Question. What happens if you abandon the Narcissist first?
If you do the discard? If you dump the Narcissist?
Answer. Go to the description and click on the link.
Question. What happens to the Narcissist when his parents die, especially his mother?
Answer. Go to the description and click on the link.
Now for the trifecta.
Question. What happens when the Narcissist intimate partner or best friend dies?
How does the Narcissist react to this? This is the topic of today's afterlife video.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS.
So what does happen when the Narcissist becomes a widow or a widow where?
What happens when the intimate partner in his or her life just gets sick and dies or has an accident and passes away?
How does the Narcissist react to this? It is sometimes unexpected. Sometimes it's a protracted process allowing the Narcissist to prepare himself mentally.
And yet surprisingly, the Narcissist reacts identically to the passing on and the demise of people in his life, which he deems significant or intimate.
He reacts the same way if he is given seven years to prepare or seven seconds to prepare.
And this reaction is comprised of three elements like everything else in narcissism.
The first element is entitlement. The Narcissist feels entitled to special treatment. And not only special treatment by other people, special treatment by God himself, special treatment by the universe.
The Narcissist sets himself apart. He considers himself unique. He doesn't need to work hard. He doesn't need to study long. He doesn't need to go through all the motions. And he doesn't need to conform to anyone's expectations. He doesn't need to have achievements or accomplishments commensurate with his standing in society and in life in general.
He expects admiration, adulation, affirmation and notoriety if need be, or being feared, even though he has invested nothing and committed himself to nothing in the process.
The Narcissist believes that his mere existence is risen enough for him to receive special treatment, special endowments, special rewards, unique, unique surprises and unexpected positive terms of events.
The universe is constructed this way, he believes, to cater to the high and mighty, to the richly endowed, to the amazingly superior, to perfect beings like himself, to godlike creatures like he or she is, etc.
The Narcissist is grandiose self-perception as a divinity or a deity. Allow the Narcissist to expect the impossible, literally.
And so when you die on the Narcissist, the Narcissist perceives this as a humongously inconsiderate act, an inconvenience inflicted on him by a disempathic person.
I mean, dying is really bad taste. Dying on him is something you should have never contemplated. It's not a legitimate course of action.
And this, of course, is very reminiscent of how an infant would react to his mother's demise, how an infant would react to his mother's absence.
It is a temper tantrum. It is a low threshold of frustration, the inability to tolerate an incompletion of one's expectations and beliefs.
Your death challenges the Narcissist worldview and even more importantly, the Narcissist view of himself within the world.
His self-image, his inflated, fantastic self-perception, his very sense of self, which does not exist. Narcissist don't have a self. Or they have a very disrupted and broken self.
So your death is a reminder. It's like an alarm clock at a very inconvenient moment in the morning. It's a reminder that the Narcissist is not all-powerful, is not omnipotent, is not godlike. She is not capable of avoiding the ineluctable, the inevitable, which is death.
Narcissist react to your death is a kind of Narcissististic injury, a challenge.
And if your death is very public and, as I said, protracted, then it could amount to Narcissististic modification.
The Narcissist behavioral repertory in this situation is identical to the way an infant reacts to frustration, absence and challenge.
And so this is the first element in the Narcissist reaction.
But it goes much deeper, as usual.
The Narcissist perceives you and himself as immortal. You have been rendered immortal by virtue of having entered or having been incorporated into the Narcissist narrative.
The Narcissist is, of course, godlike. He's never going to die. And this is not just a superstition or some idiotic belief in the afterlife.
This is not a religious thing. There are many types of stupid delusions. Religion is only one of them. It has nothing to do with this.
It is a firm conviction that death has no hold on the Narcissist. The Narcissist is convinced that he is exempt from dying, will never die. He is immortal in his own mind. It's not that he is denying death or avoiding death or repressing the very fact that we all have to die, which is something we all do.
It's not that. It's that he believes that his apotheosis, his deity, the fact, his deification, the fact that he is a god, would prevent him from dying.
And having entered the Narcissist shared fantasy, the Narcissist fictional narrative, the Narcissist unbeat and ambience and remit, having become incorporated into the Narcissist self-perception, having become a figment of the Narcissist imagination, having been rendered an internal object in the Narcissist mind, you too have become immortal.
So now you're both immortal. That allows the Narcissist, for example, to discard you with the absolute certainty that at some point in the future he would be able to hoover you.
That's even if you're 79 years old. The Narcissist simply doesn't believe that you will ever die. So it's like he has an infinite horizon within which he can discard you and hoover you, discard you and hoover you to the end of time.
And even the end of time probably does not apply to the Narcissist, as far as he's concerned.
The Narcissist therefore inhabits a timeless landscape, an eternal present. And within this eternal present, you are just a frozen artifact. You're a monument, a monolith, just waiting there for him or her, for the Narcissist to resuscitate you, to revive you and to resurrect you within a narrative, within a shared fantasy, to resurrect you as an internal object.
So the Narcissist closure is timeless. The Narcissist can always, at any point in time, as far as he's concerned, can always imbue you or re-imbue you with qualities and attributions that render you the perfect participant in a shared fantasy.
In other words, the Narcissist believes that he can always re-idealize you, he can always reintroduce you into a shared fantasy, into the disrupted narrative of your previous relationship.
And he can do this with no regard for the passage of time, because the passage of time has no impact on the Narcissist and anyone the Narcissist has chosen to anoint.
And here you go and prove him wrong by dying. Your death makes such closure. Renders' idealization impossible.
The timeless closure that the Narcissist is absolutely convinced of is forestalled by your demise.
The Narcissist remains stuck with the persecutory object that represents you in his mind, unable to re-idealize it in a new shared fantasy.
You frustrate the Narcissist not only by inconveniently passing away, inconsiderably vanishing from his life, challenging his omnipotence and godlike powers, his self-perception as a deity.
So not only that, but you also prevent the Narcissist from hovering you, from re-idealizing you, from re-establishing a new shared fantasy within which you would fit, from getting rid of the dissonance and anxiety that are generated internally in his mind by the persecutory object that represents you and used to be an idealized object.
You remember the process? When the Narcissist picks you up as an intimate partner, a source of supply, a best friend, whatever, the Narcissist creates a snapshot of you. It's an introject, it's an internal object that represents you in his mind, it's like another tower.
Then the Narcissist idealizes it, and because the Narcissist needs to separate from you, he then devalues this internal object. He renders it an enemy, a persecutory object.
Then when you die on the Narcissist the Narcissist remains stuck with his enemy within. Trojan horse, fifth column, you in his mind hate him.
There's a hateful object, a vengeful object, a critical object, an object that dislikes him and hates him, wants him dead. I don't know what.
So he remains stuck with the enemy object, the persecutory, the hostile object in his mind that used to represent you, because now you're dead.
And he is unable to transform this object into a benign, idealized, loving, compassionate, caring and affectionate, an empathic object.
So he's stuck with an enemy within, and this creates a lot of dissonance and anxiety, and he's unable to get rid of these, because you're not there anymore.
Now you could ask, why does the Narcissist need you? I keep saying that the Narcissist are unable to relate or refer to external objects.
Yes, that's very true. But external objects are triggers. The Narcissist needs an external object to allow him to create an internal object, because the Narcissist wishes to maintain an appearance of normalcy. He wishes to convince himself that his fantasy is not a fantasy, it's a reality, that his false self is not false, it's true, it's real.
And he cannot do this by totally divorcing reality. That would be psychosis.
So what the Narcissist does, he uses external objects in reality to trigger the formation and arrangement of internal objects in his mind.
That way the Narcissist can claim, "I'm in touch with reality, I'm normal, I'm okay, I'm not psychotic, I'm not crazy, I'm in touch with reality."
When you die, you remove the external object that allows the Narcissist to trigger the formation or the transformation or the rearrangement or the re-idealization of an internal object.
In other words, by dying, by passing on, you deny the Narcissist the ability to manipulate your internal object in his mind, the internal object that used to represent you in his mind.
He can no longer act upon this internal object. He can no longer interact with this internal object.
Suddenly, he remains frozen as it is, untouchable, non-manageable, non-manageable, uncontrollable.
And the Narcissist is faced with the horror of an enemy within, a hostile, critical, hating, demeaning, humiliating, devaluing internal object within his mind, that has no external correlate, has no external correspondent, there's no external object out there that corresponds to the internal object because you have died and the Narcissist is stuck.
And this is the equivalent of not obtaining closure in narcissism.
The Narcissist way of obtaining closure is, as usual, falsifying. He falsifies the persecutory object and re-idealizes it, but he cannot do that when you are ten feet under the ground. He just cannot.
You take away the Narcissist ability to reduce or mitigate his anxiety by eliminating the dissonance between the persecutory object and other objects like the false self.
The third element, the third reason for the Narcissist reactivity or reactance, the Narcissist has chosen you, especially if you're an intimate partner, but even if you're a good friend, or the Narcissist has chosen you to be his new mother.
You're a maternal figure. Narcissist converts you into a mother.
Now, the Narcissist original mother, the Narcissist biological mother, was a dead mother, metaphorically speaking. Was an absent mother, a selfish mother, instrumentalizing mother, abusive mother, hurtful mother, etc. Wrong type of mother, not good enough mother.
André Green called it in 1978 the dead mother.
So the Narcissist starts off as a child, was an infant, with a dead mother, and he keeps going through life looking for a live mother.
Not a dead one, but a live one. He keeps looking for a good enough mother.
Then he finds you. Then he convinces himself that you could be his new mother.
Then he tells himself that you could be this good enough mother that he's always been looking for.
Hence the idealization. He needs to idealize you, to believe in that.
Then he keeps testing you to see whether you are truly a good mother.
When you die on him, you prove to the Narcissist that you have always been a dead mother.
Here you are, frustrating him, abandoning him, separating from him, unavailable to him, absent from his life, having died.
Having died without the Narcissist consent, having died not as a part of the shared fantasy, having died challenging the Narcissist inflated fantastic self-deception, is a divinity.
Bad mother. You're a bad mother. This is shocking to the Narcissist.
It's shattering because the Narcissist convinces himself that the new maternal figures in his life, you included, are not like his original mother.
They are not dead mothers. These new maternal figures in his life, you included, are going to give him a chance for closure with his original mother.
By separating from you, by individuating the Narcissist completes the disrupted cycle of separation, individuation with his original mother.
And here you go and sabotage this. You undermine this. You do not allow the Narcissist to separate from you, to individuate. You behave exactly as the Narcissist original mother has done.
She was absent. You were absent. She was absent because she was depressive or selfish or hateful or whatever. You were absent because you died. Your death is a defiant act.
It's an act of hatred. You died on purpose. You died in order to frustrate the Narcissist, in order to destroy him, in order to not afford him closure, in order to not allow him to separate and individuate.
In short, you're just a replica, a clone of his original mother and his hate knows no boundaries. He hates you for dying. He hates you for dying.
Yet, at the same time, he misses you. He misses you not in the regular sense, because Narcissist are incapable of positive emotions, emotions in general.
He misses you. He misses you in the sense that he misses your functions. He misses what you used to give him, what you have been giving him. He misses your functionality within the shared fantasy. He misses your ability to allow him to re-idealize the internal object and then maybe separate again.
He misses you were a catalyst. You're a facilitator of internal processes in the Narcissist. We call it external regulation.
He misses you as an external regulator and, of course, a service provider. The four S's, sex, supply, sadistic and Narcissistic, services and safety.
You took away the safety. You took away the safety by dying. And of course, by dying, you took away all the rest, the services, the supply and the sex.
So now you've denied the Narcissist, everything you owe him, you have owed him. You deny by dying, you're denying the Narcissist his ability to function socially and otherwise.
Again, if the process is public, for example, if you're dying of cancer over four years, if the process is public, this is widely perceived as a modification by the Narcissist.
Your death, your gradual decline, your inability to function bodily as well as mentally, your ultimately your demise, they're perceived as a form of criticism.
It's as if you were saying to the Narcissist, you're not good enough to saveYou're not good like a knife enough to rescue me. You're just a human being, a limited human being. You can do nothing in the face of cancer, in the face of, I don't know what.
So your death and disability and disease are perceived as constant criticism, constant injury and finally, a modification by the Narcissist.
And if you die instantaneously and surprisingly in an accident by drinking too much coffee, for example, this is doubly so because this is perceived as a collusion between you and the universe.
Accidents are perceived as the universe's way, reality's way of snubbing the Narcissist, you know, of humiliating the Narcissist.
Of reducing the Narcissist to size. You have conspired with the universe against him and he hates you for it because you betrayed him.
Your death is a betrayal. You switch sides. You have joined his persecutors. You've joined his enemies. The enemy could be something totally abstract, like, I don't know, the way reality is structured or God or whatever. But whichever the case may be, the Narcissist is always a paranoid.
Paranoia is a form of Narcissism. Narcissist places himself at the center of attention and then everyone around the Narcissist is involved in a malign conspiracy against him because he's that important, he's that relevant. And you, by dying, you've joined his detractors. You've joined everyone who's ever wanted to harm him and to destroy him and to attack him and so on. You've become an enemy which sits well with the persecutory object and enhances it and makes the situation even worse.
Narcissist is anxiety. Narcissist is dissonance.
How to get rid of this persecutory object of you?
Now that you have died, you have confirmed 100% that you've always been the Narcissist hostile, conspiring, conniving, cunning, skimming enemy.
So your death throws the Narcissist into turbulence, typical in the wake of modifications.
And it's very difficult to emerge from this turbulence. Very often the Narcissist never dies. He rehashes, he ruminates, he becomes obsessive and compulsive. He may move on. He may find another substitute mother. He may create another shared fantasy, actually that's very likely, but there would be an unsettled account with you.
With you. There would be an open wound, a lacuna, a void, which is very threatening because it could suck the Narcissist in and never let him out again.
Your death, especially sudden death, but also gradual death, your death pushes the Narcissist forces the Narcissist to confront reality and brings him in contact with the reservoir or repository of life-threatening shame inside him.
Because if he's not a god, that's shameful. That brings out the shame.
The Narcissist original parents, parental figures, shamed him for not being perfect, for not performing, for wishing to have boundaries. It was all shame and guilt-based. These were the motivating forces in action within the dysfunctional family.
And when the Narcissist fails to save you or to rescue you, when you have joined the Narcissist universal enemies by dying on him, when you frustrate the Narcissist, when you don't allow him closure, when you become a bad mother by abandoning him, just like that, all to himself.
This regresses the Narcissist to very early infancy where he felt oceanic, unmitigated, drowning, overwhelming shame and could even lead to borderline-like behaviors and ultimately, if not tackled appropriately, to psychosis.
So, perhaps the only way to really impact the Narcissist, let alone punish him, to finally get a rise out of him, is not to cheat on him, is not to betray him in some other way, is not to dump him, is not to discard him.
If you really want to exact tribute from the Narcissist and punishment on him, maybe you should consider dying on him, by surprise or in a lengthy process.
But, if you ask me, he doesn't deserve this. Just move on, no contact and forget this simulation of a human being, this death cult of one masquerading as a person.
There's nothing there and nobody there except the howling winds of what could have been, what would never be and what is not there.