As you know by now, the narcissist baits you. He lures you into his dungeon, the dungeon of the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy is a Disney-esque, a Disney-like world. It is divorced from reality. It is delusional. It used to be called in French folie à deux. Later, shared psychosis. And today the clinical term is mass psychogenic illness.
You disappear into the shared fantasy. as you do you begin to share with the narcissists multiple facets of who you are, your identity, your life, your decision-making, your agency, your efficacy, your personal autonomy, your independence, your cognitions, your emotions, gradually, there is a hostile takeover taking place.
And before you know it, you become a figment of this narrative, of this theatre production, of this film, this movie that a narcissist has created for both of you.
Today I'm going to focus on sharing and oversharing. What is shared in the shared fantasy?
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and currently a professor of clinical psychology and business management in CIAPS, Cambridge United Kingdom and other locations throughout this thriving, ever-warming globe.
Apopo fantasy.
Your involvement with the narcissist is strongly indicative that you have what is known as a fantasy defense.
You wish to transition from being an NPC, non-player character, into a main character. This is also known as a main character syndrome.
The narcissist idealizes you, and then he provides you with access to your idealized image through his gaze, and suddenly, you're all important. You're alive. You're noticed. You're seen. And, above all, you're perfect.
This is an irresistible proposition.
I call it the Hall of Mirrors.
You fall in love not with the narcissists, but with a fantasy. And you fall in love with a fantasy, because within the fantasy you are Disney-like, a princess.
Before we proceed, there is a shared fantasy playlist on this channel, and I strongly recommend that you watch it, especially the video titled, if I remember correctly, seven phases of the shared fantasy. There's a link in the description.
What is a fantasy?
According to the dictionary of the American Psychological Association, a fantasy is any of a range of mental experiences and processes marked by vivid imagery, intensity of emotion, and relaxation or absence of logic.
It is sometimes, says the dictionary, indicative of pathology, as in delusional thinking or significant disconnection from reality.
This is the main function of the fantasy, by the way. To put a firewall between you and reality.
Having met the narcissist, he made a proposition which proved to be irresistible. He allowed you to disengage from a reality that has turned intolerable, burdensome and unbearable, and he invited you into an alternative reality, a virtual reality.
Back to the dictionary.
Fantasy in psychoanalytic theories is a figment of the imagination, a mental image, night dream, or even daydream, in which a person's conscious or unconscious wishes and impulses are fulfilled.
In other words, fantasy involves wish fulfillment.
Followers of Melanie Klein use the spelling fantasy with ph to denote specifically unconscious wishes.
So this is the definition of a fantasy.
Narcissists create an elaborate, elaborate storyboard, an incredibly detailed and highly specific narrative, story, a piece of fiction, and invites you into it.
He invites you to denude yourself to get rid of the realistic dimensions of your existence.
You are grounded and you are asked to unground yourself, to float into the clear skies, where a Disney-like castle awaits you, within which, as I said, you're a damsel in distress, or a princess or both, and the narcissist is your rescuer, savior, twin flame, soulmate, the person who understands you best, who gloms you to perfection, because you and the narcissist share the same psychological backgroundyou both come typically from this functional families.
In this Faustian bargain, in this deal with the devil, metaphorically speaking, you give up a lot. You give up on yourself.
The narcissist struck a deal, as a child, the narcissist has struck a deal with a false deity, with a false self, with the divinity.
And as a child, the narcissist has sacrificed his true self to this divinity, and then merged with it and became the moloch to which initially he had sacrificed himself.
Before I proceed, half of all narcissists are women. The gender pronouns are interchangeable.
So the narcissist is well acquainted with this process of sacrificing oneself for a symbol, for a fantasy, for something that's not real.
Sacrificing the true self, which is very real, to the false self, which by definition is false and fictitious, the narcissist imposes the same procedure on you.
He expects you to sacrifice your true self as an entry ticket into the shared fantasy. That's the entry price.
So the first thing the narcissist demands of you is to conform to the idealized internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind, to your introject.
And here starts the first phase in your gradual dissolution and disintegration on the way to becoming a two-dimensional avatar. Nothing but a character in the narcissist's everlasting, repetitive video game.
The first thing the narcissist asks you to give up on is reality testing.
Reality testing is what is known as an ego function.
People with an ego, which the narcissist does not possess, ironically, people with an ego test for reality. They maintain contact with reality. They evaluate and appraise reality appropriately. And then they act in and on reality in ways which guarantee beneficial outcomes. This is known as self-efficacy. Reality testing is a crucial component of interacting with the physical and with human environment, reading the environment appropriately.
And so the first thing the narcissist does, he asks you to give up on it.
The narcissist, within the shared fantasy, becomes your exclusive gateway to reality. Gateway to what is real, what is true, and what constitutes a fact.
The narcissist becomes, in other words, you outsource reality testing.
So from now on within the shared fantasy, if you want to reach a conclusion, if you want to pass judgment, if you want to form an opinion, about what is true and what is not, what is real and what is not, what is a fact and what is counterfactual, you want to form an opinion about what is true and what is not, what is real and what is not, what is a fact and what is counterfactual, you need to consult the narcissist.
The narcissist will tell you what to think.
It's a famous sentence, if I want your opinion, I will give it to you.
The narcissist becomes a firewall, the only access, the only point of access to reality. His reality, not real reality.
Within the shared fantasy, the narcissist functions as your externalized reality testing, but does not provide you with unmitigated, objective, neutral access to reality as it is.
In other words, it does not provide you with an ontology. Instead, the narcissist substitutes his own fantasies and grandiose delusions for reality.
His internal world passes for reality.
And when you abdicate your right and ability to interact with reality directly, when you accept that the narcissist is the only conduit and channel to reality, when you channel reality through the narcissist, you are not getting reality. And you're not gaining access to reality, and you are not in touch with facts or with the truth, but with the narcissist's utterly surrealistic, dreamlike scape, internal landscape, internal wasteland, that is, or should have been his core identity.
So the narcissist provides you with reality testing, which is actually useless.
Because trapped within the fantasy, the only reality is the shared fantasy.
The narcissist demands many additional sacrifices from you within the shared fantasy.
This is the shared part of the shared fantasy.
For example, he expects you to fit into the narrative.
The shared fantasy, as I said, is a script. It's a script within which roles are allocated to the narcissists, to you, to other people. It's very much like producing a movie and then directing it.
The narcissist has this movie in his head.
The narcissist regards himself as a main character in his own film or in his own novel.
This is the main character syndrome.
So he expects you to fit into this novel, into this book, into this movie, into this theatre play.
He expects you to act as one of the characters in strict accordance with a script that he provides you with, with a narrative that is overarching, overpowering, ubiquitous and all-pervasive.
You need to affirm and confirm the narcissist delusions. You need to tell him that they're all real.
His false self is not false. His delusions are true and his goals are realistic.
You need to accede to his goals. You need to make these goals your own.
You from now on are in a collusion, in a conspiracy, intended to realize or actualize the narcissist's perception of the world, perception of himself in the world, and his inexorable need to reenact early childhood conflicts and attain successful separation individuation within the relationship with you.
You play a maternal figure in this relationship, usually.
So a sign role within the script is typically that of a mother.
And yes, it applies to both genders. script is typically that of a mother. And yes, it applies to both genders, men and women alike.
Now, next thing you need to sacrifice.
You need to suspend your disbelief. You need to suspend your judgment of right and wrong. Factual and not factual. Truth and falsity.
You need to suspend all this.
You need to adopt the narcissist's perception of what is real, what is correct, what is appropriate, what is right, what is good, what is evil.
The narcissist replaces your judgment with his.
And the narcissist introject.
The voice inside your head that represents the narcissist keeps informing you all the time.
This is wrong. This is right.
The narcissist, in other words, becomes your conscience.
He interjects himself, he injects himself into your mind in a process known as entraining.
He creates an introject, an internal object that he installs like an app in a smartphone, and this internal object keeps talking to you, keeps interacting with you, and fulfills the functions of the super ego or the conscience or the inner critic or whatever you want to call it.
It's there and it's in control.
It's all about control. It's all about having power over your mind, subjugating it, subjecting it to a kind of governance that is micromanaging and that is all pervasive and that is all knowing and all powerful.
In short, the narcissist injects into you, installs in your mind a godlike voice, a godlike introject, the fount of morality, of behavior right and wrong.
He becomes your microcontroller.
And you, clinically speaking, become a zombie, a robot, an extension of the narcissist, remote controlled by him at any given moment.
The narcissist provides external regulation.
Now this is especially important in borderline personality, when the partner has borderline personality disorder or dependent personality disorder also known as codependency.
External regulation simply means that the narcissist is able to modify and alter your moods and emotions and regulate their intensity and their direction at any given minute.
This is usually done from the inside. We all have internal regulation of moods, affects, emotions.
But in the case of borderline and dependent personality disorders, partners usually seek someone to regulate them externally.
The borderline wants an intimate partner who would regulate her from the outside, and so does the codependent for different reasons.
So the narcissist takes over this role of external regulation.
He controls your emotions, your affects, your moods, even your thoughts, your sense of self-worth, your self-perception, your self-image.
He molds you, he shapes you, he reshapes you, he designs you, and undoes you, he is there to dissolve you and crystallize you. He's playing with you as if you were some kind of raw material.
That's another sacrifice of personal autonomy and independence and agency.
Of course, the fact that someone, the narcissist, has access to your mind and is able to change its contents, its intensity, its polarity, its interactivity and other dimensions of it.
The fact that someone from the outside can mingle or intermingle with your mind and then mangle it, play with it, reassemble it, disassemble it, this enormous power, this access from the outside makes it very difficult for you to tell the difference between external and internal.
It drives you to a state which clinically is indistinguishable from psychosis.
You begin to misidentify internal voices and internal objects as external, and external ones as internal.
So you develop simultaneously extreme narcissistic defenses or even a narcissistic style, and at the same time, you become psychotic, delusional, very, very divorced from reality, unable to tell what's happening, unable to put a boundary between yourself and the world.
That's where I stopped. The world begins, that's the world, where the world stops and I begin.
This cannot be done because you are not you and you are not in control and you are not identical with your mind.
There's a foreign agent, a foreign body embedded there, provoking immune responses within your mind.
So it's all a giant mess. It's very confusing, disorienting, dislocating, very chaotic.
Now, your main role, of course, is to provide the four assets.
Supply, narcissistic and sadistic. Services, sex, and safety.
As a maternal figure, you need to provide a secure base. You need to accept the narcissists exactly as he is. You need to love him unconditionally, regardless of his ongoing egregious abuse.
And so as long as you provide two of these four S's, you're in. This is your job description.
But to provide this, you need to betray yourself. You need to deny yourself. You need to become someone completely different, or actually, more precisely, you need to become nobody at all.
You need to get infected with the narcissist's inner emptiness. You need to become as much of a void in a black hole as the narcissist is.
In order to provide the narcissists with narcissistic supply, you need to lie about reality.
The narcissist is grandiose. His perception of reality is fantastic and inflated and distorted. It's a cognitive distortion and you need to comply with this, to go along with it, to egg him on, to agree with him.
In other words, you need to deny reality and to lie.
In order to provide him with sadistic supply, you need to deny reality and to lie.
In order to provide him with sadistic supply, you need to render yourself a punching bag, a victim. You need to deny your own needs for comfort and compassion and care and empathy and love and affection.
If you were to provide him with services, you need to suspend your own needs you need to defer them or even ignore them altogether because he comes first you need to neglect your health you need to ignore your moods you need to give up on love, you need to service him, and that's it.
And finally, to act as a maternal secure base figure, as a substitute mother, thereby making the narcissist feel safe.
Narcissist wants to feel that you will not abandon him. The narcissist has separation insecurity. The narcissist keeps testing you with narcissistic abuse to see how far he can go.
And so to provide him with this sense of safety, you need to subject yourself to the harangues and torture of the narcissist on a minute-by-minute basis, day in and day out, year in and year out.
And you need to love him and accept him unconditionally, which means you need to deny your own pain, the betrayal trauma, the abuse.
All these, the ability to provide the narcissists with the four essence requires you to suspend yourself, to give up on your core identity, to negate, and vitiate and eliminate yourself as a separate entity.
Narcissists don't do separateness. They don't do externality.
The psychological process that has led to narcissism, pathological narcissism in the first place, involved a failure of the narcissist as a child to separate from the mother and to become an individual.
So narcissists have had no experience of separating from someone important, someone significant.
And because they've had no such experience, they don't allow you to separate.
They attempt separation from you, but throughout this process of the shared fantasy, which again is inexorable, totally predictable, throughout this process, you are inert, you're objectified, you're instrumentalized, you're not a real human being. You're a symbol, an internal object, to be manipulated.
You're assigned a role and you have to play it, but the role is not you. You're an actress playing someone who you are not.
In addition to all this, you're supposed to spread the gospel, spread the word.
Narcissism is missionary, and so you're supposed to act on behalf of the narcissist, to promote him, to praise him, to adulate him as publicly as possible, to justify him, to defend him, to absorb him.
Your activities and your messages are intended for public consumption, aggrandizing the narcissist and rendering him sublime and pure.
You need to collude with the narcissist's acolytes and flying monkeys, and you need to act against the narcissist's innumerable, numerous enemies.
This is a cult. The settings and dynamics of a cult are in full operation here.
And you become a cult member, following a cult leader, who is utterly divorced from reality.
Yes, if it reminds you of Donald Trump, you're right.
So, it's a major problem.
In a shared fantasy, what you share is yourself, but not in a good sense.
In a shared fantasy you hand over yourself to the narcissist to do with as he pleases and that's exactly what he ends up doing.