You know, the first reaction we have when we come across a narcissist or a psychopath is unease, discomfort, something wrong, something's wrong, alarm bells are ringing, yet we tend to deny and suppress this gut feeling and go on with the interaction.
And then a little later we become infuriated and aggressive.
Narcissists and psychopaths are infuriating and they bring the worst in us. They render people absolutely aggressive, even violent.
Why is that?
I'm going to analyze this phenomenon today using a few concepts, life promiscuity, which is a new concept that I'm proposing, sexual promiscuity, compulsive sexting, and the role of cheating in this cerebral schizoid narcissist's life. I'm going to wrap it up and interconnect the whole thing.
So there's rhyme and reason to what I'm about to say. But I'm going to try to give you insight to your own reactions to narcissists and psychopaths.
Because very often having exited a relationship with a psychopath or a narcissist, you don't recognize yourselves anymore.
You say, it wasn't like me to do this. It wasn't me.
I felt a strange and alienated. I felt that something possessed me, something took over.
And this is what narcissists and psychopaths do to you.
And I will try to give you the reasons.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and I'm a professor of psychology.
What else?
Okay. Sexual promiscuity is often coupled with what I call life promiscuity. Life promiscuity is a new term, a new phrase that I've just coined.
So don't go looking for it on Google or YouTube. Life promiscuity is like sexual promiscuity.
In sexual promiscuity, the promiscuous person gives his body away. He treats his body like a disposable throwaway product.
In life promiscuity, the promiscuous person throws his own life away. Not only his body, but his life.
He treats his life as if his life were meaningless, worthless, and disposable.
Harvey Clappley called it a rejection of life.
The psychoanalyst Jeffrey Seinfeld called it a life unlived. It's common to psychopaths, narcissists, schizoids.
They are promiscuous with their lives. They throw them away. They dispense with them. They dispose of them as though it were so much garbage.
The same way that a promiscuous person treats his own body as a commodity, as totally alien and meaningless artifact or an object that he can share with others or give away to others, even if these others are total strangers and mean nothing to him.
And this dual promiscuity, sexual promiscuity coupled with life promiscuity, is a common feature of psychopathy.
The psychopath casts away himself, his prospects, his accomplishments, his future, and of course, his nearest and dearest.
He casts away all these things which we hold dear. These things which we all aspire to, family, happiness, love, emotions, academic degrees, accomplishments, status in society, prospects, friendships, networks, jobs, careers, everything we work so hard for, the psychopath casts away, dispenses with like so much trash.
He treats all of it as meaningless, worthless, disposable.
The hallmarks of life promiscuity are dumbness. The psychopath may be educated.
Many psychopaths have academic degrees, even advanced academic degrees, graduate and postgraduate. Many psychopaths have PhDs in very, very complex subjects, but they're dumb. They're as dumb as a donor. They're not intelligent. There's no operating intelligence or sentience there. They are more like a scanning machine, an automaton, a robot. They're more like a computer than a human being.
And consequently, they are programmed well to recycle and rehash material, even sometimes to come up with some new ideas.
It's rare, by the way, among psychopaths, but at any rate, they're not intelligent. They're seriously stupid.
The decisions of the psychopath are not merely extremely self-defeating and self-destructive, but they're inane. There's no rhyme and reason. They're utterly random.
Even his decisions lack any organizing or explanatory principle.
When you observe the psychopath for an extended period of time, you cannot connect any point in his life to any other point. Nothing is the cause of nothing, and nothing is the effect of nothing. There's no chain of being. There's no chain reaction. There's no chain at all. There are no links. He's all over the place. He's all over the place. He's like a cloud, rather than a tangible thing. He's like a dissipating cloud, the psychopath.
The psychopath has no insight of any kind into his own motivations, and because he lacks this insight, he appears to be very stupid. Some of it is pseudo-stupidity, when the psychopath actually pretends to be stupid, sometimes passive-aggressively.
But a lot of it is real stupidity, because the psychopath has no insight into anything that's happening to him. He's divorced completely from his self, from his core, from his identity, from his memory. There's a dumb founding, mind-boggling, lack of self-awareness, coupled with counter-factual reframing and outright self-deception and self-denial.
The psychopath is evasive. It's like trying to hold on to a slimy goldfish. It keeps popping away from a hen. This evasiveness is infuriating, because it closely mimics passive-aggressive gaslighting.
So you can never pinpoint the psychopath. It's like jelly or jello, you know. You cannot nail the psychopath. You cannot make the psychopath commit to anything, an opinion, a value, a decision, a choice, a preference, selection criteria, nothing.
Again, like a cloud. I'll give you two examples from my own practice.
I had someone come to me and an extreme alcoholic, or an alcoholic, not extreme, actually, but alcoholic, which is an excellent way of ruining your own body. An alcoholic and extremely sexually promiscuous.
And when I asked this person, when I suggested to this person, that she actually disrespects her body, because she told me about an incident where someone stole something from her and she was really riled up and emotionally all over the place, because this object had been stolen from her while she was having illicit underage sex. And I suggested to her that she respects the object more than she respects her body. She misses the object. She grieves and mourns the object. She's emotionally invested in the missing, lost and stolen object much more than in anything that had been done to her body while she was drugged and so on. And she denied it. She said she respects her body.
And that's from a woman who is alcoholic.
Similarly, the case of a psychopath, at age 15, he went to a gay club. He was picked up by four men twice his age. They took him to an apartment. They drugged him. And they had their way with him. They took turns. And when I suggested to him that it was rape, he protested vehemently. So it wasn't rape. I wanted it. I said, okay, you may have wanted it. But what they had done was wrong. And he couldn't see this. Never mind which angle they tried to tackle.
For example, I suggested to him that if someone 15 years old wants to have heroin, wants it very much, wants very much to do heroin or crack, it's wrong to give it to him. Similarly, if a 15-year-old wants to have sex, very, very much, it's wrong for four men to take advantage of this immature wish for men twice his age.
And he couldn't see this. That's someone who has an advanced degree, a PhD, in one of the most complex disciplines known to humanity. And yet he couldn't wrap his head around this extremely simple premise. Never mind what I did, which logical tools of reasoning I deployed, which angles of attack he couldn't see it.
The lack of self-awareness, the reframing, the self-deception and the denial were so massive that at some point he appeared and sounded stupid.
Simply stupid. This lack of insight coupled with a lack of self-awareness renders the psychopath opaque.
It's like a monolithic facade. It's as boring as watching paint dry.
Additionally, the psychopath has a fleece effect. Even when he rages, the rage is instrumental. It's goal-oriented.
And frankly, the only emotion the psychopath shows consistently, demonstrates consistently is rage and anger.
But even that is not really emanating from the inside. It's very, very goal-oriented and it's a tool. It's intended to intimidate, to manipulate, to coerce.
Otherwise, the psychopath does not experience emotions and does not express, of course, any emotions whatsoever. He sounds totally flat. He could talk about the most horrible experiences he had gone through. And it's as though he were talking about yesterday's weather. Or he could contemplate doing something really, really, really egregiously immoral and even violent. And he would discuss this as though he were discussing stock prices.
That is fledceffect. The psychopath has no boundaries whatsoever. And he has no respect and no recognition of other people's boundaries. So when his boundaries are breached, he doesn't experience it as anything egodystonic.
He is so focused on himself that if he is, for example, raped, and he wanted sex, he would say, well, but I wanted sex. He wouldn't have hesitated to breach the sexual or other boundaries of someone else like that, the flip of a coin.
Of course, when you don't have boundaries, when you don't have insight, when you don't know yourself, when you lack self-awareness, you have no self-respect because you have no self. Technically, you have no self-respect.
The psychopath is incapable of shame, of guilt, of remorse. He has these diffuse and fuzzy binary states of, I'm feeling good, I'm not feeling good. So he can tell you I'm not feeling good today, or I'm sad today, or I'm tired today.
But these are like, it's like a two-phase, a two-state machine.
I'm good, I'm not good, I'm good, I'm not good. Well-being, not well-being. Nothing more complex, and definitely nothing that is entangled with self-respect.
The psychopath may be defiant, he may be conscientious, he may be violent, he may be aggressive, and he may pretend to have boundaries.
But these are not real boundaries. These so-called boundaries are adopted from his society.
So if the psychopath is a criminal, he would have like honor, he would insist on being honored.
But that's not his boundary. That's a boundary he had borrowed from the criminal subculture, from criminal society.
The psychopath has no self-respect, he would do anything to himself, unhesitatingly. He would give his body away, like as though it was so much nothing, so much trash. He would give his mind away, he would give his ideas away, he would give his job away, he would give his wife away. There's no limit to how dissipated and dissolute and chaotic the psychopath is, and none of it is connected to self-respect.
Even when the psychopath becomes vengeful, vindictive, and violent, when you disrespect him, when you delve deeper into the situation, it's not about respect at all. It's a power play. You challenge his power.
There's no concept of self-respect.
And that's why the psychopath, for example, the psychopathic woman, would have no difficulty whatsoever, going with a total stranger, whose name she doesn't know, to her room for five minutes to have sex, and then go back, like nothing happened, to the bar.
She doesn't feel that she had breached any boundaries, she doesn't feel that she had disrespected her.
So when you ask her why did you do that, she would simply say, I wanted to. And so, I wanted to.
The psychopath resembles an animal, and this is not a pejorative, I'm not cursing the psychopath, I'm just comparing him.
Psychopathy is like an animal. He's possessed of only the most basic reflexes, most basic drives, sex, food, drink, again sex, again food, again drink, sleep, sex, food, drink, sleep. It's like a strobe. It's a discontinuous existence, it's fragmented, and it's point-like, it's pointillistic.
And so, he has these reactions to life, to circumstances, to environments, to other people, and to challenges. Reactions that are totally non-cognitive, they are automated, they're rigid, he resembles very much a machine, and they're reflexive, they're driven in the sense that they reflect urges and uncontrollable drives.
So, when he wants to have sex, he will just go and have sex, and he wants to eat, he will eat, and there will be no limit to the sex, and no limit to the food, and no consideration for the environment for other people. He wants to have sex, he will have sex, regardless of the fact, for example, that he's engaged to be married, or that he has children. I mean, that wouldn't bother him, because he wanted to have sex. His needs are so primordial, so overpowering and overwhelming, whereas the borderline is overwhelmed by emotions, and by fear of rejection and abandonment.
The psychopath is overwhelmed by basic needs, very primitive needs, what Freud used to call the id. Freud called it the id.
These are very basic animalistic, essentially, because chimpanzees have this, and gorillas, and dolphins. These are very animalistic needs, and they overpower him, because essentially the psychopath doesn't have a well-functioning ego. He doesn't have this firewall that prevents him from acting out. He doesn't have control mechanisms, he is utterly, totally out of control, and there is nothing sublime, nothing transcendental, nothing spiritual, nothing intellectual in the psychopath's life. He's constantly bored, bored. He's constantly in search of stimulation and excitement, thrill-seeking, novelty-seeking, risk-taking, adrenaline junkie, because he has no depth and no background, no hinterland. He has no support from layers and layers of complexity, like healthy people do. He's two-dimensional, he's flat, he's a denizen of flatlands, he's a point, and so every wind, internal wind, I want sex, that's an internal breeze, moves him miles and kilometers, he's like a feather, you know. He acts out and he decompensates at the drop of a hat.
And so when you try to get close to the psychopath, you encounter this essential void and emptiness.
It's not the same void like the narcissist and the borderline and the schizoid. It's another type of void. It's a void that is the outcome of insisting to remain shallow, insisting to remain superficial, artificial, and on the surface, refusing to go deep. So you can touch just the surface. It's a glimmering, shimmering surface. Touch it and that's it. Okay, so we touch it once, we touch it twice, end of story. I mean, at some point psychopaths are by far the most boring people on earth.
Narcissists can be interesting and sometimes are very interesting. Just look at me.
Psychopaths are never interesting. Nevermind which doctorate they have in which field. Nevermind if they had just received a Nobel Prize. Nevermind if they had just become president of a country. Never mind. They're boring. Simply boring.
Adolf Hitler was a rank psychopath, of course. Adolf Hitler was known for boring people. That's Adolf Hitler, the ruler of the world, for several years. A man who had the most amazing experiences and he had these table talks and people were nodding off. They were falling asleep. It's simply very boring.
The psychopaths are like repetition machines. They're repetitive.
When they speak, they keep repeating the same point. They keep rehashing the same formulations, the same speech acts, the same phrases because they're incapable of ingenuity and innovation and invention. They heard something somewhere. They adopted it and they repeat it like train parrots and they're very boring.
To alleviate their own boredom and intolerance of frustration, most psychopaths are prone to substance abuse. They are typically both junkies and alcoholics. This combination is very common.
Now, most psychopaths know that they have very little to offer. They're very little to offer.
So that's why psychopaths head straight to sex. The easiest sex in the world is with a psychopath and more so with a psychopathic borderline. That's the easiest lay. You don't even need to court. You don't even need to do anything. Just exchange a glance, buy a glass of wine. She's yours. He's hers.
That's because psychopaths and more so borderline psychopathic borderlines, they know that they are shallow. They know they have nothing to offer. They regard themselves actually as stupid and they're not wrong.
It's one of a few insights they have. They know this at some point, you know, the conversation is going to end because they're evasive. They're repetitive. They are tried. They spew cliches. They don't remember much. So they don't have a fount of life experiences.
They reframe in a way that's very infuriating and sounds very deotic. They gaslight. At some point they realize it's going to end if they don't move fast to sex.
So they use sex as a bait. They use sex as a lure.
This is the only alleged endowment. This is their contribution to the exchange.
When borderlines are present together with psychopathy, these people, psychopathic borderlines, they confuse sex with relatedness. When they have sex, they feel interconnected. They feel related.
It's the only way they can feel they have something with another person. The only interaction, interaction they have. The only interpersonal, fleeting, fake intimacy and bond. So they feel relatedness.
When they have sex, they feel that they belong. They feel that they're being loved and appreciated. They trade sex for belonging, love and appreciation, which are all fake, of course, because how much love and belonging and appreciation can you have in a one-night stand? Or how much love, appreciation and belonging can you have when you're gang raped by four men?
But even sex requires imagination, empathy, maturity, reciprocity, creativity. None of these qualities characterize the psychopath.
He has none of these.
So sex with the psychopath sucks. Every sex with a psychopath is like a one-night stand. And let me tell you, those of you who have not experienced one-night stands, one-night stands suck big time.
I have no idea why people end up having one-night stands. It's by far the most horrible experience.
Studies show that the majority of the partners in one-night sex don't even orgasm.
But with a psychopath, even if you're with a psychopath 20 years, every sexual encounter is like a one-night stand. Mechanical, experimental, exploring, uninspired, pyrotechnic, etc. No reciprocity, no maturity. No, of course, no emotions, no laughter. I forget all this.
Even on the technical level, it's bad.
Collectively, I describe psychopathy as the mask of sanity. Psychopaths appear to be sane.
When you probe a beat, not a lot by the way, when you probe a beat, you're shocked. Shocked by the way they see the world.
A psychopath told me that he sees nothing wrong in sleeping with a teenage girl who is unconscious. Never knowing what I did and tried to, he couldn't, for the life of him, he couldn't, he's a professor, by the way, a professor. For the life of him, he couldn't understand what is wrong in sleeping with a 15-year-old who is out of her mind psychologically and out of her consciousness owing to huge consumption of huge amounts of drink and drugs. He couldn't see what's wrong with him.
I tried morality, I tried religion, I tried utilitarianism, I tried, I know all the philosophical systems of ethics, I know nothing. Absolutely nothing. So it's a mask of sanity. These people are insane.
But collectively it was partly right because it's not a mask of sanity. It's even more profound or if you wish more shallow than this. Only the mask exists.
The psychopath is a 3D glitchy simulation of a human being, gone awry. The psychopath is the ultimate corrupted simulacrum.
The psychopath tends to see life and interactions with people as a zero-sum winner takes all conflict, series of conflicts.
For the psychopath, every day is a battle, every morning is a new skirmish and life itself is a never-ending total war and there's only one winner. One will remain standing and the psychopath has every intention to ascertain that it will be him or her.
Consequently, the psychopath is of course hypervigilant. If you believe that everyone is like you and your intentions are always to win, always to prevail, always to suppress and subdue and subjugate, then you would assume that others have every intention to do this to you. So you would be very, very hypervigilant, not to say paranoid.
And this paranoia, this hypervigilance rendered the psychopath even more diverse from reality and make him appear even more dumb than he is.
The psychopath scores points, he wins. Even an expression of altruism or empathy would be interpreted as some hideous dark manipulation or some attempt to score points by pointing at weakness or the vulnerability.
As far as the psychopath is concerned, there are only two states as usual. He's winning or he's losing and he's constantly alert as to, oh, who is having the upper hand? I'm having the upper hand, you're having the upper hand.
The psychopath never feels shame or remorse when he misbehaves, never. Only when he is caught misbehaving red-handed.
The psychopath never feels shame or remorse when his body is violated by multiple people. When he is discarded after that, like a piece of, so much pieces of trash, pieces of trash, he doesn't feel shame or remorse or guilt or anything.
He may say, well, it's regrettable, a kind of neutral, emotionally neutral word. He doesn't feel bad when this happens. Body feels horrible when he is caught misbehaving or when he shows a weakness or a vulnerability to the potential adversary. So he's very ashamed, very, he's self-castigating, he's self-critical, he wants to bury himself.
When by mistake he had exposed a soft side of him, a weak point, a vulnerability, because he immediately anticipates an attack.
The borderline, as I have repeatedly said in many videos, and this is the current state of knowledge, like it or not, because I've been attacked by borderlines and borderline advocates and borderline self-styled gurus online, etc. I said, I'm sorry, this is where the research is going. Definitely where the research is going. People with borderline personality disorder are secondary psychopaths, especially women. Women with borderline personality disorder are secondary psychopaths.
Now secondary psychopath is a psychopath who has empathy, a psychopath who has emotion. So the borderline, the psychopathic borderline is not intentionally evil. She is not malintentioned. She doesn't, it's not premeditated. She is not sitting like Dr. Moriarty sitting in the dark and plotting to trap people in her spider web.
No, she is not intentionally evil. She is evil. She is reified and personified. She can't help it. It's like a virus or a tigress. She kills not because she's malicious, but because she is simply. She can protest. She can declare her kind intentions, solemn vows and promises. Nevermind these, she can't help it. It's not up to her. The damage she inflicts on others, the pain, the hurt, the sleepless nights, the traumas, and if the partner is a narcissist, the mortifications. She can't control this. It's an integral part of her essence. It's her modus operandi. It's the way her brain is wired. It's who she is.
There are two paths to self-destruction, doing too much and not doing anything. Extremes of behavior and addictions are signs of underlying mental health issues.
Compulsive sex with strangers is as pathological and as self-defeating as avoiding sex altogether, for example. The same goes for any human activity, workaholism or not working at all, slacking, alcoholism versus having a drink, itinerancy versus traveling, overeating versus savoring gourmet food.
And so let us talk a bit about promiscuity and compulsive sexting.
First of all, is it true that one's promiscuous, always promiscuous?
I can tell you the latest studies about cheating. Once a cheater, yes, always a cheater. People who had cheated once have a much higher likelihood of cheating again. And even more surprisingly, people who had been cheated on have a much higher likelihood to be cheated on again.
Okay, what about promiscuity? Is it the same?
The short answer is yes, but intermittently.
Once promiscuous, always promiscuous.
Promiscuity is having sex with multiple partners, mostly total strangers, indiscriminately and impulsively. It is a compulsive reaction intended to ameliorate stress, anxiety and perceived rejection.
Promiscuity is a form of reckless self-trashing that sometimes involves practices such as group sex and adverse outcomes such as rape and recurrent sexual assault.
Promiscuity, although it's taboo, a taboo subject, but promiscuity often starts at age 13, 12, and early to mid adolescence. And then, at this age, it involves incest, molestation, gang rape, pedophilia, called hebophilia sex.
These young teenagers, they gravitate to haunts and clubs and joints and bars and so on, where older men, much older men, if it's a woman, pick them up and have their way with them, often in gangs and groups.
With age, promiscuity is replaced with other addictions and with substance abuse, most often alcoholism. So many promiscuous people become alcoholics and during the phase of alcoholism, they're less promiscuous and they convince themselves that they had become more selective or that their promiscuity is over, which is, of course, rank nonsense.
Moreover, usually the actual promiscuity, the physical contact, the sex, is replaced with other forms of sex, for example, cybersex or sexting.
So when the promiscuous person becomes an alcoholic, actual promiscuity declines if we measure promiscuity only in terms of physical contact.
But other forms of sexuality become promiscuous. For example, that person is likely to become highly promiscuous in sexting.
Many promiscuous individuals apparently settle into a more or less sublimatory, socially acceptable, functional lifestyle replete with jobs, families, you name it, housed in the suburbs of the garden. But the trait never goes away. Promiscuity is there, lurking. Given the right adverse circumstances, acting out leads to flare-ups and relapses, bouts of uncontrolled sex, flagrant infidelity and self-endagement.
Promiscuity, the numerous studies that show that promiscuity is highly correlated with many mental health disorders, among them borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. The promiscuous psychopath is an especially menacing type, as she tends to either objectify her partners in one-night stands, for example, and then, of course, the whole experience is highly unpleasant. Or if she doesn't objectify them, she tends to stalk and blackmail her partners. It's a black widow, the promiscuous psychopath.
Both types use promiscuous sex to shore up their self-esteem and to regulate their moods.
For the psychopath, sex is an aggressive, winner-takes-all, zero-sum power play. The psychopath feels empowered when she is promiscuous or he is promiscuous. There's a sense of validation, a sense of affirmation, a sense of omnipotence.
In other words, promiscuity in the psychopath is a grandiose behavior. It's a behavior intended to buttress and feed into grandiosity or a source of narcissistic supply.
That's where the somatic narcissist and the psychopath are twins, almost, not identical twins, but twins, definitely.
Short-term promiscuity, though, is also common behavior among mentally healthy people who had undergone a traumatic breakup or divorce. But it's shorter and it vanishes completely.
What about compulsive sexting? Very common now in the pandemic, in the time of pandemic.
Surveys conducted by Zoom, Webex and other popular video conferencing apps, these surveys had discovered that users are very worried about sexually explicit material exchange in sexting and making it into the public domain.
Why? Why are they worried?
In this day and age of rampant digital promiscuity and infidelity, attitudes about nudity and sexuality are far more permissive and relaxed.
So why the extreme discomfort and anxiety? What if someone sees me naked? I mean, what's a big deal?
Because it says something about you. Indiscriminate sexting, indiscriminate sexting with virtual strangers is not the same like sexting with friends, is not the same like sexting with intimate partners.
Sexting with friends and intimate partners is a healthy sex substitute. It's a healthy activity.
I encourage most experts in therapies and so on, encourage it absolutely.
So sexting is a beautiful thing and a fine thing and human nudity is very arousing and great.
But sexting, indiscriminate sexting with virtual strangers.
Virtual strangers is someone you have chatted with for an hour. That's a virtual stranger. Even a month is virtual stranger, okay?
But if you indiscriminately, as a reflex on the first chat, sext with anyone who is online, happens to be online, that's highly correlated with mental health issues such as a dysregulated sense of self-worth, low self-esteem, alcoholism, moodlability, emotional dysregulation, irrotomanic delusions, cluster B personality disorders, reactants, defiance, recklessness, issues with power and control, depression, decompensation, anxiety, acting out, object impermanence, lack of impulse control, eating disorders, sleep deprivation, body dysmorphia, and this is a partial list.
If you see someone who exchanges sexually explicit material on a first chat, stay away. It's a very dangerous person. It's someone with severe mental health issues.
Never mind how normal she appears to be. Never mind how academically accomplished she is. Never mind how wonderful person he is. Never mind if he's married with seven children. Forget all this. Never mind if he's the CEO of some company or a movie mogul or producer. Stay away. That's a sick person.
Indiscriminate promiscuous sexting with virtual strangers is a wonderful marker of insanity, of severe mental health issues.
Such behavior is indicative of self-trashing which is a self-defeating and even self-destructive behavior.
In other words, someone who constantly encompasses sex with multiple random acquaintances is very likely to be bad news, first and foremost to herself but also to you.
No one wants to be stigmatized with such disclosures, not even the mentally disordered or the mentally ill, let alone healthy people.
So this is why compulsive sexting can lead to extremely unpleasant situations.
Porn revenge, porn blackmail, I mean you know the stories.
One last note. The intimate partners cheating and promiscuity legitimize the sexlessness of the schizoid cerebral narcissism.
That's why schizoid cerebral narcissism go after promiscuous women because they know that promiscuity never ends, that it's always there, that it will be triggered and the intimate partner will cheat. They know it for sure and they seek this kind of intimate balance because it legitimizes their own sexlessness which they cannot help with.
I mean it's schizoid, they can't help it, they're sexless. They need to feel good about their sexlessness.
So if the partner is promiscuous, if she's cheating, let alone if she's alcoholic as well, the schizoid narcissist can tell himself, the cerebral narcissist can tell himself that it is the partner who is the problem. The partner is dirty, corrupted, decadent, sick, revolting and this is the reason he's not having sex with her. She is, it is her fault, she is to blame that she had become sexually undesirable to him.
The second reason is that a promiscuous cheating intimate partner does not regard the narcissist as special to her or as unique. He becomes a statistic, he is one of many and so it negates his grandiosity.
The minute his grandiosity is negated, he becomes aggressive. He becomes aggressive, it legitimizes, provokes, legitimized aggression and he expresses this aggression via sex withdrawal, via sex avoidance and sex aversion.
It's like he says, I'm not having sex with her because she doesn't see me as special, because she treats me as one of the maddening crowd, as a statistic, as a number and I can't have sex with a woman like this, but it's her fault because she's promiscuous, she's the cheater, she made me feel unspecial, she made me feel common and nobody, she made me feel a statistic so she brought it on herself.
Such a partner challenges the narcissist's grandiosity of course and he tries to compensate for this by developing a shared fantasy and within the shared fantasy, so a shared fantasy is a defense actually and within the shared fantasy he imagines himself as a rescuer, a fixer, a savior. He is the one who will get this promiscuous woman hopelessly addicted to him. He is the one who will get her to give up on her wayward deviant sexuality. She will sacrifice her promiscuity just so as not to lose him.
It is a perverted form of the typical malesavior, fixer, rescuer role which I had analyzed in my video on the Karpman Drama Triangle and this is the end of the survey of the fringes of human sexuality as manifested in borderline psychopathic and narcissistic people. It's a sad terrain, it's disheartening because each and every one of you can come across one of these people and they're very good at dissembling and dissimulating and they're very good at lying, they're very good at pretending, they're very good at self deceiving sometimes.
So you can easily fall in the trap if you don't pay attention to your gut instincts, to the red alarms, to the feeling of unease, to the fury, the aggression which you can't explain to yourself why.
Pay attention and walk away.
These people are seriously bad news and it's the kind of bad news that we got used to in the pandemic. It's not ending. It's mutating.
You can't effectively, almost in any way.
Thank you for listening.