Two Faces Of Narcissistic Abuse Disrespect From Shared Fantasy To Bargaining

One of the most confusing aspects I think of pathological narcissism is that identical behaviors have entirely different psychodynamic etiologies.

You see the narcissist behaving in a certain way, then the next day he behaves exactly the same way, but the reason he behaved that way yesterday is not the same reason he behaves the same way today.

The same behavior in the narcissist have totally different reasons, causation, and internal psychodynamic processes that lead to it.

It's like the narcissist has a limited repertory of behaviors. He has like two, three behaviors. He has a million reasons, a million processes, a million developments inside him. Inside him, it's chaos. Inside him, it's a vortex. It's a hurricane. Inside him, there's a clash of constructs, of introjects, of delusions, of bits and pieces, snippets and shards of reality. It's a giant kaleidoscope.

But then when it interfaces with reality, when it interacts with you, the narcissist is limited in his choice of behaviors to one or two or three.

And because of that, it's very confusing.

You see the same behavior recurring, happening again and again. The narcissist is a repetition machine, or as Freud called it, he has repetition compulsion.

But the repetition does not signify that the same thing is happening to him inside.

What you see is not what you get. What you see outside, the behaviors teach you nothing, nothing, close to nothing about what's happening in the narcissist's mind prior to the behavior.

And consider, for example, the connection between abuse and parentifying the intimate partner.

Here's the conundrum. The narcissist tries to convert people in his life into parental figures.

I've said it in several recent videos that when he tries to convert you into his mother, or she tries to convert you into her father, it's more typically the borderline narcissist.

But as the narcissist tries to convert you into a parent, a mother, a father, this also recreates, reenacts, triggers unresolved childhood conflicts.

If you become the narcissist's mother, he has unsettled accounts with you. He has bad memories with you. You have caused him pain in your previous incarnation as his mother.

Everything he brings, the whole baggage, he brings a trolley of unfinished business into your relationship with him when you become his mother. And he expects you to soothe him, to comfort him, to resolve for him what his original mother had failed to resolve.

He expects you to provide him with safety and security, to become a safe base.

In other words, he repeats the same traumatic sequence, expecting a totally different result this time, which is commonly the definition of insanity.

The narcissist is re-traumatized. He starts off with you as a woman, then a lover, and then you become his mother.

It's like a nightmarish transmogrification. It's like in a horror movie where you go to sleep with one person, you wake up in the morning and next to you there's a monster, someone else.

The narcissist goes to sleep with his wife, with his lover, with his intimate partner, and he wakes up in the morning with his mother in bed. And that's the very mother who hurt him beyond words, who caused him excruciating pain, anguish that he couldn't tolerate to the point that he had sacrificed himself and created another self.

She is trauma reified. She is the pain of his life, she is the anguish in his soul, and he converts you into her. He makes you her, become her.

And now, of course, this re-traumatizes him. It opens old wounds. From women, you remember that the narcissist wants any two or three. He wants supply, sadistic or narcissistic. He wants sex, adventurous sex. He wants a playmate. And he wants services. Services is house-wide, personal assistant, housekeeper, business partner, but above all, services is a mother. Services is a mother.

He wants services that come together with unconditional acceptance and unconditional love, love not dependent upon performance or upon behavior.

Similarly, from men, the narcissist wants both supply, sadistic and narcissistic, and services, usually in business. And outside these expectations, outside these transactions, the narcissist wants to be left completely alone to his own devices. He wants to do as he pleases. That is his psychopathic side, the antisocial element. He wants to be free as the wind. He wants to be unencumbered. It's a form of defiance. You will not tell me what to do. I'm my own master. I'm nobody's slave and nobody's servant.

He has this in him. And this is a clash between needs, the need for supply, the need for maternal love, the need for acceptance, the need for business, the need for services, and the need to be alone, the schizoid streak, schizoid, paranoid, psychopathic streak in every narcissist.

There's this clash of the titans constantly within him. And he's trying to convert you into a mother.

Also for this reason, because a mother's constant presence is understandable and acceptable. You can be alone when you are with mother. This is separation, individuation. That's what a child does. A child is with mother physically, but he is not with mother mentally.

He separates from mother. He becomes an individual separation, individuation.

When the mother is a safe base, it is safe not to be in the base because she's always there. You can come back to her whenever you need her. You know, she's there. She is object constant. That's object constancy.

So the narcissist cannot survive with an intimate partner. He cannot survive with a business partner. He cannot survive with a friend. Narcissists have no friends. They have many, many, you know, people around them. They have many psychophants, but they don't have a real friend.

Intimate, soul friend, soulmate. So the narcissist cannot get along with other people in their life. They cannot.

The narcissist needs his space and it's infinite space to reflect the infinite space inside himself. The narcissist externalizes his emptiness, externalizes his void. He creates a void and an emptiness around himself. And this void and emptiness are firewalls. It's not a boundary. Boundary is something else. Boundary is a rule of conduct. It's not a boundary. It's a fence. The narcissist fences himself off the world, off reality. That's why his reality testing is a problem.

And now he allows some people into the enclave. He allows some people to the garden. He even allows some people into his home.

But he gets tired of them very fast. They irritate him. They get on his nerves and he tends to become abusive and sadistic.

And in order to survive with an intimate partner in the long term, he needs to convert her into a parental figure. Because you can survive with mother and father indefinitely. But you're very likely to lose your wife if you keep abusing her.

To a swag, to reduce the abandonment anxiety, the narcissist needs to convert everyone around him. Not only an intimate partner, also a business partner. Everyone, even a service provider, narcissist parentifies everyone.

And in the process of rendering everyone a mother, a father, you know, in the process, in this process, the narcissist becomes a child. He regresses.

So whenever the narcissist is forced to accept someone in his life, to countenance the presence of someone in his life, to accept someone's emotions, attachment, bonding, love, warmth, acceptance, whenever he's forced or he wants to or needs to, whenever there's no other choice, it's the last resort, he immediately parentifies that person.

So if he has an intimate spouse, he would try to convert her into a mother figure. If he has a business partner, gradually he would push him to become a father, a collaborator, a colleague. Also, he would push him to become fathers, father figures.

He parentifies everyone around him because it's the only way that allows him to survive with other people on a constant long-term basis.

But here's the problem.

No one would agree to these terms. No one wants to be parentified. You don't want to be parentified. You want a man. You as a woman. You don't want to be a mother. You don't want to be a mother. You want to be a partner. You want to be a mother very much, but you don't want to be a mother.

You, the narcissist business partner, you didn't bargain for, I mean, you didn't agree to become his father. That's not the bargain you had struck. That's not the deal you've made with him. It's not a transaction you with countenance. You want to be his business partner. You want to make money together. Maybe we have fun together. Maybe travel a bit here and there. Going vacations, fishing, fishing expeditions together.

But you never agreed to be his father.

So people resent this parentifying. They get very angry at the narcissists. They feel manipulated, abused somehow. They feel that he's forcing on them an identity which is not theirs. He's coercing them to behave in ways, behaving ways which are alien to them.

And this process is called projective identification.

The narcissist parentifies using a monopoly of defense mechanisms and manipulative behaviors. Some of them illicit, some of them explicit, some of them overt, some of them, many of them covert.

And in this sense, the narcissist uses many codependent strategies. That's why there's a lot of confusion between narcissists and codependents. Both of them make use of an armory of a repertory of manipulative tactics, which are basically identical.

And so no one would accept this preferred and offered deal. If a narcissist were to come to you honestly as a woman and say, listen, I love you very much. I want to be with you for the rest of my life. Let's have children. Let's have a family together.

And so the only, my only condition is that you'll be my mother. Of course you will tell him to evolve, you know, and go looking for a normal man.

Narcissist knows that. So he fakes emotions. He lies simply. He fakes emotions. He fakes commitment. He makes false promises.

And this massive fraud is what we call love bombing or grooming. It's intended to pull the wool over your eyes. It's intended to cloud your judgment. It's intended to brainwash you and gradually it drives you into a psychotic shared fantasy.

This is the shared fantasy.

So here's the sequence.

Narcissist wants you, but he wants you to be his mother. Or if you're a business partner or a friend, he wants you to be his father.

You don't agree. You disagree. You will never accept this assigned role, this emergent role.

So the narcissist is to himself, okay, the only way to get her to be my mother, the only way to get him to be my father is to lie. I will fake emotions. I will fake commitment. I will make false promises. I will behave in fraudulent ways. I will mislead them and gradually I will drag them into my psychotic space, into my shared fantasy. They will become addicted to my presence, to my sense of humor, to my intelligence, and of course, to my irresistible handsomeness. And they will never be able to leave. It's like a spider with a spider web. It's sticky. There is stickiness.

There's a concept in information technology, stickiness. It's like you go to a page, web page, and you have to come back again and again. It's addictive. And this is the honeymoon phase. And again, I want to emphasize it's not only in romantic relationships or romantic courtship. It's in business. It's in the workplace. It's with neighbors. It's in church.

This is the modus operandi, the MO, method of operation of the narcissist.

Identifying possible sources, sources of services, sources of supply, sources of sex, identifying possible sources, lying to them, creating false hopes, creating a dreamlike state, dragging them into a psychotic shared fantasy, and then forcing them to parentify what's the target or the source is acquired.

Hooch, the narcissist, sees no reason to continue the act. Mission accomplished.

And then he reveals his true agenda to extract adulation, narcissistic supply, to abuse and humiliate sadistic supply, to engage in sex, including sadistic sex with women or sexual partner, and to demand services and beneficial outcomes such as money, celebrity, access, power. That's more of a psychopathic streak.

So the first stage he puts on a show for you, a whole theater production. You're the audience. You fall for it. You fall for it. You enter the shared fantasy. You suspend judgment. You ignore reality. The fantasy is you.

He reflects an idealized image of you to himself, makes it possible for you to love yourself.

I discussed all this in other videos. And so you're in the shared fantasy now.

Now he says to himself, mission accomplished. The fly is trapped in the spider web. And no amount in every movement you make any attempt to extricate yourself to run away, to just just wraps the spider web more strongly around you.

And so at this stage in us, he says, I got her. She's mine. I acquired her. I can take her for granted.

Why continue the charade? This charade, this act that I put on in order to capture her, in order to acquire her takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of resources, imagination. So why should I continue this? And he doesn't. He stops.

And then the mask sleeps. The mask sleeps. And you see the real narcissist. And he comes equipped with a list of what he wants.

The three SS. In SS, the narcissist expects his partners, both intermittent business to act as his greatest fans, adventurous or sluttish playmates, co-conspirators and parental figures.

And now I'm coming to the two phases, two faces and two phases of narcissistic abuse.

You know, there are two stages in the narcissist relationships in which he tends to be egregiously and cruelly abusive. He's abusive all the time.

But in these two phases, he really outdoes himself. He really excels. He really stands out.

The first one is during the shared fantasy. The second one is during the interstitial or bargaining stage.

When you put these two together, the two forms of maltreatment, mistreatment constitute the narcissist two pronged approach, avoidance, repetition, compulsion.

So there's a shared fantasy approach, egregious abuse, horrible abuse, narcissistic abuse, avoidance, interstitial or bargaining stage, again, egregious abuse, horrible abuse, narcissistic abuse of another same narcissistic abuse, but for a different reason.

You will see in a minute. And then avoidance, total avoidance, usually breakup.

So this constitutes approach, avoidance, repetition, compulsion. The repetition, compulsion of the narcissist is punctuated with narcissistic abuse.

It's highs and lows. The highs are narcissistic abuse and there are two major highs. Narcissistic abuse during the shared fantasy and narcissistic abuse during the interstitial or bargaining phase.

At this stage, I recommend that you watch my videos about shared fantasy.

Only the abuse in the shared fantasy phase is a recreation of the original conflict with the narcissist mother.

So in the fantasy space, in the shared fantasy, you act as the narcissist mother. You become more and more maternal, even if you don't want to. It's stronger than you.

He forces you in a variety of ways, manipulates you subtly and openly so that at the end you succumb. You want to make him happy. You want to avoid conflict, whatever the reason may be, you become more and more maternal, more and more of a mother.

And gradually you begin to see him more and more as a child.

And of course, during this phase, he regards you totally as his mother and this triggers the conflicts and the pain and the hurt that he had with his mother.

This is known as the archaic wound, or in Joanne Lachkal's term, this spot, vulnerability spot.

Once you become the narcissist mother in the shared fantasy, he reacts to you as his mother. He rejects you, he resents you, he abuses you, he tests you, he tests you to see if you really love him unconditionally. He pushes you away in the hope that you will come back. He behaves as a child who is with a very insecure attachment style and all his behavior during this phase is compulsive and very often unconscious. He wants to make sure that you are a good enough mother. In his childhood, he had a dead mother, an instrumentalizing mother, an objectifying mother, a domineering mother, an over-winning mother, wrong kind of mother, wrong kind of mother who did not provide you with a safe base and object constancy.

Now he can't get it wrong a second time. He wants to make sure that you are not this kind of mother, but he has to test you. So he pushes you to other men. Will you cheat on him? He tortures you, will you abandon him? He abuses you, will you break? He wants to see that you're resilient, that you're strong, that you can support him, be there for him, that you are a safe base.

He recreates all the original conflicts, all the dynamics, all the emotions and the hurt and the pain erupt like a volcanic event, like Mount Vesuvius and you are Pompeii. Will you be buried for millennia or will you survive somehow?

And all this, as I said, is compulsive and unconscious, most of it is compulsive and unconscious and therefore not amenable to behavior modification.

It's not like if you make the narcissist self-aware, if it's, oh, I'm really mistreating the poor woman, it's going to change his behavior. It can't change his behavior because no insight, even emotional insight, can have any effect on compulsive and unconscious behaviors.

Compulsive and unconscious behaviors require therapy, profound therapy, I mean serious therapy.

And in this particular case, the compulsion is all-encompassing, it's all pervasive. The compulsion in this case has to do not with fear of some bad things that might happen.

Typical compulsion has to do with fear, some kind of fear, fear that something bad will happen, something bad will happen to someone you love or something like that.

This particular compulsion is fear that something bad will happen to you as a narcissist.

Narcissist is fighting for his life.

The narcissist made a human sacrifice. When the false self was created, the narcissist made a human sacrifice. He sacrificed his true self to the false self. The false self was like a moron, like an idol, like a bloodthirsty, bloodthirsty Inca God.

And the narcissist put his true self on the altar and took out the beating heart. That was the first human sacrifice.

And you're the second. You are now being sacrificed to the false self. You're the next human sacrifice that the narcissist is offering to his divinity, to his Godhead.

And he can't control it. He can't control it because human sacrifice assuages fear, reduces anxiety and guarantees good, benevolent, favorable outcomes.

And if the sacrifice is not made, if you piss off the gods, if you get on the wrong side, if you are on the wrong column in the ledger, the Jews believe there's a ledger, of course. If you get in the wrong column in the ledger, then you die. It's a struggle for survival, struggle to exist. It's life or death. His life, your death.

Now, same behaviors, same behaviors, narcissistic abuse, classic, everything, the whole repertoire, the whole spectrum of behaviors, happens again in another phase of the relationship known as the interstitial or bargaining phase.

But this time, the reason for the behaviors is completely different. It is instrumental. It is goal-focused.

So in this shared fantasy, the behaviors are compulsive. They're unconscious and they tend to, I mean, the reason for abusing you, the reason for subjecting you to narcissistic abuse is to test your maternity, to test whether you can be a good enough mother.

During the bargaining phase, you are again subjected to all these behaviors, but for another reason entirely.

And the reason is he wants you gone. He wants you out of his life.

Now, once the mask had slipped and the narcissist's true face and intentions are exposed, both men and women feel bemused, deceived, angry, mad, furious, disappointed, heartbroken. People feel that they were made fools of, that they were cheated. And they start to mourn the relationship and they go through the classic stages of grief described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

They go through denial, they go through anger, they go through bargaining, depression and acceptance.

During the bargaining phase, people pose demands and the narcissist pushes them away and upsents himself. That is followed by depression. And it is during this phase that women, for example, the spouses cheat, cheating occurs in this stage, deceitful cheating, discreet cheating. And then there's acceptance.

Acceptance is when the partner gives up on the narcissist, walks away from the narcissist and some partners retaliate. Women retaliate by cheating egregiously and ostentatiously or by, you know, absconding with the family, with the family finances.

Men retaliate by smearing the narcissist, replacing the narcissist with others, absconding with his ideas or intellectual property.

But there's some kind of retaliation in some of the cases.

So there's a shared fantasy.

In the shared fantasy, there is narcissistic abuse intended to test the parental credentials of the partners, intimate partners or business partners or friends.

So there's a lot of abuse, but this is compulsive abuse, unconscious abuse, and the narcissist cannot modify his behavior or control it.

People begin to give up. They say, what the hell? That's not the man I fell in love with. That's not the man I wanted to do business with. That's not the colleague I know I've met the first time.

So they begin to give up.

At first, they deny. Then they get angry. And then they bargain. They post demands. They say, you know, shape up, shape up or ship out, change your behavior. Do this, do that. Don't do that. There's a lot of bargaining going on.

And during this bargaining phase, interstitial one phase, again, the narcissist engages in narcissistic abuse. But this time, he becomes abusive, consciously, knowingly, in a premeditated, intentional, deliberate manner.

He uses abuse because he wants to get rid of men and women in the bargaining phase. He abuses and undermines the intimacy, the business, the collaboration, because he wants to push people to replace him and then to abandon him. And he doesn't care if they cheat on him, like a woman, if a woman cheats on him. He doesn't care that he's pushing them away. He wants them gone.

The minute people exit the shared fantasy mentally and begin to pose terms and conditions, begin to make demands, begin to demand changes and alterations, the narcissist wants nothing to do with them. They become a nuisance. They become irritating. They get on his nerves and he wants them gone because he wants to move on, find the next target, the next intimate partner, the next business partner, which he could then try to identify and push into a new shared fantasy.

That's what I'm describing now is the discard phase.

Unlike the shared fantasy phase, narcissistic abuse in the bargaining phase is a repelling behavior. It's not repetition compartments. It doesn't involve any early life trauma, any conflict with the mother, any conflict with the father. It is an MO, some method of operation and the narcissist uses, applies narcissistic abuse to men, to women, to collectives, to authority figures and to the authorities.

The narcissist can apply narcissistic abuse to a whole school, to the army, to workplaces and depending on his position, even to countries.

A clear distinction must be made between the behaviors that constitute narcissistic abuse during the shared fantasy and the same identical behaviors during the bargaining phase.

In the shared fantasy, these are compulsive behaviors, which are intended to parentify the opposite, the counterparty, parentify the intimate partner, the spouse, the lover, the friend, the business partner.

Narcissistic abuse at this stage in the shared fantasy is intended to parentify and to test, to check, to verify, to prove, to prove the bona fide of the target. Narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy is intended to establish that you are really a good mother, that you will never abandon, that you will never cheat on him or betray him, that you will always be there like a safe base, like a rock, that you will accept him and love him unconditioned, etc.

Narcissistic abuse during the bargaining phase is the exact opposite, logic and aim and target and purpose to drive you away, to never see you again, to get rid of you.

And the outcomes of this ineluctable process in the bargaining phase is that the narcissist finds himself again, alone, abandoned by everyone.

So the bargaining phase is the stage in the relationship where the narcissist tells himself that had been a wrong choice. She can't really be a good enough mother. He can't really be a good enough father. I need to find a new mother. I need to find a new father.

And in order to find a new mother and father, I need to get rid of these people. I need to clean my life. I need to cleanse my life, you know, relationship cleansing. I need to get rid of my wife, my lover, my girlfriend. She's not a good enough mother. I need to get rid of my business, all my friends. They're not good parental figures. They're not good fathers.

And I need to start from zero, from scratch. Clean slate, it's a favorable phrase of the narcissist.

Narcissists are itinerant. They always start with a clean slate from zero. It's like a chess game.

So the outcome of the bargaining phase, a hundred percent of the time, is that the narcissist finds himself alone.

But women and men react differently to the narcissistic abuse in the bargaining phase. Women hurt the narcissist somehow. They can cheat on him, for example, and they do it in a way which is ostentatious or public, humiliating, clear to him, or sometimes in his presence with him as a witness. So that's one way.

I mean, not all women cheat, of course, at this stage, but they will seek to hurt him somehow. It's not revenge. Revenge is an attempt to reestablish balance, to restore cosmic justice. That's not the aim, the psychodynamic aim here.

Women retaliate via cheating, via, you know, they can engage in a smear campaign, they can destroy the narcissist's business, they can inform the authorities about crimes the narcissist is committing, they can alienate his children. I mean, whatever they do, it's not exactly revenge. There's an element of vengeance and spitefulness in the retaliation. And there is an element of self-empowerment and restoration of justice. All these elements exist, but it's not the main motivation.

The main motivation is to hurt, to inform the narcissist, to force the narcissist to experience the pain that he had caused the partner, to give him a taste of his own medication, but not in the eventual sense. It's an act of sharing, actually. It's like you caused me so much pain, you hurt me so much, and for no good reason. I loved you, or I wanted to work with you, or I wanted to be your friend, and you know, you simply wounded me to the quick, I'm bleeding, I'm dying. What did you do it for? Do you know how it feels? Do you know how it feels? Let me show you how it feels.

And then women would engage in these retaliatory activities. And ironically, this just proves to him that all women, unlike his mother, it recreates a trauma with his mother. And it recreates a trauma with his mother, this time when he's alone. The partner is no longer with him to serve as a buffer, and a resonance, and a firewall. He's all alone.

And here is this female figure. And she is vengeful. She's retaliating. She's hurting him. She's causing him enormous pain. She's humiliating him in public.

And so he re-experiences all the old wounds and conflicts with his mother, but he has no one by his side to share it with and to support him. And so he disintegrates completely.

And this is the process known as narcissistic mortification, which I advise you to, again, to search for videos that I've made on this topic.

Only women have this power. Only women have the power to cause mortification to narcissistic men, and vice versa. Only narcissistic, only men have the power to cause mortification to narcissistic women.

Back to the example of the male narcissist.

Once they are discarded via the bargaining phase, narcissistic abuse, men can only cause the narcissist extreme narcissistic injury, but never mortification.

They can act aggressively. They can punish him. They can deprive him of something. They can take away something from you.

I mean, as men do, testosterone laden and aggression infused. And this causes injury, of course, in humiliation and vindictiveness in the narcissist and so on and so forth.

And he externalizes his reaction and then he becomes psychopathic in effect, or he interiorizes the pain and the hurt and so on. And then he becomes depressed. He's humiliated. Men humiliate the narcissist and then walk away and team up with other people in full sight of the narcissist.

But only women have the power to cause him mortification. Men and women alike, people are a burden and a drain on the narcissist energy for two reasons.

One, he regards people as inferior. He holds people in contempt.

And two, he resents his total dependence on the very people that he holds in contempt. He needs from people, narcissistic supply. He can't live without it. He falls apart without it.

And yet he holds the sources of supply in total disdain. He hates them.

To summarize, women cheat on the narcissist or deceive the narcissist or betray the narcissist. And then they abandon the narcissist only because and only when the narcissist had first abused them, abused them by lying to them, making false promises, giving them false hopes and false dreams and refusing to commit, in a daze, so there's this.

And then there are active behaviors, humiliating them, rejecting them, beating them up, insulting them, undermining them, undervaluing them, passive aggressively, otherwise, narcissistic abuse.

Women, intimate partners cheat, deceive and betray because the narcissist drove them to cheat, deceive and betray.

No one starts a relationship saying to herself, well, great, I'm in this in order to cheat, betray and abandon. No one.

Narcissist drives, pushes away his partner.

But narcissistic abuse has two phases.

The first phase, the narcissist can't help it. He uses narcissistic abuse to convert his partner into a mother or father figure and then test whether the conversion process had been successful or to what extent it had been successful.

And then in the bargaining phase, he uses narcissistic abuse to get rid of these people.

Abuse during shared fantasy always leads to deceitful behavior and to betrayal. But this betrayal is usually hidden, discrete. So there's a lot of deceit introduced into the relationship.

Cheating is one form of deceit. Some women attempt, some intimate partners attempt to keep their deceitful behavior, conduct. And I'm saying again, cheating is one form of deceitful behavior than many others.

So intimate partners try to keep their deceitful, plausible deniability. They construct the deceit or they engage in a deceit in a way that they can deny it and the denial will sound plausible. Other intimate partners try to convert deceitful actions like deceitful cheating into ostentatious actions because they can't take it anymore or because they have reached the bargaining phase.

They presented a list of 65 theses like Martin Luther at the beginning of Protestantism. They nailed the list of 65 theses to the door and they said to the analysis, here are the 65 things you must do if you want us to stay together.

And then the analysis answer is, invariably, well, if this is what I have to do, I don't want to stay together.

Many women, many intimate partners cheat, others deceive in other ways, and they usually do it with other people. If it's cheating, it's usually casual partners.

All this takes place in the shared fantasy.

But all of them still strive to maintain their relationship after the deceit, after the cheating. They do it for self-interested reasons and they do it because they're emotionally invested in the relationship. It's known as the sunk cost fallacy.

The cheating, if it's cheating or the deceit, they're intended to satisfy the range of profoundly unmet emotional and physical needs of the partner. But the partner keeps on keeping on. The partner futilely soothes and hopes for commitment and for investment of the narcissist part.

Partners, intimate partners, business partners, friends, rarely give up on the nauseous that easily because most narcissists are actually interesting, entertaining, useful. So it's hard to give up on the narcissist.

On the other hand, the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy phase is so horrible, so outlandish, so inhuman that everyone around the narcissist is driven to establish an alternative outside the remake of the relationship, away from the gaze of the narcissist.

In other words, everyone is driven to deceive the narcissist because they have needs which are not met by the narcissist. They have other needs which are cruelly frustrated by the narcissist and they must team up with other people to make up for it, to compensate for it, or they will die, at least internally die, mentally die.

As the abuse continues unabated also during the failed bargaining phase, it leads to ostentatious cheating, ostentatious betrayal, ostentatious deception. And this time it's usually with intimate partners, with intimate friends, I'm sorry, with family members. This time at the end of the bargaining phase, it's clear that everything is breaking up, that there is no future and no hope.

And now usually the partner introduces people she or he can trust into the mix. And if, for example, if the intimate partner cheats on the narcissist in the bargaining phase, she's very unlikely to cheat with casual strangers, but she would cheat with a best friend.

Again, you see the reactions to narcissistic abuse are very different. Statistically, women who cheat on their narcissistic spouses during the shared fantasy, within the shared fantasy, do it with strangers or casual acquaintances as a form of, you know, one might stand because they still have hope and they're still committed. They're still trying to salvage whatever is possible.

Women who cheat, the same women, same women exposed to the same narcissistic abuse, but it is during the bargaining phase where everything clearly is lost.

They again cheat, but they cheat with intimate partners, with friends. When I say cheat, it's an example of deceptive behavior. There are many others.

A business partner during the shared fantasy would collaborate with other firms, other businessmen, competitors even, against the narcissist. But he would try to make it during the shared fantasy, he would try to make it, you know, a puzzled, incidental, one-time thing.

But then in the bargaining phase, when the business partner is exposed to the same mistreatment, the business partner will be looking for new partners, long-term, stable new partners, same with friends, same. It's the same principle applied to all the narcissists, all the relationships of the narcissist.

Let me explain.

The narcissist abuses all the time, shared fantasy, not shared fantasy, bargaining, united. Abuse is a constant background noise in a relationship with the narcissist.

The narcissist is trying to do this, is doing this, also because it gives him a sense of control, a sense of mastery.

He prefers, he made a choice as a child to be the abuser, not the abused. And it helps him to delusionally reframe the inevitable conclusion of the relationship, not as an external modification, but as an internal notification.

Let me explain.

Narcissist knows that he's pushing his spouse away. He knows this. And she's going to cheat on you. He knows this too.

Or he knows she's going to deceive him or betray him in some way. He knows this.

Now he has two options. He can deceive himself as a total victim, weakling, helpless. That's not the narcissist's way.

Or he can escalate his abuse so that in the end he can tell himself, I made her do it. I pushed her to do it. She didn't act autonomously or independently. She was my instrument. She was my tool. It is my abuse. The torture I inflicted on her that drove her to misbehave the way she did. I am still the master. She is still an object. I am still in control. She is still an unwitting instrument.

And this is the narcissistic way. The narcissist is a child. The prayer I tell you the eternal adolescent is infuriated, but is lovable. Children generally are both infuriating and lovable.

But when the narcissist is sadistic, contemptuous, exploitative, there are no redeeming or endearing features in any setting, in an intimate relationship, in the workplace. Narcissists are not only eternal children. They are eternal spoiled brats. They are eternal malevolent children, like in the Henry James stories. They are children of the corn. They are lifted off a horror movie. They are the kind of children you don't want to see in a nightmare.

People lose all respect for the narcissist. He is a sadistic bully. And they are also not afraid of the narcissist because he is gradually perceived as a clown, buffoonish, a jerry springer loser. And so people reach a kind of middle ground where they contemptuously take from the narcissist whatever is his and whatever he gives willingly or not willingly. And they do it with impunity and they do it with glee, with joy. It's taking from the narcissist as a way to cutting him down to size, pulling him down a peg, you know, retaliating.

People respect the narcissist initially, from afar, remotely. They respect him because, I don't know, he's a movie star or he's intelligent or he's a genius or he's a handsome or a handsome genius. And that's the hollow effect. The hollow effect that I mentioned in a previous video, they attribute to the narcissist wisdom, maturity, because he is a genius or because he is handsome or because he is a politician or a movie star.

But when they get to know the narcissist up close, they lose all respect. They lose all respect.

And sometimes it just pity the narcissist. When they first make contact with the narcissist, they start off by respecting the narcissist greatly. They're even all odd, you know, there's all.

But having come to know the narcissist a bit better, they regard him as a pathetic, pathetic person, a loser. Never mind if he's the president of the United States or whatever, he's a loser. Because your positioning life and how much money you have, these are not the parameters of success. Parameters of success are inner balance and happiness and outer seamless compatibility with society.

But we are social animals. So they regard him as a mentally ill, obnoxious, grandiose, and in a way invalid, crippled.

On the one hand, they feel deceived. They feel driven to hurt the narcissist, to put him in his rightful place, to mock him.

But on the other hand, they pity the narcissist. And so finally, they shun the narcissist because he provokes in them many negative emotions.

And the narcissist is disrespected because he thoroughly disrespects himself. The narcissist rejects his life. He rejects everyone and everything in his life as meaningless. He engages in self-defeating irrational misconduct. He does as he pleases, my way or the highway. He pays no heed to consequences. He lacks any ambition or motivation. He just drifts along randomly, giving up on assets, on accomplishments, on communities, on places, on language itself, on people, everyone, without regret, without second thought.

Sometimes you look at the career of a narcissist and you say, wow, you know, from zero to hero, he made it. He succeeded.

Wrong. Give it time. He will self-destruct. He will self-defeat. He will ruin and hurt everyone and everything around you.

Narcissists build, construct and deconstruct, build and ruin, invest and disinvest, merge and divest. They make friends and then convert them into enemies.

They choose, choose an intimate partner and then take away the intimate intimacy and convert the partner into a parental figure. They don't leave a stone unturned, but not in the good sense. They are malevolent spirits, a malevolent wind. They are, you know, sumun, like the dust, the dust storms in the desert. There is structure there if you look at it.

You may mistake the narcissist's actions and think that they are some kind of master plan or sometimes some kind of imposition of a set of rules or a structure, but they're not. They're all random. It's totally random. Even randomness can produce structure and order.

We know this in physics. The narcissist is ephemeral. He never attaches or bonds to anyone, anything, any place, any vocation, any pursuit. Today he's a reality TV star. Tomorrow he's a president. The next day he's in jail because he had committed a crime. Then he exits jail and he gets married for the sixth time.

You know, there's no rhyme or reason to any of this. He invests in nothing, the narcissist. He plans nothing. He commits to nothing and to no one. He drifts. He's a slacker in effect. He's indolent.

The minimal work that the narcissist does, even his hobbies, everything is shoddy, shoddy, cluttered, a hazard, ramshackle, improvised, fake, portemkin village. It's all of a sudden. There's no depth, no third dimension. Anyone who co-invested in a company run by a narcissist lost his money.

Narcissist goes bankrupt 50 times in his life and gets married another six. There's nothing there. There's no essence.

It's true that some narcissists have a stable core, so they will maintain a family in the long term. But then the instability, the crazy making will manifest in all other fields.

Generally speaking, even if the narcissist has an island of stability in his life, his wife, his family, his job, an island of stability. It's an island of stability in a turbulent, gigantic ocean of trouble, crazy making, insanity.

The narcissist is absent. He's an absence, not a presence, and he's abusive in all his relationships, mostly fending off, encroaching intimacy and commitment and success. It's nothing. The narcissist hates more than success. He will undermine and sabotage his own success.

Because what is success? It's commitment. It's responsibility. It's having to get up in the morning and do something, even if you don't want to do it.

Narcissist's freedom of action is his most cherished asset, his basic tenet, the 11th commandment, thou shalt be free to do anything you please, whenever you please, and no one will tell you otherwise.

It's like reckless patience.

The narcissist is a mask of sanity.

And like his patience, the narcissist doesn't even bother to keep it on.

So naturally, no one respects the narcissist. He's self-destructive. And he often implores people to humiliate him and to hate him and to reject him as part of the testing of the parental figure.

The narcissist never protects, never values what is his.

So others openly take everything and everyone away from him. And he regards everything as meaningless. He is not really in his life. He's more like a spectator, more like an observer.

And this also engenders disrespect. He's announced he's spineless. People ask themselves, is he coward? Is he defeated? Is he a flake? And all he reaps, all he reaps, finally, is derision, revulsion, contempt, mockery.

And people are envious of some of his assets, some of his skills and talents. And they are equally revolted by his obnoxiousness and pompous personality.

And this leads to virulent displays of public humiliation, shaming, passive-aggressive, punitive acts. Such disrespect is communicable and contagious. This contagion is exacerbated by the narcissist's own behaviors.

Often the narcissist feigns indifference, reactance, defiance. But the narcissist's apathy is not perceived as a sign of strength.

But on the contrary, as cowardice, weakness, absence of enforceable boundaries, narcissism opens himself up to contempt, to abuse, to derision.

People perceive the narcissist feigned in ostentatious disinterest, as passive aggression.

The narcissist's disrespectful and ostentatious disinterest in his own life, in his intimate partner, in his job, in his hobbies, in his property, in his children.

This overt, conspicuous pride in his apathy, cool-headedness, sang for, is interpreted by people as lack of dignity, lack of strength, lack of self-respect, abdicating, not caring for and protecting what's his.

The narcissist's reactance is not perceived as credible. He's about as intimidating and deterring as a weakling spoiled brat, and far more repulsive and antagonizing than any child.

And he's at the narcissist's attempts to man up, to deter, to intimidate. They provoke the offending party to escalate into egregious territory.

You see, narcissistic abuse is a posture. It's in the bargaining stage, it's a choice. It's a method of operation. It's a set of manipulative tools in a toolbox.

And it's, here's the thing, it's really, really stupid to make this choice, to use these tools.

Narcissists appear to be bumbling fools, no matter how intelligent they actually are.

They have no impulse control, no forethought, no foresight. They're counterproductive, self-defeating, self-destructive. Their decisions and actions are self-sabotaging. They're totally dumb. They act out when narcissistic supply is deficient.

Narcissists compensate. They go haywire. And they're pseudo stupid. They avoid the consequences of their misdeeds. They pretend that they have misunderstood something you've said or done, or that you took advantage of their good nature. They're gullible.

Narcissists are grandiose, infantile.

So they misjudge reality. They have an impaired reality testing. Their skills and limitations are also misjudged. And they completely misunderstand other people because they have no empathy. They don't read people properly. They can't fathom the intentions of others, even when these intentions are potentially risky and dangerous and malevolent, malicious.

No empathy means that the narcissist disastrously misreads others and behaves in socially unacceptable and clownish ways.

The narcissist's sense of entitlement renders the narcissist an overwhelming buffoon, the butt of mockery in the region, rather than the awe that he believes that he inspires, and the respect that he fully trusts that he deserves.

And hypervigilance, it leads to disproportionate aggression, directed at imaginary insults and slimes. It also leads to persecutory delusions and conspiracism, paranoid ideation, persecutory ideation, often directed at totally innocuous and innocent targets.

The narcissist erupts, and people say, what's wrong with this guy? You know?

And finally, the narcissist uses false modesty, pseudo humility, to fish for compliments.

But his attempts are so transparent and so inarticulate, so fake, so manipulative.

These people react with repulsion, and they seek on the contrary to humiliate him even further.

The narcissist regards learning something new, getting advice, as narcissistic injuries, because both learning and advice imply that he's not perfect and not omniscient, not all-knowing.

You see, there are so many routes to narcissistic abuse. It's a defensive posture. It's an offensive posture. It's a method of operation, intended to get rid of people. It's an unconscious compulsive choice, intended to parentify other people and then make sure that they are safe-based and good enough parents.

There are numerous etiologies to this same set of behaviors. Lumping all of them together is counterproductive and exceedingly misleading.

And I'm afraid most authorities, in quotation marks, online, do exactly this.