But people can’t wrap their heads. They can’t grasp this strategy. It is so alien, so counterintuitive, so crazy-making that they can’t believe it’s true.

They say, “Oh, nonsense. It’s a cognitive dissonance.“

His girlfriend cheated on him, so he invented the story that he made it happen, that he pushed her to cheat, that people don’t believe this.

They say, “Oh, he’s just trying to show that he was in control. He was actually deeply hurt, and he wanted her to not do it. So he was testing her. Maybe he was just testing her.

It’s none of the above. It’s not a test. It doesn’t involve romantic jealousy or possessiveness. It does not hurt the narcissist. There’s no pain, this kind of pain. It’s none of the above. It’s a maneuver. It’s a tactic. It’s a strategy of ridding oneself of undesired and undesirable intimate partners. End of story. It’s absolutely cold-blooded.

But again, the peers of the narcissist misinterpret his behavior, and this misinterpretation causes him narcissistic injury and narcissistic mortification.

He feels humiliated by the misunderstanding of his motivation.

At the same time, when he pushes his intimate partner to cheat, and she does ultimately, this is automatically perceived by the narcissist as rejection and humiliation, as a kind of criticism, as if he were inadequate, mentally ill, incapacitated, not good enough.

In other words, unworthy.

In other words, as if he is less than perfect.

So this is the irony of the situation.

The narcissist pushes his intimate partner to cheat on him in order to get rid of him.

He pushes really hard. He pushes really hard. It’s like hard work.

Then it happens, of course, because if you push anything hard enough, it happens. Then it happens.

And then once it happens, the good news is the silver lining, he does succeed to get rid of the intimate partner.

But the cloud is societal reaction, the action of everyone around him.

His peers, his peers, his colleagues, his family, everyone thinks that he’s a doormat, a cuckold, a coward, etc., not protective enough, etc.

So this hurts.

This is narcissistic injury or mortification.

Similarly, unconsciously, he perceives the act of cheating as a kind of rejection and humiliation, an indication that he is less than perfect.

Never mind that he engineered everything. Never mind that he controlled everything. Never mind that he puppeteered everyone involved, or at least he tells himself this. Never mind all that.

There’s still this element of she went ahead with it. She actually went ahead with it.

That means that I wasn’t good enough. That’s the bad object speaking.

And if you revert, if you go back to the previous video I posted about the betrayal fantasy, I talk a lot about the bad object.

Because what happens is, when the narcissist is exposed to this point of view, you’re a coward, you’re a cuckold, you’re a doormat, you’re not protective, you’re not a man, you’re inadequate, you’re not good enough, you’re unworthy of love, you’re not lovable. When he’s exposed to these messages from the environment, even though these messages are a misinterpretation of what had happened, these messages are wrong.

People don’t realize that the narcissist had acted in his own best self-interest. People don’t understand because they can’t grasp the narcissistic world. It’s so not human, it’s so alien.

But then, because the narcissist is crucially dependent on input and feedback from the outside, because he’s subject to internal regulation of his sense of self-worth, for example, because he builds his identity on the fly from narcissistic supply and beatific attention, because he’s a kaleidoscope of other people’s gazes, because of all this, he willy-nilly, unwillingly internalizes their fallacious, wrong point of view and comes to regard himself as inefficacious, helpless, unlovable, obsequious, unworthy, ugly, craven, doormat, coward, etc.

Actually, in his own mind, he had been cuckolded. He knows it’s not true, because he knows that he has done everything intentionally with a plan in mind. He knows that all the steps that led to the cheating were his own doing, 100%. So he knows that he’s the mastermind. He knows that he’s a puppet master, and yet, because the narcissist always internalizes other people’s gaze, other people’s point of view, he is forced, he has no defenses, against the alternative, fallacious, wrong view of what he had done, and he internalizes it.

And then it feeds into his harsh inner critic. It kind of fuels his sadistic superego, or bad object, it projects. It amplifies the shame that underlies narcissism, because narcissism is the outcome of shame.

You should read work by Masterson and Lydia Wielowska and so on. It’s intimately connected to shame.

So narcissism is a reaction to shame, a defense against shame.

And the whole process of forcing his intimate partner to cheat, and then being exposed to ridicule, mockery, and derision, and pity, and contempt, this whole process, having internalized this input, feeds the narcissist’s shame.

The furnace in which the narcissist burns eternally, his own inner hell and inferno.

The shame then erupts out of control, like so much magma or lava out of volcano. The shame consumes the narcissist to life-threatening proportions.

The narcissist could easily become suicidal.

So it is so bizarre, because the narcissist, to recap, to recap, see how strange, how mind-bending this is.

The narcissist wants to get rid of his intimate partner, he pushes her to cheat. It’s all he’s doing, it’s all his plan, it’s utterly in control. He pushes her to cheat.

Then she cheats.

Then other people mock the narcissist.

Then instead of saying to himself, they don’t know what they’re talking about. This is not true. I know what happened. I made it happen.

Instead of doing this, he internalizes the point of view of other people, their gaze, their ridicule and mockery and derision, internalizes it.

He internalizes all these, because he is used to feeding off the feedback and input of other people. He is used to reconstitute himself on the fly based on other people’s input and feedback. He can’t help it. It’s a reflex. It’s out of control.

So he internalizes this point of view, and then he’s flooded with shame and becomes suicidal.

Okay, you see.

Great.

Thank you, Vaknin.

Now we understand much more, that we understand much less.

Why?

Why not change the strategy? Why continue with this potentially life-threatening game, mind-playing and power play? I mean, why?

Mind game and power play? Why? Why not learn from experience and never ever do it again?

And the answer is the shared fantasy.

The narcissist’s only meaningful relationships are within a shared fantastic space.

It’s known as a shared fantasy. It was first described in 1989.

The shared fantasy of the narcissist is highly addictive. I’ve described it in previous videos, including interviews with the aforementioned fake friend.

The shared fantasy is highly addictive. The partner gets addicted to the shared fantasy.

And when the partner is cut off, this generates stalking behaviors. Stalking behaviors.

The intimate partner cannot let go of the shared fantasy and of the narcissist. And if the intimate partner is pushed away violently and aggressively, being blocked, or I don’t know what, threatened, the intimate, the erstwhile intimate partner becomes hateful.

This virulent hatred, in spurned women anyhow.

But refugees of the shared fantasy, intimate partners who have been cast out of the shared fantasy, out of paradise, out of the Garden of Eden, they resent, hate, detest the narcissist. They want him dead.

So the shared fantasy is highly addictive. It generates stalking behaviors and virulent hatred and the wish to destroy the frustrating object.

The narcissist, these women mobilize and attempt literally to ruin the narcissist, get him, you know, punish him somehow.

But once these women cheat at the narcissist’s behest, if he succeeds to force them to cheat, they are a disadvantage.

Whenever they even contemplate approaching the narcissist, he can point to the cheating. He can emotionally blackmail them. He can silence their vocal complaints. He can get rid of them for good. He can say, it’s all your fault. You cheated. You shouldn’t have. Why did you do that?

Now it’s all over. Now it’s a point of no return. Now I owe you nothing. And the intimate, the former intimate partner accepts it because cheating is wrong. Nevermind the circumstances. Cheating is always wrong. End of story. Period.

And another end of story. There’s no justification for cheating. None whatsoever.

So once you have cheated, once you’ve cheated, you’re morally compromised. You’re not in the position to make demands. You’re not in the position to require the fulfillment of promises, however broken they may be. You are not, you cannot complain.

So the cheating puts a Chinese wall, a firewall between the narcissist and his former partners, protects him. It’s a defense.

So this is not about masochism. It is just the effective dissolution of the shared fantasy.

To effectively dissolve the shared fantasy, you need to force your intimate partner to cheat.

And this requires the endurance of a narcissistic injury or narcissistic mortification because everyone perceives you as a cuckold.

The effective dissolution of the shared fantasy requires narcissistic injury or mortification by posing as a cuckolded partner in full view of everyone.

That’s the cost of dissolving the shared fantasy permanently and irreversibly.

It’s like the narcissist is faced with two unpalatable choices.

Break up with your intimate partner the way normal people do.

You can do that, but because the partner has been enmeshed in a shared fantasy, she’s not likely to take to it kindly. She’s likely to become a stalker, a hater and an underminer of the narcissist’s life for years to come.

So that’s one option.

Not very appetizing, we must admit.

The other option, push her to cheat, force her to cheat, engineer the situations which will be irresistible to her. She will fall into temptation.

And then once she has succumbed, once she has cheated, you can dissolve the shared fantasy with impunity and safety because she will have no claim on you or on the discarded fantasy and dream. She has wronged you as a narcissist.

And so the narcissist can say to himself, “She misbehaved. It’s all her fault.” And she says to herself, “I misbehaved. It’s all my fault. They’re on the same page. Way to go.”

It’s not about masochism. It’s not about narcissism.

It’s simply the only way open to the narcissist to dissolve a shared fantasy.

In the long run, this posture benefits the narcissist because he retains the high moral ground.

He can pose as a victim. Even as he devalues and discards his partners callously and cruelly, he can still point to the cheating incident and say, “Yeah, I may have been cruel. Yeah, I may have been ruthless. Yeah, I may have been callous. Yeah, I may have been abusive.”

But she had it coming. She deserved it. She cheated on me.

And you know what? 90% of people will nod their heads in assent. They will agree. Cheaters deserve the worst.

So the short-term cost of narcissistic injury and even life-threatening narcissistic mortification, the short-term cost is way outweighed by the long-term benefits of a victimhood narrative.

Now I promised you that I will apply it to other areas of life of the narcissist.

I chose an example of cheating, the example of cheating, as a form of betrayal.

But everything I’ve just said applies to other forms of betrayal.

The narcissist uses a variant of this strategy in all intimate settings, for example, in friendships. Or interpersonal relations, for example, with colleagues or collaborators.

Once the narcissist deems someone undesirable, for example, the narcissist thinks that he has been mistreated somehow. Or the narcissist thinks that the usefulness of someone is over, has become a burden. Once the narcissist decides that someone is undesirable, the narcissist entraps them.

He creates a trap. He introduces irresistible temptation.

In Hebrew we say, “You shall not put an obstacle ahead of a blind man.”

B’fnei iver lotasim michol.

So this is what the narcissist does. He spots the vulnerability of the person he wants to get rid of and then he interposes, he presents an irresistible temptation. He entraps the person.

And so then the person fails, having succumbed to the temptation, and the narcissist can say, “You know, you see what is done? You see what is done? No way. I’m in the right. I’m on the high moral ground. I was the victim.”

So the narcissist applies this strategy in all his relationships. He engineers situations which set people up for failure, people he wants to get rid of, he sets them up for failure, and then they fail inevitably because he knows exactly which buttons to push. They fail inevitably.

And the guilt, the history, he causes people to betray him ostentatiously in full view so that they have no refuge or sanctuary.

They cannot even explain themselves. They simply acted wrongly.

What can they say?

“I didn’t have free will. I was hypnotized. I was in a trance.

The narcissist is a puppet master and I’m his puppet.”

The misbehavior is spectacular. It’s conspicuous. It’s ostentatious.

There’s nothing that can be said in the defense of such misconduct.

So the narcissist engineers situations to get rid of people by pushing them to behave in immoral ways against the rules of society, against the morals of society.

He pushes them to become antisocial. He pushes them to ignore codes like you should not poach the mate of your friend. He pushes them to steal. He pushes them to do things which are egodystonic, cause them a lot of distress afterwards, a lot of shame and a lot of guilt, cause them to doubt themselves.

And then he can point at their behavior. That’s the reason I broke up with her. She cheated on me. That’s the reason I broke up with him. He poached my girlfriend.

Yeah, but who made it happen and for which purpose?

The narcissist accomplishes all this by playing on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of people he wants to get rid of.

And then he gets mortified or narcissistically injured. He becomes morally indignant and righteous because he feels that he had been compelled to get rid of.

There’s always a good reason to get rid of him. But he feels that he had been compelled. It wasn’t his choice.

And the narcissistic injury and the pain of mortification and the life-threatening suicidality, they’re all an inevitable cost of doing business. It’s the only way the narcissist can get rid of people in his life because he unmeasures everyone in a shared fantasy, even in business, even in friendships, even in marriages, even with girlfriends, even on dates.

The narcissist creates impromptu shared fantasy light.

And so the only way to exit the shared fantasy is if the other guy or the other girl misbehave.

If they do something so horrible that they have no claim on the narcissist anymore, they can’t ask to return to the shared fantasy. The gates of Eden have closed and there is an angel with the turning sword of fire, the fire of entrapment, the fire of entraining, the fire of brainwashing.

People often describe these experiences as having lost their minds, as having been zombified, as having been in a state of trance, as having dissociated massively.

Because the narcissist enters their minds and makes them do things which defy their own beliefs about themselves.

Thank you for listening. I hope I haven’t untrained you too much.