So this is just a quickie between longer videos, I mean videos, get your mind off the gutter.
Okay, today's topic is why do narcissists encourage their partners to be unfaithful?
A substantial minority of narcissists encourage their partners, proactively encourage them to sleep with others, to have sex with others, to be unfaithful via casual sex, swinging or group sex, especially threesomes.
Now, in reality, half of all narcissists are women and half are men. This is the situation today. It's been very different 40 years ago, but we have evolved and progressed since then, and women became equal to men, even in this unfortunate arena.
But when it comes to this kind of behavior, asking your intimate partner or encouraging your intimate partner to have sex with others, most of the narcissists who do this, they are actually men. Very few women narcissists do this.
Now, the victims often misinterpret the narcissist's encouragement as his wish or his command. They seek to gratify the narcissist by acquiescing, to please the narcissist, to make him happy, to preserve the couple, to introduce some spies into a dying relationship, sexually at least.
So, victims collude and collaborate in this dance macabre, although this is usually based on a total misinterpretation of the narcissist's motivations for this kind of exceedingly rare and bizarre behavior.
I don't know of many guys who would do this, and it's strange.
Now, some of you might say it's not strange at all. It's cakoldry.
Cakoldry is a fetish. It's a sexual practice. It's a form of kink.
And about one to three percent of the male population are cakolds, and a much smaller number of women are cakwins.
So, there are people who derive sexual arousal and pleasure by witnessing their intimate partners having sex with others, or by being aware of their intimate partners having sex with others.
This is cakoldry. Cakoldry, as I said, is a fetish. It's a form of masochism.
The cakold derives pleasure from being humiliated.
In his book, Masochism and the Self, Roy Baumeister, a prominent psychologist, advanced a self-theory analysis. He said that cakoldy is a form of escaping from self-awareness.
Self-awareness becomes intolerable and burdensome.
There's a perception of inadequacy, a bad object. I'm unworthy. I'm a failure. I'm a loser.
And the physical and mental pain from masochism and cakoldry, in this case, takes attention away from the bad object, from these voices, tormenting voices inside the mind, which keep telling you that you are a zero, you are a failure, you're a loser, you are good for nothing, etc., etc.
So, the masochism is like a pain that takes your mind away. It's a form of self-harming. Self-harming is very common in borderline personality disorder.
And Baumeister says it brings attention away from the self, which is desirable in times of guilt, anxiety, or insecurity, or when self-awareness is unpleasant.
Immediately you can see that this does not apply to narcissists. Even covert narcissists rarely experience guilt or shame consciously. They rarely do this.
And so, narcissists who encourage their partners to have sex with other people are not, in the vast majority of cases, are not cakolds. They are not masochists.
To characterize them as cakolds and masochists is to misunderstand narcissism profoundly.
Narcissism is a defense against shame. It's a repression of these emotions. It's an obliteration of the bad object via compensatory grandiosity.
Cakoldry is exactly the opposite. It's getting in touch with the shame. It's experiencing humiliation, seeking mortification. That's not narcissism.
So, why do narcissists behave exactly as cakolds do?
Number one, betrayal fantasy. The betrayal fantasy is a very crucial element in the devaluation discard part of the narcissistic cycle of relationship.
The narcissist needs to devalue the partner and discard the partner by shifting the blame. The narcissist would encourage his partner to betray him, to cheat on him, so that he can feel blameless and guiltless when devaluing and discarding her.
I have a video dedicated to betrayal fantasy. It's titled "How Narcissist Betrays You to Become Himself". And that sums it up.
The narcissist encourages you to misbehave, to betray him and to cheat on him, so that he can, with good conscience, dump you. Dumping is the symbolic representation of separation and individuation, the unresolved stage or phase in early childhood development with his original mother.
You are a maternal object and he needs to get rid of you in order to reenact the early conflict with his mother.
The best way to do this is if you were to cheat on him with someone else, then he would feel utterly, utterly exonerated and utterly justified in telling you goodbye.
So this is the first and major reason.
Second one, loyalty test. The narcissist converts you into a maternal figure and expects you to accept him, to embrace him and to love him unconditionally as a mother would.
But how can the narcissist trust you? How would he know that you are trustworthy, that you can be relied upon, that you will not betray him and cheat on him, or that you will not hurt him the way his original mother did, that you will not become absent, that you will not become neglectful, that you will not become racial, that you will not become vindictive.
So, how can the narcissist verify all this? By baiting you. The narcissist baits you. He puts you to a loyalty test with other potential partners.
And then if you fail the loyalty test, he devalues you and discards you because you are not a good mother. You are a dead mother, exactly like his original mother.
His original mother has betrayed him, his original mother has abandoned him, his original mother has cheated on him with her husband or father, and you're doing the same.
So it's a loyalty test.
Next, it's a dare, especially if you're prone to triangulation. If you're the narcissist's intimate partner, and the only way to get a rise out of him is to triangulate with other people, the narcissist would dare you.
The narcissist, remember, is defiant, the narcissist is reckless, and so he would dare you. He would say, "See if I care. It's a power play."
You start to triangulate, the narcissist pushes you to consummate the relationship with the third party. That is the Cartman-Drama-Triangle.
You come to the narcissist with a newly found rescuer and savior.
The narcissist tells you, "Go to that rescuer and savior. Have sex with your rescuer and savior. I dare you. See if I care. I couldn't care less about you. It's a power play."
Of course, it's not true. Deep inside, the narcissist is as tormented as anyone would be by your infidelity, by your lack of faithfulness.
Next, the narcissist would encourage you to have sex with others in order to uphold his view of the other sex as untrustworthy and whorish.
Now, narcissistic women are misandrist. They hate men, and they regard men as untrustworthy and whorish.
Narcissistic men are misogynists. They hate women, and they regard women as untrustworthy and whorish.
What better way to validate their point of view by witnessing your infidelity, your cheating, your deception?
So the narcissist encourages you to conform to his snapshot of you, to his perception of you. He perceives you as whorish, untrustworthy, having problems with impulse control, impulsive and hurtful.
And he wants you to conform to this view. He wants to feel validated. He wants to feel that he is right. He's not just deluding himself or hallucinating.
So when you go away with another man and sleep with him, you will have validated and confirmed and affirmed and Pattadak, the narcissist's view of you, as a representative of your gender and of the other sex, generally speaking.
And finally, there is sadism. Sadism is when the narcissist seeks to defile the partner, to humiliate her, to degrade her by witnessing her debauchery and self-prostitution.
Now this applies to women as well.
I will rewrite the sentence from the female narcissist's point of view.
The narcissist seeks to defile the partner by witnessing his debauchery and self-prostitution and promiscuity.
So it's a form of sadism, encouraging you to sleep with someone else.
It's a narcissist's way of hurting you, of telling you, you mean nothing to me. You're dispensable. You're interchangeable.
I want to get rid of you. I want your gun.
And so it's very hurtful, very painful.
It is the narcissist's way of reasserting control over a situation that is clearly out of control, over a relationship that is going downhill and accelerating and can no longer be manageable.
So what the narcissist does, he legitimizes, he consents to his partner's misbehavior, thereby saying, "I'm actually complicit. I'm privy to this. It's done with my permission and my consent. I'm in charge. I'm in control. Everything is okay. My grandiosity is intact. I am still omnipotent."
Of course, it is self-deception. The partner is liable to misbehave in ways which are unique to herself. She is not being manipulated or controlled by the narcissist. She is not being told what to do. She is not being coerced. She is just reactive to the environment, the toxic environment that the narcissist had created.
And so when the partner finds herself on the path to these kinds of solutions to the intractable, painful relationship, she no longer recognizes herself. She is estranged. She is disoriented.
And these causes in her behaviors which are alien to her nature, but this is not induced by the narcissist. This is the partner's reaction to the narcissist.
The psychodynamic is totally endogenous, totally internal, not external.
Later on, the partner may regret what she had done and may refrain the entire experience as if she were coerced by the narcissist. The narcissist made her do it.
This is, of course, an alloplastic defense.
But the truth is the narcissist creates a shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is onerous and difficult and harrowing and painful. And the partner who is somewhat dysregulated, somewhat damaged, somewhat broken, somewhat sensitive, somewhat susceptible falls apart, disintegrates.
And then dynamics and processes inside herself cause her to act in ways which shame her and make her feel guilty. And she doesn't know how to cope with these devastating, debilitating emotions.
So she comes up with the narrative where she has been a hapless victim, a passive object subject to manipulation and lacking any willpower. That is, of course, expressly untrue. And it's a form of splitting.
I'm all bad. The narcissist, I'm all good. The narcissist is all bad.
To break your own boundaries, to be given ways you've never behaved before by defiling yourself, degrading yourself and humiliating yourself, essentially prostituting yourself.
Now, there's no coercion involved. There's a misconception here. In none of the things that I've described is their coercion. The narcissist does not coerce his intimate partner to have sex with others. The narcissist doesn't pimp his intimate partner. The narcissist doesn't run a ring, a sex ring. And this is not human trafficking. The narcissist simply goes with the flow.
If the intimate partner triangulates, he encourages her to carry to the end. If the intimate partner seems to be unhappy, he then suggests to her to have sex with others. He baits her by introducing her to others and by leaving her alone with other men, for example, baiting her. He dares her. There's a power play. And so on and so forth. It's much more subtle and nuanced and intricate than coercion. There's no coercion involved. There's a communication of expectations. There's a lot of hurt and pain in both parties. There is a power play. I think that's the most dominant feature. There's a power play involved. There is mutual testing. You know, how far will you go? Are you willing to hurt me?
So these are very sick and dysfunctional dynamics and they involve both the narcissist and his victim. This is not exclusive to the narcissist.
And yet this is not coercive. There's no coercion. And this is why the victim, having cheated on the narcissist, having been unfaithful, is devastated because she realizes that it has been her choice. She chose to do so and she doesn't understand herself. She feels that she has acted in a way that is alien to her. She feels estranged. She feels that she is not herself.
But this is not the outcome of coercion. It's the outcome of sick pathological dynamics. Patho-etiology, as we call it, these dynamics can induce atypical behaviors in people involved in the couple.
And that is true both for the narcissist and for the victim. Even the narcissist may engage in atypical behaviors. Bouderies are broken. Rules are ignored. New behaviors emerge. There's imitation and emulation and modeling. There is merger, infusion. All these dynamics cause the victim to behave narcissistically because cheating on someone else, being unfaithful, going outside the remit of the vows one makes, bridging exclusivity agreed upon. These are all narcissistic behaviors and it is the victim who engages in them.