Erikson suggested eight stages of psychosocial development.

Identity confusion is the fifth.

It’s an identity crisis.

Again, it typically occurs during adolescence.

And at this stage, the individual experiences what Erikson called psychosocial moratorium, a very ominous term. It’s a period of time that permits you to experiment with different roles, different social roles.

Now the narcissist gets you stuck in permanent psychosocial moratorium. You’re constantly experimenting in order to gratify the narcissist and avoid his rather punishment and rage. This is also known as intermittent reinforcement.

So I’m now connecting behaviorism with role theory.

The moratorium, the permanent psychosocial moratorium is also known as intermittent reinforcement in behaviorist theory.

So and this leads to an identity crisis because your experimentation leads nowhere. The narcissist is never happy with the outcomes, never signals to you yet. That’s the right role.

Keep at it, baby. You got it right this time.

No, you’re always wrong. You always criticize. You always put down humiliated and shamed.

It’s a narcissist is in externalized version of your harsh inner critic.

Actually he takes over your harsh inner critic via the process of entrain in training.

So he becomes your sadistic super ego to borrow from Freud.

So at that stage, you don’t know what to do anymore. You’re confused. You keep experimenting because you’re terrified of the of the outcomes if you don’t, but you keep failing.

Narcissist keeps you in a permanent state of failure. He sets you up for failure as a victim in the shared fantasy. You’re in a state of identity confusion. You try on different roles. You identify with different expectations of the narcissist with different groups.

If it makes him happy, but you fail to form a cohesive positive identity that allows you to cope with the shared fantasy and to contribute to it because shared fantasy becomes your world. It’s your society. Your life is constricted.

The narcissist isolates you from friends and family in the world. He creates for you a universe, solid cystic, totally isolated, aka shared fantasy.

And you operate within it, but you keep failing. You keep failing.

You have no cohesive, positive identity. It doesn’t allow you to form an identity.

You identify with the group or with subgroups in the group.

You try to generate a negative identity by saying this is who I’m not, but you remain utterly confused, utterly confused. And this is identity diffusion.

Now there’s something called identity status model.

It’s an expansion of Ericsson’s fifth stage of identity versus identity confusion.

The model, the identity status model suggests that there are four possible identity statuses that an individual might assume, particularly during adolescence, but because you have been regressed also in the shared fantasy, each of these possible identity statuses is characterized by a different level of exploration and commitment to any specific identity.

So development moves towards identity achievement status. And this is characterized by evidence of identity exploration and commitment.

This identity achievement status is related to a stable sense of self-worth and self-esteem and healthy psychological functioning.

Narcissist never lets you get there, never. It threatens him.

Your self-esteem threatens him. Your stability threatens him. Your ability to separate from him, your separateness, cannot even be perceived by him because narcissists don’t do separateness. They’ve never been exposed to separateness. They’ve never separated from mummy in the separation individuation phase.

So separateness is automatically misperceived by them as abandonment and they misattribute it to hatred or envy or they mislabel it.

The other three identity statuses are moratorium status, which I’ve described, which is evidence of identity exploration, but lack of commitment to any single role.

For closure status, that is a commitment to an identity usually set by role models like adults, influential peers, influencers, teachers and so on.

For closure status, it’s a commitment to an identity given to you by someone, but failure to explore different options because before this commitment is made.

And as I said, this is typical of traditionalist conservative societies.

This is where the narcissist wants you to be. He wants you to commit to a diffuse, ill-defined, nebulous identity to forsake and forswear and renounce all other options, but he doesn’t give you any certainty. He doesn’t give you specs, specifications. He wants you to remain within the shared fantasy as a cloud.

And the last status is the diffusion status.

It’s a lack of both identity exploration and commitment.

And this is where you end up in a shared fantasy.

You end up giving up on exploring roles and identities and what have you.

You say, I’m going to roll with the blows. I’m going to flow with the flux. You’re not going to just play it by ear. Whatever happens happens.

This condition has been first described in 1966 by the Canadian psychologist, James Martius.

MARTIUS.

CIA, yes.

So identity diffusion is where you end up in the shared fantasy.

And it is essentially a borderline personality organization feature. It’s a lack of stability, a lack of focus in the view of the self or any elements of your identity.

As I said, it’s common in borderline personality disorder. It’s known there as identity disturbance.

In Ericsson’s ego psychology, identity diffusion was a possible outcome of the fifth stage, identity versus identity confusion.

The individual emerges from a disrupted fifth stage with an uncertain sense of identity and confusion about his or her wishes, attitudes, goals, and so on and so forth.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because this is a perfect description of the state of mind, of the victim of narcissistic abuse.

Narcissist abuses not only you, he abuses social mechanisms. He abuses expectations. He abuses worries and norms.

Take for example, role expectations.

Role expectations are the traits, attitudes, and behaviors which are considered appropriate in a particular position or in a group or in a setting or in a circumstance or environment, social setting.

So it’s a list, it’s specifications of attitudes and behaviors that are appropriate simply. So these expectations are communicated to other people and communicated from other people.

There’s an exchange there and you absorb these communications and you sometimes unconsciously adopt yourself to conform to these expectations.

And this is something the narcissist abuses. He keeps broadcasting to you expectations that are non-normative, chaotic, disruptive, threatening, negating.

And how can you adopt to this? How can you adopt to this?

The role expectations are somehow corrupted by the narcissist, which makes it exceedingly difficult for you to play it right, to do the right thing.

The narcissist wants you in this condition in order to devalue you and discard you and accomplish separation and individuation.

The role set in the shared fantasy is goal oriented. The goal is to destroy the set. The role set is the group of people and their associated roles who are related to and interact meaningfully with you.

So the role set in your case is the narcissist.

So the narcissist communicates to you the attitudes and behaviors appropriate to the role. He’s supposed to communicate to you the role expectations. He is your role set.

And yet the aim of the shared fantasy is to destroy the set.

So the role expectations communicated to you are self-defeating, self-destructive, self-trashing, dangerous and in many, many respects abusive, antisocial even.

So within the shared fantasy, you’re much more hostage than a willing intimate participant.

The narcissist coerces you into the shared fantasy and then communicates to you in a way that sets you up for failure and undermines explosively the fantasy itself.

He serves as your role set but sabotages you.

There’s something known as the Pygmalion Effect. It’s a consequence of reaction in which the expectations of someone superior to you and gender behavior from followers or fans or subordinates, which is consistent with these expectations or the leader or the supervisor or the boss, or your narcissist with your mother and he’s also superior to you because he’s much more intelligent, he’s a genius, he’s perfect, he’s godlike.

So he broadcasts to your expectations, you’re supposed to conform behaviorally, supposed to behave in a way that will uphold these expectations. It’s a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So in good relationships, this creates something known as upward Pygmalion Effect.

In bad relationships, I’m sorry, it creates something known as upward Pygmalion Effect and this is exactly what’s happening in the shared fantasy.

The expectations of followers or victims or subordinates, your expectations, lead to behaviors in the narcissist that is consistent with your expectations. The behaviors of the narcissist do not reflect his or her true abilities or personality traits but how he is perceived by you.

Now let me explain this very important dynamic.

Both the Pygmalion Effect, the upward Pygmalion Effect, are at play in the shared fantasy.

In the Pygmalion Effect, the narcissist broadcasts to you role expectations acting as your role set, but he broadcasts to you expectations which are corrupt, misleading, sabotaging, undermining, he sets you off for failure and destroys the shared fantasy.

But there’s also the reverse process.

You’re also broadcasting to the narcissist expectations.

The narcissist does adapt himself to these expectations. It is most visible during the love-warming phase but it goes, it proceeds, it continues throughout the life of the shared fantasy.

His shapeshifts, molds himself to fit you like a glove in hand. He leaves you no personal space. He’s all over you. He penetrates you, not only physically if you’re a romantic lingo but also mentally.

It is the upward Pygmalion Effect. You become a reflection of him, an extension of him, but he also becomes a reflection, an extension of you.

That’s the whole of mirror effect. You see yourself through his gaze, you fall in love with yourself through his gaze.

Now you know the clinical term, upward Pygmalion Effect.

And it’s all a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a set of beliefs, set of expectations by the narcissist of you and by you of the narcissist.

You are exchanging expectations and beliefs about each other.

And this helps to bring about fulfillment.

Your expectations create reality. They generate the fantasy in which you inhabit together.

So it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is an expectancy effect.

The effect that your expectations have, the effects, your expectations have on the narcissist and the effects that the narcissist’s expectations have on you, your behavior changes.

This is the interpersonal expectancy effect.

Your behavior is changed and this alters reality. It reshapes, redefines, redelineates, creates boundaries around the shared fantasy.

But at the same time, your expectations of yourself with regards to the narcissist and the shared fantasy affect you.

So his expectations of you change you and your expectations of you change you.

And this is known as the intrapersonal expectancy effect.

You know what the narcissist expects of you or you think you know what the narcissist expects of you and this shapes your behavior.

You wish to please, you wish to conform.

At the same time, you develop expectations of yourself to conform to the narcissist’s expectations.

You want to become submissive or caring or motherly or whatever.

This is the intrapersonal effect.

So these two effects combined make you who you are within the shared fantasy.

The narcissist similarly is exposed to these two effects and makes, they make him who he is in the shared fantasy.

And together you generate reality, your reality, which is actually divorced from everyone else’s reality, your reality of the shared fantasy.

This is very famous, a very famous situation. It’s known as the Rosenfeld or the experiment effect.

It’s when you conduct an experiment, your expectations shape the students who are being experimented upon and the students expectations of themselves to please you, to satisfy you, to gratify you as an experimenter, shape them as well.

And so the experiment is corrupted or contaminated by these exchanges of expectations.

Same with the shared fantasy. Same exactly with the shared fantasy.

They are demand characteristics. These are cues you’re broadcasting to each other, you’re signaling all the time within the shared fantasy, the victim and the narcissist.

And these cues influence bias, both of you, the narcissist and you.

Sometimes the narcissist suggests a certain outcome or a certain desirable or desired response and you conform, you change your behaviors, you even convince yourself that you desire the same outcome and the same response.

These cues distort both of you and ultimately reshape again and again, remold again and again the shared fantasy.

These are roles, the roles that you play. They create behavioral confirmation. Character confirmation is a process by which the actions of one person, you for example, the victim come to reinforce the expectations of another person, the narcissist and vice versa.

Your social interaction within the shared fantasy, within the dyad, within the couple, shape each one of you separately and the shared fantasy.

And the shared fantasy affects both of you and you affect each other and your expectations of yourself within the shared fantasy affect you as well.

It’s a mishmash. It’s a huge convoluted network of expectations, reactant behaviors, affects, attendant upon the behaviors, feedback loops and so on and so forth.

Behavioral confirmation processes are used to explain how expectations and beliefs, including for example stereotypes, come to affect reality.

The theory, this behavioral confirmation concept was developed by Mark Snyder, who is again Canadian, a Canadian psychologist or at least started his career in Canada.

John Don Peterson, anyone?

Something is happening in Canada. God knows what.

In the shared fantasy, we are both subjected to a special kind of bias known as confirmation bias.

You tend to gather evidence and information that confirms pre-existing expectations, communicated expectations.

You emphasize, you pursue supporting evidence, you dismiss, you devalue, you fail to seek contradictory evidence.

Gradually, it becomes an echo chamber, a thought silo within which you tend to reinforce each other all the time.

The shared fantasy becomes one resonant hive mind, mind meld with a D. Both your minds become one. You become each other’s internal objects and you inhabit an internal space.

You are less and less connected to the outside world, physically as well.

It begins to resemble what used to be called a shared psychotic disorder.

Now, one last thing.

As a victim, it’s very likely that you’ve been victimized before.

You’ve learned the role of victim early on before you have entered the shared fantasy.

You would not have entered the shared fantasy had you not been conditioned behaviorally to be a victim.

You have been taught to be a victim. You are a professional victim, whether you like it or not.

This insight comes from exemplar theory.

Couple theory in role theory is the hypothesis that categorization depends on specific remembered instances of the category.

In short, you would behave in a way that emulates or imitates either another victim that you have seen, your mother or yourself in an earlier role as a victim.

You need an example known clinically as exemplar. You need an example to emulate or imitate.

Exemplar theory has been applied to many, many questions in psychology, attention, skill acquisition, social decision making, and so on and so forth.

Prejudice.

We don’t rely on obstructions. Concepts don’t do anything to us.

That’s why case studies are very important. That’s why people who make videos with real life cases and examples, they get many more views than people like me who like to dwell on ideas, obstruct ideas and concepts without a single example.

Examples are much more powerful than any principle.

This is what’s happening to you as a victim.

When you enter the shared fantasy, the examples of victimhood in your past play inside your mind, interact with the narcissist expectations that you should behave as a victim and you adopt the role as a victim.

This is what role play has to say about the narcissist’s shared fantasy and about questions of personality and identity in general.

I hope those of you who have survived found it of interest.

I will see you with the next torture session.