Self Gaslighting Into Shared Fantasy

Okay, Bubod, today yet another video about shared fantasy.

This time we will try to look at it from a different angle.

You seem to have some difficulties in comprehending the concept and some of the behaviors attendant to the concept. And this is because the narcissist is inconstant, not consistent. The narcissist is not consistent, because the narcissist is dissociative. The narcissist is discontinuous.

You have this assumption of an individual with a beginning and an end and something in between. A continuity like, I don't know, a flat line or an ECG line.

Narcissists are not like that. Narcissists are packets, like IP in computers, they're like packets of information. And in between there's a void, there's deep space, there's darkness.

The narcissist erupts into life and then is extinguished, erupts extinguished like a candle in bed shape.

And so because of that, narcissists don't maintain stability, consistency. They don't have what we call inner construct validity. It's very difficult to capture the essence of the narcissist.

One day, for example, he could be enormously, incredibly, romantically jealous. And the next day, he can turn a blind eye to any shenanigans, any ostentatious infidelity that you may engage in. One day, triangulation is going to work wonderfully. The next day, he's going to be immersed in something else, obtaining supply, for example. And he isn't going to give a hoot where you're going and with whom, what you're doing. And then you say to yourself, but it's like not the same person. It's not the same person. It's what I've been saying for 25 years. It's a form of dissociative identity disorder. It's a private case of a multiplicity of personalities or personality fragments of what we call self-states.

Okay, so I'm trying to explain shared fantasy from this angle.

And together with the previous videos on shared fantasy, you ought to have complete view of the dynamic.

I also strongly recommend that you download the three graphics, violet, violet, blue, and white graphics of the relationship cycle map with the narcissist graphics created by Haley Martin.

Similarly, Haley Martin created a graphic about contempt, the various types of contempt that narcissists feel, and psychopaths, by the way, feel towards other people. And all these graphics are available on my new Instagram channel, Narcissism with Vaknin.

One word, Narcissism with Vaknin. My previous channel had been blocked by Facebook owing to your kind complaints. So on this channel, Haley Martin helps me with creating images of memes of things I say.

So you have the relationship map there and so on, but you can also download the relationship map from my website. And there are links in the description to one of my videos. You can find links to this. And don't forget to have a look at the contempt graphic created by Haley Martin.

As an aside, the pandemic seems to have transformed all of us into Saudi women with niqabs. We walk around with veils hiding our faces. So we have all been rendered onto Saudi women. Saudi women finally conquered the world and exported their fashion everywhere, courtesy Dr. Fauci and others. Jokes aside, masks are good for you. I was very strongly against masks when the pandemic started, but the pandemic has been mismanaged so egregiously by politicians and American establishment that now we have no choice. It's out of control. It's really a threat. Now we have made it into a threat.

And now we must protect ourselves by any means possible, if necessary, by becoming a Saudi woman. Nothing wrong with that. You should try it from time to time.

And I propose Saudi women. I have a few clients who are Saudi women. And I want to remind you that during the pandemic, I don't provide face-to-face counseling. And therefore, I don't provide co-therapy because co-therapy relies crucially on a face-to-face counseling, level one.

Instead, I provide co-therapy technique counseling. I'm using techniques from co-therapy in phone and email counseling. And you can write to my email, sanvaknin at gmail.com, sanvaknin, my name at gmail.com. And I'll respond. You can also go to my website and ferret out my counseling page. You can have counseling with me, you can have counseling with Lydia, and you can have counseling with both of us. A joint session.

Today I would like to discuss two phenomena.

The first one I dwelled upon, and that's the shared fantasy.

But another phenomenon which I would like to discuss today is what I call self-gaslighting.

Now, gaslighting, as you might recall, is when abusers, they don't have to be narcissists or psychopaths, and actually narcissists don't use gaslighting as much as often psychopaths do.

But any abuser, abusers tend to make you doubt your reality testing. They make you doubt your sanity, your orientation. They make you doubt your interpretation of events. They make you doubt the explanations, the narratives that you construct to explain to yourself what's happening, to render life in its kaleidoscopic myriad manifestations meaningful. So they make you doubt meaning. They make you doubt significance. They make you doubt causation, what led to what, who did what to whom. They make you doubt your sanity, your grasp of reality.

And they do this in a variety of ways which put together are known as gaslighting.

But sometimes you're doing it to yourself. And this is gaslighting, a self-gaslighting.

Now, how did I come to that?

I mean, why did I, how was I reminded of that?

The other day I received a direct message from someone saying to me, and she wrote to me, you see that you are a fraudster. Your prediction about remdesivir, the drug that had just been approved by the FDA for the treatment of COVID, your prediction was totally wrong. And everything you said was wrong.

Now here's the interesting thing. I was among the first, if not the first, but definitely among the first in late February and early March to suggest that the only class of antivirals that's going to work with COVID-19 is remdesivir, anti Ebola antivirals.

I dedicated at least three separate videos advocating, and I'm talking about the beginning of March, advocating remdesivir as a treatment for COVID. I extolled the virtues of remdesivir. I analyzed the mechanism of action of remdesivir. I suggested to start with clinical trials of remdesivir, and I said extremely clearly several times that ultimately, and finally, all the other drugs will prove to be inefficacious with one exception, remdesivir.

And I had been right. Well, there's dexamethasone as well, but remdesivir is it. This is the name of the game. It's the only antiviral that works against COVID.

So I was wrong. I was dead right. I was very, very right.

Why did she suddenly begin to ask, why did she think, how could she think that I were wrong?

She claimed to have listened to the videos. How could she have reached a conclusion that I were wrong, that I was wrong about remdesivir when I was seriously right about remdesivir?

What mechanism in her mind, what made her mishear misinterpret what she'd heard?

And that was self gaslighting.

She is not a fan, as you realize, yes, she hates my guts. So she wanted to hear, she wanted to hear, she wanted to listen to the video and to reach a conclusion that I had been mistaken. She expected to hear that I, being a fraudster, got it wrong.

She came to the video, she watched the video with preconceptions, with expectations and with very, very strong desire to prove me wrong. And this predisposed her to hear something which was not in the videos, utterly, absolutely not.

There's no way to listen to these videos and get it wrong.

So she was not actually listening to the video.

Videos, she was listening to her inner voice. She was listening to processes and dynamics in her mind that pushed her to falsify reality, to confabulate, to reframe, essentially to lie to herself and to lose reality testing.

She was no longer in touch with reality. What was she doing? She was gaslighting herself.

She removed herself from reality into a delusional space, in that delusional, fantastic space.

All her wishes came true. Sam was a fraudster and he got it wrong about him, the severe and the pandemic, because that's what she wanted very much to prove.

So what was actually said in the videos was blotted out, deleted.

You have this power, especially as victims. You hear what you want to hear. You hear what you want, what you expect to hear. You anticipate humiliation, rejection, abuse, torture, torment, agony, pain, exploitation.

And then you gather information from the environment, including information about your abuser, and you reassemble it. You reframe it. You put it together in a narrative that justifies your expectations, validates your fears and concerns, and upholds your view of your abuser.

You have a negative view of your abuser. You don't want to hear anything that contradicts this negative view.

You're going to fend it off. You're going to firewall. You're going to ignore it. You're going to repress it and deny it.

So any positive information about your abuser would be eliminated. Or even worse, you will take the information and reframe it like this woman.

I was saying in the videos, I don't know, maybe 50 times. I mean, many, many times the remdesivir is great. It's going to cure COVID.

What did she hear? Remdesivir is wrong. It's not going to cure COVID.

She heard exactly the opposite. That's what she wanted to hear.

You are doing this as well. You're gaslighting yourself.

Now, nothing wrong with it. It's not a pathology. It's known as confirmation bias.

When we are emotionally invested, when we are affected, deeply emotionally invested in any mental process, for example, in trusting someone or in distrusting someone or in experiencing pain or in being traumatized or in being very afraid, whenever we are emotionally invested in a cognitive or an emotional process, our brain shuts off, deletes, represses, denies and ignores any information that challenges the theory that you had constructed or the bias that you had formed or the narrative that you have put together.

At some point, you create a theory, a theory about other people and about specific other people like your abuser. You create a theory about the world and about specific events, occurrences and circumstances in the world, for example, your relationship.

Now, these theories are very dear to you. You're emotionally invested in these theories. You want to protect them. You don't want them to be challenged. You don't want them to be undermined. You don't want anyone to tell you you're wrong because that's narcissistic injury. It challenges your grandiosity and all of us have grandiosity. It's a normal state of things.

So you don't want to listen to any of this.

My abuser is abusive, is an animal, is bad, is evil. I don't want to listen to anything which will undermine this or contradict this or challenge this.

And if I do, if something penetrates my firewall, if there's an intrusion and some bit of information comes in which kind of unsettles the precarious tower that I had constructed, I'm going to reframe this piece of information. I'm going to lie to myself. I'm going to gaslight myself. I'm going to ignore reality. I'm going to impair my reality testing.

It's not only about abuse. It's about everything, about political candidates. The supporters of Donald Trump don't want to hear anything bad about Donald Trump.

And when there is an avalanche of seriously bad things about Donald Trump, they reframe these things. Every shortcoming becomes an advantage. Every misdeed becomes smart and clever conduct. Every disempathic, seriously wicked comment becomes irony and proof of sense of humor. Everything he does and everything he says is reinterpreted, misinterpreted, recast, reframed, confabulated.

The supporters of Donald Trump create narratives that shut out, shut off, delete and ignore any information or data which contradict their already well-established theory of who is Donald Trump, what is Donald Trump, who are the enemies of Donald Trump, who are the friends of Donald Trump, what's Donald Trump going to deliver and when.

Same with Obama supporters. Same with Adolf Hitler supporters. Same with any personality cult.

So self-gaslighting is an integral, very crucial process of establishing an inner equilibrium, an inner peace, a sense of calmness and resilience allows us to carry on with our lives.

If we were to question all the time everything we think we know about other people, about specific people, about the world, about events, about morality. We would never get anywhere. We would freeze. The world, anyhow, bombards us with gigantic amounts of information.

Studies have shown that we absorb only 5% of the information that is offered to us by reality. Otherwise we would drown. We would freeze like a very bad tablet or device. We would simply freeze.

So it's a denial of service attack if we open ourselves to all the information out there. We have to choose. We make selections and choices all the time and we make sure that this, the selected data, the selected info fits well with previous info, with previous data and with our theories within which we accommodate this data and information.

And this leads of course to resistance to learning, resistance to change. And don't think that this is only among laymen.

In my own profession, among my colleagues, I frequently encounter resistance to change. That's true in physics, where I'm active, that's true in psychology where I'm active, that used to be true in economics where I was active, when I was active in that field. There is enormous resistance.

Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called, a book about scientific revolutions. And he said that the paradigm shift, changing your mind, changing your view of how things work is a very excruciating and onerous process.

I mean, people are resistant. People fight to death to maintain their views and ideas of the world and not to accept any challenge or change.

I'm right now in the throes of suggesting a new conception of addiction.

And you know, there is this dogma that alcohol is a depressant and that alcoholism is a brain disease. Let me share something with you. There's no proof of either. If anything, alcohol is a dysregulator.

So it leads to ups and downs in moods, in emotional processing and so on, but ups and downs, not only downs. Anyone who drinks will tell you this.

When you drink, you feel good. You have the buzz. You don't feel bad. You don't become depressed. You become depressed a bit later or a lot later, the day after maybe.

But you're depressed the day after, probably also because of hangover and other effects. It's not a depressant. It's a dysregulator.

This minor change, just to accept reality, that I called us, it's not a depressant. It's been a mistake. We were mistaken. No one. No one accepts it.

You should see the fighting over this.

And when I suggest that a 40% of the brain is dedicated to addictions and to processing addictions, maybe addiction has an evolutionary advantage somewhere. Maybe it's a positive adaptation, not a negative thing.

Wow, you should see the reactions. Alcohol is a disinhibitor. It's a disinhibitor. It makes you actually feel good.

So an addiction is a normal state.

And these modifications, it's a fourth world war, third world war. I don't know what to call it. Is it a brain disorder or a disease?

Here's another bit of nonsense. Yes, of course alcohol has an effect on the brain. Everything has an effect on the brain. Sugar has an effect on the brain. I mean, everything has an effect on the brain. Everything that passes the brain blood barrier has an effect on the brain.

But what caused what? What preceded what?

We definitely don't have answers to this.

And to say that alcoholism is a brain disorder is to lie. You know, I don't mean words. That's not only nonsense. It's fallacious because we don't have any conclusive studies that demonstrate that alcoholics were born with a specific proclivity or disorder or abnormality or dysfunction in the brain.

None.

So, you know, don't feel bad. Self-gas lighting is whenever people defend the status quo, whenever they don't want to exit their comfort zone, whenever they had developed laboriously with a lot of investment, a lot of thought, a lot of dedication, a worldview, an opinion, a judgment. And then they would take information and data and falsify them and transmogrify them and transform them and ignore them and deny them and repress them and combine them wrongly with other pieces of data and information and do anything in their power to preserve the equilibrium, the homeostasis.

This is self-gas lighting.

I said that Remdesivir will prove to be the cure to COVID, ultimately.

She heard that I said exactly the opposite. Why? She wanted me to be wrong. I'm the abuser. I'm the monster. I'm the narcissist and the psychopath.

She couldn't accept that I may have been right. She wants me to be a fraud. She wants me to be wrong.

So she misheard and she didn't miss a single instance. She misheard three hours of videos. That's the power of self-gas lighting.

Now to share a fantasy.

Karen and Gammon. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. Karen and Gammon started in the black community. Blacks gave these monocles, used these monocles to describe whites. Karen was a grandiose, entitled, contemptuous white woman. Irritable, irascible, aggressive, unpleasant white woman. Gammon was the male equivalent of Karen and started in communities of color.

But then it emerged as usual by the way minorities always lead the way. Trends start with minorities. High status minorities like elites, you know, aristocracy, intellectual elites, or low status minorities.

Change starts in minority communities because they have very little to lose. They can gamble. They can take risks. They seek novelty. Their only chance is to unsettle the existing established order. That's the only way to progress.

So everything starts there. That's the ferment.

So black communities were using Karen and Gammon, and then about 20 years later it became, you know, now everyone is using Karen and Gammon, and now it applies not only to whites, but equally to people of color.

And grandiosity, entitlement, contempt, are color blind.

And when I describe the narcissist and the relationship cycle of the narcissist, many people said to me, well, that's a Gammon or Karen. You're describing a Gammon or Karen. Not really, but step by step.

I want to start with a comment by Ana Monte, if that's a real name. Ana Monte is a viewer, saw one of my videos and left a comment. Thank you, Sam. You gave me all the final answers and the strength to understand and wake up.

Every narcissist takes you in with a mask of a father and the wonderful fantasy ends when you realize that under the mask, there is just a child full of pain. You abandoned him because you wanted a man.

Thanks.

And I thought this is a wonderful summary within a single sentence of the entire dynamic. So I'm going to read it to you again. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Every narcissist takes you in with a mask of a father and the wonderful fantasy ends when you realize that under the mask, there is just a child full of pain. You abandoned him because you want a man.

Thanks.

Thank you, Ana Monte. And I answered, yes, exclamation. And most women cut off the sex with a wunderkind genius child or with a sexualist father guru and they seek intimacy with a man or they abandon the narcissist altogether. There is no infidelity. I wrote to her. There's no infidelity or unfaithfulness involved, even when there is deception, even when there is cheating.

So I distinguish two elements. There's the sex with a man outside the marriage, extramarital sex, or some other form of betrayal, non-sexual betrayal. But there's going outside the marital bond, going outside the couple.

And in a normal couple, in a healthy couple, that would be unfaithfulness, infidelity, adultery, but not with a narcissist in my view.

There may be deception. The intimate partner of the narcissist may lie to the narcissist about her behavior, what she did last night. That's deception. It's entirely different issue, but there's no unfaithfulness and there's no infidelity.

Women, when someone is with a narcissist, with a narcissist intimate partner, she doesn't prefer another man to the narcissist. She prefers a man to a child or to a father or to a guru. She opts for a man rather than for these other roles.

You see, if you have, as an intimate partner, a healthy, normal, loving, caring, sexual partner, men, let's say in this case, you can reverse the genders. You can reverse the gender pronouns, replace him with she, etc.

Don't let me repeat this every two minutes. So if you're with a healthy man, as a woman, if you're with a healthy heterosexual, you're with a healthy man and so on and so forth, loving, caring, sexy, etc., and you stray, you cheat, one night stand, love affair, that's infidelity. That's unfaithfulness because you had chosen another man to your men, over your men. You had a man, you had a man at home and you preferred another man. That's unfaithfulness. That's infidelity.

But the intimate partner of a narcissist doesn't have a man at all. She has a child. She has a father sometimes, rarely. Mostly she has a child.

When she goes with another man, when she has intimacy with another man, sexual, emotional, doesn't have to be sexual, when she offers herself in any way to another man, as a friend, as a lover. It's not that she makes a choice between two men, the man at home and the man at work, or the man at home and the man in the bar. That's not what's happening. She's not choosing another man. She's choosing a man, a man. At home, she has a child. She doesn't have a man. She's a virtual single. She's single. She doesn't have a man. So she's not choosing another man. She's not unfaithful. There's no infidelity here.

So you can say, okay, so why does she stay with him? It's immoral to stay with him and to be with men. Those who remain in the relationship with a narcissist had agreed to assume the role of his surrogate mother. Why? I don't know. They pity him. Or they cannot countenance hurting him. They don't want to hurt him. They see the wounded, small, frightened child crying in the corner. They can't hurt this child. They simply can't hurt him. They pity the child.

So they can't dump the narcissist. They can't abandon the narcissist.

But on the other hand, they need a man. They're women. They have sexual needs. They have emotional needs. They have intimacy needs. They have good time needs. They have need for fun, to have fun. They're women.

And at home, what they have is a child, 100% unadulterated, unmitigated child. So it's not that they choose one man over another. They choose to be with a man over being with a child.

And they remain with a child because they don't want to hurt the child, because they pity the child. And maybe some of them who are seriously delusional, malignantly optimistic, keep hoping that one day this child might reveal his adult side as he had done misleadingly during the grooming phase and the love bobbing phase.

But they still seek fulfillment as women elsewhere, either with other men or with children, or they become workaholic. Nevermind. The betrayal and the abandonment has many forms. Cheating with other men is only one form. Cheating with men is only one way. There are many ways to absent yourself emotionally or to absent yourself physically.

And finally, to just walk away, do things and walk away. It's a very complex dynamic because it is not a dynamic between two adults. It's a dynamic between an adult and a child, but a child who has expectations of an adult, that his child pretends to be an adult.

And you are trapped with this same child, child who thinks he's an adult. And then one day you wake up and you look at the mirror and you see a child. It's a psychedelic, bad trip. That is the terrifying experience.

Imagine that all your life you thought you were a woman. You were told you were a woman. Men courted you. You had sex with men. You thought you were a woman.

In a world without mirrors.

And one day you came across a mirror at the airport. You look at the mirror and you see that you're actually a man.

Can you imagine the shock?

The narcissist goes through his life believing himself to be an adult, treating himself as an adult, demanding respect as an adult, fulfilling adult roles. It's role playing. It's acting. It's play acting. He doesn't really feel in it. He feels he's playing a role, like a script. He regards his life as a movie.

And then one day he passes the mirror at the airport and he looks in the mirror and he sees this tiny child, this small child. Tiny child, three feet.

Imagine the shock. Imagine the disorientation, the discombobulation. Imagine the storm, the fire, the volcanic eruption, the tectonic shift in his mind the moment he finally exists. That he's not an adult.

And so, you know, many people told me during the love bombing phase and the grooming phase, the narcissist is future faking. No, he is not future faking. I would have used this phrase had it been appropriate.

Future faking is a predatory technique. It's when a predator with clear goals in mind, with a clear plan, makes false, fallacious lies and promises about the future which he knows in advance he has no intention to fulfill. It's part of a strategy. It's a subterfuge. It's in other words, scamming or con artistry.

That's not the narcissist. He doesn't future fake. He truly believes his promises and his lies. He's entering a shared fantasy, a shared psychotic state.

The narcissist is not predatory. He is acquisitive. He's not a psychopath. The psychopath is predatory.

Psychopath is going to look at you and say, wow, this woman has a lot of money. I'm going to promise her marriage. I'm going to promise her children. I'm going to promise her undying love. Then I'm going to take all her money and I'm going to dump her. That's future faking. That's future faking. It's going to groom that woman to take her money. That's future faking.

The narcissist takes a look at the same woman and he's infatuated. He's in love. She's ideal. She's brilliant. She's amazing. She's perfect. She's intelligent. She is the epitome in essence and quintessence of femininity. She is and she is. There's never been like her before or will ever be after, etc.

And then he falls for it. He falls for his own fantasy, fantastic space, his own concoction. He's not predatory. He is acquisitive. He wants to acquire her. He wants to drag her and bring her into his shared space where everything is pink and Disneyland, where every promise becomes true just by virtue of uttering it. This is magical thinking. If I only say something aloud, it must be true. If I think something, it will manifest and become. This is narcissistic thinking.

Psychopath never loses step of reality. Absolutely not. Psychopath knows exactly what he's doing. Sometimes he loses control of his impulses. Sometimes he rages. Sometimes he's reckless. Often he's reckless. That's because he doesn't care. He rejects life. He doesn't give an S, you know, but he never loses touch with reality. He knows exactly what he's doing. Any second and every minute he knows to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, not the narcissist.

The DSM defines narcissistic personality disorder as a disorder of fantasy. Fantasy is a psychological defense mechanism.

So when the narcissist makes you promises about the future, how lovely it's going to be, how perfect it's going to be, how you're going to live happily ever after, you have, you're going to have children, most perfect children and you know, future together and he will make commitment and investment and he will change himself for the umpteenth time.

When he makes all these promises, he is not lying to you. He's not faking. There's no faking in this future. He really believes it's going to happen.

Why? Because he said it and because he wants it very much.

The thing you can easily see that the narcissist in this sense is a child because children have magical thinking of this kind. They confuse fantasy in reality, wish fulfillment. It's a dream state.

In dreams, we very often fulfill wishes and when we are inside the dream, very rarely do we know that we are dreaming. Usually we think we are in reality.

The narcissist mental state is a dreamscape. It's a constant mental dreamscape, dream state and it's easy to see that the narcissist is not an adult in many ways.

For example, let's take a typical man, a healthy, normal, typical man and a woman.

When there is a romantic attachment, immediately there are three triggers in both parties, male and female. The three kind of behaviors that are triggered and they are partly biological. There is abandonment, fear of abandonment and fear of loss, which translates into romantic jealousy.

If a competitor enters the scene, a serious competitor, there is possessiveness. The intuitive perception of the other is an object, objectifying the other and rendering the other property.

Now we all do this. This is why in psychology we call people objects because we all objectify other people. The amount of data and information about other people is so gigantic that we have to reduce and to abstract. We select a few points and we connect the dots and create an introject. We create an internal representation, which is essentially an object.

So there is possessiveness and there is competition, especially with men, but not only, of course with women as well.

Adult, healthy, normal adults, adults, when they get attached, when they get bonded, especially romantically, they show romantic jealousy. They show possessiveness and they show competition.

And so when you look at the narcissist, for example, the cerebral narcissist, no way. All he has is fear of loss and abandonment. He is not possessive and he's not competitive. He couldn't care less. He couldn't care less. His wife can be out every single night of the week, return home drunk at the small hours of the morning. And he wouldn't even bother to ask where were you, who were you with and what were you doing?

He's not possessive. He's not competitive.

But the second he sees a hint, a hint of a shadow of a possibility of abandonment or loss, it triggers him. And it's the only artifact in the arsenal, in the inner world of the cerebral narcissist.

Loss of abandonment, loss, abandonment, fear of abandonment, anxiety about loss. No possessiveness, no competition.

Now this is typical of children. Children are not competitive and they're not possessive, but they do have enormous, tremendous, or to paraphrase another narcissist, huge abandonment anxiety, separation anxiety, fear of loss.

Children have this and they don't have possessiveness and not competitive. So children, as cerebral narcissists are children, they are children, very young children, pre-edipal children, children before the Oedipus complex.

Because when you as a child develop the Oedipus complex, you begin to be jealous, romantically jealous. You're in love with mother and you're romantically jealous of father and you become very possessive of mother and you're competing with your father. That's the Oedipus stage.

Narcissists get stuck pre-edipally. They are not even sufficiently developed to have the Oedipus complex. They get stuck before. They're like babies, infant formula, infant formula, risk of loss, hint of abandonment, shadow of desertion. They go crazy.

Otherwise, reassure them that you're always going to be back. Yes, you're going on a vacation with another man, you know, for two weeks, but you'll be back. He doesn't mind. He doesn't care.

Important is your presence in his life, not to be abandoned. That's child. It's totally childlike. It's totally childlike.

Some subtypes of narcissists, somatic narcissists, and especially psychopathic narcissists, they have all three. They have romantic jealousy, which is essentially abandonment, anxiety, disorder, the romantic jealousy. They are possessive and they're competitive. So somatic narcissists and psychopathic narcissists do have all three, but they have the theology, the reason, the causation, the causes beyond these three is not the same like healthy or normal person.

And also the length and the intensity of these emotions. For example, if the psychopath or the somatic narcissist becomes possessive, becomes jealous and becomes competitive and it's not working, he will dump you where the healthy normal partner may try for months and years to restore the relationship, to recover from the infidelity, to do something, to change himself, to change you, to modify behaviors, to make new agreements, to establish communication protocols.

Psychopath and somatic narcissists may be momentarily possessive and competitive, but they move on. They move on. We can go into it in another video.

So women who are with narcissists, they are virtual singles. They are like single mothers with a petulant child or with a stern father at home.

You know, many women live with their fathers or many women live with a child and they are single mothers. These women date, they go out on dates, same with a narcissist intimate partner. She goes out on dates. She goes out on dates or she has very intimate relationships with men, emotional or physical or both, because at home she doesn't have a man. She has a petulant child, spoiled brat, entitled self-styled genius usually, or intermittent bursts of a stern disciplinarian harsh father, whichever the case may be.

If you live at home with a father or you live at home with your child, you're still free to date. And these intimate partners feel absolutely free to date or free to stray or free to develop a parallel life at work or with their children or with their friends, girlfriends. I mean, it's like they have their private life and at home they have a child, like every single mother, you know.

Dating is an outlet. It's an escape from the dreary, drab, day-to-day pedestrian tasks.

And so narcissists sometimes do fulfill adult roles. They do fulfill adult roles. For example, I mentioned father. Father is an adult role. I mentioned guru. Guru is an adult role.

So the narcissist does fulfill adult roles, but he plays them. He acts them and he plays these roles only in order to acquire the intimate partner and to lead her inexorably into the shared fantasy.

Once he can take the intimate partner for granted, once he is ascertained over permanence, object permanence, object constancy, once in other words he is sure that she will never abandon him, the adult roles go out the window. They go out the window and he becomes almost 100% child.

The adult roles are brief. They're devoid of true responsibilities, chores. There's no commitment there. It's not real. It's a role. It's a role play.

And the investment in the adult roles which precede usually the shared fantasy, the narcissist plays adult roles in love bombing, grooming and honeymoon phases.

So the investment in these other roles is proportional to the narcissist expectations and to the benefits he derives.

There's no future faking. There is manipulation, but it's not intentional, not deliberate, not goal oriented, not psychopathic. It's intuitive. It's reflexive. It's like animal nature. You know, it comes from the reptilian part of the brainstem.

It's a manipulative ploy that involves self-delusional, self-deceiving role play by everyone involved. Everyone pretends its reality when it's not.

And in the initial phases, the narcissist says, okay, I will play the father. I'll play the guru. I'll play the adult. I will even make you adult promises. I'll even tell you that I'll be a great husband and a father. Anything you want to hear, I'll play the adult, but not like I'll play the adult in order to deceive you. I'll play the adult because I'm convincing myself that I can be an adult, that I can be normal if I only wish to.

It's magical thinking.

A narcissist with extreme object inconsistency and with abandonment, anxiety, for example, a compensatory narcissist. In a compensatory narcissist, the grandiosity, the overt obnoxious grandiosity, masks, disguises an inordinately low sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

So this kind of narcissist will have an extreme object inconsistency and abandonment, anxiety. And he reacts all the time, this kind of narcissist reacts all the time with romantic jealousy to his intimate partners' infidelity, or alternative double life, or behavior as a single.

Why?

Because this kind of narcissist has constant abandonment and loss anxiety. His sense of self-worth and self-esteem and self-confidence are so low that he anticipates abandonment, humiliation and rejection any minute.

And so he's constantly in a state of romantic jealousy.

Same with borderlines, same dynamic in borderlines.

But most narcissists are not compensatory. They really believe that they are superior, geniuses, gurus, amazing, perfect, brilliant, incredible, and I reward.

So these kinds of narcissists, they turn a blind eye to adultery, to betrayal, to an alternative life, to single behaviors. These kind of narcissists go about their business of securing plentiful and regular narcissistic supply.

They don't care about you. They don't give a shit where you are, what you're doing with whom, as long as you promise to be home, back home, back to take care of your child.

We must distinguish romantic jealousy from humiliation.

All narcissists feel humiliated and they feel humiliated because of their inability to live normal lives in which they are not compelled to share their women or to give their women up to other men. It's humiliating to never have an intimate partner who is only yours. An intimate partner you don't have to share with other men. It's a very humiliating thing because you know you're crippled. It's like you are quadriplegic. You're an invalid. There's nothing you can do about it.

Chronic illness generally. You know in medicine how we call illness, chronic illness? Insult. It's called insult. Serious.

The clinical term in medicine is insult. It's insulting to be incapacitated, to be disabled, to the point that you can't have anything that is exclusively yours, have anyone that is only yours, that you have to share with others. These are the unavoidable outcomes of the narcissist's disability and ubiquitous dysfunction.

He can't, for example, provide for the needs and requirements, emotional and physical, of his intimate partner. So he has to let her share herself with other men. He can't, in business, behave as an adult.

So ultimately everyone steals his ideas or he's replaced by someone else. It's a form of cheating. You know when your boss picks up someone to replace you, to substitute for you at work and then fires you, that's cheating. It's the exact equivalent of infidelity or unfaithfulness.

The narcissists go through this kind of humiliation daily. Narcissists switch from internal to external mortification real fast.

But they do first, at first, experience agonizing trepidation and mayhem. Internal mortification is a very bad feeling. It's like in internal monologue I'm defunct, I'm deficient, I'm deformed, I'm disabled, I'm incapacitated, I'm an invalid. I can't be normal. I can't have happiness. I can't have a partner who would be only mine. I can't keep my job. People will always prefer others to me. My intimate partner will prefer other men to me because I'm not a man. My boss will prefer other employees to me because I'm not an employee, I'm not an adult. I refuse to grow up.

Peter Penn says it openly in the book. I don't want to grow up. It sucks.

And being cheated on that I keep mentioning, it's only the tick of an iceberg. And I'm mentioning it because being cheated on recreates the original conflict with the mother. So it's really, really bad. It's like an echo chamber of all the previous pain that the narcissist had experienced with his mother.

So only infidelity, only sexual cheating or emotional cheating with men has this resonance within the narcissist and only this can lead him to mortification. All other forms of humiliation lead to narcissistic injury. Cheating infidelity and faithfulness with men leads to mortification because it recreates the original environment, ambience of painful and hurtful childhood.

But the narcissist is in a constant state of humiliation. Women cheat on him. Women abandon him. Businesses he creates go bankrupt. Projects he initiates fall apart. His long-term self-efficacy is zero. He's an imposter and he suffers from the imposter syndrome, Helen Deutsch.

There's a sense of lost agency, a sense of total external locus of control, and faced with such trenchant failure, if you were faced with such inexorable, repeatable, recurrent, inevitable, ineluctable, unavoidable failure, like guaranteed, failure and loss are guaranteed.

If someone were to tell you, listen, from now on here's a letter from God guaranteeing that everything you try to do, you try to make a family, you try to fall in love, you try to have an intimate partner, try to establish a business, you try to publish a book and whatever you try to do, guaranteed you will fail and you will lose.

And even when you succeed internally, you will consider it a failure because your standards are perfection. Your false self is unremitting, its grandiose, unrealistically grandiose and you have the superego who tortures you in a critic.

So you always fail, guaranteed.

What would you do? What would you do if you were faced with such an internal environment?

Well, there are two options. The first option is suicide. It's a form of internal, taking internal mortification to its logical conclusion.

I'm so impaired, I'm so disabled, I'm so effed up, I'm so, you know, good for nothing, I better put an end to it all. It's suicide.

It's the first rational, frankly, option.

And then the alternative is to say what causes me pain is reality and everyone and everything in reality.

Simple, I'm going to divorce reality and I'm not going to divorce reality by becoming psychotic. That's too extreme. I'm going to divorce reality by becoming delusional, fantastic, grandiose and that will move me from internal mortification. I am corrupt. I am decadent. I am disabled. I am imperfect. It will move me to an external mortification. Everyone is malicious. Everyone is envious of me. The world is hostile. It's a jungle out there. It's a win-lose. It's a zero-sum game.

So these are the two options of the narcissist, suicide or grandiosity. It's a no-brainer.

Of course you would choose grandiosity, but it's also a catch-22 because to defend one's fantastically inflated view of oneself, to defend one's grandiosity from challenges, from stark reality, from the lack of patience and malice of other people, this brings with its own set of humiliations, betrayals, abandonments, derision, slides, challenges and put-downs.

When you try to defend your grandiosity, you look like a buffoon. You look like a fool and people treat you disrespectfully.

Whichever way you turn, you're humiliated. You're humiliated by your intimate partners, by your recurrent failures in everything, constantly defeated. You're in a defeated state of mind.

So you try to compensate for it by pretending that you are a winner, not a loser. You're a winner. You lie to yourself and especially to others and you force others to lie to your narcissistic supply, that you're the greatest, the most amazing, the most perfect and so on and so forth.

But this also brings humiliation, defeat, failure, betrayal, abandonment. There's no escape.

And this is where I want you to understand.

Narcissism, similarly to the chronically sick addicts, narcissists are their disorder.

You can't separate the narcissist from his narcissism. Chronically sick people have gradually become their sickness.

Abicts become their substance. Narcissists become their narcissism.

The disorders displace these people. Narcissism displaces the narcissist.

The narcissist transmogrifies, changes, shapeshiftsand is consumed and digested by his dysfunction from individual to dysfunction.

Only the disease is left behind, having consumed and spat out the person that used to be.

It's a second death. First time around, the true self dies, is sacrificed, like human sacrifice, to the new God, the false self.

Then the false self proves to be not efficacious. False self proves to be not the solution.

And then the disease takes over and it's the second time the narcissist dies, in a process known as mortification.