narcissist experiences injury and may even become depressed. He can feel humiliated. He can feel devastated that they had walked away and teamed up with other people.
But this is not the same intensity, not the same magnitude, and not the same quality of the pain experienced with an intimate partner who cheats on the narcissist, betrays, and abandons him, because he perceives this as a mother, a mother abandoning her son.
He perceives such breakups as having been abandoned as a child. He feels like a child.
Or if he's in the father mode, having been betrayed by the closest possible most loved family member.
And then the narcissist trying to resolve this somehow vacillates between an internal cognitive modification, an external emotional modification.
I discussed it in a previous video. I'll be very brief, therefore.
Internal cognitive modification is when the narcissist tells himself, I'm bad, I'm evil, I misbehaved, I'm rejected, I'm humiliated, I abuse, therefore I deserve whatever happened. I made it happen. I'm in control. It didn't just happen to me. I made it happen. I'm still Godlike.
An external emotional modification is these people, these people are bad. These people are evil. These people are rejecting, humiliating, they betrayed me, they cheated on me, poor me, etc., the victim stunts.
And the narcissist oscillates between the two of them.
Sometimes he thinks that he made it all happen. He chastises himself, he castigates himself, criticizes himself, he is a strong inner critic.
And sometimes he says, well, actually, you know what, even if I had done all these things, even if I did abuse, I did reject, I did humiliate, I didn't deserve what they have done to me. What they have done to me was totally disproportional. It was nuclear, it was crazy. I didn't deserve any of it. They're horrible people.
So internal, external, external, internal.
The thing is that in reality, women do reject, do humiliate and do abandon the narcissist as a way to exit the shared fantasy or to end the bargaining.
And this renders external mortification very plausible.
The narcissist can tell himself, but she did abandon me. I did catch her cheating on me. I mean, she is evil, irredeemably so, incorrigible. So it helps him with the external mortification.
Of course, the truth is that women misbehave this way reactively after they had been rejected and abused by the narcissist beyond all measure.
Following his abuse and rejection during the shared fantasy, the narcissist stalks.
If the woman withdraws, withdraws and cheats, or withdraws and doesn't cheat, if there is a withdrawal, if she ascends herself from the shared fantasy, but stays with him, stays with the narcissist physically, but is absent emotionally, the narcissist begins to stalk her.
In the bargaining phase, he doesn't stalk, he abuses because he wants to push the intimate partner to cheat on him ostentatiously and to dump him so as to get rid of her.
I discussed all this in the previous video.
I want now to discuss some other elements which I did not cover in previous videos.
I want to start with a quote from a film that I've seen with Johnny Depp, Waiting for the Barbarians.
In the film, there's a kind of provincial governor of a colonial outpost. He saves a woman from a local nomad tribe that is oppressed and suppressed by the colonial military power.
So there's this provincial governor, that's the military, the military massacre, actually, a whole tribe of nomads. And he saves a woman from that tribe. He nurses her back to health.
They become a couple. And yet, she repeatedly misbehaves with younger soldiers while he remains awake all night awaiting her return to the bed they share. And it hurts him.
You can see in the film that he's hurt. And then he goes to the kitchen to eat something. And the cook, who is secretly in love with him, the cook tells him, You were always somewhere else. She, the woman he had saved, the woman from the nomad tribe, she couldn't understand you. She didn't know what you wanted from her. She used to cry.
And he says, Yeah, it couldn't have been easier for her to be separated from her tribe.
And the cook said, No, she used to cry because of you. You made her very unhappy. Didn't you know that?
And she's shocked. Like, she's shocked that he doesn't understand how absent he is and how painful it is for his intimate partner. How this absence is absolutely nefarious. It's toxic. This absence is suffocating.
You see, bad relationships are divided in two big groups. You can feel bad because of the presence of your partner.
Or you can feel bad because of the absence of your partner.
With narcissists, it's more often the second, actually.
Their absence, their lack of care, lack of interest, withdrawal, sexual and emotional, lack of love, lack, deficiency, absence.
They're the ones who drive the narcissist intimate partner's way.
And I've identified what I call the sequence and the suite.
And I would like to describe the sequence.
One, a woman initiates contact with the narcissist.
Two, he rejects her.
Three, she idealizes the narcissist and his rejection.
Four, the narcissist relents and agrees to a liaison.
Five, as she gets to know the narcissist better, sometimes within days, the woman gets disillusioned and repelled by him.
So this is the case where intimacy doesn't create attraction.
On the very contrary, intimacy creates repulsion.
Six, she abandons him, either by cheating on him, if he stalks her and refuses to let her go, or by staying in the relationship and cheating on him, if she's exploitative, or by absolutely walking away.
Seven, the narcissist reacts with sadness, anger, disappointment, and revulsion.
And this is what I call the sequence.
Many of you will identify this sequence in your own lives.
And then there is the suite.
The sequence is initiated by the intimate partner.
The suite is initiated by the narcissist.
In the suite, the narcissist brings a woman into his world and exposes his vulnerabilities, which then the women knowingly abuse, often with colleagues and competitors.
So stage one involves the public mortifying discard.
Stage two involves public triangulation.
Stage three involves emotional or sexual affair with another man, sometimes a colleague, competitor, co-worker, friend of the narcissist.
Stage four, replacing the narcissist totally with that other man, as a friend, a guru, or a partner.
Five, betraying and bed-mouthing the narcissist to that other man.
Six, no or intermittent contact.
And then seven, attempted intensive friend zoning with an eye towards a renewed affair or extracting benefits from the narcissist.
So I gave you the narcissist's point of view. I gave you the intimate partner's point of view and then the narcissist's point of view.
The sequence is the intimate partner's point of view.
The suite is the narcissist's point of view.
The narcissist believes that he brings a woman into his world and that's an enormous privilege.
He exposes his vulnerabilities and then he believes that he is knowingly abused.
The shared fantasy is egosyntonic.
And when the intimate partner exists in the shared fantasy, even in the most benign way, without cheating, without fighting, just packs of things and goes, the narcissist feels wrong because the shared fantasy is all pervasive, all controlling, all subsuming, and egosyntonic.
It's difficult to see outside the shared fantasy or to see it from the outside.
The bargaining phase is egosyntonic.
The narcissist feels that he's the one pushing the partner away.
So, the mortification is very unlikely in the bargaining phase.
The narcissist, even in the bargaining phase, realizes that he's the one doing all the rejection, humiliation, abuse, refusal to commit, abandonment.
But this feels as compulsive acts that are out of control.
Okay, narcissists gravitate towards transactional and ultimately sexless relationships.
Even somatic narcissists, they will end up having a sexless marriage while they frolic around with other women, while they cheat on the intimate partner.
But within the marriage, the union is likely to end up being sexless.
So, sexlessness is a feature of narcissistic intimate relationships and partnerships, whether cerebral or somatic.
So, why do narcissists feel enraged? Why do they feel unhappy when this happens?
Because repeated mortifications have estranged them from their false self.
Mortification after loss, after mortification after loss, gradually the narcissist begins to put some distance, some light between himself and his false self. He begins to feel that he is imposed upon, at the service of some alien entity. He is a badly mistreated plaything.
There is a part of the narcissist that has awakened that disagrees with the agenda, preferences and priorities of the false self. There is bad blood now between the narcissist and his false self.
The adulation and the worship of early childhood are gone. The narcissist feels more and more like he is the hostage of the false self. His free will is gone.
He is a figment. He is a nothing. He is a sliver. He is just being played around as a toy of the false self.
There is a lot of resentment and rage and anger at the false self following multiple modifications.
And that is precisely the window of healing that Cold Therapy utilizes.
This estrangement. Strangement is a clinical term. It also happens in borderline personality disorder.
Similar to a latent or closer to homosexual, cerebral narcissists get married as an alibi to avoid women and sex and to maintain an appearance of normalcy.
I am not saying that cerebral narcissists are latent or closer to homosexuals. I am saying that they behave the same way like latent and closer to homosexuals. They get married. They get married as a shield, as an alibi.
Sorry, I can't be with you because I am married. Get away, I am married.
It is a shield. It is a defense. It is a firewall against women and sex.
The sadistic sexuality of many narcissists, or at least the kinky sexuality, is unconventional. It turns many women off. The few women who share the narcissist's psychosexuality or acquiesce in it, they are broken, damaged, mentally ill, hurtful, or even dangerous women.
So the rational path for the narcissist is to go celibate and avoid the risks of rejection, cheating, betrayal, stalking, and possibly even blackmail.
I want to end up by reading to you something written by Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish religious philosopher.
Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is the founder of modern existentialism. He wrote a lot about Christianity, morality, ethics, religion, tatata, and one of his books is called The Works of Love, a wonderful book.
In the book, he says that Jesus said you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
And then Kierkegaard asked himself, Jesus said you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. Is Jesus commanding us to love ourselves?
If you don't love yourself, you can't love your neighbor according to Jesus.
So you must love yourself.
And indeed, in the Roman Catholic tradition, you can't love God truly if you don't love yourself.
In the Protestant tradition, self-love became narcissism in the Protestant tradition.
The Protestants are saying that if you self-love, you can't really love others. You can't love your neighbors. You can't love your colleagues. You can't love your family. You can't love God.
Self-love is a barrier. It's a firewall. It's a defense against loving others, against what we call object relations.
In Catholicism and with Kierkegaard, it's not the case. He believes you must self-love. You must love yourself. It's a dictum by God and Jesus.
And without this, you can't love anyone else.
Kierkegaard admits that you need to love yourself very subtly. There is a type of self-love that is deeply unhealthy, destroys humanity, and there is proper self-love.
Proper self-love makes us whole, makes us complete persons.
So according to Kierkegaard, what Jesus said is not that you should first love yourself and then love your neighbor, but you should realize that love for your neighbor and love for yourself are the same thing.
There is no self apart from others.
Relationships constitute the self, or in Jung's language, relationships constellate the self.
Kierkegaard doesn't call it love, he calls it forgiveness.
He says only when you forgive your neighbor, you truly forgive yourself, but you must forgive.
Here is a quote from his book.
When it is said you should love your neighbor as yourself, therein is contained what is presupposed, that every man loves himself.
Is it possible for anyone to misunderstand this, as if it were the intention of Christianity to proclaim self-love as a prescriptive right?
On the contrary, it is its purpose to wrest self-love away from us human beings.
This implies loving one's self, but if one must love his neighbor as himself, then the command, like a pick, wrenches open the lock of self-love and thereby rests it away from a man.
This, as yourself, does not waver in its aim and with the firmness of the eternal it critically penetrates.
It reaches the innermost hiding place where a man loves himself.
It does not leave self-love the slightest excuse or the tiniest escape hatch.
As Jacob limped after having struggled with God, so shall self-love be broken if it has struggled with this phrase, which nevertheless does not seek to teach a man not to love himself, but in fact rather seeks to teach him proper self-love.
Therefore, as yourself, suppose the most cunning deceiver who is ever in order, if possible, to have the opportunity of using many words and becoming loquacious, for then the deceiver would quickly conquer.
Supposing such a deceiver were tempting to question the royal law year in and year out, how shall I love my neighbor?
Then the terse command, unchanged, will continue to repeat the short phrase, as yourself.
And if any deceiver has deceived himself throughout his whole life by all sorts of verbosity concerning this subject, the eternal will only hold him to the terse word of the law, as yourself.
No one, to be sure, will be able to escape this command.
If it's as yourself comes as close to the life of self-love as is possible, then one's neighbor is again a qualification as fatally close to self-love as possible.
Self-love itself perceives that it is an impossibility to shirk this.
The only escape is the one which the Pharisees in their time also tried in order to justify themselves, to let it be doubtful who one's neighbor is in order to get him out of one's life.
Self-love, says Kierkegaard, is loving another.
The selfis the totality of our interconnected mesh with other people.
That's our self, he says.
If we love ourselves, by definition, we love the self which is all our human contacts and by extension all of humanity.
He denies actually the possibility of an individual.
He says that to be, to have a self, is to immerse yourself in the totality of the human experience with all other people, with all other human beings.
If you think that you can survive and live and love yourself without the aid and the support and the involvement and the penetration of other people, you are what he calls a deceiver.
Truer words have never been spoken, you need those decisions.