Yes, I regard narcissists and psychopaths as the equivalent, the exact equivalent, of domestic terrorists. I think you need to instate, to apply, security and cybersecurity measures, because you are involved in the global war on narcissism, G-W-O-N.
You know, there used to be the global war on terrorism, now it's on terror. This is the global war on narcissism. And you are in the forefront. You're all soldiers in this war.
So you need to do your job by keeping safe, applying security and safety measures, being cautious, anything from alarms to anti-malware softwares, etc. are boundaried, breaching, boundary violation conditions.
When it happens in childhood, there are many ways to breach the boundaries of the child.
Abuse, physical abuse, verbal and psychological abuse, all these are of course boundary violating or boundary victimization conditions. But there are many others.
For example, if you idolize the child, you convert him into an idol, you convert him into an object. If you instrumentalize the child, if you use the child, for example, to realize your unfulfilled dreams, to see your wishes come true, by instrumentalizing the child, you have converted him into an instrument, again an object.
These are forms of objectification. If you parentify the child, if you force the child to behave as your parent and you act as your child's child, parentification. If you provide conditional love, love that depends crucially on performance and on fulfillment of expectations.
You see all these spoiling, pampering, all these don't allow the child to separate from you and to become an individual, a process that is known as separation individuation.
And any breach and violation of boundaries during the separation individuation phase is abuse.
Nastas is considers himself infallible, omniscient. He never makes mistakes and he knows everything. He's a know-all. He's godlike. He possesses the entire knowledge of mankind and he never makes mistakes.
Remember these sentences. Stress mobilizes. Anxiety paralyzes. Dedication galvanizes. Addiction euthanizes. Envy kills.
Emulation fulfills.
Grieving is overcome. Depression overcomes. Striving attains. Perfectionism details.
Memorize these five sentences and you have 99% of the psychological knowledge you need for life.
Narcissists and psychopaths make use of two techniques of mind control. The psychopath leverages these techniques knowingly, deliberately, intentionally, he is goal-oriented. The narcissist uses these techniques unconsciously. That's just the way he is. That's how he operates.
And so these techniques are entraining and projective identification. I've discussed entraining in many videos on my YouTube channel.
To summarize, entraining is the repetition of musical notes or words in a way that synchronizes the brainwaves of the listener with the brainwaves of the emitter of the signal.
So when the abuser verbally abuses his victim, when he repeats the same refrains, the same phrases, the same words, the same exhortations, the same criticisms, the same threats, this constitutes entraining because it synchronizes the victim's brainwaves with the abuser's brainwaves, rendering them a hive mind, a single mind, the ultimate in mind control.
The second mechanism is a lot more complicated and a lot more nuanced and a lot more difficult to explain. It's known as projective identification and the problem in projective identification is the identification part of it.
The victim identifies herself with the narcissist's projected parts.
Now let's first explain projection.
Projection is when you have traits or emotions that you disown, that you reject, that you're not comfortable with, that you're ashamed of.
And then what you do, you take these traits and you take these emotions and you misattribute them to other people.
You say, I'm not weak, he is weak. I'm not abusive, she is being abusive.
That is projection.
Now projective identification involves projection. The narcissist projects the traits and emotions that he rejects in himself or herself and misattributes these traits and emotions to the victim.
Now of course whenever I say he, it's a she, half of all narcissists are women.
And then the projection having been completed, the victim becomes the parts that the narcissist had rejected.
The narcissist misattributes traits and behaviors to the victim and the victim owns them. He identifies with them. He accepts them as his own.
The victim becomes what the narcissist wants him to become. The victim becomes the part of the narcissist that the narcissist had rejected.
The traits and emotions and cognitions that the narcissist is ashamed of, that the narcissist rejects, that the narcissist renounces, these parts are owned by the victim. The victim is molded by the narcissist's projection.
Hence the word identification.
And then the victim begins to behave accordingly. He begins to conform to the parts of the narcissist that had been projected onto her.
The victim becomes the shadow of the narcissist, the rejected parts of the narcissist, the traits and behaviors and emotions and cognitions that the narcissist cannot countenance, now become the victims.
And so projective identification is a defense mechanism of the narcissist, but it ends up modifying the victim's behavior.
The victim becomes an extension of the part of the narcissist which the narcissist disowns, denies, represses, rejects, hates and is ashamed of.
Consequently, of course, the narcissist rejects, renounces and hates the victim because she now represents the part of him that he wouldn't like to acknowledge.
She's a constant reminder of who the narcissist truly is and her behaviors, having been modified by the narcissist, validate and conform the narcissist's expectations of the victim, but at the same time constantly trigger the narcissist by reminding him who he really is.
Self-awareness is knowing who you are. It is not the same as authenticity. Authenticity is being who you are, acting who you are.
And yet in conditions of fear and terror and uncertainty, it is very difficult to be authentic. Fear precludes authenticity, and so does pervasive uncertainty.
We are in the world where there is a war between the genders, between straight and LGBTQ, between minorities and majorities, between self-proclaimed victims and their putative abusers.
So what to do? Stay at home, stay celibate, stay single. Do not expose yourself to this crossfire. The world is not safe right now. It is time actually to be both self-aware and authentic and self-sufficient. It is time to stand back and review your priorities and your necessities and your needs and then to make a decision as to which level of risk you are ready to assume.
Because today to engage with other people is to risk your freedom and very often your very life.
My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Ignat Self-Love: Narcissism, Riverside.
So you have been abused, moltrated, harassed and stalked. You feel that you feel prey to a narcissist, recitable.
But you must move on from victim to survivor. No one will do it for you. No one can do it for you.
Not your therapist, not your best friend, not your nearest family.
Only you can choose survival over victimhood. There are a few steps to this.
The first one is abandon the narcissist. The narcissist initiates his own abandonment because of his fear of it. He is so terrified of losing his sources of supply and of being emotionally hurt that he would rather control, master or direct the potentially destabilizing situation by causing, precipitating and engendering his own abandonment.
Remember, the personality of the narcissist has a low level of organization. It's chaotic. It is precariously balanced. Being abandoned could cause a narcissistic injury so great that the whole edifice of the narcissist can come crumbling down.
Narcissists usually entertain suicidal ideation in such cases.
But if the narcissist had initiated and directed his own abandonment, if it is perceived by him as a goal that he had set to himself, he can and does avoid all these untoward consequences.
The next one is moving on.
To preserve one's mental health, one must abandon the narcissist.
I have said that, but one must also move on. Moving on is a process, not a decision, nor is it an event.
First, one has to acknowledge and accept painful reality.
Such acceptance is a volcanic, shattering, agonizing series of nibbling thoughts and strong intrusive resistances.
Once the battle is won and fresh and harsh and agonizing realities have been assimilated, one can move on to the learning phase.
What is a learning phase?
We label everything around us and everyone around us. We educate ourselves. We compare experiences. We digest. We have insights.
Then we decide, and then we act.
And this is what it means to move on.
Having gathered sufficient emotional sustenance, knowledge, support, and confidence, we face the battle things of our relationships, fortified and nurtured.
This stage characterizes those who do not mourn but fight, do not grieve but replenish their self-esteem, do not hide but seek, do not freeze but move on, move on, move on.
This is your model. This is your mantra. This is the keyword.
But of course, abandoning anyone and especially the narcissist.
Horses want to go through a phase of grieving or mourning, having been betrayed, having been abused.
Inevitably, we grieve. We grieve for the image we had of the traitor and the abuser, the image that was so fleeting and so wrong.
We mourn the damage that he did to us. We experience the fear of never being able to love or to trust again. And we grieve this loss of innocence.
In one stroke, we had lost someone we had trusted and even loved. We had lost our trusting and loving selves. And we had lost the trust and love that we had felt.
And anything worse? The emotional process of grieving has many failures.
First, we are dumbfounded, shocked, inert, immobile. We play dead to avoid our inner monsters. We are ossified in our pain, cast in the mold of our reticence and fears.
Then we feel enraged, indignant, rebellious, pitiful. And then we accept. And then we cry.
And then some of us learn to forgive and to pity.
And this is what we call healing.
All stages are absolutely necessary and good for you. It is bad not to rage back, not to shame those who have shamed us, to deny, to tend, to evade.
But it is equally bad to get fixated on our rage.
Permanent grieving is a perpetuation of our abuse by other means.
By endlessly recreating our harrowing experiences, we unwillingly collaborate with our abusers to perpetuate their evil deeds.
It is by moving on that we defeat our abuser, minimizing him and his importance in our lives. It is by loving and by trusting anew that we are known that which was done to us.
To forgive is never to forget, but to remember is not necessarily to re-experience.
Forgiving is an important capability. It does more for the forgiver than for the forgiven.
But it should not be a universal, indiscriminate behavior. It is absolutely legitimate to not forgive sometimes.
It depends, of course, on the severity or duration of what had been done to you.
In general, it is unwise, counterproductive, to apply to life universal and immutable principles.
Life is too chaotic to succumb to rigid edicts and rules. Sentences which start with "I never or I always" are not very credible or clever, and they often lead to self-defeating, self-restricting, and even self-destructive behaviors.
Conflicts are an important and integral part of life. One should never stick them out, but when confronted with a conflict, one should not avoid it.
It is through conflicts and through adversity as much as through care and love that we grow.
Human relationships are dynamic. We must assess our friendships, partnerships, even our marriages periodically.
In and by itself, a common past is insufficient to sustain a healthy, nourishing, supportive, caring and compassionate relationship.
Common memories are a necessary but not a sufficient condition. We must gain and regain our friendships, our love, our relationships on a daily basis.
Human relationships are a constant test for religions and empathy.
But can you remain friends with the narcissists? Can't you act civilized and remain on friendly terms with your narcissistic ex?
Well, never forget the narcissists, at least the full-fledged ones, are nice and friendly only when they want something from you.
Narcissistic supply, help, support, votes, money or sex. They prepare the ground, manipulate you and then come out with a small favor they need or ask you blatantly and surreptitiously for narcissistic supply.
Sentences such as "What did you think about my performance?" or "Do you think that I really deserved the normal price?"
Narcissists are nice and friendly only when they feel threatened and they want to neutral the threat by smothering it with oozing pleasantries.
Narcissists are nice and friendly when they have just been infused with an overdose of narcissistic supply and they feel magnanimous and they feel magnificent and ideal and perfect.
To show magnanimity is a way of flaunting one's impeccable divine credentials. It is an act of grandiosity. It is an act of humiliating giving.
You are an irrelevant prop in this spectacle and the receptacle of the narcissist overflowing, self-contented infatuation with his false self.
But all this beneficence is transient. The petrol victims often tend to thank the narcissist.
For little graces. And this is the Stockholm Syndrome. Hostages tend to emotionally identify with their captors rather than with the police.
We are grateful to our abusers and tormentors for seizing, even for a moment, their hideous activities and for allowing us to catch our breath before the next blow descends.
Some people say that they prefer to live with narcissists, to cater to their needs and to succumb to their whims because this is the way they had been conditioned in early childhood.
It is only with narcissists that such people feel alive, stimulated and excited. The world glows in technicolor 3D in the presence of a narcissist and decays into sepia colors in the absence of a narcissist.
I see nothing inherently wrong with such an approach. The test is this. If someone were to constantly humiliate and abuse you verbally using archaic Chinese, would you have felt humiliated and abused? Probably not.
You don't understand archaic Chinese. He can't get to you.
Some people have been conditioned by the narcissistic primary objects in their lives, parents, caregivers, to treat narcissistic abuse as if it were uttered in archaic Chinese to turn a deaf ear.
This technique is effective in that it allows the inverted narcissist, the codependent narcissist, the covert narcissist, the narcissist willing mate to experience only the good aspects of living with the narcissist and ignore the bad ones.
It's the narcissist's sparkling intelligence, the constant drama and excitement, the lack of intimacy and emotional attachment which some people prefer.
Every now and then, the narcissist breaks into abuse in archaic Chinese. So what? Who understands archaic Chinese anyway?
Says the inverted narcissist to herself. And she survives.
Even so, I have one mega-indoubt.
If the relationship with the narcissist is so rewarding, why are inverted narcissists so usually unhappy, so egodystonic and comfortable with who they are and what they do, so in need of help, professional or otherwise? Aren't they victims who simply experience the Stockholm syndrome, identifying with their kidney path rather than with the police? Aren't they victims who deny their own torment? Aren't they victims who fail to make the transition to survivors? Don't fall into this trap. Move on.
It may come as a shock to you, but the narcissist doesn't see you the way you see yourself. The narcissist doesn't see himself the way you see him. And frankly, it's doubtful whether the narcissist sees anyone at all.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the Smiling Blue Professor of Psychology and the author of the inestimable Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, the Bible of the field and the book that coined the phrase "narcissistic abuse."
Today, we're going to discuss the narcissist's point of view, how he perceives you and the relationship.
Are you truly a significant other or maybe just an insignificant other? Are you an intimate partner? Is there intimacy and is there a partnership in the relationship with the narcissist?
But most importantly, what does he think about you secretly in the inner recesses of his undisclosed mind, the occult areas of his demented soul?
I know you like this. You like to think that narcissists are possessed by demons. They're not possessed by demons. They are demons. I'm kidding. I'm just kidding. Narcissists are flawed human beings with lacking equipment. Nothing more, nothing less.
Terrified traumatized kids who throw temperate entrons and can perceive other people. As separate from them.
And so let's delve straight in.
When the narcissist sees you for the first time, he takes a snapshot of you, he internalizes the snapshot and he continuously interacts with the snapshot.
Blah blah blah. You know these from previous videos.
He also photoshops the snapshot, a process known as idealization. By idealizing you, he can idealize himself. If you are perfect and he is in possession of a perfect object, you, then he is perfect. Or maybe even uber perfect, more perfect than even you.
But then gradually life intervenes. Reality intrudes. You begin to deviate and diverge from the idealized snapshot, which pisses the narcissist off.
And then he begins to change the way he sees you, the external object.
Mind you, the internal object, the introject. Your representation in the narcissist's mind, the snapshot, the avatar, that doesn't change until very late in the relationship.
But the way he perceives you begins to change.
He cannot really accept you as separate from him. You are an extension. You're an organ.
But it's like someone with a chronic illness who is very angry at his heart or his liver or his lungs because they give him trouble.
So when you get chronically ill with your kidneys, for example, you may develop a hate-love relationship with your kidneys. You may resent your kidneys for giving you a tough time.
Same, the same thing. That's how the narcissist sees you. Another arm, another leg, if you're extremely lucky, another heart.
The narcissist, first of all, is likely to convince himself that he had judged you correctly when you have met.
He needs to preserve his grandiosity. The narcissist never makes mistakes. The narcissist is never wrong. The narcissist is infallible. It's inconceivable that he has misjudged you, for example.
So he tells himself, I judge her correctly and appropriately when I met her. My perception of her was right. My judgment of people is intact. Nothing's wrong with me. She has changed. She has changed. Why has she changed?
Well, I don't know the influence of bad friends. Her family is poisoning her against me. Circumstances, she is mentally ill or she is physically ill. The medication she's taking, exposure to left-wing radical ideas in college, what have you, whatever the reason may be, the narcissist convinces himself that you are being transformed, that you're in the process of metamorphosizing into another person.
And so the gap between the snapshot and you, in reality, the gap between your introject, the internal object that stands in for you, in the narcissist's mind, and you, this gap grows not only because of what you are doing.
This abyss opens up also because of the internal narrative of the narcissist. And this narrative is about how you are changing for the worse.
Nancis is a paranoid. They have persecutory delusions. They regard the world as a hostile place, how to get them, us Donald Trump.
The second process that happens with the narcissist, his point of view, is that you constantly blame shift. He thinks you're guilty. He thinks you've done something wrong. He thinks he is immaculate and innocuous and innocent. You keep blaming him for things. You keep assigning to him responsibility and guilt and accountability. And he resents this. He thinks you're manipulating him. He thinks you're playing with his mind. He thinks that's a power play and mind game that you have embarked on. He is bewildered. He's disoriented. You are his mother. You're a mother figure. Why are you doing this to him?
And so whenever you disagree with the narcissist or criticize something or suggest something or prepare or suggest, give advice, the narcissist or even offer help, the narcissist perceives this as shifting the blame, counterfactually. The facts are in the narcissist's mind that he is blameless, that he is guiltless, that he doesn't deserve any of this and that what you're doing borders on malice.
Mind you, everything the narcissist thinks about you, everything he says about you may be true. Even narcissists get it right from time to time. And because it may be true, even in principle, it provokes in you profound self-doubt. You begin to ask yourself, maybe he's right. Maybe he has a point. Maybe I'm the narcissist. Maybe I'm misbehaving. Maybe I'm too onerous, ordinary, tough, harsh, strict. Maybe I should change my ways.
This is how the narcissist molds you, makes you malleable and mutable.
The narcissist presents himself at all times as a victim, a victim of his superiors, a victim of the state, a victim of circumstances. He was born in the wrong period in history. And you're of course, swept in this tsunami wave of self-imputed victimhood.
Today it's known as TIV. It's a new personality construct.
And so the narcissist casts himself as a victim. And he does this because it affords him the high moral ground and it's a tool of manipulation. It's also an integral part of his contribulation.
He rewrites his history. He recomposes his narrative in a way that casts him in a good light.
And all others in a bad light. He's the angel. All the others are demons. He has always been right. They have always been wrong. He deserved much more. They got it. He has been discriminated against, underappreciated and generally mistreated. That's the victim's stance.
And he sees you as a victimizer. He sees you as an abuser, which makes communication with the narcissist very difficult.
Because you don't have common ground and you don't have a common language. Even your most innocuous acts, even things you do which are unrelated to the narcissist, are going to be fitted into the victimhood narrative. The narcissist is going to hypervigilantly monitor you, supervise you, spy on you, follow you around in order to gather incriminating evidence. Everything you say and everything you do can and will be used against you in the narcissist's court. You have been warned, Miranda.
And so this is the "I am the victim" thing and you are my abuser.
And he also thinks that you guilt trip him. He thinks that you are an emotional blackmailer. That you actually sacrifice in order to leverage your sacrifice to make him behave in specific ways. He thinks that you love him because you want something from him. It's not real love. It's conditional love. It's manipulative love, if it is love at all.
He thinks you make him feel guilty because by making him feel guilty, you can modify his behaviors and you're goal-oriented. In his eyes, you're very, very close to a psychopath.
And that is regardless of how empathic you are, how caring, how compassionate and how loving.
Don't think you can, by caring for the narcissist and by sharing with the narcissist, you can somehow change his mindset or state of mind. You can't.
Because it's not about you. It's about an internal world populated with avatars, a paracosm, an alternative reality where the narcissist writes scripts for movies. He's a movie director, an actor, and you're just an actress or a prop on his theater play stage.
So it's not about you.
Still, the narcissist perceives himself as a victim who is being emotionally manipulated and blackmailed via guilt tripping. He accuses you.
When you disagree with this assessment of you, he accuses you of being, of lacking self-awareness. You have no introspection, he tells you. You can see yourself really. You don't look at yourself in the mirror. You are totally unaware of yourself. You have no self-awareness. You really need to get to grips with who you are. You really need to accept how flawed and wrong and sometimes malevolent you are.
He's trying to convince you that there's in you a grain of evil.
Minnie, all those of you who miss her, here she is, always by my side and on my lips.
So he tells you you're not self-aware.
He also accuses you of being self-destructive, of being hateful. You want to drag me down with you, he tells you. Your habits are self-defeating. I'm not going to succumb to this. I'm soaring into the stratosphere. I'm bigger than this. I'm cosmically significant. I am divine. I'm god-like. You're not going to drag me to the level of a common human.
In extreme cases, the narcissist may deny you sex and become celibate because by denying you sex, he transcends the foibles and the weaknesses of the human species. He becomes Ubermensch. He becomes a superman.
So it's important for him to sustain his grandiosity by casting you not only as an abuser but as a toxic influence. Someone who creates an ambience, an environment that reduces the narcissist to the lowest common denominator.
Narcissist is not human. He's the next stage in evolution and you're trying to transform him or transmute him or transubstantiate him back into human. You're trying to devolve him, not evolve him, and he is not going to let you. He's not going to let you contaminate him and infect him with your low grade humanity.
The fact that you can't appreciate the narcissist's amazing exceptionalism, the fact that you underestimate his rarity, his sui generis, the fact that you can't absorb or worship him as the God that he is, that just proves that you are disloyal. You're disloyal.
There is this cult, there's this narrative that you belong to and you're betraying it. There's a sense of betrayal, a bit traumatic. The narcissist has been betrayed as a child by his mother and here comes a re-play, a reenactment of his early childhood betrayal.
Actually he pushes you to betray him and then when you look for alternatives he blames you for it. You're out to get me, he tells you. You're just after my money, you lie to me, you deceive me and you cheat on me with others. You entrapped me. I could have been much further in my career, in my life. I would have been much more accomplished but because of you, I'm stuck here. Because of you, I can't self-actualize and realize my potential. You're a bad influence of me. You are trapped.
In medieval times they had this vagina den kata, vagina with teeth. Women were considered to be predators, actually, throughout the majority of human history, not men. Women were considered predators, the Venus trap.
He has this misogyny, he has this deeply embedded hatred of women.
By the way, everything I'm saying just flip the genders, flip the gender pronouns and it still works. So if it's a woman, a female narcissist, a woman narcissist, she hates men, she's a misandrist.
So the choice of gender pronouns in this presentation is arbitrary. You can easily flip between the genders. It's equally accurate with men and women because there are no men and women left today. Women are just men with vaginas.
So he accuses you of...
Narcissists and borderlines are a perfect match and this is very surprising. The narcissist tends to devalue and discard his partner while the borderline has abandonment anxiety.
Ostensibly, the borderline would never select a narcissist as a partner because abandonment is guaranteed. Rejection is a four-gun conclusion.
Why would a borderline risk that?
Because she also has engulfment anxiety.
The borderline needs a partner who would at some point push her away, give her personal space, let her go.
The borderline, when she experiences intimacy, she feels bad, she feels suffocated and smothered, she wants to run away, approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion. So she needs a partner who would at first idealize her and thereby ameliorate her abandonment anxiety.
But then when she feels engulfed and enmeshed and digested and assimilated, when she wants to run away to avoid, would be able to discard her by devaluing.
She needs both functions and the only intimate partner who provides both functions reliably is the narcissist.
In the initial phases of the shared fantasy, when the narcissist love bombs the borderline, idealizes the borderline, it reduces her abandonment anxiety.
And in the later stages, when she needs it, the narcissist is available to push her away, to get rid of her, to devalue her and discard her.
And then the cycle starts all over again because narcissists need to hover and re-idealize their discarded partners.
I dwelt upon it in previous videos. That's just a side comment to one of the questions I've been asked.
But what I wanted to say something else, the meeting between the narcissist and his victim is a meeting of two hungers.
The victim is hungry for love and intimacy and acceptance. And the narcissist is hungry for existence.
The narcissist tries to become through the victim. The narcissist tries to exist through the victim.
But the sad irony is that the only way for the narcissist to exist through the victim is to abscond with her existence. And the only way for the narcissist to become through the victim is to deny the victim her own becoming.
And on the other end of the equation, the only way for the victim to obtain love from the narcissist is to stop being, to not be. And the only way for her to maintain intimacy with the narcissist is to become as much of an absence as he is.
And this is the predicament and the conundrum of the shared fantasy.
There's a meeting of two irreconcilable, incompatible hungers.
Thank you so much, Sam. I cannot thank you enough for your time. You've been so generous and for this conversation. I hope one day when I'm somewhere where you are, I know you're in Europe right now. Yes. Or do you, you're originally from Israel. So hopefully I travel a lot to Europe. So hopefully, sometime I'll be in your area and would love to invite you to one of my concerts. It would be an honor to meet you in person. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Sam. Bye-bye. Thank you for having me. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
What is the dual mothership concept in the narcissist's shared fantasy?
It's a principle that I have suggested about three years ago. Shared fantasy is a concept first developed by Sander in 1989. And I took it and ran with it and applied it to narcissistically abusive relationships.
But it still couldn't explain the prolonged grief that was involved in these kind of relationships.
So I came up with a dual mothership concept. And rather than devolve into a very long presentation, I'm going to make it very brief. And I'm going to quote someone I greatly admire, myself, Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. And here's what I said a few years ago.
The dual mothership concept, the narcissist becomes your idealizing mother. The narcissist offers you unconditional love the way a mother does or should have. You become the narcissist idealizing mother as well.
And this process is known as co-idealization. So you become the narcissist idealizing mother and you offer him unconditional love.
So what you're doing is you're idealizing each other and you're swapping unconditional love, thereby giving each other the chance for a second childhood with a good enough or even perfect mother.
This is irresistible because it allows you to experience self-love. You're exposed to an idealized image of yourself. And this idealized image is perfect. It's flawless.
So it's easy to fall in love with and you fall in love with yourself. So both parties, the narcissist and his intimate partner, experience self-love, which is not real because they don't love themselves.
They love the idealized images.
Okay, so here you are offering each other motherhood, offering each other unconditional love, offering each other an idealized image via the other's gaze.
And this is the core of the dual mothership exchange or dual mothership principle, which is in operation in the narcissist's shared fantasy.
So when you break up, there is triple mourning, triple grieving, a process of grieving involving three losses, not one, actually many more, but at least three.
A loss, loss number one, your idealized self. Loss number two, you've lost the narcissist as your mother. And loss number three, you've lost the narcissist as your child.
You feel guilt and shame for having abandoned your child. You feel heartbroken, destitute and terrified for having been abandoned by your mother.
And you have an inability to love yourself. Your self-love is disabled or deactivated because the idealized image of you has been taken away from you when you break up with the narcissist.
So it's a process of triple grieving.
And that's why when you break up with a narcissist, there is usually prolonged grief syndrome. It takes a long time for you to overcome the mourning and the grief.
Of course, additionally, you are grieving for other losses. What could have been between you?
The fantastic narrative, how things might have turned out, your hopes and dreams, etc. These are these elements of grieving are typical to any breakup.
But with a narcissist, there are three elements of grieving, which are the direct outcomes and unique consequences of the dual mothership principle at play.
Because the narcissist is your mother, you grave over losing, having lost your mother, because you are the narcissist mother. You grieve over having lost your child because you idealize each other. You grieve over, over having lost access to this idealized image of you that you grew to love or to self love.
So you.