So, you thought you got rid of me after yesterday's botched video. The last 20 minutes of the video were cut off, the sound was unsynchronized with the image.
In short, it was an apt metaphor for my biography.
And so I consult myself in Minnie's company, the only woman I will never, ever discard or devalue. Of course, as long as she serves my needs and gives me coffee, which leads me to today's topic.
And today's topic is, why do narcissists love borderlines and why do borderlines hate them back?
Now, this is a complex subject because it involves, again, the issue of mortification and the narcissist's need from time to time to take a vacation from his false self. I've dealt with it, I've dealt with these issues in the previous videos, so bear with me because I'm now responding actually to many of your questions.
Let's start with one comment that I had received and someone asked, what's the difference between narcissistic injury and narcissistic mortification?
That's actually a pretty easy one.
Narcissistic injury is the challenge to the narcissist's grandiosity.
Mortification is a challenge to the entirety of the false self. The whole false self is threatened. It crumbles. It's unable to maintain defenses and pretensions.
The grandiosity is so massively undermined that everything falls apart, the very foundation of the false self.
So the piece of fiction, because the false self is like a script or like a movie, like a piece of fiction, the piece of fiction confronted with harsh reality, countervailing information, aggression by others, hatred, criticism and so on and so forth, cannot withstand the attack and cannot integrate the material fast enough, cannot reframe it fast enough so as to support the grandiosity and the whole edifice crumbles.
And this is a process we call decompensation.
The compensation is when all defense mechanisms are disabled simultaneously and the narcissist acts out in a way that I will describe a bit later.
Another question I received, what's the difference between internal mortification and being a doormat?
Yes, I'm serious. Because internal mortification is when the narcissist takes all the responsibility on himself. He has autoplastic defenses. He says it's all my fault. I misbehave or I made it happen or I'm guilty and I'm ashamed and I want to repent, I have remorse and so on and so forth.
This does happen with narcissists. It's a common myth that narcissists don't go through these stages, even psychopaths do.
But whereas a normal or a healthy person would feel guilty and ashamed because of what they had done to others, the narcissist feels guilty and ashamed because of the impact that his own actions had on him and on his false self.
In other words, the narcissist would feel guilty and ashamed, not because of the hurt and pain and damage he caused other people, but because they had succeeded in leveraging this negative energy that he had given them, mortify him.
So for example, the psychopath would be mortified if he's caught red-handed in flagranting, doing something wrong. But not because he's doing something wrong, but because he had been caught.
Same with the narcissist. Narcissists would say, I'm guilty, I misbehaved, I shouldn't have done it and so on. But what he means to say, I shouldn't have led to a situation where I had been mortified.
Let's regress a bit and before we discuss the issue of borderlines and narcissists and the intricate and tortured relationship between them, let's regress a bit to tackle this issue of doormat or internal mortification by reminding you what Libby had said.
Libby in 2006 made a presentation based on Lansky's work in 2000. She said that narcissistic mortification is a systemic challenge. The whole narcissist collapses. There's no such thing as a narcissist.
It's empty there. There's nobody home. It's a hall of mirrors. I kept, keep saying, keep reminding you because people relate to the narcissist as though it's an entity, a person.
It's not a person. It's a facade. It's a mirage. It's a kaleidoscope. It's a phantasm.
But everything depends on slate of hand. Everything depends on pretending, on colluding in the narcissist delusional fantasy.
If you challenge it, if you undermine it and so on, narcissist vanishes into thin air and he experiences his own vanishing. It's excruciating. It's debilitating and it's life threatening.
So Libby suggested that the need to reframe narcissistic mortification is because it threatens the integrity of the self.
There's a sudden awareness by the narcissist of his limitations, of his defects, that he is not perfect, that he's not brilliant, that he's not loved, universally loved, that he's not admired, that he is not omnipotent or powerful, that he is not omniscient or knowing. He suddenly realizes that he's pretty miserable and, you know, freak.
It's difficult to accept for a normal person, let alone a narcissist.
And when they are faced, the narcissist is faced with their own hopeless, hopeless unloveability, badness, worthlessness, smallness in a way, not being special, even. It mortifies them. It creates shock, exposure.
The narcissist feels exposed. He feels skinless. Borderlines describe the same. Borderlines have an inner emptiness, but the narcissist is protected by the false self. That is, his external skin is exoskeleton and when it vanishes, he becomes essentially a borderline.
Rothstein, who was a scholar of borderline personality disorder, described border lines as failed narcissists.
So when the narcissist loses this protection, loses his skin, he becomes as vulnerable, as labile, as dysregulated, as discombobulated as any borderline. He becomes a borderline.
The shock, the exposure, the intense humiliation, sometimes he even develops somatic symptoms, conversion symptoms, I don't know, heartbeat diseases. It feels like being annihilated, like disintegrating, like the least famous painting, Galatea, where the back of her head becomes dissipated molecules. She evaporates.
And of course, the narcissist has to cope with it somehow. If he doesn't cope with it, it could and is life threatening. This trauma is irrecoverable.
And so he has to cope with it.
And Libby says that he uses two strategies to restore some cohesiveness to the self.
She says they're deflated and inflated narcissist, what she calls deflated narcissist. What they do, they debase themselves. They humiliate, they further humiliate themselves. They assume the role of the bad guy. And at the same time, they inflate or idealize the aggressing person, the person who caused them the wound, the injury.
So when there's an external mortification, where another person causes the narcissist to disintegrate, attacks the narcissist, humiliates the narcissist publicly, shames the narcissist, disgraces challenges, aggresses against the narcissist.
In the deflated solution, the narcissist idealizes that person that aggressor and inflates that person. He says, she was okay. She's good. She's good at heart. She didn't mean it. She was caught up. She didn't know what she was doing. She was drunk. She makes excuses for her. And in the process, he idealizes her and inflates her. I'm saying her, of course, could be him. And the reason he does this is to reacquire her as an internal object.
Remember narcissist do not interact with real life people. They interact with inner representations with snapshots, snapshots of real life people.
So he needs to reacquire that object to re internalize the object. The object, the aggressing person, the aggressing object, the person who caused the narcissist such enormous, enormous devastation, nuclear weapon, detonated a nuclear weapon inside the hall of mirrors. That person is a source of pain and agony and anxiety and depression as she is right now.
So the narcissist needs to transform her, to convert her in a way that the pain and the agony go away. He needs to idealize her, to inflate her, to paint her with a different brush, to relate to her differently.
And so for example, he could try to atone for what he did, what he had done, what he thinks he had done. He tries to aggrandize the other person. He tries to punish himself, self-flagellate, appease the other person. The other person becomes a self object.
In other words, critical for the functioning of the self-reparation, substitute to the self. So he needs to appease that object.
And of course, looking from the outside, he appears to be a doormat. She is here she is. She wounded him, she damaged him, she hurt him, she cheated on him, she stole his property, she abused him in public, she undermined his work, she stole his money. I don't know what. Here she is. What is he doing? He's not telling her to, you know, f off. What he's doing instead, he's telling her, I'm so sorry, it was all my fault. I made you do it. I pushed you to do it with my abuse, my rejection, with my withholding, with my misconduct. It was me.
And, and so please forgive me. I'll do anything. You're great. You're wonderful. You're perfect. You're good hearted. You are magnificent. Had it not been for me, you would have never done this. I pushed you to do it, etc.
And this is his way of reasserting control, reestablishing and buttressing the ruined grandiosity, putting the bricks together.
Because if he is the one who had caused the situation, if he brought her to this, he, that means he controls her. That means she is his pawn. He did with her what he had wanted all alone.
Her misconduct is an extension of his decision making. He's in charge. He's still godlike. It restores his sense of agency, autonomy, and self-efficacy, which are critical foundations of grandiosity in the narcissist case.
And so this is when internal modification compensates for external one. Fictitious internal modification compensates for real external modification to the narcissist is very good at this, very good at inventing fiction, fictionalized works that replace or substitute for elements in reality.
Mass is a very poor reality testing, which is why he needs other people to provide him with input and feedback, which he then regulates users to regulate his internal environment.
And now this is a hive mind. He's a hive mind. It's like a beehive. It's a kaleidoscope. It's a collage. And this collage and kaleidoscope is recreated minute by minute from input and feedback provided by other people.
So the main role of the false self is to elicit these reactions, to elicit this information from other people so that it can be put together to recreate time and again, minute by minute, second by second, the false self, which is a replacement for the true self.
There's nobody there. And when you feel that you are emptiness, that you are void, then you need to fill it in somehow or to not exist. To not exist is the most horrifying feeling imaginable.
And it also creates an internal inconsistency, contradiction, because if you don't exist, who is it? Who feels that he does not exist? Who does the feeling? Who does the perception that he does not exist?
The narcissist doesn't exist, but he must ask himself, how do I know that I don't exist if I don't exist?
It creates short circuits in the mind. And so he needs to immediately eliminate the external.
And then the other strategy, what Libby calls inflated strategy, inflated narcissist, they are revenge seekers. They are more classic. They're more what I would call psychopathic narcissist or what Kernberg called malignant narcissist. So they seek revenge, they debase the aggressing person, they attack the aggressing person. They aggrandize and re-stabilize their selves by reducing and devaluing the aggressing person. So the aggressing person humiliated them and shamed them. They say that the aggressing person is mentally or stupid, without it, or I don't know what. But they reduce the aggressing person so as to minimize the message that had come from the aggressing person.
In the world of this kind of narcissist, inflate the classic narcissist, malignant psychopathic narcissist, there's always a winner and a loser. It's a zero sum game. And I mean, I win, you lose, you win, I lose. So there's always a winner and loser, and the narcissist must secure that he is the winner, must make sure he's the winner.
Another way of doing it is by shaming, by shaming the other person. They short circuit the plunge into mortification. They never experienced mortification because they preemptively expel all impending feelings of shame and effectiveness by humiliating the other.
So when they see that the other is trying to cause the mortification, to aggress, to attack, to humiliate, to disgrace, they counter attack immediately and they shame, humiliate and disgrace the other person, thereby publicly devaluating him to the point that he becomes meaningless or derisive or, you know, a joke.
And that's another strategy.
So now there is the question of romantic jealousy.
A third question I've been repeatedly asked is, how do you distinguish mortification from romantic jealousy?
Because I mentioned in my previous videos cases where there was cheating involved, adultery, extramarital infidelity, as a way to create mortification.
And most narcissists and psychopaths would react with mortification to infidelity, infidelity of the intimate partner, regardless of how they mistreat the intimate partner. And even if they push the intimate partner to cheat, because pushing the intimate partner to cheat has other functions. So we have to do with testing the partner and so on. We're not going into it right now.
But when the partner finally succumbs and cheats on the narcissist or the psychopath, there is motivation, almost always. And there's a question, what's the difference between mortification and romantic jealousy?
Imagine the following two scenarios.
Scenario number one, your wife returns home at five in the morning and tells you that she ran across her calling in an after work bar. She went to a bar after work to have a drink and she met her calling. And she and her colleagues spend the entire night talking, reminiscing, but she assures you nothing inappropriate or sexual had happened. And you believe her, actually. You believe that nothing inappropriate or sexual had happened. But she says it was such a heartwarming fun and the synergy and chemistry were so enormous that they, both of them, had decided to meet again from time to time. She even intends to bring him home and introduce him to you.
This is scenario number one.
Scenario number two, the octogenarian widowed neighbor from upstairs. There's a guy there and he's nine years old, nine zero years old. He dropped by while you were away on a trip and he was so lonely, so depressed, so heartbroken after his wife had died that yourso lonely, so depressed, so heartbroken after his wife had died that your wife let him fondle her breasts and let him allow him to touch her genitalia in order to lift his spirits, if nothing else, if to lift nothing else besides.
Now, there's a question. Are you going to be romantically jealous in both scenarios, in both cases?
Strangely, the first scenario where there had been no sex, not inappropriate behavior, but it is the first scenario that is likely to render you far more jealous than the second scenario.
And it is because romantic jealousy is not about sex at all. It is about intimacy. Romantic jealousy is a form of extreme anxiety about anticipated loss, rejection and abandonment. The risk of losing your wife to the animated corpse from the floor above is zilch. She's not going to leave you and become his wife. He's 90 years old.
But her calling can definitely make a move on her. And the way she had already reacted to his company indicates that her calling extends the chance of breaking up your marriage. So you would be romantically jealous of her relationship with her calling, which is asexual and totally appropriate. And you would not care at all that another man had literally had sex with her, met her, I mean, made out with her just because he's 90 and there's no risk of loss there. And so people confuse humiliation, narcissistic mortification with romantic jealousy.
Being cheated on undermines one's sense of safety, creates disorientation, confusion and a menacious form of insecurity. Infantile regression triggers infantile defenses, extreme neediness, entitlement, petulance and a passive aggressive wish to destroy the frustrating and hurtful object.
But all these have nothing to do with romantic jealousy. Mortification has nothing to do with romantic jealousy. It is possible to be devastated about your wife cheating and still not feel romantically jealous or possessive at all. Mortification is about you, not about her.
When the narcissist intimate partner cheats on him and he's mortified, he's mortified not because she had cheated on him, or rarely because she had cheated on him. He's mortified because of what her cheating did to him, of his reaction, is mortified by his reaction, is mortified by his own disintegration, is mortified by the implied shame and humiliation and criticism, because her action says you are inferior, you are defective, you are hopeless, I'm going to someone who is not inferior, in other words superior to you, I'm going to someone who is not hopeless, I'm going to someone who is not defective, like you, you are the model.
So this is what narcissists react to.
So you could say, well if this is the case, why narcissists are attracted to promiscuous, labile and dysregulated borderline women. Why is that?
I mean these women are impulsive, they are essentially psychopathic, they are defiant, they have anger management issues, they are emotionally dysregulated, their moods are labile, and so the risk of cheating there or the risk of mortification of some other kind, humiliation in some other way, shaming in some other way, undermining work or undermining other interpersonal relationships or family relationships, the risk of mortification in a variety of settings and ways is much higher with a borderline woman than with a healthy woman or even much higher with a borderline woman than a psychopath or any other type of woman.
Borderline woman is by far an engine of mortification. Why would a narcissist choose her?
Well, the answer in psychology is very simple, when we do something that's the maxim in psychology, the underlying axiom, when you do something because you've chosen to do it.
So if narcissists keep selecting and teaming up with borderlines, it's because they want to select and team up with borderlines. There's a mate selection process here.
And why is that? What's the only thing that a borderline woman brings to the table that no other woman does? The potential for pain, the potential for mortification. It is precisely because of the potential to cause mortification, that narcissists select borderlines.
My good friend Joanne Lofscart had written a groundbreaking and seminal tome in I think first edition was published in 1983, the borderline narcissistic couple. And there she explained that borderlines and narcissists cater to each other's archaic wounds. She later renamed this Freudian phrase and she called it v spots, vulnerability spots. She said that borderlines and narcissists push each other's buttons on the one hand, but on the other and gratify deep set and emotional needs. They solve each other's archaic wounds on the one hand and re irritate them, recreate them on the other. So it's a never ending cycle, but it has to do with initial wounding or what Freud called unresolved conflicts or vulnerability spots or whatever you want to call it. The narcissist selects a borderline because she can push his buttons because she can help him to disintegrate.
And this is why when these women try very hard to be domestic homemakers, the narcissist feels dead and is frustrated, abusive, rejecting, and furious that the borderline woman is trying to be a homemaker and a housewife or at least a good wife. He didn't choose her to be a good wife. He chose her to destroy him. He chose her to cause him pain and hurt. He chose her to bring on multiplication and here she is abrogating her, her only duty.
And so ironically, borderline women who try to fit in, who try to be good wives, good intimate partners, good, good, you know, manage the home and they provoke the narcissist's ire and aggression and hatred and rage and abuse and rejection and with ultimatum and neglect and absence and abandonment because he doesn't want them, because he feels that they had deceived him. They were false advertising. What had been advertising is the harrowing of excruciating agony, crucifixion, and yet they refuse to drive the nails in his hands and ankles. But when they are in the borderline stage, when they disappear for days, when they cheat on him, when they steal his money, when they explode in enormous rage attacks, when they are her trigger and rageful, when they are being borderline, the classic borderline, when they're very jealous, when they're very suspicious, when they're very clinging and needy and imposing and, and what have you, at this stage, the narcissist is happy. Actually, he keeps coming back for more. He even keeps aggravating the borderline traits and behaviors because they guarantee mortification.
Why would the narcissist want to be mortified? Why would anyone want to be mortified, even if you're a narcissist?
Because not everyone is a narcissist. Of course, intensely normal people who try to avoid mortification at any cost. Just think about your reaction to cheating, how it feels. It feels like dying, absolutely like dying.
So everyone is trying to avoid this, except the narcissist. The narcissist seeks mortification, but it's not masochistic.
I read texts even by luminaries, such as Kernberg and others, who claim or imply that the narcissist is somehow masochistic and it's reverse side of the flip, the flip side of the coin of sadism. He's on the one hand a sadist and every sadist is also a masochist. We know from Graf Devine.
But that's not true in the narcissist case, or at least it's not true when it comes to mortification.
On the very contrary, mortification is the only act of self-love, only act of self-love that the narcissist engages in. With mortification, dismantles the false self, or at the very least disables it.
And now without the false self, the narcissist has no outer skin, no protection, no firewall, no moat, no castle. He is all alone in the field, naked to the core, vulnerable in the extreme, blabbering his mouth off like a madman.
And at that moment, with the rain pouring over in the mud under his bare feet, the narcissist feels alive. This is the narcissist's quest. This is the Holy Grail.
Narcissist spends his entire existence feeling dead inside, feeling there is no inside. The narcissist is all facade, all external, an apparition, a ghost.
He wants to feel alive for one minute, for one second, for one hour, for one day, just to go through this experience. How does it feel to be alive?
The mortification gives it to him.
Then he feels alive. Yes, he's in horrible pain. He feels trapped. He feels shamed. He feels ground, like ground meat. He feels that he's been reduced to atoms, atomized.
But he feels it. And he knows that only this is life. He feels it finally. He's finally able to feel, finally able to live. The world is in color, finally. It's colorful.
Now, of course, this is classic self-mutilation.
When we ask borderlines, people with borderline personality disorder and other mental health disorders, why they cut themselves, why they burn themselves with cigarettes, what is the pain doing to them? Why they seek pain?
They say, I feel alive only when I feel the pain. I feel alive only when I cut myself with a razor or knife, burn myself with cigarettes.
Only then the pain wakes me up. I feel alive.
And the narcissist's mortification, I mean, for the narcissist to feel alive is not enough to cut or burn. We'll do nothing. He needs something much more massive, much more all pervasive, much more ubiquitous. He needs his soul to be put into the machine.
So he needs something really bad and really total. And that's mortification.
This is his self-mutilation.
He then feels alive. He then feels, and he then feels for the first time, or not for the first time, but every time that he has mortification, he feels himself. He feels a self. Who is feeling the pain?
There's a core. There's a nucleus. Something wakes up. Something steers up inside him. Is it a true self? Probably vestiges of the true self. I'm trying somehow.
The true self is ossified, paralyzed, fossilized, crying, small traumatized baby. And this baby wakes up and the narcissist finally feels himself.
This is why narcissists after mortification resemble children very much. They become childlike. They regress and they display extreme infantile behaviors and infantile defenses because they are infants.
The true self wakes up. There's a chance. This false self is gone. The warden, the warden is gone. The prison is open. The doors are unlocked. He can walk out of the cell, walk out of the grounds, and he finds himself in a beautiful lush forest. It is a prison. The prison is a palace. It's a wonderful prison, but still a prison. It's a prison that the false self has constructed to keep the true self hostage, to keep him as a prisoner.
And here is the mortification, having freed him, the mortification is freedom. Freedom from any commitment, especially the primal commitment or the primary commitment to the false self.
Do you remember what I keep saying about narcissism? It's a form of religion. It's a religion with one worshiper, the narcissist, and his God, his divinity, his deity, the false self.
And the narcissist makes human sacrifice to the false self. He sacrifices his self, his true self. That's a human sacrifice.
Narcissist strikes a Faustian deal with the false self. You will make me great again and I will give you my soul. I'll give you my true self. I will slaughter it on the altar like Abraham almost slaughtered Isaac.
But the false self does not stay the narcissist's hand as God, God's angel, stayed the hand of Abraham. The false self encourages the narcissist to go ahead with the human sacrifice, to slit the true self's throat on the altar.
It's very, very primordial, primordial drama what's happening inside the narcissist.
We think that narcissist is just an idiot, a jerk. It's much more complicated than this.
And so the mortification allows the narcissist to feel alive, to feel himself, gives him the freedom, freedom from commitment. Of course, freedom from commitment is freedom from any commitment.
It also frees the narcissist from his relationship with borderline, with that specific borderline and allows him to look for the next borderline, the adventure of the next shared fantasy. It caters to his psychopathic, antisocial aspects of the personality, novelty seeking, risk taking, thrills, adrenaline junkie, etc.
Impulse, lack of impulse control.
At that moment, the narcissist becomes somatic because what is life?
According to Freud, Eros, erotic, Eros, the force of life, manifests in the libido. The libido is the sex drive, among other things. It's a creative drive. Sex is one manifestation of creativity.
So when the narcissist becomes alive, when he finally can feel, and when he kind of gets in touch with his steering core inside him, and when he's free, and he's adventurous, and he's in fantasy, and he becomes sexually aroused, becomes sexually active and aroused, and becomes a sexual being, unusual, unusual, sexual being, by the way. There's nothing like the libido of a cerebral narcissist turned somatic via mortification.
And it's true that the narcissist libido is always tainted with sadism, masochism, with unusual practices. Some would say deviant and pervert, not my style of speech. It's true that it's unusual, but it's there. It's there.
And it's real, and it's strong, and it's overpowering because it's an expression of life.
Narcissist is finally alive. The whole body is alive. His eyes, suddenly human, other parts of him come to life.
And it's because he had been mortified. It's a wonderful, wonderful feeling.
Pain and sex, the two main forces in life, come together and create a self, create life inside the narcissist.
And only mortification can give him this, and only a borderline woman can mortify.
Do you see the chain of being?
He needs borderline women to mortify him to experience this, what I've just described.
The narcissist is preoccupied with being. He wants to be. He fails. He wants to be, and he fails to be.
But he wants to be, because he does not exist, because he is a void, because he is deep space. Because throughout his life, especially his childhood, he was told that he can be loved only conditionally, only if he performs, only if so. He didn't fall, and he was not allowed to separate from the parent. He was not allowed to become an individual, separation and individuation.
So there's no one there. So he wants to be, he's obsessed with being.
And he wants to be so much that he, like a vampire, subsumes, consumes, extracts, sucks upon other people's being. He takes away their being. That's what's so special about narcissistic abuse. It's the abuse of the victim's being, not some aspect.
And so narcissists want to be, they are preoccupied with it. Borderlines on the other hand, their preoccupation is to not be. They're experts at disappearing, experts at vanishing physically, mentally. They commit suicide, 11% of borderlines end up committing suicide. They dissociate a lot. Association is very dissociation as a diagnostic criterion of borderlines. Forgetting, deleting, repressing, ignoring. Discontinuity, they are almost psychotic, as Kernberg observed, although I think the narcissists are more psychotic. But still, so borderlines are very concerned with not being. Their existence, I mean, they hate themselves. They are so fed up and disgusted with who they are. They just want to not be.
So they, for example, become alcoholics, or drug users, or engage in practices which negate boundaries, breach boundaries, such as, for example, promiscuous sex. They try to not be, the narcissist tries to be.
And of course, what they do when they come together, they trade. The narcissist helps the borderline to not be. How? He ignores her. He rejects her. He abuses her, violating her boundaries. He helps her to not be. He doesn't love her in the proper sense of the word. He abandons her. He goes away. He helps her to not be. And the borderline helps the narcissist to be.
To be, how? By modifying.
This is the deal they strike. I will cause you pain. You will love me.
So this is the title of the video. Title of the video is, why narcissists love borderlines and why they hate them back.
And this relationship is very familiar to both parties because it recreates what Freud called the unresolved primary conflict.
First conflict with a primary object, significant primary object, which is a long way of saying mother.
The narcissist has a conflict with his mother, which has never been resolved, but the mistake that many scholars make is that they think the narcissist teams up with the borderline.
The borderline is like his mother. Borderline is capable of causing him pain, capable of humiliating him, capable of ignoring him, using him, rejecting him, abandoning him like his mother.
Exactly. So he teams up with the borderline. And many scholars say that he's doing this in order to replay, to reenact the unresolved conflict with a different outcome. Like this time the borderline will love him. He's looking for unconditional love and the borderline will give him unconditional love. This time his mother substitute the borderline will behave like a proper mother. That's of course wrong, utterly wrong. They got it totally wrong.
The narcissist does not team up with the borderline in order to resolve the primary unresolved conflict. The narcissist teams up with the borderline in order to experience it again.
Don't forget, narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a reaction to the unresolved conflict.
The mother mistreated her child to an extent that the child needed to divorce himself. He needed to create a decoy, a piece of fiction, so that this piece of fiction can absorb all the hurt and all the pain and he himself needed to disappear, which is the narcissistic solution.
That's why he's so preoccupied with existence and being, because as a child he chose to not be. He chose a kind of borderline solution.
Only by going through the conflict again can he feel alive, because before he created, before he had created pathological narcissism, the child did feel alive. There was a child there. There was a lovely, cute, wonderful, smiling, bright-eyed child there.
And in the first four years, first six years or first nine years or the first nine years before that child became a narcissist, he existed. He felt he was alive with curiosity, with hope, with amazement, with wonder. He was there. He was alive. He was free.
And when the narcissist teams up with the borderline, he doesn't want her to be a good mother or a good enough mother. He wants her to be his mother, but he wants her to be his mother because his mother mortified him and he wants the borderline to mortify him again.
Why?
Because he wants to go back to being a child, the child before the narcissism, the child who used to be alive.
In other words, the narcissist wants the borderline to resurrect him. It's totally religious.
Because he had been crucified by his mother and three days or three years or three decades later, he goes to his God. Mother was God. He goes to another God and he asks that other God to cause him the pain, the kind of pain that will resurrect him.
Because when we are dead, we don't experience pain. When we experience pain, we are alive. That's indisputable. No one can argue with this.
In the mortification crisis, the narcissist sees himself through other people's eyes. He stands a chance to free himself of the shackles of this slave owner, taskmaster, cruel God, the false self.
And his only chance at achieving this is via re-traumatization, when there's no protection, when the pain is so excruciating that you can't but admit that you're alive.
These women are, of course, the narcissist pawns. He uses them. He uses projective identification and projective interjection to force them, to coerce them to behave in a way that will mortify.
He selects these women in order to fulfill roles. It's a theater play. It's production. And there's a script. And they have roles. And if they don't comply, sure, for instance, he pushes them. He tortures them until they do. There's a shared fantasy, and then there's a liberating anti-fantasy mortification, and she needs to go through the motions. She needs to hurt him.
These women need to integrate into shared psychosis, and then they need to re-traumatize the narcissist. They need to hurt him badly. Never mind how much they think they love him. If they love him, they need to hurt him.
That's the amazing mind-blowing sadness in the relationship between narcissists and borderline. That's why everyone is so obsessed with these relationships, because you see two people who love each other, beyond words, love each other, not in the healthy, normal sense. But I would say love each other existentially. The cores, the cores love each other, not the persons.
So they bond in a way, they become, you know, it's like fusion, it's like fusion reactions, like two atoms colliding in a lot of energies released in a nuclear explosion.
So the borderline, the more she loves her narcissist, the more she will hurt him. She understands intuitively that she has to reenact the unresolved conflict with his mother and mortify her. She needs to free him. She needs to make him feel alive. She needs to allow him to move to the next shared fantasy. She knows what she's doing, this act of selfless love, disguised as rage or hurt or abandonment anxiety. She knows that she will never see him again. But she also knows that this potentially is the only gift she can give him.
And when you talk to these women, they protest, they say, but we cheated on you because we felt that this is what you wanted. We did it to please you, prove you're right.
The narcissist does not push these women away. He cajoles them to push him away.
And this modification could lead to finally forcing the narcissist to accept and to internalize the insight that is very sick. That in itself is a modification.
Who wants to admit that they're sick if you are told tomorrow that you have terminal cancer that's modified?
Narcissism is the terminal cancer of the soul, stage four, stage five, and it exists.
But narcissist has to accept exactly as a neurotic patient has to accept the character neurosis in order to heal. Narcissist has to accept it.
And then it's a gamble. It's speculation. It's the first step in a therapeutic process of healing or the first step in giving up on himself and on life. It's a gamble.
The narcissist takes every time he's modified.
But every time he's modified, he is alive to take this gamble. He is free to take this gamble.
And he has emotions that guide him in taking this gamble.
And what more can anyone ask of life?.