So next time you see someone come up with a new word, a new phrase, a new concept, a new idea, a new breakthrough, you know what?

Nine out of ten times, it’s stolen from my YouTube videos. I’m kidding you’re not. Make a small study. Compare their videos to my videos. See where it all came from.

Okay.

Rammed finished.

Now, one last thing. Someone asked me about a dead father. There’s Green’s concept of a dead mother.

You see, I attribute, I give attribution, I give credit where it’s due.

The concept of dead mother is not mine. It’s Green’s and Ray Green’s.

So someone asked me about a dead father and mentioned Kafka’s father. Kafka’s father was rejecting and sadistic and influenced Kafka’s life dramatically.

One could say that he shaped Kafka and molded him into what he had become, including his literary talent and the nature of his content, his literary output. So was he a dead father? Yes, he was a dead father, but dead fathers affect children different to dead mothers. Dead fathers affect later stages of personal development. Dead mothers affect the formative years. Formative years usually culminate in the terrible tools, culminated age two or three, and then continue somehow until age six.

But the really important period is zero to two. And in this period, the mother is mother predominates. The father is largely an irrelevant figure, literally. The mother shapes the psychology of the child from now to eternity.

The father comes into the picture much later when the child, first of all, is able to recognize the difference between himself and the external environment. And when the child is able to construct a theory of the world where father fits in, the child has a symbiotic relationship with his mother. It’s a single organism, a single unit.

It’s extreme co-dependence.

And so the child doesn’t pay attention, is not aware of the existence of other people, or at the very least of their roles, of their function, of their importance.

The father is someone who comes and goes also. Father is busy at work.

So until age two, the father is a non-entity in the child’s emerging, shaping psychology.

Starting at age two, the father begins to fulfill a very important role. The father affects personal development, including socialization.

The father is a very important socialization agent. One could say more important than the mother.

So it is the father who introduces the child to society, provides the child with social skills, teaches the child how to read social cues, introduces the child to code of conduct, to what’s right, what’s wrong, what is acceptable and what is forbidden, what society countenances and what society rejects, and the various sanctions and the price and the cost to benefit ratios of various choices.

So the father is the main agent of socialization.

And then, of course, gender differentiation. If he’s a son, he emulates the father as a gender role model.

The father is the first man he sees intimately, first man he can follow, monitor. So he absorbs the father’s male attributes, thereby shaping himself into a man, into a man, sorry, he’s a male, biologically he’s a male, but into a man.

So the man attributes of the father, the masculine attributes, the role play, the role, the gender role model, the father constitutes, render his son a man, or his daughter a woman.

The daughter defines herself by contradistinction to the father. She emulates, imitates, identifies, internalizes the mother, as we will see in a minute.

But she also tells herself, this is mommy and this is not daddy. Daddy is different.

And not only biologically or anatomically, daddy is different in behavior, in reactivity, in everything.

So as far as sons and as far as daughters, the father fulfills a very important gender role differentiation. He has contributions to gender role differentiation.

And then there is identity formation, which includes psychosexuality.

So the father is the one who provides crucial and critical elements of one’s identity.

I mentioned gender, but also psychosexuality.

But not only. I said that the father is a socialization agent. And a huge part of our identity has to do with social interactions, shapes and interpersonal effects. So the father contributes to this as well.

So yes, father is important, but not important when it comes to the formation of narcissism.

Formation of narcissism is usually attributed to the formative years. That the mother is a much, much bigger contribution.

You know, in India, there is the coming to the topic finally, you know, in India, there’s a habit called Sati. Sati is when a widow, a woman, a widow, should self-immolate, should climb upon the funeral pyre of her deceased husband, of her late husband, and burn with him, self-immolate.

So in the past, until the 19th century, numerous women in India, when they were widowed at whatever age, the husband was burned, finally, on a funeral pyre. And they climbed the funeral pyre and burned with him to join him, presumably in the afterlife. And more importantly, to demonstrate conclusively, one might say, their loyalty and faithfulness to him.

Now, this is the expectation of a narcissist. The narcissist is shocked and infuriated when you move on. When you move on, when you have a life and especially when you had found another man, he can’t take it. He wants you to self-immolate on his funeral pyre. He wants to drag you with him into the Valhalla, into the hell, into his hell.

Because the narcissist lives in purgatory. He lives in hell. He inhabits hell. He is hell’s own creature, not in the religious sense, in a metaphorical sense. Hell is inside him.

Eugene O’Neill said that hell is other people. No, not for the narcissist, because the narcissist is unable to perceive other people. As far as the narcissist is concerned, hell is himself. This is why he denies himself. This is why he cuts off himself. He can’t stand himself. It’s too much of a torture.

But he wants you to descend with him to hell. He wants you to burn on his funeral pyre. Because he’s mourning himself and grieving himself from age two or four or six. He had died at age two or four or six. He had sacrificed the true self to the monarch, to the idol of the fourth self. He’s dead. It’s a walking dead. The narcissist is the walking dead. He’s a zombie. Are you getting this?

And he wants to zombify you. He wants you dead as well. He wants to mummify you.

The famous movie by Hitchcock, Psycho, where the son mummifies the mother and continues to interact with her in a shared fantasy. That’s a narcissist.

So when you finally get rid of the narcissist, when he’s out of your life, when you had broken up with him, when you had divorced him, you congratulate yourself. You say, wonderful, I got rid of this thing. I got rid of this external cancer, metastatic cancer that was invading every corner and nook and cranny of my life, suffocating me and stifling me and reducing me to insanity and worse.

Now it’s gone. He’s gone. It’s over. It’s not all. It’s just starting actually.

This is what happens immediately after you got rid of your narcissist.

And if you are lucky and he doesn’t stalk you because some narcissists actually continue to stalk you because they regard the shared fantasy as intact. They refuse to break up. They won’t take no for an answer. The shared fantasy is valid and they’re in it and you’re in it.

So they stalk you.

He wrote a manic stalking, it’s called, but that’s a minority. The vast majority just walk away. They’ll try to hoover you from time to time. Not all of them, some of them, but all in all, they walk away. They find a replacement. They discard you. They replace you.

You’re a grain of rice and every grain of rice looks like every grain of rice.

And if this bus has departed, the next one is in 15 minutes.

So the narcissist is out of your life, on majority of cases, but not out of your mind.

You continue the narcissist’s work, his abuse, his rejection, his humiliation, his sadism, his stalking. You continue his work. You are an earnest and loyal disciple of his religion. Remember, narcissism is a private religion. He had converted you. You are now a convert to his religion. He had inhabited your mind. He’s in there, he’s in there talking to you, making you do things, forcing himself on your faults and cognitions. We call this intrusive thoughts and provoking in you, dysregulated emotions.

So the self-stalking continues via something we call persecutory object and another mechanism called introjects.

Let me dwell a bit about these two mechanisms.

The persecretary object is a paranoid, a figment of paranoid ideation, which coalesces around an internal object.

So there’s this internal object and you begin to be afraid of it. You begin to anticipate pain and hurt and harm from this internal object.

We usually anticipate pain and hurt and harm and damage and worse from external objects.

But in your case, you shift these fears, these phobias, these anxieties, you shift them inside you. We call this process internalization. You internalize this negative emotionality and then you attribute it to a single well-defined, demarcated object.

And when you imbue this object with all your fears, all your dread, all your horror, all your pain, your hurt, anticipation of harm, rejection, humiliation, abandonment, even internal, when you imbue the object with all this, it becomes a persecretary object.

And then it’s able to persecute you from the inside. It continues to persecute you from the inside, continues to inflict the damage, the harm, the hurt, the pain, the agony, the doubt, the fears from the inside. It becomes a perpetual source of abuse in effect.

So now you have an internalized object, which continues the work of abuse that your narcissistic ex had started.

The second mechanism is no less, no less nefarious.

And that’s a mechanism of internalized voices. They’re known as introjects. Introjects are a complex topic. I’ll deal with it in a few minutes.

But to simplify matters, when you internalize someone’s voice, judgment, way of thinking, attitudes, even behaviors, vocalizations, when you internalize important aspects of another person and they become embedded in your mind, and then they become you, they become a part of who you are.

Is critical determinants of your identity. Then we call this process interjection.

And the results are introjects.

So the problem is that victims of complex trauma, victims of narcissistic abuse, for example, misidentify introjects, which are internal objects, misidentify introjects as external.

These voices speak from the inside. They tell you that you’re bad, unworthy, slut, failure, loser, you know, they tell you bad things about yourself. They regulate your self esteem by decreasing it to the point of vanishing. They undermine your self confidence. They render your sense of self worth, labile and fluctuating. You can’t regulate it anymore. They create, in other words, liability and dysregulation.

But these introjects in a healthy person, person who had not been subjected to prolonged trauma, and therefore doesn’t have a post traumatic condition. In such a person, the person knows that these are internal voices. He knows that in the case of a trauma victim, and also in the case of borderline, there is a misidentification. Very often, these voices are perceived as external.

It’s not that you think your abuser is there as a hologram, or is there physically. It’s not that it’s that you perceive these voices as not part of you as coming from some other source.

Even when they come from inside your mind and inside your brain, it’s like someone else is talking to you.

This happens a lot when you have a sadistic parent, sadistic narcissistic, withholding, dead parent. The voice of this parent is embedded in you like a shrapnel, like a shrapnel from the explosion of a shell, you know, it’s embedded in you, it had wounded you.

But you still perceive these voices external.

Even when the parent is long dead, you’re still arguing with the parent, you’re still having dialogues with the parent, you still justify, try to justify yourself, or make excuses, or hide things, hide things from the introjection, you know, conceal, lie, deceive.

And you’re treating the voice of the dead parent and the voice of your narcissistic abuser.

These voices you’re treating them as not really you, like foreign objects lodged in your mind, like a projectile.

You know, there’s the famous movie, I think, 1903, The Voyage to the Moon by Millet, the French filmmaker, and you see the rocket embedded in the moon, like a rocket hit the moon and penetrated it.

It’s the same with the introjects.

While in a healthy person, the introjects is fully contained within the moon.

In your case, the introject is like a rocket that had penetrated the artificial surface of the moon, but still stands out clearly distinguishable from the moon from the surface.

So there is a strong perception of alienation and estrangement, like they’re the voices.

And these abusive, humiliating, shaming, guilt-tripping voices, they’re not really you. You don’t feel they’re part of you, you feel you even resent them, you even hate them. You try to get rid of them, but they intrude, they’re intrusive.

And so technically psychosis, this is psychotic state. It’s not a very advanced psychotic state, but it already reflects, already includes some important elements of psychosis like hyper reflection.

And you need to reframe this. You need to tell yourself these voices, these introjects, the voice of my abuser, the voice of my mother, the voice of my hateful father or whatever. These are my voices. These are my voices. I took the words from them maybe, I borrowed their way of thinking and so, but I appropriated it.

It has now become me.